> much of what we expect from the modern Internet to customers' homes in 1983. > Online news, banking services, restaurant reviews, shopping, e-mail
With the exception of email, these are not the things that make the internet popular. Don't get me wrong: these things *are* popular on the internet, and once people get the internet they like having access to that stuff. But for most people who don't *have* the internet, those are not the important selling points (with, as I said, the exception of email -- and email only sells the internet to people whose relatives already have it). The big selling point is the ability to look up any information you should ever happen to need or want. That's the thing people who don't have the internet yet know about and want. That's the thing the internet had that the big national BBSes (Compuserve, AOL, etc.) lacked, which is why they were subsumed and/or obviated. You can look up *anything*.
People (usually) don't start wanting to shop and bank online until they've already been online long enough to be comfortable.
> Dear Linux community, you guys WANT to gain share...right? You WANT people to actually use Linux
Sure. I mean, not EVERYONE (replacing one monopoly with another is seldom a significant long-term improvement), but I definitely want *some* people to use it.
> Then why in the hell are you not getting behind ExpressGate/Splashtop?
Three reasons. 1. This is the first I've ever heard of either ExpressGate or Splashtop. 2. After bouncing around from distro to distro for a good while (including FreeBSD for a couple of years), I've now kind of settled down with Debian. I gave it a try again when Sarge came out, and it's been meeting my needs ever since. I don't have a reason to switch at this time. 3. Your description of the technology you are promoting doesn't make me want it. Quite the reverse.
Like most serious computer users, I routinely go months and months between reboots, so a fast boot option just isn't a very compelling feature. I mean, sure, if it doesn't have any negative consequences, I wouldn't *mind* having fast boot, but on the priority scale I'd rank it somewhere between a 3% performance improvement in Postgres and having relatime turned on by default. It's not something that's going to have me chomping at the bit to jump distros.
Battery life would only be meaningful if I were willing to suffer the agony of using a laptop, with its steaming heap of non-standard proprietary components and its one tiny little poor-quality screen and horrible little non-standard cramped non-tactile-feedback keyboard and deplorable performance characteristics and inadequate cooling and a case that's absolutely impossible to work in if you should ever happen to want to do any upgrades or repairs. I would rather wear naugahyde pants and cast iron socks than have to work with a laptop on a regular basis.
And then there's this: > EG has a top row of tabs where everything is VERY logically laid out, you got games, > video, audio, the appstore (yes they have an App store and its nice), and system.
I don't know how else to say it: this does not sound like a description of a system that would interest me.
nathan@donalbain:~$ ls -l `which vi` `which emacs` lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 Mar 24 2011/usr/bin/emacs ->/etc/alternatives/emacs lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Mar 24 2011/usr/bin/vi ->/etc/alternatives/vi nathan@donalbain:~$ ls -l/etc/alternatives/emacs/etc/alternatives/vi lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Mar 24 2011/etc/alternatives/emacs ->/usr/bin/emacs23-x lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Mar 24 2011/etc/alternatives/vi ->/usr/bin/vim.tiny nathan@donalbain:~$ ls -l/usr/bin/emacs23-x/usr/bin/vim.tiny -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6583560 Dec 11 2010/usr/bin/emacs23-x -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 632884 Jul 11 2010/usr/bin/vim.tiny nathan@donalbain:~$
Huh. Whaddaya know. vi wouldn't be bigger than Emacs even if you added a zero, and that's just the small portion that's written in C. Most of Emacs is written in lisp.
Does vi have a built-in mail and news reader? Does it come with a web browser, a spreadsheet, and a TeX-editing mode that can display what the results will look like in real time? Can the action that occurs when each individual key is pressed be fully customized and scripted by the user on a per-file-type basis and take syntactic context into account when deciding what to do? Does vi include its own shell, vshell, so that the output of in-editor scripted functions can be passed as command-line arguments to system commands and vice versa? Can you play zork and nethack in vi? Does vi ship with an Emacs mode just in case anyone should happen to want that for any reason?
No, it does not. vi users don't have any idea what the phrase "feature-complete" means. If you were building a house, it wouldn't have a bat cave or a waterpark in the basement or a helipad on the roof or an amusement park on the thirty-fourth floor or an industrial scale organic chem lab in the north wing. Heck, the vi house probably wouldn't even be capable of space flight.
Yes. (I have been known to (program in lisp (specifically, elisp (the variant used for customizing Emacs (the world's most feature-complete text editor (and the most feature-complete program of any kind for that matter)))) (from time to time (Why do you ask? (It's not some lame joke about parentheses is it? (Because, that would just be dumb.))))).)
Actually, I'm pretty sure the 120 years in that passage was the amount of time remaining until the deluge -- a one-time event.
