So they didn't just rock up to one tower and find 5 people with leukemia rather than 3....they found this at 10 different locations, which starts to lower the chances of 'clumping' skewing results. It's pretty pointless us arguing over details when we're getting these from a Wired article of all places...
Oops...gotta watch that. What they probably did was pool data from ten different locations. I'd put money on there being some transmitters with a higher local incidence of leukemia and some with lower.
The journal in question--though peer-reviewed--isn't exactly one of the major publications in its field. Unfortunately, I don't have access to that particular article at the moment, so I can't examine the authors' specific claims.
I also note the use of the word 'substantially' to describe the apparent effect of the towers on leukemia rates. As a scientist, I key on that--it may be an editorial choice, or it may be that the word 'significantly' is deliberately omitted. The increase, though measurable, may still be small enough to be plausibly attributed to clustering--or bordering on statistical significance through the use of carefully drawn borders and generous statistical tests.
I agree with the parent wholeheartedly on the scientific merit of Wired articles, however. Claims are regularly overstated, distorted, or flat-out wrong. Read the actual paper, then consult an epidemiologist and a statistician.
But don't worry, even if a study or three come out demonstrating a link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer risk, the EPA will sweep it under the rug when Infinity Broadcasting supresses the evidence under the Bush Administration's Data Quality Act.
Actually, a study or three demonstrating a statistically significant link between nonionizing radiation and cancer is exactly what I would expect, even in the absence of real harmful effects.
This is epidemiology--hardcore statistics. When determining the risk associated with some factor, you can never be entirely certain that the effects you see are 'real', and not just due to random clustering. Toss a coin ten times--you'd expect to get heads five or so times, but occasionally (1 time in about a thousand) you'll see ten heads in a row.
By making (generally reasonable) assumptions about the nature of the randomness in the data, scientists and epidemiologists tend to come up with one or more measures of how likely an apparent result is to be genuinely significant. Generally, a result is taken to be 'real' if there is less than a 5% chance that the result is the result of noise (a P value of less than 0.05). Alternately, a study may state an odds ratio and 95% confidence interval ("If you take drug foostatin you are 1.7 times more likely to have symptom bar (95% CI 1.4 to 1.95)") denoting that the relative risk is 95% likely to fall in the stated interval.
Under those circumstances, if the scientists do everything correctly, and account for every possible confounding factor, and do all their math correctly...that still leaves as many as one study in every twenty potentially reaching the incorrect conclusion.
The journal in question here--The International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health--isn't exactly a top-flight journal, either. I'm not at work at the moment so I can't check their archives, but their impact factor is fairly low. (Down to 0.924 in 2002, declining steadily since 1997.) Yes, impact factor is by no means the only criterion by which a journal should be judged--but Nature they are not. Unfortunately, the Wired article refers to an 'upcoming' paper, so I can't get at the publication cited.
Looking at the other paper mentioned in the Wired article demonstrates that Wired can't be trusted to accurately report the findings of scientific papers, either. Wired says:
Two years ago an Italian study found death rates from leukemia increased dramatically for residents living within two miles of Vatican Radio's powerful array of transmitters in Rome.
The abstract of the original paper in the American Journal of Epidemiologysays: (in part, emphasis added)
...In the 10-km area around the station, with 49,656 residents (in 1991), leukemia mortality among adults (aged >14 years; 40 cases) in 1987-1998 and childhood leukemia incidence (
eight cases) in 1987-1999 were evaluated. The risk of childhood leukemia was higher than expected for the distance up to 6 km from the radio station (standardized incidence rate = 2.2, 95% confidence interval: 1.0, 4.1), and there was a significant decline in risk with increasing distance both for male mortality (p = 0.03) and for childhood leukemia (p = 0.036). The study has limitations because of the small number of cases and the lack of exposure data. Although the study adds evidence of an excess of leukemia in a population living near high-power radio transmitters, no causal implication can be drawn. There is still insufficient scientific knowledge, and new epidemiologic studies are needed to c
Rather have them say "Central Processing Unit's" or "MPEG, Layer 3's"? Oh, I know, "Moving Picture Expert Group, Audio Compression Level 3 files"!
Dude...you totally missed the point...
ATM's? Are they also bad?
Yes. Horrifying.
The acronym is treated as a word because many people only know it as such.
The problem is not with treating the abbreviation as a word. The problem is with forming the plural by adding an apostrophe before the 's'. There should be only an 's' to form a plural. Writing "I have two CPU's" to indicate a plural is just as wrong as writing "I have two cat's". (It leaves the reader wondering, "You have two cat's...what? Two cat's ears?")
If the intent is to form the possessive adjective, there's nothing wrong with "CPU's". For example, "This CPU's heatsink is loose" is a perfectly valid usage.
Mind you, there are exceptions for proper nouns, but it's typically when the "The" is part of the name. For example:
I went to The Limited.
I am staying at The Crown Plaza.
