People talk about so and so site being safe when Google marks them unsafe, but time and time again it's shown that those sites WERE in fact infected - usually from a third-party ad network.
There are two sides to that coin. A friend of mine operates a small aviation website that was flagged as infected by Google for over a year and they steadfastly refused to fix the situation even though he got his site certified clean and uninfected by multiple security companies. Google finally relented when he blogged about his experience and it started topping the search results on their own search engine. I suppose they figured that a headline starting with the words "Why I hate Google..." wasn't doing their image any good. His site did not carry ads, it's a pretty basic HTML based site.
The StarChase system is a pursuit reduction technology that contains a miniature GPS module encased in a tracking projectile/tag and a launcher mounted on a police vehicle. It is neither a bullet nor a weapon as the BBC story claims. It doesn't use gunpowder, it uses compressed air. The word bullet does not appear anywhere on the company's website - except where another ignorant journalist has used it. You'd think the BBC would be better and more educated than the Des Moines, Iowa local news. You would also be incorrect in that assumption.
You can argue that 'weapon' means 'tool used to achieve a goal' - but come on, this is the BBC we're talking about. You put the words "American police" and "bullet" together and quite naturally scare words like "weapon" come out. Look at the quote on the page: "There are other ways to track vehicles and this could raise some civil liberties issues." What does that even mean? Fleeing from the police, endangering the lives of everyone on the road and all the BBC can think of is how the criminal's rights might be violated...somehow. Unfortunately this mental rot extends throughout the entire organization and its journalists are simply no longer able to think straight. I doubt anyone even thought for a second about the bias. Sad, because once the BBC was a paragon of honesty. Look back at newsreels and 80s broadcasts and you will see a very different organization.
There are guns that fire projectiles with compressed air and have been since at least the 18th century. This is the Star Chase system, to me it looks like a compressed air gun and that fires a bullet like projectile so the BBC is essentially right. It seems to me that you are getting worked up over nothing because you don't like the BBC and have no made up 'EU wants circus performers to wear hard-hats' type story to get worked up over this morning.
Great post, but shouldn't it be one skeleton per 3.500 years? (350.000 / 100)
Yeah (red faced) it should be. But that's still an amazingly low number of specimens for the best documented archaic human species we know of. For a very crude estimate (and I hope I get my math right this time) If we assume the average Neanderthal population world wide over those 350.000 years was 50.000 people, a generation is 25 years and there are three generations alive at the same time you get 50.000/3 ~ 16600 new Neanderthals each generation, so over 350.000 years you have (350.000/25) * 16600 = 231 million Neanderthals that ever lived and we have a sample of 100. Those numbers are crude but they still give you a rough idea of how tiny the sample size is since hominids were never anywhere nears as common in the ecosystem as, say bison or caribou.
They have dug up millions of bones - to what purpose? One would think that by now they have enough to fill a large warehouse that no-one will ever look at again, except may another archeologist digging up Los Angeles and wondering how all these ancient bones became so mixed up in a big jumble with traces of rust in the clay, around the big altar of the 21st century religious complex known as 'the museum'...
I used to wonder about that too until a paleontologist explained to me that digging up large amounts of bones, even from mundane species like duckbilled dinosaurs, can yield all sorts of data bout things like: what was the extent of variations in skeletal morphology? what did these critters die of, i.e. diseases, who ate them? how did different predators kill duckbills? (which tell you something about a whole range of predators that you have practically no other way of finding out except maybe uber-rare fossilized footprints).... the list goes on. You can also infer things about social behavior by digging up large collections of bones from a single species, you can get clues from them about how environmental factors affected population size and which environmental extremes limited a species' habitat. Another example is archaic humans whose skeletal remains are a couple of steps up from dragon's teeth on the rarity scale. The grand to total of the Neanderthal remains is IIRC about 100 (mostly incomplete) skeletons which is an unusually large sample size. It's also wroth noting that Neanderthals existed for c.a 350.000 years so that's one skeleton per 35.000 years. The skeletal remains of most older hominid species are much, much more rare. In the last few decades archaic humans have been sub-divided into a large number of subspecies based on differences in skeletal morphology and often a species classification is based on a one or two incomplete skeletons. Recently a unusually large cache of Archaic human bones was found at Dmanisi in Georgia. The morphological differences between the different individuals of that population were found to be about the same as those found in modern humans. Just for example, the Dmanisi finds included an individual whose brain size was half that of most of his contemporaries so one can conclude that brain size is no conclusive indicator of how primitive an individual is. Its the way the brain works that is important not so much the brain size. This find in Dmanisi has led to the realization that a whole group of Archaic human 'variants' including, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo gautengensis, Homo ergaster and Homo erectus were probably the same species and that they may have been been erroneously over-divided into subspecies by scientist reading far too much into variations in skeletal morphology. This is not to say those scientists made a mistake, they just did not have the broad collection of bones available that they needed to establish extremes in morphological variation and drew what conclusions they could based on the evidence available. Thats how science works: procure evidence, examine it, draw conclusions, create a theory, get new evidence, examine it, draw conclusions, revise your theory. It's also what irritates the piss out of religionists who like to have a single never changing doctrine, scientists keep changing their minds.
Germany is just starting to flex its muscles again after that whole unpleasant business with them shoving millions of people into gas chambers within living memory.
