Quite honestly, it's the fact that we aren't quite sure that scares me the most.
Then be very, very afraid. There are a lot of things we aren't quite sure about, from where all the missing matter is in the universe to exactly how the nuclear forces operate.
In fact, all the missing matter might just be waiting outside your back door waiting to mug you the next time you walk out. That's a scary idea.
Yes, but we have discovered amazing technology that allows us to see into the past![/snide]. We have examined records of climate change that span hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years.
Sadly, no we haven't, simply because records of climate change do not exist for millions, even thousands of years, into the past.
What we HAVE examined are indirect indicators of climate, such as tree rings and ice core CO2 levels. These are not records of climate change, but only of tree growth and perhaps CO2 levels.
What people forget, because scientists don't bother telling them, is that using such indirect measurements involve a lot of assumptions about conditions at the time and since. For example, one must assume that the CO2 in a core hasn't either accumulated or dispersed due to some unknown process to accept the 'measured CO2' from a current core being the actual value from the time the core was created.
Even the current "direct" measurements from satellites involve assumptions. Fortunately, the validity of these assumptions is testable (we have both the satellite measurements and ground truth data), whereas the validity of an assumption about conditions ten thousands years ago isn't (no ground truth).
So, the summary of the entire article is that many people have already been saying there is "nothing we can do" to stop what is a naturally occuring process that has happened before without us and will happen again after we are gone.
I said nothing about "investigating an industry", nor did the material I responded to.
As for decimation of the economy, when perceived correlation leads to worthless legislation that requires vast monetary investments, well, there you go. When companies are forced to spend money preventing something they cannot prevent and didn't cause, it damages the economy.
I belive you will be able to rest assured that your garbage disposal will not be network conscious based on the simple fact that it will not have a network card. Nor will your stove, your microwave, or any other home appliance save your computer and your Tivo.
You've missed the entire home automation discussion then, have you?
Telling your stove to start the cooking program for tonight's dinner certainly is a feature for home automation, as is the ability to ask the stove how much longer is left until the roast is done. Or being able to contact it from work to say "I'll be home late, do NOT start cooking the roast yet." Having the refridgerator know what is inside and how old it is (via RFID) and then automatically order from the store (or simply email a reminder "you need more milk" to the home owner) certainly is on the agenda for home automation.
Since garbage disposals do need a certain amount of use to remain functional (cleaning gunk out, for one thing), it is not far-fetched for that unit to be online to report to the owner. Certainly just having it online to record power consumption is a handy feature.
I currently have an X10 interface (serial) into the net, and it is not beyond reason to see X10 interfaces replaced by direct network connections, so that you control lights and outlets via the net.
The belief that only your computers and TIVO will be on the net is a bit naive -- perhaps not for today's appliances, but certainly for those of tomorrow.
Re:Distributed.net
on
Brute Force
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I mean, you can encrypt your golf scores. And some people do. Security is usually spent on the wrong areas, and not often enough on the areas that should be protected or encrypted.
Encryption is generally best when it is an all-or-nothing operation. If you encrypt JUST the one file with sensitive information, you draw attention to it and make it the obvious target.
OTH, if every file in your system is encrypted, it is a lot harder to know which files are important to break, and it will take so many more resources to accomplish.
Re:MOD REVIEW DOWN! TROLL!
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 1
If soemone honestly thinks that the acceptence or disapproval of a fettish is a determinant of someone else's love,
You simply don't understand. It is not "acceptance of a fetish". Porn represents this not as a "fetish" but as a normal activity which the recipient is supposed to enjoy. And the rejection of this act is equated to rejection of the person by the rejectee.
And we don't even have to go as far as the extremes of fetishes. When "normal" gets expanded through desensitization, the one who has not been desensitized isn't going to accept this as normal just because someone tells them to.
When you ask someone out to the movies and they say "no", do you assume they don't like movies, or that they don't want to go to one with you? If you do this repeatedly, to the point that you can rule out simple schedule conflicts, then what it left? If this is not "rejection", then why is rejection such a painful part of the adolescent process, to the point that boys are paralyzed into inaction? Why is it a stereotypical teenager who says "I'd like to ask her out, but she'd just say no and I'd be embarassed"?
...then they have MUCH more serious issues than porn.
If the porn is the cause of the apparent rejection, then while there may be more serious issues, the causal factor is still the porn.
