Consider using your CPU as the RAID engine. The hardware engines that venders use can easily end up underpowered when dealing with modern disks. Get enough SATA or SCSI ports and some hot swap bays you can build quite a powerful software array. If you dump the money you would have spent on a hardware RAID card into faster CPU you can easily end up with a faster overall solution.
If you are planning to go the hardware route make sure you get a controller that can keep up. There's nothing worse than having a fast expensive CPU stalled waiting forever for a read because the array's tiny cheap processor is backed up with writes.
Make sure if you go the software route, use an OS that supports it well. I know Linux's support is good but I've heard bad things about Windows. Make sure you can protect the OS as well as other data and can monitor array status and alert someone when things are about to fail or have failed.
I've been thinking about doing something with an embeded linux device with a hard drive and this Kuro Box seems like a much better option than the NLSU2. The drive goes inside the device which makes it much nicer for carrying around. I guess I should be reading Toms Networking more often.
For the original poster, the NSLU2 is probably closer to what they were originally looking for since they were trying to hack it into a single box with a plug. It's smaller, it has 2 usb ports not 1, and it's cheaper (NewEgg has them for $70 referb). Of course, the Kuro is a single box and the power supply is inside it. If they wanted a real hard drive in the device it seems like the obvious winner.
I don't know much about the NIH but it seems to be both publicly and privately funded.
Any time you get an organization like that which works closely with the industry, there will be teams of people spinning and lobbying politicians to influence where funding goes and inevitably a system is setup where if you want to keep your job, you spend money where the industry wants you to.
I doubt the NIH has avoided the industry lapdogization common to government agencies in that kind of position.
The kernel is called Linux. Yea, you may compile against GCC but come on people! it's a Linux specific kernel module. Leave the GNU/ out of it.
That said, Nice job! I love to see the capabilities of Linux expanded in new directions like this. Cool work. I wish I had time to work on cool projects like that.
Companies are in business to make money. It would be irresponsible for someone at a pharmaceutical company to spend money developing something they couldn't make any money on.
The medical community isn't working in our best interest alone. Scientists work in areas where the best interest of the individual overlaps with the best interest of their employer. There are times when the best interest of the individual does not match up with the best interest of any company and these areas of medicine are horribly neglected (see blueberries vs Lipitor, oxygen therapy vs blood pressure medication, low carb vs the AHA Diet, First Do No Harm). I'm not saying that the doctors are wrong on all these things, I'm saying nobody is putting in the work to check up on them because there's nobody to pay for it.
If the only medical research that gets done is privately funded then the only medical advancements that get made will increase the income of medical companies. If that's the case, the cost of medical care can only go up (unless someone is taking someone else's business but that rarely happens)
I don't think this study is alone. Someone needs to fund this stuff or we'll all be taking out second mortgages because the medical community has convinced us we have to or we'll die.
I think this is precisely the ONLY type of campaign that can ever hope to "win" (not end, win) any war on terrorism.
I'm assuming by "this" you mean "Bush will launch a devastatingly aggressive battle in Fallujah and other strongholds of [snip] Islamic fascists."
I think a lot of America agrees with you that this is the best approach to ending terrorism. It might work, but we run the risk of this backfiring horribly. If you take a population outraged by the brutal killing of their people to the point of being willing to die to try to stop it, and go in and kill more of their people, does it make things better or worse? I think it can make things better but it depends on the care with which you conduct the operation. If you maintain an image of caring about the lives and futures of the people over there, you can make things better. If not, you could just end up swelling the ranks of the terrorists and we could have a 9/11 every year for decades. Bush isn't great at dealing with the little things and caring about the health and safety of the people in Iraq. There is the possibility that this could go horribly wrong.
Of course, I'm not necessarily convinced that it's self preservation that's motivating people to join terrorist groups as much as it is a sense of "deserving more power". It could be that a brutal smackdown won't swell the ranks of the terrorists, but do the opposite.
The country was clearly divided over this issue and judging by the reaction of the Bush supporters I've seen today it's the "brutal smackdown" votes that won Bush the election.
I really don't see the big fuss, whether God created the world one way or another
I thought it was obvious. The big fuss is that if the intelligent design theory is true, it requires that something outside of natural forces had to be involved (God, aliens, etc.) If not, the possibility exists that there is no God. It's not about being able to believe in God, you will always be able to believe, it's about being able to not believe in God.
It can never be known for certain whether there is a God or not. By definition, it is impossible to prove that anything supernatural does or doesn't exist. What we can do is come up with a plausible explanation why things happen in terms of natural laws. In the face of a scientific explanation for things and evidence to back it up, most supernatural beliefs look fanciful and are eventually discarded (see origins of vampiers, church's objections to lightning rods, etc.)
Over time the role of the supernatural has been diminished as things once attributed to God and other supernatural forces have been explained scientifically. This has had the effect of slowly reducing the impact of beliefs in the supernatural on the world and our every day lives which has generally reduced the impact of the church on society, for better or worse.
The 5/2 looks good, but what's up with the 30/5! It's less than 4 times the bandwidth and it's 4 times the price! That's ludicrous. When are these providers going to understand that price to bandwidth should be a logarithmic relationship. 10 times the speed should be two to four times the price.
I'd understand $75 a month or even $100 a month but $199! That's horrible!
Slashdot seems like a reasonable format to have an intelligent discussion about politics. Unfortunately, that hasn't turned out to be the case. Oh well.
