There is a strange obsession among many that the only good RAM is empty RAM. Don;t shunt stuff out of memory until you need to, and it'll still be in memory next time you need it.
Hmmm, not sure I agree with this as a blanket statement. I guess it depends on what you mean by "until you need to".
I just built my wife a new computer. The old one was only five years old, with a quad-core 64-bit 2.5 GHz CPU, but it had horrible performance issues running Firefox. The problem was that my wife is a "power user" for the web, with dozens of web pages open, and Firefox was caching so much stuff that just the Firefox memory usage was well over 4 GB of RAM. Since the total RAM in her computer was 4 GB of RAM, she was experiencing horrible thrashing.
It made me wish that Firefox would start de-allocating RAM. Hold, let's say, 10 pages open, the most recently used (MRU) 10. If she clicks on one of her old browser tabs, load that page from the disk cache and free the RAM from the oldest page in the MRU list.
The kicker is that Linux tries very hard to keep disk data cached in RAM. If the system has sufficient memory pressure, then Linux will let go of the cache, but if Firefox were only keeping the 10 MRU pages, the rest should be in RAM. So my thought experiment is that the old pages should usually re-load very fast. (Even if the Linux kernel has to go to the actual disk to get back the page, that is still faster than having the system thrash gigabytes of RAM in and out of the swap partition. And I think that with Flash and JavaScript, many pages are much smaller on the disk than they are in RAM, multiplying the savings.)
Not only does her new computer have a much faster CPU, it has 16 GB of RAM. No more thrashing. So I guess it's a solved problem for her desktop use.
It seems like for mobile, the memory pressure should be hugely worse. The major difference is that you won't see the kind of thrashing my wife saw because there is no disk-based swap partition.
Streaming is the case where I don't care
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The basic objection to DRM is that when you buy something and it's DRMed, you don't really own it. If the DRM servers shut down, you can't move your purchased product to another device. (And this isn't just tinfoil-hat fantasy, it has happened more than once.)
A streaming media service is more like renting the content. I don't really care about the DRM because I don't own the content.
I buy music as CDs and I rip them. It's sort of silly that I take possession of a physical CD since I want a set of FLAC-encoded files, but that's how I guarantee I get lossless quality and don't have to deal with DRM.
As long as I can still buy the content I want without DRM, I have no objection to streaming services using DRM.
I'm wondering how useful this technology would be for large-scale energy storage. Say you have a wind farm, and you want to grab all the power when the wind is blowing, and store it for later.
400 charge/discharge cycles seems like each battery might last a year. Then the battery is swapped out for a new one. How expensive is that part?
How much will it cost to take a wood battery and recover the sodium and tin? Would it be cheaper to dispose of the sodium and just build a new battery? How do you dispose of sodium anyway... mix it with chlorine to make salt, or just dump it in the ocean, or bury it, or what?
Hmm. I did a Google search on "refine sodium" and it looks as if, much like aluminum, you use an electric process to purify sodium. If so, then refining sodium can be viewed as another way to use excess power. Perhaps it would make sense to have a facility to recycle old sodium ion batteries co-located with a major wind farm or other large-scale variable power source?
And how does this compare with other well-understood technologies for energy storage? For example: using excess power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
IMHO, the problem is not so much that the villains are active and the heroes are passive. Nor is the problem that the writers are anti-science reactionaries (most of the times).
The actual problem is that the writers need to come up with a story, and the story needs to fit the genre.
For example, in the Marvel universe, teleportation is common enough that SHIELD agents can use it. (Or at least they could in one comic I saw. For all I know, an infinite crisis war could have rebooted the entire universe and retconned this. But never mind.) Teleportation is a seriously world-changing invention, and for it to be even remotely possible, related tech needs to exist. Yet the world looks pretty much like our world.
For another example, Tony Stark has invented "repulsors", which seem to directly turn electrical energy to momentum. Jet fighters need to carry lots of fuel, but Iron Man can fly rings around them carrying nothing but a micro fusion reactor. Again, this is a world-changing invention: maybe it needs the smartest man in the world to invent this, but once he has done it, others will reverse-engineer it and then the world changes.
I give you two reasons why world-changing inventions don't change the world in comics: 0) Figuring out the impacts of this technology could tie up a writer full-time for weeks; a science fiction writer might do this, but the comics writer wants to spend time writing comics stories. 1) If the writer did spend the time, he/she would then be telling science fiction stories about the impact of technology on society, not about the comic characters.
A related problem is the desire to never change the formula too much. For example, the iconic villains always come back (e.g. Batman never seems to be done with the Joker). So, like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the storyline often ends up with everything returned to the status quo ante. Inventions not changing the world is part of this. We identify with Spider-Man partly because he lives in recognizably the same world as we do... he's sort of a "blue-collar" hero, no mansion with hidden cave for him. If he lived in a futuristic society with teleporters and personal flying cars, he might be largely the same character but I don't know if I would have thought of him as "blue-collar".
One of the things I really liked about the Watchmen story: at the end, we see that Ozymandias has actually invented some world-changing stuff (really clean electric power, really efficient electric cars, etc.) and the world actually changed. Watchmen was able to do this because it was conceived as a limited series, so they didn't need to be able to tell stories in the changed world after the ending.
TL;DR It's hard work to figure out how society would change, and stories about how society has changed don't fit the desired template for comics.
P.S. As for actual science fiction stories, sure there are some about how technology screws the world up, but there are plenty of other stories that don't take that approach.
Maybe you cna find less biased links with less cherry picking?
Cherry picking? Not me. I have no dog in this fight: I am neither pro-management nor pro-union, I live far away from the affected Hostess factories, and I don't really care about Twinkies. I followed this story with some interest due to the drama, and now these are the articles Google found for me when I looked up the details.
