Well, I'd like a little bit less sensationalist approach to the subject issue.. Maybe this kind of writing is what might get throught to all the green party people hell-bent on killing off european forests thru banning of nuclear power. No nuclear power, increased coal use, increased acid rain.. Need I say more?
I kind of doubt only 31 people had their lives shortened because of Chernobyl.. But the real figures are not going to be tallied for a while yet. You'd have to look at statistical cancer-related deaths over a wide region in a few generations and look for a statistical spike.
Oh, I'm an EE designer, as soon as the eggheads get fusion power out of the high energy labs and into regular R&D, I'll do my part to bring cheaper and less scary nuclear energy to everyone so you can keep on bitching about it on slashdot. And that's a promise.
You can have your domain, yeah. Setting up and maintaining software to run email server is free?
I don't know about you, but fiddling with the settings of my linux box quickly goes from "fun" to "I'd pay someone good money if I didn't have to bother with this". Usually sometime around 3am.
Well, yahoo is a rather nice email service as far as webmail goes. Much better than hotmail, certainly. Looking at all the.com corpses, I don't blame them trying to make profit. Personally I use another service, which is even more expensive than yahoo. But they have fascist spam filtering and IMAP among other things.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the outfit which is concerned with breaking low-grade crypto? How's that going to improve my daily life? I'd much sooner donate my CPU cycles to the evil international pharmaceutic corps which does benefit cancer study. If you get a rash from commercial ventures, there's the folding@home. It's more like basic research, so it won't produce any miracle cures, but it might eventually lead to research that could.
You're forgetting that the console is not the product. Far from it. The real product is the license fees they're getting from each and every game produced for it. And, of course, tidy revenue from all of the extra doo-dahs like feedback racing wheels etc.
So, you give away the console for free, or at least pretty close to what it's costing for you to build one and cart it over to the shelf.. So that you can start carting money to the bank from all the games and stuff people buy for your console.
The decision to limit what you can do with your cool linux port is probably due to beancounter paranoia. The same reason you cannot use SCART RGB output for DVD playback. RGB spec doesn't allow for Macrovision, so we must not support it. Anyone with half a brain concerned about people taping DVDs to VCRs? I don't think so. But a corporate beancounter doesn't exactly fit into the "half a brain" category.
And then there's the Exact Audio Copy, which actually uses the error correction code from your CD to make sure you really honestly do get digitally perfect copies. If the CD is clean, there's no problem, if it has scratches and dirt, you might have to play with the settings a bit.
So, CD ripping isn't quite the same thing as just recording the stream from a CD-player digital output and hoping it's a-okay.
Another ad-supported service goes "pay up, sucker"?
Really shocking. I mean, we've had the free ride for years, we've got more dot-com corpses than anyone cares to count... And you're still shocked to see people starting to charge money to provide service?
Hmph. Well, I don't think I'll sign up.. I already have Spamcop pay account and they have SSL IMAP and stuff. Yahoo doesn't sell extra mailbox storage overseas either.
When you start getting dozen spams every day, good luck finding bona-fide business email jammed inside. Doesn't take many deleted genuine email when you get a little careless cleaning up your inbox to start losing serious money.
Local green party leader (they're actually in goverment!) commented that they "allow" people who do not oppose nuclear power to vote for them. How very enlightened of them.
I think those two viewpoints (ecology/anti-nuclear) go hand-in-hand, because both tend to attract the same kinds of people. I'm an engineer and I pretty much run on electricity by now. But I rather like some of the enviromental agendas. Some of them. But since I've been trained to look at arguments from rational POV, not from an emotional one, I can see many of the concerns just fall apart at close examinations.
There's very simple argument in favor of more nuclear power - Coal plants, during their operation , *will* kill many many more people than a nuclear plant. If you average all the people who've died of radiation-related illnesses and divide that by the number of nuke plants, you get fairly low figures.
Lung cancer, now, thought.. Ouch.
Well, there will be fusion power available relatively soon, but I do not think it'll change the picture any. Yeah, it's inherently more safe as the process cannot run away from you and cause a meltdown.. But it's still very scary-sounding technology that the layperson cannot begin to understand. And you get radioactive waste. Never mind that the waste is buried where the sun doesn't shine, not spread all over the once-blue sky.
