>It'd be nice if they started doing some useful work, though. Or at least quit sabotaging other people's work.
In many, many years they haven't. The software landscape is littered with corpses, some put there legitimately by plain competition, but many put there by FUD, dirty tricks, etc. If they can't play right maybe they SHOULD be destroyed. At this point the ball is in their court to prove that they shouldn't be destroyed, IMHO.
Of course they're not listening to me, though. My free $peech i$n't a$ powerful a$ their free $peach.
You missed his point. He feels his current livelihood is threatened by Microsoft and his practices. Wishing to see Microsoft destroyed is an interpretation of protecting himself.
Next you say, He should be able to adapt the the changes Microsoft causes.
The simple reply is that it's like moving from a tropical paradise to a desert. Microsoft has impoverished the software landscape. Sure, in a Microsft world there are others, but they turn out to be minor players heavily rooted in a Microsoft sofware ecosystem. The diversity is gone, the lushness is gone, except from the Redmond campus.
One could just as well as why can't Microsoft adapt to free software, instead of resorting to FUD, patent threats, etc.
I did a submarine search while/after posting, and Nautilus is the only one, at least currently. There is another designated to become a museum in either Tennessee or Kentucky, but that project hasn't moved forward. There are several sails on display, but that's about it. There is one other post-Nautilus, Albacore-hull sub, I believe in Oregon, but it's a diesel-electric. (I didn't know they made any of those, past the Albacore proof-of-concept.)
As a side note, my family and I like the veteran-run museums - we've been to a few of them, now. The two I can name at the moment are the Albacore Museum in Portsmouth, NH and Warbirds, in Florida near KSC. They're great, and run by dedicated people.
I don't know if we'll see a Chernobyl on cars, since we've already seen it in people's laps. The automobile industry is much more in tune with getting sued, having been there so much. Given that the precautions of proper charging are known, simple, and effective, I expect to see them simply do it right. Beyond that, the charging system for a hybrid is much more "sealed" than conventional batteries, and less subject to tampering or "plugging in the wrong charger."
Though through defects, there will probably be some sort of incident. But I suspect your chances of getting killed by simply going out on the road, or some sort of "spontaneous fuel system explosion" are higher than a hybrid battery fault.
I hear a lot about "pebble bed" and other such reactors that have no catastrophic fail mechanisms, even if the operators walk away from the place. (Even if Homer Simpson really was the only guy in the control room.)
The training is a good point. Military pilots frequently wind up as airline pilots, so it makes sense that the same thing would happen with nuclear power plants.
I was a submarine fan as a kid, and some of that has stuck through adulthood. I've been on the USS Cod in Cleveland, OH, whatever the WWII sub is at Fall River, MA, and the Nautilus. But my favorite museum sub is the Albacore, in Portsmouth, ME. A high school friend was on the Glennard P Lipscomb.
Do you know of any other more modern submarine museums? The Nautilus was too crowded (with tourists) and too chopped up, and the WWII subs are too beaten up, which is why the Albacore is my favorite. Still, I'd like to see what a more modern (but still decommissioned) nuclear sub is like.
>No, it's normally only a few percent power losses from engine to wheel with a standard transmission. Wiki quotes 10%-20% but doesn't say what >transmission was used.
I see your 10-20% number on Wiki. Maybe my 40% number came from the gasoline, and inefficiencies of the IC engine itself, added to the 10-20%. Or maybe it's a senior moment.
>What are you smoking? Wiki
How many hours have you spent on a tractor? One of my H.S. teachers had a farm, and a number of us worked there for a number of years. In addition to several smaller tractors (A Massey-Furg and several Allis-Chalmers) he had 3 big John Deers. The 4020 was rated at 80HP, the 4430 at 125HP, and the 4320 somewhere in between. Somehow I think that 4020 was a lot more powerful than my first car, a VW Rabbit with 78HP. That's what I mean by "absurdly low HP spec".
No, the point is to make "environment" and "wallet" point in the same direction. Given the general population, that's often the only way to get the right thing done. Next we need more sex in advertising hybrids, so that the "gonads" will point in the same direction as the "environment" and the "wallet".
