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If you build breeder reactors and reprocess fuel, you're left with plenty of power for the next several hundred years and by the time it is all spent, what's left has a half life of decades instead of centuries.

What's left with reprocessing, which as long as Wall Street pays for and not government I'll support, is waste with shorter half-lifes but that's not all. You also end up with a list of toxic chemicals. And the technology is not proven yet.

Falcon

I don't know if I trust this guy with my interweb tubes, though. Did you notice the mess of cables behind him?

If we can't trust him to keep his wiring closet organized, how can we trust him to clean the tubes?

One type of wind turbine design features gearboxes to obtain the higher shaft velocities. Other types use direct drive and omit the gearbox. They are more efficient, and more expensive, see
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/10252/32672/01531394.pdf

(I did read the abstract only)

"Our existing grid could easily handle 20 million plugin cars"

I'm not sure it could. Take for example the 10 minute fill up of this car http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/electriccar-maker-touts-10minute-fillup

"To charge a 35-kWh battery in 10 minutes requires 250 kilowatts of powerâ"five times as much as the average office building consumes at its peak. That rules out rapid charging at home. Even rapid-charge âfilling stationsâ stretch the imagination, as youâ(TM)d need a megawatt power feedâ"generally available only at electrical substationsâ"to simultaneously operate four power pumps. "

Shitty or ripoff comics don't matter. True fans can tell what is and what isn't canon. Some people also find novelty in such things. And if they spawn their own audience, oh well. The only way it could hurt the originating franchise is if the original actually is of a lesser quality than the spinoff.

And on a completely different topic about a professor going to jail, these might be of interest (but I can't post to that thread for some reason.):
Active glow discharge plasma
1998 IEEE Conference on Plasma Science (If you have access, look for the article by the same professor.)
I would have posted there, but for some annoying reason slashdot isn't letting me. Feel free to post these over to the relevant article. I suspect there is some good irony in those tidbits of info.

35+ Years ago, Professor Nabil Farhatpresented what might be called "Handwriting Attribution by 3 Year Olds." He showed an audience 3 different handwritten cursive script documents, let's call them A, B, and C. The texts of the three documents had nothing to do with each other. The authorship of documents A and C was uncontested. The authorship of B was highly contested. He then showed the 2D Fourier transforms of the documents. To any observer, even a three year old, two of the image transforms (A&B) were obviously similar, while one (C) was very different. A was written by Esterhazy, while C was written by Dreyfus. B was the controversial letter behind the Dreyfus Affair.

See also:
Writer identification based on handwriting

A more technical article on the Greek affair: IEEE article

A more proper conclusion is that it is the fault of US not to take advantage of what Nokia Siemens provided them.

Your not adding anything to the conversation

"You're". Not: "your".

See, something has been added. Your grammar was frequently atrocious in your earlier screeds, but I decided to give you a free pass for those ones. You really should concentrate on getting the basics of English down, because using it poorly reflects badly on your message, no matter what you are saying. Or trying to say.

I addressed the merits of your case earlier, with regard to the physical location of the plant used to operate the gaming, versus the residence of the gamers. You argued that the WTO had no remit in this case. The WTO panel disagreed, and in accepting arbitration, the US *and* Antigua both accepted remit. You are, in effect, second guessing the legal and political teams from two countries as well as an international panel of jurists. As with idiosyncratic stock picking, there is a very, very small probability of you being correct in this instance, versus a very high probability of you not being correct in this case. I have read your bloggish/fisking-style arguments againt the WTO decision and they are unconvincing and merely reiterate or restate many of the initial arguments of the US deposition in the first round of hearings. These arguments were judged at the time to be of insufficient merit to prevent the arbitration from proceeding. Your stubborn refusal to recognise that a legally constituted body delegated to come to a resolution of this difficult problem bespeaks a cognitive difficulty in accepting wisdom.

Sometimes, you just have to admit that you are wrong. The problem is that when your intellectual capabilities constrain you from recognising the domain borders of your inexpertise, there is a high probability that you will overestimate your capabilities.

Whatever you do do not perform any write operations to the target (damaged, older) disk.

I haven't used the PC since I got it back. About all I did was boot it up once or twice. I didn't want to take the change that by using it I would irrevocably lose the data. What I'm thinking of doing is switching the old drive for the new one then booting up. If possible I don't know how to have 3 hard disk drives in the PC so I'd compleatly remove the old one. However I have a USB docking station for sata drives. It will allow me to use the disk as an external drive. Of course using USB will take a long tyme to recover data.

Have your destination drive ready in the chassis. It should be formatted, mounted etc etc so that you can write files to it. There are two schools of thought here, write the damaged drive out as a file (my choice) or as a partition. Go for the file option, it will be simpler for the time being. You will need to use the mount or df command to establish which *device* are present, say as root do

You and others have said to use dd to image the old drive then use the image. Does dd or df format disks or require them to be formated? Quickly googling I see OS X Leopard can use both the dd and df commands in terminal so perhaps I can use my Mac to work on the drive. There's also a Mac version of TestDisk I may also be able to use. However I wonder if using these commands and TestDisk on my Mac will work with ReiserFS partitions on an external drive.

Put the target drive (sata, I'm guessing) on an internal interface for speed - usb will be too slow and may try to auto mount the fs on the drive. Restart the machine.

