Actually the analog TV spectrum will cease to exist in the UK from 2005, thus disabling all analog TV reception. It's not a question of cost or of Luddism. Simply I do not need digital TV/radio because I'm happy with what I've got.
Digital TV/radio is supposedly the thing. But for me all I want is a picture on screen and sound from the speakers. Digital TV/radio is simply a technology I don't need or want. Not for me the feature-bloated digital receiver units with time-shift recording/copy lock-out technology. I say this because there is nothing wrong with my analog TV and analog radio. I get an adequate picture and sound. I can record any program without technological restriction. The times and manner of my viewing and listening are under my control. In short, analog is enough for me.
Unfortunately in the UK, the government announced this week that the entire analog TV spectrum will be sold by auction in 2005, meaning that millions of people who are happy with their analog TV sets will be forced in 2005 to spend $200-300 per set on a forced upgrade to a proprietary adapter unit (or else sign up to a restrictive rental agreement) in order to be able to receive digital TV broadcasts. This will affect all TV channels including the UK's national public television service BBC TV. I and millions of others will be forced to go digital from 2005, enforcing the various unwanted usage lock-out technologies that come with digital TV/radio.
Simply because the world's seawater stores millions of times more heat than the atmosphere, and the warm sea currents from tropical oceans transport some of this heat to northern continents like the USA and Europe which would otherwise be permanently freezing cold due to their northerly latitude. Warm sea currents are vital to agriculture and our continued well-being.
Could the vital warm sea currents ever stop due to climate change?
Yes, the warm sea currents that keep the planet warm have an Achilles heel -- sea currents stop moving if the saltiness of the seawater falls below a critical level (the density of seawater depends on its saltiness, reduced-salt seawater won't sink as it normally does in the coldest polar regions, and without sinking seawater the ocean currents stop moving).
One of the agreed effects of increasing Carbon Dioxide emissions is that rainfall will increase in northern latitudes, diluting the seawater. In the limit dilution shuts down the warm sea currents.
What is the most important warm sea current?
The Gulf Stream is the most important warm sea current because it can alter worldwide climate by various positive feedback mechanisms. The climate and food production of the USA and Europe, for example, both depend on the Gulf Stream keeping the climate warm enough to grow crops.
How secure is the Gulf Stream?
The Gulf Stream is known to be sensitive to changes in rainfall over the Atlantic. Rahmstorf's bifurcation model of Atlantic thermohaline circulation is widely accepted by independent scientists. This model implies the Atlantic Ocean has only two stable modes of circulation -- ON and OFF. The Atlantic Ocean is currently in the ON mode with an active Gulf Stream. 100000 years ago, it went into the OFF mode when the Gulf Stream shut down causing a worldwide massive Ice Age. The model shows the likely cause of the shutdown was increased rainfall.
How is the present-day Gulf Stream doing?
The Gulf Stream changes slightly in intensity from year to year, but overall its average state in recent decades is stable and active. However, the situation should be monitored closely because it is unknown exactly how much additional rainfall the Gulf Stream can tolerate without shutting down. The Rahmstorf model predicts a critical threshold of about 1Sv/yr (10^6m/yr) (sustained increase) which is ~50% above current long-term average rainfall, whereas rainfall over Northern Europe has actually been increasing only by about 2% a year over the last 20 years -- a total rise of 40% which is currently below the 50% threshold. Conclusion: the Gulf Stream looks safe now but vulnerable to future rainfall increases.
How would plants survive a Gulf Stream shutdown?
Most agricultural plants probably wouldn't survive. The summer air temperature in the US Mid-West, for example, would be just 32F(0C) which would stop all agricultural production.
The ORNL has researched the types of vegetation in the US in present-day conditions and in zero-Gulf Stream conditions.
US vegetation for Gulf Stream OFF (Ice Age conditions)
US vegetation for Gulf Stream ON (present day conditions)
Before anyone rushes to accept or reject the current arguments about climate change, ask whether there is any evidence of the Earth climate's ever having changed in the past. The answer is yes -- global and regional climates have changed enormously over hundreds and thousands of years. Some well-documented examples are:
100000 years ago, the Earth's climate began to cool massively into an Ice Age which lasted until ~10000BC causing freezing temperatures even in summertime over the USA and Europe, expansion of deserts, increased storm frequencies, and vast icesheets over the USA and Europe.
For a period of 5000 years the Sahara Desert once had enough rainfall to make it grassland from ~10000BC up to ~5000BC.
