As of April 23, 2007, more than 250,000 PS3 owners have allowed the Folding@home software to be run on their systems, averaging over 400 teraflops and peaking at over 700. By comparison, the world's most powerful supercomputer, Blue Gene has a peak performance of 280.6 teraflops.
The Computational Biochemistry and Biophysics Lab in Barcelona has launched a distributed computing project called PS3GRID. This project is expected to run sixteen times faster than an equivalent project on a standard PC. Like most distributed computing projects, it is designed to run only when the computer is idle.
So yes, even though most people don't really give a crap, with a sufficiently large user base there will be a significant number of people who do know stuff.
Same AC here. Thanks for the movie tip. The way I see it, compared to our modern lifestyle the hunter/gatherers basically "go to the supermarket" instead of what we call "working", only that the 'shopping' as well as the preparation of the food is far more time intensive. In total though they would have more leisure time as we do. The advantage that our lifestyle offers is security. We have a far less chance of dying due to a calamity, an attack by a hungry predator, a disease (even though our immune system sucks by comparison) or even people from the neighboring 'tribe' (who might e.g. not have stocked up enough for the winter). All this is reflected by the huge difference in life expectancy between both of these life styles.
Of course quantity does not mean quality and it's up to every single person to make most out of the time s/he has. "Every man dies, not every man truly lives."
I'm usually not one that compares slashdot with the digg, but seeing TFA I have to wonder whether this might have something to do with the firehose being recently opened to the everyone? As we know from all sorts of media, be it TV (24h "news" networks), digg, youtube etc. the most popular story isn't necessarily the most informative story (unfortunately quite the contrary).
The electoral college is one of the biggest problems in the whole election system. If a state votes 30% dem, 30% lib and 40% rep ALL electoral votes will go to the rep party. If it's a state like Florida with a huge amount of electoral votes this will completely misrepresent the will of the people. There is also the problem that candidates don't see the need to go to "safe" states and have their debates there. The biggest problem imho though is, that third parties under this system will never have a chance to gain significant votes, be it in safe states or "battleground" states. If the electoral vote was split up according to the respective percentages each party gets this would make the whole thing more democratic (as in "representing the will of the citizens") and third party voters will actually see their votes affecting something. I find it strange why this major flaw does not pop up in discussions.
Now the Maryland approach is nice, because they at least see the problem and want to do something, but it's still not the right approach (furthermore they'd only go with their proposal if other states join in too), because they won't split the votes according to what people voted for. This "winner takes all" mentality is what creates such negative attitudes as "We won! We don't need to care about those 40% of people that didn't vote for us, because they lost." and has no place in politics.
Modded +5? Having to handle radioactive material (even the slightest amount) is a huge turn-off for people (those who believe any amount can kill you, but also those won't risk an additional 0.00001% chance of getting cancer every time they vote) - if anything we want more people to vote, not less. And then of course you place all the credibility on the military in the hopes it will guard all the radioactive material it has (as well as guard against any black import of the material), not withstanding that people in the military itself (with the right arguments) can get corrupted just as easily as anyone else.
P.S. Someone who holds their credit card number PIN or other password in their wallet is not very clever. Anyone who is able to extract it from the victim e.g. at gunpoint will be able to use it. Might even increase the chance of getting robbed if the victim can be seen peeking for the password. A better way is to store the wrong PIN in your wallet (or better the bank card itself), a PIN that can be read upside down as well. The thief will try it out, flip it over, try it out again and then try to punch it in a third time assuming he made a mistake the first two times - voila: card gets blocked and the thief is out in the dark.
Basically, national anthems are all full of crap, and no one genuinely takes them seriously.
That's actually the reason why the third and only the third stanza comprises the current German anthem, this time around the goal was to do away with stupid crap. The Germans found out the hard way that being overly nationalistic and patriotic can lead to very bad things. I you check the lyrics of the third stanza you will see that it is very peaceful (no mention of any enemies or other evils that need to be eradicated) and simply stresses human virtues in order to make the country a better place.
The first stanza is hopelessly outdated, apart from having very nationalistic even jingoistic undertones (owing to its fervent usage by Nazis and Neo-Nazis along with the second stanza) it furthermore describes Deutschland as being bordered by the four rivers Maas, Memel, Etsch and Belt - that would include western France, all of Poland, Switzerland, Austria and a few more eastern European countries. In any case if sung today it would definitely not be in the spirit of the German revolution of 1848.
You'd have a source of carbon right from the CO2 in the air around production
Heh, now just combine this with nanobot and neural network technology and you'd have a self improving system, maybe even expanding at Moore's law's speed. You can increase the progress by breathing on it or doing sports in the vicinity. I wonder how many blows it will take until it becomes self-aware;)
I think they'd just need a chlorophyl machine to do that.
