Slashdot Mirror

Folks around the world have been producing antiparticles for quite some time. They're also created by natural processes, but don't last long in high matter density environments.

Be sure to check out the analog computer museum, among others

And don't forget about relay logic

Simply, you understand wrong. Here's some stuff from a 1983 article on the issue.

Uranium in 1983 cost $40 a pound. Uranium reserves extractable at that price would indeed only last for 50 years or so if you burn it in light-water reactors. At $40 a pound, in 1983, those fuel costs added about 0.2 cents per kilowatt hour to the cost of electricity.

If, on the other hand, you use breeder reactors, which use the fuel far more efficiently, you can pay $1000 per pound for your uranium, and those fuel costs would only add 0.03 cents per kilowatt hour to the cost of electricity. Clearly, that makes economical the extraction of ores that wouldn't be economical if you were only using LWRs and PWRs.

You could extract uranium from seawater for far less than $1000 per pound, probably $200 to $400 a pound, and there's enough uranium current dissolved in seawater (4.6x10^9 tons of it) to supply the worlds electrical generation needs for millions of years. And, actually, that's renewable; rivers continually add more uranium to the seas.

Extract 16,000 tons per year from the oceans, and you can supply 25 times the world's 1983 electrical usage, and twice the world's 1983 total energy consumption.

There's way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way more than 50 years' worth of uranium around. And we haven't even mentioned using thorium, which is about 4 times as abundant in the Earth's crust as uranium, or just breeding plutonium from U-238, which is a lot more abundant than U-235.

Albert W. Tucker had an interesting thought about a subject matter that seems to rhyme with what you are talking about.

Locking down graphics settings and views and such is all well and good.

However, if ID is relying on a shared library for their OpenGL implementation, then they're ultimately playing a losing game. There are a number of software projects that can swap out the OpenGL shared library at runtime and intercept all of the gl and wgl calls. With this functionality, you can make the graphics look however you want them to. Remove shadows, change fov, even change the viewpoint entirely!

Locking down graphics settings and views and such is all well and good.

However, if ID is relying on a shared library for their OpenGL implementation, then they're ultimately playing a losing game. There are a number of software projects that can swap out the OpenGL shared library at runtime and intercept all of the gl and wgl calls. With this functionality, you can make the graphics look however you want them to. Remove shadows, change fov, even change the viewpoint entirely.

When news of "Gates" becoming the apellation of the building broke, heated discussions appeared on the local university electronic bulletin board. Many people were dismayed that Bill Gates, a college dropout with little knowledge of computer science, would receive the honor of having the computer science building named after him. It is no ordinary building. It is the building housing the pre-eminent computer-science department that is among the top 3 in the nation.

One mathematics professor lamented that money buys anything -- including undeserved honors. He commented that Stanford University might as well name the building after "Donald Trump" since he is a billionaire.

Personally, I object to honoring Bill Gates for anything. As far as I am concerned, he is an unethical shmuck who bears principal responsibility for the suicide of Gary Kildall. Search on "Gary Kildall" if you do not know who he is.

As I think I first read here on /., wind power (and tide power) both have been shown to have significant impact on global weather. While its not a temperature impact, it does take energy out of the atmosphere (or water) which will change weather.

As someone who lives in Colorado ... I can tell you that the northern Colorado / southern Wyoming areas ... are seriously windswept. Nonstop, hard wind.

Looks like the scientific data is not impressed with the winds in your area. The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and into Texas are significantly more windy. Right on both coasts there are also much windier areas. The real wind is found out at sea, though. Looks like all the white dots (highest wind) are over the sea and the great lakes.

Living on Cape Cod, which is basically at sea, I can tell you that during the windy season (winter) it gets pretty bad here.

While we are on the topic of speech recognition hardware, here is a shameless plug for the Perception Processor that people might find interesting. The Perception Processor OR The Perception Processor

Stanford Engineering's philosophy that fosters high-tech business is what keeps the VC's here. And top-tier universities move even slower than money.

LOCKSS That is, Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe may be a solution.

