They felt the need to explain why the name was similar to football? With the only word in common being "ball"? I would worry more about explaining why they used "para" from the word "parabolic".
If you throw a ball in zero gravity, it will travel in a straight line, not along a parabola.
Gravity makes a thrown ball travel along a parabola. So being designed for zero-g, "paraball" is the very first official ball-based game that has absolutely nothing to do with parabolas.
Although if you want to pick nits, since the airplane is travelling along a parabola to create a zero-g environment for the players, the ball within the plane is travelling along a parabola relative to the earth. Relative to the playing field (the plane), it's all straight lines.
The thing that bothered me the most was that it really felt like Card was trying to bend the first book into a different direction. Many conversations and events from the first book were retold so that they appeared to be the same on the surface, but completely different things were actually happening.
The end result was a book that was very clever, but wasn't a very good story. It left me feeling that it had soiled the first book.
I am disappointed to see that the movie will include Ender's Shadow.
You will need a serious disk array to handle the bandwidth, but you will end up with a digital copy of the signal put out over DVI. That Miranda box does sub-sample the RGB (4:4:4) signal to YCbCr (4:2:2), but it is only a matter of time before someone makes a box that keeps it at 4:4:4.
If you look more closely at the page you linked to, you would see that it is actually a full year.
There are two types of leave, pregnancy leave and parental leave. Mothers-to-be can take up to 17 paid weeks off for pregnancy leave. Mothers and/or Fathers can then take an additional 35 paid weeks off for parental leave after the baby is born. So for a mother, 52 paid weeks off is indeed the maximum.
The government provides the paycheck during the time off, through the Employment Insurance program.
Even adoptive parents can take advantage of the parental leave portion.
Intruders attacking commercial premises know that they will trigger an Intruder Alarm which will summons a Police response via a monitoring station. The crooks are also aware that unless they are unlucky, the Police response is unable to attend in less than seven minutes. The crooks will normally spend those seven minutes removing items from the premises. During that time, they can clean out a fairly large amount of inventory.
To achieve this however, requires a fairly rapid incursion into the premises, moving around the area at speed to remove equipment or stock. By reducing visibility to less than ½ inch, Fog Security Systems makes movement at all extremely difficult and movement at speed impossible. Fog Security Systems Inc. protects property from intruders by harmlessly reducing visibility to inches within seconds of a break-in.
For use in a home, you would have to place the fog generators carefully. For a two-story home with sleeping areas on the second floor, you could just place them on the first floor.
This would work well in a car, too. It's pretty hard to drive a car that is filled with fog. It would be damned difficult to even steal the stereo.
A 28 year ROI is very bad. I doubt many new home owners could afford to add $14K the cost of their house
Yes, I agree, this is a big investment in money and upkeep for a homeowner, and a worse-than-28 year ROI is terrible.
I was objecting to the original poster saying that "the idea of green energy is impossible - wind and solar take up too much space to be viable".
Eventually, prices for green energy sources will come down. Hopefully other energy costs will go up to account for the environmental damage they cause. Once the ROI makes sense, mass implementation will follow.
Many green energy solutions can be implemented in a decentralized manner, instead of in huge projects like you mention. Installing them in this manner could make use of space that could not otherwise be used for energy generation.
Covering your house's shingles with solar panels would be expensive, but this could provide for much of the electrical needs of your household. For about $14,000, you can buy 24 165w Sharp 1575mm x 826mm solar panels, and save about $500 a year on electricity.
A 20m tower with a 7m diameter wind turbine could be installed in even a very small inner-city house lot. If you live in a reasonably windy climate, this could generate all the electricity you need for about $25,000.
I know these are expensive solutions, but certainly not impossible. The prices will come down.
Just boot from a Knoppix CD, and shred your hard drive from there.
I had a windows 2000 laptop with a bad hard drive that would no longer even boot. I had to send the old hard drive back to Dell. I used this method to securely erase it before I sent it back.
