It blew my mind to have pointed out to me (in John Derbyshire's EXCELLENT book Prime Obsession) that some infinite series sum to different values, depending upon the order in which the terms are added!
... there are strong reasons to think that we are causing global warming..."
If human activity is to blame for the current bout of global warming, then one would logically expect the current bout of global warming to have begun sometime during, oh, let's say the past couple of hundred years. Certainly no more than a few thousand.
But that's NOT what the evidence shows. The evidence shows that the current cycle of global warming began about 30,000 years ago. Other evidences include the land bridges between Ireland and Britain, Alaska and Siberia disappearing as the oceans began to rise -- presumably from the melting of the ice caps from the previous Ice Age. And long before human activity had any effect on global climate.
I don't have a problem with stating that human activity is contributing to the current cycle of global warming, but it clearly did not cause it, and there is no reason to believe that even if we immediately terminate all human production of atmospheric carbon (assuming that such a thing is even remotely possible), that the current global warming would subside.
We may have accelerated the progress of this cycle, but we clearly did NOT cause global warming. And in all likelihood, other sources of greenhouse gases -- things like the thawing and subsequent rotting of millions of acres of permafrost -- are now the driving forces.
The fact that we do not have a solid model that incorporates the plethora of sources of atmospheric carbon that are begin recognized currently, or one that can produce the cyclic behavior observed in the paleoclimate record should make us a little cautious. To produce models that track a few thousand years does nothing to test theories against an observed history of a cyclical process occurring over million of years.
The referenced article raises its own questions. For instance, if the planet has seen increases in CO2 and H2S immediately preceding the several previous mass extinctions, then it seems likely that some process also occurs to wash the nasty stuff out of the atmosphere, else the Earth would resemble Venus.
Perhaps it is the abundance of life on Earth that is responsible for the rise of atmospheric CO2 to levels that make the global temperature hospitable for the formation of life, and cyclic eruptions of super-volcanos (like the Yellowstone caldera) snuff out the bulk of the life infesting the planet, allowing the excess CO2 to break down or otherwise dissipate over the next few hundred years following the mass extinctions (and the release of the carbon trapped in all those carcasses), and the large amount of atmospheric dust and debris from the eruption to immediately start the planet into another Ice Age.
But that is merely speculation. The fact is, we don't know and have no theories backed by evidence to suggest plausible answers.
Yes, switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy is A Good Thing, and we should be doing so (and are, as fast as we economically can) -- but to suggest that such a switch is the "cure" for global warming is unsubstantiated, giving dangerous hope of a remedy that is almost certainly false.
To "cure" global warming, we need to be able to directly alter the amount of atmospheric carbon -- maybe extract it in the form of carbon nanotubes via gene-modded algae or trees, using carbon nanotubes to replace lumber in our technology. We're clearly a VERY long way from being able to do that.
And even then, we need to be able to deal with the H2S dumped into the environment by super-volcanos, and I cannot imagine how we can deal with that. Based on the cyclic history of the Yellowstone caldera, we should be expecting another eruption there Real Soon Now, which will pretty much obliterate life in North America, if not kick off another wave of mass extinctions around the globe.
It appears to me that all of your quite precise estimates are made on the basis of a single data point: our solar system.
So the confidence factor of these estimates is pretty low, with a sample size of one out of a population of planets (or stars with planets) in this galaxy that is a pretty large number (perhaps billions, but that's a guess).
Also, given that we know exactly zero about the processes that operated to produce (or will hopefully produce within another Darwinian cycle or two) intelligent life on this planet, it is a remarkable leap to assume that half of the habitable planets harbor intelligent life.
Just for the sake of irrational, Slashdot-style argument, let's suppose that the following mechanisms are responsible for human evolution to the top of the food chain here on the third rock from the Sun:
1) A world that is mostly water
2) A large moon that causes significant tides
3) A paleoclimate pattern of greenhouse and ice ages, without slipping over into either runaway greenhouse effect or having the ice ages crank up the albedo so as to remain permanent (a neat trick, for which we have no explanation)
4) A molten core that lasts just the right amount of time, which presumes either (or both) the tidal effects of a large moon or a specific percentage of radioactive elements sufficient to keep the home fires burning
I could go on, but you get the idea. We know zilch about what causes intelligent life to arise, whether it is the normal course or an isolated instance, and exactly what teatures of our world have contributed to this. Certainly a regular series of mass extinctions would seem to be a prerequisite for life to advance to more versatile forms. And of course, there need to be stable intervals in between the periods of catastrophe for newbie life forms to develop before the dice get rolled again (and again and again). We certainly had a number of mass extinctions before humans (or the critters that eventually became humans) arrived on the scene.
So exactly what percentage of worlds fit this description, and what is your sample size? The above notions are all simply speculations, but they're a lot more sophisticated speculations than "1 non-gas-giant planet of 5 supports life, therefore 20% of the non-gas giant planets support life", or intelligent life has appeared on this world after it is half its projected existence, therefore half of all worlds supporting life have intelligent life".
