First, Vanadium isn't *that* common, it's 10x less common by mass as carbon is, 40x less by atoms. Second, to provide the amount of solar energy to make a significant dent in energy production in the US say 10% at a rate of a very low estimate of 1 TW power would require about 3,600 SQUARE KILOMETERS of solar cells assuming a modest 20% efficiency and that's if it were BUILT IN SPACE above all that pesky atmosphere of ours. Now if you actually wanted it on Earth it's going to be far worse than that.
DO IT NOW. WHILE WE HAVE THE ENERGY TO SPARE.
now if you consider the cost of solar cells as they are, they cost about 4$ per watt of solar power and that's not counting all the electrical systems, back up systems, environmental surveys [thousands of square kilometers of nothing but panels after all] and sheer degradation of equipment/replacement of panels comes to more than FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS and that's only the panels the first time you installed them!
the popularity of breaking a particular law should not be the basis of rewriting that law. Laws should be rewritten to better serve society while minimizing any negative impact on the individual. In the case of copyright law, it *does* need a complete reworking but not because of the number of people breaking said laws. It's because they do more to hinder creative works than protecting them.
indeed that is if you even see the ads. between noscript and adblock, there's no such thing as ads unless you actively disable the ad blocking features of both which normally you wouldn't want to do in the first place. noscript isn't just good at stopping ads at the source there's also a security element to it. the thing is that a lot of ad-supported sites use the same domains as sites you couldn't give a ---- about and the only way to support one site and not another using the same ad-source domains is to temporarily allow it every single time you visit that site. never mind most of the ads don't even bother you anyway if you have a lot of tabs open or don't click/buy anything from them anyway so its not very effective as it is... of course they could always start creating ads that actually make noise so that you can't just ignore them without banning them outright and there's the problem right there. annoying ads and security problems force a lot of people to block *all* ads and now there's no way for the sites to make money off ads that way. not to mention Google would be fubared entirely in this respect if ads got annoying enough and there goes their business plan.
Sorry, but no. An outcome in which 6 billion die and 2000 survive is not an acceptable outcome.
that assumes that it's an either or scenario and that's not at all the case. there's nothing preventing humans from exploring/living in space *and* keeping a back up on Earth as well as you said yourself if we can build a backup in space we can on Earth. You also assume that resources used to construct space colonies somehow decreases the resource budget for an Earth "ark" and that's also not true. Space can be a venture populated mainly through economic means [companies... in space] while the Earth repository could be a completely separate project entirely- funded by anyone and everyone. Increasing the spread of humanity increases the odds of survival, especially in this case.
Perhaps you should read up on basic ethics before attempting to tell us what is good for us.
ethics indeed, how foolish of me to assert that humanity should be exploring not hiding in its ignorance.
indeed. RAM isn't the issue for me, I've got more than any of these programs could hope of ever using. The problem is that Firefox is sluggish but not because of a lack of RAM- it could use 10x as much and still wouldn't run out. Konqueror doesn't have ths problem, neither does Opera. a lot of the problem lies in the extensions. disabling them all speeds things up a little but renders Firefox a rather mediocre browser. Firefox 3 is a lot better at dealing with this although not all the extensions are functional to do a real test yet.
they're too busy doing surgery to worry about counting the number of sponges. but really, think of the number of surgeries that are done every year vs how many actually have this sort of thing happen. surgeons could probably go through hundreds of surgeries without anything remaining in a patient that wasn't supposed to be there and there's always that one time... anything that reduces the probability of harm to those going through surgery is a good thing, it's not perfect but it's improving and that's always a good sign,
they can't produce a web browser that doesn't leak memory left and right. Yet Opera, and the basically un-funded Konqueror, can both produce browsers that are quite a bit better than Firefox in most ways.
most of the memory problems are a result of supporting extensions, Firefox 3 is by now significantly better in this regard at least in my own tests. in fact, Firefox 3 is adding a number of new features and fixing a lot of the memory problems in Firefox's previous builds.
