But a nuclear power station is located at one site. Its once facility that can be ring fenced and defended, and its infinitely more defendable than a pipeline that stretches over thousands of miles. Hell, build an acid filled moat around the thing if you have to; surround it with gun towers, mine fields, whatever.... OK, I'm being a bit ridiculous, but the point is its doable!
And what's brought this to the forefront of the UK's attention recently was the dispute between Russia and the Ukraine over gas supply and prices. The result of which saw Russia throttle back the gas into Europe supply line. It had nothing to do with Russia's relationship with Europe, but all because it passed through the Ukraine who (Russia said) were illegally syphoning off a portion en-route. Given that Europe gets a good portion of its gas from that line, it scared a lot of people in Europe.
And this is the danger of not investing in new Nuclear technologies now! In 20 years time we will be so dependent on countries like Russia for our day to day energy needs we will be extremely vulnerable to any loss of supply. Another incident like that between Russia and the Ukraine would have a much more devastating impact.
And what about protecting it from terrorism? Pipe lines are thousands of miles long. Its impossible to protect them from attack over that distance. A coordinated strike against our gas supply lines would leave us in the same messy situation. My mum (bless her) always used to say to me "don't put all your eggs in one basket", and thats the approach we should take to energy. Some from gas, coal, oil, environmentally friendly sources, and yes - nuclear. Diversity gives us security and THAT is my primary concern. So unless the anti-nuclear environmentalists can provide a concrete solution on how to meet the energy gap in a secure way, they can go screw themselves.
In this case its survival of the smartest. Maybe the birds around the Altimont Pass are particularly stupid and are doing the rest a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool. If I look at my front window, a quarter mile away is one of the biggest wind turbines I've ever seen. Can't say I've spotted a single bird carcass lying on the ground underneath it.
Personally I don't believe wind turbines kill birds. I call bullshit. The blades just don't turn fast enough. And anyway, birds very quickly get out of the way of fast moving objects. When was the last time you ran over a bird in the road with your car? Drive at 'em as fast as you like. They see you coming and by the time you get there, they've moved.
This proves nothing, especially if it was 'filmed' digitaly. Remember digital means: 1 or 0. It is now easier than ever to 'set up' people, by simply changing two digits
Get real. You seriously think that the police are going to fake CCTV footage and expect to get away with it? We may have more CCTV cams over here than most places but we're still a million miles away from this being an Orwellian state.
And as far as your boasting of how well the pigs 'solved' & 'saved' the day concerning the London bombings.. I can't believe you'd give credit to these 'legal' criminals (ie. the cops).
So the police are supposed to just sit back and do nothing after scores of people get their limbs blown off on the London tubes? If not the Police, then who is supposed to act to prevent this from happening again? Huh?
Grow up man. Take a reality pill and stop smoking that mind bending shit you're on.
Hmm.. I've got a 1GB PowerBook running 10.4.3 (latest) and I'm not seeing what you're seeing with more apps running than that. Fire up activity viewer and select System Memory. What's the value of the Green (free) slice of the pie? Also, what does it show as for the Page out value? This increments since your last reboot. Mine is 0. If yours is higher than that, then you've definitely experienced memory exhaustion at some stage.
The general perception about politicians lately is CCTV will eliminate all problems. After the London bombing on 7/7/05, the Met spent hundreds of man hours sifting through CCTV "evidence" to find more information about the hackers, while for all practical purposes is shutting the barn door after...
I'm sure you meant bombers, not hackers, but anyway. So you think its shutting the barn door after the event. That certainly was not the case for the second set of (failed) bombing attempts a few weeks later. CCTV footage gave the Met and us the faces and (eventually) names of the second crew. Exposing them on TV forced them into hiding (or to flee) before they could strike again and it ultimately led to their capture. It also led to the Police finding more bombs in the back of a car in a train station. Without CCTV there is no way we could have identified them and stopped them from fixing the problems with their bombs and striking again. In the case of the 7/7/05 bombers the Police were able to identify them, track them back into their community and investigate what they had been doing for the last year or so, where they had been, who they associated with, etc. A vital step to try and make sure there was not a queue of future bombers waiting to strike. In both cases CCTV footage helped the Police to discover bomb making factories and chemical stores and to dispose of them safely.
Frankly, I'm glad they're there. The speed camera thing is a separate issue and I won't go into that here.
The day we can do this, is the day the quantum network card will come into being, freeing us from ping time and totally destroying the concept of LAN vs WAN.