Hopefully, this next Darwinian scythe from the icehouse-to-greenhouse-to-icehouse cycle we are currently on will result in smarter humans, and if not, then smarter bears or cockroaches. But not birds. I can't stand birds, as they crap all over my car.
These arguments PROVE (OK, strongly hint at) that there's no intelligent life on this world. When there is insufficient information to state anything about a solution set, intelligent beings do not extrapolate an answer to nine decimal places.
... and can offer little input in the matter of presenting a video stream to broadcast hardware (I suspect it's a bit different than streaming it to your TV or camcorder).
That being said, you really should check out Apple's QuickTime Broadcaster software:
While aimed at streaming webcasts, it has support for AppleScript and workflow automation. Plus, it's free, and has some tutorial examples available.
Also, the ADC has several QuickTime tools available:
The Dutch apparently believe that their votes count for something, while the American people recognize that the entire election process was Pwned by the Republicrat and Democrian parties long ago, and that the people's votes have no real effect on what kind of candidate gets elected -- hence the abysmal turn-out on election day in this country.
For democracy to work, people have to believe in it. If people see the same sort of scum repeatedly get elected to office, while the party machinery prevents anyone else from getting nominated, it's only natural that they would abandon voting as a waste of time.
Don't mistake the loss of faith in the voting process for complete apathy, though. If things should turn painful for the people, then things will get really ugly for those holding elected office.
I guess that "portable electronics" does not include notebook computers. I see that the power brick for my G4 iBook provides 65W and the power adapter for the new MacBook Pro provides 85W.
And I can't wait to read the headlines of the first bunch of software developers, found dead from carbon monoxide posoning after a long weekend of burning the midnight oil (or kerosene, butame or propane). Personal oxygen supplies may become the next big thing in office equipment.
I can see tethered cellular towers as well as WiFi towers (802.11n, something with some range) at elevations of a few thousand feet -- high enough to give them excellent line-of-sight coverage, but below air traffic corridors.
In situations like Katrina, or western wildfires, these could reinstate the communications grid very quickly and at minimal cost.
All they need as payloads would be a solar cell array and batteries for power (or run a power cable up the tether), a lightweight omnidirectional antenna, and a lightweight communications processor/router/transceiver that seeks out neighboring nodes in the communications grid, joins the grid and relays ground signals to the self-organizing grid. At some point (or points), the grid connects to the ground-based network. Eventually, the helium would leak out and they would settle back to earth, being reeled in by the tether anchors, as slack was detected in the tethers. They could then be replaced/re-filled and sent back up. My guess is that these cost for these would be well under $5K per node, which is a lot cheaper than a conventional cell tower.
No better way to drive the technology forward than to start using it commercially.
Of course, to get the maximum benefit, they would need to have cube walls with integrated DC power rails, with a power supply for every half-dozen or so cubicles. An idea for an enterprising cubicle manufacturer.
... as potential buyers decide to stick with what they've got and wait for the 80-core monsters in 5 years.
Since Intel cannot last 5 years without income, they wither and die, just as Osborne Computer Corp did 23 years earlier in what came to be called the "Osborne Effect".
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
It's the "narrow domains" that is the crux of the problem.
When used successfully over said "narrow domains", the human tendency (especially that set of humanity which makes the high-level choices for groups and organizations) will be to expand the domain in hopes of applying it to ever greater numbers of items.
Of course, as the search domain is expanded, the effectiveness of the results decline, with no warning to the clueless idiots driving the search. False positives eventually exceed true positives by greater and greater margins.
In the end, the strategy collapses, as a great many victims are shown to be wrongly targeted -- but until that point, the system does a LOT more harm than good.
Thank Goodness our leaders are such wise and contemplative souls that they would never, ever misuse such a tool.
"... but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe."
News flash -- income for ANY company selling a product is a cost to those who buy the product.
The issue is whether the consumer gets a reasonable deal for their purchase and whether they have any real choice in the matter. If the only choice one has in a personal computer, is a crappy PC, then there is likely some injustice involved.
Thankfully, we have choices -- plenty of them -- the persistence of Microsoft as the world's choice in personal computing is the fault of the world at this point, not Microsoft. The days of Microsoft preventing competition from being expressed in the marketplace are gone.
I went through a similar process, and came up with similar numbers (8864 watt-hrs/liter). One wonders how efficient this borohydride fuel cell is.
One would expect a fuel cell to be a lot lighter than a cast-iron engine block, but then electric motors are not exactly light weight. The best things about the prospect of using this in an automotive context is that
1) It deals very nicely with the carbon emissions issue (although to properly deal with greenhouse gas emissions, one would have to capture the water vapor)
2) It offers a much more feasible means of ending our dependence on foreign oil. Agricultural ethanol is *not* the answer -- at least not with any crop known today. I suspect that existing refineries and gas stations could be adapted to managing ethylene glycol and borohydride products, as well as recycling them.
