Coal is largely composed of organic matter, but it is the inorganic matter in coal minerals and trace elements that have been cited as possible causes of health, environmental, and technological problems associated with the use of coal. Some trace elements in coal are naturally radioactive. These radioactive elements include uranium (U), thorium (Th), and their numerous decay products, including radium (Ra) and radon (Rn).
How about when the *Soundtrack* for the movie costs $16?? (and as the parent poster stated, the DVD is $15)
One could argue economies of scale, that they will sell so many more units of the DVD than the CD soundtrack, but that really doesn't work for a product with a relatively low marginal cost of production. And doesn't the DVD already include these songs somewhere during the movie??
A coal plant can send more radioactive waste than a safe nuclear reaction by a large margin. At least with nuclear, you know where the radioactive material is and can contain it. In coal, it is in everything in trace amounts. But so much coal is used in a day that a very significant amount of radioactive material is released each day.
How does it work out buffering and syncing? How does it avoid "ghosts" or echos in the broadcast when a radio is simulateously received broadcasts from two base stations broadcasting the same broadcast on the same frequency, one getting the source broadcast over a DSL line with some latency, the other over fibre with much less latency?
I expect that is something that must be solved in software, and, according to the article, this is a hardware device. The original poster's dream of a blanket grass-roots radio station is a little far away. That being said, a small FM broadcaster would be great for broadcasting something in the house and being able to tune in from any simple FM radio around the yard.
Why on earth don't you guys change the laws? Corporations and their incessant drive for money can be a positive force, if they're funneled in the right direction.
Change the laws, or change the market (or both)?
How do you convince a corporation (for which goal #1 is shareholder value) to do something to benefit the community? How do you quantify the total social cost and social benefit of an action? How can you make the non-financial effect of a business decision on the community show up in the ledger and count at board meetings?
The Kyoto Protocol and CO2 emissions trading is, in a way, trying to quantify social cost and benefit by creating a market where clean companies can profit, whereas pollutors must pay higher premiums, thereby decreasing shareholder value.
So how do we go about making social cost/social benefit show up as a financial item in a shareholder quarterly report? How much does clean air cost?
If you don't spend the full value of the card, the balance should still remain on the card.
If you return an item to the store, they don't typically return cash. I returned a ~ large item, and they would only give it back in terms of store credit - i.e. value stored with the card. They refused to return it as cash or a credit to the credit card used to purchase the item.
Just be careful that they do give it back to you. I had a cashier try and keep my card even though it had $45 value left on it. She tossed it in the garbage after the transaction. I made sure she fished it out and returned it to me.
I've seen more 'fishy' cash-register things at Wal-Mart than any other store. Things like the cost of a good mysteriously increasing in price up to 50% between the shelf and the cash register. And, according to those who this has happened to, is a regular occurance.
Maybe it is just the Wal-Mart near here, but I really can't trust them.
Kindly point me to a napster-style (i.e., search and download) P2P app that includes a working and used feature whereby the copyright status of any given file can be verified before I download it.
Not all are production code yet, but they are working on it:
I am quite certain that your second-term textbook is not "cutting-edge research".
I think you are confusing two different things. The textbook is a collection of topics to help you, as a student, learn the area. The research articles in question are results and interpretations of experiments published in monthly/weekly journals.
To write a good skill, you need to be a really good writer, and spend a lot of time polishing know topics. To write a curring edge research article, you have to be studying things not yet understood.
Most research is not discussed in any detail in second-term classes. Chances are the topics presented in a textbook were studied in labs and written as articles as much as 50-100 years ago, depending on the research area. (Physics, chemistry and math may be on the 50-100 years order, comp sci may be closer to a 20 years ago estimate)
I can confirm this. I can see the balance and recent transactions using my account number and password, but if I want to actuall move any money, I need a number from my TAN list. They will tell you what the last TAN number was that you used, so you know what the next one is ONLY if you have the list in front of you.
Your account number is public (many business put their account number on their website so it is easier for you to pay them), and you keep your password (something you know) and your TAN list (something you have) secret.
"P.S. When you hear the wackos on Fox News and Elsewhere refer to this prize as coming from "the French," please know that of the nine members of the Festival jury, only ONE was French. Nearly half the jury (four) were Americans and the President of the jury was an American (Quentin Tarantino). But this fact won't stop the O'Reillys or the Lenos or the Limbaughs from attacking the French and me because, well, that's how their simple minds function."
