I run my email the exact same way that you do, and I have had the same problems. Fortunately, I've never been rejected as a spammer based on my domain name alone, and if you are hopefully someone else here can help you solve that problem.
As far as stopping the bounces... The only way I've found that works is to use a whitelist system... filter all of the addresses that you know are good (paypal@example.com, etc) into folders, and everything else goes into a generic catchall folder that you give a quick scan to before moving it to a long term keep folder.
Just a note... I highly recommend the keep folder over just trashing the message. When's it's morning and you are groggily mass deleting messages, sometimes good messages get axed accidentally... If you have your own domain, it's likely that you have POP so long term storage shouldn't be a problem.
"Convicting someone is apparently rather difficult, almost requiring a law officer to have a 'smoking camcorder' in the hands of the accused."
Requiring proof is a *GOOD* thing. AFAIK, more proof should be required for most of the current RIAA lawsuits. (Screenshot of an ip address? That's laughable).
Personally, I don't download any illegal movies or music, and I'm actually in support of the RIAA suing the people who actually download copyrighted content instead of the service providers. But should always be required for a conviction.
By using valgrind. It's a virtual machine of sorts that runs your code and checks for any memory problems at all, including use of uninitialized memory. Combine that with thorough test cases, and you can be virtually assured that you have no memory errors in your C/C++ code.
However, security is a lot more than buffer overflows... but at least it brings you up to the relative security of Java, with speed to boot.
From the sounds of it, you are using a RDMBS as a queue. If not, then ignore my message:D
I've worked on a number of systems similar to yours: The end result is that databases aren't meant to be queueing systems, they are meant to *STORE* data. ACID compliance (even the little that MySQL has) is not meant for a queueing system. It's meant for long term data reliability. Replicating databases is generally useless, as you need to delete a queue element once it is complete, and that has to be done on *every* single db server. Replication only helps for select.
My advice? The only thing I've ever seen work are custom controllers. Load up a bunch of id's into memory, work the data in there. Write your own memory allocator, and you'll be surprised at how many elements you can pack into memory when the data resides in a database (but accessible with a one table primary index query) and you keep an id reference in memory. From there, you can implement concurrency, priority, load scaling AND if you really need more performance, you can have different databases, with the controller knowing what resides where.
I see if far too often, the point is a database is NOT a queueing system.
Josh
Does 480p have anything to do with widescreen?
on
Wii Confirmed at 480p
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I have a 50" LCD Projection TV, 720p, that is widescreen (as all new TV's appear to be). I really don't care too much about resolution, but rather about dimensions. The only thing that is really a negative in my mind about the Wii is whether or not games will be square, or rectangular. Will I get to use all of the screen real-estate on my new TV, or will I have a square box in the middle, wasting at least 1/2 of my TV's display space?
Having been in university for about 4 years, from observation, the number of women in CIS classes is usually about 2/50, 4%. (Except for the first year CIS classes that are mandatory for science students). Officially, the CIS department here is concerned since only 3.7% of the people graduating from the CIS program are women. Of the women in the department I know, (and I know most of them, it's not hard to when there are so few) there's only one of them that might be interested in working on an open source program. And these numbers come from a university that overall has one of the highest percentage of women enrolled in Canada (University of Guelph). It's almost all female in this university, when men are required for surveys CIS classes are specially targetted for participants.
Given these figures, I really doubt that any shortage of women is due to sexism in FOSS projects... From what I can see, most people working in FOSS projects are generally fairly liberal anyways and accepting of women.
Yes, I do not eat jello (unless it's made from agar-agar, a seaweed).
Same goes with shoes, fabrics etc. No leather. My spouse (thankfully) doesn't wear makeup, but she isn't a vegan.
I think I do a pretty good job of being an unhypocritical vegan:).
I apologise if my reply is short, I've tried to answer a few vegan questions here but there are a ton of them and I do actually have a job I need to do:)
"why not choose to eat free-range, locally-raised, certified organic animal products?"
Because the animals are still enslaved.
"When their cows are unable to safely produce offspring, they are sold for the beef."
