If the law always served the greater good, there would be no such thing as a freedom fighter.
However, your point is a good one. Terrorism is an example of how when people decide that a transgression is justified, they aren't to selective as to who is harmed by transgression.
I don't want to make this sound more mysterious than it really is. The fundamental thing going on here is that most people either are not very good at thinking, not inclined to question their own actions, or both. Once they get into killing outside some kind of legally defined sanction, they don't make up some kind of elaborate code describing who can be killed and who cannot. They just get on with it.
The same with copyrights. Once they decide they're justified in copying a work, they don't self police the kinds of things they do with the copies they make, or refrain from making copies when certain conditions have been met. They just get on with it.
Of course copying is not anything like killing, so you wouldn't expect people to put the same amount of thought into transgressive copying that they put into transgressive killing. Ironically, they usually do put the same amount of thought into these activities: zero, unless you count rationalization that what they are doing is right.
OK. Timothy McVeigh. He thought the government had overstepped its bounds. He did not scruple, when attacking it, from blowing up a day care center.
The history of copyrights furnish plenty of examples where people who find the copyright regime to be excessive have taken liberties that encroach upon what they otherwise would accept as reasonable rights of copyright holders. In fact this argument was first made by Lord Macaulay in his second address to Parliament on copyright extension.
A modern example would be this: if a copyright holder makes it difficult for you to space shift an electronic copyright of a work, then plenty of people find a way around this, and don't scruple to distribute the fruits of their labor. Apple, on the other hand, has had great success by making their DRM less onerous to users, making space shifting relatively convenient and making it easy to recover your purchases when you no longer have access to the authorized machine. They also charge what most people regard as fair prices.
As a result, Apple has a huge number of users who don't look on the restrictions Apple has put on their purchases as punitive. It really is not that difficult to get around Apple's DRM, but there has not been an explosion in trading of DRM stripped tracks you'd expect given the ubiquity of iPods.
Well, I don't know about whiskey, but I do know a little about wine.
Wine does, indeed, continue to age in the bottle. Brandy, however, does not, and I suspect whiskey is similar.
Wine continues to age because it continues to ferment. Yeast is opportunistic. It doesn't waste time breaking down sugar to ethanol, when it can break down sugar into some easier alcohol and grab some more sugar. When it uses up all the sugar available, it looks around for other energy sources and says, oh look, here's some big fat alcohol molecules that could be broken down into smaller alcohol molecules, and the process continues in exponentially decaying levels of activity.
This does NOT happen with brandy, because (a) you've probably distilled away the yeast and (b) the alcohol levels are are so high they're toxic to yeast.
What happens to whiskey and brandy in wood casks is mysterious to me. Wood is a very complex material. No doubt things are leaching out of the brandy and other things are leaching into the brandy, and very possibly various chemical transformations are happening at the boundary between wood and wine.
Now, here's some important points: You can't take a cheap bottle of wine and turn it into a good wine by aging. Aging only takes a very good wine that is too raw and young to drink and turns it into a very good wine that is ready to drink. And cheap wines are, by in large, not <em>bad</em> wines these days. The chemistry and biology of wine are too well known for a major producer of wines to make bad wines by accident. When there are bad wines, they are deliberately made so to appeal to bad tastes.
The difference between cheap wines and expensive wines is this: cheap wines are the product of technology; expensive wines are the product of a series of accidents we probably don't fully understand. One $7 dollar bottle of Syrah is going to be much like any other bottle of $7 Syrah: mildly fruity nose, moderately tart and peppery, nondescript finish. It doesn't matter what year the vintage is, science sees to that. It doesn't matter who the vineyard is, or whether that vineyard is in Mendocino or Australia.
If you open a $100 bottle of wine from a small French estate that produces maybe several thousand cases of wine a year, you don't know what you are going to taste. It could be different from last year; it could be different from another wine made from the same grape only a few miles away. You might hate it. You might love it. But it's going to be different than anything you've tasted before, unless it is the same wine from the same vineyard in the same year.
Therefore, I'd say for wine at least, the claims for this device are hooey. You aren't going to take bottle of liquid that is made, by advanced technology, to exact standards of uniformity and put it into a magic box that gives it a unique taste. Maybe it does change the taste in a way that most people would find preferable in double blind studies. That's certainly possible. But it won't turn it into the equivalent of a much more expensive bottle of wine, because what you pay for in wine is character.
Which illustrates my point. As soon as the barrier between lawful and unlawful behavior is no longer accepted as just, a determination of "fair game" for one act spreads to circumstantially related acts.
