Very misleading statistics. Those percentages are based on the number of people with $500k in investable assets. That excludes primary residence, but according to most definitions I could find does not leave out retirement accounts(US IRAs, 401Ks, etc.). The figures you provide are a measure of the top ~15%.
It's frustrating for us though when you [USA] air your documentaries in Canada, and are quoting ounces, Fahrenheit, yards, etc.... it would be a nice gesture for us if you could at least subtitle the imperial measurements in metric...
I've watched a fair number of the "How It's Made" series, an import from Canada to the US. The narration is apparently redone for the US market using Imperial measures, but the close captioning is original and keeps the metric units. It's amusing to hear the narrator say, "the stock is cut about every two inches" while the CC reads, "the stock is every 5cm".
Actually shark researchers have been observing Great Whites returning to the Farallon Islands about 35 miles west of the Golden Gate for over 20 years. This website doesn't talk about migration and return, but Susan Casey's book The Devil's Teeth does discuss how the researchers on the island saw many of the same sharks returning year after year.
The surprising things in the research (as opposed to the article) are the genetic distinction of the Hawaii-California sharks versus sharks in the Western Pacific, and to a lesser extent the fact that sharks habitually come close to shore but rarely interact with humans.
The article and practically every person or entity mentioned in it conflates commercial computer security with military operations. Commercial espionage, theft of intellectual property, garden-variety identity theft - these things are significant issues, but they aren't military threats. I view the article as a combination of people who have a vested interest in making the situation look as scary as possible in order to show that they (the writers, the commission, the groups the commission worked with, etc.) are all doing Important Work.
Yes, the military needs to be serious about computer security - and to develop offensive computer security abilities. Yes, we need to improve security in the commercial sector. But I don't see any sign that we need some huge overarching military establishment to address both. If nothing else, the debacle that is the Department of Homeland Security should teach us that overreacting to even significant threats is a great way to do more damage than the initial threat itself.
For a canoe (which is bacially the shape of this)...
Just a pedant point, but the shape he used for the still-water record is more like a racing shell. Much smaller profile than a canoe - you practically sit on top of it rather than inside.
Parent post wasn't worth $.02. For that kind of obfuscation and dragging the red herring, I'd say "Fished" owes us.
First alert is the constant refrain of "Darwinism" this and "Darwinism" that. People who are talking about science, like the scientists and educators that are under attack from the Expelled crowd, talk about the fact and theory of evolution. The fact of evolution was clear before Darwin started writing. Darwin was the first to figure out natural selection, but that was never the total of evolutionary theory - the man himself wrote pretty extensively about sexual selection, too.
Likewise, talk about "Darwinism" not being of practical application is specious. Knowledge of evolution is fundamental; one can no more be considered an educated person who doesn't know the basics of evolution than one who doesn't know that the Sun is a star.
Make no mistake, Expelled isn't about "academic freedom" and Intelligent Design isn't about doing science. In that sense, the parent post is correct; the issue is social and political. Intelligent Design advocates have no science to back up their positions, so they're fighting to undermine actual teaching at the level of primary and secondary schools. Losing this fight wouldn't destroy American education in and of itself, but it would be a serious step backward. Why in the world would we not object when someone wants to delete a broad swath of knowledge from our educational system?
I was told by many snotty self-proclaimed debunkers that human beings could never generate a meaningful amount of power using their bodies
Depends on your definition of "meaningful", doesn't it? Ten people pedaling to run a supercomputer sounds nice, but the energy equivalent is two 60-watt bulbs per person. Think about the energy needs of even a very small apartment. You've got lights, appliances, chargers, dozens of things that we plug in to main power. Even one that's heated with natural gas still needs electricity to run the blower, and then there's air conditioning, a real power hog. Modern life in the USA takes a lot of electricity, and human (or animal) muscle is never going to provide enough energy to make it a worthwhile source.
I've got mod points at the moment, and I thought about modding this down, but no, sorry, this one deserves to be taken apart (still, +5 Insightful? Jeebus.)
...blame the generals who shot spreadsheet "simulations" back and forth instead of large scale wargames to shake-out the technology.
1 - Didn't read the article, did you? On the actual battlefield (you know, the part with soldiers on both sides?) the technology worked fine. Later, after the war had turned into an occupation, the combination of the technology and the way it was applied were far less successful.
'Scuse me? If you've got insurgents setting up an ambush, blasting the frak out of them sounds like a good solution to me. Fire a DU round from a tank down the road, all the IEDs go "boom" and the insurgents waiting on the side go "slwooop" as the massive air pressure changes suck them inside out.