"... NASA has come to the realization that space craft don't need to land like aircraft..."
Now if only they could come to the realization that they don't need to launch them from a Florida swamp, at sea level with plenty of humidity.
NASA could easily come to an arrangement with a friendly country (while there are still some around) and set up launch facilities someplace like the Atacama Desert of Chile, which is closer to the equator (about 10 degrees of latitude closer), higher (about 8K ft), and drier (drier than anywhere else on the planet). I'd guess there's not much lightning either (Florida is the most lightning-prone place in the US).
But I guess that having a major federal employer located in a state is worth more as a political plum than eliminating a bunch of difficulties that cost us incredible amounts annually and make launches much more challenging than they really need to be.
We don't have a problem with having military bases all over the planet, and we even have a prison in Cuba. I'm sure that all sorts of government (state as well as federal) work is being offshored to various places around the globe. So why can't we contract with Chile to set up launch facilities there? The Europeans had no problem seeing the value in setting up observatories there.
The important thing is not where we launch from, it's where we launch to.
For starters, they would plunder the $34B in cash and short-term investments that Microsoft is sitting on. They could easily extract $26B and not damage the company in the slightest.
Next, check the income statement -- there are lots of large numbers that are hiding (and doing a poor job of it) ginormous amounts of waste, like $12+B per year in Selling/General/Admin. Expenses -- ExxonMobile, with a network of sales outlets and sales on REAL products (not bits) of more than 8 TIMES Microsoft's "puny" $44+B per year (XOM raked in $358+B last year) only spends $14+B in Selling/General/Admin. Expenses, so Microsoft has buried a boatload of sins in that particular vault. I expect there's probably $10B per year that could be extracted from that area without harming the company one iota.
And how can a company that spends $6+B per year on R&D have so little to show for it? There's easily $5B per year that can be extracted there, and to be perfectly reasonable, nearly all of it could be eliminated. It doesn't take $6B per year to copy Apple.
And don't forget that today Microsoft, while wasteful and poorly-managed in the extreme, still manages to rake in over $12B per year in net profits. So with just a few obvious changes to make the company more shipshape, it could be generating an immediate repayment of $26B with profitability improved to almost double what it is today, yielding over $27B in recurring profits to the hypothetical LBO partners each year.
And there you have an immediate repayment of $26B, with a recurring $27B per year that gets kicked back to the buyers. If they takeover the company during the next recession, hold it for the 3 years or so until the global economy is at a short-term peak (collecting $27B per year on their investment of $312B - $26B in immediate cashout of retained earnings, or a net investment of $286B, only about 10%, but certainly not chicken feed, and there's likely to be a lot more fat that can be trimmed from the bloated Microsoft financials). Then take it public again, reselling it at something like double their purchase price, based on the doubled profitability.
Doubling $300+B in 3 years is not to be sneezed at.
But returning to who would have the where-with-all to accomplish such a feat, it's a pretty short list. Maybe the Dubai folks, or some other oil-rich group, whose coffers must be overflowing with the revenue from $70/bbl oil.
Sure, it's mind-boggling, but it makes great sense.
A more likely outcome is for a corporate raider (or group of raiders) to purchase a large, quasi-controlling interest in Microsoft, and make the changes that need to be made, then re-sell their shares as the stock price soars on doubled profitability and nice dividend payments. It is not necessary to take a company private to obtain a controlling interest.
It seems to me that a cool million a year, with ALL taxes on that million paid by Microsoft, and an employment contract that guarantees payment for 5 years, even if they are fired or quit (excuse me, "retire") the day after they arrive.
That's still not as nice a deal as most corporate CEOs get in US corporations, and it would only cost Microsoft $20M -- or about 1670 minutes* of profits. A bit over one day's profits.
Everyone has their price.
*based on 1440 minutes/day x 365.25 days/year, and $12,599,000,000 in profits for 2006, and the assumption that integrating the cascading series of tax payments results in a doubling of the $20M to a $40 expense for Microsoft.
As I understand the process ...
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
... this would constitute a confirmation if a prior prediction was made, and the observed results match the prediction.
This appears to be no more a confirmation for dark matter than when the Michelson-Morley experiment (in 1881) "confirmed" the existence of ether. In the immediate aftermath of the Michelson-Morley experiment, theoreticians generated lots of mathematical "proofs" (e.g., The Ether of Space, Sir Oliver Lodge, Harper & Bros, 1909) that showed how a boundary layer in the ether surrounding the Earth accounted for the observed results. A series of subsequent refinements of the Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of light was truly independent of direction, and Einstein's theories, which did not require the existence of ether, provided a better fit for the observed results than was a boundary layer in the ether.
