How about this, don't live in the suburbs. I live in NYC, and I can get broadband for about $30/month, and it's relatively fast (1.5 M/bit each way, roughly, for pretty much any of the options), available everywhere, and has very low latency.
Live in the suburbs, die by the suburbs. The real problem with the US is that we subsidize soccer moms paving over the forests to ahve their white picket fences. Then people bitch because they can't get superfast internet access 1000 miles from nowhere, and they complain that gas costs too much money. Isn't it the responsibility of the city folk to pay for their 100 mile long power lines, phone lines, roads, and the cheap gas to run their SUVs?
Move somewhere decent, and you'll have excellent broadband. Many of the apartment buildings in NYC (like the one I'm in right now) just buy their own DS3, and merge their signal onto the cable going to every apartment. Works quite well, it's the new trend I think. Even if that doesn't work for you, we have at least two providers of DSL, and probably two more of cable. $30 will get you quite a lot of bandwidth around here, even though everything else is quite expensive.
Also, NYC is expensive, but the wages are huge. Travel anywhere, and even when they charge you the ripoff tourist rates, it'll be cheap by comparison. Make 4 times the pay, pay 4 times the bills, save 4 times the money, and get vacations for the same price, not a bad deal.
Not quite true. The american tax rate (the average tax rate) is substantially less than in other industrialized nations. This is primarily due to the fact that we don't really tax the wealthy. Unearned income (dividends, stock gains, trust funds, you name it) are generally taxed at a much lower rate in the US than earned income (wages), and there are LOTS of loopholes that let people avoid even this minimal level of taxes.
For you and me, the tax rate is the same as elsewhere, but for the superwealthy, it's very, very low by comparison.
Neutron stars collide all the time. Whenever one object orbits another, it gives off gravitational waves, and they spiral towards each other. In the case of the Earth and the sun, it will be many trillions of years before our orbit is moved significantly.
Binary pairs of large stars (which are quite common) often turn into binary pairs of neutron stars, as the longer living star often has sufficient mass to survive the explosion of the earlier dying one.
Once you have a pair of neutron stars, their gravity is hugely more powerful, so they radiate energy away at a much faster rate. It has something to do (sorry, I'm a little rusty here) with the total field strength of the gravitational well, which is much higher at the surface of a neutron star than the surface of a normal star, due to the decreased radius.
Basically, once you have a binary pair of neutron stars, especially if they started close together (the parent stars might have been almost touching), it's only a matter of time, and not that much time, before they spiral in and collide. The collision would (presumably) create a black hole, and an intense gamma ray burst.
It wouldn't be radiation poisoning. Gamma rays cannot penetrate our atmosphere. It would just remove about half the ozone layer (by converting Nitrogen gas into various nitrous oxides), which in turn would kill off a lot of plankton.
The effect on terrestrial life would probably be substantially less. Terrestrial plants are more resistant to UV, and terrestrial animals tend to have fur/clothes, so they are more resistant as well.
I'm not saying it isn't a bad thing, but we've pretty much achieved the same effect with all the hairspray needed to keep those 60s hairstyles in place.
I would like to point out that the non GUI elements of the OS X JVM are about the worst around in terms of performance. It seems very clear that apple (first and foremost) wanted a JVM that worked and had native windowing, and didn't really worry about performance. There isn't even a -server VM in OS X, and using -server for server applications makes a HUGE difference in performance. I think running it on a modern Linux VM (1.4.x or 1.5.0) using -server would have almost doubled the performance. I am also an OS X user, but I've timed things running on OS X, and java has always been slow for the hardware available.
It is possible that 10.4 will finally change this and really make OS X a first class java citizen, we'll see. Hopefully the better compilation from gcc 4 and 64 bit everything will help substantially. Good vectorization, and an auto-vectorizing bytecode compilier would go a long way towards fixing this embarassing little weakness. Also, including a -server VM wouldn't hurt either, if Apple wants their computers to be taken seriously in the Datacenter (Xserves).
wow, that's a lot of steps. How about we save a few hundred hours of admin time (going rate, somewhat more than $50/hr) and just use software that is secure by default, how does that sound? People cost money, but software is cheap, go figure.
That seems a little simplistic. There are real differences of opinion within the country, and though neither party perfectly represents anybody, they do tend to align into groups that are fairly evenly matched. The adversarial system produces adversaries, who knew!
