I do not believe that this is a publicity stunt through up by some marketing department. The amount of money they are asking for is very modest and can probably pay for the electricity, network connectivity, server space and a developer or two.
I have used Xmarks for several years and it has been a painless experience to sync across machines and platforms. In fact it is so easy to use that I forget that there is a real application running somewhere that takes care of the synchronization and storage.
If they renew their pledge for data privacy and keep it spam/ adware free I will pay a modest annual fee to keep the service up and running.
For those who want to gripe about paying $10 - $20 for this service, either you have never used it or you are whining on the grounds that "all software should be free and someone else should donate the hardware, administrative expenses and electricity".
Be real folks, this would cost as much as one pizza, once a year.
You hit it right on the nose. In their efforts to solve what they see as a problem with one element (carbon) this process would also strip the other nutrients from the soil like nitrogen and potassium (potash). Do this long enough and all you are left with is sand and clay. Incapable of growing crops in any normal sense and would be about as successful as making a desert fertile without the use of supplements.
If folks doubt that this can happen they should do some research on how cotton agriculture so severely depleted the soil in the southern US that big areas of lower Alabama are only useful for growing pine trees.
We have been borrowing against the future for thousands of years and even the normal process of agriculture where crops are removed for consumption is an ongoing form of depletion. Food products are shipped off to cities and after consumption, end up as sewage. Then, this excellent fertilizer (human waste) is contaminated with all of the other toxins of city life and made unusable for agricultural purposes.
In an ideal system the biological waste would be returned to the soil to replenish the nutrients and you would have a long term, sustainable agricultural system. The current scheme in this article would just accelerate the process of soil depletion.
How about Soylent Green... at least then the largest sources of environmental damage (humans) would be put to good use.
I am an engineer (EE) who worked in the petrochem industry for 17 years, did another 7 years in telco, 7 more years in systems engineering and now +1 year in consulting. Here is how I have managed my career path;
When I jump into a specialty I make it the point of becoming an acknowledged peer in the subject matter, work if for a few years until it becomes boring and then transfer into a different specialty. Here is what I have done so far;
I started out in digital design (and/or/nor/nand/ uarts/ modems/ microprocessors), worked that for five years until it became boring. Jumped ship and went into compliance engineering (FCC product certification and QA/QC for electronics manufacturing) did that for five or six more years until boredom set in. Went into project engineering, spent lots of time wearing a hard-hat and swearing at construction guys and techs, did that for four years until I forgot where home was. Went into I&C, (instrumentation and control), pretty specialized area of petrochemical engineering for a few years until I felt my liver cancer risk increased enough due to benzine. Went into IT, (programmer/ analyst), IT server administration, network analyst, bailed out before the oil company consolidations happened Into telephony, rode the.COM rollercoaster managing several departments at a telco (traffic engineering, facilities engineering types, techs). Laid off after being told that "I was not a team player, I responded that I was a team player, JUST NOT ON THEIR TEAM". Went back into process controls engineering, had more fun with RF communications, stayed there for seven years until I realized the owners were certifiably insane. Now in consulting engineering on large municipal comms, AMI projects. Much more fun, every day is a new day, feel like Yoda.
I have another 14-20 years left on my career. I have "been there, done that" enough times that I do not take shit, do not fall for the latest "mission statement" and have a minimum of rework on whatever I do.
So, maybe I will go another 5-10 years as a consultant. At least I earned my stripes.
If a young whippersnapper tries to blindside me I will make bug paste out of them.
The only sage advice I can give is to keep rotating around your career. If you are a 20-something sysadmin and think that you will be a 50-something sysadmin then drink the poison KoolAide now and save yourself the misery.
I have not been too keen to spend my day hanging out in the coffee shop just to browse the internet. It always has seemed like an odd fit to me, similar to fishing and collating.
Now if they had someone playing light jazz and maybe a collection of weird art books that would be really cool.
Ah, the Harlan Ellison "I am pissed at how the story goes so I am using an alias" name. I thought that he stopped using that after the fiasco that was the Starlost television series from 1972.
