I'm dubious that these folks have overcome the limitation explained above. Tesla never overcame the limitation and that's why we don't use this form of power transmission.
Its amazing how many people don't understand electromagnetism even though its a really old science now. I've finally come to terms with it more or less, though I think I could use maybe one more series of classes to really understand stuff like antennas.
That relativity is open and shut, doesn't mean that the ordinary Joe understands it. I've got 2 Master's from MIT and have taken more than one course on relativity and I'm not sure *I* really understand it, so why should you expect the ordinary citizen to? Global warming is probably less open and shut, more complicated but immensely more important to our future. Whether relativity is true doesn't require humans to essentially sacrifice all low lying cities on the planet for our current use of fossil fuels.
There are plenty of good websites that explain the science behind GW and they explain it very well. Wikipedia is a good place to start and it's free. Its pretty basic stuff if you have some physics background. Most people don't, and so that's why nobody seems to understand it.
Even if you have a physics background, its hard to get around this feeling that beyond the basics, GW is very complicated and difficult to understand. That's because it is. What you want to ask yourself, is this:
"Do I need to completely understand a subject to think its true?"
Most people have no idea how their car works, the computers in it that make it go, the thermodynamics, but it goes and so they leave it to experts. The earth's climate is similar. We have some experts who think they understand something. I agree with the scientists, because without becoming a climate scientist myself, and as far as I can understand, they're right. Maybe in 20 years, they'll tell us all they were wrong. It wouldn't be the first time scientists reversed course.
No now comes the big question:
"If you believe the experts, should you put policy into place to make a positive outcome with regard to human induced global warming?"
I say yes, for the following reasons:
1. as long as the sacrifice is reasonable, avoiding possible catastrophe is smart
2. there are other problems with fossil fuels and CO2 that are less questionable than GW: they cause acidification of the oceans, mercury in the oceans and all sorts of nasty oil spills and pollution which causes cancer and heart disease
What is a reasonable sacrifice? That's a good place to begin debate. We could stop debating global warming and I'd welcome that.
Here's a cause which most people years ago rallied around that was far more suspicious than global warming, far more costly to prevent, and in the end turned out to be wrong. In hind site how can the same people who supported the Iraq war drag their feet on doing something about global warming?
Experts said Saddam Hussein is bent on obtaining nuclear weapons and attacking the West.
The US has now spent about $1 trillion dollars, about 1 million Iraqis are dead, and killed about 2853 US soldiers. It was complete conjecture, but everyone signed on. Ignoring the theory that people were simply justifying the war to steal Iraq's oil, isn't the downside to Global Warming a lot worse that one or two US cities being bombed by terrorists? Wouldn't loosing 1000's of square miles of coastline, cities and all, be a bit worse? Yet we've spent so much effort on a stupid cause and no effort on a cause that really just might be the biggest thing we'll ever have to deal with as humans.
The Motorola A780 (about 2 years old) has integrated GPS and runs the Linux Kernel and a heavy Linux filesystem. Its got the camera/mp3 player/GPRS-EDGE/320x240 color screen/Blue Tooth/microSD slot/USB blah blah blah... Its really cool. I finally got one, but only the European version has the integrated GPS. So I had to order it through ebay.co.uk and find someone willing to ship to the US. It even came with CoPilot preinstalled so you can really use the GPS functionality.
Why it isn't for sale in the US is beyond me, but I'm sure there is some Motorola/Microsoft politics going on. There's a community of Linux activists hacking the phone and Motorola offers the source downloadable from their website. In short this product exists and works well.
This recent announcement looks like vapor hardware. All the 'pictures' are CAD renderings. If you want it now, you can get it now. Though, unless you're in Europe, expect to work hard to get it.
Yep. This has been the biggest orgy of energy in world history. I think, from reading all these Peak Oil sites that the hangover is just a few years away - or maybe even starting now.
From a physics point of view, its not the actual energy that's the problem. Its energy on demand. Everyone keeps coming up with creative ideas, but I don't see any way better than to just reduce our energy usage and become more efficient. I think american's could probably use 1/10th the amount of energy and still have most of the quality of life they have. It'd be a strenuous transition, but we'd loose some weight and probably get healthier too.
Too bad the oil and coal companies are doing the same thing the cigarette companies did; trying to convince us all just to keep on buying that black toxic waste only to burn it up in our otherwise clean skies. And people are complicent in the act. You can only feel so sorry for a smoker who gets lung cancer, and you can only feel so sorry for people who burn up natural resources and destroy their own future.
There are those who fire back at me with a whine, "But I live in the burbs and I *have* to drive 50 miles to work". I usually smile and explain that I thought we lived in a free country where you decided where you live and work. I don't advocate a totalitarian goverment dictating to people how to live their lives, but sometimes it seems that Americans decline any responsibility for their actions and the results of those actions.
I'm very surprised that this is being reported on. There's nothing to this.
What's probably happening is that the microwaves are leaking out heating up one side of the thruster more than the other causing the air on that side to warm up and become bouyant which is whats creating the apparent thrust. I could make a lot more thrust with a 700 Watt fan than 88 millinewtons.
I'm starting to dispair over the state of science in this so called modern world when I see articles like this. Maybe next we could have an argument over whether sidereal or tropical based astrology is more accurate at predicting the future.
Your view of what is biased is of course dependent on what bias you already hold. Such is the nature of how we view truth. That you think the BBC is unbiased just tells me that you think their view of the world is the closest to yours.
I like to think a better measure of a news organization's worth is the value of news they bring to the viewer. The story about the Palestinian suicide bomber's family is worthwhile if it's done well. I'd say that its definately news if people from the same background continually blow themselves up to further some nebulous goal. What I mean by 'done well' is: did it explore different angles of a story. How did he/she get recruited? Did they get any fame/infame from the act? How do the rest of the family feel about what happened? What goal were they trying to acomplish, specifically how does killing oneself and a few disco kids further a cause? Their side of the story is very interesting no matter what your view of the world is. What's not interesting is being told what to think about an event without substantial information.
All news is biased. I would say that the BBC is amazingly biased, but that their style of reporting is excellent and interesting. Their view of the world is completely and utterly different than say someone living in Belize City, Sau Paolo, or Mumbai. What I don't like about FOX is not that they are biased, but that they just keep repeating the same story with 12 words over and over again. Their news is cheap propaganda. I find no substance in it; but then again most TV news is like that. Newspapers can be a little better, but often are not. The best stories I find are often pretty late in the news cycle after most people have lost their attention span. Documentaries by film makers, in depth stories in magazines like Soldier of Fortune and Playboy, and now-a-days some blogs have some great information. Business news is also extremely interesting because money is what drives almost all the decisions in the Western world.
