Nah, I would guess it more likely has to do with the various McAfee appliances (i.e. Messaging or Web Security). They could be using GPL code (such as a modified kernel and TCP/IP stack, or portions of some other OSS package).
Your thesis is quite borne out in certain markets. For a decade, Pixar's movie revenues kicked the arse of most of their competitors including the 800 lb gorilla, Disney, in a medium where the influence by actors is more limited, animation. Why? Because they focused on interesting stories involving engaging characters whereas their competitors had focused on soulless formulaic repetition.
Yeah, interpretation of that story, whether by actors or by animators, can make or break a movie, but even great actors can't save a rotten script.
As a result, a new development in large-scale solar is using a bunch of mirrors to focus the light into heat.
New? That was first pioneered back in the late 70s or early 80s. The thing is that your mirror arrays have to track the Sun, which requires motors and control equipment that use up some of the power you're generating. What we really need is a field of Ringworld sunflowers (and rigorous pollen control). Maybe Monsanto can design some:-)
Yeah. It about doubled but it looks a lot worse because of a non-0 offset axis for the vertical dimension. Of course that's pretty common in computer review rags that expand a 2% difference in CPU speed into 75% of a graph's vertical range, but hey that's sensationalized reporting for ya. But when it's used to exaggerate perceptions of growth to justify legislative lobbying, it's political fraud.
Lies, damn lies, graph axis offsets, and statistics. When dealing with a nearly innumerate population, they're all tantamount to fraud.
Then why is the US outsourcing most of its industrial capacity? They are losing a lot of the practical engineering knowledge and labour skills along with it. That's gotta be at least as important as losing rocket-building capacity for a few years, but outsourcing is a sacred cow because it's all about corporate profits. The OP is right; it's a dick-size PR contest.
There's also the factor that someone who was willing to commit a crime against someone because the victim belonged to a particular ethno/religious/sexual affiliation is at a bigger risk to re-offend against someone else in a violent manner. Hate often leads to escalating violence. Random violence against members of a group is a lot harder to track back to the offender than targeted violence against those with past associations.
If some guy murders his wife then, when he gets out after doing his time, hopefully most women would know better than to get involved with him. Similarly with entering into business deals with people convicted of fraud or embezzling. But if somebody likes to bloody their baseball bats by hunting homosexuals in parks and late at night, or drag black people in chains behind their pickup trucks, then everybody in those groups is at greater mortal risk performing everyday activities. That makes those criminals a greater risk to the public than some guy who accidentally kills somebody with a bad punch in a drunken bar fight; they've shown a willingness to attack people randomly.
Seriously, hate crimes are a form of terrorism; they just tend to be more individually focused instead of mass marketed. Hate crimes (including shootings and bombings against abortion clinics/doctors) certainly qualify for the term terrorism better than so-called eco-terrorists, "animal rescuers", and similar extremists, though I abhor the latter as well.
Well, you could parallelize recalculation of large spreadsheets. Create dependency trees for cells and split the branch recalculations among different threads. Some accountants and executives with large "what-if?"-type spreadsheets could find that quite useful.
Browsers could have separate threads for data transfer and rendering. If the web site is using
tags and CSS, you could split the rendering work for each div to a separate thread. More rapid and frequent partial screen updating can provide today's generation of MTV-style re-orientation addicted workers the perception of faster performance.
Parallelize WISYWYG document preparation with a backend using TeX text-layout algorithms.
But probably the biggest advantage would be obtained from more parallelism (both coarse and fine-grained) in GUI operations. That probably requires a re-architecting of display and GUI subsystems. But that's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem because, to do that properly, you also need GPUs to become multi-core to remove the GPU as a single-thread bottleneck. GPUs are going to hit the same wall general purpose CPUs are hitting now, with a few years' delay. There's hope that today's Crossfire/SLI approaches could provide a hardware base to find an evolutionary path for that.
I figure it will take at least another 5 years or more for a graphics subsystem redesign, and my guess is that it will happen on Linux first. I don't see Microsoft being first in re-architecting the Windows display subsystem to do it. Certainly not for the next Windows version in 2010(?), and thus they probably won't implement it until 2014 at the earliest. I think it's more likely to happen with somebody replacing large parts of the X.org server as a PhD thesis.
But, yeah, fundamentally the biggest bottleneck with personal computer systems is the bandwidth between the user and the computer and there's no way to parallelize the user.
