I am constantly amazed by this whole thing. Like it or not science and religion are both belief systems. Depending on what school you attend, you might have a class for each. Religion seems to think it's OK to subvert the scientific method while science (some science teachers anyway) seem to think it's OK to claim that science delivers truth.
You keep your religions texts out of my science class and I'll quit stating theory as truth. Now are you happy? Didn't think so...
My mother suffers from chronic Lyme and has tried most of the latest experimental treatments for Lyme - bar one - hyperbaric chamber. She does have a friend, a young woman who suffers severely from the effects of Lyme, who has undergone hyperbaric treatment. It seems to be the only treatment that works for her. It's usually combined with potent IV antibiotics. Google can help you find more on this.
Also, I was surprised by the folowing statement from the article:
While the chambers are useful, they aren't cheap. One of the chambers at Baystate cost $130,000. The only other medical facility in Massachusetts with a chamber is Massachusetts General Hospital. Norwalk (Conn.) Hospital also has one.
I live in Salt Lake City and I also ski a lot. I primarily ski in the backcountry and I have a fair amount of experience and training associated with mountain travel and snow safety. I would agree that avalanches that catch skiers, boarders, bielers, etc. are almost always triggered by the victem (or other member of the victem's party). This would account for the majority of avalanche fatalities worldwide so I think your point is well taken.
On the subject of off-piste skiers triggering avalanches onto on-piste skiers, I have heard of a couple situations like that here. It's a big deal here as well. It always involves a skier who has entered a closed area which makes matters even worse. Law enforcement takes this kind of thing rather seriously. Ducking a line and entering a closed area will land you in jail rather quickly here, whether you trigger an avalanche or not.
As for the inflating jackets, I have seen in books tests with personal baloons that inflate like airbags to float the victem to the top of an avalanche. Also Black Diamond here in SLC sells the Avalung which allows the wearer to breathe air trapped within the snowpack. I've been told that both of these devices work to some degree (the Avalung especially) but the practicality is often questioned.
I'm not sure why this was modded up as funny but then again it might be true and I just can't see it. The fact that I spent much of last night waiting in a search and rescue trailer waiting for some good friends to be brought out of a canyon after a member of their party was killed in a rather large slide might have something to do with it.
I think KDan has a good point. Very few avalanche fatalities in the lower 48 could be prevented with this device. I do wonder about Alaska, the Himalayas the Alps or other large ranges where slides run great distances though. I have heard of avalanches that start thousands of feet above mountain travelers and even mountain villages. A warnimg of even a few seconds could save lives.
Govenrment seems so concerned about private property rights these days while free speach protection seems to be loosing ground. Why not in this case? Look at it this way. I can't silence the person standing on the sidewalk in front of my house but I surely can kick him out of my yard. Why should my phone be any different?
Not really. The equation is much more complex. Console manufacturers never make money on the hardware. This is by design. They simply want as many usites as possible to be available for their software titles. Given the current losses sustained by MS do you really think that they could possibly make money on more volume? I think their gross margin is negative at this point and every unit sold (actually made) puts them deeper in the red. More sales in a perfect MS world translates to more software sales in the long run but since these units are running Linux then these units contribute nothing to MS. Look at it this way MS is subisdising your entertainment center. How can this be bad?
Because MS looses big money on every XBOX they make. The console business is all about selling GAMES. It's like printers. Give the printer away and make money on the consumable items (mainly cartrages but paper too). Consider this. You buy an XBOX and you run Linux on it. You just caused MS to loose money on the console with no chance of making money on a game. It's no wonder MS wants to stop this kind of thing.
All I'm seeing is posts about how insecure this is. Although I think this could open some holes it really isn't that much worse than some other CGI script. What people fail to realize is that the rights of this script are likely to be near zero. If you don't have shell access then you don't have rights to do much of anything. Thus there really isn't much that you can do with it. For some reason people seem to be thinking "full shell access" and "CGI" at the same time and this really isn't the case. I think this will be useful primarily in situations where you already have shell access, cgi-wrap or suexec, an SSL connection and no access to SSH. For when you're at your new girlfriend's house and you just haven't installed CygWin yet.
