This is not good news because if people think that the problem is not serious enough to warrant attention, society will not change its bad habits.
Unless, of course, the problem wasn't serious enough to warrent attention in the first place, as many environmental skeptics have been saying all along.
Well, you don't need to make up "the Marines bombed your house and killed your sister, father, and daughter. Join us in fighting them!"
Yet, that's exactly what happened in the last few days with the latest strike in Pakistan. The story comes out in the Associated Press that 80 people are killed in an attack on a madrassa (Islamic school). A Quote from the article: "Local leaders however insisted that most of the dead were teenage students". Suddenly, a follow up story comes out, "intelligence sources now tell ABC News that the missiles were fired from a U.S. Predator drone plane." Within hours, people are holding protest marches against the US in Pakistan, complete with banners in english protesting "US Terror Attack on Bajaur", with world-wide image coverage courtesy of Reuters. A couple hours after that, a US military rep had a press release stating that the US military was not involved in this strike.
Of course, we know now that the strike killed 5 senior leaders of al-Qaeda's branch in Pakistan, including one who was known to have harbored al-Zawahiri, the current 2nd in command of al-Qaeda. We also know the initial death reports were incorrect, the follow-up reports assigning blame were incorrect, and since no outside officials have been able to inspect the dead, it is possible that even the death count is incorrect (see the shennanigans in the recent Lebanon-Israeli conflict as evidence where bodies were being removed from morgues then used in staged pictures for foreign media).
What the US government is facing is an advanced war of propaganda, where the "enemy" is quite skilled, and has many willing accomplices in the US media; their hatred of the administration knowns no bounds. My feeling on this issue is not "should the government release their versions of events"... given how much false information is being dished out by our press, my reaction is "why has it taken until now"?
Two islamic charities were about to be investigated by the FBI. The allegation is that someone in the FBI broke the news to the reporter(s) prior to the event (not a crime), and the reporter(s) contacted the charities informing them they were about to be raided. Seems pretty cut and dry that the reporter(s) were interfering with an investigation, which now becomes a crime.
Dude, they didn't just declassify some insider information, the government case is charging that the two reporters from the NYT tipped off two Islamic charities to impending FBI raids -- charities that were under suspicion of funneling money over-seas to terrorist groups. How do we know they were doing that, well it turns out that the Bush Administration was monitoring overseas money transactions (you may have heard about this when it was leaked last December by the NYT).
One of the reporters involved, Ms. Miller, was the same one sent to jail for refusing to divulge her source who leaked that Valera Plame was employed in secret by the CIA. The reason that is important is she may have recommended her husband Willson for the assignment (on behalf of the CIA) of investigating a Saddam nuclear material deal prior to the US-Iraq war, a study that concluded inconclusively that Saddam was not persuing nuclear material.
The telcos own the wires - do you propose the government take the wires away and lease them to the lowest bidder
Well, you could do what they did to the electric grid, create an "Open Access Transmission Tarriff" that declares that a utility company does not have the right to prevent transactions to occur across their systems. This was basically the first step in electricity de-regulation, the next being that the same company cannot provide the generation, transmission, and load service, because having all three can lead to price fixing, market power, undercutting, and makes it much too easy to be anti-competative. In the telco world, this would be like splitting into transmission (maintain the lines), service providers (maintain the switchers), and service users (like us).
This has the benefit that private companies retain ownership of their lines, and customers become "accounts" that exist in the financial transaction world only. You could have me, a customer, in territory X, purchasing service from Company Y. Y collects the bills, and pays X a standardized "service" fee for moving the data of my phone calls into and out of their system. The government would regulate and standardize this fee with the existing public utility construct.
The down side to this in the electric grid is that you end up with "loop flows"; power flows according to impedance, not because someone created a contract to flow a certain way, so company A's transmission carries some flow that was intended to go across their neighbor's system B. However, there is an "inadvertant accounting" process that meters all of this unscheduled MW-Hour flows, and companies occasionally pay each other back the $ that this flow represents. Telephone calls are discrete / digital, so a company can exactly meter how much a customer is using their service, and properly bill it back to the right service company.
