During the cold war, we were terrified of a conflict with the big bad USSR. We knew they were bad because they limited the movement of their people. Border crossings were hell. You could be detained for no reason. Papers had to be in order. Cops could break into your home for any reason, even the wrong reason, and take you or your family members to jail. The stories were horrifying and we couldn't imagine why the people put up with it, other than the fact that they were no longer free.
We heard these stories not just from the news, but from immigrants who had escaped from the USSR to come to the free lands of the USA.
How times have changed.
My wife and I now dream of a day when we have enough money to leave the USA and settle somewhere a bit less offensive to our sense of liberty. I'm not sure where that is exactly, but it's not here.
I'm sure there are a lot of smart people at NASA who can do quite a lot on their modest government regulated salaries.
But I'm equally sure they are vastly outnumbered by mediocre and downright incompetent talent that waste tax payer dollars doing little, nothing or actually counter-producing by dragging the aforementioned smart people into their screwed up projects on last-minute, emergency fix-this sessions.
It's the nature of government employment methodology: "keep the fat."
Thank god we have some rich billionaires developing the commercial space program.
I'm unclear what the fuck you are talking about or how it relates to my post, but I do want to point out that my concerns and views on our sucky USA governments have absolutely nothing to do with who has won the election(s) over the past hundred years.
I'm talking about a broken system protecting inefficient employees, departments, and budgets.
You are being disingenuous at worst. At best, you are ignoring copious known truths and years of data:
Does the concrete on the roads sit still? Mostly, yes. Do we pay way too much for this service? Definitely.
Do we have electricity? Yes, except when they turn it off because they failed to plan for peak usage.
Are we being raided by armed bandits? Perhaps not today, but due to increases in no-knock warrants, I risk my life and livelihood if I shoot back at intruders since they might be police raiding the wrong house. Not to mention the copious web of gun-laws outlawing particular makes, models and carrying capacities.
Do we have running water? Yes, but we've been asked to cut back 19% and accept that rates will rise to cover the revenue short-fall (EBMUD 2008 Drought). Is it clean? Probably, but we filter out the bromide, chlorine and other crap anyway because you never know.
What about the mail? Are you kidding me? They don't even have a service agreement. Priority mail doesn't mean what you think it means. About the only thing I can depend on getting is junk. I make a point of ordering and shipping everything through FedEx and UPS for many reasons.
Need I go on? Or do you want some time to think up other areas of our lives where government has gone meddling with a promise of making things more reliable, fair, affordable and predictable?
There is a reason why I call Dominos for a pizza and not my local government. Government is an institution that protects the lazy employee and rewards those that never leave. The incentives are aligned with stagnation and waste. It is no wonder that we never see anything innovative, efficient and useful from our governments. The above poster wasn't claiming that government doesn't do anything, I believe the claim is that government doesn't do anything useful or efficient.
You have to create an environment of competition to weed out the crappy service. Roads, water, power, security are all examples where competition has been eradicated and government monopoly stagnates.
DD-WRT has an option to reboot daily. Which I use because that helped the stability problems immensely. Prior to that scheduled early morning reboot, I would lose the DHCPD service on the router causing clients to sort of "lose it" over the next 36 hours. Rebooting the wrt54g brought dhcpd back online and thus allowed clients to reconnect.
Now I run dhcpd from a linux server along with dns and nat, etc. The router is just a dumb WAP and I still have to cold reboot it every month or so. What do you expect for $100?
FYI, I have the same problem with my Apple Airport Express.
You're right, predicting a year by year change with a margin of error greater than your trend seems stupid, but it's still useful; without waiting for the end of the ten years.
If we're at <picks a number> 70F average today and their trend claims 0.02F per year, then chart it. Next year should be 70.2F on average. If they want a 5F margin of error, cool. I don't care. Just put up or shut up. But let's get predictions for surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures before we put money in the game. From what I've heard, the ocean temps have been flat.
The more important aspect of a detailed prediction is predetermined measurement methodology and independent verification. I've seen too many charts and graphs that have been coming online in recent years and decades. We've got tree rings, ice cores, documentation from monks, modern recordings, satellite infra-red topography, etc. And I've seen too many chunks of data dropped or ignored in favor of the maximum.
The most baffling aspect is the Earth's known historical record. We know it has been hotter. We know it has been cooler. We know wild swings have occurred without man's assistance. And yet, here we are, certain that we're overcooking our moderately cool planet with no possible way to fix things if we don't act NOW!
I've been on this planet for only a little while now, but in my short life I've lived through predictions of global cooling, nuclear winter when that wasn't scary enough, nuclear war, HIV, ebola, sars, mad cows, global warming... it's ALWAYS something that's going to kill us all or our children if we don't do something right now.
