The difference between fiberglass fibers and asbestos fibers is 1-2 orders of magnitude in diameter and length. This puts the glass fibers into the size range of particles that our lungs are more capable of handling.
85% thought the government was conducting the poll.
If you live in a totalitarian dictatorship and your phone rings and someone says, "I'm conducting a poll for the blah blah blah organization that you've never hear of before, do you think our glorious leader is a really great guy or do you want needles under your fingernails?" How do you answer?
In a place where people legitimately fear speaking the truth, all polls are biased.
Double all of your numbers because there is typically 20 minutes of commercials in an "hour" long program. So that's 7300 hours of ads in 30 years... 304 days. Almost a year's worth!
Everyone takes their turn pinning the tail on the donkey, then a distribution of how far from the donkey's butt is generated. Drink volumes are allocated according to the number of standard deviations.
By rights IBM/Microsoft PCs should have died while the innovators at Atari, Commodore, Amiga rose to the top with their multimedia machines. Yeh we all know. Beta was better than VHS. The Tucker was a vastly superior automobile than its American competition, yadda yadda. But they were ahead of their time. The PC with its sort-of open architecture, and more importantly the killer app Lotus 123, was just right for widespread business adoption. The general public had no interest in running 12 programs at the same time, and had no idea what multimedia was. I recall that the big question at the time was, "What would I do with a computer at home? Store my recipes?"
First to market with a revolutionary new product guarantees you an entry in wikipedia, nothing more.
The 1978 Presidential Records Act expressly forbids it. In fact this admission that they intentionally destroyed hard drives just adds to the evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the current administration. These crooks were also using Republican National Committee servers to conduct official Whitehouse business in order to skirt the record keeping requirements of the act. http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/03/white_house_emails.html
But the congress is gonna let them slide again, when they should impeach the bastards.
If this is practical and it's energy potential can be tapped, we'll have at our fingertips, an unlimited power source that won't kill you with radiation. It astonishes me how often/.ers forget the first and second law of thermodynamics. You'll only have the unlimited source of energy after you expended the same amount of energy (and more) generating and compressing the hydrogen to get it into the buckyballs in the first place.
Wake up world. Hydrogen isn't a source of energy any more than capacitors are. It's a way to store energy.
15 of the 19 terrorists that hijacked planes on September 11 are still on the list. But don't laugh we must be forever vigilant to protect our homeland from the threat of terrorist zombies.
So what they're essentially saying is that it must be true that out of a typical high school graduating class of 1,000 or, 30 people -- the equivalent of an entire classroom of kids, is a terrorist. (Just using the high school as an example to show scale, don't mean to imply anything about age or whatnot). 1 in 300 is equivalent to a bit more than 3 in 1000 not 30. Not only the author of the comment but at least 4 other people who modded him 'insightful' missed this order of magnitude mistake. Oops. I wonder if any of them are working on the terrorist watch list?
I sometimes argue that the most powerful computer I ever had was my old HP200LX. It was a full blown dos computer that I could fit in a big pocket. It had lotus123 a nice, text editor, a really easy to use database program, a great rpn calculator, and any dos program that didn't require a color screen or fancy graphics. I used to play hack on the bus. It ran on AA batteries and I only had to change them about once per month. It had a meg of memory and I had a 2 meg pcmcia card. It was powerful because having it with me all of the time opened so many possibilities not because it had a blazing processor or a high res screen.
I'm planning on buying an Eee or something similar in the next year or so. I'm holding out for one with a cooler chip and more battery life.
This whole thing reminds me of one of the key incidents that lead me to agnosticism. A respected chemist, church leader, and community member told me that evolution without the intervention of God was a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. He said that evolution, an increase in order, could not take place in the absence of some sort of divine input. Being in high school with a flawed understanding of thermodynamics, I found the argument very convincing and troubling since I already had so much doubt. Later when I learned that the second law is only true in a closed system. It occurred to me that with the sun pouring energy down onto the surface of the earth 24/7 for a few billion years is far from being a closed system. I felt betrayed by this man who I otherwise had a lot of respect for. I was also relieved to see debunked this argument that flew in the face of so many other things that I knew.
