So, basically, they inadvertnatly created a cluster that can be hit and effectively screw everybody over. Then this guy announces that he's found the cluster and that the reward for hitting these servers is beyond that previously imagined by HaX0rs. The/. points to this report and hypes the reward for the attack. Are we just begging for the |33 to attack?
Quit wasting your time on Slashdot and get back to writing those IIS security patches.:^)
Come on. Look at the page. There are no banner ads or images. It's all handwritten HTML, totaling up to less than 8K of static content! The guy probably designed the page to withstand a slashdotting. Control-V posts are helpful in some cases. Like when the site requires "free registration", or when people are actually bitching they can't read it and you have it in your cache. If this particular Control-V gets modded up, it's proof that the moderator hasn't even tried to read the article.
In 2050, advances in technology have transformed the modern home into a center of moderation. Many choices and options left to torment the family of yesteryear have been eliminated to make the home economy part of a much larger one.
Here comes the dog, with an electronic newspaper for Father! Modern newspapers have no paper at all. Father loads the day's news into his electronic reader, and the words on the page disappear as his eyes move across them. The local ball team has made a stunning victory. Father decides to license the story so he can read it whenever he wants for a full month. A single click on the payment button, and it's a done deal! Micropayments to major media companies can be made effortlessly in the modern home with almost no effort or attention required.
What's on the television, Junior? He'll soon find out. He has only six more commercials to go before the family HDTV will let him change the channel to whatever station he wants to pay for. No need for mother to pester him about the volume, since it can't be turned down during advertisements anyway. But wait! Junior has to go to the bathroom. The television pauses its commercial to wait for Junior to finish his business there. After paying for a single flush at the computerized toilet, he's back and the directed marketing resumes! Meanwhile, it looks like the subscription for the refrigerator has run out, and the door won't open! Mother makes a payment using the built-in computer, and the door opens. Many foods that were canned in the old days are now provided on a subscription basis. No more stale canned food- everything is fresh, and less than a week old!
And it's time to go. Junior goes to the bus stop, where he and his friends can watch advertisements at a bus stop terminal while they wait for the bus to take them to school to watch even more advertisements. Meanwhile, father starts his hydrogen-powered fuel cell car. After turning the ignition, he watches a few minutes of targeted advertising on the built-in HDTV set. At the end, the set retracts, letting him see through the windshield, and the engine starts.
Mother is left at the house to take care of the housework. Oh no! Junior has left his music albums all over the floor again. Mother knows what to do! She simply gathers them in a dustpan and dumps them into the garbage. And why not? Since they have all been played once, none of them will play again anyway without extra payment. And as Junior's musical tastes improve, he can rent new music to discuss with his friends at school.
Let me get this straight: If I go shell ~$1800 USDfor a Sony Vaio (like I did 3 weeks ago), then I shell out another ~$20 USD for the disc, it not only will not play in their own damned PC, but it will crash their own system?
OK everybody! Let's all go out and buy a Vaio, and then return it because it doesn't play Celine Dion CDs!
I run an email reading service, where I charge $500 for reading spam sent to me after I advertise my business on USENET with a post that includes its unmunged email address. (It usually takes some detective work and litigation to collect the money.) If the government clamps down on this market, I will have to close my spam-reading sweatshop and all my hardworking employees will be out of a job. And this will certainly not have a good outcome for the American "consumer". (I don't know what that means but it sounds good, doesn't it?) Why is the government intent on destroying the American businessman? This is nothing less than economic terrorism. Once I start making a comfortable living, the govermnent has the responsibity of making sure that I never have to change my business model. Isn't this in the Constitution or something? I guess I have to send one of my $500 checks to Senator Fritz. That might buy me a bill that makes it illegal to have an email account that does not receive at least 200 federally approved unsolicited commercial emails per day. This would be great for my business and would help promote new markets.
Re:Good to see misinformation is alive and well.
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2
As a young 17yr old you should probably be doing a little more learning about the world at large, the good, the bad, and the ugly about it. Ever wonder why you've heard the phrase: "Respect your elders."? It's because they've lived through more, learned more, and seen more than you have, and therefore, have a much better insight into how the world works. Please don't presume to have all the answers at this stage of life.
As an older person you shouldn't presume that your age makes everything you say to a younger person correct.
You do remember the events of Sept 11, 2001, correct? Good.
And you might not get modded down as Flamebait if you weren't so arrogant.
19 psycho's gave their lives to kill thousands of people...probably even more than a handful of people that could've sympathized with their struggle.
Gee, you should have told the hijackers that. I'm sure they would have changed their minds.:P
Just look at the death rates for Palestinians vs Isreali's... sure the suicide bombers take out a few people or more with each suicide, but so many more die in Isreal's retaliation against those random attacks that it makes suicide absolutely pointless! Statistically, the Arabs get their butts kicked every time they've tried to beat on Isreal. It would behoove them to rethink their strategies about how best to conquer their enemy, because guranteeing the loss of one "soldier" with every suicide attack is a pretty poor tactical, and strategic, decision when trying to run a country.
I would expect such shallow logic from someone younger than a wise sage such as yourself. If you just bean-count lost lives, it does look like the Israelis are winning (400 dead Israelis, 1200 dead Palestinians). What you fail to grasp is the political leverage that Israel is losing. Pressure from the rest of the world is building on this issue. American interests worldwide are threatened because of it. Friendly but shaky Arab governments are being threatened by rage from below. Israel may end up losing the territories that it gained in the 1967 war. Not bad for just a couple thousand casualties.
