No. But then my formative years weren't spent being inculcated with Al Gore's fireball Earth.
humanity is maybe about to give up on half its chances to secure a clean source of energy
No, humanity isn't about to give up. The French might, infested with lawyers, bureaucrats and unions causing enormous cost inflation, but the species will pursue this. Perhaps China will have a go at it; they just finished a 922km high speed rail line in 42 months. That sort of productivity is no longer possible in the West. They could probably knock off ITER in half a decade. Physicists in the West should be thinking of ways to convince the Chinese that this would be a tremendous opportunity to upstage European science.
The Beta 1 release announcement lists only 4 major new features, which seems a little underwhelming.
...porting the PIM (ie. kmail, korganizer, kaddressbook) applications to the Akonadi framework. Unfortunately, that process won’t be completed in time for 4.5.0, and will be delayed until 4.5.1...
KDE 4 has had five releases since Jan '08. It wasn't until 4.3 in August '09, 19 months after 4.0, that the thing became tolerable. Prior to then it was very unstable, amazingly memory hungry and lacking features that 3.5.x had had for years. If the only thing 4.5 and all future 4.x releases accomplish is stability enhancements, bug fixes, even less memory use and recovering those few missing features that vanished with 4.0 then the KDE developers deserve our praise.
As far as I'm concerned they can take all that PIM stuff, Akonadi whatever and shovel the lot into 5.x. Do as you will with Konquerer's HTML engine but, with respect, DO NOT FUCK UP THE FILE MANAGEMENT functionality. Linux already has several good browsers so Konquerer's ability to render web pages has little or no actual value any longer.
it leaves the KDE 4.5 feature cupboard a little bare.
Whatever. If they are working on stability and efficiency they do the lords work. 4.x should be rock solid, fast, efficient and feature complete. The rest is damage that belongs in 5.x, which needs to start existing sometime soon and then bake for a good half decade or more.
Given Jackson's track record with LOTR the Hobbit movies are worth a couple billion dollars in revenue. There is absolutely no possibility they won't get made. There have been several fits of "on hold" while the rights were negotiated with the Tolkiens. There will be more "on hold" moments while more parties wrangle for their cut. In the end it will make it to the screen because everyone, absolutely everyone, wants this.
We either need the DOE to take control of this kind of thing, or we need the other states to be willing to go through this process for themselves.
California is much larger than Texas in terms of education spending. Florida isn't far behind. You'll be surprised to learn that both of these states have school boards of their own that are highly unlikely to capitulate to the demands or agendas of Texas. Publishers are not so foolish as to believe they are going to sell whatever material TX comes up with in CA or elsewhere just because TX says so. In fact they will, in all likelihood, delight in the opportunity to reject and ridicule it. You may rest assured the balance of the nation is going to have exactly zero difficulty obtaining all the NEA approved material they can afford to overspend on.
The above should be completely self-evident to all of you. The next time you encounter this twaddle that Texas is going to corrupt the NEA blessed curricula of the nation, dock whomever is making that claim some credibility points; they're playing you for a hysterical fool. Take a breath, think about it and please, stop demanding the Feds rush in and make it all better. The Dept of Ed. was formed in 1979; has public education (actual education, as opposed to spending) in the US improved since then or not?
Yes, the altitude exposes you to a great deal more radiation. The Rocky mountains in particular also have a higher than normal concentration of Uranium. The NRC sayeth:
people residing in Colorado are exposed to more natural radiation than residents of the east or west coast because Colorado has more cosmic radiation at a higher altitude and more terrestrial radiation from soils enriched in naturally occurring uranium.
Despite this, should you wish to encounter a large amount of scanner/TSA hysteria (or any other form of chronic malcontentery) one need only visit Boulder, CO, the San Francisco of the Rockies nestled beneath the Flatirons.
People do care. Just not about resolution. People care about price.
How many 1080i/p TVs are sold for every WUXGA (1920x1200) display? 10-1? 50-1? I don't know but I'm betting there are a lot more TVs being shifted. The LCD manufacturers have most of their capacity allocated to HDTV panels. This makes for low, low prices.
So when Joe Blow waddles his 290lbs ass into Best Buy to pick up a display he has a choice; he can get the super-cheap on-sale rebated HDTV that works just fine with his 'puter due to HDMI, or he can pay a $100 premium for a *real* monitor with the extra 120 pixels. Which one do you think gets added to the $20,000 card balance?
Armstrong, Lovell and Cernan released their signed open letter yesterday. You may not like what have to say, but characterizing their statements, which are less than 24 hours old, as "old news" is ridiculous. Most of the criticisms they make aren't addressed by the latest administration statements, either.
So far the comments are focused on teh 3v1Lz H.264 vs. 'open' codecs, why one is better than the other, etc. What about Wikipedia?
Perhaps Wikipedia doesn't actually need to be riddled with video. Maybe Wikipedia is actually better off without it. Have you ever had to suffer through some lengthy, 99% irrelevant video to get a specific piece of information? How many times have you just not bothered to watch that video because it's frustrating, you can't afford the time, don't have just the right version of some plug-in, etc? Ever tried to copy and paste from a video?
How much of the useful content of Wikipedia is going to end up trapped inside videos when easily indexed and searched, entirely unencumbered US Grade-A ASCII^h^h^h^h^hUTF-8 would have been sufficient? How much more bandwidth is Wikipedia going to have to fund to serve up cell phone footage of Silambarasan Rajendar waving at people?
I'll stay here where the clean air and water is, you can go live in China and breath filth
Status quo, no? The west has been exporting its pollution to Asia for about half a century now because people like you won't tolerate suffering the consequences of your 'lifestyle.'
I'm sick and tired of the wealthy
You ARE the wealthy. You pay other people to live in your filth and argue for perpetuating the arrangement. The fact that you don't understand this is the most damning evidence of you ignorance this medium is capable of conveying.
Or perhaps you do understand... either way, be sure to read my reply on your Chinese build display and then use your Chinese built keyboard to create your brilliance response. All the Chinese made network gear in between will permit us to continue this thrilling debate at our leisure. Especially the part about how us poor folk are getting fucked by the wealthy.
A complete M134 system (a "30 cal" minigun that door gunners use to shred stuff) with 1500 rounds is about 191 lbs. Specs here. Your 200 lbs figure is arbitrary; the pentagon could order up a design to handle 300-400 lbs to deal with the additional mass of telemetry, servos, sensors, etc.
No, the parent was correct; making a remote controlled "H-K" like unit from this ducted fan is entirely feasible, and probably inevitable. Flying a minigun across town or over the hill to zap a mortar team will occur to someone.
Isn't that exactly what (properly qualified) consultants are for?
Government worker unions despise contractors. Better the NHTSA be incapable of actual engineering than that they misdirect money into non-union contract engineers.
Worse than that, this is really a problem of bureaucracy. The SEC missed Madoff [*] completely because it is populated by lawyers that really have no interest in rocking the boats of the wealthy and powerful. Lawyers have a great deal at stake whenever they interact with powerful people; their careers depend on their reputation among the connected. Bernie didn't work any miracles; his fraud was at least suspected if not obvious to hedge fund managers, quants, clients and media people. The lawyers at the SEC just didn't WANT to find anything dramatic because they're lawyers; they put on their blinders, do the audit and clock out happy they aren't on the front page of the NYT throwing a grenade into some rich guys setup.
Bunch of lawyers hiring more lawyers. No surprise they can't analyze code. What happens to these lawyers after they've made their regulatory bones at the NHTSA? Same thing that happens to the SEC lawyers; they get hired by the wealthy and powerful to handle the government.
The previous NHTSA administrator was Nicole Nason, a Case Western lawyer. The new guy is David L. Strickland, a lawyer from Harvard. These people wouldn't tolerate sharing the same building with an actual engineer.
* I've read through about half of the 500+ SEC Madoff investigation transcripts; so far the only non-attorney I have encountered is a guest finance professor on loan from some Washington area university.
I can understand why the denial of this well established problem would make someone homicidally angry...Climate change could really ruin things for my kids
Humans are expected to adapt to dramatic and frequent changes in climate. Climate change has wiped out civilizations. In what stone tablet was it carved that your precious descendants should be immune?
The planet changes ceaselessly. That means the climate WILL change and your fucking kids WILL suffer it. See if you can't live out the rest of your self-centered existence without hurting anyone as a result. Thanks so much.
Right. So it goes from some interior space where light is good, but not daylight, to some landfill where it is exposed to the Sun. What was 'worn out' now has an abundance of photons and reactivates. It's not happy about ending up in Fresh Kills with the other 500,000 discarded and reanimated sensors. Eventually they unify into a vast, angry landfill monster and wade across the water to crush New York.
Please do not contribute to garbage self-awareness.
The National Atmospheric and Science Administration has been a clearing house for all things 'science' since the 70's. Being related to space or aeronautics is not a prerequisite. If you want funding and it can be made to sound vaguely sciency, head to NASA!! Climate 'research', or something, is just the latest piglet with a tit.
Killing manned space flight has been a part of Obama's platform since he entered the national scene, regardless of subsequent back-peddling. Grownups know this, which is why those Congressmen with a direct stake in this are actively opposing this guy.
What might have been a credible future for space exploration is going to the NEA, and what is left of NASA will belong to Hanson.
API references aren't enough. Need rational, best practices, meaningful examples and references. Tutorials aren't terribly useful because they are inherently limited to cases that are easily teachable. OpenSSL is a fine specimen; crucial parts of the API are omitted from the current, maintained documentation. These can only be found in the archived SSLeay documentation, and that amounts to a spotty collection of notes.
Maybe. Dynamically moving systems to faster CPUs will raise the ceiling a little. The game is growing; the big alliances have 4000+ players. Eventually they'll break the fastest CPUs CCP can get their hands on.
The servers use "cooperative multithreading" (their term, not mine) which means it can't be distributed across cores because the system isn't thread safe. Read about it here.
EVE just doesn't scale. Microthreads, green threads, whatever you want to call them, are elegant and efficient while your problem fits inside one core. When it doesn't you get this fail.
It's very simple: open the lines back up to CLECs. They've been hurt by being shut out for the last decade, but they're still around. They'd be happy to pick up where they left off and resume reselling lines successfully.
Dumping money on politically important municipalities for "wireless", or something, isn't competition. Competing carriers is competition.
So Nokia's little Apple-wannabe store(s) somewhere near er... Chicago, or something, falls flat and that means no one wants unlocked phones? Whatever.
If you would like to participate in the failing unlocked phone market don't lament the poor performance of Nokia's fail brick-and-mortar outlets. Just head over here and buy a perfectly good unlocked Nokia 5530 GSM or any one of 105 other unlocked phones of all levels of capability. Need a cheap unlocked phone that works well with no monthly bill? Buy a RAZR V3 for $80, get some minutes from T-Mobile and forget about it. It works fine.
If we knew then what we know today, that electrification would require the creation of an immense source of greenhouse gas generation that would rapidly ruin the Earth's atmosphere, as we're being told, would we have been so enthusiastic about deploying this polluting technology to every household? Today, I have contemporaries that are sincerely evaluating yurts as replacements for traditional houses (theirs and yours) as they mosey about "sustainable living" fairs. I suspect they most emphatically do not intend that we wire our yurts for AC. Claiming universal electrification was a great vindication of fairness, or something, at the same time we're being told how selfish we're being for utilizing it appears schizophrenic.
It is fair to point out that I have conflated sandal wearing enviros with broadband freetards in contructing my straw man. In my defense I'll assert that most folks that would argue for broadband as a birthright are also likely to subscribe fully to AGW theories. I won't accept an argument that claims universal electrification can somehow be separated from all of its consequences; governance always has unintended side effects.
Mandating that everyone be wired up from birth could conceivably have a few problems as well; cut through the welds that secure that fairness hat so firmly to your head for one precious minute and think about what it might mean to make participation on the network an obligation of citizenship.
This is utter nonsense, Climate data, unlike say Quantum string theory, does not require more than school mathematics and some (scientific) and other common sense.
Well, not as long as your goal is simply reporting the basic trends in an unbiased manner. If, however, you have a lucrative agenda you will need a Ph.D. to perform the sort of statistical gymnastics necessary to produce the intended result and later protect that result from scrutiny. Do such agendas exist outside of the minds of "deniers"? Let us look at the record:
Keith Briffa, 1999, while contributing to the IPCC report, responding to Michael E. Mann's complaints about discrepancies between dendrochronological analysis and other temperature reconstructions.
I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.
How does Mann respond?
we don't have to resolve everything now. Just the big picture and the important details
That is just the sort of weasel word bullshit I have heard my entire life from people that want some inconvenient result papered over. Every "entrepreneur", every "manager", every authority I have ever encountered plays the same game; BEND IT UNTIL IT FITS. No Ph.D. is required to see clean through this obvious agenda driven bias.
Attempts to dilute the loss of credibility of UEA's CRU, its affiliates, and its legacy of climate research by claiming that all science is now suspect will get nowhere. Hard science isn't going to take a hit for the 45 year old UAE public university and its climate [pdf] marketing wing. The leaks merely confirm that climate science is a highly politicized, well funded arena of tightly controlled and carefully massaged "truth." A lot of us already knew this.
While it's always in fashion to assert that the public is too ignorant and distracted to make subtle distinctions, the reality is people know climate science is compromised by politics and instinctively discount its claims. Daily press releases from the UN et al. claiming the leak has no significance isn't going to fix this, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Does that make you scared ?
No. But then my formative years weren't spent being inculcated with Al Gore's fireball Earth.
humanity is maybe about to give up on half its chances to secure a clean source of energy
No, humanity isn't about to give up. The French might, infested with lawyers, bureaucrats and unions causing enormous cost inflation, but the species will pursue this. Perhaps China will have a go at it; they just finished a 922km high speed rail line in 42 months. That sort of productivity is no longer possible in the West. They could probably knock off ITER in half a decade. Physicists in the West should be thinking of ways to convince the Chinese that this would be a tremendous opportunity to upstage European science.
The Beta 1 release announcement lists only 4 major new features, which seems a little underwhelming.
...porting the PIM (ie. kmail, korganizer, kaddressbook) applications to the Akonadi framework. Unfortunately, that process won’t be completed in time for 4.5.0, and will be delayed until 4.5.1...
KDE 4 has had five releases since Jan '08. It wasn't until 4.3 in August '09, 19 months after 4.0, that the thing became tolerable. Prior to then it was very unstable, amazingly memory hungry and lacking features that 3.5.x had had for years. If the only thing 4.5 and all future 4.x releases accomplish is stability enhancements, bug fixes, even less memory use and recovering those few missing features that vanished with 4.0 then the KDE developers deserve our praise.
As far as I'm concerned they can take all that PIM stuff, Akonadi whatever and shovel the lot into 5.x. Do as you will with Konquerer's HTML engine but, with respect, DO NOT FUCK UP THE FILE MANAGEMENT functionality. Linux already has several good browsers so Konquerer's ability to render web pages has little or no actual value any longer.
it leaves the KDE 4.5 feature cupboard a little bare.
Whatever. If they are working on stability and efficiency they do the lords work. 4.x should be rock solid, fast, efficient and feature complete. The rest is damage that belongs in 5.x, which needs to start existing sometime soon and then bake for a good half decade or more.
Given Jackson's track record with LOTR the Hobbit movies are worth a couple billion dollars in revenue. There is absolutely no possibility they won't get made. There have been several fits of "on hold" while the rights were negotiated with the Tolkiens. There will be more "on hold" moments while more parties wrangle for their cut. In the end it will make it to the screen because everyone, absolutely everyone, wants this.
We either need the DOE to take control of this kind of thing, or we need the other states to be willing to go through this process for themselves.
California is much larger than Texas in terms of education spending. Florida isn't far behind. You'll be surprised to learn that both of these states have school boards of their own that are highly unlikely to capitulate to the demands or agendas of Texas. Publishers are not so foolish as to believe they are going to sell whatever material TX comes up with in CA or elsewhere just because TX says so. In fact they will, in all likelihood, delight in the opportunity to reject and ridicule it. You may rest assured the balance of the nation is going to have exactly zero difficulty obtaining all the NEA approved material they can afford to overspend on.
The above should be completely self-evident to all of you. The next time you encounter this twaddle that Texas is going to corrupt the NEA blessed curricula of the nation, dock whomever is making that claim some credibility points; they're playing you for a hysterical fool. Take a breath, think about it and please, stop demanding the Feds rush in and make it all better. The Dept of Ed. was formed in 1979; has public education (actual education, as opposed to spending) in the US improved since then or not?
or live in the mountains
Yes, the altitude exposes you to a great deal more radiation. The Rocky mountains in particular also have a higher than normal concentration of Uranium. The NRC sayeth:
people residing in Colorado are exposed to more natural radiation than residents of the east or west coast because Colorado has more cosmic radiation at a higher altitude and more terrestrial radiation from soils enriched in naturally occurring uranium.
Despite this, should you wish to encounter a large amount of scanner/TSA hysteria (or any other form of chronic malcontentery) one need only visit Boulder, CO, the San Francisco of the Rockies nestled beneath the Flatirons.
People do care. Just not about resolution. People care about price.
How many 1080i/p TVs are sold for every WUXGA (1920x1200) display? 10-1? 50-1? I don't know but I'm betting there are a lot more TVs being shifted. The LCD manufacturers have most of their capacity allocated to HDTV panels. This makes for low, low prices.
So when Joe Blow waddles his 290lbs ass into Best Buy to pick up a display he has a choice; he can get the super-cheap on-sale rebated HDTV that works just fine with his 'puter due to HDMI, or he can pay a $100 premium for a *real* monitor with the extra 120 pixels. Which one do you think gets added to the $20,000 card balance?
old news
Armstrong, Lovell and Cernan released their signed open letter yesterday. You may not like what have to say, but characterizing their statements, which are less than 24 hours old, as "old news" is ridiculous. Most of the criticisms they make aren't addressed by the latest administration statements, either.
Eating raw Jolokia is a source of some mildly entertaining videos.
So far the comments are focused on teh 3v1Lz H.264 vs. 'open' codecs, why one is better than the other, etc. What about Wikipedia?
Perhaps Wikipedia doesn't actually need to be riddled with video. Maybe Wikipedia is actually better off without it. Have you ever had to suffer through some lengthy, 99% irrelevant video to get a specific piece of information? How many times have you just not bothered to watch that video because it's frustrating, you can't afford the time, don't have just the right version of some plug-in, etc? Ever tried to copy and paste from a video?
How much of the useful content of Wikipedia is going to end up trapped inside videos when easily indexed and searched, entirely unencumbered US Grade-A ASCII^h^h^h^h^hUTF-8 would have been sufficient? How much more bandwidth is Wikipedia going to have to fund to serve up cell phone footage of Silambarasan Rajendar waving at people?
Citations or STFU.
You first, spun. It's your thread.
I'll stay here where the clean air and water is, you can go live in China and breath filth
Status quo, no? The west has been exporting its pollution to Asia for about half a century now because people like you won't tolerate suffering the consequences of your 'lifestyle.'
I'm sick and tired of the wealthy
You ARE the wealthy. You pay other people to live in your filth and argue for perpetuating the arrangement. The fact that you don't understand this is the most damning evidence of you ignorance this medium is capable of conveying.
Or perhaps you do understand... either way, be sure to read my reply on your Chinese build display and then use your Chinese built keyboard to create your brilliance response. All the Chinese made network gear in between will permit us to continue this thrilling debate at our leisure. Especially the part about how us poor folk are getting fucked by the wealthy.
A complete M134 system (a "30 cal" minigun that door gunners use to shred stuff) with 1500 rounds is about 191 lbs. Specs here. Your 200 lbs figure is arbitrary; the pentagon could order up a design to handle 300-400 lbs to deal with the additional mass of telemetry, servos, sensors, etc.
No, the parent was correct; making a remote controlled "H-K" like unit from this ducted fan is entirely feasible, and probably inevitable. Flying a minigun across town or over the hill to zap a mortar team will occur to someone.
"Score:5, Insightful" really isn't sufficient praise for that comment.
The heart of "green" governance beats in the depths of the wealthiest estates of the west.
Isn't that exactly what (properly qualified) consultants are for?
Government worker unions despise contractors. Better the NHTSA be incapable of actual engineering than that they misdirect money into non-union contract engineers.
Worse than that, this is really a problem of bureaucracy. The SEC missed Madoff [*] completely because it is populated by lawyers that really have no interest in rocking the boats of the wealthy and powerful. Lawyers have a great deal at stake whenever they interact with powerful people; their careers depend on their reputation among the connected. Bernie didn't work any miracles; his fraud was at least suspected if not obvious to hedge fund managers, quants, clients and media people. The lawyers at the SEC just didn't WANT to find anything dramatic because they're lawyers; they put on their blinders, do the audit and clock out happy they aren't on the front page of the NYT throwing a grenade into some rich guys setup.
What do you suppose the predominant form of life is at NHTSA? Well, right now they are looking for a Trial Attorney and a "Supervisory Equal Employment Opportunity Specialist" which is, according to the job description, a law clerk to handle civil rights complaints.
Bunch of lawyers hiring more lawyers. No surprise they can't analyze code. What happens to these lawyers after they've made their regulatory bones at the NHTSA? Same thing that happens to the SEC lawyers; they get hired by the wealthy and powerful to handle the government.
The previous NHTSA administrator was Nicole Nason, a Case Western lawyer. The new guy is David L. Strickland, a lawyer from Harvard. These people wouldn't tolerate sharing the same building with an actual engineer.
* I've read through about half of the 500+ SEC Madoff investigation transcripts; so far the only non-attorney I have encountered is a guest finance professor on loan from some Washington area university.
I can understand why the denial of this well established problem would make someone homicidally angry...Climate change could really ruin things for my kids
Humans are expected to adapt to dramatic and frequent changes in climate. Climate change has wiped out civilizations. In what stone tablet was it carved that your precious descendants should be immune?
The planet changes ceaselessly. That means the climate WILL change and your fucking kids WILL suffer it. See if you can't live out the rest of your self-centered existence without hurting anyone as a result. Thanks so much.
then you toss away the tiny thing
Right. So it goes from some interior space where light is good, but not daylight, to some landfill where it is exposed to the Sun. What was 'worn out' now has an abundance of photons and reactivates. It's not happy about ending up in Fresh Kills with the other 500,000 discarded and reanimated sensors. Eventually they unify into a vast, angry landfill monster and wade across the water to crush New York.
Please do not contribute to garbage self-awareness.
The National Atmospheric and Science Administration has been a clearing house for all things 'science' since the 70's. Being related to space or aeronautics is not a prerequisite. If you want funding and it can be made to sound vaguely sciency, head to NASA!! Climate 'research', or something, is just the latest piglet with a tit.
Killing manned space flight has been a part of Obama's platform since he entered the national scene, regardless of subsequent back-peddling. Grownups know this, which is why those Congressmen with a direct stake in this are actively opposing this guy.
What might have been a credible future for space exploration is going to the NEA, and what is left of NASA will belong to Hanson.
Enjoy.
API references aren't enough. Need rational, best practices, meaningful examples and references. Tutorials aren't terribly useful because they are inherently limited to cases that are easily teachable. OpenSSL is a fine specimen; crucial parts of the API are omitted from the current, maintained documentation. These can only be found in the archived SSLeay documentation, and that amounts to a spotty collection of notes.
(yes, I've paid for the books, too)
I call bullshit. If environmental activists...
There isn't any "if" involved here. Feinstein is sprinkling "national monuments" all over the Mojave to prevent solar projects.
link
link
No development of any kind, anywhere, under any circumstances, ever.
EnviroMission has been failing in Australia for at least half a decade. They aren't going to get anywhere in the US.
Maybe. Dynamically moving systems to faster CPUs will raise the ceiling a little. The game is growing; the big alliances have 4000+ players. Eventually they'll break the fastest CPUs CCP can get their hands on.
The servers use "cooperative multithreading" (their term, not mine) which means it can't be distributed across cores because the system isn't thread safe. Read about it here.
EVE just doesn't scale. Microthreads, green threads, whatever you want to call them, are elegant and efficient while your problem fits inside one core. When it doesn't you get this fail.
If only the US had launched some space observatories
If only the US had bothered to maintain some of its science assets
If only the US had conducted any exploration of our solar system
If only the US had commissioned any meaningful physics experiments
If only the US had any anthropologists discovering stuff
If only the US had any geneticists discovering stuff
If only the US had bothered to conduct any nuclear physics experiments
If only the US had any medical science to speak of
If only the US had any practicing bioengineers
If only the US had funded any studies into the harmful effects of BPA
...then maybe then SlashSnot editors would avoid indulging their myopic views of the US science.
It's very simple: open the lines back up to CLECs. They've been hurt by being shut out for the last decade, but they're still around. They'd be happy to pick up where they left off and resume reselling lines successfully.
Dumping money on politically important municipalities for "wireless", or something, isn't competition. Competing carriers is competition.
So Nokia's little Apple-wannabe store(s) somewhere near er... Chicago, or something, falls flat and that means no one wants unlocked phones? Whatever.
If you would like to participate in the failing unlocked phone market don't lament the poor performance of Nokia's fail brick-and-mortar outlets. Just head over here and buy a perfectly good unlocked Nokia 5530 GSM or any one of 105 other unlocked phones of all levels of capability. Need a cheap unlocked phone that works well with no monthly bill? Buy a RAZR V3 for $80, get some minutes from T-Mobile and forget about it. It works fine.
Bundling is a racket. Don't support it.
If we knew then what we know today, that electrification would require the creation of an immense source of greenhouse gas generation that would rapidly ruin the Earth's atmosphere, as we're being told, would we have been so enthusiastic about deploying this polluting technology to every household? Today, I have contemporaries that are sincerely evaluating yurts as replacements for traditional houses (theirs and yours) as they mosey about "sustainable living" fairs. I suspect they most emphatically do not intend that we wire our yurts for AC. Claiming universal electrification was a great vindication of fairness, or something, at the same time we're being told how selfish we're being for utilizing it appears schizophrenic.
It is fair to point out that I have conflated sandal wearing enviros with broadband freetards in contructing my straw man. In my defense I'll assert that most folks that would argue for broadband as a birthright are also likely to subscribe fully to AGW theories. I won't accept an argument that claims universal electrification can somehow be separated from all of its consequences; governance always has unintended side effects.
Mandating that everyone be wired up from birth could conceivably have a few problems as well; cut through the welds that secure that fairness hat so firmly to your head for one precious minute and think about what it might mean to make participation on the network an obligation of citizenship.
This is utter nonsense, Climate data, unlike say Quantum string theory, does not require more than school mathematics and some (scientific) and other common sense.
Well, not as long as your goal is simply reporting the basic trends in an unbiased manner. If, however, you have a lucrative agenda you will need a Ph.D. to perform the sort of statistical gymnastics necessary to produce the intended result and later protect that result from scrutiny. Do such agendas exist outside of the minds of "deniers"? Let us look at the record:
Keith Briffa, 1999, while contributing to the IPCC report, responding to Michael E. Mann's complaints about discrepancies between dendrochronological analysis and other temperature reconstructions.
I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.
How does Mann respond?
we don't have to resolve everything now. Just the big picture and the important details
That is just the sort of weasel word bullshit I have heard my entire life from people that want some inconvenient result papered over. Every "entrepreneur", every "manager", every authority I have ever encountered plays the same game; BEND IT UNTIL IT FITS. No Ph.D. is required to see clean through this obvious agenda driven bias.
Attempts to dilute the loss of credibility of UEA's CRU, its affiliates, and its legacy of climate research by claiming that all science is now suspect will get nowhere. Hard science isn't going to take a hit for the 45 year old UAE public university and its climate [pdf] marketing wing. The leaks merely confirm that climate science is a highly politicized, well funded arena of tightly controlled and carefully massaged "truth." A lot of us already knew this.
While it's always in fashion to assert that the public is too ignorant and distracted to make subtle distinctions, the reality is people know climate science is compromised by politics and instinctively discount its claims. Daily press releases from the UN et al. claiming the leak has no significance isn't going to fix this, either.