It still bothers me that this man would stoop to saying things that were demonstrably false in defence of something that he really believed.
When people ask me now what I believe in I tell them, "I believe that the scientific method is our most reliable and powerful tool for understanding the universe."
For astrology, crystals, healing, tarot cards and the idiotic things some women believe... Was this article designed to elicit thoughtlessly sexist comments from/.ers, or did it just turn out that way?
I was taking compressible fluid dynamics (that's the study of supersonic flow) when I picked up a book about traffic engineering. I noticed one of the formulas was very similar to a formula I was using lots in class. I looked more closely and realized that both equations must be describing similar phenomena. I've driven hundreds of thousands of miles since then, much of it in heavy traffic. A typical problem you solve in compressible fluids goes like this: there is air flowing in a pipe at over M=1 and there is a constriction in the flow. What is the velocity and pressure after the shock wave. It's a lot like traffic is moving at high speed and high density down a 4 lane highway and one lane is closed for repair.
Of course the analogy breaks down because... well it isn't the same phenomena. Each molecule of traffic has an emotional person controlling it.
Some of my observations:
When traffic reaches what I call critical flow (a combination of high density and high speed) then it doesn't take much disturbance at all to cause shocks (a shock being a rapid decrease in speed combined with an increase in traffic density, they are characterized by lots of brake lights.) When traffic is at critical flow, cause and effect can have a very non-linear relationship. Even a polite lane change, or a pothole might tip the traffic from critical to supercritical (traffic jam.) Sometimes shocks are standing shocks. This tends to happen approaching a constriction in the road when traffic sufficiently far back is sub critical. Sometimes shocks propagate backwards through traffic like waves at the beach. An excellent example of this is 880 Southbound approaching the turnoff to the San Mateo Bridge around commute time. This one is interesting because there is drag introduced by people exiting 880 but the main disturbance comes, I believe, from cars in the carpool lane cutting across all the lanes to exit to the San Mateo Bridge. As anyone who has driven this stretch of freeway can tell you, traffic blasts along at 70 then everyone is standing on their brakes, then 70, then brakes, then 70, then...
That was the best of my macro-traffic observations, here is one funny micro traffic observation. I call it the "sticky effect" or the "stupid effect" depending on my mood. If one car is overtaking another car but only going slightly faster the slower car will speed up at least temporarily to match speeds. If the passing car is going sufficiently faster then it won't happen. Two cars on a two lane road will frequently end up right next to each other as a result of the sticky effect. Causing a "moron roadblock," which is just a line of cars going too slow blocking every lane. I also call it a rolling roadblock, and when I lived in Utah I called it a mormon roadblock.
So again, I have to ask why would we need to push this on everyone outside the context of science?
Because we want a good society to live in for ourselves and our children. A large part of living in a sustainable and happy culture is understanding the world around us. That means a good portion of us should be scientists, doctors, and engineers. You have to teach science to kids from an early age if you want to end up lots of scientists, doctors, and engineers. You can't arbitrarily leave out the basis (evolution) for an entire branch of science (biology) just because some people say it doesn't agree with some book written a very long time ago.
Of course in my opinion the BEST way to combat this sort of ignorance is to teach the scientific method to kids in jr high or high school. We spend all of our time in "science" classes teaching the information that we have gotten by using the scientific method. We should teach everyone what the scientific method is and why it works really well as a tool for understanding the universe. After all the scientific method is really the foundation of modernity.
This would explain why Netflix's Watch Instantly feature always stops after a few minutes and has to re-buffer with the message "your internet connection has slowed." It's really irritating. It's been doing ever since Comcast dropped my monthly rate and told me they were signing me up for "faster" service. !@#$%@#$^%
Turning a country into a war zone;
Turning whole populations into refugees;
Military occupations with checkpoints, no knock searches, arbitrary detentions, torture, etc.;
Desperation;
Hopelessness; and
Training religious fanatics in terrorist techniques, arming them, and funding them, until they defeat your enemy for you and then abandoning them.
