Differential GPS greatly improves your precision, from meters to centimeters
This is incorrect - DGPS improves the precision from somewhere around 15 metres to 3 - 5 metres - certainly nowhere near centimetres (which is pretty much impossible with GPS due to the wavelengths involved - I understand Gallileo will be providing a high precision service though).
But I'm unclear on why the loss of funding for DGPS is big news - is anyone still using DGPS? If so, why? If you've got a view of the equatorial horizon then SBAS is a much more sensible idea.
2. The atmosphere on Mars is too thin to use aero-braking, i.e. can't land like space shuttle on earth.
But there _is_ an atmosphere, it just means that aero-braking will take a lot longer (ok, so even if you have to do a few orbits at a very low altitude (25Km or something?), does that really matter?)
2. Learn how to fly rockets backwards with sidewinds potentially 5x-10x stronger than that of Hurricane Katrina.
Seems contradictory with the above statement - if the atmosphere is too thin to pose any significant drag (i.e. no aerobraking) then it's also too thin to cause much of a side-wind problem.
No, the people who are complaining the most and trying to find software to break DRM protections are the people who don't want to pay for the latest CD they heard on the radio
I think you'll find that a lot of people who complain about DRM are, like me, completely uninterested in infringing copyright. I want to be able to play content I paid for on a player of my own choice. The player of my choice is always going to be open source... and since DRM is fundamentally incompatable with open source software you won't find me supporting DRM.
Also, I don't see why I should be restricted in what I'm allowed to do with the content so long as I'm not infringing the copyright - if I buy a DVD and play it in an "approved" DVD player then I'm required to sit through unskippable sections telling me how it's illegal for me to watch pirated content (if I was interested in watching pirated content do you think I would've paid for the DVD in the first place?). Conversely, if I break the DRM on the DVD and use my own player (in my case a MythTV system running Xine) then I get to choose what parts of the content that I paid for I want to watch. This is not an infringement of copyright, and playing a DVD in this way is not harming anyone.
Something is terribly wrong when the quality of the pirated material (which lacks all the unskippable sections accusing me of piracy) is better than what I can get by paying.
Also consider things like region coding - now the content providers are putting technology in place which gives people no choice but to crack the DRM on some content because they are trying to prevent their customers use the free market. Whilest on the other hand, they themselves are happy to use the free market by outsourcing work to cheaper countries.
In the software industry, developers actively avoid patent searches - because they are all stupid
Or you could interpret it like this: Most software patents are for ideas so bleedingly obvious that it's far quicker to come up with the idea and implement it on your own than search through patent archives and negotiate and pay licencing terms with whoever patented it first (note: not invented it first - the idea is usually so obvious it's already been used for years without anyone even thinking it was worth patenting).
Unfortunately the patent office doesn't seem to understand what constitutes obvious - lets looke at a chain of events here:
Record stores present the records they stock indexed by artist and then by album
People organise their own record collections in exactly the same way
MP3s come along and people organise the music on their disk in the same way again, something like/music/artist/album/track_number-track_title.mp3
Online music shops organise their music in the same way
Now Creative come along and say "hey, we could organise the music in our player in *exactly* the same way as everyone has been already doing for decades, and this is a great idea and not at all obvious so we're gonna patent it!"
After looking down that list of events, can you honestly say that Creative's patent doesn't cover an obvious way of organising and presenting music that absolutely *anyone* would come up with (and almost certainly already had done) when designing a music player?
1) the parent only talked about transactions paid by paypal
The point still stands that the buyer can cause trouble *after* he's paid.
Your feedback should not reflect the feedback he gave.
This is untrue - if a buyer persistently doesn't bother to read the terms of the auctions he's bidding on and then kicks up a fuss this should be logged somewhere.
If you don't agree with his feedback, comment on it.
The comment won't show up on the buyer's record though - how will other sellers know that the buyer is a potential trouble maker?
the buyer's side is worse imho: when I have done everything I should, why don't I get good feedback?
Why is that any different to the seller's side? If I have done everything I should as the seller, why don't I get good feedback?
You are missing the bit where I said that the buyer used paypal to complete there end of the transaction.