Assuming that this becomes part of the standard health-care package that today's politicians are declaring an unearned right for every human being.
Assuming today's population of 6.6 billion people represents three concurrent generations with an average of twenty-five years between generations.
Assuming that birth rates stabilize at 1.0 children per person (ie. all people enter into monogomous life-long partnerships having only two children per couple for the remainder of their extended lives).
That puts the Earth's population around 88 billion just by virtue of everyone living 1,000 years. Have you thought about the consequences of this technological advancement?
No, what are your plans for the consequences of this advancement?
I for one would certainly like to benefit and encourage you to succeed, but I'm not so sure that couple down the street is deserving...they're strange.
Yeah, it's almost as if the First Amendment doesn't apply to Iran...
Obviously not, but the USA's Bill of Rights did not provide people with their rights, rather it tried to remind future governments that people have rights by virtue of their existence.
Of course, that constitutes a belief, which makes it a kind of religion, from which people have a right to be free of as easily as a right to take part in. If we in the USA truly want to practice what we preach, we would withdraw from all these countries we occupy and open our borders to any and all who wish to share our beliefs that humans are free to believe what they want.
Anyone who believes this isn't a man-made disaster... shut the f&*k up.
Alternatively, any one who would like to stop hearing opposing view points, feel free to close the browser.
It's worth repeating, historically, the mob is often, if not always, wrong. Below is an excerpt from a speech that is well worth reading for an historical perspective:
In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.
In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
The argument can easily be made that over the last ten to twenty years we have moved from a consensus of there-is-no-warming to a consensus of global-warming. One might argue that a few determined scientists with excellent data managed this swing in just a few short years.
But the argument can also be made that the consensus prior to global-warming was not there-is-no-warming, but rather global-cooling and trying to drive policy to prevent the coming ice age. These people have a poor track record with predictions, but always seem ready with recommendations for how to behave.
Only history will prove them right or wrong. Prior to that, we are just running around with our hands in the air like chicken-little and demanding that massive works are undertaken to shore up the sky. Had we done this for global-cooling in the 1970s, we would have wasted a lot of money and resources.
I would suggest that the global warming crowd make a track of predictions for average surface, ocean and atmospheric temperatures for the next ten years. They should be able to predict the average within a margin of error EACH year on the way to that goal. If they can select the measurement criteria and firmly state their predictions... then we can observe their accuracy and react accordingly as the reality of the situation unfolds.
Up until now, all they've done is move the target.
but to write off other things such as the known impact of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a wise idea either.
That's an asinine statement. We know the impact of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's marginal. Methane and Water Vapor have a much greater effect on warming than CO2. CO2 merely happens to be exhausted from another device that the Green Movement hates more than cows, farming and a growing population: cars
I'd far prefer we write off CO2 emissions and focus on more pressing and important concerns such as:
* cancer * heart disease * abundant clean water * abundant clean energy * space exploration, mining and exploitation (lots of power, water and minerals up there) * diaspora away from Earth
These things are necessary for the long-term survival of the human race. Maintaining our planet withing an average of 1C of recently recorded temperatures is not. Nor is it possible. The planet has had huge thermal swings in the past, none of them caused by mankind. It has been much warmer than now; it has been much cooler; more importantly, it has moved the temperature needle on its own, when it felt like it, many, many degrees up and down. We did nothing then, we can do nothing now but try to get off.
If you want a temperature controlled sterile environment, I hope you're supporting the space program.
Except that in software, you have a large number of developers who were culled through an interview process and if you work for an average company, occasionally get fired for incompetence.
In government circles, you have a large number of bureaucrats who were culled through an inability to maintain gainful employment in the commercial sector and if they manage to land a spot in an average government agency occasionally celebrate the departure of the most skilled.
When I saw this headline and read the article, all I could think of was the following:
* coal... bad * oil... bad * natural gas... bad * nuclear... whoa! that's not necessary you terrorist! * geothermal... uncommon * wind... unpredictable and kills birds, nature hater! * solar... clean energy!... wait a minute... bad.
Which leaves us with the true motive of the green movement: reduce the population and die you planet haters!
1997 after Dunblane. Yes, you lot have been seriously restricting guns for decades, which is why the USA had to send you guns to help you fight WWI. But you can google for the effects of your latest insanity.
Seriously, it's like opening the pens and putting bells on your sheep:
I noticed that you are only shaping traffic on one interface. If your example eth1 is your internal LAN, then your script will nicely manage your downloads, but do little to prevent you from flooding your upstream. If eth1 is your external WAN then you are shaping your uploads, but merely dropping downloads when you flood. Since it works for you, I'm going to assume eth1 is LAN.
When I looked waaay into this subject last year, we had ten employees sharing a T1 for internet and voip. Since we are software developers, we use ssh a lot and it sucked bad too. I ended up using a linux box (FC6) for the firewall and installed traffic shaping on both the WAN and LAN interfaces using HTB, Stochastic Fairness and moderately decent filters.
