> An equivalent suppression would require shutting down the Internet permanently.
Well, the portion of the internet that's in China.
> They couldn't do it.
Technically they could, but it would be like cutting off your leg at the knee to stop the pain from a stubbed toe.
Shutting down the internet nationwide would destroy all of the progress they've made in the last thirty years and put them in the awkward position of watching more and more countries they've looked down on for decades, like Thailand and India and even Cambodia, catch up with and exceed them in area after area. (They already had to watch South Korea do this, and it rankles.) It would obviously be counterproductive, and they know it.
They *won't* do it. I'm confident of this because the Chinese government has shown repeatedly that their development goals are important to them. They don't do everything Western countries think they should, but they *do* consistently act in a manner that they believe will build the nation's economy and make it into a major world power. And while their progress is not as fast as some would like, their strategy *is* working, in the long term. They're not going to give that up easily.
They *might* have the hutzpah to tell Google to take a hike, and simply replace Google services (notably search) with competitors who are more cooperative and/or home-grown alternatives. That's not nearly the same thing as shutting down the whole internet. It would be a mistake, but a lesser mistake, and one they might actually make.
> they can stand up to their philosophical beliefs
It's not just philosophy (although there's that as well, obviously). Winning this dispute is worth actual money to Google, *if* they can pull it off. But there's also a risk if they lose. The question is, do they think they can win?
Probably. But I'm not sure they need to. I'm not close enough to the situation to tell, but it is possible that the Chinese government may be bluffing. Actually kicking Google out would be a pretty big deal and has the potential to ruin somebody's political career in a pretty big hurry, by upsetting too many of the wrong people. (I'm not talking about upsetting the regular people on the street. I'm talking about upsetting people who have actual influence.)
Of course, even if they are bluffing, Google may not be sure that that's the case.
That would violate a lot more than just thermodynamics. Universal entropy, conservation of energy, the fundamental economic problem... throw it all out the window.
Being in the closet is pretty much history at this point. I'm pretty sure there are now more people who openly admit to being gay than there are actual practicing homosexuals. Saying you're gay is like having a tatoo: your grandparents would have been appalled, but now it's a status symbol. Also, chicks dig it and will hang out with you more.
> Note also that oxidising one methane molecule does not produce one CO2 molecule...
ORLY?
I would have written the reaction thusly:
CH4 + 2(O2) -> CO2 + 2(H2O) + energy
That's one carbon, four hydrogen, and four oxygen on each side of the reaction, and the oxidization of one methane molecule is producing exactly one carbon dioxide molecule.
In English, the word "tons", without a numeric qualifier, does not refer to a specific amount. It just means "lots and lots". See also "trainloads", "a bargeload", "a buttload", "a metric ton", "a metric buttload", "a passel", "a whole passel", etc. These aren't specific literal amounts. They're just emphatic ways to say "a lot".
Now, if we say "thirty tons", then that is a specific amount (thirty times two thousand pounds). Similarly, "three metric tons" is a specific amount. The number makes it literal (assuming it's a literal number; "sixty gajillion tons", on the other hand, is back in the realm of absctraction, because a gajillion is not a specific number).
Tibetan autonomy was never going to happen anyway. China could never allow it, because that would mean admitting that they were wrong and losing face. They'd rather commit nationwide mass ritual suicide.
> So when was the concentration of methane in the atmosphere so high it caused this?
There may be other ways it could have happened.
Just for example, if an insulative ice cap formed overtop a mass of biomatter (say, a bog) that was otherwise still warm enough to decompose, possibly with some water in between, you could end up with a mixture of methane and water ice forming below the ice cap as the whole thing cooled. A few thousand years later, melt off the top layer of ice, and you've got combustible ice exposed to the surface.
There may be other possible formation scenarios as well.
The combustible ice is merely a practical concern. As such, it's basically unimportant compared to the extremely vital matter of Never Losing Face Ever, which is probably the single most important core value in far-eastern culture. Not losing face is more important than life itself and *far* more important than minor things like a few petawatt-hours of energy.
You have to understand, if Tibet hadn't always been part of China, that would imply that the "liberation" of Tibet in the mid-twentieth century was an aggressive action, not a peaceful one, and that the PROC government acted in bad faith (especially as regards the Seventeen Point thing). Admitting such a thing would be an unfathomable loss of face and an unconscionable disgrace to every Chinese person. It would be better for the entire nation to commit ritual suicide than to allow such a thing to be said.
