***Patents by themselves weren't a problem back in 1968***
A common belief. But probably wrong. Patents are, and always have been, a dubious idea. I don't have time to write a real essay. But just one example. In the early 20th Century, many of the basic patents on aircraft technology were held, naturally enough, by the Wright brothers. However, a lot of the early aircraft were built by Glenn Curtiss who was unable to get a licensing agreement from the Wrights. Curtiss built his planes anyway using (and patenting) alternate technology where he could. The ensuing lawsuits dragged on and on, draining the resources of both parties and crippling the development of aircraft in the US because no one was interested in building aircraft until they knew who they had to pay for the privilege.
By the time World War I started, the US was years behind the Europeans in aircraft design. Congress eventually solved the problem by enacting compulsory licensing at a fixed royalty.
How, exactly, did this mess -- which was far from unique -- benefit anyone?
Of course, things are far worse today. The average patent is (deliberately as far as I can see) unintelligible, the claims absurd, prior art is ignored, stuff that is obvious to practicioners is patented, natural laws are patented, etc, etc, etc.
IMHO, the patent system is broken. Badly broken. We would be well advised to carefully -- very carefully -- scrap the thing. Software patents would be a terrific place to start.
Last time I checked, US and Chinese population growth rates were about the same -- 0.7%. China's is probably still too high. Much of the US growth is legal immigration -- which is basically a population transfer from elsewhere. Many industrial countries have lower growth rates. Japan's is (slightly) negative.
I think that many serious people believe the world population will stabilize around 9-10 billion sometime around the middle of the century.
I gave up on Digg after about three days due to the mindlessness of most comments. I continue to read Slashdot because about half the comments show some sign that they are the result of the efforts of intelligent lifeforms. There are things to be learned on Slashdot... which is more than you can say for most Internet sites. Slashdot must be doing something right.
Wikipedia: Seems to me like most articles are pretty damn good. (Full disclosure -- I wrote a lot of Wikipedia articles early on. Stopped because of some changes in my situation, not because I was mad at anyone). Most of my work has been heavily rewritten since and has been much improved thereby. In the early days, my sense was that we were just trying to get content as comprehensive and good as the other on-line encyclopedias -- not all that high a bar I think.
I do think that Wikipedia covers most things pretty well today. Most of the hoopla seems to focus on the very few articles that are controversial. Occasionally, I encounter an article that clearly needs work and once in a very great while I correct something that is obviously wrong. But mostly, it has reached a stage where one has to know a hell of a lot about the subject to hand in order to improve the current articles.
I'm not sure that either Slashdot or Wikipedia needs much in the way of changes. They seem to be doing pretty well just the way they are.
Rsync or Unison or something else. Probably doesn't matter all that much. But I would set up storage somewhere (existing partitions, and/or usb harddrive(s), and/or ()a flashdrive(s)) with a separate partition for backing up each computer and would use it/them for a few months until all (well, most anyway) of the ways to screw up the file synchronization from multiple PCs have been identified and tamed. If one never makes mistakes, that won't be necessary of course.
What is this "debugging" thing you speak of? If you are asking how we will test software for a million core system, we'll do it the same way we always have. We'll get a trivial test case to run once, then we'll ship.
Other than view half the video sources on the Internet, do their income tax, and run any games or other purchased software, no there's nothing Ubuntu can't do -- assuming that their hardware is adequately supported in Linux which may or may not be the case. (Actually they might be able to do their US income tax.... maybe. But not without some support. With some cajoling, Tax Act ran after a fashion on Wine for tax years 2007 and 2008 if you aren't fussy about fonts, and might well work again next year)
I'm a Linux user 98%. The other 2% is Windows software run on Win98 in a virtual machine. After years -- literally -- of screwing around I have a color laser printer and a scanner accessible. I can even run Snood -- which about the only game I ever play -- under qemu. Further, I detest NT based Windows on the best of days... which today isn't as I just wasted most of an hour finding my wife's pictures of her new dog (under... MyMusic... which is a bit less than intuitive. If only we had WinFs, it's what? 14 years late?) and getting them embedded in a Gmail -- which the IE6 on her brand new netbook can't do. Have to use Firefox for that.
I'd love to say that Ubuntu or Red Hat, or Slackware or just about anything Unixish was an adequate replacement for Windows for the average user. But it's really not.