That's the whole point i'm trying to make with my several posts here... it's not the porn that's the problem, it's that some people can handle it, some people can't.
Nope. It is not a problem that some people can handle it. It is a problem that it creates mythic figures that we wish to see in others, and by doing so lessens our ability to see others as what they are.
Some she liked the idea, others she didn't. Neither way did that hurt our relationship any.
Once again, a single anectode is being used as proof.
The real problem isn't porn, but insecurity, closed mindedness, or a host of other things.
Yes, if we were all perfect, porn would not be a problem. But it is that "perfection" that porn shows us that makes imperfection just that much more of a problem.
When I can have a "girlfriend" that never says no to even the most bizzare and humiliating acts; who never argues with me, always does for me what I want done, and doesn't rip my clothes to shreds after a bitter breakup, why in heaven's name would I dare try for the real thing? It is that disconnection between real people and the real fantasy that is the problem. Would I be better off with the fantasy, or with a (series of) real person? I can answer that: the latter is much better, but when the former is so readily available, it's often too much work.
Suppose you are a man in a relationship and you run across bukakke videos. Hey, you think, this looks like fun. You want to try it.
"No way" says your woman. "It's disgusting and unhygenic".
Well, now you've got a problem. Your woman obviously doesn't love you or she'd be happy to have you come on her face. And have all your friends come on her face. And she thinks you don't love her or you wouldn't want her to submit to this disgusting, dehumanizing act.
I don't see how any willing and non-harmfull act...
...and it would be silly to assume that our activities are not one of those environmental factors today.
Nobody needs to assume this. It's pretty simple. If there is a proven ten or 11 year cycle in both the weather AND the solar output, and no ten or 11 year cycle in the production of the so-called greenhouse gasses, then not only is there a lack of causality, there is a lack of correlation which could be assumed to be causality.
The earth has done this before. The earth did this before we were here. If we didn't cause it the last time, or the time before that, or the time before that, then there is no reason to believe we are causing it this time.
Don't feel bad, you are not the only person who confuses perceived correlation with causality. You weren't here to see the last "global warming" cycle, or if you were you didn't notice it because it wasn't being hyped as the next global catastrophy, so THIS time MUST be different from all previous history, and we MUST be the difference. That's "perceived" but not real correlation.
Perceived correlation is not sufficient to justify a decimation of a global economy in the hope that it "works out", however.
The truth is, global warming is not the issue. "Global warming" and "global cooling" take place quite often, considering the amount of time the earth has been here.
"It's done it before, it will do it again."
For humans to assume that THEY are the ones causing it THIS TIME (when they weren't even around for most of the other times, and it happened then, too) is silly. And THAT is the real issue: is this being caused by us, or are we just along for the ride?
The Wolly Mammoths were not standing around berating themselves for not having invented fire (so they could stop the ice age); yet we want to berate ourselves for having invented fire as if we could stop the coming weather cycles.
It's happened before, it will do it again. It happened before we got here, it will happen again even if we weren't here.
Whether that's global warmings fault is debatable, but certainly plausible.
What is much more plausible is that there is an atlantic decadal cycle that results in increases in storms, just like there is a pacific decadal cycle that results in more storms, just like the decadal cycle of el Nino.
Funny how radio people have understood and take advantage of the solar 11 year cycles for a very long time, but this 11 year cycle comes as a complete mystery to most scientists.
Hint: where does a lot of heat come from? The sun. If the sun has an 11 year cycle, then doesn't it seem likely that every place on earth might have an 11 year weather cycle?
Even the International Herald Tribune, in the news section, had to admit that this is not "global warming". Of course, to make it clear to the readers, they did have a large editorial that blamed it all on global warming AND the oil companies, too.
Dude, he has no way of refusing aid from Chicago. Chicago can send whatever they want to.
That's how fucked up this is.
What's fucked up is this "federal government is our daddy, here to protect us and save us and wipe our butts for us" attitude.
What really fucked up is the people who were told this cat5 hurricane was coming and decided their property was worth more to them than their lives, so they stayed to protect it. And then they complain that nobody is risking more lives to come save them after they realize how fucked up a decision they made for themselves.
And who really fucked up the worst is the mayor of the city who failed to have plans in place to deal with his own problems, who then whines because the President of the US isn't personally filling sandbags to help fill the break in the levy. I guess if you refuse to do your own job, the best defense is to accuse someone else of failing to do theirs, when it really isn't theirs in the first place.
