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Wind is a proven technology, although all these horizontal-axis wind turbines are stupid.

Not all wind turbines are horizontal axis. There are vertical axis turbines as well. Actually there's a Best Buy in my area that has had a vertical axis wind turbine for years, the last tyme I went there they had added another one.

Out of curiosity when I went in I asked the greeter if they were selling them. He didn't know.

Geothermal is not the answer. Solar would be far more useful, as it produces power when we need it most, and we have control over the pollution inherent to the process... which we do NOT have over geothermal.

Solar is not the answer either. The answer is to use what is available in a given location. That means solar where solar is feasible, wind where it is plentiful, and geothermal where it is. Right now geothermal provides 30 MW, 20% of Hawaii's Big Island's energy. New York State has case studies of geothermal used in the state. Geothermal sources provide 27% of the Philippines energy. In 2007 California produced 13 terawatthours of energy, 4.5% of the energy the state used. Not only does geothermal provide 24% of Iceland's energy but it heats 87% of all buildings.

It is totally hogwash to discount the energy geothermal sources can provide.

Falcon

I've said it before and I'll say it again: geothermal power is a total failure on all levels.

Oh really? So geothermal doesn't really supply Iceland with approximately 24% of it's electricity? It didn't supply California with 13,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2007? Geothermal in Hawaii doesn't provide 20% or 30 MW of the Big Island's electricity? And it doesn't provide the Philippines with 27% electricity? Oh, and MIT scientists are lying when they say GeoThermal to Supply 10% of Energy Demands?

Falcon

We absolutely MUST replace coal fired electricity generation with low CO2 methods. Coal is the worst CO2 emitter.

I didn't say anything about replacing coal in the post you replied to. All I said was that nuclear power appeals to state planners not businesses.

I very much doubt that current renewable technologies are sufficient. The only stuff that is immediately deployable is wind and solar.

They are sufficient now. Those who build off the grid do so every day. And yea, solar and wind is employable today unlike nuclear power. According to Infoplease the Palo Verde 2, Ariz. is the largest reactor in the US, at 1,335 MWs. According to Wiki construction started in 1976 with it's first year of commercial operation in 1988, 12 years later. Now take wind turbines, erect and connect 10 5 megawatt turbines a month, and there are larger turbines, and in 1 year you've added 600 MWs or in 2 years 1,200 MWs. That's almost as much as Palo Verde 2 provides, in 1/6 the tyme. SciAm's A Solar Grand Plan says solar power "could supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050." The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the Unites States, created by the National Renewable Energy Lab of the Department of Energy, details the wind potential of various regions of the US. The Rocky Mountains along contain enough potential energy to electrify the US, but that's not the only region with large wind potential. On the East Coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina offshore wind farms could "supply all the energy needs of much of the East Coast and then some". From British Columbia to Southern California on the Pacific Coast could provide a lot as well. Actually hook a hard left in S Ca through AZ and NM to western Texas and the wind potential grows.

For baseloads geothermal is good though not for all of the baseload. Until large scale storage is available currently used power plants could provide the baseload.

Enhanced geothermal is very promising but there is still no commercial size power station.

Ah but there is commercial scale geothermal right now. In CA geothermal provided 13,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2007. It provides 20 percent of Hawaii's Big Island electricity. Geothermal provides 27% of Philippine's energy. Geothermal is even available and used in New York City.

If it comes to raising the planet's temperature by 5C or nuclear power, I'd have to say nuclear is the clear choice.

Fine, let businesses pay for it not taxpayers. No loan guaranties, limited liability, or other subsidies. However left to their own devices corporations will not build nuclear power plants.

When all is said and done, I think that the carbon pollution problem will only be solved by inexpensive clean electricity. Some hard choices will have to be made.

Unfortunately there is no inexpensive clean electricity. Well, except for the Negawatt, the energy not produced due to energy efficiency or simply cutting the energy used. Therein lies the hard choice, people don't want to give up what they have even if they will s

First off, wind power is a great supplement, not a replacement. It suffers from too much variability to be a reliable power source, and therefore replace fossil fuels.

True but geothermal is a reliable and steady energy source. It's also available in many places. Iceland, in the Arctic, gets a lot of energy from geothermal sources. California gets 4.5% of it's energy from geothermal sources. In Hawaii the Big Island gets 20% of it's energy from the Puna Geothermal Venture which supplies geothermal energy. Heck even the Philippines harvests geothermal energy. Mexico has 853 MW of installed geothermal energy.

That energy does not depend of sunlight or the wind. It is a steady source of energy. New York state has the webpage Geothermal Heat Pumps with contacts that can install both commercial and residential systems.

at least with nuclear power, the pollution is contained.

No it's not. Mining is not contained. Neither are leaks, spills, and other releases. Such as the tritium spills at Exelon Nuclear-owned plants in IL.

As for your road tax solution, who cares if we pay it with income taxes or fuel taxes?

I do as do many others. Only those who use the roads should have to pay for them. If a person does not directly pay for something they have no idea how much it costs for one Now if you have to pay say 10 cents a mile, in addition to gas costs, unless you're wealthy you will pay attention. And I say that as someone who loves driving and will not give up my car unless I have to.

