For that matter, the PS3 comes standard with a 4200 RPM drive, which means it's not a particularly enticing Linux environment to develop in no matter which distro you use.
Nonetheless, even though it has a slow hard drive and only 256 Megs of RAM, there are some uses for Linux on the PS3. I live in a small valley where radio reception is virtually nil. I use my PS3 to play Shoutcast streams on my stereo when I'm not watching a movie on it.
My preferred usage would be to run Pandora using the built-in browser on the PS3 but unfortunately, Pandora doesn't quite fit on the PS3. Imagine - 256 megs is too little Ram to run a browser and a flash application. Somebody must have skipped "Hardware Constraints-101" when they went to college.
It's credit mobilier all over again except this time it's housing instead of rail roads. Fannie Mae and Mac are schemes to buy votes with tax payer dollars and use more tax payer dollars to fund electoral campaigns.
Back in the 90's when I was shipping software to Europe, the price I'd charge the wholesaler was the same I'd charge local wholesalers. Getting through customs however, wasn't trivial. Import duties in the 90's which were separate from VAT were running around 15-20%. The wholesaler paid that on top of the price he paid us and added his markup which he passed on to the retailer. The retailer turned around and added his markup to the price he paid which included the duty cost plus the wholesaler's markup on the duty cost. By the time it got to the customer, the customer was paying markup on markup on duty plus regular retail-wholesale markups. What initially appeared to be a relatively small duty cost mushroomed into a sizable burden.
I was talking to one of the wholesalers about it and he laughed it off by saying 'yeah, but we get trains!' He'd then piss and moan about his more savy customers buying directly from retailers in the states and avoiding the double markups. That of course, reduced his market which meant he raised his prices more to cover his fixed costs.
Another factor driving prices in Europe was the fact that we'd sign exclusive distribution agreements so a wholesaler owned the market for a specific country. We did that because the wholesaler handled the translation and marketing costs in the specific country (we were a small company). Since he was the only source for a product, there wasn't any price competition. Here in the states, we'd wholesale with 5-6 distributors and those 5-6 companies were cut-throat with each other. The ones who couldn't compete on price, didn't survive.
The nuke proposal entails detonating the nuke off to one side of the asteroid. You want to be close enough to vaporize the surface but not so close as to fragment the asteroid.
Whether or not NASA's approach is the correct approach, NASA has the problem Schweickart's talking about - you have to try whatever you're going to do on a test asteroid (ideally on several different asteroids) before you're sure it's going to work. You certainly don't want to find out late in the game that nukes or tug boats won't do it when the outcome matters.
Schweickart's approach has the advantage of not having to re-negotiate the ban on nukes in space with the Russians.
Slightly off-topic. It seems to me that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter should be allocating some of its observing time looking for asteroids. It has the distinct advantage of being able to spot an object whose current orbit puts it on a direct path to the earth - something you can't see from the earth because the object isn't moving in our field of view. That's especially true for objects coming from the sun-side.
From what I've seen reported on the study, the authors were looking at averages being the same. That's what I've seen over the years as well. What I've also seen is the standard deviation for boys is greater. Boys are usually at the bottom, the middle and the top with the girls usually clustered in the center. Admittedly, my sample sizes are small and I'm looking at a self-selected group.
I've coached a Middle school math program called Mathcounts for the past 12 years. I coach in a Mathcounts region just south of the Silicon Valley. The program is organized around annual competitions that are structured as a hierarchy: school/region/state/national. Winning at one step gains a student, or group of students, access to the next level of competition. We've managed to do well at the regional competition and have sent at least one kid to the state level 10 out of 12 years.
At the regional level, gender has never been an issue - we send as many girls as boys to state. At the state level, gender is most definitely an issue as the top 16 kids out of the 150 or so regional winners are overwhelmingly boys. You'll usually see a 2 to 1 ratio and sometimes the boy's will sweep the top 16. In the sample I cited, I counted 6 girls out the top 38 contestants. Remember, I'm talking about the top 1% of middle school children in California. Most of the top kids are Asian which means anybody from India to Japan.