I was pretty impressed that shred could still do its thing without crashing even though the drive was having continuous write failures. There was probably some data left in the bad sectors, though, but that's much better than sending back a drive full of my data!
All that we use to control our HTPC is a Logitech MX 700 wireless mouse. With the HTPC app that we use, SageTV, everything is accessible from a mouse-driven interface. We don't use that computer for email or games requiring a keyboard. My only complaint about the mouse is that its range is only about 10 feet.
The only thing that we can't do with the mouse is turn on the TV and the stereo. I am planning on programming one of the extra buttons on the mouse to do this. I'm planning on using it to launch a macro via the software program Girder that will send all of the appropriate IR commands out of the USB-UIRT IR blaster/receiver to turn on all the devices and switch their inputs accordingly. That should solve the only problem we have, which is explaining to babysitters how to use the TV.
There are plugins for Outlook and Evolution, but they were both not open source. It was actually pretty funny, an open source server, an open source client (evolution), and a closed source, very expensive connector to get the two to talk to each other! Look for "Ximian Connector" in their FAQ:
http://www.opengroupware.org/en/users/faq
OpenGroupware will not be able to use this Evolution connector directly, but since it is open source, it will be adapted for this purpose. Helge Hess the main developer for OpenGroupware has said as much.
They actually subverted the listing for the keyword "failure" by itself, not just the phrase "miserable failure". That must have taken a lot more work.
We used to have a rack in a very prominent facility with lots of excellent security measures.
Security guards at the front desk to check photo ID passcards
Swipe passcard at light-beam turnstile for entrance to facility.
Passcard to activate elevator
Coded lock on cage
Locked server rack cabinet
Unfortunately every one of these security measures could be easily bypassed.
Security Guards didn't even look at you, let alone your photo ID passcard
People swiped their passcard wrong so often that the guards just waved you through if they heard the beep of an improper entry.
Anyone coming in at the same time as you would swipe their card, unlocking the elevator buttons.
Our cage door lock stopped working (probably a dead battery), and I discovered that anyone with reasonably long fingers could easily reach the latch on the other side and open the door.
I forgot the keys to our rack cabinet one time and a sharp tug easily forced the cheap lock to open.
The security guards didn't even ask us any questions or look at our ID when we moved our gear out of there. I'm glad we did!
I guess Microsoft is not doing so well in the networking hardware market. Must be hard to compete with all the manufacturers using Linux to run their access points.
Hmm... A story involving massive amounts of post-its, submitted by an anonymous reader, eh? Who wants to bet that it was an anonymous reader in 3M's marketing department?
They get loads of publicity throught the Slashdot story, and they don't even have to deal with the Slashdot effect!
The article talked about sending a possibly traceable SMS to a device you own to discover the number of the snarfed phone. An untraceable way to discover the number would be to use a Bluetooth headset to make a call to one of those phone numbers that read back your phone number.
What fun you could have with a Linux PDA with Bluetooth combined with a Bluetooth headset. A nice and portable way to make unlimited free calls via any vulnerable phone that is close enough to you.
When will vendors learn that vulnerabilities need to be fixed right away, even if they can't think of anything nasty that can be done with them?
I read the canoe article you mentioned in your posting at 2:46pm, and it quoted from slashdot postings from danhm and _Sharp'r_, both submitted at 2:43pm.
3 minutes for canoe to read those postings,write their article, for you to find their article, read it, and write your posting.
I knew the news loop was faster on the Internet, but that's pretty amazing!
I wish news sites would show the revision history of published articles.
You make some interesting points. As you say, correlation is not causation.
There are really two points to be made:
Cigarette companies have been targeting youth with their advertising.
Cigarette advertising encourages increased consumption of cigarettes.
The King and Siegel study is not trying to prove the second point, only the first. It makes no comment on the effectiveness of this advertising, it is only showing that cigarette companies are specifically targeting advertising to youth. It speaks of their intentions, not the results.
You are right that I did not back up the second point adequately.