Yeah, it's so easy to recognize insurgents setting up an ambush, isn't it? They don't look anything like a bunch of guys looking at their broken-down car on the side of the road. Their IEDs are never hidden or spread out where one round can't take them all out. There are never any civilians or kids in the area who would get turned inside out by the same round. Yep, you've hit the nail on the head - the problems in Iraq are largely due to insufficient application of DU rounds from a tank down the road. [/sarc]
One might argue that the insurgents are not terrorists and are thus not our enemy. A reasonable argument, save for one missing piece of logic. If the insurgents would wait we'd already be out of Iraq and they could be dealing with the local, underpowered government. Instead, they decide to take on the most powerful military in the world. Even on our bad days, that's not such a good idea.
No, it's not a reasonable argument, because to start with "the insurgents" aren't a monolithic group. There are former Baathists, foreigners, Sunni and Shi'a militas, et bloody cetera, all with different goals, but agreeing that they want the Americans out. And there has never been any indication that we would leave. Everything we've done from the time Saddam's regime fell has indicated that we planned to install a very US-friendly government and keep a big-ass military presence around to back it up. Look at the permanent bases we're building. Look at the friggin' embassy. Anyone with an interest in Iraq not being a US client state would be a fool to sit around and hope that after a while we'd just wander out. And they aren't idiots, either. They don't directly confront the most powerful military in the world, they attack where that military force cannot really be brought to bear.
"The insurgents" are definitely our enemies, plural. Many, possibly most of them, were not our enemies before the invasion and might never have become our enemies if we had handled the occupation better.
But to return to the original topic - battlefield technology doesn't help much when you aren't fighting battles. Dealing with an insurgency is only partly about effective combat.
One of my buddies is a cop and recently went out to serve his first warrant. The suspect had a Dell machine he'd lifted from his former employer over two years ago. His mistake was calling Dell tech support, where the serial number was on the stolen list. Dell called the local cops. The doofus might have gotten away with it if he'd waited another six months or so, either because Dell would have dropped the entry from their stolen list or the locals would have done something similar.
My own experience with Vonage and Comcast in the Atlanta area was mixed. From my side of the conversation, everything was almost always great, not significantly worse than wireline in any way that I could identify. But my outbound voice would sometimes drop out for up to 30 seconds at a time. This was for a business line where I frequently conducted 1-hour conference calls; some of my co-workers got accustomed to telling me when the drop-outs occurred. Then I'd just natter non-stop until they told me I was back. It was ok in some company-only calls, but at least one group insisted that I not use that line while their client was present.
I tried every fix that Vonage recommended, but nothing made any difference. Although the drop-outs were basically random (and I very seldom had more than one in an hour, and it might be several days between occurrences) they did seem more frequent after school was out in the afternoon.
Ok lets all hope we don't get another visit from the hit men of our solar system, the Baptistina family.
If anyone has the right contacts, I think an effort should be made to get one of the Baptistina objects named "Joey Bananas" or "Paulie Walnuts". Maybe some sub-group of the family could be christened the Soprano swarm.
it certainly does have implications in photonics. a member of my research group will find this very interesting as she's dealing with surface plasmons and their interactions with 1550 nm light,
That wavelength is used for long-distance fiber connectivity in big, fast, expensive router cards, the kind that telcos and ISPs use. Think 10Gbps up to 80km without repeaters (Take a look at some of these Cisco links for gory details.) The possibility that this development could lead to cheaper or more efficient lasers on that wavelength is good news.
The only thing worse than these poorly-written articles are the inane comments they generate.
The biologists who actually study DNA have known the following for a long damn time. Any "science" writer who gets them wrong should be sent back to writing obituaries and wedding announcements.
Most DNA in multicellular organisms does not code for proteins. Some non-coding DNA performs other functions. Lots and lots of non-coding DNA has no function at all. None. It's not "data", it's not "metadata", it's not structural or anything. There are very long stretches of DNA that you can alter radically or even delete and it makes no difference to the organism at all.
I'm just a layman and my technical knowledge on this subject is just about nil, so don't take my word for it. Go read what a Biochemistry Professor at UToronto (Larry Moran) says here or here or what another biologist (T. Ryan Gregory) says here.
Biology is insanely complex and messy, especially compared to computer science. Here's a hint for all the programmers, database admins, sysadmins, and other bright and talented professionals who feel moved to speculate about DNA and similar subjects: If the viability of your idea depends on the assumption that the actual researchers are too dim or ill-informed to make the connection, it's either a bad idea or it was done years ago.