Yep all of those things are really good at breeding terrorism, but I don't see anonymity in virtual worlds anywhere on the list. Nope. Sorry.
There are likely more than the 5 being reported by the media, possibly 8. There has certainly been confusion on the subject.
The following was written by Richard Sauder and is quoted from this web page: http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/ConnectingTheDots.htm
By my count, we are probably dealing with as many as eight, maybe even nine, unexplained cut or damaged undersea cables within the last week, and not the mere three or four that most mainstream news media outlets in the United States are presently reporting. Given all this cable-cutting mayhem in the last several days, who knows but what there may possibly be other cut and/or damaged cables that have not made it into the news cycle, because they are lost in the general cable-cutting noise by this point. Nevertheless, let me enumerate what I can, and keep in mind, I am not pulling these out of a hat; all of the sources are referenced at the conclusion of the article; you can click through and look at all the evidence that I have. It's there if you care to read through it all 1) one off of Marseille, France 2) two off of Alexandria, Egypt 3) one off of Dubai, in the Persian Gulf 4) one off of Bandar Abbas, Iran in the Persian Gulf 5) one between Qatar and the UAE, in the Persian Gulf 6) one in the Suez, Egypt 7) one near Penang, Malaysia 8) initially unreported cable cut on 23 January 2008 (Persian Gulf?)
The article includes the following links as references to document the above list of believed cuts:
I agree that invasion is really unlikely. But some form of attack is increasingly likely. Iran was scheduled to open their Oil Bourse very soon, but will be delaying it because of internet outages. The oil trading exchange is planned to trade in oil in NON-DOLLAR currencies. If the dollar ceases to be the petro-currency then nations all over the planet have little reason to hold onto their stockpiles of dollars. Widespread trade of oil in Euros or Yen or whatever could trigger uncontrollable inflation in the dollar as nations trade in bucks for better currencies.
I really think that an attack on Iran by us, the US, or Israel in the next week or so is a pretty high probability. I hope I am wrong. God I hope I am wrong.
There should be an expectation that a modern OS will require more RAM and CPU than an OS released 7 years ago. Gee I have a handmedown pc made in about 2000. It was a slow pc even then. It came installed with Win98, which is a 10 year old platform now. It ran horribly. It was dog slow. It crashed if you looked at it cross eyed (which is why the original owner was eager to get rid of it.) The PC has a 1GHz Pentium 3 and 256Mb of ram. I have the latest Kubuntu installed on it, and it runs quickly, boots up faster than many other computers I use, never crashes, and has a nice looking interface. It's also easy enough for my 4 year old to use.
I suppose a person's expectations determine their reality. I did not have an expectation that a modern OS would require soooo much more hardware cost and it didn't. In fact it ran better and faster with more functionality than the old OS. You did have that expectation and you got what you expected.
E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence in Elections... who cares?
E-Voting Undermines Elections.
Now having said that... Electronic tabulation (by optical scan for example) of paper ballots, accompanied by statistically appropriate manual audits, would inspire happy confidence in this voter.
However, when Iraq refuses to cooperate, or the Arabs in Israel refuse to cooperate, the procedures break down and you're left with two countries that can't reach an agreement without raising the stakes.
Wow what an astonishing thing to say!
We all know now that Iraq didn't have WMDs just like they claimed when they submitted their accounting as demanded by the US. The US invaded Iraq in violation of the Nuremberg Principals and the UN Charter. Israel is currently using collective punishment against the residents of the Gaza Strip (the blockade has resulted in no electricity, limited potable water, and food shortages.) This is a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. Why are they doing it? Because the Palestinians elected the wrong party, oops. Israel has denied Right of Return of Refugees for over 50 years now. That's another violation of international law and human rights.
To take this back to the original topic. I think that debating the ethics of robots in war is a bit is just a analogous way of debating more pressing issues, like does economic or military superiority make it okay for a nation to impose it's will by force on another nation or people? Does might make right? At the end of WWII the world community decided that might does not make right. We, the US, have abandoned that in favor of a more barbaric approach. Even after the disaster of Iraq, we are on a course to attack Iran because they are enriching uranium for use in nuclear power plants, which they have an explicit right to do under the non-proliferation treaty.