I find the idea of organic circuits interesting, but chlorophyll or photosynthesizing nanobots will only work with sunlight so that would destroy the whole computer-case manufacturing industry as well as casemodding and we'd have to program the AI of the board to maintain a group of "military" nanobots to detect and subdue other organisms that interfere with the optimal collection of sunlight. I think it's cheaper and more practical (and more peaceful) just to use the power from the outlet (and put a few solar panels on the roof) instead.
"Excuse" - you used the correct term. If you remember, back in the day when the invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan was still fresh you could hear a lot of saber rattling by the US government against Iran - which coincidentally (or should I say conveniently?) lies exactly between both those countries. Now that the Taliban has regained strength in Afghanistan and Iraq's situation is deteriorating (every single day there are dozens of people killed, even though it's 110+ degrees F outside!) Washington's rhetoric has toned down. The strategy has not worked because of the ignorance and short-sightedness of the perpetrators and against all opposition they will try to remain there because it's not only about Iraq, but about the whole region.
I'm pretty sure if the invasions had gone as "planned" there would be no big problem for the administration to find a pretext, an excuse if you may, to attack Iran - with the same support it got from congress that it got for the Iraq invasion; and I believe that this time they would have ignored the UN all together (remember, last time Rumsfeld was still running around with a vial of "anthrax" and displaying satellite images of Iraq's WMD production facilities to the UN). While Desert Storm and even the invasion of Afghanistan were sanctioned by the UN (i.e. had international support) the 2003 attack on Iraq wasn't; the administration was able to convince the American people of Saddam's threat, it was not as successful convincing people of other countries who are not under the influence of US media.
I don't understand how many war critics can't stop mentioning the fact that not finding WMDs would take away all the "legitimacy" of the invasion. The reason Iraq was invaded was definitely NOT that they had WMDs and much less that they threatened the US with using it; that was just a turkey and everyone with a few brain cells knows it.
The reason why it was used and repeated over and over while the troops were assembling in the Gulf was that it was actually a rather safe bet (since it was the US itself that provided him with those!) and that you could scare uninformed folks to death by exaggerating what the evil guy from half way around the globe could to to them.
The invasion was wrong not because Saddam had no WMDs, but (among so many other reasons) because the hawks in Washington used their power and the gullibility of the people (the same people that actually empower them by paying taxes, building stuff, working, inventing... - those same people that actually carry the US forward) to bring war to a country that did not deserve it. Their motive was to intimidate by displaying military strength, to establish control on an oil rich region and ultimately to fill their own bank accounts (if you don't believe this I suggest you read up on privately funded mercenaries "working" in Iraq, e.g. Blackwater and about the huge profits companies like Halliburton are making through Iraq in a war funded by tax dollars while no end or even an improvement of the situation is in sight (intentionally?); there's also a documentary about this).
Managing bookmarks within Mozilla can get quite troublesome. Instead I create a directory structure on my hard drive and pull any link into the appropriate folder. It's much easier to manage and it's a cross platform/browser solution, i.e. the bookmarks can easily be copied to another machine and can be used by any browser (well, except for Lynx;P) so no need for ex-/importing etc. when switching or upgrading.
What I thought was strange though was the plan to omit tabs, one of the most useful features and even a fast light weight browser like Opera has no problems handling them. The overhead for tabs should be negligible. What actually is the resource hog in Firefox is that it's caching every tab's page content including pages several levels down the history. Getting rid of tabs all together shouldn't be the solution to this problem.
While I was for quite some time a proponent for e-voting with printed receipts I've become more and more reluctant to praise its benefits. The problem is that as soon as there are irregularities or "glitches" the whole system shows its fragility: there could have been 'preloaded' votes, certain votes might have been wrongly counted (while printing out the correct receipt), a voting machine have even been rigged by the manufacturer himself etc etc. All this resulting questioning and arguing about what might or might not have happened is extremely detrimental to the people's believe in democracy.
Many developed countries such as Australia mentioned in the parent post but also e.g. Germany or France still use the ballot box because it simply is the most fail-safe, transparent and direct way of counting votes (although unfortunately there are trends toward e-voting). You don't have to be a computer expert to know how exactly the votes are counted. People walk into the booth make a mark on the paper (illustrated by an example) walk out and put it into the box. It might take a while to count, but to protect the integrity of the voting process the country should spare no expenses to ensure that every vote is counted once and only once. And even so the costs/overhead should be negligible.
If the counting takes a bit longer, then for Christ sakes let it take longer! It's not that the whole country hangs in limbo or some sort of anarchic chaos between election day and the day the new government is sworn in. Let it take two months let it take three months - as long as the votes are counted correctly that's all that matters! (Btw - in the case of the 2000 elections there was still ample time to the count ballots, the inauguration day was several weeks away. The media is to blame for creating an atmosphere of crisis or utter urgency - until the supreme court stepped in and everyone just rolled over and sighed "Finally!" when they should have all cried out "WTF??")
