Seriously, short of you personally examining the birth record yourself, or a time machine so you can be in attendence (in Honolulu, HI, USA) at the time of the birth, what would convince you?
> Just HOW do you suppose you are going to accomplish [depopulation]?
As an empirical matter, the most effective known formula involves these steps: (1) provide educational opportunities for young women; (2) provide modest economic growth; (3) wait one generation. Items (1) and (2) frequently go very well together.
So it sounds like my house is immune for many obscure reasons, which is to say, I apparently have been practicing "obscurity in depth" as my security strategy.
Firstly, for slightly complicated historical reasons, I have my internal home network on 192.168.N.0/24, where N is not zero or one.
Secondly, my desktop machines are not on the wireless, they're wired to the router, and the wired port has a different MAC than the wireless, invisible to Google.
Thirdly, I don't broadcast my SSID, which might mean it's not in the Google database.
And fourthly, my router has a nondefault password. I think this is the only obstacle to the hack that is an actual, real security measure.
Re:Autotools do not need a book
on
Autotools
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I often need to install software in an environment that's different from where it's going to be run, e.g. I install it on a file server, where the target directory is/export/apps/stow/, and then I use "stow" to put it in/export/apps, which clients mount as/usr/site, so they see "/usr/site/bin/", and are set up to look in/usr/site/lib for libraries, and so forth.
I don't know if this is instrinsic to newer build schemes or not, but my recent experience has been that "old-style" (autotools-based) packages work just fine, they interoperate well with stow, accept the "--prefix" argument to configure, and work just fine for the clients. Cmake-based packages tend to hard-code path names into start-up scripts, which then break on the clients, which view the app in a different hierarchy -- they don't have/export, in particular.
Now, it may well be that these are badly-written cmake scripts, and cmake is perfectly capable of doing it right, I honestly don't know. But it seems to me that cmake (and Python's easy-install, and every other new build scheme I've run across in the past few years) are all part of a new generation of tools which really want the build-time and run-time environments to be the same, because they're built around the "single-user isolated workstation" model.
But it's not true. Lots of us still have centralized file servers that use NFS exports to make centrally-managed Linux applications available to many clients. The new tools make some things easier, but this, they make harder.
Also, uphill through the snow both ways, and we liked it, get off my lawn, kids today don't know nothin', no respect I tell you.
The article has the kernel of an interesting point, namely the trade-off between the cost of managing firewalls on all the workstations in an enterprise, versus their inevitable half-assed-ness and tendency to get in the way, thereby consuming support hours.
But, where I work, we have a standard config that gets pushed out to all the systems, and I suspect that's pretty standard. Half-assedness arises when individual users open (or close) random ports on their own firewalls, but that case by definition doesn't necessarily consume support time if it's the users doing it, and not the support team.
Our operating theory is that of defense in depth. The boundary routers have fixed routing tables and firewalls. The servers have firewalls and white-lists of allowed clients. Clients have firewalls and intrusion-detection systems. Network traffic is monitored for suspicious patterns. And machines with special network needs are in a firewall DMZ and separately managed.
It's not perfect by any means, and I sometimes wish we could be more flexible, but I'm not ready to pre-emptively exclude any of these tools.
Also, I am posting because I have just done another one of these fat-fingered mis-moderations. It's surprsingly hard to un-do moderations. There's this thing where you have to wait a while after you hit "reply", and there's the lameness filter. There's also the karma hit from pointless posts, of course, but that at least has some deterrent value, and encourages more care in dishing out the mod points. One hopes.
> Gold is currently going for $1225 US / oz according to NYMEX. > If someone decided to dump pounds of gold for $600 US / oz, would that be considered 'market value'?
Yes.
If I then want to buy some gold, and I go to the market to do it, I will find that I can get it for $600 US/oz. If someone else wants to sell some of their gold on the same market, they will find that if they ask more than $600 US/oz for it, there will be no buyers, and if they reduce their price to $600 US/oz, they will find buyers.
This state of affairs will presumbly be temporary, until your hypothetical actor runs out of gold, after which the price will start to rise (from $600) again.
Markets can be manipulated by holders of significant amounts of resources.
Pet peeve wrt the summary, which quotes Richardson as saying that the price was low because a lot of helium became available, which meant that the "price was not determined by the market."
But this is what markets do, they use the power of pricing to set the balance between supply and demand. If you introduce a large additional supply of a resource with low marginal cost to a market, the market's price mechanism will reduce the price of that resource. The market will determine a low price.