>but of all the cars in the world, the whole world, not just america, not many will do this when they get overcharged
As you say, you know the Prius doesn't use LiPo, so while fun and spectacular, the video is irrelevant. NiMH is a completely different beast, not a speck of Li in there. For that matter, any time you find a rechargeable Li battery of any sort, you also find a very smart charger, for obvious reasons. The folks who made that video were intentionally not charging very "intelligently." Of course there are the recent laptops, but I'm under the impression that that was a design defect. Not to say a car can't have a design defect, but we do have recalls in such cases - frequently well-publicized recalls.
>I'd rather my car just dribbled a little petrol out the side wouldnt you?
I always had the impression that Detroit went after the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles because it was a blue-sky future vehicle that could be tucked away in Research, and required no substantive changes NOW. By contrast, hybrids required real work and real manufacturing very soon./RANT. The general model, not just on Slashdot, is to criticize government stupidity. Government has no monopoly on stupidity, and I would assert that US business tends to have just as big a supply. IMHO for the most part, US business just wants to keep making money the same way they made money yesterday, last week, last month, last year. Incremental innovation is tolerated, significant innovation shunned, and all attempts are made to stamp out disruptive innovation.
I'd take what you said and downgrade TMI even further. It was only a public relations and commercial disaster. As you say, radioactive emissions from the plant were negligible, and bridging from what else has been said, lower than radioactive emissions from a coal-fired power plant.
That TMI happened right about the same time as "The China Syndrome" is unfortunate and in fact masks the point that in both "disasters" there was no real disaster. In neither case did anything make significant physical progress toward China, nor was there significant radioactive release. For that matter, "The China Syndrome" worst-cased the mistakes. The only thing preventing the scenario from seeming unreasonably unrealistic were the operations failures leading to Chernobyl.
I got the impression that the reason US power plants are pressurized water designs was because the US government wanted to increase the industrial base for that type, to benefit the Navy. Otherwise commercial power plants might well have settled on a safer, simpler, more fail-safe reactor type. Any thoughts?
What does this type of operation do to the battery life?
From recent research (I'm currently in the market for a new car.) it appears that Toyota got 100k miles lifetime out of the batteries by very carefully controlling the charge-discharge characteristics of the car. From what I can tell, the battery pack is quite over-designed and used rather shallowly.
Turning the Prius into a plug-in, even with extra batteries added, most likely means changing to deep-cycle operation. I would think that this would significantly shorten battery life, though the CalCar pages say nothing about this that I could find.
I've liked the idea of in-wheel motors too, but have feared the unsprung weight.
There is one extra issue beyond what you've mentioned. With a conventional gasoline engine under the hood I've heard that something under 40% of the power makes it to the wheels. There are losses in the transmission, losses to accessories, losses in every single mechanical coupling. The Prius gets rid of the accessory loss and some of the transmission loss for its electric motor, but the some of the transmission losses and all of the coupling losses are still there. Moving the motor into the hub gets rid of ALL mechanical losses except for wheel bearing friction.
Oh, plus once you go to in-wheel it's most logical to go to 4WD in order to keep individual unsprung masses low.
So I guess at this point I have to ask a question... I'm car-shopping right now, and am pretty well settled on a Honda Accord. The engine on the model I'm looking at is "166 BHP". I would say that that ends up 166*0.4/4, or 16.6 HP/wheel, if we were saying that gas HP == electric HP, which really isn't true because of low-rpm torque, in which case even less power is necessary per wheel for the electric.
But my question is about the term "BHP". I seem to remember that that term is "Brake HorsePower", or power measured at the wheels, not at the engine. Is that true? In other words, would that mean 166 HP measured *after* all of the losses, and that the engine is really 415 HP measured at the crankshaft?
I know tractors always had absurdly low HP specs, but all of that horsepower was truly usable. I'm wondering what sort of specmanship is being played with cars, and how that translates to in-wheel electric motors.
Doesn't matter if Xerox didn't file patents. Doesn't matter if MIT didn't file patents.
All of that work becomes part of prior art, which can be used to invalidate patents. GUIs are getting old enough for patents to have expired, anyway. The true fundamentals are getting to be public domain. The rest is becoming fuzz, and can be worked around.
IMHO I always hated the fact that Linux spent so much time chasing Windows, setting its sights too low. In many respects the OS/2 WPS is now dated, but in other respects it's still unequaled. Plus if we were to re-implement the WPS today with modern plumbing it would no doubt be much better.