You should also say that you're using a phonetic alphabet as most people don't expect you to, especially since the modern phone system has enough bandwidth and clear enough signal that you shouldn't have to.
While this is true in theory, certain letters can still be ambiguous when pronounced over the phone. B and P in particular can be confused with each other, but many other consonants are pronounced with an ee ending. Throw in cold and flu season, outsourced tech support in India or elsewhere with foreign accents, and low quality long distance compression to keep costs low and it starts becoming required.
Back when I did tech support in the days of DOS, it was pretty common for user interfaces to ask "Press any key to continue", such as for a pause to load paper into a printer before a printout. I once had someone call me asking which key was the "any" key. I nearly answered the big red switch near the back of the computer with an intertwined 0 and 1. I managed to resist temptation, but I forever lost my naivety in believing that that question was an urban legend.
Hmm. I hadn't thought of it that way until now, but producing molecular oxygen that "poisoned" the environment, killing most other species competing for the same space, would have been a real evolutionary advantage for the organisms that could do it. In an "anaerobic" world, it would have worked even better than producing antibiotics.
Sure, but it's often research from scientists working on grants supplied by the pharmaceutical companies.
There's so many vaccines developed and required for infants and youths that many are combined into a single shot. While there's been substantial testing for each of the vaccines individually, there usually is very limited retesting of the effects of the combined vaccines.
And yet normally, the human body rarely not need to fight much more than two viral infections at the same time. The so-called flu shot is actually a combined vaccine for as much as 5 different strains. Many childhood immunizations shots combine multiple inoculations, as do the shots for soldiers shipped overseas to tropial or equatorial regions.
It's quite well recognized by the medical community that some combinations of drugs can have serious interactions with side effects that don't exist when they are used individually. However there is such a focus in the medical community on the benefits of widespread immunization in limiting disease spread that the possibility of negative vaccine interactions for some individuals is discounted. That's good for the majority, but sucks for any affected individuals.
The process of discovery is about identifying evidence relevant to a case. A jury is required when there is conflicting evidence or testimony is in dispute to determine appropriate weight to the relevant testimony. Remember all those court-room TV cases where the defending or prosecuting attorney says "Objection your honor! Irrelevant!" when his opponent tries to introduce a line of questioning or evidence? Remember how the judge says either "overruled" or "sustained"? That's part of the judge's job and it happens during a trial but also during discovery. However instead of needing to do in an ongoing basis (to prevent the jury from being contaminated by invalid evidence), the judge just deals with it all at once at the end of discovery.
In Novell vs. SCO, there were few or no arguments over whether documents were valid or not (i.e. disagreements over whether documents had been forged or conflicting observations of events from witnesses) that would have required determination by a jury. What was in dispute was whether the documents could have the legal interpretation that SCO ascribed to them. That is a matter of legal interpretation, and within the judge's purview. He decided that the documents presented by SCO did not have the legal interpretation that SCO ascribed to them, and that they were not relevant to SCO's allegations (or even countered them). No evidence supporting SCO's case, no need for a trial.
If SCO doesn't have enough money to get the time to appeal, it's their own fault for drawing out the clock (which they did because they had no case).
A group that made baseless accusations got their comeuppance. Oh, boo hoo hoo!
I'm living on my planet, in my life, and I've never wound up anywhere near any such security issues. And neither have you. Well, in my case, I'm borderline paranoid when it comes to computer security, to the point of running a custom OpenBSD-based firewall at home. I've also seen enough poor application and network security from other companies during my work as a consultant that I'm not willing to do a lot of e-commerce except with a few very select sites.
I didn't fall for the propaganda in 2003 from the Bush administration when they were pushing for war with Iraq. I don't fall for a lot of garbage I see in media every day. But I have seen some questionable security practices in the last 15 years from both large and small companies so I consider my concerns to be an educated paranoia. As I mention above, I do try to limit my exposure where I have control. However the problem is that no matter how good I am, that control can be limited by the current structure of financial markets (i.e. the amount of questionably secured information in the hands of credit bureaus).
I have a hard time with the concept of today's security responses being described as ineffective. I don't think that we're any worse-off today than we were years ago. That alone leaves me with the conclusion that things aren't bad.
