By Day 2 in the blazing Utah desert, Dave Buschow was in bad shape. Pale, wracked by cramps, his speech slurred, the 29-year-old New Jersey man was desperate for water and hallucinating so badly he mistook a tree for a person. After going roughly 10 hours without a drink in the 100-degree heat, he finally dropped dead of thirst, face down in the dirt, less than 100 yards from the goal: a cave with a pool of water.
But Buschow was no solitary soul, lost and alone in the desert. He and 11 other hikers from various walks of life were being led by expert guides on a wilderness-survival adventure designed to test their physical and mental toughness. And the guides, it turned out, were carrying emergency water on that torrid summer day.
Buschow wasn't told that, and he wasn't offered any. The guides did not want him to fail the $3,175 course. They wanted him to dig deep, push himself beyond his known limits, and make it to the cave on his own.
Nearly a year later, documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act reveal those and other previously undisclosed details of what turned out to be a death march for Buschow. They also raise questions about the judgments and priorities of the guides at the Boulder Outdoor Survival School. What matters more: the customer's welfare or his quest? much more at link
#2
If a DI ignored the obvious symptoms of advanced life threatening conditions, he/she'd be up on courts martial charge for homicide. The military doesn't tolerate such mistreatment on its personnel, who it pays and expects to undergo harsh training, to include similar 'volunteer' training as in the Rangers, et al. Why is this tolerated?
#7
If these idiotsindividuals want to push the limits of their endurance, let them enlist. Otherwise they're just self-absorbed wankers. That said, the actions of the "guides" sound like textbook depraved indifference to me, waiver or not.
#8
The Smokie Mtns are nearby. Every year one or more dies from exposure because they did not understand the risks and were not prepared--they usually die of exposure.
#9
Legal waivers or not, the subject displayed textbook symptoms of extreme and life-threatening dehydration. It was financial interest that drove the guides' decision to withhold emergency water from Buschow. The school's track record be damned. When someone mistakes a tree for a person and starts talking to it, they are already in a dangerous condition. The guides are responsible for gross negligence resulting in voluntary manslaughter. Jail time should await them.
ESPN takes a look at Woolmer's death and the seamy underbelly of international cricket. The article is nicely written, but the author overlooks something fairly obvious. Excerpt:
Cricket, the sport of afternoon tea and sliced cucumbers and pristine white outfits. And now, a bona fide murder mystery, where investigators have no named suspects, no clear motive and no certain cause of death. A murder mystery in which all of the above has created a factual and narrative vacuum, filled by a raft of increasingly crazy yet strangely plausible theories, spouted and dismissed and exhumed by fans and reporters and local taxi drivers alike, a deranged yet irresistible game of Clue.
A crazy fan in the bathroom with a towel. The Indian mafia with exotic poison. Pakistani Intelligence in league with al-Qaida, financed by Chinese offshore accounts.
#1
And a team upon whom religion held an ever-increasing sway...
Posted by: Howard UK ||
05/03/2007 5:45 Comments ||
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It's a myth that cricket is tradition bound. In reality, cricket is way ahead of any other sport in exploiting technology. Super slowmo, infrared imaging, near realtime simulations (showing what would have happened had player x not done y).
A young Canadian Gore disciple – he’s seen An Inconvenient Truth three times - attends a Gore lecture, only to discover something terrible:
I had read blog comments before which indicated that Al Gore is a religious man, which intrigued me, because from his movie, he comes across as a man who is ready to accept science as the proper methodology (versus evangelical faith in biblical literalism). He did not mention any kind of religious beliefs in the movie Â…
During his live slideshow today, however, he showed his true colors. One of his slides was a quote from Genesis, which he used to show that humans are the stewards of biodiversity.
The blasphemer quotes rival scripture!
The slide I found particularly interesting/shocking/sad, was his new(?) slide containing a graph of human population growth over the past couple hundred-thousand years. It started off good. He pointed at the beginning of the graph, showing the population of humans on Earth from 200,000 years ago, and referred to the “rise of humans."
Cool beans. So he believes that Homo sapiens evolved from other hominid ancestors, right? Nope.
In the very same breath, he then continued to explain that according to his religious beliefs, this “rise of humans” was God’s creation of mankind - apparently 200,000 years ago. His graph then changed to include the caption “Adam & Eve” above this starting point.