Over time, the Michelson-Morley experiment was recognized to have disproved the existence of ether -- but it wasn't that way initially.
Alternative explanations include "quantum critical phase transitions", and I'm sure that there are other possibilities, that a series of observations of similar cosmological events will provide the range of data needed to select the hypothesis that best describes the observations.
Being able to fudge one theory to fit a single observation falls quite a bit short of a "conclusive proof". Maybe dark matter does exist, but it's going to take a lot more observations for it to be convincing to me.
How precisely does dark matter permit the expansion of the universe to be defined, and how precisely does the observed phenomenon fit those numbers?
Wake me up when someone has a quantum mechanical model that tells how quarks are bound together in dark matter, or when someone manages to tap into dark energy (which is supposedly all around us).
... as I am confident that they will remedy all previous problems by expanding the scope to encompass all of Homeland Security, in a gigantic multi-faceted morass of a system that will add a zero (or two) to the price tag and be awarded to Halliburton in yet another no-bid sweetheart deal. Just the disparate "security" requirements to isolate yet bind together the FBI, CIA, NSA, and FEMA will cause analysts' heads to spin so rapidly they snap off and go soaring into the blue. Testers will not be allowed to see the results of their tests due to lack of proper security clearances and a "need to know".
If they really wanted to fix the problems at the FBI, do you think they would have rolled it into the largest bureaucracy in the government?
When you want to fix something that has problems, you isolate it so that the flaws stand out and can be remedied. If, on the other hand, you just want the flaws be not quite so visible, you roll it up inside something that stinks and bury it.
(why is it that we have such misnomers -- Homeland Security when there is none, The Patriot Act by those who are most assuredly *not* patriots,...)
Sadly, -- and any professional that builds things for "customers", be they programmers, architects, homebuilders, or whatever can confirm this -- in almost all cases, the customer is unable to visualize what they "want".
Oh, they think they know what they want, and will describe it to you in precise detail, but as it comes closer to becoming a reality, they begin to realize that what they said is not what they wanted after all, and the changes commence.
And no, I wasn't stating that people are basically stupid, merely that human nature is such that an individual nearly always takes his/her cues for what to prefer from what everyone else is doing -- what I call the "herd instinct". The percentage of individuals who take the time to try to become honestly informed (and not by asking their neighbor Joe, who has zero credentials, what to do, but by researching the subject and becoming as educated as possible about it) before making a decision is vanishingly small. Just look at the number of people posting nonsense on Slashdot about whether Macs are more expensive than PCs, without bothering to even look at a Mac price list -- or a Dell price list for that matter.
Believe me, recognizing that groups of people behave similarly to groups of sheep or cattle is far from comforting, and I wish it was not so. But it is.
So how does using SQL injection in an apache (which I believe runs as a non-admin user -- at least apache 1.3.x does, not sure about 2.x) cgi app, gain access to passwords -- which ought to still reside in an encrypted facility within OS X?
I can see that if the site's designers stored users and passwords in an unencrypted SQL table, that it would be like taking candy from a baby, but surely no one is so stoopid as to design that sort of exposure into a system?
I suppose that once they inject their code into the works and are executing commands as the apache user, they might be able to do some stuff and eventually escalate their authority to a level at which they had some power.
Most of OS X's "security" is in keeping intruders out. Once they gain access to a system, even as a non-admin user, there are probably^H^H^H^H^H^H^H numerous ways in which they can proceed. Good security practices can mitigate these exposures, but the first step in securing a system is to keep intruders out. Stronger measures are needed because nobody's perfect, and there is always the possibility that an intruder will get in, probably via social engineering. Good security practices will make things more difficult for a non-admin user to escalate their authority to a point where they can do some real damage.
But in this case, to merely hack a webserver, all that is required is to be able to create some web pages containing your content -- no further hackery is required (I think).
Possibly TFA was a bit over the top in describing what had been done to the systems -- while they could have proceeded further, merely altering data within the scope of apache's access was the only requirement to accomplish their visible exploit.
This goes to show the need to properly validate ANY input coming into your webserver from the outside world before merrily handing it off to your SQL processor.
"... in case the president needed to be evacuated from U.S. soil."
So what are they waiting for?
If the case hasn't been made by now for removing GWB from U.S. soil, I can't imagine the series of events that would make the need clearer.
Hell, I think he needs to be evacuated from the friggin' planet -- along with all the morons who think like he does (Tony Blair, are you listening? Wait, the answer to that is obvious).
Slashdot Mirror
It blew my mind to have pointed out to me (in John Derbyshire's EXCELLENT book Prime Obsession) that some infinite series sum to different values, depending upon the order in which the terms are added!
This amazing property is called "conditional convergence".
However, since we are dealing with only finite series in this instance, I think (hope) that we can assume that commutivity rules.
If human activity is to blame for the current bout of global warming, then one would logically expect the current bout of global warming to have begun sometime during, oh, let's say the past couple of hundred years. Certainly no more than a few thousand.
