I know from my brother who is working on a university in mathematics research that 4 publications in 3 years is extremely many in his subject, he has worked extremely hard for 3 years to make 2 publications in topology. I have been told it is a common problem for mathematicians that they don't make as many publications as in other fields of science, in geophysics working as researcher (which I don't I work in the private) it would be a reasonable demand with 4 publications on 3 years.
I have to disagree that bore logs are random luck... there exists various methods of logging and yeah if you only use one log, like a gamma log or something and think that your safe then... sure it's random luck if you gamma log picks up the stuff your looking for. On the other hand if you do 5 different types of logging (video, gamma, geoeletric, radar, sonic... just to mention one way of mixing them, there are a lot other logging tools available of which I don't know all) then I would say you get a lot more information. Sure logging can be done shitty, it often is, but if you do a good job and take your time with the logging and processing and interpretation of the results then I would say you have a very good idea of the state of the borehole. How much of this has been done in bore logs you have encountered I don't know, I just know what has been done in the logging my company (I am not the guy doing the logging, but we work together at times) in very deep wells for oil companies that we have done and I have to say I was very impressed with it. The wells in this option was not to be used for fracking but only investigative purposes, but I don't see why the same thing couldn't be done with a production well that you consider to do fracking on. I know that often there isn't perfect layers around, but if you have an area over lets say 100 meters that show a resistance in the area of 10 ohmm and other information to tell you that it is a clay layer, then I would feel safe. There are bound to be imperfections inside this layer, but they are not going to be 100 meters deep and 10 meters of clay layer is plenty. What I am saying is that if you make sure you error enough on the good side then you should be safe not only in theory but also in the practical application (except maybe for the truck transportation issue). I am sure that things haven't been played safe in many many cases where fracking has happened, as has been documented things have gone horribly wrong in many of these cases and I am also not questioning what you are saying about the not so nice behavior of the oil companies.
> The reality is there is no technology currently available to forecast what will actually happen when you try to turn rock formations into massive soda fountains, none at all, it is a straight up guess.
I am not so sure about that, but it might be very costly to do these studies. If you do have a big enough tight clay layer between the rock formation you are fracking and the ground water I would feel pretty sure that the two formations won't affect each other. My job is working with geophysics, mostly for groundwater purposes and I know we are very good at finding those clay layers, there's lots of methods for doing that, but it does take quite a bit of work to gather the data and process them.
I don't know that much about the fracking that has been done around the world, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that there hasn't been done much work done to figure out if the ground water would be safe from the fracked formations in many cases and that the consequences have been really bad. I'm just saying that I think it can be done safely on some wells and not in others and it is possible to figure out which ones are safe.
Of course there is always the problem of transporting chemicals to the drilling site and getting the chemicals safely down to the formation you want to do the fracking on. The transportation to site will always be a problem, getting the chemicals safely through the borehole should be possible if you do some thorough logging of the borehole to make sure that the casing is tight and intact.
As far as I can figure from the article what is says is 95/86 of the light is absorbed, it doesn't say that all of this light is converted into electricity as is stated here on Slashdot.
That is also impressive numbers and very interesting, but my guess is that the efficiency of the solar panel is going to be a lot lower than those numbers posted on the parent, most likely at least a factor 2 lower.
I agree that this should pose a problem for those who read the translations of the bible as a day meaning a literal day.
But it doesn't really make a difference for those who doesn't see "a day" as 24 hours as we know a day today. (Think about it, how would you define a day before the earth was created?).
Some of those who believes that the term "day" in Genesis and other places in the bible is this is Jehovah's Witnesses [warning religious content].
Anyhow I guess I am stupid to start discussing religion here on/. and trying to be serious about it, don't mean to be trolling. I just thought that saying that this is a problem for young creationists is true, but saying that it poses a problem for anyone who believes in the bible (or God?) is to take it a step to far.
I haven't RTF yet, but I think you are right, this one might very well be legit.
Just the fact that this is about the microprocessor design and not about software makes it sound much more sensible than much of the other patent crap that is coming up here on/.