They are talking about the GlobalWarmingPotential of the gas. Global Warming Potential is based on infrared adsorption spectra of the gas in question. What that statement means, is that methane adsorbs 21 times as much energy in the infrared spectrum as CO2. The amount of thermal energy trapped in the atmosphere by methane is 21 times that of CO2.
As for the ozone layer part, I have to agree that that seems to be a confused writer.
Does your car have three separate catalytic converters, or a "three-way catalytic converter". The difference? The three-way converter refers to three chemical reactions occuring on the catalyst (usually composed of Pt, Pd, and Rh, as well as other materials such as Al2O3...): CO + 0.5 O2 -> CO2 2NO + 2CO -> N2 + 2CO2 C3H8 + 5 O2 -> 3CO2 + 4H2O
(of course, that is an oversimplification. Some researchers have as many as 150 reaction steps on the catalyst surface...)
Of course, you could have a diesel with a cat and a NOx/particulate filter or such. I don't know, and you didn't really say in your post.
MS Word is a great tool for writing a letter to Grandma, or a short (one-page) business letter. As soon as you are working with a document longer than about 10 pages, Word is a dog and will screw you over.
I made the mistake of writing my thesis in MS Word format two years ago. I first wrote all the chapters as separate files, (as they were written at differnet times) but all formatted the same. When it came time to merge the documents together, it was a nightmare! Word kept telling me that I "didn't have permission to edit this document"! What!! I wrote the thing! Noone else has ever seen it! Who are you to tell me that I don't own my own document and who are you to stop me from merging them together??? Turns out, it is easier to export all 150 pages to text merge and reformat than to merge two Word documents.
I won't make that mistake again. My next thesis will be done in LaTeX/OpenOffice.
"Almost all attacks against our software are against the legacy systems," he said.
"If you want more secure software, upgrade."
That sounds more to me like they want people to get on the upgrade cycle and pay for software as a service instead of software as a product. They seem to be looking for new revenue streams, and want to get all those corporate clients who just finished their Windows2000 migration to upgrade to the latest version instead of using Win2K on the current servers for the next several years. They seem to want people to pay a annual/monthly charge to run the lastest (and most secure) version of Windows.
If you don't have anything to hide, then why do you close the door when you go to the bathroom?
I don't have anything to hide, but I like my privacy. The streets are public and not private, and are quite open to 'monitoring' by anyone willing to stand there and watch the street. But where does the public space end and private space begin? Waht about a public washroom? Shoudl cameras be installed there? If there were, woudl you use them? What about changing rooms at stores? Would you still shop at a store that recorded you trying on their cloths?
Where does the public space end and the indiviuals right to privacy begin? With 4 million cameras, you can bet that some rather private spaces may be monitored. But even if you think that every camera in the UK is only monitoring public spaces, and they are installing new ones, are the new ones monitoring public or private places???
I have worked with engineering and chemistry PhDs and researchers everyday for the past several years. Many of us use high performance supercomputers to solve complex problems.
But do you know how the real thinking and the real prolem is done? With pencil and paper. Lots of paper. Sometimes with chalk and chalkboard. Erasers are also important.
Computers are useless for solving complex equations until you understand the problem. And you need to work with pencil and paper before you understand the problem. Spreadsheets are good for solving lots of problems, but you shouldn't use the spreadsheet until you have solved at least one iteration on paper.
Having said that, a computer may be useful to graphically present a problem to someone, but learning to use the tool (the computer) shouldn't displace learning how to solve problems (pencil, paper and discussions).
and, you. Seriously. You are the best person to represent your own views. Then we know what you think. Just make sure that you know who you are speaking for - I am sure you can represent your views well, but I don't know if you represent my views very well.
If you want someone more local, start asking librarians at the local library if any of them have viewpoints on IP and DRM issues.
please post other such 'potentially good' representatives in reply.
But really, if you want someone with a suit and a long list of credentials to represent the people in a debate on intellectual property, pick the Professor of Law at Stanford, Lawrence Lessig. That's who I would pick. I like his views and his ideas. I publish some of my work under a creative commons license, and tried to follow the Elred case.
Another idea is to pull a strand of string through the wall too. That way, years later when you decide to add another cable, you attach the new cable and a new piece of string to one end of the old string, and pull it through from the other end. Very cheap and easy to do if you do it in advance, and a real time-saver later on.
I agree. What are you afraid of? A healthy debate? This law should do nothing to prevent people from publish what they already are. What it will do is force them to do a little more research about what they are writing.
If you are writing well researched material, then your opponent must reply in kind. If you are writing unresearched, knee-jerking, reactionary garbage and didn't set your facts right, then maybe you have something to worry about.