In fact, Japan sent hundreds of kamikaze pilots towards American warships late in World War II, and look what that got 'em: Two nukes that killed hundres of thousands of people.
Yeah, that's a typical historical development relevant to this situation. If Israel were to nuke Palestine, it would mean serious blowback for Israel and us too.
But then again, the Islamic nations aren't interested in co-existence and peace, just the complete irradication of the Jews.
A caricaturization of reality. This is a complicated 50 year old conflict that is not as simple as the comic book worldview you propose.
Hmmm... Sounds a lot like Hitler, doesn't it? And that regime didn't go over too well with the rest of the world...
Oh, here we go again, with the inevitable comparison to Hitler. I call Godwin.
Duh ! What is this silly nonsense? Do you think heat is some kind of liquid that is affected by gravity and slowly soaks down through the rocks? Heat flows in all directions.
I don't think you understand something. Nowhere in the article did it say heat was "affected by gravity". Heat does show limited properties of signal propagation, because it flows at a finite rate along a gradient of decreasing temperature and is always conserved. (Meaning, because of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.)
And measuring temperature alone provides little useful information, you also need to know the thermal conductivity and specific heat of the medium(rocks), which is highly non-uniform.
This just requires extra data on rock composition, which is well known and easily accounted for in any computational heat equation model.
Old boreholes? Give me a break. The air convection in the hole will effect the measured temperature.
Air convection is unlikely to be much of a problem at all. Air is a good insulator and a borehole of air has low thermal mass. Water convection is a much larger problem. This is from their web site, explaining how they get rid of environmental interference:
Temperature perturbations in boreholes are produced by several processes. For climate reconstruction it is important to distinguish between a changing temperature through time at the Earth?s surface and other sources of temperature perturbations.
Geologic conditions and processes, other than climate change, that produce curvature in temperature-depth profiles include the following: (1) systematic variation of thermal conductivity with depth, (2) radioactive heat generation in rocks, (3) topography, (4) lateral variation of surface temperature caused by surface orientation, changing vegetation, or variable snow cover, (5) uplift and erosion or subsidence and burial at the site, and (6) vertical percolation of groundwater.
Several approaches are taken to isolate and correct for temperature anomalies from these sources. Available topographic and geological information available at each borehole site allows one to compute the magnitude and expected shape of temperature perturbations from each source. Sites can be discarded if the geologic disturbances are too large, otherwise corrections can be made. It is also possible to combine or stack temperature anomalies from several nearby drillholes. As geologic, topographic, and hydrologic conditions at each hole are unlikely to be identical, spurious temperature anomalies are likely to cancel. If each hole has experienced a similar climatic thermal signal, the climatically induced temperature anomalies will constructively interfere in the stacked temperature profiles.
There is one very efficient method of isolating climate change effects in borehole temperatures but the method requires patience. All of the non-climate sources of temperature anomalies are steady state, or quasi steady state relative to the time scale of climate change. Thus curvature in temperature profiles from these sources is stationary in time. By measuring and remeasuring borehole temperatures after an appropriate time lapse, changes in temperature with time can safely be ascribed to climatic sources. Several monitoring experiments are in progress. With present technology available to measure temperatures in boreholes to better than 10 mK accuracy, the repeat time to isolate climate-change signals is about 5 years.
So it appears they have thought of some of these things.
I for one don't believe any such thermal signal more than a few years old can exceed the noise threshold.
It's clear you haven't read the paper, but I guess I'll take your word for it. You should know.
You know, I was wondering why nobody could spell all of a sudden whenever the topic of global warming came up.
I think it's great, actually. As long as they're kept busy indoors posting vitriol to web sites and unleashing scripts against online polls, their SUVs are parked outside and not emitting any greenhouse gases.
Therefore unless if we can know the temperature of the surface of the earth in the past, there is no way of knowing the temperature of the surface of the earth in the past. Am I the only one who thinks this is weird science?
(It's been ten years since I took a PDE course, so parts of this could be slightly off.) The heat equation looks like this:
du/dt = A * (d/dx)^2 u
where u is temperature, and the partial derivative with respect to time is proportional to the second partial derivative with respect to space (depth). (A is a constant determined by the thermal conductivity of the material.)
To use the heat equation to solve for u(x,t), you need boundary conditions surrounding a two-dimensional domain (space and time). Time here runs from 1500 AD to 2000 AD, and space runs from 0 meters at the surface to 1000 meters at the bottom of the hole. So there are four boundary functions along the extremes of both dimensions:
The first one is the function they're trying to get- it's their unknown. The second they have to assume is constant, because there is no way to directly measure it. But since temperature perturbations at the surface of the earth won't have penetrated that deep over the time scale they're looking at, and most of the variability will originate at the surface, this is a fairly safe assumption. The third just requires them to drop a thermometer down the hole, as they have done. The fourth is what you're worrying about, but they don't need it because they have 2. and 3. and can use the heat equation to extrapolate over the rest of the domain.
