The general claim is that the Bush Administration authorized or ordered wiretaps on wholesale basis without judicial oversight on individual cases. So I would gather rather than most of the communications of a few competing politicians we are actually talking about millions of separate communication transactions of an unknown number of both US citizens and foreign nationals.
There has been some suggestion that another reason the Bush Administration did not seek judicial oversight is that they were knowingly illegally gather intelligence (violating FISA) then continuing the investigation with information gathered legally and or gathering intelligence for other things rather than the "War on Terror". I personally have not read anything all that convincing of the latter... not that it should matter...the rest is probably an impeachable offence anyway. I honestly doubt it was anything but the sheer volume of intelligence gathering. But still it's illegal, it should be stopped, and those who authorized it should be removed from office and put on trial.
Over the course of the past 2 years my entire extended family has switched to Apple products. I find it interesting that well over half of them have not installed a single package beyond what is on them to begin with. And *ALL* of them objected to the useless and annoying crap on their previous big name WinTel boxes.
Why is it that Apple can figure out what regular people want and HP & Packard Bell saddle people with crap?
ID exists exclusively as, and was created for, a tool to aid religious fundamentalists to do only a few things:
Violate the constitution of the United States of America
Cast doubt in the minds of young people in the fundamental working of the sciences
Become the thin end of the wedge for the eventual goals of various forms of Christian Reconstructionism.
ID has no basis in fact or reality. ID did not spring from spiritual thought but rather as a response to legal setbacks The religious extremists who promote ID repetitively have lied, deceived, cajoled, threatened, and even perjured themselves in their efforts to discredit science and get ID in the class room.
I am all for religious tolerance and I am religious myself, but I absolutely will not tolerate dishonest and unethical religious extremists and I'm honestly outraged at the suggestion that I should.
Having said all of that the ID comment in the submission is inappropriate but I can understand the sentiment.
My Family & I lived just north of Sydney for 7~8 years, shortly after our defection from the Czech Republic. To this day I still have the impression that Australia is very protectionist (Mind you this was back in the '70's). What it's like now I couldn't comment on, as I haven't live there since 1980. The main drift of my comments though are perhaps that the issue looks different from a immigrant's point of view.
I have been using computers professionally since 1985, when I finished university. Now I have a pair of glasses for computing and a pair for the "real world". But I'll tell you now... don't play with cheap lighting or cheap displays.
French have a good record but they are human and they are uisng old designs.
hydro-electric is not without it's own issues.
Extra pebble reactors increase some sorts of risk but do mitigate the collosal big bang sorts.
do you really think fission will become popular? I honestly can't see anyone willing to generate a sizable fraction of their power like that... it just doesn't make sense.
Ohh.. and one more comment cost should only be one factor in many when choosing a power gerneration scheme.
one more... they are much better than our 'friends' in Iran and North Korea are playing with... pity...
The fact is that every reactor failure that ever was is directly attributable to a design flaw... because all the reactors that have failed *require* active moderation.
Truly Chernobyl is an extreme and ill-fitting example...
The Chernobyl facility is *extremely* large, it has 4 reactors each capable of 1 GW of electric power and outputs 3.2 gigawatts of thermal energy.
The RBMK-1000 reactor specifically is known to have design flaws which creates safety issues.
In general water cooled graphite moderated reactors employing fuel or control rods all have the fundamental flaw of requiring an active positive feedback loop to prevent a catastrophic failure.
In comparison
All of the pebble bed reactors either in operation or planned are significantly smaller, on the order 100~200 MW of electric power and 200~400 MW of thermal energy (note the increase in efficiency)
The reactor core typically has a power density of a 1/30th of that of the various light water designs.
Rather than employing control rods (and all of the machinery, electronics, &tc that go with them), pebble bed reactors are moderated by the nature of the pebbles themselves. Pebble bed reactors can and have gone lengthy periods without external cooling or moderation.