See the project ath lockss.stanford.edu

of course, all of this pre-supposes that tariffs (import or export) are things that should be done.

The Case For Free Trade of course offers another opinion.

*laughs*

Um, no, we really wouldn't appreciate you doing that with our software. And it is against our terms of use. http://vsp27.stanford.edu/license.txt

But back in my d.net days, we estimated that about 1/3 to 1/2 of all installs were zombies or forgotten. The original 5 proxies (hardcoded IP's, including my old dorm IP) probably still get pounded on after all these years.

I find it strange that he argues against copywrite, and yet the first footnote in his writings is his own copywrite. Given that the person immediately following him in the Stanford Law faculty directory is closely associated with a well known intellectual freedom license, I would think that he'd consider practicing what he preaches.

One of the trends I've noticed is that many of the people who advocate against the concept of intellectual property are the ones who have little or nothing to lose from its abolishment. (Yes, there are obvious exceptions, Stallman et all.) In this case, Lemley has little to lose - he has a nice position as a professor, writes $100+ textbooks that are a small enough market that there's little interest in trying to take the niche from his publishers. And yet, he still grabs for the very same rights he argues against.

Actually, that's essentially what they call tracking. And it is controversial. Essentially because people who get tracked into the top levels tend to do very well surrounded by other kids who are intelligent, motivated, and supported. But those tracked into the middle or lower levels don't do well, and usually benefit greatly from being mixed in with the more advanced students.

Well, if the selectivity wasnt in these colleges, these colleges wouldnt have most of these inflated prices - but then it wouldnt look good if anyone could get access to the best education. After all, we wouldnt want the masses able to move the privleged out of their well established (multigenerational) comfort zones.
Just let the masses in and let their own effort sort them out. Enough that we have some of the results of these selective colleges. With all the money they're raking in, I wont mind if I have to deal with some of the optional promotions if it means that it'd make the tuition 1/4-1/5th of its current cost due to more people paying in. They dont have problems getting the money, so they could afford to allow open admissions.

• LED destination signs, fore and aft.
• A two-way radio link to base.
• A GPS reporting system.
• Web-based bus position reporting.
• Surveillance cameras.

During the dot-com boom, Stanford was getting about a 20% return on the endowment, and they got carried away. Then when the market tanked, they started hitting on us alumni for more money.

There are several electronic journals in mathematics of very high quality that do have reviewers but that are totally free.
For example:
_ Geometry and Topology
_ Algebraic and Geometric Topology
_ Homology, Homotopy and Applications

The reviewers are volunteers. And take a look at the list of people on these panels: they all are renowned mathematicians (including a few Field medalists).

A paper version of the journal is available at a minimal cost, for those interested like librairies.

It is possible, at least in Mathematics, to have free peer reviewed journals of high quality.

But that's quite an exception: the CS and Math librairy at Stanford has to cut its subscription expenses by $40,000 a year... representing only a small part of the whole.

The most expensive journals being most of the time of little interest.

Moreover, at least in Math and CS, reviewers receive a very low compensation: Donald Knuth (the Don Knuth) used to receive something like $2000 a year to be an editor of Journal of Algorithms (see: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.p df--- his public letter to the editorial board of that Journal).

We don't really need publishers.

...at one point [Goldberg] strays into territory that can actually be put to a test. That's when he claims that the media "pointedly identify conservative politicians as conservatives," but rarely use the word "liberal" to describe liberals.

In fact, I did find a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives, but not in the direction that Goldberg claims. On the contrary: the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn't surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.

There's more in Nunberg's article, if you care to read it.

It seems that all Computer Scientists of a previous generations, like Don Knuth, Alan Kay, and of course myself all play the pipe organ.

I don't know why the current generation of Computer Scientists don't.

Again, the definition does not fit. I addressed that. Burrying waste is not a technological advance. The only advance that could come from that would be improved long-term storage containers, or maybe a faster fork lift to move them. I'm all for advances in power generation methods in nuclear reactors, use of fuel more efficiently, etc. But I am against sticking radioactive waste, that will be around for quite a while, in an area that shows geologic signs of a past water table which was higher than the yucca mountain site. That's not luddism, that's rationality. Nuclear power will be needed as a bridge to future technologies, no doubt about that...but climates change. Green belts shift. What happens if the greenbelt shifts south from oregon, idaho, and wyoming down towards nevada? It's happened before, and with the half life of waste to be stored in yucca mountain, it's fairly probable that it will happen again.

