"Less than half those who ever lived have died"
on
Movie Review, Hellboy II
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
At one point in the last few decades it was estimated that, thanks to the human population explosion, more than half the human beings who had ever lived were still alive. (There were jokes about the expectation of eventual death being less than 50%. B-) )
I hear that, since then, the origin date for "humans" has been pushed back enough by additional evidence that the "less than half" estimate was discredited.
But it is an interesting thought.
(Why SHOULD people HAVE to die, after all? At least before the heat death of the universe? OK, so the machinery of the meat breaks down. But is there any inherent reason one couldn't, with sufficient improvements in technology and application of resources, repair it indefinitely? Or even rebuild and restart it after it fails? For some time now death has been, not a state, but a prognosis: That (with current medical technology) the body's systems can no longer be repaired (and if necessary restarted) to the point that it can again operate in a way recognizable as "alive".)
But agricultural waste is chock-full of valuable organic substances. It should be composted and returned to the soil so that it can fertilise the next year's worth of food.
They claim that one of the output products is precisely that fertilizer. Preserving the fixed nitrogen, trace elements (especially sulfur), and other nutritious miscellanea for recycling into the soil and keeping them out of the fuel product (where they'd be fouling contaminants) is a win-win.
Granted you end up burning the cellulose, rather than plowing it back in. But in some soils that's not a big deal, while in others it just means the farmer has to reserve a part of the crop waste for mulch rather than selling it.
If you can make cheap fuel from agricultural waste, then you do not need investors.
You do if it takes a bunch of expensive hardware to make an plant of a size to run efficiently.
You also do if you want to scale it up faster than plowing in the profits would enable. (In-and-Out Burgers was nearly the first drive-through fast food operation, chose to stay wholly-owned and expand on its own earnings, and it's STILL only in a few states on the west coast. Compare to MacDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Taco Bell,...)
You also do if there are a bunch of fixed startup costs (such as regulatory approvals and distributor contracts) that you can (or must) amortize across a large amount of production capacity to achieve profitability.
There are lots of reasons why it would make sense to go for investment even if it is profitable at the garage-shop level.
(Which is not to say it ISN'T a scam. Just that "if it worked they wouldn't need investors" fails to prove that.)
Sure they can make a lot of crude and fertilizer out of their agricultural waste, but how much energy are they using to convert it?
They claim they're supplying the production facility's energy needs by burning one of the output fuel products (the gas).
So that just leaves transportation of the raw material to the plant and finished product from it as major energy requirements. Siting such plants scattered around farming areas or near railroad lines from them minimizes the "to" part. Pipelines or railroads into the fuel distribution network make the "from" part manageable.
If the plants can be efficient at scales significantly smaller than petroleum refineries and the fuel is usable (as claimed) at 100% as-is, you can also keep your distribution energy costs low by selling it to consumers near the plant. So fuel ends up cheapest in the farming areas - good for further reducing the cost of the raw materials by cutting the cost of the farmers' production.
The FUN part would be if the plants can be reasonably efficient at a scale where the farmers can run their own - turning their own crops into fuel for their own processes and selling the surplus. (Something like the Pennsylvania farmers before the Whiskey Rebellion - growing grain, then cutting shipping cost to the east coast markets by "processing" it into whiskey.)
Another reason people might disapprove is that the Do Not Call list preempted state laws that let the person called sue for a nontrivial chunk of change. The federal law only allows the fed to fine and sue. Then the fed gets the money and the callee only gets more aggravation.
Please stop using mydomain.com and other such nonsense. Example.com is reserved [...] for use as [an] example domain name.
And thank you, IETF.
The sysadmin of node.com (and node in the uucp mailnet), had a lot of trouble with lost mail, back in the days of roll-your-own sendmail configurations and bucket-brigade multihop mail delivery.
Every now and then some sysadmin would get the bright idea that mail to "user@node.com" or "node!user" meant some newbie had followed the manual too closely rather than filling in the actual address. So he'd hotwire the MTA configuration files to bounce the mail with a helpful (or derisive) message if the user was "user" or the site (node) was "node" or "node.com".
