"Sun Microsystems claimed that you caused $80m of damage by illegally downloading the source code for Solaris.
It's a bullshit figure. What was really unnerving was that to demonstrate to the public and the courts that I was such a bad guy, the only things they could show were financial damages.
What I was essentially doing is stealing source code to analyse it for vulnerabilities. I was moving it because I wanted to be on my target's computers for as little time as possible.
So what the government did was come up with these huge numbers; they basically told the companies to provide the loss as the R&D investment to develop the software. So if I look at Solaris source code, which was sold to educational institutions for a few grand, I merely copied it over to the computers at USC - which already had a copy of it, incidentally.
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See - look at the lies and bullshit and now a few years later SUN open-sources the code!!! If the sun sets on sun it will be ok. I do not invest in sun and I do not use or support any sun products.
What happens is likely that a parent process is not wait()ing its child after the child dies. These leaves and entry in the process table which contains little more than the return code of the child.
Since the kernel has no idea IF or when a parent will request that return code it is sort of obligated to keep the information araound.
If you kill the offending parent then init() will clean up the mess.
I believe this is due to library version issues.
OTHO, the porcesses that seem affected include privoxy, artsd, fire-fox-bin, and a few others.
I have been scratching my head over this - even where to report it. Is this a bug in the application or a bug in a library or somewhere else.
I attempted an upgrade from woody to sarge about a month ago and it broke my system. I have 1000's of zombies running around. This shows up as a defunct process. Its not the end of the world mind you but you can't kill a zombie since it is already dead.
I have reported this and warned that there will be a lot of folks with broken systems. I was very surprised to hear that sarge went stable before this problem was sorted out.
A sarge install from scratch however is fine. Its just the upgrade that is broken and in more than one place.
In the summer time in the USA the incandecant is actually a lot more inefficient than its power draw. The reason for this is that these creatures put out about 95% of their energy as heat which then has to be pushed out the window with an A/C
OTHO - in the middle of winter it can be just as efficent to heat your home with light bulbs as with a furnace and in the future as fuel prices increase it may become even more economic.
While a LED may be more efficient and it certainly can be switched on and off a lot (they are used in place of lasers in fibre optic communications) the cost will have to appraoch that of a light bulb before they become economic in say the bedroom.
So I don't think the light bulb is as obsolete as it is made out to be.
I have read that compact florescents are more energy efficient than leds. As for the life - I've been using them for over 10 years now and they live for anywhere from 5 to 7 years or more and this is at 16+ hours per day usage.
The lifespan is much greater if they run constantly - same as with a computer.
In my office for instance I have 3 x 13 watt so that is 39 watts draw. at 10 cents per kwh this works out to just under 10 cents per day or $28.08 per 30 day month for 24 hours with lights on.
Since they last over 5 years the bulbs cost less than incandesent bulbs without considering power draw. Since fuel prices are up any waste energy offsets heating costs in the winter so the marginal cost of operation is probably under a nickle per day. The lifespans I've been getting are in the 50,000 hour range even though they are not rated for this - but then I sometimes leave them on for weeks at a time. At most they are cycled once per day.
On what planets are they planning to settle because this one is overcrowed and the reason is irresponsible people who have NINE kids!!!
One way to get the genetically altered seeds
on
Plant a Seed, Get Sued?
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· Score: 4, Informative
I grew up on a farm about 200 miles north of Schmeiser's farm. Rapeseed is still grown on my Dad's land. So I have some personal information of the issues and I want to dispel some of the myths that have been postulated here.
A very simple way for the seed to show up is if Schmeiser hauled a load of seed into an elevator for cleaning. This is a very normal practice in Saskatchewan. I have personally done this.
Elevators have rather decent cleaning equipment and it does not cost all that much to run the seeds through.
The issue is that elevator agents will sometimes substitute seed and not tell the farmer. This is so very simple to do and clearly from an efficiency standpoint why not switch the bins instead of making the customer wait?
If Schmeiser hauled a single load into an elevator this is all that would be necesary. He didn't know and the elevator agent also had no idea of the consequences.
That being said - another more sinister explanation is that bees like to spread the genes around. Biological studies have proven that a bee will go to a plant with a different genetic makup for its next load of honey. This is probably built right into the genetics of a bee.
If so - then Monsanto genes would be spread willy nilly all over the place and there is NOTHING a farmer like Schmeiser can do to prevent this. It makes perfect sense that biodiversity will enhance bees' food supplies. 500 million years of evolution will favor bees that maximise the bio-diversity of the plants which produce the honey they consume. Any bee colony practicing mono-culture may well have died out millions of years ago when their food source failed.
There are many issues here. Perhaps the most important is bio-diversity. Furthermore there is not a whole lot we can do about this other than become aware of what is going on and do our best to raise the issues in the public eye.
I have challenged the supermarkets where I live to label foods that are genetically engineered. They cannot of course do anything but the more noise I make the more aware other people become. So this is the little revolt that I am making.
Now the issue is that Rape (now called canola) has been genetically engineered so it is resistant to roundup. Percy Schmeiser had his feild contaminated with Monsanto genetically altered seeds and rather than the supreme court of Canada finding that Monsanto is to blame for not keeping their experiments in the lab the court instead found Schmeiser to be liable for not being able to keep Monsanto experiments out of his feilds.
The logic of this totally excapes me.
