Ya, I'm willing to bet that he didn't do anything terribly hard, and probably themed to the book. My ex-girlfriend had read several of his books, and showed me a couple of his cyphers to decrypt, which I managed to do in a few minutes each.
As far as the judge, he should be college educated, and has quite likely taken some sort of cryptography or computer classes, and he may have retained some of that knowledge.
He may also be like some of us too, playing with cryptography in our spare time. We all have our hobbies. He may also just play with toy trains or model ships in bottles, but hey, what he does in his spare time is his business.
And unfortunately, it doesn't take any sort of credentials to be an "environmentalist". The real environmentalists that I've known, who actually understand the factors involved would be pushing for windmills.
There are too many armchair environmentalists who, with limited information, make a whole lot of noise and slow down progress on useful projects.
I have a 7' wide 16:9 screen, with a HD DLP projector, attached to a HD10-250 DirecTV receiver. I'm *VERY* pleased with it.
I was with a friend at Best Buy a few days ago, and we were walking through looking at TV's. All I could realy say about any of them was "oh how cute, it's so small." That was in the big screen LCD and Plasma area. They had a projector display, but their projectors were all out of adjustment. It's like they're trying to show that the front projection isn't as good.
We were picking up something for his new computer, that I happened to be setting up in my living room. While he wasn't really paying attention, I hooked his computer's component out (nice video card), and his digital audio out to my equipment. We kept talking, and then started messing with his head.
"Hey wanna see something cool?"
"Sure, what".
I hit the power on the projector, and while it was warming up, I switched resolutions and brought up a streaming porn feed. There's a world of difference between watching something on a 17" screen, and watching it on a 7' wide screen with 6.1 surround sound. You've never seen breasts so big in your living room.:)
There is a disadvantage to having a really *REALLY* big screen though. You no longer want to go to the movie theater and sit in an uncomfortable chair, where you can't pause the movie to take a leak. You also will have your friends bringing new release movies over to your house all the time to watch with you. Oh, the pain.. hehe
I've been using mine for about 2 years now, and am 3/4 through the bulb life. That's 1500 hours of TV's, movies, and video games. The only fatalities have been my old subwoofer, and my PS2.
I'm satisfied with the DirecTV HR10-250. Plenty of HiDef stuff to watch. I'll be happier when there's more, but it's getting better.
I've already gone through the whole hacking thing. I have a upgraded HDVR2 in the bedroom, a standalone series 2 TiVo with a regular receiver in the computer, and a standalone series 1 TiVo in the kids room. The only thing that I'd like to get out of the HR10-250 is being able to use the internet for updates, so I can ditch the damned phone line. It's fun having a shell on my TiVo, but honestly, I never did much else but play with it. Ooohh, look, I can ping from my TiVo!:) Folders for shows is nice on the HDVR2, which I kinda miss on the HR10-250. From what I've read, I can't go as high with the versions, so I'm not going to bother.
But I hope you understand what I'm saying. I've delt with a lot of environmentalists, and even if they would seem to be on the same page, they aren't.
One in particular that I can remember is a fresh water problem in one city. The city growth has forced them to pump in fresh water from hundreds of miles. Besides the pipes and infrastructure, it's causing problems in all the areas being pumped from. Fresh water lakes have lower levels. Some wetlands are drying up. Sinkholes are forming because the water table is so much lower.
Environmentalists were pitching an absolute fit, and rightly so, because the natural environment was being destroyed.
The city was sympathetic. They need to provide water to the population, but they also do care about the environment. Years of telling the population to conserve water hasn't made a significant difference. The city prepared to build a desalination plant. It would take sea water, and make it clean drinking water. This first plant would provide 10% of their supply.
One particularly loud "environmentalist" group started screaming about the wetlands around the plant. The salt from the processing would be pumped back into the salt water. They claimed it would kill all the sealife in the area. The water would simply become a large heavily salted dead area.
I found the site for the plant. It's salt output is 1.0% to 1.5% higher than the natural water. The normal fluctuation is up to 100% by season. They've reduced the pumping of ground water by 10%. They're planning on bring it up to over 50% by 2008.
The some environmentalists in the area are still pitching a fit, of course. You can't make everyone happy all the time. Of course, the ones focused on their lakes drying up are very happy.
You'll find, the environmentalists who see the existing power plants will love the windmills. The ones worried about the birds will still freak out, even if only one a year gets hit by a windmill blade. Oh, and god forbid they may want to put a windmill where some critter may live. It simply comes down to the fact that you can't make everyone happy all the time.
Hehe. I made a similiar comment on my site when I ran the story.
"...and only very occasionally do birds get hit by the windmill blades. More small birds are killed by getting hit by moving cars, caught by house cats, or flying into glass windows."
I know you were just shot down by a bunch of other people, but let me explain why I think it won't work.
1) you need capital, and lots of it. You'll need to maintain a server farm just for supporting the requests to check the keys, as well as a staff to maintain the abuse complaints, support the mail admins, etc, etc, etc.. Just imagine, if 90% of the admins on the internet with mail servers got with your system, and 1% of them were the typical daily complainers, you'd be flooded with support requests. Your server farm would need to be insanely redundant. You can't have downtime, or certified messages don't get marked as certified. You would *HAVE* to charge for the service, as you would have such a large infrastructure to maintain.
