That's fun to say, but the largest and most current study to date on the topic (a joint venture by the feds and the National Academy of Sciences done almost immediately after the final nail in the Kyoto Treaty coffin was hammered in), showed that there was, in fact, no consensus in the scientific community about this at all.
I read a report from two members of NAS which raised several issues:
1. There is no certainty about any of this. We are very bad at predicting weather, and still understand very little of it.
2. The computer models that people keep talking about don't work. If you give them data up to 1970 and ask them to predict 1990, they are way off. Not even close. This gives one reason to believe that we should not trust what it says about 2020 when we give it current data.
3. The land measurement records show a warmer earth now than 120 years ago... but most of the warming took place prior to 1940. This was followed by a couple decades of cooling! Then it started warming up again. The net change for those 120 years? Less than 2 degrees F.
4. Geological temeratures are in constant flux. From about 800 to 1300 AD there was successful agriculture in Greenland. The cold period of the centuries that followed forced the Vikings to abandon their settlements in North America, and shortened average human life spans in Europe by 10 years.
5. The only readings we have of the entire troposphere (from the Earth's surface to 30 miles up, measured everywhere, including over oceans), which have been gathered with the help of NASA and confirmed by balloon measurements, show absolutely no global warming over the last twenty years or so.
6. The sun spot cycles seem to have a much bigger impact on global climate than we once suspected. When your main source of heat is a massive, chaotic, uncontrolled fusion reaction, change is something you need to learn to expect.
7. Over the short term (less than a century or two), upper-atmosphere clouds have been discovered to be extremely efficient thermostats for the Earth. When the ammount of heat coming from the sun changes, the clouds get bigger or smaller to compensate, regulating the climate.
Some people feel that the best way to counter all this carbon going into the air (mostly in the form of CO2) is to use some kind of machine to extract atmospheric carbon. Fortunately, such machines already exist. They are called trees. It appears that John Denver had the solution to global warming figured out before anybody ever heard of it.
One last point. AI was not a bomb at the box office because interest in science is on the decline. Apollo 13 was a huge hit. AI was a bomb at the box office because it was a bad movie. Simple as that.
Similiar prephials on macs cost twice as much as they do on the PC,
Damn, are you ever out of date with that opinion!
My 4-button scroll-wheel optical USB mouse (made by Microsoft, by the way) costs exactly the same as the PC version of the same mouse. Apple uses AGP graphics cards, PCI for other internal cards, USB and Firewire for external expansion; all industry-standard stuff, really.
They also have the cheapest 802.11b solution of anybody in the industry ($99 for the card, $299 for the hub).
It is a program for creating illustrations. Therefore, it is an illustrator program.
Okay, now there are two such programs. One is called Adobe Illustrator, the other is called KIllustrator. They don't even sound alike. "K" holds no resemblance at all with "Adobe".
It's not very applicable as a rack server. Although the 3" is small compared to a typical desktop unit, there are thinner 1.5" rack servers that would make more sense,
But it's a 3" cube. That means you could easilly stuff five of them in the space of two 1.5" full-width racks.
Still not very practical, but you just know it's only a matter of time before some smart-ass does it, for the 15 minutes of fame when he publishes the web photo, if nothing else.
I can't believe Steve got Bill to port MS Office to OS X
It's not hard to believe when you consider that MS has, for most of the Mac's history, made more money selling software for the Macintosh than Apple has made selling the Macintosh itself.
In this, the Second Era of Steve, Apple Computer wisely sees that their main competition is not Microsoft, it's Dell.
I didn't say it was out of ignorance. It has been around for a long time.
Re:Vertical markets with nice profit margins
on
Compaq Shifts Focus
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· Score: 2
Actually, liability is an obvious cost when selling parts to the military. If your $0.15 bolt fails, causing a $3Billion jet to crash and end the lives of a couple pilots, you better have damn good insurance covering your warranty. Hence, you end up selling that $0.15 bolt for $30.00.
