Suppose I'm Google's ISP. I notice you start throttling traffic to Google. A have a very simple solution. No more peering for you. You deal with angry customers that can't get to Google.
Nothing will come of this. It's all bullshit "what ifs". There's no such thing as a "good new law".
The big players are going to do just fine whatever pay arrangement is set up. That's because they're big, and can inflict pain on anyone who squeezes them too hard. Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. , will not suffer much under this new regime.
Who will suffer? Small, noisy, annoying content providers. Slashdot, for example. Without Net Neutrality, all this piss and vinegar (and truth) that gets spewed at Micro$oft and the rest of the computer and IT industry become available for throttling. Not by overt censorship, oh no! "But bandwidth is limited, you see, and Slashdot doesn't really serve a wide segment of the public, and we've had complaints from some of our large paying clients, and, well, those people are hardly RESPECTABLE. Slashdot is still available, of course, but it takes 5 minutes to load each page, since we've de-emphasized its priority. Do you know how many people are in line to vote for the next America's Idol? Now there something that is serving a broad demographic."
The Net has served as the samizdat of the new soviet/industrial States of America. If we give the big boys entire control of our digital newsprint, we little fish will be silenced.
Net Neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine of the digital era. If we lose it, we've lost just about everything.
The original wolves and boars also came from somewhere. And, they're continuing to come from somehwere. This would constitute a continuing stream of relatively undamaged DNA going into the animal gene pool to dilute the damaged stuff. And, conversely, a steady stream of damaged DNA migrating back out to the outside world. We may see those giant Ant Overlords yet!
Chernobyl doesn't exist on an Island out in the Pacific. Thus, what is happening there cannot be assumed to be definitive about what happens to animals exposed to high continuous doses of radiation...
Sure, they offer you 10,000 compromised PC for $25, but they probably offer those same 10,000 PCs to every other schmuck with $25 bucks. And all of them probably have CSW, Smitfraud, VX2 and Virtumunde up the wazoo!
So they probably aren't good for too much, unless you're a good enough hacker to disable all the other malware living on them, and then defend them from all the other hackers who are shooting at the same target.
There used to be consensus that the earth was flat.
Actually, there has almost never been such a consensus in recorded history. An Egyptian mathematician first calculated the length of the Equator pretty accurately well before the birth of Christ. Used the diffennce in the arc of the sun between Cairo and Alexandria to do it. Pat Robertson does not constitute a consensus.
Disney, like Apple in the mid-nineties, has lost its way. For the past 30 years, it's not really had any significant direction, and has concentrated largely on media takeovers and lobbying for copyright extentions to protect Mickey Mouse, arguably a brand that has fizzled out anyway over the last decade. There's still a lot of good coming out of it, clearly there are good people in parts that are trying to find good things and pump Disney money into them, whether it's Pixar or Miramax (Pulp Fiction.) While I'm not necessarily going to argue that Jobs or Lasseter are the right people for the job, it certainly needs a fresh approach, and Jobs and Lasseter may, ultimately, be the right people to do that.
This is a good summing up, and I hope you're right. Disney is indeed lost. I've got two kids, one 7 and one 9 years old, prime Disney fodder. I won't let them watch any Disney shit after Beauty and the Beast (and I shut that off before the needlessly savage ending). Disney movies have completely turned into a attention-deficit inducers--wham! bam! flash! repeat--with a constant thread of product and lifestyle commercialism. John Lasseter is an amazing guy, and I hope he gets a chance to turn Disney around, but as someone else said, Disney is currently like a supertanker when it comes to maneuvering.
Pixar has been a beam of light in the current swamp of brain-dead pap that passes for children's entertainment. Maybe this buyout will turn into a new new dawn for Disney, but I'm afraid it's more likely to be a twilight for Pixar. Maybe we can get a couple of decent movies out of them before the rot sets in permanently, but I don't hold out much hope for the long term.
And it obviously doesn't matter if a keylogger running in userspace
How did the keylogger start running in userspace? How did it install? If it is a malicious part of a administor-authorized program, someone is swiftly going to get in trouble for distributing malware. I don't think you can run an unauthorized executable in userspace, except maybe for Dashboard Widgets, and they don't get access to ordinary data files.
I may be messing up the technical terms, but I don't think you can have a program running on OSX that wasn't installed by an administrator. Aside from the Kazaa-type phenomena, where massive malware is installed as a stated condition of a "free" installation of desired software, there isn't any way to get that keylogger there in the first place. And a keylogger is clearly illegal, so Kazaa-type tricks will quickly generate visits from the police for the instigators. There's probably a window of risk there, but it's a small window, high up, and throwing things at it may result in a shower of hot oil.
Clueless users will get hit by crap all the time regardless of the platform. Clued users will not, again regardless of the platform.
So far, clueless Mac users on OS9 and OSX have been just fine for years and years. I've never seen a Mac problem in my little computer shop that was caused by malware, unless you count Norton Utilities as malware.
I don't get hit running my several shop Windows PCs (yet, anyway). But I have to have use antivirus, a NAT Firewall on my router, MicroSoft Antispyware for 2000 and XP, and take care where I browse with the machines.
I take my home Mac anywhere, and didn't even have a router between it and the internet until I installed a wireless network (I use WEP on it--not invulnerable, but pretty effective). I often use it to check out email viruses and investigate malicious websites to figure out how my customer Windows boxen are getting infected. Four years old, zero problems with malware.
The WMF problem is a legacy file format. Let's not give MS a free pass on this, but seriously. It's like the zlib problem we had across distributions, a couple years back.
There are some other gross inaccuracies claimed by 'experts' and 'analysts' in this piece. "It is still built on the same legacy code, it is still written without adhering to secure coding practices, it is still thrown to the masses without adequate security testing." That's an assertion without supporting evidence. It doesn't have a factual basis.
