This underlines an important point I made previously, that part of the problem here is C/C++ and its manual memory management. Ruby, Perl and Python eliminate a whole class of programming errors by doing memory management automatically, making it easier to develop secure applications. People laugh when you say the web browser should be written in Perl, as the web server should be, but its true. The result would be a safer, and even a faster system because a Perl program would lack as many memory leaks and therefore you would end up with less memory swapping as a result. So much for how much Slashdot people know about security, or good software design, that they would then that C/C++ is a good development environment for the web browser or web server, when it obviously is a source of huge numbers of vulnerabilities. People here must be totally inept or clueless to miss that Perl has automatic memory management, reference counting and automatic allocation that you eliminate hanging pointers and out of bound access errors.
No, it has nothing to do with the WWW. It has a lot to do with poorly designed web browsers written in C/C++ which leak memory like a sieve and treat memory like everything has unlimited quantities of it. A well designed web browser supporting ALL of the HTML, Javascript and other web standards could use a small fraction of what Firefox uses if it is written properly and in a better language like Ruby. With some quality programming, the web browsers could use a fraction of the CPU power they do now by storing off screen graphics in compressed formats, for instance, especially since ending up with disk caching due to using up the RAM is far more resource intensive than decompressing images. There is no reason, NO REASON that Firefox should eat up 1 GB of RAM. The Javascript and HTML engines supporting ALL of the latest standards and ALL legacy standards only take up a few MB of RAM. There is massive memory leakage going on these browsers of forgotten image and multimedia data. Observing the behaviour of Firefox it cannot be anything else, when you open 20 windows and then close all except the first one, memory never goes back down. If web browsers were written in say, Perl or Ruby, I gaurantee that you could easily have browsers that are many times faster than current browsers because the memory usage and swapping would be much less, plus would be much safer without all of the buffer overruns.
The fact that so many experts on the disease die of it is a testament to its extreme contagiousness, and why we really should be scared of this thing. Of all people, experts of the disease take precautions to avoid catching it themselves, when they do, its not a good sign. It only makes sense to put into place travel bans from infected countries. It is important when dealing with this diseases to stop the spread by banning travel from the hot zone. There also needs to be public funding for a vaccine.
An all the way CISC architecture would allow you to have both operands of an instruction to be pointers to memory, the CPU would have the circuitry to load values into a register in the background. That would eliminate manual register loading. You would also have 3 operand versions of the instructions, as well. x86 is not the most CISC architecture out there or take the concept as far as it could. This would be a very programmer friendly environment. AMD expanded the number of registers, they could add even more, I dont know what the reasons are for not having at least 32 GPRs.
MIT shared memory support? This has been in the X server for a long time. Apps can use that to send an image to the server, the server then can take that image and composite it with others for the hardware video output buffer. The application can create the buffer on the server, render to the buffer, and then issue a command to the server that the buffer is finished rendering and can be used for compositing an output frame. The application would be given timing information, such as the frequency and the timebase, so it can know when the deadline is for submitting a finished buffer. Any submission of a buffer after the deadline is saved for the rendering of the next frame. this can work with direct and indirect rendering, in indirect the actual programming of hardware occurs in the X server, you would use GLX to send OpenGL commands to the server.
X itself is useable and was not the issue. The problems were with drivers were due to the lack of drivers, and problems with the device dependant layer (such as lack of auto configuration of drivers or when auto configuration of drivers screwed up) rather than with X itself. These problems would continue no matter what window system was used, because it was not a window system problem, it was a problem with drivers. Wayland mainly solves some slught issues with visual artifacts, as far as I am aware, by addressing issues with vertical synchronization. An X extension could have been created to address these concerns by allowing X applications a clue as to the frequency and timing of vertical synchronization and a double buffering facility that could be used by apps to update their screen contents.
