IMHO the daily commute is one of the worst things about having to work. But for those against, whether they are employers who would just rather see butts on seats, or employees fearing pay cuts, there are some good reasons to telecommute.
First, there the environmental value. If a substantial percentage of the workforce were to work from home, then that would mean a lot less pollution. Second, more telecommuters means less traffic on the roads and fewer traffic jams. Really, until the day comes when most cars on the road are driven by computers instead of people, telecommuting will be probably be the best way to cut down on traffic, thus freeing up the roads more for those who have no choice. Third, I'd go for it even if it meant losing some money in the end, just because of all the time it would save me on a daily basis. Think about it: all that extra free time -- I'd be mighty grateful for that at the end of every day! (and at the end of every year, when you think what it would add it up).
On the other hand, one of the worst barriers that holds back telecommuting is the lack of decent bandwidth -- upload bandwidth -- available to the average consumer through local ISPs. The down/up ratio is usually 10:1 or worse; I sure wish that would change. Often, link reliability is also a challenge, although using a second ISP can be a solution. I'd say another issue is the poor quality, poor manageability and high price of commercial software, which is important when dealing with so many remote systems and when downtime results in a serious loss of productivity (I say that because most people and organizations are too stupid to consider FOSS as an alternative, even when technically there are no barriers to speak of).
Forget egos -- there are plenty of academics out there who would be happy to contribute. The problem is Wikipedia's environment: it's just not one in which we can expect great articles to become better over time. Unless groups of people with specific knowledge of the subject keep a watchful eye on such articles, they simply degrade.
For three years, I wrote over 100 biology articles for Wikipedia and contributed to hundreds more -- including an entire family's taxonomy with several thousand redirects. Despite my lack of an academic background, I did my best to be as thorough and precise as possible, buying many books on the subject, never assuming anything and citing my references per paragraph and often even per sentence. WP even has guidelines to encourage people to work like this.
Unfortunately, simply writing good articles is not enough. WP must be able to maintain the quality of such articles, but it has no mechanisms for this. Instead, articles can decline in different ways, such as the efforts of enthusiastic, well-meaning individuals who insist on contributing despite not having any knowledge of the subject (they often get their information from popular media), or because of simple vandalism (such deeds can go unnoticed if the perpetrators are careful enough not to attract too much attention). In this environment, maintaining article quality -- especially when dealing with relatively popular subject matter -- is an uphill battle. In the end, I spent the first several hours of each day countering vandalism, stupidity and ignorance.
Another aspect of the problem involves WP's own guidelines, which discourage the use of scientific names for article titles. Even to amateur biologists, such as myself, this is insulting. I was perfectly happy to make tons of redirects and disambiguation pages for all of the common names that I could ever find, but I also learned long ago that there is no substitute for scientific names, especially when the goal is to organize hundreds, and even thousands of articles on species that are all closely related. Yet, there exists a group of administrators at WP who are diametrically opposed to the the principle of using scientific names for article titles on biological organisms (actually, the Spanish language WP have seen the light and done this). Naturally, these people do not generally write such articles and have no special knowledge of, or interest in the subject, but that doesn't stop them from having an opinion and continuing to block any change in this area.
So, what do the folks at WP expect? It's not like academics don't know about them (I have yet to meet one who hasn't). It's just that there are some good reasons why they don't take WP seriously. Of course, they could always decide to pay academics to improve their content, but that would go against their basic philosophy. Therefore, I suggest that WP not just beg, but make some actual policy concessions towards the academics and then try asking for their help again next year.
As a healthcare professional who does data analysis for a number of hospitals, this sounds like a great idea,...
How can you say that when the US health insurance industry has such an awful track record of discriminating against applicants who admit that they have a medical history with any of a very long list of possible ailments? AFAIK, this is not something that people are subjected to anywhere else in the world. This algorithm represents a double-edged sword that, once they have it (if they ever get it), they will use the wrong way: "What's that, no history of any medical problems, you say? Well, our algorithm predicts that later on you will likely develop costly problems anyway, so your application is rejected. Get your health insurance elsewhere!"
Increasingly, our country is appears to be more like the Corporate States of America....
It's called the United Corporations of America, son:
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Corporations of America, and to the profit for which it stands; one nation where the lobbyists write all the rules and are then appointed as judges to uphold them, with liberty and justice for all who can pay for it."
In the Netherlands (a much smaller country than the US), they tried and failed to introduce this idea (road pricing), abandoning it in 2001. The problem was, how to implement it? Their are basically two ways to do it: either an attempt is made to identify all the cars on all the roads at all times in order to work out how far each has traveled so that they can all be taxed accordingly, or all vehicles must have a tracking device installed (basically a cell phone with a GPS) so that the tax authorities can perform the same calculations. The former is impractical due to the cost and complexity of implementation, while the second raises serious privacy concerns. Because of this, the Dutch government eventually decided to back down and stick with the decades-old flat tax for all motor vehicles no matter how much or how little the individual motorists use the roads.
