The first past the post system used in the UK is pretty dismal, I actually think the number who voted labour in 2005 is closer to 35%; but nevertheless Labour received more votes than any other party at the last general election, in any electoral system they would still have been a major part of the government.
Any way that you look at it that's still 35% of the voting public who are prepared to vote for a murderous war criminal who's been systematically dismantling civil liberties since 97. That's frightening.
TFA is far more cautious about these findings than the summary suggests. Also, no scientists are currently suggesting that these findings are likely to have a significant impact on the level of anthropogenic global warming.
The effect could be huge: About 35% of Earth's land surface, or 5.2 billion hectares, is desert and semiarid ecosystems. If the Mojave readings represent an average CO2 uptake, then deserts and semiarid regions may be absorbing up to 5.2 billion tons of carbon a year.
Also...
For now, some experts doubt that the world's most barren ecosystems are the longsought missing carbon sink. "I'd be hugely surprised if this were the missing sink. If deserts are
taking up a lot of carbon, it ought to be obvious," says William Schlesinger, a biogeochemist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, who in the 1980s was among the first to examine carbon flux in deserts. Nevertheless, he says, both sets of findings are intriguing and "must be followed up."
Scientists have long struggled to balance Earth's carbon books. While atmospheric CO2 levels are rising rapidly, our planet absorbs more CO2 than can be accounted for.
and...
Provided the surprising CO2 sink in the deserts is not a mirage, it may yet prove
ephemeral. "We don't want to say that these ecosystems will continue to gain carbon at
this rate forever," Wohlfahrt says. The unexpected CO2 absorption may be due to a
recent uptick in precipitation in many deserts that has fueled a visible surge in vegetation.
If average annual rainfall levels in those deserts were to abate, that could release the
stored carbon and lead to a more rapid buildup of atmospheric CO2--and possibly
accelerate global warming.
This is not, as some posters are implying, published science that concludes the IPCC predictions are in any way likely to be inaccurate, or that carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere at a rate lower than previously thought. This is a news article in science detailing some interesting research showing that deserts may be absorbing more carbon than was previously thought, and that this may account for the fact that atmospheric measurements show the earth is absorbing carbon at a higher rate than can be accounted for by currently known sinks.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is known from atmospheric measurements, and is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years.
Just hire some more people to process the applications and do the impact studies. Construction on alternative energy supplies needs to start now. We are already past the levels of co2 in the atmosphere some scientists consider safe.
Obviously no large scale construction should be undertaken without consideration of the environmental impacts; but given the massive scale of the threat from global warming it's in everybody's interests to spend the cash to make sure alternative energy sources come online as soon as possible.
This is simply another example of the state seeking more control over the lives of individuals.
If anybody actually sits down and thinks for 10 seconds they'll realise there is no accurate way to predict what somebody will cost the healthcare system through their lives, and absolutely no way to even approach accurate prediction without 24/7 monitoring of each and every individual.
Think of the multitude of risk factors, fat is one of the smaller ones. What if you take drugs? Have promiscuous sex? Climb mountains? Or any one of a million others that cant even be quantified?
People supporting this sorf of repressive rubbish need to ask themselves whether they'd rather pay an "unjustified" few percent extra in healthcare costs or allow authorities the right to monitor their actions to make sure they're not doing anything unhealthy. Because that is precisely where this is heading.
Oh, and it's nothing to do with socialised healthcare either. With sufficient support from the authorities this could just as easily be implemented in a private healthcare system.
In terms of the contribution to anthropogenic global warming, biofuels would actually be preferable to hydrogen. For air travel at least.
Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas when it's released high up in the stratosphere. So hydrogen powered aircraft at high altitudes could potentially increase the contribution of air travel to global warming by as much as an order of magnitude.
If you read TFA it says that some products were actually able to detect, though not remove, as many as 29 out of the 30 rootkits tested once they were installed.
That's far higher than I would have expected. I thought the whole idea of a rootkit is that it modifies/hooks the kernel to make detection from userspace practically impossible, so either they're using poor/outdated rootkits or the antivirus makers are actually doing a pretty good job of detecting them (gasp).
Personally I run virus scans from a clean windows PE disk on any windows machine I suspect to be infected anyway; partly because some malware is very good at hiding itself from the OS once it's installed, partly because it makes removal much easier, but I wouldn't read these results as being bad for (some of) the antivirus makers concerned, as the summary seems to suggest.
The reaction displayed to this story on Slashdot is so typical of people's biases here. Everybody is quick to defend Google, as they are still widely seen as a good company. I don't think it takes a genius to predict that the typical response would be very different if this story was about Microsoft. I think censorship is wrong whoever does it.
For the record I have no illusions that any for profit company would be acting any differently to Google in this situation, choosing to do business in China and ignoring the ethical implications. This is of course widely seen in the use of cheap Chinese labour to manufacture western consumer goods etc. I also have no illusions that the Chinese are somehow the only repressive govt around the world and that the focus on them by westerners is not more than a little hypocritical.
