Excuse me, but the Internet (in the form of the ArpaNet and DarpaNet and finally the Internet) had been around for nearly twenty years before Tim Berners Lee did anything. He distributed his magic, shiny "web browser" across FTP and Gopher, two services that had fifteen years of use behind them before he came along. I was playing MUDs in 1985 across Telnet, long before Tim Berners Lee even got hired by CERN. At that time, the number of non-US nodes could have been measured in the dozens and they were almost all universities or research facilities. At the same time, companies in America were already fighting over IP addresses.
Your comment, "how technically it is very difficult for one country to "control the internet."" You think that's hard, wait until you see a committee of twenty countries trying to do it.
And I just can't wait until the UN/EU tries to impose a "Root Fee" to pay for managing it, that every man, woman, and child with an Internet conneection will have to pay. If you don't think the UN is thinking about this, then you don't understand the most fundamental rule of politics -- "It's all about the money."
Tim Berners Lee (Who currently resides with his wife and child in Boston, MA) did develop the http protocol while working for CERN in 1989-1991. However, it's clearly a derivative of many other internet protocols. Hypertext markup is a subset of SGML. Thus, TBL's contribution was that he happened to work at a place with a whole lot of information, a lot of SGML data, and an Internet connection. He created a simple program that would let scientists communicate data in an easily readable form over the Internet.
He never dreamed that the "Web" would become anything like it has become. The idea that he was standing over people's shoulders and forging the Web from red-hot steel with his bare hands is totally misleading. Yes, he put up the first web site (info.cern.ch) on August 6, 1991. Big deal. Who created the sockets library he was using? Who created the RFC system that let him publish his RFC? What country invented the programming language he wrote it in? Heck, what country built the machine he wrote it on? And what country produced the Apple HyperDeck that inspired him to use internal hyperlinks? When he wrote HTTP, there were new protocols hitting the Net almost every day. His just happened to be the one to catch on because it was mind-numbingly simple.
If this is your "reasoning" that the EU should own the Internet, then I imagine that you'd want to enslave everyone in the World, after all Francis Crick was from England, and he discovered DNA. Let us all hail our new EU overlords.
Receiving poor intelligence from the CIA, the Brittish, the French, the Russians, the Nigerians, the Israelis, seventy-one other countries, and U.N. Inspector Hans Blix, whose final report pointed out that over 5,000 tons of chemical and biological weapons were still unaccounted for. But hey, according to internal documents, even Saddam thought he still had WMDs, he just didn't know that the scientists had been lying for the last ten years.
Of course, there's also that pesky issue of the Syrians (his neighboring country for the geographically challenged) suddenly coming into the possession of enough chemical weapons that they shipped three tankers full of 20,000 pounds of nerve gas into Jordan, and were caught just before they detonated the semi-tankers in downtown Ahman...
But I'm sure that Saddam had nothing to do with that, it's not like he would have tried to hide his WMDs in the five weeks before the invasion. And the 50 mile long convoy of trucks running day and night from Iraq into Syria were just moving his old home movies...
A pattern of sexual harrassment of underlings is immaterial to a trial about whether an underling was sexually harrassed. If you're not the definition of a Clinton Apologist, I don't know what you are.
The judge did not find him "Criminally Perjurious" because it was a Civil Court. She did not have the right within the court system to hand down a Bench Warrant. So she did find him guilty of Contempt and Material Perjury, and fined him $90,000 and ordered a settlement in favor of the plaintiff for $900,000. Both of those amounts would be considered felony level fines in a Criminal Court.
As for your Doctor analogy, you're right, it's not called "Negligent Homocide". In a Civil trial it's called "Wrongful Death". Different terms, same meaning, different areas of the Justice system. Besides, to make it equivalent, the doctor would have to knowingly slice someone's aorta, and then claim he was not guilty because he tried to put a band-aid on it.
But when you bought your car, it came with a warranty. If you ever read the fine print that comes with any and every Microsoft product, they expressly deny *any* warranty. In fact they deny that DOS is even a functional system or that it can provide a solution to any problem whatsoever. In those days, no one had really challenged the "shrink-wrap warranty" so it was well within Microsoft's rights to say, "Hey, we didn't say it would work, we made no promises, and the user agreed to that when they bought it."
Does it suck? Heck yeah. Is Microsoft full of money grubbing, greedy bastards who want to squeeze every penny out of an upgrade, even when they knew it would have been worth the PR to push out a free upgrade. Oh heck, yeah. But, Microsoft was in the unique position of being a monopoly when it came to Operating Systems, and they could say, "screw the P.R., we want our money." The lawyer argued from that position, and the judge threw out the "any owner of DOS" group as a certified class. Then he said that the lawyer could re-file with anyone who actually lost data. It was the Plaintiff's lawyers who gave up. Microsoft didn't "win" the case, the other side "lost" by quitting.
(8) Making false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States
So the articles of impeachment do include "lying on national tv".
If you ever read the back-end discussion, it was one Hillary Rodham [Clinton] who thought that this should be the sole basis for the first Article.
And while the Judiciary Committee forwarded three articles to the House for Nixon, they forwarded FOUR articles for Clinton.
Bedides, all of the articles for Nixon are moot anyway, since Nixon took the high and honorable road and resigned rather than drag the country through the spectacle of an impeachment trial. He did this before the house ever even voted on the articles of impeachment, they had merely left the committee. There is no guarantee that any of them would have been accepted in their original form.
There is good evidence, especially with the revelation of the identity of "Deep Throat" as a disgruntled FBI agent *running the investigation* (okay, second in command) that the removal from office might have failed anyway. Most of the evidence against Nixon is circumstantial, and several of the members of the Nixon team have since made it clear that Nixon was never fully "in the loop". It was clear he did not order the break-in, and only tried to stop the investigation because it led to members of his cabinet acting without his knowledge. It was a poor choice, and it cost him the Presidency and made him a laughing stock and the butt of jokes until his death. He was loyal to his friends, and it cost him big.
Now, Clinton acted to cover up his investigation, not to help his friends, but to cover his own sorry butt. He tried hard to get Ken Starr removed (it was the Dems, after Nixon, who took away his ability to fire the Special Counsel or we could have had another Saturday Night Massacre.) He bombed an aspirin factory in the Sudan (that we're still paying to replace) on the day Monica testified. Or do you consider the event "one instance in which the President, while engaged in sex, spoke to a Republican member of Congress on the telephone regarding sending U.S. troops to Bosnia," is a faithful carrying out of the office of President? Would you want your sons and daughters sent into harm's way by someone getting a quick one in the back room? In fact, the initial investigation supplied 11 impeachable offenses against Clinton. The Judiciary committee chose to only forward four of them to the full house. One of those articles was for Lying to Congress during the open-ended Impeachment Hearings held by the judiciary committee. Something not even Nixon did. On the day the full house was to debate the Articles of Impeachment, Clinton launched an attack, without warning or consultation with the Congress, on Iraq. This "state of war" -- Democrats stated -- should be ample reason not to deliberate the impeachment of the Commander in Chief. The House Republicans disagreed (on party lines) and delayed only 24 hours.
