Ah, there's your mistake; "Nazi" stands for "National Socialist", so the Nazis were left-wing, not right.
Of course, the current crop of lefties would VERY much like us all to forget that part.....
On #5, the Senate is strictly apportioned by the Constitution as 2 Senators per state (going back to the states as basic units, Senators were originally appointed by the states themselves, not elected). To make the Senate more equally apportioned by population, you'd have to convince 2/3rds the Senate and 3/4ths the states to approve amending the Constitution to do that.
False; any amendment to change the organization of the Senate requires UNANIMOUS approval.
Article. V.
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate
We'd have better luck rolling back the powers of the existing government with the proposal that every bill introduced into Congress must state explicitly its Constitutional justification. Because 95% of everything Congress does is unconstitutional.
I _WAS_ an early adopter of Wave. It was an interesting concept - but nothing that existing programs didn't do just as well. Our office used it for a while, but it was just easier to use email.
I believe that it was Arthur C. Clarke who wrote that if the human race is to survive, then for the vast majority of time the word "ship" will be synonymous with SPACE-ship.
Ummm, "fairly regular"? Not so much, no. The length of an "average" sunspot cycle is 11 years, but there have been short cycles at 7 years, and some have lasted as long as 14 years, trough to trough. The Maunder Minimum, from about 1640 to about 1710 was a long void of sunspots. And the original post indicated that this cycle, began to rise in late 2008; false. The sunspot numbers were a daily average of about "1" from 2007 to December, 2009.
There is WHOLE BUNCHES that we do not know about the patterns of the Sun; it was only 4 centuries ago that we first SAW a sunspot. We're only a half-step beyond alchemy when it comes to understanding the Sun.
Perhaps if we sacrificed a goat, and spread the entrails over the keyboard.......
Only SHOWS, or only PRINTS? By default Adobe Reader does not PRINT the markups, even though it DISPLAYS them. In your PDF printing dialog, be sure to select to print both text and markups and annotations.
This is only an issue if you created the document 30 years ago, never looked at it since, and NOW you need it.
I started working with Apple ][+ computers almost 30 years ago. I created documents in AppleWriter, and later in AppleWorks. I have spreadsheets that I created in Visicalc. When I switched computers, I transferred all the files to the new Mac LCIII, and later to an IBM PC. I still have the files, and since I converted them to Microsoft Office (and later to OpenOffice) THEN, I can still open them. Yes, I still have the 5 1/4 inch floppies, and no, I don't have a drive that would read them any more. (The disks are probably unreadable anyway; the Earth's magnetic field does a number on mag tape AND magnetic disks.) But the DATA is still there, and resides on several DVDs and a couple of USB hard drives. If I needed them, I would still be able to open them.
I've moved several times, and I probably wouldn't be able to find the BOX that the paper documents might (or might not) still be in. But the digital files are still accessible - because I didn't wait until I needed them to convert them!
I work in the document imaging division of a copier company, so we've got you covered both ways. We'll sell you a printer or a copier if you like paper, and scanners if you don't. Here's how this can work in practice.
1. You're a law firm or an accountant. Clients come in for meetings. You print your document, and get a signature. We scan the document to an indexing document management system, and the client takes the paper original away with them. We have the scanned image, and if we ever need it, we can print it THEN. After all, a modern copier is just a computer connected to a scanner and a printer; we store the image so that the time between scanning and printing can be months instead of seconds. Same process.
2. You're a medical group with several offices. People bring you forms. We scan the form into the document management system and the patient keeps the original. If the patient visits a different office tomorrow, it won't really matter - because their records are on the server. Come back here, come back there, come back next day or next year - your records are on the server. (None of this "cloud" crap; that's a recipe for disaster!)
The point is, paper isn't going anywhere, because paper is so darned useful! It's easier to create and edit documents on paper,. and if you need to go somewhere else, paper is the perfect medium. But when you're done with it, scan it and shred it. One should never STORE paper documents!