This allowed us to torrent all day over a T1 while simultaneously enjoying 20ms latency on our ssh connections to Internet servers. Web browsing felt unaffected. We tested it heavily;).
When we moved to a 100Mbps link, I continued rate limiting at 4Mbps to save money, but plumbed in some back-doors for favored servers.
In the spirit of sharing, I've also posted a sample script to my journal. There are probably bugs and improvements to be made, but it works well for us.
I'm not referring to isolated incidents like Waco, Ruby Ridge, or the Black Panthers. I'm talking about national civil unrest. I'm talking about a federal law mandating confiscation of all weapons. Curfews. Indiscriminate bombings of urban houses and neighborhoods across the Nation because there was a "bad guy" living there.
No body gives a shit when it's happening in someone else's back yard. But if a real tyrannical government took over and started working us over like we're working over Iraq... then you'd have 1% of the people across the nation forming militias and shooting back.
That scenario should NEVER happen as long as we have hundreds of millions of guns in Civilian hands.
The UK has also seen a tripling of day-time, owner-at-home, burglaries since outlawing guns. Yea, you guys are so Civilized, you invited the thieves into your homes!
The only way you get your wish is if all law-abiding citizens are disarmed. Or we give muggers x-ray vision. It's very cavalier for you to make that decision for me, my wife, sons and daughters.
Alternatively, since individual bullet wounds are rarely fatal, and even more rarely instantly fatal, were you armed, you would be able to get off a shot or two before you collapsed. Your mugger would now be scared, possibly wounded and inclined to shop elsewhere. He (commonly men) might also leave a blood-trail for police to follow. Hospitals have to report bullet wounds, you know.
In another scenario, while you might cower in fear and handover your wallet, a nearby armed Citizen may come to your aid and eliminated said mugger from society.
RKBA makes crime more expensive for the criminal. Yes, they might raise the odds by carrying bigger guns or traveling in packs. But the alternative is to grant these criminals with the decision of life-or-death for you and every other law-abiding Citizen in this country.
If the army decides to move in, it will do so with howitzers, mobile rocket launchers and bomb-proof APCs...
I don't think the framers were dumb enough to suspect that average men with personal rifles would stand a chance overthrowing a trained army in direct combat. In fact, history shows they knew better. They engaged the British in guerrilla warfare and harried their armies and commanders until the war was untenable. They created a financial and personnel burden on the army that eventually proved too expensive to maintain. This blueprint for a david vs. goliath encounter has been repeated since (and very likely prior) in Vietnam and Iraq.
While the U.S.Army has might and force on their side, they cannot wield that strong-arm power in a civil war like we do in Iraq. The Citizens would revolt. Citizens do not tolerate their schools, churches and houses being carpet bombed just because there was intel that an insurrectionist was in the area. Such Citizens, non-combatants, all of them, would call their senator and demand an end to hostilities or an impeachment. Imagine how different our engagement in Iraq would be proceeding IF EVERY IRAQI COULD VOTE IN U.S. ELECTIONS. We'd already be done and paying reparations to thousands of families.
Individual ownership of guns is not intended as a way to subdue a tyrannical government. It is a check-mate move on the part of our founding fathers. If our government ever gets to the point where common citizens are compelled to grab a gun and go shoot agents of our government, it is over.
Of course, if the new government is a tyrannical dictator bent on subduing the entire populace regardless of the collateral damage, then they're going to have a long drawn out guerrilla war on their hands and no agent of the government would sleep soundly at night. No police officer or soldier would be safe. That's not a big deal when their families live 12,000 miles away from the battlefield, but when soldiers are told to attack their own countrymen... who retaliate by setting their home on fire... you get a lot of deserters.
Guns, aside from being a personal safety device, maintain a glimmer of hope for America. Without them, we would be at the mercy of our lords and masters.
When my manager asks me about the state of things, I lose my concentration, have to write down some notes about what I was working on, answer his question, read my notes and try to regain my concentration.
I always knew page swapping was a performance detriment. Perhaps you should buy some more RAM or install a different, more efficient OS in your cyberbrain.
Sorry if I'm off by a bit; this is from memory, but I'm fairly certain the ratios are correct. I went on a rampage with a kill-o-watt meter last year after a rather large power bill.
Nintendo Wii: 45W MSFT Xbox360: 185W MSFT Xbox: 135W
Yea, Nintendo is the worst polluter of the bunch. Those bastards. I think they sell more of them too!
Seriously, with the importance of the Internet in everyday life, is there a case that this actually infringes on a person's civil rights, or at least on their basic rights?
