I'm actually not completely hostile to the hypothesis - I'm fairly convinced that lots of behavior that we think is largely subject to free will is, in fact, heritable. Even those with a scientific bent tend to gloss over the real implications of evolution - evolution never stops. The selection pressures just change. One reason that modern Western society seems to take better in some places than others has a lot to do with the selective pressures that came from urbanization - over amazingly brief periods of time, the selective pressures of evolution have equipped urbanized cultures with a set of skills and value structures that support modern life, but those alleles are scarce among groups that never urbanized. They thus have trouble adapting to Western civilization - their evolution hasn't selected for those traits. Give them a few generations and those traits will start to appear - either through the higher expression of local alleles that are conducive to urbanization or from the importation of those alleles from visitors or immigrants. Pick up a copy of Nick Wade's Before the Dawn.
That said, I'm very skeptical of this new "the religious will outbreed us" meme. It's fairly uncontroversial that religious folk outbreed secular types, especially in modern Western societies. But these self-same societies were, in the not too distant past, for more religious than they are now. I'm not just talking pre-Enlightenment times (when the religious/secular ratio was probably near a peak), but even since. American culture is prone to Great Awakenings, when the religious nature of America reaches local peaks. Soon thereafter, however, a wave of secularism occurs - emerging from the huge cohort of children of those highly religious types had during the previous Awakening.
So, it seems to me there are multiple factors involved here, both cultural and genetic. My suspicion is that alleles that predispose toward religious impulses have synergistic reactions with those that predispose toward secularism - that the mix of alleles is too complex to push us too far in any one direction.
But who knows - evolution never stops. If religion (or secularism) is selected strongly enough, only our great grandchildren will know for sure.
Amazingly enough, the original implementation of 'Colour Recovery' was done in BBC Basic for Windows - an extension of the language used on the old Acorn computers in the 1980s.
That link is a much more technical overview of the process - the first time they used Colour Recovery, they used it as a supplement to more traditional computer colorization. They had an outside firm (Legend) do a hand-colorization of a black and white episode using an improved version of the old Ted Turner colorization process. While it works, it tends to turn out a somewhat washed-out and unsubtle colorizing - it's really hard to get the gradations of skin tones right, so they desaturate the color a little bit so it just looks washed out rather than as if everyone is wearing pancake makeup.
The Colour Recovery process is error-prone (you're using artifacts of the original color signal recorded on a different medium - there are drop-outs and inconsitencies due to the original transfer process) but where it works, it really captures the original color range and gradations much better. And it also takes out some of the guesswork - the Legend team based a lot of their work on still photos, but where none existed, they used their best judgment. In one case, they made flower in a jungle scene purple, where Colour Recovery picked up the fact that the cheap (er, cost-constrained) BBC effects department had just made everything different shades of green.
In the end, they blended the two techniques - using CR to correct the Legend colorization. The link has Legend/CR/blend shots - the blend really looks good, while each of the originals have (different) problems.
I was only describing its internal workings as authoritarian. Anyone can leave the organization, so it's not as totalitarian as a government can be.
You could make an argument that it behaves in an authoritarian manner to me and you and others outside it as well, though. In democratic and republican societies, we elect people to make the decisions as to what should or should not be classified and secret. They may make the wrong decisions, we may elect people who do not deserve to make those decisions and there may be other flaws in our democratic systems, but imperfect as they are, they are as close to representing the will of the majority as has been workable in each country so far. That one person, or small group of people, have decided that that's not good enough and have taken it upon themselves to impose their own standard of transparency regardless of their own lack of elected authority is pretty darn authoritarian too.
Good intentions are not sufficient. And who can honestly say that Julian Assange's motivations are 100% well-intentioned anyway?
“I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest,” Assange wrote Snorrason. “If you have a problem with me, piss off.”
Unlike Wikileaks, comments from the organisation have been "anonymous" and the structure of Openleaks is said to be more democratic.
So, apparently at least one prominent member of Wikileaks (Daniel Domscheit-Berg, former German spokesman for Wikileaks) and unidentified "others" felt the organization was undemocratic and Assange himself feels like it's his to operate however he feels fit.
Not really. Assange occasionally attempts to appear less radical than he actually is.
Read his paper on goverment as conspiracy. He doesn't really want any large organization to be able to have private communications. That WikiLeaks is largely opaque, authoritarian and secretive is ironic, but doesn't seem to bother him much.
I'm making no judgment as to whether Assange's world view is correct or not, but he's far more complicated than your typical muckraker or whistleblower. It's a bit like living in a William Gibson novel - the hackers are starting to strike back.
The Righthaven/Stephens Media copyright trolling was covered by a lot of the conservative blogosphere a few weeks ago. Righthaven (the trolls) has a deal for all of Stephen Media's 70-odd newpaper properties (including the Las Vegas Review-Journal). Wired had a story about their business plan.
A trademark lawyer blogged about why their business plan isn't a good one (hint: most bloggers don't have deep pockets).
Finally, Clayton Cramer posted a blacklist plus some links to BlockSite and SiteBlock to block all Stephens Media properties from Firefox/Chrome.
It was a bit of a cause célèbre for about a week, but I'm sure this will kick it up again...
It actually doesn't need to be that nefarious (of course, it could be).