Compared to ten years ago, instead of botnets of thousands of machines being used to perform denial of service attacks by prankers, you've now got botnets of tens of thousands of machines being used to deliver spam and to search for people's financial information for use in identity theft by organized crime. You now have a profit motive behind security penetrations to obtain customer information for identity theft. Personally identifying information for millions of people has been stolen and re-sold for fraudulent purposes.
I don't know what planet you're taking your observations from, but that sure sounds worse off to me. Some companies need to go bankrupt under customer class-action lawsuits for negligence during security breaches (like Pan Am did after plane hijacking and bombing). Until that happens there will not be enough incentive for companies to change and the security problem will just get worse.
The good news is that such a case (or multiple) is bound to be started in the next ten years. Unfortunately the case will probably involve Microsoft, so that it will be tied up in courts for at least a further ten years.
In the end, even if you can explain every single thing except the "why did the big bang happen?" (assuming the big bang theory is the correct one), then the religious can still say "God made it, and therefore everything, happen".
And that's cool with me, as long as they limit that statement to the parts that are unanswerable by science (with the caveat that, hey, that might change in the future).
Who knows? Maybe there was a Creator who set up the start of the universe, with the right conditions to get carbon-based life and evolution. For now, we can't prove otherwise or provide a plausible explanation for how this universe started (of course that does leave the question of where that Creator came from). But just don't expect me to buy that he also created the universe and all of the species on Earth 4000 years ago, because we've got a whole bunch of fossil evidence that's much better explained by evolution.
Good point. USAians have often made fun of Canadians and Europeans for hate crime legislation that criminalizes speech inciting violence towards groups of a specific ethnic type or sexual orientation, but this would go a lot farther than that. This is so open ended that in ten years it could conceivably be used against protesters demanding action on Global Warming (because you know Big Oil will have greased enough palms until then that little will have been done).
Most of the deaths associated with tasers are due to cardiac events. Heart attacks. Often due to.. get this.. being fat, being on coke / meth / crack, and fighting with cops. That's not good for your heart. You're probably going to have a heart attack whether you're shocked or not.. but you'd be more likely to have a heart attack if the cops started hitting you with nightsticks.
Bullshit! If a taser disrupts muscular action, it implicitly causes a mini heart-attack. If you're not healthy enough, the heart doesn't start again properly and you get a full-on heart attack. Unless the cop bangs his baton into your xiphisternum or under the ribs and into your heart, it's not likely to cause a heart attack.
A baton against the head could easily kill you, either directly through crushing a major artery in the temple or, if untreated, by bruising of the brain causing swelling. Crushed kidneys from hits against the lower back? Sure. Burst blood vessel causing a clot that leads to a pulmonary embolism, maybe. But a heart attack? You're more likely to break a rib and drive it into the heart.
As for being fat, apparently, that's over 1/2 the US population now, so if that's the criteria for making a Taser a lethal weapon, retire the things now.
I guess you're innumerate since you can't tell that the US has double the rate per population as Canada at 275/300 million vs 17/35 million. The rest of your math is just as bad since you start comparing numbers that aren't the same (i.e. 30 US deaths where the coroner confirmed the taser vs. the 17 Canadian death count using criteria that more closely correlate the 275 US death count). Of course what really matters is how many police tasers are actually in use in each country.
The point is that the current Canadian death count is high enough that the policy for taser use is being reviewed for the RCMP and certain provincial police forces. Even in June, prior to the recent incident in the Vancouver airport, Paul Kennedy, the chair of the RCMP complaints committee had recommended changes to the way the RCMP use Tasers.
Generally, the RCMP are better educated and better trained than most US cops. So if the RCMP are misusing Tasers, I'd rather not think too hard about how your boys are abusing them down there.
If a person has a heart weakness that has been with them their entire lives and has never caused problems yet kills them after being hit with the Taser, what is the cause?
If a person has a heart weakness that has been with them their entire lives and has never caused problems yet a bank robber shoots them near the heart during a robbery and the trauma caused a fatal heart attack, do you think a judge or jury will let them off saying "Sure what the hey, the guy was living on borrowed time and could have kicked off at any time"?
The point is that police can never know whether a suspect that they wish to tase could have a medical condition that would render the tasing deadly. They should treat it as deadly force. Instead, some use it repeatedly for extended durations with minimal or no justification. Sure they are probably bad apples in a good barrel, but if so why all the resistance to changing policy to stop the abuse? Because it's easier to pretend they don't exist and doing so would hurt the police's public image? Ask the Roman Catholic church how that worked out for them.
