What this means in practice is that you have freedom of speech, as long as you agree with whoever is currently in power. (Both parties agree that it's only fair when it agrees with their current platforms.)
I know you are just trying to defend your religion, but you are mistaken.
The publicity died, but the efforts were only scaled back a little. Some facts for you
Here, (Phoenix Arizona area) there have been small scale tests of Solar Power going on and slowly expanding for the last 20 years. 5 years ago, a utility was installing solar panels with inverters on some folks rooftops. APS, the local Electric Utility currently claims to have around 2% of it's generation solar. The limiting factor is the cost of the panels.
Solar panels cost have continued to go down in cost, year by year since the 1960's. They are still about 1.5 to 2 times the cost of coal/oil based electricity. That's down from more than 100 times. There has been progress.
I use solar here because you thought it was eliminated under Regan. Wrong. They just stopped making political hay with it. The same it true of syn fuels.
Synthetic fuels have been in limited production since before 1900. Ethanol, Methanol, and other more exotic liquids. Methane, ethane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and other exotic gasses have all been tried, boosted, and are all in limited production. Hitler largely ran Germany on synthetic fuels for WWII, because he didn't have access to any large oil reserves.
The research is ongoing. It's not just the Government either. Every large oil company has a research group looking for a workable alternative to oil. They need it for their continued corporate survival. The Government continues to fund research too. There are lots of programs in Colleges. It's out there, it's just not a current hot button issue. You don't often see it on the nightly 'news'.
The limiting factor really is cost. Compared to alternatives, Gas is cheap. Even at $5.00 per gallon for gasoline, Ethanol is more expensive to use. Gasoline has a higher energy capacity, so you need more ethanol to go the same distance. Methanol has an even lower energy density. That's why ethanol is presently preferred. It's the best alternative to oil we can do right now. Remember to factor that into your cost data. The energy needed to produce it factors in too. Energy costs are high for ethanol, somewhat lower for methanol. There is even work on producing wholly synthetic petroleum. That is still ridiculously expensive.
And actually, we are not even close to running out of oil. Just running out of easy to get (read 'CHEAP') oil.
To date, though, nothing we've found will replace oil completely. Too bad, we do need to get off the oil.
As the poster you were criticizing said, we need more research.
There's a fly in your soup. A serious problem in the example you used.
Monsanto patented a gene that was artificially inserted in certain crops. The crops then pollinated neighboring fields. Some of the crops in the neighboring fields had the trait. Monsanto sued the farmers who owned the neighboring fields to prevent them from growing their own seeds. The failure was clearly Monsanto's. They didn't keep the GM contained. This is actually a failure of the legal system and the patent system. A free market would not have penalized the neighbors. A monopolistic system (like any patent system) would. This is repressive monopoly in action. There is no real justice in it.
As for the argument of the lab scientist who 'needs' an income, error there too. The world does not owe him an income. If he does something that others are willing to pay for, then he gets paid. Otherwise, he doesn't deserve it. Suing your neighbors because you say you 'own' a gene that MIGHT be in some seeds is an abuse of the market. In a just society, Monsanto would have been fined heavily for the uncontrolled release of the pollen. You don't live in a just world. Hence the outrage.
You said if we don't pay him he'll steal from us. Well, he already did.
I had the same problem about 6 months ago. I found a simple solution. Just unplug the wireless router and cable modem for about 10 minutes. Worked like a charm.
Of course, this only works if you are the responsible party when the bill comes due. If there is argument, I just leave it unplugged overnight. They'll come around.
If on the other hand, you are the rider, and they pay for the service, then they also call the shots. If you split the bill, then split the service too. If they keep it up, just stop paying.
This is called negotiation. If it is more of a marriage situation, then you will need to do more sensitive and caring negotiations.
If approached gently, most people will throttle it down for you, without any display of power. After all, you would, wouldn't you?
Sorry, I don't have specific program names or locations, but there are Fortran and Cobol programs running in many large corporations that have been in use since the mid 1960's.
Google already has a project going to digitize all the worlds books. Now, they just need a link to publishers. No Amazon needed. Google can get a small cut from the retailer. A POD now looks like any other publisher. Poof, instant sales channel.
That's similar to what B&N, Borders, et al do. They also provide the distribution organization, warehouses, accounting, shipping, etc. That is a significant investment. I would imagine that most small publishers (and even larger ones) will want to use the lowest cost reseller. If Amazon is acting to restrict who they use, then they are opting out of part of the business. Let them.
So, you have a system that can store hydrogen in carbon balls at high pressures. (the cold fusion folks manage to get 6000 pascals or so inside a metal lattice chemically.) What I want to know is how long can you store it. Hydrogen leaks through anything. the atoms fit BETWEEN the molecular bonds in most metals, plastics, even wax. That's the reason that space rockets are refueled constantly. (boil off of something that boils at 4 Kelvin is really something too!) The tanks leak!