In ~1650-1800AD Europe experienced a mini Ice Age leading to cold summers, frequent crop failures and yield reductions, frozen rivers (Thames, upper Rhine, etc), and droughts.
In 1100-1200AD Europe, Greenland and Iceland were warmer and wetter than today.
Many other episodes of climate change have occurred both in pre-history and in more recent times.
The Pioneering Robot Snooker Player 1986-1988
on
Physics of Billiards
·
· Score: 5
The first robot ever to play snooker (related to the game of pool) was developed under a team led by Professor Khorosh Khodabandehloo at the University of Bristol, UK.
The Bristol snooker robot played a famous match against the then world snooker champion, Steve Davis of the UK. The robot, a customised IBM Model 7565, was severely handicapped because its operating envelope covered only about 87% of the table and also because freeplay in its joints limited its mechanical accuracy and repeatability. The strategy part of the robot was quite sophisticated having been based on advice from Steve Davis himself. It was able to make forward and reverse analyses of states of play based on support logic programming (related to but more powerful than fuzzy logic programming). The cue it used to hit a ball was actually a pneumatic piston powered by compressed air. Davis beat the robot easily! As an undergrad student, I helped to design, implement and test the robot's image processing software using the now defunct Automatix AV4 Image Processing System once made by
Robotic Vision Systems, Inc..
The whole project was filmed and shown on BBC television on the Q.E.D. science programme of 16th March 1988. Extraordinarily there are now no webpages at Bristol University to celebrate this pioneering robotics project. Professor Khorosh Khodabandehloo has left Bristol University to run his own robotics consultancy. One of his former research assistants, Ken Ho, however, has made webpages about the Bristol snooker robot: here and here.
From what I've seen, I certainly like Piper but I've seen fundamentally the same combination you cite of "visual programming, visual data flow, and P2P networking" in Khoros in the 1990.
You're wrong about Khoros being closed source; it is open source - you can download the source code here (if the link is broken, do a lycos ftp search for one of the sites still carrying it).
Dataflow architectures are also based on the same idea and have been around for many years.
A good example is the visual programming environment Khoros Cantata designed in the 1990s for image processing research. Programs are represented by a directed graph whose nodes are data sources, parameterised procedures, or outputs, and whose arcs are data flow paths (aka pipes).
For many languages the mutt mail reader handles the character sets well, assuming you have the fonts installed and are using either xterm or kterm (as appropriate).
If you want to edit Japanese, try jvim -- it handles left-to-right or right-to-left entry.
As regards Japanese can anyone get mutt to decode charset="ISO-2022-JP" automatically without changing the pager from the default internal pager to be "less -r"?
It's a too little known fact that when you eat or drink a product containing Nutrasweet artificial sweetener your body has to deal with a nasty by-product chemical Methanol ("wood alcohol") which is so toxic it is fatal at only 300milligrams/kilogram of bodyweight. Check out Google on methanol and nutrasweet.
You might want to check out MPI-6.3.2 (aka LAM) which has been around for a lot longer than Grid. MPI is a library for writing parallel programs that execute on groups of workstations.
The Electronic Telegraph (story here) has an earlier article than the Washington Post. The ET article also gives several interesting offsite links (see under the "External Links" section on the news story).
We see any number of stories saying how wonderful it would be for rice and other plants to be enhanced using genetic modifications, but I wonder what might be the possiblenegative effects of proposed GM modifications:
Making a GM rice with an unnaturally high level of vitamin X compared to a normal wild rice, might be ok for people who eat a balanced diet but people in a poor country would get a harmful overdose of X because rice is the only major food they can afford to eat.
Another issue is by making a GM plant with unnaturally high levels of nutrient X you open it up to new attacks from pests and diseases which share our preference for nutrient X.
There might be a net gain from creating GM plants for certain applications but I think publications writing about absolutely "wonderful" new GM plants should try hard to give a balanced discussion of risks as well as of benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
A footnote: the UK's entire analog TV spectrum is being sold for mobile communications use.
Actually the analog TV spectrum will cease to exist in the UK from 2005, thus disabling all analog TV reception. It's not a question of cost or of Luddism. Simply I do not need digital TV/radio because I'm happy with what I've got.
Digital TV/radio is supposedly the thing. But for me all I want is a picture on screen and sound from the speakers. Digital TV/radio is simply a technology I don't need or want. Not for me the feature-bloated digital receiver units with time-shift recording/copy lock-out technology. I say this because there is nothing wrong with my analog TV and analog radio. I get an adequate picture and sound. I can record any program without technological restriction. The times and manner of my viewing and listening are under my control. In short, analog is enough for me.