That's been my dream for some time as well. But introducing it to market would have to be carefully managed as it would have some pretty destructive effects on portions of industry. Many companies would collapse and significant unemployment would follow.
The Satellite communications industry would become irrelevant over night and so would many industries involved in Radio communications like those who supply, build and maintain Cell Phone networks. But at least we'd have mobile phones that could communicate from anywhere and TV's that could receive from anywhere.
The internet would go through a massive shake up and companies like Cisco would probably collapse when many of their product lines became irrelevant. Why would you need complicated networks anymore when you can just go point to point. Just think, no more CAT cables (hurray). Obviously something would be needed to arbitrate that link up in the first place, but it probably wouldn't look like anything we have today.
It would be fantastic to be able to have real-time communication with deep space probes though and would dramatically change the way we explore space.
It is typical in reporting on this subject to bounce from one expert to another, each one shaking his or her head about how the other one just doesn't get it.
Having pondered on this for a minute I've achieved a new state of Quantum Enlightenment. I both get it and don't get it, at the same time!
Depends what you think gravity is. According to Einstein's general relativity theory, gravitation is an effect of spacetime curvature. Think of a rubber sheet with an object in the middle of it that has huge mass. It causes the sheet (space-time) to "sink" (deform) where the heavy object is located. Anything orbiting that object is actually caught in the depression the object makes in the sheet and lacks the energy (inertia) to break free.
The quantum physicists however seem to have a different take on things, postulating the existence of the graviton; a hypothetical elementary particle that transmits the force of gravity over any distance.
Personally (not being a physicist) the two ideas seem to be so far apart that either one could be right, but not both. I just hope I live long enough to see it proved one way or the other. Or maybe something new is waiting to be discovered. Whatever, Gravity remains one of science's greatest mysteries and obtaining a true understanding of it in relation to the other forces we know about, science's greatest challenge.
all they're wary of is that weird IT guy who tries to tell them what to do with their machine
This is a mindset, policy and educational problem. It's not their machine, its the company's machine.
In the last year I worked at a client site setting up a bunch of HP-UX servers and had a chat with the guy who headed up the team that looked after their Windows environment (a couple of thousand PCs). When he arrived their security was a nightmare. For example an employee would find a screen saver on his favourite football team and install it; his friends would see it, copy it and it would work its way around the office, complete with whatever spyware/virus it was hiding. This was a regular occurrence. They were cleaning new viruses off their net every week. When I got there though they'd really locked down the environment. All the systems were the same, no one had admin rights, no one could install anything and even the USB ports were disabled.
More importantly though everyone had to read and sign a statement that declared what they could and could not do with the Company PCs, the security measures they had to follow, and acknowledge the disciplinary steps that would be taken if they breached them. Even I had to do this as a visitor to their site before they would let me connect my PowerBook to their network. Very slick, very tight and it worked well.
Even though his numbers are very flawed. (I mean, he's assuming that no computers are ever thrown away or break.)
Yeah, true. But then Mac Users are well known for having a slower upgrade cycle than most PC users. Plus they tend to get re-cycled more; either passed onto friends or relatives, or sold on Ebay (e.g. my girlfriend now ownes my old PB). They hold their value much better than PCs I'm told. Also I've not factored into my numbers the late switchers from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. There are still supposed to be a few million Mac OS 9 users out there.
You're putting words in the OP's mouth. See my first question in the post you replied to.
Smoke and mirrors, stop ducking the issue. Never mind anyone else's words, I'm telling you that Mac OS X is a UNIX clone as good as any other and deserves to wear the name. If you're not familiar with what components are included in a Mac OS X installation then take a copy of this and give it the once over.
So lets see your figures then? Amaze us with your 10's of millions of Solaris users!
Thanks for playing.
You're welcome. Checkmate in one I think.. your move.
What do you mean by "biggest"? Further, what do you mean by "Unix"? Depending on the answer to the previous two, the answer is likely Solaris, Linux, or FreeBSD. In any case, it's almost certainly NOT OS X, which is the least Unix-like of any of the other choices.
Solaris!! LMAO.. they sell small numbers of big tin for lots of profit. How can you possibly assume they have the largest installed users base! Mac OS X may not be the most traditional of Unix clones in the way it starts up and such, but it still qualifies as a Unix clone just as much as the many diverse flavors of BSD and Linux do!