This is an important point, so I'll take a moment to look up the reference I'm thinking of... ah yes, here it is, US Constitution, Amendment I:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There seems to be a habit, by politicians, policy makers and their employed enforcers (e.g. police, DMV clerks, teachers, etc.) to talk about many things we take for granted as a "privilege" when in fact, they are not. Please allow me a moment to clarify and draw some distinctions here.
1.a. Using the internet is a privilege you purchase or borrow from some other provider. Your ISP, for instance, grants you the privilege of using their Internet resources in exchange for the privilege of using your money on their books as revenues received. If you piss off your ISP, they might revoke this privilege and you'll have to find another. Play nice.
1.b. Living in a free society such as ours, you have a right to speak freely over many mediums and peaceably assemble whether physically or virtually. Provided of course that you are not trampling someone else's rights in the process (i.e. your ISP). This means that speaking freely, or posting in this case, falls under things the government should leave alone. Using the analogy of the soapbox, as a property owner, I have every right to kick a soapbox speaker off my property. But as a member of society, I have no right to kick them off public property or forbid them from entering into contract with another private property owner across the street.
Talking about banning people from the Internet is very much like banning people from using a phone (it has been done, but precedence does not equate correctness) or speaking aloud outside of their home.
We have to remember to draw these distinctions whenever someone starts talking about anything being a privilege vs. a right (driving is my favorite example). It's often the case that we have a right to pursue our interests, whatever they may be, but being able to afford them, and finding individuals willing to sell that opportunity, is a privilege we all have to earn.
Government needs to focus more (or not at all) on the cost structures of those privileges and the costs of consequences for abuses, rather than denying specific individuals of certain inalienable rights.
I don't think a citizen can opt out of a search. Certainly in some cases, the government is obligated to search for the "victim" if only to determine true cause of death. Did they go missing while hiking or were they murdered and thrown off a cliff?
Our society has injected itself, welcome or not, into the business of death. It seems very WRONG to bill a grieving widow for the costs of these services unless fraud can be proven.
As we have seen through our own history and present, when civilizations interact, it is often hostile and violent. It would only take one aggressive, space-faring, xenophobic race to send the rest into hiding.
With two such crazies, even the aggressors would hide lest they meet their doom in a kinetic fireball. Planets and space habitats are just too easy a target.
This fits with UFO observations too. We see their ships, but not their home worlds. Ships are mobile and hyperspace travel may be untraceable. Additionally, why would they communicate with us when we're broadcasting everything into space? That's crazy talk. It's only a matter of time before the Zurgs find us, drop some comets in our oceans and turn Earth into an algae farm or just bust it up and leave us for dead.
Hell, it may have happened before. We have an asteroid belt that some propose was formerly a planet. Our Moon was supposedly formed through some sort of cataclysmic collision between Earth and some other large planetoid.
We need ships. Lots of them. We're sitting ducks out here.
Guy's wife disappears. He then immediately removes the seat from his car...
Coincidentally, not immediately. Your bias is showing.
This murder was not proved. They have no body, they have insufficient blood to prove she is dead. Typical human holds 8 pints IIRC, that is much more than a 6" stain. They have no evidence of planning to commit on his part. All they have is a defendant that got up on the stand and delivered answers that the jury found weird, strange, not-normal.
So they alienated him, found him strange, and thus, were no longer a jury of his peers. Just a jury finding that the defendant was odd and probably hiding something and since we're in a murder trial, it must be that.
I have no special knowledge of this case. He may be a raging lunatic for all I know. But the one take-away that all/.'ers should heed is this:
When in court, on trial for your life, subject to judgement from average citizens who have no hope of understanding you, your mannerisms or your bizarre hobbies and interests, keep your mouth shut.
Disclaimers: I'm a senior manager for a software start-up. I worked my way up through the ranks. It took a long time. I dropped out of college because the CS program was too slow, in hindsight maybe I should have finished, maybe not.
I've interviewed hundreds if not thousands of CS majors and similar minded people for software positions. Typically, the name of their college doesn't ring a bell with me. I don't know the quality of their CS programs unless it's _the_ school I attended, MIT or Cal-Tech... and even then, my "knowledge" of those programs today is assumed.
What matters far more than the name of the college during the interview process are the candidate's answers to the following:
1. Why CS?
2. What programming do you do in your spare time?
3. What internships have you had and what did you do there?
4. Can you solve these problems?
What we often find is that most people have a degree... because. Most CS majors have little passion for the sport. Most interview candidates cannot "code their way out of a paper bag" as a former associate used to put it. If you ask them a textbook problem, you get a textbook answer. But if you ask them a real-world problem... crickets.
There are a few who love programming and seek out or invent projects that interest them... because. The degree was just part of that pursuit. Whether by nature or by design, they have tackled problems on their own of such variety, that their mind has developed the ability to think, analyze, and solve. Such people do fine in our interview process, irrespective of their degree(s) or lack thereof.