When all else fails, bring up the Nazis. I think it's time to invoke Godwin's law...
They wouldn't have to leave the WTO, just remove yourself from the treaty then sign and ratify it again with a signing statement that negates the problem.
Isn't that kind of like a christian leaving the church only to join up again right away with the caveat that he wants to opt out of the 6th, 7th and 8th commandments? I don't think it works that way. If if opting out of bits and pieces of treaties every time it suits you were as easy as that, making international treaties would be a pretty pointless exercise since everybody could just opt out at will.
Allies today, enemies tomorrow? Things change quickly. We were fighting Germany & Japan 60 years ago.
Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan are all supposed allies, we have treaties and security counsels with them, but are they really our friends? This was 3 years ago.
The point is that it doesn't have to be that way and only a bunch of total morons (read the NSA) would push us closer to that unfortunate scenario with idiotic behaviour. Both the German and the French leadership have been pretty reluctant to raise a stink over the Snowden affair (even though they are definitely pissed off about it) partly because they are pretty eager to finalize that EU/US free trade agreement ASAP and Snowden's revelations are screwing everything up at the worst possible time. One gets the feeling they made calls to Washington a while ago and asked Obama et al. whether there were any more stink-bombs coming down the pipes and were told 'no'. They then made statements based on that assurance only to find themselves with a fresh batch of stink-bombs on their hands. I have to hand it to Snowden, If it is his intention to wreck the EU-US relationship his timing is perfect. Vlad Putin must be watching this farce unfold and laughing his ass off. The only ones gaining by this carnival of stupidity are Russia and possibly China.
Guess what, the U.S. has spy agencies and their job is to spy. It just confirms they're doing an effective job, which is rare in government.
Guess what, the U.S has armed forces and their job is to blow stuff up. That does not mean that it's a good idea to have them blow up America's allies. I know everybody spies on everybody else but when you are treating your allies like enemies it's time to re-examine which is more important to you, your alliances or knowing what the president of France eats for breakfast or where the chancellor of Germany buys her strudel. As for doing their job, I fail to see how US intelligence can be said to be doing its job in view of their complete inability to keep a lid on their operations and keep in mind that we haven't even begun to take into account the miserable US intelligence failures that led to the Iraq war which must surely lead one to lower the competence rating of the US intelligence services still further.
Since Mavericks only runs on Apple hardware unless you hack the OS, I'd say that's pretty obvious so why get up on a soap box and make noise about it? And just for the record the OS X core components are open source.
MS is more worried about Google docs imo. Office already has collaborative features that work across platforms. For iWork to be interesting it would need to work on more than just Mac.
Office only has a native client on Windows, iWork has one only on OS X and iOS, Google Docs has no official native clients that I'm aware of. Since Google Docs is a web only app the only fair thing to do is compare it to the web versions of iWork and Office 365. The web version of iWork is supported on Windows browsers. It's not supported on Linux but will run there on Firefox. Comparing the two I'd say iWork is in many ways on par with Google Docs except that iWork looks more slick. I can't compare the two to Office 365 since I haven't used it but it would seem to me that iWork could be made to achieve feature parity Google Docs and Office 365 with relatively little effort. It all depends on whether Apple can pull it's head out of it's ass (unlikely), ensure official support for iWork/iCloud on Linux/Android desktops and how important it is to them to piss off Google by matching Google Docs feature-for-feature.
I think you need to double check your numbers. I know you get modded to 5 as insightful, but really...you should check your numbers.
According to this paper, from Harvard University, the Iran/Afghanistan wars will eventually cost between $4-6 trillion... now please demonstrate how ObamaCare will cost more than that. I'm not saying you are wrong, ObamaCare may cost more that $4-6 trillion but at the very least I'd like to see you back that up.
Every one of these points hits the nail square on the head.
The key to take out of this is: document document document! At minimum you should have a set of instructions to re-build your dev and build environment. "Insert the <your company> dev workstation image v4" is not allowed to be a step! Your elaborate continuous integration multi-tree setup and mountain of environment setup scripts and template directories are great until the guy who set it up takes off and you have to upgrade something. Ideally a set of instructions talking to the motivation of certain decisions, roadblocks encountered, etc.
One thing the article doesn't have is have lots of 3rd party tools and keep the license servers/license files on whatever box is most convenient for the dev working on it at the time.
He left out the best method: Hand write everything in assembly language...
After 46 million years, however, any DNA would be long degraded.
That's what they used to say about Neandertal DNA. Turns out the DNA does indeed begin to fragment but you can still piece it together for a very long time after it begins to degrade. In this case that statement is it's probably right and 46 million years is too long and even if you could recover some Dino DNA (from any source) it will be fragmented beyond recovery with current technology. Even so, we should not stop trying to defy established notions of what is impossible. A Scientist at Yale University recently discovered that pigments do not degrade, they sometimes fossilise which is an amazing discovery since it means that if we find fossilised dinosaur skin, feathers or insect exoskeletons for that matter we can figure out what color long extinct animals were. It was almost a scientific axiom that we would never know what color dinosaurs were and it certainly blew me away when I found out that was wrong.
If Apple's issue really was that micro USB was too fragile, well they could have introduced a new, standard, connector to fix that. Design a "mobile USB" standard, that is durable, orients either way, integrates pins for HDMI, etc. Get it all nice n' designed and tested, then hand the design over to the USB Group, royalty free (like all USB standards). Particularly if it was going to be part of new Apple phones I don't imagine that there'd be a lot of resistance to adoption.
