In one of my jobs I got to set up an $800,000 prototyping shop with nice CNC equipment and all that. One of the toys I bought was a 350Amp Synchrowave welder. It was hard wired into the 460V main service we built into the building, all brand new freshly installed from the 10kv transformer to the disconnects. 600Amp 3 phase 460V service just to my little shop.
First night there I figured I'd try the welder out, flipped the disconnect, hit the start button on the welder and poop, out the lights went go. I turned the disconnect off, checked the fuses - they were fine. I went out to figure out what had happened. The 600A service breaker was popped.
I figured the welder had been wired wrong, opened the case. It was wired to the disconnect with, well, welding wire - stranded copper about an inch around. One - ONE - little tiny strand had unraveled and shorted across two phases. I bent it out of the way, buttoned up and it worked fine for the next 3 years. The main breaker never tripped again, not even when I was using the welder to blow holes through aluminum plate just for fun.
Now there's no way that little tiny wire could take 600A at 460V, and I can't think of a plausible narrative to explain why the main breaker tripped - but it wasn't just floating - the CNC had been running and it had a 10HP spindle.
A whisker doesn't have to survive conducting enough current to let the smoke out of the power supply - in it's incandescent passing, if the ghost of it's exisistance is a sliver of plasma, a very substaintial, if evanescent, conductor is created, literally, out of thin air.
Yes it is amazing. For fine arts users, a number of companies have modified the display to use a grayscale "color" filter array and get 10bit grayscale out of it. In diagnostic applications it's lit by a curtain of CCFLs (there are two in a typical laptop backlight, on the edges) and it puts out over 800 nits.
The contrast is unbelievable, the gradations invisible (1024 shades of gray are like that). If I was getting an x-ray, I'd want my physician reading it on one of those displays.
Literally the best image I've ever seen in any media - print, projected, slides, chromes, transparencies, anything...
Every week, topical, broad, and well written. Rarely do they publish completely stupid articles, without at least acknowledging that many readers might find them so, New Scientist is the best magazine out there.
They publish good computer related articles as well, from social issues like privacy and security to physics issues of fabrication techniques.
Most importantly though, they still have a concept of journalism, unlike WIRED's mornoic McLuhian "there is no objectivity" "geeks are our heroes" "all technology is perfect and wonderful" breathlessness that overwhelms any actual intellectual value that might lurk accidently unexpunged from their articles. Unfortunately their worse-than-useless meme has infected most of the US technical press to a greater or lesser extent.
Technology Review used to be good, but took a huge dive into pathetic pandering and breathless sensationalism under the train wreck that was John Benditt. They started to recover a tiny bit under Robert Buderi, but alas, they've just replaced him with somone from that other "long boom" loosers magazine, Red Herring, though I don't know anything else about Jason Pontin and he may turn out to be smart - perhaps he left Red Herring out of disgust?
Why is it that random placement of irrelevant paragraphs and illegible typography has become central to any US magazine's technology identity? If there was one thing more stupid and ill-concieved than WIREDs self professed end of objectivity, it was the illegibility they passed off as cutting edge design, after stealing it from Mondo 2000 and cleaning it up a bit.
Even that centuries old bastion of reason and depth, Scientific American, has succumbed to the "expanded readership" afforded shallow, mindless optimism and has scaled back their thinking articles for more content that would be at home in WIRED's pages, and seems to have cut back on opposing views, letting corporate flacks define the market impact of their inventions without any critical review - the very heart of WIRED's journalistic abdication.
As far as I've found, aside from professional journals, that leaves New Scientist as the best source of real news about technology, and the only source I've found with any critical analysis of the consequences of an invention or discoverty.
The reason why I rant so is that, particularly since the advent of the internet, WIRED style breathless but glossy reprints of corporate press releases are irrelevant. When I want to know what Microsoft thinks is their greatest innovation, I'll go to their website and save my money. What I'm willing to pay for is a journalist who takes the time to read MSFT's latest boast, then finds the people who can meaningfully and authoritatively comment on the veracity of the release and integrates the answers, all properly attributed. Only New Scientist still does this.
Furthermore, the supreme court is not prone to tying up its time in non-events. If it did not believe the question had some meaningful merit, and some consequence in the resolution, they would have simply chosen not to hear it.
I entirely agree with Virg.
I also believe that the ruling intentionally lowers the bar for premissible police interference precisely because "simply asking somone's name" seems so innocuous. The police don't need to commit to the gravity of accusing someone of a serious crime to harrass them, they need merely ask their name....
A number of companies (Totoku, Barco, Dome, Viewsonic) have been selling IBM's T221 9 megapixel displays for years. 3940 x 2400. Now that's some pixels. The picture is amazing. The pixels sure are tiny.... And it's only about 80% the cost per pixel of apple's display.
The press release makes it sound like it's the highest resolution display (the "biggest high resolution display").
No, this is all backwards. The police have long had a right to hold a suspect if there's probable cause, name nor not. That rule was never in question in he Nevada case. The defense against abuse of that right is an unlawful arrest lawsuit. The balance of tension between fear of the police departments faced with unlawful arrest lawsuits vs the fear of letting criminals go to some degree balances the previously presumed rights of everyone to privacy and freedom of molestation by the police vs the rights and expectations of the same that the police are useful.
Were the officer to have believed there was probable cause of violence he could have arrested Hibble name or not, just not solely for refusing to give his name. In some states, in responding to a domestic, the officer would have been obligated by law to arrest one of the parties no matter what.
This ruling in no way whatsoever improves the public welfare or security or safety as it provides no additional power to the police in cases where there is defensible reason to believe that a crime has taken place.
This does create a whole new class of crime, the crime of refusing to answer a police officer's question. Though you claim that it doesn't make it a crime to fail to carry papers, what good does this ruling do without two additional assumptions: one that it is illegal to lie to a police officer (it is already a crime to lie to a federal officer) and two that if the officer suspects that you have provided a false name, that he has cause to either arrest or demand proof. It may not be a crime to fail to carry papers, but you can legally be punished for not doing so by being arrested on suspicion of providing a false or misleading answer when asked your name.
Once the officer has a legal right to ask, the law means nothing if it isn't backed up by a legal right to demand proof, and none of those legal rights mean anything if they're not backed up by arrest. Therefore if the new ruling was worth the effort of the supreme court, we can only assume that police officers now have the right to demand a name and refusing to answer or answering falsely is, itself, a crime, and suspicion of said crime is itself cause for arrest.
Now part of the ruling is predicated on the Nevada law, which states that the demand must be proceeded by probable cause to ask the question, and without establishing the chain of probable cause, one cannot be arrested. That seems like the same reasonable protection afforded by the defense against wrongful arrest in the first place, at least at first blush.
But one must consider, given that the Supremes knew full well that the officer could simply have arrested Hibble had he any reason to believe that circumstances warranted it, why not simply remind the state of that power and suggest that in the future rather than creating a new class of crime, refusing to provide one's name, they rely on the established principles governing arrest with probable cause?
The answer is quite simple, the threshold for asking someone's name is far lower than the threshold for making an arrest - therefore it's a low bar entry to arrest. If you're a black man walking down the street in a white neighborhood and no crime at all has taken place, and you have, say, enough money and education to know the law and be able to hire a lawyer, were a white police officer, merely passing by, to arrest you, you'd have at least some chance of winning an unlawful arrest case. Imagine being in the jury and hearing the story, the police producing no evidence they had a reason to suspect a black man of having committed a recent crime (though surely they would pretend to have received a tip, perhaps an anonymous phone call). Most of us would find it reprehensible that a black man was arrested merely for being black. (Those who don't might attempt to imagine the converse situation, getting lost in a black neighborhood and being arrested by a black officer.)
Now imagine that instead of a one step arrest process the o
Try to find a true HDTV Monitor. No, not HTDV compatible, but really HDTV.
It's not 1024x768 (DMD) or even 1280x1024 (LCOS). It's 1920x1080. Didn't the industry learn from the lawsuits on disk drive size and display diagonal measurements? (Of course they did, they learned that lying generates far more profit than the resulting lawsuits consume.)
I think it's kind of a rip that there's a ton of hype over HDTV, and that people are rushing off to buy HDTV "compatible" TVs, spending nearly $10,000 for some, and not one is true HDTV. Of course, in a year or two when the plasma screen finally fades away, the replacement model might actually be HDTV.
OK, there are videophiles who know the difference, and dig up something real like a nice Barco CRT projector. But most people are being defrauded.
Nicolas Negroponte said it best:
"When you look at television, ask yourself: What's wrong with it? Picture resolution? Of course not. What's wrong is the programming."
Be aware though, as an owner of an LCD projector, that watching TV runs about $0.40/hr in bulbs (actual life for me runs about 1000 hrs to failure, about 700 until the picture is so obviously muddy that failure is pending). Of course ebay helps reduce the bulb cost to a more managable $0.10/hr.
CRT projectors run 7500-10,000 hrs on a set of guns, which at retail isn't that different for the nice ones, but used they're a much better bargain over a long period of time. Plus a good CRT projector has an infinitely better picture than an LCD/DMD, though all a capable of far exceeding the data avialable in a NTSC image.