Excellent point... to get that higher efficiency, the electric train "outsources" its fuel storage problem to the bulk electric grid (11 kV at 25 Hz). This adds two constraits to their service: (1) fixed routes, and (2) 3rd party dependency (ask Amtrak how well that worked for them the other day when all the trains from Washington DC to NYC went out because a frequency converter failed).
The electric train does not "charge" a battery like an electric car has to in order to drive point to point... and I think that point separates all electric train arguments from normal commuting vehicles.
It appears to me that the true problem here is that Al negotiated through his Label to get his music onto iTunes, instead of canelling that bit of his contract and releasing direct to iTunes and keeping 100% of the earnings. And surprise, surprise, his Label screwed him over.
Case 3: (which works for thousands of indie artists) Man records songs, Man organizes with iTunes to use all the fancy stuff he created and sells the product over iTunes. Cost of Final Product: $0.99 * songs Revenue from Product: $0.65 * songs instead of "$0.045 on a digital download" * songs
Yes, it got axed in development, but they managed to salvage some backstory... the main character in Warcraft Adventures, the orc Thrall raised by Humans, becomes the Hero of the Hoarde in Warcraft III.
Umm, probably about a quarter acre large. Here's a picture of a bulk electric (500 kV) 252 MVAr (Volts-Amps-Reactive) capacitor bank using existing technologies; that's on the high end of size for a 500 kV station (typical on the east coast USA's grid is about 160 MR if a station needs it), and they can get expensive. You can find more pictures in a Google Image Search. I am told that large capacitors actually give off an audible (high-pitched) "whine" that can get quite annoying (and loud) to anyone in the vicinity.
Remember, they were talking to the marketing droid side, not the Will Wright side.
Hells yeah. I was watching the Spore E3 demo recording, and noticed that the game internals organizes the different creatures you encountered in "trading card" format (called the Sporepedia)...
Given the Sim City already made the jump a few years ago to collectable card game, I can see that Will may be positioning Spore to do the same from the start. Spore (the Card Game) is going to be better suited to compete with Pokemon and the other "battling creature" games. This kind of collectable card game spin-off is money in the bank.
On its first analog-to-digital converter, MultiGig will implement one physical ring with four phases. Taps can be implemented at any point around the ring to gain access to any of the four phases.
I interpret this as they will have 4 "clock" wires, each carrying a square wave with a 1/4 On, 3/4 Off cycle, with each of the wires out of phase (1/4th shifted) with each other. Since the wire arrangement has previously been described as a square, this creates an interesting geometry... Every side of the square (as an aggregate) is charged all the time, but depending how you tap it, you can get 4 separate clock signals. From my work in the bulk electric utility business, this seems like a nice way to electromagnetically couple the wires together to eliminate field losses; when one phase is discharging, the nearby wire is charging at the same rate, which reduces the total losses. There's a reason why high voltage lines are arranged in either a triangle or all three in a line.
Actually, when I was back in college, genetic algorithms were the hot topic in one of our VLSI classes that year. What they did was apply the genetic algorthim process to a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip to solve a computation. An FPGA is sort of like a giant array of ANDs, ORs, and NOTs with a "control array" of flip-flops that allow you to control the routing of the inputs; you can just load in a new sequence and end up with different outputs using the same hardware. The genetic algorithm comes in by randomly generating the control array sequence. You then compare the output with the target output, then blend the successful solutions together until you have the final solution, all without any hardware design involved.
The story goes, some researchers did this to attempt to reproduce a non-linear equation, I think like a Fourier Transform. The plus side was, they were successfully able to demonstrate that the resultant chip configuration was able to provide the expected results. However, after analyzing the actually solution, the researchers found that the chip was actually creating resonance between different parts of the circuit in such a way that there was no direct path between the input and output signal.