But on the other hand helping the poor is totaly unamerican (socialism is baaaaaaaad).
I see you've fallen into the trap of thinking that socialism equates to helping the poor. And the trap of being unable to differentiate between forced charity (money taken via taxes from one person to be given to someone else) and voluntary charity (freely given money, time, or merchandise.)
Yes, US bashers had a field-day when the government didn't immediately provide a large dish of cash for the Indonesian tidal wave victims. They forgot to notice all the freely-given donations from US citizens.
It's just strange that a society that holds on to religion in so many ways, seems to disagree with a major portion of it.
For a country that you accuse of being hypocritical, there certainly are a large number of thriving charity organizations doing a lot of good work in non-US (and even US-hating) countries. They must be getting money from somewhere...
You're not thinking through the math. When there are millions and billions of people online, there are too many target addresses as well as lots of senders.
Well, the spammers aren't "thinking through the math" either, then. They're doing something now called "dictionary spam", where they don't bother harvesting anything but domain names (and they've got a free source for those.) They then send emails to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of addresses at each domain name. Don't believe it? Well, I've seen the logs from just such spamming, until I shut off the logs for failed delivery attempts.
Billions of people on the net slowing things down? Hardly. Just more likely for the tens of billions of dictionary spams to hit a target.
Do you want to ban this message? This one,
that message is not bulk. It's not spam. But ONE copy of a bulk message appearing in my mailbox certainly is spam. That's the "one message" that the subject refers to.
A technology to prevent spam will take care of the problem much better then the government ever can...
What technology might that be, pray tell?
Filtering works nicely... once you've gotten one spam with a certain identifiable pattern, and then only until the pattern changes.
It is remarkable how many spams get through even the "commercial" anti-spam filters like barracuda.
and do we really want the government tell us what we can and can't do with our emails?
They aren't telling you what you can and cannot do with your emails, unless you happen to be a spammer, and then the answer is YES, because your emails are causing other people problems.
So why haven't ISPs begun requiring users to "opt in" to port 25? Maybe 1 in 10000 users has a legitimate need to relay email...
It took me a minute to figure out what you were trying to accomplish here. "Opt in to port 25?"
Sorry, wouldn't work. 10000 in 10000 users want the ability to send email, and that is all it takes. Infected systems aren't relaying, they're initiating it.
Yes, that is true here in the U.S. My understanding is that it is illegal to intercept mobile phone or cell phone or mobile phone or any number of military or commercial transmissions.
While it is true that the cellphone lobby was able to get enacted a stupid law that prohibits the interception of cellular telephone signals, and a general prohibition on equipment capable of such, that has nothing at all to do with shortwave radio or the frequency bands being discussed.
Radio Shack will happily sell you a shortwave radio capable of coverage of the entire shortware spectrum. Many modern radios cover from "DC to daylight", which is a euphemism for 100kHz or so up through 2 or even 3 GHz (minus, of course, the sections in the 830 and 890 MHz areas that are cellphone allocations.) But the "shortwave" spectrum only runs up to 30 - 50 MHz (depending on who you ask) and none of that is prohibited listening.
The Communications Act does prohibit revealing to third parties anything you overhear that is not commercial broadcast or amateur, however.
I think the problem is that hams believe they have some type of "right of first refusal" that allows them disproportionate influence on decisions about radio spectrum.
You are wrong.
This fight involves a relatively small but relatively important piece of spectrum -- that running from 3 to 30 MHz. That's only 27MHz. That's just a tad more than 4 analog TV channels wide. It's a very small section, really.
Unfortunately, that small section happens to be the place where long-range to global communications is possible. It's a place where radiation can propogate world-wide.
It's also a place where amateur radio has some primary allocations. That means that ham radio licensees really do have first rights to use that spectrum, and first responsibility to object to interference from secondary users. Because they are the primary allocation (based on international treaty, by the way) their "influence" is hardly dispropotionate.
That's a problem because they have skin in the game, so they're biased...
Biased against interference that could easily make (and has made, in certain areas) thousands of dollars of investment in equipment and uncounted hours of volunteer time worthless? Biased against a loss of a significant world-wide resource that enables communications with people not only in the US hinterlands but with remote areas of Africa and Australia? Yes, I suspect so.
which makes thier opinions on the subject unreliable.