I'm not religious, but my reason for being vegan is largely a "do unto others are you would do upon yourself" mentality. I would not appreciate being sold off for meat when I get old.
I'm not saying your way of life is wrong, but everyone draws their line somewhere.
"Vegans are not rational people (IMHO) - they do not subject their belief structure to any kind of real scrutiny - they will not eat unfertilized hen's eggs which had no chance of being life, but will kill a carrot plant to eat it. Life is life, and life is also death."
Ok, you drew me out of the woodwork here... I've been vegan for 16 years, and I consider myself fairly rational:P.
My belief structure is simple.. I do not wish to hurt others. This includes enslaving others.
Now, you say that life is life, and that a carrot is just like a hen (or a hens egg). Are you implying that you would also kill and eat a human just as easily as you would eat an egg? Or even a cow? You may answer yes to this question, but the vast majority of people who are not vegans will not. Eating a human is considered cannibalism.
The whole point is that the line gets drawn somewhere.. Most people draw the line at eating their own species, vegetarians draw the line at eating any species, and vegans draw the line at hurting/enslaving any species. But really, it doesn't end there. Fruitarians only eat fruit, no nuts or seeds... The hardcore ones eat the fruit, and spit out the seeds into the earth. That way, they are not even taking the "life" of a carrot.
So really, vegans do have scrutiny, just as much as any non vegan. They choose to draw their line further away from "just killing and enslaving other humans is bad" and replace humans with animals.
To try and protect this argument a little further, you will probably mention that animals still get killed by tractors in the fields, or by pesticides, or by transport trucks running over bunnies on the way to the market. But the point is, we do what we practically can to minimize what we view as wrong. It is analgous to a non-vegan who is against slavery but buys products that may have been created by child slave labour.
Everyone draws their line somewhere, and I don't see how drawing the line in a different place from the rest of society automatically makes these people irrational.
I was going to post something similar to what you have posted, but instead of duplicating information I will just add//make minor amendments to show my POV.
Firstly, apart from the side-effects of milking and egg production (veal, disposing of baby chicks etc) I also don't consume those products since I don't wish to enslave others... Even if you could somehow get all the male cattle and happily living in some paradise, you still have to separate the cattle from the mothers, denying them of their mothers milk and love. The point of this message is not to produce a vegan pamphlet, so I'll omit arguments for eggs and "free-range" eggs etc etc:)
Unfortunately, the article is slashdotted so I can't RTFA... but if meat were somehow just manufactured without an actual living creature being involved, I wouldn't have an ethical problem with it. I probably wouldn't eat it since meat is unappealing to me after not eating it for so long, but ethically, if it was just created like plastic is now from my POV there is no problem.
Re:naturally... I am going to have to disagree
on
Nerds Make Better Lovers
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· Score: 1, Insightful
I have to disagree with you here, based purely on personal experience. I've been dating continuously in a lot of long term relationships for the last 6-7 years, and I've seen the opposite...
There are a lot of girls who love nerdy guys, big glasses are just a "mark of nerddom". Intelligent girls tend to love the conversations that a nerdy guy can sustain, and the dumb ones will usually love anime and think they're dating some internet-james-bond with "ooh but you can just hack their lives away" ideas, equating computer knowledge with some mystical power.
Additionally, introverts are VERY sexy. Introverts are very bad at interacting in a group, but once they find a single person to interact with that person will be the sole focus of their attention when they do spend time with them.
The only point you made I don't have any experience with is weight... I've been a vegan since I was 6 years old so I've never had a weight problem, but my personal experience definately goes contrary to all your other points.
The ironic thing is... The state is also meddling in the affairs of the church by demanding that marriage be redefined to include homosexuals.
As far as I'm concerned, the state church barrier needs to be strengthened. The state needs to define a union between two people, call it something other than marriage (and make sure it is a term that does not draw from any religion) and apply consistent laws to the people within it.
And the church needs to stay away from school curriculum. Let everyone go back into their corners and live in peace.
