This tired argument of comparing original XP release to current Linux distros really needs to stop. It's apples to oranges and the only thing it accomplishes is a loss of credibility for Linux as a solution
You do realize that we compare Linux to XP because XP is widely seen as BETTER than Microsoft's latest offering? If you really want to we can have a field day tearing Vista apart comparing it to the latest Ubuntu. The fact that the most fair comparison between Linux and Windows is to compare the latest Linux distributions to a fully patched XP does say something about how Microsoft blew it with vista.
The test is valid because they used an enormously large sample size and a library of several hundred pictures, which through its massive sample size, were able to distill down using statistics to those 10 pictures which had the highest positive predictive value!
It's not quite that simple because several of the scoring systems, or even parts of the scoring systems, have been downright proven to over-diagnose problems (as an example the comprehensive system when given to people with no history of mental illness frequently produce results which would imply they are barely able to take care of themselves ).
There ARE things the test is good at. At as an example it has a sensitivity and specificity to detect schizophrenia of more than.70 ( highlighting that while useful it should never be the sole method of assessment ). Unfortunately there are also a lot of things it is sometimes used for while being complete garbage at. As an example there is no evidence whatsoever that the test can detect sexual abuse, yet quite a few shrinks still use it for that purpose.
This is the real problem with the test. People don't want to accept that it is flawed because it does have its uses.
Give the test to 100 people. Have the 100 people do pre-screenings with psychologists. Correlate the answers with clinical diagnosis.
100 people ? Really ? That's it ?
For DOUBLE BLIND TESTS with medical drugs where you can objectively measure the effects you would require thousands or tens of thousands of people before allowing a treatment or test on the market. Now what we have is a test for which double blind trials is impossible, with dubious assumptions, and many plausible interpretations of the same data. Give it to 100.000 people and get a rate of false positives and negatives lower than 10% and I might be interested...
Whenever somebody makes the nonsensical claim that it is unacceptable to censor racist or homophobic propaganda because it is a free speech issue, consider the following examples.
1: You're not allowed to harass people, even if you do so by speaking.
3: You're not allowed to tell people lies in order to make them agree to things they otherwise would not ( i.e fraud ).
4: You are not allowed to print untrue stories that may damage somebody's reputation ( i.e libel ).
5: You're not allowed to damage people's reputation by spreading lies about them ( i.e slander )
The main problem with the laws against racism and homophobia is that they have been poorly named. They should have called it "The protection against harassment of minorities act" or something like it. As with all other liberties your freedom ends where mine begins, and just like freedom of movement does not entitle you to sleep in my front-yard, nor does freedom of speech entitle you to spread lies about my sexual orientation. If you seriously think that freedom of speech gives you a right to lie about and harass people, then I'm afraid you have a rather naive idea of how the world works and you may just find that a lot of people with disagree with you.
No implications for the reliability of the IPCC
on
Sunspots Return
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Since there will of course be a lot of nonsense about this having implications for the reliability of the IPCC's statements on climate change and so on, it is worth posting the following:
We have direct measurements of incoming and outgoing solar radiation. We have satellites in orbit that detect incoming as well as outgoing radiation of all wavelengths. From these direct measurements we know that the recent change in outgoing radiation is greater than the changes in incoming radiation. We know that the change is in the region of the spectrum where CO2 and other greenhouse gasses absorb radiation the most. We also know from isotopic analysis that a majority of the increase in CO2 concentration is fossil in origin ( fossil fuels are virtually depleted in Carbon 14 since it decays radioactively over periods of several thousand years ), thus excluding the possibility that what we see is a feedback effect from changes in solar activity.
Thus we more or less know that the sun is not to blame, no matter how poorly we may understand its sunspots, cycles and whatnot. The change in radiation balance is due to neither a direct solar effect nor the type of feedbacks that occur during ice age termination. If either of the two was the case then the isotopic studies would have detected it since the CO2 in oceans and plants have comparable C14 concentrations as the atmosphere. Instead what we see is an increased concentration of fossil carbon in the atmosphere, and together with it a reduction in outgoing infra-red radiation consistent with the absorption spectra of the greenhouse gases we emit.