Ahahh. You're right that studying hard/working hard should produce a nice compensation. FYI, janitors work very hard, as do flight attendants, cooks, checkout clerks, delivery folks, and machinists; just about any profession as a matter of fact. What you're describing is the market place of labor. Its always been the case that those in highest demand get paid more. That's why CEO's get $50mega bucks per year. Its not because they work any harder or have studied any harder than the construction worker (ye olde Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in the first year). But is it fair? Of course not. Life isn't fair. Communism was a pathetic attempt at making life more fair. The minumum wage is a reasonable attempt at making life more fair.
I resent your implication that janitors have kids on welfare. Get that silver spoon and troll out of your lower class hating mouth.
Here is a reason to support making life more fair: If you don't, then poor people who have been taken advantage of will eventually stop listening to southern accent affecting Presidents and their church preachers and will burn your rich ass into a pile of ash in that brand new exurb of yours. Its happened in many many places when the wealth balance gets too whacked. That's why rich folks should support the minimum wage. Its also why they should pay more in taxes, because they benefit the most from a structured society. Its called nobility, and only snobs don't have it.
On the other hand if your going for the revolution - then by all means, get rid of all work place protections and put those 7 year old WICK program/AFDC kids to work in a debtor's prison. I'm just one of those terrible libral's who's studied history and would like our society to go on another 200 years.
Wow... Just what I was thinking. With more than $0.5bn/year revenue at stake I can imagine that there are a lot of people who would do some pretty unethical things. I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already. Afterall, ebay is in a perfect position for a windfall should Craigslist go public. And they have the revenue and the contacts to make it happen.
If you figure that they could get $0.5bn/year in revenue - with about $100million/year of expenses (you'd need an add department, lawyers, and a fancy CEO paycheck). That's $400million / year earnings with huge growth potential. So I figure Craigslist is worth about 40x earnings or about $16billion on Wall Street. I agree that if managed poorly, Craigslist's user base would shrink. But a few banner adds here and a couple more fees for say real estate listings and you'd have all the money in the world and even more users. Being able to search is the main reason I use Craigslist instead of a newspaper. Newspapers have online searches but they're hard to use and there aren't nearly as many listings because they charge their users. The main value at Craigslist is the user generated content - something newspapers don't get.
So I don't envy the owner of Craigslist. He's got a $16bn bounty on his head.
More important than micro/macro to me would be the ability to keep the system running and edit the system. I used to do that with Scheme back in my college days. It made me realize how something like the telephone system could keep running 24/7 and never go down. These days with MS Windows I gotta reboot every 30 days, and the same with these fscking Linux kernel updates. What if I don't ever want to reboot. I think a microkernel/interpreter would let you modify the running system a lot easier. You could even make incremental changes and then check to make sure they work - preserving the old code so a rollback would be simple.
The point that Andy makes which I agree on, is that computer software is still in its infancy. The part I disagree with is that it'll change by him stating the obvious.
Unfortunately, taking out a blog and talking about holes in science isn't much of a route. Real science takes place in peer reviewed journals. There are simply too many people without education on blogs; which makes blogs a popularity contest (see slashdot.org) instead of the scientific process.
The thing about global warming is that the theory is sound, even if unprovable. The consequences are huge. And there are other consequences to the large amount of CO2 production like the death of all molluscs which we might consider (see ocean acidification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification). When the results of an event are immense, they should impact your planning even if your not sure that the event will happen. I could also tie in the insecurity of our nation as a reason to cut down on oil consumption and the massive amounts of mercury released into the oceans as a reason to cut down on coal use. Really, how many reasons do we need?
People get all caught up in defending their lifestyle, by poking holes in another's argument. They're so caught up in defending themselves that they forget they're just dead wrong. I call these people apologists.
Sorta like the guy who slept with my wife back before she and I split up. I of course didn't know about it (gettin' played is no fun at all). But what irked me is that he kept telling me to my face how great he thought my relationship was and then when it fell apart said it was doomed to failure from the start. He was one of the reasons it failed, but denied it. Sorta like all the people driving SUV's sitting in gridlock traffic on the highway. In 20 years they'll say it was all inevitable. People are so funny I could cry.
The hard part becomes the local database of keys/CERTS. You say you should trust some SSL website to add the key - something a spoofed email or malicious link might accomplish easily. I say, have a 'public' key thats meant for just the bank. In this case, your're right its not really all that public. However, its still serves a functional purpose of encrypting and validating the email. I'm dubious of systems that rely on CERT authorities or webs of trust (not that I don't think they're useful). I like systems that just rely on a person giving the bank a unique key to talk back with. If you get a bogus email using said unique key, you also know who's been compromised. Having N*M keys doesn't seem like such a difficult problem to overcome if it really gives you better security (each user only has M keys, not N*M). Financial institutions routinely ask me for my social security number to make sure that its me over the phone. I feel I should be able to ask them for a number when they talk to me to make sure they are who they say they are. Using a single financial key or multiple is simply a matter of preference on how secure you want to be.
The hard part always comes back to a local database. In your system, there's a local database of trusted banks; and in my system there's a local database of unique keys that you sent out to your trusted banks (M banks, so M local pieces of data at most). Whenever you have this kind of local storage there are problems for software clients - ie. how do I validate my mail from both work and home? Do I have to carry a flash card with the CERTS/keys?
Regardless of the best solution, wouldn't it be great if we could move forward on this issue somehow. We're still using circa 1982 email technology. What's stopping adoption of newer validation technologies?
Obviously, this is where email as a whole is headed. In fact all IP services should eventually be encrypted. The government won't like it because it'll be harder to eavesdrop, but its the only solution to the problem.
I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't lead the pack with a feature in MS Outlook, and work directly with all the certificate issuers or even directly with the financial companies. But maybe they were under pressure from Washington, DC not to implement encrypted email. If they had done it, it'd be a pretty compelling feature. Redmond, are you listening? Google, are you working on this? Yahoo, want to steal my heart?