Apparently those words are a grave insult to the Sciencian faith.
He tarnishes his beautifully crafted presentation by not only stating his belief in creationism - but by placing the words “Adam and Eve” right on the slide (which is actually a scientific graph) as a caption explaining the beginnings of mankind.
He put the terrible words RIGHT ON A SCIENTIFIC GRAPH? Forget Korans down toilets, people. This is serious.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/03/2007 06:54 ||
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#1
What Al's left-wing worshippers don't remember is that Al Gore attended divinity school at Vanderbilt University after his stint as a military journalist. This may explain his passion, God gave us a beautiful planet and he believes man is screwing it up. Environmentalism is a religious concern to him.
Posted by: Steve ||
05/03/2007 7:53 Comments ||
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#2
But the geneticists do talk about an Adam and an Eve, from each of whom all humans are descended genetically. The Eve connection is through the mitochondria, as I understand it, which is only passed down through the eggs of the mothers; I think the Adam connection is traced through some genes on the Y chromosome. So we all are descended from these two individuals... only they apparently were located some distance and 10,000 years or so apart. Clearly the young Canadian disciple (a religious term, that) is not quite as knowledgeable as little American housewives. Ah well, a change of citizenship, career and sex will take care of that, eh?
Nigerian president-elect Umaru Yar'Adua promised on Wednesday to review the conduct of the disputed April elections that gave him his mandate with a view to delivering better ones in 2031 2011.
Local and foreign observers said vote-rigging was so widespread that the elections were not credible, while the opposition has rejected the results. Yar'Adua has repeatedly said he believes he won fair and square. "The next administration ... will examine as a matter of urgency the last elections ... so that we will raise the standard and quality of our general elections," Yar'Adua said at a ceremony during which he received a "certificate of election".
Yar'Adua's People's Democratic Party (PDP), which has ruled Africa's most populous nation and biggest oil producer for eight years, scored a landslide victory according to official results. Yar'Adua was credited with 24,6-million votes against 6,6-million for his closest rival. The PDP won 28 out of 36 state governors' seats and an overwhelming majority in both houses of the National Assembly.
But European observers said the elections "fell far short of basic international standards" and were not credible, while the United States State Department said the process was "seriously flawed".
Posted by: Fred ||
05/03/2007 00:00 ||
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Zimbabwean police have brutally beaten hundreds of activists and ordinary people in recent months after a crackdown on dissent by President Robert Mugabe's government, a rights group said on Wednesday.
Human Rights Watch said police had been randomly arresting and beating up Zimbabweans they accuse of supporting the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) since its leader Morgan Tsvangirai was detained and beaten in March. "Arbitrary arrests, detentions and brutal beatings by police and security forces skyrocketed in March and April and continue unabated," Georgette Gagnon, deputy African director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
Zimbabwe's government has repeatedly warned of tough action against opposition supporters it accuses of mounting a "terrorist campaign" to topple it at the behest of Mugabe's critics in London and Washington. Human Rights Watch, in a report entitled Bashing Dissent: Escalating violence and state repression in Zimbabwe, said police went on a two-week rampage in March, randomly beating people in the streets, in shopping malls and beer halls in suburbs of the capital Harare, which are considered opposition strongholds.
Police went house to house beating people with batons and had imposed an informal curfew in some Harare suburbs as high levels of repression continue, the group said after a two-week fact-finding mission in the Southern African country. "Right now, no one walks about after 7pm unless you want a beating," Human Rights Watch quoted one resident of a Harare suburb as saying.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/03/2007 00:00 ||
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Awami League (AL) President and former prime minister Sheikh Hasina is expected to return home from London on May 7. "We have already booked tickets of Emirates Airlines for May 6. The flight is scheduled to arrive in Dhaka at 8:30am on May 7," AL's assistant secretary for international affairs sub-committee Abdus Sobhan Golap, who is accompanying Hasina in London, told The Daily Star last night over telephone.
The former prime minister was scheduled to deliver speech on "Democracy and Human Rights in Bangladesh" at School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) as chief guest last night with Professor Werner Menski in the chair. Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies at SOAS organised the event.
