my point was that the effect, if any, won't be thought about until we have hard evidence of what it is.
the most likely effect as i said, is slowing of large weather systems, that traditionally cross the Dakotas in hours, this could lead to increased precipitation and flooding, since the Dakotas don't have adequate drainage because traditionally there were no trees to slow weather patterns.
but really when when a company buys cane sugar from Brazil, do they think about the damage to the amazon river that was caused by slash/burn campaigns to clear the rainforest, and replace it with cane sugar growers?
trees have a larger impact than just slowing weather systems, the return rainwater to the groundwater tables, create secondary rain from evaporation of previous rain, and generally slow runoff, and they don't take water from underground aquifers like farms do.
in other words, long term commercial farming will eventually cause Brazil's non farm land to have California style wildfires, because the can sugar regions suck too much water out of the ground for normal vegetation just like farming in California has caused such water table crisis's that cause the massive wildfires..
but don't you dare say that farming isn't sustainable, oh no, farming can't possibly be ruining the environment.
well, all i know is that in Total Annihilation there were a couple maps where you could build windmills. and as for the rest, you built solar and tidal generators until you could teched to the fusion plant. a few kbots or some subs, with a few towers for defense, and it was a race to get that fusion plant online, once you got it you could mass units like crazy, or get those super weapon buildings... TA was the precursor to System Commander, which would have been called TA2 had cavedog not tanked with most of the rest of the PC gaming industry...
of course, TA had no coal or fission plants, just solar, wind, tidal, and fusion, it was kinda assumed those energy sources were long gone by the time frame the game took place in.
wind was the worst in TA's game engine, you would hit spikes of wasted energy and then dips of not enough... yup, it was a real pain to use wind.
"California needs a major effort to install enough solar panels to power the Southern California air conditioning load. The numbers actually work for this. The nice thing about solar is that you get the power during peak hours."
no, the nice thing about roof mounted solar is it ABSORBS AND RADIATES THE HEAT AWAY FROM THE BUILDING lowering cooling costs. see, because solar needs to be at a certain angle, which most roofs aren't at, so all that heat from the sun isn't directly on the roof, it's like building a giant shade tent for your house, or building, and getting energy from it to boot.
"You see fuel prices leveling off. I agree. Where? $300 a barrel? $1500 a barrel?"
i predict the price of fuel will drop drastically, when we start slaughtering worthless third world country human beings into 'soylent green' biodiesel.
you might say 'never' but the world population is expected to hit 10 billion in 100 years from now. at some point, it becomes very attractive to just kill people and turn around the human population growth curve to 'fix everything' to the people who say 'never' consider again the holocaust, where Germans created forced labor and death camps, it becomes very easy in certain political environments to condone ethnic cleansing , or slavery, or wholesale slaughter of human beings into biofuels.
after-all what greener energy source is there than 'undesirable' human beings.
eh, with American high cholesterol levels (recommending statins for 8 year olds!!!!) i think bicycles would be a better recommendation. not only will you lower your HDL cholesterol by biking, but you're switching to a mostly green energy source, YOUR BODY. someone will probably counter that humans produce methane, a green house gas, but that gas is produced regardless of if you bike or drive a SUV. yeah yeah, need more bike lanes, more bike racks, more public showers/dressing rooms... it's still green, and GOOD FOR YOUR Cardiovascular system.
i am able to push a mountain bike to 20 MPH on flat ground after just one month of training (you can use stationary bikes if unwilling to bike in winter months) there are plenty of countries where bicycles are considered viable transit alternatives. and even in the US there are cities like portland. so, um yeah, kill that fossil fuel addiction and get your cholesterol levels down, without taking statins. 2 birds 1 stone.
super insulation methods aren't exactly out of the price range of people building homes. I mean, the cheapest super insulation method is the Straw bale wall method. Straw bales have very good R-values, and it's entirely possible that the residents can build a house that has no furnace, even in Canadian winter environments.
oh hey, did i mention, it saves your cooling bills in summertime too.