It's stupid to think that any real issues are solved in a presidential election anyway. If you really care about politics, join/form a PAC. I joined iPac which I think is a good start.
Does anyone know of a UPS system designed to/capable of taking advantage of standard 12v car/marine batteries. They are much bigger than your standard UPS battery and yet they are relatively cheap to buy and replace because they are manufactured in volume and stocked in stores. I'd like to see something designed to sit on top of one of these and provide UPS functionality.
The transition to 2.5" drives should begin now. The 1U server market would be a great place to start because space, airflow and power utilization are all problems with 3.5" drives in 1U servers. History tells us within a few years most drives will probably be 2.5". We are at the point where the 2.5" drives are fast enough and have enough capacity to be appropriate for the common desktop user as well as the high end server user. The price premium is currently too high for wide spread desktop adoption but that's less of an issue in the server realm.
The material, storage and transportation costs of 2.5" drives are all dramatically lower than 3.5" so in the end, they should become cheaper than 3.5" drives as the technology ages. Since laptop sales are so high the economies of scale for 2.5" drives are there. All we need now is for a company to streamline their manufacturing to bring the cost down to the levels of 3.5" drives and the en-mass transition will begin.
I for one, can't wait to have 8 drive raid array that fits in two 5.25" drive bays.
Well, "it will run" is more whishful thinking than anything
Right. It's my understanding that it's not a complete Java or.Net implementation, just that it can interpret and run *some* bytecode from those VM's. I didn't mean to imply that you could run Java or.Net programs under Parrot, just that there was some translation capabilities in there.
I'd like to see someone put complete support for Java and.Net bytecode into parrot but it's not worth thinking about until Perl 6, Python, Ruby and PHP are all stable and working well on Parrot and Parrot developers have nothing better to do.
Someone who commits a hateful violent act is expressing hateful violent thoughts in a very bad way. Someone who writes about hateful violent thoughts is expressing them in a much better way. Why in the WORLD would you want to forbid people from doing the right thing?
People have bad thoughts. People have bad ideas. No law can change that. Allowing people to express their bad thoughts to other people is called "venting" for a reason. When people can't vent and explode, things get ugly. We don't want that. Only when hate is drawn out into to the light of day can it be properly death with. This law makes it illegal to do exactly that.
Censorship is not about controlling the words; it's about controlling the thoughts behind them. Trying to control people's thoughts by controlling their ability to express them is a disastrous plan. Serial killers are an example of what happens when people who have bad thoughts can't express them to anyone. They lose the ability to identify with other people. They feel cut off and angry so they strike out in awful ways. We like to think of these people as evil but give a potential serial killer a web site where they can connect with other people who have the same types of feelings and they won't turn into a serial killer.
People's ability to speak their minds, no matter what they are thinking, is a cornerstone of a fair free society. The founders of the US understood this and put rules in place to forbid censorship right into the constitution (which unfortunately, doesn't seem to influence the behavior of the government much).
The arguments to forbid free speech are just like the arguments against violent video games and just as misguided. The people who create these laws are noticing a correlation between the expression of hateful or violent ideas and the commission of violent crimes but are forgetting the cardinal rule:
CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSALITY
Repeat that 3 times so we remember. Someone who really wants to run around their school with a gun killing people is probably not going to choose the Care Bear Movie over Fight Club. Someone who wants to blow up all the people who have hurt them, is probably going to choose Quake over The Simms. People who shop at prosthetic limb stores are more likely to have lost a limb. Correlation does not imply causality.
by the way --- the earlier the money the more good it can do -- it's october. jump on it folks!
This is such a good idea. I've been talking with my friends/coworkers about how nothing is going to change until we have an organization properly lobying for our rights. I the organization I ended up describing looked almost exactly like this one (right down to building off the experience of the EFF.) I'd like to see a group that pushes for more of the things I push for, but this is a great start and worth participating in.
So I joined and donated.
the EFF is a 501(c)(3) public non-profit charity... they cannot make endorsements or they loose their tax deduductible status
Since the EFF apparently can't do this, then this is the right way to make this happen.
cheap, ubiquitous, non-polluting fusion energy for our homes and cars in "5 to 10 years"
That was a horrible thing. It was a big part of why people decided not to move to nuclear power. In the back of everyone's minds was this idea that really, the right way to go is fusion and it'll be ready soon. We could have avoided a lot of ecological damage if people just focused on making what was realistic work.
As far as your statement about "not subsidizing", what would the cost of both electricity and cars if they'd never been subsidized - and if all current subsidies were rescinded?
I don't believe either were subsidized to start with. They both grew from small private isolated systems inside a free market economy.
This is a side-effect of the Petroleum Age.
Just like fusion power being 5 years off, the end of the Petroleum age is a myth. We can make petroleum from biomass on the surface, probably almost as cheep as we pump it out of the ground. The Petroleum Age will never truly end.
Look, in little more than a hundred years, we've managed to do more damage to the environment than in all of human history combined.
By what measure? Air pollution is better most places in the US than it was 100 years ago. So is water pollution. CO2 emissions are way up, true, but you also have a lot of forest re-growth (dangerous amounts, but that's another story.) Plants are having a great time. CO2 levels are up, light is more filtered and they're growing like crazy. Global warming is the biggest environmental issue and the only way you will realistically impact this is with the large scale adoption of nuclear power which is what I'm advocating.
And, no, conservation is NOT the wrong answer. Conservation gives you more time to find another way because it extends your existing resources
While conservation is always part of the answer and, sometimes it is the answer, right now, conservation won't solve our problems. We need more clean power generating capacity than we have right now, no matter how much conservation goes on.
