Why the hell would anyone think that? This isn't new; they just got caught. It happens, now and then. NBC wired domestic trucks with explosives to demonstrate the explosiveness of side saddle fuel tanks. The NYT had a reporter publishing eye-witness accounts of tragedies that were pure fabrications.
If some CBS exec steps on Rather's neck he'll only be about 3 decades late. Rather and his ilk have been broadcasting leftist propaganda long before the typical/.er was conceived.
Not so fast. Print the th from Word and you see the th raised PRECISELY as seen in the CBS memos.
Game over.
Does anyone have any idea why?
on
ORM Goes Open Source
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Abject market glut perhaps? Everyone and his brother has some form of ORM solution in various stages of infancy.
There will be a shakeout at some point. What matters then is market share. They are thinking; "open source gets us lots of market share fast and cheap." Pretty smart of them.
ORM makes my head hurt. The reason for the proliferation of "solutions" is that the problem is damn hard. Trying to abstract the "relational" model and it's various sundry details into "objects" that have the same fidelity as "normal" objects seems like a fool's errand. I see all this ORM emerging from every conceivable source and think "white elephant." At best the problem is sufficiently difficult that I'm certain most of the "solutions" we've come up with to-date were obsolete the day they were released.
The statement you quote is generically correct. I conclude based on my read of the entry that the developer is "over his head". He, and many like him, have a dependence on elaborate debugging tools and often claim that without these tools they are unable to fix problems. He already has sufficient diagnostic tools available to him and he either doesn't know about them or they've been obscured by bad code.
By design, Word will open an infinite number of files (this implements so called unlimited undo.) This is crap design. Damn near every OS in existence imposes some limit on open files. Even if there is no "built in" arbitrary limit provided by the OS, RAM will eventually be exhausted just keeping track of open files. Whoever failed to consider this is the origin of the problem; everything that has happened since is his/her fault.
Now, discovering that there are limits to open files is what the blog entry was about. The first clue eventually appeared only after someone managed to reproduce the problem in a debugger. This took a long time. Also, the altered state of running the app inside the debugger further obfuscated the problem (read the blog entry.) Perhaps it would have taken less time if simpler tools had been used...
One can easily observe OS resource usage of a running application without elaborate debugging environments. Some OSes make this easier than others. The blog entry author recalls a moment when a discovery was made by someone else using "some tools" in OS-X. He doesn't specify what these tools are. He probably doesn't know (due to abject dependence on his debugger.) In Linux I can observe file handle usage with tools that include ls and cat. In Windows I could use Sysinternals Process Explorer (a non-microsoft tool, btw) to do the same thing.
Simple observation of open files using non-debugging environment tools might have led someone to ask; "Why is Word attempting to hold <<insert large number>> files open...?"
Further, the error message displayed by Word; "Disk full." indicates another sad failure. The disk wasn't full at all. It is my guess that Word uses some generic catch-all whenever a file system operation fails. Can't write to a file? Disk Full. Can't open a file? Disk Full. etc, etc. The catch-all manages to isolate a subset of possible causes and dumps the rest into "Disk full".
Type "man open" into the shell of any POSIX like system that provides manual pages. Look for ENFILE. This is the error code you will see if you write a program, like Word, that opens too many files. If you then have your program display an accurate error message, whoever ends up maintaining your little miracle will spend fewer months fixing it. I've no doubt Windows API provides similar.
Bad design, bad coding and low-skill maintainers. Thus mickysoft.
Wrong time of year...
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...as about half the French corporate workforce is on vacation right now. Probably not the best season to try to advise them.
In my 8 years as an Oracle DBA I don't think i've ever seen a corrupt index. Saying that, I don't even know how you could force a index to get corrupted so I don't think were seeing all the info here.
I have. As the original poster said, there is usually a DBA involved.
You want to see Oracle corrupt something? Easy. Just install a half dozen oracle homes, from 8.0.6 through 9i, use any random version of sqlplus, sqldba that happens to be in the path to do things like create new tablespaces on whatever instance you happen to need to work on. Screw around with every init parameter there is, including undocumented parameters you read about on forums. Bounce the database a lot, and if it balks just kill the processes. Oh yeah, distributed transactions are fun too; wire up some materialized views over a international VPN connection and ignore hung transactions for a long time. Be sure to bounce the instance (using the aforementioned KILL -9) when Oracle tries to apply the transactions.
