i'm not sure why e-85/ ethanol(sp) isn't taking off,
e-85 isn't taking off because it is an energy sink, not an energy source. How is the Enthanol made? With Corn. How is the Corn planted, weeded, watered and fertilized? How is it brewed? How is it distilled? With fossil fuels. It takes more energy to product a gallon of Ethanol than you get from burning it. Ethanol has only 85% of the energy content of an equal volume of gasoline. There is now even a question about Ethanol contributing more to polution than fighting it.
Ethanol was added to gasoline to create another market for farmers who were growing more Corn than the demand required. So much for the "Free Market". Ethanol is a useless diversion on the road to the inevitable Hydrogen Economy. The sooner we establish the Hydrogen Economy the sooner we can cut the Mid-East loose and let them solve their own problems. The simple truth is that we IMPORT more than 60% of your fossil fuels and are almost totally dependent on Mid-East oil to maintain our standard of living, which is based entirely on affordable electricy.
Cars are a good example. For example I just bought a 2003 Mustang Cobra and am having problems where as others with more limited production, such as a 1995 for instance, were built with more precision(read:more attention), but cost less and have less problems?!?!.
It's a matter of choice. I bought a new 2002 Saturn SL. I have had ZERO problems and consistantly get 30+mpg in town and 40+mpg on the hiway. I deliberately chose quality over glitz, even though I feel the Saturn looks neater than the Mustang. So it is with software. Rather than choosing a flashy, highly promoted OS I selected Linux. My reward is high usability, stability and security.
It might be hip to predict that if MS released all of its apps as OpenSource (not that misfit license they are using for Wix, which prevents mixing Wix with truly GPL apps) then Linux would evaporate over night. But, M$ is about making obscene amounts of $$ via huge profit margins. Why would anyone do Microsoft's work for them only for the 'right' to pay retail for the product they helped make secure, stable and faster?
It is appropriate that this 'report' was released on April 1st. Halloween would also have been appropriate. Here is what it will do:
1) Give M$ a shield from responsibility for the massive insecurity of their software by making a 'security organization' the accountable party. "Software companies" (i.e., mainly M$) would fund the company. The security organization would lay down rules about how bugs and holes are discovered (not a certified programmer? -- then you can't look for/report bugs. See the story of the French scientist who is being sued for pointing out vulnerabilities.), how they are reported (no public reports at all until the patch, if ever, is released, then no announcement as to how long the bug/hole has been open), and how they are released -- through 'special' sites, for a fee, of course, so that the consumer pays even more for M$ bugs.
2) Require programmers to get "security certifications" from "accredited" schools. These are schools which have received funds (guess from whom) to finance/"reward" faculty members who establish such programs. Guess which OS will have certification programs, and which won't be allowed on campus. (Just ask youself which platforms aren't allowed equal billing with Windows on Dell computers.) Programs written by "uncertified" programmers will not be allowed distribution through 'certified' channels. Uncertified channels will be made illegal.
3) No answers as to which programmers gets 'grandfathered' in but the entire MS programming staff would be a good guess.
4) Independent Software Vendors (ISV's ---i.e., OpenSource folks) will have to meet requirements which are, in effect, designed to keep them from developing software drivers for new hardware, effectively locking them out of future markets.
Microsoft, the BSA (enforcement arm of MS licensing), and other companies with less than desirable security records would then use the courts to completely muzzle news of the vulnerabilities in their software. With that accomplished they can essentially shut down their repair operations and move the whole program into the public law enforcement arena, using local and national law enforcement agencies as their "security repair" division. Just remember that French scientist who was sued as a 'terrorist' for revealing security holes in software which the vendor claimed in their ads was "100% secure". This will be in no way different than what coal mine owners did in their efforts to keep slave labor trapped in their mines, but this time it will be consumers trapped into using buggy, insecure software with no alternatives. The end result is that the software will get worse because the incentive to repair is removed and will become more expensive because there will be no Open Source competition.
The current crop of "Security Organizations", most of whom have already knuckled under to Microsoft, will not be needed in the "New Order", but I'll wager most of them haven't figured that out yet and are probably jumping on the bandwagon because they have, like so many companies Microsoft has deflowered and plundered, visions of increased revenues as Microsoft 'partners' in this new scam.