A key difference I've seen between my Asian and non-Asian students has been their parents. If I have a strong Asian student, strong odds are that the kid's parents are first-generation immigrants. First-generation parents tend to emphasize excellence far more than parents who have been here awhile.
We've mixed together chemical soups and watched life erupt out of it.
If you're referring to Stanley Miller's amino acid experiment, life didn't erupt, amino acids did. Life is several steps removed from that step.
The universe doesn't tend towards entropy. It tends towards life.We are walking, talking evidence of this fact.
Don't know where you learned physics but you're wrong, at least about our neck of the universe. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere including life, you see entropic processes at work. Life only exists because some organism has discovered a way to expedite the movement of energy from a high state to a lower state. For example, Lenski's e coli evolved to metabolize citrate. Prior to that life form coming along, citrate was relatively stable. This particular bug figured out a way to extract energy from the citrate bonds thereby increasing the overall level of entropy in the universe. We're another example. We've figured out how to split the atom and burn oil which more than pays for the energy costs it takes for us to exist.
When Feynman talked about photons moving faster than c, I almost fell down the "how can that be?" hole he warned about at the beginning of the book.
I missed the bit about electrons traveling faster than c when I read QED. I thought he was just talking about photons. Looks like it's time for a re-read.
Completely offtopic. Did you ever get a sense as to how he explained attraction between electrons and protons? Reading his electron-electron diagrams, I got the sense that repulsion between electrons is momentum exchange as one electron coughs up a photon and the other absorbs it. That model doesn't explain why electrons are attracted to protons.
Everyone who is posting at the forum has violated the SDK and Apple is collecting names. Settlement terms will be very generous - just sign over the copyright to your App and Apple will agree not to sue you for violating the SDK.
You're right that we could provide more of our oil. Had we drilled in ANWR when it was first proposed in the 90's, we'd have an extra 1.5 million barrels/day or about 15% of our domestic consumption. That would help a lot. Offshore would help on top of that.
But the fact is we didn't and it's going to take time to get Congress to wake up to that fact and act.
In the meantime, those of us who aren't Congress can do something today that'll help cut the flow of funds to people who really don't like us. It really fries me when I think that of each dollar I'm leaving at the gas pump, some fraction of it is going to Al-Qaeda.
You don't need future tech to give the middle finger to the Middle East - you can do it now.
One way you can reduce the Middle East's influence is to drive down the value of oil and you can do that by switching your car to natural gas. There are several companies like this one that will sell you a kit to make the switch. Googling "cng conversion kits gas" brings up a host of sources.
Since natural gas is not taxed as heavily and demand is lower, a gallon-equivalent of natural gas costs about half what gasoline costs. The conversion kits allow you to choose between natural gas and gasoline so if you're somewhere you can't find a natural gas station, you can switch back to gasoline. If you there isn't a natural gas station near where you live, you can install a natural gas compressor in your garage that'll fill your car overnight. The downsides are you lose some trunk space to the extra tank, natural gas stations aren't as numerous as gasoline stations and since methane doesn't store as many calories as gasoline, you lose about 10% of your engine's power. For me, the later issue isn't a big deal since my car has more power than it needs to get me around.
Natural gas is domestically produced and there's enough of it to last 100 years and that's not counting the undersea hydrate fields. I'd rather burn domestic gas than give Al-Qaeda a cut of every dollar I spend on gasoline.
Qwest's legal problems predate the NSA's circulating access requests to the telcos in the Fall of 2001.
The insider case that Nacchio, Qwest's CEO, claims he's being punished for, goes back to the dot-com bust when Qwest execs realized they weren't going to hit revenue projections. They started dumping stock and fraudulently shifting revenue to cover up the shortfall. Again, this all happened prior to the NSA asking for data.