The reason for this offer from Daniel is imho not as important as it is that he is offering to step up back as the leader of this project and take his job down to part time so that he again can put some energy into the role as leader of Gentoo Linux. Gentoo badly needs some leadership right now, Daniel has done it well before and had Gentoo thriving while he still was at the helm, so let's get him back there and get this ship back on course. I really hope that the council will accept this offer for the best of Gentoo and not let their personal agendas stand in the way of the good of Gentoo... though I fear that might happen once again.
I quick search on the word GPS in the article didn't come up with anything. So I guess either this will be a hardware add on or it will have rely on this technique with trying to find you position depending on your position... but this only works with telephone companies that gives the data needed to Google. For example Google maps doesn't isn't able to locate itself on any net-providers here in Denmark with my Nokia E61i.
Unless Google has some kind of intelligent solution to this problem I doubt I am interested when this hits the market.
So does anyone know what the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation's framework privacy laws look like? Anyone living in countries having these laws. A description like 'balances very carefully information privacy with business needs and commercial interests' says pretty much nothing especially from someone who has a major interest in describing things in a positive way. Can anyone tell me what the actual differences are between these laws and for example a specific EU country (as far as I know the laws differ pretty much in the EU from country to country still) or in the US (perhaps specific state laws)?
This was the man I first thought of when reading the/. summary (I haven't read TFA).
I guess maybe Lomborg has done some good things, started some good things, but all in all he did nothing good for the global warming debate but make it less scientific and more political. Then again he is actually a statistician with a lot of knowledge about economics and little real knowledge about geology etc.
My point is just that people like Lomborg tend to make something that was before something that could be debated scientifically in open forums like these something that starts a flame war almost right away as soon as it is brought up. I am not sure this makes the science that we really need to be done well any better, what should have been arguments about scientific evidence ends up in economic and political arguments which never really lead to any good.
You are right this doesn't look like any real news.
The article is really written in a very unscientific way, for example this statement:
What the scientific society thinks doesn't usually change all that fast, the hypothesis first has to be verified and tested etc.
But then again in this kind of archeology this thing with verifying and testing hypothesis can be a bit difficult even though they try as they best can, but trying to figure out how humans evolved through evolution is imho as much guesswork as it is science with what we have of evidence so far.
I remain skeptical of the idea of the self healing house, I think that it might work in just the opposite direction of what is intended if not very careful, kind of like if the dampers in the other article linked to gets out of sync with the waves of the quake (or maybe rather into sync) creating resonance instead of weakening the resonance.
First thing I don't like about this idea of nano-particles turning into liquid is this. Imagine a solid structure being put under pressure, as the pressure increased a tiny fraction of the material is turned into liquid, my immediate idea is that this would weaken the structure increasing the risk of a collapse. Sure it might be nice if the liquid later filled out the tiny cracks in the structure, but if the entire thing has collapsed by then, what good will it do? The second thing I don't like is that these cracks that will be filled out in structure represent unevenness in the entire structure. I can't help but think that it would resemble using uneven bricks for a house. I can see that this could give extra strength to the building if they are used very carefully, but if you just put one uneven block into an entire building it will make it more unstable. Maybe if the blocks are to uneven they will liquefy and turn into the right structure for creating the most possible strength, I guess it depends on how much pressure would be put on a given unevenness. Also wouldn't this leave the building a lot more vulnerable to the next earthquake? All this is said knowing very little about the detail of this idea, it is just my immediate thoughts being confronted with this.
The idea to have the building itself alert the inhabitants is nice, it would especially be nice if the building would warn if there had been a minor quake that is not noticeable for humans but still might be the warning that a bigger quake will soon happen.
Is it just me or does this move from Microsoft seem rather desperate? Was Microsofts older versions of Windows phased out this fast too? I guess the people at Microsoft have a really hard time accepting that many people (and companies!) have gotten comfortable with XP and does not want to get something different. Maybe Microsoft have been taking to long to come with a "new OS" this time?