> For one, nuclear plants need coolant, which is generally > a lake or river (again, geographically specific).
Technically, needing a lake or river narrows your options for where you can put a nuclear plant. But in practice, this limitation is not a significant obstacle, because there are a LOT more lakes and rivers than power plants. Heck, I think there are more lakes in Barry County, Michigan than there are power plants in the entire US.
Solar is arguably much more limited. You can put a nuclear plant in Arizona; you just have to be careful where you put it exactly. But you can't build a solar plant in Ohio. Well, it technically *could* be done, but it's not economically viable. You'd only get significant power out of it from July to September.
> basically, turning today's electrolysis method of making aluminum > into a reversible process. They claim to already have better than > lead-acid prices, but far longer cycle life, as well as li-ion energy density.
A battery that can only operate at temperatures over 3700 degrees? Gosh, that sounds practical.
> It may or may not be more efficient. Its a hell of a lot cheaper.
From a business perspective, cheaper *is* more efficient.
Yeah, I know, physics tells you it's more efficient only if it recovers (and allows to be used) a higher percentage of the energy input. But there are other kinds of inputs besides just the power you're storing. Like the money and materials you invest in the technology in the first place, for instance. And yes, money does count, because it represents and is exchangeable for work (and raw materials, and capital goods, and other things). In a sense, money is a form of potential energy.
> That has become more difficult these days(with multipliers > locked on all but the most expensive chips, you really can't > overclock without the connivance of the motherboard.
You kids these days. It hasn't been that long since all processors ran at the same speed as the motherboard. Effectively, in today's terms, the multiplier was always 1. Put that in your overclocking pipe and smoke it.
Except for one relatively minor pet peeve (namely, the inability to put block-level elements inside a paragraph), I still haven't figured out what's wrong with XHTML 1.0. Certainly nothing so major as to require a complete overhaul. Throw in XML's inherent extensibility, with the ability to easily mix-in content from other namespaces, such as SVG and whatnot, and you have everything you need.
HTML 5 does a whole lot of things HTML itself doesn't need to do. But my main beef with it is that it goes back to the bad old days, before XML, back to the harder-to-parse harder-to-maintain non-wellformed markup we were so glad to get away from about a decade ago. Do Not Want.
> Why would a "server" os even have a web browser installed by default?
If you do server administration the way most Windows admins do (wherein you have an actual monitor and keyboard hooked up to the server and physically go there and use the GUI on the server to do administrative tasks, among other things), you end up needing a web browser for certain things. You use it to manage Reporting Services, install report files (that you develop in Visual Studio and want to install in RS so that the appropriate users can have access to them), and so on. You use the browser to read certain things (e.g., knowledge base articles) on the internet, and to read other things from the local hard drive (e.g., the documentation "books" that come with some of Microsoft's server software). There are assorted other things. Until relatively recently you even needed it to install security updates; fortunately that's no longer necessary in current versions of Windows.
But while Windows Server comes with IE installed by default, it's also pretty well locked down by default. I don't think any Javascript is enabled at all, for instance, even for documents viewed from the local hard drive. If the administrator starts relaxing the security so he can use the server for general-purpose browsing (and granted, some people DO do this), we can hardly blame Microsoft for that. Note that it's not simply a matter of clicking the blue e and clicking "yes" without reading a dialog box. To get Javascript and similar risky stuff turned on you actually have to deliberately relax the security settings. If you have anywhere near enough brains to be a server admin you would certainly know that you are trading off security for the ability to browse the web on the server. If you have anywhere near enough paranoia to be a good server admin, you don't do it.
Sure, being administered mostly through the GUI and often directly and having a browser installed on the server and so on and so forth is not the way I would have designed a server OS. Honestly, though, I don't think having the browser installed on Windows Server by default is a very big deal, in the scheme of things. When it comes to Windows server security, there are bigger fish to fry, IMO.
> Given that Opera has not had ads for nearly 5 years
Opera's been around for a good long while, though. I think it may actually still be true that Opera was shareware, which you were supposed to pay for if you wanted to continue using it after a trial period, for most of its history.