Stop being insulting. Hams, combined, have a large amount of technical experience and training in precisely this kind of problem (tracking interference and effects of radiators). Their "opinions" are much less influenced by greed than those of the power companies who see a large amount of money to be made from BPL.
Then they passed laws to restrict any short wave radio to not be able to tune any band not explicitly Ham or commercial short wave.
In which country is this law? Certainly not the US.
I don't imagine that the entire phone wire network will be without problems or leakage. It will come into your PC's your radios, your TV's and cause new and intermittent problems.
DSL operates at frequencies significantly below the AM broadcast band. It can afford to do this, since it is providing one customer per line. BPL is a BACKBONE for many customers, and thus needs to operate in the RF range to have enough bandwidth.
The truth is, MOST people will not notice the problems because MOST people don't listen to or use the spectrum involved. It will be the government, military, ham, and shortwave users who are most hurt.
I don't think this has been well thought out.
With the amount of half-truths and lies coming from the BPL proponents, I think it has been VERY well thought out, just that the thought has been about the money to be made and not the loss of emergency communcations systems involved.
First one would not have to put in extra wires since most rooms have at least one electrical receptacle. Second it would seem to me that one could put devices that would communicate with the computer anywhere in the house just by plugging it in a receptacle.
That is not what BPL is about. BPL is distribution using the high voltage lines. Once that signal gets to your local transformer, it's gone. There is a tap at the pole that converts it to a normal baseband internet signal.
The interference issues are already horrible; just imagine what they'd be like if every HOUSE was a radiator of BPL signals.
Bear in mind that the sale was restricted to residents of the county who had, in effect, already paid for the computers once.
Still irrelevant. Using this logic, since "we" paid for the lockerrooms in the new highschool, "we" ought to be able to use them whenever we want. "We" ought to be able to play basketball on the new court, and watch TV on the TVs they just bought for A/V.
EVERYBODY paid for the computers. EVERYBODY ought to benefit from them when they are sold, IF they are sold. The only people who benefitted from this sale were the few who got a computer for $50. The rest of the county residents got to pay MORE to buy replacement computers.
Besides, government's number one job is to be responsive to the desires of its constituents.
Wrongo. Consider carefully "tyranny of the majority". Consider deToqueville and the concept that a society survives only until the members realize they can tax "others" to pay for their pleasures.
The number one job of a school board is to manage and maintain the schools as a place to educate students. A school board that does not say "of course not" when the public says "gimme" is not doing its job.
Don't think for a minute that they're in the kind of shape that you'd keep your computer in.
So let's assume that 50% are in working order.
If the school buys 1000 Dells to hand out and keeps the iBooks, they have 1500 computers. That's 500 more than they would have if they sold all the iBooks. If that's 500 more than the number of students, well, gee, they've now got computers they can put in the library and classrooms or to hand out as replacements when these rowdy high schoolers destroy the one they've already been given. They'd have 500 computers to use in the elementary schools. If half of those iBooks break in a year, they'd still have 250 more computers than they have now.
The point was, it is silly to think that a computer is of no use just because the next computer you are going to buy is from a different manufacturer. Those iBooks were usable; someone at that school could use a computer. Lots of someones could use 500 of them.
Oh, and they sold for so cheap because that's what the taxpayers of the county asked the school district to do.
That's irrelevant. The school board is elected to manage the accounts and keep the schools running. I'd love it if I could simply ask my local school board to give me things for free (or "really cheap"), but they're not doing their jobs if they agree.
The point of government surplus isn't to make money, it is to keep from having to landfill items that still have value to someone.
No, the point is to recover some money that typically goes into overhead operations for the facilities. I.e., a department gets rid of a computer, surplus sells it and the money goes into the general fund to pay for lights and heat etc.
It also serves the purpose to sanitize the property management database for inventoriable items. I.e., it's a legal way to get things off of inventory when you don't need them anymore.
If the "no landfill" purpose were true, then they'd simply give the stuff away to anyone who asked. About the only thing I've ever seen "free" at the local surplus sales is three ring binders, and then only the ones that are imprinted with company logos. And the only computers that I've seen for less than $100 are either broken laptops or ones so old the word "Pentium" isn't in the spell checker.
Henrico Co. Schools of VA decided to change laptop suppliers... The result was a couple thousand laptops of no use.
Excuse me, but how does a decision to change suppliers of future purchases make currently owned equipment "of no use?" Do the iBooks figure out that their new brothers are not Apple and suddenly stop working? Does the software on them suddenly stop functioning?
