I understand what you're saying about industries fading away in the Russian far West, and I agree that Siberia probably isn't producing nearly as much air pollution as it used to. However, I wouldn't assume that the local pollution situation is getting better there. Read this account of how old chemical and nuclear waste storage areas are deteriorating and leaking. Mostly a local problem, I guess.
Also, I understand that most new oil production there is in the Arctic. We'll see how much of a mess that makes. I suspect that since the western oil companies are getting involved, that we won't see any deliberate pollution, but who knows. One of the big attractions of Russia for them is the lax attitude towards pollution. Certainly, they aren't interested in producing in Alaska, where they get not only high costs, but also bad publicity for even trivial spills.
I'm not surprised about the concentrations of pollution in Northern China and Siberia. The Soviets put quite a lot of industry in Siberia (why?) and it pollutes a lot. After all, the folks in Moscow were never going to smell it.
In Alaska, we often see a hazy sky, caused by pollution from Siberia and points east.
For the long term, we should probably be more worried about the Soviet nuclear waste the Soviets and now the Russians have accumulated in the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. Then there's the nuclear plants, two of them in Siberia, that we're down wind of. They were built by the same government which brought us Chernobyl.
If you're looking for things to worry about, you'll never run out.
Re:Another example of good documentation is R
on
Hibernate in Action
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· Score: 1
You're welcome.
At home, I'm using whatever version of LaTeX is on Debian testing. Here at work, I use MikTeX. I know that the Debian version handles the.ltx extension just fine, but I'm not sure about the windows version here at work.
The lower courts have disagreed, the **AA shysters say, so just maybe the Supremes will take it. Unfortunately, the anti-**AA decisions have come out of the NinthCircuit, the most overturned court of them all. If the Supremes do take this one, it might only be to slap down those wacky guys in California, and that would be bad.
More seriously, I'm not sure what they might do with this, but their recent Mickey Mouse decision doesn't make it look very encouraging.
Another example of good documentation is R
on
Hibernate in Action
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· Score: 1, Redundant
I think this just shows that AOL is a big company, and can hire lots of idiots with MBAs.
Anyone who is both willing and able to replace his browser isn't going to be interested in the AOL brand; that's notoriously for stupid grannies. In the windows world, only power users fiddle about with changing basic software like that, and power users have heard that there are modern browsers, like the new Netscape. What could AOL offer to make up for the shame of having their logo on your screen? Why, a skin for IE, of course! It is to laugh.
Then there's the question of why they use IE instead of Netscape. Either is free to them for the near future at least, neither is going to cause them big problems. I wonder if it was to take advantage of the fact that IEs dlls get loaded during bootup? Or maybe there is some quid pro quo expected from MS? Why would MS care?
This sounds like something that the insiders at MS might know about. Where are those Halloween document sources when you need them?
Did I complain about the review? I was asking ``So, why do I want to read this?'' about the book. You're right, I would never have known that it sucked if I hadn't read the review. Of course, I probably wouldn't have needed or cared to know, either.
The review says it's overblown and melodramatic, that the plot is needlessly contrived and somewhat thin, and the style is choppy, with lots of spelling and grammar errors.
I'll wait till I've finished reading all the good books before I start on the second string. I only have a few thousand of those good ones to go.
These are micro controllers, where 32 instead of 8 bits may not be an advantage. Even if they cost no more than the 8bit chip, they'll still have to have more transistors, and thus draw more power than an 8bit chip using the same technology. Since these will be going into embedded applications where power matters, even a little more current draw could be a big drawback.
If your application needs the extra capabilities that a 32 bit chip offers, this is a big deal, but if the old 8bit standby does the job an draws a few milliwatts less, you're better off sticking with the old fashioned, 8bit chip.
I think it's a little too early to say goodbye to 8bit microcontrollers.