As far as I have understood the problem with Solar ( and Wind ) is not so much the cost of the generation itself, but rather the costs associated with storing the energy to account for varying production and demand. At the moment there are only two options that are even remotely close to being economical and that is pumped hydroelectric storage or simply keeping a traditional power plant ( typically hydroelectric or natural gas ) on standby and ready to go when the renewable one does not produce. The problem with the former approach is partially cost and also a limited number of locations where you can do it. The problem with the second approach is that if you are going to build a whole second powerplant to allow for redundancy during periods of low wind / insolation then you might just as well use it all the time and save the cost of building the renewable one (this is less true for plants where fuel costs are significant , like gas, and more so for plants where it is a small fraction of the energy price, as it is for nuclear and hydro ).
Basically with capacity factors around 30% at best ( for wind ) the renewable energy sources would have to be substantially cheaper than nuclear, hydroelectrics and coal before it would make economic sense to use them. You could tax the other forms of energy generation to level the playing field but it is hardly an ideal solution. Basically barring dramatic improvements in energy storage technology I don't think renewables will be able to dent our fossil fuel use unless their price per kwh drops to at least half that of traditional energy sources. Parity on per kwh of generation is not enough unless you can overcome the variability.
PS: No in most areas thermal solar is not good enough because even if it takes weeks for the output to drop you would still need other plants as backup just in case the insolation goes low for a month ( as can very well happen ). Note that thermal solar ( in contrast to photovoltaic ) is very sensitive to clouds, and that it is not practical to store thermal energy for much longer than a few days at most (especially not at several hundred degrees). Also it is not necessary for output to drop to 0 for the variability to be a problem. A powerplant losing half its output in a few days will also require some sort of buffering to keep a stable supply.
In other words: IT SUCKS! It's an operating system. It can't handle files effectively... IT SUCKS! I'd explain why this is a serious issue, but it's so obvious that I'd just be stating the obvious. MOVING FILES IS SLOW ?!? An operating system that can't handle files effectively is epic fail. It sucks so bad it doesn't even need an explanation how bad it sucks. It fails at moving files... Performance issues, while moving files... enough said!
This is WAY overdue, which is also why it stings so much. Have a guess why this will hit America harder than Europe? Has nothing to do with the fact that Europeans started acting decades ago while the Americans preferred to stick their heads in the sand? There's loads of people decrying this, but what is your alternative? Wait until it will hurt even more? Because you do realise that the longer you wait the harsher it will be when you finally do it, right ? You also realise that you can't go on forever burning Oil and Coal, right ?
Other than some people who have never heard the word "externalities" and still seriously think that free market economics can magically undo physical reality, people should see that relying on limited and polluting energy sources is a bad idea, and that it will be a lot smoother to start cutting down your use of it sooner rather than waiting for the market to crash. Sure, market forces will "fix it", but it will be in the "oil just quadrupled in cost every week, 10 weeks in a row" kind of way rather than the smooth transition you can get with a sensible cap and trade system.
"Converting electrical power to and from microwave radiation is an order of magnitude more efficient than solar. "
I don't think "an order of magnitude" means what you think it means. If it did that sentence would imply the microwave conversion efficiency exceeded 100%.
I don't think this has the implications a lot of people think it has. The courts are very able to say that storing IPs with the purpose of protecting yourself against attacks is acceptable, but doing it the way the APB has been doing it is not. In fact, if I'm not mistaken Swedish law actually does specify how information is to be used when you supply a service over the net. ISPs ( as an example ) are required to delete details when they are no longer used. Due to EU directives they may soon be required to store it for 6 months, but regardless it is clear that Swedish law does permit "service providers" to store information for as long as is necessary to supply their service ( and afterwards they are required to delete it). What is considered "necessary" is down to the courts to decide I guess.