2) You're effectively duplicating the "goodmail" system. They are charging per message, because they know each message puts a load on their system.
3) It wouldn't work, because places like AOL would have their own key, but you can't guarantee that every user at AOL would be good. Can you shut down an entire ISP based on the action of a few users? If you try to track a ratio of sent emails to complaints, you'd go nuts collecting statistical information, which would go nowhere.
4) You would be assuming that every admin would be playing nicely. Say someone like me got a certification for every domain in our control (thousands of them). You could verify them, see that they aren't sending spam, but follow months, random domains on random networks, registered to various companies in various locations would start spamming with their certification.
Spammers play a variation of this now, because of the IP blacklists. They'll pay for many internet connections in various locations. I knew of some companies that would maintain hundreds of domains, with dozens of servers in several different colo's, each set of servers with 100Mb/s connections from different providers. They would spam from one set for a day or two, and then switch to a different line or colo. They'd roll between them, so any one provider would only see complaints for one day every month or two. It's not enough to terminate their service, and the spammers can continue without even pausing. Sometimes they'll cover the difference in traffic with something else, like web hosting.
5) If you don't host the authentication server farm yourself, you'd have to trust others. I like SpamCop, and we host a mirror for them. They have exclusive access to their server. I'm the only person in our company with the password, so I know that no one will ever mess with it. They are careful about who they allow to host mirrors. If you used a distributed network to handle authentication, what happens if a significant portion of the distributed network turned out to be in the hands of someone bad? It could be that they insert their own bogus codes into 50% of the authentication servers, or they could simply replace your authentication code with their own. As we all know, reverse engineering isn't impossible, it just takes a little time.
6) You would need the cooperation of everyone running a mail server, like it or not. You're suggesting starting a new standard, which we already know takes a long time to implement. You'd need the software vendors to make their software work, as well as the admin of every mail server to implement it. It's not as easy as putting something together for sendmail, there are a lot of different mail server softwares out there.
7) You'd need to get huge companies to agree to use your service. The politics required for business are outragous. It would be amazing if you could get Google, Microsoft, and AOL to cooperate in a scheme like this. More than likely, if you got one involved, the others would refuse because you were dealing with the first. They don't really care about the common good, they care about the bottom line.
Our own advancements in medicine and society are to blame here.
Medicine allows us to live longer and healtier. We survive diseases that should have killed us at young ages, and live to much older ages.
Society dictates that killing is wrong. We have never been a perfectly peaceful society, but now instead of pruning the ranks, we let them live. Years ago, if someone wronged someone else, for whatever reason, it wouldn't be unreasonable for that person to be killed. Now, if a person wrongs you, you may sue him. You may charge him. He may end up in jail for years.
Sure, it makes for a kinder society, but how much better have we actually gotten? I would be willing to bet that there are lots of people in the middle east who would say America is not the perfect society.
Long ago, we needed the human population to grow and thrive. With a very small population, there was the possibility that the species would fail if it didn't reproduce. We are well beyond that now. I don't have a nice solution about what to do with it now. World wars have always been good for pruning the population. A nice prolific plague has always done well. Right now, we're a bit too peaceful and healthy for the population to drop significantly. The more practical but not well accepted options are the makings of futuristic scifi (Logan's Run, Soyolant Green, etc).
Just yesterday, there was a guy on a bicycle, on a 4 lane road. He was *TRYING* to be good about riding on the road. He came up to a line of parked cars, and was trying to go past them. I was in the right lane, and held a car length or two behind him, because I couldn't go past. Traffic built up behind me. Traffic was too heavy beside me for me to change lanes to go around. He was doing 20mph, and traffic was doing 50mph.
I passed him when traffic was clear to my left. The next car got half way out of the lane to go around, and the next several cars missed him by inches. There was nowhere else for him to ride.
Should all traffic be reduced to 20mph because people on bicycles want to ride on the road, or should an extra lane be built for bicycles, so they aren't slowing down traffic and risking their own lives.
If I was riding a bicycle, I'd prefer to live. I used to ride a few miles on a fairly regular basis. It was nice. There were nice wide sidewalks, built that wide so people on bicycles could use them. Part of the ride was a bicycle trail. There were frequent cutouts to access local roads and businesses. I was safe from traffic, and I wasn't slowing anyone down.
Honestly, if I'm doing 50mph in a 50mph zone, I don't like slowing down for either a grandmother doing 20mph in her Cadillac, or a bicycle doing 20mph.
I always took their site as a joke. But hey, if they are believers, more power to them. Save the planet, kill yourself.:) If they'd be nice enough to take it upon themselves to thin the population off, we'll have less problems. That is, if they are thinning the population by killing themselves, not others.:)
They've been around for years, so it's not a new nutjob idea. I'm fairly sure it's a joke.
Sadly, it's not all environmentalists all the time. It's various groups contricting each other. It's all in what their own agenda is. The worst are the "Me too!" crowd. They'll take any side with very limited information, and get lots of people in on the act. The "Me too!" crowd are fun to play with though. You can ask them for details, and they'll never be able to provide them.