On the other hand, when talking about certain other places, the 'the' remains uncapitalized:
I stayed at my cabin in the Adirondacks.
I went climbing in the Rockies.
I sailed down the Mississippi River.
I drowned in the Pacific Ocean.
While I was in London, I rode the Tube.
There are examples on both sides--the use of the definite article with 'the Internet' certainly doesn't rule out 'Internet' being a proper noun.
Solar energy is not reliable, anything less than clear sky and the system isn't running efficently. Photovoltaic energy has expensive delicate solar panels you have to protect. Photothermal has huge arrays of mirrors you have to maintain and protect. Unless you are in a desert or Arizona there's not much hope for solar.
On the other hand, solar tends to provide you with electricity when you really need it. Electricity demand goes up during the day and falls roughly with the sun. Demand is highest in the summer--witness last year's blackout--because millions of people are running air conditioners on sunny days.
Yeah, solar is too expensive right now, except for certain niche markets. (My grandparents' cottage actually runs on photovoltaic panels, because it would cost about thirty grand to connect them to the grid.) It's rather a chicken and egg problem--solar panels will get cheaper when people buy more panels, but people won't buy more panels until they get cheaper. Perhaps this is someplace where government subsidies (*gasp*) might be appropriate?
Arguing that photovoltaic panels are delicate is a bit of a red herring. Yes, I suppose they're moderately fragile, but so what? We have windows on our houses. We cover entire skyscrapers in glass. You might have to provide some cover for a panel array in the event of large hail, but beyond that I wouldn't be too worried. There's the added benefit of modularity. If I throw a rock at a panel, or even drive a truck into the edge of an array, I only take out a very small fraction of the total area. If one panel is damaged, it's the work of an hour for a guy to drive out and slap a new panel in place, and generation from the rest of the site stays up. Not only that, but you get an automatic twelve or so hours of downtime at night every night to do maintenance work.
What makes you think evildoers won't own any of these alternative energy sources? They have a vested interest in maintaining their position in the energy market, and if people swing towards alternative energy they are going to be involved.
Well yes--if the evildoers in question are the big energy companies, they will be involved, and they'll probably try to manipulate energy markets as they always have (*waves at Ken Lay*). With respect to evildoers in the Middle East, it's much more difficult to ship PV generated electricity here from Saudi Arabia or Iraq. Even if OPEC decides to build solar plants in Arizona, they're going to be working in U.S. territory under U.S. law. Mexico hasn't threatened to invade Texas for quite a while now, and it's fairly unlikely that California will try to annex Nevada. The region is stable, and nobody will have to drop any more bombs.
I completely agree that solar power isn't some sort of magic bullet that will solve all of our energy problems. No doubt the future will have a mix of energy sources, in the same way as we do now. It isn't anywhere near valid to write off solar because it isn't appropriate for all energy needs.
While I won't attempt to proffer all of the observations (probably labeled as "tinfoil hat theories" because neither political party wants to call them into question) I will point out a very human readable web page that highlights some of these issues in a phone call to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
Ouch. Readers should note that the linked report of the phone call--though presented in the form of a transcript--is actually an 'account' of the conversation. I fear that some editing may have taken place. Though I doubt there were any deliberate misstatements, I am concerned that the presented account may be a bit...slanted.
For what it's worth, even in the mocked-up transcript, the Federal Reserve PR flack seems to be very patient, and the 'interviewer' seems quite unwilling to speak to the Fed's legal experts to discuss points of constitutional law.
Well...yeah. Those windows are the same shape on both craft because that shape is quite strong. You don't have corners to concentrate stress--and those viewports are going to be experiencing some stress.
Both craft are dotted with them because a) you want the crew and cameras to be able to see lots of stuff, and b) it's easier to make several small windows without defects than it is to make one big wraparound window.
I'd say the resemblance between the two craft is superficial at best--they're very distant cousins, nothing more.
Not quite familiar with the ALA, but up here in Canada, my library rents out books. It has a couple of small shelves of hardcover new stuff that you'd get for roughly 2-3$ a week. Pretty fair. I'm sure they're paying whatever legal duties or price for those books to rent them out and you can legally read the new Steve King book without shelling out an arm and a leg.
This sounds unusual, and I should correct what are likely misconceptions.
First of all, public libraries in Canada are generally free to use, as they are in other civilized nations. In a few areas, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a creeping trend towards annual user fees and whatnot, but I'm hoping that gets stomped on.
Public libraries in Canada are underfunded, however--again, as they are in most other 'civilized' nations. Libraries look for alternate revenue streams. What the parent describes is an opportunity to check out that new bestseller now, rather than waiting for several months for interest to die down. In exchange for that privilege, you pay a small premium. For a lot of people, paying $2 for a week's loan is a much better deal than buying the hardcover for $30.
That extra revenue in part will go to ensuring that the library does have a stock of the current bestsellers, but part of it I'm sure also gets diverted to other library programs. Note that the vast majority of the circulating collection is still available without charge.
