don't you mean "thanks to their shiny new decentralized freemarket system"
Let's see...
- Government mandates that PG&E sell off their generating capacaty.
- Government creates a bureau that buys and sells electricity.
- Government mandates that they sell electricity at a fixed price.
- Government mandates that they buy electricity at whatever the generating companies ask.
- Government puts the cut-off switch in the hands of said bureau.
Sounds like central planning to me.
"A free market is a great idea. We should try it some time."
Alright. There is a reason that embryo stem cells are preferred: they are different.
And there are a number of possibilities for what happens as the cells differentiate. (Production of DNA-regulation enzymes, phosphorilation of DNA bases, DNA edits, folding, etc.)
If the cells were anything BUT white cells (by which I assume they mean fully-mature antibody-producing white cells), I'd be less sceptical.
One step in the maturation of white cells is the differentiation of the antibodies. This involves the deletion of two small segments of DNA in the sites corresponding to the hypervariable regions of the antibodies. This is a noisy deletion, happening differently in each of the many cells in which it occurs, leading to the variety of antibodies with which we are blessed (and sometimes cursed).
Deletions like that are NOT reversable. (They correspond to editing out a chunk of a tape recording, and reversing them would consist of figuring out the missing waveform and editing it back IN. The information is LOST, so you don't have it to put back.)
Assuming all the OTHER steps in cell differentiation from totipotent to adult are members of a limited set of easily reversable changes, applying such fixes to an adult white cell would give you something that looked very much like a stem cell, and could fix most tissues of the body. But try to replace the immune system and you find that the splices were already done. Maybe the markers that control the edits are gone, and you get all one type of antibody. Less likely: the edits still happen but the variety is greatly reduced.
Make a clone and the clone has a defective immune system. If it survives to reproduce its offspring inherit the deficit as a nasty recessive.
Nevertheless, this IS very encouraging news. It sounds like the researcher may have found a way to reverse all the non-DNA-edit differentiation steps, producing a cell that "thinks" it's a stem cell. If true, even with an antibody coding problem such a cell could be used to repair many tissue types and grow replacement organs. And once the process is understood it might be adapted to a cell type that DIDN'T have DNA edits in its differentiation history.
Experiments with Dolly (baaaaaaa) indicate that while she is a genetic copy of her "parent" donor sheep, so is the "genetic age" of her DNA.
As it turns out, DNA ages just like the rest of the body. Over time, it deteriorates and genetic errors build up. At some point (known to be around 120 years in humans) the decay begins to trigger the cell self-destruction mechanisms, even if those cells are otherwise healthy. The body begins to die one way or the other.
You're confusing two mechanisms:
- Error building up.
- The protective (hayflick limit) cell-reproduction counter running out and shutting down the cells.
The site of the counter has been discovered: It's the repeating sequences on the end of the chromosomes (telomeres), which don't copy completely and get shorter with each reproduction. In the absense of an enzyme (telomerase) which adds more repeats to them, the cell reproduction stops after a certain number of copies.
There are several places in the body where the cells contain telomerase and "reset the counter". One of them is a step in producing germ cells (eggs and sperm). So the baby starts out with the counter reset. They procedure they used to make Dolly did NOT reset the counter. But it would be trivial fix that, i.e. by dosing the DNA-sample cell with the enzyme.
(While the degradation of the telomeres is apparently a consequence of the way open-ended chromosomes are copied, the lack of telomerase in most tissues appears to be a protective mechanism to reduce the cancer rate from the geneic errors you mention. To become cancer a cell must acquire errors that BOTH stick its reproduction switch "on" AND switch on the production of telomerase before it has run out the clock. If it misses the second step the tumor stops growing, typically at about the size of a pea, and may then self-destruct.)
He is charged with misuse of computer system information, a felony.
Once he's gotten that killed (which should be easy, since it appears they mistook downloading the site's HTML code for breaking in and stealing it), he should have a FINE and very lucrative civil rights suit.
"Denial of civil rights under color of law." In this case, his right to protected free speech, in the form of a parody of the public pronouncements of a government organization.
Sounds to me like EXACTLY what the federal civil rights law is about.
Soverign immunity won't protect the cops from a federal civil rights suit.
There are a slew of lawyers that make a great deal of money friviously suing claiming securities
violations....
Although these suits are without merit, they hurt the companies stock prices dramtically: look at each of the above company's history, and see the biggest dip the day after the suit starts (none have recovered).
I wonder if it's securities fraud (trading on inside information) to:
- Buy a big bunch of "put" options or short a bunch of the company's stock, then...
- Bring such a suit.
I think it would be useful for companies being so sued to check whether any of the parties to the suit are palying that game, too. (If so you could get them in a HEAP of trouble - and find grounds for a counter-suit, too.)
Heck: If the FTC made a point of investigating the recent trades of anyone bringing such a suit, looking for such shenanigans, I bet it would put a real damper on them.
While we haven't had blackouts yet, my electric bill is up about 300% since start of deregulation
To compare the cost of a solar power system (or wind or water power) to grid power:
- Design a system adequate for your needs.
- Compute its lifetime.