I don't think the crucial part is how (well) it works, but that this technology works. It's one of the puzzle pieces that might lead to better mass storage media. Other things will need to be researched as well (as stated in TFA, e.g. increasing the data density), but this definitely sounds promising.
The cool thing about lasers is that the data can be transmitted through the air/vacuum and is not reliant on quasi-physical contact of the reading/writing head; so while the old "arm over spinning disk" might work as well (simply increasing the data density alone would yield greater transfer rates), one could also think of an optical array that bounces off a laser (or even a few simultaneously) with a minimum of mechanical moving parts.
Virus derives from the Latin word for "venom" and has the neutral gender. The Latin plural -i only applies to masculine nouns of the o-declination. The proper plural for virus, if you'd want to use the Latin form, would be vira (though afaik there is no documented usage of the pural form), all neutral gender nouns have an -a (nominative) plural.
What if - and I know how obtuse it may sound, but bear with me - there was a government, say of a country named Utopia, that had a certain amount of direct and indirect control of the military-industrial complex, the media and a huge chunk of the country's financial assets. Now what if the head of that government (let's call him G.W. Lush) was brought up in the believe that energy is one of the most important commodities and oil was the best available and usable source of energy. Now imagine the guy behind him, Mick Deney, had strong ties (financial and otherwise) to a company Ballimurton that specializes in building oil pipelines and other infrastructure. Furthermore there is a country called Biraq that not only has huge amounts of easily obtainable oil and a very weak military, but is also ruled by dictator Habbam Bussein that nobody really likes and who uses every chance he gets to piss off Lush and his buddies.
And now, yes I know how ridiculous this scenario may seem to some, imagine a terrorist attack on Mr. Lush's country, which could, with the right amount of propaganda (albeit blatantly dishonest), be blamed on Habbam in order to justify a retaliation in form of an invasion that would make Lush (securing of oil-rich country and building military bases in a region where a lot more oil lies around for the taking) and Deney (no-bid contracts for Ballimurton, revenues are soaring) and their buddies (private contractors that do a lot of things the military does, get paid by the government far more than the 'official soldiers' get and here's the kicker: have no accountability whatsoever, nor are casualties reported to authorities, which always make for bad press) very happy. - If it went the way they would want it to go, that is..
In this, I admit, a bit of a far-fetched scenario, "the suffering and death that will likely happen if you don't go to war would not exceed the certain suffering and death of the war itself", because the casus belli here was not national security, not a direct thread of any sort against Lush's country's population, but simply an abuse of the power invested in that government in order to make themselves and their buddies richer and more powerful. - In this unlikely scenario your conjecture does not hold true.
What it comes down to is that "Mom and Pop" farmers will suffer if a corporation like Monsanto gets their way. They *will* produce crops with superior characteristics because that is what they do and millions if not billions are poured into research. What makes this evil is that 'wild' pollination of those seeds is uncontrollable, and from the perspective of the corporation a positive (side?) effect. If the modified seeds become more widespread they will disable competitors and only seeds produced by that corporation will work.
There is a reason why greed is denounced by all major religions and ethical systems: while it's not evil per se, if uninhibited it can and will lead to evil things. E.g. it is the third of the seven deadly sins in the Christian belief. "A sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things." or to put it another way: the willingness to sell your soul for an earthly temporary gain.
So let me take this very example to illustrate this moral truism. The corporation in question is Monsanto which holds 70%-100% market share of genetically "enhanced" crops. If you check the wikipedia link you'll see that they have no problem exposing their employers (or anyone else for that matter) to hazardous conditions or bribe senior officials to evade environmental assessments or investigations into their practices/products, because the amounts paid are peanuts compared to the revenue they get.
They would rather do something illegal or morally wrong simply because it is more profitable in the long run. Free market powers and strict cost benefit analysis will not guard against such evil. Things that worked yesterday won't necessarily work tomorrow, because the rules of the game change constantly. There is no comparison between the power a corporation nowadays can wield vs. say 50 years ago and if this trend continues we're all in for a rude awakening.
I used Tom's hardware's article to create a four disk RAID 5 array on my Windows XP Pro box. It does away with all the hardware limitations that conventional setups have and there's no need to pay for a dedicated controller.
