I don't use Hulu but I'm guessing it's because you can pick which episode you want on Hulu but not TV. I would watch the PTA is disbanding episode 50 times if I wans't soooo wasted to ytpe rightnow .
We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates. You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate that you are an Amazon Associate and resident of North Carolina.
Please note that this is not an immediate termination notice and you are still a valued participant in the Associates Program. All referral fees earned on qualified traffic will continue to be paid as planned.
But because the new law is drafted to go into effect once enacted -- which could happen in the next two weeks -- we will have to terminate the participation of all North Carolina residents in the Amazon Associates program on or before that same day. After the termination day, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com nor will we accept new applications for the Associates program from North Carolina residents.
The unfortunate consequences of this legislation on North Carolina residents like you were explained in detail to key senators and representatives in Raleigh, including the leadership of the Senate, House, and both chambers' finance committees. Other states, including Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee, considered nearly identical schemes, but rejected these proposals largely because of the adverse impact on their states' residents.
The North Carolina General Assembly's website is www.ncleg.net and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at www.performancemarketingalliance.com.
We thank you for being part of the Amazon Associates program, and we will apprise you of the General Assembly's action on this matter.
Sincerely,
Amazon.com
You were warned! Tell us, James Barrett, how many letters did you sent to your representatives demanding they strike down this unconstitutional tax?
Yes, it came early. But you were warned. Unwittingly operating for one day could set Amazon back thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. They tried blocking it with litigation in New York and they lost. Don't get made at them for playing it safe, you have no one to blame but your elected officials.
At least for America, this blogger simply holds a different viewpoint of how things should be from the content lawyer lobbyists and the court system they control.
But you know who's liable for that? Whoever actually put it online. Not the search engine that pointed you to it.
That's really funny you should say that because recently precedent was set at $80,000 per song for uploading and distributing it. Was the defendant the original uploader? Not even close.
And you know what? Through both those trials, I am unaware of any action taken to track down the initial uploader of those files. Maybe because doing so is futile. But it might also be that the legal system here (and also in Sweden apparently) views association of diseminating information about pirating as a more problematic and evil crime than the actual act of you pirating it for yourself!
This is a complex process of getting copyrighted material to you. Someone has to buy it, encode it, upload it, it gets seeded or whatever, you search for it, you download it, you execute it, you re-upload it, ad nauseum. And at any point in that chain, these people are not afraid to prosecute you. And, like some sort of pyramid scheme, you collect all the sins of those in the chain before you. And you pay, oh yes, my brethren, you pay dearly.
Intriguing article. I like the ad that uses Barbara Walters' photo and claims
Barbara talks about the "Miracle Pill" known as Resveratrol
Notice they didn't user her last name. But they use her image and the abc News logo... their domain name is hilarious, news3news.com (looks like newsnews and 3news were taken, ha) which leads one to the registrant residing at:
P.O. Box in the Cayman Islands. Imagine that. They don't even bother to use domainsbyproxy or a similar service like most of the other domains listed in this Wired story.
Selling questionable meds is probably pretty hard to prosecute... but using abc's logo and Walters' image for advertising is definitely prosecution worthy. I hope some of these companies go after this scum.
And when was the editing and typesetting for the edition you used done? Do you know that there area lot of public domain music works but very few recorded performances that are in the public domain?
Publishers like Kessinger Publishing specialized in maintaing and providing a means for acquiring out of print public works. They served a very valuable purpose at one point but the internet, Project Gutenberg, even Google should make them obsolete soon. We're in a transition period.
The issue with the Google books is that they don't have the original 1800s printing of the first volume. That's why they had to rely on Kessinger. Kessinger publishes both volumes of Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan and the second original printing is free on Google books. Google faces the problem of not being able to re-edit or do its own typesetting of the first edition so instead of risking litigation they just put up what they can. They cannot fight these fights for every book. I think the copyfraud label applied to them is misplaced and will soon be a non-issue as others step forward with their personal collections to offer up to the internet.
Verb, "To portion out, especially during a shortage of supply."
Saying "any given vehicle must get 10 miles or more to the gallon on EPA tests" is different from saying "you have 5 gallons of gasoline a month to use, use wisely." The AP faq does not use the word "ration" once and I am beginning to believe that you are concerned with spreading fear and misinformation in regards to this bill.
And energy rationing, by this name or any other, spells death for the economy. They might as well call it the "starve and freeze" bill.
Where did you find them explaining that everyone will have to ration energy? What does starving have to do with energy? It's further down the slope of environmental consciousness vs the economy but you are doing no one a service by claiming it is utter self-annihilation when it's not that bad.
From the AP questions:
Q: Other than costs potentially being passed along to consumers, will this affect most Americans' day-to-day lives?
A: It fundamentally will change how we use, produce and consume energy, ending the country's love affair with big gas-guzzling cars and its insatiable appetite for cheap electricity. This bill will put smaller, more efficient cars on the road, swap smokestacks for windmills and solar panels, and transform the appliances you can buy for your home.
You know, I can't buy the old school hydrochlorofluorocarbon to use as a refrigerant in my new car. The new stuff doesn't work as well (it's close) but it's a lot better for the environment. Small things like this can be important to entities like the EPA.