So to make the blanket statement any fission reactor has the potential to create a catastrophe equal to the Chernobyl incident is to simultaneous ignore the design improvements in both safety & efficiency since the RBMK was designed, some 60 some odd years ago and to ignore the implementation details of existing and planned reactors. Surely this puts you on equal footing as those who, to use your words, are "rabid pro nuclear", "Ignorant Luddites", or any number of extremists available in discussions like this.
Why don't you go read up on pebble bed reactors and while you're at peruse some of the more modern reprocessing methods? They don't really have failure modes that are anything like the older designs, like the one used at Chernobyl, do. That is not to say they are flawless or perfect (in fact I understand that the Germans halted research on theirs citing concerns with the pebble feeding mechanism) but significant safety advances have been made. Additionally current pebble bed designs don't really have that typical soviet over-the-top gigantic design... lacking the required sheer volume in fissile material & having inbuilt safety mechanism in the fuel there isn't a way a pebble bed reactor, in it's present form, could produce a catastrophe nearly as large as the Chernobyl incident, even after including 3rd & 4th order serial failures and knock on effects.... Continuing to use extreme and ill-fitting examples isn't really helping your credibility.
Statements I think most could agree on though...
All nuclear reactors (including fusion reactors) have an element of risk. All of the nuclear reactors currently producing power are of an outdated design. Newer experimental nuclear reactor demonstrate significant increase in safety (but it's not unreasonable to want more) There are currently better methods to address the risk of proliferation of illicit fissile material than the current US blanket ban on reprocessing. Newer experimental coal firing plants significantly reduce some components of the pollution but do not address the radioactive output at all. All fossil fuel are unsustainable in the long term due to either pollutants, or availability, or both. The existing and continuing danger from coal pollution is *vastly* underrated. Continuing to pollute the environment at even our current rate is against our best interest. Renewable energy sources currently lack the energy density, reliability, and availability we current enjoy using fossil fuels. Any significant disruption to energy sources will, in certainty, cause widespread human suffering, conflict, and loss of life.
What is absolutely obvious to me, evaluating the risks of losing energy against using imperfect energy sources... Any sound energy policy begins with incentives for continually improving efficiency while lowering pollution. It also encourages conservation not only from the retail consumer but the industrial consumer as well. And it places high importance to the research into developing cleaner, safer, and renewable energy sources. As the burden of using fossil fuels become more and more onerous it is clear to me that no single energy source will replace it and so research must be done in all possible areas... both the nuclear and the "green" avenues *must* be pursued if we are to avert a truly global catastrophe.
Honestly I'm fairly interested in pebble bed and related technology and wouldn't be all that against a new generation design being built in "my back yard" here in Austria. However I'd say that with the expectation that we eschew the Soviet tendency towards gigantism and the American paranoia with reprocessing. And perhaps design with an eye towards the Indian progress with the Thorium Cycle. A few well place plants could provide a sizeable part of our power needs, provide all the various cycle designs required by the thorium cycle, reduce the risk of illicit platinum proliferation, and reduce the risk and severity of a catastrophic failure of the actual reactor.
In my experience, with modern displays, it is predominatly the ambient lighting interacting with the refresh rate of the display. The flourescent lighting commonly used in US businesses is so unbeleivably poor as to be criminal.
I use two of the Apple 30 inch cinema displays and sometimes sit before them for well over 12 hours, to no ill effects.
I see in the hours between when I read this at lunch and my after work response many people have responded with surprising lucid criticisms of your imagined fears and misplaced objections. I can't help to add a few of my own.
You make a number of statements that are either very vague, mischaracterizations, impropbable, or philosophically faulty... either way they leave me with a lot of questions about how you arrived at your conclusions... actually let me restate that... Your statements lead me to conclude that you find stem cell research morally wrong on a religious basis and rather than coming out and saying that you are casting about for some hidden horror which precludes any advantage responsible research could lead to.
Your statement "I find stem-cell research rather unethical" do you refer to all stem cell research or is it that you try to incorporate the ethical difficulties of abortion in to all forms of research of stem cells?
