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So I won't complain about it running slow... the low idle RPM did make one mechanic eye it suspiciously, but if it ain't broke... presumably the thermostat is stuck, but I learned with the old truck to leave that the hell alone!

I had indeed looked for a diesel (figured out the fuel efficiency difference came to about ten grand over the life of the truck) and as I recall you helped me a lot with how to ID a good used diesel, and I looked at a lot of trucks but never did find a diesel that hadn't been rode hard and put away wet. Was getting down to the wire and went to look at one last truck, guy had sold it but had this other one he says look at, try it, you'll like it... And I say no, it won't get good enough gas mileage (since I knew people who were getting 6-8mpg tops with similar trucks) and he says seriously, this one is real efficient. Hmmph, anyone can say that. But it had been recently rebuilt end to end (so practically a new truck despite 220k miles on the odometer) and for $3000 it was a good enough deal to eat the gas mileage for a while. So I test-drove it and the durn thing performs like a new truck, accelerates like a race car, stops on a dime, and handles just perfect. (Allowing for that the long frame means "I need 40 acres to turn this rig around", and we won't even discuss parking spots.)

So it went home with me and to work moving me cross-country, and even pulling 15,000 pounds up a 6% grade it still made about 8mpg, so not in the league with a diesel but not bad for gas, and 12-14mpg on the highway with a more-moderate load (empty trailer is still 4000 pounds, and the truck itself is 6000 pounds almost exactly), well, that was a bonus. And I absolutely love it, wholly a pleasure to drive no matter how many hours I spend in it (and we've done some 18 hour jaunts together).

http://home.earthlink.net/~riv...

Oh, funny story.... I bought it in Lancaster, California; checked CarFax and I'm its 7th owner. (Had always been commercial in CA, never privately owned.) Anyway one day I was getting gas in Three Forks, Montana, and the guy at the next pump says to me: "I'll bet you bought that truck in California." I allowed as how this was so, and he says, "I built that rack." Seems it was originally a studio truck, and they had these overheight racks for their equipment (that's why it's not level with the cab).

One half mass of the particle times the square of the velocity applies everywhere. So, given the value of 1 gram, and 40K kph, we get just a bit under 62 kilojoules. While the mass was likely less than a gram, the velocity is the primary issue.

The initial impact area is over maybe a square millimeter at best. Given the kinetic impact of relatively common events, this is roughly 8 rifle bullets. So a 40 cm area is entirely expected. While the actual hole is small (as expected, it punched through) cracks would run through a small group of solar cells, rendering the affected cells useless due to transmitted shock. . .

we may have some ideas about how the brain works — at an electro-chemical level — it has been well studying and documented. a good text would be by neurologist — john eccles:

http://www.amazon.ca/Evolution...
http://home.earthlink.net/~joh...

as for treating a simulation of the brain as having the same qualities as a real functioning brain is to fear getting wet from a simulation of a rainstorm. there are scientists which would disagree that human consciousness is actually simulable in this way:

one of the worst mistakes in cognitive science.. is to suppose that in
the sense in which computers are used to process information, brains
also process information. (john searle, cognitive scientist, 1990)*

* Is the Brain a Digital Computer?
https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/...

That way we can get enough sunlight at night to compensate with ground-based solar panels. That's really simple to do, right? Easy Peasy!

That depends a bit on who is "we"... It may also be the Chinese or the Russians, meaning the US wil never get to see the moon ever again.

Anyway, while I assume your plan is not a serious suggestion, allow me to analyze it. For starters: the current non-geostationnary moon already does this to some extent, the spot is just changing all the time. More importantly, the reflectivity (or albedo) of the moon is 12%. This means that, at best, moonlight could be 8 times brighter than it is now. Currently the moon is about 250000 times dimmer than the sun, so in the best case your enhanced moon would still be 30000x dimmer than the sun...

I'm not sure about the 2 first questions.
http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/~tjp/... seems to suggest that apparent magnitude is based on flux (=total amount of light), and not on intensity (=light density).
It means that the light density of Betelgeuse supernova would be much higher than the light density of the quarter moon. The total amount would be approximately the same. If I'm not mistaken, since the sun (32.7 arcminutes) is much bigger than Betelgeuse (0.056 arcseconds), Betelgeuse supernova would also have a much higer intensity than the Sun.