The EU's mandate doesn't come from a love of micro-USB, but rather the need for a standard, whatever that is. Micro-USB is the best we've got and the most prevalent, so that is what they are going for. If there was a better one out there, particularly if you could show how increased durability could lead to longer life and less waste, I think it'd have a good chance of being the standard.
However Apple has no interest in that at all. Their new connector wasn't made because micro-USB is so bad, it was made because Apple desires to be the only place you buy Apple accessories.
I disagree, the micro USB connector is a mediocre design at best. In fact both mini and micro USB are bad designs, they do not sit firmly in the socket and micro USB connectors have a tendency to break off the little plastic contact plate inside the socket. I look at that the Micro USB system and marvel at the fact that they managed to create a socket with a plug in it and a plug with a socket in it. There is nothing more annoying than to have an expensive USB device bricked by a broken micro USB socket or getting a brand new USB drive that you can hardly touch during a data transfer for fear of the connection breaking thanks to a crappy connector. There are actually devices with micro USB sockets that are so crappy you can push the micro USB connector into them up-side-down. You can say what you want about Apple but their Lightning cable is a better design than the micro USB connector. The Lightning connector is more robust, you don't have to check the orientation, it plugs in more smoothly and there is no fragile connector panel inside the socket that you can break off because Apple put it on the connector where it belongs. I do agree with you that I wish Apple would pull it's head out of it's own ass, donate the Lightning connector and make it an open standard.
What did he expose that we didn't already suspect?
He exposed that those saying that NSA did all those things weren't crazy tinfoil-hats and that those who said that they were were naive.
Go back to old forum posts, read the discussions. Some people voiced the suspicion, most of them were ridiculed.
Oh for Christ's sake what did people think the NSA was planning to do with its new $2 billion datacenter? Store personnel records and payroll data? Host the world's biggest private World of Warcraft server? Their early experiments with the so called Echelon system were a big fat hint. Even back in 2001 a European parliament report recommended systematically encrypting all communications. It would have been incompetence of the first magnitude if the NSA hadn't exploited the USA's unique position to tap into the torrents of unencrypted data flowing though the internet backbone given the positive experiences they had had with using Echelon to conduct strategic and economic espionage. If anybody had any questions about what the scale of the NSA data collection operation was, that famous Utah datacenter only made it glaringly obvious that they had ambitions to harvest internet traffic on a mammoth scale. The knee jerk reaction to this Snowden/NSA scandal will be that people will finally begin to do what the EU parliament recommended way back in 2001 and systematically encrypt communications and storage media. This in turn makes me wonder (entering tinfoil-hat country here) whether the NSA has leaned on Intel/AMD to put back doors or hard-to-detect vulnerabilities into their encryptions circuits on their processors (assuming that's even possible, and if it is possible that such a vulnerability is hard to detect which it would have to be).
The only way for socialism to work is via big government because it requires that the government take-to-give. Heck, the two largest budget items are Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security, which are both insolvent. And yes, both are even larger than Defense spending (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY_2011.png).
What you meant was Socialism =/= Communism, which is just socialism enforced by a government that controls all of the businesses.
What the US needs is less government, which includes a smaller defense budget, as well as less interference through social programming (intentionally not "programs"). The idea that we cannot go back to even 2008 levels of spending--before the supposedly one-time bailouts and otherwise huge deficits--is ludicrous. Socialism will break the back of an already weakened economy that cannot support the government that does not even bother trying to support itself by avoiding disgustingly high deficits.
To tell you the truth all of this conservative right-think vs. liberal wrong-think you Americans have got going is something I'll never understand. I don't really see the difference between parties like your Democrats who adopt many Social Democrat ideas and Conservatives who profess to favor free market capitalism. They both practice socialism, they just do it differently. With the Soc. Dems. it's is usually vote fishing by handing entitlements to groups that didn't earn them, i.e. schemes like "lets take all those fat private pensions and nationalize them, then lets pay out equally to everybody regardless of how much they paid into the system or whether they contributed at all". Another favorite with the Soc. Dems. is taxing the middle classes and businesses to death and levying ridiculous taxes on property that forces people to move out of houses that have been in the family for generations and that have become quite valuable due to real estate prices rising sharply over the decades (in city centers for example) because they can't afford the property taxes. WIth the conservatives it's usually corporate socialism. They deregulate the financial industry, cause a recession, the banks have to write off massive amounts of debt to companies and subprime lenders and it is Joe/Jane Suburbanite (and eventually their kids) plus smaller businesses that end up footing the bill to bail out banks and big byzantine corporations because they are job-providers and not bailing them out would put people out of work and that's not worth many votes in the next election. Mind you, much as they profess to hate things like Medicare, Bush Jr. didn't seem to have any problems fishing for votes by handing out $8.4 trillion in unfunded obligations with Medicare D so it's not as if right thinking Conservatives are above borrowing ideas from evil Socialists.
Keep in mind the lowest bid was still probably 50-100x more then it would normally be cause hey, 3$ hammer is worth 100$ to the government.