A problem arises because the left side of the heat equation is a first derivative in time. As time progresses, features in the temperature profile u(x) degrade. (Partial differential equations that have second derivatives on both sides, like the wave equation, don't have this problem.) What you don't want to find, when you measure the temperature down one of these holes, is that the temperature increases uniformly with depth. That means you've waited too long, everything has equilibrated, and both sides of the heat equation are now zero, which prevents you from extrapolating backward. Apparently they must have found some curvature in u(x), or we wouldn't be seeing this article posted.
There are other complications. The thermal conductivity constant won't be uniform with depth, for example. What that means is they need computers to solve for u(x,t) numerically. Partial differential equations can almost never be solved symbolically anyway, so this isn't much of an issue.
What's their problem? Everyone and their dog knows that the heat comes from the sun, THE SUN. It does not come from humans (all you 14th centuary hippies and selfproclaimed gods out there, give it up, it's pathetic) and it does not come from evil poor people trying to make a living in undeveloped countries (hello EU, USA, UN?).
Why is it every time someone calls someone "hippies" they're always spouting nonsense? Did you read the article before you posted? HALF the heat in the crust is coming from the center of the earth. This heat is generated by radioactive decay. The other half comes from the sun.
When people say humans are causing an increase in the global temperature (whether you agree with this or not), what they mean is that humans are generating atmospheric gases that trap solar heat by interfering with its thermal radiation into space. Saying the heat "comes from the sun, not from humans" is correct in a narrow literal sense, I guess, because we aren't warming it up with our breath.
It depends on whether the building's steel will melt in a fire. We can't make skyscrapers out of tungsten. The Empire State Building is loaded with steel, a lot more than the towers were. Even with no relief from fire safety systems, it might have enough thermal mass to absorb and conduct away a trillion watt-hours of heat energy without reaching the softening point of steel. It would be a real shame in either case. Art deco rules!
Oh please. If you only look at syntactic similarities (plus the fact that all three have OO), then you might have a point (although only C++ has pointer arithmetic). Java and.NET are much more similar to each other than either is to C++..NET is based around Microsoft's old JVM implementation (they just renamed things like "java.lang" to "System"). Classes in both are handled by similar runtime mechamisms involving VMs, while in C++ they are primarily a compiler mechanism. There is a plainly visible one-to-one mapping between concepts in Java and.NET that doesn't work if you try comparing against C++.
"...some starry eyed individuals who access the Net think of Cyberspace as a community, with rules, regulations and codes of behaviour. Don't you believe it! There is no community. Perhaps there was some truth in that concept in the past, when the Internet was used exclusively by a small, homogeneous group of academics and corporate technical researchers. Today, with Internet access available to everyone, Iway travellers reflect every heterogeneous nuance of the world population. Along your journey, someone may try to tell you that in order to be a good Net "citizen", you must follow the rules of the Cyberspace community. Don't listen. The only laws and rules with which you should concern yourself are those passed by the country, state and city in which you live. The only ethics you should adopt as you pursue wealth on the Iway are those dictated by the religious faith you have chosen to follow and your own good conscience."
- Laurence Canter & Martha Siegel ("the Green Card Lawyers"), from an early review copy of their book, _How_To_Make_a_Fortune_on_the_Information_Superhig hway_, 1994.
There are some reviews of this (out of print) book on Amazon.
Just today I specced out a poweredge 2550 [dell.com]...
That's a server you just bought. Microsoft would indeed have balls to insist that server equipment manufacturers can only sell NT machines or lose their licenses to distribute NT. They don't have a monopoly in the server market. Some server manufacturers would indeed call their bluff, since it's possible to stay in business by selling Linux servers only, or servers with no preinstalled OS at all. (Not easy, but possible.)
What I find a real shame is that instead of complaining about having to ship with windows, they should try shipping with both Linux or BSD and windows. Then they will be giving the users a real opportunity to choose.
Microsoft specifically prohibits OEMs from doing this. Dual boot machines are expressly forbidden. If an OEM ships a dual boot machine, it has to be Linux on one partition and BSD on the other (or Be and OS/2, or whatever). Furthermore, selling machines preconfigured with an alternative OS (dual boot or not) is the easiest way to get Microsoft to yank your license.
I don't know how Dell got away with selling Linux machines at the same time it sold Windows boxes. Apparently they've been bitchslapped back into submission.
Anyone who has been following the issue knows that "giving the users a real opportunity to choose" has nothing to do with it. No monopoly here folks, move along. The nation's antitrust laws are no longer enforced with anything more than wrist slaps, because of an ideological fetish for "market based solutions" to everything, along with a blind spot for markets that have been broken by monopolies and cartels. With the Sherman Act out of the way, Microsoft's next problem will be the RICO laws. I can only assume these will be adjusted by law to apply only to individuals and not corporations.
Everybody missed Halley's back in 86. It's 1910 appearance was spectacular. It filled the sky. I remember in 1986, old people were telling stories about how their parents showed it to them in 1910, and said that since they were so young, they might still be alive when it came around again. But the earth was in the wrong place in 1986. The only people who saw it were rich bastards who went on package tours to mountaintops in Peru. And all they saw was a tiny smudge through a telescope. Serves them right!
Quantum Particles arent random at all, we simply dont understand them so they SEEM random.
Wow. It looks like a 19th century classical physicist has invented a time machine, zoomed forward 100 years, and opened a Slashdot account! That would be exciting. I have a sinking feeling, though, that you are not a time traveler from the pre-1920 era, but rather, you're just another scientifically illiterate 21st century creationist.