What is the half life of the hydrogen storage in this system?
So, if the buckyball left the factory last month, how much H2 content will it still have? Once it decays down to atmospheric temperature, it does me no practical good.
Victory over the RIAA and their agent/thugs means nothing.
RIAA is a front organization. It is just a way the record companies to use to interface with the legal attack dogs. They have no real assets to give up. They pass all their ill gotten gains back to their masters.
If there is a serious legal setback, then RIAA just dissolves, and comes back tomorrow under another name. The legal pit bulls, and the record companies who control all this carnage will remain untouched. To really make it stop, you need to have the courts pierce the 'corporate veil' to make the operators responsible.
The whole mess only stops when the individual record companies who are sponsoring this blatant attack on their own customers are financially penalized.
Sending a few lawyers and CEO's to prison would also help. But, that isn't going to happen.
Touch screens are where it's going. Keyboards have peaked. Still dominant for the next 20 years, but declining. Touch screens are here now, and will continue to grow more important for us. Voice has some problems. Background noise is too prevalent. Can't get rid of it in lots of environments. That is a problem that isn't solved yet. Someday, voice will be the major input system. Not yet. Current accuracy is only in the low 90% range. That is just not good enough.
I expect to see touch screens on all laptops, and on more and more monitors in the near future. That is where we already are for PDA's, and more and more phones. Touch is easy, voice is hard.
This is totally unimportant for Apple. Jobs will just smile and show some cool looking thing. The Mac heads will swoon, and for Apple, nobody else matters. Those who care don't buy Mac's anyway.
Even if true, this will have no impact on Apple. If false, same. See above.
No, the lesson from the Viet Nam war was different. What you are talking about was commonly done in the Korean conflict. That's just politics and propaganda. Common until the fighting gets really serious. Then it can't be hidden. Germany, Russia, China, Spain, everybody's done it. Most of the monuments of Egypt were about some minor military 'victory'. A couple of those 'victories' were actually total defeats. Spin isn't new either.
No,
The stark lesson from the Viet Nam conflict was different.
Never Never NEVER let the State Department run a war. Never!!!
Interestingly enough Sun Tsu told us the same thing over 2000 years ago.
Why would AT&T or Verizon want to be the next Compuserve? AOL pulled it off for a while, but they are really out of the content business now. The telcos need to pay attention to their core business. They can't do both well. No one can. Google will not make a good transport company either.
There are different dynamics. What do they do when one business unit has needs that are opposed to the core business unit? Answer, the customers suffer. That's why this won't work.
After a couple of years, the customers just flee. There are too many options. Radio, Cell Phones, Cable TV, Phone company, more are on the way. They may want to have a parallel system to allow TV and Phone, but the Internet is where everyone is moving.
That's where the future business is. Do they want to be in business in a few years? The only way to do that is to give the customers what they want. That is increasingly Internet, not captive services. The future of the backbone providers cash source is in the open Internet. If they follow the siren call of the MPAA and RIAA monopolists, they better look at how those groups are doing. Not as well as they did when they didn't try to control the Internet. If the providers watch their own business, they already know that. Grab for too much, you end up with nothing. Not what I'd want for my business.
Your question displays a lack of understanding. Not of biology, but of physics. Square cube law specifically. Aircraft don't corner as fast as small birds. the reason isn't any magic of biology, it's simple momentum.
The larger any object is, the more it weighs. Make it twice as big, it weighs eight times as much. packs eight times as much momentum. A large bird doesn't turn s fast as a small bird. Same is true of planes. Same is true of ships. A buss won't corner as fast as sports cars either.
A typical aircraft is 1000 times bigger than a swallow. It's a million times heavier. It packs a million times the momentum. It's not that the swallows design is better, or that there is some biological magic. It's just a question of size. It's true the other way too. A mosquito can turn a lot quicker than a barn swallow. Barn swallows catch mosquitoes because they can fly faster. Guess what, the aircraft you were so dismissive of can fly a lot faster than that barn swallow too. Visit a large airport. Swallows get killed by aircraft every day. They can't get out of the way in time. A barn swallow that was as large as a chicken would be ripped apart by the stresses if it were able to corner as fast as a real barn swallow. That's the real reason that chickens don't turn well in flight. (Yes, chickens can fly for short distances.) Momentum.
Your problem appears to be that you just don't understand scale. It is a wonderful thing when you do. You see reasons all around us, for all kinds of things.