None of that excuses people aiding an authoritarian regime in censoring information. Clearly in order to appease the Chinese authorities Google now have smart people employed in figuring out how to better censor the internet. This advances the technology of censorship and is of detriment to freedom everywhere, not just in China, none of this occurs in a vacuum and the Chinese govt are not the only group prone to censorship.
I'm not saying boycott China or anything like that, simply that western corporations should be forced to adhere to the same ethical standards in China they would be forced to in the West.
So, while maybe it's hypocritical to single out Google for special criticism, I also think it's wrong to defend them and to pretend that "do no evil" will ever be more than clever marketing. There should be regulation to prevent this kind of thing in any country that even pretends to care about freedom of speech.
Maybe my information is out of date, but last I checked cloning of mammals is still a massively expensive process with a stupidly high failure rate (95%+ of embryos fail to develop into live young). Even when the cloned embryos develop to adulthood there are usually significant defects.
What effect these defects might have on the animal in later life, or what problems might arise if these clones breed with normal dogs are both still largely unknown.
So why do this? It seems a ridiculously expensive, unreliable and dangerous way to try and go about breeding better dogs for a pretty trivial purpose. This technology is being mass marketed before it's even close to being ready for prime time.
I agree that teaching children some basic lessons on internet use and safety isn't necessarily a bad idea in the modern world.
The thing that really troubles me though is the paranoid attitute underlying all this, and the reasons this descision was made, to quote TFA
Virginia's requirement initially stemmed from concerns about sex offenders preying on children online and a general increase in Internet-based crime. It took effect this school year. Statistically a child in the US is 2.5 times more likely to be hit by lightning than to be the victim of abduction by a stranger. Cases of strangers abusing children are actually vanishingly rare events.
So by all means teach children about internet safety, but do so in a calm and rational way that adresses what real danger there is without trying to scare the hell out of them. The real danger here is that we bring up our children to be suspicious and mistrusfull of just about everyone, which actually has far more serious consequnces for society.
Probably offtopic, but I think maybe we should ask ourselves why the mass media spend so much of their energy blowing inconsequential dangers out of all proportion to create this generalised sense of fear, whose interests this serves, and why the hell we still listen. This is part of a general pattern, and looking at the society around me it seems to be having a profound effect.
Just because the cold war is over people tend to assume nuclear war isn't much of a risk anymore. I think the risk of a nuclear war is high and increasing, and believe that nuclear weapons are still the number one threat to the survival of the human race.
More countries have nukes than at the height of the cold war, some of those (india and pakistan for example) with pretty belligerent attitudes towards each other. The US is increasing its already massive arsenal, and working on a missile defense system that most of the other nuclear powers see as a first strike weapon. This encourages proliferation and increases tensions, for example with russia.
Add to that the impending consequences of global warming, and the struggle for resources this will no doubt trigger, and the powder keg that is the current conflict over dwindling oil resources in the middle east, and I think the risk of a serious global conflict that could spill over into nuclear war is much higher than is generally credited.
The only sane path is still multilateral disarmament. The longer these weapons exist the more the cumulative probability of their use approaches 1, you don't need to be a cryptographer to work that one out.
Yes, marketers using technology to quite literally get inside your head is a very creepy prospect. But marketers have been using everything at their disposal to get into your head since forever. How is this different?
Personally I find the fact that there's a multi-trillion dollar industry working full time in an effort to manipulate my conscious and subconscious mind into believing that corporation X is my friend and that I desperately need they're crap in order to be a worthwhile individual already is creepy enough.
The fact that this industry's influence is so pervasive they can subject each of us to thousands of hours of their propaganda before we're even old enough to think makes that doubly so. There is good research showing that more 4 year olds now recognise the mcdonalds logo that most common animals or shapes.
I also particularly love this
to gauge the emotional power of various images, including college kids drinking cocktails on spring break, twentysomethings with flasks around a campfire, and older guys at a swanky bar'. The results were used to fine-tune an ad campaign for the maker of Jack Daniels. Scientific research on how to better push drugs. Lovely. You'd think there were more serious problems for neuroscientists to be working on than how to get more people to destroy their brains with JD. I also love how this fact elicits absolutely no comment in the article, imagine the media reaction if the same technology was found being used to push marijuana.
This kind of thing is going to be an issue with all signature based AV detection. Changing a few bytes that won't alter the execution of the script/binary will change the signature the AV sees.
In this case it might be fairly easy to program the AVs engine to ignore null bytes in HTML, but how hard would it be to make other minor changes to the code that don't alter the execution but do change the signature. This kind of scanning will only ever catch copy/paste type exploits.
The AV simply doesn't know what bytes are significant, probably inserting a few NOPs or at most recompiling with minor code changes will slip most viri/trojans past signature based scanners, and I don't see how it could really be otherwise without making AV software orders of magnitude more complex and resource hungry than it already is.