The 'security problem' doesn't need a 123 page report to identify the security problem and create solutions for it. The problem is Windows. The solution is for Bill Gates to spend some of his $50 Billion to fix the code, not buy off congressmen and judges and make their problem a law enforcement issue at the public's expense. Is there no end to this man's greed?
and that is a binary installer that installs a static version of the application which contains ALL of the required libraries built in. Bender is an excellent example, nvidia is another. Memory and disk space are no longer a premium and shouldn't be the coder's main consideration when choosing an install technique.
When I can't get a binary install then I try for an rpm install, using an rpm made for the version of the distro I am running. I used urpmi when I was running Mandrake and now that I am running SUSE I use YaST2. Even then there is a chance I will run into missing dependencies or version conflicts, sometimes so severe that installation of the app is impossible without breaking my system.
I have began avoiding the tars because even though the./configure step may build a Makefile, seemingly without errors, the make step frequently dies with a msg about something missing or being the wrong version. Then you are fighting the parameter trap, if not the version conflict trap.
One thing for sure... Linux will never replace Windows on the desktop as long as developers keep requiring users to do the steps
tar -xvfz somefile.tar.gz cd somefiledir ./configure make su make install
While it may be easy distribution method for the lazy or inexperienced coder, which is probably why it is used so often, its reliability is suffering because of the traits those programmers exhibit.
In fact, because the slowness of justice causes the victims to expire anyway, the fine merely becomes a shoot to kill 'license fee'.
Microsoft would have to spend a lot more than $600M, on a level playing field, to defeat other browsers and media players. Using their illegal monopolistic leverage practices they can eliminate the competition a lot more quickly. The 'fine', a mere 10% of their expendable cash, gives Microsoft an 'indulgence' from the poltical machinery in return for cash. The appeal process will take 5 years or more (at least two computer generations) and even if they lose, the API is no big loss because it will take several more years to confirm that the API is indeed valid.
So, short of breaking Microsoft up, 10 years from now we could be looking back at this time with sadness as the pivotal event that gave Microsoft total dominance in the computer software market, the embedded market, the gaming hardware market, and perhaps most of the entertainment industry.
To arrive at its conclusions, mi2g analysed 17.074 successful digital attacks against servers and networks. It states: "With Linux accounting for 13,654 breaches, Windows for 2,005 breaches followed by BSD and Mac OS X with 555 breaches worldwide in January 2004."
The group discounted the recent wave of worms, viruses and other attacks that have affected Windows systems worldwide. It confined the study to overt digital attacks by hackers.
Let's assume for a moment that these figures are not generated in the usual im2g fashion - extracted from dark smelly places - and are indeed true. The conclusion is not - "Linux has become the most breached online server OS in the government and non-government spheres for the first time, while the number of successful hacker attacks against Windows-based servers have fallen for the last ten months."
IN THE LAST TEN MONTHS, if these figures are to be believed, 13,654 Linux servers were compromised by a maximum of 13,654 crackers. But, does that make Linux "the most breached online server OS..."? Hardly. Unless one wants to slant the real world to favor Microsoft as the most secure OS during the last 10 months one has to ask "By any method during that same 10 month period, how many online Windows servers were breached?" The answer rises into the millions. So, in terms of security it's 13,000 versus, what?, 13 MILLION, using mi2g's methodsfigure extraction. During that 10 month period please list below the number of successful virus attacks against Linux servers.... What was that? Zero you say? Right!
Knowing that the only way to successfully break into a Linux box is by human intervention, one also has to ask why a cracker would waste time cracking Windows boxes one-on-one when a simple virus could multiple their effforts a million fold...
When I was pre-teen there was a big scare about drinking Coca-Cola because some 'researcher' announced statistical data that shows a 'direct correlation' between drinking Coke and contracting Polio. Scared lots of mothers and put a temporary dent in Coke sales because most mothers knew nothing about statistics and causal relationships.
I've always wanted to them to define the 'rich' and wealthiest..
Gore did that during his attempt to steal the presidency in Florida (too bad those democrats got caught running around the counties with a Votamatic). Remember? He claimed that folks who make $250K/yr were 'millionaires' because in four years....
