| Monday, May 19, 2003 |  |
| Water and Community Growth | 2 comments |
 19 May 2003 @ 10:59Though this is about my specific location and water supply considerations, it's applicable to all communites and our relationship to water resources. ---------------------------------------- The article below, "Water experts say allotting supply for farms, homes could be difficult", raises several good points that relate to current efforts to preserve and restore the environment in Ventura County. For instance: 1) The city of Ventura is currently updating it's Comprehensive Plan, a document that will dictate how much the city will grow in the future, and where. Although water supply has been discussed in the CPAC process, city water managers have stated that our water supply will provide for only 15 years growth at the current growth rate. The Comprehensive Plan aims to continue to grow for 20 years, at a potentially accelerated rate. The city aims to expand city boundaries and build on SOAR agricultural land in order to do this, regardless of water supply limitations. 2) Meanwhile, the Casitas Municipal Water District recently announced a moratorium on new customers in the Ojai Valley. This in response to the requirement that they allow enough water to flow in the Ventura River for fish to survive (6" depth). They say they will actively seek new sources of water, including conservation and state water supply. (Note that part of the city of Ventura's supply comes from Casitas) Nowhere in the discussion is the mention of sustainability. It is clear that water is the ultimate limiting factor in the population growth of California, but will it be too late? Paul Jenkin Environmental Director, Surfrider Foundation Ventura County Chapter Coordinator, Matilija Coalition Matilija Coalition Surfers Point http://ojaivalleynews.com/issues2003/05-May2003/05-09-03/05-09-03editorials.html http://ojaivalleynews.com/issues2003/04-April2003/04-11-03/04-11-03editorials.html ______________________________________________________________ Water experts say allotting supply for farms, homes could be difficult By John Krist May 16, 2003 As California's population grows by a projected 15 million people over the next two decades, thirsty cities will increasingly turn to agriculture as a source of water, possibly jeopardizing one of the state's most important industries, experts warned farmers and irrigation district managers Thursday. "Agriculture, in our view, is becoming the new water storage facility for the state," said Mike Wade, executive director of the Farm Water Coalition, a lobbying and education group. Wade, one of several speakers during a symposium sponsored by the Association of Water Agencies of Ventura County, said that if water transfers between farms and urban agencies are not planned carefully, they could end up devastating California agriculture and the communities that depend on it for their economic health. More than 80 percent of California's developed water supply is used by agriculture, and urban agencies are increasingly seeking to negotiate deals to buy some of that water for homes and businesses, believing it a cheaper and politically more realistic alternative than building new dams. Another panelist suggested it is possible to arrange for farmers to sell some of their water to cities without causing hardship. Recently negotiated deals between the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Sacramento Valley rice growers provided an economic boost for farmers, secured a low-cost supply of water for MWD customers, minimized environmental harm and provided benefits for small agricultural communities, said Timothy Quinn, MWD's vice president for state water resources. "The role of agricultural water transfers is not to go up and bleed ag dry," Quinn said. "We have no interest in talking to farmers who want to sell the farm, take the money and head to Hawaii." MWD provides water through its 27 member agencies to about 17 million people in six Southern California counties. Two-thirds of Ventura County residents receive MWD water through the Calleguas Municipal Water District. About half of MWD's water comes from the State Water Project, and the rest is pumped across the desert from the Colorado River. Both of those sources have been tapped out. The SWP has contracts to deliver more water than it can reliably supply each year, and the federal government recently reduced California's diversion of Colorado River water by 620,000 acre-feet. (An acre-foot, 325,900 gallons, is enough to supply two average Southern California households for a year.) At the start of the year, with much of the West still gripped by drought, the Department of Water Resources notified state water contractors that they could count on receiving only 45 percent of their allocations. Quinn said MWD then decided to execute contracts it had negotiated earlier with several irrigation districts serving primarily rice farmers in the Sacramento Valley, calling for 97,200 acre-feet Feb. 14, and another 50,000 acre-feet on March 1. The agency considered buying another 20,000 acre-feet on May 1 but decided not to when DWR increased its estimate of summer deliveries after the Sierra Nevada snowpack suddenly was boosted by what state hydrologists are referring to as an "awesome April" of heavy precipitation. On April 24, DWR said contractors would get 70 percent of their entitlements, and as of this week, Quinn said, the estimate had risen to 90 percent. MWD paid $105 an