A product's reputation doesn't change overnight.
Of course, some things are more easily forgotten than others. I still think of Outlook as the only mail client that launches executable attachments automatically by default. I suspect it doesn't actually do that any more, but I'm not eager to install it and find out, either. I also think of Outlook as sending badly malformed HTML by default, even if all the user does is type in some words. Does it still do that? I don't actually know. I've never used it myself. And, for some odd reason, I don't want to.
People have other things to do with their time besides going back and trying things they disliked in the past to see if they're better now.
As a web developer, I was kind of hoping HTML5 would eventually just whither and die. I view it as a major step in the wrong direction, back to the bad old days before XML.
Okay, so they're making a million attempts a year.
Let's say you plan to keep this server for, what, twenty years? After that you will replace it with an entirely new system and new passwords.
Assuming that the number of attempts they make increases geometrically, starting from one million this year, in twenty years they could generate how many attempts? A billion or so? Maybe ten billion? Let's say a hundred billion, because you don't want to take chances with your server security.
So just make sure all your passwords are sufficiently long and complex that the search space magnitude well and truly exceeds a hundred billion. Ideally you want to make the hundred-billion number look absolutely ridiculous. This is not particularly hard. Even if you don't look beyond lowercase letters (because you want to type the password quickly with no shifting keys), 26^N goes past a trillion after just nine characters.
Personally, I'd set the minimum length to at least twenty, and make the root password more like twice that long (if you allow remote root login). It's overkill, but when it comes to security a little bit of overkill is good. It just may save you if you've underestimated some important element of risk (like, say, how many attempts they can make in a given time period).
If the architect who designed your house had copyright rights on it, I guess you'd have to pay him royalties if you ever built another house based on the same design.
Slashdot Mirror
> Information yearns to be free.
Don't anthropomorphize information. It hates that.
> An equivalent suppression would require shutting down the Internet permanently.
Well, the portion of the internet that's in China.
> They couldn't do it.
Technically they could, but it would be like cutting off your leg at the knee to stop the pain from a stubbed toe.
Shutting down the internet nationwide would destroy all of the progress they've made in the last thirty years and put them in the awkward position of watching more and more countries they've looked down on for decades, like Thailand and India and even Cambodia, catch up with and exceed them in area after area. (They already had to watch South Korea do this, and it rankles.) It would obviously be counterproductive, and they know it.
They *won't* do it. I'm confident of this because the Chinese government has shown repeatedly that their development goals are important to them. They don't do everything Western countries think they should, but they *do* consistently act in a manner that they believe will build the nation's economy and make it into a major world power. And while their progress is not as fast as some would like, their strategy *is* working, in the long term. They're not going to give that up easily.
They *might* have the hutzpah to tell Google to take a hike, and simply replace Google services (notably search) with competitors who are more cooperative and/or home-grown alternatives. That's not nearly the same thing as shutting down the whole internet. It would be a mistake, but a lesser mistake, and one they might actually make.
> they can stand up to their philosophical beliefs
It's not just philosophy (although there's that as well, obviously). Winning this dispute is worth actual money to Google, *if* they can pull it off. But there's also a risk if they lose. The question is, do they think they can win?
Probably. But I'm not sure they need to. I'm not close enough to the situation to tell, but it is possible that the Chinese government may be bluffing. Actually kicking Google out would be a pretty big deal and has the potential to ruin somebody's political career in a pretty big hurry, by upsetting too many of the wrong people. (I'm not talking about upsetting the regular people on the street. I'm talking about upsetting people who have actual influence.)
Of course, even if they are bluffing, Google may not be sure that that's the case.
Time will tell.
That would violate a lot more than just thermodynamics. Universal entropy, conservation of energy, the fundamental economic problem... throw it all out the window.
> if they're gay but in the closet
Being in the closet is pretty much history at this point. I'm pretty sure there are now more people who openly admit to being gay than there are actual practicing homosexuals. Saying you're gay is like having a tatoo: your grandparents would have been appalled, but now it's a status symbol. Also, chicks dig it and will hang out with you more.
> Note also that oxidising one methane molecule does not produce one CO2 molecule...
ORLY?
I would have written the reaction thusly:
CH4 + 2(O2) -> CO2 + 2(H2O) + energy
That's one carbon, four hydrogen, and four oxygen on each side of the reaction, and the oxidization of one methane molecule is producing exactly one carbon dioxide molecule.