The economics of the agricultural community are such that even a minor percentage inprovment in productivity will be picked up by a select few. The consequence of this is that in the long term no-one wins. The reason farm income is low is because from an economic standpoint there is almost perfect competition so everyone competes to the lowest income people can survive on. This is how commodity markets work.
From the standpoint of sustainable agriculture however - this is a very dangerous development.
First off we end up with only selected strains being planted across vast acerages. Next we end up with Monsanto (95% of the genetically altered seeds come from Monsanto) controlling the distribution of these seeds and to top it off we now have an uninformed court ruling that 100,000 years of workable agriculture where any farmer is free to develope any strain of seed is to be replaced with a regime where Monsanto Labs rule the roost.
Not only this - those genetically altered seeds will form some of the most viralent weeds one can imagine.
But - what if we end up with 100% of the farm land planted with a single strain and some biological vector brings in an infection. This will result in close to a 100% crop failure. Anyone who knows of the consequences of the Irish Potatoe Blight should realise what this will mean.
Genetic alteration is not necessarily bad. What is bad is mono culture. When we get a ruling that the individual farmers are somehow responsible for preventing contamination of their seed then we move into a world where a single corporate interest can control the seeds all farmers use.
This leads directly to mono-culture and all farmers are forced into abandoning their individual strains. The result of this mono-culture will be a massive crop failure at some point in the future.
So the judges may have been well schooled in law but they are ignorant of the biology which provides the food they eat.
As I said before - as a lone voice the only thing I can do is bitch and complain which I do. What we really need to do is get a very strong movement going. Even a million voices are not enough. The disaster mono-culture can precipate can be much larger than the Tsunami that just hit SE asia.
If you are running the typically poorly designed AC in the summer then you are pushing against a temp gradient between inside desired air temp and outside air. A much better way to do this would be to push against the average soil temperature.
In fact if the house were better insulated and better coupled with the earth an AC would probably not even be required with the added bonus that in winter you also probably would need no external energy source.
The last time I was in Malaysia I watched CNN and it was like being on another planet. The resemblence of what is broadcast in North America to what is broadcast in Malaysia was so weak that I could not believe it was the same organisation.
So I would not put too much weight on what CNN is broadcasting here as far as being america-centric is conserned.
Kevin Mitnic hacked into Sun's systems and read some of the OS code. Before his sentance was up SUN OPEN SOURCED at least SOME of this code. Furthermore, Sun claimed millions in loses for this intrusion. Yet we can all see the sun is setting on SUN. The value is in millions of people having access to the source code so like a languge (english for instance) it can be used and improved apon and adapted to meet a wider range of needs. English for instance would have no value if it were locked up and used by a small group of preists... and this is what closed source is.
So the whole premise of Sun's claims against Mitnic are flawed right from the get go!
So yes, Kevin Mitnic is even a better example of punishing the messanger.
The judges in these cases should be embarrased with their ignorance. At least in the case of the Salem witch trials there is good evidence that their food was laced with Ergot, which is hallucenogenic... so they have an excuse. I cannot see much in the way of an excuse here.
If the judge ruled that NASA should simply fix its servers then perhaps people would wake up to the fact that when you connect a computer to the net, you need to accept responsibility to secure it. It is a fact that there are evil people in the world who will attack them and get in and perhaps create harm. Even if this kid or Mitnic was malicious, and there is ZERO evidence to support this, they should not face anything more than a small fine. They really did nothing more than what most teenage boys and some teenage girls dream of doing.
In the case of a bank, throwing the thief in jail is a deterant because the thief needs physical access. In the case of cracking a computer the physical access is to all people in the world and it occurs the instant it is connected to the net. There is no deterant in punishing one person because all the would be crackers are mostly invisible and often live in other countries... some of which are our enemies.
Any bank would consider it rather unacceptable to leave the door off the vault and place it in the parking lot with no supervision. As a customer I would not deal with a bank that does this. Yet on a daily basis many of the professionals I use regularly expose confidential data through their incompatence and unwillingness to hire competant IT professionals.
I stand by my original opinion. If NASA got cracked it was their own fault. They should punish themselves for their incompetance. They should not be punishing the messenger.
Furthermore the Judge in the case should recognise this and send the correct message.
After doing such a fantastic job with the Mars missions it is quite an about face to find that NASA cannot even secure its own servers and finds it just find to take a 17 year old prankster to court!
NASA should appologise and request the court to eliminate the sentance. My gawd - but 6 months for basically nothing? This is clearly an issue of killing the messenger.
There are about 6 billion people on this planet and some of them are our enemies. This kid is not one of them. When you put a server on the net it is the same as attaching every keyboard in the world to your computer. This means you better know what you are doing.
Clearly NASA does not and seeks to hide behind the skirts of legal threats. Well folks - these threats do not work in countries like Iraq and Korea. Perhaps NASA is lucky that most of our enemies are not sophisticated enough to hack their systems. This will change. The future is a long time.
That young man did you a favour Sirs! If your techs are too incompetant to patch your servers then they are the ones who should be dealt with and not the pranksters that find the holes.
BTW. The main www.NASA.gov website is totally broken and does not even load in Mozilla. Is this another example of incompetance?
Some of the ideas presented make sense. Most do not. We are not going to solve the energy issue from the trash dump.
However - he is correct that we are far too wasteful.