It goes from "I'll get you," to "and your little dog, too."
It is a chilly January day. I start my computer doing a long, complex calculation. Tired of waiting I decide to take a walk around the block. It is freezing out. I head back in before I get frostbite. I put my frozen hands in the warm exhaust from my laptop CPU fan.
Bingo. Work extracted from waste heat. I just need some place colder to move the heat to.
My understanding of the Brownian Ratchet idea is that if both ends of the brownian ratchet device (that is to say the the collection end, which is a paddle on a spindle, and the ratchet and pawl end, where the work is extracted) are at the same temperature, it won't work. If the energy collection end is hotter than the ratchet and pawl mechanism, then extracting work doesn't violate thermodynamics. It's just like me warming my hands: you have a place to dump the heat.
If you think about how we cool chips, we integrate the heat over large volumes and relatively long times. We take the waste heat from millions of transistors flipping millions of nanoseconds and dump it into the chip packaging and ultimately a big hunk of aluminum.
So -- and this is a big piece of conjecture from very little information -- perhaps the idea is to stick the paddle on or close to the transistor, and the ratchet and pawl mechanism onto the packaging/heat sink. Extracting work from the ratchet no longer violates thermodynamics because we have a heat gradient -- it's just a transient one over microscopic distance scales. We just grab a pico joule here and there of energy from spikes in waste heat from a particular semiconductor junction. On the macroscopic scale, we still have a big piece of aluminum in thermal equilibrium, but somehow the piece of aluminum isn't getting quite as hot.
In the earliest documented version of the legend in anything like recognizable form, Robin and his Merry Men beat and rob a monk, then later on they decide to kill the monk and his page because they were afraid they would testify against them.
The whole system of sheriffs was a form of oppression forced on the population by their Norman overlords -- that much the later legends sort of get right. Monasticism was a byproduct of a Christian society in which the highest echelons made their living by murder, robbery and extortion, and in which sins could be expunged through gifts to the church. The history of medieval monasticism was a story of reformist zeal followed by rapid accumulation of wealth and corruption, recapitulated over and over again.
But notice: While it's obvious why robbing and killing sheriffs and monks might be considered admirable, apparently this doesn't stop at that. Killing the page was considered quite as merry and shrewd.
There's a lesson in this.
When the law becomes abusive, it's too much to expect that resistance to it take the form of highly principled disobedience. Once defying the law becomes seen as just and right, fine distinctions like between a corrupt church official and an innocent child witness go out the window.
You missed my point. The possibility of $700 billion makes the job doable for $100 billion.
The certainty of $700 billion would make the job undoable at any price.
It's not just the crooks on Wall Street that are the problem, by the way. It's the crooks in Washington. It's not Wall Street that needs a bailout, it's credit, global credit, from Main Street USA, to The Street in London, and beyond.
A good pilot, I have been told, is one who is extremely methodical, and follows the procedures he has been trained to do.
I suppose that means to be an amazing pilot, it helps to be a good pilot who can, at times, be a bad pilot. Certainly you see that in business all the time. An amazing businessman has to do things that go against common wisdom from time to time, but ones that do it all the time are just bad at business.
Well, the healthcare industry, if I am correct, is going to have to change its attitude. The diseases lurking outside our knowledge are not going to stay there.
The reason doctors aren't interested in diseases they don't know how to cure should be obvious. It's triage. Why should I (the doctor) waste time on you, with your interesting exotic disease, when I'm not going to change the course of your disease, given that I probably have a dozen patients I can cure waiting for my help?
My belief is that fundamental advances will improve approaches to already known diseases and reduce new diseases to something we know a bit more about.
We already do this to some degree. We have a number of shotgun style therapies that don't need to be precisely targeted. If you come in with an infection the doctor tries to figure out whether it's bacterial, viral, or parasitical. That's the reason for the two aspirins/call me in the morning prescription. If your fever goes down, he proceeds on the theory it's bacterial and prescribes an antibiotic. If it's not he proceeds on the theory it's viral and you'll have to tough it out, unless he things you might die in which case you might get acyclovir. If it's parasitical, you're in for a rough patch unless it's from a very short list.
If Ebola mutates so that it incubates for a week or so longer while the victim walks around infecting people, then it would be a bigger public health concern.
Well, I do occasionally need more than 2GB of RAM, without there being a memory leak. I've been running GIS programs, an IDE, a couple of RDBMSs, and then I fire up the old compression program...
