Or, we'd shiver in the dark and/or swelter in the heat. Because if it was that easy, it would be done already.
Did you hear me say "easy"? I seem to recall saying something like:
It will be expensive in the short term. It will pay and pay and pay for generations thereafter.
Yep. My words for "won't be easy", but nonetheless important.
Still, those few square feet wouldn't even run the blower for my A/C, never mind the compressor.
If your house was designed properly, it wouldn't even need a huge-assed A/C. At the very least, it wouldn't need to be anything as big as it is now. When I recently doubled the size of my house, I demanded the best insulating EVERYTHING. 6" thick walls instead of 4", stuffed to the gills with insulation. Attic crammed high with almost 3' of insulation. Highest-efficiency central air available. The end result is that despite DOUBLING the size of my house, and despite RISING energy costs, my average utility bill went DOWN. Before the rise of energy costs, I calculated my ROI at about 5 years. But they've gone up, so I'll break even on this extra expense in more like 3 years!
Since doing this, I've done some research to find that, while I was on the right track, I didn't travel down it nearly far enough. I could have all-but eliminated my A/C altogether by using the ground UNDERNEATH MY HOUSE as a heat-sink.
Damn. (Where was that nuke, again?)
Ain't seen any geysers around here. And there's a whole state between me and the ocean. Bio-fuels... well, most of the stuff people grow around here, they grow for food. I don't think the little bit of miracle-fuel-plant-of-the-week I could plant on my front lawn would power my heat for the season it takes to grow it, either.
Do you live in a different country than that ocean?
Didn't think so. Power generated within the same country could be considered "local" compared to foreign imports. And with a properly designed power grid, including ubiquitous electric vehicles, (and its distributed power storage capability) the occasional non-windy day provides almost no hassle. Think it's far off? Think again - the best minds in the world are at work.
And let's talk about those fields growing food. They are excellent locations to keep windmills in, since they have few obstructions to wind, keeping turbulence to a minimum while causing almost no reduction in the amount of usable farmland.
(sigh) But I guess you're the "half-empty" kind of guy. Go back to your mother's basement, why don't ye? I'll try to stay off your precious lawn.
Queue in 10 million "global warming is a scam", "don't look at me, people didna doit" and "Al Gore is a weenie" comments.
But all of these comments on the legitimacy of global warming/cooling/climate change all ignore one very simple, inescapable fact: Most "carbon-neutral" energy forms can be generated locally. Windmills use the wind in your area. Solar panels use the sunlight from your roof. This is also true for geothermal, ocean-wave, and bio-fueled energy. All can be generated locally, with local resources.
Only oil and nuclear have limited supply.
So if, for example, you were a wealthy, North-American country with a severe foreign-debt problem, you might consider the actual costs of oil in lost lives, civil liberties, currency devaluation, and raw wealth shipped oversees to fund a petroleum addiction. This cost is so huge and multi-faceted it baffles the mind. Average people just cannot even begin to understand wealth drain and cost of this magnitude.
But if we were to generate our energy locally, with renewable resources, not only would we leave a nicer place for our kids, grandkids, and their offspring, we'd also improve our national sovereignty. Rather than fund deadly radicals, we'd fund the nice guy down the street. Rather than ship our cash to entities who threaten us at every turn, we'd fund your next-door neighbors. No matter where you live, no matter who you are, no matter how wealthy you happen to be, this is a good idea.
Ignore the matter of global warming, because there's a much more immediate reason to "go green". And it has nothing to do with carbon footprint, it has to do with the green bits of paper in your back pocket. It will be expensive in the short term. It will pay and pay and pay for generations thereafter.
Which would you rather be remembered as: the generation that ignored the problem until it was too late, or the generation that set your state/country/civilization on a long-term course of prosperity?
Hello regex. Something that, until you've tasted it, you have no idea what you're missing. It's like trying to talk about mind-blowing, multiple-orgasm sex to a virgin.
Expressions maketh so many problems doth appear so simple, once you learn the syntax of its incantations. And it's hardly fair to bring up a pattern match looking for html-style tags... I rarely touch perl, but I use the perl regex syntax all the time with PHP's preg_.... functions.
Really, since there is no possible rationale by which any effort at all expended replying to you can be rationally cost-justified, I'll be brief.
Meaning, you can't imagine a single reason to justify replying? So why did you reply? And, if this is BRIEF?!?!? I'd love to try to make sense of the "long form"...
In the whole "evolution vs ID" argument, there's a sincere failing - the lack of evidence of ID. In short, I defy you to show any. I have no doubt that you'll have plenty of 'evidence' of things that 'cannot be evolved', which serves as an excellent proof of ignorance and/or lack of understanding, but proves nothing. There is no actual evidence that I've ever seen or heard (and I've looked!) which actually supports ID.
But that cannot be discussed sanely with most. The argument logic almost always follows this path: "Evolution is all wrong because $someMinorReason. Therefore, my god created the world in a week, a few thousand years ago". Perhaps this is a straw man scenario in your specific case, but you haven't argued these assumptions, so I doubt it.
My question to you is thus rephrased: Show me what evidence supports the idea that your god (whatever his/her/its) actually created the world, and NOT the FSM. The fact that some guys died because they thought "God did it" is not evidence of your god's creation, it's only evidence of their convictions. The idea that a book heavily laden with predictions happened to hit a few is not evidence of your god's creation, only that people can make predictions with varying levels of accuracy. (And yes, you do have to consider the failed predictions: try reading your horoscope in your local newspaper. You'll find that they often do a fairly good job describing your life, providing just enough detail for you to consider it a match. Try another birthday, and you'll find similar results. This is not a useful prediction of anything.)
If you accept that the whole world can be created in a week by an omnipotent being just a few thousand years ago, despite overwhelming amounts of evidence that indicate otherwise, why not just accept that it might have been the tooth fairy or the FSM or an angry centipede did it?
Since you apparently accept the idea of your omnipotent god faking the overwhelming amounts of evidence in support of evolution, why not accept the idea that a pasta-based life form faked any evidence in support of your (ahem) bathrobe-cladded god? Is it really any more fanciful?
You can't have it both ways!