The problem with the whole "flying cars" thing is that they are technologically possible, and have been for some time now. The problem is lawyers. Every time somebody comes up with a great idea, some shyster starts thinking of ways to steal all the money by filing frivolous lawsuits based on a worst-case scenario about what could happen. If we were allowed to shoot any lawyer who filed a lawsuit based on the FEAR of some outcome instead of on some ACTUAL outcome, the world would be a better place - and we would have our rocket packs and flying cars.
Um.... not so much. On some of the photos, you can clearly tell that the female vict\\\\staffer has shaved her pussy. And these are very low-res images; I guarantee that if they can't make out faces, that's the ONLY thing they can't see....
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/2010/Q1/mail604.html#Friday
In the 1700s and early 1800s, the solution to piracy was for British (and later, American) warships to hang pirates immediately when captured. And to not be too picky about capturing them instead if sinking their vessels. It's time that our Wimpy-In-Chief grow a few stones and return to the tried-and-true measures. Pirates are lazy cowards; they're in it for the money. Make it not only unprofitable but also NASTY dangerous, and they'll find other lines of work.
Many years ago when Mac laptops were relatively new, I was a computer trainer. A tobacco distributor hired our company to teach Word and Excel to their sales staff, where everybody had relatively new Mac laptops; I think they were PowerBooks.
The students - all of whom were apparently contractually required to be chain-smokers - were complaining that their laptops were pieces of crap, because they wouldn't last for more than 4 or 5 months before they failed. They apparently hadn't made the connection between THICK cigarette smoke and failing computers.
Those sales reps were filthy in other ways, as well. That model laptop had trackballs, and one student complained that her trackball was broken - it would track left and right, but not up or down. Now, that's a classic symptom of a dirty mouse or trackball, so I turned the little ring, popped it off, and dumped the ball into my hand. The well there was supposed to be gray and smooth - hers was orange and gritty. I asked her "What have you been eating?" She held up her orange fingers, and said "Cheetoes." It took me 10 minutes to scrape the greasy Cheeto dust out of the trackball well, after which it worked perfectly. I'm confident that it continued to work well for at least another few days.
I've never been a smoker, although my parents were. After two days of class, my throat was on fire, and I was coughing constantly. I was never so glad to be done with an assignment! Later, when they wanted me to teach another class, I declined. I didn't need the business THAT much!
"Spin"? I read "Spin"; it was one of the Tor "free e-books of the week". I cut my teeth on Heinlein, Campbell, Asimov and Clarke, and Wilson isn't anywhere near that league.
"Spin" was one of those books that perennially seems like it was ABOUT to get good, but never did. The science was dreck, and the character development shoddy. I felt cheated when I was through, and I got the book for free!
No matter what the original impulse power is, there MUST be some sort of propellant - like a rocket motor - that can be activated to modify the trajectory to achieve orbit. Without that, the cargo will impact the Earth.
Of COURSE human activities have an impact on CO2 levels. It's just that, compared to NATURAL causes, the anthropogenic factors are relatively small. Primitive "slash and burn" agriculture probably released FAR more CO2 than our more "refined" techniques do today.
Trees? North America probably has more forested acres now, under cultivation, that EVER grew wild.
I agree that we need to reduce CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels, but I would further suggest that petroleum is too valuable as feedstocks for chemical processes to be wantonly incinerated for fuel. We should be heating our homes with electricity - from NUKES! Or solar-power satellites.
Climate fluctuates in thousand-year cycles. The Romans in England grew wine grapes, and the Vikings had dairy farms in Greenland. Vinland was in Labrador. In between, there were some nasty cold spells. A little warmer is better than a little cooler, from the point of view of crop growth if nothing else.
If the climate were to warm a LOT, I might be worried, but the current evidence does not, on balance, suggest any substantial warming, James Hansen's frauds to the contrary. And the current extended "solar minimum" would seem to indicate that slightly cooler temperatures are more likely than any warming.
The problem with exploring robots is that they can never discover anything that they weren't DESIGNED to discover. All you can do is to confirm or deny your original biases; they can't discover anything NEW. No serendipitous discoveries.
Sort of like where we are right now with explorations of Mars; the first Mars Rover searched for life and didn't find any. Now the Mars polar probe has discovered what may be anomalous methane readings - but we can't remotely reconfigure the probe to figure out what we're actually discovering. A new generation of Mars probes will be needed with better sensors to either prove or disprove the notion of Martian life.