I've been trying to convince my dad to add 2" of external foam insulation when he resides his house (built in the 70s), it's not even close to super insulation, but if he does it it will pay for itself in a very short time (since he'd do the install himself)
6" walls are becoming commonplace, if energy prices soar higher i think 8" walls will come into vogue. especially since you can use existing 2X4s to make 8" walls.
also, the amount of energy produced by natural gas plants is much greater than 'just peaking' usage. yeah power companies like that natural gas can be turned off and on unlike coal and nuclear, but if they invest heavily in a natural gas plant, they want to make money off it, that means they will run it as much as they can, as long as they make more money doing it that way. pumping caves full of air creates wind based peaking capabilities.
oh and hey, the big problem isn't that there isn't enough natural gas, it's that the oil company that owns the natural gas rights in Alaska, has decided to not pump that natural gas out of the ground. big change in strategy that left piken high and dry and facing rising natural gas prices.
"In addition, EESTOR and ppl like pickens could solve the Global warming issue in one clean swoop."
well, global warming is in part being driven by the massively swelling human population. one billionaire can't fight a growing trend that will leave us with 10 billion humans within 100 years or less...
everyone goes around doing stuff that leads to making babies, and medicine has come along so far that we loose very few babies, when in the past a mother might loose half her babies... and then another half might die young as adults... perhaps before even having one surviving baby..
even HIV hasn't made a dent in human population growth, I shudder to think how many more hundreds of millions of people we'd have today, making more babies, without HIV.
If a regime like china can't fight population growth, what chance does America, or anyone else have?
"Oh, and it doesn't stop there. Food? Don't kid yourself - although the US has many farms, a huge proportion of our food comes from overseas. And most food grown here goes to migrant workers who send the money back home. Again, slim margins and foreign connections mean that the US is retaining a very tiny amount of the money spent on a product."
the USA is the world's largest food exporter, but there is a problem here, it's the net value of food imported vs food exported. IF we export cheap corn, wheat, rice etc, but import expensive produce fresh fruit and vegetables, the dollar value of our surplus drops... it's not like we're exporting less food each year, it's more like, if it requires manual labor to pick it from the field, America is increasingly becoming a place that can't compete on price with foreign countries.
so cheap staples like wheat can be mass produced in america, and exported in mass, but every orange and apple we import from Brazil is costing us more than every bushel of wheat we sell on the world market.
worse still, is meat processing, America has plenty of meat processing facilities, but do you know any that actually hire Americans for the 'nasty' jobs like evisceration? nope i didn't think you did, because they all import illegals to fill those jobs, because illegals can be manipulated into provided 'perfect' OSHA score cards year after year, so OSHA doesn't investigate them, so those plants don't have to do anything about worker safety. oh yeah, and foreigners don't understand unions, either so they're not a chance in hell they'll unionize to get better working conditions.
but your worries are pretty unfounded today, because of the weakness of the dollar, we've been able to gain some ground on foreign competition, in the ag business. weak dollars mean that even if we pay workers more dollars it's worth less and less, on a global scale, so we're making more money exporting to asia and europe relatively speaking.
well, before they invented windmills there was this plant, they call them 'trees' they stop a great deal of surface winds. Despite billions of 'trees' weather still generally works, if anything putting up windmills will counteract the permanent deforestation of vast tracks of land, caused by global human expansion.
since we're putting the windmills in different locations than the trees, it might have some impact on weather, but nobody thought about what cutting and burning all the rainforests in Brazil would do to the Amazon river, before they did it... if you buy fresh fruit in the winter, chances are you've contributed to deforestation in Brazil.
'The 2006 US energy use was about 4,060,000 thousand mwh.'
"Given Nevada's land and sun resources the state has the ability to produce more than 600 GW using solar thermal concentrators like those used by Nevada Solar One.[12"
well, for one state, Nevada's solar potential is pretty good. the reason why picken likes wind power is simple though, wind power is a lot cheaper than solar. wind is available closer to power consuming states in the north east, wind turbines generate income for farmers as well as utilities, and don't require buying and building giant solar energy factories, oh and, you don't need to clean the dust off of windmills like you do off solar mirror based solar thermal.
solar is nice, it has it's place, and maybe we can power California off solar, but the distributed nature of wind power makes it more attractive long term.
remember, any state that gets hail, even if within a solar corridor, is a threat to solar thermal based on mirrors. hail is the natural enemy of solar thermal. making hail proof mirrors is expensive.
even though piken isn't for it, making all those wind farms, would free up natural gas for the making of ethanol from corn. he'd rather see cars that run off natural gas... oh and piken isn't for it either, but all those windmills could be used to power 'plug in hybrids'
"'Vote against the bill, denying law enforcements precious tools (He didn't)'"
'"precious tools"? The ability to spy on Americans, in violation of their rights guaranteed by Amendment IV to the United States Constitution? It's not like the requirements to get a FISA warrant (someone with a pulse to stand in front of a secret court and say "gimme" at some point not necessarily before you started spying) were exactly onerous.'
