Alot of stuff the web uses every day didn't used to be w3c. Standards evolve, its about time we see some new tags that allow easy/cool things. Having this sort of thing in the html standard is great, w3c is working on making this a standard, this is great news! Unless you make your money writing server side code to duplicate this behavior, which will be slower, more bandwidth intensive, and clunky... Stuff like this belongs in the client, this is how it should work.
I don't know how many hospitals you've been to in the US, but I've never been to one that actually called itself a "Hospital" that didn't have an ER (I've lived in 5 cities in 4 states...)... Now sometimes you'll see a "medical center" that doesn't have an er.. but anyway...
The US is fixing the "No one sees the price tag" problem, its called HSA's. Hundreds of companies are moving to them, I own a small business its how my employees get coverage, we save tons of money on premiums, and we save tons of money on care because we all see the full price of everything, and we can shop around. HSA's are introducing value shopping to the health care market (by value I mean cost+quality=value not just cost) So if you find 2 doctors, one who will do procedure x for 300, and he's rated a B, and another doctor who charges $5000 for the same procedure, but he's rated slightly higher (maybe B+) you go for the $300 doctor...
Anyway, this is something I've learned in the last year using an HSA, doctors in the US really do overcharge (but some don't), and the reason they do is because the insurance is picking up the tab. For just a regular checkup type visit (30 minutes in the chair, vitals, weight, eyes, ears, mouth, basic physical type stuff) I was quoted earlier this year anywhere from $1000 to $45. I ended up paying $85, the doctor was professional, and good, I didn't have to wait, and I saved $450 from what our old family doctor was charging (to our previous insurance, so we never knew how much he charged).
Anyway, the "hidden charge" problem can be fixed and is being fixed, and guess what its being fixed by creating an OPEN MARKET! I know you lefties will hate that. The Health care market is not an open market right now, its run by basically an oligopoly (the doctors) and a gov't sanctioned monopoly (insurance cos) The insurance cos are in effect a monopoly because they have an OK from congress to share information, and colude on prices. Ever wonder why there aren't any "budget" health insurance companies? It's because the Insurance industry has pushed through enough laws to make it illegal to be a health insurance provider unless you play their game and set prices where they already are.
The US system can be fixed and much more readily and cheaply than the UK, or Canadian problems. IE if everyone in the US moved to HSA's there would be an immediate drop in prices across the industry everyone would save money. In national health care systems the only solution available is to spend more money on extra doctor's specialists, equipment, etc. Previously in this post it mentioned that Canadians pay $60/mo for their "free" health care... Well if they got the level of service that is available in the US, I bet it would cost closer to $300/mo... oh wait... that looks alot like the $250/mo I used to pay (regular insurance I had before HMO, I own the business, I know all the costs). If people are waiting 3+ months for a specialist that I can make an appointment to see next week, well.. that is 12 times more capacity (1 week vs 12) so I'm probably being generous with only making the cost 5 times more (60 * 5 = 300).
My point is I think you're wrong, the health care situation in the US can be fixed, and the way to fix it is to open the market, not socialize it. National health care leads to lower levels of service, or to provide the same level of service, you have to spend just as much as people are in the US.
Well if they're moving to the continent that is just what they're hoping for (the wellfare). There isn't a growing economy left over there except for the UK. Why you would want to move to a place with 20-30% unemployment is beyond me... I love it when the left and the media in this country try to tell us we have it rough at 5%. (Oh wait, 7 years ago 6% was thought to be statistically fully employed... but now 5% is horrible and no one can find a job?) Anyway, Europe may be nice and liberal but there aren't any jobs, and there aren't many prospects either (as the whole continent is basically in a recession)
Are you serious? No calculus at all in high school in canada? I was introduced to calculus in grade 9, and had full blown calc in grade 11. And that's in a US public school...
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
Well then not for the first time the NY times is lying. They state in their article that there is no known avian virus that has jumped from birds to humans and been communicable from human-human, and that this strain was first identified in 1992 and has only had 5 mutations of the 35-40 needed to be human-human transmissible in that time (almost 14 years).
