Uh, you do realize that the US was fielding aircraft in WW2, right? He was talking about a historical perspective. In terms of sheer man-hours of flight time I'm sure the US is well ahead.
here are already 82 reports of serious adverse events filed with the FDA.(mercola dot com) "In the case reports submitted to VAERS, five of the reactions were described as "life-threatening," six were "disabling," and 210 (54.5 percent) had "not recovered" as of the date data were provided by VAERS. Hospitalization was reported in 12 cases and two-thirds sought additional care in an emergency room or doctor's office (see Use of Health Services section)."
With potential side effects up to death according to Alex Jones, reports of Eubola virus like reactions to the vaccine (bleeding out of every orifice).
Uh, I'd like to see a reference to something other than a youtube video for something like that.
Most modern vaccine rants are based on complaints about the use of mercury in formulations (a practice no longer used - certainly not for the HPV vaccine). Even so, there isn't much solid evidence that the mercury ever caused problems.
And when looking at adverse event reporting, keep in mind that any time anything goes wrong after a vaccine is taken a report gets filed. Often these events happen days after vaccination and you'd expect problems just due to random coincidence. I'm sure some percentage of the population gets hit by cars within 1 day of taking an aspirin pill but it would be silly to suggest a causal relationship. Adverse event tracking is important and that is why it is done, but you need to be careful in assuming a causal relationship. At the very least you need to calculate the percentage of events based on the number of administrations and then compare that to the frequency of the event in the general population. If 0.1% of people taking a pill have car accidents within 4 hours, and the frequency based on the regular accident rate is 0.01% then the pill might cause drowsiness or something. On the other hand, if the rates are comparable then you're just looking at coincidences.
Vaccination has been around for over a century, and its importance is already well-established. Sure, any vaccine has side-effects, and for this reason some people should not be vaccinated. However, as a general policy vaccination has been shown to be a good one.
But then again, the "health care" industry would be out of business if people were cured or ever got better.
You brought a smile to my day... Thanks!
For the number of people who complain that pharma companies propagate treatments rather than cures for financial reasons I have to smile when somebody uses this argument against a VACCINE - one of the few products of modern medicine that actually does CURE disease...
You put your faith in "experts". You probably put your faith in god too? It's nobody's business how I choose to live my life...
Ok, so we put down the "pro-science" athiests and the "anti-science" thiests both at once - glad we're not leaving anyone out.:)
A terrorist or nasty bug is out to get you, and you need to defer to some "expert" to protect you. Look at how well that plan worked out for the people stuck in the Katrina aftermath/disaster.
Yeah, those people promoting vaccinations against drowning and security checkpoints to prevent hurricanes from sneaking across the border sure were proven wrong!
Live and be your own person. Natural selection.
Couldn't agree more. We'll see what the selective pressure is for having a brain vs not having one. Most of those crazy experts figure it only took 4 billion years for nature to come up with that...
Ok, sorry for feeding the troll, but I think that post takes the cake for the most out-of-whack one I've read...
Do you actually have a reference for this? I'd think that slashing the tires of a bankrobber to thwart his escape would almost certainly be found to be legal. Citizens in most jurisdictions have the power to make arrests. Slashing tires is one way to help facilitate an arrest, and it is a fairly non-violent one compared to most of your options.
Now, if after the crime was over you stopped by the alleged perpetrator's home and smashed his windows for no reason that would be illegal. On the other hand, if the swat team smashes in the windows while storming the house that would be legal.
In most areas the activities of normal people and police tend to be viewed similarly from a legal perspective - at least to a fair degree. Sure, normal people don't execute warrants or anything like that, but many jurisdictions allow for bounty hunters. Likewise the same sorts of laws tend to apply to self-defense use of weapons by both police and ordinary citizens. Now, most places do discourage people from practicing law enforcement.
I would argue that that's only true if qualified as "most poorly-written client-server apps".
I would argue that "most poorly-written client-server apps" == "most client-server apps", so I both agree and disagree with you...:)
You know what the solution is? It's not thin clients or some other buzzword. It's for big corporations to stop buying shitty software.
Go ahead and start writing it and I'm sure we'll all flock to buy it.:)
Microsoft gets a bad rap sometimes, but they are a billion times better than "enterprise" software companies that don't make or sell consumer products, but leech exclusively off of large businesses.
Alas, MS doesn't sell anything that does the stuff our Citrix-based apps do - which is very industry-specific. In any industry you'll find a number of VERY-CRITICAL enterprise-scale apps that are specific to that industry. They sell at most hundreds of licenses per year, with costs in the 6-7 figures easily per large customer. I don't really call this leaching - I'd call it meeting a market need. I'd be the first to argue for an open-source solution/etc, but there aren't any out there now. Whenever a more agile vendor comes along I'm the first to argue for a migration when it makes sense. Things have progressed by leaps and bounds, but in general this software tends to lag about 5-10 years behind mainstream consumer software. Just look at how much software still runs on VMS, CICS, etc.
The problem with this sort of software is that features matter more than backend performance, customers are more interested in whether it works than whether it can be sold in volume, it will never sell in volume anyway, and it requires all kinds of industry-specific knowledge to make the software in the first place. That means high price tags for the software. If you're paying a million dollars for a software license, would you rather get more features that make it work the way you want it to, or ask for a total redesign that will probably introduce bugs and only save you maybe $10-20k on server costs. When hardware is a one-time expense sometimes it makes sense to just throw money at hardware. Not a good solution for consumer software, but it is often a good tradeoff for industry-specific software.
I dunno. No question that thin clients aren't going to work well for laptops and other offline scenarios. However, in many global companies a huge number of enterprise apps are moving in the direction of Citrix anyway - so they already need to maintain an airtight network or they're out of commission.
Why are they moving to Citrix? Simple - most client-server apps don't handle high latencies like you find in a WAN. All those database round-trips kill performance when you have 250ms latency. The only solutions are to move the front-end closer to the database, or the database closer to the front-end (or rewrite the front-end, which is hard to do when you don't have the source). Moving databases means all kinds of replication issues.
I actually consider the idea of thin-client computing fairly tempting. If I didn't have very-low-cost PC hardware available at home (hand-me-downs) I'd probably use thin-clients around the house for most of our systems...