You see a lot of this sort of thing in the derivatives markets (I work in the industry - I was the lead architect of the CBOT's Order Routing System) and it's caused by auto-spreaders. A spread trade in derivatives involves finding a pattern between two or more products and trading the differential in prices (e.g., the March Corn contract and the June corn contract tend to move largely in sync, but the spread between them can grow and shrink, so you combine a buy and a sell when the spread narrows and a sell/buy when it grows again).
Most of the easier kinds of spreads are handled natively by the exchange trading engines - they imply prices into and out of the underlying contracts and trade the package of contracts as an atomic unit. But someone who wanted to trade non-standard spreads (like those across exchanges, for instance NYMEX energies vs. ICE energies) has to do it differently - you have to create a synthetic spread by watching the prices of the underlying products and "legging in" the different products you want to buy or sell when your price target is reached.
The easiest and least sophisticated way to do this is to wait until your prices all line up (say you want to buy the NYMEX Oil contract for 10 cents less than you sell the ICE Oil contract for) and then throw in market orders. Then you wait for the spread to move and throw in market orders when you're in the money (you sell the NYMEX Oil contract for 12 cents more than you buy the ICE Oil contract for). Bingo - you make money and you don't really care what either contract was really "worth" - you just care about the differential.
Problem is - market orders suck. The price can move away from you (screwing your differential) and you end up behind all the limit orders that were in before you (increasing your chances of a price movement). So, the smarter way to do it is to place part of your order into the market as a limit order that tracks against the price of the other market. As that market moves, you cancel/replace the leg or legs that are "in the book" so that you stay in sync with your overall strategy. If your "in the book" order(s) starts to fill, you know you've hit your target and you can drop the final part of your spread into its market, giving you a much better chance of getting your differential.
Now, imagine that you are doing a pretty complicated spread (four or five different underliers that all relate in some model you have) - depending on which ones you put into book and who else is spreading slightly different contract combinations, you get a lot of weird orders being inserted, canceled and replaced at prices all over the map. It can appear semi-random, but for each algorithm, it actually is highly deterministic.
I don't know if that's what's going on here, but I wouldn't necessarily rule it out. A number of exchanges (including the CME) are trying to stop this sort of thing, because the transaction volume going into and out of the exchange (and the associated price changes that need to get pushed out) is hugely expensive. So, these days you have to maintain a certain ratio of orders to fills (i.e., don't cancel or replace a lot) or you start to get fined.
Following on my previous reply, apparently Zamenhof later decided that adding the accusative was a bad idea and supported its removal, but had basically lost control of his language by then and went with the majority who were against any substantial changes. I think Ido (reformed Esperanto) dropped it.
As far as I remember, Esperanto just has the nominative (subject) and accusative (object) declensions. Zamenof was ambivalent about word order imparting meaning, so he forced in the subject/object declensions. In theory, an Esperanto speaker from a SOV (subject-object-verb) language background like Japanese would be able to understand the meaning of someone from a SVO (subject-verb-object) language background like English because of the declension clues.
In practice, I figure it's probably still a bit of a struggle.
Subjects end in "-o", objects in "-on". Plural is indicated by putting a "j" after the "o". (J is equivalent to the English "y" sound - "oj" = "oy", "ojn" = "oin").
Unfortunately, the information you link to undermines your case.
The most significant source of renewable power in the United States is hydroelectric power (it accounts for 67% of all renewable power in the US). The amount of hydroelectric power produced in 2008 is the same as it was in 1969.
From 2003 to 2008, the percentage of total power derived from renewables went from 6.26% to 6.70% - an increase of 7% over the course of 5 years. In terms of total energy, the only two renewable sources that showed big gains were biofuels (went from 4/10th of 1% to 1%) and wind (went from 1/10 of 1% to 3/10 of 1%). The biofuel component is mostly ethanol, which is highly controversial in terms of land use and energy return and unlikely to get significantly larger any time soon.
If you look beyond those 5 years, it's far more discouraging. Look at that hydroelectic chart again. In 1949, 30% of all the electricity used in the United States came from hydroelectric power. Today, it's 6%.
Your California numbers are just as bad. The vast bulk of renewables come from three sources - large scale hydro, small scale hydro and geothermal. All three are essentially either tapped out or have significant problems getting larger (you can't dam anything else and natural geothermal is largely tapped out - and injecting water into deep hot rocks has some significant geological dangers in a state full of fault lines).
I, too, want to move to a non-carbon economy. But even among the nerd-herd that is Slashdot, hardly anybody understands the sheer magnitude of power that is used to keep our 21st century civilization working. Wind has to grow 800% just to reach the current levels of hydroelectricity, and that's just 6% of electrical usage. And that hydropower is going to get smaller and smaller, as no one is creating new dams and existing dams are being shut down (for different environmental protection reasons). Land siting and usage issues, power transmission from places with good solar/wind potential to existing population centers, water problems - the list goes on and on.
"Significant" impact is decades away on a national scale. On a local scale, it can be transformative, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking we're 10 or 20 years away from being largely carbon-neutral. It simply can't happen - no matter how much we wish it were so. Best to just keep plugging away at it and being realistic and honest with the public - it's going to take a long time, but it can be done.
It was ridiculously easy to beat - so much so that I wondered if there was something wrong with the website. My final score was 59-11, and that was only because I typoed two of the answers (Watson is, I'm sure, a much better typist than me).
Even when I mentally tried to score it for "late" correct/incorrect answers (the website shows you Watson's answer even if you answer correctly), I'm pretty sure Watson would have ended up in the high-teens.
