The whole point of LEADERSHIP is not to invest in alternative energy when other energy sources are prohibitively expensive (how quickly we forget $150/bbl oil), but to shape the future so that when energy costs increase again the infrastructure is already in place.
I am disappointed that the US government believes that spending trillions of dollars to create inefficient, artificial jobs is more worthwhile than investing in the future of the country in terms of solid infrastructure. Those nuclear plants will not be cheaper to design and build in 20 years.
In the 1930's FDR went about building the interstate system, completing the Hoover Dam (which provided energy to California, Arizona and Nevada), the Tennessee Valley Authority which provided power to the South-East. This cheap power, as well as the roadways which permitted goods to be moved across the country cheaply, heralded new economic growth.
Today's government instead would have scrapped these types of projects in favor of repainting federal buildings in Washington, hiring analysts to make sure that homes didn't get foreclosed, while at the same time forking over more money to the banks.
While nuclear power may be expensive, peak oil is coming and there's no way to stop it. China continues to grow, and India will soon start demanding its share as well. There are not enough straws in the oil milk-shake, and putting more straws in only means that the shake will be finished a lot faster. When oil prices begin to rise again it will only be a matter of a few short months before we hit $150/bbl. In the meantime other "alternative energy" types (wind/solar) continue to be far, far less efficient than nuclear power.
Not exactly true. Statistically there are a greater number of births in the month of September, probably thanks to the end of year festivities 9 months earlier. Considering that pregnant women can't get pregnant again unless she loses the baby, and the duration of term is the same whether conceived in Jan or Nov, this necessarily decreases the number of women "available" to give birth any other time of year. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to confirm what OB/GYN's and midwives have known for a long time...
All of these problems will be fixed with the iPhone 5, scheduled to be released Q4 next year for $600. Get your credit cards ready, you mindless consumers of Apple products. Lines are shortening at the Apple store.
while bot-infected PCs might be barred from the Internet.
Or rather, machines that don't have the right "health certificate". You know, like ones running discontinued operating systems, or "unsupported" operating systems.
While I think you don't deserve the "Troll" mod, I would argue the following with respect to the "Driver License for PC's":
You are required to have a driver's license for motor vehicles, and presumably the amount of testing is much more detailed than a "PC license". Yet the road is still full of idiots. I don't see how a "PC license" would achieve anything, other than an additional revenue stream for a testing agency and more make believe jobs.
I don't see any problems when a company that sells "security" releases data about the bad terrible things that can happen to you if you don't have the appropriate "security".
And when Merck says Vioxx is safe, we must trust them.
No-one should be spying on me unless they have a pre-existing, genuine good faith suspicion that I'm up to no good
But looking at you when you are in a public place is not "spying". Heck, we all have to close our eyes because Your Highness wishes to walk down the public street? Yeah right. You know there are cameras everywhere pointed at you. Some of them are owned by the government. Some of them are privately owned. If one day video of you picking your nose in your car emerges on the internet, welcome to the modern world. But on the other hand, you will be just one of millions of nose-pickers so no one will pay any attention to you (unless of course, you draw attention to yourself and invoke the Streisand effect).
I remember reading somewhere (I think it was Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire") that it's a characteristic human tendency that the more impossible it is to enforce a law, the more outrageous the penalties for breaking said law become.
While dooming said person to perpetual poverty if they choose to continue to live in Canada (hint: move. AFAIK this is a civil matter not a criminal one, so there should not be impediments to living somewhere outside the reach of the US or Canadian courts), there's always a way around it - by forming corporations, etc. Get mom and dad and a few friends to set up and register a corp, buy the shares from them, and you're home free. Of course the corporation would have to own all assets and a trusted person found to sign bank accounts, etc so that red flags didn't show up - but really this judgment probably has no hope of even "recovering" the court costs, much less an actual billion dollars.
Yet sadly this is how bureaucrats think. Some accountant somewhere has probably put $1 billion into the "accounts receivable" ledger, and is awaiting payment.
OK, where's my freedom to enjoy a relatively bot-free internet? Or is it just freedom to break rules you're talking about?
