I used to live on the Big Island in the 90's and I am familiar with the geothermal issues there. What sets the Hawaiian geothermal project apart from other geothermal projects are the toxic volcanic fumes from Hawaiian's volcano in close proximity to inhabited areas. The biggest concern is should there be any leaks (of which there was much paranoia of under-reporting) then a toxic cloud would envelope various inhabited areas in the Puna District. There was also some concerns about how such a massive amount of energy would be used on the Island and how it may transform it from relatively clean farms (of which many were organic or permaculture) and ranchlands to an industrial polluting environment.
We had a bumper crop not only of acorns, but also of hickory nuts. I have 3 full bags of de-husked Mockernuts that I am squirreling away. Earlier in the season I picked up a bunch of large acorns from some chestnut oak trees. Even though they are from the white oak family, the acorns seemed way more bitter than those from my blackjack oaks (red oak family.) It is a shame too, because I had visions of turning them into some nice flour, but my early attempts do not fare very well.
It is a brilliant idea, and I think it is a disruptive one in that it allows all of those who are aware of the problem to take immediate action. The nice thing about solar is that it is at its most efficient during the most energy intensive times, hot summer days.
The gist of the program is that they will buy, install and maintain a solar electric system for your home. You then sign a contract and agree to pay them for the electricity generated by the solar system. You can sign a contract for 1, 5, 10 or 25 years and you get a fixed rate per Kilowatt throughout the contract period that is your current rate off the grid at the time of sign-up. So if you are currently paying 10 cents a Kilowatt when you sign up for a 25 year contract, then that price is fixed for 25 years.
The beauty of this program is that it allows any homeowner to have a solar system without the huge upfront costs. You will need to continue service with your current electric company as this is a grid-tied system (no batteries). You will need to be in a state that has a net-metering law for it to be of any use (as they will include enough panels to feed the grid during sunny days and then you can draw back your energy credits at night off the grid.) Even though it is possible that you will not be paying any more money to your local electric company for electricity, you may still be charged a monthly connect fee. You will also need to make sure that your homeowners insurance covers the solar system as they will not be responsible for damages such as a tree limb falling on the panels.
Overall, I looked at the program and was quite impressed how consumer friendly it was. I am always looking for the "catch" and I could not really find it. They require a $500 deposit and will only dock you the deposit if you decide to break the contract (as long as you allow them to recover their system and it is in good condition.) They will maintain the system and keep it in good repair throughout the contract like one would expect from a power company. They will even add more panels to your system or subtract panels from your system based on your changing energy needs.
I was pretty impressed, and if they can get enough product together as well as the infrastructure to pull this off, I can see the majority of whole neighborhoods going with this plan. Instant carbon neutrality.
I live in a suburb of Birmingham and I feel that this is overstated. I don't even feel the need to lock my door here, I often can bring my bike inside of grocery stores and leave it unlocked, etc. I generally practice a low-level type of security with my stuff. There are some sections of town though that are dangerous, but it is that way in most cities.
So Hotmail wants to reject my email because I don't use MS servers.... Well, I can have our servers reject hotmail users also and in the rejection notice will be found the following message:
HOTMAIL USERS: All hotmail accounts are now automatically rejected. Since Hotmail automatically rejects any email sent from any server that does not use a Microsoft protocol, they have broken email communications and we cannot communicate with you. If you wish to communicate with anyone at this host, please use a different email provider.
PClinuxOS has done just that. It is a live-cd that is installable and generally is a bit more up to date than Mandrake. http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/inde x.html
This project was started by Texstar who used to supply updated rpms for Mandrake (such as the latest kde) when the official Mandrake community did not.
It has those parts of Mandrake that I liked (such as unified menus, which allows you to use whatever window manager that you wish and still have the same menu structure) and ditches those things I did not like (such as 6 month release schedule... I am glad to see that they are moving it to a yearly schedule as long as that means that their yearly release is actually stable.)
both ubuntu and pclinuxos.81a does lvm2. pclinuxos.81a actually maps the lvm drives into fstab but has a bug that identifies all lvm filesystems as ext2, so you would probably want to edit/etc/fstab and put in the correct filesystem for each lvm2 partition.