It would be trivial to add a dynamic loader, or if necesary a simple compatability layer for a stable ABI, to the kernel so that old drivers will work fine.The only reason they don't is that Linux developers are anti-social and basically like the idea of Linux being unuseable to most average people, because it makes themselves feel elite to be able to use something that is so difficult to manage. Yes, Linux needs a dynamic loader or compatability layer for drivers, but try telling that to kernel developers who are off in their own world where average people can be expected to learn to love editing configuration files. Most people are not interested in that stuff, they just want to use their computer to get work done and get off, not muck around with recompiling drivers and editing configuration files.
the general concept behind systemd makes sense, its mainly some additional features on top of the current model, such as the ability to have processes started on certain system events. The fact is, if you want your bootup process to be controlled by bash scripts, all you need to do is configure systemd to start your bash script and youve got a more traditional init system. So, systemd does not take away any functionality, only adds it. Systemd supports the system v init process features so you still have all the old model functionality available to you. So, it does not make much sense that people complain about this when they can easily configure things however they want, including having a BSD style init, by having systemd hand off control to your own scripts, including to work the way things always have. People act like systemd has taken away something when it has not, i think many people just hears some soundbite about systemd introducing a new model and assume that they can no longer use things the way they do currently, which is not the case. it seems like people who don't like systemd don't want people to have the additional functionality that it provides, because it does not take away anything. Its open source software, and its something that you can control and configure to your hearts content. Its much ado about nothing. systemd, while being configurable, also will make things easier to use for many users. I think the ado about systemd is more about Linux people who think that Linux should be hard to use except for a small elite and do not want the OS to be useful to less technically adept users. This is even though making it more useable for less adept users does not in any way harm or take away flexibility from experts, who can still configure everything if they want they want to.
i thought they would be looking for industrial gases in the spectrum from planets. It doesnt seem like streetlights and city lights would be significant compared to the amount emitted by suns.
Thats incorrect. Look at the Obfuscated C Code Contest. You can write TOTALLY unmaintainable code in ANY reasonably powerful general purpose language. Such features are necessary to write good software, though of course, anything can be abused.
Still, you have not actually discounted the fact that IBM could if it wanted to operate manufacturing wherever it need to be to compete, it might not be very profitable, but they could have profits in line with the chinese, and keep this business out of hands of the chinese. It seems as though instead, everything has to have a massive, fat profit margin to these companies, that making a modest amount isnt enough. If the chinese can manufacture these goods, albeit at a relatively low profit, IBM could spin off subsidiary to do it.
It could be cheaper to replace the cheap consumer RAID drivers than to buy expensive "enterprise grade" stuff. Maybe the cost of a RAID array with backup is cheaper than all the more expensive stuff.
My solution is the one that would actually allow ISPs to gradually upgrade things over time rther than to replace everything at once, by allowing the interoperation. Its a lot easier if the changes are concentrated at the ISP end rather than effect subscribers as well. Its true that over time as due to the turnover of ipv4 older routers, that ISPs could gradually replace the subcribers routers with newer models. It would also be possible even for ISPs to collect older routers, flash them with new firmware, and put them back out, in the process of customer turnover cancellations and signups. The whole point is the solution i describe gives ISPs a transitiion period.
Theoritically, any block of Ipv4 addresses outside of the local subnet could be used, if an ipv4 address is used as a fake address, and then the user asks DNS address which happens to resolve to a real IPv4 address with the same number, then, the same NAT trick could be used with a mapping between created between another temporary local ipv4 address to the real internet ipv4 address which was already being used locally as a fake ipv4 number. Though, I would only recommend that be used as a fallback if 127.x.x.x is used up. A small part of the of RFC 1918 addreses could also be allocated for the pool of fake ipv4 address, such as maybe 172.20 and 172.21, giving a pool of 131072 ipv4 addresses, plenty for most use cases. I doubt most people will have that many TCP connections at once. Since 127 is not used for local networks, it is the best choice however as the first choice. Again, 127 is so large, i doubt most users would ever exhaust it, especially if the fake ipv4 mappings are timed out after a period of maybe 1 -7 days or so.