Sounds bloody familiar. Like my last employer. The control freaks at tech support even had the gall to forbid installing ANY drivers and/or patches into the NT machines. So I have a BSOD 3 times a day and I lose at least half-n-hour of work every time? Tough luck!
I finally got terminally ticked off at them and updated every driver for every device in my box. Not one crash afterwards.
And the only.net access was thru a http proxy.. There was ONE PC with telnet access and ssh. So I used that to access my linux box remotely. Notice I said telnet access. They wanted to monitor whatever it was you used the damn thing for.
Oh, and they decided encrypting email with confidential docs might be a good idea. After one of our clients walked after some of their docs had leaked.
It's a medical fact that one of the symptoms of depression the disease is to cause "cognitive retardation". That's in the list of things DSM-IV says the doctor should look for in a potentially depressed patient.
So. If being depressed *may* make you dumber.. And being dumped can make you depressed.. Yeah, you from the back!
On the other hand, DSM-IV also says that if the patient has had traumatic experience such as being dumped recently, they're probably not suffering from depression the disease but from depression the mood. You get better from the latter with time on your own unless you kill yourself.
... and the major problem with "eyballing it" (well.... CCD'ing it anyway) is that a lot of Kuiper belt objects have an albedo of ~0.03-0.05. That's about the same as printer toner.
That bad? I always kind of visualized asteroids as being gray-ish tone. Got suckered by SF TV, no doubt. In any case.. How exactly *do* they detect/track those objects if the albedo's so laughable? you'd have to crank the magnification way up to be able to "see" them, no? Something like Hubble's cool, but how much of the sky globe does it "see"? 1*10^-6 ? Even if we actually start building probes to go and look for the damn things, you'd need way way too many of them!
I don't really know about the spectrum of radiation from Sun, but I expect visible light's not necessarily the most optimal wavelenght to look for, correct? Reflection from black rocks-wise. At least those rocks should be warmer than the background radiation?
Woo, there's one with 1.8% probability of hitting us! But it's only 40 meters.. I wonder if they compensate for atmospheric burn on those "small" rocks.
With the annoying inverse square law for radars, you're be pretty much reduced to optics. Plenty of space to eyeball this side of pluto orbit.. Anyone actually looking to the right direction with a high-power telescope is pretty low, isn't it?
So what's the probability of the "Big Mama" showing up on the threat list with any kind of meaningful lead time?
Say, didn't one of those recent experimental NASA probes have an Ion engine? IIRC, it didn't work very well or at least it died very quickly after firing.
But the principle is/was to charge "space dust" electrically which will then propel the vehicle forward. A little bit like jet engine, really. The drive doesn't use it's own mass as a reaction source, but I'm rather sure that's not what the original technobabble engine principle was all about.
Oh, the anti-missile system is a perfectly decent piece of hardware. Okay, a plan for one.
You can cap satellites, space ships (Anyone want to bet 1st people on Mars won't be caucasian?), Dr. Strangelove scenarios..
It's just not much good against a strategic threat. I mean, all you have to do is to get some bombs inside a shipping container and once it's shipped to Redmont - Boom!
Those sneaky rogue states might consider taking off AMD sites 1st, too.
People with desirable cell types get framed, or if they're lucky, can just donate an organ for their "punishment". If they're unlucky, they just vanish, minus a few valuable body parts.
From what I recall of Niven's books, the argument was more like that capital punishment is a deterrent to crime, not surprisingly. To keep up a steady supply of replacements, voters will keep voting even more minor crimes to the death penalty class. Consider income tax fraud or shoplifting, for example. Yeah, you had organleggers in the books, but those boys'n'girls were first on the line to the chop shop if they got caught.
In any case, you can actually enforce a diet on death row inmates to ensure you have healthy donors at the end of the line. I don't know, I suppose most people would find it a little too cynical to use the appeals process time to clean out tar out of the convicts lungs..
The link seems to be dysfunctional. In any case, if my memory serves, UK is approving cloning of stem cells, not human beings. Sensationalism? Slashdot? Surely not!
