Okay, maybe that's true, but come on, referencing a slashdot article as a citation? I hadn't read up on this before, so it was interesting. Apparently filtering technology does exist to filter gasoline particulates.
Any time I think of a cash register bell, I think of the classic intro to "Are You Being Served."
But gasoline doesn't produce the same soot. Plainly put, diesel particulates are more toxic than particulates from gasoline combustion. Modern diesels, however, are much, much more clean than older diesels. I drove a diesel rental car in Turkey recently that was diesel and its exhaust just smelled like steam.
Diesel engines have two problems when it comes to pollution. Particulates and NOx emissions. Particulates can be eliminated with by increasing the heat and pressure of combustion. That takes care of most immediate, toxic product of combustion right there. However, increasing heat and pressure also leads to more N2 reacting with O2 to make NOx, which causes smog and acid rain, also serious human health concerns. If you go the other way and cool combustion way down, you can virtually eliminate NOx, but you get tons of particulates. So either reduce NOx by cooling combustion with recirculated exhaust gasses and stick on a filter to catch and burn particulates (the dreaded regen cycle that truckers can tell you about), or turn up the heat and treat NOx separately using a catalyst, urea. Most auto makers are finding that urea into the exhaust works best because the engine can be super simple again. However the big problem with this is that in northern climates (most of the western world), cars don't drive far enough to warm up completely, so you still have unwanted pollution.
Gasoline (petrol) does emit some particulates but they seem to not be as dangerous. Petrol engines also emit NOx but modern catalytic converters convert it to N2 and water.
And of course all fossil fuels emit net CO2. Biofuels can theoretically be carbon neutral, but if they are diesel-like (burn in a diesel engine) they still very much have the same pollution issues as diesel, and will have to be treated in the exact same way, using EGR, SCR (with urea), or some other technology. Likewise gasoline-like biofuels will still have to have the same pollution control systems as regular gasoline engines.
The firmware has always been a possible vector for infecting a computer with malware, and we know the NSA has done it for years. This OS X bootkit shows one method of getting the malware into the firmware. I'm sure on many PCs the NSA could just flash a new BIOS, probably with the full support and help of the firmware manufacturers.
It surprised me to learn that laptops from popular manufacturers like Lenovo ship with a piece of BIOS-based malware called Lojack. Used as a method of theft prevention, once activated it can infect a fresh install of Windows with tracking software. Was quite an eye opener to me.
Certainly in this post-Snowden era, I certainly trust my devices a lot less. Every little device is a computer these days with its own firmware. Who knows what runs there. A brave new world indeed. Looks like writing passwords down on paper is probably the most secure thing after all.
HOAs are kind of like unions. Yes you know about them up front, but you can't do anything to opt out, except buy elsewhere. If an HOA is completely opt-in, then I'm okay with it. More and more, though, HOAs are thinly disguised vehicles for keeping property prices artificially inflated. I'm kind of surprised they have the power to force a home buyer to become a part of it (except in the case of a condo complex perhaps, or an area where the grounds are kept by a third party).
Each astronaut who flies on the Soyuz, even if it's just a return journey, has to be trained and checked out in Russia for these craft. Though most landings happen without incident, it's not some simple, routine thing to land in Soyuz. Things can and do go wrong, and each person in Soyuz has to know what to do. So even crew members that arrived on the shuttle had to be checked out on the Soyuz, whether that was for escape purposes, or for the regular ride home. The same thing would be required for crew the Dragon ferries up.
I'm not sure how long Dragon is allowed to remain in space. Would be nice if they could use it as an emergency exit as well.
I'm sure research into this is ongoing, but we desperately need some better treatments for depression. Anti-psychotics just aren't working. Perhaps it's because the entire industry has started using drugs as a crutch, rather than addressing core problems, and maybe this would end up being the same thing. I dunno.
But as someone who suffers from depression, and has loved ones with serious depression, I would welcome anything that would provide these loved ones with some relief and help them be their normal selves again.
Oops I missed part of the quote.
At the heart of this struggle is the political failure of the various Arab regimes that emerged after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the end of European colonialism. Those regimesâ"whether kingdoms, parliamentary democracies, or single-party socialist statesâ"were all roughly designed after western models, with elements of western law. But all quickly devolved into despotic states, corrupt and generally incompetent in meeting the basic needs of their citizens. Not coincidentally, leaders of some of those statesâ"notably, Egypt, Syria, and Iraqâ"for a time paid lip service, and perhaps something more, to a largely secular vision of pan-Arab political unity. A humiliating defeat at the hands of the Israelis in 1967 largely dashed that dream.
Thanks for the link, by the way. It's a very good article. Worth bookmarking and passing around.
Did you even bother to read the link you posted? Here's a good quote from it:
Bewildering as all this has been, Americans might have found it easier to negotiate if they had paid as much attention to the Arab side of the terrorists' identity as they did to the Muslim side. The friction between Lewis and Said loses some of its heat, for example, when 9/11, bin Laden, and al Qaeda are seen as key elements of a struggle that is taking place primarily within the Arab core of the Middle East.
