Unless a sizable chunk of something streaks across the heavens, lights up the night's sky, and obliterates an area where there are a few hundred thousand people with cell-phone cameras and video cameras and a CNN satellite truck nearby, no one is really going to care.
Why don't they just show them pictures and proof of the Tunguska Event and play the emotional card a la Fox News? "Find out what is already going to kill your children!"
It may have happened in the middle of nowhere many years ago but if we could predict that months in advance, perhaps an evacuation of the area would be possible? Also, if it is hitting on/near another country and we are able to warn them or help them through the debacle, that's gotta be worth a lot too, ain't it?
I have paid ~$50-60 for a few smoke detector and pay maybe a dollar or two a year to maintain the batteries in them.
I make an average amount of income so $50 is nothing when a fire could take my life. I've seen other people's houses destroyed by fires but never mine. I don't know if we see other planets regularly destroyed by asteroids or impacts but if you can make a case for it, then this analogy may be apt.
I also know that walking down the street in Prince George's County might result in your death. So do I hire a body guard to protect me? No. Why? Because I don't have the money for that. If I were a billionaire, I would definitely look into it and probably hire a driver too. I see people robbed and killed on TV so, again, if you can point to examples where planets have been destroyed, this analogy is apt.
Considering the war in Iraq has cost me, the taxpayer, $300 billion and I'm not sure that that is increasing my safety... what's another billion? I mean, it's obvious NASA's not asking us to spend a significant amount of our income on "Asteroid Insurance."
In my opinion, all NASA needs to do is present congress with a scientific statistic claim with percent confidence of global destruction. If we have craters on our planet & there are bones of things that shouldn't have died lying all around, I'm guessing they could place something like a 1% chance of a decent sized asteroid hitting us within a couple thousand years. Given that information, $1 billion may not seem like a bad idea considering most of us employ smoke detectors with even less risk of harm/loss to us.
<evolutionist's response>
Humans got the evolutionary shaft. Human: "Oooh, look at me! I've got an enlarged Broca's region in my frontal lobe! DE-FENSE!" Zuniceratops: "Oh yeah? Well how about this--BAM, the ole' horn in the eye!"
Good thing we're separated by millions of years...
</evolutionist's response> --
<creationist's response>
For thousands of years, lawyers have been laying the foundation for the greatest devil inspired hoax to grace God's earth... watch the press in all it's evil glory perpetrate it even further!
</creationist's response>
No, there's a 50/50 chance they "solve" the mystery.
As the article states:
If the direction is towards the Earth, it almost certainly indicates the anomaly was caused by faulty technology or an artifact of receiving the data at the ground stations. If, however, the direction is towards the Sun, new gravitational physics may be needed to explain the effect.
So if the direction of deceleration is towards Earth, then you might be able to consider the mystery solved and blame it on the process of collecting the data. But if the deceleration is towards the sun or another direction, we have an observation of an unknown effect in physics. If the latter is the case, I think the mystery is just starting to be understood--with a long ways to go and many more observations before we can consider it solved.
Sounds like your company doesn't know it's ass from a hole in the ground.
Relax, dude. In my defense I revealed that my company is a Fortune 500 company.
And we all know that the definition of a Fortune 500 company is: a large group of people with no clue about technology, their anuses & holes in the ground but with enough bullshit spewing out of their mouths to make Wall Street happy.:-)
One thing that neither you nor I like is the fact that one could be a goddamn genius with computers and end up poor, penniless & homeless on the street. Do not underestimate the power of speaking, presenting, & dressing to satisfy those despicable humans that pay the working man's bills. Just ask Cap'n Crunch.
Ok, so the Department of Transportation can't make a business case for it. Big deal.
Allow me to strike some real fear into Microsoft. I work for a large Fortune 500 company with six digits of employees. While it's not our primary product, we write software as a lot of companies do.
When IE7 came out, I decided to use my work legal machine to install it to try it out. This resulted in a next day 7 am nastygram from my system administrator stating that I am authorized to install any software that isn't married to the kernel. Not only were we told not to use it, we were threatened not to install it OR ELSE I wouldn't be able to enter my time or access shared community sites internal to the company.
Because a lot of our company's tools don't work very nicely inside of it. So I'm still using IE6 and my company sure isn't going to upgrade my MS Office suite. Did I mention I write web applications and I can only test them in IE6 and Firefox?
So what would scare Microsoft more? The fact that a government department isn't using it or the fact that many companies like mine are still writing stuff for the old software hence forcing our customers to stick with IE6 or any version of Firefox?
The formula below shows how wave power can be calculated. Excluding waves created by major storms, the largest waves are about 15 meters high and have a period of about 15 seconds. According to the formula, such waves carry about 1700 kilowatts of potential power across each meter of wavefront. A good wave power location will have an average flux much less than this: perhaps about 50 kW/m.
* Formula: Power (in kW/m) = k H^2 T ~ 0.5 H^2 T,
where k = constant, H = wave height (crest to trough) in meters, and T = wave period (crest to crest) in seconds.
Portugal claims the world's first commercial wave farm, the Aguçadora Wave Park near Póvoa de Varzim, established in 2006. The farm will initially use three Pelmis P-750 machines generating 2.25 MW.[1] [2] Initial costs are put at 8,5 million euro. Subject to successful operation, a further 70 million euro is likely to be invested before 2009 on a further 28 machines to generate 525 MW.[3]
And for the UK:
Funding for a wave farm in Scotland was announced on February 20, 2007 by the Scottish Executive, at a cost of over 4 million pounds, as part of a £13 million funding packages for marine power in Scotland. The farm will be the world's largest with a capacity of 3MW generated by four Pelamis machines.[4].