With unmanned drones armed carrying Hellfire missiles, armored tanks vs civilians throwing rocks, and precision guided cruise missiles, the world already have something akin to "robot war."
There is a box on the page called "Current Conditions." Scroll to the bottom of that box and click on the link called "Google Map of Personal Weather Stations." Here is an example link:
Each of the station icons, which indicate current conditions, can be clicked on to access much more detailed current conditions and often extensive history as well. I'm lucky that a nearby neighbor has one, and I get accurate data from his station all of the time. It's really the ultimate site for weather geeks.
A few years ago I was managing a hazardous material removal in a high profile public location. All of the work was done late at night to maintain access for the public to the building. Each night the crew had to build a 2 story containment of poly sheeting. Of course the site was near the shore and subject to high winds which could blow down even the best containment. Since there was a personal weather station very close by I was able to monitor the windspeed from the comfort of my home. On two nights the wind got over 20mph, and I shut them down for the night to prevent the containment from being blown down.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between fiberglass fibers and asbestos fibers is 1-2 orders of magnitude in diameter and length. This puts the glass fibers into the size range of particles that our lungs are more capable of handling.
85% thought the government was conducting the poll.
If you live in a totalitarian dictatorship and your phone rings and someone says, "I'm conducting a poll for the blah blah blah organization that you've never hear of before, do you think our glorious leader is a really great guy or do you want needles under your fingernails?" How do you answer?
In a place where people legitimately fear speaking the truth, all polls are biased.
Double all of your numbers because there is typically 20 minutes of commercials in an "hour" long program. So that's 7300 hours of ads in 30 years... 304 days. Almost a year's worth!
Have you read your ISP terms of service? I seriously doubt that you are simply paying for bandwidth with no limitations on its use.
Everyone takes their turn pinning the tail on the donkey, then a distribution of how far from the donkey's butt is generated. Drink volumes are allocated according to the number of standard deviations.
First to market with a revolutionary new product guarantees you an entry in wikipedia, nothing more.
The 1978 Presidential Records Act expressly forbids it. In fact this admission that they intentionally destroyed hard drives just adds to the evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the current administration. These crooks were also using Republican National Committee servers to conduct official Whitehouse business in order to skirt the record keeping requirements of the act. http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/03/white_house_emails.html
But the congress is gonna let them slide again, when they should impeach the bastards.
Wake up world. Hydrogen isn't a source of energy any more than capacitors are. It's a way to store energy.
15 of the 19 terrorists that hijacked planes on September 11 are still on the list. But don't laugh we must be forever vigilant to protect our homeland from the threat of terrorist zombies.
I sometimes argue that the most powerful computer I ever had was my old HP200LX. It was a full blown dos computer that I could fit in a big pocket. It had lotus123 a nice, text editor, a really easy to use database program, a great rpn calculator, and any dos program that didn't require a color screen or fancy graphics. I used to play hack on the bus. It ran on AA batteries and I only had to change them about once per month. It had a meg of memory and I had a 2 meg pcmcia card. It was powerful because having it with me all of the time opened so many possibilities not because it had a blazing processor or a high res screen.
I'm planning on buying an Eee or something similar in the next year or so. I'm holding out for one with a cooler chip and more battery life.
This whole thing reminds me of one of the key incidents that lead me to agnosticism. A respected chemist, church leader, and community member told me that evolution without the intervention of God was a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. He said that evolution, an increase in order, could not take place in the absence of some sort of divine input. Being in high school with a flawed understanding of thermodynamics, I found the argument very convincing and troubling since I already had so much doubt. Later when I learned that the second law is only true in a closed system. It occurred to me that with the sun pouring energy down onto the surface of the earth 24/7 for a few billion years is far from being a closed system. I felt betrayed by this man who I otherwise had a lot of respect for. I was also relieved to see debunked this argument that flew in the face of so many other things that I knew.
It still bothers me that this man would stoop to saying things that were demonstrably false in defence of something that he really believed.