In my experience, the only people that are charged for using the regular collections of a public library are individuals visiting from out of town--there's usually a nominal fee, because they haven't already contributed through their local taxes.
That said, I happen to find it bloody interesting that the ALA is getting involved in the whole online/copyrighted scheme of things. This is a public organization, supported by public money (ie your tax dollars) that acquires a broad amount of copyrighted material (and at my local library it extends to music cd's, film, magazines etc) intended for free public consumption.
Actually, this shouldn't be surprising at all. In working with (acquiring, storing, distributing, reading) copyrighted works day in and day out, members of the ALA are subject matter experts on the effects of copyright law. The ALA regularly has to squarely face questions of both copyright law and the First Amendment. Medical associations regularly make statements to the public on issues of health, even in countries (like Canada) where health care is largely publicly funded--and they do it partly for similar reasons. Your doctor doesn't want you to hear about medicine only from a drug company.
How much copyrighted material do most of us deal with in any given day...or lifetime? The ALA includes public libraries, university libraries, various technical groups, and more. A large university collection can exceed ten million items, and include books; maps; newspapers; magazines; recordings of music and the spoken word on CD, audio tape, and LP; moving pictures on 8 mm tape, VHS and Beta cassettes, Laserdisc and DVD; journals in paper and electronic format...plus university librarians also have to deal with professors who want to use copyrighted material in their courses.
Librarians would have to be a lot dimmer than we give them credit for if the ALA were not to take an active interest in the impact of copyright law.
Why? Because it's redundant and it has led to widespread missunderstanding of fair use. You could strike that clause from the law and fair use would not change one wit! If you check the cogressional record when it was first passed they stated it was intended to reflect existing fair use, and that it was not intended to expand, restrict, or alter existing fair use in any way whatsoever!
Since Section 107 of the law describes fair use, many people have the mistaken impression that that law somehow grants, defines, and restricts fair use. They have the mistaken impression that fair use can be altered/restricted/eliminated simply by rewriting that law. That is incorrect. Fair use existed before that law existed, therefore it cannot be that law which created fair use.
Actually, the impression that fair use can be restricted, expanded, or altered by changing Section 107 is entirely correct.
Despite some recent bad law (*cough* DMCA *cough*), it is generally taken to be true that the concept of 'fair use' is a necessary and constitutionally implicit part of copyright. However, until the provisions of the 1976 Copyright Act were passed, the notion of what constituted 'fair use' was left entirely up to the courts. Beyond established case law, there were no hard and fast guidelines to aid an individual or corporation in determining what constituted acceptable and fair 'fair use'.
Through Section 107, Congress created a legal framework in which fair use was defined. Its aim was to describe fair use in a way that was acceptable both to Congress and to the courts, and provide a more formal structure to what has previously been a patchwork of rulings and debates. Until 1976 there was a legislative vacuum in that area, and the courts were left to make it up as they went along. Section 107 allowed Congress to at least shape that doctrine while still working within the bounds of the Constitution. (Incidentally, in some cases it may have expanded fair use, as well.)
You can damm well bet that if it were my family or close friend, I wouldn't not hesitate to do the same thing they did. Only a fool would fail to capitalize on whatever assets they have in order to stay alive.
Fair enough--but there remains a strong argument that a system that makes it possible to 'capitalize' on assets in this way is broken.
Historically, organs have gone to people who have (in the judgement of qualified medical practitioners) needed them most. Unfortunately, organs are now going to high profile cases and individuals who can afford a media blitz. Relatively few organs are being diverted at this point, but it's a worrying trend to all of us who either a) cannot afford a media campaign, or b) would feel ethically bound not to start one.
If your friends and family are wealthy enough to run a media campaign, have them start encouraging people to sign organ donor cards--before you get sick. Everybody wins.
No, very hot summers lead to power grid failures because environmentalist policies have blocked the construction of new power stations.
Actually, I thought that the private electricity cartels tended to restrict supplies to artificially increase prices. (See California, 2001.) Unreliable power infrastructure is the result of basic stinginess, laziness, and greed (see East Coast blackout, 2003) as well as poor regulation of the electricity market. Power is generated where it's cheapest, not where it is neeeded--consequently, the major transmission corridors on the grid carry a lot more current than they used to even a few years ago. Combine this with sloppy maintenance and monitoring of those corridors and you get last summer.
Just yesterday I received spam from this guy at cybersmtp.com, advertising they can send bulk emails out. Check this out...
Okay, either the parent poster means well but didn't think through his actions, or the mods have just been successfully astroturfed by a cybersmtp.com shill.
Congratulations--thousands of/.ers are now reading an ad for cybersmtp.com, and it's a much more targeted ad campaign than the original shotgun spam mailing. Dandy.
And what's the problem? That is COMPLETELY LEGAL. If you create problems for that other guy, maybe if his connection gets cut off from his ISP because of your complaint, YOU are responsible for the damage (false accusation)
Well, no.