I guarantee you will witness a corrupt index in short order. If you're lucky that's all you'll see. It's a credit to Oracle that their product can withstand such ineptitude and still function.
Like you, I've never been a party to corrupting something in an Oracle instance. I have seen it, however, and I know the fools involved. That they only managed to corrupt a couple blocks and not eradicate entire tablespaces is only good fortune. Either way, 99% of "corrupt" whatever is DBA induced; Oracle is by non-amateurs, for non-amateurs and does not corrupt things willy nilly.
NASA is a busy place. Let's see how many possible uses NASA may have for large scale computers I can think of off the top of my head.
Simulating high speed aerodynamics; things like mach 10 air breathing jets are a lot cheaper to simulate. Recent results seem to indicate that this method works, too.
Multibody orbital mechanics; As I understand it, any gravitational system greater than a certain number of bodies requires simulation to predict. Essentially the system must be calculated empirically because it defies any equation. I'm no physicist so I doubt that this is a proper description of the issue.
Signal analysis; NASA does queer things with signals because you can discover surprising things by analyzing large quantities of signal data. Only the NSA rivals NASA here. Measuring the speed of an object at astronomical distances or the thickness and composition of the rings of Saturn are examples of what signal analysis can do.
General Astronomy; Searching through sky surveys to identify objects that fit patterns is a common task. This sort of analysis routinely reveals things such as near earth orbit objects or extra solar planets. A big challenge contemporary astronomers face is processing very (!) large data sets; often they can collect orders of magnitude more data than they can study. I have no doubt there are large data sets that have yet to be studied fully for lack of computational capacity.
I'm public school educated white trash hick from the rust belt and speculating about the possible uses for large scale computation at NASA pose zero challenge for me. What's wrong with you?
the only surviving motivation... is the ideology of adventure
The "ideology of adventure"? As opposed to what?
Nice way to trivialize perhaps the only justification for our existence. Why are we here if not to travel and discover? The universe granted us enough awareness to perceive that there might be something worthwhile over the next hill. It seems to me we have a duty to adventure; it's our job!
That, or we could just hang back and breed. Should be fairly plain that one 8k mile dia. ball of rock is not sufficient for that to go on indefinitely.
If I compile a program as a 64 bit executable I'm going to need 64 bit libraries to run it. One can imagine creating some sort of shim to allow my 64 bit binary to work with 32 bit libraries. Microsoft did a lot of this during the transition from 16 bits to 32 bits; you may remember the term "thunking" and the mess of DLLs with "32" embedded somewhere in the file name. That's what all that was about; making old apps (16 bit) work with new libs (32 bit) and vise versa.
So the problem you're left with if you want to run both 32 and 64 bit software (sans a "shim") is; where to put two versions of almost every library. The LSB specifies where to put stuff in the file system. It does not account for the need to handle alternate compiled libs, so Debian (and others,) have to invent things non-LSB compliant to make it work. Thus the debate.
It is ironic that Debian isn't trumpeting this; If your platform is 100% open software you should be able to recompile everything 64 bit and move on. However, you will be stuck if you try to run someone's closed binary 32 bit only stuff. Doesn't that validate their whole agenda?
Isn't AMD-64 backwards-compatible with ordinary x86 code?
Yes, but 32 bit software isn't forward compatible with 64 bit software and vise versa. AMD-64 does not implement a magic thunking feature to provide this (and it shouldn't.)
Ultimately our linkers will need the brains added to know how to select the correct libraries to suit the executable (which must already be the case since it is possible now.) Where the alternate compiled objects live on the filesystem will also have to be figured out. When the LSB gets around to figuring this out our little Debian drama will end.
