...neither Social Security nor Medicare revenue is eligible to be spent by Congress. It's not part of the general budget.
Congress gets around this restriction by spending the money anyway, but promising to 'pay it back'. Of course, they're not the ones who'll have to pay it back, we and our children are. In effect, for many years, all of the money paid into SS that didn't get spent the same year on SS benefits has to be paid into SS again, with interest.
MythTV has a backend and frontend; the backend is responsible for recording shows off the TV card, and the frontend is responsible the GUI and playback. This allows one of the really cool things about MythTV: the backend and frontend can run on different computers on your network, and you can have as many frontends as your network and backend can handle concurrently.
IIRC, Knoppmyth requires a hard drive installation if you want to run it as a backend, but if you're just doing a frontend then you can run off the CD. This is pretty good for the frontends: no noisy harddrive, and no per-system administration if you've got a frontend on every TV in the house. (I'm pretty sure the CD would spin down and stay that way once the software is up and running.)
Whenever this sort of issue comes up, I find it breaks down into two camps: People who know shit about computers and people who don't. Electronic voting scares the first group, while the second group looks at it blankly and says shit like "Well, that's good 'cause computers don't make mistakes, right?"
The folks in the first group need to respond to the second group by saying "Sure, computers don't make mistakes. They'll vote for whoever the programmers tell them to vote for."
You will notice that birds have aerodynamically shaped wings (like a plane) and can glide, but insects have flat wings and cannot glide. Not surprisingly, this is for the same reasons. The division between small birds/large insects is at around this point of a 15cm wingspan.
Millions of years ago, there were much larger insects around. I seem to recall something about dragonflies with two foot (60cm) wingspans. I also seem to recall that Reynolds numbers are related to density. I guess the extra CO2 in the atmosphere back then, which was due to a higher global temperature, also made the atmosphere thick enough to allow larger insects.
I guess that means we can look forward to bigger insects, even bigger birds, and maybe, someday, flapping-wing single-passenger planes.
The ethical implications would come from the process of removing the identity from someone who may or may not be dead...
Are you suggesting that 'face donor' might be alive? What do they end up with after donating their face?
Somehow I doubt this is like donating one of your kidneys, or part of your liver. Your face might grow back, but you'd probably be left as scarred and disfigured as the recipient started out.
The data on the graph comes from three different sources for three different time periods:
For 414085BP to 2342BP, it comes from the Vostok Ice Core. This section of the graph clearly shows cyclic behavior.
For 1663AD to 1891AD it comes from the Siple Station Ice Core. This section of the graph looks like the normal upswing of the next cycle.
For 1958AD to 2000AD, it comes from air sampling in Hawaii. This section of the graph is pretty much a vertical line. Note that this air sampling is being done near an almost continuously active volcano.
The graph continues with a point labeled "Now (2001)" and "Predicted (2100)", which are both much higher on the same vertical line as the Hawaii data, but with no source for the data points.
You can't just mix different data sources like that; this chart is clearly designed to be biased.
There is something interesting here, at least in the Vostok data... the CO2 cycles start with a rapid rise, and are followed by a long decline. It's a sawtooth wave, not a sine wave. That probably says something very interesting about the physics behind whatever is causing the cycles. My guess is that something fairly catastrophic causes a large release of CO2, and that's followed by a long period of reabsorbtion.
I don't know; I've been really happy with Gentoo since I found it. I've got on my desktop at home (which is also my PVR and runs nightly batch jobs for my consulting business) and a few servers at home and at my day job. I've even got my mom's home computer running Gentoo.
The servers used to run Red Hat, but didn't get patched very often before the RHES/Fedora split, and stopped getting patched at all after that split. But once I migrated to Gentoo, I've been able to easily keep all these systems up to date with the latest security patches.
Sure, sometimes packages get into Portage stable that either aren't quite ready, or which require you to jump through a few hoops to get them to install. Usually, if you get an error that says "X is blocking Y", the solution is to uninstall both them them and then emerge -puvD world again. If that doesn't work, searching forums.gentoo.com for the package names will usually turn up a solution (like adding a USE value that you didn't have before.)
If a package just plain won't compile correctly, I ususally edit/etc/portage/package.mask and mask out that particular version of the package. This will prevent the package, and anything that depends on it, from being installed. It also prevents me from having to worry about it again until the package gets updated, which usually happens once the problem has been fixed.
Obviously, for this approach to work well, I have to be very selective about which ~x86 packages I allow to be installed. Other than the PVR stuff (mythtv) I generally don't use unstable packages. That's probably why I have such an easy time keeping my systems up to date.