I once owned a Viszla named Watson - I'm not sure, but I think the dog might have eked out a better score...
The first half of your post (increased drone usage radicalizing Pakistani opinion) conflicts with the second half of your post (Obama is soothing Muslim opinion), mainly because Obama has dramatically increased the number of Predator drone attacks in... Pakistan!
Also, planes smashing in skyscrapers and big chunks of the Pentagon being blown up happened just eight months into the Bush administration. At that point, he had pretty much been completely focused on domestic affairs (tax cuts and No Child Left Behind). Unless you really think that lowering American taxes inflamed Saudi and Afghani public opinion, your post doesn't make much sense. More quasi-successful small-scale terror attacks on the US have occurred in the past eight months (Fort Hood Shooting, Christmas Day Bomber, Times Square Bomber - all of whom were mentored by Anwar al-Awlaki) than in the last couple of years of the Bush administration. A year's worth of soothing didn't seem to accomplish much.
Not saying that Bush=good or Obama=bad (or vice versa), just that I think that the motivations of recent Islamic terrorism are a bit more complex than the identity of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I think people outside of the industry don't really understand the need for day traders.
I write trading software for the futures and options industries (I was the lead architect for the CBOT's Order Routing System, and have written trading systems for other exchanges and banks). The type of day trading that you and the GP have issues with is an absolute requirement for liquid markets and the efficient working of those markets.
Let's say you are a firm that needs to buy a large number of shares or contracts (in the futures world, you buy contracts for the future delivery of product). In the type of buy and hold market that seems "fair", that large order is going to go into a market of other buy and hold traders that are only going to trade out of their positions if the trade makes sense in their long-term strategy. Huge effective tax rates are going to make that trade unprofitable unless you've held the position a very long time (increasing your risk of market volatility) or you charge a premium (increase the price) in order to offset the tax hit.
This type of "illiquid" market raises prices dramatically. You have to factor in the time value of money, the risk exposure of holding shares for a long time (increasing the likelihood of a bad market event) and tax overhead. All that means that buying shares/contracts is riskier and selling them is more expensive.
Day trading fixes this. Day traders don't really care about the long-term direction of the market - they make money on minor intra-day price fluctuations. Because of this, they are nearly always willing to take on and shed positions. And because there are a lot of them chasing the same tiny fluctuations, they "shrink the spread" - they're going to give you a very good price because they shrink the difference between the bid and offer (price to buy/price to sell).
Now, when that original firm wants to buy that large number of shares, they are doing that in a market where there is almost always a large number of shares being offered at competitive prices. The day traders will sell off shares and pick up shares all day, just trying to end the day flat (holding nothing) to reduce after market risk.
Day trading does extract a price (they are making money) on the market, but the efficiency gains that they bring outweighs that price in almost all markets. They distribute a lot of the risk involved in trading among a bunch of smaller firms, rather than concentrating all the risk in big funds. This is generally a good thing - the government and the market in general are better off when a small firm goes bust than when one of the "too big to fail" firms starts having problems.
Now, the rise of algorithmic trading is causing some stress in this pattern - I can see some real issues coming in the next few years as these algorithms become more and more precise. I'm less concerned about a rogue algorithm dragging a market down (or up) than of all the algos converging to a point where the market gets stuck because the algos are just too damn efficient. But that's a post for another day...
There's an interesting case of an authorized sequel that was only temporarily accepted as canon.
H. Beam Piper wrote a pair of novels ("Little Fuzzy" and "Fuzzy Sapiens", the first a Huge Award nominee in 1963) before he committed suicide. There were rumors of a third "final" Fuzzy novel (the second novel had a sort-of cliffhanger), but his effects after his death were so scattered no one could ever find it.
Eventually, his estate authorized William Tuning to write the final Fuzzy novel in the trilogy ("Fuzzy Bones") in the 1980s. It was very well received by Piper's fans. Unfortunately for Tuning, three years later, someone found the unedited manuscript for Piper's final novel ("Fuzzies and Other People"). It was quickly edited and polished (maybe by Jerry Pournelle - he was a friend/acquaintance of Piper) and released. This novel resolved the issues of the first two quite differently than "Fuzzy Bones" and very quickly became the "canonical" work.
These days, you can fairly easily purchase the Piper trilogy, but good luck finding anything other than a used paperback copy of "Fuzzy Bones". Some people describe the Tuning book as an "alternate history" of the Fuzzies, which would probably tickle Piper's fancy, as his other major work (Paratime) was about alternate universes and histories.
There is yet another "third" book in the Fuzzy sequence, called "Golden Dream, A Fuzzy Odyssey" by Ardath Mayhar, which was written from the Fuzzy perspective. That one is even more obscure - I don't think the Piper fans liked that one very much (I thought it was only OK, based on 20+ year old memories). John Scalzi just announced plans for yet another sequel - presumably it will try to fit into the "accepted" canon (ignoring the Tuning and Mayhar works) so it doesn't end up on the remaindered shelf with the others.
Interestingly, Brilliant Blue can help treat spinal cord damage.
That makes sense, though - in order for the Matrix to work, you'd need a good way to fix the trauma caused by adding the headjack. Take the Blue Pill...
I have to point out that in capitalist systems, science is VERY dependent on government for funding. Unless a business stands to make a lot of money off your research (which is almost never the case for basic science) who is going to give you money to do it?