So, yes, we should study biology. But, we should also remember the physics. The tricks the mosquito uses just won't work for a passenger jet. Nor will the barn swallows turns be good for the passengers on that jumbo jet. Still, some things will be useful. We just don't know what. Who would have thought that studying a sharks skin would help racing yachts. Personally, I hope that we get a lot of surprises. That's where the fun in science is.
I don't expect AI research to give us human type intelligence in a machine. Ever. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We don't know what we will get, or what it will make possible. We can't know before the fact. Studying birds didn't give us aircraft that can corner in a second or two, it did give us jumbo jets that can take us half way around the world in an easy chair. That took a lot of other things too.
The Wright brothers succeeded where Lilenthal failed. Not because they understood birds better, but because in the meantime the internal combustion engine was developed. AI will be the same. Right now, we don't even know what we need in order to make this work. There will be surprises.
Freedom is the enemy of freedom, and must be destroyed to preserve it.
We can't be secure if anyone is allowed to do or have anything.
A lot of security people and some enforcement folks come to this conclusion. That's why we have civilian oversight. To pull them back to reality. Yes, their jobs would be easier if they could forbid everyone from doing anything. But, that ignores what the security is for. Security is only valuable if it is protecting something worthwhile. No system can be risk free if life is allowed.
This is just another example of why these people should not be allowed outside without oversight. We need them, but . . .
There have been a couple of observations that suggested that in galactic colisions or near colisions, that the dark matter can go on, and the visible matter can change course. Visible matter reacts with the gas streams, the dark matter doesn't seem to. I saw a report a couple of weeks ago of a dark matter galactic halo without a galaxy. (Found by the Einstein lensing effect.) We now have a galaxy without a dark matter halo. Looks like we have all the pieces of the puzzle, now someone just needs to put them together. That'll make a nice Doctoral Thesis.
Mond will be a casulty though. Well, that's how science progresses. the only thing certain is that the theories we have today will change.
John McCain: Has a reputation of being a maverick. He also has a reputation here in Arizona of ignoring his constituents to chase national media. He did a 180 on illegal immigration for the new presidential run. Look for him to govern like Bush, taking a stand on whatever looks popular at the moment. Look for policy changes weekly. I've voted for him as Senator. I probably won't be voting for him in the Primary tomorrow.
Mitt Romney: Governor of Massachusetts. One of the few who had the guts to stand up to Microsoft. His successor caved. He has changed his stand on abortion to further his political ambitions. The people I know from Mass all seemed to like him. Most of them, of course will be voting for the Democrat. Don't count him out in the General Election. He was after all, a Republican governor in Massachusetts, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 3 to 1. His biggest minus seems to be that Baptists hate his religion. They'd rather have the devil. He suffers from the largest bias left in American politics. Probably won't win. Too bad, he represents the best traditional 'conservative' candidate in this race. he'd like to be another Regan.
Mike Huckabee: The man is a religious bigot. Probably one of the other kind too. Former governor of Arkansas. He's running as the anointed heir of the 'religious right'. Wasn't enough for Falwell, won't be enough for Huckabee. Look for him to give lukewarm support to whoever really wins. Floundering around right now trying to find something that'll appeal to people outside of his narrow group.
Ron Paul: Congressman. Former Libertarian Presidential candidate. Couldn't get more than about 5% for that party. Can't seem to get more than that from the Republicans either. Has a lot of support from the rabid fringes. His supporters though can't seem to talk to others without alienating them. You see that in the posts on Slashdot too.
Paul won't even pull enough to be a spoiler. Huckabee might. If the two could team up, They might be able to be power brokers. That is after all what Falwell wanted to do in 1980. Pat Buchannan did it too in the early '90's.
It doesn't look like either of the two front runners will have a lock by convention time.
Maybe by that time, some of the candidates will have moved beyond sound bites and begun to actually think about principles. Romney and Paul have some, at least. Paul blares his, for better or worse. Romney needs to do more to get them out. McCain needs to find some.
The grandparent post got it wrong. Dinosaurs lasted for about 180 Million years, and died off about 65 Million years ago. Before that, there was a time when most plants were ferns, animals were mostly insects and amphibians, with a few reptiles. That was when the first protomammals appeard. That period lasted for 50 to 100 million years on most timelines. Before that, life was mostly in the oceans. (fish and such). before that, there were shelled organisms and worms. That takes us back almost 500 million years. Before that, there were sponge like things, and maybe jellyfish like things. Fossils aren't very good for animals that are basicly a smear of goo. Before that, you hit the snowball earth period, maybe 200 Million years. Maybe longer. Only life forms were single cells. Possibly a little lichen on land. Maybe not. Mostly bacteria. Before that, we just don't know. This is the earliest period with evidence of an oxygen containing atmosphere. (O2, not CO2)The geologists can tell by the kind of minerals that form.
