Regarding the short-circuiting, capacitors require overlapping surfaces that are electrically insulated from each other. That means if you're using nanotubes, you'll want both sides covered in nanotube "fuzz" and the two sides then pushed together so that the two intertwine. This means that one (or preferably both) sides need their nanotubes coated with some kind of insulating material for it to work, otherwise the nanotubes will simply short out, and then you won't have a capacitor any more. And that means you won't get short circuits from random broken nanotubes in the structure.
I'd envisioned the nanotube capacitor as using the inside and outside surfaces of the tubes as the "charge plates". That is, the inside of each tube might be negative, the outside positive, or vice versa. Thus, the walls of the nanotubes would themselves be the dielectric. The article seemed short on that sort of detail, though, so I'm just guessing.
And aluminum powder becomes even more combustible if you mix it with powdered iron oxide, thus forming thermite. Usually you need a little magnesium ribbon for an initiator...oh wait this goes in the Science Stuff They Let Us Do When We Were Kids thread...
Stealth cars. The radar and infrared versions would, of course, be preferable--I just want my car to be invisible to radar and lasers, not to other drivers...
Yeah, not only that but he tried to do an update from XP:
I tried installing it as an update to the laptop's Windows XP -- but after four hours of churning away the laptop shut down and wouldn't reboot.
This guy obviously has never done a Windows install before, or he'd know that the only reliable way to install a new version of Windows is to start from bare metal.
Most techs could probably look at the mobo and tell you what every componet and chip-set part was for. If some strange component was included, it would immediately be recognized as something that was not right.
Yes, but what about the software embedded in those familiar chips? What about the BIOS? There's lots of nasty stuff that could be hidden at that level, and would be hard to detect. Certainly, visual inspection is not going to be enough...
Uhhhh, no it's not, not to say that Ubuntu isn't good, but Novell's SuSE Linux is the most polished and accessible distribution. Everything "Just Works" (tm) in Novell SuSE
Since you mention it...I've been trying to bring up Suse on an old box at home, and the experience hasn't been exactly smooth or enjoyable so far.
First time I installed, I got a cryptic message from grub when I tried to boot. After some googling, I figured out that I had one of those archaic systems with a BIOS that requires boot files at the start of the disk. OK, so I started another install, and this time I allocated a small/boot partition. That got me further...but couldn't the installation script have detected this condition, or at least warned me? Heck, the boot partition is small, why not make it a default?
Then I made a stupid mistake when the installation program (something called Yast) prompted me for graphics parameters--I entered a color depth and resolution that my monitor/graphics card couldn't support. The result of this was that X wouldn't boot, so I had no GUI. That's a natural consequence of my mistake, but there appears to be no way to recover from this error. There is no way (that I've found) to tell the system to revert to minimal graphics values, no command line interface that lets you set video parameters. The only way to change graphics settings appears to be through Yast--which apparently requires X to be running. There's a config file in the X11 directory that says it's auto-generated and that I shouldn't edit it. Googling turned up some people with a similar problem, and various hacks to this (uneditable) file, but I figured it was easier to just reinstall (again) than try to figure out how to hack a file I'm not supposed to change. I'll go home now and see if the installation has finished, and see how far I get this time.
I guess I was hoping that a Linux distro wouldn't put me through Installation Hell, like the one I experience with every Windows Install...but that seems to be a vain hope. I can't help but note that Windows handles the graphics issue much better than Suse--Windows will fall back to VGA if it doesn't know what else to do, so you at least have a GUI; if you screw up your settings in the control panel and the screen goes fritzy, Windows automatically reverts to the previous settings. Couldn't the Suse folks have put the same amount of thought into this?
I'm not saying I couldn't have done this smarter or better, I'm just sharing the frustration of someone who's going through the Linux thing for the first time. (I have used Unix before, btw.) I should mention I downloaded 3 other distros before buying the DVD from Novell...I now think they were failing due to the same boot allocation error I finally figured out.
Just to clarify a few points: it takes a 2/3 majority of the Senate alone to ratify a treaty (the House has nothing to say about it), and any treaties so ratified acquire the force of law. I'm not sure what would happen if a ratified treaty directly contradicted a provision in the Bill of Rights. My guess is that the treaty would prevail--effectively repealing the Article in question, but I invite any lawyers out there to contribute opinions more authoritative than mine.
...[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur...
...This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land..."