The observed behavior wrt the price of Helium is the opposite of "not determined by the market".
There are enough flame wars around about the merits of markets as a means of determining prices, and IMHO they have their limits, but FFS, can we at least have educated professionals know what a market is and what it does? Markets are pitiless, soulless mechanisms for matching up buyers and sellers of resources, and disclosing price information, period full stop. They have no a priori relationship to fairness, justice, accessibility, or legality, and only a tangential relationship to efficiency.
> Rural areas are generally capable of becoming self sufficient if need be in practically no time at all.
There are a few interesting case studies that show this is not the case, or at least that the transition can be highly disruptive.
The one I am familiar with was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when large amounts of rural infrastructure stopped working because of extreme logistical confusion. Farms all over Russia had difficulty obtaining fuel, and even if they could, were unable to find buyers for their products, and couldn't get credit because of the total absence of anything resembling a banking system. Their crops rotted in the silos, and they themselves were in danger of malnutrition because of specialization. Repurposing the land to a variety of food crops would take a full season, and even then, the standard of living would drop -- this is only more of a danger in the US, where energy and capital intensive monoculture is the rule.
The same lesson is taught by a variety of "farm museums" I am familiar with near here -- there's one near Staunton, Virginia, which replicates various colonial-era immigrant farm practices. One thing that is made abuntdantly clear is that colonial-era farms were by no means self-sufficient, they already had a fairly high degree of specialization and were connected to the cash economy at many levels.
(One of the goals of the American Revolution, in fact, was to break the trade monopoly the colonies had with Great Britain, and allow the colonies to trade amongst themselves, to enhance their standard of living by tapping into a larger cash economy).
And there is a historical counter-argument -- in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, when the Serbs controlled the countryside and Bosnians were mostly restricted to the city of Sarajevo itself. Sarajevans clear-cut the city parks and burned the trees for fuel, and planted vegetable gardens, and bicycled a lot. There was a substantial drop in the standard of living, and it was by no means without risk, but it's not like everybody died instantly.
The truth is that the interconnections do everyone a lot of good. Rural areas can become self-sufficient, in the same sense that, say, a country could be entirely self-sufficient and not interact with other countries. For a bad example of how this works, see Gaza and/or North Korea. I can't think of any good examples, although the theoretical possibility does exist.
Pardon my evil, but where I live (Washington, DC) there appears to be a bit of an actual competition heating up for 4G wireless internet services to the home. There's the new "Clear" service, which uses the Sprint network, and Sprint itself, and Verizon is rumored to be gearing up for this as well.
This is in a high-density residential area, mostly 1920s-era apartment buildings, and this is good for us, because (as Verizon has made clear) we are never ever going to get fiber. 4G Wireless, WiMax, whatever it ends up being called, is going to be our realistic high-speed option in the near term.
Of course, I have never actually bought the "competition means you don't need neutrality" argument -- aside from "activation fees" and other barriers to switching, there's the probable inconvenience of having to reconnect to another provider when I want to surf to a different web site -- obviously the inconvenience of reconnecting is better than being unable to, but it's worse than the status quo where I don't have to worry about my provider.
Also, it seems to me that the pay-for-passage model (i.e. non-neutrality) is always going to screw over small content providers and reward the big guys, again. Even if the provider competition heats up, everybody will offer Google, Yahoo, Bing, Hulu, Netflix, and Facebook, and all of these guys (telecoms all) will punish Skype, and watching videos or downloading ISOs from independent websites who haven't ponied up for their traffic will be a nightmare.
Seems like we could incrementally approach this goal by doing less-expensive, lower-risk things first, like colonizing harsh terrestrial environments (Ocean bottoms, antarctica, salt flats, sterile deserts, etc.).
If we can make a self-contained, self-sustaining colony on the earth, then our species is more robust (we can survive the loss of all the plants, for instance, or if we've colonized the ocean floor, we can survive when supervillains ignite the atmosphere), and we get some experience learning the ins and outs of closed ecosystems.
Once they work reliably, then we can add "in space" to the project description, with all the additional cost and complexity that implies.