I liked the expanding foam protective material in the car from the movie Demolition Man. There is a great deal that can be done to make a car safe(r) but it is ridiculous to think that a car can truly be "zero fatalities". If you have ever seen what happens when it is car vs. train it would be prohibitively expensive to make a vehicle safe enough to take that title.
In the human body there are many types of deceleration injuries that will kill you. Some are cou contra-coup brain injuries and accidents where the heart is actually torn off of the aorta by G forces.
I wish them luck in designing better vehicles that are still affordable to own. We are getting away from people being impaled on the steering wheel or ending up as a quadriplegic because the car roof collapsed in a rollover accident. Folks still die from driving under the back end of a tractor trailer, being incinerated or killed by loose objects in a car.
One of the claims of the press is that they are the "fourth branch of government" and that they are necessary to keep the people in power honest. Of course that is all BS as the press first serves it's own interests and hides behind a constitutional protection of "freedom of the press".
We are talking about the international press and they are not obligated in any way to act as responsible stewards of US government information. For the most part, the press is propaganda. It is just not easy to figure out who they are serving as most of the time they fly no flag and take whatever position that leads to the creation of bigger and more sensational stories.
Wikileaks is not a press organization. It is a clearinghouse for folks who are willing to reveal information that they may be sworn to protect. Many of the sources of information on Wikileaks are folks who have committed an act of treason against their country by revealing information that was meant to be kept secret. What should happen is that folks who commit treason should be dealt with "old school", drawn, quartered and their body parts spread to the different corners of the realm.
It has been entertaining to most of us as we have had any skin in the game, it was always someone else s secrets.
There is only so much you can pack into little magnetic domains. It is dependent upon how small of a grain (dust speck) you can individually magnetize, signal/noise ratio to read back that magnetic field and the sensitivity of the pickup head.
I can see the day coming when there is a small near-room-temperature superconductor (SQUID) pickup head to do read/write operations.
The tradeoff is going to be when you get that small, a single cosmic ray particle can flip a 1 to a 0.
Thank you Sony, for reminding me that this is not a kick-ass machine, just a gaming platform.
"I don't know where my head was! I fell for it hook, line and sinker, bought the 80 gig model, purchased 24 different games that I really liked, installed a 300 gig HDD, loaded the machine with Linux, heck, I was right at the point of considering it a "real" computer."
At least they stopped me from doing something really foolish... like buying more games.
I will not do any more Sony firmware upgrades out of fear of it trashing my setup. I will not be buying any more games because they will probably insist upon a firmware upgrade to operate correctly. The money that I was spending a the Sony on-line store I can save on that as well.
So it's a decent BlueRay player and I still have the games I purchased.
My mind is much clearer now. I had gone with the Sony system a few years ago because they were not Microsoft. The universe is at balance again as I have discovered the Sony is a bunch of dicks... Just like Microsoft
Oh, after a weapon is "used" there is a entire recipe of isotope signatures that can yield all sorts of information about the weapon design, source of the pit, yield, efficiency, etc... We got very good at that back in the 50's and 60's.
Much of the space debris is in very small pieces like paint chips, pieces of thermal blankets, screws/nuts/bolts, etc..
The volume of near space that is "polluted" is vast. It is a constantly evolving three dimensional environment with debris moving at all sorts of crazy trajectories that change frequently depending upon the solar wind, geomagnetic field and the swelling and contraction of our tenuous upper atmosphere.
It would be like searching the beach in Fiji, looking for a particular 1957 nickel. The efforts to chase down each individual piece of trash is much greater than the risks of that particular piece.
We need to; 1. Stop spewing little parts, disgards and trash into space. 2. Do a better job of tracking what is up there. 3. Harden satellites to be able to survive the impact from a very small object. 4. Come up with a clean way to dispose of old space hardware other than abandonment in "graveyard orbits".
They discuss the radioactive coolant losses from discarded satellites that were boosted into "graveyard orbits" and how the cooling systems have sprung leaks, leaving behind solidified chunks of radioactive sodium, potassium and lead.