An unfortunate side effect of the Internet has been there are even more people in the "Me too!" crowds. They get a very little bit of information, and keep going with it. Consider those stupid fowarded emails that keep coming through. Aparently someone yesterday made $1000 by forwarding me an email saying that Microsoft and AOL have formed a partnership and are paying $1000 per email that they send out to test the new MS/AOL forwarding system. Last week, some kid with cancer was being saved by someone else forwarding an email to me.
Are you against the pollution that the coal fired plants put off, and the potential radiation from a nuclear plant? Then you'd like wind, solar, hydroelectric, and wave power.
Are you worried about the woodland critters and plants? Then solar is probably out, because you'd be covering the ground to some degree with panels.
Are you worried about the birds? Then wind power is out.
Are you worried about fish? Then hydroelectric is out.
Are you worried about whales? Then wave power is out.
There are non-environmental people against various things too. I believe it was in Connecticut, the local government was pushing for wind power. It wasn't the environmentalists there complaining, it was the locals complaining about the potential for noise and, god forbid, windmills being seen if you were to drive 20 miles and climb up on a hill to get a look.
I think nuclear plants look pretty cool. They have a particular asthetic look to the domed reactor and huge cooling towers. Then again, it's not quite as pleasing to take a boat anywhere near the warm water outlet and not find anything living in the water.
I'm all for solar, wind, and wave power. Not only can it be deployed fairly easily, but it can eventually be moved for whatever reason. Maybe another location is found to be more productive. Hydroelectric is nice, but it does require a huge building project to accomplish it, and usually flooding large areas to get the required water pressure.
I live by a really great place to put a wind and solar farm. There's a ridge with almost constant wind. The south facing side of the hills could be home to huge solar panel arrays. The residents in the valley below would never have it. There are a few million of them, living in smog year round. Clean power would destroy their pretty view. Of course, they can't usually see the view through the smog.
Environmentalists would complain that it would hurt the natural ecosystem. Sure, some coyotes may get killed. If the neighbors wouldn't have complained about gunshots, I would have killed some on my own. What about the small woodland critters? Well, my cats killed off quite a few, probably numbering near the same as any power generation systems would have. In nature, things die. It's not a perfect world, even though people have their perfect picture of it in their minds. I guess most environmentalists have never seen a house cat come home with parts of a small bird, snake, lizard, or anything else that may move enough for a cat to play with. It's nothing compared to what the larger animals do to each other.
In the last year, I've had my ID checked exactly once because of this. It was by a person being trained at a truck stop. The trainer was going through the drill perfectly. They said "Check ID", and they asked to see my drivers license.
Depending on what they do with the information on the tag, what's to stop someone from forging their own passport on say an airplane?
Say a bad guy is sitting beside the innocent victim on a plane. With a small RFID reader, you've already picked up the info on their ID. You see their name on their luggage tag, brief case, notebook, or whatever they may have. They already have a false passport prepared, so they just go into the bathroom, and print the cover page with the name, recode the RFID tag in their false passport to the victim's RFID information. Now they are the victim. All they have to do is be sure to get through immigration first. The victim will be held up indefinately, and the bad guy is already through. By the time the time they figure out what happened, the bad guy is already in a cab to destinations unknown.
It woudn't have to be with such great timing. The bad guy could get the info from any traveler in an airport, it doesn't matter where the victim is going. Get someone coming back into the country, and then leave the country at their leasure, and travel as them.
A question I've brought up before with the RFID tags in general is, what if the government puts the readers in the vehicle sensor loops at major intersections. It would be pretty easy to do, and they would be able to track anyone, as long as they have a known RFID tag with them. The tags can be in anything, since they're starting to be embedded in clothing and other products like automobile tires. It would be a simple association of what products have been seen with which people.
I agree. Before publishing anything like this, I would have monitored as many servers as possible, for a much longer duration. If the article had said that they were monitoring all 160 machines over a 1 month period, I would have been more impressed with the accuracy. It may be that they perform like this by design, but it doesn't sound quite right. If the host isn't accepting connections, then it's too busy. They should have deployed more machines to be able to take the full brunt of their mail load. I can't imagine they're using too terribly fancy machines. Our generic machine costs roughly $3k. If we need 10 more, we get 10 more. If we need 10 more machines, obviously the demand is there for them.
I don't exactly know how they handle their backend, but they already have the scheme in place, obviously.
I've had hotmail, yahoo, and gmail accounts for years.
I'm most satisfied with my gmail account.
hotmail is ok, but it sucks that my accounts have sometimes been suspended due to inactivity. It deletes all my mail, so that one important email from a year ago is gone. A few times, I've had it throw up server errors instead of the page. I have a screen shot somewhere of one of them.
Yahoo, I've seen problems with too many time. My girlfriend has a paid account with them. Why, I don't know. She uses her POP3 client, because the web client screws up too much. The POP3 client has occasional problems. Probably once every couple weeks.
I archive my mail over at gmail. 18,900 messages taking up 969Mb. Occasionally, messages get lost or misfiltered, but it isn't too bad.