A month or so ago, I ran across an article, pitched to small-business operators, about how to make the best use of free WiFi at Starbuck's, for your business. and while I found the article itself reasonable enough, a few of the commenters in the comment thread made me very glad I don't operate a coffee shop. There is evidently an entitlement sub-culture out there that really believes that, by providing free WiFi, coffee shops have effectively invited people to come in and operate their business full-time, hold meetings, and so forth, and if these proud representatives of the new economy deign to buy a drink, well, isn't that lucky for the coffee shop?
It's easy to see where a few such individuals could poison the atmosphere the coffee shop was trying to cultivate, causing their free WiFi experiment to fail.
PS: Finally found the article, it's here. Repeating for emphasis that, IMHO, the article itself provides reasonable-seeming guidelines, it was the commenters that scared me.
Deutsche Grammophon has a DRM-free web store (predictably at www.deutschegrammophon.com). Once you register with them, you can always go back to your account and re-download stuff you've bought, and the content is delivered as high-bitrate MP3s with no DRM, so you can move them between devices without difficulty.
I am not affiliated with these folks, I'm just a satisfied customer, and also slightly mystified that a DRM-free music store isn't more widely known.
> Clean coal cannot exist. What are you going to do with all the waste? What will you do with the CO2?
The thing is, there's a lot of coal, and we already know how to use it for energy. You're right that it's a poor choice, maybe even the poorest, but it is by far the most viable non-oil-based energy source out there. All of the alternatives -- *all* of them -- require kick-starting by some non-economic actor (government, philanthropists, whoever) to get them over the infrastructural hump and to the point where they provide enough ROI for those fabled market forces to begin working. And non-economic actors are always accountable to donors, who will hang up the process in political score-making to favor their constituencies. This isn't necessarily bad, their constituencies are often important and/or vulnerable, and probably deserve protection. But while it's not necessarily bad, it is necessarily slow.
Meanwhile, the oil is running out.
When the oil runs out, and the alternatives are not yet economical, the Second Coal Age will begin, because there is a lot of coal, and we know how to use it.
It's probably true that analog formats are more lasting if they're forgotten about for a while, as in this case, because they degrade relatively gracefully.
Digital media will be saved by digital virtues, principally the ease of making many perfect copies. You back up your JPEGs, right? Robust digital data is data for which there are many copies.
The problem I have with this is that, in my organizaiton, Flash is actually used for some of the administrative web services within the company. Many of my users (including me!) only have one computer, and it's a 64-bit Linux workstation. We also have a security rule that says we're supposed to patch vulnerabilities, and if a patch is not availble for a known-vulnerable application, we're supposed to remove it.
So all these rules interact and add up to "some users can no longer use some administrative web services."
What with all the IE-only intranet crap, and various other hoops I've had to jump through over the years, I've been wondering for a while if the solution is to just give the affected users sandboxed Windows VMs. Then central IT (which does our Windows support) can figure out how to patch them when they're only up for an unpredictable ten minutes every couple of days...
> I never understood why evolution is such a threat to religion. How does us evolving from apes say anything about the existence of God? What does it even have to do with it?
You'd do well to research the cultural origins of creationism, as well as fundamentalism, as it's practiced in the United States. For the former, I recommend the introductory chaper of Laurie R. Godfrey's "Scientists Confront Creationism".
The short version is, it's at least partially a reaction against the *social* Darwinism of American uber-Capitalists in the late 19th century, people who ran factory towns and controlled almost every aspect of their workers' social lives, instructing them that the bosses were rich because they out-competed the workers in the capitalist system, and that the workers were valuable only insofar as they were cogs in the great capitalist machine, and that Science proved that this was so, and there was nothing the workers could do about it. The only institution the bosses did not control was the church, and in church, the workers learned that each and every single one of them was individually loved by God himself, and that their lives had intrinsic value insofar as they obeyed the scriptures. Unsurprisingly, the worker culture tended to value the church more highly than science.
There was a similar renaissance of new-age and occult thinking in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Soviet pretensions to "scientific socialism", and scientifically-rationalized oppression, left people distrustful of anything that came with a "science" label, especially things that were both un-intuitive and morally offensive.
It's vital in exploring these issues to remember that scientific rhetoric has often been a tool of oppression, and that when people react against it, they don't always separate the actual science from the oppressive rhetoric.
On Debian and Ubuntu, the.deb-packaged Chrome adds the Google deb archive in/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list, which is automatically searched by apt and aptitude, so your regular "aptitude update; aptitude upgrade" will pull in new versions of Chrome. Presumably the Synaptic package gizmo does the same things, but I am far too cool for GUIs, so I don't know.