Fisa requires you be an agent of a foreign power to spy on an American. If you're helping THEM you are the enemy fool, not an American. that's the whole point of FISA since 1978. By allying yourself with a foreign power you are unallying yourself with AMERICA and revoking your constitutional rights. you're a dumb shit if you think this law is some horrible thing, that does nothing. it does something it forces foreign agents to be more careful and only use advanced encryption techniques, instead of using 1-800 call att.
and compared to what bush was doing this law actually tried to address the mistakes the bush administration made, in response to 9/11.
why are liberal press attacking obama over this vote? just follow the money trail, i bet ALL the main stream press that are pushing this story with the spin they are took bribes. In games, the man using built in 'cheats' is despicable, in war, it's par for the course. basically being able to hear everything your opponents are planing against you because you can, is just a tool for winning wars.
you have used debian or ubuntu/kubuntu? the apt system works very nicely, and because it's all FOSS you can even roll your own repositories, kinda like how wine has it's own repository that you add to your list so you can get wine.
a company that wanted to roll out linux, and control software could easily set up their own repository, it's a bit of work for IT, but if you're doing your own in-house projects and want everyone to be up to date on the latest security patches approved by IT, you just don't get any easier than having apt repositories.
the problem is the very link you provide states "evidence indicates that humans may acquire vCJD after consuming BSE-contaminated cattle products." so even though we know prions only work inside nerve tissue, in practice those prions have to move outside nerve cells and work their way into new nerve cells, in order for it to spread, and it DOES spread, maybe it's because meat processors turn 'nerve' tissue into 'fodder' for other cows, maybe the prions, in advanced infections (extremely sick cows) can get to high enough levels in the body, from nerve cells that rupture etc, to possibly infect others...
and if you don't think 'very sick cows' get into the food supply, you really don't have a clue. it costs $$$$ to raise a cow, for the 18 months from birth, to slaughter... the people who wind up having sick cows, are always looking for ways to get $$$$ in compensation, especially if they called in a vet, and pumped them full of medicines... adding even more $$$$.
the bigger the cattle farm, the more likely corruption has caused them find markets for even their sickest cows, and they can't all be made into dog food or cat food.
oh yeah, i was talking about polonium 210, nasty stuff.
"For instance, I spent 12 years in the military as both a commanding officer and a chef. Did I mention I was stationed in Mexico? So, when I left the service, I decided to use the handle "CmdrTaco" while browsing my favorite dating and BSDM sites..."
there was your first mistake, using a romance language to spell out your online handle. the problem is too many people use romance languages, picking a unique screen name is impossible, i on the other hand, use roma-ji which not even the japanese use often, thus it's much easier to get my handle at sites.
about the only place where roma-ji gets widely used is in anime subtitles, particularly for opening and closing themes, and dictionaries and language learning courses.
this is why we should have taught everyone never to ever use their real names online. everyone should have an online handle, sites in 'real names' by default are assumed to be generated off phone book data and bots, to try and generate traffic.
but for some reason, nobody managed to convince people that on the internet, you shouldn't use your real name... I learned from my early usenet days, that using your real name was a bad idea, but i was too busy using the internet to tell everyone not to use their real identities online...
"Well in the case of Yahoo its open to debate if they have much "technology". They are failing miserably at online search and the ads next to it is where all the money is. They have a huge brand and market share for their portal but Google's killing them on the search technology and marketing which is where the money and is and why they are in the trouble they are in. If Microsoft is going to buy them bazillions of dollars for their share of the search market it leaves one to question Microsoft's business acumen.?
well, yahoo hasn't done everything right (geocities, anyone remember when it was hot, cool tech, only to be destroyed of it's original concept of creating online cities of web content, because of it wasn't 'profitable') but even so, they're doing a good job of being #2, look at coke and pepsi, coke is so big and so successful and they've been so focused on the drink market, while pepsi, has diversified into food products like frito-lays, etc, as well as fast foods etc.
being #2 to google isn't the worst thing in the world, especially if you're more diversified. as i recall, even ask.com is still around even though they're not as popular as yahoo or google.