Apple users seem to love their computers and OS. My limited experiences with Apple have not been promising, but I hope I'm atypical.
So I'd say either switch to Apple, or take each Windows machine, disconnect it from the Internet, delouse it, make a full backup using whatever the current magic is that is compatible with Microsoft's increasingly obtuse and user hostile OS (e.g GHOST a decade ago) on a portable USB drive and teach the users how to restore their systems when they destroy them again.
***VT can get a lot of snow all at once, a blizzard would still encase the dome, melted and refrozen ice on the bottom, snow on top.***
Temperatures in Winooski typically are only above freezing for about 24-48 hours total between January 1 and March 1. It's not at all unusual to have snow on the ground from mid-December until early April. I don't think snow would stay on the dome all that well, but the pile around the perimeter would likely be quite impressive by April.
***The bigger problem, I think, is still getting water (for plants) and air into the dome, and pollutants from combustion out. Even if it is structurally possible, the additional logistical costs will outweigh the benefits enough that there is no net gain to a dome.***
I would think when serious analysis was done, that "they" would quickly opt for a seasonal dome going up around December 1st and down around the first or second week of April. Plants that plan to survive in this part of the world are dormant then anyway. Water possibly isn't that much of an issue. Winooski is on a reasonably large river, and there is a small hydro dam a couple of kilometers upstream at Twin Gorges. I expect there is enough pressure head to gravity feed irrigation water to the whole "city" if it is needed.
=====
What is more of a problem is cars. Downtown Winooski (such as it is) lies at the junction of Vermont 15 and US2/US7. US2/US7 carries a lot of local traffic headed between Colchester and Burlington. And VT15 is the major road from Burlington to Essex and towns in the NorthEast. Essex (18000) is the second largest town in Vermont and Colchester (12000) is number 4 or 5. I think they'd need to do some serious highway work including expanded access to I89 to/from the surface roads in the area.
The basic government entity is a "Town" which corresponds roughly to a township in the Middle West. The towns were chartered by the crown in the mid 18th Century and granted to land developers by the states of New Hampshire and New York -- who were prone to give the same town to different developers -- resulting in the arming of a militia by the New Hampshire developers and the eventual secession of Vermont from New York. Although it worked out OK, in retrospect, most people would probably feel that allowing real estate developers to organize light infantry is not all that great an idea. The towns still exist. They sort of correspond to really small towns in the rest of the US. Most are run by the townfolk via an annual town meeting to decide the budget and occasional public meetings to address other issues and occasionally call for the arrest and imprisonment of the president of the US or whatever else comes to mind. Mostly they do schools and roads.
A few small chunks of land were not included in any town. Those are called Gores. About half a dozen still exist. At least one is populated. They have no local government.
Cities are self governing, autonomous entities that split off from their parent towns in the late 19th century because of a desire for urban services like water, sewers, sidewalks and streetlights. Mostly they correspond to towns in the rest of the US. Many have a traffic signal in the center of town. The bigger ones two or three. Some have mayors or city councils. Some have a prudential committee and are run by town meeting.
Villages are like cities with a bit less autonomy.
Burlington might qualify as a small city elsewhere in the country... or not. It has a mayor... and a city council... and three active political parties -- Democrats, Republicans and a rather far left Progressive Coalition. They wrangle constantly.
This may sound like an incredibly dumb idea, but if you don't hook stuff to a network, it is remarkably difficult to attack it from the network. Is it maybe, just barely, possible that there are portions of the national infrastructure that should NOT be connected to the internet?
Since no one else has mentioned it, if you are going to try this, it might be a good idea to seek out the telco's Network Interface Connector and disconnect your household phone wires from the outside world. I'm not sure what can go wrong if the phone company left the wires connected when they discontinued your service, but I'll bet that if anything does happen, it will not be something good.
We have a Soundbridge and I have a mt-daapd server running 24/7. Works well enough and passes the wife test as far as her tolerating its presence in her sewing room. But she has no interest in figuring out how to use it. The user interface works well enough, but it takes more learning than she has any interest in doing. Neither does she listen to the mt-daapd via itunes on her PC although that also works once you get past the obscure interface.
I play the mt-daapd audio on my Linux machine some days when I'm in the mood via a Python script (persuading Amarok 1.4.9.1 to talk to mt-daapd is like trying to fix the Windows Registry. Possible, but not fun and usually not worth the trouble).
