FYI -- The US had a similar solar boiler -- 10MW -- at Yermo, CA just East of Barstow in the 1980s and 1990s. I doubt the economics are that great. (plant only works when the sun is well up, there aren't too many clouds, and the wind isn't blowing too much dust around). Otherwise, there would have been follow-ons and commercial projects. Maybe with today's higher electric rates... But probably not.
I'm sure that there is an in depth analysis of Solar 1, and Solar 2 -- the Yermo facility -- around somewhere, but I didn't have time to look it up. Got stuff that needs to be done -- now.
If you will read the article a little slower, you will find the following paragraph at the end of Page 1.
'If we're looking for great Web software, why not start with Mosaic? It qualifies as a brilliant synthesis of what went before, bringing new utility to the millions of users coming onto the Web in 1993. But, alas, Mosaic was No. 6 on my list of greatest software ever written; no sense repeating myself. '
You may not agree with his reasoning, but he clearly is aware of Mosaic and agrees with you on its importance.
I think you have it right. It's Ready, Aim, Fire. Not Ready, Fire, Aim.
A few years ago while pulling cat5 cable through the overhead of a school, I found the remains of a Cable TV system. the cables had simply been pulled out of the classrooms and back up into the overhead at some point.
In point of fact, just about every non-telephone related advance in communications technology has been hailed as a major advance in education; put into the schools; pretty much failed; and either been rejected or has been relegated to a minor role. That includes motion pictures, TV, Video recorders, PCs, the Internet, laptops, whiteboards, etc. With the exception of classroom PCs and maybe the Internet, the story has been the same. Lots of initial enthusiasm; spending a bunch of money; and finding that the technology has limited or no utility.
There are voices that try to tell folks that laptops are fragile, hard to use, none too reliable, easy to mislay, entirely too stealable -- and that very little proven curriculum related material is available. No one listens. If you ask me, what we need isn't more (or modestly better) technology. It's better decision makers at all levels in society.
***Demoralization and dismantling of the US military
Well, the dismantling of large chunks of the military was inevitable, after the buildup during Viet Nam. Even Reagan's huge buildup in the mid/late 80s was only a stopgap that lasted as long as the end of the cold war.***
A common misunderstanding Carter was handed a disfunctional military by Nixon, Ford, and Donnie Rumsfeld -- who was as much a disaster in his first tour at Defense as he was in his second. Carter INCREASED real military spending by 3% in each of his four budgets (which were 1978,1979,1980 and 1981 BTW not 1976-1980) That's just about the same rate that Reagan increased spending until Congress eventually stepped in and decided that the US had about as big a military as it could afford. Defense spending as a percentage of GDP was 4.7 percent when Carter took office. It was 5.2 percent when he left.
***Any electronic voting procedure is a cathastrophy. Plain simple as that. A electronic voting machine is a black box and it is impossible to verify the correctness of the result.***
There are a variety of systems that actually allow a recount (hanging chads anyone?). I agree that any system that doesn't allow later recounting the votes is unlikely to be a good idea.
Sorry. I forgot that most westerners do not understand that most Chinese characters are neither ideograms nor alphabetic characters -- something in between... sort of.
Anyway, just because ODF (or any similar encoding scheme) can represent a subset of the characters does not mean that the Chinese will be happy with it. If you want to take this discussion further, you'll need to learn some basics of how Chinese characters are constructed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Ch inese
I'm not saying that the Chinese won't love ODF. Merely that their somewhat -- for lack of a better word -- different -- writing method may not be as compatible with it or as readily handled as we Westerners tend to assume.
According to Wikipedia, one of the symbol set standards for China (CNS 11643) includes 48K different characters. Even if ODF can handle all of those, dealing with them in practice may well be a substantial problem and the ease of doing so may well be a function of apparently minor implementation details.
Chinese characters are NOT alphabetic. Mostly, they are compounded according to a rather byzantine scheme that makes perfect sense if you happen to speak a Chinese based language (or a language like Japanese with a large vocabulary inherited from Chinese). As a first approximation, most of them are composed by merging two simpler characters on a sounds_like-refers_to basis. There are standard subsets that are easily encoded just like European alphabetic characters. But there is no rule that says that users of the language are limited to those subsets.
In point of fact, Chinese/Japanese speakers can make up new characters if they choose to, and if they do a good job, their compatriots will be able to understand the new characters. They might even use them themselves.