Which (incidentally, not that this has anything to do with your point) happened within a year of when Methusaleh died. (You have to do a small amount of arithmetic to put this together, based on the ages of a Methusaleh and Lamech when their sons were born and Noah's age when the flood came.) Some theologians speculate that Methusaleh's name was prophetic, something along the lines of "he dies [and then] [it will be] sent", in reference to the flood. This is linguistically plausible, but the Bible doesn't actually say what his name means (and the name is far too succinct to be as clear as all that in the absence of additional clarification). For that matter, it doesn't even actually say whether he died right before the flood came or *because* of the flood; it only gives enough information to conclude that both events happened within a year of one another.
In any case, people who read that passage as a hard limit on maximum human lifespan are engaging in a practice we call "eisegesis" -- reading an interpretation _into_ the text rather than taking it for just what it says. Whether medical science in the current era will be able to extend human lifespan beyond 114 or 120 or any other arbitrary finite figure you care to name is an issue the Bible does not address.
It does say something about lifespans during the Millennium (see for example Isaiah 65), but that's a future era. Before that happens, there's to be (among other things) an earthquake so severe that cities and mountains and islands just plain cease to exist, worldwide (Rev. 16:17f). Ad interim, we don't really know what will happen to human lifespans in the immediate future, although I would tend to assume that people who make extremely grandiose claims (like, "the first person to live to 1000 has probably already been born) don't know either and are just making stuff up.
Influenza isn't even the illness most people call "the flu". (That's what medical people call "gastro-intestinal disease" or somesuch.) The actual influenza virus isn't dangerous at all. It doesn't, for example, make you puke until you're dehydrated. It doesn't even make you nauseated. It's pretty much just a cold: a case of the sniffles, some coughing, maybe some achy muscles for a couple of days, and possibly a headache. It's about as dangerous as a toy gun made out of a folded sheet of notebook paper.
The only way influenza could kill somebody would be if they were already most of the way dead -- standing with one foot in the grave and the other in a roller skate on a banana peel, as it were. In which case, influenza isn't actually the problem (*anything* can kill someone whose health is that bad; a papercut, for example, can be fatal if your immune system is completely shut down already) and immunizing against influenza wouldn't actually solve anything even if it WORKED, which it doesn't, because influenza mutates beyond the vaccine's ability to significantly protect against it every ten days or so.
I am generally very much in favor of vaccinations, but flu shots are completely pointless.
> For most of the Central U.S., the amount of water that comes in via rain > or rivers, is less than the amount of water lost due to evaporation.
When you say "Central US", are we talking Central timezone, or what?
> The case is different for the East Coast or for most of Europe, > where more fresh water comes in via rainfall or rivers, than gets > lost due to evaporation.
The entire Midwest is like that too. Our municipal reservoirs generally stay pretty well full just from the precipitation that falls on the reservoirs themselves. Pretty near everything else gets routed downstream as fast as possible so it doesn't flood us out. Almost every road has drainage ditches along the sides for this purpose. That water all ends up either in the great lakes or in the Mississippi.
So yeah, we can use as much water as we want.
I think much of the south (east of the Mississippi) is similar.
You trade off water efficiency for other kinds of efficiency. You could use less water and more land (per unit of food produced), for example, or less water and more equipment and labor (to distribute the water more carefully only to the plants that need it), but we don't usually do those things because water is very affordable, so being excessively efficient with it is uneconomic.
Agricultural use of water is not a significant environmental problem[1], because all the water we use for agriculture goes one of four places: it goes directly into the plants, or it evaporates right away into the air, or it runs off to the nearest stream, or it soaks into the ground and makes its way downstream rather more slowly. In all four cases, the water eventually makes its way back into the atmosphere and falls again as rain. "Using" water doesn't use it up in any permanent sense. It just relocates it slightly. It's a completely renewable resource, even on a very short timescale.
[1] I'm assuming here that you're not doing something problematic in the process, like putting DDT into the water. That would be a separate issue. What we're talking about here is just the mere fact of using water.
> The reality is corporation want to suck up all the cheaply accessible water
That's absurd. Where would they put it all? They'd need a tank so large it wouldn't fit all in one state. The entire Fortune 500 could spend a decade's worth of gross revenue building such a thing.
The article summary talks about percentages of the fresh water that is actually used, *not* percentages of what's available, because we (humanity) use only a small fraction of what's available. We take almost all of the fresh water that falls from the sky and route it downstream as fast as possible, toward the ocean (where it evaporates so it can fall again someplace else), because otherwise it would flood our basements several times a week.
When you pay your water bill, you're not paying for the water itself. You're paying for filtering and chlorine and whatnot -- water treatment. The water itself is free, if you're willing to use it untreated: just put in a couple of cisterns and Bob is your uncle. Almost nobody does this anymore because untreated water isn't worth collecting.
Now, I'm kind of assuming here that we're talking on a nationwide scale. On a local scale it might be possible for a corporation to collect a fair portion of the available water in a limited area, but it would be a *tiny* percentage of the total available water nationwide, because you could only do it in an area that's significantly drier than average. If you tried it anywhere in the Midwest, people probably wouldn't even bother to laugh at you.
