People who use this service will definitely see the number of whois-related mail to their mailbox go down, but I'm guessing that most of the people who sign up for this service won't be the kind of people who would fall for the scam anyways.
The real concern is people who are website newcomers, or less sophisticated users who still use NetSol (Veri$ign, whatever) to register their domain names. Those people are unlikely to even realize that it is possible to register their domain names through another registrar.
And, while I have a chance, I'd like to do a plug, if I may. 000domains.com has had some of the best customer support I've experienced from a registrar--I usually get a response to any of my e-mails immediately. They're not the cheapest, but they are reliable and friendly over the phone, which is great when you're trying to transfer your new client's domain away from Network Solutions! Our company has over 50 domains registered with them.
There has already been quite a lot of controversy regarding deep links, dating all the way back to 1999.
In fact, one major free website hosting company, whose name escapes me at the moment, does not allow you to deep link to their members' pages. Instead, you are forced to go to that member's home page first (I imagine that they are checking for referers or some such thing).
I think what the original poster meant was that the current default *is* an opt-out version. In other words, you must make the effort to be left alone.
Some students are willing to give out their information in order to receive freebie samples from various corporations in their mailbox, or to get cute little letters about their favorite pop-stars, or free "magazines" targetting at college students. That is "opt-in". There do actually happen to be companies who I *want* to receive information from, because I find it useful to me. That is "opt-in" as well.
The question is whether the school could have a default of "we won't give away your information" and then have a form where a student can sign a statement that says, "I don't mind if you give my name to advertising corporations."
Re:Do not lock yourself with .doc
on
Accurate OCR?
·
· Score: 1
The format is horrendously inefficient
It's true that the XML format is "bulky", but with processor speeds increasing and memory increasingly cheap, that is less of an issue. XML can be processed and cataloged pretty quickly, even if it isn't the most "efficient" way of doing it. Besides, we're talking document access in a specialized library for the visually impaired. We're not talking about many concurrent accesses all going at the same time.
Without a description of the tags used and the relation between them they are just as unreadable as anything else
Wrong. This is the nicest feature of XML! You can actually look at it, and assuming that the tags are intuitively named, you can pretty much figure out what information is in the file. Think about this: which would you rather try to decipher from within a plain text editor: volumnious RTF code, the binary content of a.doc file, or sections of text wrapped in tags like <title>, <author> and <loc_number>? And for more "effecient" data formats, it gets even worse. Imagine trying to open up an Access database in a binary editor, for example.
You can't easily display or print your stuff without digging into the technical side of XML.
Yeah, that is true. Without a decent application capable of opening and interpreting an XML file, you just can't print or display it. That also applies to every other existing data format, except *maybe* plain text, which is not really a useful format to store information in.
XML is not hype. It makes sense as a data storage format for all of the opposite reasons you cited: it can be processed fairly quickly, it is easily readable, even in text format, and there are many tools which allow you to very easily display or print XML formatted information.
the GPUL, unlike the Power4, is smaller, runs cooler and consumes far less power, making it suitable for desktop machines and small servers
Does anyone know if the chip would actually be cool enough so that it would not require a fan? One of my favorite features of the G4 is that it requires no fan whatsoever. My PowerMac G4 makes so little noise that sometimes it's hard to tell if its running or not without looking at the little glowing power button on the front.
I think this is one of the nicest features of Macintosh computers and if they need to add a fan I think that will be a real shame. On the other hand, Motorolla really hasn't gotten their act together, so Apple may not have a choice.
Obviously, there has to be a distinction made between the *kinds* of use of your information.
For instance, I would *want* all of my personal information to be in the student directory, so friends of mine at the school would be able to contact me easily. On the other hand, I would *not* want any of that information to fall into the hands of companies trying to target the student market.
I do recall that starting sophomore year or thereabouts, my school stopped listing the extension numbers of students living on campus. This mean that if you wanted to find out the phone number of a fellow student living on campus, you had to trudge over to the main office, show your student id, and then ask (no, they would not give the information over the phone!). This was very annoying, though it was clearly thought necessary to protect the privacy of the students, especially women.
Nevertheless, we still had a few obscene crank callers that got a hold of some of the numbers anyhow...