I came on board at AT&T in 1985, about 18 months after the breakup. Based on my experience, AT&T was not "very efficient". It was unquestionably effective, but the mentality of the overwhelming majority of the company was still stuck in the Bell System. Yes, there was plenty of talk about being more agile and nimble and competitive, but there was also two or three generations of monopoly mindset to overcome. Change, especially to the network, was dangerous and had to be managed very, very carefully.
The Bell System approach that AT&T inherited was incredibly conservative, which is not a bad thing if you're building everything to last for at least thirty years and you expect local, state, and federal governments to oversee everything you do. But it's lousy for turning ideas into products and services with any speed.
The idea that only one species of tree is planted by lumber companies is pure propaganda and incredibly naive.....Lumber companies are farmers.
I'm resisting the temptation to call this self-refuting and leave it at that.
Lumber companies behave exactly like farmers when they come to a new area, destroy the existing ecosystem, and replace it with a harvestable monoculture. Just as a hay field is not a prairie, a tree farm is not a forest. This happens often enough even if it's not universal. Now perhaps a given timber outfit will plant pines in one area and poplar in another, but they are not replacing forests with a similar mix any more than any other farmer does. The entire point of a tree farm is to make harvesting more efficient by having an area covered with one species and all individuals the same age.
It's true that rainforests are lousy places to grow trees. They are an excellent place to harvest trees, especially if you don't care what you leave behind after the harvest.
There are lumber and paper companies that use and encourage sustainable practices, but there are also such things as clear-cutting old-growth forests and unsustainable (and often illegal) harvesting of tropical hardwoods.
Slash-and-burn agriculture is (probably) destroying far more tropical rain forest than the timber industry. But that doesn't mean the industry is innocent of all wrongdoing.
I'm a former AT&T employee, and worked with the data networks. At least up until 2005 they had an all-ATM network, a Frame Relay network, and an IP network. There was some internetwork connectivity, but not a great deal. The Frame network definitely used ATM as its internal transport - Frame Relay interfaces with the customer, ATM packets getting sent between interfaces. But the ATM and FR networks used different switch vendors, and the big IP routers were different boxes as well. I may be wrong about this final point, but I don't think the routers used ATM except for some customer access - TCP/IP packets from the customer side were getting pumped out toward their destination over SONET without another protocol involved.
There was talk of implementing a multi-net switch, which would take all data interfaces and send them over the same backbone circuits, but that was before SBC bought the company, so who knows what's happened since.
A customer T1 access circuit could be used in many different ways: Voice, Frame Relay, ATM, or IP access, dedicated point-to-point service, or some mixture.
Oh, and SONET is (or was) the transport format for all the optical circuits running between locations, regardless of what protocols and data formats were being carried.
That's why I wouldn't say that telcos run ATM backbones, at least as a general statement of how backbone data circuits work.
Like most reporting of detailed but interesting science, this one gets it way wrong. Take a look here for a better summary.
The question that was actually being addressed by this research is whether speciation in asexual organisms works the way it does in sexual species. A sexual species in a new environment can separate into new species by adaptations to different niches. It happened with the cichlid fish in Lake Victoria, it happened with the Galapagos finches, and there are lots of other examples.
It's really an interesting question with clonal lines like the rotifers. Since there's no gene mixing between organisms, it's surprising that environmental selection alone would be sufficient to keep the traits similar enough that multiple lines could be seen as the same species after a long time. But that's what's happened here. The rotifers living on water lice diverged into two separate groups, but I think you would expect either much more divergence (as each line accumulates different mutations) or much less (as there might not be enough variation for selection to work with).
Bdelloid rotifers have been known for a long time, and known to be asexual. The bit about "discovering" them was just a gross distortion of the original article.
First of all, in a bird flu pandemic, my LAST concern, right after whether I have enough hairspray, is whether I can work from home!
Really? You're going to quit your job as soon as the news of a pandemic hits? If your local/state/national government issues orders that people only leave their homes when absolutely necessary, you're immediately going to stop worrying about whether you can pay your bills?
What does a country come to if its first concern is not whether its citicens survive but whether they can work 'til they croak?
Citizens aren't going to survive very well if the economy and infrastructure fall apart. Keeping up the infrastructure that allows you to survive will require that lots of people continue to work. Having people who are personally unaffected stay home will slow the spread of infection, which will help citizens survive.