Yes there is corruption (even in my party), but that has always been the case. Look back at the early days of New York (Tweed), and you'll see how far we've come. The corruption now is dramatically less than the corruption 100 years ago, so perhaps we're making a little bit of progress, though we seem to have backslid a little in the last few years.
I disagree. Multithreading is very important for virtually every major business (think j2ee/server) app around, even GUI apps shouldn't be doing much work in the GUI thread.
However, you are right that you need to be very careful. I would reccomend trying to cut your program into well defined modules (OO programming, coming back again), and then attempt to make each of them as atomic as possible. Also, be careful of callbacks. It's best to only make callbacks with threads that you know for sure cannot be holding a lock. If you've done that, and you make sure that any call into the system can only contend for locks that are sealed completely within the module, and that these locks always have a definite ordering (you always get A before B if you need A and B), then you are at least guaranteed that that this module will not participate in a deadlock.
Depends where you are, in silly valley, that's probably true. Come to New York, and if you're good, you can work 9 to 5 (maybe 9-6) and get paid plenty. You might even have time to slashdot at work!
No joking. Here are some hints for java newbies. Following (at least some of) these will help immensely to reduce those strange random bugs.
1) Run findbugs, fix (almost) everything. Especially double checked locks, those are always wrong, and they will cause an error sooner or later.
2) Always check all parameters to every function for range and nullness. You may think "Oh, but the next line throws a NPE if it's null.", and that may be true, right now. The problem is, code gets moved around, and 6 months later, you're wondering how a null member ended up in your supposedly not-null data structure. Always do all the checks. If they're too strict, you can back them off during testing.
3) "static final *[]" is almost always wrong. Use Collections.unmodifiableList(Arrays.asList(....)) if you need to declare a constant array. It looks a little uglier, but you can at least be guaranteed that its contents are really constant. Also, in most of these cases a lot of for loops get written to find whether or not the array has a certain member. Collections.unmodifiableSortedSet(...) or Collections.unmodifiableSet(....) will be your friend here. Use a list and you don't have to write the search code (this is a good thing). Use a set, and you've more precisely declared the purpose of the array (ordering doesn't matter), and you don't have to write the search code, and your searching will be faster (for decently large sets). Use a sorted set, and you will also get things in a nice (alphabetical, for strings) order if you have to print them out. Also, last I checked, a TreeSet is faster than a HashSet for size less than about 100, when holding most types of strings. Sorted sets are much easier to debug, keep this in mind... "Quick, do these two sets with 500 elements each contain 'washington'?"....
4) Throw some sort of exception when you get to a situation that should be impossible. This is better than a comment (as it is guaranteed to not be out of sync), and it will find all sorts of clever little bugs hiding in your code.
5) Write if conditions as "if(null == x)" rather than "if(x == null)". If you ever end up writing in C, you'll find out all too quickly that "if(x = null)" can be valid, but incorrect code. Placing the constant first will cause an incorrect assignment instead of comparison to throw a compiler error in any language.
6) Make things final whenever you can. Fields should be final when you don't modify them, if they are private (and maybe even if they're public or protected). Methods and classes should be final when you don't think anyone should override them. This helps the reader to easily establish where a function call is going "It's going here, because this method is final, so I know it isn't going to some subclass somewhere....", and makes life easier on the computers as well. Make parameters to methods final when you don't plan to modify them. You'll be surprised how many bugs this will uncover.
7) Whenever possible, don't accept, or return mutable objects. Granted, this often isn't practical, but keep it in mind. Don't store mutable objects if you didn't create them yourself, or if you gave them out to the outside world. Also, try to convince sun to get rid of the Date.setTime(long) method, and finally remove all those deprecated methods. That would make Dates immutable, and help to find so many bugs it'd make your head spin.
8) Don't use deprecated methods. Many of them were deprecated for subtle correctness issues, don't use them.
Or how about the right to vote? If groups inherit the rights of their members, then they can cast a vote, right? Dems and republicans can each make millions of paper corporations, and the votes of actual people will be irrelevant. It always started out simple, and needs to be returned to that way.... Here's roughly what it should be, though perhaps I defined citizen a little too narrowly...