Gotta agree with you there. I bought a color laser last year for $300 shipped and haven't had to touch it since. Before I had to field calls all the time when the inkjet needed unclogging and it constantly needed new cartridges. Lasers just work, and you can't argue with that.
Sure, toner is pricey, but so is ink. My printer costs 1.5 cents for black, and 4.5 cents for color per page. It would be hard to find an inkject that can beat those prices (and yes, that is for 5% coverage). For photos there is always Walmart - far cheaper than just about any consumer printer when you consider TCO. About the only time we print photos is when we just have to have them fast.
Anybody still using ink should take a serious look at color lasers and to the math...
Also consider that NVidia and ATI may not be releasing quality open source drivers for reasons other than a lack of desire. Both companies undoubtedly license technology from others, and those licenses don't allow for source distribution. That's one reason why Solaris took so long to open up. Re-inventing the wheel is expensive, particularly if the licensed code is difficult to implement -- which is probably why its was licensed to begin with!
Then they can just release the specs for their hardware and let somebody else worry about the drivers...
That is precisely the problem... the linux kernel team isn't the stakeholder here -- the user community is. Because the kernel team doesn't feel like implementing something that would benefit the community, CAD and Engineering software won't get moved to linux, games won't be moved to linux and other 3d applications will never move to linux.
Uh, linux already has proprietary 3D video drivers available for most popular cards. And yet this sort of software hasn't migrated. I think the issues are more complex than driver availability. If people are willing to use proprietary software they'll be willing to use propreitary drivers, and if people are willing to pay for software they'll be willing to pay for the cost to update the drivers for every kernel release if necessary.
The linux devs ARE a stakeholder. However, their interest is contrary to yours. You would like to minimize the cost to release proprietary software on linux. Others would like to MAXIMIZE it - which makes open source software far more competitive. If you don't like that philosophy then just use Vista, OS X, or whatever. There isn't any reason that linux has to take off on the desktop to be successful. I'd argue it already is.
I think that someone being able to issue real device keys or getting their hands on a bulk listing of such keys would seriously affect AACS. Of course, that amounts to industry espionage.
If you could get a copy of the master key list that would obviously break open the entire system (that's what DeCSS is - just a list of all the master encryption keys - granted in DeCSS's case they could be found due to a weakness in the algorithm). As you suggested this would be difficult for the same reasons that getting Verisign's master signing key would be difficult - it is considered high-value and is undoubtedly kept very safe. Most likely no single individual has access to it. They probably have two people walk up to a terminal and ask it for a single key whenever a vendor needs one. And when a session key needs to be encrypted with every player key they would just give the computer the session key and it would spit out the encrypted packet - with nobody seeing the master key list.
someone managing to get their hands at the content producers' private keys/certs and software, thus being able to generate their own working device keys.
This wouldn't work. Players work by virtue of having a key inside that can be used to decrypt one of hte many encrypted copies of the session key for the disc. I doubt they even contain certificates. A disc doesn't have any kind of processing capability, so it would not be capable of authenticating any certificates that a player might contain. Software players could use a certificate when interacting with remote websites, but a disc just contains data.
Now, apparently some kind of handshake is used by computer-based high-def DVD players. The players apparently refuse to read any content-scrabling-related content of a disc unless a handshake is performed, and that could involve some kind of certificate. Of course, since the player isn't online this is easily defeated by hacking a software player to get the cert - there would be no way to revoke them unless they start bundling firmware updates on new DVD releases...
Actually, the GPL and similar licenses are fine with advertising - they just require that any spinoffs allow you to republish under the same license and that their source is available.
If you want to make your own version of Debian that is a complete clone except that the gnome/kde desktop wallpaper is locked to some massive ad it would be perfectly legal as long as you allowed redistribution and the source of any modified GPL'ed software on the system is available.
In the meantime, I can install drivers for the circa-2000 NVidia GeForce 1 DDR on an XP SP2 box with no problem at all. The kernel people need to support a stable driver interface and sidestep the whole issue.
And good luck when Vista comes out...
A stable driver interface only goes so far, and at some point people will complain when new releases break it. By not bothering to aim for one the linux kernel team spares themselves quite a bit of grief. And all the drivers that matter are open-source anyway. Note that "matter" is in the eyes of the people doing the work writing the kernel...
And nobody benefits from nvidia's code in their binary blobs. By making things difficult for them the linux team encourages them at others to open-source their code, so that all can benefit. The pain just hasn't gotten quite bad enough for nvidia. If somebody else comes along with an open-source competitor they'll feel a bit more pain.
And even if nvidia never gives up with their blobs, it doesn't hurt the linux kernel team at all, so avoiding a binary interface is a win-win for them.
Real-looking keys wouldn't help - there isn't any kind of authentication system that you need to fool. The stream on the disc is encrypted, and you need a working key to crack it. There are probably thousands of valid ones, and probably 2^128 or 2^256 possible choices. Good luck finding one!
The crypto system is AES - you won't crack it, and you won't brute-force the key anytime soon. The routes that might break the overall DRM system would rely on obtaining a valid key. This can be done by hacking a software or hardware player, or by discovering some weakness in how the system is implemented (as was done with CSS). If the valid keys are all related in some way you might have a chance of breaking the entire thing wide-open, but if they're just random numbers finding one won't help at all in finding others.
The fundamental flaw in DRM is that the attacker has the key already - it is just hard to get to. That doesn't mean that you can simply guess the key - the underlying crypto is as strong as it gets.
Well, when they do key revocation they only revoke a key associated with the cracked player. Every model of player has a unique key. It may actually be the case that every individual player has a unique key as well - not sure about that.
So, if you crack a software player they revoke the software player, and if it impacts multiple customers they all download updates. Hardware players aren't impacted since they weren't revoked.
Now, if all of a particular brand of expensive hardware player shares a common key, and somebody goes to the trouble to extract that key from the hardware player, THEN you'll see some sweating executives...
Some will say that drugs won't get invented, but if you look at the initial medical treatment market, we had doctors who actually wanted to help people by creating new drugs and allowing them to be manufacturered by others regardless of who invented it.