It seems contradictory. There does not appear to be any reason that the government should be concerned with whether or not people are unfairly "copying" these signals--for example, like, recording them on a VCR. The only group that is hurt is the corporate sector, right?
So, shouldn't it be the marketplace that solves this, if it needs to be solved? What is the problem exactly--which businesses are complaining?
It can't be the movie studios - most of them own or are owned by the same companies that serve as broadcasters!
Michael Crichton's Terminal Man directly addressed the idea of using electric shocks to control seizures. Of course, in the book, the dude goes apeshit because like a kiddie and an open cookie jar, he just can't get enough of the electric shocks and then I think he goes on a killing spree or something. Fairly typical Crichton stuff.
I hope research like this gets us to understand more about how the brain works, but I can't help feeling that there might still be something to this "out of body" experience. After all, some accounts describe people who actually "saw" things during their out-of-body experience that were later corroborated by other people who were in the same room.
Finally, and this is the truth, you can actually purchase an Astral Projection kit. Just think of how this new discovery will hurt their business!
Re:Do not lock yourself with .doc
on
Accurate OCR?
·
· Score: 1
Or how about XML?
My guess is if this content is geared toward the vision impaired, niceties like hanging indents, styles, etc. aren't that important. In such a case, using XML with perhaps a few style-based tags (such as <B>, <I> <U> etc) should do the trick.
The nice thing about XML data is it's relatively clean, it's easy to convert to other formats, and can be made to store data or metadata as well.
When the science skeptics get ahold of the rabbit-o-saurus, they'll put it right next to their moon landing hoax books and their creationism propaganda
According to the article, the technical name for this dinosaur is Incisivosaurus. Calling it a "rabbit-o-saurus" instead will only encourage the skeptics. The picture in the article depicts something that, aside from the buck teeth, is very different from a rabbit--it looks much more like an emu or an ostrich. This is, to my understanding, consistent with recent research that suggests that dinosaurs were the antecedents of birds. And buck teeth would, no doubt, be useful in digging up plant roots or whatever, suggesting that it was a herbivore.
Granted, it's one funny looking mother.
Abby FineReader...
on
Accurate OCR?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
In regards to accuracy: I've tested and compared OmniPage Pro to Abby FineReader and Abby is much, much better at text recognition. It doesn't offer as many export formats as OmniPage Pro does, but it does include an SDK, so if you can get your hands on some programmers you might be able to fiddle with it some. Abby is definitely a step up from OmniPage.
dealing with multiple languages such as Spanish and French
I'm pretty sure that Abby FineReader has language modules, so you can scan works in many languages.
Might this be a case where using "self-organizing circuits" might do the trick? The question would be, how would the circuit evaluate its successfulness in being "random"?
Yes and no. Because black holes aren't exactly "descendants" of something, it's not like you can say that one kind of black hole is related or unrelated to another kind of black hole.
However, from the tone of the article, it seems that these types of black holes--ones which reside in the center of "globular" galaxies--would have formed differently and at a different time than the larger black holes found at the center of "spiral" galaxies.
I guess a good example is a "pygmy" animal, such as the pygmy shrew (or, try here for a more accurate description), which is not a "smaller" version of the species but is its own species, related to the normal one.
I'm pretty sure that the conditions for these black holes would have to be different, since otherwise they would have caused the formation of spiral galaxies rather than globular ones. Any astronomers out there care to chime in?
You haven't lived till you've had my grandma's Cream of Glowing Mushroom & Barley Soup.
On a more serious note: while it is important to keep these sorts of foods out of the general population, I wonder what is being done to help those whose livelihood has up to now depended upon growing/gathering and selling these foods. If they can't sell the produce, they may just eat it themselves, meaning that they will be exposed to a greater amount of radiation than most people.
This is probably one of the reasons they don't want to crack down on the babushkas.It would also be interesting to see what the public reaction to this will be...will more people seek out the babushkas to get the "good stuff"?
Extricating the human from the loop is all the more urgent because of the outlook for the next decade. By some estimates, 200 million information technology (IT) workers might be needed to support a billion people using computers at millions of businesses that could be interconnected via intranets, extranets, and the Internet.