Most tractor diesels less than 90 HP. They get their power from the torque generated by the long stroke of the piston, and from gearing down. Tractors aren't designed for speed, they are designed for maximum torque at the PTO.
The research necessary to create practical Solar power generation stations has been down and it is practical. Look up 'Solar Power Tower II'. They use a quarter section of land, lots of cheap flat plate reflectors, an azeotropic mixture of Sodium and Potassiam Nitrate as energy storage medium, a ceramic furnance on top of a 100' tower, and a steam turbine to convert the Solar energy into electricty. The electricity is used to convert brackish water into Hydrogen and Oxygen. Excess energy is stored in the tank of molten Nitrates. Even on cloudy days a SPTII can generate up to 1/3 of the power it generates on clear sunny days.
This technology isn't high tech and every villiage could have their own and sell the excess power they generate into the national grid. Large towns and cities could have more than one. The SPTII's can be built and maintained by journeyman electricians, welders, etc. At 42 deg Lat each sq meter can collect about 800 watts. For a 10MW plant only 12,500 sq Meters of collector are is needed. That's about two football fields. At 50% efficiency make it about four football fields of mirrors focusing their energy on a ceramic furnace at the top of the tower.
SPTII's are a lot safer than letting a nuke plant burn your skin off.
Add to what you said the fact that it takes more energy to create Ethanol from Corn that you get burning the Ethanol. That is, Ethanol is an energy sink, not a source.
The ONLY reason why it is being blended with gasoline is to give a subsidy to the corn farmers.
With most security analysts, who are much better trained than Enderele or Didio, pointing the finger at spammers because of the back door that MyDoom leaves behind, and saying that targeting SCO is only a diversion, along comes a BBC reporter, following in the BBC tradition, who has to "SEX UP" the story.
Why did Stephen Evans do it? I usually suspect money or some other perk is behind these shinanigans.
I tried direcTV to save money. When I installed my the cost was 19.95/month for 75 channels, most of which were shopping channels. About a dozen were of the kind I liked. A few months later they went to 100 channels, plus some digital features, and doubled the subscription fee.
I used to install and tune sat dishes and I tuned my installation to maximum signal strength on the weakest transponder. Some transponders are more powerful than others so the max sig strength varies from channel to channel.
When ever severe weather blew past and the clouds were heavy with rain ALL of the channels pixelated and then went blank. This was especially annoying if there were threats of tornados in the area.
Another problem was tree branches and leaves blocking signals. Even though I trimmed the limbs away to give the dish a clear view of the satellite there were occassions when during strong winds branches would be blown infront of the dish line of sight. This caused annoying pixelation, signal lost, signal hunting... over and over and over.
Another problem was snow and ice buildup on the dish surface and detector components. This would produce a gradual loss of signal strength until pixelation got so bad I'd have go out and use a hair dryer to melt it off.
I'll never return to Satellite TV again unless I move out into the desert away from a cable system.
After about a year I disconnected by DirecTV dish and went back to TimeWarner RoadRunner cable. During the last two years I can recall only one outtage which occured when lightening struck some substation and put it off line for about ten or 15 minutes. During the last year TWRR has increased their download speed from 2Mb/sec to 3Mb/sec without raising the price.
the pledge by congress to keep Census data private and out of the hands of law enforcement officals was any good.
Then ask youself if The PATRIOT ACT, a law hastily passed by congress and signed by the president BEFORE THE ACT WAS EMBROSSED, will treat all Americans any better than FDR and the FBI treated Japanese American.
Then think about the RICO law, designed to prevent Mafia gangsters from using their ill-gotten gain to fight prosecution. When it was passed congress promised it would only be used against the Mafia. Now, several decades later, it is used over 10,000 times a year against ordinary citizens. The most common use of RICO today is by local police departments using jail-house snitches as a pretext to steal private property and fence it (sell is what rightful owners do, fence is what thieves do) in order to supplement their budgets and fund purchase of items too costly for local budgets. RICO declares property 'guilty' so even if the owners later prove their innocence or prove a case of mistaken identity, the police can and usually do keep the property.
When the cops become robbers who can YOU go to for protection?
When the DOJ sides with the Robber Barrons and the Courts become their hand puppets where can YOU seek judical relief?