In short, I accept the trials of reproducibility and peer review. I accept the idea that the universe follows clear, consistent, and understandable laws that don't change because a tooth fairy, a guy in white clothes (pyjamas?), or a worm in a flying chariot decides it to be so when it supports your pet theory. Sorry you consider this concept "intellectual dishonesty". Most of us would call this "Science". Just don't pretend that your biblical references are scientific and/or qualifiable as evidence, because it merely displays your intellectual laziness.
First off, using longer words doesn't improve your argument. It is sometimes effective in obfuscating your lack of understanding, but not here.
Starting with your first link - how is this relevant? There is no mention of God or the great noodly FSM. People came close to death and had something resembling a memory with certain factors in common, which isn't surprising since they had a rather traumatic experience in common.
Now, your next link which proclaims that the bible has predicted things that then came true. There's a number of "probability" next to each of these, but this completely fails as a proper comparison of the Bible's predictive qualities.
1) there's no information present to indicate which arsehole the numbers where pulled out of, or what information could possibly be used to substantiate it.
2) There's no mention of the predictions that, in fact, did NOT come true demonstrably.
3) Lastly, this completely ignores the fact that highly improbable things happen every single day, simply because so much actually happens. A quick google search returns this page, quoted: "To use probability to decide between two alternatives requires a comparison of the probabilities of each alternative. Simply saying that one has low probability without calculating the probability for the other is inadequate. "
Moving on to your last link - some information about who was crucified for their Christian faith. Again, what is the relevance? The number of people that died here apparently is paled by the number of people willingly sacrificed in Central America. Is that to say that now you believe in the animal-headed Aztec gods, rather than your angy white guy in pajamas? Or do you prefer to follow the likes of Jim Jones? Lots of people died there, too. Rather recently, and the deaths are well documented!
Sorry, but once you leave the land of the demonstrable, repeatable Sciences, you enter the domain of that which can never be known, since the number of bullshit answers rises exponentially with the number of people involved in the discussion. You can't even consistently get two Christians to agree on whether there is one god or three! And because we've left behind stuff like actual EVIDENCE, there is no way to demonstrate either way!
However, Christians most definitely hate to discuss the anthropological evidence supporting that their angry guy in pajamas is actually an ideological derivation of the ancient Egyptian god of war. (EG: the burning bush, etc) Nor do they like to discuss the fact that ancient Egyptian culture was markedly different than the slavery depicted as Noah left Egypt. They were good to their women, they had slaves but they weren't generally mistreated, the Egyptian religion is based around Ma'at which is actually very similar to the "heaven/hell" scenario for Christianity. In fact, there's basically no evidence at all to support these ideas. And you can't use the Bible as a historical reference without also mentioning similar works like the Q'uran. The Q'uran has a reference to Noah, for example, but it's rather markedly different than what your Bible teaches.
So why would you trust your Bible over the Q'uran? And would you want to? More food for thought: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkXOwBIRX7Y if you're brave enough to watch it.
Simple. Explain to me how your "angry guy in white pajamas" is any more/less likely than the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Then intelligent discussion can begin.
I'll avoid taking time now to argue I think this is indicative of Design, because I expect to see the usual spontaneous compulsory posts insisting it isn't indicative Design, as sufficient psychological indication of it being considered plausibly Design.
There are a number of problems with a transponder.
1) There's no identity attached to a transponder, except for a 4 digit code you can set yourself. (is that plane 5 miles directly behind you a little 90 MPH Cessna 150 or 250 MPH Turbine?)
2) They only are useful to ATC. If you're not flying under ATC control, (perfectly legal!) or haven't contacted ATC yet for whatever reason, (such as opening a friggen flight plan) you don't know about the Turbine 5 miles directly behind you closing in at 150 MPH.
3) They use a standard pressure altimeter, which aren't exactly accurate. It's pretty normal for your altimeter to be 250 or more feet off vertically, when you get an update from a nearby AWOS or something. Meaning, the 500' of vertical separation between VFR/IFR traffic can be effectively ZERO.
I had assumed (wrongfully it turns out) that one of the benefits of using a cloud was that your data was backed up in some distributed fashion. It turns out that doesn't seem to be the case.
As a hosted-application provider, I can assure you that we have backups of backups, redundant to three different locations, never more than 24 hours old. Our recovery process is intrinsic to our day-to-day operation. (we use our failover hosting as a staging environment for public testing of new features, so that we KNOW that our data recovery works - it's tested every single day!)
It's all automatic, so that nobody has to "do" it, and errors are reported to admins by email. (which are rare) We also have an "admin dashboard" that monitors our backups, online status, load average, service availability, etc. every 5 minutes so that in the case of a failing of any conceivable part of our primary hosting cluster, an admin gets a notice within a few minutes or so - rarely do we get a call about a failure that we don't already know about.
I guess some "cloud computing" companies just don't take your data seriously, but it's certainly not par for the course.
Afraid I can't be too specific about what division, etc. but Beale AFB in Northern California has a "permanent temporary flight restriction" over it. Since it's just south of me, and on the way to just about anything interesting, I run into it all the time when I fly privately. (I'm a private pilot)
It's not a big deal, really - in order to fly above the AFB's airspace, I have to be in touch with regional (NorCal) Approach Control and have to submit to their direction. (Why else would I be in touch with ATC?!?) But at least 1-2 days/week this "temporary" flight restriction is in effect, so they're flying UAV's all the time.
The biggest problem with ATC is that it's completely segregated. Since it mostly works, it's not often criticized, but it does put a significant amount of load on the pilot. For an hour-long flight, it's not atypical for me to fly for 20-30 minutes before I get a flight plan opened and in positive contact with ATC, what with all the frequency change requests, briefings, waiting in line, and other handshaking chatter I have to do! God forbid I should crash in the first half of the flight!
Another example, if I'm flying 3,000 feet over X airport, I'd think it would be a good idea for pilots at X airport to know. But unless I actually announce on the appropriate frequency, there's no way for them to know. And there's no easy way for me to know if I'm near an airport unless I'm using a GPS. And, cruising at 140 MPH means I'm only going to be over the airport and associated traffic for anywhere from 1-2 minutes. And the next airport is 20 miles away, 1/7 of an hour away, another 8 minutes or so. Remember when I said it took 20 minutes to get a flight plan opened? Further, it's perfectly legal for me to fly just 2,000 feet over the vast majority of smaller airports without announcing anything at all, even though it's common for traffic to fly in to airports a few thousand feet high if they aren't familiar and sort of "drop in" after announcing. effort to do things that should be 100% computerized. If aviation radios had the equivalent of TCP and self-announced their position a la GPS, it could be a real-time, fully-coordinated, highly secure and all-but-automatic system that required almost no actual human intervention on the radio for most tasks.