Here's a lesson in Soil Physics for you, to help you understand my skepticism:
Soil is a highly complex medium, with a net negative charge. Positive ions adhere to soil, negative ions break up soil (called flocculation, why sodic and saline soils suck for agriculture - the negative ions in the salt complexes destroy soil structure). Clay, part of a soil, tends to be quite negative - generally -90 to -20 mmol/kg. It has a pH dependent charge, gernally getting less negative as pH decreases, with a few clay types actually becoming positive as pH dips below 6. This is pretty rare. Right now engineers in yucca mountain are counting on the clay (Primarily smectite and clinoptilolite) to stop any potential nucleide leak. However, according to my chemistry text book, Plutonium-239 is one of the main waste isotopes from nuclear fission. The movement of nucleides through clay is still fairly unknown. Will it sorp? Will it floculate the clay? It only takes one hole in a clay layer to facilitate the free movement of water through it.

Lucky for us this this a pretty damn pressing question, and there are scientist working on it. Personally, I DO hope yucca mountain is a viable site, but I haven't found enough evidence to convince me of that yet.

As far as solar being prohibitively expensive - if it had as many government subsidies as nuclear power does, it most likely wouldn't. The cost per killowatt hour for nuclear fuel that i found is around 5 cents. The cost cited on the same site for solar power was 12 cents. I have to wonder if this cost is the actual or the subsidized cost. What subsidies, you ask? these . Googling for "Nuclear Subsidies" brought that up. I googled for Solar Subsidies and only found a page citing californian subsidies for home owners.

http://protege.stanford.edu/

Use Protege-2000. It's functionality eclipses that of FM Pro. It is well-tested and in wide deployment. It is trivial to make UI plugins and other kinds of deep additions in Java, but hardly ever necessary. It is free and open source. It has a paid team of developer that fix problems proptly and provide support.

And it supports any SQL database as a backend, and inserts a "semantic data modeling" layer in between the DB and UI that allows you to do very sophisticated things in a common sense, non-db-nerd way.

See some of the definitions online...

This post caught my eye both because, I use Tableau everyday and because without Google, I never would of found it. I am a principle developement engineer at a large manufacturing company. I am often asked to solve problems that require determining the relationship and relative importance of dozens of design choices and or to tune a dozen or more parameters to optimize the performance of the system. While I am a good programmer, I am not a database expert. Prior to using Tableau I was using Excel pivottables or custom programs to explore the relationships amoung variables. This is a tedeous and time consuming process. I have also used Matlab, IGOR, and Origin where appropriate. For a recent project the amount of data overwelmed my usual approaches. Not having time to reinvent the wheel I went looking on Google to find someone that had already solved the problem of exploring unknown relationships in large masses of multidimensional data. I quickly found powerpoint presentations describing Stanford's "Polaris" data visualization tool. The website stated that a comercial version of the tool was in development. I then emailed the project lead, Pat Hanrahan, http://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/ As he was on vacation, it took over a month to get a response. He pointed me to his start-up Tableau-software. They were just in the process of releasing a beta version. I fell in love with it immediately. I could for the first time, get an intuitive understanding as to how all the variables in the system were interacting. And in just minutes after collecting the raw data. Tableau can look at datasets in the millions of records. Excel is still limited to 2^16-1 records. Why? Could Microsoft adopt many of the features of Tableau? Sure. Will they? Not likely. Excel, after nearly 20 years of development, still does not have a decent default plot format that is acceptable to a scientist or is near publication quality. Instead they look like poorly drawn cartoons. So you are forced to use much more expensive programs like Matlab, Origin, or Mathematica to get decent Plots. Pivot charts are just that, charts. Not a real scatter plot of the data. I have seen engineers completely misinterpret data because they apply a trendline to a pivot chart not relizing that what looks like the x-axis is just a set of labels and the x-axis Microsoft accually uses in the trendline calculation are just ordinal numbers. True engineering data visualization is simply not the market Microsoft is after. The examples displayed on Tableaus website are somewhat trivial compared to what the software is capable of. The true power of the software is the ability to explore many dimensions of the dataset all at once. Edward Tufte stated: "Graphics are at their best when they represents very dense and rich datasets." This is easy to achieve using Tableau. The company is very open to suggestions for improvements in the interface and in the feature set. They implemented in the first release alot of functionality I requested during the beta test phase. I have recieved two upgrades in the first year and an expecting another in the near furture. The President of the company visited and we had a great talk. I would love to give him example plots of my data for their web-site but I cannot as all the data is propietary. Is Tableau software the next Google. Of course not. That is simply a stupid, idiotic statement obviously made to draw attention to the post. But don't let that detract from what is a great piece of software if you have the right problems to solve.