Your concept of "wouldbe humans" what do you mean by this? Do you mean, as someone else suggests, a fertilized egg or a more developed fetus and again trying to incorporate the ethical difficulties of abortion into the research of stem cells?
Your assertion that "wouldbe humans" "have all the components to grow into babies, so they are completely human" which components are those? Do you suggest that either a group of cells in a petri dish or an unborn fetus left on their own (without the intervention of an existing "complete human".i.e. a mother or scientist and without any form of nurishment) eventually some how becomes a "complete human"?
Your statement "This is essentially playing God in the worst sense." and "this violates the sanctity of life" I take this to mean "Deciding which human lives and which one dies" or "Deciding what form a life, based on human cells, takes on". Is this what you meant? How is that different than the decision making of judges, lawyers, solders, &tc that has been going on since time in memorial? Can you say how a god would decide or that a god would never act through a stem cell researcher.
Your question if I were to be a fertilized egg would I find it "ethical to turn you into a treatment rather then to returned into non-existence". With what neurons would detect, recognize, and remember this event? Where is the identity that would object to such treatment? How did that identity become linked to those particular cells and not to other cells. Why wouldn't that same mechanism revise the link?
Your idea that "a few cells in somebodies back. This is a horrible existence". I must say that philosophically this is your most bizarre and problematic statement. The my cells in my back seem neither happy, sad, pampered, or tortured. They simply exist and in their existence contribute to my life liberty and happiness. How could they be anything else? Continuing with the example of spinal cord injury treatment... Once a stem cell treatment had been administered the cell differentiate to become nerve cells... Again I have to ask how cells lacking in mechanism to detect, recognize, and record the event retain this information and find misery in it. And after the short time these cells are actually living & active cells expires how and why would the specialized nerve cells carry this misery forward to future generations of cells.
"In the least, Stem-cell research is pretty creepy if you ask me." What I find creepy here are some of the bizarre ideas you bandy about as "reality"
Wow! That's pretty strange. I've been doing embedded for 20 years... Someone said 'java' once in a meeting but that's all that came of it. One of the kids that works on another project was gushing C# but I don't remember what happened to him. Now they (the user land guys) are all C++ and QT and we are still C and assembly with part time FORTRAN maintenance duties. Honestly I don't see anything wrong with it... C (or C++) is fine and FORTRAN makes some folks happy... Will you really gain all that much by using C#?
Sure people have accomplished the whole realtime java thing but usually I think when people are waiving such things around that have a faulty partition between the realtime world and user world
OK... I gotta ask Do you think that the patent system is *not* so broken as to be obvious? Do you think that the patent system is still achieving the goal set out for it in 1790?
or...
Do you think in order to point out that it broken or to propose a fix one must have an education in patent law?
or...
Are you complaining that when it comes to patent discussion the comments here on slashdot are even more uninformed, disingenuous, and sophomorically falsely cynical than they normal are. I have to admit this is something I find hard to believe.
And...
Why the attack on Zonk? We all know that while these guys are called "editors" what they are doing bears little resemblance to what most people mean by the word edit... they more are like gatekeepers who cut-n-paste...it even says so in the faq.
I do believe these technologies are completely unrelated...
However I understand that Leica has a digital rangefinder soon to be released, which possibly will worthy of our praise. Unfortunatly their current digital twin reflex is little more than an child's toy.
I don't think that is quite how it would sound... perhaps it would be more like this:
Sir, we have accepted your application for health insurance (what they don't say is as you scored fairly high on their secret rating system your premium is raised)
Sir, I'm afraid we can't offer you a job as the position has filled (or you don't qualify, or both)
Sir, we have accepted your application for a home mortgage (what they don't say is as you scored fairly high on their secret rating system your mortgage insurance rate & mortgage percentage are raised)
Businesses already know how to not hire or fire people based on criteria that are forbidden by law, they've been skirting the disabilities and equal opportunities laws for years. Likewise insurance and lending institutions have been using rating systems which are protected as corporate secrets for years... any additional information simply will be factored into their existing equations.