This whole stupid process has occurred on every platform that has been around long enough to have had to transition from one word length to another. "Linux" probably won't suffer the hell of magic "thunking" crap that Microsoft has and will foist on the world (I wonder if the long beta period for 64 bit Windows is the result of some form of unspoken collective shame, because whatever solution they come up with this time around is likely to be just as butt ugly as the last time.) But in the mean time Windows will "just work" and you won't ever hear about the difference between 32 and 64 bit binary objects, unless you're a coder...
CONNECT BY goes back to at least 7.1.x. Oracle has handled hierarchical data for a long, long time.
...the database really still has to make all the of hierarchical passes...
Thus index organized tables. The engine picks up all or most of the document in a small number (1?) of physical reads and the rest happens in RAM.
...In an XML database, this is one query, one transaction...
XQuery/XPath/XWhatever is going to end up just another Oracle "value add" to the enterprise edition server. Much of it is already there. Look into it. You may find that you can build your app on the defacto standard DBMS and before Oracle or Microsoft buys whoever you're dealing with now.:)
There are very powerful forces that are threatened by the development of Linux, and they will fight to the death. Hired character assassins are just the beginning.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Since your actually funded and can, therefore, do better than fabricated pringle-can antenna's and 802.11, I recommend this. Grown-up wireless that works very well. 802.11 is an adaptation of Ethernet to microwave that does not scale. Canopy was created to do what you want to do.
It is very necessary, if only to consume enough usable space on keyboards (especially laptops) to prevent Microsoft from inventing an "XP" key, or perhaps a "Longhorn" key. The fools that designed legacy keyboards did not anticipate a monopoly software company with the market force to "create" a new key for one of their products. Had they, I assume they would have provided Meta, Hyper and a few other alts to constrain such "innovation".
I can't believe we fund engineers and scientists to operate and monitor a spacecraft named after some dead white guy. There are people sTaRvInG!!!! Why aren't they working on that instead?!?!!11 The SUV emissions are destroying the planet with GLOBAL WARMING you fools!!!!
Someone help me here, I'm too lazy to look it up. Wouldn't this bill have to be signed by Gov. Ahhh-noold? He's probably looking forward to giving this joke a good, swift kick in the pants, unless he needs to buy off some members to get what he needs to fix the budget...
(I'm sorry, but that's how the right-leaning folks in this nation will interpret it.)
Aside from being agnostic I'll admit to being about as far "right-leaning" as one gets without actually wearing a firearm. As such, lemme put here in for my kind...
My initial interpretation is that middle east strife is a good thing; it provides these academics with opportunities to be heard on the topic of energy. These folks, specifically, appear to have something worth hearing.
More to the immediate point; who is going to throw the proverbial wrench into the works? Don't fret too much about the right wing; figure out how to make money with the solution and they'll fall in line. Worry about the left. Do you really think the left will allow the Sonora desert to be drastically altered by evil corporations so the US can continue to use non-bikes for transportation while "disengaging" from the middle east which will inevitably implode with violent consequences when we stop depending on them for oil? That's rather naive.
The left will impede any such activity with full vigor. Solving the energy problem without also dealing with Bush, Christianity, western culture, smoking, guns, meat, cars and rich people will have no great advocates on the left. In fact, if it allows the above to persist while solving the energy problem, they are obligated to oppose it.
As for me, I fully support the effort and wish them great success getting funded!
10,000 square miles isn't that big; a 117 mile diameter pool. You could build that somewhere in Nebraska and no one would notice for years aside from airline pilots.
Sounds good to me. Supplant oil production with algae and we can stop attempting to protect middle east oil resources from theocratic dictators. The only reason civilization still persists there is to maintain enough control to pipe out the oil...
I just don't understand why the Greens aren't all over this.... if they don't embrace this idea, it seems likely to me that their true motivation is less about "loving Nature" and more about "hating humans".
It is about hating humans. Widespread nuclear energy might lead to allowing rich, fat, selfish westerners to not "come to Jesus" and reform their evil ways. They wouldn't need to ride bikes and fret over solar panels mounted to their adobe hovels. Instead they may only need to buy large rolling batteries for cars and enjoy all else pretty much as is, big-macs and all.