Everyone uses and benefits from the roads.

And they will pay for it, but not with income taxes. You may walk or ride a bike everywhere but as long as you buy items you will still pay for the roads. Sellers raise their prices to cover their expenses, they are in business to make money afterall. Heck even when you order a physical object online, you're paying. Say you order a printed book from Amazon you pay shipping and the shipper pays for the roads.

Falcon

I am an adult Lego fan with quite an inventory of the stuff. This parent is right on the quality issue (and others on the thread pointing to low margins are also there).

Lego keeps on selling 1949 designs (basic lego bricks with ~11-year industrial patents) because nobody can beat them at their prices. Lego invests quite a bit in product design ... but also in manufacturing design. Their systems are partly secret (and the company is 100% privately-owned).

There are clones that can *potentially* be attached to regular Lego, but their quality is glaringly inferior ... although some are put to good use in "realistic" castle walls, depicting stones of different hues and textures. There are also extremely high quality non-official Lego-compatible components for Mindstoms, but those are another story altogether.

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Want to buy cheap Lego? Try searching ebay for bulk lego (which can be washed with lukewarm water and soap). Keep an eye out for the (regular) Lego sales at toy stores, including the official online Lego store (which also offers bulk sales). Or use the new pick-a-brick Lego outlets. For specialized/hard to find parts Bricklink and Pitsco are your friends.

• mathematical analysis including some cool animation of Escher's "Print Gallery."
• Science Jokes website by Joachim Verhagen
• Adriaan van der Hek's First Virtual Mousepad Museum

2 AA cells will power a gamepark 32 for 12 hours, so 8 will get you a total of 48 hours of play time. This battery life is pretty consistent thanks to the GP32's 8mb of RAM.

Those sprite tricks the GBA does are not terribly cpu-intensive to do in software. While the GBA's graphics display modes offset some load by making assumptions about the data in video memory, they can also cause headaches (I'm sorry, but mode7 results in unadulterated ugliness in practice). Though when you've only got 16mhz to play with, you take all the help you can get.

This does mean that GP32 games will require a bit more cpu power because they must perform their own sprite-handling (if they're using sprites at all, anyway), but since the video is just a dumb framebuffer, that also means they have a lot more control over the display.

On the topic of processor power, the GP32 is four times as powerful as the GBA when the cpu is running code from RAM (67mhz) and 8x as fast when running code from cache (130mhz). It's perfectly capable of performing some surprisingly sophisticated 3D. 2D performance is a non-issue.

All that said, you'll probably be happier with a GBA if you don't understand Korean or aren't a coder. The official titles are all in Korean as can be expected since that's the only place the GP32 is marketed. Quite frankly, the games are mediocre for the most part. None of them even try to tap the GP32's capabilities.
The most impressive displays of what the GP32 can do are all homebrew.

Who says you have to program only games?

I used a homebrew SDK to design a digital voltage meter that plugged into a gameboy/gameboy colour when I was in college - It measured Vrms better than some commercial products we tested against.

I'd like to do a PDA setup - maybe I can hack a keyboard together to plug into my gba - someone did it for the gameboy - link - look about halfway down the page.

Besides, the GBA is a good medium to develop games for - you don't need a team of 3d modellers and designers and whatnot - you can do with a designer/programmer, artist, and musician.

Plus it's just fun to hack around with console games!

About gopher at minnesota, I'm trying to remember a bit about licensing of the gopher server or protocol which really killed what was left of gopher when the web was taking off.

I've written a filter for sendmail 8.11 with MAP_REGEX which can stop Date: lines longer then 60 chars. Since I don't think tabs survive /. entry fields, only the URL. Available from http://www.cetis.hvu.nl/~koos/out lookoverflow.txt.

I learned early on to channel energies using an aluminum foil dish strapped to my forehead. I have long since ceased to be mortal.

best mousepad: the one with boobs

best pic from the cruise: big iron

best art from the gnu/art site: l33t debian button.. gotta get one

enjoy!

First, you need to patch Sendmail ...

Go to this excellent sendmail patch: sendmail patch by Koos van den Hout

Then, to get rid of the virus that is already in your spool files (because if your users were smart enough not to click on it this wouldn't be such an epidemic). I've written a little Perl-diddy that acts like an anti-virus. Rudementary usage tactics are in the comments. It will clean the user's spool file, removing all ILOVEYOU virus messages. Use and redistribute. It worked like a charm for me.

It is VITALLY important that you put the sendmail patch in place first.

Enjoy!

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There's some other ones...my favorite one is warez.phantom.com. Don't like spammers? Make return addresses/fake mail links to abuse@warez.phantom.com or postmaster@warez.phantom.com, and watch as it goes to their local postmaster.

For those of you that haven't done nslookups on this, the addresses resolve to 127.0.0.1 -- software loopack, your own computer.

This was originally used to make idiots of people trying to get into the warez scene. Copies of this (this isn't the original) document were circulated, and newbies frantically tried to ftp into "warez sites".