I also have a streaming audio server running serving up random tracks via http using edna. I listen to that sometimes, but no one else does.
Maybe in a different house with a different wife the Soundbridge would work brilliantly. It actually can play music from the household network quite reliably.
Yes... but... At least two problems. First, the AC power frequency -- 50 or 60Hz in most countries is in the audio range. Second, the US (and Canada?) wire houses with a sort of split 220 volt system where the house has two sets of circuits with the hot wire on one circuit set at 220 volts wrt the hot wire on the other set and ground half way in between. That allows stoves, driers, heaters to operate at 220 volts while most appliances and devices see 110 volts. The problem is that without some sort of coupling between the two hot wires, signals on one circuit set don't get to the other circuit set.
Well, maybe Shockwave will run in WINE. Or VMplayer, vbox, or qemu. There must be 50 ways to get your Linux PC infected with Windows malware if you'd just try.
***Every odometer I've ever had was tied to the speedometer. How do you think they work?***
Yes and no. Both work off information from the transmission. A rotating cable in older vehicles, a digital signal in newer ones.
But they display different things -- distance in one case, distance divided by time in the other. Moreover, the classical speed display is an analog meter sort of thing whose reading generally is not quite a linear function of speed. So, it's not only possible, but usual, for the odometer and speedometer to have different accuracy even though they work off the same distance data.
I agree with you. But I should point out that like millions of other folks in small town/rural America, both my fire protection and ambulance service are provided by volunteer organizations. The municipal government does do police and roads, but smaller towns hire out their policing from the state government (Unlike most of the country counties don't amount to much in New England). I suppose they could rent cops from Brinks et. al. although I for one much prefer my police not be models of the free enterprise system.
***Within the military community, you're absolutely correct***
So, the entire chain of command was court marshalled as a result of the My Lai massacre? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre). Not that I recall. Reality is that unless you lose a war and can't get to neutral ground before the victors catch up with you, military justice stops at the designated fall guy.
When I need a dimmable CFL and wanted some daylight CFLs (My wife prefers them to regular CFLs/incandescents for quilting and knitting) I had to mail order them. But I noticed a couple of months ago that the local Ace Hardware now carries both dimmable CFLs and daylight CFLs. Only need to read the labels on the bulbs that seem kind of expensive. I found that I only needed one dimmable CFL on the circuit. With it installed, the other CFLs on the circuit dimmed smoothly as well, and they seem to be lasting fine. Maybe just luck.
All the claims are true.... Sort of.... Sometimes.
1. Typical suburban house - 24 bulbs - half of them 100 watt, half 60 watt - typical ON time about 3 hours a day - (purported) savings vs incandescent about 75% - Monthly savings = right around 100kwH. That's about 15% of our electric consumption.
2. Don't like temperature extremes. I have two bulbs in outside fixtures -- in Vermont. They are a bit dim on cold Winter nights, but overall they work a lot better than I was told they would. And they don't have short lifetimes which is good because changing them isn't much fun
3. Not dimmable. I've had a low wattage dimmable CFL in the living room for years. Not only does it dim, but so do the other normal CFLs on the same circuit. They're on every night for 2-6 hours. Lifetime is about what I've come to expect from a CFL. Not the claimed 10000 hours. Mostly only get that from the circular fluorescents in table lamps and the shoplights in the garage. Maybe 5000-6000 hours.
4. Start up time. We have five (identical) CFLs in the family room that do indeed take several minutes to come to full intensity. (But no complaint about lifetime there. They've been there since we redid the room four years ago). But the rest of the CFLs in the house act like incandescents. I think we had one other bulb years ago that was a bit slow to come to full intensity in its golden years. Go figure.
5. Yes, some of the new, cheap, CFLs die almost immediately. I think I was happier when the bulbs were more expensive, but had some quality control
Over all, I'm reasonably happy with CFLs. Now that expensive white LED reading lamp "bulb" that failed last night after only six months... THAT, I'm a bit irked about.
Well then, that'd be that problem, wouldn't it? If you are going to do electronic banking and electronic commerce, ultimately one really needs 100% security for the parts of the system outside the vendors/banks. If something VERY close to 100% security can't be provided, electronic banking/commerce will eventually become too risky to use and people will stop using it.