No, I didn't miss that bit at all. My real-world example didn't use paypal, but the point still stands that buyers can cause trouble after payment - being forced to leave positive feedback for a buyer who will cause nothing but trouble is not a good idea.
Market forces make sure that will not happen. Cartels almost always fail because someone not at the top gets desparate and cheats
I'm not talking about cartels - market forces will ensure that all the insurers are doing the same thing:
One insurer starts offering cheaper insurance if they can access this data, attracting lots of business. So the other insurance companies follow suit. Eventually the only people left not using the new cheaper policy are the minority of users who actually don't want to exchange their privacy for marginally cheaper insurance and the people who would be shown by the data to be rubbish drivers. The insurance companies want to charge the rubbish drivers lots anyway, since they will make the most claims and the people who want to protect their privacy will be an absolute minority.
So in this case you have 90% of the population using the new (cheaper for them) system, 9% of the population still using the old system because they're rubbish drivers and 1% of the population using the old system to protect their privacy.
Now another insurance company tries to "break the rules" and offers a cheaper policy that will protect your privacy. They are naturally going to attract all the bad drivers, and the claims they cause will push the premiums up.
Either way, the very small minority who won't sell their privacy are losing out - they will end up grouped with the bad drivers and have to pay huge premiums.
seems in cases where the purchaser uses paypal to complete the transaction that ebay should automatically positive feedback/reputation points as they have successfully confirmed that the buyers has fulfilled their part of the transaction.
This is a terrible idea - there are many cases where _after_ the buyer has paid they cause trouble. For example, on one of my auctions I clearly stated that if you paid by cheque I wouldn't dispatch the goods until _after_ the cheque had cleared. The buyer posted me a cheque and then left negative feedback against me just 2 days after the cheque had arrived because they hadn't received the item yet.
I mean I don't know where to start: 1. they ignored the conditions stated in the auction for paying by cheque (they could've used paypal and avoided the problem) 2. they didn't give it enough time for the item to make it through the post even if I'd sent it as soon as I received the cheque 3. they didn't even bother to contact me to discuss the "problem" before dropping negative feedback on my account.
In this case I would've been very annoyed if the system had forced me to leave positive feedback for a buyer who caused nothing but trouble after "fullfilling their part of the transaction".
FWIW, I think feedback should be left by the buyer before the seller - that way by leaving positive feedback the buyer has confirmed that they have received the item with no problems. If there is a problem then it can be resolved before either party has left feedback. Remember that negative feedback should be fairly rare for legitimate sellers and noone should be leaving negative feedback without first trying to resolve the problem. (Maybe it would be worth publishing the communications that occurred between the two parties when leaving negative feedback so people can read the whole story and make their own minds up who was responsible for the bad transaction).
What's safer: driving 5mph above the speed limit with traffic, or driving 5mph below* the speed limit (and thus 12+mph below the average speed of traffic)?
Possibly a better example: when overtaking on a single carriageway, what's more dangerous: sticking to the speed limit and doing 5mph more than the car you're passing or accellerating hard and exceeding the speed limit but passing the other car in a much shorter space of time. Remember you're on the "wrong" side of the road during such an overtaking manouver - if you have a head-on collision you're fairly screwed whether you were doing 60mph or 70mph so I'd argue that breaking the speed limit and getting back onto your side of the road as quickly as possible is the safer option.
Unfortunately this is something the highways people don't seem to have understood on one of the roads near me: 60mph limit, single carriageway with 1 lane in each direction. Every so often it widens to 2 lanes in each direction so you can pass slow moving traffic (lorries, etc)... which is great, except they have reduced the limit to 50mph on the wider sections (and only the wider sections) and installed GATSOs, so there's no way you can overtake that lorry that's crawling along at 50mph without doing it on the (unsafe) narrower sections of road. Crazyness...
auto insurance companies are essentially interchangable and there is essentially no switching cost to the consumer.
You don't get a choice if they're all doing the same thing. Besides, you can guarantee that the majority of people will ignore the "selling your soul" clause if they can save £5 on their instuance - yeah, some of us care but will the insurance companies really cator to the minority?
A decent amout of power could be saved with much less expensive insulation and better building techniques, but you don't see people do that even when it pays off for the individual, too.