For the last one :
https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/
http://home.earthlink.net/~kit...
During a quarter moon, you only get sunlight reflected at weird angles off the moon.

Or just go to the page with the Google Earth image overlays for artificial night sky brightness that you can import into Google Earth and has images for the rest of the world as well.

before you do algebra, you need to learn to multiply, and before that you need to learn to add and subtract.
certain higher levels of abstract thinking require prior training in order to be of good use.
getting a good grounding in the basics gives one better preparation to wield the forces of code.

for the earlier grades —when they're still learning to add and subtract, and count their ABCs.. up to grade two and three, you cant even really assume that kind of stuff yet — kids grow slow, just like plants, and you cant just stuff it into them like cabbages — give them time to develop basic skills like recognising the 26 letters of the alphabet before giving them the ASCII code 65, 66, and 67 — give them the simplest introductions of a subject area gives them a better ability to start a good core understanding which will help them for a lifetime.

a lot of what you learn in programming is not the requisite clear training in thought — but the semantics of a language, and the APIs which it is calling.. things which continuously change — distracting from the main thing — learning how to think clearly and logically.

stripping all the semantics and APIs away — and just left with the six rudiments of logic to contemplate — the motions and interactions of the king and queen — how the rook and bishop move along vectors; how how the knights intersect in circles, and how variables advance and pawn chains interact — these are the kind of things that get children to think in abstract arrays and logical collisions. i would start Chess in Schools in grade 2, and every year the classes play each other.. with as much reward given as they do for other sports activities.

train the national mind.. train the human mind.
once they got chess down for a couple years — programming,
starting in grade 7 and 8 should be a piece of cake.

2cents from toronto island
john penner

Because let's face it, it's pretty unrealistic to get bent out of shape because you can't buy daisy wheels

Brother 411 Brougham 10-Pitch All Daisy Wheel Typewriters

or get 14k modem service anymore.

Earthlink

Another random federal agency has decided that they are the law-making body with authority over some aspect of our lives. Discretionary enforcement(*) allows them to pick-and-choose whoever they want.

The DHS regulates model rocketry, the DEA regulates chemistry sets, the ATF manages the second amendment, and so on and so on and so on.

Weren't we supposed to elect the lawmakers? I seem to recall a forum or meeting place of some sort where we could send people to make laws on our behalf.

Is this "regulation without representation"?

(*) This same federal agency doesn't suppress Starbucks cards, online gaming gold, or frequent flyer miles, all of which are just as much a currency.

Dow, adjusted for inflation.

If you'll look at the big chart at the link, you'll notice that the people who bought in at the height of the stock market in the 1920's didn't make their money back until 1960. And then actually went back into the red during the most recent crash.

You can argue if the DJIA is an accurate representation of market as a whole, or of the specific stocks in your portfolio. But you can't argue that even without factoring the capital gains tax, you're probably going to lose. With the capital gains tax, you can't win.

While I agree with some of your points, including that the nuclear industry has promising solutions to most of the problems including price, I disagree that MSR is either more complex or more expensive. Quite the opposite, as the MSR experiments proved in the 60's. Are you confusing molten salt reactors with all the failed fast breeder reactor programs that we wasted so much money on? Also, we've never produced nuclear power in the US anywhere near as cheap as coal, though I wish we would. I'll grant you that MSR safety has not been proven. That can only be proven with large scale long term deployment, which is a major downside of nuclear power, and one reason we aren't moving quickly to change any of the proven core technology, even though it has proven not commercially viable.

One of the main things we need to do but can't because of stupid politics is reprocess nuclear waste. MSR's do this from the beginning. Also, you point about fission byproduct waste when thorium is used is misleading, if technically true. U233 doesn't generate significant amounts of trans-uranic waste like plutonium, and the radioactive byproducts it does produce have a low half-lives. The waste produced is far less dangerous. Now, burning thorium is a related but separate issue than doing research into molten salt reactors. I think we should do both, but there's no reason not to burn the uranium fuel that's available in a MSR. Breeding can come later.

This article talks about how in England there has been a huge increase in the number of measles cases since Wakefield published his claptrap about vaccines causing autism and other nonsense.