If a taser is supposed to suppress muscular control and the heart is a muscle, what do you think happens to the heart when the shock hits it? Just because the frequency isn't the right frequency to cause fibrillation doesn't mean that you aren't temporarily stopping the heart. Repeated extended application is more likely to cause damage to the heart or other organs.
Police tasers should be limited to two discharges. If a police officer can't have somebody subdued after two shock applications, they should be using other "non-lethal" (or lethal) means, and they should be prepared to defend their actions in an inquiry.
I can't see metallic armor being a good idea if you're going to be targeted by microwave weapons. Try microwaving a CD if you don't understand what I'm getting at. It's called induction heating. A metallic layer on your clothing is going to be even better at capturing that electromagnetic energy and turning it into heat than your skin is.
Not a bad idea, but it should be a doubling in constant dollars, i.e. after adjustment for inflation. Otherwise, inflation would significantly reduce the real effect of that doubling.
The hard part was bootstrapping their economy and infrastructure. They have 1 billion potential customers compared to the USA's 350 million, but those 1 billion didn't have jobs or disposable income. As modern factories and infrastructure are getting built in China, and their own people are increasingly rich consumers, the importance of the US market decreases.
Sure losing competitiveness in the US market would hurt, but if they still sell relatively well in Australia, Asia, the EU, as well as to the domestic market, they won't hurt anywhere near as much as the US will. Those Taiwanese multi-billion dollar cutting-edge fabs are a mighty tempting prize. Control over that would give them control over a huge portion of semiconductor production critical to Western nations (and the US military). The only thing that comes close in capacity is South Korea and Japan, and one of those has a northern neighbour that could become much more belligerent with very little prodding.
Control of Taiwan will give China an immediate seat with the "big boys" in the technology game and when they think the time is right, they'll take it.
(yeah i know the original meme was gundam, but in all the gundam series ive seen, extrateresatials dont play a part, unless you count human space colonists)
There are more Giant Robot series in Japan, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your North American TV channels.
Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cannon God Exaxxxion, and many others. Heck, even some godzilla movies. Basically, if you're fighting extraterrestrial aliens (that implicitly have air surveillance) with giant robots, the only place where you can hide the giant robot(s) and their base are underground. Although in some series like Gatchaman, it's the aliens that have the underground lair for giant robots.
One way to look at that paper is that it's blackmail from the telco's that funded this story. Give us what we want in a legal framework, or we stop developing the infrastructure and let growth in demand overrun capacity. That's capitaloterrorism®.
On the other hand, the telcos may have overbuilt capacity so much for a while that the excess capacity drove down prices to the point where they couldn't recoup their investment. What happened is that they countered that by severely oversubscribing backbone bandwidth compared to what they provided the customer. There's now a demographic change happening in customer use resulting in the customers exceeding their expected use.
If the latter case is what's happening, then the right way to fix it is to "let the brownouts happen" by capping a 10 minute rolling average of available bandwidth for all types of traffic at the correct fraction of the subscribed data rates, not by blocking specific types of traffic (chosen by the telco and which just happen to compete with some of their other services). That will encourage people to pay more for a certain level of guaranteed bandwidth from providers who don't oversubscribe their bandwidth as much. The result will be more cash available to pay for backbone upgrades up the line if that's necessary. Most importantly, if the telcos don't get their pet legislation enacted, this is what will happen if they really do have a cash problem. It requires a little more smarts on their customer interface units, but probably nothing a remote firmware upgrade couldn't handle.
For once, this is a problem which really can just be solved by market forces instead of needing to break a successful 30 year paradigm.
Um, no. He's talking about the massive trade and government deficits the US has been running for the last 7 years. At some point the people who have been funding those (mainly the Chinese) may get tired of doing so. At which point, if they stop buying dollars to support the trade deficit and bonds to support the federal deficit, but instead start selling them, the dollar will be massively devalued, leading to a huge increase in the price of all imported consumer goods. Compared to 30 years ago, there's very little manufacturing that actually still creates goods in the US. Most of it has been outsourced to countries with cheap labour and poor environmental stewardship.
That will be good for your trade balance, of course, but bad for your economy since the high increase in the cost of goods will probably lead to a severe recession - people will be buying a lot less when everything suddenly costs many times more. It may take a decade or more for the US to recover. On the other hand, house prices won't seem that ridiculous anymore after 150% or more inflation, but anybody living on a fixed income, like retirees, are going to be seriously screwed.