More importantly, they do very well in employment because the work for them, is the end, not the means.
The best advice I got in college was this: "Find something you love to do, twenty hours per day, every day, with or without pay. Then figure out how to make money at that."
Slashdot Mirror
During the cold war, we were terrified of a conflict with the big bad USSR. We knew they were bad because they limited the movement of their people. Border crossings were hell. You could be detained for no reason. Papers had to be in order. Cops could break into your home for any reason, even the wrong reason, and take you or your family members to jail. The stories were horrifying and we couldn't imagine why the people put up with it, other than the fact that they were no longer free.
We heard these stories not just from the news, but from immigrants who had escaped from the USSR to come to the free lands of the USA.
How times have changed.
My wife and I now dream of a day when we have enough money to leave the USA and settle somewhere a bit less offensive to our sense of liberty. I'm not sure where that is exactly, but it's not here.
I'm sure there are a lot of smart people at NASA who can do quite a lot on their modest government regulated salaries.
But I'm equally sure they are vastly outnumbered by mediocre and downright incompetent talent that waste tax payer dollars doing little, nothing or actually counter-producing by dragging the aforementioned smart people into their screwed up projects on last-minute, emergency fix-this sessions.
It's the nature of government employment methodology: "keep the fat."
Thank god we have some rich billionaires developing the commercial space program.
I'm unclear what the fuck you are talking about or how it relates to my post, but I do want to point out that my concerns and views on our sucky USA governments have absolutely nothing to do with who has won the election(s) over the past hundred years.
I'm talking about a broken system protecting inefficient employees, departments, and budgets.
You are being disingenuous at worst. At best, you are ignoring copious known truths and years of data:
Need I go on? Or do you want some time to think up other areas of our lives where government has gone meddling with a promise of making things more reliable, fair, affordable and predictable?
There is a reason why I call Dominos for a pizza and not my local government. Government is an institution that protects the lazy employee and rewards those that never leave. The incentives are aligned with stagnation and waste. It is no wonder that we never see anything innovative, efficient and useful from our governments. The above poster wasn't claiming that government doesn't do anything, I believe the claim is that government doesn't do anything useful or efficient.
You have to create an environment of competition to weed out the crappy service. Roads, water, power, security are all examples where competition has been eradicated and government monopoly stagnates.
DD-WRT has an option to reboot daily. Which I use because that helped the stability problems immensely. Prior to that scheduled early morning reboot, I would lose the DHCPD service on the router causing clients to sort of "lose it" over the next 36 hours. Rebooting the wrt54g brought dhcpd back online and thus allowed clients to reconnect.
Now I run dhcpd from a linux server along with dns and nat, etc. The router is just a dumb WAP and I still have to cold reboot it every month or so. What do you expect for $100?
FYI, I have the same problem with my Apple Airport Express.
WRT: limiting pollution; I was implying that in "abundant clean..." We agree.
I also believe that clean energy, clean water are going to be essential skills for space exploration.
You're right, predicting a year by year change with a margin of error greater than your trend seems stupid, but it's still useful; without waiting for the end of the ten years.
If we're at <picks a number> 70F average today and their trend claims 0.02F per year, then chart it. Next year should be 70.2F on average. If they want a 5F margin of error, cool. I don't care. Just put up or shut up. But let's get predictions for surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures before we put money in the game. From what I've heard, the ocean temps have been flat.
The more important aspect of a detailed prediction is predetermined measurement methodology and independent verification. I've seen too many charts and graphs that have been coming online in recent years and decades. We've got tree rings, ice cores, documentation from monks, modern recordings, satellite infra-red topography, etc. And I've seen too many chunks of data dropped or ignored in favor of the maximum.
The most baffling aspect is the Earth's known historical record. We know it has been hotter. We know it has been cooler. We know wild swings have occurred without man's assistance. And yet, here we are, certain that we're overcooking our moderately cool planet with no possible way to fix things if we don't act NOW!
I've been on this planet for only a little while now, but in my short life I've lived through predictions of global cooling, nuclear winter when that wasn't scary enough, nuclear war, HIV, ebola, sars, mad cows, global warming... it's ALWAYS something that's going to kill us all or our children if we don't do something right now.
I'd just like the hysteria to stop.
Assuming you are successful.
Assuming that this becomes part of the standard health-care package that today's politicians are declaring an unearned right for every human being.
Assuming today's population of 6.6 billion people represents three concurrent generations with an average of twenty-five years between generations.
Assuming that birth rates stabilize at 1.0 children per person (ie. all people enter into monogomous life-long partnerships having only two children per couple for the remainder of their extended lives).
That puts the Earth's population around 88 billion just by virtue of everyone living 1,000 years. Have you thought about the consequences of this technological advancement?