As for Specter, that RINO is hardly someone who should be touted as having an outsatanding conscience. Does "Magic Bullet" mean anything to you? How about the fact that his voting record puts him to the left of 80 of the Senators in the building? He runs as a Republican and votes as a Democrat. It's also well known that he sold his vote to the Democrats to get a pork barrel project through when it was clear that Clinton wouldn't be removed. Conscience, my ass.
As for the vote count, you are right, I reversed the count, but that was unimportant. Even his own lawyer didn't try to claim he was innocent, he just claimed it wasn't worth removing Clinton from office. He is a convicted liar (perjurer) as the civil court judge (Susan Weber Wright) found him guilty of perjurious conduct and contempt and forced him to pay $90,000 in fines, revoked his law license and suspended his right to argue before the Supreme Court for five years. (As a civil judge, she was unable to asess up to the 30 year penalty such perjurious activity can carry as a consequence in a criminal court.)
Nice try. He was found guilty of perjury by the judge of the original civil case. HE IS A JUDICIALLY CERTIFIED LIAR. The Senate found his actions were not worthy of removal, or in legal terms, "did not rise to the level of treason, high crimes, or misdemeanors" as required by the Constitution. He was not found not guilty, they simply decided his actions did not warrant removal from office. Even Teddy (hic) Kennedy admitted that Clinton was guilty of perjury, he just claimed that it wasn't serious enough to remove him from office. If you want to split hairs with your words (find vs. vote), then I'll be more than happy to split them.
The Arkansas Bar did not file a charge against him. As soon as the civil court judge handed down the verdict of "Guilty of Perjury before the bench", then his law license was summarily (that means *without a trial*) withdrawn. As an officer of the court, he is held to a much higher standard than the average citizen.
He managed to pay an out-of-court settlement on the civil suit, but the judge found him guilty of perjury in her court, regardless of that settlement.
Get the facts straight if you want to argue semantics.
I was at a company that installed DOS 6.0 on about 65 computers, all of them were used for development and thus had "mission critical" data stored on them. Every computer had compression turned on. Of the 65 computers, exactly 2 experienced data loss. Both of these lost a single 512 byte sector due to corruption within the compression algorithm. In this case, I would say that the data loss was about the same as a mild shock. People who hear "data corruption" picture the whole disk being unusable. That's not what happened.
On top of that, this was a way to allow more data on a hardware device then the device would normally store, so it's use was, by nature, a value added proposition. So, what you were really losing was data you wouldn't have been able to store normally in the first place. Perhaps a better comparison was if Chevy installed a fictional "Turbo Boost" button that made the car go faster but might result in engine damage. They think it's safe, having bought it from a third party vendor who had been selling the boost kit for years, but when everyone gets one, a few people start having engine problems. It's a voluntary system, you had to hit the "Boost" button to cause the damage. Thus, anyone who's actually used it gets it fixed. But, most people, even the ones who do use it, don't have any problems.
So yes, I'd call this level of data loss equivalent to a mild shock in this case.
As for getting a free replacement lighter, why should it be free? If you don't use it, then what possible need do you have for a replacement? If you do plan to take up smoking, then you simply go to the dealer, show him your pack of cigarettes, and you are now part of the damaged class. Microsoft and the lawyer made it clear that they felt people who had lost data had every right to make the claim for damages.
Because Bill Clinton was being sued for sexual harrassment. He had elicited sex in return for job favors. During the course of this trial, he was called to testify. Part of that testimony was to establish his history as a sexual predator and serial harrasser. During that testimony, the prosecuting attourney brought up "Jane Doe #4", an un-named (at the time) intern in the White House. He specifically asked if Mr. Clinton had had sexual encounters with this intern. He denied everything.
Largely on the basis of this denial, the jury found him not guilty. The plantiff, who had been sexually harrassed, lost any hope for recompense in the case.
However, Clinton lied. Jane Doe #4 was Monica Lewinsky. When the evidence that he *had* been seeing Lewinsky arose, he was revealed to have perjured himself before the court, thus denying the plaintiff her civil rights. When he was called before congress to explain himself as part of the initial investigation, he *again* perjured himself. That's lying to congress. If you or I do that, we go to jail for 10 years.
Remember that the only article of impeachment ever drawn up against Nixon (largely by a young law clerk named Hillary Rodham [yes, *that* Hillary Rodham Clinton]) was for "lying to the American people". In other words, Nixon was to be impeached, not for lying under oath, not for compounding that perjury with another perjury, but for telling an untruth on national television. Remember the finger wagging, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky"?
The house felt that there was sufficient evidence for a "trial" in the senate and forwarded two articles of impeachment. The Senate rules require a super-majority to remove the president from office, a lucky thing, since 55 senators voted to remove him. In other words, the majority found him guilty of lying.
The Arkansas state Bar has since revoked his law license and his ability to practice law. He was found guilty of perjuring himself before the bench and was summarily judged and had to pay the original plaintiff some $900,000 in a settlement.
That's why he was impeached. Live it, learn it, love it.
But that's not the case here. The system that was faulty was not a critical system. It was a voluntary system, that under some circumstances caused data loss in files (I remember this, I lived through it -- man I'm old.)
This is more like Chevy producing a car with a defective lighter, that, every once in a while would give you a mild shock when you pressed it. The lawyer would be arguing that everyone who bought the car deserves the next model of car be delivered. Chevy would then respond, "No way, only the people who actually smoke in the car and have been shocked should be allowed to sue."
That's the equivalent. The lawyers in this case realized that their class went from 100 million people to about 50,000 people, and their settlement went from $1 Billion down to to about $500,000. They decided that their 33% cut wasn't worth it and dropped the suit. In this case, if you want the "scummy" lawyers, it's the ones who wouldn't take a open-and-shut case because it only would have put about two hundred thousand bucks in their pockets instead of three hundred million.
I love this attitude that the Internet is horribly broken. Right now I can go out, register a domain name, set up a server and DNS, and have an operating website within...(checks stopwatch) 4 minutes and 12 seconds. Yup, there it is. Page comes up and everything. Hmmm, no FBI guys knocking on my door. No payment to the U.S. government, no Patriot Act induced arrests. Total cost, under $10US. And you say this system is painfully broken?
Now, consider the idea that we would hand this over to the largest beaurocracy in the world. Do you really think I wouldn't then be spending at least an hour filling out forms? Do you really think the average citizen would be able to afford a web site, or do you think that the U.N., with a sudden vast new source of revenue, would start charging about $50 a month for DNS? Do I really want someone from Namibia with my personal information and my credit card number?