This article starring:
Abdus Sobhan Golap
Professor Werner Menski
Sheikh Hasina
Posted by: Fred ||
05/03/2007 00:00 ||
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Turkey headed on Wednesday for early parliamentary elections on July 22 to settle a standoff between the Islamist-rooted government and the secular elite over the country's strict separation of mosque and state. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan proposed the early poll a day after Turkey's highest court ruled that the first round of a presidential election was invalid, a defeat for the ruling AK Party that Erdogan labeled "a bullet aimed at democracy."
The opposition boycotted the first round of the vote in parliament, preventing the required quorum and forcing the country towards early elections. The court ruled that without a quorum the election was invalid. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, an AK party member and the only presidential candidate, is a former Islamist whose wife wears an Islamic headscarf. Opponents fear that Gul as president and Erdogan as prime minister would push Turkey towards an Islamist agenda, something they both deny. "We made a decision which will end all of the controversies and give the word to the nation. Our dear nation will present its preference of the future," Erdogan said. Parliament's constitutional committee proposed holding the vote on July 22 rather than June 24 as proposed by the AK Party, and CNN Turk quoted Erdogan as saying he had no objection. Parliament's general assembly was expected to approve the date.
This article starring:
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan
Posted by: Fred ||
05/03/2007 00:00 ||
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Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal are to meet face to face for a TV debate that could decide Sunday's French presidential election. "I think it will be decisive," said former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, author of the memorable put-down, "You don't have a monopoly of the heart," in the 1974 presidential election debate with his rival Francois Mitterrand. "I think I was elected because of this debate," he told RTL radio on Wednesday.
The two-hour encounter will be screened simultaneously by France's two biggest television channels from 9 p.m. (1900 GMT) and is expected to be watched by nearly half the country's 44.5 million voters.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/03/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
EUTRUTH.org > ABOLITION OF GREAT BRITAIN SET FOR MAY 2009, allegedly if EU CONSTITUTION is signed. Website claims Euros State-specific National Constitutions will no longer matter.
Liberal Democrats are attempting to muzzle conservative talk radio: they are assaulting free speech. Like the communists in the former Soviet Union, America’s liberals seek to crush dissent by consolidating control over the media—especially talk radio, which has emerged as the dominant medium for conservative opinion.
Allies close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are promoting legislation, which if passed, will take off the air prominent conservative radio hosts such as Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly—along with thousands of smaller conservative broadcasters. The bill, entitled the "Media Ownership Reform Act," is sponsored by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a leftist Democrat from New York. The legislation aims to revive the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” of the 1940’s: “all views” are to be given equal time on radio. In particular, the Federal Communications Commission would have the power to oversee and change radio and television content. The goal is to tilt the ideological balance of power away from the right on the nation’s air waves.
The real force behind the effort to censor conservative talk radio is the progressive–philanthropist, George Soros. The radical leftist billionaire has made no secret of his hatred for conservatives. He says President Bush has transformed America into a militaristic, “fascist” empire. Moreover, Soros champions many of liberalism’s chic causes: abortion on demand, legalization of drugs, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, unlimited Third World immigration, open borders, and one-world government anchored in the United Nations. He advocates all the issues that are anathema to popular radio talk-show hosts like Savage, Limbaugh and Hannity. Hence, he wants these commentators to be exiled to the political wilderness.
#1
Soros champions many of liberalismÂ’s chic causes: abortion on demand, legalization of drugs, homosexual marriage, euthanasia, unlimited Third World immigration, open borders, and one-world government anchored in the United Nations.
Sounds like the Anti-Christ.
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/03/2007 17:42 Comments ||
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#2
So... this will apply to television as well? I'm looking forward to "Fox News 8--The Ocho".
Posted by: Dar ||
05/03/2007 17:58 Comments ||
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#3
The left has tried talk radio. No one listens to liberal talk radio. It has been a failure. The liberal donks are trying to muzzle talk radio. Newspapers and liberal television are giving way to talk radio which is basically conservative and they are threatened. The tyrannical left is the antithesis of democracy.
#2
The administration contends the firing of eight of the 93 U.S. attorneys last year was justified, though mishandled. U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of a president.
Documents unearthed by an Irish vicar show ancestors of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama may have arrived in the United States from a tiny village in central Ireland as early as the 1790s. Faith! The O'Bamas left the Auld Sod that long ago? Why, it seems like only yesterday...
"They're old parish records going back to 1799," Canon Stephen Neill, rector for the parish of Moneygall, told Reuters. "They're in remarkably good condition and we have constant applications from Americans chasing their ancestors."