That means, you can't have x copies of your favourite kid. On the other hand, you're allowed to use aborted foetuses to start new stem cell lines for research.. And probably transplants & stuff in future. I suppose if you feel abortion is wrong, no matter what, this won't make things any more reprehensible. As for me, I like the idea of "no waste". I just wonder why they don't recycle organs from executed prisoners..
There's actually WMP 6.x front-end available with 7.x install. It's in the "media player" directory, I cannot remember the name of the executable excatly, but it's in there.
Efficiency aside, which is not an issue to most of us in post-gigglehurtz-era, 6.x UI is much cleaner and more straightforward to use:-)
I really do not respect black-and-white worldview.
For example, without going into whether homosexuality is evil at all.. It can be good for the community from evolutionary point of view. You have non-childbearing healthy women and non-fathering healthy men who are *not* using majority of their energy and time for raising children.. That energy is probably going somewhere else, don't you think?
In any case, as other poster already noted, there are far more bisexuals than there are homosexuals. Majority of bisexuals just happen to develop either hetero- or homosexual identity so they appear either straight or bent socially.
For my closing line, I'm going to have another evolutionary argument. If homo- and bisexuality was bad for the survival of species, any species, it would've been evolved out of existence millions of years ago. Instead it's almost universal and more common than any single hereditary disease.
It may be bad for the invidual genes which will not propagate, but it might very well be good for all the others.
If you read the article, it only talks about Xeon.
So, just curious, maybe they will go on making P4 RDRAM chipsets. There are real, honest advantages to serial bus and serious problems to paraller bus when the clock rate goes up.
Just why do you think there's only Nvidia's dual DDR P4 chipset? Which no-one seems to be using too much? One DDR module has 184 pins, dual that to 368 and I start seeing black spots just thinking about routing that in PCB..
In any case, I don't like Rambus any more than stereotypical/. software libre radicals. Maybe memory manufacturers could buy the miserable company and do a proper JEDEC serial ram standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.
Well, I'd like a little bit less sensationalist approach to the subject issue.. Maybe this kind of writing is what might get throught to all the green party people hell-bent on killing off european forests thru banning of nuclear power. No nuclear power, increased coal use, increased acid rain.. Need I say more?
I kind of doubt only 31 people had their lives shortened because of Chernobyl.. But the real figures are not going to be tallied for a while yet. You'd have to look at statistical cancer-related deaths over a wide region in a few generations and look for a statistical spike.
Oh, I'm an EE designer, as soon as the eggheads get fusion power out of the high energy labs and into regular R&D, I'll do my part to bring cheaper and less scary nuclear energy to everyone so you can keep on bitching about it on slashdot. And that's a promise.
Just *imagine* the insurance premiums on orbital craft stocked full of processed, highly active radioactive waste.. Can you say Arm + Leg?
You can have your domain, yeah. Setting up and maintaining software to run email server is free?
.com corpses, I don't blame them trying to make profit. Personally I use another service, which is even more expensive than yahoo. But they have fascist spam filtering and IMAP among other things.
I don't know about you, but fiddling with the settings of my linux box quickly goes from "fun" to "I'd pay someone good money if I didn't have to bother with this". Usually sometime around 3am.
Well, yahoo is a rather nice email service as far as webmail goes. Much better than hotmail, certainly. Looking at all the
Distributed net?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the outfit which is concerned with breaking low-grade crypto? How's that going to improve my daily life? I'd much sooner donate my CPU cycles to the evil international pharmaceutic corps which does benefit cancer study. If you get a rash from commercial ventures, there's the folding@home. It's more like basic research, so it won't produce any miracle cures, but it might eventually lead to research that could.
But breaking crypto? Why?
You're forgetting that the console is not the product. Far from it. The real product is the license fees they're getting from each and every game produced for it. And, of course, tidy revenue from all of the extra doo-dahs like feedback racing wheels etc.
So, you give away the console for free, or at least pretty close to what it's costing for you to build one and cart it over to the shelf.. So that you can start carting money to the bank from all the games and stuff people buy for your console.
The decision to limit what you can do with your cool linux port is probably due to beancounter paranoia. The same reason you cannot use SCART RGB output for DVD playback. RGB spec doesn't allow for Macrovision, so we must not support it. Anyone with half a brain concerned about people taping DVDs to VCRs? I don't think so. But a corporate beancounter doesn't exactly fit into the "half a brain" category.