Failing to plan for a herd of vultures rioting to get almost free computers is not the crime here. The crime is the attitude that perfectly functional computing hardware is suddenly "of no use", especially coming from a taxpayer funded institution. And certainly when that institution typically cries because they don't have enough money.
There is no reason not to use the iBooks until they croak, and then replace them with new Dells. It would teach kids that there really is more to life than Microsoft and Intel, and allow them a choice of which OS they preferred. Schoolkids are not processing gigabyte datasets that requires terrabyte disks and gigahertz CPUs. They're browsing the web and typing book reports. I'm sure an iBook can handle that.
If I were a resident of that county, the next time the schools put a millage up for a vote I'd remind my neighbors of the profligate waste demonstrated by this nonsense and campaign for a no vote. And a replacement of the moronic school board.
More importantly, Windows and OSX both get patched so frequently...
You would be amazed at the number of DOS systems still out in the world doing simple things that still require knowing what time it is. And, or course, the number of Windows systems that don't get patched because installing patches is the number one way to break a working system.
Slashdot Mirror
Then be very, very afraid. There are a lot of things we aren't quite sure about, from where all the missing matter is in the universe to exactly how the nuclear forces operate.
In fact, all the missing matter might just be waiting outside your back door waiting to mug you the next time you walk out. That's a scary idea.
Sadly, no we haven't, simply because records of climate change do not exist for millions, even thousands of years, into the past.
What we HAVE examined are indirect indicators of climate, such as tree rings and ice core CO2 levels. These are not records of climate change, but only of tree growth and perhaps CO2 levels.
What people forget, because scientists don't bother telling them, is that using such indirect measurements involve a lot of assumptions about conditions at the time and since. For example, one must assume that the CO2 in a core hasn't either accumulated or dispersed due to some unknown process to accept the 'measured CO2' from a current core being the actual value from the time the core was created.
Even the current "direct" measurements from satellites involve assumptions. Fortunately, the validity of these assumptions is testable (we have both the satellite measurements and ground truth data), whereas the validity of an assumption about conditions ten thousands years ago isn't (no ground truth).
So, the summary of the entire article is that many people have already been saying there is "nothing we can do" to stop what is a naturally occuring process that has happened before without us and will happen again after we are gone.
As for decimation of the economy, when perceived correlation leads to worthless legislation that requires vast monetary investments, well, there you go. When companies are forced to spend money preventing something they cannot prevent and didn't cause, it damages the economy.
You've missed the entire home automation discussion then, have you?
Telling your stove to start the cooking program for tonight's dinner certainly is a feature for home automation, as is the ability to ask the stove how much longer is left until the roast is done. Or being able to contact it from work to say "I'll be home late, do NOT start cooking the roast yet." Having the refridgerator know what is inside and how old it is (via RFID) and then automatically order from the store (or simply email a reminder "you need more milk" to the home owner) certainly is on the agenda for home automation.
Since garbage disposals do need a certain amount of use to remain functional (cleaning gunk out, for one thing), it is not far-fetched for that unit to be online to report to the owner. Certainly just having it online to record power consumption is a handy feature.
I currently have an X10 interface (serial) into the net, and it is not beyond reason to see X10 interfaces replaced by direct network connections, so that you control lights and outlets via the net.
The belief that only your computers and TIVO will be on the net is a bit naive -- perhaps not for today's appliances, but certainly for those of tomorrow.
Encryption is generally best when it is an all-or-nothing operation. If you encrypt JUST the one file with sensitive information, you draw attention to it and make it the obvious target.
OTH, if every file in your system is encrypted, it is a lot harder to know which files are important to break, and it will take so many more resources to accomplish.
You simply don't understand. It is not "acceptance of a fetish". Porn represents this not as a "fetish" but as a normal activity which the recipient is supposed to enjoy. And the rejection of this act is equated to rejection of the person by the rejectee.
And we don't even have to go as far as the extremes of fetishes. When "normal" gets expanded through desensitization, the one who has not been desensitized isn't going to accept this as normal just because someone tells them to.
When you ask someone out to the movies and they say "no", do you assume they don't like movies, or that they don't want to go to one with you? If you do this repeatedly, to the point that you can rule out simple schedule conflicts, then what it left? If this is not "rejection", then why is rejection such a painful part of the adolescent process, to the point that boys are paralyzed into inaction? Why is it a stereotypical teenager who says "I'd like to ask her out, but she'd just say no and I'd be embarassed"?