It would appear that the courts have simply ruled that APB stored personal details in a manner that is not consistent with Swedish law. I.e, it's not just the fact that they stored it. It is also a matter of how they stored it, and why they did it. I very much doubt that a Swedish court is going to convict you for having an IP ban in your server config as an example.
Oh, and because this is Sweden I don't have to rant about how I'm not a lawyer.
Oh, stop. A Windows "backbone" can be made just as secure by a competent admin as a *nix "backbone" can.
And you CAN attach wheels to your tower and CRT, hooking it up to lead acid battery and dragging it along behind you, but it is just so much easier to get a laptop...
The other guys car was DEMOLISHED because his car was fiberglass and plastic. Yeah, those crumple zones worked to save him.. but they also meant that his car sustained severe very clostly damage.
You sir are a moron. Those crumble zones saved not only his life but yours as well. A frontal collision at that speed can easily be lethal. The reason you are alive to make your post is that the other car had crumble zones that absorb some of the energy in the impact thereby making it softer for both of you. You should probably have offered him half the cost of a new car because by sacrificing his vehicle both of you coudl walk away from the accident.
If you doubt my word try the following. Drop one egg onto a pillow and put another egg into a metal strongbox that you drop on the floor. I give you one guess which egg is more likely to crack.
Hydrogen for cars mainly looked promising because the alternative non-carbon fuel was batteries, which ten years ago were nowhere close to the required performance. Then the explosion in mobile consumer electronics like laptops and cellphones brought a lot of battery research which resulted in high energy density Li-ion batteries and more recently fast-charging batteries that can be charged in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Basically developments in battery technology during the last decade has pretty much made hydrogen for automotive purposes obsolete before it was ready. There are still some issues with batteries ( mainly their high price compared to present petroleum prices) but the more recent battery generations are up to the job, and if you look at stuff that is at the engineering stage and will likely be commercialized in the near future, hydrogen seems to be a solution looking for a problem. In my opinion that application will likely be aviation where liquid hydrogen can offer an unbeatable energy/weight ratio ( in fact the highest possible of all chemical fuels ). Of course at the moment liquid hydrogen is far too expensive to produce in a CO2 neutral manner as compared to jet fuel, but that may change as Oil reserves dwindle.
Take my situation. I do a lot of volunteer work for LGBT organizations and things like it, and hence regularly receive e-mails from people who may not want them revealed to others. Yea, e-mail is insecure and I don't keep it longer than necessary and so on... but the people that send us this stuff can often be tech illiterate, desperate and don't know where else to turn. To expect of them to be experts on information security before seeking advice is not sensible.
Now this court is essentially saying that I'm going to share a bunch of very sensitive and private info (think HIV status ) about completely innocent people because the plaintiff SUSPECTS that I MAY have done something wrong? I have this slight inkling that if they tried that over here I would have problems recalling the pass-phrase for my full drive encryption. At least I don't live in England where even THAT is illegal.
No there is no minimum price in the EU. There is however a rule saying that if you have a majority market share you are not allowed to lower your costs further than your production costs in order to try to kill competition.
The reason for this rule is that companies have in the past manipulated their prices in attempts to kill competition and thereby obtaining a monopoly. The airline SAS-Braathens was convicted of similar wrongdoings after they lowered their prices below their costs in order to kill competition and made up for it by charging multiple times typical airline fairs to destinations where they had a monopoly. The rules are very clear and established. Intel deliberately ignored them and are being punished accordingly. There's nothing strange here and the EU has been consistent about it. Intel and Microsoft got more attention because they are very large companies and the fines are based on your company's revenue. Other than that this is business as usual in the EU.
If you assume something like 100kg per car, and five people per car, that works out to well beyond present lithium reserves. Seems the cost of lithium ( and hence the batteries ) is likely to go up.
Technical support. The job where every win-win situation is simultaneously a lose-lose situation, until you take a look and it collapses into "please end my misery."
