The terminal is available right out of the box. Gainroot lets you...er...gain root access. It makes Android look as closed as iPhone OS. Though you might not want to do this (...) you can run Java Swing applications using icedtea. Install icedtea, load application, run.
However, the simple fact is that nobody in the US buys N900s, so the fact that you can buy a pocket sized linux computer that incidentally makes phone calls is quite immaterial.
Unfortunately for the thesis, UK manufacturing still exists and is not that far in GDP per head behind the US. It has declined in relative terms under New Labour. Under Thatcher it initially declined then grew; the same under Major. Under New Labour, it remained pretty static. One reason was the New Labour obsession with banking, that caused the UKP to rise well above its burgernomic equivalent. The UK is pretty competitive when the UKP is worth between 1.4 and 1.5 USD, but not when it hits 2. Blair and Brown didn't care about that, which is why I, as a relatively left wing person who has worked in export manufacturing, regard them as a disaster.
Oh, and by the way, the early 70s mining strikes could have been resolved if Harold Wilson hadn't deliberately sabotaged negotiations because it was more important to him to defeat the Conservatives than to protect the economy. When Wilson resigned, a colleague watching the news on television, a Welsh miner's son of impeccable left-wing credentials, actually shouted at the set that the "evil little bastard shouldn't be allowed to just walk away like that". With inside knowledge, he blamed Wilson, not Heath, for the miners' strike and their consequent impoverishment.
They are actually proposing mutualisation/co-operatives, which is rather different. The John Lewis group has been amply demonstrating over the declining years of the banking bubble just how resilient and effective mutuals can be (strictly it's a partnership), and the organisation of PCTs should be a prime case for mutualisation. On the other hand, the PCTs have become stuffed with Labour apparatchiks and have been busily empire building. People I know in the area, both on the left and the right, are appalled at how top-heavy they have become, with nurses reclassified as "managers" and ceasing to do useful jobs, while some PCTs are claimed to have been employing statisticians and IT staff specifically to game the McKinseyite target system. It needs sorting out. Mutualisation, giving the actual nursing and medical staff the power to vote on the running of the business, would seem to be a considerable step forward.
The Lib Dems are strong in local government. Labour (and Thatcherites) hated it. The Lib Dems will support anything that devolves power back to local Government, and Cameron and the Conservative modernisers seem to be less London-centric than New Labour, which basically viewed the country as London, Edinburgh, and the railway line in between. I think it's significant that the new local government Minister is from Yorkshire, possibly the most anti-London part of England. He's begun quite well by announcing that he will ban councils from lobbying or employing lobbyists, which means they will have to put more effort into informing local electorates and less into trying to influence London-based politicians.
It was Thatcher who began the process of disenfranching not only voters but MPs by governing by Statutory Instrument, but New Labour were enthusiastic adopters of it (along with PFI, which transferred public projests to private management and made them more profitable for construction and services companies.) The new Government will, I think, actually find it quite hard to be worse.
This is a parade I've rained on before. Put simply, airships are incompatible with modern logistics and so are not cost effective. Why? Because they rely on buoyancy. Unless you are prepared to waste the expensive gas, turning around an aircraft with any significant cargo (and large numbers of humans are significant) either involves being able to hold the thing down with a force equivalent to its cargo load (not easy on something so large and prone to wind forces), or loading and unloading cargo at a similar rate so the mass of the total stays roughly constant. Otherwise, passengers and freight get off, thing heads rapidly skywards. Not good.
Now imagine the costs if the thing must always take off at constant load. It would be like old sailing ships that had to fill up with gravel ballast to make safe return trips (because if they returned empty the wind could simply push them over.) Currently an Airbus 380 can transport about 150t of freight one way, and if it makes the return journey empty, OK it is a wasted trip but it requires less fuel for takeoff, which is significant on short hauls.
If you try to solve the problem by having pumps to transfer gas from the envelope to storage tanks, to control the buoyancy, you have to factor in the cost of ferrying around the pumps and the tanks. It is not impossible, but it would be complicated and expensive and require extensive safety testing before it could be certified. Much of the simplicity relative to an airplane would be lost - and you still end up with something that requires as much or more room as a 380 - a helicopter replacement this is not.
I'm afraid not. A guy called Archimedes (based in Syracuse, but not in NY) rather beat you to it. The lift is the difference between the current density of air and the current density of the fill gas. The MW of air averages around 29, so the lift for helium is 29-4 = 25 units, and for hydrogen is 29-2 is 27 units. If helium wasn't so expensive, the small loss of lift would be justified on safety alone.