So, the question is, are the Chinese going to like the way that ODF handles their language? It doesn't matter if Slashdotters think that's a non-issue. What matters whether the Chinese think it is an issue.
Let's don't overlook that Chinese is generally written using an extensive set of non-alphabetic characters. My guess would be that the Chinese, like the Japanese, prefer their written materials to be in their characters, not in romanized text that conveys less information.
So, one issue would be whether ODF is suitable for representing Chinese (and Japanese) text.... and how much aggravation is involved in using ODF to represent the chanacters -- compared to whatever solution(s) they are using now.
***No, no more prior art. If you filed first, screw prior art. It's yours.***
I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. Prior art should still hold in that you can't patent something that was described by DaVinci, Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, Erosthanes, or some dude in Ohio in 1998 on his web site. What first to file means is that the USPTO no longer needs to flip a coin when it gets three applications for the same thing and needs to determine who made the invention when.
Of course, I'm no patent expert, and the US Congress with a little help from the lobbiests is capable of coming up with absolutely abominable legislation . But I'd keep an open mind on this one at least for a while for a while.
Show of hands, please, from all of you who think that they shouldn't be punished and/or sued for libel.
I agree that students need to be protected from bullying. I'm not wild about laws like this. They will surely be abused. But, I can't think of a better answer. So I'll stand with you in protecting the inmates of the educational establishment.
But teachers and the principal? The last thing the world needs is laws that shield those in authority from criticism.
***If it were so, then diuretics would not be a first line drug for hypertension, and considered to be the most effective ones at that.***
Diuretics are the first drug tried because they are cheap, rarely have unpleasant side affects, and work for about 50% of hypertensives.
***Americans eat more than 8 grams of sodium per day, on average***
More like 3.5 grams on average -- about twice the minimum recommended value. (Humans need some dietary Sodium and Chloride to function). Now the Japanese... they have an average intake of over 10 grams a day, and not suprisingly, they have a lot of strokes -- presumably mostly among the percentage of the population whose blood pressure is Sodium sensitive. OTOH, Japanese, on average, outlive Americans by a couple of years so its hard to make a case for the lethality of Sodium.
***High salt really gives the kidneys a workout***
You'd think so, but probably not. What actually seems to happen is that the Kidneys run blood through a processing system where all the dissolved content of the blood is diverted into a potential waste stream. The essential stuff -- including enough sodium to maintain electrolyte balances -- is transferred back to the blood from the potential waste stream by transporters. Once the Sodium level in the waste stream gets slightly above the capacity of the transporters, it doesn't matter how much Sodium is in the waste stream, the kidneys don't have to do any additional work to handle it. (I suspect that last sentance should end with "within rational limits")
***Low salt diets really work. I am on one... my parents are on one... If you do it right, you can avoid nasty blood pressure medicines that make you miserable.***
They work for some people. They don't for about the same number of people. Neither low salt diets, nor diuretics, have ever had the slightest measurable affect on my somewhat elevated bloodpressure. I avoid Sodium anyway, but it probably wouldn't matter if I didn't. In fact, the only correlation I have ever been able to find between my bloodpressure and any external stimulus is with hours and quality of sleep.
***Motherboard manufactures have realised the continued need for PATA ports which is why they are kind enough to provide the extra chip. So no BIOS update will fix this and yes it is a trend, pushed by Intel (and potentially other chipset manufacturers), which will continue.***
I'm getting a bit elderly here and maybe my memory isn't as good as it might be. But isn't hiding implementation details like whether an IDE interface is on an auxiliary chip pretty much why we have BIOSes in the first place? Seems to me like there must be more to this story.
***If nature didn't want 1 in 10 people with hypertension, she would have killed their asses by now.***
Yeah, the article says there are 600 million hypertensives and we all know (or think we know) that there are 6,000,000,000 people on the planet. But that six billion is rather strongly biased toward children, teenagers, and young adults who rarely have hypertension even if they will develop it later in life. So nature is out to get more than one in ten. Maybe more like one in six -- one in four among US non-hispanic 'caucasians' -- one in three among americans of African American descent.
I know that you're joking, but even if you aren't, odds are that you can use as much salt as you want -- at least wrt to hypertension. Only about a quarter of the population actually have or will develop elevated blood pressure and only about half of those who have hypertension have a drop in blood pressure when they reduce sodium intake.