Well, drug R&D is a bit more expensive than cell phone engineering. It mostly is the result of having to pay doctors to run the clinical trials (if you have 10,000 subjects, every one of them has a doctor, and they ALL get paid). And there is a much higher risk of failure. If you make a new cell phone chances are that the new phone will work, even if it doesn't corner the market. Not so with drugs - there is a good chance a new drug won't work at all, and even if it does it isn't guaranteed to corner the market for long.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "initial medical treatment market", and the free "drugs" that doctors invented therein. Can you give a specific example? I'm not aware of many examples of non-profit-originated drugs on the market. Note - I define drug as a dosable substance shown to be safe and effective, not just some molecule that suppresses tumor growth in a test tube (bleach works really well for that). Usually when people talk about "drugs" developed for almost no cost they're talking about some molecule that has some activity in some assay - often with no thought to safety, bioavailability, etc. Commercial pharma companies spend alomst nothing (per molecule) developing such concept molecules - the costs come in when you try to solve all the other issues. If all you want is some chemical that has an effect in some assay any pharma company could have its robots find one in a few days. There is a whole lot more to curing disease than just switching off some enzyme...
Actually, the California energy crisis was the result of the exact opposite. Utilities were required to buy power at a market rate, were required to buy all power demanded (if possible), and were required to charge customers a fixed rate. Fixed rates and high demand == shortages. However, the second rule meant that even with the shortages the generation rates were huge.
The problem would have gone away if there were realtime rate charges. First, utilities would not run out of money since they could recoup their costs. Second, demand would be constrained since customers would not draw as much power when it cost $29.95/kWh (or whatever).
The problem would also have gone away if the utilities were allowed to intentionally run blackouts even when power was available in order to get a better rate. If Enron wouldn't sell power for under $14.95 per kWh, then the utilities would just flip off everybody's power until Enron gave in (the generators lose money if nobody is buying power - it works both ways). When you go shopping for a car and you find only one left on the lot, you don't tell the salesguy up-front you'll pay ANY price to get it - you just go without (unless the price is right).
The problem was a crazy regulatory environment which allowed generators to bid huge prices and as long as there was more demand than supply the high prices would be paid.
Well, sure, that is another issue I didn't bring up. But I can't think of any Biblical cases where it has a big impact on the meaning of some piece of text. Usually they just end up being names of hard-to-identify animals, which usually don't have much significance.
Ah, but think about the old question of building more roads - does it help lower traffic jams or does it increase them because people simply travel more?
Ugh - one of my pet-peeves...:)
The best way to eliminate traffic jams is to destroy all the roads and cars. Period.
Now, ask yourself why we have roads in the first place, and then consider whether the ability to travel more is a net benefit or problem to society.
More roads doesn't so much reduce traffic, as allow people to more easily get from point A to B when they are further apart. This means that people can specialize more in jobs (since they can work further from home), that prices are more efficient (goods move easily from point A to point B), and probably a half-dozen things I'm not thinking of.
Now, I'm all for market-based traffic solutions like congestion charges to encourage people to drive off-peak (hmm, sounds just like the article). I'm also all for innovative public transit solutions (that don't involve making a 10 mile commute take two hours via some hub 10 miles out of the way). However, solutions like "well, let's just punish people who drive by making them do so inefficiently" are really just ignoring the whole reason people drive in the first place.
Well, in that sense the true original of anything spoken back before the invention of the phonograph was lost. After all, even if the Bible were written in Aramaic it wasn't like somebody was following Jesus/Mohammed/etc around doing stenography.
Of course, the ability to capture the originals of anything first published in print (not orally) would be possible, although most would doubt that the copying process would have 100% fidelity (although most scholars would accept copying as pretty close to that - unless somebody wanted to purposefully alter the text it isn't all that hard to proofread stuff).
I don't think this really has a major practical impact on the theology of any religious system. In most cases surviving copies of texts tend to agree on content for the most part, and translations tend to be non-controversial (with some variation in phrasing). I think that most differences among religious sects are the result of differences of interpretation and culture/practice, and not so much due to disagreement with regard to texts/translations...
Most modern muslims either a) don't understand what the Koran actually says, i.e. they've never actually read it...
While I agree with your points, I do want to point out that you'll find out that the above applies to the majority of folks professing to have just about any faith in modern times. Most people like to go to church/temple/whatever and light candles, and couldn't be bothered with worrying about books that are hundreds of years old. I doubt most people who practice a religion have even bothered to read through their sacred texts even once cover-to-cover. It is kind of like running into people who profess to be Tolkein fans who haven't bothered to actually read The Hobbit, or a football fan who doesn't know what it means to be offsides.
I find all of this quite bizzare - if something is important to you, why wouldn't you bother to study up on it. And if something isn't important to you why waste your time with it at all?
No it isn't. There are often radical differences in translations which can lead to serious doctrinal differences. Part of the split between Protestant and Catholic has to do with the interpretation of various passages. You're coming from the perspective of an unbeliever to whom such fine distinctions don't matter. They do to Christians.
Actually, most of the doctrinal differences between various sects of Christianity are a result of interpretation issues, mostly arising out of the fact that some particular issues aren't always unambiguously addressed in the Bible. I can't think of ANY that are really the result of translation issues (at least not among most mainstream denominations). Also, matters of culture/practice often cause splits - there are many issues that different denominations hold in common as to the letter of their doctrine, but often they stress some items more than others and may ignore particular issues entirely.
While you can find variations in translation in any English Bible (and more importantly variation in the original-language texts), it is fairly rare that they dramatically change the overall meaning of passages. Probably the closest you'll find that touches on a major doctrinal issue is the disputed verse in John's epistles that tends to support the concept of the trinity. I think most scholars believe the verse was never written by John, and yet most theologians don't consider this a major issue as far as the concept of the trinity is concerned, since its main need is to address the relationship between the Father and Son (and later the Spirit) based on the words of Jesus, and not simply to address a single verse in a single epistle. Another example might be the versions that transliterate "Lucifer" out of latin where the original Greek just refers to a "bearer of light" (the literal meaning of the word) - actually if you go back to older translations you'll find other matters like this that have caused some influence on Church doctrine, but most modern translations avoid them.
I don't know much about the Koranic translation issues, but I would think that it should be possible for the major branches of Islam to endorse a particular version. Maybe the reason that they don't is that modern Islam is still predominantly a middle-east thing, where people actually speak the language. If they wanted a translation they'd probably first aim for modern Arabic. In the Greek orthodox church the issue of English bible translations is likewise a moot one.