There is a reason Motorola and IBM both are not so interested in Apple's business and it is that the embedded business DWARFS the "Personal Computing" business. My company uses more Motorola microcontrollers than Apple... so does every car company and just is to name a few.
A pity really... I'd love to see a dual MPC8641D (dual core G4) in the retail marketplace and more of the PPC970MP as well. They are both great processors that few have used to their full potential.
Years ago the company I work for bought another company which marketed a competing device. The direct impact for me was that I got a new boss (from the other company) and I had to maintain the code for the device. The previous version control system was a combination of a make file which built everything and shell script which tarred & zipped everything and gave a name with the date embedded. So I got a stack of CDROMs and a clunky UNIX workstation with thousands of tar.gz files.
When I suggested to my new boss we put all of this in CVS, you would have thought I had suggested we stick a pineapple up his ass. As far as he was concerned making tar file was all that was needed and anything else was not only a waste of resources but suggested that his previous company wasn't fantastic.
More than a few months later when I had the time of a student worker I had him get it all into CVS... I found out later he had run the code through some code formatting tool (which wound up being doubleplus good). I still maintain the code although it's moved over to subversion. My old boss still doesn't see the need for a concurrent versioning tool but at least he works for a different company now... and they haven't released a product in over *three and a half years*.
Still with out have cheap hidden talent it's hard to get code into version control on the sly. Where as once you have some sort of version control it much easier to stick *everything* in version control and to occasionally maintain, backup, and upgrade said version control.
No, you may have not read that right. Entanglement (AKA spooky action at a distance) is all about faster than light communication (between the particles) but it can not be used for communications like a walkie-talkie. I didn't RTF(NewYork Times)A, but I read one I found with news.google and that one made that point pretty clear.
Slashdot Mirror
The general claim is that the Bush Administration authorized or ordered wiretaps on wholesale basis without judicial oversight on individual cases. So I would gather rather than most of the communications of a few competing politicians we are actually talking about millions of separate communication transactions of an unknown number of both US citizens and foreign nationals.
There has been some suggestion that another reason the Bush Administration did not seek judicial oversight is that they were knowingly illegally gather intelligence (violating FISA) then continuing the investigation with information gathered legally and or gathering intelligence for other things rather than the "War on Terror". I personally have not read anything all that convincing of the latter... not that it should matter...the rest is probably an impeachable offence anyway. I honestly doubt it was anything but the sheer volume of intelligence gathering. But still it's illegal, it should be stopped, and those who authorized it should be removed from office and put on trial.
Over the course of the past 2 years my entire extended family has switched to Apple products. I find it interesting that well over half of them have not installed a single package beyond what is on them to begin with. And *ALL* of them objected to the useless and annoying crap on their previous big name WinTel boxes.
Why is it that Apple can figure out what regular people want and HP & Packard Bell saddle people with crap?
I think you are confused about the word enterprising.
Enterprising: Showing initiative and willingness to undertake new projects:
Perhaps you meant innovative or original.
And unless you've done all these things yourself, before he did, I don't think you've got any room to talk.
Most emphatically NO.
ID exists exclusively as, and was created for, a tool to aid religious fundamentalists to do only a few things:
Violate the constitution of the United States of America
Cast doubt in the minds of young people in the fundamental working of the sciences
Become the thin end of the wedge for the eventual goals of various forms of Christian Reconstructionism.
ID has no basis in fact or reality.
ID did not spring from spiritual thought but rather as a response to legal setbacks
The religious extremists who promote ID repetitively have lied, deceived, cajoled, threatened, and even perjured themselves in their efforts to discredit science and get ID in the class room.
I am all for religious tolerance and I am religious myself, but I absolutely will not tolerate dishonest and unethical religious extremists and I'm honestly outraged at the suggestion that I should.
Having said all of that the ID comment in the submission is inappropriate but I can understand the sentiment.