Commodity DRAM hasn't had parity since the early 1990s when DRAM was selling for $100 a Megabyte. Microsoft -- which was trying to sell its memory hungry Windows OS -- pushed for the removal of parity in order to reduce DRAM prices, claiming (probably incorrectly) that DRAM failures were no longer a significant problem. I wished at the time, and still wish, they hadn't done that. Up to that point, Microsoft's record was actually pretty consumer friendly. No more regrettably. Although they are still pretty mellow compared to IBM in the mainframe arena in the 1960s and 1970s.
=====================
As I understand it, ECC is not exactly the same as parity. It is a set of overlapping parity bits cleverly designed such that for single bit failures, the hardware can look at which parity bits have failed, figure out which data bit is causing the failures, and reverse it.
***I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar.***
Voting with your dollar works poorly with actual or defacto monopolies.
Copying your correspondence asking why they are not complying with their contract and if they have any plans to stop lying to customers to your state's Attorney General, Public Utility Commission, the FCC, your senators, your congressperson, etc. might have some positive impact on their attitude. Probably not, but worth trying.
Ayn Rand's solution -- blow up their effing headquarters --- has a certain appeal, but probably would work out badly.
***Well, for one, how do these people get their blood pressure measured?***
Good question. It would appear they don't -- at least not with a sphygmomanometer that depends on the Korotkoff sounds generated by cutting off pulsating blood flow. And they won't have a pulse either. Those characteristics would normally be symptomatic of being dead. Or maybe one can pump up the blood pressure cuff and listen for a single -- hopefully loud and distinct -- thunk when blood starts flowing.
OTOH, not having a pulse or measurable blood pressure beats all hell out of having a pulse and not being functional.
I can't imagine what they are going to put on her MedicAlert bracelet.
Look at it this way. Comes the Great Cyber Wars of the 2020s, NSW is going to be positioned with a large number of skilled Microsoft hackers with a decade or two of experience in hacking into Windows based systems. This is truly forward thinking. You are to be congratulated.
Slashdot Mirror
***Patents by themselves weren't a problem back in 1968***
A common belief. But probably wrong. Patents are, and always have been, a dubious idea. I don't have time to write a real essay. But just one example. In the early 20th Century, many of the basic patents on aircraft technology were held, naturally enough, by the Wright brothers. However, a lot of the early aircraft were built by Glenn Curtiss who was unable to get a licensing agreement from the Wrights. Curtiss built his planes anyway using (and patenting) alternate technology where he could. The ensuing lawsuits dragged on and on, draining the resources of both parties and crippling the development of aircraft in the US because no one was interested in building aircraft until they knew who they had to pay for the privilege.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war
By the time World War I started, the US was years behind the Europeans in aircraft design. Congress eventually solved the problem by enacting compulsory licensing at a fixed royalty.
How, exactly, did this mess -- which was far from unique -- benefit anyone?
Of course, things are far worse today. The average patent is (deliberately as far as I can see) unintelligible, the claims absurd, prior art is ignored, stuff that is obvious to practicioners is patented, natural laws are patented, etc, etc, etc.
IMHO, the patent system is broken. Badly broken. We would be well advised to carefully -- very carefully -- scrap the thing. Software patents would be a terrific place to start.
***"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." -Kenneth Boulding***
Absolutely.
And conversely, if your only modeling tool is an exponential equation, every trend looks like a catastrophe.
Last time I checked, US and Chinese population growth rates were about the same -- 0.7%. China's is probably still too high. Much of the US growth is legal immigration -- which is basically a population transfer from elsewhere. Many industrial countries have lower growth rates. Japan's is (slightly) negative.
I think that many serious people believe the world population will stabilize around 9-10 billion sometime around the middle of the century.
Well, yeah, maybe.
I gave up on Digg after about three days due to the mindlessness of most comments. I continue to read Slashdot because about half the comments show some sign that they are the result of the efforts of intelligent lifeforms. There are things to be learned on Slashdot ... which is more than you can say for most Internet sites. Slashdot must be doing something right.
Wikipedia: Seems to me like most articles are pretty damn good. (Full disclosure -- I wrote a lot of Wikipedia articles early on. Stopped because of some changes in my situation, not because I was mad at anyone). Most of my work has been heavily rewritten since and has been much improved thereby. In the early days, my sense was that we were just trying to get content as comprehensive and good as the other on-line encyclopedias -- not all that high a bar I think.