- Compute its cost, including purchase price, consumables, and maintainence costs over its lifetime.
- Compute the monthly payment if you took out a loan for that amount, running the lifetime of the system. (Don't forget tax credits and mortgage tax breaks if you finance it as part of your house.)
- Compute your average monthly number of kilowatt-hours generated.
- Divide the monthly payment by the monthly kilowatt-hours. This is your cost per kilowatt-hour.
The cost per kilowatt-hour of solar photovoltaic systems has been getting close to the crossover with respect to grid power. For some applications (like country houses or small-loads like illuminated billboards and traffic signs) where the instalation and fixed-costs of grid power are high it's already crossed over - which is why you see so many panels these days. It also beats diesel generators for portable power now.
A big enough jump in the grid's generation cost (such as the one in California, thanks to their shiny new centrally-planned socialized electric system) might push it over even for urban residences.
And California is a good spot for solar. At the latitude of the SF Bay area, for instance, insolation is about 5 solar hours per day. Once you're east of the coastal range (unless you're just downwind of a gap in it or on the west side of a still higher mountain) there's little daytime fog or cloud cover.
one common misconception is that one can not do object oriented design in C, or any language that isn't approved by the OOP zealots...
one can create objects in C by...
Yes. But by doing that you're sacrificing the compiler support.
And IMHO it's the wroing parts of OOP that get the hype. Encapsulation and strong type checking rate higher for me than code re-use or some aspects of inheritance (though polymorphism is right up there).
One big thing about languages like C++ is that they give you a way to express your intent regarding encapsulation and data hiding to the compiler and related tools, which then check them for you. (I'd say "enforce", but C++ also has ways to express your intent to deliberately violate the normal boundaries.)
It's really instructive to look at the "things to check for in a walkthrough" section of Miller's book on software quality. There are four pages of essentially one-liners describing the easy errors to make in languages like Fortran or Cobol. And with C++ they're vitrually all impossible to generate without producing, at a minimum, a compiler warning.
... on 1/8/01, we returned all your Notification Preferences to the standard default of "yes" to put you in line with the rest of the eBay community. However, we want you to choose your Notification Preferences rather than rely on our standard defaults and will therefore not include you in any communications until 1/23/01. This will provide you with some time to evaluate these choices and modify your Notification Preferences. You will, however, continue to receive certain administrative emails that are part of executing your eBay transactions.
Sounds like an invitation to have MAPS black-hole them - maybe immediately, certainly after 1/23.
But this is so blatantly improper that I can't help but wonder if it's a hoax. Has eBay offended someone who wants to give them grief? (Like maybe somebody in France who wants to collect WWII souvineers?)
Speaking from experience, employees sometimes have their security clearance (keycards, network login, etc) revoked before being informed of their termination to reduce the risk of retribution to the company.
Happened to me once, too. The company profit-sharing plan was keyed to the departmental expenses and I was highly paid and had just finished my latest project at the start of the last quarter approached. So the boss who had inherited me (third since I'd been hired) dumped me. I got my first hint when my PPP link didn't work when I tried to check mail before coming in. (It wasn't a security thing - they let me clean out my account and my desk unsupervised. It was just "the way things are done".)
After the end of the year said boss quit, along with the most of the remainder of his department, and started a new company (much to the annoyance and bottom-line damage to the OLD company). A couple months later he called me up and wanted me to consult for his new enterprise. After he'd surprise-fired me at the old shop and then hadn't invited me to be among the founders of the new? Fat chance!
At an auto company's engineering department a couple decades ago I saw what happened when two consultants come to blows. Security had them off the premesis inside of ten minutes. (Took that long because it was a BIG site.) They were permanently banned from the company and their desk contents were packed and shipped to 'em. You DON'T lay hands on co-workers in that industry.
Funniest one was the time Amdahl pulled the plug on Key Labs. Came in that morning to find a sign on the door: "Will build mainframes for food." (Amdahl let the people at Key keep their offices and email for a month or so while they job-hunted.)
[A bug] happened at the turnover of feburary rather than the turnover of the year
Heh. The "year 2000 IS a leapyear" bug. I know one fellow who found it "broken" and "fixed" it to be really broken - because he knew about the "centuries aren't leapyears" exception but not the "every fourth century IS a leapyear" exception to the exception.
I wonder if you were using his code. (Unix on a mainframe?)
The media could give programmers credit for averting a disaster, but instead it's much easier for them to be cynical and claim that the whole Y2K thing was hype. Makes you really want to step in and help solve a problem before it truly manifests the next time too, huh?
Just wait a few more decades, though. The Unix clock will roll over and I bet that WON'T be all fixed in advance...
(Interestingly, Amdahl fixed it in their unix a decade or so ahead of time, though there may be some legacy code out there that didn't recompile with the revised data structures...)
The article missed one important point -- they were intercepting communications!
Sorry. The only "communications" protected by the wiretap law is voice telephone conversations. "Commnuncations" between the keyboard and the computer are not included in that definition - nor are e-mail with other people, nor conversations with other machines.