If this ever becomes a large scale program I shudder to think at the DRM wars and lawsuits that will take place:(
Apart from the potential minefield for misuse of IP, this sounds like an incredible service! News that matters for non-nerds:D
This sounds ludicrous I know, but it struck me one day a while back and it makes sense in a very scary manner. My summarized hypothesis goes something like this. Additionally, this is the Bush administration, as I still contend that Bush is not smart enough to come up with all this himself.
1) Bush has investments in oil. This is known. However, the Iraq war was not launched to get more oil on to the market... It was launched to drive up the price of oil. As far as Bush is concerned, this makes oil more expensive, and his companies makes more of a profit.
2) As oil goes up, the US currency slides. This is in step with Bushs's policy of lowering the dollar, to try and balance the trade deficit. (So what Bush is doing isn't 100% bad for the econonmy, but I would argue it is still risky)
3) THE BIG SAVING THE WORLD PART (tin foil hats please) Bush is rising the cost of traditional fuels to avert peak oil. (It's been on slashdot a while ago). Jimmy Carter tried to run on the platform to avert peak oil, and it failed miserably, because Americans don't like to think about taxes on oil, about things going bad... What alternative is left? Artificially increase the price of oil by pretending that you are fighting a war on terrorism, getting everyone in a such a fervour over the war that they don't really notice the oil price, and certainly don't think it's part of the policy. The US govt (and I'm not a leftie hating all things US, in fact I think that the US is one of the most benevolent superpowers in history, but that is an entirely different topic in and of itself) is not above lieing to its citizens, e.g. allowing Pearl Harbour to occur.
In short, by artifically rising the price of oil, Bush is giving the market time to catch up with viable alternatives, as well as making himself a bundle. If this sounds way too out of whack for you, or your hatred of Bush forbids you to even consider this (which I understand, even being a right winger the spend spend and lower taxes does not appear to be sound fiscal policy to me), think about what Bush has been pushing aside from this whole war on terror thing...
Nuclear Power producing hydrogen, and a more far fetched mission to the moon to retrieve Helium-3 for power generation.
Scary but comforting at the same time... Is the US public too stupid to actually tackle Peak Oil head on?
Or is this a way to ensure that the entire world helps find a solution to peak oil, and that one country isn't left with the temporary burden of high energy prices...
The hypothesis is new and fresh, and I only summarised it here... I'm sure holes can be found, but think of the basic concept, Bush might actually be doing good for the world.... Along with a lot of social bad (ABC's of sex, religious fundamentalism, etc ) *shudder*
Whether it's on purpose, or just a co-incidence, we probably won't know for another 60-70 years until FOIA comes into effect.
I've seen a lot of comments about a Nuclear explosion being the only thing that can cause a Mushroom cloud...
Two things..
1) Conventional explosives are very capable of causing mushroom clouds, go look at some of the current pics of the Iraq war
2) From Cnn,
"A large cloud appeared over North Korea in satellite images several days ago, but a U.S. official told CNN it is "no big deal" and not the result of a nuclear explosion."
I hate patents as much as the next guy... and even more when they are in the hands of a convicted monopolist.. But on the idea of a patented SPF system, consider this.
Wouldn't a patent on a mail mechanism be the perfect legal method of reducing spam? If the patent was held by a benevolent enough organisation, they could revoke spammers rights to use the patented methods to send spam, and not need to worry about new laws being passed.
I know, it has plenty of options for abuse.. but done correctly, it would put the law into the hands of the people receiving mail when it comes to suing spammers..
This may be modded as funny.. But realistically, think about this.
The amount of heat being generated by chips does not seem to be decreasing at all, and this material appears to be produced to be "heat resistant" instead of more efficient.
How long until your PC puts out enough heat that it would be economical to re-use that heat for a hot water tank, or for winter heating?
How long until we need special 240V plugs like electric stoves have for power?
I think that emphasis on more efficient chips is a better venture than heat resistant materials, as the whole heat byproduct of CPU's seems to be sprialling out of control.
Maybe it's just me.. but doesn't this entire article just bring back memories of the "interviews" about linux history who's sole purpose was to "prove" that Linus did not write linux?
There are many times when I am behind glass.. Say in a bus for example..