Probably the most "biased" links were the ones about the featherbedding that raised costs so much. But there was nothing I could find from CBS, CNN, etc. on this issue; they seem to have just not reported on that part. Do you think the claims about the separation of "Twinkie" trucks and "Wonder" trucks are untrue? If so, please post some links documenting this. If I have posted anything that is incorrect, I would appreciate a correction.
Temseter manamgemtn sold out the teamsert for a piece of the company. They knew you could not save a compjnay wher emanamgment had allowed that kind of debt load.
If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that the Teamsters Union betrayed their own workers in order to side with management!
That is an extraordinary claim. I haven't seen anything about this in the news reports I have read. Could you please post some references in support of this claim? I'd like to read more about it.
That is a clear misunderstanding of what was going on.
Well, it's possible that I misunderstand what was going on, but if so I request that you explain what really was going on -- with at least a few links to support your case.
Hostess was running out of money. Management set up a deal that would cut costs by paying workers less. This was not what the workers wanted, but according to management, it was essential to save the jobs.
One thing that riled up the workers: management got paid a lot. In an effort to make the workers happier, the top four guys at Hostess had their salaries lowered to $1 per year for 2012.
But the major costs at Hostess had to do with worker salaries, particularly with respect to delivery of Hostess products. Union rules required Hostess snack foods and Wonder bread foods to be delivered on different trucks, which had to be loaded by different people. A "Hostess" worker couldn't load a "Wonder" truck, a "Wonder" driver couldn't drive a "Hostess" truck, and the company couldn't contract out delivery. So, if a small town in a distant location wanted to buy Hostess cakes and Wonder bread, two trucks would have to drive out there, not one. Also, there is some complicated stuff I don't really understand about Hostess paying pensions to a whole bunch of workers, many of whom had never worked for Hostess.
Now, pay attention, because here's the key part: the Teamsters Union had been fighting with Hostess management, and they had seen the accounting numbers, and they believed that (at least on this issue) management was not lying. If Hostess didn't cut labor costs, it was doomed.
I am not an expert on unions, but my impression is that the Teamsters Union is not exactly a shill for management.
It wasn't Teamsters Union workers who went on strike: it was workers of a smaller union called the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM). The Teamsters Union publicly told BCTGM not to strike. Check out this page from the Teamsters Union web site:
The story gets even crazier. Management publicly told BCTGM that if the strike wasn't over by a specific date, they would shut down Hostess. BCTGM continued to strike. Management shut down the company. Then... a judge ordered both sides into an extra round of negotiations, and I thought to myself, "Here is where BCTGM can back down yet save face. They were unwavering in the face of a threat, they can proudly tell their members that they didn't back down until they were forced to, but they can still save all the jobs." But it was not to be. BCTGM continued to strike and Hostess shut down.
Despite your snide comments, I will give you a serious and polite answer.
I am a bit of a "space geek". I grew up reading science fiction (lots) and science fact (some). Back when Usenet was still the main place for discussions, I used to read the sci.space group and the discussions there.
What I posted as my opinion is based on reading a lot of stuff, written by people who know more about space technology than I do. I attempted to summarize the key points, and I apologize if I was unclear or made any mistakes.
I don't know you and I don't know why you seem so angry about this. I apologize if I offended you in some way, but I don't think what I wrote was unreasonable or offensive.
Wow. Let me guess, you are under the age of, say 40?
I watched some of the Saturn V moon launches on live TV when I was a kid. I had a Space Shuttle poster when I was a teen. So, no, your guess is wrong.
This is the entire arguement for the Space Shuttle that derailed proper space development for over 20 years.
The Space Shuttle program promised many things but did not deliver. A vehicle that requires man-centuries of labor between flights does not meet my definition of "reusable". So, the Shuttle could haul a giant heavy load up to low Earth orbit... does that sound anything like what I said I want to see?
FORGET about the whole re-usability thing - it just costs too much.
Because the NASA of the 1970's was not able to do a proper job, it can't be done? I disagree.
Cheap(er), reliable, modular, expendable life vehicles... Like what SpaceX is doing now.
And I am cheering for SpaceX. They are carefully building their technology base... start with something simple, then keep figuring out how to improve it. They may develop a working a "space pickup truck" before NASA can finish the paperwork to start studying the problem.
But realistically getting into earth orbit is easiest, fastest, and cheapest the same way they did it in the 1960's. One rocket at a time, work out the bugs, and get this shiz movin...
Assume, for a moment, that we have the "space pickup truck". Surely that is "easiest, fastest and cheapest"... once you have the craft built, you get to use it over and over. With a single-use rocket, you have to be extra-careful when building it because the only way to really test it is to fly it and use it up. With the "space pickup truck" the work of building and debugging it can be amortized across multiple flights.
I want to see mankind spread out into the solar system, and ideally I'd like to see the USA at the head of it all. So I'm not unsympathetic toward the idea.
But I really want to see the space program get done correctly. So far, every trip to the moon has been via a single-use rocket, completely used up for the one trip. It made sense when we were trying to win a race, but it also meant we hadn't built out the infrastructure.
The right way to do things: build a truly reusable space vehicle, often called a "space pickup truck". Proposed heavy lift vehicles are more like a "space moving van", and they will have their uses, but what we need more than anything else is a spacecraft that can fly and fly and fly some more with minimal maintenance.
We want a craft that can fly to orbit, return, and then go again tomorrow. It might need some maintenance overnight but it should be as little as possible. The space shuttle needed man-centuries of work between flights... we can do far better than that.
Single-stage would be ideal, but two-stage might be easier to get going... just make sure both stages are reusable and don't need too much maintenance. Cargo capacity need not be huge... it would be cheaper to fly things up in multiple small loads on a truly reusable craft, than to build, launch, and use up a single heavy-lift vehicle.
Once we have the "space pickup truck" we need to build a transportation hub in Earth orbit. It would have emergency Earth return vehicles docked, would have lots of supplies (fuel, water, oxygen, food, etc.) and would have staff on board all the time.