And, of course, I run my own mail server. My users freak out when it's down. Downtime is usually because I'm upgrading something. Ya, we all have to reboot for kernel upgrades occasionally. They were particularly tweeked when I switched POP3/IMAP servers, and changed over from Mbox to MailDir. It wasn't quite as smooth as I would have liked, but one day of intermittent problems and the next several months of 0 downtime is acceptable. We only process about 160,000 messages/day, so we're not quite on the scale of Yahoo. Then again, we only use one server. Well, 3 actually, but one primary one that does all the grunt work.
I get spam at all the accounts, but that's probably because I've used them all a good bit at some point in time. HotMail was the worst free service, but now they're probably the best for filtering spam, without bothering real messages.
My own mail server is probably the best, percentage wise. I'm not the best admin out there, but I'm pretty good. The mail always gets delivered. The worst problems I have are client side issues, usually with outlook. The best complaint, I got a few weeks ago. A user said 50% of his mail had disappeared from his account. I checked his mail directory, and he had deleted just about 50% of them. He then told me he was playing with his filtering, and it must not be quite right. Can't blame the mail service for user errors.
Pain is an electrical impulse being sent from a nerve to the brain, signaling the brain that pain exists. The brain then comprehends the pain, and responds appropriately.
If you are mentally strong enough to ignore those sensations, there is no pain.
Most people have a problem with doing this. Instead of being able to ignore the pain, they focus on it. People who can ignore the pain are usually the ones who can ignore a dripping faucet or a nagging wife. People who can't ignore the sounds are the ones that tweak out about them. Being able to hear sounds is based on the same concepts. Your ear translates the sound waves into electrical impulses, which the brain comprehends.
Kids are the best for this, as far as ignoring sounds go. Try telling a kid to clean something up, or do their homework, and you'll see.:)
I play a game with some people. I've let girls pinch me with their fingernails until they break the skin. I'll hold a conversation with them while they're doing it. It's entertaining, and of course the macho "oohh, that doesn't hurt." Sure, the sensation is there, I just ignore it. Anyone can.
I've had dental work done with no ansthetic, multiple piercings, and had nasty cuts. Sometimes you just have to deal with it, it doesn't do any good to cry about it. There's a 6" scar on my leg, from a wound that I treated myself. You'd think cleaning it with alcohol should have hurt. Other people in the room flinched. I just refused to feel it.
I started singing the "Vaporware" song before I even hit 'comments'.
But if he does manage to manufacture them, I'll finally have somewhere to store my plans for my ZPM, FTL drive, and BFG. Maybe there will still be room for the my plans to conquer this planet. Oh never mind, that sounds like the plans.:)
1) Read Slashdot
2) Find Petabyte hard drive
3) ???
4) Conquer the world!
Can't you run thin clients (of some variety) over the Internet? Like the variety that consist of a boot disk (floppy, CD, or boot ROM) and pull the rest from elsewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
Ya, I'm willing to bet that he didn't do anything terribly hard, and probably themed to the book. My ex-girlfriend had read several of his books, and showed me a couple of his cyphers to decrypt, which I managed to do in a few minutes each.
As far as the judge, he should be college educated, and has quite likely taken some sort of cryptography or computer classes, and he may have retained some of that knowledge.
He may also be like some of us too, playing with cryptography in our spare time. We all have our hobbies. He may also just play with toy trains or model ships in bottles, but hey, what he does in his spare time is his business.
OOOhhh, NIMBY is a huge factor.
And unfortunately, it doesn't take any sort of credentials to be an "environmentalist". The real environmentalists that I've known, who actually understand the factors involved would be pushing for windmills.
There are too many armchair environmentalists who, with limited information, make a whole lot of noise and slow down progress on useful projects.
Don't assume ROT13.
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2 uokvjeqfgLcgkgzvquvruceitgcosyhmcfrosb
3 vplwkfrghMdhlhawrvwsvdfjuhdptzindgsptc
4 wqmxlgshiNeimibxswxtwegkviequajoehtqud
5 xrnymhtijOfjnjcytxyuxfhlwjfrvbkpfiurve
6 ysozniujkPgkokdzuyzvygimxkgswclqgjvswf
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9 bvrcqlxmnSjnrngcxbcybjlpanjvzfotjmyvzi
10 cwsdrmynoTkosohdycdzckmqbokwagpuknzwaj
11 dxtesnzopUlptpiezdeadlnrcplxbhqvloaxbk
12 eyuftoapqVmquqjfaefbemosdqmycirwmpbycl
13 fzvgupbqrWnrvrkgbfgcfnpternzdjsxnqczdm
14 gawhvqcrsXoswslhcghdgoqufsoaektyordaen
15 hbxiwrdstYptxtmidhiehprvgtpbfluzpsebfo
16 icyjxsetuZquyunjeijfiqswhuqcgmvaqtfcgp
17 jdzkytfuvArvzvokfjkgjrtxivrdhnwbrugdhq
18 kealzugvwBswawplgklhksuyjwseioxcsvheir
19 lfbmavhwxCtxbxqmhlmiltvzkxtfjpydtwifjs
20 mgcnbwixyDuycyrnimnjmuwalyugkqzeuxjgkt
21 nhdocxjyzEvzdzsojnoknvxbmzvhlrafvykhlu
22 oiepdykzaFwaeatpkoplowycnawimsbgwzlimv
23 pjfqezlabGxbfbuqlpqmpxzdobxjntchxamjnw
24 qkgrfambcHycgcvrmqrnqyaepcykoudiybnkox
25 rlhsgbncdIzdhdwsnrsorzbfqdzlpvejzcolpy
I hope he's not screwing with us. I'm still trying to break the code.