While this new bill is further down the slope of how invasive this is to a consumer's life, I don't think it's quite as far as "energy rationing" or "starve and freeze" like you so quickly claim it to be. Is it going to dampen the economy? Most definitely. I would not pick this time to launch this bill but I feel it is long overdue. Americans should be made more aware of what energy consumption does to the environment but we cannot seem to learn. So the government is deciding to intervene and put restrictions on it. Probably the wrong way to address the problem but there you have it. It will be interesting to see if these energy caps are applied to the huge black suburbans and heavily armored luxury cars the president's entourage drives around in.
Tell me why there aren't nuclear power plants in every township in the United States? That is easy to see, right? People fear for their health and safety. The same could be said to a lesser degree of smokestacks and egregiously energy consuming automobiles. We're starting to affix a price to environmental degradation and the current administration places it much higher than the last. I'm interested in what specific cost this is going to have to the end consumer and am hesitant to automatically reject or praise this bill until that's known.
I'm not a hardware guy and I'm no fan of IBM but I must be missing something here: what is it about mainframes that makes them so different from servers?
Thanks for that link. It's nice to see belittling/patronizing people has become automated in this day and age.
Unfortunately it was ridiculously unhelpful. I had already visited Wikipedia and the other links (like the one from wiki answers) where pretty much vapid and devoid of any information at all. What I did find on Wikipedia:
Nearly all mainframes have the ability to run (or host) multiple operating systems, and thereby operate not as a single computer but as a number of virtual machines. In this role, a single mainframe can replace dozens or even hundreds of smaller servers. While mainframes pioneered this capability, virtualization is now available on most families of computer systems, though not to the same degree or level of sophistication.
So as the multicore processors increase and as virtualization improves, I'm currently led to believe that there is little difference between a mainframe and a small server farm properly networked and load balanced? Feel free to actually add some information in your reply...
Microsoft is now complaining......... IBM is so anticompetitive that governments should intervene.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Well, I think it's more a case of "we got hosed in Europe so let's see if we can turn this same sword on our competitors." From the article:
The CCIA now has added encouragement from a tiny firm backed by IBM rival Microsoft Corp., which has lodged an antitrust complaint in Europe, while pressing a related lawsuit in federal court in New York and sounding out U.S. regulators.
Microsoft's been picked over with a fine toothed comb by the EU recently and I think their strategy now is to make sure everyone else is too. If you look at it that way, Microsoft has nothing to lose. They've been scrutinized to the fullest extent and you should expect them to turn this same scrutiny over to other companies in other fields. I wouldn't be surprised to see a sort of anti-competitive gaming lawsuit aimed at Nintendo come about one of these days in the EU.
So through the whole article from Total Telecom all I could find for a concrete complaint is:
T3 contends that IBM pens in mainframe customers faced with a high cost of switching to other systems, while refusing to share blueprints necessary to offer a cheaper alternative.
I'm not a hardware guy and I'm no fan of IBM but I must be missing something here: what is it about mainframes that makes them so different from servers?
Tampa-based T3 develops mainframe technology compatible with IBM software that is designed for small and midsize enterprises.
Maybe they can't release details but I'm guessing that there's some proprietary chipsets and microcontrollers inside these things to run the (what are they at 32 or 64 processors) CPUs stacked on top of each other and banks of memory and storage and database crap. So what you've gotten software written specifically to take advantage of this stuff? And it's going to be hard to move to another mainframe or standardized servers with that stuff? Are you surprised? It'd be like if I wrote something for Windows and then complained I couldn't get the blueprint from Windows of how the API works so I could move to a "cheaper solution" like Linux.
So if T3 wins this case, what's the ideal outcome? IBM open sources the software that runs on these mainframes? IBM releases detailed chipset information? Both are laughable. And if you're going to argue that, you might as well argue that Microsoft open up Windows or Intel layout the insides of its Atom processors for the world to see.
I wish I didn't find myself defending IBM (I hate their software and these mainframes sound like a scam) but you have to draw the line somewhere or apply to everyone. My advice to the poor companies still at the hands of IBM: get out. Of course that's my advice to anyone foolish enough to buy into vendor "lock-in" software like Flash. Lesson learned: An extra layer of well defined and thought out abstraction will add a bit of overhead but in the end it might save your ass when you need to switch technologies.
So let me get this straight, the Vice President of a web company is criticizing the hardware guys in two of the world's biggest chip makers?
You guys don't get it
Is it possible to take out a massive life insurance policy on Jonathan Heiliger?
To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient.
I assure you, despite your misconception that the world revolves around you everyone has those requirements. From the people who build supercomputers right down to the netbook I am typing on while watching Gurren Lagann.
Can we get like a panel of hardware engineers to have a discussion with this guy and can I get some popcorn?
why not just put it in a vacuum chamber, warm it up, and slide it on out?
What, you mean like they discussed in the article? They even came up with a better idea: instead of heating up the whole vessel, just freeze the knob with dry ice!
The options relating to the application of dry ice to shrink the knob have already been attempted, and failed. However, the same method, along with a pressurization of the Crew Module, may be enough to free the knob from its lodged position.
The only problem is the amount of pressurization that can be conducted in the OPF is far less than the pressure that played a part in allowing the knob to become embedded in the first place.