The way the law currently works is that it is extended to protect new technologies - either by explicit legislation or by court precedent. So new forms of communication are UNprotected by default. Maybe you'd LIKE the default to be the other way, but in practice this is how it is.
By tapping communications on the the cutting edge tech, where no law has gone before, the FBI gets to spy until a court or the congress makes them stop.
Sounds like a souped up version of those mirrored sphere-ish (shaped more like two pudding dishes placed on top of each other - top one inverted) things that they sell in magic shops.
Right.
And it's NOT a hologram. (Take it from someone who worked under Leith.)
A hologram is an interference pattern, in density or phase, that constructs a wavefront by diffraction. This is NOT that.
Same question RE CPM: Has anyone done a 8080/CPM emulator (and/or a CPM filesystem) that would run on Linux?
(I've got this big box of old 8" floppies and a dusty old CPM machine, and I'd like to port the files to current media and dump the machine. It'd not like I really NEED anything there, but it has sentimental value.)
(Also: There's the source for a beautiful little RTOS I did a couple decades ago for which I lost the listing, with even greater sentimental value. True preemptive multitasking supporting Actors in a half-K on an 8080. B-) )
The problem with the punched card system is NOT that it is low-tech. The problem is that it buries the processing behind a wall, where cheating can take place and be undetectable.
It already WAS a "high-tek" replacement for paper ballots. And the problems we see now are exactly the problems we'd see in spades with a more electronified solution.
Katz says you don't have to ram a new system down people's throats. But you DO ram the results down their throats. That's the nature of elections. They'll only swallow them if they believe in the system. But they've seen how computers can go wrong, and now they've seen how punched cards can go wrong. So don't bet on them EVER accepting a netified election.
"Pay the Two Dollars!" Count the bloody ballots.
(It's a LOT better than counting the bloody bodies after the people stop trusting the elections and go back to pre-election methods of conflict resolution.)
1a) No
1b) Yes
1c) No
2) No
3) Third party alternative
1[a]) The notion of voter registration is quaintly arranged to make voting more convenient for the government and the parties in power, not more convenient for the voters.
Registration is that difficult for a reason: To make the election more accurately model a civil war. Registration is about as hard as enlisting in a militia. Throughout the history of the U.S., the vote has been extended to various subgroups of the population only after they had proven capable of organizing war-style violence.
By modeling a civil war, the elections serve, not fairness, but stability: As long as the losers believe it is a good model and a reasonably valid count they don't try to reverse it by violence, because they believe they'd lose THAT battle, too. (And they HAVE reversed very heavily and publicly corrupted elections by violence, repeatedly.)
[1b)] Let's figure out a more efficient way to check the validity of a voter's identify at the polls,
Yes. Failure to check lets corrupt politicians rig the elections. Just don't create a national ID card usable for other purposes - like tracking, and then oppressing, the population. Otherwise people who would fight might also refuse to vote out of principle - or even go to war RIGHT THEN. (In addition to people concerned about privacy and oppression there is a major religious faction that is fanatically opposed to hanging numbers on the people on religious grounds.)
[1c)...] and scrap the idea of registration before voting day.
Same as 1[a]). If they're not interested enough to take the trouble to register they certainly won't take the trouble to fight. So if the civil-war model is to hold they shouldn't vote.
2) If campaign money is speech (Buckley vs Valejo!) then my voice is being drowned out by the roar of corporate cash. Let's investigate public financing so that we know in advance who has bought the candidates - us!
Forget it!
In addition to the problems with limiting free speech (which will cause the courts to CONTINUE to strike down your efforts), that puts the people in power in charge of handing out the ONLY money that can be spent by their oppostion.
Do you want the same people that have kept Nader and Browne out of the debates chosing who will be able to buy TV and newspaper ads, or even print pamphlets, posters, bumper stickers, and campaign buttons?
3) Just exactly why isn't voting day a national holiday?!?
Because when they STARTED only the landowners voted, and most of those could take the day off and ride into town.
There is already a law on the books to guarantee time off to vote. A holiday would be better, but not perfect. (Some jobs have to keep running even on holidays.)
Better yet: Just keep the polls open for 24 hours, closing them all simultaneously about the start of TV primetime at the population centroid.
That would also eliminate the problem of the networks influencing the election by calling the results before everybody has voted - causing voters to give up prematurely and usually making the prophecies self-fulfilling.
The Electoral College is there for a reason: To keep a few states with large populations from running roughshod over the bulk of the states.
Go to any news site and look at the election map. (Here for instance.) This election is EXACTLY what the electoral college is INTENDED to address.
Further: The partitioning of the vote into states limits the ability of a corrupt political machine in one big state to swing the election. With it a cheater can only capture the electors of his state - which MIGHT swing the election, but only if the other states split just right. Without it his fake votes could swamp the genuine voters any time the election is at all close. And we'd be recounting the WHOLE COUNTRY, not just a few counties or a couple states.
"Hanging chads"&"intent" recounts look like fraud.
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 2
... there's precedent for an election being overturned because of the inaccuracies of punch-card voting. In 1998 Massachusetts outlawed the use of punch card balloting because in 1996, a primary result was overturned when they went back and manually counted the "hanging chad" cards that hadn't been counted by the machine vote. (The vote count there, by the way, went from -250 to +100. Check the recent AP Wires for the full story.)