In this article the interview the lead scientist analyzing the 1918 virus and he says at this point its only 50/50 that that virus was a bird virus because of the way it codes its amino acids which has never been seen in any bird flu ever. The article goes on to say that if his analysis proves that the 1918 virus was a bird virus that it would be the first documented case of a bird virus jumping to humans and becoming fully transmissible. If they're lying, ok I'll believe you I guess...
the socio-economic problems certainly do contribute to the mortality rate. How many people do you know who sleep with their chickens? How many people do you know who work 16+ hours on a farm, manually planting/harvesting/etc? All of these things contribute greatly to the mortality rate. Further, I just read an article that directly contradicts your statement about antibodies. Its in the NY Times, it says that millions of southeast asians have antibodies for this exact flu strain, that it has been known in China and Vietnam since at least 1992, that it infects people every year, and that many people get it and survive. Look, we're talking about 125 people reported infected (62 deaths) out of a population of 4 billion. If that isn't making a mountain out of a mole hill I don't know what is.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
less than 30 hours... ok I guess... 125 people in southeast asia have gone to the hospital for it, of those 60 have died. There are reports that this exact same strain has been known in Asia for 14 years now, and it kills people every year, and it hasn't mutated to become human-human transmisable, and there are millions of people in asia who have antibodies to fight this strain (meaning they were infected and their immune systems won).
125 people is not every single person who has contracted this virus, it is every person who felt it serious enough to go to the hospital. If we used this same measure with chicken pox you'd probably see a 50% mortality rate. No one in my family went to the hospital when they got chicken pox, it never got noted in any CDC report, but people die from chicken pox. You're using blatantly skewed numbers and scare mongering.
You probably think "The Day After Tomorrow" is based on scientific fact and is actually going to happen later this year.
Well ok, so it is going to mutate, and 50% of the world will be dead next week... why don't I just get my gun and kill my family now? It'd save us a lot of pain and suffering. I don't know if I've ever read anything more cynical, pessimistic, or wrong-headed in my life. SARS was supposed to kill us last year, West Nile the year before that, the killer bees we're supposed to make the US southwest un-inhabitable by now.... Grow up, we'll find a solution to this problem (if it becomes a problem, which is still not a given by any means as you seem to think).
That article also directly contradicts the 60% number being bantered about. it says 92 infections 42 deaths. I'm not doing the long division for you but that's less than 50% so it must be less than 60
Except Avian flu is not easily spread, and if it ever does mutate to become easily spread, it could easily lose alot of potency in the mutation. Viruses do not always become more deadly after a mutation. Granted it could become more easily spread, but even an easily spread flu will not infect 50% of the population, 25% would be an extremely high number. And if we actually saw a 5% mortality rate in 1st world countries I would be stunned. 5% mortality in China probably equates to.5% mortality rate in the US or Europe.
Re:The 1957 influenza epidemic
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
your so-called "routine" shots weren't even invented 10 years ago. People have survived flu epidemics for thousands of years without them. Flu shots would be one of those "new technologies" which would cause this epidemic to be much less severe. Unfortunately a general flu shot won't protect you against avian flu as its a different strain, and will kill people with or without the shot equally. That is if it mutates into a human-human transmisable form, or to a bird-human easily transmisable form... At this point like what? 40 people have died in Asia, SARS killed way more than that, and didn't become a pandemic, in China where the average person who has died from this disease makes in a year less than you make in a day, it can hardly be assumed that the death rates/transmission rates will be the same in both populations.
So, this steam is just going to "appear". For this to work you're going to need a pretty hefty input of energy to boil water to create that steam.
So either you need a solar energy source (which won't work on a rainy day), or you'll need a bunch of batteries, which are bad, or you have to burn gasoline/other fossil fuel to boil the water to create steam to make this elecrolysis efficient enough.
This is not a solution. I much prefer honda's solution mentioned earlier (an electrolizer/storage solution for your home that runs on natural gas, and heats your home). Hook that up to solar power at your home (in alot of places) instead of the natural gas, and you've got a closed loop no emmission solution. And because it stores the hydrogen, if you have a rainy day, you still have fuel for your car.
obviously there is overhead associated with it, however having to run a java app server (like jboss, or even just tomcat) so that jsps work, has a much larger overhead hit (150-300MB of RAM used at the very least). Java can be fast for some things, but I've yet to see a truly high performance app server (tomcat, jboss, websphere, are all dogs compared to a simple SOAP/xml-rpc client/server setup in any language).
Further, if you're trying to make all local calls, then your app isn't scalable. My apps by default have n-tier clustering built in all the time. You're site grows, you need to handle 1 million hits a day now... drop a couple more 2k boxes in there, move a couple services around, no new code to write, just works.