So every couple months somebody trying to hit a user or mailing list at node would get bounced, manage to report it by some alternate path, and there'd be another round of hunt-for-the-excessively-helpful site.
In self-defense the sysadmin of node set up the account "user" and configured the "vacation" program so the account was always "on vacation" and delivered the "helpful message" as the vacation notification. Thus it "provided the helpful message" for the whole net.
It also logged all the incoming mail. Turns out that the "problem" was a non-problem. Mail to "user@node.com" or "node!user" from the entire world averaged something like three letters per month.
Or at least it did until some fool webmaster used "user@node.com" for the "fill me in please" default field in a mailing-list subscription page. And then the spammers got hold of it...
... the only good way to do SPAM filtering is to ONLY deliver a 250 Queued message if the email is actually going to be delivered.
Which means an automated agent has the feedback necessary to "sniff out" the content filtering algorithm, trying variations until one gets through and remembering the result to get through more easily on the next message. Goodbye filters.
I'm not taking sides. I'm just pointing out a reason some people make this choice.
Did anyone else notice how the article goes from picosecond switching of this device to switching "a million times" in one second?
I bet the original press release used "million million" to get around the British/US ambiguity about "trillion" and then a proofreader thought the repeat was a typo.
What's *really* strange is that if I look at the raw sendmail logs on my server, the Email from friend@frienddomain.com comes in, and is forwarded to gmail... with an "OK" as the response -- i.e. the gmail MTA doesn't reject the message as it ideally should. However, the Email then disappears -- it's not even in my gmail spam filter... so there is no trace of it at all.
While the RFCs specify that an MTA that is dropping should notify the sender in various ways, modern MTAs often violate these parts of the spec, pretending to accept and then dropping the mail and/or failing to send bounce notifications.
This is deliberate. Not sending bounce messages reduces the load on the servers and net (now that most mail traffic bounces). Pretending to accept mail which is actually dropped is a defense against guessing email addresses and probing filters to see what gets past them.
"... First, he never borrowed that pot. Second, it was already broken when he borrowed it. Third, when he returned it, it was in perfect condition."
That's called "pleading the alternative" and is totally legit - at least in criminal proceedings.
- The prosecution has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
- The defense only has to poke holes, raising reasonable doubt.
- So if the prosecution fails to disprove even one counter-theory it's a win for the defense.
Not sure how that goes over in civil proceedings, where the sides are on an even footing and the standard is "preponderance of evidence" rather than "beyond a reasonable doubt". NYCL, can you tell us?
The fairness doctrine doesn't censor anything. It allows for equal time and space of people with opposing or different views.
No. It REQUIRES equal time and space for people with opposing or different views. Big difference.
Conservative talk radio is a business, collecting revenue by attracting ears for advertisers. It spends long blocks of time - like three hour chunks - on particular points of view. The fairness doctrine would require stations playing it to give equal blocks of time - in equivalent timeslots - to anti-conservative viewpoints, which would NOT attract the target demographic. This would be a massive financial hit (in a number of ways) on any station that played a talk show with enough of a point-of-view to invoke the doctrine.
The result would be that such stations would drop political talk shows entirely. This would leave the entire political content of stations coming from their news coverage (which has been shown, by an objective scale developed by Stanford and UCLA researchers, to be massively left-biased). The entertainment content is similarly left-biased (though not subject to the methodology used on news coverage.) As one big talk show host says: "I AM equal time!"
The left has just as much opportunity to field its own talk shows with its own biases. And it has tried, several times. But (with a few notable exceptions in extremely liberal areas, such as KGO radio in San Francisco) their content has failed to attract enough of an audience to be profitable. So shutting down political talk radio by reinstitution of the so-called "fairness doctrine" would have the effect of massively suppressing conservative political viewpoints on broadcast media.
