Something like this has been tried in America every election since 1992 by a non-profit organization called Project Vote Smart. They try to enlist the help of the local media to pressure candidates into filling out their issues questionnaire called the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT). Here is the version that candidates for the US Congress were asked to fill out in 2006.
The problem is that candidates don't feel the need to fill it out. They may get a little bit of bad publicity for not participating, but that's better for them than being pinned-down on where they stand on the issues. (See this article Politicians Grow Wary Of Survey as Internet Spreads Attack Ads on the topic from 10/25/26 issue of the Wall Street Journal).
Disclaimer: I used to work for Project Vote Smart about 10 years ago.
While it may or may not have your personal favorite, this page compares the features of 13 different source control systems. I found it via this page that compared five of the more popular open-source systems.
While I've never tried speed and can't compare the two, when I was on Modafinil for a couple of months, I didn't experience any bad sad effects. Taking it in the morning, I felt awake and alert during the day, and could still sleep at night. (This was about three years ago. My neurologist prescribed it to counteract a medication I was on for chronic headaces - novarsc - a calcium channel blocker - that was making me very tired.
The only negative side-effect that I noticed was that my physical reflexes were more sensitive (or twitchy) than normal for the first few days. So I had to be more careful, for instance, when getting out of a wet bathtub/shower.
As for the mental stimulation, I didn't feel overstimulated, but I did feel like my mind was the sharpest it had ever been at concentrated thinking and coding.
I thought his points about most money to be made from a new technology comes indirectly, over the long-term from industries that support it.
If one had money to invest during the dot.com bubble, one should have probably have put it into companies that made networking hardware (up until that industry became "bubbled" as well) and in delivery companies. I imagine long-term stock-holders of UPS and FedEx must be quite happy with their companies' performance.
Many people, though, wish Gentoo had a more automated install.
There is an "Official" Gentoo Installer Project. They are taking their time, with the hope of getting it right, making it useable for nearly everybody. Project Roadmap: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/ins taller/ Mailing list archives here: http://news.gmane.org/group/gmane.linux.gen too.ins taller/ Code snapshots: http://dev.gentoo.org/~tseng/installer -snapshots/
Two altenative installers that people have actually used to get working Gentoo distributions: http://www.cs.luc.edu/projects/naj a http://glis.sourceforge.net/
Other Gentoo Installer projects on Sourceforge that have actually released some code: http://sourceforge.net/projects/geninstalle r/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/glbf/
Some prototype code from Sridahr R., who since has switched to Debian: http://cs.annauniv.edu/~rsridhar/pub/proj ects/gli/
Finally, here are four Gentoo-based distributions with their own installers:
Vidalinux http://www.vidalinux.com/ http://dis trowatch.planetmirror.com/table.php?dist ribution=vidalinux with a Anaconda-based installer: http://freshmeat.net/projects/gentooin staler/ http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/?q=node/view/ 35 Not sure if they survived their financial crunch: http://www.linuxbeta.com/index.php?page=a rticles&r elease=84
Jollix http://www.jollix.de/en/en_about.html " a LiveCD based on Gentoo Linux Jollix boots directly from CD without touching the hard disk... Once jollix is installed on a hard disk, it can be updated via portage, the packet manager of Gentoo linux. In fact, jollix IS gentoo at this point (somehow preconfigured)."
Navyn OS http://navynos.linux.pl "Navyn OS is the completed system build from Gentoo. It is also a live-cd so you can boot and run it from the cdrom drive. Since version 2004.07 there is a user friendly installer on the cdrom, and with only a few mouse clicks you can install the system onto your hard drive."
Gentoox http://gentoox.shallax.com Installable Gentoo CD for the MS Xbox.
While it would be amazing if they could make a workable nuclear device that size, 10 tons of explosive yield for a golf-ball sized mass of material is not a very efficient nuclear weapon.
Doing a few calculations:
A
golf ball must have a diameter of not less than 1.680 inches (42.67mm)
Feeding that into
Calculation of Density with Halfnium,
gives a mass of 0.54143749 kg for a golf-ball sized chunk of Halfnium (neglecting the particular isotope in question).
