I stand corrected, the 'actual cost incurred' of government bailouts over the past 2 years, assuming anyone can get ahold of this info, may only have 9 or 10 zeros before the decimal point. But as has been the case for most corporate giants, government and quasi-government entities over the past few years (FNM,FMC,GM,AIG,WaMu among them) and certainly for the FDIC the 'actual cost incurred' will almost certainly exceed the "maximum" "capacity" "announced." Thank you for your kind critique and have a nice day!
Tax law is an excellent way to go after the RIAA in response to these kinds of cases. Some RIAA activities could fall into the category of racketeering. They have certainly committed violations of anti-trust laws. (price fixing...) I can even imagine cases where an individual is hurt on a shattered legally purchased CD, forcing the RIAA to decide whether the consumer buys the content (in which case, fair use laws apply), or whether the consumer purchased the media (in which case the record companies should be liable for damages caused by defective, dangerous products.) If the RIAA says, 'we own both' then consumers should be able to sue upwards of $2 million for damages arising from the content as well as any possibility the media itself is unsafe. Are they willing to take back millions of CDs worth trillions of dollars (using their math) if it is found, for example, that the aluminum and plasticizers in the CDs are found to be hazardous to human health? This sounds far fetched, but anyone who understands CPSIA, the typical badger-brained congressional response to the issue of chemicals in imported children's toys, this may be a possibility. From the CPSIA FAQ:
Does the new requirement for total lead on children's products apply to children's books, cassettes and CD's, printed game boards, posters and other printed goods used for children's education?
In general, yes. CPSIA defines children's products as those products intended primarily for use by children 12 and under.
"Spokesperson Cara Duckworth of the RIAA, who attended the trial, told reporters afterwards, "Since day one we have been willing to settle this case... and we remain willing to do so." The industry appears to be doing everything it can not to appear vindictive in these cases..."
The RIAA says, vindictive, pretty old me? No, no, we are bending over backwards to take as little as possible of this poor native American mom's scant resources and transfer it to the billionaires we protect. Look, we kept it under $2 million, that's fair isn't it?
Use the above resources, don't buy anything which pays into the RIAA coffers. Let them see a $5 million negative blip that makes them wish they hadn't racketeered against their consumers including this midwestern mom.
I have no words for the award amount, the jury, the MPAA. But there is something I will do and if every slashreader on this list does the same, we can make a noticeable dent. I refuse to buy another new CD/DVD/AA3... from any company which is a member of the RIAA cartel. I don't advocate stealing, I advocate buying directly from the artist or independent labels. There is plenty of good music out there. I won't suffer, but this cartel will.
Yes there are parts of any sprawling American city which would be better off if torn down and rebuilt. This sounds too much like yet another bailout (as if $13.9 trillion tax dollars thrown into banks ^H^H^H^ black holes wasn't enough.) This is simply a plan to reduce property supply, prop up property prices and therefore bail out banks and property developers (generally wealthier with more $olitical influen$e than tenants and mortgage holders.) It is exactly like the government destruction of fruit during the Great Depression in order to prop up cannerys and megafarms:
"...And the failure hands over the State like a great sorrow. The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit--and kerosene spayed over the golden mountains."
- From "The Grapes of Wrath", John Steinbeck 1939
There is one DIY 'portable' (luggable) DTV. There are some commercial ones but they are much much more expensive than analog portable TVs and as I mentioned, the battery life is likely to be much shorter and as you mentioned, it may not work in a moving bus/van/boat...) It may be difficult to get people exited by this oversight until someone notices that they can no longer watch instant replays on their portable at the ballgame. Tailgate parties will also be TV free.
This is why government should be as local and small as possible, when it attempts to micromanage the lives of 300 million individuals, something is always overlooked.
During a weather emergency, the TV not the first place I go
Unless you're driving, analog TV is (was) the best place to go for weather emergency info because:
Weather radar can quickly and visually indicate where the storm is, how fast its moving and in what direction. Anyone with a vague idea of where they live can see whether the worst is behind or ahead.
Neither NOAA nor commercial AM/FM stations can possibly give neighborhood granularity coverage fast enough.