> So the remaining question is does it work the same way in humans.
If the mice showed actual cognitive improvement, I'm sure someone is already thinking about a study involving humans. Whether they'll do that straight away or do another couple of animal studies first, I don't know (for a drug already approved in humans for other indications one would imagine the former, but you never know) but in any case I am certain they're already thinking about how the human study might go.
> Trying to make the internet non-communicable is like making water not wet.
That's easy: run it through one of those mister/atomizer thingies that people get to make the atmosphere in their homes less dry in the winter, then while it's still suspended in the air lower its temperature to about forty below. You get a dry powder, which will precipitate out of the air and collect on surfaces.
> Enumerating the irrationals fails because there is so much complexity,
Actually, it's much more basic than that: enumerating the irrationals fails because there are too many of them -- there aren't enough counting numbers to go around. (Yes, I know, there are infinitely many counting numbers, but it's a strictly smaller infinitely large number than the number of rationals. If you are in doubt about this, research Cantor's diagonal.)
Batteries don't generate energy. They store it, chemically. (Well, the ones we usually think of as "batteries" work chemically.)
Nonetheless, I don't know how they propose to be more energy efficient than a mirror-based distillation rig. Besides keeping the parabola aimed at the sun, which requires negligible energy, the main costs of running such a rig are keeping it supplied with water to distill and flushing it out with solvent once in a while to prevent salt buildup. (You can even use filtered seawater for the solvent.) The latter costs seem unavoidable for electrical-cell-based desalination, and the former is, as I said, negligible.
Of course, it only works in parts of the world that get a lot of sunshine, so for example it would be a non-starter in northern Ohio. (Not that we need desalination in Ohio. Most of our water management issues involve finding ways to get the water to drain away more efficiently so it doesn't flood our basements; that seems likely to be common in places that don't get enough sunshine to boil water with a parabolic mirror... but I suppose there could be exceptions.)
> appeared to reverse plaque buildup and improve memory > in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's disease by reducing > levels of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain that cause mental > deficits in Alzheimer's disease
Wait, what did the study show? Did it show A) that Bexarotene improved memory in mice or B) that Bexarotene reduced levels of beta-amyloid plaques in the brains of mice? These are most emphatically not the same thing, unless some extremely recent study that I'm not aware of has shown C) that beta-amyloid plaques cause the mental deficits associated with Alzheimer's -- which would be very surprising, because several prior drug candidates that have been shown to reduce the plaques in human brains have failed to do anything useful for memory. There's a very strong correlation between Alzheimer's symptoms and the existence of the plaques, but causation has not been shown and so far appears not to be the case. This has been written about many times -- a quick search for "beta amyloid" on e.g. pipeline.corante.com will find you a bundle of posts on the subject.
No, that's backwards. Yahoo actively alienates people who use computers by rote, because they *constantly* dork around with the arrangement of their site. Things are almost never where you remember them being. (Yahoo Mail is especially horrible in this regard. Their users are constantly coming to me for help finding where the "reply" button got moved to this week.) It only *looks* like they haven't reorganized it in decades. In actual fact, they've probably moved at least one thing between the time I wrote this and the time you're reading it. Despite constantly shuffling things around, though, they never achieve a state of being organized. That's probably because their organizational skills leave something to be desired.
Swords would be largely useless in a zombie apocalypse, because you can't use them without closing to melee range, which is highly inadvisable. What you want in that scenario is a semi-automatic bolas-firing weapon (or possibly antimatter bullets).
I tried 3.0, got tired of losing data, and downgraded back to 2.0. I tried 3.5, got tired of losing data, downgraded back to 2.0, poked around in Bugzilla until I found the relevant issue, noticed that the problem was not fixed in 3.6, and did not attempt the upgrade.
The most important bug that was keeping me from updating was finally fixed in, umm, I think version 8, maybe 9, but by then I had kind of lost interest in the upgrade treadmill, so at the moment I'm currently still using 2.0.0.20 for now. Maybe I'll upgrade eventually, but I think I'll wait and see which version people say the right kinds of things about so I can upgrade to a *good* version.
An example of "the right kinds of things", which would make me WANT to upgrade, would be something like, "This version doesn't have a lot of completely pointless UI changes, but it does fix most of the outstanding bugs. Support has also been added for a couple more CSS features, and the browser now remembers if you select an alternate stylesheet for a particular site and uses the same one when you visit the site again."
I'm *unlikely* to be so excited about upgrading to a version about which people are saying things like "The new up-is-down left-side scrollbar[1] really makes the browser feel more modern, especially in conjunction with eliminating the window border and hiding the minimize and maximize buttons, which was long overdue. Also, having your preferences stored in the new Choices database allows a completely redesigned preferences dialog that allows you to search and get results from not just your prefs but also from your cookies and the Mozilla Planet feed, all in one unified interface. Additionally, hovering over a link now checks to see if the page it points to has any embedded video or plugin content, and if so it starts playing that in an overlay in front of the page you were looking at."