Pressurize crew module and dry ice on knob to TBD (To Be Determined) pressure. Pro's: Could allow for uniform structural deflection to increase gap between pressure pane and dashboard; enough to free up the knob non-destructively. Less potential for inducing further damage to the pane.
**UPDATE: The above option was selected on Thursday as the opening process for an attempt to remove the knob. The cabin will be pressurized to 3 psid, before an engineer will apply dry ice to the knob. This option is not deemed to be a likely solution, but more so the opening option that avoids additional damage to the window.**
Although it's lengthy, you should try reading the article next time. The guys at NASA are pretty clever.
The article neglects to mention the extreme disappointment of John M. Grunsfeld who spent the majority of Mission STS-125 photographing a strange phenomenon he could witness through his window but could not detect on radar. A large knob-shaped object would move about above the atmosphere with an almost supernatural fluidity and change of speeds relative to the Earth. He neglected to mention it to his crewmates hoping that he had stumbled upon either the first contact with alien life or observed a new phenomenon he dubbed in his journal "Grunsfeld's Effect." Unfortunately the engineers at NASA have immortalized his name by calling the stuck debris "Grunsfeld's Knob" or "Grunsfeld's God." The engineers have also started referring to being duped as "being grunsfelded." Example: "I called up to order some of those damn Video Professor instructional DVDs and ended up with 8 of the stupid things. Man did I get Grunsfelded!"
Well, I'm glad they found such an unbiased and informed person to make such a statement about security versus usability. And for a second there I was afraid he was just doing this for attention.
Mr. Nielsen, could you send us screen shots of a working example? Perhaps show us how it looks like when you log into the administrative console now with your password entered in and then a screenshot of the way you think it would be more usable. I'll review them and let you know in a most interesting way what I think.
Perhaps you should read up on our friend Kevin Mitnick and NASA "Hacker" Gary McKinnon both of whom are no strangers to the over-the-shoulder-attack. Really, I'm no security expert or pen tester but I'm going to speculate that these 'soft hacks' are some of the most dangerous vulnerabilities left. Your suggestion just makes them all the more easier. Me personally would like to see the standard bumped up to the level of the input box not even being masked... no input is recorded in anyway on the screen. Now that's a usability nightmare when you can't even backspace to correct your errors. I don't think I've seen this since my days in a computer lab at college but I think sacrificing a few login attempts worth of time is worth the security.
Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security...
[citation desperately needed]
I think back to the few times when I've entered my password accidentally into the username box because the tab key I hit didn't register or the site didn't support it and I just felt nervous and dirty and needed to change my password. Just knowing that there were photons and radiation everywhere in my cube belying my password to anyone who cared to capture them... I mean it's bad enough that the sound waves of my keystrokes are floating around telling people my password. Sorry to go all tinfoil hat on you there.
Yesterday a piece of space trash knocked our Microwave Power Plant operating over Oregon off target from its station. Unfortunately, it continued to beam a strong powerful ray of energy down as its sights fell over your Western provinces. We are sorry.
We urge you not to think of it as "a swath of destruction" so much as "a wicked cool tattoo"... I heard Mexico is very jealous.
Williston Lake was a very beautiful lake right up until it evaporated... but look on the bright side--there sure the hell ain't no zebra mussels left in there now!
We're also sorry that instead of shutting it down, we just swung it back over Canada to its power station in Oregon and next time we will totally just stop it before this happens. To make up for it, we'll send you some extra power so your people stop rioting and Mad Maxing.
Forgot to add... why aren't they drilling in some desert area... some abandoned nuclear test site? Sure, the power transmission losses will be larger, but so will the safety (especially compared to SF)
First of all it's "north of San Fransisco" and by North they mean it's actually North of Santa Rosa. And it looks to be about 20 miles north of that up near Clear Lake. And if you go to their project site and look at the map at the bottom, you'll notice in the past week there's been 3.0 or larger earth quakes in that region. The 3.4 they had in Basel looks to be just another daily occurrence in those parts.
If you look where they're drilling, there's not a whole lot of homes around there. I'm not sure what the radius of destruction is from the epicenter for a "big one" but I don't think it's massive enough to hit a lot way out there. I could be wrong. But you know, I bet if they see a 3.4 like Basel, they shut it down if the government doesn't first. I do like the interactive map on their site so you can see the earthquakes relative to their drilling.
Who knows? They could have determined that unstable areas are safer for drilling since the region around you is having 3.0+ earthquakes all the time? Not like you're going to screw anything up if the plates are shifting constantly anyway, right?
Also, the government funded stuff is all over the place (Utah included) so don't worry, they want this energy source available to all and non centralized. I'm not sure what your motivation is here or why the summary labeled this as pure evil Personally, I'm interested in what this could do for non-polluting energy. I think in order to get the drilling permits and convince backers it was safe enough for America you would have to show a lot of proof. But I'm not a seismologist. Looks worth a shot to me though.
