Which means they'll say there was more heat and pressure than you thought, which sped it up. And that water leeching through fossil remains carries the radioactive parts from one place to another, making things appear older that have lost C14 and things look younger that have gained it. In fact, the latter I've already heard.
Good points. If it's not a DB server, a very busy file server, or a rather large mail server, though, there's a very good chance it won't be a hundred gigabytes at a time that needs caching. Speed on something that randomly accesses a wide set of small files each infrequently needs a cache speedup much more than huge reads and writes or over data that's always in the OS's cache in main memory.
Also, if during a write the cache can fill during a seek and empty before the next write request from the OS (I haven't read anything that claims this will be the norm for this arrangment, but it'd be the ideal case for a disk cache) then it will offer a speedup no matter what other conditions exist.
I'm not saying these two things outweigh your well-stated checklist. It's just a couple more things to consider.
Quality control is part of all reasonable organizations. Programmers debug, factories x-ray and circuit test, stores have mystery shoppers, and the Press and the People along with other branches of government are supposed to keep people in any one branch of government in line.
In the U.S., the powers of the Executive branch of government has been growing unchecked for decades at the national, state, and local levels. If the legislative and judicial branches don't handle it and the sycophantic press don't handle it, then only the people are left. If we let the Executive branch have all the power (whether it's the FBI, the state police, or the local police doing making the arrests at the order of the President, the governors, or the mayors), then we don't have to worry about the terrorists. If the Executive branch has all the power, we'll already be living in a tyrannical dictatorship and the only "terrorists" interested in crushing that regime will be freedom fighters in the spirit of George Washington.
Now, it's easy to say we're not at that point yet. Clearly we're not. But we're on a slippery slope toward that day, and we need to claw our way back to the top before force is the only option for freedom in the U.S. at some point in the future. Only a well-educated, well-informed populace willing to take some responsibility for their freedom can ever trust their government, as only a government that fears it constituency can ever be trusted. If they don't fear our votes and our political organization, then they must fear our arms and our willingness to fight or we'll never remain free.
I was going to mod your post Troll, but I wanted more to make clear why it's a trollish post, so I'll waive the benefit of using mod points in this thread to point that out.
The U.S. House of Representatives does not hold political power over the Israeli Defense Force, over Hezbollah, or over Hamas. The U.S. House of Representatives cannot order the Prime Minister of Israel to withdraw troops. The U.S. House of Representatives cannot order Hezbollah militia members to stop shelling a sovereign country and to stop kidnapping the soldiers of a sovereign country as they have been doing. The U.S. House of Representatives cannot order Hamas to stop strapping bombs to fourteen-year-old boys and sending them into pizza parlors and busses in a sovereign country to kill the civilian populations in Israel.
What's going on in Lebanon and in Gaza is not a war fought by the United States. It is a fight between the uniformed troops of a sovereign nation called Israel and the plainclothes thugs with no governmental authority who keep attacking their people. You can call the Hamas-aligned Palestinian militants freedom fighters if you wish, and I might even be able to see that side of it. Hezbollah, though, left the territory of one sovereign nation to attack the people within the territory of another sovereign nation, and the government of the nation they attacked from did not stop them. That is not freedom fighting. That is an act of war.
All sovereign nations have a duty to protect their citizens from acts of war committed by neighboring countries or forces being harbored by neighboring countries. Israel is no different in this respect than if troops from Panama invaded Nicaragua or if troops from Belgium invaded Denmark. The difference here is that it's not likely you'll ever see Panama invading Nicaragua or Belgium invading Denmark. Israel does have to deal with Hezbollah crossing the border from Lebanon and killing Israelis. If a counterattack is the best way they can find to deal with it, I'll trust their judgment when in that situation themselves more than the judgment of a whiny prick on/. who can't even keep straight which governments are fighting which wars.
I see. Yes, that is definitely a concern. Sorry for being so snarky.
Hopefully, the farmers won't be the ones who have to make the decision. Most biofuels are being made from crops that are already being grown for food. Corn oil and soybean oil are often already the target, so the fact that table grains and grains for high oil content are often different stocks of seed should hopefully be a limited issue.
Using the same source for both would have an upward pressure on the prices for both, to be sure. Hopefully in mkost cases it won't knock things completely out of whack. If there was a serious drought, a crop blight, or an attack with an indescriminate herbicide (agent orange, anyone?), the prices of food and fuel would hoth skyrocket. That's the worst scenario.
OTOH, the cost of fuel to ship food from rural farming regions to urban areas is already driving prices much higher than they could be given more even use of the land. If the cost of the raw material for both goes up hand in hand, that's exponential instead of linear. The cost of fuel is also already driving up the cost of production signifigantly, since there is fuel involved in running farm equiptment. So we'd be going from two price pressures on the crops to three on the fuel costs, plus the added demand pressure from using as the fuel.
It's truly a whole new economics, and it may mean the slow return of local farms in areas that don't currently have them. Since ethanol in particular can't yet be reliably transported by pipeline, local fuel production facilities make much more sense too. It's too bad the Feds are just now getting around to wanting to update the locks and dams on the nation's main rivers, because barges are the cheapest way to ship large amounts of grain. Bigger locks mean more barges per tugboat. Trains will hopefully be used more than trucks for the large amounts of corn, soybeans, and grain oils that have to move outside the pipeline, as that's a big cost savings, too.
Have you seen the price of gas? Some people are already starting to choose between eating and driving. Even more will have to choose when all those summer vacationers stay home, and the tourism industry lays people off.
BTW, don't let anyone tell you Bush invaded Iraq for cheap oil. No oil man wants cheap oil. They all want exactly what we have now -- scared markets that drive up the market price without necessarily raising the price of extraction and refinement. If Bush did this for Big Oil instead of his stated reasons, then the payoff is now, not after the war.