Bad weather makes for good ratings so during hurricanes, tropical storms, supercell storms, tornadoes, you're likely to get good coverage from several stations, radar in the corner of the screen, text crawling across the bottom giving locale updates much faster than a radio stations 20 minute/hourly update cycle.
Because TV is a big profitable industry, a typical transmitter is much more powerful and has better coverage than a typical NOAA 162.xx MHz transmitter.
TV coverage during any storm is almost always better than AM/FM coverage
for relevant information. Noaa.gov, weather.com, and/or a local AM "News and weather station" are my collective first choice.
Static on analog AM (455-1600kHz) can tell you a thunderstorm is 50-100 miles away. Beyond that I'd say analog AM and FM radio is all but useless. The news cycles are too long, there are too many clear channel and autoDJ and syndicated stations. (I've been there, camping at 4:00a.m., emergency sirens come on, I scan the radio dial for information and here 1940s music, Art Bell, Industrial music and static...)
NOAA transmitters are typical of heavy government, by time a weather event is verified enough to get into the update cycle, it has probably passed you. NOAA transmitters are pathetically weak and placed in locations where their line of sight coverage is abysmal. Cross any great lake and you're likely to pick up TV stations the whole way across but you won't pick up any NOAA station more than 10 miles offshore. (In my case not even this far because the nearest station was about 15 miles inland!) Try this, get one of those TV/weather radios (before tomorrow morning!) scan through the T.V. channels and if you are within 25 miles of a big city, you'll probably get some TV stations and if you hear a NOAA station at all, it will be very weak.
Now here is the rub, not only is digital TV an all or nothing affair which has a wider area of 'perfect picture', but a much smaller area of 'usable picture', but to date there are no portable battery operated televisions capable of receiving a DTV signal. Yes you could run your DTV converter off an inverter, and someone has even created one which runs on half a dozen D batteries, but DTV decoding is computationally intensive which means it burns through batteries much faster than your Analog LCD TV. Gaps in weather and other emergency coverage will eventually be seen as one of the unintended consequences of the government mandated forced obsolescence of analog TV. A second unintended consequence is that millions of TVs will end up in landfills before their time because their owner is either out of DTV range, or he isn't technically savvy enough to hook up a converter. The third unintended consequence is that themanufacturers of new televisions will have a very good year. DTV was sold in the pre-internet days on the premise that it would provide jobs for EEs after the downsizing of NASA and the military. It has provided jobs, but unfortunately very few of these jobs have been within the U.S. And now we're stuck with "the worlds first DTV system" which was designed when MS Windows didn't even have a TCP stack and the 'web' consisted of a few dozen organizations, email and usenet. My point here being that after all of the money spent on DTV, it is within 5 years of being irrelevant thanks to youtube and similar video services and more efficient codecs.
Yes, ZFS is very different from HFS+ (and that's a good thing). But ZFS makes Time machine much easier to implement, maintain and far, far more performant. Sun already had time slider in OpenSolaris last year and the difference between UFS and ZFS is at least as wide. Not to mention the fact that Apple throws heaps of money at its desktop and they only need to deal with drivers from vendors it controls.
I have no idea why Apple would excise ZFS from its web exposure except to say that they're extremely good at hiding OpenSource technology under their own brand name. (BSD/OSX, Mozilla/Safari, VNC/Apple Remote Desktop...) Maybe they were unhappy with the patent protection clause in CDDL.
What has risen at a rate higher than inflation over the past few decades?
The price of housing: A problem which is well on its way to correcting itself.
The price of medical care: Our average age is rising so it needs more sophisticated medical care.
The price of oil: Correction, it may eventually go back if we remain stupid about consumption but that's a supply/demand issue.
The price of a university education: Reaganistas convinced us that a University education should payback the individual in short order, universities capitalized on this false promise. They've convinced us that investment would pay off while they dumbed themselves down so anyone could get in (subprime anyone?) They've spent money on gyms, dorms and (apparently) rankings instead of good teachers and research. Yes university education is good for the society as a whole. But for the individual student the financial break-even point is very far out unless she follows hot trends such as IT in the early 1990s or investment banking in the early 2000s. Smart students didn't pursue sciences, medicine, engineering or a variety of other careers where a creative individual can work for a better society. When will this bubble pop?