1) "People" in the constitution refers only to citizens. The constitution shall not be construed as to confer any rights upon fictional or artificial entities or groups (nations, corporations, unions, etc...), nor upon non-citizens. Non-citizens (this might be unwise), corporations, nations, and groups would get their rights through treaties or laws, such as the Geneva Convention.
2) Citizenship cannot be stripped or given up except by mutual consent of the United States, and the citzen in question, in writing, witnessed by a court of competent jurisdiction, and only contingent upon the receipt of foreign citizenship. Nothing of value, other than another citizenship, may be offered in exchange for relinquishing US citizenship.
3) Citizens cannot be denied the right to vote for any reason whatsoever.
4) Those who are born in the US are automatically made citizens. (this is how it is now).
Something like that. Would clean up all sorts of little loopholes. For instance, a Deleware court's decision so many years ago that (in a blatant act of Judicial Activism) gave corporations the rights of "people". In addition to the "Lock up as many black and poor people as possible, and then we can prevent them from voting us out of power after they get out..." and "declare them terrorists so we can strip their citizenship and we don't have to treat them like humans or let them vote..." angles.
Apparently one of their MySQL databases got corrupted as well. Figures. You'd think with all that volume they'd be wise enough to use a DB that can withstand a hard powercycle without losing data.
Just remember, friends don't let friends use MySQL for important data.
Exactly, but then the questions becomes, "Why screw around?". why not use SHA-1024 and RSA-4096, and just leave it at that? Furthermore, RSA doesn't really grow as exponentially as algorithms like SHA do, primes become rarer in larger numbers, so 4096 isn't really 2^2048X as strong as 2048.
It might be time to start chaining algorithms together. Do something like SHA-1024, then use 256 bits as a key, and run it through AES or Twofish to produce a more compact (maybe 512 bit) size. Should increase difficulty by chaining two unrelated algorithms together, two breaks might be needed in order to really break the system.
Same with RSA. Use RSA-4096, and ECC 1024 together. They work on fundamentally different principles (and the NSA now endorses them both), so a break in one hopefully wouldn't help to break the other.
I never advocated Kyoto. In fact, it turns out that the same greens who push Kyoto so stongly also are working hard to eliminate any reasonably possible means of meeting the targets due to their opposition to nuclear power, just as you said.
The US spends (back of envelope calculation) something on the order of a 500 billion to a trillion dollars on energy per year. Of that, roughly 40%, or 200-400 billion is electricity. Once again, this is a rough extrapolation. We are willing to spend more than $100 billion per year in order to wage war in Iraq on the basis of evidence known to be faulty, you think we can't spend $100 billion per year to convert all our coal and gas plants to nuclear?
That alone would (roughly) cut our CO2 emissions in half. That seems a no brainer to me. Spend 1% of our GDP (which is about 10 trillion per year) in order to greatly reduce the pollution we cause to the planet. This would also have the effect of saving 30,000 lives (roughly) per year, as that's about how many people are killed by coal related air pollution each year. In addition, last year, Nuclear power was actually cheaper than coal, and only held back by NIMBYISM, even without considering the medical bills caused by coal. Upholding a CO2 lowering treaty, if done intelligently might actually save money.
The same goes for cars. Forcing more extensive biodiesel and TDP use, together with more efficient cars would probably save money. This would partially be because even if it costs more, the money would be spent within the country, rather than leaving our economy altogether and going to the middle east.
I would be more inclined to believe what you say if there was any real reason to believe that substantial CO2 reductions would cost much (more than 1% of GDP), or even anything at all. The evidence I've seen however indicates that even discounting global warming related problems, it might actually save us money to reduce CO2 emissions.
This has very little to do with Kyoto though, as we both know Kyoto is like a bandaid on the arm to treat a headwound.
1) We have a plausible mechanism of action. CO2 traps infrared light (simple spectral tests easly back this up), and therefore we have reason to believe that all else being equal, increased CO2 might cause the earth to warm up.
2) We have 400,000 years of CO2 records, CO2 has recently reached higher concentrations than at any point in the last 400,000 years, and it's climbing at an incredible rate.
3) We have know that people produce a lot of CO2, primarily from burning of fossil fuels.
4) Seems plausible that humans (in the industrial age) are causing (through the increased CO2 emissions) the increased atmospheric CO2. Especially reasonable considering that the levels started to shoot up when the industrial revolution came, and have more or less tracked human emissions since.
