The population density of the US is basically a wide strip from Boston to Washington, Chicago, and a thin strip on the western coast. The rest is not-so-populous. The rest east of the Mississipi is fairly populous, west is almost uninhabited in comparison to the larger population centers. There are a few largish cities out west that aren't on the coast, but not that many.
And, hey, that's funny, that's what the night map looks like.;)
Slashdot needs a misapplication-of-physics mod. Your car acts like a green house. Visible light, which glass is almost fully transparent to, is absorbed by the interior. That energy is radiated back as infra-red, which glass is not-so-transparent to.
With this glass, *more* IR would be trapped inside. What cars need is glass that is *less* opaque to IR so it can radiate harmlessly outward without warming the interior even further.
This would only work in large buildings because you would be using A/C all the time.
Outside of the fact that just about every Hotmail customer has received similar emails (I know I have on my rarely used Hotmail account), there is another big thing that screams "Legitimate!". The email doesn't ask you to go to a site to provide any personal info. It's just reminding you to log in every once in a while so you don't lose the account and advertises their premium service. What's so scary about that?
Ok, I stand partially corrected. Being an American who lives at 41N the sun just isn't something I'd expect to be able to do that. It's easy not to think of how much more solar radiation is incident in lower latitudes. Also as an American this just wouldn't work well enough for me since I'm so used to chlorinated, flouride-treated tap water. I just don't have the necessary resistance to junk in the water.
There seems to be precious little US EPA-style research into how well this works. For example, they "admit" they don't know how well it works on parasites. Mostly it's other lab research pulled together and monitoring disease rates. However, every little bit helps in developing countries, and this must be better than nothing.
UV kills bacteria? Don't think so, at least not in concentrations from the sun on the ground. Perhaps you're thinking ozone? That doesn't come for free from the sun at altitudes humans can survive at. Maybe with the heat, but I think 165F is the minimum to kill most stuff (in food). For water, boiling is the usual recommendation when using heat.
What you end up if you put water in PET bottles on your roof in warm weather would be some pretty nasty water. Especially "wild" water. This is a problem with inline filters for hydration systems. Whatever's in there just keeps growing, but faster due to green house effects of the container.
The latest on making clean water for humanitarian purposes (at least from the US military perspective) seems to be MIOX units. Although they seem to be kind of flimsy for military use (3.5 ounces, seems to be thermoplastic), MIOX and MSR claim to have delivered 8,000 units to the military so far. I think it was a joint R&D between MIOX (making their municipal treatment technology smaller), MSR (for the outdoors market) and the US military. They plan on delivering them to humanitarian organizations as well.
It works on lithium camera batteries and salt (table, rock, potassium chloride, etc). The units themselves are expensive ($129 in outdoor stores) but after that it's almost free to purify water. Plus the batteries last about 10 years in storage, and the salt indefinitely. None of it is poisonous or difficult to handle until right before you treat the water. Kills everything, even crypto but doesn't do any filtering.
We just got one, haven't tried it out backpacking yet, just in the living room. Bit of a chlorine taste, but better than iodine.
People tend to read too much into the meaning of the fact that you can live days without water and weeks without food. Toward the end of either you're basically lying on the ground unable to move. Impairment starts very early and is very dependent on environmental conditions, the individual, etc.
A soldier might be able to live for weeks without food, but will not be as effective a soldier. A soldier weakened by hunger can't perform the same physical feats. A soldier that is thinking about how it's been days since his/her last meal is more likely to make a mistake that could end very badly.
Money spent on R&D that keeps soldiers in their best fighting form is certainly not useless in my book. Think before making knee-jerk "military spending is bad" comments.
Ok, how about from the other side. Although I'm plenty old enough and married, I don't have kids. I do however have parents.
They started to raise me your way. They realized their mistake when I got bullied by a girl. They spent a lot of time to undo what they previously taught me. My siblings were not raised that way.
Violence is part of nature, it won't go away if you ignore it.
I run 20-odd small to big production servers along with 2 other coworkers. Downloading and compiling everything from source would be insanity. (You know, like a Gentoo user!:)) We have other responsibilities. Patching all those systems when a security issue popped up? I would lose my mind. I'd much rather RHEL's backported patches so everything didn't change in functionality every week.
I guess they put the "most popular" packages on the lower numbered disks, but FC2 was the first time I didn't need the last disk (needed all the others though). It seems I always want some fairly unpopular packages...
According to http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Diction ary&va=brick, bricks is so a word. The plural of brick is bricks or brick. Wouldn't the first ("bricks") even be the preferred plural?