When/if oil (and coal, and natural gas) get too expensive, we'll shift our electricity generation away from those fuels and towards nuclear. Between direct use of electricty, and the generation of hydrogen for a portable fuel source, we can do/build everything we need.
Of course, these commodities aren't just used as fuels; oil provides lubrication, plastics, and lots of other refined products. Most of those can be obtained through recycling though, especially if there is plenty of electricty. Also, when the reserves got low, we'd stop using the stuff as fuel and conserve what's left for these other uses.
I read the article, and it doesn't say anything at all about Perl. It just mentions the name of the language once, in a somewhat ambiguous context.
One of my colleagues, who dislikes both Perl and Java, made this comparison: In Java, when you allocate an object, you have no control over when it gets deallocated, and you have no guaranteed way of performing some action just before it does. In contrast, a Perl object gets deallocated precisely when the last reference pointing to it is removed, and if it has a DESTROY method then that method will be called just before deallocation.
Perl's approach allows you to use a common C++ idiom for accessing resources: you define a class that represents the resource (file, socket, memory pool, etc). To get access to the resource you create an object, and to release the resource you destroy the object (let it go out of scope.) You use the object constructor and destructor to set up access and to safely release access. (ie: opening/locking a file and unlocking/closing the file.) With a proper design, this approach to resource allocation fits nicely with exception handling, because if an exception occurs your resource objects will wind up going out of scope, and their destructors will take care of cleaning up.
Since Java objects don't/can't behave this way, you can't use this idiom, and that makes resource allocation much more complex and error prone, especially when you start to deal with exception handling. For this reason, my colleague preferred Perl over Java.
(Or course, his true loves are C++ and Python; he likes the scripting language idea, but prefer's Python's OOP handcuffs over Perl's free-for-all OOP model.)
I'm a MythTV user, and I've never used Tivo, so maybe that's why I don't understand this...
Why in the world do you need six Tivo boxes, and five subscriptions to the same guide data?
I can think of two reasons for having multiple boxes: multiple tuners to record more than one show at a time, and to let you hook up to multiple TVs so you can watch more than one show at a time. I don't see any justification for the multiple subscriptions, except that Tivo forces you to do that because you have multiple boxes.
With MythTV, you can have multiple tuner cards in a single box, and you can have one big server box for recording and smaller/cheaper boxes for playback at each TV. You also only need one subscription to guide data, which gets downloaded into a central database that would be shared by multiple recorder boxes if you wanted/needed to have more than one.
Guide data is currently free, of course, but even if it weren't you would still only need one subscription.
Tivo's interface may be better than MythTV's interface (or not; MythTV is pretty easy to use) but MythTV is improving while Tivo is being whittled away. I know where I'll be spending my money...
All of our best models suggest that CO2 can play a very large role in climate change.
All of our best models can barely predict the weather next week.
All of our best models also seem to produce the same results (which happen to agree with the politics of the model-creator) regardless of the input conditions.
Climate modeling is hard, because the climate is chaotic, poorly understood, and we have no way to test the models.
There's lots of text editing programs for Linux, with a wide variety of features, and I'm sure some can do the find and replace commands you mention. You can do it from the command-line too; here's what I'd do:
That'll format the book with one line per paragraph. If you do this a lot, you can put all of that into a script instead, so you just have to remember the name of the script instead of the whole command
In file named process_book:
#!/usr/bin/perl -i.bak -0
my $book = <>;
$book=~s/\cM//g; # Unix line endings $book=~s/\n/\x01/g; # Collapse lines $book=~s/\x01\x01/\n/g; # Separate paragraphs $book=~s/\x01//g; # Insert whitespace
print $book;
To process a book:
$ process_book book.txt
By the way, notice that I used \x01 instead of |, since | characters might appear in the book.
I work in NY and live in NJ; the tax situation here has been fairly stable for a long time. NY and NJ have an agreement; NY rapes us with an income tax, and NJ rapes us with property tax.
Basically, when I file my taxes I fill out the NYS Non-Resident form, on which I pay state and city taxes. (These are withheld from my paycheck during the year.) I also fill out the NJ Resident form, on which I claim a deduction for the total amount of taxes I paid to NY. Since NY taxes are more than NJ (income) taxes, that deduction cancels out my taxable income for NJ.
NJ also has a 'homestead rebate', which basically means they give you $50 a year for living here.
This would be a reasonable arrangement, since I'm not double-taxed, and as a commuter into NYC I do benefit from many city services (everything but the schools.) However, because NJ state doesn't get any tax money from me, my local community doesn't either, so local government services are funded by property taxes.