Which is not to say that a generation or three of robotic probes wouldn't be a good and valuable thing to do before shipping valuable people to other star systems. But robotic and "telepresence" sensors make very little sense except as the first step that will eventually lead to human exploration and colonization.
Just another panic-of-the-day. Yes, it could happen. Yes, it HAS happened - in 1850-something, when telegraph offices caught fire from the induced current in the telegraph wires. Yes, it WILL happen again - someday. But not in the next 3 years, not with an extended Solar Minimum that still hasn't bounced up yet.
As a retired Navy officer, I have a little familiarity with the subject of "security". Does the name "Walker family" ring any bells?
The Walkers were three security-cleared, top-secret-crypto-certified Soviet spies. For YEARS, they gave communications crypto codes to the Soviets, which allowed the Russians to read U.S. ciphers.
Against dedicated spying like this, there is NO WAY to GUARANTEE the security of your documents. Microfilm cameras have evolved into cell phone cameras, and high resolution digital copiers have made things harder to control, but if an trusted-but-untrustworthy person has access to a document, he has an excellent chance of being able to transmit the secret information to another party. At best, you can hope to detect when he has done so.
Because no matter what the vetting process, spies DO get through.
Like Google Maps, which are generally accurate but are plainly labeled "For entertainment purposes only!", Wikpedia CANNOT be trusted. Anyone who goes first to Wikipedia for more than a general overview of a topic is a fool.
When Google Earth first went online, I checked things like the US Capitol and the White House; both showed only outlines. Now, the images are complete and quite good. The Naval Observatory is at a much lower resolution that the rest of DC; perhaps the Capitol and White House were only recently unblurred, and they haven't gotten back to the USNO. (That's a guess, of course; it's been a while since I looked.)
Of the others in the IT Security article, most of the overhead imagery IS degraded. So waderoush's article is's COMPLETELY wrong; just MOSTLY wrong.
In an IDEAL situation, we'd divert the asteroid into Earth-orbit, and make it available for mining. If there is any ice in the thing, it could be immensely valuable.
Lacking that, I vote for nuking it. You don't have to smash it (but that's OK too), just push the pieces either back (so that the Earth will be out of the way) or to the side) so that it goes elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, there's your mistake; "Nazi" stands for "National Socialist", so the Nazis were left-wing, not right. Of course, the current crop of lefties would VERY much like us all to forget that part.....
On #5, the Senate is strictly apportioned by the Constitution as 2 Senators per state (going back to the states as basic units, Senators were originally appointed by the states themselves, not elected). To make the Senate more equally apportioned by population, you'd have to convince 2/3rds the Senate and 3/4ths the states to approve amending the Constitution to do that.
False; any amendment to change the organization of the Senate requires UNANIMOUS approval.
Article. V.
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate
We'd have better luck rolling back the powers of the existing government with the proposal that every bill introduced into Congress must state explicitly its Constitutional justification. Because 95% of everything Congress does is unconstitutional.
I _WAS_ an early adopter of Wave. It was an interesting concept - but nothing that existing programs didn't do just as well. Our office used it for a while, but it was just easier to use email.
"Cool. Not sure why I'd want it though." PRECISELY. Neat concept, but not so hot in practice.
I believe that it was Arthur C. Clarke who wrote that if the human race is to survive, then for the vast majority of time the word "ship" will be synonymous with SPACE-ship.
Ummm, "fairly regular"? Not so much, no. The length of an "average" sunspot cycle is 11 years, but there have been short cycles at 7 years, and some have lasted as long as 14 years, trough to trough. The Maunder Minimum, from about 1640 to about 1710 was a long void of sunspots. And the original post indicated that this cycle, began to rise in late 2008; false. The sunspot numbers were a daily average of about "1" from 2007 to December, 2009. There is WHOLE BUNCHES that we do not know about the patterns of the Sun; it was only 4 centuries ago that we first SAW a sunspot. We're only a half-step beyond alchemy when it comes to understanding the Sun. Perhaps if we sacrificed a goat, and spread the entrails over the keyboard.......
