Clean coal. It is possible to burn coal so that there is not any of the nasties you get when you burn coal at home.
It is possible to burn most anything without getting nasty byproducts.
Concerning nuclear waste, the previous poster is right. It won't be sitting around for hundreds of thousands of years. We are going to figure out what to do with it very shortly. We are going to have literally clean burning fission power. We will be converting mass to energy with no nasty byproducts.
I find it amazing that on the one hand, people marvel at humanity's ability to do things like create dynamite, nuclear weapons, and clean drinking water from sewage, but on the other hand, say things like making clean burning energy from coal, not to mention plutonium, is impossible.
The BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Nor Anytime) Environmentalist are a walking paradox. One the one hand. science has the power to restore nature, but they refuse to allow science to help mankind.
Re:ACLU Acts on Principles, Not Popular Perception
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Joining the ACLU?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you say that mixing religion with government is OK, then you admit that it would be just fine if ever a hypothetical Muslim majority in the United States should decree that the Koran and sharia law would be posted in all schools and to which everyone must memorize and adhere, rigth after one of the 5 prayer sessions during the day.
The "Seperation of Church and State" has no foundation in the constitution. This is the text of the first amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...
The Founding Fathers were openly religious. The practice of praying to God, and not just any God, the Christian God embraced by the Christian religions, in government has continued even today.
The Constitution specifically states that the federal government cannot infringe on my right to practice my religion, whether I am elected or not, nor whether I am appointed a judge or hired as a soldier. The Constitution specifically states that I am allowed to practice my religion, whether I am in my home, at church, on the floor of the senate, or in the office of the President of the United States.
Let's pretend we do obtain a Muslim majority. Let's pretend we elect a Muslim fanatic to be the president, and the Supreme Court is stacked with Muslim fanatics as well. They have no right under the constitution to prevent me from practicing my Christian religion. They have no right to support the Muslim religion above the Christian one. But they have every right to pray to Allah and to call on us Christians to embrace Islam.
That's what I believe. That's what my forefathers agreed to. And that is what has held our nation together, despite the varieties of religions.
Now answer me this question: Why does the ACLU insist on enforcing Atheism in my schools, in my government, and in my courts? Why are they trying to force the hand of government to respect one religions (Atheism, Islam) over another (Christianity, Judaism)? Why am I not allowed to pray in schools, whether it be to God, Eloheim, or to Allah? Why am I forced to pay tribute to the pagan gods of Mother Earth, Environmentalism, or Atheism?
The ACLU stands for the Anti-American Civil Liberals Union, just like the NAACP should be called the NAALCP (LCP = Liberal Colored People, not those who happen to agree with the rest of the nation).
Go ahead and spend your dollars where you like. I spend mine on President Bush and his reelection campaign, and getting conservative, Christian God-Fearing representatives elected, so if you want your Anti-Christian, Atheistic views to be held in government, you'd better mobilize.
IBM is doing research. Except they are doing it in the real world, not in some isolated lab. They are going to bring out facts and figures showing real companies saving millions of real dollars because they embraced Linux and Open Source software.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is going to show that Windows 2003 performs slightly better in a controlled environment and under specific conditions.
I see Big Blue as adopting Linux for one reason only -- because if you can't beat 'em, you have to join 'em. Nothing Big Blue can make in house will ever compete with what we can make in our spare time. Period. Microsoft is short-sighted for not jumping on the bandwagon with IBM.
(some of whom contribute to open source projects in their spare time, etc)
This is illegal at Microsoft. Their contract implies that the software they write on their own time is actually Microsoft's. They can't GPL it because they don't own it.
As far as Open Source winning in open debate, it already has. Don't you see? The fact that Linux is as successful as it is means that Open Source software is superior to proprietary software. The fact that Apache powers the internet, that Bind is all but the standard, and that it all created a huge industry, attests to the fact that proprietary software is lost and done for.
We are experimenting with Thin Clients at my company. All the salespeople are running off of one server. We get cheap Lindows boxes at around $200, and we spend our cash on things like mice that actually work, and flat screens with high resolution.
So far, we have significantly reduced the workload for us and them. We are also able to control the users and their configurations. They can focus on their job, and we can focus on other IT tasks.
They like it a lot because it feels so much faster than windows did -- and we are using cheaper hardware!
Mainframes are not dying. You really think that Microsoft or Linux is ever going to be able to handle the mainframe hardware? I don't think so.
Sure, Linux runs *on* a mainframe, but what you are really doing is running hundreds of seperate environments that share resources on a single mainframe. The knowledge needed to get those hundreds of instances running *well* is arcane but still useful.
If you want to learn mainframes, learn it. I think mainframes are making a comeback, and there is going to be a shortage of mainframe guys (but a glut of us Linux sysadmins).
If you do have some opinions on where the company should go, share them with your immediate supervisor or manager. Be prepared to answer questions when they get asked. Have at your fingertips and on your tongue tip the answers to the questions he is going to ask you.
If your supervisor is worth anything, he will give you the message his supervisors would give you. If you are able to convince him, then you have a shot at getting it all the way up. Besides, your supervisor will be better at getting the message sold than you would.
You have to get educated. You have to learn how to sell it. You have to have the facts to back it up.
Python is running on a virtual machine that uses a stack. This is what pretty much every high level modern language does, including Perl and Java.
However, with the addition of Parrot, Python, as well as Perl, will be running on a virtual machine that uses registers rather than a stack. Register based machines are much faster than stack based machines.
Damian Conway, in a presentation at the Seattle Perl User's Group, demonstrated that you can actually get code that is written in perl that runs only a small factor (like 4 or 5 times) slower than C, rather than many orders of magnitudes (like 100 or 10,000 times) slower. This speedup will benefit Python as well, when it is ported to Parrot.
In short, Python and Perl, and every other language that is ported to Parrot, will kick some serious butt, and put a lot of C programmers out of work.