I'm thinking, big ship, used to house hundreds if not thousands of sailors. Why not turn it into some sort of affordable housing?
The U.S. has more than enough housing inventory. The best way to create 'affordable housing' is to shut down the socialist enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac whose charter was to create affordable housing but which instead, through counter-productive anti-capitalist anti-market forces, fed and bloated house prices far beyond reality and created the biggest economic bubble in history.
In order to fix the economic mess this government created, rather than turn aircraft carriers into houses, you'd have to turn about 8000 houses into artificial reefs each month for at least a year!
"And in the south he saw the golden oranges hanging on the trees, the little golden oranges on the dark green trees; and guards with shotguns patrolling the lines so a man might not pick an orange for a thin child, oranges to be dumped if the price was low."
-- John Steinbeck, the Grapes of Wrath.
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"- Ronald Reagan
Whoah, in one breath midwesterners are stupid luddites and in the next you advocate the core political views beneath the Hollywood smear campaigns. You and those dumb would agree that the day the government mandates this kind of market meddling is the day things went wrong. But then, is corn the first time the government has attempted this? What would be the price of coal, oil or highways without government micromanagement?
Ever since my grandfather told me about running tractor engines on a blend of ethanol and more than 50% water (steam injection) I suspected that it should play a part in our fuel mix. Yes, steam injection was hard on engine, but think about ceramics and other technology we have now. If Detroit had put its mind to it. The same is true of the negative energy balance, the use of corn instead of cellulosic ethanol... To paraphrase Reagan, Ethanol isn't the problem, the government is.
Thankfully those of us dumb enough to believe in the possibilities of ethanol fuel were spared the MTBE fiasco our more environmentally enlightened oil industry friends in California and elsewhere had to go through.
My part of the midwest has sold up to 10% ethanol since the 1980s if not earlier and I've run everything from late 60s V8 engines not even designed for unleaded (150k miles) to high compression Mazdas (>200,000 miles) on this mix.
Maybe someone is trying to cover up a QA problem with American cars by using ethanol as a scapegoat.
1) Technologies which haven't yet and may never live up to their promise:
Fusion/Cold fusion: Is this always 40 years in the future?
Photovolatic power: Why hasn't this followed 'Moores law(sic)' like trends of other silicon based technology? (yeah there's a slashjoke somewhere in that sentence)
High temperature superconductors:Remain a lab curiosity decades after solid state lasers, bright LEDs, and other lab curiosities made it into our homes.
Artificial Intelligence/Expert Systems: For decades expert systems have been able to outperformed doctors on diagnosis accuracy. So why hasn't the cost of medical care gone down like every other automatable vocation? Why don't doctors use these tools?
Neural Networks: This and fuzzly logic were buzzwords for a while but what happened?
Fuel Cells: There should be a fuel cell in every home furnace, water heater and car.
Hybrid cars (be real, the battery capacity is anemic and the mpg on some of these hybrids is below what some of GM's Cadillacs and other diesel monstrosities of the late 1970s, erly 80s had)
Pebble bed fission.
2)Good products which failed to break into the market:
Cars with small, efficient Diesel or rotary engines:GM and Mazda's teething pains gave these technologies a bad rap which hasn't been overcome 2 decades later (at least not in the U.S. market.)
Laserdisc:Randomly access each frame, skip the commercials, no copy protection, what's not to like about this 1980 technology?
DEC, Cray, Amiga:... This list should be much longer but it's late. Have we abandoned Josephson Junctions, Full memory crossbars, fast buses and efficient Operating systems?
GNU/Linux, OSX and Solaris: Three solid alternatives to Microsoft Windows, each has strength and yet none have made a significant dent in Microsoft's marketshare.
3) Products which should have never seen the light of day.
Microsoft Windows, 2000, ME, Vista and that evil paperclip
Itanium
Any A/V standard blessed by the FCC, RIAA or MPAA (NTSC, HDTV, VHS, DVD, Blue Ray...): They locked us into LoFi multimedia mediocrity, consumer distrusting content management and region codes.