The problem with these things is the initial outlay - yeah, it may save you in the long run over 20 years, but the initial cost can be high.
The same applies in all markets - why do you think people Hire-Purchase cars/TVs/sofas/etc instead of buying them outright?
Maybe a solution is for the power companies to pay for the installation of the kit and then continue to charge you (at a reduced rate) for the electricity. I'm certainly the last person to ask for credit on anything, but this kind of model does seem to work well elsewhere (when was the last time you paid for a cellphone outright instead of getting it subsidised by your telco?)
you realize that solar power will never solve anyone's energy needs
I don't think any one technology can "solve" the energy needs of a country, but if everyone covered their roof with photovoltaic cells then it would significantly reduce the total amount of energy needed to be produced by powerstations. This is, of course, assuming you can produce the photovoltaic cells efficiently enough.
At the moment, photovoltaic cells are reasonably inefficient. But the thought occurs that you could layer photovoltaic cells across the surface of thermal solar panels, allowing the thermal panels to soak up much of the energy that would otherwise be lost.
Putting the photovoltaic cells in orbit would also increase their power output since there would be no atmospheric absorbtion and almost 24 hours per day of direct sunlight. This is much more expensive though and it probably makes more sense to manufacture as much as possible on the moon, using raw materials found there. (Yeah, don't look at me like I'm crazy - solving big problems like this needs big solutions).
We are moving slowly into developing technologies that sip, rather then guzzle energy.
In some areas this is true, but unfortunately in others exactly the opposite is true. For example, whilest the new generation of CPUs is way more energy efficient than the last generation, we're still using way more energy than the 286/386 era processors. Sure, we get a lot more processing power from that, but we're burning all that extra power on shiny GUIs, etc - i.e. the net energy used to do a particular *job* has increased.
There are certainly areas where we can make big improvements too - the figures quoted for power wasted by standby modes on devices is crazy. It should _not_ take that amount of power just to keep the IR receiver and maybe a standby light/clock running. Also, creap PSUs seem to be a problem, maybe we should be outlawing linear regulators? (One would think that switched mode regulators would be cheaper for device manufacturers to use, but even my fairly new Linksys access point runs off a chunky, hot power brick).
What these environmentalists need to do is build a priority management system. This shotgun approach has got to end.
Indeed, I can't see how we can please all the environmentalists when it comes to energy production:
Solar - impractical in many areas due to lack of intense sunlight, and photovoltaics are very expensive. In the long run, photovoltaics on every home's roof may be a good thing, but only when the price gets more sensible. Also, here in the UK there is some effort involved since you need to get planning permission to put photovoltaics on your roof (why?!?). Of course there are lots of nasty chemicals involved in the production of semiconductors so maybe the energy savings don't offset the damage caused by the production of the panels in the first place?
Wind - suffers from the "not in my back yard" problem - noone wants wind turbines anywhere near them, not to mention the fact that they kill birds
Hydro - requires flooding of vast amounts of land, thus lots of environmental damage
Tidal - depending on the system used this may require flooding of land and may have a negative influence on the coastline
Wave - again, can have a negative influence on the coastline
Fossil fuels - contributes to global warming
Fission - suggest this and you'll get all the environmentalists up in arms
Personally, I'm in favour of fission, with energy efficient homes (including active stuff like photovoltaics, thermal solar panels and wind turbines built into the home). We should also seriously be considering stuff like orbital solar arrays - as usual, I imagine the people responsible will only start seriously considering these solutions when it's too late to build the infrastructure before the oil supplies run out.
For vehicles, an energy storage system, rather than energy production seems to be the way forward - i.e. hydrogen or batteries.
For both homes and vehicles there needs to be significant legislation change though.:
Make it easier for people to add clean power generation systems to their homes without having to mess about with things like planning permission.
Sort out fuel tax so it's actually viable for people to use environmentally friendly fuels. At the moment in the UK, LPG has a greatly reduced tax because it's considered "clean", even though it's still a hydrocarbon and contributes to global warming. But if you want to run your diesel vehicle on biofuel (such as vegitable oil) you are required to pay the full tax normally applied to diesel. This makes it not financially viable for anyone to set up a business recycling vegitable oil into fuel since after tax the biofuel would be more expensive than diesel.