But that's NOT what the evidence shows. The evidence shows that the current cycle of global warming began about 30,000 years ago. Other evidences include the land bridges between Ireland and Britain, Alaska and Siberia disappearing as the oceans began to rise -- presumably from the melting of the ice caps from the previous Ice Age. And long before human activity had any effect on global climate.
I don't have a problem with stating that human activity is contributing to the current cycle of global warming, but it clearly did not cause it, and there is no reason to believe that even if we immediately terminate all human production of atmospheric carbon (assuming that such a thing is even remotely possible), that the current global warming would subside.
We may have accelerated the progress of this cycle, but we clearly did NOT cause global warming. And in all likelihood, other sources of greenhouse gases -- things like the thawing and subsequent rotting of millions of acres of permafrost -- are now the driving forces.
The fact that we do not have a solid model that incorporates the plethora of sources of atmospheric carbon that are begin recognized currently, or one that can produce the cyclic behavior observed in the paleoclimate record should make us a little cautious. To produce models that track a few thousand years does nothing to test theories against an observed history of a cyclical process occurring over million of years.
The referenced article raises its own questions. For instance, if the planet has seen increases in CO2 and H2S immediately preceding the several previous mass extinctions, then it seems likely that some process also occurs to wash the nasty stuff out of the atmosphere, else the Earth would resemble Venus.
Perhaps it is the abundance of life on Earth that is responsible for the rise of atmospheric CO2 to levels that make the global temperature hospitable for the formation of life, and cyclic eruptions of super-volcanos (like the Yellowstone caldera) snuff out the bulk of the life infesting the planet, allowing the excess CO2 to break down or otherwise dissipate over the next few hundred years following the mass extinctions (and the release of the carbon trapped in all those carcasses), and the large amount of atmospheric dust and debris from the eruption to immediately start the planet into another Ice Age.
But that is merely speculation. The fact is, we don't know and have no theories backed by evidence to suggest plausible answers.
Yes, switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy is A Good Thing, and we should be doing so (and are, as fast as we economically can) -- but to suggest that such a switch is the "cure" for global warming is unsubstantiated, giving dangerous hope of a remedy that is almost certainly false.
To "cure" global warming, we need to be able to directly alter the amount of atmospheric carbon -- maybe extract it in the form of carbon nanotubes via gene-modded algae or trees, using carbon nanotubes to replace lumber in our technology. We're clearly a VERY long way from being able to do that.
And even then, we need to be able to deal with the H2S dumped into the environment by super-volcanos, and I cannot imagine how we can deal with that. Based on the cyclic history of the Yellowstone caldera, we should be expecting another eruption there Real Soon Now, which will pretty much obliterate life in North America, if not kick off another wave of mass extinctions around the globe.
Quick, somebody send Dubya an email loaded with urls to sex sites, eBay, and games, before he does something else.
For that matter, send one to Congress as well, but I think we know that we can dispense with the eBay and gaming links on that one.
This government is not nearly crippled enough.
It appears to me that all of your quite precise estimates are made on the basis of a single data point: our solar system.
So the confidence factor of these estimates is pretty low, with a sample size of one out of a population of planets (or stars with planets) in this galaxy that is a pretty large number (perhaps billions, but that's a guess).
Also, given that we know exactly zero about the processes that operated to produce (or will hopefully produce within another Darwinian cycle or two) intelligent life on this planet, it is a remarkable leap to assume that half of the habitable planets harbor intelligent life.
Just for the sake of irrational, Slashdot-style argument, let's suppose that the following mechanisms are responsible for human evolution to the top of the food chain here on the third rock from the Sun:
1) A world that is mostly water
2) A large moon that causes significant tides
3) A paleoclimate pattern of greenhouse and ice ages, without slipping over into either runaway greenhouse effect or having the ice ages crank up the albedo so as to remain permanent (a neat trick, for which we have no explanation)
4) A molten core that lasts just the right amount of time, which presumes either (or both) the tidal effects of a large moon or a specific percentage of radioactive elements sufficient to keep the home fires burning
I could go on, but you get the idea. We know zilch about what causes intelligent life to arise, whether it is the normal course or an isolated instance, and exactly what teatures of our world have contributed to this. Certainly a regular series of mass extinctions would seem to be a prerequisite for life to advance to more versatile forms. And of course, there need to be stable intervals in between the periods of catastrophe for newbie life forms to develop before the dice get rolled again (and again and again). We certainly had a number of mass extinctions before humans (or the critters that eventually became humans) arrived on the scene.
So exactly what percentage of worlds fit this description, and what is your sample size? The above notions are all simply speculations, but they're a lot more sophisticated speculations than "1 non-gas-giant planet of 5 supports life, therefore 20% of the non-gas giant planets support life", or intelligent life has appeared on this world after it is half its projected existence, therefore half of all worlds supporting life have intelligent life".
