Cooking is probably a dying art. But it's not dead yet, and is not likely to be for some time yet, unlike the implication given in the article.
I kind of have to disagree on that.:-)
What people have not figured upon is the rapid development of new kitchen appliances and improvements to pot and pan technology that have dramatically reduced the drudgery of cooking food.
As an owner of a set of Wearever non-stick pots and pans, I love them because cleanup is now 1/4 the time it used to take with regular metal pots and pans (no stuck-on foods that require way too much elbow grease to remove them).
Kitchen appliances have made some amazing strides in the last 20 years. The development of food processors and high-speed hand-held wand-like mixers have made it possible to make foods that would have been difficult if not impossible to do from scratch in the past.
I am quite stunned that Douglas Adams is dead, especially when he was only 49 years old.
Many of us remember the famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of novels he did, some of the best-read science fiction novels of the last 20 years.
You obviously know a grand total of zero about nuclear powerplant design.
All Western nuclear powerplants use a very heavy containment dome design that is so strong that a Chernobyl-level explosion of the reactor rods would wouldn't even make a scratch on the structure of the dome. Even today's precision-guided munitions would barely crack the dome itself, as the Israelis found out when they attacked the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.
When Chernobyl exploded, if the reactor was inside a Western-style containment dome there would have been just about zero spewing of radioactive uranium dust. But it wasn't, and the explosion literally blew off the roof of the building where the reactor was located and started a major fire that spewed radioactive uranium dust for many kilometers around.
What really happened at Chernobyl was that in their stupidity they let the entire uranium/graphite pile overheat, and the result was a massive conventional explosion that blew off the roof of the building where the reactor was located. It also caused a massive fire that spewed out smoke loaded with radioactive uranium dust particles.
Actually, one thing that hurt nuclear power in the USA is the fact that every nuclear powerplant is a custom-built unit. That tends to send costs soaring, to say the least.
The Department of Energy should have followed the French model of nuclear powerplant construction, which meant standardizing on a single plant design; this drastically reduces costs and makes it easier in terms of operator training and determining safety issues.
As for the Chernobyl disaster, that was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go. No containment dome, and no decent safety measures to minimize the possibility of an explosion and meltdown. Note that when Three Mile Island had its core meltdown just about all of its radioactivity was still safely confined inside the containment dome.
As for storing radioactive waste, there are places in Texas that are excellent for this purpose. Thanks to the petroleum industry, we have knowledge of extensive underground salt domes in geologically stable areas that are candidates for nuclear waste repositories. And salt is an excellent radioactivity absorber, too.
I can't believe that everybody here on/. thinks that the best way to stop a very small asteroid on a collision course with Earth is to blow it up.
I'm surprised NOBODY here has thought of this solution: use a braking rocket or solar sail to slow the asteroid and nudge it into the L1 zone of equal gravitational pull between the Earth and the Moon.
Crazy? Not when you look at what composes an asteroid--a list of strategically-important minerals out of the wazoo, often of higher quality than even minerals on the Moon. It could become the base material to build space colonies between the Earth and the Moon.
What's interesting is that a lot of old infrastructure has been used to lay fiber-optic cable in cities.
Because fiber-optic cables tend to be much more tolerant of bad external conditions than copper cables, it's small wonder why old sewage systems and the old pneumatic tubes mentioned in the article are being used to run fiber-optic lines. After all, many railroads made a ton of money using their right-of-way land to run copper and later fiber-optic lines (Southern Pacific was famous for doing this--that's how the modern Sprint communications company was born).
However, I'm sure that the designers of UCAV will use techniques designed to mitigate any attempt to jam the control signals for the UCAV.
The only really effective way to stop UCAV's other than a lucky shot by ground-based rapid-fire cannon is to detonate a low-yield (around 1 to 4 kT) nuclear warhead at very high altitude (e.g. around 25 km altitude). The EMP from the nuclear blast will effectively jam all communications between the ground controller and the UCAV, though the EMP effects would also jam the communications for the defenders, too.
I think the reason why Rambus' suit was thrown out is simple: US v. United Shoe Machinery Company (1941), the second-most famous anti-trust case after US v. Standard Oil Trust (1911).