Isnt subnetting more a software implementation DHCP, and BGP thing in the router, enter a net mask address and network address into the router config and then the router can analyse the addresses to determine if they are local or not. It seems, if IPV6 does not provide an equivalent for DHCP's getting the net mask then we are screwed. But net masks are not something you find in the IP packets headers themselves.
The fact is, TCP v6 was defective by design, because of what it does not have, and that is a mechanism for a long transition period between ipv4 and ipv6. If we had such transition period, ipv6 would now be widespread. The transition period means that ipv4 and ipv6 networks can communicate with each other. Making Ipv6 talk send packets to an ipv4 network is easy: give the ipv4 address block a subset of the ipv6 address block. The more complex but entirely doable part is ipv4->ipv6. Since ipv6 is larger address space than ipv4, ipv4 cannot directly see a lot of ipv6 addresses. The answer lies in the DNS system. When a user on an ipv4 network askes for the IP address associated with a DNS address which only has an ipv6 address associated with it, somewhere upstream, an upstream router and DNS server will conspire to 1) give the user (ipv4 peer) a fake IPv4 address for a DNS address 2) give the information on the ipv6 to fake ipv4 mapping to the router 3) which the router uses NAT to rewrite the packets headed out from from the fake ipv4 destination address to the real ipv6 destination address. Ipv6 packets headed in would be rewritten to ipv4 replacing the ipv6 source address with the fake ipv4 source address. Each ipv4 peer should be able to re-use the same block of ipv4 fake addresses, the mappings can be done on a per ipv4 peer (user) basis. Using this, its also possible to give ipv4 clients direct access to ipv6, using an.ipv6 DNS TLD, which can be used in the form.ipv6. You could even write an HTTP and other application protocol proxy that would automatically rewrite all ipv6 addresses in HTML with ipv6 TLD addresses. This makes ipv6 a upstream ISP thing rather than something that affects things on the users end, greatly simplifying things.ISPs as a complementary measure could also offer 6over4 gateways as well, and then over time transition to allowing raw ipv6 over their networks, a transition which can be gradual.
Its pretty obvious that this idea is a scam being foisted on an easily duped public and hear the word biometric and instantly have this image of something that will keep them safe, which of course, is completely delusional. We know that such biometric data would be easily stolen and used by criminals, and since you cannot change it, like you can an encryption key or password, you are screwed for life. Numerical keys work well for authentication and it makes sense to randomly generate these sort of things for your own use, which gives people control over these things. You have two kinds of people who think that biometrics is a good idea, you have the low information masses who don't know what the hell they are talking about, and you have the evil people who are up to no good and know that this has nothing to do with peoples well being, and are pushing this because they actually want to deprive people of privacy, and they know biometrics would help with an invasion of privacy, they know full well that biometrics are simply a horrible means of online authentication but thats not what they want. Their trick is to make the idiots out there think that it would be good for them, but the people are pushing for this knowing its not good for people, they push it because they basically hate people and want more power for themselves.
Something like OpenID is the answer, gives people complete control and is an open platform.
Watch out, this is an trick to use the concerns over the weak passwords people use to push for monitoring and control mandates. Basically, its none of their business to force this on businesses. What kind of authentication a service offers is a private matter between users of the service and the service.
I do think, OpenID does exactly what we need here. its a single sign on system that can work in a decentralized manner between sites, and it does not require biometrics which is just a way to take away privacy. I think what has been needed is a system that makes creating and managing OpenID easy for common users. Then people can use a strong, strong password rather than a lot of weak ones.