The U.S. built the basis of the Internet when they built DARPANet and ARAPANet in the early 70's. Yes, there were other networks (BitNet springs to mind) but the Internet is nearly 100% American grown. The IP protocol came out of ARPANet, and CERN didn't have it. The U.S. Government sank billions into the initial creation of the Internet, designing the very signals and software that power it, not just "laying cables". Do you really think they want to relinquish control of the DNS servers that point at their military computers to a foreign government? How easy would it be for Syria (a security council member) to then poison the DNS and redirect all millitary communications to their collector site? How about routing traffic and packet sniffing sensitive military information? If you don't think that an organization composed of 200 dictators, tyrants, and thugs, and 70 democracies is not capable of corruption...well, I'll let you figure it out.
Painful? I don't see it. Leave it as it is. It ain't broke.
I'd be happy to fund further research. What I refuse to do is fund a political agenda. All I've heard is how these recent hurricanes are "linked to global warming". It's more accurate to say that "researchers are trying to link global warming to these hurricanes". That's just bad science, and I refuse to pay for it.
I would love to see a truly open source climate model, where everything is open to scrutiny. And then a distributed project to do it more accurately. I'd especially love to see a physically based model, rather than a fluid dynamics based version (and if you really want, I'd be happy to expand on that comment.)
You are right, we know squat about the long-term hurricane cycle. I was merely pointing out that the data for the last century looks like a sine wave with about a 33 year up and 33 year down (or a 66 year cycle, which fits with your 50-70 figure nicely.) If that's the case, then it also matches the secondary solar cycle (which is 33 years, although I forget the names of all the different solar cycles.)
Again, I'd love to see research done, let's start by bringing the proxy data up to date. I've heard that doing that would cost less than $400,000. In the meantime, most of these climatologists are getting multi-million dollar grants for building new computer models that have nothing to do with reality (and are not peer reviewed.)
There is no opposition to the exploration of these ideas, what is opposed is making sweeping, dangerous, changes based on preliminary evidence. You have fallen prey to the "correlation equals causality" fallacy when you claim that mankind is responsible for climate change. You also don't see the ramifications of sweeping changes. Kyoto (the anagram lover's Tokyo) would cripple the ability of first world nations to produce any kind of goods, including the food that keeps the third world nations alive. In the meantime, developing nations would belch forth more pollution than cuts could ever hope to make up for. Kyoto, even if completely successful, would result (according to climatologists) in delaying global warming by 288 days over 100 years. At a cost of trillions of dollars and millions of lives. All based on what is a sketchy correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature.
It is just as valid (in fact it has better correlation) to say that the level of sea piracy is the cause of global warming. In the 900-1100 period (the time when the Vikings ruled the seas, and there was no piracy to speak of [no private, non-governmental piracy anyway]) we had the Medieval Optimum, a period of time far warmer than the current period (by as much as 3 degrees C according to some proxy data). During the 1650-1800's period, piracy reached its peak, cooling the planet as buccanneers and privateers roamed every ocean. Since 1800, the U.S. Coast Guard patrolled the seas, drastically cutting piracy, and clearly leading to the global rise in temperatures. Now as we once again approach zero piracy, temperatures should once again approach those seen in the medieval optimum, when oranges grew in Berlin and English wines challenged French vineyards for quality.
The correlation clearly is better than CO2 levels which have historically fluctuated anywhere from 7000ppm to 120ppm, with most of the interglacial period being in the 180-400ppm range. However, when we correlate just the last century of CO2 fluctuation to temperature we find large discrepencies. The 1950's - 1970's show a marked cooling (just as modern high-seas piracy reached it's high point) while at the same time CO2 levels were increasing at an unprecedented rate. (Of course, the sun was also at a solar minimum, but climatologists seem to love to ignore the sun in their models, modeling it as a simple, non-varying light souce.) In fact, historically, CO2 levels have lagged 20-90 years behind the rise in temperatures. In other words, CO2 levels increase as temperature increases, and not the other way around.
As for your claim that I know nothing about plate tectonics, well, it is laughable, having spent years doing geological work with my father who did work for mining companies... Did you know that there's evidence the Rockies (in general) have risen three feet just in the last century? The Himalayas are even more active, as the Indian subcontinent is slamming into the side of Asia. To say that there's been no "signifigant change" is to be ignorant of the consequences of small change on a large system. The climate is mind-bogglingly complex. A change of 10 feet of altitude can cause signifigant changes in wind patterns and temperature. Orographic effects are real and predominate the equations for surface temperatures.
And if you choose to ignore the geologic effects, then clearly errosive effects are in your time frame. Forest fires clear more land and produce more CO2 in one burst then most man-made effects do in a year. Mount St. Helens has created more pollution this year than the entire state of Washington. Rivers cut new basins, and hills are worn down.
You harp on CO2 but ignore that 98% of greenhouse gasses are water vapor, and that if you wanted to warm a planet CO2 would be the absolute worst choice of a gas to use. Methane is 21 times as powerful a GHG as CO2, but no one talks about that, because it's predominantly formed by wetlands. You want to reduce global warming? Let's drain all those damn wetlands. And get r
Other factors being equal, increased CO2 (and methane, and many others) levels WILL lead to a trapping of heat in the atmosphere.
But that's my point, your graph shows that other factors will not be equal. I'm sick and tired of being told over and over about the evils of greenhouse gasses when the simple fact is that 98% of all greenhouse gas is water vapor. And quite frankly, we still don't know if water vapor is a positive or negative feedback device. Almost all climate models tend towards the positive feedback point of view, but evidence is starting to lean strongly towards a negative feedback point of view.
All human contribution in history has raised global greenhouse gasses by 0.28% of the total. Yes, that's right, for all the screaming and moaning, if we take all the greenhouse gasses, water vapor included, and add them up, then the change since the start of the industrial revolution is 0.28%.
What I love is that in your second paragraph, you say that lots of things affect global temperature and then claim that none of those have changed in the last 10,000 years. Tell me, how many islands have sunk, how many have sprung up? The Rocky mountains have gotten how much higher? The Himalayas rise nearly an inch a year on average. North America is now sevral dozen miles further from Europe, and closer to Asia.
Ocean temperatures change amazingly slowly. Deep water current cycle in millenia, so the ocean temperatures we're seeing today could be the reuslt of the Medieval Optimum, and not anything of our doing.
This whole discussion is supposed to be about the number of hurricanes, well, hurricanes only form when a cold air mass passes over warmer tropical waters. In other words, the atmosphere has to be cooler for hurricanes to form. This can also be tracked. The cooler the air over the Atlantic, the higher the number of hurricanes. Hurrah, we're seeing the effects of curbing Global Warming. Oh wait, that's not doom and gloom enough for your crowd, somehow they have to blame the U.S. for it.