Given that the punched card system I'm familiar with (which appears to be the same as the one used in Florida):
- Makes the voter use a stylus to push out the chad - with the chad solidly attached to the card until it suddenly pops loose when the pressure reaches a certain point.
- Passes the card through a narrow slot, while bending it, to knock off any chads that are still clinging to their hole.
I find it difficult to believe that large numbers of cards with "hanging chads" could result from "voter error".
A more likely explanation for hanging chads would be poll workers either mishandling the ballots (to be charatible) or surreptitiously punching cards while handling them, without the aid of the "machine" to clean off the chads.
Regardless of whether these problems are the result of a defective design or cheating by poll workers, I agree that Massechusetts did the right thing by outlawing the machines. (Of course there IS the question of whether whatever replaced it was less, or more, susceptable to either error or cheating.)
But if the machines ARE subject to "hanging chad" error in normal use, this error would not be limited to Gore voters, but should occur with equal density to votes for Bush. So manually recounting ONLY a small number of heavily-Democratic precincts would have the same effect as cheating. Only the errors in THOSE precincts would be caught - and the errors in THOSE precincts would be mainly missing Gore votes.
If some precincts are going to be recounted by a different set of rules - one that recovers votes lost by mispunched ballots - then to get an accurate measure of the actual vote you must recount ALL of the precincts in the state - heavily Democratic and heavily Republican alike.
So which should it be? Assume the errors are fairly distributed and discard the manual recount, or assume the election is too close for that and recount them ALL?
couldn't they send out threatening emails to anybody who has an MP3 with (for instance) Metallica in the file name, with roughly the same effect?
They did that already. Didn't work all that well (because lots of things other than Metallica files have that in the name, and lots of Metallica MP3s aren't named so simply). It also caused a firestorm.
Distinguishing between what is real and what's not is probably only useful in court... (correct me if I'm wrong...)
Whether it's a real Metallica song or an unlicensed cover of it doesn't matter. They're both copyright violations.
If the technology really does work - or even works moderately well as a bird-dog - using it for a webcrawler to hunt for infringers may work - and be within existing law. They can check manually before going to court. If it's good enough, they can weasel-word a cease-and-desist order and not get much problem from occasionally sending one to a host of a misidentified file.
No law changes required. If they finally buy a clue and go after the >hostsindexers, they'd be on completely solid legal ground, and the litigation would be reduced to:
- Did the defendant knowingly host a copyrighted work without obtaining the proper license?
- Did he refuse to take it down in response to the cease-and-desist order?
- Does the plantiff hold the copyright (or otherwise have standing)?
- (In the first few cases) is such hosting fair use?
But even if it's NEARLY perfect it will sometimes misidentify a non-infringing work. If it does this even once, it opens any subscription hosting service that uses it to civil action for contract violation by its customers.
As we've seen, in free competition the indexing services that use a filter will lose to those that don't - because they'll lose the portion of the customer base that doesn't care whether they're downloading a copyrighted work. And any flase-positive flakeyness in the technology would produce the same sort of flap as the nannyware web filters. This should preclude attempts to pass and enforce a legal mandate, on first amendment grounds.
But it DOES note that you can make something like it for microwaves - out of conductive rings and wires.
Now the only difference between microwaves and visible light is the wavelengh. Microwave plumbing tends to have segments measured in quarter wavelengths and larger - and visible light is moderately large compared to reasonably sized molecules.
So it seems to me you OUGHT to be able to make your rings and wires with nanotech. Maybe buckytubes for the wires and cyclo--ene or another buckystrucure for the rings. And as with any nanotech construct it would tend to be either perfect or massively broken.
You might get your perfect optical lenses after all - at least for one color of light at a time...
Since we haven't met the outsiders and bought the faster-than-light drive, we'd also need boosterspice, to live long enough to be around when the probe got there and sent back the data.
For those who haven't read Niven's "Known Space" series:
- The outsiders: wandering traders in information - a lifeform that lives at liquid helium temperatures. They don't use FTL drives themselves, but will sell you the plans. For a decade or so of your gross planetary product. They'll take installment payments. (As you can tell from their spacedrive they're no in any hurry.)
- Boosterspice: A longevity drug by and for humans, made by a gene-engineered plant derived from ragweed. Good for several extra centuries of life.
I don't think that a seven year old want's to use a linux disto because of the simple fact that they can't play much games on them
"Games" are a distraction. The computer IS the game. You learn by playing with it, first from the outside, then by writing simple programs, then by tearing into the code to see how it works, then by modifying the code to see if you can make it better, cleaner, or more capable.
Try THAT with windows! You hit a wall. With linux it's all there as you get to each step.
It's not convenient for professionalls - there's a learning curve. But children are little learning engines, with all the time in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
don't you mean "thanks to their shiny new decentralized freemarket system"
Let's see...
- Government mandates that PG&E sell off their generating capacaty.
- Government creates a bureau that buys and sells electricity.
- Government mandates that they sell electricity at a fixed price.