I think Blalock and Thomas were the first to directly operate on the heart. They were treating blue babys in the 40's. Thomas' role is especially remarkable in that because he was black, he had no college or formal medical training.
This article says the window treatment for the dye alone would run around $300-$400 per square meter of glass. The solar cells would cost extra. The process requires vapor deposition which adds to the cost and it alters the light color passing through the window which may or may not be acceptable to the end user. And then there's this:
Oddly enough, a number of reports appearing today (for example, in the Associated Press) suggested that Covalent's concentrators would be of use in actual windows, but cofounder John Mapel made no mention of that possibility when we talked last week. That's no great surprise -- it would be difficult to get high-intensity light into vertically-positioned windows, much less windows placed on the wrong side of a building.
As a number of other posters have pointed out - wait for an actual product to see what it actually is and what it's capable of.
One barrier? How about that Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were in the United States? The FBI had specifically asked the CIA if any Al Qaeda members were in the United States and the CIA refused to answer. The CIA didn't divulge that information to the FBI until 9/12?
FISA serves to compartmentalize information. That's fine if you're worried about the government spying on its own citizens. Not so fine when it keeps the government from putting together information that's crucial to defense of its citizens.
Bush is trying to diminish FISA's control over his actions for good reasons.
FISA was established when the nation was not at war. The idea was that the CIA wouldn't engage in domestic surveillance because the FBI is supposed to do that. If the FBI wanted information the CIA had, it had to go to the FISA court to get it. That barricade made sense when it was established but had the side effect of hobbling legitimate inquiries. To wit, after the Cole bombing, the FBI had solid information that Al Qaeda was behind it and they had good information that Al Qaeda was established here in the states. They asked the CIA what the CIA knew and the CIA refused to divulge that they knew two Al-Qaeda operatives were in San Diego. The CIA had tracked them while following a meeting in Malaysia. The CIA didn't divulge that information to the FBI until late in the summer of 2001. The CIA justified its failure to pass the information on, despite being asked point blank in several meetings, to "The Wall", a reference to the barrier established by the FISA court.
After 9/11 when the 9/11 commission looked at why we missed several signals that could have thwarted 9/11, the FISA court played a dominant role. We're at war and Bush is trying to win it. He views FISA as an impediment to that goal and like presidents before him, i.e. Roosevelt and Lincoln, is pushing the boundaries of the Constitution.
Whether Bush is right or wrong comes down to a lot more than 'rules are for other people, not us.'
I was working at a garlic factory when HP showed up with a keyboard/barcode scanner they wanted to sell. I put it in the dustiest part of the factory where the garlic powder got put into barrels. If you've ever eaten a burger with onions at McDonalds, chances are you've had some onions that went through those chutes. Lots of powder, huge amount of dust. The keyboard lasted one day before going tits up. HP came round a week later to collect a garlic/onion encrusted lump of plastic. They simply couldn't believe how cruddy their keyboard looked after just a week.
A couple weeks later, I was talking to the salesman and asked him if they had been able to salvage the keyboard. He laughed and said that they had taken it apart and put it through the cafeteria's dishwasher. Once it was put back together, it worked fine. Feeling emboldened by their example, I tried the same thing at home. The keyboard never recovered from the drenching. Moral? ymmv.
I have an irobot vacuum cleaner and a dog. The vacuum does the job fairly well, not perfectly. If I insisted on perfection, I'd still be vacuuming 2-3 times a week cleaning up dog hair instead of once a month. The algorithm the vacuum uses is "1) When you bump into something or at a random time select from a list of behaviors (turn right/turn left/go straight/follow a wall/draw a spiral). 2) Execute the behavior until the first rule kicks in." Not very clever, but good enough.
The thing is it's intelligence way beyond what was available years ago. Not brilliant, just good enough.
We keep raising expectations when the early goals get met. When Blue Gene beat Kasparov, it wasn't executing terrifically clever algorithms - it was just amazingly fast at executing the ones it knew. When Checkers turned out to be a deterministic game, it was a computer that figured it out. When Douglas Hofstadter heard David Cope's computer-composed mazurka, he was shaken and even stirred. So now winning at Chess and Checkers or writing music is no longer considered AI.