This is an unacceptable result. So, when Lovelock proposes something that might be a viable solution to the energy problem without also condemning modern lifestyles, meat, Bush, corporations, smoking, Christianity or anything else, he gets thrown to the wolves.
There may be some merit in attempting to quantify codec properties. Don't think these tests will provide any useful answers. Whatever value the results have will be squandered by the incessant blather of countless audiophiles. They will prattle on with their subjective claims and anecdotes until any credible results fade into the noise. Left with nothing credible on which to base decisions, those who use codecs to publish sound will consider cost/profit and little else.
The purpose of being an audiophile is to discover/invent/imagine minute differences in noise. There is no "best" speaker, codec, bit rate, circuit or recording method. Live performances are flawed because the auditorium will not have been built 2 days prior based on the latest theories of sound propagation and is, therefore, obsolete. No combination of equipment or technology will ever satisfy even the most tolerant audiophile.
I clearly remember the awe we once had for the phenomenal quality of 128Kbps CD quality recordings. It was called "near perfect" and "almost live." Today, 128Kbps is considered laughable crap suitable only for fools that don't know better.
The whole thing is a pseudoscience wannabe filled to the brim with vendors lauding useless gear before gullible fools. I will not participate.
...but I mean in 400 years how is anyone going to know what we were like...
What tiny fraction of our history is actually preserved in a useful manner will be misinterpreted and spun in ways you can't possibly imagine. 400 years from now you will be known as an ignorant fool guilty of untold crimes against lord knows whom. This will be true regardless of the quality of the archive used to figure you out.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd think a major News network...
/.er was conceived.
Why the hell would anyone think that? This isn't new; they just got caught. It happens, now and then. NBC wired domestic trucks with explosives to demonstrate the explosiveness of side saddle fuel tanks. The NYT had a reporter publishing eye-witness accounts of tragedies that were pure fabrications.
If some CBS exec steps on Rather's neck he'll only be about 3 decades late. Rather and his ilk have been broadcasting leftist propaganda long before the typical
Give it up, folks.
Not so fast. Print the th from Word and you see the th raised PRECISELY as seen in the CBS memos.
Game over.
Abject market glut perhaps? Everyone and his brother has some form of ORM solution in various stages of infancy.
There will be a shakeout at some point. What matters then is market share. They are thinking; "open source gets us lots of market share fast and cheap." Pretty smart of them.
ORM makes my head hurt. The reason for the proliferation of "solutions" is that the problem is damn hard. Trying to abstract the "relational" model and it's various sundry details into "objects" that have the same fidelity as "normal" objects seems like a fool's errand. I see all this ORM emerging from every conceivable source and think "white elephant." At best the problem is sufficiently difficult that I'm certain most of the "solutions" we've come up with to-date were obsolete the day they were released.
Check out their logs...
...note the recent blip?
Coral Statistics
The key problem is expressed in very few words
The statement you quote is generically correct. I conclude based on my read of the entry that the developer is "over his head". He, and many like him, have a dependence on elaborate debugging tools and often claim that without these tools they are unable to fix problems. He already has sufficient diagnostic tools available to him and he either doesn't know about them or they've been obscured by bad code.
By design, Word will open an infinite number of files (this implements so called unlimited undo.) This is crap design. Damn near every OS in existence imposes some limit on open files. Even if there is no "built in" arbitrary limit provided by the OS, RAM will eventually be exhausted just keeping track of open files. Whoever failed to consider this is the origin of the problem; everything that has happened since is his/her fault.
Now, discovering that there are limits to open files is what the blog entry was about. The first clue eventually appeared only after someone managed to reproduce the problem in a debugger. This took a long time. Also, the altered state of running the app inside the debugger further obfuscated the problem (read the blog entry.) Perhaps it would have taken less time if simpler tools had been used...
One can easily observe OS resource usage of a running application without elaborate debugging environments. Some OSes make this easier than others. The blog entry author recalls a moment when a discovery was made by someone else using "some tools" in OS-X. He doesn't specify what these tools are. He probably doesn't know (due to abject dependence on his debugger.) In Linux I can observe file handle usage with tools that include ls and cat. In Windows I could use Sysinternals Process Explorer (a non-microsoft tool, btw) to do the same thing.