The genetic algorithm had created an analog solution in digital hardware by incorporating the electromagnetic losses and field coupling of the FPGA wiring itself; if they had tried to tweak the "solution" by removing portions of the unused pieces of the FPGA circuit, or even using the same control sequence on a different FPGA, the "solution" would not work.
My guess is they are about to release a network search agent, possibly coupled to a mobile wireless device. I'm imagining a handheld (Palm pilot-ish) coupled to a wireless Windows CE coupled with a Microsoft Terranova or similar map program for getting information while out in the field, coupled with Microsoft Search for finding information on the fly.
The star design (nodes radiating from a central node) implies a network configuration, where there is a central location that is retrieving data from external servers. The first portion "do you know what I can do" with pictures of circuitry also implies a hardware device capable of networking, but the multiple images (arrows) suggests a query. The "and where I can go" with pictures of cities and beaches implies a mobile device. "or how I can change your life" could really mean anything.
Of course, Origami is basically "folding paper", so the hardware itself could be a Digital Paper device coupled to a wireless 802.11g" device for on the go searches...
If that's not it, maybe I can patent the idea for a device like that before they get around to building one.
Agreed. Given that Google is now 24% down and dropping from their peak several weeks ago, I (as a Google Shareholder) don't want to see the stock slide any more.
First they miss their earnings forecast this last quarter, which limits the amount of new investment from banks (which only means they should take care of their existing cash), mostly due to competition in advertising.
When you put all the pieces together, Google needs real intelligence to weather the next few months, or they are going to lose the short-term trader's confidence... and with that, their value drops.
I think if Google wishes to be recognised for humanist achievements one step along that road is going to be relocating their headquarters outside the USA
I think they are making good headways into getting into China lately...
You were doing so well until your last paragraph, then you fell into the "bash the USA" mode... If you bothered to take a real look around the world, you'd see the USA is still the best there is... Quite far from a police state, where we all have the abilities to voice our opinions. Peoples from all walks of live interact, using voices instead of violence. I only have to point you at the the Iraq shrine attack today to show how the world is much more disparate than here.
Are the NSA wiretaps lawful? Yes, the president is excercising a power granted by article 2 of our constitution during wartime. Congress can either (1) cancel the war on terror, thus negating his power or (2) pass a constitutional amendment restricting wartime powers, making it illegal. While I see a lot of blathering, I don't see either step taking place.
..., but have they stopped? Probably not.
What effect has the revelation of their use had on society? For the majority of US citizens who have contacts outside of the US? None, there are no reports of anyone who's been injured by tapping; no violation of trade secrets, noones personal property have been infringed... On the otherhand, I'm sure that anyone who had contacts with terrorist-related entities has now either encoded their speech, shortened their messages, or switched to alternative (electronic) secure communications. So, in a sense, we've made made it harder for our society to detect harm coming our way, which in my opinion is the real crime.
Interestingly enough, I find that from the WSJ, the number of wiretaps last year is only at 1,710 in 2004. 1,710 wiretaps for the year vs a USA 2004 estimated population of 293,656,842 is 0.00058% of the population (assuming one tap per person). Hardly something to gawk at.
That made me want to find previous years, so I stumbled on a watchdog group, EPIC, which puts the 2000 wiretap count at 1,190 for a +43.6%... Yet, 2000 was a local low, the lowest since 1997 (difference of 4 taps), so you could just as easily say "the number of wiretaps from 1997 to 2004 are up 43%". The 1999 wiretap count is at 1,350, which means only a 26% increase from 1999, since 2000-2001 (election year) involved a large decrease (-11%) from the previous year. I'll leave this to others to argue the exiting government's preparedness for 9/11/2001.