I think this will definitely be a good thing for those who wish more people would use Linux on the desktop and possible also laptop market. People like Mark Shuttleworth and his fanboys can start cheering already. I myself am no longer so certain that getting everyone to use Linux is what is best for Linux as a whole right now. My main reason for thinking this is seeing how little Ubuntu contributes to the rest of the "open-source community". Maybe I am wrong, in that case I would love to hear why.
I gladly leave the picking up of unsatisfied Windows users to other flavors of Linux, I myself prefer to stick with Gentoo and wish that all the developers at Gentoo would realize that Gentoo just isn't and is not supposed to become an "click and go" OS.
Others who will cheer at this news will probably be those trying to earn some money by selling cracked software, only this time people are not going to come to them to get the newest software but will want the "good old XP". I don't think they care much though, as long as they can make money. Maybe there will even become a real market for buying and selling those XP-licenses that people have lying around?
I wonder how many very useful ideas like this one there is lying around right now? Probably quite a few. According to the conspiracy people things similar to this happen all the time, with the big cooperations making sure that for example things to replace the fossil fuels does never get publicly known, I doubt there is very much truth in this, but this little story might make me think just a little more of the conspiracy theories. If Einstein didn't react to this, I wonder how many other great discoveries that just perish because no one reacts to them?
I don't blame Einstein, I bet there was a lot of more or less intelligent nut cases who contacted him with all kinds of "great ideas" and "energy machines" all the time, had he been reacting to it all he would probably have had far less time to work on his own theories.
Well if you want to reinstall then that I am not going to stop you, but repairing a messed up installation usually isn't that hard if you know a bit about the system or go get a bit of support on the Gentoo Forums. Just use a bootable CD and chroot into the system and get whatever fails on you fixed. If it is a hardware failure then that is something totally different and it should not in the first place be blamed on Gentoo (even though compiling can be tough for the HD)
I sure am not a big security expert, so forgive my n00bish words here.
I don't remember where, but at some point I read somebody, probably a sys-admin, saying that if you really want security then what you need to do is disable all the things you do not need. Not by default to allow everything and then pick the things you do not want, but go the other way around and make the default to not allow anything and then enable the things you need. I guess this is one of the reasons I like Gentoo so much, I know everything that is installed on the system and I can remove it if I don't like it. I don't like to install all kinds of things that I do not know what is and do not know if I can trust. The more things I have installed the more vulnerabilities I also have.
One of my friends once ran a version of Windows XP that he had pretty much scraped everything of that didn't need to be there, I think he was a lot more secure than he would have been had he filled his computer with all kinds of AV and anti-malware programs, some of them seem to be causing more problems than they solve anyhow.
The sad thing about this is that it actually does make sense that Google should buy Youtube for the reason stated in the OP.
It is really sad how the interpretation has become a matter of who can afford the most lawyers and things like that. I think this is a trend that is seen at it's strongest in the USA but we sure also see this here in Europe and Denmark where I live. In my simple mind the law should be equal for everyone no matter how much money they have, but that really is being naive these days as far as I can figure.
I don't know if my thinking here is to much influenced by movies like Civil Action, but then again it claims to be based on a true story (and the movie is almost 10 years old, so I guess this isn't a new trend, at least in the US).
I think this is about the stupidest thing I have heard from Turkey for a long time (not that I hear much from there). Seems the courts and government doesn't agree on if Turkey should work on tying to become part of the European Union. Things like these are going to be a problem a serious problem in any negotiations, I can hardly think of any way to demonstrate more clearly that freedom of speech is not something that is not practiced in Turkey.
Thinking about it I find it a bit ironic that the country I live in, Denmark (member of the EU) have done exactly the same thing with allofmp3 that Turkey now did to youtube, yet Denmark is probably quite well known for their so called defense of freedom of speech, latest demonstrated by some drawings of Muhammed. I guess the reasons behind the two court ordered bannings are a bit different. In Turkey the reasons being nationalistic and religious, while it in Denmark is the music industries (and according to them also the artists) interest and money that is the reason (one could maybe then start arguing that we just have a different kind of "state religion" in Denmark, I will keep out of that discussion).