If you report factual information only, you're in the clear. "There is someone who was connected through your ISP at IP address x.x.x.x at time xx:xx:xx who ran a full port scan on my system. It was kind of annoying. The full logs are attached. He didn't attempt to root our boxen, but could you keep an eye on this user, since this is unusual behaviour..."
The guy who was port scanning was doing it on the so-called public internet, using the resources of his ISP and the private server--and likely in contravention of most modern AUPs, too. The scanner therefore can't reasonably expect his actions to be confidential, at least with respect to informing the parties involved. Note that the statement outlined above contains no accusation of criminal behaviour, and only states that the actions are unusual--which is true: most users don't do full port scans of other people's servers. Consequently, the person making the report is protected from any sort of libel action.
Besides, if--as is quite likely, these days--the port scanning attempt came from a zombie, then the ISP and the rooted user probably do want to know about it.
I fail to see how scanning ports is akin to robbery. Actually a port scan by itself is a completely legitimate activity as it simply is querying what services are available.
True, port scanning in and of itself is not comparable to robbery. Rather, it is like casing the joint: trying the doors to see if they're locked; testing the windows (ahem) for a good seal; checking all the security cameras to see where they're pointed, or if they're turned on at all.
A business owner who saw someone doing that type of thing at their bricks and mortar presence might be a little suspicious. Sure, the 'port scanner' isn't doing anything illegal at the moment, but there are few applications for the information gathered that are legitimate. Most businesses (on- and offline) don't have much use or sympathy for freelance 'security consultants' providing convenient and unsolicited 'security audits' for them.
The individuals attempting to login as root are admittedly being decidedly unsubtle, and are probably relatively harmless due to their lack of skill. On the other hand, if there was a mentally deficient individual wandering the neighbourhood trying to pull open front doors on random homes...wouldn't you want someone to at least keep an eye on him, even if you did keep your own door locked?
I mean really, unless an attacker is DoSing your site due to resource issues I don't see how you can really conclude that the actions are malicious.
What conclusions, pray, should be drawn from multiple attempts to gain root access to someone else's boxen? The original poster also specifically asked for an appropriate message to send that didn't sound like a corporate cease & desist--he just wants a 'kid, stop rattling my doorknob' message, to make the point that the 'investigator' has crossed from your 'public' internet on to a decidedly 'private' server.
Maybe because they are smarter and are going where the money is?
Indeed. I'm a graduate student working out of a cancer center in a large teaching hospital. I did my undergrad in physics (another area where women are relatively poorly represented) and am now working in molecular biology.
I notice that I'm in a new building, surrounded by a tremendous amount of research money, in a field that is rapidly growing.
I am also surrounded by a lot of hot and geeky (those terms are not mutually exclusive!) women. Guys, if you're dead set on IT and CS but still want to have an attractive work environment, maybe a jump into bioinformatics is in order.
Jail should purely be about rehabilitation, and if it isn't about rehabilitation then we have a problem.
Actually, there are three major purposes to the prison system. Rehabilitation is indeed one of them. If a criminal can be made to see the error of his ways, then that's definitely a good thing. It's good for the criminal and it's good for society. Rehabilitation deserves more emphasis in a lot of cases.
On the other hand, there are other purposes, too. Retribution is indeed one of them. If someone has done something serious enough to warrant a prison term, then they (almost always) deserve to be punished. In general, this punishment takes the form of diminished freedom--restricted movement, limited contact with the outside. Retribution in the form of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse--though rampant in the prison system, and apparently condoned at many levels--has no place in the prisons of a civilized society.
Deterrence is the last. Some people lack the moral sense not to do things that they shouldn't. In at least some cases, saying "Don't do X or you'll go to jail" is the last resort for persuading these borderline sociopaths. Not that it always works--there will always be crimes of passion, and there will always be people who either feel they won't be caught, or who don't fear a prison term (I'm not going to mention Ken Lay here at all...).
Until a drivers license becomes more "legitimate" as a form of ID than a state-issued ID.
Two points--a driver's license is a state-issued ID, and also the grandparent post just indicated that he didn't drive, not that he didn't (or couldn't) hold a license.
Passports are also acceptable ID (except in establishments staffed by idiots), and always should be.
've always maintained that there's a big difference between driving fast and driving dangerously.
There's a difference between driving while male and driving dangerously.
There's a difference between driving while under the age of twenty-five and driving dangerously.
Nevertheless, most insurance companies have no qualms about charging all males and all young people higher rates, because of a greater statistical likelihood they will be involved in an accident. Presumably, this company has found a correlation between faster driving and increased accident claims, and therefore they feel that it is a reasonable criterion to examine in setting insurance rates.
I've always maintained that there's a big difference between driving fast and driving dangerously.
If this were true then an insurance company wouldn't be offering a discount for the people who don't drive fast.
Insurance rates aren't set randomly--they're set based on the average expected claims for a given combination of driver and vehicle (plus a percentage on top for the company). Presumably this company has done the research and found that there is indeed a correlation between lower speeds and reduced risk of accidents.