acre-foot for the rice farmers' water, which is about a sixth of the price urban agencies pay for state water. To free up water for sale to MWD, farmers agreed to idle some of their cropland. To minimize economic harm to the local economy, the irrigation districts agreed to allow no more than 20 percent of their farm acreage to go fallow, and the price paid by MWD includes a $5-per-acre-foot fee those communities can use for assistance programs. Quinn said the reason MWD was able to overcome the usual suspicion rural water users have toward urban dwellers -- particularly when one of those groups is from Northern California and the other is from the south -- was that MWD has invested more than $30 million over the past decade in environmental restoration programs in the Sacramento Valley. When Interior Secretary Gale Norton on Jan. 1 cut off California's access to Colorado River water, the trust MWD had cultivated during its long partnership with northern irrigation districts paid off. "If you just go to them and say, 'Do it because the big city needs it,' well, I haven't seen that work anywhere in California," Quinn said. More > |
| How the MacIntel Will Change the Market | 1 comment |
 19 May 2003 @ 09:31Howthe MacIntel Will Change the Market By John C. Dvorak April 7, 2003 My recent column in which I suggested that Apple may be contemplating a switch to the Intel architecture resulted in some interesting discussion. Much of it came from Mac mavens who seem to think that such a savvy move to an Intel platform is unlikely and ill-advised, since the new IBM-made PowerPC chip appears to be the front-runner for a future upgrade. But Apple must go with Intel or risk its future. I'll explain why. (Mac users should actually like this column, for a change.) I see an opportunity for Apple to take the entire market—away from Microsoft, that is. The window is open. Much of this initiative, I believe, will come from Intel. The Microsoft/AMD connection. First of all, the recent comments about Microsoft's 64-bit operating system that are starting to crop up in blogs and the British press are not lost on Intel. Also, Microsoft's long-standing and cozy relationship with AMD—Intel's most hated enemy—cannot make the chip leviathan happy. Simply put, Intel would love to screw Microsoft. Even the possibility that Microsoft might eschew the Itanium processor for the Athlon 64 cannot sit well, and Intel has to do something to get the world back on the Intel/Itanium fast track. Enter Apple. Apple must sense that despite user loyalty and software that's often superior, it's in a position of weakness based on simple market economics. And Adobe seemed to be promoting the Wintel platform recently, which surely didn't go down well at the home of the Mac. Apple must drool thinking about the other 95 percent of the market—the part it doesn't own. None of these circumstances or their possible ramifications—like the possibility of Intel supporting Apple—are lost on Microsoft, which must put the stake in the heart of Apple now by any means possible. This means Apple has to act boldly—and soon. Killer instinct. The die was cast when Microsoft bought Connectix, a company that is nowhere near Redmond's roadmap, but is part of the Apple scheme. Supposedly Microsoft made the buyout because Connectix virtualization software lets multiple versions of Windows run on individual systems. But ever since people began using the software to run Linux on Windows machines, it became a threat. The ability to run some sort of Intel-based Apple OS side by side with Windows would be worse and could be a disaster. Who needs such a comparison? Microsoft bought the company and now will disable the feature. The war has begun. Scenario. So here's what I see unfolding. Phase one. Late 2003/early 2004: Apple ports and optimizes the Unix-kernel OS X for the Itanium. The company rolls out the first Itanium desktop in conjunction with a PowerPC 970 machine for insurance. This generates a lot of buzz. Debate ensues. Pundits call the Itanium system the MacIntel. Intel is happy. Phase two. 2004: Bragging about its success, Apple rolls out another version of the OS for the plain x86 family, selling that version directly to any OEM (Dell, HP, IBM, and others) for bundling. The company also offers the OS to the installed base as a shrink-wrapped product, allows dual booting to ease the transition for those switching from Windows to Mac, and gives away an office suite as an incentive. Apple reinaugurates the "Switch" ads that were always part of a multi-attack strategy. The company's 5 percent share continues, because at first the only machines are Itanium and older PowerPC systems selling to the same audience. The OS ploy is pure gravy. Phase three. Late 2004 or sometime in 2005: Just as Apple's new OS begins to populate the x86 market, Apple rolls out its own x86 machine. This time the company is leery of who it licenses the OS to, setting up a tiered fee schedule to avoid lowballers by making them pay more (just the way Microsoft did with its NT licenses). The company phases out the PowerPC machines and introduces a competitively priced x86 computer made at the same Chinese factories that Dell, Gateway, and HP use to cut manufacturing costs. If sales of the Itanium line skyrocket, Apple could skip the x86 machine altogether, leaving it to licensees and end-users. Unlike its competitors, Apple doesn't have to pay for the OS, and because of a long-term branding effort to make its systems seem