As we begin to understand ourselves better, it may turn out that we're not much different than my vacuum cleaner - at a random time, pick from a list of behaviors (work/watch tv/ post on slashdot/ have sex/eat).
"In my mind the biggest problem with nuclear power isn't nuclear plant safety, so much as it is the risk of weaponization of the fuel."
It is only 'weaponization' of the fuel...IF you put it in a weapon.
The problem is we can't control the 'IF' when other countries have the reactor. Witness Iran's enrichment facility at Natanz. They claim it's just to enrich uranium to reactor-grade but the difference between using it to produce reactor-grade and weapons-grade is the number of times you pass the uranium through the process.
As Iran is illustrating, the proliferation of overseas nuclear power plants that use enriched uranium will inevitably lead to nuclear weapon proliferation.
Nuclear reactors may end up being a default Hobson's choice because as a country, we can't seem to organize ourselves effectively to produce the huge quantity of energy we consume.
"If you actually have some problem then you can go to a physician and have total confidence that the only person who will know the result is you and him."
I think you have it backwards. I was deficient in B12 a few years ago and suffering memory problems as a result. While my doctor and I were talking about possible causes, she was taking notes on an insurance form. She said, "If I mark 'memory problem' on this chart, it'll follow you the rest of your life." so she marked fatigue as the reason for the blood tests.
A private genetic test would be just that - private from your insurer. Granted, you don't want people prying into your genetics but you at least should be able to decide without someone vetting your reasoning.
If we are going to pretend that the USA is governed by the rule of law
That pretense went away when the Senate failed to convict Clinton.
Consider: Bill Clinton, Scooter Libby and Martha Stewart all were guilty of perjury. Only Martha Stewart served 2 years in prison - the other two got off; albeit Clinton got disbarred and paid a $90,000 fine. Clinton repaid the Democratic party by accepting the $1 million bribe from Marc Rich at the end of his term. I didn't see the Democratic party doing anything then except gasp.
.I don't know why Benjamin Franklin is ever mentioned as a scientist. He doesn't actually seem to have done anything great.
Franklin is responsible for figuring out that electricity came with opposite charges which he labeled positive and negative. We still use his discovery and notation today.
He also discovered that pointy things move charges better than flat surfaces and then turned around and capitalized on that discovery by inventing the lightning rod. That one invention saved so many lives that he was celebrated as a great scientist by the French years later when he went there as our Ambassador.
He speculated on the nature of lightning and hence the famed kite experiment which proved his hypothesis. He was damn lucky not to have been killed by his experiment but in conducting it, he was in every sense a scientist - hypothesize, figure out a way to test the hypothesis, do it, publish the results. What more do you want - dancing naked ladies?
We had Sequoia touch screen equipment in Monterey County, California until we got a new registrar. The Sequoia had the paper roll but the former registrar stated that the electronic version was the authoritative source if there was a discrepancy. (!)
He lost his job when he was caught embezzling money using a county-issued credit card.
His replacement, perhaps desiring to avoid any association with her predecessor and to make the voting process more transparent, tossed the Sequoias in favor of simple paper ballots. It was a politically astute move - nobody trusted the Sequoias.
The grandparent may be thinking of this event. Had the bollide arrived a few hours earlier, it would have exploded over either Pakistan or India who were already shooting at each other over Kashmir. The explosion was twice as large as the Hiroshima blast.
Whether both sides would have held their fire in that event is hard to tell.
Slashdot Mirror
For that matter, the PS3 comes standard with a 4200 RPM drive, which means it's not a particularly enticing Linux environment to develop in no matter which distro you use.
Nonetheless, even though it has a slow hard drive and only 256 Megs of RAM, there are some uses for Linux on the PS3. I live in a small valley where radio reception is virtually nil. I use my PS3 to play Shoutcast streams on my stereo when I'm not watching a movie on it.