Do the easy math: that comes one IT worker for every 5 people using computers. That seems like an outrageous overestimate. Haven't people learned from the demand hype of the late 90's which drove the whole technology sector into a deep recession?
If you were to draw a curve graph comparing use of the internet (i.e. how many web pages viewed, how many users checking their e-mail), demand (as opposed to need) for technology resources, and the amount of money people are willing to spend for technology on a graph, you would see an interesting thing: In 97-99, you would see that demand for technology resources would be high--companies would be scrambling over themselves to hire as many IT professionals and purchase as much software, hardware, routers, cable, etc. as possible. At the same time, the line for money spent would be extremely high as well. On the other hand, the "actual use" line would be low. Move ahead to 2000-Spring 2000. You would see that the money line had dropped by a nice little chunk (no one wanted to spend any money on the web anymore if they could help it--it was the year of the dot com busts). Infrastructure would still be important, so that line would only have dipped slightly. People have ditched vague commercial ideas for more sound click-and-mortar technology. The internet use line, meanwhile, is going upwards rapidly. Move to late spring/summer of 2001. Both the demand line and the money line have plummeted. No one wants to invest in new technologies, and no one is even wanting to spend money on standard technology like Cisco routers. What was the dot-com bust is now the Internet infrastructure bust. Paradoxically, Internet use has continued to grow this whole time, and now over half of all people in the US do something online every day. So the whole time that IT technology acquisition and IT financial investment is going down, Internet use is actually going up
Okay, that was a little long winded, but my point is that IT growth should *match* IT use, not move in the opposite direction from it.
Trees certainly do absorb a lot of CO2, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find environmentalists who would oppose planting trees to benefit the planet. Of course, it's important to grow the right type of trees -- evergreens grow really quickly, and it's tempting to always plant them first. But ultimately you want a good variation of trees, ideally native species.
This is why preserving old growth forests and rainforests is important. The trees are already there, so they don't need to planted! We just have to somehow keep ourselves from chopping them down all the time.
Hmm...before coming to a conclusion like that, it might be useful to find out how many studies have been made on what the effect this sequestration might have on the ocean itself. I'm guessing here that it would be pumped directly into the water, right? Otherwise, I don't see how it would be a cost improvement over burying it on land.
We can't know for sure what the biological effect of this would be. That's why "enviro-nuts" are concerned. Most environmentalists that I know really, honestly, genuinely are more concerned about preserving the environment than they are in fund-raising. This is an argument that is consistently railed against environmentalists, and I always think that it's interesting that not much is said about the financial benefits of the polar opposite of the environmentalist: the polluting corporation, who stands to profit *much* more from finding a cheap and easy way to deal with its pollution (or not having to deal with it at all).
Also, notice what the poster said: it's a "quick fix approach." Generally, quick fixes don't bode very well over the long run.
Also, an environmental friend of mind points out that this sequestration is temporary; once the algae that would absorb the CO2 die, they would decompose, releasing *all* of the CO2 they absorbed back into the atmosphere. Ultimately the real solution, he says, is to reduce CO2 emissions period. Unfortunately, it's possible by focusing on sequestration, we might get more indifferent about fossil fuel burning--after all, now we have a "solution" for all that excess CO2.
Ex-President Clinton was on Letterman last night, and he pointed out that if India and China follow our lead of using fossel fuels for energy, that their pollution output will dwarf the US's in the coming years, and we as a nation would suffer the consequences.
It's definitely something to think about. Even nuclear power, as loaded of a topic as it might be, seems a better long-term solution than using fossil fuels for energy.
The main issue is that in shrink-wrapped software, you can say what a program does and doesn't do. You want this feature? Sorry, bucko, wait for the next version to come up.
On the other hand, software that it is written for a particular company has to be changed and upgraded as the company needs it. And sometimes when changes are made to software, it has effects that reach beyond what the change was, and they're not always "bugs" or "mistakes."
Also, even the most effective software testers are no match against users when it comes to discovering loopholes and sources of problems in software interfaces!