Physics went through this debate about 80 years ago and decided that you are wrong. Unlike the rolling of dice, etc., where randomness is only apparent because of our ignorance of all the details of the situation, events on a quantum level are truly random. If you're going to say otherwise, you have to provide a mechanism (like little fairies deciding when a nucleus will decay).
But even rolling dice is a bad example of a deterministic process- we figured this out in the eighties. To predict the outcome, you need such exquisite detail of the initial conditions that even minute contributions from quantum processes cannot be ignored.
Hale-Bopp was a nice smudge, good for quiet talks with your girl in the darkness while you waited for your night vision to kick in so you could see more and more of the tail. But the winner for best comet ever has to be Shoemaker-Levy in 1994, which struck Jupiter on camera in a series of cataclysmic explosions that destroyed the comet itself, as well as the UFO that must have been following behind, full of aliens committing mass suicide in their mission to enter the afterlife in San Diego and find a bunch of brainwashed Nike-wearing New Age cult members who could teach them how they could live in paradise and make the rent on a multimillion dollar villa by being overpaid web designers during the mid-nineties. (For its part, Jupiter didn't seem to be too bothered by any of this and gobbled up the whole entourage with an enormous appetite.)
After that, I'm jaded. Unless a comet collides with a planet, it's a flop and I don't care. I mean, I recognize that a cult mass suicide is always an honor for any comet, but what I really want to see is a collision between two solar system bodies. This Ikeya-Zhang looks like it's going to be a big disappointment- mostly staying below the horizon except during daylight hours. You won't see it unless you wake up really early and look at the horizon in the few minutes before the sun comes up and ruins everything. (And it isn't even going to smash into anything. What a ripoff! What are my NASA tax dollars going, anyway?) Halley's comet pulled the same kind of stunt 16 years ago- it actually stayed on the other side of the sun from us, like it was trying to hide! You would think such a letdown would have triggered a mass cult suicide in 1986, but you would be wrong.
I never post to it. (And after finding my ten year old posts to alt.drugs sitting in plain sight on Google, I doubt I ever will again!) But I do searches through newsgroups all the time when I'm looking for answers to obscure technical questions, or when I want to know if anyone's come across the same bug that I'm having trouble with at the moment. USENET might have more crap, but sometimes crap is what you want! You don't always want your search results to get choked up with corporate stuff. If you're doing Java programming for example, and you want to find out why class X doesn't work, a normal web search is difficult to control because all you get is bullcrap from Sun, and a zillion identical javadocs for class X that people leave around on their HTTP servers. I want to find out what people are complaining about, or whether anyone actually USES a certain API I'm considering. For getting a feel for what's going on in the field, without getting snowed under by marketing materials from a vendor, USENET is great. It isn't as corporatized.
Of course, the existence of alternate web based bulletin board systems like this one decreases its relevance for search purposes. And it's suffocating under the weight of all that spam. But USENET is still the biggest forum out there, and it's still the one that's the most easily searched.
Limewire is good. But don't download its Windows installer- that has spyware in it! Instead: install a JVM on your computer, then go to Limewire's page for alternate OS downloads, select "other" as your operating system, and run it using the JVM, without all the crap they bundle in. Most spyware is Windows-specific. Yeah, it's a shame that P2P only became popular recently, in the age of the MP3. If it had been invented 10-20 years earlier, with RFCs, and had the stature of, say, FTP, people would be thinking of it as a fundamental part of the Internet. Instead we have this horrible situation, where anyone who uses a P2P client is presumed to be a freeloader or a criminal. P2P deserves better than a bunch of spyware-loaded clients that block each other's users from their own networks.
Some tax evader arguments are really funny. They always start with something like a clerical error, then build up and up- and in the middle, you hear something like "...and therefore the entire federal government is illegitimate...". They all end the same way- nobody owes any taxes. I especially like this one: Is U.S. income tax invalid because Ohio wasn't legally a state when the 16th amendment was ratified? On the 150th anniversary of Ohio's statehood, someone looked in the archives and realized that there had been an oversight, and that Ohio had never been formally admitted to the Union. (Statehood admission was handled much more casually back in 1803.) So in 1953 they introduced a bill making Ohio a state, retroactively until 1803. The tax evaders say that since Congress can't make laws ex post facto, Ohio wasn't a state all those years. The ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1911 was therefore invalid, because it was introduced to Congress by the Taft administration, and Taft couldn't legally be president since he was born in Cincinatti and was therefore not a citizen. There's another rumor going around about how the IRS is paying reparations for slavery to anyone who can prove they're descended from slaves. And I remember hearing once about how "all taxes are voluntary", but I forget the details of how that one works.
What about chemical castration? I don't know much about how it works, so there could be a good medical reason why it's not feasible. But if there weren't, I'd certainly consent to it if it meant I'd be put in a wing for prisoners who had also consented to it. Maybe that's why I'm not in prison.
Slashdot Mirror
So, basically, they inadvertnatly created a cluster that can be hit and effectively screw everybody over. /. points to this report and hypes the reward for the attack.
:^)
Then this guy announces that he's found the cluster and that the reward for hitting these servers is beyond that previously imagined by HaX0rs.