Oh, I see you suggest not to use USB but to install it internally. I'd have to do more research to see how to install a third disk if it's possible. I imagine it is because Apple sells Mac Pros with up to 4 hard disks. I imagine I'd have to edit fstab before installing it though so Linux doesn't automatically try to mount the drive. If I use the docking station hooked to my Mac though I can tell it to not mount or dismount the disk.

I'd encourage you to go for broke and see if you can replay the old journal

I'd like that. Unfortunately I'll probably have a problem with the next part:

sure you won't have any file names - just unattached inodes

A lot of the data and files I have on the disk are webpages I saved on my disks. Though I don't do research as much as I used to when I come across info I want to keep I'll save it. For instance I read in the IEEE's magazine "Spectrum" and article "A Broadband Utopia" about how a group of cities in northeastern Utah joined together to build a broadband infrastructure. I found the article online, you have to be a member or buy it in order to read it online now but it used to be free, so I saved it.

Because of this if the file names are not recovered it would take a long tyme to rebuild the documents, webpages. Others I saved were how people in various locations, whether Central America or Africa, were able to pottery to decontaminate and kill pathogens in water so it was potable. Being webpages it's likely there will be a number of different files, css, html, and photos among others. That makes for a lot of documents, so I'd like to recover document names. But the big thing is that the docs are recovered, over a period of tyme I could then rebuild them.

Falcon

This looks like a similar approach to one I have been thinking about for a while now.

This type of layered control is very likely to be the future of all AI, not just that in games (I say this because there is some evidence that the human brain works in exactly this manner). I have a suggestion: let the thing fight itself. Begin with the same basic game, and rather than the randomness and fuzzy logic that you use (what does that mean? Can we see your algorithms?), use an artificial neural network for each unit, another for each "squad" (all nearby units, allows for flanking and such). Something with a few input nodes, a single hidden layer, and a similar number of output nodes should probably be all that's needed for the units, and the squad AI would only need a few more than that. This would likely be more computationally expensive, but it has one big advantage: it will learn.

Begin with two full armies, each with their NNs randomly generated. Use an evolutionary algorithm, and have the winner fight the winner. Not only does this allow you to create a solid AI with minimal effort (see here), but when you have your final AI, it will be able to adapt to a specific player's gameplay style (over the course of several games). Replay value is off the charts, development takes a bit more initial effort than what you have, but in the long run you'll get an AI that genuinely uses tactics just like a real human player. I'm not sure how this could be adapted to a commander AI that would dictate broader strategy (due to the complexity of the NN required, you'd probably need a monster computer to run it), but it would be the sort of thing to try.

Also, this same approach would also work for strong AI, if we had any idea what sorts of NNs to create. RTS is a much simpler problem, and has a lot of applications (pathfinding, planning, coordination) to other types of AI.

If I've entirely misunderstood what you're doing here, I'm apologize, but TFA had more pop culture references than technical details. Reply if you want me to clarify any points.

If you have a GPS, then you also have a compass, because any GPS can compute North.

This is untrue. A GPS can tell you what your coordinates are but not which way your device is facing relative to north. If you're moving it assumes the GPS is facing the direction of travel, which is not always the case. When you aren't moving it gets quickly confused.

No, actually it is true. You just need multiple antennas in a known orientation.

Sources:

• GPS-based attitude and guidance displays for general aviation
• GPS-Based Attitude For Aircraft

We all know what the difference is between a GPS and a compass.

Apparently some of us are confused about the relative capabilities though.

In context of the iPhone, no, calculating attitude from the GPS data isn't possible due to its size. But calculating attitude using GPS is quite possible and has already been done.

Why should POSIX care which order it happens in? Allowing these two separate operations to be reordered could (in theory) allow a filesystem driver to increase performance by ordering the operations such that the drive head travels the shortest distance.

We're talking past each other. Of course POSIX defines an ordering of operations on a running system. You're talking about writes to the backing disk being reordered, which is outside the scope of POSIX, and about crash recovery, which is also outside the scope of POSIX. My argument is that a reasonable system ought to maintain at least some of the POSIX ordering guarantees across crashes.

My Google skills are apparently lacking, as I'm unable to locate the POSIX specs for file system operations.

It's not free.

Scientific Journals cannot be compared to TV documentaries. I'm not familiar with many other fields, but the IEEE Spectrum and ACM publish journals that are widely used as technical resources in engineering. Journals are not primarily a form of entertainment.

PRINT ARTICLE (instead of the 5 separate pages):
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/8747

The 25:
1 - Signetics NE555 Timer (1971)
2 - Texas Instruments TMC0281 Speech Synthesizer (1978)
3 - MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (1975)
4 - Texas Instruments TMS32010 Digital Signal Processor (1983)
5 - Microchip Technology PIC 16C84 Microcontroller (1993)
6 - Fairchild Semiconductor A741 Op-Amp (1968)
7 - Intersil ICL8038 Waveform Generator (circa 1983*)
8 - Western Digital WD1402A UART (1971)
9 - Acorn Computers ARM1 Processor (1985)
10 - Kodak KAF-1300 Image Sensor (1986)
11 - IBM Deep Blue 2 Chess Chip (1997)
12 - Transmeta Corp. Crusoe Processor (2000)
13 - Texas Instruments Digital Micromirror Device (1987)
14 - Intel 8088 Microprocessor (1979)
15 - Micronas Semiconductor MAS3507 MP3 Decoder (1997)
16 - Mostek MK4096 4-Kilobit DRAM (1973)
17 - Xilinx XC2064 FPGA (1985)
18 - Zilog Z80 Microprocessor (1976)
19 - Sun Microsystems SPARC Processor (1987)
20 - Tripath Technology TA2020 AudioAmplifier (1998)
21 - Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set (1994)
22 - Motorola MC68000 Microprocessor (1979)
23 - Chips & Technologies AT Chip Set (1985)
24 - Computer Cowboys Sh-Boom Processor (1988)
25 - Toshiba NAND Flash Memory (1989)

( mod me up so some karmawhore will find themselves FAIL'd )

What about the IBM Cell Processor (2005). Bringing peta-flops to Folding@Home certain qualifies as an amazing contribution, even if the PS3 itself hasn't ruled the console market.