Nanotech as a buzzword. The pigment crystals in makeup and shampoo should not count as nanotechnology no matter what the marketing people think.
Next time it goes onto FAT16 formatted punched cards which will be shipped via passenger pigeon to my secure station wagon which will bring it to my geothermal powered server which lies in my lair, deep beneath an Icelandic volcano. And a second copy will go to a Raid-Z ZFS servers which are currently running on each of on Jupiter's Galilean moons (except Europa)
Mod parent up. These guys made mistakes, but well paid admins for enormous organizations make these same mistakes. (Bush's email anyone;-) We should be more interested in informing and helping than in criticizing and 'persecuting(sic)'.
When I first started in IT, I brought a hard drive back which contained important data for an Aids research clinic. I suggested that they make sure to do a backup now. I felt for them because the state of the art PC tape backup technology in 1988 was so slow, expensive and prone to eat tapes that I'd have almost suggested swapping out a 2nd MFM drive every day. A few weeks later I got a call, they'd lost their data again and this time there wasn't much I could do.
Real men backup their data to slashdot. I hope you don't mind if I use this thread.
beegin 665 mydailybackup.uue
M27-N)W0@=&AIR!A(&=R96%T(&)A8VMU"$*27-N)W0@=&AIR!A(&=R96%T
)(&)A8VMU"$*
end
9 months ago I wrote a storymash chapter based around the concept of a sound machine which encouraged swarming behavior if crickets... and other living things. Run with it! (or run away!)
Do you travel on airplanes? Most of the newer ones are fly-by-wire now.
O.K. I exaggerated slightly but:
Software Bug Halts F22 Flight
There are indications that fly-by-wire contributed to or caused crashes of an FA18 and some commercial Airbus planes which is why, unlike Airbus, Boeing designs allow the pilot to override fly-by-wire.
By the same token, ever since the Therac 25 deaths, there are FDC regulations preventing certain medical devices from being completely under software control (CT scanners, radiation therapy machines...) This is a good thing. Moore's law has allowed us to create software of a complexity that is either beyond what any human can understand and effectively test. Many eyes helps but QA doesn't really get the respect in opensource communities that development does and many commercial companies see QA as an unnecessary expense. Look for more accidental failures as companies trim their investment in quality during these difficult economic times.
One minor 'haha' failure I know of cost a fortune 500 company about 1 job a month worth of lost revenue. The contractor who found it was the first out the door. Yes, Y2k engineers caught a reasonable percentage of Y2k bugs but the main reason it was a relative 'non-event' had more to do with the background level of bugs in nearly all software.
If it is 'terrorists', who are they scaring besides a few computer geeks who understand the complexity and instability of our infrastructure? Yes, someone is inconveniencing and possibly slightly increasing the level of computational system errors in one community slightly above background noise. Yes malware attacks, cyber attacks and Y2k did actually cause some financial and personal damage, but this damage will always pale in comparison to the damage caused by the fact that significant investment in software and systems quality ended with the Apollo program in the 1970s.
Personally, I'd rather live longer, and if better air quality is what it takes, then that's a sacrafice I'm prepared to make.
A reasonable wish, I wish slashdotters were better informed about the science of how to improve air quality to we can better inform employers and voters. The U.S. is going through a massive 'coal bubble', dirty 'CLEAN (sic) coal' power plants are cropping up in place of nuclear or alongside massive hydroelectric power plants. It won't be long before there won't be a safe place from pollution. Big cities such as LA, London, Beijing and SLC are legendary for their pollution, what is less well known is that the Ohio river valley from Pennsylvania to the western Great Lakes states is chronically polluted with NOx, SOx, CO2 (obviously, though the Fed still refuses to count this as pollution) and particulates. The first step towards reducing this is figuring out how much of the world gets by with 1/10th to 1/2th the energy usage per person, grab the bits which don't impact our 'comfort' enough to be balance a shorter life and research what it would take to bring back the comfort for the bits that people think is more important than living longer.