Lastly people take risks in the name of discovery and production. It happens every time a human leaves Earth's gravitational pull, it happened in the early days of a lot of technology until it was perfected. I'm not arguing we should risk human lives, I'm just pointing out that we might be blowing a risk out of proportion that, since non of us are seismologists, none of us really understand. Is it like drilling a pinhole through a one inch slab of marble or drilling the pinhole through one millimeter thick pie crust? I highly doubt they'd be wasting their time if they didn't know the ground would remain stable long enough for their tunnel to remain intact. It looks like they're taking precautions and claim to have refined the process to make it safer at least.
Yes, Google's given these guys $6.5 million. But the United States federal government has given them $200 million--especially the Department of Energy. If you're a United States citizen, you should be aware that you are also funding "the next big one."
Also the article says it's "nearly the same" drilling technology as the one that caused the quake in Basel while the summary says it's the same. It seems it's not the same though. The article goes on to say:
Officials at AltaRock, with offices in Sausalito, Calif., and Seattle, insist that the company has learned the lessons of Basel and that its own studies indicate the project can be carried out safely. James T. Turner, AltaRock's senior vice president for operations, said the company had applied for roughly 20 patents on ways to improve the method.
I don't know about Basel but I'm certain these guys know they would face serious legal/criminal action if they didn't know for sure it was safe.
Like Eric Clapton releasing an album paying homage to the great blues guitarist Robert Johnson, my next album will be concentrating on my roots and be recorded entirely on thirty five thousand year old flutes using only the recording technology they had back then... I predict this will appeal more to the older crowd and while a lot of the themes of the songs have anti-Cro Magnum themes, I think this sort of retro music is long overdue.
The proposal lists detection of nuclear WMDs via neutrons and gamma rays... the proposal itself also correctly notes that places like NYC are trying to ban Geiger counters and probably wouldn't be too keen on this sort of data being opened up to the masses. So you find out your neighborhood has an irregular--perhaps even mildly dangerous--amount of radioactive activity. Watch the lawsuits roll in...
The proposal itself stays away from video and on their site they talk about who would have release rights to this video, I'm not sure why the EFF is commenting on that. It looks like they want to stay away from somone/group grabbing all the video and putting it up on YouTube to make the street in front of your house a public spectacle.
I found the February 20th, 1875 article online that both Anderson & Wikipedia excerpted and it was actually pretty interesting to read. In college I had an English composition teacher that had us dig up old Microfiche and select an interesting article and write an essay on it. I found one that was an article of the execution of a slave convicted of rape and murder. It was amazing to find out that the details of the rape and murder obviously sold newspapers then just as much as they do today.
What is really interesting is that even though this article is 140 years old, they still ended the soft articles on a light note (maybe I notice this because the Onion mocks it so often?). The last few sentences:
I related to Mr. Lacoume the conversation which I had overheard between the old Frenchman and the waiter, and asked him if he had many discontented customers. "Oh yes," he replied laughing, "there are at least a dozen old fellows who come here every day, take one fifteen cent drink, eat a dinner which would cost them $1 in a restaurant, and then complain that the beef is tough or the potatoes water." Mr. Lacoume confirmed the statement that thousands of people in New-Orleans live on free lunches.
HTML - as opposed to XHTML, even when delivered with the MIME type text/html - allows authors to omit certain tags. According to the HTML 4 DTD, you can omit the following tags (tags of so-called "void" - empty - elements are marked as strikethrough):
</area>
</base>
<body>
</body>
(Void Element) </br>
</col>
</colgroup>
</dd>
</dt>
<head>
</head>
(Void Element) </hr>
<html>
</html>
(Void Element) </img>
(Void Element) </input>
</li>
(Void Element) </link>
(Void Element) </meta>
</option>
</p>
</param>
<tbody>
</tbody>
</td>
</tfoot>
</th>
</thead>
</tr>
For example, if you have a list of items marked up as <li>List item</li>, you could instead just write <li>List item. Or instead of a paragraph that you'd usually close with via </p>, you could just use <p>My paragraph. This even works with html, head, and body, which are not required in HTML. (Make sure you feel comfortable with this before making it your standard coding practice.)
Omitting optional tags keeps your HTML formally valid, while decreasing your file size. In a typical document, this can mean 5-20 % savings.
Now, my first reaction was simply "that cannot be valid!" But, of course, it is. What I found interesting is that when I looked at the source for that tutorial they themselves are using </li> and </p>. Interesting, huh? You would hope that Google would follow the very advice they are trying to give you.
Some of these suggestions may come at the cost of readability and maintainability. There's something about web pages being nice tidy properly formatted XML documents with proper closing tags that I like.
China marked the date July 1st, 2009 as the day manufacturers will be forced to install filtering software on all new PCs.
The article linked to that text's story says
The notice says the software must either be pre-installed on the hard drive or enclosed on a compact disc.
The manufacturers and distributors could comply with the letter of the law and just put it on a disc. If you wanted to see true protests from them, you would burn the disc in some unknown standard or zip it up... or put it on an HD DVD disc:)
Have these requirements since changed to require it installed? If they have I haven't heard...
If you're a netbook manufacturer and you put it on the disc instead of the netbook (which are almost always sans disc drive) what are the odds anyone's going to bother figuring out how to move that to their computer unless they themselves personally want it. You could also provide tutorials on removing the software completely for people that have any "issues" (wink wink) with the software.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't use Hulu but I'm guessing it's because you can pick which episode you want on Hulu but not TV. I would watch the PTA is disbanding episode 50 times if I wans't soooo wasted to ytpe rightnow .