Anyhow I kind of understand if the Turkish negotiators will think of the EU as talking with two tongues if they start telling them that Turkey can't do this kind of thing if they want to be part of the EU.
I have never used OpenNMS and don't know much about this product or any of the other commercial runner ups mentioned, but I noticed one thing from the OpenNMS homepage and that is that they have this OpenNMS Group which provides services, training and support for the product. I think this is a model that more many other Open Source products would have a lot to gain from following.
One obvious benefit of this is that it allows the developers to get paid for working with the product, that way making it possible for some developers to spend more time with the product and they will be in very much direct contact with the users of the product, not only reading about the bugs in a Bugzilla. It allows for some the lead developers to really be devoted to the product which is a really big asset to any Open Source project where money can not be made from selling the program itself.
Another good thing about this is that it gives the companies who have to choose between products confidence that they can put some trust in that this project is not going to stop being developed because some key developer for some reason is leaving the project.
Of course some care have to be put into not making sure that model does not lead to one big costumer in the services, training and support department does not get to lead the development of the product, which could have negative side effects, but really I don't think the risk of this is too big, the worst that could happen from this is that the project gets forked, with one fork keeping on working for the "company version" of the product while the rest of the project goes in another direction, but if just the services, training and support groups follows the second group then whatever company can hire people to work on the company version of the product. It just means more good Open Source code and good jobs for OS developers, the GNU license should make sure that a company can not take the code and make it into a closed source project.
I am sorry but since when did the "geek community" (if such a thing even exists as a movement or whatever) suddenly get a political or moral side? The reason why Google should have the geeks support is because they support the geeks with great jobs and great innovative software and code.
If Google had not done this then they would be pretty much the single exception from all other multinational companies.
Here in Denmark we have this huge shipping company Mærsk or A.P. Møller as it also known. They have lots of other activities also, the company has always been somehow very attached to Denmark and many Danes are proud that Mærsk is a Danish company. The thing is that the government here in Denmark have been proposing to change how the taxing system works for companies. The general idea is to lower the tax rate but to remove many of the things that companies can withdraw from their incomes when taxes are to be calculated, in part to prevent what Google is being accused of doing here, namely putting all their income in countries where they have lot's of losses and expenses also. Mærsk have been threatening the Danish government that if these tax changes are done as proposed then they may be forced to move many of their activities to other countries. I see no evil in this, companies have to look at the bottom line and for most businesses generating income for their shareholders or who ever gets the money in the end.
I would not consider Google to be evil if they did something similar to this, they would just be acting like pretty much any other multinational company does these days. I feel pretty sure the Irish doesn't see Googles way of doing their accounting as evil;)
If something has to be done about this, it can't be done at the national level, I guess that is also what some of these movements like Attack (spelled?) and other have been talking about. I doubt there is ever going to be any real changes in this any time soon, there are far to big interests at stake for countries and big companies.
The article doesn't hide this either, but there is really very little real energy to be won in this way, I don't really get what Mr. Woodring says about megawatts being wasted though, no human is able to generate that much electrical power, maybe he refers to megawatthours which he might be right about, but it would have been generated over the span of many years.
I think it would be more efficient if the people who go to the gym instead would just put on a pair of running shoes and would not have to exercise in a room that had not to be lit and heated for the purpose of them having a place to exercise.
I guess the best thing about this is that it might raise some people's awareness of how much energy different electrical devices use during the day and might help them remember to shut them off and think of energy efficiency when they buy new equipment.
The good thing about the way the human body works is not how much energy we use or generate, our biggest strength in this is the precise and versatile we can use our bodies and the energy we generate from the our food intake. For example I bet you can save a lot more energy and pollution from exercising by getting wood for heating than you would ever be able to make by exercising a stair machine or spinning device.
Slashdot Mirror
I know from my brother who is working on a university in mathematics research that 4 publications in 3 years is extremely many in his subject, he has worked extremely hard for 3 years to make 2 publications in topology.