A typical 1000 Megawatt coal powerplant such as the behemoth ERGs boondoggle just being completed in SE Wisconsin requires 1215 train carloads of Coal (Carbon) every day. Once burned, each carbon molocule (Atomic Weight 12) will have two Oxygen Molecules (Atomic Weight 16) attached to it and this 'refuse' to be sequestured will weigh 3.67 times as much. All else being equal, this means you would need 4459 boxcars full of carbon junk leaving the power plant. But CO2 can't easily be compressed into boxcars so it is likely the carbon will be sequestered with calcium or silicon (in rock), and weigh much more. And Shell thinks this is cheaper than solar, wind and hydropower? Have I missed April fools day or is someone playing a shell game?
Actually for professional looking photos, sensor size does matter, again as the result of basic physics. You can downsize the sensor all you want but you can't downsize the wavelength of visible light. Come on Pentax, Mamaiya, Rollie or somebody, please release an affordable digital medium format camera!
The real irony is that Sun get's slagged so often by FOSS advocates even though Sun has probably contributed more than 50% of all FOSS code. And while the article/survey seems to indicate that Linux is continues to take market share from 'Unix', it doesn't explain why the google trendline for Linux and all GNU/Linux distributions is falling and the google trendline for OpenSolaris is rising. Maybe OpenSolaris is stealing market share from Unix (AIX/Solaris 8/HP...). IMHO, that's a good thing and Sun is in much better shape than you think. It still has the cash to buy itself and go private and/or buy GM or a number of other companies, and it hasn't to my knowledge accepted a dime of bailout money or been the benefit of silly government intervention like 'cash for clunkers' to get it's old equipment out of data centers.
Slashdot Mirror
I stand corrected, the 'actual cost incurred' of government bailouts over the past 2 years, assuming anyone can get ahold of this info, may only have 9 or 10 zeros before the decimal point. But as has been the case for most corporate giants, government and quasi-government entities over the past few years (FNM,FMC,GM,AIG,WaMu among them) and certainly for the FDIC the 'actual cost incurred' will almost certainly exceed the "maximum" "capacity" "announced." Thank you for your kind critique and have a nice day!
Tax law is an excellent way to go after the RIAA in response to these kinds of cases. Some RIAA activities could fall into the category of racketeering. They have certainly committed violations of anti-trust laws. (price fixing...) I can even imagine cases where an individual is hurt on a shattered legally purchased CD, forcing the RIAA to decide whether the consumer buys the content (in which case, fair use laws apply), or whether the consumer purchased the media (in which case the record companies should be liable for damages caused by defective, dangerous products.) If the RIAA says, 'we own both' then consumers should be able to sue upwards of $2 million for damages arising from the content as well as any possibility the media itself is unsafe. Are they willing to take back millions of CDs worth trillions of dollars (using their math) if it is found, for example, that the aluminum and plasticizers in the CDs are found to be hazardous to human health? This sounds far fetched, but anyone who understands CPSIA, the typical badger-brained congressional response to the issue of chemicals in imported children's toys, this may be a possibility. From the CPSIA FAQ:
Does the new requirement for total lead on children's products apply to children's books, cassettes and CD's, printed game boards, posters and other printed goods used for children's education?
In general, yes. CPSIA defines children's products as those products intended primarily for use by children 12 and under.
From TFA:
"Spokesperson Cara Duckworth of the RIAA, who attended the trial, told reporters afterwards, "Since day one we have been willing to settle this case... and we remain willing to do so." The industry appears to be doing everything it can not to appear vindictive in these cases..."
The RIAA says, vindictive, pretty old me? No, no, we are bending over backwards to take as little as possible of this poor native American mom's scant resources and transfer it to the billionaires we protect. Look, we kept it under $2 million, that's fair isn't it?
Use the above resources, don't buy anything which pays into the RIAA coffers. Let them see a $5 million negative blip that makes them wish they hadn't racketeered against their consumers including this midwestern mom.
I have no words for the award amount, the jury, the MPAA. But there is something I will do and if every slashreader on this list does the same, we can make a noticeable dent. I refuse to buy another new CD/DVD/AA3... from any company which is a member of the RIAA cartel. I don't advocate stealing, I advocate buying directly from the artist or independent labels. There is plenty of good music out there. I won't suffer, but this cartel will.