If you want to turn this off, and leave it off, you can change the settings in/etc/default/google-chrome.
How exactly is this a bad law? It is pretty damned obvious by now to anyone with a brain that the feds aren't gonna do jack shit about illegals, and as anyone who has lived in one of the border states can tell you illegals are turning the towns into war zones!
One of the concerns that the police (!) have expressed about this law is that it will actually worsen this problem, the issue being related to the fact that only some illegals are gang members and drug smugglers. This law raises the stakes of a state-police encounter for all illegals. Illegals who just want to work are less likely to go to the police if they are victims of drug gangs, because any encounter with any police force will carry the risk of immediate deportation.
The issue in this case is less one of justice -- illegal immigrants of sterling character and admirable work ethic are still illegal, after all, and this law is neither more nor less unjust than its Federal counterpart. But there is a practical issue -- the complete marginalization of all illegals strengthens the gangs, by taking away one avenue of recourse for some of their victims.
The police can still use illegals as informants, there's a provision in the text of the law that says that the police can decline to take immigration action if it would "hinder an investigation", but it seems clear that it would discourage illegals who are victims of crimes from contacting the police.
The area was the Government's back-yard at the time, and the actual home where the munitions were found is Federal property today, so I think the NIMBY tag is misapplied.
There was a chemical weapons lab at American University during the first world war, and they apparently also were testing the weapons delivery systems, and fired all kinds of nasty stuff into what was then vacant land.
Which is not to say that it's OK, of course, only that it's a documentation and clean-up FAIL, and not really a NIMBY FAIL.
Also, I was surprised to see the article actually did refer to "smoking glassware", I had assumed that was an alarmist mis-interpretation of "smoked glass", but apparently they did find "smoking and fuming glassware".
Slashdot Mirror
FFS:
Snopes has it.
Factcheck.org has it.
Seriously, short of you personally examining the birth record yourself, or a time machine so you can be in attendence (in Honolulu, HI, USA) at the time of the birth, what would convince you?
> Just HOW do you suppose you are going to accomplish [depopulation]?
As an empirical matter, the most effective known formula involves these steps: (1) provide educational opportunities for young women; (2) provide modest economic growth; (3) wait one generation. Items (1) and (2) frequently go very well together.
So it sounds like my house is immune for many obscure reasons, which is to say, I apparently have been practicing "obscurity in depth" as my security strategy.
Firstly, for slightly complicated historical reasons, I have my internal home network on 192.168.N.0/24, where N is not zero or one.
Secondly, my desktop machines are not on the wireless, they're wired to the router, and the wired port has a different MAC than the wireless, invisible to Google.
Thirdly, I don't broadcast my SSID, which might mean it's not in the Google database.
And fourthly, my router has a nondefault password. I think this is the only obstacle to the hack that is an actual, real security measure.
I often need to install software in an environment that's different from where it's going to be run, e.g. I install it on a file server, where the target directory is /export/apps/stow/, and then I use "stow" to put it in /export/apps, which clients mount as /usr/site, so they see "/usr/site/bin/", and are set up to look in /usr/site/lib for libraries, and so forth.
I don't know if this is instrinsic to newer build schemes or not, but my recent experience has been that "old-style" (autotools-based) packages work just fine, they interoperate well with stow, accept the "--prefix" argument to configure, and work just fine for the clients. Cmake-based packages tend to hard-code path names into start-up scripts, which then break on the clients, which view the app in a different hierarchy -- they don't have /export, in particular.
Now, it may well be that these are badly-written cmake scripts, and cmake is perfectly capable of doing it right, I honestly don't know. But it seems to me that cmake (and Python's easy-install, and every other new build scheme I've run across in the past few years) are all part of a new generation of tools which really want the build-time and run-time environments to be the same, because they're built around the "single-user isolated workstation" model.
But it's not true. Lots of us still have centralized file servers that use NFS exports to make centrally-managed Linux applications available to many clients. The new tools make some things easier, but this, they make harder.
Also, uphill through the snow both ways, and we liked it, get off my lawn, kids today don't know nothin', no respect I tell you.
The article has the kernel of an interesting point, namely the trade-off between the cost of managing firewalls on all the workstations in an enterprise, versus their inevitable half-assed-ness and tendency to get in the way, thereby consuming support hours.