Note: I wouldn't use TCP - it sucks ass when the packet loss gets any higher than a few percent - but there are a number of protocols that have been developed for such a purpose. For example, many game developers use UDP and then code lots of logic into the application, which extends UDP into a quasi-protocol.
The technology really wouldn't be all that hard. Just break down the Earth into groups of coordinates, perhaps 30 seconds or so on a side. Then, a GPS unit would "announce" it's position into an IRC group of the coordinate block that applied. Depending on the speed of the aircraft, it would also "subscribe" to the coordinate blocks that are deemed appropriate - the faster the plane, the larger the radius of coordinate groups it would request updates from.
Running a radio-based packet-switching network is pretty well understood - HAMs have been doing it for a long, long time, along with cell phone providers, Wifi, WiMax, UWB, and gobs of other technologies, any of which would probably be quite sufficient for the task. There is a *lot* of radio space available for aviation, since aviation radio is one of the older technologies around, and simple packet-switching technologies allow many radios to share a common communications channel.
Think IRC, with SSL enabled as appropriate. (granting an FAA-granted 4096-bit certificate would make it damned hard to spoof a radio call!) I could write the software in a few months. I could program the GPS unit with a GPU and a bare-bones Linux core in perhaps 6 months. But it would take me 10 years (at best) to get this rammed through the Gubbmint if I had nearly unlimited funds and some damned good lobbyists on my speed-dial. Augh.
Don't take this as an attack. We all make mistakes sometimes.
But wow. Pitiful that you'd think that two people with "fer'n acksents" would be the same guy. As if 5.75 billion of the world's 6 billion people sounded "fer'n".
For a while, I did as you did, although I amped it up a bit. Rather than submit a single form, I reverse-engineered the submission form, then write a PHP shell script to auto-submit random (crap) data into the form with several connections at once. Then I'd fork a hundred or so processes to run the script in a loop. Over a few hours, I'd submit a few hundred thousand submissions to the phisher, data that appeared legit, but wasn't.
Until it bored me. You do it for a while, but the next day, there's another phisher, another form to reverse engineer. So you do it again, and again, and again, until... ?
Anytime your private encryption key is "over there" you are at risk. If your private key is stored on *their* servers in such a manner that *they* can get to it, your privacy is at risk.
As a software developer, I'm in a pilot program to use encryption for digital signatures. Despite the relative simplicity of using openSSL functionality, it's been surprisingly painstaking and laborious to put everything together.
See, real security requires outright paranoia. How do you prevent your CA key from being compromised, in such a way that you can all-but guarantee that it hasn't been? To do this, you have to make it not only unlikely, but impossible to be compromised in every conceivable way. How do you prevent your client's private key from being compromised, in such a way that you can all but guarantee it? How do you prevent a malicious client from obtaining a signed certificate? How do you prevent 3rd parties from MITM attacks? How do you provide high-level security for all the above, while still providing redundancy for disaster recovery? How do you prevent compromises stemming from a social engineering attack?
Not including implementation and ongoing maintenance of these procedures, the cost of just proving that you have all these measures in place runs to many thousands of dollars!
A solution that answers all these and every conceivable related question is surprisingly difficult, and many, if not most, of the problems are not technical, but social.
Really? How many are working on counter-theories to evolution? Yeah, sit down Skippy. SOME scientists are just as religious about their theories as religions themselves.
Try reading his sentence again:
More importantly, they are always looking for new evidence which will either corroborate or contradict their theories.
The question is... is there actual evidence that can be found anywhere to indicate that evolution is clearly wrong?
And don't give me the idiocy of irreducible complexity - arguing that this debunks evolution so it must be intelligent design is kinda like saying: "Well I can't figure it out, so some guy in white pajamas musta didit". Might as well argue that it was a care bear armed with a pickle, or maybe the flying spaghetti monster...
Banks are subject to intense regulatory oversight. Additionally, money in a bank is backed by FDIC which, as we've seen just recently, protected the numerous customers of Freddie Mac. This oversight won't prevent a stupid, but does work to limit the damage to me if my bank does a stupid.
Google is not under such oversight, and if it disappeared tomorrow would take all your data with it. There is *some* oversight a la regulation of a public company, but this oversight is more about stock fraud and the like, not providing any guarantee of customer satisfaction.
So you're one of those guys that has one of those ultra-cool external CD players attached to the center console or are you still using the cassette insert for your walkman CD player?:)
No, I'm one of those guys who installed an aftermarket CD-Radio in my (ahem) standardized, pluggable bay. See, my car came with a standard-sized radio socket so it wasn't a particularly big deal to upgrade. (It could have been easier, but...)
I bike halfway to work - in California we have these "park and ride" lots, where you can drive to a transportation hub and catch public transit the rest of the way. My long commute and lack of bike trails near home make biking all the way to work impractical, but there's a beautiful bike trail along the 56 freeway that I can take once I get to the park and ride lot.
Other than that, I stretch, do crunches, and do pushups every morning when I wake up. This is not only stay-in-shape exercise, it's also wake-me-up exercise - double benefits! On the weekents, I ride my bike to In N Out - the benefits may cancel out with the calories, but at least I'm getting exercise.:-)
I'm a jogger, and I live in the California central valley. I am *not* a morning person. For 4-5 months out of the year, it's too hot to jog far, and that would be now. So I have a cheap-o treadmill I bought at Kmart on sale for about $70, and I run vigorously for one hour while watching my fave show for the day. (Currently, Junkyard Wars - go "High Flyers!")
The rest of the year, I go for a jog around 9 PM or so for about 45 min to an hour. I'm a bit introvert, and don't like the whole 'health club' thing, either. But jogging is very much an individual thing. Grab an MP3 player, and pick some place you'd like to run to. It's great for thinking to yourself - I usually jog in a reverie, barely conscious of my environment beyond avoiding cars. It's really awesome when the endorphins kick in - I have, at times, been so overwhelmed with the joy of being alive, I've cried! It's an awesome feeling!
