"Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral,"...
Is it abundant, or is it rare?
"rare earth" doesn't mean rare. "Rare earth's" are a class of elements that are fairly common in the Earth's crust but not often concentrated enough for profitable mining. The concentrated deposits that do exist tend to have many kinds of rare earth's which makes the extraction that much more difficult because they are chemically similar.
Notice how older, used, less expensive vehicles tend to be favored by the non-rich?
The 80's called. They want their used car stereotype back.
Cars have been getting bigger since the early 90's. The land yacht's of lore are now so old they are difficult to maintain, smog, and fuel. A new civic is bigger than a late 90's Accord. A new Jetta is bigger than a mid-90's Passat. This means that the poor are driving *smaller* cars even if they drive the same models.
Except for indirect spying on whoever might be home, I don't see why a smart phone app to measure home power usage is even useful. What you really need are overall trends and patterns by device. Not only can this wait until you get home, it works much better on a large screen.
Funny thing, "time off" while unemployed tends to be rather unproductive. It is difficult to commit to anything because there's no guessing how long you have. Job hunting itself is also an unpredictable impulsive afair that largely requires one to drop everything to follow up on a hot opportunity. That is, when it is not brain sucking unsolvable problem that drains one's ability to focus on other things.
I think bad economic times are actually bad for open-source development. People secure in their jobs can afford to slack a little and spend time on hobbies. Many companies also pay thier employees to contriute to open-source software. When budgets are tight, corporate efforts tend to smaller in scale and more foccused on the immediately needs of the company.
His revelation is right on the mark. I constantly see proponents of Open Source say things such as "It's auditable because the source code is free". Well yes it is, but no one cares. I think even from the Slashdot crowd the number of people who bothered to build Firefox from source is a small minority compared to those who downloaded it. Those who actually look at the code are an even smaller subset of those bothered to build from source.
It isn't necessary for a user to personally view, modify, or even compile the source to benefit from open source. At some point the copyright holder may add shovelware, spyware or just plain bugs. They may choose not to port to other platforms. They may just abandon the product. In these cases. a user of a closed source app can do little but continue to use the old version until it no longer runs on current platforms or until advanced security threats make it unsafe.
But as long as one person has the will and ability to adopt what the developer has effectively or literally abandoned, the freeloaders can still their updated binaries. They won't be exactly what they wanted but the freeloaders never had or asked for that anyway.
How much longer can our workforce afford to higher someone because they own a piece of paper and not on their ability?
About as long as we can hire people for the school they attended, for the people that they know, for the companies that they have worked for, and for all the downturns in which they managed to avoid getting laid off.
Circumstantial evidence is a crappy way to select but when employers lack effective means to measure ability there isn't much choice.
Suing may get you money but remember where the money comes from. So that still doesn't stop the police from doing what they did. They don't pay YOU and I Pay. The officers must be fired,the DA must get Fired for brining the case to court. He is a criminal lawyer so he should have known the laws.
The money comes from the police department budget. And the people responsible for that budget are elected officials. Since beading money to highly public lawsuits is really good way to get tossed out in the next election, the officials are inclined to take action against those who caused the mess.
Perhaps the technology-related fields fare better because it has always been a moving target. Before you had worries about job security you had worries about your tools becoming obsolete or deprecated. The entire mindset is to keep learning new languages, concepts, and technology. Never rest on your laurels.
Who is resting? Most of those whose skills are obsolete got that way by serving their employers interest rather than their own. There is often a dilemma: what is most needed at your current job isn't necessarily useful for the next and for many fields there is no equivalent to working on an open source project on your spare time. If you can't get your training on the job you can't get it at all. Hedging means steering your experience to something less useful to your current employer but more marketable outside. That's a tricky and somewhat dangerous stand to make and it should come as no surprise that many fail.
So these brown dwarfs are essentially big balls of (mostly) hydrogen with the centers under tremendous pressures and temperatures but not quite hot enough to "light" (in a fusion sense). Well what would happen if you managed to drop a fusion bomb on it?