A flip side is that the conservatives could potentially start a news organization of their own, covering conservative viewpoints. Indeed, this HAS been done to some extent, in the form of Fox News. But FNN has shown its true colors in the primary season: It covers only ONE of the four or so major conservative factions' positions and is perfectly happy to blatantly suppress the others.
Starting a new wholly-owned NETWORK by buying a little station in each major market is forbidden by FCC rules, which limit the amount of the population stations owned by a single entity can reach to well under 50%. So they'd have to recruit a lot of independents. (And you can bet, if they were succeeding, there would be attempts to invoke the fairness doctrine against them, adding massive legal costs to the equation.)
So with talk radio as the only broadcast outlet for conservative political thought (but not effective for liberal positions), and liberal political thought dominating entertainment content and most news coverage, shutting down political talk radio by reimposing the fairness doctrine would be a massive blow to the right and a victory for the left.
Speaking of comics: The Disney studios Duckburg stories by Carl Barks are a crash course in economics, politics, and practical philosophy.
(One strongly libertarian entrepreneur of my acquaintance styled himself a "Barksist" and would quote the nephews' statement "Flipism gets its acid test." when approaching a particularly spaghetti-bowl like freeway interchange. B-) )
They've been reprinted under the imprint "Gladstone Press".
A problem with the Skylark and Lensman series is that they were written when eugenics was still popular in the US, before the NAZIs made such a graphic display of their dark-side implications. The good guys are good guys and the bad guys bad guys largely due to their genetics. The last book of the Lensman series shows that the police/military organization you've been following was actually a secret breeding program, run by behind-the-scenes aliens, to produce a human master race to rule the galaxy and wipe out their ancient enemies.
Whenever I feel like trusting government officials I re-read the section of _The Grey Lensman_ where an "unattached lensman" (a supercop, with carte blanch to do whatever he pleases, no oversight, massive resources, and a gadget that lets him wiretap minds remotely) wipes out a nest of dope dealers by calling in the equivalent of a massive surprise nuclear carpet-bombing on the city they're in, to vaporize them all before they can get away.
Here's some that got me started, back in the late 50s. They are all quite accessible to a young reader:
Eric Frank Russel's _Wasp_ (Also good: _The Space Willies_ A.K.A. _Next of Kin_) Murray Leinster's Med Ship series. Hal Clemmet's _Needle_ (A.K.A _From Outer Space_) Heinlein's _Red Planet_ George O. Smith's _Space Plague_ (A.K.A. _Highways in Hiding_) and _Venus Equilateral_ (though the latter is quite dated, using vacuum tube technology.)
- fully compatible with x86 instruction set. (whereas other GPU use different architecture, and often instruction sets that aren't as much adapted to run general computing).
I was about to ask "Since when is the x86 instruction set optimized to run general computing?"
Then I noticed that the word was "adapted". Yeah, that's fair...
Seriously: The x86 (inspired by the hardware driving Datapoint's early smart terminals and previous chips for building hand calculators) was contemporary with Motorola's 68x (inspired by Gordon Bell's masterfully engineered PDP-11 and VAX instruction sets). While a lot of good people have poured their hearts and souls into turning it into a silk purse, and the original sows were particularly good examples of their breeds, the x86's descent from a pair of sow's ears is still apparent.
A friend of mine named "Mark Miller" found that there were a number of other computer scientists with the same name.
He joked that he should get together with them and submit, in a timely fashion for an April edition of a learned computer science journal, a jointly-authored article titled "Global Namespaces Considered Harmful" - with no text, just a long list of authors and disambiguating affiliation information.
(He also joked that, since one of the meanings of "mark" is a synonym for "bit", "Mark Miller" obviously meant "computer scientist" - or at least "data processor".)
I just had to bite the bullet a few months ago, retire my AMPS/TDMA phone and switch to GSM. (AT&T is the only cell carrier that covers my vacation/eventual-retirement home and they're shutting down the TDMA option.) Had hoped OpenMoko would be in time for me but they missed by about 9 months.