a cut above low-cost PCs, the company can sell at a modest premium. Minimally, Apple should be able to double its overall share of the systems market to 10 percent. I would expect something like 25 percent eventually, which would make the company five times bigger than today and give it enormous software profits. History not repeated. In the past, Apple's licensing scheme failed because the company could not pump a raw OS into the mainstream Intel world to act as a profit buffer and market-share grabber. Licensees were underselling Apple OS systems, and Apple had no other channel through which to distribute its OS. By switching to Intel before unrolling a scheme like the one I've described, the company could have a huge existing base of computers waiting for software. There is no doubt that a MacIntel machine could supplant the Wintel platform. And most likely, the entire hungry Linux community could port all the x86 Linux code to the MacIntel OS within weeks, creating a huge flood of good products. Adobe and other Mac products already run x86 code. This whole ploy is not like starting from scratch. Everything is already geared for success. The ducks are in a row. Right now, all things being equal, Apple should be able to grab half the market for operating systems. If it's as aggressive as Microsoft was with Netscape and essentially gives away the OS to the installed base, Apple could possibly knock Microsoft out of the box completely. In fact, this scheme or something close to it is what all Mac users want and is possibly the only thing that will keep the company afloat in the long term. After all, who really cares what chip is inside? More > |
| Question W | 0 comments |
 19 May 2003 @ 09:31Hijack The Meaning Of The Question Mark If radical conservatives can hijack the media, the truth, and the Constitution, citizens can hijack the meaning of a question mark! |
| RIAA Apologizes For Threatening Letter | 0 comments |
 19 May 2003 @ 09:31RIAA Apologizes For Threatening Letter By Declan McCullagh Staff Writer, CNET News.com May 12, 2003, 3:16 PM PT The Recording Industry Association of America apologized Monday to Penn State University for sending an incorrect legal notice of alleged Internet copyright violations. The notice and subsequent apology appears to mark the first time that a faulty notification has been made public. The incident also shows just how easily automated programs that search for copyrighted material can be fooled, as well as how disruptive such notices can be on college campuses. Last Thursday, the RIAA sent a stiff copyright warning to Penn State's department of astronomy and astrophysics. Department officials at first were puzzled, because the notification invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and alleged that one of its FTP sites was unlawfully distributing songs by the musician Usher. The letter demanded that the department "remove the site" and delete the infringing sound files. But no such files existed on the server, which is used by faculty and graduate students to publish research and grant proposals. Matt Soccio, the department's system administrator, said that he searched the FTP server "for files ending in mp3, wma, ogg, wav, mov, mpg, etc., and found nothing that would precipitate this complaint." Except, that is, when Soccio realized two things. The department has on its faculty a professor emeritus named Peter Usher whose work on radio-selected quasars the FTP site hosted. The site also had a copy of an a capella song performed by astronomers about the Swift gamma ray satellite, which Penn State helped to design. The combination of the word "Usher" and the suffix ".mp3" had triggered the RIAA's automated copyright crawlers. In an e-mail sent after a query from CNET News.com, the RIAA said a temporary employee had caused the notice to be sent. "We have withdrawn, and apologize for, the DMCA notice that had been sent to Penn State University in error. In order to safeguard against errors like this one, we have individuals look at each and every notice we send out. In this particular instance, a temp employee made a mistake and did not follow RIAA's established protocol, and we regret any inconvenience this may have caused. We are currently reviewing any other notices this temp may have sent." The RIAA confirmed that its policy does not require its Internet copyright enforcers to listen to the complete song that is allegedly infringing. By way of additional apology, the RIAA said it will send Peter Usher an Usher CD and T-shirt "in appreciation of his understanding." An RIAA spokesman noted that the RIAA has sent out "conservatively tens of thousands of notices" in the last five years and that this incident to be the first error that has been discovered. A representative of Penn State said Monday afternoon that the university accepts "that this was an honest mistake by the recording industry." Spokesman Tysen Kendig said Penn State "remains committed to working closely with the RIAA and other law enforcement entities" to take actions against the trading of copyrighted material. Penn State President Graham Spanier, who testified before Congress in February about online piracy, is the co-chairman of a working group that includes the entertainment industry. The flap at Penn State occurred as the RIAA has stepped up its enforcement efforts against peer-to-peer users on campus. It recently sued four college students for running programs that create a searchable index of files on a local area network; the students settled the suits by paying $12,000 to $17,000 each to the RIAA. It has also used the messaging features built into Kazaa and Grokster to warn users of copyright violations. Copyright notices Under section 512 of the controversial DMCA, a representative of a copyright holder can send a "takedown" notice to a university or other Internet provider, requesting that copyrighted material be removed. Anyone receiving a false notice can sue for damages and attorney's fees, but only if the sender "knowingly materially misrepresents" information. Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that portion of the DMCA gives too much leeway to copyright holders. "If you have a good-faith belief that use of the material is not authorized by the copyright holder under copyright law, that's the only standard you have to meet," Cohn said. "You can't be liable if you're wrong unless you knowingly and materially misrepresented (the information). I think the situations where there will be liability will be very small." Cohn said the RIAA's apology is the first time that an incorrect DMCA notice has become public. Peter Meszaros, head of Penn State's department of astronomy and astrophysics, said "there are strict and well-advertised guidelines" about using the department’s computers, and that "infringements are reported to the central Penn State computer security office, which handles any breaches, if and when they occur." According to department policy, faculty members and graduate students may place files on the FTP site, but undergraduate students have access only with a faculty member's sponsorship. Soccio, the department's network and information systems manager, said he had been worried that the server would be yanked from the network during the middle of Penn State's final exams last week. "If our site was shut down as this was being investigated, I wouldn't even be able to have a conversation with you because (there would) be so many people in my office wanting to know when it would be back up," he said. The RIAA's notice went to the university's central computing office, which told the department to delete the material or "we will need to disable access to the machine hosting the infringing song." The central office then notified the department. Soccio said: "The swiftness of the activity the university wanted to take just around finals time scared the living daylights out of me. I'm just glad the university took my word for it that we weren't violating copyright law." Now, Soccio said, he's writing a letter to his members of Congress opposing the DMCA and will post it in the department for signatures. "I'm loath to think that our educational resources and years of valuable resources can be jeopardized just because some kid in a dorm room is downloading copyrighted material," he said. "That's not a price that society should have to pay." |
| Humans Genes Closer To Dolphins' Than Any Land Animals | 2 comments |
 19 May 2003 @ 09:31Humans Genes Closer To Dolphins' Than Any Land Animals By: Seema Kumar Discovery Channel Online News For years, marine biologists have told us that dolphins share many traits with humans, including intelligence and friendliness. Now, a comparison of dolphin and human chromosomes shows that the genetic make-up of dolphins is amazingly similar to humans. In fact, researchers at Texas A&M University have found that dolphins have more in common with us genetically than cows, horses or pigs. "The extent of the genetic similarity came as a real surprise to us," says David Busbee of Texas A&M University, who published his results in last week's Cytogenetics and Cell Genetics. This information will not only help researchers construct the genetic blueprint of dolphins, but also bolster conservation efforts. Aided by the progress made in mapping the human genome, researchers will continue to identify individual genes on dolphin chromosomes. Busbee estimates it will save them 20 years of work, and the similarities and differences will reveal how long ago humans and dolphins branched off the evolutionary tree. Researchers at Texas A&M University applied "paints," or fluorescently labeled human chromosomes, to dolphin chromosomes, and found that 13 of 22 dolphin chromosomes were exactly the same as human chromosomes. Of the remaining nine dolphin chromosomes, many were combinations or rearrangements of their human counterparts. Researchers also identified three dolphin genes that were similar to human genes. Until now, researchers have never been able to do genetic studies of dolphins because they are a protected species, making it difficult to get tissues from them. However, Busbee was able to grow colonies of cells from fetal tissues when a female dolphin miscarried. "Dolphins are marine mammals that swim in the ocean and it was astonishing to learn that we had more in common with the dolphin than with land mammals," says Horst Hameister, professor of medical genetics at the University of Ulm in Germany. In the past 15 years, the world's dolphin populations have declined considerably, exacerbated by high levels of PCBs. Researchers speculate that PCBs impair the immune systems of dolphins, leaving them vulnerable to disease. "If we can show that humans are similar to dolphins, and anything that endangers dolphins is an equal concern for humans, it may be easier to persuade governments to become serious about combating industrial pollution and keeping oceans clean," says Busbee. More > |