This is completely wrong. Gödel's theorem does not state that "any
sufficiently complex system is unable to describe itself." Very roughly, it
(specifically the first incompleteness theorem) states that any
consistent mathematical system
that is able to describe itself is necessarily incomplete. And,
there is no chance that "Goedel's theorem might be proven wrong in the
future." It is a theorem, a mathematical truth. Not a "theory", if
that's what you are confusing it with. For more info see
Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
Perhaps it's time for me to repost what was involved installing a private
certificate server on Windows 2000 via its "intuitive" point-and-click
GUI.
These were the actual procedures
involved, that I precisely documented for the respective customers
so that they could replicate them, for two
different projects that accomplished exactly the same goal. (Scroll
past the lameness filter stuff at the beginning.) This was several
years ago, but AFAIK it hasn't changed significantly.
The problem with your "procedure" is that steps like "follow wizard" involve
answering multiple questions, which you've neglected to fill in. The answers
to these questions weren't always obvious, at least to me. Maybe I'm
just dumb, but it took several attempts over two days, some by trial-and-error
answering questions in different ways, before I got the IIS version to work.
It involved researching a number of pages on the MS site as well as searching
through newsgroups to resolve unanswered or unclear info.
Basically, you have given a rough summary with the details missing.
Once I found the correct Apache how-to - and yes, it
did take a little research, but it wasn't that hard - it just worked the first time,
with no guesswork involved.
Hey P and GP, a verb following
"Microsoft" should be singular, not plural - it should be
"Microsoft buys". Is using company
names as plurals a new trend or something?
I keep seeing it over and over on Slashdot these days,
and it seems to be propagating like some kind of meme. Get a clue and
read the Wall Street Journal or something else outside of/. occasionally, to reboot your grammar. (I know this is
way offtopic, but someone has to say it.)
I use and like NoScript too, but for the kinds
of sites I visit, there are only a few where I want to block the
JavaScript. It would be much more useful for me if there were an
option to base it on a blacklist model instead of a whitelist
model, so that I could just add the annoying sites as I occasionally
run across them, and rather than having to
keep whitelisting almost every new site I visit. Too many
sites these days unfortunately need js turned on just
to be able to navigate them.
The world as we know it wouldn't grind to a financial halt if
advertisers were to die off in some mass extinction, in spite of what
sales people would like you to think.
Without advertising, I doubt so many people would be buying things they
don't need and overextending their credit to do so. While the world
wouldn't grind to a financial halt, it would slow down significantly,
probably causing a major recession/depression. The economy is
unfortunately very dependent on the stupid people of the
world who use their paycheck as a ticket to shop till they drop for
useless crap.
Mid 90s. A nameless mid-sized ($100 million) company (were
I was a short-term contractor)
kept all
corporate data in a ERP system, from accounting to customer orders
and inventory. They had a RAID-5 disk configuration, and faithfully
backed up the system nightly with carefully planned tape rotations.
The RAID-5 controller failed in a way that destroyed all data
unretrievably. Turns out the backup tape had been running off the
end for months, but the tape operator ignored the cryptic error message.
It was a MAJOR disaster that almost wiped out the company.
If you go up to the directory level (remove the p-m6.jpg from the URL),
there are a lot of other interesting images for the related projects
they are working on. Here's one of the scientists hard at
work, apparently on the beer project. Man, I need to apply for a grant
there...
The analog TV / human eye combination is amazingly robust in the
presence of weak signals. Even a snowy picture that looks like noise on
an oscilloscope is recognizable (if not ideal) to a human, and there are
many people in marginal reception areas that make do with what signal
they can. Their TVs are still useful for news and so on, even if the
picture is far from perfect. I've been on an island where that was the
case, and I still watched the news every night through the background
snow, although watching a movie or long program was too annoying and
fatiguing. Cartoons, on the other hand, were fine. I don't really
know, but I can't imagine digital TV would be this robust/flexible, or
are its error-correction algorithms really that advanced? My guess is
probably not, and large class of people in rural and outlying areas are
going to be cut off.