Consequently, treaties or resolutions passed by the United Nations have no effect on US law unless they are ratified by (some of) our elected representatives. There may be some measure of comfort in this for those who hold the Bill of Rights dear, but the danger is that whoever happens to be President, and those who happen to be present during the Senate hearing on the proposed treaty, effectively have the power to circumvent the procedures required for amending the U.S. Constitution. Considering the quality of those who currently rule in Washington, I am apprehensive whenever I hear of another UN resolution concocted by that strange assortment of Kleptocrats who seem to dominate that body. One of these days, the President may find a UN resolution that he likes.
In truth, you are all blameless. English is a terrible language, and people should try to avoid using it as much as possible. Of course, most already succeed without even trying.
It's a "joe job"? Are you sure? It sounded kinda appealing to me.
From what I can discern (can't load the articles) Blue Frog is basically a variation on the good old mail-bomb. Back when spammers were naive enough to use real "from" addresses, a little script could send a lot of replies in a short time. I assume BF follows URLs in spam, and emails the admin account of that domain? Or what? Hmmm...I'd sure like to know more about how this works, and how they can be sure they don't target innocent sites.
If you use this type of solution, don't you become part of the problem? Don't you just add to the amount of trash congesting the internet? If I could be sure that using BF results in surgical strikes against spammers with no collateral damage, I'd join the Great Botnet Army of Light in a heartbeat. Maybe some day these sites will be back up and I'll be able to find out how it works...
The alleged "pyramids" project at what seem to be odd angles (not vertical) from fairly convoluted terrain. If I were going to build a pyramid, I'd find a nice flat spot to put it first. I also don't see why people think it's so unlikely that there should be pyramid-shaped hills. You see all kinds of regular geometric forms in nature.
Interesting. If I understand what you said correctly, Illinois has criteria that--if met--make a software license non-taxable. It also sounds like the case you cited says that EULAs do not meet the criteria (at the very least because they are not signed). Could it be reasonably argued on this basis that EULAs do not constitute a grant of license, and that they are therefore not a contract because nothing of value has changed hands?
What I want is to question the nature of the transaction itself: if the purchase of a software package is held by a court to not imply a grant of license, though the EULA says it grants a license--as opposed to a transfer of ownership of some item--then what exactly is transferred? It seems to me that the answer would be nothing--the EULA says you don't own the software, but it also doesn't effectively grant a license. If you have gained nothing of value in return for your money, then can there be any question of a contract between you and the software publisher? If there's neither license nor contract, then there are no limits that can be imposed by the EULA on what you do with whatever it is that you didn't buy. Of course, the software company could argue that you did buy one copy of their software...but they've resisted that.
I guess I was thinking that maybe tax law would be a good wedge to expose the self contradictory nature of package software "purchases". Would EULAs still hold up if the state stood to lose tax revenue? Now if we could only find someone with sufficient resources and interest to argue a case like this...
I've been wondering about this. A lot of EULAs seem to say (as far as I can understand them) that I don't really own a copy of the software--I just have a license to use it under the terms of said license. Now, if I'm obtaining a license and not really buying anything, can such a transaction be subject to sales tax? It's like charging sales tax when I put money in a parking meter--I'm not buying the parking space, just the right to use it for a limited time.
I'm probably completely of the mark...but if I were right, what fun it would be to challenge the right of states to collect sales tax on software because of the EULA! I bet courts would start ruling EULAs invalid right and left...
Like most scientific reporting, this article creates much heat but little light. Let's take a look at a couple of the statments made by "the governments chief scientist":
"...even if international agreement could be reached on limiting emissions, climate change was inevitable."
Surely, this is a trivial truth--indeed, almost a tautology. The world's climate has always been changing and will continue to change as long as we manage to hold on to an atmosphere. So of course no matter what happens, climate change will continue--and King's assertion will be vindicated. Of course, real science has to include numbers, so we get some:
...a 3C rise would cause a drop worldwide of between 20 and 400 million tonnes in cereal crops and put about 400 million more people at risk of hunger.
As the article mentions, the 3 degree figure is itself controversial; if we grant that the world's average temperature is indeed rising (and it does seem to be), there is no way to calculate exactly how much it will rise. Moreover, there are many other factors at work, and there is no way to predict their influence on the world's climate. Indeed, for all we know, our carbon emissions are the only thing that is staving off the next ice age.
There is no clue in the article about how King arrived at his calculation of the loss of cereal crops due to warming. The wide spread between 20 and 400 million suggests a disturbingl lack of precision, but more importantly, why does King think that global warming would cause the loss of any cereal crop production? There's certainly no argument for this cited in the article. Let's grant that a worldwide shift in annual temperatures and precipitation is going to take place; it then seems reasonable to suppose that some areas where wheat is grown today might not yield profitable wheat harvests in the future. But why should we believe that other areas that do not grow wheat today might not become suitable for this crop after the change has taken place? If the world becomes a warmer place, then it seems to me that the latitudes at which wheat can be grown would shift northward (in the Northern Hemisphere, of course). Those latitudes that were previously suitable for wheat might now become suitable for other crops that require warmer weather--anything from pineapples to sugar cane.
