Computer people understand better than most that you need to break down a task (influencing public policy on technology and privacy) into managable chunks and then set up a program to deal with each chunk.
The EFF is just such a program for dealing with the handling of technology and privacy based court cases. They do a good job of this and have a reasonable amount of public respect. They don't get heavily into lobbying; that is not what their program was written for.
Lobbying of governments should, again, be broken down into two discrete tasks: tech and privacy. A program that targets influencing privacy legislation should stay away from hardcore technology topics (like breaking up microsoft) and leave that to a second technically oriented program.
What kind of lobbying program would work for techies? How about something like distributed.net where people circulate messages about topics of interest and forward ones they agree with via email to their elected representatives. Oh, wait a minute. Such a thing already exists... it is called a "mailing list" or a "forum". Here are just a sampling of what I found doing a Google search on "privacy mailing list":
http://www.vortex.com/privacy.html
http://www.pfir.org/
http://www.epic.org/privacy/privacy_resources_faq. html
So, if you want to get yourself involved, just clip topical rants from these publications and email them to your friends, Member of Parliament, Representative, Muhla, or other applicable elected or appointed person.
Don't expect a non-profit organisation to do anything that you are not prepared to do yourself! If you donate money to a political party, then wrap the cheque in a rant. There, you are now using money to influence a party's politics.
Bode's Law is just an observation and not a "law". It clearly doesn't work for most of the extrasolar planetary systems we've been finding lately, so it shouldn't be used to justify something like Pluto's demotion to planetoid.
Asteroids aren't held together by gravity, they are literally one big rock.
Asteroids are held together by gravity... that is why NEAR could land on one, and why these photos from the NEAR probe show a boulder field strewn with SEVERAL rocks.
The limiting factor on how big an asteriod can get without falling apart is a combination of centrifugal force caused by its rotation, and the Roche limit of how far away it is from a larger body that inflictes tidal forces upon it. More on the Roche limit here.
Comets may be a single cohesive body of some sort, we don't know yet. Hopefully the Contour mission will tell us what comets really are made of.
Another criteria for being a planet, IMHO, is that its gravity influences other established solar system bodies. Remember that Pluto was discovered because of the perturbations in the orbit of Neptune that suggested "something is out there".
Pluto passes the test of being significant enough to perturb a bona-fide planet.
The article talks about the starfish's use of microscopic lenses that are beyond human's present ability to manufacture. That is great, but the key problem with optical computing is the multiplexor/demultiplexor switching issue. These lenses won't fix that.
Here is a link to a SciAm story that highlights some of the things folks are working on for optical computing (near bottom of article).
Something these critters body parts may help with is:
"One of the problems optical computers have faced is a lack
of accuracy; for instance, these devices have practical limits of eight to 11 bits of accuracy in basic operations. "
But this still won't give us routing solutions for optical packets through multiplexors!
Sad that gold has turned away from being the world's foremost item of currency into a ping-pong ball for physics experiments.
Let's see, at US$270.30/troy ounce (London PM fix), works out to US$8.69/gram.
So how many gold atoms were subjected to this horribly painful experiment? I don't know, the articles didn't say. But then the Ministry of Forests doesn't release numbers of spotted owls either. But I digress...
There are 6.02*10^23 gold atoms in a gram (it is monovalent usually in an isometric crystal as a native mineral). Let us assume that two hundred innocent gold atoms were subjected to this "experiment". That works out to 3.32*10^-22 grams of gold! (Or in other numbers, that is 3.32*10^-28 TONNES!). At the present gold price, that works out to US$0.0289*10^-19 !!! Wasted, I say!
Are all you US taxpayers as horrified at the expenditure of your tax dollars on this experiment? Here is what you do:
If the worm attacks the ip address 198.137.240.92, then the folks at www.whitehouse.gov should relocate to a new IP and update the DNS. Maybe they can donate their "old" ip to M!cros0ft.
That doesn't fix the problem with the DSL modems but should avoid the trouble with shutting down the white house. But isn't George heading to Italia soon?
>Civilisation arised 10,000 years ago,
>coincendentally the same time climate became
>quite stable.
10,000 years ago marked the end of the last ice age. Have a look at
this link and tell me how hospitable the climate in Canada looked 10,000 years ago.
Also note the comment that Native
peoples were able to quickly adapt to a changing environment through modifications in resource use, weaponry and hunting strategy. Climate changed; people adapted. Imagine that.
I reiterate, Climate has never been stable, and never will be.
> Ask a dinosaur what it was like to have his
> atmosphere altered.