Actually, if the idea had been implemented, it would have made all forms of commercial transportation using the roads (for goods, services and people) significantly more expensive. Well, would the companies involved have had to pay those taxes equally? Perhaps. If so, you know those costs would have been passed on to the consumers anyway (including the ones without cars), making everything from peanuts to public transportation more expensive. If not, the average motorist would consider the tax unjust.
Consider also that there is a much simpler alternative: simply add more tax to the price of fuel (75% of which already consists of tax in the Netherlands). This is not only an effective solution (those who drive more pay more tax), it's also low-tech (so it's super cheap to implement) and it further encourages people to drive more fuel-efficient vehicles. In addition, a fuel tax is arguably also a more effective method of taxing foreign vehicles that would otherwise likely pay less, or no road tax at all.
The story is pure nonsense. Boid snakes (boas) may have relatively long teeth compared to colubrids (typical snakes), which come in handy when catching and holding on to flighty prey, (especially birds), but they will not have gone deep enough (perhaps a few millimeters at most) to reach any silicone breast implants, which are typically placed subglandularly. I'm not even sure if the teeth would be able to pierce an implant if the snake's head had been mashed onto her breast.
Then there's the question of the girl's alleged implants. After reading this article, it seems that many implants these days contain a saline solution as opposed to a silicone gel, and even when they contain the latter it's a semi-solid substance "that mostly eliminates filler leakage." Anything else and the girl would probably have to be at least ten years older.
Actually, at first I misread the title of the story and thought the girl had died of silicon poisoning. However, in the unlikely event that an implant had been pierced and resulted in a death, I would still be more surprised if the snake had been so unfortunate. After all, in that case the snake will have made contact with only a minute amount of silicone and, as opposed to the girl, the substance would not have entered its bloodstream.
In the highly unlikely event that any silicone did get into the snake's mouth, it's unlikely that this will have caused the snake any harm. Snakes frequently and inadvertently ingest all kinds of organic and inorganic matter when swallowing meals (dirt, grit, leaves, the contents of the prey animal's stomach), but this almost never does any harm. Short of getting (or forcing) the snake to swallow an obvious poison of some sort, the only normally non-toxic organic substance I can think of that turned out to be harmful for snakes was vegetable oil, which I once heard ended up killing a specimen after it was used to make a force-feeding session easier.
Finally, if the snake did actually die afterwards, it seems to me more likely that this would be due to unrelated causes, such as a poor state of health, which with snakes and reptiles in general can often be difficult to detect until its too late.
... the man can be a fanatical lunatic, and I think at this point this does the cause more harm than good.
By telling us it how it is? If you have evidence to the contrary, then please inform us. Otherwise, your comments are glib and baseless. I imagine that in police states with high rates of cell phone usage, such as China or Iran, the authorities do indeed track people in exactly this way. It would also be naive to assume that the DHS hasn't tried it yet.
Personally, I've had a cell phone since 1995 and am rather disappointed with them. Even if you ignore the tracking issue, by now so much more should be possible with them. Much of my disappointment has been due to the proprietary software. I used to ask myself, Why is it that these phones only seem to do what my telco wants and not what I want? I mean, I'm the customer, aren't I? Why aren't any manufacturers offering me what I want?
The answer is simple: I am not the customer: the telco is. Compared to the rest of us, telcos buy cell phones in enormous quantities from the manufacturers, so they end up dictating the specifications. Linux-based phones have been around for years in small numbers, but the reason each of those models always seems to die an early death is because the telcos avoid them like the plague. Why? Because it would give their subscribers too much freedom. It's hard to make lucrative deals with 3rd party software companies for the right to, say, offer the only email option on a particular phone, if that's too easy to circumvent.
Like Internet access, since life with a cell phone has become unthinkable for so many of us, at this point I believe it would be appropriate for, e.g. the European Union (don't bother counting on Uncle Sam), to introduce some regulations and standardization that will guarantee end users the freedom and privacy that they deserve. For instance, always make it possible to install a range of operating systems (including FOSS ones) on any smart phone and make geographic tracking unlawful if not approved of by the subscriber.
Indeed. The corporations have owned Washington for many decades now. Even back in the 1950's, Ike Eisenhower warned that America's military-industrial complex had become too strong. Now look where we are: America has a military budget that's larger than that of all other countries combined, yet at the same time a substantial number of Americans live below the poverty line.
Even worse, many of our laws have now been drafted by lobbyists -- a fact that some of our politicians have even been happy to admit. The lobbyists continue to play the politicians and the politicians continue to play the people for whom the latter continue to vote. It's a vicious cycle that's only made worse by the poor state of America's educational system, which has been deteriorating for many decades. The electorate has now largely been reduced to a mass of ignorant, overly-religious, flag-waving zombie-consumers whose only purpose seems to be in making the rich richer.
Unfortunately, I'm not certain that there is much reason to believe that America can get out of this rut, which is like an extreme experiment in unbridled free-market capitalism that has gone badly wrong. The problem is that its people have wished this upon themselves. In this way America are kind of like Afghanistan; a country to which we've tried to introduce democracy, but whose citizens do not recognize the value of it and are thus not willing to fight for it, i.e. a horse that has been led to horse to water, but will not drink. Americans, of the other hand, had their freedom, but then gave it away willingly to the corporations... and continue to do so. Like the poor Afghans, they don't understand that their usual behavior is not in their best interest either.
