Well, for one thing, drunk drivers aren't going to be caught by RFID, unless they're speeding which they don't need to do to be dangerous.
You might want to look into the literature for traffic calming (also see trafficcalming.org). There's plenty of evidence that simple measures can dramatically reduce the number of casualties.
It IS beautiful, although I am left wondering whether it wouldn't be preferrable to have the air flow rising as it naturally tends to do. Some houses have been so well engineered that there is no HVAC system needed, all the circulation is passive... would it be possible to do this with a computer?
The US Coast Gaurd announced today that they picked up a determined French refugee in a rowboat off the coast of Massachusetts. She has been taken to an undisclosed location for indefinite detention.
There are several Canadians that have been taken in custody without the closest consular office or embassy warned, or letting them make a phone call. Nor were they charged with anything or told when they'd be out. So I wouldn't mind it if things happenned like you describe them:)
That was one thing that bothered me about the political compass. There are a few issues with this survey, such as length (75 questions!) and choice of controls (drop-downs instead of radio buttons?), but the fact that it is open more than compensates!
It's hard to tell from the few essays I've read by Graham whether he is more right than left-wing, but it seems pretty clear that he is leaning to the libertarian side of things. Note that you could be both libertarian and right-wing, and have more in common with me (left-wing libertarian) than you would with GWB.
As to what the reviewer thought... sure, that might be postmodernist. A lot of people in Europe think I'm American when in fact I am Canadian; their belief and their claim does not change this. You could deconstruct the meaning of Canadian or American, but you couldn't reduce the fact I hold a Canadian (but not American) citizenship and passport.
It's murkier with political labels because there is no "proof" that can be easily produced such as a passport. All we can say then is that according to a right-left political spectrum hypothesis, much of Graham's politics seem unexplainable -perhaps even insane- while using a spectrum they are quite straightforward, and arguably more internally coherent than what passes as right or left-wing these days.
Since I don't like postmodernism all that much, I'll finish by saying in Wilberian fashion that the compass includes and transcends the old idea of the spectrum, and is therefore closer to the truth.
Last I heard certain nanotubes were toxic to the environment. Does anyone know whether these suffer from the same issue?
Rachels environment and health weekly had a threepartseries looking at dangers of new technologies, including nanotech.
Apparently, studies on lab rats show that small particles don't harm them as much as very small ones, and that nanoparticles are worst of all.
It probably won't be a big problem for consumers, assuming the end product is stable; I'm more concerned for those producing it. Likely a few scientists, like the Curies, will die from stuff that's in their labs:(
I'm also less concerned with the grey goo hypothesis than the nanohaze we could be getting.
(Note: I'm not saying I agree with this protestor's tactics either)
A multinational company whose entire survival hinges on the acceptance of a product gives you the results of their studies, yet does not publish it in any peer-reviewed journal, or share with you enough details to assess whether the studies were in fact legitimate.
What's more, the technology is provably dangerous, and early field trials show alarming results. What studies from Monsanto were leaked were shoddy at best.
And if that wasn't enough, their crop would either let farmers spray more (Roundup-Ready), destroy the value of an existing natural pesticide (Bt), or lock you in to buying their seeds by not letting you germinate those you saved.
And you're not supposed to think that maybe, just maybe, a company might put its own survival over scientific integrity and ecological thinking? That MAYBE THEY ARE LYING TO YOU TO MAKE A QUICK BUCK?
Ok, sorry for shouting, but for god's sake, people, can we please be 1% as cynical about Monsanto's claims as we are about Microsoft's claims? GM stuff we release in the wild can't be taken out. Once cross-pollinated, we're stuck with this shit in our food supply. We ought to be extremely critical.
Good god, you're making $30k at 20, and looking for sympathy?
1- Get rid of the car. Move closer to work if necessary, or find work closer to home. 2- Tell your leech of a GF to pay her share of the rent or move the hell out of your appartment and your life.
30k is a fair chunk of money. I can live very comfortably on half that while still making student loan payments. Of course, I have roommates and no car, but can still afford to eat out several times a week.
If I were making more money, I'd be saving it for a downpayment on a house, not on car, insurance and girls. The way you're going, you'll always be poor.