This means that instead of downloading special drivers for the controller I only need to modify three Windows files in the case of a reinstall. I don't have to stick to one brand/model of RAID controller (or to some of the new mainboard chipsets that support RAID 5 as well). Featurewise it does not support RAID level migration. On the other hand it recognizes disks of a RAID setup automatically no matter how they are connected to the computer (e.g. right now I have two connected through the mainboard's SATA and two through a SATA controller, but I could replace the controller/mainboard, replug them and it would still work); this was the feature that made me decide to go for it. The software overhead is not noticeable (3GHz P-IV). Performance is on par with hardware RAID setups. Only things that's a bit annoying is that when for one reason or another the machine reboots without shutting down (power outage/crash) it will 'rebuild' the array when it boots back into Windows, which takes a few hours. While the system is still usable copying files from/to the array will take quite a while.
I've already partitioned the array into four partitions. My play for increasing its size is simply swapping it one by one with bigger HDDs and then creating a new partition with the new unused space. I believe that should work with any RAID 1/5/6 array, be it hardware or software. One might even combine the partitions afterwards using Partition Magic, but I 'm not a big fan of huge partitions.
Hope that helps. Anyone else with Software RAID experience? I'd love to see Linux support for it, that would most certainly mean indefinite support (right now I'm stuck with Windows XP, don't know whether Vista supports it, but I'm not really willing to find out anyway seeing as Vista doesn't increase performance/usability at all.);)
What makes this article newsworthy? TFA doesn't report anything new or out of the ordinary. Any army in the world would recruit hackers and use their abilities. In fact TFA starts with "The People's Liberation Army (PLA) continues to build cyberwarfare units..." - Yes, well, in other news: "A sack of rice just tipped over in Zhejiang province, China. No casualties have been confirmed yet. Authorities advise citizens to remain calm..."
Is this article just general fear mongering or is someone setting up a new potential military venture since the current one isn't running so well... - Sorry, but reading sensationalist crap like that just gets me riled up.
Thanks for the elaborate explanation. If I get you correctly you're saying that the steel beams' yield stress was decreased by the heat induced by the burning fuel; this weakening led to the deformation (i.e. collapse) of the steel which (since steel heats up when bent) increased the temperature passed the melting point of steel. It does sound plausible, but I'm still quite apprehensive about the latter part. It would be great if there where any formulas or experiments to back it up, i.e. setting a steel structure on fire, waiting until it collapses and determining whether or not there is molten steel on the ground.
This might also aid in building better skyscrapers in the future. After seeing those two planes fly into the buildings I would never have guessed they would literally pulverize like that (who actually did??). The 'pan-caking' that took place was supposed to be due to a simultaneous/uniformly distributed weakening of the main pillars on all sides of the buildings?
And then there was WTC7 - the official story states that there was a fire in the 5th to 7th floor and somehow the two skyscrapers caused structural damage to it (falling debris??) so it would pulverize in the same fashion as they did. Any more details? - Not from the official investigation.. - It would be great if we knew for sure how that building with basically just a fire burning somewhere could get utterly annihilated like that. This is the first (and as of yet, only) steel frame building that collapsed like that supposedly due to the fire. The lack of explanation also means that this could happen again anytime, even without any terrorist involvement.. Due to a very patchy official investigation (no other investigation were permitted!) we have learned nothing from the WTC7 collapse and wouldn't know how to prevent such a thing from happening in the future!
Imho your comparison between that physicist and a creationist is not appropriate. Unless the official view were creationism. It's not the theory of this physicist that can be likened to creationism - it's the official version. The official story is so strange it makes anyone with a brain wonder. For the first time ever has a building (designed to withstand planes crashing into it) collapses due to fire, officially due to weakening of the steel frame because the fire could never have risen above the melting point of steel. Yet we see a pool of molten steel right there at ground zero. Even if we believed the official story that there was a structural failure, why would all three WTC buildings collapse into their own footprint? Given that they weren't hit from four sides simultaneously it does seem a bit weird. And what of WTC building 7 - the third one that collpases into its own footprint (at free fall speed) yet was never hit by a plane? Any official or otherwise rational explanantion for that?
I wonder why nobody has made it into a movie yet, seeing as the book was published as early as 1949(!). And the story is as fresh and thought-provoking as ever. Maybe call the movie "Twenty-sixteen" - you could even film many scenes "on location" nowadays;)
What is interesting is that voter turn out in both rounds was a whopping 84%! So people apparently did put some credence into the system, despite the negative rhetoric and people like Le Pen (who got 10% in the first round) discouraging his voters from voting in round 2.
I think in France we did have a significant amount of people voting for something. E.g. some people wanted stronger restrictions on immigration etc., since according to their point of view poor immigrants ("scum" according to Sarkozy) with no perspective caused the social strife that lead to the riots in 2005. On the other hand there were around 10% of the voters in the first round who voted for far left parties (including 4% who voted for communist presidential candidate Olivier Besancenot) who then definitely voted for Royal who ran on a socialist platform.