For reference, here's all the different ROT's.
1 tnjuidpefKbfjfyuptuqtbdhsfbnrxglbeqnra
2 uokvjeqfgLcgkgzvquvruceitgcosyhmcfrosb
3 vplwkfrghMdhlhawrvwsvdfjuhdptzindgsptc
4 wqmxlgshiNeimibxswxtwegkviequajoehtqud
5 xrnymhtijOfjnjcytxyuxfhlwjfrvbkpfiurve
6 ysozniujkPgkokdzuyzvygimxkgswclqgjvswf
7 ztpaojvklQhlpleavzawzhjnylhtxdmrhkwtxg
8 auqbpkwlmRimqmfbwabxaikozmiuyensilxuyh
9 bvrcqlxmnSjnrngcxbcybjlpanjvzfotjmyvzi
10 cwsdrmynoTkosohdycdzckmqbokwagpuknzwaj
11 dxtesnzopUlptpiezdeadlnrcplxbhqvloaxbk
12 eyuftoapqVmquqjfaefbemosdqmycirwmpbycl
13 fzvgupbqrWnrvrkgbfgcfnpternzdjsxnqczdm
14 gawhvqcrsXoswslhcghdgoqufsoaektyordaen
15 hbxiwrdstYptxtmidhiehprvgtpbfluzpsebfo
16 icyjxsetuZquyunjeijfiqswhuqcgmvaqtfcgp
17 jdzkytfuvArvzvokfjkgjrtxivrdhnwbrugdhq
18 kealzugvwBswawplgklhksuyjwseioxcsvheir
19 lfbmavhwxCtxbxqmhlmiltvzkxtfjpydtwifjs
20 mgcnbwixyDuycyrnimnjmuwalyugkqzeuxjgkt
21 nhdocxjyzEvzdzsojnoknvxbmzvhlrafvykhlu
22 oiepdykzaFwaeatpkoplowycnawimsbgwzlimv
23 pjfqezlabGxbfbuqlpqmpxzdobxjntchxamjnw
24 qkgrfambcHycgcvrmqrnqyaepcykoudiybnkox
25 rlhsgbncdIzdhdwsnrsorzbfqdzlpvejzcolpy
Go with the front projection. Seriously.
I have a 7' wide 16:9 screen, with a HD DLP projector, attached to a HD10-250 DirecTV receiver. I'm *VERY* pleased with it.
I was with a friend at Best Buy a few days ago, and we were walking through looking at TV's. All I could realy say about any of them was "oh how cute, it's so small." That was in the big screen LCD and Plasma area. They had a projector display, but their projectors were all out of adjustment. It's like they're trying to show that the front projection isn't as good.
We were picking up something for his new computer, that I happened to be setting up in my living room. While he wasn't really paying attention, I hooked his computer's component out (nice video card), and his digital audio out to my equipment. We kept talking, and then started messing with his head.
"Hey wanna see something cool?"
"Sure, what".
I hit the power on the projector, and while it was warming up, I switched resolutions and brought up a streaming porn feed. There's a world of difference between watching something on a 17" screen, and watching it on a 7' wide screen with 6.1 surround sound. You've never seen breasts so big in your living room.
There is a disadvantage to having a really *REALLY* big screen though. You no longer want to go to the movie theater and sit in an uncomfortable chair, where you can't pause the movie to take a leak. You also will have your friends bringing new release movies over to your house all the time to watch with you. Oh, the pain.. hehe
I've been using mine for about 2 years now, and am 3/4 through the bulb life. That's 1500 hours of TV's, movies, and video games. The only fatalities have been my old subwoofer, and my PS2.
I'm satisfied with the DirecTV HR10-250. Plenty of HiDef stuff to watch. I'll be happier when there's more, but it's getting better.
:) Folders for shows is nice on the HDVR2, which I kinda miss on the HR10-250. From what I've read, I can't go as high with the versions, so I'm not going to bother.
I've already gone through the whole hacking thing. I have a upgraded HDVR2 in the bedroom, a standalone series 2 TiVo with a regular receiver in the computer, and a standalone series 1 TiVo in the kids room. The only thing that I'd like to get out of the HR10-250 is being able to use the internet for updates, so I can ditch the damned phone line. It's fun having a shell on my TiVo, but honestly, I never did much else but play with it. Ooohh, look, I can ping from my TiVo!
Ok, I understand.
But I hope you understand what I'm saying. I've delt with a lot of environmentalists, and even if they would seem to be on the same page, they aren't.
One in particular that I can remember is a fresh water problem in one city. The city growth has forced them to pump in fresh water from hundreds of miles. Besides the pipes and infrastructure, it's causing problems in all the areas being pumped from. Fresh water lakes have lower levels. Some wetlands are drying up. Sinkholes are forming because the water table is so much lower.
