Wait, what? How are you producing Hydrogen with a positive energy ratio?
In plant based ethanol / bio-diesel production you get net energy because the plants get energy from the sun. If you have some way to efficiently convert plant energy into hydrogen, that would be awesome - but it's pretty unlikely. My guess is that you're talking about the energy ratio for converting natural gas into hydrogen - that's great, but it's totally missing the point of trying to avoid fossil fuels. If we want to do that sort of thing, coal to diesel is a much better plan because there's more coal.
You're right about ethanol from sugar - that's the only way ethanol makes any sense. It might be worth killing our sugar tariffs and importing some ethanol from the countries that can make it efficiently. Even then, they'd still probably be better off with some crop specifically selected for bio-diesel production - the process is likely to be massively more efficient even than sugar to ethanol.
People do get new cars every once and a while. If lawmakers in the US took the following simple steps, we'd be converted to a primarily-diesel fleet in 10 years:
Mandate sulfur-free diesel fuel availability.
Legalize modern diesel engines, and provide sales incentives to manufacturers similar to what's currently being provided for hybrids.
Subsidize bio-diesel production to the same extent that corn-based ethanol production is currently subsidized.
Promote an increasingly bio-diesel heavy mix in the pumps.
The huge thing is that the fourth step - gradually shifting from petroleum-diesel to bio-diesel - gets us to 100% bio-fuels with no engine changes at all. Properly processed biodiesel will run in *every* diesel engine on the road today. With ethanol, todays cars still require 85% gasoline, and even the "flex-fuel" vehicles will still require 15% gasoline.
Oh, and we can already net energy in bio-diesel production. The same thing can't be said about ethanol - it mostly uses more natural gas energy to produce than you get back when you burn the ethanol, all while wasting prime food-farming land on fuel production.
Wait, what? I suggest you go and study the economics of money in a lot more detail before you go around blaming our reasonably low inflation rate for all our problems. It's much, much more complicated than that - most of the things that seems obvious about monetary policy become much less obvious as you get more details on how the system actually works.
All that stuff is true, but it's equally true for public officials at a state or federal level. Your vote doesn't matter two shits to them compared to the votes they can get through corporate donations and pandering to insane special interest groups.
1) we have the infrastructure to use it immediately.
We've got the infrastructure to distribute diesel fuel directly - and existing diesel engines can run on high quality commercial biodiesel with no modification at all; you can treat such biodiesel exactly like traditional diesel fuel.
2) It's not corrosive or particularly toxic.
I guess diesel fuel is a bit more toxic than ethanol, but it's nothing we haven't been dealing with for a very long time.
3) unlike algae it's grown by agricultiure so Archer Daniels Midland can get their cut of the pie.
This is the main reason, and it's a big mistake to let them turn subsidized food into fuel inefficiently. The algae to biodiesel process takes *no* food land and produces much higher energy density fuel through a much more efficient process.
Regardless, isn't our energy better spent on figuring out how to clean up the mess Bush has made, than on dwelling on unsubstantiated claims and lamenting the past?
No. Absolutely not.
We had serious election problems. Unless we fix them, we'll have serious election problems next time too. And the time after that. Claims of intentional voting fraud may be unsubstantiated, but clear problems in our election processes and, even worse, our post-election auditing procedures were very well documented. Until those problems are fixed, we aren't electing our officials democratically - at absolute best, we're electing them randomly. And with DRE voting machines, random error and voting fraud look exactly the same - it doesn't really matter if there was voting fraud in 2004, if we systematically can't detect voting fraud in future elections that's a HUGE problem.
If you are correct, and only two parties can exist, then it is time for two new parties rather than the fused parties in power now.
Unless radical voting reform occurs, the two new parties will be named "Democrats" and "Republicans" - and will be an evolution from the existing parties. If you look through the history of successful political parties in the United States, you'll see that that's how it's worked for a very long time. Our last president who didn't call himself a "Democrat" or "Republican" was Millard Fillmore in 1853. But... if you compare the political stances of the parties then and the parties now, you'll see that we have two different parties than they had in the 1850's.