Care to explain how this is wrong?
In English, the word "tons", without a numeric qualifier, does not refer to a specific amount. It just means "lots and lots". See also "trainloads", "a bargeload", "a buttload", "a metric ton", "a metric buttload", "a passel", "a whole passel", etc. These aren't specific literal amounts. They're just emphatic ways to say "a lot".
Now, if we say "thirty tons", then that is a specific amount (thirty times two thousand pounds). Similarly, "three metric tons" is a specific amount. The number makes it literal (assuming it's a literal number; "sixty gajillion tons", on the other hand, is back in the realm of absctraction, because a gajillion is not a specific number).
Tibetan autonomy was never going to happen anyway. China could never allow it, because that would mean admitting that they were wrong and losing face. They'd rather commit nationwide mass ritual suicide.
> So when was the concentration of methane in the atmosphere so high it caused this?
There may be other ways it could have happened.
Just for example, if an insulative ice cap formed overtop a mass of biomatter (say, a bog) that was otherwise still warm enough to decompose, possibly with some water in between, you could end up with a mixture of methane and water ice forming below the ice cap as the whole thing cooled. A few thousand years later, melt off the top layer of ice, and you've got combustible ice exposed to the surface.
There may be other possible formation scenarios as well.
No, you don't understand Chinese thinking.
The combustible ice is merely a practical concern. As such, it's basically unimportant compared to the extremely vital matter of Never Losing Face Ever, which is probably the single most important core value in far-eastern culture. Not losing face is more important than life itself and *far* more important than minor things like a few petawatt-hours of energy.
You have to understand, if Tibet hadn't always been part of China, that would imply that the "liberation" of Tibet in the mid-twentieth century was an aggressive action, not a peaceful one, and that the PROC government acted in bad faith (especially as regards the Seventeen Point thing). Admitting such a thing would be an unfathomable loss of face and an unconscionable disgrace to every Chinese person. It would be better for the entire nation to commit ritual suicide than to allow such a thing to be said.
> For one, nuclear plants need coolant, which is generally
> a lake or river (again, geographically specific).
Technically, needing a lake or river narrows your options for where you can put a nuclear plant. But in practice, this limitation is not a significant obstacle, because there are a LOT more lakes and rivers than power plants. Heck, I think there are more lakes in Barry County, Michigan than there are power plants in the entire US.
Solar is arguably much more limited. You can put a nuclear plant in Arizona; you just have to be careful where you put it exactly. But you can't build a solar plant in Ohio. Well, it technically *could* be done, but it's not economically viable. You'd only get significant power out of it from July to September.
> basically, turning today's electrolysis method of making aluminum
> into a reversible process. They claim to already have better than
> lead-acid prices, but far longer cycle life, as well as li-ion energy density.
A battery that can only operate at temperatures over 3700 degrees? Gosh, that sounds practical.
> Li-ion batteries have round-trip efficiencies in the 90s (some chemistries in the upper 90s).
On a per-charge basis, you mean, assuming you already have the lithium-ion battery just sitting around and not otherwise being used for anything.
> It may or may not be more efficient. Its a hell of a lot cheaper.
From a business perspective, cheaper *is* more efficient.
Yeah, I know, physics tells you it's more efficient only if it recovers (and allows to be used) a higher percentage of the energy input. But there are other kinds of inputs besides just the power you're storing. Like the money and materials you invest in the technology in the first place, for instance. And yes, money does count, because it represents and is exchangeable for work (and raw materials, and capital goods, and other things). In a sense, money is a form of potential energy.
> That has become more difficult these days(with multipliers
> locked on all but the most expensive chips, you really can't
> overclock without the connivance of the motherboard.
You kids these days. It hasn't been that long since all processors ran at the same speed as the motherboard. Effectively, in today's terms, the multiplier was always 1. Put that in your overclocking pipe and smoke it.
> What's your alternative?
Except for one relatively minor pet peeve (namely, the inability to put block-level elements inside a paragraph), I still haven't figured out what's wrong with XHTML 1.0. Certainly nothing so major as to require a complete overhaul. Throw in XML's inherent extensibility, with the ability to easily mix-in content from other namespaces, such as SVG and whatnot, and you have everything you need.
