Re:Free Dry Land!
on
Water From Wind
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, this is most likely not true.
Here's why: Assume for the sake of argument that you can remove 20% of the water vapor over the 2-1/2 or so Meters above your house in a given day. And that all the houses in the big city do the same thing. Most of the water will go where? down the toilet or sink eventually, or perhaps be put into a garden, etc. where much of the moisture will re-evaporate. Now then, a reasonable assumption is that what goes down the toilet or sink gets put through the local sewage treatment plant or into a local septic field -- where, guess what -- it re-evaporates.
Secondarily, that 2-1-/2 meters of 20% more-dehumidified air is only maybe 1/100th of what is available under the weather, but even so, as the moisture re-distributes from the other 99%, assume it generates a little wind. Ultimately pulls say 1% more moist air in from the sea, soaks up some heat in the atmosphere, but if there is a constant drain that moisture will keep coming toward your city. Providing more wind energy to produce power and rain, etc. Not dry areas.
Let me know what you think.
I'm Pessimistic: here's some math...
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 1
I may be wrong but this strikes me as much ado about nothing because in thermodynamic terms, there is never a free lunch, and the math seems sketchy.
Here's my take on the economics of a windmill approach... I recently read an article about how a typical power generation windmill has three blades, maybe 25 M in diameter, and in the future might generate 500 KW. Today, say 3-5 KW per blade per meter but in no case do shorter blades offer the efficiency of bigger blades. Some of the better dehumidifiers out there get about 20 Liters/day (say 6-1/2 gallons) per kilowatt from reasonably moist. So a 3 blade 5 meter windmill would get 3*5*3=45 KW of energy, and presumably put out about about 900 liters of water. Enough to live on and water a small garden, but not drought ending by any means.
Now then, in a hot climate, use that same power generation to pump seawater into a salt pond, then consider that in hot climates the sun provides enough heat over a 40mx40m pond (1600 Sq Meters)-- this equals around 9 MW day avg -- and use that tremendous heat rise to power a moist-lift evaporation / power unit -- now you've got the capacity to create a whole lot more fresh water and power. Even if the power generation capacity is only 5% efficient, by my calculation that's still about 70 KW/hr. PLUS the remaining heat is still available for desalination purposes
But all the engineering to make the pond, the moist-lift evaporator, and the power unit plus the water storage or transport system-- all of those cost serious money because they just can't be mass produced.
I for one have been ready to dump all of my WinXX machines for years. Except for one minor detail: Commodity peripherals wear out or get obsoleted very quickly.Which means that to stay up-to-date for things like printers, scanners, digital cameras, etc. I can't swap out these [should-be-easy because they're USB interfaced] pieces until I know that there is a Linux driver available for each part in the chain. But I would pay extra for a similar-spec component with a Linux driver over the WinXX machine. Which means that there is added profit margin available to a component manufacturer -- if there enough others like me to support them to put out the money to cover cost of developing the driver.
Where this strikes me as a good approach is that the Linux kernel folks are offering to make the driver development cost irrelevant/free. So if the OS community basically puts out the vote via a common website which basically lets those of us who want to buy OS essentially vote on which components to ask the Linux Kernel folks to make drivers for first, then a company can assess whether or not to "play ball". And if the manufactures play ball, then it is up to those of us to make it profitable and desirable for them to do so in the future by voting with our wallets for Linux components and away from WinXX.
I like this on one level: developing a stronger group with a unified vision and goal promoting open source development and free standards -- because those two are key to a non-corporate dominated future.
But on two levels I don't, primarily for a simple reason of naming -- Linux is not the the be all and end all of free standards (FSG) or open source (OSDL) -- Linux is a result of both.
My first objection is systems based. Assume I and a group of my peers develop the world's greatest new open source architecture -- that is not Linux. Will the Linux foundation support the open standards and open source efforts by making it easy to hook to it, etc.? Or am I and my peers now competitors?
The second is lesser because without corporate financial involvement, the proprietary solutions will always win by virtue of deep pocketbooks, lobbying, etc. So there has to be corporate buy-in in order for an open source approach to be viable in the future But Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, and Oracle and have all been both black hats and white hats in the "Open Source" arena, so I have a level of distrust in their backing of a "single" organization under a single OS titled name.