The headroom wasn't that hot on the Civic, though for that I'm going from numbers on the web. It's the Accord that had the extra headroom. The Civic was right on par with the Camry and Prius. I'm only 6'4", my son is a bit over 2" taller. But then again he's 21, so I'm not too worried about him driving this car, whenever we buy,
I'm 6'4", and my head just touches the roof liner. Most of the sedans from Honda and Toyota are right in the same ballpark for headroom, and the Honda Accord has almost 1.5" more.
Back to $2.70/gal... And do you think that will hold for the next year or past? The break-even point is a constantly changing thing - in the direction that favors technology.
My wife and I were on the Honda lot recently looking around, after the place was closed. The Honda Accord Hybrid looked like it turned a $20k car into a $30k one, and added 1 or 2 mpg to city and highway mileage.
I had an '86 Golf, rated at 28/40 mpg. On my ~10mi commute with 5 lights, I routinely got 37-38 mpg. Once or twice a year I take a 640 mi trip, and routinely got 38-39 mpg with a high point of 41 mpg. Though a generally decent vehicle it had it's share of bugs.
Even with the degraded mileage figures for both Prius and Camry, (non-hybrid) they suggest that it will take 1.2 years to break even, using some sort of "average" driving and mileage statistics. But at the front of the article, they specify this at $2.70/gal gasoline. Prices right now are well above that, and it seems to me that $2.70/gal is closer to a low figure for the past year than any sort of average.
I keep gasoline records for my vehicles, I guess it's a family idiosyncrasy. But the other day someone looked at the book for our 2000 Toyota Sienna, and noticed that over its life the price of gasoline has more than doubled. Does anyone believe that that isn't going to continue to happen? So any vehicle bought now and kept for 7 years, count on paying upwards of $6.00/gal later in its life. That changes the break-even point, just a little.
BTW, the Prius just doesn't have the necessary headroom for tall people. In the efficient vehicle category that you can wrap around a tall person, the Honda Accord looks pretty good. Some of the VWs look good too, as well as having TDI engines. But Consumer Reports hates them for long-term.
Oh no! Free software violates Microsoft patents! And we know how valuable those patents ALL are!
We'd better shut down the infringing software.
Shutdown that pesky BIND. That means you, too, root servers. Shutdown that horrible infringing Apache, and all of those evil websites using it. Oh, and don't forget sendmail, postfix, and exim. And how about all of that silly routing software, arp, and such.
Weren't patents recently "reformed" to grant coverage to "first to file" instead of "first to invent"?
Sometimes I really think the best way to fight idiots is to give them what they're asking for ALL of it, and COMPLETELY. Let Microsoft just TRY to rebuild the internet, or anything remotely like it - using Microsoft sofware and ONLY Microsoft software.
What IDIOTS we've become in the USA. The handwriting is on the wall for the demise of our greatness, and this is only one sign. (Actually a BIG sign - facts, information, and ideas are under assault from many sides.)
But I typically buy somewhere near the bottom, so "a little extra" to get the Intel board turns out to be a lot extra. Usually for graphics there's a "nutritionally complete" point where the card has full capabilities, though not as fast a clock or not as many pipes as the expensive cards, and avoids crap like TurboCache. My ATI 8500LE and nV 5700LE were both good cards, in that respect. Unfortunately I did a poor job on my current nV 6200, nor realizing that it had a half-width bus, when I bought it.
I'm not a hard-core gamer, but every now and then. Plus if anyone would ever get back into full 3D visualization/exploration like Uru Myst...
Or Intel could release their now stuff on a standalone video card.
I have owned or made purchasing decisions for 6 3D graphics cards. * 2 were Matrox G400s, based on their being the first mainstream card to get 3D hardware support under Linux. I even ran Utah-GLX on one. * 1 was an ATI Radeon 8500LE, based on price/performance and the existence of the open source R200 drivers. * 3 are nVidia cards, since there's no competitive contemporary open source 3D any more, and the quality of nVidia's binary seems to be better. There are reverse-engineering efforts on both, but it's unclear who will be the clear winner on this.
So I *have* put my money where my mouth is, and will continue to do so.
I also recommend hardware for friends and co-workers, and this is a factor. Even for a friend who is only going to use Windows, if all else is equal I would advise that he "reward" the company for its Linux support. Notice that in this case I said, "all else is equal," and let the friend know why I gave the advice I did.
