if you don't want to lessen the value of human soldiers, then the best thing to do isn't to waste money on exorbitant defense projects, but to deploy the armed forces only when it is absolutely necessary. that is, if you value the lives of soldiers you won't put them in harm's way unnecessarily.
our defense budget is far and beyond that of all other nations, but i very much doubt that Canada, France, Sweden, Japan, etc. value the lives of their soldiers any less than we do.
if the majority of Americans want public research into space exploration, medical research, and fundamental research, then it is the government's duty to carry out these wishes. the only hard rule about what a government ought to be doing is protecting the interests of its constituency. even in a world without military conflict (and thus with no need for "common defense") government will still be a necessity, just not in its present form.
believe it or not, not everyone is paranoid about a Soviet/German/Chinese invasion or terrorist attack. defense is far from the only common interest shared by a society. certain things like road systems, public education, communications networks, power grids, and other vital public infrastructure cannot be built by a lone individual. they require the collective efforts & resources of a community to develop.
likewise, law enforcement, emergency services, courts, etc. are all public services that a modern society needs to function. because most people don't want to live in a dog eat dog world where might makes right, we establish social institutions to ensure law and order and promote social justice. these institutions do far more for public safety on a day to day basis than a ridiculously expensive military.
and because most people have the foresight to see that fundamental research, space exploration, ecological conservation, and the arts all serve the long-term interests of a society, the government also has the responsibility of funding these admittedly loftier endeavors. if you want to live in a country whose government is only interested in military defense, then move to a nation under military dictatorship. you don't need a democratic government that protects free speech, free press, ensures due process, regulates health standards, and ensures their nation is at the forefront of science & technology, etc. to have an armed forces.
i can see your line of reason, but if we go by that definition then what is an energy source really just depends on the available technology.
right now the primary method of producing hydrogen is through electrolysis of water, and the primary means of extracting energy from hydrogen is through catalysis with oxygen to create water. since producing hydrogen in this way involves higher potentials than the total reduction potentials using a state-of-the-art fuel cell, there is a net energy loss. and even if an electrolysis technique could be created that involved no overpotential, such as by using a hydrogenase enzyme, there would still be no net energy gain by extracting energy from hydrogen in this way. therefore hydrogen would not be an energy source using the electrolysis-fuel-cell/oxidation-reduction hydrogen economy.
however, if we can produce hydrogen by different means, such as finding a natural source of pure hydrogen, or extract energy out of hydrogen by a more efficient means, such as using hydrogen isotopes in nuclear fusion, then hydrogen would be an energy source. just because current technology focuses on using hydrogen as an energy carrier rather than an energy source doesn't mean that hydrogen can't be an energy source.
i mean, obviously trying to store energy by converting water to hydrogen + oxygen, and then trying to re-extract that energy by converting them back to water is never going to be net energy positive, since no technology/electrochemical reaction can be more than 100% efficient. but that just makes hydrogen not an energy source in the context of current fuel cell technology.
if by "he" you mean the author of the summary, then perhaps yes. but if you're referring to Seth Shostak, the SETI guy, then that isn't what he's arguing at all. here's the excerpt FTA:
But there's an obvious problem: nothing is simpler than a sweep of blue sky, or the inky blackness of space. If simplicity is the benchmark, space itself is evidence of design. And leaving aside this uncomfortable implication, it would mean ignoring a piece of skywriting, or an overhead flying saucer, if it contains more visual information than its background.
That's true, agreed Shostak. But the key is comparison. Against a low-information background, one looks for life in complication; and against a complex background, one searches for simplicity. In either case, it's the degree of unexpected variation that matters. That's where Intelligent Design falls short.
what's offensive is very subjective. and as history has shown, people can get offended by just about anything. the SimCopter easter egg sounds like it was meant to be more humorous than offensive. but i guess some people are offended by the sight of homosexuals, or perhaps just think that video games should not acknowledge the existence of homosexuality (after all, it might turn our children gay!).
for those interested, the guy responsible for the SimCopter easter egg is now a member of the culture jamming activist group, the yes men. but be warned, if you're offended by the sight of pixelated men in kissing in a video game, you might want not want to click on that link.
exactly. middle and lower class individuals don't have off-shore tax-free bank accounts. and even if they did, they wouldn't keep as much of their income in it.
if you give a tax break to a family making $50,000 a year or less, they're more likely to spend it, thus reinvesting it back into the economy. that's because a low-income family has to spend all of their income just to pay for food, shelter, and other basic necessities.
that's why Reaganomics/trickle-down theory is pure nonsense. if you want to stimulate the economy by giving tax cuts to the public, then why not give that money directly to masses who will actually spend that money and put it back into the economy? why would you give it all to a rich minority and hope that it will "trickle down"? someone with 600 million dollars in the bank isn't going to spend any more money just because they receive another 2 million dollars from the government.
the proven way to stimulate a flagging economy is through public works projects, preferably projects with great public value such as the Hoover dam. not only are you directly putting money back into the economy, but you're also building useful public infrastructure rather than throwing it away on new yachts or mansions for the rich.
and what loony extreme would that be? moral/logical consistency?
a "free distribution" by definition needs to be "free" in the FOSS sense. they're simply modifying the definition to elaborate on an issue that had been overlooked up until now.