Second, what bird flu? Who has been affected? People who have very close contact with infected birds.
And it will stay that way forever? You are assuming that the virus does not or will not mutate to allow human-human transmission. Such a change isn't inevitable, but it can damn well happen. If not H5N1, then possibly another strain. H5N1 is the best candidate because there's gigantic reservoir of virus in close association with humans - domestic birds.
The biggest threat we're actually facing is the hype around it.
Nope. We assess he size of a threat by a combination of likelihood and impact. The impact of the "hype" is mainly some fear and some money and effort spent on planning. The likelihood of a pandemic of some kind - bird flu or another infectious disease - within the next say, ten years, is pretty damn high, and the impact can be huge. That investment in planning can pay off in lives saved.
I get suspicious whenever a creature purported to have gone extinct X million years ago is discovered alive and well.It seems to happen with some regularity.It seems to me, if you find a fossil of an animal you believe to be extinct, you will probably test it with the assumption it is of relatively old age.I think you probably find what you're looking for.Anyway, not trying to start a flame war. But that's probably going to happen anyway. ("YOU IGNORANT BASTARD DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW DATING WORKS!!!")
You've hit on the first objection to your suspicion already - dating isn't based on anything so trivial as believing an organism is extinct. It's based, typically, on knowing the approximate age of the sediment the fossil is found in. That in turn is based on things like radiodating of overlaying igneous rock, index fossils in the same or nearby layers, and similar techniques. Due to stuff like that, the general age of most sediments is pretty well known. Geologists who are familiar with a given area can tell you what era a particular formation dates from. If your fossil came from a well-known formation, you probably know the date of a given fossil plus or minus a few percent as soon as you locate it. As to how you know the critter is extinct: You don't, not with 100% certainty. But if it's over a few million years old, it's a pretty good bet. Most species don't last all that long, geologically speaking. And you're probably also rather misled by the popular reporting. The "Jurassic Shrimp" is actually a new species within a genus (Neoglyphea) with only one previously-known member, which genus is part of a family (Glypheidae)that was previously thought to be extinct. As one of the discoverers said, "the group is less completely extinct than was thought."
The blog entry is very short, but there's a link to the layman's version of the report in PDF format. You may find it to be a bit hyper ("1 billion miles an hour") and kind of dumbed-down.
The PSTN ceased to be truly circuit switched decades ago. It's been digitized, packet switching for a long time. The only circuit is in the "last mile" from the CO to CPE.
Sorry, not true. In the USA, the major phone carriers did change to digital years ago (about 20 years for AT&T). But each digitized voice call was placed on a particular *channel* of a DS1/DS3/OCx circuit between each switching node, and it stays on that channel through the duration of the call. The whole set-up of the PSTN is that the separate signalling network is used to set up a path which is dedicated to one call for its duration.
There are packet-switching add-ons for the major switches, mostly Nortel and Lucent machines, but the telcos didn't start getting them until the late 1990's at the earliest.
Perhaps our population and technology levels would be set back one or two thousand years, put in the context of a civilization that is about 5000-6000 years old, and a species that is 200,000 years old. In other words, losing about 40% of the temporal gains of our civilization, and about 1% of the gains of our species.
I don't think those percentages are sensible. Both technology and population have increased exponentially - there would be very little difference in most ways between a 2000-year setback and a 5000-year setback. Look at this page on population growth. When you say "set back one or two thousand years" in terms of population, you really are talking about the deaths of 95% of the human race.
From a technological perspective, being kicked back a thousand years doesn't necessarily mean the remainders of the human race can actually operate at 1000CE levels. The easily accessible natural mineral resources have been used up. Whether the 'unused stock' in the form of buildings and machines would be sufficient to sustain 1000CE-level technology for several generations doesn't seem to be an question to answer.
So no, I'd say we would lose more like 90+% of the actual gains the species has made.
Of course, AT&T is going along because they need support for the big merger with SBC (putting most of the baby bells back together. AT&T was once the largest company on earth and they are set to do it again. Guess what, voice calls are still big business and how do you think your cell phone calls go from tower to tower. You guessed it, land lines..............AT&T has always been an evil company.
While I don't have a lot of love for AT&T since I was laid off over a year ago, I don't think some of the above holds up under examination. The SBC merger was announced in January of 2005 and had been in the works for no more than six months before, probably less. There had been talks with BellSouth, but they didn't work out. Cooperating with the government for the sake of the merger would only be significant since the announcement.