Also, conservation is not always a good thing if the cost is too high. Sometimes you end up wasting more than you save. Think of it this way: Every time you take time out of someone's day, that's time they don't have to get other things done. If you take 10% of everyone's time that means you need 10% more people to get the same amount done. (I know this is wildly simplified, but the effect is real) If those 10% more people use more resources than you saved by taking everyone's time, you had a net loss. This is why I hate recycling. If it's worth my time to sort my garbage manually, it's worth some immigrant's minimum wage to sort it manually much faster and cheaper and it's worth some inventors time to figure out how to sort it even faster and cheaper. It's wrong to guilt people into wasting their time.
the cost of building enough reactors will still be in the hundreds of billions.
And what's the cost of not building them?
And, it won't fix the biggest problem of all - a general unwillingness to do the little things early on that will cost us dearly in the not-so-long run.
Conservation is the wrong answer. Our future society will use much more power than we do now. Focusing on conservation to solve our energy problems is like replacing shingles on a roof while the house is being blown away. It's not useless, but there are much bigger problems we should be working on right now.
What breakthroughs are you hoping for? Cold fusion?
Why is cold fusion so reprehensible to so many environmentalists. Why is the concept of guilt free power use so repulsive to them? Don't count cold fusion out yet. I doubt it will ever play a roll in large scale power generation but I bet it becomes important technology somewhere.
read up on Edison vs Tesla and their fight over DC vs AC power.
I love that story. It's great because the better technology won despite a massive political and public relations campaign trying to stop it. AC is much safer for people (you can be electrocuted by as little as 17 volts DC) and has proven inexpensive and flexible for power distribution.
but the complaints of my friends and colleagues are still the same - electricity costs too much!
Listen to your friends! Electricity does cost too much. It costs us a clean safe environment. It costs us massive manpower and economic resources. It costs us too much money. Electricity should be less expensive, more reliable, and more environmentally friendly than it is. The cost of building nuclear reactors looks staggering but next to the cost of what we do now for power, it's cheap!
Watch the Modern Marvels on giant machines some time. Look at the massive amounts of money and energy we've spend on just a few meager machines that mine a tiny portion of the coal we extract today.
I've tried for 15 years to take the view that attitudes will change
Maybe they're not changing because they shouldn't change.
There's a lot of tinfoil hat type people who think that there is no such thing as environmentally sound power and that we must conserve, it's the only way. This is rubbish. It's important for each type of energy to accurately reflect the cost of that energy, none of them should be subsidized. The cost of energy should reflect it's complete cost. If charging fees for emissions to compensate for the damage those emissions do is possible, it's only fair that we do that. This would go a long way towards encouraging development of environmentally friendly power generation technologies and it makes good economic sense. It's also wildly important for our government to allocate money to research into alternative energy sources.
Some day we will have unlimited power. Despite constant assertions to the contrary over human history, the universe seems to be a closed loop system. All energy is constant, it just changes form. Some day we will discover how to close the loop on our power use and we won't have to care about such things as efficiency, just capacity. Until then, it's our duty to do as little damage to our world as possible. Let's get going!
Therefore intermediate and high level nuclear waste is about 100 and 1 million times more radioactive than natural uranium respectively.
That depends on whether you are talking about U238 or U235. With U235, you are taking radioactive fissionable material that would decay on it's own out of the ground and making it decay in a reactor and capturing the energy from that. This is obviously just fine.
With 238, it's slightly different. You are taking an higly stable yet still radioactive material and pumping it up into plutonium in a breeder reactor. This creates a whole different radioactive decay chain than what would normally happen and makes it happen much quicker.
Most nuclear power is generated using U235 and they are very careful not to make plutonuim in the process. While it's true the radioactive material that comes out of a power plant is much more concentrated than what it was in the ground, it is incorrect to say there's "more" of it. It's the same ammount, just instead of being spread out through massive veins of ore (that sometimes run under residential neighberhoods, like in the case of my house) they are bundled up in a nice little unit that can be stored somewhere where they won't bother people.
Internal combustion power plants? This I'd love to see.
Hehe. I should have said "heat engine" power plants. I used the wrong term.
All of that said, hybrids will be a much better choice than conventional or electrical until battery technology stops sucking and moves past the 1950's.
I can think of at least 4 types of batteries invented after the 1950's. There's tons of R&D put in to them every year.
Batteries alone won't make a bit of difference to this problem. You could have a perfect battery (0 loss, infinite capacity, instant charge time) and still not have electric cars be economical or environmentally sound if power generation is still oil and coal based.
In my mind steam turbines counted as internal combustion engines. I had my definition of internal combustion engine wrong. I should have used the term "heat engine".
What's wrong with having an environment you can enjoy?
My point is not that we shouldn't strive for an enjoyable environment. My point is that striving for an enjoyable environment shouldn't be considered environmentalism. Living on a 200 acre farm with a bunch of show horses may make your environment awesome, but it takes a horrible toll on the environment.
even if it is as safe and as efficient as its proponents would have us believe, it's another Band-Aid over the true problem - the refusal to learn how to live within our environment in a sustainable fashion.
How would changing so that we use nuclear power to live within our environment in a sustainable fashion not be living within our environment in a sustainable fashion?
Also, why do environmentalists keep insisting that the only way to live environmentally soundly is to make huge personal sacrifices and essentially destroy modern society? Why is it wrong to come up with clever technical solutions to the problems instead? Why is it that proposals that would help the environment so often end up ignored, and instead they focus on the goal of making everyone do what they tell us to?