Actually what I _really_ wish I could find is a nice, free, secure file transfer program. I use scp but our designer doesn't seem to get it or ssh. I just want a nice gui that he can run on his Mac that is a bit more secure than ftp.
I'm actually surprised that the big media giants haven't announced something like this already (of course they would have to admit they were wrong about the evil nature of P2P). They could sell a set top PVR box with XGb allocated to sharing. They do a Freenet style encrypted network but with a central set of directory servers like Napster. Then they save huge chunks of bandwidth when customer A streams his copy of Attack of the Clones" to customer B across the street. I'm pretty sure AT&T could pull something like this off quite easily but they would have to ease the upstream bandwidth limits. They would get the benefits of P2P (huge library, distributed infrastructure, etc.) with the control of "VOD".
If you want to see a film that attempts to make sense of some of this see Devil's Playground. It's about the period in an Amish youth's life called Rumspringa. It's when 16 year old Amish kids walk on the wild side.
The Amish believe that a person should be baptised only after choosing the Amish church. They also believe that this decision should only be made freely by an informed adult. Rumspringa results in a crazy part of Amish life which is fascinating. These seemingly naive, bonnet wearin', buggy drivin' kids party like rock stars. The outcome is equally as fascinating. Each year these kids battle with harsher and more adicting drugs and more tempting technology but the return rate has never been higher.
I got to see the director's Q&A session at Sundance last year and it was incredible to see this young, intelegent, well educated, beautiful woman talk about her feelings towards the Amish. On one hand she saw them as opressive yet on the other hand she saw a life of loving and belonging that she never saw anyplace else.
I was just reading Petreley's latest article at Linux World where he rambles on about client side Java and how JEdit is the proof that client side Java has arrived. I don't know if I agree although I do think JEdit is a nice editor.
The issue is that the software is trained for the specific voice. Even if someone is there to help, the phrases have to be spoken naturally by the person who will use the software. This process can take many hours to reach any kind of accurate training. It seems that it could be possible to memorize all of the training phrases and use the help of a friend for seeing the start and stop cues but it's going to be a long tedious process.
After that just to protest the use of foreign oil and it's damaging effects on the environment, we're going to crash this fully loaded oil tanker. Oh wait...
It's all about security. I let my boss know whenever a major security patch came out for IE or Outlook. I then let him know whenever a major worm made headlines. Sure we have scanners and sure we catch just about everything (that we know of) but you would be amazed at how creative users can be. I think my boss saw one too many private e-mails or Word docs sent by worms. Anyway, after a while I was required to switch. Users can use IE but are asked to use it only for specific tasks. Sure we have exposure using Mozilla but it's not wide open by default.
First let me say that I'm a big Mandrake fan. I have used it for years and I buy official CDs and I am a Mandrake Club member.
That said, I never like the whole street performer concept. The reason is that it will never provide more than a minimal existance. People will give as long as they feel it's a worthy cause. As soon as people see any form of real financial succes the giving will all but stop. It's just human nature. So I think Mandrake needs to quit pretending that it's enlightened financial model is going to work. I think Mandrake needs to offer more services for a fee. For example US mirrors of Mandrake suck. I can rarely get a connection and when I can the files are outdated. I would be willing to pay well for a descent update service. I want to issue a command, get some feedback about what's going to be installed and proceed. Signed files would be nice too. I'm a big fan of open source but companies need to be smarter about how they are going to make money in an open source market. For some it's not hard but you can't model yourself after closed source companies and you can't expect windfall profits from what is really a non-profit business model. Maybe Mandrake going non-profit is a good idea. I think that's the best idea so far as long as enough money can be raised to support it's excellent programmers and designers.
On the other hand the features that I found useful were handled perfectly by Mandrake.
It does a lot of things (desktop and server related) really well. For example it was the first distro that out of the box worked with my video card, scsi card, sound card, ReiserFS partition and FreeSWan connection. Right now I'm using Gentoo just because it's easier for me to administer but I still think Mandrake deserves a lot more credit than it's given.
Pirated CDs travel on roads too. Oh, and by boat. Trains too. Maybe we should impose a gas tax while we're at it. They should set up toll boths on the interstates!
I love biking in the cold. I even own a set of studded tires for biking on ice and snow. I live near a smallish lake and often ride across it. Great fun.