"Failing to reliably perform basic floating point ops is pretty embarrassing. But Intel's come a long way since then."
while we're at it, lets bring up the FOOF bug. I still have a working FOOF bug Pentium 120 laptop, the battery is dead, the screen sucks, but it still runs windows 95, and i for some reason, have an old version of linux on there too.
there is at least one radioactive element dirty enough.
do you remember the UK person who was 'poisoned' on an airplane with a microscopic dose of a radioactive element and then died 2 weeks later, as well as the person who targeted him? (apparently the assassin got enough contact with the stuff to die himself!) very nasty, the main problem being, how do you refine enough of that highly toxic stuff, since only machines can safely handle the stuff,
oh yeah, i think it's also very rare, and perhaps a byproduct of manufacturing weapons grade radioactive stuff.
but IMO if you really want to be a terrorist, instead of focusing on humans, you'd try to get mad cow diseased meat into the US food supply. as i recall, just from 3 cows with the disease caused japan to stop importing US beef, imagine if you could get a hundred cows of diseased meat into the food supply!
the Us beef industry would practically collapse, nobody would want to import US beef. even Americans might stop eating so much beef, if the problem kept cropping up.
actually, the glass(plastic, whatever) plate from a flat bed scanner would be good for holding the page flat, i'm actually considering tearing up my old flat bed scanner and going with a digi cam/tripod, and a stand with the remains of the flatbed scanner to hold the pages flat.
i'm wasn't going to do OCR work, the pictures are important to the text, IMO.
i'm not cutting them apart, and yeah scanners take to long.
you assume privilege escalation is required. a lot of things, like browser search redirects, or say, generating 'click' through to ad sites, without the end user aware of what's happening doesn't require privilege escalation, all they have to do is corrupt a few browser settings, and if you aren't running noscript, then it's easy for hackers to come up with ways to use your browser for evil, without needing to root your system.
i'm serious here, if you know that n% of users even if they notice, won't do anything because they don't understand what's going on in the first place... it may not be as easy to make write once run anywhere exploits, but the idea is that if your goal is to infect as many people as possible and that n$ won't do anything, then it might be a viable model to at least try to do it as a write once run any where exploit.
the idea of selling people on 'oh firewfox is secure' without at least giving these novices 'noscript' and explain that there are bad sites that can do bad things to your browser, and no script is there to block stuff that the bad guys figured out and other haven't...
they might complain, or simply set up bypasses for all the dancing pig sites, but if they do, it's their fault... i consider noscript as essential to any firefox install.
"are you just speculating in the vein of "nothing's really safe" ?"
I live with the speculation that nothing is safe, it's part of my mental illness, a feature modern medicine does little about, at least in the dosages that leave me coherent and aware of the world around me.
in some ways it's more frightening on high doses of strong medications, which can alter your perception, and even make you high. They tried at least 4-5 medications... before finding one that helps, and has fewer negative side effects.
Oh, BTW noscript add-on for firefox makes 'bad' website flaws a little less likely to work. I don't think noscript would be popular if it didn't protect you from 0-day exploits.
because bacteria and fungi are larger sets of dna and are able to easily craft solid spores, at the down side of not being small enough to avoid being taken out by Other bacteria, etc... people with weak bacteria in the stomach are more likely to get illnesses from hostile bacteria...
still, people who get infected by a strong bacteria, may not have any way to effectively fight off that bacteria... other than using anti-biotics which winds up making super bugs, and then everyone is hosed.
bio warfare is scary, even if there are trade offs between being able to survive hard radiation, vs being able to quickly infect and spread to others vs potency to the targets... it's probably a good thing that there normally are trade offs.
there are those that believe HIV was a man made virus 'super weapon' to basically kill off people in 3rd world nations... even if it isn't it's definitely killed more than enough people around the world, including those with access to the best medicines.