- Government mandates that they buy electricity at whatever the generating companies ask.
- Government puts the cut-off switch in the hands of said bureau.
Sounds like central planning to me.
"A free market is a great idea. We should try it some time."
Sounds like central planning to me.
Alright. There is a reason that embryo stem cells are preferred: they are different.
And there are a number of possibilities for what happens as the cells differentiate. (Production of DNA-regulation enzymes, phosphorilation of DNA bases, DNA edits, folding, etc.)
If the cells were anything BUT white cells (by which I assume they mean fully-mature antibody-producing white cells), I'd be less sceptical.
One step in the maturation of white cells is the differentiation of the antibodies. This involves the deletion of two small segments of DNA in the sites corresponding to the hypervariable regions of the antibodies. This is a noisy deletion, happening differently in each of the many cells in which it occurs, leading to the variety of antibodies with which we are blessed (and sometimes cursed).
Deletions like that are NOT reversable. (They correspond to editing out a chunk of a tape recording, and reversing them would consist of figuring out the missing waveform and editing it back IN. The information is LOST, so you don't have it to put back.)
Assuming all the OTHER steps in cell differentiation from totipotent to adult are members of a limited set of easily reversable changes, applying such fixes to an adult white cell would give you something that looked very much like a stem cell, and could fix most tissues of the body. But try to replace the immune system and you find that the splices were already done. Maybe the markers that control the edits are gone, and you get all one type of antibody. Less likely: the edits still happen but the variety is greatly reduced.
Make a clone and the clone has a defective immune system. If it survives to reproduce its offspring inherit the deficit as a nasty recessive.
Nevertheless, this IS very encouraging news. It sounds like the researcher may have found a way to reverse all the non-DNA-edit differentiation steps, producing a cell that "thinks" it's a stem cell. If true, even with an antibody coding problem such a cell could be used to repair many tissue types and grow replacement organs. And once the process is understood it might be adapted to a cell type that DIDN'T have DNA edits in its differentiation history.
Experiments with Dolly (baaaaaaa) indicate that while she is a genetic copy of her "parent" donor sheep, so is the "genetic age" of her DNA.
As it turns out, DNA ages just like the rest of the body. Over time, it deteriorates and genetic errors build up. At some point (known to be around 120 years in humans) the decay begins to trigger the cell self-destruction mechanisms, even if those cells are otherwise healthy. The body begins to die one way or the other.
You're confusing two mechanisms:
- Error building up.
- The protective (hayflick limit) cell-reproduction counter running out and shutting down the cells.
The site of the counter has been discovered: It's the repeating sequences on the end of the chromosomes (telomeres), which don't copy completely and get shorter with each reproduction. In the absense of an enzyme (telomerase) which adds more repeats to them, the cell reproduction stops after a certain number of copies.
There are several places in the body where the cells contain telomerase and "reset the counter". One of them is a step in producing germ cells (eggs and sperm). So the baby starts out with the counter reset. They procedure they used to make Dolly did NOT reset the counter. But it would be trivial fix that, i.e. by dosing the DNA-sample cell with the enzyme.
(While the degradation of the telomeres is apparently a consequence of the way open-ended chromosomes are copied, the lack of telomerase in most tissues appears to be a protective mechanism to reduce the cancer rate from the geneic errors you mention. To become cancer a cell must acquire errors that BOTH stick its reproduction switch "on" AND switch on the production of telomerase before it has run out the clock. If it misses the second step the tumor stops growing, typically at about the size of a pea, and may then self-destruct.)
He is charged with misuse of computer system information, a felony.
Once he's gotten that killed (which should be easy, since it appears they mistook downloading the site's HTML code for breaking in and stealing it), he should have a FINE and very lucrative civil rights suit.
"Denial of civil rights under color of law." In this case, his right to protected free speech, in the form of a parody of the public pronouncements of a government organization.
Sounds to me like EXACTLY what the federal civil rights law is about.
Soverign immunity won't protect the cops from a federal civil rights suit.
There are a slew of lawyers that make a great deal of money friviously suing claiming securities ...
violations.
Although these suits are without merit, they hurt the companies stock prices dramtically: look at each of the above company's history, and see the biggest dip the day after the suit starts (none have recovered).
I wonder if it's securities fraud (trading on inside information) to:
- Buy a big bunch of "put" options or short a bunch of the company's stock, then...
- Bring such a suit.
I think it would be useful for companies being so sued to check whether any of the parties to the suit are palying that game, too. (If so you could get them in a HEAP of trouble - and find grounds for a counter-suit, too.)
Heck: If the FTC made a point of investigating the recent trades of anyone bringing such a suit, looking for such shenanigans, I bet it would put a real damper on them.
While we haven't had blackouts yet, my electric bill is up about 300% since start of deregulation
To compare the cost of a solar power system (or wind or water power) to grid power:
- Design a system adequate for your needs.
- Compute its lifetime.
- Compute its cost, including purchase price, consumables, and maintainence costs over its lifetime.
- Compute the monthly payment if you took out a loan for that amount, running the lifetime of the system. (Don't forget tax credits and mortgage tax breaks if you finance it as part of your house.)