5) Seems plausible that due to higher CO2 concentrations, the earth should warm up somewhat.
6) The earth is slowly warming, and has been for decades. Simple historical temperature data confirms this easily enough.
7) Is it crazy to assume that the earth is warming because the CO2 levels are higher, just as a naieve model would predict?
8) We don't know what the long term effects of this warming will be. Maybe things will stabilize, maybe not, we don't really know.
9) Given that we don't know what will happen as CO2 levels continue to rise, and we are pretty sure that we're responsible for rising CO2 levels, doesn't it make sense to at least start to take precautions until we know for sure what we're dealing with?
You are right to have doubts, but don't just reject things out of hand. It seems likely that we are causing the equilibrium of the earth to shift. How much it will shift, we don't really know, but maybe we shouldn't just plow ahead blindly. Maybe this should be the time to take a look around and see if we can perhaps be a little more careful, specifically because we don't know.
The skeptics should still side with the global-warming-is-happening crowd, as reducing CO2 is the natural position to take if you DON"T KNOW. Only the dogmatic conservatives (most of them religious) are anti CO2 control, and that's just because they flat out reject the notion that they could be causing anything bad for business.
Lol, finally a solar revelation that is actually insightful. The real cost of solar is likely not going to be the cost of covering all the roofs, it's more likely to be the cost of the massively bulked up distribution grid needed to shuffle the power from one area to another. I hear P2P electrical grids become a nightmare really quickly.
However, it does seem like a good place to start, if the cells can be produced cheaply enough, and without producing too much pollution. Sortof a partial solution, but does reduce the number of reactors needed quite substantially.
A few? Do tell. How many of these things would it take to generate the US's energy demands? I bet it's in the billions, that's a lot of floating things at sea.
Seriously, technologies that can provide "Up to 7% of the US energy needs, if we place continuous lines of them along all our coasts!!!!!" are not very useful. are we to dam every river, cover every coastline with floatie things, cover every field with windmills, cover every patch of open ground with solar cells, etc.... just to derive "almost 25% of our energy needs!!!!!"? And at what cost? How many millions of tons of refined ore, how many dead animals, what fraction of the earth's surface given up or defiled?
Coal and oil are bad, but don't replace them by emulating them. We need something with a small impact. That pretty much limits it down to Fission, Fusion, and orbiting solar collectors. Only one of the three has been producing double digit percentages of the US's power for decades without ever killing anyone, can you guess which one?
"don't know if we'll ever be able to make sustained and safe reactions which have a high enough energy return to be worth doing"
I agree with what you say, except for this little part. People seem to forget that never is a long time. You say you don't know if we'll ever be able to do commercially what we can do exerimentally right now. The odds of eventual success seem overwhelming, given our previous experience in such matters.
The PS2 was awesome? Brother, you've been misinformed. The PS2 was supposed to render hollywood quality graphics in realtime, and cook you breakfast as well. When it came out it was competitive with a decent PC for graphics, though it got blown out everywhere else (ram capacity, etc.....). The XBox eats it alive. If you see the two side by side it's hard to deny that the XBox graphics are hugely better.
The point is that Sony has a nice long track record of designing silicon with huge theoretical potential. Unfortunately, the designs often turn out to be almost impossible to program decently. The Cell might be different, but I kindof doubt it. It'll be competing with multicore vector enabled PPC and x86 processors when it finally comes out, and it'll be harder to program than any of these designs. Its theoretical performance might be higher, but I'm not sure anyone will be able to actually make it run faster than a modern PC when it's released. We were supposed to have supercomputers made from PS2 emotion engines by now, where are they?
Just as the child points out, this is not true. In reality, the primary cause of Mars's problem is that it is not massive enough. Gas too easily attains escape velocity (even more so if it were warmer), and thus it cannot hold an atmospere for any length of time. In this case however, we're talking about (perhaps) multi million year spans, so it may be long enough for us to enjoy it, not sure though.
Slashdot Mirror
It does, on linux and Solaris, I believe. No 64 bits on windows, perhaps because windows doesn't support it?
How about this, don't live in the suburbs. I live in NYC, and I can get broadband for about $30/month, and it's relatively fast (1.5 M/bit each way, roughly, for pretty much any of the options), available everywhere, and has very low latency.