Exactly. Redhat has been cutting fat from its distro for quite some time now. They only include fat where users demand it and it is almost as reliable as the original. They are aiming towards a minimalist, stable linux system that can be installed anywhere.
I like mass transit. I lived for several years in Seoul, Korea. In Seoul, the subways are a godsend. You can get anywhere in the city in about half or quarter the time it takes to ride a bus or drive. And the subways aren't for the poor as they would be in America. They are the best option for most long-distance travel in Seoul.
The busses are awesome as well. The busses that actually go places run every 5 or 10 minutes. You don't have to schedule yourself around the busses' schedule.
You can pick up a taxi for cheap short trips anywhere in the city. These are great to provide the "last mile" to your destination, if you don't have time to walk it.
The problem is that nowhere in America do we even get close to the population density of Seoul. Here in Seattle and the Puget Sound area (Tacoma to Everett), the population density is closer to Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico than Seoul. We can't afford to build subways under our city. We can't afford to run busses every five or ten minutes. There cannot be enough taxi drivers to make it useful for short, quick trips. And even if we could, it wouldn't be much more efficient than driving.
So the problem is about mobility. In Seoul, you can go anywhere you want in a reasonable amount of time without a car. With a car, you can't get there any faster or cheaper.
In Seattle, you *can't* go anywhere in a reasonable amount of time *unless* you have a car.
That's where this Tango comes in. It is exactly what we Americans would use. I would buy one for its fuel cost efficiency alone. I really don't care too much for safety, as long as it is more safe than a motorcycle (which is pretty damn safe). It provides me with the ability to go pretty much anywhere I want anytime I want, which the busses don't, and walking or biking can't. I can give a lift to a friend, or put some goods in the back. That's why I drive a Hyundai Accent. That's why I would get one of these.
I find the carbohydrates vs. fats arguments silly. It's all about calories. It's simple: If you take in more than you burn per day, no matter what the source, you gain weight.
Let's talk about what happens when you eat carbs vs. when you eat fat.
Let's pretend you eat a pound of butter for lunch. Your body, which is not digesting fat, but rather accumulating fat (you are getting fatter, right?) will simple expel the butter. It can't store it.
Let's pretent you eat a pound of sugar for lunch. Your body will absorb the sugar into the blood stream after breaking it down. Your cells will take what they need -- but they are probably already pretty well off, and your body won't need as much sugar as you put into your system. So your body releases insulin to have the fat cells absorb and store the sugar as fat. (Incidentally, you have likely gained a resistance to insulin, so your body probably releases too much, and having too much insulin without any sugar leads to hunger.)
The idea of limiting carbs is to switch your body from carb-burning mode to fat-burning mode. When you start burning fat, you stop gaining fat. Why store fat when there are no excess carbs to store?
So that pound of butter you ate for lunch is partially burned, but mostly crapped out. And that pound of sugar? You won't be eating much sugar anymore.
Once you get over the initial two days of limited carbs, your body's insulin will be pretty low or maybe close to nil. Your constant hunger will disappear, as long as you don't overdo the carbs again. And you will be able to eat a couple of slices of cheese and hold off on food until dinner.
This could be the first step towards a more open and cooperative hardware industry. Today, it is practically impossible to obtain the specs and paramaters of existing hardware. Maybe in the future, hardware manufacturers will publish their specs and intentions as they release new hardware. Open Source could turn into Open Hardware.
I think 2003 is a historic year in the software industry. This is the year that Open Source software began to be recognized as far superior to proprietary software. This is also the year that people are changing their opinion about which is the best way to develop software.
With these governments all across the world adopting the Open Source philosophy, and with the corresponding influx of dvelopers, testers, and designers, Open Source software will become unbeatable in all arenas.
I personally am very glad to see these governments mandate Open Source software. Why should a government subject themselves and their citizens to proprietary lockin? Their software should be just as open as their government. I hope one day that the United States will adopt a similar approach.
What is a black hole? It is a collection of matter so dense that light and any other form of radiation cannot escape it.
For the record: Electrons do have a "physical size". It is just very, very, very small.
Now, go back to your algebra books. Read the algebra equations. See them dance and play. Then you move into Trigonometry, where you realize that there is something deep, very deep, here but you cannot put your finger on it. When you move up to calculus, then you can start learning "real physics". Conquer the field of calculus, understand Newtonian mechanics in all its beautiful glory, then you move into Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, and Electromagnetism. Master that, then you can start to consider this mysterious "electron". But you will not understand it, just like no physicist understands it today. If you are able to understand it, then I hope you get a Nobel prize for it. But unless you gain the same learning that we have already achieved, you have no hope of ever understanding it.
Right now, you should be contemplating the parobola of the path of a mass as it moves through two dimensions under the effects of gravity. Your poor mind is unable to contemplate anything more magnificent yet.
Environmentalism is leaking to the cosmic ray / subatomic particle world! Pretty soon, they will be saying "Save the muon!" and "Stop abusing our natural resources -- don't harvest photons!" I can't wait for the day when they will try to elevate the particles to be on par with humans, like they are doing with monkeys, dogs, and fish.
And that whole "we shouldn't play with the fabric of space and time" crap -- Okay. Let's stop playing with the fabric of space and time. Everyone, you must cease existing immediately, but without releasing any radiation at all. Any attempts at motion -- even very slight or slow, will also disrupt the fabric of space and time, so you must do this without moving any parts of your body. There, now that we have prevented anyone from disrupting the space time continuum, we should probably move to eliminate the earth, the sun, and all the planets as well. There's no telling what their enormous gravitational fields could do to space-time around them!
Why am I being so foolish? Because everything you do -- everything you are -- disrupts the space-time continuum. In fact, some physicists believe that matter and energy are just folds or tears in the space time continuum. It was Einstein who discovered that space-time wasn't as continous as we had hoped, both from a Relativistic notion, and from a gravitational notion. But it is these inconsistencies that make life, and all existence, possible.