no one is forcing you to use a free distribution. and the FSF hasn't condemned the Fedora project for taking the pragmatic approach. but it would hypocritical for them to overlook the issue of proprietary firmware blobs in their definition of free distributions after the issue has been raised by members of the community.
i'm a pragmatist too. i run Windows XP because the programs i use for work are Windows-only. but i'm not going to bitch about FSF not including my Windows XP Professional distribution in their definition of a free system just because someone "philosophically disagreed" with an OS.
true. new technologies always start off prohibitively expensive, but a killer application--or in this case, implementation--could drive widespread adoption to the point where economies of scale come into play.
while you may be right about some aspects of the Middle English creole hypothesis, the Norman conquest of England certainly had a profound effect on the evolution of the English language. language is a social/cultural construct. subsequently, its evolution is inextricably tied to the social & cultural development of a region. after all, a diachronic analysis is meaningless without historic context.
the fact of the matter is, the Norman conquest was a vital chapter in the historic narrative of the British isles. i would be very surprised if 300-odd-years of Norman rule had no effect whatsoever on the development of modern English. i mean, the Normans basically supplanted the English ruling class, replacing the entire English nobility with new Anglo-Norman-speaking Norman nobility.
it's true that the (disproportionately large number of) French and Norman loanwords used in the English language were largely borrowed after 1400, by which time English had returned to use in government and in the king's court. and the grammatical changes in English followed a pattern shared by many other Germanic languages. but the Great Vowel Shift was almost certainly influenced by Norman occupation in some way or another.
it should be noted that this (1200-1600) was the time when the language of the aristocracy was gradually shifting from French to English. this likely changed the prestige accent of English by making it sound more French in style. another possibility is that due to England being at war with France throughout much of this period, the French-speaking nobility may have been more susceptible to hypercorrection in an attempt to change pronounciation to something sounding "more English."
in fact, the shift from French to English as the language of the aristocracy/ruling-class may have contributed more to the rapid changes undergone by the English language to form modern English than the period of Norman rule immediately after William's conquest of England. firstly, William and his successors up to, and including, the early Plantagenets, such as Angevin kings, were all absentee rulers for the most part. the administrative system William set up allowed he and his successors to rule from France by writ. similarly, the early Anglo-Norman barons were also largely absentee landowners, who consider France their true home, and spent the majority of their time in France.
so it would make sense that it wasn't until much later, after the Anglo-Norman nobility had begun assimilating and interacting directly with the native English population, that these transformations in the English language began to take place. this was also the time of the Great Plague, which drove mass migrations to the South East of England causing different dialects and accents to intermingle and modify each other in order to standardize pronounciation. the rise of the middle class in London and upward social mobility caused by the pandemic hitting the aristocracy could also have driven (or accelerated) social interactions between the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and the English masses.
while i don't doubt that electronic warfare is being actively developed by other nations (i'm sure the U.S. armed forces aren't the only military interested in, or actively developing, electronic warfare tactics), i wouldn't put it past the MIC to exaggerate the risk of electronic attacks in order to manipulate the public. it certainly wouldn't be the first time the public was mislead about our nation's defense in order to funnel tax dollars into unnecessary defense projects. and now with war logistics being an more lucrative than ever through the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) and its cost-plus award-fee contracts, even more more private sector companies have a vested interest in seeing a renewed Cold-War-type international tension and corresponding military spending.
it's just too bad Americans never heeded Eisenhower's farewell address. of course, if more people working in the defense industry were truly patriotic, they'd all be as morally enlightened as you, and the MIC wouldn't exist.
it looks like a physical mockup, not a 3D render. most publicity/promo photos are cleaned up a fair bit to give them an unrealistically "perfect" look, but these are pretty clearly touched up photos rather than 3D renders.
and if you go to the Pilotfish website, you'll see that these publicity shots are exactly the same look/feel as those of their other products (which have already been released).
but no doubt there'll still be some paranoid arm-chair digital imaging experts screaming "fake!" or "photoshopped!" over these photos.
that doesn't explain why people in Tokyo pay 36% less per month than residents of L.A. or N.Y.C. for broadband service. they pay less than 2/3 the monthly fees for over 9x the bandwidth--and that bandwidth is symmetrical, which in the U.S. would be considered leased lines, or business connections, and cost even more.
the U.S. has a lot of sparsely-populated rural areas, but most people still live in big cities or their surrounding suburbs. it's not like we're Australia, Canada or Russia. and we don't have a nationalized broadband industry where people in the city are subsidizing rural communities. if we were, i could understand the huge disparity in the cost of bandwidth between us and other developed nations (in 2007 Japanese residents were paying $0.36 per Mbps versus the $5.98 per Mbps we pay here in the U.S.).
actually, Bigfin squids were first discovered in 1907, and the species in this particular video isn't new either. if you're talking about this particular specimen that's captured the video, then you may be right. but otherwise, deep sea drilling hasn't contributed much to our scientific understanding of this species.
great law indeed. i'd never heard of Magnuson-Moss before, but i wish the conspicuous disclosure of terms and conditions provision were more generally applied to cover all business contracts and advertising. perhaps it'd mitigate "small print syndrome" and other deceptive business practices.