If you add this all up, you get roughly a Billion years, Plus or minus maybe 200 Million. Earth is just a little younger than the Sun, maybe 4.5 to 5 billion years. That's the period, after Earth formed and before the first animal fossils, that is mostly unknown. It's gennerally believed that for the first 2 to 2 1/2 Billion years, asteroid bombardment kept the surface melted. There was a gigantic colision that resulted in the Moon, about 2 1/2 Billion years ago. All our atmosphere and oceans are younger than that. (any atmosphere from before that would have been blasted off into space by the colision with a planet close to the size of Mars. Earth and Moon are what is left.)
I hope this lets you understand the time lines they are talking about.
Sounds like Ford needs to fire an attorney. Then, they can blame him (or her). That's the only way I can see for them to recover from this PR disaster.
Most of the comments on this story seem to be looking at this question from the view of a programmer. There is a more important view. Look at it from the point of view of a user. 6 months at latest, the programmers all have other jobs. The users, though are just screwed.
The biggest problem for a user in a recession is that the vendor goes belly up. It's bad for the former employees, it's a disaster for those who depended on the product. Open Source Software (or Libre/Free Software) removes this worry. The product will continue for as long as a reasonable group of people continue to have a use for it.
Yes, Open Source is recession proof. I wonder if Proprietary Software is too?
I know I'd really hate to have my business depending on abandonware.
Using the articles numbers, during a 2 year period, OSX use increased by 74% while Linux use only increased by 117% in the same period, so Apple is killing Linux. Sounds like fanboy logic to me.
Using real numbers, both combined are less than 10% of Windows numbers. There's gotta be room for more fanboy logic there.
One more interesting piece of information. Apple had a 15 year head start on Linux. They even had a couple of years head start on Windows. I wonder if that has any bearing?
The author admits that the plant in question was canceled as part of the political fallout from the Three Mile Island incident. The author even admits that there was no danger to the surrounding area from TMI, but concentrates on a 'there COULD have been' scenario. He seems to think that hydrogen is a radioactive element. He concentrates on that as the danger. Yes, there was steam, and maybe a little hydrogen in the containment building. The hydrogen recombined with the oxygen in the containment as it was designed to. No venting took place.The steam cooled and turned back into water. Nobody was hurt.
I started college in Physics, changed majors when I looked at the job market for folks with a bachelors degree. Spent one semester as a Nuclear Engineering major. Shifted out of that when we analyzed the cost of a nuclear power plant. First semester. No large system will ever be economical when the construction cost spends more on lawyers than on materials. That is the real problem with nuclear power in America. We may have to do what the French did. Get rid of the lawyers, and suddenly it's economical. There are still problems, always are. With everything. There is a reason why the environmental lobby lost it's love for hydro and wind after a few plants had been built. They started counting the species threatened by the installations.
For the argument that we can use the Southwest for these plants, I don't think you realize what these numbers mean. 15% of the US means roofing ALL of Arizona and half of Southern California. I wonder what the environmental impact of that would be? How many species are you willing to exterminate to realize your dream? By the way, that would also entail leveling several mountain ranges. It might look good on a map, but in practice, it'd never work. Nuclear on the other hand does work. There is just this meem that it is 'dangerous'. Dreams of bombs and 'big corporations' fill the mind. No facts, just stories.
Still, everything can be messed up. American nuclear plants were designed as plutonium generators from the beginning, That's where the US government got the plutonium for all those bombs. Russia did the same thing. A plant CAN be designed to burn it's own plutonium, but the two that were built in the US were both closed down by the feds. So the industry you are looking at was designed (50 years ago) to produce waste for other federal programs to use as feestock.
You should learn more about the subject. It'll be a real eye opener.
What this system really lacks, from what I have read, (I haven't really bought or even used one.) is synaptic, and a quick link to a Debian repository. Then the Author could get whatever he wanted. Firefox/Iceweasel, games like Freeciv, Westnoth, whatever. He could get his fill of ofice type apps too.
For the specs I've seen Abi or Koffice might be a better choice than Open Office, the specs for the machine are minimal. If I had one of these machines the first thing I'd do is add memory. It's still slow, but would at least run some interesting stuff.
Still, it is a nice first stab at a decent low end home machine. I can remember being happy with my old K6 300. This thing has better specs than that. You just have to be choosy in what you run.
The first liger was Shasta in the Hogle zoo in Salt Lake City. The liger was sterile. Sorry to have to let you know that. Lions and Tigers remain different species.
Slashdot Mirror
What this means in practice is that you have freedom of speech, as long as you agree with whoever is currently in power. (Both parties agree that it's only fair when it agrees with their current platforms.)
I know you are just trying to defend your religion, but you are mistaken.