The other problems with hydrogen are (a) that it leaks out of just about everything even faster than helium does and (b) your safety statement is utterly unproven - because nobody has recently built full size airships and compared the safety record to current winged aircraft, which are quite extraordinarily safe. Historically, airships in the 1930s might have been safer than airplanes - but since then airplanes have had over 70 years of technical advancement which have paid off massively.
The Government website is slightly clunky but yes, it works. It's a pity the last Government tried to make the system too big and intrusive (Government of anal retentive Stalinists, I'm afraid) because some of the automation projects were very good - like the link between passports and driving licences, which worked perfectly when I had to renew one and change the other, and the car tax system which checks your documents on-line.
It also means that British accounting systems have to be really good because they have to do the essential Government functions more easily than the free versions.
Thermoelectric looks obvious, doesn't it? A few years ago I thought how convenient it would be to use the waste heat from my Diesel boat heater to generate electric power, and I contacted a manufacturer. The reply I got was "we're not even going to quote you because it's insanely expensive". Apparently thermoelectric generators are so expensive they only make sense on things like trans-Siberian or Alaskan gas pipeline monitors, where there isn't enough light for a solar PV supply and the cost of miles of environmentally resistant wiring would be even more prohibitive. Although Peltier generators are cheap, they are hugely inefficient - and even more inefficient in reverse. It would have been cheaper to cover the entire deck in solar panels.
I'm sorry but this is such a common mis-spelling on Slashdot that it's getting to me. Cars have brakes. "Car breaks" means it stops working because of mechanical or electrical failure. Spellcheckers can't fix homophones.
Tell me what decent IT staff would want to do the boring job of maintaining small email, web and IM servers for a few hundred people? It will get put to the end of the queue and forgotten about. I've yet to find a single person who can install a half decent mail server from scratch and and be bothered to do the work of maintaining it for year after year. This is one case where economies of scale are everything and Taylorism has a place. Efficient IT infrastructure needs to be big so that there's enough challenges for the MScs to keep them interested, and enough grunt work for the support army to cover for the inevitable churn of the boring low level jobs.
After his bad reception in Washington, where a number of US politicians tried to cover the British (and Scots) Governments in drilling mud, Cameron is this week in Turkey assuring them of our support for their EU membership bid (and describing Gaza as a prison camp), before the Indians get told that our real Special Relationship is with them. Our new Government is already into Plan B after only a few weeks. The US Administration may have won its war with BP, but it risks being out-manoeuvered in the East,
So long as you did COBOL for money, you're allowed. People got rich writing COBOL. Smalltalk though...has anybody ever earned any money from it (teaching excluded)?
You won't get rid of us in a hurry. So you had better focus on fixing the invasion of privacy. It's going to be a difficult area to fix, especially the balance between exposing the hypocrisy of those in power, and protecting the rights of the poor.
But hang on a minute. It isn't the puritanical pricks who are posting those photos; I personally would never post any picture of anyone in a public place without their permission (if it's evidence of illegality, go to the police.) It's...the people who "know how to have a good time". And who are the people who post inappropriate images out of a desire to bully or mock? Check. Perhaps someone needs a slight values reassessment.
I thought on some current thinking there is no such thing as "time"; like money, it is just a representation of something more fundamental - change in entropy perhaps. Things in the Universe change, and we assign a scale to the perceived rate of change by comparing it to something else that changes in what we consider to be a regular way. Like money, the value of time varies according to where it is being used or measured.
If this view or something like it is correct, then "time travel" is a bogus concept. (Negative money, debt, is only a meaningful concept because people agree to pretend that it exists, but it has no objective correlate in the physical world.)
I agree with what you say, though I myself am not a theist. I think the root objection that I have to Dawkins is that he has merely substituted "rationality" as his ultimate source of authority, on the basis that "rationality" works. However, the constant counter-intuitive discoveries of physics show that rationality is a constantly moving target. Today's rational argument from a priori axioms is tomorrow's misapplication of bad science. We cannot argue against the existence of a prime mover by any rational argument, because any rational argument may be superseded by new discoveries. "Scientific rationalism" cannot go any further than agnosticism, and to try to do so is to resort to blind faith in atheism. On that basis, Dawkins is as delusional (in his terms) as the people he mocks, because he demands more authority for his beliefs that they warrant.