My preferred usage would be to run Pandora using the built-in browser on the PS3 but unfortunately, Pandora doesn't quite fit on the PS3. Imagine - 256 megs is too little Ram to run a browser and a flash application. Somebody must have skipped "Hardware Constraints-101" when they went to college.
When will it be Reid's Turn?
It's credit mobilier all over again except this time it's housing instead of rail roads. Fannie Mae and Mac are schemes to buy votes with tax payer dollars and use more tax payer dollars to fund electoral campaigns.
Both parties are in it up to their neck.
Back in the 90's when I was shipping software to Europe, the price I'd charge the wholesaler was the same I'd charge local wholesalers. Getting through customs however, wasn't trivial. Import duties in the 90's which were separate from VAT were running around 15-20%. The wholesaler paid that on top of the price he paid us and added his markup which he passed on to the retailer. The retailer turned around and added his markup to the price he paid which included the duty cost plus the wholesaler's markup on the duty cost. By the time it got to the customer, the customer was paying markup on markup on duty plus regular retail-wholesale markups. What initially appeared to be a relatively small duty cost mushroomed into a sizable burden.
I was talking to one of the wholesalers about it and he laughed it off by saying 'yeah, but we get trains!' He'd then piss and moan about his more savy customers buying directly from retailers in the states and avoiding the double markups. That of course, reduced his market which meant he raised his prices more to cover his fixed costs.
Another factor driving prices in Europe was the fact that we'd sign exclusive distribution agreements so a wholesaler owned the market for a specific country. We did that because the wholesaler handled the translation and marketing costs in the specific country (we were a small company). Since he was the only source for a product, there wasn't any price competition. Here in the states, we'd wholesale with 5-6 distributors and those 5-6 companies were cut-throat with each other. The ones who couldn't compete on price, didn't survive.
The nuke proposal entails detonating the nuke off to one side of the asteroid. You want to be close enough to vaporize the surface but not so close as to fragment the asteroid.
Whether or not NASA's approach is the correct approach, NASA has the problem Schweickart's talking about - you have to try whatever you're going to do on a test asteroid (ideally on several different asteroids) before you're sure it's going to work. You certainly don't want to find out late in the game that nukes or tug boats won't do it when the outcome matters.
Schweickart's approach has the advantage of not having to re-negotiate the ban on nukes in space with the Russians.
Slightly off-topic. It seems to me that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter should be allocating some of its observing time looking for asteroids. It has the distinct advantage of being able to spot an object whose current orbit puts it on a direct path to the earth - something you can't see from the earth because the object isn't moving in our field of view. That's especially true for objects coming from the sun-side.
From what I've seen reported on the study, the authors were looking at averages being the same. That's what I've seen over the years as well. What I've also seen is the standard deviation for boys is greater. Boys are usually at the bottom, the middle and the top with the girls usually clustered in the center. Admittedly, my sample sizes are small and I'm looking at a self-selected group.
I've coached a Middle school math program called Mathcounts for the past 12 years. I coach in a Mathcounts region just south of the Silicon Valley. The program is organized around annual competitions that are structured as a hierarchy: school/region/state/national. Winning at one step gains a student, or group of students, access to the next level of competition. We've managed to do well at the regional competition and have sent at least one kid to the state level 10 out of 12 years.
At the regional level, gender has never been an issue - we send as many girls as boys to state. At the state level, gender is most definitely an issue as the top 16 kids out of the 150 or so regional winners are overwhelmingly boys. You'll usually see a 2 to 1 ratio and sometimes the boy's will sweep the top 16. In the sample I cited, I counted 6 girls out the top 38 contestants. Remember, I'm talking about the top 1% of middle school children in California. Most of the top kids are Asian which means anybody from India to Japan.
A key difference I've seen between my Asian and non-Asian students has been their parents. If I have a strong Asian student, strong odds are that the kid's parents are first-generation immigrants. First-generation parents tend to emphasize excellence far more than parents who have been here awhile.