So I would guess that "per unit" would be 3MW/4 Units or 0.75 MW/Unit. Although I don't know what the point is if by unit you mean machine and a Pelamis machine is much less in cost to build than a coal/oil powered turbine. Could you specify if you mean per unit as in per turbine? I understand what you mean, there is a lot to be said about start up cost and maintenance though I don't think there's a lot of information out there as Portugal and Scotland are few countries investing in this technology.
If you think this idea is new, it is not. The patents for this technology go all the way back to the 1970s.[1][2]
As was noted in the original discussion on this topic,
The European Union requires 22 percent of electricity consumption to come from renewable energy sources -- such as solar, wind and wave -- by 2010.
Which explains why you'll see this more and more in the news. Some of the countries in Europe have energy generation from wind & waves up to 10% or 15% but 2010 is getting closer and closer.
Everyone recognizes that it's not smart to put all your eggs in one basket and right now a lot of countries are pretty dependent on oil. With a possible energy crisis or global warming problem, wave power looks like it will be one of the many solutions that each country will develop to mitigate their problems.
Also suspect was the fact that if you pressed up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B and then A, the machine would flash the jackpot screen continually while declaring all its cash "are belong to you." Casinos grew suspicious after younger and younger players continually cleaned out the machine in a methodical manner before eventually treating their "conquering" of the slot as a standard Saturday morning ritual.
I'm sorry, it's Monday and I definitely wish I could UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA my job right now. I used to think that this cheat code (or things like the game genie) were detrimental to youthful minds thinking that you just needed to figure out the trick to life and everything was over. I used to think that they would grow up expecting everything to be easy once you were "in on it" and that this would be bad and they would never understand that life is much more complicated. But, you know what? I sadly see more and more everyday that it's a matter of knowing what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA to tell your boss to make him/her think you know what's going on. Or what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA you tell someone to befriend them to hook you up with a position/help. And then it's to the pharmacy where you're given more UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA in pill form because your doctor (of which there are thousands of kinds) tells you you need it. Notice the tangents my brain flies off on when it's Monday.
I think this option is better than Linux or F/OSS operating systems that would possibly require MORE training for their programmers and users to learn.
You must not be a resident of the United Kingdom. I find it interesting that any country's government or military would rely on a foreign proprietary piece of software to reach mission critical goals.
Who cares about training when you're now dependent on a company in another nation? What happens when there's another nutcase in the white house who orders Microsoft to cut off updates or support to foreign military customers?
I believe prior to BAE's sole recommendation that AMS, a company that specializes in Combat Management Systems, recommended Unix. There was also criticism of a lack of third party external review for this decision (not sure if that's linked in the original article or not). If it's the case that BAE up and said "We're going with Win2K" and the government said "ok," I would be a bit concerned.
I do not think the United States Navy would willingly rely on any foreign proprietary software.
Surely schools can't control what kids say to one another?
I don't know about that.
When I was in high school, I was blatantly told that I didn't have the full rights of an adult until I was 18. I don't know if this is true or not. I actually still don't know if this is true. But let me relate the events that I witnessed and took part in while attending a small town high school in Minnesota.
The grade ahead of me was full of punks. I don't mean 'punks' in the derogatory term, I mean punks that accepted anybody, didn't drink much, tried to skateboard, talked about anarchy, didn't cause too much trouble but liked their music loud and fast. Now, the grade before me had access to an industrial copying machine via one of their parents. What resulted was a 'zine. A punk zine for a school that was often folded 8 1/2 x 11 pages stapled together with images, music reviews, articles & basically anything and all things punk. Including, but not limited to, taking it to the man. The zine was fifty cents to cover copying costs.
I loved these people, everyone else was a tightly knit clique of 'in' crowds where the punks didn't care if I listened to The Beatles & read Sci-Fi Fantasy & lived in the country.
The zine was considered contraband by the teachers. If they found it on your person, they gave you detention. One of the articles in an early edition criticized the entire student body of the school. Foul language was not omitted in this underground publication. First amendment right? The teachers didn't think so.
Lastly, the T-Shirts that people would try to wear were often banned. You were made to turn them inside out or go home with detention. Shirts that said "F You" or even "I hate this hick town." were grounds for detention. In the end, the punks made artwork and screened it onto shirts where it looked like a cool design but if you hooked your thumb and forefinger in it and pulled it down to cover up the inner four inches or so, it said "FUCK YOU." That way, they could choose to display the image whenever they wanted to and a teacher wasn't around. They weren't threatening people with it or harassing people, it was just their response to life and everything. The teachers found it offensive (and some of the dimmer students probably did too) so it was censored.
So to answer your question about schools censoring what the students can say to each other, I experienced that prior to being 18 quite a bit.
I prefer what Wal*Mart is doing -- working to convince the market that these bulbs MIGHT be better for them. I also wonder about the ancillary effect of the incandescent -- namely, heat.
There is no "MIGHT", these bulbs are better for everybody.
I have seen conclusive evidence in theory and have experienced in real life in my implementation of paying large amounts of money to replace my bulbs but having it pay off in the long run. It is both better economically & for the environment. Why do you use the word 'might'?
In the cold Midwest, I actually like reading under my incandescent lamp over my bed -- the warmth is nice, it is focused, and it is better than overheating my entire house. This way, I get just enough heat that I need when I am awake, as when I am asleep I can tolerate much lower heat requirements.