Make sure you have good shoes, though. It's worth it to spend $100 on some good therapeutic running shoes. They'll last longer than you thought, and will prevent injuries to your hips and knees. (I'm 36, so it's not like it only happens to "old folks")
Since somebody else brought it up, I weigh a bit over 200, and am just shy of 6', making my BMI around 27-28. I jog primarily because I have issues with blood sugar, and jogging sets everything "right". My doctor's told me that if I stopped jogging and taking care of myself, I'd be a out-n-out diabetic almost immediately!
So I jog. I eat reasonably well, occasionally going on a conscious diet to lose a few pounds. More than just the blood sugar, it improves my whole sense of well-being. Very much worth it!
The major navigation units like TomTom run embedded linux.
And if you ask me, this is the future of "car computing". I don't want to play solitaire on the road, and I don't want a GP O/S that's vulnerable to viruses. I don't want bluetooth anywhere near my ignition and fuel injection systems.
Cars last 10-15 years. Computers typically last about 2-3. Trying to tie these together is a bad, bad idea.
I drive (and love!) a 10 year-old Saturn with almost 200,000 miles on it. When it was built, the idea of a Tom-Tom was barely conceived, yet I drive with one routinely on long trips. Even if a Tom-Tom was built-in to new cars today, in just a few years it would be out-of-date as new units include everything from weather to instant-connect for ordering food locally. It would stick out like tail fins and sorely date your car.
Sorry.
Make my car drive reliably and efficiently first, leave the gadgets for later. At the very least, create a standardized, pluggable bay and protocol for gadgets down the road, akin to the ubiquitous cigarette lighter jack, so that we can plug in gadgets easily in the future. (hint: cigarette lighter jacks SUCK ASS for power plugs, they are just already there - give me something decent!)
And this is why, as an outsourced provider, we don't outsource *our* hosting. Even if there is a significant cost benefit, we'll still have our own systems. I'd rather know who's looking at what and remain in (some) control of the information flow.
We do offer a rather strong privacy policy, but we do still retain the right to look at information of our clients. Look - it's their equipment, their server, their bandwidth. Your information is yours, but they are free to look at it for pretty much any reason they want. Either you trust them with this level of access, or you don't.
Ummmm, yes. If you can identify them BEFORE they make their first attack then that would qualify as "predictive".
Stock analysts make daily predictions based on past behavior. This is not only predictive, but if it wasn't for this past analysis, the predictions would be largely meaningless and highly inaccurate. Or do you want a computer program that can predict what you'll think before you actually think it?
Not in my experience. The attacks are usually automated scripts running on zombies that randomly scan address (or search their immediate networks) looking for known vulnerabilities.
How many high profile hosts have you overseen? In my experience, the random attacks you mention are found everywhere. But high-profile hosts are their own deal. I've seen very carefully crafted spam attacks directed at one of my client ISPs that would last anywhere from 3-8 hours. (one of the largest regional ISPs in my area) A typical spam attack would entail perhaps 250,000 deliverable messages. It was a constant game of cat and mouse with firewall rules and automated responses.
I'd implement an anti-spam technology which would work for anywhere from a few days to a few months, while logging the repeated attempts to crack my solution. And then, the measure would be defeated and I'd be back to the drawing board while the mail cluster's load average spiked to 20.0 or so and users complained.
One of my more successful ideas I called "Double Dribble". I'd identify spam that had been sent to a non-deliverable address, then returned to sender, then bounced with an invalid return address. I'd calculate the success rate of the source IP address and within 5 minutes or so, I'd have a spam source identified and blocked with a dynamic DNS RBL.
That solution held off the spammer for almost a full year, until he/she/it began randomizing sending addresses so well that each IP address would send only maybe 10 emails every 24 hours, well below the threshold of Double Dribble. The address pool was insane - well over 100,000 unique IP addresses logged over a 24 hour period.
Then greylisting was implemented, which stopped the spam dead in its tracks, and completely nullified the spam that Double Dribble couldn't stop. That's when I turned over the account to another party. I still use greylisting personally with great success.
Now a real predictive system would look more factors.
#1. Who was attacking.
#2. How did the attacker(s) gain access to the machines used in the attack.
#3. What other machines are vulnerable to #2 that are available to #1.
No. A Real system would find out:
1) Who was attacking.
2) Send out the Russian Mafia after them to bust a few kneecaps.
3) What other machines are attacking that haven't been attacked by the Russian Mafia.
4) Send Chuck Norris after any attackers who are part of the Russian Mafia.
5) Scan for Natalie Portman donkey porn and send a copy to you.
Californian. With private health insurance, and with history with "Healthy Families". Obviously, the govt run "Healthy families" was cheaper. But I much prefer the private (Blue Cross) health insurance because:
1) I can opt to pay for service not supported by my insurance. (not an option with HF)
2) Covers nearly everything medical, not just a "supported list". This means far better care for my type-I diabetic son.
3) Everything is $25. Doc visit, pills, etc.
4) Covers me and my wife, not just my kids
5) Covers partial dental, at my choice. (HF only covers certain procedures, price works out about the same)
Mis-spellings and other grammatical errors provide information about the author, if nothing else other than their literacy. When you quote another author in your authored work, [sic] allows you to preserve this information while making clear that it's not the 2nd author's typo.
[sic] is somewhat like "This page intentionally left blank" - it provides information (meta-information) about the information that indicates the degree of trustworthiness of the presented information.
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Or, we'd shiver in the dark and/or swelter in the heat. Because if it was that easy, it would be done already.
Did you hear me say "easy"? I seem to recall saying something like:
Yep. My words for "won't be easy", but nonetheless important.
Still, those few square feet wouldn't even run the blower for my A/C, never mind the compressor.