The publicity died, but the efforts were only scaled back a little. Some facts for you
Here, (Phoenix Arizona area) there have been small scale tests of Solar Power going on and slowly expanding for the last 20 years. 5 years ago, a utility was installing solar panels with inverters on some folks rooftops. APS, the local Electric Utility currently claims to have around 2% of it's generation solar. The limiting factor is the cost of the panels.
Solar panels cost have continued to go down in cost, year by year since the 1960's. They are still about 1.5 to 2 times the cost of coal/oil based electricity. That's down from more than 100 times. There has been progress.
I use solar here because you thought it was eliminated under Regan. Wrong. They just stopped making political hay with it. The same it true of syn fuels.
Synthetic fuels have been in limited production since before 1900. Ethanol, Methanol, and other more exotic liquids. Methane, ethane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and other exotic gasses have all been tried, boosted, and are all in limited production. Hitler largely ran Germany on synthetic fuels for WWII, because he didn't have access to any large oil reserves.
The research is ongoing. It's not just the Government either. Every large oil company has a research group looking for a workable alternative to oil. They need it for their continued corporate survival. The Government continues to fund research too. There are lots of programs in Colleges. It's out there, it's just not a current hot button issue. You don't often see it on the nightly 'news'.
The limiting factor really is cost. Compared to alternatives, Gas is cheap. Even at $5.00 per gallon for gasoline, Ethanol is more expensive to use. Gasoline has a higher energy capacity, so you need more ethanol to go the same distance. Methanol has an even lower energy density. That's why ethanol is presently preferred. It's the best alternative to oil we can do right now. Remember to factor that into your cost data. The energy needed to produce it factors in too. Energy costs are high for ethanol, somewhat lower for methanol. There is even work on producing wholly synthetic petroleum. That is still ridiculously expensive.
And actually, we are not even close to running out of oil. Just running out of easy to get (read 'CHEAP') oil.
To date, though, nothing we've found will replace oil completely. Too bad, we do need to get off the oil.
As the poster you were criticizing said, we need more research.
There's a fly in your soup. A serious problem in the example you used.
Monsanto patented a gene that was artificially inserted in certain crops. The crops then pollinated neighboring fields. Some of the crops in the neighboring fields had the trait. Monsanto sued the farmers who owned the neighboring fields to prevent them from growing their own seeds. The failure was clearly Monsanto's. They didn't keep the GM contained. This is actually a failure of the legal system and the patent system. A free market would not have penalized the neighbors. A monopolistic system (like any patent system) would. This is repressive monopoly in action. There is no real justice in it.
As for the argument of the lab scientist who 'needs' an income, error there too. The world does not owe him an income. If he does something that others are willing to pay for, then he gets paid. Otherwise, he doesn't deserve it. Suing your neighbors because you say you 'own' a gene that MIGHT be in some seeds is an abuse of the market. In a just society, Monsanto would have been fined heavily for the uncontrolled release of the pollen. You don't live in a just world. Hence the outrage.
You said if we don't pay him he'll steal from us. Well, he already did.
So, do you have any points that make sense?
I had the same problem about 6 months ago. I found a simple solution. Just unplug the wireless router and cable modem for about 10 minutes. Worked like a charm.
Of course, this only works if you are the responsible party when the bill comes due. If there is argument, I just leave it unplugged overnight. They'll come around.
If on the other hand, you are the rider, and they pay for the service, then they also call the shots. If you split the bill, then split the service too. If they keep it up, just stop paying.
This is called negotiation. If it is more of a marriage situation, then you will need to do more sensitive and caring negotiations.
If approached gently, most people will throttle it down for you, without any display of power. After all, you would, wouldn't you?
Sorry, I don't have specific program names or locations, but there are Fortran and Cobol programs running in many large corporations that have been in use since the mid 1960's.
As Mark Twain said over 100 years ago, "Figures don't lie, but Liars sure figure."
One more example of bad statistics used badly.
Google already has a project going to digitize all the worlds books. Now, they just need a link to publishers. No Amazon needed. Google can get a small cut from the retailer. A POD now looks like any other publisher. Poof, instant sales channel.
That's similar to what B&N, Borders, et al do. They also provide the distribution organization, warehouses, accounting, shipping, etc. That is a significant investment. I would imagine that most small publishers (and even larger ones) will want to use the lowest cost reseller. If Amazon is acting to restrict who they use, then they are opting out of part of the business. Let them.
Somebody else will step in to fill the void.
So, Microsoft says Microsoft is better.
Can anyone tell me why this is news?
Will we be just as surprised when Apple says Apple is better?
Why is this piece of advertising being treated as news?