I have been told it is a common problem for mathematicians that they don't make as many publications as in other fields of science, in geophysics working as researcher (which I don't I work in the private) it would be a reasonable demand with 4 publications on 3 years.
I have to disagree that bore logs are random luck ... there exists various methods of logging and yeah if you only use one log, like a gamma log or something and think that your safe then ... sure it's random luck if you gamma log picks up the stuff your looking for. ... just to mention one way of mixing them, there are a lot other logging tools available of which I don't know all) then I would say you get a lot more information.
On the other hand if you do 5 different types of logging (video, gamma, geoeletric, radar, sonic
Sure logging can be done shitty, it often is, but if you do a good job and take your time with the logging and processing and interpretation of the results then I would say you have a very good idea of the state of the borehole. How much of this has been done in bore logs you have encountered I don't know, I just know what has been done in the logging my company (I am not the guy doing the logging, but we work together at times) in very deep wells for oil companies that we have done and I have to say I was very impressed with it. The wells in this option was not to be used for fracking but only investigative purposes, but I don't see why the same thing couldn't be done with a production well that you consider to do fracking on.
I know that often there isn't perfect layers around, but if you have an area over lets say 100 meters that show a resistance in the area of 10 ohmm and other information to tell you that it is a clay layer, then I would feel safe. There are bound to be imperfections inside this layer, but they are not going to be 100 meters deep and 10 meters of clay layer is plenty.
What I am saying is that if you make sure you error enough on the good side then you should be safe not only in theory but also in the practical application (except maybe for the truck transportation issue).
I am sure that things haven't been played safe in many many cases where fracking has happened, as has been documented things have gone horribly wrong in many of these cases and I am also not questioning what you are saying about the not so nice behavior of the oil companies.
> The reality is there is no technology currently available to forecast what will actually happen when you try to turn rock formations into massive soda fountains, none at all, it is a straight up guess.
I am not so sure about that, but it might be very costly to do these studies.
If you do have a big enough tight clay layer between the rock formation you are fracking and the ground water I would feel pretty sure that the two formations won't affect each other.
My job is working with geophysics, mostly for groundwater purposes and I know we are very good at finding those clay layers, there's lots of methods for doing that, but it does take quite a bit of work to gather the data and process them.
I don't know that much about the fracking that has been done around the world, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that there hasn't been done much work done to figure out if the ground water would be safe from the fracked formations in many cases and that the consequences have been really bad.
I'm just saying that I think it can be done safely on some wells and not in others and it is possible to figure out which ones are safe.
Of course there is always the problem of transporting chemicals to the drilling site and getting the chemicals safely down to the formation you want to do the fracking on. The transportation to site will always be a problem, getting the chemicals safely through the borehole should be possible if you do some thorough logging of the borehole to make sure that the casing is tight and intact.
As far as I can figure from the article what is says is 95/86 of the light is absorbed, it doesn't say that all of this light is converted into electricity as is stated here on Slashdot. That is also impressive numbers and very interesting, but my guess is that the efficiency of the solar panel is going to be a lot lower than those numbers posted on the parent, most likely at least a factor 2 lower.
I agree that this should pose a problem for those who read the translations of the bible as a day meaning a literal day. /. and trying to be serious about it, don't mean to be trolling. I just thought that saying that this is a problem for young creationists is true, but saying that it poses a problem for anyone who believes in the bible (or God?) is to take it a step to far.
But it doesn't really make a difference for those who doesn't see "a day" as 24 hours as we know a day today. (Think about it, how would you define a day before the earth was created?).
Some of those who believes that the term "day" in Genesis and other places in the bible is this is Jehovah's Witnesses [warning religious content].
Anyhow I guess I am stupid to start discussing religion here on
I haven't RTF yet, but I think you are right, this one might very well be legit.
/.
Just the fact that this is about the microprocessor design and not about software makes it sound much more sensible than much of the other patent crap that is coming up here on
The reason for this offer from Daniel is imho not as important as it is that he is offering to step up back as the leader of this project and take his job down to part time so that he again can put some energy into the role as leader of Gentoo Linux. ... though I fear that might happen once again.