I also lived in the Midwest. For your one example of the bulb maybe reducing your heating bill, there are millions of examples where people only wanted light but got heat with it. The bulb should serve one purpose instead of dividing the energy spent into two. It is simply common sense that it is more efficient to either heat or light instead of a mandatory both. Can you guarantee me that every summer you want your room heated when it is lit? I highly doubt that.
I'm not even going to discuss the fact that most bulbs are situated at the top of the room and--since heat rises and with relatively little air circulation--they have to heat the entire ceiling on down before you start to feel it.
Your argument against CFLs and their 'ugly light' or the time it takes for them to turn on is preposterous. It's time we start owning up and educating ourselves about how insanely stupid some of our energy consumption is. Australia and the California government see it so severe that they have to force their citizens to do this. It is evident that people like you will require the government to ban these "illegal substances" so that they aren't used even after the consumer is educated.
I've read a lot of Michael Crichton's works. I enjoyed them.
What I do not enjoy, however, is his political commentary. The same can be said for Orson Scott Card. Why is it that authors, singers, actors, etc feel the need to get political? Are we enveloped in a society where it is expected that if you have any leverage, you push your beliefs on other people?
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record.
Mr. Crichton, you're great at plot twists and you also happen to be great at political spin. Please keep to the former so I can remain a fan of yours. I like your position on this topic but you do not end your commentary well:
Fortunately, two congressmen want to make the full benefit of the decoded genome available to us all. Last Friday, Xavier Becerra, a Democrat of California, and Dave Weldon, a Republican of Florida, sponsored the Genomic Research and Accessibility Act, to ban the practice of patenting genes found in nature. Mr. Becerra has been careful to say the bill does not hamper invention, but rather promotes it. He's right. This bill will fuel innovation, and return our common genetic heritage to us. It deserves our support.
How will this bill fuel innovation? You wrote in Jurassic Park that it is better to invest billions in a dinosaur theme park than to find a cure for AIDS. Why? Because you can't charge people anything you want for a cure for AIDS, that would be immoral. What if it was acceptable to charge a million dollars for a single dose of a cure? The benefit of medical research would sky rocket and I'm sure more money would go into development. My question is simply, how do you ensure that forcing parts of research to be open to the public won't prevent companies from dumping money into that research? If a company discovers and goes through the painstaking research of finding "natural genes" then why shouldn't they be able to profit off that?
I agree with you, but if you're going to comment on this, you must be prepared for the counter argument. "He's right." Simply won't suffice for me.
Something interesting to note is that this paper is dated March of 2004 (not too new as Ars Technica reported) and it causes me great wonder why I've never come upon this before (or why it's never been cited in the news). I recall reading tons of reports from one of the Associations where piracy is proven to hurt record sales but several years after this one is published, I finally see it.
For those of you interested in the data, pages 34 on contain some very interesting data whereby downloads are broken down by song, album, country & genre (in case everyone was trying to pin illegal downloads on those damned teeny boppers).
For those of you who wish to question the sample size, see Section B. "File Sharing Data and Album Sample" of the paper. You will also be interested in reading Appendix A in which they call into question their own sample sizes and weigh in on how accurate they might or might not be. To quote the paper for some more detail on the downloads samples,
Over the sample period we observe 1.75
million file downloads or roughly ten per minute.10 This is about 0.01% of all the
downloads in the world. A significant majority of the downloads were music files.
U.S. users accounted for about one third of the downloads (and the data contain about
0.01% of all music downloads by U.S. users).
To quote the paper on album sales samples,
The mean of sales for these albums during our
observation period is 151,786 copies, ranging from 71 copies to 3.5 million copies.
Don't kid yourself, this is a difficult study to do. Both the downloads and album sales must be sampled and modeled correctly to draw correct conclusions. In the end, it would be hard to verify/discredit any studies done on this topic since A) consumers are human and therefore erradic & B) macro economics still isn't well understood.
Now, for those of you who just want the bottom line at the end of the paper,
We find that file sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average
album in our sample.
And, from the very end of the paper,
If we are correct in arguing that downloading has little effect on the production of music,
then file sharing probably increases aggregate welfare. Shifts from sales to downloads
are simply transfers between firms and consumers. And while we have argued that file
sharing imposes little dynamic cost in terms of future production, it has considerably
increased the consumption of recorded music. File sharing lowers the price and allows
an apparently large pool of individuals to enjoy music. The sheer magnitude of this
activity, the billions of tracks which are downloaded each year, suggests the added social
welfare from file sharing is likely to be quite high.
Yeah, that's right, the research concluded that "file sharing probably increases aggregate welfare." I'll bet if we all got drills & augers, we could get that into the brains of the people running the RIAA & MPAA.
EMI has been pitching the possibility of selling its entire music collection to the public in MP3 form...
Not quite, they're looking to sell it to a service. If my tax dollars were paying for all of EMI's music to enter public domain, I would imagine a lot of people wouldn't like that idea.
EMI, which is the world's largest independent music company, reported revenue of £867.9m and £62.7m profit for the six months ending 30 September last year.
I'm assuming that those profits are primarily music based so what amount would you have to offer the world's largest independent music company to be able to release their MP3s without any form copy protection? It's difficult to consider anyone being able to afford this.
I live near where a recent 'outbreak' of Avian Flu has occurred in England. Forgive me for perhaps not seeing the bigger picture, but what's the big deal? regular flu kills more people every winter in the UK alone than Avian Flu has the world over - ever. AFAIK anyway.