So, then, how is this unique to capitalist systems? Are you saying that in socialist or communist systems, the much smaller private sector does a lot of basic research?
You could try to make the argument that in a corporatist environment dominated by monopolies you might get some private sector basic research (ala Bell Labs), but somehow I don't get the impression that's the kind of system you're pining for.
I could've sworn I've written about this before, but can't seem to find the link right now...
Anyway, the whole "legal tender" issue is about preventing issues after payment, not about the payment itself. It is an improvement on the barter system.
If we barter for something, I could give you something that should be of equivalent value (Apple music player for Microsoft music player) but turns out not to be (Zune 30 on December 31). We now clog up the courts suing for bartering in bad faith (Apple view) or defending for unknown defects (Microsoft view).
If we use money, however, once we've agreed on a price and that price had been met, the seller has no recourse even if the "worth" of the money goes down (as it inevitably will). When you agree to accept "legal tender", the debt has been paid - the money is backed by the government, not by the person who paid it. You cannot claim that the money is "bad" - even if we have a major economic meltdown and the money is worthless, you can't take the sold good back.
Why so few diesels in the US? Largely due to far more stringent emissions standards in the US.
The largest market for cars in the US is California, and due to the unique geography of Los Angeles, traditional "smog causing" forms of pollution (NOx, SOx and soot) have been regulated far more strictly than anywhere else in the world. Several other states (New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine) have adopted the California standards and many more states are considering them.
Part of the problem (SOx) is being solved through a switchover to low-sulfur diesel, and NOx may largely be handled by new technology like BlueTec, but soot/particulates are still a problem. The current Euro 4 European regulations for diesel allow 150% more particulate matter than does California's LEV II.
As much as many Slashdotter's would like to make everything into a "USA sucks - why can't we be more like [Canada/Europe/Botswana]", this is actually largely the result of a few things that we are either more stringent about (particulate pollution) or have little control over (Europe's source of crude oil - the Middle East - being naturally lower in sulfur than the US/Canadian crude that is our primary source). The US is actually far more stringent about all sorts of pollution than anywhere else - it's just that carbon gets all the ink, and even there, we've done a lot better in real terms than either our or the European's rhetoric would lead you to believe.
In the end, no car company is going to sell cars that are illegal to own in half the country, so they just don't bother. That may change when Euro 5 compliant cars start rolling off the lines in a year or so, but we still have "two-fleet" regulations hindering things. (The "two-fleet" rule states that the Big 3 have to calculate their CAFE/fuel efficiency standards for cars they build in the US separately from cars they import, so it makes no economic sense for Ford to import fuel-efficient models built in its plants in Europe.)
It would be pretty difficult for him to be a plant, considering Obama was doing a media shoot of "walking door-to-door" to ask people for their vote. Obama happened to walk up on Wurzelbacher's house when Sam/Joe was out playing football with his son in the front yard. Obama asked for his vote, Wurzelbacher asked his question, and the rest is history...
Feel free to believe that Charles Keating knew 30 years ahead of time where the 2008 Democratic nominee would be walking for a photo op and cleverly arranged for a distant relative (by marriage) to purchase a house there in order to help his old buddy McCain (who was only peripherally involved in the Keating Five scandal in the first place), but the rest of us will put the tinfoil down...
I've been the lead architect and/or senior programmer on a couple of futures and options exchange trading platforms (CBOT's Order Routing System, CBOE's CBOEdirect) and pay the bills currently by connecting firms to various electronic trading platforms. Hardly anyone uses Microsoft except for GUI/user-facing applications. The back-end stuff is almost always UNIX/Linux.
Off the top of my head, I know that all the LiffeConnect-based systems (London Financial Futures Exchange, EuroNext, Amsterdam, CBOT Metals Complex, Tokyo Futures Exchange, probably a couple of others) run on Linux (a relatively recent change from Sun boxen). NYSE now owns that codebase, and I'm pretty sure that the NYSE uses Linux and AIX on its own platform.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange's GLOBEX trading engine (running CME, CBOT non-Metals, NYMEX plus a couple smaller exchanges like Minneapolis and Kansas City) platform runs on Linux. They migrated from Solaris to Red Hat back in 2004.
The Intercontinental Exchange's WebICE platform is written in Java and I believe it's running on Linux, but there may be some Solaris still around.
The CBOEdirect system is Java but runs mostly on Sun Enterprise hardware. There is some Linux in the mix, and they certainly use it on some of their other trading systems.
In the (futures and options) trading world, running on Windows servers is considered to be a sure sign of being bush-league. Demand for UNIX/Linux is huge. And I'm not saying this as a Java/UNIX/Linux snob - most of the systems I've written were Microsoft-based (for a variety of reasons - most started out as technology demonstrations that grew way beyond their intended lifespan - "the client's always right").
This is still way too expensive for developing countries - even though the refrigerator itself may cost less to build and service, the energy costs don't really improve. With few or overstressed power systems, this isn't going to help.
What can help is "Pot-in-pot" refrigerators. Two nesting unglazed ceramic pots, separated by wet sand and covered with a wet towel, will keep the interior cold enough thru evaporative cooling to keep vegetables fresh for up to two weeks.