Local affiliates say they were "blind-sided" by the company's action.
I'm sorry, sir, I normally restrict myself to civil language but you are so full of shit.
I don't even live in North Carolina and recalled reading about 'warning' letters sent to you. Maybe you should open up your e-mails from June 17-18:
We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates. You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate that you are an Amazon Associate and resident of North Carolina.
Please note that this is not an immediate termination notice and you are still a valued participant in the Associates Program. All referral fees earned on qualified traffic will continue to be paid as planned.
But because the new law is drafted to go into effect once enacted -- which could happen in the next two weeks -- we will have to terminate the participation of all North Carolina residents in the Amazon Associates program on or before that same day. After the termination day, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com nor will we accept new applications for the Associates program from North Carolina residents.
The unfortunate consequences of this legislation on North Carolina residents like you were explained in detail to key senators and representatives in Raleigh, including the leadership of the Senate, House, and both chambers' finance committees. Other states, including Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee, considered nearly identical schemes, but rejected these proposals largely because of the adverse impact on their states' residents.
The North Carolina General Assembly's website is www.ncleg.net and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at www.performancemarketingalliance.com. We thank you for being part of the Amazon Associates program, and we will apprise you of the General Assembly's action on this matter.
Sincerely,
Amazon.com
You were warned! Tell us, James Barrett, how many letters did you sent to your representatives demanding they strike down this unconstitutional tax?
Yes, it came early. But you were warned. Unwittingly operating for one day could set Amazon back thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. They tried blocking it with litigation in New York and they lost. Don't get made at them for playing it safe, you have no one to blame but your elected officials.
But you know who's liable for that? Whoever actually put it online. Not the search engine that pointed you to it.
That's really funny you should say that because recently precedent was set at $80,000 per song for uploading and distributing it. Was the defendant the original uploader? Not even close.
And you know what? Through both those trials, I am unaware of any action taken to track down the initial uploader of those files. Maybe because doing so is futile. But it might also be that the legal system here (and also in Sweden apparently) views association of diseminating information about pirating as a more problematic and evil crime than the actual act of you pirating it for yourself!
This is a complex process of getting copyrighted material to you. Someone has to buy it, encode it, upload it, it gets seeded or whatever, you search for it, you download it, you execute it, you re-upload it, ad nauseum. And at any point in that chain, these people are not afraid to prosecute you. And, like some sort of pyramid scheme, you collect all the sins of those in the chain before you. And you pay, oh yes, my brethren, you pay dearly.
Barbara talks about the "Miracle Pill" known as Resveratrol
Notice they didn't user her last name. But they use her image and the abc News logo ... their domain name is hilarious, news3news.com (looks like newsnews and 3news were taken, ha) which leads one to the registrant residing at:
PO Box 12068
George Town, Grand Cayman KY1-1010
P.O. Box in the Cayman Islands. Imagine that. They don't even bother to use domainsbyproxy or a similar service like most of the other domains listed in this Wired story.
... but using abc's logo and Walters' image for advertising is definitely prosecution worthy. I hope some of these companies go after this scum.
Selling questionable meds is probably pretty hard to prosecute
The paper was written in 1869.
And when was the editing and typesetting for the edition you used done? Do you know that there area lot of public domain music works but very few recorded performances that are in the public domain?
Publishers like Kessinger Publishing specialized in maintaing and providing a means for acquiring out of print public works. They served a very valuable purpose at one point but the internet, Project Gutenberg, even Google should make them obsolete soon. We're in a transition period.
The issue with the Google books is that they don't have the original 1800s printing of the first volume. That's why they had to rely on Kessinger. Kessinger publishes both volumes of Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan and the second original printing is free on Google books. Google faces the problem of not being able to re-edit or do its own typesetting of the first edition so instead of risking litigation they just put up what they can. They cannot fight these fights for every book. I think the copyfraud label applied to them is misplaced and will soon be a non-issue as others step forward with their personal collections to offer up to the internet.
What do you think the "cap" part of "cap and trade" means?
cap:
Verb, "To set an upper limit on something"
ration:
Verb, "To portion out, especially during a shortage of supply."
Saying "any given vehicle must get 10 miles or more to the gallon on EPA tests" is different from saying "you have 5 gallons of gasoline a month to use, use wisely." The AP faq does not use the word "ration" once and I am beginning to believe that you are concerned with spreading fear and misinformation in regards to this bill.
And energy rationing, by this name or any other, spells death for the economy. They might as well call it the "starve and freeze" bill.
Where did you find them explaining that everyone will have to ration energy? What does starving have to do with energy? It's further down the slope of environmental consciousness vs the economy but you are doing no one a service by claiming it is utter self-annihilation when it's not that bad.
From the AP questions:
Q: Other than costs potentially being passed along to consumers, will this affect most Americans' day-to-day lives?
A: It fundamentally will change how we use, produce and consume energy, ending the country's love affair with big gas-guzzling cars and its insatiable appetite for cheap electricity. This bill will put smaller, more efficient cars on the road, swap smokestacks for windmills and solar panels, and transform the appliances you can buy for your home.
