Worried about global warming[1]? Then don't recycle paper. Mature forests let off as much CO2 as they absorb; young growing forests and tree farms absorb more CO2 than they release.
In fact, tree farms combined with landfills makes a great carbon sink. Coal is dug out of the ground, burned, and the carbon winds up in atmospheric CO2. A growing tree farm absorbs the CO2, then is cut down, the trees turned to paper, and the paper is ultimately buried in the ground in landfills, returning the carbon to the Earth from whence it was removed. And on the tree farm, new trees have been planted, sucking up carbon again during their rapid growth...
The problem is so much of the modern environmentalist movement is purely aesthetic, so biodegrading and recycling are promoted to eliminate ugliness, despite the fact that they merely reduce localized environmental landfill ugliness while increasing atmospheric CO2.
[1] I personally am waiting for the satellities to show evidence of atmospheric warming, given the number of factors that can distort surface measurements.
The NSA is subject to all the same idiocies as any other bureaucracy.
The NSA is even more disjointed than most bureaucracies because intel agencies encourage compartmentalization.
The NSA claim that Osama bin Laden is better off tech-wise than the NSA is being quoted out of context and was made at the beginning of a budget-setting period.
RATIONAL CONCLUSION:
One part of the NSA is trying to scare the politicians into giving them more money, because the NSA is a government bureaucracy and that's what government bureaucracies do. Another part is fulfilling its assigned mission to give Americans better security tools, because that's what this part of the NSA bureaucracy exists to do.
Most 'Christians' (we're talking protestant and Catholic organizations here) would define Christianity as those people who believe the Bible is the only revealed 'Word of God' and that it cannot be added to.
Er, then Protestants can't believe Roman Catholics are Christian, because of the books of Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabes, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), and Baruch, plus additional passages in Daniel and Esther. And they can't belive that Orthodox Catholics are Christian because of the above works, plus 1 and 2 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and 3 Maccabes.
And actually, Catholic doctrine places the teaching authority of the Church before that of the Bible. Which makes sense, because the choice of which books were canonical and which were not was made in the 5th Century by the Catholic Church.
Any Protestant church "based on the Bible" has to do one of the following:
1) Accept that the Catholic Church had teaching authority in the 5th Century and somehow lost it subsequently.
2) Argue that St. Jerome was divinely inspired as to which books to put in the Bible.
3) Argue that Martin Luther (who removed OT books from the Bible that were not included by the Jews in the First Century A.D.) was divinely inspired to compile the Bible.
4) Argue that God reveals to believers that the books in the Bible are His word.
Arguments 1 or 2 would mean that the Protestants would have to add the Apochrypha back into their Bibles, and argument 4 leaves Protestants with no way to argue with the Mormons adding a third volume except "God didn't tell me that it was His word!"
And Argument 3 indicates that God was perfectly willing to allow all Christians to go a millenium believing certain non-inspired books were actually the Word of God.
Y'know, I don't have a whisper of proof or evidence for the nonexistence of a lot of things.
For example, I have an old furnace chimney that my new furnace doesn't use. I don't have a whisper of evidence or proof that a pixie hasn't taken up residence in it. Yet, if you asked me, I'd tell you I'm sure that there are no pixies are in my old furnace chimney.
Oh, there's currently a militant sect of Tibetan Buddhism that engages in terrorist attacks against other sects. Even tried to kill the Dali Lama once or twice.
Cold fusion is like faith healing or UFOs; there's a lot of claims that it's real, a lot of people who testify that it's real, but no successful repeatable experiments or irrefutable evidence that it's real.
So if you believe faith healing and UFOs are real, then go ahead and believe that cold fusion is real.
With a.003 x.004 micrometer transistor, put a gig of RAM and the whole video subsystem on the processor itself, and use a full-speed FSB to access the battery-supported terabyte of RAM that's replaced your hard disk entirely.
Look, do you have any idea how much of what is written up in intelligence reports is collated public-record information? Sometimes the best way of finding out what's going on in, say, Kashmir is to get a Pakistani news broadcast and an Indian news broadcast and see where they agree and where they differ. A lot of what "they" tell people in policy positions is what the radio news in Tehran said this morning, because not everything gets published in the New York Times even if it isn't secret.
