Good points. As to the pick up truck, something like this is often used by a bunch of small farmers to take their produce to the market (the cost of transportation is shared - or even form cooperatives). They can use the same distribution model to send fuel to the market.
The fellow is a jerk and cannot seem to make his points without attempting to insult you, but what he is trying to say is perfectly logical.
Forget about plastic jugs. What stops a farmer from digging up an acre of his land and employing a low investment technology like this to make oil ? They already do that with aquaculture (and hydroponics) in many 3rd world countries (I spent 3 years in India on work, so I have seen this first hand). As to distribution, this is no more complicated than have a truck with a suction pump coming in once every two days to pick up the crude. They manage projects far more complicated than that.
The fact that big oil companies will find ways to flood the world market with cheap oil is neither here nor there. First, they would not want to - it will hurt profits in the short term, and second, even if they did, they still cannot do enough to drive the farmer above out of business (he invests nothing - not even fertilizer (which has caused some farmer suicides in India), and big agro businesses have been unable to do that anyways) permanently.
This is one of those possibilities where everyone benefits as the entry level cost is so low. One culture of algae is all that it takes.
1. The constitution governs the behavior of the government wherever it chooses to act. The constitution states for instance that treaties entered into by the US and ratified will have the same power as the law of the land. This is why enemy POWs whether they are held in the US or abroad by our military have the privileges of the Geneva Convention. What gives them those rights is not the Geneva Convention itself but that the constitution compels our government to act in compliance with its treaty obligations, which include the Geneva Convention.
The government does not get pick or choose which parts of constitution it does or does not uphold. That is an Orwellian nonsense perpetrated by the current (and a few previous) administrations that attempts to create a terrorism related loophole in the constitution. There isn't one.
2. What Al Qaeda, or any given enemy of ours does or does not do is irrelevant to US law.
3. This is the way you fight a war legally (yes, there are laws of war) - if you pick up a terrorist on foreign soil trying to kill Americans, you hold them as POWs. So you either have a POW (in which case you hold them for the duration of the war and grant them all the Geneva Convention rights) or you have (in case the crime was either conspired / committed on US soil or the said accused was extradited from abroad) to try them in a US court. There is no third category of a detainee allowed under US law, regardless of the myriad (il)legal fantasies of this administration.
And what excuse might he have had for invading Canada ?
The fellow is right - Bush wanted to invade Iraq before he got elected. I do not know if it was oil, or a feeling of revenge (for the alleged attempt on his father's life), or even if he was as delusional as he then claimed to be (planting seeds of democracy in a soil richly nourished with centuries of voluntary mental slavery).
9-11, coupled with a knowledge that most of us flunk our already pathetic history and geography classes at school, gave him the pretext he needed. Whether the precise steps for this grand deceit were hatched in his own mind (in which case he is a masterful actor) or were spoon fed to him by a cabal of shady operators (like Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) is irrelevant. As he has often been fond of saying, he is the "decider" and the buck most definitely stops with him.
Impeaching him is a little meaningless now. He should instead be tried for treason (destroying your own country economically and endangering it strategically by frittering away its military resources by misleading it into war is treason) after he leaves office along with his various sidekicks.
All these ebook readers have either no support, or limited support or paid support for PDF documents. Why would I want to pay someone any amount to read my own PDFs ? (Or PDFs that I have legally downloaded, from say, a Journal, or a PDF that I have already paid for) ?
These are just gimmicks. What these people are trying to do is to build an iPod for book readers. Its a badly misguided effort. Starters - books/written documents are massively more ubiquitous than music and in most cases, legally free to read (think the internet, scientific journals that your employer subscribes to, free ebooks, your own documents, etc.). You simply cannot transplant the successful model in one market to another when the markets are so very different.
Until some of these people figure out that an ebook reader is just that - an ebook reader, and not a hamster wheel for further purchases of closed format texts, they will keep falling short.