For those not bothering to read the article, this is part which you need to know:

This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last year. The country once recorded only several dozen cases every year. It now ranks second in Europe, behind only Romania.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Measles_incidence_England%26Wales_1940-2007.png

Here is the graph om measles incidents in England and Wales, . As you can see even the 2,000 cases from the last year are still less than the measles cases from 1998, when everybody was vaccinated and the fraudulent study was published.

I'd like to see the stats for the last 5 years too, but for me it is quite clear that this "outbrake" is more PR scare than real epidemic.

This article talks about how in England there has been a huge increase in the number of measles cases since Wakefield published his claptrap about vaccines causing autism and other nonsense.

For those not bothering to read the article, this is part which you need to know:

This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last year. The country once recorded only several dozen cases every year. It now ranks second in Europe, behind only Romania.

A few years ago I had the stinky job of cleaning up a large area of a building that had skunk stink so bad I had to use a quality respiratory just to get near. A chemically effective solution involves hydrogen peroxide and baking soda: http://home.earthlink.net/~skunkremedy/home/sk00003.htm

I went to Walgreens to get a bunch of hydrogen peroxide -- put eight quarts in my basket and proceeded to the checkout. When I got there, I was told I wasn't allowed to buy that much at once -- I can't recall the limit but it was less than I had. Obviously, I just went shopping at multiple stores till I figured I had enough, but, it is this kind of ridiculous crap that is sure to expand.

Blocking content at the router/firewall is the best place to block it inside your network. Otherwise you're dealing with keeping several machines up to date. As IT infrastructure becomes more diverse (Mac, Windows Flavors, Guests etc) keeping individual machines updated will be harder than a centralize point. Another option is to force users to utilize a specifc DNS server (ie http://www.opendns.com/business-security/). Then all you do is block DNS traffic destined for any other DNS servers.

I'd avoid the $50 walmart router and look at some stand alone firewall/routers with good filtering options: IPCop (http://ipcop.org/) + URLFILTER (http://www.urlfilter.net/) or Cop+ (http://home.earthlink.net/~copplus/) or UnTangle (https://www.untangle.com/store/lite-package.html)

Will it slow down your connection? It can if you do not use fast enough equipment, but in general the price of CPU cycles isn't an issue when using PC based solutions.

I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad at the prospect of obtaining lot's more uranium. The world has yet to demonstrate that commercial nuclear plants make any financial sense, and then there's the incredibly stupid waste storage system we have in the US (have each plant simply hang onto it). I'm more concerned over the prospect of a fire in those storage polls than a meltdown in a core.

Molten salt reactors seem promising, and there's little debate that they would be cheaper. There are other challenges, but cost seems to be a clear benefit. Also, with continuous fuel reprocessing, the waste is a tiny fraction of what we generate in a traditional light water reactor, and we could even use waste from our existing reactors as fuel for molten salt reactors, eventually burning up most of it. We could even burn Thorium, which should last a very long time. All this needs major investments in R&D. A driving factor behind such investments will be running out of cheap enriched uranium. If we succeed in obtaining uranium from the sea cheaply, we will most likely continue down our incredibly stupid path until someone does have their nuclear waste catch fire and go Chernobyl on us.

No, I don't have a good source. There is a page, Why Are Launch Costs So High" which looks at the problem.

No. Sholes arranged the keys so the arms wouldn't jam in order to allow typists to type faster. Typewriter salesmen would show this feature off for managers by having a speed contest with groups of typists on rival brands with different layouts, and QWERTY would always win. Even if you could physically hit the keys faster on another layout, you'd have to slow down to keep it from jamming. It's why QWERTY became popular, then standard, it was faster. Faster layouts only became possible once the arm mechanism improved to eliminate jamming, but by then the QWERTY patent had ended and QWERTY was already standard. [No company was going to shut down their entire typing pool to wait six months for them to retrain on Dvorak, on the chance that maybe it was 10% faster.]

http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html

Incidentally, a lot of keyboards can't handle a large number of simultaneous keys being pressed due to what's called "ghosting". Try typing "THE QUICK RED FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG" with both shift keys held down. You'll be disappointed. (This is one of the reasons gaming keyboards cost so much.)

...also, I meant optimized against typewriter jamming, I guess. Still, there are lots of bad adjacent key pairs, like GH and ED, that should still cause typewriter jamming. The process used was not exactly perfect.

I am a ramdisc fan since Mac+.