This study provides "the
first longitudinal evidence to our knowledge that tobacco promotional activities are
causally related to the onset of smoking." According to the authors it "provides
clear evidence that tobacco industry advertising and
promotional activities can influence non-susceptible
never-smokers to start the process of becoming addicted
to cigarettes... our data establish that the influence of
tobacco promotional activities was present before
adolescents showed any susceptibility to become smokers... we estimate that 34 per cent of all experimentation
in California between 1993 and 1996 can be attributed to
tobacco promotional activities."
Here is a quote from Emerson Foote, former Chairman of the Board of McCann-Erickson, which handled $20 million in tobacco account sales:
"The cigarette industry has been artfully maintaining that cigarette advertising has nothing to do with total sales. This is complete and utter nonsense. I am always amused by the suggestion that advertising, a function that has been shown to increase consumption of virtually every other product, somehow miraculously fails to work for tobacco products."
At the outset it should be said that we are presently,
and I believe unfairly, constrained from directly
promoting cigarettes to the youth market... if our
company is to survive and prosper, over the long term we
must get our share of the youth market... Thus we need new
brands designed to be particularly attractive to the
young smoker, while ideally at the same time appealing
to all smokers... Perhaps these questions may be best
approached by consideration of factors influencing presmokers
to try smoking, learn to smoke and become
confirmed smokers.
According to the American Lung Association, smoking rates have declined since 1991. In 1991, in the US, 25.7% of adults smoked. In 2001, in the US, 22.8% of adults smoked.
However, in the 18-24 age group, that trend is reversed; 22.9% in 1991, 26.9% in 2001. Cigarette companies have been targeting youth with their advertising.
The best part of this exemption is that Canadians are allowed to make a copy of someone else's music recordings. You don't have to own the original LP/tape/CD/whatever.
Yes, this means that Canadians are allowed to download music from P2P networks! Unfortunately, the Canadian Copyright Act specifically states that the exemption does not apply if you are "(b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade; (c) communicating to the public by telecommunication".
It hasn't been tested in court, but it is commonly accepted that sharing music - i.e. allowing uploads - with P2P networks violates these clauses. So Canadians can download from P2P networks, but not upload.
So a (probably) completely legal alternative for Canadians is to rip mp3 streams from web radio. Sure beats the price-point of iTunes, and makes me feel a lot better about paying that levy on the hundreds of CDRs we go through in the course of software development.
I have come to expect that the majority of the posters here on Slashdot haven't read the article.
It happens less often, but even Slashdot submitters sometimes fail to read the article they are submitting.
What's really sad is when the person who wrote the article didn't even research the subject they are writing about.
According to the article, "The new law, which takes effect Jan. 1, allows moviegoers to make a citizen's arrest if they see someone in a theater with a recording device." Recording devices are illegal in a movie theatre! The cops are busting everyone with a PDA or a cellphone! That thought has understandably got everyone here all up in a lather.
653z. (a) Every person who operates a recording device in a
motion picture theater while a motion picture is being exhibited, for
the purpose of recording a theatrical motion picture and without the
express written authority of the owner of the motion picture
theater, is guilty of a public offense and shall be punished by
imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, by a fine not
exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that
fine and imprisonment.
You make an extremely good point. My first reaction to this development was one of outrage that they would give up so much control over the system. You convinced me that this is a necessary - though unpalatable - change.
However, I think that there is a better way to solve the problem of leaving a high-tech nation no option but to shoot down the system. They could build into Galileo the ability to selectively reduce the accuracy or even disable it altogether for specific regions. The control over this spot service reduction would be in the hands of the EU, not the US.
Whenever the US orders a service reduction, the EU would then have the final decision on whether to go ahead with it. We have seen that the EU is willing to disobey the US military machine when they feel it is necessary.
Here's an idea to make the process accountable, without requiring a mound of paper at the voting site.
Vote at the machine
The machine asks you for a PIN number.
The machine concatenates your voter registration number with the person you voted for and your PIN number, and computes a SHA-1 hash of the result.