Simple observation of open files using non-debugging environment tools might have led someone to ask; "Why is Word attempting to hold <<insert large number>> files open...?"
Further, the error message displayed by Word; "Disk full." indicates another sad failure. The disk wasn't full at all. It is my guess that Word uses some generic catch-all whenever a file system operation fails. Can't write to a file? Disk Full. Can't open a file? Disk Full. etc, etc. The catch-all manages to isolate a subset of possible causes and dumps the rest into "Disk full".
Type "man open" into the shell of any POSIX like system that provides manual pages. Look for ENFILE. This is the error code you will see if you write a program, like Word, that opens too many files. If you then have your program display an accurate error message, whoever ends up maintaining your little miracle will spend fewer months fixing it. I've no doubt Windows API provides similar.
Bad design, bad coding and low-skill maintainers. Thus mickysoft.
...as about half the French corporate workforce is on vacation right now. Probably not the best season to try to advise them.
In my 8 years as an Oracle DBA I don't think i've ever seen a corrupt index. Saying that, I don't even know how you could force a index to get corrupted so I don't think were seeing all the info here.
I have. As the original poster said, there is usually a DBA involved.
You want to see Oracle corrupt something? Easy. Just install a half dozen oracle homes, from 8.0.6 through 9i, use any random version of sqlplus, sqldba that happens to be in the path to do things like create new tablespaces on whatever instance you happen to need to work on. Screw around with every init parameter there is, including undocumented parameters you read about on forums. Bounce the database a lot, and if it balks just kill the processes. Oh yeah, distributed transactions are fun too; wire up some materialized views over a international VPN connection and ignore hung transactions for a long time. Be sure to bounce the instance (using the aforementioned KILL -9) when Oracle tries to apply the transactions.
I guarantee you will witness a corrupt index in short order. If you're lucky that's all you'll see. It's a credit to Oracle that their product can withstand such ineptitude and still function.
Like you, I've never been a party to corrupting something in an Oracle instance. I have seen it, however, and I know the fools involved. That they only managed to corrupt a couple blocks and not eradicate entire tablespaces is only good fortune. Either way, 99% of "corrupt" whatever is DBA induced; Oracle is by non-amateurs, for non-amateurs and does not corrupt things willy nilly.
NASA is a busy place. Let's see how many possible uses NASA may have for large scale computers I can think of off the top of my head.
Simulating high speed aerodynamics; things like mach 10 air breathing jets are a lot cheaper to simulate. Recent results seem to indicate that this method works, too.
Multibody orbital mechanics; As I understand it, any gravitational system greater than a certain number of bodies requires simulation to predict. Essentially the system must be calculated empirically because it defies any equation. I'm no physicist so I doubt that this is a proper description of the issue.
Signal analysis; NASA does queer things with signals because you can discover surprising things by analyzing large quantities of signal data. Only the NSA rivals NASA here. Measuring the speed of an object at astronomical distances or the thickness and composition of the rings of Saturn are examples of what signal analysis can do.
General Astronomy; Searching through sky surveys to identify objects that fit patterns is a common task. This sort of analysis routinely reveals things such as near earth orbit objects or extra solar planets. A big challenge contemporary astronomers face is processing very (!) large data sets; often they can collect orders of magnitude more data than they can study. I have no doubt there are large data sets that have yet to be studied fully for lack of computational capacity.
I'm public school educated white trash hick from the rust belt and speculating about the possible uses for large scale computation at NASA pose zero challenge for me. What's wrong with you?
the only surviving motivation ... is the ideology of adventure
The "ideology of adventure"? As opposed to what?
Nice way to trivialize perhaps the only justification for our existence. Why are we here if not to travel and discover? The universe granted us enough awareness to perceive that there might be something worthwhile over the next hill. It seems to me we have a duty to adventure; it's our job!
That, or we could just hang back and breed. Should be fairly plain that one 8k mile dia. ball of rock is not sufficient for that to go on indefinitely.
What exactly is the problem with LSB compliance?