Nothing the US Govt. does surprises me any more after I watched a documentary that claims that the Bush administrations handed a contract to handle oversight of tens of billions worth of funds going to Iraq and that specifically asked for qualified accountants to a firm run out of a private residence in S-California (apparently none of the handful of employees were certified accountants). Apparently some $8.8 billion of that money subsequently went missing. To put that into perspective $8.8 billion will buy you 58 F-22 stealth fighters at a fly-away unit cost of $150 million or around 1000 M1 Abrams tanks at a drive-away price of $8.6 million. Those thousand tanks are enough to equip four armored divisions of 250 tanks each which are in turn enough to provide the armor component of two entire field-corps (and the current US army has four field-corps of whom one is airborne). The amazing thing is that nobody to this day seems to know how or why that peanut sized accountancy firm got that contract.
"The WSJ reports that six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government finally acknowledged that design and software problems have kept customers from applying online for coverage."
What software platform does the software run on ?
I think this problem has less to do with the platform and more to do with the fact that this is what you get when you take the lowest bid without doing some basic research on the competence of the bidder. I mean 92 files per 'Apply'? Seriously? And they rolled it out after the Government Accountability Office warned that insufficient testing had been done? This mess says something about the people running the project. It seems to me that those three months could have been well spent hiring software testing contractors to do some load testing although one gets the feeling from the descriptions that team working on this system were scrambling so madly to get it working by their deadline that there would probably not have been any time to fix any except the very worst the bugs the contractors would have found.
If the Saudis suddenly stopped selling oil to... it would trash our allies
When you say "allies", are you sure you don't mean "markets"? I don't think the USA has allies any more - just peoples and countries who depend on it for aid and subsidies and TV programmes.
That's what happens when you let a Bush loose in a porcelain shop.
Besides that, I think anyone predicting a sudden collapse of supply is silly.
A sudden collapse of supply is not the problem. The problem is that even maintaining todays output is insufficient. Energy use grows exponentially. It doubles in about 30 years. So 30 years from now we're going to need twice as much output, and 60 years from now we're going to need 4 times as much output and after 90 years, 16 times the output. Even a steady linear increase in production capacity will be outpaced in a few doubling times.
But we don't get a steady linear increase in production. We get an exponential growth at the beginning, that levels off, and then tapers downwards. There is no sudden collapse of supply, but there is a sudden disparity between supply and demand.
That isn't the only problem. They (Wall Street) have begun to bundle shale leases like they did with their mortgage backed securities. Basically they are bundling shale leases into packages and there are allegations that crappy shale 'claims' (for lack of a better word), that are basically equivalent to subprime mortgages, are being rated as prime quality extraction areas and sold off to unsuspecting suckers. Anybody who remembers 2008 will have a fair idea where that can lead unless somebody hits the breaks and given that everybody from the shale boom areas to Washington is busy dancing to the shale-fracking-will-give-us-energy-independence buzz that seems unlikely. The mentality of people caught up in this shale 'goldrush' is scarily similar to what I experienced leading up to the mortgage crisis.
Vaporware.... Meanwhile I have been using Bing for three months now and can't see much difference from Google. Just about the only thing that Google search still has that I miss on Bing is a few advanced features like the ability to limit searches to specified time periods. Their image search is also pretty good, I get fewer hits but also less garbage/noise. Bing maps isn't quite up to par with Google maps but they do have better maps in some out-of-the-way places where I spend my time and Bing translator is if anything even better than Google translate.
I have read several articles and reports by economists and geologists claiming this fracking boom is a bubble. The estimate of 100 years worth of gas is overstated. It seems 25 years worth of gas is more likely, less if gas exports are allowed.
I don't really have an opinion on the issue as a whole, but it's worth pointing out that similar reports have been telling us for decades that the end was nigh, and yet we continue finding new deposits and/or new ways to exploit known deposits. Obviously that can't continue forever, and it seems pretty clear that there are other issues that have to be considered (e.g. climate change), but I'm pretty skeptical of anyone projecting near-term resource exhaustion.
It's always possible, of course, that this time the wolf really is here, but...
Besides that, I think anyone predicting a sudden collapse of supply is silly. That's not how the world works; you don't see all of the fields simultaneously ceasing production, instead many fields begin to decline at differing rates. The result -- when we near exhaustion -- will be that available supply gradually tapers off, which will cause prices to gradually rise in order to limit demand to available supply. Rising prices will eventually move us off of fossil fuels, if we haven't already done it for other reasons.
I was in the.skeptic camp in 2007/8 well before the mortgage crisis and I used to get got same kind of speeches you just gave. Nobody believed you could have a mortgage crisis on that scale, they didn't even think that there was anything wrong with putting people on bonuses handing out loans. You can have a fracking bubble without resource exhaustion just like you can have a real estate bubble without that being the end of real estate. Secondly, when it comes to shale oil and gas, resource exhaustion is a pretty rapid process. Regular oil wells last for multiple decades, shale deposits are exhausted in years and the drop in yields is very rapid so you frack your way through deposits very rapidly. You should read that last article linked to in the summary, it is a good place to start and it also mentions the 10 year shelf life of the shale oil boom (I got that figure elsewhere). I suppose we'll see what happens next, I just hope it isn't a rerun of the mortgage crisis.
Slashdot Mirror
People talk about so and so site being safe when Google marks them unsafe, but time and time again it's shown that those sites WERE in fact infected - usually from a third-party ad network.
