The logic behind using safe forms of nuclear power has been clear for a long, long time. It's nice to see some greens finally start accepting what has been obvious to some of us for 30 or 40 years.
You can sell nuclear energy to me when you can answer the question "What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant"? Arrogant people think nuclear power is perfectly safe. Paranoid people think nuclear power will destroy the planet. Intelligent people see plant designs that are intrinsically safe, but want to know what we're going to do with the waste.
The ONLY solution the industry has right now is "bury it" (Yucca), "make it someone else's problem" (Arizona's) and "hope we're not around if it is a problem"(whoever is on the planet when Yucca breaks open, or is attacked, or a society 1,000 years from now, which can't read English, trundles into the mysterious cave and comes out with Magical Glowing Glass.)
Industry never changes. Their solutions to waste never change; it's always about hiding it or making it someone else's problem, because those are the cheapest and easiest.
We've got about 50,000 tons of nuclear waste sitting around in various stockpiles across the nation; more than any other hazardous waste, and if you want to get really scared- some of it is sitting in pools of water (because it heats itself constantly) in STEEL CONTAINERS.
The only solution on the table right now is Yucca; only problem is, we're just extending the parameters of "bury a hole" and "be long gone when it becomes a problem." The stuff in Yucca mountain will be around for 100,000 years. There are serious problems with making stuff last that long, making signs that people will understand even 1,000 years from now, geological changes over just a few thousand years, etc.
If you can get a heads up about someone robbing a house tomorrow night because they were stupid enough to post it on MySpace, why should that be considered protected?
Back in 1999 or 2000, Audi brought back the S-series of cars in the USA with a performance version of the A4 sedan- the S4. It was a twin-turbocharged V6, and it was faster than the BMW M3- the yardstick at the time. As with many turbocharged cars, manufacturers don't push the limits of these engines for a lot of different reasons; insurance categories, "gentleman's agreements" on speeds or horsepower levels, reliability, stepping on other model lines, room for "improvement" in next year's model, etc. There's plenty of room for a "tuner" to release revised "chips" (tables used for fuel, timing, and boost pressure levels stored in [E/EE/P]ROM memory) that increase horsepower levels. The S4 biturbo reliably makes slightly over 300HP with a chip (from 250); my '91 Audi makes almost 280 (from 217. And it has done so for about 100,000 miles with no problems. It was chipped at 110,000 miles, so yes, some chips are perfectly fine.)
Chip makers pushed the limits to offer the "best" chips- or did shoddy testing, rushing development, to be first-to-market. A few of the chips could overspin the turbos, and a couple people grenaded them.
Dealers were wise to "chips" and would look for them if a car with damaged turbos came in (and Audi implemented various controls to make ECU-swapping much more difficult, but they've all been circumvented.) US warranty law prohibits them from blaming a failure on an aftermarket component unless they can prove reasonably that the changed component caused the failure; a chip is a pretty damn clear-cut case. So these kids (and many of them were in fact kids- rich off internet dot-coms, or mummy and daddy) would borrow a friend's stock ECU, put it in the car, and have it towed to the dealer and say "gee, I dunno what happened."
Then the geniuses would go on Audiworld and brag about how they "tricked the dealer", complete with thumbs-up and grinning smiley icons, people congradulating them, etc. Someone at Audi Client Relations noticed (or was tipped off by people pissed at the scam), and ACR started surfing the forum regularly looking for fraud, and -completely- voiding the warranties of those they could find and in some cases going after owners for the cost of repairs, and postings in forums were cited as evidence. I don't remember if anyone was sued or not- I believe a few were.
That wasn't shocking; what was shocking was the reaction from the Audiworld users. They were absolutely livid that Audi Client Relations DARED to "snoop" on "their" forum.
It's not just the Internet- it has been my personal experience that few people take responsibility for their actions and many are infuriated when someone catches them doing something wrong, instead of being ashamed.
What is more likely, that the military let classified data walk out the door due to incompetence, or due to some clever X-files style conspiracy? After you answer that question, replace "the military" with "the department of motor vehicles" and ask yourself again. The answer would usually be the same in both cases.
Did you know Winston Churchill wasn't permitted to speak on the BBC (the State telecoms monopoly of the day ) between 1933 and 1939 because his views on Nazi Germany were considered too extreme?
Did you know that the Bush administration has barred climate researchers working for the government from speaking directly to the press? And that press releases, statements, or publicly released research on any climate matter must pass through the White House first, where they are essentially rewritten?
---Piltz worked under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Each year, he helped write a report to Congress called "Our Changing Planet." Piltz says he is responsible for editing the report and sending a review draft to the White House.
Asked what happens, Piltz says: "It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality." Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, "Phil Cooney." Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. "He's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House," he says.
Cooney, the former oil industry lobbyist, became chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Piltz says Cooney edited climate reports in his own hand. In one report, a line that said earth is undergoing rapid change becomes "may be undergoing change." "Uncertainty" becomes "significant remaining uncertainty." One line that says energy production contributes to warming was just crossed out.
"He was obviously passing it through a political screen," says Piltz. "He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout." ----
Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse.