The other route of attack that *might* work would be to create a single solid third party, some sort of "Green Libertarian" party. On the other hand, even if that did happen, it would still make the most sense for that party to run its candidates as a "Democrat" or "Republican".
Are you still clinging to the myth that the 2004 election was illegitimately won by Bush?
The potential effect of the voting irregularities significantly exceeded Bush's margin of victory. That means that we have no way of knowing who won, and yet a victor was declared anyway. Both candidates were utter wastes of flesh, but that doesn't matter - for democracy to work, it's pretty important that we have legitimate elections where we're sure who won.
The reason is that if the money is collected in smallish amounts, it is actually a good reflection of popularity.
Here's the problem: Who's making those rules? There only has to be a tiny loophole for such rules to favor specific types of candidate, and anyone but a trained economist paying close attention probably wouldn't even notice the problem. When compromising on rules in a committee, we can be *sure* that such loopholes will be created.
I'd much rather our democracy was based on something other than who manages to insert the better loophole in the campaign finance rules.
Still, if he is really a libertarian, why doesn't he seek the libertarin nomination.
Because it's extremely unlikely game-theoretically for a third party candidate to win. We have a two party system (mathematically), so you have to pick one of those two parties to run under. Ron Paul actually ran as a Libertarian in the late 80's, and he's smart to not make that mistake again.
If you think wireless networks will solve the last mile problem, I've got a really nice bridge to sell you.
The problem isn't that wireless network technology doesn't exist (although it's not perfect), or even that it isn't fast enough (it's pretty fast), but that in the current legal situation with licensed spectrum - there simply isn't enough legal wireless bandwidth to go around. Trying to use a single 802.11g network with ten or twenty other people sucks. WiMax isn't much faster, but it sure let's a bunch more people use it at the same time.
If we really want decent internet connections, we need to have neutral connections - and we need to not allow companies with legally granted infrastructure monopolies use that as leverage to expand into extra-fee content delivery. Allowing stuff like Verizon FIOS TV is a horrible mistake.
I had no problem understanding him at all. He does construct some complex sentences, but it's probably worth you while to learn to understand that style of speaking - it's reasonably common when talking about non-trivial topics.
Yea, video processing code is the poster child for SIMD - a 30% runtime improvement there over no SIMD is quite reasonable. On the other hand, the difference between SSE2 and SSE3 for the same code is probably somewhat smaller. In other areas, SIMD doesn't help at all, or only helps if you use techniques that are much more complex than multi-threading code.
Another interesting development is GPUs as general purpose SIMD processors...
When have you ever seen a game benchmark changed by the difference between SSE2 support and SSE3 support? From what I've seen, most game developers don't even consider using the new SSE instructions for a couple years - both waiting for AMD to support them and waiting for people to replace the vast majority of older Intel machines that don't support them.
Even when chips do support SSE type instructions, they rarely produce as drastic a performance improvement as the chip manufacturers hype would imply. Writing a program for SIMD parallelism (like SSE) is just as hard as writing it for a multi-core processor, and works for far fewer workloads.
The early Barcelonas will be designed for dual socket servers, and they'll be released at reasonably low clock speeds. If you want to make an 8 core workstation that isn't super fast on single threaded tasks, then they'll be a great deal. If you want a single socket system, you'll be spending more money for lower speeds than if you waited for the Phenom processors.
I see no reason why the detection team would be prevented from using a boot CD to examine the contents of the hard drive, for example, perhaps even loading their OWN virtual machine to virtualize the malware-infected system and monitor for suspicious activity.
It sounds like the rootkit is designed to be undetectable for stock anti-virus software - i.e. the most likely conditions to be found in the wild. Even the CPU usage requirement makes sense there - once you consider 100 detection modules for different rootkits in a piece of anti-virus software, even a whole second seems like way too much CPU time per rootkit detection.
But don't try and pretend that frequency of exploits and security have any inherent causal relationship.
I would go so far as so say that you could *define* security as whether or not a box will get cracked, and that things like number of successful attacks per machine and what percentage of the time a system has a published and unpatched root hole are related figures.