"If you pay us $1499 every year for 3 years, we'll sell you a license for things you don't use AND an overpriced server that we'd normally charge $7,000 for."
At least, that's the "deal" I got by email 6 weeks ago. Probably not a bad deal if you are managing a SUN-only shop, but if you are happy with Eclipse and Linux running on cheap hardware...
The only thing that could save us is if they "leap-frog" us. Cities like Curitiba are certainly examples of what you can do with mass transit and other innovations in urban planning. On the technological front, there are many countries where cell phones are the norm and they'll likely never mainstream our old phone systems. For energy, decentralized production may similarly choke off the potential for a big centralized grid.
So, I'm hopeful, and not too concerned about the third-world; I think they'll mostly figure it out on their own. As for us, I'm not so sure... we may need to learn lessons from them!
It's worth noting that solar energy, my personal favorite, is also subject to the same problem: in order to meet our current needs, we would have to cover half of the state of California with solar panels. That much land is available, scattered across the globe, of course, but the sheer production of solar panels involved is daunting.
Putting the solar panels on rooftops or integrating them as other building materials takes care of the land area. As for building enough, that is daunting, but not impossible. Japan is soon going to enter mass-production, and prices keep falling. Wind may be even more promising.
Unfortunately, at some point we're just going to have to face it: we're using too much energy. There is no reasonable way to produce it at this rate. We're just going to have to cut down, and that won't be easy.
There are a lot of easy ways to save energy. Mandating even half-assed fuel efficiency standards could improve air quality, reduce your reliance on foreign fuels and help your balance of trade. There are so many opportunities for energy efficiency, it's mind-boggling.
Linking to counterpunch would generally be seen as left-wing flamebait. Maybe we're seeing left-libertarians and right-libertarians in a de facto alliance against the right-authoritarians? More than the linking, that such articles appear on counterpunch is suggestive.
Any other US watchers with some insight as to what's going on here?
The headphone switch was a good first step. Next should be the laptop carrying case.
I suggest a backpack, especially if yours is at all heavy. Something that doesn't look too snazzy is good. Worn-out looking is best, but that's not always possible and looks mighty suspicious if you're wearing a nice suit. Put the PDA in it too.
Ok, so that's all the security by obscurity stuff. Surely we can come up with better than this- and I'm not thinking guns, pepper spray or tazers, which make it even more likely that you will get seriously injured. A lot of thieves these days don't operate alone, and they have toys too.
Other things you might keep in mind: making all the data useless to the thieves. And how about a laptop or PDA with wireless and GPS that can report its coordinates? Would it be considered unsafe to put in your own backdoor on a system for cases of theft?
Judging from how difficult it was for nuns to get into silos, your scenario is unfortunately plausible.
But the password would have kept you safe, assuming of course that Russians or terrorists had not done any decent humint work, or (gasp!) infiltrated your ranks.
Unsafe measures only give an impression of security, and that's often worse than no security at all.
General 1: "We had a serious breach. A group of terrorists managed to infiltrate our base and get past the first level of security into the missile silos. We should consider adding an extra layer of physical security"
General 2: "They should never have gotten that far, but we caught them so we know the system is working."
General 1: "Well, had there been just 2 more of them, they could have broken through the last level of physical security"
General 2: "Even if they did, they would still need the secret password to launch the missiles. We don't need to worry"
GIS information
on
Open Maps?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
GIS is a new-ish field, still developping very fast. A lot of tools are fairly mature, but the prices are still high, interoperability is getting good but there aren't many mature commodity components.
The major industry effort towards interop seems to be OpenGIS.
Some open source GIS stuff that looks promising to me are Mapserver and OpenMap.
I found the learning curve too much at this point, and many of the OSS solutions didn't work straight out of the box. Proprietary solutions are so expensive that they made playing around impossible.
What's more, getting data was difficult. Your city should be able to share its digitized maps. Here in Canada, my city was reluctant to share them, as some are copyright to ESRI (imagine your city co-owning its information with a foreign company!!!). What I found out however is that there isn't any copyright if you take the paper maps they publish and digitize it yourself. Time consuming, I know:(
There are a lot of useful hacks that I wanted to do with geographic data, but I shelved those plans for now. Hopefully in a year or so we will have better tools and cheaper data. If you manage to help us get there, thanks in advance:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for one thing, drunk drivers aren't going to be caught by RFID, unless they're speeding which they don't need to do to be dangerous.