In almost all cases, those infected with H5N1 had extensive physical contact with infected birds. Still, around 60% of humans known to have been infected with the current Asian strain of HPAI A(H5N1) have died from it, and H5N1 may mutate or reassort into a strain capable of efficient human-to-human transmission. In 2003, world-renowned virologist Robert Webster published an article titled "The world is teetering on the edge of a pandemic that could kill a large fraction of the human population" in American Scientist. He called for adequate resources to fight what he sees as a major world threat to possibly billions of lives.
So, as far as I know, the 'outbreak' you speak of must have been from people exposed to birds directly. Now, you might point out that that outbreak was quite small and few people died. But a 60% death rate is nothing to sneeze at (no pun intended). As the above paragraph points out, should this mutate to a strain of flu that is easily transmitted between human hosts (like some of the normal flu strains), the death rate would probably still remain at 60% or be even higher if medical resources are stretched thin.
I believe that's the "big deal," the fear of a mutation that isn't such a far flung idea considering other strains of influenza.
There were some interesting questions asked and lots of people are sceptical.
Disclaimer, I'm not a physicist.
Well, most importantly, a while back I had read up on the research being done at Los Alamos National Laboratory on quantum computers. Granted, this was 4 or 5 years ago, they have an interesting paper[PDF warning] where, if you'll look at figures 1 & 2, you'll notice that the number of bits you are able to factor is directly related to the decoherence time.
Now, if you're not familiar with Shor's Algorithm, the values in the first figure might not mean much but, in layman's terms, I believe they were experiencing problems with 8 or more qubits. I remember reading that decoherence would destroy the relationship between the qubits before they could prepare them and do a meaningful computation. I had always thought that this would be an upper bound until someone figured out a way around it. If this computer is also using similar means, I'd like to know what special modification they did to overcome these coherence problems.
You're correct that there are a lot of important questions to be answered but a 16 qubit computer that is a "a single instance specific formula calculator" as you put it still interests me greatly and may be a giant leap forward in our ability to understand future computers that may be true full blown quantum computers. Why downplay this unless you can directly point out a problem with what they're doing and what they claim they can do?
The root of the problem is a corporate mentality that users don't have any rights. So they have something real cutesy called "Digital Rights Management" because, hey let's face it, businesses want to define a users rights. Why do you think EULA's and TOS's are so damn long and obfuscated?
Why is Vista a threat to our freedom? Because it's laden with DRM. Why is it laden with DRM? Because they feel pressure to use DRM so users can't spread media. Why do they feel this pressure? Because huge organizations full of lawyers threaten people everyday with lawsuits, they don't want to be a target of those lawsuits.
Now, I know that Vista will soon be the number one used operating system. Will it be Vista's fault that users are giving up their rights? Yes. Will it be Microsoft's fault for giving in to fears and not fighting for our rights? Yes, but no more so than the DRM that Apple puts on its iTMS. Will it be the RIAA/MPAA/other lawyer's faults for putting this fear into the corporate mentality of how to run a successful business? Most definitely.
Stop complaining about each piece of software that comes out with restricted rights attached to it and hit the root of the issue: legions of lawyers lobbying for unbelievable laws on copyrights and enough money to strong arm cases against any defendant.
The only part of this article worth pointing out (that I didn't really read) is that Microsoft is one of the few companies with the cash to fight back. But instead, they're selling the limitation of rights on their OS as a feature.
...the network tends towards liberal values just as a flower turns toward the sun
That's not a good analogy, nature is both beautiful and ugly. Natural trends are not always the best, for instance, what if I said that "the network tends towards liberal values just as a bull tends to rape any female cow next to him." Doesn't sound so enticing, does it? If you're going to use an analogy, please use one that sheds light or meaning on the situation. Your quote underneath your picture just sounds like you smoked enough dope to spew hippie peace love crap.
Personally, I've only become aware of this case via this article. If all he did was post that on a forum to cause all this trouble with Scientology, I sure feel sorry for him. But if a California court found him guilty of any wrong, then I think he should serve his time. I don't think "interfering with a church" should constitute a long sentence though. I feel I am missing a large part of the story here or that this article was written omitting tactics Mr. Henson used agains Scientology. I can't judge until all the facts are in but I am aware that people with a lot of money can make strange charges stick.
I personally hate Scientology but they are a religion and must be respected as one. If they can convince chumps to give them money, there's nothing I can do to stop that.
Just because ExxonMobil paid someone, does not mean the arguments the scientist made are not valid, although they might as well be; same goes for the people who worked at the IPCC report. Let's stick to the actual arguments and data, instead of making cheap ad hominem attacks.
No, it doesn't mean their scientific findings aren't valid. But it sure the hell does mean they're financially motivated. Here's what should happen: Exxon should hire scientists to research this. If the report comes up against global warming, the scientists get $10,000 grand and stay employed. If the report comes up proving global warming is our fault, the scientists get $10,000 and stay employed. You have to approach a hypothesis willing to disprove or prove it--otherwise you're not engaging in the scientific process. You're basically paying "scientists" money to say something.
Instead, we see Exxon offering money for the predetermined outcome of 'scientific' research. And that, my friend, is why I feel compelled to keep "making cheap ad hominem attacks." Because Exxon is pissing science down their leg and the public is paying attention to it when they shouldn't. Who's offering the $10,000 for the report proving global warming is our fault?
I'm not sure if this has been posted or linked on Slashdot before but the IPCC Final Report[PDF Warning] is public as of today. The BBC has a summary:
Probable temperature rise between 1.8C and 4C
Possible temperature rise between 1.1C and 6.4C
Sea level most likely to rise by 28-43cm
Arctic summer sea ice disappears in second half of century
Increase in heatwaves very likely
Increase in tropical storm intensity likely
It's a 20 page report and I know we're all really busy but I think this is the first document one can read and really catch up on what's been decided recently in the scientific community.