Environmentalists were pitching an absolute fit, and rightly so, because the natural environment was being destroyed.
The city was sympathetic. They need to provide water to the population, but they also do care about the environment. Years of telling the population to conserve water hasn't made a significant difference. The city prepared to build a desalination plant. It would take sea water, and make it clean drinking water. This first plant would provide 10% of their supply.
One particularly loud "environmentalist" group started screaming about the wetlands around the plant. The salt from the processing would be pumped back into the salt water. They claimed it would kill all the sealife in the area. The water would simply become a large heavily salted dead area.
I found the site for the plant. It's salt output is 1.0% to 1.5% higher than the natural water. The normal fluctuation is up to 100% by season. They've reduced the pumping of ground water by 10%. They're planning on bring it up to over 50% by 2008.
The some environmentalists in the area are still pitching a fit, of course. You can't make everyone happy all the time. Of course, the ones focused on their lakes drying up are very happy.
You'll find, the environmentalists who see the existing power plants will love the windmills. The ones worried about the birds will still freak out, even if only one a year gets hit by a windmill blade. Oh, and god forbid they may want to put a windmill where some critter may live. It simply comes down to the fact that you can't make everyone happy all the time.
Hehe. I made a similiar comment on my site when I ran the story.
"...and only very occasionally do birds get hit by the windmill blades. More small birds are killed by getting hit by moving cars, caught by house cats, or flying into glass windows."
I know you were just shot down by a bunch of other people, but let me explain why I think it won't work.
1) you need capital, and lots of it. You'll need to maintain a server farm just for supporting the requests to check the keys, as well as a staff to maintain the abuse complaints, support the mail admins, etc, etc, etc.. Just imagine, if 90% of the admins on the internet with mail servers got with your system, and 1% of them were the typical daily complainers, you'd be flooded with support requests. Your server farm would need to be insanely redundant. You can't have downtime, or certified messages don't get marked as certified. You would *HAVE* to charge for the service, as you would have such a large infrastructure to maintain.
2) You're effectively duplicating the "goodmail" system. They are charging per message, because they know each message puts a load on their system.
3) It wouldn't work, because places like AOL would have their own key, but you can't guarantee that every user at AOL would be good. Can you shut down an entire ISP based on the action of a few users? If you try to track a ratio of sent emails to complaints, you'd go nuts collecting statistical information, which would go nowhere.
4) You would be assuming that every admin would be playing nicely. Say someone like me got a certification for every domain in our control (thousands of them). You could verify them, see that they aren't sending spam, but follow months, random domains on random networks, registered to various companies in various locations would start spamming with their certification.
Spammers play a variation of this now, because of the IP blacklists. They'll pay for many internet connections in various locations. I knew of some companies that would maintain hundreds of domains, with dozens of servers in several different colo's, each set of servers with 100Mb/s connections from different providers. They would spam from one set for a day or two, and then switch to a different line or colo. They'd roll between them, so any one provider would only see complaints for one day every month or two. It's not enough to terminate their service, and the spammers can continue without even pausing. Sometimes they'll cover the difference in traffic with something else, like web hosting.
5) If you don't host the authentication server farm yourself, you'd have to trust others. I like SpamCop, and we host a mirror for them. They have exclusive access to their server. I'm the only person in our company with the password, so I know that no one will ever mess with it. They are careful about who they allow to host mirrors. If you used a distributed network to handle authentication, what happens if a significant portion of the distributed network turned out to be in the hands of someone bad? It could be that they insert their own bogus codes into 50% of the authentication servers, or they could simply replace your authentication code with their own. As we all know, reverse engineering isn't impossible, it just takes a little time.
6) You would need the cooperation of everyone running a mail server, like it or not. You're suggesting starting a new standard, which we already know takes a long time to implement. You'd need the software vendors to make their software work, as well as the admin of every mail server to implement it. It's not as easy as putting something together for sendmail, there are a lot of different mail server softwares out there.
7) You'd need to get huge companies to agree to use your service. The politics required for business are outragous. It would be amazing if you could get Google, Microsoft, and AOL to cooperate in a scheme like this. More than likely, if you got one involved, the others would refuse because you were dealing with the first. They don't really care about the common good, they care about the bottom line.
Research who wrote that. You'll find that you shouldn't be quoting him for anything. He has interests in NOT having wind power succeed.
Our own advancements in medicine and society are to blame here.
Medicine allows us to live longer and healtier. We survive diseases that should have killed us at young ages, and live to much older ages.
Society dictates that killing is wrong. We have never been a perfectly peaceful society, but now instead of pruning the ranks, we let them live. Years ago, if someone wronged someone else, for whatever reason, it wouldn't be unreasonable for that person to be killed. Now, if a person wrongs you, you may sue him. You may charge him. He may end up in jail for years.
Sure, it makes for a kinder society, but how much better have we actually gotten? I would be willing to bet that there are lots of people in the middle east who would say America is not the perfect society.
