The Navy-funded Polywell experiment is looking to hit break-even in some time less than the frustrating "20 years away" event horizon that's been plaguing magnetic confinement and laser based devices such as this one. I'd say it's a good bet that Polywell will achieve break-even first.
Well said!
I'm a Canadian, so I obviously can't vote in your upcoming election, but I just want to say I hope Obama wins. Speaking for myself, he is a very inspiring man who makes me feel better about the world. I think he can really make America a proud and united country again, and an inspiration to the rest of the world. It may be surprising to hear, but I think that the mood of a country like the USA can affect the mood of other countries. I know I'm gushing a little, and maybe Obama may end up disappointing us, but I've lived with a sort of dull feeling about the direction the world has been taking for nearly 1/3rd of my life, and I think that McCain and Palin would definitely continue down that road. Nobody needs or deserves that.
I'd like to close with a quote from Obama's 30 minute ad, which I think sums up why he will make a great world leader:
"I am reminded every single day that I am not a perfect man. I will not be a perfect president. But I can promise you this, I will always tell you what I think and where I stand. I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you when we disagree, and most importantly I will open the doors of Government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again."
Excuse me, but "trickle-down" is proven to work very well. The Reagan years were some of the best this country has ever had.
I already addressed this in my other reply, but while I will agree that Reagan was a decent president, his economic policies were voodoo economics at best. His policies were responsible for quadrupling the national debit and moving the country from the worlds largest creditor to the worlds largest debtor, as well as sparking the S&L crisis, leading to the stock market crash of 1987.
I was merely pointing out the hypocrisy of the allegations of socialism in the current election when clearly the people laying down theis allegations don't know what true socialism is. I don't think that Palin is a socialist, but neither is Obama.
As for Reagan's economic policies working, you must be forgetting about the fact that under Reagan you saw a massive increase in trade deficit expansion, the Savings and Loan crisis, and the stock market crash of 1987. Not to mention in order to cover budget deficits, the US borrowed heavily raising the national debit from $700 billion to $3 trillion, which just so happened to move the US from the largest creditor to the largest debtor in the world. How long do you think the government can keep operating like this until something breaks?
Another point is that a lot of these corporations, even while being taxed at low rates designed to allow them to compete better and generate jobs somehow, are outsourcing their jobs to other countries in order to increase their profits. Deregulation and lower taxes for the wealthy really is working well, isn't it? If you want to talk un-American, maybe you should look at these so-called pillars of the economy first before casting your finger at the people they are hurting.
You say that rich people are rich because they make themselves that way. Yet McCain's policies reflect Reagan's "trickle down" philosophy which patently does not work. Rich people are rich because they don't fritter their money away, you just argued your own point away.
Think of these rebates as a form of economic convection, the money being spent and rising up to the rich. If you give people that are not shrewd with their money some extra money, they will spend it freely, injecting that money into the economy, thus stimulating it. It's fairly easy to figure out how this is going to work.
As well, this implication that Obama is a socialist for backing a progressive tax system but moving some numbers around to try and give the little guy a bit of a break is ridiculous. He is raising taxes back to the level that they were at under Clinton, and they are LOWER than they were under George H.W. Bush and Reagan. If anyone is a socialist (and a hypocrite by extension!) in this race it is Sarah Palin who supports massive taxes on corporations with little or no taxes on citizens in Alaska, yet they give out ~$2,000 rebates to everyone regardless of if they work or not. Maybe you should be decrying Palin as being un-American!
Seriously, instead of repeating talking points back and forth, why not do some actual reading about the issues and form your opinion based on that.
I do know is that this talk of un-Americanism would do Joe McCarthy proud.
So unless you've got a usable source of free energy, the whole idea is inherently uneconomic, no matter how good your catalyst is, and no matter how efficient your process is.
Sorry, that's the Physics talking. I just meant it to be an example of the sort of slightly-more-than-trivial calculations that come up while in University (doing Physics, specifically). It could have easily have been "find the growth rate of an animal population with preadators" or "find the rate of a chemical reaction".
Put it this way, I have yet to find a decent enough math package for PalmOS that I feel replaces my trusty TI-85. Basically, I put it down to the fact that data entry on a PDA is far too cumbersome to do calculations fast enough for my liking. As well, a full blown computer may be undesirable in certain situations, or just too expensive to justify, especially for academic use (ie. on tests or assignments). I mean, who wants to boot up their notebook if they're just trying figure out the closest approach of a comet or the inverse of a small matrix?