Live in the suburbs, die by the suburbs. The real problem with the US is that we subsidize soccer moms paving over the forests to ahve their white picket fences. Then people bitch because they can't get superfast internet access 1000 miles from nowhere, and they complain that gas costs too much money. Isn't it the responsibility of the city folk to pay for their 100 mile long power lines, phone lines, roads, and the cheap gas to run their SUVs?
Move somewhere decent, and you'll have excellent broadband. Many of the apartment buildings in NYC (like the one I'm in right now) just buy their own DS3, and merge their signal onto the cable going to every apartment. Works quite well, it's the new trend I think. Even if that doesn't work for you, we have at least two providers of DSL, and probably two more of cable. $30 will get you quite a lot of bandwidth around here, even though everything else is quite expensive.
Also, NYC is expensive, but the wages are huge. Travel anywhere, and even when they charge you the ripoff tourist rates, it'll be cheap by comparison. Make 4 times the pay, pay 4 times the bills, save 4 times the money, and get vacations for the same price, not a bad deal.
Not quite true. The american tax rate (the average tax rate) is substantially less than in other industrialized nations. This is primarily due to the fact that we don't really tax the wealthy. Unearned income (dividends, stock gains, trust funds, you name it) are generally taxed at a much lower rate in the US than earned income (wages), and there are LOTS of loopholes that let people avoid even this minimal level of taxes.
For you and me, the tax rate is the same as elsewhere, but for the superwealthy, it's very, very low by comparison.
Neutron stars collide all the time. Whenever one object orbits another, it gives off gravitational waves, and they spiral towards each other. In the case of the Earth and the sun, it will be many trillions of years before our orbit is moved significantly.
Binary pairs of large stars (which are quite common) often turn into binary pairs of neutron stars, as the longer living star often has sufficient mass to survive the explosion of the earlier dying one.
Once you have a pair of neutron stars, their gravity is hugely more powerful, so they radiate energy away at a much faster rate. It has something to do (sorry, I'm a little rusty here) with the total field strength of the gravitational well, which is much higher at the surface of a neutron star than the surface of a normal star, due to the decreased radius.
Basically, once you have a binary pair of neutron stars, especially if they started close together (the parent stars might have been almost touching), it's only a matter of time, and not that much time, before they spiral in and collide. The collision would (presumably) create a black hole, and an intense gamma ray burst.
It wouldn't be radiation poisoning. Gamma rays cannot penetrate our atmosphere. It would just remove about half the ozone layer (by converting Nitrogen gas into various nitrous oxides), which in turn would kill off a lot of plankton.
The effect on terrestrial life would probably be substantially less. Terrestrial plants are more resistant to UV, and terrestrial animals tend to have fur/clothes, so they are more resistant as well.
I'm not saying it isn't a bad thing, but we've pretty much achieved the same effect with all the hairspray needed to keep those 60s hairstyles in place.
We don't make electricity from oil. This would save coal equivalent to .05% of the US oil use, but no oil. It's even more useless than you imagine.
I would like to point out that the non GUI elements of the OS X JVM are about the worst around in terms of performance. It seems very clear that apple (first and foremost) wanted a JVM that worked and had native windowing, and didn't really worry about performance. There isn't even a -server VM in OS X, and using -server for server applications makes a HUGE difference in performance. I think running it on a modern Linux VM (1.4.x or 1.5.0) using -server would have almost doubled the performance. I am also an OS X user, but I've timed things running on OS X, and java has always been slow for the hardware available.
It is possible that 10.4 will finally change this and really make OS X a first class java citizen, we'll see. Hopefully the better compilation from gcc 4 and 64 bit everything will help substantially. Good vectorization, and an auto-vectorizing bytecode compilier would go a long way towards fixing this embarassing little weakness. Also, including a -server VM wouldn't hurt either, if Apple wants their computers to be taken seriously in the Datacenter (Xserves).
wow, every top notch java programmer you know spends their time writing web pages? Maybe this says something about you?
Not to be insulting, but that's a pretty broad brush you're painting with.
wow, that's a lot of steps. How about we save a few hundred hours of admin time (going rate, somewhat more than $50/hr) and just use software that is secure by default, how does that sound? People cost money, but software is cheap, go figure.