Once you have all the above? The moon becomes trivial. Build a "moon shuttle" that could be basically a couple of fuel tanks and engines bolted to a frame, with some sort of shielded crew compartment and a lunar lander docked to it. It need not be pretty and it need not be tough because it will never land anywhere.
Ideally, also we should build a "space cannon" system that can shoot things into space. This would be the cheapest way to send up inert things like oxygen and fuel, or even dried food and tough electronics. And humans living in space will need serious radiation shielding... the cannon could possibly send up lots of shielding mass.
Imagine how expensive it would be to deliver cargo from America to Australia if we had to do it by building a single-use cargo missile. With modern aircraft the dominating factor is fuel costs. If we could get space travel costs down to chiefly the cost of fuel that would be a massive reduction in costs.
It is by now an old trope in science fiction: the idea that people will have electrodes installed to directly stimulate the pleasure center of their brains. It's kind of a frightening idea: on the one hand, it would be a "high" that shouldn't damage you, but on the other hand it is likely to be so intensely pleasurable that it's fiendishly addictive. Larry Niven wrote stories where "wireheads" routinely would starve to death, feeling such intense pleasure that they forgot to do anything else including eat. He furthermore imagined that the "dealers" who sold wirehead gear had an "induction" helmet that could provide a taste of the experience without implanting the electrodes, and his protagonist narrator commented that this really wasn't fair.
This seems like a possible technology, and possible things tend to happen eventually. But I haven't heard of it happening in the real world yet. I'm wondering if it's coming.
With so much in such a small space/size and an unusual factor as well, I have a very bad feeling about your ability to upgrade practically any parts in this thing.
The good news: it's a very modular design, and it looks well-engineered.
The bad news: its parts are totally nonstandard, so you will only get the upgrades that Apple wants you to have, at the prices Apple wants to charge.
Of course, maybe some third party will figure out how to make the parts and sell them to you... If so, Apple will shut them down hard. It has happened before.
I'll give them this: that looks like it will set a new record for crazy powerful computing hardware in a small package, and I'll bet it will actually be quieter than older "wind tunnel" PowerMacs. But if I'm spending my own money, I don't want one.
Hmm. Did you ever try Activision's game Starmaster? I thought Starmaster was a much better Star Raiders game than the official Star Raiders cartridge. (We had both.)
The original Atari 800 Star Raiders was a classic. I need to get an emulator and play that again.
I also played the Atari ST version of Star Raiders and it wasn't as good as the original. Better-looking, though. I did love the fact that there was a button that did something dangerous, and you had to hit a key twice to activate it; on the first keypress a protective cover was shown retracting and a warning tone played, and if you didn't hit the key again right away the protective cover was shown sliding down over the button. I think it activated an emergency hyperjump that sometimes saved you and sometimes killed you, but I don't remember for sure.
Has anyone done a Star Raiders sort of game for Android or Linux? I love the combination of a strategic map and arcade-style dogfighting.
P.S. I hated Activision's 2600 game Robot Tank. It was basically the same game as Starmaster except you had no way to repair damage, so it just got less and less fun until you died.
Has any camera maker yet made a camera that is designed to interoperate with your phone?
I'd love a compact pocket camera that would zap photos over to my phone via Bluetooth or NFC or heck, even WiFi. I much prefer the low-light performance of a larger camera lens, and even a pocket camera has better zoom features.
And of course I want a camera I can charge with micro USB so I don't have one more charger to deal with.
Does anyone make such a camera yet?
P.S. Obligatory: "...the companion camera will never threaten to stab you, and in fact cannot speak."
Four doctors from the University of California, San Francisco wrote an open letter expressing their grave concerns based on their expertise. They listed dangers of these scanners and requested to see the safety studies and get access to the raw data of the safety studies; they also asked for the names of the people who conducted the safety studies. The government's answer boiled down to "our experts have studied this and it's safe". Completely non-responsive to the listed concerns and not sharing any data.
So I never yet have let them scan me; I always have requested the pat-down. When they ask if I would prefer it in private, I tell them no. I'd rather the patdown be out in the open where anyone could watch. I have no particular reason to think any TSA agent would give me extra trouble in private, but I'd prefer as much publicity as possible.
I guess millimeter wave isn't ionizing radiation? That's a giant improvement right there. Maybe the new machines are safe? Safer, anyway.
You should understand that it is not the use of deb/apt what makes Debian dist-upgradeable, it is Debian's focus on being so.
Oh, I understand that all right. But given that they are inheriting from an upstream that does such an excellent job, it's lame that they can't keep their end dist-upgradable.
I never meant to imply that there is something magical about the.deb package format; it's the hard work of the Debian community that really makes Debian so smoothly upgradable. Ubuntu, in turn, works enough to not screw this up. Mint, less so. (But as I said, I cut the Mint guys a lot of slack since they are really helping me out by keeping a GNOME 2.x style of desktop alive.)
I agree that a distro using Debian packages and APT really ought to be dist-upgradeable. It's lame that it's not.
But the Mint guys are the ones working hardest to let me have the kind of desktop I prefer, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.
You can avoid some pain if you set your computer up properly. Put/home and/ on separate partitions. Then, you can upgrade just by running the new installer! The installer always wants to clean-wipe the/ partition, but it doesn't care whether you wipe/home or leave it in place. (I always back up the/etc directory, just by copying it somewhere on the/home partition. I also back up a complete list of all the currently installed packages.)
I'm certain that MST3K's producers made fully sure that the rights to play the movie in syndication were fully paid up
Yes, MST3K made sure they had a legal ability to do what they were doing. Cinematic Titanic continues this tradition. This is one reason why the movies they show tend to be bad: bad movies are cheap to license.
That's the brilliant part about Rifftrax. Since they are not redistributing the movie, they don't need rights. Thus they can do any movie they want, including Star Wars movies, Lord of the Rings, anything. They don't have to pay anything and they don't need to get permission first. (I don't think George Lucas would give permission to Rifftrax to mercilessly rip Episode 1...)