True, the correlation isn't perfect--there are some fast drivers who are not dangerous, and there are some dangerous drivers who don't drive fast. This measure must have some significant predictive value, though, or else an insurance company wouldn't try to adopt it. Remember, they work with statistics. If on average faster drivers are involved in more accidents or more expensive insurance claims than slow drivers, then it makes sense to them to provide a discount to drivers who seldom speed.
There is probably some engineering trick to work around this. It might be possible to use mirrors to shine on the opposite side of the sail. Almost surely wouldn't be as fast, but seems like it would be doable.
Who modded this funny? Essentially this exact idea has been proposed already. I don't have time to come up with a link, but here is the essence of the technique.
Picture a circular solar sail in two attached pieces: an inner circle and an outer ring. The whole assembly can be accelerated away from the Sun. When you want to stop, separate the two rings. Bow the outer ring inward just slightly, so that it reflects light on to the outward-facing surface of the inner circle.
Presto! The outer ring will continue to accelerate outwards--it's a one shot brake--but the inner ring slows down.
Looking stuff up online is a fairly recent practice. Has it saved lives, or encouraged a lazy attitude towards diagnosis?
It's not just used for diagnosis. Physicians also can refer to the internet for details and best practices with respect to treatment. (Obviously, they are mostly consulting with their colleagues and downloading peer-reviewed and medical association documents, rather than the Internet at large.) I do research at a large teaching hospital and cancer center (I am not an MD, just a scientist.) The protocols for treating virtually any cancer will change from year to year and sometimes from month to month, depending on the latest outcomes of clinical trials and what new drugs have come available. By speeding up the dissemination of this information, lives are definitely saved.
My family physician can probably recognize and deal with all common ailments, but what if I just got back from Africa or Hawaii? He probably doesn't see many cases of malaria. He probably doesn't know, off the top of his head, the best way to treat a delayed allergic reaction to a jellyfish sting. I'd much prefer he look up an article or two online--or email a colleague--than have him wing it (or pray that he has something useful in his dead tree library).
Although there are no doubt a few exceptions--there are lazy people in every field--I think giving doctors access to online information sources almost always means that they are better-informed and their knowledge more up-to-date than before.
...Which all boils down to the same conclusion that I reached in the grandparent post, albeit for very different reasons and by very different means: Taiwanese fab plants have no sensible reason to move to the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops...gotta watch that. What they probably did was pool data from ten different locations. I'd put money on there being some transmitters with a higher local incidence of leukemia and some with lower.
The journal in question--though peer-reviewed--isn't exactly one of the major publications in its field. Unfortunately, I don't have access to that particular article at the moment, so I can't examine the authors' specific claims.
I also note the use of the word 'substantially' to describe the apparent effect of the towers on leukemia rates. As a scientist, I key on that--it may be an editorial choice, or it may be that the word 'significantly' is deliberately omitted. The increase, though measurable, may still be small enough to be plausibly attributed to clustering--or bordering on statistical significance through the use of carefully drawn borders and generous statistical tests.
I agree with the parent wholeheartedly on the scientific merit of Wired articles, however. Claims are regularly overstated, distorted, or flat-out wrong. Read the actual paper, then consult an epidemiologist and a statistician.
Actually, a study or three demonstrating a statistically significant link between nonionizing radiation and cancer is exactly what I would expect, even in the absence of real harmful effects.
This is epidemiology--hardcore statistics. When determining the risk associated with some factor, you can never be entirely certain that the effects you see are 'real', and not just due to random clustering. Toss a coin ten times--you'd expect to get heads five or so times, but occasionally (1 time in about a thousand) you'll see ten heads in a row.
By making (generally reasonable) assumptions about the nature of the randomness in the data, scientists and epidemiologists tend to come up with one or more measures of how likely an apparent result is to be genuinely significant. Generally, a result is taken to be 'real' if there is less than a 5% chance that the result is the result of noise (a P value of less than 0.05). Alternately, a study may state an odds ratio and 95% confidence interval ("If you take drug foostatin you are 1.7 times more likely to have symptom bar (95% CI 1.4 to 1.95)") denoting that the relative risk is 95% likely to fall in the stated interval.
Under those circumstances, if the scientists do everything correctly, and account for every possible confounding factor, and do all their math correctly...that still leaves as many as one study in every twenty potentially reaching the incorrect conclusion.
The journal in question here--The International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health--isn't exactly a top-flight journal, either. I'm not at work at the moment so I can't check their archives, but their impact factor is fairly low. (Down to 0.924 in 2002, declining steadily since 1997.) Yes, impact factor is by no means the only criterion by which a journal should be judged--but Nature they are not. Unfortunately, the Wired article refers to an 'upcoming' paper, so I can't get at the publication cited.
Looking at the other paper mentioned in the Wired article demonstrates that Wired can't be trusted to accurately report the findings of scientific papers, either. Wired says:
The abstract of the original paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology says: (in part, emphasis added)
Dude...you totally missed the point...