Don't get into disease - some vaccines are MANDATORY. Where is your freedom there? Society has the inherent right to be free from polio or smallpox, because the individual sacrifice is miniscule, and the possible benefit (eradication of the disease) is huge. The common cold - not so easy. Even if you forced everyone to receive a vaccine the virus mutates so fast that it would already be onto the next version by the time you're done.
You have no inherent freedom to speed on the highway and endanger everyone. You have no freedom to drive drunk. You might do it, and you might even get away with it, but you are not as "free" as you think.
They exist to provide people with access to the Internet for a fee.
According to certain TERMS OF SERVICE. Ooops, fixed that for ya.
What you think you wave a wad of dollar bills and everyone has to do what you say? Build your own fucking network. Society has rules. Society NEEDS rules. The internet has been mainstream for 20+ years. Joe Sixpack is not going to fix his machine unless you make him, or he would have done so already. The only reason this is a problem for you and me is because there's always the next vulnerability that's just waiting to be exploited. Neither you nor I are writing our own OS, nor do we have time to keep up with every single possible exploit for every single program we run. But if the botnet is out there, you can bet that some douche some day will try to use that exploit on YOU. If your machine is constantly being hammered, the bad guy only has to be lucky once.
Because I am paying for them. My ISP incurs costs when dealing with botnets and spam, and passes those costs on to me. My internet performance is degraded because of a degree of bandwidth that is being used all the time by botnets and spam. And on the other side, my bank is charging me fees and/or higher interest (or paying less interest) because they need to cover their estimated losses due to online fraud.
Now if all this overhead served some useful purpose, then it would just be something the world would have to deal with. However all of it is illegitimate, fraudulent and/or get-rich-quick scams that benefit society not at all. Why the FUCK do you insist we all keep paying for this? Must be nice to be rich and be able to afford all that waste.
1. By definition, an internet service provider IS a man in the middle. To everyone whining about using this method - welcome to the real world. A man in the middle approach is the easiest one for the man in the middle to take. 2. Perhaps the ISP should just terminate the accounts of users of infected machines, since I am sure running an infected machine on the net is a violation of the TOS somewhere.
I WANT them to break the service and force people to upgrade, instead of continuing to spew their filthy zombie attacks all over the net. The more dramatic and attention getting, the better. Face it - your mission critical systems should not be on a residential account anyway, RIGHT? That's what the premium priced business packages are for... So what if grandpa has to click on some links to download some software and fix his machine before he can read his paper today. It's worth it to clean up the net.
Yeah, that's why in the very last paragraph of the linked page you provided it's listed as the #1 killer worldwide.
As a second year med student please take some advice from this attending physician: while there are certain ways in which the data is sliced demographically that ends up presenting other pathologies as number one, the overall aggregate data clearly states that heart disease is #1 worldwide with 7.2 million cases per year. Right there at the bottom of the page where it says "World". Picking and choosing data is an error that is committed very often nowadays - people try to create "meta-analyses" that demonstrate their pet theory but conveniently leave out all the studies that fail to support their theories. This is bad science. Don't do it. Either look at all of the data, or make sure that have have the right tools to evaluate your special subset of data in the context of the big picture.
I agree that stenting is a stop-gap at best, and long term patient compliance with CAD medications will always be a challenge. The future, as you say, lies in prevention and raising awareness of the real causes of CAD: Smoking, sedentarism/obesity, diet and lastly genetics.
It's a good thing that great advances are being made in very specialized areas of medicine. Meanwhile, the leading killer world-wide is still heart disease which receives disproportionately inadequate funding despite recent progress in PTCA stenting, etc. Machines like this may grab funding dollars and headlines, but they don't save very many lives.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of LEADERSHIP is not to invest in alternative energy when other energy sources are prohibitively expensive (how quickly we forget $150/bbl oil), but to shape the future so that when energy costs increase again the infrastructure is already in place.
I am disappointed that the US government believes that spending trillions of dollars to create inefficient, artificial jobs is more worthwhile than investing in the future of the country in terms of solid infrastructure. Those nuclear plants will not be cheaper to design and build in 20 years.
In the 1930's FDR went about building the interstate system, completing the Hoover Dam (which provided energy to California, Arizona and Nevada), the Tennessee Valley Authority which provided power to the South-East. This cheap power, as well as the roadways which permitted goods to be moved across the country cheaply, heralded new economic growth.