I think it is really sad that so many uneducated people want to get involved in this discussion, when they have nothing to add and gain nothing from hearing the experts. It's like 40 years ago when the mention of "radiation" and "radioactivity" would send common folk running in fear. Now it's just "black holes" and "particle accelerators".
Let me rephrase that in plain English: Don't tell me what I can and can't do unless you take the time to learn about it. After all, you would hate to have the Pope come and say "You shouldn't clone in Java and other programming languages. Cloning is wrong."
Yes, votes matter. But as long as we allow people who don't care about our country (IE, non-land owners, non-citizens) to vote, there will always be people willing to throw their vote away.
Unfortunately, in today's world, it seems the great majority of actual voters are throwing their vote away. They don't research. They don't think.
So am I just supposed to lie down and let them vote whatever idiot decides to spend some money on a TV commercial into office? No, I would rather make my vote count more by backing it up with money. If I don't, someone else will. I care about the results of the election, so I do what I can to legally manipulate the people who don't care to support my position.
Exactly. We can take the entire light range of the sun, and up the red light so it is blue, thus improving the efficiency of solar cells. Heck, you could take all the light and up it to X-Ray status, and that is guaranteed to knock off electrons with some "minor" side effects.
You are discounting the Doppler Shift, which is how the light actually changes frequency. You are discounting the property of the photonic crystal that it behaves like a mirror and reflects light and then behaves like glass and propagates light depending on its compression.
And "stretching" the light as you described has no effect on light. If it did, then you would get alternating bluer and redder light as you sent a shockwave through the crystal.
You are wrong. The light actually shifts from one frequency to another. It doesn't alternate between two frequencies.
IAAP -- Here it is in plain English.
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Mastering Light
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· Score: 5, Informative
IAAP (I am a Physicist) and the effect is pretty simple. I think anyone should be able to understand it if it is explained properly.
"Doppler Shift" is a phenomena you are already familiar with. Consider a car honking its horn as he drives by at freeway speeds. As he approaches, the sound is heard at a higher frequency. As he passes by, the frequency shifts, and as he is leaving, the frequency is lower than normal.
Light is like sound in that it is a wave and has a frequency. Let's examine light from high to low frequencies. X-Rays are light at extremely high frequencies. Ultra-Violet light is just above the visible light range. Then we get into the rainbow - blue, then green, then red. Next is infra-red light -- light just below red in frequency. Travelling farther down, we start to reach the radio band. Below that, the frequencies are so low that it no longer is light anymore, but more like a slowly shifting magnetic or electric field.
The Doppler effect works for light as well. The problem is you or the object emanating the light has to be travelling near light speeds to see any noticeable effect. We call this "redshift" in astronomy, because stars seem to be travelling away from us, and so the light emanating from them is lower in frequency (more red). Certainly, attaining near-light-speeds is dangerous and difficult. We're not talking "bullet" fast, we are talking "cosmic ray" fast.
However, there is an oh-so-tiny Doppler shift when *any* motion is involved with light. When your friend walks towards you, the light bouncing off of him is slightly more blue. When he walks away, it is slightly more red. Good luck actually detecting this, however.
Photonic crystals have the strange property of behaving like a piece of glass at one moment, and a mirror the next, depending on how much pressure is applied where.
So, using a proper push on the crystal, it is possible to set up a travelling hall of mirrors. The light appears to be slightly shifted due to the Doppler effect to the mirror, so when it is reflected, the light is shifted, by an oh-so-tiny amount. Multiply that shift by a kazillion reflections, which is quite possible if you make the hall of mirrors very tiny (think atomic scale), and you can control light to almost any frequency, high or low, depending on how you set up the mirrors.
So, the net effect is light goes in at one frequency, and comes out the other end at another, without expending hardly any energy to get it done.
The engineering challenge is configuring the crystal so that it can withstand the forces that need to be applied, and applying the forces in a controllable way. Right now they are doing tests with bullets and crystals, because they only need to record data for the instant that the shock waves are travelling through the crystal, and they don't mind using a cheap, destructive method. In the future, they will probably use sound waves to control the crystal. But how they configure this is left to the imagination.
The applications are numerous, and some of them are listed in the article. Needless to say, if we want to use light to transmit data, the more control we have over the light, the more effective we can be in transmitting that data. Also, doctors will be happy because we can now easily exploit the Terahertz range for X-ray type applications.
Anyone else find it interesting that this post was made a few minutes ago and almost instantly got exactly 4 moderation points for being interesting?
I'll tell you what's left when you remove royalties from the equation -- and it certainly isn't shills like you. It is innovation, freedom, and advancement for everyone. Why should I have to pay a guy a buck because he came up with the idea of a "shopping cart" on a website? Why can't I take the idea and move it forward? It is alright to patent machines and such, but patenting ideas is absurd. (And, on a lesser note, I wouldn't mind them patenting their code and only their code -- but what's the use of that?)
And ask yourself this: did the internet grow by leaps and bounds because Microsoft came out with IIS or because a bunch of organizations decided to pool their efforts to make one solid web server that can be configured to do anything a web server should do? I personally think proprietary software is holding us back and costing us far more than the cost of licensing the software because we can't take their ideas and build on them.
Then where do we get paid? Two ways: By implementing existing solutions in a way that people can use them, or by implementing entirely new solutions. For both instances, people are willing to pay money to have someone else do it. For both instances, it really doesn't matter whether the end result is Open Source or proprietary to them. We know that going the Open Source will allow us to satisfy more people with better products than the other case, because IT will constantly be evolving and building on the successes and failures of the past, rather than limiting the growth to one giant monopoly.
In order to become president, you need to win the electoral college. The electoral college is made up of one vote per representative or senator from each state.
Florida has a law that say they will send electors who support the candidate who gains the majority of the votes.
In the event that it is a close call, Florida state law says that there must be 1 and exactly 1 recount.