PRINT ARTICLE (instead of the 5 separate pages):
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/8747

The 25:
1 - Signetics NE555 Timer (1971)
2 - Texas Instruments TMC0281 Speech Synthesizer (1978)
3 - MOS Technology 6502 Microprocessor (1975)
4 - Texas Instruments TMS32010 Digital Signal Processor (1983)
5 - Microchip Technology PIC 16C84 Microcontroller (1993)
6 - Fairchild Semiconductor A741 Op-Amp (1968)
7 - Intersil ICL8038 Waveform Generator (circa 1983*)
8 - Western Digital WD1402A UART (1971)
9 - Acorn Computers ARM1 Processor (1985)
10 - Kodak KAF-1300 Image Sensor (1986)
11 - IBM Deep Blue 2 Chess Chip (1997)
12 - Transmeta Corp. Crusoe Processor (2000)
13 - Texas Instruments Digital Micromirror Device (1987)
14 - Intel 8088 Microprocessor (1979)
15 - Micronas Semiconductor MAS3507 MP3 Decoder (1997)
16 - Mostek MK4096 4-Kilobit DRAM (1973)
17 - Xilinx XC2064 FPGA (1985)
18 - Zilog Z80 Microprocessor (1976)
19 - Sun Microsystems SPARC Processor (1987)
20 - Tripath Technology TA2020 AudioAmplifier (1998)
21 - Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set (1994)
22 - Motorola MC68000 Microprocessor (1979)
23 - Chips & Technologies AT Chip Set (1985)
24 - Computer Cowboys Sh-Boom Processor (1988)
25 - Toshiba NAND Flash Memory (1989)

( mod me up so some karmawhore will find themselves FAIL'd )

The latest IEEE Spectrum "Winners and Losers" edition listed a robotic strawberry picker as a loser. The gist was that it doesn't work in fields, only special greenhouses, and that the mechanics of actually picking a strawberry without damaging it is fairly complicated. This tomatobot doesn't seem to address either of these issues, either.

I also have an ACM and AMS membership, so I guess its a draw, but I would point out that IEEE DOES have a standard for Professional Membership http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/qualifications/qualifications.html#Member

Member grade is limited to those who have satisfied IEEE-specified educational requirements and/or who have demonstrated professional competence in IEEE-designated fields of interest. For admission or transfer to the grade of Member, a candidate shall be either:

(a) An individual who shall have received a three-to-five year university-level or higher degree (i) from an accredited institution or program and (ii) in an IEEE-designated field

(b) An individual who shall have received a three-to-five year university-level or higher degree from an accredited institution or program and who has at least three years of professional work experience engaged in teaching, creating, developing, practicing or managing in IEEE-designated fields; or

(c) An individual who, through at least six years of professional work experience, has demonstrated competence in teaching, creating, developing, practicing or managing within IEEE-designated fields.

This approach covers all of the "traditional" CompSci paths: getting a degree in a CompSci field, getting a degree in something else and falling into CompSci, and just "falling into it" and never getting a degree.

They also provide a Code of Ethics:http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/ethics/code.html, something most Professional organizations do. The only things missing to convert them into a "proper" body like Lawyers or Accountants is to institute some sort of entrance exam (which is difficult unless you test only on the lowest common pieces), and for members to start including initials after their names.

I also have an ACM and AMS membership, so I guess its a draw, but I would point out that IEEE DOES have a standard for Professional Membership http://www.ieee.org/web/membership/qualifications/qualifications.html#Member

Member grade is limited to those who have satisfied IEEE-specified educational requirements and/or who have demonstrated professional competence in IEEE-designated fields of interest. For admission or transfer to the grade of Member, a candidate shall be either:

(a) An individual who shall have received a three-to-five year university-level or higher degree (i) from an accredited institution or program and (ii) in an IEEE-designated field

(b) An individual who shall have received a three-to-five year university-level or higher degree from an accredited institution or program and who has at least three years of professional work experience engaged in teaching, creating, developing, practicing or managing in IEEE-designated fields; or

(c) An individual who, through at least six years of professional work experience, has demonstrated competence in teaching, creating, developing, practicing or managing within IEEE-designated fields.

This approach covers all of the "traditional" CompSci paths: getting a degree in a CompSci field, getting a degree in something else and falling into CompSci, and just "falling into it" and never getting a degree.

They also provide a Code of Ethics:http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/ethics/code.html, something most Professional organizations do. The only things missing to convert them into a "proper" body like Lawyers or Accountants is to institute some sort of entrance exam (which is difficult unless you test only on the lowest common pieces), and for members to start including initials after their names.

ead the abstract

True I linked to the abstract not the article itself, which I did read. I have that issue of the "Spectrum" and I saved the online article on my computer.

Falcon

If cities would allow no-holds-bared competition, every city would end up looking as if it were overrun by a herd of rabid gophers. It is simply not feasible to have 20 companies run wires/fibre/what-not all over the place.