Some details though: DMD/LCD projectors generally have square pixels, so you get 640x480, or more likely you scale by a non-integer and get a blurry picture (it's probably still far better than a regular TV, so the blurring may be irrelevant). CRTs don't quantify the scan lines into pixels and are therefore "better" with analog TV. Digital TV is another beast, but typically also uses non-square pixels (eg D1 720x480) which inexpensive DMD/LCD projectors still can't deal with except by scaling.
I find DMD projectors "harsh". Others might call it "crisp." It doesn't look good to me. LCDs look better, but are a bit muddy. A good CRT projector looks great. But they're HUGE, and expensive, so... LCD or DMD projectors are probably the way to go in practice, just be aware of the operating cost. Figure out which models meet your requirements, figure out the purchase price, and add pro-rated bulb cost and see if it's still a good deal. Bulb prices vary a lot by projectors, but in general don't buy something brighter than you need, or you'll be paying for it as long as you own it.
Re:Maybe it is because we are skeptical...
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A New Ice Age?
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Nah, people here are skeptical because there's a strain of militant libertarians drawn to computer geekdom who rebel reflexively against any sort of central planning that seems authoritarian.
If we wanted to warm the planet up, we'd convert all the carbon on the planet to CO2 or cow farts depending on how edible it was. If that was law, the same libertarians would be fighting it.
Of course that's what we're doing. It's not really open to reasonable debate. There's a collection of industry flacks who spit out pseudo-science refutations of the real science of climatology, harping on any admission of statistical or projection error as a fatal flaw in the whole concept. It's disingenuous, but effective given the ultra-right's iron grip on the media.
The basic fact is we're pushing the environment very quickly into a new regime which will cause significant changes and bring unexpected hardship to much of humanity, at the extreme threatening the viability of the planet for supporting humans in comfort. It might well be the sort of change that brings about that 2/3rds reduction you seek, but it is unlikely to be a means that most people find optimal.
Is it avoidable? Yes, literally effortlessly and without any meaningful sacrifice to the overall population in terms of lifestyle, economy or employment. BUT the people who profit from the current energy economy will not under a renewable economy and so, obviously, they will resist. Given such people control the politics of this country (and many others) and sit on the choak points of the global economy as it currently operates, we're not likely to embrace any such changes until we're forced to.
Those that have such power and wealth are very unlikely to give it up willingly. Historically, in such situations force has been necessary and there's no reason to think it won't be this time. That's the liberal dilemma: embracing peace and reason as a weapon against such conflict is very unlikely to be successful. And, of course, everyone with the education and resources to be effective in the fight for change has an undeniable vested interest in the system maintaining the privilege that granted them their education and the leisure time to worry about global problems, a life they're unlikely to risk on a fight to protect the welfare of future generations or those unable to afford the mobility or imported food or air conditioning (or heat) that a changed global environment will make their new survival issues.
Those struggling to survive due to the new environment are unlikely to have the resources to do anything about it. Plows and water Buffalo aren't going to make much of an invasion force against Washington.
It is trivially possible to avert this disaster. We will not until it's too late, but we could if we wanted to. There are far better means by which we might make use of combinations of renewable and, when most efficient, some non-renewable resources to live within a reasonable per-capita planetary carbon (and other pollutant) and energy budget, but if we take an extreme case we could convert the entire global energy budget to photovoltaics. To do so would be reasonably affordable, and could be done without risk, and easily.
Here's the basic math.
Lets say the whole world wants to use as much power per capita as the US does (and they do, and will). If we continue to use all the carbon based fuels in the planet, including methane hydrates, we have enough for 60 years. If we use all the uranium, it adds 6 months. Uh oh.
Best case is that we safely burn all the methane and oil to bring everyone up to the living standards we enjoy:about 20Tonne CO2 equivalent per capita for the US. The world average is now 4.2T per capita per year, though the world seems to be able to absorb only about 1E10T of CO2 per year. That means the world can support only about 500,000,000 (5E8) people on a carbon economy at our current US standard of living (or twice that at the European standard of living). Somehow w
I want this on my street. It should also trigger red-light cams when the miscreants run the light anyway. Of course it should be set to the normal fair 10-20% overage for street speed limits, but such a system would be most welcome in my neighborhood.
As for people in real emergencies that actually have a reason to speed, they can go to court and explain it to a judge.
As a moron teenager, I used to think speed limits were stupid, but I've grown up a bit. First, driving is stupid. If you like driving fast, go to a track and really have fun (or better yet, end the highway subsidy system, build high speed rail, and turn the surviving freeways into FunZones where people can race as much as they want).
But in my neighborhood people drive absurdly fast. They crash into people's houses, they regularly wreck parked cars, and once, not far from here, they killed a little girl on her way home from school, pinning her against a building.
They installed a few traffic cams, but at least one moron drove by so quickly that the picture was too blurry to be useful, and pinned the detector at 100mph. On a city street.
Unfortunately, some nervious teamsters fought the legality and got them removed.
I hate survailence as a rule, and think there should be a constitutional amendment that says "No law shall regulate the private behavior of consenting adults." But driving is public, and speeding puts everyone's lives at risk. For most non-smokers, the only mode of death they should rationally worry about is due to driving.
Personally I wanted to put those pop up barriers they use at protected facilites that can stop a speeding 18w wheeler cold - they're giant concrete barriers on hydraulics that pop up when a guard presses a button. If they were on an automatic system, and they just popped up, maybe just barely within stopping distance of a speeding car... well evolution would take care of the rest...
of course other regions might not warrant such solutions....
Everyone uses roads because the government decided, thanks to Henry Ford and Mr. Firestone (and the massive swindles and fraud of the then recent railroad boom) that everyone would have to use roads.
And so by policy fiat (more precisely special interest lobbying) one transportation means got absolutely incredible government subsidy: free land, free roads, free protection for the oil industry... 2% of the entire nation paved with tax dollars, literally.
So, people don't have a choice but to use roads, at least outside of pre-auto east coast cities.
Unfortunately, that's completely contrary to the argument I was trying to make with that example. damn.
Your point about it not being fair that everyone pays is also valid. The counter point is that the collective cost is trivial. It should really be put up to local votes, and settled on a local level. If communities choose to divert some of their tax money to support free networks (and the local business that could thereby thrive) it's their far-sighted choice.
If a local community would rather get raped by the telecom monopoly and stifle local business, that's their short sighted mistake to commit.
Not that I'm biased or anything. I really think they'd have the right to be that stupid. really.
But just think: if you were starting a company, hoping to grow, but short on cash at the outset (like almost all business starts) and you have a choice: a regular community with typical network service - a few cable modem companies, some random mediocre DSL service here and there, the opportunity to spend $1000/mo on business grade T1s - or a community that would give all your employees free megabit plus wireless service at home off municipal fiber trunks, that your biz could get a OC192 feed off of for $50 a month or so... which would you choose?
But the real question is: is it fair to pass a federal law making it illegal for communities to build municipal networks?
Now as for more accountable - the federal government is clearly not terribly accountable, possibly less so than Malwart - but malwort chooses to forgo a profitable business line to promote a corporate value that's not shared by every community it does business in, as does blockbuster. That's not accountability, it's a corporate agenda. And they can afford to run over local interests because of their size (big organizations of all sorts tend to be this way, it's a corollary to that old saw about absolute power).
Gosh... 400 years of slavery had nothing to do with it, huh? I'm sure you see that as a "gift" we gave those poor people living in dirt and huts and they were too stupid to recognize how wonderful we were for providing them with wood floors and rape (mixing your "good" white blood with theirs) and chains (for their own good) and murder (death is escape from the horror of being born black) and taking them from their families (what a boon to them to get them away from their other ner-do-well relatives), then once they were freed, we gifted them with 100 years of regular lynching (the gift of knowing one's place), and once the ungrateful miscreants rejected that gift, we offered them economic marginalization, regular police beat downs, and social segregation (providing the opportunity to learn to be independent).
Your absolutely astonishing cultural and historical ignorance would be hysterical if it weren't both tragic and horrifically common.
I realize it's utterly pointless to argue with people like you. You are simply congenitally incapable of generalizing your own experience across whatever bounds your ignorance draws, and the concept of empathy for someone that doesn't look like you is utterly alien. It's like trying to get a 5 year old to engage in abstract reasoning: you look like a human being, and therefore one would assume you have equivalent capacity for thought, but your reasoning makes it clear that you simply do not.
There should be a test for this sort of mental state that would prevent you and people like you from ever having a position of authority based on the same justification as keeping an avowed child molester from becoming a baby sitter. But don't despair, it might someday be curable.
This is true in a practical sense, and really that's all that matters, but in an ideologic sense it isn't.
Society has long idealized the free dissemination of information. It is "knowledge that sets us free." It is by learning that we become great, etc.
In history, those cultures we generally ascribe greatness to are those that most effectively made use of broad dissemination of information for free as a social imperative: the Greeks, ancient Islam, the rise of public schooling in the US. Those periods and cultures that have striven to manage or control the dissemination of information generally end up viewed as social catastrophes; from the dark ages, to fundamental Islamicism, to Ashcroft.
The US was founded by people well schooled in and respectful of (the then vogue interpretations of) classical history. From these roots we have free schools and universities, free libraries, even free speech. In all the principle is that the more educated the world is, the more improved its condition. "As he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me..." and by so doing the total light is increased.
The publishing industry polluted all that. Guttenberg was an asshole. Well, nobody ever called Guttenberg an asshole, perhaps because it wasn't his fault, but the fault of the for-profit publishing industry that followed.