And in case you think that isn't ever going to happen, apparently the Chinese have been making noise about shifting their ownership of foreign funds to away from currencies that have been showing recent weakness.
Of course, when the US can no longer afford to buy foreign goods, especially basic items like steel, and all their manufacturing capacity has been dismantled, why that might just be a good time for the Peep's Republic to invade Taiwan.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, I would guess it more likely has to do with the various McAfee appliances (i.e. Messaging or Web Security). They could be using GPL code (such as a modified kernel and TCP/IP stack, or portions of some other OSS package).
Your thesis is quite borne out in certain markets. For a decade, Pixar's movie revenues kicked the arse of most of their competitors including the 800 lb gorilla, Disney, in a medium where the influence by actors is more limited, animation. Why? Because they focused on interesting stories involving engaging characters whereas their competitors had focused on soulless formulaic repetition.
Yeah, interpretation of that story, whether by actors or by animators, can make or break a movie, but even great actors can't save a rotten script.
New? That was first pioneered back in the late 70s or early 80s. The thing is that your mirror arrays have to track the Sun, which requires motors and control equipment that use up some of the power you're generating. What we really need is a field of Ringworld sunflowers (and rigorous pollen control). Maybe Monsanto can design some
Yeah. It about doubled but it looks a lot worse because of a non-0 offset axis for the vertical dimension. Of course that's pretty common in computer review rags that expand a 2% difference in CPU speed into 75% of a graph's vertical range, but hey that's sensationalized reporting for ya. But when it's used to exaggerate perceptions of growth to justify legislative lobbying, it's political fraud.
Lies, damn lies, graph axis offsets, and statistics. When dealing with a nearly innumerate population, they're all tantamount to fraud.
Then why is the US outsourcing most of its industrial capacity? They are losing a lot of the practical engineering knowledge and labour skills along with it. That's gotta be at least as important as losing rocket-building capacity for a few years, but outsourcing is a sacred cow because it's all about corporate profits. The OP is right; it's a dick-size PR contest.
There's also the factor that someone who was willing to commit a crime against someone because the victim belonged to a particular ethno/religious/sexual affiliation is at a bigger risk to re-offend against someone else in a violent manner. Hate often leads to escalating violence. Random violence against members of a group is a lot harder to track back to the offender than targeted violence against those with past associations.
If some guy murders his wife then, when he gets out after doing his time, hopefully most women would know better than to get involved with him. Similarly with entering into business deals with people convicted of fraud or embezzling. But if somebody likes to bloody their baseball bats by hunting homosexuals in parks and late at night, or drag black people in chains behind their pickup trucks, then everybody in those groups is at greater mortal risk performing everyday activities. That makes those criminals a greater risk to the public than some guy who accidentally kills somebody with a bad punch in a drunken bar fight; they've shown a willingness to attack people randomly.
Seriously, hate crimes are a form of terrorism; they just tend to be more individually focused instead of mass marketed. Hate crimes (including shootings and bombings against abortion clinics/doctors) certainly qualify for the term terrorism better than so-called eco-terrorists, "animal rescuers", and similar extremists, though I abhor the latter as well.
Well, you could parallelize recalculation of large spreadsheets. Create dependency trees for cells and split the branch recalculations among different threads. Some accountants and executives with large "what-if?"-type spreadsheets could find that quite useful.
Browsers could have separate threads for data transfer and rendering. If the web site is using tags and CSS, you could split the rendering work for each div to a separate thread. More rapid and frequent partial screen updating can provide today's generation of MTV-style re-orientation addicted workers the perception of faster performance.
Parallelize WISYWYG document preparation with a backend using TeX text-layout algorithms.
But probably the biggest advantage would be obtained from more parallelism (both coarse and fine-grained) in GUI operations. That probably requires a re-architecting of display and GUI subsystems. But that's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem because, to do that properly, you also need GPUs to become multi-core to remove the GPU as a single-thread bottleneck. GPUs are going to hit the same wall general purpose CPUs are hitting now, with a few years' delay. There's hope that today's Crossfire/SLI approaches could provide a hardware base to find an evolutionary path for that.