I do agree with you about the difficulty in catching subtle meanings, or things like word-play/puns/etc. I do know that these come up in the Bible from time to time (not sure how common they are), and I imagine they would come up in just about any major literary work whether of a religious nature or not.
If you can think of some area of substantial translation controversy in the Bible I'd be very interested in your posting a reference. Preferably one where the generally-accepted (beyond a single denomination) translations differ widely on some topic of substantial importance. In 30 seconds I could find variations on minor prepositions and stuff like that in any footnoted Bible, and I'm sure there are copies of "Fred Smith's authoritative version" out there that differ greatly.
I find the whole concept interesting since in the arena of Bible translation most organizations aim primarily to capture the meaning of the original text, and not to try to make it more palatable. I could think of a number of passages in the Old Testament that amount to genocide and nobody really bothers trying to water them down. I'm not sure why this would be a major issue in translations of the Koran.
Adding user-feedback to a moderately unstable system like the electricity grid is not necessarily the best thing to do. Adding load-leveling capacity by storing power in the form of ice is a very, very good idea.
But in this case the load-leveling is being done by end-users. They just happen to be cooperating with the power company.
How would user-feedback make the system more unstable? Do you think that some users would set up their processes to INCREASE consumption when the price RISES? Users would either ignore the realtime rate, or they'd use it in a way that furthers the grid's goals - reducing usage when capacity is low, and raising it when capacity is high.
Right now utilities already do this in the form of on/off-peak metering. Generally only large industrial consumers are eligible (this varies greatly by country/region/etc). This is useful to save on gas-fired turbines and such, but as you point out wind is far less predictable - it might be more available at 1PM and less available at 1AM. To handle a grid with a lot of wind capacity you'd need realtime rates, and users who base their consumption on the realtime rates.
Regardless of the scheme you pick you need to make sure customers have incentive to cooperate. If you just tell them they're doing it for the common good they'll realize that they're going through a lot of trouble and possibly undertaking costs just to line utility executive pockets. If on the other hand you vary the rates in realtime, or give them breaks on their bills for participating they'll go along with it. Too often environmental initiatives are not reward-based, and as a result everybody pays them lip-service but silently undermines them. In most industries the greening-up of processes has not been the result of any desire to help out the environment, but rather large efficiency gains associated with recycling waste streams and reducing waste in general.
Only problem with the thermostat solution Austin is using is that they're giving you a $20 value (digital thermostats are DIRT cheap these days), and you're not saving a dime on your electric bill (well, other than just the general benefit of higher setpoints at times - which you can get with any digital thermostat).
If they offered people 10% off their bill in exchange for the shutdown rights or something like that then you'd see it take off.
What we really need are market-based solutions. Sure, a few people will sacrifice comfort for the greater good, but if you want to really go green make it cheaper to do so. Show customers a set of super-eco-friendly appliances that also save them cash every month and people will flock to buy them. Kind of like energy-star monitors - nobody had to be told to use the features - it just made sense. I think that the concept of one-rate-24x7 needs to go away. Sure, realtime pricing would be nice, but if they at least had on/off-peak pricing you'd see a big impact in residential energy use. And you might see more solar cells on rooftops if utilities buy-back at the peak rate.
I wonder about that. Novell is obviously targeting customers who already have Microsoft AD controllers.
I'd think that domain controllers (and file servers in general) would be prime candidates for linux migration, assuming samba were completely compatible. Administrators could still use the same tools to administer the domains/systems from windows PCs, but the backend server would be running linux. I imagine that in many companies nobody actually logs into the domain controllers themselves - they use various client/server or web front-ends to maintain it. So, as long as the linux box looks like a Windows 2K3 box to the outside world, there is almost no learning curve.
What there would be is a complete elimination of all client-license costs. Those servers cost a fortune in licensing - not just the OS but a fee for each concurrent user that can connect at any given time (on top of the windows XP pro/whatever licenses for the workstations themselves). You can get rid of all of that with Samba, and not have to worry about license capacity, keyservers, or any of that stuff.
Now, I'm not saying samba is there yet - I can't say I've personally used half of its domain-oriented functions - just enough for around the house. But, if it DID get there why wouldn't companies use it? To the end users there is no difference, and to all but the most closely involved IT folks there would also be no difference. The biggest difference would be in the finanace department...
Actually, all FSF projects use the or-later clause to my knowledge. And even if they don't the FSF requires copyright attribution by all contributors, which gives them the right to relicense all GNU code to anything they want. In some sense it is actually a dangerous thing, but people trust that the FSF won't abuse this power. Additionally if they did the GPL v2+ code could be forked (even without copyright).
Actually, you don't need anything quite as elaborate as what this article seems to describe. All you need is the ability for power companies to charge rates that vary in realtime based on supply/demand, and to allow customer to elect to use these rates instead of averaged-out ones.
I'm sure a lot of industrial processes work on the principle that they need to generate x quantity of some particular good in a 24 hour period, but the capacity in the plant is such that they can maybe run at less than full output for some of the day, and catch up at other times. The refrigeration in this article is just one example of this sort of thing.
If the rates varied in realtime you could design your industrial process to automatically tailor its power consumpation to the going rate. As a result you can save megabucks on your utility bill, and the utility in turn can save even more bucks on now-unneeded coal-fired plants.
The same would apply in residential situations - people could have their air conditioners fluctuate their setpoint based on the price of electricity within some limit. If during a particular hour of the day power is cheaper than average go ahead and drop the temperature an extra degree or two, and then coast through times of price-spiking. Instead of brining plants online and offline utilities would just vary the price of electricity throughout the day. If the fluctuations in price are large enough homeowners would probably buy solar-based systems or energy-storage systems of some kind (bigger water heaters that don't run during the day, storage tanks to hold cold water for cooling during the day, etc.).
Basically all you need is an electric meter with online access to the power company, and a way for power-consuming devices to find out the current rate. For cheaper devices a simple timer would at least cover general on/off-peak times.
Anything that encourages energy-users to be conscious of the realities of electrical supply/demand fluctuation will only help the environment, the supply of fuel, the general economy, etc. With the current system a kWh is a kWh and consumers have no incentive to shift their usage off-peak.