In my town, which has very few businesses, that means I pay $11,000 a year in taxes for a modest 3 bedroom house!. The only saving grace is that, since it's a reasonable commute to NYC from here, the house is worth over $500K, about 35% more than I paid for it 1.5 years ago.
Google doesn't really use any of the scalability features in Linux. In fact, they seem to go out of their way to avoid them and instead rely almost entirely on in-house technology for scaling.
It's a bit like saying that florescent lights are scalable because you can put thousands of individual lights within a building, or that IBM laptops are scalable because you can purchase them in units of 1000 running MS Windows.
True, but to continue the metaphor, the company that is saying florescent lights aren't scalable happens to produce huge stadium lights for use within buildings: One bright light at the top, with lots of windows/fiber optic to distribute it.
Sun's machines and OS, for example, are scalable because you can get a monster server with dozens of cpus. For some application designs, that's exactly what you need, though there is a ceiling that you hit.
Linux is catching up with that kind of scalability, but it's not nearly as mature. However, Google has taken advantage of Linux's other kind of scalability, which allows thousands of separate compute nodes. Again, this is only good for some application designs, but web services (as a general category) work very well in such a system. You can't scale horizontally like this with Sun, because of the hardware/software cost of each compute node.
It does apply to everyone, because everyone sees it whenever they use a computer and try to access the filesystem.
Spatial Browsing, if implemented everywhere (including MS Windows and OSX), could become the new "preconception baggage", but it wouldn't be any better, because it's not really 'spatial'.
As currently implemented, Spatial Browsing replaces representing your filesystem as a hierarchical tree with representing your filesystem as a flood of windows which appear to be disconnected, but which actually have a vague and very poorly represented hierarchical relationship.
True spatial browsing, ala Raskin's Humane Interface, would be a real improvement. Instead of the hierarchy, documents are scattered around in groups, and you can zoom in on a group to discover that there are smaller groups within the larger group. This would make perfect sense to most people, who have stuff piled all over their physical desks using pretty much the same organizational structure.
I did an internship with GE Astrospace about 14 years ago, and the project I worked on was developing an accurate fuel gauge for satellites.
They store fuel in spherical tanks which are pressurized with helium (to push the fuel against the sides), and which have ribs inside which guide the fuel towards the nozzle. You can't put any kind of mechanical device in there to measure how much fuel is left, and they definitely avoid having anything electronic in there.
As a result, their only way of estimating how much fuel is remaining is to keep careful records of how long each jet burns during station-keeping, and an estimate of how much fuel is used for each burn. This estimate becomes less and less accurate over the life of the satellite, due to the measurement errors adding up and degredation in the jet performance.
I was told that by the 'end' of a satellite's lifetime, they can still have enough fuel to last another year. Or they may be out of fuel. Either way, the company has to get the replacement up there before the old satellite runs out, which is an expensive and lengthy process. Most satellites get replaced when they still have 1-2 years of life left in them, which is a huge waste of resources. (Many millions of dollars.)
Anyway, by the end of my internship, we were able to demonstrate a method of directly measuring the amount of fuel in the tanks at any point during the satellite's lifetime, with a much lower error than the record keeping approach. This would allow the satellite to be left in service much closer to it's true end of life. I don't know if the process ever got out of the experimental stage though; not long after I left, GE Astrospace was sold off to another company, and I'm pretty sure the engineering department got gutted.
I've got a distiller; it's like a big coffee maker. The tap water in New Jersey is over-chlorinated, and we've got lots of very old pipes too. I had a Pur filter, but it wasn't really doing the trick.
My wife and I switched to bottled water, which was costing us around $0.25/gallon from Costco, in bulk. That wasn't too expensive, but we were creating a mountain of plastic bottles, and sometimes a whole case would be bad: if they sit out in the sun, the plastic leaches into the water.
So I got a distiller; every night I fill it with a gallon of tap water, and four hours later I have a gallon of very pure and good-tasting water to drink. I've got a two-gallon storage container in the fridge, and another gallon on the counter.
Between the cost of the distiller ($400) and the cost of electricity, it'll take a few years for this to be more cost-effective than the water from Costco. But the advantages are worth it:
- No more trips to the store or running out of water - No more 'bad' water - The costs are hidden in my electric bill, which is less painful - No more plastic bottles - Less money for Costco
The amount of CO2 we release is measureable, but fairly insignificant compared to the total amount that exchanged between the atmostphere and carbon sinks naturally. It's kind of like worrying that you might cause a flood by running your garden hose during a heavy thunderstorm.