The
Are we just begging for the |33 to attack?
Quit wasting your time on Slashdot and get back to writing those IIS security patches.
Come on. Look at the page. There are no banner ads or images. It's all handwritten HTML, totaling up to less than 8K of static content! The guy probably designed the page to withstand a slashdotting. Control-V posts are helpful in some cases. Like when the site requires "free registration", or when people are actually bitching they can't read it and you have it in your cache. If this particular Control-V gets modded up, it's proof that the moderator hasn't even tried to read the article.
An American flag on Slashdot is supposed to mean "bad news". What is it doing on this story?
In 2050, advances in technology have transformed the modern home into a center of moderation. Many choices and options left to torment the family of yesteryear have been eliminated to make the home economy part of a much larger one.
Here comes the dog, with an electronic newspaper for Father! Modern newspapers have no paper at all. Father loads the day's news into his electronic reader, and the words on the page disappear as his eyes move across them. The local ball team has made a stunning victory. Father decides to license the story so he can read it whenever he wants for a full month. A single click on the payment button, and it's a done deal! Micropayments to major media companies can be made effortlessly in the modern home with almost no effort or attention required.
What's on the television, Junior? He'll soon find out. He has only six more commercials to go before the family HDTV will let him change the channel to whatever station he wants to pay for. No need for mother to pester him about the volume, since it can't be turned down during advertisements anyway. But wait! Junior has to go to the bathroom. The television pauses its commercial to wait for Junior to finish his business there. After paying for a single flush at the computerized toilet, he's back and the directed marketing resumes! Meanwhile, it looks like the subscription for the refrigerator has run out, and the door won't open! Mother makes a payment using the built-in computer, and the door opens. Many foods that were canned in the old days are now provided on a subscription basis. No more stale canned food- everything is fresh, and less than a week old!
And it's time to go. Junior goes to the bus stop, where he and his friends can watch advertisements at a bus stop terminal while they wait for the bus to take them to school to watch even more advertisements. Meanwhile, father starts his hydrogen-powered fuel cell car. After turning the ignition, he watches a few minutes of targeted advertising on the built-in HDTV set. At the end, the set retracts, letting him see through the windshield, and the engine starts.
Mother is left at the house to take care of the housework. Oh no! Junior has left his music albums all over the floor again. Mother knows what to do! She simply gathers them in a dustpan and dumps them into the garbage. And why not? Since they have all been played once, none of them will play again anyway without extra payment. And as Junior's musical tastes improve, he can rent new music to discuss with his friends at school.
Let me get this straight: If I go shell ~$1800 USDfor a Sony Vaio (like I did 3 weeks ago), then I shell out another ~$20 USD for the disc, it not only will not play in their own damned PC, but it will crash their own system?
OK everybody! Let's all go out and buy a Vaio, and then return it because it doesn't play Celine Dion CDs!
I run an email reading service, where I charge $500 for reading spam sent to me after I advertise my business on USENET with a post that includes its unmunged email address. (It usually takes some detective work and litigation to collect the money.) If the government clamps down on this market, I will have to close my spam-reading sweatshop and all my hardworking employees will be out of a job. And this will certainly not have a good outcome for the American "consumer". (I don't know what that means but it sounds good, doesn't it?)
Why is the government intent on destroying the American businessman? This is nothing less than economic terrorism. Once I start making a comfortable living, the govermnent has the responsibity of making sure that I never have to change my business model. Isn't this in the Constitution or something?
I guess I have to send one of my $500 checks to Senator Fritz. That might buy me a bill that makes it illegal to have an email account that does not receive at least 200 federally approved unsolicited commercial emails per day. This would be great for my business and would help promote new markets.
As a young 17yr old you should probably be doing a little more learning about the world at large, the good, the bad, and the ugly about it. Ever wonder why you've heard the phrase: "Respect your elders."? It's because they've lived through more, learned more, and seen more than you have, and therefore, have a much better insight into how the world works. Please don't presume to have all the answers at this stage of life.
:P
As an older person you shouldn't presume that your age makes everything you say to a younger person correct.
You do remember the events of Sept 11, 2001, correct? Good.
And you might not get modded down as Flamebait if you weren't so arrogant.
19 psycho's gave their lives to kill thousands of people...probably even more than a handful of people that could've sympathized with their struggle.
Gee, you should have told the hijackers that. I'm sure they would have changed their minds.
Just look at the death rates for Palestinians vs Isreali's... sure the suicide bombers take out a few people or more with each suicide, but so many more die in Isreal's retaliation against those random attacks that it makes suicide absolutely pointless! Statistically, the Arabs get their butts kicked every time they've tried to beat on Isreal. It would behoove them to rethink their strategies about how best to conquer their enemy, because guranteeing the loss of one "soldier" with every suicide attack is a pretty poor tactical, and strategic, decision when trying to run a country.
I would expect such shallow logic from someone younger than a wise sage such as yourself. If you just bean-count lost lives, it does look like the Israelis are winning (400 dead Israelis, 1200 dead Palestinians). What you fail to grasp is the political leverage that Israel is losing. Pressure from the rest of the world is building on this issue. American interests worldwide are threatened because of it. Friendly but shaky Arab governments are being threatened by rage from below. Israel may end up losing the territories that it gained in the 1967 war. Not bad for just a couple thousand casualties.