First off, it's not professional to call peers "alarmists", especially if you want respect from them. Scientists are usually if anything very reserved about stating an opinion, so I'm highly skeptical of scientists willing to immediately and simply label a broad class of their peers as "alarmists". It might explain why these guys are getting their funding yanked and such. Second, just like "Darwinism" isn't a theory but proven fact- global warming, the fact that humans are causing it, and that we had better do something very quickly or we'll be fucked- is all widely accepted. We have decades of research and evidence, like glacial "records" going back more than long enough to show the planet has never seen anything like us humans, climate-wise. Or evidence that on September 11th, when the FAA grounded planes across the country, the weather patterns changed dramatically.
It's widely accepted that pretending we're not having a massive effect on our planet's climate is the exact opposite of "alarmism"- it's sticking your head in the sand and hoping the lion's gone away.
We have an administration which forbids government scientists from speaking with press, and requires all climate-related press releases to be routed directly through the whitehouse, where they are absolutely gutted? (really. 60 minutes got photocopies of the press releases and reports, after they'd been scribbled all over by white house staff.)
So in one corner, we have a bunch of disgruntled scientists claiming they're being marginalized for taking an unpopular view. And on the other hand, we have scientists being gagged and censored by the Bush administration for presenting valid evidence that the climate is seriously fucked up.
Yeah, I'm really going to loose sleep over the head-in-the-sand people getting to be "unpopular"...
Sorry, but I have to side with the IRS here. Everyone who isn't paying the taxes they're supposed to be deserves to be found out. People who cheat on their taxes just make the rest of us pay more.
I couldn't agree more. Corporations used to foot about 50% of the nation's tax bill. Want to guess where it is now? Hint: it's only one digit. The reason your taxes are "so high" is because your employer isn't paying any, if their accountant is worth their salt.
How do corporations avoid paying taxes?
Corruption. Let's not beat around the Bush here. Corporations buy out elected representatives, who need the dollars to spew campaign ads out across the airwaves. Tax "incentive" after "incentive" snuck into bills completely unrelated.
Job extortion. "If you don't give us a tax break, we'll take our X number of jobs elsewhere." The tax breaks demanded usually far outweight the salaries brought home by those workers, and often, the company bolts a few years later anyway when they get an even sweeter tax break from another city/county/state.
Book cooking. Suddenly, gosh golly gee, the company just isn't making much money. Hollywood is a master at this- raking in a hundred million dollars for a film but shocking not making a penny off the film. Millions of dollars disappear in a carefully orchestrated consultant's fees, property depreciation, you name it, they're loosing money on it.
"Independent contractors" whereever possible. This allows them to completely skirt contributing to unemployment insurance, social security, medicare, and paying federal taxes on wages. Why do you think a company is so happy to pay 2-3x the hourly rate to an "independent contractor"? Because they still make out like filthy bandits.
Off-shore incorporation/reincorporation. Lot of US companies aren't actually US companies. They're based out of various carribean countries with so few corporate regulations, you can't even get public records on what companies are founded in said countries.
That's just a small sampling.
And you know what -really- steams me? The small business owners that use their companies as tax shelters. They happily barter for the majority of the services they need, they happily take cash under the table, employ illegal immigrants (woe is them, US citizens are just SO expensive. Then why is 4% of the country unemployed?), register their cars and trucks with commercial plates so they pay less insurance and dramatically less taxes, write off all their mileage as business expenses...the list goes on.
Ever wonder why Bubba the Landscaper has a brand new truck every single year, a huge house, 3-4 kids, a big powerboat and a summer place on the shore? It isn't because he's an investment genius. It's because he's NOT PAYING TAXES ON MOST OF HIS INCOME.
Have we really slummed low enough that we are using cheesy 80's movies [imdb.com] as inspiration for national defense?
Real Genius was probably making fun of the Star Wars Defense project (and military-academia links, among other things.) The sad thing is that, yes, for 20-30 or more years, our military has been pumping billions into this prime example of the military-industrial-congressional complex.
The script had some jabs at Caltech (coordinates for the house were a mortuary near Caltech) but I suspect they had MIT equally in mind.
Salon.com has a featured article on where all our unwanted techno trash gets sent, and what is not being done enough to account for all the so-called 'recycling' we're doing
Looks like they've been recycling the grammar manuals over at Salon a little too much...
At first I thought it was my version of flash. But even after getting the latest, those videos are still too dark. To make matters worse, there does not seem to be an effort to sort this issue out. We need some common video controls on some these videos for sure.
If you're using Windows, you probably don't have the correct color profile selected for your display, or you're using the wrong gamma setting. Or you're using Linux, and don't have the gamma set properly (X does not default to a reasonable gamma- it defaults to 2.4 or something, when Windows is 2.2.) Note that you can't use "2.2" as a parameter- you have to give it something like "1.2" or similar. Google "linux gamma" etc.
Macs also sometimes default to goofy profiles, so check under "Color" in the Displays control panel.
I've never had a problem with video brightness on google video, but I am using a calibrated display on an OSX macbook (and Dell monitor- yes, both are calibrated.)
Just for comparison's sake, I borrowed some Kill-A-Watt meters and measured my gear.
Powerbook 1ghz 17": Idling, about 15w, full-bore 29W or so
Dual P3-850 2U rackmount: 150W
Dual 2Ghz G5 Xserve rackmount: 175W
Mac Mini 1.25ghz: Idling, 11W, full bore, about ~25W
Celeron (original celeron) 450mhz PC. No hard drives, one CPU fan, one PSU fan, floppy, 2 net cards, CDROM drive. 65W, idling (running a bsd-based firewall.)