An asteroid strike or severe volcanism doesn't rank up there with increasing CO2 content of the air from.033%v/v to about 0.043%v/v. (30% increase, which is an arbitrary increase I've made up)
Remember than methane is about 100x more potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Since methane composes 2 ppm v/v (0.0002%), a 30% decrease in methane (to 1.6 ppm v/v) will result the same effect as a the increase in CO2.
How do we decrease methane? We all become vegetarians and get those pollution spewing cows and goats off the farms! Digestion processes of herbivors and of decay of organic matter (usually in swamps) are the two bigggest sources of methane.
Ban the cow. Open hunting season on wild goats and sheep. And fill in all the swamps. There is a recommendation for all you bleeding hearts who insist that Mother Earth's temperature should be kept from changing.
>We (humains) almost all live close to water
>near sea level, if it goes up, good luck
>keeping it back
One word: Netherlands.
>Chances are we'll kill our civilisation.
Civilizations change. I don't speak the same language that Queen Victoria did. Change != kill.
>elimination of living quarters of thousands
>of people
Are you suggesting that refugees don't exist except for climate change? I suspect people in Sudan and Bosnia might disagree.
>There are many many ways to save energy and
>reduce global warming but we are not using then
>because it is unconvenient.
We use "price" as a lowest common denominator to decide between options. If oil is cheaper than solar energy, it is likely because solar energy is totally inefficient. When the price of oil increases, either through taxation or shortages, to a price where solar is cost effective, then we'll see non-fossil fuels move into the market. Remember that 'centrally planned economies' fiddle with supply and demand to acheive higher goals. We've seen just how environmentally friendly centrally planned economies are!
One of the most greehouse-friendly way of generating power is hydro power. But we don't build many dams any more because they are perceived to have other environmental problems (think of the poor, homeless fish who now can't migrate). Then there are those great windmill farms that chop up the poor birdies who are migrating along the windy valleys. There is no free power; everything has an impact.
It is still damned cold here in Canada. Given the choice between global warming and global cooling, I'll take the former! Global no-weather-change is NOT an option. Never has been, and never will be.
I load my Laptop in Canada with my awesome Microsoft Word-XP® sales presentation that I'm gonna make to a Client in Australia. The presentation is REALLY big (seems a 2 page brochure in Word-XP® requires a 20Gb hard drive). So I buy a new drive before I create my presentation.
At the airport I buy some DIMMs in the duty free (Memory just changed).
I get into Aus and visit the Client's office and find that my net card doesn't work with their system. So I frantically buy a new token-ring PCMCIA card and plug it into my laptop, removing my ethernet card (MAC address just changed - do token ring cards use MAC addresses?).
Did I mention that I normally plug in a parallel port ZIP drive back in Canada, but I didn't bring it on this trip. So the IOmega Parallel2SCSI driver tries to load and fails, so it diables my virtual SCSI address (I don't know if that really happens, but let's assume that it does. My SCSI subsystem has just disappeared).
So there, I'm ready to do my presentation in the Client's office, and XP coughs and demands that I type in my 27 digit code on the back of the CD.
Did I mention that the CDs are on my desk back in Vancouver?
You can't quote a size of an oil reserve without quoting the price that the reserve was estimated at. All oil reservoirs have huge quantities of "marginal" oil that cannot be economically recovered at $12/bbl oil, but CAN be economically recovered at $25/bbl. Remember that the estimate made in 1970 would have been done on an oil price that bears no relation to today's price.
Another problem with this "we are running out of oil" cry is that new technology makes oil available that was considered garbage only a couple of decades ago. I just spent 6 months doing engineering work on a 150k bbl/day oilsand mine in northern Alberta... this mine has a 30 year life (at US$12/bbl oil). Only 20 years ago, this deposit would not have been included in the inventory of available oil because the technology to recover it didn't exist.
At this moment the oil supply is quickly using up the $10/bbl supplies, is tapping much of the $20/bbl supplies, but hasn't touched the $30/bbl supplies. When the cheaper stuff is used up, whole new inventories of expensive oil will appear (get your gasoline charge card ready!). At that crude price, the alternatives to gasoline are beginning to look attractive (read alcohol, coal gasification, etc) and they will begin to take market share from crude oil.
Regarding fuel cells:
Remember that 76% of the US energy consumption comes from oil and coal (Mining Engineering, May 2001, pp40-41). If people want to run electric fuel cells in their vehicles, those cells are likely going to consume power generated by coal.
All a fuel cell does is convert your car from a gasoline burner, to a coal burner!
I've got a DSL computer located in Canada. How much is an ID on my proxy server worth to ya?
Just think, the whole world can watch the Toronto Maple Leafs lose.