With all the money they have now, they should have enough money to rewrite the browser and rendering engine from scratch. That's basically the only way they'll ever deal with the 700 unclosed blocker bugs they had before the release of Firefox 3.0.
you are incorrect on both counts. first, fixing memory holes/leaks doesn't require a rewrite of all the code from scratch. it probably could fix the holes in a very labor intensive way but it will also likely destroy compatibility with pretty much... everything... second, those 700 "bugs" you speak of are a lot of the time features that are desired in future versions, low level problems etc. at the start of the FF4 development there were something like 11,000+ of these in total.
Maxthon is a browser that is basically a shell over Trident. It was developed in China so it's no surprise that it's pretty popular as it is customized to do things that IE's shell can't do.
Since MS wants IE to win the new browser wars, what's their motivation to make Trident available to developers who might create competing browsers such as Maxthon?
As far as I understand MS's motives, the more people that use their software or derivatives of their software that acclimate users to MS's products the better. From MS's view point it is a lot better for users to be using MS-based software even in the form of trident with a new shell than anyone else's software. Case in point, Maxthon partnered with Microsoft on at least one occasion working on the development of the Maxthon browser.
Maybe if they implemented support for top-down left-right layouts instead of trying to make deals with search engines, they might get somewhere.
Mozilla makes a lot of cash from deals with search engines [cough google] which they can later funnel into design change rojects.
Which probably includes the layout problem too.
WE ARE THE BORG. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED.
The BORG strive for perfection, not assisting other species. They have no need to justify their actions to any inferior species. But you are correct that in Startrek the BORG use nanomachines to assimilate other species into the collective or in the case of species 8472 it was used as a weapon to supress the retalitory invasion of species 8472 after the BORG invaded fluidic space. Which actually is sort of an application of nanotechnology- a weapon against disease. Cancer? dead. viruses? not really alve so dead-er? Bacteria+Fungi dead. are your cells not repairing that genetic damage like they should? nanorobes. need to fix bone? make a nano-scaffold to allow bone tissue to regrow bone correctly. right now as it stands, the best we have to deal with drug delivery without nanorobes would be micelles and similar structures composed of surfactants, cell surface receptors and enclosing a drug of some sort. the cell surface receptor triggers endocytosis in cells which take in the micell and allow the drug inside to be delivered to the inside of the target cell. very specific but also very experimental.
too late. we've already revived ancient viruses from our genome and they are found to be extremely bad at infecting eucaryotes like us. it could be for any number of reasons, the RNA-i based defenses, millions of years of evolution, the fact these viruses didn't manage to replicate themselves without excising themselves from our genome- take your pick. The fact is that viruses that exist *now* are the ones you should be worrying about.
I'm not surprised that they decided to go with a format that certainly costs less than a movie or a series, yet will still bring diehard fans in to buy it.
Indeed if it fails they are not out much except the respect of many of their fans. What concerns me is that the only thing worse than no Firefly series is a badly re-animated Firefly series.
We've visited nearly all the planets in the solar system - the exceptions being Neptune and Mercury. We've landed on Mars, Venus, Titan, the moon. If other humans can be my representative in those places, then so can robots.
except that none of our robotic missions really did much other than take a glance at a few rocks. we need to do some real geology not just marvel at the pretty colors of various rocks in the immediate area. human beings at the moment are the best geologists, until we build a robot capable of doing its own thinking, testing and analyzing samples and using logic to deduce an appropriate next step we're stuck with people.
For example, an orbiter has photographed the complete surface of mars in high detail - how long would that take a human? It comes down to the right tool for the job - we don't hit in nails with our hand - we use a hammer. We don't walk 20km to work - we don't even ride horses. We drive cars or take the train. Some feel sentimental for the time when horses had a role to play in transportation. Some feel sentimental for the time that humans had a role to play in space exploration. But in both cases, that time has now past, and sentimentality will not bring it back.
And I'll say again - sentimentality is not a sound basis for space exploration. You feel sentimental for the human centred space missions of yesteryear - so be it. Your attitude is inseparable from being sentimental over the horse and cart - harmless to reflect on, but no longer practical as transport.
If we had the technology to autonomously explore the solar system at or better than humans I would agree with this particular point but we don't. The robots of today are essentially brain-dead. Ignoring that little fact doesn't solve anything. Either we build better robots or we send humans to do the job. It's that simple.