Hopefully, this next Darwinian scythe from the icehouse-to-greenhouse-to-icehouse cycle we are currently on will result in smarter humans, and if not, then smarter bears or cockroaches. But not birds. I can't stand birds, as they crap all over my car.
These arguments PROVE (OK, strongly hint at) that there's no intelligent life on this world.
When there is insufficient information to state anything about a solution set, intelligent beings do not extrapolate an answer to nine decimal places.
That being said, you really should check out Apple's QuickTime Broadcaster software:
While aimed at streaming webcasts, it has support for AppleScript and workflow automation.Plus, it's free, and has some tutorial examples available.
Also, the ADC has several QuickTime tools available:
(where IANABE == I Am Not A Broadcast Engineer)
What gives?
The Dutch apparently believe that their votes count for something, while the American people recognize that the entire election process was Pwned by the Republicrat and Democrian parties long ago, and that the people's votes have no real effect on what kind of candidate gets elected -- hence the abysmal turn-out on election day in this country.
For democracy to work, people have to believe in it. If people see the same sort of scum repeatedly get elected to office, while the party machinery prevents anyone else from getting nominated, it's only natural that they would abandon voting as a waste of time.
Don't mistake the loss of faith in the voting process for complete apathy, though. If things should turn painful for the people, then things will get really ugly for those holding elected office.
We live in a truce between apathy and comfort.
I guess that "portable electronics" does not include notebook computers. I see that the power brick for my G4 iBook provides 65W and the power adapter for the new MacBook Pro provides 85W.
And I can't wait to read the headlines of the first bunch of software developers, found dead from carbon monoxide posoning after a long weekend of burning the midnight oil (or kerosene, butame or propane). Personal oxygen supplies may become the next big thing in office equipment.
I can see tethered cellular towers as well as WiFi towers (802.11n, something with some range) at elevations of a few thousand feet -- high enough to give them excellent line-of-sight coverage, but below air traffic corridors.
In situations like Katrina, or western wildfires, these could reinstate the communications grid very quickly and at minimal cost.
All they need as payloads would be a solar cell array and batteries for power (or run a power cable up the tether), a lightweight omnidirectional antenna, and a lightweight communications processor/router/transceiver that seeks out neighboring nodes in the communications grid, joins the grid and relays ground signals to the self-organizing grid. At some point (or points), the grid connects to the ground-based network. Eventually, the helium would leak out and they would settle back to earth, being reeled in by the tether anchors, as slack was detected in the tethers. They could then be replaced/re-filled and sent back up. My guess is that these cost for these would be well under $5K per node, which is a lot cheaper than a conventional cell tower.
No better way to drive the technology forward than to start using it commercially.
By replacing desktops with notebooks --
Of course, to get the maximum benefit, they would need to have cube walls with integrated DC power rails, with a power supply for every half-dozen or so cubicles. An idea for an enterprising cubicle manufacturer.
Since Intel cannot last 5 years without income, they wither and die, just as Osborne Computer Corp did 23 years earlier in what came to be called the "Osborne Effect".
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
It's the "narrow domains" that is the crux of the problem.
When used successfully over said "narrow domains", the human tendency (especially that set of humanity which makes the high-level choices for groups and organizations) will be to expand the domain in hopes of applying it to ever greater numbers of items.
Of course, as the search domain is expanded, the effectiveness of the results decline, with no warning to the clueless idiots driving the search. False positives eventually exceed true positives by greater and greater margins.
In the end, the strategy collapses, as a great many victims are shown to be wrongly targeted -- but until that point, the system does a LOT more harm than good.
Thank Goodness our leaders are such wise and contemplative souls that they would never, ever misuse such a tool.
"... but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe."
News flash -- income for ANY company selling a product is a cost to those who buy the product.
The issue is whether the consumer gets a reasonable deal for their purchase and whether they have any real choice in the matter. If the only choice one has in a personal computer, is a crappy PC, then there is likely some injustice involved.
Thankfully, we have choices -- plenty of them -- the persistence of Microsoft as the world's choice in personal computing is the fault of the world at this point, not Microsoft. The days of Microsoft preventing competition from being expressed in the marketplace are gone.
I went through a similar process, and came up with similar numbers (8864 watt-hrs/liter). One wonders how efficient this borohydride fuel cell is.
One would expect a fuel cell to be a lot lighter than a cast-iron engine block, but then electric motors are not exactly light weight. The best things about the prospect of using this in an automotive context is that
1) It deals very nicely with the carbon emissions issue (although to properly deal with greenhouse gas emissions, one would have to capture the water vapor)
2) It offers a much more feasible means of ending our dependence on foreign oil. Agricultural ethanol is *not* the answer -- at least not with any crop known today. I suspect that existing refineries and gas stations could be adapted to managing ethylene glycol and borohydride products, as well as recycling them.