I haven't seen anyone discredit this panel or this document yet. What I have seen is criticism from right wing papers about this report either being "unsurprising" or "offering no hope, grim." On the other hand, leftist papers have been in a sort of "we're doomed" sort of mode. I haven't really seen anyone stepping up to the plate and telling the public that it's on our consciouses now. We are responsible--if you have the money, start paying more for green products or products from carbon neutral companies. Increase incentive for companies to be carbon neutral. Right now, as a consumer, I don't know how I would figure out if the car I bought comes from a more or less environmentally friendly company. Consumers need to start driving this change because it sure the hell isn't going to be our ignorant president.
from the you're-wrong-and-i-think-mr.-lincoln-knows-why dept.
Also, Zonk, I think you mean Mr. Chase knows why, Salmon P. Chase is on the $10,000 bill. Offering nominal fees for paper and pen to write reports is one thing but when the incentive is a large percentage of my yearly income, I think Exxon should be ousted as scientifically backwards assholes.
Maybe it's cheap labor, maybe he sees opportunities for growth, I can't say.
Or maybe, just maybe, he thinks that if he does something kind towards them, they'll embrace him back and won't think of him as a faceless corporate billionaire from which it's ok to steal?
The United States economy was initially built on slavery, but I don't hold it against them because they've cleaned up their act. If you sold drugs to make enough money for rent but quit once you were on your feet in a job, I wouldn't hold it against you. Yeah, I realize those are flame bait analogies but that's just how I feel. If Romania's infrastructure was built on piracy, I certainly hope they clean up their act--there are plenty of FOSS alternatives out there that are not as well supported as Windows apps but certainly can do the job with a lot of time and effort.
What they're doing is illegal. I hope the president was acknowledging this and leveling with Gates so rarely does a politician shoot straight, let's enjoy this rare moment.
In fact, I've experienced them both at home and at work with Linux.
But I would like to point out that some of the problems you faced (like integration with MS Exchange server) are simply Microsoft not wanting to release/support/adapt to standards. I know you're not directly blaming the Linux community for your (and the seemingly global) failure in adopting it but what is putting a real big halt on it in the corporate environment is companies working against it. Maybe this will change but I highly doubt it.
The shortcomings that Linux suffers are a result of poor design. Poor design of third party devices, software & services. If all the wireless card manufacturers got together and agreed on a interoperable adapter interface to their cards, it would mean that the OS developers would just need to write one other side for ever driver of every wireless card to work. The problem is that if they opened this up, they perceive their competitors would grow stronger by seeing their research. I suppose something could be said about this hampering innovation or removing the option to continually change chipsets in the search for the cheaper/better hardware, I don't know enough about wireless cards. But one would think everyone could agree on some interface to use. This is apparently a good design practice but poor business move.
I reiterate that you are not alone in your frustration. You didn't fail to adopt Linux, Linux didn't fail to meet your needs, it was the entire community and their business practices that failed you.
Microsoft cautioned everyone not to play the song "Hit Me Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears on or near your computer while the mic is on.
Several lawsuits already involve brutal crimes by computers against annoying young teeny bopper women. Although we can't act like we didn't see this coming, tension has been steadily rising.
It would probably have to go to Edward L. Van Halen's patent awarded in 1987. You see, fig. 1 just can't be beat.
Well, now I'm torn between that and the "The ornamental design for a unisex short with reversible condom, as shown.." After all, some of us are so busy with life that we don't have time to stop and take out a condom and put it on when we're about to have sex. For the promiscuous person on the go!
Slashdot Mirror
It may have happened in the middle of nowhere many years ago but if we could predict that months in advance, perhaps an evacuation of the area would be possible? Also, if it is hitting on/near another country and we are able to warn them or help them through the debacle, that's gotta be worth a lot too, ain't it?
I'm a United States citizen.
... what's another billion? I mean, it's obvious NASA's not asking us to spend a significant amount of our income on "Asteroid Insurance."
I have paid ~$50-60 for a few smoke detector and pay maybe a dollar or two a year to maintain the batteries in them.
I make an average amount of income so $50 is nothing when a fire could take my life. I've seen other people's houses destroyed by fires but never mine. I don't know if we see other planets regularly destroyed by asteroids or impacts but if you can make a case for it, then this analogy may be apt.
I also know that walking down the street in Prince George's County might result in your death. So do I hire a body guard to protect me? No. Why? Because I don't have the money for that. If I were a billionaire, I would definitely look into it and probably hire a driver too. I see people robbed and killed on TV so, again, if you can point to examples where planets have been destroyed, this analogy is apt.
Considering the war in Iraq has cost me, the taxpayer, $300 billion and I'm not sure that that is increasing my safety
In my opinion, all NASA needs to do is present congress with a scientific statistic claim with percent confidence of global destruction. If we have craters on our planet & there are bones of things that shouldn't have died lying all around, I'm guessing they could place something like a 1% chance of a decent sized asteroid hitting us within a couple thousand years. Given that information, $1 billion may not seem like a bad idea considering most of us employ smoke detectors with even less risk of harm/loss to us.
Humans got the evolutionary shaft.
Human: "Oooh, look at me! I've got an enlarged Broca's region in my frontal lobe! DE-FENSE!"
Zuniceratops: "Oh yeah? Well how about this--BAM, the ole' horn in the eye!"
Good thing we're separated by millions of years...