We just don't know what are the dynamics of the atmosphere and biosphere as CO2 levels and temperatures increase. At the very least we should be prepared for ocean level rising, hurricanes increasing and all that. The nature will take care of itself (hopefully), but our economy won't...
Actually, we have a pretty good idea of the dynamics: increased temperatures and CO2 lead to more vigourous plant growth, which leads to more plant-eating animals, which leads to more animal-eating animals. Biodiversity increases, and the ecosystem improves. Even humans will do better; there will be more food for us, and less hardship during winters (which will reduce our need for fuel, btw.)
As far as the ocean levels rising, it isn't happening, at least not for as long as satellites have been measuring ocean levels. Apparently, although the ocean level varies over time, its average level has been the same for many years, as measured by satellite. But when measured from the shorelines, it seems to be rising. What actually must be happening is that the shorelines are sinking (at least around the measurement points.)
Is the whole continent sinking? Maybe, from the weight of the new plants... Or maybe continents just tend to heave up in the middle and dip their shorelines down. Perhaps something is pushing up from underneath, and this is what causes the continents to move around.
Hurricanes haven't been getting worse either; we had a busy year this year, but it was just on the high side of average. Both the number of hurricanes, and their top wind speeds, have been pretty much constant for as long as these things have been measured.
The case for global warming is solid and backed up by the figures.
True; temperatures have been rising for 300 years or so.
The case for the mechanics of greenhouse effects is also solid.
Largely true; we know that CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere hold in heat, and that water vapor holds in much more. We also know that this effect is critical for keeping our planet from freezing solid.
We also know that increasing CO2 levels have a minor impact as a greenhouse gas, but may cause a domino effect: the small addition of heat from CO2 might cause more water vapor to stay in the atmosphere, which could have a large heating effect. But it's also possible that a counter-balancing mechanism would kick in to prevent this. The latter seems likely, since we know there have been periods in history with much higher CO2 levels than today, but without runaway global warming.
The case that CO2 levels are higher in the atmosphere today than they were 50 years ago is also solid.
True, and the rate seems to be increasing as well. From 1900 to 1940 CO2 levels rose around 18%, and from 1940 to 2000 they rose around 80%.
However, most of the warming that occured between 1900 and 2000 occurred before 1950. It seems that rising CO2 levels follow warmings, rather than preceed them. This suggests that the higher temperatures are causing the higher CO2 levels, rather than the other way around.
The case that human activity is resulting in a greater amount of CO2 being added to the atmosphere than would otherwise happen would appear to be self-evident - we're taking carbon stocks that would otherwise lie under the ground and we're literally burning them up, and we're replacing natural carbon sinks with deserts of tarmac and concrete.
Not really true. Sure, we're taking carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the atmosphere, but only 2/3 of it seems to stay there; reabsorption occurs, and may be able to hold more than we know. Furthermore, our contribution may be insignificant compared to what the earth is releasing. As I stated above, CO2 increases seem to be caused by higher temperatures (perhaps released from warmer oceans) and that contribution might be much more than we release.
We're not really replacing the carbon sinks either. In some areas we might be, but it's a fact that the forests in the United States, and probably much of the rest of the world, are growing in size, largely due to the higher amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Pine trees grow up to three times faster at today's CO2 levels than at the levels in 1900, and all other plants grow faster too (anywhere from 10% to 300%, depending on species and conditions.) This could very well be the 'counter-balance' mechanism that prevents runaway global warming; higher CO2 levels cause the vegetative carbon sinks to grow more plentiful.
Here's another plausible expanation, from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. The gist is that long term measurements of solar activity (going back thousands of years) show that the sun's output varies in cycles, and that those cycles coorelate very closely with average temperature measurements over the same period.
This seems much more plausible to me, since it explains global warming and cooling that we know occurred well before the industrial revolution.
That must be why people are so good at predicting the direction of the stock market; there is so much data around, and it's all 100% accurate, too.
More data just tells you more about what happened yesterday. It does you no good in predicting what will happen tomorrow.
Doug.
There is a TV show on the Discovery Channel called MythBusters, and on one episode they pressurized an old airplane and tried to damage it by firing bullets through the hull and window.
Suprisingly, they couldn't get the plane to rapidly decompress. Bullet holes in the hull and window barely made a dent in the pressure (just a slow leak) and the window didn't even crack.