We've mixed together chemical soups and watched life erupt out of it.
If you're referring to Stanley Miller's amino acid experiment, life didn't erupt, amino acids did. Life is several steps removed from that step.
The universe doesn't tend towards entropy. It tends towards life.We are walking, talking evidence of this fact.
Don't know where you learned physics but you're wrong, at least about our neck of the universe. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere including life, you see entropic processes at work. Life only exists because some organism has discovered a way to expedite the movement of energy from a high state to a lower state. For example, Lenski's e coli evolved to metabolize citrate. Prior to that life form coming along, citrate was relatively stable. This particular bug figured out a way to extract energy from the citrate bonds thereby increasing the overall level of entropy in the universe. We're another example. We've figured out how to split the atom and burn oil which more than pays for the energy costs it takes for us to exist.
When Feynman talked about photons moving faster than c, I almost fell down the "how can that be?" hole he warned about at the beginning of the book.
I missed the bit about electrons traveling faster than c when I read QED. I thought he was just talking about photons. Looks like it's time for a re-read.
Completely offtopic. Did you ever get a sense as to how he explained attraction between electrons and protons? Reading his electron-electron diagrams, I got the sense that repulsion between electrons is momentum exchange as one electron coughs up a photon and the other absorbs it. That model doesn't explain why electrons are attracted to protons.
Everyone who is posting at the forum has violated the SDK and Apple is collecting names. Settlement terms will be very generous - just sign over the copyright to your App and Apple will agree not to sue you for violating the SDK.
Clever bastards! What will they think of next?
You're right that we could provide more of our oil. Had we drilled in ANWR when it was first proposed in the 90's, we'd have an extra 1.5 million barrels/day or about 15% of our domestic consumption. That would help a lot. Offshore would help on top of that.
But the fact is we didn't and it's going to take time to get Congress to wake up to that fact and act.
In the meantime, those of us who aren't Congress can do something today that'll help cut the flow of funds to people who really don't like us. It really fries me when I think that of each dollar I'm leaving at the gas pump, some fraction of it is going to Al-Qaeda.
You don't need future tech to give the middle finger to the Middle East - you can do it now.
One way you can reduce the Middle East's influence is to drive down the value of oil and you can do that by switching your car to natural gas. There are several companies like this one that will sell you a kit to make the switch. Googling "cng conversion kits gas" brings up a host of sources.
Since natural gas is not taxed as heavily and demand is lower, a gallon-equivalent of natural gas costs about half what gasoline costs. The conversion kits allow you to choose between natural gas and gasoline so if you're somewhere you can't find a natural gas station, you can switch back to gasoline. If you there isn't a natural gas station near where you live, you can install a natural gas compressor in your garage that'll fill your car overnight. The downsides are you lose some trunk space to the extra tank, natural gas stations aren't as numerous as gasoline stations and since methane doesn't store as many calories as gasoline, you lose about 10% of your engine's power. For me, the later issue isn't a big deal since my car has more power than it needs to get me around.
Natural gas is domestically produced and there's enough of it to last 100 years and that's not counting the undersea hydrate fields. I'd rather burn domestic gas than give Al-Qaeda a cut of every dollar I spend on gasoline.
Qwest's legal problems predate the NSA's circulating access requests to the telcos in the Fall of 2001.
The insider case that Nacchio, Qwest's CEO, claims he's being punished for, goes back to the dot-com bust when Qwest execs realized they weren't going to hit revenue projections. They started dumping stock and fraudulently shifting revenue to cover up the shortfall. Again, this all happened prior to the NSA asking for data.
The company has a history of engaging in illegal activity. In 2001, they paid an additional $350,000 fine on top of the June, 2000 $1.5 million fine they paid the FCC for slamming users. The slamming complaints started in the 90's.
Nacchio's blowing smoke by playing the role of NSA's victim.