When Congress sells its soul to the highest bidder, repeals the Bill of Rights, sells off trades and patents, votes itself a retirement package equal to its salary and with 100% free health care, and considers the office an inheritable birthright, who do YOU vote for?
filed lawsuites here in the USA, and we would be reading stories about the suite and the defendents.... but they aren't serious, they haven't filed any suites against linux users here. They are pumping and dumping their stock, and Darrell's scrapbook of news stories... again.
Just because in the past it has not been possible to predict this sort of thing accurately does not mean it will not be possible in the future and therefore is not worth spending money on.
Robert,
That's like saying, for example, that just because working perpetual motion machines haven't been made in the past doesn't mean they won't be made in the future.
Such a statement does not take into account the physical reality of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics. 1) You cannot get more energy out of a process than you put into it. 2) Not only can you not get more out, you can't even get out what you put in. 3) To get out all of what you put in, your process must vent waste energy to ZERO degrees Kelvin, which is impossible to reach... hence, you can't get out of the game.
As far as weather, water and earth... energy inputs to those systems cannot be mapped to specific output results.... they are not deterministic! Small changes in inputs can result in wildly different outputs (insensitive to initial conditions), or a given input doesn't always give the same output (nonuniqueness) or the system goes into wild oscillations (instability). Man HAS NO CONTROL over how much energy is put into these systems, even if he could measure them, and their models cannot reliability make any predictions as to the result of those inputs. It doesn't matter if they are considered linear or nonlinear systems. The best one can do is graph the strange attractor that resides behind a particular system. For a given input, the longer the process is allowed to continue, the more unpredictable the results will be. The best weather "models" can only go about 10-14 days into the future, and the results are given only in percentages in an area. They do that by running the same data in several different models and averaging the results. And, although they may "predict" a 30% chance for rain in your area, you have no assurance that it will rain at all on your house, your block or your city. Perhaps not even on your county or that area of your state.
It is intersting to note that the stock market is a chaotic system too. That's why you don't see any models predicting the price of Gold or any other stock on January 12, 2005 at 1:43 PM to within ten cents per ounce... or even a dollar per ounce. He who can do that rules the market. If these people truely had the ability to create models which accurately predict the dynamics of chaotic systems they'd test them first in the stock market. That they don't says volumes.
Slashdot Mirror
i'm not sure why e-85/ ethanol(sp) isn't taking off,
e-85 isn't taking off because it is an energy sink, not an energy source. How is the Enthanol made? With Corn. How is the Corn planted, weeded, watered and fertilized? How is it brewed? How is it distilled? With fossil fuels. It takes more energy to product a gallon of Ethanol than you get from burning it. Ethanol has only 85% of the energy content of an equal volume of gasoline. There is now even a question about Ethanol contributing more to polution than fighting it.
Ethanol was added to gasoline to create another market for farmers who were growing more Corn than the demand required. So much for the "Free Market". Ethanol is a useless diversion on the road to the inevitable Hydrogen Economy. The sooner we establish the Hydrogen Economy the sooner we can cut the Mid-East loose and let them solve their own problems. The simple truth is that we IMPORT more than 60% of your fossil fuels and are almost totally dependent on Mid-East oil to maintain our standard of living, which is based entirely on affordable electricy.
that Linux first appears at the 6th spot and Cray appears at the 19th.
Who doesn't play in what?
Wow! I'm impressed!
With such an eye for the future why don't you become a weather forcaster? They certainly could use your prognosticating powers.
I, too, have set up a lot of friends (former WinXX users all) and I go with
/etc/host file.
1) Mandrake
2) A listing of ad servers in the
Everything else is either included or not needed.
It costs them nothing and I donate my time. What are friends for if not that?
It's a matter of choice. I bought a new 2002 Saturn SL. I have had ZERO problems and consistantly get 30+mpg in town and 40+mpg on the hiway. I deliberately chose quality over glitz, even though I feel the Saturn looks neater than the Mustang. So it is with software. Rather than choosing a flashy, highly promoted OS I selected Linux. My reward is high usability, stability and security.
Cringley can't see the forest for the trees.