You have to make sure that your intranet application renders properly (in spite of Microsoft's continued non-compliance with many CSS features) on what has always seemed to me to be a buggy, bloated, easy-to-malware infest piece of junk software application masquerading as a browser.
In fact, one of the studies we are doing internally at my company is looking at the cost of deploying Firefox exclusively inside the firewall. Interestingly enough, the main resistance at this point is that if we don't continue to support IE internally, our web developers won't have the skills to deploy and secure web applications OUTSIDE of the firewall.
Let us assume a hypothetical situation in which I (a content producer)
am equipped with a minimal amount of equipment in the form of access to a) a library computer with a USB port, an inexpensive USB connectable digital camera/video corder/scanner/whatever, and the cord...
I am the only person in the right place at the right time and capture some amazing event with world-wide benefit and implications...
I do not wish to keep the benefit to myself or profit unreasonably from the dissemination of the content, and
the library auto-encodes my content to the theoretically perfect DRM solution that meets all of the listed specs, but is not open source and is not freely available to run on ALL browser connected systems.
My content is no longer free. It is now controlled by an outside interest that can profit from it's dissemination or alternatively from it's suppression.
For example, if I invented a vaccine for one of a number of deadly viruses and wished to publish both the vaccine and the inexpensive production method for use throughout the world -- in the process rendering a highly profitable line of drugs useless. If you can't unlock my content because the DRM is commercially controlled, then what?
I have been studying a variation on this exact problem for some time and have reached a tentative conclusion: that the energy and cost of such a system is economically prohibitive, not scientifically prohibitive.
By which I mean I did the math using the available solar insolation figures for the metro area closest to the middle of the US as a sample, the Carnot equation for thermodynamic efficiency [Max efficiency of a heat engine before losses = 1 - the ratio of the low temp/high temp in absolute degrees (Kelvin or Rankine) -- the formula works the same way]. Assuming a big rooftop as a heat source, and 90% efficiency in gathering all of the heat and 90% in the engine itself the system would produce -- are you ready?
About enough power to run the lights and light appliances in an average home, but not near enough to contribute to the heating and/or cooling loads in the home -- which are the main power consumers. Meaning that the economic payback for even a successful mass-produced system (which assumes a production figure of around 1/5 the cost of a custom built system) would most likely be measured in decades, not years. And that the manufacturing heat cost of building the system will use more energy than it will produce in a lifetime.
Oops, you are correct. Which means that the system has to operate at high pressure to raise the boiling point. Which means thick, custom metals usually. Thing is, there are already quite a few things out there that boil low, such as ammonia, freon, R-XXX whatever version is used in the AC of the house already. There are even binary (two gas) systems that operate at a fairly low temp.
Well, I will track, read and report back to/. if this proves to be more interesting than I am seeing at the moment.
But 58 Celsius is 136 degrees fahrenheit. My attic temperature (house in the central Midwest US, (it has insulation above and below, by the way, and is ventilated, which is pretty normal for most houses nowadays) -- which I monitor for experimental purposes, hovers around 120 on the worst days. So I don't have enough heat to boil the fluid, and would presumably have to use some type of fuel or power source to match pressures and boiling points.
Also, another key item is what point the fluid condenses at. If it takes power to condense the fluid (via pressure, etc.) then the net power output is lowered as well.
Finally, if their experimental rig can't be turned into a production unit that mass produced for lower than the cost of the power savings over 7-10 years, most homeowners, etc. will pass on it. TCO vs. savings for a business may be longer of course.
So my question isn't whether it works...it is whether or not it is economically viable even if it does.
As someone whose significant other (my wife) was diagnosed about three weeks ago, I would hope that the science behind the research is what leads to the "right" answer being developed in a new direction.
The thing is, medically, I don't think that the sudden onset of "nerve ending" (re)growth taking place in the brain is the answer. What we want is to discover a chemical means of telling the body to stop attacking the myelin sheaths between the nerves as if they were a virus. Meaning that this research has value in terms of "if we can do something like this (A) here (at the spinal cord junctures), how can we do similar thing (B) at the myelin level. So if researchers can specifically enhance the good molecules or block the bad molecules that are causing problems in MS from being active in the brain space like they are in this experiment, you have permanent stability at the point in time when a diagnosis is made.