Oh, well...
PS -- This is a bit of a rant, so go ahead and mod it down.
Technically they're right. We are not a democracy, we are a republic...
Excuse me, but the United States is both a republic and a democracy. These terms are not mutually exclusive.
The US is a republic as opposed to a monarchy, even though today most monarchies are constitutional (as opposed to absolute) and, in almost all other ways, function as republics. The US is a democracy in that all of the people in the country have an equal say (equal vote) in whatever may affect them, or more specifically, who gets to represent them. In that sense, the US is a representative democracy as opposed to a direct democracy, but it is still a democracy. AFAIK, no governments today function as direct democracies on the national level.
Some may argue that, in Washington, corporate lobbyists have more influence than the electorate, but I still prefer to think that democratic republic is a more descriptive term for the current form of government in the USA than, say, autocratic republic (e.g. the Democratic People's Republic of Korea), or theocratic republic (e.g. Islamic Republic of Iran).
It sounds like the extroverts among us would have more fun with this than the introverted types, which includes me. The idea of constantly being hooked up to a hive-mind sounds exhausting. I suspect that if this concept ever becomes a reality and they wanted more nerds on board, then they'd have to include a switch so that individuals would have the choice to take themselves off-line every once in a while (or only join in when they felt like it).
Excuse me, but often today's leaker turns out to be tomorrow's hero.
For example, after the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times in 1971, it showed that a number of presidents had lied to the American people and violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. That leak helped to end the Vietnam war.
Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker and the first person ever to be prosecuted for a leak in the United States, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. This act had been designed for espionage and, until that time, had never been used for anything else except to prosecute spies: those who act with the express intent to harm the US or help a foreign power. However, against Ellsberg they used a clause within the act that says only those with legal authority may publish classified documents. The same clause is now being used against Bradley Manning.
Why use the Espionage Act against leakers? Because, unlike Great Britain, the US has never had an Official Secrets Act: a law that would criminalize any and all disclosure of classified information. Efforts have been made by Congress to pass one -- the last time under Bill Clinton (which he vetoed) -- but this has never succeeded, because lawmakers have always considered that it would be too much at odds with the First Amendment. Yet, that's the way the Espionage Act is now being used.
Finally, is it not highly ironic that, even as the government prosecutes Bradley Manning, the State Dept. is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Daniel Ellsberg and his leaking of the Pentagon Papers? (see this link).
When astro images are made with reflecting telescopes, diffraction spikes around bright stars can usually be seen at 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees. Sometimes they are rotates a bit, but most of us are so used to seeing these little crosses, that artists often add them in their renditions of star fields.
This won't be the case with the James Webb Space Telescope, however. Once it begins operations, we're going to have to get used to seeing diffraction spikes around stars in the images it sends back to us at something like 0, 150 and 210 degrees. In short, they will look like little Y's. It will take a little getting used to, but I look forward to seeing them anyway.
That's the FOSS version of the venerable Andrew File System (Debian packages available). I use it together with MIT Kerberos V and OpenLDAP. It may not be the easiest system to set up and maintain, but what you get for your efforts -- a distributed file system -- is pretty cool even on a single server.
The problem with NFS and Samba solutions is that the manner in which servers and hard disks are organized has too much influence on directory structure: as disks and servers are changed over time, the structure of the file system usually changes as well. In addition, many users have different drive mappings, which further increases confusion and the risk of files eventually getting lost.
This is not the case with AFS; it's namespace (the AFS file system directory structure) is not influenced by disk structure and all users always see the same directory structure. So, when disks and/or servers are added or removed from a cell, which is what an AFS administrative unit is called, its namespace remains unaffected. In this respect it is less likely that anything will ever be lost.
Placing a monolith, or any relatively small-sized object on the moon is a waste of time: it is bound to be obliterated, or at least buried, by an asteroid strike long before the Earth-Moon system is destroyed by an aging sun. Something that would last much further into the future would be a large-scale excavation of some kind, like the Nazca Lines. It could be something as simple as a straight line, or consist of more complex shapes, perhaps conveying information about our civilization. The bigger it would be, the better: preferably on a scale of thousands to hundreds of thousands of meters. That way, large parts would remain recognizable as obviously artificial for as long as possible. If the excavation robots used for the project were self-replicating, it would be possible to do it for relatively little money as well.
No, the implication is that dual stack fails as a general Internet solution if providers start to give their users IPv6-only... at a point in time long before all IPv4 users and services have dual stack. The fact is, at the moment IPv6-only users can access only a small percentage of what the Internet has to offer. If you're an AT&T user, there's no real reason to complain about your wretched ISP not having any immediate plans to give you native IPv6, because you can always go out and get yourself a/48 from a tunnel broker, such as Hurricane Electric, or SixXS. However, I've not yet seen the reverse: tunnel brokers that are willing to offer their customers one or more public IPv4 addresses via an IPv6 tunnel. At the rate things are going, though, I'll bet there will be a market for this sooner as opposed to later.