Am I the only person who noticed this guy cites a "legacy" file format as a security problem, and in the next paragraph disses the expert who cite problems with Microsoft's reliance on legacy code?
I didn't realize file format vulnerabilities weren't code problems. Apparently, this means the.wmf exploit can be used to hack into Mac and Linux boxen, right?
With the cost of replacing those batteries totaling in the THOUSANDS every 7 years, the lackluster engine performance, the lack of BIG savings on petrol costs, and the expensive price tag of these things, I just don't see much justification for buying a hybrid right now.
Can these $10,000 batteries suddenly become worthless once they're old? What makes them so expensive--is there a huge amount of hand labor, or are they made with valuable (i.e. recyclable) stuff?
If my old batteries are worth a couple grand in materials, that will both take care of the disposal problem (they won't be disposed, they'll be recycled) and help cover the replacement costs.
Plus, one must also assume that unless the entire high cost of these batteries is in materials (hence making them highly exchangable), improved manufacturing techniques over time and the economies of scale will make the batteries much cheaper by the time they need replacing.
It sounds to me like General Moters is blowing FUD as fast and hard as they can. Perhaps their workers and stockholders would be better served if GM would instead put their efforts into some useable efficiency technologies for their cars, instead of criticizing the companies who are trying to improve their products.
Oh, silly me. I forgot that isn't the Detroit way.
Here's the money quote from the ariticle linked above
Stengel also said the Altamont site is an anomaly. Besides its poor location, he said many of the turbines there, some decades old, use older designs, with faster-spinning blades that reach closer to the ground than recent models -- where birds are more likely to be flying as they hunt for prey.
Old designs, with low level, fast spinning blades, and guy wires to stabilize them, are responsible for a lot of bird kills.
New designs use self-supporting tower, redesigned blades that rotate more slowly (and more quietly), and don't hug the ground as much (more to access the energy of higher level winds than to save birds--removing guy wires and slowin the blade speed does most of that).
About a month ago, here in Madison, we had a major bird kill (several hundred in a night) around radio towers (and their associated guy wires) when a flock flew into them on a foggy night. We never have similar bird kill problems associated with unguyed water towers.
I can also testify that old designs are quite noisy, and that rural neighbors get very bent out of shape about the "woosh, woosh" noise of older turbines. The new ones are much less noisy.
The evolution of wind turbines is a perfect illustration of how an environmentally sensitive approach can improve both the efficiency and reduce the impact of a technology. Imagine what we'd be seeing today if the traditional energy and mining industries had employed a similar synergy, instead of bulldozing all opposition under (sometimes literally).
We actually don't have substantial evidence (fossil or otherwise) that mutation ever caused inter-species changes, just the assumption that it could occur, given that intra-species changes occur. This is the 'flaw' in evolution that IDers seek to have pointed out - macro-evolution _isn't consistent with the scientific method_.
How do I put this politely? I can't just say this is total crap, can I?
Ah, the heck with it. This is crap.
EVERY bit of evidence we have is consistent with the FACT that inter-species changes occur regularly and naturally over geological time. And not always over geological time--see the current Bird Flu virus for a very current contemporary example of a real-time species change (switching vectors from Birds to Humans is a change on par with the change between a salamander and a lizard--just happening on a smaller scale).
Enormous segments of DNA sequences--far too large to occur by chance--are shared by organisms as diverse as humans and Planarians, pointing to a distant, but still influential common ancestor. Completely different organs, with utterly separate functions, still use the same basic parts (example gill arch in Fish is to jawbone in Reptiles is to Hammer and Stirrup inner ear in Mammals). Why would any intelligent DESIGNER waste so much time using the same parts? Lack of imagination? Separated species, traced back to a likely common ancestor, show the proportionate change expected by normal random mutation of the mitochondrial DNA. Darwin didn't even know about DNA, much less mitochondrial DNA, but the damn stuff works just the way Darwin's Evolution predicts. Now there's an amazing coincidence for you, if ID really does mean anything.
Everything we can discover about the past and the evolution of species falls in line with the basic outlines of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. There are no exceptions to this rule. The only gray areas are the areas that are hard to investigate because of gaps in the fossil record, or due to the shortness of accurate and comprehensive human record keeping. Every time we fill in those gaps we find our new knowledge is consistent with Evolution.
Every. Damn. Time.
What IDers have so far failed to show is a single bit of positive evidence that what they are claiming--some mysterious designer who guides evolution or creates species out of mud--exists. Just because everything in the Cosmos can't be explained (yet) doesn't make hocus-pocus responsible for it.
ID is not about religion or truth. ID is about destroying the idea of actual truth, in favor of believing whatever makes an individual feel comfortable about themselves and their actions (Iraq had WMD, Men are supposed to boss women around, Global Warming is a myth, Jeebus will return before we run out of fossil fuel, Gawd meant for us to cut down the Rain Forests,...)
Ironically, I personally believe in a Higher Power. I feel it in my heart, and that is good enough for me. But I would never, ever, presume to say I can scientifically prove that my Higher Power exists. That's not what faith is about.
The NASA link posted on the top of your graph doesn't work. Pretty hard to credit your scholarship when all you have for citations is a funky website and Faux News.
The data allegedly goes back to 1880. Gosh, who knew we had a comprehensive arctic temperature monitoring program going all the way back to 1880. Or is this data (assuming it isn't completely fake) coming from only a few (or a single) monitoring stations somewhere inside the Artic circle? That isn't real data. Local variations in cloud cover or wind patterns can produce local conditions that completely contradict a regional trend. The most screamingly obvious example of this would be a breakdown of the Gulf Stream (CAUSED by global warming) resulting in the freezing of Iceland and Norway. That data would show a local cooling trend, but it wouldn't mean global warming wasn't happening.
Finally, constant, careful, monitoring by our Nuke sub fleet since the 1950s indicates that the Arctic Ice has been steadily losing thickness since monitoring began. That directly contradicts your "data" and your conclusions.