But, where I work, we have a standard config that gets pushed out to all the systems, and I suspect that's pretty standard. Half-assedness arises when individual users open (or close) random ports on their own firewalls, but that case by definition doesn't necessarily consume support time if it's the users doing it, and not the support team.
Our operating theory is that of defense in depth. The boundary routers have fixed routing tables and firewalls. The servers have firewalls and white-lists of allowed clients. Clients have firewalls and intrusion-detection systems. Network traffic is monitored for suspicious patterns. And machines with special network needs are in a firewall DMZ and separately managed.
It's not perfect by any means, and I sometimes wish we could be more flexible, but I'm not ready to pre-emptively exclude any of these tools.
This is indeed old news.
Also, I am posting because I have just done another one of these fat-fingered mis-moderations. It's surprsingly hard to un-do moderations. There's this thing where you have to wait a while after you hit "reply", and there's the lameness filter. There's also the karma hit from pointless posts, of course, but that at least has some deterrent value, and encourages more care in dishing out the mod points. One hopes.
> Gold is currently going for $1225 US / oz according to NYMEX.
> If someone decided to dump pounds of gold for $600 US / oz, would that be considered 'market value'?
Yes.
If I then want to buy some gold, and I go to the market to do it, I will find that I can get it for $600 US/oz. If someone else wants to sell some of their gold on the same market, they will find that if they ask more than $600 US/oz for it, there will be no buyers, and if they reduce their price to $600 US/oz, they will find buyers.
This state of affairs will presumbly be temporary, until your hypothetical actor runs out of gold, after which the price will start to rise (from $600) again.
Markets can be manipulated by holders of significant amounts of resources.
Pet peeve wrt the summary, which quotes Richardson as saying that the price was low because a lot of helium became available, which meant that the "price was not determined by the market."
But this is what markets do, they use the power of pricing to set the balance between supply and demand. If you introduce a large additional supply of a resource with low marginal cost to a market, the market's price mechanism will reduce the price of that resource. The market will determine a low price.
The observed behavior wrt the price of Helium is the opposite of "not determined by the market".
There are enough flame wars around about the merits of markets as a means of determining prices, and IMHO they have their limits, but FFS, can we at least have educated professionals know what a market is and what it does? Markets are pitiless, soulless mechanisms for matching up buyers and sellers of resources, and disclosing price information, period full stop. They have no a priori relationship to fairness, justice, accessibility, or legality, and only a tangential relationship to efficiency.
> Rural areas are generally capable of becoming self sufficient if need be in practically no time at all.
There are a few interesting case studies that show this is not the case, or at least that the transition can be highly disruptive.
The one I am familiar with was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when large amounts of rural infrastructure stopped working because of extreme logistical confusion. Farms all over Russia had difficulty obtaining fuel, and even if they could, were unable to find buyers for their products, and couldn't get credit because of the total absence of anything resembling a banking system. Their crops rotted in the silos, and they themselves were in danger of malnutrition because of specialization. Repurposing the land to a variety of food crops would take a full season, and even then, the standard of living would drop -- this is only more of a danger in the US, where energy and capital intensive monoculture is the rule.
The same lesson is taught by a variety of "farm museums" I am familiar with near here -- there's one near Staunton, Virginia, which replicates various colonial-era immigrant farm practices. One thing that is made abuntdantly clear is that colonial-era farms were by no means self-sufficient, they already had a fairly high degree of specialization and were connected to the cash economy at many levels.
(One of the goals of the American Revolution, in fact, was to break the trade monopoly the colonies had with Great Britain, and allow the colonies to trade amongst themselves, to enhance their standard of living by tapping into a larger cash economy).
And there is a historical counter-argument -- in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, when the Serbs controlled the countryside and Bosnians were mostly restricted to the city of Sarajevo itself. Sarajevans clear-cut the city parks and burned the trees for fuel, and planted vegetable gardens, and bicycled a lot. There was a substantial drop in the standard of living, and it was by no means without risk, but it's not like everybody died instantly.
The truth is that the interconnections do everyone a lot of good. Rural areas can become self-sufficient, in the same sense that, say, a country could be entirely self-sufficient and not interact with other countries. For a bad example of how this works, see Gaza and/or North Korea. I can't think of any good examples, although the theoretical possibility does exist.
Beagleboards. They are filled with awesome.
Posting to undo a fat-fingered bad moderation. Move along, nothing to see here. Burn, karma, burn...
> Wireless is MORE competitive?