With them in mind I got one of the "free" locked phones - and checked what the unlocking and phone switching policies were. AT&T claimed:
- The PHONE is locked to the CARD, but,
- The CARD isn't locked to the PHONE (either by the card or by the network refusing to accept calls with that card and any other phone.)
Story is likely the same for any other GSM carrier. So just pull the GSM smartcard from any and shove it into your OpenMoko phone.
If you're signing up for new service, ask them if they'll credit you with the phone allowance if you bring your own phone rather than making them give you one of the "free" ones. Might not work but won't hurt to ask. (And if there's another GSM carrier in your service area, you might try hinting that you'll see if THEY'll credit you for the phone...
Of course don't tell them that it's an OpenMoko phone. I bet they're scared you - and thousands of others - will download some hack that lets you bypass some part of their service model. B-)
If G8 wants to get involved in something financial and internet related they should start by killing off international identity theft rings.
This is a MUCH larger dollar amount than even the claims of the content conglomerates. It also hits a broader range of businesses - primarily the financial institutions, which are already in enough trouble from the housing bubble bust.
Taking down a handfull of the biggest identity theft rings would drastically cut these losses. This would do a lot to stabilize the world economy - without appreciably shifting the world power balance or hurting any particular country (unless it was acting as a safe haven for one of the rings and participating in its ill-gotten gains).
The Riemann zeta function is \zeta(s) = \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{n^{s}} [written for LaTeX], or "the sum of 1/(n^s) as n goes from 0 to infinity (increasing by 1 repeatedly)" [in more human-readable form].
You have a slight typo. Should be: "... as n goes from 1 to infinity..."
Let's cover it with soot until it's much darker. That'll melt it all down and solve the whole problem.
Fuel's getting expensive. Opening the northwest passage to shipping would result in a further cut in carbon emissions with less disruption to economies than just cutting international trade.
That's a funny line, but it's not accurate. It's not always true that half the people are above and half are below average.
That depends on which measure of central trend you're calling "average". Usually it refers to the arithmetic mean, in which case you're correct. But it can also refer to the median, in which case the quote is correct. (Or to the geometric mean, the mode,...)
Essentially the entire broadcast media in the U.S. was (and largely still is) biasing the news by giving no coverage to conservative viewpoints (except to occasionally ridicule them) or events that would support conservative worldviews.
Make that "... broadcast NEWS media...". (Neo)conservative talk shows, with hosts like Limbaugh, Hannity, etc., are a major industry.
Fox News' feed and sound track are also syndicated. It forms both the top/bottom of the hour news shows for many independent radio stations and the full programming (except for local news and commercial insertion) for all-news radio stations in many outlets (including a San Jose station serving the San Francisco Bay area.)
Fox News gained popularity because it filled a gap: Essentially the entire broadcast media in the U.S. was (and largely still is) biasing the news by giving no coverage to conservative viewpoints (except to occasionally ridicule them) or events that would support conservative worldviews. Fox News built an audience by covering conservative viewpoints as well as liberal ones - and thus quickly gained a large audience among those not served by other news outlets.
Unfortunately, during the recent presidential primaries it became GLARINGLY obvious that Fox News was reporting from a PARTICULAR CONSERVATIVE FACTION'S viewpoint (that of the neoconservatives) and was perfectly happy to suppress the other major conservative factions' viewpoints (religious right, paleoconservative, constitutionalist,...). Their enmity against the constitutionalist faction was particularly blatant in the case of Ron Paul, whom they first ridiculed and then suppressed (to the point of reporting the Nevada results for the first and third place winners, skipping second place in order to avoid mentioning his name.)
So there's again a coverage gap that can feed a new news network with a different viewpoint and slant on the news. Watch for the rise of another new news network (or a major ideology shift in one of the current ones) once somebody with a couple billion realizes what a goldmine is out the to be claimed.
Slashdot Mirror
At one point in the last few decades it was estimated that, thanks to the human population explosion, more than half the human beings who had ever lived were still alive. (There were jokes about the expectation of eventual death being less than 50%. B-) )
I hear that, since then, the origin date for "humans" has been pushed back enough by additional evidence that the "less than half" estimate was discredited.