In US v. United Shoe Machinery Company, it was ruled that a company could not use the patent laws of the USA as a means to keep out competitors; you have to remember at the time United Shoe had a fairly large portfolio of critical patents on various aspects of shoe-making machines, and United Shoe used them to effectively shut down all competition.
Rambus is using their patents on SDRAM to try to extort money from other companies, despite the fact that Rambus doesn't really make any product per se. This is a major no-no based on the case I cited.
Based on that BBC online article, that's still not a good idea.
A much better solution is diesel fuel derived from plant sources (biodiesel). Already, BMW is selling the BMW 330d turbodiesel coupe/sedan, which has a top speed of 143 mph and does 0-60 in six seconds--with vastly superior driver comfort. And the 330d could probably be made to run on biodiesel with only some minor engine modifications with no loss in performance.
In fact, in some cities (San Francisco), you can get across town far faster by bike than any other way!
There is, however, this little issue of all those steep hills in San Francisco. I'm not sure if those messenger bicyclists are willing to go up and down Nob and Russian Hills.
What I find interesting is that while everyone gripes about Microsoft software, they all love Microsoft-branded mouse pointers and keyboards. The latest MS Intellimouse and Intellimouse Explorer standard mice and their latest trackball pointers are flat-out excellent units, in my opinion.
I use a MS Natural Elite keyboard, and after getting used to it going back to a regular keyboard was totally no fun: it felt unnatural and cramped in comparison.
I use a Microsoft Natural Elite keyboard, and believe me, after you're used to that keyboard going back to a regular keyboard is totally not fun at all.
I think the reason why is because on the Natural keyboard you type without angling the wrist, and when you go back to a regular keyboard the need to angle the wrist makes a regular keyboard feel very uncomfortable and cramped in comparsion.
By the way, another thing that really helps to cut down wrist problems is to get yourself a chair that has adjustable height. It makes a huge difference in terms of proper wrist position, too.
However, given the fuel consumption of those little turbine engines, unless you can build a plane to be mostly a flying fuel tank you'll be lucky if you can fly it more than a few miles.
That's why modern jet airliners have fuel tanks that carry fuel in the thousands of gallons.
I'm sure the security guards at Area 51 are equipped with full-automatic weapons, and with nightscopes and modern M16A1's that model airplane you're suggesting will be blown to pieces from all the small-arms gunfire.
Given that the accuracy of satellite GPS is under 30 feet nowadays, the frightening thing is that anyone that knows how to make nerve gas (if you can make insecticide you can make nerve gas) could build a GPS guided model plane filled with 1 kg of Sarin, which when dropped would kill everyone within a 250-300 feet radius of the release point in open air. You could literally fly one and drop it off in front of the New York Stock Exchange. (shudder)
One of the things that Alvin Toffler talked about in The Third Wave was that if a media distribution medium shows up that can drastically reduce the cost of distributing information on a vast scale, it would literally change the world. That medium now exists--the public Internet. I mean look at the absolutely amazing amount of things you get get off the Internet--the so-called 500-channel cable TV promised back in the 1980's has nothing compared to what you can get off the Internet.
Political groups of every persuasion now have a voice where none existed before; you can read newspapers, magazines, etc. from literally world-wide, where this was impossible before.
We are right now in the middle of the greatest information revolution since the invention of the low-cost hot-metal type printing press by Johann Gutenberg in the 1450's.
However, MP3.com is not as big a threat to RIAA as people make it out to be. That's why they're still around, despite the legal issues of the MyMP3.com music storage service.
MP3.com aims its audience specfically at lesser-known bands that haven't been tied to the major record labels. It's a great way to introduce people to new and promising musicians.
After reading the article, I think Mr. Rifkin forgot one thing: he should have read the book The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.
A major salient point from Toffler is the so-called demassification of the media, meaning that many more people can disseminate information than in the past. Despite the arrival of the media superconglomerates like AOL Time Warner (an entity I have lots of qualms about because of their reach in both media content creation and distribution), the commercialization of the Internet has allowed entities of all political, racial, gender, etc. persuasions to have a voice that can be read by potentially billions of people.
Why do you think ever since the Internet has become commercial that TV viewership and newspaper readership has gone down? Or the fact that only now has the RIAA realized the threat of things like Napster bypassing all the middlemen in terms of music distribution?