I've often explained my job as "high tech janitor/security guard". You really can see a lot of similarities. Not the janitor who cleans up puke (though, I've done the electronic equivalent of that too), but the one that keeps the heat running on a daily basis.
But trust me, we know you're not just another category of end-users. You're completely different. You're basically users who think they know everything. Normal users frequently *admit* they don't understand everything that's going on. (developer) "I can't patch my system to avoid this latest worm, my hallowed development environment might not work the same way." (sysadmin) "Yeah, thanks for all getting infected with Blaster. Again."
Developer's are technical users, but frequently can't see what effect their changes, requests, and refusal to follow policy will have beyond their own cube. We know *all* about developers.
I really have to disagree with your point #2. My wife and I are backpackers. We did an 8 day "tent vacation, without car" just last month. I'll admit, much of our day was spent walking 8-11 miles/day rather than doing things needed to survive, but remember it was a "vacation", not "life". The incredible amount of work required just to do the things that normally end up being a small percentage of your day is frightening.
Alternatively, look at the PBS series "Colonial House"--21st century people living as 17th century settlers on 1000 acres of Maine nothingness. They work six 12 hour days a week just to survive, plant a few crops and send some products back to the fictional investors in the colony to pay back the debt.
There's a good correlation between free time and technology, and only a person born in a first world country in the late 20th century could so misunderstand that. Granted, the TV and the other entertainment doesn't do much to make us more productive, but it has evolved to fill that void of time that didn't exist 100 years ago.
As a backpacker I enjoy going back to that "simple life" every now and then. But believe me, it's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there...
I actually tend to agree that human CO2 release has little to do with global warming (wake me up when we top the high temps of the last two warm periods, Roman and Middle Ages, we still have a way to go). Basing hysteria on the measurement of temperature change over the last century or so strikes me as insanity on a 4.3 billion year old planet.
However, I went to junkscience.com. Most of the links down the right side of the page were from foxnews.com. Surely, you're joking if you expect us to believe that it's a balanced site.
I'm not sure about the exact figures, but human eyes begin to sense less light after the age of 20. I think everything is around 20% darker every 10 years thereafter. By the age of 60 you would expect on average 45-50% darker vision. Sounds like he's right on schedule.
The "inconclusive" (according to CNNHN, right now) 10% over 50 years would be well under any human's ability to detect.
If I make shit up about a story for those who don't read articles, can I get 3 informatives too? Besides, GPS barely works when there are buildings, don't we all know that?
Here is the actual quote from the site:
Using cell-phone contact, Wi-Fi internet connections, and custom software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team, Pac-man and the ghosts will be tracked from a central location and their progress will be broadcast over the internet for viewers from around the world.
It seems to me that the focus has been diverted from building the infrastructure necessary to cope with earthquakes (in terms of buildings as well as emergency care) to instead predicting them in advance.
What evidence do you have in support of that statement? This article is about a presumably small team of Russian scientists' work for 20 years. Maybe a few other seismologists worldwide watching and potentially trying to reproduce their research. How is that a shift in focus? What would these seismologists know about emergency care of the injured, or structural engineering to make sure the buildings can withstand the quakes?
You know, screw it. It's just science. Let's focus on the really important stuff, right? All those meteorolgists on the Weather Channel should really get their acts together and just resign, become EMTs or structural engineers, and move to beach houses in NC where they can be of *real* help for the next hurricane... Or maybe a trailer park in KS for the next tornado...
Maybe, just maybe, there's room in the big, crazy world for both fields of endeavor (prediction and response).
"...require a PC running Linux...and a variety of hardware (including none besides the PC)." means that some of the projects require nothing besides the PC, but others require additional hardware. Where did you (and your moderators) learn to read English? You need more practice before you complain about things like this./. needs a "Just Plain Wrong" moderation. Not that I have mod points today...
I have to disagree. I'm a native English speaker (Mid-Adlantic US, anthracite at first, but twinged with central New Jersey now after traveling through Philly for a few years--I don't even know what I sound like any more, I pick up accents very easily) and it's a really subtle difference that I thought didn't exist at first.
After prounouncing them all a dozen or so times, "geek" does not sound like "greek" to me at all. "Greek" is lower-pitched and more drawn out. A bit closer to "cheap", but still not exactly the same. Sounds exactly like "beak", "speak" and "leek" to me.
You'll probably get different answers from every region.
I'm a customer of pobox.com (for my personal correspondence) and the poor schmuck who runs part of the anti-spam solution for about 15,000 people, but that's part of a company 30 times that size.