I've done that. You're right. It's big fun. It's also fairly effecient as long as you can maintain traction and your chain doesn't get too gummed up with snow. I can ride a stock bike (with studs) on ice and snow and actually travel fairly fast. If the ice is not smooth then it's a better form of transport than skating. The bike being used to travel to the south pole is far from what you and I are talking about. It adds so much weight and mechanical complexity that I fail to see any benefit. Maybe I could make roller skates with giant studded tires and get my name in Wired too.
It's this kind of thing that makes me wonder why anyone cares. I bike. I bike a lot. I just can't see why sombody would take a bike to the south pole when hiking or skiing would work so much better? It's like race walking. It's different. It's hard. It's contrived. I can dream up any number of hard, death defying contrived things to do. That doesn't mean they are worth doing. There is a reason this expedition is self funded.
I modified my contract to be very specific. I can't directly compete against my company using information that I could not have obtained someplace else. So true secrets of the company are protected but I can actually go work for a competitor but I can't divulge trade secrets. How would my current employer know? Most likely nobody would know but right now a former employee is building a product line for a competitor using our artwork, copy, vendors, customer list, etc. That former employee and the new employer are in a bad spot legally and they know it. What I like is that my current employer is protected from blatant violations like this but we'll likely avoid the silly battles that go on when an employee signs away every right to employment. Yea, I know these contracts don't hold up in most states but that doesn't keep people from wasting a lot of time, money and energy on them.
Create a points system based on method of entry and create a rating system (open, hardened, impossible, etc.) for targets. Scores are created by combining the various entry levels with the various target ratings. Targets could be selected by the audiencs, the teams or the event coordinators. Targets could be published before hand or not.
Granted this would be shut down so fast. All involved would be sent to Guantanamo Bay for being terrorists but it would be _really_ fun to watch. I also think that it could be done without causing real damage and in fact would _increase_ security. It would still be shut down though.
Slashdot Mirror
I am constantly amazed by this whole thing. Like it or not science and religion are both belief systems. Depending on what school you attend, you might have a class for each. Religion seems to think it's OK to subvert the scientific method while science (some science teachers anyway) seem to think it's OK to claim that science delivers truth.
You keep your religions texts out of my science class and I'll quit stating theory as truth. Now are you happy? Didn't think so...
My mother suffers from chronic Lyme and has tried most of the latest experimental treatments for Lyme - bar one - hyperbaric chamber. She does have a friend, a young woman who suffers severely from the effects of Lyme, who has undergone hyperbaric treatment. It seems to be the only treatment that works for her. It's usually combined with potent IV antibiotics. Google can help you find more on this.
Also, I was surprised by the folowing statement from the article:
While the chambers are useful, they aren't cheap. One of the chambers at Baystate cost $130,000. The only other medical facility in Massachusetts with a chamber is Massachusetts General Hospital. Norwalk (Conn.) Hospital also has one.
$130,000 is cheap for a medical device.
I live in Salt Lake City and I also ski a lot. I primarily ski in the backcountry and I have a fair amount of experience and training associated with mountain travel and snow safety. I would agree that avalanches that catch skiers, boarders, bielers, etc. are almost always triggered by the victem (or other member of the victem's party). This would account for the majority of avalanche fatalities worldwide so I think your point is well taken.
On the subject of off-piste skiers triggering avalanches onto on-piste skiers, I have heard of a couple situations like that here. It's a big deal here as well. It always involves a skier who has entered a closed area which makes matters even worse. Law enforcement takes this kind of thing rather seriously. Ducking a line and entering a closed area will land you in jail rather quickly here, whether you trigger an avalanche or not.
As for the inflating jackets, I have seen in books tests with personal baloons that inflate like airbags to float the victem to the top of an avalanche. Also Black Diamond here in SLC sells the Avalung which allows the wearer to breathe air trapped within the snowpack. I've been told that both of these devices work to some degree (the Avalung especially) but the practicality is often questioned.
I'm not sure why this was modded up as funny but then again it might be true and I just can't see it. The fact that I spent much of last night waiting in a search and rescue trailer waiting for some good friends to be brought out of a canyon after a member of their party was killed in a rather large slide might have something to do with it.