Here is the recipe for the fellow who wishes to succeed in this market : Support PDF and ODF's out of the box, without any penny pinching schemes to ask people to pay to some format that the dumb machine can understand. Sell a quality product that behaves like a hard disk and uses some free software like aigaion for library management, and do not even dream of selling ebooks. You will lose.
Amazon, for all its smarts, has still not figured it out. I would pay $500 for a quality product like the above. I will not however pay one red cent for a product that is nothing more than a portable storefront for a book shop. The model they ought to be following for an ebook reader is that of a PDA, not that of an iPod.
Of course, it might already be too late. The day ASUS comes out with a tablet EEEPC running linux, this market will officially be dead.
There is little point in stating the obvious, but how many people (ok, as a fraction of the people you know), need a 4TB partition size ? Assuming that your statement is correct (which I think it isn't). Even if I had a hard disk that big, I would not want partitions that big. For people with needs for distributed network storage, there is OpenAFS.
I am not in the habit of making bold predictions. But let me make one. The day that ZFS is ported to Linux (whether through a third party module or in the mainline) will come a lot sooner than the day OpenSolaris will even remotely match the hardware supported by Linux and the sheer richness of the userspace applications in Linux.
Sun waited far too long for this and not all the Debian founders in the world are going to help them get past the huge lag between OpenSolaris and Linux.
While ZFS is cool, it will someday be ported to Linux (the market forces are such). The advantages over ext3 etc. are simply not compelling enough for me to abandon an entire universe of software and hardware I have gotten used to with Linux distributions.
I see no use for Dtrace as I use nothing more fancy than Matlab for analyzing my data. No fancy number crunching or developing here. I used to do a lot of heavy duty Fortran 95 programming, but that is history (which will not be repeated).
So, Sun wants me to trial an OS that is about 5 years late, and has major hardware problems while offering no compelling reasons for the switch. Sorry, but Microsoft beat Sun by a year or so. Its called Vista.
I used to be a Solaris user (on Sun hardware) - used it for about 5-6 years. The image of pricey hardware that worked at half the speed of commonly available Intel/AMD hardware running Linux has sort of stayed with me.
That is false. There is no such thing as Debian. Its Debian Stable, or Debian Testing, or Debian Unstable (and even Debian Experimental if you count the repos).
Many people who use Debian for a personal system, tend to run Debian Testing. A somewhat smaller number run Debian Unstable. Only servers and people with such mission critical needs use Debian Stable.
Ubuntu is a six monthly freeze snapshot of Debian Unstable. They freeze it, fix bugs in it, put the bugfixes upstream and then release it.
So, it isn't newer than Debian (since no such thing exists). If anything they are typically older than Debian Unstable the day after the release. Ubuntu does its own updates, which may or may not follow Debian Unstable updates, but in my experience, Debian Unstable updates faster than Ubuntu, even though both start from the same base.
Not to be a nitpick or anything, but your statement was largely false and needed to be corrected.
ISO sells out and countenances a corrupt process about which it had ample warning.
ISO's name becomes dirt among those who care for standards.
Some of the people ticked off at the destruction of this former standards body hold a public protest.
ISO does not like the resulting bad publicity.
I will say this once, ISO, so listen closely. Once a standards body loses the confidence of the people it is supposed to serve, it is terminal, unless it backtracks and expunges the reason for the loss of confidence. Chew on that. Get back to us once you have rediscovered your spine.
Has they been Microsoft, they would have put out a statement extolling the virtues of companies that do not violate IP by buying customized business solutions from Microsoft itself.
Good question. For the sake of this invention, I hope that it is more than the sum total of earth's magnetic field and the magnetic field generated by neighboring conductors.
Yes, and the amount of safety equipment that goes with each such installation often ends up being as expensive, if not more expensive, than the silane chambers etc. Translate that to a transmission line hundreds of miles long and think.
Silane explodes with considerable violence on exposure to air. Plus, how are you going to put conductors under great pressure ? The main attractiveness of super conductors lies in long distance electrical supply lines. Unless they come up with a way to hermetically seal the "wire" over distances of hundreds of miles with a seal that can withstand high pressure compressors dotting the landscape (unlikely), this very interesting advance will remain just that - very interesting.