The evidence and data on racial differences of IQ are pretty well established. In the scientific community, there is virtually no question that there are major differences in IQ between races, with Orientals and Caucasians at the high end and Negros, Mesoamericans, etc at the lower end. There are massive differences in biochemistry, physiology and neurology in almost every area between racial groups, including brain size, skeletal structure, biochemistry, genetics, eye color, skin color, and so on, for instance Caucasians are the only racial group where most adults can digest Lactose, and this is clearly due to tens of thousands of years of divergent evolution that caused some races in cold climates to develop higher IQ and larger brain capacity. A strong and compelling scientific argument has been made by many, such as J.P. Rushton, et al that racial genetics is the cause, for instance, the fact that IQ differences show up by age 3 before education has had a large effect, the MRI studies that have shown that Caucasians have a larger brain that the Negro, and as well the strong predictor that IQs are of SAT scores. Studies of black children living with adoptive white parents show that blacks still have the same IQ as black children living with black parents. The study found that even that where white children and black children were living with the same adoptive parents, the white children still scored 20% higher despite growing up with the same parents. The higher IQ of caucasians likely developed due to the cold, temperate climate of Northern Europe which required more long term planning and skilled crafts to develop technologies to survive the cold winters. The cold winters heavily selected for higher IQ, whilst the tropical environment, where the fruit hangs on the true all year, does not. SAT scores and IQ scores are accurate predictors of life outcomes a well, showing that IQs are a very accurate measurement of a persons intelligence occupational capabilities. As in the book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, the success of countries is tightly coupled to the average IQ levels, and since IQ levels is the result of the racial makeup of the population, it reflects the racial groups. This is why you can very easily predict GDP of different countries with the racial demographics of the countries, as well a predict a vast number of other things from test scores to rates of homicides. Some have also looked at the fact that Caucasians have a larger frontal lobe than even orientals, where impulse control and creativity is based, which could explain why Caucasian majority countries have had longer lived, healthier democracies, especially the US. Orientals have excellent math skills, but seem to have a totalitarian streak. Caucasians and Orientals have been shown easily beat the average Negro in mathematical tests.
It is pretty clear that entire civilizations are nothing more than the reflection of microscopic DNA that constructs the neurological system and constructs human behaviour. Cultural interactions can share information and influences, but the more of the high IQ racial groups you have, the most of such sharing and origination occurs. The population tends to take on the characteristics of the average individual rather than the outlier. For Einstein to do his work required a country that had a well established industrial base, faciliitated by a high IQ, highly capable population that could provide the environment stable enough that things could move a bit past basic sustenance level of existance, that there was enough industrial base to provide for labatory equipment for instance. Einstien was building on previous work, of others as well, so these things do not come about as a result of the lone genius but require a country that is well populated with High IQ genetics. If Einstien had been born in Nigeria, no matter how intelligent or smart he was, he wouldnt have gotten very far for the lack of everything that he would have needed. Indeed, there is a feedback effect, the high IQ population caucasian and orienta
I don't think artificial turf is the answer. Its planting a drought resistant fiolage, some xeriscaping, etc. There are plenty of things you can plant in the yard. And why not let the weeds take over? Whats wrong with having a yard full of globesedge and matchweed. Nothing in my view.
These red tide problems have been going on for decades, long before the oil spill. The oil spill has been devastating but I dont think its causing this.
The smell from this can be horrendous and is bad for tourism. Several counties on the West coast of Florida have issued restrictions on the use of fertilizers. The fertilizers used on lawns is blamed for the red tide outbreaks by feeding the organisms, it is believed. The effect on the environment can be harmful in depleting and causing population loss of fish and other species. A large portion of the runoff of fertilizer is from entirely ornamental landscape applications, a complete waste of resources, especially considering the issue of Phosphate depletion. I would like to see a broad restrictions on such fertilizers except for production of food crops. That some people would waste the resource nd threaten the ecosystem, for the vanity of a perfect green yard is outrageous. In Florida, they often use grass species which are pretty much impossible to keep going without these massive applications, such as St. Augustine. When you stop throwing the chemicals on the yard, the St. Augustine will mostly go away.