I'm gonna call BS on this one. Why would a ram disc need a fan?

MacOS System 6 had RAMdisk applications available for it (one was called AppDisk), and by System 7 this functionality was built into the OS via a system control panel. The software allowed you to donate whatever RAM you had available to a disk that mounted on the desktop. You could use it for cache files, or copy entire applications to it to run at blazing speeds off the RAMdisk instead off the comparatively slow SCSI-1 HDD, or the mind-numbingly slow floppy disk drive. In 1989, when RAM was prohibitively expensive, if you had a Mac IIfx (not publicly available until 1990) or Mac SE/30 and were very wealthy, you could have a desktop with 128MB of RAM (along with the MODE32 control panel that allowed the SE/30 to see all that memory, or the ROM from a Mac IIfx or Mac IIsi which accomplished the same thing, unless you ran A/UX which was natively 32-bit clean), and with the RAMdisk software you could designate amounts up to whatever the system didn't need to be used as a RAMdisk... say... about 120MB, which at the time would have been about as large as the biggest HDDs available to consumers. You can still find this software on Gamba's site.

To answer your question, the Mac Plus was an AIO or all-in-one computer. I'm not sure if you are old enough to know or remember what a cathode ray tube is, but the Mac Plus used one as a display, and it generated a substantial amount of heat, requiring a fan to cool the machine.

Also, RAM itself will generate some heat, usually not enough to need its own fan, and RAM in a Mac Plus didn't have a dedicated fan. A RAMdisk is not the same as an SSD, which runs off the disk bus. Like RAM, a RAMdisk runs off the system bus... generally much faster than the disk bus.

Reading over what this guy is saying, I swear he's been reading my comments I've posted about the web. For example:

âoeThe real culprits are the employers themselves.â

You pay what it takes to get the people you need, and if wages have to go up, then so be it, right?

The only people that can do that are people who are currently doing the same job someplace else.

a lot of employers wonâ(TM)t accept applications from people who are currently unemployed.

youâ(TM)re always going to have this problem if employers are relying on the schools to produce their skills for them.

But the screening is never as good as somebody who has human judgment,

in many fields you canâ(TM)t easily learn this stuff in a classroom.

So the shortfall is in giving people experience, ... getting them up to speed in these work-based skills. And the problem is, ... virtually none of them [employers] are willing to do it.

These things, and others, I've been saying since I got my first degree. And that wasn't last year, either.

If all you expect are to find people who have the experience you want, you will eventually run out of experienced people because no one was trained to replace them because everyone was looking for experience. To beat the proverbial dead horse: how can someone gain experience if all people are looking for is people who already have experience?

Some of my own comments on this ridiculous situation:

http://home.earthlink.net/~kspandle/main/columns/articles/whining_for_employees.html

http://home.earthlink.net/~kspandle/main/columns/articles/here_we_go_again.html

Reading over what this guy is saying, I swear he's been reading my comments I've posted about the web. For example:

âoeThe real culprits are the employers themselves.â

You pay what it takes to get the people you need, and if wages have to go up, then so be it, right?

The only people that can do that are people who are currently doing the same job someplace else.

a lot of employers wonâ(TM)t accept applications from people who are currently unemployed.

youâ(TM)re always going to have this problem if employers are relying on the schools to produce their skills for them.

But the screening is never as good as somebody who has human judgment,

in many fields you canâ(TM)t easily learn this stuff in a classroom.

So the shortfall is in giving people experience, ... getting them up to speed in these work-based skills. And the problem is, ... virtually none of them [employers] are willing to do it.

These things, and others, I've been saying since I got my first degree. And that wasn't last year, either.

If all you expect are to find people who have the experience you want, you will eventually run out of experienced people because no one was trained to replace them because everyone was looking for experience. To beat the proverbial dead horse: how can someone gain experience if all people are looking for is people who already have experience?

Some of my own comments on this ridiculous situation:

http://home.earthlink.net/~kspandle/main/columns/articles/whining_for_employees.html

http://home.earthlink.net/~kspandle/main/columns/articles/here_we_go_again.html

1 - It doesn't matter if he knew or not knew he was writing scripture. But in all probabilities he probably knew it was going to be scripture as when it was written in 63AD, he is referring to both old testament and almost all of the New Testament.