In the end, it took a small bomb under the window to cause any real damage; blasting a big hole caused sudden decompression. However, planes have suffered that kind of damage before and managed to land safely, so it's still not an immediate death sentence.
Now, I wouldn't try emptying the magazine on a fully automatic machine gun; enough bullet holes in a small area might weaken the hull too much. But a few shots from a revolver would be reasonably safe. (Provided the pilots are behind a bullet-proof wall. You don't want to shoot them by accident.
BIC solves the performance problem of TCP in fast long distance networks. In a high bandwidth network beyond 1 Gbps with the network delays in the range of milliseconds (or bandwidth in the range of Mbps, but delays in the range of seconds), TCP severely underutilizes the available bandwidth because of its slow response to available bandwidth. BIC solves this problem by modifying TCP's window increase function.
I just read an article in this month's CPU (computer power user) about the limitations of TCP on high-speed networks. Apparently, due to the way TCP adjusts to available bandwidth, it can never exceed 450Mbps or so.
TCP was designed for the 10/100 Mbps ethernet or less. To make effective use of faster networks, you need to use an enhanced version of TCP, of which there are several. I don't think any are mainstream yet, though.
That aside, as others have pointed out, your PCI bus and hard drives will bottleneck sooner than TCP will.
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Congress gets around this restriction by spending the money anyway, but promising to 'pay it back'. Of course, they're not the ones who'll have to pay it back, we and our children are. In effect, for many years, all of the money paid into SS that didn't get spent the same year on SS benefits has to be paid into SS again, with interest.
MythTV has a backend and frontend; the backend is responsible for recording shows off the TV card, and the frontend is responsible the GUI and playback. This allows one of the really cool things about MythTV: the backend and frontend can run on different computers on your network, and you can have as many frontends as your network and backend can handle concurrently.
IIRC, Knoppmyth requires a hard drive installation if you want to run it as a backend, but if you're just doing a frontend then you can run off the CD. This is pretty good for the frontends: no noisy harddrive, and no per-system administration if you've got a frontend on every TV in the house. (I'm pretty sure the CD would spin down and stay that way once the software is up and running.)
The folks in the first group need to respond to the second group by saying "Sure, computers don't make mistakes. They'll vote for whoever the programmers tell them to vote for."
Millions of years ago, there were much larger insects around. I seem to recall something about dragonflies with two foot (60cm) wingspans. I also seem to recall that Reynolds numbers are related to density. I guess the extra CO2 in the atmosphere back then, which was due to a higher global temperature, also made the atmosphere thick enough to allow larger insects.
I guess that means we can look forward to bigger insects, even bigger birds, and maybe, someday, flapping-wing single-passenger planes.
The ethical implications would come from the process of removing the identity from someone who may or may not be dead...
Are you suggesting that 'face donor' might be alive? What do they end up with after donating their face?
Somehow I doubt this is like donating one of your kidneys, or part of your liver. Your face might grow back, but you'd probably be left as scarred and disfigured as the recipient started out.
Did you read the caption?
The data on the graph comes from three different sources for three different time periods:
For 414085BP to 2342BP, it comes from the Vostok Ice Core. This section of the graph clearly shows cyclic behavior.
For 1663AD to 1891AD it comes from the Siple Station Ice Core. This section of the graph looks like the normal upswing of the next cycle.
For 1958AD to 2000AD, it comes from air sampling in Hawaii. This section of the graph is pretty much a vertical line. Note that this air sampling is being done near an almost continuously active volcano.
The graph continues with a point labeled "Now (2001)" and "Predicted (2100)", which are both much higher on the same vertical line as the Hawaii data, but with no source for the data points.
You can't just mix different data sources like that; this chart is clearly designed to be biased.
There is something interesting here, at least in the Vostok data... the CO2 cycles start with a rapid rise, and are followed by a long decline. It's a sawtooth wave, not a sine wave. That probably says something very interesting about the physics behind whatever is causing the cycles. My guess is that something fairly catastrophic causes a large release of CO2, and that's followed by a long period of reabsorbtion.
I don't know; I've been really happy with Gentoo since I found it. I've got on my desktop at home (which is also my PVR and runs nightly batch jobs for my consulting business) and a few servers at home and at my day job. I've even got my mom's home computer running Gentoo.
The servers used to run Red Hat, but didn't get patched very often before the RHES/Fedora split, and stopped getting patched at all after that split. But once I migrated to Gentoo, I've been able to easily keep all these systems up to date with the latest security patches.