(Incidentally, if anyone can tell me where to get biofuel in the UK to run my diesel van on, I would be very interested).
Only a fanboy would bother to pull up a non default browser
Clicking the blue 'e' starts IE, not the default browser. Most people think the blue 'e' is "the internet", so that's what they will click when they want to access the web.
Myself (and a number of my fellow students) love the 'track changes' features in Word.
Storing documents in a revision control system, such as SubVersion, is well worth the effort for exactly this reason. Add to that the ability to go back and grab an earlier revision at any time and diff any two revisions.
I no longer recommend Firefox as a security solution, but simply as a "better" browser. IE7 is new and not out of beta. Its security track record hasn't been determined yet.
FireFox's track record for fixing security holes in a timely way is certainly better than IE's. No software is _completely_ secure - the only way to protect yourself is to upgrade frequently. And upgrading doesn't help at all if the vendor hasn't yet bothered fixing that security hole that's been exploited in the wild for months. There are numerous examples of holes in IE which have been publicised and MS *still* didn't fix them until after they started getting exploited in the wild over a year later.
You can have the most secure software in the world, but that doesn't mean anything if you never bother to fix the few holes you have when they are discovered.
I don't personally believe its more secure. It may get patched quicker
Does rapid patching not count towards security? I would certainly prefer to run software with 100 undiscovered security holes than 1 or 2 holes that have been well publicised and left unpatched for months or years.
Your point is nonsense. Please bitch slap yourself to see if you come to your senses.
No, really it isn't. If you use the highest alert level when they intelligence survices are saying they have no evidence to indicate a possibility of further attacks what the hell are you going to use when they have got evidence that there will be further attacks?
If the alert levels were really intended to keep the public informed then they would have been raised before people were arrested (i.e. when the intelligence services knew there was an impending attack) rather than after (when the threat should be significantly reduced since you just arrested a load of people).
In reality, the scare-o-meter is just another tool used to keep the public scared to push Labour's political agenda. The really sad thing is that this is exactly what the terrorists want.
Mayhaps the alert is because they know that they haven't caught everyone they suspect, eh?
In that case they have outright lied to the public since they've gone on record saying they have nothing to suggest an attack and the extra security is purely a precautionary measure to protect against anything they are currently unaware of.
Are we sure there were only 21 people involved? I mean dang sure?
My point is that "We think we got everyone but we can't be absolutely sure" doesn't constitute a warning level of "An attack is imminent". It's more like "An attack may be imminent"
Slashdot Mirror
Differential GPS greatly improves your precision, from meters to centimeters
This is incorrect - DGPS improves the precision from somewhere around 15 metres to 3 - 5 metres - certainly nowhere near centimetres (which is pretty much impossible with GPS due to the wavelengths involved - I understand Gallileo will be providing a high precision service though).
But I'm unclear on why the loss of funding for DGPS is big news - is anyone still using DGPS? If so, why? If you've got a view of the equatorial horizon then SBAS is a much more sensible idea.
public domain is "more free" than GPL, sort of
Umm, except GPL covers software, not file formats - there's no reason you can't write a non-GPL OGG decoder.
There's the not inconsequential matter of all the material presently in MP3 format.
This is bunk - most of the material I own was bought in Red Book format.
It is indeed, but it's not original to Google. This approach was originally proposed by a couple of guys at CMU
If you read the FAQ you'll see that Google licensed the idea from CMU:
How was Google Image Labeler developed?
Google Image Labeler is based in part on technology licensed from and developed at Carnegie Mellon University.
2. The atmosphere on Mars is too thin to use aero-braking, i.e. can't land like space shuttle on earth.
But there _is_ an atmosphere, it just means that aero-braking will take a lot longer (ok, so even if you have to do a few orbits at a very low altitude (25Km or something?), does that really matter?)
2. Learn how to fly rockets backwards with sidewinds potentially 5x-10x stronger than that of Hurricane Katrina.
Seems contradictory with the above statement - if the atmosphere is too thin to pose any significant drag (i.e. no aerobraking) then it's also too thin to cause much of a side-wind problem.