I'm just waiting for home Blu-Ray players to start offering an option to play an externally-downloaded audio track while playing a disc, or for AppleTV sort of products to do the same for general media files. There is no technical reason why this could not be done, and it would mean that when you pause the movie the Rifftrax pauses as well, much more convenient for the user.
A good LP-er doesn't just play the game, their value is in their commentary and jokes as they play the game.
I've never heard of this, but I believe you. My favorite podcast, Spilled Milk, is really funny and I think those guys would be just as funny if they stopped talking about food and started talking about some other topic.
Would you please post a link or two with some of your favorite "episodes" of LP?
For Intel to "win" the "mobile war" as the headline suggests, Intel would have to get the mobile device market to adopt proprietary Intel parts that only Intel can sell. Otherwise, Intel is just another vendor, and the mobile device makers can buy from Intel or not at their whim; Intel just being one of a group of commodity providers is not what Intel considers a "win".
Hydro is mature. All the good locations already have hydro plants; and environmentalists are trying to get existing hydro plants torn out to benefit river wildlife, so just forget about building new hydro plants.
I'm pretty sure pumped hydro storage is in a similar situation... you need a giant reservoir uphill of a source of lots of water you can pump. Where can you build a new one of these, and will the environmentalists approve?
Using a decentralized group of electric cars as an energy-storage system is an interesting idea, but I don't think you can dependably store very much that way in the near future.
I have hopes for molten-salt solar plants, which can keep producing power after the sun goes down because the salt holds so much heat. And it would be cool if we could work out a good way to use hydrogen to store excess energy from wind or solar... but it takes a lot of electricity to strip hydrogen out of water, and hydrogen is tricky to store.
And just as you will face opposition to building more hydro, you will face opposition to building solar in the desert.
Nuclear is more expensive than wind, and is also poor at load following; you normally find nuclear needs hydro as well; because it's so expensive to build it runs flat out and then the hydro does the load following- nuclear is better for baseload.
I agree with your final statement; nuclear is indeed better for base load and not good at load-following. But probably natural gas is a better near-term way to reliably follow loads.
By all means get renewables into the mix, but don't make the same mistake the U.K. made, wasting huge sums of money on a system that doesn't work very well. (Right when demand is most heavy in winter, the wind farms stop producing. Quote: "In winter, when the most intense cold period coincides with a high pressure front, most wind turbines do not work.")
One no-brainer idea: homes and businesses in warm places (Arizona, Florida, Texas, etc.) should have solar panels on the roof. This will produce peak power during peak demand times (when everyone is running the air conditioning, the sun will be shining). This is only a tiny part of the overall energy picture, though, and will happen on its own as the cost of solar panels keeps falling.
after killing off regulations, the large corporations would have an even larger stranglehold on the marketplace, as there would be no anti-trust laws to keep them from colluding, price-fixing, etc. and any competitor who tried to enter the field would be crushed before they could get a foothold.
This sounds scary, but the reality is that a burdensome regulatory system favors large entrenched companies over start-ups. Back when Microsoft was smaller, they didn't like government, but these days they have a ton of lobbyists in D.C. just like every other major company.
Do you remember the days when IBM was "the evil empire" and ruled computing with an iron fist? Tell me, which anti-trust law was used to take them down? Oh wait, that didn't happen. IBM fought the anti-trust courts to a stand-still until the Reagan administration just gave up on it, and then the rapid evolution of desktop computers took away IBM's monopoly position. Whatever you think of Microsoft and IBM now, back then Microsoft did us all a service by helping yank the rug out from under IBM. (Microsoft now lives in fear that mobile computing and/or browser-based apps will do to Windows what Windows did to IBM mainframes.)
Market forces can allow a nimble start-up to take market away from an entrenched monopoly. But if that monopoly is cemented in place by laws, it's basically impossible for the start-ups to even get off the ground. Imagine if IBM had been able to get a law passed that payrolls could only be computed on a computer "certified" by a government agency, and the certification was a morass of red tape and fees. IBM would have just tasked a few of their full-time lawyers to navigating the red tape, would have coughed up a few fees they could easily afford, and would have relaxed knowing that no little uncertified desktop computers could undercut their monopoly.
I agree 100%: if we are going to mutate the USB standard this much, let's take the opportunity to make a symmetric connector. I don't want to buy Apple products, but I do think that they did a great job on the physical design of the Lightning connector, and I wish I could have something like that on all my devices.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a strange obsession among many that the only good RAM is empty RAM. Don;t shunt stuff out of memory until you need to, and it'll still be in memory next time you need it.
Hmmm, not sure I agree with this as a blanket statement. I guess it depends on what you mean by "until you need to".
I just built my wife a new computer. The old one was only five years old, with a quad-core 64-bit 2.5 GHz CPU, but it had horrible performance issues running Firefox. The problem was that my wife is a "power user" for the web, with dozens of web pages open, and Firefox was caching so much stuff that just the Firefox memory usage was well over 4 GB of RAM. Since the total RAM in her computer was 4 GB of RAM, she was experiencing horrible thrashing.
It made me wish that Firefox would start de-allocating RAM. Hold, let's say, 10 pages open, the most recently used (MRU) 10. If she clicks on one of her old browser tabs, load that page from the disk cache and free the RAM from the oldest page in the MRU list.
The kicker is that Linux tries very hard to keep disk data cached in RAM. If the system has sufficient memory pressure, then Linux will let go of the cache, but if Firefox were only keeping the 10 MRU pages, the rest should be in RAM. So my thought experiment is that the old pages should usually re-load very fast. (Even if the Linux kernel has to go to the actual disk to get back the page, that is still faster than having the system thrash gigabytes of RAM in and out of the swap partition. And I think that with Flash and JavaScript, many pages are much smaller on the disk than they are in RAM, multiplying the savings.)