I have seen Postgres used numerous times in the Corp world and where it
failed was usually in projects that went from small to very large and
highly loaded with great speed. Basically it did not scale well. The
problem was not so much the issue of missing features in Postgres since
the feature set is growing at a steady pace, the problem was with
stability. As the projects grew larger, the traffic went up and it
became imperative that the database be available 24/7 with next to 0
down time Postgres didn't work out all that well because of stability
issues. This will change as Postgres matures but at the moment
developers should think hard about when they use Postgres instead of
Oracle or some other high end database.
I personally haven't encountered any stability problems with Postgres,
but I haven't used it for very large scale applications. However, I
have migrated from Postgres to Oracle (not because of
scalability/stability but because the client wanted it) and it was
relatively straightforward. Having gone through this, I would feel
comfortable starting with Postgres with an eye towards
eventually migrating to Oracle when/if the situation warranted - it shouldn't
be
the huge IT migration nightmare some might fear. Although going back
might be a little harder, depending on what Oracle features are used.
The biggest part of the project was translating
PL/pgSQL to PL/SQL, and I wrote some
throwaway scripts to translate the subset that
we used. I
posted about this, and there was an interest in the translation,
an example of which I emailed to someone in that thread.
If there is still interest, I can email the
example to a volunteer
here who wants to redistribute it (I don't want to make my email
public).
Thanks for this information, although it's a little too late for me.:) For
some reason I didn't see this in my Google search for how to do this
update - maybe I didn't look hard enough - and otherwise I don't know
how I could have known that "tzdata" was the magic package name. But
I'll remember it for the next daylight savings time change. Live
and learn. Anyway, maybe my procedure wasn't a total loss since at
least one non-Debian user appears to have benefitted.
And to think that some people claim Linux isn't ready for the desktop!;)
In retrospect, I should have made it very clear that my procedure
was intended for an obsolete Debian version that is no-longer supported,
and for that I apologize. (Great advocacy there, huh?) If you
have a currently supported Linux, definitely do apt-get
or its equivalent - and it will have already been updated for you
if you have automatic security updates, as you should.
My server has only been rebooted after power failures and has run
literally for years with zero downtime. I did periodic apt-gets for
security updates until they stopped, and never had a single problem.
So I have no pressing reason to switch to Debian Sarge.
To repeat emphatically: my procedure is for obsolete
Linuxes only. Sorry.
BTW after the time-zone update I didn't have to restart any service,
as one poster suggested. It just worked. Perhaps there was a nightly
run that did something - not sure, because I applied the update several
days before the time change - but I did nothing else other than exactly what I
posted.
For those running Sarge, apt-get is fine. However, updates have been
discontinued for Debian Woody, since it is obsolete. But
there is no other reason for me to upgrade, since everything else works
perfectly on this server that just sits there humming along year after
year. From debian.org itself: "Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 has been obsoleted
by Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (sarge). Security updates have been
discontinued as of the end of June 2006." So, I can no longer do
apt-get, and the procedure I posted is the only thing I found on how to
do it.
I posted this because determing exactly what to do was a little
frustrating, frankly. I found a lot of discussion about it from people
helpfully volunteering their versions of "how to do it", but
always, it seemed, from imperfect memory - missing or incomplete steps,
swapped arguments in "ln", misspellings, vague steps like "then you
compile the zoneinfo", telling you the commands to use but not their
exact arguments, etc. What I posted were the *exact* command lines
I typed, copied directly from the bash shell, so I (whoever I am)
can vouch for its absolute accuracy.
I imagine there are others in my boat, with no-longer supported
Linuxes that otherwise work fine. Anyway, if even one person benefitted, as it seems, I guess
my post was worth it.:)
Here is how I updated a Linux machine (Debian Woody) for Eastern time, if anyone is interested. Some of the information I found on thar Intraweb was, well, sloppy, and it took some trial-and-error. The following was exactly what I typed, and it "took" correctly this morning, with a nice 1-hour gap in the Apache log at 2am. I don't know if this is the best way, but it worked.
su - # root password, of course:) ls -l/etc/localtime # (mine said: /etc/localtime ->/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern, # in case we have to reverse the procedure below) mkdir/root/dst2007 cd/root/dst2007 wget ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz tar -xzf tzdata2007c.tar.gz zic -d zoneinfo northamerica cd/usr/share mv zoneinfo zoneinfo.old mv/root/dst2007/zoneinfo/. ln -sf/usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York/etc/localtime zdump -v/etc/localtime | grep 2007 # (should include Mar 11 in listing)
Not sure if I understand that correctly, but if physicists say that an
orbit is a straight line through space/time (in a sense), then it
follows that a straight line inside a planetary gravitational field
would have a curve to it.