... an 8-cpu monster with only 2G of RAM and a standard disk setup.
The poor baby's probably starved for data to crunch, having only 256M of RAM per cpu and apparently just the standard disk setup.
And it appears that they left the default OS X limit of 100 tasks per user in place as well.
Gotta open things up to let those puppies breathe!
Now if only they could come to the realization that they don't need to launch them from a Florida swamp, at sea level with plenty of humidity.
NASA could easily come to an arrangement with a friendly country (while there are still some around) and set up launch facilities someplace like the Atacama Desert of Chile, which is closer to the equator (about 10 degrees of latitude closer), higher (about 8K ft), and drier (drier than anywhere else on the planet). I'd guess there's not much lightning either (Florida is the most lightning-prone place in the US).
But I guess that having a major federal employer located in a state is worth more as a political plum than eliminating a bunch of difficulties that cost us incredible amounts annually and make launches much more challenging than they really need to be.
We don't have a problem with having military bases all over the planet, and we even have a prison in Cuba. I'm sure that all sorts of government (state as well as federal) work is being offshored to various places around the globe. So why can't we contract with Chile to set up launch facilities there? The Europeans had no problem seeing the value in setting up observatories there.
The important thing is not where we launch from, it's where we launch to.
Yes, in a second announcement later in the day, the "inhumanity gene", FUD9999 was discovered.
It took longer to recognize as it was so much more prevalent than the DUF1220 gene.
Apparently, the function of the FUD9999 gene is to convert the proteins that DUF1220 encodes into a complex mixture of steroids and alcohol.
And are there formats suitable for replacing track or canister incandescent reflector bulbs?
...
Seems like it should be possible, but I don't recall ever seeing any in the stores
Consider the amount the hypothetical LBO group would anticipate making --
Let's look at the Microsoft balance sheet ...
For starters, they would plunder the $34B in cash and short-term investments that Microsoft is sitting on. They could easily extract $26B and not damage the company in the slightest.
Next, check the income statement -- there are lots of large numbers that are hiding (and doing a poor job of it) ginormous amounts of waste, like $12+B per year in Selling/General/Admin. Expenses -- ExxonMobile, with a network of sales outlets and sales on REAL products (not bits) of more than 8 TIMES Microsoft's "puny" $44+B per year (XOM raked in $358+B last year) only spends $14+B in Selling/General/Admin. Expenses, so Microsoft has buried a boatload of sins in that particular vault. I expect there's probably $10B per year that could be extracted from that area without harming the company one iota.
And how can a company that spends $6+B per year on R&D have so little to show for it? There's easily $5B per year that can be extracted there, and to be perfectly reasonable, nearly all of it could be eliminated. It doesn't take $6B per year to copy Apple.
And don't forget that today Microsoft, while wasteful and poorly-managed in the extreme, still manages to rake in over $12B per year in net profits. So with just a few obvious changes to make the company more shipshape, it could be generating an immediate repayment of $26B with profitability improved to almost double what it is today, yielding over $27B in recurring profits to the hypothetical LBO partners each year.
And there you have an immediate repayment of $26B, with a recurring $27B per year that gets kicked back to the buyers. If they takeover the company during the next recession, hold it for the 3 years or so until the global economy is at a short-term peak (collecting $27B per year on their investment of $312B - $26B in immediate cashout of retained earnings, or a net investment of $286B, only about 10%, but certainly not chicken feed, and there's likely to be a lot more fat that can be trimmed from the bloated Microsoft financials). Then take it public again, reselling it at something like double their purchase price, based on the doubled profitability.
Doubling $300+B in 3 years is not to be sneezed at.
But returning to who would have the where-with-all to accomplish such a feat, it's a pretty short list. Maybe the Dubai folks, or some other oil-rich group, whose coffers must be overflowing with the revenue from $70/bbl oil.
Sure, it's mind-boggling, but it makes great sense.
A more likely outcome is for a corporate raider (or group of raiders) to purchase a large, quasi-controlling interest in Microsoft, and make the changes that need to be made, then re-sell their shares as the stock price soars on doubled profitability and nice dividend payments. It is not necessary to take a company private to obtain a controlling interest.
Why so little?
It seems to me that a cool million a year, with ALL taxes on that million paid by Microsoft, and an employment contract that guarantees payment for 5 years, even if they are fired or quit (excuse me, "retire") the day after they arrive.
That's still not as nice a deal as most corporate CEOs get in US corporations, and it would only cost Microsoft $20M -- or about 1670 minutes* of profits. A bit over one day's profits.
Everyone has their price.
*based on 1440 minutes/day x 365.25 days/year, and $12,599,000,000 in profits for 2006, and the assumption that integrating the cascading series of tax payments results in a doubling of the $20M to a $40 expense for Microsoft.