One other problem that folks have had in the past with running computer components in oil is that the stuff tends to creep through cabling and leak out the distal end of the cable. Messy. That means that networking, keyboards, monitors, hard drives, etc will very likely have to be coupled to the motherboards by some wireless technology. Not a problem in a home, but is there going to be an interference and bandwidth issue with hundreds or thousands of wireless devices in a server farm?
Probably leakproof cabling can be devised, but I doubt it will be cheap.
BTW, I don't know much about connectors, and what I do know is surely a decade out of date. But my impression is that "gas tight" connection technologies replaced simple metal to metal contact technologies in most connectors in the late 1980s due to the high price of gold. Gold is pretty much the ideal metal to metal material as it is soft and doesn't oxidize. But it got expensive and was largely phased out. I have no idea if oil can work its way into a typical "gas tight" connection. My guess would be that it can't/won't, but that's just a guess
I can't speak to the other 49, but Microsoft/IBM certainly get into the list of awful products with MSDOS 4.0. And maybe with the original release of OS/2 ("half an operating system") as well, even though IBM eventually made later versions into a decent product.
I'm pretty sure that even with FAT, copying a 10mB file within the same partition isn't a move of 10mb. It's just moving a pointer from one directory to another. The size of the file is irrelevant? Contrast this with moving data between two different partitions or devices where the whole 10mb has to be physically moved.
That is to say that a one byte file would take just as long to copy within the same partition as would a 10mB file? Maybe sorting out the disk cache takes some time. But surely not seconds.
Clearly computing has moved beyond my meager understanding. I wish it a good trip, but I don't feel much inclined to go along for the ride. Let me know when they have things sorted out, and I'll look to see if I'm interested in the finished product (They do intend to finish Windows someday, right?). In the meantime, I'm switching to a Slackware desktop.
Acer-Power 1000 (Athlon 64 3800+, 512mB memory) -- Windows XP SP2 - 90sec (Probably would be 20sec faster if I had gotten around to killing a lot of the junk loaded at boot)
Same Acer Power 1000 - Kunbuntu (Unbuntu 4.1.1) - 50sec
P166 64mb with fully patched Windows 95 - 60 sec
The Win95 machine has been optimized a bit to speed up boot and has a fairly new 8GB hard drive which is probably faster than the HD in a typical P166. A more typical P166 would probably be 10-20 sec slower. Even then, it would probably be comperable to XP on much faster hardware.
===
Being nice to Microsoft I did not time the other XP machines around here, one of which takes about 200 seconds to boot. (And don't even mention the subject of W2K boot times).
Boy, I wish that were true. I've done somewhere between 30 and 60 Linux installs in the past 10 years and I have NEVER had every hardware device work in the PC without tinkering. But Unbuntu has fixed all that? No, it has not. I installed Kunbuntu last week on an AcerPower 1000. It detected the Broadcom wireless, but installed a generic broadxx driver that does not work. Took me about 9 hours to find, deceipher, and install ndiswrapper and Windows drivers -- which at this point work only from the command line.
Nothing against ndiswrapper. It's a wonderous program and can be pretty straightforward once you have it down. But I don't see many non-geeks managing to get it working.
On the positive side, everything else (well, everything I care about anyway) works, and, for the first time ever, I actually got correct test page printed out of CUPS without days of tinkering.
(K)unbuntu looks to be good enough for a non-gamer who doesn't have important unsupported peripherals. Slackware 11 seems to work OK also, but -- predictably -- is taking some configuring. That's OK, I'm willing to tinker quite a bit if it means that I never have to type "sudo" again.
The good news: Desktop Linux has come a long way in the past decade. The bad news: It still has a little way -- not all that far I think -- to go.
***Except that kind of reasoning is the job of legislators, not judges.***
Exactly what part of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."" do you not understand? Seems pretty clear to me.
Congress has made a law they are constitutionally forbidden to make and the judge has struck it down. Contrary to what you seem to think, that is his job.
***The year-long contracts thing has been done-to-death in the employment world, especially in tech employment. This is nothing new or special, either.***
I could be wrong, but I think the one year thing has to do with the risk that if a company employs a "temporary worker" for too long, the state and federal tax folks may (quite reasonably in many cases) decree the "temp" to be an actual employee... and come looking for missing SSA, medicare, disability, unemployment, etc payments.... and maybe a fine for failing to cover the employee for workman's comp. And the newfound employee might then turn around and sue for missing benefits.