And, your statement about the Seinfeld lifestyle versus the Little House on the Prairie ( or that of Native Americans ) only makes sense if you eliminate the personal automobiles from the equation.
Sigh. Why is it that every time someone recommends getting rid of the car they never indicate what the heck we should replace it with? I've had this discussion before and the answer is that every alternative has horrible consequences that make the problems of the car look trivial.
The biggest problem with using the Little House solution, horses is that you could not have our modern economy with it. Our economy requires a highly specialized labor force. It's almost a given nowadays that there is only one person in the entire world capable of doing a certain job and only a handful within a city reasonably qualified to learn it. We could not have this type of economy with this rapid progress without a highly mobile population. Skills are so specialized that we need to draw upon a huge population in order to make a company function. Horses would be incapable of safely transporting people the distances they need to commute in the time they would need to do it and at the volumes that our economy demands. There are similar issues with walking, biking, motorcycles, trains, busses, and every other silly scheme I've heard brought up. I should also point out the horrible expense and mess that would be caused by approximately 200 million horses running around the US. Parking, traffic, theft, maintenance all turn into nightmares when you consider horses in the kind of numbers we're talking about here.
The lie of the "personal sacrifice" solution to environmental issues lies in the falsehood that if people were willing to just go back to the way things were in the simple old days, everything would be fine. The fact is, each of us were much harder on the environment in the simple old days than we are now, there were just fewer of us. Yes, we use fossil fuels now and we didn't way back in the 1700's but we cut down whole states worth of trees back then just to build the things we needed. Plus, we really don't want to live like we did back then. Life was hard and short and mostly full of back breaking toil. The life of a death row inmate is more fun and probably longer than that of a man in the 1700's. Screw that! I believe that the real solution to environmental issues will not come from everyone sacrificing things voluntarily, it will come from economic incentives and technological advancements.
The good news that I see on the horizon is that our economy is getting so ridiculously specialized that drawing on the population of a densely populated city isn't enough for a lot of companies. They are starting to expand to cover anyone in the world who they can get to do the job by let
isn't a tad bit of a misstatement to call a nuclear power plant non-polluting?
I stick by non-polluting. Taking radioactive material out of the ground and returning less radioactive material to safer places in the ground, is something I can't consider pollution. I believe it makes the environment just ever so slightly safer and better. The radioactive radon gas that constantly seeps up into the room I'm in now is caused by uranium breaking down in the bedrock below me. Take it out and put it in Yucca Mountain and I get less cancer.
Everything anyone does has an impact on nature, right down to swatting mosquitoes. Just because it has an impact on the world, doesn't mean it is pollution. From what I understand, the mining of uranium ore is rough on the environment and could be considered pollution, but it's also my understanding that you could power the entire world for 20 years with what we already pulled out back in the post WW2/cold war era. Plus, mining coal is horrible for the environment, never mind the tons of mercury that comes out when you burn it that they are currently safely storing in the lungs of the general population not to mention fish and other wildlife everywhere. Overall, the switch to nuclear power would dramatically reduce the pollution created by generating power.
Heat is another byproduct of nuclear power generation but it's also a byproduct of every other heat-engine based power technology and is rapidly dissipated with little effect on anything so I don't consider it pollution.
for instance use a lot of chemicals in their manufaturing process more recent advances are allowing for organic solar panels but still a little pollution is generated
I agree that solar power technology currently can't be considered non-polluting. Lots of people consider solar to be the ultimate in low-impact living. This is naive. These are the same people who live on giant plots of land lamenting the high-impact living of people in cities. If you look carefully at it, someone living in downtown Manhattan shares a tiny footprint of land with everyone who lives above and below them whereas the big house in the country disturbs vast expanses of land. If everyone in the United States had a 5 acre plot of land they'd take up almost every bit of land in the continental US (all the mountains, forest, farm land, all of it.) The plain truth is that the Seinfeld lifestyle is much more environmentally friendly than the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle. These same people tend to praise the native American's for their low-impact lifestyle. Each native American required the resources of huge expanses of land to support them. They had a profound impact on the environment but, because their way of life, they couldn't sustain enough population to make a big impact. If you look on a per-person impact basis, native American's were awfully hard on their environment.
Just because it's quaint, simple, and peaceful doesn't mean it's low-impact or environmentally friendly. I'd reclassify most environmentalists as "my environment-ists" because what they really want is to have an environment that they can enjoy, play with and have fun in. They don't care that nuclear power is better for nature, their scared it's bad for them so they hate it.
Right now, oil and coal cost much more than nuclear and pollute horribly yet they are still generating a majority of the world's power. This is silly. It's time to build a lot of nuclear power plants. Lets build them and buy us some time to generate good efficient non-polluting or low pollution methods of generating power that are economically more attractive than nuclear so eventually they shut down on their own because they cost too much.
I was doing some reading about power transmission and distribution a while ago and stumbled across it. I had always heard it was higher, around 15% so the number stuck in my head. I just checked wikipedia and they have it at 7.2% for the US in 2003 which is lower than what I had heard but I'm sure it changes year to year, especially as higher voltage systems are put in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider using your CPU as the RAID engine. The hardware engines that venders use can easily end up underpowered when dealing with modern disks. Get enough SATA or SCSI ports and some hot swap bays you can build quite a powerful software array. If you dump the money you would have spent on a hardware RAID card into faster CPU you can easily end up with a faster overall solution.