But it is an interesting thought.
(Why SHOULD people HAVE to die, after all? At least before the heat death of the universe? OK, so the machinery of the meat breaks down. But is there any inherent reason one couldn't, with sufficient improvements in technology and application of resources, repair it indefinitely? Or even rebuild and restart it after it fails? For some time now death has been, not a state, but a prognosis: That (with current medical technology) the body's systems can no longer be repaired (and if necessary restarted) to the point that it can again operate in a way recognizable as "alive".)
But agricultural waste is chock-full of valuable organic substances. It should be composted and returned to the soil so that it can fertilise the next year's worth of food.
They claim that one of the output products is precisely that fertilizer. Preserving the fixed nitrogen, trace elements (especially sulfur), and other nutritious miscellanea for recycling into the soil and keeping them out of the fuel product (where they'd be fouling contaminants) is a win-win.
Granted you end up burning the cellulose, rather than plowing it back in. But in some soils that's not a big deal, while in others it just means the farmer has to reserve a part of the crop waste for mulch rather than selling it.
If you can make cheap fuel from agricultural waste, then you do not need investors.
You do if it takes a bunch of expensive hardware to make an plant of a size to run efficiently.
You also do if you want to scale it up faster than plowing in the profits would enable. (In-and-Out Burgers was nearly the first drive-through fast food operation, chose to stay wholly-owned and expand on its own earnings, and it's STILL only in a few states on the west coast. Compare to MacDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Taco Bell, ...)
You also do if there are a bunch of fixed startup costs (such as regulatory approvals and distributor contracts) that you can (or must) amortize across a large amount of production capacity to achieve profitability.
There are lots of reasons why it would make sense to go for investment even if it is profitable at the garage-shop level.
(Which is not to say it ISN'T a scam. Just that "if it worked they wouldn't need investors" fails to prove that.)
Will you choose peesel or shitroleum?
That's easy. There's lots more energy per unit of processed waste in shitroleum. B-)
Using either, of course, assumes the processing renders it inoffensive.
(Now if we could just process this thread to render IT inoffensive. B-) )
Sure they can make a lot of crude and fertilizer out of their agricultural waste, but how much energy are they using to convert it?
They claim they're supplying the production facility's energy needs by burning one of the output fuel products (the gas).
So that just leaves transportation of the raw material to the plant and finished product from it as major energy requirements. Siting such plants scattered around farming areas or near railroad lines from them minimizes the "to" part. Pipelines or railroads into the fuel distribution network make the "from" part manageable.
If the plants can be efficient at scales significantly smaller than petroleum refineries and the fuel is usable (as claimed) at 100% as-is, you can also keep your distribution energy costs low by selling it to consumers near the plant. So fuel ends up cheapest in the farming areas - good for further reducing the cost of the raw materials by cutting the cost of the farmers' production.
The FUN part would be if the plants can be reasonably efficient at a scale where the farmers can run their own - turning their own crops into fuel for their own processes and selling the surplus. (Something like the Pennsylvania farmers before the Whiskey Rebellion - growing grain, then cutting shipping cost to the east coast markets by "processing" it into whiskey.)
Another reason people might disapprove is that the Do Not Call list preempted state laws that let the person called sue for a nontrivial chunk of change. The federal law only allows the fed to fine and sue. Then the fed gets the money and the callee only gets more aggravation.
Please stop using mydomain.com and other such nonsense. Example.com is reserved [...] for use as [an] example domain name.
And thank you, IETF.
The sysadmin of node.com (and node in the uucp mailnet), had a lot of trouble with lost mail, back in the days of roll-your-own sendmail configurations and bucket-brigade multihop mail delivery.
Every now and then some sysadmin would get the bright idea that mail to "user@node.com" or "node!user" meant some newbie had followed the manual too closely rather than filling in the actual address. So he'd hotwire the MTA configuration files to bounce the mail with a helpful (or derisive) message if the user was "user" or the site (node) was "node" or "node.com".