Slashdot Mirror
Same AC here. Thanks for the movie tip. The way I see it, compared to our modern lifestyle the hunter/gatherers basically "go to the supermarket" instead of what we call "working", only that the 'shopping' as well as the preparation of the food is far more time intensive. In total though they would have more leisure time as we do. The advantage that our lifestyle offers is security. We have a far less chance of dying due to a calamity, an attack by a hungry predator, a disease (even though our immune system sucks by comparison) or even people from the neighboring 'tribe' (who might e.g. not have stocked up enough for the winter). All this is reflected by the huge difference in life expectancy between both of these life styles.
Of course quantity does not mean quality and it's up to every single person to make most out of the time s/he has. "Every man dies, not every man truly lives."
I'm usually not one that compares slashdot with the digg, but seeing TFA I have to wonder whether this might have something to do with the firehose being recently opened to the everyone? As we know from all sorts of media, be it TV (24h "news" networks), digg, youtube etc. the most popular story isn't necessarily the most informative story (unfortunately quite the contrary).
The electoral college is one of the biggest problems in the whole election system. If a state votes 30% dem, 30% lib and 40% rep ALL electoral votes will go to the rep party. If it's a state like Florida with a huge amount of electoral votes this will completely misrepresent the will of the people. There is also the problem that candidates don't see the need to go to "safe" states and have their debates there. The biggest problem imho though is, that third parties under this system will never have a chance to gain significant votes, be it in safe states or "battleground" states. If the electoral vote was split up according to the respective percentages each party gets this would make the whole thing more democratic (as in "representing the will of the citizens") and third party voters will actually see their votes affecting something. I find it strange why this major flaw does not pop up in discussions.
Now the Maryland approach is nice, because they at least see the problem and want to do something, but it's still not the right approach (furthermore they'd only go with their proposal if other states join in too), because they won't split the votes according to what people voted for. This "winner takes all" mentality is what creates such negative attitudes as "We won! We don't need to care about those 40% of people that didn't vote for us, because they lost." and has no place in politics.
Modded +5? Having to handle radioactive material (even the slightest amount) is a huge turn-off for people (those who believe any amount can kill you, but also those won't risk an additional 0.00001% chance of getting cancer every time they vote) - if anything we want more people to vote, not less. And then of course you place all the credibility on the military in the hopes it will guard all the radioactive material it has (as well as guard against any black import of the material), not withstanding that people in the military itself (with the right arguments) can get corrupted just as easily as anyone else.
P.S. Someone who holds their credit card number PIN or other password in their wallet is not very clever. Anyone who is able to extract it from the victim e.g. at gunpoint will be able to use it. Might even increase the chance of getting robbed if the victim can be seen peeking for the password. A better way is to store the wrong PIN in your wallet (or better the bank card itself), a PIN that can be read upside down as well. The thief will try it out, flip it over, try it out again and then try to punch it in a third time assuming he made a mistake the first two times - voila: card gets blocked and the thief is out in the dark.
Basically, national anthems are all full of crap, and no one genuinely takes them seriously.
That's actually the reason why the third and only the third stanza comprises the current German anthem, this time around the goal was to do away with stupid crap. The Germans found out the hard way that being overly nationalistic and patriotic can lead to very bad things. I you check the lyrics of the third stanza you will see that it is very peaceful (no mention of any enemies or other evils that need to be eradicated) and simply stresses human virtues in order to make the country a better place.
The first stanza is hopelessly outdated, apart from having very nationalistic even jingoistic undertones (owing to its fervent usage by Nazis and Neo-Nazis along with the second stanza) it furthermore describes Deutschland as being bordered by the four rivers Maas, Memel, Etsch and Belt - that would include western France, all of Poland, Switzerland, Austria and a few more eastern European countries. In any case if sung today it would definitely not be in the spirit of the German revolution of 1848.
Are we to believe all these Vista installs are simply not browsing the web?
I'm not using Vista myself, but from what I read I gather this is part of the ultra-cool new security scheme implemented in Vista.
You'd have a source of carbon right from the CO2 in the air around production
;)
Heh, now just combine this with nanobot and neural network technology and you'd have a self improving system, maybe even expanding at Moore's law's speed. You can increase the progress by breathing on it or doing sports in the vicinity. I wonder how many blows it will take until it becomes self-aware
I think they'd just need a chlorophyl machine to do that.
I find the idea of organic circuits interesting, but chlorophyll or photosynthesizing nanobots will only work with sunlight so that would destroy the whole computer-case manufacturing industry as well as case modding and we'd have to program the AI of the board to maintain a group of "military" nanobots to detect and subdue other organisms that interfere with the optimal collection of sunlight. I think it's cheaper and more practical (and more peaceful) just to use the power from the outlet (and put a few solar panels on the roof) instead.
