They used a lot of resources creating a world, and forgot to make it interesting or have a story. For all the CG effort on that movie, they still didn't come up with anything that isn't roundly trounced by many real world locations in terms of spectacle. Technically impressive yes - but ultimately pretty dull.
Call me crazy too, but 9/11 was either a true false flag op, or the US government created an opportunity out of knowing there was an imminent attack on US soil.
Here I will blow your mind: there are no grand conspiracies. Bad people are bad people because they always find a way to make a profit by taking advantage of bad situations, and the world is kind of messed up like that.
Well played. Your assertion of something which happened in a presidency 40+ years ago clearly refutes all points. Both sides are the same! Vote Republican!
Um, no. In a true emergency, everyone for themselves unless life or limb is in danger. Absent of that criteria the neighbors will not be allowed inside for any reason, which means they won't use my phone and I won't be using their phone.
Be prepared for an emergency or suffer, this includes those who foolishly only keep a cellphone and have no landline.
I've always been slightly curious as to how difficult it would actually be to equip all cellphones with the chips and antenna necessary to communicate with something like the Iridium satellite network.
Barring something truly apocalyptic, it's not like the satellites are going to go down.
As far as I know it's trending 7 now, but it depends on which panels you buy. I think for my specific ones it's 10, but that's because we bought high-efficiency ones since roof-real estate was at a premium (and the govt subsidy which drops it to 7 favored going for more capacity).
But if you've space to use, then you can use cheaper ones and the payoff is much quicker.
Yes, but what if you could induce lightning in a certain location, and then convert it into energy ? All we need is something that can absorb the energy , and give it back at a slower rate later.
Much more interesting than wireless electricity.
The trick is to collect it before it turns into lightning. Stop it doing all that work on the atmosphere.
Superconducting helium balloons connected to clouds which discharge the current build up as it occurs gives you more manageable levels of current. The average potential difference between stratosphere and the ground is something like 300,000 V at all times, so even in clear air conditions you'd get some power.
At this point though, the volcano powerplant makes more sense.
An under-expressed notion by the people talking about MASERs. A 100W focussed beam of microwaves might charge your laptop, but it's also going to happily start microwaving any incidental internal organs in it's path.
Lightning is incredibly inefficient. Yes it pushes a ton of current...but 90% or so of the power is lost turning the air into plasma. The fact it's still dangerous at ground level is just a reflection of the truly staggering amount of power their is to start with.
It doesn't but I can see how it would be easier to be efficient while doing so - you start trying to inductively couple things and you end up with magnetic field lines and EM flying all over the place. Not that it can't be done, but it's not trivial.
Whereas a pair of magnets under mutual attraction are basically locked together, and so all you're really dealing with is the mechanical efficiencies, and the second magnet can be the permanent stator of your generator.
Antiquated 3rd-party software is a frequent culprit. Microscopes, sensors, CAD machinery, etc that costs $100K+ isn't getting replaced just because its software or web interface hasn't been updated in the last 5-8 years. The lack of software updates on equipment this expensive may be appalling, but it doesn't change the facts.
Admittedly this is why all that stuff needs to stop being made to run on Windows.
Even if it only targeted a specific variant of Linux, it would be possible to preserve the ABIs it wanted while still patching the big problems.
but I'm not sure anyone writes applications that directly speak X anymore.
There are many graphics libraries out there and many applications are based on them. The PP is right.
Software is soft, it can be anything we want it to be. It does not make sense to create deliberate incompatibilities when a gradual transition is possible.
What I meant was, if you were looking at a client application, chances are it's not written to speak X directly, but rather uses toolkits to do so - big central things which have lots of interest and users.
My criticism of the OP was that if you change X a lot, you're breaking it, and things will have to be rewritten anyway.
I go backwards and forwards of whether I like the idea behind Wayland as it currently exists, but I think they're right in the sense that anything significant done to fix X would involve breaking compatibility. That said, I do inevitably come back to thinking breaking network transparency is a silly idea.
Also because *nix in a lot of cases feels behind Windows in this. The Windows RDP implementation does a lot of things very right - it's quick enough to use over the web, it lets you take over the local console session (and lock out the local console but also restore it - seriously, try getting this to work on any Linux distro) and it can also support multiple remote users.