Sure, sometimes packages get into Portage stable that either aren't quite ready, or which require you to jump through a few hoops to get them to install. Usually, if you get an error that says "X is blocking Y", the solution is to uninstall both them them and then emerge -puvD world again. If that doesn't work, searching forums.gentoo.com for the package names will usually turn up a solution (like adding a USE value that you didn't have before.)
If a package just plain won't compile correctly, I ususally edit /etc/portage/package.mask and mask out that particular version of the package. This will prevent the package, and anything that depends on it, from being installed. It also prevents me from having to worry about it again until the package gets updated, which usually happens once the problem has been fixed.
Obviously, for this approach to work well, I have to be very selective about which ~x86 packages I allow to be installed. Other than the PVR stuff (mythtv) I generally don't use unstable packages. That's probably why I have such an easy time keeping my systems up to date.
When/if oil (and coal, and natural gas) get too expensive, we'll shift our electricity generation away from those fuels and towards nuclear. Between direct use of electricty, and the generation of hydrogen for a portable fuel source, we can do/build everything we need.
Of course, these commodities aren't just used as fuels; oil provides lubrication, plastics, and lots of other refined products. Most of those can be obtained through recycling though, especially if there is plenty of electricty. Also, when the reserves got low, we'd stop using the stuff as fuel and conserve what's left for these other uses.
I read the article, and it doesn't say anything at all about Perl. It just mentions the name of the language once, in a somewhat ambiguous context.
One of my colleagues, who dislikes both Perl and Java, made this comparison: In Java, when you allocate an object, you have no control over when it gets deallocated, and you have no guaranteed way of performing some action just before it does. In contrast, a Perl object gets deallocated precisely when the last reference pointing to it is removed, and if it has a DESTROY method then that method will be called just before deallocation.
Perl's approach allows you to use a common C++ idiom for accessing resources: you define a class that represents the resource (file, socket, memory pool, etc). To get access to the resource you create an object, and to release the resource you destroy the object (let it go out of scope.) You use the object constructor and destructor to set up access and to safely release access. (ie: opening/locking a file and unlocking/closing the file.) With a proper design, this approach to resource allocation fits nicely with exception handling, because if an exception occurs your resource objects will wind up going out of scope, and their destructors will take care of cleaning up.
Since Java objects don't/can't behave this way, you can't use this idiom, and that makes resource allocation much more complex and error prone, especially when you start to deal with exception handling. For this reason, my colleague preferred Perl over Java.
(Or course, his true loves are C++ and Python; he likes the scripting language idea, but prefer's Python's OOP handcuffs over Perl's free-for-all OOP model.)
I'm a MythTV user, and I've never used Tivo, so maybe that's why I don't understand this...
Why in the world do you need six Tivo boxes, and five subscriptions to the same guide data?
I can think of two reasons for having multiple boxes: multiple tuners to record more than one show at a time, and to let you hook up to multiple TVs so you can watch more than one show at a time. I don't see any justification for the multiple subscriptions, except that Tivo forces you to do that because you have multiple boxes.
With MythTV, you can have multiple tuner cards in a single box, and you can have one big server box for recording and smaller/cheaper boxes for playback at each TV. You also only need one subscription to guide data, which gets downloaded into a central database that would be shared by multiple recorder boxes if you wanted/needed to have more than one.
Guide data is currently free, of course, but even if it weren't you would still only need one subscription.
Tivo's interface may be better than MythTV's interface (or not; MythTV is pretty easy to use) but MythTV is improving while Tivo is being whittled away. I know where I'll be spending my money...
All of our best models can barely predict the weather next week.
All of our best models also seem to produce the same results (which happen to agree with the politics of the model-creator) regardless of the input conditions.
Climate modeling is hard, because the climate is chaotic, poorly understood, and we have no way to test the models.
Oops. The one-liner should have been:
There's lots of text editing programs for Linux, with a wide variety of features, and I'm sure some can do the find and replace commands you mention. You can do it from the command-line too; here's what I'd do:
That'll format the book with one line per paragraph. If you do this a lot, you can put all of that into a script instead, so you just have to remember the name of the script instead of the whole command
In file named process_book:
To process a book:
By the way, notice that I used \x01 instead of |, since | characters might appear in the book.
I work in NY and live in NJ; the tax situation here has been fairly stable for a long time. NY and NJ have an agreement; NY rapes us with an income tax, and NJ rapes us with property tax.
Basically, when I file my taxes I fill out the NYS Non-Resident form, on which I pay state and city taxes. (These are withheld from my paycheck during the year.) I also fill out the NJ Resident form, on which I claim a deduction for the total amount of taxes I paid to NY. Since NY taxes are more than NJ (income) taxes, that deduction cancels out my taxable income for NJ.