Actually, recent studies have shown some minor good news. If you live past your mid-70s or so with no sign of Alzeimers, you probably won't get it. Talk of these diseases want me to run folding@home again. But I'm a dnet man myself...

This is the Stanford spinoff of the Polaris project presented at IEEE InfoVis several times over the past few years. Chris Stolte was the main student involved, and a CiteSeer search on his name will turn up most of the related work. To summarize: The goal of the work was to provide a visual programming environment (using a spreadsheet-like layout) to presenting data in multi-dimensional databases. It uses some sound (a.k.a., proven) results to create initial intiutive mappings of this data. See the papers for more details.

This is the Stanford spinoff of the Polaris project presented at IEEE InfoVis several times over the past few years. Chris Stolte was the main student involved, and a CiteSeer search on his name will turn up most of the related work. To summarize: The goal of the work was to provide a visual programming environment (using a spreadsheet-like layout) to presenting data in multi-dimensional databases. It uses some sound (a.k.a., proven) results to create initial intiutive mappings of this data. See the papers for more details.

Just to help out a bit:

http://www-cse.stanford.edu/classes/cs201/projects /nuremberg-files/

i sent this email to the journalist.

Now I double dare you to send that same e-mail to the scientist who was the author of the study.

RC5? My God you have your priorities distorted. Read this why don't you? What a waste of CPU-cycles. If you're going to use them, why not do something like Protein Folding, where you can contribute to the cure of diseases?

Sheesh...

It must be the drugs.

Why not go whole hog if you're going to use a broken keyboard?

It's actually even better.

In 500 years, it's less radioactive than the ore it came from, because you are accelerating nuclear decay. Remember, making something not at all radioactive is an impossible goal, but making it safe is entirely attainable. Banannas are amazingly radioactive, but we still eat them, no?

Of course, you are left with a *lot* of depleated uranium, which is a mildly toxic heavy metal on it's own merits. But it's no more toxic than lead.

Radioactive waste is very much a problem that is less troublesome the longer you wait.

The big thing is that right now, we don't *need* reprocessing. It is possible to seperate out the stuff that you want -- u238 a.k.a. depleated uranium, u235, Pu239 and Pu240 (where the more Pu240 the less likely the Plutonium is going to be useful for making bombs), and folks have been talking about a variety of other non-radioactive decay components as being potentially economically feasable to get out of the reprocessed ore. But lately, folks have found all kinds of nice Uranium ores, so other than storage space, it's not economically necessary to reprocess it right now.

And if it's really really critical that you have waste that's safe *now* you just bombard it with neutrons until it's safe. They have it worked out, and, because it'll put off a lot of heat that can be used, it may not be that expensive as far as energy goes.