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I'm actually not completely hostile to the hypothesis - I'm fairly convinced that lots of behavior that we think is largely subject to free will is, in fact, heritable. Even those with a scientific bent tend to gloss over the real implications of evolution - evolution never stops. The selection pressures just change. One reason that modern Western society seems to take better in some places than others has a lot to do with the selective pressures that came from urbanization - over amazingly brief periods of time, the selective pressures of evolution have equipped urbanized cultures with a set of skills and value structures that support modern life, but those alleles are scarce among groups that never urbanized. They thus have trouble adapting to Western civilization - their evolution hasn't selected for those traits. Give them a few generations and those traits will start to appear - either through the higher expression of local alleles that are conducive to urbanization or from the importation of those alleles from visitors or immigrants. Pick up a copy of Nick Wade's Before the Dawn.
That said, I'm very skeptical of this new "the religious will outbreed us" meme. It's fairly uncontroversial that religious folk outbreed secular types, especially in modern Western societies. But these self-same societies were, in the not too distant past, for more religious than they are now. I'm not just talking pre-Enlightenment times (when the religious/secular ratio was probably near a peak), but even since. American culture is prone to Great Awakenings, when the religious nature of America reaches local peaks. Soon thereafter, however, a wave of secularism occurs - emerging from the huge cohort of children of those highly religious types had during the previous Awakening.
So, it seems to me there are multiple factors involved here, both cultural and genetic. My suspicion is that alleles that predispose toward religious impulses have synergistic reactions with those that predispose toward secularism - that the mix of alleles is too complex to push us too far in any one direction.
But who knows - evolution never stops. If religion (or secularism) is selected strongly enough, only our great grandchildren will know for sure.
Amazingly enough, the original implementation of 'Colour Recovery' was done in BBC Basic for Windows - an extension of the language used on the old Acorn computers in the 1980s.
That link is a much more technical overview of the process - the first time they used Colour Recovery, they used it as a supplement to more traditional computer colorization. They had an outside firm (Legend) do a hand-colorization of a black and white episode using an improved version of the old Ted Turner colorization process. While it works, it tends to turn out a somewhat washed-out and unsubtle colorizing - it's really hard to get the gradations of skin tones right, so they desaturate the color a little bit so it just looks washed out rather than as if everyone is wearing pancake makeup.
The Colour Recovery process is error-prone (you're using artifacts of the original color signal recorded on a different medium - there are drop-outs and inconsitencies due to the original transfer process) but where it works, it really captures the original color range and gradations much better. And it also takes out some of the guesswork - the Legend team based a lot of their work on still photos, but where none existed, they used their best judgment. In one case, they made flower in a jungle scene purple, where Colour Recovery picked up the fact that the cheap (er, cost-constrained) BBC effects department had just made everything different shades of green.
In the end, they blended the two techniques - using CR to correct the Legend colorization. The link has Legend/CR/blend shots - the blend really looks good, while each of the originals have (different) problems.
I was only describing its internal workings as authoritarian. Anyone can leave the organization, so it's not as totalitarian as a government can be.
You could make an argument that it behaves in an authoritarian manner to me and you and others outside it as well, though. In democratic and republican societies, we elect people to make the decisions as to what should or should not be classified and secret. They may make the wrong decisions, we may elect people who do not deserve to make those decisions and there may be other flaws in our democratic systems, but imperfect as they are, they are as close to representing the will of the majority as has been workable in each country so far. That one person, or small group of people, have decided that that's not good enough and have taken it upon themselves to impose their own standard of transparency regardless of their own lack of elected authority is pretty darn authoritarian too.
Good intentions are not sufficient. And who can honestly say that Julian Assange's motivations are 100% well-intentioned anyway?
A goodly number of the original members of Wikileaks have left and are griping about Assange's controlling nature.
This has led to the formation of OpenLeaks.
An article about the new OpenLeaks site states:
So, apparently at least one prominent member of Wikileaks (Daniel Domscheit-Berg, former German spokesman for Wikileaks) and unidentified "others" felt the organization was undemocratic and Assange himself feels like it's his to operate however he feels fit.
Sounds authoritarian to me.
Not really. Assange occasionally attempts to appear less radical than he actually is.
Read his paper on goverment as conspiracy. He doesn't really want any large organization to be able to have private communications. That WikiLeaks is largely opaque, authoritarian and secretive is ironic, but doesn't seem to bother him much.
I'm making no judgment as to whether Assange's world view is correct or not, but he's far more complicated than your typical muckraker or whistleblower. It's a bit like living in a William Gibson novel - the hackers are starting to strike back.
He may not have invented the comsat, but he did invent the waterbed!
The wiki on him has a nice list of stuff generally thought to have been presaged in Heinlein's works.
The Righthaven/Stephens Media copyright trolling was covered by a lot of the conservative blogosphere a few weeks ago. Righthaven (the trolls) has a deal for all of Stephen Media's 70-odd newpaper properties (including the Las Vegas Review-Journal). Wired had a story about their business plan.
A trademark lawyer blogged about why their business plan isn't a good one (hint: most bloggers don't have deep pockets).
Finally, Clayton Cramer posted a blacklist plus some links to BlockSite and SiteBlock to block all Stephens Media properties from Firefox/Chrome.
It was a bit of a cause célèbre for about a week, but I'm sure this will kick it up again...
It actually doesn't need to be that nefarious (of course, it could be).