The shocker was how low the Mini's power consumption was, and how high the celeron router. Also, the Xserve, Mini, and Dual P3 all had power factors of.99, whereas the celeron had a power factor of about.6...ie, not power-factor corrected.
Oh, and switchgear? Varied from 1W (yes, ONE watt!) to ELEVEN for an old 100BaseT switch. The lowest power consumers were newer hubs, second by a pair of gigabit switches I bought within the last year that were about 5-7W.
Spindler went without payment for almost six months because Apple didn't know how to move funds from California to Belgium.
This reminds me...Just FYI as a sort of public announcement for slashdotters since I hear on a fairly regular basis from techies who don't get paid timely, especially with startups: there are a lot of laws people don't know about regarding payroll. For example, in Massachusetts (and probably a number of other states) is not just a civil matter, it's a -criminal- one as well!
If you work in MA:
You must be paid bi-weekly if you're salaried, and you have to be paid within 6 days of that period. There are no acceptable excuses for delays, period, end of discussion- even if the Treasurer is stricken with some mystery disease and can't write checks, that's the company's problem- not yours.
If you are terminated, fired, laid off, down-sized, whatevered- you MUST BE PAID WITHIN THE FOLLOWING DAY FOR ANY AND ALL WAGES. Your employer cannot make excuses about deducting wages for expenses, petty cash you borrowed, calculating taxes, or whatever; that's all stuff they should have done before letting you go. No excuses about "oh, we only cut checks on tuesdays" or "we only cut payroll checks from our _____ location" - well then, they should have picked tuesday to let you go, and had the check sent ahead. Terminations are rarely spur of the moment "gee, I think I'll fire Bob in 30 minutes." They're decisions made over days, not hours or minutes.
Violating wage-related laws is a CRIMINAL matter and the CEO, CFO, VP's, etc can be criminally charged if the DA's office is interested enough (ie, several of you are locked out, for example, with back-wages.)
You can ask the DA's office to pursue the matter, OR pursue it privately- your choice (ie, you're not at the whim of a DA who can't be bothered.)
Your employer is liable for TREBLE DAMAGES PLUS LEGAL EXPENSES (ie, triple whatever the amount is in question.) Not that you should be taking advantage of employers for the tiniest infraction, but this is a great way to have a sweeter taste in your mouth if you've been given the boot.
You also might be interested to know that quite a number of jobs are excluded from "independent contractor status", specifically because employers use them to get around having to pay social security taxes, benefits, etc. These MA laws are on top of the IRS rules limiting what employees can be considered independent contractors
don't hold your breath....
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Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 4, Interesting
You know, I wasn't really planning to replace my dual G5 powermac for quite some time, but this might be enough to motivate me to put it up on ebay and get an intel machine when they come out.
Don't hold your breath. Adobe is busy digging itself out of the huge mess that is "we never got off Codewarrior", and won't go Universal-Binary until the next release. Microsoft isn't in quite as bad a position, but is desperate to get people to upgrade to verion N+1 in office, so don't count on a free UB version there.
Mark my words: you won't see a pro intel tower until Adobe (and possibly MS) are Universal Binary.
While the "cottage industry" is mostly embracing UB and virtually everything I use has been UB for at least one or two minor revision numbers- the big boys are dragging their feet. Even Diskwarrior (from the vaporware kings, Alsoft- DiskExpress for OSX anyone?) isn't UB yet.
I'm not exactly thrilled about Bootcamp. Why? 1)I don't want to dedicate 20-30GB to a disk partition for a host OS I'm not going to use except for gaming and 1-2 Windows-only apps I need. I much prefer an emulator-based solution like Qemu, or WINE aka "darwine". I'm also not thrilled because this just largely removed the "necessity" fire from under the pants of darwine and Qemu developers, and both projects desperately need more work.
Unfortunately, Qemu/Q is buggy enough that Windows Update doesn't run on an installed guest OS and it doesn't import VPC7 systems cleanly like it claims. Darwine can't handle anything more complex than Minesweeper; half the installers I try don't run, and what does install never works. One error I saw in the WINE log said "JPEG support not builtin". Just loooovely.
Oh yeah- and if you use Mono on OSX, there's an intel-only build, but it's missing a lot of standard important libraries, and the devs have refused to release a proper build. Oh yeah- and setting up a system to actually build mono is a goddamn pain and two thirds.
Not every company will (without hesitation) own up to its mistakes and be generous enough to offer repairs.
You mean like when "Dual USB" iBooks started dying, getting new motherboards almost every month, how Apple just LEAP up and took care of the problem?
Apple certainly did not "take care of it without hesitation"; they wouldn't admit any faults (just kept "servicing" the units until they went out of warranty- often times breaking unrelated components, loosing computers altogether, taking weeks to do the repairs, somehow not doing the repair at all, etc.) and only after (among other things) a petition with 3800 signatures did Apple extend the warranty, but not for all the models affected nor all the problems people are having. In short- Apple's reaction was purely token.
Ahhh, the great "Powerbook 5300's caught on fire!" myth.
A unit (ONE, 1, Uno) AT APPLE caught fire because the BATTERY MANUFACTURER (Hi Sony!) LIED about the specs of the Lithium Ion battery. ~1000 units had shipped to resellers and ~100 made it to customers, but Apple was able to get them ALL back. None of them caught fire except the lab unit.