There's a whole corner of Wikipedia, a science subject, that owes almost its entire existence to over 20,000 of my edits contributed over a 3-year period. I learned a lot during that time, which I think is reflected in the quality of the articles I worked on, but sadly Wikipedia did not. In the end I was spending way too much of my time defending the way those articles were written from complete debutantes who had less of an idea what they were doing than when I started. I felt like a blade of grass in somebody's lawn: wanting to grow higher, but regularly being cut back down to size.
I suppose one of my main problems was that there has always been considerable public interest in the subject I was writing about, but at the same time there has always existed a lot of fear and misunderstanding. Consequently, after I had carefully researched the subject of each page, filling it with facts and tagging every sentence and paragraph with one or more references, others would often come by and, totally unimpeded by any knowledge of the subject, just start making changes as they saw fit. I could argue with them, typically regarding the quality of their sources, but they were often stubborn and refused to understand. I could point out that they were not following Wikipedia's own guidelines, but they didn't see it that way. The administrators and arbitrators didn't have any knowledge of the subject either and figured we just had to remain civil and reach a consensus.
It's been almost two years since I stopped contributing and many of the articles I worked so hard on are now steadily decaying, reflecting less fact and more public ignorance. The admins should be looking for better ways to preserve good edits and prevent bad ones. However, not only does Wikipedia lack an effective mechanism to counter quality deterioration, they aren't even looking for one. The current approach was probably more correct five or six years ago, when any information was better than no information, but now they need a new strategy, or else they stand to lose as much as they gain.
Oh, I still visit the site often enough, as most of us probably do, but as a result of my experience I no longer have the respect for Wikipedia that I once did. If Jimbo thinks advertising on Wikipedia's pages would be degrading, I don't see how that would be worse than the way the project is currently being managed. So go ahead, rent out some banner space; it won't make a difference to me anyway.
Like most businesses, ATK will hate paying taxes (and likely bend over backwards to avoid doing that), but obviously love receiving tax money in the form of government contracts. It also looks like they've worked hard at oiling a number of prominent state politicians to make sure they keep those contracts regardless of whether their technology is outdated or not.
One of the things I hate about cable Internet is that, in the Netherlands (and probably elsewhere as well), consumers always seem to be given dynamic IP addresses. So, I called up CAI Harderwijk, a non-profit organization incidentally, to ask them directly about this. Apparently, they are indeed a cable operator (not an ISP), so they said this issue was always up to the various ISPs that make use of their infrastructure. Nevertheless, I asked why, in their opinion, do cable ISPs in general not offer fixed addresses? Well, they do, apparently, since this is also possible with previous DOCSIS versions, but its a privilege that is usually reserved for business customers. Most cable ISPs consider it unnecessarily expensive to provide all customers with fixed IP addresses.
Otherwise, CAI Harderwijk now have a thoroughly modern infrastructure. For instance, they can remotely control the availability of their services to individual clients. This is as opposed to UPC (the only available cable ISP in and around Amsterdam), who still have to arrange their client connections locally and manually. The latter method has the added disadvantage that a small percentage of cable customers will always enjoy services for which they do not pay -- something that is impossible to avoid due to the scale and the administration involved. CAI Harderwijk does not have this problem; an advantage that they can now pass on to their ISP customers.
I saw nothing new in the video clip; just the same old configuration options as before, except with a new, flashy interface. I don't see why that's necessary, but I suppose we should be grateful that they aren't foisting any animated paperclips on us.
Over the years I've hear of various ways in which the democratic process can be improved. I saw this TED talk last night and it certainly looks interesting; if it can make the proceedings so much more transparent, let's set up a trial somewhere and see how it goes. Personally, I'd like to see it combined with instant-runoff voting; a system that has seen only limited implementation despite its advantages. Yet, I wonder if I will ever encounter these concepts in practice.
I find it disappointing that, all over the world, older democracies seem to be deeply conservative about their voting processes, resisting change even when the flaws in their systems are obvious and better solutions are available. We are quick to criticize the voting processes of emerging democracies, but resist doing anything when the problems are closer to home.
Poor voting practices at home also have a knock-on effect: why, for example, should the Afghans improve their voting system when we can't be bothered to improve ours? By saying one thing and doing another, we send the message that it's really not that important to be so respectful of the voting process. In such cases, we have no right to be so proud of our democracies.
1.) Since an electric car's battery is a relatively expensive component, it should last long enough. However, seeing as Honda en Toyota guarantee the batteries in their hybrid vehicles for 100.000 miles and hardly ever sell replacements, we probably shouldn't worry. However, the guarantee that DBM Energy will eventually offer for their car batteries remains to be seen.
2.) A battery like this should not make an average electric car unnecessarily expensive. How much do DBM Energy plan to ask for their product?
3.) When not using a hefty DC charging station, how long does it take to charge the battery with only 110-220V? Actually, even if it does take eight hours, I personally would not consider it a major problem, but I would expect those charging stations to be available along the highways.
