Wish I had mod points to vote you up. Cheers for not blindly following dubious "science" and calling out those who do. Not only is it a shitty study with corresponding shitty methods and assumptions it vaguely admits as much (while keeping a sensational and contradicting talking point). The effect of people who are concerned more about global warming use more energy is "largely due to the effect of age, as older households were much more likely to agree with this statement, and also had lower energy consumption". When that effect was accounted for there was "only a weak trend" to show that people who care about the environment cut their energy usage... So when you account for the effect of "old people use less energy and don't give a shit about global warming" then you get the effect of... people who care about global warming only do a little to reduce their energy usage.
This study is ridiculously pathetic and says more about its fake-spin-science-touting promoters than it does about anything.
Good question. According to their FAQ their satellites will be capable of delivering "gigabytes of capacity". Obviously that would be split among individual beams, and sliced up into smaller pieces for individual service providers and again for individual people. It is based on the Ka-Band which currently supports about 500 megabits per beam (with multiple beams).
The 150 ms / 300 ms round trip was the "simulated" ping time. They ran real ping tests over 24 hours to the most remote coverage location at the Cook Islands.
One was from Surrey, England to the Cook Islands and averaged 570-800ms round trip -- the other was from California, US to the Cook Islands and averaged 420-620ms round trip. These were performed once per second for 24 hours and can be found in Figure 5 of the research paper.
Anil Seth, who studies consciousness at the University of Sussex, UK, warns that we have to be cautious when interpreting behaviour from a single case study. The woman was missing part of her hippocampus, which was removed to treat her epilepsy, so she doesn't represent a "normal" brain, he says.
Normally a scientist will not ethically be able to put deep brain electrodes in a person, but this was likely part of a larger experiment related to the hippocampus surgery. It will be interesting to see if similar cases present similar behaviors and more interesting if the same thing happens in someone with a full hippocampus.
In additon to tensile strength it would also have to have very high shear strength. From TFA this (and most 3D printed strength improvements) is an improvement in compressive strength. The only strength component not relevant to a space elevator cable.
Is it 51% or 50%+1? There is a big difference. If it's 51% then DDOS as soon as someone gets 50%-1 would work to prevent an exploit. If it's 50%+ then now many false transactions could they make at 51% (or 50%+2) before the DDOS is activated? If it's 50%+ then maybe the DDOS needs to come at 49% or 48% by community agreement. It does set an unsettling precedent that there could be DDOS battles over percent hashing contributions.
On the other hand, maybe this is enforcement that a bitcoin fork needs -- explicit support for mining pools. Such that the ability to get to say 40% by any one actor (pool or individual) is explicitly guarded against. There could be some sort of enforced diminishing returns with viability consensus like transaction consensus. Surely if you are trusting transactions to hash consensus you could also trust "ability or degree to contribute" to the same mechanism. If no-one could get over 48% then no-one could get over 50%. Does anyone know if that's a possible solution?
Does a mining pool really provide the ability to perform a 50%+ attack? They aren't running custom clients are they? Would it require ALL members of the mining pool to collude in the exploit?
Lets examine how much time $443 million will buy us for budget examination... The 2011 budget expenditures are an estimated $3.82 trillion. So $443 million out of $3.82 trillion is 0.000116 of our budget. or 0.0116 % of the budget. If we spread that spending evenly throughout the year then 0.0116% of the 8760 hours in the year accounts for 0.99 hours. That's right -- less than one hour. That $443 million dollars will buy us less than one hour of time for budget examination. The cost of the wars in Iran and Iraq, however, was over $1 trillion. That would have bought us over 9 days per year every year over the last 10 years.
Good point... The summary left off an important bit of information from TFA:
"Based on that technology, MIT researchers have made a button-sized power generator fueled by butane that can run three times longer than a lithium-ion battery of the same weight; the device can then be recharged instantly, just by snapping in a tiny cartridge of fresh fuel"
So... using this to convert butane to electrical energy it lasts three times longer than a lithium-ion battery of the same weight.
You find that butane/propane/gas/diesel is about 45 megajoules / kg and Li-ion batteries store about 0.75 megajoule / kg. Converted energy 2.25 megajoules (3x Li-Ion) out of stored energy 45 megajoules = 5% efficiency rate converting butane heat to electrical energy using this device.