As I said, "climate change" is a given of life on this planet. But it seems passing strange to me that those who are talking about it most today insist that all consequences of such change will be negative. Such a purely negative view is surely at least subject to doubt if we consider a relatively recent period at which global temperatures were several degrees higher than today--the so-called "Little Optimum" which lasted from about 900-1200 AD. This was a period when agriculture flourished in Europe, and Iceland was a pleasant place. On the other hand, nobody much enjoyed the ice ages. Lighten up--change can be a good thing!
Re:Simplicity, price, and size please
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The Future of the PDA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I can get you pretty close--the Palm Z22. You won't want to carry it in your wallet (ouch...the idea had never occurred to me before), but I just replaced my Sony Clie with one of these, and I'm happy. The Clie cost me $400 bucks back when it was first introduced, and I was going to do all kinds of wonderful things with this slim brushed-aluminum wonder (you know, like hook it up to a GPS and never get lost again, and listen to music, and well...lots of stuff).
Well, I never did a thing with the Clie that I hadn't done with my old green-screen Palm, and I found that its battery would last at most 2 days--providing you didn't use it very much. I did buy a GPS for my car, so I'm not lost as often any more, and I got an MP3 player to drown out the noise in the cubicle farm I work in, and I got a nice phone that works in Europe and over here in the US and is flat enough that I can clip it to my belt and never notice it's there, and I got a lap-top to fulfill my portable computer needs.
Meanwhile, the Clie's battery life went from bad to pathetic, and every time it ran down completely, I'd lose all my data. I finally got sick of it a month or so ago, and bought the Palm Z22. The main reasons I bought it were that a) I realized that I still needed to do all the stuff the good old Palm did, but b) I wasn't going to pay $400 for it, and c) I wanted to keep using the simple Palm interface and my collection of apps.
The Z22 cost me $80. That's a little more than it's worth, but not outrageously so. It has a color screen that's not as nice as the Clie, but who cares--it's plenty bright and legible, and I ain't gonna admire the Mona Lisa on it. It's got 32M of flash memory that's persistent so I won't lose it if the battery goes flat--but the battery will last a week without recharging, so that probably won't happen. There's absolutely no frills--no memory cards, and the only interface on the thing is the USB port you use for syncing and charging. And you know what? I don't care.
I gather the Z22 is marketed as a "beginner's" Palm; if so, Palm doesn't get it. I think there's lots of people like me who still see a neeed for a device like this, and who have given up on the search for the One Device To Rule Them All.
FWIW, here's another vote against Gigabyte. I was putting together an AMD system about 6 months ago, and made the mistake of buying a Gigabyte board with NForce 4 SLI. I don't know why...I have no intention of sticking two graphics boards into my PC...it was one of those stupid impulse buys. Anyway, the board runs OK, but has a major heat management issue: the NForce chipset has a thin heatsink and no cooling fan, and there is no room to put one in because the graphics card projects over the heatsink for the darn chipset. The AMD CPU runs incredibly cool--it never breaks 40 C. The chipset, on the other hand, hits 65 when I'm playing games (and I wouldn't be surprised if it went over 70 if I let it).
I installed extra case fans, and glued a little 2" fan where it blows over the chipset heatsink, so it runs at about 45 C...as long as the room doesn't get too warm. So I traded one heat problem (the Intel CPU) for another (the Nvidia chipset), and didn't get what I really wanted: a quiet system. I don't know why the Nvidia chipset runs so hot, but given this fact, Gigabyte should have provided a more massive heatsink and fan--or better yet, a passive liquid cooling setup like the Abit Otes. Bah, now I have to wait for it to break so I have an excuse to buy a new one. I know, I'll disconnect the fans...
Why would I want to run the worst possible OS on the most expensive hardware? What a perversity! I want to put together my PC myself out of stock parts, then boot MacOS X...with Windows emulation until the software developers catch on and drop Windows. It would feel so good to pay for MacOS rather than the world's biggest software turd. Heck I'd pay twice as much for a good OS...I just don't want to be locked into Apple's hardware.
I couldn't agree more. I look around my workplace (the software development group of a large healthcare firm), and see thousands of PCs, each subtly different from the other, that have to be individually maintained by our not-too-bright IT staff. They run an OS that was never designed for collaborative use, has never had true "multi-user" capability, and barely manages to do something remotely like multitasking.