You can prove anything by cherry picking data from individual collection sites. Here a more rigorous collection of data that actually provides a link to its primary sources:
Despite uncertainites about locations and timing, overall a stunning result emerged. Averaged over 29 widely scattered locations, ice thinned more than 40% in barely three decades. Amounts of thinning differed in different regions, but an overall thinning pattern was clear.
Another website that explains things a with less technical detail. The data they use is several years old, so it isn't as alarming as it could be. I find it plenty scary enough.
But I think liguid nitrogen is the eventual way to go. Nitrogen is inert, relatively easy to transport, and predictable in its expansion and compression. Who want's flake of frozen CO2 gumming up the works, for example.
The other big attractor for liguid nitrogen is it's ability to be used for bulk transport of energy from producer regions to user areas. North Dakota is often called the Saudi Arabia of Wind Energy, but no has figured out how to get the power from North Dakota to somewhere that people actually live. Liquid nitrogen could solve that. A pressurized pipeline could carry liquid nitrogen from collection areas in North Dakota to the the highly urbanized areas around Minneapolis. Liquid nitrogen could be stored for use in peak periods, provide direct airconditioning for large buildings, and even be used to generate electricity using an compressed air motor. Imagine a huge power plant whose only emission is cool nitrogen gas (which already makes up 70% of the atmosphere).
The only technological hurdles are transporting massive amounts of a supercooled/pressurized gas, which isn't anything too difficult to imagine. After all, we already move around a lot of oil and natural gas using pipelines, and liguid nitrogen has the advantage of being non-corrosive and non-flammable.
Rather than trying to make hydrogen out of natural gas, or from Nuke power, why not use the direct mechanical energy of wind power to mechanically compress air from the atmosphere and transfer that power without conversion losses? Plus, this would have the additional benefit of importing fresh, clean air from rural wind production areas to crowded urban areas that could really use it!
If Moore's law holds, any future CPU's will only be even more powerful
Moore's Law says computer (normally processor) speed will double every 18 months. Assuming a reasonable measure of present-day parity in performance between Intel and IBM processors, that means the 70-15 Intel advantage (cited by Jobs, who has seen the roadmaps from both IBM and Intel) by mid 2006 (one year from today) easily SQUARES Moore's law.
Intel has been pretty quiet lately. Some of us thought they had fallen asleep and were resting on their laurels. Now I think they've been working on something revolutionary. And I think that is why Apple had to switch.
Intel processors provide more performance per watt than PowerPC processors do, said Jobs. "When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PoweRPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do," he explained.
My heart tells me this sucks. But on the other hand, if what Jobs is saying about the roadmap is true, Apple had no choice. A ratio of nearly 5-1 in the watts/performance ratio would be impossible to sustain if Apple was trying to compete against Intel platforms with PowerPC chips.
Is anyone else thinking about what else this means? I'm assuming the Power roadmap from IBM wasn't totally abysmal. That tells me that the huge difference between the processor families in the next couple of years means Intel has used its pile of cash to develop something really amazing, processor-wise.
This is the crucial issue. Not only is the fertile deep water being dumped on the surface, likely causing increased local biological activity, but it is being removed from the deep ocean in a different way than normally happens with natural upwelling.
For example, the Grand Banks off the Northeast United States is an extremely productive fishery created by the natural mixing of deep water and the Gulf Stream. If the deep water fertility is being depleted by thermal mining by, say, the huge population of the East Coast megapolises, the Grand Banks could conceivably suffer.
And, of course, locally, eutrophication in the surface dumping areas could be an ecological catastrophe, instead of a bonus to fisheries. It all depends on the area and the means of diffusing the water.
All kvetching aside, this is a very provocative concept for many areas of the world. There are huge thermal gradients available in many coastal areas, and combined with passive solar in shallow seawater tanks to create the warm, humid conditions needed for good condensation, we could be talking about a great way to get fresh water to a lot of hot, dry parts of the world (Hello, Saudi Arabia?).
It may not be the answer to everything, but it could turn out to be a big help, if developed with a little care and common sense.
Why are we still wasting money on the space program?
Which Space program are you talking about?
The one that got us communication, weather (and yes, Spy) satellites? The one that enables you to determine where you are anywhere on the planet using a GPS? The one that got us the Hubble Space Telescope, which is giving us a clear enough view to look back into the origins of our Universe? The one that has Voyager about to leave our Solar System?
That Space program?
How about the Space program that has an international Space Station if orbit, where we can experiment with weightlessness and hard vacuum in manufacturing and medicine? I for one wonder what an alloy of aluminum and lead might allow us to do. Can't perform those experiments on the planet. What if we discover that the vaccine for AIDS or the cure for Cancer is an antibody so complex it can only be grown slowly in a weightless environment? Might that Space Program be worth the money?
Now, pie-in-the-sky ego gratification efforts like a useless trip to the Moon to plant another flag and leave some more footprints--well, you have a point (although those "useless" missions to the Moon allowed us to leave behind some laser reflectors and such that have helped us track continental drift and nail down the speed of light). But I would definitely grant that simply going for the sake of going is not a good use of resources. We have probably already advanced Space Food Sticks and Tang to their theoretical potential.
I agree that we need to question how and why we're trying to move forward in Space, on the ground, and in the Oceans. We should spend our money wisely, to good effect, and with a long term view regarding payoff.
But I think as humans, we need to move forward and expand our horizons. Otherwise, we'll stagnate, and spend our time killing each other and counting down to the Rapture...
If you look at the public struggles between creationists and evolutionists, the creationists who represent the mainstream Evangelical thought are not trying to remove evolution, they would just like the teaching of evolution to acknowledge that it is not a proven fact, and that there are other schools of thought, an in particular, the possibility of intelligent design.