A college friend's Chrysler had this back in the mid 70's, except the light came on when you were being wasteful. Every now and then he tried to drive in such a way as to keep it lit as much as possible, just to be contrarian.
So it was our job to do so? We were anointed probation officers?
But more to the point, and where we are today... When Congress attempts to do something by passing a law, we speak quite fervently about the unintended consequences of that law. Anything any of us does has consequences, some intended, some not. The pragmatic issue is whether the unintended consequences outweigh the intended ones.
This wasn't rocket science. GHW Bush knew what the unintended consequences would be, and at the time he spoke of "fine tuning" the military and economic strength left for Saddam Hussein. The goal was enough to maintain a nation, but too little to threaten neighbors. Perhaps he stopped pounding them a little early, but he also knew the risks of landing just where we are, today.
The real problem with the Iraq war isn't now, and didn't start back in November. It began even before the war. Even if you forgive the entire intelligence fiasco, the entire thing was under-resourced. Even after toppling Saddam Hussein, we might have had 30-90 days to make their lives better, and we *would* have been welcomed as liberators. Instead, our soldiers watched their people loot, we didn't have the proper strength, training, or policies to do correct policing anyway, and it seems that "Iraq reconstruction" was really a feeding trough for US corporations. (Instead of putting Iraqis back to work, which *would* have helped more than most anything else we did.)
There's no good way out, now. Perhaps re-instituting the draft and getting our strength there up to 500,000 might do the job, but it's also possible that the well is SO poisoned after 4 years of fiddling around that even a real strength buildup wouldn't do it.
From what I understand, the problem isn't getting U-235 to go boom, it's getting U-235.
You're quite literally sorting atom-by-atom, putting the U-238 in one bucket and the U-235 in the other, a 2% sort-by-weight problem. But really it's even worse than that, because one always hears about Uranium hexa-Fluoride, so it isn't 235 vs 238, you have to add 54 to each. That changes a 2.1% weight difference into a 1.7% difference. That's why they talk about thousands of centrifuges for refining.
So from what I understand, some sort of nuclear bomb really isn't hard, given the material. Of course making a *small* bomb really IS hard, as is getting the fissile material.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you've just proven his point.
>It'd be nice if they started doing some useful work, though. Or at least quit sabotaging other people's work.
In many, many years they haven't. The software landscape is littered with corpses, some put there legitimately by plain competition, but many put there by FUD, dirty tricks, etc. If they can't play right maybe they SHOULD be destroyed. At this point the ball is in their court to prove that they shouldn't be destroyed, IMHO.
Of course they're not listening to me, though. My free $peech i$n't a$ powerful a$ their free $peach.
You missed his point. He feels his current livelihood is threatened by Microsoft and his practices. Wishing to see Microsoft destroyed is an interpretation of protecting himself.
Next you say, He should be able to adapt the the changes Microsoft causes.
The simple reply is that it's like moving from a tropical paradise to a desert. Microsoft has impoverished the software landscape. Sure, in a Microsft world there are others, but they turn out to be minor players heavily rooted in a Microsoft sofware ecosystem. The diversity is gone, the lushness is gone, except from the Redmond campus.
One could just as well as why can't Microsoft adapt to free software, instead of resorting to FUD, patent threats, etc.
So you're saying it's not a known-unknown, but rather an unknown-unknown, to borrow from the former Secretary of Defense.
I did a submarine search while/after posting, and Nautilus is the only one, at least currently. There is another designated to become a museum in either Tennessee or Kentucky, but that project hasn't moved forward. There are several sails on display, but that's about it. There is one other post-Nautilus, Albacore-hull sub, I believe in Oregon, but it's a diesel-electric. (I didn't know they made any of those, past the Albacore proof-of-concept.)
As a side note, my family and I like the veteran-run museums - we've been to a few of them, now. The two I can name at the moment are the Albacore Museum in Portsmouth, NH and Warbirds, in Florida near KSC. They're great, and run by dedicated people.
I don't know if we'll see a Chernobyl on cars, since we've already seen it in people's laps. The automobile industry is much more in tune with getting sued, having been there so much. Given that the precautions of proper charging are known, simple, and effective, I expect to see them simply do it right. Beyond that, the charging system for a hybrid is much more "sealed" than conventional batteries, and less subject to tampering or "plugging in the wrong charger."