When people ask me now what I believe in I tell them, "I believe that the scientific method is our most reliable and powerful tool for understanding the universe."
I was taking compressible fluid dynamics (that's the study of supersonic flow) when I picked up a book about traffic engineering. I noticed one of the formulas was very similar to a formula I was using lots in class. I looked more closely and realized that both equations must be describing similar phenomena. I've driven hundreds of thousands of miles since then, much of it in heavy traffic. A typical problem you solve in compressible fluids goes like this: there is air flowing in a pipe at over M=1 and there is a constriction in the flow. What is the velocity and pressure after the shock wave. It's a lot like traffic is moving at high speed and high density down a 4 lane highway and one lane is closed for repair.
Of course the analogy breaks down because... well it isn't the same phenomena. Each molecule of traffic has an emotional person controlling it.
Some of my observations:
When traffic reaches what I call critical flow (a combination of high density and high speed) then it doesn't take much disturbance at all to cause shocks (a shock being a rapid decrease in speed combined with an increase in traffic density, they are characterized by lots of brake lights.) When traffic is at critical flow, cause and effect can have a very non-linear relationship. Even a polite lane change, or a pothole might tip the traffic from critical to supercritical (traffic jam.) Sometimes shocks are standing shocks. This tends to happen approaching a constriction in the road when traffic sufficiently far back is sub critical. Sometimes shocks propagate backwards through traffic like waves at the beach. An excellent example of this is 880 Southbound approaching the turnoff to the San Mateo Bridge around commute time. This one is interesting because there is drag introduced by people exiting 880 but the main disturbance comes, I believe, from cars in the carpool lane cutting across all the lanes to exit to the San Mateo Bridge. As anyone who has driven this stretch of freeway can tell you, traffic blasts along at 70 then everyone is standing on their brakes, then 70, then brakes, then 70, then...
That was the best of my macro-traffic observations, here is one funny micro traffic observation. I call it the "sticky effect" or the "stupid effect" depending on my mood. If one car is overtaking another car but only going slightly faster the slower car will speed up at least temporarily to match speeds. If the passing car is going sufficiently faster then it won't happen. Two cars on a two lane road will frequently end up right next to each other as a result of the sticky effect. Causing a "moron roadblock," which is just a line of cars going too slow blocking every lane. I also call it a rolling roadblock, and when I lived in Utah I called it a mormon roadblock.
Drive safe!
Diebold's ATM and bank security business $2 billion
Diebold's Other Miscellaneous Businesses $0.6 billion
Ability to control the US's elections... Priceless.
Because we want a good society to live in for ourselves and our children. A large part of living in a sustainable and happy culture is understanding the world around us. That means a good portion of us should be scientists, doctors, and engineers. You have to teach science to kids from an early age if you want to end up lots of scientists, doctors, and engineers. You can't arbitrarily leave out the basis (evolution) for an entire branch of science (biology) just because some people say it doesn't agree with some book written a very long time ago.
Of course in my opinion the BEST way to combat this sort of ignorance is to teach the scientific method to kids in jr high or high school. We spend all of our time in "science" classes teaching the information that we have gotten by using the scientific method. We should teach everyone what the scientific method is and why it works really well as a tool for understanding the universe. After all the scientific method is really the foundation of modernity.
This would explain why Netflix's Watch Instantly feature always stops after a few minutes and has to re-buffer with the message "your internet connection has slowed." It's really irritating. It's been doing ever since Comcast dropped my monthly rate and told me they were signing me up for "faster" service. !@#$%@#$^%
What breeds terrorism?
Lets see...
Turning a country into a war zone;
Turning whole populations into refugees;
Military occupations with checkpoints, no knock searches, arbitrary detentions, torture, etc.;
Desperation;
Hopelessness; and
Training religious fanatics in terrorist techniques, arming them, and funding them, until they defeat your enemy for you and then abandoning them.
Yep all of those things are really good at breeding terrorism, but I don't see anonymity in virtual worlds anywhere on the list. Nope. Sorry.