"Fusion" bombs fuse Deuterium and Tritium. Brown dwarfs already fuse Deuterium and Tritium for the part of their life cycle. That's what makes them brown dwarfs and not planets.
In order to create a real star, you need proton fusion. But that requires maintaining necessary heat and pressure for millions of years. If the gravity of the brown dwarf and the native deuterium and tritium couldn't do it then it is unlikely that your puny little H-bomb is going to accomplish much.
While it is true that electrical heat converts 100% of the energy delivered to the device into heat. But this is a highly dishonest measurement. Electricity is not an energy source. It is an energy transfer medium. Here in California most of our electrical is generated by gas. Gas is burned to generated heat (losses from incomplete combustion and transfer to the environment), heat is converted to mechanical energy (thermodynamic losses), mechanical energy is converted to electrical energy (more losses), and more still is lost to resistance in the wires that bring the electrical energy to your home.
Compare this to burning the gas directly in your home, which uses all the heat directly rather than wasting much of it via unnecessary conversions.
ISS is in low Earth orbit, below the Van Alan belts. The radiation environment isn't that severe. A study performed in the early 90's found that off the shelf electronics were fine for LEO. For geosync and higher orbits, minor shielding was needed to achieve reliable operation.
Is there no natural gas infrastructure in the UK? In the States (or at least the places that I have lived), people mostly heat with gas. It's still fossil fuel, of course, but it's a lot more efficient and cheaper than burning the same fuel to generate electricity and then using an electric heater. Our peak energy consumption is during summer, when the air conditioners run.
Now, if they had resurrected a recorder/player device that actually "played" the cylinder, that would be different.
The articles doesn't say but they may even have an original player. It doesn't really matter:
1) The cylinder is warped so it may not be possible to play it on the original device without some dubious restoration.
2) Even if it wasn't warped, actually playing the recording with an original or reconstructed device would almost certainly cause further damage to the recording. That may not be a big deal for some old 45 where there may still be thousands of surviving copies but Edison's cylinder is a one of a kind historical artifact.
The cylinder likely sat around for many decades unplayed, not because it couldn't be done but because the artifact was too precious to subject to that kind of treatment. With the optical scan, we get the best of both world: We get to hear every note and scratch and we get to preserve the cylinder for future generations as it came to our own.
Maybe I don't understand who these free seminars are for, put perhaps a whitelist would suite them better than a blacklist?
There is no definitive listing of potential customers. A white listing would likely only serve to limit the seminars to existing customers and that would defeat much of the purpose of holding the seminars.
If it has to be injected into the tumor than the tumors must still be identified. Chemo will still be needed to catch smaller tumors that are not identified. So it looks like a less invasive alternative to surgically removing tumors. Useful but a lot way from a cure for cancer.
My friends run into this a lot when signing up for free seminars. The idea is to prevent employees of their competiors from attending their events. Competitor domains are blocked (obviously) but also well known ISP's and free web mail services like Gmail because a employee of a competitor can easily hide there. The whole process is quite leaky though. There are just too many domains to check. If you have a personal domain or even a lesser known ISP, they let you in rather than trying to figure out what or who you are.
This works for companies you are doing business with, and yes, I do this myself. However, if Google or Facebook are selling your email address, there isn't much you can do about it.
But they don't. I have separate addresses for google and facebook. They have not been abused. My policy is that if I get spam on an address I terminate that address. If it is someone that I think is likely a victim and someone I want to continue to do business with, I notify them and assign a new address.
The rate at which addresses leak to spammers is still small but increasing rapidly. I attribute this to the recent surge in attacks on customer databases.
BTW, 100 addresses is not enough for the long term unless you can find some way to recycle no longer used addresses. I've been doing this since the 90's and I have over 500 addresses assigned.
That's nice. The only nail that counts, will be the one where solid state is at least modestly cheaper for a given amount of space.