According to Sitchin's interpretation of the Sumarian texts. This is not unlike how humans were created by the gods. In a feat of genetic engineering by Enki (whose symbol was the intertwining snakes that are used as the symbol of medicine now and looks similar to the DNA helix,) and his half-sister Ninharsag, they created a new creature by mixing the genes of the gods and a terrestial creature (proto-human) to create a new species with dexterity but not so much smarts to use as slave labor in the mines.
Further mixing of the genes led to the current race of humans. If there is truth to this, it would explain why there is no "missing link" and would bridge the gap between evolution and creationism. But I agree with the above poster that human attempts at gene mixing with other animals would most likely be turned into a slave race (not too much different than the way we use mules).
I posit that despite much progress, we have still not risen above slave class to the gods.
This could be very interesting in that there are rumblings that the "tail" of a comet may not actually be melting ice, etc (the dirty snowball model that is the current accepted theory). James McCanney has an interesting theory called the Plasma Discharge Comet Model.
From the website http://www.usinternet.com/users/jmccanney/
"The work showed among other things that comets were not dirty snow balls sublimating (vaporizing) in the solar environment, but were a complex plasma discharge interaction involving an asteroidal comet nucleus with the "solar capacitor", the capacitor being the result of a differential flow in the solar wind of high energy particles leaving the sun. The balance of charge in the solar system and a myriad of of other previously unknown effects were predicted by the theory, including the existence of an electron sheet arriving from the sun at a cometary nucleus and resulting x-rays. Only recently have these been verified by observation. The new comet theory also explained that the tail matter was not moving away from the comet nucleus, but was being drawn in by electrical forces millions of times more powerful than gravity or solar wind forces alone. Essentially a comet was now seen as a huge "cosmic vacuum cleaner". Comets were being captured into the solar system by the existing planets and the comet "tail drag" helped to circularize their orbits. Many commonly stated beliefs regarding the nature of the solar system were being dispelled with more subtle explanations. "
The implications of this theory are intriguing as it may explain how Mars lost its atmosphere as well as such bizarre things as the LaBrea tar pits and all of the trapped creatures in it. (Under this theory a larger body can pull elements from a smaller body if it gets close enough such that things such as oil may not be decomposed dinosaurs, but instead gets "rained" down when a smaller planetary body moves close enough).
Isn't this the core of their security issues also? My understanding is that the reason MS's OS is such a constant security risk is because of the intended security holes created by making Office interact seamlessly with the OS.
> can it access my TCPIP networked printer easily? > are there suitable printer drivers? > can it access my companies Windows NT shares? > can it authenticate to Windows networks? > will it talk to exchange?
my experience with knoppix:
- cups will work with most printers including tcp/ip printers. If there is another linux computer running a cups server with those printers already configured... then knoppix will pick up those printers without a need to install/configure them.
- you can access Windows NT shares via LinNeighborhood
- authenticating to windows networks is possible via samba, but not necessary to run a live-cd.
- you can access exchange in several ways, with the easiest being via a web browser... http://server/exchange other ways include imap and evolution or kmail, but that would require some configuration.
A Republican congressman owns a company that sells voting machines
The voting machines are closed source with no audit trail
The voting machines are easily manipulated by anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge of excel
untested and uncertified patches are known to have been placed on voting machines prior to elections
Republicans continue to defy odds and win elections that polls show them losing
---- This happened in Alabama in the latest election for our governor. Initial results showed that the incumbant democrat had won the election, then a last minute change in the figures from a district with a republican in charge of election certification swung the election to the Republican. There was no recourse for the democratic incumbant.
This could easily be skewed if professional athletes were part of the study. Professional athletes make outrageous amounts of money and almost all are tall. Even those that appear to be short on tv (compared to the other athletes) are often over 6 feet tall. It would not take too many athletes (with minimum salaries in triple digits) to totally skew the results.