Uh, actually, evolution is a proven fact. The fact is the fossil record, and according to it, evolution happened. "Intelligent Design" acknowledges the fact of evolution, and seeks to inject Gawd and Jeebus (names changed to avoid blasphemy) into it by assuming that evolution was guided by a benevolent deity. It doesn't deny that evolution happened. In order to do that, you either assume Trilobites, Tyranosaurs, and Turkomen all existed at the same time, or that some supernatural entity created all those fossils just to tempt Mankind into arrogantly denying that earth and the stars came into being a little over 6000 years ago.
So, fine. Faithful "scientists" believe Gawd guided evolution to produce the pinnacle of creation, Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, and Terri Schiavo's parents. The "scientists" want their theory taught in Science classes in schools. No problem. Submit your theory to peer reviewed journals and defend it. Provide examples that show intelligent design exists (like, for a counter-example, the vestigal human gene for synthesizing Vitamin C--evidence of random evolution, since an intelligent designer would have known we needed to be able to synthesize Vitamin C on those long ocean voyages). Find some completely useless structures in prehistoric ancestors to Man that were only useful in the context of later civilization. How about a cell phone holder clip on the skulls of prehistoric monkeys? A pouch for holding Airline carryons? A floating point processor in the human brain? Gosh, think of all the ways an intelligent designer could have helped us out! Why the hell are we just smart monkeys with weak arms?
If Intelligent Design can stand up to scientific review, and provide a range of testable predictions that can be verified by experiment and research, then: Woohoo! We ain't alone in a cold lonely Universe! Big Daddy is watching us! If we kneel down a pray often enough, that comet will miss us! Get ready for the Rapture! Burn that oil! Unfortunately, the only theory that currently makes sense in those terms is random evolution through the mechanism of Natural Selection.
If not, as is currently the case (in spades), then Intelligent Design is just gussied up superstition, and has no place in a Science classroom. We might as well teach methods for transmuting gold and reading entrails to predict the future. Those are theories too, and have exactly as much basis in fact as Intelligent Design.
The becomes training in holding your handle up every time you close the door only if you lock the door every time you close it.
In a lot of urban environments, this is how it is done, and your example holds up pretty well.
Outside the cities, and probably in hyper-law-abiding Japan, we have the luxury of not locking our doors when we leave the car, and even (gasp!) leaving the keys in the car. Thus, we only hold that handle up when we are actually locking the car in a strange or urban environment, where we are hyper-vigilant anyway.
Small town America--it may be boring, but that ain't always a bad thing...
I take 20mg of extended release Ritalin a day. It's a Schedule II Controlled Substance. I have to get a monthly, non-renewable prescription from my doctor in order to get it.
When I was first getting prescribed, I had to go through a battery of tests and evaluations. The first time, I exhausted the $3000 cap on mental health benefits in my insurance, and didn't get through the process (just got a lot of humiliation and attitude from a suck-it-up-and-concentrate doctor).
The next time I started into the process, I began in the fall so I could spread out the cost over two plan years, and I made it.
Ritalin changed my life. I moved from menial jobs into Management, and now I run my own business. I don't take any other medication and I don't run to my doctor asking for more or different stuff. I'm just glad to be able to sit down and calmly complete a task, instead of procrastinating until I'm motivated by frantic anticipation of the looming deadline.
I know that it's easier these days to get a prescription for Ritalin, in part because of the tremendous documented benefits for adult cases like mine. And I'm sure there are some doctors out there who may overprescribe anti-depressants in order to get whiner patients out of their offices.
However, I don't think there are lots of people taking Ritalin who don't need it. It's not an exciting drug or anything. I hardly notice that I'm taking it, except that I just get so much more done.
I recognize my problem in a lot of frustrated people I know. My dad is one of them. He would never consider taking medication for a mental problem because he's a stubborn old coot. He has a lot of company in this frustrated, bitter country of ours. The pervasive idea that people who seek help are losers, and that we all go seeking redemption from a pill bottle harms an awful lot of people, who endure needless pain and frustration because of our anti-drug stigmas.
White I can't speak to the issue of anti-depressants from personal experience, I think the problem in our society isn't that too many people are being prescribed Ritalin, but that too few are.
This is a very good point. The Mac Mini has indeed changed some of my plans to offer Linux on cheap computers I buy from goverment surplus (50-60 bucks for a 500-600Mhz PIII). I was figuring to set up and sell such beasties for around $300 (including keyboard and monitor). The Mac Mini is putting a little heat on my price point. I'm now also considering offering a Mac Mini package, with a Monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Linux has everything I need these days to offer a very useful, if slightly tame, computer for families who want to send email, surf the web, and create normal word processing documents and graphics.
Everything except Shockwave, that is. Does anyone know what is up with Shockwave? If it works on Firefox for MacOSX, it wouldn't seem like it should be so hard port it over for Linux. I sent Macromedia a very polite pleading letter asking them to please do Shockwave for Linux. No answer, of course, but I was wondering if there was some nuts and bolts reason why it doesn't work.
The flagship product, Nanosolar SolarPly, is a 14 feet x 10 feet solar electricity module delivering 120 watts per square inch at 110V. The company is now offering solar panels at below $1 per peak watt.
I may be stupid, but the above statement, from the linked article, seems to be saying these cells will provide 120 Watts per square inch. In another part of the article, the company is claiming 12% efficiency in converting sunlight to electrical charges.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think a square inch of sunlight, even in the most intensely sunlit areas, has anywhere near 120 Watts of power in it.
Maybe I misread something, or the article had a typo, but that statement certainly caught my eye. Other parts of the article seemed serious, at least compared to the wacko company that was claiming they had solved the energy crisis by developing a way to filter the hydrogen out of water.
This study addresses exactly that criticism of yours, and it blows it away.
Just wanted to chime in with a "No shite, Sherlocks!"