I do think that Wikipedia covers most things pretty well today. Most of the hoopla seems to focus on the very few articles that are controversial. Occasionally, I encounter an article that clearly needs work and once in a very great while I correct something that is obviously wrong. But mostly, it has reached a stage where one has to know a hell of a lot about the subject to hand in order to improve the current articles.
I'm not sure that either Slashdot or Wikipedia needs much in the way of changes. They seem to be doing pretty well just the way they are.
Rsync or Unison or something else. Probably doesn't matter all that much. But I would set up storage somewhere (existing partitions, and/or usb harddrive(s), and/or ()a flashdrive(s)) with a separate partition for backing up each computer and would use it/them for a few months until all (well, most anyway) of the ways to screw up the file synchronization from multiple PCs have been identified and tamed. If one never makes mistakes, that won't be necessary of course.
Isn't quantum computing supposed to solve all these problems without need for a zillion cores? Or have a latched onto the wrong panacea here?
***How do we debug a million-core program?***
What is this "debugging" thing you speak of? If you are asking how we will test software for a million core system, we'll do it the same way we always have. We'll get a trivial test case to run once, then we'll ship.
Other than view half the video sources on the Internet, do their income tax, and run any games or other purchased software, no there's nothing Ubuntu can't do -- assuming that their hardware is adequately supported in Linux which may or may not be the case. (Actually they might be able to do their US income tax. ... maybe. But not without some support. With some cajoling, Tax Act ran after a fashion on Wine for tax years 2007 and 2008 if you aren't fussy about fonts, and might well work again next year)
I'm a Linux user 98%. The other 2% is Windows software run on Win98 in a virtual machine. After years -- literally -- of screwing around I have a color laser printer and a scanner accessible. I can even run Snood -- which about the only game I ever play -- under qemu. Further, I detest NT based Windows on the best of days ... which today isn't as I just wasted most of an hour finding my wife's pictures of her new dog (under ... MyMusic ... which is a bit less than intuitive. If only we had WinFs, it's what? 14 years late?) and getting them embedded in a Gmail -- which the IE6 on her brand new netbook can't do. Have to use Firefox for that.
I'd love to say that Ubuntu or Red Hat, or Slackware or just about anything Unixish was an adequate replacement for Windows for the average user. But it's really not.
Apple users seem to love their computers and OS. My limited experiences with Apple have not been promising, but I hope I'm atypical.
So I'd say either switch to Apple, or take each Windows machine, disconnect it from the Internet, delouse it, make a full backup using whatever the current magic is that is compatible with Microsoft's increasingly obtuse and user hostile OS (e.g GHOST a decade ago) on a portable USB drive and teach the users how to restore their systems when they destroy them again.
***VT can get a lot of snow all at once, a blizzard would still encase the dome, melted and refrozen ice on the bottom, snow on top.***
Temperatures in Winooski typically are only above freezing for about 24-48 hours total between January 1 and March 1. It's not at all unusual to have snow on the ground from mid-December until early April. I don't think snow would stay on the dome all that well, but the pile around the perimeter would likely be quite impressive by April.
***The bigger problem, I think, is still getting water (for plants) and air into the dome, and pollutants from combustion out. Even if it is structurally possible, the additional logistical costs will outweigh the benefits enough that there is no net gain to a dome.***
I would think when serious analysis was done, that "they" would quickly opt for a seasonal dome going up around December 1st and down around the first or second week of April. Plants that plan to survive in this part of the world are dormant then anyway. Water possibly isn't that much of an issue. Winooski is on a reasonably large river, and there is a small hydro dam a couple of kilometers upstream at Twin Gorges. I expect there is enough pressure head to gravity feed irrigation water to the whole "city" if it is needed.
=====
What is more of a problem is cars. Downtown Winooski (such as it is) lies at the junction of Vermont 15 and US2/US7. US2/US7 carries a lot of local traffic headed between Colchester and Burlington. And VT15 is the major road from Burlington to Essex and towns in the NorthEast. Essex (18000) is the second largest town in Vermont and Colchester (12000) is number 4 or 5. I think they'd need to do some serious highway work including expanded access to I89 to/from the surface roads in the area.