The machine prints out your vote, your voter registration number, your chosen PIN and the hash on a reciept and gives it to you.
Later on, a text file is made publically accessible with a row for every vote. Each row would have only the hash and the person they voted for. The algorithm for computing the hash would also be published.
Anyone who is interested in confirming that their vote was properly recorded can look up their hash in the text file to make sure it lists the person they voted for.
Anyone who has a spreadsheet can do a recount.
Any third party with a bit of cryptography knowledge can write a web app for people to confirm that their hash was computed properly.
This method has the advantage of remaining completely anonymous and completely accountable.
There have been a lot of back-of-the-napkin type of calculations flying around in this discussion relating to system costs and pollution associated with solar cells.
If anyone is serious about evaluating an alternative energy installation, you should download RETScreen, free software developed by the government of Canada. The software is all excel spreadsheets with extensive macros, so it should work with OpenOffice, too.
RETScreen lets you estimate the total system capacity that you will need to meet your electrical needs. There is no need to guess how much energy from the sun you will receive, Retscreen has charts that indicate this based on latitude and local weather patterns. It contains databases from ground station data and NASA satellite derived surface meteorology and solar energy data, including temperature data across the globe.
It has cost estimates for the panels, electrical equipment, batteries for use with off-grid systems, and installation and maintenance cost estimates.
It also lets you calculate the estimated Greenhouse Gas emissions that will be avoided for the proposed project.
Photovoltaics are not the be-all and end-all in solar power. In northern climes, you can save a huge amount on your heating energy bills with an inexpensive passive solar heating setup. RETScreen has worksheets for this as well as wind energy, biomass, and other renewable energy sources.
The wind-power analysis is also very interesting, as it is a much more economical electrical energy source for those of us a bit further north who don't get as much sun. RETScreen contains databases on annual average wind speed data across the globe for calculating the energy production of a wind-power system.
According to Barry Popik, a word-sleuth and consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, that is a common urban legend. He has found evidence that Chicago was called The Windy City in newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, in the early 1880's.
Slashdot Mirror
They felt the need to explain why the name was similar to football? With the only word in common being "ball"? I would worry more about explaining why they used "para" from the word "parabolic".
If you throw a ball in zero gravity, it will travel in a straight line, not along a parabola.
Gravity makes a thrown ball travel along a parabola. So being designed for zero-g, "paraball" is the very first official ball-based game that has absolutely nothing to do with parabolas.
Although if you want to pick nits, since the airplane is travelling along a parabola to create a zero-g environment for the players, the ball within the plane is travelling along a parabola relative to the earth. Relative to the playing field (the plane), it's all straight lines.
The thing that bothered me the most was that it really felt like Card was trying to bend the first book into a different direction. Many conversations and events from the first book were retold so that they appeared to be the same on the surface, but completely different things were actually happening.
The end result was a book that was very clever, but wasn't a very good story. It left me feeling that it had soiled the first book.
I am disappointed to see that the movie will include Ender's Shadow.
It's not only possible, it's easy, using off-the-shelf components.
First, convert the DVI signal to HD-SDI, which is the standard that all the professional HDTV editing gear uses.
Miranda DVI-Ramp
Next, capture the HD-SDI signal to your hard drive.
Blackmagic DeckLink HD
You will need a serious disk array to handle the bandwidth, but you will end up with a digital copy of the signal put out over DVI. That Miranda box does sub-sample the RGB (4:4:4) signal to YCbCr (4:2:2), but it is only a matter of time before someone makes a box that keeps it at 4:4:4.
If you look more closely at the page you linked to, you would see that it is actually a full year.
There are two types of leave, pregnancy leave and parental leave. Mothers-to-be can take up to 17 paid weeks off for pregnancy leave. Mothers and/or Fathers can then take an additional 35 paid weeks off for parental leave after the baby is born. So for a mother, 52 paid weeks off is indeed the maximum.
The government provides the paycheck during the time off, through the Employment Insurance program.