Personally, I think that it'd be simpler, and better management in the long run, to only hire temps for temporary jobs. But what the hell do I know?
***And "SAN" means what? Don't ever assume that everyone else knows your acronym. Spell it out the first time that you use it.***
Yeah, that'd be good style. But unless you intend to undertake an editorial Jihad on Slashdot and strafe every article that makes slips like this, this is probably not a good place to start. It's a request for specific information in a specialized area. Seems likely that anyone who can contribute anything useful will know what SAN means.
Don't let me discourage you from making useful editorial comments. I'm only suggesting that Slashdot being what it is, you're probably going to have to target them at the really egregious stuff if you plan to retain your sanity.
***Does sunspot activity correspond to an decrease in the amount of radiation hitting the earth? If we are at a low point now for sunspots will their increase be truly noticable?***
No, decreased sunspot activity is thought to be associated with LOWER overall solar radiation. For example, the virtual disappearance of sun spots around 1700 (the "Maunder Minimum") corresponds to the "Little Ice Age" which featured growth of mountain glaciers in Europe and repeated freezes of the Thames at London. The Wikipedia article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum . Read it, and you'll know as much as I do about the subject -- probably more.
Slashdot Mirror
In general, you seem to be correct. You can patent just about anything. But there is an exception. Since 1911, the words "Perpetual Motion" have been the kiss of death for a patent application. In order to patent your perpetual motion machine, you have to obsfucate its nature -- for exmple by claiming it is an anti-gravity machine. No, I'm not making this up. Wish I were. See http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:SzVmVt9_BIwJ: news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1111_0511 11_junk_patent.html+patent+perpetual+motion&hl=en& ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&ie=UTF-8
I'm sure that there is an in depth analysis of Solar 1, and Solar 2 -- the Yermo facility -- around somewhere, but I didn't have time to look it up. Got stuff that needs to be done -- now.
If you will read the article a little slower, you will find the following paragraph at the end of Page 1.
'If we're looking for great Web software, why not start with Mosaic? It qualifies as a brilliant synthesis of what went before, bringing new utility to the millions of users coming onto the Web in 1993. But, alas, Mosaic was No. 6 on my list of greatest software ever written; no sense repeating myself. '
You may not agree with his reasoning, but he clearly is aware of Mosaic and agrees with you on its importance.
I think you have it right. It's Ready, Aim, Fire. Not Ready, Fire, Aim.
A few years ago while pulling cat5 cable through the overhead of a school, I found the remains of a Cable TV system. the cables had simply been pulled out of the classrooms and back up into the overhead at some point.
In point of fact, just about every non-telephone related advance in communications technology has been hailed as a major advance in education; put into the schools; pretty much failed; and either been rejected or has been relegated to a minor role. That includes motion pictures, TV, Video recorders, PCs, the Internet, laptops, whiteboards, etc. With the exception of classroom PCs and maybe the Internet, the story has been the same. Lots of initial enthusiasm; spending a bunch of money; and finding that the technology has limited or no utility.
There are voices that try to tell folks that laptops are fragile, hard to use, none too reliable, easy to mislay, entirely too stealable -- and that very little proven curriculum related material is available. No one listens. If you ask me, what we need isn't more (or modestly better) technology. It's better decision makers at all levels in society.
A common misunderstanding Carter was handed a disfunctional military by Nixon, Ford, and Donnie Rumsfeld -- who was as much a disaster in his first tour at Defense as he was in his second. Carter INCREASED real military spending by 3% in each of his four budgets (which were 1978,1979,1980 and 1981 BTW not 1976-1980) That's just about the same rate that Reagan increased spending until Congress eventually stepped in and decided that the US had about as big a military as it could afford. Defense spending as a percentage of GDP was 4.7 percent when Carter took office. It was 5.2 percent when he left.
Don't believe me? Look it up. It's public record.
There are a variety of systems that actually allow a recount (hanging chads anyone?). I agree that any system that doesn't allow later recounting the votes is unlikely to be a good idea.
Anyway, just because ODF (or any similar encoding scheme) can represent a subset of the characters does not mean that the Chinese will be happy with it. If you want to take this discussion further, you'll need to learn some basics of how Chinese characters are constructed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Ch inese
I'm not saying that the Chinese won't love ODF. Merely that their somewhat -- for lack of a better word -- different -- writing method may not be as compatible with it or as readily handled as we Westerners tend to assume. According to Wikipedia, one of the symbol set standards for China (CNS 11643) includes 48K different characters. Even if ODF can handle all of those, dealing with them in practice may well be a substantial problem and the ease of doing so may well be a function of apparently minor implementation details.