Pardon my evil, but where I live (Washington, DC) there appears to be a bit of an actual competition heating up for 4G wireless internet services to the home. There's the new "Clear" service, which uses the Sprint network, and Sprint itself, and Verizon is rumored to be gearing up for this as well.
This is in a high-density residential area, mostly 1920s-era apartment buildings, and this is good for us, because (as Verizon has made clear) we are never ever going to get fiber. 4G Wireless, WiMax, whatever it ends up being called, is going to be our realistic high-speed option in the near term.
Of course, I have never actually bought the "competition means you don't need neutrality" argument -- aside from "activation fees" and other barriers to switching, there's the probable inconvenience of having to reconnect to another provider when I want to surf to a different web site -- obviously the inconvenience of reconnecting is better than being unable to, but it's worse than the status quo where I don't have to worry about my provider.
Also, it seems to me that the pay-for-passage model (i.e. non-neutrality) is always going to screw over small content providers and reward the big guys, again. Even if the provider competition heats up, everybody will offer Google, Yahoo, Bing, Hulu, Netflix, and Facebook, and all of these guys (telecoms all) will punish Skype, and watching videos or downloading ISOs from independent websites who haven't ponied up for their traffic will be a nightmare.
Seems like we could incrementally approach this goal by doing less-expensive, lower-risk things first, like colonizing harsh terrestrial environments (Ocean bottoms, antarctica, salt flats, sterile deserts, etc.).
If we can make a self-contained, self-sustaining colony on the earth, then our species is more robust (we can survive the loss of all the plants, for instance, or if we've colonized the ocean floor, we can survive when supervillains ignite the atmosphere), and we get some experience learning the ins and outs of closed ecosystems.
Once they work reliably, then we can add "in space" to the project description, with all the additional cost and complexity that implies.
A month or so ago, I ran across an article, pitched to small-business operators, about how to make the best use of free WiFi at Starbuck's, for your business. and while I found the article itself reasonable enough, a few of the commenters in the comment thread made me very glad I don't operate a coffee shop. There is evidently an entitlement sub-culture out there that really believes that, by providing free WiFi, coffee shops have effectively invited people to come in and operate their business full-time, hold meetings, and so forth, and if these proud representatives of the new economy deign to buy a drink, well, isn't that lucky for the coffee shop?
It's easy to see where a few such individuals could poison the atmosphere the coffee shop was trying to cultivate, causing their free WiFi experiment to fail.
PS: Finally found the article, it's here. Repeating for emphasis that, IMHO, the article itself provides reasonable-seeming guidelines, it was the commenters that scared me.
Deutsche Grammophon has a DRM-free web store (predictably at www.deutschegrammophon.com). Once you register with them, you can always go back to your account and re-download stuff you've bought, and the content is delivered as high-bitrate MP3s with no DRM, so you can move them between devices without difficulty.
I am not affiliated with these folks, I'm just a satisfied customer, and also slightly mystified that a DRM-free music store isn't more widely known.
> Clean coal cannot exist. What are you going to do with all the waste? What will you do with the CO2?
The thing is, there's a lot of coal, and we already know how to use it for energy. You're right that it's a poor choice, maybe even the poorest, but it is by far the most viable non-oil-based energy source out there. All of the alternatives -- *all* of them -- require kick-starting by some non-economic actor (government, philanthropists, whoever) to get them over the infrastructural hump and to the point where they provide enough ROI for those fabled market forces to begin working. And non-economic actors are always accountable to donors, who will hang up the process in political score-making to favor their constituencies. This isn't necessarily bad, their constituencies are often important and/or vulnerable, and probably deserve protection. But while it's not necessarily bad, it is necessarily slow.
Meanwhile, the oil is running out.
When the oil runs out, and the alternatives are not yet economical, the Second Coal Age will begin, because there is a lot of coal, and we know how to use it.
> Google lets us have porn on our handsets, so we look the other way.
That's not how you do porn. Or at least, that's not how I do porn.
It's probably true that analog formats are more lasting if they're forgotten about for a while, as in this case, because they degrade relatively gracefully.
Digital media will be saved by digital virtues, principally the ease of making many perfect copies. You back up your JPEGs, right? Robust digital data is data for which there are many copies.
The problem I have with this is that, in my organizaiton, Flash is actually used for some of the administrative web services within the company. Many of my users (including me!) only have one computer, and it's a 64-bit Linux workstation. We also have a security rule that says we're supposed to patch vulnerabilities, and if a patch is not availble for a known-vulnerable application, we're supposed to remove it.