Even adoptive parents can take advantage of the parental leave portion.
Wow, lots of people advocating violence. My favourite anti-intrusion system is totally passive, and based on fog.
http://www.fogsecurity.com/area_denial2.php
For use in a home, you would have to place the fog generators carefully. For a two-story home with sleeping areas on the second floor, you could just place them on the first floor.
This would work well in a car, too. It's pretty hard to drive a car that is filled with fog. It would be damned difficult to even steal the stereo.
Yes, I agree, this is a big investment in money and upkeep for a homeowner, and a worse-than-28 year ROI is terrible.
I was objecting to the original poster saying that "the idea of green energy is impossible - wind and solar take up too much space to be viable" .
Eventually, prices for green energy sources will come down. Hopefully other energy costs will go up to account for the environmental damage they cause. Once the ROI makes sense, mass implementation will follow.
Many green energy solutions can be implemented in a decentralized manner, instead of in huge projects like you mention. Installing them in this manner could make use of space that could not otherwise be used for energy generation.
Covering your house's shingles with solar panels would be expensive, but this could provide for much of the electrical needs of your household. For about $14,000, you can buy 24 165w Sharp 1575mm x 826mm solar panels, and save about $500 a year on electricity.
A 20m tower with a 7m diameter wind turbine could be installed in even a very small inner-city house lot. If you live in a reasonably windy climate, this could generate all the electricity you need for about $25,000.
I know these are expensive solutions, but certainly not impossible. The prices will come down.
Just boot from a Knoppix CD, and shred your hard drive from there.
I had a windows 2000 laptop with a bad hard drive that would no longer even boot. I had to send the old hard drive back to Dell. I used this method to securely erase it before I sent it back.
I was pretty impressed that shred could still do its thing without crashing even though the drive was having continuous write failures. There was probably some data left in the bad sectors, though, but that's much better than sending back a drive full of my data!
Gas prices are generally higher in Canada than in the US.
According to the DOE, as of May 31st, the average retail gas price in the US was $2.051 USD per gallon.
The gas station I drove by this morning in Toronto was selling gas for $0.85 CAD per litre. It was a lot more, around $0.95 a couple of weeks ago.
With the financial exchange rate and unit conversion rate, we are currently paying $2.38 USD per gallon for gas.
All that we use to control our HTPC is a Logitech MX 700 wireless mouse. With the HTPC app that we use, SageTV, everything is accessible from a mouse-driven interface. We don't use that computer for email or games requiring a keyboard. My only complaint about the mouse is that its range is only about 10 feet.
The only thing that we can't do with the mouse is turn on the TV and the stereo. I am planning on programming one of the extra buttons on the mouse to do this. I'm planning on using it to launch a macro via the software program Girder that will send all of the appropriate IR commands out of the USB-UIRT IR blaster/receiver to turn on all the devices and switch their inputs accordingly. That should solve the only problem we have, which is explaining to babysitters how to use the TV.
This is great news for OpenGroupware. It's a full featured calendar, email and groupware server.
Previously, the only end to end open source solution you could set up with OpenGroupware was using Mozilla Calendar, another iCalendar app, or by using the built in web client. The Mozilla/iCalendar support is good, but "provides little "groupware" functionality and the support for it is to be consider experimental".
There are plugins for Outlook and Evolution, but they were both not open source. It was actually pretty funny, an open source server, an open source client (evolution), and a closed source, very expensive connector to get the two to talk to each other! Look for "Ximian Connector" in their FAQ:
http://www.opengroupware.org/en/users/faq
OpenGroupware will not be able to use this Evolution connector directly, but since it is open source, it will be adapted for this purpose. Helge Hess the main developer for OpenGroupware has said as much.
They actually subverted the listing for the keyword "failure" by itself, not just the phrase "miserable failure". That must have taken a lot more work.
We used to have a rack in a very prominent facility with lots of excellent security measures.
Unfortunately every one of these security measures could be easily bypassed.