Hotspot helps, but still comes up short ... benchmarks here

Java is still roughly a factor of eight slower than C++

• Patent - 4,246,075, Hilbertz, W.H., Mineral accretion of large surface structures, building components and elements, Jan. 20, 1981.
  (22 years ago so it's expired i believe the period is 17yrs. IANAL)
• Patent - 4,440,605, Hilbertz, W.H., Repair of reinforced concrete structures by mineral accretion, Apr. 3, 1984 - expired Apr. 5, 1992 due
  to failure to pay maintenance fees.
• Patent - 4,461,684, Hilbertz, W.H., Accretion coating and mineralization of materials for protection against biodegradation, Jul.
  24, 1984 - expired July 26, 1992 due to failure to pay maintenance fees.
• Patent - 5,543,034, Hilbertz, W.H. and Goreau, T.J., Method of enhancing the growth of aquatic organisms, and structures created thereby, Aug. 6, 1996. (7 yrs should be still good)
• Patent - 4,623,433, Streichenberger, A.O., Process for orienting and accelerating the formation of concretions in a marine environment,
  Nov. 18, 1986 - expired Nov. 23, 1994 due to failure to pay maintenance fees.
• Patent 4,539,078, Wingfield, W.R., Method of and Apparatus for Making a Synthetic Breakwater, Sep. 3, 1985. (18 Yrs.)
• Patent 4,507,177, Duckworth, R. et al., Method of Stabilization of Particulate Material, Mar. 26, 1985. (18 Yrs.)
• Patent - 4,927,504, Scala, C.R., Sculpture process, May 22, 1990 (13 yrs)

What ever social/moral issues exist (e.g., artist, like software engineers, need to get paid for their work), peer-to-peer networks have many interesting computer science issues associated with them. For example, Hector Garcia-Molina database group at Standford is also involved in peer-to-peer network research. A peer-to-peer network that provided privacy to those who supplied files would not only avoid RIAA suits, but it would protect people who publish material that governments and corporations wished to suppress (e.g., it would be a way to guarantee free free speech).

I have not worked this through, but on the face of it, I would think that it should be possible to create a peer-to-peer network where it would be difficult to tell which system supplied a file. The idea (half-baked, perhaps) is that a request would go out for a file, or perhaps a string which could be matched by a responder ("Barry Manilow"+hits). The response would be routed through intermediate systems and might not follow the same path through the life of the transaction (e.g., the file fetch). Neither the requester or the responder would know that path to the other. They would just send packets out to their neighbors.

While in theory it would be possible to trace these transactions, it would be difficult. And doing so might be similar to wiretapping the internet, which might be illegal without a court order (at least in the US).

So there are a few questions:

• Is there p2p software that obscures the source of files? Certainly what I've proposed is not terribly original, so perhaps it already exists. Avoiding getting sued by the RIAA seems like a pretty good incentive to use this software.

• Is there some problem with this concept? Would a peer-to-peer network that emulates a routing network be easier to track than I think?

What ever social/moral issues exist (e.g., artist, like software engineers, need to get paid for their work), peer-to-peer networks have many interesting computer science issues associated with them. For example, Hector Garcia-Molina database group at Standford is also involved in peer-to-peer network research. A peer-to-peer network that provided privacy to those who supplied files would not only avoid RIAA suits, but it would protect people who publish material that governments and corporations wished to suppress (e.g., it would be a way to guarantee free free speech).

I have not worked this through, but on the face of it, I would think that it should be possible to create a peer-to-peer network where it would be difficult to tell which system supplied a file. The idea (half-baked, perhaps) is that a request would go out for a file, or perhaps a string which could be matched by a responder ("Barry Manilow"+hits). The response would be routed through intermediate systems and might not follow the same path through the life of the transaction (e.g., the file fetch). Neither the requester or the responder would know that path to the other. They would just send packets out to their neighbors.

While in theory it would be possible to trace these transactions, it would be difficult. And doing so might be similar to wiretapping the internet, which might be illegal without a court order (at least in the US).

So there are a few questions:

• Is there p2p software that obscures the source of files? Certainly what I've proposed is not terribly original, so perhaps it already exists. Avoiding getting sued by the RIAA seems like a pretty good incentive to use this software.

• Is there some problem with this concept? Would a peer-to-peer network that emulates a routing network be easier to track than I think?

You mean... like the VERY FIRST RESULT in your Stanford link SPECIFICALLY STATES in paragraph "1."?