Many people will rubbish Acer, but I've found their business machines to be boringly reliable. Same with Lenovo. I personally have 5 Acers currently on the go which are over 4 years old, three used as servers, one desktop and one Ferrari notebook which has been heavily abused and just keeps going. But we also have some Dell servers and a slew of HP laptops that have never given any trouble.
My baseline suggestions would be:
Always buy machines for business users
Never buy the latest technology
If it's really cheap, there's a reason
That, and two very important points.
Hard drives are the most unreliable part of modern PCs.Replace the hard drives once they're out of warranty. All you need is a good quality USB2 hard drive and HD Clone. Keep the old drives somewhere safe as your second line disaster recovery if you lose old data. If you have a lot of friends and family to look after, the small cost of your duplicator is easily amortised.
Get a large can of dust blaster and clean out the ventilation of laptops periodically (depending on environment). Component life can roughly double for each 10 degreee C fall in temperature, and removing dust from internal heatsinks can often achieve that.
So when you pay your taxes and you read of some lawyer or accountant who weasels his way into not paying any, this makes him a hero?
As someone's sig says "taxes buy civilisation". Phelps wants it both ways: he wants the Government to let him sue anyone who crosses him, and he doesn't want to pay for it. This, in my book, makes him a leech.
I have an MSI Wind for testing which dual boots XP and 10.04. Both 3 and Vodafone 3G dongles install on both operating systems, but with Linux I don't get the tedious "phone" application, it just works. It is, ffs, a modem. And Unix and Linux are far, far better at modems and terminals than Windows ever will be.
Paper on molten salt tanksThis suggests that you have misunderstood. It appears to be economic to use ordinary carbon steel rather than a stainless steel for the containment vessel, for a cost saving of around 20%. I was too pessimistic in my own post (below).
Very few things are generally corrosive. It depends on the chemistry involved. For instance, dilute sodium hydroxide can be kept perfectly safely for years in mild steel tanks exposed to the air, whereas water or concentrated hydroxide would rapidly corrode them. It's a mistake to assume that even A4 (316), the industry standard, is suitable for everything; there are plenty of things that corrode it.
Having said that, it's been known for a long time that certain austenitic high-chrome alloys resist molten alkali nitrates very well. I would imagine that the designers of this plant have optimised the piping for the salt mixture in use, using the usual lifetime/costs tradeoffs in corrosion engineering. (The same tradeoffs that make it much cheaper, for instance, to make a boat out of steel with sacrificial anodes than out of stainless steel or aluminum)
Exactly as with this plant, there will be several proofs of concept along the way to regulatory approval and workable production plants. How long will it take? In the early days of reactors there was little regulatory oversight and a gung-ho approach. Not so now. It's reasonable to assume that this design is unlikely to be in volume production much before 2040 - by which time solar plants will be bigger, cheaper and well established.
On one version of your argument, the Neandertals went extinct because one announced to the other "Ugg go invent fire", and the other one said "Ugg crazy, wait for homo sap to invent central heating"
And Meghrabi was recently released on erroneous health problems
. I do hope that you realise that you are libelling a number of Scottish doctors, as you have no evidence for that statement - many cancers do have unexpected periods of remission. Meghrabi was convicted under Scottish law - not by an International Court - and was also released under Scottish law - which, by the way, Cameron cannot legally interfere with, as it is separate from the English legal system.
You may not like Scottish law. I personally consider aspects of US Law, like your constant reference to an 18th century document to deal with 21st century issues, to be laughable. But if someone is tried, convicted and dealt with under sovereign Scottish law, US politicians have no business whatever interfering. The McKinnon case, similarly, is one of someone who should have been dealt with under English law - but the US interfered.
However, my basic point is that pissing off a new Prime Minister is likely to be counterproductive in the long term. Your failure to understand this seems to be shared by a large number of your countrymen.
is the US Government trying to force the British Prime Minister to intervene in the Scottish courts over Meghrabi? US politicians seem to be doing their best to make Cameron feel that anti-British sentiment is alive and kicking. I quite realise that we actually are a declining little country of no great importance to the US except as a kicking boy, but they should be aware that Etonians are trained to hide their real feelings - and exact revenge at a time that suits them.
Slashdot Mirror
200kg to 1 sf is 400lb, not 500. Picky I know, but 500lb is still wrong on any scale.
However, the simple fact is that nobody in the US buys N900s, so the fact that you can buy a pocket sized linux computer that incidentally makes phone calls is quite immaterial.