The concept is that one could value-add to low value artifacts by mixing them with some intangible that immeasurably increased the value (pun on immeasurably). Ahh, but trouble lay ahead, once there were two publishers it turns out that ideas, like fire, are expansible over all space without lessening their density at any point, and the second could equally add value to their cheap pulp by touching it to the flames of the first.
In a free market, back and forth the price would fall until it was just the price of the raw material, and what kind of business is selling pulp to the public? Might as well be a tree farmer.
So we must eliminate the pesky free market and create some protectionism - get the constables with their guns to bully and if absolutely necessary kill anyone who breaks the rules and spreads that fire without first obtaining express written permission of the NFL and paying ASCAP.
In one extreme, infinite copyright, the concept fails completely and soon no idea, no concept no invention can be but stillborn, hopelessly mired in an intractable web of monopolies.
In the other extreme, no copyright, we get a perfectly workable society, as we did for thousands of years (and during which time the finest art and music known flourished) but in which inventors (including artists) have some trouble participating in a free market, but rather must be supported directly.
How does this relate to the question at hand? Well you can probably get paid to fan someone, but you can't own the wind (and bill everyone who's cooled by it... not unless you first form a PAC, hire Jack Valenti, and grease some congressmen with soft money, just wait we'll all soon be wearing RFID tagged anemometers on our heads and paying by the CFM).
There will always be a market for programmers (and artists and musicians) (as long as there is a market) to do work for hire. But the era of publishing for (vast) profit is over. Whether it's music or books, or movies, or software, mass distribution for profit is dead. It's corpse lays heavily on innovation and it's starting to stink.
It had a good run, 300 or so years, and society advanced thanks to it. But it's over now. It is time to start undoing the monopolies. Their value is past. All software must be free.
But not all programming must be unpaid.
"Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody..."
Like basic mail service, like the streets that connect our houses, our LOCAL governments, which do tend to be accountable, should provide LOCAL network service to our houses. Backbone service is different, and for that there should be competition... rather like the mail (commercial airlines carry airmail, in fact that's how they got started).
The networks should be managed by law under common carriage.
Blockbuster or WalMart is what happens when a monopoly imposes it's ideology - no naughty words, no porn. What next? No anti christian content? No liberal content allowed?
Our government for all it's flaws (and they are legion) has a good record on supporting free speech. Anybody can send almost anything through the mail, and the post office has never been subject to intimidation for carrying politically or morally suspect material. Trucks can carry porn or even bootleg CDs and the RIAA doesn't sue the DPW.
This is how the networks should run.
It's just stupid innefficient to have companies running these things for profit. It's like these idiotic T-Mobile hot spots. How moronic to pay all that money just to get a stupid bill, and basically next to nothing for the actual service. Just stop the billing. We the people should undertake the construction and management of those services that we the people can most efficiently create collectively. Basic transportation and telecommunications systems, fire, police, and military, are perfect examples of social systems that can only be efficiently managed by the public and not for profit.
What's amusing is that the telecoms have basically lost their profit and are seeking monopoly protection from We the People against We the People. It's not unlike the abuse for profit of the granted temporary monopolies we give inventors to promote invention.
We need to start defending the commons from theft.
What is claimed and desired to be secured by United States Letters Patent is:
For those new to patents - what follows is the important bits, the claims. Under patent law you get what claims are allowed, as interpreted by a judge, so long as those claims are not found to be anticipated by prior art or obvious, as interpreted by a lay jury. Ultimately patent cases are decided in a specialized federal court that is well versed in the concepts. This was filed on Dec 1, 2000. there may be more information pertinent to the priority date in the file wrapper.
1. In a computer system that includes one or more scripts that can be selected for execution by a user, a method for facilitating the identification and selection of the one or more scripts for execution, the method comprising the acts of:
This sort of claim explicitly requires that all of the elements be present and no more. Thus far they have claimed a computer that includes scripts--an odd wording but likely to stand--which are selected by the user, method by which that selection is chosen to be the one or more scripts.
incorporating the one or more scripts into a file, wherein the file is formatted in such a manner as to enable the one or more scripts to be associated with different scripting languages;
The scripts are intrinsically associated with one or more scripting languages. This wasn't written well, but the intention, which would likely be allowed, is that the file has an interpretive language script in it and an identifier which says what language it was written in.
presenting a list of scripts to a user for selection, wherein the list includes an identifier for each of the one or more scripts, the identifier comprising a descriptive name and functional description of each corresponding script; and
The computer system must present a list of at least one item - a button that causes a script to execute would satisfy the first half but the this button must also have at least a descriptive name and a functional description of the script. A file listing in a file system wherein the files are named with a descriptive name and a brief functional listing would satisfy this claim, as would a web page with a list of scripts to execute. Comprising means the list could contain more information, but must at least have the descriptive name and functional description.
upon receiving a user selection of a particular identifier that is associated with a script from the list, executing the script that is associated with the particular identifier.
runs the script.
OK - in English:
This claim claims a server serving a web page which has a list of cgi script(s) on it (for example), gives the user a list of the scripts on the server, each identified on the web page with a descriptive name and a functional description of what it does, the page programmed so that, as expected, when the user selects which script to run, it does.
It's not just XML - it's a hella broad claim.
Independent claim 9 says that the file must support more than one scripting language (um HTML does that to - a perl script or a python script - you get to pick one). It's also a bit more explicit about parsing the file into a list - though your typical http server does that - parsing the html document into a list if the document is so formatted.
19 gets a bit narrower to xml - defining field names for the fields that would be parsed into the list, in particular defining that the scripting language is specified by an extension attribute (like.perl or some such). It seems to me that the test of obviousness would be applied - naming fields in a particular way may be the sort of thing that one could inappropriately but legally copyright, but patent?
22 Is a plurality of 19 - at least two data fields - and explicitly includes the script code in an
That's not entirely true - otherwise we wouldn't have any use for ECC or parity. Computers can make "mistakes" in as much as data can be corrupted by physical processes that having nothing to do with the intended or programmed operation.
Technicalities aside, none of the election problems are about counting accuracy, neither human, nor mechanical, nor electronic. That's not the point. All measurements have an associated accuracy. It's how we deal with it that counts. If the margin of the election is of a size that given the error rate of the system there's a "reasonable" probability that the outcome is in error (1 sigma, 13% probability of error, say, given the error rate of the technology used) then a run-off election should be automatic, even if there's only two candidates in both elections. No matter what the voting technology. A 5% threashold would be statistically supportable.
All sampling systems have a margin of error. It's a 9th grade science mistake to get an F for submitting a graph of plant growth or whatever without any error bars. We seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance in refusing to admit there's an inescapable margin of error, and thereby not accommodating for it.
In 2000, FL and several other states should have held run-off elections between W and G after the first election found them at a "statistical tie". It's not clear which way it would have gone after that, but whoever thereby won would actually have been a democratically elected president, rather than one technically appointed by a divisive judicial coup.
Anyway, the critical failure regarding DREs is the lack of recognition that they are fallible. How do we deal with critical systems that might fail? We create an audit trail so if something goes wrong, we have a chance of undoing the error, or at least figuring out what failed and fixing it, and at the very least knowing that something did in fact go wrong so we can try again.
The systems shipped by Diebold and ESS etc are both intrinsically fallible and intrinsically inauditable, which is intolerable. Further, if a voter has reason to doubt the impartiality of a company that has, for example, pledged to deliver it's electoral votes to the republican in the next election to be run on it's own vote counting equipment, they might have some reason to doubt the veracity of the black-box tallying process and that undermines the authority of democracy. It is important, therefore, even if it were proven technically unnecessary, to provide voters with the familiar indicator of fairness provided by a human-readable, authoritative, tangible ballot.
We've gone through a lot of effort convincing ourselves, and by force much of the world, that having a brainwashed electorate choose one or the other corporateflack as titular head of the country is the best and fairest form of government on the planet (and it may well be, alas); at the very least we can apply basic 9th grade science to finding out whether tweedle dee or tweedle dum won the popularity contest.
It's not the security that I'd pay for, I use SSH anyway.
The whole business model is idiotic. What you're paying for is billing - to bill all us random jerks who wander from place to place, and show up once, then again in some other state a few months later. It's not trivial and getting all the invoices out is what costs the money, most of them for 10 minutes of use ever month or two.
I travel a lot on UAL, and the red carpet clubs have largely adopted T-Mobile. But they have free local POTS access. I pay $25 a month for AT&T Global and I can dialup locally almost anywhere in the world and get a reliable 28.8, usually better.
Membership in the RCC isn't cheap, and I've been suggesting that they rethink wireless access as a loss-leader. The setup costs are, obviously, trivial, and they already have good network connectivity for their won operations. They could easily set up wireless access point and give away service for free. I suspect they'd make back their money with one additional member per site, and they'd probably recruit 100's if not 1000's.
(I pay my fees for a stall I don't have to share my luggage with, a few free lattes a month, and the aforementioned free local phone service).
I'm sure they're getting a few bucks from T-Mobile, but whatever it is, they're being penny wise and pound foolish. The same basically goes for all wireless service providers. What we need is a movement to set up nearby free/open WAPs and just kill fee for wireless stupidity once and for all.
I have a dell Inspiron 7500, huge old monster it is. It came with a Dell shoulder bag, more huge still, yet somehow without much space.