If you are planning to go the hardware route make sure you get a controller that can keep up. There's nothing worse than having a fast expensive CPU stalled waiting forever for a read because the array's tiny cheap processor is backed up with writes.
Make sure if you go the software route, use an OS that supports it well. I know Linux's support is good but I've heard bad things about Windows. Make sure you can protect the OS as well as other data and can monitor array status and alert someone when things are about to fail or have failed.
Cool device!
I've been thinking about doing something with an embeded linux device with a hard drive and this Kuro Box seems like a much better option than the NLSU2. The drive goes inside the device which makes it much nicer for carrying around. I guess I should be reading Toms Networking more often.
For the original poster, the NSLU2 is probably closer to what they were originally looking for since they were trying to hack it into a single box with a plug. It's smaller, it has 2 usb ports not 1, and it's cheaper (NewEgg has them for $70 referb). Of course, the Kuro is a single box and the power supply is inside it. If they wanted a real hard drive in the device it seems like the obvious winner.
The Linksys NSLU2 may be a good palce to start.
TomsNetworking has a good article about messing around with it.
Add a USB network card and a big USB key and you should be good to go (it has 2 USB ports).
I don't know much about the NIH but it seems to be both publicly and privately funded.
Any time you get an organization like that which works closely with the industry, there will be teams of people spinning and lobbying politicians to influence where funding goes and inevitably a system is setup where if you want to keep your job, you spend money where the industry wants you to.
I doubt the NIH has avoided the industry lapdogization common to government agencies in that kind of position.
The kernel is called Linux. Yea, you may compile against GCC but come on people! it's a Linux specific kernel module. Leave the GNU/ out of it.
That said, Nice job! I love to see the capabilities of Linux expanded in new directions like this. Cool work. I wish I had time to work on cool projects like that.
Companies are in business to make money. It would be irresponsible for someone at a pharmaceutical company to spend money developing something they couldn't make any money on.
The medical community isn't working in our best interest alone. Scientists work in areas where the best interest of the individual overlaps with the best interest of their employer. There are times when the best interest of the individual does not match up with the best interest of any company and these areas of medicine are horribly neglected (see blueberries vs Lipitor, oxygen therapy vs blood pressure medication, low carb vs the AHA Diet, First Do No Harm). I'm not saying that the doctors are wrong on all these things, I'm saying nobody is putting in the work to check up on them because there's nobody to pay for it.
If the only medical research that gets done is privately funded then the only medical advancements that get made will increase the income of medical companies. If that's the case, the cost of medical care can only go up (unless someone is taking someone else's business but that rarely happens)
I don't think this study is alone. Someone needs to fund this stuff or we'll all be taking out second mortgages because the medical community has convinced us we have to or we'll die.
I think this is precisely the ONLY type of campaign that can ever hope to "win" (not end, win) any war on terrorism.
I'm assuming by "this" you mean "Bush will launch a devastatingly aggressive battle in Fallujah and other strongholds of [snip] Islamic fascists."
I think a lot of America agrees with you that this is the best approach to ending terrorism. It might work, but we run the risk of this backfiring horribly. If you take a population outraged by the brutal killing of their people to the point of being willing to die to try to stop it, and go in and kill more of their people, does it make things better or worse? I think it can make things better but it depends on the care with which you conduct the operation. If you maintain an image of caring about the lives and futures of the people over there, you can make things better. If not, you could just end up swelling the ranks of the terrorists and we could have a 9/11 every year for decades. Bush isn't great at dealing with the little things and caring about the health and safety of the people in Iraq. There is the possibility that this could go horribly wrong.
Of course, I'm not necessarily convinced that it's self preservation that's motivating people to join terrorist groups as much as it is a sense of "deserving more power". It could be that a brutal smackdown won't swell the ranks of the terrorists, but do the opposite.
The country was clearly divided over this issue and judging by the reaction of the Bush supporters I've seen today it's the "brutal smackdown" votes that won Bush the election.
God help us if they are wrong.
I really don't see the big fuss, whether God created the world one way or another
I thought it was obvious. The big fuss is that if the intelligent design theory is true, it requires that something outside of natural forces had to be involved (God, aliens, etc.) If not, the possibility exists that there is no God. It's not about being able to believe in God, you will always be able to believe, it's about being able to not believe in God.
It can never be known for certain whether there is a God or not. By definition, it is impossible to prove that anything supernatural does or doesn't exist. What we can do is come up with a plausible explanation why things happen in terms of natural laws. In the face of a scientific explanation for things and evidence to back it up, most supernatural beliefs look fanciful and are eventually discarded (see origins of vampiers, church's objections to lightning rods, etc.)
Over time the role of the supernatural has been diminished as things once attributed to God and other supernatural forces have been explained scientifically. This has had the effect of slowly reducing the impact of beliefs in the supernatural on the world and our every day lives which has generally reduced the impact of the church on society, for better or worse.
That's the big fuss.
The 5/2 looks good, but what's up with the 30/5! It's less than 4 times the bandwidth and it's 4 times the price! That's ludicrous. When are these providers going to understand that price to bandwidth should be a logarithmic relationship. 10 times the speed should be two to four times the price.
I'd understand $75 a month or even $100 a month but $199! That's horrible!
Slashdot seems like a reasonable format to have an intelligent discussion about politics. Unfortunately, that hasn't turned out to be the case. Oh well.
