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You're just plain wrong. The closest turbines would have been only four miles off the shore of the Cape. Colby did a visibility study https://digitalcommons.colby.e... and found that “41.25% of residential areas will be able to see 90% of at least one tower.”

Denmark (and Sweden and others) have successfully banned antibiotics in farm animals with a good result on human health. http://www.colby.edu/biology/BI402B/Casewell%20et%20al%202003.pdf

"Often enough, the lease specifies a sole TV provider. If you don't go with them, you have to move."

That's illegal, (47 C.F.R. Section 1.4000), FCC Fact Sheet on Placement of Antennas. As long as you do not alter the building in any fashion, and place the antenna/Sat dish in your renter controlled area, there isn't a damned thing they can do about it. If they try to evict you, the Landlord-Tenent act reders illegal actions, (or lock-ins), unenforceable.

From my own state:

Just because something is agreed to in a lease does not necessarily mean it is enforceable by the landlord. Some clauses may be illegal, such as a waiver of rights under the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act, or limitations on the landlord's liability for injury or damages.

Your lease could state that your landlord is allowed to eat as much food of yours as he wanted, rape your daughter, and hold you liable for all property damages even if it isn't your fault. However, those provisions would be illegal, and not enforceable. Legally, you cannot be locked into any utility provider for any service. If you want DishTV, Adelphia Internet, and forego a landline for ATT cellular service, you can do it, and your landlord cannot do anything about it.

3.) Stop trying to hit it rich by playing the lottery, unless you find that particularly entertaining.

Nations that have been around a lot longer than the United States of America have had plenty of time to think about waste management and other issues that can be swept under the table for only a few hundred years; certainly more than you chose to put into your comment.

For example, in Germany the cost of the individual throwing away the MP3 player would be calculated in advance of the product being placed on the shelf, and the company producing the MP3 player would be required to pay for the disposal costs of each unit sold. This approach does not favour any specific technology or product; it merely ensures that products sold are accountable for the waste or damage they place on society.

Colby College shows a course titled "198fs Turbo Chemistry".
http://www.colby.edu/academics_cs/catalogue/2005_2 006/course_descriptions/chcrs.cfm

Don't bitch at us about what the Swedish government has chosen to charge their citizens for the privelage to use gasoline. According to this article 68.5% of the price of gas in Sweden is tax. That's $4.16 per gallon at $6.08. Meaning actual cost is $1.92 per gallon, which is probably about what it is here in the US minus the taxes.

838K would only be ~65% Carnot efficient against room temperature, and that's *just* the thermodynamic efficiency. I can't imagine you'd beat 50%, just thermodynamically (all of the losses from heating the air, for instance). And those losses would *scale* with area, so making it larger (and hotter) would make it less efficient as well.

From the description on the webpage, it looks like the steam generator runs at 550 F? It's a little tough to tell where the "550" is. If that's true, the thermodynamic efficiency could be, at best, 48%.

Plus you're just supporting my point more when you say they have to defocus the mirrors - that's lost energy right there.

None of the web pages I've seen so far tout the towers as advantageous over solar panels. The main advantage is that you can store energy very efficiently, but there are other methods of doing this which aren't specific to this method and could be used with solar panels (like pumping water uphill, which is also 90+% effective!). Have there been any studies on this?

Remember that solar panels right now are ~15-20% total efficiency - that is, straight from the solar flux to electricity. I don't see any numbers on the total efficiencies of those towers, though here suggests a 2-mile radius (25 km^2 or so) needed for, say, 200 MW. So that's 25 million m^2, per for 200 MW, so that's 8 watts per square meter, or less than 1% efficiency. Even being nice, and assuming that the power generation occurs 5 hours out of a day, so that the actual efficiency is ~5 times higher, it's still only ~4% efficient.

The only advantage I see is that it's probably cheaper than a solar panel plant would be, right now. But it's in a thermodynamic bottleneck. You can't increase the efficiency without increasing the heat, and you can't increase the heat without causing more problems, as you stated (they had to defocus the mirrors). Photovoltaics don't have that bottleneck. Lab solar panels now hit 34% or better efficiency, and as we've seen recently, there's a lot of work being done to improve it. Build a solar panel plant of the same area, and

I fully admit the possibility of being wrong, but thermodynamics doesn't lie. Use a heat engine to generate electricity, and fundamentally, any process which avoids it will probably beat you in efficiency eventually. No one denies that hydroelectric plants are the undisputed kings of energy efficiency, and that's because they aren't heat engines.

If we limit the age of the universe to 13.7 billion years, that puts some fairly tight constraints on the evolution of life, especially advanced civilizations, in the universe.

If the universe is older by a older by a small amount or perhaps a few billion years, or even greater (which an eventual solution to the age paradox might bring us to), the possibilities for extra-terrestrial life become more and more possible.

Given enough time, even "kooky" theories like the panspermia hypothesis become more and more likely, since distance, lack of speed, and survivability drastically cut the probabilities of anything resembling viable life making it across the vast tracts of space, but time increases it.

(Not to say that it happened, of course - run-of-the-mill abiogenesis could easily have happened instead... or as well.)