If I compile a program as a 64 bit executable I'm going to need 64 bit libraries to run it. One can imagine creating some sort of shim to allow my 64 bit binary to work with 32 bit libraries. Microsoft did a lot of this during the transition from 16 bits to 32 bits; you may remember the term "thunking" and the mess of DLLs with "32" embedded somewhere in the file name. That's what all that was about; making old apps (16 bit) work with new libs (32 bit) and vise versa.
So the problem you're left with if you want to run both 32 and 64 bit software (sans a "shim") is; where to put two versions of almost every library. The LSB specifies where to put stuff in the file system. It does not account for the need to handle alternate compiled libs, so Debian (and others,) have to invent things non-LSB compliant to make it work. Thus the debate.
It is ironic that Debian isn't trumpeting this; If your platform is 100% open software you should be able to recompile everything 64 bit and move on. However, you will be stuck if you try to run someone's closed binary 32 bit only stuff. Doesn't that validate their whole agenda?
Isn't AMD-64 backwards-compatible with ordinary x86 code?
Yes, but 32 bit software isn't forward compatible with 64 bit software and vise versa. AMD-64 does not implement a magic thunking feature to provide this (and it shouldn't.)
Ultimately our linkers will need the brains added to know how to select the correct libraries to suit the executable (which must already be the case since it is possible now.) Where the alternate compiled objects live on the filesystem will also have to be figured out. When the LSB gets around to figuring this out our little Debian drama will end.
This whole stupid process has occurred on every platform that has been around long enough to have had to transition from one word length to another. "Linux" probably won't suffer the hell of magic "thunking" crap that Microsoft has and will foist on the world (I wonder if the long beta period for 64 bit Windows is the result of some form of unspoken collective shame, because whatever solution they come up with this time around is likely to be just as butt ugly as the last time.) But in the mean time Windows will "just work" and you won't ever hear about the difference between 32 and 64 bit binary objects, unless you're a coder...
...CONNECT BY is a new Oracle 10g...
...the database really still has to make all the of hierarchical passes...
...In an XML database, this is one query, one transaction...
:)
CONNECT BY goes back to at least 7.1.x. Oracle has handled hierarchical data for a long, long time.
Thus index organized tables. The engine picks up all or most of the document in a small number (1?) of physical reads and the rest happens in RAM.
XQuery/XPath/XWhatever is going to end up just another Oracle "value add" to the enterprise edition server. Much of it is already there. Look into it. You may find that you can build your app on the defacto standard DBMS and before Oracle or Microsoft buys whoever you're dealing with now.
SCO has, for some time, told anyone who will listen that McDonalds cash registers run SCO Unix. Micky-dees is one of their largest customers.
Correction: WAS one of their largest customers!
When it rains it pours, eh?
*ahem*
/dev/null {} \;
find . -name '*.c' -exec grep TODO
Any code monkey that has dealt with >1000 lines of C has probably done that. I don't need to look to guess the Linux kernel has a few...
There are very powerful forces that are threatened by the development of Linux, and they will fight to the death. Hired character assassins are just the beginning.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
- Mahatma Gandhi
Bring it!
Since your actually funded and can, therefore, do better than fabricated pringle-can antenna's and 802.11, I recommend this. Grown-up wireless that works very well. 802.11 is an adaptation of Ethernet to microwave that does not scale. Canopy was created to do what you want to do.
It is very necessary, if only to consume enough usable space on keyboards (especially laptops) to prevent Microsoft from inventing an "XP" key, or perhaps a "Longhorn" key. The fools that designed legacy keyboards did not anticipate a monopoly software company with the market force to "create" a new key for one of their products. Had they, I assume they would have provided Meta, Hyper and a few other alts to constrain such "innovation".
I can't believe we fund engineers and scientists to operate and monitor a spacecraft named after some dead white guy. There are people sTaRvInG!!!! Why aren't they working on that instead?!?!!11 The SUV emissions are destroying the planet with GLOBAL WARMING you fools!!!!
Global warming - I don't care whether...
Were talking about experimental robots that float around on an air-hockey table. Somehow, this guy manages to end up ranting about "global warming."