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Uh, you do realize that the US was fielding aircraft in WW2, right? He was talking about a historical perspective. In terms of sheer man-hours of flight time I'm sure the US is well ahead.
here are already 82 reports of serious adverse events filed with the FDA.(mercola dot com)
"In the case reports submitted to VAERS, five of the reactions were described as "life-threatening," six were "disabling," and 210 (54.5 percent) had "not recovered" as of the date data were provided by VAERS. Hospitalization was reported in 12 cases and two-thirds sought additional care in an emergency room or doctor's office (see Use of Health Services section)."
With potential side effects up to death according to Alex Jones, reports of Eubola virus like reactions to the vaccine (bleeding out of every orifice).
Uh, I'd like to see a reference to something other than a youtube video for something like that.
Most modern vaccine rants are based on complaints about the use of mercury in formulations (a practice no longer used - certainly not for the HPV vaccine). Even so, there isn't much solid evidence that the mercury ever caused problems.
And when looking at adverse event reporting, keep in mind that any time anything goes wrong after a vaccine is taken a report gets filed. Often these events happen days after vaccination and you'd expect problems just due to random coincidence. I'm sure some percentage of the population gets hit by cars within 1 day of taking an aspirin pill but it would be silly to suggest a causal relationship. Adverse event tracking is important and that is why it is done, but you need to be careful in assuming a causal relationship. At the very least you need to calculate the percentage of events based on the number of administrations and then compare that to the frequency of the event in the general population. If 0.1% of people taking a pill have car accidents within 4 hours, and the frequency based on the regular accident rate is 0.01% then the pill might cause drowsiness or something. On the other hand, if the rates are comparable then you're just looking at coincidences.
Vaccination has been around for over a century, and its importance is already well-established. Sure, any vaccine has side-effects, and for this reason some people should not be vaccinated. However, as a general policy vaccination has been shown to be a good one.
But then again, the "health care" industry would be out of business if people were cured or ever got better.
:)
You brought a smile to my day... Thanks!
For the number of people who complain that pharma companies propagate treatments rather than cures for financial reasons I have to smile when somebody uses this argument against a VACCINE - one of the few products of modern medicine that actually does CURE disease...
You put your faith in "experts". You probably put your faith in god too? It's nobody's business how I choose to live my life...
Ok, so we put down the "pro-science" athiests and the "anti-science" thiests both at once - glad we're not leaving anyone out.
A terrorist or nasty bug is out to get you, and you need to defer to some "expert" to protect you. Look at how well that plan worked out for the people stuck in the Katrina aftermath/disaster.
Yeah, those people promoting vaccinations against drowning and security checkpoints to prevent hurricanes from sneaking across the border sure were proven wrong!
Live and be your own person. Natural selection.
Couldn't agree more. We'll see what the selective pressure is for having a brain vs not having one. Most of those crazy experts figure it only took 4 billion years for nature to come up with that...
Ok, sorry for feeding the troll, but I think that post takes the cake for the most out-of-whack one I've read...
Do you actually have a reference for this? I'd think that slashing the tires of a bankrobber to thwart his escape would almost certainly be found to be legal. Citizens in most jurisdictions have the power to make arrests. Slashing tires is one way to help facilitate an arrest, and it is a fairly non-violent one compared to most of your options.
Now, if after the crime was over you stopped by the alleged perpetrator's home and smashed his windows for no reason that would be illegal. On the other hand, if the swat team smashes in the windows while storming the house that would be legal.
In most areas the activities of normal people and police tend to be viewed similarly from a legal perspective - at least to a fair degree. Sure, normal people don't execute warrants or anything like that, but many jurisdictions allow for bounty hunters. Likewise the same sorts of laws tend to apply to self-defense use of weapons by both police and ordinary citizens. Now, most places do discourage people from practicing law enforcement.
I would argue that that's only true if qualified as "most poorly-written client-server apps".
:)
:)
I would argue that "most poorly-written client-server apps" == "most client-server apps", so I both agree and disagree with you...
You know what the solution is? It's not thin clients or some other buzzword. It's for big corporations to stop buying shitty software.
Go ahead and start writing it and I'm sure we'll all flock to buy it.
Microsoft gets a bad rap sometimes, but they are a billion times better than "enterprise" software companies that don't make or sell consumer products, but leech exclusively off of large businesses.
Alas, MS doesn't sell anything that does the stuff our Citrix-based apps do - which is very industry-specific. In any industry you'll find a number of VERY-CRITICAL enterprise-scale apps that are specific to that industry. They sell at most hundreds of licenses per year, with costs in the 6-7 figures easily per large customer. I don't really call this leaching - I'd call it meeting a market need. I'd be the first to argue for an open-source solution/etc, but there aren't any out there now. Whenever a more agile vendor comes along I'm the first to argue for a migration when it makes sense. Things have progressed by leaps and bounds, but in general this software tends to lag about 5-10 years behind mainstream consumer software. Just look at how much software still runs on VMS, CICS, etc.
The problem with this sort of software is that features matter more than backend performance, customers are more interested in whether it works than whether it can be sold in volume, it will never sell in volume anyway, and it requires all kinds of industry-specific knowledge to make the software in the first place. That means high price tags for the software. If you're paying a million dollars for a software license, would you rather get more features that make it work the way you want it to, or ask for a total redesign that will probably introduce bugs and only save you maybe $10-20k on server costs. When hardware is a one-time expense sometimes it makes sense to just throw money at hardware. Not a good solution for consumer software, but it is often a good tradeoff for industry-specific software.
I dunno. No question that thin clients aren't going to work well for laptops and other offline scenarios. However, in many global companies a huge number of enterprise apps are moving in the direction of Citrix anyway - so they already need to maintain an airtight network or they're out of commission.
Why are they moving to Citrix? Simple - most client-server apps don't handle high latencies like you find in a WAN. All those database round-trips kill performance when you have 250ms latency. The only solutions are to move the front-end closer to the database, or the database closer to the front-end (or rewrite the front-end, which is hard to do when you don't have the source). Moving databases means all kinds of replication issues.
I actually consider the idea of thin-client computing fairly tempting. If I didn't have very-low-cost PC hardware available at home (hand-me-downs) I'd probably use thin-clients around the house for most of our systems...