"Excuse" - you used the correct term. If you remember, back in the day when the invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan was still fresh you could hear a lot of saber rattling by the US government against Iran - which coincidentally (or should I say conveniently?) lies exactly between both those countries. Now that the Taliban has regained strength in Afghanistan and Iraq's situation is deteriorating (every single day there are dozens of people killed, even though it's 110+ degrees F outside!) Washington's rhetoric has toned down. The strategy has not worked because of the ignorance and short-sightedness of the perpetrators and against all opposition they will try to remain there because it's not only about Iraq, but about the whole region.
I'm pretty sure if the invasions had gone as "planned" there would be no big problem for the administration to find a pretext, an excuse if you may, to attack Iran - with the same support it got from congress that it got for the Iraq invasion; and I believe that this time they would have ignored the UN all together (remember, last time Rumsfeld was still running around with a vial of "anthrax" and displaying satellite images of Iraq's WMD production facilities to the UN). While Desert Storm and even the invasion of Afghanistan were sanctioned by the UN (i.e. had international support) the 2003 attack on Iraq wasn't; the administration was able to convince the American people of Saddam's threat, it was not as successful convincing people of other countries who are not under the influence of US media.
I don't understand how many war critics can't stop mentioning the fact that not finding WMDs would take away all the "legitimacy" of the invasion. The reason Iraq was invaded was definitely NOT that they had WMDs and much less that they threatened the US with using it; that was just a turkey and everyone with a few brain cells knows it.
The reason why it was used and repeated over and over while the troops were assembling in the Gulf was that it was actually a rather safe bet (since it was the US itself that provided him with those!) and that you could scare uninformed folks to death by exaggerating what the evil guy from half way around the globe could to to them.
The invasion was wrong not because Saddam had no WMDs, but (among so many other reasons) because the hawks in Washington used their power and the gullibility of the people (the same people that actually empower them by paying taxes, building stuff, working, inventing... - those same people that actually carry the US forward) to bring war to a country that did not deserve it. Their motive was to intimidate by displaying military strength, to establish control on an oil rich region and ultimately to fill their own bank accounts (if you don't believe this I suggest you read up on privately funded mercenaries "working" in Iraq, e.g. Blackwater and about the huge profits companies like Halliburton are making through Iraq in a war funded by tax dollars while no end or even an improvement of the situation is in sight (intentionally?); there's also a documentary about this).
Managing bookmarks within Mozilla can get quite troublesome. Instead I create a directory structure on my hard drive and pull any link into the appropriate folder. It's much easier to manage and it's a cross platform/browser solution, i.e. the bookmarks can easily be copied to another machine and can be used by any browser (well, except for Lynx ;P) so no need for ex-/importing etc. when switching or upgrading.
What I thought was strange though was the plan to omit tabs, one of the most useful features and even a fast light weight browser like Opera has no problems handling them. The overhead for tabs should be negligible. What actually is the resource hog in Firefox is that it's caching every tab's page content including pages several levels down the history. Getting rid of tabs all together shouldn't be the solution to this problem.
While I was for quite some time a proponent for e-voting with printed receipts I've become more and more reluctant to praise its benefits. The problem is that as soon as there are irregularities or "glitches" the whole system shows its fragility: there could have been 'preloaded' votes, certain votes might have been wrongly counted (while printing out the correct receipt), a voting machine have even been rigged by the manufacturer himself etc etc. All this resulting questioning and arguing about what might or might not have happened is extremely detrimental to the people's believe in democracy.
Many developed countries such as Australia mentioned in the parent post but also e.g. Germany or France still use the ballot box because it simply is the most fail-safe, transparent and direct way of counting votes (although unfortunately there are trends toward e-voting). You don't have to be a computer expert to know how exactly the votes are counted. People walk into the booth make a mark on the paper (illustrated by an example) walk out and put it into the box. It might take a while to count, but to protect the integrity of the voting process the country should spare no expenses to ensure that every vote is counted once and only once. And even so the costs/overhead should be negligible.
If the counting takes a bit longer, then for Christ sakes let it take longer! It's not that the whole country hangs in limbo or some sort of anarchic chaos between election day and the day the new government is sworn in. Let it take two months let it take three months - as long as the votes are counted correctly that's all that matters! (Btw - in the case of the 2000 elections there was still ample time to the count ballots, the inauguration day was several weeks away. The media is to blame for creating an atmosphere of crisis or utter urgency - until the supreme court stepped in and everyone just rolled over and sighed "Finally!" when they should have all cried out "WTF??")
I don't think the crucial part is how (well) it works, but that this technology works. It's one of the puzzle pieces that might lead to better mass storage media. Other things will need to be researched as well (as stated in TFA, e.g. increasing the data density), but this definitely sounds promising.