Remember, market price applies to people who buy oil on the market. The Big Oil companies don't buy oil on the marjets, they sell it there. It still costs about what it did in 2000 to extract the oil. It costs a little more to refine it because of hurricane Katrina. The big oil companies can't say it's more expensive to extract the oil because of the strife in Iraq, because oil companies weren't allowed to do business with Iraq (except to the amount of the oil-for-food program) before. The price is riding concerns over instability and uncertainty. Big Oil profits are the highest ever.
Here's a basic economics lesson for those of you who may be rusty in the discipline or may be too tired to realize it at whatever late and/or early hour you read./ -- profit is roughly what you sell something for minus what you paid to get it minus expenses. If profits are at record highs, then there's a much larger selling price than acquisition price. All because of "instability" and "uncertainty". IOW, the guys at the Big Oil companies learned a lesson from Microsoft -- they're using Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to make money. The only difference is that with a fungible resource that everyone uses, you don't make people fear and doubt the competition. You make them fear and doubt the supply chain, so that you can create a sense of a shortage or of an impending shortage whether or not that's actually the case.
The point is that with closed-source, you have someone outside your organization who has blueprints you don't. Add to that the fact that fuzzing makes attacking much, much easier than securing against the attack.
Pretty soon it's clear that it's better for everyone to have the blueprints of a secure system than for only your vendor to have the source of a closed system. Obvious, that is, unless you're stupid, a troll, or both.
Religion, as I see it, is a branch of philosphy which is predicated on the importance of faith. Science, OTOH, would be a branch of philosophy which is predicated on a lack of importance of faith.
Religion essentially is philosophy that at some point says, "Knowledge truth is found through faith". Different religions place that faith differently, but it's placing the truth somewhere dependent on faith.
Science places knowledge of the truth at exact odds with faith -- if you can't test it and find out empirically, then you can't know something is true. It may be true, and it may not be true, but you can have no knowledge that it is true, and you shouldn't claim to know the unknowable.
Those that put faith in something that hasn't been supported by experimental evidence are practicing religion, even if it is faith in the Big Bang, faith in Evolution, or faith in sulfur being flammable. If you have no evidence to believe something and you believe it, that's faith and faith is the domain of religion. If you have done experiments or have read, witnessed, et cetera the results of the experiements of others, then it's science.
The problem is the thought process of some people -- they have faith in anything that sounds scientific even if they don't know anything about it and can't cite anyone who knows anything about it. That makes a religion out of something that seems scientific.
I never argued that faith and science are the same -- only that religion and science come from the same discipline of philosophy. They are essentially two different branches of philosophy. One has very little to do with the other. Someone could think only religiously, only scientifically, or could think scientifically when it is helpful and religiously when it is helpful. Many people find science useful in that it is applicable to accomplishing things and also find religion useful in that many religions bring comfort, focus, or purpose to life. Some people prefer one over the other.
It doesn't bother me if you prefer religion. It doesn't bother me if you prefer science. It doesn't bother me if your preferences quiver and shift, or if you rpefer neither at any time. It does bother me when people slam either of them as invalid because of their own beliefs and preferences.
Neither is necessarily any more or less valid than the other just as Existentialism is not necessarily any more or less valid than Stoicism or Jainism is necessarily any more or less valid than Rastafarianism. Philosohies come and go. Their popularity waxes and wanes. There are errors of thought made in the name of all philosophies.
A phiolosophy can be found to be internally inconsistent. To claim to invalidate one philosophy in terms of another is kind of silly, though. It's very similar to the fight between religions themselves. To say that followers of some foreign religion are going to Hell, hell, Hades, oblivion, or whatever because your religion says so is just plain arrogant and foolish. Their religion may say the same about you, and likely does. Science and religion shouldn't cause wars between their followers any more than between one religion and another.
Anyone who understands the Bible well isn't any sort of idiot. That's some hard reading. It's easy to parrot some guy behind a pulpit. It's difficult to read 700,000 or 800,000 words(791,328 in the King James translation) and understand what it all means.
According to my best understanding of Christianity, there has never been and will never be any mortal human who understands the Bible completely. After all, Christians believe it is the true, living word of God. To understand the true, living word of God in its entirety and at every level would require much more than any human's intellect.
You may debate on either side of whether or not there's any truth to what's on the pages. To claim that some yokel who pounds on the cover to give some false sense of legitimacy to his own ramblings and never takes heed of what's inside understands it, though, is just silly talk.
Do I personally believe what's in the book in question? That's frankly none of your business. Would I condemn the text of a book or its readers without having read it myself? Never. After all, if you're so big on intelligence and discourse, you should inform yourself before speaking.
This assumes that science is not a religion. In many ways, for many people, it is. To ban religion would be to ban science, and to some extent mathematics.
Any so-called science which cannot be performed as an experiment under controlled conditions and recreated according to the notes from those experiements is more blind faith than anything proven. Therefore, it is not science in the truest form of the word. Speculative mathematics, any of the social sciences, economics, and medicine require some amount of faith in something you cannot fully understand and cannot fully control. The mystery is greater than the answers, and the mystery seems to grow as more questions are answered. How is that different from religion?
Religion and science are two branches of the same tree. That tree is philosophy, and imperfect human thought is the strongest root. As long as philosophies exist, those philosphies will be partly religious and partly scientific. One cannot remove a branch and change the nature of the tree.
Hurricanes? You're blaming the government for hurricanes? You think W. and Cheney ordered the invasion of Mississippi and Louisiana by the U.S. Department of Tropical Storm Creation and Control?
Pull your skull out from between your buttocks and read what you wrote. Billions of dollars have bene spent on Katrina recovery. Billions. With a 'B'. It's estimated it will be $150 Billion from the feds, or half of the total cost to rebuild the whole damn area. Was it there fast enough? No. Is it being managed perfectly? No. Do you think you could do it better? It's a huge undertaking. No one knew how few people would evacuate. Some people knew the levees may not hold, but the collapse wasn't the sole fault of the federal government. Fraud prevention was one of the concerns initially, and when that went by the wayside to speed up payments, FEMA is getting grilled about -- guess what -- the vast amount of fraud being committed with recovery funds.