4.) Quick-charging this type of battery usually ends up shortening its lifespan. To what extent would this be the case with DBM Energy's new invention?
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO the daily commute is one of the worst things about having to work. But for those against, whether they are employers who would just rather see butts on seats, or employees fearing pay cuts, there are some good reasons to telecommute.
First, there the environmental value. If a substantial percentage of the workforce were to work from home, then that would mean a lot less pollution. Second, more telecommuters means less traffic on the roads and fewer traffic jams. Really, until the day comes when most cars on the road are driven by computers instead of people, telecommuting will be probably be the best way to cut down on traffic, thus freeing up the roads more for those who have no choice. Third, I'd go for it even if it meant losing some money in the end, just because of all the time it would save me on a daily basis. Think about it: all that extra free time -- I'd be mighty grateful for that at the end of every day! (and at the end of every year, when you think what it would add it up).
On the other hand, one of the worst barriers that holds back telecommuting is the lack of decent bandwidth -- upload bandwidth -- available to the average consumer through local ISPs. The down/up ratio is usually 10:1 or worse; I sure wish that would change. Often, link reliability is also a challenge, although using a second ISP can be a solution. I'd say another issue is the poor quality, poor manageability and high price of commercial software, which is important when dealing with so many remote systems and when downtime results in a serious loss of productivity (I say that because most people and organizations are too stupid to consider FOSS as an alternative, even when technically there are no barriers to speak of).
Notice that no link is included to the new website for the Canterbury distribution. That's too suspicious.
Almost fooled me, there.
Forget egos -- there are plenty of academics out there who would be happy to contribute. The problem is Wikipedia's environment: it's just not one in which we can expect great articles to become better over time. Unless groups of people with specific knowledge of the subject keep a watchful eye on such articles, they simply degrade.
For three years, I wrote over 100 biology articles for Wikipedia and contributed to hundreds more -- including an entire family's taxonomy with several thousand redirects. Despite my lack of an academic background, I did my best to be as thorough and precise as possible, buying many books on the subject, never assuming anything and citing my references per paragraph and often even per sentence. WP even has guidelines to encourage people to work like this.
Unfortunately, simply writing good articles is not enough. WP must be able to maintain the quality of such articles, but it has no mechanisms for this. Instead, articles can decline in different ways, such as the efforts of enthusiastic, well-meaning individuals who insist on contributing despite not having any knowledge of the subject (they often get their information from popular media), or because of simple vandalism (such deeds can go unnoticed if the perpetrators are careful enough not to attract too much attention). In this environment, maintaining article quality -- especially when dealing with relatively popular subject matter -- is an uphill battle. In the end, I spent the first several hours of each day countering vandalism, stupidity and ignorance.
Another aspect of the problem involves WP's own guidelines, which discourage the use of scientific names for article titles. Even to amateur biologists, such as myself, this is insulting. I was perfectly happy to make tons of redirects and disambiguation pages for all of the common names that I could ever find, but I also learned long ago that there is no substitute for scientific names, especially when the goal is to organize hundreds, and even thousands of articles on species that are all closely related. Yet, there exists a group of administrators at WP who are diametrically opposed to the the principle of using scientific names for article titles on biological organisms (actually, the Spanish language WP have seen the light and done this). Naturally, these people do not generally write such articles and have no special knowledge of, or interest in the subject, but that doesn't stop them from having an opinion and continuing to block any change in this area.
So, what do the folks at WP expect? It's not like academics don't know about them (I have yet to meet one who hasn't). It's just that there are some good reasons why they don't take WP seriously. Of course, they could always decide to pay academics to improve their content, but that would go against their basic philosophy. Therefore, I suggest that WP not just beg, but make some actual policy concessions towards the academics and then try asking for their help again next year.
As a healthcare professional who does data analysis for a number of hospitals, this sounds like a great idea, ...
How can you say that when the US health insurance industry has such an awful track record of discriminating against applicants who admit that they have a medical history with any of a very long list of possible ailments? AFAIK, this is not something that people are subjected to anywhere else in the world. This algorithm represents a double-edged sword that, once they have it (if they ever get it), they will use the wrong way: "What's that, no history of any medical problems, you say? Well, our algorithm predicts that later on you will likely develop costly problems anyway, so your application is rejected. Get your health insurance elsewhere!"
Increasingly, our country is appears to be more like the Corporate States of America. ...
It's called the United Corporations of America, son:
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Corporations of America, and to the profit for which it stands; one nation where the lobbyists write all the rules and are then appointed as judges to uphold them, with liberty and justice for all who can pay for it."
In the Netherlands (a much smaller country than the US), they tried and failed to introduce this idea (road pricing), abandoning it in 2001. The problem was, how to implement it? Their are basically two ways to do it: either an attempt is made to identify all the cars on all the roads at all times in order to work out how far each has traveled so that they can all be taxed accordingly, or all vehicles must have a tracking device installed (basically a cell phone with a GPS) so that the tax authorities can perform the same calculations. The former is impractical due to the cost and complexity of implementation, while the second raises serious privacy concerns. Because of this, the Dutch government eventually decided to back down and stick with the decades-old flat tax for all motor vehicles no matter how much or how little the individual motorists use the roads.