Slashdot Mirror
This underlines an important point I made previously, that part of the problem here is C/C++ and its manual memory management. Ruby, Perl and Python eliminate a whole class of programming errors by doing memory management automatically, making it easier to develop secure applications. People laugh when you say the web browser should be written in Perl, as the web server should be, but its true. The result would be a safer, and even a faster system because a Perl program would lack as many memory leaks and therefore you would end up with less memory swapping as a result. So much for how much Slashdot people know about security, or good software design, that they would then that C/C++ is a good development environment for the web browser or web server, when it obviously is a source of huge numbers of vulnerabilities. People here must be totally inept or clueless to miss that Perl has automatic memory management, reference counting and automatic allocation that you eliminate hanging pointers and out of bound access errors.
No, it has nothing to do with the WWW. It has a lot to do with poorly designed web browsers written in C/C++ which leak memory like a sieve and treat memory like everything has unlimited quantities of it. A well designed web browser supporting ALL of the HTML, Javascript and other web standards could use a small fraction of what Firefox uses if it is written properly and in a better language like Ruby. With some quality programming, the web browsers could use a fraction of the CPU power they do now by storing off screen graphics in compressed formats, for instance, especially since ending up with disk caching due to using up the RAM is far more resource intensive than decompressing images. There is no reason, NO REASON that Firefox should eat up 1 GB of RAM. The Javascript and HTML engines supporting ALL of the latest standards and ALL legacy standards only take up a few MB of RAM. There is massive memory leakage going on these browsers of forgotten image and multimedia data. Observing the behaviour of Firefox it cannot be anything else, when you open 20 windows and then close all except the first one, memory never goes back down. If web browsers were written in say, Perl or Ruby, I gaurantee that you could easily have browsers that are many times faster than current browsers because the memory usage and swapping would be much less, plus would be much safer without all of the buffer overruns.
The fact that so many experts on the disease die of it is a testament to its extreme contagiousness, and why we really should be scared of this thing. Of all people, experts of the disease take precautions to avoid catching it themselves, when they do, its not a good sign. It only makes sense to put into place travel bans from infected countries. It is important when dealing with this diseases to stop the spread by banning travel from the hot zone. There also needs to be public funding for a vaccine.
An all the way CISC architecture would allow you to have both operands of an instruction to be pointers to memory, the CPU would have the circuitry to load values into a register in the background. That would eliminate manual register loading. You would also have 3 operand versions of the instructions, as well. x86 is not the most CISC architecture out there or take the concept as far as it could. This would be a very programmer friendly environment. AMD expanded the number of registers, they could add even more, I dont know what the reasons are for not having at least 32 GPRs.
MIT shared memory support? This has been in the X server for a long time. Apps can use that to send an image to the server, the server then can take that image and composite it with others for the hardware video output buffer. The application can create the buffer on the server, render to the buffer, and then issue a command to the server that the buffer is finished rendering and can be used for compositing an output frame. The application would be given timing information, such as the frequency and the timebase, so it can know when the deadline is for submitting a finished buffer. Any submission of a buffer after the deadline is saved for the rendering of the next frame. this can work with direct and indirect rendering, in indirect the actual programming of hardware occurs in the X server, you would use GLX to send OpenGL commands to the server.
X itself is useable and was not the issue. The problems were with drivers were due to the lack of drivers, and problems with the device dependant layer (such as lack of auto configuration of drivers or when auto configuration of drivers screwed up) rather than with X itself. These problems would continue no matter what window system was used, because it was not a window system problem, it was a problem with drivers. Wayland mainly solves some slught issues with visual artifacts, as far as I am aware, by addressing issues with vertical synchronization. An X extension could have been created to address these concerns by allowing X applications a clue as to the frequency and timing of vertical synchronization and a double buffering facility that could be used by apps to update their screen contents.
Systemd still supports the system V boot process features, you can still run init scripts from systemd if you wish.