It might be hip to predict that if MS released all of its apps as OpenSource (not that misfit license they are using for Wix, which prevents mixing Wix with truly GPL apps) then Linux would evaporate over night. But, M$ is about making obscene amounts of $$ via huge profit margins. Why would anyone do Microsoft's work for them only for the 'right' to pay retail for the product they helped make secure, stable and faster?
It is appropriate that this 'report' was released on April 1st. Halloween would also have been appropriate. Here is what it will do:
1) Give M$ a shield from responsibility for the massive insecurity of their software by making a 'security organization' the accountable party. "Software companies" (i.e., mainly M$) would fund the company. The security organization would lay down rules about how bugs and holes are discovered (not a certified programmer? -- then you can't look for/report bugs. See the story of the French scientist who is being sued for pointing out vulnerabilities.), how they are reported (no public reports at all until the patch, if ever, is released, then no announcement as to how long the bug/hole has been open), and how they are released -- through 'special' sites, for a fee, of course, so that the consumer pays even more for M$ bugs.
2) Require programmers to get "security certifications" from "accredited" schools. These are schools which have received funds (guess from whom) to finance/"reward" faculty members who establish such programs. Guess which OS will have certification programs, and which won't be allowed on campus. (Just ask youself which platforms aren't allowed equal billing with Windows on Dell computers.) Programs written by "uncertified" programmers will not be allowed distribution through 'certified' channels. Uncertified channels will be made illegal.
3) No answers as to which programmers gets 'grandfathered' in but the entire MS programming staff would be a good guess.
4) Independent Software Vendors (ISV's ---i.e., OpenSource folks) will have to meet requirements which are, in effect, designed to keep them from developing software drivers for new hardware, effectively locking them out of future markets.
Microsoft, the BSA (enforcement arm of MS licensing), and other companies with less than desirable security records would then use the courts to completely muzzle news of the vulnerabilities in their software. With that accomplished they can essentially shut down their repair operations and move the whole program into the public law enforcement arena, using local and national law enforcement agencies as their "security repair" division. Just remember that French scientist who was sued as a 'terrorist' for revealing security holes in software which the vendor claimed in their ads was "100% secure". This will be in no way different than what coal mine owners did in their efforts to keep slave labor trapped in their mines, but this time it will be consumers trapped into using buggy, insecure software with no alternatives. The end result is that the software will get worse because the incentive to repair is removed and will become more expensive because there will be no Open Source competition.
The current crop of "Security Organizations", most of whom have already knuckled under to Microsoft, will not be needed in the "New Order", but I'll wager most of them haven't figured that out yet and are probably jumping on the bandwagon because they have, like so many companies Microsoft has deflowered and plundered, visions of increased revenues as Microsoft 'partners' in this new scam.
The 'security problem' doesn't need a 123 page report to identify the security problem and create solutions for it. The problem is Windows. The solution is for Bill Gates to spend some of his $50 Billion to fix the code, not buy off congressmen and judges and make their problem a law enforcement issue at the public's expense. Is there no end to this man's greed?
When I can't get a binary install then I try for an rpm install, using an rpm made for the version of the distro I am running. I used urpmi when I was running Mandrake and now that I am running SUSE I use YaST2. Even then there is a chance I will run into missing dependencies or version conflicts, sometimes so severe that installation of the app is impossible without breaking my system.
I have began avoiding the tars because even though the
One thing for sure... Linux will never replace Windows on the desktop as long as developers keep requiring users to do the stepsWhile it may be easy distribution method for the lazy or inexperienced coder, which is probably why it is used so often, its reliability is suffering because of the traits those programmers exhibit.
Exactly right.
In fact, because the slowness of justice causes the victims to expire anyway, the fine merely becomes a shoot to kill 'license fee'.
Microsoft would have to spend a lot more than $600M, on a level playing field, to defeat other browsers and media players. Using their illegal monopolistic leverage practices they can eliminate the competition a lot more quickly. The 'fine', a mere 10% of their expendable cash, gives Microsoft an 'indulgence' from the poltical machinery in return for cash. The appeal process will take 5 years or more (at least two computer generations) and even if they lose, the API is no big loss because it will take several more years to confirm that the API is indeed valid.
So, short of breaking Microsoft up, 10 years from now we could be looking back at this time with sadness as the pivotal event that gave Microsoft total dominance in the computer software market, the embedded market, the gaming hardware market, and perhaps most of the entertainment industry.