That's not to say that the industry doesn't bilk the government whenever they can get away with it, but even at it's worst (in the 70's and 80's, before people got wise to it) that sort of thing was not as common as the press may have lead you to believe.
(Your example was an obvious exaggeration. The only "$10,000 nuts" in a fighter jet are the ones between the pilots legs, and medical research may even make those cheaper to replace eventually.)
Re:Using a lot of proprietary components didn't he
on
Compaq Shifts Focus
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· Score: 2
Actually, it sounds like an electric hand-drill would probably have been the right tool for the job.
In this case, I think you took the old saying, "when your only tool is a hammer, every job starts to look like a nail" to literal extremes.:)
Still, kudos to you for your quick&dirty hardware hack.
"Media" is the only acceptable word for multiple means of transmitting information, even according to Webster.
"Mediums" is a word, but (to borrow a phrase) I don't think it means what you think it means.
On the other hand, we could just start using the word "mediums" incorrectly to annoy spelling nazis, sort of like what many of us do with fake words like "virii" and "boxen".
If you didn't rush to defend your incorrect use, you might have convinced us that that's what you were up to.:)
That's not entirely correct. Lots of laws are out there which place limits on commerce, but do not have any impact on private citizens. If I know your fax number, I can send you a fax without you asking for it and I am not breaking the law.
However, if a company sends an advertisement to your fax machine, that's illegal.
The difference being that my radio doesn't keep tuning itself to Top 40 stations, waiting for me to change the channel.
As for "staying on topic", I believe I did. Read my response again.
Unscrambling your e-mail address was just a way of making a point: You stand up for spammers, and don't seem to think anything should be done to reduce it, but you clearly don't want to get it yourself.
Actually, they do a lot more than just "filter". If somebody calls a number with this service, they get a message informing them that the number does not accept solicitations. If they attept to circumvent that system, then they violate local laws.
This is the exact same thing as an unsolicited telephone call, which is legal in most places.
In almost all phone markets in the US, it is possible to have "all solicitations" blocked from your line, and it is illegal for a marketer to try get around it.
Tell me where I have order that feature for my e-mail account, and you win this argument.
Can't do it? I guess you lose.
As for shirts with logos on them, you knew the logo was on there when you bought it, and the retailer is probably willing to sell you the shirt for less money, because you will be a walking billboard for them. If you wanted a Tommy Hilfiger shirt with no logo, you would probably be expected to pay more for it. (And if you are paying a premium to advertise for them, you're just a rube.)
Yuck. I hate that when I miss a closing tag. I'm pretty sure most of you can sort out that the two pro-spam paragraphs are quotes from dan@uglyfish.dhs.org anyway.
The only right you have with regards to your home (aside from owning it) is that the Gov't can't make you house soldiers in it, and they can't search it without a warrent.
That has got to be the most ignorant thing I have seen posted here yet, and that's counting all the penis bird trolls! Do you realize that if you break into my house, I have the legal right to kill you? I have the right to put up a "No Solicitors" sign, and have anybody who ignores it arrested for trespassing. I have a shitload of rights when it comes to my property. Without property rights, there can be no capitalism.
The fact is, if you get DirecTV or pay for cable, you get innundated with commercials in the comfort of your home through a medium that YOU pay for, using electricity that YOU pay for, on a TV that YOU paid for. Sure, it's regulated. But there is still a shitload of it, and you still didn't ask for it.
Actually, dan@uglyfish.dhs.org , when you pay for cable TV, you ARE asking for those ads. The ads are like web banners - they pay for the content that you want to get at.
Spam is more closely analagous to sending somebody a fax, or leaving a message on their answering machine. You are using their resources to finance your advertising.
Sorry dan@uglyfish.dhs.org but you are not correct about this.
What if an ISP were to offer me a dial-up with a mailbox with 100k of space for dirt cheap? If spammers fill up the box before I get a chance to check my mail, the file limit is exceeded and I am denied communication which I might want. Most people get about 5-10 MB... but with spam taking more and more advantage of VB and media features, it's not hard to imagine a day when e-mail becomes almost completely useless to the typical luser due to a massive tide of spam.