Bush won the initial count. It was close, so that didn't count. He won the recount. There was no evidence of foul play. Stupidity, yes, foul play, no. (Yes, there was evidence of foul play. But I will not mention them here, because it makes my blood boil).
Gore's team tried to legally challenge the vote. He first wanted only a few, heavily democratic regions recounted. The law says no. A judge, who was a liberal, said "Yes", without citing any laws. A judge above him held it up in court. The supreme court of Florida held it up as well. They are all liberals, and were very opposed to Bush. Some have even stated publically their distaste for Bush. This means they were not impartial in their decisions.
The Supreme Court said "You cannot change the state law after the election. Therefore, since the state law says that whoever wins the recount, wins the race. Therefore, Bush won the race.
Now, several things could've happened, which would have been very curious indeed, because they are legal, yet have never been done before.
1) The legislature is responsible for choosing and sending the electors to the electoral college. They gave the power to the people to choose. They could've taken it away, and sent whomever they wanted. The constitution says it is the legislatures who decide who to send, or how to choose who to send.
Bush told the legislature not to meet and not to overturn the law and choose electors. That would've been just too weird.
2) In the event that the legislature can't decide by a certain date who they will send, the election can be thrown to the house of representatives. The house of representatives would've decided who would be the next president if the Florida Secretary of State did not stamp the piece of paper that says Bush Won in time enough to send the electors to DC.
This is not just made up on the spur of the moment. This is the constitution. This is the way we all agreed it should be 200 years ago.
Why did the Supreme Court step in? Because it was the only organization that would've given the people a feeling of sincerity and impartiality. I think it was wrong for the Supreme Court to get involved, but it was only because of the Florida courts and their corruption and mangling of the law that it was necessary.
Now, your job is to go read the constitution. We live in a nation where we all made a deal with the government, and we laid out what they can and most certainly cannot do. We laid out how we choose who is in the government in no uncertain terms. Anyone who stands to defy that is a traitor to the constitution, and threatens the only thing that keeps us together and prevents a second civil war or worse. That deal cannot change unless by a specific process that we laid out. That deal is binding beyond the Supreme Court (the Supreme Court owing its existence to the document) and should the Supreme Court overthrow the document, the people will overthrow the Supreme Court.
Remember this: During that frightful time, there were people assembling for war. There were many who said that they had had enough of the courts overruling the constitution. They would gladly have taken up arms to overthrow the government, knowing full well that it would have cost them their lives.
Remember, we walk a fine line, and it is near another civil war, this time between conservative, God-fearing Christians, and socialist environmentalist degenerate wackos who want to overthrow our nation and freedom by subversion and sabotage. The only thing that prevents one from waging open warfare with the other is the constitution, which guarantees that
Remember that politicians are people. President Bush raised far more money than the Democrats in 2000 because he targetted middle income families, and didn't spend as much time as he normally would've contacting big businesses.
YOU do make a difference. The reason why the democrats are consistently coming out pro-big-business lately is because the grass-root democrats won't support them. Ask a democrat, "When is the last time you gave a buck to a candidate?" Then ask the same question to a republican. Which party do you think is eating from the hands of the constituency?
I'll admit, the Republican Party doesn't do what I wish they did 100% of the time, but they are aiming in the general direction. Deregulation, lowering taxes, beefing up our borders are all things I feel are important. You'll find me and millions like me are going to put a couple bucks into our republican candidates. That is going to sway them away from big business, and more towards our interests.
Washington State Republicans have broken completely from Boeing -- one of the reason why Boeing is leaving -- for this very same reason. They don't need their cash anymore. The republicans in WA are more than willing to pop out a $20 bill to support their own candidates as long as they do what the supporters want. (HINT: This next budget coming down is pretty much what we wanted. Expect a big republican win next year.)
As long as you are giving a buck or two to your candidate, and millions of you are doing the same, you will have bought their vote. You get to write a letter to them that starts: "Dear Representative, I gave $20 to your campaign last year, but I will be giving $50 to your opponent this time unless..." which always gets more attention than "Dear Representative, I am a whiny brat who will never give a dime to your campaign."
Remember, Big Business lives off of our buck. We can strangle them with boycotts if we so desire. (You ever notice how whimpy the business people get when they are faced with consumer outrage?) There is no way someone as dependent on our cash, and who can only turn a couple of percentage points on it for profit, can every compete with our cash going directly into the pockets of our representatives. We really do have the power. We really do control the game -- but only if we get in the ring and fight!
So if you want to start a "Fair Use Consumer Advocacy Group", give a couple of bucks to your favorite politician who is generally going in your direction, and tell them where you want them to go. Convince others to do the same. A couple of thousand dollars and a couple of hundred votes later, you will have them eating out of your hand. They will come to you and ask, "Which way should I vote to get your help in next year's campaign?"
If you don't know where to start, start small. Look for state representatives or city council members you want to support. Check out their record. Call them up and ask them how you can help. When you get to know them, and you begin to trust them, and they you, give them your money. Trust me, it works, and it is really simple. And as long as enough people are doing it, we'll keep the government in check.
I live in his district. I campaigned furiously against him. Unfortunately, the Republicans felt that the campaign money was better spent elsewhere last time, and so all we could do was knock on doors and hand out flyers. We came within a few points, but it wasn't enough to unseat him. We'll get him next year.
He's also a strong supporter of Baghdad Jim from Seattle -- the representative who broadcast from Baghdad weeks before we invaded, saying there is nothing there that would interest us, and that Saddam was a really great guy, while badmouthing the president and otherwise spreading Hussein's propaganda. You should've seen the look on his face when an army vet told him to his face on TV camera that he was a lying, dirty traitor.
Anyways, if he keeps this up, he is going to offend everyone out there -- conservative and liberal alike. To me, he is just showing his true colors, and when you see that he only follows the money, you'll see that he is just another pathetic politician, and we need to replace him with someone with a conscience who actually stands for something.