If your house was designed properly, it wouldn't even need a huge-assed A/C. At the very least, it wouldn't need to be anything as big as it is now. When I recently doubled the size of my house, I demanded the best insulating EVERYTHING. 6" thick walls instead of 4", stuffed to the gills with insulation. Attic crammed high with almost 3' of insulation. Highest-efficiency central air available. The end result is that despite DOUBLING the size of my house, and despite RISING energy costs, my average utility bill went DOWN. Before the rise of energy costs, I calculated my ROI at about 5 years. But they've gone up, so I'll break even on this extra expense in more like 3 years!
Since doing this, I've done some research to find that, while I was on the right track, I didn't travel down it nearly far enough. I could have all-but eliminated my A/C altogether by using the ground UNDERNEATH MY HOUSE as a heat-sink.
Damn. (Where was that nuke, again?)
Ain't seen any geysers around here. And there's a whole state between me and the ocean. Bio-fuels... well, most of the stuff people grow around here, they grow for food. I don't think the little bit of miracle-fuel-plant-of-the-week I could plant on my front lawn would power my heat for the season it takes to grow it, either.
Do you live in a different country than that ocean?
Didn't think so. Power generated within the same country could be considered "local" compared to foreign imports. And with a properly designed power grid, including ubiquitous electric vehicles, (and its distributed power storage capability) the occasional non-windy day provides almost no hassle. Think it's far off? Think again - the best minds in the world are at work.
And let's talk about those fields growing food. They are excellent locations to keep windmills in, since they have few obstructions to wind, keeping turbulence to a minimum while causing almost no reduction in the amount of usable farmland.
(sigh) But I guess you're the "half-empty" kind of guy. Go back to your mother's basement, why don't ye? I'll try to stay off your precious lawn.
Queue in 10 million "global warming is a scam", "don't look at me, people didna doit" and "Al Gore is a weenie" comments.
But all of these comments on the legitimacy of global warming/cooling/climate change all ignore one very simple, inescapable fact: Most "carbon-neutral" energy forms can be generated locally. Windmills use the wind in your area. Solar panels use the sunlight from your roof. This is also true for geothermal, ocean-wave, and bio-fueled energy. All can be generated locally, with local resources.
Only oil and nuclear have limited supply.
So if, for example, you were a wealthy, North-American country with a severe foreign-debt problem, you might consider the actual costs of oil in lost lives, civil liberties, currency devaluation, and raw wealth shipped oversees to fund a petroleum addiction. This cost is so huge and multi-faceted it baffles the mind. Average people just cannot even begin to understand wealth drain and cost of this magnitude.
But if we were to generate our energy locally, with renewable resources, not only would we leave a nicer place for our kids, grandkids, and their offspring, we'd also improve our national sovereignty. Rather than fund deadly radicals, we'd fund the nice guy down the street. Rather than ship our cash to entities who threaten us at every turn, we'd fund your next-door neighbors. No matter where you live, no matter who you are, no matter how wealthy you happen to be, this is a good idea.
Ignore the matter of global warming, because there's a much more immediate reason to "go green". And it has nothing to do with carbon footprint, it has to do with the green bits of paper in your back pocket. It will be expensive in the short term. It will pay and pay and pay for generations thereafter.
Which would you rather be remembered as: the generation that ignored the problem until it was too late, or the generation that set your state/country/civilization on a long-term course of prosperity?
I choose the latter, thank you.
Hello regex. Something that, until you've tasted it, you have no idea what you're missing. It's like trying to talk about mind-blowing, multiple-orgasm sex to a virgin.
Expressions maketh so many problems doth appear so simple, once you learn the syntax of its incantations. And it's hardly fair to bring up a pattern match looking for html-style tags... I rarely touch perl, but I use the perl regex syntax all the time with PHP's preg_.... functions.
Really, since there is no possible rationale by which any effort at all expended replying to you can be rationally cost-justified, I'll be brief.
Meaning, you can't imagine a single reason to justify replying? So why did you reply? And, if this is BRIEF?!?!? I'd love to try to make sense of the "long form"...
As far as pajamas, here's a typical rendition of "god" in the Judeo-Christian world. http://www.ewtn.com/series/2006/fall2006/Finding_God.jpg If you don't think these are pajamas, perhaps a bathrobe is better?
In the whole "evolution vs ID" argument, there's a sincere failing - the lack of evidence of ID. In short, I defy you to show any. I have no doubt that you'll have plenty of 'evidence' of things that 'cannot be evolved', which serves as an excellent proof of ignorance and/or lack of understanding, but proves nothing. There is no actual evidence that I've ever seen or heard (and I've looked!) which actually supports ID.
But that cannot be discussed sanely with most. The argument logic almost always follows this path: "Evolution is all wrong because $someMinorReason. Therefore, my god created the world in a week, a few thousand years ago". Perhaps this is a straw man scenario in your specific case, but you haven't argued these assumptions, so I doubt it.
My question to you is thus rephrased: Show me what evidence supports the idea that your god (whatever his/her/its) actually created the world, and NOT the FSM. The fact that some guys died because they thought "God did it" is not evidence of your god's creation, it's only evidence of their convictions. The idea that a book heavily laden with predictions happened to hit a few is not evidence of your god's creation, only that people can make predictions with varying levels of accuracy. (And yes, you do have to consider the failed predictions: try reading your horoscope in your local newspaper. You'll find that they often do a fairly good job describing your life, providing just enough detail for you to consider it a match. Try another birthday, and you'll find similar results. This is not a useful prediction of anything.)
If you accept that the whole world can be created in a week by an omnipotent being just a few thousand years ago, despite overwhelming amounts of evidence that indicate otherwise, why not just accept that it might have been the tooth fairy or the FSM or an angry centipede did it?
Since you apparently accept the idea of your omnipotent god faking the overwhelming amounts of evidence in support of evolution, why not accept the idea that a pasta-based life form faked any evidence in support of your (ahem) bathrobe-cladded god? Is it really any more fanciful?
You can't have it both ways!
In short, I accept the trials of reproducibility and peer review. I accept the idea that the universe follows clear, consistent, and understandable laws that don't change because a tooth fairy, a guy in white clothes (pyjamas?), or a worm in a flying chariot decides it to be so when it supports your pet theory. Sorry you consider this concept "intellectual dishonesty". Most of us would call this "Science". Just don't pretend that your biblical references are scientific and/or qualifiable as evidence, because it merely displays your intellectual laziness.
What say I?