Which is why I would keep it short with a not so subtle threat of sending the emails to the proper authorities for an extreme situation like this. It could be at the bottom of the text...like:
***WARNING*** If you are sending this email based on a forged email in alt.bestiality.whatever, ALL emails will be sent to the proper authorities and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
--------------- Unless the sender is a total idiot, they will most likely get the hint and not reply back. As far as family and friends, they are on the whitelist. I also think that there is a bypass function in there that you could give to people that you give your email address to.
For a situation like this, the best bet may be something like Tagged Message Delivery Agent (TMDA). In essence, it blocks all incoming email first. It has a whitelist (for email from people you know), a blacklist, and a reply form for the unknown.
In your case, a bestiality enthusiast would reply to your email. Instead of ending up in your email box, the sender would get an email from you confirming that they intended to send you an email (this blocks most unsolicited email since this email would end up at the forged email address), and you could put in an additional warning along the lines that any person replying to a forged post to bestiality.whatever will be turned over to the proper authorities.
You should then be unencumbered by any other such annoyance.
The simplest mutually beneficial aspect of a Debian/Mandrake blend would be to focus Debian (and its stability) for servers (taking advantage of Mandrake's wonderful server tools), while focusing Mandrake on desktops. Mandrake could strip alot of its server software from its iso's (but they could be uploaded through urpmi or apt), while Debian could strip away alot of the unnecessary desktop related features. What may come of this are two highly focused but slimmed down distros, each with a solid community backing them.
Any Mandrake user could install items from Debian's server and vice versa since they would have standardized the basic layout (hopefully more standardized than the LSB).
I find great humour in the rush to judgement on crackpotness. History is alive with crackpots such as Galileo's bizarre idea that the earth circled the sun. Everyone at that time knew that the sun and all planets circled the earth. It is quite obvious as the sun makes its circle around us everyday!
Other crackpots include Albert Einstein, who so infuriated the scientific community with his nonsense theories that a who's who list of prominent scientists of the day took out a full page ad in the New York Times (I believe) denouncing one of his theories (theory of relativity I believe).
True science is constantly challenged. The problem is that when theories become status quo they develop inertia by those established under those theories. Their adherence can be just as fanatical as any fundamentalist religion.
Most likely the extra expense that is brought into this study has nothing to do with maintaining a linux box (which in my experience takes far less of ones time than any windows box). I would bet that the extra expenses that made it appear that open source software was more expensive was because of the added uses of open source software, the fact that you can get into the source and make changes and adopt it to your needs. The fact that businesses that run linux may have more techs on hand may have more to do with the special needs of the companies and the adjustments that CAN be done with Linux.
a little history: Nibiru is the Sumerian term for this planet, which is estimated to have a 3,600 earth year cycle.
The Sumerians had a complete record of all of the known planets (including the recently discovered ones such as Uranus, Neptune and Pluto), they knew that Uranus and Neptune were watery planets and had been knocked on their side among other facts we are now rediscovering, and they even had a layout of our solar system before its current order when the earth was positioned where the current asteroid belt is located and pluto was a moon of saturn.
If this planetary body is indeed quickly shooting through our solar system again (some feel that it is really a red dwarf sun with satelites).
The last time it would have approached would have been around the time of the biblical exodus. During that time there were peculiar weather patterns and ecological imbalances that led to a plague of locusts, which in turn probably created the plague of frogs, etc. The parting of the red sea would make sense in terms of a tsunami. They were told to go to the edge of the Red Sea, as it receded they quickly crossed it and headed to the next mountain range. By the time the Egyptians came chasing after them, they got hit by the full force of the Tsunami.
Approx 3,600 years before the exodus would have been the time of the great flood (which has been recorded in multiple places around the globe and is not just limited to the middle east.)
The key to both of the above stories is that there was little warning before these huge events. The few voices of warnings were largely ignored or ridiculed.
One other curious fact. The symbol of this planet was similar to the winged globe common in Egypt. Check out this NASA SOHO picture of the sun in September http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/rea ltime/javag if/gifs/20020918_1842_c3.gif or http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q43E216D1 I thought this was a fraud until I downloaded it from NASA's site. You will find this type image throughout the region, not just in Egypt.
This is how I would handle it:
do a light internal audit by pooling all of your licenses in a common place.
