I don't imagine the money is that much of a problem. Wholesale pirating may have been slowed down a bit by Microsoft in later versions of Windows 7, but I doubt it would affect the Russian Government. Organizations that big can get site licenses for dirt cheap.
It might have something to do with not wanting to be dependent on US closed source technology. Or free of suspected back doors.
In reality the question is now why Russia has ordered this, it is why is the US dragging its feet?
Second Rule of science: Investigate the sources of reports. If the main source is not a scientist in the field of study, and/or it was paid for by a notoriously insane group that is not respected by the scientific community at large, do not trust.
Sorry, but that has never been a "rule of science".
Theories stand or fall on their own merit. Science does not care about sources.
The funny thing is.... No one knows if this speed-up is a natural cycle, or if there's really something out of whack with the core.
There being no artificial means of altering the magnetic field of the entire planet, you can rest assured that the speed up is a natural occurrence./smirk
As for it being part of a cycle, magnetic pole wandering, and indeed complete reversals, while documented in geology, follow no easily discernible pattern over time, with long periods of stability followed by many reversals over a short period.
There are some claim the pattern is a Lévy distribution, but this has yet to be proven, and that fact by itself provides no predictive capabilities.
There is a pretty good wiki article on this. The article includes a time-chart showing reversals of the magnetic field. There are very long periods of stability, as well as periods of frequent short reversals.
Magnetic Pole reversals happen over a period of time of tens of thousands of years, and a reversal is proceeded by a diminishing of field strength, not necessarily by pole wandering. The current rate of field strength weakening suggests a reversal sometime in the years 3000-4000.
So the speed up of the NMP's movement is not significant in estimating a reversal, and a reversal does not signify anything out of "whack" with the core of the earth.
It is a perfectly natural thing that has occurred many many many times. And yes, mankind has lived thru reversals entirely unaware.
Well first off, the USA is an Ethanol EXPORTER.. So nothing is going to Brazil.
Second, it all comes down to dollars and cents. 40% of US petroleum is produced locally. That percentage of it that goes to foreign oil goes to Canada, Mexico, and Nigeria in that order. Saudi Arabia is a distant 4th.
You pay (currently) about 13% less at the pump for E85 but you get 35% less mileage: you've made a fools bargain.
E85 has never been cost effective at the pump IN SPITE of the massive subsidies and tax breaks.
Have you ever actually tried to eat the grade of corn used for corn ethanol? I thought not, but believe me, don't try it, you won't be able to, it's a grade lower than that used for silage/cattle feed. It's grown on land too marginal for real human crops and tastes.
Ah, No. Not true.
Ethanol has taken over prime farm corn land.
Ethanol has actually driven up the price of silage corn, and beef.
It is most often the exact same corn as silage, because there is no point in switching to a lower grade. The seed, planting, and harvesting costs the same, and you cut your market options by growing anything other than cattle grade corn.
We don't directly eat silage either, so just because it does not taste good to humans when eaten directly is a hollow argument. It tastes pretty good when you eat the cow/pig.
I'm sure this is where the vegans jump in and pontificate about eating animals, but thats not what this thread is about.
The speed with which you can get a credit card canceled and a new one issued by US banks after a loss or theft probably DOES make it cheaper to simply pay off the losses rather than us an expensive (and flawed) chip & pin system.
Plus, there is no evidence c&p was a regulatory mandate. And if it turns out that it was a regulatory mandate it was still defective.
Nor is there any evidence c&p has lead to lower credit card fees.
This has nothing to do with regulations. It's a case of the market finding the lowest cost solution that still protects the consumer from CC fraud.
Functional art form, but the functionality becomes irrelevant over time. By the time the case is finished the contents are obsolete.
To the key to modding is to build it big and roomy.
Something like that Philco case, where you could probably stuff several generations of motherboards, power supplies, and back planes into the same case over many years, to extend its functional life. It would be a shame to get it finished only to find it so customized to specific components that you had to start over.
The internal structural elements have to be easily reconfigurable.