Assuming metric tons for simplicity, a yield of:
10 tons / 0.54143749 kg
Is equivalent to:
18.5 tons / kg
Compare that with existing nuclear weapons. Once you scale the weapon above a certain size, and using optimal designs, you can obtain much higher yield efficiencies, or Yield-to-Weight Ratio's.
"The
W-54 Davy Crockett warhead... was the lightest ever deployed by the US, with a minimum mass of about 23 kg (it also came in heavier packages) and had yields ranging from 10 tons up to 1 Kt in various versions."
According to this page
at the
National Conference of State Legislatures, twelve U.S. States do their legistlative redistricting by independent commissions, with Iowa as a wildcard. And six U.S. States do their congressional redistricting via independent commissions.
If you pay attention to some of the news stories today about the Senate vote, you will notice that the Senate has revised the bill slightly.
Some of the changes are listed in a news release from Sentator Burns' website:
The final CAN SPAM Act includes changes not in the earlier Senate passed version, including increased damages up to $250 per spam e-mail with a cap of $2 million that can be tripled for aggravated violations. For e-mails using false or deceptive headers, the cap does not apply. Additionally, the revisions to the earlier bill enhance FTC enforcement authority.
This means that the House gets to vote again on the revised bill - probably after Thanksgiving
Nineteen months in the making, Python 2.3 represents a commitment to stability and improved performance, with a minimum of new language features. Countless bugs and memory leaks have been fixed, many new and updated modules have been added, and the new type/class system introduced in Python 2.2 has been significantly improved. Python 2.3 can be up to 30% faster than Python 2.2.
This was an idea that I always wanted to try. The first model I bought was the CycleFX DirectControl for CycleFX ITS (PCs). It connects to your PC via a serial port. You can run the included "bicycling" games, but not any other games - unless you want to write a joystick driver for it. I didn't. The higher end PlayStation2 model looks like it should work nicely.
The second model I bought was the Eloton SimCycle along with its GameBox accessory. This lets you plug the SimCycle into a gameport as the Y-Axis, shared with another gameport controller. This finally offered the experience I wanted.
It's a matter of trial and error to find games that let you configure the Y-Axis as your speed or throttle. The reaction of the PC to changes in your pedaling speed is not instantaneous. I'd estimate there to be a.7 seconds delay. So it's best to use it in games where you are usually going forward but you would like to vary the speed. That generally means racing and flight sims. With a FPS like Unreal it's just not precise enough.
Some of the games I've found to work well are:
WWII Fighters
Red Baron 3D
Falcon 4
MS Flight Simulator series
Rowan's Battle of Britain
Mig Alley
Panzer Elite
F1 2002
Papyrus' NASCAR series
Need for Speed series
Driver
Midtown Madness series
MechWarrior 3
RalliSport Challenge
Superbike 2001
Most importantly, it works very well with Battlefield 1942, controlling my forward motion whether I'm an infantryman or driving a vehicle. In fact, because Battlefield 1942 is such an addicting game, I've been getting a lot of exercise lately! I like it a lot.
From what I remember reading, M|S's IE4 and above were designed with a very modular architecture. Could these modules be easily wrapped up and inserted inside Mozilla? Could somebody working on Mozilla comment on this?
Or would it be better to just port IE5 straight over to Linux? The hard parts must already be done as they have it running on Solaris and HP-UX.
And what about the license to get access to the source code. Although free, would it only be licensable to corporate entities? If so, wouldn't that exclude all the Mozilla contributors? (Unless a Mozilla.com hired all the contributors on as employees - on salaray at say 1 cent a year?)
It will be interesting to see how these issues will play out.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that candidates don't feel the need to fill it out. They may get a little bit of bad publicity for not participating, but that's better for them than being pinned-down on where they stand on the issues. (See this article Politicians Grow Wary Of Survey as Internet Spreads Attack Ads on the topic from 10/25/26 issue of the Wall Street Journal).
Disclaimer: I used to work for Project Vote Smart about 10 years ago.
Caffeine!
While it may or may not have your personal favorite, this page compares the features of 13 different source control systems. I found it via this page that compared five of the more popular open-source systems.