In short: 1)Apple's supplier was at fault, not Apple. 2)Apple caught the problem and acted immediately instead of waiting for consumers to discover the problem.
Seems like they did everything right, chief. Next time, troll harder.
Listen, we can put an evil Devil's face on the browser, along with flashing neon lights and big signs that say "WARNING: This site is suspicious", and a gloved hand that comes out of the monitor and slaps the user silly, and you know what? People will still fall for these scams!
From the article summary:
Some users think that favicons and lock icons in HTML are more important indicators.
As some other posters pointed out, "these were above average users, we're doomed". Not exactly the world's best parallel- but if "above average" users set themselves on fire using your company's fireplace, would you say, "MAN! We have REALLY stupid users"? Maybe your manual gives improper instructions. Maybe you have a defect. If your "above average users" are fooled/tricked, then the operating system/email client/browser is failing, not the user.
Also, want to take a guess why they think that "lock icon" is so important? Because for years they've been told by "tooltips", every "consumer reporter", etc that they should look for it, "when shopping online". It's not the user's fault that they've been given information that was at best incomplete; nobody told them "the lock just means your connection to the other computer can't be decoded."
Compound this with all the problems in Outlook, IE, Windows...well...the deck is rather stacked against them. Not to mention, it used to be a lot tougher to get an SSL cert...
Listen, we can put an evil Devil's face on the browser, along with flashing neon lights and big signs that say "WARNING: This site is suspicious", and a gloved hand that comes out of the monitor and slaps the user silly, and you know what? People will still fall for these scams!
From the article summary:
Some users think that favicons and lock icons in HTML are more important indicators.
Want to take a guess why they think that "lock icon" is so important? Because for years they've been told by "tooltips", every "consumer reporter", etc that they should look for it, "when shopping online". It's not the user's fault that they've been given information that was at best incomplete; nobody told them "the lock just means your connection to the other computer can't be decoded."
Compound this with all the problems in Outlook, IE, Windows...well...the deck is rather stacked against them. Not to mention, it used to be a lot tougher to get an SSL cert...
As some other posters pointed out, "these were above average users, we're doomed". If your "above average users" are fooled/tricked, then the operating system/email client/browser is failing, not the user.
It is being reported on the Vonage Forums that last month when Loren Veltkamp's Chanhassen, Minnesota home caught on fire, he immediately called 9-1-1 using Vonage. Unfortunately, Vonage put him on hold,
Next at 6: Slashdot links to Vonage-forum, forum webserver puts thousands on hold and THEN catches fire.
PS:Houses usually don't "catch" fire, like they're standing around and fire lands on them out of the blue. How'd the guy's house actually catch fire? Why didn't he have an extinguisher? Why didn't he hang up the phone and DIAL AGAIN?
PPS:The above is half serious and half spoofing the typical "apologist" line.
who achieved the phenomenon with a budget of tins cans, string and glue whilst Nasa failed with a team of hundreds and a 9 figure budget.
Wow. I don't know where to begin. Oh, I know- how about the fact that NASA DID NOT FAIL(article is from 2004, by the way- and they hit Mach 10).
before the £1m engine eventually crashes into the ground
A million British Pounds is US$1.7 million, which would put it firmly in the "seven figures" realm for JUST THE ENGINE. So I would think it would be reasonable to assume that eight figures ($10M) have been spent on the project in total.
Lastly- the Aussies benefited quite a bit from research NASA has made over the last couple of DECADES...
This reminds me of a method on reporting mailing list outages I devised back in 2001 or so.
I told people we were switching to new software (Mailman)- and that if they got an error message or similar, to flip a quarter X times (I forget how many) and ONLY email me if they got all heads. I didn't want to get a couple dozen reports of the same problem, and I figured that if there were any problems, they'd affect a large set of the 1000+ users of the list.
It worked brilliantly.
iPods don't decode "in cpu", they have an ASIC
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DRM Reduces Battery Life
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· Score: 2, Informative
They do more advanced processing, and thus require more CPU power to decode.
The iPod doesn't use a CPU to decode anything it plays; it's all done by an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) which handles the mp3, AAC, WAV, Apple-lossless, etc decompression.
I suspect that the power used to decode equal-bitrate MP3 and AAC files is imperceptible...
...Or not studying the history books enough. The US Armed forces have an unfortunate history with animals doing the dirty work, at least with bats carrying incendiary bombs during WWII.
Supposedly during one of the tests, someone got the bright idea to take a picture of the sleeping bats before carting them out to the test area (asleep and equipped with their little napalm canisters.) They all woke up with the flash. And, as they say, Hilarity Ensued.
We (humans) have never had good luck at this sort of thing. The Russians tried it with dogs carrying satchel charges; they trained the dogs by feeding them underneath tanks. Well, the only problem was that they used Russian tanks to train 'em, not German tanks...and apparently dogs are very good at distinguishing between Russian and German tanks.
. . . when a group of people lets all of their scientific achievements throughout history become overshadowed by religious fundamentalism.
Achievements by muslims have been overshadowed by religious fundamentalism for centuries. No- really. Look at the list of innovations. The Muslim world goes completely dead after a certain mile-marker in the history books.
Is it our fault to realize it and point it out? Or is it their fault for not recognizing the problems with their society and doing something to correct it?
