Have you never heard of "Migration Assistant"? Not only does it copy your applications, it copies your system setting and documents as well.
Migration assistant copies from one Mac to another; that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about making a fresh install on an existing Mac.
Migration Assistant doesn't help new users; they need to install everything they want to use from scratch.
Migration Assistant doesn't work reliably: some applications never get copied, others end up missing configuration files or license keys.
And Migration Assistant blindly copies bad configuration files and rogue applications, which are often the reason people are doing fresh installs in the first place, so they can't actually use it.
Ubuntu on MacBook is a lot of work because MacBooks are odd. I wouldn't actually bother with Apple hardware: Ubuntu is far easier to install on a PC laptop, and you save money, too.
That being said, it took me hours of work just getting it up to what I would consider basic functionality.
You're talking about MacOS, of course, right? Because after a clean MacOS install, you have to manually install all the applications and utilities you want to use.
Ubuntu installs and just works: all the applications are there out of the box.
Yeah, de Icaza makes stupid comments about OOXML and Gil's employer has some obsession with proprietary video formats. Neither of those is a big deal to me, in particular since they are so utterly without consequences: Gnome supports ODF anyway, and lack of Ogg support on the N800 affects almost nobody and is, frankly, the least of Nokia's problems.
To me, the biggest problem in the open source world is still those stupid dual-licenses from companies like Troll Tech and Sun. I therefore take a principled stand against KDE: as long as it is based on a dual-licensed toolkit, I consider KDE evil and will not use it.
Why can't it re-processed from current "long term storage"? That actually makes little sense. Uranium is mined from much more diluted sources than that and somehow it gets concentrated without problems even though it has much wider range of impurities.
Because when you're mining and refining uranium, you're extracting a single isotope with defined chemical and physical properties. In addition, uranium isn't very radioactive, so it's comparatively easy to handle.
Nuclear waste is a complex mix of radioisotopes that have nothing in common chemically or physically. Even though you could burn them in a nuclear reactor if they were concentrated, once they have been taken out of the reactor and diluted for storage, there is no effective process to separate them out from the inert materials. And nuclear waste is highly radioactive, so it's hard to handle and process.
so political will is *fundamental* in any nuclear project. I've seen very few projects in civilian nuclear arena go because the scientists were recommending that the project is not possible. Almost all of the projects that are canceled, are canceled for political reasons.
Of course. And that is as it should be, because the nuclear projects that are being proposed are irresponsible.
And, of course, "political will" is fundamental: until there is the political will to propose and push through nuclear power plants that make sense, nuclear will continue to fail.
Shouldn't you start with the countries that are in most desperate need?
First of all, I dispute that sending food to countries is "helping" them.
More importantly, however, no, that's not a good strategy. Some countries simply can't be helped right now: they have political or social issues that they need to work out for themselves, and where external aid doesn't necessarily help or may even undermine them.
Furthermore, a better strategy is to invest your aid dollars in countries and projects where you get the biggest economic and educational benefit for the buck, because every country you improve in that way stops draining aid dollars and starts becoming a contributor.
Instead of spreading our aid dollars around the world, we should probably pick a small number of countries where real progress is likely in the short term and focus all our aid on those countries. And our aid should consist of favorable trading terms, education, investments, and infrastructure, not hand-outs. As soon as those countries have become developed, they can join in and help more countries.
Nuclear fuel, as found in nature, is no more dangerous than lead. I had some uranium ores as a kid. It's harmless because it has had billions of years to decay, so that only the long-lived isotopes are left.
Nuclear waste, however, contains a lot of short-lived isotopes, which are very dangerous. Give it another billion years, and that waste will be harmless again. But we need to be worried about the next few thousand years.
That is why nuclear power is such an issue: you take a material that has decayed and become largely harmless and you transform it into something that is going to be dangerous for thousands of years to come. And there is no way to get rid of the waste once you have created it and processed it for storage; you can't just shove it into a reactor again.
The only responsible use of nuclear power is to build reactors that don't generate high level nuclear waste. Those are theoretically feasible, but they aren't being built. Instead, people keep proposing and building the unsafe kind.
Current nuclear waste is lots great fuel for these reactors.
That is true only if you ship the waste off to those reactors right away.