</evolutionist's response>
--
<creationist's response>
For thousands of years, lawyers have been laying the foundation for the greatest devil inspired hoax to grace God's earth
</creationist's response>
As the article states: So if the direction of deceleration is towards Earth, then you might be able to consider the mystery solved and blame it on the process of collecting the data. But if the deceleration is towards the sun or another direction, we have an observation of an unknown effect in physics. If the latter is the case, I think the mystery is just starting to be understood--with a long ways to go and many more observations before we can consider it solved.
And we all know that the definition of a Fortune 500 company is: a large group of people with no clue about technology, their anuses & holes in the ground but with enough bullshit spewing out of their mouths to make Wall Street happy.
One thing that neither you nor I like is the fact that one could be a goddamn genius with computers and end up poor, penniless & homeless on the street. Do not underestimate the power of speaking, presenting, & dressing to satisfy those despicable humans that pay the working man's bills. Just ask Cap'n Crunch.
Ok, so the Department of Transportation can't make a business case for it. Big deal.
Allow me to strike some real fear into Microsoft. I work for a large Fortune 500 company with six digits of employees. While it's not our primary product, we write software as a lot of companies do.
When IE7 came out, I decided to use my work legal machine to install it to try it out. This resulted in a next day 7 am nastygram from my system administrator stating that I am authorized to install any software that isn't married to the kernel. Not only were we told not to use it, we were threatened not to install it OR ELSE I wouldn't be able to enter my time or access shared community sites internal to the company.
Because a lot of our company's tools don't work very nicely inside of it. So I'm still using IE6 and my company sure isn't going to upgrade my MS Office suite. Did I mention I write web applications and I can only test them in IE6 and Firefox?
So what would scare Microsoft more? The fact that a government department isn't using it or the fact that many companies like mine are still writing stuff for the old software hence forcing our customers to stick with IE6 or any version of Firefox?
I'm not entirely sure if the 5MW is per unit but, from the Wikipedia page on wave power: And from the specific wave farm: And for the UK: So I would guess that "per unit" would be 3MW/4 Units or 0.75 MW/Unit. Although I don't know what the point is if by unit you mean machine and a Pelamis machine is much less in cost to build than a coal/oil powered turbine. Could you specify if you mean per unit as in per turbine? I understand what you mean, there is a lot to be said about start up cost and maintenance though I don't think there's a lot of information out there as Portugal and Scotland are few countries investing in this technology.
If you think this idea is new, it is not. The patents for this technology go all the way back to the 1970s.[1] [2]
As was noted in the original discussion on this topic, Which explains why you'll see this more and more in the news. Some of the countries in Europe have energy generation from wind & waves up to 10% or 15% but 2010 is getting closer and closer.
Everyone recognizes that it's not smart to put all your eggs in one basket and right now a lot of countries are pretty dependent on oil. With a possible energy crisis or global warming problem, wave power looks like it will be one of the many solutions that each country will develop to mitigate their problems.
I'm sorry, it's Monday and I definitely wish I could UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA my job right now. I used to think that this cheat code (or things like the game genie) were detrimental to youthful minds thinking that you just needed to figure out the trick to life and everything was over. I used to think that they would grow up expecting everything to be easy once you were "in on it" and that this would be bad and they would never understand that life is much more complicated. But, you know what? I sadly see more and more everyday that it's a matter of knowing what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA to tell your boss to make him/her think you know what's going on. Or what UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA you tell someone to befriend them to hook you up with a position/help. And then it's to the pharmacy where you're given more UpUpDownDownLeftRightLeftRightBA in pill form because your doctor (of which there are thousands of kinds) tells you you need it. Notice the tangents my brain flies off on when it's Monday.
Who cares about training when you're now dependent on a company in another nation? What happens when there's another nutcase in the white house who orders Microsoft to cut off updates or support to foreign military customers?
I believe prior to BAE's sole recommendation that AMS, a company that specializes in Combat Management Systems, recommended Unix. There was also criticism of a lack of third party external review for this decision (not sure if that's linked in the original article or not). If it's the case that BAE up and said "We're going with Win2K" and the government said "ok," I would be a bit concerned.
I do not think the United States Navy would willingly rely on any foreign proprietary software.
When I was in high school, I was blatantly told that I didn't have the full rights of an adult until I was 18. I don't know if this is true or not. I actually still don't know if this is true. But let me relate the events that I witnessed and took part in while attending a small town high school in Minnesota.
The grade ahead of me was full of punks. I don't mean 'punks' in the derogatory term, I mean punks that accepted anybody, didn't drink much, tried to skateboard, talked about anarchy, didn't cause too much trouble but liked their music loud and fast. Now, the grade before me had access to an industrial copying machine via one of their parents. What resulted was a 'zine. A punk zine for a school that was often folded 8 1/2 x 11 pages stapled together with images, music reviews, articles & basically anything and all things punk. Including, but not limited to, taking it to the man. The zine was fifty cents to cover copying costs.
I loved these people, everyone else was a tightly knit clique of 'in' crowds where the punks didn't care if I listened to The Beatles & read Sci-Fi Fantasy & lived in the country.
The zine was considered contraband by the teachers. If they found it on your person, they gave you detention. One of the articles in an early edition criticized the entire student body of the school. Foul language was not omitted in this underground publication. First amendment right? The teachers didn't think so.
Lastly, the T-Shirts that people would try to wear were often banned. You were made to turn them inside out or go home with detention. Shirts that said "F You" or even "I hate this hick town." were grounds for detention. In the end, the punks made artwork and screened it onto shirts where it looked like a cool design but if you hooked your thumb and forefinger in it and pulled it down to cover up the inner four inches or so, it said "FUCK YOU." That way, they could choose to display the image whenever they wanted to and a teacher wasn't around. They weren't threatening people with it or harassing people, it was just their response to life and everything. The teachers found it offensive (and some of the dimmer students probably did too) so it was censored.