When you say "they are set to do it again" you make it sound as if there are a significant number of the same people at AT&T (or SBC or Verizon) as there were before the company was split up in 1984. That's nonsense. The head honchos from '84 have all retired. The upper levels of management have turned over several times since then. Joe Naccio from Qwest is the best example I know of an ex-AT&T guy who got to the top, but he was notable in the early 1990's for not being a typical AT&T guy. I would actually agree that probably Ivan Seidenberg (Verizon CEO) or Ed Whitacre (SBC) would love to have a virtual monopoly on landline and cell service over most of the country. And the current regulatory climate is about as favorable as they could hope for. But what they want is not to ressurrect the Bell System, but to build their own empire.
And while landline voice service is big business, it's not nearly what it used to be. Per-minute revenues (if they even bother figuring that anymore) must be well below $0.01US. The fiber glut from a few years ago still hasn't been used up. Not all those fibers belong to the telcos, either.
As far as AT&T having "always been" an evil company - well, you're entitled to your opinion, but I was there for almost twenty years. I saw plenty of stupid (e.g. several million dollars spent to hire the wrong CEO, cut loose after less than a year) but nothing I would describe as evil.
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Very misleading statistics. Those percentages are based on the number of people with $500k in investable assets. That excludes primary residence, but according to most definitions I could find does not leave out retirement accounts(US IRAs, 401Ks, etc.). The figures you provide are a measure of the top ~15%.
It's frustrating for us though when you [USA] air your documentaries in Canada, and are quoting ounces, Fahrenheit, yards, etc.... it would be a nice gesture for us if you could at least subtitle the imperial measurements in metric ...
I've watched a fair number of the "How It's Made" series, an import from Canada to the US. The narration is apparently redone for the US market using Imperial measures, but the close captioning is original and keeps the metric units. It's amusing to hear the narrator say, "the stock is cut about every two inches" while the CC reads, "the stock is every 5cm".
As for myself, I only ever post to facebook via twitter (which also crossposts to buzz and livejournal).
Maybe that works for your friends, but I find tweets posted to FB and LJ are just irritating. Seeing the same tweets in both places is even worse.
Actually shark researchers have been observing Great Whites returning to the Farallon Islands about 35 miles west of the Golden Gate for over 20 years. This website doesn't talk about migration and return, but Susan Casey's book The Devil's Teeth does discuss how the researchers on the island saw many of the same sharks returning year after year.
The surprising things in the research (as opposed to the article) are the genetic distinction of the Hawaii-California sharks versus sharks in the Western Pacific, and to a lesser extent the fact that sharks habitually come close to shore but rarely interact with humans.
The article and practically every person or entity mentioned in it conflates commercial computer security with military operations. Commercial espionage, theft of intellectual property, garden-variety identity theft - these things are significant issues, but they aren't military threats. I view the article as a combination of people who have a vested interest in making the situation look as scary as possible in order to show that they (the writers, the commission, the groups the commission worked with, etc.) are all doing Important Work.
Yes, the military needs to be serious about computer security - and to develop offensive computer security abilities. Yes, we need to improve security in the commercial sector. But I don't see any sign that we need some huge overarching military establishment to address both. If nothing else, the debacle that is the Department of Homeland Security should teach us that overreacting to even significant threats is a great way to do more damage than the initial threat itself.
For a canoe (which is bacially the shape of this) ...
Just a pedant point, but the shape he used for the still-water record is more like a racing shell. Much smaller profile than a canoe - you practically sit on top of it rather than inside.
First alert is the constant refrain of "Darwinism" this and "Darwinism" that. People who are talking about science, like the scientists and educators that are under attack from the Expelled crowd, talk about the fact and theory of evolution. The fact of evolution was clear before Darwin started writing. Darwin was the first to figure out natural selection, but that was never the total of evolutionary theory - the man himself wrote pretty extensively about sexual selection, too.
Likewise, talk about "Darwinism" not being of practical application is specious. Knowledge of evolution is fundamental; one can no more be considered an educated person who doesn't know the basics of evolution than one who doesn't know that the Sun is a star.
Make no mistake, Expelled isn't about "academic freedom" and Intelligent Design isn't about doing science. In that sense, the parent post is correct; the issue is social and political. Intelligent Design advocates have no science to back up their positions, so they're fighting to undermine actual teaching at the level of primary and secondary schools. Losing this fight wouldn't destroy American education in and of itself, but it would be a serious step backward. Why in the world would we not object when someone wants to delete a broad swath of knowledge from our educational system?