[1] Imagine if a talented graphics artist spent sixty hours in Photoshop making a Xaw-style scrollbar (like Emacs used to use before it got GTK support) that looks like something out of a magazine ad, complete with reflectivity and glittering highlights. I can totally see the people who thought up the post-3.6 UI changes thinking that would be awesome.
As a general rule, I tend to agree: if a trademark is genuinely a unique or creative name for the product, competitors should not be allowed to just appropriate it -- they should be liable for the infringement and have to pay (reasonable) damages.
I do *not* think this should apply in cases of an appropriated standard word for the thing, like "Word" for word processing (or "Writer" for that matter) or "One-Click" for an activity that (ostensibly) involves clicking once or "Multi-Touch" for a touch-screen interface that supports multiple simultaneous touches. A trademark, to be enforceable, should have to actually be an original name[1]. Otherwise it should get laughed out of court summarily.
The thing I don't like about current trademark law is the way it actively encourages unnecessary litigation by placing a burden on the mark holder to show that they've defended the mark. That isn't what they should have to show. The law should be changed. The plaintiff should have to show that the mark was originally theirs, a new and unique name when they started using it, and they should have to show that they've used it more or less continuously, for products or services available to the public, since that time. And maybe they should have to show that the registered it within some amount of time after first use (so that there's a definitive place people can check a name they're thinking of using, in order to verify that it's not going to infringe somebody else's mark).
However, my proposed changes are *not* currently the law: under trademark law as it stands right now, you *do* have to defend your mark (and prevent other people from using it, especially in conjunction with competing products) if you want to keep it. It is at least arguable that the "Wi-Fi" mark is potentially in danger of becoming genericized in popular usage. It hasn't gone all the way to fully generic yet (like, say, bulldozer or zamboni or thermos or klenex or aspirin -- all of which have been treated as generic terms by the general public for so long that there isn't even another single-word term in the English language for any of the things they represent, and most folks don't even KNOW that they were originally brand names), but "Wi-Fi" has arguably taken some steps in that general direction.
[1] When I say that a name should have to be original, I mean that it should at least have to be original as regards the type of product in question -- "Epidermis" is not an original word overall, but it might be a sufficiently original trade name for, say, a brand of frozen pizza -- because until now the word "epidermis" has not been generally associated with pizza (or food in general, or frozenness, or anything along those lines). (Whether many consumers would want to buy pizza sold under such a name is an entirely separate question -- a marketing issue rather than a legal one.)
> All the letter says is that it isn't getting as warm as the alarmists said it would,
Well, duh. The alarmists assured us, among other things, that 85% of Florida would be under the ocean by the year 2000. I'm pretty sure that didn't happen: I know a couple of people who have visited the place since 2000 (heck, my sister's college roommate lived down there until a couple of years ago), and when they came back they didn't say anything about the coastline having moved anywhere near that drastically. Come to think of it, I've yet to see any evidence that mean sea level has changed *at all* since the global warming predictions that it would do so started coming out.
So yeah, the extremists were all wet. Go figure. I'll bet the most extreme predictions being made now are wrong too. That's how it usually works.
What I want to know from the climate scientists is how they thing they can say, based on less than a century's worth of halfway decent weather data, what a normal rate of climate change would have been without large-scale human activity modifying it. We know from historical record that weather and climate have been doing various things that surprised people since antiquity, but we only have anything resembling reliable numbers for the last few decades. We know the temperature's been (gradually on the scale of a human lifespan, rapidly on a geological scale) increasing during that entire time. We know from historical record that at times the climate has occasionally surprised everyone with (as far as they knew then) unprecedented cooling, but we don't have any numbers for that, because there weren't weather stations back then.
On what basis have we determined that the current trend is in any way unusual? There's no data to go on for such an assertion. Zippo. The last time the climate was doing anything *other* than getting warmer at the current rate, thermometers hadn't been invented yet.
Sure, but the benefits of a GUI are mainly applicable to things like interactive image editing and interactive web browsing and so forth -- nothing any sane network administrator would ever do on a production server. A beginning network administrator who's just getting his feet wet might want a GUI for the little change-the-settings-for-this-service applets and whatnot, but with a little more experience you quickly learn how to do it the easy way, which does not require a GUI.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore:
> much of what we expect from the modern Internet to customers' homes in 1983.
> Online news, banking services, restaurant reviews, shopping, e-mail
With the exception of email, these are not the things that make the internet popular. Don't get me wrong: these things *are* popular on the internet, and once people get the internet they like having access to that stuff. But for most people who don't *have* the internet, those are not the important selling points (with, as I said, the exception of email -- and email only sells the internet to people whose relatives already have it). The big selling point is the ability to look up any information you should ever happen to need or want. That's the thing people who don't have the internet yet know about and want. That's the thing the internet had that the big national BBSes (Compuserve, AOL, etc.) lacked, which is why they were subsumed and/or obviated. You can look up *anything*.