Virginia is considering just such a measure, largely because several of the 9/11 hijackers were licensed there.... Proponents claim it would help law enforcement determine that you are who you claim to be and would make forgeries less common.
As I recall, the hijackers all had legitimate id in their own names. No fancy RFID chip is going to improve on that. Merely knowing who they are doesn't help a bit. Furthermore, if I were a known terrorist, I'd ask the government which was sponsoring and sheltering me to issue me a passport in some common name. Then when I got here, I could get a legitimate id in that name. The RFID would be great for that: everyone knows it's secure, so no one would doubt it.
I had to return an inspiron AC adapter because it was smoking, back around 1998. Had the same problem with a zip drive adapter about that time, too, come to think of it.
I wonder why it took them so long to get around to doing something about it? I guess that having equipment burst into flames (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit) dowsn't hurt sales.
Google has to do it, not make it work
on
Breaking Google's DRM
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Google has to do this, but they don't have to make it work.
They have to show the suits at the publishing houses that they are being responsible, safeguarding the suits' ``intellectual property''. It doesn't really matter whether it actually works, just as it doesn't really matter if the features in the checklist on the box of software work. It's a tool for the salesman to use.
If this feature exists but really doesn't work, then the suits get the illusion that their ``intellectual property'' is protected, and they get free advertising of the try-before-you-buy variety. For this best of all possible worlds scenario, it has to work well enough to fool the suits, but not well enough to stop the rest of us.
Sounds to me as if Google has gotten it to work just about well enough to do a good job for all concerned: Google, us readers, and even the suits.
do not ever attempt to turn the ignition all the way off... In most cases you will lose both your power steering and your power braking.
Losing power steering is not a problem if you're moving.
I had a '78 F150 (18-foot long pickup) with power steering. The power steering pump shattered one cold winter day, and I did without for a few weeks. With the power steering dead, it was almost impossible to turn the wheel, unless the truck was moving. Even at 20 miles per hour, steering was heavy but entirely adequate. At highway speeds, you hardly noticed that it was off. Parallel parking was a real problem, though.
Power brakes are nice, but you can still stop the car without them. You just push really hard. Furthermore, as another poster already pointed out, the vaccuum reservoir will give you two or three power-assisted brake applications, so just turn the engine off, depress the brake pedal, and don't let it up!
Make sure that you keep it at least on partially as most cars will not lose total power this way.
That doesn't match my experience. What I've found is that eithr the engine is turned on, and you have power assist, or it is off, and you don't. No in-between.
From the article: Are we putting too much trust in the increasing number of electronic systems that our lives depend upon?
Have to launch it and send it in the opposite direction of orbit for it to fall; but damn, in microgravity it shouldn't be that hard to come up with a spring loaded trash disposal system.....
For evey action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you change the orbit of the excrement, you also slightly change the orbit of the space station. Since there's a bit of atmospheric drag in that low orbit, that might be a good thing. De-orbiting the trash will tend to counter the drag which is slowing the space station.
So, we change orbits by flinging poo. We'll call it the monkey drive.
Hannibal had a huge army, equipped with all the latest weapons, including elephants. The answer is obvious: Hannibal crossed the Alps whenever he wanted to! And he wanted to in 218 BC.
You study history and the other humanities not because you want vocational training, but because you want an education. Therefore, people who have studied history usually wind up applying to be your boss, because they are educated, like a person, while you are trained, like a seal.
I am educated, but I also have a degree in engineering, so I know that there is a difference.
... you mean like ~detect~? Seems to have a wildcard function to me..
That's not wildcard, that's synonym searching. From the Google docs:
" ~" Searches
You may want to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. Indicate a search for both by placing the tilde sign ("~") immediately in front of the keyword.
For example, to search for food facts as well as nutrition and cooking information, use:
~food ~facts
Google does do wildcards, but only in quoted strings. They don't seem to have documented it on their website, but I've found it here, among other places.