So, you have a system that can store hydrogen in carbon balls at high pressures. (the cold fusion folks manage to get 6000 pascals or so inside a metal lattice chemically.) What I want to know is how long can you store it. Hydrogen leaks through anything. the atoms fit BETWEEN the molecular bonds in most metals, plastics, even wax. That's the reason that space rockets are refueled constantly. (boil off of something that boils at 4 Kelvin is really something too!) The tanks leak!
What is the half life of the hydrogen storage in this system?
So, if the buckyball left the factory last month, how much H2 content will it still have? Once it decays down to atmospheric temperature, it does me no practical good.
Victory over the RIAA and their agent/thugs means nothing.
RIAA is a front organization. It is just a way the record companies to use to interface with the legal attack dogs. They have no real assets to give up. They pass all their ill gotten gains back to their masters.
If there is a serious legal setback, then RIAA just dissolves, and comes back tomorrow under another name. The legal pit bulls, and the record companies who control all this carnage will remain untouched. To really make it stop, you need to have the courts pierce the 'corporate veil' to make the operators responsible.
The whole mess only stops when the individual record companies who are sponsoring this blatant attack on their own customers are financially penalized.
Sending a few lawyers and CEO's to prison would also help. But, that isn't going to happen.
Input for the future?
Touch screens are where it's going. Keyboards have peaked. Still dominant for the next 20 years, but declining. Touch screens are here now, and will continue to grow more important for us. Voice has some problems. Background noise is too prevalent. Can't get rid of it in lots of environments. That is a problem that isn't solved yet. Someday, voice will be the major input system. Not yet. Current accuracy is only in the low 90% range. That is just not good enough.
I expect to see touch screens on all laptops, and on more and more monitors in the near future. That is where we already are for PDA's, and more and more phones. Touch is easy, voice is hard.
This is totally unimportant for Apple. Jobs will just smile and show some cool looking thing. The Mac heads will swoon, and for Apple, nobody else matters. Those who care don't buy Mac's anyway. Even if true, this will have no impact on Apple. If false, same. See above.
No, the lesson from the Viet Nam war was different. What you are talking about was commonly done in the Korean conflict. That's just politics and propaganda. Common until the fighting gets really serious. Then it can't be hidden. Germany, Russia, China, Spain, everybody's done it. Most of the monuments of Egypt were about some minor military 'victory'. A couple of those 'victories' were actually total defeats. Spin isn't new either.
No,
The stark lesson from the Viet Nam conflict was different.
Never Never NEVER let the State Department run a war. Never!!!
Interestingly enough Sun Tsu told us the same thing over 2000 years ago.
By the way, who's running the Iraq thing now?
Why would AT&T or Verizon want to be the next Compuserve? AOL pulled it off for a while, but they are really out of the content business now. The telcos need to pay attention to their core business. They can't do both well. No one can. Google will not make a good transport company either.
There are different dynamics. What do they do when one business unit has needs that are opposed to the core business unit? Answer, the customers suffer. That's why this won't work.
After a couple of years, the customers just flee. There are too many options. Radio, Cell Phones, Cable TV, Phone company, more are on the way. They may want to have a parallel system to allow TV and Phone, but the Internet is where everyone is moving.
That's where the future business is. Do they want to be in business in a few years? The only way to do that is to give the customers what they want. That is increasingly Internet, not captive services. The future of the backbone providers cash source is in the open Internet. If they follow the siren call of the MPAA and RIAA monopolists, they better look at how those groups are doing. Not as well as they did when they didn't try to control the Internet. If the providers watch their own business, they already know that. Grab for too much, you end up with nothing. Not what I'd want for my business.
Any aircraft the size of a barn swallow.
Your question displays a lack of understanding. Not of biology, but of physics. Square cube law specifically. Aircraft don't corner as fast as small birds. the reason isn't any magic of biology, it's simple momentum.
The larger any object is, the more it weighs. Make it twice as big, it weighs eight times as much. packs eight times as much momentum. A large bird doesn't turn s fast as a small bird. Same is true of planes. Same is true of ships. A buss won't corner as fast as sports cars either.
A typical aircraft is 1000 times bigger than a swallow. It's a million times heavier. It packs a million times the momentum. It's not that the swallows design is better, or that there is some biological magic. It's just a question of size. It's true the other way too. A mosquito can turn a lot quicker than a barn swallow. Barn swallows catch mosquitoes because they can fly faster. Guess what, the aircraft you were so dismissive of can fly a lot faster than that barn swallow too. Visit a large airport. Swallows get killed by aircraft every day. They can't get out of the way in time. A barn swallow that was as large as a chicken would be ripped apart by the stresses if it were able to corner as fast as a real barn swallow. That's the real reason that chickens don't turn well in flight. (Yes, chickens can fly for short distances.) Momentum.