HTML 5 does a whole lot of things HTML itself doesn't need to do. But my main beef with it is that it goes back to the bad old days, before XML, back to the harder-to-parse harder-to-maintain non-wellformed markup we were so glad to get away from about a decade ago. Do Not Want.
> Why would a "server" os even have a web browser installed by default?
If you do server administration the way most Windows admins do (wherein you have an actual monitor and keyboard hooked up to the server and physically go there and use the GUI on the server to do administrative tasks, among other things), you end up needing a web browser for certain things. You use it to manage Reporting Services, install report files (that you develop in Visual Studio and want to install in RS so that the appropriate users can have access to them), and so on. You use the browser to read certain things (e.g., knowledge base articles) on the internet, and to read other things from the local hard drive (e.g., the documentation "books" that come with some of Microsoft's server software). There are assorted other things. Until relatively recently you even needed it to install security updates; fortunately that's no longer necessary in current versions of Windows.
But while Windows Server comes with IE installed by default, it's also pretty well locked down by default. I don't think any Javascript is enabled at all, for instance, even for documents viewed from the local hard drive. If the administrator starts relaxing the security so he can use the server for general-purpose browsing (and granted, some people DO do this), we can hardly blame Microsoft for that. Note that it's not simply a matter of clicking the blue e and clicking "yes" without reading a dialog box. To get Javascript and similar risky stuff turned on you actually have to deliberately relax the security settings. If you have anywhere near enough brains to be a server admin you would certainly know that you are trading off security for the ability to browse the web on the server. If you have anywhere near enough paranoia to be a good server admin, you don't do it.
Sure, being administered mostly through the GUI and often directly and having a browser installed on the server and so on and so forth is not the way I would have designed a server OS. Honestly, though, I don't think having the browser installed on Windows Server by default is a very big deal, in the scheme of things. When it comes to Windows server security, there are bigger fish to fry, IMO.
> I couldn't, for example, tell you if Konqueror has stopped sucking in the last 5 years
In a word, no.
> Given that Opera has not had ads for nearly 5 years
Opera's been around for a good long while, though. I think it may actually still be true that Opera was shareware, which you were supposed to pay for if you wanted to continue using it after a trial period, for most of its history.
A product's reputation doesn't change overnight.
Of course, some things are more easily forgotten than others. I still think of Outlook as the only mail client that launches executable attachments automatically by default. I suspect it doesn't actually do that any more, but I'm not eager to install it and find out, either. I also think of Outlook as sending badly malformed HTML by default, even if all the user does is type in some words. Does it still do that? I don't actually know. I've never used it myself. And, for some odd reason, I don't want to.
People have other things to do with their time besides going back and trying things they disliked in the past to see if they're better now.
As a web developer, I was kind of hoping HTML5 would eventually just whither and die. I view it as a major step in the wrong direction, back to the bad old days before XML.
> why would a brand new installation of Windows have javascript turned off?
Security reasons. Windows Server 2008, for example, has IE pretty locked down by default.
Okay, so they're making a million attempts a year.
Let's say you plan to keep this server for, what, twenty years? After that you will replace it with an entirely new system and new passwords.
Assuming that the number of attempts they make increases geometrically, starting from one million this year, in twenty years they could generate how many attempts? A billion or so? Maybe ten billion? Let's say a hundred billion, because you don't want to take chances with your server security.
So just make sure all your passwords are sufficiently long and complex that the search space magnitude well and truly exceeds a hundred billion. Ideally you want to make the hundred-billion number look absolutely ridiculous. This is not particularly hard. Even if you don't look beyond lowercase letters (because you want to type the password quickly with no shifting keys), 26^N goes past a trillion after just nine characters.
Personally, I'd set the minimum length to at least twenty, and make the root password more like twice that long (if you allow remote root login). It's overkill, but when it comes to security a little bit of overkill is good. It just may save you if you've underestimated some important element of risk (like, say, how many attempts they can make in a given time period).
Yeah, that works as long as the patient is conscious.
The question becomes somewhat more difficult when the patient doesn't look, medically speaking, like he's ever going to wake up ever again.
If the architect who designed your house had copyright rights on it, I guess you'd have to pay him royalties if you ever built another house based on the same design.