Ok, I've been developing for 12 years now, and almost purely web development for the last 4. I generally use PHP for what its good for (page generation, presentation layer type stuff), and use xml-rpc or SOAP from php to connect to java, python, perl, or c++ whatever has the best libraries/capabilities/ease of use for what I'm trying to do. I've actually moved almost exclusively to python as my backend/business logic language of choice, but Java worked fine for this purpose 3 years ago too. To me, setting up struts, jsps, all that garbage is a ton of overhead that a simple soap/xml-rpc setup easily replaces (and in my experience php + soap/xml-rpc + languageX is faster than an all java setup). PHP then can do what its best at, my frontends are very lightweight, and load almost as fast as static html, and I use a real language for logic and libraries etc. Now maybe this new PHP Framework will provide some classes and things that would be useable on the backend, I dunno.
The setup I use is basically the J2EE model, except I get the best of all worlds, because I can access code written in any language seemlessly, use n-tier architecture without even thinking about it, use advanced cacheing libraries available in the higher end/heavier languages, and because the backend code is running as a daemon running a soap or xml-rpc server, I sidestep the whole perl/python interpretter startup bottleneck.
It's not about which language is "best" its about what tool gets the job done.
I suppose its semantics, but I would put "quality" under "Functionality". I don't know how much code you've written, but writing good, documented, reusable, scalable, maintainable, bug free code takes a whole heck of a lot more time than whipping up a couple of features in a proof of concept. Quality implementations always take substantially more time and effort. If you give me specs, I can give you your program/features in a week or less, almost every time, however, if you feed the system bad data, or expect it to be able to process 20 million records, or think its going to have years of uptime without a crash, well you're going to be very disappointed. Moving a program from proof of concept to a quality piece of work takes substantial effort. This is what companies don't want to pay/wait for, they see the proof of concept, and they say "Let's ship that! Good job joe programmer, you wrote the whole product in 2 weeks." Meanwhile the programmer is saying "No, you don't understand, I need to spend about another 8 months on that before it works properly all the time, and doesn't crash when you give it bad input, and is secure against hackers". And the marketing guys and CEO are already announcing product availability in 1 month. Then when you say "There are all these bugs, and this doesn't work, and that won't work 90% of the time" they say "Well, why'd you write broken code?!".
This is the number 1 reason why I started my own company, where I have control over these things. I don't over promise my customers, cause I know exactly what its gonna take, I normally ship high quality software, except when the customer doesn't get it, and says I need X by Y I'll pay Z. I'll say ok, well I can give you A by Y for Z, and make it very well known to the customer that because of their time crunch/lack of funds, they will not get a fully functional product (meaning quality will be sacrificed, as I will deliver the features).
In short, features are easy quality is hard, and expensive, and time consuming. Quality is the biggest variable.
So, you're gonna carbon date those plants right? Carbon dating never has granularity of better than ~500 years. All studies I've ever seen/read/written reports about which used carbon dating list the findings in thousands of years (These animals were alive 5000-7000 years ago, These bones are 25000-30000 years old). Show me one study where they said "This plant died here 6271 years ago on March 3rd" and I'll buy the idea that you can get an accurate time/temp from 6000 years ago. You cannot do that with carbon dating, it is not an exact science, it is much more of a black art and a bunch of guess work.
Further, your comment about "reasonably accurate climate depiction" is hilarious. We are talking about a net change of 1.5 degrees over the last 50 years. You've got to be pretty spot on if you're talking about a change of around 1-3%. You think you can just read a 6000 year old tree fossil like a thermometer? No, I'm sorry you can't. Further, if you are off by just 1% you have created a 100% error in your study. You can't be "reasonably accurate" and have the data mean anything in this situation. You have to be absolutly correct, and have 100% verifiable data from every part of the globe to build an accurate depiction of the climate 6000 years ago, 2000 years ago, whatever, and that's the only way you'll have convincing enough data to say that today's 1.5 degree warming is "unprecedented", "dangerous", or "caused by man". If after collecting the data from 6000 years ago you see that from 6000 years ago to 5900 years ago there was a 1.5 degree rise in temperatures, all of the global warming theories are immediately debunked, man didn't cause it then, his effect now is not causing it either, or if it is, its not unheard of, its nothing the planet hasn't seen before, and there is absolutely no cause for alarm.
How is Opera lightyears ahead? Because I either have to pay or watch banner ads all day? That is my biggest beef with Opera, I've never had to pay for a web browser (been on the net since 93), why would I start now? I certainly don't want to see banner ads all day. Anyway, the times I have used Opera, its seemed slower than firefox, and the interface is so cluttered, its worse than MS word. Firefox has its shortcomings too (its not like I didn't mention 2 or 3 in my post, flash is notoriously slow and buggy, certain gif animations totally trash the browser, etc) however, IE does the same sort of thing and has its own pet peeves, I've had IE crash loading very many websites. I'm saying if its fair to pick on FF for crashes, then IE needs to have all of its crashes documented as "DoS security breeches" as well. You can't measure FF in centimeters and IE in miles (IE, the granularity of centimeters will uncover alot more flaws than measuring in miles would).