Professionally, I already run SpamAssassin. It does pretty well without SPF. Users are actually sending thank you emails. I guess we'll see if it has much effect after v2.70. It sure will be a while before it has a large score.
The problem is that even with the company being 30 times this size, all of our email comes from the same 2nd level domain name rather than subdomains. We have 2 choices: send all of our outgoing email through the same place (they charge by the byte for internal corporate backbone usage, it's cheaper for us over the Internet), or keep the SPF records up to date for all the internet access points. Both options suck.
Personally, since pobox.com is primarily a mail-forwarding service, this might seriously affect their bottom line. This proposal makes their service more annoying to use, perhaps enough that it isn't worth my $15/year. It might be worth it to finally just get a DynDNS setup instead.
Their "objections rebutted" page mentions this as one of the biggest problems with the system. No shit. They are under the mistaken impression that many MUAs make it easy to separate the configuration of your envelope from and your header From:. Of course, they "offer" that I can use their SASL SMTP servers. Unless their customer base is a lot smarter than the average bear they will not understand what to do with this. Years of experience as postmaster@ suggests most email users are frighteningly stupid. How many crystal clear bounce messages have you "interpreted" for your users? Just what part of "user unknown" is confusing? "Thanks, you just decreased spam worldwide by a few percent. Too bad your company went out of business because of it."
I use pobox.com. It allows me to forward my pobox.com email to any address. I use myusername@the.address.of.my.cable.modem. Then I set up my router to forward port 25 to my Linux box. From there I access it locally via files or IMAP, or the web using squirrelmail running on port 443--also forwarded by the router and password protected.
I've been using pobox.com for 4 years, and this whole method for 2. It's gotten me through 4 ISP changes, various long outages etc.
Ok pobox.com costs $15 a year to your free, and I need the 24x7 Linux box and broadband connection, but I would do those two anyhow.:) And, I can store more than 4MB of mail, so there. I only need to change the alias once or twice a year when for some reason I get a new DHCP address, and the mail just queues up on pobox.com when it can't reach me so it's not like I lose anything.
This brings up an interesting issue. A lot of the moderators seem to be as dumb as rocks (ha watch *this* post get moderated), or at least severely humor impaired. After a half hour or so it seems that moderators actually take time to read posts and moderate funny when appropriate.
Is this the equivalent of "First post!"? "First moderation with no comprehension of what the poster was getting at?" Can we moderate the moderators and get rid of anyone who took the parent's parent seriously? They don't belong here. They're probably Windows users anyhow.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The population density of the US is basically a wide strip from Boston to Washington, Chicago, and a thin strip on the western coast. The rest is not-so-populous. The rest east of the Mississipi is fairly populous, west is almost uninhabited in comparison to the larger population centers. There are a few largish cities out west that aren't on the coast, but not that many.
;)
And, hey, that's funny, that's what the night map looks like.
Slashdot needs a misapplication-of-physics mod. Your car acts like a green house. Visible light, which glass is almost fully transparent to, is absorbed by the interior. That energy is radiated back as infra-red, which glass is not-so-transparent to.
With this glass, *more* IR would be trapped inside. What cars need is glass that is *less* opaque to IR so it can radiate harmlessly outward without warming the interior even further.
This would only work in large buildings because you would be using A/C all the time.
Outside of the fact that just about every Hotmail customer has received similar emails (I know I have on my rarely used Hotmail account), there is another big thing that screams "Legitimate!". The email doesn't ask you to go to a site to provide any personal info. It's just reminding you to log in every once in a while so you don't lose the account and advertises their premium service. What's so scary about that?
Ok, I stand partially corrected. Being an American who lives at 41N the sun just isn't something I'd expect to be able to do that. It's easy not to think of how much more solar radiation is incident in lower latitudes. Also as an American this just wouldn't work well enough for me since I'm so used to chlorinated, flouride-treated tap water. I just don't have the necessary resistance to junk in the water.
There seems to be precious little US EPA-style research into how well this works. For example, they "admit" they don't know how well it works on parasites. Mostly it's other lab research pulled together and monitoring disease rates. However, every little bit helps in developing countries, and this must be better than nothing.
UV kills bacteria? Don't think so, at least not in concentrations from the sun on the ground. Perhaps you're thinking ozone? That doesn't come for free from the sun at altitudes humans can survive at. Maybe with the heat, but I think 165F is the minimum to kill most stuff (in food). For water, boiling is the usual recommendation when using heat.
What you end up if you put water in PET bottles on your roof in warm weather would be some pretty nasty water. Especially "wild" water. This is a problem with inline filters for hydration systems. Whatever's in there just keeps growing, but faster due to green house effects of the container.