This appears to be no more a confirmation for dark matter than when the Michelson-Morley experiment (in 1881) "confirmed" the existence of ether. In the immediate aftermath of the Michelson-Morley experiment, theoreticians generated lots of mathematical "proofs" (e.g., The Ether of Space, Sir Oliver Lodge, Harper & Bros, 1909) that showed how a boundary layer in the ether surrounding the Earth accounted for the observed results. A series of subsequent refinements of the Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of light was truly independent of direction, and Einstein's theories, which did not require the existence of ether, provided a better fit for the observed results than was a boundary layer in the ether.
Over time, the Michelson-Morley experiment was recognized to have disproved the existence of ether -- but it wasn't that way initially.
Alternative explanations include "quantum critical phase transitions", and I'm sure that there are other possibilities, that a series of observations of similar cosmological events will provide the range of data needed to select the hypothesis that best describes the observations.
Being able to fudge one theory to fit a single observation falls quite a bit short of a "conclusive proof". Maybe dark matter does exist, but it's going to take a lot more observations for it to be convincing to me.
How precisely does dark matter permit the expansion of the universe to be defined, and how precisely does the observed phenomenon fit those numbers?
Wake me up when someone has a quantum mechanical model that tells how quarks are bound together in dark matter, or when someone manages to tap into dark energy (which is supposedly all around us).
... as I am confident that they will remedy all previous problems by expanding the scope to encompass all of Homeland Security, in a gigantic multi-faceted morass of a system that will add a zero (or two) to the price tag and be awarded to Halliburton in yet another no-bid sweetheart deal. Just the disparate "security" requirements to isolate yet bind together the FBI, CIA, NSA, and FEMA will cause analysts' heads to spin so rapidly they snap off and go soaring into the blue. Testers will not be allowed to see the results of their tests due to lack of proper security clearances and a "need to know".
...)
If they really wanted to fix the problems at the FBI, do you think they would have rolled it into the largest bureaucracy in the government?
When you want to fix something that has problems, you isolate it so that the flaws stand out and can be remedied. If, on the other hand, you just want the flaws be not quite so visible, you roll it up inside something that stinks and bury it.
(why is it that we have such misnomers -- Homeland Security when there is none, The Patriot Act by those who are most assuredly *not* patriots,
I knew that Jon Stewart couldn't get away with it ... ... I'll bet that Stephen Colbert is behind this "investigation".
Sadly, -- and any professional that builds things for "customers", be they programmers, architects, homebuilders, or whatever can confirm this -- in almost all cases, the customer is unable to visualize what they "want".
Oh, they think they know what they want, and will describe it to you in precise detail, but as it comes closer to becoming a reality, they begin to realize that what they said is not what they wanted after all, and the changes commence.
And no, I wasn't stating that people are basically stupid, merely that human nature is such that an individual nearly always takes his/her cues for what to prefer from what everyone else is doing -- what I call the "herd instinct". The percentage of individuals who take the time to try to become honestly informed (and not by asking their neighbor Joe, who has zero credentials, what to do, but by researching the subject and becoming as educated as possible about it) before making a decision is vanishingly small. Just look at the number of people posting nonsense on Slashdot about whether Macs are more expensive than PCs, without bothering to even look at a Mac price list -- or a Dell price list for that matter.
Believe me, recognizing that groups of people behave similarly to groups of sheep or cattle is far from comforting, and I wish it was not so. But it is.
I can see that if the site's designers stored users and passwords in an unencrypted SQL table, that it would be like taking candy from a baby, but surely no one is so stoopid as to design that sort of exposure into a system?
I suppose that once they inject their code into the works and are executing commands as the apache user, they might be able to do some stuff and eventually escalate their authority to a level at which they had some power.
Most of OS X's "security" is in keeping intruders out. Once they gain access to a system, even as a non-admin user, there are probably^H^H^H^H^H^H^H numerous ways in which they can proceed. Good security practices can mitigate these exposures, but the first step in securing a system is to keep intruders out. Stronger measures are needed because nobody's perfect, and there is always the possibility that an intruder will get in, probably via social engineering. Good security practices will make things more difficult for a non-admin user to escalate their authority to a point where they can do some real damage.
But in this case, to merely hack a webserver, all that is required is to be able to create some web pages containing your content -- no further hackery is required (I think).
Possibly TFA was a bit over the top in describing what had been done to the systems -- while they could have proceeded further, merely altering data within the scope of apache's access was the only requirement to accomplish their visible exploit.
This goes to show the need to properly validate ANY input coming into your webserver from the outside world before merrily handing it off to your SQL processor.
" ... in case the president needed to be evacuated from U.S. soil."
So what are they waiting for?
If the case hasn't been made by now for removing GWB from U.S. soil, I can't imagine the series of events that would make the need clearer.
Hell, I think he needs to be evacuated from the friggin' planet -- along with all the morons who think like he does (Tony Blair, are you listening? Wait, the answer to that is obvious).