There are two sides to that coin. A friend of mine operates a small aviation website that was flagged as infected by Google for over a year and they steadfastly refused to fix the situation even though he got his site certified clean and uninfected by multiple security companies. Google finally relented when he blogged about his experience and it started topping the search results on their own search engine. I suppose they figured that a headline starting with the words "Why I hate Google..." wasn't doing their image any good. His site did not carry ads, it's a pretty basic HTML based site.
The StarChase system is a pursuit reduction technology that contains a miniature GPS module encased in a tracking projectile/tag and a launcher mounted on a police vehicle. It is neither a bullet nor a weapon as the BBC story claims. It doesn't use gunpowder, it uses compressed air. The word bullet does not appear anywhere on the company's website - except where another ignorant journalist has used it. You'd think the BBC would be better and more educated than the Des Moines, Iowa local news. You would also be incorrect in that assumption.
You can argue that 'weapon' means 'tool used to achieve a goal' - but come on, this is the BBC we're talking about. You put the words "American police" and "bullet" together and quite naturally scare words like "weapon" come out. Look at the quote on the page: "There are other ways to track vehicles and this could raise some civil liberties issues." What does that even mean? Fleeing from the police, endangering the lives of everyone on the road and all the BBC can think of is how the criminal's rights might be violated...somehow. Unfortunately this mental rot extends throughout the entire organization and its journalists are simply no longer able to think straight. I doubt anyone even thought for a second about the bias. Sad, because once the BBC was a paragon of honesty. Look back at newsreels and 80s broadcasts and you will see a very different organization.
There are guns that fire projectiles with compressed air and have been since at least the 18th century. This is the Star Chase system, to me it looks like a compressed air gun and that fires a bullet like projectile so the BBC is essentially right. It seems to me that you are getting worked up over nothing because you don't like the BBC and have no made up 'EU wants circus performers to wear hard-hats' type story to get worked up over this morning.
Those sites I truly despise I hope their programmers/scripters get a horrible infestation of something nasty.
Just mail them a bootlegged Windows 8 DVD.
duckbilled dinosaurs
We just call those ducks now...
Are they in a row?
Great post, but shouldn't it be one skeleton per 3.500 years? (350.000 / 100)
Yeah (red faced) it should be. But that's still an amazingly low number of specimens for the best documented archaic human species we know of. For a very crude estimate (and I hope I get my math right this time) If we assume the average Neanderthal population world wide over those 350.000 years was 50.000 people, a generation is 25 years and there are three generations alive at the same time you get 50.000/3 ~ 16600 new Neanderthals each generation, so over 350.000 years you have (350.000/25) * 16600 = 231 million Neanderthals that ever lived and we have a sample of 100. Those numbers are crude but they still give you a rough idea of how tiny the sample size is since hominids were never anywhere nears as common in the ecosystem as, say bison or caribou.
They have dug up millions of bones - to what purpose? One would think that by now they have enough to fill a large warehouse that no-one will ever look at again, except may another archeologist digging up Los Angeles and wondering how all these ancient bones became so mixed up in a big jumble with traces of rust in the clay, around the big altar of the 21st century religious complex known as 'the museum'...
I used to wonder about that too until a paleontologist explained to me that digging up large amounts of bones, even from mundane species like duckbilled dinosaurs, can yield all sorts of data bout things like: what was the extent of variations in skeletal morphology? what did these critters die of, i.e. diseases, who ate them? how did different predators kill duckbills? (which tell you something about a whole range of predators that you have practically no other way of finding out except maybe uber-rare fossilized footprints) .... the list goes on. You can also infer things about social behavior by digging up large collections of bones from a single species, you can get clues from them about how environmental factors affected population size and which environmental extremes limited a species' habitat. Another example is archaic humans whose skeletal remains are a couple of steps up from dragon's teeth on the rarity scale. The grand to total of the Neanderthal remains is IIRC about 100 (mostly incomplete) skeletons which is an unusually large sample size. It's also wroth noting that Neanderthals existed for c.a 350.000 years so that's one skeleton per 35.000 years. The skeletal remains of most older hominid species are much, much more rare. In the last few decades archaic humans have been sub-divided into a large number of subspecies based on differences in skeletal morphology and often a species classification is based on a one or two incomplete skeletons. Recently a unusually large cache of Archaic human bones was found at Dmanisi in Georgia. The morphological differences between the different individuals of that population were found to be about the same as those found in modern humans. Just for example, the Dmanisi finds included an individual whose brain size was half that of most of his contemporaries so one can conclude that brain size is no conclusive indicator of how primitive an individual is. Its the way the brain works that is important not so much the brain size. This find in Dmanisi has led to the realization that a whole group of Archaic human 'variants' including, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo gautengensis, Homo ergaster and Homo erectus were probably the same species and that they may have been been erroneously over-divided into subspecies by scientist reading far too much into variations in skeletal morphology. This is not to say those scientists made a mistake, they just did not have the broad collection of bones available that they needed to establish extremes in morphological variation and drew what conclusions they could based on the evidence available. Thats how science works: procure evidence, examine it, draw conclusions, create a theory, get new evidence, examine it, draw conclusions, revise your theory. It's also what irritates the piss out of religionists who like to have a single never changing doctrine, scientists keep changing their minds.
Germany is just starting to flex its muscles again after that whole unpleasant business with them shoving millions of people into gas chambers within living memory.