Last spring a job came up local (usually I commute by air) and I needed something that would let me carry my laptop on my motorcycle in traffic - which meant "backpack." Plus, my right shoulder was starting to sag from about 300,000 flown miles with my old Dell bag.
I bought several sequentially and made use of return policies when they either didn't quite fit (2), had an odd format (1), or weren't very good quality (1).
I finally settled on the Trager Cross Country Laptop Brief. The straps were long enough to go around my leather jacket (and the ends are sewn so they won't zoop through on a bump), it's very strong (thus far). I've put 86,000 air miles on it since (that's a lot of security screenings) and about 120 motorcycle trips (about 5,000 miles) - some in light rain. It still looks new, no failures at all. After some experimentation I keep both the shoulder strap and the backpack straps out and switch depending on how far I'm carrying it (except if I'm trying to get some slightly oversize bit of luggage on as carry on in addition, then I put the backpack straps away so they won't say it's a "bag" rather than a "laptop case").
It's meaningfully smaller than the dell case (it fits inside a hard case easily that the dell case wouldn't) and yet has a lot more room.
It also has a "laptop sleve" that I think was supposed to satisfy the "laptops out of their bags" rule but doesn't any more. It'd be cool if it did (those stupid conveyor rollers are pretty hard on laptops) but at least it makes it easy to slide the laptop out, and then back in - nothing to snag on.
The side pocket is minimally useful. It holds a compact umbrella well (seattle made, makes sense) but is otherwise pretty useless (dosn't close securily - it's supposed to be for a cell phone, but I wouldn't use it that way.) Also the "airline ticket pocket" doesn't work well - when loaded and closed the some of the weight goes through the zipper on the top flap and so you can't easily reclose it with the bag on your shoulder - therefore you can't easily get to your airline tickets. It should have a zippered pocket underneath the back flap that's the right shape for airline tickets).
Other than those two little things - the marginal side pocket and the stress mistake on the front flap (another solution would be to run the main closing belt UNDER the front flap so the flap isn't stressed... eh trager?) the thing works great.
Other features are: It actually fits under the seat in front of you. You can get your laptop out when it's there without taking the whole thing out. It's comfortable as a backpack, and works as well as any I've tried using the shoulder strap. For $99 it's a great deal.
My girlfriend has trouble carrying much of anything through the airport, and so I got her a High Sierra - Endeavors 18" Wheeled Computer Backpack. Different brand, but also good quality. The wheels work fine and she likes it. She's never, as far as I know, used the backpack part. It's got lots of room, yet somehow never enough for her. It's legal carry on, but really doesn't fit under the seat in front of you, at least filled as she tends to.
Really, SciAm's response was quite fair, and they rebutted the critiques of his rebuts by offering him as much space as he wanted on their web site.
I read the whole mess. I'm not an expert, but I am a physicist and competent to review the work at a high level. My personal opinion is what follows:
1) Lomborg's reasoning is specious and poorly connected. He extracts details out of context and puts them together to tell a rosy environmental picture that ends up being in diametric opposition to the best data. That is he builds up a lot of small anomalies in the data and ends up with an answer that a first order check against big picture data shows is false. He uses the specious conclusion to attack the first order results, which is anti-scientific.
2) The political argument is that "environmentalists" somehow benefit from being alarmist, and are therefore all suspect. I have yet to figure out the reward mechanism for tilting against big business. The contrary position, engaging in research the findings of which support the activities of the wealthiest corporations on earth, has a direct and well documented fiscal reward system.
3) The vast majority of environmental scientists have found data which supports the contrary argument, and present their data, both raw and refined, in support of those conclusions over many years, and to extensive review, both researchers in all fields.. Lombard has done no such research and merely picks and chooses among the data which supports his arguments and dismisses the majority that doesn't as false to support his alarmist argument that environmental regulations will be the ruination of us all.
He does make some good economic arguments though - as much as his environmental science is as weak as one would expect from a young and inexperienced economist with no background in science, his economic arguments are both sensible and deserving of consideration.
The argument of his that I find most persuasive, after the veil of poor science is brushed away, is that given finite resources, and given some calculation of risk*consequence (that is the statistically weighted risk of some particular outcome) it is not rational to squander finite resources on low risk outcomes. More precisely, the best answer is to carefully consider consequences and probabilities and rationally allocate resources to optimize future survivability.
SciAm did not attack that foundation or reasoning, though they did fail to give it proper credit in their response to Lombard's science. Indeed, SciAm supports such rationalist arguments as they did in suggesting that asteroid monitoring is under funded due to the relatively low cost of doing so, and the high risk*result value of a very low risk, but catastrophic cost of a potential impact.
Lombard's book got undeserved attention because it fits so well with the needs of polluting industries to refute the obvious damage done. It's really not his fault - he's got a limited education in science and he overstepped his expertise. This isn't new, and as pointed out over and over again in the response to this article, almost inescapable in popular science writing. Why he got unfairly crucified is because he was unreasonably lionized, and it all had little do with the content or lack thereof of his book. A more reasonable answer would have been a clear review of his scientific failings and a pat on the back for a nice first try, and an open hand from the scientific community offering to teach an obviously bright guy the basics of environmental and atmospheric science so he could give it a better go next time.
And we made sure there's no useful legal remedy against you!
As an added bonus, we're going to require, at no extra charge, already included in your kind and generous campaign donations, a special feature whereby your victims have to go to your very own webpage to hunt for some "opt-out" mechanism - wink wink!
Just think of all the pop up ads you can sell!
Spamming has never been so profitable and thanks to your very own congresspeople, such as Billy Tauzin, every legitimate business trying to pump up next quarter's earnings has a whole new "legitimate" revenue stream!
We heard your concerns that requiring an identifier might make effective spam filters possible, reducing the profitability of the CPU time and disk space of your victims that you steal, so we made sure the mechanism is utterly useless by making it illegal for the FTC to define a uniform identifier!
But what's that you say - those jail times and fines sound scary? Not to worry - nobody but the FTC can even instigate a prosecution and to do so, your victims have to "prove" your address obfuscation was intentional haha! Ever hear of someone proving a negative?
So no worries - you're home free, thanks to us, your humble legislative servants. We've delivered, now give us our next contribution.
I wrote this before the evote thread came out and posted it to the spam thread... and low and behold it appeared here.
I pressed the button for the democrat, like 55% of all voters did, and somehow the republican won. But computers can't make mistakes and people who irresponsibly suggest that they could are just luddites!
And we made sure there's no useful legal remedy against you!
As an added bonus, we're going to require, at no extra charge, already included in your kind and generous campaign donations, a special feature whereby your victims have to go to your very own webpage to hunt for some "opt-out" mechanism - wink wink!
Just think of all the pop up ads you can sell!
Spamming has never been so profitable and thanks to your very own congresspeople, such as Billy Tauzin, every legitimate business trying to pump up next quarter's earnings has a whole new "legitimate" revenue stream!
We heard your concerns that requiring an identifier might make effective spam filters possible, reducing the profitability of the CPU time and disk space of your victims that you steal, so we made sure the mechanism is utterly useless by making it illegal for the FTC to define a uniform identifier!
But what's that you say - those jail times and fines sound scary? Not to worry - nobody but the FTC can even instigate a prosecution and to do so, your victims have to "prove" your address obfuscation was intentional haha! Ever hear of someone proving a negative?
So no worries - you're home free, thanks to us, your humble legislative servants. We've delivered, now give us our next contribution.
It does a great job of reliably backtracking the responsible ISPs hosting both the original mail servers and any URLs and generates spam reports. It's a lot more tedious than just hitting delete, but I use the RBLs and find a meaningful correlation between the amount of spam I get on day 2 to the expediency with which I reported spam on day 1.
If everyone used spamcop the hosting ISPs would be deluged every time a spam went out, the spammers effectively instigating a self-inflicted DOS attack. I'm rubber and you're glue...
"I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work." - Kent Brockman
Clearly there is a PAC driven talking points campaign to vilify anyone who points out the man behind the curtain. This seems to be coming from The Election Center (www.electioncenter.org) a front group for Diebold that's positioned itself as expert on the subject and is distributing white papers that get picked up verbatim by other organizations in an attempt to manufacture astroturf support for DREs.
These documents come from a guy named "Doug Lewis" who is, according to Bev Harris, a former used computer parts salesman who's been anointed a meta-expert on DRE security and who's pronouncements are cited by my ROV as being more authoritative than, for example the opinion of the Joint MIT/Caltech voting technology Committee (after all what do a bunch of geeks know compared to a PR flack?)
Anyway, he originally wrote "I knew that at some point in the growth and acceptance of DRE's that it was likely that the conspiracy theorists would begin t" Thanks to MS-Word QuickSave! The paragraph now reads "Now that Direct Recording Equipment (DRE) voting systems are growing in acceptance and use in American elections, it is almost inevitable that some groups, individuals and organizations will claim that such systems are not safe enough to use in elections."
He goes on to say "The problem is that well intentioned people, some of them even highly educated and respected, scare voters and public officials with claims that the voting equipment and/or its software can be manipulated to change the outcome of elections. And, the claim is, it can do so without anyone discovering the theft of votes. " This from 4-2003.
Hopefully the MD legislature can see through this transparent mendacity.
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You'd think that, wouldn't you....