A brief primer on Vermont governance:
The basic government entity is a "Town" which corresponds roughly to a township in the Middle West. The towns were chartered by the crown in the mid 18th Century and granted to land developers by the states of New Hampshire and New York -- who were prone to give the same town to different developers -- resulting in the arming of a militia by the New Hampshire developers and the eventual secession of Vermont from New York. Although it worked out OK, in retrospect, most people would probably feel that allowing real estate developers to organize light infantry is not all that great an idea. The towns still exist. They sort of correspond to really small towns in the rest of the US. Most are run by the townfolk via an annual town meeting to decide the budget and occasional public meetings to address other issues and occasionally call for the arrest and imprisonment of the president of the US or whatever else comes to mind. Mostly they do schools and roads.
A few small chunks of land were not included in any town. Those are called Gores. About half a dozen still exist. At least one is populated. They have no local government.
Cities are self governing, autonomous entities that split off from their parent towns in the late 19th century because of a desire for urban services like water, sewers, sidewalks and streetlights. Mostly they correspond to towns in the rest of the US. Many have a traffic signal in the center of town. The bigger ones two or three. Some have mayors or city councils. Some have a prudential committee and are run by town meeting.
Villages are like cities with a bit less autonomy.
Burlington might qualify as a small city elsewhere in the country ... or not. It has a mayor ... and a city council ... and three active political parties -- Democrats, Republicans and a rather far left Progressive Coalition. They wrangle constantly.
This may sound like an incredibly dumb idea, but if you don't hook stuff to a network, it is remarkably difficult to attack it from the network. Is it maybe, just barely, possible that there are portions of the national infrastructure that should NOT be connected to the internet?
Since no one else has mentioned it, if you are going to try this, it might be a good idea to seek out the telco's Network Interface Connector and disconnect your household phone wires from the outside world. I'm not sure what can go wrong if the phone company left the wires connected when they discontinued your service, but I'll bet that if anything does happen, it will not be something good.
We have a Soundbridge and I have a mt-daapd server running 24/7. Works well enough and passes the wife test as far as her tolerating its presence in her sewing room. But she has no interest in figuring out how to use it. The user interface works well enough, but it takes more learning than she has any interest in doing. Neither does she listen to the mt-daapd via itunes on her PC although that also works once you get past the obscure interface.
I play the mt-daapd audio on my Linux machine some days when I'm in the mood via a Python script (persuading Amarok 1.4.9.1 to talk to mt-daapd is like trying to fix the Windows Registry. Possible, but not fun and usually not worth the trouble).
I also have a streaming audio server running serving up random tracks via http using edna. I listen to that sometimes, but no one else does.
Maybe in a different house with a different wife the Soundbridge would work brilliantly. It actually can play music from the household network quite reliably.
Yes ... but ... At least two problems. First, the AC power frequency -- 50 or 60Hz in most countries is in the audio range. Second, the US (and Canada?) wire houses with a sort of split 220 volt system where the house has two sets of circuits with the hot wire on one circuit set at 220 volts wrt the hot wire on the other set and ground half way in between. That allows stoves, driers, heaters to operate at 220 volts while most appliances and devices see 110 volts. The problem is that without some sort of coupling between the two hot wires, signals on one circuit set don't get to the other circuit set.
***I'm a Linux user, you insensitive clod!***
Well, maybe Shockwave will run in WINE. Or VMplayer, vbox, or qemu. There must be 50 ways to get your Linux PC infected with Windows malware if you'd just try.
***Every odometer I've ever had was tied to the speedometer. How do you think they work?***
Yes and no. Both work off information from the transmission. A rotating cable in older vehicles, a digital signal in newer ones.
But they display different things -- distance in one case, distance divided by time in the other. Moreover, the classical speed display is an analog meter sort of thing whose reading generally is not quite a linear function of speed. So, it's not only possible, but usual, for the odometer and speedometer to have different accuracy even though they work off the same distance data.
I agree with you. But I should point out that like millions of other folks in small town/rural America, both my fire protection and ambulance service are provided by volunteer organizations. The municipal government does do police and roads, but smaller towns hire out their policing from the state government (Unlike most of the country counties don't amount to much in New England). I suppose they could rent cops from Brinks et. al. although I for one much prefer my police not be models of the free enterprise system.
***Within the military community, you're absolutely correct***
So, the entire chain of command was court marshalled as a result of the My Lai massacre? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre). Not that I recall. Reality is that unless you lose a war and can't get to neutral ground before the victors catch up with you, military justice stops at the designated fall guy.