Slashdot Mirror
my point was that the effect, if any, won't be thought about until we have hard evidence of what it is.
the most likely effect as i said, is slowing of large weather systems, that traditionally cross the Dakotas in hours, this could lead to increased precipitation and flooding, since the Dakotas don't have adequate drainage because traditionally there were no trees to slow weather patterns.
but really when when a company buys cane sugar from Brazil, do they think about the damage to the amazon river that was caused by slash/burn campaigns to clear the rainforest, and replace it with cane sugar growers?
trees have a larger impact than just slowing weather systems, the return rainwater to the groundwater tables, create secondary rain from evaporation of previous rain, and generally slow runoff, and they don't take water from underground aquifers like farms do.
in other words, long term commercial farming will eventually cause Brazil's non farm land to have California style wildfires, because the can sugar regions suck too much water out of the ground for normal vegetation just like farming in California has caused such water table crisis's that cause the massive wildfires..
but don't you dare say that farming isn't sustainable, oh no, farming can't possibly be ruining the environment.
well, all i know is that in Total Annihilation there were a couple maps where you could build windmills. and as for the rest, you built solar and tidal generators until you could teched to the fusion plant. a few kbots or some subs, with a few towers for defense, and it was a race to get that fusion plant online, once you got it you could mass units like crazy, or get those super weapon buildings... TA was the precursor to System Commander, which would have been called TA2 had cavedog not tanked with most of the rest of the PC gaming industry...
of course, TA had no coal or fission plants, just solar, wind, tidal, and fusion, it was kinda assumed those energy sources were long gone by the time frame the game took place in.
wind was the worst in TA's game engine, you would hit spikes of wasted energy and then dips of not enough... yup, it was a real pain to use wind.
"California needs a major effort to install enough solar panels to power the Southern California air conditioning load. The numbers actually work for this. The nice thing about solar is that you get the power during peak hours."
no, the nice thing about roof mounted solar is it ABSORBS AND RADIATES THE HEAT AWAY FROM THE BUILDING lowering cooling costs. see, because solar needs to be at a certain angle, which most roofs aren't at, so all that heat from the sun isn't directly on the roof, it's like building a giant shade tent for your house, or building, and getting energy from it to boot.
"$9T is NOTHING compared to the looming problem they have coming with their aging population."
Come on it's Japan, of course they'll build robots to replace their aging population in the workforce!
"You see fuel prices leveling off. I agree. Where? $300 a barrel? $1500 a barrel?"
i predict the price of fuel will drop drastically, when we start slaughtering worthless third world country human beings into 'soylent green' biodiesel.
you might say 'never' but the world population is expected to hit 10 billion in 100 years from now. at some point, it becomes very attractive to just kill people and turn around the human population growth curve to 'fix everything' to the people who say 'never' consider again the holocaust, where Germans created forced labor and death camps, it becomes very easy in certain political environments to condone ethnic cleansing , or slavery, or wholesale slaughter of human beings into biofuels.
after-all what greener energy source is there than 'undesirable' human beings.
eh, with American high cholesterol levels (recommending statins for 8 year olds!!!!) i think bicycles would be a better recommendation. not only will you lower your HDL cholesterol by biking, but you're switching to a mostly green energy source, YOUR BODY. someone will probably counter that humans produce methane, a green house gas, but that gas is produced regardless of if you bike or drive a SUV. yeah yeah, need more bike lanes, more bike racks, more public showers/dressing rooms... it's still green, and GOOD FOR YOUR Cardiovascular system.
i am able to push a mountain bike to 20 MPH on flat ground after just one month of training (you can use stationary bikes if unwilling to bike in winter months) there are plenty of countries where bicycles are considered viable transit alternatives. and even in the US there are cities like portland. so, um yeah, kill that fossil fuel addiction and get your cholesterol levels down, without taking statins. 2 birds 1 stone.
super insulation methods aren't exactly out of the price range of people building homes. I mean, the cheapest super insulation method is the Straw bale wall method. Straw bales have very good R-values, and it's entirely possible that the residents can build a house that has no furnace, even in Canadian winter environments.
oh hey, did i mention, it saves your cooling bills in summertime too.