We keep hearing about how Muslims aren't a bunch of heathen, god-crazed warriors. How they're peace-loving, rich in culture, etc. Yet, we keep seeing time and time again examples of a violent, xenophobic society completely out of control and dedicated to nothing but the destruction or domination of all other societies and cultures...and no other religion or society is as quick to rush to violence or as intense when it does so.
When was the last time you saw a Unitarian Universalist blow themselves up in a market square?
Alternatively you can just switch distributions or upgrade your networking from appletalk (a 1980s protocol, since you were talking about being 10-years backwards).
Secure password authentication in AFP was introduced at least 10 years ago. We're talking about AppleSHARE here, Mr. Genius. A protocol fully maintained and used extensively on current hardware. I'll switch to SMB when it offers the same level of performance as AFP (it doesn't, not even close, in raw transfer speed or directory operations) and the same filename compatibility.
Maybe you and any other users of appletalk on unsecure networks ought to band together and fix it.
So let's get this straight.
Linux software authors tell us how wonderful Linux is, how great "open source" is. We won't be locked into anything, blah blah.
We switch over. Things are good; it's free, it's fast, it's mostly stable and somewhat bug-free. Until we discover problems.
We report the problems- even filing those nice bug reports in Bugzilla.
We notice nobody's giving our problems any attention (over the course of years) and we complain about the delay.
We get told "it's a matter of principle" and to go fuc...sorry, I mean...fix it ourselves.
Like many a faithful geek, I was led down the path of "enlightenment" offered. I helped give open-source software market share. I helped sell open-source to my boss, and my boss's boss. I redirected my career to support open-source software.
And what do I get in return? "Fix it yourself, you dumb user."
To think I still get asked why I'm not running Linux on my Powerbook. Because IT JUST WORKS; no politics, no "nobody cares about that bug so it won't be fixed". Because I don't have to deal with arrogant blowhard grad students telling me to fix software myself. I have neither the time, ability, knowledge nor inclination necessary to run around fixing complex software. 99.999% of the rest of the world doesn't either. Sad reality of life is that there is an extremely small segment of the population of linux users that have even the slightest qualifications to know how to go about fixing bugs or adding features.
Like most academics, you have zero comprehension of what matters in the real world. Joe Sixpack doesn't go into Firefox and add features. Jane Officeuser doesn't fix GnuTLS so it works with netatalk. Users don't give a damn about theoretical lawsuit possiblities. They don't give a shit about the finer points of licensing. Nothing impresses a CIO or a Director of IT less than "oh, we have to transmit passwords in clear-text because the license for a system library isn't compatible with the license for the server software."
Oh, and if you believe the whole Debian kool-aide line about "we have to protect this because we'd ALL BE SUED", I have two bridges in NY I'd just LOVE to sell you. PS: It says "gullible sheep" on the ceiling.
Anybody with a Macintosh and brains. AFP outperforms SMB by a factor of about 5:1 on directory operations, and 1.5:1 on raw file transfer performance. SMB also has very half-assed filename support.
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You can sell nuclear energy to me when you can answer the question "What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant"? Arrogant people think nuclear power is perfectly safe. Paranoid people think nuclear power will destroy the planet. Intelligent people see plant designs that are intrinsically safe, but want to know what we're going to do with the waste.
The ONLY solution the industry has right now is "bury it" (Yucca), "make it someone else's problem" (Arizona's) and "hope we're not around if it is a problem"(whoever is on the planet when Yucca breaks open, or is attacked, or a society 1,000 years from now, which can't read English, trundles into the mysterious cave and comes out with Magical Glowing Glass.)
Industry never changes. Their solutions to waste never change; it's always about hiding it or making it someone else's problem, because those are the cheapest and easiest.
We've got about 50,000 tons of nuclear waste sitting around in various stockpiles across the nation; more than any other hazardous waste, and if you want to get really scared- some of it is sitting in pools of water (because it heats itself constantly) in STEEL CONTAINERS.
The only solution on the table right now is Yucca; only problem is, we're just extending the parameters of "bury a hole" and "be long gone when it becomes a problem." The stuff in Yucca mountain will be around for 100,000 years. There are serious problems with making stuff last that long, making signs that people will understand even 1,000 years from now, geological changes over just a few thousand years, etc.
Back in 1999 or 2000, Audi brought back the S-series of cars in the USA with a performance version of the A4 sedan- the S4. It was a twin-turbocharged V6, and it was faster than the BMW M3- the yardstick at the time. As with many turbocharged cars, manufacturers don't push the limits of these engines for a lot of different reasons; insurance categories, "gentleman's agreements" on speeds or horsepower levels, reliability, stepping on other model lines, room for "improvement" in next year's model, etc. There's plenty of room for a "tuner" to release revised "chips" (tables used for fuel, timing, and boost pressure levels stored in [E/EE/P]ROM memory) that increase horsepower levels. The S4 biturbo reliably makes slightly over 300HP with a chip (from 250); my '91 Audi makes almost 280 (from 217. And it has done so for about 100,000 miles with no problems. It was chipped at 110,000 miles, so yes, some chips are perfectly fine.)
Chip makers pushed the limits to offer the "best" chips- or did shoddy testing, rushing development, to be first-to-market. A few of the chips could overspin the turbos, and a couple people grenaded them.