The thing that hurt the Pentium Pro was the fact the CPU core was over-optimized for 32-bit code, so the Pentium Pro 200 MHz ran Windows 95/98 like a Pentium 166 MHz CPU.
I believe Intel tweaked the P6 core of the Pentium Pro when it was adapted for the Pentium II core, so it ran 16-bit code quite a bit faster. It's the Pentium II core that became the basis for the Celeron and Pentium III CPU's.
Re:Is Hubble So useful? Adaptive optics is cheaper
on
Happy Birthday Hubble
·
· Score: 2
While using adaptive optics helps reduce the effects of the atmosphere, it's still not going to completely negate the effects of water vapor, dust and pollution particles.
Remember, the Next Generation Space Telescope will operate at the same altitude as Hubble--350 to 400 miles off the ground, which eliminates the atmospheric effects from the particles I mentioned above. For example, could you have been able to get those astonishing pictures from the Eagle Nebula from ground-based telescopes? I don't think so.:-) And only Hubble could see the numerous galaxies at a supposedly dark part of the sky that ground-based observers noted.
If I could moderate I'd mod you down to troll status.:-)
The thing about Hubble--epecially since COSTAR was installed--is that it offers extremely sharp pictures you'll never see on a ground-based telescope, even with the new telescopes going up at Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
The reason is simple: no atmospheric interference. Even at the high altitudes of the ground observatories I mentioned, you still have a lot of atmosphere to contend with.
Why do you think both NASA and ESA are on a fairly fast track to build more powerful space telescopes that will be launched starting late this decade?
Actually, what Sprint and Qualcomm are aiming for in its first release of 3G phones is a much more conservative 384 kilobits per second download speed on mobile operation. That is essentially triple that of ISDN and the same as the most common ADSL connections.
In fact, Sprint and Qualcomm recently demonstrated an amazing 2.4 Mbps data transfer speed on a CDMA2000-compliant digital cellular link. This is faster than a T-1 land line.
Because Sprint's network is all-digital to start with, I won't be surprised at all that the first really useful 3G cellular system will be the Sprint system.
Slashdot Mirror
Cooking is probably a dying art. But it's not dead yet, and is not likely to be for some time yet, unlike the implication given in the article.
:-)
I kind of have to disagree on that.
What people have not figured upon is the rapid development of new kitchen appliances and improvements to pot and pan technology that have dramatically reduced the drudgery of cooking food.
As an owner of a set of Wearever non-stick pots and pans, I love them because cleanup is now 1/4 the time it used to take with regular metal pots and pans (no stuck-on foods that require way too much elbow grease to remove them).
Kitchen appliances have made some amazing strides in the last 20 years. The development of food processors and high-speed hand-held wand-like mixers have made it possible to make foods that would have been difficult if not impossible to do from scratch in the past.
I am quite stunned that Douglas Adams is dead, especially when he was only 49 years old.
:'-(
Many of us remember the famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of novels he did, some of the best-read science fiction novels of the last 20 years.
Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.
You obviously know a grand total of zero about nuclear powerplant design.
All Western nuclear powerplants use a very heavy containment dome design that is so strong that a Chernobyl-level explosion of the reactor rods would wouldn't even make a scratch on the structure of the dome. Even today's precision-guided munitions would barely crack the dome itself, as the Israelis found out when they attacked the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.
When Chernobyl exploded, if the reactor was inside a Western-style containment dome there would have been just about zero spewing of radioactive uranium dust. But it wasn't, and the explosion literally blew off the roof of the building where the reactor was located and started a major fire that spewed radioactive uranium dust for many kilometers around.
Thank you for the correction! :-)
What really happened at Chernobyl was that in their stupidity they let the entire uranium/graphite pile overheat, and the result was a massive conventional explosion that blew off the roof of the building where the reactor was located. It also caused a massive fire that spewed out smoke loaded with radioactive uranium dust particles.
Actually, one thing that hurt nuclear power in the USA is the fact that every nuclear powerplant is a custom-built unit. That tends to send costs soaring, to say the least.
The Department of Energy should have followed the French model of nuclear powerplant construction, which meant standardizing on a single plant design; this drastically reduces costs and makes it easier in terms of operator training and determining safety issues.