Your problem appears to be that you just don't understand scale. It is a wonderful thing when you do. You see reasons all around us, for all kinds of things.
So, yes, we should study biology. But, we should also remember the physics. The tricks the mosquito uses just won't work for a passenger jet. Nor will the barn swallows turns be good for the passengers on that jumbo jet. Still, some things will be useful. We just don't know what. Who would have thought that studying a sharks skin would help racing yachts. Personally, I hope that we get a lot of surprises. That's where the fun in science is.
I don't expect AI research to give us human type intelligence in a machine. Ever. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We don't know what we will get, or what it will make possible. We can't know before the fact. Studying birds didn't give us aircraft that can corner in a second or two, it did give us jumbo jets that can take us half way around the world in an easy chair. That took a lot of other things too.
The Wright brothers succeeded where Lilenthal failed. Not because they understood birds better, but because in the meantime the internal combustion engine was developed. AI will be the same. Right now, we don't even know what we need in order to make this work. There will be surprises.
Freedom is the enemy of freedom, and must be destroyed to preserve it.
We can't be secure if anyone is allowed to do or have anything.
A lot of security people and some enforcement folks come to this conclusion. That's why we have civilian oversight. To pull them back to reality. Yes, their jobs would be easier if they could forbid everyone from doing anything. But, that ignores what the security is for. Security is only valuable if it is protecting something worthwhile. No system can be risk free if life is allowed.
This is just another example of why these people should not be allowed outside without oversight. We need them, but . . .
There have been a couple of observations that suggested that in galactic colisions or near colisions, that the dark matter can go on, and the visible matter can change course. Visible matter reacts with the gas streams, the dark matter doesn't seem to. I saw a report a couple of weeks ago of a dark matter galactic halo without a galaxy. (Found by the Einstein lensing effect.) We now have a galaxy without a dark matter halo. Looks like we have all the pieces of the puzzle, now someone just needs to put them together. That'll make a nice Doctoral Thesis.
Mond will be a casulty though. Well, that's how science progresses. the only thing certain is that the theories we have today will change.
John McCain: Has a reputation of being a maverick. He also has a reputation here in Arizona of ignoring his constituents to chase national media. He did a 180 on illegal immigration for the new presidential run. Look for him to govern like Bush, taking a stand on whatever looks popular at the moment. Look for policy changes weekly. I've voted for him as Senator. I probably won't be voting for him in the Primary tomorrow.
Mitt Romney: Governor of Massachusetts. One of the few who had the guts to stand up to Microsoft. His successor caved. He has changed his stand on abortion to further his political ambitions. The people I know from Mass all seemed to like him. Most of them, of course will be voting for the Democrat. Don't count him out in the General Election. He was after all, a Republican governor in Massachusetts, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 3 to 1. His biggest minus seems to be that Baptists hate his religion. They'd rather have the devil. He suffers from the largest bias left in American politics. Probably won't win. Too bad, he represents the best traditional 'conservative' candidate in this race. he'd like to be another Regan.
Mike Huckabee: The man is a religious bigot. Probably one of the other kind too. Former governor of Arkansas. He's running as the anointed heir of the 'religious right'. Wasn't enough for Falwell, won't be enough for Huckabee. Look for him to give lukewarm support to whoever really wins. Floundering around right now trying to find something that'll appeal to people outside of his narrow group.
Ron Paul: Congressman. Former Libertarian Presidential candidate. Couldn't get more than about 5% for that party. Can't seem to get more than that from the Republicans either. Has a lot of support from the rabid fringes. His supporters though can't seem to talk to others without alienating them. You see that in the posts on Slashdot too.
Paul won't even pull enough to be a spoiler. Huckabee might. If the two could team up, They might be able to be power brokers. That is after all what Falwell wanted to do in 1980. Pat Buchannan did it too in the early '90's.
It doesn't look like either of the two front runners will have a lock by convention time.
Maybe by that time, some of the candidates will have moved beyond sound bites and begun to actually think about principles. Romney and Paul have some, at least. Paul blares his, for better or worse. Romney needs to do more to get them out. McCain needs to find some.
The grandparent post got it wrong. Dinosaurs lasted for about 180 Million years, and died off about 65 Million years ago. Before that, there was a time when most plants were ferns, animals were mostly insects and amphibians, with a few reptiles. That was when the first protomammals appeard. That period lasted for 50 to 100 million years on most timelines. Before that, life was mostly in the oceans. (fish and such). before that, there were shelled organisms and worms. That takes us back almost 500 million years. Before that, there were sponge like things, and maybe jellyfish like things. Fossils aren't very good for animals that are basicly a smear of goo. Before that, you hit the snowball earth period, maybe 200 Million years. Maybe longer. Only life forms were single cells. Possibly a little lichen on land. Maybe not. Mostly bacteria. Before that, we just don't know. This is the earliest period with evidence of an oxygen containing atmosphere. (O2, not CO2)The geologists can tell by the kind of minerals that form.