By the time 2 Timothy 3:16 was written, all of the New Testament books had already been written except for 2 Peter, Hebrews, Jude, and the apostle John's writings
Inspiration

I remember in the OT one prophet didn't know what the hell he was saying but still knew he was writing scripture so even understanding (at the time) is not a requirement. He ask God what is the meaning of this and God said to shut up and just write it, to paraphrase it a little.

2 - Of course not. Only place God written directly is in exodus with the 10 commandments, Jesus's speeches in the NT were recorded by the every ones you are trying to degrade. If you can't trust their testimony of what they say, how you trust what they said Jesus said?
The vast majority of the text are by humans (sometimes openly declaring to mouthing for God, but still humans).

3 - The inspiration of the scriptures are actually attributed to God, Holy Spirit and Jesus.

• Father Hebrews 10:5
• Son Philippians 2:7
• Holy Spirit Luke 1:35

The are many attributes that are assigned to all three. Scroll Down a little to see the list
But again God has signed his code. There are hepatic structures that would only be there if the Old and New testaments where put together. Did you even try to make a fictional genealogy that matches Mathew's hepatic structures like in the video I linked to before?
No human could of done that, go on, give it a try and you will see how hard it is, yet it's in there and linking both OT and NW, and the genealogy of Christ. It's really amazing.

Yes some Christians will be speaking on behalf of God, like when they give prophesy but there have only been 12 disciples and only recorded 19 apostles.
According to 1Cor. 1:1 & 9, to be an Apostle you must have seen the Lord, and been called to be one directly by Him.
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_apostles_were_there#ixzz1xKsPe07E

So you know the genealogy recorded has many limitations on it which meant it could only be written by someone not human (inspired), because of how complex it is. Please try an make a fictional geneology in the much easier language of English but still matching the hepatic structures as talked about in the video. Do it now, open up word, make up some shit up of about 20 dead people in the lineage and see if you get even 3 rules mention within hour. (There are actually 70 rules in the text in the greek language which is much more precise than english)

So when you post back, tell me how far you got with your genealogy please. It is an impossible thing to do in your life time, even with super computers. But that will let you know God inspired Paul what to say down to the letter.

I really need to sleep now,
Good night, TheLink, Cheers Madfan

web developers just pick up and drop widgets all over the place,

Rule #2 of IT that should never be broken: Never let a web designer design your web page.

Giving free reign to a web designer to design a web site is like giving a two year-old a Faberge egg.

I've seen as well and when I realized that you don't need to be an admin to install Chrome, I was ticked off. To put it mildly.

That is a gigantic security hole just waiting to be exploited. Further, there's a reason corporate machines are locked down. We don't want people, especially IT people, installing every random piece of software that asks the user to install it.

Rule #3 of IT that should never be broken: Never, ever, ever, EVER give a regular user administrative rights on their machine. Ever. Chrome breaks this rule with a wrecking ball.

It's bad enough that as an admin I am constantly harassed by Windows 7, "Do you want to allow...?" Yes, I'm a fucking admin, just install the damn thing! Now we have to put up with companies making it so every user can install whatever they want and expect us to figure out what they did. Aside from their search engine, I will never use any product of Google, and this crap especially so.

Funny that it takes a study to find this out. It should be obvious to anyone who is dating, online or not. The only real difference between online dating and real life dating is online dating allows one to find faults quicker so you can move on to the next 'loser'.

Besides, some reasons behind this situation have already been described.

it's not my duty on *my computer* to "change paradigms" at the whim of pseudo-bored software companies.

This is what happens when you let programmers design your applications. It's Rule #1 in IT that should never be broken but Canonical seems to be going out of their way to add to the pile of examples for why this rule exists.

Per your comments on Win7, I have tried to turn as much cruft off as possible, but the programmers decided otherwise. It seems they went out of their way to make things more difficult, to hide as much as possible and make it much more tortuous to do simple things.

There's a reason people keep upgrading to Windows XP.

Just have these guys design every site.

Just another example of Rule #2 of IT that should never be broken: Never let a web designer design your web site.

Programmers don't really understand good design and usability.

This is the first rule of IT that should never be broken: Never let a programmer design your application.

One would think this should be obvious, but it is astounding how often this rule is broken. GIMP, Linux in general, Windows 7, games, the list goes on. Time and again, when applications suck, you can trace it back to letting programmers have a hand in designing it.