Dealers were wise to "chips" and would look for them if a car with damaged turbos came in (and Audi implemented various controls to make ECU-swapping much more difficult, but they've all been circumvented.) US warranty law prohibits them from blaming a failure on an aftermarket component unless they can prove reasonably that the changed component caused the failure; a chip is a pretty damn clear-cut case. So these kids (and many of them were in fact kids- rich off internet dot-coms, or mummy and daddy) would borrow a friend's stock ECU, put it in the car, and have it towed to the dealer and say "gee, I dunno what happened."
Then the geniuses would go on Audiworld and brag about how they "tricked the dealer", complete with thumbs-up and grinning smiley icons, people congradulating them, etc. Someone at Audi Client Relations noticed (or was tipped off by people pissed at the scam), and ACR started surfing the forum regularly looking for fraud, and -completely- voiding the warranties of those they could find and in some cases going after owners for the cost of repairs, and postings in forums were cited as evidence. I don't remember if anyone was sued or not- I believe a few were.
That wasn't shocking; what was shocking was the reaction from the Audiworld users. They were absolutely livid that Audi Client Relations DARED to "snoop" on "their" forum.
It's not just the Internet- it has been my personal experience that few people take responsibility for their actions and many are infuriated when someone catches them doing something wrong, instead of being ashamed.
Or so they want you to think! Mwuahahaha.
Time to start metamoderating.
Did you know that the Bush administration has barred climate researchers working for the government from speaking directly to the press? And that press releases, statements, or publicly released research on any climate matter must pass through the White House first, where they are essentially rewritten?
Maybe you should tune into 60 minutes more often.
---Piltz worked under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Each year, he helped write a report to Congress called "Our Changing Planet." Piltz says he is responsible for editing the report and sending a review draft to the White House.
Asked what happens, Piltz says: "It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality." Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, "Phil Cooney." Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. "He's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House," he says.
Cooney, the former oil industry lobbyist, became chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Piltz says Cooney edited climate reports in his own hand. In one report, a line that said earth is undergoing rapid change becomes "may be undergoing change." "Uncertainty" becomes "significant remaining uncertainty." One line that says energy production contributes to warming was just crossed out.
"He was obviously passing it through a political screen," says Piltz. "He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout." ----
First off, it's not professional to call peers "alarmists", especially if you want respect from them. Scientists are usually if anything very reserved about stating an opinion, so I'm highly skeptical of scientists willing to immediately and simply label a broad class of their peers as "alarmists". It might explain why these guys are getting their funding yanked and such. Second, just like "Darwinism" isn't a theory but proven fact- global warming, the fact that humans are causing it, and that we had better do something very quickly or we'll be fucked- is all widely accepted. We have decades of research and evidence, like glacial "records" going back more than long enough to show the planet has never seen anything like us humans, climate-wise. Or evidence that on September 11th, when the FAA grounded planes across the country, the weather patterns changed dramatically.
It's widely accepted that pretending we're not having a massive effect on our planet's climate is the exact opposite of "alarmism"- it's sticking your head in the sand and hoping the lion's gone away.
We have an administration which forbids government scientists from speaking with press, and requires all climate-related press releases to be routed directly through the whitehouse, where they are absolutely gutted? (really. 60 minutes got photocopies of the press releases and reports, after they'd been scribbled all over by white house staff.)
So in one corner, we have a bunch of disgruntled scientists claiming they're being marginalized for taking an unpopular view. And on the other hand, we have scientists being gagged and censored by the Bush administration for presenting valid evidence that the climate is seriously fucked up.
Yeah, I'm really going to loose sleep over the head-in-the-sand people getting to be "unpopular"...
I couldn't agree more. Corporations used to foot about 50% of the nation's tax bill. Want to guess where it is now? Hint: it's only one digit. The reason your taxes are "so high" is because your employer isn't paying any, if their accountant is worth their salt.
How do corporations avoid paying taxes?
That's just a small sampling.
And you know what -really- steams me? The small business owners that use their companies as tax shelters. They happily barter for the majority of the services they need, they happily take cash under the table, employ illegal immigrants (woe is them, US citizens are just SO expensive. Then why is 4% of the country unemployed?), register their cars and trucks with commercial plates so they pay less insurance and dramatically less taxes, write off all their mileage as business expenses...the list goes on.
Ever wonder why Bubba the Landscaper has a brand new truck every single year, a huge house, 3-4 kids, a big powerboat and a summer place on the shore? It isn't because he's an investment genius. It's because he's NOT PAYING TAXES ON MOST OF HIS INCOME.
Real Genius was probably making fun of the Star Wars Defense project (and military-academia links, among other things.) The sad thing is that, yes, for 20-30 or more years, our military has been pumping billions into this prime example of the military-industrial-congressional complex.
The script had some jabs at Caltech (coordinates for the house were a mortuary near Caltech) but I suspect they had MIT equally in mind.
Looks like they've been recycling the grammar manuals over at Salon a little too much...
If you're using Windows, you probably don't have the correct color profile selected for your display, or you're using the wrong gamma setting. Or you're using Linux, and don't have the gamma set properly (X does not default to a reasonable gamma- it defaults to 2.4 or something, when Windows is 2.2.) Note that you can't use "2.2" as a parameter- you have to give it something like "1.2" or similar. Google "linux gamma" etc.
Macs also sometimes default to goofy profiles, so check under "Color" in the Displays control panel.
I've never had a problem with video brightness on google video, but I am using a calibrated display on an OSX macbook (and Dell monitor- yes, both are calibrated.)
Just for comparison's sake, I borrowed some Kill-A-Watt meters and measured my gear.