At some level, the local and state governments must take responsibility for their people, too. And how about the people themselves? Yes, the government may have screwed up on Katrina. Screwing up and meaning well isn't even the same ballpark as bypassing court-ordered warrants, ordering onerous record keeping requirements on businesses in case they might sell a good or service to a pedophile or terrorist, miltary tribunals in place of courts, or other huge abuses of power.
It's no longer the blacks. It's now the angry white man, especially the angry white Christian or angry white Jewish man.
I, for one, wonder how long it will take people to realize that white men died to free the slaves in America, white men died to defeat Hitler, white men died to keep South Vietnam free (and in vain), white men voted for the black majority to be able to take power in South Africa, and white men are dying now to help Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if you disagree with the actions of the U.S. Government, surely no reasonable person expects every U.S. soldier, airman, sailor, and Marine to be serving for evil purposes.
Just because powerful white men did terrible things to other groups in the past doesn't mean that all of today's white men are rich, evil, powerful, and well-connected. White men have been on both sides of those evil issues in the past, and few white men believe those were right today. White men are not the only group that has done evil or bad things, either. Pol Pot was not white. Mao was not white. Ghadafi is not white. The Japanese that participated in the rape of Nanking and the Bataan death march are not white.
Personally, I believe the hypocrisy of Bush's administration is the worst part of his work. To take away freedom in the guise of protecting it is exactly what we've been warned about by countless philosophers, sages, and authors. And to grow the government more than ever and spend more than ever to make the government more powerful under the guise of conservativism isn't much better. A real conservative spends less, not more. "Terrorism" and these wars are the excuse to be a liberal and call himself a conservative. Sure, the military expenditures are necessary when you're fighting a war. But no one made him declare war on Iraq at the exact same time we were in Afghanistan. No one is forcing him to use the war to spend more and more money domestically. The Congress and the President have pulled the proverbial wool over the eyes of the country.
I am a true conservative white man. I believe in spending only as much on government as is necessary, and that only as much is necessary as to perform the basic tasks of government. A people has never been better off when the people are afraid of the government, and people should never have to be on the side of their government. It is the government who should always be afraid of the people, and the government that should be on the side of its people and doing the will of those people. Hence the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the First, the Fourth, the Tenth, the Fifth... all of the first ten amendments, the ones called the Bill of Rights... which are quickly becoming a bill of sale for a product with no real warranty.
All of this makes me angry. I guess that means I'm an angry white man. One who believes in gun onwership, small government, and truly free speech. Come knock on my door, FBI, I'll be expecting you. I'll show you what should be the greatest weapons in my arsenal, as our founders planned -- my pen (and keyboard) and my voter card. Let's hope people wake up and those are enough.
And, of course, no x86 processor has ever been 8-bit. Except in the external bus, which AFAIK doesn't matter to applications in any way except execution speed.
How true. I didn't start with the 8086/8088 simply because my rant started with the last 16-bit chip, the 80286. For the sake of completitude (that should drive the grammer polizia nuts), I'd like to say that there was the 8086 at 16 bits internal and external, with the 8088 being its half-bussed brother.
The 80186 and 80188 were likewise, with the important distinctions of starting at 6 Mhz instead of 4.77 as a base, adding the PUSHA, POPA, ENTER, and LEAVE instructions among others, having DMA and some other controllers on-chip, and only being used in a few PC-type machines like the Tandy 2000 (which was mostly, but not completely, PC compatible). The 80186 was widely used, however, as a microcontroller. It didn't have the protected mode of the 286 or the ability to handle 16 megs of RAM.
The 80286, interestingly enough, had protected mode, addressed up to 16 megs of RAM, ran at up to 25 Mhz (like my Harris-built processor), and was still the speed champ after the very first 386s came out. Unfortunately, the was no Virtual Mode and the switch to Protected Mode was a one-way switch -- to go back, one had to reset the processor (which under any remotely standard OS meant rebooting).
On a personal note, my Harris-built 286 chip, the ISA motherboard I bought it on, the AT power supply, the EGA card and monitor, Sound Blaster 16 ISA, keyboard, Logitech 3-button serial mouse, and all the drives except the 40 MB K-Lok hard drive from my first PC compatible computer are still in working order. I've lost many a motherboard or processor since, but for 15 years I've had one system that will consistently let me play my old games and MOD/S3M/MTM/IT/669 files without Windows or a DOS emulator whenever I choose to drag it out of the closet and hook it all up.
Sure, I have 512 times the RAM in my main desktop machine, along with 3072 times the diskspace of the original (1148 times the current drive in that system), and a video card that will render about 14 times as many pixels at 16777216 times as many colors. But do I get any more work done, or have any more fun playing the games? Well, on a rare occassion I actually do. Usually, though, I personally use tools and play games very similar to what was available then. They look prettier and network better, but the biggest benefit in my mind is that there's less eyestrain due to the better resolution and more precise color representation. Oh, and my new system cost less than the original, even before adjusting dollars for inflation.
This is Slashdot, right?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 4, Informative
Hey, a guy says 16-bit 486 and you people pick on him for a bunch of other shit?
A little news for all of you know-it-all teeny Omega geeks out there who don't pay attention to us geezers talk about processor history... the last 16 bit chip in PCs was the 286.