The ignorance of we in the west does us few favors. We often confuse culture and religion in the Muslim world. And many of us are unaware that Arab is not equivalent to Muslim. The vast majority of the world's Muslims are not Arab, and in fact not even middle-eastern--they are Asian! The Arab and nearby world represents a disproportionate amount of Islamist terrorism. In effect, we are seeing the results of a thousand years of culture clashing with western meddling to create some truly desperate folk. It surely wouldn't hurt to at least understand the dynamics of the situation before blindly stabbing. Odds are the criminals who murdered these people in France are probably immigrants from north African, countries (Arab mainly), who are not only escaping brutal, corrupt regimes (we fixed things so well in Libya), but are also un-integrated, disenfranchised in modern European society which has little understanding of their values. So they are exceedingly vulnerable to ideologies that purport to empower them, even if they are wrong and criminal.
Islamist terrorists succeed in getting their recruits to dehumanize the west. Let's not do the same in our own ideology towards the Muslim world.
Yes really. What makes you think these people celebrating are the majority? Do you know how many muslims there are and how many of them are ordinary, peaceful folk? We're talking 1.6 Billion people that identify as Muslim. If 1.6 Billion muslims hated Americans as you seem to think, I think we probably would have long ago fought World War III.
And how is claiming all Muslims are terrorists any better than the many people that dislike America (we have great cause to be disliked, let's be honest) celebrating 9/11? If the world succeeded in destroying all 1.6 billion Muslim terrorists, then which group will become the new terrorists?
Certainly all acts of violence are to be condemned, whether it is by an Islamist terrorist, a Christian terrorist, an atheist terrorist, or war and conflict in general.
And in fact the criminals who murdered these 12 people are not followers of Islam though they claim to do it in the name of Islam. And the vast majority of those who are Muslim in the world do not condone nor celebrate these kind of murders done in the name of Islam, and really do want, as most of us do, peace. To paint them all with the same brush is to be as bigoted as those who committed this heinous act in the first place, especially when I read of westerners who call for the annihilation of Muslims, as I've read in other places. Surely that is no better than religious extremism.
I have spent some significant time in the middle east, and I can assure you that in general the peoples of that area (of all cultural identities, Turkish, Arab, Persian, and others) are good folks who are welcoming and hospitable, just as I'm sure the majority of westerners are. We have our own extremist and criminals in the west as well, of different kinds, be they non-religious or religious.
In actual fact, the root causes of many forms of terrorism are not very different from common gang problems in the United States. Disenfranchisement, poverty, political corruption, military occupation all contribute to the problem, though that cannot excuse personal responsibility.
This tragic event seems to fit the definition of "terrorism" but I fear the word has still lost all meaning. A man who shot and killed 8 people in Calgary recently is called a "mass murderer." Perhaps this is not terrorism because his goal was to terrorize and kill a single family, not a city or nation? If a killing can be linked to some religious idea is it terrorism? The "troubles" in northern Ireland in the 80s and 90s, was that terrorism? What about the PKK fight against Turkey, or the intifada in Palestine (which is clearly not religious in nature)? What about the massacre in Norway in 2011? Certainly that was terrorism, but definitely not religious at all?
I sincerely hope that these criminals are captured quickly and brought to justice. I also hope that innocent folks who do follow Isam, and are in fact peaceful, will not face reprisals or violence against them. And my heart goes out to the families who lost their loved ones in today's senseless attack.
Just a note that many games on archive.org cannot be downloaded. They can be played online only, through the uncredited javascript dosbox implementation. Not sure how that affects the legal status of these games.
ASN.1 is certainly not a "programming" language. It is a type of domain-specific language, I suppose, similar to how a web programmer has to know HTML and CSS, while writing programs in some other language. I guess in our modern world where XML is used to bludgeon every problem to death, I can see why some people might call ASN.1 with a programming language, though like XML, ASN.1 is not turing complete. ASN.1 is pretty cool, though. It is a binary, self-describing data encoding scheme, and forms the basis of a number of core protocols we use all the time, including LDAP (which uses a form of ASN.1 called BER). ASN.1 has been around for far longer than XML, and if you're working with network protocols at the software level, is worth knowing.
I once wrote an LDAP proxy server that spoke LDAP wire protocol natively, and I had to implement ASN.1 encoding and decoding. My code at the time was written in C using the wonderful glib library (which minus gobject should be made part of the standard c library someday). It has since been rewritten in Python using Twisted which nicely abstractly all the ASN.1 stuff away in the nice Twisted LDAP adapter classes.
This is why I like Python. Python allows object-oriented programming styles or procedural, or a mix. Python has a lot of warts, but it's really refreshing to me to use. Every time I look at Java, I'm turned off by the forcing of class-based object-oriented programming for everything, even when the program is really just procedural with a static main. Perhaps this tends to make programmers try to shoehorn OOP when it's not the best fit.
If anyone else hadn't heard about using a CA with ssh, as I hadn't, they might find this short tutorial interesting:
https://www.digitalocean.com/c...
Wish this was available back in my uni days when I managed many dozens of Linux workstations. Managing keys was always a pain.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