Which then allows other research to go forward on medications that can be used to selectively induce myelin-damaged neurons to re-lay those molecules into position like they did when we were growing up.
And fact checking. And interface checking. AKA what some folks would call "pre-packaging".
What works is when there is sort of an open source "fact community" around an educational project that can use a common interface to do the "educational packaging" without racking up the costs of content experts, etc.
Wow, an intelligent, well written neutral opinion on this subject. Which correctly summarizes the central questions between creationism and pure Darwinian evolution as well. And even points at the value of current research into the biological sciences without posturing that science must be inherently anti-religion in order to progress.
While I find the idea that life originated from some primordial soup mix to be distasteful at best and downright inconceivable at worst, using scientific conjecture to attack the idea that a sufficiently super-advanced, presumably immortal "super being" that we conceptually use language to call "God" could not:
bring together the proper elements for life to survive, AKA a planet which is created (made) for that purpose,
populate the planet with biological organisms in a planned manner designed to insure balanced a eco-system forms,
then place another unique organism (humans) within that eco-system,
while perhaps not scientifically provable at this time, is also not scientifically discreditable.
So the whole science vs. religion arguments are a great big waste of time, flame wars, and effort, when the things that really matter are that we learn enough about our local world and do what it takes to make it the best possible habitat for all of the creatures that live in this corner of the universe.
Think of it this way. I'm not the greatest fisherman because I don't know how to find the right spots, the bait to use, etc. for most kinds of fishing. So my success rate is low. Good fishermen/women know the exact times, baits, and places to achieve the highest hit rate in terms of catching fish.
Online predators, like fish predators (the fishermen/women in this second analogy) know exactly what they are doing to achieve the highest hit rate on their desired victims.
Hanging around the mall trolling for victim gets a person noticed. Hanging around trolling online is easy and invisible because the predator can simply pose as another "teen", etc. and gives the predator the chance to remain undetected until the last minute. Only we're not talking "game wardens" and fish, we're talking about children's lives being ruined when a predator slips through the cracks and reaches a victim
Seems to me that many of the posts here so far miss a few points so far and just point at lack of parental oversight as the major problem. Statistics don't make the 'Net or the state of California safer. Think about it:
If Mr/Ms. Joe/Jane "Child Predator" hangs around the mall watching children for extended periods of time, he or she tends to end up in jail, and not for "statutory rape".
Statistics for statutory rape do not include 1/10th of the sexual assaults on minors that take place. Many cases are plea-bargained, or can't be easily prosecuted because of the high standards for what is/isn't admissable evidence in the US.
More valid to my conserns: when Mr/Ms. Online Predator hands around the 'Net (in MySpace or elsewhere), he/she can pose as just another teen, etc. until vital information is obtained, until he/she knows exactly where to go to find or meet a victim, and remain undetected until the very last minutes. In this situation, there is only a very small window of time in the "real world" for detection and protecting a child from a sure fire sexually abusive situation.
I guess what I am saying is that while there is no substitution for parental monitoring in the real and 'Net worlds, I don't have to worry about sexual predators from all across the country coming to the local mall to target my kids and remainining undetected, I DO have to worry about the uses of technology by those same predators to lead them right to my doorstep.
Actually you prove my point because while there is management pressure to upgrade, you are going through the process of testing first. A PHB that forces a bad upgrade usually won't last very long in today's IT world, hopefully if the issue is forced either you win, or at the worst his/her bad decision doesn't take you down with it.
Enterprise environments won't use -- or at least should not use immature software from any source -- open or proprietary. In fact, most major enterprises have a very slow and conservative adoption software adoption process to prevent a single application from breaking other existing applications. Software requiring interfaces between systems are even more rigorously tested -- and this is all a good thing.
My thought is that the problem is that few enterprise businesses are assisting in developing the maturity of applications that would enable more widespread use. Every large enterprise has small projects that would benefit from open source tools, etc. out there, but if the enterprise isn't willing to spend the developer resources, then it essentially locks the door to the acceptance of more mature open source tools that are validated "in-house", thus facilitating greater acceptance throughout.
Try this on for size: Assume that this being called God has the ability to affect at least one thing we "mere mortals" don't.... the so called gravitational constant, i.e. how much gravity a mass of a certain size exists. And that there is a "law" that explains how this being called God does it.