Not to be a smart ass (well, sorta), but what about IE? IE is at least as "unstable" as you report Mozilla to be. In my case, I've found that IE crashes far more than Mozilla does, yet I use Mozilla more than IE. I don't think that this is a criteria that many will be using to judge browsers, as both are relatively stable.
Seriously though, how many open crash bugs are left? It seems that the one you point out is somewhat complicated to duplicate, involves Mozilla interacting with Java (something that seems to cause most browsers some consternation), and is not an issue for 99% of the web-browsing public.
Not that this has anything to do with Mozilla Mail in the least. A comparison between Outlook and Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird might be a little more on topic. It seems to me that all three are, like their browser counterparts, fairly stable, and offer a fair to decent email experience.
I find that a big draw for Outlook would be it's well designed UI (seriously, it's about the only thing it's good for!:) and the lock-in you get with MS Exchange, but the huge drawback being the fact that it is so easily comprimised by viruses and worms and whatnot.
Sadly most people seem to be insanely ignorant of this point, and just keep chugging along, happily flooding the internet with Klez, Bugbear, and Sobig.:(
I think that the great feature that could attract people to the Mozilla team's offerings is the built-in Bayesian spam filter! Much like pop-up blocking, and, to a lesser extent, tabbed browsing, this is the kind of feature you can mention to somebody, and they go "Oh, hey... that's pretty cool!" It's definitely something that people need, given how much spam is out there, but if people don't know about it, then they will content to wallow in mediocrity.
The reference to the Hawkings Effect is the key. Steve H. has a well accepted theory that black holes leak. The smaller they are the faster they leak. (It's basically a quantum effect, if the black hole is low enough mass the singularity is close enough to the event horizon to let some matter tunnel out and escape. The event horizon shrinks further until the black hole evaporates.) If all goes right the holes we could create with our limited technology couldn't last long enough to cause any problems. This of course is all just theory, if he's wrong there will be hell to pay.
I'm sorry, this isn't exactly correct. What happens is, due to the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle, empty space isn't exactly empty and we get these quantum fluctuations where so-called virtual particle pairs (particle/anti-particle pairs) pop in and out of existence all the time.
Unfortunately for these particles, if they come into being in the vicinity of a black hole's event horizon, there is a small possiblity that one or both will get sucked in. Hawking radiation occurs when one particle (the one with negative energy*) gets sucked in and the other escapes. In order to conserve energy (energy is ALWAYS conserved over long time scales, this is why we can't have perpetual motion machines:/ ) the black hole ends up losing mass and the particle that escaped, to an outside observer, looks like radiation that the black hole is emitting. This being Hawking Radiation.
I could go on and on about this, but there is an excellent, and a little more detailed, explanation of this in
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
As for these crazy physicists creating quantum scale black holes. This could be an excellent opportunity to understand gravity at the quantum level.
*- Negative energy particles can exist, again due to the uncertainty principle, and are in fact necessary as the total energy of the particle pair has to equal zero.
(try and get nvidia to make a chipset that is linux hostile..)
What about the NV2A (AKA. the X-Box GPU)? Last I heard the X-Box Linux crowd were contemplating hacking the nVidia drivers to support this.
That doesn't exactly sound Linux friendly to me.
Not that I'm saying that Microsoft will get anywhere with these plans to lock out the competition. Nor am I saying that the graphics hardware the system ships with will not have Linux drivers. I'm just saying that it is not beyond Microsoft to do something like this, and we should not let hubris blind us to the idea that they might succeed.
Bah! You had floppies? You young'uns had it easy! Why, in my day we had to trek across the glacial icepacks with TCP/IP packets printed out on punched cards. Let me tell you, in a net game of Quake, which was text based at the time, you'd be a LPB if you got a ping of around 24 hours!
Unfortunately this had to be posted today of all days...
Anyways, the Linux Client really exists (you can even check the packets coming from Bioware, the 'evil bit' is set to 0!:) and the game is a blast. It's also good to see that news of the installer is getting out, as there are many people who don't know about it.
Just wanted to point out to everyone (it's been mentioned before in some replys, but what the heck) that there are *TWO* unofficial Linux data installers available
here and here. All you need are your installation CDs. No Windows partition required.