Today's government instead would have scrapped these types of projects in favor of repainting federal buildings in Washington, hiring analysts to make sure that homes didn't get foreclosed, while at the same time forking over more money to the banks.
While nuclear power may be expensive, peak oil is coming and there's no way to stop it. China continues to grow, and India will soon start demanding its share as well. There are not enough straws in the oil milk-shake, and putting more straws in only means that the shake will be finished a lot faster. When oil prices begin to rise again it will only be a matter of a few short months before we hit $150/bbl. In the meantime other "alternative energy" types (wind/solar) continue to be far, far less efficient than nuclear power.
But hey, we were warned.
Certainly more powerful than the Taliban...
1 in 365.25 I suppose.
Not exactly true. Statistically there are a greater number of births in the month of September, probably thanks to the end of year festivities 9 months earlier. Considering that pregnant women can't get pregnant again unless she loses the baby, and the duration of term is the same whether conceived in Jan or Nov, this necessarily decreases the number of women "available" to give birth any other time of year. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to confirm what OB/GYN's and midwives have known for a long time...
True. Any idiot who checks a laptop is begging to have it stolen, broken, or both.
I can see it now: Oral sex banned in his district...
All of these problems will be fixed with the iPhone 5, scheduled to be released Q4 next year for $600. Get your credit cards ready, you mindless consumers of Apple products. Lines are shortening at the Apple store.
while bot-infected PCs might be barred from the Internet.
Or rather, machines that don't have the right "health certificate". You know, like ones running discontinued operating systems, or "unsupported" operating systems.
While I think you don't deserve the "Troll" mod, I would argue the following with respect to the "Driver License for PC's":
You are required to have a driver's license for motor vehicles, and presumably the amount of testing is much more detailed than a "PC license". Yet the road is still full of idiots. I don't see how a "PC license" would achieve anything, other than an additional revenue stream for a testing agency and more make believe jobs.
or copies of the CNN front page...
This makes me glad to know that I will soon be able to download your profiles. They got the name just right.
So, protecting state secrets is of no benefit to society?
No. Its only benefit is to POLITICS.
It might get the few stragglers to finally upgrade..
Yep. #1 reason to upgrade to a new television: to watch the commercials properly.
I mean it would be like not having health insurance, having a heart attack, getting $50K in bills.
My recent heart attack just cost me $130k. Check your prices...
I don't see any problems when a company that sells "security" releases data about the bad terrible things that can happen to you if you don't have the appropriate "security".
And when Merck says Vioxx is safe, we must trust them.
No-one should be spying on me unless they have a pre-existing, genuine good faith suspicion that I'm up to no good
But looking at you when you are in a public place is not "spying". Heck, we all have to close our eyes because Your Highness wishes to walk down the public street? Yeah right. You know there are cameras everywhere pointed at you. Some of them are owned by the government. Some of them are privately owned. If one day video of you picking your nose in your car emerges on the internet, welcome to the modern world. But on the other hand, you will be just one of millions of nose-pickers so no one will pay any attention to you (unless of course, you draw attention to yourself and invoke the Streisand effect).
I remember reading somewhere (I think it was Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire") that it's a characteristic human tendency that the more impossible it is to enforce a law, the more outrageous the penalties for breaking said law become.
While dooming said person to perpetual poverty if they choose to continue to live in Canada (hint: move. AFAIK this is a civil matter not a criminal one, so there should not be impediments to living somewhere outside the reach of the US or Canadian courts), there's always a way around it - by forming corporations, etc. Get mom and dad and a few friends to set up and register a corp, buy the shares from them, and you're home free. Of course the corporation would have to own all assets and a trusted person found to sign bank accounts, etc so that red flags didn't show up - but really this judgment probably has no hope of even "recovering" the court costs, much less an actual billion dollars.
Yet sadly this is how bureaucrats think. Some accountant somewhere has probably put $1 billion into the "accounts receivable" ledger, and is awaiting payment.
But everyone knows about True Crypt by now, so the judge will ask you for both passwords. Back to square 1.
I see no legitimate reason why someone would refuse to disclose a password that is related to it.