(By the way, leaving a note on my windshield is illegal if my car is parked in the garage. Ditto if it is parked in the lot of an apartment complex which forbids solicitation.
E-mail is not a public accomodation. I own my e-mail account, just as I own my fax machine and PCS phone. Just as with those devices, the person who is paying for the service should have final say in how it is used.
You have no First Amendment right to make "first contact" with you via mobile phone. Nor do you have a right to send unsolicited ads to my fax machine. On my land-line phone, I can use the phone company's service to opt out of call solicitations. These same rules should be made to apply to e-mail. There is no Free Speech case here.
You have just raised the best argument against allowing spam to date: specifically, that you have property rights concerning the data storage device space which you are leasing from your ISP.
An e-mail box is not a USPS mail box. It is a privately owned data file which is leased for the purpose of being able to exchange data with others. Your example of putting a billboard on somebody's lawn which faces their window is particularilly cogent.
Opt-out is a whack-a-mole game, because when you tell an advertiser you don't want to hear from them, they can come back as another company in a week anyway. Most spammers are fly-by-night scams anyway.
The First Amendment does not establish the right to send me e-mail.
How about if I summarize all of Jon Katz's articles for you.
"I perceive that there is a trend occurring in America, because there is an element of our culture which I just became aware of, so it must be a new thing. By telling you about it, I am a journalist, but better than most journalists because I am into that whole Open Source thing that all the kids seem to be talking about these days.
Anyway, everything bad, frightening and/or dangerous about this trend, which I (nobody else) have boldly discovered, is the fault of Corporate Greed. We are in grave immeditate danger of becoming slaves to a Corporatist state. Boo!
Also, everything good, interesting, or revolutionary about this trend is the result of young people, who obviously have more energy, creativity, and all-around coolness than me, so I am trying to associate myself with this new trend of theirs so I can feel that I am superior to all those other aging Boomer journalists, who are just slaves to the Corporate State. By the way, if somebody from Wired is reading this, can I have my job back? Look at how many responses my Slashdot columns get! I can really bring in a lot of eyeballs for your ad revenue."
You are now free to skim all future Katz articles and read the vastly more interesting discussions which follow them.
How is it that "cooler heads" prevailed if the response was to break off all talks in reaction to a perceived slight by the Oracle marketing team?
If "cooler heads" had actually won the day, you would have responded to Oracle by saying "we like your product a lot, but we are a Linux company and believe in eating our own dogfood, so come back with a new presentation which does not force us to rely on a competitor's technology and we can make this work."
Then you say that RHAT has a marketing department that works against the engineers out of spite? Sounds like a sick company to me, in the black or not.
Of course, since you posted anonymously, you could just be some short-selling wise guy trying to make Red Hat and/or Oracle sound like they don't know what they are doing, in order to manipulate the market. Or, for that matter, you could be a (re: another) Microsoft astroturfer. Or maybe you really are in the trenches of the Red Hat cubicle farm, passing along the story as you best recall from gossipping with your co-workers over a smoke-break.
(It's a well established fact that the smokers in a big company have a better idea of what other departments are up to than most managers do, because designated smoking areas has forced them to socialize with people they would not otherwise see... But since the banter of a smoking area mostly consists of people venting thier frustrations, the view one comes away with after listening to them is often a little skewed.)
Wow. All those people complaining about mid-word capital letters screwing up the language might have a point, after all. We are slipping into the habbit of capitalizing second sylables, even when it is not CorRect.
Just so you know, the correct spelling/capitlization is "PostgreSQL".
Also acceptable is "Postgres" (because the QL was not really there for the whole history of the system. It evolved from a BSD database project called "Ingres")
So is "postgres" (because most unix geeks hate having to use the shift key when running apps from a CLI).
You have just stumbled upon what is perhaps the most useless question you can possibly ask when buying computer technology.
iPaq, Palm, Yopy, whatever... In a year and a half, you will want something better, and will be able to buy something better with the change you find in your sofa.