I compare this to the environment I enjoyed in the early 90s: diskless Sun workstations connected to Unix servers (Convexen), and I long for the good old days. Heck, I had a PC at home--but it was for play; the real computers were at work, and I knew it. The OS had been designed from the ground up as a multi-user collaborative environment, with a simple, sensible and reasonably effective security scheme. Thanks to my.profile and my private cache of scripts and macros, I could personalize my X Windows and command line environment to my heart's content.
Yes, there were some drawbacks. Sometimes, response was sluggish--who started that damn compile at three in the afternoon? And of course, if the server went down, everyone was SOL. I think the first concern could be addressed by the much faster processors of today (and some judicious load-balancing). Our networks have gotten much faster and more efficient, so I don't think response time would be much of a problem. As far as downtime, it has to be at least a wash--and when a large mob bearing torches and pitchforks descends on IT, they tend to get problems fixed with amazing alacrity.
Balancing the two environments, today's seems to be the obvious loser. Why are companies throwing billions down the Wintel rathole each year when they could have efficient centralized servers running a real collaborative OS? How did this happen?
I think I know part of the answer. The first signs of the Great Fall came when a few managers bought PCs so they could run MS Office applications--primarily spreadsheets at first, then--oh wonder of wonders--PowerPoint and Word. But now management found that they had been sundered from their underlings, who were working in a completely different environment from theirs. Incompatibility reared its head: You had to buy one set of apps for the PHBs, and another for the geeks. Worse, underlings could not read communications sent to them in Word format by their bosses, and they could not produce beautiful PowerPoint presentations on demand. They could--alas--only do their jobs. Management found this Wasteful and Inefficient, so they decreed that henceforth, everyone shall use computers just like theirs, running an operating system just as powerful and capable as theirs. And so now we live in compatibility Hell.
Previous comments on this article pretty well pointed out its boggling bogosities. To me, this yet is another data point to support my growing suspicion that there is something badly wrong with the current notion of "studies" per se. I'm not talking about "traditional" double-blind controlled experimentation here--I'm talking about a process that entails analyzing data derived from a sample population that has the goal of showing statistically significant covariance between some disease and a putative causal agent. Such studies never attempt to prove causality--they can't because covariance doesn't demonstrate causality. Insofar as I can tell, the rationale of "studies" is something like "covariance doesn't demonstrate a causal relationship, but it's important anyhow".
If that's science, then the definition of science has changed since I went to school. As I dimly recall, the traditional scientific method entails carefully designed experiments using control subjects, that isolate one variable. If appropriate, an experiment involving human subjects is conducted using the "double blind" method--that is, neither subjects nor experimenters know which individuals are members of the subject or control groups. After the conclusion of the experiment, those who conducted it publish a paper describing their methods and results. Other scientists then try to repeat those results. If the results can't be repeated, then the conclusions of the original experiment are regarded as unproven.
In contrast, it seems to me that "studies" do nothing but advance hypotheses that one might attempt to prove or disprove through experimentation. Yet, the publication of every study is treated by the populace as a scientific revelation; worse, public policy is often influenced by the results of "studies".
I would prefer to see the funds that subsidize the current deluge of "studies" go to real science. If not, then I prefer that the funds go to me. I'll produce a study that shows...um...that work makes people tired.
I'm not an AOL user, so maybe I'm just uninformed about the details of this plan, but I don't understand how AOL could even pretend that this "blue ribbon" program offers any kind of advantage to their customers--it seems to be an obvious ruse to increase AOL revenues. Maybe I missed this part, but is AOL (or Goodmail) actually going to review each piece of email to guarantee that it's 100% wholesome, and devoid of pernicious content? I kinda suspect not...why would they turn down money? If some guy who's selling imitation Viagra decides that it's profitable to invest a few cents per email, is Goodmail going to refuse?
In fact, it seems to me that this "blue ribbon" certification is a heaven-sent opportunity for con-artists everywhere: pay Goodmail, and lots of naive AOL users are going to think the "blue ribbon" guarantees that the offer is legit. Of course, that could create long-term liability issues for AOL...
People seem skeptical of this article's prediction--and I have to admit there wasn't much attempt to outline how such a "metaverse" would work, or counter obvious objections. Still, I think something like Neal Stephenson's metaverse would be fun--and maybe even useful and possible.