There are no other f+cking models that fit the facts. None. If you global warming doubters think there are other credible models (that can stand up to peer review) to explain the massive quantities of data, then set them up and collect your million$ from a grateful energy industry.
Otherwise, shut up and stop making the problem worse by emitting more useless hot air.
Florida is going to be gone? By what? Total Sea Level rise by 2100 is expected to be 31-50 cm. Even if it's a meter or more, that will not destroy Florida.
The very fact you cited in your original post, the increased shedding of ice from the Antarctic continent, is brand new information, and is going to completely change the equation.
Global warming is happening faster than predicted, and keeps happening faster than predicted. In 10 years, the world will be involved in a frantic effort to try and reduce sunlight to the tropics by shooting rockets leaving trails of aluminum oxide into the stratosphere (same stuff they use in the space shuttle--it's cheap and has a very high albido).
Call me an alarmist, but I think time is running out. The unthinkable is becoming the unavoidable.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing will come of this. It's all bullshit "what ifs". There's no such thing as a "good new law".
The big players are going to do just fine whatever pay arrangement is set up. That's because they're big, and can inflict pain on anyone who squeezes them too hard. Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. , will not suffer much under this new regime.
Who will suffer? Small, noisy, annoying content providers. Slashdot, for example. Without Net Neutrality, all this piss and vinegar (and truth) that gets spewed at Micro$oft and the rest of the computer and IT industry become available for throttling. Not by overt censorship, oh no! "But bandwidth is limited, you see, and Slashdot doesn't really serve a wide segment of the public, and we've had complaints from some of our large paying clients, and, well, those people are hardly RESPECTABLE. Slashdot is still available, of course, but it takes 5 minutes to load each page, since we've de-emphasized its priority. Do you know how many people are in line to vote for the next America's Idol? Now there something that is serving a broad demographic."
The Net has served as the samizdat of the new soviet/industrial States of America. If we give the big boys entire control of our digital newsprint, we little fish will be silenced.
Net Neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine of the digital era. If we lose it, we've lost just about everything.
The original wolves and boars also came from somewhere. And, they're continuing to come from somehwere. This would constitute a continuing stream of relatively undamaged DNA going into the animal gene pool to dilute the damaged stuff. And, conversely, a steady stream of damaged DNA migrating back out to the outside world. We may see those giant Ant Overlords yet!
Chernobyl doesn't exist on an Island out in the Pacific. Thus, what is happening there cannot be assumed to be definitive about what happens to animals exposed to high continuous doses of radiation...
Sure, they offer you 10,000 compromised PC for $25, but they probably offer those same 10,000 PCs to every other schmuck with $25 bucks. And all of them probably have CSW, Smitfraud, VX2 and Virtumunde up the wazoo!
So they probably aren't good for too much, unless you're a good enough hacker to disable all the other malware living on them, and then defend them from all the other hackers who are shooting at the same target.
Actually, there has almost never been such a consensus in recorded history. An Egyptian mathematician first calculated the length of the Equator pretty accurately well before the birth of Christ. Used the diffennce in the arc of the sun between Cairo and Alexandria to do it. Pat Robertson does not constitute a consensus.
This is a good summing up, and I hope you're right. Disney is indeed lost. I've got two kids, one 7 and one 9 years old, prime Disney fodder. I won't let them watch any Disney shit after Beauty and the Beast (and I shut that off before the needlessly savage ending). Disney movies have completely turned into a attention-deficit inducers--wham! bam! flash! repeat--with a constant thread of product and lifestyle commercialism. John Lasseter is an amazing guy, and I hope he gets a chance to turn Disney around, but as someone else said, Disney is currently like a supertanker when it comes to maneuvering.
Pixar has been a beam of light in the current swamp of brain-dead pap that passes for children's entertainment. Maybe this buyout will turn into a new new dawn for Disney, but I'm afraid it's more likely to be a twilight for Pixar. Maybe we can get a couple of decent movies out of them before the rot sets in permanently, but I don't hold out much hope for the long term.
I really hope I'm wrong on this one.
How did the keylogger start running in userspace? How did it install? If it is a malicious part of a administor-authorized program, someone is swiftly going to get in trouble for distributing malware. I don't think you can run an unauthorized executable in userspace, except maybe for Dashboard Widgets, and they don't get access to ordinary data files.
I may be messing up the technical terms, but I don't think you can have a program running on OSX that wasn't installed by an administrator. Aside from the Kazaa-type phenomena, where massive malware is installed as a stated condition of a "free" installation of desired software, there isn't any way to get that keylogger there in the first place. And a keylogger is clearly illegal, so Kazaa-type tricks will quickly generate visits from the police for the instigators. There's probably a window of risk there, but it's a small window, high up, and throwing things at it may result in a shower of hot oil.
So far, clueless Mac users on OS9 and OSX have been just fine for years and years. I've never seen a Mac problem in my little computer shop that was caused by malware, unless you count Norton Utilities as malware.
I don't get hit running my several shop Windows PCs (yet, anyway). But I have to have use antivirus, a NAT Firewall on my router, MicroSoft Antispyware for 2000 and XP, and take care where I browse with the machines.
I take my home Mac anywhere, and didn't even have a router between it and the internet until I installed a wireless network (I use WEP on it--not invulnerable, but pretty effective). I often use it to check out email viruses and investigate malicious websites to figure out how my customer Windows boxen are getting infected. Four years old, zero problems with malware.
There are some other gross inaccuracies claimed by 'experts' and 'analysts' in this piece. "It is still built on the same legacy code, it is still written without adhering to secure coding practices, it is still thrown to the masses without adequate security testing." That's an assertion without supporting evidence. It doesn't have a factual basis.
Am I the only person who noticed this guy cites a "legacy" file format as a security problem, and in the next paragraph disses the expert who cite problems with Microsoft's reliance on legacy code?
