I don't know. You don't know. No one who replied to me so far knows. If they talk confidently, don't make too many grammar and spelling mistakes and sound reasonable they will get moderated Insightful, but they don't know. The people moderating them Insightful also don't know. Slashdot is a forum for entertainment only. Insightful is just a measure of popularity, like being asked to hang out with the cool kids in highschool, except that the people you're 'hanging' with are not in any sense cool. Your lawyer/solicitor knows, but she doesn't post legal here because she has better things to do. Other lawyers may, but they aren't yours and are not giving you legal advice.
Even then, surely if someone's breaking into your home you're Allowed to tape them without their consent... They're trying to enter Your home without Your consent too, are they not? Law is not based on logic but (in the UK) on a bunch of rulings over hundreds of years and constantly changing legislation. There is lots of information contained in this. If you want to collect evidence and use it in court you should ask your solicitor for advice first otherwise you are in danger of it being inadmissable due to some obscure legal case or clause in some act.
Or you could listen to some random dudes on the internet arguing based on car analogies, five minute Google searches and conversations a mate once had with a policeman or even lawyers posting with the disclaimer "I Am A Lawyer But I Am Not Your Lawyer". None of which counts as legal advice BTW. It's your choice. I know what I'd do if I was going to spend significant amounts of my time and money trying to film burglars.
A sign saying, "Smile, you are being videotaped" would do nicely. That depends on the country you're in which is my point. You need legal advice to determine whether that phrase is enough and your camera's footage is high enough quality to make the evidence usable.
If you're in the UK, make sure you write a disclaimer on the front door of your apartment that says "By breaking into this apartment you consent to be photographed and have the evidence used in court". Or rather some version of that agreed to by a lawyer.
I've actually been in a situation where some company tried to get out of paying me for some work I did. I taped a conversation in which my contact person at the the company admitted that their claimed reason for not paying me was not true and the fuck up was not my fault. But my solicitor told me that since I hadn't got her agreement for recording her, it was inadmissable evidence. So amateur surveillance might not help you much. It's also illegal, though I don't think the burglar would be able to sue you even in the hippy criminal's rights obsessed UK.
On the other hand I know someone who's house was burgled. The police fit a wireless camera system there - she could disable it when she was at home. I think they actually caught the burglars using one of the other cameras they installed in the neighbourhood. So the government can use video evidence. Then again, this was a very, very good camera from what I've heard. So as well as getting a lawyer approved weasel words for your front door, get a lawyer approved camera too. Webcams I think would be useless.
That's not as fun as the '24' game we CIA intelligence analysts play. I ended up confessing to loads of stuff. Spent 6 months in psych evaluation afterwards too!
Have you noticed you raise your UID the power 6781192948219889129129191929199101019818823717661551514141819101011.. and then subtract 89001287481241121121345677885432312332435671291912818281717238191987.. the result is prime.
Hmmphh
Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there. The slashdot filter forced me to truncate these numbers, but you should be able to work out the missing digits.
If you Googled that recipe in the US or the UK, I'd say you're now on a watch list. Hope you haven't had any recent contacts with any Muslim countries like say Uzbekistan and don't depend of security clearance for your job.
Hello spooks. Hope you enjoy the Panorama program!
I do like that Peter Clarke chap BTW. He reminds me of Geofrey Rush's character in Elizabeth. He's clearly a bastard but given appropriate discretionary powers he gets the job done. And there are distinct parallels between Muslim extremists now and Catholic extremists then I think. You chaps in Maryland are doing a sterling job. Watch Elizabeth if you get a chance, it's a very good movie. I like the idea of some Walsingham references at the NSA/SIS. Maybe you could name a meeting room after him or something:-)
And can you take the parent off the watchlist please, he just got trolled.
That honestly sounds like America to me. Read a book about Mao's China or North Korea now. Guess what, elites exist everywhere. But they behave worse in Communist societies when they have absolute power than in in democratic ones where they don't, because they can.