And then there's the Exact Audio Copy, which actually uses the error correction code from your CD to make sure you really honestly do get digitally perfect copies. If the CD is clean, there's no problem, if it has scratches and dirt, you might have to play with the settings a bit.
So, CD ripping isn't quite the same thing as just recording the stream from a CD-player digital output and hoping it's a-okay.
It has to be great because it's talked about? Black & White anyone? I'd wait for the review in one of the more reputable mags.
In fact, these days I rarely buy any games before they hit the mid-price mark. You get them cheaper and with quite a few bugs less.
As for comparison to IRL role playing.. If we can use such a term.. If you remove the social aspect, what are you left with?
Another ad-supported service goes "pay up, sucker"?
... And you're still shocked to see people starting to charge money to provide service?
Really shocking. I mean, we've had the free ride for years, we've got more dot-com corpses than anyone cares to count
Hmph. Well, I don't think I'll sign up.. I already have Spamcop pay account and they have SSL IMAP and stuff. Yahoo doesn't sell extra mailbox storage overseas either.
Horsehockey.
When you start getting dozen spams every day, good luck finding bona-fide business email jammed inside. Doesn't take many deleted genuine email when you get a little careless cleaning up your inbox to start losing serious money.
Managing the email deluge's bad enough already.
Sorry if you don't like the argument. Men may not be potatoes, but both can be tallied up.
My pet peeve as well.
Local green party leader (they're actually in goverment!) commented that they "allow" people who do not oppose nuclear power to vote for them. How very enlightened of them.
I think those two viewpoints (ecology/anti-nuclear) go hand-in-hand, because both tend to attract the same kinds of people. I'm an engineer and I pretty much run on electricity by now. But I rather like some of the enviromental agendas. Some of them. But since I've been trained to look at arguments from rational POV, not from an emotional one, I can see many of the concerns just fall apart at close examinations.
There's very simple argument in favor of more nuclear power - Coal plants, during their operation , *will* kill many many more people than a nuclear plant. If you average all the people who've died of radiation-related illnesses and divide that by the number of nuke plants, you get fairly low figures.
Lung cancer, now, thought.. Ouch.
Well, there will be fusion power available relatively soon, but I do not think it'll change the picture any. Yeah, it's inherently more safe as the process cannot run away from you and cause a meltdown.. But it's still very scary-sounding technology that the layperson cannot begin to understand. And you get radioactive waste. Never mind that the waste is buried where the sun doesn't shine, not spread all over the once-blue sky.
Sounds bloody familiar. Like my last employer. The control freaks at tech support even had the gall to forbid installing ANY drivers and/or patches into the NT machines. So I have a BSOD 3 times a day and I lose at least half-n-hour of work every time? Tough luck!
.net access was thru a http proxy.. There was ONE PC with telnet access and ssh. So I used that to access my linux box remotely. Notice I said telnet access. They wanted to monitor whatever it was you used the damn thing for.
I finally got terminally ticked off at them and updated every driver for every device in my box. Not one crash afterwards.
And the only
Oh, and they decided encrypting email with confidential docs might be a good idea. After one of our clients walked after some of their docs had leaked.
It's a medical fact that one of the symptoms of depression the disease is to cause "cognitive retardation". That's in the list of things DSM-IV says the doctor should look for in a potentially depressed patient.
.. And being dumped can make you depressed.. Yeah, you from the back!
So. If being depressed *may* make you dumber
On the other hand, DSM-IV also says that if the patient has had traumatic experience such as being dumped recently, they're probably not suffering from depression the disease but from depression the mood. You get better from the latter with time on your own unless you kill yourself.
That bad? I always kind of visualized asteroids as being gray-ish tone. Got suckered by SF TV, no doubt. In any case.. How exactly *do* they detect/track those objects if the albedo's so laughable? you'd have to crank the magnification way up to be able to "see" them, no? Something like Hubble's cool, but how much of the sky globe does it "see"? 1*10^-6 ? Even if we actually start building probes to go and look for the damn things, you'd need way way too many of them!
I don't really know about the spectrum of radiation from Sun, but I expect visible light's not necessarily the most optimal wavelenght to look for, correct? Reflection from black rocks-wise. At least those rocks should be warmer than the background radiation?