Tag computers (red dot maybe) that are completely compliant. The easiest way would be to create a database containing the number of licenses owned of each piece of software and then go to each computer, see what is installed, and associate a license from the pool to that computer. Then tag it visably.
When you are done you will then have a list of completely compliant machines, and then a list of partially compliant machines. You can then either uninstall the software without the license on those machines or mark them with a black dot. If you have one or two non-crucial programs you might uninstall... if the programs are crucial for that department then you may decide to black dot them.
All Black Doted computers will be wiped and replaced with free, open source software. I would also try and get a department policy encouraging the use of the GPL for all software created at the university. The GPL has two distict advantages for college students. The first is that they are completely free to continue on and improve upon existing work with licensing fears. The 2nd being that they are given immediate credit for their work, and if they code well, they could be establishing a name for themselves while still in school. That is a tremendous advantage when shopping for positions after college. The taxpayers (who are the ones who provide for education) also benefit since their investment is returned to them in free, usable software.
One other advantage to this approach is that the university computer department can work with the other departments whose computers have been black doted to customize, and improve upon the free software they will use in those departments. During the transition stage, the computer department will get plenty of experience debugging while the departments with black doted computers will be getting software customized for their needs. In the long run, it will save the university quite a bundle (in time, money and hassle) as the customized black doted computer software becomes more mature, they will be able to retire more of the expensive, proprietary software instead of the expensive upgrade cycles.
I would not waste too much time and resources on the audit... I would instead:
- just pool all of the licenses in a central location
- create a database of them
- red dot all completely compliant computers
- black dot non-compliant ones
- wipe the black doted compuers and reinstall with free software
- involve the computer department in projects needed for the university and GPL the software created (this has the added benefit of allowing other universities and programmers in assisting with your projects)
This should help resolve the short term (audit) and long term (financial) software issues for your university.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to live on the Big Island in the 90's and I am familiar with the geothermal issues there. What sets the Hawaiian geothermal project apart from other geothermal projects are the toxic volcanic fumes from Hawaiian's volcano in close proximity to inhabited areas. The biggest concern is should there be any leaks (of which there was much paranoia of under-reporting) then a toxic cloud would envelope various inhabited areas in the Puna District. There was also some concerns about how such a massive amount of energy would be used on the Island and how it may transform it from relatively clean farms (of which many were organic or permaculture) and ranchlands to an industrial polluting environment.
We had a bumper crop not only of acorns, but also of hickory nuts. I have 3 full bags of de-husked Mockernuts that I am squirreling away. Earlier in the season I picked up a bunch of large acorns from some chestnut oak trees. Even though they are from the white oak family, the acorns seemed way more bitter than those from my blackjack oaks (red oak family.) It is a shame too, because I had visions of turning them into some nice flour, but my early attempts do not fare very well.
This is probably cause and affect. More acorns mean more deer grazing. More deer grazing mean more deer ticks left behind.
It is a brilliant idea, and I think it is a disruptive one in that it allows all of those who are aware of the problem to take immediate action. The nice thing about solar is that it is at its most efficient during the most energy intensive times, hot summer days.
You might want to check out the REnU program at Citizenre, http://renu.citizenre.com/
The gist of the program is that they will buy, install and maintain a solar electric system for your home. You then sign a contract and agree to pay them for the electricity generated by the solar system. You can sign a contract for 1, 5, 10 or 25 years and you get a fixed rate per Kilowatt throughout the contract period that is your current rate off the grid at the time of sign-up. So if you are currently paying 10 cents a Kilowatt when you sign up for a 25 year contract, then that price is fixed for 25 years.
The beauty of this program is that it allows any homeowner to have a solar system without the huge upfront costs. You will need to continue service with your current electric company as this is a grid-tied system (no batteries). You will need to be in a state that has a net-metering law for it to be of any use (as they will include enough panels to feed the grid during sunny days and then you can draw back your energy credits at night off the grid.) Even though it is possible that you will not be paying any more money to your local electric company for electricity, you may still be charged a monthly connect fee. You will also need to make sure that your homeowners insurance covers the solar system as they will not be responsible for damages such as a tree limb falling on the panels.