Oh, and by the way, the early 70s mining strikes could have been resolved if Harold Wilson hadn't deliberately sabotaged negotiations because it was more important to him to defeat the Conservatives than to protect the economy. When Wilson resigned, a colleague watching the news on television, a Welsh miner's son of impeccable left-wing credentials, actually shouted at the set that the "evil little bastard shouldn't be allowed to just walk away like that". With inside knowledge, he blamed Wilson, not Heath, for the miners' strike and their consequent impoverishment.
They are actually proposing mutualisation/co-operatives, which is rather different. The John Lewis group has been amply demonstrating over the declining years of the banking bubble just how resilient and effective mutuals can be (strictly it's a partnership), and the organisation of PCTs should be a prime case for mutualisation. On the other hand, the PCTs have become stuffed with Labour apparatchiks and have been busily empire building. People I know in the area, both on the left and the right, are appalled at how top-heavy they have become, with nurses reclassified as "managers" and ceasing to do useful jobs, while some PCTs are claimed to have been employing statisticians and IT staff specifically to game the McKinseyite target system. It needs sorting out. Mutualisation, giving the actual nursing and medical staff the power to vote on the running of the business, would seem to be a considerable step forward.
It was Thatcher who began the process of disenfranching not only voters but MPs by governing by Statutory Instrument, but New Labour were enthusiastic adopters of it (along with PFI, which transferred public projests to private management and made them more profitable for construction and services companies.) The new Government will, I think, actually find it quite hard to be worse.
Now imagine the costs if the thing must always take off at constant load. It would be like old sailing ships that had to fill up with gravel ballast to make safe return trips (because if they returned empty the wind could simply push them over.) Currently an Airbus 380 can transport about 150t of freight one way, and if it makes the return journey empty, OK it is a wasted trip but it requires less fuel for takeoff, which is significant on short hauls.
If you try to solve the problem by having pumps to transfer gas from the envelope to storage tanks, to control the buoyancy, you have to factor in the cost of ferrying around the pumps and the tanks. It is not impossible, but it would be complicated and expensive and require extensive safety testing before it could be certified. Much of the simplicity relative to an airplane would be lost - and you still end up with something that requires as much or more room as a 380 - a helicopter replacement this is not.
The other problems with hydrogen are (a) that it leaks out of just about everything even faster than helium does and (b) your safety statement is utterly unproven - because nobody has recently built full size airships and compared the safety record to current winged aircraft, which are quite extraordinarily safe. Historically, airships in the 1930s might have been safer than airplanes - but since then airplanes have had over 70 years of technical advancement which have paid off massively.
It also means that British accounting systems have to be really good because they have to do the essential Government functions more easily than the free versions.
Thermoelectric looks obvious, doesn't it? A few years ago I thought how convenient it would be to use the waste heat from my Diesel boat heater to generate electric power, and I contacted a manufacturer. The reply I got was "we're not even going to quote you because it's insanely expensive". Apparently thermoelectric generators are so expensive they only make sense on things like trans-Siberian or Alaskan gas pipeline monitors, where there isn't enough light for a solar PV supply and the cost of miles of environmentally resistant wiring would be even more prohibitive. Although Peltier generators are cheap, they are hugely inefficient - and even more inefficient in reverse. It would have been cheaper to cover the entire deck in solar panels.
If a quad core system is taking 20 minutes to build an index on a table with 300 000 rows and any sane key, something is very seriously wrong.
I'm sorry but this is such a common mis-spelling on Slashdot that it's getting to me. Cars have brakes. "Car breaks" means it stops working because of mechanical or electrical failure. Spellcheckers can't fix homophones.
Tell me what decent IT staff would want to do the boring job of maintaining small email, web and IM servers for a few hundred people? It will get put to the end of the queue and forgotten about. I've yet to find a single person who can install a half decent mail server from scratch and and be bothered to do the work of maintaining it for year after year. This is one case where economies of scale are everything and Taylorism has a place. Efficient IT infrastructure needs to be big so that there's enough challenges for the MScs to keep them interested, and enough grunt work for the support army to cover for the inevitable churn of the boring low level jobs.