Long ago, we needed the human population to grow and thrive. With a very small population, there was the possibility that the species would fail if it didn't reproduce. We are well beyond that now. I don't have a nice solution about what to do with it now. World wars have always been good for pruning the population. A nice prolific plague has always done well. Right now, we're a bit too peaceful and healthy for the population to drop significantly. The more practical but not well accepted options are the makings of futuristic scifi (Logan's Run, Soyolant Green, etc).
I think you're wrong.
Just yesterday, there was a guy on a bicycle, on a 4 lane road. He was *TRYING* to be good about riding on the road. He came up to a line of parked cars, and was trying to go past them. I was in the right lane, and held a car length or two behind him, because I couldn't go past. Traffic built up behind me. Traffic was too heavy beside me for me to change lanes to go around. He was doing 20mph, and traffic was doing 50mph.
I passed him when traffic was clear to my left. The next car got half way out of the lane to go around, and the next several cars missed him by inches. There was nowhere else for him to ride.
Should all traffic be reduced to 20mph because people on bicycles want to ride on the road, or should an extra lane be built for bicycles, so they aren't slowing down traffic and risking their own lives.
If I was riding a bicycle, I'd prefer to live. I used to ride a few miles on a fairly regular basis. It was nice. There were nice wide sidewalks, built that wide so people on bicycles could use them. Part of the ride was a bicycle trail. There were frequent cutouts to access local roads and businesses. I was safe from traffic, and I wasn't slowing anyone down.
Honestly, if I'm doing 50mph in a 50mph zone, I don't like slowing down for either a grandmother doing 20mph in her Cadillac, or a bicycle doing 20mph.
I always took their site as a joke. But hey, if they are believers, more power to them. Save the planet, kill yourself.
They've been around for years, so it's not a new nutjob idea. I'm fairly sure it's a joke.
Can't be done. Nuclear plants need water for cooling. They have to be by an ocean or other large body of water.
Sadly, it's not all environmentalists all the time. It's various groups contricting each other. It's all in what their own agenda is. The worst are the "Me too!" crowd. They'll take any side with very limited information, and get lots of people in on the act. The "Me too!" crowd are fun to play with though. You can ask them for details, and they'll never be able to provide them.
An unfortunate side effect of the Internet has been there are even more people in the "Me too!" crowds. They get a very little bit of information, and keep going with it. Consider those stupid fowarded emails that keep coming through. Aparently someone yesterday made $1000 by forwarding me an email saying that Microsoft and AOL have formed a partnership and are paying $1000 per email that they send out to test the new MS/AOL forwarding system. Last week, some kid with cancer was being saved by someone else forwarding an email to me.
{sigh}
It all depends on the group, and their agenda.
Are you against the pollution that the coal fired plants put off, and the potential radiation from a nuclear plant? Then you'd like wind, solar, hydroelectric, and wave power.
Are you worried about the woodland critters and plants? Then solar is probably out, because you'd be covering the ground to some degree with panels.
Are you worried about the birds? Then wind power is out.
Are you worried about fish? Then hydroelectric is out.
Are you worried about whales? Then wave power is out.
There are non-environmental people against various things too. I believe it was in Connecticut, the local government was pushing for wind power. It wasn't the environmentalists there complaining, it was the locals complaining about the potential for noise and, god forbid, windmills being seen if you were to drive 20 miles and climb up on a hill to get a look.
I think nuclear plants look pretty cool. They have a particular asthetic look to the domed reactor and huge cooling towers. Then again, it's not quite as pleasing to take a boat anywhere near the warm water outlet and not find anything living in the water.
I'm all for solar, wind, and wave power. Not only can it be deployed fairly easily, but it can eventually be moved for whatever reason. Maybe another location is found to be more productive. Hydroelectric is nice, but it does require a huge building project to accomplish it, and usually flooding large areas to get the required water pressure.
I live by a really great place to put a wind and solar farm. There's a ridge with almost constant wind. The south facing side of the hills could be home to huge solar panel arrays. The residents in the valley below would never have it. There are a few million of them, living in smog year round. Clean power would destroy their pretty view. Of course, they can't usually see the view through the smog.
Environmentalists would complain that it would hurt the natural ecosystem. Sure, some coyotes may get killed. If the neighbors wouldn't have complained about gunshots, I would have killed some on my own. What about the small woodland critters? Well, my cats killed off quite a few, probably numbering near the same as any power generation systems would have. In nature, things die. It's not a perfect world, even though people have their perfect picture of it in their minds. I guess most environmentalists have never seen a house cat come home with parts of a small bird, snake, lizard, or anything else that may move enough for a cat to play with. It's nothing compared to what the larger animals do to each other.
There's a reason that we're described as "average height, average build, brown hair and eyes.". Both you and I are 50% of the people out there.
I do the same thing with my credit cards.
In the last year, I've had my ID checked exactly once because of this. It was by a person being trained at a truck stop. The trainer was going through the drill perfectly. They said "Check ID", and they asked to see my drivers license.
I was going to say, that's more likely.
Depending on what they do with the information on the tag, what's to stop someone from forging their own passport on say an airplane?