maybe then instead of pouring millions of dollars into marketing/advertising and other manipulative business practices, companies will instead have to put that money into R&D to develop competitive products/technologies and succeed based purely on their technical merits (instead of, say, lobbying/bribing/tricking standard-setting bodies to adopt your proprietary technology as an industry standard).
i mean, things like films, music, clothes, etc. are highly subjective, thus they inherently rely on promotional advertising/marketing to gain exposure, after which each work can be propelled on its own creative/aesthetic merits. however, technology should to be judged on its technical merits, not which company has the biggest marketing budget or the most lobbying power to buy their own industry standards.
i was actually referring to the same story, but i thought it was 100 MB. however, upon some more research it seems that 100MB/sec residential connections have been the norm in Japan for about 4 years now, so 1 Gbps (128 MB/sec) isn't much of an increase. it seems that Koreans are also enjoying residential fibre-optic broadband.
meanwhile, Comcast pompously refers to their 22 Mbps and 50 Mbps (2.75 MB/sec and 6.25 MB/sec) connections as "wideband" internet access. the state of residential internet access in the U.S. is an absolute joke compared to the widespread FttH symmetric broadband services being provided in other countries.
yea, that video gave me the chills. at first it looked sorta like the alien from Independence Day, but about 100 times creepier. but once i actually understood what i was seeing, i was just in awe at the beauty of such a bizarre living creature. these kinds of discoveries just emphasize the reason we need to support ecological conservation all the more. imagine all of the millions of other bizarre and beautiful creatures out there still unknown to science.
for those who are interested in other video clips of Magnapinnidae, here's a page with several short clips and screen captures. most of them are poor quality, as they seem to be VHS-rips, but the 6th and 8th clips are pretty amazing.
the Micron video shows a 2-drive setup performance of 200,000 I/Os per second. (2KB) random read = ~400MB/sec.
a benchmark performed by Linux.com also shows that SSD absolutely creams SATA, even 6 SATA drives in RAID 6, in terms of random seek. in other tests a single Mtron 16GB SSD gave 111 MB/s sustained read with.1 ms access time, outstripping the WD Raptor 150, which was the fastest SATA drive at the time the test was performed (12/13/07). the only area where SSD lags behind is random write, which it suffered 23% over the raptor. but with the several-fold increases in I/Os per second achieved by Micron's PCIe cards, even random write speeds would be be faster than normal mechanical rotating drives.
yes, that was one of the causes, but generally these kinds of major disasters happen due to the confluence of multiple chance mishaps/mistakes. and i'm basing my information off of an episode of "Air Crash Investigation" that was aired on NatGeo, so take it for what you will. but to the best of my recollection, the NTSB investigation attributed the crash to these causes:
the Tenerife airport was a minor airport not used to the high volume traffic they received that day diverted from Las Palmas Airport, which was shutdown due to bomb threats. they were understaffed to handle all the planes they had to deal with, and were perhaps too distracted to notice the accident unfolding in front of them.
not being a designed for large commercial airliners like the Boeing 747, the airport's runway/taxiway layout was difficult for Pan Am 1736 to navigate. in fact, the directions the received from the tower required them to perform two 145 degree turns, a practical impossibility for a large 747; the runway exits were also unmarked; both of these factors led Pan Am 1736 to get off at the wrong runway exit.
there was also miscommunication caused by a language barrier & imprecise/nonstandard phrasing. in the recordings the KLM pilot was recorded as saying "we're now at take-off" or possibly "we're now um... taking off" to indicate they were beginning their take off. the tower also responded with a similarly vague/imprecise statement of "O.K." in response to the nonstandard statement, thinking the KLM was in take-off position.
and, yes, there was also the mutual interference caused by both the Pan Am crew and Tower trying to speak at the same time, causing the Tower and KLM to miss the Pan Am's transmission reporting that they were still taxiing down the runway, and also causing the KLM to miss the tower's transmission telling them to "Stand by for take off."
lastly, the impatience of the KLM pilot (possibly due to the demanding schedules put on airline pilots) caused the KLM to take off without tower clearance. his own co-pilot expressed concerns about the Pan Am not being clear of the runway, but his protest was ignored. even in spite of all of the errors from before, if the KLM had followed procedure and waited for tower clearance to take off, the collision might have been avoided.
but regardless of which circumstance you want to attribute as the ultimate cause of the accident, better situational awareness of everyone's location on the ground would have prevented this runway collision.
like they say, there's more than one way to skin a cat. however, this system is here now. the technology has been tested for over several years and proven itself to be effective. and there are things that can be done about the cost. GPS was really expensive when it first came out as well, but now it's relatively cheap to get a GPS navigation system. by standardizing the design for the cockpit device, it can be produced more cheaply by many manufacturers. and if it's a standard feature on all planes, that will also reduce unit costs, in addition to distributing the cost of operating the satellites across millions of planes.
the data speaks for itself. i don't think it has anything to do with satellites being "cool." if you can design a safe radar alternative to this system, you could present it to the FAA for their consideration. but if there are no other alternatives available, then what is wrong with the FAA adopting this technology?
besides, how would you transmit weather data from the national weather service without using satellites? how would you provide coverage outside of radar range? and if you're using GPS satellites for tracking planes, you're still using satellites, but i think only military planes using GPS with their transponders.
while i agree that the post 9/11 airport security measures and completely pointless and make flying an absolute nightmare, that does not negate the benefits of this new system.
firstly, it's not the lack of "airspace" that this system is addressing. ADS-B provides more accurate/precise information to pilots in addition to having far more extensive coverage than radar. not only are they getting weather & air traffic information for improved situational awareness in the air, but this technology is also being used to help pilots navigate on the tarmac:
With radar, pilots rely on air traffic controllers and a see-and-avoid strategy that literally entails looking out the window to avoid wandering in the way of--or colliding with--other aircraft on the runways. With ADS-B, pilots have a cockpit display, which looks like a full-color, topographical map on a computer screen, showing where they are, where everyone else is, and the ever-changing weather around them. "It's giving the pilot an extra set of eyes," says von Thaden, who is also a licensed pilot.