You mean like these: 1, 2, 3, or 4? Or these: 5, 6? Darn, I wish I had those links, last week another /.er posted links to city views with a bunch more cables.

A saner idea, which some cities have implemented, is to place a whole network of city-owned conduits (essentially weather-proof empty pipes) which then can be leased for a nominal fee by anyone who wishes to run a fibre or some other wiring through them to a customer. Probably even more efficient would be for a city to run optical fibre to all households and simply lease that fiber to whatever competing businesses the residents wishes to be connected to.

It is better than what we have now. A Broadband Utopia does like you say, run fiber to homes and businesses then leases access. Here's the link to TFA.

Falcon

If cities would allow no-holds-bared competition, every city would end up looking as if it were overrun by a herd of rabid gophers. It is simply not feasible to have 20 companies run wires/fibre/what-not all over the place.

You mean like these: 1, 2, 3, or 4? Or these: 5, 6? Darn, I wish I had those links, last week another /.er posted links to city views with a bunch more cables.

A saner idea, which some cities have implemented, is to place a whole network of city-owned conduits (essentially weather-proof empty pipes) which then can be leased for a nominal fee by anyone who wishes to run a fibre or some other wiring through them to a customer. Probably even more efficient would be for a city to run optical fibre to all households and simply lease that fiber to whatever competing businesses the residents wishes to be connected to.

It is better than what we have now. A Broadband Utopia does like you say, run fiber to homes and businesses then leases access. Here's the link to TFA.

Falcon

I think GP should have said the natural consequence of capitalism, is that it easily lends itself to abuse in the end.

As does communism, socialism, religion(ism), and other "isms".

Once a few or a single company owns a market, there are no market forces keeping them in check. The free market doesn't account for that scenario, despite desperately repeated talking points.

But one or a few companies more than likely wouldn't "own" a market in a free market system. I wouldn't say all, because there may be cases that are exceptions but I can't think of any right though you might, but I bet most economic sectors where one or a few companies dominate it it's because government allows it. Like cable and phone service. Governments, in the US, gave one provider a monopoly in the use of rights of way for each service. Radio is the same but different. Originally in the US radio frequencies were homesteaded.

The first person to broadcast in an area on a specific frequency had the right to use that frequency. If someone else in the same area started broadcasting on the same frequency or interferred with the broadcasting courts were ruling that the first person to broadcast had the right to that frequency. This all changed when the big radio businesses pressured congress to create the Federal Radio Commission and to license the airwaves. The excuse being that the airwaves were a scarce resource. But the real reason was that big broadcasters didn't want competition.

So yeah, capitalism doesn't own corruption, but without some kind of system of fair rules, coupled with enforcement, it does lend itself to corruption quite easily.

Now this is where I disagree with some Libertarians, capital and small "l", I do support some regulating but only after the market has not been able to work out the problems. Such as a big radio broadcasting business entering into a market some one else is already using. Even that can be dealt with by the courts as it was in the beginning. Another area I disagree with some is in the ownership of infrastructure such as cable and phone. I believe it would be better if the entity that owns the infrastructure didn't sale the services directly to consumers so that they wouldn't have a monopoly on it. Instead I'd have them allow open access so others could offer said services. An example of this is northeastern Utah where a group of communities got together to build a broadband utopia. Private businesses can use the infrastructure to provide broadband, cable TV, and or phone access to consumers. This mixes a free market with socialism, if the government owns the system. However as was done with the Rural Electrification Act to electrify rural communities during the mid to later 1930s. The act paid for the erection of wind generators, the Jacobs wind turbines were considered the best and even today people seek out Jacobs to use themselves. When erected many of them were owned by coops where those who used the electricity and wanted to be a member of the coop could be.

I'll also note that capitalism does some things quite a bit more efficiently (and therefor maybe better) than the other economic systems - but each economic system, like each political system, has it's benefits, and I don't see why we constantly feel the need to apply one system to everything in an ideologically pure way.

Though I consider myself pro free market capitalism and a libertarian, as I state above I agree with this. Though I want liber

Ah, but there are other factors as well, such as the fact that a large generator system is much more efficient at turning petroleum into energy than a car's ICE is, and that once the cars are taking energy from the grid, the means of generation can be weaned away from petroleum into any number of other sources without any change in the design of the car.

Pure electric cars make the most sense, period, of any system. Hybrids are interim solutions at best, and things like hydrogen based engines make almost no sense at all - no infrastructure, low efficiencies, etc.

The only technology that is lagging here is batteries / ultracaps. There's already a battery company with a 10-minute recharge time for medium performance batteries; they're ramping up production right now (yes, they're actually making batteries.) Here's a car based on them. Should EEstor or one of the other Ultracap companies come through with fast charging systems, we're off and running. There are no other problems remaining to solve that don't fall to engineering we already know how to do (for instance, a local charging station that builds it's stored charge slowly, overnight, when rates are low and utilities are looking to load balance, and dumps to your car in minutes.)

It is totally about the energy storage system in the vehicle.

Capacity is only unlimited if income is unlimited. Even in a monopoly people will only pay so much, so there's a limited income to expand the network - which puts hard physical limits on capacity, and to make any money at all the network has to be contended.