You might want to look into the literature for traffic calming (also see trafficcalming.org). There's plenty of evidence that simple measures can dramatically reduce the number of casualties.
Nifty!
:)
That was one thing that bothered me about the political compass. There are a few issues with this survey, such as length (75 questions!) and choice of controls (drop-downs instead of radio buttons?), but the fact that it is open more than compensates!
Thanks for pointing this out!
Check out the political compass.
It's hard to tell from the few essays I've read by Graham whether he is more right than left-wing, but it seems pretty clear that he is leaning to the libertarian side of things. Note that you could be both libertarian and right-wing, and have more in common with me (left-wing libertarian) than you would with GWB.
As to what the reviewer thought... sure, that might be postmodernist. A lot of people in Europe think I'm American when in fact I am Canadian; their belief and their claim does not change this. You could deconstruct the meaning of Canadian or American, but you couldn't reduce the fact I hold a Canadian (but not American) citizenship and passport.
It's murkier with political labels because there is no "proof" that can be easily produced such as a passport. All we can say then is that according to a right-left political spectrum hypothesis, much of Graham's politics seem unexplainable -perhaps even insane- while using a spectrum they are quite straightforward, and arguably more internally coherent than what passes as right or left-wing these days.
Since I don't like postmodernism all that much, I'll finish by saying in Wilberian fashion that the compass includes and transcends the old idea of the spectrum, and is therefore closer to the truth.
Apparently, studies on lab rats show that small particles don't harm them as much as very small ones, and that nanoparticles are worst of all.
It probably won't be a big problem for consumers, assuming the end product is stable; I'm more concerned for those producing it. Likely a few scientists, like the Curies, will die from stuff that's in their labs
I'm also less concerned with the grey goo hypothesis than the nanohaze we could be getting.
(Note: I'm not saying I agree with this protestor's tactics either)
A multinational company whose entire survival hinges on the acceptance of a product gives you the results of their studies, yet does not publish it in any peer-reviewed journal, or share with you enough details to assess whether the studies were in fact legitimate.
What's more, the technology is provably dangerous, and early field trials show alarming results. What studies from Monsanto were leaked were shoddy at best.
And if that wasn't enough, their crop would either let farmers spray more (Roundup-Ready), destroy the value of an existing natural pesticide (Bt), or lock you in to buying their seeds by not letting you germinate those you saved.
And you're not supposed to think that maybe, just maybe, a company might put its own survival over scientific integrity and ecological thinking? That MAYBE THEY ARE LYING TO YOU TO MAKE A QUICK BUCK?
Ok, sorry for shouting, but for god's sake, people, can we please be 1% as cynical about Monsanto's claims as we are about Microsoft's claims? GM stuff we release in the wild can't be taken out. Once cross-pollinated, we're stuck with this shit in our food supply. We ought to be extremely critical.
Good god, you're making $30k at 20, and looking for sympathy?
1- Get rid of the car. Move closer to work if necessary, or find work closer to home.
2- Tell your leech of a GF to pay her share of the rent or move the hell out of your appartment and your life.
30k is a fair chunk of money. I can live very comfortably on half that while still making student loan payments. Of course, I have roommates and no car, but can still afford to eat out several times a week.
If I were making more money, I'd be saving it for a downpayment on a house, not on car, insurance and girls. The way you're going, you'll always be poor.
BoingBoing noted that an obvious use for this would be heckling. Probably not something the marketing types thought of... :)
It's simple really- being able to live 5,000 years means we can start interstellar travel.
At least, that's the theory I hear from people that think aliens helped us evolve by inoculating our planet with magic mushroom spores.
"If you pay us $1499 every year for 3 years, we'll sell you a license for things you don't use AND an overpriced server that we'd normally charge $7,000 for."
At least, that's the "deal" I got by email 6 weeks ago. Probably not a bad deal if you are managing a SUN-only shop, but if you are happy with Eclipse and Linux running on cheap hardware...