No, what are your plans for the consequences of this advancement?
I for one would certainly like to benefit and encourage you to succeed, but I'm not so sure that couple down the street is deserving...they're strange.
Yeah, it's almost as if the First Amendment doesn't apply to Iran...
Obviously not, but the USA's Bill of Rights did not provide people with their rights, rather it tried to remind future governments that people have rights by virtue of their existence.
Of course, that constitutes a belief, which makes it a kind of religion, from which people have a right to be free of as easily as a right to take part in. If we in the USA truly want to practice what we preach, we would withdraw from all these countries we occupy and open our borders to any and all who wish to share our beliefs that humans are free to believe what they want.
Anyone who believes this isn't a man-made disaster ... shut the f&*k up.
Alternatively, any one who would like to stop hearing opposing view points, feel free to close the browser.
It's worth repeating, historically, the mob is often, if not always, wrong. Below is an excerpt from a speech that is well worth reading for an historical perspective:
http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
The argument can easily be made that over the last ten to twenty years we have moved from a consensus of there-is-no-warming to a consensus of global-warming. One might argue that a few determined scientists with excellent data managed this swing in just a few short years.
But the argument can also be made that the consensus prior to global-warming was not there-is-no-warming, but rather global-cooling and trying to drive policy to prevent the coming ice age. These people have a poor track record with predictions, but always seem ready with recommendations for how to behave.
Only history will prove them right or wrong. Prior to that, we are just running around with our hands in the air like chicken-little and demanding that massive works are undertaken to shore up the sky. Had we done this for global-cooling in the 1970s, we would have wasted a lot of money and resources.
I would suggest that the global warming crowd make a track of predictions for average surface, ocean and atmospheric temperatures for the next ten years. They should be able to predict the average within a margin of error EACH year on the way to that goal. If they can select the measurement criteria and firmly state their predictions... then we can observe their accuracy and react accordingly as the reality of the situation unfolds.
Up until now, all they've done is move the target.
but to write off other things such as the known impact of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not a wise idea either.
That's an asinine statement. We know the impact of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's marginal. Methane and Water Vapor have a much greater effect on warming than CO2. CO2 merely happens to be exhausted from another device that the Green Movement hates more than cows, farming and a growing population: cars
I'd far prefer we write off CO2 emissions and focus on more pressing and important concerns such as:
* cancer
* heart disease
* abundant clean water
* abundant clean energy
* space exploration, mining and exploitation (lots of power, water and minerals up there)
* diaspora away from Earth
These things are necessary for the long-term survival of the human race. Maintaining our planet withing an average of 1C of recently recorded temperatures is not. Nor is it possible. The planet has had huge thermal swings in the past, none of them caused by mankind. It has been much warmer than now; it has been much cooler; more importantly, it has moved the temperature needle on its own, when it felt like it, many, many degrees up and down. We did nothing then, we can do nothing now but try to get off.
If you want a temperature controlled sterile environment, I hope you're supporting the space program.
Except that in software, you have a large number of developers who were culled through an interview process and if you work for an average company, occasionally get fired for incompetence.
In government circles, you have a large number of bureaucrats who were culled through an inability to maintain gainful employment in the commercial sector and if they manage to land a spot in an average government agency occasionally celebrate the departure of the most skilled.
When I saw this headline and read the article, all I could think of was the following:
* coal... bad ... wait a minute... bad.
* oil... bad
* natural gas... bad
* nuclear... whoa! that's not necessary you terrorist!
* geothermal... uncommon
* wind... unpredictable and kills birds, nature hater!
* solar... clean energy!
Which leaves us with the true motive of the green movement: reduce the population and die you planet haters!
1997 after Dunblane. Yes, you lot have been seriously restricting guns for decades, which is why the USA had to send you guns to help you fight WWI. But you can google for the effects of your latest insanity.
Seriously, it's like opening the pens and putting bells on your sheep:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/23/AR2007042301794.html
I noticed that you are only shaping traffic on one interface. If your example eth1 is your internal LAN, then your script will nicely manage your downloads, but do little to prevent you from flooding your upstream. If eth1 is your external WAN then you are shaping your uploads, but merely dropping downloads when you flood. Since it works for you, I'm going to assume eth1 is LAN.
When I looked waaay into this subject last year, we had ten employees sharing a T1 for internet and voip. Since we are software developers, we use ssh a lot and it sucked bad too. I ended up using a linux box (FC6) for the firewall and installed traffic shaping on both the WAN and LAN interfaces using HTB, Stochastic Fairness and moderately decent filters.
This allowed us to torrent all day over a T1 while simultaneously enjoying 20ms latency on our ssh connections to Internet servers. Web browsing felt unaffected. We tested it heavily ;).