The weak point is the mail client. Hotmail, gmail, and yahoo could be changed fairly simply, but getting everyone to configure their Thunderbird, Outlook and others would be a bit of work. In order to avoid spoofed financial identities, the best would be for all clients of financial institutions to have a financial public key they only give out to banks and such. That way even if you get an email from Ch4s3 B4nK, with a valid looking certificate, you aren't fooled into thinking you have done business with them. Because only the real Chase Bank would have your financial public key. There are still exploits and there will always be, but what we have right now is completely unprotected.
Having a high fidelity database of public keys from your financial institutions would also accomplish the above, but its hard not to be fooled from a look-alike bank. I want to avoid relying too much on any certificate company's honesty. A semi-private financial public key would accomplish a lot - sort of like giving out a unique email to your bank so that they know to send you email only at that address - but its better when you can keep it secret.
I'm attacking this very distinction. The idea of the noble war waged by ethical soldiers who spare women and children is a romantic story told to us so that we support war. Who wants to support something that's nasty and mean. In every war I've studied the most casualties are amoung civilians. War is a terrible nasty mean thing. Terrorism is just a technique used in warfare, and its used very often. The firebombing of Tokyo killed over 100,000 civilians and razed half of the city. 9/11 is a joke compared to that kind of terror. The justification for the firebombing was that the whole of the Japanese country was part of the war machine and that in order to win, you had to attack civilians too. I won't dissagree with that, but people who attack the United States can say the same thing. All is fair in love and war, no?
Terrorism financing is so hard to track down because terrorism doesn't exist until its labelled as such. The actual distinction between terrorism and war is nada (both require a lawmaker's stamp). Its obvious 9/11 was nasty, clearly characterizable as warfare. Think of the organized crime wars of past eras or the Janjaweed in Sudan now. What makes terrorism even more difficult to detect is that people who are not criminal, are sympathetic to the enemy. Bush says over and over that the US is not at war with Iraq, but that's just not true. The real Iraq is still there, and those people hate the US and want us out. Really, we're at war with all those people - right or wrong. I'm not very sympathetic to them, because I don't know many. I just don't think its a war worth winning. That's because I would do OK with expensive oil and a nervous Israel. I'd probably do better since there'd be less cars trying to run me over on my bike. And my Israeli friends would probably spend more time here in the US instead of Tel Aviv and I'd get to see them more.
The US tries to sell this as a war on terror when its really just a war on Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon to be Iran. But by trying to not be at war when you are, you create this confusion. Why did I say Saudi Arabia? Because they're a monarchy chiefly supported by the US and Britain (a puppet dicatorship if you will - watch 'Lawrence of Arabia' that's the Sauds). That's why so many of the 9/11 hijackers were from there.
The same thing happened back in the 1980's with Northern Ireland. Plenty of donation money for poor Irish made its way to violent means back in the 80's. I lived in Boston back then and the level of conspiracy was intense. Donate to a good Irish cause - some of the money found its way to the IRA. I remember the winks and nods at Southie day in 1984. The British and Irish were at war, but the Irish couldn't fight against a nuclear power with conventional means. The Irish didn't want to take over Britain, they just wanted to kick them out of Northern Ireland (or least stop the paramilitary Protestant death squads). But in the end the British drew a truce reigned in the death squads and none of those terrorists is in a place like gitmo. That's because the British didn't have the heart for decimating the Northern Irish Catholics, which is what they would've had to do to win. I'll give the British props for not being as inhuman as the US is now.
Maybe eventually, Americans will realize you can't have a war on terror because terror is a form of war. In fact it was originally coined by the French as a form of warfare on their own population. They had to keep all those citizens in line after the revolution and so they did some pretty terrible (terrorizing) things.
To win this war, you need to rephrase the whole thing. Define your enemy. In this case it would be Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, maybe Syria soon too. But since the US population isn't ready to accept that this country is an imperialist on the scale of the Roman Empire, we have this stupid 'war on terror' confusion. If you want to win, you need to get everyone on board and lock up or kill every possible enemy and bomb them into oblivion. Think Dresden in WW2 or Nagasaki. That's how you break the enemy's morale. You have to decimate them. Think hundreds of Gitmo's. That's how you win a war. You kill them.
I personally don't have the stomach for it, and I think its a stupid gamble that only people who havn't read their history would make.
You're right, but the efforts you went through, while noble, are beyond most people's abilities. Its about what kind of society you want to live in. There will always be people like you who have the drive to modestly succeed no matter what their background is. But even you admit to the student loans, which if not backed by the Federal government, would not have existed for you. Private solutions to student loans, like indentured servitude, aren't such a good deal. I agree with the above poster that the whole professional army is very dangerous to our republic. Its turning the armed forces into a force separate from the society which it's supposed to serve. Part of serving requires that it be connected to the society by having people from all walks of life in it. The people who voluntarily join the military obviously aren't a true cross section of our society.
Both the A780 and the E680 are available for US networks, though most of their other models don't work inside the US's GSM frequencies and there's a real lack of linux CDMA phones. Both of these models are being hacked and there's a small community of users using these as routers. see http://www.dewmill.com/linuxphone.html for an example.
The dirth of linux smart phones has more to do with the weirdness of the US phone market. There are lots of cool linux phones (not just Motorola) that work outside the US on the standard GSM bands, but the popularity of CDMA and the unusual GSM bands make the worlwide phones not so usable here.
Both the a780 and the e680 have third party apps and are pretty damn cool. I think the poster just hasn't looked hard enough. That's a really old announcement of the a760 and I don't think its even for sale here in the US. Get with the program man!
No commercial or free software exists to decode MS Office documents except for MS Office. I've tried everything and tested and tested. There's always something that screws up the import. ODF is a way out of this MS quagmire and you can still keep using MS Office - all they have to do is add ODF to the mix. They can hobble ODF a little by not implimenting some ease of use features, but in the end this law could set us all down the road to owning our own data and being free to use whatever office suite we like the best. It could be wonderful for end users. That said, I still continue to submit bug reports for open office and try to help them decode MS Word documents.
I think what the poster is saying is that if people forget trauma then the trauma doesn't really exist. If murderers forget their deeds, and their conscience doesn't know about their deeds, then won't they just do it over and over again. Conversly, won't society have less appreciation for the gravity of a crime if the victim can simply erase a crime from his or her memory. Like say I was mugged and suffered a few bruises. The mugging is mostly a trauma. It makes me scared to go out at night. But say this pill exists. Won't others (and law) be likely to think that muggings aren't so bad. After all, you could just forget it. Now apply the same logic to rape and you get the travesty that could ensue.