From their data, which goes back to 1968, and a few pokes with Excel, we can see that State Wiretaps outnumber Federal by a 3:2 ratio every year back to 1998.... there's a 16% increase in federal wiretaps from 2002-2003, and another +26% increase from 2003-2004, to a current 730 Federal Wiretaps for the year 2004. Wiretaps are going up across the board, but looking back at history, 1993-1994 shows the greatest increase in federal wiretaps, single year up 32% compared to +26% in 2004-2005.
The top 3 years of increases in the last twenty are 2001 (25%) 2004 (18%), and 1994 (18%). The wiretaps in 2004 are roughly double the amount in 1991.
If we group by Presidental Office years (since each president tends to change policies and staff when they come into office, group by 4 years), the Bush Administration increase is +14.6% in the first term... impressive, but short of the Clinton Administration's increase of +17.7% in its first term. However, neither president matches the rates of increases in the 80's, with 35% increase by Reagan and 20% increase by Bush Senior.
He was originally asking $500 million, a sum that I would consider "tons of $$$". Microsoft claims that they had been working in-house on the capability to add the linking since 1989, and Mr Amado approached them with a working product in 1992. From other research, it appears that the "trick" in question is to link an Excel document from Access in read/write mode as an in-line table, something we all take for granted in the modern Office versions.
Microsoft said no thanks at the time, and released their in-house work in 1995 with the release of Office95. The jury decided that there wasn't sufficent evidence that Microsoft was in the clear, so they settled for $9 million and an agreement to cease using the technology.
When the majority of the best and brightest in the country all lean towards a particular political philosophy, what should that tell you?... that the people in administration are using politics as a litmus test in their hiring practices. Either that, or they aren't as "best" as you'd have us believe.
All the people I know in academia are well-informed, widely-read, and thoughtful voters.
Whereas all the people I know in academia consider being well-informed reading a set of magazines that reinforce their current viewpoints, and pull their "party line" when it comes to voting without actually reviewing the full slate of what their politicians represent. But both cases are merely our personal experiences.
Now, if a professor were to mark down a student for expressing a different view (assuming they were able to defend their reasoning), that would be beyond the pale.
I was curious, so I actually to the website in question. It appears that they have collected statements from the professors that are quite interesting, to say the least, and certainly worthy of concern to past alumni. Now, its one thing if the alumni organization was just harping on political contrarians because they held different poltiical views; that's intimidation... teachers are citizens too, and they are free to speak whatever they wish (though we are not required to listen). However, when the teachers carried their views into the classrooms, that's when these alumni decided that enough was enough...
It's an interesting read, and it makes me glad that I did not go to UCLA.
Currently, Excel handles 256 columns x 65536 rows... anything larger, and you need to be working in Access. However, if your data fits those limitations, Excel is (IMHO) the best analyst tool under our sun.
Excel 12 (aka Office 2003, currently in development) will have 16k columns x 1M rows. I found information here on the new limits.
If only we lived in a world where they included that information in the article, and there was some sort of reference that could allow us to read that article...
"Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD "screeners", but prevent the creation of pirate copies."
Why not just use either software for region free DVDs or a hacked region free firmware. Then use DVD decrypter like someone will do anyway?
I think the point is, these DVDs are going to non-technical people who receive hundreds and hundreds of DVDs (that work) from other competing studios. If the movie doesn't work, they move on... they have a fixed deadline to review everything and make their vote. There's no time to give special treatment to a studio that can't even get something as simple as region encoding correct.
And its not like they're taking these movies to their home computers and popping them in; to prevent piracy, these are special release DVDs which only play on the special DVD players -- "Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD "screeners", but prevent the creation of pirate copies." If the DVD doesn't work, they have no other alternative.
So basically, they can't.. (1) it has a special encoding scheme that your household DVD decrypter isn't going to understand, (2) these aren't the type of people who would know how to crack it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not good news because if people think that the problem is not serious enough to warrant attention, society will not change its bad habits.