Which brings me to my point. The question "how much swap do I need" is probably meaningless, even for a given amount of memory. There are people who find 2GB with no swap fine, and others, like me, who probably could get by with 2GB of RAM and maybe 512MB of swap, and others who might need more.
I think the 2x RAM rule of thumb has one virtue: excepting certain exotic kinds of systems, it's fairly safe that anybody who finds themselves needing more than that is probably feeling a world of pain that can only be fixed by getting more RAM. On the other hand, in most cases 2x RAM amounts to a trivial amount of disk. Probably most people could get by with 25% of RAM, but the value of thinking about whether that is true for you is very likely less than the cost of the disk space.
Common sense applies. If you have some kind of scientific computing device with a gazillion bytes of RAM, your swap requirements might not be related to your maximum RAM requirements at all. If you're running some kind of operating system that launches a bunch of rarely used garbage, you probably ought to think about your swap. I had awful problems with Vista until I figured out the page file Windows created had something like eight thousand fragments. I was actually better off getting rid of the page file
Well, there's always economies of scale. You might not have the scale to be able to hire a competent operations team, or you may find it cheaper and more certain to somebody who has a proven track record.
I dunno. It's the new thing, and one thing's that certain is lots of really horrible mistakes will be made.
You're making a mountain out of a molehill. "Acute respiratory infection" is another way of saying an elderly person with a failing immune system died of pneumonia that may or may not have turned septic.
Here in the US, yes. In the African bush, largely not not exclusively so.
One of the big killers in worldwide mortality statistics (after HIV and malaria) is, if I recall, "acute respiratory infection", which includes just about anything that didn't get an official diagnosis other than the obvious fact the person died of some kind of lung infection. That probably contains countless infectious agents as yet unknown to science.
Infectious agents often develop a kind of symbiotic relationship with their host populations. They are tolerated by the populations, but they are deadly to immunologically naive populations. Move into to take over another population's niche, and you must endure ordeal by disease.
Emerging diseases will be a major story throughout this century, mark my words. As people move into previously "pestilential" habitats, as climate change disrupts and displaces populations, we'll be seeing a lot more the likes of HIV, bird flu, and Ebola (which is probably the least dangerous of the three in a public health sense).
Now is the time for a new Apollo program, but in the biological sciences. Now is the time to pick a family of viruses, like influenza, and learn to attack it, not just by public health and immunization measures, but directly through its genetic, biochemical and biological characteristics. This would not only be of great practical benefit, it would prepare us for new agents, or new strains of old infectious agents.
The interesting thing about the tree suggestion is that we may have reached peak oil. I you plant a new forest, that forest will be a net absorber of CO2 for decades, until, as a mature trees, it reaches more of an equilibrium with some trees dying and releasing CO2 as seedlings takes their place.
At some point on the decline side of the production curve, it might well be practical to balance the remaining carbon emissions by planting trees.
I'm not sure that's true today. Just one of these devices can remove carbon a lot faster than even a large number of growing trees. The other advantage is that they can switched off.
One problem with climate change is not that humans can't adapt to a different climate, it's that they can't adapt fast enough. The same goes for ecosystems, but on a much, much longer time scale. While it may be ecologically desirable to return CO2 to pre-industrial levels, the climate impact of that may be just as bad, economically speaking, as continued warming.
We could watch the impact of sequestration, and slow or stop it as the problems it creates begin to counterbalance the ones it solves.
Of course, the huge problem with this is that every scenario has winners and losers. Russia is quite looking forward to a warm Siberia, and access to an open polar sea.
I remember the days when Notes ran with no memory protection and on only four megabytes of RAM. It did what every other program did in those days: It crashed a lot and brought the whole system down with it, every time.
Sure. I didn't find it crashy, but there's no question such platforms could crash, say through OLE or something like that. The iPhone of course is much more sophisticated and safe.
The key point is that it didn't expose confidential and proprietary information to any script kiddie with an Internet connection. It was, in fact, good enough for the CIA's email, and any kind of groupware/computer supported cooperative work application involving sensitive proprietary data you can imagine. It might be ugly as hell doing it, but it was much safer.
In any case, one thing I always tell young programmers: crashes aren't the worst thing your program can do. Managers and buyers often view crashiness as the height of badness, but in fact it is far from it. The worst things an application can do, in no particular order are: (1) lose data, (2) expose sensitive data, (3) create false data.