The security guards didn't even ask us any questions or look at our ID when we moved our gear out of there. I'm glad we did!
How about $4.99 (after $25 in rebates) for a Microsoft 802.11b router, with a 4-port switch?
I guess Microsoft is not doing so well in the networking hardware market. Must be hard to compete with all the manufacturers using Linux to run their access points.
Hmm... A story involving massive amounts of post-its, submitted by an anonymous reader, eh? Who wants to bet that it was an anonymous reader in 3M's marketing department?
They get loads of publicity throught the Slashdot story, and they don't even have to deal with the Slashdot effect!
The article talked about sending a possibly traceable SMS to a device you own to discover the number of the snarfed phone. An untraceable way to discover the number would be to use a Bluetooth headset to make a call to one of those phone numbers that read back your phone number.
What fun you could have with a Linux PDA with Bluetooth combined with a Bluetooth headset. A nice and portable way to make unlimited free calls via any vulnerable phone that is close enough to you.
When will vendors learn that vulnerabilities need to be fixed right away, even if they can't think of anything nasty that can be done with them?
That was really strange.
I read the canoe article you mentioned in your posting at 2:46pm, and it quoted from slashdot postings from danhm and _Sharp'r_, both submitted at 2:43pm.
3 minutes for canoe to read those postings,write their article, for you to find their article, read it, and write your posting.
I knew the news loop was faster on the Internet, but that's pretty amazing!
I wish news sites would show the revision history of published articles.
You make some interesting points. As you say, correlation is not causation.
There are really two points to be made:
The King and Siegel study is not trying to prove the second point, only the first. It makes no comment on the effectiveness of this advertising, it is only showing that cigarette companies are specifically targeting advertising to youth. It speaks of their intentions, not the results.
You are right that I did not back up the second point adequately.
Here are some exerpts from a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998:
This study provides "the first longitudinal evidence to our knowledge that tobacco promotional activities are causally related to the onset of smoking." According to the authors it "provides clear evidence that tobacco industry advertising and promotional activities can influence non-susceptible never-smokers to start the process of becoming addicted to cigarettes ... our data establish that the influence of
tobacco promotional activities was present before
adolescents showed any susceptibility to become smokers ... we estimate that 34 per cent of all experimentation
in California between 1993 and 1996 can be attributed to
tobacco promotional activities."
Here is a quote from Emerson Foote, former Chairman of the Board of McCann-Erickson, which handled $20 million in tobacco account sales:
"The cigarette industry has been artfully maintaining that cigarette advertising has nothing to do with total sales. This is complete and utter nonsense. I am always amused by the suggestion that advertising, a function that has been shown to increase consumption of virtually every other product, somehow miraculously fails to work for tobacco products."
Here is a quote from a leaked internal paper by Claude Teague, Assistant Chief in R&D at RJ Reynolds:
At the outset it should be said that we are presently, and I believe unfairly, constrained from directly promoting cigarettes to the youth market ... if our
company is to survive and prosper, over the long term we
must get our share of the youth market ... Thus we need new
brands designed to be particularly attractive to the
young smoker, while ideally at the same time appealing
to all smokers ... Perhaps these questions may be best
approached by consideration of factors influencing presmokers
to try smoking, learn to smoke and become
confirmed smokers.
According to the American Lung Association, smoking rates have declined since 1991. In 1991, in the US, 25.7% of adults smoked. In 2001, in the US, 22.8% of adults smoked.
However, in the 18-24 age group, that trend is reversed; 22.9% in 1991, 26.9% in 2001. Cigarette companies have been targeting youth with their advertising.
Actually, until an exemption was made to the Canadian Copyright Act, for the most part, Canadians did not enjoy the right to copy music for personal use. The levy was first introduced at the same time as this exemption, in 1997.
The best part of this exemption is that Canadians are allowed to make a copy of someone else's music recordings. You don't have to own the original LP/tape/CD/whatever.
Yes, this means that Canadians are allowed to download music from P2P networks! Unfortunately, the Canadian Copyright Act specifically states that the exemption does not apply if you are "(b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade; (c) communicating to the public by telecommunication".