Genealogy Web site www.ancestry.co.uk asked Neill, whose father is Anglican archbishop of Dublin, to check parish records after discovering documents indicating Obama's great-great-great grandfather arrived in New York in 1850 before settling in Ohio. "Like most of us he has an interesting mix of ancestry, including some impressively early all-American roots," said Megan Smolenyak, a spokeswoman for the Web site.
Between 1845 and 1851 over a million people left Ireland on 'famine ships' to escape mass-starvation caused by potato blight and ancestry.co.uk says passenger lists show Obama's great-great-great grandfather Falmuth Kearney was among them. Aye, and well's remembered old "Foulmouth" Kearney back in County Offaly!
Subsequent research into the parish records provided by Neill revealed not only that the Kearneys hailed from Moneygall in County Offaly but also that other family members may have crossed the Atlantic before him in the 1790s, the Web site said. 'S'truth! Why, old Sean O'Bama was said to have been one o' St. Brendan's rowers.
Born in Hawaii to a white American mother and Kenyan father, Obama's European connection means he can also join more than 30 million of his countrymen in claiming Irish descent.
Posted by: Fred ||
05/03/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
too much Guinness
Posted by: Captain America ||
05/03/2007 0:42 Comments ||
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#2
Hmmmm. He sure doesn't look like any Irish I've known. For instance, the Kennedy family of Boston. Osama Obama looks way too slender, no ruddy complection, and never been seen falling down drunk in public like normal good Irish lads.
#4
If Bill Clinton can be the "first black President" and Hillary can be black in church, Obama can certainly be Irish or Turkish or a Liechtensteiner for that matter.
#9
Ah yes, the "everyman" image. Got to get all the bases covered before election time. I thought I detected an Irish brouge or was it a Nigerian lilt?
A virulent strain of tuberculosis resistant to most available drugs is surfacing around the globe, raising fears of a pandemic that could devastate efforts to contain TB and prove deadly to people with immune-deficiency diseases such as HIV-AIDS.
Known formally as extensively drug-resistant TB, or XDR-TB, the strain has been detected in 37 countries. It arises when the bacterium that causes TB mutates because antibiotics used to combat it are carelessly administered by poorly trained doctors or patients don't take their full course of medication. Rather than being killed by the drugs, the microbe builds up resistance to them.
At least 50 percent of those who contract this strain of TB will die of it, according to medical experts. In trying to stop the spread of the disease, which can be transmitted through coughing, spitting or even speaking, health officials have imposed sometimes extreme controls on infected people.
Robert Daniels, a 27-year-old dual Russian-U.S. citizen, underwent months of treatment for TB in Russia, where he often led a homeless existence. After telling people he was feeling better, he flew from Moscow to New York on Jan. 14 last year, then on to Phoenix.
In fact, his disease had not disappeared. The microbe causing it had mutated, apparently helped by his failure to complete a drug regimen in Russia. Weeks after arriving in Phoenix, Daniels was again coughing, feeling weak and losing weight.
Doctors in Phoenix diagnosed his illness as the new resistant strain of TB. Daniels again failed to follow doctors' orders, authorities say. So health officials got a court order, and he was locked up in the prison wing of a Phoenix hospital, where he has spent the past nine months in hermetically sealed isolation.
"It's not right," Daniels said in a telephone interview. "I'm not a criminal."
Daniels has become a case study in the bleak choices society faces in dealing with the new strain and attempting to balance protection of individual rights with protection of the public.
Even in the antibiotics age, TB has remained a scourge in poorer countries and communities. Today, one in three people globally is estimated to be infected with dormant TB, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Most will never get sick, but in one in 10 cases the bacterium becomes active when the host's immune system is compromised. Worldwide, an estimated 1.7 million people die every year of the disease.
Two events last year alerted the medical community to a frightening new version of the disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drawing on a survey of TB labs on six continents, reported that the prevalence of the super strain of TB increased from 3 percent of patients to 11 percent between 2000 and 2004. It reached 15 percent in South Korea and 19 percent in Latvia. There are no statistics yet about the new strain in Russia, China or Africa, areas with major TB populations.
In the United States, 13,767 TB cases were recorded in 2006, the lowest rate of infection since reporting began in 1953. A retrospective analysis by the CDC found 49 cases of the new strain in the country since 1993.