Unlike in the movie "This is Spinal Tap" there is not an 11 on the volume control for storage capacity in a data center. We will not see proud proclamations from boards of directors "today we are running our data storage at 115% of capacity!"
Having been in the predicament many times of frantically trying to ration out disk storage space for some critical application at 3 AM Sunday morning I think that running data centers at 80-90% is being conservative and may save your ass the next time you cannot get into your data center due to some sort of natural disaster like a hurricane (remember the data center in New Orleans a few years ago?)
Storage space does cost money, when we are looking at terabytes (petabytes anyone?) of storage there does need to be some cost factor calculations. In the telco world we do a similar exercise with Erlang calculations and blocking probability for data circuits. I would rather that the cut-off point between enough or too much storage capacity be made by well informed engineers rather than some clueless MBA looking for a feather in their hat.
There has been some discussion regarding the music and chants in church having a psychological effect upon the parishioners. If you ever spent any time listening to Gregorian chants you can feel that there is "something" going on. Irrespective of your particular faith or lack of one.
This is typical of Motorola the company. They pull the same shit with their radio products. If you buy a commercial radio it can only be programmed with their RSS software suite that is intended for dealers only. If you wanted to buy RSS it is very expensive and comes with all sorts of covenants and restrictions on it's use.
For them to plant a modification time-bomb in the Droid X is not surprising in the least. For those of us in the radio business we typically refer to Motorola as the radio-mafia.
The hell with Motorola, buy the Android OS on a different hardware platform. Do not paint that "Android" is bad because of one bunch of dumb asses.
The article mentions the identical twins but it does not indicate if they are adult, identical twins living in different places, with different environmental conditions. If you took two 25 year old identical twins and raised one in Florida and the other in Seattle for five years you would definitely find different flora in the gut.
Now if these identical twins were still children, raised in the same environment, then that would indeed be interesting.
It is like Slashdot. If you want to look at everything at -1 you can. Naturally you will see a bunch of crap.
For android applications you can always sort things by how popular they are and find the creme of the crop.
Who knows, you may be surprised by what application may be developed by a high school girl. To ignore the potential creativity of a vast swath of society is foolish. Maybe the killer app is one that targets high school girls.
The endurance device looks really cool as an autonomous submersible that can find it's way back to the transducer dropped through the opening in the ice. Here are a few problems;
Getting to Europa the package needs to set down in an area where there is a "lead" in the ice where it is thinner. Trying to drill or melt your way through a kilometer of ice would be a serious challenge that we would even have a problem with today (an opening the size of Endurance).
To make a hole would either require an automated drilling system or a nuclear power source to melt it's way down to below the ice. Since RTG (radioisotope thermal generators) require a significant amount of plutonium or radioactive thorium to generate even a small amount of thermal energy it would require a "real" reactor to create enough heat to melt a hole. As the reactor and ENDURANCE melts their way down they would deploy a tether back up to the surface. As they melt downwards the water will freeze above them, leaving the tether encased in ice.Once they break free of the ice layer and make it into the depths of Europa's ocean the reactor can be powered back and act as a docking station, recharging station and communications hub for the ENDURANCE explorer. Data would be relayed back up the tether to a satellite relay station to send data back up to an orbiter.
With a "down hole" power source the ENDURANCE probe could carry out extended exploration missions down to the crush depth of the submursiable and missions could last for months (aka the Mars rovers).
Slashdot Mirror
I do not believe that this is a publicity stunt through up by some marketing department. The amount of money they are asking for is very modest and can probably pay for the electricity, network connectivity, server space and a developer or two.
I have used Xmarks for several years and it has been a painless experience to sync across machines and platforms. In fact it is so easy to use that I forget that there is a real application running somewhere that takes care of the synchronization and storage.
If they renew their pledge for data privacy and keep it spam/ adware free I will pay a modest annual fee to keep the service up and running.
For those who want to gripe about paying $10 - $20 for this service, either you have never used it or you are whining on the grounds that "all software should be free and someone else should donate the hardware, administrative expenses and electricity".