When I need a dimmable CFL and wanted some daylight CFLs (My wife prefers them to regular CFLs/incandescents for quilting and knitting) I had to mail order them. But I noticed a couple of months ago that the local Ace Hardware now carries both dimmable CFLs and daylight CFLs. Only need to read the labels on the bulbs that seem kind of expensive. I found that I only needed one dimmable CFL on the circuit. With it installed, the other CFLs on the circuit dimmed smoothly as well, and they seem to be lasting fine. Maybe just luck.
All the claims are true. ... Sort of. ... Sometimes.
1. Typical suburban house - 24 bulbs - half of them 100 watt, half 60 watt - typical ON time about 3 hours a day - (purported) savings vs incandescent about 75% - Monthly savings = right around 100kwH. That's about 15% of our electric consumption.
2. Don't like temperature extremes. I have two bulbs in outside fixtures -- in Vermont. They are a bit dim on cold Winter nights, but overall they work a lot better than I was told they would. And they don't have short lifetimes which is good because changing them isn't much fun
3. Not dimmable. I've had a low wattage dimmable CFL in the living room for years. Not only does it dim, but so do the other normal CFLs on the same circuit. They're on every night for 2-6 hours. Lifetime is about what I've come to expect from a CFL. Not the claimed 10000 hours. Mostly only get that from the circular fluorescents in table lamps and the shoplights in the garage. Maybe 5000-6000 hours.
4. Start up time. We have five (identical) CFLs in the family room that do indeed take several minutes to come to full intensity. (But no complaint about lifetime there. They've been there since we redid the room four years ago). But the rest of the CFLs in the house act like incandescents. I think we had one other bulb years ago that was a bit slow to come to full intensity in its golden years. Go figure.
5. Yes, some of the new, cheap, CFLs die almost immediately. I think I was happier when the bulbs were more expensive, but had some quality control
Over all, I'm reasonably happy with CFLs. Now that expensive white LED reading lamp "bulb" that failed last night after only six months ... THAT, I'm a bit irked about.
***Nothing is 100% secure.***
Well then, that'd be that problem, wouldn't it? If you are going to do electronic banking and electronic commerce, ultimately one really needs 100% security for the parts of the system outside the vendors/banks. If something VERY close to 100% security can't be provided, electronic banking/commerce will eventually become too risky to use and people will stop using it.
***Regular ram only has parity***
Commodity DRAM hasn't had parity since the early 1990s when DRAM was selling for $100 a Megabyte. Microsoft -- which was trying to sell its memory hungry Windows OS -- pushed for the removal of parity in order to reduce DRAM prices, claiming (probably incorrectly) that DRAM failures were no longer a significant problem. I wished at the time, and still wish, they hadn't done that. Up to that point, Microsoft's record was actually pretty consumer friendly. No more regrettably. Although they are still pretty mellow compared to IBM in the mainframe arena in the 1960s and 1970s.
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As I understand it, ECC is not exactly the same as parity. It is a set of overlapping parity bits cleverly designed such that for single bit failures, the hardware can look at which parity bits have failed, figure out which data bit is causing the failures, and reverse it.
***I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar.*** Voting with your dollar works poorly with actual or defacto monopolies. Copying your correspondence asking why they are not complying with their contract and if they have any plans to stop lying to customers to your state's Attorney General, Public Utility Commission, the FCC, your senators, your congressperson, etc. might have some positive impact on their attitude. Probably not, but worth trying. Ayn Rand's solution -- blow up their effing headquarters --- has a certain appeal, but probably would work out badly.
***Well, for one, how do these people get their blood pressure measured?*** Good question. It would appear they don't -- at least not with a sphygmomanometer that depends on the Korotkoff sounds generated by cutting off pulsating blood flow. And they won't have a pulse either. Those characteristics would normally be symptomatic of being dead. Or maybe one can pump up the blood pressure cuff and listen for a single -- hopefully loud and distinct -- thunk when blood starts flowing. OTOH, not having a pulse or measurable blood pressure beats all hell out of having a pulse and not being functional. I can't imagine what they are going to put on her MedicAlert bracelet.
Look at it this way. Comes the Great Cyber Wars of the 2020s, NSW is going to be positioned with a large number of skilled Microsoft hackers with a decade or two of experience in hacking into Windows based systems. This is truly forward thinking. You are to be congratulated.