Look at this way. In a Communist dictatorship the ways that the elite can manipulate society are a superset of the ways an elite in a democracy can. That's because the whole point of democracy is to limit the power of the elite and the whole point of a Communist dictatorship is to maximize it.
The GP doesn't seem to favor Socialism or Capitalism or whatever from his post. He said people label him as a 'socialist or a commie'. Now he said that any mention of helping others triggers this but reading between the lines I'd say he's actually advocating the state helping others as opposed to, say, going out and helping them himself.
So I'd say his error term from the average is likely large and negative and that is why most people disagree with him. It's democracy at work really.
Headlines pushed to your wrist were good if you're that guy who has to be the first to know when the pope dies or something. That would be quite useful if you were considering running for Pope.
Many of my friends have urged me to run and some independent citizens have started Draft_Hal_For_Pontif.com, but I haven't decided at this point.
He does seem like something out of Ian Fleming. I always thought a typical Ian Fleming character had a thin veneer of sophistication over a fundamentally limited intellect and thuggish personality. It's enough to fool the bimbos they prey on, and to some extent each other but you definitely wouldn't want to get stuck talking to them in a bar since they'd probably enjoy beating you to a pulp more than sex with yet another interchangable woman. They remind me of Patrick Bateman, the souless yuppy antihero of American Psycho actually. They certainly share his strange disatisfaction with normal heterosexual sex, unthinking materialism and fondness for extreme violence.
Then again who hasn't dreamed of saying something like this to a European who keeps whining about your country's brutal but eminently practical foreign policy -
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/12/world/main529102.shtml
Putin became agitated Monday after a reporter from the French newspaper Le Monde questioned his troops' use of heavy weapons against civilians in the war in Chechnya. Chechnya is predominantly Muslim.
"If you want to become an Islamic radical and have yourself circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow," Putin said.
"I would recommend that he who does the surgery does it so you'll have nothing growing back, afterward," he added. Circumcision is a tenet of Islam for all males. I dunno really. Russia was in semi terminal decline before Putin. I think desperate times increase the likelihood of psychopaths being elected and more controversially that you sometimes need them.
Certainly in the UK, Churchill was pretty much completely vicious when he had a chance but his viciousness was directed at the Nazis and probably saved the country. I suspect he'd have dealt with whiny Euro journalists with much the same contempt too, though he would probably have phrased in a more genuinely witty way. Someone genuinely civilized who listened to the Eurowhiners might have lost everything because they lacked the fundamental ruthlessness necessary to deal with the situation. And once there were no more enemies to be smitten, the Great British electorate replaced Churchill.
Which, whatever you think about the guy as a politician is damn cool. He's like James Bond, or maybe a James Bond villian. Rumours about his personal life just confirms the impression.
Sounds like America. Despite all the hoopla about freedom and whatnot in america, there is substantial indoctrination i.e. any mention of helping others gets you labelled a 'socialist' or a 'commie'. IMHO America is probably one of THE most indoctrinated societies in the world at the moment. You can't have a discussion about much with a large percentage of people about certain topics. It's not at all like America. America has does not have state censorship - the constitution forbids it. Ok, I'm sure you can find a few corner cases where it has happened but compared to China or even Russia where the government directly decides the content of the only legal news sources and kills unofficial journalists it is non existent.
Of course in the marketplace of ideas, you're allowed to try to sell anything no matter how quirky. But that does not mean that all ideas will sell equally well. Some ideas will be popular like iPods and some will be unpopular like feces brown Zunes.
Maybe you're the indoctrinated one, and you only believe in Socialism because you avoid reading anything that disagrees with your preconceptions. Certainly what I've read about planned economies and dictatorships of the proletariat makes me think they just end up making most people poor, unfree and unhappy while a spoiled, vicious elite wields absolute power. If someone seriously advocated them to me, I'd argue with them just like people argue with you.