Say a bad guy is sitting beside the innocent victim on a plane. With a small RFID reader, you've already picked up the info on their ID. You see their name on their luggage tag, brief case, notebook, or whatever they may have. They already have a false passport prepared, so they just go into the bathroom, and print the cover page with the name, recode the RFID tag in their false passport to the victim's RFID information. Now they are the victim. All they have to do is be sure to get through immigration first. The victim will be held up indefinately, and the bad guy is already through. By the time the time they figure out what happened, the bad guy is already in a cab to destinations unknown.
It woudn't have to be with such great timing. The bad guy could get the info from any traveler in an airport, it doesn't matter where the victim is going. Get someone coming back into the country, and then leave the country at their leasure, and travel as them.
A question I've brought up before with the RFID tags in general is, what if the government puts the readers in the vehicle sensor loops at major intersections. It would be pretty easy to do, and they would be able to track anyone, as long as they have a known RFID tag with them. The tags can be in anything, since they're starting to be embedded in clothing and other products like automobile tires. It would be a simple association of what products have been seen with which people.
I agree. Before publishing anything like this, I would have monitored as many servers as possible, for a much longer duration. If the article had said that they were monitoring all 160 machines over a 1 month period, I would have been more impressed with the accuracy. It may be that they perform like this by design, but it doesn't sound quite right. If the host isn't accepting connections, then it's too busy. They should have deployed more machines to be able to take the full brunt of their mail load. I can't imagine they're using too terribly fancy machines. Our generic machine costs roughly $3k. If we need 10 more, we get 10 more. If we need 10 more machines, obviously the demand is there for them.
I don't exactly know how they handle their backend, but they already have the scheme in place, obviously.
I've had hotmail, yahoo, and gmail accounts for years.
I'm most satisfied with my gmail account.
hotmail is ok, but it sucks that my accounts have sometimes been suspended due to inactivity. It deletes all my mail, so that one important email from a year ago is gone. A few times, I've had it throw up server errors instead of the page. I have a screen shot somewhere of one of them.
Yahoo, I've seen problems with too many time. My girlfriend has a paid account with them. Why, I don't know. She uses her POP3 client, because the web client screws up too much. The POP3 client has occasional problems. Probably once every couple weeks.
I archive my mail over at gmail. 18,900 messages taking up 969Mb. Occasionally, messages get lost or misfiltered, but it isn't too bad.
And, of course, I run my own mail server. My users freak out when it's down. Downtime is usually because I'm upgrading something. Ya, we all have to reboot for kernel upgrades occasionally. They were particularly tweeked when I switched POP3/IMAP servers, and changed over from Mbox to MailDir. It wasn't quite as smooth as I would have liked, but one day of intermittent problems and the next several months of 0 downtime is acceptable. We only process about 160,000 messages/day, so we're not quite on the scale of Yahoo. Then again, we only use one server. Well, 3 actually, but one primary one that does all the grunt work.
I get spam at all the accounts, but that's probably because I've used them all a good bit at some point in time. HotMail was the worst free service, but now they're probably the best for filtering spam, without bothering real messages.
My own mail server is probably the best, percentage wise. I'm not the best admin out there, but I'm pretty good. The mail always gets delivered. The worst problems I have are client side issues, usually with outlook. The best complaint, I got a few weeks ago. A user said 50% of his mail had disappeared from his account. I checked his mail directory, and he had deleted just about 50% of them. He then told me he was playing with his filtering, and it must not be quite right. Can't blame the mail service for user errors.
Your dad is right on the pain.
:)
Pain is an electrical impulse being sent from a nerve to the brain, signaling the brain that pain exists. The brain then comprehends the pain, and responds appropriately.
If you are mentally strong enough to ignore those sensations, there is no pain.
Most people have a problem with doing this. Instead of being able to ignore the pain, they focus on it. People who can ignore the pain are usually the ones who can ignore a dripping faucet or a nagging wife. People who can't ignore the sounds are the ones that tweak out about them. Being able to hear sounds is based on the same concepts. Your ear translates the sound waves into electrical impulses, which the brain comprehends.
Kids are the best for this, as far as ignoring sounds go. Try telling a kid to clean something up, or do their homework, and you'll see.
I play a game with some people. I've let girls pinch me with their fingernails until they break the skin. I'll hold a conversation with them while they're doing it. It's entertaining, and of course the macho "oohh, that doesn't hurt." Sure, the sensation is there, I just ignore it. Anyone can.
I've had dental work done with no ansthetic, multiple piercings, and had nasty cuts. Sometimes you just have to deal with it, it doesn't do any good to cry about it. There's a 6" scar on my leg, from a wound that I treated myself. You'd think cleaning it with alcohol should have hurt. Other people in the room flinched. I just refused to feel it.
I started singing the "Vaporware" song before I even hit 'comments'.
But if he does manage to manufacture them, I'll finally have somewhere to store my plans for my ZPM, FTL drive, and BFG. Maybe there will still be room for the my plans to conquer this planet. Oh never mind, that sounds like the plans.
1) Read Slashdot
2) Find Petabyte hard drive
3) ???
4) Conquer the world!
Ummmm...
Can't you run thin clients (of some variety) over the Internet? Like the variety that consist of a boot disk (floppy, CD, or boot ROM) and pull the rest from elsewhere?
I didn't think most people here were invited. They're still telling them the long way.