When we moved to a 100Mbps link, I continued rate limiting at 4Mbps to save money, but plumbed in some back-doors for favored servers.
In the spirit of sharing, I've also posted a sample script to my journal. There are probably bugs and improvements to be made, but it works well for us.
I'm not referring to isolated incidents like Waco, Ruby Ridge, or the Black Panthers. I'm talking about national civil unrest. I'm talking about a federal law mandating confiscation of all weapons. Curfews. Indiscriminate bombings of urban houses and neighborhoods across the Nation because there was a "bad guy" living there.
No body gives a shit when it's happening in someone else's back yard. But if a real tyrannical government took over and started working us over like we're working over Iraq... then you'd have 1% of the people across the nation forming militias and shooting back.
That scenario should NEVER happen as long as we have hundreds of millions of guns in Civilian hands.
The UK has also seen a tripling of day-time, owner-at-home, burglaries since outlawing guns. Yea, you guys are so Civilized, you invited the thieves into your homes!
The only way you get your wish is if all law-abiding citizens are disarmed. Or we give muggers x-ray vision. It's very cavalier for you to make that decision for me, my wife, sons and daughters.
Alternatively, since individual bullet wounds are rarely fatal, and even more rarely instantly fatal, were you armed, you would be able to get off a shot or two before you collapsed. Your mugger would now be scared, possibly wounded and inclined to shop elsewhere. He (commonly men) might also leave a blood-trail for police to follow. Hospitals have to report bullet wounds, you know.
In another scenario, while you might cower in fear and handover your wallet, a nearby armed Citizen may come to your aid and eliminated said mugger from society.
RKBA makes crime more expensive for the criminal. Yes, they might raise the odds by carrying bigger guns or traveling in packs. But the alternative is to grant these criminals with the decision of life-or-death for you and every other law-abiding Citizen in this country.
I don't trust MY life in the hands of criminals.
If the army decides to move in, it will do so with howitzers, mobile rocket launchers and bomb-proof APCs...
I don't think the framers were dumb enough to suspect that average men with personal rifles would stand a chance overthrowing a trained army in direct combat. In fact, history shows they knew better. They engaged the British in guerrilla warfare and harried their armies and commanders until the war was untenable. They created a financial and personnel burden on the army that eventually proved too expensive to maintain. This blueprint for a david vs. goliath encounter has been repeated since (and very likely prior) in Vietnam and Iraq.
While the U.S.Army has might and force on their side, they cannot wield that strong-arm power in a civil war like we do in Iraq. The Citizens would revolt. Citizens do not tolerate their schools, churches and houses being carpet bombed just because there was intel that an insurrectionist was in the area. Such Citizens, non-combatants, all of them, would call their senator and demand an end to hostilities or an impeachment. Imagine how different our engagement in Iraq would be proceeding IF EVERY IRAQI COULD VOTE IN U.S. ELECTIONS. We'd already be done and paying reparations to thousands of families.
Individual ownership of guns is not intended as a way to subdue a tyrannical government. It is a check-mate move on the part of our founding fathers. If our government ever gets to the point where common citizens are compelled to grab a gun and go shoot agents of our government, it is over.
Of course, if the new government is a tyrannical dictator bent on subduing the entire populace regardless of the collateral damage, then they're going to have a long drawn out guerrilla war on their hands and no agent of the government would sleep soundly at night. No police officer or soldier would be safe. That's not a big deal when their families live 12,000 miles away from the battlefield, but when soldiers are told to attack their own countrymen... who retaliate by setting their home on fire... you get a lot of deserters.
Guns, aside from being a personal safety device, maintain a glimmer of hope for America. Without them, we would be at the mercy of our lords and masters.
When my manager asks me about the state of things, I lose my concentration, have to write down some notes about what I was working on, answer his question, read my notes and try to regain my concentration.
I always knew page swapping was a performance detriment. Perhaps you should buy some more RAM or install a different, more efficient OS in your cyberbrain.
Sorry if I'm off by a bit; this is from memory, but I'm fairly certain the ratios are correct. I went on a rampage with a kill-o-watt meter last year after a rather large power bill.
Nintendo Wii: 45W
MSFT Xbox360: 185W
MSFT Xbox: 135W
Yea, Nintendo is the worst polluter of the bunch. Those bastards. I think they sell more of them too!
Seriously, with the importance of the Internet in everyday life, is there a case that this actually infringes on a person's civil rights, or at least on their basic rights?
This is an important point, so I'll take a moment to look up the reference I'm thinking of... ah yes, here it is, US Constitution, Amendment I:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
There seems to be a habit, by politicians, policy makers and their employed enforcers (e.g. police, DMV clerks, teachers, etc.) to talk about many things we take for granted as a "privilege" when in fact, they are not. Please allow me a moment to clarify and draw some distinctions here.