Not only does her new computer have a much faster CPU, it has 16 GB of RAM. No more thrashing. So I guess it's a solved problem for her desktop use.
It seems like for mobile, the memory pressure should be hugely worse. The major difference is that you won't see the kind of thrashing my wife saw because there is no disk-based swap partition.
The basic objection to DRM is that when you buy something and it's DRMed, you don't really own it. If the DRM servers shut down, you can't move your purchased product to another device. (And this isn't just tinfoil-hat fantasy, it has happened more than once.)
A streaming media service is more like renting the content. I don't really care about the DRM because I don't own the content.
I buy music as CDs and I rip them. It's sort of silly that I take possession of a physical CD since I want a set of FLAC-encoded files, but that's how I guarantee I get lossless quality and don't have to deal with DRM.
As long as I can still buy the content I want without DRM, I have no objection to streaming services using DRM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery
I'm wondering how useful this technology would be for large-scale energy storage. Say you have a wind farm, and you want to grab all the power when the wind is blowing, and store it for later.
400 charge/discharge cycles seems like each battery might last a year. Then the battery is swapped out for a new one. How expensive is that part?
How much will it cost to take a wood battery and recover the sodium and tin? Would it be cheaper to dispose of the sodium and just build a new battery? How do you dispose of sodium anyway... mix it with chlorine to make salt, or just dump it in the ocean, or bury it, or what?
Hmm. I did a Google search on "refine sodium" and it looks as if, much like aluminum, you use an electric process to purify sodium. If so, then refining sodium can be viewed as another way to use excess power. Perhaps it would make sense to have a facility to recycle old sodium ion batteries co-located with a major wind farm or other large-scale variable power source?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080514052937AAu27e4
And how does this compare with other well-understood technologies for energy storage? For example: using excess power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
P.S. Another article:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-battery-made-of-wood-long-lasting-efficient-environmentally-friendly
So this is a rather informal one.
It's a coup, but rather a strange one. The people want Morsi gone, the military is moving against him and then handing off power to the people.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/07/03/egypt-morsi-protests-army-deadline/2485355/
Here's a summary of the situation from the point of view of one of the protesters.
Why President Morsi is in Trouble:
A youth leader of the June 30th demonstrations gives us an insider's view of why ordinary Egyptians are in revolt.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/why-president-morsi-is-in-trouble/?singlepage=true
IMHO, the problem is not so much that the villains are active and the heroes are passive. Nor is the problem that the writers are anti-science reactionaries (most of the times).
The actual problem is that the writers need to come up with a story, and the story needs to fit the genre.
For example, in the Marvel universe, teleportation is common enough that SHIELD agents can use it. (Or at least they could in one comic I saw. For all I know, an infinite crisis war could have rebooted the entire universe and retconned this. But never mind.) Teleportation is a seriously world-changing invention, and for it to be even remotely possible, related tech needs to exist. Yet the world looks pretty much like our world.
For another example, Tony Stark has invented "repulsors", which seem to directly turn electrical energy to momentum. Jet fighters need to carry lots of fuel, but Iron Man can fly rings around them carrying nothing but a micro fusion reactor. Again, this is a world-changing invention: maybe it needs the smartest man in the world to invent this, but once he has done it, others will reverse-engineer it and then the world changes.
I give you two reasons why world-changing inventions don't change the world in comics: 0) Figuring out the impacts of this technology could tie up a writer full-time for weeks; a science fiction writer might do this, but the comics writer wants to spend time writing comics stories. 1) If the writer did spend the time, he/she would then be telling science fiction stories about the impact of technology on society, not about the comic characters.
A related problem is the desire to never change the formula too much. For example, the iconic villains always come back (e.g. Batman never seems to be done with the Joker). So, like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the storyline often ends up with everything returned to the status quo ante. Inventions not changing the world is part of this. We identify with Spider-Man partly because he lives in recognizably the same world as we do... he's sort of a "blue-collar" hero, no mansion with hidden cave for him. If he lived in a futuristic society with teleporters and personal flying cars, he might be largely the same character but I don't know if I would have thought of him as "blue-collar".
One of the things I really liked about the Watchmen story: at the end, we see that Ozymandias has actually invented some world-changing stuff (really clean electric power, really efficient electric cars, etc.) and the world actually changed. Watchmen was able to do this because it was conceived as a limited series, so they didn't need to be able to tell stories in the changed world after the ending.
TL;DR It's hard work to figure out how society would change, and stories about how society has changed don't fit the desired template for comics.
P.S. As for actual science fiction stories, sure there are some about how technology screws the world up, but there are plenty of other stories that don't take that approach.
Maybe you cna find less biased links with less cherry picking?
Cherry picking? Not me. I have no dog in this fight: I am neither pro-management nor pro-union, I live far away from the affected Hostess factories, and I don't really care about Twinkies. I followed this story with some interest due to the drama, and now these are the articles Google found for me when I looked up the details.
Probably the most "biased" links were the ones about the featherbedding that raised costs so much. But there was nothing I could find from CBS, CNN, etc. on this issue; they seem to have just not reported on that part. Do you think the claims about the separation of "Twinkie" trucks and "Wonder" trucks are untrue? If so, please post some links documenting this. If I have posted anything that is incorrect, I would appreciate a correction.
Temseter manamgemtn sold out the teamsert for a piece of the company. They knew you could not save a compjnay wher emanamgment had allowed that kind of debt load.
If I am understanding you correctly, you are saying that the Teamsters Union betrayed their own workers in order to side with management!
That is an extraordinary claim. I haven't seen anything about this in the news reports I have read. Could you please post some references in support of this claim? I'd like to read more about it.
That is a clear misunderstanding of what was going on.
Well, it's possible that I misunderstand what was going on, but if so I request that you explain what really was going on -- with at least a few links to support your case.