Linux distros can "kind of" do this, but no one's really made it work right yet, and as I understand it an "X screen" type function simply doesn't work right yet (I can't teleport an app on my desktop to a remote server, nor bring it back, and if I open a remote X desktop I can't easily get it to run on the local screen). x2go comes closest, but it's still not entirely there yet.
I don't know - isn't this basically what Wayland is doing?
On some level, Wayland compatibility is fairly easy since everyone is already using libraries - swap the libraries out with Wayland versions, and you're there. This is functionally what you're proposing, since what doesn't use the libraries breaks - but I'm not sure anyone writes applications that directly speak X anymore.
Which is why we have nxproxy which optimizes those things away.
If we wanted to do something new to X11, the best thing would be to get the NX modifications rolled in as a supported capability so Remote X would just work with them.
Same thing can be said of Hydrogen, which I suspect you'd agree with.
Assuming it's real and works - and I can't think of any physical reason why it'd be impossible - what this could be is a way to store and transport energy. Gasoline is quite energy dense and easily transportable. There is a massive infrastructure already build out for it and it's something everyone is familiar with. There's no reason you couldn't use a renewable resource to power this process. Currently you can't put sunshine in your gas tank - but with this maybe you can.
I agree that using renewable electricity directly is better, but this could be (again, if it's real/works) yet another piece of the puzzle. It seems like it would be more efficient and direct that biofuels. It's presumably carbon neutral once you power it from renewable electricity. Only issue I'd have with it is, if we were to replace all fossil-petroleum derived fuels with this stuff, it would do relatively little to reduce pollution in population centers. Might eliminate sulfur contamination but NOx and particulates from poorly maintained engines would still be a problem. I'd still advocate electrification of vehicles over this by itself, but a hybrid running off of renewable gasoline seems like a terrific way to fill the "EV range" gap. =Smidge=
There are also plenty of really important edge cases where this is important anyway - aviation fuel is a notable one (a lot of biofuel research is geared towards finding ways to produce aviation-compatible fuels).
There's also the obvious benefit that if you can make petrol, then you can make pretty much any other type of hydrocarbon. Being able to do that with processivity is a huge breakthrough in and of itself.
A 5th or 6th grader should be able to do mental calculations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication of single digit numbers virtually instantaneously.
She may not enjoy achieving that, but once she does she will be happier in math class, not less happy. Right now she's the dumb girl who doesn't know that 7 + 5 = 12. Fix that and she'll do better in math going forward.
Except she won't. Because that's not the wider study of mathematics which she's going to be moving into. What she's going to be moving into is abstractions like algebra and calculus with concepts like limits and derivatives. All things which have basically nothing to do with one's ability to do mental arithmetic, and which are not substantially aided by that.
Mental arithmetic speed should rightly be regarded as a by-product of effective education, not the goal of it.
This is absolutely spot-on! My now 10-year-old niece hates math. She doesn't even understand why she hates math (I just had a conversation about it with her this weekend). I asked her to solve several different problems and discovered she is completely unable to compute the answer to "7+3" in her head without using her finger to poke at an imaginary 3 to arrive at "10". Unfortunately, I don't live in the same city (I live 4 hours away) in order to help her. I told her mother she needs a lot of practice with flashcards because she should be able to do these computations in her head in seconds. She generally understands *how* to do them, but she lacks the practice and lacks the confidence that comes with practice. She is definitely behind, though, because she has absolutely no understanding of multiplication and when you bring up division, you may as well be talking to her about what her health might be like when she's 74 - it's a complete mystery and I could watch her eyes glaze over.
Congratulations, you've just ensured she'll hate math more, because you're also focusing on the wrong question: math is not about one's ability to do mental arithmetic, it's about an approach to problem solving with numbers. You could drill her mental arithmetic all you want, it isn't going to improve her intuitive understanding of how numbers relate and interact.
My father would periodically get stuck on the idea that mental arithmetic was important, but then end result was him belittling the speed with which I could do it and failing to convey any idea of how one got faster at it. It took years (and I'm still learning essentially) until I began to figure out some systems which worked for me (ironically when I was musing on a comment in university calculus which I still never understood in context which was "solve the easier problem first" - transposed to a lot of mental math situations, I realized you just picked something that was close and easy, and have you manageable numbers).