I think I'll stick to the old fashioned bottle of booze. That way you only forget for as long as your drinking binze goes on.
Didn't mean to say that Quantum computers ain't cool. They're practically absolute zero. Its pretty difficult to setup the entanglement and then you have to setup some sort of forcing element to solve the system, no? My hat is off to you with your amazing quantum strangeness. It will definately change the world forever when the problems are solved. You might even be able to make a computer win a game of Go.
What we need is several parallel me's to post on Slashdot, get my work done, go hiking, and see which one has the best life and collapse back down to the right solution.
Philosophically speaking aren't we all quantumly entangled by the big bang theory - and so now all is connected like a rube goldberg machine?
Agreed, the 2nd law is a brutal law and it takes no prisoners. This idea is bunk and glad you debunked it!
That said, there are some other strange ideas about getting power out of the ocean. One group came to my lab in the 1990's and wanted to put some sort of energy collector in the Gulfstream. Since the density of water is about 1000 times that of air, you could in theory get that much more power out of a flow with the same speed. The Gulfstream is only about 5 knots, and power scales with the square of the flow speed. But even so, you could assume that you could get about 100 times the power out of the same sized machinery. Rotating machinery with blades are not so good for fish, so the people I was talking to were trying to build flapping foils. It had potential, kinda like wind turbines but underwater.
Entaglement just sounds like this analogy: If I throw a six sided die and cover it, I know that there's a 1/6 chance that top is showing a 6. If I look at it, and see the six, I know its a six. I also know that the bottom is a 1. The two sides are entangled. So what's the big deal? That some particles only exist in certain patterns doesn't seem too weird to me. Most of the time, these experiments need to be performed in ultravacuums at or near absolute zero. Doesn't everything average out to 'reality' on the large scale anyways. The important fact is that no information is instantly transmitted across space instantaneously. Its just that we find out what's going on instantaneously. Its all a big pinball game.
The Arstech article was pretty good at explaining why this 'new' technology needed to avoid the restrictions of FISA. This monitoring technology basically multiplexes the tapping resources of the NSA to cover more and more of the entire population. Say you're trying to find a conversation by a specific person. This technology would let you scan the entire phone space and find him/her in seconds. You could conceivably monitor anyone anywhere on any telephone. Its pretty scary and cool.
But when this technology is used to suppress legitimate dissention, say McCain's attempt to ban torture, or Kerry's attempt to save ANWR then wouldn't you be crossing a line? Wouldn't you be just another dictator keeping your friends rich?
FISA is already a scary law that shouldn't pass constitutional muster IMO. But circumnavigating FISA is clearly illegal. Am I a legality snob? No, but there needs to be some transparency when it comes to spying on citizens. By having an ultra secret organization (the NSA), who's solely under the direction of the President conduct this gestapo type activity, its a system that will be abused. The transparency, which is law, is the whole warrants and judges thing. People in congress with secret clearance can look at the list of warrants and see who's being spied on. There's some feedback into the political process. This is the important part of the system.
But right now we don't know enough, to decide how bad the spying was. It could conceivably be really very wrong. In order to implement this new surveillance, if it is necessary at all, one would need to setup checks and balances on it. There are ways, but they're not simple. Basically, you'd have to open up the technology to review and find ways of making the targets anonymous until it was determined that a clear danger existed. Soft triggers and targets would have to be reviewed by judges to avoid netting a false positive.
People keep making connections between past wars (WW2 is common) and this one. You might remember that in WW2 there was an Axis that wanted to dominate the whole world based on a vision of moral and cultural superiority. This Axis took over a large portion of the world and threatened long time Allies of the US with anihilation. I'm not talking about bombing a pair of sky scrapers, but complete and total control over the civilized world. It was an extraordinary situation. These Islamic terrorists do not advocate nor have the ability to take over any significant portion of the western world. Sure, worse case scenario is they blow up a city or two with some nuclear bomb (a long term possibility). Scary shit indeed, but they can't possibly compare to the Axis. The Islamic terrorists mostly seem pissed off that there are Israelis and that the west supports all these dictators in their countries so we can get their oil. Not exactly big deals except if your living in Tel Aviv or the CEO of Exxon.
There are ways to save Israel and still have a decent economy without controlling the entire of central asia, and spying on your citizens with draconian laws. But these ways require a compromise, something the all or nothing, gamble it all sensbilities of this goverment seem incapable of working at. I give the current US administration cudos for scaring the living shit out of congress and Americans to make us do what they want. But its time to get a backbone and stand up. I lived in NYC when those towers fell, and those people didn't deserve to die. At the very least, we should stand by those who died by standing up for the values that make us worth something on this planet. I'd rather die in a free country from a terrorist attack than live in a tyranny where my only right is to go spend my paycheck at a mall. The next couple years will be determined by what kind of life Americans want to lead: a free one that has dangers, or a tyranny that only partially mitigates those dangers. I thought this was a place where people wanted freedom.
The way I've been burnt by Microsoft isn't over the short term. I believe that MS has a lot of attractive software solutions in the short term. The deployment can be fast, the solution sexy, and the cost lower than a linux implementation. In short I agree with the findings of your study.
What your study fails to address is the longer term problem often faced with MS products. The company has a history of pushing new incompatible products on existing customers, which then force an expensive upgrade. Examples are QuickBasic, and now VisualBasic, the impending Office Suite, and device drivers written in the 1990's.
If I had implemented a program on Unix in the 1990's, it would run with minimal changes today. The API is very similiar, even device drivers written 10 years ago will run or run with few changes. This kind of code reuse just isn't possible in Redmond. Windows 95/95/ME is effectively dead and any hardware or software is obsolete. I wrote a lot of stuff for that OS, and its all dead now. I later returned to write code on NT and it won't run on XP now. When will the madness end? It won't because when you saturated a market, the only way to get revenue is to force an upgrade. I'm willing to pay for new technologies - sure - but I shouldn't be forced to.
While Linux solutions might take longer, I feel better knowing that far down the road I'll be able to maintain them.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me suggest qet. It has a nice ring and a friendly association with bras and kets which we all know are so delightfully fun.
Mod immediate parent up!
I'm dubious that these folks have overcome the limitation explained above. Tesla never overcame the limitation and that's why we don't use this form of power transmission.