Thing is is here in the USA cablecos and telcos received almost $200 billion to buildout broadband but they did not. All they did was use the money to pad their bottom lines. They also battle attempts by others build out broadband. Some articles and posts on /. have been about this, whither it's telecos trying to block muni wifi or cablecos trying to block cities from installing cable. One example is A Broadband Utopia. Commercial broadband businesses tried to stop it but were unsuccessful. They were successful though having the Utah state government enact a law that requires it to be open, which was planned from the beginning. Because of the network Comcast was forced to offer a $90 bundle.

Falcon

But solar panels are nasty. I mean really toxic-nasty. You do not want highly dispersed, decentralised energy production based on toxic chemistry. At least, nuclear powerplants are small and localised.

Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel also generates a lot of toxic chemicals. See the IEEE "Spectrum's" "Nuclear Wasteland".

You really want nuclear powerplants.

You may want it but I don't. I want clean energy and nuclear power is not clean. While there is no real "clean" energy there are sources that are cleaner than nuclear. Nor do I want my tax dollars subsidizing nuclear power, and without government subsidies nuclear power isn't profitable in the US. And don't try to use the argument that that's because all of the regulations and NAMBYs, without government subsidies nuclear power is not profitable in France, India, or Russia either and they don't have the laws and regulations the US does. As the freemarket CATO Institute says in "Nuclear Energy: Risky Business"
"Given all of this, how do France, India, China, and Russia build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Government officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Either these governments build expensive plants and shove them down the market's throat-or they build shoddy plants and hope for the best."

Falcon

Read the FA, especially linked journal summary, published back in December.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/wrapper.jsp?arnumber=4671110

  This isn't an April Fools joke.

  This is brilliant. There's been a lot of scifi stories that hypothesized implants that run off of neural impulses; this isn't limited by the extremely small amounts of electricity that the nervous system generates.

  Waste is definitely going to be a problem, but one that's likely solvable by engineering yeast that produce waste that can be metabolized and flushed out by the liver or kidneys.

  This may also be an answer to the problem of powering nanomachines that repair the human body. I'm hardly an expert in the field, anyone who is (and is still here today) care to comment?

SB

Nov. 25th 2007
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=755

Nov. 4th 1988
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel2/727/3075/00095357.pdf?arnumber=95357

Monkey Feeding Itself

Brain-Computer Interface

It's not that I'm unimpressed, just not really impressed, especially since Asimo already has coordination and calculating abilities of it's own so it's not really "raw" input=result.

According to this paper, "Impact of DRAM process technology on neutron-induced soft errors" (unfortunately not free), the basic strategy is still the same. As the process scales down, the memory cells get smaller and present less of a target to cosmic rays. However, logic becomes more susceptible to upset due to decreased capacitance.

In the paper they placed various sets of DIMMs into a neutron beam and recorded the MTBE for 1TB of memory. From the data, susceptibility decreases with smaller process nodes. However this effect is offset by the increasing amount of memory installed in computers.

I'd like to see Sun paired with a company that has experience with consumers and consumer products like Apple

I read an article some years ago in a business magazine on how the writer envisioned the marriage of Apple, Redhat, and Sun. He thought it was a good idea. Here's one by IEEE on the same theme.

Falcon

Long term storage isn't too bad, it is medium term that is tough (because the spent fuel is a lot hotter in the medium term). Having the used rods sitting on site at reactors is a great way to have them be available when the political will to use them as fuel eventually turns up, so it still isn't that big a deal. It does sort of hinge on viable breeder reactors though:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/4891

(but still, millions of pounds of solid waste is probably better than trillions of pounds emissions)

Ignoring nuclear power because of controversy (...)

Ignoring the only proven alternative to coal, as in one that is supplying a significant percent of electricity in several nations (over 50% in some cases), only because some dimwits don't understand physics or engineering, is extremely stupid.

Nuclear power is not proven to be green or environmentally friendly. Ignoring that is extremely stupid. Yes nuclear power does provide some countries with a significant amount of power. However even France, one of those countries, does not not have it solved. The article "Nuclear Wasteland in the IEEE's magazine "Spectrum" says "France's engineers tried harder than those in any other country to build and run breeder reactors reliably at a commercial scale, but ultimately they failed. The result is that even in France--the best real-world model of what reprocessing can accomplish--the technology remains a tantalizing but only partial solution to the problem of high-level nuclear waste."

Falcon

I don't know about Masad backdoors into Checkpoint firewalls, but the RAIN protocol http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=00910866 is the method used to build Checkpoint HA clusters. Another intersting point is that Narus, a company founded by an Israeli, created technology that has been used to gather intelligence on the backbones of some of the largest ISP's in the world. The AT&T traffic sniffing snafu of a few years ago was accomplished using Narus devices.

I think you are confusing actual research with ...

Then sit back down and shut up while you think about it. While you're sitting there, ostensibly thinking, here is some material to consider:

• Real-time cone-beam CT image reconstruction using a mercury's dual cell-based system (DCBS) and a Sony's Playstation 3 (PS3) cluster
• Playstation 3 Consoles Tackle Black Hole Vibrations
• PS3 boosts protein research plan
• Building Supercomputer Using Playstation 3
• PlayStation Cell Speeds Docking Programs
• Researchers Use PlayStation Cluster to Forge a Web Skeleton Key
• Playstation cluster creates cheap supercomputer
• and so on..

Garbage products like xbox have gone down in flames (pun intended) and MS has to make smoke (no pun intended) and noise to distract from the situation. Same crowd is going on attack against OpenOffice.org and other key products. The universal office format, OpenDocument Format, is getting specialized attackers. Repeat lies often enough that people believe them seems to be an ongoing theme from MS.