Think of it this way: What if Microsoft wrote a terrible review of a Linux filesystem with obvious errors. The right of reply would allow the coder responsible to send in a reply that said "actually, we do have that feature. It is in the code, lines 789-1245. It works. It has worked for several years now, and we have a mailing list full of responses to prove it." This is good.
What this law does (or what it intends to do, and I hope that the law is not bent to other purposes) is level the playing field. Microsoft can try and publish a slander paper on Red Hat, but Red Hat can refute the charges just like Microsoft can refute something that Red Hat says about Microsoft.
What this forces people to write more about the strengths of the idea that they are proposing and less about the weaknesses of someone else's idea. It is easy to be a critic. It takes a lot more thought to come up with a better idea. But better ideas change the word and negative comments take it nowhere.
The right of reply can be very good. Far too many stories are one-sided. Some of the best journalism I have ever read involved a newspaper committing half of a page to one side of an issue and the other half to the opposite issue. That format forced the reading to really THINK about the issue.
Please reply with your well-researched and insightful comments. They may be contrary to mine, but if they are insightful, then I am listening.
I like to think that humans did not evolve from chimps. Unfortunately, too often the _behaviour_ of some humans is strong evidence that we are very close to chimps.
This guy has proven where he ethically stands on the issue of privacy, and it is definitely not be one the side of those who care about privacy.
Personally, I am glad that I call myself Canadian, as we have a respectable Privacy Commissioner, who has been earning my respect over time. Our guy is on the side of the citizens.
I paid for my fastmail.fm account. I wanted something that did POP3 over SSL, IMAP over SSL, and SMTP via SSL. Plus a nice web internface. Plus subdomain addressing, and a decent amount of email storage space. That is worth US$20 per year to me. It may not be for everyone, but it is worth it to me.
I have used many of the free email accounts, and you get what you pay for. Yahoo pulled the plug on a few important features, and it was actually cheaper to go with Fastmail and the extra features than the get an enhanced Yahoo account.
But that's just me. I rate email as very important. Others may not. I have heard a few good things about myrealbox, and it may be a great solution for lots of people, but I have not tried them. I am happy with fastmail right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the original report.
How about when the *Soundtrack* for the movie costs $16?? (and as the parent poster stated, the DVD is $15)
One could argue economies of scale, that they will sell so many more units of the DVD than the CD soundtrack, but that really doesn't work for a product with a relatively low marginal cost of production. And doesn't the DVD already include these songs somewhere during the movie??
A coal plant can send more radioactive waste than a safe nuclear reaction by a large margin. At least with nuclear, you know where the radioactive material is and can contain it. In coal, it is in everything in trace amounts. But so much coal is used in a day that a very significant amount of radioactive material is released each day.
Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash: Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance
How does it work out buffering and syncing? How does it avoid "ghosts" or echos in the broadcast when a radio is simulateously received broadcasts from two base stations broadcasting the same broadcast on the same frequency, one getting the source broadcast over a DSL line with some latency, the other over fibre with much less latency?
I expect that is something that must be solved in software, and, according to the article, this is a hardware device. The original poster's dream of a blanket grass-roots radio station is a little far away. That being said, a small FM broadcaster would be great for broadcasting something in the house and being able to tune in from any simple FM radio around the yard.
How do you convince a corporation (for which goal #1 is shareholder value) to do something to benefit the community? How do you quantify the total social cost and social benefit of an action? How can you make the non-financial effect of a business decision on the community show up in the ledger and count at board meetings?
The Kyoto Protocol and CO2 emissions trading is, in a way, trying to quantify social cost and benefit by creating a market where clean companies can profit, whereas pollutors must pay higher premiums, thereby decreasing shareholder value.
So how do we go about making social cost/social benefit show up as a financial item in a shareholder quarterly report? How much does clean air cost?
If you don't spend the full value of the card, the balance should still remain on the card.
If you return an item to the store, they don't typically return cash. I returned a ~ large item, and they would only give it back in terms of store credit - i.e. value stored with the card. They refused to return it as cash or a credit to the credit card used to purchase the item.
Just be careful that they do give it back to you. I had a cashier try and keep my card even though it had $45 value left on it. She tossed it in the garbage after the transaction. I made sure she fished it out and returned it to me.
I've seen more 'fishy' cash-register things at Wal-Mart than any other store. Things like the cost of a good mysteriously increasing in price up to 50% between the shelf and the cash register. And, according to those who this has happened to, is a regular occurance.
Maybe it is just the Wal-Mart near here, but I really can't trust them.