Overall, I looked at the program and was quite impressed how consumer friendly it was. I am always looking for the "catch" and I could not really find it. They require a $500 deposit and will only dock you the deposit if you decide to break the contract (as long as you allow them to recover their system and it is in good condition.) They will maintain the system and keep it in good repair throughout the contract like one would expect from a power company. They will even add more panels to your system or subtract panels from your system based on your changing energy needs.
I was pretty impressed, and if they can get enough product together as well as the infrastructure to pull this off, I can see the majority of whole neighborhoods going with this plan. Instant carbon neutrality.
Could you give examples. I am unaware of this....
I live in a suburb of Birmingham and I feel that this is overstated. I don't even feel the need to lock my door here, I often can bring my bike inside of grocery stores and leave it unlocked, etc. I generally practice a low-level type of security with my stuff. There are some sections of town though that are dangerous, but it is that way in most cities.
So Hotmail wants to reject my email because I don't use MS servers.... Well, I can have our servers reject hotmail users also and in the rejection notice will be found the following message:
HOTMAIL USERS:
All hotmail accounts are now automatically rejected. Since Hotmail automatically rejects any email sent from any server that does not use a Microsoft protocol, they have broken email communications and we cannot communicate with you. If you wish to communicate with anyone at this host, please use a different email provider.
Mandriva ... isn't that for erectile dysfunction?
Is your man-thing a bit wee?
Has the drivah gone dormant?
done.
e x.html
PClinuxOS has done just that. It is a live-cd that is installable and generally is a bit more up to date than Mandrake.
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/ind
This project was started by Texstar who used to supply updated rpms for Mandrake (such as the latest kde) when the official Mandrake community did not.
It has those parts of Mandrake that I liked (such as unified menus, which allows you to use whatever window manager that you wish and still have the same menu structure) and ditches those things I did not like (such as 6 month release schedule... I am glad to see that they are moving it to a yearly schedule as long as that means that their yearly release is actually stable.)
both ubuntu and pclinuxos .81a does lvm2. pclinuxos .81a actually maps the lvm drives into fstab but has a bug that identifies all lvm filesystems as ext2, so you would probably want to edit /etc/fstab and put in the correct filesystem for each lvm2 partition.
According to Sitchin's interpretation of the Sumarian texts. This is not unlike how humans were created by the gods. In a feat of genetic engineering by Enki (whose symbol was the intertwining snakes that are used as the symbol of medicine now and looks similar to the DNA helix,) and his half-sister Ninharsag, they created a new creature by mixing the genes of the gods and a terrestial creature (proto-human) to create a new species with dexterity but not so much smarts to use as slave labor in the mines.
Further mixing of the genes led to the current race of humans. If there is truth to this, it would explain why there is no "missing link" and would bridge the gap between evolution and creationism. But I agree with the above poster that human attempts at gene mixing with other animals would most likely be turned into a slave race (not too much different than the way we use mules).
I posit that despite much progress, we have still not risen above slave class to the gods.
This could be very interesting in that there are rumblings that the "tail" of a comet may not actually be melting ice, etc (the dirty snowball model that is the current accepted theory). James McCanney has an interesting theory called the Plasma Discharge Comet Model.
From the website http://www.usinternet.com/users/jmccanney/
"The work showed among other things that comets were not dirty snow balls sublimating (vaporizing) in the solar environment, but were a complex plasma discharge interaction involving an asteroidal comet nucleus with the "solar capacitor", the capacitor being the result of a differential flow in the solar wind of high energy particles leaving the sun. The balance of charge in the solar system and a myriad of of other previously unknown effects were predicted by the theory, including the existence of an electron sheet arriving from the sun at a cometary nucleus and resulting x-rays. Only recently have these been verified by observation. The new comet theory also explained that the tail matter was not moving away from the comet nucleus, but was being drawn in by electrical forces millions of times more powerful than gravity or solar wind forces alone. Essentially a comet was now seen as a huge "cosmic vacuum cleaner". Comets were being captured into the solar system by the existing planets and the comet "tail drag" helped to circularize their orbits. Many commonly stated beliefs regarding the nature of the solar system were being dispelled with more subtle explanations. "
The implications of this theory are intriguing as it may explain how Mars lost its atmosphere as well as such bizarre things as the LaBrea tar pits and all of the trapped creatures in it. (Under this theory a larger body can pull elements from a smaller body if it gets close enough such that things such as oil may not be decomposed dinosaurs, but instead gets "rained" down when a smaller planetary body moves close enough).