It is not true anymore once the waste has been processed for storage. So, we can't just keep building reactors using currently popular commercial technologies, keep accumulating waste, and then hope that at some point in the future, we can extract more energy from that waste.
Too bad it was canceled for political reasons.
Yes, and those "political reasons" are just as important as physical laws and technological reasons.
Politicians just want to be elected and people don't want to know about nuclear
That argument is bullshit. People who "don't want to know about nuclear" don't care what type of reactor is being built. The people who have been holding up breeders, IFRs, etc. are people who are already pro-nuclear, but who, for various reasons, prefer wasteful and dangerous technologies.
Until proponents of nuclear power manage to come up with realistic plans and commitments to efficient and safe designs, and until they stop proposing inefficient and unsafe designs, the only rational choice is not to have nuclear power at all.
But US Nuclear scientists have already developed a 99.5% efficient reactor and ran a 40MW prototype - the Integral Fast Reactor at Argone National Labs. Clinton de-funded this effort ~3 weeks into his first term and it was killed the next year.
Republicans are just as responsible for killing those efforts. And the reason may well be that there's a lot more profit in highly wasteful, dangerous nuclear power plants.
People trying to sell nuclear energy are engaging in bait-and-switch: they are baiting with the theoretically possible efficient reactors, but when it comes to deployment, switch to the inefficient, wasteful, dangerous kind. And as long as that's the case, nuclear power is simply off the table.
Yes, Microsoft makes money on its software. I still fail to see why this is a bad thing.
For typical software companies like Microsoft, only a small percentage of their expenses goes to software development.
With Microsoft, the problem is even worse because most of their money doesn't derive from the value the software engineers create and any fair competition in the market, it comes from their business practices.
They should work for free, so that their hard work can then be given away for free?
That's a bogus argument, since most free software developers get paid quite well.
Cutting out all the other people that get paid at companies like Microsoft--the PR and marketing guys, the lawyers, the administrators, the strategists, and the FUDsters--saves a lot of money, allowing programmers on open source projects to be paid well even though the revenue stream is much smaller.
Mostly, the fact that what passes for "nuclear power" right now is wasting 99% of the energy contained in the nuclear fuel and unnecessarily generates highly radioactive waste that nobody has figured out how to dispose of safely. Until those economic and political aspects have been addressed, nuclear power remains dangerous and irresponsible.
The second reason is that the world's supply of nuclear fuel is actually fairly limited. That means that nuclear power is at best a temporary band-aid anyway. Furthermore, the best use for nuclear fuel is likely space exploration, and we'll be severely hampered in that if we burn it all up on earth to run toaster ovens.
Lastly, renewable energy sources have become much more realistic, with engineered bio-fuels, much improved wind and solar generation, and much better storage technologies. I think it is much more realistic that we can supply all our energy needs from renewable, distributed power generation than from a gigantic nuclear power infrastructure.
Yes, in theory we could build a safe and efficient nuclear infrastructure. But what actually gets deployed is the dangerous, inefficient kind of nuclear power, the kind that generates highly dangerous nuclear waste and could exhaust our supply of nuclear fuel in a century or two.
Debates whether "nuclear energy is safe" are meaningless. We need a debate about whether specific, planned nuclear policies and strategies are safe, and the ones that are on the drawing board right now clearly are not.
subduction zones seem to be the best place to put it to me. what can go wrong with that?
Plates move a few inches per year, so all the highly radioactive waste will have decayed by the time the waste finally disappears; in effect, subduction zones are no different from just dumping the radioactive waste into the ground or into the sea floor.
If you actually managed to get radioactive waste into a subduction zone in any meaningful way, that stuff doesn't disappear, it either flies out a volcano or it gets manufactured into new crust, neither of which is necessarily particularly safe.
There's a whole lot of nations in all sorts of stages of development. OLPC is for that subset of nations that is at a stage where they can take advantage of it.
If our principle were that all nations need to wait with using technology until the worst-off nations aren't starving anymore, we'd all have to throw away our computers.
It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice.
The main effect of western food aid on developing nations is to kill their own agriculture and ensure permanent dependence on foreign aid and food imports, since producers in those nations can't compete with free. To make things even worse, the same nations that send food aid have erected barriers to allow producers in those nations to export their agricultural products.