The 386sx was a 32-bit chip on a 16-bit bus. The 386dx was a 32-bit chip on a 32-bit bus. The 486sx and 486dx were both 32bits internally and externally, the latter having a built-in math coprocessor. The 486dx2 series were chips with the core running at twice the bus speed. The dx4 series usually ran at 3x the bus, but could be run at 4x a slower bus. The first Pentiums were monstrous 5-volt parts with no MMX. Then there were the Intel Pentium Pro and the AMD k5. Then the Pentium MMX and Pentium II vs. AMD k6/k6-2/k6-3, while Cyrix actually looked threatening for a while with the 6x86 series. Then the Athlon and Athlon XP took off, the Pentium 3 and Celeron lost a little ground, and the Cyrix M2 was a laughing stock. For a while Via and Transmeta had some somewhat promising offering in the mobile/low power embedded space (where AMD has the Geode positioned).
That brings us to the current chips. In case you're still lost, that includes Pentium 4 / P4EE / Celeron / Pentium D / Celeron D / Pentium M vs. the Athlon XP / Athlon 64 / Athlong 64FX / Sempron / Athlon 64 x2 / Turion / Turion x2.
Damn, it's a sad day when/. goons give a hard time over spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and anything else they can find but miss the geeky details.
One bill, one purpose. One bill should be able to do any of these things:
1. regulate one certain narrowly defined type of behavior, including punishments for it and including assigning a specified portion of tax revenues to enforcement of the regulation (or the buidget appropriation for it)
2. set up one certain narrowly defined helpful government program, including assigning a portion of tax revenues to it (or budget segment)
3. honor one person or group of people, including assigning a portion of tax revenues to cover whatever announcements, plaques, monuments, or whatever are deemed necessary
4. give Congress or other federal employees raises which come due after the end of each Congress member's respective term (No one should be able to give a raise to a buddy in some bureau while the Representative or Senator is still guaranteed access to power.)
5. Give Congress longer vacations, effective immediately. It's become obvious we're usually better off when these misanthropes aren't busy exerting their might as pocket monkeys of the big corporations, anyway.
6. ban lobbying by professional lobbyists. ban corporate-paid Congressional fact-finding trips. Ban the peddling of influence altogether, under penalties of imprisonment and fines. Imprison the Congress member along with the lobbyist if this is broken. If these yahoos start going to jail for listening to their wallets, maybe they'll start listening to their consitutents like they should be doing.
You're probably right. This would probably work over FTP, too. This would probably be a file with an IP then whitespace, then the name. It would probably be called a 'hosts' file. On *nix, it would probably live at/etc/hosts, while on XP it'd be at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts instead.
In fact, this was how things worked before DNS. Those are the actual locations and names used for those files, and take a look at the format...
Also, we wouldn't need different port numbers. The way HTTP/1.1 works is that once you connect to the server by IP, you (usually your browser on your behalf) sends the hostname to the server in a header. The browser would still be able to do that no matter how it got the hostname, even if one had to manually assign name to IP address mapping for a bookmark. It would suck, but it would work.
What DNS gives us is a scalable, distributed name lookup. Nothing less, and only a little bit more.
Top ten reasons the U.S. is a great place for startups
1. Lower taxes 2. More people speaking the same language
(look for this to change somewhat as more and more people in the U.S. speak only Spanish) 3. cheaper energy costs 4. that very pride and arrogance that other countries hate
("Hey, why bother, someone else already makes that." vs. "I can do it better, faster, and cheaper because I'm
smarter, younger, cooler, and/or better educated." -- you see, we're not prideful and arrogant jsut with other
countries, but among ourselves, too.) 5. lower taxes 6. consumer-driven media 7. cheaper energy costs 8. consumer-driven education system 9. venture capital, stocks, bonds and other easy financing 10. less paperwork to start a business
This is the essence of the American Dream -- to be able to take an idea, market it, get money, make a product, get money, market the product, get money, sell the product, get money, sell the company, get money, keep as much of that money as you can in your own hands, and repeat.
Stealing wifi really is theft. Theft really is a crime.
Yes, someone may have spare wifi capacity. They may also have bandwidth to the net to spare. Then, the damage done is only technical.
What if they don't? What if they have to pay extra because you're using half or more of the bandwidth they're renting (you don't really ever "buy" bandwidth outside your LAN, do you)? I'd call that stealing. Rent your own damn bandwidth.
Either way, I've had multiple Red Hat, Mandrake (no, not Mandriva -- before the merger), Caldera, and Slackware boxes with uptimes of over a year. It's hard to get less than zero downtime.
I once was at an employer for 2.5 years, and when I left had an _average_ 'uptime' among 40 servers of over 10 months according to the uptime command. The average amount of time not operational was less than 6 hours out of the prior year. We had a smaller number of Windows servers -- only about 5 -- so the numbers don't mean as much. I can assure you, though, that any one of those servers would have to be rebooted for one reason or another every couple of weeks. One was only used to monitor other servers and still had problems. We had two SCO servers (which were admined by a different department) which were also more reliable than any of our Windows servers.
I've never worked at a place that had more Linux downtime than Windows downtime. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that I am more comfortable working under Linux than under Windows. Of course, I never had any trouble with OS/2 or Netware that compares to the trouble I've had with Windows, either.
I wondered a long time about the monster trucks called 4x4x4 -- that last 4 was a mystery. Thanks to the 'net, I know it's for a vehicle with 4 out of 4 powered wheels and 4-wheel steering.
Some rough carpentry 2x4s are slightly larger than well-finished commercialized 2x4s. I've seen 1.78x3.82 even. But the idea is the same -- never quite 2x4. The 2x10s I have in my basement at the moment are closer to 1.5x9.6, but I won't have to sand them at all for their intended target project. That's an advantage, not mysterious missing wood.
Now, if I can just find a Skt370 for that C633 that costs less than the UPS to get it to my 20, I'll be 5x5.
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Which means they'll say there was more heat and pressure than you thought, which sped it up. And that water leeching through fossil remains carries the radioactive parts from one place to another, making things appear older that have lost C14 and things look younger that have gained it. In fact, the latter I've already heard.