OK, the IE fanboys are really stretching now. If crashing the browser is an "exploit" then that opens a whole new avenue of attack on IE. IE crashes like this (for me) far more often then firefox, and firefox crashes just about every time I visit a site with really involved flash or those really annoying smiley face banner ads (those are firefox killers).
ctrl+alt+del kill process is a good workaround for this "extremely dangerous" exploit. Again if this is a security vulnerability, then flash is the greatest hacking tool against firefox. Java is probably the greatest hacking tool against IE.
People are just really desparate for Firefox to have more bugs than IE. Thanks for finding some code that should probably be cleaned up, but crashing the browser is not in any way violating the security of the system on which the browser is running.
How can the "rate" be of concern? Do we know the "rate" of temperature change in the past? I don't think so, at any rate, it would be very hard to get readings on temperature change with 1 year granularity from 6000 years ago. We have seen 2-5 degree changes in the not distant past (1600-1800 mini ice age, and the medieval times cooling, these cooling and warming cycles could not have taken hundreds of years, as they have both occured in the last few hundred years). Currently we are talking about a cycle in terms of about 100 years, so how is this an increased rate? If the earth is not outside (or even close to outside) of historical parameters, then obviously we aren't "destroying" the planet.
I don't drive an SUV, and I care about taking care of the planet. I'm not calling for all out burn everything just cause we can policy here. I think we should try to take care of things because then they are more beautiful, not out of some over hyped fear that if we don't then the whole planet will fall out of the solar system or something.
So, basically you can have transparent windows now, I'm so glad that MS in "innovating"... I've had that for the last 4 years on my enlightenment desktop, and I don't need a $3000 video card to render it, or a 3.6 Ghz dual core proc either...
Unfortunately, this doesn't hold up as the box is the exact same hardware as the 510 with windows installed. There is no extra hardware testing, and these boxes don't have an os, so there is *NO* software testing, so no matter what it is cheaper than the 510 with windows, cause they did have to do testing for that. They aren't marketing the clean boxes either, they got a ton of free advertising by getting posted on slashdot but that didn't cost them a dime.
In short there are a ton of places where they should be saving even more money because of this than the windows box, and they should be passing that savings on to the consumer.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/03/163 9208&tid=187&tid=218 You obviously missed the above article, it lists a few companies that make money purely with GPL'd/OSS software. The include SugarCRM, MySQL, and many others. These companies were once startups (and some would still be considered startups). They are largely pure software development plays (IE they don't sell appliances/hardware).
The article mentions that MySQL AB will make 40 million this year. That's pretty good. SugarCRM has raised something like 7 million in capital (obviously this isn't making money, but someone believes they have a chance to make money.. VCs might not be brilliant, but they do try to make good investments).
Obviously these are the success stories, on average 1 in 5 companies makes it through the first year, and only a handful of those make it to 5 years. Those are statistics across all industries, you can't expect OSS companies to be impervious to those stats. Startups fail, business models fail, regardless of the state of the source.
What I think you forget, is that in 1980 there was this company called IBM, they had billions in sales, billions in cash, and any time a large company needed computers they called IBM. Suddenly this little company called MS appeared and changed the rules, and the unbeatable goliath of IBM took about 5 years to fall completely apart into a smoldering wreck. Yes they reorged, no they didn't go out of business, and I don't think MS will go out of business either.
MS won in the 90's because they made network computing simple, and easy enough for an attorney or accountant to set up their own network without having to spend thousands on a Novell or Unix consultant. Google is the first firm with the resources (cash and network resources), reliability, developers, and interest to develop fully internet based apps. MS has the a couple of the above list, but they don't have the reliability, and they certainly don't have the interest/desire. Google will make internet computing simple the way MS made network computing simple, and it is this paradigm shift that MS doesn't understand, and loathes. They will fight it tooth and nail, but that is where computing is going, just like in the early 80s when IBM fought the PC tooth and nail because mainframes were their business and there couldn't be a paradigm shift away from that (in their minds).
I'm well aware that sun has x86 boxes, obviously MS doesn't have a sparc version of windows.. It was a joke, trying to show the hilarity of the term "Unix Hardware"
Slashdot Mirror
Alot of stuff the web uses every day didn't used to be w3c.