In point of fact, Chinese/Japanese speakers can make up new characters if they choose to, and if they do a good job, their compatriots will be able to understand the new characters. They might even use them themselves.
So, the question is, are the Chinese going to like the way that ODF handles their language? It doesn't matter if Slashdotters think that's a non-issue. What matters whether the Chinese think it is an issue.
So, one issue would be whether ODF is suitable for representing Chinese (and Japanese) text. ... and how much aggravation is involved in using ODF to represent the chanacters -- compared to whatever solution(s) they are using now.
I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. Prior art should still hold in that you can't patent something that was described by DaVinci, Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, Erosthanes, or some dude in Ohio in 1998 on his web site. What first to file means is that the USPTO no longer needs to flip a coin when it gets three applications for the same thing and needs to determine who made the invention when.
See http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/86141 which makes if pretty clear that Germany -- a first to file country -- considers prior art in judging the validity of patents.
Of course, I'm no patent expert, and the US Congress with a little help from the lobbiests is capable of coming up with absolutely abominable legislation . But I'd keep an open mind on this one at least for a while for a while.
I agree that students need to be protected from bullying. I'm not wild about laws like this. They will surely be abused. But, I can't think of a better answer. So I'll stand with you in protecting the inmates of the educational establishment.
But teachers and the principal? The last thing the world needs is laws that shield those in authority from criticism.
Diuretics are the first drug tried because they are cheap, rarely have unpleasant side affects, and work for about 50% of hypertensives.
***Americans eat more than 8 grams of sodium per day, on average***
More like 3.5 grams on average -- about twice the minimum recommended value. (Humans need some dietary Sodium and Chloride to function). Now the Japanese ... they have an average intake of over 10 grams a day, and not suprisingly, they have a lot of strokes -- presumably mostly among the percentage of the population whose blood pressure is Sodium sensitive. OTOH, Japanese, on average, outlive Americans by a couple of years so its hard to make a case for the lethality of Sodium.
***High salt really gives the kidneys a workout***
You'd think so, but probably not. What actually seems to happen is that the Kidneys run blood through a processing system where all the dissolved content of the blood is diverted into a potential waste stream. The essential stuff -- including enough sodium to maintain electrolyte balances -- is transferred back to the blood from the potential waste stream by transporters. Once the Sodium level in the waste stream gets slightly above the capacity of the transporters, it doesn't matter how much Sodium is in the waste stream, the kidneys don't have to do any additional work to handle it. (I suspect that last sentance should end with "within rational limits")
***Low salt diets really work. I am on one... my parents are on one... If you do it right, you can avoid nasty blood pressure medicines that make you miserable.***
They work for some people. They don't for about the same number of people. Neither low salt diets, nor diuretics, have ever had the slightest measurable affect on my somewhat elevated bloodpressure. I avoid Sodium anyway, but it probably wouldn't matter if I didn't. In fact, the only correlation I have ever been able to find between my bloodpressure and any external stimulus is with hours and quality of sleep.
I'm getting a bit elderly here and maybe my memory isn't as good as it might be. But isn't hiding implementation details like whether an IDE interface is on an auxiliary chip pretty much why we have BIOSes in the first place? Seems to me like there must be more to this story.
Yeah, the article says there are 600 million hypertensives and we all know (or think we know) that there are 6,000,000,000 people on the planet. But that six billion is rather strongly biased toward children, teenagers, and young adults who rarely have hypertension even if they will develop it later in life. So nature is out to get more than one in ten. Maybe more like one in six -- one in four among US non-hispanic 'caucasians' -- one in three among americans of African American descent.
I know that you're joking, but even if you aren't, odds are that you can use as much salt as you want -- at least wrt to hypertension. Only about a quarter of the population actually have or will develop elevated blood pressure and only about half of those who have hypertension have a drop in blood pressure when they reduce sodium intake.
Probably leakproof cabling can be devised, but I doubt it will be cheap.