No, the people who are complaining the most and trying to find software to break DRM protections are the people who don't want to pay for the latest CD they heard on the radio
I think you'll find that a lot of people who complain about DRM are, like me, completely uninterested in infringing copyright. I want to be able to play content I paid for on a player of my own choice. The player of my choice is always going to be open source... and since DRM is fundamentally incompatable with open source software you won't find me supporting DRM.
Also, I don't see why I should be restricted in what I'm allowed to do with the content so long as I'm not infringing the copyright - if I buy a DVD and play it in an "approved" DVD player then I'm required to sit through unskippable sections telling me how it's illegal for me to watch pirated content (if I was interested in watching pirated content do you think I would've paid for the DVD in the first place?). Conversely, if I break the DRM on the DVD and use my own player (in my case a MythTV system running Xine) then I get to choose what parts of the content that I paid for I want to watch. This is not an infringement of copyright, and playing a DVD in this way is not harming anyone.
Something is terribly wrong when the quality of the pirated material (which lacks all the unskippable sections accusing me of piracy) is better than what I can get by paying.
Also consider things like region coding - now the content providers are putting technology in place which gives people no choice but to crack the DRM on some content because they are trying to prevent their customers use the free market. Whilest on the other hand, they themselves are happy to use the free market by outsourcing work to cheaper countries.
Or you could interpret it like this: Most software patents are for ideas so bleedingly obvious that it's far quicker to come up with the idea and implement it on your own than search through patent archives and negotiate and pay licencing terms with whoever patented it first (note: not invented it first - the idea is usually so obvious it's already been used for years without anyone even thinking it was worth patenting).
Unfortunately the patent office doesn't seem to understand what constitutes obvious - lets looke at a chain of events here:
After looking down that list of events, can you honestly say that Creative's patent doesn't cover an obvious way of organising and presenting music that absolutely *anyone* would come up with (and almost certainly already had done) when designing a music player?
1) the parent only talked about transactions paid by paypal
The point still stands that the buyer can cause trouble *after* he's paid.
Your feedback should not reflect the feedback he gave.
This is untrue - if a buyer persistently doesn't bother to read the terms of the auctions he's bidding on and then kicks up a fuss this should be logged somewhere.
If you don't agree with his feedback, comment on it.
The comment won't show up on the buyer's record though - how will other sellers know that the buyer is a potential trouble maker?
the buyer's side is worse imho: when I have done everything I should, why don't I get good feedback?
Why is that any different to the seller's side? If I have done everything I should as the seller, why don't I get good feedback?
You are missing the bit where I said that the buyer used paypal to complete there end of the transaction.
No, I didn't miss that bit at all. My real-world example didn't use paypal, but the point still stands that buyers can cause trouble after payment - being forced to leave positive feedback for a buyer who will cause nothing but trouble is not a good idea.
Market forces make sure that will not happen. Cartels almost always fail because someone not at the top gets desparate and cheats
I'm not talking about cartels - market forces will ensure that all the insurers are doing the same thing:
One insurer starts offering cheaper insurance if they can access this data, attracting lots of business. So the other insurance companies follow suit. Eventually the only people left not using the new cheaper policy are the minority of users who actually don't want to exchange their privacy for marginally cheaper insurance and the people who would be shown by the data to be rubbish drivers. The insurance companies want to charge the rubbish drivers lots anyway, since they will make the most claims and the people who want to protect their privacy will be an absolute minority.
So in this case you have 90% of the population using the new (cheaper for them) system, 9% of the population still using the old system because they're rubbish drivers and 1% of the population using the old system to protect their privacy.
Now another insurance company tries to "break the rules" and offers a cheaper policy that will protect your privacy. They are naturally going to attract all the bad drivers, and the claims they cause will push the premiums up.
Either way, the very small minority who won't sell their privacy are losing out - they will end up grouped with the bad drivers and have to pay huge premiums.
seems in cases where the purchaser uses paypal to complete the transaction that ebay should automatically positive feedback/reputation points as they have successfully confirmed that the buyers has fulfilled their part of the transaction.