It's got nothing to do with mistaking animal for humans. It's about distinguishing real faces from the imaginary faces our mind creates out of random objects (clouds was given as an example). ie: It's about knowing when to run and when to say "OMG, for a moment I thought that big rock was a bear".
There is no penalty for running away from a rock.
Birds do this all the time. Their instinct is to fly first and look sheepish later.
The article, if you bothered to read it, was indeed make the claim that distinguishing human faces from animal was a key survival mechanism.
I thought we've verify the efficiency of single line queue for many years.
Me too.
I further doubt that most people still think single queue, multiple servers is perceived by customers as the least efficient. People have seen it work well at banks, Airport Security, Post offices, and other places. (Did I just say post offices were efficient?).
The bad rap it gets is usually from the jump-in-front people who perceive the lack of an opportunity to queue-hop as removing one option under their control. Just often enough to enforce this belief, the die-hard queue hopper will get serviced faster than the average customer.
Single queue - multi server "reduces wait time for those that wait".
If you perceive that you are in the slowest line, you probably are, because you wouldn't notice the speed of other lines if you weren't.
I doubt there is blockage at the network level anywhere.
None of my clients, (Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android) crashed, so your crashes may have been just an anomaly, or a side effect.
The alleged crypto code release was some time ago, not anything recent, and the last I head was that it simply allowed eves dropping on calls and text, no failures of super nodes
I suspect it is the new 5.0 version (or maybe some of those shenanigan versions skype released in cahoots with Verizon) are essentially taking down supernodes, or making them un-reachable, and causing the system wide outage.
As for patches ASAP, don't forget this is Skype. The only way to get them to talk to or be responsive to their users/customers seems to be to take down their entire network. They have a video up on there site with the CEO being all apologetic, without revealing anything at all.
Maybe survival, but wouldn't you think that anything registering "close enough" wasn't too dangerous to spend more time looking at, and anything that wasn't human would be immediately recognizable? I don't think anyone's going to mistake a cheetah for a person. One says "possible friend" and the other says "you're dead before you realize it's a cheetah"
I was thinking the same thing.
Unless they were watching "The Walking Dead" or "Fringe" on the day they wrote that, I simply see no reason to make such a claim.
There has never been a time when people needed to recognize another animal as dangerous but at the same time run the risk of mistaking it for human.
Similarly, there has historically been far more risk to humans from other humans, (some indistinguishable from one's own clan) than from any animals.
So perhaps they meant it the other way around; suggesting you could safely ignore the animals staring at you from the bushes, but if you notice another human staring from the bushes you likely to get a spear or arrow in your ribs.
None of these illness you mention has anything to do with recognizing human faces and distinguishing them from animals.
Nor does the most rabid or schizophrenic person look anything other than human.
You are conflating unusual, illness-induced behavior with the purported claim in this article, that distinguishing human from seemingly human was a key to survival.
For every
"you could look in his eyes and tell he was crazy" there are dozens and dozens of
"he was the nicest neighbor and couldn't have possibly cut up his wife and buried her in the back yard"
Slashdot Mirror
Stuxnet had nothing to do with windows. It attacked motor controller chips made by Seimans.
Still your point is valid, the primary motive would seem to be to avoid dependency on untrustworthy software for which you can't even see the code.
If it is CODE in their own repositories then it becomes very difficult to hide "report back to today's KGB".
Code is vastly more transparent than closed binary sources from, say, Microsoft or Apple.
"Dictator" is open for argument.
I don't imagine the money is that much of a problem. Wholesale pirating may have been slowed down a bit by Microsoft in later versions of Windows 7, but I doubt it would affect the Russian Government. Organizations that big can get site licenses for dirt cheap.
It might have something to do with not wanting to be dependent on US closed source technology. Or free of suspected back doors.
In reality the question is now why Russia has ordered this, it is why is the US dragging its feet?
Extra FCC license for Wifi?
Wifi runs in unlicensed spectrum.