Suddenly bringing enough matter together to "create" a planet doesn't seem so dreadfully difficult, does it.
What I am really saying is that it would be foolish to say that a being called "God" doesn't operate according to the laws of the universe, even if we mere mortals don't understand those "laws" yet, and only have theories to approximate them.
The content crowd part is what loses me. I know that the major players in the content arena try to use patents to control the content, but I'm not sure where the patent office comes into play except in a good way.
For example, if a video codec used an alogrithm that was discovered to have code which is arguably prior art, wouldn't that prevent the codec or the tech to implement it from being patented, etc.?
If this survives what I would predict to be a hugelobbying effort on the part of the massive corporate software interests, this could be the most significant reform of the Patent Office in my lifetime. [which is longer than I'd like to admit but shorter than the creation of digital computers].
I mean, since when has there been an "Open submission" for prior art in any of the USPTOs area of authority, or to have a searchable database for newly published applications that allows you, me, and everybody else to offer feedback directly to the examiners who need the information most [Note: I am including the patent quality index" under the heading of feedback by the way.]
From the Techworld article:The USPTO will host a public meeting to discuss the projects at its offices on 16 February.
I hope that RSM, ESR, etc. Lawrense Lessig et. all are there to defend this proposed change.
I don't think there is a problem with my comprehension per se, I think that perhaps you and I are talking in two different directions that aren't antithetical to each other.
My point about the statistics is merely an adjunct commentary, and if you will permit the biblical analogy, is that the 90% market leader is effectively trying to "point at the mote in the other guy's eye" while simultaneously "ignoring the beam" in his own, and using a faulty statistically analysis to do it. The question of safety favoring OSS is much more in the realm that the more eyes that can see and test the code, the fewer bugs (which sometimes become vulnerabilities) exist and the shorter their surviveal time in "the wild".
Perhaps a more useful analogy is this: the Windows hegemony is more like the general populace in terms of risk -- the first uncaught airborn super-flu or other pandemic virus is likely to kill millions and cost billions of dollars to fight, control, etc.. But those millions are unlikely to include (statistically speaking) an equal amount of the first responders (the OSS 'nixes, etc.) who take the adequate precautions of masks, gloves, etc..
Now then, who do you want taking care of YOUR interests -- a first responder with all of the medical expertise in nasty bug stomping and control, or are you okay trying to survive with the Campbell's (hidden recipe) version of grandma's chicken soup?
The company with 90% market share consisently and nearly constantly distorts every piece of negative press they get, and trumpets all the negative press about the 2%. But a vulnerability in the 90% software threatens not only my core business (if it is found on the WinX platform), but that of any and all of my customers if they are.
Not intending to "karma whore" here, but look at the stats from an already done analysis:
22 Technical Cyber Security Alerts were issued in 2005
11 of those alerts were for Windows platforms
3 were for Oracle products
2 were for Cisco products
1 was for Mac OS X
None were for Linux
, and secondarily look at this quote
"Here's more of the same. US-CERT's list of current vulnerabilities contains a total of 11 vulnerabilities, six of which mention Windows by name, and none of which mentions Linux.
Folks, as other/. posters have already discussed better than I can, most of the supposed Linux bugs are either duplicates or in user- space software. That would be akin to saying a Firefox browser vulnerability is a Windows OS security problem,as opposed to an underlying OS vulnerability that would affect any and all software on the platform.
Perhaps because IBM has already successfully defended Linux from SCO?
perhaps because IBM plays nice and has donated massive amounts of code to the OSS world?
perhaps because IBM is comfortable with Novell, offering the only real competitor to Win NT networking?
Perhaps because IBM offers a strong competitor to SQL Server, AKA DB-2, with a full stack including the web sphere stuff, etc. that doesn't need any MS components to run?
In other words, where Microsoft's bullying business tactics don't have a way in? What think ye all?
Most folks know from elementary school at the earliest or high school science at the latest that the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen, which, while not the main flame source (the skin surrounding the gas bags was) didn't exactly help either.
Most people thing of football games and the goodyear blimp, filled with helium, etc. which people assume to make a dirigible unburnable.