Now consider the average house. Most have R12 or less insulation in the walls. New houses typically have R20. If houses were built with R50 in the walls and a passive solar heating system is integrated then the furnace can probably be eliminated.
My calculations on this is that it costs less to insulate the house than to install the furnace. In fact the extra insulation costs about $1 per square foot of surface area. So a 2000 square foot house of dimension 40x50 by 10feet high walls has 1800 square feet of wall plus 2000 square feet of ceiling and 2000 square feet of floor. Ignoring the floor - we get about $4000 bux extra for the insulation. Furnace installations are more...
In a super-insulated home like this there is still going to be need for a heat supply in the middle of winter... and probably air conditioning in the middle of summer - however the size is about 10% of currently recomended.
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Out of interest, the house I own was deemed by the insurance company to be worth about $150,000 in replacement cost. I can sell it today for about that much.
To build it properly to a standard where I do not need a furnace for instance requires that I dismantal and rebuild it. I can build a new one from scratch easier.
Since the house already stands, I am faced with unloading it on some other smuck or if I want to properly insulate it - I need to take it apart and rebuild it! Had this been done when it was built - the house would actually have been cheaper and since it was built in 1961, there would have been almost 40 years of zero fuel costs.
That gas this house has consumed could have been left for my grandchildren.
This is the problem in North America. I suspect that within 5 years this will become painfully apparent as people finally come to grips with the passing of peak oil and gas production.
Well - I understand what you are saying but it does take a lot of mental effort to decode what you wrote.
You are correct that wind has serious problems. If people check the BP statistical review they will find burried in the numbers certain overlooked facts.
Typically the power generated from wind is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the installed capacity. This is the first problem.
The next problem is that if wind is backed up by a suitable reserve generating capacity then wind is ok. Built into the grid is a reserve/surge capacity and it can offset wind provided the total power generated from wind is a small percentage of the grid capacity. Effectively the wind power operator looks for a hidden subsidy from the large utilities that provide the reserve generating capacity.
This is a serious problem. For each megawatt of wind power installed you need about 0.6 megawatts of backup capacity.
Perhaps the best use of wind would be to pump water to the top of a mountain and then use the reservoir for a hydro project. Hydro is wonderful in that it can be turned up or down quickly. It handles surges well. Wind does not.
One way to look at this is that if you want to invest in wind power - then double your investment and expect only 1/4 of the return. Wind is very expensive.
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Another way to look at this issue.
If we assume a 50% reliability - and wind power generally is lower than this... then we get the following.
If we want 1 megawatt of reliable supply then we need to install 2 megawatts of generating capacity. On the other hand - we can figure out a way to store the energy... we could for instance build a big electrolysis plant and use the energy to create hydrogen.
If we do this then we could size the plant to accept the maximum electrical power our wind farm can produce. But in this case the hydrogen plant will on average be 50% underutilized due to a lack of electricity. Or... we can spilt the underutilization/overbuilding between the wind farm generators and the hydrogen plant any way we want.
Regardless what we do - we need to build at least 2x as much plant / wind farm because we can't count on the wind blowing all the time.
This does not say that it doesn't make sense to build the plant / wind farm. I'm only saying that we need to build at least 2 times the capacity compared to what we expect to get from it. And this number might actually be closer to 4x and not 2x. Again - the BP review says total energy ouput is about 25% to 33% of installed capacity.
If you compare this to say nuclear - nuclear runs about 95%.
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Now - lets conclude this analysis. Suppose we trust the numbers in the BP statistical review of world energy. Suppose we want a reliable source of energy we can use whenever we want and we choose to use hydrogen as the energy carrier. Suppose we chose to burn the hydrogen in a very efficient fuel cell and this is going to produce our electricity.
So... we build a 3 gigawatt wind farm. We build a 3 gigawatt electrolysis plant.
From these two investments we expect to get say 1 gigawatt of power. Here I switched from the previous estimated efficiency of 50% to 33% because the BP numbers are between 25% and 33% and not between 33% and 50%. I was being terribly generous before!
So we've invested say $3 billion for the wind farm and say about (guess) $2 billion in the electrolysis plant. This is going to produce hydrogen.
If we build a nice co-gen of 1 gigawatt capacity then it will cost ANOTHER close to $1 billion for this plant and a fuel cell plant will be more expensive but also more efficient.
Over all - we need to invest close to $6 billion bux for this system.
Now - lets compare to say coal. A coal fired plant is about $1 billion bux for 1 gigawatt. A nuclear plant is also about $1 billion for 1 gigawatt of generating capacity.
The fellow should have checked out the street lamp.
My guess is that the bulb exploded, launching a light projectile towards the upper left hand corner of the picture on a plane that is more or less parallel with the plane of the picture.
Opposite this projectile a much more massive chunk traveled downward and from this peice we see some smoke trails traveling both downward and upward. The downward trails appear to ensnarl the pole somewhat.
Given the shutter speed is about 1/3 of the usual minimum for taking pictures there is ample time for the projectiles to travel the distances we observe.
Another possible explanation is a small pyro device tossed into the air which explodes on this side of the street light. If one looks closely it does appear that some of the smoke is on this side of the street lamp pole. So maybe we had some kids fill a soda bottle with gunpowder and light a fuse and toss it into the air. Checking hospital reports may yeild the clues we need!