News flash: There is nothing preventing companies from developing DRM or closed binaries on linux. nVidia already has closed binaries, hulu (with drm obviously) runs on a linux OS. The reason companies don't support linux desktop is solely because the linux desktop market is so small that companies do not see a profit benefit in supporting it. So email your favorite(?) company and let them know you are a linux user and you would like for them to support linux.
Replace the URL bar with a tool to support more than just one command? Isn't that what keyword searches are for? I find the firefox URL bar to be extremely useful when combined with keyword searches. Here's how:
Go to any search field for instance the google search box, right click and choose "Add a Keyword for this Search...".
Give the search a single character "keyword" (eg g for google).
Now when you want to do a search you can do the following sequence:
Ctl-L # access the URL bar Keyword [SEARCH TERMS] # eg "g slashdot" will perform a google search for slashdot
These are some of the keyword searches I use most often:
p for pubmed g for google gs for google scholar gm for google maps w for wikipedia d for duckduckgo ed for english dictionary sd for spanish dictionary
The URL bar is by far the most useful feature of Firefox!
You and the GP are missing the point here. God, obviously, will borrow Santa Clause's sleigh. Santa doesn't deliver all the presents at once, right? It takes time for him to ride his sleigh across the sky. So *logically* God will be driving Santa's magic sleigh across the sky approximately 6 hours behind the sun. Or maybe he's hitching a ride with FSM.
If only that were true. Video: intel i915.modeset=1, ATI nomodeset (until questionable drivers are installed). Downloading and compiling drivers for wifi (the new one I bought cause there was no chance of it working with an old card I dug up). Even after the headache of getting everything up and running X has crashed a few times. With Windows it just works. As much as it pains me to say that, its true. I am thinking I should go back to Fedora (first jump from Fedora to Ubuntu -- was with RedHat since well before Fedora split off and 10.04 has been a nightmare). You guys who say Ubuntu is best for hardware compatibility must be purchasing only hardware pre-screened to work. If you have a legacy system or didn't spec out every purchase for linux compatibility then it's a real pain in the ass. I would rather have out of the box hardware support over look and feel, bundled packages or anything else.
Get the 4 function calculators. You can test physics knowledge with a 4 function calculator. I would say a 3x4 index card (or a formula sheet) would also be acceptable. That way you could better test their ability to apply formulas rather than memorize them. If a student needs a translation dictionary then there are very reasonably priced self contained models available. Well worth the investment for any class that allows it.
And Tracfone/Net10 uses the ATT network which, in the US, is 10x better than T-Mobile. You couldn't pay me to use T-Mobile's network. You mean I get to have calls dropped, calls missed and a plain inability to call out most of the places I go for only $45 / month?! OH BOY! Where do I sign up!
Hey. Just a little heads up. I know you've probably been slurping down the palin talking points when she says things like "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" just cost the people too much to remain viable. Unfortunately both of you are completely wrong. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are Government Sponsorded Enterprises (GSE). This means that they were incorporated by an act of congress, but are PRIVATELY OWNED. That's right privately owned. THEY WERE NOT RUN BY THE GOVERNMENT. The deregulation (by republicans) of these two organizations allowed them to be run into the ground. Now the taxpayers are HAVING to pay for a bailout to slow the plummeting republican shitstorm that is our current economy.
I don't know where you get this whole federal money competes with and beats out private funding idea. Do you really think that federally funded research somehow precludes private research investment at universities? You obviously don't work in an academic setting. Both federal and private projects coincide together with no problem.
Great 25 charities fund $1.2 billion in private research. I think science (and subsequently business who can make money off freely published results) would appreciate and benefit from an additional $1.2 billion or so from the government. That $1.2bil can come from a slice of the money we are wasting in the optional war in Iraq that's distracting us from the real front on terror (Afghanistan) and real domestic issues.