The main problem with dirigibles is WIND and the high drag incurred by the "flying body" shape in anything over a minimal amount of crosswind.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's why: Assume for the sake of argument that you can remove 20% of the water vapor over the 2-1/2 or so Meters above your house in a given day. And that all the houses in the big city do the same thing. Most of the water will go where? down the toilet or sink eventually, or perhaps be put into a garden, etc. where much of the moisture will re-evaporate. Now then, a reasonable assumption is that what goes down the toilet or sink gets put through the local sewage treatment plant or into a local septic field -- where, guess what -- it re-evaporates.
Secondarily, that 2-1-/2 meters of 20% more-dehumidified air is only maybe 1/100th of what is available under the weather, but even so, as the moisture re-distributes from the other 99%, assume it generates a little wind. Ultimately pulls say 1% more moist air in from the sea, soaks up some heat in the atmosphere, but if there is a constant drain that moisture will keep coming toward your city. Providing more wind energy to produce power and rain, etc. Not dry areas.
Let me know what you think.
Here's my take on the economics of a windmill approach... I recently read an article about how a typical power generation windmill has three blades, maybe 25 M in diameter, and in the future might generate 500 KW. Today, say 3-5 KW per blade per meter but in no case do shorter blades offer the efficiency of bigger blades. Some of the better dehumidifiers out there get about 20 Liters/day (say 6-1/2 gallons) per kilowatt from reasonably moist. So a 3 blade 5 meter windmill would get 3*5*3=45 KW of energy, and presumably put out about about 900 liters of water. Enough to live on and water a small garden, but not drought ending by any means.
Now then, in a hot climate, use that same power generation to pump seawater into a salt pond, then consider that in hot climates the sun provides enough heat over a 40mx40m pond (1600 Sq Meters)-- this equals around 9 MW day avg -- and use that tremendous heat rise to power a moist-lift evaporation / power unit -- now you've got the capacity to create a whole lot more fresh water and power. Even if the power generation capacity is only 5% efficient, by my calculation that's still about 70 KW/hr. PLUS the remaining heat is still available for desalination purposes
But all the engineering to make the pond, the moist-lift evaporator, and the power unit plus the water storage or transport system-- all of those cost serious money because they just can't be mass produced.
See this article in Mother Earth News" that is kind of old but has the specifics of one implementation like this...
Where this strikes me as a good approach is that the Linux kernel folks are offering to make the driver development cost irrelevant/free. So if the OS community basically puts out the vote via a common website which basically lets those of us who want to buy OS essentially vote on which components to ask the Linux Kernel folks to make drivers for first, then a company can assess whether or not to "play ball". And if the manufactures play ball, then it is up to those of us to make it profitable and desirable for them to do so in the future by voting with our wallets for Linux components and away from WinXX.
But on two levels I don't, primarily for a simple reason of naming -- Linux is not the the be all and end all of free standards (FSG) or open source (OSDL) -- Linux is a result of both.
My first objection is systems based. Assume I and a group of my peers develop the world's greatest new open source architecture -- that is not Linux. Will the Linux foundation support the open standards and open source efforts by making it easy to hook to it, etc.? Or am I and my peers now competitors?
The second is lesser because without corporate financial involvement, the proprietary solutions will always win by virtue of deep pocketbooks, lobbying, etc. So there has to be corporate buy-in in order for an open source approach to be viable in the future But Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, and Oracle and have all been both black hats and white hats in the "Open Source" arena, so I have a level of distrust in their backing of a "single" organization under a single OS titled name.
My thoughs only. What do you think?
You have to make sure that your intranet application renders properly (in spite of Microsoft's continued non-compliance with many CSS features) on what has always seemed to me to be a buggy, bloated, easy-to-malware infest piece of junk software application masquerading as a browser.
In fact, one of the studies we are doing internally at my company is looking at the cost of deploying Firefox exclusively inside the firewall. Interestingly enough, the main resistance at this point is that if we don't continue to support IE internally, our web developers won't have the skills to deploy and secure web applications OUTSIDE of the firewall.
- am equipped with a minimal amount of equipment in the form of access to a) a library computer with a USB port, an inexpensive USB connectable digital camera/video corder/scanner/whatever, and the cord...
- I am the only person in the right place at the right time and capture some amazing event with world-wide benefit and implications...