The union stepped up and did their part, and management screwed them, and refused to make an actual management changes.
Actually, no.
I followed this story. The way it actually worked:
Hostess went into bankruptcy in 2004. It found investors who bailed it out and it kept going.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostess_Brands#Bankruptcy_.282004.29
Hostess went into bankruptcy again. It found additional investors who bailed it out and it kept going.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostess_Brands#Bankruptcy_and_liquidation_.282012.29
Hostess was running out of money. Management set up a deal that would cut costs by paying workers less. This was not what the workers wanted, but according to management, it was essential to save the jobs.
One thing that riled up the workers: management got paid a lot. In an effort to make the workers happier, the top four guys at Hostess had their salaries lowered to $1 per year for 2012.
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/26/hostess-twinkies-bankrupt/
But the major costs at Hostess had to do with worker salaries, particularly with respect to delivery of Hostess products. Union rules required Hostess snack foods and Wonder bread foods to be delivered on different trucks, which had to be loaded by different people. A "Hostess" worker couldn't load a "Wonder" truck, a "Wonder" driver couldn't drive a "Hostess" truck, and the company couldn't contract out delivery. So, if a small town in a distant location wanted to buy Hostess cakes and Wonder bread, two trucks would have to drive out there, not one. Also, there is some complicated stuff I don't really understand about Hostess paying pensions to a whole bunch of workers, many of whom had never worked for Hostess.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-on-the-right/111912-633985-unions-dont-always-benefit-workers.htm?p=full
http://ohioansforworkplacefreedom.com/how-unions-killed-twinkies-and-wonderbread/
Now, pay attention, because here's the key part: the Teamsters Union had been fighting with Hostess management, and they had seen the accounting numbers, and they believed that (at least on this issue) management was not lying. If Hostess didn't cut labor costs, it was doomed.
I am not an expert on unions, but my impression is that the Teamsters Union is not exactly a shill for management.
It wasn't Teamsters Union workers who went on strike: it was workers of a smaller union called the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM). The Teamsters Union publicly told BCTGM not to strike. Check out this page from the Teamsters Union web site:
http://www.teamster.org/content/teamsters-bakery-workers-should-hold-secret-ballot-vote-hostess
The story gets even crazier. Management publicly told BCTGM that if the strike wasn't over by a specific date, they would shut down Hostess. BCTGM continued to strike. Management shut down the company. Then... a judge ordered both sides into an extra round of negotiations, and I thought to myself, "Here is where BCTGM can back down yet save face. They were unwavering in the face of a threat, they can proudly tell their members that they didn't back down until they were forced to, but they can still save all the jobs." But it was not to be. BCTGM continued to strike and Hostess shut down.
Despite your snide comments, I will give you a serious and polite answer.
I am a bit of a "space geek". I grew up reading science fiction (lots) and science fact (some). Back when Usenet was still the main place for discussions, I used to read the sci.space group and the discussions there.
What I posted as my opinion is based on reading a lot of stuff, written by people who know more about space technology than I do. I attempted to summarize the key points, and I apologize if I was unclear or made any mistakes.
I don't know you and I don't know why you seem so angry about this. I apologize if I offended you in some way, but I don't think what I wrote was unreasonable or offensive.
Wow. Let me guess, you are under the age of, say 40?
I watched some of the Saturn V moon launches on live TV when I was a kid. I had a Space Shuttle poster when I was a teen. So, no, your guess is wrong.
This is the entire arguement for the Space Shuttle that derailed proper space development for over 20 years.
The Space Shuttle program promised many things but did not deliver. A vehicle that requires man-centuries of labor between flights does not meet my definition of "reusable". So, the Shuttle could haul a giant heavy load up to low Earth orbit... does that sound anything like what I said I want to see?
FORGET about the whole re-usability thing - it just costs too much.
Because the NASA of the 1970's was not able to do a proper job, it can't be done? I disagree.
Cheap(er), reliable, modular, expendable life vehicles... Like what SpaceX is doing now.
And I am cheering for SpaceX. They are carefully building their technology base... start with something simple, then keep figuring out how to improve it. They may develop a working a "space pickup truck" before NASA can finish the paperwork to start studying the problem.
But realistically getting into earth orbit is easiest, fastest, and cheapest the same way they did it in the 1960's. One rocket at a time, work out the bugs, and get this shiz movin...
Assume, for a moment, that we have the "space pickup truck". Surely that is "easiest, fastest and cheapest"... once you have the craft built, you get to use it over and over. With a single-use rocket, you have to be extra-careful when building it because the only way to really test it is to fly it and use it up. With the "space pickup truck" the work of building and debugging it can be amortized across multiple flights.
I want to see mankind spread out into the solar system, and ideally I'd like to see the USA at the head of it all. So I'm not unsympathetic toward the idea.
But I really want to see the space program get done correctly. So far, every trip to the moon has been via a single-use rocket, completely used up for the one trip. It made sense when we were trying to win a race, but it also meant we hadn't built out the infrastructure.
The right way to do things: build a truly reusable space vehicle, often called a "space pickup truck". Proposed heavy lift vehicles are more like a "space moving van", and they will have their uses, but what we need more than anything else is a spacecraft that can fly and fly and fly some more with minimal maintenance.
We want a craft that can fly to orbit, return, and then go again tomorrow. It might need some maintenance overnight but it should be as little as possible. The space shuttle needed man-centuries of work between flights... we can do far better than that.
Single-stage would be ideal, but two-stage might be easier to get going... just make sure both stages are reusable and don't need too much maintenance. Cargo capacity need not be huge... it would be cheaper to fly things up in multiple small loads on a truly reusable craft, than to build, launch, and use up a single heavy-lift vehicle.
Once we have the "space pickup truck" we need to build a transportation hub in Earth orbit. It would have emergency Earth return vehicles docked, would have lots of supplies (fuel, water, oxygen, food, etc.) and would have staff on board all the time.