All not counting whether it is more energy efficient to run superconductors with energy hog compressors or to just stick to what we have, hopefully realizing practical room temperature superconductivity.
We have known for a long time that alcohol consumption is not good for those gray cells. Is our culture so alcohol addled that these blunt truths can't otherwise be common public knowledge ?
the plastic feels cheaper
The magnesium finish on my Dell D830 feels perfectly non-cheap to me. And I don't mean to pry, but how is the plastic as long as it serves its purpose relevant to the laptop (unless you are running around in a Humvee in Iraq - in which case you would buy a toughbook, not an apple or a dell) ? Do you like to use the laptop case for shaving ?
there is some kind of high-pitched inductor/capacitor chirp when you move the mouse around which is incredibly irritating
Never heard of such a thing in a physically undamaged laptop.
the speakers are too quiet to watch a DVD with when there's traffic on the road outside
Hint : its a laptop, not a boombox. Sorry, but your complaints sound like carping to me. Not unlike a Maserati owner confusing the relative difference in looks between his car and a trusty Honda Civic for difference in things that matter.
Microsoft - made you more likely to be cruel to little animals Tux - made you grown a long beard and lose all your friends Novell - made you betray your friends Democrat donkey - made you find new ways to destroy yourself Republican elephant - made you question the value of an education
What is next ?
"Judge, I crashed my car because I stared at a Ferrari logo for too long." ?
Slashdot Mirror
Some kids in Estonia and Nigeria just got very very happy.
How fast do you want your Nigerian oil money today ?
Clippy :
"Portable Batch System - can I help you ?"
User :
"Maybe".
Clippy :
"Enter Windows Genuine Advantage process and enter the License number. Its below your laptop."
User :
"Wot laptop ?"
Clippy :
"I mean your Portable Batch System."
User :
"You do not understand ...".
Clippy :
"Please call the manufacturer of the laptop for further help."
Did this answer your question ?
1. Yes.
2. Hell, yes.
Maybe patent peace will protect it and its parent company.
Good points. As to the pick up truck, something like this is often used by a bunch of small farmers to take their produce to the market (the cost of transportation is shared - or even form cooperatives). They can use the same distribution model to send fuel to the market.
The fellow is a jerk and cannot seem to make his points without attempting to insult you, but what he is trying to say is perfectly logical.
Forget about plastic jugs. What stops a farmer from digging up an acre of his land and employing a low investment technology like this to make oil ? They already do that with aquaculture (and hydroponics) in many 3rd world countries (I spent 3 years in India on work, so I have seen this first hand). As to distribution, this is no more complicated than have a truck with a suction pump coming in once every two days to pick up the crude. They manage projects far more complicated than that.
The fact that big oil companies will find ways to flood the world market with cheap oil is neither here nor there. First, they would not want to - it will hurt profits in the short term, and second, even if they did, they still cannot do enough to drive the farmer above out of business (he invests nothing - not even fertilizer (which has caused some farmer suicides in India), and big agro businesses have been unable to do that anyways) permanently.
This is one of those possibilities where everyone benefits as the entry level cost is so low. One culture of algae is all that it takes.
Gives a new meaning to shitting into the car.
Maureen to her father before breakfast :
"Dad, you said you were going to shit in my car, not Jack's !"
1. The constitution governs the behavior of the government wherever it chooses to act. The constitution states for instance that treaties entered into by the US and ratified will have the same power as the law of the land. This is why enemy POWs whether they are held in the US or abroad by our military have the privileges of the Geneva Convention. What gives them those rights is not the Geneva Convention itself but that the constitution compels our government to act in compliance with its treaty obligations, which include the Geneva Convention.
The government does not get pick or choose which parts of constitution it does or does not uphold. That is an Orwellian nonsense perpetrated by the current (and a few previous) administrations that attempts to create a terrorism related loophole in the constitution. There isn't one.