This is a terrible idea - there are many cases where _after_ the buyer has paid they cause trouble. For example, on one of my auctions I clearly stated that if you paid by cheque I wouldn't dispatch the goods until _after_ the cheque had cleared. The buyer posted me a cheque and then left negative feedback against me just 2 days after the cheque had arrived because they hadn't received the item yet.
I mean I don't know where to start:
1. they ignored the conditions stated in the auction for paying by cheque (they could've used paypal and avoided the problem)
2. they didn't give it enough time for the item to make it through the post even if I'd sent it as soon as I received the cheque
3. they didn't even bother to contact me to discuss the "problem" before dropping negative feedback on my account.
In this case I would've been very annoyed if the system had forced me to leave positive feedback for a buyer who caused nothing but trouble after "fullfilling their part of the transaction".
FWIW, I think feedback should be left by the buyer before the seller - that way by leaving positive feedback the buyer has confirmed that they have received the item with no problems. If there is a problem then it can be resolved before either party has left feedback. Remember that negative feedback should be fairly rare for legitimate sellers and noone should be leaving negative feedback without first trying to resolve the problem. (Maybe it would be worth publishing the communications that occurred between the two parties when leaving negative feedback so people can read the whole story and make their own minds up who was responsible for the bad transaction).
What's safer: driving 5mph above the speed limit with traffic, or driving 5mph below* the speed limit (and thus 12+mph below the average speed of traffic)?
Possibly a better example: when overtaking on a single carriageway, what's more dangerous: sticking to the speed limit and doing 5mph more than the car you're passing or accellerating hard and exceeding the speed limit but passing the other car in a much shorter space of time. Remember you're on the "wrong" side of the road during such an overtaking manouver - if you have a head-on collision you're fairly screwed whether you were doing 60mph or 70mph so I'd argue that breaking the speed limit and getting back onto your side of the road as quickly as possible is the safer option.
Unfortunately this is something the highways people don't seem to have understood on one of the roads near me: 60mph limit, single carriageway with 1 lane in each direction. Every so often it widens to 2 lanes in each direction so you can pass slow moving traffic (lorries, etc)... which is great, except they have reduced the limit to 50mph on the wider sections (and only the wider sections) and installed GATSOs, so there's no way you can overtake that lorry that's crawling along at 50mph without doing it on the (unsafe) narrower sections of road. Crazyness...
auto insurance companies are essentially interchangable and there is essentially no switching cost to the consumer.
You don't get a choice if they're all doing the same thing. Besides, you can guarantee that the majority of people will ignore the "selling your soul" clause if they can save £5 on their instuance - yeah, some of us care but will the insurance companies really cator to the minority?
A decent amout of power could be saved with much less expensive insulation and better building techniques, but you don't see people do that even when it pays off for the individual, too.
The problem with these things is the initial outlay - yeah, it may save you in the long run over 20 years, but the initial cost can be high.
The same applies in all markets - why do you think people Hire-Purchase cars/TVs/sofas/etc instead of buying them outright?
Maybe a solution is for the power companies to pay for the installation of the kit and then continue to charge you (at a reduced rate) for the electricity. I'm certainly the last person to ask for credit on anything, but this kind of model does seem to work well elsewhere (when was the last time you paid for a cellphone outright instead of getting it subsidised by your telco?)
you realize that solar power will never solve anyone's energy needs
I don't think any one technology can "solve" the energy needs of a country, but if everyone covered their roof with photovoltaic cells then it would significantly reduce the total amount of energy needed to be produced by powerstations. This is, of course, assuming you can produce the photovoltaic cells efficiently enough.
At the moment, photovoltaic cells are reasonably inefficient. But the thought occurs that you could layer photovoltaic cells across the surface of thermal solar panels, allowing the thermal panels to soak up much of the energy that would otherwise be lost.
Putting the photovoltaic cells in orbit would also increase their power output since there would be no atmospheric absorbtion and almost 24 hours per day of direct sunlight. This is much more expensive though and it probably makes more sense to manufacture as much as possible on the moon, using raw materials found there. (Yeah, don't look at me like I'm crazy - solving big problems like this needs big solutions).