First off, using longer words doesn't improve your argument. It is sometimes effective in obfuscating your lack of understanding, but not here.
Starting with your first link - how is this relevant? There is no mention of God or the great noodly FSM. People came close to death and had something resembling a memory with certain factors in common, which isn't surprising since they had a rather traumatic experience in common.
Now, your next link which proclaims that the bible has predicted things that then came true. There's a number of "probability" next to each of these, but this completely fails as a proper comparison of the Bible's predictive qualities.
1) there's no information present to indicate which arsehole the numbers where pulled out of, or what information could possibly be used to substantiate it.
2) There's no mention of the predictions that, in fact, did NOT come true demonstrably.
3) Lastly, this completely ignores the fact that highly improbable things happen every single day, simply because so much actually happens. A quick google search returns this page, quoted: "To use probability to decide between two alternatives requires a comparison of the probabilities of each alternative. Simply saying that one has low probability without calculating the probability for the other is inadequate. "
Moving on to your last link - some information about who was crucified for their Christian faith. Again, what is the relevance? The number of people that died here apparently is paled by the number of people willingly sacrificed in Central America. Is that to say that now you believe in the animal-headed Aztec gods, rather than your angy white guy in pajamas? Or do you prefer to follow the likes of Jim Jones? Lots of people died there, too. Rather recently, and the deaths are well documented!
Sorry, but once you leave the land of the demonstrable, repeatable Sciences, you enter the domain of that which can never be known, since the number of bullshit answers rises exponentially with the number of people involved in the discussion. You can't even consistently get two Christians to agree on whether there is one god or three! And because we've left behind stuff like actual EVIDENCE, there is no way to demonstrate either way!
However, Christians most definitely hate to discuss the anthropological evidence supporting that their angry guy in pajamas is actually an ideological derivation of the ancient Egyptian god of war. (EG: the burning bush, etc) Nor do they like to discuss the fact that ancient Egyptian culture was markedly different than the slavery depicted as Noah left Egypt. They were good to their women, they had slaves but they weren't generally mistreated, the Egyptian religion is based around Ma'at which is actually very similar to the "heaven/hell" scenario for Christianity. In fact, there's basically no evidence at all to support these ideas. And you can't use the Bible as a historical reference without also mentioning similar works like the Q'uran. The Q'uran has a reference to Noah, for example, but it's rather markedly different than what your Bible teaches.
So why would you trust your Bible over the Q'uran? And would you want to? More food for thought: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkXOwBIRX7Y if you're brave enough to watch it.
Simple. Explain to me how your "angry guy in white pajamas" is any more/less likely than the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Then intelligent discussion can begin.
I'll avoid taking time now to argue I think this is indicative of Design, because I expect to see the usual spontaneous compulsory posts insisting it isn't indicative Design, as sufficient psychological indication of it being considered plausibly Design.
But I will. This is clearly an indication of Intelligent Design. His noodliness is obvious in almost everything we do! The recent discovery of the world's smallest snake makes clear that FSM has a message to the world: I am ruler of all I survey! Worship me!
Compare pictures here, of the world's smallest snake and an artists rendering of the FSM. Aren't the similarities striking?
Long live Intelligent Design!
There are a number of problems with a transponder.
1) There's no identity attached to a transponder, except for a 4 digit code you can set yourself. (is that plane 5 miles directly behind you a little 90 MPH Cessna 150 or 250 MPH Turbine?)
2) They only are useful to ATC. If you're not flying under ATC control, (perfectly legal!) or haven't contacted ATC yet for whatever reason, (such as opening a friggen flight plan) you don't know about the Turbine 5 miles directly behind you closing in at 150 MPH.
3) They use a standard pressure altimeter, which aren't exactly accurate. It's pretty normal for your altimeter to be 250 or more feet off vertically, when you get an update from a nearby AWOS or something. Meaning, the 500' of vertical separation between VFR/IFR traffic can be effectively ZERO.
4) They can be turned off easily.
I had assumed (wrongfully it turns out) that one of the benefits of using a cloud was that your data was backed up in some distributed fashion. It turns out that doesn't seem to be the case.
As a hosted-application provider, I can assure you that we have backups of backups, redundant to three different locations, never more than 24 hours old. Our recovery process is intrinsic to our day-to-day operation. (we use our failover hosting as a staging environment for public testing of new features, so that we KNOW that our data recovery works - it's tested every single day!)
It's all automatic, so that nobody has to "do" it, and errors are reported to admins by email. (which are rare) We also have an "admin dashboard" that monitors our backups, online status, load average, service availability, etc. every 5 minutes so that in the case of a failing of any conceivable part of our primary hosting cluster, an admin gets a notice within a few minutes or so - rarely do we get a call about a failure that we don't already know about.
I guess some "cloud computing" companies just don't take your data seriously, but it's certainly not par for the course.
Afraid I can't be too specific about what division, etc. but Beale AFB in Northern California has a "permanent temporary flight restriction" over it. Since it's just south of me, and on the way to just about anything interesting, I run into it all the time when I fly privately. (I'm a private pilot)
It's not a big deal, really - in order to fly above the AFB's airspace, I have to be in touch with regional (NorCal) Approach Control and have to submit to their direction. (Why else would I be in touch with ATC?!?) But at least 1-2 days/week this "temporary" flight restriction is in effect, so they're flying UAV's all the time.
The biggest problem with ATC is that it's completely segregated. Since it mostly works, it's not often criticized, but it does put a significant amount of load on the pilot. For an hour-long flight, it's not atypical for me to fly for 20-30 minutes before I get a flight plan opened and in positive contact with ATC, what with all the frequency change requests, briefings, waiting in line, and other handshaking chatter I have to do! God forbid I should crash in the first half of the flight!
Another example, if I'm flying 3,000 feet over X airport, I'd think it would be a good idea for pilots at X airport to know. But unless I actually announce on the appropriate frequency, there's no way for them to know. And there's no easy way for me to know if I'm near an airport unless I'm using a GPS. And, cruising at 140 MPH means I'm only going to be over the airport and associated traffic for anywhere from 1-2 minutes. And the next airport is 20 miles away, 1/7 of an hour away, another 8 minutes or so. Remember when I said it took 20 minutes to get a flight plan opened? Further, it's perfectly legal for me to fly just 2,000 feet over the vast majority of smaller airports without announcing anything at all, even though it's common for traffic to fly in to airports a few thousand feet high if they aren't familiar and sort of "drop in" after announcing.
effort to do things that should be 100% computerized. If aviation radios had the equivalent of TCP and self-announced their position a la GPS, it could be a real-time, fully-coordinated, highly secure and all-but-automatic system that required almost no actual human intervention on the radio for most tasks.