This site is a reference for mainly energy-related, molten salt technologies, and will ultimately replace the web site: http://home.earthlink.net/~bhoglund/index.html

Oh goody, we're taking data from Earthlink.net accounts now? ;-) The data is from the 50s. That said Bruce Hoglund seems to be at least reasonably knowledgeable on the topic.

Geeks interested in safe practical thorium power really need to read the history of molten salt reactors here. I hope India and China have the sense to invest in this path. The LFTR is the long term theoretical evolution of the molten salt reactor path. My only problem with the whole LFTR hype is it's pushing for massive research instead of building reactors we know how to build now. We should get back in the game now, first building a new MSR taking into account what we learned in the 60's and new advances since then, and then build a few commercial plants.

To be specific about some of the hype I don't like, check out the claimed advantages of LFTRs. Some of the advantages that LFTR theoretically inherit from MSR I wont dispute, including inherent safety, small size, and low operational cost, as MSR research proved that already in the 60's. However, I take issue with "load following" which means ramping the reactor up and down to follow the load. That's what all our other generators are good for, but to get your investment out of a nuclear reactor, you want to take advantage of it's low fuel cost and run it at 100% capacity almost all the time. This also greatly simplifies the engineering involved, and given the economics, there's simply no way our early LFTRs will be designed for load following. Then they claim minimal end-of-life expense. Cleaning up the MSR plant turned out to be massively more expensive than anyone would have guessed, though with knowledge gained from that experience, we should be able to do a better job next time. Then, they assume that the first LFTRs will use a new turbine design, rather than standard steam turbines. That might be where we eventually get, but build the first plants using cheaply available and well understood technology! This sort of hype looks more like fishing for DARPA grants than solving the energy crisis.

Your post was interesting. But defining your acronyms (LFTR, MSR) as you first introduce them would make it even more accessible.

Geeks interested in safe practical thorium power really need to read the history of molten salt reactors here. I hope India and China have the sense to invest in this path. The LFTR is the long term theoretical evolution of the molten salt reactor path. My only problem with the whole LFTR hype is it's pushing for massive research instead of building reactors we know how to build now. We should get back in the game now, first building a new MSR taking into account what we learned in the 60's and new advances since then, and then build a few commercial plants.

To be specific about some of the hype I don't like, check out the claimed advantages of LFTRs. Some of the advantages that LFTR theoretically inherit from MSR I wont dispute, including inherent safety, small size, and low operational cost, as MSR research proved that already in the 60's. However, I take issue with "load following" which means ramping the reactor up and down to follow the load. That's what all our other generators are good for, but to get your investment out of a nuclear reactor, you want to take advantage of it's low fuel cost and run it at 100% capacity almost all the time. This also greatly simplifies the engineering involved, and given the economics, there's simply no way our early LFTRs will be designed for load following. Then they claim minimal end-of-life expense. Cleaning up the MSR plant turned out to be massively more expensive than anyone would have guessed, though with knowledge gained from that experience, we should be able to do a better job next time. Then, they assume that the first LFTRs will use a new turbine design, rather than standard steam turbines. That might be where we eventually get, but build the first plants using cheaply available and well understood technology! This sort of hype looks more like fishing for DARPA grants than solving the energy crisis.

It seems that no matter how badly you fuck up, no matter how many pooches you screw, ... you will always get hired.

I have been saying the same thing for who knows how long, but I usually say, "They could film these people eating live babies and someone would still hire them because of their "experience"."

Of course, this is also the fourth way to be successful; be a failure. It seems the more you fail, the greater you are wanted.

In case you are wondering, the first three ways to be successful are be attractive, be able to sell ice cubes to Eskimos in January and blame someone else.

For some light reading and the answer to why you don't get anywhere. The fourth part I haven't added but I may make an addendum in the near future.

We -appear- to have the property of having Free Will (e.g. if I ask you to raise one of your hands, there will be the rather compelling sense of you choosing which one). Apart from the opportunities for indeterminacy allowed by quantum behavior, this would be an illusory perception.

The implications of not having Free Will would be so psychologically and morally broad, I think it fair to say that no one can -consistently- maintain they lack Free Will and remain a functional consciousness on a decision-by-decision and day-to-day basis.

