If someone is SO materialistic so as to BREAK OFF a relationship that is leading to marriage just because they don't get a diamond ring, then there's a decent chance that they're probably not worth the relationship in the first place.
Its all in the symbolism, not the materialism (for most folks, anyway). What ever happened to your sense of romance? Oh... that's right... Slashdot... news for nerds.
Of course, it took me about 25 years of marriage to start to figure out the value of symbolism, etc... Such is life as a nerd.
What's this slashdot generation nonsense? My daughter is 24 and I'm a slashdotter!! (No, I won't give you her phone number:-)
Re:Old idea with problems.. but promising..
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Sigh... it's the old "we are running out of space for garbage" myth again.
Just a nit in this discussion, but there is not any problem at all in terms of space for waste. I forget the figures, but basically you could put all the waste generated in the US for a century into a spot something like 10mi x 10mi. I live in the middle of a desert where the nearest large city outside of the one I live in (Phoenix) is 120 miles away! LOTS of room for rubbish. For that matter, we have huge retired open pit copper mines around here. We can use the rubbish to restore the scenery (although open pit mines are pretty cool to look at, and the Arizona town of Bisbee is built in one).
Other than that, I'm glad at least someone did the math so I didn't have to.
Alright... this makes me an old fogey... but there were no computers available when I was in high school. The only computer I had even SEEN in person was MANIAC, because it lived across the street from me (at UNM) when I was in Junior High School.
So us high school nerds played chess instead.
My first year out of high school (1965), OTOH, got me hooked on computers - Fortran programming on a 7094 at the University.... and life has been nerd-dom ever since!
Me thinks the slashdot folks are a bit, shall we say, less experienced (all right... younger:-) in life.
I didn't say that TWA800 wasn't hit by a missile. I said that the theory that the US Navy fired a missile that hit it was absurd, and gave my reasons.
To bring this in line with the original article, let me point out that an extremely unlikely event like a fuel tank explosion may be surprisingly likely over the 30 years these jets have been in service! Looked at another way, to prevent a fuel tank explosion means that the wiring has to have been right every instant for billions of minutes of flying. It means that no fuel ignition event (which theoretically might even include ionizing radiation such as the rare, but measured, extreme cosmic ray events, or even a small meteor).
But, I don't think it was hit by a missile....
Eyewitness accounts, especially of sudden major events are remarkably inconsistent. For example, almost every witnessed civilian plane crash has had witnesses testify that the plane was on fire or exploded before it hit the ground. And yet in most of these crashes, the plane did not catch fire until impact. For that matter, many people have reported that they were abducted by aliens in the middle of the night (hint: many thousands). Do you believe their eyewitness reports too?
The only shoot-down scenario that makes sense to me is a missile hitting TWA 800 that is a longer range SAM, not a ManPAD - TWA 800 was at the very edge of a Stinger engagement envelope. Somebody determined enough to carry out such an attack wouldn't be foolish enough to engage at the edge of the envelope!There is a small Bofors laser guided SAM that would do the trick (assuming it was a dud) and could be put fired from a boat. .
Right after the accident, that was my personal working hypothesis (except for the dud part, which didn't become necessary until the wreckage and bodies were examined).
But this only works if the missile hit the center fuel tank, igniting it, but the warhead was a dud. Otherwise there would have been plentiful evidence of a large high velocity explosion. The difference between a high explosive (20,000 ft/sec or so explosion velocity) and a fuel-air in a tank (hundreds of ft/sec velocity) is distinctly qualitative in its effects. But then there is still the issue of whether there was a government coverup.
The FBI is one organization that can maintain a cover-up for a few years, if all in the know think there is a good reason for it. But the NTSB is unlikely to go along. And how good is a coverup if one of the divers sees something and talks? How about all the forensic specialists (many civilian) involved? There were too many people that had an opportunity to find damning evidence (high velocity explosion signature on parts or bodies, a piece of the missile in the wreckage, etc).
Where were the witnesses who were *close* to the launch? I have heard of lots of people who claimed to see a streak of light in the sky, but nobody who claimed to see a specific boat launch the missile. And yet you would expect *someone* to have been very close to the launch site - that area is pretty crowded. Note also that a light in the sky could have been the explosion itself or a reflection of the explosion in the water, or any number of other events.
Additionally, there have been several documented center fuel tank explosions in Boeing passenger jets (although not 747s), including a recent one in the hangar in Thailand. This lends credence to the fuel explosion theory. We also have the in-flight breakup of the airliner near Taiwan this year - a 747 from the same vintage as TWA800 - that has yet to be explained AFAIK. Another SAM? Another center fuel tank explosion? A UFO? A levitating Majarishi who got in the way? Or another exploding central fuel tank?
The problem with most government conspiracy theories is they require too many people to keep secrets that they are unlikely to keep. For example, government agencies are sometimes capable of keeping secrets for long periods of time. But this requires some motivation on the part of the individuals, not just the fact that they are members of the organization.
A favorite of mine is the TWA-800 conspiracy mess. One of the theories was that a navy ship accidently shot down the aircraft with a SAM. This would have required hundreds of people of a wide range of views and position to keep secret something that lots of people want to know. This just could not happen! When I was in the Navy (Moffett Field, CA 1968), my squadron had a big drug bust. We were told that this fact was classified, but the next day's San Jose Mercury had the story.
The government of course must be able to engage in conspiracies - in the sense of having a group make hidden decisions and take hidden actions against someone. Certainly this is handy in war. And yet we are seeing war plans leaked to the press just this month!
I think when evaluating a possible conspiracy, one has to consider the motivations of the individuals who would have to have knowledge and keep the secret - their motivations over whatever period of time the alleged secret has been kept. For example, if it is a long held secret (Kennedy assassination), people have a long time to change their minds about disclosure. Maybe they are dying and have nothing to lose. Maybe they see an advantage in revealing the information. Maybe they get drunk/stoned/senile and let out verifiable information. The fact that this has not happened pretty well rules out most Kennedy conspiracy theories.
I do think it is possible that Castro subtly influenced Oswald in the direction of assassination - he certainly had motive (Kennedy was trying to kill Castro) and opportunity (Oswald was in Cuba just before the assassination). Why is this still possible (although unlikely)? Because there may have only been a few people who knew, and those people may have been in the police state of Cuba ever since - not free to make allegations even if they had reasons.
So my rule on evaluating conspiracy theory is to try to estimate the behavior of those who would have to be holding the secret. How many are there? How long would they have to keep the secret for the plot to be successful? (a conspiracy that would its conspirators executed 5 years later may be one that may consequently not be tried). What kinds of people would hold the secret? What opportunities would they have to give it away, and how credible would their revelations be? Who would investigate their revelations? etc...
Some people see invisible conspiracies all over the place - although usually in the government. I see incompetence all over the place - usually in the government - and incompetence is incompatible with successful conspiracies!
Dendochronology is great for determining exactly which year something happened in. It is not as good for determining exactly *what* happened. Tree rings are not thermometers - they are sensitive to lots of different effects. The same is true of lots of other paleoclimatic data sources - they require significant inferential jumps to produce climate data.
That would be nice, but it is rather hard to diagnose the hardware without getting involved with the software, unless the bug is really simple.
Furthermore, software bugs can result in tech calls that the technicians will be expected to solve but cannot. At least with Windows, they have experience.
Well, I must admit my last call was over a year ago. They were really good at that time. But I guess now they have gotten as bad as others, based on your support.
BTW... I have found that tech support people in general are very hostile to people who actually demonstrate knowledge. In their little world, the best customer is one who goes along with their script, offers no information other than what is asked.
As a result, I frequently end up talking to supervisors just to get something done!
I had a problem with my microwave broadband connection the other day. My traces showed the packet loss rate started at a particular minute during the early AM (when I was asleep, like any good late-nite geek). Loss rate went from around 5% to 40-50% in one minute, and stayed up until the repairman arrived and fixed it.
In spite of this evidence, the first thing he did was look at a tree in the path and proclaim that the problem. When I pointed out that it was unlikely that it had suddenly grown into the path at 0552 on that morning, he temporarily shut up. But he still raised my antenna 9' to get over the tree (this was great fun for him - it was 105 degrees in the hot sun, but that was his first thing). Then he came down and continued to grumble about the tree.
Ultimately, the problem was solved by (duh) replacing the RF modem.
Whenever I tried to suggest something like this, I was answered with sullen hostility. Perhaps the fact that I used to design RF cable modems and hold a patent in the area was enough to convince him I was trouble (yes, I was dumb enough to mention it at one point - BAD IDEA).
Given the tiny penetration of Linux on desktops, it would seem reasonable for Dell to not offer Linux on those systems for simple economic reasons: technical support (for which Dell is known) is less expensive if your staff doesn't have to deal with disparate OS's. They can obviously get around the contract provisions with new part designators, but the fact that they only did so for servers reflects the realities of the operating system market, not legal positions.
The news is not that Dell doesn't offer Linux on its desk/laptops, but that Dell offers alternate operating systems on their servers. Why? Because Linux has had its greatest success in servers, and thus there is significant customer demand.
So why not sell desk/laptops with no OS at all? Same issue - tech support.
If this is simply about Microsoft bullying, why would Dell offer Linux on servers, the area where Microsoft is currently making its biggest push to try to unseat Linux?
Microsoft has an effective monopoly on desktops. Regardless of how it got that way, it is now a fact that most people (including myself, an experienced 20 year Unix user) want Windows on their desktop. This is because Windows has the most applications software that normal people (and even geeks like myself) use. It is the same lockin that kept IBM's monopoly for so long.
The fact that Dell recognizes this (although they blame it on Microsoft) simply shows that they are putting their efforts on where the customers are: Microsoft OS's on desktops; Microsoft and Linux on servers. The servers may require more Linux support, but they have higher margins and more sophisticated users.
Most businesspeople have morals and a sense of right and wrong. Unfortunately, modern teaching in business tends to produce graduates who have been taught relativist morality which allows them to rationalize almost anything.
One wonders at the rationalizations in Bill Gates' mind when he simply lies about Microsoft. Or maybe he believes some of the nonsense (You cannot remove the browser from the OS without destroying the OS). My best guess is that he has a Clintonian sense of language. "It matters what the definition of [...fill in the blank...] is."
Good point. It is typically in hundreds of kHz and will cause a *lot* of interference when it is arcing. However, any small amount of nonlinearity in the "circuit" would rectify some of the current, so it might penetrate.
BTW... RF burns are wierd. I once got my finger too close to the output of a mere 75 watt transmitter at a point where the impedance was very high (antenna mismatch), and a small arc burned a tiny spot on my finger - all the way to the bone (a little cylinder of burned flesh eventually fell out)! Ouch! This was at 7 MHZ.
Not necessarily. It depends on all sorts of factors, such as how fast the voltage builds up, the relative leakage of the devices, the capacitance of the devices, etc. You get the idea.
There are ways to help equalize them... for example, put a large resistor in parallel with each gap (same value on each one). This would help to equalize the voltage across them before they flash over - assuming the rise time of the pulse isn't too fast (a *dangerous* assumption).
Re:Just pretty lightning.. not effective, here's w
on
Build Your Own Tesla Coil
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· Score: 5, Informative
One hopes that the above poster is intentionally posting pseudoscientific nonsense... but a few people seem to have taken it seriously... so...
While these Tesla coils are probably harmless, to do damage to a human you need not 100 amps, but less than.1 Amp. That will stop someone's heart.
Furthermore, let us say that you want to put 100 amps into something from 20 meters. First of all, 10,000 volts isn't anywhere close (you calculations are way off - in fact, they are sheer nonsense!) A few megavolts at a minimum would be required.
But... as far as power delivered to the load... the resistance of the air is uninteresting. Once the arc starts, the resistance drops dramatically in the plasma. Thus one could deliver 100 amps at 20 meters with a lot less power than you calculate.
The statement that electricity naturally flows to the nearest earth is likewise fallacious. Electricity flows (or tries to flow) across potential differences. If you hook one end of a potential difference to the earth, electricity from the other end will certainly try to flow there. But if the Tesla coil is insulated from the earth, the electricity will have no particular interest in flowing to the earth!
What a tiny percentage of america you describe. How many Vanderbilt's are in top offices, just out of curiousity? Bob Dole certainly isn't a member of a "corporate class" - he comes from small town Kansas (Russell). He is the only generation Dole in office. Gore is second generation as is Bush.
I think you are pointing out something much different: the start of political classes. These are not "corporate classes!"
Oh... and Kennedy didn't get his money from "corporations" either. His father was a criminal (liquor smuggler during prohibition).
The Roosevelts are just about out of the political world.
So your very few cases hardly prove that we have "corporate classes.:
The drug companies are already heavily regulated. That is one of the problems! The FDA, like any bureaucracy, would rather hinder progress than risk disgrace. In the terms of drug regulation, what this means is that they would rather squash a possibly useful drug than allow a possibly dangerous drug on the market. The working definition of dangerous, btw, is a drug that gets bad press due to its effects on a few people.
But what I was really addressing was the author's terribly incorrect portrayal of drug companies - implying that they were feeding at the public trough by essentially taking publicly funded research and reaping huge profits without significant investment. This was a very poor characterization. The comment on extending the patents, OTOH, was somewhat correct... the drug companies cut a deal with congress.... if they do clinical studies on children, they can keep their patents longer that would otherwise expire.
Overall, though, the piece was poorly disguised anti-corporate left-wing propaganda.
In other words, because someone came up with a lousy name for a form of corporate insurance, all of the class warfare rhetoric is valid.
Nonsense. In America, we don't have classes... in the sense of hereditary social strata. Take a look at the backgrounds of most corporate higher-ups and you will not find people born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Social mobility, which is very strong in America especially, gives lie to the term "classes."
As far as the business of insuring employees - that is an aberration in the corporate system, not a condemnation of the whole system. And in any case, when you are dealing with masses of people and financial issues, you *do*, of necessity, end up using commodity terms to refer to the people (or at least the aspect of them that you are interested in). This doesn't mean that you think of them as cattle or peasants or anything else. It is just a matter of process.
As far as the environmental thing... go back and read it.
Well... never mind. Here is the quote:.... and landowners fighting environmental regulations insist that they "own" wildlife and that the regulations amount to an unconstitutional "taking" by government.
This is a direct quote from the article. Note the term "land owners?" This is not about public land. Note also that this phrase gives another example of the fraudulent and polemical tone of the piece. Landowners fighting environmental takings do NOT claim they own the wildlife! What they do claim is that if they are to make large expenditures on behalf of the common good (for environmental reasons) that they should be reimbursed from the commons for their extraordinary contribution. If somebody suddenly can no longer build on his land, which he paid large amounts of money for, he is claiming that this constitutes a taking and that he should be reimbursed. And he is of course correct. The author, however, tries to brush aside this entire argument by mischaracterizing it (a favorite tactic of the left) so that it seems ridiculous. Environmentalists do their best to simply *take* that person's property rights for the common good.
This happens all the time here in Arizona. An example, where the expense is absorbed by a class of people, recently popped up: The Salt River Project reservoir - Roosevelt Lake - which is the major water supply for Phoenix, has been drawn down to very low levels due to a prolonged drought. A rare species of bird has taken up residence in the area normally covered by water. Now the project cannot fill up this area again without absorbing whatever expense is required to relocate the birds, or protect them or whatever... and this includes all the studies and lawsuits necessary to prove they have done the job. This is on land that was UNDERWATER until a couple of years ago. This is what is meant by a taking! The SRP is being forced to pay a cost, due to no fault of its own, to maintain mankind's interest in preserving this species of bird. I would argue that mankind, or at least the federal government, should provide recompense.
Of course SRP is big, so they are hard to feel sorry for. But exactly the same thing happens to the little guy around here. This is why the common way to deal with endangered species by some landowners (this poster not included) is "shoot, scoop and bury."
Note that this has nothing to do with the commons in any traditional legal sense. Private land never was part of the commons.
Drug companies would LOVE to find drugs that would prolong human life --- btw... Prozac is one such drug. Only someone ignorant of the horrible results of depression, and the benefits of prozac to many depressed, would call it a "cosmetic drug."
And yes, they do try to keep their proprietary drugs from being sold by others who have not invested in them.
Of course, one can try a couple of alternatives:
1) Give them no protection. That would result in no new drugs.
2) Let the government take over from the drug companies. That approach was shown to be rather, shall we say, lacking... in the USSR and other central command economies.
An interesting, but very biased article
on
Reclaiming the Commons
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There is no doubt that the issue of the "commons" is an important one in our age. Furthermore, it is clear to most that the concept of Copyright has been abused.
But this article shows its political biases in a number of ways. Early on, the use of the term "corporate classes" is pretty telling.
The attack upon the drug companies used very misleading data. The article implies that a drug company does little other than take a government funded drug, fill out a little paperwork, and then sell it for way above production costs. There is no attempt at balance in this presentation. In fact, a drug company takes the results of basic research, and invests vasts amounts of money (typically a billion or more per drug) in clinical trials required by a government bureaucracy (FDA). This is risk money expended without knowing if the drug will be successful, and in fact many are not. The drug company then must advertise the drug (which includes providing real information), produce it, and market it. In addition to that, it is liable to unpredictable but huge losses if some unforeseen adverse event occurs in even a tiny number of uses. In other words, the idea of the drug may be in the commons, but the implementation uses vast amounts of private capital, at high risk.
The failure of the paper to clarify this point tells me that the author has a clearly anti-private property bias, and is willing to lie in order to put forward his points. This is unfortunate, because he there are valid viewpoints in some of what he says.
Another issue that is brushed aside is the "taking" of landowner's property by environmental rules. Through the use of quotes, this very serious issue is simply discarded as one requiring no thought and engendering no reasoned dispute. In fact, those of us living in the wilder parts of the US are well aware that our personal property (and to a large extent our financial future) may be arbitrarily taken from us in the name of protection of a species that we may not even be aware of. In other words, there is a clear case that these takings, if necessary to protect the species, should be paid for by the beneficiaries of the commons, but instead are arbitrarily taken from random individuals!
At least when capitalists use the government to take land (such as the railroad's eminent domain takings), they are required to compensate the landowners. But in the view of the author of this paper, apparently the environmental takings are justified with no compensation to the person injured by those takings.
Thus, overall, I would say that this is a well written piece of propaganda attacking private property rights not only in areas where those rights have been overextended by corrupt government (copyright extensions, DMCA) but in areas where they rights are fundamental, owned by individuals, and deeply rooted in history.
It is an attempt to extend the commons to the those things which have traditionally been the very fundaments of private property: your land. Admittedly, this is a small part of the article, but it is an example of the dangerous thinking behind such a polemic.
Yes. I considered tossing in that situation, because it is analogous.
And you are quite right. Adding prescriptions to Medicare will probably result in price controls, which will greatly slow the world-wide progress in medication research.
Of course, that doesn't stop me from driving to Mexico to buy prescription drugs occasionally:-)
CDMA proved itself technologically superior to TDMA. It allows more users in the same piece of space/bandwidth than TDMA does.
"Better Range" is not an advantage of CDMA. The advantage is better spectral efficiency. I think it may also be more resistant to multipath, but I am not sure. Certainly WCDMA will be.
Market forces and regulation, of course, distort how this affects what people actually have. Compatibility is in fact very important, which is why GSM provides, today, superior service in *that* particular regard. I am not sure why GSM is expanding so fast in the US, but I would bet it is to take advantage of the vast variety of GSM phones due to its superior compatibility. Also, due to the spectacular collapse of share values in telecom companies (partly caused by their grossly overbidding for bandwidth sold by greedy governments), the next generation (3 G wireless) has been delayed... perhaps for a long time.
Today, the US has in inferior system due to its lack of compatibility and resultant duplication of resources. You might say that US users are suffering from the regulatory decision that allowed mankind to realize the benefits of CDMA in the future!
The multiple standards had nothing to do with the us "protecting its native manufacturers." You may have noticed that if that was the goal, it failed! The multiple standardsd were due to a regulatory philosophy of reducing the standardization ordered by the government. The FCC decided to regulate based on spectral efficiency, rather than specific technical specifications. Both TDMA and CDMA met the initial requiremens, and the US thus has two kinds of TDMA (GSM and US) and CDMA. The choice was made completely by the providers. A provider could choose whatever standard he desired, as long as it met the FCC's spectral efficiency standards (and related things such as tolerance of out of band interference, etc). The result is this very frustrating hodge podge of systems. In the short run, it certainly provides on benefit to US telecom providers: it reduces churn - it makes it harder for a consumer to change providers. In the long run, I think it will hurt them, because various applications (such as instant messaging, etc) will not appear as quickly or be as ubiquitous as they are in GSM countries.
BTW... the US is not the only country with multiple standards. Japan also has at least two.
Frankly, I wish the French or some other country had done the experiment so we in the US could have a single standard... but that's not how it worked out. We are the guinea pigs.
CDMA, btw, was invented by the president of Qualcomm, and would never have made it as a standard without this competitive build-out. In general, the "established" carriers took the proven approach - TDMA. Others took the gamble of the unproven technology (CDMA). CDMA is so bizarre that it was not really possible to predict it's bandwidth efficiency without large scale builds.
BTW... from a technical standpoint, CDMA is a very elegant way to do things. Basically, one takes a high rate pseudo-random bit sequence and multiplies the data stream (at a slower bit rate) by it. One transmits the result, perhaps after shifting the frequency.
The receiver has a synchronized pseudo-random bit sequence, and inverts the transform by multiplying the received RF signal (mixing) by it, and out of a loss pass filter appears the original data (audio) stream.It is a form of Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum technology.
Pretty cool - nice an isomorphic - with pseudorandom. I love it! I've loved DSS for years.
Interfering signals in the same bandwidth are multiplied, of course, by the same bit stream. But since it is pseudorandom, and the interfering signals are not correlated to it, they appear as broadband noise to the receiver. With techniques like this, you can also hide a signal so it is not detectable except by a receiver with the synchronized code. This stuff was first used for military secure and LPD (Low Probability of Detection) systems. The original inventor was the 1940's actress Heddy Lamar, who invented a system which multiplied music from a phonograph by audio (and recovered it by the same process). This was used to allow Roosevelt and Churchill to communicate over short wave radio without being deciphered.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a way around this. If you set it up right, you can have a cgi that looks like
e
http://www.fiddle.dee/a/long/directory/path/her
where the cgi script is named "long".
In other words, you can make the question mark go away.
I've done this occasionally. I don't remember why, but it wasn't to fools google.
If someone is SO materialistic so as to BREAK OFF a relationship that is leading to marriage just because they don't get a diamond ring, then there's a decent chance that they're probably not worth the relationship in the first place.
Its all in the symbolism, not the materialism (for most folks, anyway). What ever happened to your sense of romance? Oh... that's right... Slashdot... news for nerds.
Of course, it took me about 25 years of marriage to start to figure out the value of symbolism, etc... Such is life as a nerd.
What's this slashdot generation nonsense? My daughter is 24 and I'm a slashdotter!! (No, I won't give you her phone number :-)
Sigh... it's the old "we are running out of space for garbage" myth again.
Just a nit in this discussion, but there is not any problem at all in terms of space for waste. I forget the figures, but basically you could put all the waste generated in the US for a century into a spot something like 10mi x 10mi. I live in the middle of a desert where the nearest large city outside of the one I live in (Phoenix) is 120 miles away! LOTS of room for rubbish. For that matter, we have huge retired open pit copper mines around here. We can use the rubbish to restore the scenery (although open pit mines are pretty cool to look at, and the Arizona town of Bisbee is built in one).
Other than that, I'm glad at least someone did the math so I didn't have to.
Alright... this makes me an old fogey... but there were no computers available when I was in high school. The only computer I had even SEEN in person was MANIAC, because it lived across the street from me (at UNM) when I was in Junior High School.
:-) in life.
So us high school nerds played chess instead.
My first year out of high school (1965), OTOH, got me hooked on computers - Fortran programming on a 7094 at the University.... and life has been nerd-dom ever since!
Me thinks the slashdot folks are a bit, shall we say, less experienced (all right... younger
I didn't say that TWA800 wasn't hit by a missile. I said that the theory that the US Navy fired a missile that hit it was absurd, and gave my reasons.
To bring this in line with the original article, let me point out that an extremely unlikely event like a fuel tank explosion may be surprisingly likely over the 30 years these jets have been in service! Looked at another way, to prevent a fuel tank explosion means that the wiring has to have been right every instant for billions of minutes of flying. It means that no fuel ignition event (which theoretically might even include ionizing radiation such as the rare, but measured, extreme cosmic ray events, or even a small meteor).
But, I don't think it was hit by a missile....
Eyewitness accounts, especially of sudden major events are remarkably inconsistent. For example, almost every witnessed civilian plane crash has had witnesses testify that the plane was on fire or exploded before it hit the ground. And yet in most of these crashes, the plane did not catch fire until impact. For that matter, many people have reported that they were abducted by aliens in the middle of the night (hint: many thousands). Do you believe their eyewitness reports too?
The only shoot-down scenario that makes sense to me is a missile hitting TWA 800 that is a longer range SAM, not a ManPAD - TWA 800 was at the very edge of a Stinger engagement envelope. Somebody determined enough to carry out such an attack wouldn't be foolish enough to engage at the edge of the envelope!There is a small Bofors laser guided SAM that would do the trick (assuming it was a dud) and could be put fired from a boat. .
Right after the accident, that was my personal working hypothesis (except for the dud part, which didn't become necessary until the wreckage and bodies were examined).
But this only works if the missile hit the center fuel tank, igniting it, but the warhead was a dud. Otherwise there would have been plentiful evidence of a large high velocity explosion. The difference between a high explosive (20,000 ft/sec or so explosion velocity) and a fuel-air in a tank (hundreds of ft/sec velocity) is distinctly qualitative in its effects.
But then there is still the issue of whether there was a government coverup.
The FBI is one organization that can maintain a cover-up for a few years, if all in the know think there is a good reason for it. But the NTSB is unlikely to go along. And how good is a coverup if one of the divers sees something and talks? How about all the forensic specialists (many civilian) involved? There were too many people that had an opportunity to find damning evidence (high velocity explosion signature on parts or bodies, a piece of the missile in the wreckage, etc).
Where were the witnesses who were *close* to the launch? I have heard of lots of people who claimed to see a streak of light in the sky, but nobody who claimed to see a specific boat launch the missile. And yet you would expect *someone* to have been very close to the launch site - that area is pretty crowded. Note also that a light in the sky could have been the explosion itself or a reflection of the explosion in the water, or any number of other events.
Additionally, there have been several documented center fuel tank explosions in Boeing passenger jets (although not 747s), including a recent one in the hangar in Thailand. This lends credence to the fuel explosion theory. We also have the in-flight breakup of the airliner near Taiwan this year - a 747 from the same vintage as TWA800 - that has yet to be explained AFAIK. Another SAM? Another center fuel tank explosion? A UFO? A levitating Majarishi who got in the way? Or another exploding central fuel tank?
The problem with most government conspiracy theories is they require too many people to keep secrets that they are unlikely to keep. For example, government agencies are sometimes capable of keeping secrets for long periods of time. But this requires some motivation on the part of the individuals, not just the fact that they are members of the organization.
A favorite of mine is the TWA-800 conspiracy mess. One of the theories was that a navy ship accidently shot down the aircraft with a SAM. This would have required hundreds of people of a wide range of views and position to keep secret something that lots of people want to know. This just could not happen! When I was in the Navy (Moffett Field, CA 1968), my squadron had a big drug bust. We were told that this fact was classified, but the next day's San Jose Mercury had the story.
The government of course must be able to engage in conspiracies - in the sense of having a group make hidden decisions and take hidden actions against someone. Certainly this is handy in war. And yet we are seeing war plans leaked to the press just this month!
I think when evaluating a possible conspiracy, one has to consider the motivations of the individuals who would have to have knowledge and keep the secret - their motivations over whatever period of time the alleged secret has been kept.
For example, if it is a long held secret (Kennedy assassination), people have a long time to change their minds about disclosure. Maybe they are dying and have nothing to lose. Maybe they see an advantage in revealing the information. Maybe they get drunk/stoned/senile and let out verifiable information. The fact that this has not happened pretty well rules out most Kennedy conspiracy theories.
I do think it is possible that Castro subtly influenced Oswald in the direction of assassination - he certainly had motive (Kennedy was trying to kill Castro) and opportunity (Oswald was in Cuba just before the assassination). Why is this still possible (although unlikely)? Because there may have only been a few people who knew, and those people may have been in the police state of Cuba ever since - not free to make allegations even if they had reasons.
So my rule on evaluating conspiracy theory is to try to estimate the behavior of those who would have to be holding the secret. How many are there? How long would they have to keep the secret for the plot to be successful? (a conspiracy that would its conspirators executed 5 years later may be one that may consequently not be tried). What kinds of people would hold the secret? What opportunities would they have to give it away, and how credible would their revelations be? Who would investigate their revelations? etc...
Some people see invisible conspiracies all over the place - although usually in the government. I see incompetence all over the place - usually in the government - and incompetence is incompatible with successful conspiracies!
Dendochronology is great for determining exactly which year something happened in. It is not as good for determining exactly *what* happened. Tree rings are not thermometers - they are sensitive to lots of different effects. The same is true of lots of other paleoclimatic data sources - they require significant inferential jumps to produce climate data.
Actually, picking common numbers in a lottery reduces your expected return! Not the chance of winning, but the amount you are likely to win.
.0000000001$ or something like that :-)
If lots of people pick 123456, and it happens to be selected, they will split the amount.
Better to choose something more random. The expected return on making that choice vs otherwise is
That would be nice, but it is rather hard to diagnose the hardware without getting involved with the software, unless the bug is really simple.
Furthermore, software bugs can result in tech calls that the technicians will be expected to solve but cannot. At least with Windows, they have experience.
Well, I must admit my last call was over a year ago. They were really good at that time. But I guess now they have gotten as bad as others, based on your support.
BTW... I have found that tech support people in general are very hostile to people who actually demonstrate knowledge. In their little world, the best customer is one who goes along with their script, offers no information other than what is asked.
As a result, I frequently end up talking to supervisors just to get something done!
I had a problem with my microwave broadband connection the other day. My traces showed the packet loss rate started at a particular minute during the early AM (when I was asleep, like any good late-nite geek). Loss rate went from around 5% to 40-50% in one minute, and stayed up until the repairman arrived and fixed it.
In spite of this evidence, the first thing he did was look at a tree in the path and proclaim that the problem. When I pointed out that it was unlikely that it had suddenly grown into the path at 0552 on that morning, he temporarily shut up. But he still raised my antenna 9' to get over the tree (this was great fun for him - it was 105 degrees in the hot sun, but that was his first thing). Then he came down and continued to grumble about the tree.
Ultimately, the problem was solved by (duh) replacing the RF modem.
Whenever I tried to suggest something like this, I was answered with sullen hostility. Perhaps the fact that I used to design RF cable modems and hold a patent in the area was enough to convince him I was trouble (yes, I was dumb enough to mention it at one point - BAD IDEA).
Given the tiny penetration of Linux on desktops, it would seem reasonable for Dell to not offer Linux on those systems for simple economic reasons: technical support (for which Dell is known) is less expensive if your staff doesn't have to deal with disparate OS's. They can obviously get around the contract provisions with new part designators, but the fact that they only did so for servers reflects the realities of the operating system market, not legal positions.
The news is not that Dell doesn't offer Linux on its desk/laptops, but that Dell offers alternate operating systems on their servers. Why? Because Linux has had its greatest success in servers, and thus there is significant customer demand.
So why not sell desk/laptops with no OS at all? Same issue - tech support.
If this is simply about Microsoft bullying, why would Dell offer Linux on servers, the area where Microsoft is currently making its biggest push to try to unseat Linux?
Microsoft has an effective monopoly on desktops. Regardless of how it got that way, it is now a fact that most people (including myself, an experienced 20 year Unix user) want Windows on their desktop. This is because Windows has the most applications software that normal people (and even geeks like myself) use. It is the same lockin that kept IBM's monopoly for so long.
The fact that Dell recognizes this (although they blame it on Microsoft) simply shows that they are putting their efforts on where the customers are: Microsoft OS's on desktops; Microsoft and Linux on servers. The servers may require more Linux support, but they have higher margins and more sophisticated users.
Most businesspeople have morals and a sense of right and wrong. Unfortunately, modern teaching in business tends to produce graduates who have been taught relativist morality which allows them to rationalize almost anything.
One wonders at the rationalizations in Bill Gates' mind when he simply lies about Microsoft. Or maybe he believes some of the nonsense (You cannot remove the browser from the OS without destroying the OS). My best guess is that he has a Clintonian sense of language. "It matters what the definition of [...fill in the blank...] is."
Good point. It is typically in hundreds of kHz and will cause a *lot* of interference when it is arcing. However, any small amount of nonlinearity in the "circuit" would rectify some of the current, so it might penetrate.
BTW... RF burns are wierd. I once got my finger too close to the output of a mere 75 watt transmitter at a point where the impedance was very high (antenna mismatch), and a small arc burned a tiny spot on my finger - all the way to the bone (a little cylinder of burned flesh eventually fell out)! Ouch! This was at 7 MHZ.
Not necessarily. It depends on all sorts of factors, such as how fast the voltage builds up, the relative leakage of the devices, the capacitance of the devices, etc. You get the idea.
There are ways to help equalize them... for example, put a large resistor in parallel with each gap (same value on each one). This would help to equalize the voltage across them before they flash over - assuming the rise time of the pulse isn't too fast (a *dangerous* assumption).
One hopes that the above poster is intentionally posting pseudoscientific nonsense... but a few people seem to have taken it seriously... so...
.1 Amp. That will stop someone's heart.
While these Tesla coils are probably harmless, to do damage to a human you need not 100 amps, but less than
Furthermore, let us say that you want to put 100 amps into something from 20 meters. First of all, 10,000 volts isn't anywhere close (you calculations are way off - in fact, they are sheer nonsense!) A few megavolts at a minimum would be required.
But... as far as power delivered to the load... the resistance of the air is uninteresting. Once the arc starts, the resistance drops dramatically in the plasma. Thus one could deliver 100 amps at 20 meters with a lot less power than you calculate.
The statement that electricity naturally flows to the nearest earth is likewise fallacious. Electricity flows (or tries to flow) across potential differences. If you hook one end of a potential difference to the earth, electricity from the other end will certainly try to flow there. But if the Tesla coil is insulated from the earth, the electricity will have no particular interest in flowing to the earth!
All in all... very cleverly stated nonsense.
Naughty of you (or ignorant of you).
What welfare and subsidies are you talking about?
What a tiny percentage of america you describe. How many Vanderbilt's are in top offices, just out of curiousity? Bob Dole certainly isn't a member of a "corporate class" - he comes from small town Kansas (Russell). He is the only generation Dole in office. Gore is second generation as is Bush.
I think you are pointing out something much different: the start of political classes. These are not "corporate classes!"
Oh... and Kennedy didn't get his money from "corporations" either. His father was a criminal (liquor smuggler during prohibition).
The Roosevelts are just about out of the political world.
So your very few cases hardly prove that we have "corporate classes.:
The drug companies are already heavily regulated. That is one of the problems! The FDA, like any bureaucracy, would rather hinder progress than risk disgrace. In the terms of drug regulation, what this means is that they would rather squash a possibly useful drug than allow a possibly dangerous drug on the market. The working definition of dangerous, btw, is a drug that gets bad press due to its effects on a few people.
But what I was really addressing was the author's terribly incorrect portrayal of drug companies - implying that they were feeding at the public trough by essentially taking publicly funded research and reaping huge profits without significant investment. This was a very poor characterization. The comment on extending the patents, OTOH, was somewhat correct... the drug companies cut a deal with congress.... if they do clinical studies on children, they can keep their patents longer that would otherwise expire.
Overall, though, the piece was poorly disguised anti-corporate left-wing propaganda.
In other words, because someone came up with a lousy name for a form of corporate insurance, all of the class warfare rhetoric is valid.
.... and landowners fighting environmental regulations insist that they "own" wildlife and that the regulations amount to an unconstitutional "taking" by government.
Nonsense. In America, we don't have classes... in the sense of hereditary social strata. Take a look at the backgrounds of most corporate higher-ups and you will not find people born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Social mobility, which is very strong in America especially, gives lie to the term "classes."
As far as the business of insuring employees - that is an aberration in the corporate system, not a condemnation of the whole system. And in any case, when you are dealing with masses of people and financial issues, you *do*, of necessity, end up using commodity terms to refer to the people (or at least the aspect of them that you are interested in). This doesn't mean that you think of them as cattle or peasants or anything else. It is just a matter of process.
As far as the environmental thing... go back and read it.
Well... never mind. Here is the quote:
This is a direct quote from the article. Note the term "land owners?" This is not about public land. Note also that this phrase gives another example of the fraudulent and polemical tone of the piece. Landowners fighting environmental takings do NOT claim they own the wildlife! What they do claim is that if they are to make large expenditures on behalf of the common good (for environmental reasons) that they should be reimbursed from the commons for their extraordinary contribution. If somebody suddenly can no longer build on his land, which he paid large amounts of money for, he is claiming that this constitutes a taking and that he should be reimbursed. And he is of course correct. The author, however, tries to brush aside this entire argument by mischaracterizing it (a favorite tactic of the left) so that it seems ridiculous. Environmentalists do their best to simply *take* that person's property rights for the common good.
This happens all the time here in Arizona. An example, where the expense is absorbed by a class of people, recently popped up: The Salt River Project reservoir - Roosevelt Lake - which is the major water supply for Phoenix, has been drawn down to very low levels due to a prolonged drought. A rare species of bird has taken up residence in the area normally covered by water. Now the project cannot fill up this area again without absorbing whatever expense is required to relocate the birds, or protect them or whatever... and this includes all the studies and lawsuits necessary to prove they have done the job. This is on land that was UNDERWATER until a couple of years ago. This is what is meant by a taking! The SRP is being forced to pay a cost, due to no fault of its own, to maintain mankind's interest in preserving this species of bird. I would argue that mankind, or at least the federal government, should provide recompense.
Of course SRP is big, so they are hard to feel sorry for. But exactly the same thing happens to the little guy around here. This is why the common way to deal with endangered species by some landowners (this poster not included) is "shoot, scoop and bury."
Note that this has nothing to do with the commons in any traditional legal sense. Private land never was part of the commons.
Drug companies would LOVE to find drugs that would prolong human life --- btw... Prozac is one such drug. Only someone ignorant of the horrible results of depression, and the benefits of prozac to many depressed, would call it a "cosmetic drug."
And yes, they do try to keep their proprietary drugs from being sold by others who have not invested in them.
Of course, one can try a couple of alternatives:
1) Give them no protection. That would result in no new drugs.
2) Let the government take over from the drug companies. That approach was shown to be rather, shall we say, lacking... in the USSR and other central command economies.
There is no doubt that the issue of the "commons" is an important one in our age. Furthermore, it is clear to most that the concept of Copyright has been abused.
But this article shows its political biases in a number of ways. Early on, the use of the term "corporate classes" is pretty telling.
The attack upon the drug companies used very misleading data. The article implies that a drug company does little other than take a government funded drug, fill out a little paperwork, and then sell it for way above production costs. There is no attempt at balance in this presentation. In fact, a drug company takes the results of basic research, and invests vasts amounts of money (typically a billion or more per drug) in clinical trials required by a government bureaucracy (FDA). This is risk money expended without knowing if the drug will be successful, and in fact many are not. The drug company then must advertise the drug (which includes providing real information), produce it, and market it. In addition to that, it is liable to unpredictable but huge losses if some unforeseen adverse event occurs in even a tiny number of uses. In other words, the idea of the drug may be in the commons, but the implementation uses vast amounts of private capital, at high risk.
The failure of the paper to clarify this point tells me that the author has a clearly anti-private property bias, and is willing to lie in order to put forward his points. This is unfortunate, because he there are valid viewpoints in some of what he says.
Another issue that is brushed aside is the "taking" of landowner's property by environmental rules. Through the use of quotes, this very serious issue is simply discarded as one requiring no thought and engendering no reasoned dispute. In fact, those of us living in the wilder parts of the US are well aware that our personal property (and to a large extent our financial future) may be arbitrarily taken from us in the name of protection of a species that we may not even be aware of. In other words, there is a clear case that these takings, if necessary to protect the species, should be paid for by the beneficiaries of the commons, but instead are arbitrarily taken from random individuals!
At least when capitalists use the government to take land (such as the railroad's eminent domain takings), they are required to compensate the landowners. But in the view of the author of this paper, apparently the environmental takings are justified with no compensation to the person injured by those takings.
Thus, overall, I would say that this is a well written piece of propaganda attacking private property rights not only in areas where those rights have been overextended by corrupt government (copyright extensions, DMCA) but in areas where they rights are fundamental, owned by individuals, and deeply rooted in history.
It is an attempt to extend the commons to the those things which have traditionally been the very fundaments of private property: your land. Admittedly, this is a small part of the article, but it is an example of the dangerous thinking behind such a polemic.
Good point. I mis-typed. I meant spread spectrum.
Yes. I considered tossing in that situation, because it is analogous.
:-)
And you are quite right. Adding prescriptions to Medicare will probably result in price controls, which will greatly slow the world-wide progress in medication research.
Of course, that doesn't stop me from driving to Mexico to buy prescription drugs occasionally
Next generation GSM uses CDMA. Period.
CDMA proved itself technologically superior to TDMA. It allows more users in the same piece of space/bandwidth than TDMA does.
"Better Range" is not an advantage of CDMA. The advantage is better spectral efficiency. I think it may also be more resistant to multipath, but I am not sure. Certainly WCDMA will be.
Market forces and regulation, of course, distort how this affects what people actually have. Compatibility is in fact very important, which is why GSM provides, today, superior service in *that* particular regard. I am not sure why GSM is expanding so fast in the US, but I would bet it is to take advantage of the vast variety of GSM phones due to its superior compatibility. Also, due to the spectacular collapse of share values in telecom companies (partly caused by their grossly overbidding for bandwidth sold by greedy governments), the next generation (3 G wireless) has been delayed... perhaps for a long time.
Today, the US has in inferior system due to its lack of compatibility and resultant duplication of resources. You might say that US users are suffering from the regulatory decision that allowed mankind to realize the benefits of CDMA in the future!
The multiple standards had nothing to do with the us "protecting its native manufacturers." You may have noticed that if that was the goal, it failed! The multiple standardsd were due to a regulatory philosophy of reducing the standardization ordered by the government. The FCC decided to regulate based on spectral efficiency, rather than specific technical specifications. Both TDMA and CDMA met the initial requiremens, and the US thus has two kinds of TDMA (GSM and US) and CDMA. The choice was made completely by the providers. A provider could choose whatever standard he desired, as long as it met the FCC's spectral efficiency standards (and related things such as tolerance of out of band interference, etc). The result is this very frustrating hodge podge of systems. In the short run, it certainly provides on benefit to US telecom providers: it reduces churn - it makes it harder for a consumer to change providers. In the long run, I think it will hurt them, because various applications (such as instant messaging, etc) will not appear as quickly or be as ubiquitous as they are in GSM countries.
BTW... the US is not the only country with multiple standards. Japan also has at least two.
Frankly, I wish the French or some other country had done the experiment so we in the US could have a single standard... but that's not how it worked out. We are the guinea pigs.
CDMA, btw, was invented by the president of Qualcomm, and would never have made it as a standard without this competitive build-out. In general, the "established" carriers took the proven approach - TDMA. Others took the gamble of the unproven technology (CDMA). CDMA is so bizarre that it was not really possible to predict it's bandwidth efficiency without large scale builds.
BTW... from a technical standpoint, CDMA is a very elegant way to do things. Basically, one takes a high rate pseudo-random bit sequence and multiplies the data stream (at a slower bit rate) by it. One transmits the result, perhaps after shifting the frequency.
The receiver has a synchronized pseudo-random bit sequence, and inverts the transform by multiplying the received RF signal (mixing) by it, and out of a loss pass filter appears the original data (audio) stream.It is a form of Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum technology.
Pretty cool - nice an isomorphic - with pseudorandom. I love it! I've loved DSS for years.
Interfering signals in the same bandwidth are multiplied, of course, by the same bit stream. But since it is pseudorandom, and the interfering signals are not correlated to it, they appear as broadband noise to the receiver. With techniques like this, you can also hide a signal so it is not detectable except by a receiver with the synchronized code. This stuff was first used for military secure and LPD (Low Probability of Detection) systems. The original inventor was the 1940's actress Heddy Lamar, who invented a system which multiplied music from a phonograph by audio (and recovered it by the same process). This was used to allow Roosevelt and Churchill to communicate over short wave radio without being deciphered.