Gotta agree with you there. I bought a color laser last year for $300 shipped and haven't had to touch it since. Before I had to field calls all the time when the inkjet needed unclogging and it constantly needed new cartridges. Lasers just work, and you can't argue with that.
Sure, toner is pricey, but so is ink. My printer costs 1.5 cents for black, and 4.5 cents for color per page. It would be hard to find an inkject that can beat those prices (and yes, that is for 5% coverage). For photos there is always Walmart - far cheaper than just about any consumer printer when you consider TCO. About the only time we print photos is when we just have to have them fast.
Anybody still using ink should take a serious look at color lasers and to the math...
Also consider that NVidia and ATI may not be releasing quality open source drivers for reasons other than a lack of desire. Both companies undoubtedly license technology from others, and those licenses don't allow for source distribution. That's one reason why Solaris took so long to open up. Re-inventing the wheel is expensive, particularly if the licensed code is difficult to implement -- which is probably why its was licensed to begin with!
Then they can just release the specs for their hardware and let somebody else worry about the drivers...
That is precisely the problem... the linux kernel team isn't the stakeholder here -- the user community is. Because the kernel team doesn't feel like implementing something that would benefit the community, CAD and Engineering software won't get moved to linux, games won't be moved to linux and other 3d applications will never move to linux.
Uh, linux already has proprietary 3D video drivers available for most popular cards. And yet this sort of software hasn't migrated. I think the issues are more complex than driver availability. If people are willing to use proprietary software they'll be willing to use propreitary drivers, and if people are willing to pay for software they'll be willing to pay for the cost to update the drivers for every kernel release if necessary.
The linux devs ARE a stakeholder. However, their interest is contrary to yours. You would like to minimize the cost to release proprietary software on linux. Others would like to MAXIMIZE it - which makes open source software far more competitive. If you don't like that philosophy then just use Vista, OS X, or whatever. There isn't any reason that linux has to take off on the desktop to be successful. I'd argue it already is.
I think that someone being able to issue real device keys or getting their hands on a bulk listing of such keys would seriously affect AACS. Of course, that amounts to industry espionage.
If you could get a copy of the master key list that would obviously break open the entire system (that's what DeCSS is - just a list of all the master encryption keys - granted in DeCSS's case they could be found due to a weakness in the algorithm). As you suggested this would be difficult for the same reasons that getting Verisign's master signing key would be difficult - it is considered high-value and is undoubtedly kept very safe. Most likely no single individual has access to it. They probably have two people walk up to a terminal and ask it for a single key whenever a vendor needs one. And when a session key needs to be encrypted with every player key they would just give the computer the session key and it would spit out the encrypted packet - with nobody seeing the master key list.
someone managing to get their hands at the content producers' private keys/certs and software, thus being able to generate their own working device keys.
This wouldn't work. Players work by virtue of having a key inside that can be used to decrypt one of hte many encrypted copies of the session key for the disc. I doubt they even contain certificates. A disc doesn't have any kind of processing capability, so it would not be capable of authenticating any certificates that a player might contain. Software players could use a certificate when interacting with remote websites, but a disc just contains data.
Now, apparently some kind of handshake is used by computer-based high-def DVD players. The players apparently refuse to read any content-scrabling-related content of a disc unless a handshake is performed, and that could involve some kind of certificate. Of course, since the player isn't online this is easily defeated by hacking a software player to get the cert - there would be no way to revoke them unless they start bundling firmware updates on new DVD releases...
Actually, the GPL and similar licenses are fine with advertising - they just require that any spinoffs allow you to republish under the same license and that their source is available.
If you want to make your own version of Debian that is a complete clone except that the gnome/kde desktop wallpaper is locked to some massive ad it would be perfectly legal as long as you allowed redistribution and the source of any modified GPL'ed software on the system is available.
In the meantime, I can install drivers for the circa-2000 NVidia GeForce 1 DDR on an XP SP2 box with no problem at all. The kernel people need to support a stable driver interface and sidestep the whole issue.
And good luck when Vista comes out...
A stable driver interface only goes so far, and at some point people will complain when new releases break it. By not bothering to aim for one the linux kernel team spares themselves quite a bit of grief. And all the drivers that matter are open-source anyway. Note that "matter" is in the eyes of the people doing the work writing the kernel...
And nobody benefits from nvidia's code in their binary blobs. By making things difficult for them the linux team encourages them at others to open-source their code, so that all can benefit. The pain just hasn't gotten quite bad enough for nvidia. If somebody else comes along with an open-source competitor they'll feel a bit more pain.
And even if nvidia never gives up with their blobs, it doesn't hurt the linux kernel team at all, so avoiding a binary interface is a win-win for them.
Real-looking keys wouldn't help - there isn't any kind of authentication system that you need to fool. The stream on the disc is encrypted, and you need a working key to crack it. There are probably thousands of valid ones, and probably 2^128 or 2^256 possible choices. Good luck finding one!
The crypto system is AES - you won't crack it, and you won't brute-force the key anytime soon. The routes that might break the overall DRM system would rely on obtaining a valid key. This can be done by hacking a software or hardware player, or by discovering some weakness in how the system is implemented (as was done with CSS). If the valid keys are all related in some way you might have a chance of breaking the entire thing wide-open, but if they're just random numbers finding one won't help at all in finding others.
The fundamental flaw in DRM is that the attacker has the key already - it is just hard to get to. That doesn't mean that you can simply guess the key - the underlying crypto is as strong as it gets.
Well, when they do key revocation they only revoke a key associated with the cracked player. Every model of player has a unique key. It may actually be the case that every individual player has a unique key as well - not sure about that.
So, if you crack a software player they revoke the software player, and if it impacts multiple customers they all download updates. Hardware players aren't impacted since they weren't revoked.
Now, if all of a particular brand of expensive hardware player shares a common key, and somebody goes to the trouble to extract that key from the hardware player, THEN you'll see some sweating executives...
Some will say that drugs won't get invented, but if you look at the initial medical treatment market, we had doctors who actually wanted to help people by creating new drugs and allowing them to be manufacturered by others regardless of who invented it.