Standards evolve, its about time we see some new tags that allow easy/cool things. Having this sort of thing in the html standard is great, w3c is working on making this a standard, this is great news! Unless you make your money writing server side code to duplicate this behavior, which will be slower, more bandwidth intensive, and clunky... Stuff like this belongs in the client, this is how it should work.
As soon as they can use proper grammar on their front page maybe I'll look at their tech
"makes browsing more easier" - sphereSite frontpage
I don't know how many hospitals you've been to in the US, but I've never been to one that actually called itself a "Hospital" that didn't have an ER (I've lived in 5 cities in 4 states...)... Now sometimes you'll see a "medical center" that doesn't have an er.. but anyway...
The US is fixing the "No one sees the price tag" problem, its called HSA's. Hundreds of companies are moving to them, I own a small business its how my employees get coverage, we save tons of money on premiums, and we save tons of money on care because we all see the full price of everything, and we can shop around. HSA's are introducing value shopping to the health care market (by value I mean cost+quality=value not just cost) So if you find 2 doctors, one who will do procedure x for 300, and he's rated a B, and another doctor who charges $5000 for the same procedure, but he's rated slightly higher (maybe B+) you go for the $300 doctor...
Anyway, this is something I've learned in the last year using an HSA, doctors in the US really do overcharge (but some don't), and the reason they do is because the insurance is picking up the tab. For just a regular checkup type visit (30 minutes in the chair, vitals, weight, eyes, ears, mouth, basic physical type stuff) I was quoted earlier this year anywhere from $1000 to $45. I ended up paying $85, the doctor was professional, and good, I didn't have to wait, and I saved $450 from what our old family doctor was charging (to our previous insurance, so we never knew how much he charged).
Anyway, the "hidden charge" problem can be fixed and is being fixed, and guess what its being fixed by creating an OPEN MARKET! I know you lefties will hate that. The Health care market is not an open market right now, its run by basically an oligopoly (the doctors) and a gov't sanctioned monopoly (insurance cos) The insurance cos are in effect a monopoly because they have an OK from congress to share information, and colude on prices. Ever wonder why there aren't any "budget" health insurance companies? It's because the Insurance industry has pushed through enough laws to make it illegal to be a health insurance provider unless you play their game and set prices where they already are.
The US system can be fixed and much more readily and cheaply than the UK, or Canadian problems. IE if everyone in the US moved to HSA's there would be an immediate drop in prices across the industry everyone would save money. In national health care systems the only solution available is to spend more money on extra doctor's specialists, equipment, etc. Previously in this post it mentioned that Canadians pay $60/mo for their "free" health care... Well if they got the level of service that is available in the US, I bet it would cost closer to $300/mo... oh wait... that looks alot like the $250/mo I used to pay (regular insurance I had before HMO, I own the business, I know all the costs). If people are waiting 3+ months for a specialist that I can make an appointment to see next week, well.. that is 12 times more capacity (1 week vs 12) so I'm probably being generous with only making the cost 5 times more (60 * 5 = 300).
My point is I think you're wrong, the health care situation in the US can be fixed, and the way to fix it is to open the market, not socialize it. National health care leads to lower levels of service, or to provide the same level of service, you have to spend just as much as people are in the US.
Well if they're moving to the continent that is just what they're hoping for (the wellfare). There isn't a growing economy left over there except for the UK. Why you would want to move to a place with 20-30% unemployment is beyond me... I love it when the left and the media in this country try to tell us we have it rough at 5%. (Oh wait, 7 years ago 6% was thought to be statistically fully employed... but now 5% is horrible and no one can find a job?) Anyway, Europe may be nice and liberal but there aren't any jobs, and there aren't many prospects either (as the whole continent is basically in a recession)
Are you serious? No calculus at all in high school in canada? I was introduced to calculus in grade 9, and had full blown calc in grade 11. And that's in a US public school...
Well then not for the first time the NY times is lying.
They state in their article that there is no known avian virus that has jumped from birds to humans and been communicable from human-human, and that this strain was first identified in 1992 and has only had 5 mutations of the 35-40 needed to be human-human transmissible in that time (almost 14 years).