And as for the number of users running Mac OS X, I currently put that around 17 million mark. Here's where I got those numbers from.
Start from a base of 9,000,000+ users as per this January 6th 2004 article:
So, 9000000+829000+749000+876000+836000+1046000+107000 0+1182000+1236000 = 16,824,000
If you honestly thing that Sun or any of the other BSD's can boast a user base that size, I reckon you're smoking something dodgy. I'm not even sure the Linux installed base is that big as 90% of Linux installs are likely to be small servers, not desktops.
Whoops, you should've patented it then while you had the chance. Now Yahoo will sue your ass for daring to steal their IP thoughts and boasting about it in public;-)
You should have used the word "few". As most DO have effects that impair judgement beyond just a few hours. If you believe otherwise you're deceiving yourself.
Flashbacks can occur years after any intensely emotional experience, positive or negative, drugs or no drugs.
Bollocks. You've obviously never seen anyone experience a flashback. Its more than just reliving a vivid memory, its like tripping out all over again. For example, my friend described having a normal chat with her dad 2 days after coming down off a tab when he suddenly sprouted a beard, tail and horns! Scared the shit out of her.
In terms of perceptual impairment? No, really, it can't.
Really! Tell that to my mates ex-girlfriend, the one who robbed us both. She turned from someone who was polite, considerate, clean and took pride in herself into someone who lost 3 stone in weight, stole from the people she used to be close to, and even got nicked for violently attacking a girl in the center of town so she could steal her hand bag. Not to mention all the times she got picked up for shoplifting. She was as fucked up between fixes as she was when she got them.
Which is, you know, totally different from alcohol. Or gambling.
If you weren't being so sarcastic you'd actually be right. They're quite different. Gambling doesn't come into this as its a mental illness and not artificially induced. You can't pop a pill to become a gambler.
To be honest, I don't believe there is an opensource drop in replacement for Exchange yet.
Have you taken a look at Scalix yet? The server only runs on Linux and their community version is free (though I don't know if its open source per-se). It has native support for MS Outlook, and it has a very impressive AJAX enabled web interface. Their product demo shows it off pretty well.
They don't list Ubuntu as one of their supported platforms. Perhaps because they only package in rpm, dunno.
The psychoactive effects of most recreational drugs last for minutes or hours, not days
Thats not a universal truth. I had a friend years ago who used to pop acid tabs. Sometimes she's have flashbacks from 2-4 days later, some pretty scary ones too. Besides, you're just looking at the length of the "high" effect, but the downer that follows can be just as bad. E's for example can leave you feeling down the next day after the high effect has warn off. The cravings that come from Heroin and Crack addiction change a person's personality, values and judgement and are directly responsible for large amounts of crime and crime related violence.
Hmm, this is going way off topic, but I want to comment anyway.
I don't think it will ever be possible to legalize drugs the way you suggest for one reason and one reason only. The amount of time strong mind/behaviour altering drugs like cocaine, crack and heroin stay in your system. Most people can regulate the amount of alcohol they consume so they're only affected from 6-12 hours. But with class B and class A drugs thats not the case. The last thing we as a society needs is a pandemic of people driving cars and working in sensitive jobs that are still experiencing judgment impairing effects of drugs, days after they've consumed them, with no recourse to stop them because they're not doing anything illegal. The amount of road deaths and work accidents would rocket! It would be a disaster.
Take a look at this site for the more info on the length of time drugs can remain in the body.
Having said that, I DO think that if someone develops a nasty addiction to something like crack, they should be able to go to their doctor, and if the doctor's diagnosis recognizes the addiction, they should get the drugs they need for FREE, until they can be put on a plan that weans them off it. I have this view because two years ago a friends ex-girlfriend got hooked on heroin and to try and get money to support it she broke into my house when I was away one weekend, and stole two laptops and various other valuable items from my office. Fortunately she did the same to my friend two weeks later, cut herself when braking the window, leaving blood spots behind and got arrested once they'd processed the DNA and sent to prison. If she's had the kind of help I describe I would never have experienced what its like to have your private property violated. It changes you as a person!
Slashdot Mirror
It looks exactly the same as my PowerBook G4. The only difference is the power adapter and lack of a Firewire 800 port on the right hand side.
I'm just glad they kept a firewire port at all as I do all by backups to a firewire portable drive.