What the intel agencies do is use a random number generator and a dictionary file to name things, so that the mere name of a project doesn't tell other countries' intel agencies anything. So "Pyramid" might be a code name of a spy in Russia, while "Ballpoint" might be a montioring device in Cairo, and "Cossack" might be the code name of an optical scanner disguised as a Bic.
Since the primary focus of the French intelligence services for the last thirty years has been stealing secrets from U.S., Japanese, and German companies for use by French companies largely owned by the French government, they asssume that's the primary mission of American intelligence in Europe, too. We've PNGed several French diplomats when we've caught them spying on U.S. companies.
Okay, since the other respondents can't distinguish between conservatism/liberalism within a religion and political alignment...
Yes, the light side is the conservative branch of the Force; it has an extensive dogma, rigid rules, repression of emotion, and a long tradition. The dark side allows one to choose his own path to enlightnment, free emotional expression, and personal empowerment.
Simple. A government has no buisness collecting information about the religion of its citizens, since there is no legitimate purpose for which the government can put the data to use. So rendering the data invalid by lying is a proper form of civil disobedience.
What about country DNS servers as generic servers?
No, I don't mean a country selling its national domain to any and all comers. I mean, what happens if a country sets up its root servers to resolve both.xx and, say,.foo domains? Would the.foo resolutions propagate through the standard DNS system the same way the.xx resolutions do?
Concrete example: Turkey decides to start selling.kom addresses and puts them on the same machine as the.tr root DNS server. What happens?
Back in January 1997, when Next had just been bought, I figured it would be two-and-a-half years before Apple managed to release a consumer OS based on OpenStep, and three-and-a-half before it was mainstream.
So I expected that in roughly July of 2000, Mac OS X would be mainstream. Instead, a year later, Macs with OS X preinstalled will have barely started shipping.
1997: Apple buys Next (January)
2001: Incomplete version of OS X client released. (March).
So, it took Apple a mere four years and two months, starting from the established OpenStep codebase, to release a product that will be missing functionality (analog video input support and reading DVDs) important to it's most important market, multimedia.
That certainly isn't blazing speed, but I'm sure translucent windows are worth it...
It had three kinds of episodes: episodes that ended in a deus-ex-machina, pseudo-intelligent episodes that were thought-provoking the first time you watched them and were full of huge holes the second time you watched them, and crap episodes derived from the previous pseudo-intelligent episodes.
Oh, sure, about seven decent episodes aired, so it wasn't a total loss. But it took seven seasons for TNG to produce as many decent episodes as TOS did in three, or DS9 did in any two of the War years.
I wouldn't be surprised if the long term plan was to fold the enterprise functionality of AIX into Linux, have the OS maintained by the open source community with much less IBM manpower than AIX takes, and then put AIX out to pasture.
Absolutely. IBM will have the service contract on its servers anyway, IBM doesn't make money selling AIX for other peoples' servers, and essentially nobody buys an IBM server for AIX.
So if IBM can cut server OS development and maintenence costs by 50% by having much of the work done by the Linux community, that increases their profit margins.
And it also benefits the Linux community, since they'd be developing and maintaining Linux anyway, and this adds IBM and IBM server customers to the people who have an interest in helping develop and maintain Linux.
Environmental disasters by what standard? There's no biosphere to disrupt. The worst that can happen to the "environment" on the moon is violations of the aesthetic taste of Jean-Jacques Rousseau-style romantics.
There are no NASA cuts. There is a reallocation of what NASA is spending its money on, but the budget for NASA as a whole is essentially unchanged
And if the record of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization is any indication, the "so-called 'missile-defense' program" will have plenty of space spinoffs -- both the DC-X and Clementine were SDIO projects, after all.
Under Bush NASA will be getting its first funding increase in the last seven years, even if the increase just keeps up with current inflation (more or less).
Now, yes, specific programs within NASA are being defunded in favor of OTHER specific programs. But the choice isn't between space exploration and tax cuts, it's between space exploration mission A and space exploration mission B.
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Worried about global warming[1]? Then don't recycle paper. Mature forests let off as much CO2 as they absorb; young growing forests and tree farms absorb more CO2 than they release.
In fact, tree farms combined with landfills makes a great carbon sink. Coal is dug out of the ground, burned, and the carbon winds up in atmospheric CO2. A growing tree farm absorbs the CO2, then is cut down, the trees turned to paper, and the paper is ultimately buried in the ground in landfills, returning the carbon to the Earth from whence it was removed. And on the tree farm, new trees have been planted, sucking up carbon again during their rapid growth...