So to answer your question about schools censoring what the students can say to each other, I experienced that prior to being 18 quite a bit.
I have seen conclusive evidence in theory and have experienced in real life in my implementation of paying large amounts of money to replace my bulbs but having it pay off in the long run. It is both better economically & for the environment. Why do you use the word 'might'?
I also lived in the Midwest. For your one example of the bulb maybe reducing your heating bill, there are millions of examples where people only wanted light but got heat with it. The bulb should serve one purpose instead of dividing the energy spent into two. It is simply common sense that it is more efficient to either heat or light instead of a mandatory both. Can you guarantee me that every summer you want your room heated when it is lit? I highly doubt that.
I'm not even going to discuss the fact that most bulbs are situated at the top of the room and--since heat rises and with relatively little air circulation--they have to heat the entire ceiling on down before you start to feel it.
Your argument against CFLs and their 'ugly light' or the time it takes for them to turn on is preposterous. It's time we start owning up and educating ourselves about how insanely stupid some of our energy consumption is. Australia and the California government see it so severe that they have to force their citizens to do this. It is evident that people like you will require the government to ban these "illegal substances" so that they aren't used even after the consumer is educated.
What I do not enjoy, however, is his political commentary. The same can be said for Orson Scott Card. Why is it that authors, singers, actors, etc feel the need to get political? Are we enveloped in a society where it is expected that if you have any leverage, you push your beliefs on other people?
To quote a speech of Crichton: Mr. Crichton, you're great at plot twists and you also happen to be great at political spin. Please keep to the former so I can remain a fan of yours. I like your position on this topic but you do not end your commentary well: How will this bill fuel innovation? You wrote in Jurassic Park that it is better to invest billions in a dinosaur theme park than to find a cure for AIDS. Why? Because you can't charge people anything you want for a cure for AIDS, that would be immoral. What if it was acceptable to charge a million dollars for a single dose of a cure? The benefit of medical research would sky rocket and I'm sure more money would go into development. My question is simply, how do you ensure that forcing parts of research to be open to the public won't prevent companies from dumping money into that research? If a company discovers and goes through the painstaking research of finding "natural genes" then why shouldn't they be able to profit off that?
I agree with you, but if you're going to comment on this, you must be prepared for the counter argument. "He's right." Simply won't suffice for me.
Something interesting to note is that this paper is dated March of 2004 (not too new as Ars Technica reported) and it causes me great wonder why I've never come upon this before (or why it's never been cited in the news). I recall reading tons of reports from one of the Associations where piracy is proven to hurt record sales but several years after this one is published, I finally see it.
For those of you interested in the data, pages 34 on contain some very interesting data whereby downloads are broken down by song, album, country & genre (in case everyone was trying to pin illegal downloads on those damned teeny boppers).
For those of you who wish to question the sample size, see Section B. "File Sharing Data and Album Sample" of the paper. You will also be interested in reading Appendix A in which they call into question their own sample sizes and weigh in on how accurate they might or might not be. To quote the paper for some more detail on the downloads samples, To quote the paper on album sales samples, Don't kid yourself, this is a difficult study to do. Both the downloads and album sales must be sampled and modeled correctly to draw correct conclusions. In the end, it would be hard to verify/discredit any studies done on this topic since A) consumers are human and therefore erradic & B) macro economics still isn't well understood.
Now, for those of you who just want the bottom line at the end of the paper, And, from the very end of the paper, Yeah, that's right, the research concluded that "file sharing probably increases aggregate welfare." I'll bet if we all got drills & augers, we could get that into the brains of the people running the RIAA & MPAA.
Recently, I learned that EMI will be allowing music videos to stream freely to UK, German & French users through AOL.
Also--possibly in relation to this--EMI's top legal counsel, Charles Ashcroft, has stepped down after ten years with the company. There's been a lot of internal restructuring so I wonder if these no-DRM propositions are on the way in or on the way out.
From the article linked above, I'm assuming that those profits are primarily music based so what amount would you have to offer the world's largest independent music company to be able to release their MP3s without any form copy protection? It's difficult to consider anyone being able to afford this.
Well, most importantly, a while back I had read up on the research being done at Los Alamos National Laboratory on quantum computers. Granted, this was 4 or 5 years ago, they have an interesting paper[PDF warning] where, if you'll look at figures 1 & 2, you'll notice that the number of bits you are able to factor is directly related to the decoherence time.
Now, if you're not familiar with Shor's Algorithm, the values in the first figure might not mean much but, in layman's terms, I believe they were experiencing problems with 8 or more qubits. I remember reading that decoherence would destroy the relationship between the qubits before they could prepare them and do a meaningful computation. I had always thought that this would be an upper bound until someone figured out a way around it. If this computer is also using similar means, I'd like to know what special modification they did to overcome these coherence problems.
You're correct that there are a lot of important questions to be answered but a 16 qubit computer that is a "a single instance specific formula calculator" as you put it still interests me greatly and may be a giant leap forward in our ability to understand future computers that may be true full blown quantum computers. Why downplay this unless you can directly point out a problem with what they're doing and what they claim they can do?
Why is Vista a threat to our freedom? Because it's laden with DRM. Why is it laden with DRM? Because they feel pressure to use DRM so users can't spread media. Why do they feel this pressure? Because huge organizations full of lawyers threaten people everyday with lawsuits, they don't want to be a target of those lawsuits.