Well, drug R&D is a bit more expensive than cell phone engineering. It mostly is the result of having to pay doctors to run the clinical trials (if you have 10,000 subjects, every one of them has a doctor, and they ALL get paid). And there is a much higher risk of failure. If you make a new cell phone chances are that the new phone will work, even if it doesn't corner the market. Not so with drugs - there is a good chance a new drug won't work at all, and even if it does it isn't guaranteed to corner the market for long.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "initial medical treatment market", and the free "drugs" that doctors invented therein. Can you give a specific example? I'm not aware of many examples of non-profit-originated drugs on the market. Note - I define drug as a dosable substance shown to be safe and effective, not just some molecule that suppresses tumor growth in a test tube (bleach works really well for that). Usually when people talk about "drugs" developed for almost no cost they're talking about some molecule that has some activity in some assay - often with no thought to safety, bioavailability, etc. Commercial pharma companies spend alomst nothing (per molecule) developing such concept molecules - the costs come in when you try to solve all the other issues. If all you want is some chemical that has an effect in some assay any pharma company could have its robots find one in a few days. There is a whole lot more to curing disease than just switching off some enzyme...
Actually, the California energy crisis was the result of the exact opposite. Utilities were required to buy power at a market rate, were required to buy all power demanded (if possible), and were required to charge customers a fixed rate. Fixed rates and high demand == shortages. However, the second rule meant that even with the shortages the generation rates were huge.
The problem would have gone away if there were realtime rate charges. First, utilities would not run out of money since they could recoup their costs. Second, demand would be constrained since customers would not draw as much power when it cost $29.95/kWh (or whatever).
The problem would also have gone away if the utilities were allowed to intentionally run blackouts even when power was available in order to get a better rate. If Enron wouldn't sell power for under $14.95 per kWh, then the utilities would just flip off everybody's power until Enron gave in (the generators lose money if nobody is buying power - it works both ways). When you go shopping for a car and you find only one left on the lot, you don't tell the salesguy up-front you'll pay ANY price to get it - you just go without (unless the price is right).
The problem was a crazy regulatory environment which allowed generators to bid huge prices and as long as there was more demand than supply the high prices would be paid.
Well, sure, that is another issue I didn't bring up. But I can't think of any Biblical cases where it has a big impact on the meaning of some piece of text. Usually they just end up being names of hard-to-identify animals, which usually don't have much significance.
Ah, but think about the old question of building more roads - does it help lower traffic jams or does it increase them because people simply travel more?
:)
Ugh - one of my pet-peeves...
The best way to eliminate traffic jams is to destroy all the roads and cars. Period.
Now, ask yourself why we have roads in the first place, and then consider whether the ability to travel more is a net benefit or problem to society.
More roads doesn't so much reduce traffic, as allow people to more easily get from point A to B when they are further apart. This means that people can specialize more in jobs (since they can work further from home), that prices are more efficient (goods move easily from point A to point B), and probably a half-dozen things I'm not thinking of.
Now, I'm all for market-based traffic solutions like congestion charges to encourage people to drive off-peak (hmm, sounds just like the article). I'm also all for innovative public transit solutions (that don't involve making a 10 mile commute take two hours via some hub 10 miles out of the way). However, solutions like "well, let's just punish people who drive by making them do so inefficiently" are really just ignoring the whole reason people drive in the first place.
Well, in that sense the true original of anything spoken back before the invention of the phonograph was lost. After all, even if the Bible were written in Aramaic it wasn't like somebody was following Jesus/Mohammed/etc around doing stenography.
Of course, the ability to capture the originals of anything first published in print (not orally) would be possible, although most would doubt that the copying process would have 100% fidelity (although most scholars would accept copying as pretty close to that - unless somebody wanted to purposefully alter the text it isn't all that hard to proofread stuff).
I don't think this really has a major practical impact on the theology of any religious system. In most cases surviving copies of texts tend to agree on content for the most part, and translations tend to be non-controversial (with some variation in phrasing). I think that most differences among religious sects are the result of differences of interpretation and culture/practice, and not so much due to disagreement with regard to texts/translations...
Most modern muslims either a) don't understand what the Koran actually says, i.e. they've never actually read it...
While I agree with your points, I do want to point out that you'll find out that the above applies to the majority of folks professing to have just about any faith in modern times. Most people like to go to church/temple/whatever and light candles, and couldn't be bothered with worrying about books that are hundreds of years old. I doubt most people who practice a religion have even bothered to read through their sacred texts even once cover-to-cover. It is kind of like running into people who profess to be Tolkein fans who haven't bothered to actually read The Hobbit, or a football fan who doesn't know what it means to be offsides.
I find all of this quite bizzare - if something is important to you, why wouldn't you bother to study up on it. And if something isn't important to you why waste your time with it at all?
No it isn't. There are often radical differences in translations which can lead to serious doctrinal differences. Part of the split between Protestant and Catholic has to do with the interpretation of various passages. You're coming from the perspective of an unbeliever to whom such fine distinctions don't matter. They do to Christians.
Actually, most of the doctrinal differences between various sects of Christianity are a result of interpretation issues, mostly arising out of the fact that some particular issues aren't always unambiguously addressed in the Bible. I can't think of ANY that are really the result of translation issues (at least not among most mainstream denominations). Also, matters of culture/practice often cause splits - there are many issues that different denominations hold in common as to the letter of their doctrine, but often they stress some items more than others and may ignore particular issues entirely.
While you can find variations in translation in any English Bible (and more importantly variation in the original-language texts), it is fairly rare that they dramatically change the overall meaning of passages. Probably the closest you'll find that touches on a major doctrinal issue is the disputed verse in John's epistles that tends to support the concept of the trinity. I think most scholars believe the verse was never written by John, and yet most theologians don't consider this a major issue as far as the concept of the trinity is concerned, since its main need is to address the relationship between the Father and Son (and later the Spirit) based on the words of Jesus, and not simply to address a single verse in a single epistle. Another example might be the versions that transliterate "Lucifer" out of latin where the original Greek just refers to a "bearer of light" (the literal meaning of the word) - actually if you go back to older translations you'll find other matters like this that have caused some influence on Church doctrine, but most modern translations avoid them.
I don't know much about the Koranic translation issues, but I would think that it should be possible for the major branches of Islam to endorse a particular version. Maybe the reason that they don't is that modern Islam is still predominantly a middle-east thing, where people actually speak the language. If they wanted a translation they'd probably first aim for modern Arabic. In the Greek orthodox church the issue of English bible translations is likewise a moot one.