Except for very short term disaster relief, sending food "aid" to developing nations is evil.
That's the point: while voting irregularities are unfortunate, as long as there is a regular transition of power, you still have a fairly well functioning democracy. It's when individuals and/or parties start installing themselves for the long term that democracy has died.
First of all, there are many different kinds of nuclear waste. Some are fairly safe, others aren't. Your analogy to Hiroshima is bullshit; exposure to a nuclear bomb and nuclear fallout is not the same as exposure to nuclear waste.
Second, there is no safe permanent nuclear waste disposal at the moment; all nuclear waste is stored above ground in temporary storage because there is no agreement on where to put it for the long term. That's not just political wrangling; it's simply that nobody knows what storage locations are stable over the long time.
Third, currently deployed nuclear reactors are irresponsibly wasteful of nuclear energy; they extract only a small fraction of the energy and generate high-level dangerous waste.
I think what you're saying is that nuclear energy could be safe. But it is not safe using current or planned reactor technologies and current nuclear waste disposal techniques. So, let's go ahead with nuclear technology after adopting efficient nuclear power plants and after getting consensus on waste disposal.
If you go to DECS's home page, you'll see that he's strongly biased in favor of all things Apple. So, take his comments with a big lump of salt. In his Apple-centric world-view, of course, MPEG4 and AAC are the natural Internet audio and video formats, and, of course, DRM is the right way of doing business.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF? No, you don't.
Yes, you do.
Have you never heard of "Migration Assistant"? Not only does it copy your applications, it copies your system setting and documents as well.
Migration assistant copies from one Mac to another; that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about making a fresh install on an existing Mac.
Migration Assistant doesn't help new users; they need to install everything they want to use from scratch.
Migration Assistant doesn't work reliably: some applications never get copied, others end up missing configuration files or license keys.
And Migration Assistant blindly copies bad configuration files and rogue applications, which are often the reason people are doing fresh installs in the first place, so they can't actually use it.
Ubuntu on MacBook is a lot of work because MacBooks are odd. I wouldn't actually bother with Apple hardware: Ubuntu is far easier to install on a PC laptop, and you save money, too.
That being said, it took me hours of work just getting it up to what I would consider basic functionality.
You're talking about MacOS, of course, right? Because after a clean MacOS install, you have to manually install all the applications and utilities you want to use.
Ubuntu installs and just works: all the applications are there out of the box.
Our planet is decaying in its own filth, and is best avoided by all aliens.
folks: people could die without these radioisotopes
And people could die in a nuclear accident.
i think we all know what the obvious answer is
That's because you're no worse off calling the ambulance from your broken down car on the highway as you would be from home.
please, no more scolding lectures about safety first, the canadian government did the right thing
No, they did not, because this action will make it even harder to convince communities to permit nuclear facilities to be located near them.
The cat isn't "glow-in-the-dark" it is fluorescent.
Yeah, de Icaza makes stupid comments about OOXML and Gil's employer has some obsession with proprietary video formats. Neither of those is a big deal to me, in particular since they are so utterly without consequences: Gnome supports ODF anyway, and lack of Ogg support on the N800 affects almost nobody and is, frankly, the least of Nokia's problems.
To me, the biggest problem in the open source world is still those stupid dual-licenses from companies like Troll Tech and Sun. I therefore take a principled stand against KDE: as long as it is based on a dual-licensed toolkit, I consider KDE evil and will not use it.
I think it's safe to say that this has come to a crashing halt over the last 50 years.
How can you tell whether music is from an artist represented by the RIAA?
Maybe we should ask for a labeling requirement on all music (CD, on-line, radio) indicating whether the music comes from an RIAA artist or not.
Why can't it re-processed from current "long term storage"? That actually makes little sense. Uranium is mined from much more diluted sources than that and somehow it gets concentrated without problems even though it has much wider range of impurities.
Because when you're mining and refining uranium, you're extracting a single isotope with defined chemical and physical properties. In addition, uranium isn't very radioactive, so it's comparatively easy to handle.