The group discounted the recent wave of worms, viruses and other attacks that have affected Windows systems worldwide. It confined the study to overt digital attacks by hackers.
Let's assume for a moment that these figures are not generated in the usual im2g fashion - extracted from dark smelly places - and are indeed true. The conclusion is not - "Linux has become the most breached online server OS in the government and non-government spheres for the first time, while the number of successful hacker attacks against Windows-based servers have fallen for the last ten months."
IN THE LAST TEN MONTHS, if these figures are to be believed, 13,654 Linux servers were compromised by a maximum of 13,654 crackers. But, does that make Linux "the most breached online server OS..."? Hardly. Unless one wants to slant the real world to favor Microsoft as the most secure OS during the last 10 months one has to ask "By any method during that same 10 month period, how many online Windows servers were breached?" The answer rises into the millions. So, in terms of security it's 13,000 versus, what?, 13 MILLION, using mi2g's methodsfigure extraction. During that 10 month period please list below the number of successful virus attacks against Linux servers.... What was that? Zero you say? Right!
Knowing that the only way to successfully break into a Linux box is by human intervention, one also has to ask why a cracker would waste time cracking Windows boxes one-on-one when a simple virus could multiple their effforts a million fold...
Pure BS, of course, just like this 'research'.
Gore did that during his attempt to steal the presidency in Florida (too bad those democrats got caught running around the counties with a Votamatic). Remember? He claimed that folks who make $250K/yr were 'millionaires' because in four years....
So you're drunk but your friend isn't, and you ask him to blow into your car's breath tester. How is the device going to know the difference?
Most tractor diesels less than 90 HP. They get their power from the torque generated by the long stroke of the piston, and from gearing down. Tractors aren't designed for speed, they are designed for maximum torque at the PTO.
The research necessary to create practical Solar power generation stations has been down and it is practical. Look up 'Solar Power Tower II'. They use a quarter section of land, lots of cheap flat plate reflectors, an azeotropic mixture of Sodium and Potassiam Nitrate as energy storage medium, a ceramic furnance on top of a 100' tower, and a steam turbine to convert the Solar energy into electricty. The electricity is used to convert brackish water into Hydrogen and Oxygen. Excess energy is stored in the tank of molten Nitrates. Even on cloudy days a SPTII can generate up to 1/3 of the power it generates on clear sunny days.
This technology isn't high tech and every villiage could have their own and sell the excess power they generate into the national grid. Large towns and cities could have more than one. The SPTII's can be built and maintained by journeyman electricians, welders, etc. At 42 deg Lat each sq meter can collect about 800 watts. For a 10MW plant only 12,500 sq Meters of collector are is needed. That's about two football fields. At 50% efficiency make it about four football fields of mirrors focusing their energy on a ceramic furnace at the top of the tower.
SPTII's are a lot safer than letting a nuke plant burn your skin off.
The ONLY reason why it is being blended with gasoline is to give a subsidy to the corn farmers.
The same examiners who thought that 'one-click shopping' envolved a great leap forward in technology and/or business practices.
of Woodside, CA.
There is a Charles H Moore of Woodside CA that invented the FORTH language, which is one of my favorites. Could it be the same man?
With most security analysts, who are much better trained than Enderele or Didio, pointing the finger at spammers because of the back door that MyDoom leaves behind, and saying that targeting SCO is only a diversion, along comes a BBC reporter, following in the BBC tradition, who has to "SEX UP" the story.
Why did Stephen Evans do it? I usually suspect money or some other perk is behind these shinanigans.
I tried direcTV to save money. When I installed my the cost was 19.95/month for 75 channels, most of which were shopping channels. About a dozen were of the kind I liked. A few months later they went to 100 channels, plus some digital features, and doubled the subscription fee.
I used to install and tune sat dishes and I tuned my installation to maximum signal strength on the weakest transponder. Some transponders are more powerful than others so the max sig strength varies from channel to channel.
When ever severe weather blew past and the clouds were heavy with rain ALL of the channels pixelated and then went blank. This was especially annoying if there were threats of tornados in the area.