That seems a little simplistic. There are real differences of opinion within the country, and though neither party perfectly represents anybody, they do tend to align into groups that are fairly evenly matched. The adversarial system produces adversaries, who knew!
Yes there is corruption (even in my party), but that has always been the case. Look back at the early days of New York (Tweed), and you'll see how far we've come. The corruption now is dramatically less than the corruption 100 years ago, so perhaps we're making a little bit of progress, though we seem to have backslid a little in the last few years.
well, I guess they weren't doing real time market data distribution, go figure.
I disagree. Multithreading is very important for virtually every major business (think j2ee/server) app around, even GUI apps shouldn't be doing much work in the GUI thread.
However, you are right that you need to be very careful. I would reccomend trying to cut your program into well defined modules (OO programming, coming back again), and then attempt to make each of them as atomic as possible. Also, be careful of callbacks. It's best to only make callbacks with threads that you know for sure cannot be holding a lock. If you've done that, and you make sure that any call into the system can only contend for locks that are sealed completely within the module, and that these locks always have a definite ordering (you always get A before B if you need A and B), then you are at least guaranteed that that this module will not participate in a deadlock.
Depends where you are, in silly valley, that's probably true. Come to New York, and if you're good, you can work 9 to 5 (maybe 9-6) and get paid plenty. You might even have time to slashdot at work!
No joking. Here are some hints for java newbies. Following (at least some of) these will help immensely to reduce those strange random bugs.
1) Run findbugs, fix (almost) everything. Especially double checked locks, those are always wrong, and they will cause an error sooner or later.
2) Always check all parameters to every function for range and nullness. You may think "Oh, but the next line throws a NPE if it's null.", and that may be true, right now. The problem is, code gets moved around, and 6 months later, you're wondering how a null member ended up in your supposedly not-null data structure. Always do all the checks. If they're too strict, you can back them off during testing.
3) "static final *[]" is almost always wrong. Use Collections.unmodifiableList(Arrays.asList(....)) if you need to declare a constant array. It looks a little uglier, but you can at least be guaranteed that its contents are really constant. Also, in most of these cases a lot of for loops get written to find whether or not the array has a certain member. Collections.unmodifiableSortedSet(...) or Collections.unmodifiableSet(....) will be your friend here. Use a list and you don't have to write the search code (this is a good thing). Use a set, and you've more precisely declared the purpose of the array (ordering doesn't matter), and you don't have to write the search code, and your searching will be faster (for decently large sets). Use a sorted set, and you will also get things in a nice (alphabetical, for strings) order if you have to print them out. Also, last I checked, a TreeSet is faster than a HashSet for size less than about 100, when holding most types of strings. Sorted sets are much easier to debug, keep this in mind... "Quick, do these two sets with 500 elements each contain 'washington'?"....
4) Throw some sort of exception when you get to a situation that should be impossible. This is better than a comment (as it is guaranteed to not be out of sync), and it will find all sorts of clever little bugs hiding in your code.
5) Write if conditions as "if(null == x)" rather than "if(x == null)". If you ever end up writing in C, you'll find out all too quickly that "if(x = null)" can be valid, but incorrect code. Placing the constant first will cause an incorrect assignment instead of comparison to throw a compiler error in any language.
6) Make things final whenever you can. Fields should be final when you don't modify them, if they are private (and maybe even if they're public or protected). Methods and classes should be final when you don't think anyone should override them. This helps the reader to easily establish where a function call is going "It's going here, because this method is final, so I know it isn't going to some subclass somewhere....", and makes life easier on the computers as well. Make parameters to methods final when you don't plan to modify them. You'll be surprised how many bugs this will uncover.
7) Whenever possible, don't accept, or return mutable objects. Granted, this often isn't practical, but keep it in mind. Don't store mutable objects if you didn't create them yourself, or if you gave them out to the outside world. Also, try to convince sun to get rid of the Date.setTime(long) method, and finally remove all those deprecated methods. That would make Dates immutable, and help to find so many bugs it'd make your head spin.
8) Don't use deprecated methods. Many of them were deprecated for subtle correctness issues, don't use them.
Or how about the right to vote? If groups inherit the rights of their members, then they can cast a vote, right? Dems and republicans can each make millions of paper corporations, and the votes of actual people will be irrelevant. It always started out simple, and needs to be returned to that way.... Here's roughly what it should be, though perhaps I defined citizen a little too narrowly...