Be real folks, this would cost as much as one pizza, once a year.
You hit it right on the nose. In their efforts to solve what they see as a problem with one element (carbon) this process would also strip the other nutrients from the soil like nitrogen and potassium (potash). Do this long enough and all you are left with is sand and clay. Incapable of growing crops in any normal sense and would be about as successful as making a desert fertile without the use of supplements.
If folks doubt that this can happen they should do some research on how cotton agriculture so severely depleted the soil in the southern US that big areas of lower Alabama are only useful for growing pine trees.
We have been borrowing against the future for thousands of years and even the normal process of agriculture where crops are removed for consumption is an ongoing form of depletion. Food products are shipped off to cities and after consumption, end up as sewage. Then, this excellent fertilizer (human waste) is contaminated with all of the other toxins of city life and made unusable for agricultural purposes.
In an ideal system the biological waste would be returned to the soil to replenish the nutrients and you would have a long term, sustainable agricultural system. The current scheme in this article would just accelerate the process of soil depletion.
How about Soylent Green... at least then the largest sources of environmental damage (humans) would be put to good use.
I am an engineer (EE) who worked in the petrochem industry for 17 years, did another 7 years in telco, 7 more years in systems engineering and now +1 year in consulting. Here is how I have managed my career path;
When I jump into a specialty I make it the point of becoming an acknowledged peer in the subject matter, work if for a few years until it becomes boring and then transfer into a different specialty. Here is what I have done so far;
I started out in digital design (and/or/nor/nand/ uarts/ modems/ microprocessors), worked that for five years until it became boring. .COM rollercoaster managing several departments at a telco (traffic engineering, facilities engineering types, techs). Laid off after being told that "I was not a team player, I responded that I was a team player, JUST NOT ON THEIR TEAM".
Jumped ship and went into compliance engineering (FCC product certification and QA/QC for electronics manufacturing) did that for five or six more years until boredom set in.
Went into project engineering, spent lots of time wearing a hard-hat and swearing at construction guys and techs, did that for four years until I forgot where home was.
Went into I&C, (instrumentation and control), pretty specialized area of petrochemical engineering for a few years until I felt my liver cancer risk increased enough due to benzine.
Went into IT, (programmer/ analyst), IT server administration, network analyst, bailed out before the oil company consolidations happened
Into telephony, rode the
Went back into process controls engineering, had more fun with RF communications, stayed there for seven years until I realized the owners were certifiably insane.
Now in consulting engineering on large municipal comms, AMI projects. Much more fun, every day is a new day, feel like Yoda.
I have another 14-20 years left on my career. I have "been there, done that" enough times that I do not take shit, do not fall for the latest "mission statement" and have a minimum of rework on whatever I do.
So, maybe I will go another 5-10 years as a consultant. At least I earned my stripes.
If a young whippersnapper tries to blindside me I will make bug paste out of them.
The only sage advice I can give is to keep rotating around your career. If you are a 20-something sysadmin and think that you will be a 50-something sysadmin then drink the poison KoolAide now and save yourself the misery.
I have not been too keen to spend my day hanging out in the coffee shop just to browse the internet. It always has seemed like an odd fit to me, similar to fishing and collating.
Now if they had someone playing light jazz and maybe a collection of weird art books that would be really cool.
So, if they can suppress the gene would it be possible for me to grow a tail?
Sure I would need to buy new clothes and chairs would be redesigned but think of how useful a tail would be.
Ah, the Harlan Ellison "I am pissed at how the story goes so I am using an alias" name. I thought that he stopped using that after the fiasco that was the Starlost television series from 1972.
I liked the expanding foam protective material in the car from the movie Demolition Man. There is a great deal that can be done to make a car safe(r) but it is ridiculous to think that a car can truly be "zero fatalities". If you have ever seen what happens when it is car vs. train it would be prohibitively expensive to make a vehicle safe enough to take that title.
In the human body there are many types of deceleration injuries that will kill you. Some are cou contra-coup brain injuries and accidents where the heart is actually torn off of the aorta by G forces.