Unless, of course, the problem wasn't serious enough to warrent attention in the first place, as many environmental skeptics have been saying all along.
Well, you don't need to make up "the Marines bombed your house and killed your sister, father, and daughter. Join us in fighting them!"
Yet, that's exactly what happened in the last few days with the latest strike in Pakistan. The story comes out in the Associated Press that 80 people are killed in an attack on a madrassa (Islamic school). A Quote from the article: "Local leaders however insisted that most of the dead were teenage students". Suddenly, a follow up story comes out, "intelligence sources now tell ABC News that the missiles were fired from a U.S. Predator drone plane." Within hours, people are holding protest marches against the US in Pakistan, complete with banners in english protesting "US Terror Attack on Bajaur", with world-wide image coverage courtesy of Reuters. A couple hours after that, a US military rep had a press release stating that the US military was not involved in this strike.
Of course, we know now that the strike killed 5 senior leaders of al-Qaeda's branch in Pakistan, including one who was known to have harbored al-Zawahiri, the current 2nd in command of al-Qaeda. We also know the initial death reports were incorrect, the follow-up reports assigning blame were incorrect, and since no outside officials have been able to inspect the dead, it is possible that even the death count is incorrect (see the shennanigans in the recent Lebanon-Israeli conflict as evidence where bodies were being removed from morgues then used in staged pictures for foreign media).
What the US government is facing is an advanced war of propaganda, where the "enemy" is quite skilled, and has many willing accomplices in the US media; their hatred of the administration knowns no bounds. My feeling on this issue is not "should the government release their versions of events"... given how much false information is being dished out by our press, my reaction is "why has it taken until now"?
Maybe everyone else is playing an MMORPG?
Two islamic charities were about to be investigated by the FBI. The allegation is that someone in the FBI broke the news to the reporter(s) prior to the event (not a crime), and the reporter(s) contacted the charities informing them they were about to be raided. Seems pretty cut and dry that the reporter(s) were interfering with an investigation, which now becomes a crime.
Dude, they didn't just declassify some insider information, the government case is charging that the two reporters from the NYT tipped off two Islamic charities to impending FBI raids -- charities that were under suspicion of funneling money over-seas to terrorist groups. How do we know they were doing that, well it turns out that the Bush Administration was monitoring overseas money transactions (you may have heard about this when it was leaked last December by the NYT).
One of the reporters involved, Ms. Miller, was the same one sent to jail for refusing to divulge her source who leaked that Valera Plame was employed in secret by the CIA. The reason that is important is she may have recommended her husband Willson for the assignment (on behalf of the CIA) of investigating a Saddam nuclear material deal prior to the US-Iraq war, a study that concluded inconclusively that Saddam was not persuing nuclear material.
The telcos own the wires - do you propose the government take the wires away and lease them to the lowest bidder
Well, you could do what they did to the electric grid, create an "Open Access Transmission Tarriff" that declares that a utility company does not have the right to prevent transactions to occur across their systems. This was basically the first step in electricity de-regulation, the next being that the same company cannot provide the generation, transmission, and load service, because having all three can lead to price fixing, market power, undercutting, and makes it much too easy to be anti-competative. In the telco world, this would be like splitting into transmission (maintain the lines), service providers (maintain the switchers), and service users (like us).
This has the benefit that private companies retain ownership of their lines, and customers become "accounts" that exist in the financial transaction world only. You could have me, a customer, in territory X, purchasing service from Company Y. Y collects the bills, and pays X a standardized "service" fee for moving the data of my phone calls into and out of their system. The government would regulate and standardize this fee with the existing public utility construct.
The down side to this in the electric grid is that you end up with "loop flows"; power flows according to impedance, not because someone created a contract to flow a certain way, so company A's transmission carries some flow that was intended to go across their neighbor's system B. However, there is an "inadvertant accounting" process that meters all of this unscheduled MW-Hour flows, and companies occasionally pay each other back the $ that this flow represents. Telephone calls are discrete / digital, so a company can exactly meter how much a customer is using their service, and properly bill it back to the right service company.