There are those of us suffering under the naming system invented by a totalitarian regime that is more interested in stifling innovation than in allowing "reasonble" access to the domain. Getting anything registered on the.ca domain is a fruitless exercise to the point where anybody not directly related to gov't usually gives up and gets a.com or.org domain. -AD
Slashdot Mirror
Computer people understand better than most that you need to break down a task (influencing public policy on technology and privacy) into managable chunks and then set up a program to deal with each chunk.
. html
The EFF is just such a program for dealing with the handling of technology and privacy based court cases. They do a good job of this and have a reasonable amount of public respect. They don't get heavily into lobbying; that is not what their program was written for.
Lobbying of governments should, again, be broken down into two discrete tasks: tech and privacy. A program that targets influencing privacy legislation should stay away from hardcore technology topics (like breaking up microsoft) and leave that to a second technically oriented program.
What kind of lobbying program would work for techies? How about something like distributed.net where people circulate messages about topics of interest and forward ones they agree with via email to their elected representatives. Oh, wait a minute. Such a thing already exists... it is called a "mailing list" or a "forum". Here are just a sampling of what I found doing a Google search on "privacy mailing list":
http://www.vortex.com/privacy.html
http://www.pfir.org/
http://www.epic.org/privacy/privacy_resources_faq
So, if you want to get yourself involved, just clip topical rants from these publications and email them to your friends, Member of Parliament, Representative, Muhla, or other applicable elected or appointed person.
Don't expect a non-profit organisation to do anything that you are not prepared to do yourself! If you donate money to a political party, then wrap the cheque in a rant. There, you are now using money to influence a party's politics.
-AD
Bode's Law is just an observation and not a "law". It clearly doesn't work for most of the extrasolar planetary systems we've been finding lately, so it shouldn't be used to justify something like Pluto's demotion to planetoid.
t io ns.html
http://www.sciam.com/explorations/052796explora
-AD
Asteroids are held together by gravity... that is why NEAR could land on one, and why these photos from the NEAR probe show a boulder field strewn with SEVERAL rocks.
The limiting factor on how big an asteriod can get without falling apart is a combination of centrifugal force caused by its rotation, and the Roche limit of how far away it is from a larger body that inflictes tidal forces upon it. More on the Roche limit here.
Comets may be a single cohesive body of some sort, we don't know yet. Hopefully the Contour mission will tell us what comets really are made of.
-AD
Another criteria for being a planet, IMHO, is that its gravity influences other established solar system bodies. Remember that Pluto was discovered because of the perturbations in the orbit of Neptune that suggested "something is out there".
Pluto passes the test of being significant enough to perturb a bona-fide planet.
-AD
Something these critters body parts may help with is: "One of the problems optical computers have faced is a lack of accuracy; for instance, these devices have practical limits of eight to 11 bits of accuracy in basic operations. "
But this still won't give us routing solutions for optical packets through multiplexors!
-AD
Sad that gold has turned away from being the world's foremost item of currency into a ping-pong ball for physics experiments.
Let's see, at US$270.30/troy ounce (London PM fix), works out to US$8.69/gram.
So how many gold atoms were subjected to this horribly painful experiment? I don't know, the articles didn't say. But then the Ministry of Forests doesn't release numbers of spotted owls either. But I digress...
There are 6.02*10^23 gold atoms in a gram (it is monovalent usually in an isometric crystal as a native mineral). Let us assume that two hundred innocent gold atoms were subjected to this "experiment". That works out to 3.32*10^-22 grams of gold! (Or in other numbers, that is 3.32*10^-28 TONNES!). At the present gold price, that works out to US$0.0289*10^-19 !!! Wasted, I say!
Are all you US taxpayers as horrified at the expenditure of your tax dollars on this experiment? Here is what you do:
Fire up your web browser and point it to the white house web site
send them a message expressing your outrage. I suggest the following: /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
GET
That should get our message out there. Save the Gold!
-AD
That doesn't fix the problem with the DSL modems but should avoid the trouble with shutting down the white house. But isn't George heading to Italia soon?
-AD
Hang on a minute. It wasn't Bush that we leaving stains on blue dresses. Got your presidents confused?
>coincendentally the same time climate became
>quite stable.
10,000 years ago marked the end of the last ice age. Have a look at this link and tell me how hospitable the climate in Canada looked 10,000 years ago.
Also note the comment that Native peoples were able to quickly adapt to a changing environment through modifications in resource use, weaponry and hunting strategy. Climate changed; people adapted. Imagine that.
I reiterate, Climate has never been stable, and never will be.
-AD
> Ask a dinosaur what it was like to have his
.033%v/v to about 0.043%v/v. (30% increase, which is an arbitrary increase I've made up)
> atmosphere altered.
