links: October 2010 Archives

All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. 5 Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years. 6 Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase. 7

Despite the privacy watchdog and human rights groups preferring a more data-protection-friendly opt-in model, Undersecretary for Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Adeline Wong Ching-man said the administration wanted the opt-out model. "Apart from considerations about the livelihood of people who work in the direct marketing industry, the government has to take into account the fact that some customers may want to accept calls from direct marketers," Wong told RTHK, adding that many countries favoured this option.

In the 1970s, the surviving Fianna Fáil ex-ministers were horrified at the prospect of the emergence of a very different kind of Fianna Fáil. It was only with great difficulty that Frank Aiken, because of his concerns for the party and the country, was persuaded to stand again for election in 1973. Later, President de Valera confided his deep fears for the country to a minister in whose integrity he had confidence. And when he was dying, Seán MacEntee asked to see me to confide his deep concern for the future of the State because of what had happened to his party, Fianna Fáil. The truth is that because of the widespread lack of a tradition of civic responsibility or a sense of civic morality, for which I fear the Catholic Church must bear some of the blame, the disappearance of the revolutionary generation from government in the 1960s removed the only barrier to the spread to politics of the socially inadequate value system that we, as a people, had inherited from our colonial past.

We cannot endure however, the sheer sense of injustice and the total loss of moral law at the filthy hands of these so-called rogues and sleeveens (it is equally disheartening to see we have had cause over the years to establish a colloquialism to best describe such recurrent characters in Irish society). An example has been set by the leaders of this country that their selfish and cynical behaviour is an acceptable discourse in modern Ireland. Our potential to act meaningfully and righteously in this society has been shrouded in this cynicism by the greedy, ignorant brutes that head our banks and by the lacklustre unimaginative politicians that sit in our Government offices.

“The M3 and Limerick Tunnel contracts are proof . . . that penalty clauses based on never-ending growth hang taxpayers out to dry,” PlanBetter said. “The contracts are naive in that there is no amendment or reset clause. The PPP [public private partnership] contracts highlight another failure by Government to regulate. This time, a public organisation got wrapped up in the myth of high, endless levels of growth.” It said the road authority’s reputation “has been holed below the waterline with these revelations” as it continued to ignore a 7 per cent fall in traffic over the last two years and still used a 2003 multiplier that assumes traffic growth of over 2 per cent every year. A roads authority spokesman said a “revenue guarantee arrangement” was a common feature of PPP contracts throughout Europe. Its purpose was to “enhance the fundability of these projects and attract more competitive funding terms”. He added that there had been no payments made to date to either consortium.

China devotes significant resources to building a world-class education system and pioneering research in competitive industries and sciences, and has had notable successes in network computing, clean energy, and military technology. But a lack of integrity among researchers is hindering China’s potential and harming collaboration between Chinese scholars and their international counterparts, scholars in China and abroad say.

Tomato USB is an alternative Linux-based firmware for powering Broadcom-based ethernet routers. It is a modification of the famous Tomato firmware, with additional built-in support for USB port, wireless-N mode support, support for several newer router models, and various enhancements.

Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming.

Liquid Galaxy is a cluster of computers running Google Earth to create an immersive experience. It started as a Google 20% project, and just kept growing! We built Liquid Galaxy installations in Google offices across the globe, and brought them to over a dozen different conferences. People liked it so much that we decided to share it. The latest public versions of Google Earth for Linux, Mac and Windows all include the features that make Liquid Galaxy work. This site documents how to use them, and all the supporting scripts and configuration files we use. We even put up the plans for our custom frame.