That, in fact, is why crashes exist. It's not that they're good, it's that they're better than the alternative. Not grasping this is very, very dangerous, especially so for many years in the Java world, with its plethora of frameworks with checked exceptions. You can easily stop your program from crashing: you catch any exception and proceed as if nothing happened. But, oh, is that so much worse than crashing.
There's been a lot of exaggeration and misdirection on both sides of this. Credit has not completely dried up... yet. However it is heading that way and the closer it gets the less root causes matter. You don't tell a lung cancer patient that he ought to have stopped smoking years ago. But you don't invite him to light up in his oxygen tent either.
The problem with the bailout bill is not the sheer dollar figure; the $700 billion, after all, doesn't have to be spent. The fund might accomplish what needs to by spending, say, $100 billion. The difference between what needs to be spent and what could be spent is the double edged sword of this proposal. The existence of a huge reserve creates confidence in the stabilization of credit -- very important.
This is how the Fed control the money supply: through manipulating expectations. People don't think the Fed is going to lower interest rates much, so the power of that lever on the economy is lessened. One of the bailout bill's provisions is to lower the floor on what the Fed can set the reserve rate (the cash on hand banks need to keep to cover possible withdrawals) to zero. Actually doing so would be, of course insane.
The Fed has models which say where the point of insanity comes; let's say that is 2%, and we're at 2.2%. If you know the floor is really 2%, then you know that the Fed can't lower the rate below 2%, then lowering the rate from 2.2% to 2.1% isn't going to change your behavior. If you don't know how low the Fed can go, then old Ben can simply be seen thoughtfully caressing the reserve rate lever. He doesn't actually have to push it to 2.1%, if you think he might, and go even lower, you are going to get your dollars into loans fast. If you don't their value could be seriously deflated sitting on your balance sheet.
The $700 billion figure is kind of like that. You'd be mad to set out to spend that kind of money on distressed investments. But the fact that you could is important. Suppose you really need $100 billion, and that's what you have available. You've spent $90 billion, and people are thinking "that about wraps it up for the fund." When you throw out the next five billion, people aren't even paying attention. It does very little to increase confidence in making a loan to some other institution, so you might as well not spend it at all. If you have $610 billion left, the impact of that five billion you're thinking about using is greater, even before you actually spend it, than the impact of spending five billion when it's half of what you've got left.
Unfortunately, that brings us to the other edge of the sword. Suppose we really only need to spend $100 billion, and the remaining $600 billion is there for psychology. Well, you've just created the biggest slush fund in history and handed it to an administration that is not renowned for its prudence, whatever else you may say about it. You could do a lot of favors with $600 billion.
The problem is Constitutional. The Executive isn't supposed to have a lot of leeway in how it spends money, but the size of that pot of money could buy a lot of indirect leeway.
Personally, I think the answer is to stage the funds. Wall Street does this all the time. When you buy a company, sometimes you snap it up, but frequently you stage the investment in order to make the company jump through a series of hoops.
So, let's say we created a $150 billion fund, and replenished it quarterly in each of the following quarters. If the $150 simply disappeared without a trace, then we could stop the infusion. This reduces the incentive for firms to make abusive claims because they might need the fund to be there next quarter. We can dream up new encumbrances on the funds every quarter as specific abuses arise. If in some quarter we only spent $10 billion in some quarter, we'd only put that much in, but if we spent $100 billion, there would be no questio
I think they're referring to the notes, which is a groupware platform capable of email, calendering, workflow management etc. Kind of like Exchange and Sharepoint.
Except they're not. It's just a web front end to Notes.
It would be interesting though,because Notes was a highly secure system for doing these things back before the Internet was in widespread use. Even though it ran on primitive platforms, it included features like two factor security, digital signatures, robust encryption for communication and local storage, revokable certificates... all kinds of amazing goodies.
And it did it on machines with no memory protection and only four megabytes of RAM.
It would be nice to be able to take work out on a mobile platform without having to expose some kind of front end to the web.
However, that's not the question. The question is, has there been any change in the mechanisms releasing methane. If so, we don't know whether we've seen the full impact of the change that has taken place, or whether the change is progressing.
It's not a cause for panic, it's something to look into. Even if this change has no global implications, the Arctic is changing in ways that make it very worth keeping an eye on.
Slashdot Mirror
No! Demand Internal Combustion voting machines.
I'm guessing there'll be a few false starts in the space porn field.
The first examples are likely to be more humorous than erotic.
If the law always served the greater good, there would be no such thing as a freedom fighter.