Sure, that doesn't give us good numbers in questions like: Which is more secure, Solaris or FreeBSD - but compared to a stock install of Windows XP those systems are, in unquestionable fact, more secure simply because they don't get auto-cracked in 15 minutes if exposed to the internet.
And of course it goes without saying that claiming a program is more secure because it had fewer vulnerabilities reported defies all logic.
That depends. It seems perfectly logical to me to say that OpenBSD is relatively secure for an OS, and to use its two remote vulnerabilities in 10 years as evidence of that claim. The requirement there though is that OpenBSD is open source, and that it's reputation makes it so that any security researcher who finds a security problem in it gets to boast for years.
Updates on Vista and updates on, say, Ubuntu are quite different. The automatic updates on Vista upgrade the core OS components. The updates on Ubuntu update all of the officially supported pacakges - everything from OpenOffice to The Gimp to Freeciv. If there's a security bug in Photoshop's processing of.tiff files, Vista automatic updates won't help you.
Mac OS X handles things *exactly* the same way that Ubuntu does. It prompts an administrator for their own user password before allowing them to perform any admin actions.
I'm not sure where your "sudo command line" comments come from - sure, some sort of "sudo apt-get install xxx" is the fast and easy way to explain things in web HOWTOS but all that functionality can be easily found in the GUI Package Manager as well... it's just hard to paste mouse clicks.
Why? A Dell with Ubuntu works just as well as a Dell with Vista. Anything else is just hobbyists screwing around - which I admit is fun, but it's not a very good basis for comparing operating systems in the real world.
In the end, comparing operating systems based on how they handle marginally supported hardware is a waste of time. The reason you have the hardware is to run the software - selecting hardware that works with the software should be a blatantly obvious thing to do.
Sure, it's nice to be able to play around installing a bunch of different operating systems on one computer, but that's what that is: playing around. If you're planning on getting work done with a computer, the normal model is this: Buy a computer with an OS on it, use it with that OS, recycle it years later. Linux has the feature that you can frequently recycle Windows machines into Linux machines, but that's getting lucky and should be treated as such.
If you seriously want a Linux desktop, I suggest the following install procedure: Buy one from Dell or System76.
Ubuntu is a zillion times worse because it sets some weird 32-bit graphics mode for the install process. What's up? 256 colors not enough for an installer?
Why not just use the alternate install CD? That'll work anywhere, and it's even more compatible than vesa mode.
You did miss something. I suggest actually reading the list of advisories: http://secunia.com/product/10611/?task=advisories That's all the advisories for Ubuntu 6.06... for all time. How many of those are for programs that you've even heard of, much less would be installed on your machine?
Check out this highly-critical security vulnerability for the xmms music player:
Sven Krewitt of Secunia Research discovered that XMMS did not correctly handle BMP images when loading GUI skins. If a user were tricked into loading a specially crafted skin, a remote attacker could execute arbitrary code with user privileges.
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Wait, what? How are you producing Hydrogen with a positive energy ratio?
In plant based ethanol / bio-diesel production you get net energy because the plants get energy from the sun. If you have some way to efficiently convert plant energy into hydrogen, that would be awesome - but it's pretty unlikely. My guess is that you're talking about the energy ratio for converting natural gas into hydrogen - that's great, but it's totally missing the point of trying to avoid fossil fuels. If we want to do that sort of thing, coal to diesel is a much better plan because there's more coal.
You're right about ethanol from sugar - that's the only way ethanol makes any sense. It might be worth killing our sugar tariffs and importing some ethanol from the countries that can make it efficiently. Even then, they'd still probably be better off with some crop specifically selected for bio-diesel production - the process is likely to be massively more efficient even than sugar to ethanol.
People do get new cars every once and a while. If lawmakers in the US took the following simple steps, we'd be converted to a primarily-diesel fleet in 10 years:
The huge thing is that the fourth step - gradually shifting from petroleum-diesel to bio-diesel - gets us to 100% bio-fuels with no engine changes at all. Properly processed biodiesel will run in *every* diesel engine on the road today. With ethanol, todays cars still require 85% gasoline, and even the "flex-fuel" vehicles will still require 15% gasoline.