It works on lithium camera batteries and salt (table, rock, potassium chloride, etc). The units themselves are expensive ($129 in outdoor stores) but after that it's almost free to purify water. Plus the batteries last about 10 years in storage, and the salt indefinitely. None of it is poisonous or difficult to handle until right before you treat the water. Kills everything, even crypto but doesn't do any filtering.
We just got one, haven't tried it out backpacking yet, just in the living room. Bit of a chlorine taste, but better than iodine.
People tend to read too much into the meaning of the fact that you can live days without water and weeks without food. Toward the end of either you're basically lying on the ground unable to move. Impairment starts very early and is very dependent on environmental conditions, the individual, etc.
A soldier might be able to live for weeks without food, but will not be as effective a soldier. A soldier weakened by hunger can't perform the same physical feats. A soldier that is thinking about how it's been days since his/her last meal is more likely to make a mistake that could end very badly.
Money spent on R&D that keeps soldiers in their best fighting form is certainly not useless in my book. Think before making knee-jerk "military spending is bad" comments.
Ok, how about from the other side. Although I'm plenty old enough and married, I don't have kids. I do however have parents.
They started to raise me your way. They realized their mistake when I got bullied by a girl. They spent a lot of time to undo what they previously taught me. My siblings were not raised that way.
Violence is part of nature, it won't go away if you ignore it.
I run 20-odd small to big production servers along with 2 other coworkers. Downloading and compiling everything from source would be insanity. (You know, like a Gentoo user! :)) We have other responsibilities. Patching all those systems when a security issue popped up? I would lose my mind. I'd much rather RHEL's backported patches so everything didn't change in functionality every week.
I guess they put the "most popular" packages on the lower numbered disks, but FC2 was the first time I didn't need the last disk (needed all the others though). It seems I always want some fairly unpopular packages...
I think I can speak for all married men. Don't expect much in royalties from our wives...
Goddammit!
According to http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Diction ary&va=brick, bricks is so a word. The plural of brick is bricks or brick. Wouldn't the first ("bricks") even be the preferred plural?
I've often explained my job as "high tech janitor/security guard". You really can see a lot of similarities. Not the janitor who cleans up puke (though, I've done the electronic equivalent of that too), but the one that keeps the heat running on a daily basis.
But trust me, we know you're not just another category of end-users. You're completely different. You're basically users who think they know everything. Normal users frequently *admit* they don't understand everything that's going on. (developer) "I can't patch my system to avoid this latest worm, my hallowed development environment might not work the same way." (sysadmin) "Yeah, thanks for all getting infected with Blaster. Again."
Developer's are technical users, but frequently can't see what effect their changes, requests, and refusal to follow policy will have beyond their own cube. We know *all* about developers.
I really have to disagree with your point #2. My wife and I are backpackers. We did an 8 day "tent vacation, without car" just last month. I'll admit, much of our day was spent walking 8-11 miles/day rather than doing things needed to survive, but remember it was a "vacation", not "life". The incredible amount of work required just to do the things that normally end up being a small percentage of your day is frightening.
Alternatively, look at the PBS series "Colonial House"--21st century people living as 17th century settlers on 1000 acres of Maine nothingness. They work six 12 hour days a week just to survive, plant a few crops and send some products back to the fictional investors in the colony to pay back the debt.
There's a good correlation between free time and technology, and only a person born in a first world country in the late 20th century could so misunderstand that. Granted, the TV and the other entertainment doesn't do much to make us more productive, but it has evolved to fill that void of time that didn't exist 100 years ago.
As a backpacker I enjoy going back to that "simple life" every now and then. But believe me, it's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there...
I actually tend to agree that human CO2 release has little to do with global warming (wake me up when we top the high temps of the last two warm periods, Roman and Middle Ages, we still have a way to go). Basing hysteria on the measurement of temperature change over the last century or so strikes me as insanity on a 4.3 billion year old planet.
However, I went to junkscience.com. Most of the links down the right side of the page were from foxnews.com. Surely, you're joking if you expect us to believe that it's a balanced site.
I'm not sure about the exact figures, but human eyes begin to sense less light after the age of 20. I think everything is around 20% darker every 10 years thereafter. By the age of 60 you would expect on average 45-50% darker vision. Sounds like he's right on schedule.
The "inconclusive" (according to CNNHN, right now) 10% over 50 years would be well under any human's ability to detect.
It seems to me that the focus has been diverted from building the infrastructure necessary to cope with earthquakes (in terms of buildings as well as emergency care) to instead predicting them in advance.