Or when I am across the street from someone.. and they *don't have a cellphone*.
I think the real usefulness of this comes from that fact that only the sender requires this device.
Although even with the above uses, I'm sure there will be double the annoyances;)
Josh.
Poker is a great motivation for higher level math
on
Geeks and Poker?
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· Score: -1
I think that poker is a great way to create interest in higher level math...
My stats professor's brother is playing in this World Poker Tournament, and we get plenty of card probability questions to go along with it;)
Article Text (page one)
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Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: -1, Redundant
I managed to pull this from teh site miraculously.. only the first page though
If you happened to be cruising the parking lot at PDI/Dreamworks' Northern California studio during production of Shrek 2, you might have seen something that looked like a stunt for the David Letterman show - containers of water being dropped from ladders, with several people scrutinizing the splashes when the containers hit the ground.
"We always shoot live-action references for ourselves," says Shrek 2 visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg about PDI's approach. "On Halloween, we had cauldrons in the cafeteria with dry ice that gave off a smoky effect, and our effects guys came by and said 'Oh that's perfect!' They shot footage and used that as reference, too." So audiences at Shrek 2 can expect to see more realistic-looking effects than they've seen before in the computer-animated ogre's stylized world.
It's a high standard to exceed, since the original Shrek won the animated feature film Oscar for 2001, the first winner in that category. Bielenberg, who earned a BAFTA nomination for the visual effects in Shrek, garnered wide attention for breakthrough work in several areas, including an innovative approach for animating fire. For this sequel, Bielenberg says, "We've raised the bar again. The overall level of complexity is two or three times the complexity of the first Shrek. For instance, in the forest scene where Donkey and Shrek first met there was a certain simplicity to the environment. There was moss-like grass and not much ground cover. This time, in a similar forest scene, the amount of detail that we have in the environment is much richer. There are vines and flowers and grass, and the leaves on the trees flutter in the wind. It's not photoreal, but the richness has increased."
For this new film, Shrek co-director Andrew Adamson paired with co-directors Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon, and the voice actors from the original are back in force. Newlyweds Shrek and Fiona (Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz) are once again accompanied by sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy). They're also joined by some major new characters - the tabby cat Puss-in-Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) and a quartet of humans, including King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews) as Fiona's royal parents.
Visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg does his second Shrek tour of duty.
Up Close and Personal
When it came to the look of the characters, reports Bielenberg, "There were a lot of refinements done 'under the hood.' We've added more muscles, especially in the necks of the characters - for example, the male characters have Adam's apples now." Using the sci-tech Academy Award-winning facial animation system developed by longtime PDI animator Dick Walsh, the studio was also able to achieve what Bielenberg calls "amazing close-ups where the acting shows through. You're no longer looking at an animated character - you're really looking at an actor."
Overall, asserts Bielenberg, "We did very little to change Shrek's and Fiona's appearance, so they're very consistent with the first film. We've done a little bit of upgrading, adding a little bit more subsurface scattering on their skin, but not a lot, actually. We did use subsurface scattering to soften the area around Shrek's nose, and also with his ears so that when they're backlit the light shows through. And we've redone Fiona's hair a little bit, but I don't think it will be an apparent change."
"The bulk of visual development time was spent working on the new human characters and developing new technology for modeling and moving hair," says Bielenberg. "Modeling hair is a real challenge because you're not dealing with something that's hard and easily definable. You have tens of thousands of hairs that you're trying to move around. We came up with new programs and techniques for modeling hair." Compared to PDI's previous method of modeling a "clump volumes" of hair, the new approach enables PDI to interpolate the movement of neighboring hairs on a much finer level. As a result, the characters' hair parted in more convincing ways and the haircuts showed off some better-looking bangs.
Slashdot Mirror
I run my email the exact same way that you do, and I have had the same problems. Fortunately, I've never been rejected as a spammer based on my domain name alone, and if you are hopefully someone else here can help you solve that problem.
As far as stopping the bounces... The only way I've found that works is to use a whitelist system... filter all of the addresses that you know are good (paypal@example.com, etc) into folders, and everything else goes into a generic catchall folder that you give a quick scan to before moving it to a long term keep folder.