BTW, I don't know much about connectors, and what I do know is surely a decade out of date. But my impression is that "gas tight" connection technologies replaced simple metal to metal contact technologies in most connectors in the late 1980s due to the high price of gold. Gold is pretty much the ideal metal to metal material as it is soft and doesn't oxidize. But it got expensive and was largely phased out. I have no idea if oil can work its way into a typical "gas tight" connection. My guess would be that it can't/won't, but that's just a guess
I can't speak to the other 49, but Microsoft/IBM certainly get into the list of awful products with MSDOS 4.0. And maybe with the original release of OS/2 ("half an operating system") as well, even though IBM eventually made later versions into a decent product.
Anyway disregard the prior (stupid) message.
That is to say that a one byte file would take just as long to copy within the same partition as would a 10mB file? Maybe sorting out the disk cache takes some time. But surely not seconds.
Clearly computing has moved beyond my meager understanding. I wish it a good trip, but I don't feel much inclined to go along for the ride. Let me know when they have things sorted out, and I'll look to see if I'm interested in the finished product (They do intend to finish Windows someday, right?). In the meantime, I'm switching to a Slackware desktop.
Acer-Power 1000 (Athlon 64 3800+, 512mB memory) -- Windows XP SP2 - 90sec (Probably would be 20sec faster if I had gotten around to killing a lot of the junk loaded at boot)
Same Acer Power 1000 - Kunbuntu (Unbuntu 4.1.1) - 50sec
P166 64mb with fully patched Windows 95 - 60 sec
The Win95 machine has been optimized a bit to speed up boot and has a fairly new 8GB hard drive which is probably faster than the HD in a typical P166. A more typical P166 would probably be 10-20 sec slower. Even then, it would probably be comperable to XP on much faster hardware.
===
Being nice to Microsoft I did not time the other XP machines around here, one of which takes about 200 seconds to boot. (And don't even mention the subject of W2K boot times).
Boy, I wish that were true. I've done somewhere between 30 and 60 Linux installs in the past 10 years and I have NEVER had every hardware device work in the PC without tinkering. But Unbuntu has fixed all that? No, it has not. I installed Kunbuntu last week on an AcerPower 1000. It detected the Broadcom wireless, but installed a generic broadxx driver that does not work. Took me about 9 hours to find, deceipher, and install ndiswrapper and Windows drivers -- which at this point work only from the command line.
Nothing against ndiswrapper. It's a wonderous program and can be pretty straightforward once you have it down. But I don't see many non-geeks managing to get it working.
On the positive side, everything else (well, everything I care about anyway) works, and, for the first time ever, I actually got correct test page printed out of CUPS without days of tinkering.
(K)unbuntu looks to be good enough for a non-gamer who doesn't have important unsupported peripherals. Slackware 11 seems to work OK also, but -- predictably -- is taking some configuring. That's OK, I'm willing to tinker quite a bit if it means that I never have to type "sudo" again.
The good news: Desktop Linux has come a long way in the past decade. The bad news: It still has a little way -- not all that far I think -- to go.
Exactly what part of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."" do you not understand? Seems pretty clear to me.
Congress has made a law they are constitutionally forbidden to make and the judge has struck it down. Contrary to what you seem to think, that is his job.
I could be wrong, but I think the one year thing has to do with the risk that if a company employs a "temporary worker" for too long, the state and federal tax folks may (quite reasonably in many cases) decree the "temp" to be an actual employee ... and come looking for missing SSA, medicare, disability, unemployment, etc payments. ... and maybe a fine for failing to cover the employee for workman's comp. And the newfound employee might then turn around and sue for missing benefits.
Personally, I think that it'd be simpler, and better management in the long run, to only hire temps for temporary jobs. But what the hell do I know?
Yeah, that'd be good style. But unless you intend to undertake an editorial Jihad on Slashdot and strafe every article that makes slips like this, this is probably not a good place to start. It's a request for specific information in a specialized area. Seems likely that anyone who can contribute anything useful will know what SAN means.
Don't let me discourage you from making useful editorial comments. I'm only suggesting that Slashdot being what it is, you're probably going to have to target them at the really egregious stuff if you plan to retain your sanity.
(SAN="Storage Area Network" ... I think)
No, decreased sunspot activity is thought to be associated with LOWER overall solar radiation. For example, the virtual disappearance of sun spots around 1700 (the "Maunder Minimum") corresponds to the "Little Ice Age" which featured growth of mountain glaciers in Europe and repeated freezes of the Thames at London. The Wikipedia article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum . Read it, and you'll know as much as I do about the subject -- probably more.