Excellent point... to get that higher efficiency, the electric train "outsources" its fuel storage problem to the bulk electric grid (11 kV at 25 Hz). This adds two constraits to their service: (1) fixed routes, and (2) 3rd party dependency (ask Amtrak how well that worked for them the other day when all the trains from Washington DC to NYC went out because a frequency converter failed).
The electric train does not "charge" a battery like an electric car has to in order to drive point to point... and I think that point separates all electric train arguments from normal commuting vehicles.
It appears to me that the true problem here is that Al negotiated through his Label to get his music onto iTunes, instead of canelling that bit of his contract and releasing direct to iTunes and keeping 100% of the earnings. And surprise, surprise, his Label screwed him over.
Case 3: (which works for thousands of indie artists)
Man records songs, Man organizes with iTunes to use all the fancy stuff he created and sells the product over iTunes.
Cost of Final Product: $0.99 * songs
Revenue from Product: $0.65 * songs instead of "$0.045 on a digital download" * songs
Yes, it got axed in development, but they managed to salvage some backstory ... the main character in Warcraft Adventures, the orc Thrall raised by Humans, becomes the Hero of the Hoarde in Warcraft III.
Umm, probably about a quarter acre large. Here's a picture of a bulk electric (500 kV) 252 MVAr (Volts-Amps-Reactive) capacitor bank using existing technologies; that's on the high end of size for a 500 kV station (typical on the east coast USA's grid is about 160 MR if a station needs it), and they can get expensive. You can find more pictures in a Google Image Search. I am told that large capacitors actually give off an audible (high-pitched) "whine" that can get quite annoying (and loud) to anyone in the vicinity.
Remember, they were talking to the marketing droid side, not the Will Wright side.
Hells yeah. I was watching the Spore E3 demo recording, and noticed that the game internals organizes the different creatures you encountered in "trading card" format (called the Sporepedia)...
Given the Sim City already made the jump a few years ago to collectable card game, I can see that Will may be positioning Spore to do the same from the start. Spore (the Card Game) is going to be better suited to compete with Pokemon and the other "battling creature" games. This kind of collectable card game spin-off is money in the bank.
On its first analog-to-digital converter, MultiGig will implement one physical ring with four phases. Taps can be implemented at any point around the ring to gain access to any of the four phases.
I interpret this as they will have 4 "clock" wires, each carrying a square wave with a 1/4 On, 3/4 Off cycle, with each of the wires out of phase (1/4th shifted) with each other. Since the wire arrangement has previously been described as a square, this creates an interesting geometry... Every side of the square (as an aggregate) is charged all the time, but depending how you tap it, you can get 4 separate clock signals. From my work in the bulk electric utility business, this seems like a nice way to electromagnetically couple the wires together to eliminate field losses; when one phase is discharging, the nearby wire is charging at the same rate, which reduces the total losses. There's a reason why high voltage lines are arranged in either a triangle or all three in a line.
Actually, when I was back in college, genetic algorithms were the hot topic in one of our VLSI classes that year. What they did was apply the genetic algorthim process to a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip to solve a computation. An FPGA is sort of like a giant array of ANDs, ORs, and NOTs with a "control array" of flip-flops that allow you to control the routing of the inputs; you can just load in a new sequence and end up with different outputs using the same hardware. The genetic algorithm comes in by randomly generating the control array sequence. You then compare the output with the target output, then blend the successful solutions together until you have the final solution, all without any hardware design involved.
The story goes, some researchers did this to attempt to reproduce a non-linear equation, I think like a Fourier Transform. The plus side was, they were successfully able to demonstrate that the resultant chip configuration was able to provide the expected results. However, after analyzing the actually solution, the researchers found that the chip was actually creating resonance between different parts of the circuit in such a way that there was no direct path between the input and output signal.