I figure it will take at least another 5 years or more for a graphics subsystem redesign, and my guess is that it will happen on Linux first. I don't see Microsoft being first in re-architecting the Windows display subsystem to do it. Certainly not for the next Windows version in 2010(?), and thus they probably won't implement it until 2014 at the earliest. I think it's more likely to happen with somebody replacing large parts of the X.org server as a PhD thesis.
But, yeah, fundamentally the biggest bottleneck with personal computer systems is the bandwidth between the user and the computer and there's no way to parallelize the user.
While this is true in theory, certain letters can still be ambiguous when pronounced over the phone. B and P in particular can be confused with each other, but many other consonants are pronounced with an ee ending. Throw in cold and flu season, outsourced tech support in India or elsewhere with foreign accents, and low quality long distance compression to keep costs low and it starts becoming required.
Back when I did tech support in the days of DOS, it was pretty common for user interfaces to ask "Press any key to continue", such as for a pause to load paper into a printer before a printout. I once had someone call me asking which key was the "any" key. I nearly answered the big red switch near the back of the computer with an intertwined 0 and 1. I managed to resist temptation, but I forever lost my naivety in believing that that question was an urban legend.
Hmm. I hadn't thought of it that way until now, but producing molecular oxygen that "poisoned" the environment, killing most other species competing for the same space, would have been a real evolutionary advantage for the organisms that could do it. In an "anaerobic" world, it would have worked even better than producing antibiotics.
Sure, but it's often research from scientists working on grants supplied by the pharmaceutical companies.
There's so many vaccines developed and required for infants and youths that many are combined into a single shot. While there's been substantial testing for each of the vaccines individually, there usually is very limited retesting of the effects of the combined vaccines.
And yet normally, the human body rarely not need to fight much more than two viral infections at the same time. The so-called flu shot is actually a combined vaccine for as much as 5 different strains. Many childhood immunizations shots combine multiple inoculations, as do the shots for soldiers shipped overseas to tropial or equatorial regions.
It's quite well recognized by the medical community that some combinations of drugs can have serious interactions with side effects that don't exist when they are used individually. However there is such a focus in the medical community on the benefits of widespread immunization in limiting disease spread that the possibility of negative vaccine interactions for some individuals is discounted. That's good for the majority, but sucks for any affected individuals.
The process of discovery is about identifying evidence relevant to a case. A jury is required when there is conflicting evidence or testimony is in dispute to determine appropriate weight to the relevant testimony. Remember all those court-room TV cases where the defending or prosecuting attorney says "Objection your honor! Irrelevant!" when his opponent tries to introduce a line of questioning or evidence? Remember how the judge says either "overruled" or "sustained"? That's part of the judge's job and it happens during a trial but also during discovery. However instead of needing to do in an ongoing basis (to prevent the jury from being contaminated by invalid evidence), the judge just deals with it all at once at the end of discovery.
In Novell vs. SCO, there were few or no arguments over whether documents were valid or not (i.e. disagreements over whether documents had been forged or conflicting observations of events from witnesses) that would have required determination by a jury. What was in dispute was whether the documents could have the legal interpretation that SCO ascribed to them. That is a matter of legal interpretation, and within the judge's purview. He decided that the documents presented by SCO did not have the legal interpretation that SCO ascribed to them, and that they were not relevant to SCO's allegations (or even countered them). No evidence supporting SCO's case, no need for a trial.
If SCO doesn't have enough money to get the time to appeal, it's their own fault for drawing out the clock (which they did because they had no case).
A group that made baseless accusations got their comeuppance. Oh, boo hoo hoo!
I'm living on my planet, in my life, and I've never wound up anywhere near any such security issues. And neither have you.
Well, in my case, I'm borderline paranoid when it comes to computer security, to the point of running a custom OpenBSD-based firewall at home. I've also seen enough poor application and network security from other companies during my work as a consultant that I'm not willing to do a lot of e-commerce except with a few very select sites.
I didn't fall for the propaganda in 2003 from the Bush administration when they were pushing for war with Iraq. I don't fall for a lot of garbage I see in media every day. But I have seen some questionable security practices in the last 15 years from both large and small companies so I consider my concerns to be an educated paranoia. As I mention above, I do try to limit my exposure where I have control. However the problem is that no matter how good I am, that control can be limited by the current structure of financial markets (i.e. the amount of questionably secured information in the hands of credit bureaus).