I've been trying to convince my dad to add 2" of external foam insulation when he resides his house (built in the 70s), it's not even close to super insulation, but if he does it it will pay for itself in a very short time (since he'd do the install himself)
6" walls are becoming commonplace, if energy prices soar higher i think 8" walls will come into vogue. especially since you can use existing 2X4s to make 8" walls.
i think maybe you missed the article on pumping caves full of air to 1500 PSI http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/07/02/2231259.shtml
also, the amount of energy produced by natural gas plants is much greater than 'just peaking' usage. yeah power companies like that natural gas can be turned off and on unlike coal and nuclear, but if they invest heavily in a natural gas plant, they want to make money off it, that means they will run it as much as they can, as long as they make more money doing it that way. pumping caves full of air creates wind based peaking capabilities.
oh and hey, the big problem isn't that there isn't enough natural gas, it's that the oil company that owns the natural gas rights in Alaska, has decided to not pump that natural gas out of the ground. big change in strategy that left piken high and dry and facing rising natural gas prices.
"In addition, EESTOR and ppl like pickens could solve the Global warming issue in one clean swoop."
well, global warming is in part being driven by the massively swelling human population. one billionaire can't fight a growing trend that will leave us with 10 billion humans within 100 years or less...
everyone goes around doing stuff that leads to making babies, and medicine has come along so far that we loose very few babies, when in the past a mother might loose half her babies... and then another half might die young as adults... perhaps before even having one surviving baby..
even HIV hasn't made a dent in human population growth, I shudder to think how many more hundreds of millions of people we'd have today, making more babies, without HIV.
If a regime like china can't fight population growth, what chance does America, or anyone else have?
"Oh, and it doesn't stop there. Food? Don't kid yourself - although the US has many farms, a huge proportion of our food comes from overseas. And most food grown here goes to migrant workers who send the money back home. Again, slim margins and foreign connections mean that the US is retaining a very tiny amount of the money spent on a product."
the USA is the world's largest food exporter, but there is a problem here, it's the net value of food imported vs food exported. IF we export cheap corn, wheat, rice etc, but import expensive produce fresh fruit and vegetables, the dollar value of our surplus drops... it's not like we're exporting less food each year, it's more like, if it requires manual labor to pick it from the field, America is increasingly becoming a place that can't compete on price with foreign countries.
so cheap staples like wheat can be mass produced in america, and exported in mass, but every orange and apple we import from Brazil is costing us more than every bushel of wheat we sell on the world market.
worse still, is meat processing, America has plenty of meat processing facilities, but do you know any that actually hire Americans for the 'nasty' jobs like evisceration? nope i didn't think you did, because they all import illegals to fill those jobs, because illegals can be manipulated into provided 'perfect' OSHA score cards year after year, so OSHA doesn't investigate them, so those plants don't have to do anything about worker safety. oh yeah, and foreigners don't understand unions, either so they're not a chance in hell they'll unionize to get better working conditions.
but your worries are pretty unfounded today, because of the weakness of the dollar, we've been able to gain some ground on foreign competition, in the ag business. weak dollars mean that even if we pay workers more dollars it's worth less and less, on a global scale, so we're making more money exporting to asia and europe relatively speaking.
well, before they invented windmills there was this plant, they call them 'trees' they stop a great deal of surface winds. Despite billions of 'trees' weather still generally works, if anything putting up windmills will counteract the permanent deforestation of vast tracks of land, caused by global human expansion.
since we're putting the windmills in different locations than the trees, it might have some impact on weather, but nobody thought about what cutting and burning all the rainforests in Brazil would do to the Amazon river, before they did it... if you buy fresh fruit in the winter, chances are you've contributed to deforestation in Brazil.
'The 2006 US energy use was about 4,060,000 thousand mwh.'
"Given Nevada's land and sun resources the state has the ability to produce more than 600 GW using solar thermal concentrators like those used by Nevada Solar One.[12"
well, for one state, Nevada's solar potential is pretty good. the reason why picken likes wind power is simple though, wind power is a lot cheaper than solar. wind is available closer to power consuming states in the north east, wind turbines generate income for farmers as well as utilities, and don't require buying and building giant solar energy factories, oh and, you don't need to clean the dust off of windmills like you do off solar mirror based solar thermal.
solar is nice, it has it's place, and maybe we can power California off solar, but the distributed nature of wind power makes it more attractive long term.
remember, any state that gets hail, even if within a solar corridor, is a threat to solar thermal based on mirrors. hail is the natural enemy of solar thermal. making hail proof mirrors is expensive.
even though piken isn't for it, making all those wind farms, would free up natural gas for the making of ethanol from corn. he'd rather see cars that run off natural gas... oh and piken isn't for it either, but all those windmills could be used to power 'plug in hybrids'
"'Vote against the bill, denying law enforcements precious tools (He didn't)'"
'"precious tools"? The ability to spy on Americans, in violation of their rights guaranteed by Amendment IV to the United States Constitution? It's not like the requirements to get a FISA warrant (someone with a pulse to stand in front of a secret court and say "gimme" at some point not necessarily before you started spying) were exactly onerous.'