People (usually) don't start wanting to shop and bank online until they've already been online long enough to be comfortable.
> Dear Linux community, you guys WANT to gain share...right? You WANT people to actually use Linux
Sure. I mean, not EVERYONE (replacing one monopoly with another is seldom a significant long-term improvement), but I definitely want *some* people to use it.
> Then why in the hell are you not getting behind ExpressGate/Splashtop?
Three reasons. 1. This is the first I've ever heard of either ExpressGate or Splashtop. 2. After bouncing around from distro to distro for a good while (including FreeBSD for a couple of years), I've now kind of settled down with Debian. I gave it a try again when Sarge came out, and it's been meeting my needs ever since. I don't have a reason to switch at this time. 3. Your description of the technology you are promoting doesn't make me want it. Quite the reverse.
Like most serious computer users, I routinely go months and months between reboots, so a fast boot option just isn't a very compelling feature. I mean, sure, if it doesn't have any negative consequences, I wouldn't *mind* having fast boot, but on the priority scale I'd rank it somewhere between a 3% performance improvement in Postgres and having relatime turned on by default. It's not something that's going to have me chomping at the bit to jump distros.
Battery life would only be meaningful if I were willing to suffer the agony of using a laptop, with its steaming heap of non-standard proprietary components and its one tiny little poor-quality screen and horrible little non-standard cramped non-tactile-feedback keyboard and deplorable performance characteristics and inadequate cooling and a case that's absolutely impossible to work in if you should ever happen to want to do any upgrades or repairs. I would rather wear naugahyde pants and cast iron socks than have to work with a laptop on a regular basis.
And then there's this:
> EG has a top row of tabs where everything is VERY logically laid out, you got games,
> video, audio, the appstore (yes they have an App store and its nice), and system.
I don't know how else to say it: this does not sound like a description of a system that would interest me.
Oh, really?
/usr/bin/emacs -> /etc/alternatives/emacs /usr/bin/vi -> /etc/alternatives/vi /etc/alternatives/emacs /etc/alternatives/vi /etc/alternatives/emacs -> /usr/bin/emacs23-x /etc/alternatives/vi -> /usr/bin/vim.tiny /usr/bin/emacs23-x /usr/bin/vim.tiny /usr/bin/emacs23-x /usr/bin/vim.tiny
nathan@donalbain:~$ ls -l `which vi` `which emacs`
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 Mar 24 2011
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Mar 24 2011
nathan@donalbain:~$ ls -l
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Mar 24 2011
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Mar 24 2011
nathan@donalbain:~$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6583560 Dec 11 2010
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 632884 Jul 11 2010
nathan@donalbain:~$
Huh. Whaddaya know. vi wouldn't be bigger than Emacs even
if you added a zero, and that's just the small portion that's written
in C. Most of Emacs is written in lisp.
Does vi have a built-in mail and news reader? Does it come with a
web browser, a spreadsheet, and a TeX-editing mode that can display
what the results will look like in real time? Can the action that occurs
when each individual key is pressed be fully customized and scripted
by the user on a per-file-type basis and take syntactic context into
account when deciding what to do? Does vi include its own shell,
vshell, so that the output of in-editor scripted functions can be passed
as command-line arguments to system commands and vice versa?
Can you play zork and nethack in vi? Does vi ship with an Emacs
mode just in case anyone should happen to want that for any reason?
No, it does not. vi users don't have any idea what the phrase
"feature-complete" means. If you were building a house, it wouldn't
have a bat cave or a waterpark in the basement or a helipad on the
roof or an amusement park on the thirty-fourth floor or an industrial
scale organic chem lab in the north wing. Heck, the vi house
probably wouldn't even be capable of space flight.
Yes. (I have been known to (program in lisp (specifically, elisp (the variant used for customizing Emacs (the world's most feature-complete text editor (and the most feature-complete program of any kind for that matter)))) (from time to time (Why do you ask? (It's not some lame joke about parentheses is it? (Because, that would just be dumb.))))).)
Actually, I'm pretty sure the 120 years in that passage was the amount of time remaining until the deluge -- a one-time event.
Which (incidentally, not that this has anything to do with your point) happened within a year of when Methusaleh died. (You have to do a small amount of arithmetic to put this together, based on the ages of a Methusaleh and Lamech when their sons were born and Noah's age when the flood came.) Some theologians speculate that Methusaleh's name was prophetic, something along the lines of "he dies [and then] [it will be] sent", in reference to the flood. This is linguistically plausible, but the Bible doesn't actually say what his name means (and the name is far too succinct to be as clear as all that in the absence of additional clarification). For that matter, it doesn't even actually say whether he died right before the flood came or *because* of the flood; it only gives enough information to conclude that both events happened within a year of one another.