In fact, Japan sent hundreds of kamikaze pilots towards American warships late in World War II, and look what that got 'em: Two nukes that killed hundres of thousands of people.
Yeah, that's a typical historical development relevant to this situation. If Israel were to nuke Palestine, it would mean serious blowback for Israel and us too.
But then again, the Islamic nations aren't interested in co-existence and peace, just the complete irradication of the Jews.
A caricaturization of reality. This is a complicated 50 year old conflict that is not as simple as the comic book worldview you propose.
Hmmm... Sounds a lot like Hitler, doesn't it? And that regime didn't go over too well with the rest of the world...
Oh, here we go again, with the inevitable comparison to Hitler. I call Godwin.
I say the 17 year old whooped your ass!
Duh ! What is this silly nonsense? Do you think heat is some kind of liquid that is affected by gravity and slowly soaks down through the rocks? Heat flows in all directions.
I don't think you understand something. Nowhere in the article did it say heat was "affected by gravity". Heat does show limited properties of signal propagation, because it flows at a finite rate along a gradient of decreasing temperature and is always conserved. (Meaning, because of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.)
And measuring temperature alone provides little useful information, you also need to know the thermal conductivity and specific heat of the medium(rocks), which is highly non-uniform.
This just requires extra data on rock composition, which is well known and easily accounted for in any computational heat equation model.
Old boreholes? Give me a break. The air convection in the hole will effect the measured temperature.
Air convection is unlikely to be much of a problem at all. Air is a good insulator and a borehole of air has low thermal mass. Water convection is a much larger problem. This is from their web site, explaining how they get rid of environmental interference:
Temperature perturbations in boreholes are produced by several processes. For climate reconstruction it is important to distinguish between a changing temperature through time at the Earth?s surface and other sources of temperature perturbations.
Geologic conditions and processes, other than climate change, that produce curvature in temperature-depth profiles include the following: (1) systematic variation of thermal conductivity with depth, (2) radioactive heat generation in rocks, (3) topography, (4) lateral variation of surface temperature caused by surface orientation, changing vegetation, or variable snow cover, (5) uplift and erosion or subsidence and burial at the site, and (6) vertical percolation of groundwater.
Several approaches are taken to isolate and correct for temperature anomalies from these sources. Available topographic and geological information available at each borehole site allows one to compute the magnitude and expected shape of temperature perturbations from each source. Sites can be discarded if the geologic disturbances are too large, otherwise corrections can be made. It is also possible to combine or stack temperature anomalies from several nearby drillholes. As geologic, topographic, and hydrologic conditions at each hole are unlikely to be identical, spurious temperature anomalies are likely to cancel. If each hole has experienced a similar climatic thermal signal, the climatically induced temperature anomalies will constructively interfere in the stacked temperature profiles.
There is one very efficient method of isolating climate change effects in borehole temperatures but the method requires patience. All of the non-climate sources of temperature anomalies are steady state, or quasi steady state relative to the time scale of climate change. Thus curvature in temperature profiles from these sources is stationary in time. By measuring and remeasuring borehole temperatures after an appropriate time lapse, changes in temperature with time can safely be ascribed to climatic sources. Several monitoring experiments are in progress. With present technology available to measure temperatures in boreholes to better than 10 mK accuracy, the repeat time to isolate climate-change signals is about 5 years.
So it appears they have thought of some of these things.
I for one don't believe any such thermal signal more than a few years old can exceed the noise threshold.
It's clear you haven't read the paper, but I guess I'll take your word for it. You should know.
You know, I was wondering why nobody could spell all of a sudden whenever the topic of global warming came up.
I think it's great, actually. As long as they're kept busy indoors posting vitriol to web sites and unleashing scripts against online polls, their SUVs are parked outside and not emitting any greenhouse gases.
Therefore unless if we can know the temperature of the surface of the earth in the past, there is no way of knowing the temperature of the surface of the earth in the past. Am I the only one who thinks this is weird science?
(It's been ten years since I took a PDE course, so parts of this could be slightly off.)
The heat equation looks like this:
du/dt = A * (d/dx)^2 u
where u is temperature, and the partial derivative with respect to time is proportional to the second partial derivative with respect to space (depth). (A is a constant determined by the thermal conductivity of the material.)
To use the heat equation to solve for u(x,t), you need boundary conditions surrounding a two-dimensional domain (space and time). Time here runs from 1500 AD to 2000 AD, and space runs from 0 meters at the surface to 1000 meters at the bottom of the hole. So there are four boundary functions along the extremes of both dimensions:
1. u(0 meters, t)
2. u(1000 meters, t)
3. u(x, 2000 AD)
4. u(x, 1500 AD)
The first one is the function they're trying to get- it's their unknown. The second they have to assume is constant, because there is no way to directly measure it. But since temperature perturbations at the surface of the earth won't have penetrated that deep over the time scale they're looking at, and most of the variability will originate at the surface, this is a fairly safe assumption. The third just requires them to drop a thermometer down the hole, as they have done. The fourth is what you're worrying about, but they don't need it because they have 2. and 3. and can use the heat equation to extrapolate over the rest of the domain.