The problem is so much of the modern environmentalist movement is purely aesthetic, so biodegrading and recycling are promoted to eliminate ugliness, despite the fact that they merely reduce localized environmental landfill ugliness while increasing atmospheric CO2.
[1] I personally am waiting for the satellities to show evidence of atmospheric warming, given the number of factors that can distort surface measurements.
What happened to the health issues with mobile phones?
See "silicone gel related connective tissue diseases", "spicy food causes ulcers", and "demon posession causes epileptic seizures".
FACTS:
The NSA is a bureaucracy with several missions.
The NSA is subject to all the same idiocies as any other bureaucracy.
The NSA is even more disjointed than most bureaucracies because intel agencies encourage compartmentalization.
The NSA claim that Osama bin Laden is better off tech-wise than the NSA is being quoted out of context and was made at the beginning of a budget-setting period.
RATIONAL CONCLUSION:
One part of the NSA is trying to scare the politicians into giving them more money, because the NSA is a government bureaucracy and that's what government bureaucracies do. Another part is fulfilling its assigned mission to give Americans better security tools, because that's what this part of the NSA bureaucracy exists to do.
Most 'Christians' (we're talking protestant and Catholic organizations here) would define Christianity as those people who believe the Bible is the only revealed 'Word of God' and that it cannot be added to.
Er, then Protestants can't believe Roman Catholics are Christian, because of the books of Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabes, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), and Baruch, plus additional passages in Daniel and Esther. And they can't belive that Orthodox Catholics are Christian because of the above works, plus 1 and 2 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and 3 Maccabes.
And actually, Catholic doctrine places the teaching authority of the Church before that of the Bible. Which makes sense, because the choice of which books were canonical and which were not was made in the 5th Century by the Catholic Church.
Any Protestant church "based on the Bible" has to do one of the following:
1) Accept that the Catholic Church had teaching authority in the 5th Century and somehow lost it subsequently.
2) Argue that St. Jerome was divinely inspired as to which books to put in the Bible.
3) Argue that Martin Luther (who removed OT books from the Bible that were not included by the Jews in the First Century A.D.) was divinely inspired to compile the Bible.
4) Argue that God reveals to believers that the books in the Bible are His word.
Arguments 1 or 2 would mean that the Protestants would have to add the Apochrypha back into their Bibles, and argument 4 leaves Protestants with no way to argue with the Mormons adding a third volume except "God didn't tell me that it was His word!"
And Argument 3 indicates that God was perfectly willing to allow all Christians to go a millenium believing certain non-inspired books were actually the Word of God.
Y'know, I don't have a whisper of proof or evidence for the nonexistence of a lot of things.
For example, I have an old furnace chimney that my new furnace doesn't use. I don't have a whisper of evidence or proof that a pixie hasn't taken up residence in it. Yet, if you asked me, I'd tell you I'm sure that there are no pixies are in my old furnace chimney.
Oh, there's currently a militant sect of Tibetan Buddhism that engages in terrorist attacks against other sects. Even tried to kill the Dali Lama once or twice.
Cold fusion is like faith healing or UFOs; there's a lot of claims that it's real, a lot of people who testify that it's real, but no successful repeatable experiments or irrefutable evidence that it's real.
So if you believe faith healing and UFOs are real, then go ahead and believe that cold fusion is real.
OpenNIC and AlterNIC already exist; these guys aren't going to change anything, either.
Nope, it'll take a major country code registry rebelling against ICANN for anything to change. Say, the British or the Canadians...
With a .003 x .004 micrometer transistor, put a gig of RAM and the whole video subsystem on the processor itself, and use a full-speed FSB to access the battery-supported terabyte of RAM that's replaced your hard disk entirely.
I suggest dicing and boiling.
Look, do you have any idea how much of what is written up in intelligence reports is collated public-record information? Sometimes the best way of finding out what's going on in, say, Kashmir is to get a Pakistani news broadcast and an Indian news broadcast and see where they agree and where they differ. A lot of what "they" tell people in policy positions is what the radio news in Tehran said this morning, because not everything gets published in the New York Times even if it isn't secret.
What the intel agencies do is use a random number generator and a dictionary file to name things, so that the mere name of a project doesn't tell other countries' intel agencies anything. So "Pyramid" might be a code name of a spy in Russia, while "Ballpoint" might be a montioring device in Cairo, and "Cossack" might be the code name of an optical scanner disguised as a Bic.