I think KDan has a good point. Very few avalanche fatalities in the lower 48 could be prevented with this device. I do wonder about Alaska, the Himalayas the Alps or other large ranges where slides run great distances though. I have heard of avalanches that start thousands of feet above mountain travelers and even mountain villages. A warnimg of even a few seconds could save lives.
Govenrment seems so concerned about private property rights these days while free speach protection seems to be loosing ground. Why not in this case? Look at it this way. I can't silence the person standing on the sidewalk in front of my house but I surely can kick him out of my yard. Why should my phone be any different?
I heard it as:
Lotteries are taxes for the math impaired.
Not really. The equation is much more complex. Console manufacturers never make money on the hardware. This is by design. They simply want as many usites as possible to be available for their software titles. Given the current losses sustained by MS do you really think that they could possibly make money on more volume? I think their gross margin is negative at this point and every unit sold (actually made) puts them deeper in the red. More sales in a perfect MS world translates to more software sales in the long run but since these units are running Linux then these units contribute nothing to MS. Look at it this way MS is subisdising your entertainment center. How can this be bad?
Why?
Because MS looses big money on every XBOX they make. The console business is all about selling GAMES. It's like printers. Give the printer away and make money on the consumable items (mainly cartrages but paper too). Consider this. You buy an XBOX and you run Linux on it. You just caused MS to loose money on the console with no chance of making money on a game. It's no wonder MS wants to stop this kind of thing.
All I'm seeing is posts about how insecure this is. Although I think this could open some holes it really isn't that much worse than some other CGI script. What people fail to realize is that the rights of this script are likely to be near zero. If you don't have shell access then you don't have rights to do much of anything. Thus there really isn't much that you can do with it. For some reason people seem to be thinking "full shell access" and "CGI" at the same time and this really isn't the case. I think this will be useful primarily in situations where you already have shell access, cgi-wrap or suexec, an SSL connection and no access to SSH. For when you're at your new girlfriend's house and you just haven't installed CygWin yet.
Actually what I _really_ wish I could find is a nice, free, secure file transfer program. I use scp but our designer doesn't seem to get it or ssh. I just want a nice gui that he can run on his Mac that is a bit more secure than ftp.
I'm actually surprised that the big media giants haven't announced something like this already (of course they would have to admit they were wrong about the evil nature of P2P). They could sell a set top PVR box with XGb allocated to sharing. They do a Freenet style encrypted network but with a central set of directory servers like Napster. Then they save huge chunks of bandwidth when customer A streams his copy of Attack of the Clones" to customer B across the street. I'm pretty sure AT&T could pull something like this off quite easily but they would have to ease the upstream bandwidth limits. They would get the benefits of P2P (huge library, distributed infrastructure, etc.) with the control of "VOD".
If you want to see a film that attempts to make sense of some of this see Devil's Playground. It's about the period in an Amish youth's life called Rumspringa. It's when 16 year old Amish kids walk on the wild side.
The Amish believe that a person should be baptised only after choosing the Amish church. They also believe that this decision should only be made freely by an informed adult. Rumspringa results in a crazy part of Amish life which is fascinating. These seemingly naive, bonnet wearin', buggy drivin' kids party like rock stars. The outcome is equally as fascinating. Each year these kids battle with harsher and more adicting drugs and more tempting technology but the return rate has never been higher.
I got to see the director's Q&A session at Sundance last year and it was incredible to see this young, intelegent, well educated, beautiful woman talk about her feelings towards the Amish. On one hand she saw them as opressive yet on the other hand she saw a life of loving and belonging that she never saw anyplace else.
I was just reading Petreley's latest article at Linux World where he rambles on about client side Java and how JEdit is the proof that client side Java has arrived. I don't know if I agree although I do think JEdit is a nice editor.
And who would you elect to run this electrinic government infrastructure?
The issue is that the software is trained for the specific voice. Even if someone is there to help, the phrases have to be spoken naturally by the person who will use the software. This process can take many hours to reach any kind of accurate training. It seems that it could be possible to memorize all of the training phrases and use the help of a friend for seeing the start and stop cues but it's going to be a long tedious process.
After that just to protest the use of foreign oil and it's damaging effects on the environment, we're going to crash this fully loaded oil tanker. Oh wait...