Just a note... I highly recommend the keep folder over just trashing the message. When's it's morning and you are groggily mass deleting messages, sometimes good messages get axed accidentally... If you have your own domain, it's likely that you have POP so long term storage shouldn't be a problem.
Josh
"Convicting someone is apparently rather difficult, almost requiring a law officer to have a 'smoking camcorder' in the hands of the accused." Requiring proof is a *GOOD* thing. AFAIK, more proof should be required for most of the current RIAA lawsuits. (Screenshot of an ip address? That's laughable). Personally, I don't download any illegal movies or music, and I'm actually in support of the RIAA suing the people who actually download copyrighted content instead of the service providers. But should always be required for a conviction.
By using valgrind. It's a virtual machine of sorts that runs your code and checks for any memory problems at all, including use of uninitialized memory. Combine that with thorough test cases, and you can be virtually assured that you have no memory errors in your C/C++ code.
However, security is a lot more than buffer overflows... but at least it brings you up to the relative security of Java, with speed to boot.
From the sounds of it, you are using a RDMBS as a queue. If not, then ignore my message :D
I've worked on a number of systems similar to yours: The end result is that databases aren't meant to be queueing systems, they are meant to *STORE* data. ACID compliance (even the little that MySQL has) is not meant for a queueing system. It's meant for long term data reliability. Replicating databases is generally useless, as you need to delete a queue element once it is complete, and that has to be done on *every* single db server. Replication only helps for select.
My advice? The only thing I've ever seen work are custom controllers. Load up a bunch of id's into memory, work the data in there. Write your own memory allocator, and you'll be surprised at how many elements you can pack into memory when the data resides in a database (but accessible with a one table primary index query) and you keep an id reference in memory. From there, you can implement concurrency, priority, load scaling AND if you really need more performance, you can have different databases, with the controller knowing what resides where.
I see if far too often, the point is a database is NOT a queueing system.
Josh
I have a 50" LCD Projection TV, 720p, that is widescreen (as all new TV's appear to be). I really don't care too much about resolution, but rather about dimensions. The only thing that is really a negative in my mind about the Wii is whether or not games will be square, or rectangular. Will I get to use all of the screen real-estate on my new TV, or will I have a square box in the middle, wasting at least 1/2 of my TV's display space?
That's the big question in my mind.
Having been in university for about 4 years, from observation, the number of women in CIS classes is usually about 2/50, 4%. (Except for the first year CIS classes that are mandatory for science students). Officially, the CIS department here is concerned since only 3.7% of the people graduating from the CIS program are women. Of the women in the department I know, (and I know most of them, it's not hard to when there are so few) there's only one of them that might be interested in working on an open source program. And these numbers come from a university that overall has one of the highest percentage of women enrolled in Canada (University of Guelph). It's almost all female in this university, when men are required for surveys CIS classes are specially targetted for participants.
Given these figures, I really doubt that any shortage of women is due to sexism in FOSS projects... From what I can see, most people working in FOSS projects are generally fairly liberal anyways and accepting of women.
Josh
That's no record.. I've personally done 48 hours.
:)
The human body can take a lot of punishment.
Josh
"A 1440 Kb floppy disk can store 46080 MD5 hashes"
:)
Unless you did raw device io, FAT12 (which is the standard floppy format) has overhead associated with its fat table... You won't fit that many
Yes, I do not eat jello (unless it's made from agar-agar, a seaweed). Same goes with shoes, fabrics etc. No leather. My spouse (thankfully) doesn't wear makeup, but she isn't a vegan. I think I do a pretty good job of being an unhypocritical vegan :).
I apologise if my reply is short, I've tried to answer a few vegan questions here but there are a ton of them and I do actually have a job I need to do :)
"why not choose to eat free-range, locally-raised, certified organic animal products?"
Because the animals are still enslaved.
"When their cows are unable to safely produce offspring, they are sold for the beef."
I'm not religious, but my reason for being vegan is largely a "do unto others are you would do upon yourself" mentality. I would not appreciate being sold off for meat when I get old.