When all else fails, bring up the Nazis. I think it's time to invoke Godwin's law...
They wouldn't have to leave the WTO, just remove yourself from the treaty then sign and ratify it again with a signing statement that negates the problem.
Isn't that kind of like a christian leaving the church only to join up again right away with the caveat that he wants to opt out of the 6th, 7th and 8th commandments? I don't think it works that way. If if opting out of bits and pieces of treaties every time it suits you were as easy as that, making international treaties would be a pretty pointless exercise since everybody could just opt out at will.
Allies today, enemies tomorrow? Things change quickly. We were fighting Germany & Japan 60 years ago.
Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan are all supposed allies, we have treaties and security counsels with them, but are they really our friends? This was 3 years ago.
The point is that it doesn't have to be that way and only a bunch of total morons (read the NSA) would push us closer to that unfortunate scenario with idiotic behaviour. Both the German and the French leadership have been pretty reluctant to raise a stink over the Snowden affair (even though they are definitely pissed off about it) partly because they are pretty eager to finalize that EU/US free trade agreement ASAP and Snowden's revelations are screwing everything up at the worst possible time. One gets the feeling they made calls to Washington a while ago and asked Obama et al. whether there were any more stink-bombs coming down the pipes and were told 'no'. They then made statements based on that assurance only to find themselves with a fresh batch of stink-bombs on their hands. I have to hand it to Snowden, If it is his intention to wreck the EU-US relationship his timing is perfect. Vlad Putin must be watching this farce unfold and laughing his ass off. The only ones gaining by this carnival of stupidity are Russia and possibly China.
Guess what, the U.S. has spy agencies and their job is to spy. It just confirms they're doing an effective job, which is rare in government.
Guess what, the U.S has armed forces and their job is to blow stuff up. That does not mean that it's a good idea to have them blow up America's allies. I know everybody spies on everybody else but when you are treating your allies like enemies it's time to re-examine which is more important to you, your alliances or knowing what the president of France eats for breakfast or where the chancellor of Germany buys her strudel. As for doing their job, I fail to see how US intelligence can be said to be doing its job in view of their complete inability to keep a lid on their operations and keep in mind that we haven't even begun to take into account the miserable US intelligence failures that led to the Iraq war which must surely lead one to lower the competence rating of the US intelligence services still further.
Free OS X Is No Threat To Linux
Since Mavericks only runs on Apple hardware unless you hack the OS, I'd say that's pretty obvious so why get up on a soap box and make noise about it? And just for the record the OS X core components are open source.
MS is more worried about Google docs imo. Office already has collaborative features that work across platforms. For iWork to be interesting it would need to work on more than just Mac.
Office only has a native client on Windows, iWork has one only on OS X and iOS, Google Docs has no official native clients that I'm aware of. Since Google Docs is a web only app the only fair thing to do is compare it to the web versions of iWork and Office 365. The web version of iWork is supported on Windows browsers. It's not supported on Linux but will run there on Firefox. Comparing the two I'd say iWork is in many ways on par with Google Docs except that iWork looks more slick. I can't compare the two to Office 365 since I haven't used it but it would seem to me that iWork could be made to achieve feature parity Google Docs and Office 365 with relatively little effort. It all depends on whether Apple can pull it's head out of it's ass (unlikely), ensure official support for iWork/iCloud on Linux/Android desktops and how important it is to them to piss off Google by matching Google Docs feature-for-feature.
So, linux and OSX aren't doing anything in the background too?
Sure they do things in the background, they just do it more efficiently than Windows.
I think you need to double check your numbers. I know you get modded to 5 as insightful, but really...you should check your numbers.
According to this paper, from Harvard University, the Iran/Afghanistan wars will eventually cost between $4-6 trillion... now please demonstrate how ObamaCare will cost more than that. I'm not saying you are wrong, ObamaCare may cost more that $4-6 trillion but at the very least I'd like to see you back that up.
Every one of these points hits the nail square on the head.
The key to take out of this is: document document document! At minimum you should have a set of instructions to re-build your dev and build environment. "Insert the <your company> dev workstation image v4" is not allowed to be a step! Your elaborate continuous integration multi-tree setup and mountain of environment setup scripts and template directories are great until the guy who set it up takes off and you have to upgrade something. Ideally a set of instructions talking to the motivation of certain decisions, roadblocks encountered, etc.
One thing the article doesn't have is have lots of 3rd party tools and keep the license servers/license files on whatever box is most convenient for the dev working on it at the time.
He left out the best method: Hand write everything in assembly language...
After 46 million years, however, any DNA would be long degraded.
That's what they used to say about Neandertal DNA. Turns out the DNA does indeed begin to fragment but you can still piece it together for a very long time after it begins to degrade. In this case that statement is it's probably right and 46 million years is too long and even if you could recover some Dino DNA (from any source) it will be fragmented beyond recovery with current technology. Even so, we should not stop trying to defy established notions of what is impossible. A Scientist at Yale University recently discovered that pigments do not degrade, they sometimes fossilise which is an amazing discovery since it means that if we find fossilised dinosaur skin, feathers or insect exoskeletons for that matter we can figure out what color long extinct animals were. It was almost a scientific axiom that we would never know what color dinosaurs were and it certainly blew me away when I found out that was wrong.