So all these rules interact and add up to "some users can no longer use some administrative web services."
What with all the IE-only intranet crap, and various other hoops I've had to jump through over the years, I've been wondering for a while if the solution is to just give the affected users sandboxed Windows VMs. Then central IT (which does our Windows support) can figure out how to patch them when they're only up for an unpredictable ten minutes every couple of days...
> I never understood why evolution is such a threat to religion. How does us evolving from apes say anything about the existence of God? What does it even have to do with it?
You'd do well to research the cultural origins of creationism, as well as fundamentalism, as it's practiced in the United States. For the former, I recommend the introductory chaper of Laurie R. Godfrey's "Scientists Confront Creationism".
The short version is, it's at least partially a reaction against the *social* Darwinism of American uber-Capitalists in the late 19th century, people who ran factory towns and controlled almost every aspect of their workers' social lives, instructing them that the bosses were rich because they out-competed the workers in the capitalist system, and that the workers were valuable only insofar as they were cogs in the great capitalist machine, and that Science proved that this was so, and there was nothing the workers could do about it. The only institution the bosses did not control was the church, and in church, the workers learned that each and every single one of them was individually loved by God himself, and that their lives had intrinsic value insofar as they obeyed the scriptures. Unsurprisingly, the worker culture tended to value the church more highly than science.
There was a similar renaissance of new-age and occult thinking in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Soviet pretensions to "scientific socialism", and scientifically-rationalized oppression, left people distrustful of anything that came with a "science" label, especially things that were both un-intuitive and morally offensive.
It's vital in exploring these issues to remember that scientific rhetoric has often been a tool of oppression, and that when people react against it, they don't always separate the actual science from the oppressive rhetoric.
On Debian and Ubuntu, the .deb-packaged Chrome adds the Google deb archive in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list, which is automatically searched by apt and aptitude, so your regular "aptitude update; aptitude upgrade" will pull in new versions of Chrome. Presumably the Synaptic package gizmo does the same things, but I am far too cool for GUIs, so I don't know.
If you want to turn this off, and leave it off, you can change the settings in /etc/default/google-chrome.
How exactly is this a bad law? It is pretty damned obvious by now to anyone with a brain that the feds aren't gonna do jack shit about illegals, and as anyone who has lived in one of the border states can tell you illegals are turning the towns into war zones!
One of the concerns that the police (!) have expressed about this law is that it will actually worsen this problem, the issue being related to the fact that only some illegals are gang members and drug smugglers. This law raises the stakes of a state-police encounter for all illegals. Illegals who just want to work are less likely to go to the police if they are victims of drug gangs, because any encounter with any police force will carry the risk of immediate deportation.
The issue in this case is less one of justice -- illegal immigrants of sterling character and admirable work ethic are still illegal, after all, and this law is neither more nor less unjust than its Federal counterpart. But there is a practical issue -- the complete marginalization of all illegals strengthens the gangs, by taking away one avenue of recourse for some of their victims.
The police can still use illegals as informants, there's a provision in the text of the law that says that the police can decline to take immigration action if it would "hinder an investigation", but it seems clear that it would discourage illegals who are victims of crimes from contacting the police.
Who are the customers...
You asked the right question, but you may not have gotten the right answer. The customers are the ones who give you money for your services.
The advertisers give you money for matching up their ads with eyeballs.
The readership consumes content, and in return gives you the eyeballs that you sell to the advertisers.
Ergo, the readership is a supplier of raw materials, and the advertisers are the customers.
Like any good business, you will of course switch suppliers in order to please your customers, because the customer is always right.
> I can drive for 3 hours in any given direction and not hit another city with a population over 2000
I used to have a car like that...
The area was the Government's back-yard at the time, and the actual home where the munitions were found is Federal property today, so I think the NIMBY tag is misapplied.
There was a chemical weapons lab at American University during the first world war, and they apparently also were testing the weapons delivery systems, and fired all kinds of nasty stuff into what was then vacant land.
Which is not to say that it's OK, of course, only that it's a documentation and clean-up FAIL, and not really a NIMBY FAIL.
Also, I was surprised to see the article actually did refer to "smoking glassware", I had assumed that was an alarmist mis-interpretation of "smoked glass", but apparently they did find "smoking and fuming glassware".