The shocker was how low the Mini's power consumption was, and how high the celeron router. Also, the Xserve, Mini, and Dual P3 all had power factors of .99, whereas the celeron had a power factor of about .6...ie, not power-factor corrected.
Oh, and switchgear? Varied from 1W (yes, ONE watt!) to ELEVEN for an old 100BaseT switch. The lowest power consumers were newer hubs, second by a pair of gigabit switches I bought within the last year that were about 5-7W.
This reminds me...Just FYI as a sort of public announcement for slashdotters since I hear on a fairly regular basis from techies who don't get paid timely, especially with startups: there are a lot of laws people don't know about regarding payroll. For example, in Massachusetts (and probably a number of other states) is not just a civil matter, it's a -criminal- one as well!
If you work in MA:
IANAL, blah blah, might be wrong about some points, blah blah. Full details on the Massachusetts Unfair Wage Payment Act.
You also might be interested to know that quite a number of jobs are excluded from "independent contractor status", specifically because employers use them to get around having to pay social security taxes, benefits, etc. These MA laws are on top of the IRS rules limiting what employees can be considered independent contractors
Don't hold your breath. Adobe is busy digging itself out of the huge mess that is "we never got off Codewarrior", and won't go Universal-Binary until the next release. Microsoft isn't in quite as bad a position, but is desperate to get people to upgrade to verion N+1 in office, so don't count on a free UB version there.
Mark my words: you won't see a pro intel tower until Adobe (and possibly MS) are Universal Binary.
While the "cottage industry" is mostly embracing UB and virtually everything I use has been UB for at least one or two minor revision numbers- the big boys are dragging their feet. Even Diskwarrior (from the vaporware kings, Alsoft- DiskExpress for OSX anyone?) isn't UB yet.
I'm not exactly thrilled about Bootcamp. Why? 1)I don't want to dedicate 20-30GB to a disk partition for a host OS I'm not going to use except for gaming and 1-2 Windows-only apps I need. I much prefer an emulator-based solution like Qemu, or WINE aka "darwine". I'm also not thrilled because this just largely removed the "necessity" fire from under the pants of darwine and Qemu developers, and both projects desperately need more work.
Unfortunately, Qemu/Q is buggy enough that Windows Update doesn't run on an installed guest OS and it doesn't import VPC7 systems cleanly like it claims. Darwine can't handle anything more complex than Minesweeper; half the installers I try don't run, and what does install never works. One error I saw in the WINE log said "JPEG support not builtin". Just loooovely.
Oh yeah- and if you use Mono on OSX, there's an intel-only build, but it's missing a lot of standard important libraries, and the devs have refused to release a proper build. Oh yeah- and setting up a system to actually build mono is a goddamn pain and two thirds.
You mean like when "Dual USB" iBooks started dying, getting new motherboards almost every month, how Apple just LEAP up and took care of the problem?
Apple certainly did not "take care of it without hesitation"; they wouldn't admit any faults (just kept "servicing" the units until they went out of warranty- often times breaking unrelated components, loosing computers altogether, taking weeks to do the repairs, somehow not doing the repair at all, etc.) and only after (among other things) a petition with 3800 signatures did Apple extend the warranty, but not for all the models affected nor all the problems people are having. In short- Apple's reaction was purely token.
Nice revisionism there, chief.
A unit (ONE, 1, Uno) AT APPLE caught fire because the BATTERY MANUFACTURER (Hi Sony!) LIED about the specs of the Lithium Ion battery. ~1000 units had shipped to resellers and ~100 made it to customers, but Apple was able to get them ALL back. None of them caught fire except the lab unit.
http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/tidbits-295.htm l#lnk2
In short: 1)Apple's supplier was at fault, not Apple. 2)Apple caught the problem and acted immediately instead of waiting for consumers to discover the problem.
Seems like they did everything right, chief. Next time, troll harder.
Listen, we can put an evil Devil's face on the browser, along with flashing neon lights and big signs that say "WARNING: This site is suspicious", and a gloved hand that comes out of the monitor and slaps the user silly, and you know what? People will still fall for these scams!
From the article summary: Some users think that favicons and lock icons in HTML are more important indicators.
As some other posters pointed out, "these were above average users, we're doomed". Not exactly the world's best parallel- but if "above average" users set themselves on fire using your company's fireplace, would you say, "MAN! We have REALLY stupid users"? Maybe your manual gives improper instructions. Maybe you have a defect. If your "above average users" are fooled/tricked, then the operating system/email client/browser is failing, not the user.
Also, want to take a guess why they think that "lock icon" is so important? Because for years they've been told by "tooltips", every "consumer reporter", etc that they should look for it, "when shopping online". It's not the user's fault that they've been given information that was at best incomplete; nobody told them "the lock just means your connection to the other computer can't be decoded."
Compound this with all the problems in Outlook, IE, Windows...well...the deck is rather stacked against them. Not to mention, it used to be a lot tougher to get an SSL cert...
Listen, we can put an evil Devil's face on the browser, along with flashing neon lights and big signs that say "WARNING: This site is suspicious", and a gloved hand that comes out of the monitor and slaps the user silly, and you know what? People will still fall for these scams!
From the article summary: Some users think that favicons and lock icons in HTML are more important indicators.