Heh... never mind. I see now that when you said "$20", you meant to repeat "$20k"... it made it look like you were talking about fuel costs.
In any case, gasoline vehicles are not subsidized. In fact, the price has been artificially raised, to make up for the loss which the auto industry is taking on government-mandated electric cars.
ZEV's, on the other hand, are massively subsidized - more than half the cost covered with government money in some cases, and then the car is still sold at a loss.
The real cost of a compact electric car, which seats two uncomfortably, and which you would never consider paying more than about 11 grand for if it was a gas car, is in the ball-park of about $60,000.
On top of that, parts for them are so prohibitively expensive that you will end up junking it and buying new after about 75,000 miles, because that will be cheaper than maintaining it.
Like I said, when somebody makes an affordable electric car that can pull a Lund fishing boat and three adults for 600 miles, then electric cars will be ready for normal people to use. None can yet, therefore all electric cars are, for the moment, nothing more than toys for rich yuppies.
Slashdot Mirror
I read a report from two members of NAS which raised several issues:
1. There is no certainty about any of this. We are very bad at predicting weather, and still understand very little of it.
2. The computer models that people keep talking about don't work. If you give them data up to 1970 and ask them to predict 1990, they are way off. Not even close. This gives one reason to believe that we should not trust what it says about 2020 when we give it current data.
3. The land measurement records show a warmer earth now than 120 years ago... but most of the warming took place prior to 1940. This was followed by a couple decades of cooling! Then it started warming up again. The net change for those 120 years? Less than 2 degrees F.
4. Geological temeratures are in constant flux. From about 800 to 1300 AD there was successful agriculture in Greenland. The cold period of the centuries that followed forced the Vikings to abandon their settlements in North America, and shortened average human life spans in Europe by 10 years.
5. The only readings we have of the entire troposphere (from the Earth's surface to 30 miles up, measured everywhere, including over oceans), which have been gathered with the help of NASA and confirmed by balloon measurements, show absolutely no global warming over the last twenty years or so.
6. The sun spot cycles seem to have a much bigger impact on global climate than we once suspected. When your main source of heat is a massive, chaotic, uncontrolled fusion reaction, change is something you need to learn to expect.
7. Over the short term (less than a century or two), upper-atmosphere clouds have been discovered to be extremely efficient thermostats for the Earth. When the ammount of heat coming from the sun changes, the clouds get bigger or smaller to compensate, regulating the climate.
Some people feel that the best way to counter all this carbon going into the air (mostly in the form of CO2) is to use some kind of machine to extract atmospheric carbon. Fortunately, such machines already exist. They are called trees. It appears that John Denver had the solution to global warming figured out before anybody ever heard of it.
One last point. AI was not a bomb at the box office because interest in science is on the decline. Apollo 13 was a huge hit. AI was a bomb at the box office because it was a bad movie. Simple as that.
Damn, are you ever out of date with that opinion!
My 4-button scroll-wheel optical USB mouse (made by Microsoft, by the way) costs exactly the same as the PC version of the same mouse. Apple uses AGP graphics cards, PCI for other internal cards, USB and Firewire for external expansion; all industry-standard stuff, really.
They also have the cheapest 802.11b solution of anybody in the industry ($99 for the card, $299 for the hub).
Your information is from the previous Century.
Therefore, it is an illustrator program.
Okay, now there are two such programs. One is called Adobe Illustrator, the other is called KIllustrator. They don't even sound alike. "K" holds no resemblance at all with "Adobe".
But it's a 3" cube. That means you could easilly stuff five of them in the space of two 1.5" full-width racks.
Still not very practical, but you just know it's only a matter of time before some smart-ass does it, for the 15 minutes of fame when he publishes the web photo, if nothing else.
It's not hard to believe when you consider that MS has, for most of the Mac's history, made more money selling software for the Macintosh than Apple has made selling the Macintosh itself.