1) "People" in the constitution refers only to citizens. The constitution shall not be construed as to confer any rights upon fictional or artificial entities or groups (nations, corporations, unions, etc...), nor upon non-citizens. Non-citizens (this might be unwise), corporations, nations, and groups would get their rights through treaties or laws, such as the Geneva Convention.
2) Citizenship cannot be stripped or given up except by mutual consent of the United States, and the citzen in question, in writing, witnessed by a court of competent jurisdiction, and only contingent upon the receipt of foreign citizenship. Nothing of value, other than another citizenship, may be offered in exchange for relinquishing US citizenship.
3) Citizens cannot be denied the right to vote for any reason whatsoever.
4) Those who are born in the US are automatically made citizens. (this is how it is now).
Something like that. Would clean up all sorts of little loopholes. For instance, a Deleware court's decision so many years ago that (in a blatant act of Judicial Activism) gave corporations the rights of "people". In addition to the "Lock up as many black and poor people as possible, and then we can prevent them from voting us out of power after they get out..." and "declare them terrorists so we can strip their citizenship and we don't have to treat them like humans or let them vote..." angles.
Might only require a single amendment.
Apparently one of their MySQL databases got corrupted as well. Figures. You'd think with all that volume they'd be wise enough to use a DB that can withstand a hard powercycle without losing data.
Just remember, friends don't let friends use MySQL for important data.
Exactly, but then the questions becomes, "Why screw around?". why not use SHA-1024 and RSA-4096, and just leave it at that? Furthermore, RSA doesn't really grow as exponentially as algorithms like SHA do, primes become rarer in larger numbers, so 4096 isn't really 2^2048X as strong as 2048.
It might be time to start chaining algorithms together. Do something like SHA-1024, then use 256 bits as a key, and run it through AES or Twofish to produce a more compact (maybe 512 bit) size. Should increase difficulty by chaining two unrelated algorithms together, two breaks might be needed in order to really break the system.
Same with RSA. Use RSA-4096, and ECC 1024 together. They work on fundamentally different principles (and the NSA now endorses them both), so a break in one hopefully wouldn't help to break the other.
I never advocated Kyoto. In fact, it turns out that the same greens who push Kyoto so stongly also are working hard to eliminate any reasonably possible means of meeting the targets due to their opposition to nuclear power, just as you said.
The US spends (back of envelope calculation) something on the order of a 500 billion to a trillion dollars on energy per year. Of that, roughly 40%, or 200-400 billion is electricity. Once again, this is a rough extrapolation. We are willing to spend more than $100 billion per year in order to wage war in Iraq on the basis of evidence known to be faulty, you think we can't spend $100 billion per year to convert all our coal and gas plants to nuclear?
That alone would (roughly) cut our CO2 emissions in half. That seems a no brainer to me. Spend 1% of our GDP (which is about 10 trillion per year) in order to greatly reduce the pollution we cause to the planet. This would also have the effect of saving 30,000 lives (roughly) per year, as that's about how many people are killed by coal related air pollution each year. In addition, last year, Nuclear power was actually cheaper than coal, and only held back by NIMBYISM, even without considering the medical bills caused by coal. Upholding a CO2 lowering treaty, if done intelligently might actually save money.
The same goes for cars. Forcing more extensive biodiesel and TDP use, together with more efficient cars would probably save money. This would partially be because even if it costs more, the money would be spent within the country, rather than leaving our economy altogether and going to the middle east.
I would be more inclined to believe what you say if there was any real reason to believe that substantial CO2 reductions would cost much (more than 1% of GDP), or even anything at all. The evidence I've seen however indicates that even discounting global warming related problems, it might actually save us money to reduce CO2 emissions.
This has very little to do with Kyoto though, as we both know Kyoto is like a bandaid on the arm to treat a headwound.
Fair enough, but we have a little more.
1) We have a plausible mechanism of action. CO2 traps infrared light (simple spectral tests easly back this up), and therefore we have reason to believe that all else being equal, increased CO2 might cause the earth to warm up.
2) We have 400,000 years of CO2 records, CO2 has recently reached higher concentrations than at any point in the last 400,000 years, and it's climbing at an incredible rate.
3) We have know that people produce a lot of CO2, primarily from burning of fossil fuels.