Mind you, I look forward to that nail, but until it gets here, it's not yet time to party.
For most users, disk storage is already much larger than needed. All that is needed is that an SSD have cheaper unit cost while still providing adequate storage. Even if it is still 4x the cost per byte, it won't matter because the extra storage isn't useful.
Yes, it is obvious but really, Oracle will do open source whenever and wherever they can profit from it. And by profit I mean actual dollars in the fairly short term. That has been their policy with everything they acquired from Sun. Long term growth and good will be damned.
What lives will it save? Without the pet industry, these animals would never be born.
Without the pet industry, people who want pets will get them from the pound/shelter, which is what they should have been doing anyway. Strays that might been destroyed because people chose to buy their pets from pet shops now have homes.
The big power draw with Tivo and likely other DVR is that it is *always* recording, even if nothing is scheduled. This is what allows a user to turn on the set, notice that something good is in progress and then back up to when the show started (or 20 minutes which is the Tivo limit) and start watching. Obviously, if the DVR shuts down when not instructed to record, this won't happen.
There are ways around this limitation but they add complexity, will need to be thought out and explained to end users.
All of my clocks that matter synch themselves every few hours with the nearest WWV signal.
Many of my other timekeeping devices get their time hack from the net.
Anything free-running probably only has about a 30-second-per-day accuracy anyway (I don't own any Omegas, yet) and I really don't much care, because picking up a watch you haven't worn in a few months and setting it is part of the point of continuing to own analog technology at a time when I could put a solar-powered, radio-synchronized device on my wrist that will read accurately to the millisecond.
WWV is weak on the West Coast. My watch sync attempts to sync to WWV every night but it is only successful about one day in three. This was initially frustrating because the device is supposed to adjust for DST but would fail to make the switch because it could not receive the signal on that day. Now the changeover day is different from what is programmed in so it doesn't work anyway.
All the information is about the implications but not about how it actually works or the trade offs required to get there. They also seems to going directly to the consumer. There are only two reasons to bypass big spending pros and prosumers when introducing new technology:
1) The technology is useless for those who know was they are doing (face recognition) or
2) The quality of the result is significantly lower than existing tech without compelling advantages for those who know what they are doing.
My guess is #2. Exploding the pixel count of the sensor would make the product outrageously expensive. Clearly they are not doing that. So that means the quality suffers as finely adjustable optical focus is replaced by coarse digital focus achievable from the available sensors. We are probably getting camera phone level results. Good enough for Facebook but not something you want to print.
Paying for yourself not practical? I don't smoke and I'm not overweight, and I pay $150/mo for full coverage. If I stay in the hospital, I'm never on the hook for more than $1500; my insurance pays the rest. Granted I am single and young, but I'm not exactly going bankrupt here. I'm sure if you have a large family or are otherwise unhealthy it can be a a huge burden, but if you can't afford that then it pays to not have kids and just take care of yourself.
Your age has as a lot to do with it. I pay about the same as you but my deductible is $5000 despite the fact that I've never smoked and am probably in better shape than you. The catch is that I'm 42. The really scary part is the trend. Nine years ago, I paid $45/month for a $1000 deductible (may even have been $500). Even catastrophic only insurance for the very healthy may soon be unaffordable.
This doesn't even make sense without the GPL. Even if AVM owned the copyright to all code, it doesn't by itself prevent users from adding new code in place. It's as if the author of a book sued to prevent purchasers from the writing in the margins of their own copy.
Unless German copyright law is very different from US law, there must be a clause in the license that TFA fails to mention. This clause presumably disallows consumers from making modifications to the software. Since the GPL is involved, this license could only apply to the code owned entirely by AVM that is not part of a larger GPL unit.
Slashdot Mirror
"Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral,"...
Is it abundant, or is it rare?
"rare earth" doesn't mean rare. "Rare earth's" are a class of elements that are fairly common in the Earth's crust but not often concentrated enough for profitable mining. The concentrated deposits that do exist tend to have many kinds of rare earth's which makes the extraction that much more difficult because they are chemically similar.