Gentoo badly needs some leadership right now, Daniel has done it well before and had Gentoo thriving while he still was at the helm, so let's get him back there and get this ship back on course.
I really hope that the council will accept this offer for the best of Gentoo and not let their personal agendas stand in the way of the good of Gentoo
I quick search on the word GPS in the article didn't come up with anything. So I guess either this will be a hardware add on or it will have rely on this technique with trying to find you position depending on your position ... but this only works with telephone companies that gives the data needed to Google. For example Google maps doesn't isn't able to locate itself on any net-providers here in Denmark with my Nokia E61i.
Unless Google has some kind of intelligent solution to this problem I doubt I am interested when this hits the market.
So does anyone know what the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation's framework privacy laws look like?
Anyone living in countries having these laws.
A description like 'balances very carefully information privacy with business needs and commercial interests' says pretty much nothing especially from someone who has a major interest in describing things in a positive way.
Can anyone tell me what the actual differences are between these laws and for example a specific EU country (as far as I know the laws differ pretty much in the EU from country to country still) or in the US (perhaps specific state laws)?
:)
You are right Gore and Lomborg are equally true in this respect
This was the man I first thought of when reading the /. summary (I haven't read TFA).
I guess maybe Lomborg has done some good things, started some good things, but all in all he did nothing good for the global warming debate but make it less scientific and more political. Then again he is actually a statistician with a lot of knowledge about economics and little real knowledge about geology etc.
My point is just that people like Lomborg tend to make something that was before something that could be debated scientifically in open forums like these something that starts a flame war almost right away as soon as it is brought up.
I am not sure this makes the science that we really need to be done well any better, what should have been arguments about scientific evidence ends up in economic and political arguments which never really lead to any good.
You are right this doesn't look like any real news.
The article is really written in a very unscientific way, for example this statement:
What the scientific society thinks doesn't usually change all that fast, the hypothesis first has to be verified and tested etc.
But then again in this kind of archeology this thing with verifying and testing hypothesis can be a bit difficult even though they try as they best can, but trying to figure out how humans evolved through evolution is imho as much guesswork as it is science with what we have of evidence so far.
I wonder if AMD will loose the competition to Intel all together.
Do we risk going back to having only one big CPU producer?
I seem to recall that Solaris is now also based on Intel chips (or was that AMD chips).
I have always been buying Intel CPU's until now, but still I am rather fond of AMD as they have forced Intel to get their act together.
I remain skeptical of the idea of the self healing house, I think that it might work in just the opposite direction of what is intended if not very careful, kind of like if the dampers in the other article linked to gets out of sync with the waves of the quake (or maybe rather into sync) creating resonance instead of weakening the resonance.
First thing I don't like about this idea of nano-particles turning into liquid is this. Imagine a solid structure being put under pressure, as the pressure increased a tiny fraction of the material is turned into liquid, my immediate idea is that this would weaken the structure increasing the risk of a collapse. Sure it might be nice if the liquid later filled out the tiny cracks in the structure, but if the entire thing has collapsed by then, what good will it do?
The second thing I don't like is that these cracks that will be filled out in structure represent unevenness in the entire structure. I can't help but think that it would resemble using uneven bricks for a house. I can see that this could give extra strength to the building if they are used very carefully, but if you just put one uneven block into an entire building it will make it more unstable.
Maybe if the blocks are to uneven they will liquefy and turn into the right structure for creating the most possible strength, I guess it depends on how much pressure would be put on a given unevenness.
Also wouldn't this leave the building a lot more vulnerable to the next earthquake?
All this is said knowing very little about the detail of this idea, it is just my immediate thoughts being confronted with this.
The idea to have the building itself alert the inhabitants is nice, it would especially be nice if the building would warn if there had been a minor quake that is not noticeable for humans but still might be the warning that a bigger quake will soon happen.
Is it just me or does this move from Microsoft seem rather desperate?
Was Microsofts older versions of Windows phased out this fast too?