However, your point is a good one. Terrorism is an example of how when people decide that a transgression is justified, they aren't to selective as to who is harmed by transgression.
I don't want to make this sound more mysterious than it really is. The fundamental thing going on here is that most people either are not very good at thinking, not inclined to question their own actions, or both. Once they get into killing outside some kind of legally defined sanction, they don't make up some kind of elaborate code describing who can be killed and who cannot. They just get on with it.
The same with copyrights. Once they decide they're justified in copying a work, they don't self police the kinds of things they do with the copies they make, or refrain from making copies when certain conditions have been met. They just get on with it.
Of course copying is not anything like killing, so you wouldn't expect people to put the same amount of thought into transgressive copying that they put into transgressive killing. Ironically, they usually do put the same amount of thought into these activities: zero, unless you count rationalization that what they are doing is right.
OK. Timothy McVeigh. He thought the government had overstepped its bounds. He did not scruple, when attacking it, from blowing up a day care center.
The history of copyrights furnish plenty of examples where people who find the copyright regime to be excessive have taken liberties that encroach upon what they otherwise would accept as reasonable rights of copyright holders. In fact this argument was first made by Lord Macaulay in his second address to Parliament on copyright extension.
A modern example would be this: if a copyright holder makes it difficult for you to space shift an electronic copyright of a work, then plenty of people find a way around this, and don't scruple to distribute the fruits of their labor. Apple, on the other hand, has had great success by making their DRM less onerous to users, making space shifting relatively convenient and making it easy to recover your purchases when you no longer have access to the authorized machine. They also charge what most people regard as fair prices.
As a result, Apple has a huge number of users who don't look on the restrictions Apple has put on their purchases as punitive. It really is not that difficult to get around Apple's DRM, but there has not been an explosion in trading of DRM stripped tracks you'd expect given the ubiquity of iPods.
Well, not in the early versions of the legend. It's only as attitudes toward the law change that we get a kind of mirror-lawful Robin Hood.
Well, I don't know about whiskey, but I do know a little about wine.
Wine does, indeed, continue to age in the bottle. Brandy, however, does not, and I suspect whiskey is similar.
Wine continues to age because it continues to ferment. Yeast is opportunistic. It doesn't waste time breaking down sugar to ethanol, when it can break down sugar into some easier alcohol and grab some more sugar. When it uses up all the sugar available, it looks around for other energy sources and says, oh look, here's some big fat alcohol molecules that could be broken down into smaller alcohol molecules, and the process continues in exponentially decaying levels of activity.
This does NOT happen with brandy, because (a) you've probably distilled away the yeast and (b) the alcohol levels are are so high they're toxic to yeast.
What happens to whiskey and brandy in wood casks is mysterious to me. Wood is a very complex material. No doubt things are leaching out of the brandy and other things are leaching into the brandy, and very possibly various chemical transformations are happening at the boundary between wood and wine.
Now, here's some important points: You can't take a cheap bottle of wine and turn it into a good wine by aging. Aging only takes a very good wine that is too raw and young to drink and turns it into a very good wine that is ready to drink. And cheap wines are, by in large, not <em>bad</em> wines these days. The chemistry and biology of wine are too well known for a major producer of wines to make bad wines by accident. When there are bad wines, they are deliberately made so to appeal to bad tastes.
The difference between cheap wines and expensive wines is this: cheap wines are the product of technology; expensive wines are the product of a series of accidents we probably don't fully understand. One $7 dollar bottle of Syrah is going to be much like any other bottle of $7 Syrah: mildly fruity nose, moderately tart and peppery, nondescript finish. It doesn't matter what year the vintage is, science sees to that. It doesn't matter who the vineyard is, or whether that vineyard is in Mendocino or Australia.
If you open a $100 bottle of wine from a small French estate that produces maybe several thousand cases of wine a year, you don't know what you are going to taste. It could be different from last year; it could be different from another wine made from the same grape only a few miles away. You might hate it. You might love it. But it's going to be different than anything you've tasted before, unless it is the same wine from the same vineyard in the same year.
Therefore, I'd say for wine at least, the claims for this device are hooey. You aren't going to take bottle of liquid that is made, by advanced technology, to exact standards of uniformity and put it into a magic box that gives it a unique taste. Maybe it does change the taste in a way that most people would find preferable in double blind studies. That's certainly possible. But it won't turn it into the equivalent of a much more expensive bottle of wine, because what you pay for in wine is character.
So, you're saying civil disobedience never goes overboard?
If so, it can only be by definition, which proves my point.