I didn't realize file format vulnerabilities weren't code problems. Apparently, this means the
We need better trolls.
Can these $10,000 batteries suddenly become worthless once they're old? What makes them so expensive--is there a huge amount of hand labor, or are they made with valuable (i.e. recyclable) stuff?
If my old batteries are worth a couple grand in materials, that will both take care of the disposal problem (they won't be disposed, they'll be recycled) and help cover the replacement costs.
Plus, one must also assume that unless the entire high cost of these batteries is in materials (hence making them highly exchangable), improved manufacturing techniques over time and the economies of scale will make the batteries much cheaper by the time they need replacing.
It sounds to me like General Moters is blowing FUD as fast and hard as they can. Perhaps their workers and stockholders would be better served if GM would instead put their efforts into some useable efficiency technologies for their cars, instead of criticizing the companies who are trying to improve their products.
Oh, silly me. I forgot that isn't the Detroit way.
Old designs, with low level, fast spinning blades, and guy wires to stabilize them, are responsible for a lot of bird kills.
New designs use self-supporting tower, redesigned blades that rotate more slowly (and more quietly), and don't hug the ground as much (more to access the energy of higher level winds than to save birds--removing guy wires and slowin the blade speed does most of that).
About a month ago, here in Madison, we had a major bird kill (several hundred in a night) around radio towers (and their associated guy wires) when a flock flew into them on a foggy night. We never have similar bird kill problems associated with unguyed water towers.
I can also testify that old designs are quite noisy, and that rural neighbors get very bent out of shape about the "woosh, woosh" noise of older turbines. The new ones are much less noisy.
The evolution of wind turbines is a perfect illustration of how an environmentally sensitive approach can improve both the efficiency and reduce the impact of a technology. Imagine what we'd be seeing today if the traditional energy and mining industries had employed a similar synergy, instead of bulldozing all opposition under (sometimes literally).
How do I put this politely? I can't just say this is total crap, can I?
Ah, the heck with it. This is crap.
EVERY bit of evidence we have is consistent with the FACT that inter-species changes occur regularly and naturally over geological time. And not always over geological time--see the current Bird Flu virus for a very current contemporary example of a real-time species change (switching vectors from Birds to Humans is a change on par with the change between a salamander and a lizard--just happening on a smaller scale).
Enormous segments of DNA sequences--far too large to occur by chance--are shared by organisms as diverse as humans and Planarians, pointing to a distant, but still influential common ancestor. Completely different organs, with utterly separate functions, still use the same basic parts (example gill arch in Fish is to jawbone in Reptiles is to Hammer and Stirrup inner ear in Mammals). Why would any intelligent DESIGNER waste so much time using the same parts? Lack of imagination? Separated species, traced back to a likely common ancestor, show the proportionate change expected by normal random mutation of the mitochondrial DNA. Darwin didn't even know about DNA, much less mitochondrial DNA, but the damn stuff works just the way Darwin's Evolution predicts. Now there's an amazing coincidence for you, if ID really does mean anything.
Everything we can discover about the past and the evolution of species falls in line with the basic outlines of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. There are no exceptions to this rule. The only gray areas are the areas that are hard to investigate because of gaps in the fossil record, or due to the shortness of accurate and comprehensive human record keeping. Every time we fill in those gaps we find our new knowledge is consistent with Evolution.
Every. Damn. Time.
What IDers have so far failed to show is a single bit of positive evidence that what they are claiming--some mysterious designer who guides evolution or creates species out of mud--exists. Just because everything in the Cosmos can't be explained (yet) doesn't make hocus-pocus responsible for it.
ID is not about religion or truth. ID is about destroying the idea of actual truth, in favor of believing whatever makes an individual feel comfortable about themselves and their actions (Iraq had WMD, Men are supposed to boss women around, Global Warming is a myth, Jeebus will return before we run out of fossil fuel, Gawd meant for us to cut down the Rain Forests,
Ironically, I personally believe in a Higher Power. I feel it in my heart, and that is good enough for me. But I would never, ever, presume to say I can scientifically prove that my Higher Power exists. That's not what faith is about.
The data allegedly goes back to 1880. Gosh, who knew we had a comprehensive arctic temperature monitoring program going all the way back to 1880. Or is this data (assuming it isn't completely fake) coming from only a few (or a single) monitoring stations somewhere inside the Artic circle? That isn't real data. Local variations in cloud cover or wind patterns can produce local conditions that completely contradict a regional trend. The most screamingly obvious example of this would be a breakdown of the Gulf Stream (CAUSED by global warming) resulting in the freezing of Iceland and Norway. That data would show a local cooling trend, but it wouldn't mean global warming wasn't happening.
Finally, constant, careful, monitoring by our Nuke sub fleet since the 1950s indicates that the Arctic Ice has been steadily losing thickness since monitoring began. That directly contradicts your "data" and your conclusions.
You can prove anything by cherry picking data from individual collection sites. Here a more rigorous collection of data that actually provides a link to its primary sources:
http://www.planetwater.ca/research/sea-ice.htm
Another website that explains things a with less technical detail. The data they use is several years old, so it isn't as alarming as it could be. I find it plenty scary enough.
http://www.solcomhouse.com/PolarIce.htm
Here's a link to a prototype in France that will go 200Km on a fill up.
i r-car.htm&url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/22 81011.stm
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=a
It doesn't actually use liquid nitrogen, because the maker is including an electric compressor that you can plug in overnight (or at work) and fill up the car overnight.
But I think liguid nitrogen is the eventual way to go. Nitrogen is inert, relatively easy to transport, and predictable in its expansion and compression. Who want's flake of frozen CO2 gumming up the works, for example.