One obvious objection is that each online "fiefdom"--let's just call it a "fief"-- currently has its own set of rules, and that these rules are incompatible--you can't mix a high fantasy RPG with Grand Theft Auto--or even Star Wars. That would make about as much sense as mixing chess with baseball. But why couldn't there be a neutral layer that connects all these now-closed universes? You could regard online games as a set of conventions that are adopted by a certain subset of those who inhabit the metaverse. Indeed, the metaverse could provide a meeting place where potential players gather to design and implement games. (I'm making the assumption that game engines and design components will be made accessible enough in the future so that it doesn't take years of heads-down coding to make a game.)
The metaverse could also provide a forum for the adherents of different fiefs to negotiate a common interface--which could involve agreements about what powers or artifacts can be transferred from one fief to another, how a certain level of achievement can be translated from one fief to another, and so forth. Games could become open-ended, with players moving on from one fief to another without losing everything they gained in the last one. Avatars might be allowed to play in more than one fief at a time, or might even gain status in the metaverse depending on their achievements in fiefs.
In time, the metaverse itself could become a very interesting place--a place where people meet to talk, plan expansions or vote on changes to the metaverse, or just hang out. Hey, can I call dibs on the lot across from the Black Sun?
Yep, I freely admit to not being paranoid enough. Trust me, I'm making up for it in my old age 8^)
As for the goth thing...are you a Visigoth or an Ostrogoth? I've occasionally run across a Visigoth who wouldn't pillage and plunder his grandmother's hut, but I can't abide an Ostrogoth. And don't even get me started on the Vandals and the Huns...
Well... I was thinking that these posting were going to be sent around the world, read, replied to...and eventually vaporize. Why would anyone want to keep the damn things? And I was also not thinking about my email address ever getting harvested by spammers, because spam hadn't been invented yet! Heck, one of the benefits of getting laid off my old job a couple of years ago was that I could get rid of the email account I'd had since 1988 and that was drawing a sh*tload of spam every day. Yes, yes I was posting to usenet during work hours. But see, the bosses hadn't figured out USENET was there yet...it was underground, man. And they were paying for it. And we thought it would last forever. What fools we were.
The age of massive industrialized warfare waged by nation-states is also over. Today, bombs are delivered by car or truck, engagements are fought by small, loosely controlled bands of irregulars, and our enemies communicate via handwritten notes sent by courier. And they are not only winning, they are running rings around us. So the kabillions we (the industrialized "Western" nation-states) spend on air superiority, electronic intelligence (ELINT) systems, space weapons, and huge military staffs whose chief talent is giving PowerPoint presentations are a complete waste of resources .
Read something by Martin van Creveld if you want to understand what's going on.
Through a Glass, Darkly is a good place to start.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd envisioned the nanotube capacitor as using the inside and outside surfaces of the tubes as the "charge plates". That is, the inside of each tube might be negative, the outside positive, or vice versa. Thus, the walls of the nanotubes would themselves be the dielectric. The article seemed short on that sort of detail, though, so I'm just guessing.
And aluminum powder becomes even more combustible if you mix it with powdered iron oxide, thus forming thermite. Usually you need a little magnesium ribbon for an initiator...oh wait this goes in the Science Stuff They Let Us Do When We Were Kids thread...
Yeah, but my titanium rapier will rock!
"Massive extensions" of RSS? Does that mean they're going to change the meaning of the acronym, or redefine "Really Simple"?
Stealth cars. The radar and infrared versions would, of course, be preferable--I just want my car to be invisible to radar and lasers, not to other drivers...
Yeah, not only that but he tried to do an update from XP:
This guy obviously has never done a Windows install before, or he'd know that the only reliable way to install a new version of Windows is to start from bare metal.
Yes, but what about the software embedded in those familiar chips? What about the BIOS? There's lots of nasty stuff that could be hidden at that level, and would be hard to detect. Certainly, visual inspection is not going to be enough...
Since you mention it...I've been trying to bring up Suse on an old box at home, and the experience hasn't been exactly smooth or enjoyable so far.
First time I installed, I got a cryptic message from grub when I tried to boot. After some googling, I figured out that I had one of those archaic systems with a BIOS that requires boot files at the start of the disk. OK, so I started another install, and this time I allocated a small /boot partition. That got me further...but couldn't the installation script have detected this condition, or at least warned me? Heck, the boot partition is small, why not make it a default?
Then I made a stupid mistake when the installation program (something called Yast) prompted me for graphics parameters--I entered a color depth and resolution that my monitor/graphics card couldn't support. The result of this was that X wouldn't boot, so I had no GUI. That's a natural consequence of my mistake, but there appears to be no way to recover from this error. There is no way (that I've found) to tell the system to revert to minimal graphics values, no command line interface that lets you set video parameters. The only way to change graphics settings appears to be through Yast--which apparently requires X to be running. There's a config file in the X11 directory that says it's auto-generated and that I shouldn't edit it. Googling turned up some people with a similar problem, and various hacks to this (uneditable) file, but I figured it was easier to just reinstall (again) than try to figure out how to hack a file I'm not supposed to change. I'll go home now and see if the installation has finished, and see how far I get this time.