The curve you are talking about is the path that a light beam
would follow, not the curvature of the earth. Otherwise, the earth
would look flat to someone on the surface, and of course it
doesn't, since ships, etc. disappear over the horizon.
That said, I don't understand why the building would follow the
curvature of the earth, if what the other poster above
who visited there is correct. Could it just be for
practical building construction reasons, so that you can wash the floors without
the water running downhill to the center? The high-speed particles in
the accelerator are going to be affected negligibly by gravity
and certainly will not follow the curvature of the earth. Perhaps the accelerator
itself is offset at each end compared to the middle?
I am glad to see the have included public domain as a prominent
choice. It was there before, but somewhat buried and hard to find - it
you used their standard picker, it wouldn't come up at all. I wrote
them about this years ago, and (whether in response to my complaint or
not) it's good to see they've finally done something about it.
Public
domain is a greatly underrated and overlooked choice. It can make life vastly
easier for users by not having to worry about tracking credits for every
little nitpicking minutiae, but instead depends on commonsense ethics to
make acknowledgments where appropriate, without having to worry about
violating the fine print of some legal copyright license. For minor
stuff where suing would be silly even if someone plagiarized it - from a
simple utility icon to this very post you're reading - I think public
domain release makes a lot of sense for those willing to do it but who
are now simply unaware of the possibility.
On the other hand, they still haven't clarified the fine legal
points of exactly what "commercial use" means. As I've posted
here before, almost anything can be interpreted as "commercial use" if
someone is so inclined. IMO almost any use of works under a
noncommecial-only license is a risk not worth taking. In addition, they
can't be incorporated into GPL software, so for open-source development
"noncommercial-only" works are completely worthless.
> Our "IT manager" has no IT experience at all, beyond knowing who
has what contracts. Thats the guy in charge of security.
That's about as sensible as hiring blind paraplegics to deliver pizza.
Your company deserves to have IT disaster after IT disaster; maybe
eventually they'll wake up to the reality that computers aren't easy.
A manager doesn't deliver pizzas (in a big enough operation). A blind
paraplegic, if competent,
could probably manage it just fine.
I agree that it would be better for an IT manager to have an IT
background, but in a large organization, managerial skills can be just as
important if not more so in that position. Assuming he has hired a
competent staff, including security experts,
they will be making the technical recommendations for his
consideration and approval. He is not going to be configuring firewalls
or pulling CAT5 cable.
If they induced you into buying the chips under the pretense of
offering a free MP3, and they didn't, that is false advertising.
Depending on your state laws,
you should be able to demand your money back (not that it
would be worth the effort other than making a point to them), and you can
also file a complaint with your state consumer fraud division, letting
the chip company know that you are doing that. If enough people do that,
they may be pressured into to at least not falsely calling their
offer an "MP3", and possibly even fined for false advertising.
This is really getting off topic, but what the heck.
Actually, a nautical mile is 6076.1155 feet. This is very convenient,
because it is about a minute of arc along a meridian of the Earth. Thus
converting from nautical miles to a change of latitude on a nautical
chart is easy and natural.
The choice of 1/10,000 of the distance from the equator to the
north pole (through Paris) seems rather arbitrary and and clumsy, with no practical
use that I know of. I wonder if the world would have been better off if
the already existing standard of
6076.1155 feet were chosen as the definition for "1 km". It would have
been very close to the old familiar mile. One meter would have been
almost exactly 2 yards or 6 feet. And so on.
I know this is offtopic and that
I'll probably be modded down as such, but heck, I'm going to burn
my karma anyway and not post A/C.
Look, you make some very good points, and I commend you for them, but
god is your post hard to read. Maybe it is just me, but I find it
downright painful; everything just runs together forcing me to read it more
slowly than normal. A few extra seconds using the shift key and punctuation would
save many minutes of total time of readers who are slowed down trying to
read it. Actually, your post is a great example of the selfishness you talk
about: to save a little inconvenience on your end, you disregard the
inconvenience to possibly hundreds of readers, with a negative net gain
overall.