ATM's? Are they also bad?
Yes. Horrifying.
The acronym is treated as a word because many people only know it as such.
The problem is not with treating the abbreviation as a word. The problem is with forming the plural by adding an apostrophe before the 's'. There should be only an 's' to form a plural. Writing "I have two CPU's" to indicate a plural is just as wrong as writing "I have two cat's". (It leaves the reader wondering, "You have two cat's...what? Two cat's ears?")
If the intent is to form the possessive adjective, there's nothing wrong with "CPU's". For example, "This CPU's heatsink is loose" is a perfectly valid usage.
On the other hand, solar tends to provide you with electricity when you really need it. Electricity demand goes up during the day and falls roughly with the sun. Demand is highest in the summer--witness last year's blackout--because millions of people are running air conditioners on sunny days.
Yeah, solar is too expensive right now, except for certain niche markets. (My grandparents' cottage actually runs on photovoltaic panels, because it would cost about thirty grand to connect them to the grid.) It's rather a chicken and egg problem--solar panels will get cheaper when people buy more panels, but people won't buy more panels until they get cheaper. Perhaps this is someplace where government subsidies (*gasp*) might be appropriate?
Arguing that photovoltaic panels are delicate is a bit of a red herring. Yes, I suppose they're moderately fragile, but so what? We have windows on our houses. We cover entire skyscrapers in glass. You might have to provide some cover for a panel array in the event of large hail, but beyond that I wouldn't be too worried. There's the added benefit of modularity. If I throw a rock at a panel, or even drive a truck into the edge of an array, I only take out a very small fraction of the total area. If one panel is damaged, it's the work of an hour for a guy to drive out and slap a new panel in place, and generation from the rest of the site stays up. Not only that, but you get an automatic twelve or so hours of downtime at night every night to do maintenance work.
What makes you think evildoers won't own any of these alternative energy sources? They have a vested interest in maintaining their position in the energy market, and if people swing towards alternative energy they are going to be involved.
Well yes--if the evildoers in question are the big energy companies, they will be involved, and they'll probably try to manipulate energy markets as they always have (*waves at Ken Lay*). With respect to evildoers in the Middle East, it's much more difficult to ship PV generated electricity here from Saudi Arabia or Iraq. Even if OPEC decides to build solar plants in Arizona, they're going to be working in U.S. territory under U.S. law. Mexico hasn't threatened to invade Texas for quite a while now, and it's fairly unlikely that California will try to annex Nevada. The region is stable, and nobody will have to drop any more bombs.
I completely agree that solar power isn't some sort of magic bullet that will solve all of our energy problems. No doubt the future will have a mix of energy sources, in the same way as we do now. It isn't anywhere near valid to write off solar because it isn't appropriate for all energy needs.
Ouch. Readers should note that the linked report of the phone call--though presented in the form of a transcript--is actually an 'account' of the conversation. I fear that some editing may have taken place. Though I doubt there were any deliberate misstatements, I am concerned that the presented account may be a bit...slanted.
For what it's worth, even in the mocked-up transcript, the Federal Reserve PR flack seems to be very patient, and the 'interviewer' seems quite unwilling to speak to the Fed's legal experts to discuss points of constitutional law.
Well...yeah. Those windows are the same shape on both craft because that shape is quite strong. You don't have corners to concentrate stress--and those viewports are going to be experiencing some stress.
Both craft are dotted with them because a) you want the crew and cameras to be able to see lots of stuff, and b) it's easier to make several small windows without defects than it is to make one big wraparound window.
I'd say the resemblance between the two craft is superficial at best--they're very distant cousins, nothing more.
This sounds unusual, and I should correct what are likely misconceptions.
First of all, public libraries in Canada are generally free to use, as they are in other civilized nations. In a few areas, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a creeping trend towards annual user fees and whatnot, but I'm hoping that gets stomped on.
Public libraries in Canada are underfunded, however--again, as they are in most other 'civilized' nations. Libraries look for alternate revenue streams. What the parent describes is an opportunity to check out that new bestseller now, rather than waiting for several months for interest to die down. In exchange for that privilege, you pay a small premium. For a lot of people, paying $2 for a week's loan is a much better deal than buying the hardcover for $30.
That extra revenue in part will go to ensuring that the library does have a stock of the current bestsellers, but part of it I'm sure also gets diverted to other library programs. Note that the vast majority of the circulating collection is still available without charge.
In my experience, the only people that are charged for using the regular collections of a public library are individuals visiting from out of town--there's usually a nominal fee, because they haven't already contributed through their local taxes.
That said, I happen to find it bloody interesting that the ALA is getting involved in the whole online/copyrighted scheme of things. This is a public organization, supported by public money (ie your tax dollars) that acquires a broad amount of copyrighted material (and at my local library it extends to music cd's, film, magazines etc) intended for free public consumption.