If Apple's issue really was that micro USB was too fragile, well they could have introduced a new, standard, connector to fix that. Design a "mobile USB" standard, that is durable, orients either way, integrates pins for HDMI, etc. Get it all nice n' designed and tested, then hand the design over to the USB Group, royalty free (like all USB standards). Particularly if it was going to be part of new Apple phones I don't imagine that there'd be a lot of resistance to adoption.
The EU's mandate doesn't come from a love of micro-USB, but rather the need for a standard, whatever that is. Micro-USB is the best we've got and the most prevalent, so that is what they are going for. If there was a better one out there, particularly if you could show how increased durability could lead to longer life and less waste, I think it'd have a good chance of being the standard.
However Apple has no interest in that at all. Their new connector wasn't made because micro-USB is so bad, it was made because Apple desires to be the only place you buy Apple accessories.
I disagree, the micro USB connector is a mediocre design at best. In fact both mini and micro USB are bad designs, they do not sit firmly in the socket and micro USB connectors have a tendency to break off the little plastic contact plate inside the socket. I look at that the Micro USB system and marvel at the fact that they managed to create a socket with a plug in it and a plug with a socket in it. There is nothing more annoying than to have an expensive USB device bricked by a broken micro USB socket or getting a brand new USB drive that you can hardly touch during a data transfer for fear of the connection breaking thanks to a crappy connector. There are actually devices with micro USB sockets that are so crappy you can push the micro USB connector into them up-side-down. You can say what you want about Apple but their Lightning cable is a better design than the micro USB connector. The Lightning connector is more robust, you don't have to check the orientation, it plugs in more smoothly and there is no fragile connector panel inside the socket that you can break off because Apple put it on the connector where it belongs. I do agree with you that I wish Apple would pull it's head out of it's own ass, donate the Lightning connector and make it an open standard.
What did he expose that we didn't already suspect?
He exposed that those saying that NSA did all those things weren't crazy tinfoil-hats and that those who said that they were were naive.
Go back to old forum posts, read the discussions. Some people voiced the suspicion, most of them were ridiculed.
Oh for Christ's sake what did people think the NSA was planning to do with its new $2 billion datacenter? Store personnel records and payroll data? Host the world's biggest private World of Warcraft server? Their early experiments with the so called Echelon system were a big fat hint. Even back in 2001 a European parliament report recommended systematically encrypting all communications. It would have been incompetence of the first magnitude if the NSA hadn't exploited the USA's unique position to tap into the torrents of unencrypted data flowing though the internet backbone given the positive experiences they had had with using Echelon to conduct strategic and economic espionage. If anybody had any questions about what the scale of the NSA data collection operation was, that famous Utah datacenter only made it glaringly obvious that they had ambitions to harvest internet traffic on a mammoth scale. The knee jerk reaction to this Snowden/NSA scandal will be that people will finally begin to do what the EU parliament recommended way back in 2001 and systematically encrypt communications and storage media. This in turn makes me wonder (entering tinfoil-hat country here) whether the NSA has leaned on Intel/AMD to put back doors or hard-to-detect vulnerabilities into their encryptions circuits on their processors (assuming that's even possible, and if it is possible that such a vulnerability is hard to detect which it would have to be).
The only way for socialism to work is via big government because it requires that the government take-to-give. Heck, the two largest budget items are Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security, which are both insolvent. And yes, both are even larger than Defense spending (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY_2011.png).
What you meant was Socialism =/= Communism, which is just socialism enforced by a government that controls all of the businesses.
What the US needs is less government, which includes a smaller defense budget, as well as less interference through social programming (intentionally not "programs"). The idea that we cannot go back to even 2008 levels of spending--before the supposedly one-time bailouts and otherwise huge deficits--is ludicrous. Socialism will break the back of an already weakened economy that cannot support the government that does not even bother trying to support itself by avoiding disgustingly high deficits.
To tell you the truth all of this conservative right-think vs. liberal wrong-think you Americans have got going is something I'll never understand. I don't really see the difference between parties like your Democrats who adopt many Social Democrat ideas and Conservatives who profess to favor free market capitalism. They both practice socialism, they just do it differently. With the Soc. Dems. it's is usually vote fishing by handing entitlements to groups that didn't earn them, i.e. schemes like "lets take all those fat private pensions and nationalize them, then lets pay out equally to everybody regardless of how much they paid into the system or whether they contributed at all". Another favorite with the Soc. Dems. is taxing the middle classes and businesses to death and levying ridiculous taxes on property that forces people to move out of houses that have been in the family for generations and that have become quite valuable due to real estate prices rising sharply over the decades (in city centers for example) because they can't afford the property taxes. WIth the conservatives it's usually corporate socialism. They deregulate the financial industry, cause a recession, the banks have to write off massive amounts of debt to companies and subprime lenders and it is Joe/Jane Suburbanite (and eventually their kids) plus smaller businesses that end up footing the bill to bail out banks and big byzantine corporations because they are job-providers and not bailing them out would put people out of work and that's not worth many votes in the next election. Mind you, much as they profess to hate things like Medicare, Bush Jr. didn't seem to have any problems fishing for votes by handing out $8.4 trillion in unfunded obligations with Medicare D so it's not as if right thinking Conservatives are above borrowing ideas from evil Socialists.
Keep in mind the lowest bid was still probably 50-100x more then it would normally be cause hey, 3$ hammer is worth 100$ to the government.