Which illustrates my point. As soon as the barrier between lawful and unlawful behavior is no longer accepted as just, a determination of "fair game" for one act spreads to circumstantially related acts.
It goes from "I'll get you," to "and your little dog, too."
It is a chilly January day. I start my computer doing a long, complex calculation. Tired of waiting I decide to take a walk around the block. It is freezing out. I head back in before I get frostbite. I put my frozen hands in the warm exhaust from my laptop CPU fan.
Bingo. Work extracted from waste heat. I just need some place colder to move the heat to.
My understanding of the Brownian Ratchet idea is that if both ends of the brownian ratchet device (that is to say the the collection end, which is a paddle on a spindle, and the ratchet and pawl end, where the work is extracted) are at the same temperature, it won't work. If the energy collection end is hotter than the ratchet and pawl mechanism, then extracting work doesn't violate thermodynamics. It's just like me warming my hands: you have a place to dump the heat.
If you think about how we cool chips, we integrate the heat over large volumes and relatively long times. We take the waste heat from millions of transistors flipping millions of nanoseconds and dump it into the chip packaging and ultimately a big hunk of aluminum.
So -- and this is a big piece of conjecture from very little information -- perhaps the idea is to stick the paddle on or close to the transistor, and the ratchet and pawl mechanism onto the packaging/heat sink. Extracting work from the ratchet no longer violates thermodynamics because we have a heat gradient -- it's just a transient one over microscopic distance scales. We just grab a pico joule here and there of energy from spikes in waste heat from a particular semiconductor junction. On the macroscopic scale, we still have a big piece of aluminum in thermal equilibrium, but somehow the piece of aluminum isn't getting quite as hot.
about the origins of the Robin Hood legend.
In the earliest documented version of the legend in anything like recognizable form, Robin and his Merry Men beat and rob a monk, then later on they decide to kill the monk and his page because they were afraid they would testify against them.
The whole system of sheriffs was a form of oppression forced on the population by their Norman overlords -- that much the later legends sort of get right. Monasticism was a byproduct of a Christian society in which the highest echelons made their living by murder, robbery and extortion, and in which sins could be expunged through gifts to the church. The history of medieval monasticism was a story of reformist zeal followed by rapid accumulation of wealth and corruption, recapitulated over and over again.
But notice: While it's obvious why robbing and killing sheriffs and monks might be considered admirable, apparently this doesn't stop at that. Killing the page was considered quite as merry and shrewd.
There's a lesson in this.
When the law becomes abusive, it's too much to expect that resistance to it take the form of highly principled disobedience. Once defying the law becomes seen as just and right, fine distinctions like between a corrupt church official and an innocent child witness go out the window.
Besides, that awful burning thing in the sky is out there. I forget what they call it but it's fucking scary.
Yesss. We hates it.
You missed my point. The possibility of $700 billion makes the job doable for $100 billion.
The certainty of $700 billion would make the job undoable at any price.
It's not just the crooks on Wall Street that are the problem, by the way. It's the crooks in Washington. It's not Wall Street that needs a bailout, it's credit, global credit, from Main Street USA, to The Street in London, and beyond.
A good pilot, I have been told, is one who is extremely methodical, and follows the procedures he has been trained to do.
I suppose that means to be an amazing pilot, it helps to be a good pilot who can, at times, be a bad pilot. Certainly you see that in business all the time. An amazing businessman has to do things that go against common wisdom from time to time, but ones that do it all the time are just bad at business.
Well, the healthcare industry, if I am correct, is going to have to change its attitude. The diseases lurking outside our knowledge are not going to stay there.
The reason doctors aren't interested in diseases they don't know how to cure should be obvious. It's triage. Why should I (the doctor) waste time on you, with your interesting exotic disease, when I'm not going to change the course of your disease, given that I probably have a dozen patients I can cure waiting for my help?
My belief is that fundamental advances will improve approaches to already known diseases and reduce new diseases to something we know a bit more about.
We already do this to some degree. We have a number of shotgun style therapies that don't need to be precisely targeted. If you come in with an infection the doctor tries to figure out whether it's bacterial, viral, or parasitical. That's the reason for the two aspirins/call me in the morning prescription. If your fever goes down, he proceeds on the theory it's bacterial and prescribes an antibiotic. If it's not he proceeds on the theory it's viral and you'll have to tough it out, unless he things you might die in which case you might get acyclovir. If it's parasitical, you're in for a rough patch unless it's from a very short list.