Plus, with my external (firewire) isight camera, when I eventually upgrade I'll be able to have vid conferences with myself
But a nuclear power station is located at one site. Its once facility that can be ring fenced and defended, and its infinitely more defendable than a pipeline that stretches over thousands of miles. Hell, build an acid filled moat around the thing if you have to; surround it with gun towers, mine fields, whatever
And what's brought this to the forefront of the UK's attention recently was the dispute between Russia and the Ukraine over gas supply and prices. The result of which saw Russia throttle back the gas into Europe supply line. It had nothing to do with Russia's relationship with Europe, but all because it passed through the Ukraine who (Russia said) were illegally syphoning off a portion en-route. Given that Europe gets a good portion of its gas from that line, it scared a lot of people in Europe.
And this is the danger of not investing in new Nuclear technologies now! In 20 years time we will be so dependent on countries like Russia for our day to day energy needs we will be extremely vulnerable to any loss of supply. Another incident like that between Russia and the Ukraine would have a much more devastating impact.
And what about protecting it from terrorism? Pipe lines are thousands of miles long. Its impossible to protect them from attack over that distance. A coordinated strike against our gas supply lines would leave us in the same messy situation. My mum (bless her) always used to say to me "don't put all your eggs in one basket", and thats the approach we should take to energy. Some from gas, coal, oil, environmentally friendly sources, and yes - nuclear. Diversity gives us security and THAT is my primary concern. So unless the anti-nuclear environmentalists can provide a concrete solution on how to meet the energy gap in a secure way, they can go screw themselves.
In this case its survival of the smartest. Maybe the birds around the Altimont Pass are particularly stupid and are doing the rest a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool. If I look at my front window, a quarter mile away is one of the biggest wind turbines I've ever seen. Can't say I've spotted a single bird carcass lying on the ground underneath it.
Personally I don't believe wind turbines kill birds. I call bullshit. The blades just don't turn fast enough. And anyway, birds very quickly get out of the way of fast moving objects. When was the last time you ran over a bird in the road with your car? Drive at 'em as fast as you like. They see you coming and by the time you get there, they've moved.
Just out of curiosity, what sect of Buddhist are you?
So the police are supposed to just sit back and do nothing after scores of people get their limbs blown off on the London tubes? If not the Police, then who is supposed to act to prevent this from happening again? Huh?
Grow up man. Take a reality pill and stop smoking that mind bending shit you're on.
LOL
Hmm
Frankly, I'm glad they're there. The speed camera thing is a separate issue and I won't go into that here.
The Satellite communications industry would become irrelevant over night and so would many industries involved in Radio communications like those who supply, build and maintain Cell Phone networks. But at least we'd have mobile phones that could communicate from anywhere and TV's that could receive from anywhere.
The internet would go through a massive shake up and companies like Cisco would probably collapse when many of their product lines became irrelevant. Why would you need complicated networks anymore when you can just go point to point. Just think, no more CAT cables (hurray). Obviously something would be needed to arbitrate that link up in the first place, but it probably wouldn't look like anything we have today.
It would be fantastic to be able to have real-time communication with deep space probes though and would dramatically change the way we explore space.
A logic probe
Tell me again why you need 64bit extensions on a consumer laptop. 2GB memory not big enough for you?
Depends what you think gravity is. According to Einstein's general relativity theory, gravitation is an effect of spacetime curvature. Think of a rubber sheet with an object in the middle of it that has huge mass. It causes the sheet (space-time) to "sink" (deform) where the heavy object is located. Anything orbiting that object is actually caught in the depression the object makes in the sheet and lacks the energy (inertia) to break free.
The quantum physicists however seem to have a different take on things, postulating the existence of the graviton; a hypothetical elementary particle that transmits the force of gravity over any distance.
Personally (not being a physicist) the two ideas seem to be so far apart that either one could be right, but not both. I just hope I live long enough to see it proved one way or the other. Or maybe something new is waiting to be discovered. Whatever, Gravity remains one of science's greatest mysteries and obtaining a true understanding of it in relation to the other forces we know about, science's greatest challenge.
In the last year I worked at a client site setting up a bunch of HP-UX servers and had a chat with the guy who headed up the team that looked after their Windows environment (a couple of thousand PCs). When he arrived their security was a nightmare. For example an employee would find a screen saver on his favourite football team and install it; his friends would see it, copy it and it would work its way around the office, complete with whatever spyware/virus it was hiding. This was a regular occurrence. They were cleaning new viruses off their net every week. When I got there though they'd really locked down the environment. All the systems were the same, no one had admin rights, no one could install anything and even the USB ports were disabled.