It would be trivial to add a dynamic loader, or if necesary a simple compatability layer for a stable ABI, to the kernel so that old drivers will work fine.The only reason they don't is that Linux developers are anti-social and basically like the idea of Linux being unuseable to most average people, because it makes themselves feel elite to be able to use something that is so difficult to manage. Yes, Linux needs a dynamic loader or compatability layer for drivers, but try telling that to kernel developers who are off in their own world where average people can be expected to learn to love editing configuration files. Most people are not interested in that stuff, they just want to use their computer to get work done and get off, not muck around with recompiling drivers and editing configuration files.
the general concept behind systemd makes sense, its mainly some additional features on top of the current model, such as the ability to have processes started on certain system events. The fact is, if you want your bootup process to be controlled by bash scripts, all you need to do is configure systemd to start your bash script and youve got a more traditional init system. So, systemd does not take away any functionality, only adds it. Systemd supports the system v init process features so you still have all the old model functionality available to you. So, it does not make much sense that people complain about this when they can easily configure things however they want, including having a BSD style init, by having systemd hand off control to your own scripts, including to work the way things always have. People act like systemd has taken away something when it has not, i think many people just hears some soundbite about systemd introducing a new model and assume that they can no longer use things the way they do currently, which is not the case. it seems like people who don't like systemd don't want people to have the additional functionality that it provides, because it does not take away anything. Its open source software, and its something that you can control and configure to your hearts content. Its much ado about nothing. systemd, while being configurable, also will make things easier to use for many users. I think the ado about systemd is more about Linux people who think that Linux should be hard to use except for a small elite and do not want the OS to be useful to less technically adept users. This is even though making it more useable for less adept users does not in any way harm or take away flexibility from experts, who can still configure everything if they want they want to.
i thought they would be looking for industrial gases in the spectrum from planets. It doesnt seem like streetlights and city lights would be significant compared to the amount emitted by suns.
I for one welcome our new moth overlords.
Thats incorrect. Look at the Obfuscated C Code Contest. You can write TOTALLY unmaintainable code in ANY reasonably powerful general purpose language. Such features are necessary to write good software, though of course, anything can be abused.
Still, you have not actually discounted the fact that IBM could if it wanted to operate manufacturing wherever it need to be to compete, it might not be very profitable, but they could have profits in line with the chinese, and keep this business out of hands of the chinese. It seems as though instead, everything has to have a massive, fat profit margin to these companies, that making a modest amount isnt enough. If the chinese can manufacture these goods, albeit at a relatively low profit, IBM could spin off subsidiary to do it.
It could be cheaper to replace the cheap consumer RAID drivers than to buy expensive "enterprise grade" stuff. Maybe the cost of a RAID array with backup is cheaper than all the more expensive stuff.
My solution is the one that would actually allow ISPs to gradually upgrade things over time rther than to replace everything at once, by allowing the interoperation. Its a lot easier if the changes are concentrated at the ISP end rather than effect subscribers as well. Its true that over time as due to the turnover of ipv4 older routers, that ISPs could gradually replace the subcribers routers with newer models. It would also be possible even for ISPs to collect older routers, flash them with new firmware, and put them back out, in the process of customer turnover cancellations and signups. The whole point is the solution i describe gives ISPs a transitiion period.
Theoritically, any block of Ipv4 addresses outside of the local subnet could be used, if an ipv4 address is used as a fake address, and then the user asks DNS address which happens to resolve to a real IPv4 address with the same number, then, the same NAT trick could be used with a mapping between created between another temporary local ipv4 address to the real internet ipv4 address which was already being used locally as a fake ipv4 number. Though, I would only recommend that be used as a fallback if 127.x.x.x is used up. A small part of the of RFC 1918 addreses could also be allocated for the pool of fake ipv4 address, such as maybe 172.20 and 172.21, giving a pool of 131072 ipv4 addresses, plenty for most use cases. I doubt most people will have that many TCP connections at once. Since 127 is not used for local networks, it is the best choice however as the first choice. Again, 127 is so large, i doubt most users would ever exhaust it, especially if the fake ipv4 mappings are timed out after a period of maybe 1 -7 days or so.