Nuclear waste is a complex mix of radioisotopes that have nothing in common chemically or physically. Even though you could burn them in a nuclear reactor if they were concentrated, once they have been taken out of the reactor and diluted for storage, there is no effective process to separate them out from the inert materials. And nuclear waste is highly radioactive, so it's hard to handle and process.
so political will is *fundamental* in any nuclear project. I've seen very few projects in civilian nuclear arena go because the scientists were recommending that the project is not possible. Almost all of the projects that are canceled, are canceled for political reasons.
Of course. And that is as it should be, because the nuclear projects that are being proposed are irresponsible.
And, of course, "political will" is fundamental: until there is the political will to propose and push through nuclear power plants that make sense, nuclear will continue to fail.
Shouldn't you start with the countries that are in most desperate need?
First of all, I dispute that sending food to countries is "helping" them.
More importantly, however, no, that's not a good strategy. Some countries simply can't be helped right now: they have political or social issues that they need to work out for themselves, and where external aid doesn't necessarily help or may even undermine them.
Furthermore, a better strategy is to invest your aid dollars in countries and projects where you get the biggest economic and educational benefit for the buck, because every country you improve in that way stops draining aid dollars and starts becoming a contributor.
Instead of spreading our aid dollars around the world, we should probably pick a small number of countries where real progress is likely in the short term and focus all our aid on those countries. And our aid should consist of favorable trading terms, education, investments, and infrastructure, not hand-outs. As soon as those countries have become developed, they can join in and help more countries.
where do you think the nuclear fuel comes from?
Nuclear fuel is not the same as nuclear waste.
Nuclear fuel, as found in nature, is no more dangerous than lead. I had some uranium ores as a kid. It's harmless because it has had billions of years to decay, so that only the long-lived isotopes are left.
Nuclear waste, however, contains a lot of short-lived isotopes, which are very dangerous. Give it another billion years, and that waste will be harmless again. But we need to be worried about the next few thousand years.
That is why nuclear power is such an issue: you take a material that has decayed and become largely harmless and you transform it into something that is going to be dangerous for thousands of years to come. And there is no way to get rid of the waste once you have created it and processed it for storage; you can't just shove it into a reactor again.
The only responsible use of nuclear power is to build reactors that don't generate high level nuclear waste. Those are theoretically feasible, but they aren't being built. Instead, people keep proposing and building the unsafe kind.
Current nuclear waste is lots great fuel for these reactors.
That is true only if you ship the waste off to those reactors right away.
It is not true anymore once the waste has been processed for storage. So, we can't just keep building reactors using currently popular commercial technologies, keep accumulating waste, and then hope that at some point in the future, we can extract more energy from that waste.
Too bad it was canceled for political reasons.
Yes, and those "political reasons" are just as important as physical laws and technological reasons.
Politicians just want to be elected and people don't want to know about nuclear
That argument is bullshit. People who "don't want to know about nuclear" don't care what type of reactor is being built. The people who have been holding up breeders, IFRs, etc. are people who are already pro-nuclear, but who, for various reasons, prefer wasteful and dangerous technologies.
Until proponents of nuclear power manage to come up with realistic plans and commitments to efficient and safe designs, and until they stop proposing inefficient and unsafe designs, the only rational choice is not to have nuclear power at all.
But US Nuclear scientists have already developed a 99.5% efficient reactor and ran a 40MW prototype - the Integral Fast Reactor at Argone National Labs. Clinton de-funded this effort ~3 weeks into his first term and it was killed the next year.
Republicans are just as responsible for killing those efforts. And the reason may well be that there's a lot more profit in highly wasteful, dangerous nuclear power plants.
People trying to sell nuclear energy are engaging in bait-and-switch: they are baiting with the theoretically possible efficient reactors, but when it comes to deployment, switch to the inefficient, wasteful, dangerous kind. And as long as that's the case, nuclear power is simply off the table.
The idea of a full visual record of one's life has been around for many years. Here's one of the pioneers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann
I don't see what Microsoft actually contributed to this work.
Yes, Microsoft makes money on its software. I still fail to see why this is a bad thing.
For typical software companies like Microsoft, only a small percentage of their expenses goes to software development.
With Microsoft, the problem is even worse because most of their money doesn't derive from the value the software engineers create and any fair competition in the market, it comes from their business practices.