Its amazing how many people don't understand electromagnetism even though its a really old science now. I've finally come to terms with it more or less, though I think I could use maybe one more series of classes to really understand stuff like antennas.
That relativity is open and shut, doesn't mean that the ordinary Joe understands it. I've got 2 Master's from MIT and have taken more than one course on relativity and I'm not sure *I* really understand it, so why should you expect the ordinary citizen to? Global warming is probably less open and shut, more complicated but immensely more important to our future. Whether relativity is true doesn't require humans to essentially sacrifice all low lying cities on the planet for our current use of fossil fuels.
There are plenty of good websites that explain the science behind GW and they explain it very well. Wikipedia is a good place to start and it's free. Its pretty basic stuff if you have some physics background. Most people don't, and so that's why nobody seems to understand it.
Even if you have a physics background, its hard to get around this feeling that beyond the basics, GW is very complicated and difficult to understand. That's because it is. What you want to ask yourself, is this:
"Do I need to completely understand a subject to think its true?"
Most people have no idea how their car works, the computers in it that make it go, the thermodynamics, but it goes and so they leave it to experts. The earth's climate is similar. We have some experts who think they understand something. I agree with the scientists, because without becoming a climate scientist myself, and as far as I can understand, they're right. Maybe in 20 years, they'll tell us all they were wrong. It wouldn't be the first time scientists reversed course.
No now comes the big question:
"If you believe the experts, should you put policy into place to make a positive outcome with regard to human induced global warming?"
I say yes, for the following reasons:
1. as long as the sacrifice is reasonable, avoiding possible catastrophe is smart
2. there are other problems with fossil fuels and CO2 that are less questionable than
GW: they cause acidification of the oceans, mercury in the oceans and
all sorts of nasty oil spills and pollution which causes cancer and heart disease
What is a reasonable sacrifice? That's a good place to begin debate. We could stop debating global warming and I'd welcome that.
Here's a cause which most people years ago rallied around that was far more suspicious than global warming, far more costly to prevent, and in the end turned out to be wrong. In hind site how can the same people who supported the Iraq war drag their feet on doing something about global warming?
Experts said Saddam Hussein is bent on obtaining nuclear weapons and attacking the West.
The US has now spent about $1 trillion dollars, about 1 million Iraqis are dead, and killed about 2853 US soldiers. It was complete conjecture, but everyone signed on. Ignoring the theory that people were simply justifying the war to steal Iraq's oil, isn't the downside to Global Warming a lot worse that one or two US cities being bombed by terrorists? Wouldn't loosing 1000's of square miles of coastline, cities and all, be a bit worse? Yet we've spent so much effort on a stupid cause and no effort on a cause that really just might be the biggest thing we'll ever have to deal with as humans.
The Motorola A780 (about 2 years old) has integrated GPS and runs the Linux Kernel and a heavy Linux filesystem. Its got the camera/mp3 player/GPRS-EDGE/320x240 color screen/Blue Tooth/microSD slot/USB blah blah blah... Its really cool. I finally got one, but only the European version has the integrated GPS. So I had to order it through ebay.co.uk and find someone willing to ship to the US. It even came with CoPilot preinstalled so you can really use the GPS functionality.
Why it isn't for sale in the US is beyond me, but I'm sure there is some Motorola/Microsoft politics going on. There's a community of Linux activists hacking the phone and Motorola offers the source downloadable from their website. In short this product exists and works well.
This recent announcement looks like vapor hardware. All the 'pictures' are CAD renderings. If you want it now, you can get it now. Though, unless you're in Europe, expect to work hard to get it.
Yep. This has been the biggest orgy of energy in world history. I think, from reading all these Peak Oil sites that the hangover is just a few years away - or maybe even starting now.
From a physics point of view, its not the actual energy that's the problem. Its energy on demand. Everyone keeps coming up with creative ideas, but I don't see any way better than to just reduce our energy usage and become more efficient. I think american's could probably use 1/10th the amount of energy and still have most of the quality of life they have. It'd be a strenuous transition, but we'd loose some weight and probably get healthier too.
Too bad the oil and coal companies are doing the same thing the cigarette companies did; trying to convince us all just to keep on buying that black toxic waste only to burn it up in our otherwise clean skies. And people are complicent in the act. You can only feel so sorry for a smoker who gets lung cancer, and you can only feel so sorry for people who burn up natural resources and destroy their own future.
There are those who fire back at me with a whine, "But I live in the burbs and I *have* to drive 50 miles to work". I usually smile and explain that I thought we lived in a free country where you decided where you live and work. I don't advocate a totalitarian goverment dictating to people how to live their lives, but sometimes it seems that Americans decline any responsibility for their actions and the results of those actions.
I'm very surprised that this is being reported on. There's nothing to this.
What's probably happening is that the microwaves are leaking out heating up one side of the thruster more than the other causing the air on that side to warm up and become bouyant which is whats creating the apparent thrust. I could make a lot more thrust with a 700 Watt fan than 88 millinewtons.
I'm starting to dispair over the state of science in this so called modern world when I see articles like this. Maybe next we could have an argument over whether sidereal or tropical based astrology is more accurate at predicting the future.
Your view of what is biased is of course dependent on what bias you already hold. Such is the nature of how we view truth. That you think the BBC is unbiased just tells me that you think their view of the world is the closest to yours.
I like to think a better measure of a news organization's worth is the value of news they bring to the viewer. The story about the Palestinian suicide bomber's family is worthwhile if it's done well. I'd say that its definately news if people from the same background continually blow themselves up to further some nebulous goal. What I mean by 'done well' is: did it explore different angles of a story. How did he/she get recruited? Did they get any fame/infame from the act? How do the rest of the family feel about what happened? What goal were they trying to acomplish, specifically how does killing oneself and a few disco kids further a cause? Their side of the story is very interesting no matter what your view of the world is. What's not interesting is being told what to think about an event without substantial information.
All news is biased. I would say that the BBC is amazingly biased, but that their style of reporting is excellent and interesting. Their view of the world is completely and utterly different than say someone living in Belize City, Sau Paolo, or Mumbai. What I don't like about FOX is not that they are biased, but that they just keep repeating the same story with 12 words over and over again. Their news is cheap propaganda. I find no substance in it; but then again most TV news is like that. Newspapers can be a little better, but often are not. The best stories I find are often pretty late in the news cycle after most people have lost their attention span. Documentaries by film makers, in depth stories in magazines like Soldier of Fortune and Playboy, and now-a-days some blogs have some great information. Business news is also extremely interesting because money is what drives almost all the decisions in the Western world.