I guess the people at Microsoft have a really hard time accepting that many people (and companies!) have gotten comfortable with XP and does not want to get something different. Maybe Microsoft have been taking to long to come with a "new OS" this time?
I think this will definitely be a good thing for those who wish more people would use Linux on the desktop and possible also laptop market. People like Mark Shuttleworth and his fanboys can start cheering already.
I myself am no longer so certain that getting everyone to use Linux is what is best for Linux as a whole right now.
My main reason for thinking this is seeing how little Ubuntu contributes to the rest of the "open-source community".
Maybe I am wrong, in that case I would love to hear why.
I gladly leave the picking up of unsatisfied Windows users to other flavors of Linux, I myself prefer to stick with Gentoo and wish that all the developers at Gentoo would realize that Gentoo just isn't and is not supposed to become an "click and go" OS.
Others who will cheer at this news will probably be those trying to earn some money by selling cracked software, only this time people are not going to come to them to get the newest software but will want the "good old XP". I don't think they care much though, as long as they can make money.
Maybe there will even become a real market for buying and selling those XP-licenses that people have lying around?
I wonder how many very useful ideas like this one there is lying around right now? Probably quite a few.
According to the conspiracy people things similar to this happen all the time, with the big cooperations making sure that for example things to replace the fossil fuels does never get publicly known, I doubt there is very much truth in this, but this little story might make me think just a little more of the conspiracy theories.
If Einstein didn't react to this, I wonder how many other great discoveries that just perish because no one reacts to them?
I don't blame Einstein, I bet there was a lot of more or less intelligent nut cases who contacted him with all kinds of "great ideas" and "energy machines" all the time, had he been reacting to it all he would probably have had far less time to work on his own theories.
Well if you want to reinstall then that I am not going to stop you, but repairing a messed up installation usually isn't that hard if you know a bit about the system or go get a bit of support on the Gentoo Forums.
Just use a bootable CD and chroot into the system and get whatever fails on you fixed.
If it is a hardware failure then that is something totally different and it should not in the first place be blamed on Gentoo (even though compiling can be tough for the HD)
I sure am not a big security expert, so forgive my n00bish words here.
I don't remember where, but at some point I read somebody, probably a sys-admin, saying that if you really want security then what you need to do is disable all the things you do not need. Not by default to allow everything and then pick the things you do not want, but go the other way around and make the default to not allow anything and then enable the things you need.
I guess this is one of the reasons I like Gentoo so much, I know everything that is installed on the system and I can remove it if I don't like it.
I don't like to install all kinds of things that I do not know what is and do not know if I can trust. The more things I have installed the more vulnerabilities I also have.
One of my friends once ran a version of Windows XP that he had pretty much scraped everything of that didn't need to be there, I think he was a lot more secure than he would have been had he filled his computer with all kinds of AV and anti-malware programs, some of them seem to be causing more problems than they solve anyhow.
The sad thing about this is that it actually does make sense that Google should buy Youtube for the reason stated in the OP.
It is really sad how the interpretation has become a matter of who can afford the most lawyers and things like that. I think this is a trend that is seen at it's strongest in the USA but we sure also see this here in Europe and Denmark where I live.
In my simple mind the law should be equal for everyone no matter how much money they have, but that really is being naive these days as far as I can figure.
I don't know if my thinking here is to much influenced by movies like Civil Action, but then again it claims to be based on a true story (and the movie is almost 10 years old, so I guess this isn't a new trend, at least in the US).
I think this is about the stupidest thing I have heard from Turkey for a long time (not that I hear much from there). Seems the courts and government doesn't agree on if Turkey should work on tying to become part of the European Union.
Things like these are going to be a problem a serious problem in any negotiations, I can hardly think of any way to demonstrate more clearly that freedom of speech is not something that is not practiced in Turkey.
Thinking about it I find it a bit ironic that the country I live in, Denmark (member of the EU) have done exactly the same thing with allofmp3 that Turkey now did to youtube, yet Denmark is probably quite well known for their so called defense of freedom of speech, latest demonstrated by some drawings of Muhammed.