You can blame the AV companies, but there's a limit to how effective signature based AVs can be, and using detection based on behavior generally requires the user to know something about what the hell their PC is actually supposed to be doing in the first place, which would make it useless for precisely the users who most need AV protection.
As I'm sure many have said before AV software is a sticking plaster over a gaping wound, if your browser decides to execute untrusted code from the internet with full privileges no amount of AV software out there will save you from getting owned.
Except that what the article states makes no sense.
An "especially attractive feature" of processing coal and biomass together to make synfuels is that it requires only half the amount of biomaterial as pure biofuel production, while still making fuels with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions, Williams said.
If they're using 50% coal and 50% biomass won't the result will still be a hydrocarbon? In which case their actual CO2 emissions will be pretty much as normal, with around 50% of those emissions theoretically offset in the process of growing the biomass in the first place. It's certainly not going to be anywhere near zero emissions unless they're proposing some way to filter the CO2 out of the jet exhaust.
Even a 50% reduction in net warming using this method seems unfeasible, because emitting greenhouse gases up in the stratosphere causes more net warming than emitting them on the ground, i forget the exact factor, I thinks it's estimated to be around 50% more. And that's still ignoring the fact that putting human beings and industry into competition for limited arable land resources is a horrible idea in the first place.
Maybe this is serious research and I'm just missing some important point, but it sounds horribly like airline industry FUD to me...
It amazes me the number of people who really do still seem to believe that flying cars and Star Trek are the future (I know the parent was joking, but there is a serious point here).
I haven't got my crystal ball with me, but I'm still fairly sure that if there's going to be a future, it's not going to involve petrol powered flying cars pumping out CO2 on an unprecedented scale. I'm also fairly sure that if human civilization ever does advance to the point where interstellar travel is possible it will require us to evolve our ideas a little beyond the America in space that the Star Trek franchise basically represents.
I for one don't think the immediate future is going in the direction of flying cars and starships, right now I'd be happy if the human race just concentrated on finding a way to avoid polluting or blasting ourselves back to neolithic times, nevermind anything else.
The author of this article isn't really advocating PC manufacturers be forced to stop bundling windows, so much as he's arguing they be forced to bundle Linux, and be able to bundle windows too if they wish.
I don't think this would have the effect he's anticipating. Forcing a bunch of manufacturers with zero clue about Linux to bundle it with their PC's will make them view it as an additional cost. Therefore they'll do the bare minimum the law requires, which would probably be shoving a Ubuntu CD in the box with the PC, or at best shipping a poorly configured image. I doubt they'll bother making sure the hardware works correctly with the distro, I very much doubt they'll offer proper tech support or get mp3/dvd working out the box (dell doesn't even do the last one, and they chose to offer Linux). Meanwhile the windows option will ship with a properly configured image, correct drivers preinstalled and the usual(read that however you want) level of tech support. All this will just convince people that Linux is some cheap inferior knock off of Windows.
Ultimately it also transfers the costs of breaking up the Microsoft monopoly to hardware manufacturers, who shouldn't really be forced to pay for MS's predatory business practices.
I doubt if there's an easy legal quick-fix to this problem. Certainly not one as easy as TFA suggests. I think to end the monopoly anytime soon you'd have to break Microsoft up into at least 3 separate independent companies (Windows, Office, Xbox), force them to adopt open specs for things like document formats, exchange server protocols, and make sure proper competition legislation stops the kind of shenanigans that allowed this to happen in the first place.
I don't see much chance of that happening though, we'll have to live with Microsoft's broken software a while yet.
Net neutrality isn't about getting rid of QoS, but about the deliberate extortion of money by ISPs and backbones to give preferential service to their own offerings and to those willing to pay.
I think 90% of people on slashdot would agree with this. But then most people here have some understanding of the issues involved. A lot of non-technical people, especially regulators, will get caught up in the FUD being spread.
I think the real background to this is that certain groups are, for obvious reasons, very keen to change the internet from it's current free-for-all state to a managed tiered service; more closely resembling "push" services like television or other traditional media. ISPs are generally happy to support them as they can see opportunities for profit, e.g charging both the user and the server owner for the same bandwidth.
If some form of network neutrality legislation is not forthcoming I think this could become a serious problem. There's only a handful of companies that own most of the internet backbone, if they decide to start prioritizing content they like over content they dislike it will force all the smaller ISPs to follow suit and pass these fees on their customers. The dangers for internet freedom of allowing some random CEO to price internet services they dislike out of existence should require no further explanation.
There are clearly legitimate applications for QoS, prioritizing latency dependent applications over somebody's p2p traffic for example. The question from a regulatory point of view becomes where do you draw the line. What level of regulation is required to stop attempts to change the nature of the net and prevent unscrupulous ISPs charging twice for bandwidth, and to what extent will this interfere with legitimate technologies.