I dare sare you've hit on one of the most fundamental flaws in capitalism
My Family & I lived just north of Sydney for 7~8 years, shortly after our defection from the Czech Republic. To this day I still have the impression that Australia is very protectionist (Mind you this was back in the '70's). What it's like now I couldn't comment on, as I haven't live there since 1980. The main drift of my comments though are perhaps that the issue looks different from a immigrant's point of view.
I have been using computers professionally since 1985, when I finished university. Now I have a pair of glasses for computing and a pair for the "real world". But I'll tell you now... don't play with cheap lighting or cheap displays.
what.. with all of the legit X86-OSX users in the world!
Agree with all except...
French have a good record but they are human and they are uisng old designs.
hydro-electric is not without it's own issues.
Extra pebble reactors increase some sorts of risk but do mitigate the collosal big bang sorts.
do you really think fission will become popular? I honestly can't see anyone willing to generate a sizable fraction of their power like that... it just doesn't make sense.
Ohh.. and one more comment cost should only be one factor in many when choosing a power gerneration scheme.
one more... they are much better than our 'friends' in Iran and North Korea are playing with... pity...
The fact is that every reactor failure that ever was is directly attributable to a design flaw... because all the reactors that have failed *require* active moderation.
Truly Chernobyl is an extreme and ill-fitting example...
The Chernobyl facility is *extremely* large, it has 4 reactors each capable of 1 GW of electric power and outputs 3.2 gigawatts of thermal energy.
The RBMK-1000 reactor specifically is known to have design flaws which creates safety issues.
In general water cooled graphite moderated reactors employing fuel or control rods all have the fundamental flaw of requiring an active positive feedback loop to prevent a catastrophic failure.
In comparison
All of the pebble bed reactors either in operation or planned are significantly smaller, on the order 100~200 MW of electric power and 200~400 MW of thermal energy (note the increase in efficiency)
The reactor core typically has a power density of a 1/30th of that of the various light water designs.
Rather than employing control rods (and all of the machinery, electronics, &tc that go with them), pebble bed reactors are moderated by the nature of the pebbles themselves. Pebble bed reactors can and have gone lengthy periods without external cooling or moderation.
So to make the blanket statement any fission reactor has the potential to create a catastrophe equal to the Chernobyl incident is to simultaneous ignore the design improvements in both safety & efficiency since the RBMK was designed, some 60 some odd years ago and to ignore the implementation details of existing and planned reactors. Surely this puts you on equal footing as those who, to use your words, are "rabid pro nuclear", "Ignorant Luddites", or any number of extremists available in discussions like this.
"Feral C"... If there was ever a description of how I use C (and probably FORTRAN) there it is!
I love it... when will GCC be supporting it?
Whoa There!
Why don't you go read up on pebble bed reactors and while you're at peruse some of the more modern reprocessing methods? They don't really have failure modes that are anything like the older designs, like the one used at Chernobyl, do. That is not to say they are flawless or perfect (in fact I understand that the Germans halted research on theirs citing concerns with the pebble feeding mechanism) but significant safety advances have been made. Additionally current pebble bed designs don't really have that typical soviet over-the-top gigantic design... lacking the required sheer volume in fissile material & having inbuilt safety mechanism in the fuel there isn't a way a pebble bed reactor, in it's present form, could produce a catastrophe nearly as large as the Chernobyl incident, even after including 3rd & 4th order serial failures and knock on effects.... Continuing to use extreme and ill-fitting examples isn't really helping your credibility.
Statements I think most could agree on though...
All nuclear reactors (including fusion reactors) have an element of risk.
All of the nuclear reactors currently producing power are of an outdated design.
Newer experimental nuclear reactor demonstrate significant increase in safety (but it's not unreasonable to want more)
There are currently better methods to address the risk of proliferation of illicit fissile material than the current US blanket ban on reprocessing.
Newer experimental coal firing plants significantly reduce some components of the pollution but do not address the radioactive output at all.
All fossil fuel are unsustainable in the long term due to either pollutants, or availability, or both.
The existing and continuing danger from coal pollution is *vastly* underrated.
Continuing to pollute the environment at even our current rate is against our best interest.