His premise was that this book went along with the media industry-held view that web content was essentially dead, and that the lesson to be learned from the whole thing was that the Internet wasn't as strong of a medium as people had once thought. A quote from the article:
That, at any rate, is how much of the commercial media world views the Internet saga. New technology thing came along. Couldn't figure it out. Seemed important. Threw a lot of money at it. Down a hole. It's over now, thank God.
And that would be the story's end, if it weren't for one stubborn fact that refuses to vanish -- instead it just sits there, center stage, after the curtain has dropped behind it, thumbing its nose at the booing crowd: The Internet itself hasn't gone away.
Scott Rosenberg contrasts Bamboozled at the Revolution with Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a collection of essays by David Weinberger. This book follow the growth of personal, non-commercial internet content and "communities of interest." "The crucial difference between these two books" writes Rosenberg, "is that Weinberger focuses on people who actually use the Net -- whereas Motavalli concentrates on people who didn't, and probably still don't."
The idea, I think, is that the time it takes before the two objects move together is equal to the amount of time that a beam of light would between them.
The "message" that tells an mass that it is being acted on by another mass is relayed, theoretically, by the elusive "graviton", a particle which so far has been unobservable, except during episodes of Star Trek Voyager. The speed of the graviton travelling from one mass to another would always be no greater than the speed of light.
I'm not sure that putting this technology into everybody's homes is going to necessarily make things better. Aren't people sedentary enough? And certainly putting speakers behind the walls is only of concern for people who can afford to have a speaker asthetic.
Also, check out this part of the article:
Even waking up in the morning is a high-tech venture. His alarm clock neither beeps nor buzzes; instead, music begins to play, curtains open on sunshine and lights switch on. And in the bathroom, the shower starts flowing.
Unless he's the type to leap right out of bed and zip into the bathroom, isn't that a big waste of water? I know that it's not as big of a deal in Indiana, I guess, but it still seems like extravagant wastefulness to have someone "start the shower" for you (I always jump right in, and just give a little shudder for the half second of cold water). In Virginia, we have a drought that's so bad we now have mandatory water restrictions.
While his house is indeed "cool", I don't see this really "benefiting" humankind any more than, say, Theater Surround systems or MP3 players. They're neat, they're fun, and they're great for people who can afford them. But the truth is automated (or at least the best equivalent at the time) houses have been around forever, and always among the wealthiest of the population.
Slashdot Mirror
People who use this service will definitely see the number of whois-related mail to their mailbox go down, but I'm guessing that most of the people who sign up for this service won't be the kind of people who would fall for the scam anyways.
The real concern is people who are website newcomers, or less sophisticated users who still use NetSol (Veri$ign, whatever) to register their domain names. Those people are unlikely to even realize that it is possible to register their domain names through another registrar.
And, while I have a chance, I'd like to do a plug, if I may. 000domains.com has had some of the best customer support I've experienced from a registrar--I usually get a response to any of my e-mails immediately. They're not the cheapest, but they are reliable and friendly over the phone, which is great when you're trying to transfer your new client's domain away from Network Solutions! Our company has over 50 domains registered with them.
Of course, they may not catch everyone trying to use their service for Spamming, but I imagine they'll be kicked off after one SpamCop report.
These types of links are called deep links .
There has already been quite a lot of controversy regarding deep links, dating all the way back to 1999.
In fact, one major free website hosting company, whose name escapes me at the moment, does not allow you to deep link to their members' pages. Instead, you are forced to go to that member's home page first (I imagine that they are checking for referers or some such thing).
Clearly, deep linking is beneficial, but some companies just don't get it.
Oh, this was an experiment?
quickly removes wet laundry
Hmmm...
I think what the original poster meant was that the current default *is* an opt-out version. In other words, you must make the effort to be left alone.
Some students are willing to give out their information in order to receive freebie samples from various corporations in their mailbox, or to get cute little letters about their favorite pop-stars, or free "magazines" targetting at college students. That is "opt-in". There do actually happen to be companies who I *want* to receive information from, because I find it useful to me. That is "opt-in" as well.
The question is whether the school could have a default of "we won't give away your information" and then have a form where a student can sign a statement that says, "I don't mind if you give my name to advertising corporations."