Compared to ten years ago, instead of botnets of thousands of machines being used to perform denial of service attacks by prankers, you've now got botnets of tens of thousands of machines being used to deliver spam and to search for people's financial information for use in identity theft by organized crime. You now have a profit motive behind security penetrations to obtain customer information for identity theft. Personally identifying information for millions of people has been stolen and re-sold for fraudulent purposes.
I don't know what planet you're taking your observations from, but that sure sounds worse off to me. Some companies need to go bankrupt under customer class-action lawsuits for negligence during security breaches (like Pan Am did after plane hijacking and bombing). Until that happens there will not be enough incentive for companies to change and the security problem will just get worse.
The good news is that such a case (or multiple) is bound to be started in the next ten years. Unfortunately the case will probably involve Microsoft, so that it will be tied up in courts for at least a further ten years.
And that's cool with me, as long as they limit that statement to the parts that are unanswerable by science (with the caveat that, hey, that might change in the future).
Who knows? Maybe there was a Creator who set up the start of the universe, with the right conditions to get carbon-based life and evolution. For now, we can't prove otherwise or provide a plausible explanation for how this universe started (of course that does leave the question of where that Creator came from). But just don't expect me to buy that he also created the universe and all of the species on Earth 4000 years ago, because we've got a whole bunch of fossil evidence that's much better explained by evolution.
Good point. USAians have often made fun of Canadians and Europeans for hate crime legislation that criminalizes speech inciting violence towards groups of a specific ethnic type or sexual orientation, but this would go a lot farther than that. This is so open ended that in ten years it could conceivably be used against protesters demanding action on Global Warming (because you know Big Oil will have greased enough palms until then that little will have been done).
Bullshit! If a taser disrupts muscular action, it implicitly causes a mini heart-attack. If you're not healthy enough, the heart doesn't start again properly and you get a full-on heart attack. Unless the cop bangs his baton into your xiphisternum or under the ribs and into your heart, it's not likely to cause a heart attack.
A baton against the head could easily kill you, either directly through crushing a major artery in the temple or, if untreated, by bruising of the brain causing swelling. Crushed kidneys from hits against the lower back? Sure. Burst blood vessel causing a clot that leads to a pulmonary embolism, maybe. But a heart attack? You're more likely to break a rib and drive it into the heart.
As for being fat, apparently, that's over 1/2 the US population now, so if that's the criteria for making a Taser a lethal weapon, retire the things now.
I guess you're innumerate since you can't tell that the US has double the rate per population as Canada at 275/300 million vs 17/35 million. The rest of your math is just as bad since you start comparing numbers that aren't the same (i.e. 30 US deaths where the coroner confirmed the taser vs. the 17 Canadian death count using criteria that more closely correlate the 275 US death count). Of course what really matters is how many police tasers are actually in use in each country.
The point is that the current Canadian death count is high enough that the policy for taser use is being reviewed for the RCMP and certain provincial police forces. Even in June, prior to the recent incident in the Vancouver airport, Paul Kennedy, the chair of the RCMP complaints committee had recommended changes to the way the RCMP use Tasers.
Generally, the RCMP are better educated and better trained than most US cops. So if the RCMP are misusing Tasers, I'd rather not think too hard about how your boys are abusing them down there.
If a person has a heart weakness that has been with them their entire lives and has never caused problems yet kills them after being hit with the Taser, what is the cause?
If a person has a heart weakness that has been with them their entire lives and has never caused problems yet a bank robber shoots them near the heart during a robbery and the trauma caused a fatal heart attack, do you think a judge or jury will let them off saying "Sure what the hey, the guy was living on borrowed time and could have kicked off at any time"?
The point is that police can never know whether a suspect that they wish to tase could have a medical condition that would render the tasing deadly. They should treat it as deadly force. Instead, some use it repeatedly for extended durations with minimal or no justification. Sure they are probably bad apples in a good barrel, but if so why all the resistance to changing policy to stop the abuse? Because it's easier to pretend they don't exist and doing so would hurt the police's public image? Ask the Roman Catholic church how that worked out for them.
If a taser is supposed to suppress muscular control and the heart is a muscle, what do you think happens to the heart when the shock hits it? Just because the frequency isn't the right frequency to cause fibrillation doesn't mean that you aren't temporarily stopping the heart. Repeated extended application is more likely to cause damage to the heart or other organs.