In one of my jobs I got to set up an $800,000 prototyping shop with nice CNC equipment and all that. One of the toys I bought was a 350Amp Synchrowave welder. It was hard wired into the 460V main service we built into the building, all brand new freshly installed from the 10kv transformer to the disconnects. 600Amp 3 phase 460V service just to my little shop.
First night there I figured I'd try the welder out, flipped the disconnect, hit the start button on the welder and poop, out the lights went go. I turned the disconnect off, checked the fuses - they were fine. I went out to figure out what had happened. The 600A service breaker was popped.
I figured the welder had been wired wrong, opened the case. It was wired to the disconnect with, well, welding wire - stranded copper about an inch around. One - ONE - little tiny strand had unraveled and shorted across two phases. I bent it out of the way, buttoned up and it worked fine for the next 3 years. The main breaker never tripped again, not even when I was using the welder to blow holes through aluminum plate just for fun.
Now there's no way that little tiny wire could take 600A at 460V, and I can't think of a plausible narrative to explain why the main breaker tripped - but it wasn't just floating - the CNC had been running and it had a 10HP spindle.
A whisker doesn't have to survive conducting enough current to let the smoke out of the power supply - in it's incandescent passing, if the ghost of it's exisistance is a sliver of plasma, a very substaintial, if evanescent, conductor is created, literally, out of thin air.
Yes it is amazing. For fine arts users, a number of companies have modified the display to use a grayscale "color" filter array and get 10bit grayscale out of it. In diagnostic applications it's lit by a curtain of CCFLs (there are two in a typical laptop backlight, on the edges) and it puts out over 800 nits.
The contrast is unbelievable, the gradations invisible (1024 shades of gray are like that). If I was getting an x-ray, I'd want my physician reading it on one of those displays.
Literally the best image I've ever seen in any media - print, projected, slides, chromes, transparencies, anything...
Every week, topical, broad, and well written. Rarely do they publish completely stupid articles, without at least acknowledging that many readers might find them so, New Scientist is the best magazine out there.
They publish good computer related articles as well, from social issues like privacy and security to physics issues of fabrication techniques.
Most importantly though, they still have a concept of journalism, unlike WIRED's mornoic McLuhian "there is no objectivity" "geeks are our heroes" "all technology is perfect and wonderful" breathlessness that overwhelms any actual intellectual value that might lurk accidently unexpunged from their articles. Unfortunately their worse-than-useless meme has infected most of the US technical press to a greater or lesser extent.
Technology Review used to be good, but took a huge dive into pathetic pandering and breathless sensationalism under the train wreck that was John Benditt. They started to recover a tiny bit under Robert Buderi, but alas, they've just replaced him with somone from that other "long boom" loosers magazine, Red Herring, though I don't know anything else about Jason Pontin and he may turn out to be smart - perhaps he left Red Herring out of disgust?
Why is it that random placement of irrelevant paragraphs and illegible typography has become central to any US magazine's technology identity? If there was one thing more stupid and ill-concieved than WIREDs self professed end of objectivity, it was the illegibility they passed off as cutting edge design, after stealing it from Mondo 2000 and cleaning it up a bit.
Even that centuries old bastion of reason and depth, Scientific American, has succumbed to the "expanded readership" afforded shallow, mindless optimism and has scaled back their thinking articles for more content that would be at home in WIRED's pages, and seems to have cut back on opposing views, letting corporate flacks define the market impact of their inventions without any critical review - the very heart of WIRED's journalistic abdication.
As far as I've found, aside from professional journals, that leaves New Scientist as the best source of real news about technology, and the only source I've found with any critical analysis of the consequences of an invention or discoverty.
The reason why I rant so is that, particularly since the advent of the internet, WIRED style breathless but glossy reprints of corporate press releases are irrelevant. When I want to know what Microsoft thinks is their greatest innovation, I'll go to their website and save my money. What I'm willing to pay for is a journalist who takes the time to read MSFT's latest boast, then finds the people who can meaningfully and authoritatively comment on the veracity of the release and integrates the answers, all properly attributed. Only New Scientist still does this.
Furthermore, the supreme court is not prone to tying up its time in non-events. If it did not believe the question had some meaningful merit, and some consequence in the resolution, they would have simply chosen not to hear it.
I entirely agree with Virg.
I also believe that the ruling intentionally lowers the bar for premissible police interference precisely because "simply asking somone's name" seems so innocuous. The police don't need to commit to the gravity of accusing someone of a serious crime to harrass them, they need merely ask their name....
A number of companies (Totoku, Barco, Dome, Viewsonic) have been selling IBM's T221 9 megapixel displays for years. 3940 x 2400. Now that's some pixels. The picture is amazing. The pixels sure are tiny.... And it's only about 80% the cost per pixel of apple's display.
The press release makes it sound like it's the highest resolution display (the "biggest high resolution display").
No, this is all backwards. The police have long had a right to hold a suspect if there's probable cause, name nor not. That rule was never in question in he Nevada case. The defense against abuse of that right is an unlawful arrest lawsuit. The balance of tension between fear of the police departments faced with unlawful arrest lawsuits vs the fear of letting criminals go to some degree balances the previously presumed rights of everyone to privacy and freedom of molestation by the police vs the rights and expectations of the same that the police are useful.
Were the officer to have believed there was probable cause of violence he could have arrested Hibble name or not, just not solely for refusing to give his name. In some states, in responding to a domestic, the officer would have been obligated by law to arrest one of the parties no matter what.
This ruling in no way whatsoever improves the public welfare or security or safety as it provides no additional power to the police in cases where there is defensible reason to believe that a crime has taken place.
This does create a whole new class of crime, the crime of refusing to answer a police officer's question. Though you claim that it doesn't make it a crime to fail to carry papers, what good does this ruling do without two additional assumptions: one that it is illegal to lie to a police officer (it is already a crime to lie to a federal officer) and two that if the officer suspects that you have provided a false name, that he has cause to either arrest or demand proof. It may not be a crime to fail to carry papers, but you can legally be punished for not doing so by being arrested on suspicion of providing a false or misleading answer when asked your name.
Once the officer has a legal right to ask, the law means nothing if it isn't backed up by a legal right to demand proof, and none of those legal rights mean anything if they're not backed up by arrest. Therefore if the new ruling was worth the effort of the supreme court, we can only assume that police officers now have the right to demand a name and refusing to answer or answering falsely is, itself, a crime, and suspicion of said crime is itself cause for arrest.
Now part of the ruling is predicated on the Nevada law, which states that the demand must be proceeded by probable cause to ask the question, and without establishing the chain of probable cause, one cannot be arrested. That seems like the same reasonable protection afforded by the defense against wrongful arrest in the first place, at least at first blush.
But one must consider, given that the Supremes knew full well that the officer could simply have arrested Hibble had he any reason to believe that circumstances warranted it, why not simply remind the state of that power and suggest that in the future rather than creating a new class of crime, refusing to provide one's name, they rely on the established principles governing arrest with probable cause?
The answer is quite simple, the threshold for asking someone's name is far lower than the threshold for making an arrest - therefore it's a low bar entry to arrest.
If you're a black man walking down the street in a white neighborhood and no crime at all has taken place, and you have, say, enough money and education to know the law and be able to hire a lawyer, were a white police officer, merely passing by, to arrest you, you'd have at least some chance of winning an unlawful arrest case. Imagine being in the jury and hearing the story, the police producing no evidence they had a reason to suspect a black man of having committed a recent crime (though surely they would pretend to have received a tip, perhaps an anonymous phone call). Most of us would find it reprehensible that a black man was arrested merely for being black. (Those who don't might attempt to imagine the converse situation, getting lost in a black neighborhood and being arrested by a black officer.)
Now imagine that instead of a one step arrest process the o
Try to find a true HDTV Monitor. No, not HTDV compatible, but really HDTV.
It's not 1024x768 (DMD) or even 1280x1024 (LCOS). It's 1920x1080. Didn't the industry learn from the lawsuits on disk drive size and display diagonal measurements? (Of course they did, they learned that lying generates far more profit than the resulting lawsuits consume.)
I think it's kind of a rip that there's a ton of hype over HDTV, and that people are rushing off to buy HDTV "compatible" TVs, spending nearly $10,000 for some, and not one is true HDTV. Of course, in a year or two when the plasma screen finally fades away, the replacement model might actually be HDTV.
OK, there are videophiles who know the difference, and dig up something real like a nice Barco CRT projector. But most people are being defrauded.
Nicolas Negroponte said it best:
"When you look at television, ask yourself: What's wrong with it? Picture resolution? Of course not. What's wrong is the programming."
Be aware though, as an owner of an LCD projector, that watching TV runs about $0.40/hr in bulbs (actual life for me runs about 1000 hrs to failure, about 700 until the picture is so obviously muddy that failure is pending). Of course ebay helps reduce the bulb cost to a more managable $0.10/hr.
CRT projectors run 7500-10,000 hrs on a set of guns, which at retail isn't that different for the nice ones, but used they're a much better bargain over a long period of time. Plus a good CRT projector has an infinitely better picture than an LCD/DMD, though all a capable of far exceeding the data avialable in a NTSC image.
Some details though:
DMD/LCD projectors generally have square pixels, so you get 640x480, or more likely you scale by a non-integer and get a blurry picture (it's probably still far better than a regular TV, so the blurring may be irrelevant). CRTs don't quantify the scan lines into pixels and are therefore "better" with analog TV. Digital TV is another beast, but typically also uses non-square pixels (eg D1 720x480) which inexpensive DMD/LCD projectors still can't deal with except by scaling.