Though through defects, there will probably be some sort of incident. But I suspect your chances of getting killed by simply going out on the road, or some sort of "spontaneous fuel system explosion" are higher than a hybrid battery fault.
I hear a lot about "pebble bed" and other such reactors that have no catastrophic fail mechanisms, even if the operators walk away from the place. (Even if Homer Simpson really was the only guy in the control room.)
The training is a good point. Military pilots frequently wind up as airline pilots, so it makes sense that the same thing would happen with nuclear power plants.
I was a submarine fan as a kid, and some of that has stuck through adulthood. I've been on the USS Cod in Cleveland, OH, whatever the WWII sub is at Fall River, MA, and the Nautilus. But my favorite museum sub is the Albacore, in Portsmouth, ME. A high school friend was on the Glennard P Lipscomb.
Do you know of any other more modern submarine museums? The Nautilus was too crowded (with tourists) and too chopped up, and the WWII subs are too beaten up, which is why the Albacore is my favorite. Still, I'd like to see what a more modern (but still decommissioned) nuclear sub is like.
>No, it's normally only a few percent power losses from engine to wheel with a standard transmission. Wiki quotes 10%-20% but doesn't say what
>transmission was used.
I see your 10-20% number on Wiki. Maybe my 40% number came from the gasoline, and inefficiencies of the IC engine itself, added to the 10-20%. Or maybe it's a senior moment.
>What are you smoking? Wiki
How many hours have you spent on a tractor? One of my H.S. teachers had a farm, and a number of us worked there for a number of years. In addition to several smaller tractors (A Massey-Furg and several Allis-Chalmers) he had 3 big John Deers. The 4020 was rated at 80HP, the 4430 at 125HP, and the 4320 somewhere in between. Somehow I think that 4020 was a lot more powerful than my first car, a VW Rabbit with 78HP. That's what I mean by "absurdly low HP spec".
No, the point is to make "environment" and "wallet" point in the same direction. Given the general population, that's often the only way to get the right thing done. Next we need more sex in advertising hybrids, so that the "gonads" will point in the same direction as the "environment" and the "wallet".
>but of all the cars in the world, the whole world, not just america, not many will do this when they get overcharged
As you say, you know the Prius doesn't use LiPo, so while fun and spectacular, the video is irrelevant. NiMH is a completely different beast, not a speck of Li in there. For that matter, any time you find a rechargeable Li battery of any sort, you also find a very smart charger, for obvious reasons. The folks who made that video were intentionally not charging very "intelligently." Of course there are the recent laptops, but I'm under the impression that that was a design defect. Not to say a car can't have a design defect, but we do have recalls in such cases - frequently well-publicized recalls.
>I'd rather my car just dribbled a little petrol out the side wouldnt you?
Depends on how close sparks or open flames are.
I always had the impression that Detroit went after the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles because it was a blue-sky future vehicle that could be tucked away in Research, and required no substantive changes NOW. By contrast, hybrids required real work and real manufacturing very soon. /RANT. The general model, not just on Slashdot, is to criticize government stupidity. Government has no monopoly on stupidity, and I would assert that US business tends to have just as big a supply. IMHO for the most part, US business just wants to keep making money the same way they made money yesterday, last week, last month, last year. Incremental innovation is tolerated, significant innovation shunned, and all attempts are made to stamp out disruptive innovation.
I'd take what you said and downgrade TMI even further. It was only a public relations and commercial disaster. As you say, radioactive emissions from the plant were negligible, and bridging from what else has been said, lower than radioactive emissions from a coal-fired power plant.
That TMI happened right about the same time as "The China Syndrome" is unfortunate and in fact masks the point that in both "disasters" there was no real disaster. In neither case did anything make significant physical progress toward China, nor was there significant radioactive release. For that matter, "The China Syndrome" worst-cased the mistakes. The only thing preventing the scenario from seeming unreasonably unrealistic were the operations failures leading to Chernobyl.
I got the impression that the reason US power plants are pressurized water designs was because the US government wanted to increase the industrial base for that type, to benefit the Navy. Otherwise commercial power plants might well have settled on a safer, simpler, more fail-safe reactor type. Any thoughts?
What does this type of operation do to the battery life?