You know, I can't buy the old school hydrochlorofluorocarbon to use as a refrigerant in my new car. The new stuff doesn't work as well (it's close) but it's a lot better for the environment. Small things like this can be important to entities like the EPA.
While this new bill is further down the slope of how invasive this is to a consumer's life, I don't think it's quite as far as "energy rationing" or "starve and freeze" like you so quickly claim it to be. Is it going to dampen the economy? Most definitely. I would not pick this time to launch this bill but I feel it is long overdue. Americans should be made more aware of what energy consumption does to the environment but we cannot seem to learn. So the government is deciding to intervene and put restrictions on it. Probably the wrong way to address the problem but there you have it. It will be interesting to see if these energy caps are applied to the huge black suburbans and heavily armored luxury cars the president's entourage drives around in.
Tell me why there aren't nuclear power plants in every township in the United States? That is easy to see, right? People fear for their health and safety. The same could be said to a lesser degree of smokestacks and egregiously energy consuming automobiles. We're starting to affix a price to environmental degradation and the current administration places it much higher than the last. I'm interested in what specific cost this is going to have to the end consumer and am hesitant to automatically reject or praise this bill until that's known.
I'm not a hardware guy and I'm no fan of IBM but I must be missing something here: what is it about mainframes that makes them so different from servers?
Well let's see: here.
Thanks for that link. It's nice to see belittling/patronizing people has become automated in this day and age.
Unfortunately it was ridiculously unhelpful. I had already visited Wikipedia and the other links (like the one from wiki answers) where pretty much vapid and devoid of any information at all. What I did find on Wikipedia:
Nearly all mainframes have the ability to run (or host) multiple operating systems, and thereby operate not as a single computer but as a number of virtual machines. In this role, a single mainframe can replace dozens or even hundreds of smaller servers. While mainframes pioneered this capability, virtualization is now available on most families of computer systems, though not to the same degree or level of sophistication.
So as the multicore processors increase and as virtualization improves, I'm currently led to believe that there is little difference between a mainframe and a small server farm properly networked and load balanced? Feel free to actually add some information in your reply ...
Microsoft is now complaining ......... IBM is so anticompetitive that governments should intervene.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Well, I think it's more a case of "we got hosed in Europe so let's see if we can turn this same sword on our competitors." From the article:
The CCIA now has added encouragement from a tiny firm backed by IBM rival Microsoft Corp., which has lodged an antitrust complaint in Europe, while pressing a related lawsuit in federal court in New York and sounding out U.S. regulators.
Microsoft's been picked over with a fine toothed comb by the EU recently and I think their strategy now is to make sure everyone else is too. If you look at it that way, Microsoft has nothing to lose. They've been scrutinized to the fullest extent and you should expect them to turn this same scrutiny over to other companies in other fields. I wouldn't be surprised to see a sort of anti-competitive gaming lawsuit aimed at Nintendo come about one of these days in the EU.
T3 contends that IBM pens in mainframe customers faced with a high cost of switching to other systems, while refusing to share blueprints necessary to offer a cheaper alternative.
I'm not a hardware guy and I'm no fan of IBM but I must be missing something here: what is it about mainframes that makes them so different from servers?
Tampa-based T3 develops mainframe technology compatible with IBM software that is designed for small and midsize enterprises.
Maybe they can't release details but I'm guessing that there's some proprietary chipsets and microcontrollers inside these things to run the (what are they at 32 or 64 processors) CPUs stacked on top of each other and banks of memory and storage and database crap. So what you've gotten software written specifically to take advantage of this stuff? And it's going to be hard to move to another mainframe or standardized servers with that stuff? Are you surprised? It'd be like if I wrote something for Windows and then complained I couldn't get the blueprint from Windows of how the API works so I could move to a "cheaper solution" like Linux.
So if T3 wins this case, what's the ideal outcome? IBM open sources the software that runs on these mainframes? IBM releases detailed chipset information? Both are laughable. And if you're going to argue that, you might as well argue that Microsoft open up Windows or Intel layout the insides of its Atom processors for the world to see.
I wish I didn't find myself defending IBM (I hate their software and these mainframes sound like a scam) but you have to draw the line somewhere or apply to everyone. My advice to the poor companies still at the hands of IBM: get out. Of course that's my advice to anyone foolish enough to buy into vendor "lock-in" software like Flash. Lesson learned: An extra layer of well defined and thought out abstraction will add a bit of overhead but in the end it might save your ass when you need to switch technologies.
You guys don't get it
Is it possible to take out a massive life insurance policy on Jonathan Heiliger?
To build servers for companies like Facebook, and Amazon, and other people who are operating fairly homogeneous applications, the servers have to be cheap, and they have to be super power-efficient.
I assure you, despite your misconception that the world revolves around you everyone has those requirements. From the people who build supercomputers right down to the netbook I am typing on while watching Gurren Lagann.
Can we get like a panel of hardware engineers to have a discussion with this guy and can I get some popcorn?
why not just put it in a vacuum chamber, warm it up, and slide it on out?
What, you mean like they discussed in the article? They even came up with a better idea: instead of heating up the whole vessel, just freeze the knob with dry ice!