Given the size of the long trail into the upper left hand corner however, I suspect that whatever was thrown in this direction was on fire and we are only seeing a vapour/smoke trail that disappears within a few seconds (like 15 for instance). I wonder if sodium from a high pressure sodium lamp can do this.
If the heat wave is real - then water vapour is far more likely to be the culprit. H2O is a stronger green house gas in all wavelengths than CO2 is and it is 100x greater in concentration than CO2.
That being said... the climate of dear old earth is now 20 degrees colder than usual. Usual here is measured on the scale of 570 million years.
People need to learn a bit on paleoclimatology.
Living with AIDS will cause it to spread?
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 1, Troll
IMHO this might be a dangerous treatment. How is this different from the "white" in Star Trek that keeps the Jem'Hadar alive?
AIDS does have low grade secondary transmission vectors. Consider. It has been known for more than a decade that mosquitoes can harber AIDS for at least 12 hours. If over 99% of the population is AIDS free then the likelhood of a mosquitoe carrying AIDS and picking on a new victim is extremely low. However if 50% of the population has AIDS then the likelihood is quite significant.
IMHO the epidemiologists have not come to grips with this.
My wife was declared terminally ill within 10 days of my firstborn. We had no insurance at the time. We had an appointment with an agent but it turns out my daughter was born prematurely. So my wife was in the hospital giving birth when the agent was to come over. Hense no insurance about 2 weeks later when she went back into the hospital for a grand mal seisure.
Childbirth was fine. It was the brain tumour that did her in.
Well, even without the insurance we did ok but life would have been a lot easier if I could have afforded a nurse because for 10 years I had to provide 100% supervision, support my family and raise my kids.
I did this through contracting. I was paid 2x what employees were paid - but I did absolutely excellent work (from home). My time was my own, my clients wanted me to clone myself, I had some of the most interesting project one could ask for, and I did have the support of my clients who really did do their best to help me out from time to time.
That being said I was so burned out from the stress after 10 years that I could no longer work. It took 3 years to recover - probably Post Tramatic Stress Disorder! Other than clients lifting work deadlines - I got no help from anyone. Insurance would have made a difference because if I were assured of a policy payout then I would have been willing to take on debt to hire help during the tough years.
Now if any people think that making 2x salary is enough in a situation like this.. forget it. Had I a normal day job I would have needed about 12 hours per day coverage and nursing staff are not cheap. Even with 2x salary I could not have ben able to afford 1.5 nurses salaries along with maintaining my own household.
My ONLY option was doing it all myself - or a premature nursing home - and that 2nd option was not in the cards.
So all in all - You do need insurance if you are married because if either gets sick its on the other's shoulders. Contracting is a good way to go - just make sure you do a really good job because your tenure is a 5 minute phone call.
As for steady employment? Well - I had to interview and hire my supervisor - but made 2x his salary. I didn't think that was a bad idea and I was able to STAY COMPLETELY AWAY from all office politics... everyone knew I was not after anyone's job!!!
There is enough uranium/plutonium sitting in swimming pools on reactor sites in the USA to power 100 CANDU style reactors for 50 years and this is without mining a single gram of new uranium. It is the USA idea of not re-processing fuel that promotes the mining.
With a reactor design like the fast integral reactor there is enough uranium already mined to power 100 reactors for about 60,000 years. The reason for this is because the fast integral reactor burns 100% of the fuel load instead of the 2% that the current enriched reactors burn. Please note that companies like USEC discard as "depleated" about 93% of the uranium that hits the plant and therefore the USA fuel cycle is really only burning 2% of 7% = 0.14% of the uranium that is mined.
That a nuclear program can be profitable with such low usage rates is indicative of how much potential there really is for energy from this source.
Now the USA produces about 8% of its total energy from Nuclear so if 1200 reactors are built then there is only about 5,000 years supply of fuel but this will be producing 100% of the required energy.
This is still without more mining.
Also please note that by the time 100% of the uranium has been burned there are no actinides left and the only by-products are relatively safe short lived isotopes. So this really does solve the waste problem but it still takes 5,000 years to do it.
On this basis the once-through program is even more idiotic. We have so damn much uranium kicking around that we really do not know what to do with it. We can't burn it because we have no use for the energy.
Meanwhile young men and women are in the middle east shooting at people in the mistaken belief that America's oil supplies need to be secured.
A better idea is to build some CANDU reactors, re-cycle the existing spent fuel, use the electricity to produce hydrogen and drop that through a Fischer-Tropsch upgrader and convert coal, bitumin, oil shale or pretty much any other carbon source to liquid fuels. Meanwhile some of the hydrogen can be pulled off as CH4 if desired or if feasible just put into the natural gas pipelines as H2 for home heating. I really think H2 is not going to be a very good idea mind you... but maybe its ok.
Get Canada to build a bunch of nuke plants for Tar Sands operations and send the waste up here. We'll burn it in the CANDU's for the next 100 years or so and sell you gasoline, ok?
Slashdot Mirror
I quote:
/ 2130030/kevin-mitnick-art-intrusion-part
"Sun Microsystems claimed that you caused $80m of damage by illegally downloading the source code for Solaris.
It's a bullshit figure. What was really unnerving was that to demonstrate to the public and the courts that I was such a bad guy, the only things they could show were financial damages.
What I was essentially doing is stealing source code to analyse it for vulnerabilities. I was moving it because I wanted to be on my target's computers for as little time as possible.