It hasn't been tested in court, but it is commonly accepted that sharing music - i.e. allowing uploads - with P2P networks violates these clauses. So Canadians can download from P2P networks, but not upload.
So a (probably) completely legal alternative for Canadians is to rip mp3 streams from web radio. Sure beats the price-point of iTunes, and makes me feel a lot better about paying that levy on the hundreds of CDRs we go through in the course of software development.
I have come to expect that the majority of the posters here on Slashdot haven't read the article.
It happens less often, but even Slashdot submitters sometimes fail to read the article they are submitting.
What's really sad is when the person who wrote the article didn't even research the subject they are writing about.
According to the article, "The new law, which takes effect Jan. 1, allows moviegoers to make a citizen's arrest if they see someone in a theater with a recording device." Recording devices are illegal in a movie theatre! The cops are busting everyone with a PDA or a cellphone! That thought has understandably got everyone here all up in a lather.
The actual law states (emphasis is mine):
Section 653z is added to the Penal Code, to read:
653z. (a) Every person who operates a recording device in a motion picture theater while a motion picture is being exhibited, for the purpose of recording a theatrical motion picture and without the express written authority of the owner of the motion picture theater, is guilty of a public offense and shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that fine and imprisonment.
You make an extremely good point. My first reaction to this development was one of outrage that they would give up so much control over the system. You convinced me that this is a necessary - though unpalatable - change.
However, I think that there is a better way to solve the problem of leaving a high-tech nation no option but to shoot down the system. They could build into Galileo the ability to selectively reduce the accuracy or even disable it altogether for specific regions. The control over this spot service reduction would be in the hands of the EU, not the US.
Whenever the US orders a service reduction, the EU would then have the final decision on whether to go ahead with it. We have seen that the EU is willing to disobey the US military machine when they feel it is necessary.
Here's an idea to make the process accountable, without requiring a mound of paper at the voting site.
Later on, a text file is made publically accessible with a row for every vote. Each row would have only the hash and the person they voted for. The algorithm for computing the hash would also be published.
Anyone who is interested in confirming that their vote was properly recorded can look up their hash in the text file to make sure it lists the person they voted for.
Anyone who has a spreadsheet can do a recount.
Any third party with a bit of cryptography knowledge can write a web app for people to confirm that their hash was computed properly.
This method has the advantage of remaining completely anonymous and completely accountable.
Any thoughts?
I release this idea into the public domain.
There have been a lot of back-of-the-napkin type of calculations flying around in this discussion relating to system costs and pollution associated with solar cells.
If anyone is serious about evaluating an alternative energy installation, you should download RETScreen, free software developed by the government of Canada. The software is all excel spreadsheets with extensive macros, so it should work with OpenOffice, too.
RETScreen lets you estimate the total system capacity that you will need to meet your electrical needs. There is no need to guess how much energy from the sun you will receive, Retscreen has charts that indicate this based on latitude and local weather patterns. It contains databases from ground station data and NASA satellite derived surface meteorology and solar energy data, including temperature data across the globe.
It has cost estimates for the panels, electrical equipment, batteries for use with off-grid systems, and installation and maintenance cost estimates.
It also lets you calculate the estimated Greenhouse Gas emissions that will be avoided for the proposed project.
Photovoltaics are not the be-all and end-all in solar power. In northern climes, you can save a huge amount on your heating energy bills with an inexpensive passive solar heating setup. RETScreen has worksheets for this as well as wind energy, biomass, and other renewable energy sources.
The wind-power analysis is also very interesting, as it is a much more economical electrical energy source for those of us a bit further north who don't get as much sun. RETScreen contains databases on annual average wind speed data across the globe for calculating the energy production of a wind-power system.
You could also be wrong.
According to Barry Popik, a word-sleuth and consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, that is a common urban legend. He has found evidence that Chicago was called The Windy City in newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, in the early 1880's.