Notice how most older cars are bigger?
Notice how older, used, less expensive vehicles tend to be favored by the non-rich?
The 80's called. They want their used car stereotype back.
Cars have been getting bigger since the early 90's. The land yacht's of lore are now so old they are difficult to maintain, smog, and fuel. A new civic is bigger than a late 90's Accord. A new Jetta is bigger than a mid-90's Passat. This means that the poor are driving *smaller* cars even if they drive the same models.
Except for indirect spying on whoever might be home, I don't see why a smart phone app to measure home power usage is even useful. What you really need are overall trends and patterns by device. Not only can this wait until you get home, it works much better on a large screen.
Funny thing, "time off" while unemployed tends to be rather unproductive. It is difficult to commit to anything because there's no guessing how long you have. Job hunting itself is also an unpredictable impulsive afair that largely requires one to drop everything to follow up on a hot opportunity. That is, when it is not brain sucking unsolvable problem that drains one's ability to focus on other things.
I think bad economic times are actually bad for open-source development. People secure in their jobs can afford to slack a little and spend time on hobbies. Many companies also pay thier employees to contriute to open-source software. When budgets are tight, corporate efforts tend to smaller in scale and more foccused on the immediately needs of the company.
His revelation is right on the mark. I constantly see proponents of Open Source say things such as "It's auditable because the source code is free". Well yes it is, but no one cares. I think even from the Slashdot crowd the number of people who bothered to build Firefox from source is a small minority compared to those who downloaded it. Those who actually look at the code are an even smaller subset of those bothered to build from source.
It isn't necessary for a user to personally view, modify, or even compile the source to benefit from open source. At some point the copyright holder may add shovelware, spyware or just plain bugs. They may choose not to port to other platforms. They may just abandon the product. In these cases. a user of a closed source app can do little but continue to use the old version until it no longer runs on current platforms or until advanced security threats make it unsafe.
But as long as one person has the will and ability to adopt what the developer has effectively or literally abandoned, the freeloaders can still their updated binaries. They won't be exactly what they wanted but the freeloaders never had or asked for that anyway.
How much longer can our workforce afford to higher someone because they own a piece of paper and not on their ability?
About as long as we can hire people for the school they attended, for the people that they know, for the companies that they have worked for, and for all the downturns in which they managed to avoid getting laid off.
Circumstantial evidence is a crappy way to select but when employers lack effective means to measure ability there isn't much choice.
Suing may get you money but remember where the money comes from. So that still doesn't stop the police from doing what they did. They don't pay YOU and I Pay. The officers must be fired,the DA must get Fired for brining the case to court. He is a criminal lawyer so he should have known the laws.
The money comes from the police department budget. And the people responsible for that budget are elected officials. Since beading money to highly public lawsuits is really good way to get tossed out in the next election, the officials are inclined to take action against those who caused the mess.
Perhaps the technology-related fields fare better because it has always been a moving target. Before you had worries about job security you had worries about your tools becoming obsolete or deprecated. The entire mindset is to keep learning new languages, concepts, and technology. Never rest on your laurels.
Who is resting? Most of those whose skills are obsolete got that way by serving their employers interest rather than their own. There is often a dilemma: what is most needed at your current job isn't necessarily useful for the next and for many fields there is no equivalent to working on an open source project on your spare time. If you can't get your training on the job you can't get it at all. Hedging means steering your experience to something less useful to your current employer but more marketable outside. That's a tricky and somewhat dangerous stand to make and it should come as no surprise that many fail.
So these brown dwarfs are essentially big balls of (mostly) hydrogen with the centers under tremendous pressures and temperatures but not quite hot enough to "light" (in a fusion sense). Well what would happen if you managed to drop a fusion bomb on it?