Suggestion: if you
really can't be bothered to use the shift key, use the CAPS LOCK
instead. That way the letters in your post will be bigger and easier to
read, and you will get your point across more emphatically.
Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but that is exactly how your post looks to me,
except s/uppercase/lowercase/.
I don't know if you're trying to make some
kind of "statement" with your "style," but IMHO it really detracts from the content
of your post. Sorry.
To follow up on my post: I see, from another post under this story, that
CSICOP did finally publish a rebuttal, using the
exact figures from that paper, including the one I mentioned:
The PEAR Proposition: Fact or Fallacy?. It only took them 16 years:
I wrote to the Skeptical Inquirer
editor about this around the year 1990, I believe. So if you
felt a subtle but unexplainable feeling of relief and enlightenment
at about 9:50am this morning, that was just my psi propagating throughout
the world.:)
I don't see how this is really that new of an idea. Pre-cooling
buildings below normal temperature settings, prior to the onset of peak
demand periods when electricity rate is higher, is a standard
economizing measure that has been used for years.
Peak electricity demand probably has little
relationship to the tiny percent of wind energy injected into the grid
- when wind energy is more, the coal/oil/nuke generators just have to use
slightly less fuel than they would otherwise, regardless of the
demand. As for frozen food warehouses, it would suprise me
if they don't already overcool when electricity rates are lower, to save
money when the rates are higher, although I don't really know. But the
motivation to save money is high enough in the cutthroat-margin food
business, and the technique simple enough, that I would imagine this is
already being done.
Anyway, I don't see why this has to be some kind of "large scale
test". If the
percent of wind energy is really so large at night that the grid cannot
accomodate the fluctuations, just adjust the differential day/night
electricity rates
accordingly. Greed will take care of the rest.
Thanks, this has the 50-page
paper I was looking for when I saw this story - I remember it
from years ago:
On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomen (1986). Foundations of Physics, 16, No. 8, pp. 721-772
(PDF).
Now, the Foundations of Physics is
not exactly a top-tier journal, but there is some very minimal peer review.
The figures present some results that are, on the
surface, somewhat surprising. For example, look at Fig. 2, p. 726. I suggested to CSICOP (the Skeptical
Inquirer magazine, that I subscribed to) that they have some of their experts
do a rebuttal, but even though I got a
response that they'd take it under consideration, it apparently never happened.
I am still puzzled by this paper.
"If my library doesn't have a book, then I can get to have it shipped from another library that does have the book."
I'll bet this only works in the same county (i. e. under the authority of the same local government).
Our public library (in Massachusetts) will look for hard-to-find
books and articles from about anywhere in the U.S., as far as I can
tell. I've special requested articles in obscure journals that have
ended up coming from various university libraries around the country.
About 15 years ago they found for me an old, 1950's, obscure computing
book from the Huges Aircraft Research and Development Laboratory! I got
the physical copy (possibly one of few, if not the only one, still in
existence) on loan for two weeks. Librarians are amazing people.
So who is Fabienne? "Multichannel audio specialist and futurist Fabienne Serriere is a Franco-American hardware, software and embedded interaction designer. She believes in a gorgeous technologically morphable future. Her interests include hardware hacking, wearable computing, and large scale music system design." Wow. Maybe there's hope for Netscape 9 after all? (Although she says she's not directly part of the dev team, although I haven't a clue what an "anchor" is or does.)
The reason why you think this is broken is because you don't know how
the back button works. Seriously. Read the specification
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt. The back button wasn't designed to
provide a transparent view of the current system state. It was designed
to allow the user to view what they have previously viewed.
The "design" of the back button in rfc2616 are recommendations, not
requirements. Please refer to the meanings of MUST, SHOULD, MAY
in
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt.