After installing the data, you're then going to need some form of Wine (the latest Wine worked for me). You then add the following to the end of ~/.wine/system.reg:
Maybe you were just listing the games that you play regularly, and you already know this; but Unreal 2k3 has
Linux support in the box on CD3 and (hopefully) Neverwinter Nights should have a Linux client that you can download here within the next few weeks.
As a Public Service Announcement(tm) to anyone who's into gaming and Linux, or is considering installing Linux, you should peruse Linux Games and The Linux Game Tome every once and a while. Maybe if people are more aware that commercial games are ported to Linux we can have fewer people trying to run Quake III in WINE (Ugh!).
I've been around since late August '98, and I have to say that./ hasn't changed one bit. This especially directed towards those who have some sort of brain-damaged view that./ was at some point a paragon of tech news reporting. But alas, it's the same ichor and vitriol filled shouting match that it's always been; and I wouldn't have it any other way:)
I am quite aware that people on the net are from all over the place, and I make it a point not to flame people's spelling.
In the case of my original post, I just thought that the context of the mistype was rather funny and decided to make light of it. I'm sure the original poster will recover. I mean, he did spell it DNA later on in the post. Unless that was the typo... hmm...
First of all, we share roughly 97% of our DNS with chimpanzees.
First ICANN removes all public accountability from their organization, and now they're taking away the chimpanzees' ability to serve domain names? When will this madness end!?
This is pathetic. A whole article about a linux trade show, and not ONE worthwhile piece of information. I've got some news for you linux types: without industry-standard applications like Microsoft Word or games like Quake 3, your little toy OS is going exactly NOWHERE.
What bridge have you been living under? I wasn't aware that there was *another* video game, exclusive to Windows, called Quake 3? Fancy that!
If you're going to attempt to insult us Linux using folk, you might as well do us all a favour and do it right.
This probably has a lot to do with the fact that many law makers were once lawyers themselves. More laws lead to more criminals (regardless of whether or not the laws are just) which lead to more cases where lawyers can make themselves a career from.
There is probably more to it than that, but not much.:/
Slashdot Mirror
The Navy-funded Polywell experiment is looking to hit break-even in some time less than the frustrating "20 years away" event horizon that's been plaguing magnetic confinement and laser based devices such as this one. I'd say it's a good bet that Polywell will achieve break-even first.
Here, let me Google that for you.
Well said! I'm a Canadian, so I obviously can't vote in your upcoming election, but I just want to say I hope Obama wins. Speaking for myself, he is a very inspiring man who makes me feel better about the world. I think he can really make America a proud and united country again, and an inspiration to the rest of the world. It may be surprising to hear, but I think that the mood of a country like the USA can affect the mood of other countries. I know I'm gushing a little, and maybe Obama may end up disappointing us, but I've lived with a sort of dull feeling about the direction the world has been taking for nearly 1/3rd of my life, and I think that McCain and Palin would definitely continue down that road. Nobody needs or deserves that.
I'd like to close with a quote from Obama's 30 minute ad, which I think sums up why he will make a great world leader:
"I am reminded every single day that I am not a perfect man. I will not be a perfect president. But I can promise you this, I will always tell you what I think and where I stand. I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you when we disagree, and most importantly I will open the doors of Government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again."
Excuse me, but "trickle-down" is proven to work very well. The Reagan years were some of the best this country has ever had.
I already addressed this in my other reply, but while I will agree that Reagan was a decent president, his economic policies were voodoo economics at best. His policies were responsible for quadrupling the national debit and moving the country from the worlds largest creditor to the worlds largest debtor, as well as sparking the S&L crisis, leading to the stock market crash of 1987.
I was merely pointing out the hypocrisy of the allegations of socialism in the current election when clearly the people laying down theis allegations don't know what true socialism is. I don't think that Palin is a socialist, but neither is Obama.
As for Reagan's economic policies working, you must be forgetting about the fact that under Reagan you saw a massive increase in trade deficit expansion, the Savings and Loan crisis, and the stock market crash of 1987. Not to mention in order to cover budget deficits, the US borrowed heavily raising the national debit from $700 billion to $3 trillion, which just so happened to move the US from the largest creditor to the largest debtor in the world. How long do you think the government can keep operating like this until something breaks?
Another point is that a lot of these corporations, even while being taxed at low rates designed to allow them to compete better and generate jobs somehow, are outsourcing their jobs to other countries in order to increase their profits. Deregulation and lower taxes for the wealthy really is working well, isn't it? If you want to talk un-American, maybe you should look at these so-called pillars of the economy first before casting your finger at the people they are hurting.