Oh, and we can already net energy in bio-diesel production. The same thing can't be said about ethanol - it mostly uses more natural gas energy to produce than you get back when you burn the ethanol, all while wasting prime food-farming land on fuel production.
Wait, what? I suggest you go and study the economics of money in a lot more detail before you go around blaming our reasonably low inflation rate for all our problems. It's much, much more complicated than that - most of the things that seems obvious about monetary policy become much less obvious as you get more details on how the system actually works.
All that stuff is true, but it's equally true for public officials at a state or federal level. Your vote doesn't matter two shits to them compared to the votes they can get through corporate donations and pandering to insane special interest groups.
We've got the infrastructure to distribute diesel fuel directly - and existing diesel engines can run on high quality commercial biodiesel with no modification at all; you can treat such biodiesel exactly like traditional diesel fuel.
I guess diesel fuel is a bit more toxic than ethanol, but it's nothing we haven't been dealing with for a very long time.
This is the main reason, and it's a big mistake to let them turn subsidized food into fuel inefficiently. The algae to biodiesel process takes *no* food land and produces much higher energy density fuel through a much more efficient process.
No. Absolutely not.
We had serious election problems. Unless we fix them, we'll have serious election problems next time too. And the time after that. Claims of intentional voting fraud may be unsubstantiated, but clear problems in our election processes and, even worse, our post-election auditing procedures were very well documented. Until those problems are fixed, we aren't electing our officials democratically - at absolute best, we're electing them randomly. And with DRE voting machines, random error and voting fraud look exactly the same - it doesn't really matter if there was voting fraud in 2004, if we systematically can't detect voting fraud in future elections that's a HUGE problem.
Unless radical voting reform occurs, the two new parties will be named "Democrats" and "Republicans" - and will be an evolution from the existing parties. If you look through the history of successful political parties in the United States, you'll see that that's how it's worked for a very long time. Our last president who didn't call himself a "Democrat" or "Republican" was Millard Fillmore in 1853. But... if you compare the political stances of the parties then and the parties now, you'll see that we have two different parties than they had in the 1850's.
The other route of attack that *might* work would be to create a single solid third party, some sort of "Green Libertarian" party. On the other hand, even if that did happen, it would still make the most sense for that party to run its candidates as a "Democrat" or "Republican".
The potential effect of the voting irregularities significantly exceeded Bush's margin of victory. That means that we have no way of knowing who won, and yet a victor was declared anyway. Both candidates were utter wastes of flesh, but that doesn't matter - for democracy to work, it's pretty important that we have legitimate elections where we're sure who won.
Here's the problem: Who's making those rules? There only has to be a tiny loophole for such rules to favor specific types of candidate, and anyone but a trained economist paying close attention probably wouldn't even notice the problem. When compromising on rules in a committee, we can be *sure* that such loopholes will be created.
I'd much rather our democracy was based on something other than who manages to insert the better loophole in the campaign finance rules.
Because it's extremely unlikely game-theoretically for a third party candidate to win. We have a two party system (mathematically), so you have to pick one of those two parties to run under. Ron Paul actually ran as a Libertarian in the late 80's, and he's smart to not make that mistake again.
If you think wireless networks will solve the last mile problem, I've got a really nice bridge to sell you.
The problem isn't that wireless network technology doesn't exist (although it's not perfect), or even that it isn't fast enough (it's pretty fast), but that in the current legal situation with licensed spectrum - there simply isn't enough legal wireless bandwidth to go around. Trying to use a single 802.11g network with ten or twenty other people sucks. WiMax isn't much faster, but it sure let's a bunch more people use it at the same time.
If we really want decent internet connections, we need to have neutral connections - and we need to not allow companies with legally granted infrastructure monopolies use that as leverage to expand into extra-fee content delivery. Allowing stuff like Verizon FIOS TV is a horrible mistake.
I had no problem understanding him at all. He does construct some complex sentences, but it's probably worth you while to learn to understand that style of speaking - it's reasonably common when talking about non-trivial topics.