In any case, people who read that passage as a hard limit on maximum human lifespan are engaging in a practice we call "eisegesis" -- reading an interpretation _into_ the text rather than taking it for just what it says. Whether medical science in the current era will be able to extend human lifespan beyond 114 or 120 or any other arbitrary finite figure you care to name is an issue the Bible does not address.
It does say something about lifespans during the Millennium (see for example Isaiah 65), but that's a future era. Before that happens, there's to be (among other things) an earthquake so severe that cities and mountains and islands just plain cease to exist, worldwide (Rev. 16:17f). Ad interim, we don't really know what will happen to human lifespans in the immediate future, although I would tend to assume that people who make extremely grandiose claims (like, "the first person to live to 1000 has probably already been born) don't know either and are just making stuff up.
HTH.HAND.
Yeah, except, that's preposterous.
Influenza isn't even the illness most people call "the flu". (That's what medical people call "gastro-intestinal disease" or somesuch.) The actual influenza virus isn't dangerous at all. It doesn't, for example, make you puke until you're dehydrated. It doesn't even make you nauseated. It's pretty much just a cold: a case of the sniffles, some coughing, maybe some achy muscles for a couple of days, and possibly a headache. It's about as dangerous as a toy gun made out of a folded sheet of notebook paper.
The only way influenza could kill somebody would be if they were already most of the way dead -- standing with one foot in the grave and the other in a roller skate on a banana peel, as it were. In which case, influenza isn't actually the problem (*anything* can kill someone whose health is that bad; a papercut, for example, can be fatal if your immune system is completely shut down already) and immunizing against influenza wouldn't actually solve anything even if it WORKED, which it doesn't, because influenza mutates beyond the vaccine's ability to significantly protect against it every ten days or so.
I am generally very much in favor of vaccinations, but flu shots are completely pointless.
> For most of the Central U.S., the amount of water that comes in via rain
> or rivers, is less than the amount of water lost due to evaporation.
When you say "Central US", are we talking Central timezone, or what?
> The case is different for the East Coast or for most of Europe,
> where more fresh water comes in via rainfall or rivers, than gets
> lost due to evaporation.
The entire Midwest is like that too. Our municipal reservoirs
generally stay pretty well full just from the precipitation that
falls on the reservoirs themselves. Pretty near everything else
gets routed downstream as fast as possible so it doesn't flood
us out. Almost every road has drainage ditches along the sides
for this purpose. That water all ends up either in the great lakes
or in the Mississippi.
So yeah, we can use as much water as we want.
I think much of the south (east of the Mississippi) is similar.
You trade off water efficiency for other kinds of efficiency. You could use less water and more land (per unit of food produced), for example, or less water and more equipment and labor (to distribute the water more carefully only to the plants that need it), but we don't usually do those things because water is very affordable, so being excessively efficient with it is uneconomic.
Agricultural use of water is not a significant environmental problem[1], because all the water we use for agriculture goes one of four places: it goes directly into the plants, or it evaporates right away into the air, or it runs off to the nearest stream, or it soaks into the ground and makes its way downstream rather more slowly. In all four cases, the water eventually makes its way back into the atmosphere and falls again as rain. "Using" water doesn't use it up in any permanent sense. It just relocates it slightly. It's a completely renewable resource, even on a very short timescale.
[1] I'm assuming here that you're not doing something problematic in the process, like putting DDT into the water. That would be a separate issue. What we're talking about here is just the mere fact of using water.
> The reality is corporation want to suck up all the cheaply accessible water
That's absurd. Where would they put it all? They'd need a tank so large it wouldn't fit all in one state. The entire Fortune 500 could spend a decade's worth of gross revenue building such a thing.
The article summary talks about percentages of the fresh water that is actually used, *not* percentages of what's available, because we (humanity) use only a small fraction of what's available. We take almost all of the fresh water that falls from the sky and route it downstream as fast as possible, toward the ocean (where it evaporates so it can fall again someplace else), because otherwise it would flood our basements several times a week.
When you pay your water bill, you're not paying for the water itself. You're paying for filtering and chlorine and whatnot -- water treatment. The water itself is free, if you're willing to use it untreated: just put in a couple of cisterns and Bob is your uncle. Almost nobody does this anymore because untreated water isn't worth collecting.
Now, I'm kind of assuming here that we're talking on a nationwide scale. On a local scale it might be possible for a corporation to collect a fair portion of the available water in a limited area, but it would be a *tiny* percentage of the total available water nationwide, because you could only do it in an area that's significantly drier than average. If you tried it anywhere in the Midwest, people probably wouldn't even bother to laugh at you.
> RTFA!
YMBNH.
> So the remaining question is does it work the same way in humans.