You say that rich people are rich because they make themselves that way. Yet McCain's policies reflect Reagan's "trickle down" philosophy which patently does not work. Rich people are rich because they don't fritter their money away, you just argued your own point away.
Think of these rebates as a form of economic convection, the money being spent and rising up to the rich. If you give people that are not shrewd with their money some extra money, they will spend it freely, injecting that money into the economy, thus stimulating it. It's fairly easy to figure out how this is going to work.
As well, this implication that Obama is a socialist for backing a progressive tax system but moving some numbers around to try and give the little guy a bit of a break is ridiculous. He is raising taxes back to the level that they were at under Clinton, and they are LOWER than they were under George H.W. Bush and Reagan. If anyone is a socialist (and a hypocrite by extension!) in this race it is Sarah Palin who supports massive taxes on corporations with little or no taxes on citizens in Alaska, yet they give out ~$2,000 rebates to everyone regardless of if they work or not. Maybe you should be decrying Palin as being un-American!
Seriously, instead of repeating talking points back and forth, why not do some actual reading about the issues and form your opinion based on that.
I do know is that this talk of un-Americanism would do Joe McCarthy proud.
So unless you've got a usable source of free energy, the whole idea is inherently uneconomic, no matter how good your catalyst is, and no matter how efficient your process is.
Hmm... yes, it's too bad we don't have something like that.
Sorry, that's the Physics talking. I just meant it to be an example of the sort of slightly-more-than-trivial calculations that come up while in University (doing Physics, specifically). It could have easily have been "find the growth rate of an animal population with preadators" or "find the rate of a chemical reaction".
-Colin
Put it this way, I have yet to find a decent enough math package for PalmOS that I feel replaces my trusty TI-85. Basically, I put it down to the fact that data entry on a PDA is far too cumbersome to do calculations fast enough for my liking. As well, a full blown computer may be undesirable in certain situations, or just too expensive to justify, especially for academic use (ie. on tests or assignments). I mean, who wants to boot up their notebook if they're just trying figure out the closest approach of a comet or the inverse of a small matrix?
-Colin
The Japanese should know better than to give the elderly access to powered exoskeletons.
-Colin
You could try SpamBayes for Outlook (it supports IMAP). I've been testing it out at work and it seems to be good, but can be a little flaky at times.
As for Mozilla Mail, I'm not sure about IMAP support, but it's not beyond reason that it would work.
-Colin
Not to be a smart ass (well, sorta), but what about IE? IE is at least as "unstable" as you report Mozilla to be. In my case, I've found that IE crashes far more than Mozilla does, yet I use Mozilla more than IE. I don't think that this is a criteria that many will be using to judge browsers, as both are relatively stable.
:) and the lock-in you get with MS Exchange, but the huge drawback being the fact that it is so easily comprimised by viruses and worms and whatnot.
:(
Seriously though, how many open crash bugs are left? It seems that the one you point out is somewhat complicated to duplicate, involves Mozilla interacting with Java (something that seems to cause most browsers some consternation), and is not an issue for 99% of the web-browsing public.
Not that this has anything to do with Mozilla Mail in the least. A comparison between Outlook and Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird might be a little more on topic. It seems to me that all three are, like their browser counterparts, fairly stable, and offer a fair to decent email experience.
I find that a big draw for Outlook would be it's well designed UI (seriously, it's about the only thing it's good for!
Sadly most people seem to be insanely ignorant of this point, and just keep chugging along, happily flooding the internet with Klez, Bugbear, and Sobig.
I think that the great feature that could attract people to the Mozilla team's offerings is the built-in Bayesian spam filter! Much like pop-up blocking, and, to a lesser extent, tabbed browsing, this is the kind of feature you can mention to somebody, and they go "Oh, hey... that's pretty cool!" It's definitely something that people need, given how much spam is out there, but if people don't know about it, then they will content to wallow in mediocrity.
-Colin
I'm sorry, this isn't exactly correct. What happens is, due to the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle, empty space isn't exactly empty and we get these quantum fluctuations where so-called virtual particle pairs (particle/anti-particle pairs) pop in and out of existence all the time.
Unfortunately for these particles, if they come into being in the vicinity of a black hole's event horizon, there is a small possiblity that one or both will get sucked in. Hawking radiation occurs when one particle (the one with negative energy*) gets sucked in and the other escapes. In order to conserve energy (energy is ALWAYS conserved over long time scales, this is why we can't have perpetual motion machines
I could go on and on about this, but there is an excellent, and a little more detailed, explanation of this in A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
As for these crazy physicists creating quantum scale black holes. This could be an excellent opportunity to understand gravity at the quantum level.