What evidence do you have in support of that statement? This article is about a presumably small team of Russian scientists' work for 20 years. Maybe a few other seismologists worldwide watching and potentially trying to reproduce their research. How is that a shift in focus? What would these seismologists know about emergency care of the injured, or structural engineering to make sure the buildings can withstand the quakes?
You know, screw it. It's just science. Let's focus on the really important stuff, right? All those meteorolgists on the Weather Channel should really get their acts together and just resign, become EMTs or structural engineers, and move to beach houses in NC where they can be of *real* help for the next hurricane... Or maybe a trailer park in KS for the next tornado...
Maybe, just maybe, there's room in the big, crazy world for both fields of endeavor (prediction and response).
Uh, shouldn't that have been "That just means more time playing with *my daughter*."
:)
Poor kid. She plays second fiddle to your lego collection.
"...require a PC running Linux...and a variety of hardware (including none besides the PC)." means that some of the projects require nothing besides the PC, but others require additional hardware. Where did you (and your moderators) learn to read English? You need more practice before you complain about things like this. /. needs a "Just Plain Wrong" moderation. Not that I have mod points today...
I have to disagree. I'm a native English speaker (Mid-Adlantic US, anthracite at first, but twinged with central New Jersey now after traveling through Philly for a few years--I don't even know what I sound like any more, I pick up accents very easily) and it's a really subtle difference that I thought didn't exist at first.
After prounouncing them all a dozen or so times, "geek" does not sound like "greek" to me at all. "Greek" is lower-pitched and more drawn out. A bit closer to "cheap", but still not exactly the same. Sounds exactly like "beak", "speak" and "leek" to me.
You'll probably get different answers from every region.
I've "gotten" "dual head" a few times, but I still wish I had a computer with two monitors attached to it. :)
/. because of this... Really, I am a geek.
Please don't kick me off
I'm a customer of pobox.com (for my personal correspondence) and the poor schmuck who runs part of the anti-spam solution for about 15,000 people, but that's part of a company 30 times that size.
Professionally, I already run SpamAssassin. It does pretty well without SPF. Users are actually sending thank you emails. I guess we'll see if it has much effect after v2.70. It sure will be a while before it has a large score.
The problem is that even with the company being 30 times this size, all of our email comes from the same 2nd level domain name rather than subdomains. We have 2 choices: send all of our outgoing email through the same place (they charge by the byte for internal corporate backbone usage, it's cheaper for us over the Internet), or keep the SPF records up to date for all the internet access points. Both options suck.
Personally, since pobox.com is primarily a mail-forwarding service, this might seriously affect their bottom line. This proposal makes their service more annoying to use, perhaps enough that it isn't worth my $15/year. It might be worth it to finally just get a DynDNS setup instead.
Their "objections rebutted" page mentions this as one of the biggest problems with the system. No shit. They are under the mistaken impression that many MUAs make it easy to separate the configuration of your envelope from and your header From:. Of course, they "offer" that I can use their SASL SMTP servers. Unless their customer base is a lot smarter than the average bear they will not understand what to do with this. Years of experience as postmaster@ suggests most email users are frighteningly stupid. How many crystal clear bounce messages have you "interpreted" for your users? Just what part of "user unknown" is confusing? "Thanks, you just decreased spam worldwide by a few percent. Too bad your company went out of business because of it."
I use pobox.com. It allows me to forward my pobox.com email to any address. I use myusername@the.address.of.my.cable.modem. Then I set up my router to forward port 25 to my Linux box. From there I access it locally via files or IMAP, or the web using squirrelmail running on port 443--also forwarded by the router and password protected.
:) And, I can store more than 4MB of mail, so there. I only need to change the alias once or twice a year when for some reason I get a new DHCP address, and the mail just queues up on pobox.com when it can't reach me so it's not like I lose anything.
I've been using pobox.com for 4 years, and this whole method for 2. It's gotten me through 4 ISP changes, various long outages etc.
Ok pobox.com costs $15 a year to your free, and I need the 24x7 Linux box and broadband connection, but I would do those two anyhow.
This brings up an interesting issue. A lot of the moderators seem to be as dumb as rocks (ha watch *this* post get moderated), or at least severely humor impaired. After a half hour or so it seems that moderators actually take time to read posts and moderate funny when appropriate.
:)
Is this the equivalent of "First post!"? "First moderation with no comprehension of what the poster was getting at?" Can we moderate the moderators and get rid of anyone who took the parent's parent seriously? They don't belong here. They're probably Windows users anyhow.