As for the Chernobyl disaster, that was a disaster waiting to happen from the get-go. No containment dome, and no decent safety measures to minimize the possibility of an explosion and meltdown. Note that when Three Mile Island had its core meltdown just about all of its radioactivity was still safely confined inside the containment dome.
As for storing radioactive waste, there are places in Texas that are excellent for this purpose. Thanks to the petroleum industry, we have knowledge of extensive underground salt domes in geologically stable areas that are candidates for nuclear waste repositories. And salt is an excellent radioactivity absorber, too.
I can't believe that everybody here on /. thinks that the best way to stop a very small asteroid on a collision course with Earth is to blow it up.
I'm surprised NOBODY here has thought of this solution: use a braking rocket or solar sail to slow the asteroid and nudge it into the L1 zone of equal gravitational pull between the Earth and the Moon.
Crazy? Not when you look at what composes an asteroid--a list of strategically-important minerals out of the wazoo, often of higher quality than even minerals on the Moon. It could become the base material to build space colonies between the Earth and the Moon.
What's interesting is that a lot of old infrastructure has been used to lay fiber-optic cable in cities.
Because fiber-optic cables tend to be much more tolerant of bad external conditions than copper cables, it's small wonder why old sewage systems and the old pneumatic tubes mentioned in the article are being used to run fiber-optic lines. After all, many railroads made a ton of money using their right-of-way land to run copper and later fiber-optic lines (Southern Pacific was famous for doing this--that's how the modern Sprint communications company was born).
However, I'm sure that the designers of UCAV will use techniques designed to mitigate any attempt to jam the control signals for the UCAV.
The only really effective way to stop UCAV's other than a lucky shot by ground-based rapid-fire cannon is to detonate a low-yield (around 1 to 4 kT) nuclear warhead at very high altitude (e.g. around 25 km altitude). The EMP from the nuclear blast will effectively jam all communications between the ground controller and the UCAV, though the EMP effects would also jam the communications for the defenders, too.
I think the reason why Rambus' suit was thrown out is simple: US v. United Shoe Machinery Company (1941), the second-most famous anti-trust case after US v. Standard Oil Trust (1911).
In US v. United Shoe Machinery Company, it was ruled that a company could not use the patent laws of the USA as a means to keep out competitors; you have to remember at the time United Shoe had a fairly large portfolio of critical patents on various aspects of shoe-making machines, and United Shoe used them to effectively shut down all competition.
Rambus is using their patents on SDRAM to try to extort money from other companies, despite the fact that Rambus doesn't really make any product per se. This is a major no-no based on the case I cited.
Based on that BBC online article, that's still not a good idea.
A much better solution is diesel fuel derived from plant sources (biodiesel). Already, BMW is selling the BMW 330d turbodiesel coupe/sedan, which has a top speed of 143 mph and does 0-60 in six seconds--with vastly superior driver comfort. And the 330d could probably be made to run on biodiesel with only some minor engine modifications with no loss in performance.
In fact, in some cities (San Francisco), you can get across town far faster by bike than any other way!
There is, however, this little issue of all those steep hills in San Francisco. I'm not sure if those messenger bicyclists are willing to go up and down Nob and Russian Hills.
From what I know, most large computer manufacturers either use Mitsumi or KeyTronic keyboards.
But most of them offer the option to upgrade to a Microsoft keyboard at a pretty low price.
What I find interesting is that while everyone gripes about Microsoft software, they all love Microsoft-branded mouse pointers and keyboards. The latest MS Intellimouse and Intellimouse Explorer standard mice and their latest trackball pointers are flat-out excellent units, in my opinion.
I use a MS Natural Elite keyboard, and after getting used to it going back to a regular keyboard was totally no fun: it felt unnatural and cramped in comparison.
AMEN! :-)
I use a Microsoft Natural Elite keyboard, and believe me, after you're used to that keyboard going back to a regular keyboard is totally not fun at all.
I think the reason why is because on the Natural keyboard you type without angling the wrist, and when you go back to a regular keyboard the need to angle the wrist makes a regular keyboard feel very uncomfortable and cramped in comparsion.
By the way, another thing that really helps to cut down wrist problems is to get yourself a chair that has adjustable height. It makes a huge difference in terms of proper wrist position, too.
However, given the fuel consumption of those little turbine engines, unless you can build a plane to be mostly a flying fuel tank you'll be lucky if you can fly it more than a few miles.