Good points. If it's not a DB server, a very busy file server, or a rather large mail server, though, there's a very good chance it won't be a hundred gigabytes at a time that needs caching. Speed on something that randomly accesses a wide set of small files each infrequently needs a cache speedup much more than huge reads and writes or over data that's always in the OS's cache in main memory.
Also, if during a write the cache can fill during a seek and empty before the next write request from the OS (I haven't read anything that claims this will be the norm for this arrangment, but it'd be the ideal case for a disk cache) then it will offer a speedup no matter what other conditions exist.
I'm not saying these two things outweigh your well-stated checklist. It's just a couple more things to consider.
Quality control is part of all reasonable organizations. Programmers debug, factories x-ray and circuit test, stores have mystery shoppers, and the Press and the People along with other branches of government are supposed to keep people in any one branch of government in line.
In the U.S., the powers of the Executive branch of government has been growing unchecked for decades at the national, state, and local levels. If the legislative and judicial branches don't handle it and the sycophantic press don't handle it, then only the people are left. If we let the Executive branch have all the power (whether it's the FBI, the state police, or the local police doing making the arrests at the order of the President, the governors, or the mayors), then we don't have to worry about the terrorists. If the Executive branch has all the power, we'll already be living in a tyrannical dictatorship and the only "terrorists" interested in crushing that regime will be freedom fighters in the spirit of George Washington.
Now, it's easy to say we're not at that point yet. Clearly we're not. But we're on a slippery slope toward that day, and we need to claw our way back to the top before force is the only option for freedom in the U.S. at some point in the future. Only a well-educated, well-informed populace willing to take some responsibility for their freedom can ever trust their government, as only a government that fears it constituency can ever be trusted. If they don't fear our votes and our political organization, then they must fear our arms and our willingness to fight or we'll never remain free.
I was going to mod your post Troll, but I wanted more to make clear why it's a trollish post, so I'll waive the benefit of using mod points in this thread to point that out.
/. who can't even keep straight which governments are fighting which wars.
The U.S. House of Representatives does not hold political power over the Israeli Defense Force, over Hezbollah, or over Hamas. The U.S. House of Representatives cannot order the Prime Minister of Israel to withdraw troops. The U.S. House of Representatives cannot order Hezbollah militia members to stop shelling a sovereign country and to stop kidnapping the soldiers of a sovereign country as they have been doing. The U.S. House of Representatives cannot order Hamas to stop strapping bombs to fourteen-year-old boys and sending them into pizza parlors and busses in a sovereign country to kill the civilian populations in Israel.
What's going on in Lebanon and in Gaza is not a war fought by the United States. It is a fight between the uniformed troops of a sovereign nation called Israel and the plainclothes thugs with no governmental authority who keep attacking their people. You can call the Hamas-aligned Palestinian militants freedom fighters if you wish, and I might even be able to see that side of it. Hezbollah, though, left the territory of one sovereign nation to attack the people within the territory of another sovereign nation, and the government of the nation they attacked from did not stop them. That is not freedom fighting. That is an act of war.
All sovereign nations have a duty to protect their citizens from acts of war committed by neighboring countries or forces being harbored by neighboring countries. Israel is no different in this respect than if troops from Panama invaded Nicaragua or if troops from Belgium invaded Denmark. The difference here is that it's not likely you'll ever see Panama invading Nicaragua or Belgium invading Denmark. Israel does have to deal with Hezbollah crossing the border from Lebanon and killing Israelis. If a counterattack is the best way they can find to deal with it, I'll trust their judgment when in that situation themselves more than the judgment of a whiny prick on
I see. Yes, that is definitely a concern. Sorry for being so snarky.
Hopefully, the farmers won't be the ones who have to make the decision. Most biofuels are being made from crops that are already being grown for food. Corn oil and soybean oil are often already the target, so the fact that table grains and grains for high oil content are often different stocks of seed should hopefully be a limited issue.
Using the same source for both would have an upward pressure on the prices for both, to be sure. Hopefully in mkost cases it won't knock things completely out of whack. If there was a serious drought, a crop blight, or an attack with an indescriminate herbicide (agent orange, anyone?), the prices of food and fuel would hoth skyrocket. That's the worst scenario.
OTOH, the cost of fuel to ship food from rural farming regions to urban areas is already driving prices much higher than they could be given more even use of the land. If the cost of the raw material for both goes up hand in hand, that's exponential instead of linear. The cost of fuel is also already driving up the cost of production signifigantly, since there is fuel involved in running farm equiptment. So we'd be going from two price pressures on the crops to three on the fuel costs, plus the added demand pressure from using as the fuel.
It's truly a whole new economics, and it may mean the slow return of local farms in areas that don't currently have them. Since ethanol in particular can't yet be reliably transported by pipeline, local fuel production facilities make much more sense too. It's too bad the Feds are just now getting around to wanting to update the locks and dams on the nation's main rivers, because barges are the cheapest way to ship large amounts of grain. Bigger locks mean more barges per tugboat. Trains will hopefully be used more than trucks for the large amounts of corn, soybeans, and grain oils that have to move outside the pipeline, as that's a big cost savings, too.
Have you seen the price of gas? Some people are already starting to choose between eating and driving. Even more will have to choose when all those summer vacationers stay home, and the tourism industry lays people off.
./ -- profit is roughly what you sell something for minus what you paid to get it minus expenses. If profits are at record highs, then there's a much larger selling price than acquisition price. All because of "instability" and "uncertainty". IOW, the guys at the Big Oil companies learned a lesson from Microsoft -- they're using Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to make money. The only difference is that with a fungible resource that everyone uses, you don't make people fear and doubt the competition. You make them fear and doubt the supply chain, so that you can create a sense of a shortage or of an impending shortage whether or not that's actually the case.