You have never ever forgotten a password, right?
Because people inherently have freedom.
OK, where's my freedom to enjoy a relatively bot-free internet? Or is it just freedom to break rules you're talking about?
Don't get into disease - some vaccines are MANDATORY. Where is your freedom there? Society has the inherent right to be free from polio or smallpox, because the individual sacrifice is miniscule, and the possible benefit (eradication of the disease) is huge. The common cold - not so easy. Even if you forced everyone to receive a vaccine the virus mutates so fast that it would already be onto the next version by the time you're done.
You have no inherent freedom to speed on the highway and endanger everyone. You have no freedom to drive drunk. You might do it, and you might even get away with it, but you are not as "free" as you think.
They exist to provide people with access to the Internet for a fee.
According to certain TERMS OF SERVICE. Ooops, fixed that for ya.
What you think you wave a wad of dollar bills and everyone has to do what you say? Build your own fucking network. Society has rules. Society NEEDS rules. The internet has been mainstream for 20+ years. Joe Sixpack is not going to fix his machine unless you make him, or he would have done so already. The only reason this is a problem for you and me is because there's always the next vulnerability that's just waiting to be exploited. Neither you nor I are writing our own OS, nor do we have time to keep up with every single possible exploit for every single program we run. But if the botnet is out there, you can bet that some douche some day will try to use that exploit on YOU. If your machine is constantly being hammered, the bad guy only has to be lucky once.
What are you worried about botnets anyway?
Because I am paying for them. My ISP incurs costs when dealing with botnets and spam, and passes those costs on to me. My internet performance is degraded because of a degree of bandwidth that is being used all the time by botnets and spam. And on the other side, my bank is charging me fees and/or higher interest (or paying less interest) because they need to cover their estimated losses due to online fraud.
Now if all this overhead served some useful purpose, then it would just be something the world would have to deal with. However all of it is illegitimate, fraudulent and/or get-rich-quick scams that benefit society not at all. Why the FUCK do you insist we all keep paying for this? Must be nice to be rich and be able to afford all that waste.
Let's look at the following:
1. By definition, an internet service provider IS a man in the middle. To everyone whining about using this method - welcome to the real world. A man in the middle approach is the easiest one for the man in the middle to take.
2. Perhaps the ISP should just terminate the accounts of users of infected machines, since I am sure running an infected machine on the net is a violation of the TOS somewhere.
I WANT them to break the service and force people to upgrade, instead of continuing to spew their filthy zombie attacks all over the net. The more dramatic and attention getting, the better. Face it - your mission critical systems should not be on a residential account anyway, RIGHT? That's what the premium priced business packages are for... So what if grandpa has to click on some links to download some software and fix his machine before he can read his paper today. It's worth it to clean up the net.
but it isn't the major killer worldwide,
Yeah, that's why in the very last paragraph of the linked page you provided it's listed as the #1 killer worldwide.
As a second year med student please take some advice from this attending physician: while there are certain ways in which the data is sliced demographically that ends up presenting other pathologies as number one, the overall aggregate data clearly states that heart disease is #1 worldwide with 7.2 million cases per year. Right there at the bottom of the page where it says "World". Picking and choosing data is an error that is committed very often nowadays - people try to create "meta-analyses" that demonstrate their pet theory but conveniently leave out all the studies that fail to support their theories. This is bad science. Don't do it. Either look at all of the data, or make sure that have have the right tools to evaluate your special subset of data in the context of the big picture.
I agree that stenting is a stop-gap at best, and long term patient compliance with CAD medications will always be a challenge. The future, as you say, lies in prevention and raising awareness of the real causes of CAD: Smoking, sedentarism/obesity, diet and lastly genetics.
Good luck in your studies.
It's a good thing that great advances are being made in very specialized areas of medicine. Meanwhile, the leading killer world-wide is still heart disease which receives disproportionately inadequate funding despite recent progress in PTCA stenting, etc. Machines like this may grab funding dollars and headlines, but they don't save very many lives.
The Island of Kesmai (shut down by EA in 1999)
Megawars III (CompuServe)/Stellar Emperor (GEnie)
Air Warrior, Air Warrior II, Air Warrior III...