If the porn is the cause of the apparent rejection, then while there may be more serious issues, the causal factor is still the porn.
That's the whole point i'm trying to make with my several posts here... it's not the porn that's the problem, it's that some people can handle it, some people can't.
Nope. It is not a problem that some people can handle it. It is a problem that it creates mythic figures that we wish to see in others, and by doing so lessens our ability to see others as what they are.
Some she liked the idea, others she didn't. Neither way did that hurt our relationship any.
Once again, a single anectode is being used as proof.
The real problem isn't porn, but insecurity, closed mindedness, or a host of other things.
Yes, if we were all perfect, porn would not be a problem. But it is that "perfection" that porn shows us that makes imperfection just that much more of a problem.
When I can have a "girlfriend" that never says no to even the most bizzare and humiliating acts; who never argues with me, always does for me what I want done, and doesn't rip my clothes to shreds after a bitter breakup, why in heaven's name would I dare try for the real thing? It is that disconnection between real people and the real fantasy that is the problem. Would I be better off with the fantasy, or with a (series of) real person? I can answer that: the latter is much better, but when the former is so readily available, it's often too much work.
Suppose you are a man in a relationship and you run across bukakke videos. Hey, you think, this looks like fun. You want to try it.
"No way" says your woman. "It's disgusting and unhygenic".
Well, now you've got a problem. Your woman obviously doesn't love you or she'd be happy to have you come on her face. And have all your friends come on her face. And she thinks you don't love her or you wouldn't want her to submit to this disgusting, dehumanizing act.
I don't see how any willing and non-harmfull act...
When it is willing for both parties, no problem.
Nobody needs to assume this. It's pretty simple. If there is a proven ten or 11 year cycle in both the weather AND the solar output, and no ten or 11 year cycle in the production of the so-called greenhouse gasses, then not only is there a lack of causality, there is a lack of correlation which could be assumed to be causality.
The earth has done this before. The earth did this before we were here. If we didn't cause it the last time, or the time before that, or the time before that, then there is no reason to believe we are causing it this time.
Don't feel bad, you are not the only person who confuses perceived correlation with causality. You weren't here to see the last "global warming" cycle, or if you were you didn't notice it because it wasn't being hyped as the next global catastrophy, so THIS time MUST be different from all previous history, and we MUST be the difference. That's "perceived" but not real correlation.
Perceived correlation is not sufficient to justify a decimation of a global economy in the hope that it "works out", however.
The truth is, global warming is not the issue. "Global warming" and "global cooling" take place quite often, considering the amount of time the earth has been here.
"It's done it before, it will do it again."
For humans to assume that THEY are the ones causing it THIS TIME (when they weren't even around for most of the other times, and it happened then, too) is silly. And THAT is the real issue: is this being caused by us, or are we just along for the ride?
The Wolly Mammoths were not standing around berating themselves for not having invented fire (so they could stop the ice age); yet we want to berate ourselves for having invented fire as if we could stop the coming weather cycles.
It's happened before, it will do it again. It happened before we got here, it will happen again even if we weren't here.
What is much more plausible is that there is an atlantic decadal cycle that results in increases in storms, just like there is a pacific decadal cycle that results in more storms, just like the decadal cycle of el Nino.
Funny how radio people have understood and take advantage of the solar 11 year cycles for a very long time, but this 11 year cycle comes as a complete mystery to most scientists.
Hint: where does a lot of heat come from? The sun. If the sun has an 11 year cycle, then doesn't it seem likely that every place on earth might have an 11 year weather cycle?
Even the International Herald Tribune, in the news section, had to admit that this is not "global warming". Of course, to make it clear to the readers, they did have a large editorial that blamed it all on global warming AND the oil companies, too.
Dude, he has no way of refusing aid from Chicago. Chicago can send whatever they want to.
That's how fucked up this is.
What's fucked up is this "federal government is our daddy, here to protect us and save us and wipe our butts for us" attitude.
What really fucked up is the people who were told this cat5 hurricane was coming and decided their property was worth more to them than their lives, so they stayed to protect it. And then they complain that nobody is risking more lives to come save them after they realize how fucked up a decision they made for themselves.