The CDC survey was followed by a report from Yale University researchers that the superbug had raged through a rural hospital in South Africa in 2005 and early 2006, killing 52 of 53 who contracted it, including six health care workers. The victims, apparently infected by airborne transmission of the virus, died on average just 16 days after diagnosis; most of them also had HIV.
"We have to come to grips with this quickly," said Vladislav Yerokhin, director of the Central Tuberculosis Research Institute in Moscow. "This is not just a threat for TB patients. This is a serious threat for the general population."
Russia has become a petri dish for drug resistance.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, rising poverty and a disintegrating medical system unleashed a TB epidemic in Russia and other post-communist countries. In 2005, the number of newly diagnosed cases in Russia reached 119,226, and 32,148 people died of the disease, according to the Ministry of Health and Social Development.
Up to 70 percent of TB patients in Russia are homeless, unemployed, in prison, former prisoners or alcohol abusers; 30 percent or more of patients break off their treatment, boosting resistance to anti-TB drugs.
In addition, Russia has an estimated 1 million people who are HIV-positive. That is an explosive combination, according to Murray Feshbach, an expert on Russian demography at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. "It's potentially catastrophic for Russia," he said.
Today, South Africa is also a major TB infection zone. "The pressure of TB is enormous in our setting, and the majority of AIDS-related deaths are due to TB," said Gilles van Cutsem, medical coordinator with Doctors Without Borders in Khayelitsha, a large township on the edge of Cape Town, South Africa.
"People are wary about transmission within the community, as well as within health structures, from patients to patients and from patients to staff," van Cutsem said. "Considering that a great proportion of the health staff is also HIV-positive, this is even more of a concern."
Active TB bacteria are treated with four standard drugs. In most cases, patients quickly become non-infectious and start to feel better, although they are considered cured only after a full course of treatment, lasting about six months.
By the 1980s, doctors had begun to notice that some patients were resistant to these first-line drugs, particularly the two most potent ones, isoniazid and rifampicin. Their condition was defined as multidrug-resistant TB.
When the first line of drugs fail, doctors fall back on more expensive ones that have toxic side effects but can cure the condition after being used for 18 to 24 months. However, it is extremely difficult to keep patients taking the drugs for such a long period.
The new strain, a step up in resistance from the multidrug-resistant variety, has appeared more recently. An estimated 22,000 Russians have TB that is resistant to drug therapy to some degree. An unknown number of them have the new super strain.
If it is not contained, it will almost certainly mutate again into a completely drug-resistant TB, according to Mario Raviglione, director of WHO's Stop TB Department.
Some experts believe that may have already happened. Doctors reported this year that a 49-year-old woman in Italy died after 625 days of hospital treatment; all the drugs they tried failed.
The world is facing a return to the era before antibiotics when the white plague, as TB was known, was often a death sentence, according to Raviglione. The only treatment option then involved risky surgery in which doctors collapsed or removed an infected lung or attempted to cut out diseased tissue.
"We will be left with surgery and prayers," Raviglione said. "It's a desperate situation."
New drugs are in the pipeline but still years away, and patient non-cooperation could quickly undermine their effectiveness. "Monitoring patients is not easy when you are talking about a man who drinks a half a liter of vodka a day, or has no home or no family or no job, or all of the above. Those are our TB patients, " said Sergei Borisov, deputy director of the Phthisio-Pulmonary Institute in Moscow.
Some doctors and medical ethicists have said that countries will have to consider forced isolation of uncooperative patients, a public health strategy that evokes the sanitariums of decades ago.
"We have to face the possibility that restrictive measures may be necessary to control what could become a global pandemic," said Ross Upshur, director of the Joint Center for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. "I'm not advocating detention as a first resort," he added. "But if voluntary measures fail, people do not have the right to infect others. At the same time, people should be treated humanely, and they should have access to counsel, and they shouldn't be placed in a prison setting."
Other experts say such an approach might merely drive the disease underground and is impractical in poor countries.
"Forcing one uncooperative patient into isolation is fine, or even 10 patients or 100 patients," Borisov said. "But what about our situation in Russia, where 25 percent of the patients are uncooperative? Are we going to lock up thousands of patients? And where will we put them? Doctors cannot be prison guards."