4) Seems plausible that humans (in the industrial age) are causing (through the increased CO2 emissions) the increased atmospheric CO2. Especially reasonable considering that the levels started to shoot up when the industrial revolution came, and have more or less tracked human emissions since.
5) Seems plausible that due to higher CO2 concentrations, the earth should warm up somewhat.
6) The earth is slowly warming, and has been for decades. Simple historical temperature data confirms this easily enough.
7) Is it crazy to assume that the earth is warming because the CO2 levels are higher, just as a naieve model would predict?
8) We don't know what the long term effects of this warming will be. Maybe things will stabilize, maybe not, we don't really know.
9) Given that we don't know what will happen as CO2 levels continue to rise, and we are pretty sure that we're responsible for rising CO2 levels, doesn't it make sense to at least start to take precautions until we know for sure what we're dealing with?
You are right to have doubts, but don't just reject things out of hand. It seems likely that we are causing the equilibrium of the earth to shift. How much it will shift, we don't really know, but maybe we shouldn't just plow ahead blindly. Maybe this should be the time to take a look around and see if we can perhaps be a little more careful, specifically because we don't know.
The skeptics should still side with the global-warming-is-happening crowd, as reducing CO2 is the natural position to take if you DON"T KNOW. Only the dogmatic conservatives (most of them religious) are anti CO2 control, and that's just because they flat out reject the notion that they could be causing anything bad for business.
Doubt all you want, but don't be one of them.
Have you seen the Linux source code? I'm amazed that it works at all, but apparently it works very well.
It may work, but as of 2.2 at least, it was hardly beautiful.
Lol, finally a solar revelation that is actually insightful. The real cost of solar is likely not going to be the cost of covering all the roofs, it's more likely to be the cost of the massively bulked up distribution grid needed to shuffle the power from one area to another. I hear P2P electrical grids become a nightmare really quickly.
However, it does seem like a good place to start, if the cells can be produced cheaply enough, and without producing too much pollution. Sortof a partial solution, but does reduce the number of reactors needed quite substantially.
A few? Do tell. How many of these things would it take to generate the US's energy demands? I bet it's in the billions, that's a lot of floating things at sea.
Seriously, technologies that can provide "Up to 7% of the US energy needs, if we place continuous lines of them along all our coasts!!!!!" are not very useful. are we to dam every river, cover every coastline with floatie things, cover every field with windmills, cover every patch of open ground with solar cells, etc.... just to derive "almost 25% of our energy needs!!!!!"? And at what cost? How many millions of tons of refined ore, how many dead animals, what fraction of the earth's surface given up or defiled?
Coal and oil are bad, but don't replace them by emulating them. We need something with a small impact. That pretty much limits it down to Fission, Fusion, and orbiting solar collectors. Only one of the three has been producing double digit percentages of the US's power for decades without ever killing anyone, can you guess which one?
"don't know if we'll ever be able to make sustained and safe reactions which have a high enough energy return to be worth doing"
I agree with what you say, except for this little part. People seem to forget that never is a long time. You say you don't know if we'll ever be able to do commercially what we can do exerimentally right now. The odds of eventual success seem overwhelming, given our previous experience in such matters.
The PS2 was awesome? Brother, you've been misinformed. The PS2 was supposed to render hollywood quality graphics in realtime, and cook you breakfast as well. When it came out it was competitive with a decent PC for graphics, though it got blown out everywhere else (ram capacity, etc.....). The XBox eats it alive. If you see the two side by side it's hard to deny that the XBox graphics are hugely better.
The point is that Sony has a nice long track record of designing silicon with huge theoretical potential. Unfortunately, the designs often turn out to be almost impossible to program decently. The Cell might be different, but I kindof doubt it. It'll be competing with multicore vector enabled PPC and x86 processors when it finally comes out, and it'll be harder to program than any of these designs. Its theoretical performance might be higher, but I'm not sure anyone will be able to actually make it run faster than a modern PC when it's released. We were supposed to have supercomputers made from PS2 emotion engines by now, where are they?
Just as the child points out, this is not true. In reality, the primary cause of Mars's problem is that it is not massive enough. Gas too easily attains escape velocity (even more so if it were warmer), and thus it cannot hold an atmospere for any length of time. In this case however, we're talking about (perhaps) multi million year spans, so it may be long enough for us to enjoy it, not sure though.