Ahahh. You're right that studying hard/working hard should produce a nice compensation. FYI, janitors work very hard, as do flight attendants, cooks, checkout clerks, delivery folks, and machinists; just about any profession as a matter of fact. What you're describing is the market place of labor. Its always been the case that those in highest demand get paid more. That's why CEO's get $50mega bucks per year. Its not because they work any harder or have studied any harder than the construction worker (ye olde Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in the first year). But is it fair? Of course not. Life isn't fair. Communism was a pathetic attempt at making life more fair. The minumum wage is a reasonable attempt at making life more fair.
I resent your implication that janitors have kids on welfare. Get that silver spoon and troll out of your lower class hating mouth.
Here is a reason to support making life more fair: If you don't, then poor people who have been taken advantage of will eventually stop listening to southern accent affecting Presidents and their church preachers and will burn your rich ass into a pile of ash in that brand new exurb of yours. Its happened in many many places when the wealth balance gets too whacked. That's why rich folks should support the minimum wage. Its also why they should pay more in taxes, because they benefit the most from a structured society. Its called nobility, and only snobs don't have it.
On the other hand if your going for the revolution - then by all means, get rid of all work place protections and put those 7 year old WICK program/AFDC kids to work in a debtor's prison. I'm just one of those terrible libral's who's studied history and would like our society to go on another 200 years.
> Got a better plan....
1. Rent an apartment/buy a condo close to work and bike/walk/mass-transit
2. Move
2. Sell car
Its so complicated you probably can't get that nuclear reactor
hydrogen economy head around it.
Wow... Just what I was thinking. With more than $0.5bn/year revenue at stake I can imagine that there are a lot of people who would do some pretty unethical things. I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already. Afterall, ebay is in a perfect position for a windfall should Craigslist go public. And they have the revenue and the contacts to make it happen.
If you figure that they could get $0.5bn/year in revenue - with about $100million/year of expenses (you'd need an add department, lawyers, and a fancy CEO paycheck). That's $400million / year earnings with huge growth potential. So I figure Craigslist is worth about 40x earnings or about $16billion on Wall Street. I agree that if managed poorly, Craigslist's user base would shrink. But a few banner adds here and a couple more fees for say real estate listings and you'd have all the money in the world and even more users. Being able to search is the main reason I use Craigslist instead of a newspaper. Newspapers have online searches but they're hard to use and there aren't nearly as many listings because they charge their users. The main value at Craigslist is the user generated content - something newspapers don't get.
So I don't envy the owner of Craigslist. He's got a $16bn bounty on his head.
More important than micro/macro to me would be the ability to keep the system running and edit the system. I used to do that with Scheme back in my college days. It made me realize how something like the telephone system could keep running 24/7 and never go down. These days with MS Windows I gotta reboot every 30 days, and the same with these fscking Linux kernel updates. What if I don't ever want to reboot. I think a microkernel/interpreter would let you modify the running system a lot easier. You could even make incremental changes and then check to make sure they work - preserving the old code so a rollback would be simple.
The point that Andy makes which I agree on, is that computer software is still in its infancy. The part I disagree with is that it'll change by him stating the obvious.
Unfortunately, taking out a blog and talking about holes in science isn't much of a route. Real science takes place in peer reviewed journals. There are simply too many people without education on blogs; which makes blogs a popularity contest (see slashdot.org) instead of the scientific process.
. When the results of an event are immense, they should impact your planning even if your not sure that the event will happen. I could also tie in the insecurity of our nation as a reason to cut down on oil consumption and the massive amounts of mercury released into the oceans as a reason to cut down on coal use. Really, how many reasons do we need?
The thing about global warming is that the theory is sound, even if unprovable. The consequences are huge. And there are other consequences to the large amount of CO2 production like the death of all molluscs which we might consider (see ocean acidification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification)
People get all caught up in defending their lifestyle, by poking holes in another's argument. They're so caught up in defending themselves that they forget they're just dead wrong. I call these people apologists.
Sorta like the guy who slept with my wife back before she and I split up. I of course didn't know about it (gettin' played is no fun at all). But what irked me is that he kept telling me to my face how great he thought my relationship was and then when it fell apart said it was doomed to failure from the start. He was one of the reasons it failed, but denied it. Sorta like all the people driving SUV's sitting in gridlock traffic on the highway. In 20 years they'll say it was all inevitable. People are so funny I could cry.
The hard part becomes the local database of keys/CERTS. You say you should trust some SSL website to add the key - something a spoofed email or malicious link might accomplish easily. I say, have a 'public' key thats meant for just the bank. In this case, your're right its not really all that public. However, its still serves a functional purpose of encrypting and validating the email. I'm dubious of systems that rely on CERT authorities or webs of trust (not that I don't think they're useful). I like systems that just rely on a person giving the bank a unique key to talk back with. If you get a bogus email using said unique key, you also know who's been compromised. Having N*M keys doesn't seem like such a difficult problem to overcome if it really gives you better security (each user only has M keys, not N*M). Financial institutions routinely ask me for my social security number to make sure that its me over the phone. I feel I should be able to ask them for a number when they talk to me to make sure they are who they say they are. Using a single financial key or multiple is simply a matter of preference on how secure you want to be.
The hard part always comes back to a local database. In your system, there's a local database of trusted banks; and in my system there's a local database of unique keys that you sent out to your trusted banks (M banks, so M local pieces of data at most). Whenever you have this kind of local storage there are problems for software clients - ie. how do I validate my mail from both work and home? Do I have to carry a flash card with the CERTS/keys?
Regardless of the best solution, wouldn't it be great if we could move forward on this issue somehow. We're still using circa 1982 email technology. What's stopping adoption of newer validation technologies?
Obviously, this is where email as a whole is headed. In fact all IP services should eventually be encrypted. The government won't like it because it'll be harder to eavesdrop, but its the only solution to the problem.
I'm surprised that Microsoft didn't lead the pack with a feature in MS Outlook, and work directly with all the certificate issuers or even directly with the financial companies. But maybe they were under pressure from Washington, DC not to implement encrypted email. If they had done it, it'd be a pretty compelling feature. Redmond, are you listening? Google, are you working on this? Yahoo, want to steal my heart?