Isn't it about time for you enviro-spaz activist types to take your hysteria elsewhere? Go find a political or environmental site and rant there.
Thanks.
Someone help me here, I'm too lazy to look it up. Wouldn't this bill have to be signed by Gov. Ahhh-noold? He's probably looking forward to giving this joke a good, swift kick in the pants, unless he needs to buy off some members to get what he needs to fix the budget...
(I'm sorry, but that's how the right-leaning folks in this nation will interpret it.)
Aside from being agnostic I'll admit to being about as far "right-leaning" as one gets without actually wearing a firearm. As such, lemme put here in for my kind...
My initial interpretation is that middle east strife is a good thing; it provides these academics with opportunities to be heard on the topic of energy. These folks, specifically, appear to have something worth hearing.
More to the immediate point; who is going to throw the proverbial wrench into the works? Don't fret too much about the right wing; figure out how to make money with the solution and they'll fall in line. Worry about the left. Do you really think the left will allow the Sonora desert to be drastically altered by evil corporations so the US can continue to use non-bikes for transportation while "disengaging" from the middle east which will inevitably implode with violent consequences when we stop depending on them for oil? That's rather naive.
The left will impede any such activity with full vigor. Solving the energy problem without also dealing with Bush, Christianity, western culture, smoking, guns, meat, cars and rich people will have no great advocates on the left. In fact, if it allows the above to persist while solving the energy problem, they are obligated to oppose it.
As for me, I fully support the effort and wish them great success getting funded!
10,000 square miles isn't that big; a 117 mile diameter pool. You could build that somewhere in Nebraska and no one would notice for years aside from airline pilots.
Sounds good to me. Supplant oil production with algae and we can stop attempting to protect middle east oil resources from theocratic dictators. The only reason civilization still persists there is to maintain enough control to pipe out the oil...
I just don't understand why the Greens aren't all over this.... if they don't embrace this idea, it seems likely to me that their true motivation is less about "loving Nature" and more about "hating humans".
It is about hating humans. Widespread nuclear energy might lead to allowing rich, fat, selfish westerners to not "come to Jesus" and reform their evil ways. They wouldn't need to ride bikes and fret over solar panels mounted to their adobe hovels. Instead they may only need to buy large rolling batteries for cars and enjoy all else pretty much as is, big-macs and all.
This is an unacceptable result. So, when Lovelock proposes something that might be a viable solution to the energy problem without also condemning modern lifestyles, meat, Bush, corporations, smoking, Christianity or anything else, he gets thrown to the wolves.
...those that question things like the abuse of prisoners and civilian casulties...
Impossible. There are no such people. Before one might attempt to question anything about the Bush administration, Rummy has them disappeared...
Right?
There may be some merit in attempting to quantify codec properties. Don't think these tests will provide any useful answers. Whatever value the results have will be squandered by the incessant blather of countless audiophiles. They will prattle on with their subjective claims and anecdotes until any credible results fade into the noise. Left with nothing credible on which to base decisions, those who use codecs to publish sound will consider cost/profit and little else.
The purpose of being an audiophile is to discover/invent/imagine minute differences in noise. There is no "best" speaker, codec, bit rate, circuit or recording method. Live performances are flawed because the auditorium will not have been built 2 days prior based on the latest theories of sound propagation and is, therefore, obsolete. No combination of equipment or technology will ever satisfy even the most tolerant audiophile.
I clearly remember the awe we once had for the phenomenal quality of 128Kbps CD quality recordings. It was called "near perfect" and "almost live." Today, 128Kbps is considered laughable crap suitable only for fools that don't know better.
The whole thing is a pseudoscience wannabe filled to the brim with vendors lauding useless gear before gullible fools. I will not participate.
...but I mean in 400 years how is anyone going to know what we were like...
What tiny fraction of our history is actually preserved in a useful manner will be misinterpreted and spun in ways you can't possibly imagine. 400 years from now you will be known as an ignorant fool guilty of untold crimes against lord knows whom. This will be true regardless of the quality of the archive used to figure you out.
So don't worry about it.