The other big attractor for liguid nitrogen is it's ability to be used for bulk transport of energy from producer regions to user areas. North Dakota is often called the Saudi Arabia of Wind Energy, but no has figured out how to get the power from North Dakota to somewhere that people actually live. Liquid nitrogen could solve that. A pressurized pipeline could carry liquid nitrogen from collection areas in North Dakota to the the highly urbanized areas around Minneapolis. Liquid nitrogen could be stored for use in peak periods, provide direct airconditioning for large buildings, and even be used to generate electricity using an compressed air motor. Imagine a huge power plant whose only emission is cool nitrogen gas (which already makes up 70% of the atmosphere).
The only technological hurdles are transporting massive amounts of a supercooled/pressurized gas, which isn't anything too difficult to imagine. After all, we already move around a lot of oil and natural gas using pipelines, and liguid nitrogen has the advantage of being non-corrosive and non-flammable.
Rather than trying to make hydrogen out of natural gas, or from Nuke power, why not use the direct mechanical energy of wind power to mechanically compress air from the atmosphere and transfer that power without conversion losses? Plus, this would have the additional benefit of importing fresh, clean air from rural wind production areas to crowded urban areas that could really use it!
- If Moore's law holds, any future CPU's will only be even more powerful
Moore's Law says computer (normally processor) speed will double every 18 months. Assuming a reasonable measure of present-day parity in performance between Intel and IBM processors, that means the 70-15 Intel advantage (cited by Jobs, who has seen the roadmaps from both IBM and Intel) by mid 2006 (one year from today) easily SQUARES Moore's law.Intel has been pretty quiet lately. Some of us thought they had fallen asleep and were resting on their laurels. Now I think they've been working on something revolutionary. And I think that is why Apple had to switch.
- Intel processors provide more performance per watt than PowerPC processors do, said Jobs. "When we look at future roadmaps, mid-2006 and beyond, we see PoweRPC gives us 15 units of perfomance per watt, but Intel's roadmap gives us 70. And so this tells us what we have to do," he explained.
My heart tells me this sucks. But on the other hand, if what Jobs is saying about the roadmap is true, Apple had no choice. A ratio of nearly 5-1 in the watts/performance ratio would be impossible to sustain if Apple was trying to compete against Intel platforms with PowerPC chips.Is anyone else thinking about what else this means? I'm assuming the Power roadmap from IBM wasn't totally abysmal. That tells me that the huge difference between the processor families in the next couple of years means Intel has used its pile of cash to develop something really amazing, processor-wise.
It might be time to start shorting AMD...
Just imagine how freaked out all the tinfoil-hat types will be over that.
"My GAWD! First you give us brain cancer with cell phones, now you want to irradiate our entire bodies in our car thru nukyuler induction rays!"
The horror! The horror!
This is the crucial issue. Not only is the fertile deep water being dumped on the surface, likely causing increased local biological activity, but it is being removed from the deep ocean in a different way than normally happens with natural upwelling.
For example, the Grand Banks off the Northeast United States is an extremely productive fishery created by the natural mixing of deep water and the Gulf Stream. If the deep water fertility is being depleted by thermal mining by, say, the huge population of the East Coast megapolises, the Grand Banks could conceivably suffer.
And, of course, locally, eutrophication in the surface dumping areas could be an ecological catastrophe, instead of a bonus to fisheries. It all depends on the area and the means of diffusing the water.
All kvetching aside, this is a very provocative concept for many areas of the world. There are huge thermal gradients available in many coastal areas, and combined with passive solar in shallow seawater tanks to create the warm, humid conditions needed for good condensation, we could be talking about a great way to get fresh water to a lot of hot, dry parts of the world (Hello, Saudi Arabia?).
It may not be the answer to everything, but it could turn out to be a big help, if developed with a little care and common sense.
- Why are we still wasting money on the space program?
Which Space program are you talking about?The one that got us communication, weather (and yes, Spy) satellites? The one that enables you to determine where you are anywhere on the planet using a GPS? The one that got us the Hubble Space Telescope, which is giving us a clear enough view to look back into the origins of our Universe? The one that has Voyager about to leave our Solar System?
That Space program?
How about the Space program that has an international Space Station if orbit, where we can experiment with weightlessness and hard vacuum in manufacturing and medicine? I for one wonder what an alloy of aluminum and lead might allow us to do. Can't perform those experiments on the planet. What if we discover that the vaccine for AIDS or the cure for Cancer is an antibody so complex it can only be grown slowly in a weightless environment? Might that Space Program be worth the money?
Now, pie-in-the-sky ego gratification efforts like a useless trip to the Moon to plant another flag and leave some more footprints--well, you have a point (although those "useless" missions to the Moon allowed us to leave behind some laser reflectors and such that have helped us track continental drift and nail down the speed of light). But I would definitely grant that simply going for the sake of going is not a good use of resources. We have probably already advanced Space Food Sticks and Tang to their theoretical potential.
I agree that we need to question how and why we're trying to move forward in Space, on the ground, and in the Oceans. We should spend our money wisely, to good effect, and with a long term view regarding payoff.
But I think as humans, we need to move forward and expand our horizons. Otherwise, we'll stagnate, and spend our time killing each other and counting down to the Rapture...
Liger would be a good name for Mac OS 10.6. It could be the cross-platform release right after Lion (which is the obvious successor to Tiger).
- If you look at the public struggles between creationists and evolutionists, the creationists who represent the mainstream Evangelical thought are not trying to remove evolution, they would just like the teaching of evolution to acknowledge that it is not a proven fact, and that there are other schools of thought, an in particular, the possibility of intelligent design.