So what the government did was come up with these huge numbers; they basically told the companies to provide the loss as the R&D investment to develop the software. So if I look at Solaris source code, which was sold to educational institutions for a few grand, I merely copied it over to the computers at USC - which already had a copy of it, incidentally.
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See - look at the lies and bullshit and now a few years later SUN open-sources the code!!! If the sun sets on sun it will be ok. I do not invest in sun and I do not use or support any sun products.
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What a crock!
This comes from here:
http://www.computingcareers.co.uk/vnunet/features
What happens is likely that a parent process is not wait()ing its child after the child dies. These leaves and entry in the process table which contains little more than the return code of the child.
Since the kernel has no idea IF or when a parent will request that return code it is sort of obligated to keep the information araound.
If you kill the offending parent then init() will clean up the mess.
I believe this is due to library version issues.
OTHO, the porcesses that seem affected include privoxy, artsd, fire-fox-bin, and a few others.
I have been scratching my head over this - even where to report it. Is this a bug in the application or a bug in a library or somewhere else.
I attempted an upgrade from woody to sarge about a month ago and it broke my system. I have 1000's of zombies running around. This shows up as a defunct process. Its not the end of the world mind you but you can't kill a zombie since it is already dead.
I have reported this and warned that there will be a lot of folks with broken systems. I was very surprised to hear that sarge went stable before this problem was sorted out.
A sarge install from scratch however is fine. Its just the upgrade that is broken and in more than one place.
This has got to be one of the worst written articals I've ever read.
Imagine starting a story on cold fusion and rabling on about having fine hair.
Clearly she doesn't know about the work of Philo farnsworth either. Why this artical receives mention in slashdot is beyond me.
This is off topic but they won't as far as I'm conserned. They ripped me off with a piece of junk fridge so I will never deal with the company again.
Sorry - that is $2.808 per month. I amde a typo.
In the summer time in the USA the incandecant is actually a lot more inefficient than its power draw. The reason for this is that these creatures put out about 95% of their energy as heat which then has to be pushed out the window with an A/C
OTHO - in the middle of winter it can be just as efficent to heat your home with light bulbs as with a furnace and in the future as fuel prices increase it may become even more economic.
While a LED may be more efficient and it certainly can be switched on and off a lot (they are used in place of lasers in fibre optic communications) the cost will have to appraoch that of a light bulb before they become economic in say the bedroom.
So I don't think the light bulb is as obsolete as it is made out to be.
I have read that compact florescents are more energy efficient than leds. As for the life - I've been using them for over 10 years now and they live for anywhere from 5 to 7 years or more and this is at 16+ hours per day usage.
The lifespan is much greater if they run constantly - same as with a computer.
In my office for instance I have 3 x 13 watt so that is 39 watts draw. at 10 cents per kwh this works out to just under 10 cents per day or $28.08 per 30 day month for 24 hours with lights on.
Since they last over 5 years the bulbs cost less than incandesent bulbs without considering power draw. Since fuel prices are up any waste energy offsets heating costs in the winter so the marginal cost of operation is probably under a nickle per day. The lifespans I've been getting are in the 50,000 hour range even though they are not rated for this - but then I sometimes leave them on for weeks at a time. At most they are cycled once per day.
Nine kids?
On what planets are they planning to settle because this one is overcrowed and the reason is irresponsible people who have NINE kids!!!
I grew up on a farm about 200 miles north of Schmeiser's farm. Rapeseed is still grown on my Dad's land. So I have some personal information of the issues and I want to dispel some of the myths that have been postulated here.
A very simple way for the seed to show up is if Schmeiser hauled a load of seed into an elevator for cleaning. This is a very normal practice in Saskatchewan. I have personally done this.
Elevators have rather decent cleaning equipment and it does not cost all that much to run the seeds through.
The issue is that elevator agents will sometimes substitute seed and not tell the farmer. This is so very simple to do and clearly from an efficiency standpoint why not switch the bins instead of making the customer wait?
If Schmeiser hauled a single load into an elevator this is all that would be necesary. He didn't know and the elevator agent also had no idea of the consequences.
That being said - another more sinister explanation is that bees like to spread the genes around. Biological studies have proven that a bee will go to a plant with a different genetic makup for its next load of honey. This is probably built right into the genetics of a bee.
If so - then Monsanto genes would be spread willy nilly all over the place and there is NOTHING a farmer like Schmeiser can do to prevent this. It makes perfect sense that biodiversity will enhance bees' food supplies. 500 million years of evolution will favor bees that maximise the bio-diversity of the plants which produce the honey they consume. Any bee colony practicing mono-culture may well have died out millions of years ago when their food source failed.
There are many issues here. Perhaps the most important is bio-diversity. Furthermore there is not a whole lot we can do about this other than become aware of what is going on and do our best to raise the issues in the public eye.
I have challenged the supermarkets where I live to label foods that are genetically engineered. They cannot of course do anything but the more noise I make the more aware other people become. So this is the little revolt that I am making.
Now the issue is that Rape (now called canola) has been genetically engineered so it is resistant to roundup. Percy Schmeiser had his feild contaminated with Monsanto genetically altered seeds and rather than the supreme court of Canada finding that Monsanto is to blame for not keeping their experiments in the lab the court instead found Schmeiser to be liable for not being able to keep Monsanto experiments out of his feilds.
The logic of this totally excapes me.