We are moving slowly into developing technologies that sip, rather then guzzle energy.
In some areas this is true, but unfortunately in others exactly the opposite is true. For example, whilest the new generation of CPUs is way more energy efficient than the last generation, we're still using way more energy than the 286/386 era processors. Sure, we get a lot more processing power from that, but we're burning all that extra power on shiny GUIs, etc - i.e. the net energy used to do a particular *job* has increased.
There are certainly areas where we can make big improvements too - the figures quoted for power wasted by standby modes on devices is crazy. It should _not_ take that amount of power just to keep the IR receiver and maybe a standby light/clock running. Also, creap PSUs seem to be a problem, maybe we should be outlawing linear regulators? (One would think that switched mode regulators would be cheaper for device manufacturers to use, but even my fairly new Linksys access point runs off a chunky, hot power brick).
Indeed, I can't see how we can please all the environmentalists when it comes to energy production:
Personally, I'm in favour of fission, with energy efficient homes (including active stuff like photovoltaics, thermal solar panels and wind turbines built into the home). We should also seriously be considering stuff like orbital solar arrays - as usual, I imagine the people responsible will only start seriously considering these solutions when it's too late to build the infrastructure before the oil supplies run out.
For vehicles, an energy storage system, rather than energy production seems to be the way forward - i.e. hydrogen or batteries.
For both homes and vehicles there needs to be significant legislation change though.:
(Incidentally, if anyone can tell me where to get biofuel in the UK to run my diesel van on, I would be very interested).
Only a fanboy would bother to pull up a non default browser
Clicking the blue 'e' starts IE, not the default browser. Most people think the blue 'e' is "the internet", so that's what they will click when they want to access the web.
Myself (and a number of my fellow students) love the 'track changes' features in Word.
Storing documents in a revision control system, such as SubVersion, is well worth the effort for exactly this reason. Add to that the ability to go back and grab an earlier revision at any time and diff any two revisions.
I no longer recommend Firefox as a security solution, but simply as a "better" browser. IE7 is new and not out of beta. Its security track record hasn't been determined yet.
FireFox's track record for fixing security holes in a timely way is certainly better than IE's. No software is _completely_ secure - the only way to protect yourself is to upgrade frequently. And upgrading doesn't help at all if the vendor hasn't yet bothered fixing that security hole that's been exploited in the wild for months. There are numerous examples of holes in IE which have been publicised and MS *still* didn't fix them until after they started getting exploited in the wild over a year later.
You can have the most secure software in the world, but that doesn't mean anything if you never bother to fix the few holes you have when they are discovered.
I don't personally believe its more secure. It may get patched quicker
Does rapid patching not count towards security? I would certainly prefer to run software with 100 undiscovered security holes than 1 or 2 holes that have been well publicised and left unpatched for months or years.
If they used it on a glass table would the ambient light or perhaps a light shone at the mouse be enough not to have to "hover" it above a surface?
:)
I think I'd prefer to carry a real mouse when I'm travelling rather than a glass table
Google is serving css and javascript from www.google.com for third-party sites such as blogs.
This is a non-issue if you tell your browser not to honor third party cookies.
Your point is nonsense. Please bitch slap yourself to see if you come to your senses.
No, really it isn't. If you use the highest alert level when they intelligence survices are saying they have no evidence to indicate a possibility of further attacks what the hell are you going to use when they have got evidence that there will be further attacks?
If the alert levels were really intended to keep the public informed then they would have been raised before people were arrested (i.e. when the intelligence services knew there was an impending attack) rather than after (when the threat should be significantly reduced since you just arrested a load of people).
In reality, the scare-o-meter is just another tool used to keep the public scared to push Labour's political agenda. The really sad thing is that this is exactly what the terrorists want.
Mayhaps the alert is because they know that they haven't caught everyone they suspect, eh?
In that case they have outright lied to the public since they've gone on record saying they have nothing to suggest an attack and the extra security is purely a precautionary measure to protect against anything they are currently unaware of.
Are we sure there were only 21 people involved? I mean dang sure?
My point is that "We think we got everyone but we can't be absolutely sure" doesn't constitute a warning level of "An attack is imminent". It's more like "An attack may be imminent"