Given the empirical force of the premise of Free Will, and the compelling psychological necessity for it, it seems unsurprising that we tend to seek to integrate this premise with our underlying metaphysics.

To do so, there are basically two choices: a "spiritual" attribute unconstrained by physics we generally ascribe to matter at the scale of our brain's chemistry, or, a broadening of our concept of the practical causal scope of quantum effects.

So, the connection here seems clear to me. I think most of the "problem" is a perceived one for specifically those who have no real answer to how to integrate a free consciousness with a deterministic chemistry. Some of us will say "soul", and... problem solved. Others of a more naturalistic metaphysical stance have a -lot- more work to do.

The requirements for a coherent worldview here are pretty persistent across the history of philosophy. Two interesting lines of inquiry here are the Mind-Body Problem (described well here, and by a stridently atheist philosophy professor, lest I be accused of bias), and questions of Supervenience (the notion that, say, Economics can be reduced to Chemistry, which is actually a rather subtle and extensively-examined question in philosophy).

Anyway, these topics can get huge. Short form to the question "Why are these associated?"... because of the recognition that these levels need to be integrated by individuals to maintain a rational consciousness, and naturalism providing no straightforward means this this integration.

So, basically it comes from a massive, unresolvable, inescapable problem for the worldview of the average Slashdotter, which happily is not a problem at all for me given my metaphysical premises.

In my view, it is the most important function of art and science
to awaken this [cosmic religious] feeling and keep it alive
in those who are receptive to it. (Albert Einstein)

In my view, it is the most important function of art and science
to awaken this [cosmic religious] feeling and keep it alive
in those who are receptive to it. (Albert Einstein)

Instructions on how to do this have been available for YEARS! They won't even get you a runner-up in a junior science competition anymore!

i was already working on 'audiobrain' for pChess - mapping move scores to pitch, but jon stokes system for mapping square values to note and octave makes too much sense - using Bflat for B, and Bnatural for the H column is just genius, and provides the missing link - i sense a new feature coming to pChess.. :-}

pChess (open source chess application for OS X)

Sounds like the German's don't have fair-use exceptions for schools.

From Fair Use and Copyright for Teachers:

Fair use explicitly allows use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Rather than listing exact limits of fair use, copyright law provides four standards for determination of the fair use exemption:

It's a bit surprising to find out that some relatively unknown experimenters may have actually stumbled on tunnel-diode-like technology in the early days of radio over 80 years ago. I think they were officially invented by Sony in 1957, although most that I've seen in the U.S. came from G.E.
http://www.sony.co.jp/Products/SC-HP/outline/overview/history.html

Perhaps some here have experimented with a homemade cat-whisker diode for a crystal radio.
As it turns out, making a little oscillator with a homemade metal-metal tunnel diode is easy enough that many here could do it. (a couple of variations using other materials are linked from the page below)

http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/ntype-nr.htm

I wish the story had made it clear just what sort of diode properties besides "cheaper" they were going for. It doesn't seem like they'd merge into current I.C. designs being of a much different process. The energy conversion thing is interesting, but that's much different than fast efficient diodes for switching power supplies or tunnel diodes for oscillators and high-frequency or pulse/trigger circuits. And it's a little hard to tell exactly how it ties in with LCD technology as that's pretty low frequency. Most digital I.C.s don't need or contain many diodes. They don't say anything about this helping to make better transistors. Normal diodes, even fast and cheap ones, usually can't replace transistors. And more unusual diodes with the negative-resistance effects of tunnel-diodes would certainly would not be a simple transplant into logic circuits. They've been well suited to a small niche of applications in the past.

I guess it is time to dig up the old Trek episode where Spock was on old Earth building electronics with a bunch of vacuum tubes...

And honey is expensive because the supply is limited, it is labour-intensive to produce, and working in a honey house often leads to madness. ;)

This is incorrect.

The GPS constellation is arranged so this should be impossible unless:

• Satellites were broken
• The device was junk
• or it was being used incorrectly (for instance, without line of sight to the sky)

Although none of the satellites are in a direct polar orbit (this avoids occasional "bunching" of satellites, a problem encountered by a forerunner to GPS called "Transit".), the constellation is divided into six orbital planes at varying inclinations. There is nowhere on the surface of the Earth where fewer than four satellites should be visible at any one time.