- Compute your average monthly number of kilowatt-hours generated.
- Divide the monthly payment by the monthly kilowatt-hours. This is your cost per kilowatt-hour.
The cost per kilowatt-hour of solar photovoltaic systems has been getting close to the crossover with respect to grid power. For some applications (like country houses or small-loads like illuminated billboards and traffic signs) where the instalation and fixed-costs of grid power are high it's already crossed over - which is why you see so many panels these days. It also beats diesel generators for portable power now.
A big enough jump in the grid's generation cost (such as the one in California, thanks to their shiny new centrally-planned socialized electric system) might push it over even for urban residences.
And California is a good spot for solar. At the latitude of the SF Bay area, for instance, insolation is about 5 solar hours per day. Once you're east of the coastal range (unless you're just downwind of a gap in it or on the west side of a still higher mountain) there's little daytime fog or cloud cover.
one common misconception is that one can not do object oriented design in C, or any language that isn't approved by the OOP zealots...
one can create objects in C by...
Yes. But by doing that you're sacrificing the compiler support.
And IMHO it's the wroing parts of OOP that get the hype. Encapsulation and strong type checking rate higher for me than code re-use or some aspects of inheritance (though polymorphism is right up there).
One big thing about languages like C++ is that they give you a way to express your intent regarding encapsulation and data hiding to the compiler and related tools, which then check them for you. (I'd say "enforce", but C++ also has ways to express your intent to deliberately violate the normal boundaries.)
It's really instructive to look at the "things to check for in a walkthrough" section of Miller's book on software quality. There are four pages of essentially one-liners describing the easy errors to make in languages like Fortran or Cobol. And with C++ they're vitrually all impossible to generate without producing, at a minimum, a compiler warning.
... on 1/8/01, we returned all your Notification Preferences to the standard default of "yes" to put you in line with the rest of the eBay community. However, we want you to choose your Notification Preferences rather than rely on our standard defaults and will therefore not include you in any communications until 1/23/01. This will provide you with some time to evaluate these choices and modify your Notification Preferences. You will, however, continue to receive certain administrative emails that are part of executing your eBay transactions.
Sounds like an invitation to have MAPS black-hole them - maybe immediately, certainly after 1/23.
But this is so blatantly improper that I can't help but wonder if it's a hoax. Has eBay offended someone who wants to give them grief? (Like maybe somebody in France who wants to collect WWII souvineers?)
(Subject line says it all.) They can get in a LOT of trouble for failing to pay up.
Speaking from experience, employees sometimes have their security clearance (keycards, network login, etc) revoked before being informed of their termination to reduce the risk of retribution to the company.
Happened to me once, too. The company profit-sharing plan was keyed to the departmental expenses and I was highly paid and had just finished my latest project at the start of the last quarter approached. So the boss who had inherited me (third since I'd been hired) dumped me. I got my first hint when my PPP link didn't work when I tried to check mail before coming in. (It wasn't a security thing - they let me clean out my account and my desk unsupervised. It was just "the way things are done".)
After the end of the year said boss quit, along with the most of the remainder of his department, and started a new company (much to the annoyance and bottom-line damage to the OLD company). A couple months later he called me up and wanted me to consult for his new enterprise. After he'd surprise-fired me at the old shop and then hadn't invited me to be among the founders of the new? Fat chance!
At an auto company's engineering department a couple decades ago I saw what happened when two consultants come to blows. Security had them off the premesis inside of ten minutes. (Took that long because it was a BIG site.) They were permanently banned from the company and their desk contents were packed and shipped to 'em. You DON'T lay hands on co-workers in that industry.
Funniest one was the time Amdahl pulled the plug on Key Labs. Came in that morning to find a sign on the door: "Will build mainframes for food." (Amdahl let the people at Key keep their offices and email for a month or so while they job-hunted.)
The life of the IP should not depend on the life of the author. If it does, you are building in an incentive to bump off the author.
That certainly would explain the way the RIAA and the entertainment industry in general treat the creators. B-)
[A bug] happened at the turnover of feburary rather than the turnover of the year
Heh. The "year 2000 IS a leapyear" bug. I know one fellow who found it "broken" and "fixed" it to be really broken - because he knew about the "centuries aren't leapyears" exception but not the "every fourth century IS a leapyear" exception to the exception.
I wonder if you were using his code. (Unix on a mainframe?)
The media could give programmers credit for averting a disaster, but instead it's much easier for them to be cynical and claim that the whole Y2K thing was hype. Makes you really want to step in and help solve a problem before it truly manifests the next time too, huh?
Just wait a few more decades, though. The Unix clock will roll over and I bet that WON'T be all fixed in advance...
(Interestingly, Amdahl fixed it in their unix a decade or so ahead of time, though there may be some legacy code out there that didn't recompile with the revised data structures...)
The article missed one important point -- they were intercepting communications!
Sorry. The only "communications" protected by the wiretap law is voice telephone conversations. "Commnuncations" between the keyboard and the computer are not included in that definition - nor are e-mail with other people, nor conversations with other machines.