In this article the interview the lead scientist analyzing the 1918 virus and he says at this point its only 50/50 that that virus was a bird virus because of the way it codes its amino acids which has never been seen in any bird flu ever. The article goes on to say that if his analysis proves that the 1918 virus was a bird virus that it would be the first documented case of a bird virus jumping to humans and becoming fully transmissible. If they're lying, ok I'll believe you I guess...
the socio-economic problems certainly do contribute to the mortality rate. How many people do you know who sleep with their chickens? How many people do you know who work 16+ hours on a farm, manually planting/harvesting/etc? All of these things contribute greatly to the mortality rate. Further, I just read an article that directly contradicts your statement about antibodies. Its in the NY Times, it says that millions of southeast asians have antibodies for this exact flu strain, that it has been known in China and Vietnam since at least 1992, that it infects people every year, and that many people get it and survive. Look, we're talking about 125 people reported infected (62 deaths) out of a population of 4 billion. If that isn't making a mountain out of a mole hill I don't know what is.
less than 30 hours... ok I guess... 125 people in southeast asia have gone to the hospital for it, of those 60 have died.
There are reports that this exact same strain has been known in Asia for 14 years now, and it kills people every year, and it hasn't mutated to become human-human transmisable, and there are millions of people in asia who have antibodies to fight this strain (meaning they were infected and their immune systems won).
125 people is not every single person who has contracted this virus, it is every person who felt it serious enough to go to the hospital. If we used this same measure with chicken pox you'd probably see a 50% mortality rate. No one in my family went to the hospital when they got chicken pox, it never got noted in any CDC report, but people die from chicken pox. You're using blatantly skewed numbers and scare mongering.
You probably think "The Day After Tomorrow" is based on scientific fact and is actually going to happen later this year.
Well ok, so it is going to mutate, and 50% of the world will be dead next week... why don't I just get my gun and kill my family now? It'd save us a lot of pain and suffering. I don't know if I've ever read anything more cynical, pessimistic, or wrong-headed in my life. SARS was supposed to kill us last year, West Nile the year before that, the killer bees we're supposed to make the US southwest un-inhabitable by now.... Grow up, we'll find a solution to this problem (if it becomes a problem, which is still not a given by any means as you seem to think).
That article also directly contradicts the 60% number being bantered about.
it says 92 infections 42 deaths.
I'm not doing the long division for you but that's less than 50% so it must be less than 60
Except Avian flu is not easily spread, and if it ever does mutate to become easily spread, it could easily lose alot of potency in the mutation. Viruses do not always become more deadly after a mutation. Granted it could become more easily spread, but even an easily spread flu will not infect 50% of the population, 25% would be an extremely high number. And if we actually saw a 5% mortality rate in 1st world countries I would be stunned. 5% mortality in China probably equates to .5% mortality rate in the US or Europe.
your so-called "routine" shots weren't even invented 10 years ago. People have survived flu epidemics for thousands of years without them. Flu shots would be one of those "new technologies" which would cause this epidemic to be much less severe. Unfortunately a general flu shot won't protect you against avian flu as its a different strain, and will kill people with or without the shot equally. That is if it mutates into a human-human transmisable form, or to a bird-human easily transmisable form... At this point like what? 40 people have died in Asia, SARS killed way more than that, and didn't become a pandemic, in China where the average person who has died from this disease makes in a year less than you make in a day, it can hardly be assumed that the death rates/transmission rates will be the same in both populations.
So, this steam is just going to "appear". For this to work you're going to need a pretty hefty input of energy to boil water to create that steam.
So either you need a solar energy source (which won't work on a rainy day), or you'll need a bunch of batteries, which are bad, or you have to burn gasoline/other fossil fuel to boil the water to create steam to make this elecrolysis efficient enough.
This is not a solution. I much prefer honda's solution mentioned earlier (an electrolizer/storage solution for your home that runs on natural gas, and heats your home). Hook that up to solar power at your home (in alot of places) instead of the natural gas, and you've got a closed loop no emmission solution. And because it stores the hydrogen, if you have a rainy day, you still have fuel for your car.
obviously there is overhead associated with it, however having to run a java app server (like jboss, or even just tomcat) so that jsps work, has a much larger overhead hit (150-300MB of RAM used at the very least). Java can be fast for some things, but I've yet to see a truly high performance app server (tomcat, jboss, websphere, are all dogs compared to a simple SOAP/xml-rpc client/server setup in any language).
Further, if you're trying to make all local calls, then your app isn't scalable. My apps by default have n-tier clustering built in all the time. You're site grows, you need to handle 1 million hits a day now... drop a couple more 2k boxes in there, move a couple services around, no new code to write, just works.