I'd have to agree with you that most of those arguments are fallacious and do not consider pollution improvements of one technology over the other. Except for the case of hydroelectric power. While there have been improvements to create lower impact dams, the argument against hydroelectric power isn't simply one of "aww... poor little salmon". Its the fact that once dammed the entire river recosystem that existed is essentially destroyed. As developed in the past, hydroelectric dams have been some of the most ecologically damaging power sources available, turning entire rivers into dry riverbeds. Fortunately power companies are becoming more considerate of these ecosystems and are now releasing more water from the dams than they have in the past to keep rivers viable. However most dams built in the past and cheap high-impact dams built today are terribly destructive to the plants and animals in and *around* the rivers that are dammed (not just salmon). There is a lot of hydroelectric power available here in the southeast, but when you purchase "renewable energy" for a premium here Southern Company does NOT provide that power from hydroelectric dams. Instead they provide switchgrass burning in coal plants (quickly sequestered and quickly released CO2). The reason for this is most people are keenly aware of the damage hydroelectric dams cause to the natural ecosystem not to mention moral issues of robbing clean water availability from downstream locations. So I am generally for prius, nuclear, solar, microwave (however much a pipedream that currently is), wind, etc. The waste from those energy sources can be mitigated and stored properly. It is simply not possible to "properly store" the destruction of a river ecosystem. There have been lower impact hydroelectric systems more recently developed, which are a great improvement and candidates for replacement of existing ageing hydroelectric systems. Still, they are far from mainstream and continue to give electric companies too much power over the ecosystem and drinking water availability in those watersheds.
It's tempting to claim that a algae biofuel system would produce massive amounts of fuel. You just need huge tanks, right? The only problem is the light reaching those tanks only enters at the surface area. 8' is pretty deep and would require active agitation to maintain the algae population. If it's just a pit the algae at the top is the only part that will be able to utilize available solar energy (think pond scum). Ideally the system could use it's own fuel source for agitation, but this would require immediate processing and would definitely put it beyond "cheap jug of algae" technology. Well, I guess problems like these (along with a viable algae) are why it hasn't been done yet. As soon as issues like those can be worked out I agree that this will empower many people to produce safe, clean fuel. Since we need portable fuel (gas/crude/etc) this would be more helpful to the energy crisis than direct electricity producing technology (PV, wind, etc).
That is cool. I, like several other posters, would love to see that too. However, please do NOT scan it using a flatbed scanner or anything like that. The head and intense light of a scanner would not be good for such an old clipping. It would take a decent camera and tripod to get a flashless photo of the clipping. If you have those things on hand it would be awesome to see.
Web 3.0? F that. iWeb 2009 Enterprise Edition is just around the corner. It will make Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 look like buzzwords from the 1990s. The the major feature enhancements of iWeb 2009 Enterprise Edition are:
A synergistic development model. Grassroots support. Enterprise level uptime and support (obviously).
This technology promises to create a paradigm shift in the way we think about web services.
These are the requirements for my next phone and/or carrier:
Wifi and the ability to use wifi voip / data automatically while at a hotspot. 1M pixel camera with flash Availability in transmission bands for any carrier I choose
-- Seriously, apple, AT&T only at the iphone launch? A keypad/entry system with tactile feedback.
-- This puts the current iphone out of the running. Having to stare at a phone like a monkey while I use it is not an option. Full keyboard would be ideal like some of the Nokia EXX phones and that new Motorola. No restriction on mp3 music playing, transferring, ringtones, etc.
-- The current crippling that Verizon does to their phones is unacceptable. The ability to add third party application games and utilities.
--- Again, you suck Verizon. I can't wait to get rid of Verizon for this reason. Stupid contract.
A GPS with HR monitor would be awesome too. Then I wouldn't need any other gadget for anything, but I realize that might be asking too much. Unless hmmmmm... it's an open system and you can buy third party bluetooth HR monitors?
So right now I believe my phone will be an open platform with Virgin Mobile as the carrier. From what I can tell they don't cripple their phones and I will be able to spend $20 per month to handle the times when I'm not at a wifi hotspot (work and home are covered). I'm just waiting for that open phone that handles wifi voip well and works on the Virgin Mobile (which is Sprint in the US) network.