It's stupid to think that any real issues are solved in a presidential election anyway. If you really care about politics, join/form a PAC. I joined iPac which I think is a good start.
Does anyone know of a UPS system designed to/capable of taking advantage of standard 12v car/marine batteries. They are much bigger than your standard UPS battery and yet they are relatively cheap to buy and replace because they are manufactured in volume and stocked in stores. I'd like to see something designed to sit on top of one of these and provide UPS functionality.
...proof that stupid people have a reproductive advantage over smart people.
:)
That explains a lot of things.
The transition to 2.5" drives should begin now. The 1U server market would be a great place to start because space, airflow and power utilization are all problems with 3.5" drives in 1U servers. History tells us within a few years most drives will probably be 2.5". We are at the point where the 2.5" drives are fast enough and have enough capacity to be appropriate for the common desktop user as well as the high end server user. The price premium is currently too high for wide spread desktop adoption but that's less of an issue in the server realm.
The material, storage and transportation costs of 2.5" drives are all dramatically lower than 3.5" so in the end, they should become cheaper than 3.5" drives as the technology ages. Since laptop sales are so high the economies of scale for 2.5" drives are there. All we need now is for a company to streamline their manufacturing to bring the cost down to the levels of 3.5" drives and the en-mass transition will begin.
I for one, can't wait to have 8 drive raid array that fits in two 5.25" drive bays.
Well, "it will run" is more whishful thinking than anything
.Net implementation, just that it can interpret and run *some* bytecode from those VM's. I didn't mean to imply that you could run Java or .Net programs under Parrot, just that there was some translation capabilities in there.
.Net bytecode into parrot but it's not worth thinking about until Perl 6, Python, Ruby and PHP are all stable and working well on Parrot and Parrot developers have nothing better to do.
Right. It's my understanding that it's not a complete Java or
I'd like to see someone put complete support for Java and
The funny thing is that, as far as I remember, it will run java and .net bytecode. It's a little swiss army VM.
Someone who commits a hateful violent act is expressing hateful violent thoughts in a very bad way. Someone who writes about hateful violent thoughts is expressing them in a much better way. Why in the WORLD would you want to forbid people from doing the right thing?
People have bad thoughts. People have bad ideas. No law can change that. Allowing people to express their bad thoughts to other people is called "venting" for a reason. When people can't vent and explode, things get ugly. We don't want that. Only when hate is drawn out into to the light of day can it be properly death with. This law makes it illegal to do exactly that.
Censorship is not about controlling the words; it's about controlling the thoughts behind them. Trying to control people's thoughts by controlling their ability to express them is a disastrous plan. Serial killers are an example of what happens when people who have bad thoughts can't express them to anyone. They lose the ability to identify with other people. They feel cut off and angry so they strike out in awful ways. We like to think of these people as evil but give a potential serial killer a web site where they can connect with other people who have the same types of feelings and they won't turn into a serial killer.
People's ability to speak their minds, no matter what they are thinking, is a cornerstone of a fair free society. The founders of the US understood this and put rules in place to forbid censorship right into the constitution (which unfortunately, doesn't seem to influence the behavior of the government much).
The arguments to forbid free speech are just like the arguments against violent video games and just as misguided. The people who create these laws are noticing a correlation between the expression of hateful or violent ideas and the commission of violent crimes but are forgetting the cardinal rule:
CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSALITY
Repeat that 3 times so we remember. Someone who really wants to run around their school with a gun killing people is probably not going to choose the Care Bear Movie over Fight Club. Someone who wants to blow up all the people who have hurt them, is probably going to choose Quake over The Simms. People who shop at prosthetic limb stores are more likely to have lost a limb. Correlation does not imply causality.
by the way --- the earlier the money the more good it can do -- it's october. jump on it folks!
This is such a good idea. I've been talking with my friends/coworkers about how nothing is going to change until we have an organization properly lobying for our rights. I the organization I ended up describing looked almost exactly like this one (right down to building off the experience of the EFF.) I'd like to see a group that pushes for more of the things I push for, but this is a great start and worth participating in.
So I joined and donated.
the EFF is a 501(c)(3) public non-profit charity... they cannot make endorsements or they loose their tax deduductible status
Since the EFF apparently can't do this, then this is the right way to make this happen.
cheap, ubiquitous, non-polluting fusion energy for our homes and cars in "5 to 10 years"
That was a horrible thing. It was a big part of why people decided not to move to nuclear power. In the back of everyone's minds was this idea that really, the right way to go is fusion and it'll be ready soon. We could have avoided a lot of ecological damage if people just focused on making what was realistic work.
As far as your statement about "not subsidizing", what would the cost of both electricity and cars if they'd never been subsidized - and if all current subsidies were rescinded?
I don't believe either were subsidized to start with. They both grew from small private isolated systems inside a free market economy.
This is a side-effect of the Petroleum Age.
Just like fusion power being 5 years off, the end of the Petroleum age is a myth. We can make petroleum from biomass on the surface, probably almost as cheep as we pump it out of the ground. The Petroleum Age will never truly end.
Look, in little more than a hundred years, we've managed to do more damage to the environment than in all of human history combined.
By what measure? Air pollution is better most places in the US than it was 100 years ago. So is water pollution. CO2 emissions are way up, true, but you also have a lot of forest re-growth (dangerous amounts, but that's another story.) Plants are having a great time. CO2 levels are up, light is more filtered and they're growing like crazy. Global warming is the biggest environmental issue and the only way you will realistically impact this is with the large scale adoption of nuclear power which is what I'm advocating.