Renewable energy sources currently lack the energy density, reliability, and availability we current enjoy using fossil fuels.
Any significant disruption to energy sources will, in certainty, cause widespread human suffering, conflict, and loss of life.
What is absolutely obvious to me, evaluating the risks of losing energy against using imperfect energy sources... Any sound energy policy begins with incentives for continually improving efficiency while lowering pollution. It also encourages conservation not only from the retail consumer but the industrial consumer as well. And it places high importance to the research into developing cleaner, safer, and renewable energy sources. As the burden of using fossil fuels become more and more onerous it is clear to me that no single energy source will replace it and so research must be done in all possible areas... both the nuclear and the "green" avenues *must* be pursued if we are to avert a truly global catastrophe.
Honestly I'm fairly interested in pebble bed and related technology and wouldn't be all that against a new generation design being built in "my back yard" here in Austria. However I'd say that with the expectation that we eschew the Soviet tendency towards gigantism and the American paranoia with reprocessing. And perhaps design with an eye towards the Indian progress with the Thorium Cycle. A few well place plants could provide a sizeable part of our power needs, provide all the various cycle designs required by the thorium cycle, reduce the risk of illicit platinum proliferation, and reduce the risk and severity of a catastrophic failure of the actual reactor.
In my experience, with modern displays, it is predominatly the ambient lighting interacting with the refresh rate of the display. The flourescent lighting commonly used in US businesses is so unbeleivably poor as to be criminal.
I use two of the Apple 30 inch cinema displays and sometimes sit before them for well over 12 hours, to no ill effects.
I see in the hours between when I read this at lunch and my after work response many people have responded with surprising lucid criticisms of your imagined fears and misplaced objections. I can't help to add a few of my own.
.i.e. a mother or scientist and without any form of nurishment) eventually some how becomes a "complete human"?
You make a number of statements that are either very vague, mischaracterizations, impropbable, or philosophically faulty... either way they leave me with a lot of questions about how you arrived at your conclusions... actually let me restate that...
Your statements lead me to conclude that you find stem cell research morally wrong on a religious basis and rather than coming out and saying that you are casting about for some hidden horror which precludes any advantage responsible research could lead to.
Your statement "I find stem-cell research rather unethical" do you refer to all stem cell research or is it that you try to incorporate the ethical difficulties of abortion in to all forms of research of stem cells?
Your concept of "wouldbe humans" what do you mean by this? Do you mean, as someone else suggests, a fertilized egg or a more developed fetus and again trying to incorporate the ethical difficulties of abortion into the research of stem cells?
Your assertion that "wouldbe humans" "have all the components to grow into babies, so they are completely human" which components are those? Do you suggest that either a group of cells in a petri dish or an unborn fetus left on their own (without the intervention of an existing "complete human"
Your statement "This is essentially playing God in the worst sense." and "this violates the sanctity of life" I take this to mean "Deciding which human lives and which one dies" or "Deciding what form a life, based on human cells, takes on". Is this what you meant? How is that different than the decision making of judges, lawyers, solders, &tc that has been going on since time in memorial? Can you say how a god would decide or that a god would never act through a stem cell researcher.
Your question if I were to be a fertilized egg would I find it "ethical to turn you into a treatment rather then to returned into non-existence". With what neurons would detect, recognize, and remember this event? Where is the identity that would object to such treatment? How did that identity become linked to those particular cells and not to other cells. Why wouldn't that same mechanism revise the link?
Your idea that "a few cells in somebodies back. This is a horrible existence". I must say that philosophically this is your most bizarre and problematic statement. The my cells in my back seem neither happy, sad, pampered, or tortured. They simply exist and in their existence contribute to my life liberty and happiness. How could they be anything else? Continuing with the example of spinal cord injury treatment... Once a stem cell treatment had been administered the cell differentiate to become nerve cells... Again I have to ask how cells lacking in mechanism to detect, recognize, and record the event retain this information and find misery in it. And after the short time these cells are actually living & active cells expires how and why would the specialized nerve cells carry this misery forward to future generations of cells.