Depends on your definition of "meaningful", doesn't it? Ten people pedaling to run a supercomputer sounds nice, but the energy equivalent is two 60-watt bulbs per person. Think about the energy needs of even a very small apartment. You've got lights, appliances, chargers, dozens of things that we plug in to main power. Even one that's heated with natural gas still needs electricity to run the blower, and then there's air conditioning, a real power hog. Modern life in the USA takes a lot of electricity, and human (or animal) muscle is never going to provide enough energy to make it a worthwhile source.
...blame the generals who shot spreadsheet "simulations" back and forth instead of large scale wargames to shake-out the technology.
1 - Didn't read the article, did you? On the actual battlefield (you know, the part with soldiers on both sides?) the technology worked fine. Later, after the war had turned into an occupation, the combination of the technology and the way it was applied were far less successful.
'Scuse me? If you've got insurgents setting up an ambush, blasting the frak out of them sounds like a good solution to me. Fire a DU round from a tank down the road, all the IEDs go "boom" and the insurgents waiting on the side go "slwooop" as the massive air pressure changes suck them inside out.Yeah, it's so easy to recognize insurgents setting up an ambush, isn't it? They don't look anything like a bunch of guys looking at their broken-down car on the side of the road. Their IEDs are never hidden or spread out where one round can't take them all out. There are never any civilians or kids in the area who would get turned inside out by the same round. Yep, you've hit the nail on the head - the problems in Iraq are largely due to insufficient application of DU rounds from a tank down the road. [/sarc]
One might argue that the insurgents are not terrorists and are thus not our enemy. A reasonable argument, save for one missing piece of logic. If the insurgents would wait we'd already be out of Iraq and they could be dealing with the local, underpowered government. Instead, they decide to take on the most powerful military in the world. Even on our bad days, that's not such a good idea.No, it's not a reasonable argument, because to start with "the insurgents" aren't a monolithic group. There are former Baathists, foreigners, Sunni and Shi'a militas, et bloody cetera, all with different goals, but agreeing that they want the Americans out. And there has never been any indication that we would leave. Everything we've done from the time Saddam's regime fell has indicated that we planned to install a very US-friendly government and keep a big-ass military presence around to back it up. Look at the permanent bases we're building. Look at the friggin' embassy. Anyone with an interest in Iraq not being a US client state would be a fool to sit around and hope that after a while we'd just wander out. And they aren't idiots, either. They don't directly confront the most powerful military in the world, they attack where that military force cannot really be brought to bear.
"The insurgents" are definitely our enemies, plural. Many, possibly most of them, were not our enemies before the invasion and might never have become our enemies if we had handled the occupation better.
But to return to the original topic - battlefield technology doesn't help much when you aren't fighting battles. Dealing with an insurgency is only partly about effective combat.
One of my buddies is a cop and recently went out to serve his first warrant. The suspect had a Dell machine he'd lifted from his former employer over two years ago. His mistake was calling Dell tech support, where the serial number was on the stolen list. Dell called the local cops. The doofus might have gotten away with it if he'd waited another six months or so, either because Dell would have dropped the entry from their stolen list or the locals would have done something similar.
My own experience with Vonage and Comcast in the Atlanta area was mixed. From my side of the conversation, everything was almost always great, not significantly worse than wireline in any way that I could identify. But my outbound voice would sometimes drop out for up to 30 seconds at a time. This was for a business line where I frequently conducted 1-hour conference calls; some of my co-workers got accustomed to telling me when the drop-outs occurred. Then I'd just natter non-stop until they told me I was back. It was ok in some company-only calls, but at least one group insisted that I not use that line while their client was present. I tried every fix that Vonage recommended, but nothing made any difference. Although the drop-outs were basically random (and I very seldom had more than one in an hour, and it might be several days between occurrences) they did seem more frequent after school was out in the afternoon.
Ok lets all hope we don't get another visit from the hit men of our solar system, the Baptistina family.
If anyone has the right contacts, I think an effort should be made to get one of the Baptistina objects named "Joey Bananas" or "Paulie Walnuts". Maybe some sub-group of the family could be christened the Soprano swarm.
That wavelength is used for long-distance fiber connectivity in big, fast, expensive router cards, the kind that telcos and ISPs use. Think 10Gbps up to 80km without repeaters (Take a look at some of these Cisco links for gory details.) The possibility that this development could lead to cheaper or more efficient lasers on that wavelength is good news.
The only thing worse than these poorly-written articles are the inane comments they generate.
The biologists who actually study DNA have known the following for a long damn time. Any "science" writer who gets them wrong should be sent back to writing obituaries and wedding announcements.