Another problem was tree branches and leaves blocking signals. Even though I trimmed the limbs away to give the dish a clear view of the satellite there were occassions when during strong winds branches would be blown infront of the dish line of sight. This caused annoying pixelation, signal lost, signal hunting... over and over and over.
Another problem was snow and ice buildup on the dish surface and detector components. This would produce a gradual loss of signal strength until pixelation got so bad I'd have go out and use a hair dryer to melt it off.
I'll never return to Satellite TV again unless I move out into the desert away from a cable system.
After about a year I disconnected by DirecTV dish and went back to TimeWarner RoadRunner cable. During the last two years I can recall only one outtage which occured when lightening struck some substation and put it off line for about ten or 15 minutes. During the last year TWRR has increased their download speed from 2Mb/sec to 3Mb/sec without raising the price.
the pledge by congress to keep Census data private and out of the hands of law enforcement officals was any good.
Then ask youself if The PATRIOT ACT, a law hastily passed by congress and signed by the president BEFORE THE ACT WAS EMBROSSED, will treat all Americans any better than FDR and the FBI treated Japanese American.
Then think about the RICO law, designed to prevent Mafia gangsters from using their ill-gotten gain to fight prosecution. When it was passed congress promised it would only be used against the Mafia. Now, several decades later, it is used over 10,000 times a year against ordinary citizens. The most common use of RICO today is by local police departments using jail-house snitches as a pretext to steal private property and fence it (sell is what rightful owners do, fence is what thieves do) in order to supplement their budgets and fund purchase of items too costly for local budgets. RICO declares property 'guilty' so even if the owners later prove their innocence or prove a case of mistaken identity, the police can and usually do keep the property.
When the cops become robbers who can YOU go to for protection?
When the DOJ sides with the Robber Barrons and the Courts become their hand puppets where can YOU seek judical relief?
When Congress sells its soul to the highest bidder, repeals the Bill of Rights, sells off trades and patents, votes itself a retirement package equal to its salary and with 100% free health care, and considers the office an inheritable birthright, who do YOU vote for?
Plainly, WE deserve the corruption WE tolerate.
My copy doesn't show any ads.
But then, I don't run Windows.
I guess they figure that if you have enough money to waste on buying Windows then you'll love all the stuff the ads are showing.
some slimy patent lawyer who probably doesn't even know how spray cans work.
filed lawsuites here in the USA, and we would be reading stories about the suite and the defendents.... but they aren't serious, they haven't filed any suites against linux users here. They are pumping and dumping their stock, and Darrell's scrapbook of news stories... again.
Robert,
That's like saying, for example, that just because working perpetual motion machines haven't been made in the past doesn't mean they won't be made in the future.
Such a statement does not take into account the physical reality of the Three Laws of Thermodynamics. 1) You cannot get more energy out of a process than you put into it. 2) Not only can you not get more out, you can't even get out what you put in. 3) To get out all of what you put in, your process must vent waste energy to ZERO degrees Kelvin, which is impossible to reach... hence, you can't get out of the game.
As far as weather, water and earth... energy inputs to those systems cannot be mapped to specific output results.... they are not deterministic! Small changes in inputs can result in wildly different outputs (insensitive to initial conditions), or a given input doesn't always give the same output (nonuniqueness) or the system goes into wild oscillations (instability). Man HAS NO CONTROL over how much energy is put into these systems, even if he could measure them, and their models cannot reliability make any predictions as to the result of those inputs. It doesn't matter if they are considered linear or nonlinear systems. The best one can do is graph the strange attractor that resides behind a particular system. For a given input, the longer the process is allowed to continue, the more unpredictable the results will be. The best weather "models" can only go about 10-14 days into the future, and the results are given only in percentages in an area. They do that by running the same data in several different models and averaging the results. And, although they may "predict" a 30% chance for rain in your area, you have no assurance that it will rain at all on your house, your block or your city. Perhaps not even on your county or that area of your state.
It is intersting to note that the stock market is a chaotic system too. That's why you don't see any models predicting the price of Gold or any other stock on January 12, 2005 at 1:43 PM to within ten cents per ounce... or even a dollar per ounce. He who can do that rules the market. If these people truely had the ability to create models which accurately predict the dynamics of chaotic systems they'd test them first in the stock market. That they don't says volumes.