Slashdot Mirror
This is completely wrong. Gödel's theorem does not state that "any sufficiently complex system is unable to describe itself." Very roughly, it (specifically the first incompleteness theorem) states that any consistent mathematical system that is able to describe itself is necessarily incomplete. And, there is no chance that "Goedel's theorem might be proven wrong in the future." It is a theorem, a mathematical truth. Not a "theory", if that's what you are confusing it with. For more info see Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
The problem with your "procedure" is that steps like "follow wizard" involve answering multiple questions, which you've neglected to fill in. The answers to these questions weren't always obvious, at least to me. Maybe I'm just dumb, but it took several attempts over two days, some by trial-and-error answering questions in different ways, before I got the IIS version to work. It involved researching a number of pages on the MS site as well as searching through newsgroups to resolve unanswered or unclear info. Basically, you have given a rough summary with the details missing.
Once I found the correct Apache how-to - and yes, it did take a little research, but it wasn't that hard - it just worked the first time, with no guesswork involved.
Hey P and GP, a verb following "Microsoft" should be singular, not plural - it should be "Microsoft buys". Is using company names as plurals a new trend or something? I keep seeing it over and over on Slashdot these days, and it seems to be propagating like some kind of meme. Get a clue and read the Wall Street Journal or something else outside of /. occasionally, to reboot your grammar. (I know this is
way offtopic, but someone has to say it.)
I use and like NoScript too, but for the kinds of sites I visit, there are only a few where I want to block the JavaScript. It would be much more useful for me if there were an option to base it on a blacklist model instead of a whitelist model, so that I could just add the annoying sites as I occasionally run across them, and rather than having to keep whitelisting almost every new site I visit. Too many sites these days unfortunately need js turned on just to be able to navigate them.
Without advertising, I doubt so many people would be buying things they don't need and overextending their credit to do so. While the world wouldn't grind to a financial halt, it would slow down significantly, probably causing a major recession/depression. The economy is unfortunately very dependent on the stupid people of the world who use their paycheck as a ticket to shop till they drop for useless crap.
I used to be married to someone like that.
Mid 90s. A nameless mid-sized ($100 million) company (were I was a short-term contractor) kept all corporate data in a ERP system, from accounting to customer orders and inventory. They had a RAID-5 disk configuration, and faithfully backed up the system nightly with carefully planned tape rotations. The RAID-5 controller failed in a way that destroyed all data unretrievably. Turns out the backup tape had been running off the end for months, but the tape operator ignored the cryptic error message. It was a MAJOR disaster that almost wiped out the company.
If you go up to the directory level (remove the p-m6.jpg from the URL), there are a lot of other interesting images for the related projects they are working on. Here's one of the scientists hard at work, apparently on the beer project. Man, I need to apply for a grant there...
The analog TV / human eye combination is amazingly robust in the presence of weak signals. Even a snowy picture that looks like noise on an oscilloscope is recognizable (if not ideal) to a human, and there are many people in marginal reception areas that make do with what signal they can. Their TVs are still useful for news and so on, even if the picture is far from perfect. I've been on an island where that was the case, and I still watched the news every night through the background snow, although watching a movie or long program was too annoying and fatiguing. Cartoons, on the other hand, were fine. I don't really know, but I can't imagine digital TV would be this robust/flexible, or are its error-correction algorithms really that advanced? My guess is probably not, and large class of people in rural and outlying areas are going to be cut off.
I personally haven't encountered any stability problems with Postgres, but I haven't used it for very large scale applications. However, I have migrated from Postgres to Oracle (not because of scalability/stability but because the client wanted it) and it was relatively straightforward. Having gone through this, I would feel comfortable starting with Postgres with an eye towards eventually migrating to Oracle when/if the situation warranted - it shouldn't be the huge IT migration nightmare some might fear. Although going back might be a little harder, depending on what Oracle features are used.
The biggest part of the project was translating PL/pgSQL to PL/SQL, and I wrote some throwaway scripts to translate the subset that we used. I posted about this, and there was an interest in the translation, an example of which I emailed to someone in that thread. If there is still interest, I can email the example to a volunteer here who wants to redistribute it (I don't want to make my email public).
Thanks for this information, although it's a little too late for me. :) For
some reason I didn't see this in my Google search for how to do this
update - maybe I didn't look hard enough - and otherwise I don't know
how I could have known that "tzdata" was the magic package name. But
I'll remember it for the next daylight savings time change. Live
and learn. Anyway, maybe my procedure wasn't a total loss since at
least one non-Debian user appears to have benefitted.