Kindly point me to a napster-style (i.e., search and download) P2P app that includes a working and used feature whereby the copyright status of any given file can be verified before I download it.
Not all are production code yet, but they are working on it:
Creative Commons Technology
RDF enhanced Search Prototype
How to Tag HTML pages
How license embedding works in MP3s
Applications integrated with Creative Commons
I am quite certain that your second-term textbook is not "cutting-edge research".
I think you are confusing two different things. The textbook is a collection of topics to help you, as a student, learn the area. The research articles in question are results and interpretations of experiments published in monthly/weekly journals.
To write a good skill, you need to be a really good writer, and spend a lot of time polishing know topics. To write a curring edge research article, you have to be studying things not yet understood.
Most research is not discussed in any detail in second-term classes. Chances are the topics presented in a textbook were studied in labs and written as articles as much as 50-100 years ago, depending on the research area. (Physics, chemistry and math may be on the 50-100 years order, comp sci may be closer to a 20 years ago estimate)
A woodchipper can also be a secure method of making data unreadable.
I can confirm this. I can see the balance and recent transactions using my account number and password, but if I want to actuall move any money, I need a number from my TAN list. They will tell you what the last TAN number was that you used, so you know what the next one is ONLY if you have the list in front of you.
Your account number is public (many business put their account number on their website so it is easier for you to pay them), and you keep your password (something you know) and your TAN list (something you have) secret.
"P.S. When you hear the wackos on Fox News and Elsewhere refer to this prize as coming from "the French," please know that of the nine members of the Festival jury, only ONE was French. Nearly half the jury (four) were Americans and the President of the jury was an American (Quentin Tarantino). But this fact won't stop the O'Reillys or the Lenos or the Limbaughs from attacking the French and me because, well, that's how their simple minds function."
Source of quote: Michael Moore
Hope this clears up the "French" issue for you.
-----
They are talking about the Global Warming Potential of the gas. Global Warming Potential is based on infrared adsorption spectra of the gas in question. What that statement means, is that methane adsorbs 21 times as much energy in the infrared spectrum as CO2. The amount of thermal energy trapped in the atmosphere by methane is 21 times that of CO2.
As for the ozone layer part, I have to agree that that seems to be a confused writer.
Does your car have three separate catalytic converters, or a "three-way catalytic converter". The difference? The three-way converter refers to three chemical reactions occuring on the catalyst (usually composed of Pt, Pd, and Rh, as well as other materials such as Al2O3...):
CO + 0.5 O2 -> CO2
2NO + 2CO -> N2 + 2CO2
C3H8 + 5 O2 -> 3CO2 + 4H2O
(of course, that is an oversimplification. Some researchers have as many as 150 reaction steps on the catalyst surface...)
Of course, you could have a diesel with a cat and a NOx/particulate filter or such. I don't know, and you didn't really say in your post.
MS Word is a great tool for writing a letter to Grandma, or a short (one-page) business letter. As soon as you are working with a document longer than about 10 pages, Word is a dog and will screw you over.
I made the mistake of writing my thesis in MS Word format two years ago. I first wrote all the chapters as separate files, (as they were written at differnet times) but all formatted the same. When it came time to merge the documents together, it was a nightmare! Word kept telling me that I "didn't have permission to edit this document"! What!! I wrote the thing! Noone else has ever seen it! Who are you to tell me that I don't own my own document and who are you to stop me from merging them together??? Turns out, it is easier to export all 150 pages to text merge and reformat than to merge two Word documents.
I won't make that mistake again. My next thesis will be done in LaTeX/OpenOffice.
Read the last two sentences of the article:
"Almost all attacks against our software are against the legacy systems," he said.
"If you want more secure software, upgrade."
That sounds more to me like they want people to get on the upgrade cycle and pay for software as a service instead of software as a product. They seem to be looking for new revenue streams, and want to get all those corporate clients who just finished their Windows2000 migration to upgrade to the latest version instead of using Win2K on the current servers for the next several years. They seem to want people to pay a annual/monthly charge to run the lastest (and most secure) version of Windows.
If you don't have anything to hide, then why do you close the door when you go to the bathroom?
I don't have anything to hide, but I like my privacy. The streets are public and not private, and are quite open to 'monitoring' by anyone willing to stand there and watch the street. But where does the public space end and private space begin? Waht about a public washroom? Shoudl cameras be installed there? If there were, woudl you use them? What about changing rooms at stores? Would you still shop at a store that recorded you trying on their cloths?