I find DMD projectors "harsh". Others might call it "crisp." It doesn't look good to me. LCDs look better, but are a bit muddy. A good CRT projector looks great. But they're HUGE, and expensive, so... LCD or DMD projectors are probably the way to go in practice, just be aware of the operating cost. Figure out which models meet your requirements, figure out the purchase price, and add pro-rated bulb cost and see if it's still a good deal. Bulb prices vary a lot by projectors, but in general don't buy something brighter than you need, or you'll be paying for it as long as you own it.
Nah, people here are skeptical because there's a strain of militant libertarians drawn to computer geekdom who rebel reflexively against any sort of central planning that seems authoritarian.
If we wanted to warm the planet up, we'd convert all the carbon on the planet to CO2 or cow farts depending on how edible it was. If that was law, the same libertarians would be fighting it.
Of course that's what we're doing. It's not really open to reasonable debate. There's a collection of industry flacks who spit out pseudo-science refutations of the real science of climatology, harping on any admission of statistical or projection error as a fatal flaw in the whole concept. It's disingenuous, but effective given the ultra-right's iron grip on the media.
The basic fact is we're pushing the environment very quickly into a new regime which will cause significant changes and bring unexpected hardship to much of humanity, at the extreme threatening the viability of the planet for supporting humans in comfort. It might well be the sort of change that brings about that 2/3rds reduction you seek, but it is unlikely to be a means that most people find optimal.
Is it avoidable? Yes, literally effortlessly and without any meaningful sacrifice to the overall population in terms of lifestyle, economy or employment. BUT the people who profit from the current energy economy will not under a renewable economy and so, obviously, they will resist. Given such people control the politics of this country (and many others) and sit on the choak points of the global economy as it currently operates, we're not likely to embrace any such changes until we're forced to.
Those that have such power and wealth are very unlikely to give it up willingly. Historically, in such situations force has been necessary and there's no reason to think it won't be this time. That's the liberal dilemma: embracing peace and reason as a weapon against such conflict is very unlikely to be successful. And, of course, everyone with the education and resources to be effective in the fight for change has an undeniable vested interest in the system maintaining the privilege that granted them their education and the leisure time to worry about global problems, a life they're unlikely to risk on a fight to protect the welfare of future generations or those unable to afford the mobility or imported food or air conditioning (or heat) that a changed global environment will make their new survival issues.
Those struggling to survive due to the new environment are unlikely to have the resources to do anything about it. Plows and water Buffalo aren't going to make much of an invasion force against Washington.
It is trivially possible to avert this disaster. We will not until it's too late, but we could if we wanted to. There are far better means by which we might make use of combinations of renewable and, when most efficient, some non-renewable resources to live within a reasonable per-capita planetary carbon (and other pollutant) and energy budget, but if we take an extreme case we could convert the entire global energy budget to photovoltaics. To do so would be reasonably affordable, and could be done without risk, and easily.
Here's the basic math.
Lets say the whole world wants to use as much power per capita as the US does (and they do, and will). If we continue to use all the carbon based fuels in the planet, including methane hydrates, we have enough for 60 years. If we use all the uranium, it adds 6 months. Uh oh.
Best case is that we safely burn all the methane and oil to bring everyone up to the living standards we enjoy:about 20Tonne CO2 equivalent per capita for the US. The world average is now 4.2T per capita per year, though the world seems to be able to absorb only about 1E10T of CO2 per year. That means the world can support only about 500,000,000 (5E8) people on a carbon economy at our current US standard of living (or twice that at the European standard of living). Somehow w
I want this on my street. It should also trigger red-light cams when the miscreants run the light anyway. Of course it should be set to the normal fair 10-20% overage for street speed limits, but such a system would be most welcome in my neighborhood.
As for people in real emergencies that actually have a reason to speed, they can go to court and explain it to a judge.
As a moron teenager, I used to think speed limits were stupid, but I've grown up a bit. First, driving is stupid. If you like driving fast, go to a track and really have fun (or better yet, end the highway subsidy system, build high speed rail, and turn the surviving freeways into FunZones where people can race as much as they want).
But in my neighborhood people drive absurdly fast. They crash into people's houses, they regularly wreck parked cars, and once, not far from here, they killed a little girl on her way home from school, pinning her against a building.
They installed a few traffic cams, but at least one moron drove by so quickly that the picture was too blurry to be useful, and pinned the detector at 100mph. On a city street.
Unfortunately, some nervious teamsters fought the legality and got them removed.
I hate survailence as a rule, and think there should be a constitutional amendment that says "No law shall regulate the private behavior of consenting adults." But driving is public, and speeding puts everyone's lives at risk. For most non-smokers, the only mode of death they should rationally worry about is due to driving.
Personally I wanted to put those pop up barriers they use at protected facilites that can stop a speeding 18w wheeler cold - they're giant concrete barriers on hydraulics that pop up when a guard presses a button. If they were on an automatic system, and they just popped up, maybe just barely within stopping distance of a speeding car... well evolution would take care of the rest...
of course other regions might not warrant such solutions....
well.... not to counter my own argument, but...
Everyone uses roads because the government decided, thanks to Henry Ford and Mr. Firestone (and the massive swindles and fraud of the then recent railroad boom) that everyone would have to use roads.
And so by policy fiat (more precisely special interest lobbying) one transportation means got absolutely incredible government subsidy: free land, free roads, free protection for the oil industry... 2% of the entire nation paved with tax dollars, literally.
So, people don't have a choice but to use roads, at least outside of pre-auto east coast cities.
Unfortunately, that's completely contrary to the argument I was trying to make with that example. damn.
Your point about it not being fair that everyone pays is also valid. The counter point is that the collective cost is trivial. It should really be put up to local votes, and settled on a local level. If communities choose to divert some of their tax money to support free networks (and the local business that could thereby thrive) it's their far-sighted choice.
If a local community would rather get raped by the telecom monopoly and stifle local business, that's their short sighted mistake to commit.
Not that I'm biased or anything. I really think they'd have the right to be that stupid. really.
But just think: if you were starting a company, hoping to grow, but short on cash at the outset (like almost all business starts) and you have a choice: a regular community with typical network service - a few cable modem companies, some random mediocre DSL service here and there, the opportunity to spend $1000/mo on business grade T1s - or a community that would give all your employees free megabit plus wireless service at home off municipal fiber trunks, that your biz could get a OC192 feed off of for $50 a month or so... which would you choose?
But the real question is: is it fair to pass a federal law making it illegal for communities to build municipal networks?
Now as for more accountable - the federal government is clearly not terribly accountable, possibly less so than Malwart - but malwort chooses to forgo a profitable business line to promote a corporate value that's not shared by every community it does business in, as does blockbuster. That's not accountability, it's a corporate agenda. And they can afford to run over local interests because of their size (big organizations of all sorts tend to be this way, it's a corollary to that old saw about absolute power).
Yikes.
Gosh... 400 years of slavery had nothing to do with it, huh? I'm sure you see that as a "gift" we gave those poor people living in dirt and huts and they were too stupid to recognize how wonderful we were for providing them with wood floors and rape (mixing your "good" white blood with theirs) and chains (for their own good) and murder (death is escape from the horror of being born black) and taking them from their families (what a boon to them to get them away from their other ner-do-well relatives), then once they were freed, we gifted them with 100 years of regular lynching (the gift of knowing one's place), and once the ungrateful miscreants rejected that gift, we offered them economic marginalization, regular police beat downs, and social segregation (providing the opportunity to learn to be independent).
Your absolutely astonishing cultural and historical ignorance would be hysterical if it weren't both tragic and horrifically common.
I realize it's utterly pointless to argue with people like you. You are simply congenitally incapable of generalizing your own experience across whatever bounds your ignorance draws, and the concept of empathy for someone that doesn't look like you is utterly alien. It's like trying to get a 5 year old to engage in abstract reasoning: you look like a human being, and therefore one would assume you have equivalent capacity for thought, but your reasoning makes it clear that you simply do not.
There should be a test for this sort of mental state that would prevent you and people like you from ever having a position of authority based on the same justification as keeping an avowed child molester from becoming a baby sitter. But don't despair, it might someday be curable.
This is true in a practical sense, and really that's all that matters, but in an ideologic sense it isn't.
Society has long idealized the free dissemination of information. It is "knowledge that sets us free." It is by learning that we become great, etc.
In history, those cultures we generally ascribe greatness to are those that most effectively made use of broad dissemination of information for free as a social imperative: the Greeks, ancient Islam, the rise of public schooling in the US. Those periods and cultures that have striven to manage or control the dissemination of information generally end up viewed as social catastrophes; from the dark ages, to fundamental Islamicism, to Ashcroft.
The US was founded by people well schooled in and respectful of (the then vogue interpretations of) classical history. From these roots we have free schools and universities, free libraries, even free speech. In all the principle is that the more educated the world is, the more improved its condition. "As he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me..." and by so doing the total light is increased.
The publishing industry polluted all that. Guttenberg was an asshole. Well, nobody ever called Guttenberg an asshole, perhaps because it wasn't his fault, but the fault of the for-profit publishing industry that followed.