The cool thing about lasers is that the data can be transmitted through the air/vacuum and is not reliant on quasi-physical contact of the reading/writing head; so while the old "arm over spinning disk" might work as well (simply increasing the data density alone would yield greater transfer rates), one could also think of an optical array that bounces off a laser (or even a few simultaneously) with a minimum of mechanical moving parts.
What if you Base-64 encode the data?
Then your data would bloat up by about 35%. More if you were to add white spaces for further camouflage.
Virus derives from the Latin word for "venom" and has the neutral gender. The Latin plural -i only applies to masculine nouns of the o-declination. The proper plural for virus, if you'd want to use the Latin form, would be vira (though afaik there is no documented usage of the pural form), all neutral gender nouns have an -a (nominative) plural.
What if - and I know how obtuse it may sound, but bear with me - there was a government, say of a country named Utopia, that had a certain amount of direct and indirect control of the military-industrial complex, the media and a huge chunk of the country's financial assets. Now what if the head of that government (let's call him G.W. Lush) was brought up in the believe that energy is one of the most important commodities and oil was the best available and usable source of energy. Now imagine the guy behind him, Mick Deney, had strong ties (financial and otherwise) to a company Ballimurton that specializes in building oil pipelines and other infrastructure. Furthermore there is a country called Biraq that not only has huge amounts of easily obtainable oil and a very weak military, but is also ruled by dictator Habbam Bussein that nobody really likes and who uses every chance he gets to piss off Lush and his buddies.
And now, yes I know how ridiculous this scenario may seem to some, imagine a terrorist attack on Mr. Lush's country, which could, with the right amount of propaganda (albeit blatantly dishonest), be blamed on Habbam in order to justify a retaliation in form of an invasion that would make Lush (securing of oil-rich country and building military bases in a region where a lot more oil lies around for the taking) and Deney (no-bid contracts for Ballimurton, revenues are soaring) and their buddies (private contractors that do a lot of things the military does, get paid by the government far more than the 'official soldiers' get and here's the kicker: have no accountability whatsoever, nor are casualties reported to authorities, which always make for bad press) very happy. - If it went the way they would want it to go, that is..
In this, I admit, a bit of a far-fetched scenario, "the suffering and death that will likely happen if you don't go to war would not exceed the certain suffering and death of the war itself", because the casus belli here was not national security, not a direct thread of any sort against Lush's country's population, but simply an abuse of the power invested in that government in order to make themselves and their buddies richer and more powerful. - In this unlikely scenario your conjecture does not hold true.
What it comes down to is that "Mom and Pop" farmers will suffer if a corporation like Monsanto gets their way. They *will* produce crops with superior characteristics because that is what they do and millions if not billions are poured into research. What makes this evil is that 'wild' pollination of those seeds is uncontrollable, and from the perspective of the corporation a positive (side?) effect. If the modified seeds become more widespread they will disable competitors and only seeds produced by that corporation will work.
There is a reason why greed is denounced by all major religions and ethical systems: while it's not evil per se, if uninhibited it can and will lead to evil things. E.g. it is the third of the seven deadly sins in the Christian belief. "A sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things." or to put it another way: the willingness to sell your soul for an earthly temporary gain.
So let me take this very example to illustrate this moral truism. The corporation in question is Monsanto which holds 70%-100% market share of genetically "enhanced" crops. If you check the wikipedia link you'll see that they have no problem exposing their employers (or anyone else for that matter) to hazardous conditions or bribe senior officials to evade environmental assessments or investigations into their practices/products, because the amounts paid are peanuts compared to the revenue they get.
They would rather do something illegal or morally wrong simply because it is more profitable in the long run. Free market powers and strict cost benefit analysis will not guard against such evil. Things that worked yesterday won't necessarily work tomorrow, because the rules of the game change constantly. There is no comparison between the power a corporation nowadays can wield vs. say 50 years ago and if this trend continues we're all in for a rude awakening.
I used Tom's hardware's article to create a four disk RAID 5 array on my Windows XP Pro box. It does away with all the hardware limitations that conventional setups have and there's no need to pay for a dedicated controller.
;)
This means that instead of downloading special drivers for the controller I only need to modify three Windows files in the case of a reinstall. I don't have to stick to one brand/model of RAID controller (or to some of the new mainboard chipsets that support RAID 5 as well). Featurewise it does not support RAID level migration. On the other hand it recognizes disks of a RAID setup automatically no matter how they are connected to the computer (e.g. right now I have two connected through the mainboard's SATA and two through a SATA controller, but I could replace the controller/mainboard, replug them and it would still work); this was the feature that made me decide to go for it. The software overhead is not noticeable (3GHz P-IV). Performance is on par with hardware RAID setups. Only things that's a bit annoying is that when for one reason or another the machine reboots without shutting down (power outage/crash) it will 'rebuild' the array when it boots back into Windows, which takes a few hours. While the system is still usable copying files from/to the array will take quite a while.