The process involves photons that are absorbed while exciting the energy of molecules OF COURSE quantum mechanics is involved. Coming up next, thermodynamics may be at work in volcanic eruptions.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that we compare Linux to XP because XP is widely seen as BETTER than Microsoft's latest offering? If you really want to we can have a field day tearing Vista apart comparing it to the latest Ubuntu. The fact that the most fair comparison between Linux and Windows is to compare the latest Linux distributions to a fully patched XP does say something about how Microsoft blew it with vista.
It's not quite that simple because several of the scoring systems, or even parts of the scoring systems, have been downright proven to over-diagnose problems (as an example the comprehensive system when given to people with no history of mental illness frequently produce results which would imply they are barely able to take care of themselves ).
There ARE things the test is good at. At as an example it has a sensitivity and specificity to detect schizophrenia of more than .70 ( highlighting that while useful it should never be the sole method of assessment ). Unfortunately there are also a lot of things it is sometimes used for while being complete garbage at. As an example there is no evidence whatsoever that the test can detect sexual abuse, yet quite a few shrinks still use it for that purpose.
This is the real problem with the test. People don't want to accept that it is flawed because it does have its uses.
100 people ? Really ? That's it ?
For DOUBLE BLIND TESTS with medical drugs where you can objectively measure the effects you would require thousands or tens of thousands of people before allowing a treatment or test on the market. Now what we have is a test for which double blind trials is impossible, with dubious assumptions, and many plausible interpretations of the same data. Give it to 100.000 people and get a rate of false positives and negatives lower than 10% and I might be interested...
In the words of my doctor:
"BMI is mainly useful to diagnose underweight and detect anorexia. For obesity waist measurements are better."
Whenever somebody makes the nonsensical claim that it is unacceptable to censor racist or homophobic propaganda because it is a free speech issue, consider the following examples.
1: You're not allowed to harass people, even if you do so by speaking.
3: You're not allowed to tell people lies in order to make them agree to things they otherwise would not ( i.e fraud ).
4: You are not allowed to print untrue stories that may damage somebody's reputation ( i.e libel ).
5: You're not allowed to damage people's reputation by spreading lies about them ( i.e slander )
The main problem with the laws against racism and homophobia is that they have been poorly named. They should have called it "The protection against harassment of minorities act" or something like it. As with all other liberties your freedom ends where mine begins, and just like freedom of movement does not entitle you to sleep in my front-yard, nor does freedom of speech entitle you to spread lies about my sexual orientation. If you seriously think that freedom of speech gives you a right to lie about and harass people, then I'm afraid you have a rather naive idea of how the world works and you may just find that a lot of people with disagree with you.
Since there will of course be a lot of nonsense about this having implications for the reliability of the IPCC's statements on climate change and so on, it is worth posting the following:
We have direct measurements of incoming and outgoing solar radiation. We have satellites in orbit that detect incoming as well as outgoing radiation of all wavelengths. From these direct measurements we know that the recent change in outgoing radiation is greater than the changes in incoming radiation. We know that the change is in the region of the spectrum where CO2 and other greenhouse gasses absorb radiation the most. We also know from isotopic analysis that a majority of the increase in CO2 concentration is fossil in origin ( fossil fuels are virtually depleted in Carbon 14 since it decays radioactively over periods of several thousand years ), thus excluding the possibility that what we see is a feedback effect from changes in solar activity.
Thus we more or less know that the sun is not to blame, no matter how poorly we may understand its sunspots, cycles and whatnot. The change in radiation balance is due to neither a direct solar effect nor the type of feedbacks that occur during ice age termination. If either of the two was the case then the isotopic studies would have detected it since the CO2 in oceans and plants have comparable C14 concentrations as the atmosphere. Instead what we see is an increased concentration of fossil carbon in the atmosphere, and together with it a reduction in outgoing infra-red radiation consistent with the absorption spectra of the greenhouse gases we emit.