Your link: similar Google search on Stanford in the US.

And the very first link in the search results: The Equivalence of Mass and Energy

Maybe if you are going to act like a 15 year-old snot, you should check your fucking facts first... or people like me dig up your mistakes so they can stuff your ass with them.

Oh, and it's Google, not google.

Whilst it might not take cool pictures, there's certainly some cool pictures of it - or, rather, the important elements of it.

Very, very spherical
That is about as close to a typical POVray render reality has ever gotten. Those spheres are the most spherical objects created by mankind.

They would make excellent HDR Probe reflectors if they weren't so expensive.
( In fact, you can run the manu photos through HDRshop and derive panoramic images of whatever environment they were in. Cute. )

More on fabrication and measurement.
From reading that, it appears they could've made them even more precise if they really, really wanted to (i.e. would be able to put up with tossing out even more of the spheres than they already did).

Whilst it might not take cool pictures, there's certainly some cool pictures of it - or, rather, the important elements of it.

Very, very spherical
That is about as close to a typical POVray render reality has ever gotten. Those spheres are the most spherical objects created by mankind.

They would make excellent HDR Probe reflectors if they weren't so expensive.
( In fact, you can run the manu photos through HDRshop and derive panoramic images of whatever environment they were in. Cute. )

More on fabrication and measurement.
From reading that, it appears they could've made them even more precise if they really, really wanted to (i.e. would be able to put up with tossing out even more of the spheres than they already did).

I wonder if Gravity Probe B will be able to measure this effect if it is still in working order next time an eclipse rolls around.

(Side note-- I never heard of this probe until I saw it in a magazine. Why not?)

The conflicts over Kashmir, "Kurdistan", Taiwan, these could lead to civil war. Serious business. That's why they are so touchy, especailly, nuclear states Pakistan and India.

There are/were some US Texans who want/ed to succeed. Of course they are idiots, but their militias got repressed.

Should Azatlan be returned to Mexico? Stay tunned, for a civil war near you.
http://wais.stanford.edu/USA/us_chicanos.html

The EFF is your "freedom to innovate" insurance policy. When you need to argue "Constitutional Rights aren't just the law, they're good ideas. Technological developments aren't just my job, they're a good idea" and you just don't have the time, money or the right words to say it right, the EFF says it for you, and says it very well.

When the MP/RI/XXAA / DMCA takedown letter arrives, 98% of other lawyers or civil rights groups are just going to hear "I work in technobabble, and now I'm being sued for neutrino transducer violations because of warp field coil incompatibility with carnivore but it really is a 4th amendment issue because of eiozh bhpaceog phshzt!..." when you call them up.

When you call the EFF up with your 'intersection of technology with legal rights' legal problem, the EFF will actually understand the issue and will want to help you. And, if they can afford to help you they will- but for that they need money. That means donations ahead of time. That's why you should support the EFF now. $2/week gets you the spiffy hat, or $2.09 /month the nifty bumpersticker AND 1st Amendment Rights carried into Cyberspace. Ask for 'Short' instead of Venti once in a while: you know you aren't supposed to have your caffeine all at once anyways. Or just drink regular coffee with cream and a little splenda. Not only do you save $, you'll lose #s (weight, not octothorpes). Protected rights & a smaller waistline: $2/week, $2/month. Best.Insurance.Ever.

Full Disclosure: I've met many of the EFF's staff, so I know how dedicated they are. Their staff attorneys aren't making much more than paralegals might make at the big corporate law firms. They're the not-profit, and We profit from their existance (are you listening- any encryption exporting companies? this includes You). So donate!

Next you'll be saying that Gates purchased the U of Texas.

No, but he did purchase Standford.

That's not really necessary. For the most part, people are already prevented from acting rotten if they feel that doing so would harm their reputation. In the context of doing business, corporations act rotten if its worth their while. If enough customers have the right information, it stops being worthwhile.

Consider the prisoners' dilemma -- the best outcome for both prisoners is if they both remain silent, but they don't. Why? They lack information. If they could co-ordinate their efforts, they could produce a better outcome for themselves than if they acted independently. Economic and social systems live and die on information, and when the infrastructure delivers instant and comprehensive information to the ordinary consumer, then real social change is possible.