The weak point is the mail client. Hotmail, gmail, and yahoo could be changed fairly simply, but getting everyone to configure their Thunderbird, Outlook and others would be a bit of work. In order to avoid spoofed financial identities, the best would be for all clients of financial institutions to have a financial public key they only give out to banks and such. That way even if you get an email from Ch4s3 B4nK, with a valid looking certificate, you aren't fooled into thinking you have done business with them. Because only the real Chase Bank would have your financial public key. There are still exploits and there will always be, but what we have right now is completely unprotected.
Having a high fidelity database of public keys from your financial institutions would also accomplish the above, but its hard not to be fooled from a look-alike bank. I want to avoid relying too much on any certificate company's honesty. A semi-private financial public key would accomplish a lot - sort of like giving out a unique email to your bank so that they know to send you email only at that address - but its better when you can keep it secret.
I'm attacking this very distinction. The idea of the noble war waged by ethical soldiers who spare women and children is a romantic story told to us so that we support war. Who wants to support something that's nasty and mean. In every war I've studied the most casualties are amoung civilians. War is a terrible nasty mean thing. Terrorism is just a technique used in warfare, and its used very often. The firebombing of Tokyo killed over 100,000 civilians and razed half of the city. 9/11 is a joke compared to that kind of terror. The justification for the firebombing was that the whole of the Japanese country was part of the war machine and that in order to win, you had to attack civilians too. I won't dissagree with that, but people who attack the United States can say the same thing. All is fair in love and war, no?
Terrorism financing is so hard to track down because terrorism doesn't exist until its labelled as such. The actual distinction between terrorism and war is nada (both require a lawmaker's stamp). Its obvious 9/11 was nasty, clearly characterizable as warfare. Think of the organized crime wars of past eras or the Janjaweed in Sudan now. What makes terrorism even more difficult to detect is that people who are not criminal, are sympathetic to the enemy. Bush says over and over that the US is not at war with Iraq, but that's just not true. The real Iraq is still there, and those people hate the US and want us out. Really, we're at war with all those people - right or wrong. I'm not very sympathetic to them, because I don't know many. I just don't think its a war worth winning. That's because I would do OK with expensive oil and a nervous Israel. I'd probably do better since there'd be less cars trying to run me over on my bike. And my Israeli friends would probably spend more time here in the US instead of Tel Aviv and I'd get to see them more.
The US tries to sell this as a war on terror when its really just a war on Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon to be Iran. But by trying to not be at war when you are, you create this confusion. Why did I say Saudi Arabia? Because they're a monarchy chiefly supported by the US and Britain (a puppet dicatorship if you will - watch 'Lawrence of Arabia' that's the Sauds). That's why so many of the 9/11 hijackers were from there.
The same thing happened back in the 1980's with Northern Ireland. Plenty of donation money for poor Irish made its way to violent means back in the 80's. I lived in Boston back then and the level of conspiracy was intense. Donate to a good Irish cause - some of the money found its way to the IRA. I remember the winks and nods at Southie day in 1984. The British and Irish were at war, but the Irish couldn't fight against a nuclear power with conventional means. The Irish didn't want to take over Britain, they just wanted to kick them out of Northern Ireland (or least stop the paramilitary Protestant death squads). But in the end the British drew a truce reigned in the death squads and none of those terrorists is in a place like gitmo. That's because the British didn't have the heart for decimating the Northern Irish Catholics, which is what they would've had to do to win. I'll give the British props for not being as inhuman as the US is now.
Maybe eventually, Americans will realize you can't have a war on terror because terror is a form of war. In fact it was originally coined by the French as a form of warfare on their own population. They had to keep all those citizens in line after the revolution and so they did some pretty terrible (terrorizing) things.
To win this war, you need to rephrase the whole thing. Define your enemy. In this case it would be Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, maybe Syria soon too. But since the US population isn't ready to accept that this country is an imperialist on the scale of the Roman Empire, we have this stupid 'war on terror' confusion. If you want to win, you need to get everyone on board and lock up or kill every possible enemy and bomb them into oblivion. Think Dresden in WW2 or Nagasaki. That's how you break the enemy's morale. You have to decimate them. Think hundreds of Gitmo's. That's how you win a war. You kill them.
I personally don't have the stomach for it, and I think its a stupid gamble that only people who havn't read their history would make.
You're right, but the efforts you went through, while noble, are beyond most people's abilities. Its about what kind of society you want to live in. There will always be people like you who have the drive to modestly succeed no matter what their background is. But even you admit to the student loans, which if not backed by the Federal government, would not have existed for you. Private solutions to student loans, like indentured servitude, aren't such a good deal. I agree with the above poster that the whole professional army is very dangerous to our republic. Its turning the armed forces into a force separate from the society which it's supposed to serve. Part of serving requires that it be connected to the society by having people from all walks of life in it. The people who voluntarily join the military obviously aren't a true cross section of our society.
Both the A780 and the E680 are available for US networks, though most of their other models don't work inside the US's GSM frequencies and there's a real lack of linux CDMA phones. Both of these models are being hacked and there's a small community of users using these as routers. see http://www.dewmill.com/linuxphone.html for an example.
The dirth of linux smart phones has more to do with the weirdness of the US phone market. There are lots of cool linux phones (not just Motorola) that work outside the US on the standard GSM bands, but the popularity of CDMA and the unusual GSM bands make the worlwide phones not so usable here.
Both the a780 and the e680 have third party apps and are pretty damn cool. I think the poster just hasn't looked hard enough. That's a really old announcement of the a760 and I don't think its even for sale here in the US. Get with the program man!
No commercial or free software exists to decode MS Office documents except for MS Office. I've tried everything and tested and tested. There's always something that screws up the import. ODF is a way out of this MS quagmire and you can still keep using MS Office - all they have to do is add ODF to the mix. They can hobble ODF a little by not implimenting some ease of use features, but in the end this law could set us all down the road to owning our own data and being free to use whatever office suite we like the best. It could be wonderful for end users. That said, I still continue to submit bug reports for open office and try to help them decode MS Word documents.