"In the least, Stem-cell research is pretty creepy if you ask me." What I find creepy here are some of the bizarre ideas you bandy about as "reality"
Wow! That's pretty strange. I've been doing embedded for 20 years... Someone said 'java' once in a meeting but that's all that came of it. One of the kids that works on another project was gushing C# but I don't remember what happened to him. Now they (the user land guys) are all C++ and QT and we are still C and assembly with part time FORTRAN maintenance duties. Honestly I don't see anything wrong with it... C (or C++) is fine and FORTRAN makes some folks happy... Will you really gain all that much by using C#?
Sure people have accomplished the whole realtime java thing but usually I think when people are waiving such things around that have a faulty partition between the realtime world and user world
Obviously these people have never observed my ex-wife and her capacity to remember ancient transgressions or her ability to loose keys.
OK... I gotta ask Do you think that the patent system is *not* so broken as to be obvious? Do you think that the patent system is still achieving the goal set out for it in 1790?
or...
Do you think in order to point out that it broken or to propose a fix one must have an education in patent law?
or...
Are you complaining that when it comes to patent discussion the comments here on slashdot are even more uninformed, disingenuous, and sophomorically falsely cynical than they normal are. I have to admit this is something I find hard to believe.
And...
Why the attack on Zonk? We all know that while these guys are called "editors" what they are doing bears little resemblance to what most people mean by the word edit... they more are like gatekeepers who cut-n-paste...it even says so in the faq.
Too True... One of the smartest people I ever met was a bartender.
I do believe these technologies are completely unrelated...
However I understand that Leica has a digital rangefinder soon to be released, which possibly will worthy of our praise. Unfortunatly their current digital twin reflex is little more than an child's toy.
Well... I think he's right and it's not a troll. So one man's milk is another's garbage.
I don't think that is quite how it would sound... perhaps it would be more like this:
Sir, we have accepted your application for health insurance (what they don't say is as you scored fairly high on their secret rating system your premium is raised)
Sir, I'm afraid we can't offer you a job as the position has filled (or you don't qualify, or both)
Sir, we have accepted your application for a home mortgage (what they don't say is as you scored fairly high on their secret rating system your mortgage insurance rate & mortgage percentage are raised)
Businesses already know how to not hire or fire people based on criteria that are forbidden by law, they've been skirting the disabilities and equal opportunities laws for years. Likewise insurance and lending institutions have been using rating systems which are protected as corporate secrets for years... any additional information simply will be factored into their existing equations.
yes
A pity really... I'd love to see a dual MPC8641D (dual core G4) in the retail marketplace and more of the PPC970MP as well. They are both great processors that few have used to their full potential.
Years ago the company I work for bought another company which marketed a competing device. The direct impact for me was that I got a new boss (from the other company) and I had to maintain the code for the device. The previous version control system was a combination of a make file which built everything and shell script which tarred & zipped everything and gave a name with the date embedded. So I got a stack of CDROMs and a clunky UNIX workstation with thousands of tar.gz files.
When I suggested to my new boss we put all of this in CVS, you would have thought I had suggested we stick a pineapple up his ass. As far as he was concerned making tar file was all that was needed and anything else was not only a waste of resources but suggested that his previous company wasn't fantastic.
More than a few months later when I had the time of a student worker I had him get it all into CVS... I found out later he had run the code through some code formatting tool (which wound up being doubleplus good). I still maintain the code although it's moved over to subversion. My old boss still doesn't see the need for a concurrent versioning tool but at least he works for a different company now... and they haven't released a product in over *three and a half years*.
Still with out have cheap hidden talent it's hard to get code into version control on the sly. Where as once you have some sort of version control it much easier to stick *everything* in version control and to occasionally maintain, backup, and upgrade said version control.
No, you may have not read that right. Entanglement (AKA spooky action at a distance) is all about faster than light communication (between the particles) but it can not be used for communications like a walkie-talkie. I didn't RTF(NewYork Times)A, but I read one I found with news.google and that one made that point pretty clear.