NJ also has a 'homestead rebate', which basically means they give you $50 a year for living here.
This would be a reasonable arrangement, since I'm not double-taxed, and as a commuter into NYC I do benefit from many city services (everything but the schools.) However, because NJ state doesn't get any tax money from me, my local community doesn't either, so local government services are funded by property taxes.
In my town, which has very few businesses, that means I pay $11,000 a year in taxes for a modest 3 bedroom house!. The only saving grace is that, since it's a reasonable commute to NYC from here, the house is worth over $500K, about 35% more than I paid for it 1.5 years ago.
True, but to continue the metaphor, the company that is saying florescent lights aren't scalable happens to produce huge stadium lights for use within buildings: One bright light at the top, with lots of windows/fiber optic to distribute it.
Sun's machines and OS, for example, are scalable because you can get a monster server with dozens of cpus. For some application designs, that's exactly what you need, though there is a ceiling that you hit.
Linux is catching up with that kind of scalability, but it's not nearly as mature. However, Google has taken advantage of Linux's other kind of scalability, which allows thousands of separate compute nodes. Again, this is only good for some application designs, but web services (as a general category) work very well in such a system. You can't scale horizontally like this with Sun, because of the hardware/software cost of each compute node.
It does apply to everyone, because everyone sees it whenever they use a computer and try to access the filesystem.
Spatial Browsing, if implemented everywhere (including MS Windows and OSX), could become the new "preconception baggage", but it wouldn't be any better, because it's not really 'spatial'.
As currently implemented, Spatial Browsing replaces representing your filesystem as a hierarchical tree with representing your filesystem as a flood of windows which appear to be disconnected, but which actually have a vague and very poorly represented hierarchical relationship.
True spatial browsing, ala Raskin's Humane Interface, would be a real improvement. Instead of the hierarchy, documents are scattered around in groups, and you can zoom in on a group to discover that there are smaller groups within the larger group. This would make perfect sense to most people, who have stuff piled all over their physical desks using pretty much the same organizational structure.
I did an internship with GE Astrospace about 14 years ago, and the project I worked on was developing an accurate fuel gauge for satellites.
They store fuel in spherical tanks which are pressurized with helium (to push the fuel against the sides), and which have ribs inside which guide the fuel towards the nozzle. You can't put any kind of mechanical device in there to measure how much fuel is left, and they definitely avoid having anything electronic in there.
As a result, their only way of estimating how much fuel is remaining is to keep careful records of how long each jet burns during station-keeping, and an estimate of how much fuel is used for each burn. This estimate becomes less and less accurate over the life of the satellite, due to the measurement errors adding up and degredation in the jet performance.
I was told that by the 'end' of a satellite's lifetime, they can still have enough fuel to last another year. Or they may be out of fuel. Either way, the company has to get the replacement up there before the old satellite runs out, which is an expensive and lengthy process. Most satellites get replaced when they still have 1-2 years of life left in them, which is a huge waste of resources. (Many millions of dollars.)
Anyway, by the end of my internship, we were able to demonstrate a method of directly measuring the amount of fuel in the tanks at any point during the satellite's lifetime, with a much lower error than the record keeping approach. This would allow the satellite to be left in service much closer to it's true end of life. I don't know if the process ever got out of the experimental stage though; not long after I left, GE Astrospace was sold off to another company, and I'm pretty sure the engineering department got gutted.
I've got a distiller; it's like a big coffee maker.
The tap water in New Jersey is over-chlorinated, and we've got lots of very old pipes too. I had a Pur filter, but it wasn't really doing the trick.
My wife and I switched to bottled water, which was costing us around $0.25/gallon from Costco, in bulk. That wasn't too expensive, but we were creating a mountain of plastic bottles, and sometimes a whole case would be bad: if they sit out in the sun, the plastic leaches into the water.
So I got a distiller; every night I fill it with a gallon of tap water, and four hours later I have a gallon of very pure and good-tasting water to drink. I've got a two-gallon storage container in the fridge, and another gallon on the counter.
Between the cost of the distiller ($400) and the cost of electricity, it'll take a few years for this to be more cost-effective than the water from Costco. But the advantages are worth it:
- No more trips to the store or running out of water
- No more 'bad' water
- The costs are hidden in my electric bill, which is less painful
- No more plastic bottles
- Less money for Costco
The amount of CO2 we release is measureable, but fairly insignificant compared to the total amount that exchanged between the atmostphere and carbon sinks naturally. It's kind of like worrying that you might cause a flood by running your garden hose during a heavy thunderstorm.