Ok, I've been developing for 12 years now, and almost purely web development for the last 4. I generally use PHP for what its good for (page generation, presentation layer type stuff), and use xml-rpc or SOAP from php to connect to java, python, perl, or c++ whatever has the best libraries/capabilities/ease of use for what I'm trying to do. I've actually moved almost exclusively to python as my backend/business logic language of choice, but Java worked fine for this purpose 3 years ago too. To me, setting up struts, jsps, all that garbage is a ton of overhead that a simple soap/xml-rpc setup easily replaces (and in my experience php + soap/xml-rpc + languageX is faster than an all java setup). PHP then can do what its best at, my frontends are very lightweight, and load almost as fast as static html, and I use a real language for logic and libraries etc. Now maybe this new PHP Framework will provide some classes and things that would be useable on the backend, I dunno.
The setup I use is basically the J2EE model, except I get the best of all worlds, because I can access code written in any language seemlessly, use n-tier architecture without even thinking about it, use advanced cacheing libraries available in the higher end/heavier languages, and because the backend code is running as a daemon running a soap or xml-rpc server, I sidestep the whole perl/python interpretter startup bottleneck.
It's not about which language is "best" its about what tool gets the job done.
I suppose its semantics, but I would put "quality" under "Functionality". I don't know how much code you've written, but writing good, documented, reusable, scalable, maintainable, bug free code takes a whole heck of a lot more time than whipping up a couple of features in a proof of concept. Quality implementations always take substantially more time and effort. If you give me specs, I can give you your program/features in a week or less, almost every time, however, if you feed the system bad data, or expect it to be able to process 20 million records, or think its going to have years of uptime without a crash, well you're going to be very disappointed. Moving a program from proof of concept to a quality piece of work takes substantial effort. This is what companies don't want to pay/wait for, they see the proof of concept, and they say "Let's ship that! Good job joe programmer, you wrote the whole product in 2 weeks." Meanwhile the programmer is saying "No, you don't understand, I need to spend about another 8 months on that before it works properly all the time, and doesn't crash when you give it bad input, and is secure against hackers". And the marketing guys and CEO are already announcing product availability in 1 month. Then when you say "There are all these bugs, and this doesn't work, and that won't work 90% of the time" they say "Well, why'd you write broken code?!".
This is the number 1 reason why I started my own company, where I have control over these things. I don't over promise my customers, cause I know exactly what its gonna take, I normally ship high quality software, except when the customer doesn't get it, and says I need X by Y I'll pay Z. I'll say ok, well I can give you A by Y for Z, and make it very well known to the customer that because of their time crunch/lack of funds, they will not get a fully functional product (meaning quality will be sacrificed, as I will deliver the features).
In short, features are easy quality is hard, and expensive, and time consuming. Quality is the biggest variable.
So, you're gonna carbon date those plants right?
Carbon dating never has granularity of better than ~500 years. All studies I've ever seen/read/written reports about which used carbon dating list the findings in thousands of years (These animals were alive 5000-7000 years ago, These bones are 25000-30000 years old). Show me one study where they said "This plant died here 6271 years ago on March 3rd" and I'll buy the idea that you can get an accurate time/temp from 6000 years ago. You cannot do that with carbon dating, it is not an exact science, it is much more of a black art and a bunch of guess work.
Further, your comment about "reasonably accurate climate depiction" is hilarious. We are talking about a net change of 1.5 degrees over the last 50 years. You've got to be pretty spot on if you're talking about a change of around 1-3%. You think you can just read a 6000 year old tree fossil like a thermometer? No, I'm sorry you can't. Further, if you are off by just 1% you have created a 100% error in your study. You can't be "reasonably accurate" and have the data mean anything in this situation. You have to be absolutly correct, and have 100% verifiable data from every part of the globe to build an accurate depiction of the climate 6000 years ago, 2000 years ago, whatever, and that's the only way you'll have convincing enough data to say that today's 1.5 degree warming is "unprecedented", "dangerous", or "caused by man". If after collecting the data from 6000 years ago you see that from 6000 years ago to 5900 years ago there was a 1.5 degree rise in temperatures, all of the global warming theories are immediately debunked, man didn't cause it then, his effect now is not causing it either, or if it is, its not unheard of, its nothing the planet hasn't seen before, and there is absolutely no cause for alarm.
How is Opera lightyears ahead? Because I either have to pay or watch banner ads all day? That is my biggest beef with Opera, I've never had to pay for a web browser (been on the net since 93), why would I start now? I certainly don't want to see banner ads all day. Anyway, the times I have used Opera, its seemed slower than firefox, and the interface is so cluttered, its worse than MS word. Firefox has its shortcomings too (its not like I didn't mention 2 or 3 in my post, flash is notoriously slow and buggy, certain gif animations totally trash the browser, etc) however, IE does the same sort of thing and has its own pet peeves, I've had IE crash loading very many websites. I'm saying if its fair to pick on FF for crashes, then IE needs to have all of its crashes documented as "DoS security breeches" as well. You can't measure FF in centimeters and IE in miles (IE, the granularity of centimeters will uncover alot more flaws than measuring in miles would).