If you add this all up, you get roughly a Billion years, Plus or minus maybe 200 Million. Earth is just a little younger than the Sun, maybe 4.5 to 5 billion years. That's the period, after Earth formed and before the first animal fossils, that is mostly unknown. It's gennerally believed that for the first 2 to 2 1/2 Billion years, asteroid bombardment kept the surface melted. There was a gigantic colision that resulted in the Moon, about 2 1/2 Billion years ago. All our atmosphere and oceans are younger than that. (any atmosphere from before that would have been blasted off into space by the colision with a planet close to the size of Mars. Earth and Moon are what is left.)
I hope this lets you understand the time lines they are talking about.
Sounds like Ford needs to fire an attorney. Then, they can blame him (or her). That's the only way I can see for them to recover from this PR disaster.
Most of the comments on this story seem to be looking at this question from the view of a programmer. There is a more important view. Look at it from the point of view of a user. 6 months at latest, the programmers all have other jobs. The users, though are just screwed.
The biggest problem for a user in a recession is that the vendor goes belly up. It's bad for the former employees, it's a disaster for those who depended on the product. Open Source Software (or Libre/Free Software) removes this worry. The product will continue for as long as a reasonable group of people continue to have a use for it.
Yes, Open Source is recession proof. I wonder if Proprietary Software is too?
I know I'd really hate to have my business depending on abandonware.
Using the articles numbers, during a 2 year period, OSX use increased by 74% while Linux use only increased by 117% in the same period, so Apple is killing Linux. Sounds like fanboy logic to me.
Using real numbers, both combined are less than 10% of Windows numbers. There's gotta be room for more fanboy logic there.
One more interesting piece of information. Apple had a 15 year head start on Linux. They even had a couple of years head start on Windows. I wonder if that has any bearing?
The author admits that the plant in question was canceled as part of the political fallout from the Three Mile Island incident. The author even admits that there was no danger to the surrounding area from TMI, but concentrates on a 'there COULD have been' scenario. He seems to think that hydrogen is a radioactive element. He concentrates on that as the danger. Yes, there was steam, and maybe a little hydrogen in the containment building. The hydrogen recombined with the oxygen in the containment as it was designed to. No venting took place.The steam cooled and turned back into water. Nobody was hurt.
I started college in Physics, changed majors when I looked at the job market for folks with a bachelors degree. Spent one semester as a Nuclear Engineering major. Shifted out of that when we analyzed the cost of a nuclear power plant. First semester. No large system will ever be economical when the construction cost spends more on lawyers than on materials. That is the real problem with nuclear power in America. We may have to do what the French did. Get rid of the lawyers, and suddenly it's economical. There are still problems, always are. With everything. There is a reason why the environmental lobby lost it's love for hydro and wind after a few plants had been built. They started counting the species threatened by the installations.
For the argument that we can use the Southwest for these plants, I don't think you realize what these numbers mean. 15% of the US means roofing ALL of Arizona and half of Southern California. I wonder what the environmental impact of that would be? How many species are you willing to exterminate to realize your dream? By the way, that would also entail leveling several mountain ranges. It might look good on a map, but in practice, it'd never work. Nuclear on the other hand does work. There is just this meem that it is 'dangerous'. Dreams of bombs and 'big corporations' fill the mind. No facts, just stories.
Still, everything can be messed up. American nuclear plants were designed as plutonium generators from the beginning, That's where the US government got the plutonium for all those bombs. Russia did the same thing. A plant CAN be designed to burn it's own plutonium, but the two that were built in the US were both closed down by the feds. So the industry you are looking at was designed (50 years ago) to produce waste for other federal programs to use as feestock.
You should learn more about the subject. It'll be a real eye opener.
What this system really lacks, from what I have read, (I haven't really bought or even used one.) is synaptic, and a quick link to a Debian repository. Then the Author could get whatever he wanted. Firefox/Iceweasel, games like Freeciv, Westnoth, whatever. He could get his fill of ofice type apps too.
For the specs I've seen Abi or Koffice might be a better choice than Open Office, the specs for the machine are minimal. If I had one of these machines the first thing I'd do is add memory. It's still slow, but would at least run some interesting stuff.
Still, it is a nice first stab at a decent low end home machine. I can remember being happy with my old K6 300. This thing has better specs than that. You just have to be choosy in what you run.
The first liger was Shasta in the Hogle zoo in Salt Lake City. The liger was sterile. Sorry to have to let you know that. Lions and Tigers remain different species.