2. What Al Qaeda, or any given enemy of ours does or does not do is irrelevant to US law.
3. This is the way you fight a war legally (yes, there are laws of war) - if you pick up a terrorist on foreign soil trying to kill Americans, you hold them as POWs. So you either have a POW (in which case you hold them for the duration of the war and grant them all the Geneva Convention rights) or you have (in case the crime was either conspired / committed on US soil or the said accused was extradited from abroad) to try them in a US court. There is no third category of a detainee allowed under US law, regardless of the myriad (il)legal fantasies of this administration.
And what excuse might he have had for invading Canada ?
The fellow is right - Bush wanted to invade Iraq before he got elected. I do not know if it was oil, or a feeling of revenge (for the alleged attempt on his father's life), or even if he was as delusional as he then claimed to be (planting seeds of democracy in a soil richly nourished with centuries of voluntary mental slavery).
9-11, coupled with a knowledge that most of us flunk our already pathetic history and geography classes at school, gave him the pretext he needed. Whether the precise steps for this grand deceit were hatched in his own mind (in which case he is a masterful actor) or were spoon fed to him by a cabal of shady operators (like Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) is irrelevant. As he has often been fond of saying, he is the "decider" and the buck most definitely stops with him.
Impeaching him is a little meaningless now. He should instead be tried for treason (destroying your own country economically and endangering it strategically by frittering away its military resources by misleading it into war is treason) after he leaves office along with his various sidekicks.
All these ebook readers have either no support, or limited support or paid support for PDF documents. Why would I want to pay someone any amount to read my own PDFs ? (Or PDFs that I have legally downloaded, from say, a Journal, or a PDF that I have already paid for) ?
These are just gimmicks. What these people are trying to do is to build an iPod for book readers. Its a badly misguided effort. Starters - books/written documents are massively more ubiquitous than music and in most cases, legally free to read (think the internet, scientific journals that your employer subscribes to, free ebooks, your own documents, etc.). You simply cannot transplant the successful model in one market to another when the markets are so very different.
Until some of these people figure out that an ebook reader is just that - an ebook reader, and not a hamster wheel for further purchases of closed format texts, they will keep falling short.
Here is the recipe for the fellow who wishes to succeed in this market : Support PDF and ODF's out of the box, without any penny pinching schemes to ask people to pay to some format that the dumb machine can understand. Sell a quality product that behaves like a hard disk and uses some free software like aigaion for library management, and do not even dream of selling ebooks. You will lose.
Amazon, for all its smarts, has still not figured it out. I would pay $500 for a quality product like the above. I will not however pay one red cent for a product that is nothing more than a portable storefront for a book shop. The model they ought to be following for an ebook reader is that of a PDA, not that of an iPod.
Of course, it might already be too late. The day ASUS comes out with a tablet EEEPC running linux, this market will officially be dead.
That is one way to boost Vista adoption rates.
Can't make Vista better ? No problem. Lets just screw Windows XP.
There is little point in stating the obvious, but how many people (ok, as a fraction of the people you know), need a 4TB partition size ? Assuming that your statement is correct (which I think it isn't). Even if I had a hard disk that big, I would not want partitions that big. For people with needs for distributed network storage, there is OpenAFS.
I am not in the habit of making bold predictions. But let me make one. The day that ZFS is ported to Linux (whether through a third party module or in the mainline) will come a lot sooner than the day OpenSolaris will even remotely match the hardware supported by Linux and the sheer richness of the userspace applications in Linux.
Sun waited far too long for this and not all the Debian founders in the world are going to help them get past the huge lag between OpenSolaris and Linux.
While ZFS is cool, it will someday be ported to Linux (the market forces are such). The advantages over ext3 etc. are simply not compelling enough for me to abandon an entire universe of software and hardware I have gotten used to with Linux distributions.
I see no use for Dtrace as I use nothing more fancy than Matlab for analyzing my data. No fancy number crunching or developing here. I used to do a lot of heavy duty Fortran 95 programming, but that is history (which will not be repeated).
So, Sun wants me to trial an OS that is about 5 years late, and has major hardware problems while offering no compelling reasons for the switch. Sorry, but Microsoft beat Sun by a year or so. Its called Vista.