The concept is that one could value-add to low value artifacts by mixing them with some intangible that immeasurably increased the value (pun on immeasurably). Ahh, but trouble lay ahead, once there were two publishers it turns out that ideas, like fire, are expansible over all space without lessening their density at any point, and the second could equally add value to their cheap pulp by touching it to the flames of the first.
In a free market, back and forth the price would fall until it was just the price of the raw material, and what kind of business is selling pulp to the public? Might as well be a tree farmer.
So we must eliminate the pesky free market and create some protectionism - get the constables with their guns to bully and if absolutely necessary kill anyone who breaks the rules and spreads that fire without first obtaining express written permission of the NFL and paying ASCAP.
In one extreme, infinite copyright, the concept fails completely and soon no idea, no concept no invention can be but stillborn, hopelessly mired in an intractable web of monopolies.
In the other extreme, no copyright, we get a perfectly workable society, as we did for thousands of years (and during which time the finest art and music known flourished) but in which inventors (including artists) have some trouble participating in a free market, but rather must be supported directly.
How does this relate to the question at hand? Well you can probably get paid to fan someone, but you can't own the wind (and bill everyone who's cooled by it... not unless you first form a PAC, hire Jack Valenti, and grease some congressmen with soft money, just wait we'll all soon be wearing RFID tagged anemometers on our heads and paying by the CFM).
There will always be a market for programmers (and artists and musicians) (as long as there is a market) to do work for hire. But the era of publishing for (vast) profit is over. Whether it's music or books, or movies, or software, mass distribution for profit is dead. It's corpse lays heavily on innovation and it's starting to stink.
It had a good run, 300 or so years, and society advanced thanks to it. But it's over now. It is time to start undoing the monopolies. Their value is past. All software must be free.
But not all programming must be unpaid.
"Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody..."
Absolutely right.
Like basic mail service, like the streets that connect our houses, our LOCAL governments, which do tend to be accountable, should provide LOCAL network service to our houses. Backbone service is different, and for that there should be competition... rather like the mail (commercial airlines carry airmail, in fact that's how they got started).
The networks should be managed by law under common carriage.
Blockbuster or WalMart is what happens when a monopoly imposes it's ideology - no naughty words, no porn. What next? No anti christian content? No liberal content allowed?
Our government for all it's flaws (and they are legion) has a good record on supporting free speech. Anybody can send almost anything through the mail, and the post office has never been subject to intimidation for carrying politically or morally suspect material. Trucks can carry porn or even bootleg CDs and the RIAA doesn't sue the DPW.
This is how the networks should run.
It's just stupid innefficient to have companies running these things for profit. It's like these idiotic T-Mobile hot spots. How moronic to pay all that money just to get a stupid bill, and basically next to nothing for the actual service. Just stop the billing. We the people should undertake the construction and management of those services that we the people can most efficiently create collectively. Basic transportation and telecommunications systems, fire, police, and military, are perfect examples of social systems that can only be efficiently managed by the public and not for profit.
What's amusing is that the telecoms have basically lost their profit and are seeking monopoly protection from We the People against We the People. It's not unlike the abuse for profit of the granted temporary monopolies we give inventors to promote invention.
We need to start defending the commons from theft.
What is claimed and desired to be secured by United States Letters Patent is:
.perl or some such). It seems to me that the test of obviousness would be applied - naming fields in a particular way may be the sort of thing that one could inappropriately but legally copyright, but patent?
For those new to patents - what follows is the important bits, the claims. Under patent law you get what claims are allowed, as interpreted by a judge, so long as those claims are not found to be anticipated by prior art or obvious, as interpreted by a lay jury. Ultimately patent cases are decided in a specialized federal court that is well versed in the concepts. This was filed on Dec 1, 2000. there may be more information pertinent to the priority date in the file wrapper.
1. In a computer system that includes one or more scripts that can be selected for execution by a user, a method for facilitating the identification and selection of the one or more scripts for execution, the method comprising the acts of:
This sort of claim explicitly requires that all of the elements be present and no more. Thus far they have claimed a computer that includes scripts--an odd wording but likely to stand--which are selected by the user, method by which that selection is chosen to be the one or more scripts.
incorporating the one or more scripts into a file, wherein the file is formatted in such a manner as to enable the one or more scripts to be associated with different scripting languages;
The scripts are intrinsically associated with one or more scripting languages. This wasn't written well, but the intention, which would likely be allowed, is that the file has an interpretive language script in it and an identifier which says what language it was written in.
presenting a list of scripts to a user for selection, wherein the list includes an identifier for each of the one or more scripts, the identifier comprising a descriptive name and functional description of each corresponding script; and
The computer system must present a list of at least one item - a button that causes a script to execute would satisfy the first half but the this button must also have at least a descriptive name and a functional description of the script. A file listing in a file system wherein the files are named with a descriptive name and a brief functional listing would satisfy this claim, as would a web page with a list of scripts to execute. Comprising means the list could contain more information, but must at least have the descriptive name and functional description.
upon receiving a user selection of a particular identifier that is associated with a script from the list, executing the script that is associated with the particular identifier.
runs the script.
OK - in English:
This claim claims a server serving a web page which has a list of cgi script(s) on it (for example), gives the user a list of the scripts on the server, each identified on the web page with a descriptive name and a functional description of what it does, the page programmed so that, as expected, when the user selects which script to run, it does.
It's not just XML - it's a hella broad claim.
Independent claim 9 says that the file must support more than one scripting language (um HTML does that to - a perl script or a python script - you get to pick one). It's also a bit more explicit about parsing the file into a list - though your typical http server does that - parsing the html document into a list if the document is so formatted.
19 gets a bit narrower to xml - defining field names for the fields that would be parsed into the list, in particular defining that the scripting language is specified by an extension attribute (like
22 Is a plurality of 19 - at least two data fields - and explicitly includes the script code in an
To futher the progress of humanity - it's like getting to the final round and all the bonus points in one step. People willingly die for far less.
That's not entirely true - otherwise we wouldn't have any use for ECC or parity. Computers can make "mistakes" in as much as data can be corrupted by physical processes that having nothing to do with the intended or programmed operation.
Technicalities aside, none of the election problems are about counting accuracy, neither human, nor mechanical, nor electronic. That's not the point. All measurements have an associated accuracy. It's how we deal with it that counts. If the margin of the election is of a size that given the error rate of the system there's a "reasonable" probability that the outcome is in error (1 sigma, 13% probability of error, say, given the error rate of the technology used) then a run-off election should be automatic, even if there's only two candidates in both elections. No matter what the voting technology. A 5% threashold would be statistically supportable.
All sampling systems have a margin of error. It's a 9th grade science mistake to get an F for submitting a graph of plant growth or whatever without any error bars. We seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance in refusing to admit there's an inescapable margin of error, and thereby not accommodating for it.
In 2000, FL and several other states should have held run-off elections between W and G after the first election found them at a "statistical tie". It's not clear which way it would have gone after that, but whoever thereby won would actually have been a democratically elected president, rather than one technically appointed by a divisive judicial coup.
Anyway, the critical failure regarding DREs is the lack of recognition that they are fallible. How do we deal with critical systems that might fail? We create an audit trail so if something goes wrong, we have a chance of undoing the error, or at least figuring out what failed and fixing it, and at the very least knowing that something did in fact go wrong so we can try again.
The systems shipped by Diebold and ESS etc are both intrinsically fallible and intrinsically inauditable, which is intolerable. Further, if a voter has reason to doubt the impartiality of a company that has, for example, pledged to deliver it's electoral votes to the republican in the next election to be run on it's own vote counting equipment, they might have some reason to doubt the veracity of the black-box tallying process and that undermines the authority of democracy. It is important, therefore, even if it were proven technically unnecessary, to provide voters with the familiar indicator of fairness provided by a human-readable, authoritative, tangible ballot.
We've gone through a lot of effort convincing ourselves, and by force much of the world, that having a brainwashed electorate choose one or the other corporate flack as titular head of the country is the best and fairest form of government on the planet (and it may well be, alas); at the very least we can apply basic 9th grade science to finding out whether tweedle dee or tweedle dum won the popularity contest.
It's not the security that I'd pay for, I use SSH anyway.
The whole business model is idiotic. What you're paying for is billing - to bill all us random jerks who wander from place to place, and show up once, then again in some other state a few months later. It's not trivial and getting all the invoices out is what costs the money, most of them for 10 minutes of use ever month or two.
I travel a lot on UAL, and the red carpet clubs have largely adopted T-Mobile. But they have free local POTS access. I pay $25 a month for AT&T Global and I can dialup locally almost anywhere in the world and get a reliable 28.8, usually better.
Membership in the RCC isn't cheap, and I've been suggesting that they rethink wireless access as a loss-leader. The setup costs are, obviously, trivial, and they already have good network connectivity for their won operations. They could easily set up wireless access point and give away service for free. I suspect they'd make back their money with one additional member per site, and they'd probably recruit 100's if not 1000's.
(I pay my fees for a stall I don't have to share my luggage with, a few free lattes a month, and the aforementioned free local phone service).
I'm sure they're getting a few bucks from T-Mobile, but whatever it is, they're being penny wise and pound foolish. The same basically goes for all wireless service providers. What we need is a movement to set up nearby free/open WAPs and just kill fee for wireless stupidity once and for all.
I have a dell Inspiron 7500, huge old monster it is. It came with a Dell shoulder bag, more huge still, yet somehow without much space.