If the mice showed actual cognitive improvement, I'm sure someone is already thinking about a study involving humans. Whether they'll do that straight away or do another couple of animal studies first, I don't know (for a drug already approved in humans for other indications one would imagine the former, but you never know) but in any case I am certain they're already thinking about how the human study might go.
> I think the fact that Ohio is not near any source of saltwater would be the real non-starter.
Granted.
> Trying to make the internet non-communicable is like making water not wet.
That's easy: run it through one of those mister/atomizer thingies that people get to make the atmosphere in their homes less dry in the winter, then while it's still suspended in the air lower its temperature to about forty below. You get a dry powder, which will precipitate out of the air and collect on surfaces.
Wait, did I just say rationals? I meant irrationals.
Rationals, of course _can_ be and _have been_ enumerated. Again, see Cantor's diagonal.
> Enumerating the irrationals fails because there is so much complexity,
Actually, it's much more basic than that: enumerating the irrationals fails because there are too many of them -- there aren't enough counting numbers to go around. (Yes, I know, there are infinitely many counting numbers, but it's a strictly smaller infinitely large number than the number of rationals. If you are in doubt about this, research Cantor's diagonal.)
Batteries don't generate energy. They store it, chemically. (Well, the ones we usually think of as "batteries" work chemically.)
Nonetheless, I don't know how they propose to be more energy efficient than a mirror-based distillation rig. Besides keeping the parabola aimed at the sun, which requires negligible energy, the main costs of running such a rig are keeping it supplied with water to distill and flushing it out with solvent once in a while to prevent salt buildup. (You can even use filtered seawater for the solvent.) The latter costs seem unavoidable for electrical-cell-based desalination, and the former is, as I said, negligible.
Of course, it only works in parts of the world that get a lot of sunshine, so for example it would be a non-starter in northern Ohio. (Not that we need desalination in Ohio. Most of our water management issues involve finding ways to get the water to drain away more efficiently so it doesn't flood our basements; that seems likely to be common in places that don't get enough sunshine to boil water with a parabolic mirror... but I suppose there could be exceptions.)
> appeared to reverse plaque buildup and improve memory
> in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's disease by reducing
> levels of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain that cause mental
> deficits in Alzheimer's disease
Wait, what did the study show? Did it show A) that Bexarotene improved memory in mice or B) that Bexarotene reduced levels of beta-amyloid plaques in the brains of mice? These are most emphatically not the same thing, unless some extremely recent study that I'm not aware of has shown C) that beta-amyloid plaques cause the mental deficits associated with Alzheimer's -- which would be very surprising, because several prior drug candidates that have been shown to reduce the plaques in human brains have failed to do anything useful for memory. There's a very strong correlation between Alzheimer's symptoms and the existence of the plaques, but causation has not been shown and so far appears not to be the case. This has been written about many times -- a quick search for "beta amyloid" on e.g. pipeline.corante.com will find you a bundle of posts on the subject.
No, that's backwards. Yahoo actively alienates people who use computers by rote, because they *constantly* dork around with the arrangement of their site. Things are almost never where you remember them being. (Yahoo Mail is especially horrible in this regard. Their users are constantly coming to me for help finding where the "reply" button got moved to this week.) It only *looks* like they haven't reorganized it in decades. In actual fact, they've probably moved at least one thing between the time I wrote this and the time you're reading it. Despite constantly shuffling things around, though, they never achieve a state of being organized. That's probably because their organizational skills leave something to be desired.
Swords would be largely useless in a zombie apocalypse, because you can't use them without closing to melee range, which is highly inadvisable. What you want in that scenario is a semi-automatic bolas-firing weapon (or possibly antimatter bullets).
You upgraded to 3.6?
I tried 3.0, got tired of losing data, and downgraded back to 2.0. I tried 3.5, got tired of losing data, downgraded back to 2.0, poked around in Bugzilla until I found the relevant issue, noticed that the problem was not fixed in 3.6, and did not attempt the upgrade.
The most important bug that was keeping me from updating was finally fixed in, umm, I think version 8, maybe 9, but by then I had kind of lost interest in the upgrade treadmill, so at the moment I'm currently still using 2.0.0.20 for now. Maybe I'll upgrade eventually, but I think I'll wait and see which version people say the right kinds of things about so I can upgrade to a *good* version.
An example of "the right kinds of things", which would make me WANT to upgrade, would be something like, "This version doesn't have a lot of completely pointless UI changes, but it does fix most of the outstanding bugs. Support has also been added for a couple more CSS features, and the browser now remembers if you select an alternate stylesheet for a particular site and uses the same one when you visit the site again."