Nothing the US Govt. does surprises me any more after I watched a documentary that claims that the Bush administrations handed a contract to handle oversight of tens of billions worth of funds going to Iraq and that specifically asked for qualified accountants to a firm run out of a private residence in S-California (apparently none of the handful of employees were certified accountants). Apparently some $8.8 billion of that money subsequently went missing. To put that into perspective $8.8 billion will buy you 58 F-22 stealth fighters at a fly-away unit cost of $150 million or around 1000 M1 Abrams tanks at a drive-away price of $8.6 million. Those thousand tanks are enough to equip four armored divisions of 250 tanks each which are in turn enough to provide the armor component of two entire field-corps (and the current US army has four field-corps of whom one is airborne). The amazing thing is that nobody to this day seems to know how or why that peanut sized accountancy firm got that contract.
"The WSJ reports that six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government finally acknowledged that design and software problems have kept customers from applying online for coverage."
What software platform does the software run on ?
I think this problem has less to do with the platform and more to do with the fact that this is what you get when you take the lowest bid without doing some basic research on the competence of the bidder. I mean 92 files per 'Apply'? Seriously? And they rolled it out after the Government Accountability Office warned that insufficient testing had been done? This mess says something about the people running the project. It seems to me that those three months could have been well spent hiring software testing contractors to do some load testing although one gets the feeling from the descriptions that team working on this system were scrambling so madly to get it working by their deadline that there would probably not have been any time to fix any except the very worst the bugs the contractors would have found.
If the Saudis suddenly stopped selling oil to ... it would trash our allies
When you say "allies", are you sure you don't mean "markets"?
I don't think the USA has allies any more - just peoples and countries who depend on it for aid and subsidies and TV programmes.
That's what happens when you let a Bush loose in a porcelain shop.
Besides that, I think anyone predicting a sudden collapse of supply is silly.
A sudden collapse of supply is not the problem. The problem is that even maintaining todays output is insufficient. Energy use grows exponentially. It doubles in about 30 years. So 30 years from now we're going to need twice as much output, and 60 years from now we're going to need 4 times as much output and after 90 years, 16 times the output. Even a steady linear increase in production capacity will be outpaced in a few doubling times.
But we don't get a steady linear increase in production. We get an exponential growth at the beginning, that levels off, and then tapers downwards. There is no sudden collapse of supply, but there is a sudden disparity between supply and demand.
That isn't the only problem. They (Wall Street) have begun to bundle shale leases like they did with their mortgage backed securities. Basically they are bundling shale leases into packages and there are allegations that crappy shale 'claims' (for lack of a better word), that are basically equivalent to subprime mortgages, are being rated as prime quality extraction areas and sold off to unsuspecting suckers. Anybody who remembers 2008 will have a fair idea where that can lead unless somebody hits the breaks and given that everybody from the shale boom areas to Washington is busy dancing to the shale-fracking-will-give-us-energy-independence buzz that seems unlikely. The mentality of people caught up in this shale 'goldrush' is scarily similar to what I experienced leading up to the mortgage crisis.
Vaporware.... Meanwhile I have been using Bing for three months now and can't see much difference from Google. Just about the only thing that Google search still has that I miss on Bing is a few advanced features like the ability to limit searches to specified time periods. Their image search is also pretty good, I get fewer hits but also less garbage/noise. Bing maps isn't quite up to par with Google maps but they do have better maps in some out-of-the-way places where I spend my time and Bing translator is if anything even better than Google translate.
I have read several articles and reports by economists and geologists claiming this fracking boom is a bubble. The estimate of 100 years worth of gas is overstated. It seems 25 years worth of gas is more likely, less if gas exports are allowed.
I don't really have an opinion on the issue as a whole, but it's worth pointing out that similar reports have been telling us for decades that the end was nigh, and yet we continue finding new deposits and/or new ways to exploit known deposits. Obviously that can't continue forever, and it seems pretty clear that there are other issues that have to be considered (e.g. climate change), but I'm pretty skeptical of anyone projecting near-term resource exhaustion.
It's always possible, of course, that this time the wolf really is here, but...
Besides that, I think anyone predicting a sudden collapse of supply is silly. That's not how the world works; you don't see all of the fields simultaneously ceasing production, instead many fields begin to decline at differing rates. The result -- when we near exhaustion -- will be that available supply gradually tapers off, which will cause prices to gradually rise in order to limit demand to available supply. Rising prices will eventually move us off of fossil fuels, if we haven't already done it for other reasons.
I was in the.skeptic camp in 2007/8 well before the mortgage crisis and I used to get got same kind of speeches you just gave. Nobody believed you could have a mortgage crisis on that scale, they didn't even think that there was anything wrong with putting people on bonuses handing out loans. You can have a fracking bubble without resource exhaustion just like you can have a real estate bubble without that being the end of real estate. Secondly, when it comes to shale oil and gas, resource exhaustion is a pretty rapid process. Regular oil wells last for multiple decades, shale deposits are exhausted in years and the drop in yields is very rapid so you frack your way through deposits very rapidly. You should read that last article linked to in the summary, it is a good place to start and it also mentions the 10 year shelf life of the shale oil boom (I got that figure elsewhere). I suppose we'll see what happens next, I just hope it isn't a rerun of the mortgage crisis.