I guess I was hoping that a Linux distro wouldn't put me through Installation Hell, like the one I experience with every Windows Install...but that seems to be a vain hope. I can't help but note that Windows handles the graphics issue much better than Suse--Windows will fall back to VGA if it doesn't know what else to do, so you at least have a GUI; if you screw up your settings in the control panel and the screen goes fritzy, Windows automatically reverts to the previous settings. Couldn't the Suse folks have put the same amount of thought into this?
I'm not saying I couldn't have done this smarter or better, I'm just sharing the frustration of someone who's going through the Linux thing for the first time. (I have used Unix before, btw.) I should mention I downloaded 3 other distros before buying the DVD from Novell...I now think they were failing due to the same boot allocation error I finally figured out.
Just to clarify a few points: it takes a 2/3 majority of the Senate alone to ratify a treaty (the House has nothing to say about it), and any treaties so ratified acquire the force of law. I'm not sure what would happen if a ratified treaty directly contradicted a provision in the Bill of Rights. My guess is that the treaty would prevail--effectively repealing the Article in question, but I invite any lawyers out there to contribute opinions more authoritative than mine.
Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution:
Article VI of the United States Constitution:
Consequently, treaties or resolutions passed by the United Nations have no effect on US law unless they are ratified by (some of) our elected representatives. There may be some measure of comfort in this for those who hold the Bill of Rights dear, but the danger is that whoever happens to be President, and those who happen to be present during the Senate hearing on the proposed treaty, effectively have the power to circumvent the procedures required for amending the U.S. Constitution. Considering the quality of those who currently rule in Washington, I am apprehensive whenever I hear of another UN resolution concocted by that strange assortment of Kleptocrats who seem to dominate that body. One of these days, the President may find a UN resolution that he likes.
I visit a webSITE.
I aim with my gunSIGHT.
In truth, you are all blameless. English is a terrible language, and people should try to avoid using it as much as possible. Of course, most already succeed without even trying.
From what I can discern (can't load the articles) Blue Frog is basically a variation on the good old mail-bomb. Back when spammers were naive enough to use real "from" addresses, a little script could send a lot of replies in a short time. I assume BF follows URLs in spam, and emails the admin account of that domain? Or what? Hmmm...I'd sure like to know more about how this works, and how they can be sure they don't target innocent sites.
If you use this type of solution, don't you become part of the problem? Don't you just add to the amount of trash congesting the internet? If I could be sure that using BF results in surgical strikes against spammers with no collateral damage, I'd join the Great Botnet Army of Light in a heartbeat. Maybe some day these sites will be back up and I'll be able to find out how it works...
The alleged "pyramids" project at what seem to be odd angles (not vertical) from fairly convoluted terrain. If I were going to build a pyramid, I'd find a nice flat spot to put it first. I also don't see why people think it's so unlikely that there should be pyramid-shaped hills. You see all kinds of regular geometric forms in nature.
What I want is to question the nature of the transaction itself: if the purchase of a software package is held by a court to not imply a grant of license, though the EULA says it grants a license--as opposed to a transfer of ownership of some item--then what exactly is transferred? It seems to me that the answer would be nothing--the EULA says you don't own the software, but it also doesn't effectively grant a license. If you have gained nothing of value in return for your money, then can there be any question of a contract between you and the software publisher? If there's neither license nor contract, then there are no limits that can be imposed by the EULA on what you do with whatever it is that you didn't buy. Of course, the software company could argue that you did buy one copy of their software...but they've resisted that.
I guess I was thinking that maybe tax law would be a good wedge to expose the self contradictory nature of package software "purchases". Would EULAs still hold up if the state stood to lose tax revenue? Now if we could only find someone with sufficient resources and interest to argue a case like this...
I'm probably completely of the mark...but if I were right, what fun it would be to challenge the right of states to collect sales tax on software because of the EULA! I bet courts would start ruling EULAs invalid right and left...
Surely, this is a trivial truth--indeed, almost a tautology. The world's climate has always been changing and will continue to change as long as we manage to hold on to an atmosphere. So of course no matter what happens, climate change will continue--and King's assertion will be vindicated. Of course, real science has to include numbers, so we get some:
As the article mentions, the 3 degree figure is itself controversial; if we grant that the world's average temperature is indeed rising (and it does seem to be), there is no way to calculate exactly how much it will rise. Moreover, there are many other factors at work, and there is no way to predict their influence on the world's climate. Indeed, for all we know, our carbon emissions are the only thing that is staving off the next ice age.