You see a lot of this sort of thing in the derivatives markets (I work in the industry - I was the lead architect of the CBOT's Order Routing System) and it's caused by auto-spreaders. A spread trade in derivatives involves finding a pattern between two or more products and trading the differential in prices (e.g., the March Corn contract and the June corn contract tend to move largely in sync, but the spread between them can grow and shrink, so you combine a buy and a sell when the spread narrows and a sell/buy when it grows again).
Most of the easier kinds of spreads are handled natively by the exchange trading engines - they imply prices into and out of the underlying contracts and trade the package of contracts as an atomic unit. But someone who wanted to trade non-standard spreads (like those across exchanges, for instance NYMEX energies vs. ICE energies) has to do it differently - you have to create a synthetic spread by watching the prices of the underlying products and "legging in" the different products you want to buy or sell when your price target is reached.
The easiest and least sophisticated way to do this is to wait until your prices all line up (say you want to buy the NYMEX Oil contract for 10 cents less than you sell the ICE Oil contract for) and then throw in market orders. Then you wait for the spread to move and throw in market orders when you're in the money (you sell the NYMEX Oil contract for 12 cents more than you buy the ICE Oil contract for). Bingo - you make money and you don't really care what either contract was really "worth" - you just care about the differential.
Problem is - market orders suck. The price can move away from you (screwing your differential) and you end up behind all the limit orders that were in before you (increasing your chances of a price movement). So, the smarter way to do it is to place part of your order into the market as a limit order that tracks against the price of the other market. As that market moves, you cancel/replace the leg or legs that are "in the book" so that you stay in sync with your overall strategy. If your "in the book" order(s) starts to fill, you know you've hit your target and you can drop the final part of your spread into its market, giving you a much better chance of getting your differential.
Now, imagine that you are doing a pretty complicated spread (four or five different underliers that all relate in some model you have) - depending on which ones you put into book and who else is spreading slightly different contract combinations, you get a lot of weird orders being inserted, canceled and replaced at prices all over the map. It can appear semi-random, but for each algorithm, it actually is highly deterministic.
I don't know if that's what's going on here, but I wouldn't necessarily rule it out. A number of exchanges (including the CME) are trying to stop this sort of thing, because the transaction volume going into and out of the exchange (and the associated price changes that need to get pushed out) is hugely expensive. So, these days you have to maintain a certain ratio of orders to fills (i.e., don't cancel or replace a lot) or you start to get fined.
Following on my previous reply, apparently Zamenhof later decided that adding the accusative was a bad idea and supported its removal, but had basically lost control of his language by then and went with the majority who were against any substantial changes. I think Ido (reformed Esperanto) dropped it.
As far as I remember, Esperanto just has the nominative (subject) and accusative (object) declensions. Zamenof was ambivalent about word order imparting meaning, so he forced in the subject/object declensions. In theory, an Esperanto speaker from a SOV (subject-object-verb) language background like Japanese would be able to understand the meaning of someone from a SVO (subject-verb-object) language background like English because of the declension clues.
In practice, I figure it's probably still a bit of a struggle.
Subjects end in "-o", objects in "-on". Plural is indicated by putting a "j" after the "o". (J is equivalent to the English "y" sound - "oj" = "oy", "ojn" = "oin").
Unfortunately, the information you link to undermines your case.
The most significant source of renewable power in the United States is hydroelectric power (it accounts for 67% of all renewable power in the US). The amount of hydroelectric power produced in 2008 is the same as it was in 1969.
From 2003 to 2008, the percentage of total power derived from renewables went from 6.26% to 6.70% - an increase of 7% over the course of 5 years. In terms of total energy, the only two renewable sources that showed big gains were biofuels (went from 4/10th of 1% to 1%) and wind (went from 1/10 of 1% to 3/10 of 1%). The biofuel component is mostly ethanol, which is highly controversial in terms of land use and energy return and unlikely to get significantly larger any time soon.
If you look beyond those 5 years, it's far more discouraging. Look at that hydroelectic chart again. In 1949, 30% of all the electricity used in the United States came from hydroelectric power. Today, it's 6%.
Your California numbers are just as bad. The vast bulk of renewables come from three sources - large scale hydro, small scale hydro and geothermal. All three are essentially either tapped out or have significant problems getting larger (you can't dam anything else and natural geothermal is largely tapped out - and injecting water into deep hot rocks has some significant geological dangers in a state full of fault lines).
I, too, want to move to a non-carbon economy. But even among the nerd-herd that is Slashdot, hardly anybody understands the sheer magnitude of power that is used to keep our 21st century civilization working. Wind has to grow 800% just to reach the current levels of hydroelectricity, and that's just 6% of electrical usage. And that hydropower is going to get smaller and smaller, as no one is creating new dams and existing dams are being shut down (for different environmental protection reasons). Land siting and usage issues, power transmission from places with good solar/wind potential to existing population centers, water problems - the list goes on and on.
"Significant" impact is decades away on a national scale. On a local scale, it can be transformative, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking we're 10 or 20 years away from being largely carbon-neutral. It simply can't happen - no matter how much we wish it were so. Best to just keep plugging away at it and being realistic and honest with the public - it's going to take a long time, but it can be done.
It was ridiculously easy to beat - so much so that I wondered if there was something wrong with the website. My final score was 59-11, and that was only because I typoed two of the answers (Watson is, I'm sure, a much better typist than me).
Even when I mentally tried to score it for "late" correct/incorrect answers (the website shows you Watson's answer even if you answer correctly), I'm pretty sure Watson would have ended up in the high-teens.