Only SHOWS, or only PRINTS? By default Adobe Reader does not PRINT the markups, even though it DISPLAYS them. In your PDF printing dialog, be sure to select to print both text and markups and annotations.
I started working with Apple ][+ computers almost 30 years ago. I created documents in AppleWriter, and later in AppleWorks. I have spreadsheets that I created in Visicalc. When I switched computers, I transferred all the files to the new Mac LCIII, and later to an IBM PC. I still have the files, and since I converted them to Microsoft Office (and later to OpenOffice) THEN, I can still open them. Yes, I still have the 5 1/4 inch floppies, and no, I don't have a drive that would read them any more. (The disks are probably unreadable anyway; the Earth's magnetic field does a number on mag tape AND magnetic disks.) But the DATA is still there, and resides on several DVDs and a couple of USB hard drives. If I needed them, I would still be able to open them.
I've moved several times, and I probably wouldn't be able to find the BOX that the paper documents might (or might not) still be in. But the digital files are still accessible - because I didn't wait until I needed them to convert them!
1. You're a law firm or an accountant. Clients come in for meetings. You print your document, and get a signature. We scan the document to an indexing document management system, and the client takes the paper original away with them. We have the scanned image, and if we ever need it, we can print it THEN. After all, a modern copier is just a computer connected to a scanner and a printer; we store the image so that the time between scanning and printing can be months instead of seconds. Same process.
2. You're a medical group with several offices. People bring you forms. We scan the form into the document management system and the patient keeps the original. If the patient visits a different office tomorrow, it won't really matter - because their records are on the server. Come back here, come back there, come back next day or next year - your records are on the server. (None of this "cloud" crap; that's a recipe for disaster!)
The point is, paper isn't going anywhere, because paper is so darned useful! It's easier to create and edit documents on paper,. and if you need to go somewhere else, paper is the perfect medium. But when you're done with it, scan it and shred it. One should never STORE paper documents!
Wait, I _SAW_ that... It was the original "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" movie, right? (Showing my age here...)
The problem with the whole "flying cars" thing is that they are technologically possible, and have been for some time now. The problem is lawyers. Every time somebody comes up with a great idea, some shyster starts thinking of ways to steal all the money by filing frivolous lawsuits based on a worst-case scenario about what could happen. If we were allowed to shoot any lawyer who filed a lawsuit based on the FEAR of some outcome instead of on some ACTUAL outcome, the world would be a better place - and we would have our rocket packs and flying cars.
Um.... not so much. On some of the photos, you can clearly tell that the female vict\\\\staffer has shaved her pussy. And these are very low-res images; I guarantee that if they can't make out faces, that's the ONLY thing they can't see.... http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/2010/Q1/mail604.html#Friday
In the 1700s and early 1800s, the solution to piracy was for British (and later, American) warships to hang pirates immediately when captured. And to not be too picky about capturing them instead if sinking their vessels. It's time that our Wimpy-In-Chief grow a few stones and return to the tried-and-true measures. Pirates are lazy cowards; they're in it for the money. Make it not only unprofitable but also NASTY dangerous, and they'll find other lines of work.
The students - all of whom were apparently contractually required to be chain-smokers - were complaining that their laptops were pieces of crap, because they wouldn't last for more than 4 or 5 months before they failed. They apparently hadn't made the connection between THICK cigarette smoke and failing computers.
Those sales reps were filthy in other ways, as well. That model laptop had trackballs, and one student complained that her trackball was broken - it would track left and right, but not up or down. Now, that's a classic symptom of a dirty mouse or trackball, so I turned the little ring, popped it off, and dumped the ball into my hand. The well there was supposed to be gray and smooth - hers was orange and gritty. I asked her "What have you been eating?" She held up her orange fingers, and said "Cheetoes." It took me 10 minutes to scrape the greasy Cheeto dust out of the trackball well, after which it worked perfectly. I'm confident that it continued to work well for at least another few days.
I've never been a smoker, although my parents were. After two days of class, my throat was on fire, and I was coughing constantly. I was never so glad to be done with an assignment! Later, when they wanted me to teach another class, I declined. I didn't need the business THAT much!