I wish them luck in designing better vehicles that are still affordable to own. We are getting away from people being impaled on the steering wheel or ending up as a quadriplegic because the car roof collapsed in a rollover accident. Folks still die from driving under the back end of a tractor trailer, being incinerated or killed by loose objects in a car.
One of the claims of the press is that they are the "fourth branch of government" and that they are necessary to keep the people in power honest. Of course that is all BS as the press first serves it's own interests and hides behind a constitutional protection of "freedom of the press".
We are talking about the international press and they are not obligated in any way to act as responsible stewards of US government information. For the most part, the press is propaganda. It is just not easy to figure out who they are serving as most of the time they fly no flag and take whatever position that leads to the creation of bigger and more sensational stories.
Wikileaks is not a press organization. It is a clearinghouse for folks who are willing to reveal information that they may be sworn to protect. Many of the sources of information on Wikileaks are folks who have committed an act of treason against their country by revealing information that was meant to be kept secret. What should happen is that folks who commit treason should be dealt with "old school", drawn, quartered and their body parts spread to the different corners of the realm.
It has been entertaining to most of us as we have had any skin in the game, it was always someone else s secrets.
There is only so much you can pack into little magnetic domains. It is dependent upon how small of a grain (dust speck) you can individually magnetize, signal/noise ratio to read back that magnetic field and the sensitivity of the pickup head. I can see the day coming when there is a small near-room-temperature superconductor (SQUID) pickup head to do read/write operations. The tradeoff is going to be when you get that small, a single cosmic ray particle can flip a 1 to a 0.
Thank you Sony, for reminding me that this is not a kick-ass machine, just a gaming platform.
"I don't know where my head was! I fell for it hook, line and sinker, bought the 80 gig model, purchased 24 different games that I really liked, installed a 300 gig HDD, loaded the machine with Linux, heck, I was right at the point of considering it a "real" computer."
At least they stopped me from doing something really foolish... like buying more games.
I will not do any more Sony firmware upgrades out of fear of it trashing my setup. I will not be buying any more games because they will probably insist upon a firmware upgrade to operate correctly. The money that I was spending a the Sony on-line store I can save on that as well.
So it's a decent BlueRay player and I still have the games I purchased.
My mind is much clearer now. I had gone with the Sony system a few years ago because they were not Microsoft. The universe is at balance again as I have discovered the Sony is a bunch of dicks... Just like Microsoft
Oh, after a weapon is "used" there is a entire recipe of isotope signatures that can yield all sorts of information about the weapon design, source of the pit, yield, efficiency, etc... We got very good at that back in the 50's and 60's.
I imagine that they are looking for neutron ratios and possibly gamma energy levels?
Much of the space debris is in very small pieces like paint chips, pieces of thermal blankets, screws/nuts/bolts, etc..
The volume of near space that is "polluted" is vast. It is a constantly evolving three dimensional environment with debris moving at all sorts of crazy trajectories that change frequently depending upon the solar wind, geomagnetic field and the swelling and contraction of our tenuous upper atmosphere.
It would be like searching the beach in Fiji, looking for a particular 1957 nickel. The efforts to chase down each individual piece of trash is much greater than the risks of that particular piece.
We need to;
1. Stop spewing little parts, disgards and trash into space.
2. Do a better job of tracking what is up there.
3. Harden satellites to be able to survive the impact from a very small object.
4. Come up with a clean way to dispose of old space hardware other than abandonment in "graveyard orbits".
A great article on the space junk problem can be found at;
http://www.satellitetoday.com/commercial/manufacturers/Space-Debris-Small-But-Growing-Problem_21599.html
They discuss the radioactive coolant losses from discarded satellites that were boosted into "graveyard orbits" and how the cooling systems have sprung leaks, leaving behind solidified chunks of radioactive sodium, potassium and lead.
One of the biggest sources of space junk are the gobs of solidified radioactive coolant from old Soviet satellites.
Unlike in the movie "This is Spinal Tap" there is not an 11 on the volume control for storage capacity in a data center. We will not see proud proclamations from boards of directors "today we are running our data storage at 115% of capacity!"