This statement really suprised me:
4 0M ar/ 1299.html
"Brad was forced to sell new vulnerabilities from Linux kernel code to unmentioned blackhat companies."
So I checked the grsecurity forums + Google. There seems to be something there, but Brad claims its not really malicious:
http://forums.grsecurity.net/viewtopic.php?t=10
http://seclists.org/lists/fulldisclosure/2004/
While I've never tried speed and can't compare the two, when I was on Modafinil for a couple of months, I didn't experience any bad sad effects. Taking it in the morning, I felt awake and alert during the day, and could still sleep at night. (This was about three years ago. My neurologist prescribed it to counteract a medication I was on for chronic headaces - novarsc - a calcium channel blocker - that was making me very tired.
The only negative side-effect that I noticed was that my physical reflexes were more sensitive (or twitchy) than normal for the first few days. So I had to be more careful, for instance, when getting out of a wet bathtub/shower.
As for the mental stimulation, I didn't feel overstimulated, but I did feel like my mind was the sharpest it had ever been at concentrated thinking and coding.
From personal experience, the continuous reboot problem also affects Windows 2000, that is, my gaming machine.
Microsoft better have a good fix for this!
I do wonder how much the issue with the OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing)
l a te nt_landrush/
l -f requency-division-multiplexing/
patents will delay the roll-out of WiMax.
See:
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/0625wilan.htm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/04/wi_fi_p
OFDM is, in part, what makes WiMax work via non-line of sight (NLOS), cope with interfence, and provide high bandwidth.
See:
http://www.ofdmnews.com/
and one vendor's product here:
http://www.yenra.com/w-ofdm-wide-band-orthogona
A little searching reveals that the page for presenting the study results is:
e cted/pdf/adweek.pdf
http://promotions.yahoo.com/disconnected/
"Disconnected: Life Without the Internet"
with the detailed report in this PDF file:
http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/promo/disconn
Remember that this is a marketing study and not a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in a psychiatry journal.
I thought his points about most money to be made from a new technology comes indirectly, over the long-term from industries that support it.
If one had money to invest during the dot.com bubble, one should have probably have put it into companies that made networking hardware (up until that industry became "bubbled" as well) and in delivery companies. I imagine long-term stock-holders of UPS and FedEx must be quite happy with their companies' performance.
A site I've enjoyed in the past is Terrafly that lets you view / visually fly over satellite maps of the United States using a Java applet.
Also check out the links to the other sources provided on that page.
Somewhat related - and very interesting - is this narrative of the B-52 accident at the Thule airbase in Greenland in 1968.
This is touched on a little bit in Jem's review, but I thought this would be a good place to add a few more notes:
x .xml
s taller/n too.ins taller/r -snapshots/
j a
e r/
j ects/gli/
s trowatch.planetmirror.com/table.php?dist ribution=vidalinuxn staler// 35a rticles&r elease=84
" a LiveCD based on Gentoo Linux Jollix boots directly from CD without touching the hard disk...
e Gentoo CD for the MS Xbox.
Gentoo's Install Documentation Lives here:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/inde
Many people, though, wish Gentoo had a more automated install.
There is an "Official" Gentoo Installer Project.
They are taking their time, with the hope of getting it right, making it useable for nearly everybody.
Project Roadmap:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/in
Mailing list archives here:
http://news.gmane.org/group/gmane.linux.ge
Code snapshots:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~tseng/installe
Two altenative installers that people have actually used to get working Gentoo distributions:
http://www.cs.luc.edu/projects/na
http://glis.sourceforge.net/
Other Gentoo Installer projects on Sourceforge that have actually released some code:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/geninstall
http://sourceforge.net/projects/glbf/
Some prototype code from Sridahr R., who since has switched to Debian:
http://cs.annauniv.edu/~rsridhar/pub/pro
Finally, here are four Gentoo-based distributions with their own installers:
Vidalinux
http://www.vidalinux.com/
http://di
with a Anaconda-based installer:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/gentooi
http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/?q=node/view
Not sure if they survived their financial crunch:
http://www.linuxbeta.com/index.php?page=
Jollix
http://www.jollix.de/en/en_about.html
Once jollix is installed on a hard disk, it can be updated via portage, the packet manager of Gentoo linux. In fact, jollix IS gentoo at this point (somehow preconfigured)."