I think Blalock and Thomas were the first to directly operate on the heart. They were treating blue babys in the 40's. Thomas' role is especially remarkable in that because he was black, he had no college or formal medical training.
This article says the window treatment for the dye alone would run around $300-$400 per square meter of glass. The solar cells would cost extra. The process requires vapor deposition which adds to the cost and it alters the light color passing through the window which may or may not be acceptable to the end user. And then there's this:
Oddly enough, a number of reports appearing today (for example, in the Associated Press) suggested that Covalent's concentrators would be of use in actual windows, but cofounder John Mapel made no mention of that possibility when we talked last week. That's no great surprise -- it would be difficult to get high-intensity light into vertically-positioned windows, much less windows placed on the wrong side of a building.
As a number of other posters have pointed out - wait for an actual product to see what it actually is and what it's capable of.
One barrier? How about that Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were in the United States? The FBI had specifically asked the CIA if any Al Qaeda members were in the United States and the CIA refused to answer. The CIA didn't divulge that information to the FBI until 9/12?
FISA serves to compartmentalize information. That's fine if you're worried about the government spying on its own citizens. Not so fine when it keeps the government from putting together information that's crucial to defense of its citizens.
We both have fears, just different ones.
Bush is trying to diminish FISA's control over his actions for good reasons.
FISA was established when the nation was not at war. The idea was that the CIA wouldn't engage in domestic surveillance because the FBI is supposed to do that. If the FBI wanted information the CIA had, it had to go to the FISA court to get it. That barricade made sense when it was established but had the side effect of hobbling legitimate inquiries. To wit, after the Cole bombing, the FBI had solid information that Al Qaeda was behind it and they had good information that Al Qaeda was established here in the states. They asked the CIA what the CIA knew and the CIA refused to divulge that they knew two Al-Qaeda operatives were in San Diego. The CIA had tracked them while following a meeting in Malaysia. The CIA didn't divulge that information to the FBI until late in the summer of 2001. The CIA justified its failure to pass the information on, despite being asked point blank in several meetings, to "The Wall", a reference to the barrier established by the FISA court.
After 9/11 when the 9/11 commission looked at why we missed several signals that could have thwarted 9/11, the FISA court played a dominant role. We're at war and Bush is trying to win it. He views FISA as an impediment to that goal and like presidents before him, i.e. Roosevelt and Lincoln, is pushing the boundaries of the Constitution.
Whether Bush is right or wrong comes down to a lot more than 'rules are for other people, not us.'
I was working at a garlic factory when HP showed up with a keyboard/barcode scanner they wanted to sell. I put it in the dustiest part of the factory where the garlic powder got put into barrels. If you've ever eaten a burger with onions at McDonalds, chances are you've had some onions that went through those chutes. Lots of powder, huge amount of dust. The keyboard lasted one day before going tits up. HP came round a week later to collect a garlic/onion encrusted lump of plastic. They simply couldn't believe how cruddy their keyboard looked after just a week.
A couple weeks later, I was talking to the salesman and asked him if they had been able to salvage the keyboard. He laughed and said that they had taken it apart and put it through the cafeteria's dishwasher. Once it was put back together, it worked fine. Feeling emboldened by their example, I tried the same thing at home. The keyboard never recovered from the drenching. Moral? ymmv.
I have an irobot vacuum cleaner and a dog. The vacuum does the job fairly well, not perfectly. If I insisted on perfection, I'd still be vacuuming 2-3 times a week cleaning up dog hair instead of once a month. The algorithm the vacuum uses is "1) When you bump into something or at a random time select from a list of behaviors (turn right/turn left/go straight/follow a wall/draw a spiral). 2) Execute the behavior until the first rule kicks in." Not very clever, but good enough.
The thing is it's intelligence way beyond what was available years ago. Not brilliant, just good enough.