In retrospect, I should have made it very clear that my procedure was intended for an obsolete Debian version that is no-longer supported, and for that I apologize. (Great advocacy there, huh?) If you have a currently supported Linux, definitely do apt-get or its equivalent - and it will have already been updated for you if you have automatic security updates, as you should.
My server has only been rebooted after power failures and has run literally for years with zero downtime. I did periodic apt-gets for security updates until they stopped, and never had a single problem. So I have no pressing reason to switch to Debian Sarge.
To repeat emphatically: my procedure is for obsolete Linuxes only. Sorry.
BTW after the time-zone update I didn't have to restart any service, as one poster suggested. It just worked. Perhaps there was a nightly run that did something - not sure, because I applied the update several days before the time change - but I did nothing else other than exactly what I posted.
I posted this because determing exactly what to do was a little frustrating, frankly. I found a lot of discussion about it from people helpfully volunteering their versions of "how to do it", but always, it seemed, from imperfect memory - missing or incomplete steps, swapped arguments in "ln", misspellings, vague steps like "then you compile the zoneinfo", telling you the commands to use but not their exact arguments, etc. What I posted were the *exact* command lines I typed, copied directly from the bash shell, so I (whoever I am) can vouch for its absolute accuracy.
I imagine there are others in my boat, with no-longer supported Linuxes that otherwise work fine. Anyway, if even one person benefitted, as it seems, I guess my post was worth it. :)
Here is how I updated a Linux machine (Debian Woody) for Eastern
:) /etc/localtime /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern, /root/dst2007 /root/dst2007 /usr/share /root/dst2007/zoneinfo/ . /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York /etc/localtime /etc/localtime | grep 2007
time, if anyone is interested. Some of the information I found on
thar Intraweb was, well, sloppy, and it took some trial-and-error.
The following was exactly what I typed, and it "took" correctly
this morning, with a nice 1-hour gap in the Apache log at 2am. I
don't know if this is the best way, but it worked.
su -
# root password, of course
ls -l
# (mine said:
# in case we have to reverse the procedure below)
mkdir
cd
wget ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007c.tar.gz
tar -xzf tzdata2007c.tar.gz
zic -d zoneinfo northamerica
cd
mv zoneinfo zoneinfo.old
mv
ln -sf
zdump -v
# (should include Mar 11 in listing)
The curve you are talking about is the path that a light beam would follow, not the curvature of the earth. Otherwise, the earth would look flat to someone on the surface, and of course it doesn't, since ships, etc. disappear over the horizon.
That said, I don't understand why the building would follow the curvature of the earth, if what the other poster above who visited there is correct. Could it just be for practical building construction reasons, so that you can wash the floors without the water running downhill to the center? The high-speed particles in the accelerator are going to be affected negligibly by gravity and certainly will not follow the curvature of the earth. Perhaps the accelerator itself is offset at each end compared to the middle?
Public domain is a greatly underrated and overlooked choice. It can make life vastly easier for users by not having to worry about tracking credits for every little nitpicking minutiae, but instead depends on commonsense ethics to make acknowledgments where appropriate, without having to worry about violating the fine print of some legal copyright license. For minor stuff where suing would be silly even if someone plagiarized it - from a simple utility icon to this very post you're reading - I think public domain release makes a lot of sense for those willing to do it but who are now simply unaware of the possibility.
On the other hand, they still haven't clarified the fine legal points of exactly what "commercial use" means. As I've posted here before, almost anything can be interpreted as "commercial use" if someone is so inclined. IMO almost any use of works under a noncommecial-only license is a risk not worth taking. In addition, they can't be incorporated into GPL software, so for open-source development "noncommercial-only" works are completely worthless.
A manager doesn't deliver pizzas (in a big enough operation). A blind paraplegic, if competent, could probably manage it just fine.
I agree that it would be better for an IT manager to have an IT background, but in a large organization, managerial skills can be just as important if not more so in that position. Assuming he has hired a competent staff, including security experts, they will be making the technical recommendations for his consideration and approval. He is not going to be configuring firewalls or pulling CAT5 cable.