I think what the poster is saying is that if people forget trauma then the trauma doesn't really exist. If murderers forget their deeds, and their conscience doesn't know about their deeds, then won't they just do it over and over again. Conversly, won't society have less appreciation for the gravity of a crime if the victim can simply erase a crime from his or her memory. Like say I was mugged and suffered a few bruises. The mugging is mostly a trauma. It makes me scared to go out at night. But say this pill exists. Won't others (and law) be likely to think that muggings aren't so bad. After all, you could just forget it. Now apply the same logic to rape and you get the travesty that could ensue.
I think I'll stick to the old fashioned bottle of booze. That way you only forget for as long as your drinking binze goes on.
Didn't mean to say that Quantum computers ain't cool. They're practically absolute zero. Its pretty difficult to setup the entanglement and then you have to setup some sort of forcing element to solve the system, no? My hat is off to you with your amazing quantum strangeness. It will definately change the world forever when the problems are solved. You might even be able to make a computer win a game of Go.
What we need is several parallel me's to post on Slashdot, get my work done, go hiking, and see which one has the best life and collapse back down to the right solution.
Philosophically speaking aren't we all quantumly entangled by the big bang theory - and so now all is connected like a rube goldberg machine?
Agreed, the 2nd law is a brutal law and it takes no prisoners. This idea is bunk and glad you debunked it!
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That said, there are some other strange ideas about getting power out of the ocean. One group came to my lab in the 1990's and wanted to put some sort of energy collector in the Gulfstream. Since the density of water is about 1000 times that of air, you could in theory get that much more power out of a flow with the same speed. The Gulfstream is only about 5 knots, and power scales with the square of the flow speed. But even so, you could assume that you could get about 100 times the power out of the same sized machinery. Rotating machinery with blades are not so good for fish, so the people I was talking to were trying to build flapping foils. It had potential, kinda like wind turbines but underwater.
Here's the halfbakery link:
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Underwater_20Windm
Entaglement just sounds like this analogy: If I throw a six sided die and cover it, I know that there's a 1/6 chance that top is showing a 6. If I look at it, and see the six, I know its a six. I also know that the bottom is a 1. The two sides are entangled. So what's the big deal? That some particles only exist in certain patterns doesn't seem too weird to me. Most of the time, these experiments need to be performed in ultravacuums at or near absolute zero. Doesn't everything average out to 'reality' on the large scale anyways. The important fact is that no information is instantly transmitted across space instantaneously. Its just that we find out what's going on instantaneously. Its all a big pinball game.
The Arstech article was pretty good at explaining why this 'new' technology needed to avoid the restrictions of FISA. This monitoring technology basically multiplexes the tapping resources of the NSA to cover more and more of the entire population. Say you're trying to find a conversation by a specific person. This technology would let you scan the entire phone space and find him/her in seconds. You could conceivably monitor anyone anywhere on any telephone. Its pretty scary and cool.
But when this technology is used to suppress legitimate dissention, say McCain's attempt to ban torture, or Kerry's attempt to save ANWR then wouldn't you be crossing a line? Wouldn't you be just another dictator keeping your friends rich?
FISA is already a scary law that shouldn't pass constitutional muster IMO. But circumnavigating FISA is clearly illegal. Am I a legality snob? No, but there needs to be some transparency when it comes to spying on citizens. By having an ultra secret organization (the NSA), who's solely under the direction of the President conduct this gestapo type activity, its a system that will be abused.
The transparency, which is law, is the whole warrants and judges thing. People in congress with secret clearance can look at the list of warrants and see who's being spied on. There's some feedback into the political process. This is the important part of the system.
But right now we don't know enough, to decide how bad the spying was. It could conceivably be really very wrong. In order to implement this new surveillance, if it is necessary at all, one would need to setup checks and balances on it. There are ways, but they're not simple. Basically, you'd have to open up the technology to review and find ways of making the targets anonymous until it was determined that a clear danger existed. Soft triggers and targets would have to be reviewed by judges to avoid netting a false positive.
People keep making connections between past wars (WW2 is common) and this one. You might remember that in WW2 there was an Axis that wanted to dominate the whole world based on a vision of moral and cultural superiority. This Axis took over a large portion of the world and threatened long time Allies of the US with anihilation. I'm not talking about bombing a pair of sky scrapers, but complete and total control over the civilized world. It was an extraordinary situation. These Islamic terrorists do not advocate nor have the ability to take over any significant portion of the western world. Sure, worse case scenario is they blow up a city or two with some nuclear bomb (a long term possibility). Scary shit indeed, but they can't possibly compare to the Axis. The Islamic terrorists mostly seem pissed off that there are Israelis and that the west supports all these dictators in their countries so we can get their oil. Not exactly big deals except if your living in Tel Aviv or the CEO of Exxon.
There are ways to save Israel and still have a decent economy without controlling the entire of central asia, and spying on your citizens with draconian laws. But these ways require a compromise, something the all or nothing, gamble it all sensbilities of this goverment seem incapable of working at. I give the current US administration cudos for scaring the living shit out of congress and Americans to make us do what they want. But its time to get a backbone and stand up. I lived in NYC when those towers fell, and those people didn't deserve to die. At the very least, we should stand by those who died by standing up for the values that make us worth something on this planet. I'd rather die in a free country from a terrorist attack than live in a tyranny where my only right is to go spend my paycheck at a mall. The next couple years will be determined by what kind of life Americans want to lead: a free one that has dangers, or a tyranny that only partially mitigates those dangers. I thought this was a place where people wanted freedom.
The way I've been burnt by Microsoft isn't over the short term. I believe that MS has a lot of attractive software solutions in the short term. The deployment can be fast, the solution sexy, and the cost lower than a linux implementation. In short I agree with the findings of your study.
What your study fails to address is the longer term problem often faced with MS products. The company has a history of pushing new incompatible products on existing customers, which then force an expensive upgrade. Examples are QuickBasic, and now VisualBasic, the impending Office Suite, and device drivers written in the 1990's.
If I had implemented a program on Unix in the 1990's, it would run with minimal changes today. The API is very similiar, even device drivers written 10 years ago will run or run with few changes. This kind of code reuse just isn't possible in Redmond. Windows 95/95/ME is effectively dead and any hardware or software is obsolete. I wrote a lot of stuff for that OS, and its all dead now. I later returned to write code on NT and it won't run on XP now. When will the madness end? It won't because when you saturated a market, the only way to get revenue is to force an upgrade. I'm willing to pay for new technologies - sure - but I shouldn't be forced to.
While Linux solutions might take longer, I feel better knowing that far down the road I'll be able to maintain them.