Google search tip: wildcard word (*)
Google treats "*" as a wildcard meaning "any word". You can use it in phrases to:
Ignore unimportant words
* "all but * anything but" (vs, and)
* "shanked * jengaship" (my, your, his jengaship)
Fill in phrases where you don't know a word
* "phyllis * tam" pomona (a middle name)
* "the * family is my boss" (hard-to-understand song lyrics from a song in Office Space)
See how people have filled in expressions and jokes
* "185 * walk into a bar"
* "friends don't let friends * *" (*'s at the end just keep the phrases from being cut off in snippets.)
* "* is to * as * is to *"
Crudely "search by proximity"
* "The shareware version * 10 levels"
* "The shareware version * * 10 levels"
* "The shareware version * * * 10 levels"
It's pretty powerful, but it's only in what google calls a ``phrase search''.
Jerry Pournelle's blog is one of the oldest blogs on the web, and when it's politics season, he comments on that. Even when he's wrong, he's worth reading.
Yes indeed, it is. And unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials is... Follow this closely, now, it's tricky... unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. It's not theft at all. That's why there's a different law, with a different name.
Whats the difference between taking something that isn't yours and taking something that isn't yours.
The difference is that when it's theft, what the owner had is somehow diminished. When it's unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, the only thing which is diminished is the artificial monopoly the owner has been granted for a limited time. I'd say that's a huge, meaningful difference.
When you steal Joe's hamburger, you are better off, Joe is worse off, and the rest of us are unaffected. When you commit unauthorized distribution of Joe's copyrighted materials, Joe may or may not be worse off, you are better off, and so are the rest of us.
Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials is not always immoral (though, by definition, it's always illegal). If Joe has somehow violated the social contract which brought him the monopoly, that unauthorized distribution should be done by the government which granted the monopoly in the first place. There's no reason to think that's the case here, with Cisco's stuff, of course.
Still, we can't blame Microsoft for a lot of the instability since there are so many users out there using terrible and/or outdated drivers. Microsoft cannot be blamed for the quality of the drivers that most Windows users have because they didn't write them.
I'm not sure that I agree with that ``can't blame Microsoft'' stuff.
First of all, Linux and the *BSDs all write their own drivers, so to speak. If Microsoft can't do that, maybe they should change their business model, or get into another line of work. We do it free, while MS can't do it even though they're paid to? That's lame, to put the best possible face on it.
Second, if MS is going to rely entirely on third-party drivers, they need to ensure that bad drivers can't bugger the entire system. They seem to have failed in that. If Windows were sold as a hobby system, I could understand this cavalier approach, but MS claims that their systems are suitable for serious use. Their reliance on ``... terrible and/or outdated [third-party]drivers...'' belies that claim.
Oh, the horror! Oh, the shock! The MS marketing department lies to us! Who'd a thunk it?
But it will[not] happen because of the Publisher's closed nature and fierce legal protection, not because the Scribus team couldn't write it. Oh, that and the fact that even Publisher itself can't import its own files properly from version to version
I don't know if this is true for MS Publisher, but I can tell the world it's true for MS Word! Documents are paginated differently between different versions, and too often complex objects such as equations and pictures get buggered. I lost far too many hours to this before I gave up on wordprocessors.
It does mean that you don't want so much hassle from those nasty ignorant c**ts on the border.
I've talked to a number of Britains, and none of them have had anything good to say about our border scum, and most of them have had horror stories. The Indians, Africans, Chinese, Italians, Turks, et cetera I meet never seem to have the same kinds of problems that every Brit I've run into has faced.
What's up with you guys? Do you deliberately piss off the INS people? It's hard to believe that they'd all have a special hatred for the British, but that's what I've gathered from listening to Brit's tales.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I understand that most new oil production there is in the Arctic. We'll see how much of a mess that makes. I suspect that since the western oil companies are getting involved, that we won't see any deliberate pollution, but who knows. One of the big attractions of Russia for them is the lax attitude towards pollution. Certainly, they aren't interested in producing in Alaska, where they get not only high costs, but also bad publicity for even trivial spills.