The format is horrendously inefficient
.doc file, or sections of text wrapped in tags like <title>, <author> and <loc_number>? And for more "effecient" data formats, it gets even worse. Imagine trying to open up an Access database in a binary editor, for example.
It's true that the XML format is "bulky", but with processor speeds increasing and memory increasingly cheap, that is less of an issue. XML can be processed and cataloged pretty quickly, even if it isn't the most "efficient" way of doing it. Besides, we're talking document access in a specialized library for the visually impaired. We're not talking about many concurrent accesses all going at the same time.
Without a description of the tags used and the relation between them they are just as unreadable as anything else
Wrong. This is the nicest feature of XML! You can actually look at it, and assuming that the tags are intuitively named, you can pretty much figure out what information is in the file. Think about this: which would you rather try to decipher from within a plain text editor: volumnious RTF code, the binary content of a
You can't easily display or print your stuff without digging into the technical side of XML.
Yeah, that is true. Without a decent application capable of opening and interpreting an XML file, you just can't print or display it. That also applies to every other existing data format, except *maybe* plain text, which is not really a useful format to store information in.
XML is not hype. It makes sense as a data storage format for all of the opposite reasons you cited: it can be processed fairly quickly, it is easily readable, even in text format, and there are many tools which allow you to very easily display or print XML formatted information.
the GPUL, unlike the Power4, is smaller, runs cooler and consumes far less power, making it suitable for desktop machines and small servers
Does anyone know if the chip would actually be cool enough so that it would not require a fan? One of my favorite features of the G4 is that it requires no fan whatsoever. My PowerMac G4 makes so little noise that sometimes it's hard to tell if its running or not without looking at the little glowing power button on the front.
I think this is one of the nicest features of Macintosh computers and if they need to add a fan I think that will be a real shame. On the other hand, Motorolla really hasn't gotten their act together, so Apple may not have a choice.
Obviously, there has to be a distinction made between the *kinds* of use of your information.
For instance, I would *want* all of my personal information to be in the student directory, so friends of mine at the school would be able to contact me easily. On the other hand, I would *not* want any of that information to fall into the hands of companies trying to target the student market.
I do recall that starting sophomore year or thereabouts, my school stopped listing the extension numbers of students living on campus. This mean that if you wanted to find out the phone number of a fellow student living on campus, you had to trudge over to the main office, show your student id, and then ask (no, they would not give the information over the phone!). This was very annoying, though it was clearly thought necessary to protect the privacy of the students, especially women.
Nevertheless, we still had a few obscene crank callers that got a hold of some of the numbers anyhow...
It seems contradictory. There does not appear to be any reason that the government should be concerned with whether or not people are unfairly "copying" these signals--for example, like, recording them on a VCR. The only group that is hurt is the corporate sector, right?
So, shouldn't it be the marketplace that solves this, if it needs to be solved? What is the problem exactly--which businesses are complaining?
It can't be the movie studios - most of them own or are owned by the same companies that serve as broadcasters!
Michael Crichton's Terminal Man directly addressed the idea of using electric shocks to control seizures. Of course, in the book, the dude goes apeshit because like a kiddie and an open cookie jar, he just can't get enough of the electric shocks and then I think he goes on a killing spree or something. Fairly typical Crichton stuff.
I hope research like this gets us to understand more about how the brain works, but I can't help feeling that there might still be something to this "out of body" experience. After all, some accounts describe people who actually "saw" things during their out-of-body experience that were later corroborated by other people who were in the same room.
Finally, and this is the truth, you can actually purchase an Astral Projection kit. Just think of how this new discovery will hurt their business!
Or how about XML?
My guess is if this content is geared toward the vision impaired, niceties like hanging indents, styles, etc. aren't that important. In such a case, using XML with perhaps a few style-based tags (such as <B>, <I> <U> etc) should do the trick.
The nice thing about XML data is it's relatively clean, it's easy to convert to other formats, and can be made to store data or metadata as well.