As far as I have understood the problem with Solar ( and Wind ) is not so much the cost of the generation itself, but rather the costs associated with storing the energy to account for varying production and demand. At the moment there are only two options that are even remotely close to being economical and that is pumped hydroelectric storage or simply keeping a traditional power plant ( typically hydroelectric or natural gas ) on standby and ready to go when the renewable one does not produce. The problem with the former approach is partially cost and also a limited number of locations where you can do it. The problem with the second approach is that if you are going to build a whole second powerplant to allow for redundancy during periods of low wind / insolation then you might just as well use it all the time and save the cost of building the renewable one (this is less true for plants where fuel costs are significant , like gas, and more so for plants where it is a small fraction of the energy price, as it is for nuclear and hydro ).
Basically with capacity factors around 30% at best ( for wind ) the renewable energy sources would have to be substantially cheaper than nuclear, hydroelectrics and coal before it would make economic sense to use them. You could tax the other forms of energy generation to level the playing field but it is hardly an ideal solution. Basically barring dramatic improvements in energy storage technology I don't think renewables will be able to dent our fossil fuel use unless their price per kwh drops to at least half that of traditional energy sources. Parity on per kwh of generation is not enough unless you can overcome the variability.
PS: No in most areas thermal solar is not good enough because even if it takes weeks for the output to drop you would still need other plants as backup just in case the insolation goes low for a month ( as can very well happen ). Note that thermal solar ( in contrast to photovoltaic ) is very sensitive to clouds, and that it is not practical to store thermal energy for much longer than a few days at most (especially not at several hundred degrees). Also it is not necessary for output to drop to 0 for the variability to be a problem. A powerplant losing half its output in a few days will also require some sort of buffering to keep a stable supply.
In other words: IT SUCKS! It's an operating system. It can't handle files effectively... IT SUCKS! I'd explain why this is a serious issue, but it's so obvious that I'd just be stating the obvious. MOVING FILES IS SLOW ?!? An operating system that can't handle files effectively is epic fail. It sucks so bad it doesn't even need an explanation how bad it sucks. It fails at moving files... Performance issues, while moving files... enough said!
This is WAY overdue, which is also why it stings so much. Have a guess why this will hit America harder than Europe? Has nothing to do with the fact that Europeans started acting decades ago while the Americans preferred to stick their heads in the sand? There's loads of people decrying this, but what is your alternative? Wait until it will hurt even more? Because you do realise that the longer you wait the harsher it will be when you finally do it, right ? You also realise that you can't go on forever burning Oil and Coal, right ?
Other than some people who have never heard the word "externalities" and still seriously think that free market economics can magically undo physical reality, people should see that relying on limited and polluting energy sources is a bad idea, and that it will be a lot smoother to start cutting down your use of it sooner rather than waiting for the market to crash. Sure, market forces will "fix it", but it will be in the "oil just quadrupled in cost every week, 10 weeks in a row" kind of way rather than the smooth transition you can get with a sensible cap and trade system.
"Converting electrical power to and from microwave radiation is an order of magnitude more efficient than solar. "
I don't think "an order of magnitude" means what you think it means. If it did that sentence would imply the microwave conversion efficiency exceeded 100%.
I don't think this has the implications a lot of people think it has. The courts are very able to say that storing IPs with the purpose of protecting yourself against attacks is acceptable, but doing it the way the APB has been doing it is not. In fact, if I'm not mistaken Swedish law actually does specify how information is to be used when you supply a service over the net. ISPs ( as an example ) are required to delete details when they are no longer used. Due to EU directives they may soon be required to store it for 6 months, but regardless it is clear that Swedish law does permit "service providers" to store information for as long as is necessary to supply their service ( and afterwards they are required to delete it). What is considered "necessary" is down to the courts to decide I guess.