NFC strikes me as a dumb idea, too. The bastard child of RFID and bluetooth. Apple will patent it's own alternative then foist it off on the fanbois to drool over. Neither will become the standard and apple's garden will remain solidly walled.
The only way NFC could become truly useful would be for you to surrender your last vestiges of privacy and control to your phone. Who really wants to convert to e-currency with all the tracking that implies?
NFC's more fundamental problem though is adoption, which is the same problem with this Apple standard. The proposed use cases for NFC are very broad - that is, it doesn't remove any requirements from vendors and end-point users it simply adds new ones. Just look at VISA and Mastercard trying to push those PayWave type systems - and they're the dominant global players in this market.
But even if we really could have robots take care of our every possible need - what will the humans do? What possible sense of purpose will there be in a world where you are not needed... for anything.
Well I suppose you might consider this an existential crisis and conclude you should just kill yourself. But then, if all you're needed for is work - why don't you do that already?
Worrying about what we might do with too much leisure time seems similar to worrying about what one might do if they won the lottery.
He's already in prison, adding unnecessary psychological torture is just being a dick.
If ReiserFS is worth maintaining, use it, and keep the name because it was Reiser who started the project and that's what people know it as. If it's not worth maintaining, drop it and let it die.
Rename it is a better suggestion though. Dropping the codebase is, I agree, not rational or sensible. But renaming it is - after all, you do terrible shit, lo and behold we simply choose to forget you. Seems apt.
If ReiserFS can be a good filesystem, I'd rather see it renamed and continued in development - shedding the baggage of it's creators actions is a good idea. It also means the new filesystem can be considered on its own merits - currently a Google search for ReiserFS leads to the 3rd hit being about the murder.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd strongly disagree on Avatar.
They used a lot of resources creating a world, and forgot to make it interesting or have a story. For all the CG effort on that movie, they still didn't come up with anything that isn't roundly trounced by many real world locations in terms of spectacle. Technically impressive yes - but ultimately pretty dull.
Well...
Oh.
Ow.
My brain.
Oh god.
Call me crazy too, but 9/11 was either a true false flag op, or the US government created an opportunity out of knowing there was an imminent attack on US soil.
Here I will blow your mind: there are no grand conspiracies. Bad people are bad people because they always find a way to make a profit by taking advantage of bad situations, and the world is kind of messed up like that.
Like LBJ in Vietnam?
Well played. Your assertion of something which happened in a presidency 40+ years ago clearly refutes all points. Both sides are the same! Vote Republican!
Um, no. In a true emergency, everyone for themselves unless life or limb is in danger. Absent of that criteria the neighbors will not be allowed inside for any reason, which means they won't use my phone and I won't be using their phone.
Be prepared for an emergency or suffer, this includes those who foolishly only keep a cellphone and have no landline.
Yeah most of us are not sociopaths.
I've always been slightly curious as to how difficult it would actually be to equip all cellphones with the chips and antenna necessary to communicate with something like the Iridium satellite network.
Barring something truly apocalyptic, it's not like the satellites are going to go down.
As far as I know it's trending 7 now, but it depends on which panels you buy. I think for my specific ones it's 10, but that's because we bought high-efficiency ones since roof-real estate was at a premium (and the govt subsidy which drops it to 7 favored going for more capacity).
But if you've space to use, then you can use cheaper ones and the payoff is much quicker.
Yes, but what if you could induce lightning in a certain location, and then convert it into energy ?
All we need is something that can absorb the energy , and give it back at a slower rate later.
Much more interesting than wireless electricity.
The trick is to collect it before it turns into lightning. Stop it doing all that work on the atmosphere.
Superconducting helium balloons connected to clouds which discharge the current build up as it occurs gives you more manageable levels of current. The average potential difference between stratosphere and the ground is something like 300,000 V at all times, so even in clear air conditions you'd get some power.
At this point though, the volcano powerplant makes more sense.
An under-expressed notion by the people talking about MASERs. A 100W focussed beam of microwaves might charge your laptop, but it's also going to happily start microwaving any incidental internal organs in it's path.