I'm not saying your way of life is wrong, but everyone draws their line somewhere.
"Vegans are not rational people (IMHO) - they do not subject their belief structure to any kind of real scrutiny - they will not eat unfertilized hen's eggs which had no chance of being life, but will kill a carrot plant to eat it. Life is life, and life is also death."
:P.
Ok, you drew me out of the woodwork here... I've been vegan for 16 years, and I consider myself fairly rational
My belief structure is simple.. I do not wish to hurt others. This includes enslaving others.
Now, you say that life is life, and that a carrot is just like a hen (or a hens egg). Are you implying that you would also kill and eat a human just as easily as you would eat an egg? Or even a cow? You may answer yes to this question, but the vast majority of people who are not vegans will not. Eating a human is considered cannibalism.
The whole point is that the line gets drawn somewhere.. Most people draw the line at eating their own species, vegetarians draw the line at eating any species, and vegans draw the line at hurting/enslaving any species. But really, it doesn't end there. Fruitarians only eat fruit, no nuts or seeds... The hardcore ones eat the fruit, and spit out the seeds into the earth. That way, they are not even taking the "life" of a carrot.
So really, vegans do have scrutiny, just as much as any non vegan. They choose to draw their line further away from "just killing and enslaving other humans is bad" and replace humans with animals.
To try and protect this argument a little further, you will probably mention that animals still get killed by tractors in the fields, or by pesticides, or by transport trucks running over bunnies on the way to the market. But the point is, we do what we practically can to minimize what we view as wrong. It is analgous to a non-vegan who is against slavery but buys products that may have been created by child slave labour.
Everyone draws their line somewhere, and I don't see how drawing the line in a different place from the rest of society automatically makes these people irrational.
I am speaking as a vegan of 16 years here.
:)
I was going to post something similar to what you have posted, but instead of duplicating information I will just add//make minor amendments to show my POV.
Firstly, apart from the side-effects of milking and egg production (veal, disposing of baby chicks etc) I also don't consume those products since I don't wish to enslave others... Even if you could somehow get all the male cattle and happily living in some paradise, you still have to separate the cattle from the mothers, denying them of their mothers milk and love. The point of this message is not to produce a vegan pamphlet, so I'll omit arguments for eggs and "free-range" eggs etc etc
Unfortunately, the article is slashdotted so I can't RTFA... but if meat were somehow just manufactured without an actual living creature being involved, I wouldn't have an ethical problem with it. I probably wouldn't eat it since meat is unappealing to me after not eating it for so long, but ethically, if it was just created like plastic is now from my POV there is no problem.
I have to disagree with you here, based purely on personal experience. I've been dating continuously in a lot of long term relationships for the last 6-7 years, and I've seen the opposite...
There are a lot of girls who love nerdy guys, big glasses are just a "mark of nerddom". Intelligent girls tend to love the conversations that a nerdy guy can sustain, and the dumb ones will usually love anime and think they're dating some internet-james-bond with "ooh but you can just hack their lives away" ideas, equating computer knowledge with some mystical power.
Additionally, introverts are VERY sexy. Introverts are very bad at interacting in a group, but once they find a single person to interact with that person will be the sole focus of their attention when they do spend time with them.
The only point you made I don't have any experience with is weight... I've been a vegan since I was 6 years old so I've never had a weight problem, but my personal experience definately goes contrary to all your other points.
Josh.
The ironic thing is... The state is also meddling in the affairs of the church by demanding that marriage be redefined to include homosexuals.
As far as I'm concerned, the state church barrier needs to be strengthened. The state needs to define a union between two people, call it something other than marriage (and make sure it is a term that does not draw from any religion) and apply consistent laws to the people within it.
And the church needs to stay away from school curriculum. Let everyone go back into their corners and live in peace.
If this ever becomes a large scale program I shudder to think at the DRM wars and lawsuits that will take place :(
Apart from the potential minefield for misuse of IP, this sounds like an incredible service! News that matters for non-nerds :D
This sounds ludicrous I know, but it struck me one day a while back and it makes sense in a very scary manner. My summarized hypothesis goes something like this. Additionally, this is the Bush administration, as I still contend that Bush is not smart enough to come up with all this himself.