It's funny that a guy that shares a name with the author of capitalism is so against freedom.
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Some people are really stupid.
Clean coal. It is possible to burn coal so that there is not any of the nasties you get when you burn coal at home.
It is possible to burn most anything without getting nasty byproducts.
Concerning nuclear waste, the previous poster is right. It won't be sitting around for hundreds of thousands of years. We are going to figure out what to do with it very shortly. We are going to have literally clean burning fission power. We will be converting mass to energy with no nasty byproducts.
I find it amazing that on the one hand, people marvel at humanity's ability to do things like create dynamite, nuclear weapons, and clean drinking water from sewage, but on the other hand, say things like making clean burning energy from coal, not to mention plutonium, is impossible.
The BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Nor Anytime) Environmentalist are a walking paradox. One the one hand. science has the power to restore nature, but they refuse to allow science to help mankind.
The "Seperation of Church and State" has no foundation in the constitution. This is the text of the first amendment:
The Founding Fathers were openly religious. The practice of praying to God, and not just any God, the Christian God embraced by the Christian religions, in government has continued even today.
The Constitution specifically states that the federal government cannot infringe on my right to practice my religion, whether I am elected or not, nor whether I am appointed a judge or hired as a soldier. The Constitution specifically states that I am allowed to practice my religion, whether I am in my home, at church, on the floor of the senate, or in the office of the President of the United States.
Let's pretend we do obtain a Muslim majority. Let's pretend we elect a Muslim fanatic to be the president, and the Supreme Court is stacked with Muslim fanatics as well. They have no right under the constitution to prevent me from practicing my Christian religion. They have no right to support the Muslim religion above the Christian one. But they have every right to pray to Allah and to call on us Christians to embrace Islam.
That's what I believe. That's what my forefathers agreed to. And that is what has held our nation together, despite the varieties of religions.
Now answer me this question: Why does the ACLU insist on enforcing Atheism in my schools, in my government, and in my courts? Why are they trying to force the hand of government to respect one religions (Atheism, Islam) over another (Christianity, Judaism)? Why am I not allowed to pray in schools, whether it be to God, Eloheim, or to Allah? Why am I forced to pay tribute to the pagan gods of Mother Earth, Environmentalism, or Atheism?
The ACLU stands for the Anti-American Civil Liberals Union, just like the NAACP should be called the NAALCP (LCP = Liberal Colored People, not those who happen to agree with the rest of the nation).
Go ahead and spend your dollars where you like. I spend mine on President Bush and his reelection campaign, and getting conservative, Christian God-Fearing representatives elected, so if you want your Anti-Christian, Atheistic views to be held in government, you'd better mobilize.
IBM is doing research. Except they are doing it in the real world, not in some isolated lab. They are going to bring out facts and figures showing real companies saving millions of real dollars because they embraced Linux and Open Source software.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is going to show that Windows 2003 performs slightly better in a controlled environment and under specific conditions.
I see Big Blue as adopting Linux for one reason only -- because if you can't beat 'em, you have to join 'em. Nothing Big Blue can make in house will ever compete with what we can make in our spare time. Period. Microsoft is short-sighted for not jumping on the bandwagon with IBM.
This is illegal at Microsoft. Their contract implies that the software they write on their own time is actually Microsoft's. They can't GPL it because they don't own it.
As far as Open Source winning in open debate, it already has. Don't you see? The fact that Linux is as successful as it is means that Open Source software is superior to proprietary software. The fact that Apache powers the internet, that Bind is all but the standard, and that it all created a huge industry, attests to the fact that proprietary software is lost and done for.
We are experimenting with Thin Clients at my company. All the salespeople are running off of one server. We get cheap Lindows boxes at around $200, and we spend our cash on things like mice that actually work, and flat screens with high resolution.
So far, we have significantly reduced the workload for us and them. We are also able to control the users and their configurations. They can focus on their job, and we can focus on other IT tasks.
They like it a lot because it feels so much faster than windows did -- and we are using cheaper hardware!
Mainframes are not dying. You really think that Microsoft or Linux is ever going to be able to handle the mainframe hardware? I don't think so.
Sure, Linux runs *on* a mainframe, but what you are really doing is running hundreds of seperate environments that share resources on a single mainframe. The knowledge needed to get those hundreds of instances running *well* is arcane but still useful.
If you want to learn mainframes, learn it. I think mainframes are making a comeback, and there is going to be a shortage of mainframe guys (but a glut of us Linux sysadmins).
If you do have some opinions on where the company should go, share them with your immediate supervisor or manager. Be prepared to answer questions when they get asked. Have at your fingertips and on your tongue tip the answers to the questions he is going to ask you.
If your supervisor is worth anything, he will give you the message his supervisors would give you. If you are able to convince him, then you have a shot at getting it all the way up. Besides, your supervisor will be better at getting the message sold than you would.
You have to get educated. You have to learn how to sell it. You have to have the facts to back it up.
Python is running on a virtual machine that uses a stack. This is what pretty much every high level modern language does, including Perl and Java.
However, with the addition of Parrot, Python, as well as Perl, will be running on a virtual machine that uses registers rather than a stack. Register based machines are much faster than stack based machines.
Damian Conway, in a presentation at the Seattle Perl User's Group, demonstrated that you can actually get code that is written in perl that runs only a small factor (like 4 or 5 times) slower than C, rather than many orders of magnitudes (like 100 or 10,000 times) slower. This speedup will benefit Python as well, when it is ported to Parrot.
In short, Python and Perl, and every other language that is ported to Parrot, will kick some serious butt, and put a lot of C programmers out of work.
Exactly. Redhat has been cutting fat from its distro for quite some time now. They only include fat where users demand it and it is almost as reliable as the original. They are aiming towards a minimalist, stable linux system that can be installed anywhere.