So every couple months somebody trying to hit a user or mailing list at node would get bounced, manage to report it by some alternate path, and there'd be another round of hunt-for-the-excessively-helpful site.
In self-defense the sysadmin of node set up the account "user" and configured the "vacation" program so the account was always "on vacation" and delivered the "helpful message" as the vacation notification. Thus it "provided the helpful message" for the whole net.
It also logged all the incoming mail. Turns out that the "problem" was a non-problem. Mail to "user@node.com" or "node!user" from the entire world averaged something like three letters per month.
Or at least it did until some fool webmaster used "user@node.com" for the "fill me in please" default field in a mailing-list subscription page. And then the spammers got hold of it...
... the only good way to do SPAM filtering is to ONLY deliver a 250 Queued message if the email is actually going to be delivered.
Which means an automated agent has the feedback necessary to "sniff out" the content filtering algorithm, trying variations until one gets through and remembering the result to get through more easily on the next message. Goodbye filters.
I'm not taking sides. I'm just pointing out a reason some people make this choice.
Did anyone else notice how the article goes from picosecond switching of this device to switching "a million times" in one second?
I bet the original press release used "million million" to get around the British/US ambiguity about "trillion" and then a proofreader thought the repeat was a typo.
What's *really* strange is that if I look at the raw sendmail logs on my server, the Email from friend@frienddomain.com comes in, and is forwarded to gmail ... with an "OK" as the response -- i.e. the gmail MTA doesn't reject the message as it ideally should. However, the Email then disappears -- it's not even in my gmail spam filter ... so there is no trace of it at all.
While the RFCs specify that an MTA that is dropping should notify the sender in various ways, modern MTAs often violate these parts of the spec, pretending to accept and then dropping the mail and/or failing to send bounce notifications.
This is deliberate. Not sending bounce messages reduces the load on the servers and net (now that most mail traffic bounces). Pretending to accept mail which is actually dropped is a defense against guessing email addresses and probing filters to see what gets past them.
"... First, he never borrowed that pot. Second, it was already broken when he borrowed it. Third, when he returned it, it was in perfect condition."
That's called "pleading the alternative" and is totally legit - at least in criminal proceedings.
- The prosecution has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
- The defense only has to poke holes, raising reasonable doubt.
- So if the prosecution fails to disprove even one counter-theory it's a win for the defense.
Not sure how that goes over in civil proceedings, where the sides are on an even footing and the standard is "preponderance of evidence" rather than "beyond a reasonable doubt". NYCL, can you tell us?
The fairness doctrine doesn't censor anything.
It allows for equal time and space of people with opposing or different views.
No. It REQUIRES equal time and space for people with opposing or different views. Big difference.
Conservative talk radio is a business, collecting revenue by attracting ears for advertisers. It spends long blocks of time - like three hour chunks - on particular points of view. The fairness doctrine would require stations playing it to give equal blocks of time - in equivalent timeslots - to anti-conservative viewpoints, which would NOT attract the target demographic. This would be a massive financial hit (in a number of ways) on any station that played a talk show with enough of a point-of-view to invoke the doctrine.
The result would be that such stations would drop political talk shows entirely. This would leave the entire political content of stations coming from their news coverage (which has been shown, by an objective scale developed by Stanford and UCLA researchers, to be massively left-biased). The entertainment content is similarly left-biased (though not subject to the methodology used on news coverage.) As one big talk show host says: "I AM equal time!"
The left has just as much opportunity to field its own talk shows with its own biases. And it has tried, several times. But (with a few notable exceptions in extremely liberal areas, such as KGO radio in San Francisco) their content has failed to attract enough of an audience to be profitable. So shutting down political talk radio by reinstitution of the so-called "fairness doctrine" would have the effect of massively suppressing conservative political viewpoints on broadcast media.
A flip side is that the conservatives could potentially start a news organization of their own, covering conservative viewpoints. Indeed, this HAS been done to some extent, in the form of Fox News. But FNN has shown its true colors in the primary season: It covers only ONE of the four or so major conservative factions' positions and is perfectly happy to blatantly suppress the others.