OK, the IE fanboys are really stretching now. If crashing the browser is an "exploit" then that opens a whole new avenue of attack on IE. IE crashes like this (for me) far more often then firefox, and firefox crashes just about every time I visit a site with really involved flash or those really annoying smiley face banner ads (those are firefox killers).
ctrl+alt+del kill process is a good workaround for this "extremely dangerous" exploit. Again if this is a security vulnerability, then flash is the greatest hacking tool against firefox. Java is probably the greatest hacking tool against IE.
People are just really desparate for Firefox to have more bugs than IE. Thanks for finding some code that should probably be cleaned up, but crashing the browser is not in any way violating the security of the system on which the browser is running.
How can the "rate" be of concern? Do we know the "rate" of temperature change in the past? I don't think so, at any rate, it would be very hard to get readings on temperature change with 1 year granularity from 6000 years ago. We have seen 2-5 degree changes in the not distant past (1600-1800 mini ice age, and the medieval times cooling, these cooling and warming cycles could not have taken hundreds of years, as they have both occured in the last few hundred years). Currently we are talking about a cycle in terms of about 100 years, so how is this an increased rate? If the earth is not outside (or even close to outside) of historical parameters, then obviously we aren't "destroying" the planet.
I don't drive an SUV, and I care about taking care of the planet. I'm not calling for all out burn everything just cause we can policy here. I think we should try to take care of things because then they are more beautiful, not out of some over hyped fear that if we don't then the whole planet will fall out of the solar system or something.
So, basically you can have transparent windows now, I'm so glad that MS in "innovating"... I've had that for the last 4 years on my enlightenment desktop, and I don't need a $3000 video card to render it, or a 3.6 Ghz dual core proc either...
Unfortunately, this doesn't hold up as the box is the exact same hardware as the 510 with windows installed. There is no extra hardware testing, and these boxes don't have an os, so there is *NO* software testing, so no matter what it is cheaper than the 510 with windows, cause they did have to do testing for that. They aren't marketing the clean boxes either, they got a ton of free advertising by getting posted on slashdot but that didn't cost them a dime.
In short there are a ton of places where they should be saving even more money because of this than the windows box, and they should be passing that savings on to the consumer.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/03/163 9208&tid=187&tid=218
You obviously missed the above article, it lists a few companies that make money purely with GPL'd/OSS software. The include SugarCRM, MySQL, and many others. These companies were once startups (and some would still be considered startups). They are largely pure software development plays (IE they don't sell appliances/hardware).
The article mentions that MySQL AB will make 40 million this year. That's pretty good. SugarCRM has raised something like 7 million in capital (obviously this isn't making money, but someone believes they have a chance to make money.. VCs might not be brilliant, but they do try to make good investments).
Obviously these are the success stories, on average 1 in 5 companies makes it through the first year, and only a handful of those make it to 5 years. Those are statistics across all industries, you can't expect OSS companies to be impervious to those stats. Startups fail, business models fail, regardless of the state of the source.
What I think you forget, is that in 1980 there was this company called IBM, they had billions in sales, billions in cash, and any time a large company needed computers they called IBM. Suddenly this little company called MS appeared and changed the rules, and the unbeatable goliath of IBM took about 5 years to fall completely apart into a smoldering wreck. Yes they reorged, no they didn't go out of business, and I don't think MS will go out of business either.
MS won in the 90's because they made network computing simple, and easy enough for an attorney or accountant to set up their own network without having to spend thousands on a Novell or Unix consultant. Google is the first firm with the resources (cash and network resources), reliability, developers, and interest to develop fully internet based apps. MS has the a couple of the above list, but they don't have the reliability, and they certainly don't have the interest/desire. Google will make internet computing simple the way MS made network computing simple, and it is this paradigm shift that MS doesn't understand, and loathes. They will fight it tooth and nail, but that is where computing is going, just like in the early 80s when IBM fought the PC tooth and nail because mainframes were their business and there couldn't be a paradigm shift away from that (in their minds).
I'm well aware that sun has x86 boxes, obviously MS doesn't have a sparc version of windows.. It was a joke, trying to show the hilarity of the term "Unix Hardware"