Last spring a job came up local (usually I commute by air) and I needed something that would let me carry my laptop on my motorcycle in traffic - which meant "backpack." Plus, my right shoulder was starting to sag from about 300,000 flown miles with my old Dell bag.
I bought several sequentially and made use of return policies when they either didn't quite fit (2), had an odd format (1), or weren't very good quality (1).
I finally settled on the Trager Cross Country Laptop Brief. The straps were long enough to go around my leather jacket (and the ends are sewn so they won't zoop through on a bump), it's very strong (thus far). I've put 86,000 air miles on it since (that's a lot of security screenings) and about 120 motorcycle trips (about 5,000 miles) - some in light rain. It still looks new, no failures at all. After some experimentation I keep both the shoulder strap and the backpack straps out and switch depending on how far I'm carrying it (except if I'm trying to get some slightly oversize bit of luggage on as carry on in addition, then I put the backpack straps away so they won't say it's a "bag" rather than a "laptop case").
It's meaningfully smaller than the dell case (it fits inside a hard case easily that the dell case wouldn't) and yet has a lot more room.
It also has a "laptop sleve" that I think was supposed to satisfy the "laptops out of their bags" rule but doesn't any more. It'd be cool if it did (those stupid conveyor rollers are pretty hard on laptops) but at least it makes it easy to slide the laptop out, and then back in - nothing to snag on.
The side pocket is minimally useful. It holds a compact umbrella well (seattle made, makes sense) but is otherwise pretty useless (dosn't close securily - it's supposed to be for a cell phone, but I wouldn't use it that way.) Also the "airline ticket pocket" doesn't work well - when loaded and closed the some of the weight goes through the zipper on the top flap and so you can't easily reclose it with the bag on your shoulder - therefore you can't easily get to your airline tickets. It should have a zippered pocket underneath the back flap that's the right shape for airline tickets).
Other than those two little things - the marginal side pocket and the stress mistake on the front flap (another solution would be to run the main closing belt UNDER the front flap so the flap isn't stressed... eh trager?) the thing works great.
Other features are: It actually fits under the seat in front of you. You can get your laptop out when it's there without taking the whole thing out. It's comfortable as a backpack, and works as well as any I've tried using the shoulder strap. For $99 it's a great deal.
My girlfriend has trouble carrying much of anything through the airport, and so I got her a High Sierra - Endeavors 18" Wheeled Computer Backpack. Different brand, but also good quality. The wheels work fine and she likes it. She's never, as far as I know, used the backpack part. It's got lots of room, yet somehow never enough for her. It's legal carry on, but really doesn't fit under the seat in front of you, at least filled as she tends to.
Really, SciAm's response was quite fair, and they rebutted the critiques of his rebuts by offering him as much space as he wanted on their web site.
I read the whole mess. I'm not an expert, but I am a physicist and competent to review the work at a high level. My personal opinion is what follows:
1) Lomborg's reasoning is specious and poorly connected. He extracts details out of context and puts them together to tell a rosy environmental picture that ends up being in diametric opposition to the best data. That is he builds up a lot of small anomalies in the data and ends up with an answer that a first order check against big picture data shows is false. He uses the specious conclusion to attack the first order results, which is anti-scientific.
2) The political argument is that "environmentalists" somehow benefit from being alarmist, and are therefore all suspect. I have yet to figure out the reward mechanism for tilting against big business. The contrary position, engaging in research the findings of which support the activities of the wealthiest corporations on earth, has a direct and well documented fiscal reward system.
3) The vast majority of environmental scientists have found data which supports the contrary argument, and present their data, both raw and refined, in support of those conclusions over many years, and to extensive review, both researchers in all fields.. Lombard has done no such research and merely picks and chooses among the data which supports his arguments and dismisses the majority that doesn't as false to support his alarmist argument that environmental regulations will be the ruination of us all.
He does make some good economic arguments though - as much as his environmental science is as weak as one would expect from a young and inexperienced economist with no background in science, his economic arguments are both sensible and deserving of consideration.
The argument of his that I find most persuasive, after the veil of poor science is brushed away, is that given finite resources, and given some calculation of risk*consequence (that is the statistically weighted risk of some particular outcome) it is not rational to squander finite resources on low risk outcomes. More precisely, the best answer is to carefully consider consequences and probabilities and rationally allocate resources to optimize future survivability.
SciAm did not attack that foundation or reasoning, though they did fail to give it proper credit in their response to Lombard's science. Indeed, SciAm supports such rationalist arguments as they did in suggesting that asteroid monitoring is under funded due to the relatively low cost of doing so, and the high risk*result value of a very low risk, but catastrophic cost of a potential impact.
Lombard's book got undeserved attention because it fits so well with the needs of polluting industries to refute the obvious damage done. It's really not his fault - he's got a limited education in science and he overstepped his expertise. This isn't new, and as pointed out over and over again in the response to this article, almost inescapable in popular science writing. Why he got unfairly crucified is because he was unreasonably lionized, and it all had little do with the content or lack thereof of his book. A more reasonable answer would have been a clear review of his scientific failings and a pat on the back for a nice first try, and an open hand from the scientific community offering to teach an obviously bright guy the basics of environmental and atmospheric science so he could give it a better go next time.
Oh well.
And we made sure there's no useful legal remedy against you!
As an added bonus, we're going to require, at no extra charge, already included in your kind and generous campaign donations, a special feature whereby your victims have to go to your very own webpage to hunt for some "opt-out" mechanism - wink wink!
Just think of all the pop up ads you can sell!
Spamming has never been so profitable and thanks to your very own congresspeople, such as Billy Tauzin, every legitimate business trying to pump up next quarter's earnings has a whole new "legitimate" revenue stream!
We heard your concerns that requiring an identifier might make effective spam filters possible, reducing the profitability of the CPU time and disk space of your victims that you steal, so we made sure the mechanism is utterly useless by making it illegal for the FTC to define a uniform identifier!
But what's that you say - those jail times and fines sound scary? Not to worry - nobody but the FTC can even instigate a prosecution and to do so, your victims have to "prove" your address obfuscation was intentional haha! Ever hear of someone proving a negative?
So no worries - you're home free, thanks to us, your humble legislative servants. We've delivered, now give us our next contribution.
Sincerely,
Congress.
I wrote this before the evote thread came out and posted it to the spam thread... and low and behold it appeared here.
I pressed the button for the democrat, like 55% of all voters did, and somehow the republican won. But computers can't make mistakes and people who irresponsibly suggest that they could are just luddites!
And we made sure there's no useful legal remedy against you!
As an added bonus, we're going to require, at no extra charge, already included in your kind and generous campaign donations, a special feature whereby your victims have to go to your very own webpage to hunt for some "opt-out" mechanism - wink wink!
Just think of all the pop up ads you can sell!
Spamming has never been so profitable and thanks to your very own congresspeople, such as Billy Tauzin, every legitimate business trying to pump up next quarter's earnings has a whole new "legitimate" revenue stream!
We heard your concerns that requiring an identifier might make effective spam filters possible, reducing the profitability of the CPU time and disk space of your victims that you steal, so we made sure the mechanism is utterly useless by making it illegal for the FTC to define a uniform identifier!
But what's that you say - those jail times and fines sound scary? Not to worry - nobody but the FTC can even instigate a prosecution and to do so, your victims have to "prove" your address obfuscation was intentional haha! Ever hear of someone proving a negative?
So no worries - you're home free, thanks to us, your humble legislative servants. We've delivered, now give us our next contribution.
Sincerely,
Congress.
Absolutely everyone should use spamcop.
It does a great job of reliably backtracking the responsible ISPs hosting both the original mail servers and any URLs and generates spam reports. It's a lot more tedious than just hitting delete, but I use the RBLs and find a meaningful correlation between the amount of spam I get on day 2 to the expediency with which I reported spam on day 1.
If everyone used spamcop the hosting ISPs would be deluged every time a spam went out, the spammers effectively instigating a self-inflicted DOS attack. I'm rubber and you're glue...
"I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply doesn't work." - Kent Brockman
Clearly there is a PAC driven talking points campaign to vilify anyone who points out the man behind the curtain. This seems to be coming from The Election Center (www.electioncenter.org) a front group for Diebold that's positioned itself as expert on the subject and is distributing white papers that get picked up verbatim by other organizations in an attempt to manufacture astroturf support for DREs.
These documents come from a guy named "Doug Lewis" who is, according to Bev Harris, a former used computer parts salesman who's been anointed a meta-expert on DRE security and who's pronouncements are cited by my ROV as being more authoritative than, for example the opinion of the Joint MIT/Caltech voting technology Committee (after all what do a bunch of geeks know compared to a PR flack?)
Anyway, he originally wrote "I knew that at some point in the growth and acceptance of DRE's that it was likely that the conspiracy theorists would begin t" Thanks to MS-Word QuickSave! The paragraph now reads "Now that Direct Recording Equipment (DRE) voting systems are growing in acceptance and use in American elections, it is almost inevitable that some groups, individuals and organizations will claim that such systems are not safe enough to use in elections."
He goes on to say "The problem is that well intentioned people, some of them even highly educated and respected, scare voters and public officials with claims that the voting equipment and/or its software can be manipulated to change the outcome of elections. And, the claim is, it can do so without anyone discovering the theft of votes. " This from 4-2003.
Hopefully the MD legislature can see through this transparent mendacity.