Second Rule of science: Investigate the sources of reports. If the main source is not a scientist in the field of study, and/or it was paid for by a notoriously insane group that is not respected by the scientific community at large, do not trust.
Sorry, but that has never been a "rule of science".
Theories stand or fall on their own merit. Science does not care about sources.
The probable cause of this is a sudden shift in the tilt of our molten core. This would realign our magnetic poles.
This is what happens when you get all of your "scientific knowledge" from movies people.
Stay in school.
The funny thing is.... No one knows if this speed-up is a natural cycle, or if there's really something out of whack with the core.
There being no artificial means of altering the magnetic field of the entire planet, you can rest assured that the speed up is a natural occurrence. /smirk
As for it being part of a cycle, magnetic pole wandering, and indeed complete reversals, while documented in geology, follow no easily discernible pattern over time, with long periods of stability followed by many reversals over a short period.
There are some claim the pattern is a Lévy distribution, but this has yet to be proven, and that fact by itself provides no predictive capabilities.
There is a pretty good wiki article on this. The article includes a time-chart showing reversals of the magnetic field. There are very long periods of stability, as well as periods of frequent short reversals.
Magnetic Pole reversals happen over a period of time of tens of thousands of years, and a reversal is proceeded by a diminishing of field strength, not necessarily by pole wandering. The current rate of field strength weakening suggests a reversal sometime in the years 3000-4000.
So the speed up of the NMP's movement is not significant in estimating a reversal, and a reversal does not signify anything out of "whack" with the core of the earth.
It is a perfectly natural thing that has occurred many many many times. And yes, mankind has lived thru reversals entirely unaware.
IF.
Subsidies once enacted, never seem to go away.
Regards of market conditions.
Well first off, the USA is an Ethanol EXPORTER.. So nothing is going to Brazil.
Second, it all comes down to dollars and cents. 40% of US petroleum is produced locally. That percentage of it that goes to foreign oil goes to Canada, Mexico, and Nigeria in that order. Saudi Arabia is a distant 4th.
You pay (currently) about 13% less at the pump for E85 but you get 35% less mileage: you've made a fools bargain.
E85 has never been cost effective at the pump IN SPITE of the massive subsidies and tax breaks.
Exactly so.
North America has precious little land suitable for Sugar Cane. Beets many. Switchgrass maybe.
The US isn't Brazil, and Brazil's methods were, as you pointed out an ecological nightmare.
Corn for ethanol has unfortunately been grown on Class 1 Farm Land, competing with animal feed stocks. (Its often as not the same exact corn).
Have you ever actually tried to eat the grade of corn used for corn ethanol? I thought not, but believe me, don't try it, you won't be able to, it's a grade lower than that used for silage/cattle feed. It's grown on land too marginal for real human crops and tastes.
Ah, No. Not true.
Ethanol has taken over prime farm corn land.
Ethanol has actually driven up the price of silage corn, and beef.
It is most often the exact same corn as silage, because there is no point in switching to a lower grade. The seed, planting, and harvesting costs the same, and you cut your market options by growing anything other than cattle grade corn.
We don't directly eat silage either, so just because it does not taste good to humans when eaten directly is a hollow argument. It tastes pretty good when you eat the cow/pig.
I'm sure this is where the vegans jump in and pontificate about eating animals, but thats not what this thread is about.
National Corn Growers Association.
Now there wouldn't be anything self serving on that site would there?
What other use would you put that land to?
Wheat perhaps? Yeah, that's proven very healthy over the generations hasn't it.
You make it sound so sleazy.
The speed with which you can get a credit card canceled and a new one issued by US banks after a loss or theft probably DOES make it cheaper to simply pay off the losses rather than us an expensive (and flawed) chip & pin system.
Plus, there is no evidence c&p was a regulatory mandate. And if it turns out that it was a regulatory mandate it was still defective.
Nor is there any evidence c&p has lead to lower credit card fees.
This has nothing to do with regulations. It's a case of the market finding the lowest cost solution that still protects the consumer from CC fraud.
Functional art form, but the functionality becomes irrelevant over time. By the time the case is finished the contents are obsolete.