In Alaska, we often see a hazy sky, caused by pollution from Siberia and points east.
For the long term, we should probably be more worried about the Soviet nuclear waste the Soviets and now the Russians have accumulated in the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. Then there's the nuclear plants, two of them in Siberia, that we're down wind of. They were built by the same government which brought us Chernobyl.
If you're looking for things to worry about, you'll never run out.
At home, I'm using whatever version of LaTeX is on Debian testing. Here at work, I use MikTeX. I know that the Debian version handles the .ltx extension just fine, but I'm not sure about the windows version here at work.
More seriously, I'm not sure what they might do with this, but their recent Mickey Mouse decision doesn't make it look very encouraging.
The program is GPLed, and shows that excellent documentation is possible, if enough people.
Anyone who is both willing and able to replace his browser isn't going to be interested in the AOL brand; that's notoriously for stupid grannies. In the windows world, only power users fiddle about with changing basic software like that, and power users have heard that there are modern browsers, like the new Netscape. What could AOL offer to make up for the shame of having their logo on your screen? Why, a skin for IE, of course! It is to laugh.
Then there's the question of why they use IE instead of Netscape. Either is free to them for the near future at least, neither is going to cause them big problems. I wonder if it was to take advantage of the fact that IEs dlls get loaded during bootup? Or maybe there is some quid pro quo expected from MS? Why would MS care?
This sounds like something that the insiders at MS might know about. Where are those Halloween document sources when you need them?
Good review, bad book.
I'll wait till I've finished reading all the good books before I start on the second string. I only have a few thousand of those good ones to go.
The acccessibility bit I can follow, but what about the deals with the U.S. government? That I don't get.
If your application needs the extra capabilities that a 32 bit chip offers, this is a big deal, but if the old 8bit standby does the job an draws a few milliwatts less, you're better off sticking with the old fashioned, 8bit chip.
I think it's a little too early to say goodbye to 8bit microcontrollers.
As I recall, the hijackers all had legitimate id in their own names. No fancy RFID chip is going to improve on that. Merely knowing who they are doesn't help a bit. Furthermore, if I were a known terrorist, I'd ask the government which was sponsoring and sheltering me to issue me a passport in some common name. Then when I got here, I could get a legitimate id in that name. The RFID would be great for that: everyone knows it's secure, so no one would doubt it.
I wonder why it took them so long to get around to doing something about it? I guess that having equipment burst into flames (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit) dowsn't hurt sales.
They have to show the suits at the publishing houses that they are being responsible, safeguarding the suits' ``intellectual property''. It doesn't really matter whether it actually works, just as it doesn't really matter if the features in the checklist on the box of software work. It's a tool for the salesman to use.
If this feature exists but really doesn't work, then the suits get the illusion that their ``intellectual property'' is protected, and they get free advertising of the try-before-you-buy variety. For this best of all possible worlds scenario, it has to work well enough to fool the suits, but not well enough to stop the rest of us.
Sounds to me as if Google has gotten it to work just about well enough to do a good job for all concerned: Google, us readers, and even the suits.
Losing power steering is not a problem if you're moving.
I had a '78 F150 (18-foot long pickup) with power steering. The power steering pump shattered one cold winter day, and I did without for a few weeks. With the power steering dead, it was almost impossible to turn the wheel, unless the truck was moving. Even at 20 miles per hour, steering was heavy but entirely adequate. At highway speeds, you hardly noticed that it was off. Parallel parking was a real problem, though.
Power brakes are nice, but you can still stop the car without them. You just push really hard. Furthermore, as another poster already pointed out, the vaccuum reservoir will give you two or three power-assisted brake applications, so just turn the engine off, depress the brake pedal, and don't let it up!
Make sure that you keep it at least on partially as most cars will not lose total power this way.