"Fusion" bombs fuse Deuterium and Tritium. Brown dwarfs already fuse Deuterium and Tritium for the part of their life cycle. That's what makes them brown dwarfs and not planets.
http://cronodon.com/SpaceTech/BrownDwarf.html
In order to create a real star, you need proton fusion. But that requires maintaining necessary heat and pressure for millions of years. If the gravity of the brown dwarf and the native deuterium and tritium couldn't do it then it is unlikely that your puny little H-bomb is going to accomplish much.
http://www.tim-thompson.com/fusion.html#ppcycle
While it is true that electrical heat converts 100% of the energy delivered to the device into heat. But this is a highly dishonest measurement. Electricity is not an energy source. It is an energy transfer medium. Here in California most of our electrical is generated by gas. Gas is burned to generated heat (losses from incomplete combustion and transfer to the environment), heat is converted to mechanical energy (thermodynamic losses), mechanical energy is converted to electrical energy (more losses), and more still is lost to resistance in the wires that bring the electrical energy to your home.
Compare this to burning the gas directly in your home, which uses all the heat directly rather than wasting much of it via unnecessary conversions.
ISS is in low Earth orbit, below the Van Alan belts. The radiation environment isn't that severe. A study performed in the early 90's found that off the shelf electronics were fine for LEO. For geosync and higher orbits, minor shielding was needed to achieve reliable operation.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=6&sqi=2&ved=0CE4QFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Frsta.royalsocietypublishing.org%2Fcontent%2F361%2F1802%2F193.full.pdf&rct=j&q=low%20earth%20orbit%20radiation%20environment&ei=BmgXTrarKIa0sAPB3s3uDQ&usg=AFQjCNHCt82GlFwEYW4z90dov1umXWOh_Q&sig2=O5-vlK7lpRbKEBSzrgSSsw&cad=rja
Is there no natural gas infrastructure in the UK? In the States (or at least the places that I have lived), people mostly heat with gas. It's still fossil fuel, of course, but it's a lot more efficient and cheaper than burning the same fuel to generate electricity and then using an electric heater. Our peak energy consumption is during summer, when the air conditioners run.
Now, if they had resurrected a recorder/player device that actually "played" the cylinder, that would be different.
The articles doesn't say but they may even have an original player. It doesn't really matter:
1) The cylinder is warped so it may not be possible to play it on the original device without some dubious restoration.
2) Even if it wasn't warped, actually playing the recording with an original or reconstructed device would almost certainly cause further damage to the recording. That may not be a big deal for some old 45 where there may still be thousands of surviving copies but Edison's cylinder is a one of a kind historical artifact.
The cylinder likely sat around for many decades unplayed, not because it couldn't be done but because the artifact was too precious to subject to that kind of treatment. With the optical scan, we get the best of both world: We get to hear every note and scratch and we get to preserve the cylinder for future generations as it came to our own.
Maybe I don't understand who these free seminars are for, put perhaps a whitelist would suite them better than a blacklist?
There is no definitive listing of potential customers. A white listing would likely only serve to limit the seminars to existing customers and that would defeat much of the purpose of holding the seminars.
If it has to be injected into the tumor than the tumors must still be identified. Chemo will still be needed to catch smaller tumors that are not identified. So it looks like a less invasive alternative to surgically removing tumors. Useful but a lot way from a cure for cancer.
My friends run into this a lot when signing up for free seminars. The idea is to prevent employees of their competiors from attending their events. Competitor domains are blocked (obviously) but also well known ISP's and free web mail services like Gmail because a employee of a competitor can easily hide there. The whole process is quite leaky though. There are just too many domains to check. If you have a personal domain or even a lesser known ISP, they let you in rather than trying to figure out what or who you are.
This works for companies you are doing business with, and yes, I do this myself. However, if Google or Facebook are selling your email address, there isn't much you can do about it.
But they don't. I have separate addresses for google and facebook. They have not been abused. My policy is that if I get spam on an address I terminate that address. If it is someone that I think is likely a victim and someone I want to continue to do business with, I notify them and assign a new address.