Now, I know that Vista will soon be the number one used operating system. Will it be Vista's fault that users are giving up their rights? Yes. Will it be Microsoft's fault for giving in to fears and not fighting for our rights? Yes, but no more so than the DRM that Apple puts on its iTMS. Will it be the RIAA/MPAA/other lawyer's faults for putting this fear into the corporate mentality of how to run a successful business? Most definitely.
Stop complaining about each piece of software that comes out with restricted rights attached to it and hit the root of the issue: legions of lawyers lobbying for unbelievable laws on copyrights and enough money to strong arm cases against any defendant.
The only part of this article worth pointing out (that I didn't really read) is that Microsoft is one of the few companies with the cash to fight back. But instead, they're selling the limitation of rights on their OS as a feature.
That's not a good analogy, nature is both beautiful and ugly. Natural trends are not always the best, for instance, what if I said that "the network tends towards liberal values just as a bull tends to rape any female cow next to him." Doesn't sound so enticing, does it? If you're going to use an analogy, please use one that sheds light or meaning on the situation. Your quote underneath your picture just sounds like you smoked enough dope to spew hippie peace love crap.
Personally, I've only become aware of this case via this article. If all he did was post that on a forum to cause all this trouble with Scientology, I sure feel sorry for him. But if a California court found him guilty of any wrong, then I think he should serve his time. I don't think "interfering with a church" should constitute a long sentence though. I feel I am missing a large part of the story here or that this article was written omitting tactics Mr. Henson used agains Scientology. I can't judge until all the facts are in but I am aware that people with a lot of money can make strange charges stick.
If you want to support Keith Henson, there is a donation fund set up for his defense fees.
I personally hate Scientology but they are a religion and must be respected as one. If they can convince chumps to give them money, there's nothing I can do to stop that.
Instead, we see Exxon offering money for the predetermined outcome of 'scientific' research. And that, my friend, is why I feel compelled to keep "making cheap ad hominem attacks." Because Exxon is pissing science down their leg and the public is paying attention to it when they shouldn't. Who's offering the $10,000 for the report proving global warming is our fault?
- Probable temperature rise between 1.8C and 4C
- Possible temperature rise between 1.1C and 6.4C
- Sea level most likely to rise by 28-43cm
- Arctic summer sea ice disappears in second half of century
- Increase in heatwaves very likely
- Increase in tropical storm intensity likely
It's a 20 page report and I know we're all really busy but I think this is the first document one can read and really catch up on what's been decided recently in the scientific community.I haven't seen anyone discredit this panel or this document yet. What I have seen is criticism from right wing papers about this report either being "unsurprising" or "offering no hope, grim." On the other hand, leftist papers have been in a sort of "we're doomed" sort of mode. I haven't really seen anyone stepping up to the plate and telling the public that it's on our consciouses now. We are responsible--if you have the money, start paying more for green products or products from carbon neutral companies. Increase incentive for companies to be carbon neutral. Right now, as a consumer, I don't know how I would figure out if the car I bought comes from a more or less environmentally friendly company. Consumers need to start driving this change because it sure the hell isn't going to be our ignorant president.
Also, Zonk, I think you mean Mr. Chase knows why, Salmon P. Chase is on the $10,000 bill. Offering nominal fees for paper and pen to write reports is one thing but when the incentive is a large percentage of my yearly income, I think Exxon should be ousted as scientifically backwards assholes.
The United States economy was initially built on slavery, but I don't hold it against them because they've cleaned up their act. If you sold drugs to make enough money for rent but quit once you were on your feet in a job, I wouldn't hold it against you. Yeah, I realize those are flame bait analogies but that's just how I feel. If Romania's infrastructure was built on piracy, I certainly hope they clean up their act--there are plenty of FOSS alternatives out there that are not as well supported as Windows apps but certainly can do the job with a lot of time and effort.
What they're doing is illegal. I hope the president was acknowledging this and leveling with Gates so rarely does a politician shoot straight, let's enjoy this rare moment.
Your frustrations aren't unique.
In fact, I've experienced them both at home and at work with Linux.
But I would like to point out that some of the problems you faced (like integration with MS Exchange server) are simply Microsoft not wanting to release/support/adapt to standards. I know you're not directly blaming the Linux community for your (and the seemingly global) failure in adopting it but what is putting a real big halt on it in the corporate environment is companies working against it. Maybe this will change but I highly doubt it.
The shortcomings that Linux suffers are a result of poor design. Poor design of third party devices, software & services. If all the wireless card manufacturers got together and agreed on a interoperable adapter interface to their cards, it would mean that the OS developers would just need to write one other side for ever driver of every wireless card to work. The problem is that if they opened this up, they perceive their competitors would grow stronger by seeing their research. I suppose something could be said about this hampering innovation or removing the option to continually change chipsets in the search for the cheaper/better hardware, I don't know enough about wireless cards. But one would think everyone could agree on some interface to use. This is apparently a good design practice but poor business move.
I reiterate that you are not alone in your frustration. You didn't fail to adopt Linux, Linux didn't fail to meet your needs, it was the entire community and their business practices that failed you.
Microsoft cautioned everyone not to play the song "Hit Me Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears on or near your computer while the mic is on.
Several lawsuits already involve brutal crimes by computers against annoying young teeny bopper women. Although we can't act like we didn't see this coming, tension has been steadily rising.
It would probably have to go to Edward L. Van Halen's patent awarded in 1987. You see, fig. 1 just can't be beat.
Well, now I'm torn between that and the "The ornamental design for a unisex short with reversible condom, as shown.." After all, some of us are so busy with life that we don't have time to stop and take out a condom and put it on when we're about to have sex. For the promiscuous person on the go!