The way the law currently works is that it is extended to protect new technologies - either by explicit legislation or by court precedent. So new forms of communication are UNprotected by default. Maybe you'd LIKE the default to be the other way, but in practice this is how it is.
By tapping communications on the the cutting edge tech, where no law has gone before, the FBI gets to spy until a court or the congress makes them stop.
Sounds like a souped up version of those mirrored sphere-ish (shaped more like two pudding dishes placed on top of each other - top one inverted) things that they sell in magic shops.
Right.
And it's NOT a hologram. (Take it from someone who worked under Leith.)
A hologram is an interference pattern, in density or phase, that constructs a wavefront by diffraction. This is NOT that.
Same question RE CPM: Has anyone done a 8080/CPM emulator (and/or a CPM filesystem) that would run on Linux?
(I've got this big box of old 8" floppies and a dusty old CPM machine, and I'd like to port the files to current media and dump the machine. It'd not like I really NEED anything there, but it has sentimental value.)
(Also: There's the source for a beautiful little RTOS I did a couple decades ago for which I lost the listing, with even greater sentimental value. True preemptive multitasking supporting Actors in a half-K on an 8080. B-) )
The problem with the punched card system is NOT that it is low-tech. The problem is that it buries the processing behind a wall, where cheating can take place and be undetectable.
It already WAS a "high-tek" replacement for paper ballots. And the problems we see now are exactly the problems we'd see in spades with a more electronified solution.
Katz says you don't have to ram a new system down people's throats. But you DO ram the results down their throats. That's the nature of elections. They'll only swallow them if they believe in the system. But they've seen how computers can go wrong, and now they've seen how punched cards can go wrong. So don't bet on them EVER accepting a netified election.
"Pay the Two Dollars!" Count the bloody ballots.
(It's a LOT better than counting the bloody bodies after the people stop trusting the elections and go back to pre-election methods of conflict resolution.)
1a) No
...] and scrap the idea of registration before voting day.
1b) Yes
1c) No
2) No
3) Third party alternative
1[a]) The notion of voter registration is quaintly arranged to make voting more convenient for the government and the parties in power, not more convenient for the voters.
Registration is that difficult for a reason: To make the election more accurately model a civil war. Registration is about as hard as enlisting in a militia. Throughout the history of the U.S., the vote has been extended to various subgroups of the population only after they had proven capable of organizing war-style violence.
By modeling a civil war, the elections serve, not fairness, but stability: As long as the losers believe it is a good model and a reasonably valid count they don't try to reverse it by violence, because they believe they'd lose THAT battle, too. (And they HAVE reversed very heavily and publicly corrupted elections by violence, repeatedly.)
[1b)] Let's figure out a more efficient way to check the validity of a voter's identify at the polls,
Yes. Failure to check lets corrupt politicians rig the elections. Just don't create a national ID card usable for other purposes - like tracking, and then oppressing, the population. Otherwise people who would fight might also refuse to vote out of principle - or even go to war RIGHT THEN. (In addition to people concerned about privacy and oppression there is a major religious faction that is fanatically opposed to hanging numbers on the people on religious grounds.)
[1c)
Same as 1[a]). If they're not interested enough to take the trouble to register they certainly won't take the trouble to fight. So if the civil-war model is to hold they shouldn't vote.
2) If campaign money is speech (Buckley vs Valejo!) then my voice is being drowned out by the roar of corporate cash. Let's investigate public financing so that we know in advance who has bought the candidates - us!
Forget it!
In addition to the problems with limiting free speech (which will cause the courts to CONTINUE to strike down your efforts), that puts the people in power in charge of handing out the ONLY money that can be spent by their oppostion.
Do you want the same people that have kept Nader and Browne out of the debates chosing who will be able to buy TV and newspaper ads, or even print pamphlets, posters, bumper stickers, and campaign buttons?
3) Just exactly why isn't voting day a national holiday?!?
Because when they STARTED only the landowners voted, and most of those could take the day off and ride into town.
There is already a law on the books to guarantee time off to vote. A holiday would be better, but not perfect. (Some jobs have to keep running even on holidays.)
Better yet: Just keep the polls open for 24 hours, closing them all simultaneously about the start of TV primetime at the population centroid.
That would also eliminate the problem of the networks influencing the election by calling the results before everybody has voted - causing voters to give up prematurely and usually making the prophecies self-fulfilling.
The Electoral College is there for a reason: To keep a few states with large populations from running roughshod over the bulk of the states.
Go to any news site and look at the election map. (Here for instance.) This election is EXACTLY what the electoral college is INTENDED to address.
Further: The partitioning of the vote into states limits the ability of a corrupt political machine in one big state to swing the election. With it a cheater can only capture the electors of his state - which MIGHT swing the election, but only if the other states split just right. Without it his fake votes could swamp the genuine voters any time the election is at all close. And we'd be recounting the WHOLE COUNTRY, not just a few counties or a couple states.
... there's precedent for an election being overturned because of the inaccuracies of punch-card voting. In 1998 Massachusetts outlawed the use of punch card balloting because in 1996, a primary result was overturned when they went back and manually counted the "hanging chad" cards that hadn't been counted by the machine vote. (The vote count there, by the way, went from -250 to +100. Check the recent AP Wires for the full story.)