Actually, this shouldn't be surprising at all. In working with (acquiring, storing, distributing, reading) copyrighted works day in and day out, members of the ALA are subject matter experts on the effects of copyright law. The ALA regularly has to squarely face questions of both copyright law and the First Amendment. Medical associations regularly make statements to the public on issues of health, even in countries (like Canada) where health care is largely publicly funded--and they do it partly for similar reasons. Your doctor doesn't want you to hear about medicine only from a drug company.
How much copyrighted material do most of us deal with in any given day...or lifetime? The ALA includes public libraries, university libraries, various technical groups, and more. A large university collection can exceed ten million items, and include books; maps; newspapers; magazines; recordings of music and the spoken word on CD, audio tape, and LP; moving pictures on 8 mm tape, VHS and Beta cassettes, Laserdisc and DVD; journals in paper and electronic format...plus university librarians also have to deal with professors who want to use copyrighted material in their courses.
Librarians would have to be a lot dimmer than we give them credit for if the ALA were not to take an active interest in the impact of copyright law.
Despite some recent bad law (*cough* DMCA *cough*), it is generally taken to be true that the concept of 'fair use' is a necessary and constitutionally implicit part of copyright. However, until the provisions of the 1976 Copyright Act were passed, the notion of what constituted 'fair use' was left entirely up to the courts. Beyond established case law, there were no hard and fast guidelines to aid an individual or corporation in determining what constituted acceptable and fair 'fair use'.
Through Section 107, Congress created a legal framework in which fair use was defined. Its aim was to describe fair use in a way that was acceptable both to Congress and to the courts, and provide a more formal structure to what has previously been a patchwork of rulings and debates. Until 1976 there was a legislative vacuum in that area, and the courts were left to make it up as they went along. Section 107 allowed Congress to at least shape that doctrine while still working within the bounds of the Constitution. (Incidentally, in some cases it may have expanded fair use, as well.)
Fair enough--but there remains a strong argument that a system that makes it possible to 'capitalize' on assets in this way is broken.
Historically, organs have gone to people who have (in the judgement of qualified medical practitioners) needed them most. Unfortunately, organs are now going to high profile cases and individuals who can afford a media blitz. Relatively few organs are being diverted at this point, but it's a worrying trend to all of us who either a) cannot afford a media campaign, or b) would feel ethically bound not to start one.
If your friends and family are wealthy enough to run a media campaign, have them start encouraging people to sign organ donor cards--before you get sick. Everybody wins.
Actually, I thought that the private electricity cartels tended to restrict supplies to artificially increase prices. (See California, 2001.) Unreliable power infrastructure is the result of basic stinginess, laziness, and greed (see East Coast blackout, 2003) as well as poor regulation of the electricity market. Power is generated where it's cheapest, not where it is neeeded--consequently, the major transmission corridors on the grid carry a lot more current than they used to even a few years ago. Combine this with sloppy maintenance and monitoring of those corridors and you get last summer.
Netcraft confirms it.
Okay, either the parent poster means well but didn't think through his actions, or the mods have just been successfully astroturfed by a cybersmtp.com shill.
Congratulations--thousands of /.ers are now reading an ad for cybersmtp.com, and it's a much more targeted ad campaign than the original shotgun spam mailing. Dandy.
Well, no.
If you report factual information only, you're in the clear. "There is someone who was connected through your ISP at IP address x.x.x.x at time xx:xx:xx who ran a full port scan on my system. It was kind of annoying. The full logs are attached. He didn't attempt to root our boxen, but could you keep an eye on this user, since this is unusual behaviour..."
The guy who was port scanning was doing it on the so-called public internet, using the resources of his ISP and the private server--and likely in contravention of most modern AUPs, too. The scanner therefore can't reasonably expect his actions to be confidential, at least with respect to informing the parties involved. Note that the statement outlined above contains no accusation of criminal behaviour, and only states that the actions are unusual--which is true: most users don't do full port scans of other people's servers. Consequently, the person making the report is protected from any sort of libel action.
Besides, if--as is quite likely, these days--the port scanning attempt came from a zombie, then the ISP and the rooted user probably do want to know about it.
True, port scanning in and of itself is not comparable to robbery. Rather, it is like casing the joint: trying the doors to see if they're locked; testing the windows (ahem) for a good seal; checking all the security cameras to see where they're pointed, or if they're turned on at all.
A business owner who saw someone doing that type of thing at their bricks and mortar presence might be a little suspicious. Sure, the 'port scanner' isn't doing anything illegal at the moment, but there are few applications for the information gathered that are legitimate. Most businesses (on- and offline) don't have much use or sympathy for freelance 'security consultants' providing convenient and unsolicited 'security audits' for them.
The individuals attempting to login as root are admittedly being decidedly unsubtle, and are probably relatively harmless due to their lack of skill. On the other hand, if there was a mentally deficient individual wandering the neighbourhood trying to pull open front doors on random homes...wouldn't you want someone to at least keep an eye on him, even if you did keep your own door locked?