The rate at which addresses leak to spammers is still small but increasing rapidly. I attribute this to the recent surge in attacks on customer databases.
BTW, 100 addresses is not enough for the long term unless you can find some way to recycle no longer used addresses. I've been doing this since the 90's and I have over 500 addresses assigned.
That's nice. The only nail that counts, will be the one where solid state is at least modestly cheaper for a given amount of space.
Mind you, I look forward to that nail, but until it gets here, it's not yet time to party.
For most users, disk storage is already much larger than needed. All that is needed is that an SSD have cheaper unit cost while still providing adequate storage. Even if it is still 4x the cost per byte, it won't matter because the extra storage isn't useful.
Yes, it is obvious but really, Oracle will do open source whenever and wherever they can profit from it. And by profit I mean actual dollars in the fairly short term. That has been their policy with everything they acquired from Sun. Long term growth and good will be damned.
What lives will it save? Without the pet industry, these animals would never be born.
Without the pet industry, people who want pets will get them from the pound/shelter, which is what they should have been doing anyway. Strays that might been destroyed because people chose to buy their pets from pet shops now have homes.
The big power draw with Tivo and likely other DVR is that it is *always* recording, even if nothing is scheduled. This is what allows a user to turn on the set, notice that something good is in progress and then back up to when the show started (or 20 minutes which is the Tivo limit) and start watching. Obviously, if the DVR shuts down when not instructed to record, this won't happen.
There are ways around this limitation but they add complexity, will need to be thought out and explained to end users.
All of my clocks that matter synch themselves every few hours with the nearest WWV signal.
Many of my other timekeeping devices get their time hack from the net.
Anything free-running probably only has about a 30-second-per-day accuracy anyway (I don't own any Omegas, yet) and I really don't much care, because picking up a watch you haven't worn in a few months and setting it is part of the point of continuing to own analog technology at a time when I could put a solar-powered, radio-synchronized device on my wrist that will read accurately to the millisecond.
WWV is weak on the West Coast. My watch sync attempts to sync to WWV every night but it is only successful about one day in three. This was initially frustrating because the device is supposed to adjust for DST but would fail to make the switch because it could not receive the signal on that day. Now the changeover day is different from what is programmed in so it doesn't work anyway.
All the information is about the implications but not about how it actually works or the trade offs required to get there. They also seems to going directly to the consumer. There are only two reasons to bypass big spending pros and prosumers when introducing new technology:
My guess is #2. Exploding the pixel count of the sensor would make the product outrageously expensive. Clearly they are not doing that. So that means the quality suffers as finely adjustable optical focus is replaced by coarse digital focus achievable from the available sensors. We are probably getting camera phone level results. Good enough for Facebook but not something you want to print.
Paying for yourself not practical? I don't smoke and I'm not overweight, and I pay $150/mo for full coverage. If I stay in the hospital, I'm never on the hook for more than $1500; my insurance pays the rest. Granted I am single and young, but I'm not exactly going bankrupt here. I'm sure if you have a large family or are otherwise unhealthy it can be a a huge burden, but if you can't afford that then it pays to not have kids and just take care of yourself.
Your age has as a lot to do with it. I pay about the same as you but my deductible is $5000 despite the fact that I've never smoked and am probably in better shape than you. The catch is that I'm 42. The really scary part is the trend. Nine years ago, I paid $45/month for a $1000 deductible (may even have been $500). Even catastrophic only insurance for the very healthy may soon be unaffordable.
This doesn't even make sense without the GPL. Even if AVM owned the copyright to all code, it doesn't by itself prevent users from adding new code in place. It's as if the author of a book sued to prevent purchasers from the writing in the margins of their own copy.
Unless German copyright law is very different from US law, there must be a clause in the license that TFA fails to mention. This clause presumably disallows consumers from making modifications to the software. Since the GPL is involved, this license could only apply to the code owned entirely by AVM that is not part of a larger GPL unit.