A note on email versus e-mail

Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)

I'm with Knuth on this one. See the bottom of the page.

This is how you produce hydrogen. Notice the part about "electricity." That's right, in order to produce hydrogen you need the very same energy that we were trying to save in the first place. Your hydrogen-powered Prius may run as pure and clean as fresh snow, but if a coal-fired generator is supplying the electricity needed to electrolyze water and make hydrogen, then it's all for naught.

So let's stop beating around the bush: the only technology we have today that does not produce carbon and comes anywhere close to supplying Terra's present-day energy needs is good old nuclear. Or, nucular in the parlance of our current administration. Wind, water and/or solar simply don't. I think we need to bite the bullet, recognize this fact, and start building. The nuclear stigma is very unfortunate given the stakes of the global warming game we're playing. The fact is it can be done cheaply and safely, and few bad eggs seem to have spoiled the bunch... unless you have complete idiots at the helm, living in the proximity of a modern, well-managed nuclear power plant is probably a lot, lot safer than strapping into a rickety box of sheet metal and hurtling yourself down the freeway to work every morning in the presence of countless other drivers about whose skills and preoccupations you know nothing.

The depressing sticking point is that with a $100 billion, Manhattan-style research project we could probably get something like fusion power off the ground, thus solving our energy and pollution woes for basically forever.

By the way, that's about the same amount of money as we will be spending in Iraq in the coming years to ensure our oil supply and with it our ability to pump astronomical quantities of carbon into the air for the foreseeable future. Gallingly ironic.

In particular, the thrust of Shirky's argument is that we should change how we do things (i.e., the regulatory environment) because we can make use of the spectrum as a public commons without interfering with one another. The gaping hole in this argument is that, absent FCC regulation (or something equivalent), there is nothing to guarantee that everyone will operate this way. And it only takes one bad actor to ruin everyone's fun.

As a specific example, imagine that a large telecommunications company decides to market their new "bulletproof" phone service in the (currently unrestricted) 2.4GHz band by spending a huge chunk of cash to set up megawatt-level transmitters all over the place. Sure, their service will work great... but given enough power, it will drown out many/most other devices in the band, whether they are spread-spectrum or not. Shirky also mentions people in adjacent homes using wireless routers without interfering with one another, but there is nothing fundamental about that, either -- I could build a jammer for less than $100 that would disrupt every wireless 802.11g router within a city block.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to the WiFi band -- my lab has done quite a bit of research into the potentially disruptive effects of the proposed ultrawideband (UWB) allocation on GPS, which is in wide use worldwide, including some safety-critical applications.

As for the Economist piece, many other posters in this thread have noted a multitude of problems originating from the journalist-writing-as-engineer nature of the article; here's another big one: The article suggests (in the first two paragraphs of the section entitled "The sweet and low down") that simply repurposing the lower (i.e. currently licensed) swaths of spectrum is something of a panacea. What the author doesn't seem to understand is that there is an attendant difficulty in designing efficient antennas at these lower frequencies. There's a reason, for example, that commercial radio broadcasts aren't done in the 100KHz band -- the antennas on both ends would have to be hundreds of meters long (on the order of a quarter-wavelength) to be even marginally efficient. And if the antennas have to be a manageable size (and therefore inefficient), the transmitter power has to go way up to make the link work -- and we're right back where we started.

There is certainly promise in spread-spectrum radios, mesh networks, and other cool new technology. But it's not nearly as much of a no-brainer as these two pieces make it sound. I hate to be on the side of the "old school," but there is considerable merit to that line of thinking here.

-HJ

• Argentine Ants Invasion: Success Tied to Reduced Genetic Variation
• Supercolony of ants found (Europe; Mirrored articles: #1 and #2)
• Invading Ants Press United Front in California
• Argentine Ants Threaten Californian Horned Lizards
• It's the weather
• Giant mutant ant colony found in Australia (similar story.
• Might not be 'supercolony' after all: #1 and #2.