- I do not wish to keep the benefit to myself or profit unreasonably from the dissemination of the content, and
- the library auto-encodes my content to the theoretically perfect DRM solution that meets all of the listed specs, but is not open source and is not freely available to run on ALL browser connected systems.
My content is no longer free. It is now controlled by an outside interest that can profit from it's dissemination or alternatively from it's suppression.For example, if I invented a vaccine for one of a number of deadly viruses and wished to publish both the vaccine and the inexpensive production method for use throughout the world -- in the process rendering a highly profitable line of drugs useless. If you can't unlock my content because the DRM is commercially controlled, then what?
By which I mean I did the math using the available solar insolation figures for the metro area closest to the middle of the US as a sample, the Carnot equation for thermodynamic efficiency [Max efficiency of a heat engine before losses = 1 - the ratio of the low temp/high temp in absolute degrees (Kelvin or Rankine) -- the formula works the same way]. Assuming a big rooftop as a heat source, and 90% efficiency in gathering all of the heat and 90% in the engine itself the system would produce -- are you ready?
About enough power to run the lights and light appliances in an average home, but not near enough to contribute to the heating and/or cooling loads in the home -- which are the main power consumers. Meaning that the economic payback for even a successful mass-produced system (which assumes a production figure of around 1/5 the cost of a custom built system) would most likely be measured in decades, not years. And that the manufacturing heat cost of building the system will use more energy than it will produce in a lifetime.
Well, I will track, read and report back to /. if this proves to be more interesting than I am seeing at the moment.
But 58 Celsius is 136 degrees fahrenheit. My attic temperature (house in the central Midwest US, (it has insulation above and below, by the way, and is ventilated, which is pretty normal for most houses nowadays) -- which I monitor for experimental purposes, hovers around 120 on the worst days. So I don't have enough heat to boil the fluid, and would presumably have to use some type of fuel or power source to match pressures and boiling points.
Also, another key item is what point the fluid condenses at. If it takes power to condense the fluid (via pressure, etc.) then the net power output is lowered as well.
Finally, if their experimental rig can't be turned into a production unit that mass produced for lower than the cost of the power savings over 7-10 years, most homeowners, etc. will pass on it. TCO vs. savings for a business may be longer of course.
So my question isn't whether it works...it is whether or not it is economically viable even if it does.
The thing is, medically, I don't think that the sudden onset of "nerve ending" (re)growth taking place in the brain is the answer. What we want is to discover a chemical means of telling the body to stop attacking the myelin sheaths between the nerves as if they were a virus. Meaning that this research has value in terms of "if we can do something like this (A) here (at the spinal cord junctures), how can we do similar thing (B) at the myelin level. So if researchers can specifically enhance the good molecules or block the bad molecules that are causing problems in MS from being active in the brain space like they are in this experiment, you have permanent stability at the point in time when a diagnosis is made.
Which then allows other research to go forward on medications that can be used to selectively induce myelin-damaged neurons to re-lay those molecules into position like they did when we were growing up.
What works is when there is sort of an open source "fact community" around an educational project that can use a common interface to do the "educational packaging" without racking up the costs of content experts, etc.
Wow, an intelligent, well written neutral opinion on this subject. Which correctly summarizes the central questions between creationism and pure Darwinian evolution as well. And even points at the value of current research into the biological sciences without posturing that science must be inherently anti-religion in order to progress.
While I find the idea that life originated from some primordial soup mix to be distasteful at best and downright inconceivable at worst, using scientific conjecture to attack the idea that a sufficiently super-advanced, presumably immortal "super being" that we conceptually use language to call "God" could not:
while perhaps not scientifically provable at this time, is also not scientifically discreditable.
So the whole science vs. religion arguments are a great big waste of time, flame wars, and effort, when the things that really matter are that we learn enough about our local world and do what it takes to make it the best possible habitat for all of the creatures that live in this corner of the universe.
Think of it this way. I'm not the greatest fisherman because I don't know how to find the right spots, the bait to use, etc. for most kinds of fishing. So my success rate is low. Good fishermen/women know the exact times, baits, and places to achieve the highest hit rate in terms of catching fish.
Online predators, like fish predators (the fishermen/women in this second analogy) know exactly what they are doing to achieve the highest hit rate on their desired victims.