ADS-B's ability to update in real-time is especially important on runways, with so many planes in such close proximity. "Things happen a lot faster on the surface," says Vincent Capezzuto, the FAA program manager for ADS-B. "There are aircraft speeding up to take off. There are aircraft that are landing and going really fast and decelerating and taking sharp turns onto these high-speed taxiways to get off the runway." [...] Additionally, by enabling more tightly spaced landings, and less time in holding patterns, ADS-B saves 40 to 70 gallons (150 to 265 liters) of fuel per landing. Mangeot estimates that the Continuous Descent Approach enabled by ADS-B, during which aircraft glide in with their engines at idle thrust, cut nitrous oxide emissions (a greenhouse gas) by about 34 percent as well as noise pollution by some 30 percent.
in fact the worst plane accident in history (excluding the 9-11 attacks, which were deliberate terrorist acts) was the Tenerife airport disaster (1977) which involved the collision of two 747s on the runway. since pilots rely so heavily on air traffic controllers to help them navigate the runway, a simple miscommunication due to a language barrier between the pilot and the tower caused one of the 747s to be parked directly in the path of another 747 preparing for take-off. and because looking out the window was the only other way for pilots to see their surroundings (and avoid collisions), the heavy fog covering the airport that day obscured the two planes from each other until it was too late. this accident could easily have been prevented if ADS-B had been in place, since the pilots in both planes would have been able to clearly see their relative position to each other and to the layout of the runway system.
lastly, i want to point out the crash of Avianca Flight 52 in 1990. this incident occurred during foggy conditions as well, but this time the root cause of the accident was due to the 707 being put in a holding pattern for over an hour until they literally ran out of fuel and crashed. the 707 was actually given priority landing right before they ran out of fuel, however due to bad wind shear info given by the flight controllers the plane dropped below the glideslope, resulting a missed approach. however, they didn't have enough fuel for a second approach. the engines flamed out; the plane lost power; and then it crashed.
accurate weather info, more tightly spaced landings, less time in holding patterns, and less fuel expended for landings would all improve the safety and efficacy of commercial air travel. perhaps if the planes on the ground that night had been able to taxi themselves using the ADS-B display, the decreased workload on the tower controllers would have allowed them to land more planes in a shorter amount of time--maybe ev
their infrastructure is designed for binary data--1's and 0's. it doesn't matter whether those 1's and 0's are used to make text or multimedia.
it's not like we're all still using dial-up connections and are expecting to stream HD-video over them. the reason streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive applications have become so popular is because the technology and infrastructure has progressed to the point where these are now practical uses of internet access. aside from rare companies like the BBC, who are early adopters in order to be technological leaders in their industry, most commercial companies aren't going to develop an application that depends on technological infrastructure that isn't widely available yet.
there's a symbiotic relationship between technology/infrastructure and application/usage. it's cutting-edge applications that gain popular usage which drive technological progress and infrastructure upgrades. but at the same time, it's the widespread adoption of new technologies and infrastructure upgrades that stimulate the development of new applications, and change the way people use technology. the public can't make use of technology that isn't available to them.
the reason ISPs in the U.S. are struggling, and their service quality is so poor is because of two things: shortsightedness and greed. greed drove them to oversell their networks by way too much. their shortsightedness caused them to think this business model was sustainable. the Japanese have already begun efforts to make 100 Mbit residential connections a nationwide standard. they saw where technology was headed, and they've been gradually making headway over the years to upgrade their infrastructure to keep up with demand. there's no reason why U.S. ISPs couldn't have done the same. it's because they've gotten used to abusing their monopolies that their networks have become overloaded. and they still think that they should dictate how consumers use their internet access.
wow, brilliant deduction! because, up until now we were all expecting to receive internet access for free.
anyone who's looked at broadband costs/availability in different parts of the world knows that ISPs in certain countries have a charge-more-for-less attitude. part of this is due to their being unregulated natural monopolies, thus being able to do whatever they want. part of it is due to pro-business/anti-consumer attitudes that dominate our culture. but at least part of the blame rests on ignorant members of the public who buy the "pirates are stealing your internet speeds!!!!11" BS put out by greedy ISPs, who all the while continue to oversell far beyond their network capacity.
bandwidth isn't a limited natural resource. if public demand for internet bandwidth increases, you just increase the network capacity and make more money. if you want to increase your subscription base, you need to upgrade your network to match the increase traffic load. that's just common sense. but some ISPs seem to want to increase their number of subscribers without matching increases in network capacity. and now they're trying to shift blame for the poor service quality on "power users" for actually using the internet connections they paid for.
so rather than upgrading their networks to conform to changes in internet usage like Japanese, Korean and European ISPs are doing, U.S. ISPs are instead wasting money on traffic monitoring & packet analysis/shaping technology. in other words, rather than increasing network capacity to meet public internet usage, they're trying to manipulate public internet usage to conform to their insufficient network capacity & business model.
it's no wonder many communities are establishing their own municipal WiFi/WiMax networks rather than getting reamed by commercial ISPs for subpar service.
Adds reader gillbates: "She now faces up to 3 years in jail and $300,000 in fines -- a troubling precedent for anyone who has ever registered with a website under a pseudonym."
how so? i register on websites with pseudonyms all the time. this does not trouble me at all (other than the fact a grown woman would conspire with her daughter to bully a neighbor's kid, especially a young girl with emotional problems).
the problem isn't with the interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in this particular case. the problem is with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act itself. this incident actually resulted in the death of a girl and was motivated by deliberate malice. a maximum (which are rarely handed out to members of privileged social groups) of 3 years in jail and $300,000 doesn't seem any more ridiculous than handing out such punishments to well-intending security experts.
i would be more disturbed by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act being applied to non-malicious teenage hackers breaking into un-secured government networks out of curiosity. if they can be faulted for "damages" that include the time spent investigating the intrusion and fixing the pre-existing security flaws, then certainly a grown woman can be punished for causing the death of a little girl.
in any case, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act needs major reforms, and perhaps making such ridiculous laws applicable to the general population will open people's eyes.
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if you don't want to lessen the value of human soldiers, then the best thing to do isn't to waste money on exorbitant defense projects, but to deploy the armed forces only when it is absolutely necessary. that is, if you value the lives of soldiers you won't put them in harm's way unnecessarily.
our defense budget is far and beyond that of all other nations, but i very much doubt that Canada, France, Sweden, Japan, etc. value the lives of their soldiers any less than we do.
"supposed to be doing" according to who?
if the majority of Americans want public research into space exploration, medical research, and fundamental research, then it is the government's duty to carry out these wishes. the only hard rule about what a government ought to be doing is protecting the interests of its constituency. even in a world without military conflict (and thus with no need for "common defense") government will still be a necessity, just not in its present form.
believe it or not, not everyone is paranoid about a Soviet/German/Chinese invasion or terrorist attack. defense is far from the only common interest shared by a society. certain things like road systems, public education, communications networks, power grids, and other vital public infrastructure cannot be built by a lone individual. they require the collective efforts & resources of a community to develop.
likewise, law enforcement, emergency services, courts, etc. are all public services that a modern society needs to function. because most people don't want to live in a dog eat dog world where might makes right, we establish social institutions to ensure law and order and promote social justice. these institutions do far more for public safety on a day to day basis than a ridiculously expensive military.
and because most people have the foresight to see that fundamental research, space exploration, ecological conservation, and the arts all serve the long-term interests of a society, the government also has the responsibility of funding these admittedly loftier endeavors. if you want to live in a country whose government is only interested in military defense, then move to a nation under military dictatorship. you don't need a democratic government that protects free speech, free press, ensures due process, regulates health standards, and ensures their nation is at the forefront of science & technology, etc. to have an armed forces.
i can see your line of reason, but if we go by that definition then what is an energy source really just depends on the available technology.
right now the primary method of producing hydrogen is through electrolysis of water, and the primary means of extracting energy from hydrogen is through catalysis with oxygen to create water. since producing hydrogen in this way involves higher potentials than the total reduction potentials using a state-of-the-art fuel cell, there is a net energy loss. and even if an electrolysis technique could be created that involved no overpotential, such as by using a hydrogenase enzyme, there would still be no net energy gain by extracting energy from hydrogen in this way. therefore hydrogen would not be an energy source using the electrolysis-fuel-cell/oxidation-reduction hydrogen economy.
however, if we can produce hydrogen by different means, such as finding a natural source of pure hydrogen, or extract energy out of hydrogen by a more efficient means, such as using hydrogen isotopes in nuclear fusion, then hydrogen would be an energy source. just because current technology focuses on using hydrogen as an energy carrier rather than an energy source doesn't mean that hydrogen can't be an energy source.
i mean, obviously trying to store energy by converting water to hydrogen + oxygen, and then trying to re-extract that energy by converting them back to water is never going to be net energy positive, since no technology/electrochemical reaction can be more than 100% efficient. but that just makes hydrogen not an energy source in the context of current fuel cell technology.
if by "he" you mean the author of the summary, then perhaps yes. but if you're referring to Seth Shostak, the SETI guy, then that isn't what he's arguing at all. here's the excerpt FTA:
what's offensive is very subjective. and as history has shown, people can get offended by just about anything. the SimCopter easter egg sounds like it was meant to be more humorous than offensive. but i guess some people are offended by the sight of homosexuals, or perhaps just think that video games should not acknowledge the existence of homosexuality (after all, it might turn our children gay!).
for those interested, the guy responsible for the SimCopter easter egg is now a member of the culture jamming activist group, the yes men. but be warned, if you're offended by the sight of pixelated men in kissing in a video game, you might want not want to click on that link.
exactly. middle and lower class individuals don't have off-shore tax-free bank accounts. and even if they did, they wouldn't keep as much of their income in it.
if you give a tax break to a family making $50,000 a year or less, they're more likely to spend it, thus reinvesting it back into the economy. that's because a low-income family has to spend all of their income just to pay for food, shelter, and other basic necessities.
that's why Reaganomics/trickle-down theory is pure nonsense. if you want to stimulate the economy by giving tax cuts to the public, then why not give that money directly to masses who will actually spend that money and put it back into the economy? why would you give it all to a rich minority and hope that it will "trickle down"? someone with 600 million dollars in the bank isn't going to spend any more money just because they receive another 2 million dollars from the government.
the proven way to stimulate a flagging economy is through public works projects, preferably projects with great public value such as the Hoover dam. not only are you directly putting money back into the economy, but you're also building useful public infrastructure rather than throwing it away on new yachts or mansions for the rich.
and what loony extreme would that be? moral/logical consistency?
a "free distribution" by definition needs to be "free" in the FOSS sense. they're simply modifying the definition to elaborate on an issue that had been overlooked up until now.
no one is forcing you to use a free distribution. and the FSF hasn't condemned the Fedora project for taking the pragmatic approach. but it would hypocritical for them to overlook the issue of proprietary firmware blobs in their definition of free distributions after the issue has been raised by members of the community.
i'm a pragmatist too. i run Windows XP because the programs i use for work are Windows-only. but i'm not going to bitch about FSF not including my Windows XP Professional distribution in their definition of a free system just because someone "philosophically disagreed" with an OS.
true. new technologies always start off prohibitively expensive, but a killer application--or in this case, implementation--could drive widespread adoption to the point where economies of scale come into play.
while you may be right about some aspects of the Middle English creole hypothesis, the Norman conquest of England certainly had a profound effect on the evolution of the English language. language is a social/cultural construct. subsequently, its evolution is inextricably tied to the social & cultural development of a region. after all, a diachronic analysis is meaningless without historic context.
the fact of the matter is, the Norman conquest was a vital chapter in the historic narrative of the British isles. i would be very surprised if 300-odd-years of Norman rule had no effect whatsoever on the development of modern English. i mean, the Normans basically supplanted the English ruling class, replacing the entire English nobility with new Anglo-Norman-speaking Norman nobility.
it's true that the (disproportionately large number of) French and Norman loanwords used in the English language were largely borrowed after 1400, by which time English had returned to use in government and in the king's court. and the grammatical changes in English followed a pattern shared by many other Germanic languages. but the Great Vowel Shift was almost certainly influenced by Norman occupation in some way or another.
it should be noted that this (1200-1600) was the time when the language of the aristocracy was gradually shifting from French to English. this likely changed the prestige accent of English by making it sound more French in style. another possibility is that due to England being at war with France throughout much of this period, the French-speaking nobility may have been more susceptible to hypercorrection in an attempt to change pronounciation to something sounding "more English."
in fact, the shift from French to English as the language of the aristocracy/ruling-class may have contributed more to the rapid changes undergone by the English language to form modern English than the period of Norman rule immediately after William's conquest of England. firstly, William and his successors up to, and including, the early Plantagenets, such as Angevin kings, were all absentee rulers for the most part. the administrative system William set up allowed he and his successors to rule from France by writ. similarly, the early Anglo-Norman barons were also largely absentee landowners, who consider France their true home, and spent the majority of their time in France.
so it would make sense that it wasn't until much later, after the Anglo-Norman nobility had begun assimilating and interacting directly with the native English population, that these transformations in the English language began to take place. this was also the time of the Great Plague, which drove mass migrations to the South East of England causing different dialects and accents to intermingle and modify each other in order to standardize pronounciation. the rise of the middle class in London and upward social mobility caused by the pandemic hitting the aristocracy could also have driven (or accelerated) social interactions between the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and the English masses.
while i don't doubt that electronic warfare is being actively developed by other nations (i'm sure the U.S. armed forces aren't the only military interested in, or actively developing, electronic warfare tactics), i wouldn't put it past the MIC to exaggerate the risk of electronic attacks in order to manipulate the public. it certainly wouldn't be the first time the public was mislead about our nation's defense in order to funnel tax dollars into unnecessary defense projects. and now with war logistics being an more lucrative than ever through the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) and its cost-plus award-fee contracts, even more more private sector companies have a vested interest in seeing a renewed Cold-War-type international tension and corresponding military spending.
it's just too bad Americans never heeded Eisenhower's farewell address. of course, if more people working in the defense industry were truly patriotic, they'd all be as morally enlightened as you, and the MIC wouldn't exist.
it looks like a physical mockup, not a 3D render. most publicity/promo photos are cleaned up a fair bit to give them an unrealistically "perfect" look, but these are pretty clearly touched up photos rather than 3D renders.
and if you go to the Pilotfish website, you'll see that these publicity shots are exactly the same look/feel as those of their other products (which have already been released).
but no doubt there'll still be some paranoid arm-chair digital imaging experts screaming "fake!" or "photoshopped!" over these photos.
RTFA. that's a taskbar, not a crease. you can disable/remove the taskbar to use the entire screen for a single image/application/etc.
that doesn't explain why people in Tokyo pay 36% less per month than residents of L.A. or N.Y.C. for broadband service. they pay less than 2/3 the monthly fees for over 9x the bandwidth--and that bandwidth is symmetrical, which in the U.S. would be considered leased lines, or business connections, and cost even more.
the U.S. has a lot of sparsely-populated rural areas, but most people still live in big cities or their surrounding suburbs. it's not like we're Australia, Canada or Russia. and we don't have a nationalized broadband industry where people in the city are subsidizing rural communities. if we were, i could understand the huge disparity in the cost of bandwidth between us and other developed nations (in 2007 Japanese residents were paying $0.36 per Mbps versus the $5.98 per Mbps we pay here in the U.S.).
actually, Bigfin squids were first discovered in 1907, and the species in this particular video isn't new either. if you're talking about this particular specimen that's captured the video, then you may be right. but otherwise, deep sea drilling hasn't contributed much to our scientific understanding of this species.
great law indeed. i'd never heard of Magnuson-Moss before, but i wish the conspicuous disclosure of terms and conditions provision were more generally applied to cover all business contracts and advertising. perhaps it'd mitigate "small print syndrome" and other deceptive business practices.
maybe then instead of pouring millions of dollars into marketing/advertising and other manipulative business practices, companies will instead have to put that money into R&D to develop competitive products/technologies and succeed based purely on their technical merits (instead of, say, lobbying/bribing/tricking standard-setting bodies to adopt your proprietary technology as an industry standard).
i mean, things like films, music, clothes, etc. are highly subjective, thus they inherently rely on promotional advertising/marketing to gain exposure, after which each work can be propelled on its own creative/aesthetic merits. however, technology should to be judged on its technical merits, not which company has the biggest marketing budget or the most lobbying power to buy their own industry standards.
i was actually referring to the same story, but i thought it was 100 MB. however, upon some more research it seems that 100MB/sec residential connections have been the norm in Japan for about 4 years now, so 1 Gbps (128 MB/sec) isn't much of an increase. it seems that Koreans are also enjoying residential fibre-optic broadband.
meanwhile, Comcast pompously refers to their 22 Mbps and 50 Mbps (2.75 MB/sec and 6.25 MB/sec) connections as "wideband" internet access. the state of residential internet access in the U.S. is an absolute joke compared to the widespread FttH symmetric broadband services being provided in other countries.
yea, that video gave me the chills. at first it looked sorta like the alien from Independence Day, but about 100 times creepier. but once i actually understood what i was seeing, i was just in awe at the beauty of such a bizarre living creature. these kinds of discoveries just emphasize the reason we need to support ecological conservation all the more. imagine all of the millions of other bizarre and beautiful creatures out there still unknown to science.
for those who are interested in other video clips of Magnapinnidae, here's a page with several short clips and screen captures. most of them are poor quality, as they seem to be VHS-rips, but the 6th and 8th clips are pretty amazing.
the Micron video shows a 2-drive setup performance of 200,000 I/Os per second. (2KB) random read = ~400MB/sec.
a benchmark performed by Linux.com also shows that SSD absolutely creams SATA, even 6 SATA drives in RAID 6, in terms of random seek. in other tests a single Mtron 16GB SSD gave 111 MB/s sustained read with .1 ms access time, outstripping the WD Raptor 150, which was the fastest SATA drive at the time the test was performed (12/13/07). the only area where SSD lags behind is random write, which it suffered 23% over the raptor. but with the several-fold increases in I/Os per second achieved by Micron's PCIe cards, even random write speeds would be be faster than normal mechanical rotating drives.
that's still not quite as impressive as 1600 MB/sec throughput using 2 drives (which can be integrated into a single-card solution).
yes, that was one of the causes, but generally these kinds of major disasters happen due to the confluence of multiple chance mishaps/mistakes. and i'm basing my information off of an episode of "Air Crash Investigation" that was aired on NatGeo, so take it for what you will. but to the best of my recollection, the NTSB investigation attributed the crash to these causes:
but regardless of which circumstance you want to attribute as the ultimate cause of the accident, better situational awareness of everyone's location on the ground would have prevented this runway collision.
like they say, there's more than one way to skin a cat. however, this system is here now. the technology has been tested for over several years and proven itself to be effective. and there are things that can be done about the cost. GPS was really expensive when it first came out as well, but now it's relatively cheap to get a GPS navigation system. by standardizing the design for the cockpit device, it can be produced more cheaply by many manufacturers. and if it's a standard feature on all planes, that will also reduce unit costs, in addition to distributing the cost of operating the satellites across millions of planes.
the data speaks for itself. i don't think it has anything to do with satellites being "cool." if you can design a safe radar alternative to this system, you could present it to the FAA for their consideration. but if there are no other alternatives available, then what is wrong with the FAA adopting this technology?
besides, how would you transmit weather data from the national weather service without using satellites? how would you provide coverage outside of radar range? and if you're using GPS satellites for tracking planes, you're still using satellites, but i think only military planes using GPS with their transponders.
while i agree that the post 9/11 airport security measures and completely pointless and make flying an absolute nightmare, that does not negate the benefits of this new system.
firstly, it's not the lack of "airspace" that this system is addressing. ADS-B provides more accurate/precise information to pilots in addition to having far more extensive coverage than radar. not only are they getting weather & air traffic information for improved situational awareness in the air, but this technology is also being used to help pilots navigate on the tarmac:
in fact the worst plane accident in history (excluding the 9-11 attacks, which were deliberate terrorist acts) was the Tenerife airport disaster (1977) which involved the collision of two 747s on the runway. since pilots rely so heavily on air traffic controllers to help them navigate the runway, a simple miscommunication due to a language barrier between the pilot and the tower caused one of the 747s to be parked directly in the path of another 747 preparing for take-off. and because looking out the window was the only other way for pilots to see their surroundings (and avoid collisions), the heavy fog covering the airport that day obscured the two planes from each other until it was too late. this accident could easily have been prevented if ADS-B had been in place, since the pilots in both planes would have been able to clearly see their relative position to each other and to the layout of the runway system.
lastly, i want to point out the crash of Avianca Flight 52 in 1990. this incident occurred during foggy conditions as well, but this time the root cause of the accident was due to the 707 being put in a holding pattern for over an hour until they literally ran out of fuel and crashed. the 707 was actually given priority landing right before they ran out of fuel, however due to bad wind shear info given by the flight controllers the plane dropped below the glideslope, resulting a missed approach. however, they didn't have enough fuel for a second approach. the engines flamed out; the plane lost power; and then it crashed.
accurate weather info, more tightly spaced landings, less time in holding patterns, and less fuel expended for landings would all improve the safety and efficacy of commercial air travel. perhaps if the planes on the ground that night had been able to taxi themselves using the ADS-B display, the decreased workload on the tower controllers would have allowed them to land more planes in a shorter amount of time--maybe ev
their infrastructure is designed for binary data--1's and 0's. it doesn't matter whether those 1's and 0's are used to make text or multimedia.
it's not like we're all still using dial-up connections and are expecting to stream HD-video over them. the reason streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive applications have become so popular is because the technology and infrastructure has progressed to the point where these are now practical uses of internet access. aside from rare companies like the BBC, who are early adopters in order to be technological leaders in their industry, most commercial companies aren't going to develop an application that depends on technological infrastructure that isn't widely available yet.
there's a symbiotic relationship between technology/infrastructure and application/usage. it's cutting-edge applications that gain popular usage which drive technological progress and infrastructure upgrades. but at the same time, it's the widespread adoption of new technologies and infrastructure upgrades that stimulate the development of new applications, and change the way people use technology. the public can't make use of technology that isn't available to them.
the reason ISPs in the U.S. are struggling, and their service quality is so poor is because of two things: shortsightedness and greed. greed drove them to oversell their networks by way too much. their shortsightedness caused them to think this business model was sustainable. the Japanese have already begun efforts to make 100 Mbit residential connections a nationwide standard. they saw where technology was headed, and they've been gradually making headway over the years to upgrade their infrastructure to keep up with demand. there's no reason why U.S. ISPs couldn't have done the same. it's because they've gotten used to abusing their monopolies that their networks have become overloaded. and they still think that they should dictate how consumers use their internet access.
wow, brilliant deduction! because, up until now we were all expecting to receive internet access for free.
anyone who's looked at broadband costs/availability in different parts of the world knows that ISPs in certain countries have a charge-more-for-less attitude. part of this is due to their being unregulated natural monopolies, thus being able to do whatever they want. part of it is due to pro-business/anti-consumer attitudes that dominate our culture. but at least part of the blame rests on ignorant members of the public who buy the "pirates are stealing your internet speeds!!!!11" BS put out by greedy ISPs, who all the while continue to oversell far beyond their network capacity.
bandwidth isn't a limited natural resource. if public demand for internet bandwidth increases, you just increase the network capacity and make more money. if you want to increase your subscription base, you need to upgrade your network to match the increase traffic load. that's just common sense. but some ISPs seem to want to increase their number of subscribers without matching increases in network capacity. and now they're trying to shift blame for the poor service quality on "power users" for actually using the internet connections they paid for.
so rather than upgrading their networks to conform to changes in internet usage like Japanese, Korean and European ISPs are doing, U.S. ISPs are instead wasting money on traffic monitoring & packet analysis/shaping technology. in other words, rather than increasing network capacity to meet public internet usage, they're trying to manipulate public internet usage to conform to their insufficient network capacity & business model.
it's no wonder many communities are establishing their own municipal WiFi/WiMax networks rather than getting reamed by commercial ISPs for subpar service.
how so? i register on websites with pseudonyms all the time. this does not trouble me at all (other than the fact a grown woman would conspire with her daughter to bully a neighbor's kid, especially a young girl with emotional problems).
the problem isn't with the interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in this particular case. the problem is with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act itself. this incident actually resulted in the death of a girl and was motivated by deliberate malice. a maximum (which are rarely handed out to members of privileged social groups) of 3 years in jail and $300,000 doesn't seem any more ridiculous than handing out such punishments to well-intending security experts.
i would be more disturbed by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act being applied to non-malicious teenage hackers breaking into un-secured government networks out of curiosity. if they can be faulted for "damages" that include the time spent investigating the intrusion and fixing the pre-existing security flaws, then certainly a grown woman can be punished for causing the death of a little girl.
in any case, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act needs major reforms, and perhaps making such ridiculous laws applicable to the general population will open people's eyes.