A space colony doesn't constitute a valid backup for the human race. There are 6 billion (or so) humans. A valid backup includes all of them. Or we can accept our mortality - and recognise that risk management dictates that trying to maintain an off planet colony represents more of a risk to our survival than unforeseen extinction events.
A valid back up for humanity only requires that there is a large enough colony that the human species could be reuilt if something did happen on Earth. That's a heck of a lot less than you are implying. Kill two birds with one stone and set up a mining colony that big and you're set. send back energy/helium 3 or something equally valuable in return.
why not? you're made of organic molecules that are assembled into certain structures, your brain has a certain layout and your ears transduce sound a certain way- once you emulate the transduction part and develop a good enough representation of the human brain with an AI in regard to music then you *can* program a robot eat to hear what a human's does, you can even optimize the sound if you have a great enough understanding. heck it doesn't even need to be us doing the designing! by the time that advanced of an AI comes out, AIs/computers will have been doing the real design work for years.
but please excuse me for being a bit skeptical of what the government thinks about medical advice... Does anyone honestly believe that politicians know what is best for our health? Or that they care one whit about what is in our best interest?
Politicians are generally ignorant of medical science, that's why you do your own research from multiple sources- edu domains are a great way to start with this. there are several medical journals out there as well. will the average person know of any of this? not unless they know what to look for and where. few know where and how to look for valid scientific information, they trust in youtube which is just disturbing. most likely out of ignorance or sloth- people have "better things to do" or wouldn't care even if they had nothing better to do with their time.
Really? Because I seem to recall that space probes have so far done a great deal and humans in space have done nothing. For example, an orbiter has photographed the complete surface of mars in high detail - how long would that take a human? It comes down to the right tool for the job
ah so the fact that no humans have ever visited another planet had nothing to do with it... here's what I suggest you try some time: build a robot, an advanced one and rather than leaving your house, use it to explore the world. The catch is that you can only give it a command every 20-30 minutes and it gives a low-bandwidth feed in response in 20-30 minutes. not only that but it's retarded, so retarded in fact, that it isn't even capable of avoiding boulders it finds in its path and since it is less than a foot high, virtually every rock is an obstacle.
You, in contrast, practice an avoidance technique by imagining that your inner emptiness could be filled if only you lived in the Star Trek universe where the realities of gravity, energy, time and distance could be set aside for the sake of story. Dreams are fine - just abandon the moral uppityness and absurd superiority because we don't like Star Trek and lack your inner empty spot.
good one, I couldn't possibly have seen that coming. look, one way or another, humanity should start exploring space. First by robot, then by a small crew of humans [if there is no robot to do the same work, that is through a sophisticated AI] to explore in finer detail. My objection to only exploring space with *very* advanced AI robots has to do with making sure there are at least 1 human settlement *somewhere* other than Earth to act as a back up plan if anything should happen on Earth. Other than that, if and when we do build robots that have an AI that is self-sufficient and has similar or better dexterity than ourselves and we have a small colony outside Earth then we can sit here and twiddle our thumbs if we like, I just think that there at least needs to be a back up plan and the ability to explore space in great detail. ok as an analogy, would you consider it adequate to only stay in the basement or wherever you live and only explore the world through a few crude robots that take 30+ minutes to send and receive data/commands? why is that acceptable in space? i'd chat more but I've got to go to work... outside
as opposed to IE where we are either not aware of these little vulnerabilities or they are just not fixed. Firefox is by no measure "perfect" but it has a history of actually fixing bugs and has a number of extensions that make Firefox much more easily secured. Opera is very similar in this regard, it has a number of features which make it a much better browser to use out of the box.
... in charge of saving our agricultural bacon? The same people who tried to bring agricultural holocaust to the developing world with their you-can't-save-our-seeds-for-next-year's-crop shenanigans?
If we are ever stupid enough not to build up a back up vault and Monsanto is our only hope, then shame on us.
What's so wonderful about manned exploration of space anyway?