Police tasers should be limited to two discharges. If a police officer can't have somebody subdued after two shock applications, they should be using other "non-lethal" (or lethal) means, and they should be prepared to defend their actions in an inquiry.
I can't see metallic armor being a good idea if you're going to be targeted by microwave weapons. Try microwaving a CD if you don't understand what I'm getting at. It's called induction heating. A metallic layer on your clothing is going to be even better at capturing that electromagnetic energy and turning it into heat than your skin is.
Not a bad idea, but it should be a doubling in constant dollars, i.e. after adjustment for inflation. Otherwise, inflation would significantly reduce the real effect of that doubling.
The hard part was bootstrapping their economy and infrastructure. They have 1 billion potential customers compared to the USA's 350 million, but those 1 billion didn't have jobs or disposable income. As modern factories and infrastructure are getting built in China, and their own people are increasingly rich consumers, the importance of the US market decreases.
Sure losing competitiveness in the US market would hurt, but if they still sell relatively well in Australia, Asia, the EU, as well as to the domestic market, they won't hurt anywhere near as much as the US will. Those Taiwanese multi-billion dollar cutting-edge fabs are a mighty tempting prize. Control over that would give them control over a huge portion of semiconductor production critical to Western nations (and the US military). The only thing that comes close in capacity is South Korea and Japan, and one of those has a northern neighbour that could become much more belligerent with very little prodding.
Control of Taiwan will give China an immediate seat with the "big boys" in the technology game and when they think the time is right, they'll take it.
There are more Giant Robot series in Japan, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your North American TV channels.
Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cannon God Exaxxxion, and many others. Heck, even some godzilla movies. Basically, if you're fighting extraterrestrial aliens (that implicitly have air surveillance) with giant robots, the only place where you can hide the giant robot(s) and their base are underground. Although in some series like Gatchaman, it's the aliens that have the underground lair for giant robots.
Although I like the Sun one liner.
Sun: The protoculture is the computer.
One way to look at that paper is that it's blackmail from the telco's that funded this story. Give us what we want in a legal framework, or we stop developing the infrastructure and let growth in demand overrun capacity. That's capitaloterrorism®.
On the other hand, the telcos may have overbuilt capacity so much for a while that the excess capacity drove down prices to the point where they couldn't recoup their investment. What happened is that they countered that by severely oversubscribing backbone bandwidth compared to what they provided the customer. There's now a demographic change happening in customer use resulting in the customers exceeding their expected use.
If the latter case is what's happening, then the right way to fix it is to "let the brownouts happen" by capping a 10 minute rolling average of available bandwidth for all types of traffic at the correct fraction of the subscribed data rates, not by blocking specific types of traffic (chosen by the telco and which just happen to compete with some of their other services). That will encourage people to pay more for a certain level of guaranteed bandwidth from providers who don't oversubscribe their bandwidth as much. The result will be more cash available to pay for backbone upgrades up the line if that's necessary. Most importantly, if the telcos don't get their pet legislation enacted, this is what will happen if they really do have a cash problem. It requires a little more smarts on their customer interface units, but probably nothing a remote firmware upgrade couldn't handle.
For once, this is a problem which really can just be solved by market forces instead of needing to break a successful 30 year paradigm.
Um, no. He's talking about the massive trade and government deficits the US has been running for the last 7 years. At some point the people who have been funding those (mainly the Chinese) may get tired of doing so. At which point, if they stop buying dollars to support the trade deficit and bonds to support the federal deficit, but instead start selling them, the dollar will be massively devalued, leading to a huge increase in the price of all imported consumer goods. Compared to 30 years ago, there's very little manufacturing that actually still creates goods in the US. Most of it has been outsourced to countries with cheap labour and poor environmental stewardship.
That will be good for your trade balance, of course, but bad for your economy since the high increase in the cost of goods will probably lead to a severe recession - people will be buying a lot less when everything suddenly costs many times more. It may take a decade or more for the US to recover. On the other hand, house prices won't seem that ridiculous anymore after 150% or more inflation, but anybody living on a fixed income, like retirees, are going to be seriously screwed.
And in case you think that isn't ever going to happen, apparently the Chinese have been making noise about shifting their ownership of foreign funds to away from currencies that have been showing recent weakness.
Of course, when the US can no longer afford to buy foreign goods, especially basic items like steel, and all their manufacturing capacity has been dismantled, why that might just be a good time for the Peep's Republic to invade Taiwan.