I mean really, unless an attacker is DoSing your site due to resource issues I don't see how you can really conclude that the actions are malicious.
What conclusions, pray, should be drawn from multiple attempts to gain root access to someone else's boxen? The original poster also specifically asked for an appropriate message to send that didn't sound like a corporate cease & desist--he just wants a 'kid, stop rattling my doorknob' message, to make the point that the 'investigator' has crossed from your 'public' internet on to a decidedly 'private' server.
Indeed. I'm a graduate student working out of a cancer center in a large teaching hospital. I did my undergrad in physics (another area where women are relatively poorly represented) and am now working in molecular biology.
I notice that I'm in a new building, surrounded by a tremendous amount of research money, in a field that is rapidly growing.
I am also surrounded by a lot of hot and geeky (those terms are not mutually exclusive!) women. Guys, if you're dead set on IT and CS but still want to have an attractive work environment, maybe a jump into bioinformatics is in order.
3?
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Actually, there are three major purposes to the prison system. Rehabilitation is indeed one of them. If a criminal can be made to see the error of his ways, then that's definitely a good thing. It's good for the criminal and it's good for society. Rehabilitation deserves more emphasis in a lot of cases.
On the other hand, there are other purposes, too. Retribution is indeed one of them. If someone has done something serious enough to warrant a prison term, then they (almost always) deserve to be punished. In general, this punishment takes the form of diminished freedom--restricted movement, limited contact with the outside. Retribution in the form of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse--though rampant in the prison system, and apparently condoned at many levels--has no place in the prisons of a civilized society.
Deterrence is the last. Some people lack the moral sense not to do things that they shouldn't. In at least some cases, saying "Don't do X or you'll go to jail" is the last resort for persuading these borderline sociopaths. Not that it always works--there will always be crimes of passion, and there will always be people who either feel they won't be caught, or who don't fear a prison term (I'm not going to mention Ken Lay here at all...).
Two points--a driver's license is a state-issued ID, and also the grandparent post just indicated that he didn't drive, not that he didn't (or couldn't) hold a license.
Passports are also acceptable ID (except in establishments staffed by idiots), and always should be.
There's a difference between driving while male and driving dangerously.
There's a difference between driving while under the age of twenty-five and driving dangerously.
Nevertheless, most insurance companies have no qualms about charging all males and all young people higher rates, because of a greater statistical likelihood they will be involved in an accident. Presumably, this company has found a correlation between faster driving and increased accident claims, and therefore they feel that it is a reasonable criterion to examine in setting insurance rates.
If this were true then an insurance company wouldn't be offering a discount for the people who don't drive fast.
Insurance rates aren't set randomly--they're set based on the average expected claims for a given combination of driver and vehicle (plus a percentage on top for the company). Presumably this company has done the research and found that there is indeed a correlation between lower speeds and reduced risk of accidents.
True, the correlation isn't perfect--there are some fast drivers who are not dangerous, and there are some dangerous drivers who don't drive fast. This measure must have some significant predictive value, though, or else an insurance company wouldn't try to adopt it. Remember, they work with statistics. If on average faster drivers are involved in more accidents or more expensive insurance claims than slow drivers, then it makes sense to them to provide a discount to drivers who seldom speed.
Who modded this funny? Essentially this exact idea has been proposed already. I don't have time to come up with a link, but here is the essence of the technique.
Picture a circular solar sail in two attached pieces: an inner circle and an outer ring. The whole assembly can be accelerated away from the Sun. When you want to stop, separate the two rings. Bow the outer ring inward just slightly, so that it reflects light on to the outward-facing surface of the inner circle.
Presto! The outer ring will continue to accelerate outwards--it's a one shot brake--but the inner ring slows down.
It's not just used for diagnosis. Physicians also can refer to the internet for details and best practices with respect to treatment. (Obviously, they are mostly consulting with their colleagues and downloading peer-reviewed and medical association documents, rather than the Internet at large.) I do research at a large teaching hospital and cancer center (I am not an MD, just a scientist.) The protocols for treating virtually any cancer will change from year to year and sometimes from month to month, depending on the latest outcomes of clinical trials and what new drugs have come available. By speeding up the dissemination of this information, lives are definitely saved.
My family physician can probably recognize and deal with all common ailments, but what if I just got back from Africa or Hawaii? He probably doesn't see many cases of malaria. He probably doesn't know, off the top of his head, the best way to treat a delayed allergic reaction to a jellyfish sting. I'd much prefer he look up an article or two online--or email a colleague--than have him wing it (or pray that he has something useful in his dead tree library).
Although there are no doubt a few exceptions--there are lazy people in every field--I think giving doctors access to online information sources almost always means that they are better-informed and their knowledge more up-to-date than before.
...Which all boils down to the same conclusion that I reached in the grandparent post, albeit for very different reasons and by very different means: Taiwanese fab plants have no sensible reason to move to the United States.