Lightning is incredibly inefficient. Yes it pushes a ton of current...but 90% or so of the power is lost turning the air into plasma. The fact it's still dangerous at ground level is just a reflection of the truly staggering amount of power their is to start with.
Seconding this. The only reason I'm booted into Windows at the moment is to play Endless Space.
It doesn't but I can see how it would be easier to be efficient while doing so - you start trying to inductively couple things and you end up with magnetic field lines and EM flying all over the place. Not that it can't be done, but it's not trivial.
Whereas a pair of magnets under mutual attraction are basically locked together, and so all you're really dealing with is the mechanical efficiencies, and the second magnet can be the permanent stator of your generator.
>
Antiquated 3rd-party software is a frequent culprit. Microscopes, sensors, CAD machinery, etc that costs $100K+ isn't getting replaced just because its software or web interface hasn't been updated in the last 5-8 years. The lack of software updates on equipment this expensive may be appalling, but it doesn't change the facts.
Admittedly this is why all that stuff needs to stop being made to run on Windows.
Even if it only targeted a specific variant of Linux, it would be possible to preserve the ABIs it wanted while still patching the big problems.
but I'm not sure anyone writes applications that directly speak X anymore.
There are many graphics libraries out there and many applications are based on them. The PP is right.
Software is soft, it can be anything we want it to be. It does not make sense to create deliberate incompatibilities when a gradual transition is possible.
What I meant was, if you were looking at a client application, chances are it's not written to speak X directly, but rather uses toolkits to do so - big central things which have lots of interest and users.
My criticism of the OP was that if you change X a lot, you're breaking it, and things will have to be rewritten anyway.
I go backwards and forwards of whether I like the idea behind Wayland as it currently exists, but I think they're right in the sense that anything significant done to fix X would involve breaking compatibility. That said, I do inevitably come back to thinking breaking network transparency is a silly idea.
Also because *nix in a lot of cases feels behind Windows in this. The Windows RDP implementation does a lot of things very right - it's quick enough to use over the web, it lets you take over the local console session (and lock out the local console but also restore it - seriously, try getting this to work on any Linux distro) and it can also support multiple remote users.
Linux distros can "kind of" do this, but no one's really made it work right yet, and as I understand it an "X screen" type function simply doesn't work right yet (I can't teleport an app on my desktop to a remote server, nor bring it back, and if I open a remote X desktop I can't easily get it to run on the local screen). x2go comes closest, but it's still not entirely there yet.
I don't know - isn't this basically what Wayland is doing?
On some level, Wayland compatibility is fairly easy since everyone is already using libraries - swap the libraries out with Wayland versions, and you're there. This is functionally what you're proposing, since what doesn't use the libraries breaks - but I'm not sure anyone writes applications that directly speak X anymore.
Which is why we have nxproxy which optimizes those things away.
If we wanted to do something new to X11, the best thing would be to get the NX modifications rolled in as a supported capability so Remote X would just work with them.
Same thing can be said of Hydrogen, which I suspect you'd agree with.
Assuming it's real and works - and I can't think of any physical reason why it'd be impossible - what this could be is a way to store and transport energy. Gasoline is quite energy dense and easily transportable. There is a massive infrastructure already build out for it and it's something everyone is familiar with. There's no reason you couldn't use a renewable resource to power this process. Currently you can't put sunshine in your gas tank - but with this maybe you can.
I agree that using renewable electricity directly is better, but this could be (again, if it's real/works) yet another piece of the puzzle. It seems like it would be more efficient and direct that biofuels. It's presumably carbon neutral once you power it from renewable electricity. Only issue I'd have with it is, if we were to replace all fossil-petroleum derived fuels with this stuff, it would do relatively little to reduce pollution in population centers. Might eliminate sulfur contamination but NOx and particulates from poorly maintained engines would still be a problem. I'd still advocate electrification of vehicles over this by itself, but a hybrid running off of renewable gasoline seems like a terrific way to fill the "EV range" gap.
=Smidge=
There are also plenty of really important edge cases where this is important anyway - aviation fuel is a notable one (a lot of biofuel research is geared towards finding ways to produce aviation-compatible fuels).