Interesting stuff.
Isn't this the core of their security issues also?
My understanding is that the reason MS's OS is such a constant security risk is because of the intended security holes created by making Office interact seamlessly with the OS.
> can it access my TCPIP networked printer easily?
> are there suitable printer drivers?
> can it access my companies Windows NT shares?
> can it authenticate to Windows networks?
> will it talk to exchange?
my experience with knoppix:
- cups will work with most printers including tcp/ip printers. If there is another linux computer running a cups server with those printers already configured... then knoppix will pick up those printers without a need to install/configure them.
- you can access Windows NT shares via LinNeighborhood
- authenticating to windows networks is possible via samba, but not necessary to run a live-cd.
- you can access exchange in several ways, with the easiest being via a web browser...
http://server/exchange
other ways include imap and evolution or kmail, but that would require some configuration.
Let's see if I have this right.
A Republican congressman owns a company that sells voting machines
The voting machines are closed source with no audit trail
The voting machines are easily manipulated by anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge of excel
untested and uncertified patches are known to have been placed on voting machines prior to elections
Republicans continue to defy odds and win elections that polls show them losing
----
This happened in Alabama in the latest election for our governor. Initial results showed that the incumbant democrat had won the election, then a last minute change in the figures from a district with a republican in charge of election certification swung the election to the Republican. There was no recourse for the democratic incumbant.
This could easily be skewed if professional athletes were part of the study. Professional athletes make outrageous amounts of money and almost all are tall. Even those that appear to be short on tv (compared to the other athletes) are often over 6 feet tall. It would not take too many athletes (with minimum salaries in triple digits) to totally skew the results.
Which is why I would keep it short with a not so subtle threat of sending the emails to the proper authorities for an extreme situation like this. It could be at the bottom of the text...like:
***WARNING***
If you are sending this email based on a forged email in alt.bestiality.whatever, ALL emails will be sent to the proper authorities and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
---------------
Unless the sender is a total idiot, they will most likely get the hint and not reply back. As far as family and friends, they are on the whitelist. I also think that there is a bypass function in there that you could give to people that you give your email address to.
For a situation like this, the best bet may be something like Tagged Message Delivery Agent (TMDA). In essence, it blocks all incoming email first. It has a whitelist (for email from people you know), a blacklist, and a reply form for the unknown.
In your case, a bestiality enthusiast would reply to your email. Instead of ending up in your email box, the sender would get an email from you confirming that they intended to send you an email (this blocks most unsolicited email since this email would end up at the forged email address), and you could put in an additional warning along the lines that any person replying to a forged post to bestiality.whatever will be turned over to the proper authorities.
You should then be unencumbered by any other such annoyance.
TMDA can be found at http://tmda.net/
The simplest mutually beneficial aspect of a Debian/Mandrake blend would be to focus Debian (and its stability) for servers (taking advantage of Mandrake's wonderful server tools), while focusing Mandrake on desktops. Mandrake could strip alot of its server software from its iso's (but they could be uploaded through urpmi or apt), while Debian could strip away alot of the unnecessary desktop related features. What may come of this are two highly focused but slimmed down distros, each with a solid community backing them.
Any Mandrake user could install items from Debian's server and vice versa since they would have standardized the basic layout (hopefully more standardized than the LSB).
I find great humour in the rush to judgement on crackpotness. History is alive with crackpots such as Galileo's bizarre idea that the earth circled the sun. Everyone at that time knew that the sun and all planets circled the earth. It is quite obvious as the sun makes its circle around us everyday!
Other crackpots include Albert Einstein, who so infuriated the scientific community with his nonsense theories that a who's who list of prominent scientists of the day took out a full page ad in the New York Times (I believe) denouncing one of his theories (theory of relativity I believe).