BTW, don't let anyone tell you Bush invaded Iraq for cheap oil. No oil man wants cheap oil. They all want exactly what we have now -- scared markets that drive up the market price without necessarily raising the price of extraction and refinement. If Bush did this for Big Oil instead of his stated reasons, then the payoff is now, not after the war.
Remember, market price applies to people who buy oil on the market. The Big Oil companies don't buy oil on the marjets, they sell it there. It still costs about what it did in 2000 to extract the oil. It costs a little more to refine it because of hurricane Katrina. The big oil companies can't say it's more expensive to extract the oil because of the strife in Iraq, because oil companies weren't allowed to do business with Iraq (except to the amount of the oil-for-food program) before. The price is riding concerns over instability and uncertainty. Big Oil profits are the highest ever.
Here's a basic economics lesson for those of you who may be rusty in the discipline or may be too tired to realize it at whatever late and/or early hour you read
The point is that with closed-source, you have someone outside your organization who has blueprints you don't. Add to that the fact that fuzzing makes attacking much, much easier than securing against the attack.
Pretty soon it's clear that it's better for everyone to have the blueprints of a secure system than for only your vendor to have the source of a closed system. Obvious, that is, unless you're stupid, a troll, or both.
Exactly the opposite, actually.
Religion, as I see it, is a branch of philosphy which is predicated on the importance of faith. Science, OTOH, would be a branch of philosophy which is predicated on a lack of importance of faith.
Religion essentially is philosophy that at some point says, "Knowledge truth is found through faith". Different religions place that faith differently, but it's placing the truth somewhere dependent on faith.
Science places knowledge of the truth at exact odds with faith -- if you can't test it and find out empirically, then you can't know something is true. It may be true, and it may not be true, but you can have no knowledge that it is true, and you shouldn't claim to know the unknowable.
Those that put faith in something that hasn't been supported by experimental evidence are practicing religion, even if it is faith in the Big Bang, faith in Evolution, or faith in sulfur being flammable. If you have no evidence to believe something and you believe it, that's faith and faith is the domain of religion. If you have done experiments or have read, witnessed, et cetera the results of the experiements of others, then it's science.
The problem is the thought process of some people -- they have faith in anything that sounds scientific even if they don't know anything about it and can't cite anyone who knows anything about it. That makes a religion out of something that seems scientific.
I never argued that faith and science are the same -- only that religion and science come from the same discipline of philosophy. They are essentially two different branches of philosophy. One has very little to do with the other. Someone could think only religiously, only scientifically, or could think scientifically when it is helpful and religiously when it is helpful. Many people find science useful in that it is applicable to accomplishing things and also find religion useful in that many religions bring comfort, focus, or purpose to life. Some people prefer one over the other.
It doesn't bother me if you prefer religion. It doesn't bother me if you prefer science. It doesn't bother me if your preferences quiver and shift, or if you rpefer neither at any time. It does bother me when people slam either of them as invalid because of their own beliefs and preferences.
Neither is necessarily any more or less valid than the other just as Existentialism is not necessarily any more or less valid than Stoicism or Jainism is necessarily any more or less valid than Rastafarianism. Philosohies come and go. Their popularity waxes and wanes. There are errors of thought made in the name of all philosophies.
A phiolosophy can be found to be internally inconsistent. To claim to invalidate one philosophy in terms of another is kind of silly, though. It's very similar to the fight between religions themselves. To say that followers of some foreign religion are going to Hell, hell, Hades, oblivion, or whatever because your religion says so is just plain arrogant and foolish. Their religion may say the same about you, and likely does. Science and religion shouldn't cause wars between their followers any more than between one religion and another.
Anyone who understands the Bible well isn't any sort of idiot. That's some hard reading. It's easy to parrot some guy behind a pulpit. It's difficult to read 700,000 or 800,000 words(791,328 in the King James translation) and understand what it all means.
According to my best understanding of Christianity, there has never been and will never be any mortal human who understands the Bible completely. After all, Christians believe it is the true, living word of God. To understand the true, living word of God in its entirety and at every level would require much more than any human's intellect.
You may debate on either side of whether or not there's any truth to what's on the pages. To claim that some yokel who pounds on the cover to give some false sense of legitimacy to his own ramblings and never takes heed of what's inside understands it, though, is just silly talk.
Do I personally believe what's in the book in question? That's frankly none of your business. Would I condemn the text of a book or its readers without having read it myself? Never. After all, if you're so big on intelligence and discourse, you should inform yourself before speaking.
This assumes that science is not a religion. In many ways, for many people, it is. To ban religion would be to ban science, and to some extent mathematics.
Any so-called science which cannot be performed as an experiment under controlled conditions and recreated according to the notes from those experiements is more blind faith than anything proven. Therefore, it is not science in the truest form of the word. Speculative mathematics, any of the social sciences, economics, and medicine require some amount of faith in something you cannot fully understand and cannot fully control. The mystery is greater than the answers, and the mystery seems to grow as more questions are answered. How is that different from religion?
Religion and science are two branches of the same tree. That tree is philosophy, and imperfect human thought is the strongest root. As long as philosophies exist, those philosphies will be partly religious and partly scientific. One cannot remove a branch and change the nature of the tree.
ODF is XML. ODF is XML.
There, say it with me now...
ODF is XML. ODF is XML.
And when I want to use Open Source Software that reads Office files and saves them as ODF, well, I already do sue that.
Hurricanes? You're blaming the government for hurricanes? You think W. and Cheney ordered the invasion of Mississippi and Louisiana by the U.S. Department of Tropical Storm Creation and Control?
Pull your skull out from between your buttocks and read what you wrote. Billions of dollars have bene spent on Katrina recovery. Billions. With a 'B'. It's estimated it will be $150 Billion from the feds, or half of the total cost to rebuild the whole damn area. Was it there fast enough? No. Is it being managed perfectly? No. Do you think you could do it better? It's a huge undertaking. No one knew how few people would evacuate. Some people knew the levees may not hold, but the collapse wasn't the sole fault of the federal government. Fraud prevention was one of the concerns initially, and when that went by the wayside to speed up payments, FEMA is getting grilled about -- guess what -- the vast amount of fraud being committed with recovery funds.