When the science skeptics get ahold of the rabbit-o-saurus, they'll put it right next to their moon landing hoax books and their creationism propaganda
According to the article, the technical name for this dinosaur is Incisivosaurus. Calling it a "rabbit-o-saurus" instead will only encourage the skeptics. The picture in the article depicts something that, aside from the buck teeth, is very different from a rabbit--it looks much more like an emu or an ostrich. This is, to my understanding, consistent with recent research that suggests that dinosaurs were the antecedents of birds. And buck teeth would, no doubt, be useful in digging up plant roots or whatever, suggesting that it was a herbivore.
Granted, it's one funny looking mother.
In regards to accuracy: I've tested and compared OmniPage Pro to Abby FineReader and Abby is much, much better at text recognition. It doesn't offer as many export formats as OmniPage Pro does, but it does include an SDK, so if you can get your hands on some programmers you might be able to fiddle with it some. Abby is definitely a step up from OmniPage.
I'm pretty sure that Abby FineReader has language modules, so you can scan works in many languages.
...they won't be making their latest version of Solaris available to non-Sun platforms.
There is an article on eWeek that discusses how people are responding to Sun's refusal to release Solaris 9 to non-Sun x86 hardware.
Hmmm...
Might this be a case where using "self-organizing circuits" might do the trick? The question would be, how would the circuit evaluate its successfulness in being "random"?
Yes and no. Because black holes aren't exactly "descendants" of something, it's not like you can say that one kind of black hole is related or unrelated to another kind of black hole.
However, from the tone of the article, it seems that these types of black holes--ones which reside in the center of "globular" galaxies--would have formed differently and at a different time than the larger black holes found at the center of "spiral" galaxies.
I guess a good example is a "pygmy" animal, such as the pygmy shrew (or, try here for a more accurate description), which is not a "smaller" version of the species but is its own species, related to the normal one.
I'm pretty sure that the conditions for these black holes would have to be different, since otherwise they would have caused the formation of spiral galaxies rather than globular ones. Any astronomers out there care to chime in?
You haven't lived till you've had my grandma's Cream of Glowing Mushroom & Barley Soup.
On a more serious note: while it is important to keep these sorts of foods out of the general population, I wonder what is being done to help those whose livelihood has up to now depended upon growing/gathering and selling these foods. If they can't sell the produce, they may just eat it themselves, meaning that they will be exposed to a greater amount of radiation than most people.
This is probably one of the reasons they don't want to crack down on the babushkas.It would also be interesting to see what the public reaction to this will be...will more people seek out the babushkas to get the "good stuff"?
Do the easy math: that comes one IT worker for every 5 people using computers. That seems like an outrageous overestimate. Haven't people learned from the demand hype of the late 90's which drove the whole technology sector into a deep recession?
If you were to draw a curve graph comparing use of the internet (i.e. how many web pages viewed, how many users checking their e-mail), demand (as opposed to need) for technology resources, and the amount of money people are willing to spend for technology on a graph, you would see an interesting thing: In 97-99, you would see that demand for technology resources would be high--companies would be scrambling over themselves to hire as many IT professionals and purchase as much software, hardware, routers, cable, etc. as possible. At the same time, the line for money spent would be extremely high as well. On the other hand, the "actual use" line would be low. Move ahead to 2000-Spring 2000. You would see that the money line had dropped by a nice little chunk (no one wanted to spend any money on the web anymore if they could help it--it was the year of the dot com busts). Infrastructure would still be important, so that line would only have dipped slightly. People have ditched vague commercial ideas for more sound click-and-mortar technology. The internet use line, meanwhile, is going upwards rapidly. Move to late spring/summer of 2001. Both the demand line and the money line have plummeted. No one wants to invest in new technologies, and no one is even wanting to spend money on standard technology like Cisco routers. What was the dot-com bust is now the Internet infrastructure bust. Paradoxically, Internet use has continued to grow this whole time, and now over half of all people in the US do something online every day. So the whole time that IT technology acquisition and IT financial investment is going down, Internet use is actually going up
Okay, that was a little long winded, but my point is that IT growth should *match* IT use, not move in the opposite direction from it.
Trees certainly do absorb a lot of CO2, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find environmentalists who would oppose planting trees to benefit the planet. Of course, it's important to grow the right type of trees -- evergreens grow really quickly, and it's tempting to always plant them first. But ultimately you want a good variation of trees, ideally native species.