Given that the punched card system I'm familiar with (which appears to be the same as the one used in Florida):
- Makes the voter use a stylus to push out the chad - with the chad solidly attached to the card until it suddenly pops loose when the pressure reaches a certain point.
- Passes the card through a narrow slot, while bending it, to knock off any chads that are still clinging to their hole.
I find it difficult to believe that large numbers of cards with "hanging chads" could result from "voter error".
A more likely explanation for hanging chads would be poll workers either mishandling the ballots (to be charatible) or surreptitiously punching cards while handling them, without the aid of the "machine" to clean off the chads.
Regardless of whether these problems are the result of a defective design or cheating by poll workers, I agree that Massechusetts did the right thing by outlawing the machines. (Of course there IS the question of whether whatever replaced it was less, or more, susceptable to either error or cheating.)
But if the machines ARE subject to "hanging chad" error in normal use, this error would not be limited to Gore voters, but should occur with equal density to votes for Bush. So manually recounting ONLY a small number of heavily-Democratic precincts would have the same effect as cheating. Only the errors in THOSE precincts would be caught - and the errors in THOSE precincts would be mainly missing Gore votes.
If some precincts are going to be recounted by a different set of rules - one that recovers votes lost by mispunched ballots - then to get an accurate measure of the actual vote you must recount ALL of the precincts in the state - heavily Democratic and heavily Republican alike.
So which should it be? Assume the errors are fairly distributed and discard the manual recount, or assume the election is too close for that and recount them ALL?
If they finally buy a clue and go after the >hostsindexers, they'd be on completely solid legal ground ...
...
Make that:
If they finally buy a clue and go after the hosts rather than the indexers, they'd be on completely solid legal ground
couldn't they send out threatening emails to anybody who has an MP3 with (for instance) Metallica in the file name, with roughly the same effect?
They did that already. Didn't work all that well (because lots of things other than Metallica files have that in the name, and lots of Metallica MP3s aren't named so simply). It also caused a firestorm.
Distinguishing between what is real and what's not is probably only useful in court... (correct me if I'm wrong...)
Whether it's a real Metallica song or an unlicensed cover of it doesn't matter. They're both copyright violations.
If the technology really does work - or even works moderately well as a bird-dog - using it for a webcrawler to hunt for infringers may work - and be within existing law. They can check manually before going to court. If it's good enough, they can weasel-word a cease-and-desist order and not get much problem from occasionally sending one to a host of a misidentified file.
No law changes required. If they finally buy a clue and go after the >hostsindexers, they'd be on completely solid legal ground, and the litigation would be reduced to:
- Did the defendant knowingly host a copyrighted work without obtaining the proper license?
- Did he refuse to take it down in response to the cease-and-desist order?
- Does the plantiff hold the copyright (or otherwise have standing)?
- (In the first few cases) is such hosting fair use?
But even if it's NEARLY perfect it will sometimes misidentify a non-infringing work. If it does this even once, it opens any subscription hosting service that uses it to civil action for contract violation by its customers.
As we've seen, in free competition the indexing services that use a filter will lose to those that don't - because they'll lose the portion of the customer base that doesn't care whether they're downloading a copyrighted work. And any flase-positive flakeyness in the technology would produce the same sort of flap as the nannyware web filters. This should preclude attempts to pass and enforce a legal mandate, on first amendment grounds.
the story doesn't cover stuff for visible light.
But it DOES note that you can make something like it for microwaves - out of conductive rings and wires.
Now the only difference between microwaves and visible light is the wavelengh. Microwave plumbing tends to have segments measured in quarter wavelengths and larger - and visible light is moderately large compared to reasonably sized molecules.
So it seems to me you OUGHT to be able to make your rings and wires with nanotech. Maybe buckytubes for the wires and cyclo--ene or another buckystrucure for the rings. And as with any nanotech construct it would tend to be either perfect or massively broken.
You might get your perfect optical lenses after all - at least for one color of light at a time...
Since we haven't met the outsiders and bought the faster-than-light drive, we'd also need boosterspice, to live long enough to be around when the probe got there and sent back the data.
For those who haven't read Niven's "Known Space" series:
- The outsiders: wandering traders in information - a lifeform that lives at liquid helium temperatures. They don't use FTL drives themselves, but will sell you the plans. For a decade or so of your gross planetary product. They'll take installment payments. (As you can tell from their spacedrive they're no in any hurry.)
- Boosterspice: A longevity drug by and for humans, made by a gene-engineered plant derived from ragweed. Good for several extra centuries of life.
I don't think that a seven year old want's to use a linux disto because of the simple fact that they can't play much games on them
"Games" are a distraction. The computer IS the game. You learn by playing with it, first from the outside, then by writing simple programs, then by tearing into the code to see how it works, then by modifying the code to see if you can make it better, cleaner, or more capable.
Try THAT with windows! You hit a wall. With linux it's all there as you get to each step.
It's not convenient for professionalls - there's a learning curve. But children are little learning engines, with all the time in the world.