Unfortunately in the UK, the government announced this week that the entire analog TV spectrum will be sold by auction in 2005, meaning that millions of people who are happy with their analog TV sets will be forced in 2005 to spend $200-300 per set on a forced upgrade to a proprietary adapter unit (or else sign up to a restrictive rental agreement) in order to be able to receive digital TV broadcasts. This will affect all TV channels including the UK's national public television service BBC TV. I and millions of others will be forced to go digital from 2005, enforcing the various unwanted usage lock-out technologies that come with digital TV/radio.
Here are the correct image URLs (from Quarternary Environment Project) should work:
Simply because the world's seawater stores millions of times more heat than the atmosphere, and the warm sea currents from tropical oceans transport some of this heat to northern continents like the USA and Europe which would otherwise be permanently freezing cold due to their northerly latitude. Warm sea currents are vital to agriculture and our continued well-being.
Yes, the warm sea currents that keep the planet warm have an Achilles heel -- sea currents stop moving if the saltiness of the seawater falls below a critical level (the density of seawater depends on its saltiness, reduced-salt seawater won't sink as it normally does in the coldest polar regions, and without sinking seawater the ocean currents stop moving).
One of the agreed effects of increasing Carbon Dioxide emissions is that rainfall will increase in northern latitudes, diluting the seawater. In the limit dilution shuts down the warm sea currents.
The Gulf Stream is the most important warm sea current because it can alter worldwide climate by various positive feedback mechanisms. The climate and food production of the USA and Europe, for example, both depend on the Gulf Stream keeping the climate warm enough to grow crops.
The Gulf Stream is known to be sensitive to changes in rainfall over the Atlantic. Rahmstorf's bifurcation model of Atlantic thermohaline circulation is widely accepted by independent scientists. This model implies the Atlantic Ocean has only two stable modes of circulation -- ON and OFF. The Atlantic Ocean is currently in the ON mode with an active Gulf Stream. 100000 years ago, it went into the OFF mode when the Gulf Stream shut down causing a worldwide massive Ice Age. The model shows the likely cause of the shutdown was increased rainfall.
The Gulf Stream changes slightly in intensity from year to year, but overall its average state in recent decades is stable and active. However, the situation should be monitored closely because it is unknown exactly how much additional rainfall the Gulf Stream can tolerate without shutting down. The Rahmstorf model predicts a critical threshold of about 1Sv/yr (10^6m/yr) (sustained increase) which is ~50% above current long-term average rainfall, whereas rainfall over Northern Europe has actually been increasing only by about 2% a year over the last 20 years -- a total rise of 40% which is currently below the 50% threshold. Conclusion: the Gulf Stream looks safe now but vulnerable to future rainfall increases.
Most agricultural plants probably wouldn't survive. The summer air temperature in the US Mid-West, for example, would be just 32F(0C) which would stop all agricultural production.
The ORNL has researched the types of vegetation in the US in present-day conditions and in zero-Gulf Stream conditions.
Before anyone rushes to accept or reject the current arguments about climate change, ask whether there is any evidence of the Earth climate's ever having changed in the past. The answer is yes -- global and regional climates have changed enormously over hundreds and thousands of years. Some well-documented examples are:
chmod -w $HOME/.netscape/cookies
The first robot ever to play snooker (related to the game of pool) was developed under a team led by Professor Khorosh Khodabandehloo at the University of Bristol, UK.
The Bristol snooker robot played a famous match against the then world snooker champion, Steve Davis of the UK. The robot, a customised IBM Model 7565, was severely handicapped because its operating envelope covered only about 87% of the table and also because freeplay in its joints limited its mechanical accuracy and repeatability. The strategy part of the robot was quite sophisticated having been based on advice from Steve Davis himself. It was able to make forward and reverse analyses of states of play based on support logic programming (related to but more powerful than fuzzy logic programming). The cue it used to hit a ball was actually a pneumatic piston powered by compressed air. Davis beat the robot easily! As an undergrad student, I helped to design, implement and test the robot's image processing software using the now defunct Automatix AV4 Image Processing System once made by Robotic Vision Systems, Inc..
The whole project was filmed and shown on BBC television on the Q.E.D. science programme of 16th March 1988. Extraordinarily there are now no webpages at Bristol University to celebrate this pioneering robotics project. Professor Khorosh Khodabandehloo has left Bristol University to run his own robotics consultancy. One of his former research assistants, Ken Ho, however, has made webpages about the Bristol snooker robot: here and here.