Note: I wouldn't use TCP - it sucks ass when the packet loss gets any higher than a few percent - but there are a number of protocols that have been developed for such a purpose. For example, many game developers use UDP and then code lots of logic into the application, which extends UDP into a quasi-protocol.
The technology really wouldn't be all that hard. Just break down the Earth into groups of coordinates, perhaps 30 seconds or so on a side. Then, a GPS unit would "announce" it's position into an IRC group of the coordinate block that applied. Depending on the speed of the aircraft, it would also "subscribe" to the coordinate blocks that are deemed appropriate - the faster the plane, the larger the radius of coordinate groups it would request updates from.
Running a radio-based packet-switching network is pretty well understood - HAMs have been doing it for a long, long time, along with cell phone providers, Wifi, WiMax, UWB, and gobs of other technologies, any of which would probably be quite sufficient for the task. There is a *lot* of radio space available for aviation, since aviation radio is one of the older technologies around, and simple packet-switching technologies allow many radios to share a common communications channel.
Think IRC, with SSL enabled as appropriate. (granting an FAA-granted 4096-bit certificate would make it damned hard to spoof a radio call!) I could write the software in a few months. I could program the GPS unit with a GPU and a bare-bones Linux core in perhaps 6 months. But it would take me 10 years (at best) to get this rammed through the Gubbmint if I had nearly unlimited funds and some damned good lobbyists on my speed-dial. Augh.
But, I digress. What was I talking about, again?
Don't take this as an attack. We all make mistakes sometimes.
But wow. Pitiful that you'd think that two people with "fer'n acksents" would be the same guy. As if 5.75 billion of the world's 6 billion people sounded "fer'n".
For a while, I did as you did, although I amped it up a bit. Rather than submit a single form, I reverse-engineered the submission form, then write a PHP shell script to auto-submit random (crap) data into the form with several connections at once. Then I'd fork a hundred or so processes to run the script in a loop. Over a few hours, I'd submit a few hundred thousand submissions to the phisher, data that appeared legit, but wasn't.
Until it bored me. You do it for a while, but the next day, there's another phisher, another form to reverse engineer. So you do it again, and again, and again, until... ?
So I don't bother anymore. I delete the messages.
Anytime your private encryption key is "over there" you are at risk. If your private key is stored on *their* servers in such a manner that *they* can get to it, your privacy is at risk.
As a software developer, I'm in a pilot program to use encryption for digital signatures. Despite the relative simplicity of using openSSL functionality, it's been surprisingly painstaking and laborious to put everything together.
See, real security requires outright paranoia. How do you prevent your CA key from being compromised, in such a way that you can all-but guarantee that it hasn't been? To do this, you have to make it not only unlikely, but impossible to be compromised in every conceivable way. How do you prevent your client's private key from being compromised, in such a way that you can all but guarantee it? How do you prevent a malicious client from obtaining a signed certificate? How do you prevent 3rd parties from MITM attacks? How do you provide high-level security for all the above, while still providing redundancy for disaster recovery? How do you prevent compromises stemming from a social engineering attack?
Not including implementation and ongoing maintenance of these procedures, the cost of just proving that you have all these measures in place runs to many thousands of dollars!
A solution that answers all these and every conceivable related question is surprisingly difficult, and many, if not most, of the problems are not technical, but social.
A whole festering pile of other interesting, shocking, and amusing ads can be found here...
I saw this just this morning there...
Really? How many are working on counter-theories to evolution? Yeah, sit down Skippy. SOME scientists are just as religious about their theories as religions themselves.
Try reading his sentence again:
More importantly, they are always looking for new evidence which will either corroborate or contradict their theories.
The question is... is there actual evidence that can be found anywhere to indicate that evolution is clearly wrong?
And don't give me the idiocy of irreducible complexity - arguing that this debunks evolution so it must be intelligent design is kinda like saying: "Well I can't figure it out, so some guy in white pajamas musta didit". Might as well argue that it was a care bear armed with a pickle, or maybe the flying spaghetti monster...
Banks are subject to intense regulatory oversight. Additionally, money in a bank is backed by FDIC which, as we've seen just recently, protected the numerous customers of Freddie Mac. This oversight won't prevent a stupid, but does work to limit the damage to me if my bank does a stupid.
Google is not under such oversight, and if it disappeared tomorrow would take all your data with it. There is *some* oversight a la regulation of a public company, but this oversight is more about stock fraud and the like, not providing any guarantee of customer satisfaction.
So you're one of those guys that has one of those ultra-cool external CD players attached to the center console or are you still using the cassette insert for your walkman CD player? :)
No, I'm one of those guys who installed an aftermarket CD-Radio in my (ahem) standardized, pluggable bay. See, my car came with a standard-sized radio socket so it wasn't a particularly big deal to upgrade. (It could have been easier, but...)
Perhaps next time you should read my WHOLE post?
I bike halfway to work - in California we have these "park and ride" lots, where you can drive to a transportation hub and catch public transit the rest of the way. My long commute and lack of bike trails near home make biking all the way to work impractical, but there's a beautiful bike trail along the 56 freeway that I can take once I get to the park and ride lot.
Other than that, I stretch, do crunches, and do pushups every morning when I wake up. This is not only stay-in-shape exercise, it's also wake-me-up exercise - double benefits! On the weekents, I ride my bike to In N Out - the benefits may cancel out with the calories, but at least I'm getting exercise. :-)
I'm a jogger, and I live in the California central valley. I am *not* a morning person. For 4-5 months out of the year, it's too hot to jog far, and that would be now. So I have a cheap-o treadmill I bought at Kmart on sale for about $70, and I run vigorously for one hour while watching my fave show for the day. (Currently, Junkyard Wars - go "High Flyers!")