I like mass transit. I lived for several years in Seoul, Korea. In Seoul, the subways are a godsend. You can get anywhere in the city in about half or quarter the time it takes to ride a bus or drive. And the subways aren't for the poor as they would be in America. They are the best option for most long-distance travel in Seoul.
The busses are awesome as well. The busses that actually go places run every 5 or 10 minutes. You don't have to schedule yourself around the busses' schedule.
You can pick up a taxi for cheap short trips anywhere in the city. These are great to provide the "last mile" to your destination, if you don't have time to walk it.
The problem is that nowhere in America do we even get close to the population density of Seoul. Here in Seattle and the Puget Sound area (Tacoma to Everett), the population density is closer to Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico than Seoul. We can't afford to build subways under our city. We can't afford to run busses every five or ten minutes. There cannot be enough taxi drivers to make it useful for short, quick trips. And even if we could, it wouldn't be much more efficient than driving.
So the problem is about mobility. In Seoul, you can go anywhere you want in a reasonable amount of time without a car. With a car, you can't get there any faster or cheaper.
In Seattle, you *can't* go anywhere in a reasonable amount of time *unless* you have a car.
That's where this Tango comes in. It is exactly what we Americans would use. I would buy one for its fuel cost efficiency alone. I really don't care too much for safety, as long as it is more safe than a motorcycle (which is pretty damn safe). It provides me with the ability to go pretty much anywhere I want anytime I want, which the busses don't, and walking or biking can't. I can give a lift to a friend, or put some goods in the back. That's why I drive a Hyundai Accent. That's why I would get one of these.
I had some whalemeat in Pusan. It tasted like beef, but with a fishy overtone. I enjoyed it a lot.
The meat is actually quite lean, I would say a bit leaner than beef, but not as lean as pork.
If I could buy whale meat at the local grocery store, I would. I enjoy seafood, and I love beef.
Let's talk about what happens when you eat carbs vs. when you eat fat.
Let's pretend you eat a pound of butter for lunch. Your body, which is not digesting fat, but rather accumulating fat (you are getting fatter, right?) will simple expel the butter. It can't store it.
Let's pretent you eat a pound of sugar for lunch. Your body will absorb the sugar into the blood stream after breaking it down. Your cells will take what they need -- but they are probably already pretty well off, and your body won't need as much sugar as you put into your system. So your body releases insulin to have the fat cells absorb and store the sugar as fat. (Incidentally, you have likely gained a resistance to insulin, so your body probably releases too much, and having too much insulin without any sugar leads to hunger.)
The idea of limiting carbs is to switch your body from carb-burning mode to fat-burning mode. When you start burning fat, you stop gaining fat. Why store fat when there are no excess carbs to store?
So that pound of butter you ate for lunch is partially burned, but mostly crapped out. And that pound of sugar? You won't be eating much sugar anymore.
Once you get over the initial two days of limited carbs, your body's insulin will be pretty low or maybe close to nil. Your constant hunger will disappear, as long as you don't overdo the carbs again. And you will be able to eat a couple of slices of cheese and hold off on food until dinner.
This could be the first step towards a more open and cooperative hardware industry. Today, it is practically impossible to obtain the specs and paramaters of existing hardware. Maybe in the future, hardware manufacturers will publish their specs and intentions as they release new hardware. Open Source could turn into Open Hardware.
I think 2003 is a historic year in the software industry. This is the year that Open Source software began to be recognized as far superior to proprietary software. This is also the year that people are changing their opinion about which is the best way to develop software.
With these governments all across the world adopting the Open Source philosophy, and with the corresponding influx of dvelopers, testers, and designers, Open Source software will become unbeatable in all arenas.
I personally am very glad to see these governments mandate Open Source software. Why should a government subject themselves and their citizens to proprietary lockin? Their software should be just as open as their government. I hope one day that the United States will adopt a similar approach.
IAAP - I am a Physicist
Easy: Electrons are not black holes.
What is a black hole? It is a collection of matter so dense that light and any other form of radiation cannot escape it.
For the record: Electrons do have a "physical size". It is just very, very, very small.
Now, go back to your algebra books. Read the algebra equations. See them dance and play. Then you move into Trigonometry, where you realize that there is something deep, very deep, here but you cannot put your finger on it. When you move up to calculus, then you can start learning "real physics". Conquer the field of calculus, understand Newtonian mechanics in all its beautiful glory, then you move into Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, and Electromagnetism. Master that, then you can start to consider this mysterious "electron". But you will not understand it, just like no physicist understands it today. If you are able to understand it, then I hope you get a Nobel prize for it. But unless you gain the same learning that we have already achieved, you have no hope of ever understanding it.
Right now, you should be contemplating the parobola of the path of a mass as it moves through two dimensions under the effects of gravity. Your poor mind is unable to contemplate anything more magnificent yet.
IAAP -- I am a Physicist.
Environmentalism is leaking to the cosmic ray / subatomic particle world! Pretty soon, they will be saying "Save the muon!" and "Stop abusing our natural resources -- don't harvest photons!" I can't wait for the day when they will try to elevate the particles to be on par with humans, like they are doing with monkeys, dogs, and fish.
And that whole "we shouldn't play with the fabric of space and time" crap -- Okay. Let's stop playing with the fabric of space and time. Everyone, you must cease existing immediately, but without releasing any radiation at all. Any attempts at motion -- even very slight or slow, will also disrupt the fabric of space and time, so you must do this without moving any parts of your body. There, now that we have prevented anyone from disrupting the space time continuum, we should probably move to eliminate the earth, the sun, and all the planets as well. There's no telling what their enormous gravitational fields could do to space-time around them!
Why am I being so foolish? Because everything you do -- everything you are -- disrupts the space-time continuum. In fact, some physicists believe that matter and energy are just folds or tears in the space time continuum. It was Einstein who discovered that space-time wasn't as continous as we had hoped, both from a Relativistic notion, and from a gravitational notion. But it is these inconsistencies that make life, and all existence, possible.