From what you're saying you'd be happier in a country where no one argues with Socialist ideas. Now I've read enough about those places to tell you that you'd probably end up in a concentration camp for unorthodox thought. It's the idealists and true believers that end up getting martyred, not the vast mass of people that are basically uninterested in politics.
And incidentally the fact that you're able in America to read only progressive media that agrees with you while other people are free to watch only Fox news that agrees with them tells me that the government is not indoctrinating people, it's more that they indoctrinate themselves. Which is fair enough of course, they will all end up being wrong politically but in different ways.
I think of it as error terms from the Platonic ideal set of policies that no individual can know. Imagine that the political spectrum is represented as a two dimensional line. The far left have a large negative number and the far right have large positive ones. The average is zero. Now the average may not coincide with the Platonic ideal of course, since there are some key facts that no one knows. No one can know how well the policies being debated will actually work in practice of course. But the average is not bad per se, just not perfect. It is much better than fringe ideas.
You can think of the democratic process - free elections and a free press - as averaging out all the large individual errors to produce a smaller error in the policies of the governing party which will try to get elected by having policies that most people support.
Of course if I were on the far left or the far right this process would work very much against me. But to me that's the point of democracy, a few people at the fringes of the political spectrum end up not having any power at all ever and the vast mass of centrists get to compete for it.
Hmm, I dunno about that. I'm in Taiwan at the moment and the sheer volume of embedded stuff produced is absolutely unbelievable. They crank out stuff at an amazing rate, probably millions of products per year. Most of it will sink without trace of course, a tiny minority will end up being sold very cheaply globally in hardware stores. And a very, very small minority will be OEMd for a global company which knows how to do marketing and will sell for a fortune.
But I'd guess that Asia is full of people knocking out embedded code mostly by doing a brutal cut and paste job on a previous product or a reference design. Sometimes they forget to update the USB VID and PID from the reference design for example or ship completely untested firmware for example, so the amount of time spent on it must be very low.
That's the problem with the whole Web 2.0 thing. Everyone writes about Ajax, Perl, and web technologies. And reading it it's easy to lose track of the fact that the majority of programmers are probably writing embedded code. Certainly the majority of processors are embedded.
It is possible. Freeman Dyson wrote a paper on spraying particulates into the atmosphere. So did Edward Teller. Recently people have proposed a plan to stabilise the population in the Arctic
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/12343892/can_dr_evil_save_the_world/print
A real-life experiment in the Arctic was, of course, out of the question. But after some discussion, Caldeira and Wood decided to run some computer modeling to see if shooting particles into the stratosphere over the North Pole could help stabilize the region. How much sunlight, they wondered, would you have to reflect to stop the ice from melting? What effect would it have on the rest of the Earth's climate?
Scientists routinely use such computer models to test the effects of various climate-related scenarios, from rising CO2 levels to the impact of deforestation on global warming. After several weeks of running a climate simulation on Stanford's superfast computer network, Caldeira concluded that shading the sunlight directly over the polar ice cap by less than twenty-five percent would maintain the "natural" level of ice in the Arctic, even with a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. Push the shading up to fifty percent, and the ice grows. Even better, the restoration happens fast: Within five years, the temperature would drop by almost two degrees. 2 degrees Centigrade is a lot in global warming terms. Wikipedia says "The average global air temperature near the Earth's surface increased 0.74 ± 0.18 degrees C (1.33 ± 0.32 degrees F) during the hundred years ending in 2005".
The modeling results interested Wood. He calculated that it would take roughly 300,000 metric tons of particles each year to shade the sunlight in the Arctic by twenty-five percent -- a tiny amount, on a planetary scale. As for how to get those particles up there, Wood thinks that a half-dozen 747s could do the job. Even better, you could build a Kevlar tube fifteen miles long, with a diameter slightly larger than a garden hose. The bottom of the hose would be connected to a combustor that created the aerosols, while the top would be held in place by high-tech kites or a high-altitude airship that the Defense Department is developing. "It's nothing more than a fancy blimp," Wood says.