They should work for free, so that their hard work can then be given away for free?
That's a bogus argument, since most free software developers get paid quite well.
Cutting out all the other people that get paid at companies like Microsoft--the PR and marketing guys, the lawyers, the administrators, the strategists, and the FUDsters--saves a lot of money, allowing programmers on open source projects to be paid well even though the revenue stream is much smaller.
What exactly changed your mind?
Mostly, the fact that what passes for "nuclear power" right now is wasting 99% of the energy contained in the nuclear fuel and unnecessarily generates highly radioactive waste that nobody has figured out how to dispose of safely. Until those economic and political aspects have been addressed, nuclear power remains dangerous and irresponsible.
The second reason is that the world's supply of nuclear fuel is actually fairly limited. That means that nuclear power is at best a temporary band-aid anyway. Furthermore, the best use for nuclear fuel is likely space exploration, and we'll be severely hampered in that if we burn it all up on earth to run toaster ovens.
Lastly, renewable energy sources have become much more realistic, with engineered bio-fuels, much improved wind and solar generation, and much better storage technologies. I think it is much more realistic that we can supply all our energy needs from renewable, distributed power generation than from a gigantic nuclear power infrastructure.
Safe waste disposal already exists in theory
Yes, in theory we could build a safe and efficient nuclear infrastructure. But what actually gets deployed is the dangerous, inefficient kind of nuclear power, the kind that generates highly dangerous nuclear waste and could exhaust our supply of nuclear fuel in a century or two.
Debates whether "nuclear energy is safe" are meaningless. We need a debate about whether specific, planned nuclear policies and strategies are safe, and the ones that are on the drawing board right now clearly are not.
subduction zones seem to be the best place to put it to me. what can go wrong with that?
Plates move a few inches per year, so all the highly radioactive waste will have decayed by the time the waste finally disappears; in effect, subduction zones are no different from just dumping the radioactive waste into the ground or into the sea floor.
If you actually managed to get radioactive waste into a subduction zone in any meaningful way, that stuff doesn't disappear, it either flies out a volcano or it gets manufactured into new crust, neither of which is necessarily particularly safe.
There's a whole lot of nations in all sorts of stages of development. OLPC is for that subset of nations that is at a stage where they can take advantage of it.
If our principle were that all nations need to wait with using technology until the worst-off nations aren't starving anymore, we'd all have to throw away our computers.
It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice.
The main effect of western food aid on developing nations is to kill their own agriculture and ensure permanent dependence on foreign aid and food imports, since producers in those nations can't compete with free. To make things even worse, the same nations that send food aid have erected barriers to allow producers in those nations to export their agricultural products.
Except for very short term disaster relief, sending food "aid" to developing nations is evil.
Well, I went the other way: I used to be pro-nuclear, and after learning more about it, I think it's a really bad idea.
I guess it should make you happy that I admit that I was wrong after learning more about the subject.
That's the point: while voting irregularities are unfortunate, as long as there is a regular transition of power, you still have a fairly well functioning democracy. It's when individuals and/or parties start installing themselves for the long term that democracy has died.
First of all, there are many different kinds of nuclear waste. Some are fairly safe, others aren't. Your analogy to Hiroshima is bullshit; exposure to a nuclear bomb and nuclear fallout is not the same as exposure to nuclear waste.
Second, there is no safe permanent nuclear waste disposal at the moment; all nuclear waste is stored above ground in temporary storage because there is no agreement on where to put it for the long term. That's not just political wrangling; it's simply that nobody knows what storage locations are stable over the long time.
Third, currently deployed nuclear reactors are irresponsibly wasteful of nuclear energy; they extract only a small fraction of the energy and generate high-level dangerous waste.
I think what you're saying is that nuclear energy could be safe. But it is not safe using current or planned reactor technologies and current nuclear waste disposal techniques. So, let's go ahead with nuclear technology after adopting efficient nuclear power plants and after getting consensus on waste disposal.
If you go to DECS's home page, you'll see that he's strongly biased in favor of all things Apple. So, take his comments with a big lump of salt. In his Apple-centric world-view, of course, MPEG4 and AAC are the natural Internet audio and video formats, and, of course, DRM is the right way of doing business.