Once you have all the above? The moon becomes trivial. Build a "moon shuttle" that could be basically a couple of fuel tanks and engines bolted to a frame, with some sort of shielded crew compartment and a lunar lander docked to it. It need not be pretty and it need not be tough because it will never land anywhere.
Ideally, also we should build a "space cannon" system that can shoot things into space. This would be the cheapest way to send up inert things like oxygen and fuel, or even dried food and tough electronics. And humans living in space will need serious radiation shielding... the cannon could possibly send up lots of shielding mass.
Imagine how expensive it would be to deliver cargo from America to Australia if we had to do it by building a single-use cargo missile. With modern aircraft the dominating factor is fuel costs. If we could get space travel costs down to chiefly the cost of fuel that would be a massive reduction in costs.
It is by now an old trope in science fiction: the idea that people will have electrodes installed to directly stimulate the pleasure center of their brains. It's kind of a frightening idea: on the one hand, it would be a "high" that shouldn't damage you, but on the other hand it is likely to be so intensely pleasurable that it's fiendishly addictive. Larry Niven wrote stories where "wireheads" routinely would starve to death, feeling such intense pleasure that they forgot to do anything else including eat. He furthermore imagined that the "dealers" who sold wirehead gear had an "induction" helmet that could provide a taste of the experience without implanting the electrodes, and his protagonist narrator commented that this really wasn't fair.
This seems like a possible technology, and possible things tend to happen eventually. But I haven't heard of it happening in the real world yet. I'm wondering if it's coming.
With so much in such a small space/size and an unusual factor as well, I have a very bad feeling about your ability to upgrade practically any parts in this thing.
The good news: it's a very modular design, and it looks well-engineered.
The bad news: its parts are totally nonstandard, so you will only get the upgrades that Apple wants you to have, at the prices Apple wants to charge.
Of course, maybe some third party will figure out how to make the parts and sell them to you... If so, Apple will shut them down hard. It has happened before.
I'll give them this: that looks like it will set a new record for crazy powerful computing hardware in a small package, and I'll bet it will actually be quieter than older "wind tunnel" PowerMacs. But if I'm spending my own money, I don't want one.
My favorite 2600 game was Star Raiders.
Hmm. Did you ever try Activision's game Starmaster? I thought Starmaster was a much better Star Raiders game than the official Star Raiders cartridge. (We had both.)
The original Atari 800 Star Raiders was a classic. I need to get an emulator and play that again.
I also played the Atari ST version of Star Raiders and it wasn't as good as the original. Better-looking, though. I did love the fact that there was a button that did something dangerous, and you had to hit a key twice to activate it; on the first keypress a protective cover was shown retracting and a warning tone played, and if you didn't hit the key again right away the protective cover was shown sliding down over the button. I think it activated an emergency hyperjump that sometimes saved you and sometimes killed you, but I don't remember for sure.
Has anyone done a Star Raiders sort of game for Android or Linux? I love the combination of a strategic map and arcade-style dogfighting.
P.S. I hated Activision's 2600 game Robot Tank. It was basically the same game as Starmaster except you had no way to repair damage, so it just got less and less fun until you died.
Has any camera maker yet made a camera that is designed to interoperate with your phone?
I'd love a compact pocket camera that would zap photos over to my phone via Bluetooth or NFC or heck, even WiFi. I much prefer the low-light performance of a larger camera lens, and even a pocket camera has better zoom features.
And of course I want a camera I can charge with micro USB so I don't have one more charger to deal with.
Does anyone make such a camera yet?
P.S. Obligatory: "...the companion camera will never threaten to stab you, and in fact cannot speak."
Hmm. Wikipedia says that the government did answer the open letter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray#Health_effects
Here's the citation:
http://www.fda.gov/Radiation-EmittingProducts/RadiationEmittingProductsandProcedures/SecuritySystems/ucm231857.htm
I still want to minimize my exposure to ionizing radiation.
I don't care that much about the "Virtual Nude" thing. (Although I might care more if I were an attractive young female, I guess.)
My objection to the thing is the X-ray radiation. I am by no means convinced these things are safe.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-glossed-over-cancer-concerns
Four doctors from the University of California, San Francisco wrote an open letter expressing their grave concerns based on their expertise. They listed dangers of these scanners and requested to see the safety studies and get access to the raw data of the safety studies; they also asked for the names of the people who conducted the safety studies. The government's answer boiled down to "our experts have studied this and it's safe". Completely non-responsive to the listed concerns and not sharing any data.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126833083
So I never yet have let them scan me; I always have requested the pat-down. When they ask if I would prefer it in private, I tell them no. I'd rather the patdown be out in the open where anyone could watch. I have no particular reason to think any TSA agent would give me extra trouble in private, but I'd prefer as much publicity as possible.
I guess millimeter wave isn't ionizing radiation? That's a giant improvement right there. Maybe the new machines are safe? Safer, anyway.
You should understand that it is not the use of deb/apt what makes Debian dist-upgradeable, it is Debian's focus on being so.
Oh, I understand that all right. But given that they are inheriting from an upstream that does such an excellent job, it's lame that they can't keep their end dist-upgradable.
I never meant to imply that there is something magical about the .deb package format; it's the hard work of the Debian community that really makes Debian so smoothly upgradable. Ubuntu, in turn, works enough to not screw this up. Mint, less so. (But as I said, I cut the Mint guys a lot of slack since they are really helping me out by keeping a GNOME 2.x style of desktop alive.)
I agree that a distro using Debian packages and APT really ought to be dist-upgradeable. It's lame that it's not.
But the Mint guys are the ones working hardest to let me have the kind of desktop I prefer, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.
You can avoid some pain if you set your computer up properly. Put /home and / on separate partitions. Then, you can upgrade just by running the new installer! The installer always wants to clean-wipe the / partition, but it doesn't care whether you wipe /home or leave it in place. (I always back up the /etc directory, just by copying it somewhere on the /home partition. I also back up a complete list of all the currently installed packages.)