It would appear that the courts have simply ruled that APB stored personal details in a manner that is not consistent with Swedish law. I.e, it's not just the fact that they stored it. It is also a matter of how they stored it, and why they did it. I very much doubt that a Swedish court is going to convict you for having an IP ban in your server config as an example.
Oh, and because this is Sweden I don't have to rant about how I'm not a lawyer.
You mean something like this? http://www.ubuntu.com/files/u1/addopera9.png
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
And you CAN attach wheels to your tower and CRT, hooking it up to lead acid battery and dragging it along behind you, but it is just so much easier to get a laptop...
You sir are a moron. Those crumble zones saved not only his life but yours as well. A frontal collision at that speed can easily be lethal. The reason you are alive to make your post is that the other car had crumble zones that absorb some of the energy in the impact thereby making it softer for both of you. You should probably have offered him half the cost of a new car because by sacrificing his vehicle both of you coudl walk away from the accident.
If you doubt my word try the following. Drop one egg onto a pillow and put another egg into a metal strongbox that you drop on the floor. I give you one guess which egg is more likely to crack.
Fixed that for you. Sorry but that annoys me every time.
Hydrogen for cars mainly looked promising because the alternative non-carbon fuel was batteries, which ten years ago were nowhere close to the required performance. Then the explosion in mobile consumer electronics like laptops and cellphones brought a lot of battery research which resulted in high energy density Li-ion batteries and more recently fast-charging batteries that can be charged in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Basically developments in battery technology during the last decade has pretty much made hydrogen for automotive purposes obsolete before it was ready. There are still some issues with batteries ( mainly their high price compared to present petroleum prices) but the more recent battery generations are up to the job, and if you look at stuff that is at the engineering stage and will likely be commercialized in the near future, hydrogen seems to be a solution looking for a problem. In my opinion that application will likely be aviation where liquid hydrogen can offer an unbeatable energy/weight ratio ( in fact the highest possible of all chemical fuels ). Of course at the moment liquid hydrogen is far too expensive to produce in a CO2 neutral manner as compared to jet fuel, but that may change as Oil reserves dwindle.
Sony has prior art on that.
Take my situation. I do a lot of volunteer work for LGBT organizations and things like it, and hence regularly receive e-mails from people who may not want them revealed to others. Yea, e-mail is insecure and I don't keep it longer than necessary and so on... but the people that send us this stuff can often be tech illiterate, desperate and don't know where else to turn. To expect of them to be experts on information security before seeking advice is not sensible.
Now this court is essentially saying that I'm going to share a bunch of very sensitive and private info (think HIV status ) about completely innocent people because the plaintiff SUSPECTS that I MAY have done something wrong? I have this slight inkling that if they tried that over here I would have problems recalling the pass-phrase for my full drive encryption. At least I don't live in England where even THAT is illegal.
Regards: a Scandinavian.
Sorry , couldn't help myself.
It was the single core Mac!
No there is no minimum price in the EU. There is however a rule saying that if you have a majority market share you are not allowed to lower your costs further than your production costs in order to try to kill competition.
The reason for this rule is that companies have in the past manipulated their prices in attempts to kill competition and thereby obtaining a monopoly. The airline SAS-Braathens was convicted of similar wrongdoings after they lowered their prices below their costs in order to kill competition and made up for it by charging multiple times typical airline fairs to destinations where they had a monopoly. The rules are very clear and established. Intel deliberately ignored them and are being punished accordingly. There's nothing strange here and the EU has been consistent about it. Intel and Microsoft got more attention because they are very large companies and the fines are based on your company's revenue. Other than that this is business as usual in the EU.
If you assume something like 100kg per car, and five people per car, that works out to well beyond present lithium reserves. Seems the cost of lithium ( and hence the batteries ) is likely to go up.
Technical support. The job where every win-win situation is simultaneously a lose-lose situation, until you take a look and it collapses into "please end my misery."
The process involves photons that are absorbed while exciting the energy of molecules OF COURSE quantum mechanics is involved. Coming up next, thermodynamics may be at work in volcanic eruptions.