An asteroid strike or severe volcanism doesn't rank up there with increasing CO2 content of the air from
Remember than methane is about 100x more potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Since methane composes 2 ppm v/v (0.0002%), a 30% decrease in methane (to 1.6 ppm v/v) will result the same effect as a the increase in CO2.
How do we decrease methane? We all become vegetarians and get those pollution spewing cows and goats off the farms! Digestion processes of herbivors and of decay of organic matter (usually in swamps) are the two bigggest sources of methane.
Ban the cow. Open hunting season on wild goats and sheep. And fill in all the swamps. There is a recommendation for all you bleeding hearts who insist that Mother Earth's temperature should be kept from changing.
-AD
>We (humains) almost all live close to water
>near sea level, if it goes up, good luck
>keeping it back
One word: Netherlands.
>Chances are we'll kill our civilisation.
Civilizations change. I don't speak the same language that Queen Victoria did. Change != kill.
>elimination of living quarters of thousands
>of people
Are you suggesting that refugees don't exist except for climate change? I suspect people in Sudan and Bosnia might disagree.
>There are many many ways to save energy and
>reduce global warming but we are not using then
>because it is unconvenient.
We use "price" as a lowest common denominator to decide between options. If oil is cheaper than solar energy, it is likely because solar energy is totally inefficient. When the price of oil increases, either through taxation or shortages, to a price where solar is cost effective, then we'll see non-fossil fuels move into the market. Remember that 'centrally planned economies' fiddle with supply and demand to acheive higher goals. We've seen just how environmentally friendly centrally planned economies are!
One of the most greehouse-friendly way of generating power is hydro power. But we don't build many dams any more because they are perceived to have other environmental problems (think of the poor, homeless fish who now can't migrate). Then there are those great windmill farms that chop up the poor birdies who are migrating along the windy valleys. There is no free power; everything has an impact.
It is still damned cold here in Canada. Given the choice between global warming and global cooling, I'll take the former! Global no-weather-change is NOT an option. Never has been, and never will be.
-AD
At the airport I buy some DIMMs in the duty free (Memory just changed).
I get into Aus and visit the Client's office and find that my net card doesn't work with their system. So I frantically buy a new token-ring PCMCIA card and plug it into my laptop, removing my ethernet card (MAC address just changed - do token ring cards use MAC addresses?).
Did I mention that I normally plug in a parallel port ZIP drive back in Canada, but I didn't bring it on this trip. So the IOmega Parallel2SCSI driver tries to load and fails, so it diables my virtual SCSI address (I don't know if that really happens, but let's assume that it does. My SCSI subsystem has just disappeared).
So there, I'm ready to do my presentation in the Client's office, and XP coughs and demands that I type in my 27 digit code on the back of the CD.
Did I mention that the CDs are on my desk back in Vancouver?
-AD
You can't quote a size of an oil reserve without quoting the price that the reserve was estimated at. All oil reservoirs have huge quantities of "marginal" oil that cannot be economically recovered at $12/bbl oil, but CAN be economically recovered at $25/bbl. Remember that the estimate made in 1970 would have been done on an oil price that bears no relation to today's price.
Another problem with this "we are running out of oil" cry is that new technology makes oil available that was considered garbage only a couple of decades ago. I just spent 6 months doing engineering work on a 150k bbl/day oilsand mine in northern Alberta... this mine has a 30 year life (at US$12/bbl oil). Only 20 years ago, this deposit would not have been included in the inventory of available oil because the technology to recover it didn't exist.
At this moment the oil supply is quickly using up the $10/bbl supplies, is tapping much of the $20/bbl supplies, but hasn't touched the $30/bbl supplies. When the cheaper stuff is used up, whole new inventories of expensive oil will appear (get your gasoline charge card ready!). At that crude price, the alternatives to gasoline are beginning to look attractive (read alcohol, coal gasification, etc) and they will begin to take market share from crude oil.
Regarding fuel cells:
Remember that 76% of the US energy consumption comes from oil and coal (Mining Engineering, May 2001, pp40-41). If people want to run electric fuel cells in their vehicles, those cells are likely going to consume power generated by coal.
All a fuel cell does is convert your car from a gasoline burner, to a coal burner!
-AD
I've got a DSL computer located in Canada. How much is an ID on my proxy server worth to ya? Just think, the whole world can watch the Toronto Maple Leafs lose.
There are those of us suffering under the naming system invented by a totalitarian regime that is more interested in stifling innovation than in allowing "reasonble" access to the domain. Getting anything registered on the .ca domain is a fruitless exercise to the point where anybody not directly related to gov't usually gives up and gets a .com or .org domain. -AD