Yes there are parts of any sprawling American city which would be better off if torn down and rebuilt. This sounds too much like yet another bailout (as if $13.9 trillion tax dollars thrown into banks ^H^H^H^ black holes wasn't enough.) This is simply a plan to reduce property supply, prop up property prices and therefore bail out banks and property developers (generally wealthier with more $olitical influen$e than tenants and mortgage holders.) It is exactly like the government destruction of fruit during the Great Depression in order to prop up cannerys and megafarms:
"...And the failure hands over the State like a great sorrow. The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit--and kerosene spayed over the golden mountains." - From "The Grapes of Wrath", John Steinbeck 1939
There is one DIY 'portable' (luggable) DTV. There are some commercial ones but they are much much more expensive than analog portable TVs and as I mentioned, the battery life is likely to be much shorter and as you mentioned, it may not work in a moving bus/van/boat...) It may be difficult to get people exited by this oversight until someone notices that they can no longer watch instant replays on their portable at the ballgame. Tailgate parties will also be TV free.
This is why government should be as local and small as possible, when it attempts to micromanage the lives of 300 million individuals, something is always overlooked.
During a weather emergency, the TV not the first place I go
Unless you're driving, analog TV is (was) the best place to go for weather emergency info because:
for relevant information. Noaa.gov, weather.com, and/or a local AM "News and weather station" are my collective first choice.
Static on analog AM (455-1600kHz) can tell you a thunderstorm is 50-100 miles away. Beyond that I'd say analog AM and FM radio is all but useless. The news cycles are too long, there are too many clear channel and autoDJ and syndicated stations. (I've been there, camping at 4:00a.m., emergency sirens come on, I scan the radio dial for information and here 1940s music, Art Bell, Industrial music and static...)
NOAA transmitters are typical of heavy government, by time a weather event is verified enough to get into the update cycle, it has probably passed you. NOAA transmitters are pathetically weak and placed in locations where their line of sight coverage is abysmal. Cross any great lake and you're likely to pick up TV stations the whole way across but you won't pick up any NOAA station more than 10 miles offshore. (In my case not even this far because the nearest station was about 15 miles inland!) Try this, get one of those TV/weather radios (before tomorrow morning!) scan through the T.V. channels and if you are within 25 miles of a big city, you'll probably get some TV stations and if you hear a NOAA station at all, it will be very weak.
Now here is the rub, not only is digital TV an all or nothing affair which has a wider area of 'perfect picture', but a much smaller area of 'usable picture', but to date there are no portable battery operated televisions capable of receiving a DTV signal. Yes you could run your DTV converter off an inverter, and someone has even created one which runs on half a dozen D batteries, but DTV decoding is computationally intensive which means it burns through batteries much faster than your Analog LCD TV. Gaps in weather and other emergency coverage will eventually be seen as one of the unintended consequences of the government mandated forced obsolescence of analog TV. A second unintended consequence is that millions of TVs will end up in landfills before their time because their owner is either out of DTV range, or he isn't technically savvy enough to hook up a converter. The third unintended consequence is that themanufacturers of new televisions will have a very good year. DTV was sold in the pre-internet days on the premise that it would provide jobs for EEs after the downsizing of NASA and the military. It has provided jobs, but unfortunately very few of these jobs have been within the U.S. And now we're stuck with "the worlds first DTV system" which was designed when MS Windows didn't even have a TCP stack and the 'web' consisted of a few dozen organizations, email and usenet. My point here being that after all of the money spent on DTV, it is within 5 years of being irrelevant thanks to youtube and similar video services and more efficient codecs.
Yes, ZFS is very different from HFS+ (and that's a good thing). But ZFS makes Time machine much easier to implement, maintain and far, far more performant. Sun already had time slider in OpenSolaris last year and the difference between UFS and ZFS is at least as wide. Not to mention the fact that Apple throws heaps of money at its desktop and they only need to deal with drivers from vendors it controls. I have no idea why Apple would excise ZFS from its web exposure except to say that they're extremely good at hiding OpenSource technology under their own brand name. (BSD/OSX, Mozilla/Safari, VNC/Apple Remote Desktop...) Maybe they were unhappy with the patent protection clause in CDDL.