I once owned a Viszla named Watson - I'm not sure, but I think the dog might have eked out a better score...
Technically, that would be "on the Gripping Hand".
The first half of your post (increased drone usage radicalizing Pakistani opinion) conflicts with the second half of your post (Obama is soothing Muslim opinion), mainly because Obama has dramatically increased the number of Predator drone attacks in... Pakistan!
Also, planes smashing in skyscrapers and big chunks of the Pentagon being blown up happened just eight months into the Bush administration. At that point, he had pretty much been completely focused on domestic affairs (tax cuts and No Child Left Behind). Unless you really think that lowering American taxes inflamed Saudi and Afghani public opinion, your post doesn't make much sense. More quasi-successful small-scale terror attacks on the US have occurred in the past eight months (Fort Hood Shooting, Christmas Day Bomber, Times Square Bomber - all of whom were mentored by Anwar al-Awlaki) than in the last couple of years of the Bush administration. A year's worth of soothing didn't seem to accomplish much.
Not saying that Bush=good or Obama=bad (or vice versa), just that I think that the motivations of recent Islamic terrorism are a bit more complex than the identity of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Just use it on the inevitable dupe.
I think people outside of the industry don't really understand the need for day traders.
I write trading software for the futures and options industries (I was the lead architect for the CBOT's Order Routing System, and have written trading systems for other exchanges and banks). The type of day trading that you and the GP have issues with is an absolute requirement for liquid markets and the efficient working of those markets.
Let's say you are a firm that needs to buy a large number of shares or contracts (in the futures world, you buy contracts for the future delivery of product). In the type of buy and hold market that seems "fair", that large order is going to go into a market of other buy and hold traders that are only going to trade out of their positions if the trade makes sense in their long-term strategy. Huge effective tax rates are going to make that trade unprofitable unless you've held the position a very long time (increasing your risk of market volatility) or you charge a premium (increase the price) in order to offset the tax hit.
This type of "illiquid" market raises prices dramatically. You have to factor in the time value of money, the risk exposure of holding shares for a long time (increasing the likelihood of a bad market event) and tax overhead. All that means that buying shares/contracts is riskier and selling them is more expensive.
Day trading fixes this. Day traders don't really care about the long-term direction of the market - they make money on minor intra-day price fluctuations. Because of this, they are nearly always willing to take on and shed positions. And because there are a lot of them chasing the same tiny fluctuations, they "shrink the spread" - they're going to give you a very good price because they shrink the difference between the bid and offer (price to buy/price to sell).
Now, when that original firm wants to buy that large number of shares, they are doing that in a market where there is almost always a large number of shares being offered at competitive prices. The day traders will sell off shares and pick up shares all day, just trying to end the day flat (holding nothing) to reduce after market risk.
Day trading does extract a price (they are making money) on the market, but the efficiency gains that they bring outweighs that price in almost all markets. They distribute a lot of the risk involved in trading among a bunch of smaller firms, rather than concentrating all the risk in big funds. This is generally a good thing - the government and the market in general are better off when a small firm goes bust than when one of the "too big to fail" firms starts having problems.
Now, the rise of algorithmic trading is causing some stress in this pattern - I can see some real issues coming in the next few years as these algorithms become more and more precise. I'm less concerned about a rogue algorithm dragging a market down (or up) than of all the algos converging to a point where the market gets stuck because the algos are just too damn efficient. But that's a post for another day...
There's an interesting case of an authorized sequel that was only temporarily accepted as canon.
H. Beam Piper wrote a pair of novels ("Little Fuzzy" and "Fuzzy Sapiens", the first a Huge Award nominee in 1963) before he committed suicide. There were rumors of a third "final" Fuzzy novel (the second novel had a sort-of cliffhanger), but his effects after his death were so scattered no one could ever find it.
Eventually, his estate authorized William Tuning to write the final Fuzzy novel in the trilogy ("Fuzzy Bones") in the 1980s. It was very well received by Piper's fans. Unfortunately for Tuning, three years later, someone found the unedited manuscript for Piper's final novel ("Fuzzies and Other People"). It was quickly edited and polished (maybe by Jerry Pournelle - he was a friend/acquaintance of Piper) and released. This novel resolved the issues of the first two quite differently than "Fuzzy Bones" and very quickly became the "canonical" work.
These days, you can fairly easily purchase the Piper trilogy, but good luck finding anything other than a used paperback copy of "Fuzzy Bones". Some people describe the Tuning book as an "alternate history" of the Fuzzies, which would probably tickle Piper's fancy, as his other major work (Paratime) was about alternate universes and histories.
There is yet another "third" book in the Fuzzy sequence, called "Golden Dream, A Fuzzy Odyssey" by Ardath Mayhar, which was written from the Fuzzy perspective. That one is even more obscure - I don't think the Piper fans liked that one very much (I thought it was only OK, based on 20+ year old memories). John Scalzi just announced plans for yet another sequel - presumably it will try to fit into the "accepted" canon (ignoring the Tuning and Mayhar works) so it doesn't end up on the remaindered shelf with the others.
I hate to bust up a good anti-US rant, but the firms that got the contracts to develop the oil fields are:
CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) : China
Petronas : Indonesia
Shell : Anglo-Dutch
Total: France
Shell and Exxon (hey, a US firm!) are developing a different oil field, but in general, US corporations are relatively minor players in Iraqi oil.