We keep raising expectations when the early goals get met. When Blue Gene beat Kasparov, it wasn't executing terrifically clever algorithms - it was just amazingly fast at executing the ones it knew. When Checkers turned out to be a deterministic game, it was a computer that figured it out. When Douglas Hofstadter heard David Cope's computer-composed mazurka, he was shaken and even stirred. So now winning at Chess and Checkers or writing music is no longer considered AI.
As we begin to understand ourselves better, it may turn out that we're not much different than my vacuum cleaner - at a random time, pick from a list of behaviors (work/watch tv/ post on slashdot/ have sex/eat).
Gee. I just posted on slashdot...
"In my mind the biggest problem with nuclear power isn't nuclear plant safety, so much as it is the risk of weaponization of the fuel."
It is only 'weaponization' of the fuel...IF you put it in a weapon.
The problem is we can't control the 'IF' when other countries have the reactor. Witness Iran's enrichment facility at Natanz. They claim it's just to enrich uranium to reactor-grade but the difference between using it to produce reactor-grade and weapons-grade is the number of times you pass the uranium through the process.
As Iran is illustrating, the proliferation of overseas nuclear power plants that use enriched uranium will inevitably lead to nuclear weapon proliferation.
Nuclear reactors may end up being a default Hobson's choice because as a country, we can't seem to organize ourselves effectively to produce the huge quantity of energy we consume.
"If you actually have some problem then you can go to a physician and have total confidence that the only person who will know the result is you and him."
I think you have it backwards. I was deficient in B12 a few years ago and suffering memory problems as a result. While my doctor and I were talking about possible causes, she was taking notes on an insurance form. She said, "If I mark 'memory problem' on this chart, it'll follow you the rest of your life." so she marked fatigue as the reason for the blood tests.
A private genetic test would be just that - private from your insurer. Granted, you don't want people prying into your genetics but you at least should be able to decide without someone vetting your reasoning.
That pretense went away when the Senate failed to convict Clinton.
Consider: Bill Clinton, Scooter Libby and Martha Stewart all were guilty of perjury. Only Martha Stewart served 2 years in prison - the other two got off; albeit Clinton got disbarred and paid a $90,000 fine. Clinton repaid the Democratic party by accepting the $1 million bribe from Marc Rich at the end of his term. I didn't see the Democratic party doing anything then except gasp.
.I don't know why Benjamin Franklin is ever mentioned as a scientist. He doesn't actually seem to have done anything great.
Franklin is responsible for figuring out that electricity came with opposite charges which he labeled positive and negative. We still use his discovery and notation today.
He also discovered that pointy things move charges better than flat surfaces and then turned around and capitalized on that discovery by inventing the lightning rod. That one invention saved so many lives that he was celebrated as a great scientist by the French years later when he went there as our Ambassador.
He speculated on the nature of lightning and hence the famed kite experiment which proved his hypothesis. He was damn lucky not to have been killed by his experiment but in conducting it, he was in every sense a scientist - hypothesize, figure out a way to test the hypothesis, do it, publish the results. What more do you want - dancing naked ladies?
We had Sequoia touch screen equipment in Monterey County, California until we got a new registrar. The Sequoia had the paper roll but the former registrar stated that the electronic version was the authoritative source if there was a discrepancy. (!)
He lost his job when he was caught embezzling money using a county-issued credit card.
His replacement, perhaps desiring to avoid any association with her predecessor and to make the voting process more transparent, tossed the Sequoias in favor of simple paper ballots. It was a politically astute move - nobody trusted the Sequoias.
Sometimes computer-placed advertising just ain't what it's cut out to be.
On the way to rtfa, a full-screen Dell ad popped up.
Or perhaps, the software is very, very clever and Dell was trying to discourage me from continuing on to read the article.
The grandparent may be thinking of this event. Had the bollide arrived a few hours earlier, it would have exploded over either Pakistan or India who were already shooting at each other over Kashmir. The explosion was twice as large as the Hiroshima blast.
Whether both sides would have held their fire in that event is hard to tell.
This blog entry by William Patry adds quite a bit of background.
Patry is Senior Copyright Counsel for Google.