The genetic algorithm had created an analog solution in digital hardware by incorporating the electromagnetic losses and field coupling of the FPGA wiring itself; if they had tried to tweak the "solution" by removing portions of the unused pieces of the FPGA circuit, or even using the same control sequence on a different FPGA, the "solution" would not work.
So, you're saying that "Intelligent Design" may be better than "Evolution" after all?
(Yes, I had to go there)
My guess is they are about to release a network search agent, possibly coupled to a mobile wireless device. I'm imagining a handheld (Palm pilot-ish) coupled to a wireless Windows CE coupled with a Microsoft Terranova or similar map program for getting information while out in the field, coupled with Microsoft Search for finding information on the fly.
The star design (nodes radiating from a central node) implies a network configuration, where there is a central location that is retrieving data from external servers. The first portion "do you know what I can do" with pictures of circuitry also implies a hardware device capable of networking, but the multiple images (arrows) suggests a query. The "and where I can go" with pictures of cities and beaches implies a mobile device. "or how I can change your life" could really mean anything.
Of course, Origami is basically "folding paper", so the hardware itself could be a Digital Paper device coupled to a wireless 802.11g" device for on the go searches...
If that's not it, maybe I can patent the idea for a device like that before they get around to building one.
Agreed. Given that Google is now 24% down and dropping from their peak several weeks ago, I (as a Google Shareholder) don't want to see the stock slide any more.
First they miss their earnings forecast this last quarter, which limits the amount of new investment from banks (which only means they should take care of their existing cash), mostly due to competition in advertising.
They are already under attack for providing content blocking for China, now may have to scale back their image searches, are under governmental requests for search records on providing pornography to minors... meanwhile, there're competing search engines, and their tricks in google maps are being duplicated.
When you put all the pieces together, Google needs real intelligence to weather the next few months, or they are going to lose the short-term trader's confidence... and with that, their value drops.
I think if Google wishes to be recognised for humanist achievements one step along that road is going to
... Quite far from a police state, where we all have the abilities to voice our opinions. Peoples from all walks of live interact, using voices instead of violence. I only have to point you at the the Iraq shrine attack today to show how the world is much more disparate than here.
be relocating their headquarters outside the USA
I think they are making good headways into getting into China lately...
You were doing so well until your last paragraph, then you fell into the "bash the USA" mode... If you bothered to take a real look around the world, you'd see the USA is still the best there is
You're right, when people say "the end of oil", they really should have said "the end of oil at the prices we are accustomed to today".
What effect has the revelation of their use had on society? For the majority of US citizens who have contacts outside of the US? None, there are no reports of anyone who's been injured by tapping; no violation of trade secrets, noones personal property have been infringed... On the otherhand, I'm sure that anyone who had contacts with terrorist-related entities has now either encoded their speech, shortened their messages, or switched to alternative (electronic) secure communications. So, in a sense, we've made made it harder for our society to detect harm coming our way, which in my opinion is the real crime.
Interestingly enough, I find that from the WSJ, the number of wiretaps last year is only at 1,710 in 2004. 1,710 wiretaps for the year vs a USA 2004 estimated population of 293,656,842 is 0.00058% of the population (assuming one tap per person). Hardly something to gawk at.
... Yet, 2000 was a local low, the lowest since 1997 (difference of 4 taps), so you could just as easily say "the number of wiretaps from 1997 to 2004 are up 43%". The 1999 wiretap count is at 1,350, which means only a 26% increase from 1999, since 2000-2001 (election year) involved a large decrease (-11%) from the previous year. I'll leave this to others to argue the exiting government's preparedness for 9/11/2001.
.... there's a 16% increase in federal wiretaps from 2002-2003, and another +26% increase from 2003-2004, to a current 730 Federal Wiretaps for the year 2004. Wiretaps are going up across the board, but looking back at history, 1993-1994 shows the greatest increase in federal wiretaps, single year up 32% compared to +26% in 2004-2005.