I do agree with you about the difficulty in catching subtle meanings, or things like word-play/puns/etc. I do know that these come up in the Bible from time to time (not sure how common they are), and I imagine they would come up in just about any major literary work whether of a religious nature or not.
If you can think of some area of substantial translation controversy in the Bible I'd be very interested in your posting a reference. Preferably one where the generally-accepted (beyond a single denomination) translations differ widely on some topic of substantial importance. In 30 seconds I could find variations on minor prepositions and stuff like that in any footnoted Bible, and I'm sure there are copies of "Fred Smith's authoritative version" out there that differ greatly.
I find the whole concept interesting since in the arena of Bible translation most organizations aim primarily to capture the meaning of the original text, and not to try to make it more palatable. I could think of a number of passages in the Old Testament that amount to genocide and nobody really bothers trying to water them down. I'm not sure why this would be a major issue in translations of the Koran.
Adding user-feedback to a moderately unstable system like the electricity grid is not necessarily the best thing to do. Adding load-leveling capacity by storing power in the form of ice is a very, very good idea.
But in this case the load-leveling is being done by end-users. They just happen to be cooperating with the power company.
How would user-feedback make the system more unstable? Do you think that some users would set up their processes to INCREASE consumption when the price RISES? Users would either ignore the realtime rate, or they'd use it in a way that furthers the grid's goals - reducing usage when capacity is low, and raising it when capacity is high.
Right now utilities already do this in the form of on/off-peak metering. Generally only large industrial consumers are eligible (this varies greatly by country/region/etc). This is useful to save on gas-fired turbines and such, but as you point out wind is far less predictable - it might be more available at 1PM and less available at 1AM. To handle a grid with a lot of wind capacity you'd need realtime rates, and users who base their consumption on the realtime rates.
Regardless of the scheme you pick you need to make sure customers have incentive to cooperate. If you just tell them they're doing it for the common good they'll realize that they're going through a lot of trouble and possibly undertaking costs just to line utility executive pockets. If on the other hand you vary the rates in realtime, or give them breaks on their bills for participating they'll go along with it. Too often environmental initiatives are not reward-based, and as a result everybody pays them lip-service but silently undermines them. In most industries the greening-up of processes has not been the result of any desire to help out the environment, but rather large efficiency gains associated with recycling waste streams and reducing waste in general.
Only problem with the thermostat solution Austin is using is that they're giving you a $20 value (digital thermostats are DIRT cheap these days), and you're not saving a dime on your electric bill (well, other than just the general benefit of higher setpoints at times - which you can get with any digital thermostat).
If they offered people 10% off their bill in exchange for the shutdown rights or something like that then you'd see it take off.
What we really need are market-based solutions. Sure, a few people will sacrifice comfort for the greater good, but if you want to really go green make it cheaper to do so. Show customers a set of super-eco-friendly appliances that also save them cash every month and people will flock to buy them. Kind of like energy-star monitors - nobody had to be told to use the features - it just made sense. I think that the concept of one-rate-24x7 needs to go away. Sure, realtime pricing would be nice, but if they at least had on/off-peak pricing you'd see a big impact in residential energy use. And you might see more solar cells on rooftops if utilities buy-back at the peak rate.
I wonder about that. Novell is obviously targeting customers who already have Microsoft AD controllers.
I'd think that domain controllers (and file servers in general) would be prime candidates for linux migration, assuming samba were completely compatible. Administrators could still use the same tools to administer the domains/systems from windows PCs, but the backend server would be running linux. I imagine that in many companies nobody actually logs into the domain controllers themselves - they use various client/server or web front-ends to maintain it. So, as long as the linux box looks like a Windows 2K3 box to the outside world, there is almost no learning curve.
What there would be is a complete elimination of all client-license costs. Those servers cost a fortune in licensing - not just the OS but a fee for each concurrent user that can connect at any given time (on top of the windows XP pro/whatever licenses for the workstations themselves). You can get rid of all of that with Samba, and not have to worry about license capacity, keyservers, or any of that stuff.
Now, I'm not saying samba is there yet - I can't say I've personally used half of its domain-oriented functions - just enough for around the house. But, if it DID get there why wouldn't companies use it? To the end users there is no difference, and to all but the most closely involved IT folks there would also be no difference. The biggest difference would be in the finanace department...
Actually, all FSF projects use the or-later clause to my knowledge. And even if they don't the FSF requires copyright attribution by all contributors, which gives them the right to relicense all GNU code to anything they want. In some sense it is actually a dangerous thing, but people trust that the FSF won't abuse this power. Additionally if they did the GPL v2+ code could be forked (even without copyright).
Actually, you don't need anything quite as elaborate as what this article seems to describe. All you need is the ability for power companies to charge rates that vary in realtime based on supply/demand, and to allow customer to elect to use these rates instead of averaged-out ones.
I'm sure a lot of industrial processes work on the principle that they need to generate x quantity of some particular good in a 24 hour period, but the capacity in the plant is such that they can maybe run at less than full output for some of the day, and catch up at other times. The refrigeration in this article is just one example of this sort of thing.
If the rates varied in realtime you could design your industrial process to automatically tailor its power consumpation to the going rate. As a result you can save megabucks on your utility bill, and the utility in turn can save even more bucks on now-unneeded coal-fired plants.
The same would apply in residential situations - people could have their air conditioners fluctuate their setpoint based on the price of electricity within some limit. If during a particular hour of the day power is cheaper than average go ahead and drop the temperature an extra degree or two, and then coast through times of price-spiking. Instead of brining plants online and offline utilities would just vary the price of electricity throughout the day. If the fluctuations in price are large enough homeowners would probably buy solar-based systems or energy-storage systems of some kind (bigger water heaters that don't run during the day, storage tanks to hold cold water for cooling during the day, etc.).
Basically all you need is an electric meter with online access to the power company, and a way for power-consuming devices to find out the current rate. For cheaper devices a simple timer would at least cover general on/off-peak times.
Anything that encourages energy-users to be conscious of the realities of electrical supply/demand fluctuation will only help the environment, the supply of fuel, the general economy, etc. With the current system a kWh is a kWh and consumers have no incentive to shift their usage off-peak.