"Spin"? I read "Spin"; it was one of the Tor "free e-books of the week". I cut my teeth on Heinlein, Campbell, Asimov and Clarke, and Wilson isn't anywhere near that league. "Spin" was one of those books that perennially seems like it was ABOUT to get good, but never did. The science was dreck, and the character development shoddy. I felt cheated when I was through, and I got the book for free!
No matter what the original impulse power is, there MUST be some sort of propellant - like a rocket motor - that can be activated to modify the trajectory to achieve orbit. Without that, the cargo will impact the Earth.
Of COURSE human activities have an impact on CO2 levels. It's just that, compared to NATURAL causes, the anthropogenic factors are relatively small. Primitive "slash and burn" agriculture probably released FAR more CO2 than our more "refined" techniques do today. Trees? North America probably has more forested acres now, under cultivation, that EVER grew wild. I agree that we need to reduce CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels, but I would further suggest that petroleum is too valuable as feedstocks for chemical processes to be wantonly incinerated for fuel. We should be heating our homes with electricity - from NUKES! Or solar-power satellites.
Climate fluctuates in thousand-year cycles. The Romans in England grew wine grapes, and the Vikings had dairy farms in Greenland. Vinland was in Labrador. In between, there were some nasty cold spells. A little warmer is better than a little cooler, from the point of view of crop growth if nothing else. If the climate were to warm a LOT, I might be worried, but the current evidence does not, on balance, suggest any substantial warming, James Hansen's frauds to the contrary. And the current extended "solar minimum" would seem to indicate that slightly cooler temperatures are more likely than any warming.
Sort of like where we are right now with explorations of Mars; the first Mars Rover searched for life and didn't find any. Now the Mars polar probe has discovered what may be anomalous methane readings - but we can't remotely reconfigure the probe to figure out what we're actually discovering. A new generation of Mars probes will be needed with better sensors to either prove or disprove the notion of Martian life.
Which is not to say that a generation or three of robotic probes wouldn't be a good and valuable thing to do before shipping valuable people to other star systems. But robotic and "telepresence" sensors make very little sense except as the first step that will eventually lead to human exploration and colonization.
Just another panic-of-the-day. Yes, it could happen. Yes, it HAS happened - in 1850-something, when telegraph offices caught fire from the induced current in the telegraph wires. Yes, it WILL happen again - someday. But not in the next 3 years, not with an extended Solar Minimum that still hasn't bounced up yet.
As a retired Navy officer, I have a little familiarity with the subject of "security". Does the name "Walker family" ring any bells? The Walkers were three security-cleared, top-secret-crypto-certified Soviet spies. For YEARS, they gave communications crypto codes to the Soviets, which allowed the Russians to read U.S. ciphers. Against dedicated spying like this, there is NO WAY to GUARANTEE the security of your documents. Microfilm cameras have evolved into cell phone cameras, and high resolution digital copiers have made things harder to control, but if an trusted-but-untrustworthy person has access to a document, he has an excellent chance of being able to transmit the secret information to another party. At best, you can hope to detect when he has done so. Because no matter what the vetting process, spies DO get through.
OpenText (Formerly Captaris) Alchemy does this as well. It isn't cheap - but it does work. www.captaris.com
Like Google Maps, which are generally accurate but are plainly labeled "For entertainment purposes only!", Wikpedia CANNOT be trusted. Anyone who goes first to Wikipedia for more than a general overview of a topic is a fool.
When Google Earth first went online, I checked things like the US Capitol and the White House; both showed only outlines. Now, the images are complete and quite good. The Naval Observatory is at a much lower resolution that the rest of DC; perhaps the Capitol and White House were only recently unblurred, and they haven't gotten back to the USNO. (That's a guess, of course; it's been a while since I looked.) Of the others in the IT Security article, most of the overhead imagery IS degraded. So waderoush's article is's COMPLETELY wrong; just MOSTLY wrong.
In an IDEAL situation, we'd divert the asteroid into Earth-orbit, and make it available for mining. If there is any ice in the thing, it could be immensely valuable. Lacking that, I vote for nuking it. You don't have to smash it (but that's OK too), just push the pieces either back (so that the Earth will be out of the way) or to the side) so that it goes elsewhere.