We have the science, we have had the science, but a republican dominated government refused to provide the funding that would have allowed the Army Corp. of Engineers to Build levies that both the Governor and Mayor have been requesting for years before this happened.
I think you mean reduced the funding and used it for other things that most people don't agree with.
Not refused to provide. It's subtle, but not the same.
1 - Water, provided in the Astrodome, additional sources being transported in as needed.
Five days later - after three days without potable (drinkable) water - and now almost all water in the area is contaminated with E.coli (many sources report this, including the Wall Street Journal).
2 - Food, provided in the Astrodome, additional sources being transported in as needed.
Five days later - again, when I posted it at the time it was not the case that people could get food.
3 - Clothing, being donated to the evacuees by several sources including local and national; both public and private.
Help up by national authorities - some of it is still, more than a week later, being held up by federal authorities. Source - print edition of today's (Tuesday Sept 6th) Wall Street Journal.
4 - Shelter - *ahem* ASTRODOME.
You obviously haven't been paying attention. Maslow talks about safe and secure shelter. Obviously not the case for almost an entire week.
Here's an experiment. Let's airdrop you into someplace and impose the same conditions on you. Then see if you "lose your cool" in a city with more weapons than people. We'll give you food, half a day's travel from where we leave you, after five days, and water after six days. All the local supplies will have rotting corpses, sewer backwash, and debris.
I doubt you'll be as rational as you think from your safe and secure posting place.
70 years ago, most patents were public and used to create new things - in the last ten years it's shifted so much that most patents are used to hamper development and creation, much as lawyers are.
and if you're an IP or patent lawyer and offended by what I just said, ask yourself why your field has quintupled in size over just the last ten years?
is because they used way too many acronyms and way too confusing words to describe it in the first place.
80 percent of the battle is always marketing - the reason my first commercial (non-military) applications were used by so many people is we wrote it to a grade 10 level for a group that had to have a high school graduation, and we avoided acronyms where ever we could, never assuming anything.
I was in school in New Orleans, no idea when it will start again. It is scary situation...
I just got an email today that the University of Washington and other universities and colleges will take students from the disaster area here, so they can complete their studies while the city is being fixed up (at least thru the end of the semester that starts
I was in school in New Orleans, no idea when it will start again. It is scary situation...
I just got an email today that the http://www.uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=11910" >University of Washington and other universities and colleges will take students from the disaster area here, so they can complete their studies while the city is being fixed up (at least thru the end of the semester that starts
You know how cranky you get when you miss breakfast? Multiply that times a thousand per person.
I think it's more likely dehydration and the lack of a potable (drinkable) water supply - people start having problems after 72 hours without water, but you can survive more than a month without food.
That plus seeing lots of busses take all the fancy hotel guests away while they get left to rot, and seeing lots of helicopters go by without dropping any food and water...
Web Kiosks? Are you kidding? How are they going to work underwater and without power?
Floating bathtubs with fuel cells and a solar cell array of course!
Oh, and an outboard penguin.
.
.
Of course, you can always get a sealed unit, in plastic, with a battery for power, but most of the survivors are no longer under water - those are the ones who didn't survive that are under water.
Another possibility is airdrop them onto the tops of buildings, which solves all the problems, with a standard battery and solar cell like those ones you see on the highways. Use wireless to negotiate and cache the results so it can burst the info and survive on low power.
Seeing as how FEMA has no money left, they can probably use the help the next time a US city is hit.
Good point, but the goal is that you plug into one of those projects and help them out, with things like uploading the city directories of names, or whatever.
What pisses me off, is that considering we've blown something like two hundred billion in Iraq over the time we've been there... and the Government's saw fit to expend that much... What have they done to correct this? Bureaucrats are wonderful at throwing money at problems to either solve them or make them go away. Considering the 200B we've blown in a war we shouldn't be involved in, if we, in contrat, took ONE PERCENT of that, Two Billion, how much of a difference would that make? I fail to see how whenever natural disasters happen, the responsibility falls on the hands of Nonprofit Organizations and Celebrities, or big Companies like Office Depot who, as of this morning, had a logo emblazoned on their main page stating their benevolent actions of donating a million. Wonderful advertising schema, really.
Very good points. As someone's who has actually built levees and other flood control mechanisms - and built bridges, airports, and roads when they were destroyed during my service in the Army - I find it extremely aggravating that noone was airlifting clean potable water supplies - or even setting up water treatment centers - for almost five days.
actually, the people who should be dealing with ICU and Kidney dialysis patients are those trained to do that - most people don't have those skills - but a lot of slashdots have the skill to create Linux web services for the refugess - and it's something you can do remotely to help as well.
Let's say you live in Seattle or NYC. Other than donations to a reputable group, another useful thing you can do is help with a project that sets up a way for the survivors to locate friends, relatives, and family - either to live with them (cause many have no homes anymore), to contact (to say they're alive), or to get peace of mind (knowing who lived or died in their family).
Cell phones are one thing, but they don't list who your relatives are or let you search or update.
Other than that, maybe drinkable potable water supplies, but not everyone knows how to do that.
Expecting people to be angels when you haven't satisfied their primary needs of: 1. Water - yes, this is 1 - and potable too; 2. Food - and it has to be ethnically acceptable too; 3. Clothing - and sitting around in 110 degree temperatures when you may not have been dressed for it in the first place... 4. Shelter - this basically means dry shelter;
but basically, if you haven't met at least the first seven levels, and it sounds like most people there haven't even had the first four levels met, you will act in ways that few people would believe.
Add that to seeing bus service laid on to evac the hotel guests while they wouldn't even use the trains to get you out, and you might be a bit miffed - and you can forget about civility.
But, hey, I'm just repeating my Army training guidelines...
patents the business process of filing for patents for obvious things that should have been excluded from being patented because prior art exists for them.
It will shortly be followed up by a patent for the business process of filing patents for software.
Just a question. This patent seems completely stupid, but are there valid examples of patented technologies that anybody can provide, or does everyone here hate patents in total?
I like my patent for a man-gorilla hybrid personally. That reminds me, a certain resident owes me a check for his license fee...
But we used to have more public patents, or institutional patents held by universities and colleges - now it seems like it's less so.
[in regards to my patent concept for delivering virus programs thru a USB or other device port]
Well now, I think that is a geat idea!
*runs off to patent office*
Darn. See, that's why even though my grandfather had a patent on radiators (true), I've relied mostly on copyrights, with over 100 works on file in the Library of Congress and in other nation's repositories....
Each day it just gets stranger and stranger and the excuses get more and more unbelievable for why it is this way.
What occurred to me is that there's something rather bizarre about how little interest has been generated by the complete destruction of a major US city a few days ago. I've barely blinked (sent money, couldn't do anything else, shrugged and went back to work) and in general there seems to have been a lot less fuss than I certainly would have imagined something like this would prompt.
Well, when almost everything coming out in the news nowadays is part of a long string of unending failures, why are you surprised?
It's like the fact that few people care about processor speed anymore and Net speeds are what matters.
This is like saying that Chrysler must accept Toyota. No they damn well don't and if they want to run a competition to put them out of business, then that's their decision.
Well, it's called marketshare. Right now Toyota and Honda are eating Chrysler, GM, and Ford's shorts, because they sell Hybrids that are mass-manufactured - and thus cheaper and more reliable - while Ford et al sell hand-made hybrids and reluctantly at that.
While gas goes above $3 a gallon (twice what it was before the current Failure-de-chef), the market is demanding FEWER Giant Trucks and Giant SUVs - just as the market is demanding the OS price drops when laptops sell for less than $500.
So, yeah, Bill G could increase his burn rate on the $80 billion in cash - but he can only do so for so long.
Remember when IBM was a giant and MSFT was teeny - the same holds true for MSFT and OSDL today in terms of Win vs Linux/BSD.
And here I thought a lot of the earnings I get were from the billions in cash Microsoft had...
As to your comments on Palm, they split into Palm and PalmSource quite a while ago - one provides the OS (which WinCE competes with), the other provides the actual devices which use the OS.
And that battle is mostly on cellphones and MP3 players nowadays, not the traditional PDA.
I basically agree, though I think you didn't word the criticism directly enough. The deeper point revealed by the "serious" publication of this kind of tripe is that America is moving to a police state where the convenience of the police is a primary consideration over the freedoms and rights of the citizens. Since they (the political monopolists, not the police) want to monitor everything and everyone in search of their political enemies, then of course they want to maximize the convenience of the process. Searching for terrorists is just an excuse for standardizing browsers in this specific case, and the police are just the hired agents.
Every day in every way we become more and more like our old enemies.
When will they start building the giant barbed wire walls and demanding our papers while the killer dogs sniff us?
Why blame the tool, when anyone can roll their own browser anyway, and that's been the case since Mosaic? Heck, half the "information" that law enforcement thinks is "true" can be faked, since it's all http requests in the first case.
Never mind the possibility that your neighborhood script kiddie hacked your laptop over the wireless and zombied it, or piggybacked over the wire, or broke into your house and logged on as you, or wandered into a room when you went on break to run the exploit, or severed your finger to activate the fingerprint reader (true story of that), or...
But you get the drift.
It's the same as it was back in the 80s when I was Acting Security Officer in Pacific Region - most of the hacks are by clueless n00bs who leave a trail any competent investigator can follow, and ninety percent of the security is defeated easily by social engineering, not by techie toys.
I'm sure the Gestapo complained about having to file reports when they interrogated people - even though the methods they used got them no better information than an intelligent investigator could have had if they'd used their brains instead of taking the easy way out.
The question is, due you want to believe the fine folks at the EU's intelsat (which is the BBC link) or the US NOAA satellites.
Keep in mind, one group is known for lying about global warming due to certain policy decisions - and the other one has no interest in lying about it.
But I was reading on ScienceDirect a paper on the Antartic Ozone Hole growth just recently, based on US data, which said that it indeed was growing at a record pace, so take that for what you will.
Now if we could just get some data from, say, China or Japan's satellites, that might clarify the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
We have the science, we have had the science, but a republican dominated government refused to provide the funding that would have allowed the Army Corp. of Engineers to Build levies that both the Governor and Mayor have been requesting for years before this happened.
I think you mean reduced the funding and used it for other things that most people don't agree with.
Not refused to provide. It's subtle, but not the same.
1 - Water, provided in the Astrodome, additional sources being transported in as needed.
Five days later - after three days without potable (drinkable) water - and now almost all water in the area is contaminated with E.coli (many sources report this, including the Wall Street Journal).
2 - Food, provided in the Astrodome, additional sources being transported in as needed.
Five days later - again, when I posted it at the time it was not the case that people could get food.
3 - Clothing, being donated to the evacuees by several sources including local and national; both public and private.
Help up by national authorities - some of it is still, more than a week later, being held up by federal authorities. Source - print edition of today's (Tuesday Sept 6th) Wall Street Journal.
4 - Shelter - *ahem* ASTRODOME.
You obviously haven't been paying attention. Maslow talks about safe and secure shelter. Obviously not the case for almost an entire week.
Here's an experiment. Let's airdrop you into someplace and impose the same conditions on you. Then see if you "lose your cool" in a city with more weapons than people. We'll give you food, half a day's travel from where we leave you, after five days, and water after six days. All the local supplies will have rotting corpses, sewer backwash, and debris.
I doubt you'll be as rational as you think from your safe and secure posting place.
what the hell is the world coming to? XML is a PLAIN TEXT FILE! How can you patent a format? It is like a recipe, you can't patent that?
If they can patent a menu, they can patent a recipe.
.
.
Welcome to Soviet Amerika. Orwell was only off by twenty years.
70 years ago, most patents were public and used to create new things - in the last ten years it's shifted so much that most patents are used to hamper development and creation, much as lawyers are.
and if you're an IP or patent lawyer and offended by what I just said, ask yourself why your field has quintupled in size over just the last ten years?
is because they used way too many acronyms and way too confusing words to describe it in the first place.
80 percent of the battle is always marketing - the reason my first commercial (non-military) applications were used by so many people is we wrote it to a grade 10 level for a group that had to have a high school graduation, and we avoided acronyms where ever we could, never assuming anything.
Sadly, it's still true.
I was in school in New Orleans, no idea when it will start again. It is scary situation...
I just got an email today that the University of Washington and other universities and colleges will take students from the disaster area here, so they can complete their studies while the city is being fixed up (at least thru the end of the semester that starts
I was in school in New Orleans, no idea when it will start again. It is scary situation...
" >University of Washington and other universities and colleges will take students from the disaster area here, so they can complete their studies while the city is being fixed up (at least thru the end of the semester that starts
I just got an email today that the http://www.uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=11910
You know how cranky you get when you miss breakfast? Multiply that times a thousand per person.
...
I think it's more likely dehydration and the lack of a potable (drinkable) water supply - people start having problems after 72 hours without water, but you can survive more than a month without food.
That plus seeing lots of busses take all the fancy hotel guests away while they get left to rot, and seeing lots of helicopters go by without dropping any food and water
Web Kiosks? Are you kidding? How are they going to work underwater and without power?
Floating bathtubs with fuel cells and a solar cell array of course!
Oh, and an outboard penguin.
.
.
Of course, you can always get a sealed unit, in plastic, with a battery for power, but most of the survivors are no longer under water - those are the ones who didn't survive that are under water.
Another possibility is airdrop them onto the tops of buildings, which solves all the problems, with a standard battery and solar cell like those ones you see on the highways. Use wireless to negotiate and cache the results so it can burst the info and survive on low power.
Seeing as how FEMA has no money left, they can probably use the help the next time a US city is hit.
unless you're using it. Same logic that applies to services and TCP/IP ports applies to all communications devices.
Except some of the more modern devices are designed to broadcast even when you "turn them off".
Good point, but the goal is that you plug into one of those projects and help them out, with things like uploading the city directories of names, or whatever.
What pisses me off, is that considering we've blown something like two hundred billion in Iraq over the time we've been there... and the Government's saw fit to expend that much... What have they done to correct this? Bureaucrats are wonderful at throwing money at problems to either solve them or make them go away. Considering the 200B we've blown in a war we shouldn't be involved in, if we, in contrat, took ONE PERCENT of that, Two Billion, how much of a difference would that make? I fail to see how whenever natural disasters happen, the responsibility falls on the hands of Nonprofit Organizations and Celebrities, or big Companies like Office Depot who, as of this morning, had a logo emblazoned on their main page stating their benevolent actions of donating a million. Wonderful advertising schema, really.
Very good points. As someone's who has actually built levees and other flood control mechanisms - and built bridges, airports, and roads when they were destroyed during my service in the Army - I find it extremely aggravating that noone was airlifting clean potable water supplies - or even setting up water treatment centers - for almost five days.
That, to be explicit, is insane.
Failures like this shouldn't be tolerated.
actually, the people who should be dealing with ICU and Kidney dialysis patients are those trained to do that - most people don't have those skills - but a lot of slashdots have the skill to create Linux web services for the refugess - and it's something you can do remotely to help as well.
Let's say you live in Seattle or NYC. Other than donations to a reputable group, another useful thing you can do is help with a project that sets up a way for the survivors to locate friends, relatives, and family - either to live with them (cause many have no homes anymore), to contact (to say they're alive), or to get peace of mind (knowing who lived or died in their family).
Cell phones are one thing, but they don't list who your relatives are or let you search or update.
Other than that, maybe drinkable potable water supplies, but not everyone knows how to do that.
of Needs.
...
...
Expecting people to be angels when you haven't satisfied their primary needs of:
1. Water - yes, this is 1 - and potable too;
2. Food - and it has to be ethnically acceptable too;
3. Clothing - and sitting around in 110 degree temperatures when you may not have been dressed for it in the first place
4. Shelter - this basically means dry shelter;
but basically, if you haven't met at least the first seven levels, and it sounds like most people there haven't even had the first four levels met, you will act in ways that few people would believe.
Add that to seeing bus service laid on to evac the hotel guests while they wouldn't even use the trains to get you out, and you might be a bit miffed - and you can forget about civility.
But, hey, I'm just repeating my Army training guidelines
patents the business process of filing for patents for obvious things that should have been excluded from being patented because prior art exists for them.
It will shortly be followed up by a patent for the business process of filing patents for software.
I for one welcome our insane Patent Overlords.
Just a question. This patent seems completely stupid, but are there valid examples of patented technologies that anybody can provide, or does everyone here hate patents in total?
...
I like my patent for a man-gorilla hybrid personally. That reminds me, a certain resident owes me a check for his license fee
But we used to have more public patents, or institutional patents held by universities and colleges - now it seems like it's less so.
[in regards to my patent concept for delivering virus programs thru a USB or other device port]
....
Well now, I think that is a geat idea!
*runs off to patent office*
Darn. See, that's why even though my grandfather had a patent on radiators (true), I've relied mostly on copyrights, with over 100 works on file in the Library of Congress and in other nation's repositories
Each day it just gets stranger and stranger and the excuses get more and more unbelievable for why it is this way.
I do. But now they seem to be used to fight legal wars and stop technological and engineering advances, instead of promoting them.
... then Creative would owe me money ...
Sigh.
Maybe I should file a patent for delivering virus programs with a USB or other plug-in computer device
What occurred to me is that there's something rather bizarre about how little interest has been generated by the complete destruction of a major US city a few days ago. I've barely blinked (sent money, couldn't do anything else, shrugged and went back to work) and in general there seems to have been a lot less fuss than I certainly would have imagined something like this would prompt.
Well, when almost everything coming out in the news nowadays is part of a long string of unending failures, why are you surprised?
It's like the fact that few people care about processor speed anymore and Net speeds are what matters.
This is like saying that Chrysler must accept Toyota. No they damn well don't and if they want to run a competition to put them out of business, then that's their decision.
Well, it's called marketshare. Right now Toyota and Honda are eating Chrysler, GM, and Ford's shorts, because they sell Hybrids that are mass-manufactured - and thus cheaper and more reliable - while Ford et al sell hand-made hybrids and reluctantly at that.
While gas goes above $3 a gallon (twice what it was before the current Failure-de-chef), the market is demanding FEWER Giant Trucks and Giant SUVs - just as the market is demanding the OS price drops when laptops sell for less than $500.
So, yeah, Bill G could increase his burn rate on the $80 billion in cash - but he can only do so for so long.
Remember when IBM was a giant and MSFT was teeny - the same holds true for MSFT and OSDL today in terms of Win vs Linux/BSD.
And here I thought a lot of the earnings I get were from the billions in cash Microsoft had ...
As to your comments on Palm, they split into Palm and PalmSource quite a while ago - one provides the OS (which WinCE competes with), the other provides the actual devices which use the OS.
And that battle is mostly on cellphones and MP3 players nowadays, not the traditional PDA.
I basically agree, though I think you didn't word the criticism directly enough. The deeper point revealed by the "serious" publication of this kind of tripe is that America is moving to a police state where the convenience of the police is a primary consideration over the freedoms and rights of the citizens. Since they (the political monopolists, not the police) want to monitor everything and everyone in search of their political enemies, then of course they want to maximize the convenience of the process. Searching for terrorists is just an excuse for standardizing browsers in this specific case, and the police are just the hired agents.
Every day in every way we become more and more like our old enemies.
When will they start building the giant barbed wire walls and demanding our papers while the killer dogs sniff us?
Why blame the tool, when anyone can roll their own browser anyway, and that's been the case since Mosaic? Heck, half the "information" that law enforcement thinks is "true" can be faked, since it's all http requests in the first case.
...
Never mind the possibility that your neighborhood script kiddie hacked your laptop over the wireless and zombied it, or piggybacked over the wire, or broke into your house and logged on as you, or wandered into a room when you went on break to run the exploit, or severed your finger to activate the fingerprint reader (true story of that), or
But you get the drift.
It's the same as it was back in the 80s when I was Acting Security Officer in Pacific Region - most of the hacks are by clueless n00bs who leave a trail any competent investigator can follow, and ninety percent of the security is defeated easily by social engineering, not by techie toys.
I'm sure the Gestapo complained about having to file reports when they interrogated people - even though the methods they used got them no better information than an intelligent investigator could have had if they'd used their brains instead of taking the easy way out.
The question is, due you want to believe the fine folks at the EU's intelsat (which is the BBC link) or the US NOAA satellites.
Keep in mind, one group is known for lying about global warming due to certain policy decisions - and the other one has no interest in lying about it.
But I was reading on ScienceDirect a paper on the Antartic Ozone Hole growth just recently, based on US data, which said that it indeed was growing at a record pace, so take that for what you will.
Now if we could just get some data from, say, China or Japan's satellites, that might clarify the issue.