The economics of the agricultural community are such that even a minor percentage inprovment in productivity will be picked up by a select few. The consequence of this is that in the long term no-one wins. The reason farm income is low is because from an economic standpoint there is almost perfect competition so everyone competes to the lowest income people can survive on. This is how commodity markets work.
From the standpoint of sustainable agriculture however - this is a very dangerous development.
First off we end up with only selected strains being planted across vast acerages. Next we end up with Monsanto (95% of the genetically altered seeds come from Monsanto) controlling the distribution of these seeds and to top it off we now have an uninformed court ruling that 100,000 years of workable agriculture where any farmer is free to develope any strain of seed is to be replaced with a regime where Monsanto Labs rule the roost.
Not only this - those genetically altered seeds will form some of the most viralent weeds one can imagine.
But - what if we end up with 100% of the farm land planted with a single strain and some biological vector brings in an infection. This will result in close to a 100% crop failure. Anyone who knows of the consequences of the Irish Potatoe Blight should realise what this will mean.
Genetic alteration is not necessarily bad. What is bad is mono culture. When we get a ruling that the individual farmers are somehow responsible for preventing contamination of their seed then we move into a world where a single corporate interest can control the seeds all farmers use.
This leads directly to mono-culture and all farmers are forced into abandoning their individual strains. The result of this mono-culture will be a massive crop failure at some point in the future.
So the judges may have been well schooled in law but they are ignorant of the biology which provides the food they eat.
As I said before - as a lone voice the only thing I can do is bitch and complain which I do. What we really need to do is get a very strong movement going. Even a million voices are not enough. The disaster mono-culture can precipate can be much larger than the Tsunami that just hit SE asia.
If you are running the typically poorly designed AC in the summer then you are pushing against a temp gradient between inside desired air temp and outside air. A much better way to do this would be to push against the average soil temperature.
In fact if the house were better insulated and better coupled with the earth an AC would probably not even be required with the added bonus that in winter you also probably would need no external energy source.
I did this in my Calcomp plotter about 1990 or before. I wanted to emulate pen thicknesses. Does this qualify as prior art?
The maps have been commerically published many times over.
The last time I was in Malaysia I watched CNN and it was like being on another planet. The resemblence of what is broadcast in North America to what is broadcast in Malaysia was so weak that I could not believe it was the same organisation.
So I would not put too much weight on what CNN is broadcasting here as far as being america-centric is conserned.
Yes - I see a lot wrong with this picture.
Kevin Mitnic hacked into Sun's systems and read some of the OS code. Before his sentance was up SUN OPEN SOURCED at least SOME of this code. Furthermore, Sun claimed millions in loses for this intrusion. Yet we can all see the sun is setting on SUN. The value is in millions of people having access to the source code so like a languge (english for instance) it can be used and improved apon and adapted to meet a wider range of needs. English for instance would have no value if it were locked up and used by a small group of preists... and this is what closed source is.
So the whole premise of Sun's claims against Mitnic are flawed right from the get go!
So yes, Kevin Mitnic is even a better example of punishing the messanger.
The judges in these cases should be embarrased with their ignorance. At least in the case of the Salem witch trials there is good evidence that their food was laced with Ergot, which is hallucenogenic... so they have an excuse. I cannot see much in the way of an excuse here.
If the judge ruled that NASA should simply fix its servers then perhaps people would wake up to the fact that when you connect a computer to the net, you need to accept responsibility to secure it. It is a fact that there are evil people in the world who will attack them and get in and perhaps create harm. Even if this kid or Mitnic was malicious, and there is ZERO evidence to support this, they should not face anything more than a small fine. They really did nothing more than what most teenage boys and some teenage girls dream of doing.
In the case of a bank, throwing the thief in jail is a deterant because the thief needs physical access. In the case of cracking a computer the physical access is to all people in the world and it occurs the instant it is connected to the net. There is no deterant in punishing one person because all the would be crackers are mostly invisible and often live in other countries... some of which are our enemies.
Any bank would consider it rather unacceptable to leave the door off the vault and place it in the parking lot with no supervision. As a customer I would not deal with a bank that does this. Yet on a daily basis many of the professionals I use regularly expose confidential data through their incompatence and unwillingness to hire competant IT professionals.
I stand by my original opinion. If NASA got cracked it was their own fault. They should punish themselves for their incompetance. They should not be punishing the messenger.
Furthermore the Judge in the case should recognise this and send the correct message.
You are the moron. What if the hacker was in Korea. Would you vote to attack the country in order to have him face a judge?
After doing such a fantastic job with the Mars missions it is quite an about face to find that NASA cannot even secure its own servers and finds it just find to take a 17 year old prankster to court!
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Please read this story:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/19/
NASA should appologise and request the court to eliminate the sentance. My gawd - but 6 months for basically nothing? This is clearly an issue of killing the messenger.
There are about 6 billion people on this planet and some of them are our enemies. This kid is not one of them. When you put a server on the net it is the same as attaching every keyboard in the world to your computer. This means you better know what you are doing.
Clearly NASA does not and seeks to hide behind the skirts of legal threats. Well folks - these threats do not work in countries like Iraq and Korea. Perhaps NASA is lucky that most of our enemies are not sophisticated enough to hack their systems. This will change. The future is a long time.
That young man did you a favour Sirs! If your techs are too incompetant to patch your servers then they are the ones who should be dealt with and not the pranksters that find the holes.