At some level, the local and state governments must take responsibility for their people, too. And how about the people themselves? Yes, the government may have screwed up on Katrina. Screwing up and meaning well isn't even the same ballpark as bypassing court-ordered warrants, ordering onerous record keeping requirements on businesses in case they might sell a good or service to a pedophile or terrorist, miltary tribunals in place of courts, or other huge abuses of power.
Because they asked about using King Kong, and the guy at MCA was a real jackass?
It's no longer the blacks. It's now the angry white man, especially the angry white Christian or angry white Jewish man.
I, for one, wonder how long it will take people to realize that white men died to free the slaves in America, white men died to defeat Hitler, white men died to keep South Vietnam free (and in vain), white men voted for the black majority to be able to take power in South Africa, and white men are dying now to help Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if you disagree with the actions of the U.S. Government, surely no reasonable person expects every U.S. soldier, airman, sailor, and Marine to be serving for evil purposes.
Just because powerful white men did terrible things to other groups in the past doesn't mean that all of today's white men are rich, evil, powerful, and well-connected. White men have been on both sides of those evil issues in the past, and few white men believe those were right today. White men are not the only group that has done evil or bad things, either. Pol Pot was not white. Mao was not white. Ghadafi is not white. The Japanese that participated in the rape of Nanking and the Bataan death march are not white.
Personally, I believe the hypocrisy of Bush's administration is the worst part of his work. To take away freedom in the guise of protecting it is exactly what we've been warned about by countless philosophers, sages, and authors. And to grow the government more than ever and spend more than ever to make the government more powerful under the guise of conservativism isn't much better. A real conservative spends less, not more. "Terrorism" and these wars are the excuse to be a liberal and call himself a conservative. Sure, the military expenditures are necessary when you're fighting a war. But no one made him declare war on Iraq at the exact same time we were in Afghanistan. No one is forcing him to use the war to spend more and more money domestically. The Congress and the President have pulled the proverbial wool over the eyes of the country.
I am a true conservative white man. I believe in spending only as much on government as is necessary, and that only as much is necessary as to perform the basic tasks of government. A people has never been better off when the people are afraid of the government, and people should never have to be on the side of their government. It is the government who should always be afraid of the people, and the government that should be on the side of its people and doing the will of those people. Hence the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the First, the Fourth, the Tenth, the Fifth... all of the first ten amendments, the ones called the Bill of Rights... which are quickly becoming a bill of sale for a product with no real warranty.
All of this makes me angry. I guess that means I'm an angry white man. One who believes in gun onwership, small government, and truly free speech. Come knock on my door, FBI, I'll be expecting you. I'll show you what should be the greatest weapons in my arsenal, as our founders planned -- my pen (and keyboard) and my voter card. Let's hope people wake up and those are enough.
How true. I didn't start with the 8086/8088 simply because my rant started with the last 16-bit chip, the 80286. For the sake of completitude (that should drive the grammer polizia nuts), I'd like to say that there was the 8086 at 16 bits internal and external, with the 8088 being its half-bussed brother.
The 80186 and 80188 were likewise, with the important distinctions of starting at 6 Mhz instead of 4.77 as a base, adding the PUSHA, POPA, ENTER, and LEAVE instructions among others, having DMA and some other controllers on-chip, and only being used in a few PC-type machines like the Tandy 2000 (which was mostly, but not completely, PC compatible). The 80186 was widely used, however, as a microcontroller. It didn't have the protected mode of the 286 or the ability to handle 16 megs of RAM.
The 80286, interestingly enough, had protected mode, addressed up to 16 megs of RAM, ran at up to 25 Mhz (like my Harris-built processor), and was still the speed champ after the very first 386s came out. Unfortunately, the was no Virtual Mode and the switch to Protected Mode was a one-way switch -- to go back, one had to reset the processor (which under any remotely standard OS meant rebooting).
On a personal note, my Harris-built 286 chip, the ISA motherboard I bought it on, the AT power supply, the EGA card and monitor, Sound Blaster 16 ISA, keyboard, Logitech 3-button serial mouse, and all the drives except the 40 MB K-Lok hard drive from my first PC compatible computer are still in working order. I've lost many a motherboard or processor since, but for 15 years I've had one system that will consistently let me play my old games and MOD/S3M/MTM/IT/669 files without Windows or a DOS emulator whenever I choose to drag it out of the closet and hook it all up.
Sure, I have 512 times the RAM in my main desktop machine, along with 3072 times the diskspace of the original (1148 times the current drive in that system), and a video card that will render about 14 times as many pixels at 16777216 times as many colors. But do I get any more work done, or have any more fun playing the games? Well, on a rare occassion I actually do. Usually, though, I personally use tools and play games very similar to what was available then. They look prettier and network better, but the biggest benefit in my mind is that there's less eyestrain due to the better resolution and more precise color representation. Oh, and my new system cost less than the original, even before adjusting dollars for inflation.
Hey, a guy says 16-bit 486 and you people pick on him for a bunch of other shit?
/. goons give a hard time over spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and anything else they can find but miss the geeky details.
A little news for all of you know-it-all teeny Omega geeks out there who don't pay attention to us geezers talk about processor history... the last 16 bit chip in PCs was the 286.