It is true that the lack of a direct polar plane means that in polar regions the satellites will sit lower on the horizon than in regions that are closer to the equator (They'll never be directly overhead in Alaska). But if the device is capable, and it's being used properly, you WILL be able to use it in Alaska or anywhere.

Read up in it if you're skeptical:
http://home.earthlink.net/~fjolles/gps.htm
http://www.kowoma.de/en/gps/orbits.htm
http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/gps/gps_f.html

Do you mean the one mentioned in the middle of this article

"Molten salts have been used in many industries as a high temperature heat transfer medium. The 'highest profile' use of molten salts in this regard is the Solar Power Tower near Dagget, California (excuse the pun). It uses a Sodium Nitrite/Nitrate mixture to absorb and store the sun's heat from the focus of many mirrors in the desert upon a central tower. The heat from the salt is then transfered via a heat exchanger to produce steam to drive a conventional steam turbine and generator to produce electricity from the sun for Southern California.3a"

"Last modified, 20 Nov 97"

7" touch sensitive screens and the best thing they can think to put on it is a flat, non-feedback QWERTY keyboard that was originally designed to avoid keys sticking on typewriters and has caused millions of cases of RSI. The new input device has to be:

1. 1. Fast. Really fast.
2. 2. Comfortable/ergonomic.
3. 3. Work with 1 or 2 hands/thumbs.
4. 4. Not require large amounts of concentration - inputting text should be a largely subconscious activity.

It's notable that Wii has done remarkably well with an obvious yet new input device, in spite of going backwards a generation in graphics capability.

Swype and SlideIT look pretty cool, especially if they allowed optimised keyboard layouts. What else is possible?

From Eathlink's own site:

http://support.earthlink.net/articles/cable/earthlink-powered-by-comcast-usage-cap.php

Excessive users consume so much data that their data usage could negatively impact the service for other customers. In order to clarify excessive use, Comcast established a 250 GB monthly data usage cap for residential Comcast Internet access accounts. Based on its analysis of customer data usage, Comcast determined that more than 99% of their residential customers would not be impacted by this Usage Cap.

So 99% of customers are penalized without knowing it, however most won't come near this cap. But what about customers who play online games left and right, watch youtube, have shit like Steam constantly downloading updates for their games (if they don't turn that off). Staying in the gaming realm for a second, when Steam did the first CoD:MW2 free weekend, it was a cluster fuck of preloading, then having to re-download again. Compared to 250gb, the reloads would be a small % but some people on the Steam/Valve forums did complain about Comcast caps on trying to reload the game again,

EarthLink initiated the 250 GB monthly Usage Cap on July 1, 2010.

Guess they have Dr. Emmett Brown in a DeLorean.

The customer service representative on this telephone call will (i) tell you how much data per month the account has used, (ii) help you identify the source of excessive use, (iii) explain ways to moderate and reduce your data usage

No more 2girls1cup replays!

That's kind of old, according do ACLU helping keep Twitter users' IDs secret in Pa. a judge will decide whether the subpoena is thrown out.

Falcon

... has everyone forgotten the dreaded Seagate 'stiction' problems? And those fun fixes? I was told they were due to contamination, but found out later, not so. But I banged my share of them around just to get them running long enough to copy off the data. Ah, Ghost.

Or the Miniscribe brick scandal, which not a quality control problem, illustrates how your favorite drive manufacturer can become a casualty of even bad accounting?

Is any drive manufacturer immune to problems? Nope.

You're both wrong. To be really successful, you only need to fit into one of these categories.

Here Iranians, How to make an atomic bomb, a nice weekend project. There's also how to clone your neighbor's wife in 10 easy steps. Quite an informative website actually.

you've got a straight road to expensive failure.

Sing it brother (or sister)! As one who is currently helping to support an Oracle-based ERP project, expensive doesn't begin to describe how much it's costing us. Original estimated cost: $20 million. Last known official number I heard for current cost: $46 million. I'm sure that number is over $50 million by now.

But wait, there's more. We bought an off-the-shelf portion of their product and of course have to shoe-horn it to do what we want. There are portions of our home-grown process that aren't yet implemented and probably won't be implemented for several more months even though those portions are a critical part of our operations.

But hey, the people who are "managing" the project get to put it on their résumé and act like they know what they're doing, which is all that matters.

an aggressive sales force that would sell ice to eskimos

I see you've read my column.