This is why preserving old growth forests and rainforests is important. The trees are already there, so they don't need to planted! We just have to somehow keep ourselves from chopping them down all the time.
Hmm...before coming to a conclusion like that, it might be useful to find out how many studies have been made on what the effect this sequestration might have on the ocean itself. I'm guessing here that it would be pumped directly into the water, right? Otherwise, I don't see how it would be a cost improvement over burying it on land.
We can't know for sure what the biological effect of this would be. That's why "enviro-nuts" are concerned. Most environmentalists that I know really, honestly, genuinely are more concerned about preserving the environment than they are in fund-raising. This is an argument that is consistently railed against environmentalists, and I always think that it's interesting that not much is said about the financial benefits of the polar opposite of the environmentalist: the polluting corporation, who stands to profit *much* more from finding a cheap and easy way to deal with its pollution (or not having to deal with it at all).
Also, notice what the poster said: it's a "quick fix approach." Generally, quick fixes don't bode very well over the long run.
Also, an environmental friend of mind points out that this sequestration is temporary; once the algae that would absorb the CO2 die, they would decompose, releasing *all* of the CO2 they absorbed back into the atmosphere. Ultimately the real solution, he says, is to reduce CO2 emissions period. Unfortunately, it's possible by focusing on sequestration, we might get more indifferent about fossil fuel burning--after all, now we have a "solution" for all that excess CO2.
Ex-President Clinton was on Letterman last night, and he pointed out that if India and China follow our lead of using fossel fuels for energy, that their pollution output will dwarf the US's in the coming years, and we as a nation would suffer the consequences.
It's definitely something to think about. Even nuclear power, as loaded of a topic as it might be, seems a better long-term solution than using fossil fuels for energy.
The main issue is that in shrink-wrapped software, you can say what a program does and doesn't do. You want this feature? Sorry, bucko, wait for the next version to come up.
On the other hand, software that it is written for a particular company has to be changed and upgraded as the company needs it. And sometimes when changes are made to software, it has effects that reach beyond what the change was, and they're not always "bugs" or "mistakes."
Also, even the most effective software testers are no match against users when it comes to discovering loopholes and sources of problems in software interfaces!
Scott Rosenberg wrote what I feel is an insightful review of this book at Salon.com in mid-August.
His premise was that this book went along with the media industry-held view that web content was essentially dead, and that the lesson to be learned from the whole thing was that the Internet wasn't as strong of a medium as people had once thought. A quote from the article:
Scott Rosenberg contrasts Bamboozled at the Revolution with Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a collection of essays by David Weinberger. This book follow the growth of personal, non-commercial internet content and "communities of interest." "The crucial difference between these two books" writes Rosenberg, "is that Weinberger focuses on people who actually use the Net -- whereas Motavalli concentrates on people who didn't, and probably still don't."
All in all, an interesting read.
The University of Missouri has also released a press release concerning the experiment.
The idea, I think, is that the time it takes before the two objects move together is equal to the amount of time that a beam of light would between them.
The "message" that tells an mass that it is being acted on by another mass is relayed, theoretically, by the elusive "graviton", a particle which so far has been unobservable, except during episodes of Star Trek Voyager. The speed of the graviton travelling from one mass to another would always be no greater than the speed of light.
I'm not sure that putting this technology into everybody's homes is going to necessarily make things better. Aren't people sedentary enough? And certainly putting speakers behind the walls is only of concern for people who can afford to have a speaker asthetic.
Also, check out this part of the article:
Unless he's the type to leap right out of bed and zip into the bathroom, isn't that a big waste of water? I know that it's not as big of a deal in Indiana, I guess, but it still seems like extravagant wastefulness to have someone "start the shower" for you (I always jump right in, and just give a little shudder for the half second of cold water). In Virginia, we have a drought that's so bad we now have mandatory water restrictions.
While his house is indeed "cool", I don't see this really "benefiting" humankind any more than, say, Theater Surround systems or MP3 players. They're neat, they're fun, and they're great for people who can afford them. But the truth is automated (or at least the best equivalent at the time) houses have been around forever, and always among the wealthiest of the population.