Human beings can think for themselves and can do worlds more than any space probe we have ever built. it takes 20+ minutes for each set of commands to reach the Mars rovers to tell them to do anything at all no matter how simple while a human being can explore the surface without being told every move to make. the technology designed to carry humans to Mars and other planets will be very useful on Earth and comes handy when we do decide to start colonizing space. I mean you really didn't intend us to be hanging out on this little speck of dust for the next few million years did you? That would be awful to watch humanity sitting crippled on Earth unwilling to actually explore anywhere in detail or do anything interesting in space.
what does it matter what side you use as long as it does what you require? is Gimp enough for you to teach students how to do something or is an older proprietary solution superior in this regard? If you can get away with using OSS equivalents than by all means go for it- maybe note a few things about the older proprietary software [eg. in gimp you do this but in photoshop you...] there's not really much sense in going with a piece of software because it is more familiar and yet doesn't do what you want now does it? Not only that but students can get their own copy of FOSS sotware to use however they like- legally.
worse than that, they realize there's no oil on Mars nor is there a big chunk of the nation believing that we should be there. Nothing short of a new cold war with other superpowers or some other fantastic reason going to make sure we get there any time soon. Right now as it is they plan to return in say 30 years... The apathy of this country in regard to science is truly astounding and quite disturbing.
The point of this story is that the idea of locking phones to plans in Europe is immediately recognized as something wrong by the courts, and here in the United States it is accepted as a common business practice. Why is Europe always so far ahead of us in this regard?
It was my understanding that Germany overturned the injunction against T-mobile which would have prevented them from locking people into an exclusive contract on the i-phones. In that case, I think the point is that Europe isn't as hard on monopolies as it should be. Granted, Europe is better than the USA at going after monopolies but in this case, they didn't follow through for what ever reason. [1000 euro price tag?] it's actually kind of disheartening to see this sort of thing in any country in Europe sigh...
Haha! Truckers don't look at Road Signs!
Hell, they don't even look before they change lanes
:) that may be so but they *will* obey a nice set of reinforced concrete pillars ready to catch anyone foolish enough to disregard the signs. which is exactly what the local towns are doing over here...
indeed, I would have thought the reason why they didn't release the chip was because the bug caused it to be 10-20% slower in either case and probably affects similar chips of different clock speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
the popularity of breaking a particular law should not be the basis of rewriting that law. Laws should be rewritten to better serve society while minimizing any negative impact on the individual. In the case of copyright law, it *does* need a complete reworking but not because of the number of people breaking said laws. It's because they do more to hinder creative works than protecting them.
indeed that is if you even see the ads. between noscript and adblock, there's no such thing as ads unless you actively disable the ad blocking features of both which normally you wouldn't want to do in the first place. noscript isn't just good at stopping ads at the source there's also a security element to it. the thing is that a lot of ad-supported sites use the same domains as sites you couldn't give a ---- about and the only way to support one site and not another using the same ad-source domains is to temporarily allow it every single time you visit that site. never mind most of the ads don't even bother you anyway if you have a lot of tabs open or don't click/buy anything from them anyway so its not very effective as it is... of course they could always start creating ads that actually make noise so that you can't just ignore them without banning them outright and there's the problem right there. annoying ads and security problems force a lot of people to block *all* ads and now there's no way for the sites to make money off ads that way. not to mention Google would be fubared entirely in this respect if ads got annoying enough and there goes their business plan.
ethics indeed, how foolish of me to assert that humanity should be exploring not hiding in its ignorance.
indeed. RAM isn't the issue for me, I've got more than any of these programs could hope of ever using. The problem is that Firefox is sluggish but not because of a lack of RAM- it could use 10x as much and still wouldn't run out. Konqueror doesn't have ths problem, neither does Opera. a lot of the problem lies in the extensions. disabling them all speeds things up a little but renders Firefox a rather mediocre browser. Firefox 3 is a lot better at dealing with this although not all the extensions are functional to do a real test yet.
they're too busy doing surgery to worry about counting the number of sponges. but really, think of the number of surgeries that are done every year vs how many actually have this sort of thing happen. surgeons could probably go through hundreds of surgeries without anything remaining in a patient that wasn't supposed to be there and there's always that one time... anything that reduces the probability of harm to those going through surgery is a good thing, it's not perfect but it's improving and that's always a good sign,
WE ARE THE BORG. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED.