The 386sx was a 32-bit chip on a 16-bit bus. The 386dx was a 32-bit chip on a 32-bit bus. The 486sx and 486dx were both 32bits internally and externally, the latter having a built-in math coprocessor. The 486dx2 series were chips with the core running at twice the bus speed. The dx4 series usually ran at 3x the bus, but could be run at 4x a slower bus. The first Pentiums were monstrous 5-volt parts with no MMX. Then there were the Intel Pentium Pro and the AMD k5. Then the Pentium MMX and Pentium II vs. AMD k6/k6-2/k6-3, while Cyrix actually looked threatening for a while with the 6x86 series. Then the Athlon and Athlon XP took off, the Pentium 3 and Celeron lost a little ground, and the Cyrix M2 was a laughing stock. For a while Via and Transmeta had some somewhat promising offering in the mobile/low power embedded space (where AMD has the Geode positioned).
That brings us to the current chips. In case you're still lost, that includes Pentium 4 / P4EE / Celeron / Pentium D / Celeron D / Pentium M vs. the Athlon XP / Athlon 64 / Athlong 64FX / Sempron / Athlon 64 x2 / Turion / Turion x2.
Damn, it's a sad day when
I've been saying this for years.
One bill, one purpose. One bill should be able to do any of these things:
1. regulate one certain narrowly defined type of behavior, including punishments for it and including assigning a specified portion of tax revenues to enforcement of the regulation (or the buidget appropriation for it)
2. set up one certain narrowly defined helpful government program, including assigning a portion of tax revenues to it (or budget segment)
3. honor one person or group of people, including assigning a portion of tax revenues to cover whatever announcements, plaques, monuments, or whatever are deemed necessary
4. give Congress or other federal employees raises which come due after the end of each Congress member's respective term (No one should be able to give a raise to a buddy in some bureau while the Representative or Senator is still guaranteed access to power.)
5. Give Congress longer vacations, effective immediately. It's become obvious we're usually better off when these misanthropes aren't busy exerting their might as pocket monkeys of the big corporations, anyway.
6. ban lobbying by professional lobbyists. ban corporate-paid Congressional fact-finding trips. Ban the peddling of influence altogether, under penalties of imprisonment and fines. Imprison the Congress member along with the lobbyist if this is broken. If these yahoos start going to jail for listening to their wallets, maybe they'll start listening to their consitutents like they should be doing.
By 90% of the population, they likely mean far less than 90% geographical coverage. People aren't uniformly distributed geographically.
You're probably right. This would probably work over FTP, too. This would probably be a file with an IP then whitespace, then the name. It would probably be called a 'hosts' file. On *nix, it would probably live at /etc/hosts, while on XP it'd be at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts instead.
In fact, this was how things worked before DNS. Those are the actual locations and names used for those files, and take a look at the format...
Also, we wouldn't need different port numbers. The way HTTP/1.1 works is that once you connect to the server by IP, you (usually your browser on your behalf) sends the hostname to the server in a header. The browser would still be able to do that no matter how it got the hostname, even if one had to manually assign name to IP address mapping for a bookmark. It would suck, but it would work.
What DNS gives us is a scalable, distributed name lookup. Nothing less, and only a little bit more.
Top ten reasons the U.S. is a great place for startups
1. Lower taxes
2. More people speaking the same language
(look for this to change somewhat as more and more people in the U.S. speak only Spanish)
3. cheaper energy costs
4. that very pride and arrogance that other countries hate
("Hey, why bother, someone else already makes that." vs. "I can do it better, faster, and cheaper because I'm
smarter, younger, cooler, and/or better educated." -- you see, we're not prideful and arrogant jsut with other
countries, but among ourselves, too.)
5. lower taxes
6. consumer-driven media
7. cheaper energy costs
8. consumer-driven education system
9. venture capital, stocks, bonds and other easy financing
10. less paperwork to start a business
This is the essence of the American Dream -- to be able to take an idea, market it, get money, make a product, get money, market the product, get money, sell the product, get money, sell the company, get money, keep as much of that money as you can in your own hands, and repeat.
Stealing wifi really is theft. Theft really is a crime.
Yes, someone may have spare wifi capacity. They may also have bandwidth to the net to spare. Then, the damage done is only technical.
What if they don't? What if they have to pay extra because you're using half or more of the bandwidth they're renting (you don't really ever "buy" bandwidth outside your LAN, do you)? I'd call that stealing. Rent your own damn bandwidth.
Either way, I've had multiple Red Hat, Mandrake (no, not Mandriva -- before the merger), Caldera, and Slackware boxes with uptimes of over a year. It's hard to get less than zero downtime.
I once was at an employer for 2.5 years, and when I left had an _average_ 'uptime' among 40 servers of over 10 months according to the uptime command. The average amount of time not operational was less than 6 hours out of the prior year. We had a smaller number of Windows servers -- only about 5 -- so the numbers don't mean as much. I can assure you, though, that any one of those servers would have to be rebooted for one reason or another every couple of weeks. One was only used to monitor other servers and still had problems. We had two SCO servers (which were admined by a different department) which were also more reliable than any of our Windows servers.
I've never worked at a place that had more Linux downtime than Windows downtime. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that I am more comfortable working under Linux than under Windows. Of course, I never had any trouble with OS/2 or Netware that compares to the trouble I've had with Windows, either.
I wondered a long time about the monster trucks called 4x4x4 -- that last 4 was a mystery. Thanks to the 'net, I know it's for a vehicle with 4 out of 4 powered wheels and 4-wheel steering.
Some rough carpentry 2x4s are slightly larger than well-finished commercialized 2x4s. I've seen 1.78x3.82 even. But the idea is the same -- never quite 2x4. The 2x10s I have in my basement at the moment are closer to 1.5x9.6, but I won't have to sand them at all for their intended target project. That's an advantage, not mysterious missing wood.
Now, if I can just find a Skt370 for that C633 that costs less than the UPS to get it to my 20, I'll be 5x5.
Or Filezilla. Or maybe even better in this situation, Portable Filezilla so they don't even have to install it.
In the U.S., we have door-to-door steak knife salespeople.
/. standby...
BTW, the best way to make the point about people vs. things being responsible for actions might be an old
In Soviet Russia, knives stab people with YOU!