BTW. The main www.NASA.gov website is totally broken and does not even load in Mozilla. Is this another example of incompetance?
Thankyou.
I agree with you 100%. This is another case of shooting the messenger.
I am amased this was modded up to +5!!!
Some of the ideas presented make sense. Most do not. We are not going to solve the energy issue from the trash dump.
However - he is correct that we are far too wasteful.
Now consider the average house. Most have R12 or less insulation in the walls. New houses typically have R20. If houses were built with R50 in the walls and a passive solar heating system is integrated then the furnace can probably be eliminated.
My calculations on this is that it costs less to insulate the house than to install the furnace. In fact the extra insulation costs about $1 per square foot of surface area. So a 2000 square foot house of dimension 40x50 by 10feet high walls has 1800 square feet of wall plus 2000 square feet of ceiling and 2000 square feet of floor. Ignoring the floor - we get about $4000 bux extra for the insulation. Furnace installations are more...
In a super-insulated home like this there is still going to be need for a heat supply in the middle of winter... and probably air conditioning in the middle of summer - however the size is about 10% of currently recomended.
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Out of interest, the house I own was deemed by the insurance company to be worth about $150,000 in replacement cost. I can sell it today for about that much.
To build it properly to a standard where I do not need a furnace for instance requires that I dismantal and rebuild it. I can build a new one from scratch easier.
Since the house already stands, I am faced with unloading it on some other smuck or if I want to properly insulate it - I need to take it apart and rebuild it! Had this been done when it was built - the house would actually have been cheaper and since it was built in 1961, there would have been almost 40 years of zero fuel costs.
That gas this house has consumed could have been left for my grandchildren.
This is the problem in North America. I suspect that within 5 years this will become painfully apparent as people finally come to grips with the passing of peak oil and gas production.
Well - I understand what you are saying but it does take a lot of mental effort to decode what you wrote.
... we can spilt the underutilization/overbuilding between the wind farm generators and the hydrogen plant any way we want.
You are correct that wind has serious problems. If people check the BP statistical review they will find burried in the numbers certain overlooked facts.
Typically the power generated from wind is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the installed capacity. This is the first problem.
The next problem is that if wind is backed up by a suitable reserve generating capacity then wind is ok. Built into the grid is a reserve/surge capacity and it can offset wind provided the total power generated from wind is a small percentage of the grid capacity. Effectively the wind power operator looks for a hidden subsidy from the large utilities that provide the reserve generating capacity.
This is a serious problem. For each megawatt of wind power installed you need about 0.6 megawatts of backup capacity.
Perhaps the best use of wind would be to pump water to the top of a mountain and then use the reservoir for a hydro project. Hydro is wonderful in that it can be turned up or down quickly. It handles surges well. Wind does not.
One way to look at this is that if you want to invest in wind power - then double your investment and expect only 1/4 of the return. Wind is very expensive.
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Another way to look at this issue.
If we assume a 50% reliability - and wind power generally is lower than this... then we get the following.
If we want 1 megawatt of reliable supply then we need to install 2 megawatts of generating capacity. On the other hand - we can figure out a way to store the energy... we could for instance build a big electrolysis plant and use the energy to create hydrogen.
If we do this then we could size the plant to accept the maximum electrical power our wind farm can produce. But in this case the hydrogen plant will on average be 50% underutilized due to a lack of electricity. Or
Regardless what we do - we need to build at least 2x as much plant / wind farm because we can't count on the wind blowing all the time.
This does not say that it doesn't make sense to build the plant / wind farm. I'm only saying that we need to build at least 2 times the capacity compared to what we expect to get from it. And this number might actually be closer to 4x and not 2x. Again - the BP review says total energy ouput is about 25% to 33% of installed capacity.
If you compare this to say nuclear - nuclear runs about 95%.
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Now - lets conclude this analysis. Suppose we trust the numbers in the BP statistical review of world energy. Suppose we want a reliable source of energy we can use whenever we want and we choose to use hydrogen as the energy carrier. Suppose we chose to burn the hydrogen in a very efficient fuel cell and this is going to produce our electricity.
So... we build a 3 gigawatt wind farm. We build a 3 gigawatt electrolysis plant.
From these two investments we expect to get say 1 gigawatt of power. Here I switched from the previous estimated efficiency of 50% to 33% because the BP numbers are between 25% and 33% and not between 33% and 50%. I was being terribly generous before!
So we've invested say $3 billion for the wind farm and say about (guess) $2 billion in the electrolysis plant. This is going to produce hydrogen.
If we build a nice co-gen of 1 gigawatt capacity then it will cost ANOTHER close to $1 billion for this plant and a fuel cell plant will be more expensive but also more efficient.
Over all - we need to invest close to $6 billion bux for this system.
Now - lets compare to say coal. A coal fired plant is about $1 billion bux for 1 gigawatt. A nuclear plant is also about $1 billion for 1 gigawatt of generating capacity.
Any way you look at it - wind is about
The fellow should have checked out the street lamp.
My guess is that the bulb exploded, launching a light projectile towards the upper left hand corner of the picture on a plane that is more or less parallel with the plane of the picture.
Opposite this projectile a much more massive chunk traveled downward and from this peice we see some smoke trails traveling both downward and upward. The downward trails appear to ensnarl the pole somewhat.