More importantly though everyone had to read and sign a statement that declared what they could and could not do with the Company PCs, the security measures they had to follow, and acknowledge the disciplinary steps that would be taken if they breached them. Even I had to do this as a visitor to their site before they would let me connect my PowerBook to their network. Very slick, very tight and it worked well.
So lets see your figures then? Amaze us with your 10's of millions of Solaris users!
You're welcome. Checkmate in one I think
And as for the number of users running Mac OS X, I currently put that around 17 million mark. Here's where I got those numbers from.
Start from a base of 9,000,000+ users as per this January 6th 2004 article:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jan/06macosx
Then add the number of Macintosh Units sold since then per quarter. Each had a copy of OSX on it:
2004
Q1: 829,000
Q2: 749,000
Q3: 876,000
Q4: 836,000
2005
Q1: 1,046,000
Q2: 1,070,000
Q3: 1,182,000
Q4: 1,236,000
So, 9000000+829000+749000+876000+836000+1046000+10700
If you honestly thing that Sun or any of the other BSD's can boast a user base that size, I reckon you're smoking something dodgy. I'm not even sure the Linux installed base is that big as 90% of Linux installs are likely to be small servers, not desktops.
Bollocks. You've obviously never seen anyone experience a flashback. Its more than just reliving a vivid memory, its like tripping out all over again. For example, my friend described having a normal chat with her dad 2 days after coming down off a tab when he suddenly sprouted a beard, tail and horns! Scared the shit out of her.
Really! Tell that to my mates ex-girlfriend, the one who robbed us both. She turned from someone who was polite, considerate, clean and took pride in herself into someone who lost 3 stone in weight, stole from the people she used to be close to, and even got nicked for violently attacking a girl in the center of town so she could steal her hand bag. Not to mention all the times she got picked up for shoplifting. She was as fucked up between fixes as she was when she got them.
If you weren't being so sarcastic you'd actually be right. They're quite different. Gambling doesn't come into this as its a mental illness and not artificially induced. You can't pop a pill to become a gambler.
To be honest, I don't believe there is an opensource drop in replacement for Exchange yet.
Have you taken a look at Scalix yet? The server only runs on Linux and their community version is free (though I don't know if its open source per-se). It has native support for MS Outlook, and it has a very impressive AJAX enabled web interface. Their product demo shows it off pretty well.
They don't list Ubuntu as one of their supported platforms. Perhaps because they only package in rpm, dunno.
The psychoactive effects of most recreational drugs last for minutes or hours, not days
Thats not a universal truth. I had a friend years ago who used to pop acid tabs. Sometimes she's have flashbacks from 2-4 days later, some pretty scary ones too. Besides, you're just looking at the length of the "high" effect, but the downer that follows can be just as bad. E's for example can leave you feeling down the next day after the high effect has warn off. The cravings that come from Heroin and Crack addiction change a person's personality, values and judgement and are directly responsible for large amounts of crime and crime related violence.
Hmm, this is going way off topic, but I want to comment anyway.
I don't think it will ever be possible to legalize drugs the way you suggest for one reason and one reason only. The amount of time strong mind/behaviour altering drugs like cocaine, crack and heroin stay in your system. Most people can regulate the amount of alcohol they consume so they're only affected from 6-12 hours. But with class B and class A drugs thats not the case. The last thing we as a society needs is a pandemic of people driving cars and working in sensitive jobs that are still experiencing judgment impairing effects of drugs, days after they've consumed them, with no recourse to stop them because they're not doing anything illegal. The amount of road deaths and work accidents would rocket! It would be a disaster.
Take a look at this site for the more info on the length of time drugs can remain in the body.
Having said that, I DO think that if someone develops a nasty addiction to something like crack, they should be able to go to their doctor, and if the doctor's diagnosis recognizes the addiction, they should get the drugs they need for FREE, until they can be put on a plan that weans them off it. I have this view because two years ago a friends ex-girlfriend got hooked on heroin and to try and get money to support it she broke into my house when I was away one weekend, and stole two laptops and various other valuable items from my office. Fortunately she did the same to my friend two weeks later, cut herself when braking the window, leaving blood spots behind and got arrested once they'd processed the DNA and sent to prison. If she's had the kind of help I describe I would never have experienced what its like to have your private property violated. It changes you as a person!