Isnt subnetting more a software implementation DHCP, and BGP thing in the router, enter a net mask address and network address into the router config and then the router can analyse the addresses to determine if they are local or not. It seems, if IPV6 does not provide an equivalent for DHCP's getting the net mask then we are screwed. But net masks are not something you find in the IP packets headers themselves.
The fact is, TCP v6 was defective by design, because of what it does not have, and that is a mechanism for a long transition period between ipv4 and ipv6. If we had such transition period, ipv6 would now be widespread. The transition period means that ipv4 and ipv6 networks can communicate with each other. Making Ipv6 talk send packets to an ipv4 network is easy: give the ipv4 address block a subset of the ipv6 address block. The more complex but entirely doable part is ipv4->ipv6. Since ipv6 is larger address space than ipv4, ipv4 cannot directly see a lot of ipv6 addresses. The answer lies in the DNS system. When a user on an ipv4 network askes for the IP address associated with a DNS address which only has an ipv6 address associated with it, somewhere upstream, an upstream router and DNS server will conspire to 1) give the user (ipv4 peer) a fake IPv4 address for a DNS address 2) give the information on the ipv6 to fake ipv4 mapping to the router 3) which the router uses NAT to rewrite the packets headed out from from the fake ipv4 destination address to the real ipv6 destination address. Ipv6 packets headed in would be rewritten to ipv4 replacing the ipv6 source address with the fake ipv4 source address. Each ipv4 peer should be able to re-use the same block of ipv4 fake addresses, the mappings can be done on a per ipv4 peer (user) basis. Using this, its also possible to give ipv4 clients direct access to ipv6, using an .ipv6 DNS TLD, which can be used in the form .ipv6. You could even write an HTTP and other application protocol proxy that would automatically rewrite all ipv6 addresses in HTML with ipv6 TLD addresses. This makes ipv6 a upstream ISP thing rather than something that affects things on the users end, greatly simplifying things.ISPs as a complementary measure could also offer 6over4 gateways as well, and then over time transition to allowing raw ipv6 over their networks, a transition which can be gradual.
Molex, those were connectors that every PC builder fondly knows about from the power supply connections.
Its pretty obvious that this idea is a scam being foisted on an easily duped public and hear the word biometric and instantly have this image of something that will keep them safe, which of course, is completely delusional. We know that such biometric data would be easily stolen and used by criminals, and since you cannot change it, like you can an encryption key or password, you are screwed for life. Numerical keys work well for authentication and it makes sense to randomly generate these sort of things for your own use, which gives people control over these things. You have two kinds of people who think that biometrics is a good idea, you have the low information masses who don't know what the hell they are talking about, and you have the evil people who are up to no good and know that this has nothing to do with peoples well being, and are pushing this because they actually want to deprive people of privacy, and they know biometrics would help with an invasion of privacy, they know full well that biometrics are simply a horrible means of online authentication but thats not what they want. Their trick is to make the idiots out there think that it would be good for them, but the people are pushing for this knowing its not good for people, they push it because they basically hate people and want more power for themselves.
Something like OpenID is the answer, gives people complete control and is an open platform.
Watch out, this is an trick to use the concerns over the weak passwords people use to push for monitoring and control mandates. Basically, its none of their business to force this on businesses. What kind of authentication a service offers is a private matter between users of the service and the service.
I do think, OpenID does exactly what we need here. its a single sign on system that can work in a decentralized manner between sites, and it does not require biometrics which is just a way to take away privacy. I think what has been needed is a system that makes creating and managing OpenID easy for common users. Then people can use a strong, strong password rather than a lot of weak ones.