Actually, if the idea had been implemented, it would have made all forms of commercial transportation using the roads (for goods, services and people) significantly more expensive. Well, would the companies involved have had to pay those taxes equally? Perhaps. If so, you know those costs would have been passed on to the consumers anyway (including the ones without cars), making everything from peanuts to public transportation more expensive. If not, the average motorist would consider the tax unjust.
Consider also that there is a much simpler alternative: simply add more tax to the price of fuel (75% of which already consists of tax in the Netherlands). This is not only an effective solution (those who drive more pay more tax), it's also low-tech (so it's super cheap to implement) and it further encourages people to drive more fuel-efficient vehicles. In addition, a fuel tax is arguably also a more effective method of taxing foreign vehicles that would otherwise likely pay less, or no road tax at all.
The story is pure nonsense. Boid snakes (boas) may have relatively long teeth compared to colubrids (typical snakes), which come in handy when catching and holding on to flighty prey, (especially birds), but they will not have gone deep enough (perhaps a few millimeters at most) to reach any silicone breast implants, which are typically placed subglandularly. I'm not even sure if the teeth would be able to pierce an implant if the snake's head had been mashed onto her breast.
Then there's the question of the girl's alleged implants. After reading this article, it seems that many implants these days contain a saline solution as opposed to a silicone gel, and even when they contain the latter it's a semi-solid substance "that mostly eliminates filler leakage." Anything else and the girl would probably have to be at least ten years older.
Actually, at first I misread the title of the story and thought the girl had died of silicon poisoning. However, in the unlikely event that an implant had been pierced and resulted in a death, I would still be more surprised if the snake had been so unfortunate. After all, in that case the snake will have made contact with only a minute amount of silicone and, as opposed to the girl, the substance would not have entered its bloodstream.
In the highly unlikely event that any silicone did get into the snake's mouth, it's unlikely that this will have caused the snake any harm. Snakes frequently and inadvertently ingest all kinds of organic and inorganic matter when swallowing meals (dirt, grit, leaves, the contents of the prey animal's stomach), but this almost never does any harm. Short of getting (or forcing) the snake to swallow an obvious poison of some sort, the only normally non-toxic organic substance I can think of that turned out to be harmful for snakes was vegetable oil, which I once heard ended up killing a specimen after it was used to make a force-feeding session easier.
Finally, if the snake did actually die afterwards, it seems to me more likely that this would be due to unrelated causes, such as a poor state of health, which with snakes and reptiles in general can often be difficult to detect until its too late.
... the man can be a fanatical lunatic, and I think at this point this does the cause more harm than good.
By telling us it how it is? If you have evidence to the contrary, then please inform us. Otherwise, your comments are glib and baseless. I imagine that in police states with high rates of cell phone usage, such as China or Iran, the authorities do indeed track people in exactly this way. It would also be naive to assume that the DHS hasn't tried it yet.
Personally, I've had a cell phone since 1995 and am rather disappointed with them. Even if you ignore the tracking issue, by now so much more should be possible with them. Much of my disappointment has been due to the proprietary software. I used to ask myself, Why is it that these phones only seem to do what my telco wants and not what I want? I mean, I'm the customer, aren't I? Why aren't any manufacturers offering me what I want?
The answer is simple: I am not the customer: the telco is. Compared to the rest of us, telcos buy cell phones in enormous quantities from the manufacturers, so they end up dictating the specifications. Linux-based phones have been around for years in small numbers, but the reason each of those models always seems to die an early death is because the telcos avoid them like the plague. Why? Because it would give their subscribers too much freedom. It's hard to make lucrative deals with 3rd party software companies for the right to, say, offer the only email option on a particular phone, if that's too easy to circumvent.
Like Internet access, since life with a cell phone has become unthinkable for so many of us, at this point I believe it would be appropriate for, e.g. the European Union (don't bother counting on Uncle Sam), to introduce some regulations and standardization that will guarantee end users the freedom and privacy that they deserve. For instance, always make it possible to install a range of operating systems (including FOSS ones) on any smart phone and make geographic tracking unlawful if not approved of by the subscriber.
Indeed. The corporations have owned Washington for many decades now. Even back in the 1950's, Ike Eisenhower warned that America's military-industrial complex had become too strong. Now look where we are: America has a military budget that's larger than that of all other countries combined, yet at the same time a substantial number of Americans live below the poverty line.
Even worse, many of our laws have now been drafted by lobbyists -- a fact that some of our politicians have even been happy to admit. The lobbyists continue to play the politicians and the politicians continue to play the people for whom the latter continue to vote. It's a vicious cycle that's only made worse by the poor state of America's educational system, which has been deteriorating for many decades. The electorate has now largely been reduced to a mass of ignorant, overly-religious, flag-waving zombie-consumers whose only purpose seems to be in making the rich richer.