I think it is really sad that so many uneducated people want to get involved in this discussion, when they have nothing to add and gain nothing from hearing the experts. It's like 40 years ago when the mention of "radiation" and "radioactivity" would send common folk running in fear. Now it's just "black holes" and "particle accelerators".
Let me rephrase that in plain English: Don't tell me what I can and can't do unless you take the time to learn about it. After all, you would hate to have the Pope come and say "You shouldn't clone in Java and other programming languages. Cloning is wrong."
You are being silly.
Yes, votes matter. But as long as we allow people who don't care about our country (IE, non-land owners, non-citizens) to vote, there will always be people willing to throw their vote away.
Unfortunately, in today's world, it seems the great majority of actual voters are throwing their vote away. They don't research. They don't think.
So am I just supposed to lie down and let them vote whatever idiot decides to spend some money on a TV commercial into office? No, I would rather make my vote count more by backing it up with money. If I don't, someone else will. I care about the results of the election, so I do what I can to legally manipulate the people who don't care to support my position.
Exactly. We can take the entire light range of the sun, and up the red light so it is blue, thus improving the efficiency of solar cells. Heck, you could take all the light and up it to X-Ray status, and that is guaranteed to knock off electrons with some "minor" side effects.
You are discounting the Doppler Shift, which is how the light actually changes frequency. You are discounting the property of the photonic crystal that it behaves like a mirror and reflects light and then behaves like glass and propagates light depending on its compression.
And "stretching" the light as you described has no effect on light. If it did, then you would get alternating bluer and redder light as you sent a shockwave through the crystal.
Thank you for not becoming a Physicist.
You are wrong. The light actually shifts from one frequency to another. It doesn't alternate between two frequencies.
IAAP (I am a Physicist) and the effect is pretty simple. I think anyone should be able to understand it if it is explained properly.
"Doppler Shift" is a phenomena you are already familiar with. Consider a car honking its horn as he drives by at freeway speeds. As he approaches, the sound is heard at a higher frequency. As he passes by, the frequency shifts, and as he is leaving, the frequency is lower than normal.
Light is like sound in that it is a wave and has a frequency. Let's examine light from high to low frequencies. X-Rays are light at extremely high frequencies. Ultra-Violet light is just above the visible light range. Then we get into the rainbow - blue, then green, then red. Next is infra-red light -- light just below red in frequency. Travelling farther down, we start to reach the radio band. Below that, the frequencies are so low that it no longer is light anymore, but more like a slowly shifting magnetic or electric field.
The Doppler effect works for light as well. The problem is you or the object emanating the light has to be travelling near light speeds to see any noticeable effect. We call this "redshift" in astronomy, because stars seem to be travelling away from us, and so the light emanating from them is lower in frequency (more red). Certainly, attaining near-light-speeds is dangerous and difficult. We're not talking "bullet" fast, we are talking "cosmic ray" fast.
However, there is an oh-so-tiny Doppler shift when *any* motion is involved with light. When your friend walks towards you, the light bouncing off of him is slightly more blue. When he walks away, it is slightly more red. Good luck actually detecting this, however.
Photonic crystals have the strange property of behaving like a piece of glass at one moment, and a mirror the next, depending on how much pressure is applied where.
So, using a proper push on the crystal, it is possible to set up a travelling hall of mirrors. The light appears to be slightly shifted due to the Doppler effect to the mirror, so when it is reflected, the light is shifted, by an oh-so-tiny amount. Multiply that shift by a kazillion reflections, which is quite possible if you make the hall of mirrors very tiny (think atomic scale), and you can control light to almost any frequency, high or low, depending on how you set up the mirrors.
So, the net effect is light goes in at one frequency, and comes out the other end at another, without expending hardly any energy to get it done.
The engineering challenge is configuring the crystal so that it can withstand the forces that need to be applied, and applying the forces in a controllable way. Right now they are doing tests with bullets and crystals, because they only need to record data for the instant that the shock waves are travelling through the crystal, and they don't mind using a cheap, destructive method. In the future, they will probably use sound waves to control the crystal. But how they configure this is left to the imagination.
The applications are numerous, and some of them are listed in the article. Needless to say, if we want to use light to transmit data, the more control we have over the light, the more effective we can be in transmitting that data. Also, doctors will be happy because we can now easily exploit the Terahertz range for X-ray type applications.
Anyone else find it interesting that this post was made a few minutes ago and almost instantly got exactly 4 moderation points for being interesting?
I'll tell you what's left when you remove royalties from the equation -- and it certainly isn't shills like you. It is innovation, freedom, and advancement for everyone. Why should I have to pay a guy a buck because he came up with the idea of a "shopping cart" on a website? Why can't I take the idea and move it forward? It is alright to patent machines and such, but patenting ideas is absurd. (And, on a lesser note, I wouldn't mind them patenting their code and only their code -- but what's the use of that?)
And ask yourself this: did the internet grow by leaps and bounds because Microsoft came out with IIS or because a bunch of organizations decided to pool their efforts to make one solid web server that can be configured to do anything a web server should do? I personally think proprietary software is holding us back and costing us far more than the cost of licensing the software because we can't take their ideas and build on them.
Then where do we get paid? Two ways: By implementing existing solutions in a way that people can use them, or by implementing entirely new solutions. For both instances, people are willing to pay money to have someone else do it. For both instances, it really doesn't matter whether the end result is Open Source or proprietary to them. We know that going the Open Source will allow us to satisfy more people with better products than the other case, because IT will constantly be evolving and building on the successes and failures of the past, rather than limiting the growth to one giant monopoly.
In order to become president, you need to win the electoral college. The electoral college is made up of one vote per representative or senator from each state.
Florida has a law that say they will send electors who support the candidate who gains the majority of the votes.
In the event that it is a close call, Florida state law says that there must be 1 and exactly 1 recount.