The options relating to the application of dry ice to shrink the knob have already been attempted, and failed. However, the same method, along with a pressurization of the Crew Module, may be enough to free the knob from its lodged position.
The only problem is the amount of pressurization that can be conducted in the OPF is far less than the pressure that played a part in allowing the knob to become embedded in the first place.
Pressurize crew module and dry ice on knob to TBD (To Be Determined) pressure. Pro's: Could allow for uniform structural deflection to increase gap between pressure pane and dashboard; enough to free up the knob non-destructively. Less potential for inducing further damage to the pane.
**UPDATE: The above option was selected on Thursday as the opening process for an attempt to remove the knob. The cabin will be pressurized to 3 psid, before an engineer will apply dry ice to the knob. This option is not deemed to be a likely solution, but more so the opening option that avoids additional damage to the window.**
Although it's lengthy, you should try reading the article next time. The guys at NASA are pretty clever.
The article neglects to mention the extreme disappointment of John M. Grunsfeld who spent the majority of Mission STS-125 photographing a strange phenomenon he could witness through his window but could not detect on radar. A large knob-shaped object would move about above the atmosphere with an almost supernatural fluidity and change of speeds relative to the Earth. He neglected to mention it to his crewmates hoping that he had stumbled upon either the first contact with alien life or observed a new phenomenon he dubbed in his journal "Grunsfeld's Effect." Unfortunately the engineers at NASA have immortalized his name by calling the stuck debris "Grunsfeld's Knob" or "Grunsfeld's God." The engineers have also started referring to being duped as "being grunsfelded." Example: "I called up to order some of those damn Video Professor instructional DVDs and ended up with 8 of the stupid things. Man did I get Grunsfelded!"
Usability expert and columnist Jakob Nielsen
Well, I'm glad they found such an unbiased and informed person to make such a statement about security versus usability. And for a second there I was afraid he was just doing this for attention.
... no input is recorded in anyway on the screen. Now that's a usability nightmare when you can't even backspace to correct your errors. I don't think I've seen this since my days in a computer lab at college but I think sacrificing a few login attempts worth of time is worth the security.
Mr. Nielsen, could you send us screen shots of a working example? Perhaps show us how it looks like when you log into the administrative console now with your password entered in and then a screenshot of the way you think it would be more usable. I'll review them and let you know in a most interesting way what I think.
Perhaps you should read up on our friend Kevin Mitnick and NASA "Hacker" Gary McKinnon both of whom are no strangers to the over-the-shoulder-attack. Really, I'm no security expert or pen tester but I'm going to speculate that these 'soft hacks' are some of the most dangerous vulnerabilities left. Your suggestion just makes them all the more easier. Me personally would like to see the standard bumped up to the level of the input box not even being masked
Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security ...
[citation desperately needed]
... I mean it's bad enough that the sound waves of my keystrokes are floating around telling people my password. Sorry to go all tinfoil hat on you there.
I think back to the few times when I've entered my password accidentally into the username box because the tab key I hit didn't register or the site didn't support it and I just felt nervous and dirty and needed to change my password. Just knowing that there were photons and radiation everywhere in my cube belying my password to anyone who cared to capture them
Memo from the United States
... I heard Mexico is very jealous.
... but look on the bright side--there sure the hell ain't no zebra mussels left in there now!
February 12th, 2020
Dear Canada,
Yesterday a piece of space trash knocked our Microwave Power Plant operating over Oregon off target from its station. Unfortunately, it continued to beam a strong powerful ray of energy down as its sights fell over your Western provinces. We are sorry.
We urge you not to think of it as "a swath of destruction" so much as "a wicked cool tattoo"
Williston Lake was a very beautiful lake right up until it evaporated
We're also sorry that instead of shutting it down, we just swung it back over Canada to its power station in Oregon and next time we will totally just stop it before this happens. To make up for it, we'll send you some extra power so your people stop rioting and Mad Maxing.
We hope there's no hard feelings,
Sincerely,
The United States
I find it interesting that their little "trial run" of blocking Google comes so soon after Bing decides to filter out anything sensitive (you know porn, skeletons, pandas) to China. So if we've got on big player playing ball, let the other one know what will happen to them if they don't. Another motive could be a a display of defiance to the West's requests to stop with all the blocking and blocking software? Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's many factors.
The original NASA story is here with large desktop background sized images. If you don't visit the weekly top ten site, you really should. Some of those images are breathtaking. Check out the thunderstorm anvil over Africa.
Forgot to add ... why aren't they drilling in some desert area... some abandoned nuclear test site? Sure, the power transmission losses will be larger, but so will the safety (especially compared to SF)
First of all it's "north of San Fransisco" and by North they mean it's actually North of Santa Rosa. And it looks to be about 20 miles north of that up near Clear Lake. And if you go to their project site and look at the map at the bottom, you'll notice in the past week there's been 3.0 or larger earth quakes in that region. The 3.4 they had in Basel looks to be just another daily occurrence in those parts.
If you look where they're drilling, there's not a whole lot of homes around there. I'm not sure what the radius of destruction is from the epicenter for a "big one" but I don't think it's massive enough to hit a lot way out there. I could be wrong. But you know, I bet if they see a 3.4 like Basel, they shut it down if the government doesn't first. I do like the interactive map on their site so you can see the earthquakes relative to their drilling.