I've already partitioned the array into four partitions. My play for increasing its size is simply swapping it one by one with bigger HDDs and then creating a new partition with the new unused space. I believe that should work with any RAID 1/5/6 array, be it hardware or software. One might even combine the partitions afterwards using Partition Magic, but I 'm not a big fan of huge partitions. Hope that helps. Anyone else with Software RAID experience? I'd love to see Linux support for it, that would most certainly mean indefinite support (right now I'm stuck with Windows XP, don't know whether Vista supports it, but I'm not really willing to find out anyway seeing as Vista doesn't increase performance/usability at all.)
What makes this article newsworthy? TFA doesn't report anything new or out of the ordinary. Any army in the world would recruit hackers and use their abilities. In fact TFA starts with "The People's Liberation Army (PLA) continues to build cyberwarfare units..." - Yes, well, in other news: "A sack of rice just tipped over in Zhejiang province, China. No casualties have been confirmed yet. Authorities advise citizens to remain calm..."
Is this article just general fear mongering or is someone setting up a new potential military venture since the current one isn't running so well... - Sorry, but reading sensationalist crap like that just gets me riled up.
Thanks for the elaborate explanation. If I get you correctly you're saying that the steel beams' yield stress was decreased by the heat induced by the burning fuel; this weakening led to the deformation (i.e. collapse) of the steel which (since steel heats up when bent) increased the temperature passed the melting point of steel. It does sound plausible, but I'm still quite apprehensive about the latter part. It would be great if there where any formulas or experiments to back it up, i.e. setting a steel structure on fire, waiting until it collapses and determining whether or not there is molten steel on the ground.
This might also aid in building better skyscrapers in the future. After seeing those two planes fly into the buildings I would never have guessed they would literally pulverize like that (who actually did??). The 'pan-caking' that took place was supposed to be due to a simultaneous/uniformly distributed weakening of the main pillars on all sides of the buildings?
And then there was WTC7 - the official story states that there was a fire in the 5th to 7th floor and somehow the two skyscrapers caused structural damage to it (falling debris??) so it would pulverize in the same fashion as they did. Any more details? - Not from the official investigation.. - It would be great if we knew for sure how that building with basically just a fire burning somewhere could get utterly annihilated like that. This is the first (and as of yet, only) steel frame building that collapsed like that supposedly due to the fire. The lack of explanation also means that this could happen again anytime, even without any terrorist involvement.. Due to a very patchy official investigation (no other investigation were permitted!) we have learned nothing from the WTC7 collapse and wouldn't know how to prevent such a thing from happening in the future!
Imho your comparison between that physicist and a creationist is not appropriate. Unless the official view were creationism. It's not the theory of this physicist that can be likened to creationism - it's the official version. The official story is so strange it makes anyone with a brain wonder. For the first time ever has a building (designed to withstand planes crashing into it) collapses due to fire, officially due to weakening of the steel frame because the fire could never have risen above the melting point of steel. Yet we see a pool of molten steel right there at ground zero. Even if we believed the official story that there was a structural failure, why would all three WTC buildings collapse into their own footprint? Given that they weren't hit from four sides simultaneously it does seem a bit weird. And what of WTC building 7 - the third one that collpases into its own footprint (at free fall speed) yet was never hit by a plane? Any official or otherwise rational explanantion for that?
Something is rotten in the big Apple.
I wonder why nobody has made it into a movie yet, seeing as the book was published as early as 1949(!). And the story is as fresh and thought-provoking as ever. Maybe call the movie "Twenty-sixteen" - you could even film many scenes "on location" nowadays ;)
WTF?
On second thought, let me in the same breath welcome our new prepubescent overlords! (Who knows what those critters are capable of? *trembles*)
It's called Cacheviewer. It still needs a bit of tweaking, but as it is right now, it's already quite useful and imho beats reloading stuff with IE.
What is interesting is that voter turn out in both rounds was a whopping 84%! So people apparently did put some credence into the system, despite the negative rhetoric and people like Le Pen (who got 10% in the first round) discouraging his voters from voting in round 2.
I think in France we did have a significant amount of people voting for something. E.g. some people wanted stronger restrictions on immigration etc., since according to their point of view poor immigrants ("scum" according to Sarkozy) with no perspective caused the social strife that lead to the riots in 2005. On the other hand there were around 10% of the voters in the first round who voted for far left parties (including 4% who voted for communist presidential candidate Olivier Besancenot) who then definitely voted for Royal who ran on a socialist platform.