True science is constantly challenged. The problem is that when theories become status quo they develop inertia by those established under those theories. Their adherence can be just as fanatical as any fundamentalist religion.
Most likely the extra expense that is brought into this study has nothing to do with maintaining a linux box (which in my experience takes far less of ones time than any windows box). I would bet that the extra expenses that made it appear that open source software was more expensive was because of the added uses of open source software, the fact that you can get into the source and make changes and adopt it to your needs. The fact that businesses that run linux may have more techs on hand may have more to do with the special needs of the companies and the adjustments that CAN be done with Linux.
a little history:
a ltime/javag if/gifs/20020918_1842_c3.gif
Nibiru is the Sumerian term for this planet, which is estimated to have a 3,600 earth year cycle.
The Sumerians had a complete record of all of the known planets (including the recently discovered ones such as Uranus, Neptune and Pluto), they knew that Uranus and Neptune were watery planets and had been knocked on their side among other facts we are now rediscovering, and they even had a layout of our solar system before its current order when the earth was positioned where the current asteroid belt is located and pluto was a moon of saturn.
If this planetary body is indeed quickly shooting through our solar system again (some feel that it is really a red dwarf sun with satelites).
The last time it would have approached would have been around the time of the biblical exodus. During that time there were peculiar weather patterns and ecological imbalances that led to a plague of locusts, which in turn probably created the plague of frogs, etc. The parting of the red sea would make sense in terms of a tsunami. They were told to go to the edge of the Red Sea, as it receded they quickly crossed it and headed to the next mountain range. By the time the Egyptians came chasing after them, they got hit by the full force of the Tsunami.
Approx 3,600 years before the exodus would have been the time of the great flood (which has been recorded in multiple places around the globe and is not just limited to the middle east.)
The key to both of the above stories is that there was little warning before these huge events. The few voices of warnings were largely ignored or ridiculed.
One other curious fact. The symbol of this planet was similar to the winged globe common in Egypt. Check out this NASA SOHO picture of the sun in September
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/re
or
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q43E216D1
I thought this was a fraud until I downloaded it from NASA's site. You will find this type image throughout the region, not just in Egypt.
This is how I would handle it: do a light internal audit by pooling all of your licenses in a common place. Tag computers (red dot maybe) that are completely compliant. The easiest way would be to create a database containing the number of licenses owned of each piece of software and then go to each computer, see what is installed, and associate a license from the pool to that computer. Then tag it visably. When you are done you will then have a list of completely compliant machines, and then a list of partially compliant machines. You can then either uninstall the software without the license on those machines or mark them with a black dot. If you have one or two non-crucial programs you might uninstall... if the programs are crucial for that department then you may decide to black dot them. All Black Doted computers will be wiped and replaced with free, open source software. I would also try and get a department policy encouraging the use of the GPL for all software created at the university. The GPL has two distict advantages for college students. The first is that they are completely free to continue on and improve upon existing work with licensing fears. The 2nd being that they are given immediate credit for their work, and if they code well, they could be establishing a name for themselves while still in school. That is a tremendous advantage when shopping for positions after college. The taxpayers (who are the ones who provide for education) also benefit since their investment is returned to them in free, usable software. One other advantage to this approach is that the university computer department can work with the other departments whose computers have been black doted to customize, and improve upon the free software they will use in those departments. During the transition stage, the computer department will get plenty of experience debugging while the departments with black doted computers will be getting software customized for their needs. In the long run, it will save the university quite a bundle (in time, money and hassle) as the customized black doted computer software becomes more mature, they will be able to retire more of the expensive, proprietary software instead of the expensive upgrade cycles. I would not waste too much time and resources on the audit... I would instead: - just pool all of the licenses in a central location - create a database of them - red dot all completely compliant computers - black dot non-compliant ones - wipe the black doted compuers and reinstall with free software - involve the computer department in projects needed for the university and GPL the software created (this has the added benefit of allowing other universities and programmers in assisting with your projects) This should help resolve the short term (audit) and long term (financial) software issues for your university.