Navyn OS
http://navynos.linux.pl
"Navyn OS is the completed system build from Gentoo. It is also a live-cd so you can boot and run it from the cdrom drive. Since version 2004.07 there is a user friendly installer on the cdrom, and with only a few mouse clicks you can install the system onto your hard drive."
Gentoox
http://gentoox.shallax.com
Installabl
2.25 kt / kg is, of course, 2,250 tons / kg and not 2,250,000 tons / kg.
The conclusion, however, still stands.
Doing a few calculations:
A golf ball must have a diameter of not less than 1.680 inches (42.67mm)
or a volume of 40.679 cm^3.
Feeding that into Calculation of Density with Halfnium, gives a mass of 0.54143749 kg for a golf-ball sized chunk of Halfnium (neglecting the particular isotope in question).
Assuming metric tons for simplicity, a yield of:
10 tons / 0.54143749 kg
Is equivalent to:
18.5 tons / kg
Compare that with existing nuclear weapons. Once you scale the weapon above a certain size, and using optimal designs, you can obtain much higher yield efficiencies, or Yield-to-Weight Ratio's.
"The W-54 Davy Crockett warhead ... was the lightest ever deployed by the US, with a minimum mass of about 23 kg (it also came in heavier packages) and had yields ranging from 10 tons up to 1 Kt in various versions."
Yield-to-Weight Ratios of US Mk-53 Nuclear Weapon
2.25 kt/kg
Or
2,250,000 tons / kg
Which is a MUCH higher efficiency weapon - at least in the energy sense.
According to this page at the National Conference of State Legislatures, twelve U.S. States do their legistlative redistricting by independent commissions, with Iowa as a wildcard. And six U.S. States do their congressional redistricting via independent commissions.
Some of the changes are listed in a news release from Sentator Burns' website:
The final CAN SPAM Act includes changes not in the earlier Senate passed version, including increased damages up to $250 per spam e-mail with a cap of $2 million that can be tripled for aggravated violations. For e-mails using false or deceptive headers, the cap does not apply. Additionally, the revisions to the earlier bill enhance FTC enforcement authority.
This means that the House gets to vote again on the revised bill - probably after Thanksgiving
On the other hand, they look pretty cool. More photos here.
I think I'll add them to my Christmas wish list. :-)
And to go with these red-glowing GloFish, maybe I'll add some of these green-glowing Night Perls from Taiwan:
news story picture.
Where aren't these people on their list?
Even the Slashdot editors might qualify.
I hope Slashdot doesn't give in to this trend and start putting advertisements on their website.
They would totally lose my respect if they were to sell out like that!
To quote the Python 2.3 release page:
The second model I bought was the Eloton SimCycle along with its GameBox accessory. This lets you plug the SimCycle into a gameport as the Y-Axis, shared with another gameport controller. This finally offered the experience I wanted.
It's a matter of trial and error to find games that let you configure the Y-Axis as your speed or throttle. The reaction of the PC to changes in your pedaling speed is not instantaneous. I'd estimate there to be a .7 seconds delay. So it's best to use it in games where you are usually going forward but you would like to vary the speed. That generally means racing and flight sims. With a FPS like Unreal it's just not precise enough.
Some of the games I've found to work well are:
Most importantly, it works very well with Battlefield 1942, controlling my forward motion whether I'm an infantryman or driving a vehicle. In fact, because Battlefield 1942 is such an addicting game, I've been getting a lot of exercise lately! I like it a lot.
From what I remember reading, M|S's IE4 and above were designed with a very modular architecture. Could these modules be easily wrapped up and inserted inside Mozilla? Could somebody working on Mozilla comment on this?
Or would it be better to just port IE5 straight over to Linux? The hard parts must already be done as they have it running on Solaris and HP-UX.
And what about the license to get access to the source code. Although free, would it only be licensable to corporate entities? If so, wouldn't that exclude all the Mozilla contributors? (Unless a Mozilla.com hired all the contributors on as employees - on salaray at say 1 cent a year?)
It will be interesting to see how these issues will play out.