That's why modern jet airliners have fuel tanks that carry fuel in the thousands of gallons.
Fat chance, buddy.
I'm sure the security guards at Area 51 are equipped with full-automatic weapons, and with nightscopes and modern M16A1's that model airplane you're suggesting will be blown to pieces from all the small-arms gunfire.
Given that the accuracy of satellite GPS is under 30 feet nowadays, the frightening thing is that anyone that knows how to make nerve gas (if you can make insecticide you can make nerve gas) could build a GPS guided model plane filled with 1 kg of Sarin, which when dropped would kill everyone within a 250-300 feet radius of the release point in open air. You could literally fly one and drop it off in front of the New York Stock Exchange. (shudder)
One of the things that Alvin Toffler talked about in The Third Wave was that if a media distribution medium shows up that can drastically reduce the cost of distributing information on a vast scale, it would literally change the world. That medium now exists--the public Internet. I mean look at the absolutely amazing amount of things you get get off the Internet--the so-called 500-channel cable TV promised back in the 1980's has nothing compared to what you can get off the Internet.
Political groups of every persuasion now have a voice where none existed before; you can read newspapers, magazines, etc. from literally world-wide, where this was impossible before.
We are right now in the middle of the greatest information revolution since the invention of the low-cost hot-metal type printing press by Johann Gutenberg in the 1450's.
However, MP3.com is not as big a threat to RIAA as people make it out to be. That's why they're still around, despite the legal issues of the MyMP3.com music storage service.
MP3.com aims its audience specfically at lesser-known bands that haven't been tied to the major record labels. It's a great way to introduce people to new and promising musicians.
After reading the article, I think Mr. Rifkin forgot one thing: he should have read the book The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.
A major salient point from Toffler is the so-called demassification of the media, meaning that many more people can disseminate information than in the past. Despite the arrival of the media superconglomerates like AOL Time Warner (an entity I have lots of qualms about because of their reach in both media content creation and distribution), the commercialization of the Internet has allowed entities of all political, racial, gender, etc. persuasions to have a voice that can be read by potentially billions of people.
Why do you think ever since the Internet has become commercial that TV viewership and newspaper readership has gone down? Or the fact that only now has the RIAA realized the threat of things like Napster bypassing all the middlemen in terms of music distribution?
The thing that hurt the Pentium Pro was the fact the CPU core was over-optimized for 32-bit code, so the Pentium Pro 200 MHz ran Windows 95/98 like a Pentium 166 MHz CPU.
I believe Intel tweaked the P6 core of the Pentium Pro when it was adapted for the Pentium II core, so it ran 16-bit code quite a bit faster. It's the Pentium II core that became the basis for the Celeron and Pentium III CPU's.
While using adaptive optics helps reduce the effects of the atmosphere, it's still not going to completely negate the effects of water vapor, dust and pollution particles.
:-) And only Hubble could see the numerous galaxies at a supposedly dark part of the sky that ground-based observers noted.
Remember, the Next Generation Space Telescope will operate at the same altitude as Hubble--350 to 400 miles off the ground, which eliminates the atmospheric effects from the particles I mentioned above. For example, could you have been able to get those astonishing pictures from the Eagle Nebula from ground-based telescopes? I don't think so.
If I could moderate I'd mod you down to troll status. :-)
The thing about Hubble--epecially since COSTAR was installed--is that it offers extremely sharp pictures you'll never see on a ground-based telescope, even with the new telescopes going up at Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
The reason is simple: no atmospheric interference. Even at the high altitudes of the ground observatories I mentioned, you still have a lot of atmosphere to contend with.
Why do you think both NASA and ESA are on a fairly fast track to build more powerful space telescopes that will be launched starting late this decade?
Actually, what Sprint and Qualcomm are aiming for in its first release of 3G phones is a much more conservative 384 kilobits per second download speed on mobile operation. That is essentially triple that of ISDN and the same as the most common ADSL connections.
In fact, Sprint and Qualcomm recently demonstrated an amazing 2.4 Mbps data transfer speed on a CDMA2000-compliant digital cellular link. This is faster than a T-1 land line.
Because Sprint's network is all-digital to start with, I won't be surprised at all that the first really useful 3G cellular system will be the Sprint system.