I'm thinking, big ship, used to house hundreds if not thousands of sailors. Why not turn it into some sort of affordable housing?
The U.S. has more than enough housing inventory. The best way to create 'affordable housing' is to shut down the socialist enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac whose charter was to create affordable housing but which instead, through counter-productive anti-capitalist anti-market forces, fed and bloated house prices far beyond reality and created the biggest economic bubble in history.
In order to fix the economic mess this government created, rather than turn aircraft carriers into houses, you'd have to turn about 8000 houses into artificial reefs each month for at least a year!
"And in the south he saw the golden oranges hanging on the trees, the little golden oranges on the dark green trees; and guards with shotguns patrolling the lines so a man might not pick an orange for a thin child, oranges to be dumped if the price was low."
-- John Steinbeck, the Grapes of Wrath. "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"- Ronald Reagan
Whoah, in one breath midwesterners are stupid luddites and in the next you advocate the core political views beneath the Hollywood smear campaigns. You and those dumb would agree that the day the government mandates this kind of market meddling is the day things went wrong. But then, is corn the first time the government has attempted this? What would be the price of coal, oil or highways without government micromanagement? Ever since my grandfather told me about running tractor engines on a blend of ethanol and more than 50% water (steam injection) I suspected that it should play a part in our fuel mix. Yes, steam injection was hard on engine, but think about ceramics and other technology we have now. If Detroit had put its mind to it. The same is true of the negative energy balance, the use of corn instead of cellulosic ethanol... To paraphrase Reagan, Ethanol isn't the problem, the government is.
Thankfully those of us dumb enough to believe in the possibilities of ethanol fuel were spared the MTBE fiasco our more environmentally enlightened oil industry friends in California and elsewhere had to go through. My part of the midwest has sold up to 10% ethanol since the 1980s if not earlier and I've run everything from late 60s V8 engines not even designed for unleaded (150k miles) to high compression Mazdas (>200,000 miles) on this mix. Maybe someone is trying to cover up a QA problem with American cars by using ethanol as a scapegoat.
1) Technologies which haven't yet and may never live up to their promise:
2)Good products which failed to break into the market:
3) Products which should have never seen the light of day.
Curse you lameness filter!
Next time it goes onto FAT16 formatted punched cards which will be shipped via passenger pigeon to my secure station wagon which will bring it to my geothermal powered server which lies in my lair, deep beneath an Icelandic volcano. And a second copy will go to a Raid-Z ZFS servers which are currently running on each of on Jupiter's Galilean moons (except Europa)
Mod parent up. These guys made mistakes, but well paid admins for enormous organizations make these same mistakes. (Bush's email anyone ;-) We should be more interested in informing and helping than in criticizing and 'persecuting(sic)'.
When I first started in IT, I brought a hard drive back which contained important data for an Aids research clinic. I suggested that they make sure to do a backup now. I felt for them because the state of the art PC tape backup technology in 1988 was so slow, expensive and prone to eat tapes that I'd have almost suggested swapping out a 2nd MFM drive every day. A few weeks later I got a call, they'd lost their data again and this time there wasn't much I could do.
Real men backup their data to slashdot. I hope you don't mind if I use this thread.
beegin 665 mydailybackup.uue
M27-N)W0@=&AIR!A(&=R96%T(&)A8VMU"$*27-N)W0@=&AIR!A(&=R96%T
)(&)A8VMU"$*
end
9 months ago I wrote a storymash chapter based around the concept of a sound machine which encouraged swarming behavior if crickets... and other living things. Run with it! (or run away!)
O.K. I exaggerated slightly but:
Software Bug Halts F22 Flight There are indications that fly-by-wire contributed to or caused crashes of an FA18 and some commercial Airbus planes which is why, unlike Airbus, Boeing designs allow the pilot to override fly-by-wire.