If Ebola mutates so that it incubates for a week or so longer while the victim walks around infecting people, then it would be a bigger public health concern.
It's too fast and too obvious to spread far.
Well, I do occasionally need more than 2GB of RAM, without there being a memory leak. I've been running GIS programs, an IDE, a couple of RDBMSs, and then I fire up the old compression program...
Which brings me to my point. The question "how much swap do I need" is probably meaningless, even for a given amount of memory. There are people who find 2GB with no swap fine, and others, like me, who probably could get by with 2GB of RAM and maybe 512MB of swap, and others who might need more.
I think the 2x RAM rule of thumb has one virtue: excepting certain exotic kinds of systems, it's fairly safe that anybody who finds themselves needing more than that is probably feeling a world of pain that can only be fixed by getting more RAM. On the other hand, in most cases 2x RAM amounts to a trivial amount of disk. Probably most people could get by with 25% of RAM, but the value of thinking about whether that is true for you is very likely less than the cost of the disk space.
Common sense applies. If you have some kind of scientific computing device with a gazillion bytes of RAM, your swap requirements might not be related to your maximum RAM requirements at all. If you're running some kind of operating system that launches a bunch of rarely used garbage, you probably ought to think about your swap. I had awful problems with Vista until I figured out the page file Windows created had something like eight thousand fragments. I was actually better off getting rid of the page file
Well, there's always economies of scale. You might not have the scale to be able to hire a competent operations team, or you may find it cheaper and more certain to somebody who has a proven track record.
I dunno. It's the new thing, and one thing's that certain is lots of really horrible mistakes will be made.
Here in the US, yes. In the African bush, largely not not exclusively so.
Probably quite a few.
One of the big killers in worldwide mortality statistics (after HIV and malaria) is, if I recall, "acute respiratory infection", which includes just about anything that didn't get an official diagnosis other than the obvious fact the person died of some kind of lung infection. That probably contains countless infectious agents as yet unknown to science.
Infectious agents often develop a kind of symbiotic relationship with their host populations. They are tolerated by the populations, but they are deadly to immunologically naive populations. Move into to take over another population's niche, and you must endure ordeal by disease.
Emerging diseases will be a major story throughout this century, mark my words. As people move into previously "pestilential" habitats, as climate change disrupts and displaces populations, we'll be seeing a lot more the likes of HIV, bird flu, and Ebola (which is probably the least dangerous of the three in a public health sense).
Now is the time for a new Apollo program, but in the biological sciences. Now is the time to pick a family of viruses, like influenza, and learn to attack it, not just by public health and immunization measures, but directly through its genetic, biochemical and biological characteristics. This would not only be of great practical benefit, it would prepare us for new agents, or new strains of old infectious agents.
as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in labored puns about windows and clouds and nobody had the sense to silence them.
The interesting thing about the tree suggestion is that we may have reached peak oil. I you plant a new forest, that forest will be a net absorber of CO2 for decades, until, as a mature trees, it reaches more of an equilibrium with some trees dying and releasing CO2 as seedlings takes their place.
At some point on the decline side of the production curve, it might well be practical to balance the remaining carbon emissions by planting trees.
I'm not sure that's true today. Just one of these devices can remove carbon a lot faster than even a large number of growing trees. The other advantage is that they can switched off.
One problem with climate change is not that humans can't adapt to a different climate, it's that they can't adapt fast enough. The same goes for ecosystems, but on a much, much longer time scale. While it may be ecologically desirable to return CO2 to pre-industrial levels, the climate impact of that may be just as bad, economically speaking, as continued warming.
We could watch the impact of sequestration, and slow or stop it as the problems it creates begin to counterbalance the ones it solves.
Of course, the huge problem with this is that every scenario has winners and losers. Russia is quite looking forward to a warm Siberia, and access to an open polar sea.
I remember the days when Notes ran with no memory protection and on only four megabytes of RAM. It did what every other program did in those days: It crashed a lot and brought the whole system down with it, every time.
Sure. I didn't find it crashy, but there's no question such platforms could crash, say through OLE or something like that. The iPhone of course is much more sophisticated and safe.
The key point is that it didn't expose confidential and proprietary information to any script kiddie with an Internet connection. It was, in fact, good enough for the CIA's email, and any kind of groupware/computer supported cooperative work application involving sensitive proprietary data you can imagine. It might be ugly as hell doing it, but it was much safer.