Most DNA in multicellular organisms does not code for proteins. Some non-coding DNA performs other functions. Lots and lots of non-coding DNA has no function at all. None. It's not "data", it's not "metadata", it's not structural or anything. There are very long stretches of DNA that you can alter radically or even delete and it makes no difference to the organism at all.
I'm just a layman and my technical knowledge on this subject is just about nil, so don't take my word for it. Go read what a Biochemistry Professor at UToronto (Larry Moran) says here or here or what another biologist (T. Ryan Gregory) says here.
Biology is insanely complex and messy, especially compared to computer science. Here's a hint for all the programmers, database admins, sysadmins, and other bright and talented professionals who feel moved to speculate about DNA and similar subjects: If the viability of your idea depends on the assumption that the actual researchers are too dim or ill-informed to make the connection, it's either a bad idea or it was done years ago.
I came on board at AT&T in 1985, about 18 months after the breakup. Based on my experience, AT&T was not "very efficient". It was unquestionably effective, but the mentality of the overwhelming majority of the company was still stuck in the Bell System. Yes, there was plenty of talk about being more agile and nimble and competitive, but there was also two or three generations of monopoly mindset to overcome. Change, especially to the network, was dangerous and had to be managed very, very carefully.
The Bell System approach that AT&T inherited was incredibly conservative, which is not a bad thing if you're building everything to last for at least thirty years and you expect local, state, and federal governments to oversee everything you do. But it's lousy for turning ideas into products and services with any speed.
I'm resisting the temptation to call this self-refuting and leave it at that.
Lumber companies behave exactly like farmers when they come to a new area, destroy the existing ecosystem, and replace it with a harvestable monoculture. Just as a hay field is not a prairie, a tree farm is not a forest. This happens often enough even if it's not universal. Now perhaps a given timber outfit will plant pines in one area and poplar in another, but they are not replacing forests with a similar mix any more than any other farmer does. The entire point of a tree farm is to make harvesting more efficient by having an area covered with one species and all individuals the same age.
It's true that rainforests are lousy places to grow trees. They are an excellent place to harvest trees, especially if you don't care what you leave behind after the harvest.
There are lumber and paper companies that use and encourage sustainable practices, but there are also such things as clear-cutting old-growth forests and unsustainable (and often illegal) harvesting of tropical hardwoods.
Slash-and-burn agriculture is (probably) destroying far more tropical rain forest than the timber industry. But that doesn't mean the industry is innocent of all wrongdoing.
Eh, not exactly.
I'm a former AT&T employee, and worked with the data networks. At least up until 2005 they had an all-ATM network, a Frame Relay network, and an IP network. There was some internetwork connectivity, but not a great deal. The Frame network definitely used ATM as its internal transport - Frame Relay interfaces with the customer, ATM packets getting sent between interfaces. But the ATM and FR networks used different switch vendors, and the big IP routers were different boxes as well. I may be wrong about this final point, but I don't think the routers used ATM except for some customer access - TCP/IP packets from the customer side were getting pumped out toward their destination over SONET without another protocol involved.
There was talk of implementing a multi-net switch, which would take all data interfaces and send them over the same backbone circuits, but that was before SBC bought the company, so who knows what's happened since.
A customer T1 access circuit could be used in many different ways: Voice, Frame Relay, ATM, or IP access, dedicated point-to-point service, or some mixture.
Oh, and SONET is (or was) the transport format for all the optical circuits running between locations, regardless of what protocols and data formats were being carried.
That's why I wouldn't say that telcos run ATM backbones, at least as a general statement of how backbone data circuits work.
Runners-up: Dictionary Switcher, View Headers Toggle Button, Contacts Sidebar.
It also mentions "Mozilla has three recommended extensions, Foxytunes, Enigmail, and an adblocker"
Like most reporting of detailed but interesting science, this one gets it way wrong. Take a look here for a better summary.
The question that was actually being addressed by this research is whether speciation in asexual organisms works the way it does in sexual species. A sexual species in a new environment can separate into new species by adaptations to different niches. It happened with the cichlid fish in Lake Victoria, it happened with the Galapagos finches, and there are lots of other examples.
It's really an interesting question with clonal lines like the rotifers. Since there's no gene mixing between organisms, it's surprising that environmental selection alone would be sufficient to keep the traits similar enough that multiple lines could be seen as the same species after a long time. But that's what's happened here. The rotifers living on water lice diverged into two separate groups, but I think you would expect either much more divergence (as each line accumulates different mutations) or much less (as there might not be enough variation for selection to work with).