In Wood's view, this was a no-brainer. You could stabilize the ice, save the polar bears and demonstrate the virtues of planetary engineering for less money than it takes to feed and clothe the soldiers in Iraq for a year. Because the aerosols are launched only over the Arctic, there is little danger of directly impacting humans. And best of all, you can try it for a few years and see if it works. If something goes wrong, you can quit, and within a year or so, all the particles will have dissipated, returning the region to its "natural" state. I like this quote too.
"Human beings are like cockroaches," Wood says with typical black humor. "It's fairly easy to kill the first ten percent of the population. And if you try really hard, you might even get the next ten percent. But no matter what you do, you'll never get that last ten percent. We will find a way to survive." That's the spirit.
3.1W is the whole laptop, not the processor (actually it's usually around 5W). CPU is only a small part of power consumption when you have devices like screen with backlight and wireless network. No, pretty sure the Geode TDP is 3.1W. That includes the chipset and graphics of course but not the backlight or wifi. Check out this link
Average power for the Geode is 1.3W, which is a significant percentage of the total power of the OLPC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1#Power_consumption
The laptop will consume about 2 W of power during normal use, far less than the 10 W to 45 W of conventional laptops.[3] With build 656 power consumption is between 5 and 8 watts. (Measured on G1G1 laptop) Future software builds should meet the target of 2 watts.
In e-book mode, which is still under development and has not yet been released, all hardware sub-systems are intended to be powered down except the monochrome display. When the user moves to a different page the system will wake up, draw the new page on the display and then go back to sleep. Power consumption in this future "e-book mode" is estimated to be 0.3 W to 0.8 W.
GE also makes the excellent Minigun. Ideal for home defense, hunting and mowing down hordes of zombies in a last stand.
I read that when Bush went to London, the English Secret Service were somewhat concerned that one of the SUVs that accompanies the Presidential limousine carried a minigun in case the Prez got into a Black Hawk down type situation with protesters.
Directional control and a button are enough for Sonic, or any Atari 2600 game. I'm sure Nintendo and Sony are quaking in their boots.
Actually this is a low power PPC house. Maybe Apple will partner with Microsoft on an XBox360 portable. I like that, it's the computing industry equivalent of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact.
Actually it's interesting to compare the power consumption with Atom. Wiki says the OLPC "originally used the GX series Geode processor in the OLPC XO; but has since moved to the Geode LX". The LX uses has a TDP of 3.1W at 433Mhz. An Atom has a TDP of 0.65W at 800Mhz and a much lower average power. Even the 1866 MHz Atom has a lower TDP than a 433 Mhz LX!
I think it would do better if you compare average power rather than the worst case TDP value since the Atom is a much more recent design - it supports things like the C6 state where the the caches are powered down and processor state is saved in an SRAM kept alive but a low voltage supply.
So Atom looks like it will have more computing power per watt. The Atom is an in order design of course, but so is the Geode. Then again for an OLPC like machine you'd probably want an Atom with an embedded graphics controller and chipset, which is probably still some way off.
Identity Theft International bans phones but offers free internet access in most cities. Don't worry about that funny message about site certificates not matching, it's just our https proxy. Click OK! Click OK!
Yeah, I think a Cult of Personality is absolutely a religious phenomenon that Stalinism shares with Scientology. People avoided criticism of the Leader because the believed he had semi devine status, not purely because they feared punishment. I read that even people in Gulags would say to each other that "all the abuses would end if someone could find some way to tell Stalin". And most of the grief when he died was genuine, even though he had almost destroyed the country and his policies had killed more Soviet citizens than the Wehrmacht. I knew an American guy who bought a Chairman Mao lighter and his Chinese girlfriend complained it was disrespectful. This was quite recently and in Korea, so she wasn't motivated by possible punishment.
I mean that Communism and Nazism behaved like religions. And like religions they started to sprout irrational beliefs in areas outside their original remit. In that sense the Communist belief in Lysenkoism is a bit like the Catholic aversion to birth control. Neither were part of the original doctrine, but once you have priests or politicians that believe they have access to the absolute truth a bit sprouting is almost inevitable.
And like Christianity in the Middle Ages they took over the state and used it to suppress rival ideologies. That's why Communism was against religion, not because it was any less sensible. Religious, Communist and Nazi ideas seem like gibberish to non believers so they are naturally tempted to use the power of the state to keep those non believers quiet.
In a sense the genius of the secular system is that they are offered a quid pro quo where they can't control the state but neither can their opponents.
Well the Old Testament was written by backward Taliban types in the dark ages. What do you expect?
Something I didn't realise about the Old Testament until recently is that when they talk of the the Philistines binding Samson in 'chains of iron' it's because the Philistines had managed to master the technology to use iron but the Israelites hadn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines#History The Philistines long held a monopoly on iron smithing (a skill they possibly acquired during conquests in Anatolia), and the biblical description of Goliath's armor is consistent with this iron-smithing technology.
The Qu'ran is just a bad mashup of the same primitive ramblings that inspired the Old Testament with some self serving editing by Mohammed. Or more likely early Muslims, since Mohammed was not particularly literate and had more important things to do with his time, like capture slaves and booty from more settled neighbouring tribes.
Slashdot Mirror
Argumentum ad grammarium:
The GP made a a typo and therefore he is wrong about everything and guilty. Hang him!
Or you could listen to some random dudes on the internet arguing based on car analogies, five minute Google searches and conversations a mate once had with a policeman or even lawyers posting with the disclaimer "I Am A Lawyer But I Am Not Your Lawyer". None of which counts as legal advice BTW. It's your choice. I know what I'd do if I was going to spend significant amounts of my time and money trying to film burglars.
If you're in the UK, make sure you write a disclaimer on the front door of your apartment that says "By breaking into this apartment you consent to be photographed and have the evidence used in court". Or rather some version of that agreed to by a lawyer.
I've actually been in a situation where some company tried to get out of paying me for some work I did. I taped a conversation in which my contact person at the the company admitted that their claimed reason for not paying me was not true and the fuck up was not my fault. But my solicitor told me that since I hadn't got her agreement for recording her, it was inadmissable evidence. So amateur surveillance might not help you much. It's also illegal, though I don't think the burglar would be able to sue you even in the hippy criminal's rights obsessed UK.
On the other hand I know someone who's house was burgled. The police fit a wireless camera system there - she could disable it when she was at home. I think they actually caught the burglars using one of the other cameras they installed in the neighbourhood. So the government can use video evidence. Then again, this was a very, very good camera from what I've heard. So as well as getting a lawyer approved weasel words for your front door, get a lawyer approved camera too. Webcams I think would be useless.
That's Servalan.
That's not as fun as the '24' game we CIA intelligence analysts play. I ended up confessing to loads of stuff. Spent 6 months in psych evaluation afterwards too!
the result is prime.
Hmmphh Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there. The slashdot filter forced me to truncate these numbers, but you should be able to work out the missing digits.
If you Googled that recipe in the US or the UK, I'd say you're now on a watch list. Hope you haven't had any recent contacts with any Muslim countries like say Uzbekistan and don't depend of security clearance for your job.
:-)
Check this out
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6610000/newsid_6610700/6610737.stm?bw=nb&mp=rm
Hello spooks. Hope you enjoy the Panorama program!
I do like that Peter Clarke chap BTW. He reminds me of Geofrey Rush's character in Elizabeth. He's clearly a bastard but given appropriate discretionary powers he gets the job done. And there are distinct parallels between Muslim extremists now and Catholic extremists then I think. You chaps in Maryland are doing a sterling job. Watch Elizabeth if you get a chance, it's a very good movie. I like the idea of some Walsingham references at the NSA/SIS. Maybe you could name a meeting room after him or something
And can you take the parent off the watchlist please, he just got trolled.
Look at this way. In a Communist dictatorship the ways that the elite can manipulate society are a superset of the ways an elite in a democracy can. That's because the whole point of democracy is to limit the power of the elite and the whole point of a Communist dictatorship is to maximize it.
So I'd say his error term from the average is likely large and negative and that is why most people disagree with him. It's democracy at work really.
Many of my friends have urged me to run and some independent citizens have started Draft_Hal_For_Pontif.com, but I haven't decided at this point.
Then again who hasn't dreamed of saying something like this to a European who keeps whining about your country's brutal but eminently practical foreign policy -
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/12/world/main529102.shtml Putin became agitated Monday after a reporter from the French newspaper Le Monde questioned his troops' use of heavy weapons against civilians in the war in Chechnya. Chechnya is predominantly Muslim.
"If you want to become an Islamic radical and have yourself circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow," Putin said.
"I would recommend that he who does the surgery does it so you'll have nothing growing back, afterward," he added. Circumcision is a tenet of Islam for all males. I dunno really. Russia was in semi terminal decline before Putin. I think desperate times increase the likelihood of psychopaths being elected and more controversially that you sometimes need them.
Certainly in the UK, Churchill was pretty much completely vicious when he had a chance but his viciousness was directed at the Nazis and probably saved the country. I suspect he'd have dealt with whiny Euro journalists with much the same contempt too, though he would probably have phrased in a more genuinely witty way. Someone genuinely civilized who listened to the Eurowhiners might have lost everything because they lacked the fundamental ruthlessness necessary to deal with the situation. And once there were no more enemies to be smitten, the Great British electorate replaced Churchill.
And maybe the Le Monde reporter had second thoughts when Muslim mobs burned the Paris suburbs and imposed de facto Shariah law on 5 million French citizens.
It reminds me. I've got a Hungarian friend who's obviously not keen on things Russian given Russia's historical behaviour in Hungary.
Back when Putin was first elected my friend read that he flew his own fighter down to Chechnya. And it's true, he has flown to official visits in jet fighters.
Which, whatever you think about the guy as a politician is damn cool. He's like James Bond, or maybe a James Bond villian. Rumours about his personal life just confirms the impression.
Of course in the marketplace of ideas, you're allowed to try to sell anything no matter how quirky. But that does not mean that all ideas will sell equally well. Some ideas will be popular like iPods and some will be unpopular like feces brown Zunes.
Maybe you're the indoctrinated one, and you only believe in Socialism because you avoid reading anything that disagrees with your preconceptions. Certainly what I've read about planned economies and dictatorships of the proletariat makes me think they just end up making most people poor, unfree and unhappy while a spoiled, vicious elite wields absolute power. If someone seriously advocated them to me, I'd argue with them just like people argue with you.
From what you're saying you'd be happier in a country where no one argues with Socialist ideas. Now I've read enough about those places to tell you that you'd probably end up in a concentration camp for unorthodox thought. It's the idealists and true believers that end up getting martyred, not the vast mass of people that are basically uninterested in politics.
And incidentally the fact that you're able in America to read only progressive media that agrees with you while other people are free to watch only Fox news that agrees with them tells me that the government is not indoctrinating people, it's more that they indoctrinate themselves. Which is fair enough of course, they will all end up being wrong politically but in different ways.
I think of it as error terms from the Platonic ideal set of policies that no individual can know. Imagine that the political spectrum is represented as a two dimensional line. The far left have a large negative number and the far right have large positive ones. The average is zero. Now the average may not coincide with the Platonic ideal of course, since there are some key facts that no one knows. No one can know how well the policies being debated will actually work in practice of course. But the average is not bad per se, just not perfect. It is much better than fringe ideas.
You can think of the democratic process - free elections and a free press - as averaging out all the large individual errors to produce a smaller error in the policies of the governing party which will try to get elected by having policies that most people support.
Of course if I were on the far left or the far right this process would work very much against me. But to me that's the point of democracy, a few people at the fringes of the political spectrum end up not having any power at all ever and the vast mass of centrists get to compete for it.
Hmm, I dunno about that. I'm in Taiwan at the moment and the sheer volume of embedded stuff produced is absolutely unbelievable. They crank out stuff at an amazing rate, probably millions of products per year. Most of it will sink without trace of course, a tiny minority will end up being sold very cheaply globally in hardware stores. And a very, very small minority will be OEMd for a global company which knows how to do marketing and will sell for a fortune.
But I'd guess that Asia is full of people knocking out embedded code mostly by doing a brutal cut and paste job on a previous product or a reference design. Sometimes they forget to update the USB VID and PID from the reference design for example or ship completely untested firmware for example, so the amount of time spent on it must be very low.
That's the problem with the whole Web 2.0 thing. Everyone writes about Ajax, Perl, and web technologies. And reading it it's easy to lose track of the fact that the majority of programmers are probably writing embedded code. Certainly the majority of processors are embedded.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/12343892/can_dr_evil_save_the_world/print A real-life experiment in the Arctic was, of course, out of the question. But after some discussion, Caldeira and Wood decided to run some computer modeling to see if shooting particles into the stratosphere over the North Pole could help stabilize the region. How much sunlight, they wondered, would you have to reflect to stop the ice from melting? What effect would it have on the rest of the Earth's climate?
Scientists routinely use such computer models to test the effects of various climate-related scenarios, from rising CO2 levels to the impact of deforestation on global warming. After several weeks of running a climate simulation on Stanford's superfast computer network, Caldeira concluded that shading the sunlight directly over the polar ice cap by less than twenty-five percent would maintain the "natural" level of ice in the Arctic, even with a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. Push the shading up to fifty percent, and the ice grows. Even better, the restoration happens fast: Within five years, the temperature would drop by almost two degrees. 2 degrees Centigrade is a lot in global warming terms. Wikipedia says "The average global air temperature near the Earth's surface increased 0.74 ± 0.18 degrees C (1.33 ± 0.32 degrees F) during the hundred years ending in 2005". The modeling results interested Wood. He calculated that it would take roughly 300,000 metric tons of particles each year to shade the sunlight in the Arctic by twenty-five percent -- a tiny amount, on a planetary scale. As for how to get those particles up there, Wood thinks that a half-dozen 747s could do the job. Even better, you could build a Kevlar tube fifteen miles long, with a diameter slightly larger than a garden hose. The bottom of the hose would be connected to a combustor that created the aerosols, while the top would be held in place by high-tech kites or a high-altitude airship that the Defense Department is developing. "It's nothing more than a fancy blimp," Wood says.
In Wood's view, this was a no-brainer. You could stabilize the ice, save the polar bears and demonstrate the virtues of planetary engineering for less money than it takes to feed and clothe the soldiers in Iraq for a year. Because the aerosols are launched only over the Arctic, there is little danger of directly impacting humans. And best of all, you can try it for a few years and see if it works. If something goes wrong, you can quit, and within a year or so, all the particles will have dissipated, returning the region to its "natural" state. I like this quote too. "Human beings are like cockroaches," Wood says with typical black humor. "It's fairly easy to kill the first ten percent of the population. And if you try really hard, you might even get the next ten percent. But no matter what you do, you'll never get that last ten percent. We will find a way to survive." That's the spirit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geode_(processor)#Geode_LX
Average power for the Geode is 1.3W, which is a significant percentage of the total power of the OLPC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1#Power_consumption The laptop will consume about 2 W of power during normal use, far less than the 10 W to 45 W of conventional laptops.[3] With build 656 power consumption is between 5 and 8 watts. (Measured on G1G1 laptop) Future software builds should meet the target of 2 watts.
In e-book mode, which is still under development and has not yet been released, all hardware sub-systems are intended to be powered down except the monochrome display. When the user moves to a different page the system will wake up, draw the new page on the display and then go back to sleep. Power consumption in this future "e-book mode" is estimated to be 0.3 W to 0.8 W.
GE also makes the excellent Minigun. Ideal for home defense, hunting and mowing down hordes of zombies in a last stand.
I read that when Bush went to London, the English Secret Service were somewhat concerned that one of the SUVs that accompanies the Presidential limousine carried a minigun in case the Prez got into a Black Hawk down type situation with protesters.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/protecting-w/presidential-suv-machine-gun-pops-up-fills-the-air-with-lead-290181.php
Actually this is a low power PPC house. Maybe Apple will partner with Microsoft on an XBox360 portable. I like that, it's the computing industry equivalent of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact.
Umm what? The Geode is an x86 processor. It runs x86 binaries, including Flash.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Adobe_Flash
Actually it's interesting to compare the power consumption with Atom. Wiki says the OLPC "originally used the GX series Geode processor in the OLPC XO; but has since moved to the Geode LX". The LX uses has a TDP of 3.1W at 433Mhz. An Atom has a TDP of 0.65W at 800Mhz and a much lower average power. Even the 1866 MHz Atom has a lower TDP than a 433 Mhz LX!
I think it would do better if you compare average power rather than the worst case TDP value since the Atom is a much more recent design - it supports things like the C6 state where the the caches are powered down and processor state is saved in an SRAM kept alive but a low voltage supply.
So Atom looks like it will have more computing power per watt. The Atom is an in order design of course, but so is the Geode. Then again for an OLPC like machine you'd probably want an Atom with an embedded graphics controller and chipset, which is probably still some way off.
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Yeah, I think a Cult of Personality is absolutely a religious phenomenon that Stalinism shares with Scientology. People avoided criticism of the Leader because the believed he had semi devine status, not purely because they feared punishment. I read that even people in Gulags would say to each other that "all the abuses would end if someone could find some way to tell Stalin". And most of the grief when he died was genuine, even though he had almost destroyed the country and his policies had killed more Soviet citizens than the Wehrmacht. I knew an American guy who bought a Chairman Mao lighter and his Chinese girlfriend complained it was disrespectful. This was quite recently and in Korea, so she wasn't motivated by possible punishment.
I mean that Communism and Nazism behaved like religions. And like religions they started to sprout irrational beliefs in areas outside their original remit. In that sense the Communist belief in Lysenkoism is a bit like the Catholic aversion to birth control. Neither were part of the original doctrine, but once you have priests or politicians that believe they have access to the absolute truth a bit sprouting is almost inevitable.
And like Christianity in the Middle Ages they took over the state and used it to suppress rival ideologies. That's why Communism was against religion, not because it was any less sensible. Religious, Communist and Nazi ideas seem like gibberish to non believers so they are naturally tempted to use the power of the state to keep those non believers quiet.
In a sense the genius of the secular system is that they are offered a quid pro quo where they can't control the state but neither can their opponents.
Well the Old Testament was written by backward Taliban types in the dark ages. What do you expect?
Something I didn't realise about the Old Testament until recently is that when they talk of the the Philistines binding Samson in 'chains of iron' it's because the Philistines had managed to master the technology to use iron but the Israelites hadn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines#History
The Philistines long held a monopoly on iron smithing (a skill they possibly acquired during conquests in Anatolia), and the biblical description of Goliath's armor is consistent with this iron-smithing technology.
So 'God's chosen people' hadn't enterered the Iron Age at that point. There's lots of other signs that they were not exactly academically inclined either, like the biblical value of 3 for Pi which was less accurate than the value the competing civilisations knew.
The Qu'ran is just a bad mashup of the same primitive ramblings that inspired the Old Testament with some self serving editing by Mohammed. Or more likely early Muslims, since Mohammed was not particularly literate and had more important things to do with his time, like capture slaves and booty from more settled neighbouring tribes.