Yea, video processing code is the poster child for SIMD - a 30% runtime improvement there over no SIMD is quite reasonable. On the other hand, the difference between SSE2 and SSE3 for the same code is probably somewhat smaller. In other areas, SIMD doesn't help at all, or only helps if you use techniques that are much more complex than multi-threading code.
Another interesting development is GPUs as general purpose SIMD processors...
When have you ever seen a game benchmark changed by the difference between SSE2 support and SSE3 support? From what I've seen, most game developers don't even consider using the new SSE instructions for a couple years - both waiting for AMD to support them and waiting for people to replace the vast majority of older Intel machines that don't support them.
Even when chips do support SSE type instructions, they rarely produce as drastic a performance improvement as the chip manufacturers hype would imply. Writing a program for SIMD parallelism (like SSE) is just as hard as writing it for a multi-core processor, and works for far fewer workloads.
The early Barcelonas will be designed for dual socket servers, and they'll be released at reasonably low clock speeds. If you want to make an 8 core workstation that isn't super fast on single threaded tasks, then they'll be a great deal. If you want a single socket system, you'll be spending more money for lower speeds than if you waited for the Phenom processors.
It sounds like the rootkit is designed to be undetectable for stock anti-virus software - i.e. the most likely conditions to be found in the wild. Even the CPU usage requirement makes sense there - once you consider 100 detection modules for different rootkits in a piece of anti-virus software, even a whole second seems like way too much CPU time per rootkit detection.
I would go so far as so say that you could *define* security as whether or not a box will get cracked, and that things like number of successful attacks per machine and what percentage of the time a system has a published and unpatched root hole are related figures.
Sure, that doesn't give us good numbers in questions like: Which is more secure, Solaris or FreeBSD - but compared to a stock install of Windows XP those systems are, in unquestionable fact, more secure simply because they don't get auto-cracked in 15 minutes if exposed to the internet.
That depends. It seems perfectly logical to me to say that OpenBSD is relatively secure for an OS, and to use its two remote vulnerabilities in 10 years as evidence of that claim. The requirement there though is that OpenBSD is open source, and that it's reputation makes it so that any security researcher who finds a security problem in it gets to boast for years.
Updates on Vista and updates on, say, Ubuntu are quite different. The automatic updates on Vista upgrade the core OS components. The updates on Ubuntu update all of the officially supported pacakges - everything from OpenOffice to The Gimp to Freeciv. If there's a security bug in Photoshop's processing of .tiff files, Vista automatic updates won't help you.
Except for the fact that this software is distributed as a .deb archive, and dpkg doesn't support installing 32 bit packages on a 64 bit system.
Mac OS X handles things *exactly* the same way that Ubuntu does. It prompts an administrator for their own user password before allowing them to perform any admin actions.
I'm not sure where your "sudo command line" comments come from - sure, some sort of "sudo apt-get install xxx" is the fast and easy way to explain things in web HOWTOS but all that functionality can be easily found in the GUI Package Manager as well... it's just hard to paste mouse clicks.
Why? A Dell with Ubuntu works just as well as a Dell with Vista. Anything else is just hobbyists screwing around - which I admit is fun, but it's not a very good basis for comparing operating systems in the real world.
In the end, comparing operating systems based on how they handle marginally supported hardware is a waste of time. The reason you have the hardware is to run the software - selecting hardware that works with the software should be a blatantly obvious thing to do.
Sure, it's nice to be able to play around installing a bunch of different operating systems on one computer, but that's what that is: playing around. If you're planning on getting work done with a computer, the normal model is this: Buy a computer with an OS on it, use it with that OS, recycle it years later. Linux has the feature that you can frequently recycle Windows machines into Linux machines, but that's getting lucky and should be treated as such.
If you seriously want a Linux desktop, I suggest the following install procedure: Buy one from Dell or System76.
Why not just use the alternate install CD? That'll work anywhere, and it's even more compatible than vesa mode.
You did miss something. I suggest actually reading the list of advisories: http://secunia.com/product/10611/?task=advisories
That's all the advisories for Ubuntu 6.06... for all time. How many of those are for programs that you've even heard of, much less would be installed on your machine?
Check out this highly-critical security vulnerability for the xmms music player: