Science magazine, within the last two weeks, had a survey story on research into the effects of Chernobyl. From that story, it was clear that the predicted negative consequences of low dose radiation were so far below expected that sensitive studies could not find them at all - even in animals living next to the reactor. The 30km exclusion zone around Chernobyl is now a wildlife sanctuary, and a local biologist was quoted as recommending it as a place for wildlife rides!
The only unexpected negative consequence was an unusually high rate of thyroid cancer in children, but this is not a true low-dose effect because the thyroid efficiently concentrates radioactive iodine. Fortunately, thyroid cancer is relatively benign and there have only been four deaths from it.
Furthermore, a closer reading of the latest scare study shows that those exposed were not in the low dose group! They were workers at the facility after the event - those who were involved in cleaning things up.
There is lots of evidence that low dose radiation is not as dangerous, per milli-severt, as high dose radiation. The linear dose-response model that is used by environmental agencies shows way too high a risk at low levels. This results in ridiculously low level requirements on nuclear plants - levels which, btw, coal burning plants exceed every day!
A hypothesis on the nonlinearity of the dose response is that it DNA is self-repairing, it may take near-simultaneous hits on the same DNA to defeat that mechanism. Simple statistics shows that the odds of this, relative to radiation dosage, are far from linear.
Does anyone remember the extremely high numbers of excess deaths expected from Chernobyl? To date, it has killed fewer people than a medium sized commercial airliner crash - and Chernobyl was a worst-case meltdown. Almost all of the deaths were among workers immediately after the event who received very high doses.
Chernobyl was an uncontained reactor with a positive coefficient - loaded with graphite which burned once the temperatures got too high.
And finally, if you really are worried about radiation, take a geiger counter in an airplane. You will watch the background level climb dramatically as the aircraft climbs. When I did this, it went from 26 clicks per minute to many hundreds - and I live in a high-background area.
Since every trivial thing you can do with software these days is patented, doesn't releasing your open source also open you up to patent infringement attacks?
Nonsense. The EMP might fry unprotected equipment (which is not what will be involved) but after that, the only radio communications it will affect would be HF. Not a problem for the UCAV.
This technology, inherently stealthy, will no doubt be of great use to folks wanting to move high-value substances across our borders.
Today, there are dirigible-carried radars along our southern borders watching for smuggling planes. Will they see a plane like this, flying at a few hundred feet AGL? Not likely!
Terrorists oughta love this one
on
First Arcology?
·
· Score: 2
The World Trade Center in New York City is a huge building. The terrorist attack there came close to killing 10,000 people (if the cyanide gas had not been destroyed by the explosion).
I can just imagine the mess if a bad guy wanted to attack this monstrosity. Scary!
Optimism was based on over-simplistic model
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 5
The point of the article is some people have had an over-simplistic model of how the genome interacts with cellular systems. The one-gene/one-protein view ignores the interactions between the genes, proteins, etc.
A lot of optimism assumed that a single gene had a single function, for all time through the life of the cell. But as one would expect with a biological system, things are far more complex. Geners are "turned on" and "turned off." Multiple genes interact indirectly.
The key is that the cell is an emergent system. It exhibits extremely complex behavior as a result of vast numbers of interactions of simpler parts. Thus we may never find a "gene" that "codes for" the shape of a nose. The fact that a nose arises at all from a bunch of protein specifications is itself a clue that things are extremely complicated.
The decoding of the genome will indeed be extremely valuable. But it won't "solve" biology anymore than the understanding of the laws of gases "solves" the weather forecast problem!
Pons & Fleishmann Experiment very flawed
on
Excess Heat
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· Score: 4
The authors, as quoted in the review, imply that the calorimetry used by Pons and Fleishmann was not understandable by physicists. But the entire Pons and Fleishmann effort was flawed in ways that don't require a deep electrochemistry background to understand:
Their paper made claims of great excess energy production, but in fact they got this by the all-too-common error of dividing by a small difference of large numbers. Unfortunately, the paper was not available until a while after the claims were made.
They used open cell calorimetry (their reactors were open to the atmosphere). That meant that the heat loss in the system due to evaporation, convective transport, etc. had to be calculated from dangerous assumptions.
Their claim was for heavy water (D2O), but with open cells, normal diffusion at the water/air interface rapidly replaces the D2O in an open cell with H2O. Not only does this defeat their original fusion hypothesis , it also, once again changes the denominator since the hydrolysis energies of H2O and D2O are different.
They measured the temperature in the cell with a single sensor. This did not account for stirring (caused by the bubbling of the electrolysis) or other nonuniformities in the temperature of the cell.
They measured average voltage and current using simple voltmeters and ammeters. Experiments that I did showed that the bubbling causes a significant AC component in both signals, affecting true power measurements.
In summary, the Pons & Fleishmann experiments were significantly flawed.
Of interest to Slashdotters, the cold fusion episode was probably the first major episode of pathological science which had active internet participation by many of the principals (except for P&F). This led to rapid replication of experiments, and many far more careful experiments including those with closed calorimeters (using catalysts to recombine the D2 and H2 products). Although there were occasional reports of excess heat or nuclear products, there were no consistent findings. Furthermore, as is typical in pathological science, the more careful the experiment, the lower the statistical significance of any results found.
Another interesting aspect of this whole affair is that a physicist, Dr. Steven Jones, also in Utah (at BYU, not UU), was about to publish his own cold fusion results using electrolysis (and did publish about the same time). This empending publication may have stampeded P&F into their actions.
However, Jones was operating on a different theory. He was trying to explain the (still unexplained AFAIK) excess amount of He3 released by volcanic eruptions. His theory was that a small amount of fusion was taking place deep in the earth, producing the He3. He tried to duplicate this with a "soup" of chemicals, and to generate the "pressure" using electroylysis in a palladium (I believe) electrode.
In contrast to P&F, Jones was very careful in his experiments. He kept seeing slighly significant excess neutron emissions. However, whenever he tooks steps to refine the experiments by reducing the neutron background (going into deep mines, and a tunnel under the Alps), the neutron emissions followed suit... the excess was a slight excess over the background, no matter the background. This ultimately led to a "no effect" conclusion. This is also characteristic of pathological science.
Performance (unless you are dealing with big SMP systems) is not really the issue. The original N words above are.
You pay a lot of the robustness of Oracle (or Informix, another favorite of mine). You get it back in reliability. I have done extensive performance benchmarks on these things on a 40CPU Sun E-10K and they do perform.
But I also have experience with using Informix for 10 years in a huge reservations systems app (now on the E10K) and what you really get is high availabillity, good recovery, and nifty features (high performance backups, and lots of stuff that was unportable enough that we didn't use it.
You also get easy-to use tools. A big system doesn't use Sysadmins and programmers for database admin, it uses Database Administrators, many of whom have no programming experience). On the big databases, these folks are "off the shelf" in the job market.
I had LASIK laser corrective eye surgery 4 years ago. and ended up with amazing 20/12 vision (equivalent) in both eyes,
from 20/400 in both with what is called extreme astigmatism in addition to moderate myopia (near-sightedness). Because I am an old fogey, I had one eye set intentionally near-sighted.
This was great (other than what they call "glare" at night)... a problem of blurring that only shows up in high contrast conditions.
4 years later, my vision is probably about 20/50 (last measured 20/35) in both eyes... it has slowly drifted. But vision is still vastly better
than before, and still correctable to 20/12 (or equiv in the nearsighted eye... let's see... 3.3/2).
Also, let me point out a few things:
- I had LASIK, not the skin-of-the eye frying laster surgery(Laser RK or PRK) . Laser involves peeling back the skin of the eye over the cornea, zapping the cornea, and putting the skin back (no pain but wierd).
- The techniques have gotten better, although with wider availablity it is likely it is now used by some less competent surgeons. At the time I had it, there was no FDA approved laser (in the US only), and this was a custom laser built for some very good opthomalogists.
-The oldest eye shaping technique is RK, which was brought to the US from Russia about 20 years ago by a local MD. This technique involves cutting the cornea with a diamond scalpel, and I absolutely avoided that one!
-I had my eyes done at separate times, and in steps (2 times one eye, 3 on the other - over a year). This one-eye-at-a-time/partial-correction-at-a-time is to avoid over-correction, and loss of both eyes due to a single-time screw-up or infection.
-I had fairly rapidly changing vision during the year I was going through this. I would have the procedure and end up with about 20/20, and then it would fade quickly (days sometimes). I would then have it again. This is not uncommon, and in fact is intentional by the doctors... they don't want to make too big a change at once or it may become irreversible.
-The clinic made me watch a 30 minute video tape on the hazards of the procedure, and read a thick booklet on the same.
If yours doesn't, go somewhere else!
Other XML synergies: Re:XML is very useful...
on
Inside XML
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· Score: 3
I have been doing XML in Java for over a year, and friends have extensively used it for 3 or 4 years. XML is one of those rare things, like Java, that has synergistic value.
Prior to XML, we had used our own text based markup language (surprisingly similar to XML except only two levels of hierarchy) since 1989. We (30 year OLTP designers and coders) found it *much easier* to design, develop, debug, comunicate about, and communicate with than prior fixed field non-text formats
List of Synergies in case of XML (and mostly true with our old approach) include:
Use of off the shelf editors to create debug messages.
Messages (documents to an XML purist) easy to generate from auxiliary programs for data loading.
Logging using the same XML as the original messages, and adding other XML message/subtree types for internal actions, is very easy, and you can use all sorts of available tools to work on the logs.This true for data export logs and debug logs.
>b>Use of XML display programs (the best I have used so far includes the dreaded M-word - Microsoft explorer). With Explorer 5.0 and above (and I think 4.0 and above), if you click on a.xml file, it will bring it up "pretty printed". I suspect there are similar tools under Linux but I haven't used them in my Linux work.
Synergistic use in programs: if you create an application that uses XML for input and-or output, it is trivial to also use XML for configuration files for that application. Furthermore, you can take the hierarchical DOM data structures and use sub-trees (from the original input message) to pass data to lower levels of your architecture, without having to convert it into instance variables or some other protocol (e.g. RMI, COM or just method calls).
Multiple implentations of parser/generator API's.
As another post mentioned, in the case of Java, the standardized two API's - DOM and SAX - allow one to pick and choose parsers from a widely available set, and not change any code. This is a powerful feature, letting you use, for example, a parser with strong error handling for test, and then changing it to a parser that is very fast for production. This can be done with a runtime command line argument if you want!
I would also point out that I have used SAX in some cases and DOMs in another. I had no problem quickly using SAX for message-based uses. It may be harder when using all the features of XML, but not all are needed for most data interchange usages.
The browser world *had* the opportunity to revolutionize computing
by providing a platform for universal distributed computing. The browser,
operating system independent and using universal standards, could have
supplanted the operating system itself as the platform for client applications.
This would have allowed us to escape from the OS wars and start afresh.
Apparently this was Brad Silverberg's (formerly of Microsoft) vision.
BUT IT FAILED. Netscape failed to properly support Java,
making applets nothing but toys (proper support would have included the
ability to store applets on the user's machine, solving the applet
download problem).Netscape also failed to provide a powerful dynamic HTML capability.
Microsoft, ironically, came much closer.
They provided (starting with IE4) powerful dynamic HTML coupled with ECMAScript.
In addition, the provided (albeit subtly) a way to store applets on the
client computer, and even a way to securely store data between sessions. All
of these are *necessary* components of a true distributed platform. However,
their browsers were buggy and the event management was not quite adequate.
Caveat - I have not investigated 5.5.
Unfortunately, because of the estrangement between Microsoft and Java supporters,
we are unlikely to see a suitable Java platform on IE - which would be IMHO
a great distributed platform.
There was a guy who tested a "flying saucer" at NASA Ames in the '60s (I was in the Navy there at the time). However, this flying saucer, while novel, was not magic. It was disk shaped and had 6 or 8 Wankel engine driven ducted fans pointing downward. There was even an attempt to take it commercial (I *think* it was call a DiscoJet - and this was pre-disco days:-)
So maybe this little bit of wierdness is explained by the mundane.
Machine recounts are more *fair* and unbiased than hand recounts. Notice how the hand recounts are only in selected, strongly Democratic counties. Notice how the standards vary all over the place (dimpled, pregnant, hanging... chad). It is more important (and far more possible) to have an unbiased count than a "accurate" count that is done by error-prone, bias-prone, fature prone psychics trying to divining the intent of voters incapable of doing what millions of others have done successfully: correctly produce a valid ballot.
More importantly, why the US is behind in wireless
on
New All-In-One Nokia
·
· Score: 2
You miss an important point. The USofA has 6 different standards for cellular/PCS systems (not to mention SMS and other land mobile standards). This means that our market is very fragmented and not the best target for high volume connectivity. Also, when you change your service you usually have to change your phone, so a big investment in a really fancy phone is not nearly as practical.
I have a Dual-band Qualcomm phone that I used with Sprint. It is technically compatible with those used by Quest, but I had to buy a new phone when I switched to Quest because Sprint refused to release the security codes!
This sort of behavior by US cellular vendors, in addition to the wide standards variance, is why the US way behind in wireless compared to Europe which has a unified (if inferior - TDMA) standard.
The US standards are:
800 MHZ Analog Cellular
900 MHZ TDMA
900 MHZ CDMA
1900 MHZ TDMA
1900 MHZ CDMA
GSM (Global standard used in Europe)
Watch out for that (Verizon) SingleRate. It says "no roaming" but in the fine print you find that this means no roaming charges WITHIN THEIR NETWORK. Furthermore, to get no-roaming, you need to buy a tri-mode phone.
30 years ago, during my hacker days, a group of us got access to the source code of a pretty secure operating system (GCOS-III pre: GETSS). That source code enabled us to find a number of exploits that one would *never* find without it. We found about 12 ways to get into the equivalent of "root."
To a hacker or a cracker, source code is worth it's weight in gold! You can look for buffer overflows and figure out how to exploit them. You can find hidden API tricks that allow one to gain extra privileges. You can find bugs that defeat security measures. You can find lots of stuff.
If you thought windows was easy to hack before... well, it just got a lot easier!
In theory, the EULA is a contract. You agree to the contract when you open the package containing the software, or enter the unlock codes.
However, I think in Microsoft's case, the EULA could be defeated in court because one could argue that the contract is not voluntary. Contract law invalidates any contract that was entered involuntarily by either party. Since many people need software that forces them to use Microsoft operating systems and software, and there is no alternataive in many cases, one could argue that the contract was entered involuntarily.
I'm not a lawyer, but I would love to see someone try this and win!
Gee... I could have sworn that the democrats controlled the House of Representatives during the entire Reagan and Bush administrations, and that all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives!
Also, the economists most favored by liberals (as opposed to those favored by Reagan) have always considered deficit spending to be a stimulus and to cause runaway booms... not recession.
It is sad that you twist history so much. The 80's started out badly, and then had an unprecedented boom. There was a small correction late in Bush's term, and before Clinton ever took office, the economy was in recovery and the recession was over. Did you bother to check your facts?
Sometimes fundamental goals are at odds with reality! In the case of the S&L's there was no way for the system to work.
BTW... the loans were neither low interest nor federally insured.
The deregulation was done by Carter... and extended by Reagan because the S&L's were still bankrupt.
The only reason that the new owners had little reason to minimize risk was because their depositors were taking no risk! You can't have your cake and eat it too! You want the depositors to have no risk, but somehow you want to invoke risk to cause people to take prudent actions. Don't you see a disconnect there? Unless you regulate the rate of interest the S&L's can pay, the depositors (who have no risk) will rationally seek out the S&L with the highest interest rates, which will, of course, be the one making the highest risk loans!
It also was not a pyramid scheme. Until the tax law changed, these were genuine investments. I know... I did the numbers and I bet some of my money on it. I would have bet more, but I saw that the tax law might change, and knew it would tank the industry if it did - and indeed, it did.
This is a serious misstatement of the S&L fiasco. First of all, S&L's were de-regulated because the Carter-years inflation made the literally insolvent. They had to be able to make risky loans, so they could get high interest rates, so they wouldn't lose all of their depositors.
Second, the small investors *were* protected by the government, which is the only reason they loaned the money. And that protection (FSLIC) is what made the whole thing insane from an economic sense. The cost to the government of the S&L fiasco was paying back those small investors. If the insurance hadn't been there, people would not have given their money to the riskiest S&L's, and there would have been a lot less of a problem.
However, the event which triggered the S&L crash was a tax law change, put in by class-warfare democrats, which suddenly made real estate one of only a few industries where your COSTS were not tax deductible but your gains were taxed (passive loss deduction limitation). This instantly destroyed the commercial real estate market, causing the dominos of system to fall... first the value of the property drops to below the mortgage value; then the owning partnerships go bankrupt because their investment is insolvent; then the S&L's holding all the paper go insolvent; then the government takes our taxmoney and bails out the little guys who invested in this government-created ponzi scheme in the first place.
Maybe you aren't old enough to remember the *real* recession in 81/82, which Reagan did inherit. That recession (and the whole economy during the Carter years) made the one in 1991 look trivial.
The short recession in the Bush years was partly a result of the oil shock from the war period, and partly a result of the S&L disaster, which was caused by a stupid, democrat-required change in the tax law in 1986 that instantly caused commercial real estate to drop 20-30% in valuation (see below)... resulting, over time, in the collapse of the S&L's who were holding the commercial paper.
A short lesson the S&L collapse...
S&L's were set up under FDR on the silly premise that the government could control interest rates and rates of return. Thus they were chartered to loan money long term (mortgages) and borrow money from their depositors at the whim of those depositors. When the oil-shock inspired inflation of the '70s drove interest rates much higher than what S&L's could pay, the S&L's were de-regulated (first by Carter, and then Reagan) in order to allow them to invest in higher yielding investments, so they could pay competitive interest and not lose all their depositors. Because of the high marginal tax rates of the early '80s, anyone with a significant income was looking for tax shelters, and the best deal was investment real estate - commercial buildings, apartment houses, etc. These did not really get you out of paying tax, but they deferred it. This drove the prices of those properties to the point where they were only economical investments to those who could take the large tax write-off they offered. In 1986, the tax law was changed to eliminate "passive loss deductions" which immediately destroyed the economics of this whole industry. This caused the properties to drop in value, to below the value of the mortgages. Their cash flow was already negative (only positive in an after tax sense before the change), so they went under. The S&L's were left holding on the paper.
As this worked its way through the system, it depressed housing and construction, and sucked huge amount of money out of the federal government to pay off those depositors who invested in the failing S&L's.
The whole thing is an example of how a feel-good government economic program leads to disaster.
it is also an example of how easy it is too fool most of the people. To this day, most folks think that the S&L disaster was caused by Charles Keating and crooks. In fact, it was ultimately caused by the government FSLIC insurance, which guaranteed that if you invested in the riskiest S&L CD's (which, of course, paid the highest interest rates), you would not lose any money. This destruction of economic law led to the inevitable (as triggered by the tax law change).
Josh, your economic slip is showing. Biggest recession since the Great Depression? When was that? Oh, you mean the one Reagan inherited? And I assume you give Clinoon/Bore the credit for the economic upturn that had already started after Bush saved the world's oil supply.
Get a clue! Economic policy takes time to work its way through the system. Reagan's tax and regulatory reforms allowed two innovations that have been the biggest driver behind the US technological explosion: Venture Capital and Junk Bonds.
Slashdot Mirror
The only unexpected negative consequence was an unusually high rate of thyroid cancer in children, but this is not a true low-dose effect because the thyroid efficiently concentrates radioactive iodine. Fortunately, thyroid cancer is relatively benign and there have only been four deaths from it.
Furthermore, a closer reading of the latest scare study shows that those exposed were not in the low dose group! They were workers at the facility after the event - those who were involved in cleaning things up. There is lots of evidence that low dose radiation is not as dangerous, per milli-severt, as high dose radiation. The linear dose-response model that is used by environmental agencies shows way too high a risk at low levels. This results in ridiculously low level requirements on nuclear plants - levels which, btw, coal burning plants exceed every day!
A hypothesis on the nonlinearity of the dose response is that it DNA is self-repairing, it may take near-simultaneous hits on the same DNA to defeat that mechanism. Simple statistics shows that the odds of this, relative to radiation dosage, are far from linear.
Does anyone remember the extremely high numbers of excess deaths expected from Chernobyl? To date, it has killed fewer people than a medium sized commercial airliner crash - and Chernobyl was a worst-case meltdown. Almost all of the deaths were among workers immediately after the event who received very high doses.
Chernobyl was an uncontained reactor with a positive coefficient - loaded with graphite which burned once the temperatures got too high.
And finally, if you really are worried about radiation, take a geiger counter in an airplane. You will watch the background level climb dramatically as the aircraft climbs. When I did this, it went from 26 clicks per minute to many hundreds - and I live in a high-background area.
Since every trivial thing you can do with software these days is patented, doesn't releasing your open source also open you up to patent infringement attacks?
Nonsense. The EMP might fry unprotected equipment (which is not what will be involved) but after that, the only radio communications it will affect would be HF. Not a problem for the UCAV.
Today, there are dirigible-carried radars along our southern borders watching for smuggling planes. Will they see a plane like this, flying at a few hundred feet AGL? Not likely!
I can just imagine the mess if a bad guy wanted to attack this monstrosity. Scary!
A lot of optimism assumed that a single gene had a single function, for all time through the life of the cell. But as one would expect with a biological system, things are far more complex. Geners are "turned on" and "turned off." Multiple genes interact indirectly.
The key is that the cell is an emergent system. It exhibits extremely complex behavior as a result of vast numbers of interactions of simpler parts. Thus we may never find a "gene" that "codes for" the shape of a nose. The fact that a nose arises at all from a bunch of protein specifications is itself a clue that things are extremely complicated.
The decoding of the genome will indeed be extremely valuable. But it won't "solve" biology anymore than the understanding of the laws of gases "solves" the weather forecast problem!
In summary, the Pons & Fleishmann experiments were significantly flawed.
Of interest to Slashdotters, the cold fusion episode was probably the first major episode of pathological science which had active internet participation by many of the principals (except for P&F). This led to rapid replication of experiments, and many far more careful experiments including those with closed calorimeters (using catalysts to recombine the D2 and H2 products). Although there were occasional reports of excess heat or nuclear products, there were no consistent findings. Furthermore, as is typical in pathological science, the more careful the experiment, the lower the statistical significance of any results found.
Another interesting aspect of this whole affair is that a physicist, Dr. Steven Jones, also in Utah (at BYU, not UU), was about to publish his own cold fusion results using electrolysis (and did publish about the same time). This empending publication may have stampeded P&F into their actions.
However, Jones was operating on a different theory. He was trying to explain the (still unexplained AFAIK) excess amount of He3 released by volcanic eruptions. His theory was that a small amount of fusion was taking place deep in the earth, producing the He3. He tried to duplicate this with a "soup" of chemicals, and to generate the "pressure" using electroylysis in a palladium (I believe) electrode.
In contrast to P&F, Jones was very careful in his experiments. He kept seeing slighly significant excess neutron emissions. However, whenever he tooks steps to refine the experiments by reducing the neutron background (going into deep mines, and a tunnel under the Alps), the neutron emissions followed suit... the excess was a slight excess over the background, no matter the background. This ultimately led to a "no effect" conclusion. This is also characteristic of pathological science.
Performance (unless you are dealing with big SMP systems) is not really the issue. The original N words above are. You pay a lot of the robustness of Oracle (or Informix, another favorite of mine). You get it back in reliability. I have done extensive performance benchmarks on these things on a 40CPU Sun E-10K and they do perform. But I also have experience with using Informix for 10 years in a huge reservations systems app (now on the E10K) and what you really get is high availabillity, good recovery, and nifty features (high performance backups, and lots of stuff that was unportable enough that we didn't use it. You also get easy-to use tools. A big system doesn't use Sysadmins and programmers for database admin, it uses Database Administrators, many of whom have no programming experience). On the big databases, these folks are "off the shelf" in the job market.
This was great (other than what they call "glare" at night)... a problem of blurring that only shows up in high contrast conditions.
4 years later, my vision is probably about 20/50 (last measured 20/35) in both eyes... it has slowly drifted. But vision is still vastly better than before, and still correctable to 20/12 (or equiv in the nearsighted eye... let's see... 3.3/2).
Also, let me point out a few things:
If yours doesn't, go somewhere else!
Prior to XML, we had used our own text based markup language (surprisingly similar to XML except only two levels of hierarchy) since 1989. We (30 year OLTP designers and coders) found it *much easier* to design, develop, debug, comunicate about, and communicate with than prior fixed field non-text formats
List of Synergies in case of XML (and mostly true with our old approach) include:
I would also point out that I have used SAX in some cases and DOMs in another. I had no problem quickly using SAX for message-based uses. It may be harder when using all the features of XML, but not all are needed for most data interchange usages.
Karl Sagan.... wasn't that the same guy who predicted global cooling from the Kuwait oil fires during the gulf war?
Oops. Karl Sagan was a noted astronomer, not a climatologist. He was also prone to left/green political causes.
The browser world *had* the opportunity to revolutionize computing
by providing a platform for universal distributed computing. The browser,
operating system independent and using universal standards, could have
supplanted the operating system itself as the platform for client applications.
This would have allowed us to escape from the OS wars and start afresh.
Apparently this was Brad Silverberg's (formerly of Microsoft) vision.
BUT IT FAILED. Netscape failed to properly support Java,
making applets nothing but toys (proper support would have included the
ability to store applets on the user's machine, solving the applet
download problem).Netscape also failed to provide a powerful dynamic HTML capability.
Microsoft, ironically, came much closer.
They provided (starting with IE4) powerful dynamic HTML coupled with ECMAScript.
In addition, the provided (albeit subtly) a way to store applets on the
client computer, and even a way to securely store data between sessions. All
of these are *necessary* components of a true distributed platform. However,
their browsers were buggy and the event management was not quite adequate.
Caveat - I have not investigated 5.5.
Unfortunately, because of the estrangement between Microsoft and Java supporters,
we are unlikely to see a suitable Java platform on IE - which would be IMHO
a great distributed platform.
There was a guy who tested a "flying saucer" at NASA Ames in the '60s (I was in the Navy there at the time). However, this flying saucer, while novel, was not magic. It was disk shaped and had 6 or 8 Wankel engine driven ducted fans pointing downward. There was even an attempt to take it commercial (I *think* it was call a DiscoJet - and this was pre-disco days :-)
So maybe this little bit of wierdness is explained by the mundane.
Machine recounts are more *fair* and unbiased than hand recounts. Notice how the hand recounts are only in selected, strongly Democratic counties. Notice how the standards vary all over the place (dimpled, pregnant, hanging... chad). It is more important (and far more possible) to have an unbiased count than a "accurate" count that is done by error-prone, bias-prone, fature prone psychics trying to divining the intent of voters incapable of doing what millions of others have done successfully: correctly produce a valid ballot.
You miss an important point. The USofA has 6 different standards for cellular/PCS systems (not to mention SMS and other land mobile standards). This means that our market is very fragmented and not the best target for high volume connectivity. Also, when you change your service you usually have to change your phone, so a big investment in a really fancy phone is not nearly as practical.
I have a Dual-band Qualcomm phone that I used with Sprint. It is technically compatible with those used by Quest, but I had to buy a new phone when I switched to Quest because Sprint refused to release the security codes!
This sort of behavior by US cellular vendors, in addition to the wide standards variance, is why the US way behind in wireless compared to Europe which has a unified (if inferior - TDMA) standard.
The US standards are:
800 MHZ Analog Cellular
900 MHZ TDMA
900 MHZ CDMA
1900 MHZ TDMA
1900 MHZ CDMA
GSM (Global standard used in Europe)
Watch out for that (Verizon) SingleRate. It says "no roaming" but in the fine print you find that this means no roaming charges WITHIN THEIR NETWORK. Furthermore, to get no-roaming, you need to buy a tri-mode phone.
To a hacker or a cracker, source code is worth it's weight in gold! You can look for buffer overflows and figure out how to exploit them. You can find hidden API tricks that allow one to gain extra privileges. You can find bugs that defeat security measures. You can find lots of stuff.
If you thought windows was easy to hack before... well, it just got a lot easier!
However, I think in Microsoft's case, the EULA could be defeated in court because one could argue that the contract is not voluntary. Contract law invalidates any contract that was entered involuntarily by either party. Since many people need software that forces them to use Microsoft operating systems and software, and there is no alternataive in many cases, one could argue that the contract was entered involuntarily.
I'm not a lawyer, but I would love to see someone try this and win!
Gee... I could have sworn that the democrats controlled the House of Representatives during the entire Reagan and Bush administrations, and that all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives!
Also, the economists most favored by liberals (as opposed to those favored by Reagan) have always considered deficit spending to be a stimulus and to cause runaway booms... not recession.
It is sad that you twist history so much. The 80's started out badly, and then had an unprecedented boom. There was a small correction late in Bush's term, and before Clinton ever took office, the economy was in recovery and the recession was over. Did you bother to check your facts?
Sometimes fundamental goals are at odds with reality! In the case of the S&L's there was no way for the system to work.
BTW... the loans were neither low interest nor federally insured.
The deregulation was done by Carter... and extended by Reagan because the S&L's were still bankrupt.
The only reason that the new owners had little reason to minimize risk was because their depositors were taking no risk! You can't have your cake and eat it too! You want the depositors to have no risk, but somehow you want to invoke risk to cause people to take prudent actions. Don't you see a disconnect there? Unless you regulate the rate of interest the S&L's can pay, the depositors (who have no risk) will rationally seek out the S&L with the highest interest rates, which will, of course, be the one making the highest risk loans!
It also was not a pyramid scheme. Until the tax law changed, these were genuine investments. I know... I did the numbers and I bet some of my money on it. I would have bet more, but I saw that the tax law might change, and knew it would tank the industry if it did - and indeed, it did.
This is a serious misstatement of the S&L fiasco. First of all, S&L's were de-regulated because the Carter-years inflation made the literally insolvent. They had to be able to make risky loans, so they could get high interest rates, so they wouldn't lose all of their depositors.
Second, the small investors *were* protected by the government, which is the only reason they loaned the money. And that protection (FSLIC) is what made the whole thing insane from an economic sense. The cost to the government of the S&L fiasco was paying back those small investors. If the insurance hadn't been there, people would not have given their money to the riskiest S&L's, and there would have been a lot less of a problem.
However, the event which triggered the S&L crash was a tax law change, put in by class-warfare democrats, which suddenly made real estate one of only a few industries where your COSTS were not tax deductible but your gains were taxed (passive loss deduction limitation). This instantly destroyed the commercial real estate market, causing the dominos of system to fall... first the value of the property drops to below the mortgage value; then the owning partnerships go bankrupt because their investment is insolvent; then the S&L's holding all the paper go insolvent; then the government takes our taxmoney and bails out the little guys who invested in this government-created ponzi scheme in the first place.
Maybe you aren't old enough to remember the *real* recession in 81/82, which Reagan did inherit. That recession (and the whole economy during the Carter years) made the one in 1991 look trivial.
The short recession in the Bush years was partly a result of the oil shock from the war period, and partly a result of the S&L disaster, which was caused by a stupid, democrat-required change in the tax law in 1986 that instantly caused commercial real estate to drop 20-30% in valuation (see below)... resulting, over time, in the collapse of the S&L's who were holding the commercial paper.
A short lesson the S&L collapse...
S&L's were set up under FDR on the silly premise that the government could control interest rates and rates of return. Thus they were chartered to loan money long term (mortgages) and borrow money from their depositors at the whim of those depositors. When the oil-shock inspired inflation of the '70s drove interest rates much higher than what S&L's could pay, the S&L's were de-regulated (first by Carter, and then Reagan) in order to allow them to invest in higher yielding investments, so they could pay competitive interest and not lose all their depositors. Because of the high marginal tax rates of the early '80s, anyone with a significant income was looking for tax shelters, and the best deal was investment real estate - commercial buildings, apartment houses, etc. These did not really get you out of paying tax, but they deferred it. This drove the prices of those properties to the point where they were only economical investments to those who could take the large tax write-off they offered. In 1986, the tax law was changed to eliminate "passive loss deductions" which immediately destroyed the economics of this whole industry. This caused the properties to drop in value, to below the value of the mortgages. Their cash flow was already negative (only positive in an after tax sense before the change), so they went under. The S&L's were left holding on the paper.
As this worked its way through the system, it depressed housing and construction, and sucked huge amount of money out of the federal government to pay off those depositors who invested in the failing S&L's.
The whole thing is an example of how a feel-good government economic program leads to disaster.
it is also an example of how easy it is too fool most of the people. To this day, most folks think that the S&L disaster was caused by Charles Keating and crooks. In fact, it was ultimately caused by the government FSLIC insurance, which guaranteed that if you invested in the riskiest S&L CD's (which, of course, paid the highest interest rates), you would not lose any money. This destruction of economic law led to the inevitable (as triggered by the tax law change).
Fuzzy Math, sqlgeek.... you;re using fuzzy math.
Seriously... your math is wrong. After the Bush tax cut, the rich pay a higher proportion of the taxes than they do now! Go look at the numbers
Josh, your economic slip is showing. Biggest recession since the Great Depression? When was that? Oh, you mean the one Reagan inherited? And I assume you give Clinoon/Bore the credit for the economic upturn that had already started after Bush saved the world's oil supply.
Get a clue! Economic policy takes time to work its way through the system. Reagan's tax and regulatory reforms allowed two innovations that have been the biggest driver behind the US technological explosion: Venture Capital and Junk Bonds.
As someone who has been forced off his land by Algore's environmental police whether Algore supports jackbooted thugs.