And who really fucked up the worst is the mayor of the city who failed to have plans in place to deal with his own problems, who then whines because the President of the US isn't personally filling sandbags to help fill the break in the levy. I guess if you refuse to do your own job, the best defense is to accuse someone else of failing to do theirs, when it really isn't theirs in the first place.
I see you've fallen into the trap of thinking that socialism equates to helping the poor. And the trap of being unable to differentiate between forced charity (money taken via taxes from one person to be given to someone else) and voluntary charity (freely given money, time, or merchandise.)
Yes, US bashers had a field-day when the government didn't immediately provide a large dish of cash for the Indonesian tidal wave victims. They forgot to notice all the freely-given donations from US citizens.
It's just strange that a society that holds on to religion in so many ways, seems to disagree with a major portion of it.
For a country that you accuse of being hypocritical, there certainly are a large number of thriving charity organizations doing a lot of good work in non-US (and even US-hating) countries. They must be getting money from somewhere...
Well, the spammers aren't "thinking through the math" either, then. They're doing something now called "dictionary spam", where they don't bother harvesting anything but domain names (and they've got a free source for those.) They then send emails to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of addresses at each domain name. Don't believe it? Well, I've seen the logs from just such spamming, until I shut off the logs for failed delivery attempts.
Billions of people on the net slowing things down? Hardly. Just more likely for the tens of billions of dictionary spams to hit a target.
Do you want to ban this message? This one,
that message is not bulk. It's not spam. But ONE copy of a bulk message appearing in my mailbox certainly is spam. That's the "one message" that the subject refers to.
What technology might that be, pray tell?
Filtering works nicely ... once you've gotten one spam with a certain identifiable pattern, and then only until the pattern changes.
It is remarkable how many spams get through even the "commercial" anti-spam filters like barracuda.
and do we really want the government tell us what we can and can't do with our emails?
They aren't telling you what you can and cannot do with your emails, unless you happen to be a spammer, and then the answer is YES, because your emails are causing other people problems.
It took me a minute to figure out what you were trying to accomplish here. "Opt in to port 25?"
Sorry, wouldn't work. 10000 in 10000 users want the ability to send email, and that is all it takes. Infected systems aren't relaying, they're initiating it.
While it is true that the cellphone lobby was able to get enacted a stupid law that prohibits the interception of cellular telephone signals, and a general prohibition on equipment capable of such, that has nothing at all to do with shortwave radio or the frequency bands being discussed.
Radio Shack will happily sell you a shortwave radio capable of coverage of the entire shortware spectrum. Many modern radios cover from "DC to daylight", which is a euphemism for 100kHz or so up through 2 or even 3 GHz (minus, of course, the sections in the 830 and 890 MHz areas that are cellphone allocations.) But the "shortwave" spectrum only runs up to 30 - 50 MHz (depending on who you ask) and none of that is prohibited listening.
The Communications Act does prohibit revealing to third parties anything you overhear that is not commercial broadcast or amateur, however.
You are wrong.
This fight involves a relatively small but relatively important piece of spectrum -- that running from 3 to 30 MHz. That's only 27MHz. That's just a tad more than 4 analog TV channels wide. It's a very small section, really.
Unfortunately, that small section happens to be the place where long-range to global communications is possible. It's a place where radiation can propogate world-wide.
It's also a place where amateur radio has some primary allocations. That means that ham radio licensees really do have first rights to use that spectrum, and first responsibility to object to interference from secondary users. Because they are the primary allocation (based on international treaty, by the way) their "influence" is hardly dispropotionate.
That's a problem because they have skin in the game, so they're biased ...
Biased against interference that could easily make (and has made, in certain areas) thousands of dollars of investment in equipment and uncounted hours of volunteer time worthless? Biased against a loss of a significant world-wide resource that enables communications with people not only in the US hinterlands but with remote areas of Africa and Australia? Yes, I suspect so.
which makes thier opinions on the subject unreliable.
Stop being insulting. Hams, combined, have a large amount of technical experience and training in precisely this kind of problem (tracking interference and effects of radiators). Their "opinions" are much less influenced by greed than those of the power companies who see a large amount of money to be made from BPL.
In which country is this law? Certainly not the US.
I don't imagine that the entire phone wire network will be without problems or leakage. It will come into your PC's your radios, your TV's and cause new and intermittent problems.
DSL operates at frequencies significantly below the AM broadcast band. It can afford to do this, since it is providing one customer per line. BPL is a BACKBONE for many customers, and thus needs to operate in the RF range to have enough bandwidth.
The truth is, MOST people will not notice the problems because MOST people don't listen to or use the spectrum involved. It will be the government, military, ham, and shortwave users who are most hurt.
I don't think this has been well thought out.
With the amount of half-truths and lies coming from the BPL proponents, I think it has been VERY well thought out, just that the thought has been about the money to be made and not the loss of emergency communcations systems involved.
That is not what BPL is about. BPL is distribution using the high voltage lines. Once that signal gets to your local transformer, it's gone. There is a tap at the pole that converts it to a normal baseband internet signal.
The interference issues are already horrible; just imagine what they'd be like if every HOUSE was a radiator of BPL signals.
Still irrelevant. Using this logic, since "we" paid for the lockerrooms in the new highschool, "we" ought to be able to use them whenever we want. "We" ought to be able to play basketball on the new court, and watch TV on the TVs they just bought for A/V.
EVERYBODY paid for the computers. EVERYBODY ought to benefit from them when they are sold, IF they are sold. The only people who benefitted from this sale were the few who got a computer for $50. The rest of the county residents got to pay MORE to buy replacement computers.
Besides, government's number one job is to be responsive to the desires of its constituents.
Wrongo. Consider carefully "tyranny of the majority". Consider deToqueville and the concept that a society survives only until the members realize they can tax "others" to pay for their pleasures.
The number one job of a school board is to manage and maintain the schools as a place to educate students. A school board that does not say "of course not" when the public says "gimme" is not doing its job.
So, the people at the school who support the iBooks now will forget how to support them when they first touch a Dell?
And no, "lack of support" still does not make a computer useless.
So let's assume that 50% are in working order.
If the school buys 1000 Dells to hand out and keeps the iBooks, they have 1500 computers. That's 500 more than they would have if they sold all the iBooks. If that's 500 more than the number of students, well, gee, they've now got computers they can put in the library and classrooms or to hand out as replacements when these rowdy high schoolers destroy the one they've already been given. They'd have 500 computers to use in the elementary schools. If half of those iBooks break in a year, they'd still have 250 more computers than they have now.
The point was, it is silly to think that a computer is of no use just because the next computer you are going to buy is from a different manufacturer. Those iBooks were usable; someone at that school could use a computer. Lots of someones could use 500 of them.
Oh, and they sold for so cheap because that's what the taxpayers of the county asked the school district to do.
That's irrelevant. The school board is elected to manage the accounts and keep the schools running. I'd love it if I could simply ask my local school board to give me things for free (or "really cheap"), but they're not doing their jobs if they agree.
No, the point is to recover some money that typically goes into overhead operations for the facilities. I.e., a department gets rid of a computer, surplus sells it and the money goes into the general fund to pay for lights and heat etc.
It also serves the purpose to sanitize the property management database for inventoriable items. I.e., it's a legal way to get things off of inventory when you don't need them anymore.
If the "no landfill" purpose were true, then they'd simply give the stuff away to anyone who asked. About the only thing I've ever seen "free" at the local surplus sales is three ring binders, and then only the ones that are imprinted with company logos. And the only computers that I've seen for less than $100 are either broken laptops or ones so old the word "Pentium" isn't in the spell checker.
Excuse me, but how does a decision to change suppliers of future purchases make currently owned equipment "of no use?" Do the iBooks figure out that their new brothers are not Apple and suddenly stop working? Does the software on them suddenly stop functioning?
Failing to plan for a herd of vultures rioting to get almost free computers is not the crime here. The crime is the attitude that perfectly functional computing hardware is suddenly "of no use", especially coming from a taxpayer funded institution. And certainly when that institution typically cries because they don't have enough money.
There is no reason not to use the iBooks until they croak, and then replace them with new Dells. It would teach kids that there really is more to life than Microsoft and Intel, and allow them a choice of which OS they preferred. Schoolkids are not processing gigabyte datasets that requires terrabyte disks and gigahertz CPUs. They're browsing the web and typing book reports. I'm sure an iBook can handle that.
If I were a resident of that county, the next time the schools put a millage up for a vote I'd remind my neighbors of the profligate waste demonstrated by this nonsense and campaign for a no vote. And a replacement of the moronic school board.
You would be amazed at the number of DOS systems still out in the world doing simple things that still require knowing what time it is. And, or course, the number of Windows systems that don't get patched because installing patches is the number one way to break a working system.