Unfortunately, I'm not certain that there is much reason to believe that America can get out of this rut, which is like an extreme experiment in unbridled free-market capitalism that has gone badly wrong. The problem is that its people have wished this upon themselves. In this way America are kind of like Afghanistan; a country to which we've tried to introduce democracy, but whose citizens do not recognize the value of it and are thus not willing to fight for it, i.e. a horse that has been led to horse to water, but will not drink. Americans, of the other hand, had their freedom, but then gave it away willingly to the corporations... and continue to do so. Like the poor Afghans, they don't understand that their usual behavior is not in their best interest either.
Oh, well...
PS -- This is a bit of a rant, so go ahead and mod it down.
Technically they're right. We are not a democracy, we are a republic...
Excuse me, but the United States is both a republic and a democracy. These terms are not mutually exclusive.
The US is a republic as opposed to a monarchy, even though today most monarchies are constitutional (as opposed to absolute) and, in almost all other ways, function as republics. The US is a democracy in that all of the people in the country have an equal say (equal vote) in whatever may affect them, or more specifically, who gets to represent them. In that sense, the US is a representative democracy as opposed to a direct democracy, but it is still a democracy. AFAIK, no governments today function as direct democracies on the national level.
Some may argue that, in Washington, corporate lobbyists have more influence than the electorate, but I still prefer to think that democratic republic is a more descriptive term for the current form of government in the USA than, say, autocratic republic (e.g. the Democratic People's Republic of Korea), or theocratic republic (e.g. Islamic Republic of Iran).
It sounds like the extroverts among us would have more fun with this than the introverted types, which includes me. The idea of constantly being hooked up to a hive-mind sounds exhausting. I suspect that if this concept ever becomes a reality and they wanted more nerds on board, then they'd have to include a switch so that individuals would have the choice to take themselves off-line every once in a while (or only join in when they felt like it).
Excuse me, but often today's leaker turns out to be tomorrow's hero.
For example, after the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times in 1971, it showed that a number of presidents had lied to the American people and violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. That leak helped to end the Vietnam war.
Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker and the first person ever to be prosecuted for a leak in the United States, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. This act had been designed for espionage and, until that time, had never been used for anything else except to prosecute spies: those who act with the express intent to harm the US or help a foreign power. However, against Ellsberg they used a clause within the act that says only those with legal authority may publish classified documents. The same clause is now being used against Bradley Manning.
Why use the Espionage Act against leakers? Because, unlike Great Britain, the US has never had an Official Secrets Act: a law that would criminalize any and all disclosure of classified information. Efforts have been made by Congress to pass one -- the last time under Bill Clinton (which he vetoed) -- but this has never succeeded, because lawmakers have always considered that it would be too much at odds with the First Amendment. Yet, that's the way the Espionage Act is now being used.
Finally, is it not highly ironic that, even as the government prosecutes Bradley Manning, the State Dept. is promoting a documentary film that celebrates Daniel Ellsberg and his leaking of the Pentagon Papers? (see this link).
When astro images are made with reflecting telescopes, diffraction spikes around bright stars can usually be seen at 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees. Sometimes they are rotates a bit, but most of us are so used to seeing these little crosses, that artists often add them in their renditions of star fields.
This won't be the case with the James Webb Space Telescope, however. Once it begins operations, we're going to have to get used to seeing diffraction spikes around stars in the images it sends back to us at something like 0, 150 and 210 degrees. In short, they will look like little Y's. It will take a little getting used to, but I look forward to seeing them anyway.
That's the FOSS version of the venerable Andrew File System (Debian packages available). I use it together with MIT Kerberos V and OpenLDAP. It may not be the easiest system to set up and maintain, but what you get for your efforts -- a distributed file system -- is pretty cool even on a single server.
The problem with NFS and Samba solutions is that the manner in which servers and hard disks are organized has too much influence on directory structure: as disks and servers are changed over time, the structure of the file system usually changes as well. In addition, many users have different drive mappings, which further increases confusion and the risk of files eventually getting lost.
This is not the case with AFS; it's namespace (the AFS file system directory structure) is not influenced by disk structure and all users always see the same directory structure. So, when disks and/or servers are added or removed from a cell, which is what an AFS administrative unit is called, its namespace remains unaffected. In this respect it is less likely that anything will ever be lost.
Thank for that observation, Dr. Seuss.
Placing a monolith, or any relatively small-sized object on the moon is a waste of time: it is bound to be obliterated, or at least buried, by an asteroid strike long before the Earth-Moon system is destroyed by an aging sun. Something that would last much further into the future would be a large-scale excavation of some kind, like the Nazca Lines. It could be something as simple as a straight line, or consist of more complex shapes, perhaps conveying information about our civilization. The bigger it would be, the better: preferably on a scale of thousands to hundreds of thousands of meters. That way, large parts would remain recognizable as obviously artificial for as long as possible. If the excavation robots used for the project were self-replicating, it would be possible to do it for relatively little money as well.