I'm *unlikely* to be so excited about upgrading to a version about which people are saying things like "The new up-is-down left-side scrollbar[1] really makes the browser feel more modern, especially in conjunction with eliminating the window border and hiding the minimize and maximize buttons, which was long overdue. Also, having your preferences stored in the new Choices database allows a completely redesigned preferences dialog that allows you to search and get results from not just your prefs but also from your cookies and the Mozilla Planet feed, all in one unified interface. Additionally, hovering over a link now checks to see if the page it points to has any embedded video or plugin content, and if so it starts playing that in an overlay in front of the page you were looking at."
[1] Imagine if a talented graphics artist spent sixty hours in Photoshop making a Xaw-style scrollbar (like Emacs used to use before it got GTK support) that looks like something out of a magazine ad, complete with reflectivity and glittering highlights. I can totally see the people who thought up the post-3.6 UI changes thinking that would be awesome.
As a general rule, I tend to agree: if a trademark is genuinely a unique or creative name for the product, competitors should not be allowed to just appropriate it -- they should be liable for the infringement and have to pay (reasonable) damages.
I do *not* think this should apply in cases of an appropriated standard word for the thing, like "Word" for word processing (or "Writer" for that matter) or "One-Click" for an activity that (ostensibly) involves clicking once or "Multi-Touch" for a touch-screen interface that supports multiple simultaneous touches. A trademark, to be enforceable, should have to actually be an original name[1]. Otherwise it should get laughed out of court summarily.
The thing I don't like about current trademark law is the way it actively encourages unnecessary litigation by placing a burden on the mark holder to show that they've defended the mark. That isn't what they should have to show. The law should be changed. The plaintiff should have to show that the mark was originally theirs, a new and unique name when they started using it, and they should have to show that they've used it more or less continuously, for products or services available to the public, since that time. And maybe they should have to show that the registered it within some amount of time after first use (so that there's a definitive place people can check a name they're thinking of using, in order to verify that it's not going to infringe somebody else's mark).
However, my proposed changes are *not* currently the law: under trademark law as it stands right now, you *do* have to defend your mark (and prevent other people from using it, especially in conjunction with competing products) if you want to keep it. It is at least arguable that the "Wi-Fi" mark is potentially in danger of becoming genericized in popular usage. It hasn't gone all the way to fully generic yet (like, say, bulldozer or zamboni or thermos or klenex or aspirin -- all of which have been treated as generic terms by the general public for so long that there isn't even another single-word term in the English language for any of the things they represent, and most folks don't even KNOW that they were originally brand names), but "Wi-Fi" has arguably taken some steps in that general direction.
[1] When I say that a name should have to be original, I mean that it should at least have to be original as regards the type of product in question -- "Epidermis" is not an original word overall, but it might be a sufficiently original trade name for, say, a brand of frozen pizza -- because until now the word "epidermis" has not been generally associated with pizza (or food in general, or frozenness, or anything along those lines). (Whether many consumers would want to buy pizza sold under such a name is an entirely separate question -- a marketing issue rather than a legal one.)
> All the letter says is that it isn't getting as warm as the alarmists said it would,
Well, duh. The alarmists assured us, among other things, that 85% of Florida would be under the ocean by the year 2000. I'm pretty sure that didn't happen: I know a couple of people who have visited the place since 2000 (heck, my sister's college roommate lived down there until a couple of years ago), and when they came back they didn't say anything about the coastline having moved anywhere near that drastically. Come to think of it, I've yet to see any evidence that mean sea level has changed *at all* since the global warming predictions that it would do so started coming out.
So yeah, the extremists were all wet. Go figure. I'll bet the most extreme predictions being made now are wrong too. That's how it usually works.
What I want to know from the climate scientists is how they thing they can say, based on less than a century's worth of halfway decent weather data, what a normal rate of climate change would have been without large-scale human activity modifying it. We know from historical record that weather and climate have been doing various things that surprised people since antiquity, but we only have anything resembling reliable numbers for the last few decades. We know the temperature's been (gradually on the scale of a human lifespan, rapidly on a geological scale) increasing during that entire time. We know from historical record that at times the climate has occasionally surprised everyone with (as far as they knew then) unprecedented cooling, but we don't have any numbers for that, because there weren't weather stations back then.
On what basis have we determined that the current trend is in any way unusual? There's no data to go on for such an assertion. Zippo. The last time the climate was doing anything *other* than getting warmer at the current rate, thermometers hadn't been invented yet.
> Built from just the disassembled hardware in a ... mini-computer, ... the F-BOMB serves as 3.5"-by-4"-by-1" spy computer.
>
I don't think the summary author knows what it means.
There is only XUL.
> A GUI-Less OS
I wouldn't go that far. I think the GUI should be optional at install time, but it should exist.
Sure, but the benefits of a GUI are mainly applicable to things like interactive image editing and interactive web browsing and so forth -- nothing any sane network administrator would ever do on a production server. A beginning network administrator who's just getting his feet wet might want a GUI for the little change-the-settings-for-this-service applets and whatnot, but with a little more experience you quickly learn how to do it the easy way, which does not require a GUI.