Who knows? They could have determined that unstable areas are safer for drilling since the region around you is having 3.0+ earthquakes all the time? Not like you're going to screw anything up if the plates are shifting constantly anyway, right?
Also, the government funded stuff is all over the place (Utah included) so don't worry, they want this energy source available to all and non centralized. I'm not sure what your motivation is here or why the summary labeled this as pure evil Personally, I'm interested in what this could do for non-polluting energy. I think in order to get the drilling permits and convince backers it was safe enough for America you would have to show a lot of proof. But I'm not a seismologist. Looks worth a shot to me though.
Lastly people take risks in the name of discovery and production. It happens every time a human leaves Earth's gravitational pull, it happened in the early days of a lot of technology until it was perfected. I'm not arguing we should risk human lives, I'm just pointing out that we might be blowing a risk out of proportion that, since non of us are seismologists, none of us really understand. Is it like drilling a pinhole through a one inch slab of marble or drilling the pinhole through one millimeter thick pie crust? I highly doubt they'd be wasting their time if they didn't know the ground would remain stable long enough for their tunnel to remain intact. It looks like they're taking precautions and claim to have refined the process to make it safer at least.
Also the article says it's "nearly the same" drilling technology as the one that caused the quake in Basel while the summary says it's the same. It seems it's not the same though. The article goes on to say:
Officials at AltaRock, with offices in Sausalito, Calif., and Seattle, insist that the company has learned the lessons of Basel and that its own studies indicate the project can be carried out safely. James T. Turner, AltaRock's senior vice president for operations, said the company had applied for roughly 20 patents on ways to improve the method.
I don't know about Basel but I'm certain these guys know they would face serious legal/criminal action if they didn't know for sure it was safe.
Like Eric Clapton releasing an album paying homage to the great blues guitarist Robert Johnson, my next album will be concentrating on my roots and be recorded entirely on thirty five thousand year old flutes using only the recording technology they had back then ... I predict this will appeal more to the older crowd and while a lot of the themes of the songs have anti-Cro Magnum themes, I think this sort of retro music is long overdue.
The proposal lists detection of nuclear WMDs via neutrons and gamma rays ... the proposal itself also correctly notes that places like NYC are trying to ban Geiger counters and probably wouldn't be too keen on this sort of data being opened up to the masses. So you find out your neighborhood has an irregular--perhaps even mildly dangerous--amount of radioactive activity. Watch the lawsuits roll in ...
The proposal itself stays away from video and on their site they talk about who would have release rights to this video, I'm not sure why the EFF is commenting on that. It looks like they want to stay away from somone/group grabbing all the video and putting it up on YouTube to make the street in front of your house a public spectacle.
What is really interesting is that even though this article is 140 years old, they still ended the soft articles on a light note (maybe I notice this because the Onion mocks it so often?). The last few sentences:
I related to Mr. Lacoume the conversation which I had overheard between the old Frenchman and the waiter, and asked him if he had many discontented customers. "Oh yes," he replied laughing, "there are at least a dozen old fellows who come here every day, take one fifteen cent drink, eat a dinner which would cost them $1 in a restaurant, and then complain that the beef is tough or the potatoes water." Mr. Lacoume confirmed the statement that thousands of people in New-Orleans live on free lunches.
How many cwts of Mars Orbiters must be lost before we learn?!
HTML - as opposed to XHTML, even when delivered with the MIME type text/html - allows authors to omit certain tags. According to the HTML 4 DTD, you can omit the following tags (tags of so-called "void" - empty - elements are marked as strikethrough):
For example, if you have a list of items marked up as <li>List item</li>, you could instead just write <li>List item. Or instead of a paragraph that you'd usually close with via </p>, you could just use <p>My paragraph. This even works with html, head, and body, which are not required in HTML. (Make sure you feel comfortable with this before making it your standard coding practice.)
Omitting optional tags keeps your HTML formally valid, while decreasing your file size. In a typical document, this can mean 5-20 % savings.
Now, my first reaction was simply "that cannot be valid!" But, of course, it is. What I found interesting is that when I looked at the source for that tutorial they themselves are using </li> and </p>. Interesting, huh? You would hope that Google would follow the very advice they are trying to give you.
Some of these suggestions may come at the cost of readability and maintainability. There's something about web pages being nice tidy properly formatted XML documents with proper closing tags that I like.
China marked the date July 1st, 2009 as the day manufacturers will be forced to install filtering software on all new PCs.
The article linked to that text's story says
The notice says the software must either be pre-installed on the hard drive or enclosed on a compact disc.
The manufacturers and distributors could comply with the letter of the law and just put it on a disc. If you wanted to see true protests from them, you would burn the disc in some unknown standard or zip it up ... or put it on an HD DVD disc :)
...
Have these requirements since changed to require it installed? If they have I haven't heard
If you're a netbook manufacturer and you put it on the disc instead of the netbook (which are almost always sans disc drive) what are the odds anyone's going to bother figuring out how to move that to their computer unless they themselves personally want it. You could also provide tutorials on removing the software completely for people that have any "issues" (wink wink) with the software.