I'm certain that MST3K's producers made fully sure that the rights to play the movie in syndication were fully paid up
Yes, MST3K made sure they had a legal ability to do what they were doing. Cinematic Titanic continues this tradition. This is one reason why the movies they show tend to be bad: bad movies are cheap to license.
That's the brilliant part about Rifftrax. Since they are not redistributing the movie, they don't need rights. Thus they can do any movie they want, including Star Wars movies, Lord of the Rings, anything. They don't have to pay anything and they don't need to get permission first. (I don't think George Lucas would give permission to Rifftrax to mercilessly rip Episode 1...)
I'm just waiting for home Blu-Ray players to start offering an option to play an externally-downloaded audio track while playing a disc, or for AppleTV sort of products to do the same for general media files. There is no technical reason why this could not be done, and it would mean that when you pause the movie the Rifftrax pauses as well, much more convenient for the user.
A good LP-er doesn't just play the game, their value is in their commentary and jokes as they play the game.
I've never heard of this, but I believe you. My favorite podcast, Spilled Milk, is really funny and I think those guys would be just as funny if they stopped talking about food and started talking about some other topic.
Would you please post a link or two with some of your favorite "episodes" of LP?
For Intel to "win" the "mobile war" as the headline suggests, Intel would have to get the mobile device market to adopt proprietary Intel parts that only Intel can sell. Otherwise, Intel is just another vendor, and the mobile device makers can buy from Intel or not at their whim; Intel just being one of a group of commodity providers is not what Intel considers a "win".
I've said it before: Apple will never lock themselves in with Intel.
wind is intermittent; but it doesn't melt down, and storage can be done with hydro, pumped hydro or electric cars
But you need to plan to replace the wind turbines about every 12 years, and this cost must be factored in to the cost of the power.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9770837/Wind-farm-turbines-wear-sooner-than-expected-says-study.html
Hydro is mature. All the good locations already have hydro plants; and environmentalists are trying to get existing hydro plants torn out to benefit river wildlife, so just forget about building new hydro plants.
I'm pretty sure pumped hydro storage is in a similar situation... you need a giant reservoir uphill of a source of lots of water you can pump. Where can you build a new one of these, and will the environmentalists approve?
Using a decentralized group of electric cars as an energy-storage system is an interesting idea, but I don't think you can dependably store very much that way in the near future.
I have hopes for molten-salt solar plants, which can keep producing power after the sun goes down because the salt holds so much heat. And it would be cool if we could work out a good way to use hydrogen to store excess energy from wind or solar... but it takes a lot of electricity to strip hydrogen out of water, and hydrogen is tricky to store.
And just as you will face opposition to building more hydro, you will face opposition to building solar in the desert.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/its_green_against_green_in_mojave_desert_solar_battle/2236/
Nuclear is more expensive than wind, and is also poor at load following; you normally find nuclear needs hydro as well; because it's so expensive to build it runs flat out and then the hydro does the load following- nuclear is better for baseload.
I agree with your final statement; nuclear is indeed better for base load and not good at load-following. But probably natural gas is a better near-term way to reliably follow loads.
By all means get renewables into the mix, but don't make the same mistake the U.K. made, wasting huge sums of money on a system that doesn't work very well. (Right when demand is most heavy in winter, the wind farms stop producing. Quote: "In winter, when the most intense cold period coincides with a high pressure front, most wind turbines do not work.")
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-2008055/Energy-giants-want-billions-windfarms.html
One no-brainer idea: homes and businesses in warm places (Arizona, Florida, Texas, etc.) should have solar panels on the roof. This will produce peak power during peak demand times (when everyone is running the air conditioning, the sun will be shining). This is only a tiny part of the overall energy picture, though, and will happen on its own as the cost of solar panels keeps falling.
after killing off regulations, the large corporations would have an even larger stranglehold on the marketplace, as there would be no anti-trust laws to keep them from colluding, price-fixing, etc. and any competitor who tried to enter the field would be crushed before they could get a foothold.
This sounds scary, but the reality is that a burdensome regulatory system favors large entrenched companies over start-ups. Back when Microsoft was smaller, they didn't like government, but these days they have a ton of lobbyists in D.C. just like every other major company.
Do you remember the days when IBM was "the evil empire" and ruled computing with an iron fist? Tell me, which anti-trust law was used to take them down? Oh wait, that didn't happen. IBM fought the anti-trust courts to a stand-still until the Reagan administration just gave up on it, and then the rapid evolution of desktop computers took away IBM's monopoly position. Whatever you think of Microsoft and IBM now, back then Microsoft did us all a service by helping yank the rug out from under IBM. (Microsoft now lives in fear that mobile computing and/or browser-based apps will do to Windows what Windows did to IBM mainframes.)
Market forces can allow a nimble start-up to take market away from an entrenched monopoly. But if that monopoly is cemented in place by laws, it's basically impossible for the start-ups to even get off the ground. Imagine if IBM had been able to get a law passed that payrolls could only be computed on a computer "certified" by a government agency, and the certification was a morass of red tape and fees. IBM would have just tasked a few of their full-time lawyers to navigating the red tape, would have coughed up a few fees they could easily afford, and would have relaxed knowing that no little uncertified desktop computers could undercut their monopoly.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/10/19/lift-the-regulatory-burden-on-small-businesses
And I'm not convinced that anti-trust laws are well-written or completely beneficial to the economy.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/case-against-antitrust
do we really want to look like an idiot walking around with a giant brick to our head?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRLRjKCGHek
P.S. My favorite bit is at the very end of the video.
I agree 100%: if we are going to mutate the USB standard this much, let's take the opportunity to make a symmetric connector. I don't want to buy Apple products, but I do think that they did a great job on the physical design of the Lightning connector, and I wish I could have something like that on all my devices.