Slashdot Mirror
Wish I had mod points to vote you up. Cheers for not blindly following dubious "science" and calling out those who do. Not only is it a shitty study with corresponding shitty methods and assumptions it vaguely admits as much (while keeping a sensational and contradicting talking point). The effect of people who are concerned more about global warming use more energy is "largely due to the effect of age, as older households were much more likely to agree with this statement, and also had lower energy consumption". When that effect was accounted for there was "only a weak trend" to show that people who care about the environment cut their energy usage... So when you account for the effect of "old people use less energy and don't give a shit about global warming" then you get the effect of ... people who care about global warming only do a little to reduce their energy usage.
This study is ridiculously pathetic and says more about its fake-spin-science-touting promoters than it does about anything.
Good question. According to their FAQ their satellites will be capable of delivering "gigabytes of capacity". Obviously that would be split among individual beams, and sliced up into smaller pieces for individual service providers and again for individual people. It is based on the Ka-Band which currently supports about 500 megabits per beam (with multiple beams).
The 150 ms / 300 ms round trip was the "simulated" ping time. They ran real ping tests over 24 hours to the most remote coverage location at the Cook Islands.
One was from Surrey, England to the Cook Islands and averaged 570-800ms round trip -- the other was from California, US to the Cook Islands and averaged 420-620ms round trip. These were performed once per second for 24 hours and can be found in Figure 5 of the research paper.
From TFA:
Anil Seth, who studies consciousness at the University of Sussex, UK, warns that we have to be cautious when interpreting behaviour from a single case study. The woman was missing part of her hippocampus, which was removed to treat her epilepsy, so she doesn't represent a "normal" brain, he says.
Normally a scientist will not ethically be able to put deep brain electrodes in a person, but this was likely part of a larger experiment related to the hippocampus surgery. It will be interesting to see if similar cases present similar behaviors and more interesting if the same thing happens in someone with a full hippocampus.
Good point.
[citation needed]
In additon to tensile strength it would also have to have very high shear strength. From TFA this (and most 3D printed strength improvements) is an improvement in compressive strength. The only strength component not relevant to a space elevator cable.
Is it 51% or 50%+1? There is a big difference. If it's 51% then DDOS as soon as someone gets 50%-1 would work to prevent an exploit. If it's 50%+ then now many false transactions could they make at 51% (or 50%+2) before the DDOS is activated? If it's 50%+ then maybe the DDOS needs to come at 49% or 48% by community agreement. It does set an unsettling precedent that there could be DDOS battles over percent hashing contributions.
On the other hand, maybe this is enforcement that a bitcoin fork needs -- explicit support for mining pools. Such that the ability to get to say 40% by any one actor (pool or individual) is explicitly guarded against. There could be some sort of enforced diminishing returns with viability consensus like transaction consensus. Surely if you are trusting transactions to hash consensus you could also trust "ability or degree to contribute" to the same mechanism. If no-one could get over 48% then no-one could get over 50%. Does anyone know if that's a possible solution?
Does a mining pool really provide the ability to perform a 50%+ attack? They aren't running custom clients are they? Would it require ALL members of the mining pool to collude in the exploit?
Lets examine how much time $443 million will buy us for budget examination... The 2011 budget expenditures are an estimated $3.82 trillion. So $443 million out of $3.82 trillion is 0.000116 of our budget. or 0.0116 % of the budget. If we spread that spending evenly throughout the year then 0.0116% of the 8760 hours in the year accounts for 0.99 hours. That's right -- less than one hour. That $443 million dollars will buy us less than one hour of time for budget examination. The cost of the wars in Iran and Iraq, however, was over $1 trillion. That would have bought us over 9 days per year every year over the last 10 years.
Good point... The summary left off an important bit of information from TFA:
"Based on that technology, MIT researchers have made a button-sized power generator fueled by butane that can run three times longer than a lithium-ion battery of the same weight; the device can then be recharged instantly, just by snapping in a tiny cartridge of fresh fuel"
So... using this to convert butane to electrical energy it lasts three times longer than a lithium-ion battery of the same weight.
But if you look at energy density of the two fuel sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
You find that butane/propane/gas/diesel is about 45 megajoules / kg and Li-ion batteries store about 0.75 megajoule / kg. Converted energy 2.25 megajoules (3x Li-Ion) out of stored energy 45 megajoules = 5% efficiency rate converting butane heat to electrical energy using this device.