There is no clue in the article about how King arrived at his calculation of the loss of cereal crops due to warming. The wide spread between 20 and 400 million suggests a disturbingl lack of precision, but more importantly, why does King think that global warming would cause the loss of any cereal crop production? There's certainly no argument for this cited in the article. Let's grant that a worldwide shift in annual temperatures and precipitation is going to take place; it then seems reasonable to suppose that some areas where wheat is grown today might not yield profitable wheat harvests in the future. But why should we believe that other areas that do not grow wheat today might not become suitable for this crop after the change has taken place? If the world becomes a warmer place, then it seems to me that the latitudes at which wheat can be grown would shift northward (in the Northern Hemisphere, of course). Those latitudes that were previously suitable for wheat might now become suitable for other crops that require warmer weather--anything from pineapples to sugar cane.
As I said, "climate change" is a given of life on this planet. But it seems passing strange to me that those who are talking about it most today insist that all consequences of such change will be negative. Such a purely negative view is surely at least subject to doubt if we consider a relatively recent period at which global temperatures were several degrees higher than today--the so-called "Little Optimum" which lasted from about 900-1200 AD. This was a period when agriculture flourished in Europe, and Iceland was a pleasant place. On the other hand, nobody much enjoyed the ice ages. Lighten up--change can be a good thing!
Well, I never did a thing with the Clie that I hadn't done with my old green-screen Palm, and I found that its battery would last at most 2 days--providing you didn't use it very much. I did buy a GPS for my car, so I'm not lost as often any more, and I got an MP3 player to drown out the noise in the cubicle farm I work in, and I got a nice phone that works in Europe and over here in the US and is flat enough that I can clip it to my belt and never notice it's there, and I got a lap-top to fulfill my portable computer needs.
Meanwhile, the Clie's battery life went from bad to pathetic, and every time it ran down completely, I'd lose all my data. I finally got sick of it a month or so ago, and bought the Palm Z22. The main reasons I bought it were that a) I realized that I still needed to do all the stuff the good old Palm did, but b) I wasn't going to pay $400 for it, and c) I wanted to keep using the simple Palm interface and my collection of apps.
The Z22 cost me $80. That's a little more than it's worth, but not outrageously so. It has a color screen that's not as nice as the Clie, but who cares--it's plenty bright and legible, and I ain't gonna admire the Mona Lisa on it. It's got 32M of flash memory that's persistent so I won't lose it if the battery goes flat--but the battery will last a week without recharging, so that probably won't happen. There's absolutely no frills--no memory cards, and the only interface on the thing is the USB port you use for syncing and charging. And you know what? I don't care.
I gather the Z22 is marketed as a "beginner's" Palm; if so, Palm doesn't get it. I think there's lots of people like me who still see a neeed for a device like this, and who have given up on the search for the One Device To Rule Them All.
I installed extra case fans, and glued a little 2" fan where it blows over the chipset heatsink, so it runs at about 45 C...as long as the room doesn't get too warm. So I traded one heat problem (the Intel CPU) for another (the Nvidia chipset), and didn't get what I really wanted: a quiet system. I don't know why the Nvidia chipset runs so hot, but given this fact, Gigabyte should have provided a more massive heatsink and fan--or better yet, a passive liquid cooling setup like the Abit Otes. Bah, now I have to wait for it to break so I have an excuse to buy a new one. I know, I'll disconnect the fans...
Why would I want to run the worst possible OS on the most expensive hardware? What a perversity! I want to put together my PC myself out of stock parts, then boot MacOS X...with Windows emulation until the software developers catch on and drop Windows. It would feel so good to pay for MacOS rather than the world's biggest software turd. Heck I'd pay twice as much for a good OS...I just don't want to be locked into Apple's hardware.
I compare this to the environment I enjoyed in the early 90s: diskless Sun workstations connected to Unix servers (Convexen), and I long for the good old days. Heck, I had a PC at home--but it was for play; the real computers were at work, and I knew it. The OS had been designed from the ground up as a multi-user collaborative environment, with a simple, sensible and reasonably effective security scheme. Thanks to my .profile and my private cache of scripts and macros, I could personalize my X Windows and command line environment to my heart's content.