Fisa requires you be an agent of a foreign power to spy on an American. If you're helping THEM you are the enemy fool, not an American. that's the whole point of FISA since 1978. By allying yourself with a foreign power you are unallying yourself with AMERICA and revoking your constitutional rights. you're a dumb shit if you think this law is some horrible thing, that does nothing. it does something it forces foreign agents to be more careful and only use advanced encryption techniques, instead of using 1-800 call att.
and compared to what bush was doing this law actually tried to address the mistakes the bush administration made, in response to 9/11.
why are liberal press attacking obama over this vote? just follow the money trail, i bet ALL the main stream press that are pushing this story with the spin they are took bribes. In games, the man using built in 'cheats' is despicable, in war, it's par for the course. basically being able to hear everything your opponents are planing against you because you can, is just a tool for winning wars.
you have used debian or ubuntu/kubuntu? the apt system works very nicely, and because it's all FOSS you can even roll your own repositories, kinda like how wine has it's own repository that you add to your list so you can get wine.
a company that wanted to roll out linux, and control software could easily set up their own repository, it's a bit of work for IT, but if you're doing your own in-house projects and want everyone to be up to date on the latest security patches approved by IT, you just don't get any easier than having apt repositories.
the problem is the very link you provide states "evidence indicates that humans may acquire vCJD after consuming BSE-contaminated cattle products." so even though we know prions only work inside nerve tissue, in practice those prions have to move outside nerve cells and work their way into new nerve cells, in order for it to spread, and it DOES spread, maybe it's because meat processors turn 'nerve' tissue into 'fodder' for other cows, maybe the prions, in advanced infections (extremely sick cows) can get to high enough levels in the body, from nerve cells that rupture etc, to possibly infect others...
and if you don't think 'very sick cows' get into the food supply,
you really don't have a clue. it costs $$$$ to raise a cow, for the 18 months from birth, to slaughter... the people who wind up having sick cows, are always looking for ways to get $$$$ in compensation, especially if they called in a vet, and pumped them full of medicines... adding even more $$$$.
the bigger the cattle farm, the more likely corruption has caused them find markets for even their sickest cows, and they can't all be made into dog food or cat food.
oh yeah, i was talking about polonium 210, nasty stuff.
"For instance, I spent 12 years in the military as both a commanding officer and a chef. Did I mention I was stationed in Mexico? So, when I left the service, I decided to use the handle "CmdrTaco" while browsing my favorite dating and BSDM sites..."
there was your first mistake, using a romance language to spell out your online handle. the problem is too many people use romance languages, picking a unique screen name is impossible, i on the other hand, use roma-ji which not even the japanese use often, thus it's much easier to get my handle at sites.
about the only place where roma-ji gets widely used is in anime subtitles, particularly for opening and closing themes, and dictionaries and language learning courses.
this is why we should have taught everyone never to ever use their real names online. everyone should have an online handle, sites in 'real names' by default are assumed to be generated off phone book data and bots, to try and generate traffic.
but for some reason, nobody managed to convince people that on the internet, you shouldn't use your real name... I learned from my early usenet days, that using your real name was a bad idea, but i was too busy using the internet to tell everyone not to use their real identities online...
"Well in the case of Yahoo its open to debate if they have much "technology". They are failing miserably at online search and the ads next to it is where all the money is. They have a huge brand and market share for their portal but Google's killing them on the search technology and marketing which is where the money and is and why they are in the trouble they are in. If Microsoft is going to buy them bazillions of dollars for their share of the search market it leaves one to question Microsoft's business acumen.?
well, yahoo hasn't done everything right (geocities, anyone remember when it was hot, cool tech, only to be destroyed of it's original concept of creating online cities of web content, because of it wasn't 'profitable') but even so, they're doing a good job of being #2, look at coke and pepsi, coke is so big and so successful and they've been so focused on the drink market, while pepsi, has diversified into food products like frito-lays, etc, as well as fast foods etc.
being #2 to google isn't the worst thing in the world, especially if you're more diversified. as i recall, even ask.com is still around even though they're not as popular as yahoo or google.
so what about the democrats who would have rather had clinton?