--David
News flash: There is nothing preventing companies from developing DRM or closed binaries on linux. nVidia already has closed binaries, hulu (with drm obviously) runs on a linux OS. The reason companies don't support linux desktop is solely because the linux desktop market is so small that companies do not see a profit benefit in supporting it. So email your favorite(?) company and let them know you are a linux user and you would like for them to support linux.
Replace the URL bar with a tool to support more than just one command? Isn't that what keyword searches are for? I find the firefox URL bar to be extremely useful when combined with keyword searches. Here's how:
Go to any search field for instance the google search box, right click and choose "Add a Keyword for this Search...".
Give the search a single character "keyword" (eg g for google).
Now when you want to do a search you can do the following sequence:
Ctl-L # access the URL bar
Keyword [SEARCH TERMS] # eg "g slashdot" will perform a google search for slashdot
These are some of the keyword searches I use most often:
p for pubmed
g for google
gs for google scholar
gm for google maps
w for wikipedia
d for duckduckgo
ed for english dictionary
sd for spanish dictionary
The URL bar is by far the most useful feature of Firefox!
You and the GP are missing the point here. God, obviously, will borrow Santa Clause's sleigh. Santa doesn't deliver all the presents at once, right? It takes time for him to ride his sleigh across the sky. So *logically* God will be driving Santa's magic sleigh across the sky approximately 6 hours behind the sun. Or maybe he's hitching a ride with FSM.
Seriously? ... Let me be the first to welcome you to the world of academic journals.
If only that were true. Video: intel i915.modeset=1, ATI nomodeset (until questionable drivers are installed). Downloading and compiling drivers for wifi (the new one I bought cause there was no chance of it working with an old card I dug up). Even after the headache of getting everything up and running X has crashed a few times. With Windows it just works. As much as it pains me to say that, its true. I am thinking I should go back to Fedora (first jump from Fedora to Ubuntu -- was with RedHat since well before Fedora split off and 10.04 has been a nightmare). You guys who say Ubuntu is best for hardware compatibility must be purchasing only hardware pre-screened to work. If you have a legacy system or didn't spec out every purchase for linux compatibility then it's a real pain in the ass. I would rather have out of the box hardware support over look and feel, bundled packages or anything else.
Good call not allowing an ipod in a physics class...
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/matlab-mobile/id370976661?mt=8
Get the 4 function calculators. You can test physics knowledge with a 4 function calculator. I would say a 3x4 index card (or a formula sheet) would also be acceptable. That way you could better test their ability to apply formulas rather than memorize them. If a student needs a translation dictionary then there are very reasonably priced self contained models available. Well worth the investment for any class that allows it.
And Tracfone/Net10 uses the ATT network which, in the US, is 10x better than T-Mobile. You couldn't pay me to use T-Mobile's network. You mean I get to have calls dropped, calls missed and a plain inability to call out most of the places I go for only $45 / month?! OH BOY! Where do I sign up!
That's what happened the last time a civilization constructed a 14 TeV large hadron collider! I need some protection. Where's my tinfoil hat!
Hey. Just a little heads up. I know you've probably been slurping down the palin talking points when she says things like "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" just cost the people too much to remain viable. Unfortunately both of you are completely wrong. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are Government Sponsorded Enterprises (GSE). This means that they were incorporated by an act of congress, but are PRIVATELY OWNED. That's right privately owned. THEY WERE NOT RUN BY THE GOVERNMENT. The deregulation (by republicans) of these two organizations allowed them to be run into the ground. Now the taxpayers are HAVING to pay for a bailout to slow the plummeting republican shitstorm that is our current economy.
I don't know where you get this whole federal money competes with and beats out private funding idea. Do you really think that federally funded research somehow precludes private research investment at universities? You obviously don't work in an academic setting. Both federal and private projects coincide together with no problem.
Great 25 charities fund $1.2 billion in private research. I think science (and subsequently business who can make money off freely published results) would appreciate and benefit from an additional $1.2 billion or so from the government. That $1.2bil can come from a slice of the money we are wasting in the optional war in Iraq that's distracting us from the real front on terror (Afghanistan) and real domestic issues.