Want to take a guess why they think that "lock icon" is so important? Because for years they've been told by "tooltips", every "consumer reporter", etc that they should look for it, "when shopping online". It's not the user's fault that they've been given information that was at best incomplete; nobody told them "the lock just means your connection to the other computer can't be decoded."
Compound this with all the problems in Outlook, IE, Windows...well...the deck is rather stacked against them. Not to mention, it used to be a lot tougher to get an SSL cert...
As some other posters pointed out, "these were above average users, we're doomed". If your "above average users" are fooled/tricked, then the operating system/email client/browser is failing, not the user.
It is being reported on the Vonage Forums that last month when Loren Veltkamp's Chanhassen, Minnesota home caught on fire, he immediately called 9-1-1 using Vonage. Unfortunately, Vonage put him on hold,
Next at 6: Slashdot links to Vonage-forum, forum webserver puts thousands on hold and THEN catches fire.
PS:Houses usually don't "catch" fire, like they're standing around and fire lands on them out of the blue. How'd the guy's house actually catch fire? Why didn't he have an extinguisher? Why didn't he hang up the phone and DIAL AGAIN?
PPS:The above is half serious and half spoofing the typical "apologist" line.
Wow. I don't know where to begin. Oh, I know- how about the fact that NASA DID NOT FAIL(article is from 2004, by the way- and they hit Mach 10).
before the £1m engine eventually crashes into the ground
A million British Pounds is US$1.7 million, which would put it firmly in the "seven figures" realm for JUST THE ENGINE. So I would think it would be reasonable to assume that eight figures ($10M) have been spent on the project in total.
Lastly- the Aussies benefited quite a bit from research NASA has made over the last couple of DECADES...
I told people we were switching to new software (Mailman)- and that if they got an error message or similar, to flip a quarter X times (I forget how many) and ONLY email me if they got all heads. I didn't want to get a couple dozen reports of the same problem, and I figured that if there were any problems, they'd affect a large set of the 1000+ users of the list.
It worked brilliantly.
The iPod doesn't use a CPU to decode anything it plays; it's all done by an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) which handles the mp3, AAC, WAV, Apple-lossless, etc decompression.
I suspect that the power used to decode equal-bitrate MP3 and AAC files is imperceptible...
Supposedly during one of the tests, someone got the bright idea to take a picture of the sleeping bats before carting them out to the test area (asleep and equipped with their little napalm canisters.) They all woke up with the flash. And, as they say, Hilarity Ensued.
We (humans) have never had good luck at this sort of thing. The Russians tried it with dogs carrying satchel charges; they trained the dogs by feeding them underneath tanks. Well, the only problem was that they used Russian tanks to train 'em, not German tanks...and apparently dogs are very good at distinguishing between Russian and German tanks.
And again, Hilarity Ensued.
Achievements by muslims have been overshadowed by religious fundamentalism for centuries. No- really. Look at the list of innovations. The Muslim world goes completely dead after a certain mile-marker in the history books.
Is it our fault to realize it and point it out? Or is it their fault for not recognizing the problems with their society and doing something to correct it?
We keep hearing about how Muslims aren't a bunch of heathen, god-crazed warriors. How they're peace-loving, rich in culture, etc. Yet, we keep seeing time and time again examples of a violent, xenophobic society completely out of control and dedicated to nothing but the destruction or domination of all other societies and cultures...and no other religion or society is as quick to rush to violence or as intense when it does so.
When was the last time you saw a Unitarian Universalist blow themselves up in a market square?
Secure password authentication in AFP was introduced at least 10 years ago. We're talking about AppleSHARE here, Mr. Genius. A protocol fully maintained and used extensively on current hardware. I'll switch to SMB when it offers the same level of performance as AFP (it doesn't, not even close, in raw transfer speed or directory operations) and the same filename compatibility.
Maybe you and any other users of appletalk on unsecure networks ought to band together and fix it.
So let's get this straight.
Like many a faithful geek, I was led down the path of "enlightenment" offered. I helped give open-source software market share. I helped sell open-source to my boss, and my boss's boss. I redirected my career to support open-source software.
And what do I get in return? "Fix it yourself, you dumb user."
To think I still get asked why I'm not running Linux on my Powerbook. Because IT JUST WORKS; no politics, no "nobody cares about that bug so it won't be fixed". Because I don't have to deal with arrogant blowhard grad students telling me to fix software myself. I have neither the time, ability, knowledge nor inclination necessary to run around fixing complex software. 99.999% of the rest of the world doesn't either. Sad reality of life is that there is an extremely small segment of the population of linux users that have even the slightest qualifications to know how to go about fixing bugs or adding features.
Like most academics, you have zero comprehension of what matters in the real world. Joe Sixpack doesn't go into Firefox and add features. Jane Officeuser doesn't fix GnuTLS so it works with netatalk. Users don't give a damn about theoretical lawsuit possiblities. They don't give a shit about the finer points of licensing. Nothing impresses a CIO or a Director of IT less than "oh, we have to transmit passwords in clear-text because the license for a system library isn't compatible with the license for the server software."
Oh, and if you believe the whole Debian kool-aide line about "we have to protect this because we'd ALL BE SUED", I have two bridges in NY I'd just LOVE to sell you. PS: It says "gullible sheep" on the ceiling.
Anybody with a Macintosh and brains. AFP outperforms SMB by a factor of about 5:1 on directory operations, and 1.5:1 on raw file transfer performance. SMB also has very half-assed filename support.