In any case, one thing I always tell young programmers: crashes aren't the worst thing your program can do. Managers and buyers often view crashiness as the height of badness, but in fact it is far from it. The worst things an application can do, in no particular order are: (1) lose data, (2) expose sensitive data, (3) create false data.
That, in fact, is why crashes exist. It's not that they're good, it's that they're better than the alternative. Not grasping this is very, very dangerous, especially so for many years in the Java world, with its plethora of frameworks with checked exceptions. You can easily stop your program from crashing: you catch any exception and proceed as if nothing happened. But, oh, is that so much worse than crashing.
There's been a lot of exaggeration and misdirection on both sides of this. Credit has not completely dried up ... yet. However it is heading that way and the closer it gets the less root causes matter. You don't tell a lung cancer patient that he ought to have stopped smoking years ago. But you don't invite him to light up in his oxygen tent either.
The problem with the bailout bill is not the sheer dollar figure; the $700 billion, after all, doesn't have to be spent. The fund might accomplish what needs to by spending, say, $100 billion. The difference between what needs to be spent and what could be spent is the double edged sword of this proposal. The existence of a huge reserve creates confidence in the stabilization of credit -- very important.
This is how the Fed control the money supply: through manipulating expectations. People don't think the Fed is going to lower interest rates much, so the power of that lever on the economy is lessened. One of the bailout bill's provisions is to lower the floor on what the Fed can set the reserve rate (the cash on hand banks need to keep to cover possible withdrawals) to zero. Actually doing so would be, of course insane.
The Fed has models which say where the point of insanity comes; let's say that is 2%, and we're at 2.2%. If you know the floor is really 2%, then you know that the Fed can't lower the rate below 2%, then lowering the rate from 2.2% to 2.1% isn't going to change your behavior. If you don't know how low the Fed can go, then old Ben can simply be seen thoughtfully caressing the reserve rate lever. He doesn't actually have to push it to 2.1%, if you think he might, and go even lower, you are going to get your dollars into loans fast. If you don't their value could be seriously deflated sitting on your balance sheet.
The $700 billion figure is kind of like that. You'd be mad to set out to spend that kind of money on distressed investments. But the fact that you could is important. Suppose you really need $100 billion, and that's what you have available. You've spent $90 billion, and people are thinking "that about wraps it up for the fund." When you throw out the next five billion, people aren't even paying attention. It does very little to increase confidence in making a loan to some other institution, so you might as well not spend it at all. If you have $610 billion left, the impact of that five billion you're thinking about using is greater, even before you actually spend it, than the impact of spending five billion when it's half of what you've got left.
Unfortunately, that brings us to the other edge of the sword. Suppose we really only need to spend $100 billion, and the remaining $600 billion is there for psychology. Well, you've just created the biggest slush fund in history and handed it to an administration that is not renowned for its prudence, whatever else you may say about it. You could do a lot of favors with $600 billion.
The problem is Constitutional. The Executive isn't supposed to have a lot of leeway in how it spends money, but the size of that pot of money could buy a lot of indirect leeway.
Personally, I think the answer is to stage the funds. Wall Street does this all the time. When you buy a company, sometimes you snap it up, but frequently you stage the investment in order to make the company jump through a series of hoops.
So, let's say we created a $150 billion fund, and replenished it quarterly in each of the following quarters. If the $150 simply disappeared without a trace, then we could stop the infusion. This reduces the incentive for firms to make abusive claims because they might need the fund to be there next quarter. We can dream up new encumbrances on the funds every quarter as specific abuses arise. If in some quarter we only spent $10 billion in some quarter, we'd only put that much in, but if we spent $100 billion, there would be no questio
I think they're referring to the notes, which is a groupware platform capable of email, calendering, workflow management etc. Kind of like Exchange and Sharepoint.
Except they're not. It's just a web front end to Notes.
It would be interesting though,because Notes was a highly secure system for doing these things back before the Internet was in widespread use. Even though it ran on primitive platforms, it included features like two factor security, digital signatures, robust encryption for communication and local storage, revokable certificates ... all kinds of amazing goodies.
And it did it on machines with no memory protection and only four megabytes of RAM.
It would be nice to be able to take work out on a mobile platform without having to expose some kind of front end to the web.
To answer your question -- no, not in itself.
However, that's not the question. The question is, has there been any change in the mechanisms releasing methane. If so, we don't know whether we've seen the full impact of the change that has taken place, or whether the change is progressing.
It's not a cause for panic, it's something to look into. Even if this change has no global implications, the Arctic is changing in ways that make it very worth keeping an eye on.