Daniels, for instance, was often homeless when he was in Russia, according to him and his wife, Alla Danielova, an English teacher. Daniels said he bounced among friends' houses, partying and trying to ignore the bloody sputum he was coughing up. "I knew I was going to have to treat it, but I had other plans at that time," he said. "I didn't think it was a big deal. Now I know better."
Daniels acknowledged that he had visited a fast-food restaurant and stores in Phoenix without a mask but denied that he had stopped taking his medicine there. "That's a nasty lie," he said.
He said his condition is now improving. He has petitioned the court to be moved out of the prison ward and, ultimately, released. But last week a judge rejected his plea and ordered him to remain in medical confinement. Again, we have the AIDS-infected to thank for this explosion in Tuberculosis.
#1
boo hoo damiels as i remember you where told too wear a mask and you didn't . so you where a threat too others and went against a court order which does make you a criminal
#2
Daniels deserves confinement because of demonstrated irresponsibility and endangering others. I have to wonder where a homeless Russian guy got the money for airline flights to New York and Phoenix.
Posted by: IT Insider ||
05/03/2007 22:52 Comments ||
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#5
"It's not right," Daniels said in a telephone interview. "I'm not a criminal."
YES, YOU ARE.
You won't take your medication, you won't wear a mask in public; you assaulted innocent people with your murderous illness every day you walked around outside.
You brought this on yourself.
Looking for sympathy? Check the (English) dictionary - you'll find it right between sweat and syphalis, you oxygen thief.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
05/03/2007 23:26 Comments ||
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Samsung Electronics has begun mass production of a 16 Gbyte NAND flash memory chip that would be used in digital music players, music phones, and digital cameras. Samsung, which is making the chips using a 51-nanometer manufacturing process, said it is the first to mass-produce what it claims is the "highest capacity memory chip now available. In rolling out the densest NAND flash in the world, we are throwing open the gates to a much wider playing field for flash-driven consumer electronics," Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing for Samsung Semiconductor, said in a statement issued Sunday.
Samsung said its 51-nanometer production process can make NAND flash chips 60% more efficiently than the typical 60-nanometer process used in the industry. In addition, the new production process accelerates the read-write speeds by about 80% over current data processing speeds for comparable chip designs. Samsung plans to integrate the chip with a suite of Flash software and firmware for storage devices for music phones and MP3 players. As the demand for video content grows, Samsung expects to promote the chip for storage in mid- to high-range digital cameras. The company expects the high-capacity chip to enter the mainstream market beginning late this year.
The latest product follows by about eight months Samsung's launch of production of a 60-nanometer 8-Gbyte NAND flash memory chip. Samsung has been pushing the envelope in flash technology. In March, the company introduced a 64 Gbyte solid-state flash drive for ultra-portable notebooks. The South Korean company unveiled the 1.8-inch drive at its annual Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, Taiwan, and said it planned to start mass production in the second quarter. For someone who remembers ferrite core memory planes, 16Gb on a single chip is simply stupendous. Were it not for the advent of digital photography and music downloads, a single one of these chips could probably hold every single document, spreadsheet and digital record that the average household would produce in a human lifetime. I can still remember the first chip memory devices. A Texas Instruments catalog that I taught myself digital electronics out of proudly announced a 16 bit register file which could simultaneously read and write. Later whopping 1K serial DRAMs came to market and it's been upwards and onwards ever since.
While I was working during the late 1970s with Tegal Corporation to develop plasma etching and deposition chemistries, the buzz was all about integrated citcuits made with micron (1 millionth or 0.000001 Meter) and sub-micron line widths. The Samsung device is now utilizing 60nM (60 nanometer or billionths of a meter) for its line widths. Thats 0.000000060 of a meter wide. By comparison a human hair ranges from 0.000180 to 0.000018 of a meter in diameter (18 to 180 microns).
During the mid-1980s I worked at Intel performing yield analysis for their stupendous 256K C-MOS DRAM. The largest of its kind at that time, it represented a huge leap ahead (despite other larger memory chips), due to C-MOS's low power consumption. This important property increased battery lifetimes then, as now, a major limiting factor in overall performance. To give an understanding of how small the memory cells were in the 256K DRAM chip, we had to switch over to an ultralow contaminant molding compound for encapsulating the chips because it was found that stray radioactive boron in the plastic's glass reinforcing fibers were emitting alpha particles which carried enough charge to flip the individual memory bit cells and create soft errors in the stored data.