Bush won the initial count. It was close, so that didn't count. He won the recount. There was no evidence of foul play. Stupidity, yes, foul play, no. (Yes, there was evidence of foul play. But I will not mention them here, because it makes my blood boil).
Gore's team tried to legally challenge the vote. He first wanted only a few, heavily democratic regions recounted. The law says no. A judge, who was a liberal, said "Yes", without citing any laws. A judge above him held it up in court. The supreme court of Florida held it up as well. They are all liberals, and were very opposed to Bush. Some have even stated publically their distaste for Bush. This means they were not impartial in their decisions.
The Supreme Court said "You cannot change the state law after the election. Therefore, since the state law says that whoever wins the recount, wins the race. Therefore, Bush won the race.
Now, several things could've happened, which would have been very curious indeed, because they are legal, yet have never been done before.
1) The legislature is responsible for choosing and sending the electors to the electoral college. They gave the power to the people to choose. They could've taken it away, and sent whomever they wanted. The constitution says it is the legislatures who decide who to send, or how to choose who to send.
Bush told the legislature not to meet and not to overturn the law and choose electors. That would've been just too weird.
2) In the event that the legislature can't decide by a certain date who they will send, the election can be thrown to the house of representatives. The house of representatives would've decided who would be the next president if the Florida Secretary of State did not stamp the piece of paper that says Bush Won in time enough to send the electors to DC.
This is not just made up on the spur of the moment. This is the constitution. This is the way we all agreed it should be 200 years ago.
Why did the Supreme Court step in? Because it was the only organization that would've given the people a feeling of sincerity and impartiality. I think it was wrong for the Supreme Court to get involved, but it was only because of the Florida courts and their corruption and mangling of the law that it was necessary.
Now, your job is to go read the constitution. We live in a nation where we all made a deal with the government, and we laid out what they can and most certainly cannot do. We laid out how we choose who is in the government in no uncertain terms. Anyone who stands to defy that is a traitor to the constitution, and threatens the only thing that keeps us together and prevents a second civil war or worse. That deal cannot change unless by a specific process that we laid out. That deal is binding beyond the Supreme Court (the Supreme Court owing its existence to the document) and should the Supreme Court overthrow the document, the people will overthrow the Supreme Court.
Remember this: During that frightful time, there were people assembling for war. There were many who said that they had had enough of the courts overruling the constitution. They would gladly have taken up arms to overthrow the government, knowing full well that it would have cost them their lives.
Remember, we walk a fine line, and it is near another civil war, this time between conservative, God-fearing Christians, and socialist environmentalist degenerate wackos who want to overthrow our nation and freedom by subversion and sabotage. The only thing that prevents one from waging open warfare with the other is the constitution, which guarantees that
Remember that politicians are people. President Bush raised far more money than the Democrats in 2000 because he targetted middle income families, and didn't spend as much time as he normally would've contacting big businesses.
YOU do make a difference. The reason why the democrats are consistently coming out pro-big-business lately is because the grass-root democrats won't support them. Ask a democrat, "When is the last time you gave a buck to a candidate?" Then ask the same question to a republican. Which party do you think is eating from the hands of the constituency?
I'll admit, the Republican Party doesn't do what I wish they did 100% of the time, but they are aiming in the general direction. Deregulation, lowering taxes, beefing up our borders are all things I feel are important. You'll find me and millions like me are going to put a couple bucks into our republican candidates. That is going to sway them away from big business, and more towards our interests.
Washington State Republicans have broken completely from Boeing -- one of the reason why Boeing is leaving -- for this very same reason. They don't need their cash anymore. The republicans in WA are more than willing to pop out a $20 bill to support their own candidates as long as they do what the supporters want. (HINT: This next budget coming down is pretty much what we wanted. Expect a big republican win next year.)
As long as you are giving a buck or two to your candidate, and millions of you are doing the same, you will have bought their vote. You get to write a letter to them that starts: "Dear Representative, I gave $20 to your campaign last year, but I will be giving $50 to your opponent this time unless..." which always gets more attention than "Dear Representative, I am a whiny brat who will never give a dime to your campaign."
Remember, Big Business lives off of our buck. We can strangle them with boycotts if we so desire. (You ever notice how whimpy the business people get when they are faced with consumer outrage?) There is no way someone as dependent on our cash, and who can only turn a couple of percentage points on it for profit, can every compete with our cash going directly into the pockets of our representatives. We really do have the power. We really do control the game -- but only if we get in the ring and fight!
So if you want to start a "Fair Use Consumer Advocacy Group", give a couple of bucks to your favorite politician who is generally going in your direction, and tell them where you want them to go. Convince others to do the same. A couple of thousand dollars and a couple of hundred votes later, you will have them eating out of your hand. They will come to you and ask, "Which way should I vote to get your help in next year's campaign?"
If you don't know where to start, start small. Look for state representatives or city council members you want to support. Check out their record. Call them up and ask them how you can help. When you get to know them, and you begin to trust them, and they you, give them your money. Trust me, it works, and it is really simple. And as long as enough people are doing it, we'll keep the government in check.
I live in his district. I campaigned furiously against him. Unfortunately, the Republicans felt that the campaign money was better spent elsewhere last time, and so all we could do was knock on doors and hand out flyers. We came within a few points, but it wasn't enough to unseat him. We'll get him next year.
He's also a strong supporter of Baghdad Jim from Seattle -- the representative who broadcast from Baghdad weeks before we invaded, saying there is nothing there that would interest us, and that Saddam was a really great guy, while badmouthing the president and otherwise spreading Hussein's propaganda. You should've seen the look on his face when an army vet told him to his face on TV camera that he was a lying, dirty traitor.
Anyways, if he keeps this up, he is going to offend everyone out there -- conservative and liberal alike. To me, he is just showing his true colors, and when you see that he only follows the money, you'll see that he is just another pathetic politician, and we need to replace him with someone with a conscience who actually stands for something.
It's funny that a guy that shares a name with the author of capitalism is so against freedom.