That made me want to find previous years, so I stumbled on a watchdog group, EPIC, which puts the 2000 wiretap count at 1,190 for a +43.6%
From their data, which goes back to 1968, and a few pokes with Excel, we can see that State Wiretaps outnumber Federal by a 3:2 ratio every year back to 1998
The top 3 years of increases in the last twenty are 2001 (25%) 2004 (18%), and 1994 (18%). The wiretaps in 2004 are roughly double the amount in 1991.
If we group by Presidental Office years (since each president tends to change policies and staff when they come into office, group by 4 years), the Bush Administration increase is +14.6% in the first term... impressive, but short of the Clinton Administration's increase of +17.7% in its first term. However, neither president matches the rates of increases in the 80's, with 35% increase by Reagan and 20% increase by Bush Senior.
He was originally asking $500 million, a sum that I would consider "tons of $$$". Microsoft claims that they had been working in-house on the capability to add the linking since 1989, and Mr Amado approached them with a working product in 1992. From other research, it appears that the "trick" in question is to link an Excel document from Access in read/write mode as an in-line table, something we all take for granted in the modern Office versions.
Microsoft said no thanks at the time, and released their in-house work in 1995 with the release of Office95. The jury decided that there wasn't sufficent evidence that Microsoft was in the clear, so they settled for $9 million and an agreement to cease using the technology.
When the majority of the best and brightest in the country all lean towards a particular political philosophy, what should that tell you? ... that the people in administration are using politics as a litmus test in their hiring practices. Either that, or they aren't as "best" as you'd have us believe.
All the people I know in academia are well-informed, widely-read, and thoughtful voters.
Whereas all the people I know in academia consider being well-informed reading a set of magazines that reinforce their current viewpoints, and pull their "party line" when it comes to voting without actually reviewing the full slate of what their politicians represent. But both cases are merely our personal experiences.
Now, if a professor were to mark down a student for expressing a different view (assuming they were able to defend their reasoning), that would be beyond the pale.
I was curious, so I actually to the website in question. It appears that they have collected statements from the professors that are quite interesting, to say the least, and certainly worthy of concern to past alumni. Now, its one thing if the alumni organization was just harping on political contrarians because they held different poltiical views; that's intimidation... teachers are citizens too, and they are free to speak whatever they wish (though we are not required to listen). However, when the teachers carried their views into the classrooms, that's when these alumni decided that enough was enough...
It's an interesting read, and it makes me glad that I did not go to UCLA.
Currently, Excel handles 256 columns x 65536 rows... anything larger, and you need to be working in Access. However, if your data fits those limitations, Excel is (IMHO) the best analyst tool under our sun.
Excel 12 (aka Office 2003, currently in development) will have 16k columns x 1M rows. I found information here on the new limits.
If only we lived in a world where they included that information in the article, and there was some sort of reference that could allow us to read that article...
"Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD "screeners", but prevent the creation of pirate copies."
Why not just use either software for region free DVDs or a hacked region free firmware. Then use DVD decrypter like someone will do anyway?
I think the point is, these DVDs are going to non-technical people who receive hundreds and hundreds of DVDs (that work) from other competing studios. If the movie doesn't work, they move on... they have a fixed deadline to review everything and make their vote. There's no time to give special treatment to a studio that can't even get something as simple as region encoding correct.
And its not like they're taking these movies to their home computers and popping them in; to prevent piracy, these are special release DVDs which only play on the special DVD players -- "Developed by Cinea, a subsidiary of Dolby, the players permit their owners to view encrypted DVD "screeners", but prevent the creation of pirate copies." If the DVD doesn't work, they have no other alternative.
So basically, they can't.. (1) it has a special encoding scheme that your household DVD decrypter isn't going to understand, (2) these aren't the type of people who would know how to crack it.