I guess the reasons behind the two court ordered bannings are a bit different.
In Turkey the reasons being nationalistic and religious, while it in Denmark is the music industries (and according to them also the artists) interest and money that is the reason (one could maybe then start arguing that we just have a different kind of "state religion" in Denmark, I will keep out of that discussion).
Anyhow I kind of understand if the Turkish negotiators will think of the EU as talking with two tongues if they start telling them that Turkey can't do this kind of thing if they want to be part of the EU.
Sorry again my comments reflect I am not an native English speaker.
In my post costumer should be customer.
I have never used OpenNMS and don't know much about this product or any of the other commercial runner ups mentioned, but I noticed one thing from the OpenNMS homepage and that is that they have this OpenNMS Group which provides services, training and support for the product.
I think this is a model that more many other Open Source products would have a lot to gain from following.
One obvious benefit of this is that it allows the developers to get paid for working with the product, that way making it possible for some developers to spend more time with the product and they will be in very much direct contact with the users of the product, not only reading about the bugs in a Bugzilla. It allows for some the lead developers to really be devoted to the product which is a really big asset to any Open Source project where money can not be made from selling the program itself.
Another good thing about this is that it gives the companies who have to choose between products confidence that they can put some trust in that this project is not going to stop being developed because some key developer for some reason is leaving the project.
Of course some care have to be put into not making sure that model does not lead to one big costumer in the services, training and support department does not get to lead the development of the product, which could have negative side effects, but really I don't think the risk of this is too big, the worst that could happen from this is that the project gets forked, with one fork keeping on working for the "company version" of the product while the rest of the project goes in another direction, but if just the services, training and support groups follows the second group then whatever company can hire people to work on the company version of the product. It just means more good Open Source code and good jobs for OS developers, the GNU license should make sure that a company can not take the code and make it into a closed source project.
If Google had not done this then they would be pretty much the single exception from all other multinational companies.
;)
Here in Denmark we have this huge shipping company Mærsk or A.P. Møller as it also known.
They have lots of other activities also, the company has always been somehow very attached to Denmark and many Danes are proud that Mærsk is a Danish company.
The thing is that the government here in Denmark have been proposing to change how the taxing system works for companies. The general idea is to lower the tax rate but to remove many of the things that companies can withdraw from their incomes when taxes are to be calculated, in part to prevent what Google is being accused of doing here, namely putting all their income in countries where they have lot's of losses and expenses also.
Mærsk have been threatening the Danish government that if these tax changes are done as proposed then they may be forced to move many of their activities to other countries. I see no evil in this, companies have to look at the bottom line and for most businesses generating income for their shareholders or who ever gets the money in the end.
I would not consider Google to be evil if they did something similar to this, they would just be acting like pretty much any other multinational company does these days.
I feel pretty sure the Irish doesn't see Googles way of doing their accounting as evil
If something has to be done about this, it can't be done at the national level, I guess that is also what some of these movements like Attack (spelled?) and other have been talking about. I doubt there is ever going to be any real changes in this any time soon, there are far to big interests at stake for countries and big companies.
The article doesn't hide this either, but there is really very little real energy to be won in this way, I don't really get what Mr. Woodring says about megawatts being wasted though, no human is able to generate that much electrical power, maybe he refers to megawatthours which he might be right about, but it would have been generated over the span of many years.
I think it would be more efficient if the people who go to the gym instead would just put on a pair of running shoes and would not have to exercise in a room that had not to be lit and heated for the purpose of them having a place to exercise.
I guess the best thing about this is that it might raise some people's awareness of how much energy different electrical devices use during the day and might help them remember to shut them off and think of energy efficiency when they buy new equipment.
The good thing about the way the human body works is not how much energy we use or generate, our biggest strength in this is the precise and versatile we can use our bodies and the energy we generate from the our food intake.
For example I bet you can save a lot more energy and pollution from exercising by getting wood for heating than you would ever be able to make by exercising a stair machine or spinning device.