By the same token, ever since the Therac 25 deaths, there are FDC regulations preventing certain medical devices from being completely under software control (CT scanners, radiation therapy machines...) This is a good thing. Moore's law has allowed us to create software of a complexity that is either beyond what any human can understand and effectively test. Many eyes helps but QA doesn't really get the respect in opensource communities that development does and many commercial companies see QA as an unnecessary expense. Look for more accidental failures as companies trim their investment in quality during these difficult economic times.
One minor 'haha' failure I know of cost a fortune 500 company about 1 job a month worth of lost revenue. The contractor who found it was the first out the door. Yes, Y2k engineers caught a reasonable percentage of Y2k bugs but the main reason it was a relative 'non-event' had more to do with the background level of bugs in nearly all software.
If it is 'terrorists', who are they scaring besides a few computer geeks who understand the complexity and instability of our infrastructure? Yes, someone is inconveniencing and possibly slightly increasing the level of computational system errors in one community slightly above background noise. Yes malware attacks, cyber attacks and Y2k did actually cause some financial and personal damage, but this damage will always pale in comparison to the damage caused by the fact that significant investment in software and systems quality ended with the Apollo program in the 1970s.
I've used Research Disclosure publications which I'm pretty sure U.S. patent applicants are required to look through in their search for prior art.
I think this means that it might be possible to build a gravitational wave telescope. I get first dibs on a patent/prior art if the big corporations don't completely emasculate the USPTO's ability to grant patents to the little guys.
P.S. I also get first dibs on the 'gravitational wave sterling engine, powering devices on earth from colliding black holes out there!'
A reasonable wish, I wish slashdotters were better informed about the science of how to improve air quality to we can better inform employers and voters. The U.S. is going through a massive 'coal bubble', dirty 'CLEAN (sic) coal' power plants are cropping up in place of nuclear or alongside massive hydroelectric power plants. It won't be long before there won't be a safe place from pollution. Big cities such as LA, London, Beijing and SLC are legendary for their pollution, what is less well known is that the Ohio river valley from Pennsylvania to the western Great Lakes states is chronically polluted with NOx, SOx, CO2 (obviously, though the Fed still refuses to count this as pollution) and particulates. The first step towards reducing this is figuring out how much of the world gets by with 1/10th to 1/2th the energy usage per person, grab the bits which don't impact our 'comfort' enough to be balance a shorter life and research what it would take to bring back the comfort for the bits that people think is more important than living longer.
A typical 1000 Megawatt coal powerplant such as the behemoth ERGs boondoggle just being completed in SE Wisconsin requires 1215 train carloads of Coal (Carbon) every day. Once burned, each carbon molocule (Atomic Weight 12) will have two Oxygen Molecules (Atomic Weight 16) attached to it and this 'refuse' to be sequestured will weigh 3.67 times as much. All else being equal, this means you would need 4459 boxcars full of carbon junk leaving the power plant. But CO2 can't easily be compressed into boxcars so it is likely the carbon will be sequestered with calcium or silicon (in rock), and weigh much more. And Shell thinks this is cheaper than solar, wind and hydropower? Have I missed April fools day or is someone playing a shell game?
Actually for professional looking photos, sensor size does matter, again as the result of basic physics. You can downsize the sensor all you want but you can't downsize the wavelength of visible light. Come on Pentax, Mamaiya, Rollie or somebody, please release an affordable digital medium format camera!
The real irony is that Sun get's slagged so often by FOSS advocates even though Sun has probably contributed more than 50% of all FOSS code. And while the article/survey seems to indicate that Linux is continues to take market share from 'Unix', it doesn't explain why the google trendline for Linux and all GNU/Linux distributions is falling and the google trendline for OpenSolaris is rising. Maybe OpenSolaris is stealing market share from Unix (AIX/Solaris 8/HP...). IMHO, that's a good thing and Sun is in much better shape than you think. It still has the cash to buy itself and go private and/or buy GM or a number of other companies, and it hasn't to my knowledge accepted a dime of bailout money or been the benefit of silly government intervention like 'cash for clunkers' to get it's old equipment out of data centers.
If you squint at credits at end of video, you'll see that this technology existed in MCMLXXIX. 1979, or is that -1961?