Whether 1-, 8-. 16, or 32-node clusters, PS3s are useful in computationally intensive tasks. I'd like to see an add-on for Blender or other 3D software that allows adding a PS3 as a single node cluster. If it's there and you're working with a desktop, why not also use the processors of the otherwise idle gaming machine

I'm familiar with the L2ARC idea. I think time will tell whether or not adding an extra layer of cache between the memory and commodity SATA hard drive really makes sense or not. For laptop use where we care about the power and shock resistance attributes of SSD's, it makes sense to pay a price premium for SSD's. However, it's not clear that SSD's will indeed become cheap enough, and even if they do, historically the cache hierarchy has 3 orders of magnitude between main memory and disks, and over the last 3 decades, there have been other technologies that have been cheaper per gigabyte than main memory, but more faster given a price level than hard drives (and for one reason or another, they have fallen into what Dr. Steve Hetzler, an IBM Fellow from the IBM Almaden Research Center has called "the dead zone".

I first heard this argument at the December 2008 IDEMA Symposium, where I was giving a talk as the new CTO of the Linux Foundation, and his presentation was well worth the effort I made to head out to the Bay Area to give the talk.

It turns out that Dr. Steve Hetzler is apparently going to be giving the same talk in three days at the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the IEEE Magnetics Society, which will be held at the Western Digital facility in San Jose on February 24th. A brief talk description and map to the facility can be found here. It's an extremely interesting, entertaining, and thought-provoking talk, and some folks that have seen the slides of Dr. Hetzler's talk have taken an extreme exception to them. However, he makes some very powerful arguments both from supply side (specifically, the capital cost of the Silicon Fabs to replace even 10% of the HDD market is a very large number), and the demand side. For those of you who are in the Bay Area, and who is interested in storage issues, I'd strongly encourage you to listen to his talk and make your own judgements. The web site states that no RSVP's are required, and I don't think you have to be an IEEE member to attend.

Actually IEEE allows you to make your paper available on the internet at *one* location. However the material must not be reprinted/republished without permission from the IEEE. They also don't allow making your work part of another world-wide indexed collection. That's still far from perfect but at least it allows you to make your work accessible on your homepage or your university's Digital Commons repository. I don't know what the future plans of IEEE are.

Unfortunately I don't have such a choice now, I rent an apartment.

Do the research, if you can make it make financial sense(remember, it'd be a deductible expense!), talk with your landlord. They might do it.

I have done some research. Hopefully in a few years I'll own the apartment building. My sister owns it now but when the mortgage is paid down enough so I can qualify for one the plan is that she will sell it to me and I'll take over the mortgage. Once I do own it I'll have an energy audit done, then save money to have an architect redesign the building.

in the sense of a 'carbon tax', nuclear power is lumped in right along with wind, solar, tidal, etc...

Except nuclear power isn't carbon free, the construction emits a lot of carbon. How? Nuclear power plants require vast amounts of concrete and steel. Both require a lot of energy to make, concrete is made from cement and cement is made from heating lime to 1450C in a kiln. A lot of heat is also required to make steel. More than likely that energy comes from a fossil fuel. Then there's uranium mining. These along with other things are called the nuclear cycle.

Oh, and when have I expressed anything but disdain for coal power?

When did I say you didn't?

I'm trying to remember, did you ever post a link showing just how much nuclear power is subsidized? Bonus points if it shows coal or nuclear above wind/solar per kwh.

Yes I have. "Hooked on Subsidies: Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power" is one. CATO, a Freemarket Institute, also has articles that say something about coal subsidies.

• Coal-to-liquids: "It's a Syn
• Clean Coal: "McCain, Obama, and Clean Coal"
• Rural Subsidies

And it doesn't matter if the company making the solar panel doesn't get the subsidy if every customer who buys their product gets one.

You're right it's still a subsidy however the people have a choice as to who they buy from. When a subsidy is given to nuclear power people don't have that choice.

BTW, your first solar and nanosolar links go to the same spot.

Oops I cut and pasted wrong, NanoSolar.

Nanosolar gets government subsidies

Maybe I spoke too soon. Looking at that page you provide a link to though it doesn't say how much or what type of subsidy Nanosolar gets. The second link says Germany gave the company a subsidy for it's German plant. The "Spectrum" article " First Solar: Quest for the $1 Watt" says the subsidies are feed-in tariffs. Because it's not the government giving the money though I don't consider them subsidies. Perhaps "rebate" would be a better word.

Falcon

Unfortunately I don't have such a choice now, I rent an apartment.

Do the research, if you can make it make financial sense(remember, it'd be a deductible expense!), talk with your landlord. They might do it.

If carbon emissions were taxed alternative energy wouldn't look as expensive. And there are no clean coal plants in commercial production, what plants there are are for research.

Pretty much my point. Except that, in the sense of a 'carbon tax', nuclear power is lumped in right along with wind, solar, tidal, etc... Oh, and when have I expressed anything but disdain for coal power? I want to get rid of it! Mountaintop mining is another form of nasty pollution in my mind.

Even then though I doubt nuclear power would be profitable without subsidies.

I'm trying to remember, did you ever post a link showing just how much nuclear power is subsidized? Bonus points if it shows coal or nuclear above wind/solar per kwh.