Much as the hard drive's technological demise has been predicted over and over again, so has that of silicon technology. Especially the fabrication method known as photolithography. It is identical to the process whereby the copper layer of printed circuit boards is patterned using a photo-sensitive resist, only the scale is incredibly smaller. During the micron line width days of silicon, ordinary light was used to expose the photoresists employed in photolithography. As the linewidths increasingly approached the actual wavelength of light, scattering and reflectance notching all begin to interfere with accurate replication of the masking image being projected onto the wafer.
New approaches using E-Beam (electron beam) and other ultra-narrow beam technologies were developed to circumvent this issue. Remarkably enough, just like the disk drive, which continues to amaze everyone with its longevity, so has photolithography been given new life through the use of Deep UV (Ultra Violet) illumination for developing the resist patterns. It is most likely what Samsung is using to fabricate these little wonders and I am obliged to congratulate them for this achievement. I still have to wonder if they are depositing tungsten conductor layers for this chip using the CVD reactors I used to work on for one of their OEM suppliers.
#1
Speaking of "Now in production" > FREEREPUBLIC - TENET [60 Minutes interview ]: CIA-INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY BELIEVED SADDAM WOULD HAVE HAD NUCLEAR WEAPON BY 2007-2009.
#7
What's the max read/write to a block before failure count?
For read replacement of hard drives these chips make sense BUT for write (esp window's stupid registry and hives - now if you had a big block of cmos and windows was smart enough to use it for the registry and hives and only wrote it to flash once in awhile) it can be an application killer.
#8
I remember replacing a 10 megabyte drive on a Prime computer. The drive was about one foot by two feet. The service tech asked if anyone wanted it because he really didn't want to hump it out to the car. No takers.
And that was advanced technology.
I once was regaled by one of the first DEC service engineers: A giant two megabyte drive's spindle failed, and it started jumping around, walked sideways, and blocked the computer room door. Then it caught fire. Things got exciting!
The first computer I used in a serious way was a microVAX with 300M of disk space. I once went to a computer users' group meeting where we determined that the combined storage space of the campus VAX cluster was THREE HONKIN' GIG! Woo hoo!
Soon they'll be giving that much away in cereal boxes.
#15
#14: "did you even bother to read the article's first sentence?"
Geez, Zen - aren't you asking a lot of EP?
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
05/03/2007 17:25 Comments ||
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#16
Here's a good question: what do you think will be the "next wave" in computer technology?
Right now, I see the biggest lag as being in software. Unlike the new and better hardware, which to a great extent is being designed by computer, software is still being done by teams of people.
This means that it seems to be stuck in development, only incrementally changing in a rather linear manner, instead of by leaps and bounds with multi-dimensional jumps in performance.
Posted by: Mark E. ||
05/03/2007 18:43 Comments ||
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#18
Mark E: Programming today is either linear or parallel, a limitation of digital processing. To start with, we are reaching a point with hardware that can actually process analog data.
An analogy of this would be listening to someone play the trumpet as serial processing. Being able to distinguish between eight trumpeters playing at the same time would be parallel processing.
But multi-dimensional processing would be like listening to an orchestra--not only hearing different instruments individually, but operating in concert. Vastly more information is conveyed, but it is organized as a whole.
But programming for this, keeping the analogy, would be the difference between writing an instrument solo and writing a symphony.
Having a shortage of Beethovens in the programming community, would probably mean that we need a program that writes such software.
#19
Mark E "Can it make my word documents go back in time?"
I could have used one of those
Posted by: Dan Rather ||
05/03/2007 20:59 Comments ||
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#20
Having a shortage of Beethovens in the programming community, would probably mean that we need a program that writes such software.
Very interesting and apt analogies, 'moose. The biggest problem with having "a program that writes such software", is encapsulated in the old addage, "GIGO" (Garbage In - Garbage Out". Namely, the scribe program is only as good as its originators. Much of what you, very wisely, dance around is related to AI (artificial intelligence) or "machine intelligence". Little short of an AI engine would be required for "listening to an orchestra--not only hearing different instruments individually, but operating in concert".