In this, the Second Era of Steve, Apple Computer wisely sees that their main competition is not Microsoft, it's Dell.
I didn't say it was out of ignorance. It has been around for a long time.
That's not to say that the industry doesn't bilk the government whenever they can get away with it, but even at it's worst (in the 70's and 80's, before people got wise to it) that sort of thing was not as common as the press may have lead you to believe.
(Your example was an obvious exaggeration. The only "$10,000 nuts" in a fighter jet are the ones between the pilots legs, and medical research may even make those cheaper to replace eventually.)
In this case, I think you took the old saying, "when your only tool is a hammer, every job starts to look like a nail" to literal extremes. :)
Still, kudos to you for your quick&dirty hardware hack.
"Mediums" is a word, but (to borrow a phrase) I don't think it means what you think it means.
On the other hand, we could just start using the word "mediums" incorrectly to annoy spelling nazis, sort of like what many of us do with fake words like "virii" and "boxen".
If you didn't rush to defend your incorrect use, you might have convinced us that that's what you were up to. :)
However, if a company sends an advertisement to your fax machine, that's illegal.
These same laws should be extended to e-mail.
As for "staying on topic", I believe I did. Read my response again.
Unscrambling your e-mail address was just a way of making a point: You stand up for spammers, and don't seem to think anything should be done to reduce it, but you clearly don't want to get it yourself.
Actually, they do a lot more than just "filter". If somebody calls a number with this service, they get a message informing them that the number does not accept solicitations. If they attept to circumvent that system, then they violate local laws.
In almost all phone markets in the US, it is possible to have "all solicitations" blocked from your line, and it is illegal for a marketer to try get around it.
Tell me where I have order that feature for my e-mail account, and you win this argument.
Can't do it? I guess you lose.
As for shirts with logos on them, you knew the logo was on there when you bought it, and the retailer is probably willing to sell you the shirt for less money, because you will be a walking billboard for them. If you wanted a Tommy Hilfiger shirt with no logo, you would probably be expected to pay more for it. (And if you are paying a premium to advertise for them, you're just a rube.)
Yuck. I hate that when I miss a closing tag. I'm pretty sure most of you can sort out that the two pro-spam paragraphs are quotes from dan@uglyfish.dhs.org anyway.
That has got to be the most ignorant thing I have seen posted here yet, and that's counting all the penis bird trolls! Do you realize that if you break into my house, I have the legal right to kill you? I have the right to put up a "No Solicitors" sign, and have anybody who ignores it arrested for trespassing. I have a shitload of rights when it comes to my property. Without property rights, there can be no capitalism.
The fact is, if you get DirecTV or pay for cable, you get innundated with commercials in the comfort of your home through a medium that YOU pay for, using electricity that YOU pay for, on a TV that YOU paid for. Sure, it's regulated. But there is still a shitload of it, and you still didn't ask for it.
Actually, dan@uglyfish.dhs.org , when you pay for cable TV, you ARE asking for those ads. The ads are like web banners - they pay for the content that you want to get at.
Spam is more closely analagous to sending somebody a fax, or leaving a message on their answering machine. You are using their resources to finance your advertising.
Sorry dan@uglyfish.dhs.org but you are not correct about this.
(By the way, leaving a note on my windshield is illegal if my car is parked in the garage. Ditto if it is parked in the lot of an apartment complex which forbids solicitation.
E-mail is not a public accomodation. I own my e-mail account, just as I own my fax machine and PCS phone. Just as with those devices, the person who is paying for the service should have final say in how it is used.
You have no First Amendment right to make "first contact" with you via mobile phone. Nor do you have a right to send unsolicited ads to my fax machine. On my land-line phone, I can use the phone company's service to opt out of call solicitations. These same rules should be made to apply to e-mail. There is no Free Speech case here.
An e-mail box is not a USPS mail box. It is a privately owned data file which is leased for the purpose of being able to exchange data with others. Your example of putting a billboard on somebody's lawn which faces their window is particularilly cogent.