There's also the obvious benefit that if you can make petrol, then you can make pretty much any other type of hydrocarbon. Being able to do that with processivity is a huge breakthrough in and of itself.
I have to disagree.
A 5th or 6th grader should be able to do mental calculations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication of single digit numbers virtually instantaneously.
She may not enjoy achieving that, but once she does she will be happier in math class, not less happy. Right now she's the dumb girl who doesn't know that 7 + 5 = 12. Fix that and she'll do better in math going forward.
Except she won't. Because that's not the wider study of mathematics which she's going to be moving into. What she's going to be moving into is abstractions like algebra and calculus with concepts like limits and derivatives. All things which have basically nothing to do with one's ability to do mental arithmetic, and which are not substantially aided by that.
Mental arithmetic speed should rightly be regarded as a by-product of effective education, not the goal of it.
This is absolutely spot-on! My now 10-year-old niece hates math. She doesn't even understand why she hates math (I just had a conversation about it with her this weekend). I asked her to solve several different problems and discovered she is completely unable to compute the answer to "7+3" in her head without using her finger to poke at an imaginary 3 to arrive at "10". Unfortunately, I don't live in the same city (I live 4 hours away) in order to help her. I told her mother she needs a lot of practice with flashcards because she should be able to do these computations in her head in seconds. She generally understands *how* to do them, but she lacks the practice and lacks the confidence that comes with practice. She is definitely behind, though, because she has absolutely no understanding of multiplication and when you bring up division, you may as well be talking to her about what her health might be like when she's 74 - it's a complete mystery and I could watch her eyes glaze over.
Congratulations, you've just ensured she'll hate math more, because you're also focusing on the wrong question: math is not about one's ability to do mental arithmetic, it's about an approach to problem solving with numbers. You could drill her mental arithmetic all you want, it isn't going to improve her intuitive understanding of how numbers relate and interact.
My father would periodically get stuck on the idea that mental arithmetic was important, but then end result was him belittling the speed with which I could do it and failing to convey any idea of how one got faster at it. It took years (and I'm still learning essentially) until I began to figure out some systems which worked for me (ironically when I was musing on a comment in university calculus which I still never understood in context which was "solve the easier problem first" - transposed to a lot of mental math situations, I realized you just picked something that was close and easy, and have you manageable numbers).
NFC strikes me as a dumb idea, too. The bastard child of RFID and bluetooth. Apple will patent it's own alternative then foist it off on the fanbois to drool over. Neither will become the standard and apple's garden will remain solidly walled.
The only way NFC could become truly useful would be for you to surrender your last vestiges of privacy and control to your phone. Who really wants to convert to e-currency with all the tracking that implies?
NFC's more fundamental problem though is adoption, which is the same problem with this Apple standard. The proposed use cases for NFC are very broad - that is, it doesn't remove any requirements from vendors and end-point users it simply adds new ones. Just look at VISA and Mastercard trying to push those PayWave type systems - and they're the dominant global players in this market.
But even if we really could have robots take care of our every possible need - what will the humans do? What possible sense of purpose will there be in a world where you are not needed... for anything.
Well I suppose you might consider this an existential crisis and conclude you should just kill yourself. But then, if all you're needed for is work - why don't you do that already?
Worrying about what we might do with too much leisure time seems similar to worrying about what one might do if they won the lottery.
He's already in prison, adding unnecessary psychological torture is just being a dick.
If ReiserFS is worth maintaining, use it, and keep the name because it was Reiser who started the project and that's what people know it as. If it's not worth maintaining, drop it and let it die.
Rename it is a better suggestion though. Dropping the codebase is, I agree, not rational or sensible. But renaming it is - after all, you do terrible shit, lo and behold we simply choose to forget you. Seems apt.
If ReiserFS can be a good filesystem, I'd rather see it renamed and continued in development - shedding the baggage of it's creators actions is a good idea. It also means the new filesystem can be considered on its own merits - currently a Google search for ReiserFS leads to the 3rd hit being about the murder.
I suspect Volkswagen wouldn't be as popular though if it was called something like Auschwitzwagen.
There's also a pretty big difference between the name of a company and the name of a person, at least as far as association goes.