If they induced you into buying the chips under the pretense of offering a free MP3, and they didn't, that is false advertising. Depending on your state laws, you should be able to demand your money back (not that it would be worth the effort other than making a point to them), and you can also file a complaint with your state consumer fraud division, letting the chip company know that you are doing that. If enough people do that, they may be pressured into to at least not falsely calling their offer an "MP3", and possibly even fined for false advertising.
Actually, a nautical mile is 6076.1155 feet. This is very convenient, because it is about a minute of arc along a meridian of the Earth. Thus converting from nautical miles to a change of latitude on a nautical chart is easy and natural.
The choice of 1/10,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole (through Paris) seems rather arbitrary and and clumsy, with no practical use that I know of. I wonder if the world would have been better off if the already existing standard of 6076.1155 feet were chosen as the definition for "1 km". It would have been very close to the old familiar mile. One meter would have been almost exactly 2 yards or 6 feet. And so on.
Look, you make some very good points, and I commend you for them, but god is your post hard to read. Maybe it is just me, but I find it downright painful; everything just runs together forcing me to read it more slowly than normal. A few extra seconds using the shift key and punctuation would save many minutes of total time of readers who are slowed down trying to read it. Actually, your post is a great example of the selfishness you talk about: to save a little inconvenience on your end, you disregard the inconvenience to possibly hundreds of readers, with a negative net gain overall.
Suggestion: if you really can't be bothered to use the shift key, use the CAPS LOCK instead. That way the letters in your post will be bigger and easier to read, and you will get your point across more emphatically. Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but that is exactly how your post looks to me, except s/uppercase/lowercase/.
I don't know if you're trying to make some kind of "statement" with your "style," but IMHO it really detracts from the content of your post. Sorry.
To follow up on my post: I see, from another post under this story, that CSICOP did finally publish a rebuttal, using the exact figures from that paper, including the one I mentioned: The PEAR Proposition: Fact or Fallacy?. It only took them 16 years: I wrote to the Skeptical Inquirer editor about this around the year 1990, I believe. So if you felt a subtle but unexplainable feeling of relief and enlightenment at about 9:50am this morning, that was just my psi propagating throughout the world. :)
Peak electricity demand probably has little relationship to the tiny percent of wind energy injected into the grid - when wind energy is more, the coal/oil/nuke generators just have to use slightly less fuel than they would otherwise, regardless of the demand. As for frozen food warehouses, it would suprise me if they don't already overcool when electricity rates are lower, to save money when the rates are higher, although I don't really know. But the motivation to save money is high enough in the cutthroat-margin food business, and the technique simple enough, that I would imagine this is already being done.
Anyway, I don't see why this has to be some kind of "large scale test". If the percent of wind energy is really so large at night that the grid cannot accomodate the fluctuations, just adjust the differential day/night electricity rates accordingly. Greed will take care of the rest.
Thanks, this has the 50-page paper I was looking for when I saw this story - I remember it from years ago: On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomen (1986). Foundations of Physics, 16, No. 8, pp. 721-772 (PDF). Now, the Foundations of Physics is not exactly a top-tier journal, but there is some very minimal peer review. The figures present some results that are, on the surface, somewhat surprising. For example, look at Fig. 2, p. 726. I suggested to CSICOP (the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, that I subscribed to) that they have some of their experts do a rebuttal, but even though I got a response that they'd take it under consideration, it apparently never happened. I am still puzzled by this paper.
Our public library (in Massachusetts) will look for hard-to-find books and articles from about anywhere in the U.S., as far as I can tell. I've special requested articles in obscure journals that have ended up coming from various university libraries around the country. About 15 years ago they found for me an old, 1950's, obscure computing book from the Huges Aircraft Research and Development Laboratory! I got the physical copy (possibly one of few, if not the only one, still in existence) on loan for two weeks. Librarians are amazing people.
So who is Fabienne? "Multichannel audio specialist and futurist Fabienne Serriere is a Franco-American hardware, software and embedded interaction designer. She believes in a gorgeous technologically morphable future. Her interests include hardware hacking, wearable computing, and large scale music system design." Wow. Maybe there's hope for Netscape 9 after all? (Although she says she's not directly part of the dev team, although I haven't a clue what an "anchor" is or does.)
The "design" of the back button in rfc2616 are recommendations, not requirements. Please refer to the meanings of MUST, SHOULD, MAY in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt.