Richard Jewell brought it all on himself by committing a very suspicious crime in regards to the bombing incident: he stole evidence from the crime scene and hid it in his house. He willingly chose to commit criminal activity in regards to the case; no wonder he opened himself up to worse suspicion.
Excuse me, this is the first I've ever heard about this. What did he steal then? How did the stealing of evidence relate to him being the bomber? The press latched onto Jewell because the police leaked he was a suspect. Jewell has won almost every lawsuit he has filed against the media. But think of how a mere $500k judgement against NBC compares to the hundreds of millions up for game in the TV News business.
Really, it is so it shouldn't be. There is nothing the government should do that it should keep hidden from us. If you don't like it, don't read it. If the judiciary does not like what a newspaper prints, it does not have to buy it.
Here you raise a straw man, this isn't something the government is doing on its own, its doing something to someone. Its not the governments rights that are being protected by a publication ban it is that person's. Its not your rights that are being violated, its you being inconvienced to hear the details later.
In a republic, the rights of the individual outweigh the rights of the public. That is why YOUR tax returns are secret and why people fight for privacy in their dealings with the government. The investigation of a crime is not a public event until the trial!
Even then, in many cases regarding minors, the happenings at trial are kept secret to protect those accused.
There is a fine line between the protection you as a citizen get by your trial being public and from the harm that is caused by it. If the press wasn't so keen to publish the acusations and not the results of trial, AND if the public wasn't soo facinated by gossip, then there wouldn't need to be any publication bans. But, the public is fancinated, the media feeds it and feeds from it, but the publics WANT does not make it a Public RIGHT.
What Canada is doing is simply favouring the rights of the individual over the WANTS of the public. The public is gaining nothing in learning the juicy tidbits now rather then later, but to the person who's being acused that time frame is vital.
I am a ex-pat Canadian living in the SF Bay area. One thing that often has irked me is the release of 'facts' in regard to a criminal investigation/case before the accused is put to trial or even arrested. It is often assumed that the public's right to know and the ability of a free press to report is based on the giving the public the 'information' the fastest. Somehow, the press's rush to publicize anything that is found in a criminal trial is deemed more important then the accused right to a fair trial and the freedom from vigililantism that can come from the premature release of 'facts'. Actually given the use of the press by police agencies in the US to 'leak' information regarding an investigation that soils the reputation of the innocent (Richard Jewell), this speed of information disemination actually harms the operation of a free society.
In Canada, it is reasonably assured that the police won't release ANY information regarding an on-going investigation before that information can be presented at trial. So it should be. In Canada, the judiciary often limits what the press can write about only during a limited finite period. Again, so it should be, as long as someone's life is at stake in a proceding, we as a public, can wait for the gossip.
As well, since this example from Canada is in the pre-trial phase a simple US approximization is the Grand Jury, who's proceding ares are often secret forever.
I say to the court, throw out the foriegn correspondants, let the public wait to hear the juicy gossip from the court room! To the people who deam this a infrigment on their rights, wait until you are accused and tried in the press! Ask then where your rights of 'innocent until proven guilty' are and see how much work it is for you to prove your innocence for the rest of your life!
Why oh why do we need to know NOW? Let the officers tell us in their own words what happened when they can be cross examined by the accused!
As the US enforces the 'Patriot Act' and its ilk we will see how prominatly the false accusations will be printed and how hidden the retractments.
Looks like he's acutally tricking IIS into increasing the priority of the particular thread your running on. Nifty, maybe a new exploit. But patentable, 1.5 Million lines of code?? The kids still a fraud.
Although, my first analysis about him just upping the win-modem task priority still might just work.
From a witness at the science show. Turns out he just uped the task priority for the modem. I guess with a win-modem on a slowish computer the driver won't work at 100%. If you increase the priority you will speed it up.
The rest of the story about actually programming, patenting the invention then is utter bullsh*t. This kid should be exposed as the fraud he is.
Henry Raddicks reviews need to be read in full to get some of the jokes he mentions. He has a whole cast of characters (homophobic uncle, poor dog he's always trying some crazy theory on) that he references in many of his reviews..
Examples...
Handbook of Meat Product Technology
An admirably thorough guide to the tools of the production-line meat processing trade. The superb colour photographs particularly made it a perfect gift for my 15 year old daughter who is showing alarming signs of not becoming vegetarian.
God, Why Did Dad Lose His Job?
A truly wonderful guide which has enabled me to explain my recent sacking for vandalising company property to my children in terms of a minor act of redemption. First rate.
I think anyone wanting to comment on this issue as a 'Greedy telcoms want to keep bandwidth away from the masses' should look at the real story of why there is excess dark capacity in the world.
Umm... If you re-read that article it states that to 'light' the 5% of the fibre it cost $255 million dollars. To Light the other 95% the costs would be in the low billions. Considering that there is probably 5 million people in Oregon, that would amount to around $2000 per capita to light the remaining 95%.
So... what happens once we've lit, does everyone get 10 gigabit internet connetions? No! No one gets squat because the fibre isn't connected to anyone.
The reason it was laid down, was that some company's (Worldcom, Global Crossing etc) were able to re-sell dark-capacity to other startups. These company's were able to report massive revenues from selling unused fibre. Thus, more and more company's started up trying to tap into this market. Global Crossing and someothers did oceanic fibre, but others stayed closer to home. They raised money, planted dark-fibre then tried to sell off their dark-capacity for revenue. But... it was just a pyramid scheme and they all went bankrupt.
Just as 'eye-balls' were the currency for.com, dark-fibre was the currency for the telcoms. There wasn't much financial bankground to the idea, but what did that matter if your company now was capable of 100 gigabits between seattle and san francisco?
I believe that in most cases 'Spontanious Human Combustion' it has been shown that the person died from a slow burn of their fat in an oxygen depleted atmosphere. Most = 99%.
In these cases, the person was always
a) alone
b) in a closed room
c) smoking or near a lit fire
d) either intoxicated to the point of unconciousness or already dead from natural causes
e) Mildly to Fully Obese
f) Room has heavy waxy soot on ceiling or high points of the wall
In fact because of the extremely high rate of intoxication among the victums it was thought at one point they died from the alcholol in the blood stream combusting.
What happened really was:
a) Person passes out
b) Cigarette or Fire catches clothing on fire
c) Due to lack of oxygen fire become a slow burn
d) fat from body melts from fire
e) clothing uses molten fat as fuel, ie a human candle
While the heat is strong at the point of the burn, it doesn't turn into a huge fire, thus the lack of damage to other features in the room.
Now, before you go thinking I'm a leftist nutbag liberal socialist , I understand and agree that companies are usually formed for the intended purpose of making a profit. That's all well and good, and making a profit is a wonderful motivator. There's nothing wrong with profit
As a followup to your thought, I would point out that the phrase "doing what's best for the shareholders" has been used to justify behavior far different then making a profit by building a widget cheaper and selling it for more. The problem is that shareholders, in most cases, do not see any money coming from the profit (dividends) and instead only see profit by selling their stock for more then they bought it.
Since mearly holding 100,000 shares of Microsoft gaurantee's you virtualy no return, no matter how big and profitable Microsoft will become, unless you sell your stock and cease being a shareholder. Shareholder interest in being a part of a ethical company will be virtualy nonexistant, since the only way a shareholder can profit is to cease being a shareholder. Maybe if dividends become fashionable (the current market where a profitable company's stock goes down in value might help), we will see a return to ethical company's as the shareholders look for long term returns via dividends rather then shortterm equity investments.
What we see today, with Worldcom, Enron et all, is that CEOs and CFOs have found that rather then the old and tired way of making the widgets better/cheaper, the 'New Economy' methods of hype and fraud make shareholders happier, at least in the short term.
The half of the population who's most fit and most likely to make the trip goes. If my kid is weak and sick and not likely to make it, I would prefer if he/she would die with me, together, rather for them to die alone in the middle of a desert, to be abandoned.
Buy of course, what would happen in real life, is that by the time the two tribes finish killing each other off, and the last few people, all mangled and bleeding try to get across the desert, it starts to rain.
"Regardless, I believe one of the attributes that makes US currency recognizable around the world is its simple color scheme. Its powerful, and looks like no other currency. When color is added to US currency, I fully expect the value of the dolor to drop because it will no longer have the bold, simple 2 color scheme. It will be just like every other paper currency on the world market."
I hope your not serious. The color/shape/size/smell/taste of the physical bill has NOTHING to do with its value in the world market. This has got to be the stupidist argument against coloring/changing the dollar. The forces of the economy, the federal reserve, interest rates and 10000 other things done without even looking at the physical bill have soo much greater impact then someones aesthetic critique.
I hope the reserve has the balls to do this, then order every $1 bill destroyed and replaced with the coin. I've used them (take public transit often here in the US) and they are FAR more convienent then feeding a folded faded dollar bill to pay or get 4 quarters. Having lived in other countries where the constant whining of 'traditionalists' have little weight, I've actually expirieced.. 'progress'. Of course even uttering that word in the States gets you labeled as a 'Liberal'.
I always though american's prided themselves on progess and being the first to do something?
Well I think it should be brought up that erasing with white noise is a very poor way of 'erasing' data.
The best way to erase this tape is to first record over it with other speach by nixon repeatedly, then erase. Finally 'erasing' or destroying the orginal tapes of the speach used to overrecord. Or just have nixon over report with the same mic and equipment saying different things. Without a library of speach to XOR out of any recoverable signal, you'd get nothing. Ecentually you'd be encrypting it with a one time pad.
If you write something on paper, and want to cross it out so no one could read it, don't just squiggle over it, right dummy words until you can ready anything, then squiggle it all out.
I belive my point, was that there is a difference between the fear of contemplating the horrid and it happening. The thing about nuclear that is supposed to scare people about nuclear is that it is invisible. However, it is easily detectable.
I think we all overestimate the amount of fear this could cause by asking people scaring questions. The questions that need to be asked are would you go back to an area once a 'dirty bomb' went off if there was no/very little radiation detectable. I point to the fact that people now work at places infected by anthrax contamination, which is ALOT harder to gaurantee cleanlyness or to clean then some place dirtied by radiation.
Yes the 'public' have fears about radation, but its easier to 'fear' something when it doesn't affect you, then if you have to move your house and belongings when people say its save.
Case in point, the area around the 'shed' that the article mentions, did the whole neighbourhood close up and disappear, even though its WAY more contaminated then the area after a dirty bomb?
I don't know, have you ever brought it up with a bunch of people? I think you've got too many 70's disaster movies in your head. When the WTC were attacked, did people immediatly panic and run in large groups to the nearest shopping mall and loot it? Were there ANY deaths as the result of the attacks?
I say ask the random person THIS question, if terrorists attacked the smithsonian with a dirty bomb, and the government cleaned it up, would you let them win by not going back ever?
Any fool with a geiger counter can verify wether the cleanup was successful. We're all very trusting that we aren't getting any anthrax spores in our mail, even though we have NO way of verifying this.
If you manage to steal any of the spent fuel that's lying around, or even a medium-sized shipment of medical isotopes, you have enough to contaminate a good chunk of the core of a major city. While harder to acquire than a few bags of fertilizer, it's by no means prohibitively hard.
1st) I have read that the radioactivity of spent fuel rods is so great, that the lethal dose of gamma rays would occur in a matter of hours to anyone withing a good (10yards) area. I hope those bomb makers are fast...
2nd) Ohhh.... so contaminating an area with low-grade nuclear material with half lives around 30 days is going to kill us all... hmm... the stuff usually is in hospitals which shows how uncontrolable deadly the stuff is.
3rd) Saying a large bomb blowing some nuclear material for blocks would cause more fear and expense then a biological or nerve gas attack is obviously using very simple logic. Ask yourself, how long does it take to clean a building contaminated with ANY agent? It takes at LEAST as long as the time required to sample and test the location to make sure it is clean of the contaminant. With a biological attack, you need to sample then culture, with nuclear all you need a gieger counter. As well, with some biological attacks (smallpox), it is very hard to determine who is carries the agent, as well the agent replicates itself and spreads by itself!
Take these two scenarios and tell me which is going to bring the most worry.
1)A bomb blowing up in the new york subway with spreading fairly non toxic medical grade nuclear material.
2)A rag coated in blood is found on a seat in the subway that is tested and found to contain ebola.
Its actually very scary to think what would happen if someone does a suicide attack by getting themselves infected then traveling... How would you dectect or stop them??? Finding someone smuggling something radio active would be alot easier.
"If I buy a one-seat license and install it on every computer in my house, my company, and my mom's house, and they take me to court, I'll point to the provision in the GPL which says that the works may not be re-distributed with "further" restrictions."
And you'll lose, and you'll lose sooo bad.
A) because not every piece of software on the disk is covered by the GPL and probably it is possible to get to that software without 'installing' the whole cd
B) Becasue you 'agreed' to the shrink wrap license by purchasing/opening the package.
And unlike windows....
C) You have alternatives that give you nearly identitcal functionality and software, that do not require a per-seat licence, but perhaps are more of a burden to you, and you still choose to use the software with the perseat license and violate the license.
The GPL only covers the software specifically licensed by the GPL. It doesn't streach across the pits on the CD to 'infect' other software distributed with it.
Well, just as a simple followup, if you dig through those km's of mountains, you don't find very much oil. You find some coal, but its not equally distributed amoungst the limestone. If every creature died, settled and turned to coal, why would the coal clump together?
Furthermore, if Organic materials can become oil, and carbon stars pump out oil, why does it have to be one or the other? Stellar production only means there is alot more oil on earth then previously thought. Which would hurt efforts to conserve oil and which would pump alot more CO2 into the atmosphere. But the negative conotations have no bearing on whether the this actually occurs in space.
The point of the article was that it appears that carbon stars pump out a heck of alot of 'fossil' fuels. If only %.000000001 of that survived the creation of the earth then there should be vastly more space based oil on earth then organic.
As far as hydrocarbons being on other planets, i believe that Methane is quite common in the gassious planets. If you dig up any point on the surface on earth, you may not come accross oil/coal. It would be too early to say the scratches we've made on other planets where we havn't found oil constitutes overwhelming evidence that hydrocarbon fuels aren't found on other planets. Considering we're just figuring out that there might be a vast frozen ocean underneath mars, we really only know a very little about how things are. If there were oceans of oil on earth, perhaps, but I don't know of anything readily visible from space to give evidence that earth has any oil on it either. To streach Stroedinger (sp?!?), just because we haven't looked, doesn't mean its not there, i'll save the reference that its both there and not there, but I hope you get the point.
I agree there is alot of limestone, But in that limestone, there isn't a ton of oil, natural gas or coal. That is, going to the grand canyon and tunneling in a km, I doubt your going to find any along the way.
As well, Stellar production doesn't mean there isn't organic production. This isn't two sides of a coin, but two possible methods of production.
Stellar production is still specualation, but if there is stellar evidance of hydrocarbons that with simple, natural processes can become natural gas or oil. Given the ammounts that carbon stars can produce, it would be far from a streach to assume that some of it is still here on earth.
Whether this is a good thing for the enviroment isn't relevent at all to whether this fact is true or not. I'm not advocating that it is a good thing, but we can't picket the stars and tell them to stop producing hydrocarbons if they infact are.
There was a very interesting article in a recent issue of Astronomy. To summarize (from memory)...
Carbon Stars (A particular period in the life of a star where the carbon produced in the core has reached the surface), seem to produce complex hydrocarbons in great numbers. This is suggested by spectrograms of the light produced. Some of these spectrograms seem to indicate that the building blocks of coal and oil (ketones) are being produced as well. The numbers, from memory are around 1 million Earth masses a year.
If the star previous to our sun had a carbon cycle (which i believe from reading this its quite common) then the deposits we are finding could be the remnants of what was deposited on the earth during the formation of it, rather then from organic matter.
If that were to be the case, then this could be the source that this article mentions.
That would mean that hydrocarbon energy could be nearly limitless.
Personally, I always had a hard time beliveing that enough plant matter could die in the same spot and be covered over to create oil fields that would hold millions and millions of barrels of oil. I mean, what plant matter/animal matter could possibly have died under the sea floor in those great #'s?. I can see the amazon rain bason, but there's alot of oil and gas and coal just about everywhere on earth.
The downside to this abundance, would be that everyone would just get SUV's and gas guzzlers and our air would go to shit. But we might just have to have the strength to let that be the reason to use less rather then keep talking about how the sky will fall. But the hydrocarbon family of molecules is a very efficiant energy store, and it just happens to be in the dirt.
Check out the guy who wrote the troll on penitiononline.com . 'slashdotwidener@yahoo.com' (at the bottom of the intro page). Looks like he got some practice before moving on to bigger things. I hope he doesn't let this go to his head.
My God... I went without coffee when Bernie Ebbers decided we didn't need it, now that the new guy brought it back.. All i need is a friken nuke to take it away again..
But hey, they found that mice loaded with caffeine are 75% more likely to survive a lethal dose of radiation, maybe there are EMP protected coffee makers in teh US Army?
I think it was the woman, because we needed to see someone we would recognize in order to get the point that the people in the future are in control and everything is turning out as 'planned'.
I believe in Le Jete, this is done through hearing the main character's thoughts. I can't remember everything, but I believe he is assanitated by his friend in the airport, and before he dies, he realizes that the people in control only want to stay in control, not save the world.
As the film is a comentary on the fact the people who govern the world are more interested in winning an election or staying in power then to really help the people.
And as all good Sci-fi does, it just uses the abstraction of future events to make a comentary on the present, 12 Monkeys/le Jete should be on the top 20 list, and I think in the top 3. But of course, maybe they didn't get the significance of the woman on the plane.
In 3 seconds, it transforms the entire movie from a simple race to safe the world against the clock into a deft political commentary
The purpose of the final scene I think if one of PURE briliance. But first, to say Gillian et all was responsible for all of this deny's that the important aspects of the plot was in the short film Le Jete (sp?) which 12 monkies was based on.
Now back to the final scene, it shows the the scientists at some point are capable of sending 'anyone' back to 'any' time. But instead of doing the SF-movie standard (ala T2) which is to fix the problems damn the concequences, the scientists instead seem to just be there and they DON'T stop the plauge. By this time at least that city is completely contaminated and everyone on the plane is as well.
So why don't they?
1st, if they stop it, there wouldn't be a reason to go back in time, therefore we might have a paradox. Better to get the cure and return home.
2nd. The scientists are in control, they have all the power in the future (present). If they prevented the plague they would lose their power. Right now they go back to a society where THEY will now move humans to the outside world under THEIR terms.
But in the end I think that both are true. The scientists are being greedy and smart. In fact, its a shock ending that the more you think about it, the more you realize that it isn't a fake twist, but really its the only way it could end.
I think you will find MOST back end software (mission critical for their business cycles, not for life and death) for MOST large businesses and governments to be now in Java. Certainly most US States now support Java only as for their back end software. Many large corportations are as well and most others are moving to it.
Why? Because the programmers you hire to implement your finacial logic shouldn't have to worry about memory, server loads etc. Java has an incredible framework for distrubuting large applications amongst many programmers with diverse specialties. This prevents someone who's working on a front end application to mess up the whole system.
I think the problem many programmers see with EJB and everything is that there is so much overhead, and you have to write these very abstract objects then hand this all to the server to handle. Well, when you have 15-30 developers working, that is a very efficient way of working.
As far as overhead? If you have a mid to large scale programing task the cost of development exceeds $2-4 million very quickly. At this price range, a savings in development time of 25% equates to the cost of a sunfire 10000!
As well, for Mission Critical Applications, if i gave you 1 month to collect 30 engineers to develop in 1 year a Mission Critical Application for Millions of transactions is a complicated business rule enviroment. Do you think you could do a better job then BEA, IBM or JBoss of implementing a multi-server transactional system that supportable? Do you think the money you'd have to pay those guys to develop such an application would be less then the license of BEA or IBM? And there's Jboss for free to boot!
What would you suppose people to program in for these applications?.net? C++ C? Perl?
Slashdot Mirror
Richard Jewell brought it all on himself by committing a very suspicious crime in regards to the bombing incident: he stole evidence from the crime scene and hid it in his house. He willingly chose to commit criminal activity in regards to the case; no wonder he opened himself up to worse suspicion.
Excuse me, this is the first I've ever heard about this. What did he steal then? How did the stealing of evidence relate to him being the bomber? The press latched onto Jewell because the police leaked he was a suspect. Jewell has won almost every lawsuit he has filed against the media. But think of how a mere $500k judgement against NBC compares to the hundreds of millions up for game in the TV News business.
Really, it is so it shouldn't be. There is nothing the government should do that it should keep hidden from us. If you don't like it, don't read it. If the judiciary does not like what a newspaper prints, it does not have to buy it.
Here you raise a straw man, this isn't something the government is doing on its own, its doing something to someone. Its not the governments rights that are being protected by a publication ban it is that person's. Its not your rights that are being violated, its you being inconvienced to hear the details later.
In a republic, the rights of the individual outweigh the rights of the public. That is why YOUR tax returns are secret and why people fight for privacy in their dealings with the government. The investigation of a crime is not a public event until the trial!
Even then, in many cases regarding minors, the happenings at trial are kept secret to protect those accused.
There is a fine line between the protection you as a citizen get by your trial being public and from the harm that is caused by it. If the press wasn't so keen to publish the acusations and not the results of trial, AND if the public wasn't soo facinated by gossip, then there wouldn't need to be any publication bans. But, the public is fancinated, the media feeds it and feeds from it, but the publics WANT does not make it a Public RIGHT.
What Canada is doing is simply favouring the rights of the individual over the WANTS of the public. The public is gaining nothing in learning the juicy tidbits now rather then later, but to the person who's being acused that time frame is vital.
then the public's right to know immediatly.
I am a ex-pat Canadian living in the SF Bay area. One thing that often has irked me is the release of 'facts' in regard to a criminal investigation/case before the accused is put to trial or even arrested. It is often assumed that the public's right to know and the ability of a free press to report is based on the giving the public the 'information' the fastest. Somehow, the press's rush to publicize anything that is found in a criminal trial is deemed more important then the accused right to a fair trial and the freedom from vigililantism that can come from the premature release of 'facts'. Actually given the use of the press by police agencies in the US to 'leak' information regarding an investigation that soils the reputation of the innocent (Richard Jewell), this speed of information disemination actually harms the operation of a free society.
In Canada, it is reasonably assured that the police won't release ANY information regarding an on-going investigation before that information can be presented at trial. So it should be. In Canada, the judiciary often limits what the press can write about only during a limited finite period. Again, so it should be, as long as someone's life is at stake in a proceding, we as a public, can wait for the gossip.
As well, since this example from Canada is in the pre-trial phase a simple US approximization is the Grand Jury, who's proceding ares are often secret forever.
I say to the court, throw out the foriegn correspondants, let the public wait to hear the juicy gossip from the court room! To the people who deam this a infrigment on their rights, wait until you are accused and tried in the press! Ask then where your rights of 'innocent until proven guilty' are and see how much work it is for you to prove your innocence for the rest of your life!
Why oh why do we need to know NOW? Let the officers tell us in their own words what happened when they can be cross examined by the accused!
As the US enforces the 'Patriot Act' and its ilk we will see how prominatly the false accusations will be printed and how hidden the retractments.
Here's the link properly Here
Looks like he's acutally tricking IIS into increasing the priority of the particular thread your running on. Nifty, maybe a new exploit. But patentable, 1.5 Million lines of code?? The kids still a fraud.
Although, my first analysis about him just upping the win-modem task priority still might just work.
http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/ilug/2003-January/05 3624.html
From a witness at the science show. Turns out he just uped the task priority for the modem. I guess with a win-modem on a slowish computer the driver won't work at 100%. If you increase the priority you will speed it up.
The rest of the story about actually programming, patenting the invention then is utter bullsh*t. This kid should be exposed as the fraud he is.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-rev iews/-/AA9IP6AYACFK5/102-2168050-5628139
Henry Raddicks reviews need to be read in full to get some of the jokes he mentions. He has a whole cast of characters (homophobic uncle, poor dog he's always trying some crazy theory on) that he references in many of his reviews..
Examples...
Handbook of Meat Product Technology
An admirably thorough guide to the tools of the production-line meat processing trade. The superb colour photographs particularly made it a perfect gift for my 15 year old daughter who is showing alarming signs of not becoming vegetarian.
God, Why Did Dad Lose His Job?
A truly wonderful guide which has enabled me to explain my recent sacking for vandalising company property to my children in terms of a minor act of redemption. First rate.
I think anyone wanting to comment on this issue as a 'Greedy telcoms want to keep bandwidth away from the masses' should look at the real story of why there is excess dark capacity in the world.
Beyond Investing article
It is a very informitive article about why many telco's went bankrupt and bilked billions from investors.
Umm... If you re-read that article it states that to 'light' the 5% of the fibre it cost $255 million dollars. To Light the other 95% the costs would be in the low billions. Considering that there is probably 5 million people in Oregon, that would amount to around $2000 per capita to light the remaining 95%.
.com, dark-fibre was the currency for the telcoms. There wasn't much financial bankground to the idea, but what did that matter if your company now was capable of 100 gigabits between seattle and san francisco?
So... what happens once we've lit, does everyone get 10 gigabit internet connetions? No! No one gets squat because the fibre isn't connected to anyone.
The reason it was laid down, was that some company's (Worldcom, Global Crossing etc) were able to re-sell dark-capacity to other startups. These company's were able to report massive revenues from selling unused fibre. Thus, more and more company's started up trying to tap into this market. Global Crossing and someothers did oceanic fibre, but others stayed closer to home. They raised money, planted dark-fibre then tried to sell off their dark-capacity for revenue. But... it was just a pyramid scheme and they all went bankrupt.
Just as 'eye-balls' were the currency for
I believe that in most cases 'Spontanious Human Combustion' it has been shown that the person died from a slow burn of their fat in an oxygen depleted atmosphere. Most = 99%.
In these cases, the person was always
a) alone
b) in a closed room
c) smoking or near a lit fire
d) either intoxicated to the point of unconciousness or already dead from natural causes
e) Mildly to Fully Obese
f) Room has heavy waxy soot on ceiling or high points of the wall
In fact because of the extremely high rate of intoxication among the victums it was thought at one point they died from the alcholol in the blood stream combusting.
What happened really was:
a) Person passes out
b) Cigarette or Fire catches clothing on fire
c) Due to lack of oxygen fire become a slow burn
d) fat from body melts from fire
e) clothing uses molten fat as fuel, ie a human candle
While the heat is strong at the point of the burn, it doesn't turn into a huge fire, thus the lack of damage to other features in the room.
THus, in the end, no Paranormal activties needed.
Now, before you go thinking I'm a leftist nutbag liberal socialist , I understand and agree that companies are usually formed for the intended purpose of making a profit. That's all well and good, and making a profit is a wonderful motivator. There's nothing wrong with profit
As a followup to your thought, I would point out that the phrase "doing what's best for the shareholders" has been used to justify behavior far different then making a profit by building a widget cheaper and selling it for more. The problem is that shareholders, in most cases, do not see any money coming from the profit (dividends) and instead only see profit by selling their stock for more then they bought it.
Since mearly holding 100,000 shares of Microsoft gaurantee's you virtualy no return, no matter how big and profitable Microsoft will become, unless you sell your stock and cease being a shareholder. Shareholder interest in being a part of a ethical company will be virtualy nonexistant, since the only way a shareholder can profit is to cease being a shareholder. Maybe if dividends become fashionable (the current market where a profitable company's stock goes down in value might help), we will see a return to ethical company's as the shareholders look for long term returns via dividends rather then shortterm equity investments.
What we see today, with Worldcom, Enron et all, is that CEOs and CFOs have found that rather then the old and tired way of making the widgets better/cheaper, the 'New Economy' methods of hype and fraud make shareholders happier, at least in the short term.
The half of the population who's most fit and most likely to make the trip goes. If my kid is weak and sick and not likely to make it, I would prefer if he/she would die with me, together, rather for them to die alone in the middle of a desert, to be abandoned.
Buy of course, what would happen in real life, is that by the time the two tribes finish killing each other off, and the last few people, all mangled and bleeding try to get across the desert, it starts to rain.
"Regardless, I believe one of the attributes that makes US currency recognizable around the world is its simple color scheme. Its powerful, and looks like no other currency. When color is added to US currency, I fully expect the value of the dolor to drop because it will no longer have the bold, simple 2 color scheme. It will be just like every other paper currency on the world market."
.. 'progress'. Of course even uttering that word in the States gets you labeled as a 'Liberal'.
I hope your not serious. The color/shape/size/smell/taste of the physical bill has NOTHING to do with its value in the world market. This has got to be the stupidist argument against coloring/changing the dollar. The forces of the economy, the federal reserve, interest rates and 10000 other things done without even looking at the physical bill have soo much greater impact then someones aesthetic critique.
I hope the reserve has the balls to do this, then order every $1 bill destroyed and replaced with the coin. I've used them (take public transit often here in the US) and they are FAR more convienent then feeding a folded faded dollar bill to pay or get 4 quarters. Having lived in other countries where the constant whining of 'traditionalists' have little weight, I've actually expirieced
I always though american's prided themselves on progess and being the first to do something?
Well I think it should be brought up that erasing with white noise is a very poor way of 'erasing' data.
The best way to erase this tape is to first record over it with other speach by nixon repeatedly, then erase. Finally 'erasing' or destroying the orginal tapes of the speach used to overrecord. Or just have nixon over report with the same mic and equipment saying different things. Without a library of speach to XOR out of any recoverable signal, you'd get nothing. Ecentually you'd be encrypting it with a one time pad.
If you write something on paper, and want to cross it out so no one could read it, don't just squiggle over it, right dummy words until you can ready anything, then squiggle it all out.
I belive my point, was that there is a difference between the fear of contemplating the horrid and it happening. The thing about nuclear that is supposed to scare people about nuclear is that it is invisible. However, it is easily detectable.
I think we all overestimate the amount of fear this could cause by asking people scaring questions. The questions that need to be asked are would you go back to an area once a 'dirty bomb' went off if there was no/very little radiation detectable. I point to the fact that people now work at places infected by anthrax contamination, which is ALOT harder to gaurantee cleanlyness or to clean then some place dirtied by radiation.
Yes the 'public' have fears about radation, but its easier to 'fear' something when it doesn't affect you, then if you have to move your house and belongings when people say its save.
Case in point, the area around the 'shed' that the article mentions, did the whole neighbourhood close up and disappear, even though its WAY more contaminated then the area after a dirty bomb?
DOH!!!
s/were there ANY deaths as the result of the attacks/were there ANY deaths as the result of the panic from the attacks/
argh... bad one
I don't know, have you ever brought it up with a bunch of people? I think you've got too many 70's disaster movies in your head. When the WTC were attacked, did people immediatly panic and run in large groups to the nearest shopping mall and loot it? Were there ANY deaths as the result of the attacks?
I say ask the random person THIS question, if terrorists attacked the smithsonian with a dirty bomb, and the government cleaned it up, would you let them win by not going back ever?
Any fool with a geiger counter can verify wether the cleanup was successful. We're all very trusting that we aren't getting any anthrax spores in our mail, even though we have NO way of verifying this.
If you manage to steal any of the spent fuel that's lying around, or even a medium-sized shipment of medical isotopes, you have enough to contaminate a good chunk of the core of a major city. While harder to acquire than a few bags of fertilizer, it's by no means prohibitively hard.
1st) I have read that the radioactivity of spent fuel rods is so great, that the lethal dose of gamma rays would occur in a matter of hours to anyone withing a good (10yards) area. I hope those bomb makers are fast...
2nd) Ohhh.... so contaminating an area with low-grade nuclear material with half lives around 30 days is going to kill us all... hmm... the stuff usually is in hospitals which shows how uncontrolable deadly the stuff is.
3rd) Saying a large bomb blowing some nuclear material for blocks would cause more fear and expense then a biological or nerve gas attack is obviously using very simple logic. Ask yourself, how long does it take to clean a building contaminated with ANY agent? It takes at LEAST as long as the time required to sample and test the location to make sure it is clean of the contaminant. With a biological attack, you need to sample then culture, with nuclear all you need a gieger counter. As well, with some biological attacks (smallpox), it is very hard to determine who is carries the agent, as well the agent replicates itself and spreads by itself!
Take these two scenarios and tell me which is going to bring the most worry.
1)A bomb blowing up in the new york subway with spreading fairly non toxic medical grade nuclear material.
2)A rag coated in blood is found on a seat in the subway that is tested and found to contain ebola.
Its actually very scary to think what would happen if someone does a suicide attack by getting themselves infected then traveling... How would you dectect or stop them??? Finding someone smuggling something radio active would be alot easier.
Remeber, Fear = not knowing
"If I buy a one-seat license and install it on every computer in my house, my company, and my mom's house, and they take me to court, I'll point to the provision in the GPL which says that the works may not be re-distributed with "further" restrictions."
And you'll lose, and you'll lose sooo bad.
A) because not every piece of software on the disk is covered by the GPL and probably it is possible to get to that software without 'installing' the whole cd
B) Becasue you 'agreed' to the shrink wrap license by purchasing/opening the package.
And unlike windows....
C) You have alternatives that give you nearly identitcal functionality and software, that do not require a per-seat licence, but perhaps are more of a burden to you, and you still choose to use the software with the perseat license and violate the license.
The GPL only covers the software specifically licensed by the GPL. It doesn't streach across the pits on the CD to 'infect' other software distributed with it.
Well, just as a simple followup, if you dig through those km's of mountains, you don't find very much oil. You find some coal, but its not equally distributed amoungst the limestone. If every creature died, settled and turned to coal, why would the coal clump together?
Furthermore, if Organic materials can become oil, and carbon stars pump out oil, why does it have to be one or the other? Stellar production only means there is alot more oil on earth then previously thought. Which would hurt efforts to conserve oil and which would pump alot more CO2 into the atmosphere. But the negative conotations have no bearing on whether the this actually occurs in space.
The point of the article was that it appears that carbon stars pump out a heck of alot of 'fossil' fuels. If only %.000000001 of that survived the creation of the earth then there should be vastly more space based oil on earth then organic.
As far as hydrocarbons being on other planets, i believe that Methane is quite common in the gassious planets. If you dig up any point on the surface on earth, you may not come accross oil/coal. It would be too early to say the scratches we've made on other planets where we havn't found oil constitutes overwhelming evidence that hydrocarbon fuels aren't found on other planets. Considering we're just figuring out that there might be a vast frozen ocean underneath mars, we really only know a very little about how things are. If there were oceans of oil on earth, perhaps, but I don't know of anything readily visible from space to give evidence that earth has any oil on it either. To streach Stroedinger (sp?!?), just because we haven't looked, doesn't mean its not there, i'll save the reference that its both there and not there, but I hope you get the point.
I agree there is alot of limestone, But in that limestone, there isn't a ton of oil, natural gas or coal. That is, going to the grand canyon and tunneling in a km, I doubt your going to find any along the way.
As well, Stellar production doesn't mean there isn't organic production. This isn't two sides of a coin, but two possible methods of production.
Stellar production is still specualation, but if there is stellar evidance of hydrocarbons that with simple, natural processes can become natural gas or oil. Given the ammounts that carbon stars can produce, it would be far from a streach to assume that some of it is still here on earth.
Whether this is a good thing for the enviroment isn't relevent at all to whether this fact is true or not. I'm not advocating that it is a good thing, but we can't picket the stars and tell them to stop producing hydrocarbons if they infact are.
There was a very interesting article in a recent issue of Astronomy. To summarize (from memory)...
Carbon Stars (A particular period in the life of a star where the carbon produced in the core has reached the surface), seem to produce complex hydrocarbons in great numbers. This is suggested by spectrograms of the light produced. Some of these spectrograms seem to indicate that the building blocks of coal and oil (ketones) are being produced as well. The numbers, from memory are around 1 million Earth masses a year.
If the star previous to our sun had a carbon cycle (which i believe from reading this its quite common) then the deposits we are finding could be the remnants of what was deposited on the earth during the formation of it, rather then from organic matter.
If that were to be the case, then this could be the source that this article mentions.
That would mean that hydrocarbon energy could be nearly limitless.
Personally, I always had a hard time beliveing that enough plant matter could die in the same spot and be covered over to create oil fields that would hold millions and millions of barrels of oil. I mean, what plant matter/animal matter could possibly have died under the sea floor in those great #'s?. I can see the amazon rain bason, but there's alot of oil and gas and coal just about everywhere on earth.
The downside to this abundance, would be that everyone would just get SUV's and gas guzzlers and our air would go to shit. But we might just have to have the strength to let that be the reason to use less rather then keep talking about how the sky will fall. But the hydrocarbon family of molecules is a very efficiant energy store, and it just happens to be in the dirt.
Check out the guy who wrote the troll on penitiononline.com . 'slashdotwidener@yahoo.com' (at the bottom of the intro page). Looks like he got some practice before moving on to bigger things. I hope he doesn't let this go to his head.
My God... I went without coffee when Bernie Ebbers decided we didn't need it, now that the new guy brought it back.. All i need is a friken nuke to take it away again..
But hey, they found that mice loaded with caffeine are 75% more likely to survive a lethal dose of radiation, maybe there are EMP protected coffee makers in teh US Army?
I think it was the woman, because we needed to see someone we would recognize in order to get the point that the people in the future are in control and everything is turning out as 'planned'.
I believe in Le Jete, this is done through hearing the main character's thoughts. I can't remember everything, but I believe he is assanitated by his friend in the airport, and before he dies, he realizes that the people in control only want to stay in control, not save the world.
As the film is a comentary on the fact the people who govern the world are more interested in winning an election or staying in power then to really help the people.
And as all good Sci-fi does, it just uses the abstraction of future events to make a comentary on the present, 12 Monkeys/le Jete should be on the top 20 list, and I think in the top 3. But of course, maybe they didn't get the significance of the woman on the plane.
In 3 seconds, it transforms the entire movie from a simple race to safe the world against the clock into a deft political commentary
But if you blink you miss it.
The purpose of the final scene I think if one of PURE briliance. But first, to say Gillian et all was responsible for all of this deny's that the important aspects of the plot was in the short film Le Jete (sp?) which 12 monkies was based on.
Now back to the final scene, it shows the the scientists at some point are capable of sending 'anyone' back to 'any' time. But instead of doing the SF-movie standard (ala T2) which is to fix the problems damn the concequences, the scientists instead seem to just be there and they DON'T stop the plauge. By this time at least that city is completely contaminated and everyone on the plane is as well.
So why don't they?
1st, if they stop it, there wouldn't be a reason to go back in time, therefore we might have a paradox. Better to get the cure and return home.
2nd. The scientists are in control, they have all the power in the future (present). If they prevented the plague they would lose their power. Right now they go back to a society where THEY will now move humans to the outside world under THEIR terms.
But in the end I think that both are true. The scientists are being greedy and smart. In fact, its a shock ending that the more you think about it, the more you realize that it isn't a fake twist, but really its the only way it could end.
I think you will find MOST back end software (mission critical for their business cycles, not for life and death) for MOST large businesses and governments to be now in Java. Certainly most US States now support Java only as for their back end software. Many large corportations are as well and most others are moving to it.
.net? C++ C? Perl?
Why? Because the programmers you hire to implement your finacial logic shouldn't have to worry about memory, server loads etc. Java has an incredible framework for distrubuting large applications amongst many programmers with diverse specialties. This prevents someone who's working on a front end application to mess up the whole system.
I think the problem many programmers see with EJB and everything is that there is so much overhead, and you have to write these very abstract objects then hand this all to the server to handle. Well, when you have 15-30 developers working, that is a very efficient way of working.
As far as overhead? If you have a mid to large scale programing task the cost of development exceeds $2-4 million very quickly. At this price range, a savings in development time of 25% equates to the cost of a sunfire 10000!
As well, for Mission Critical Applications, if i gave you 1 month to collect 30 engineers to develop in 1 year a Mission Critical Application for Millions of transactions is a complicated business rule enviroment. Do you think you could do a better job then BEA, IBM or JBoss of implementing a multi-server transactional system that supportable? Do you think the money you'd have to pay those guys to develop such an application would be less then the license of BEA or IBM? And there's Jboss for free to boot!
What would you suppose people to program in for these applications?