The BORG strive for perfection, not assisting other species. They have no need to justify their actions to any inferior species. But you are correct that in Startrek the BORG use nanomachines to assimilate other species into the collective or in the case of species 8472 it was used as a weapon to supress the retalitory invasion of species 8472 after the BORG invaded fluidic space. Which actually is sort of an application of nanotechnology- a weapon against disease. Cancer? dead. viruses? not really alve so dead-er? Bacteria+Fungi dead. are your cells not repairing that genetic damage like they should? nanorobes. need to fix bone? make a nano-scaffold to allow bone tissue to regrow bone correctly. right now as it stands, the best we have to deal with drug delivery without nanorobes would be micelles and similar structures composed of surfactants, cell surface receptors and enclosing a drug of some sort. the cell surface receptor triggers endocytosis in cells which take in the micell and allow the drug inside to be delivered to the inside of the target cell. very specific but also very experimental.
too late. we've already revived ancient viruses from our genome and they are found to be extremely bad at infecting eucaryotes like us. it could be for any number of reasons, the RNA-i based defenses, millions of years of evolution, the fact these viruses didn't manage to replicate themselves without excising themselves from our genome- take your pick. The fact is that viruses that exist *now* are the ones you should be worrying about.
If we had the technology to autonomously explore the solar system at or better than humans I would agree with this particular point but we don't. The robots of today are essentially brain-dead. Ignoring that little fact doesn't solve anything. Either we build better robots or we send humans to do the job. It's that simple.
A valid back up for humanity only requires that there is a large enough colony that the human species could be reuilt if something did happen on Earth. That's a heck of a lot less than you are implying. Kill two birds with one stone and set up a mining colony that big and you're set. send back energy/helium 3 or something equally valuable in return.
why not? you're made of organic molecules that are assembled into certain structures, your brain has a certain layout and your ears transduce sound a certain way- once you emulate the transduction part and develop a good enough representation of the human brain with an AI in regard to music then you *can* program a robot eat to hear what a human's does, you can even optimize the sound if you have a great enough understanding. heck it doesn't even need to be us doing the designing! by the time that advanced of an AI comes out, AIs/computers will have been doing the real design work for years.
good one, I couldn't possibly have seen that coming. look, one way or another, humanity should start exploring space. First by robot, then by a small crew of humans [if there is no robot to do the same work, that is through a sophisticated AI] to explore in finer detail. My objection to only exploring space with *very* advanced AI robots has to do with making sure there are at least 1 human settlement *somewhere* other than Earth to act as a back up plan if anything should happen on Earth. Other than that, if and when we do build robots that have an AI that is self-sufficient and has similar or better dexterity than ourselves and we have a small colony outside Earth then we can sit here and twiddle our thumbs if we like, I just think that there at least needs to be a back up plan and the ability to explore space in great detail.
ok as an analogy, would you consider it adequate to only stay in the basement or wherever you live and only explore the world through a few crude robots that take 30+ minutes to send and receive data/commands? why is that acceptable in space? i'd chat more but I've got to go to work... outside
as opposed to IE where we are either not aware of these little vulnerabilities or they are just not fixed. Firefox is by no measure "perfect" but it has a history of actually fixing bugs and has a number of extensions that make Firefox much more easily secured. Opera is very similar in this regard, it has a number of features which make it a much better browser to use out of the box.
what does it matter what side you use as long as it does what you require? is Gimp enough for you to teach students how to do something or is an older proprietary solution superior in this regard? If you can get away with using OSS equivalents than by all means go for it- maybe note a few things about the older proprietary software [eg. in gimp you do this but in photoshop you...] there's not really much sense in going with a piece of software because it is more familiar and yet doesn't do what you want now does it? Not only that but students can get their own copy of FOSS sotware to use however they like- legally.
worse than that, they realize there's no oil on Mars nor is there a big chunk of the nation believing that we should be there. Nothing short of a new cold war with other superpowers or some other fantastic reason going to make sure we get there any time soon. Right now as it is they plan to return in say 30 years... The apathy of this country in regard to science is truly astounding and quite disturbing.
indeed, I would have thought the reason why they didn't release the chip was because the bug caused it to be 10-20% slower in either case and probably affects similar chips of different clock speeds.