I think we need to be very careful. There is clearly a need for regulation, but it's imperative that those drafting it have an understanding of the technical issues involved, as bad regulation could be as much a danger to internet freedom as no regulation.
I don't live in the states, but aren't they the sole provider in many areas?
Something needs to be done to stop the growing trend of laundry-list TOS agreements that amount to "we can kick you off our network any time we damn well feel like it"; aren't there laws about unfair clauses in these kinds of contracts.
Go to Sri-Lanka sometime, or any other place with a majority Buddhist population. Some of the chief agitators in the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict are Buddhist monks, and the Buddhist clergy there have the same set of backwards social attitudes as clergy anywhere else. The Dali Lama ran close to a fascist regime in Nepal before the Chinese moved in, and instituted an almost fully fascist one.
There's this this utterly blue-eyed view of Buddhists around that just doesn't tally with the facts. Sure Buddhism preaches non-violence and enlightenment, and that's a good thing, but it's followers are as violent and judgmental as anyone else. Christianity preaches love and forgiveness while practicing violence, repression and judgment. I don't know the details of what Islam preaches but I assume it's the same story.
I have no problem with personal religion, but I don't have much time for churches of any ilk; giving any person the power to speak for God (or indeed the Buddha) is just foolish.
I think once people have any access to the internet it's very difficult to entirely prevent them accessing things they're not supposed to. No matter how good your filtering tech. The way IP works just makes censorship extremely difficult.
I think that's a big part of the reason repressive politicians, in the West as well as in Burma, are shit scared of it's potential. The internet is genuinely democratic, in its packet routing algorithms at least. This is why we need to fight against the tiered, pay-per-click internet that many politicians and ISPs seem intent on bringing in. You can bet those routing algorithms will have censorship capabilities designed in from day 1; and stopping this (or any other) kind of dissent will become just that little bit easier.
Why do so many people here play into this wretched stereotype of the Linux user as a socially inept weird guy whose only chance of procreation is if some dumb sorority girl offers him a mercy fuck after he fixes her computer...
I find it profoundly depressing that so many of you have internalized this kind of nonsense to the extent you actually repeat and propagate these stereotypes of yourselves.
This "nerd auction" simultaneously insults and stereotypes women(as sex objects who need a man for anything technical) and Linux users(as socially inept nerds).
I'd expect the former on a male dominated computer-user forum, depressing as it is. The way in which people here propagate these negative stereotypes of themselves is genuinely surprising to me though. Is this an American thing? Do all intelligent young people get beaten so badly in high school that they lose all self esteem? Or just what the hell is this all about Slashdot? I Demand answers dammit!!
The problem isn't that good science journalism isn't possible, it's that it's nowhere on the list of priorities for newspaper editors. Obviously a science journalist is never going to understand every detail of the papers he/she's reading, or be able to give a proper evaluation of whether or not all the assumptions are valid; but that's not necessary to be a good science journalist, that's what peer review is for. All that's required is for journalists to be scientifically literate and sceptically minded. This means checking whether a piece of 'science' that they find on the newswire is based on reputable peer-reviewed research or just plain hype. It means not publishing the findings of incomplete studies. It means not getting suckered in by whatever hype company X wants to get into the papers this week. And above all it requires the journalist to actually give a toss about science and the scientific method; and not just print whatever crap is expedient.
The real problem is that finding scientifically educated people in journalism is about as likely as finding unicorns in 21st century New York; and given the scientific literacy of the general population there is no particular demand for this to change.
Solar powered PC's for 1500$ are a prime example of what's wrong with the consumerist approach to environmentalism. I doubt whether the energy saved by running a PC off this thing will even offset the energy used in it's manufacture, but hey it sounds good and people go "aren't dell good environmentalists".
Everybody goes out and replaces their (perfectly functioning) fords with a "green" Prius. Totally ignoring the fact that manufacturing the Prius itself requires large amounts of energy, therefore emitting a lot of carbon. It would be better for the planet to keep to old car for a few years, or even better to use public transport.
The consumerist approach to environmentalism is like trying to fight WWII by asking individual members of the population to buy guns and go out and shoot a few Germans in their spare time. If governments took this problem remotely as seriously as they claim to there would be proper regulation, as indeed there must be. Consumerism will not solve this problem, we need people who can actually add up working out how existing resources can best be directed to save the planet; not the bloody marketing department at dell.
The placebo effect itslef is actually still rather poorly understood, oddly given that all medicines these days are tested against it. There's relatively little research into the mechanisms by which the effect actually works, but certainly conscious belief in the placebo is not absolutely necessary. Placebos have been shown to have an effect even when the patient has been told they're recieving a placebo.
*shrugs* a lot of this kind of stuff relies on people's natural suggestability if you ask me. Same as hypnosis, the processing occurs at a subconscious level. Rational people are generally less succeptible, but not immune.