Perhaps if a conventional engine were given a replete vocabulary and sensing profile of orchestral music characteristics (i.e., adagio, allegro, concerto, sonata, fugue, canon, etc.), it might be able to provide discriminative information, but certainly not the emotional content that symphonic pieces convey. Consider for a moment Beethoven's 6th "Pastoral" Symphony. Not even the most advanced modern computer could divine or identify the allegro "storm" passage as such, while a human ear can readily discern its tempestuous overtones.
As for advanced "multi-dimensional" processing, I would look towards optical computing. There have already been demonstrated optical processors that can compare two different time frames of the same scene and almost instantly (i.e., at light speed), differentiate even very slight variations between the two. Such capability would prove invaluable in FoF (Friend or Foe) combat indentification, real-time motion detection and so forth.
Extremely nuanced input discrimination still awaits much more refined voice interpretation software and pattern recognition macros. Consider how the human mind is estimated at possessing approximately one terabyte of storage capacity. We now have disk drive arrays with that sort of memory space. Now, consider how the human eye operates. Long before a signal reaches the brain's optical cortex, it has already been subjected to numerous conformality tests. The retina itself has built in networks that test for perpendicularity, roundness, squareness, planarity and numerous other geometric qualities.
Now imagine the immense difficulty in recreating olfactory, aural and tactile inputs for these advanced computing systems. Until so many of these other quasi-human traits are reliably incorporated, or software simulated, in these computing systems, it will be difficult to obtain the "jumps in performance" being sought.
Bulk information processing, especially as it stands, will never surpass human ability at synthesizing disparate sensory inputs.
Wally Schirra, one of America's seven original Mercury astronauts, died Thursday morning in California, NASA officials confirmed.
Schirra, who was named an astromaut by NASA in April 1959, piloted the six orbit Sigma 7 Mercury flight on Oct. 3, 1962, a flight which lasted a little more than nine hours. The spacecraft attained a velocity of 17,557 miles per hour at an altitude of 175 statue miles and traveled almost 144,000 statute miles before re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.
Schirra was one of America's most experienced astronauts, logging nearly 300 hours of space travel in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. It applies not only to Captain Schirra, but all the American and Soviet astronauts of that era - we will not see their like again.
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
05/03/2007 12:24 ||
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See you among the stars, good sir.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/03/2007 13:24 Comments ||
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To know that a man of his caliber has since been replaced with trash like Lisa Nowak certainly indicates the era of heroes and space pioneers is a foregone thing. Godspeed, Captain!
Posted by: Dar ||
05/03/2007 13:59 Comments ||
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Heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio and envelope-pushers Rosie O'Donnell and Sacha Baron Cohen are among the entertainment newsmakers on Time magazine's list of 100 people who shape the world. The list of 100 most influential, on newsstands Friday, also includes Queen Elizabeth II, presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, director Martin Scorsese and model Kate Moss. It does not include President Bush.
The list includes 71 men and 29 women from 27 countries. Other entertainers making the cut were Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Justin Timberlake, Tyra Banks, Cate Blanchett, America Ferrera, Tina Fey, John Mayer, Brian Williams, Michael J. Fox, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and "American Idol" creator Simon Fuller.
Separately, Time named 14 "power givers" such as Bill and Melinda Gates, Angelina Jolie and Queen Rania al-Abdullah of Jordan. God help us...
Posted by: Dave D. ||
05/03/2007 08:24 ||
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Leonardo DiCaprio is still around? I thought he drowned in a boating accident a few years ago.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/03/2007 9:03 Comments ||
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From the people who brought you the faux Koran flush story, more tidbits from the 'Less Weak More Better Enquirer', on sale at your checkout counter today!
#9
It is a CNN Time poll. CNN doesn't like George W. They are saying that Rosie O'Donnell is more influential than President Bush or VP Cheney. Got to be a lot wrong with this poll.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Nigerian president-elect Umaru Yar'Adua promised on Wednesday to review the conduct of the disputed April elections that gave him his mandate with a view to delivering better ones in 
Zimbabwean police have brutally beaten hundreds of activists and ordinary people in recent months after a crackdown on dissent by President Robert Mugabe's government, a rights group said on Wednesday.
Awami League (AL) President and former prime minister 
Turkey headed on Wednesday for early parliamentary elections on July 22 to settle a standoff between the Islamist-rooted government and the secular elite over the country's strict separation of mosque and state. 
Documents unearthed by an Irish vicar show ancestors of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama may have arrived in the United States from a tiny village in central Ireland as early as the 1790s.