1) Bush has investments in oil. This is known. However, the Iraq war was not launched to get more oil on to the market... It was launched to drive up the price of oil. As far as Bush is concerned, this makes oil more expensive, and his companies makes more of a profit.
2) As oil goes up, the US currency slides. This is in step with Bushs's policy of lowering the dollar, to try and balance the trade deficit. (So what Bush is doing isn't 100% bad for the econonmy, but I would argue it is still risky)
3) THE BIG SAVING THE WORLD PART (tin foil hats please)
Bush is rising the cost of traditional fuels to avert peak oil. (It's been on slashdot a while ago). Jimmy Carter tried to run on the platform to avert peak oil, and it failed miserably, because Americans don't like to think about taxes on oil, about things going bad... What alternative is left? Artificially increase the price of oil by pretending that you are fighting a war on terrorism, getting everyone in a such a fervour over the war that they don't really notice the oil price, and certainly don't think it's part of the policy. The US govt (and I'm not a leftie hating all things US, in fact I think that the US is one of the most benevolent superpowers in history, but that is an entirely different topic in and of itself) is not above lieing to its citizens, e.g. allowing Pearl Harbour to occur.
In short, by artifically rising the price of oil, Bush is giving the market time to catch up with viable alternatives, as well as making himself a bundle. If this sounds way too out of whack for you, or your hatred of Bush forbids you to even consider this (which I understand, even being a right winger the spend spend and lower taxes does not appear to be sound fiscal policy to me), think about what Bush has been pushing aside from this whole war on terror thing...
Nuclear Power producing hydrogen, and a more far fetched mission to the moon to retrieve Helium-3 for power generation.
Scary but comforting at the same time... Is the US public too stupid to actually tackle Peak Oil head on?
Or is this a way to ensure that the entire world helps find a solution to peak oil, and that one country isn't left with the temporary burden of high energy prices...
The hypothesis is new and fresh, and I only summarised it here... I'm sure holes can be found, but think of the basic concept, Bush might actually be doing good for the world.... Along with a lot of social bad (ABC's of sex, religious fundamentalism, etc ) *shudder*
Whether it's on purpose, or just a co-incidence, we probably won't know for another 60-70 years until FOIA comes into effect.
Josh.
I've seen a lot of comments about a Nuclear explosion being the only thing that can cause a Mushroom cloud...
Two things..
1) Conventional explosives are very capable of causing mushroom clouds, go look at some of the current pics of the Iraq war
2) From Cnn,
"A large cloud appeared over North Korea in satellite images several days ago, but a U.S. official told CNN it is "no big deal" and not the result of a nuclear explosion."
I hate patents as much as the next guy... and even more when they are in the hands of a convicted monopolist.. But on the idea of a patented SPF system, consider this.
Wouldn't a patent on a mail mechanism be the perfect legal method of reducing spam? If the patent was held by a benevolent enough organisation, they could revoke spammers rights to use the patented methods to send spam, and not need to worry about new laws being passed.
I know, it has plenty of options for abuse.. but done correctly, it would put the law into the hands of the people receiving mail when it comes to suing spammers..
This may be modded as funny.. But realistically, think about this.
The amount of heat being generated by chips does not seem to be decreasing at all, and this material appears to be produced to be "heat resistant" instead of more efficient.
How long until your PC puts out enough heat that it would be economical to re-use that heat for a hot water tank, or for winter heating?
How long until we need special 240V plugs like electric stoves have for power?
I think that emphasis on more efficient chips is a better venture than heat resistant materials, as the whole heat byproduct of CPU's seems to be sprialling out of control.
Josh
I recently bought 2 120GB seagate drives about 6 months ago, and they are performing fine.
In addition, I bought a 30GB seagate drive back in 2000, and it's had no problems whatsoever either.
I'm definately a seagate fan as far as hard drive reliability is concerned.
You are confusing Patent law with trademark law.