All I have is a Wall street journal article:

$29.91 'clean coal' per mwh (megawatt hour)
$24.34 solar
$23.37 wind
$1.59 nuclear .67 hydroelectric .44 normal coal .25 Natural Gas

Yes, engineering always needs to be done but they are not being subsidized at the same amount as coal or nuclear. They may have but I doubt either First Solar or Nanosolar received subsidies directly. You could say Germany's Nanosolar order is one, and it might be, but I don't think of it so much as a subsidy anymore than first adopters subsidize research and development.

Germany forces the electric companies to pay something like 10X what they normally pay for every kwh of solar energy sold on the grid; I'd tend to say that's a subsidy. And it doesn't matter if the company making the solar panel doesn't get the subsidy if every customer who buys their product gets one. BTW, your first solar and nanosolar links go to the same spot.

Still - Nanosolar gets government subsidies - "Nanosolar in 2006 announced a $75 million Series C round, which it claimed amounted to $100 million when combined with government subsidies." and "Nanosolar already has secured a subsidy for 50 percent of the capital expenses of building the German facility." 50% capex subsidy

First solar? Well, the first page of google reveals less, but they still seem dependent upon german subsidies.

Again, I'm not opposed to wind/solar/whatever where they make the most sense. I just think we should put some money down on actually building a few plants. Odds are they'll prove their worth over an estimated 60+ year lifespan, even if wind/solar end up being a bigger chunk of the final answer.

Well, I guess that despite the cost of these repairs, they will be saving money off their electricity bill.

...but if your wireless mics really are in the TV bands, and really aren't Part 15 devices, then they're Part 74, Subpart H devices, which do require a license. There are no other options. You're one of many who've been sold a bill of goods by unscrupulous manufacturers of these microphones which, by law, can only be licensed to television stations, broadcast networks, cable television systems, motion picture producers, television program producers, and Multipoint Multichannel Distribution System (MMDS) licensees (Title 47 USC, 74.832). See this for a pretty good, if slightly dated, FAQ on what's required to license a wireless microphone in the US.

These microphones typically will be offered no protection against interference from whitespace protocols like the IEEE 802.22 standard. Note that the IEEE 802.22 group is also in the final stages of standardizing a beacon protocol, IEEE 802.22.1 [pdf]. This beacon is to be present whenever the (licensed) wireless microphone is in operation, and produces a signal easier to detect (at a greater range) than the microphone itself, so that cognitive white space secondary users can more reliably determine that that television channel is occupied and move elsewhere. This system avoids interference to the wireless microphone by the secondary user.

If there was 1 Gbps fiber available, open wlreless and municipal wifi would never work....

Actually it would work as it would cost too much to lay fiber everywhere. Fiber can be laid to central points from which wireless providers can tap into the fiber. Wireless is afterall cheaper. Many people who build off the grid use solar or other energy sources for power because it's cheaper. If you build a home a few miles from the closest power line it can cost more to have the powerlines installed than a PV system will cost. The last I heard, to lay 1000 feet of powerlines can cost something like $1000 so one mile would cost more than $5000. And fiber cost more.

Related to this a few years ago IEEE's "Spectrum" had an article about how a group of US engineers setup radio towers to provide wireless access to a village in Southeast Asia, in Cambodia or Viet Nam. It was the cheapest way to provide net access.

Falcon

The most logical structure for telecom networks is to have the government own the physical infrastructure (which is a natural monopoly) and then allow any private company that wants to to provide services (Internet, television, phone, whatever) over that infrastructure.

This is what a group of communities did in northeastern Utah. Governments there banded together to finance and build a Broadband Utopia. These communities built it then allowed whoever wanted to offer services it could deliver whether broadband access, cable tv, or phone service. If they wanted they could provide all three.

Of course the existing telecom companies have lots of lobbyists, give lots of money to both parties, and are quite happy with things just the way they are, so this is unlikely to ever happen.

Because of it Comcast was forced to reduce it's prices in the area.

Falcon

Thanks for citing the ieee paper http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1083337. Unfortunately I am not a current member. Can the entire paper be found anywhere else online? Thanks this is a very interesting discussion.

What are the odds the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is federally funded?

The IEEE is an international non-profit, professional organization for the advancement of technology (including standardizing Ethernet and WiFi, publishing leading electrical engineering research publications, etc.). It has the most members of any technical professional organization in the world, with more than 365,000 members in around 150 countries.

You can read about their sources of income here. Most money comes from conference fees, individual memberships, and journal subscriptions. I don't think they get very much money directly from any government.

The memristor is is just a way to model nonlinear circuit elements and is one of many components in a nonlinear expansion for circuit modeling. See this paper by Leon Chua, the memristor's inventor. Note that in this paper the fourth element of the four element torus is negative resistance and not the memristor. All of the publicity over the memristor has been (sucessfull) marketing by some researchers at HP. .

From the talk page for the memristor on wikipedia

"Resistance, Capacitance and Inductance are regarded as fundamental because to each there corresponds a different picture of what is going on with the energy. Resistance refers to the loss of energy to Joule heating. Capacitance refers to storage of energy in the electric field. Inductance refers to storage of energy in the magnetic field.