And, no, conservation is NOT the wrong answer. Conservation gives you more time to find another way because it extends your existing resources
While conservation is always part of the answer and, sometimes it is the answer, right now, conservation won't solve our problems. We need more clean power generating capacity than we have right now, no matter how much conservation goes on.
Also, conservation is not always a good thing if the cost is too high. Sometimes you end up wasting more than you save. Think of it this way: Every time you take time out of someone's day, that's time they don't have to get other things done. If you take 10% of everyone's time that means you need 10% more people to get the same amount done. (I know this is wildly simplified, but the effect is real) If those 10% more people use more resources than you saved by taking everyone's time, you had a net loss. This is why I hate recycling. If it's worth my time to sort my garbage manually, it's worth some immigrant's minimum wage to sort it manually much faster and cheaper and it's worth some inventors time to figure out how to sort it even faster and cheaper. It's wrong to guilt people into wasting their time.
the cost of building enough reactors will still be in the hundreds of billions.
And what's the cost of not building them?
And, it won't fix the biggest problem of all - a general unwillingness to do the little things early on that will cost us dearly in the not-so-long run.
Conservation is the wrong answer. Our future society will use much more power than we do now. Focusing on conservation to solve our energy problems is like replacing shingles on a roof while the house is being blown away. It's not useless, but there are much bigger problems we should be working on right now.
What breakthroughs are you hoping for? Cold fusion?
Why is cold fusion so reprehensible to so many environmentalists. Why is the concept of guilt free power use so repulsive to them? Don't count cold fusion out yet. I doubt it will ever play a roll in large scale power generation but I bet it becomes important technology somewhere.
read up on Edison vs Tesla and their fight over DC vs AC power.
I love that story. It's great because the better technology won despite a massive political and public relations campaign trying to stop it. AC is much safer for people (you can be electrocuted by as little as 17 volts DC) and has proven inexpensive and flexible for power distribution.
but the complaints of my friends and colleagues are still the same - electricity costs too much!
Listen to your friends! Electricity does cost too much. It costs us a clean safe environment. It costs us massive manpower and economic resources. It costs us too much money. Electricity should be less expensive, more reliable, and more environmentally friendly than it is. The cost of building nuclear reactors looks staggering but next to the cost of what we do now for power, it's cheap!
Watch the Modern Marvels on giant machines some time. Look at the massive amounts of money and energy we've spend on just a few meager machines that mine a tiny portion of the coal we extract today.
I've tried for 15 years to take the view that attitudes will change
Maybe they're not changing because they shouldn't change.
There's a lot of tinfoil hat type people who think that there is no such thing as environmentally sound power and that we must conserve, it's the only way. This is rubbish. It's important for each type of energy to accurately reflect the cost of that energy, none of them should be subsidized. The cost of energy should reflect it's complete cost. If charging fees for emissions to compensate for the damage those emissions do is possible, it's only fair that we do that. This would go a long way towards encouraging development of environmentally friendly power generation technologies and it makes good economic sense. It's also wildly important for our government to allocate money to research into alternative energy sources.
Some day we will have unlimited power. Despite constant assertions to the contrary over human history, the universe seems to be a closed loop system. All energy is constant, it just changes form. Some day we will discover how to close the loop on our power use and we won't have to care about such things as efficiency, just capacity. Until then, it's our duty to do as little damage to our world as possible. Let's get going!
Therefore intermediate and high level nuclear waste is about 100 and 1 million times more radioactive than natural uranium respectively.
That depends on whether you are talking about U238 or U235. With U235, you are taking radioactive fissionable material that would decay on it's own out of the ground and making it decay in a reactor and capturing the energy from that. This is obviously just fine.
With 238, it's slightly different. You are taking an higly stable yet still radioactive material and pumping it up into plutonium in a breeder reactor. This creates a whole different radioactive decay chain than what would normally happen and makes it happen much quicker.
Most nuclear power is generated using U235 and they are very careful not to make plutonuim in the process. While it's true the radioactive material that comes out of a power plant is much more concentrated than what it was in the ground, it is incorrect to say there's "more" of it. It's the same ammount, just instead of being spread out through massive veins of ore (that sometimes run under residential neighberhoods, like in the case of my house) they are bundled up in a nice little unit that can be stored somewhere where they won't bother people.
Internal combustion power plants? This I'd love to see.
Hehe. I should have said "heat engine" power plants. I used the wrong term.
All of that said, hybrids will be a much better choice than conventional or electrical until battery technology stops sucking and moves past the 1950's.
I can think of at least 4 types of batteries invented after the 1950's. There's tons of R&D put in to them every year.
Batteries alone won't make a bit of difference to this problem. You could have a perfect battery (0 loss, infinite capacity, instant charge time) and still not have electric cars be economical or environmentally sound if power generation is still oil and coal based.
In my mind steam turbines counted as internal combustion engines. I had my definition of internal combustion engine wrong. I should have used the term "heat engine".
What's wrong with having an environment you can enjoy?
My point is not that we shouldn't strive for an enjoyable environment. My point is that striving for an enjoyable environment shouldn't be considered environmentalism. Living on a 200 acre farm with a bunch of show horses may make your environment awesome, but it takes a horrible toll on the environment.
even if it is as safe and as efficient as its proponents would have us believe, it's another Band-Aid over the true problem - the refusal to learn how to live within our environment in a sustainable fashion.
How would changing so that we use nuclear power to live within our environment in a sustainable fashion not be living within our environment in a sustainable fashion?