Trademark law requires rigorous and fair enforcement, however patent law can be wielded in whatever manner the patent holder wishes.
A patent exists to create an artificial monopoly for the company that holds it.
Maybe... Just maybe, there aren't (m)any missing?
Maybe it's just me.. but doesn't this entire article just bring back memories of the "interviews" about linux history who's sole purpose was to "prove" that Linus did not write linux?
My two cents
There are many times when I am behind glass.. Say in a bus for example..
;)
Or when I am across the street from someone.. and they *don't have a cellphone*.
I think the real usefulness of this comes from that fact that only the sender requires this device.
Although even with the above uses, I'm sure there will be double the annoyances
Josh.
I think that poker is a great way to create interest in higher level math...
;)
My stats professor's brother is playing in this World Poker Tournament, and we get plenty of card probability questions to go along with it
I managed to pull this from teh site miraculously.. only the first page though If you happened to be cruising the parking lot at PDI/Dreamworks' Northern California studio during production of Shrek 2, you might have seen something that looked like a stunt for the David Letterman show - containers of water being dropped from ladders, with several people scrutinizing the splashes when the containers hit the ground. "We always shoot live-action references for ourselves," says Shrek 2 visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg about PDI's approach. "On Halloween, we had cauldrons in the cafeteria with dry ice that gave off a smoky effect, and our effects guys came by and said 'Oh that's perfect!' They shot footage and used that as reference, too." So audiences at Shrek 2 can expect to see more realistic-looking effects than they've seen before in the computer-animated ogre's stylized world. It's a high standard to exceed, since the original Shrek won the animated feature film Oscar for 2001, the first winner in that category. Bielenberg, who earned a BAFTA nomination for the visual effects in Shrek, garnered wide attention for breakthrough work in several areas, including an innovative approach for animating fire. For this sequel, Bielenberg says, "We've raised the bar again. The overall level of complexity is two or three times the complexity of the first Shrek. For instance, in the forest scene where Donkey and Shrek first met there was a certain simplicity to the environment. There was moss-like grass and not much ground cover. This time, in a similar forest scene, the amount of detail that we have in the environment is much richer. There are vines and flowers and grass, and the leaves on the trees flutter in the wind. It's not photoreal, but the richness has increased." For this new film, Shrek co-director Andrew Adamson paired with co-directors Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon, and the voice actors from the original are back in force. Newlyweds Shrek and Fiona (Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz) are once again accompanied by sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy). They're also joined by some major new characters - the tabby cat Puss-in-Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) and a quartet of humans, including King Harold (John Cleese) and Queen Lillian (Julie Andrews) as Fiona's royal parents. Visual effects supervisor Ken Bielenberg does his second Shrek tour of duty. Up Close and Personal When it came to the look of the characters, reports Bielenberg, "There were a lot of refinements done 'under the hood.' We've added more muscles, especially in the necks of the characters - for example, the male characters have Adam's apples now." Using the sci-tech Academy Award-winning facial animation system developed by longtime PDI animator Dick Walsh, the studio was also able to achieve what Bielenberg calls "amazing close-ups where the acting shows through. You're no longer looking at an animated character - you're really looking at an actor." Overall, asserts Bielenberg, "We did very little to change Shrek's and Fiona's appearance, so they're very consistent with the first film. We've done a little bit of upgrading, adding a little bit more subsurface scattering on their skin, but not a lot, actually. We did use subsurface scattering to soften the area around Shrek's nose, and also with his ears so that when they're backlit the light shows through. And we've redone Fiona's hair a little bit, but I don't think it will be an apparent change." "The bulk of visual development time was spent working on the new human characters and developing new technology for modeling and moving hair," says Bielenberg. "Modeling hair is a real challenge because you're not dealing with something that's hard and easily definable. You have tens of thousands of hairs that you're trying to move around. We came up with new programs and techniques for modeling hair." Compared to PDI's previous method of modeling a "clump volumes" of hair, the new approach enables PDI to interpolate the movement of neighboring hairs on a much finer level. As a result, the characters' hair parted in more convincing ways and the haircuts showed off some better-looking bangs.