There is also good evidence (look at your graph again, for example) that CO2 levels today are so low as to produce CO2 starvation among most plants. Increases in CO2 are having a noticable effect on plant output. In other words, we're getting more food.
And while you can claim that "[historically] levels of these greenhouse gases have not reached the levels they are at today" you are taking that information from ice core samples that are being called more and more into question. Several studies are now claiming that the CO2 levels gleaned from ice cores may be inaccurate becuase CO2 has a tendency to leach into the ice matrix, changing the concentrations in the trapped bubbles.
The fact is that the proxy data we can trust shows that temperatures have been much higher in the past, even in this interglacial period. In the 1100 royal census, there are 113 vineyards listed in the counties around...London. In the 1300's Berlin was a major exporter of oranges. In 1909, a successful trip was made through the ice-free waters of the artic, in October.
Every person who has bought into Global Warming has the same problem. They think that the Earth's climate is a stable system. While the average person can be forgiven this delusion, the climatologists who propose it should all be lined up and shot. We have thousands of years of history and tens of thousands of years of proxy data that all scream out, "the only constant is change". Then these same climatologists scream bloody murder about a.5 degree variance over 150 years. They never mention that the period of 1650-1800 was the coldest time in the entire millenium. Nope.
You know, we do have two examples of stable atmospheric temperature in the solar system, Venus and Mars. Their climate barely changes over the time we have observed them. And they also have one other thing in common: they're dead.
Hmm. I may have confused PPM for percentage in my memory. No matter, your graph far better demonstrates that PPM CO2 has no correlation to temperature than I ever could with words.
Yes, it's the highest since we've had satellites, but a plot of number of hurricanes vs year would show a multi-decadal cycle. In short, what's really happened is that we've come out of the lowest period of huricanes (an almost four decade lull) and back to what we were seeing in the sixties and thirties.
Hmmm. Looks like about a 33 year cycle, in other words, three solar cycles. And, not surprisingly, we're seeing the strongest solar activity on record. So solar activity, which is also some 95% correlated to current temperature trends also seem to mimic the hurricane cycle.
Of course, it's probably just the FSM getting mad about the lack of Atlantic pirates. Ramen.
How do we know we're headed for a record year? In 1933 the 21 hurricane "maximum" was based on hurricanes that made landfall or were measured by sea-going vessels. The number of hurricanes that were detected by satellite? Let me think... zero.
In 2005, we've had three hurricanes make landfall, and we've named 14 other tropical depressions that are swirling over the Atlantic. Number of storms measured by satellite? 17.
This article falls prey to one of the classic blunders, the most well known being "never fight a land war in Asia", but in this case, never blame an improved sensititvity in your system of measurement for an apparent increase in the measured number.
You should read a book. The carboniferous period had CO2 levels of 7000% of our current level. Oh, and they had one of the coldest periods in the history of the planet then.
Hey, I worked at MCI ( er, WorldCom, er, MCI WorldCom, er MCI) too! I got busted one Friday afternoon when my whole management chain got the axe. My manager was able to save himself by taking a 20% pay cut, but I got to laugh as his 50,000 shares went from $96 to $0.67...
Of course, then I went road warrior for two years at well into the six figures, but that's another story...
Simple, find one fossil, anywhere, of a species existing before it should. For example, a fossil of a rabbit in the Cambrian period.
In other words, show one example of a creature existing "out of place" in the fossil record, and you can disprove evolution. The fact that this hasn't happened over several billion fossil items is rather relling...
Funny, my wife's RIO (something...mumble) took SD cards. It had 256MB built in, and then she could drop in a 1GB SD card and listen to 10-20 hours of audio. (Audio books at 56kbits don't take much space). And it was about 2.5 inches (that's 7CM) across.
Sure there is, you leak it in NTSC because you're trying to attract a Canadian audience. You don't need to leak the PAL version because the Brits are already nuts for Doctor Who, but this way, it hits the streets in Canada in a playable format and people get interested.
The leaked copy wasn't even that great. It was compressed beyond belief and included some unpolished special effects (the garbage can scene had clearly not been shaded properly yet.)
Are you telling me that someone who works in a video production studio would have somehow dubbed off a *lousy* copy. No way, he would have picked the best DivX or Xvid setting out there and sent out a pristine copy. I worked in video for three years and those guys are obsessed about picture quality.
The whole thing screamed of viral marketing tactics. And it worked. The ratings for our long neglected Time Lord were through the roof. Clearly even with the poor quality it drummed up a lot of excitement.
The problem is, it's not enforced as part of the standard. I can spend five minutes with a scan tool and find a dozen open relays that don't do authorization. I know, I get spammed by them 50 times a day.
And as for relay control, same thing. It's not part of the standard and people don't do it.
As for SPF, yeah, I know about that too. Have you ever tried setting it up? Have you ever seen an SMTP mail server that supports it natively? I haven't. That's my point.
People are obviously incapable of doing anything more than the bare minimum of the standard, so it's time we raised the bar by improving the standard. How about a mail server that can handle 8-bit data natively? How about XML based mail? All these things are possible and the time has long since passed that we should have upped the standard. Face it, do you still use "mail -d" to read your e-mail?
Aside: actually I do get out, and my mail server is quite nicely set up, including authorization, relay control, and even spammer blacklists that remove about 95% of the spam before it even gets into the mailboxes, but I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about the obvious spam problems that are "out there". Unless you think spam isn't an issue.
The SMTP standard that we use for mail transfer was developed in the late 70's - early 80's and has, for the most part, never been updated. In that time period, the idea of hordes of spam flowing through the net wasn't even considered.
It has always been the most obvious solution to me that what we really need is SMTP 2.0, where a server only accepts mail from a user that can authenticate themselves with a name and password. A server can also accept mail from another server, but only for mail directed at legitimate users on it's system. Mail servers would have to register with a central authority, and must include their active IP address in that registration. Any attempt to deliver mail from an unregistered server is bounced.
Wouldn't this simple fix stop 99% of spammers in their tracks? Isn't it about time we updated the SMTP standard?
For the same reason that my original tiny (armpit of a) home town in Wisconsin has 7MB DSL, and me, living in the "4th most connected city in America" can only get 1.5MB.
In my home town, some ubergeek looked around and said, "Hmmm. 3,000 people in need of broadband. The phone company has said, 'screw you' to them, and I really want a DS-3 line."
So, he bought a used DSLAM, and started connecting locals to it for $40 a month. After his first 30 customers, he was paying off his DS-3 line. By his first 200 customers, he was up to an OC-12. Now he serves about 20% of the population of the city, and makes money like mad.
The phone company looked at it and said, "for 600 customers, it's not worth the effort of upgrading our CO, when we can just stick one more DSLAM in a big city and get 10 times that."
It's easier to roll out service to a small town then to a big city.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but the Internet (in the form of the ArpaNet and DarpaNet and finally the Internet) had been around for nearly twenty years before Tim Berners Lee did anything. He distributed his magic, shiny "web browser" across FTP and Gopher, two services that had fifteen years of use behind them before he came along. I was playing MUDs in 1985 across Telnet, long before Tim Berners Lee even got hired by CERN. At that time, the number of non-US nodes could have been measured in the dozens and they were almost all universities or research facilities. At the same time, companies in America were already fighting over IP addresses.
Your comment, "how technically it is very difficult for one country to "control the internet."" You think that's hard, wait until you see a committee of twenty countries trying to do it.
And I just can't wait until the UN/EU tries to impose a "Root Fee" to pay for managing it, that every man, woman, and child with an Internet conneection will have to pay. If you don't think the UN is thinking about this, then you don't understand the most fundamental rule of politics -- "It's all about the money."
Tim Berners Lee (Who currently resides with his wife and child in Boston, MA) did develop the http protocol while working for CERN in 1989-1991. However, it's clearly a derivative of many other internet protocols. Hypertext markup is a subset of SGML. Thus, TBL's contribution was that he happened to work at a place with a whole lot of information, a lot of SGML data, and an Internet connection. He created a simple program that would let scientists communicate data in an easily readable form over the Internet.
He never dreamed that the "Web" would become anything like it has become. The idea that he was standing over people's shoulders and forging the Web from red-hot steel with his bare hands is totally misleading. Yes, he put up the first web site (info.cern.ch) on August 6, 1991. Big deal. Who created the sockets library he was using? Who created the RFC system that let him publish his RFC? What country invented the programming language he wrote it in? Heck, what country built the machine he wrote it on? And what country produced the Apple HyperDeck that inspired him to use internal hyperlinks? When he wrote HTTP, there were new protocols hitting the Net almost every day. His just happened to be the one to catch on because it was mind-numbingly simple.
If this is your "reasoning" that the EU should own the Internet, then I imagine that you'd want to enslave everyone in the World, after all Francis Crick was from England, and he discovered DNA. Let us all hail our new EU overlords.
Receiving poor intelligence from the CIA, the Brittish, the French, the Russians, the Nigerians, the Israelis, seventy-one other countries, and U.N. Inspector Hans Blix, whose final report pointed out that over 5,000 tons of chemical and biological weapons were still unaccounted for. But hey, according to internal documents, even Saddam thought he still had WMDs, he just didn't know that the scientists had been lying for the last ten years.
Of course, there's also that pesky issue of the Syrians (his neighboring country for the geographically challenged) suddenly coming into the possession of enough chemical weapons that they shipped three tankers full of 20,000 pounds of nerve gas into Jordan, and were caught just before they detonated the semi-tankers in downtown Ahman...
But I'm sure that Saddam had nothing to do with that, it's not like he would have tried to hide his WMDs in the five weeks before the invasion. And the 50 mile long convoy of trucks running day and night from Iraq into Syria were just moving his old home movies...
A pattern of sexual harrassment of underlings is immaterial to a trial about whether an underling was sexually harrassed. If you're not the definition of a Clinton Apologist, I don't know what you are.
The judge did not find him "Criminally Perjurious" because it was a Civil Court. She did not have the right within the court system to hand down a Bench Warrant. So she did find him guilty of Contempt and Material Perjury, and fined him $90,000 and ordered a settlement in favor of the plaintiff for $900,000. Both of those amounts would be considered felony level fines in a Criminal Court.
As for your Doctor analogy, you're right, it's not called "Negligent Homocide". In a Civil trial it's called "Wrongful Death". Different terms, same meaning, different areas of the Justice system. Besides, to make it equivalent, the doctor would have to knowingly slice someone's aorta, and then claim he was not guilty because he tried to put a band-aid on it.
But when you bought your car, it came with a warranty. If you ever read the fine print that comes with any and every Microsoft product, they expressly deny *any* warranty. In fact they deny that DOS is even a functional system or that it can provide a solution to any problem whatsoever. In those days, no one had really challenged the "shrink-wrap warranty" so it was well within Microsoft's rights to say, "Hey, we didn't say it would work, we made no promises, and the user agreed to that when they bought it."
Does it suck? Heck yeah. Is Microsoft full of money grubbing, greedy bastards who want to squeeze every penny out of an upgrade, even when they knew it would have been worth the PR to push out a free upgrade. Oh heck, yeah. But, Microsoft was in the unique position of being a monopoly when it came to Operating Systems, and they could say, "screw the P.R., we want our money." The lawyer argued from that position, and the judge threw out the "any owner of DOS" group as a certified class. Then he said that the lawyer could re-file with anyone who actually lost data. It was the Plaintiff's lawyers who gave up. Microsoft didn't "win" the case, the other side "lost" by quitting.
Hmm, line 8 of article 1:
(8) Making false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States
So the articles of impeachment do include "lying on national tv".
If you ever read the back-end discussion, it was one Hillary Rodham [Clinton] who thought that this should be the sole basis for the first Article.
And while the Judiciary Committee forwarded three articles to the House for Nixon, they forwarded FOUR articles for Clinton.
Bedides, all of the articles for Nixon are moot anyway, since Nixon took the high and honorable road and resigned rather than drag the country through the spectacle of an impeachment trial. He did this before the house ever even voted on the articles of impeachment, they had merely left the committee. There is no guarantee that any of them would have been accepted in their original form.
There is good evidence, especially with the revelation of the identity of "Deep Throat" as a disgruntled FBI agent *running the investigation* (okay, second in command) that the removal from office might have failed anyway. Most of the evidence against Nixon is circumstantial, and several of the members of the Nixon team have since made it clear that Nixon was never fully "in the loop". It was clear he did not order the break-in, and only tried to stop the investigation because it led to members of his cabinet acting without his knowledge. It was a poor choice, and it cost him the Presidency and made him a laughing stock and the butt of jokes until his death. He was loyal to his friends, and it cost him big.
Now, Clinton acted to cover up his investigation, not to help his friends, but to cover his own sorry butt. He tried hard to get Ken Starr removed (it was the Dems, after Nixon, who took away his ability to fire the Special Counsel or we could have had another Saturday Night Massacre.) He bombed an aspirin factory in the Sudan (that we're still paying to replace) on the day Monica testified. Or do you consider the event "one instance in which the President, while engaged in sex, spoke to a Republican member of Congress on the telephone regarding sending U.S. troops to Bosnia," is a faithful carrying out of the office of President? Would you want your sons and daughters sent into harm's way by someone getting a quick one in the back room? In fact, the initial investigation supplied 11 impeachable offenses against Clinton. The Judiciary committee chose to only forward four of them to the full house. One of those articles was for Lying to Congress during the open-ended Impeachment Hearings held by the judiciary committee. Something not even Nixon did. On the day the full house was to debate the Articles of Impeachment, Clinton launched an attack, without warning or consultation with the Congress, on Iraq. This "state of war" -- Democrats stated -- should be ample reason not to deliberate the impeachment of the Commander in Chief. The House Republicans disagreed (on party lines) and delayed only 24 hours.
As for Specter, that RINO is hardly someone who should be touted as having an outsatanding conscience. Does "Magic Bullet" mean anything to you? How about the fact that his voting record puts him to the left of 80 of the Senators in the building? He runs as a Republican and votes as a Democrat. It's also well known that he sold his vote to the Democrats to get a pork barrel project through when it was clear that Clinton wouldn't be removed. Conscience, my ass.
As for the vote count, you are right, I reversed the count, but that was unimportant. Even his own lawyer didn't try to claim he was innocent, he just claimed it wasn't worth removing Clinton from office. He is a convicted liar (perjurer) as the civil court judge (Susan Weber Wright) found him guilty of perjurious conduct and contempt and forced him to pay $90,000 in fines, revoked his law license and suspended his right to argue before the Supreme Court for five years. (As a civil judge, she was unable to asess up to the 30 year penalty such perjurious activity can carry as a consequence in a criminal court.)
Nice try. He was found guilty of perjury by the judge of the original civil case. HE IS A JUDICIALLY CERTIFIED LIAR. The Senate found his actions were not worthy of removal, or in legal terms, "did not rise to the level of treason, high crimes, or misdemeanors" as required by the Constitution. He was not found not guilty, they simply decided his actions did not warrant removal from office. Even Teddy (hic) Kennedy admitted that Clinton was guilty of perjury, he just claimed that it wasn't serious enough to remove him from office. If you want to split hairs with your words (find vs. vote), then I'll be more than happy to split them.
The Arkansas Bar did not file a charge against him. As soon as the civil court judge handed down the verdict of "Guilty of Perjury before the bench", then his law license was summarily (that means *without a trial*) withdrawn. As an officer of the court, he is held to a much higher standard than the average citizen.
He managed to pay an out-of-court settlement on the civil suit, but the judge found him guilty of perjury in her court, regardless of that settlement.
Get the facts straight if you want to argue semantics.
I was at a company that installed DOS 6.0 on about 65 computers, all of them were used for development and thus had "mission critical" data stored on them. Every computer had compression turned on. Of the 65 computers, exactly 2 experienced data loss. Both of these lost a single 512 byte sector due to corruption within the compression algorithm. In this case, I would say that the data loss was about the same as a mild shock. People who hear "data corruption" picture the whole disk being unusable. That's not what happened.
On top of that, this was a way to allow more data on a hardware device then the device would normally store, so it's use was, by nature, a value added proposition. So, what you were really losing was data you wouldn't have been able to store normally in the first place. Perhaps a better comparison was if Chevy installed a fictional "Turbo Boost" button that made the car go faster but might result in engine damage. They think it's safe, having bought it from a third party vendor who had been selling the boost kit for years, but when everyone gets one, a few people start having engine problems. It's a voluntary system, you had to hit the "Boost" button to cause the damage. Thus, anyone who's actually used it gets it fixed. But, most people, even the ones who do use it, don't have any problems.
So yes, I'd call this level of data loss equivalent to a mild shock in this case.
As for getting a free replacement lighter, why should it be free? If you don't use it, then what possible need do you have for a replacement? If you do plan to take up smoking, then you simply go to the dealer, show him your pack of cigarettes, and you are now part of the damaged class. Microsoft and the lawyer made it clear that they felt people who had lost data had every right to make the claim for damages.
Because Bill Clinton was being sued for sexual harrassment. He had elicited sex in return for job favors. During the course of this trial, he was called to testify. Part of that testimony was to establish his history as a sexual predator and serial harrasser. During that testimony, the prosecuting attourney brought up "Jane Doe #4", an un-named (at the time) intern in the White House. He specifically asked if Mr. Clinton had had sexual encounters with this intern. He denied everything.
Largely on the basis of this denial, the jury found him not guilty. The plantiff, who had been sexually harrassed, lost any hope for recompense in the case.
However, Clinton lied. Jane Doe #4 was Monica Lewinsky. When the evidence that he *had* been seeing Lewinsky arose, he was revealed to have perjured himself before the court, thus denying the plaintiff her civil rights. When he was called before congress to explain himself as part of the initial investigation, he *again* perjured himself. That's lying to congress. If you or I do that, we go to jail for 10 years.
Remember that the only article of impeachment ever drawn up against Nixon (largely by a young law clerk named Hillary Rodham [yes, *that* Hillary Rodham Clinton]) was for "lying to the American people". In other words, Nixon was to be impeached, not for lying under oath, not for compounding that perjury with another perjury, but for telling an untruth on national television. Remember the finger wagging, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky"?
The house felt that there was sufficient evidence for a "trial" in the senate and forwarded two articles of impeachment. The Senate rules require a super-majority to remove the president from office, a lucky thing, since 55 senators voted to remove him. In other words, the majority found him guilty of lying.
The Arkansas state Bar has since revoked his law license and his ability to practice law. He was found guilty of perjuring himself before the bench and was summarily judged and had to pay the original plaintiff some $900,000 in a settlement.
That's why he was impeached. Live it, learn it, love it.
But that's not the case here. The system that was faulty was not a critical system. It was a voluntary system, that under some circumstances caused data loss in files (I remember this, I lived through it -- man I'm old.)
This is more like Chevy producing a car with a defective lighter, that, every once in a while would give you a mild shock when you pressed it. The lawyer would be arguing that everyone who bought the car deserves the next model of car be delivered. Chevy would then respond, "No way, only the people who actually smoke in the car and have been shocked should be allowed to sue."
That's the equivalent. The lawyers in this case realized that their class went from 100 million people to about 50,000 people, and their settlement went from $1 Billion down to to about $500,000. They decided that their 33% cut wasn't worth it and dropped the suit. In this case, if you want the "scummy" lawyers, it's the ones who wouldn't take a open-and-shut case because it only would have put about two hundred thousand bucks in their pockets instead of three hundred million.
I love this attitude that the Internet is horribly broken. Right now I can go out, register a domain name, set up a server and DNS, and have an operating website within...(checks stopwatch) 4 minutes and 12 seconds. Yup, there it is. Page comes up and everything. Hmmm, no FBI guys knocking on my door. No payment to the U.S. government, no Patriot Act induced arrests. Total cost, under $10US. And you say this system is painfully broken?
Now, consider the idea that we would hand this over to the largest beaurocracy in the world. Do you really think I wouldn't then be spending at least an hour filling out forms? Do you really think the average citizen would be able to afford a web site, or do you think that the U.N., with a sudden vast new source of revenue, would start charging about $50 a month for DNS? Do I really want someone from Namibia with my personal information and my credit card number?
The U.S. built the basis of the Internet when they built DARPANet and ARAPANet in the early 70's. Yes, there were other networks (BitNet springs to mind) but the Internet is nearly 100% American grown. The IP protocol came out of ARPANet, and CERN didn't have it. The U.S. Government sank billions into the initial creation of the Internet, designing the very signals and software that power it, not just "laying cables". Do you really think they want to relinquish control of the DNS servers that point at their military computers to a foreign government? How easy would it be for Syria (a security council member) to then poison the DNS and redirect all millitary communications to their collector site? How about routing traffic and packet sniffing sensitive military information? If you don't think that an organization composed of 200 dictators, tyrants, and thugs, and 70 democracies is not capable of corruption...well, I'll let you figure it out.
Painful? I don't see it. Leave it as it is. It ain't broke.
I'd be happy to fund further research. What I refuse to do is fund a political agenda. All I've heard is how these recent hurricanes are "linked to global warming". It's more accurate to say that "researchers are trying to link global warming to these hurricanes". That's just bad science, and I refuse to pay for it.
I would love to see a truly open source climate model, where everything is open to scrutiny. And then a distributed project to do it more accurately. I'd especially love to see a physically based model, rather than a fluid dynamics based version (and if you really want, I'd be happy to expand on that comment.)
You are right, we know squat about the long-term hurricane cycle. I was merely pointing out that the data for the last century looks like a sine wave with about a 33 year up and 33 year down (or a 66 year cycle, which fits with your 50-70 figure nicely.) If that's the case, then it also matches the secondary solar cycle (which is 33 years, although I forget the names of all the different solar cycles.)
Again, I'd love to see research done, let's start by bringing the proxy data up to date. I've heard that doing that would cost less than $400,000. In the meantime, most of these climatologists are getting multi-million dollar grants for building new computer models that have nothing to do with reality (and are not peer reviewed.)
There is no opposition to the exploration of these ideas, what is opposed is making sweeping, dangerous, changes based on preliminary evidence. You have fallen prey to the "correlation equals causality" fallacy when you claim that mankind is responsible for climate change. You also don't see the ramifications of sweeping changes. Kyoto (the anagram lover's Tokyo) would cripple the ability of first world nations to produce any kind of goods, including the food that keeps the third world nations alive. In the meantime, developing nations would belch forth more pollution than cuts could ever hope to make up for. Kyoto, even if completely successful, would result (according to climatologists) in delaying global warming by 288 days over 100 years. At a cost of trillions of dollars and millions of lives. All based on what is a sketchy correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature.
It is just as valid (in fact it has better correlation) to say that the level of sea piracy is the cause of global warming. In the 900-1100 period (the time when the Vikings ruled the seas, and there was no piracy to speak of [no private, non-governmental piracy anyway]) we had the Medieval Optimum, a period of time far warmer than the current period (by as much as 3 degrees C according to some proxy data). During the 1650-1800's period, piracy reached its peak, cooling the planet as buccanneers and privateers roamed every ocean. Since 1800, the U.S. Coast Guard patrolled the seas, drastically cutting piracy, and clearly leading to the global rise in temperatures. Now as we once again approach zero piracy, temperatures should once again approach those seen in the medieval optimum, when oranges grew in Berlin and English wines challenged French vineyards for quality.
The correlation clearly is better than CO2 levels which have historically fluctuated anywhere from 7000ppm to 120ppm, with most of the interglacial period being in the 180-400ppm range. However, when we correlate just the last century of CO2 fluctuation to temperature we find large discrepencies. The 1950's - 1970's show a marked cooling (just as modern high-seas piracy reached it's high point) while at the same time CO2 levels were increasing at an unprecedented rate. (Of course, the sun was also at a solar minimum, but climatologists seem to love to ignore the sun in their models, modeling it as a simple, non-varying light souce.) In fact, historically, CO2 levels have lagged 20-90 years behind the rise in temperatures. In other words, CO2 levels increase as temperature increases, and not the other way around.
As for your claim that I know nothing about plate tectonics, well, it is laughable, having spent years doing geological work with my father who did work for mining companies... Did you know that there's evidence the Rockies (in general) have risen three feet just in the last century? The Himalayas are even more active, as the Indian subcontinent is slamming into the side of Asia. To say that there's been no "signifigant change" is to be ignorant of the consequences of small change on a large system. The climate is mind-bogglingly complex. A change of 10 feet of altitude can cause signifigant changes in wind patterns and temperature. Orographic effects are real and predominate the equations for surface temperatures.
And if you choose to ignore the geologic effects, then clearly errosive effects are in your time frame. Forest fires clear more land and produce more CO2 in one burst then most man-made effects do in a year. Mount St. Helens has created more pollution this year than the entire state of Washington. Rivers cut new basins, and hills are worn down.
You harp on CO2 but ignore that 98% of greenhouse gasses are water vapor, and that if you wanted to warm a planet CO2 would be the absolute worst choice of a gas to use. Methane is 21 times as powerful a GHG as CO2, but no one talks about that, because it's predominantly formed by wetlands. You want to reduce global warming? Let's drain all those damn wetlands. And get r
Other factors being equal, increased CO2 (and methane, and many others) levels WILL lead to a trapping of heat in the atmosphere.
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.5 degree variance over 150 years. They never mention that the period of 1650-1800 was the coldest time in the entire millenium. Nope.
But that's my point, your graph shows that other factors will not be equal. I'm sick and tired of being told over and over about the evils of greenhouse gasses when the simple fact is that 98% of all greenhouse gas is water vapor. And quite frankly, we still don't know if water vapor is a positive or negative feedback device. Almost all climate models tend towards the positive feedback point of view, but evidence is starting to lean strongly towards a negative feedback point of view.
All human contribution in history has raised global greenhouse gasses by 0.28% of the total. Yes, that's right, for all the screaming and moaning, if we take all the greenhouse gasses, water vapor included, and add them up, then the change since the start of the industrial revolution is 0.28%.
What I love is that in your second paragraph, you say that lots of things affect global temperature and then claim that none of those have changed in the last 10,000 years. Tell me, how many islands have sunk, how many have sprung up? The Rocky mountains have gotten how much higher? The Himalayas rise nearly an inch a year on average. North America is now sevral dozen miles further from Europe, and closer to Asia.
Ocean temperatures change amazingly slowly. Deep water current cycle in millenia, so the ocean temperatures we're seeing today could be the reuslt of the Medieval Optimum, and not anything of our doing.
This whole discussion is supposed to be about the number of hurricanes, well, hurricanes only form when a cold air mass passes over warmer tropical waters. In other words, the atmosphere has to be cooler for hurricanes to form. This can also be tracked. The cooler the air over the Atlantic, the higher the number of hurricanes. Hurrah, we're seeing the effects of curbing Global Warming. Oh wait, that's not doom and gloom enough for your crowd, somehow they have to blame the U.S. for it.
There is also good evidence (look at your graph again, for example) that CO2 levels today are so low as to produce CO2 starvation among most plants. Increases in CO2 are having a noticable effect on plant output. In other words, we're getting more food.
And while you can claim that "[historically] levels of these greenhouse gases have not reached the levels they are at today" you are taking that information from ice core samples that are being called more and more into question. Several studies are now claiming that the CO2 levels gleaned from ice cores may be inaccurate becuase CO2 has a tendency to leach into the ice matrix, changing the concentrations in the trapped bubbles.
The fact is that the proxy data we can trust shows that temperatures have been much higher in the past, even in this interglacial period. In the 1100 royal census, there are 113 vineyards listed in the counties around... London . In the 1300's Berlin was a major exporter of oranges . In 1909, a successful trip was made through the ice-free waters of the artic, in October
Every person who has bought into Global Warming has the same problem. They think that the Earth's climate is a stable system. While the average person can be forgiven this delusion, the climatologists who propose it should all be lined up and shot. We have thousands of years of history and tens of thousands of years of proxy data that all scream out, "the only constant is change". Then these same climatologists scream bloody murder about a
You know, we do have two examples of stable atmospheric temperature in the solar system, Venus and Mars. Their climate barely changes over the time we have observed them. And they also have one other thing in common: they're dead.
So give me a system experiencing change any day.
Hmm. I may have confused PPM for percentage in my memory. No matter, your graph far better demonstrates that PPM CO2 has no correlation to temperature than I ever could with words.
Yes, it's the highest since we've had satellites, but a plot of number of hurricanes vs year would show a multi-decadal cycle. In short, what's really happened is that we've come out of the lowest period of huricanes (an almost four decade lull) and back to what we were seeing in the sixties and thirties.
Hmmm. Looks like about a 33 year cycle, in other words, three solar cycles. And, not surprisingly, we're seeing the strongest solar activity on record. So solar activity, which is also some 95% correlated to current temperature trends also seem to mimic the hurricane cycle.
Of course, it's probably just the FSM getting mad about the lack of Atlantic pirates. Ramen.
How do we know we're headed for a record year? In 1933 the 21 hurricane "maximum" was based on hurricanes that made landfall or were measured by sea-going vessels. The number of hurricanes that were detected by satellite? Let me think... zero.
In 2005, we've had three hurricanes make landfall, and we've named 14 other tropical depressions that are swirling over the Atlantic. Number of storms measured by satellite? 17.
This article falls prey to one of the classic blunders, the most well known being "never fight a land war in Asia", but in this case, never blame an improved sensititvity in your system of measurement for an apparent increase in the measured number.
You should read a book. The carboniferous period had CO2 levels of 7000% of our current level. Oh, and they had one of the coldest periods in the history of the planet then.
Hey, I worked at MCI ( er, WorldCom, er, MCI WorldCom, er MCI) too! I got busted one Friday afternoon when my whole management chain got the axe. My manager was able to save himself by taking a 20% pay cut, but I got to laugh as his 50,000 shares went from $96 to $0.67...
Of course, then I went road warrior for two years at well into the six figures, but that's another story...
Simple, find one fossil, anywhere, of a species existing before it should. For example, a fossil of a rabbit in the Cambrian period.
In other words, show one example of a creature existing "out of place" in the fossil record, and you can disprove evolution. The fact that this hasn't happened over several billion fossil items is rather relling...
Funny, my wife's RIO (something...mumble) took SD cards. It had 256MB built in, and then she could drop in a 1GB SD card and listen to 10-20 hours of audio. (Audio books at 56kbits don't take much space). And it was about 2.5 inches (that's 7CM) across.
I always wanted to swipe it.
Sure there is, you leak it in NTSC because you're trying to attract a Canadian audience. You don't need to leak the PAL version because the Brits are already nuts for Doctor Who, but this way, it hits the streets in Canada in a playable format and people get interested.
The leaked copy wasn't even that great. It was compressed beyond belief and included some unpolished special effects (the garbage can scene had clearly not been shaded properly yet.)
Are you telling me that someone who works in a video production studio would have somehow dubbed off a *lousy* copy. No way, he would have picked the best DivX or Xvid setting out there and sent out a pristine copy. I worked in video for three years and those guys are obsessed about picture quality.
The whole thing screamed of viral marketing tactics. And it worked. The ratings for our long neglected Time Lord were through the roof. Clearly even with the poor quality it drummed up a lot of excitement.
I mean, not that I downloaded it or anything...
Exactly. It's available.
The problem is, it's not enforced as part of the standard. I can spend five minutes with a scan tool and find a dozen open relays that don't do authorization. I know, I get spammed by them 50 times a day.
And as for relay control, same thing. It's not part of the standard and people don't do it.
As for SPF, yeah, I know about that too. Have you ever tried setting it up? Have you ever seen an SMTP mail server that supports it natively? I haven't. That's my point.
People are obviously incapable of doing anything more than the bare minimum of the standard, so it's time we raised the bar by improving the standard. How about a mail server that can handle 8-bit data natively? How about XML based mail? All these things are possible and the time has long since passed that we should have upped the standard. Face it, do you still use "mail -d" to read your e-mail?
Aside: actually I do get out, and my mail server is quite nicely set up, including authorization, relay control, and even spammer blacklists that remove about 95% of the spam before it even gets into the mailboxes, but I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about the obvious spam problems that are "out there". Unless you think spam isn't an issue.
The SMTP standard that we use for mail transfer was developed in the late 70's - early 80's and has, for the most part, never been updated. In that time period, the idea of hordes of spam flowing through the net wasn't even considered.
It has always been the most obvious solution to me that what we really need is SMTP 2.0, where a server only accepts mail from a user that can authenticate themselves with a name and password. A server can also accept mail from another server, but only for mail directed at legitimate users on it's system. Mail servers would have to register with a central authority, and must include their active IP address in that registration. Any attempt to deliver mail from an unregistered server is bounced.
Wouldn't this simple fix stop 99% of spammers in their tracks? Isn't it about time we updated the SMTP standard?
For the same reason that my original tiny (armpit of a) home town in Wisconsin has 7MB DSL, and me, living in the "4th most connected city in America" can only get 1.5MB.
In my home town, some ubergeek looked around and said, "Hmmm. 3,000 people in need of broadband. The phone company has said, 'screw you' to them, and I really want a DS-3 line."
So, he bought a used DSLAM, and started connecting locals to it for $40 a month. After his first 30 customers, he was paying off his DS-3 line. By his first 200 customers, he was up to an OC-12. Now he serves about 20% of the population of the city, and makes money like mad.
The phone company looked at it and said, "for 600 customers, it's not worth the effort of upgrading our CO, when we can just stick one more DSLAM in a big city and get 10 times that."
It's easier to roll out service to a small town then to a big city.