Woo, there's one with 1.8% probability of hitting us! But it's only 40 meters.. I wonder if they compensate for atmospheric burn on those "small" rocks.
With the annoying inverse square law for radars, you're be pretty much reduced to optics. Plenty of space to eyeball this side of pluto orbit.. Anyone actually looking to the right direction with a high-power telescope is pretty low, isn't it?
So what's the probability of the "Big Mama" showing up on the threat list with any kind of meaningful lead time?
Say, didn't one of those recent experimental NASA probes have an Ion engine? IIRC, it didn't work very well or at least it died very quickly after firing.
But the principle is/was to charge "space dust" electrically which will then propel the vehicle forward. A little bit like jet engine, really. The drive doesn't use it's own mass as a reaction source, but I'm rather sure that's not what the original technobabble engine principle was all about.
Oh, the anti-missile system is a perfectly decent piece of hardware. Okay, a plan for one.
You can cap satellites, space ships (Anyone want to bet 1st people on Mars won't be caucasian?), Dr. Strangelove scenarios..
It's just not much good against a strategic threat. I mean, all you have to do is to get some bombs inside a shipping container and once it's shipped to Redmont - Boom!
Those sneaky rogue states might consider taking off AMD sites 1st, too.
From what I recall of Niven's books, the argument was more like that capital punishment is a deterrent to crime, not surprisingly. To keep up a steady supply of replacements, voters will keep voting even more minor crimes to the death penalty class. Consider income tax fraud or shoplifting, for example. Yeah, you had organleggers in the books, but those boys'n'girls were first on the line to the chop shop if they got caught.
In any case, you can actually enforce a diet on death row inmates to ensure you have healthy donors at the end of the line. I don't know, I suppose most people would find it a little too cynical to use the appeals process time to clean out tar out of the convicts lungs..
The link seems to be dysfunctional. In any case, if my memory serves, UK is approving cloning of stem cells, not human beings. Sensationalism? Slashdot? Surely not!
That means, you can't have x copies of your favourite kid. On the other hand, you're allowed to use aborted foetuses to start new stem cell lines for research.. And probably transplants & stuff in future. I suppose if you feel abortion is wrong, no matter what, this won't make things any more reprehensible. As for me, I like the idea of "no waste". I just wonder why they don't recycle organs from executed prisoners..
There's actually WMP 6.x front-end available with 7.x install. It's in the "media player" directory, I cannot remember the name of the executable excatly, but it's in there.
:-)
Efficiency aside, which is not an issue to most of us in post-gigglehurtz-era, 6.x UI is much cleaner and more straightforward to use
But I still prefer my Zoom player.
I really do not respect black-and-white worldview.
For example, without going into whether homosexuality is evil at all.. It can be good for the community from evolutionary point of view. You have non-childbearing healthy women and non-fathering healthy men who are *not* using majority of their energy and time for raising children.. That energy is probably going somewhere else, don't you think?
In any case, as other poster already noted, there are far more bisexuals than there are homosexuals. Majority of bisexuals just happen to develop either hetero- or homosexual identity so they appear either straight or bent socially.
For my closing line, I'm going to have another evolutionary argument. If homo- and bisexuality was bad for the survival of species, any species, it would've been evolved out of existence millions of years ago. Instead it's almost universal and more common than any single hereditary disease.
It may be bad for the invidual genes which will not propagate, but it might very well be good for all the others.
Maybe he was right about rambus first time around, but the situation has changed since?
How about it?
If you read the article, it only talks about Xeon.
/. software libre radicals. Maybe memory manufacturers could buy the miserable company and do a proper JEDEC serial ram standard.
So, just curious, maybe they will go on making P4 RDRAM chipsets. There are real, honest advantages to serial bus and serious problems to paraller bus when the clock rate goes up.
Just why do you think there's only Nvidia's dual DDR P4 chipset? Which no-one seems to be using too much? One DDR module has 184 pins, dual that to 368 and I start seeing black spots just thinking about routing that in PCB..
In any case, I don't like Rambus any more than stereotypical
Stepped on someone's free toes, did I?
How dare they?
Charging *money* for end result of the work done by their employees?
What's the world coming to?