Wow, and the French though that your fat American fingers would never be able to crank out predictable trolls about their military with such speed:-P Clearly they underestimated you. Kudos.
Slashdot Mirror
The first past the post system used in the UK is pretty dismal, I actually think the number who voted labour in 2005 is closer to 35%; but nevertheless Labour received more votes than any other party at the last general election, in any electoral system they would still have been a major part of the government. Any way that you look at it that's still 35% of the voting public who are prepared to vote for a murderous war criminal who's been systematically dismantling civil liberties since 97. That's frightening.
The effect could be huge: About 35% of Earth's land surface, or 5.2 billion hectares, is desert and semiarid ecosystems. If the Mojave readings represent an average CO2 uptake, then deserts and semiarid regions may be absorbing up to 5.2 billion tons of carbon a year.
Also...
For now, some experts doubt that the world's most barren ecosystems are the longsought missing carbon sink. "I'd be hugely surprised if this were the missing sink. If deserts are taking up a lot of carbon, it ought to be obvious," says William Schlesinger, a biogeochemist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, who in the 1980s was among the first to examine carbon flux in deserts. Nevertheless, he says, both sets of findings are intriguing and "must be followed up." Scientists have long struggled to balance Earth's carbon books. While atmospheric CO2 levels are rising rapidly, our planet absorbs more CO2 than can be accounted for.
and...
Provided the surprising CO2 sink in the deserts is not a mirage, it may yet prove ephemeral. "We don't want to say that these ecosystems will continue to gain carbon at this rate forever," Wohlfahrt says. The unexpected CO2 absorption may be due to a recent uptick in precipitation in many deserts that has fueled a visible surge in vegetation. If average annual rainfall levels in those deserts were to abate, that could release the stored carbon and lead to a more rapid buildup of atmospheric CO2--and possibly accelerate global warming.
This is not, as some posters are implying, published science that concludes the IPCC predictions are in any way likely to be inaccurate, or that carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere at a rate lower than previously thought.
This is a news article in science detailing some interesting research showing that deserts may be absorbing more carbon than was previously thought, and that this may account for the fact that atmospheric measurements show the earth is absorbing carbon at a higher rate than can be accounted for by currently known sinks. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is known from atmospheric measurements, and is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years.
Just hire some more people to process the applications and do the impact studies. Construction on alternative energy supplies needs to start now. We are already past the levels of co2 in the atmosphere some scientists consider safe.
Obviously no large scale construction should be undertaken without consideration of the environmental impacts; but given the massive scale of the threat from global warming it's in everybody's interests to spend the cash to make sure alternative energy sources come online as soon as possible.
This is simply another example of the state seeking more control over the lives of individuals.
If anybody actually sits down and thinks for 10 seconds they'll realise there is no accurate way to predict what somebody will cost the healthcare system through their lives, and absolutely no way to even approach accurate prediction without 24/7 monitoring of each and every individual. Think of the multitude of risk factors, fat is one of the smaller ones. What if you take drugs? Have promiscuous sex? Climb mountains? Or any one of a million others that cant even be quantified?
People supporting this sorf of repressive rubbish need to ask themselves whether they'd rather pay an "unjustified" few percent extra in healthcare costs or allow authorities the right to monitor their actions to make sure they're not doing anything unhealthy. Because that is precisely where this is heading.
Oh, and it's nothing to do with socialised healthcare either. With sufficient support from the authorities this could just as easily be implemented in a private healthcare system.
In terms of the contribution to anthropogenic global warming, biofuels would actually be preferable to hydrogen. For air travel at least.
Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas when it's released high up in the stratosphere. So hydrogen powered aircraft at high altitudes could potentially increase the contribution of air travel to global warming by as much as an order of magnitude.
If you read TFA it says that some products were actually able to detect, though not remove, as many as 29 out of the 30 rootkits tested once they were installed.
That's far higher than I would have expected. I thought the whole idea of a rootkit is that it modifies/hooks the kernel to make detection from userspace practically impossible, so either they're using poor/outdated rootkits or the antivirus makers are actually doing a pretty good job of detecting them (gasp).
Personally I run virus scans from a clean windows PE disk on any windows machine I suspect to be infected anyway; partly because some malware is very good at hiding itself from the OS once it's installed, partly because it makes removal much easier, but I wouldn't read these results as being bad for (some of) the antivirus makers concerned, as the summary seems to suggest.
The reaction displayed to this story on Slashdot is so typical of people's biases here. Everybody is quick to defend Google, as they are still widely seen as a good company. I don't think it takes a genius to predict that the typical response would be very different if this story was about Microsoft. I think censorship is wrong whoever does it.
For the record I have no illusions that any for profit company would be acting any differently to Google in this situation, choosing to do business in China and ignoring the ethical implications. This is of course widely seen in the use of cheap Chinese labour to manufacture western consumer goods etc. I also have no illusions that the Chinese are somehow the only repressive govt around the world and that the focus on them by westerners is not more than a little hypocritical.