Starting a new wholly-owned NETWORK by buying a little station in each major market is forbidden by FCC rules, which limit the amount of the population stations owned by a single entity can reach to well under 50%. So they'd have to recruit a lot of independents. (And you can bet, if they were succeeding, there would be attempts to invoke the fairness doctrine against them, adding massive legal costs to the equation.)
So with talk radio as the only broadcast outlet for conservative political thought (but not effective for liberal positions), and liberal political thought dominating entertainment content and most news coverage, shutting down political talk radio by reimposing the fairness doctrine would be a massive blow to the right and a victory for the left.
You also can't go wrong with comics.
Speaking of comics: The Disney studios Duckburg stories by Carl Barks are a crash course in economics, politics, and practical philosophy.
(One strongly libertarian entrepreneur of my acquaintance styled himself a "Barksist" and would quote the nephews' statement "Flipism gets its acid test." when approaching a particularly spaghetti-bowl like freeway interchange. B-) )
They've been reprinted under the imprint "Gladstone Press".
A problem with the Skylark and Lensman series is that they were written when eugenics was still popular in the US, before the NAZIs made such a graphic display of their dark-side implications. The good guys are good guys and the bad guys bad guys largely due to their genetics. The last book of the Lensman series shows that the police/military organization you've been following was actually a secret breeding program, run by behind-the-scenes aliens, to produce a human master race to rule the galaxy and wipe out their ancient enemies.
Whenever I feel like trusting government officials I re-read the section of _The Grey Lensman_ where an "unattached lensman" (a supercop, with carte blanch to do whatever he pleases, no oversight, massive resources, and a gadget that lets him wiretap minds remotely) wipes out a nest of dope dealers by calling in the equivalent of a massive surprise nuclear carpet-bombing on the city they're in, to vaporize them all before they can get away.
Here's some that got me started, back in the late 50s. They are all quite accessible to a young reader:
Eric Frank Russel's _Wasp_ (Also good: _The Space Willies_ A.K.A. _Next of Kin_)
Murray Leinster's Med Ship series.
Hal Clemmet's _Needle_ (A.K.A _From Outer Space_)
Heinlein's _Red Planet_
George O. Smith's _Space Plague_ (A.K.A. _Highways in Hiding_) and _Venus Equilateral_ (though the latter is quite dated, using vacuum tube technology.)
- fully compatible with x86 instruction set. (whereas other GPU use different architecture, and often instruction sets that aren't as much adapted to run general computing).
I was about to ask "Since when is the x86 instruction set optimized to run general computing?"
Then I noticed that the word was "adapted". Yeah, that's fair...
Seriously: The x86 (inspired by the hardware driving Datapoint's early smart terminals and previous chips for building hand calculators) was contemporary with Motorola's 68x (inspired by Gordon Bell's masterfully engineered PDP-11 and VAX instruction sets). While a lot of good people have poured their hearts and souls into turning it into a silk purse, and the original sows were particularly good examples of their breeds, the x86's descent from a pair of sow's ears is still apparent.
A friend of mine named "Mark Miller" found that there were a number of other computer scientists with the same name.
He joked that he should get together with them and submit, in a timely fashion for an April edition of a learned computer science journal, a jointly-authored article titled "Global Namespaces Considered Harmful" - with no text, just a long list of authors and disambiguating affiliation information.
(He also joked that, since one of the meanings of "mark" is a synonym for "bit", "Mark Miller" obviously meant "computer scientist" - or at least "data processor".)
I just had to bite the bullet a few months ago, retire my AMPS/TDMA phone and switch to GSM. (AT&T is the only cell carrier that covers my vacation/eventual-retirement home and they're shutting down the TDMA option.) Had hoped OpenMoko would be in time for me but they missed by about 9 months.