Interestingly, Brilliant Blue can help treat spinal cord damage. That makes sense, though - in order for the Matrix to work, you'd need a good way to fix the trauma caused by adding the headjack. Take the Blue Pill...
I have to point out that in capitalist systems, science is VERY dependent on government for funding. Unless a business stands to make a lot of money off your research (which is almost never the case for basic science) who is going to give you money to do it?
So, then, how is this unique to capitalist systems? Are you saying that in socialist or communist systems, the much smaller private sector does a lot of basic research?
You could try to make the argument that in a corporatist environment dominated by monopolies you might get some private sector basic research (ala Bell Labs), but somehow I don't get the impression that's the kind of system you're pining for.
Anyway, the whole "legal tender" issue is about preventing issues after payment, not about the payment itself. It is an improvement on the barter system.
If we barter for something, I could give you something that should be of equivalent value (Apple music player for Microsoft music player) but turns out not to be (Zune 30 on December 31). We now clog up the courts suing for bartering in bad faith (Apple view) or defending for unknown defects (Microsoft view).
If we use money, however, once we've agreed on a price and that price had been met, the seller has no recourse even if the "worth" of the money goes down (as it inevitably will). When you agree to accept "legal tender", the debt has been paid - the money is backed by the government, not by the person who paid it. You cannot claim that the money is "bad" - even if we have a major economic meltdown and the money is worthless, you can't take the sold good back.
Why so few diesels in the US? Largely due to far more stringent emissions standards in the US.
The largest market for cars in the US is California, and due to the unique geography of Los Angeles, traditional "smog causing" forms of pollution (NOx, SOx and soot) have been regulated far more strictly than anywhere else in the world. Several other states (New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine) have adopted the California standards and many more states are considering them.
Part of the problem (SOx) is being solved through a switchover to low-sulfur diesel, and NOx may largely be handled by new technology like BlueTec, but soot/particulates are still a problem. The current Euro 4 European regulations for diesel allow 150% more particulate matter than does California's LEV II.
As much as many Slashdotter's would like to make everything into a "USA sucks - why can't we be more like [Canada/Europe/Botswana]", this is actually largely the result of a few things that we are either more stringent about (particulate pollution) or have little control over (Europe's source of crude oil - the Middle East - being naturally lower in sulfur than the US/Canadian crude that is our primary source). The US is actually far more stringent about all sorts of pollution than anywhere else - it's just that carbon gets all the ink, and even there, we've done a lot better in real terms than either our or the European's rhetoric would lead you to believe.
In the end, no car company is going to sell cars that are illegal to own in half the country, so they just don't bother. That may change when Euro 5 compliant cars start rolling off the lines in a year or so, but we still have "two-fleet" regulations hindering things. (The "two-fleet" rule states that the Big 3 have to calculate their CAFE/fuel efficiency standards for cars they build in the US separately from cars they import, so it makes no economic sense for Ford to import fuel-efficient models built in its plants in Europe.)
Um, no he's not.
It would be pretty difficult for him to be a plant, considering Obama was doing a media shoot of "walking door-to-door" to ask people for their vote. Obama happened to walk up on Wurzelbacher's house when Sam/Joe was out playing football with his son in the front yard. Obama asked for his vote, Wurzelbacher asked his question, and the rest is history...
Feel free to believe that Charles Keating knew 30 years ahead of time where the 2008 Democratic nominee would be walking for a photo op and cleverly arranged for a distant relative (by marriage) to purchase a house there in order to help his old buddy McCain (who was only peripherally involved in the Keating Five scandal in the first place), but the rest of us will put the tinfoil down...
I've been the lead architect and/or senior programmer on a couple of futures and options exchange trading platforms (CBOT's Order Routing System, CBOE's CBOEdirect) and pay the bills currently by connecting firms to various electronic trading platforms. Hardly anyone uses Microsoft except for GUI/user-facing applications. The back-end stuff is almost always UNIX/Linux.
Off the top of my head, I know that all the LiffeConnect-based systems (London Financial Futures Exchange, EuroNext, Amsterdam, CBOT Metals Complex, Tokyo Futures Exchange, probably a couple of others) run on Linux (a relatively recent change from Sun boxen). NYSE now owns that codebase, and I'm pretty sure that the NYSE uses Linux and AIX on its own platform.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange's GLOBEX trading engine (running CME, CBOT non-Metals, NYMEX plus a couple smaller exchanges like Minneapolis and Kansas City) platform runs on Linux. They migrated from Solaris to Red Hat back in 2004.
The Intercontinental Exchange's WebICE platform is written in Java and I believe it's running on Linux, but there may be some Solaris still around.
The CBOEdirect system is Java but runs mostly on Sun Enterprise hardware. There is some Linux in the mix, and they certainly use it on some of their other trading systems.
In the (futures and options) trading world, running on Windows servers is considered to be a sure sign of being bush-league. Demand for UNIX/Linux is huge. And I'm not saying this as a Java/UNIX/Linux snob - most of the systems I've written were Microsoft-based (for a variety of reasons - most started out as technology demonstrations that grew way beyond their intended lifespan - "the client's always right").
What can help is "Pot-in-pot" refrigerators. Two nesting unglazed ceramic pots, separated by wet sand and covered with a wet towel, will keep the interior cold enough thru evaporative cooling to keep vegetables fresh for up to two weeks.