None of that excuses people aiding an authoritarian regime in censoring information. Clearly in order to appease the Chinese authorities Google now have smart people employed in figuring out how to better censor the internet. This advances the technology of censorship and is of detriment to freedom everywhere, not just in China, none of this occurs in a vacuum and the Chinese govt are not the only group prone to censorship.
I'm not saying boycott China or anything like that, simply that western corporations should be forced to adhere to the same ethical standards in China they would be forced to in the West.
So, while maybe it's hypocritical to single out Google for special criticism, I also think it's wrong to defend them and to pretend that "do no evil" will ever be more than clever marketing. There should be regulation to prevent this kind of thing in any country that even pretends to care about freedom of speech.
Why would you do this? I don't understand.
Maybe my information is out of date, but last I checked cloning of mammals is still a massively expensive process with a stupidly high failure rate (95%+ of embryos fail to develop into live young). Even when the cloned embryos develop to adulthood there are usually significant defects. What effect these defects might have on the animal in later life, or what problems might arise if these clones breed with normal dogs are both still largely unknown.
So why do this? It seems a ridiculously expensive, unreliable and dangerous way to try and go about breeding better dogs for a pretty trivial purpose. This technology is being mass marketed before it's even close to being ready for prime time.
I agree that teaching children some basic lessons on internet use and safety isn't necessarily a bad idea in the modern world.
The thing that really troubles me though is the paranoid attitute underlying all this, and the reasons this descision was made, to quote TFA
Virginia's requirement initially stemmed from concerns about sex offenders preying on children online and a general increase in Internet-based crime. It took effect this school year. Statistically a child in the US is 2.5 times more likely to be hit by lightning than to be the victim of abduction by a stranger. Cases of strangers abusing children are actually vanishingly rare events.So by all means teach children about internet safety, but do so in a calm and rational way that adresses what real danger there is without trying to scare the hell out of them. The real danger here is that we bring up our children to be suspicious and mistrusfull of just about everyone, which actually has far more serious consequnces for society.
Probably offtopic, but I think maybe we should ask ourselves why the mass media spend so much of their energy blowing inconsequential dangers out of all proportion to create this generalised sense of fear, whose interests this serves, and why the hell we still listen. This is part of a general pattern, and looking at the society around me it seems to be having a profound effect.
Just because the cold war is over people tend to assume nuclear war isn't much of a risk anymore. I think the risk of a nuclear war is high and increasing, and believe that nuclear weapons are still the number one threat to the survival of the human race.
More countries have nukes than at the height of the cold war, some of those (india and pakistan for example) with pretty belligerent attitudes towards each other. The US is increasing its already massive arsenal, and working on a missile defense system that most of the other nuclear powers see as a first strike weapon. This encourages proliferation and increases tensions, for example with russia.
Add to that the impending consequences of global warming, and the struggle for resources this will no doubt trigger, and the powder keg that is the current conflict over dwindling oil resources in the middle east, and I think the risk of a serious global conflict that could spill over into nuclear war is much higher than is generally credited.
The only sane path is still multilateral disarmament. The longer these weapons exist the more the cumulative probability of their use approaches 1, you don't need to be a cryptographer to work that one out.
Yes, marketers using technology to quite literally get inside your head is a very creepy prospect. But marketers have been using everything at their disposal to get into your head since forever. How is this different?
Personally I find the fact that there's a multi-trillion dollar industry working full time in an effort to manipulate my conscious and subconscious mind into believing that corporation X is my friend and that I desperately need they're crap in order to be a worthwhile individual already is creepy enough.
The fact that this industry's influence is so pervasive they can subject each of us to thousands of hours of their propaganda before we're even old enough to think makes that doubly so. There is good research showing that more 4 year olds now recognise the mcdonalds logo that most common animals or shapes.
I also particularly love this
to gauge the emotional power of various images, including college kids drinking cocktails on spring break, twentysomethings with flasks around a campfire, and older guys at a swanky bar'. The results were used to fine-tune an ad campaign for the maker of Jack Daniels. Scientific research on how to better push drugs. Lovely. You'd think there were more serious problems for neuroscientists to be working on than how to get more people to destroy their brains with JD. I also love how this fact elicits absolutely no comment in the article, imagine the media reaction if the same technology was found being used to push marijuana.This kind of thing is going to be an issue with all signature based AV detection. Changing a few bytes that won't alter the execution of the script/binary will change the signature the AV sees.
In this case it might be fairly easy to program the AVs engine to ignore null bytes in HTML, but how hard would it be to make other minor changes to the code that don't alter the execution but do change the signature. This kind of scanning will only ever catch copy/paste type exploits.
The AV simply doesn't know what bytes are significant, probably inserting a few NOPs or at most recompiling with minor code changes will slip most viri/trojans past signature based scanners, and I don't see how it could really be otherwise without making AV software orders of magnitude more complex and resource hungry than it already is.