1.a. Using the internet is a privilege you purchase or borrow from some other provider. Your ISP, for instance, grants you the privilege of using their Internet resources in exchange for the privilege of using your money on their books as revenues received. If you piss off your ISP, they might revoke this privilege and you'll have to find another. Play nice.
1.b. Living in a free society such as ours, you have a right to speak freely over many mediums and peaceably assemble whether physically or virtually. Provided of course that you are not trampling someone else's rights in the process (i.e. your ISP). This means that speaking freely, or posting in this case, falls under things the government should leave alone. Using the analogy of the soapbox, as a property owner, I have every right to kick a soapbox speaker off my property. But as a member of society, I have no right to kick them off public property or forbid them from entering into contract with another private property owner across the street.
Talking about banning people from the Internet is very much like banning people from using a phone (it has been done, but precedence does not equate correctness) or speaking aloud outside of their home.
We have to remember to draw these distinctions whenever someone starts talking about anything being a privilege vs. a right (driving is my favorite example). It's often the case that we have a right to pursue our interests, whatever they may be, but being able to afford them, and finding individuals willing to sell that opportunity, is a privilege we all have to earn.
Government needs to focus more (or not at all) on the cost structures of those privileges and the costs of consequences for abuses, rather than denying specific individuals of certain inalienable rights.
I don't think a citizen can opt out of a search. Certainly in some cases, the government is obligated to search for the "victim" if only to determine true cause of death. Did they go missing while hiking or were they murdered and thrown off a cliff?
Our society has injected itself, welcome or not, into the business of death. It seems very WRONG to bill a grieving widow for the costs of these services unless fraud can be proven.
As we have seen through our own history and present, when civilizations interact, it is often hostile and violent. It would only take one aggressive, space-faring, xenophobic race to send the rest into hiding.
With two such crazies, even the aggressors would hide lest they meet their doom in a kinetic fireball. Planets and space habitats are just too easy a target.
This fits with UFO observations too. We see their ships, but not their home worlds. Ships are mobile and hyperspace travel may be untraceable. Additionally, why would they communicate with us when we're broadcasting everything into space? That's crazy talk. It's only a matter of time before the Zurgs find us, drop some comets in our oceans and turn Earth into an algae farm or just bust it up and leave us for dead.
Hell, it may have happened before. We have an asteroid belt that some propose was formerly a planet. Our Moon was supposedly formed through some sort of cataclysmic collision between Earth and some other large planetoid.
We need ships. Lots of them. We're sitting ducks out here.
Guy's wife disappears. He then immediately removes the seat from his car...
/.'ers should heed is this:
Coincidentally, not immediately. Your bias is showing.
This murder was not proved. They have no body, they have insufficient blood to prove she is dead. Typical human holds 8 pints IIRC, that is much more than a 6" stain. They have no evidence of planning to commit on his part. All they have is a defendant that got up on the stand and delivered answers that the jury found weird, strange, not-normal.
So they alienated him, found him strange, and thus, were no longer a jury of his peers. Just a jury finding that the defendant was odd and probably hiding something and since we're in a murder trial, it must be that.
I have no special knowledge of this case. He may be a raging lunatic for all I know. But the one take-away that all
When in court, on trial for your life, subject to judgement from average citizens who have no hope of understanding you, your mannerisms or your bizarre hobbies and interests, keep your mouth shut.
Disclaimers: I'm a senior manager for a software start-up. I worked my way up through the ranks. It took a long time. I dropped out of college because the CS program was too slow, in hindsight maybe I should have finished, maybe not.
... because. Most CS majors have little passion for the sport. Most interview candidates cannot "code their way out of a paper bag" as a former associate used to put it. If you ask them a textbook problem, you get a textbook answer. But if you ask them a real-world problem... crickets.
... because. The degree was just part of that pursuit. Whether by nature or by design, they have tackled problems on their own of such variety, that their mind has developed the ability to think, analyze, and solve. Such people do fine in our interview process, irrespective of their degree(s) or lack thereof.
I've interviewed hundreds if not thousands of CS majors and similar minded people for software positions. Typically, the name of their college doesn't ring a bell with me. I don't know the quality of their CS programs unless it's _the_ school I attended, MIT or Cal-Tech... and even then, my "knowledge" of those programs today is assumed.
What matters far more than the name of the college during the interview process are the candidate's answers to the following:
1. Why CS?
2. What programming do you do in your spare time?
3. What internships have you had and what did you do there?
4. Can you solve these problems?
What we often find is that most people have a degree
There are a few who love programming and seek out or invent projects that interest them
More importantly, they do very well in employment because the work for them, is the end, not the means.
The best advice I got in college was this: "Find something you love to do, twenty hours per day, every day, with or without pay. Then figure out how to make money at that."