Having been in the predicament many times of frantically trying to ration out disk storage space for some critical application at 3 AM Sunday morning I think that running data centers at 80-90% is being conservative and may save your ass the next time you cannot get into your data center due to some sort of natural disaster like a hurricane (remember the data center in New Orleans a few years ago?)
Storage space does cost money, when we are looking at terabytes (petabytes anyone?) of storage there does need to be some cost factor calculations. In the telco world we do a similar exercise with Erlang calculations and blocking probability for data circuits. I would rather that the cut-off point between enough or too much storage capacity be made by well informed engineers rather than some clueless MBA looking for a feather in their hat.
Ok, you are going to use a "heat ray" on a bunch of brain fried wackos who hop around the desert and outlaw kite flying...
This is about as effective as the ice cube repeating rifle as a weapon of war against the swarming hordes of Eskimos.
We would have had much better luck with bacon bombs and hacky-sacks emblazoned with the face of Muhammad.
Like the SUV driving "soccer mom" who is concerned about the environment and recycles her husband's beer cans but drives a vehicle that gets 7 mpg.
Boutique lifestyles of the nouveau riche. Wealth coming out of their eyeballs but morally bankrupt.
The 60's generation, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
Or the cricket bat vs lemur.
There has been some discussion regarding the music and chants in church having a psychological effect upon the parishioners. If you ever spent any time listening to Gregorian chants you can feel that there is "something" going on. Irrespective of your particular faith or lack of one.
So now we can pussy-foot around China to be careful not to offend our biggest trading partner and debt holder.
Chinese people want a good life, just like everyone else. China, the government is a friggen evil empire.
This is typical of Motorola the company. They pull the same shit with their radio products. If you buy a commercial radio it can only be programmed with their RSS software suite that is intended for dealers only. If you wanted to buy RSS it is very expensive and comes with all sorts of covenants and restrictions on it's use.
For them to plant a modification time-bomb in the Droid X is not surprising in the least. For those of us in the radio business we typically refer to Motorola as the radio-mafia.
The hell with Motorola, buy the Android OS on a different hardware platform. Do not paint that "Android" is bad because of one bunch of dumb asses.
The article mentions the identical twins but it does not indicate if they are adult, identical twins living in different places, with different environmental conditions. If you took two 25 year old identical twins and raised one in Florida and the other in Seattle for five years you would definitely find different flora in the gut.
Now if these identical twins were still children, raised in the same environment, then that would indeed be interesting.
It is like Slashdot. If you want to look at everything at -1 you can. Naturally you will see a bunch of crap.
For android applications you can always sort things by how popular they are and find the creme of the crop.
Who knows, you may be surprised by what application may be developed by a high school girl. To ignore the potential creativity of a vast swath of society is foolish. Maybe the killer app is one that targets high school girls.
The endurance device looks really cool as an autonomous submersible that can find it's way back to the transducer dropped through the opening in the ice. Here are a few problems;
Getting to Europa the package needs to set down in an area where there is a "lead" in the ice where it is thinner. Trying to drill or melt your way through a kilometer of ice would be a serious challenge that we would even have a problem with today (an opening the size of Endurance).
To make a hole would either require an automated drilling system or a nuclear power source to melt it's way down to below the ice. Since RTG (radioisotope thermal generators) require a significant amount of plutonium or radioactive thorium to generate even a small amount of thermal energy it would require a "real" reactor to create enough heat to melt a hole. As the reactor and ENDURANCE melts their way down they would deploy a tether back up to the surface. As they melt downwards the water will freeze above them, leaving the tether encased in ice.Once they break free of the ice layer and make it into the depths of Europa's ocean the reactor can be powered back and act as a docking station, recharging station and communications hub for the ENDURANCE explorer. Data would be relayed back up the tether to a satellite relay station to send data back up to an orbiter.
With a "down hole" power source the ENDURANCE probe could carry out extended exploration missions down to the crush depth of the submursiable and missions could last for months (aka the Mars rovers).