That doesn't match my experience. What I've found is that eithr the engine is turned on, and you have power assist, or it is off, and you don't. No in-between.
From the article:
Are we putting too much trust in the increasing number of electronic systems that our lives depend upon?
If you have to ask, the answer is yes.
For evey action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you change the orbit of the excrement, you also slightly change the orbit of the space station. Since there's a bit of atmospheric drag in that low orbit, that might be a good thing. De-orbiting the trash will tend to counter the drag which is slowing the space station.
So, we change orbits by flinging poo. We'll call it the monkey drive.
Hannibal had a huge army, equipped with all the latest weapons, including elephants. The answer is obvious: Hannibal crossed the Alps whenever he wanted to! And he wanted to in 218 BC.
You study history and the other humanities not because you want vocational training, but because you want an education. Therefore, people who have studied history usually wind up applying to be your boss, because they are educated, like a person, while you are trained, like a seal.
I am educated, but I also have a degree in engineering, so I know that there is a difference.
R is like SPLUS. If you _must_ have SPSS, look into PSPP.
That's not wildcard, that's synonym searching. From the Google docs:
Google does do wildcards, but only in quoted strings. They don't seem to have documented it on their website, but I've found it here, among other places. It's pretty powerful, but it's only in what google calls a ``phrase search''.Jerry Pournelle's blog is one of the oldest blogs on the web, and when it's politics season, he comments on that. Even when he's wrong, he's worth reading.
Yes indeed, it is. And unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials is ... Follow this closely, now, it's tricky ... unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. It's not theft at all. That's why there's a different law, with a different name.
Whats the difference between taking something that isn't yours and taking something that isn't yours.
The difference is that when it's theft, what the owner had is somehow diminished. When it's unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, the only thing which is diminished is the artificial monopoly the owner has been granted for a limited time. I'd say that's a huge, meaningful difference.
When you steal Joe's hamburger, you are better off, Joe is worse off, and the rest of us are unaffected. When you commit unauthorized distribution of Joe's copyrighted materials, Joe may or may not be worse off, you are better off, and so are the rest of us.
Unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials is not always immoral (though, by definition, it's always illegal). If Joe has somehow violated the social contract which brought him the monopoly, that unauthorized distribution should be done by the government which granted the monopoly in the first place. There's no reason to think that's the case here, with Cisco's stuff, of course.
I'm sure that organ sales would go a long way to make up the difference.
I'm not sure that I agree with that ``can't blame Microsoft'' stuff.
First of all, Linux and the *BSDs all write their own drivers, so to speak. If Microsoft can't do that, maybe they should change their business model, or get into another line of work. We do it free, while MS can't do it even though they're paid to? That's lame, to put the best possible face on it.
Second, if MS is going to rely entirely on third-party drivers, they need to ensure that bad drivers can't bugger the entire system. They seem to have failed in that. If Windows were sold as a hobby system, I could understand this cavalier approach, but MS claims that their systems are suitable for serious use. Their reliance on ``... terrible and/or outdated [third-party]drivers ...'' belies that claim.
Oh, the horror! Oh, the shock! The MS marketing department lies to us! Who'd a thunk it?
I don't know if this is true for MS Publisher, but I can tell the world it's true for MS Word! Documents are paginated differently between different versions, and too often complex objects such as equations and pictures get buggered. I lost far too many hours to this before I gave up on wordprocessors.
If you think that punctuation doesn't affect meaning, you are illiterate.
I've talked to a number of Britains, and none of them have had anything good to say about our border scum, and most of them have had horror stories. The Indians, Africans, Chinese, Italians, Turks, et cetera I meet never seem to have the same kinds of problems that every Brit I've run into has faced.
What's up with you guys? Do you deliberately piss off the INS people? It's hard to believe that they'd all have a special hatred for the British, but that's what I've gathered from listening to Brit's tales.