Opt-out is a whack-a-mole game, because when you tell an advertiser you don't want to hear from them, they can come back as another company in a week anyway. Most spammers are fly-by-night scams anyway.
The First Amendment does not establish the right to send me e-mail.
"I perceive that there is a trend occurring in America, because there is an element of our culture which I just became aware of, so it must be a new thing. By telling you about it, I am a journalist, but better than most journalists because I am into that whole Open Source thing that all the kids seem to be talking about these days.
Anyway, everything bad, frightening and/or dangerous about this trend, which I (nobody else) have boldly discovered, is the fault of Corporate Greed. We are in grave immeditate danger of becoming slaves to a Corporatist state. Boo!
Also, everything good, interesting, or revolutionary about this trend is the result of young people, who obviously have more energy, creativity, and all-around coolness than me, so I am trying to associate myself with this new trend of theirs so I can feel that I am superior to all those other aging Boomer journalists, who are just slaves to the Corporate State. By the way, if somebody from Wired is reading this, can I have my job back? Look at how many responses my Slashdot columns get! I can really bring in a lot of eyeballs for your ad revenue."
You are now free to skim all future Katz articles and read the vastly more interesting discussions which follow them.
If "cooler heads" had actually won the day, you would have responded to Oracle by saying "we like your product a lot, but we are a Linux company and believe in eating our own dogfood, so come back with a new presentation which does not force us to rely on a competitor's technology and we can make this work."
Then you say that RHAT has a marketing department that works against the engineers out of spite? Sounds like a sick company to me, in the black or not.
Of course, since you posted anonymously, you could just be some short-selling wise guy trying to make Red Hat and/or Oracle sound like they don't know what they are doing, in order to manipulate the market. Or, for that matter, you could be a (re: another) Microsoft astroturfer. Or maybe you really are in the trenches of the Red Hat cubicle farm, passing along the story as you best recall from gossipping with your co-workers over a smoke-break.
(It's a well established fact that the smokers in a big company have a better idea of what other departments are up to than most managers do, because designated smoking areas has forced them to socialize with people they would not otherwise see... But since the banter of a smoking area mostly consists of people venting thier frustrations, the view one comes away with after listening to them is often a little skewed.)
Wow. All those people complaining about mid-word capital letters screwing up the language might have a point, after all. We are slipping into the habbit of capitalizing second sylables, even when it is not CorRect.
Just so you know, the correct spelling/capitlization is "PostgreSQL".
Also acceptable is "Postgres" (because the QL was not really there for the whole history of the system. It evolved from a BSD database project called "Ingres")
So is "postgres" (because most unix geeks hate having to use the shift key when running apps from a CLI).
When I demand that you be forced to feed the poor, I am, in fact, a communist.
So really, the bishop had nothing to complain about. He was being described correctly in both cases.
You could always tatoo the really important information and clues on yourself. Remember Sammy Jenkis.
You have just stumbled upon what is perhaps the most useless question you can possibly ask when buying computer technology.
iPaq, Palm, Yopy, whatever... In a year and a half, you will want something better, and will be able to buy something better with the change you find in your sofa.
In any case, gasoline vehicles are not subsidized. In fact, the price has been artificially raised, to make up for the loss which the auto industry is taking on government-mandated electric cars.
ZEV's, on the other hand, are massively subsidized - more than half the cost covered with government money in some cases, and then the car is still sold at a loss.
The real cost of a compact electric car, which seats two uncomfortably, and which you would never consider paying more than about 11 grand for if it was a gas car, is in the ball-park of about $60,000.
On top of that, parts for them are so prohibitively expensive that you will end up junking it and buying new after about 75,000 miles, because that will be cheaper than maintaining it.
Like I said, when somebody makes an affordable electric car that can pull a Lund fishing boat and three adults for 600 miles, then electric cars will be ready for normal people to use. None can yet, therefore all electric cars are, for the moment, nothing more than toys for rich yuppies.
I was talking about the price of the vehicle. Please read my comment again in that context.