Also, why do environmentalists keep insisting that the only way to live environmentally soundly is to make huge personal sacrifices and essentially destroy modern society? Why is it wrong to come up with clever technical solutions to the problems instead? Why is it that proposals that would help the environment so often end up ignored, and instead they focus on the goal of making everyone do what they tell us to?
And, your statement about the Seinfeld lifestyle versus the Little House on the Prairie ( or that of Native Americans ) only makes sense if you eliminate the personal automobiles from the equation.
Sigh. Why is it that every time someone recommends getting rid of the car they never indicate what the heck we should replace it with? I've had this discussion before and the answer is that every alternative has horrible consequences that make the problems of the car look trivial.
The biggest problem with using the Little House solution, horses is that you could not have our modern economy with it. Our economy requires a highly specialized labor force. It's almost a given nowadays that there is only one person in the entire world capable of doing a certain job and only a handful within a city reasonably qualified to learn it. We could not have this type of economy with this rapid progress without a highly mobile population. Skills are so specialized that we need to draw upon a huge population in order to make a company function. Horses would be incapable of safely transporting people the distances they need to commute in the time they would need to do it and at the volumes that our economy demands. There are similar issues with walking, biking, motorcycles, trains, busses, and every other silly scheme I've heard brought up. I should also point out the horrible expense and mess that would be caused by approximately 200 million horses running around the US. Parking, traffic, theft, maintenance all turn into nightmares when you consider horses in the kind of numbers we're talking about here.
The lie of the "personal sacrifice" solution to environmental issues lies in the falsehood that if people were willing to just go back to the way things were in the simple old days, everything would be fine. The fact is, each of us were much harder on the environment in the simple old days than we are now, there were just fewer of us. Yes, we use fossil fuels now and we didn't way back in the 1700's but we cut down whole states worth of trees back then just to build the things we needed. Plus, we really don't want to live like we did back then. Life was hard and short and mostly full of back breaking toil. The life of a death row inmate is more fun and probably longer than that of a man in the 1700's. Screw that! I believe that the real solution to environmental issues will not come from everyone sacrificing things voluntarily, it will come from economic incentives and technological advancements.
The good news that I see on the horizon is that our economy is getting so ridiculously specialized that drawing on the population of a densely populated city isn't enough for a lot of companies. They are starting to expand to cover anyone in the world who they can get to do the job by let
isn't a tad bit of a misstatement to call a nuclear power plant non-polluting?
I stick by non-polluting. Taking radioactive material out of the ground and returning less radioactive material to safer places in the ground, is something I can't consider pollution. I believe it makes the environment just ever so slightly safer and better. The radioactive radon gas that constantly seeps up into the room I'm in now is caused by uranium breaking down in the bedrock below me. Take it out and put it in Yucca Mountain and I get less cancer.
Everything anyone does has an impact on nature, right down to swatting mosquitoes. Just because it has an impact on the world, doesn't mean it is pollution. From what I understand, the mining of uranium ore is rough on the environment and could be considered pollution, but it's also my understanding that you could power the entire world for 20 years with what we already pulled out back in the post WW2/cold war era. Plus, mining coal is horrible for the environment, never mind the tons of mercury that comes out when you burn it that they are currently safely storing in the lungs of the general population not to mention fish and other wildlife everywhere. Overall, the switch to nuclear power would dramatically reduce the pollution created by generating power.
Heat is another byproduct of nuclear power generation but it's also a byproduct of every other heat-engine based power technology and is rapidly dissipated with little effect on anything so I don't consider it pollution.
for instance use a lot of chemicals in their manufaturing process more recent advances are allowing for organic solar panels but still a little pollution is generated
I agree that solar power technology currently can't be considered non-polluting. Lots of people consider solar to be the ultimate in low-impact living. This is naive. These are the same people who live on giant plots of land lamenting the high-impact living of people in cities. If you look carefully at it, someone living in downtown Manhattan shares a tiny footprint of land with everyone who lives above and below them whereas the big house in the country disturbs vast expanses of land. If everyone in the United States had a 5 acre plot of land they'd take up almost every bit of land in the continental US (all the mountains, forest, farm land, all of it.) The plain truth is that the Seinfeld lifestyle is much more environmentally friendly than the Little House on the Prairie lifestyle. These same people tend to praise the native American's for their low-impact lifestyle. Each native American required the resources of huge expanses of land to support them. They had a profound impact on the environment but, because their way of life, they couldn't sustain enough population to make a big impact. If you look on a per-person impact basis, native American's were awfully hard on their environment.
Just because it's quaint, simple, and peaceful doesn't mean it's low-impact or environmentally friendly. I'd reclassify most environmentalists as "my environment-ists" because what they really want is to have an environment that they can enjoy, play with and have fun in. They don't care that nuclear power is better for nature, their scared it's bad for them so they hate it.
Right now, oil and coal cost much more than nuclear and pollute horribly yet they are still generating a majority of the world's power. This is silly. It's time to build a lot of nuclear power plants. Lets build them and buy us some time to generate good efficient non-polluting or low pollution methods of generating power that are economically more attractive than nuclear so eventually they shut down on their own because they cost too much.
I was doing some reading about power transmission and distribution a while ago and stumbled across it. I had always heard it was higher, around 15% so the number stuck in my head. I just checked wikipedia and they have it at 7.2% for the US in 2003 which is lower than what I had heard but I'm sure it changes year to year, especially as higher voltage systems are put in place.
m ission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_trans