Hanging around the mall trolling for victim gets a person noticed. Hanging around trolling online is easy and invisible because the predator can simply pose as another "teen", etc. and gives the predator the chance to remain undetected until the last minute. Only we're not talking "game wardens" and fish, we're talking about children's lives being ruined when a predator slips through the cracks and reaches a victim
I guess what I am saying is that while there is no substitution for parental monitoring in the real and 'Net worlds, I don't have to worry about sexual predators from all across the country coming to the local mall to target my kids and remainining undetected, I DO have to worry about the uses of technology by those same predators to lead them right to my doorstep.
Actually you prove my point because while there is management pressure to upgrade, you are going through the process of testing first. A PHB that forces a bad upgrade usually won't last very long in today's IT world, hopefully if the issue is forced either you win, or at the worst his/her bad decision doesn't take you down with it.
My thought is that the problem is that few enterprise businesses are assisting in developing the maturity of applications that would enable more widespread use. Every large enterprise has small projects that would benefit from open source tools, etc. out there, but if the enterprise isn't willing to spend the developer resources, then it essentially locks the door to the acceptance of more mature open source tools that are validated "in-house", thus facilitating greater acceptance throughout.
Try this on for size: Assume that this being called God has the ability to affect at least one thing we "mere mortals" don't.... the so called gravitational constant, i.e. how much gravity a mass of a certain size exists. And that there is a "law" that explains how this being called God does it.
Suddenly bringing enough matter together to "create" a planet doesn't seem so dreadfully difficult, does it.
What I am really saying is that it would be foolish to say that a being called "God" doesn't operate according to the laws of the universe, even if we mere mortals don't understand those "laws" yet, and only have theories to approximate them.
For example, if a video codec used an alogrithm that was discovered to have code which is arguably prior art, wouldn't that prevent the codec or the tech to implement it from being patented, etc.?
Let me know what you think.
I mean, since when has there been an "Open submission" for prior art in any of the USPTOs area of authority, or to have a searchable database for newly published applications that allows you, me, and everybody else to offer feedback directly to the examiners who need the information most [Note: I am including the patent quality index" under the heading of feedback by the way.]
From the Techworld article:The USPTO will host a public meeting to discuss the projects at its offices on 16 February.
I hope that RSM, ESR, etc. Lawrense Lessig et. all are there to defend this proposed change.
My point about the statistics is merely an adjunct commentary, and if you will permit the biblical analogy, is that the 90% market leader is effectively trying to "point at the mote in the other guy's eye" while simultaneously "ignoring the beam" in his own, and using a faulty statistically analysis to do it. The question of safety favoring OSS is much more in the realm that the more eyes that can see and test the code, the fewer bugs (which sometimes become vulnerabilities) exist and the shorter their surviveal time in "the wild".
Perhaps a more useful analogy is this: the Windows hegemony is more like the general populace in terms of risk -- the first uncaught airborn super-flu or other pandemic virus is likely to kill millions and cost billions of dollars to fight, control, etc.. But those millions are unlikely to include (statistically speaking) an equal amount of the first responders (the OSS 'nixes, etc.) who take the adequate precautions of masks, gloves, etc..
Now then, who do you want taking care of YOUR interests -- a first responder with all of the medical expertise in nasty bug stomping and control, or are you okay trying to survive with the Campbell's (hidden recipe) version of grandma's chicken soup?
The company with 90% market share consisently and nearly constantly distorts every piece of negative press they get, and trumpets all the negative press about the 2%. But a vulnerability in the 90% software threatens not only my core business (if it is found on the WinX platform), but that of any and all of my customers if they are.
That's what.
- 11 of those alerts were for Windows platforms
- 3 were for Oracle products
- 2 were for Cisco products
- 1 was for Mac OS X
- None were for Linux
, and secondarily look at this quoteFolks, as other
In other words, where Microsoft's bullying business tactics don't have a way in? What think ye all?
Most folks know from elementary school at the earliest or high school science at the latest that the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen, which, while not the main flame source (the skin surrounding the gas bags was) didn't exactly help either.
Most people thing of football games and the goodyear blimp, filled with helium, etc. which people assume to make a dirigible unburnable.
The main problem with dirigibles is WIND and the high drag incurred by the "flying body" shape in anything over a minimal amount of crosswind.