Bdelloid rotifers have been known for a long time, and known to be asexual. The bit about "discovering" them was just a gross distortion of the original article.
Really? You're going to quit your job as soon as the news of a pandemic hits? If your local/state/national government issues orders that people only leave their homes when absolutely necessary, you're immediately going to stop worrying about whether you can pay your bills?
What does a country come to if its first concern is not whether its citicens survive but whether they can work 'til they croak?
Citizens aren't going to survive very well if the economy and infrastructure fall apart. Keeping up the infrastructure that allows you to survive will require that lots of people continue to work. Having people who are personally unaffected stay home will slow the spread of infection, which will help citizens survive.
Second, what bird flu? Who has been affected? People who have very close contact with infected birds.
And it will stay that way forever? You are assuming that the virus does not or will not mutate to allow human-human transmission. Such a change isn't inevitable, but it can damn well happen. If not H5N1, then possibly another strain. H5N1 is the best candidate because there's gigantic reservoir of virus in close association with humans - domestic birds.
The biggest threat we're actually facing is the hype around it.
Nope. We assess he size of a threat by a combination of likelihood and impact. The impact of the "hype" is mainly some fear and some money and effort spent on planning. The likelihood of a pandemic of some kind - bird flu or another infectious disease - within the next say, ten years, is pretty damn high, and the impact can be huge. That investment in planning can pay off in lives saved.
As to how you know the critter is extinct: You don't, not with 100% certainty. But if it's over a few million years old, it's a pretty good bet. Most species don't last all that long, geologically speaking. And you're probably also rather misled by the popular reporting. The "Jurassic Shrimp" is actually a new species within a genus (Neoglyphea) with only one previously-known member, which genus is part of a family (Glypheidae)that was previously thought to be extinct. As one of the discoverers said, "the group is less completely extinct than was thought."
http://www.aps.org/meet/DPP06/baps/loader.cfm?url= /commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=78234
The PSTN ceased to be truly circuit switched decades ago. It's been digitized, packet switching for a long time. The only circuit is in the "last mile" from the CO to CPE.
Sorry, not true. In the USA, the major phone carriers did change to digital years ago (about 20 years for AT&T). But each digitized voice call was placed on a particular *channel* of a DS1/DS3/OCx circuit between each switching node, and it stays on that channel through the duration of the call. The whole set-up of the PSTN is that the separate signalling network is used to set up a path which is dedicated to one call for its duration.
There are packet-switching add-ons for the major switches, mostly Nortel and Lucent machines, but the telcos didn't start getting them until the late 1990's at the earliest.
I don't think those percentages are sensible. Both technology and population have increased exponentially - there would be very little difference in most ways between a 2000-year setback and a 5000-year setback. Look at this page on population growth. When you say "set back one or two thousand years" in terms of population, you really are talking about the deaths of 95% of the human race.
From a technological perspective, being kicked back a thousand years doesn't necessarily mean the remainders of the human race can actually operate at 1000CE levels. The easily accessible natural mineral resources have been used up. Whether the 'unused stock' in the form of buildings and machines would be sufficient to sustain 1000CE-level technology for several generations doesn't seem to be an question to answer.
So no, I'd say we would lose more like 90+% of the actual gains the species has made.
When you say "they are set to do it again" you make it sound as if there are a significant number of the same people at AT&T (or SBC or Verizon) as there were before the company was split up in 1984. That's nonsense. The head honchos from '84 have all retired. The upper levels of management have turned over several times since then. Joe Naccio from Qwest is the best example I know of an ex-AT&T guy who got to the top, but he was notable in the early 1990's for not being a typical AT&T guy. I would actually agree that probably Ivan Seidenberg (Verizon CEO) or Ed Whitacre (SBC) would love to have a virtual monopoly on landline and cell service over most of the country. And the current regulatory climate is about as favorable as they could hope for. But what they want is not to ressurrect the Bell System, but to build their own empire.
And while landline voice service is big business, it's not nearly what it used to be. Per-minute revenues (if they even bother figuring that anymore) must be well below $0.01US. The fiber glut from a few years ago still hasn't been used up. Not all those fibers belong to the telcos, either.
As far as AT&T having "always been" an evil company - well, you're entitled to your opinion, but I was there for almost twenty years. I saw plenty of stupid (e.g. several million dollars spent to hire the wrong CEO, cut loose after less than a year) but nothing I would describe as evil.