After his bad reception in Washington, where a number of US politicians tried to cover the British (and Scots) Governments in drilling mud, Cameron is this week in Turkey assuring them of our support for their EU membership bid (and describing Gaza as a prison camp), before the Indians get told that our real Special Relationship is with them. Our new Government is already into Plan B after only a few weeks. The US Administration may have won its war with BP, but it risks being out-manoeuvered in the East,
So long as you did COBOL for money, you're allowed. People got rich writing COBOL. Smalltalk though...has anybody ever earned any money from it (teaching excluded)?
But hang on a minute. It isn't the puritanical pricks who are posting those photos; I personally would never post any picture of anyone in a public place without their permission (if it's evidence of illegality, go to the police.) It's...the people who "know how to have a good time". And who are the people who post inappropriate images out of a desire to bully or mock? Check. Perhaps someone needs a slight values reassessment.
If this view or something like it is correct, then "time travel" is a bogus concept. (Negative money, debt, is only a meaningful concept because people agree to pretend that it exists, but it has no objective correlate in the physical world.)
I agree with what you say, though I myself am not a theist. I think the root objection that I have to Dawkins is that he has merely substituted "rationality" as his ultimate source of authority, on the basis that "rationality" works. However, the constant counter-intuitive discoveries of physics show that rationality is a constantly moving target. Today's rational argument from a priori axioms is tomorrow's misapplication of bad science. We cannot argue against the existence of a prime mover by any rational argument, because any rational argument may be superseded by new discoveries. "Scientific rationalism" cannot go any further than agnosticism, and to try to do so is to resort to blind faith in atheism. On that basis, Dawkins is as delusional (in his terms) as the people he mocks, because he demands more authority for his beliefs that they warrant.
My baseline suggestions would be:
That, and two very important points.
Hard drives are the most unreliable part of modern PCs.Replace the hard drives once they're out of warranty. All you need is a good quality USB2 hard drive and HD Clone. Keep the old drives somewhere safe as your second line disaster recovery if you lose old data. If you have a lot of friends and family to look after, the small cost of your duplicator is easily amortised.
Get a large can of dust blaster and clean out the ventilation of laptops periodically (depending on environment). Component life can roughly double for each 10 degreee C fall in temperature, and removing dust from internal heatsinks can often achieve that.
As someone's sig says "taxes buy civilisation". Phelps wants it both ways: he wants the Government to let him sue anyone who crosses him, and he doesn't want to pay for it. This, in my book, makes him a leech.
I have an MSI Wind for testing which dual boots XP and 10.04. Both 3 and Vodafone 3G dongles install on both operating systems, but with Linux I don't get the tedious "phone" application, it just works. It is, ffs, a modem. And Unix and Linux are far, far better at modems and terminals than Windows ever will be.
Paper on molten salt tanksThis suggests that you have misunderstood. It appears to be economic to use ordinary carbon steel rather than a stainless steel for the containment vessel, for a cost saving of around 20%. I was too pessimistic in my own post (below).
Having said that, it's been known for a long time that certain austenitic high-chrome alloys resist molten alkali nitrates very well. I would imagine that the designers of this plant have optimised the piping for the salt mixture in use, using the usual lifetime/costs tradeoffs in corrosion engineering. (The same tradeoffs that make it much cheaper, for instance, to make a boat out of steel with sacrificial anodes than out of stainless steel or aluminum)
On one version of your argument, the Neandertals went extinct because one announced to the other "Ugg go invent fire", and the other one said "Ugg crazy, wait for homo sap to invent central heating"
. I do hope that you realise that you are libelling a number of Scottish doctors, as you have no evidence for that statement - many cancers do have unexpected periods of remission. Meghrabi was convicted under Scottish law - not by an International Court - and was also released under Scottish law - which, by the way, Cameron cannot legally interfere with, as it is separate from the English legal system.
You may not like Scottish law. I personally consider aspects of US Law, like your constant reference to an 18th century document to deal with 21st century issues, to be laughable. But if someone is tried, convicted and dealt with under sovereign Scottish law, US politicians have no business whatever interfering. The McKinnon case, similarly, is one of someone who should have been dealt with under English law - but the US interfered.
However, my basic point is that pissing off a new Prime Minister is likely to be counterproductive in the long term. Your failure to understand this seems to be shared by a large number of your countrymen.
is the US Government trying to force the British Prime Minister to intervene in the Scottish courts over Meghrabi? US politicians seem to be doing their best to make Cameron feel that anti-British sentiment is alive and kicking. I quite realise that we actually are a declining little country of no great importance to the US except as a kicking boy, but they should be aware that Etonians are trained to hide their real feelings - and exact revenge at a time that suits them.