No, the implication is that dual stack fails as a general Internet solution if providers start to give their users IPv6-only... at a point in time long before all IPv4 users and services have dual stack. The fact is, at the moment IPv6-only users can access only a small percentage of what the Internet has to offer. If you're an AT&T user, there's no real reason to complain about your wretched ISP not having any immediate plans to give you native IPv6, because you can always go out and get yourself a /48 from a tunnel broker, such as Hurricane Electric, or SixXS. However, I've not yet seen the reverse: tunnel brokers that are willing to offer their customers one or more public IPv4 addresses via an IPv6 tunnel. At the rate things are going, though, I'll bet there will be a market for this sooner as opposed to later.
There's a whole corner of Wikipedia, a science subject, that owes almost its entire existence to over 20,000 of my edits contributed over a 3-year period. I learned a lot during that time, which I think is reflected in the quality of the articles I worked on, but sadly Wikipedia did not. In the end I was spending way too much of my time defending the way those articles were written from complete debutantes who had less of an idea what they were doing than when I started. I felt like a blade of grass in somebody's lawn: wanting to grow higher, but regularly being cut back down to size.
I suppose one of my main problems was that there has always been considerable public interest in the subject I was writing about, but at the same time there has always existed a lot of fear and misunderstanding. Consequently, after I had carefully researched the subject of each page, filling it with facts and tagging every sentence and paragraph with one or more references, others would often come by and, totally unimpeded by any knowledge of the subject, just start making changes as they saw fit. I could argue with them, typically regarding the quality of their sources, but they were often stubborn and refused to understand. I could point out that they were not following Wikipedia's own guidelines, but they didn't see it that way. The administrators and arbitrators didn't have any knowledge of the subject either and figured we just had to remain civil and reach a consensus.
It's been almost two years since I stopped contributing and many of the articles I worked so hard on are now steadily decaying, reflecting less fact and more public ignorance. The admins should be looking for better ways to preserve good edits and prevent bad ones. However, not only does Wikipedia lack an effective mechanism to counter quality deterioration, they aren't even looking for one. The current approach was probably more correct five or six years ago, when any information was better than no information, but now they need a new strategy, or else they stand to lose as much as they gain.
Oh, I still visit the site often enough, as most of us probably do, but as a result of my experience I no longer have the respect for Wikipedia that I once did. If Jimbo thinks advertising on Wikipedia's pages would be degrading, I don't see how that would be worse than the way the project is currently being managed. So go ahead, rent out some banner space; it won't make a difference to me anyway.
... the Singularity must almost be upon us. I, for one, welcome our new supercomputing overlords!
(No it isn't, Ray Kurzweil is an idiot, and don't call me Shirley!)
Like most businesses, ATK will hate paying taxes (and likely bend over backwards to avoid doing that), but obviously love receiving tax money in the form of government contracts. It also looks like they've worked hard at oiling a number of prominent state politicians to make sure they keep those contracts regardless of whether their technology is outdated or not.
One of the things I hate about cable Internet is that, in the Netherlands (and probably elsewhere as well), consumers always seem to be given dynamic IP addresses. So, I called up CAI Harderwijk, a non-profit organization incidentally, to ask them directly about this. Apparently, they are indeed a cable operator (not an ISP), so they said this issue was always up to the various ISPs that make use of their infrastructure. Nevertheless, I asked why, in their opinion, do cable ISPs in general not offer fixed addresses? Well, they do, apparently, since this is also possible with previous DOCSIS versions, but its a privilege that is usually reserved for business customers. Most cable ISPs consider it unnecessarily expensive to provide all customers with fixed IP addresses.
Otherwise, CAI Harderwijk now have a thoroughly modern infrastructure. For instance, they can remotely control the availability of their services to individual clients. This is as opposed to UPC (the only available cable ISP in and around Amsterdam), who still have to arrange their client connections locally and manually. The latter method has the added disadvantage that a small percentage of cable customers will always enjoy services for which they do not pay -- something that is impossible to avoid due to the scale and the administration involved. CAI Harderwijk does not have this problem; an advantage that they can now pass on to their ISP customers.
I saw nothing new in the video clip; just the same old configuration options as before, except with a new, flashy interface. I don't see why that's necessary, but I suppose we should be grateful that they aren't foisting any animated paperclips on us.
Over the years I've hear of various ways in which the democratic process can be improved. I saw this TED talk last night and it certainly looks interesting; if it can make the proceedings so much more transparent, let's set up a trial somewhere and see how it goes. Personally, I'd like to see it combined with instant-runoff voting; a system that has seen only limited implementation despite its advantages. Yet, I wonder if I will ever encounter these concepts in practice.
I find it disappointing that, all over the world, older democracies seem to be deeply conservative about their voting processes, resisting change even when the flaws in their systems are obvious and better solutions are available. We are quick to criticize the voting processes of emerging democracies, but resist doing anything when the problems are closer to home.
Poor voting practices at home also have a knock-on effect: why, for example, should the Afghans improve their voting system when we can't be bothered to improve ours? By saying one thing and doing another, we send the message that it's really not that important to be so respectful of the voting process. In such cases, we have no right to be so proud of our democracies.
... this concept would not go down well with the government, especially around their nuclear facilities.