Actually, we have a pretty good idea of the dynamics: increased temperatures and CO2 lead to more vigourous plant growth, which leads to more plant-eating animals, which leads to more animal-eating animals. Biodiversity increases, and the ecosystem improves. Even humans will do better; there will be more food for us, and less hardship during winters (which will reduce our need for fuel, btw.)
As far as the ocean levels rising, it isn't happening, at least not for as long as satellites have been measuring ocean levels. Apparently, although the ocean level varies over time, its average level has been the same for many years, as measured by satellite. But when measured from the shorelines, it seems to be rising. What actually must be happening is that the shorelines are sinking (at least around the measurement points.)
Is the whole continent sinking? Maybe, from the weight of the new plants... Or maybe continents just tend to heave up in the middle and dip their shorelines down. Perhaps something is pushing up from underneath, and this is what causes the continents to move around.
Hurricanes haven't been getting worse either; we had a busy year this year, but it was just on the high side of average. Both the number of hurricanes, and their top wind speeds, have been pretty much constant for as long as these things have been measured.
True; temperatures have been rising for 300 years or so.
Largely true; we know that CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere hold in heat, and that water vapor holds in much more. We also know that this effect is critical for keeping our planet from freezing solid.
We also know that increasing CO2 levels have a minor impact as a greenhouse gas, but may cause a domino effect: the small addition of heat from CO2 might cause more water vapor to stay in the atmosphere, which could have a large heating effect. But it's also possible that a counter-balancing mechanism would kick in to prevent this. The latter seems likely, since we know there have been periods in history with much higher CO2 levels than today, but without runaway global warming.
True, and the rate seems to be increasing as well. From 1900 to 1940 CO2 levels rose around 18%, and from 1940 to 2000 they rose around 80%.
However, most of the warming that occured between 1900 and 2000 occurred before 1950. It seems that rising CO2 levels follow warmings, rather than preceed them. This suggests that the higher temperatures are causing the higher CO2 levels, rather than the other way around.
Not really true. Sure, we're taking carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the atmosphere, but only 2/3 of it seems to stay there; reabsorption occurs, and may be able to hold more than we know. Furthermore, our contribution may be insignificant compared to what the earth is releasing. As I stated above, CO2 increases seem to be caused by higher temperatures (perhaps released from warmer oceans) and that contribution might be much more than we release.
We're not really replacing the carbon sinks either. In some areas we might be, but it's a fact that the forests in the United States, and probably much of the rest of the world, are growing in size, largely due to the higher amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Pine trees grow up to three times faster at today's CO2 levels than at the levels in 1900, and all other plants grow faster too (anywhere from 10% to 300%, depending on species and conditions.) This could very well be the 'counter-balance' mechanism that prevents runaway global warming; higher CO2 levels cause the vegetative carbon sinks to grow more plentiful.
For more on all of this, watch this seminar from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
Here's another plausible expanation, from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. The gist is that long term measurements of solar activity (going back thousands of years) show that the sun's output varies in cycles, and that those cycles coorelate very closely with average temperature measurements over the same period.
This seems much more plausible to me, since it explains global warming and cooling that we know occurred well before the industrial revolution.
There is a TV show on the Discovery Channel called MythBusters, and on one episode they pressurized an old airplane and tried to damage it by firing bullets through the hull and window.
Suprisingly, they couldn't get the plane to rapidly decompress. Bullet holes in the hull and window barely made a dent in the pressure (just a slow leak) and the window didn't even crack.
In the end, it took a small bomb under the window to cause any real damage; blasting a big hole caused sudden decompression. However, planes have suffered that kind of damage before and managed to land safely, so it's still not an immediate death sentence.
Now, I wouldn't try emptying the magazine on a fully automatic machine gun; enough bullet holes in a small area might weaken the hull too much. But a few shots from a revolver would be reasonably safe. (Provided the pilots are behind a bullet-proof wall. You don't want to shoot them by accident.
If that's true, why does BIC TCP exist?
According to their FAQ:
I just read an article in this month's CPU (computer power user) about the limitations of TCP on high-speed networks. Apparently, due to the way TCP adjusts to available bandwidth, it can never exceed 450Mbps or so.
TCP was designed for the 10/100 Mbps ethernet or less. To make effective use of faster networks, you need to use an enhanced version of TCP, of which there are several. I don't think any are mainstream yet, though.
That aside, as others have pointed out, your PCI bus and hard drives will bottleneck sooner than TCP will.