Uh, actually, evolution is a proven fact. The fact is the fossil record, and according to it, evolution happened. "Intelligent Design" acknowledges the fact of evolution, and seeks to inject Gawd and Jeebus (names changed to avoid blasphemy) into it by assuming that evolution was guided by a benevolent deity. It doesn't deny that evolution happened. In order to do that, you either assume Trilobites, Tyranosaurs, and Turkomen all existed at the same time, or that some supernatural entity created all those fossils just to tempt Mankind into arrogantly denying that earth and the stars came into being a little over 6000 years ago.So, fine. Faithful "scientists" believe Gawd guided evolution to produce the pinnacle of creation, Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, and Terri Schiavo's parents. The "scientists" want their theory taught in Science classes in schools. No problem. Submit your theory to peer reviewed journals and defend it. Provide examples that show intelligent design exists (like, for a counter-example, the vestigal human gene for synthesizing Vitamin C--evidence of random evolution, since an intelligent designer would have known we needed to be able to synthesize Vitamin C on those long ocean voyages). Find some completely useless structures in prehistoric ancestors to Man that were only useful in the context of later civilization. How about a cell phone holder clip on the skulls of prehistoric monkeys? A pouch for holding Airline carryons? A floating point processor in the human brain? Gosh, think of all the ways an intelligent designer could have helped us out! Why the hell are we just smart monkeys with weak arms?
If Intelligent Design can stand up to scientific review, and provide a range of testable predictions that can be verified by experiment and research, then: Woohoo! We ain't alone in a cold lonely Universe! Big Daddy is watching us! If we kneel down a pray often enough, that comet will miss us! Get ready for the Rapture! Burn that oil! Unfortunately, the only theory that currently makes sense in those terms is random evolution through the mechanism of Natural Selection.
If not, as is currently the case (in spades), then Intelligent Design is just gussied up superstition, and has no place in a Science classroom. We might as well teach methods for transmuting gold and reading entrails to predict the future. Those are theories too, and have exactly as much basis in fact as Intelligent Design.
The becomes training in holding your handle up every time you close the door only if you lock the door every time you close it.
In a lot of urban environments, this is how it is done, and your example holds up pretty well.
Outside the cities, and probably in hyper-law-abiding Japan, we have the luxury of not locking our doors when we leave the car, and even (gasp!) leaving the keys in the car. Thus, we only hold that handle up when we are actually locking the car in a strange or urban environment, where we are hyper-vigilant anyway.
Small town America--it may be boring, but that ain't always a bad thing...
I take 20mg of extended release Ritalin a day. It's a Schedule II Controlled Substance. I have to get a monthly, non-renewable prescription from my doctor in order to get it.
When I was first getting prescribed, I had to go through a battery of tests and evaluations. The first time, I exhausted the $3000 cap on mental health benefits in my insurance, and didn't get through the process (just got a lot of humiliation and attitude from a suck-it-up-and-concentrate doctor).
The next time I started into the process, I began in the fall so I could spread out the cost over two plan years, and I made it.
Ritalin changed my life. I moved from menial jobs into Management, and now I run my own business. I don't take any other medication and I don't run to my doctor asking for more or different stuff. I'm just glad to be able to sit down and calmly complete a task, instead of procrastinating until I'm motivated by frantic anticipation of the looming deadline.
I know that it's easier these days to get a prescription for Ritalin, in part because of the tremendous documented benefits for adult cases like mine. And I'm sure there are some doctors out there who may overprescribe anti-depressants in order to get whiner patients out of their offices.
However, I don't think there are lots of people taking Ritalin who don't need it. It's not an exciting drug or anything. I hardly notice that I'm taking it, except that I just get so much more done.
I recognize my problem in a lot of frustrated people I know. My dad is one of them. He would never consider taking medication for a mental problem because he's a stubborn old coot. He has a lot of company in this frustrated, bitter country of ours. The pervasive idea that people who seek help are losers, and that we all go seeking redemption from a pill bottle harms an awful lot of people, who endure needless pain and frustration because of our anti-drug stigmas.
White I can't speak to the issue of anti-depressants from personal experience, I think the problem in our society isn't that too many people are being prescribed Ritalin, but that too few are.
Just my two cents...
This is a very good point. The Mac Mini has indeed changed some of my plans to offer Linux on cheap computers I buy from goverment surplus (50-60 bucks for a 500-600Mhz PIII). I was figuring to set up and sell such beasties for around $300 (including keyboard and monitor). The Mac Mini is putting a little heat on my price point. I'm now also considering offering a Mac Mini package, with a Monitor, keyboard and mouse. Linux has everything I need these days to offer a very useful, if slightly tame, computer for families who want to send email, surf the web, and create normal word processing documents and graphics. Everything except Shockwave, that is. Does anyone know what is up with Shockwave? If it works on Firefox for MacOSX, it wouldn't seem like it should be so hard port it over for Linux. I sent Macromedia a very polite pleading letter asking them to please do Shockwave for Linux. No answer, of course, but I was wondering if there was some nuts and bolts reason why it doesn't work.
I may be stupid, but the above statement, from the linked article, seems to be saying these cells will provide 120 Watts per square inch. In another part of the article, the company is claiming 12% efficiency in converting sunlight to electrical charges.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think a square inch of sunlight, even in the most intensely sunlit areas, has anywhere near 120 Watts of power in it.
Maybe I misread something, or the article had a typo, but that statement certainly caught my eye. Other parts of the article seemed serious, at least compared to the wacko company that was claiming they had solved the energy crisis by developing a way to filter the hydrogen out of water.
Just wanted to chime in with a "No shite, Sherlocks!"
There are no other f+cking models that fit the facts. None. If you global warming doubters think there are other credible models (that can stand up to peer review) to explain the massive quantities of data, then set them up and collect your million$ from a grateful energy industry.
Otherwise, shut up and stop making the problem worse by emitting more useless hot air.
Global warming is happening faster than predicted, and keeps happening faster than predicted. In 10 years, the world will be involved in a frantic effort to try and reduce sunlight to the tropics by shooting rockets leaving trails of aluminum oxide into the stratosphere (same stuff they use in the space shuttle--it's cheap and has a very high albido).
Call me an alarmist, but I think time is running out. The unthinkable is becoming the unavoidable.