Yes, there were some drawbacks. Sometimes, response was sluggish--who started that damn compile at three in the afternoon? And of course, if the server went down, everyone was SOL. I think the first concern could be addressed by the much faster processors of today (and some judicious load-balancing). Our networks have gotten much faster and more efficient, so I don't think response time would be much of a problem. As far as downtime, it has to be at least a wash--and when a large mob bearing torches and pitchforks descends on IT, they tend to get problems fixed with amazing alacrity.
Balancing the two environments, today's seems to be the obvious loser. Why are companies throwing billions down the Wintel rathole each year when they could have efficient centralized servers running a real collaborative OS? How did this happen?
I think I know part of the answer. The first signs of the Great Fall came when a few managers bought PCs so they could run MS Office applications--primarily spreadsheets at first, then--oh wonder of wonders--PowerPoint and Word. But now management found that they had been sundered from their underlings, who were working in a completely different environment from theirs. Incompatibility reared its head: You had to buy one set of apps for the PHBs, and another for the geeks. Worse, underlings could not read communications sent to them in Word format by their bosses, and they could not produce beautiful PowerPoint presentations on demand. They could--alas--only do their jobs. Management found this Wasteful and Inefficient, so they decreed that henceforth, everyone shall use computers just like theirs, running an operating system just as powerful and capable as theirs. And so now we live in compatibility Hell.
If that's science, then the definition of science has changed since I went to school. As I dimly recall, the traditional scientific method entails carefully designed experiments using control subjects, that isolate one variable. If appropriate, an experiment involving human subjects is conducted using the "double blind" method--that is, neither subjects nor experimenters know which individuals are members of the subject or control groups. After the conclusion of the experiment, those who conducted it publish a paper describing their methods and results. Other scientists then try to repeat those results. If the results can't be repeated, then the conclusions of the original experiment are regarded as unproven.
In contrast, it seems to me that "studies" do nothing but advance hypotheses that one might attempt to prove or disprove through experimentation. Yet, the publication of every study is treated by the populace as a scientific revelation; worse, public policy is often influenced by the results of "studies".
I would prefer to see the funds that subsidize the current deluge of "studies" go to real science. If not, then I prefer that the funds go to me. I'll produce a study that shows...um...that work makes people tired.
In fact, it seems to me that this "blue ribbon" certification is a heaven-sent opportunity for con-artists everywhere: pay Goodmail, and lots of naive AOL users are going to think the "blue ribbon" guarantees that the offer is legit. Of course, that could create long-term liability issues for AOL...
One obvious objection is that each online "fiefdom"--let's just call it a "fief"-- currently has its own set of rules, and that these rules are incompatible--you can't mix a high fantasy RPG with Grand Theft Auto--or even Star Wars. That would make about as much sense as mixing chess with baseball. But why couldn't there be a neutral layer that connects all these now-closed universes? You could regard online games as a set of conventions that are adopted by a certain subset of those who inhabit the metaverse. Indeed, the metaverse could provide a meeting place where potential players gather to design and implement games. (I'm making the assumption that game engines and design components will be made accessible enough in the future so that it doesn't take years of heads-down coding to make a game.)
The metaverse could also provide a forum for the adherents of different fiefs to negotiate a common interface--which could involve agreements about what powers or artifacts can be transferred from one fief to another, how a certain level of achievement can be translated from one fief to another, and so forth. Games could become open-ended, with players moving on from one fief to another without losing everything they gained in the last one. Avatars might be allowed to play in more than one fief at a time, or might even gain status in the metaverse depending on their achievements in fiefs.
In time, the metaverse itself could become a very interesting place--a place where people meet to talk, plan expansions or vote on changes to the metaverse, or just hang out. Hey, can I call dibs on the lot across from the Black Sun?
Yep, I freely admit to not being paranoid enough. Trust me, I'm making up for it in my old age 8^)
As for the goth thing...are you a Visigoth or an Ostrogoth? I've occasionally run across a Visigoth who wouldn't pillage and plunder his grandmother's hut, but I can't abide an Ostrogoth. And don't even get me started on the Vandals and the Huns...
Well... I was thinking that these posting were going to be sent around the world, read, replied to...and eventually vaporize. Why would anyone want to keep the damn things? And I was also not thinking about my email address ever getting harvested by spammers, because spam hadn't been invented yet! Heck, one of the benefits of getting laid off my old job a couple of years ago was that I could get rid of the email account I'd had since 1988 and that was drawing a sh*tload of spam every day. Yes, yes I was posting to usenet during work hours. But see, the bosses hadn't figured out USENET was there yet...it was underground, man. And they were paying for it. And we thought it would last forever. What fools we were.
Read something by Martin van Creveld if you want to understand what's going on. Through a Glass, Darkly is a good place to start.