The article includes the following links as references to document the above list of believed cuts:
1) http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1202064573279&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
2) http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/business/?id=24186
3) http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theuae/2008/February/theuae_February121.xml§ion=theuae
4) http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080202132053.iohfg5ob&show_article=1
5) http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2153455.htm
6) http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i03tUdyj8wf2Xa9P4trWEjqAJdyQ
7) http://www.arabianbusiness.com/510132-internet-problems-continue-with-fourth-cable-break?ln=en
8) http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=7980
9) https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Effects+of+Fibre+Outage+through+Mediterranean
10) http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/01/internet.outage/?iref=hpmostpop
11) http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/04/technology/cables.php
12) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/business/worldbusiness/31cable.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
13) http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/31/Cut-cable-disrupts-Internet-in-Middle-East_1.html
14)
I agree that invasion is really unlikely. But some form of attack is increasingly likely. Iran was scheduled to open their Oil Bourse very soon, but will be delaying it because of internet outages. The oil trading exchange is planned to trade in oil in NON-DOLLAR currencies. If the dollar ceases to be the petro-currency then nations all over the planet have little reason to hold onto their stockpiles of dollars. Widespread trade of oil in Euros or Yen or whatever could trigger uncontrollable inflation in the dollar as nations trade in bucks for better currencies.
I really think that an attack on Iran by us, the US, or Israel in the next week or so is a pretty high probability. I hope I am wrong. God I hope I am wrong.
I suppose a person's expectations determine their reality. I did not have an expectation that a modern OS would require soooo much more hardware cost and it didn't. In fact it ran better and faster with more functionality than the old OS. You did have that expectation and you got what you expected.
E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence in Elections... who cares?
E-Voting Undermines Elections.
Now having said that... Electronic tabulation (by optical scan for example) of paper ballots, accompanied by statistically appropriate manual audits, would inspire happy confidence in this voter.
Asus aaaw. As in "aaaw my battery is dead already!?!?!"
Wow what an astonishing thing to say!
We all know now that Iraq didn't have WMDs just like they claimed when they submitted their accounting as demanded by the US. The US invaded Iraq in violation of the Nuremberg Principals and the UN Charter. Israel is currently using collective punishment against the residents of the Gaza Strip (the blockade has resulted in no electricity, limited potable water, and food shortages.) This is a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. Why are they doing it? Because the Palestinians elected the wrong party, oops. Israel has denied Right of Return of Refugees for over 50 years now. That's another violation of international law and human rights.
To take this back to the original topic. I think that debating the ethics of robots in war is a bit is just a analogous way of debating more pressing issues, like does economic or military superiority make it okay for a nation to impose it's will by force on another nation or people? Does might make right? At the end of WWII the world community decided that might does not make right. We, the US, have abandoned that in favor of a more barbaric approach. Even after the disaster of Iraq, we are on a course to attack Iran because they are enriching uranium for use in nuclear power plants, which they have an explicit right to do under the non-proliferation treaty.
With unmanned drones armed carrying Hellfire missiles, armored tanks vs civilians throwing rocks, and precision guided cruise missiles, the world already have something akin to "robot war."
goto wunderground.com
enter your zip code
There is a box on the page called "Current Conditions." Scroll to the bottom of that box and click on the link called "Google Map of Personal Weather Stations." Here is an example link:
http://www.wunderground.com/stationmaps/gmap.asp?zip=94608&magic=1&wmo=99999
Each of the station icons, which indicate current conditions, can be clicked on to access much more detailed current conditions and often extensive history as well. I'm lucky that a nearby neighbor has one, and I get accurate data from his station all of the time. It's really the ultimate site for weather geeks.
A few years ago I was managing a hazardous material removal in a high profile public location. All of the work was done late at night to maintain access for the public to the building. Each night the crew had to build a 2 story containment of poly sheeting. Of course the site was near the shore and subject to high winds which could blow down even the best containment. Since there was a personal weather station very close by I was able to monitor the windspeed from the comfort of my home. On two nights the wind got over 20mph, and I shut them down for the night to prevent the containment from being blown down.