I'll back obama just because i can't stand mccain, and i am in a swing state, albeit in the back woods of wisconsin.
"Failing to reliably perform basic floating point ops is pretty embarrassing. But Intel's come a long way since then."
while we're at it, lets bring up the FOOF bug. I still have a working FOOF bug Pentium 120 laptop, the battery is dead, the screen sucks, but it still runs windows 95, and i for some reason, have an old version of linux on there too.
there is at least one radioactive element dirty enough.
do you remember the UK person who was 'poisoned' on an airplane with a microscopic dose of a radioactive element and then died 2 weeks later, as well as the person who targeted him? (apparently the assassin got enough contact with the stuff to die himself!) very nasty, the main problem being, how do you refine enough of that highly toxic stuff, since only machines can safely handle the stuff,
oh yeah, i think it's also very rare, and perhaps a byproduct of manufacturing weapons grade radioactive stuff.
but IMO if you really want to be a terrorist, instead of focusing on humans, you'd try to get mad cow diseased meat into the US food supply. as i recall, just from 3 cows with the disease caused japan to stop importing US beef, imagine if you could get a hundred cows of diseased meat into the food supply!
the Us beef industry would practically collapse, nobody would want to import US beef. even Americans might stop eating so much beef, if the problem kept cropping up.
actually, the glass(plastic, whatever) plate from a flat bed scanner would be good for holding the page flat, i'm actually considering tearing up my old flat bed scanner and going with a digi cam/tripod, and a stand with the remains of the flatbed scanner to hold the pages flat.
i'm wasn't going to do OCR work, the pictures are important to the text, IMO.
i'm not cutting them apart, and yeah scanners take to long.
you assume privilege escalation is required. a lot of things, like browser search redirects, or say, generating 'click' through to ad sites, without the end user aware of what's happening doesn't require privilege escalation, all they have to do is corrupt a few browser settings, and if you aren't running noscript, then it's easy for hackers to come up with ways to use your browser for evil, without needing to root your system.
i'm serious here, if you know that n% of users even if they notice, won't do anything because they don't understand what's going on in the first place... it may not be as easy to make write once run anywhere exploits, but the idea is that if your goal is to infect as many people as possible and that n$ won't do anything, then it might be a viable model to at least try to do it as a write once run any where exploit.
the idea of selling people on 'oh firewfox is secure' without at least giving these novices 'noscript' and explain that there are bad sites that can do bad things to your browser, and no script is there to block stuff that the bad guys figured out and other haven't...
they might complain, or simply set up bypasses for all the dancing pig sites, but if they do, it's their fault... i consider noscript as essential to any firefox install.
"are you just speculating in the vein of "nothing's really safe" ?"
I live with the speculation that nothing is safe, it's part of my mental illness, a feature modern medicine does little about, at least in the dosages that leave me coherent and aware of the world around me.
in some ways it's more frightening on high doses of strong medications, which can alter your perception, and even make you high. They tried at least 4-5 medications... before finding one that helps, and has fewer negative side effects.
Oh, BTW noscript add-on for firefox makes 'bad' website flaws a little less likely to work. I don't think noscript would be popular if it didn't protect you from 0-day exploits.
because bacteria and fungi are larger sets of dna and are able to easily craft solid spores, at the down side of not being small enough to avoid being taken out by Other bacteria, etc... people with weak bacteria in the stomach are more likely to get illnesses from hostile bacteria...
still, people who get infected by a strong bacteria, may not have any way to effectively fight off that bacteria... other than using anti-biotics which winds up making super bugs, and then everyone is hosed.
bio warfare is scary, even if there are trade offs between being able to survive hard radiation, vs being able to quickly infect and spread to others vs potency to the targets... it's probably a good thing that there normally are trade offs.
there are those that believe HIV was a man made virus 'super weapon' to basically kill off people in 3rd world nations... even if it isn't it's definitely killed more than enough people around the world, including those with access to the best medicines.