With them in mind I got one of the "free" locked phones - and checked what the unlocking and phone switching policies were. AT&T claimed:
- The PHONE is locked to the CARD, but,
- The CARD isn't locked to the PHONE (either by the card or by the network refusing to accept calls with that card and any other phone.)
Story is likely the same for any other GSM carrier. So just pull the GSM smartcard from any and shove it into your OpenMoko phone.
If you're signing up for new service, ask them if they'll credit you with the phone allowance if you bring your own phone rather than making them give you one of the "free" ones. Might not work but won't hurt to ask. (And if there's another GSM carrier in your service area, you might try hinting that you'll see if THEY'll credit you for the phone...
Of course don't tell them that it's an OpenMoko phone. I bet they're scared you - and thousands of others - will download some hack that lets you bypass some part of their service model. B-)
Not a "slight typo" unless you believe in "nullity" (division by zero)
It's 1 / (something ^ n). For n = 0: (anything ^ n) = 1. 1/1 = 1 and does not divide by zero.
Going with the typo would redefine the function to be the actual zeta function plus one.
If G8 wants to get involved in something financial and internet related they should start by killing off international identity theft rings.
This is a MUCH larger dollar amount than even the claims of the content conglomerates. It also hits a broader range of businesses - primarily the financial institutions, which are already in enough trouble from the housing bubble bust.
Taking down a handfull of the biggest identity theft rings would drastically cut these losses. This would do a lot to stabilize the world economy - without appreciably shifting the world power balance or hurting any particular country (unless it was acting as a safe haven for one of the rings and participating in its ill-gotten gains).
The Riemann zeta function is \zeta(s) = \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{n^{s}} [written for LaTeX], or "the sum of 1/(n^s) as n goes from 0 to infinity (increasing by 1 repeatedly)" [in more human-readable form].
You have a slight typo. Should be: "... as n goes from 1 to infinity ..."
Naw.
Let's cover it with soot until it's much darker. That'll melt it all down and solve the whole problem.
Fuel's getting expensive. Opening the northwest passage to shipping would result in a further cut in carbon emissions with less disruption to economies than just cutting international trade.
That's a funny line, but it's not accurate. It's not always true that half the people are above and half are below average.
That depends on which measure of central trend you're calling "average". Usually it refers to the arithmetic mean, in which case you're correct. But it can also refer to the median, in which case the quote is correct. (Or to the geometric mean, the mode, ...)
Essentially the entire broadcast media in the U.S. was (and largely still is) biasing the news by giving no coverage to conservative viewpoints (except to occasionally ridicule them) or events that would support conservative worldviews.
Make that "... broadcast NEWS media ...". (Neo)conservative talk shows, with hosts like Limbaugh, Hannity, etc., are a major industry.
Fox News' feed and sound track are also syndicated. It forms both the top/bottom of the hour news shows for many independent radio stations and the full programming (except for local news and commercial insertion) for all-news radio stations in many outlets (including a San Jose station serving the San Francisco Bay area.)
Fox News gained popularity because it filled a gap: Essentially the entire broadcast media in the U.S. was (and largely still is) biasing the news by giving no coverage to conservative viewpoints (except to occasionally ridicule them) or events that would support conservative worldviews. Fox News built an audience by covering conservative viewpoints as well as liberal ones - and thus quickly gained a large audience among those not served by other news outlets.
Unfortunately, during the recent presidential primaries it became GLARINGLY obvious that Fox News was reporting from a PARTICULAR CONSERVATIVE FACTION'S viewpoint (that of the neoconservatives) and was perfectly happy to suppress the other major conservative factions' viewpoints (religious right, paleoconservative, constitutionalist, ...). Their enmity against the constitutionalist faction was particularly blatant in the case of Ron Paul, whom they first ridiculed and then suppressed (to the point of reporting the Nevada results for the first and third place winners, skipping second place in order to avoid mentioning his name.)
So there's again a coverage gap that can feed a new news network with a different viewpoint and slant on the news. Watch for the rise of another new news network (or a major ideology shift in one of the current ones) once somebody with a couple billion realizes what a goldmine is out the to be claimed.