Since the primary focus of the French intelligence services for the last thirty years has been stealing secrets from U.S., Japanese, and German companies for use by French companies largely owned by the French government, they asssume that's the primary mission of American intelligence in Europe, too. We've PNGed several French diplomats when we've caught them spying on U.S. companies.
Okay, since the other respondents can't distinguish between conservatism/liberalism within a religion and political alignment...
Yes, the light side is the conservative branch of the Force; it has an extensive dogma, rigid rules, repression of emotion, and a long tradition. The dark side allows one to choose his own path to enlightnment, free emotional expression, and personal empowerment.
Simple. A government has no buisness collecting information about the religion of its citizens, since there is no legitimate purpose for which the government can put the data to use. So rendering the data invalid by lying is a proper form of civil disobedience.
What about country DNS servers as generic servers?
.xx and, say, .foo domains? Would the .foo resolutions propagate through the standard DNS system the same way the .xx resolutions do?
.kom addresses and puts them on the same machine as the .tr root DNS server. What happens?
No, I don't mean a country selling its national domain to any and all comers. I mean, what happens if a country sets up its root servers to resolve both
Concrete example: Turkey decides to start selling
Back in January 1997, when Next had just been bought, I figured it would be two-and-a-half years before Apple managed to release a consumer OS based on OpenStep, and three-and-a-half before it was mainstream.
So I expected that in roughly July of 2000, Mac OS X would be mainstream. Instead, a year later, Macs with OS X preinstalled will have barely started shipping.
But, hey, it's got translucent windows, right?
Yeah, but you'd kinda hope that after 4 years and two months of work on an already-existing OS (OpenStep), you could ship feature-complete.
Are the complaints justified? Well:
1997: Apple buys Next (January)
2001: Incomplete version of OS X client released. (March).
So, it took Apple a mere four years and two months, starting from the established OpenStep codebase, to release a product that will be missing functionality (analog video input support and reading DVDs) important to it's most important market, multimedia.
That certainly isn't blazing speed, but I'm sure translucent windows are worth it...
Please. TNG was crap.
It had three kinds of episodes: episodes that ended in a deus-ex-machina, pseudo-intelligent episodes that were thought-provoking the first time you watched them and were full of huge holes the second time you watched them, and crap episodes derived from the previous pseudo-intelligent episodes.
Oh, sure, about seven decent episodes aired, so it wasn't a total loss. But it took seven seasons for TNG to produce as many decent episodes as TOS did in three, or DS9 did in any two of the War years.
I wouldn't be surprised if the long term plan was to fold the enterprise functionality of AIX into Linux, have the OS maintained by the open source community with much less IBM manpower than AIX takes, and then put AIX out to pasture.
Absolutely. IBM will have the service contract on its servers anyway, IBM doesn't make money selling AIX for other peoples' servers, and essentially nobody buys an IBM server for AIX.
So if IBM can cut server OS development and maintenence costs by 50% by having much of the work done by the Linux community, that increases their profit margins.
And it also benefits the Linux community, since they'd be developing and maintaining Linux anyway, and this adds IBM and IBM server customers to the people who have an interest in helping develop and maintain Linux.
Environmental disasters by what standard? There's no biosphere to disrupt. The worst that can happen to the "environment" on the moon is violations of the aesthetic taste of Jean-Jacques Rousseau-style romantics.
Freedom of the press is the freedom to operate one without government control of what you publish, not the right to use someone else's press.
And democracy is not liberty; being given orders by by a mob is still being given orders.
There are no NASA cuts. There is a reallocation of what NASA is spending its money on, but the budget for NASA as a whole is essentially unchanged
And if the record of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization is any indication, the "so-called 'missile-defense' program" will have plenty of space spinoffs -- both the DC-X and Clementine were SDIO projects, after all.
Under Bush NASA will be getting its first funding increase in the last seven years, even if the increase just keeps up with current inflation (more or less).
Now, yes, specific programs within NASA are being defunded in favor of OTHER specific programs. But the choice isn't between space exploration and tax cuts, it's between space exploration mission A and space exploration mission B.
AT&T is planning to divide itself into four smaller companies -- wireless, cable, buisness telecom services, and consumer long distance.