You can blame the AV companies, but there's a limit to how effective signature based AVs can be, and using detection based on behavior generally requires the user to know something about what the hell their PC is actually supposed to be doing in the first place, which would make it useless for precisely the users who most need AV protection.
As I'm sure many have said before AV software is a sticking plaster over a gaping wound, if your browser decides to execute untrusted code from the internet with full privileges no amount of AV software out there will save you from getting owned.
An "especially attractive feature" of processing coal and biomass together to make synfuels is that it requires only half the amount of biomaterial as pure biofuel production, while still making fuels with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions, Williams said.
If they're using 50% coal and 50% biomass won't the result will still be a hydrocarbon? In which case their actual CO2 emissions will be pretty much as normal, with around 50% of those emissions theoretically offset in the process of growing the biomass in the first place.
It's certainly not going to be anywhere near zero emissions unless they're proposing some way to filter the CO2 out of the jet exhaust.
Even a 50% reduction in net warming using this method seems unfeasible, because emitting greenhouse gases up in the stratosphere causes more net warming than emitting them on the ground, i forget the exact factor, I thinks it's estimated to be around 50% more. And that's still ignoring the fact that putting human beings and industry into competition for limited arable land resources is a horrible idea in the first place.
Maybe this is serious research and I'm just missing some important point, but it sounds horribly like airline industry FUD to me...
It amazes me the number of people who really do still seem to believe that flying cars and Star Trek are the future (I know the parent was joking, but there is a serious point here).
I haven't got my crystal ball with me, but I'm still fairly sure that if there's going to be a future, it's not going to involve petrol powered flying cars pumping out CO2 on an unprecedented scale.
I'm also fairly sure that if human civilization ever does advance to the point where interstellar travel is possible it will require us to evolve our ideas a little beyond the America in space that the Star Trek franchise basically represents.
I for one don't think the immediate future is going in the direction of flying cars and starships, right now I'd be happy if the human race just concentrated on finding a way to avoid polluting or blasting ourselves back to neolithic times, nevermind anything else.
The author of this article isn't really advocating PC manufacturers be forced to stop bundling windows, so much as he's arguing they be forced to bundle Linux, and be able to bundle windows too if they wish.
I don't think this would have the effect he's anticipating.
Forcing a bunch of manufacturers with zero clue about Linux to bundle it with their PC's will make them view it as an additional cost. Therefore they'll do the bare minimum the law requires, which would probably be shoving a Ubuntu CD in the box with the PC, or at best shipping a poorly configured image. I doubt they'll bother making sure the hardware works correctly with the distro, I very much doubt they'll offer proper tech support or get mp3/dvd working out the box (dell doesn't even do the last one, and they chose to offer Linux).
Meanwhile the windows option will ship with a properly configured image, correct drivers preinstalled and the usual(read that however you want) level of tech support. All this will just convince people that Linux is some cheap inferior knock off of Windows.
Ultimately it also transfers the costs of breaking up the Microsoft monopoly to hardware manufacturers, who shouldn't really be forced to pay for MS's predatory business practices.
I doubt if there's an easy legal quick-fix to this problem. Certainly not one as easy as TFA suggests.
I think to end the monopoly anytime soon you'd have to break Microsoft up into at least 3 separate independent companies (Windows, Office, Xbox), force them to adopt open specs for things like document formats, exchange server protocols, and make sure proper competition legislation stops the kind of shenanigans that allowed this to happen in the first place.
I don't see much chance of that happening though, we'll have to live with Microsoft's broken software a while yet.
I think 90% of people on slashdot would agree with this. But then most people here have some understanding of the issues involved. A lot of non-technical people, especially regulators, will get caught up in the FUD being spread.
I think the real background to this is that certain groups are, for obvious reasons, very keen to change the internet from it's current free-for-all state to a managed tiered service; more closely resembling "push" services like television or other traditional media. ISPs are generally happy to support them as they can see opportunities for profit, e.g charging both the user and the server owner for the same bandwidth.
If some form of network neutrality legislation is not forthcoming I think this could become a serious problem. There's only a handful of companies that own most of the internet backbone, if they decide to start prioritizing content they like over content they dislike it will force all the smaller ISPs to follow suit and pass these fees on their customers. The dangers for internet freedom of allowing some random CEO to price internet services they dislike out of existence should require no further explanation.
There are clearly legitimate applications for QoS, prioritizing latency dependent applications over somebody's p2p traffic for example. The question from a regulatory point of view becomes where do you draw the line. What level of regulation is required to stop attempts to change the nature of the net and prevent unscrupulous ISPs charging twice for bandwidth, and to what extent will this interfere with legitimate technologies.
I think we need to be very careful. There is clearly a need for regulation, but it's imperative that those drafting it have an understanding of the technical issues involved, as bad regulation could be as much a danger to internet freedom as no regulation.
.. why give them your money?I don't live in the states, but aren't they the sole provider in many areas?