--David
I'd have to agree with you that most of those arguments are fallacious and do not consider pollution improvements of one technology over the other. Except for the case of hydroelectric power. While there have been improvements to create lower impact dams, the argument against hydroelectric power isn't simply one of "aww... poor little salmon". Its the fact that once dammed the entire river recosystem that existed is essentially destroyed. As developed in the past, hydroelectric dams have been some of the most ecologically damaging power sources available, turning entire rivers into dry riverbeds. Fortunately power companies are becoming more considerate of these ecosystems and are now releasing more water from the dams than they have in the past to keep rivers viable. However most dams built in the past and cheap high-impact dams built today are terribly destructive to the plants and animals in and *around* the rivers that are dammed (not just salmon). There is a lot of hydroelectric power available here in the southeast, but when you purchase "renewable energy" for a premium here Southern Company does NOT provide that power from hydroelectric dams. Instead they provide switchgrass burning in coal plants (quickly sequestered and quickly released CO2). The reason for this is most people are keenly aware of the damage hydroelectric dams cause to the natural ecosystem not to mention moral issues of robbing clean water availability from downstream locations. So I am generally for prius, nuclear, solar, microwave (however much a pipedream that currently is), wind, etc. The waste from those energy sources can be mitigated and stored properly. It is simply not possible to "properly store" the destruction of a river ecosystem. There have been lower impact hydroelectric systems more recently developed, which are a great improvement and candidates for replacement of existing ageing hydroelectric systems. Still, they are far from mainstream and continue to give electric companies too much power over the ecosystem and drinking water availability in those watersheds.
--David
It's tempting to claim that a algae biofuel system would produce massive amounts of fuel. You just need huge tanks, right? The only problem is the light reaching those tanks only enters at the surface area. 8' is pretty deep and would require active agitation to maintain the algae population. If it's just a pit the algae at the top is the only part that will be able to utilize available solar energy (think pond scum). Ideally the system could use it's own fuel source for agitation, but this would require immediate processing and would definitely put it beyond "cheap jug of algae" technology. Well, I guess problems like these (along with a viable algae) are why it hasn't been done yet. As soon as issues like those can be worked out I agree that this will empower many people to produce safe, clean fuel. Since we need portable fuel (gas/crude/etc) this would be more helpful to the energy crisis than direct electricity producing technology (PV, wind, etc).
That is cool. I, like several other posters, would love to see that too. However, please do NOT scan it using a flatbed scanner or anything like that. The head and intense light of a scanner would not be good for such an old clipping. It would take a decent camera and tripod to get a flashless photo of the clipping. If you have those things on hand it would be awesome to see.
Web 3.0? F that. iWeb 2009 Enterprise Edition is just around the corner. It will make Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 look like buzzwords from the 1990s. The the major feature enhancements of iWeb 2009 Enterprise Edition are:
A synergistic development model.
Grassroots support.
Enterprise level uptime and support (obviously).
This technology promises to create a paradigm shift in the way we think about web services.
My bad, I misspoke.
Shitty contract.
Happy?
These are the requirements for my next phone and/or carrier:
Wifi and the ability to use wifi voip / data automatically while at a hotspot.
1M pixel camera with flash
Availability in transmission bands for any carrier I choose
-- Seriously, apple, AT&T only at the iphone launch?
A keypad/entry system with tactile feedback.
-- This puts the current iphone out of the running. Having to stare at a phone like a monkey while I use it is not an option. Full keyboard would be ideal like some of the Nokia EXX phones and that new Motorola.
No restriction on mp3 music playing, transferring, ringtones, etc.
-- The current crippling that Verizon does to their phones is unacceptable.
The ability to add third party application games and utilities.
--- Again, you suck Verizon. I can't wait to get rid of Verizon for this reason. Stupid contract.
A GPS with HR monitor would be awesome too. Then I wouldn't need any other gadget for anything, but I realize that might be asking too much. Unless hmmmmm... it's an open system and you can buy third party bluetooth HR monitors?
So right now I believe my phone will be an open platform with Virgin Mobile as the carrier. From what I can tell they don't cripple their phones and I will be able to spend $20 per month to handle the times when I'm not at a wifi hotspot (work and home are covered). I'm just waiting for that open phone that handles wifi voip well and works on the Virgin Mobile (which is Sprint in the US) network.
--David