A problem arises because the left side of the heat equation is a first derivative in time. As time progresses, features in the temperature profile u(x) degrade. (Partial differential equations that have second derivatives on both sides, like the wave equation, don't have this problem.) What you don't want to find, when you measure the temperature down one of these holes, is that the temperature increases uniformly with depth. That means you've waited too long, everything has equilibrated, and both sides of the heat equation are now zero, which prevents you from extrapolating backward. Apparently they must have found some curvature in u(x), or we wouldn't be seeing this article posted.
There are other complications. The thermal conductivity constant won't be uniform with depth, for example. What that means is they need computers to solve for u(x,t) numerically. Partial differential equations can almost never be solved symbolically anyway, so this isn't much of an issue.
What's their problem? Everyone and their dog knows that the heat comes from the sun, THE SUN. It does not come from humans (all you 14th centuary hippies and selfproclaimed gods out there, give it up, it's pathetic) and it does not come from evil poor people trying to make a living in undeveloped countries (hello EU, USA, UN?).
Why is it every time someone calls someone "hippies" they're always spouting nonsense? Did you read the article before you posted? HALF the heat in the crust is coming from the center of the earth. This heat is generated by radioactive decay. The other half comes from the sun.
When people say humans are causing an increase in the global temperature (whether you agree with this or not), what they mean is that humans are generating atmospheric gases that trap solar heat by interfering with its thermal radiation into space. Saying the heat "comes from the sun, not from humans" is correct in a narrow literal sense, I guess, because we aren't warming it up with our breath.
It depends on whether the building's steel will melt in a fire. We can't make skyscrapers out of tungsten. The Empire State Building is loaded with steel, a lot more than the towers were. Even with no relief from fire safety systems, it might have enough thermal mass to absorb and conduct away a trillion watt-hours of heat energy without reaching the softening point of steel.
It would be a real shame in either case. Art deco rules!
Oh please. If you only look at syntactic similarities (plus the fact that all three have OO), then you might have a point (although only C++ has pointer arithmetic). Java and .NET are much more similar to each other than either is to C++. .NET is based around Microsoft's old JVM implementation (they just renamed things like "java.lang" to "System"). Classes in both are handled by similar runtime mechamisms involving VMs, while in C++ they are primarily a compiler mechanism. There is a plainly visible one-to-one mapping between concepts in Java and .NET that doesn't work if you try comparing against C++.
What, no Unicode or extended-ASCII characters?
I think Gosling is the best source of information on C# and Java. After all, he invented both languages.
Cut-n-pasted from EFF:
g hway_, 1994.
"...some starry eyed individuals who access the Net think of Cyberspace as a community, with rules, regulations and codes of behaviour. Don't you believe it! There is no community. Perhaps there was some truth in that concept in the past, when the Internet was used exclusively by a small, homogeneous group of academics and corporate technical researchers. Today, with Internet access available to everyone, Iway travellers reflect every heterogeneous nuance of the world population. Along your journey, someone may try to tell you that in order to be a good Net "citizen", you must follow the rules of the Cyberspace community. Don't listen. The only laws and rules with which you should concern yourself are those passed by the country, state and city in which you live. The only ethics you should adopt as you pursue wealth on the Iway are those dictated by the religious faith you have chosen to follow and your own good conscience."
- Laurence Canter & Martha Siegel ("the Green Card Lawyers"), from an early review copy of their book, _How_To_Make_a_Fortune_on_the_Information_Superhi
There are some reviews of this (out of print) book on Amazon.
Just today I specced out a poweredge 2550 [dell.com]...
That's a server you just bought. Microsoft would indeed have balls to insist that server equipment manufacturers can only sell NT machines or lose their licenses to distribute NT. They don't have a monopoly in the server market. Some server manufacturers would indeed call their bluff, since it's possible to stay in business by selling Linux servers only, or servers with no preinstalled OS at all. (Not easy, but possible.)
Where Dell got bitchslapped was in the desktop and laptop arena.
What I find a real shame is that instead of complaining about having to ship with windows, they should try shipping with both Linux or BSD and windows. Then they will be giving the users a real opportunity to choose.
Microsoft specifically prohibits OEMs from doing this. Dual boot machines are expressly forbidden. If an OEM ships a dual boot machine, it has to be Linux on one partition and BSD on the other (or Be and OS/2, or whatever). Furthermore, selling machines preconfigured with an alternative OS (dual boot or not) is the easiest way to get Microsoft to yank your license.
I don't know how Dell got away with selling Linux machines at the same time it sold Windows boxes. Apparently they've been bitchslapped back into submission.
Anyone who has been following the issue knows that "giving the users a real opportunity to choose" has nothing to do with it. No monopoly here folks, move along. The nation's antitrust laws are no longer enforced with anything more than wrist slaps, because of an ideological fetish for "market based solutions" to everything, along with a blind spot for markets that have been broken by monopolies and cartels. With the Sherman Act out of the way, Microsoft's next problem will be the RICO laws. I can only assume these will be adjusted by law to apply only to individuals and not corporations.
Too bad you missed Halley's back in 1986.
Everybody missed Halley's back in 86. It's 1910 appearance was spectacular. It filled the sky. I remember in 1986, old people were telling stories about how their parents showed it to them in 1910, and said that since they were so young, they might still be alive when it came around again. But the earth was in the wrong place in 1986. The only people who saw it were rich bastards who went on package tours to mountaintops in Peru. And all they saw was a tiny smudge through a telescope. Serves them right!