Panspermia is a bit worrisome a possibility, in some ways. It would mean that some/many/all alien civilizations might share anything from RNA to DNA to histones to mitochondria. Depending on how advanced the 'seeded' lifeform was (could be anything from a fragment of proto-RNA to a whole eukaryote), we might have to worry about not only bacteria on our future journeys to the stars, but viruses as well. On the plus side, chirality may be conserved, so we don't end up starving to death eating left-handed sugar (L-sucrose) and starch on alien worlds when some layabout gardener on staff mixes salt and Roundup in the fertilizer in the Earth terrarium.

There, that's my fun little bit of tinfoil hat speculation :)

Klaatu berrada nicto...

Er, I mean, back to your irregular program...

...about MUDs.

First off, the basic premise of this post is wrong. MUDs were always a niche type of thing. There were a few 10 years ago when the Internet was small. There are a lot now that the Internet is big. It's hard to say which has grown faster.

Of course, there are many more long-running MUDs today than there were 10 years ago. When a favorite goes dark, it doesn't mean they are fading away (although it may SEEM like it at the time). When Cats closed, it didn't mean Broadway theater was dead.

More relevant question: Why haven't MUDs broken out of their niche?

Answer #1: They did. EverQuest was an LPC MUD with a graphical front end pasted on it. Some MUDders see EQ as a diabolical competitor leeching away the potential users of "true" MUDs; others see it as the logical next step.

Answer #2: The amount of creativity to keep a MUD lively doesn't scale well. The number of people people creating new content for MUDs eventually defines the size of the niche which will be supported by their creativity. The FaerieMUD Consortium has an interesting solution to this: using the creativity of players themselves to generate new content for their MUD. This is an extension of the long tradition of wizards, immortals and promotion to coders in the MUD community. We have been working on this for a long time, but it is not quite there yet.

Another interesting question: Are there common problems faced by all MUD-coders for which pooled solutions are possible in Open Source?

Two obvious places for this are: A general-purpose backend server for hosting MUDs (the ability to scale might be nice, too); and a graphical front end.

The MUES Project on Source Forge has recently posted Alpha code for the first of these. Several projects have code up on SourgeForge for the second. It's my personal opinion that MUDs will never break out of the niche until these types of problems are well-solved by Open Source software. It's also going to be important to do it right. I can say from personal experience that getting all the things people are looking for in the next-generation MUD is no simple task. The discussion in this paper on CME (Coolest MUD Ever) is very informative.

For a real life way to make your car run a little cleaner (Albeit with some LESS power, since ethanol has a lower energy density than gas), add ethanol to your gas tank. Many newer cars now support ethanol in the gas mix (they detect how much alcohol is present in the gasoline) and adjust the engine accordingly. I know the production Ford Ranger 3.0L has this right now, and I'm sure some other cars do too.

Here we are, in 2004. I listened to Microsoft, I made sure my new PC has a Palladium chip integrated on the motherboard. This way, I'm told, my PC will run only cryptographically signed programs, which will prevent these evil virus to execute.

But since I cannot afford to buy a key from MS each time I write a Word macro, I'll have to allow them to run.

And since Outlook cannot be removed from my Windows 2003 PPPP (Palladium-Protected Professional Plus), I use it for all my email. I use macros there, too, because I need Outlook to update my calendar when my boss sends me a meeting invitation.

And Outlook 2003 PPPP and Word 2003 PPPP are Palladium-signed applications. So they're safe, right?

I am sure nobody will ever find any buffer overflow or format string vulnerability in these apps, and that none will ever use them to create another of these worms that propagate using the deadly Word+Outlook combo, and can be activated merely by previewing the message.

This is such a nice improvement over the current situation. So who care if I have to insert my credit card in the MS PPPP Card Reader and pay $1.50 each time I want to read the news on MSNBCNN? That's definitely worth the price.

** N ** O ** T ** ! **

-- SysKoll

As events like these at MIT show, and as slashdot quickly approaches a quarter of a million users, it's time for a slashdot reunion. Below is enclosed a list of the first 50 users, the folks who really know what it means to say, "I remember the good ol' days." How many of these users are still active? Reply, and show your true colors. The who replies with the lowest userid gets a prize! CmdrTaco (1) email: malda@slashdot.org
Hemos (2)
drendite (3) email: reishus@utdallas.edu
CowboyNeal (4) email: pater@slashdot.org
samzenpus (5)
jgoldsch (6)
CLorox (7) email: clorspam@marblehead.com
Emmett Plant (8) email: emmett@slashdot.org
keith (9) email: kcalder at andrew.cmu.edu
ximenes (10) email: sak8@po.cwru.edu
velkro (11) email: root@localhost
RAD Kade 1 (12) email: kmradlof@nospam@colby.edu
TechNoir (13) email: technoir@linux.com
Christopher Bibbs (14)
DeadBeef (15) email: spam@osoal.org.nz
Tom Rothamel (16) email: tom-slashdot@onegeek.org
Rolf W. Rasmussen (17) email: rolfwr+slashdot@ii.uib.no
davidu (18) email: davidu@angrywhitemale.com
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Pug (21) email: pug007@sgi.net
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bounce@vegas.net (23)
Dorkman (24)
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psychonut (26) email: lfd@NOSPAMsnip.net
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version conflict (28) email: cat /proc/kcore >> /dev/audio
jk (29) email: hns@scurvy.org
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Vadim Grinshpun (31) email: vg23@nospam.cornell.edu spidey (32)
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