If memristance is the "fourth fundamental" circuit element then memristors must do something with the energy they are imparted other than turn it into heat, or store it in electric or magnetic fields. So what do memristor supporters have to say about this? nothing. This is not surprising, since the concept of memristance stems from a purely mathematical argument bent on taming the current/voltage relationships of nonlinear circuit elements. The concept of memristance was invented out of convenience to avoid dealing with frequency-dependent (time-dependent) resistance, inductance, and capacitance. Thus the memeristor is not "fundamental", unless in your book fundamental is synonymous with convenient."

i = current
q = charge
V = voltage
phi = magnetic flux

dq = i dt (current)
dphi = V dt (voltage)
dV = r di (resistance)
dq = C dv (capacitance)
dphi = L di (inductance)
(see http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6207)
It was hypothesized that some device should exist that connects charge and flux, and follows the relationship: dphi = M dq. This is "memristance." It was predicted in 1971 as the "fourth basic circuit element"; see: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1083337
They were fundamentally theoretically new then. They just had not been physically realized and connected with that theory until recently.
Please don't dismiss them as "pure marketing hype" without some research.

i = current
q = charge
V = voltage
phi = magnetic flux

dq = i dt (current)
dphi = V dt (voltage)
dV = r di (resistance)
dq = C dv (capacitance)
dphi = L di (inductance)
(see http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6207)
It was hypothesized that some device should exist that connects charge and flux, and follows the relationship: dphi = M dq. This is "memristance." It was predicted in 1971 as the "fourth basic circuit element"; see: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1083337
They were fundamentally theoretically new then. They just had not been physically realized and connected with that theory until recently.
Please don't dismiss them as "pure marketing hype" without some research.

USB 3 will do at least 200mb/s sustained. And home users will love it when external harddrives gets faster. Professionals may need firewire for other stuff but the measly 100mb/s will not be an argument for firewire.

when USB 3.0 can do 200MB/s (not sustained), FireWire S3200 will have sustained speeds of 400MB/s. and it's not faster external hard drives that will push consumers to upgrade from USB 2.0 to 3.0--current UDMA133 hard drives are already far outstripping the 33MB/s transfer speed USB 2.0 is capable of providing. it's the ever increasing disk sizes, especially in portable media players, along with the proliferation of HD video, hi-res cameras, lossless audio, and other applications exposing consumers to ever-larger file transfers, that will increase demand for faster bus interfaces.

And every computer at NASA uses USB for the mouse, it doesn't mean shit. 1394b is an interconnect system. It can't track launch debris.

i know you're just trolling, but if every computer at NASA uses USB--whether it's for mouse/keyboard/printer/scanner/whatever--then that clearly means USB isn't going anywhere. i mean, FireWire is a high speed serial bus. of course it's being used as an interconnect--in this case to connect debris-monitoring equipment. what did you expect them to use it as? a CPU? NASA and the military use IEEE 1394b for high-speed interconnects because it's the best solution. IEEE 1394b has been standardized by SAE AS5643 as a data bus network for use in future military & aerospace projects (such as the Orion crew exploration vehicle) that require a high throughput data bus. USB doesn't even come close to the same performance.

Face it, firewire is dead. It's only been used for DV by consumers. Now DV is gone and firewire will soon follow as far as consumers are concerned.

yea, you can repeat that as many times as you want, but that won't make it true. FireWire's current applications extend far beyond the DV format. as long as most consumer laptops and computers still support FireWire, it's not considered dead, especially as there are no viable alternatives to FireWire for sustained high speed data transfers.

clueless armchair analysts have been predicting the death of FireWire since USB 2.0 came out. but anyone who's actually worked with both interfaces or is media production (or understands the difference between PIO and DMA) knows that USB's real-world performance doesn't even compare to that of FireWire.

So often "pure" rationalizations fail in the realms of complex systems and biological systems, such as the principal of bio-accumulation of toxins, where extremely low environmental levels of a substance may aggregate to very high levels in a predator species. Or japanese subway cars where the high number of cell phones, and the closed metal shell of the car, can cause standing waves (microwave hotspots) within the car, far greater than the individual phones power output. Resonance can cause astonishing accumulations of power from very low power sources.

The most compelling description of neuronal damage in the brain due to microwave EMF at low levels, similar to a cell phone were studies which found that the blood brain barrier membrane in rats dilated slightly under low level microwave EMF. This then allowed albumin proteins to pass through the membrane into the brain, where subsequent neuronal damage was caused through the molecular interactions.

So, the amount of power required to induce the membrane change was in fact too low to directly cause tissue damage, but the brain was profoundly perturbed due to a subsequent cascade of effects. The world (and us) are symbiotic and minor changes can destabilize the entire system. Acting like a know-it-all cuz you weren't open to following a counter-intuitive concept all the way through is kinda dangerous.. znew=z^2+c

So why give it up, then?

One would deploy EMI shielded Cat5e or Cat6 (or Cat11) cable and make sure your equipment is all properly grounded.

There was an interesting discussion on grounding GbE here: http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/news/2_2.htm that hints this may actually not work as expected, though.

You could always just hire a company http://www.fms-corp.com/ to come and make sure everything is all properly shielded but then you move to the next component in the chain and start exploring 60Hz AC EMF http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=00065035 and the output from your normal computer systems.

Personally, I prefer to think of it as the catalyst for turning my children into the "X-men" of our future.

Find a job where the people there are into technology. Some places, the developers consider software to be a job, and when they go home they watch TV and go to sporting events. Other places they go home and collaborate on projects, build Battlebots, and read Make magazine.

Talk to the developers. You might think that the company where they build robots with lasers would be staffed with industrious geeks, but it might turn-out that the corporate environment stifles such people.

You might want to talk to people in user's groups. Find your local LUG, IGDA chapter, ACM meeting, or IEEE charter. See where those people work (or don't work, if they aren't your type)