To the key to modding is to build it big and roomy.
Something like that Philco case, where you could probably stuff several generations of motherboards, power supplies, and back planes into the same case over many years, to extend its functional life. It would be a shame to get it finished only to find it so customized to specific components that you had to start over.
The internal structural elements have to be easily reconfigurable.
Skype to skype is free. Zip. Nada. Anywhere in the world.
Skype to land lines is three bucks a month. Unlimited minutes.
Skype runs on computers as well as smart phones.
So you can make a skype call from anywhere with your smart phone to any other skype user for free.
It's got nothing to do with mistaking animal for humans. It's about distinguishing real faces from the imaginary faces our mind creates out of random objects (clouds was given as an example). ie: It's about knowing when to run and when to say "OMG, for a moment I thought that big rock was a bear".
There is no penalty for running away from a rock.
Birds do this all the time. Their instinct is to fly first and look sheepish later.
The article, if you bothered to read it, was indeed make the claim that distinguishing human faces from animal was a key survival mechanism.
Actually, calling cards are not "just as cheap as skype" because the overwhelmingly vast majority of skype users use it for FREE with skype-to-skype.
Skype-to-skype calls whether computer to computer or smartphone to smartphone are free anywhere in the world.
I thought we've verify the efficiency of single line queue for many years.
Me too.
I further doubt that most people still think single queue, multiple servers is perceived by customers as the least efficient. People have seen it work well at banks, Airport Security, Post offices, and other places. (Did I just say post offices were efficient?).
The bad rap it gets is usually from the jump-in-front people who perceive the lack of an opportunity to queue-hop as removing one option under their control. Just often enough to enforce this belief, the die-hard queue hopper will get serviced faster than the average customer.
Single queue - multi server "reduces wait time for those that wait".
If you perceive that you are in the slowest line, you probably are, because you wouldn't notice the speed of other lines if you weren't.
So is having two articles about the same issue on the front page of SlashDot.
Really, what more is there to say about this, than to have Skype fess up that their new software version seriously broke things...
I doubt there is blockage at the network level anywhere.
None of my clients, (Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android) crashed, so your crashes may have been just an anomaly, or a side effect.
The alleged crypto code release was some time ago, not anything recent, and the last I head was that it simply allowed eves dropping on calls and text, no failures of super nodes
I suspect it is the new 5.0 version (or maybe some of those shenanigan versions skype released in cahoots with Verizon) are essentially taking down supernodes, or making them un-reachable, and causing the system wide outage.
As for patches ASAP, don't forget this is Skype. The only way to get them to talk to or be responsive to their users/customers seems to be to take down their entire network. They have a video up on there site with the CEO being all apologetic, without revealing anything at all.
Maybe survival, but wouldn't you think that anything registering "close enough" wasn't too dangerous to spend more time looking at, and anything that wasn't human would be immediately recognizable? I don't think anyone's going to mistake a cheetah for a person. One says "possible friend" and the other says "you're dead before you realize it's a cheetah"
I was thinking the same thing.
Unless they were watching "The Walking Dead" or "Fringe" on the day they wrote that, I simply see no reason to make such a claim.
There has never been a time when people needed to recognize another animal as dangerous but at the same time run the risk of mistaking it for human.
Similarly, there has historically been far more risk to humans from other humans, (some indistinguishable from one's own clan) than from any animals.
So perhaps they meant it the other way around; suggesting you could safely ignore the animals staring at you from the bushes, but if you notice another human staring from the bushes you likely to get a spear or arrow in your ribs.
None of these illness you mention has anything to do with recognizing human faces and distinguishing them from animals.
Nor does the most rabid or schizophrenic person look anything other than human.
You are conflating unusual, illness-induced behavior with the purported claim in this article, that distinguishing human from seemingly human was a key to survival.
For every
"you could look in his eyes and tell he was crazy"
there are dozens and dozens of
"he was the nicest neighbor and couldn't have possibly cut up his wife and buried her in the back yard"
Define "similar faces".