The rest of the year, I go for a jog around 9 PM or so for about 45 min to an hour. I'm a bit introvert, and don't like the whole 'health club' thing, either. But jogging is very much an individual thing. Grab an MP3 player, and pick some place you'd like to run to. It's great for thinking to yourself - I usually jog in a reverie, barely conscious of my environment beyond avoiding cars. It's really awesome when the endorphins kick in - I have, at times, been so overwhelmed with the joy of being alive, I've cried! It's an awesome feeling!
Make sure you have good shoes, though. It's worth it to spend $100 on some good therapeutic running shoes. They'll last longer than you thought, and will prevent injuries to your hips and knees. (I'm 36, so it's not like it only happens to "old folks")
Since somebody else brought it up, I weigh a bit over 200, and am just shy of 6', making my BMI around 27-28. I jog primarily because I have issues with blood sugar, and jogging sets everything "right". My doctor's told me that if I stopped jogging and taking care of myself, I'd be a out-n-out diabetic almost immediately!
So I jog. I eat reasonably well, occasionally going on a conscious diet to lose a few pounds. More than just the blood sugar, it improves my whole sense of well-being. Very much worth it!
The major navigation units like TomTom run embedded linux.
And if you ask me, this is the future of "car computing". I don't want to play solitaire on the road, and I don't want a GP O/S that's vulnerable to viruses. I don't want bluetooth anywhere near my ignition and fuel injection systems.
Cars last 10-15 years. Computers typically last about 2-3. Trying to tie these together is a bad, bad idea.
I drive (and love!) a 10 year-old Saturn with almost 200,000 miles on it. When it was built, the idea of a Tom-Tom was barely conceived, yet I drive with one routinely on long trips. Even if a Tom-Tom was built-in to new cars today, in just a few years it would be out-of-date as new units include everything from weather to instant-connect for ordering food locally. It would stick out like tail fins and sorely date your car.
Sorry.
Make my car drive reliably and efficiently first, leave the gadgets for later. At the very least, create a standardized, pluggable bay and protocol for gadgets down the road, akin to the ubiquitous cigarette lighter jack, so that we can plug in gadgets easily in the future. (hint: cigarette lighter jacks SUCK ASS for power plugs, they are just already there - give me something decent!)
And this is why, as an outsourced provider, we don't outsource *our* hosting. Even if there is a significant cost benefit, we'll still have our own systems. I'd rather know who's looking at what and remain in (some) control of the information flow.
We do offer a rather strong privacy policy, but we do still retain the right to look at information of our clients. Look - it's their equipment, their server, their bandwidth. Your information is yours, but they are free to look at it for pretty much any reason they want. Either you trust them with this level of access, or you don't.
(... Collecting panties risks lawsuits and may pose an environmental hazard.)
Man, oh man. What kind of chix do you DATE!?!?!?
I beat you all. Mine's denser.
Written in PHP:
Hello World
Show me your densest, most bug-free rendition of your "hello world" code. It's possible I can beat it...
Ummmm, yes. If you can identify them BEFORE they make their first attack then that would qualify as "predictive".
Stock analysts make daily predictions based on past behavior. This is not only predictive, but if it wasn't for this past analysis, the predictions would be largely meaningless and highly inaccurate. Or do you want a computer program that can predict what you'll think before you actually think it?
Not in my experience. The attacks are usually automated scripts running on zombies that randomly scan address (or search their immediate networks) looking for known vulnerabilities.
How many high profile hosts have you overseen? In my experience, the random attacks you mention are found everywhere. But high-profile hosts are their own deal. I've seen very carefully crafted spam attacks directed at one of my client ISPs that would last anywhere from 3-8 hours. (one of the largest regional ISPs in my area) A typical spam attack would entail perhaps 250,000 deliverable messages. It was a constant game of cat and mouse with firewall rules and automated responses.
I'd implement an anti-spam technology which would work for anywhere from a few days to a few months, while logging the repeated attempts to crack my solution. And then, the measure would be defeated and I'd be back to the drawing board while the mail cluster's load average spiked to 20.0 or so and users complained.
One of my more successful ideas I called "Double Dribble". I'd identify spam that had been sent to a non-deliverable address, then returned to sender, then bounced with an invalid return address. I'd calculate the success rate of the source IP address and within 5 minutes or so, I'd have a spam source identified and blocked with a dynamic DNS RBL.
That solution held off the spammer for almost a full year, until he/she/it began randomizing sending addresses so well that each IP address would send only maybe 10 emails every 24 hours, well below the threshold of Double Dribble. The address pool was insane - well over 100,000 unique IP addresses logged over a 24 hour period.
Then greylisting was implemented, which stopped the spam dead in its tracks, and completely nullified the spam that Double Dribble couldn't stop. That's when I turned over the account to another party. I still use greylisting personally with great success.
Now a real predictive system would look more factors.
#1. Who was attacking.
#2. How did the attacker(s) gain access to the machines used in the attack.
#3. What other machines are vulnerable to #2 that are available to #1.
No. A Real system would find out:
1) Who was attacking.
2) Send out the Russian Mafia after them to bust a few kneecaps.
3) What other machines are attacking that haven't been attacked by the Russian Mafia.
4) Send Chuck Norris after any attackers who are part of the Russian Mafia.
5) Scan for Natalie Portman donkey porn and send a copy to you.
6) ???
7) Profit!
Californian. With private health insurance, and with history with "Healthy Families". Obviously, the govt run "Healthy families" was cheaper. But I much prefer the private (Blue Cross) health insurance because:
1) I can opt to pay for service not supported by my insurance. (not an option with HF)
2) Covers nearly everything medical, not just a "supported list". This means far better care for my type-I diabetic son.
3) Everything is $25. Doc visit, pills, etc.
4) Covers me and my wife, not just my kids
5) Covers partial dental, at my choice. (HF only covers certain procedures, price works out about the same)
Mis-spellings and other grammatical errors provide information about the author, if nothing else other than their literacy. When you quote another author in your authored work, [sic] allows you to preserve this information while making clear that it's not the 2nd author's typo.
[sic] is somewhat like "This page intentionally left blank" - it provides information (meta-information) about the information that indicates the degree of trustworthiness of the presented information.
For this reason, it's useful.