Given the shutter speed is about 1/3 of the usual minimum for taking pictures there is ample time for the projectiles to travel the distances we observe.
Another possible explanation is a small pyro device tossed into the air which explodes on this side of the street light. If one looks closely it does appear that some of the smoke is on this side of the street lamp pole. So maybe we had some kids fill a soda bottle with gunpowder and light a fuse and toss it into the air. Checking hospital reports may yeild the clues we need!
Given the size of the long trail into the upper left hand corner however, I suspect that whatever was thrown in this direction was on fire and we are only seeing a vapour/smoke trail that disappears within a few seconds (like 15 for instance). I wonder if sodium from a high pressure sodium lamp can do this.
If the heat wave is real - then water vapour is far more likely to be the culprit. H2O is a stronger green house gas in all wavelengths than CO2 is and it is 100x greater in concentration than CO2.
That being said... the climate of dear old earth is now 20 degrees colder than usual. Usual here is measured on the scale of 570 million years.
People need to learn a bit on paleoclimatology.
IMHO this might be a dangerous treatment. How is this different from the "white" in Star Trek that keeps the Jem'Hadar alive?
AIDS does have low grade secondary transmission vectors. Consider. It has been known for more than a decade that mosquitoes can harber AIDS for at least 12 hours. If over 99% of the population is AIDS free then the likelhood of a mosquitoe carrying AIDS and picking on a new victim is extremely low. However if 50% of the population has AIDS then the likelihood is quite significant.
IMHO the epidemiologists have not come to grips with this.
My wife was declared terminally ill within 10 days of my firstborn. We had no insurance at the time. We had an appointment with an agent but it turns out my daughter was born prematurely. So my wife was in the hospital giving birth when the agent was to come over. Hense no insurance about 2 weeks later when she went back into the hospital for a grand mal seisure.
Childbirth was fine. It was the brain tumour that did her in.
Well, even without the insurance we did ok but life would have been a lot easier if I could have afforded a nurse because for 10 years I had to provide 100% supervision, support my family and raise my kids.
I did this through contracting. I was paid 2x what employees were paid - but I did absolutely excellent work (from home). My time was my own, my clients wanted me to clone myself, I had some of the most interesting project one could ask for, and I did have the support of my clients who really did do their best to help me out from time to time.
That being said I was so burned out from the stress after 10 years that I could no longer work. It took 3 years to recover - probably Post Tramatic Stress Disorder! Other than clients lifting work deadlines - I got no help from anyone. Insurance would have made a difference because if I were assured of a policy payout then I would have been willing to take on debt to hire help during the tough years.
Now if any people think that making 2x salary is enough in a situation like this.. forget it. Had I a normal day job I would have needed about 12 hours per day coverage and nursing staff are not cheap. Even with 2x salary I could not have ben able to afford 1.5 nurses salaries along with maintaining my own household.
My ONLY option was doing it all myself - or a premature nursing home - and that 2nd option was not in the cards.
So all in all - You do need insurance if you are married because if either gets sick its on the other's shoulders. Contracting is a good way to go - just make sure you do a really good job because your tenure is a 5 minute phone call.
As for steady employment? Well - I had to interview and hire my supervisor - but made 2x his salary. I didn't think that was a bad idea and I was able to STAY COMPLETELY AWAY from all office politics... everyone knew I was not after anyone's job!!!
The life of a contractor can be bliss.
There is enough uranium/plutonium sitting in swimming pools on reactor sites in the USA to power 100 CANDU style reactors for 50 years and this is without mining a single gram of new uranium. It is the USA idea of not re-processing fuel that promotes the mining.
With a reactor design like the fast integral reactor there is enough uranium already mined to power 100 reactors for about 60,000 years. The reason for this is because the fast integral reactor burns 100% of the fuel load instead of the 2% that the current enriched reactors burn. Please note that companies like USEC discard as "depleated" about 93% of the uranium that hits the plant and therefore the USA fuel cycle is really only burning 2% of 7% = 0.14% of the uranium that is mined.
That a nuclear program can be profitable with such low usage rates is indicative of how much potential there really is for energy from this source.
Now the USA produces about 8% of its total energy from Nuclear so if 1200 reactors are built then there is only about 5,000 years supply of fuel but this will be producing 100% of the required energy.
This is still without more mining.
Also please note that by the time 100% of the uranium has been burned there are no actinides left and the only by-products are relatively safe short lived isotopes. So this really does solve the waste problem but it still takes 5,000 years to do it.
On this basis the once-through program is even more idiotic. We have so damn much uranium kicking around that we really do not know what to do with it. We can't burn it because we have no use for the energy.
Meanwhile young men and women are in the middle east shooting at people in the mistaken belief that America's oil supplies need to be secured.
A better idea is to build some CANDU reactors, re-cycle the existing spent fuel, use the electricity to produce hydrogen and drop that through a Fischer-Tropsch upgrader and convert coal, bitumin, oil shale or pretty much any other carbon source to liquid fuels. Meanwhile some of the hydrogen can be pulled off as CH4 if desired or if feasible just put into the natural gas pipelines as H2 for home heating. I really think H2 is not going to be a very good idea mind you... but maybe its ok.
Get Canada to build a bunch of nuke plants for Tar Sands operations and send the waste up here. We'll burn it in the CANDU's for the next 100 years or so and sell you gasoline, ok?