The only thing that could save us is if they "leap-frog" us. Cities like Curitiba are certainly examples of what you can do with mass transit and other innovations in urban planning. On the technological front, there are many countries where cell phones are the norm and they'll likely never mainstream our old phone systems. For energy, decentralized production may similarly choke off the potential for a big centralized grid.
So, I'm hopeful, and not too concerned about the third-world; I think they'll mostly figure it out on their own. As for us, I'm not so sure... we may need to learn lessons from them!
There are a lot of easy ways to save energy. Mandating even half-assed fuel efficiency standards could improve air quality, reduce your reliance on foreign fuels and help your balance of trade. There are so many opportunities for energy efficiency, it's mind-boggling.
Yours answer was a fair point, and I didn't take it as flamebait.
:)
My question was asked honestly, but it seems some mods can't tell the difference, and one modded me a troll. oh well...
Great news, but...
Anyone know why MySQL as opposed to a more standards-compliant db like PG?
Thank you AC, that makes sense now! :)
Uhm... this gets modded up insightful?
I'm not so blind that I can't see M$ would LIKE to control the web. I just don't understand HOW that might be even remotely possible.
So, why would anyone shell out cash to Microsoft to get access to their data that's on the web? What could they offer that open-source can't?
Fascinating article. Unfortunately it does not back up one of its main claims, that Longhorn will lock in webdevelopers. How exactly is that possible?
Not a troll... just genuinely curious. Have I missed something really obvious?
makes for strange linking fellows.
Linking to counterpunch would generally be seen as left-wing flamebait. Maybe we're seeing left-libertarians and right-libertarians in a de facto alliance against the right-authoritarians? More than the linking, that such articles appear on counterpunch is suggestive.
Any other US watchers with some insight as to what's going on here?
Step 2: Security through obscurity
The headphone switch was a good first step. Next should be the laptop carrying case.
I suggest a backpack, especially if yours is at all heavy. Something that doesn't look too snazzy is good. Worn-out looking is best, but that's not always possible and looks mighty suspicious if you're wearing a nice suit. Put the PDA in it too.
Ok, so that's all the security by obscurity stuff. Surely we can come up with better than this- and I'm not thinking guns, pepper spray or tazers, which make it even more likely that you will get seriously injured. A lot of thieves these days don't operate alone, and they have toys too.
Other things you might keep in mind: making all the data useless to the thieves. And how about a laptop or PDA with wireless and GPS that can report its coordinates? Would it be considered unsafe to put in your own backdoor on a system for cases of theft?
And did I mention make back-ups?
The nuns were not there as part of a guided tour.
Worse, there are several examples of such actions, where it takes security a long time to get on the scene.
Judging from how difficult it was for nuns to get into silos, your scenario is unfortunately plausible.
But the password would have kept you safe, assuming of course that Russians or terrorists had not done any decent humint work, or (gasp!) infiltrated your ranks.
Unsafe measures only give an impression of security, and that's often worse than no security at all.
General 1: "We had a serious breach. A group of terrorists managed to infiltrate our base and get past the first level of security into the missile silos. We should consider adding an extra layer of physical security"
General 2: "They should never have gotten that far, but we caught them so we know the system is working."
General 1: "Well, had there been just 2 more of them, they could have broken through the last level of physical security"
General 2: "Even if they did, they would still need the secret password to launch the missiles. We don't need to worry"
GIS is a new-ish field, still developping very fast. A lot of tools are fairly mature, but the prices are still high, interoperability is getting good but there aren't many mature commodity components.
:(
:)
The major industry effort towards interop seems to be OpenGIS.
Some open source GIS stuff that looks promising to me are Mapserver and OpenMap.
I found the learning curve too much at this point, and many of the OSS solutions didn't work straight out of the box. Proprietary solutions are so expensive that they made playing around impossible.
What's more, getting data was difficult. Your city should be able to share its digitized maps. Here in Canada, my city was reluctant to share them, as some are copyright to ESRI (imagine your city co-owning its information with a foreign company!!!). What I found out however is that there isn't any copyright if you take the paper maps they publish and digitize it yourself. Time consuming, I know
There are a lot of useful hacks that I wanted to do with geographic data, but I shelved those plans for now. Hopefully in a year or so we will have better tools and cheaper data. If you manage to help us get there, thanks in advance