I used to be a Solaris user (on Sun hardware) - used it for about 5-6 years. The image of pricey hardware that worked at half the speed of commonly available Intel/AMD hardware running Linux has sort of stayed with me.
That is false. There is no such thing as Debian. Its Debian Stable, or Debian Testing, or Debian Unstable (and even Debian Experimental if you count the repos).
Many people who use Debian for a personal system, tend to run Debian Testing. A somewhat smaller number run Debian Unstable. Only servers and people with such mission critical needs use Debian Stable.
Ubuntu is a six monthly freeze snapshot of Debian Unstable. They freeze it, fix bugs in it, put the bugfixes upstream and then release it.
So, it isn't newer than Debian (since no such thing exists). If anything they are typically older than Debian Unstable the day after the release. Ubuntu does its own updates, which may or may not follow Debian Unstable updates, but in my experience, Debian Unstable updates faster than Ubuntu, even though both start from the same base.
Not to be a nitpick or anything, but your statement was largely false and needed to be corrected.
ISO sells out and countenances a corrupt process about which it had ample warning.
ISO's name becomes dirt among those who care for standards.
Some of the people ticked off at the destruction of this former standards body hold a public protest.
ISO does not like the resulting bad publicity.
I will say this once, ISO, so listen closely. Once a standards body loses the confidence of the people it is supposed to serve, it is terminal, unless it backtracks and expunges the reason for the loss of confidence. Chew on that. Get back to us once you have rediscovered your spine.
And Linus was just playing his golden eyed boy games.
How about taxing politicians everytime they want to waste my time by calling my do not call listed phone for polling etc. ?
Gatorade
Has they been Microsoft, they would have put out a statement extolling the virtues of companies that do not violate IP by buying customized business solutions from Microsoft itself.
Good question. For the sake of this invention, I hope that it is more than the sum total of earth's magnetic field and the magnetic field generated by neighboring conductors.
Yes, and the amount of safety equipment that goes with each such installation often ends up being as expensive, if not more expensive, than the silane chambers etc. Translate that to a transmission line hundreds of miles long and think.
You cannot hope to give a country better leadership than it deserves. If people are stupid, they will elect the likes of Bush and Clinton.
So, focus on science while you can in this country and forget about the rest.
Silane explodes with considerable violence on exposure to air. Plus, how are you going to put conductors under great pressure ? The main attractiveness of super conductors lies in long distance electrical supply lines. Unless they come up with a way to hermetically seal the "wire" over distances of hundreds of miles with a seal that can withstand high pressure compressors dotting the landscape (unlikely), this very interesting advance will remain just that - very interesting.
All not counting whether it is more energy efficient to run superconductors with energy hog compressors or to just stick to what we have, hopefully realizing practical room temperature superconductivity.
We have known for a long time that alcohol consumption is not good for those gray cells. Is our culture so alcohol addled that these blunt truths can't otherwise be common public knowledge ?
The magnesium finish on my Dell D830 feels perfectly non-cheap to me. And I don't mean to pry, but how is the plastic as long as it serves its purpose relevant to the laptop (unless you are running around in a Humvee in Iraq - in which case you would buy a toughbook, not an apple or a dell) ? Do you like to use the laptop case for shaving ?
there is some kind of high-pitched inductor/capacitor chirp when you move the mouse around which is incredibly irritating
Never heard of such a thing in a physically undamaged laptop. the speakers are too quiet to watch a DVD with when there's traffic on the road outside
Hint : its a laptop, not a boombox. Sorry, but your complaints sound like carping to me. Not unlike a Maserati owner confusing the relative difference in looks between his car and a trusty Honda Civic for difference in things that matter.
Microsoft - made you more likely to be cruel to little animals
Tux - made you grown a long beard and lose all your friends
Novell - made you betray your friends
Democrat donkey - made you find new ways to destroy yourself
Republican elephant - made you question the value of an education
What is next ?
"Judge, I crashed my car because I stared at a Ferrari logo for too long." ?