Quantum Particles arent random at all, we simply dont understand them so they SEEM random.
Wow. It looks like a 19th century classical physicist has invented a time machine, zoomed forward 100 years, and opened a Slashdot account! That would be exciting. I have a sinking feeling, though, that you are not a time traveler from the pre-1920 era, but rather, you're just another scientifically illiterate 21st century creationist.
Physics went through this debate about 80 years ago and decided that you are wrong. Unlike the rolling of dice, etc., where randomness is only apparent because of our ignorance of all the details of the situation, events on a quantum level are truly random. If you're going to say otherwise, you have to provide a mechanism (like little fairies deciding when a nucleus will decay).
But even rolling dice is a bad example of a deterministic process- we figured this out in the eighties. To predict the outcome, you need such exquisite detail of the initial conditions that even minute contributions from quantum processes cannot be ignored.
Hale-Bopp was a nice smudge, good for quiet talks with your girl in the darkness while you waited for your night vision to kick in so you could see more and more of the tail. But the winner for best comet ever has to be Shoemaker-Levy in 1994, which struck Jupiter on camera in a series of cataclysmic explosions that destroyed the comet itself, as well as the UFO that must have been following behind, full of aliens committing mass suicide in their mission to enter the afterlife in San Diego and find a bunch of brainwashed Nike-wearing New Age cult members who could teach them how they could live in paradise and make the rent on a multimillion dollar villa by being overpaid web designers during the mid-nineties. (For its part, Jupiter didn't seem to be too bothered by any of this and gobbled up the whole entourage with an enormous appetite.)
After that, I'm jaded. Unless a comet collides with a planet, it's a flop and I don't care. I mean, I recognize that a cult mass suicide is always an honor for any comet, but what I really want to see is a collision between two solar system bodies. This Ikeya-Zhang looks like it's going to be a big disappointment- mostly staying below the horizon except during daylight hours. You won't see it unless you wake up really early and look at the horizon in the few minutes before the sun comes up and ruins everything. (And it isn't even going to smash into anything. What a ripoff! What are my NASA tax dollars going, anyway?) Halley's comet pulled the same kind of stunt 16 years ago- it actually stayed on the other side of the sun from us, like it was trying to hide! You would think such a letdown would have triggered a mass cult suicide in 1986, but you would be wrong.
I never post to it. (And after finding my ten year old posts to alt.drugs sitting in plain sight on Google, I doubt I ever will again!) But I do searches through newsgroups all the time when I'm looking for answers to obscure technical questions, or when I want to know if anyone's come across the same bug that I'm having trouble with at the moment. USENET might have more crap, but sometimes crap is what you want! You don't always want your search results to get choked up with corporate stuff. If you're doing Java programming for example, and you want to find out why class X doesn't work, a normal web search is difficult to control because all you get is bullcrap from Sun, and a zillion identical javadocs for class X that people leave around on their HTTP servers. I want to find out what people are complaining about, or whether anyone actually USES a certain API I'm considering. For getting a feel for what's going on in the field, without getting snowed under by marketing materials from a vendor, USENET is great. It isn't as corporatized.
Of course, the existence of alternate web based bulletin board systems like this one decreases its relevance for search purposes. And it's suffocating under the weight of all that spam. But USENET is still the biggest forum out there, and it's still the one that's the most easily searched.
Limewire is good. But don't download its Windows installer- that has spyware in it! Instead: install a JVM on your computer, then go to Limewire's page for alternate OS downloads, select "other" as your operating system, and run it using the JVM, without all the crap they bundle in. Most spyware is Windows-specific.
Yeah, it's a shame that P2P only became popular recently, in the age of the MP3. If it had been invented 10-20 years earlier, with RFCs, and had the stature of, say, FTP, people would be thinking of it as a fundamental part of the Internet. Instead we have this horrible situation, where anyone who uses a P2P client is presumed to be a freeloader or a criminal. P2P deserves better than a bunch of spyware-loaded clients that block each other's users from their own networks.
Some tax evader arguments are really funny. They always start with something like a clerical error, then build up and up- and in the middle, you hear something like "...and therefore the entire federal government is illegitimate...". They all end the same way- nobody owes any taxes.
I especially like this one: Is U.S. income tax invalid because Ohio wasn't legally a state when the 16th amendment was ratified? On the 150th anniversary of Ohio's statehood, someone looked in the archives and realized that there had been an oversight, and that Ohio had never been formally admitted to the Union. (Statehood admission was handled much more casually back in 1803.) So in 1953 they introduced a bill making Ohio a state, retroactively until 1803. The tax evaders say that since Congress can't make laws ex post facto, Ohio wasn't a state all those years. The ratification of the 16th Amendment in 1911 was therefore invalid, because it was introduced to Congress by the Taft administration, and Taft couldn't legally be president since he was born in Cincinatti and was therefore not a citizen.
There's another rumor going around about how the IRS is paying reparations for slavery to anyone who can prove they're descended from slaves. And I remember hearing once about how "all taxes are voluntary", but I forget the details of how that one works.
What about chemical castration? I don't know much about how it works, so there could be a good medical reason why it's not feasible. But if there weren't, I'd certainly consent to it if it meant I'd be put in a wing for prisoners who had also consented to it.
Maybe that's why I'm not in prison.