The evidence and data on racial differences of IQ are pretty well established. In the scientific community, there is virtually no question that there are major differences in IQ between races, with Orientals and Caucasians at the high end and Negros, Mesoamericans, etc at the lower end. There are massive differences in biochemistry, physiology and neurology in almost every area between racial groups, including brain size, skeletal structure, biochemistry, genetics, eye color, skin color, and so on, for instance Caucasians are the only racial group where most adults can digest Lactose, and this is clearly due to tens of thousands of years of divergent evolution that caused some races in cold climates to develop higher IQ and larger brain capacity. A strong and compelling scientific argument has been made by many, such as J.P. Rushton, et al that racial genetics is the cause, for instance, the fact that IQ differences show up by age 3 before education has had a large effect, the MRI studies that have shown that Caucasians have a larger brain that the Negro, and as well the strong predictor that IQs are of SAT scores. Studies of black children living with adoptive white parents show that blacks still have the same IQ as black children living with black parents. The study found that even that where white children and black children were living with the same adoptive parents, the white children still scored 20% higher despite growing up with the same parents. The higher IQ of caucasians likely developed due to the cold, temperate climate of Northern Europe which required more long term planning and skilled crafts to develop technologies to survive the cold winters. The cold winters heavily selected for higher IQ, whilst the tropical environment, where the fruit hangs on the true all year, does not. SAT scores and IQ scores are accurate predictors of life outcomes a well, showing that IQs are a very accurate measurement of a persons intelligence occupational capabilities. As in the book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, the success of countries is tightly coupled to the average IQ levels, and since IQ levels is the result of the racial makeup of the population, it reflects the racial groups. This is why you can very easily predict GDP of different countries with the racial demographics of the countries, as well a predict a vast number of other things from test scores to rates of homicides. Some have also looked at the fact that Caucasians have a larger frontal lobe than even orientals, where impulse control and creativity is based, which could explain why Caucasian majority countries have had longer lived, healthier democracies, especially the US. Orientals have excellent math skills, but seem to have a totalitarian streak. Caucasians and Orientals have been shown easily beat the average Negro in mathematical tests.
It is pretty clear that entire civilizations are nothing more than the reflection of microscopic DNA that constructs the neurological system and constructs human behaviour. Cultural interactions can share information and influences, but the more of the high IQ racial groups you have, the most of such sharing and origination occurs. The population tends to take on the characteristics of the average individual rather than the outlier. For Einstein to do his work required a country that had a well established industrial base, faciliitated by a high IQ, highly capable population that could provide the environment stable enough that things could move a bit past basic sustenance level of existance, that there was enough industrial base to provide for labatory equipment for instance. Einstien was building on previous work, of others as well, so these things do not come about as a result of the lone genius but require a country that is well populated with High IQ genetics. If Einstien had been born in Nigeria, no matter how intelligent or smart he was, he wouldnt have gotten very far for the lack of everything that he would have needed. Indeed, there is a feedback effect, the high IQ population caucasian and orienta
I don't think artificial turf is the answer. Its planting a drought resistant fiolage, some xeriscaping, etc. There are plenty of things you can plant in the yard. And why not let the weeds take over? Whats wrong with having a yard full of globesedge and matchweed. Nothing in my view.
These red tide problems have been going on for decades, long before the oil spill. The oil spill has been devastating but I dont think its causing this.
The smell from this can be horrendous and is bad for tourism. Several counties on the West coast of Florida have issued restrictions on the use of fertilizers. The fertilizers used on lawns is blamed for the red tide outbreaks by feeding the organisms, it is believed. The effect on the environment can be harmful in depleting and causing population loss of fish and other species. A large portion of the runoff of fertilizer is from entirely ornamental landscape applications, a complete waste of resources, especially considering the issue of Phosphate depletion. I would like to see a broad restrictions on such fertilizers except for production of food crops. That some people would waste the resource nd threaten the ecosystem, for the vanity of a perfect green yard is outrageous. In Florida, they often use grass species which are pretty much impossible to keep going without these massive applications, such as St. Augustine. When you stop throwing the chemicals on the yard, the St. Augustine will mostly go away.