*- Negative energy particles can exist, again due to the uncertainty principle, and are in fact necessary as the total energy of the particle pair has to equal zero.
-Colin
A petawatt is one petajoule/second. So, are you impressed yet? Or do you want some frickin' sharks thrown in there too?
Picky.
-Colin
(try and get nvidia to make a chipset that is linux hostile..)
What about the NV2A (AKA. the X-Box GPU)? Last I heard the X-Box Linux crowd were contemplating hacking the nVidia drivers to support this.
That doesn't exactly sound Linux friendly to me.
Not that I'm saying that Microsoft will get anywhere with these plans to lock out the competition. Nor am I saying that the graphics hardware the system ships with will not have Linux drivers. I'm just saying that it is not beyond Microsoft to do something like this, and we should not let hubris blind us to the idea that they might succeed.
-Colin
Bah! You had floppies? You young'uns had it easy! Why, in my day we had to trek across the glacial icepacks with TCP/IP packets printed out on punched cards. Let me tell you, in a net game of Quake, which was text based at the time, you'd be a LPB if you got a ping of around 24 hours!
-Colin
Unfortunately this had to be posted today of all days...
:) and the game is a blast. It's also good to see that news of the installer is getting out, as there are many people who don't know about it.
Anyways, the Linux Client really exists (you can even check the packets coming from Bioware, the 'evil bit' is set to 0!
-Colin
Just wanted to point out to everyone (it's been mentioned before in some replys, but what the heck) that there are *TWO* unofficial Linux data installers available here and here. All you need are your installation CDs. No Windows partition required.
After installing the data, you're then going to need some form of Wine (the latest Wine worked for me). You then add the following to the end of ~/.wine/system.reg:
[Software//Bioware//NWN//Neverwinter] 1048122278
"Location"="X://nwn"
With drive X (or what have you) set up to point to wherever the nwn data directory is.
Finally you download and run the standalone patch using Wine.
-Colin
Maybe you were just listing the games that you play regularly, and you already know this; but Unreal 2k3 has Linux support in the box on CD3 and (hopefully) Neverwinter Nights should have a Linux client that you can download here within the next few weeks.
As a Public Service Announcement(tm) to anyone who's into gaming and Linux, or is considering installing Linux, you should peruse Linux Games and The Linux Game Tome every once and a while. Maybe if people are more aware that commercial games are ported to Linux we can have fewer people trying to run Quake III in WINE (Ugh!).
-Colin
I've been around since late August '98, and I have to say that ./ hasn't changed one bit. This especially directed towards those who have some sort of brain-damaged view that ./ was at some point a paragon of tech news reporting. But alas, it's the same ichor and vitriol filled shouting match that it's always been; and I wouldn't have it any other way :)
Happy B'day Slashdot!
http colon slash slash slash dot dot org. har.
Colin
Durn! And I thought *I* had a low UID.
Well, it's still low, but not that low.
*looks nervously about*
My mom says I'm cool!
*runs away*
I am quite aware that people on the net are from all over the place, and I make it a point not to flame people's spelling.
In the case of my original post, I just thought that the context of the mistype was rather funny and decided to make light of it. I'm sure the original poster will recover. I mean, he did spell it DNA later on in the post. Unless that was the typo... hmm...
-Colin
First of all, we share roughly 97% of our DNS with chimpanzees.
:)
First ICANN removes all public accountability from their organization, and now they're taking away the chimpanzees' ability to serve domain names? When will this madness end!?
-Colin
This is pathetic. A whole article about a linux trade show, and not ONE worthwhile piece of information. I've got some news for you linux types: without industry-standard applications like Microsoft Word or games like Quake 3, your little toy OS is going exactly NOWHERE.
What bridge have you been living under? I wasn't aware that there was *another* video game, exclusive to Windows, called Quake 3? Fancy that!
If you're going to attempt to insult us Linux using folk, you might as well do us all a favour and do it right.
-Colin
This probably has a lot to do with the fact that many law makers were once lawyers themselves. More laws lead to more criminals (regardless of whether or not the laws are just) which lead to more cases where lawyers can make themselves a career from.
:/
There is probably more to it than that, but not much.
-Colin