Something needs to be done to stop the growing trend of laundry-list TOS agreements that amount to "we can kick you off our network any time we damn well feel like it"; aren't there laws about unfair clauses in these kinds of contracts.
Crap, you're right. I meant Tibet, obviously, not Nepal. Stupid Himalayan mountain states :D
Go to Sri-Lanka sometime, or any other place with a majority Buddhist population. Some of the chief agitators in the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict are Buddhist monks, and the Buddhist clergy there have the same set of backwards social attitudes as clergy anywhere else. The Dali Lama ran close to a fascist regime in Nepal before the Chinese moved in, and instituted an almost fully fascist one.
There's this this utterly blue-eyed view of Buddhists around that just doesn't tally with the facts.
Sure Buddhism preaches non-violence and enlightenment, and that's a good thing, but it's followers are as violent and judgmental as anyone else. Christianity preaches love and forgiveness while practicing violence, repression and judgment. I don't know the details of what Islam preaches but I assume it's the same story.
I have no problem with personal religion, but I don't have much time for churches of any ilk; giving any person the power to speak for God (or indeed the Buddha) is just foolish.
I think once people have any access to the internet it's very difficult to entirely prevent them accessing things they're not supposed to. No matter how good your filtering tech. The way IP works just makes censorship extremely difficult.
I think that's a big part of the reason repressive politicians, in the West as well as in Burma, are shit scared of it's potential. The internet is genuinely democratic, in its packet routing algorithms at least. This is why we need to fight against the tiered, pay-per-click internet that many politicians and ISPs seem intent on bringing in. You can bet those routing algorithms will have censorship capabilities designed in from day 1; and stopping this (or any other) kind of dissent will become just that little bit easier.
Why do so many people here play into this wretched stereotype of the Linux user as a socially inept weird guy whose only chance of procreation is if some dumb sorority girl offers him a mercy fuck after he fixes her computer...
I find it profoundly depressing that so many of you have internalized this kind of nonsense to the extent you actually repeat and propagate these stereotypes of yourselves.
This "nerd auction" simultaneously insults and stereotypes women(as sex objects who need a man for anything technical) and Linux users(as socially inept nerds).
I'd expect the former on a male dominated computer-user forum, depressing as it is. The way in which people here propagate these negative stereotypes of themselves is genuinely surprising to me though. Is this an American thing? Do all intelligent young people get beaten so badly in high school that they lose all self esteem? Or just what the hell is this all about Slashdot? I Demand answers dammit!!
The problem isn't that good science journalism isn't possible, it's that it's nowhere on the list of priorities for newspaper editors.
Obviously a science journalist is never going to understand every detail of the papers he/she's reading, or be able to give a proper evaluation of whether or not all the assumptions are valid; but that's not necessary to be a good science journalist, that's what peer review is for.
All that's required is for journalists to be scientifically literate and sceptically minded.
This means checking whether a piece of 'science' that they find on the newswire is based on reputable peer-reviewed research or just plain hype. It means not publishing the findings of incomplete studies. It means not getting suckered in by whatever hype company X wants to get into the papers this week. And above all it requires the journalist to actually give a toss about science and the scientific method; and not just print whatever crap is expedient.
The real problem is that finding scientifically educated people in journalism is about as likely as finding unicorns in 21st century New York; and given the scientific literacy of the general population there is no particular demand for this to change.
Solar powered PC's for 1500$ are a prime example of what's wrong with the consumerist approach to environmentalism.
I doubt whether the energy saved by running a PC off this thing will even offset the energy used in it's manufacture, but hey it sounds good and people go "aren't dell good environmentalists".
Everybody goes out and replaces their (perfectly functioning) fords with a "green" Prius. Totally ignoring the fact that manufacturing the Prius itself requires large amounts of energy, therefore emitting a lot of carbon. It would be better for the planet to keep to old car for a few years, or even better to use public transport.
The consumerist approach to environmentalism is like trying to fight WWII by asking individual members of the population to buy guns and go out and shoot a few Germans in their spare time. If governments took this problem remotely as seriously as they claim to there would be proper regulation, as indeed there must be. Consumerism will not solve this problem, we need people who can actually add up working out how existing resources can best be directed to save the planet; not the bloody marketing department at dell.
The placebo effect itslef is actually still rather poorly understood, oddly given that all medicines these days are tested against it.
There's relatively little research into the mechanisms by which the effect actually works, but certainly conscious belief in the placebo is not absolutely necessary. Placebos have been shown to have an effect even when the patient has been told they're recieving a placebo.
*shrugs* a lot of this kind of stuff relies on people's natural suggestability if you ask me. Same as hypnosis, the processing occurs at a subconscious level. Rational people are generally less succeptible, but not immune.
Wow, and the French though that your fat American fingers would never be able to crank out predictable trolls about their military with such speed :-P Clearly they underestimated you. Kudos.