From what I've seen, I certainly like Piper but I've seen fundamentally the same combination you cite of "visual programming, visual data flow, and P2P networking" in Khoros in the 1990.
You're wrong about Khoros being closed source; it is open source - you can download the source code here (if the link is broken, do a lycos ftp search for one of the sites still carrying it).
Actually the concept of combining Unix-style pipes and a GUI is not new:
Here is an example Khoros program with "pipes" and GUI.
What is it with caching contents of a POST method -- netscape picked up its cached version of my previous post...
Last correction: patch < deattack.c.patch using the following text copied into deattack.c.patch
--- deattack.c Wed May 12 12:19:25 1999
+++ deattack.c.orig Fri Feb 9 20:00:21 2001
@@ -79,7 +79,7 @@
detect_attack(unsigned char *buf, word32 len, unsigned char *IV)
{
static word16 *h = (word16 *) NULL;
- static word16 n = HASH_MINSIZE / HASH_ENTRYSIZE;
+ static word32 n = HASH_MINSIZE / HASH_ENTRYSIZE;
register word32 i, j;
word32 l;
register unsigned char *c;
Yes, and if you'd read the whole thread before rushing to post you'd have seen my corrected patch posted 7 minutes before your comment.
I posted a patch file
Correction: patch < deattack.c.patch using the following text copied into deattack.c.patch
--- deattack.c Wed May 12 12:19:25 1999
+++ deattack.c.orig Fri Feb 9 20:00:21 2001
@@ -79,7 +79,7 @@
detect_attack(unsigned char *buf, word32 len, unsigned char *IV)
{
static word16 *h = (word16 *) NULL;
- static word32 n = HASH_MINSIZE / HASH_ENTRYSIZE;
+ static word16 n = HASH_MINSIZE / HASH_ENTRYSIZE;
register word32 i, j;
word32 l;
register unsigned char *c;
Cut-and-paste the following text into a file deattack.c.patch.
+++ deattack.c.orig Wed May 12 12:19:25 1999
@@ -79,7 +79,7 @@
detect_attack(unsigned char *buf, word32 len, unsigned char *IV)
{
static word16 *h = (word16 *) NULL;
- static word32 n = HASH_MINSIZE / HASH_ENTRYSIZE;
+ static word16 n = HASH_MINSIZE / HASH_ENTRYSIZE;
register word32 i, j;
word32 l;
register unsigned char *c;
Get the source tar file, untar it with tar zxvf tarfile, change into the source directory, and patch
Is it true the US economy is "falling off a cliff" (London Evening Standard, 7th February) a claim which is being made in several newspapers?
For many languages the mutt mail reader handles the character sets well, assuming you have the fonts installed and are using either xterm or kterm (as appropriate).
If you want to edit Japanese, try jvim -- it handles left-to-right or right-to-left entry.
As regards Japanese can anyone get mutt to decode charset="ISO-2022-JP" automatically without changing the pager from the default internal pager to be "less -r"?
It's a too little known fact that when you eat or drink a product containing Nutrasweet artificial sweetener your body has to deal with a nasty by-product chemical Methanol ("wood alcohol") which is so toxic it is fatal at only 300milligrams/kilogram of bodyweight. Check out Google on methanol and nutrasweet.
Two years ago an Australian court ruled reverse engineering to be lawful (Slashdot story, October 1999) . Other jurisdictions outside the US have given similar positive decisions.
You might want to check out MPI-6.3.2 (aka LAM) which has been around for a lot longer than Grid. MPI is a library for writing parallel programs that execute on groups of workstations.
The Electronic Telegraph (story here) has an earlier article than the Washington Post. The ET article also gives several interesting offsite links (see under the "External Links" section on the news story).
We see any number of stories saying how wonderful it would be for rice and other plants to be enhanced using genetic modifications, but I wonder what might be the possible negative effects of proposed GM modifications:
There might be a net gain from creating GM plants for certain applications but I think publications writing about absolutely "wonderful" new GM plants should try hard to give a balanced discussion of risks as well as of benefits.
Rahmstorf's bifurcation model of Atlantic thermohaline circulation is widely accepted by independent scientists, implying the Atlantic Ocean has only two stable modes of thermohaline circulation -- implications discussed here
because the Gulf Stream might shut down as a result of the increasing rainfall over the North Atlantic, thus making a new Ice Age.
Rahmstorf bifurcation model of Atlantic thermohaline circulation-- implications discussed here.