It's all about security. I let my boss know whenever a major security patch came out for IE or Outlook. I then let him know whenever a major worm made headlines. Sure we have scanners and sure we catch just about everything (that we know of) but you would be amazed at how creative users can be. I think my boss saw one too many private e-mails or Word docs sent by worms. Anyway, after a while I was required to switch. Users can use IE but are asked to use it only for specific tasks. Sure we have exposure using Mozilla but it's not wide open by default.
Alternatively a cheaper solution would be to use AutoIt which isn't capable of recording but it is very easy to use and works quite well.
I tried this. For some reason it was _really_ slow. I have many apps installed this way but it did not work well for Mozilla.
First let me say that I'm a big Mandrake fan. I have used it for years and I buy official CDs and I am a Mandrake Club member.
That said, I never like the whole street performer concept. The reason is that it will never provide more than a minimal existance. People will give as long as they feel it's a worthy cause. As soon as people see any form of real financial succes the giving will all but stop. It's just human nature. So I think Mandrake needs to quit pretending that it's enlightened financial model is going to work. I think Mandrake needs to offer more services for a fee. For example US mirrors of Mandrake suck. I can rarely get a connection and when I can the files are outdated. I would be willing to pay well for a descent update service. I want to issue a command, get some feedback about what's going to be installed and proceed. Signed files would be nice too. I'm a big fan of open source but companies need to be smarter about how they are going to make money in an open source market. For some it's not hard but you can't model yourself after closed source companies and you can't expect windfall profits from what is really a non-profit business model. Maybe Mandrake going non-profit is a good idea. I think that's the best idea so far as long as enough money can be raised to support it's excellent programmers and designers.
On the other hand the features that I found useful were handled perfectly by Mandrake.
It does a lot of things (desktop and server related) really well. For example it was the first distro that out of the box worked with my video card, scsi card, sound card, ReiserFS partition and FreeSWan connection. Right now I'm using Gentoo just because it's easier for me to administer but I still think Mandrake deserves a lot more credit than it's given.
Pirated CDs travel on roads too. Oh, and by boat. Trains too. Maybe we should impose a gas tax while we're at it. They should set up toll boths on the interstates!
I love biking in the cold. I even own a set of studded tires for biking on ice and snow. I live near a smallish lake and often ride across it. Great fun.
I've done that. You're right. It's big fun. It's also fairly effecient as long as you can maintain traction and your chain doesn't get too gummed up with snow. I can ride a stock bike (with studs) on ice and snow and actually travel fairly fast. If the ice is not smooth then it's a better form of transport than skating. The bike being used to travel to the south pole is far from what you and I are talking about. It adds so much weight and mechanical complexity that I fail to see any benefit. Maybe I could make roller skates with giant studded tires and get my name in Wired too.
It's this kind of thing that makes me wonder why anyone cares. I bike. I bike a lot. I just can't see why sombody would take a bike to the south pole when hiking or skiing would work so much better? It's like race walking. It's different. It's hard. It's contrived. I can dream up any number of hard, death defying contrived things to do. That doesn't mean they are worth doing. There is a reason this expedition is self funded.
I modified my contract to be very specific. I can't directly compete against my company using information that I could not have obtained someplace else. So true secrets of the company are protected but I can actually go work for a competitor but I can't divulge trade secrets. How would my current employer know? Most likely nobody would know but right now a former employee is building a product line for a competitor using our artwork, copy, vendors, customer list, etc. That former employee and the new employer are in a bad spot legally and they know it. What I like is that my current employer is protected from blatant violations like this but we'll likely avoid the silly battles that go on when an employee signs away every right to employment. Yea, I know these contracts don't hold up in most states but that doesn't keep people from wasting a lot of time, money and energy on them.
Use real targets.
Create a points system based on method of entry and create a rating system (open, hardened, impossible, etc.) for targets. Scores are created by combining the various entry levels with the various target ratings. Targets could be selected by the audiencs, the teams or the event coordinators. Targets could be published before hand or not.
Granted this would be shut down so fast. All involved would be sent to Guantanamo Bay for being terrorists but it would be _really_ fun to watch. I also think that it could be done without causing real damage and in fact would _increase_ security. It would still be shut down though.