Where does the public space end and the indiviuals right to privacy begin? With 4 million cameras, you can bet that some rather private spaces may be monitored. But even if you think that every camera in the UK is only monitoring public spaces, and they are installing new ones, are the new ones monitoring public or private places???
I have worked with engineering and chemistry PhDs and researchers everyday for the past several years. Many of us use high performance supercomputers to solve complex problems.
But do you know how the real thinking and the real prolem is done? With pencil and paper. Lots of paper. Sometimes with chalk and chalkboard. Erasers are also important.
Computers are useless for solving complex equations until you understand the problem. And you need to work with pencil and paper before you understand the problem. Spreadsheets are good for solving lots of problems, but you shouldn't use the spreadsheet until you have solved at least one iteration on paper.
Having said that, a computer may be useful to graphically present a problem to someone, but learning to use the tool (the computer) shouldn't displace learning how to solve problems (pencil, paper and discussions).
---------
I am not a vegetarian because I love animals. I am a vegetarian because I hate plants....
Crunch crunch crunch! yummm! Another brussel sprout gone! hahahaha!
Here are a few good representatives to mention if you want someone to debate on intellectual property issues:
Bruce Perens, former Debian project leader.
Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Chair of the Creative Commons project, author of several books on intellectual property...
and,
you. Seriously. You are the best person to represent your own views. Then we know what you think. Just make sure that you know who you are speaking for - I am sure you can represent your views well, but I don't know if you represent my views very well.
If you want someone more local, start asking librarians at the local library if any of them have viewpoints on IP and DRM issues.
please post other such 'potentially good' representatives in reply.
But really, if you want someone with a suit and a long list of credentials to represent the people in a debate on intellectual property, pick the Professor of Law at Stanford, Lawrence Lessig. That's who I would pick. I like his views and his ideas. I publish some of my work under a creative commons license, and tried to follow the Elred case.
----
Another idea is to pull a strand of string through the wall too. That way, years later when you decide to add another cable, you attach the new cable and a new piece of string to one end of the old string, and pull it through from the other end. Very cheap and easy to do if you do it in advance, and a real time-saver later on.
I agree. What are you afraid of? A healthy debate? This law should do nothing to prevent people from publish what they already are. What it will do is force them to do a little more research about what they are writing.
If you are writing well researched material, then your opponent must reply in kind. If you are writing unresearched, knee-jerking, reactionary garbage and didn't set your facts right, then maybe you have something to worry about.
Think of it this way: What if Microsoft wrote a terrible review of a Linux filesystem with obvious errors. The right of reply would allow the coder responsible to send in a reply that said "actually, we do have that feature. It is in the code, lines 789-1245. It works. It has worked for several years now, and we have a mailing list full of responses to prove it." This is good.
What this law does (or what it intends to do, and I hope that the law is not bent to other purposes) is level the playing field. Microsoft can try and publish a slander paper on Red Hat, but Red Hat can refute the charges just like Microsoft can refute something that Red Hat says about Microsoft.
What this forces people to write more about the strengths of the idea that they are proposing and less about the weaknesses of someone else's idea. It is easy to be a critic. It takes a lot more thought to come up with a better idea. But better ideas change the word and negative comments take it nowhere.
The right of reply can be very good. Far too many stories are one-sided. Some of the best journalism I have ever read involved a newspaper committing half of a page to one side of an issue and the other half to the opposite issue. That format forced the reading to really THINK about the issue.
Please reply with your well-researched and insightful comments. They may be contrary to mine, but if they are insightful, then I am listening.
I like to think that humans did not evolve from chimps. Unfortunately, too often the _behaviour_ of some humans is strong evidence that we are very close to chimps.
24 track! That's the equivalent of 12 (stereo) recorders!
This guy has proven where he ethically stands on the issue of privacy, and it is definitely not be one the side of those who care about privacy.
Personally, I am glad that I call myself Canadian, as we have a respectable Privacy Commissioner, who has been earning my respect over time. Our guy is on the side of the citizens.
I paid for my fastmail.fm account. I wanted something that did POP3 over SSL, IMAP over SSL, and SMTP via SSL. Plus a nice web internface. Plus subdomain addressing, and a decent amount of email storage space. That is worth US$20 per year to me. It may not be for everyone, but it is worth it to me.
I have used many of the free email accounts, and you get what you pay for. Yahoo pulled the plug on a few important features, and it was actually cheaper to go with Fastmail and the extra features than the get an enhanced Yahoo account.
But that's just me. I rate email as very important. Others may not. I have heard a few good things about myrealbox, and it may be a great solution for lots of people, but I have not tried them. I am happy with fastmail right now.