From recent research (I'm currently in the market for a new car.) it appears that Toyota got 100k miles lifetime out of the batteries by very carefully controlling the charge-discharge characteristics of the car. From what I can tell, the battery pack is quite over-designed and used rather shallowly.
Turning the Prius into a plug-in, even with extra batteries added, most likely means changing to deep-cycle operation. I would think that this would significantly shorten battery life, though the CalCar pages say nothing about this that I could find.
I've liked the idea of in-wheel motors too, but have feared the unsprung weight.
There is one extra issue beyond what you've mentioned. With a conventional gasoline engine under the hood I've heard that something under 40% of the power makes it to the wheels. There are losses in the transmission, losses to accessories, losses in every single mechanical coupling. The Prius gets rid of the accessory loss and some of the transmission loss for its electric motor, but the some of the transmission losses and all of the coupling losses are still there. Moving the motor into the hub gets rid of ALL mechanical losses except for wheel bearing friction.
Oh, plus once you go to in-wheel it's most logical to go to 4WD in order to keep individual unsprung masses low.
So I guess at this point I have to ask a question... I'm car-shopping right now, and am pretty well settled on a Honda Accord. The engine on the model I'm looking at is "166 BHP". I would say that that ends up 166*0.4/4, or 16.6 HP/wheel, if we were saying that gas HP == electric HP, which really isn't true because of low-rpm torque, in which case even less power is necessary per wheel for the electric.
But my question is about the term "BHP". I seem to remember that that term is "Brake HorsePower", or power measured at the wheels, not at the engine. Is that true? In other words, would that mean 166 HP measured *after* all of the losses, and that the engine is really 415 HP measured at the crankshaft?
I know tractors always had absurdly low HP specs, but all of that horsepower was truly usable.
I'm wondering what sort of specmanship is being played with cars, and how that translates to in-wheel electric motors.
Given the story earlier today about new anti-piracy legislation...
Gitmo for you buddy, for spreading piracy by printing that evil number!
Randall Munroe would be LUCKY to get Gitmo. Time for some Extreme Rendition in Eastern Europe!
Doesn't matter if Xerox didn't file patents.
Doesn't matter if MIT didn't file patents.
All of that work becomes part of prior art, which can be used to invalidate patents. GUIs are getting old enough for patents to have expired, anyway. The true fundamentals are getting to be public domain. The rest is becoming fuzz, and can be worked around.
IMHO I always hated the fact that Linux spent so much time chasing Windows, setting its sights too low. In many respects the OS/2 WPS is now dated, but in other respects it's still unequaled. Plus if we were to re-implement the WPS today with modern plumbing it would no doubt be much better.
Still, the mileage isn't bad on either car.
The headroom wasn't that hot on the Civic, though for that I'm going from numbers on the web. It's the Accord that had the extra headroom. The Civic was right on par with the Camry and Prius. I'm only 6'4", my son is a bit over 2" taller. But then again he's 21, so I'm not too worried about him driving this car, whenever we buy,
I'm 6'4", and my head just touches the roof liner. Most of the sedans from Honda and Toyota are right in the same ballpark for headroom, and the Honda Accord has almost 1.5" more.
Back to $2.70/gal... And do you think that will hold for the next year or past? The break-even point is a constantly changing thing - in the direction that favors technology.
My wife and I were on the Honda lot recently looking around, after the place was closed. The Honda Accord Hybrid looked like it turned a $20k car into a $30k one, and added 1 or 2 mpg to city and highway mileage.
I had an '86 Golf, rated at 28/40 mpg. On my ~10mi commute with 5 lights, I routinely got 37-38 mpg. Once or twice a year I take a 640 mi trip, and routinely got 38-39 mpg with a high point of 41 mpg. Though a generally decent vehicle it had it's share of bugs.
Maybe it's not about payback time, but...
Even with the degraded mileage figures for both Prius and Camry, (non-hybrid) they suggest that it will take 1.2 years to break even, using some sort of "average" driving and mileage statistics. But at the front of the article, they specify this at $2.70/gal gasoline. Prices right now are well above that, and it seems to me that $2.70/gal is closer to a low figure for the past year than any sort of average.
I keep gasoline records for my vehicles, I guess it's a family idiosyncrasy. But the other day someone looked at the book for our 2000 Toyota Sienna, and noticed that over its life the price of gasoline has more than doubled. Does anyone believe that that isn't going to continue to happen? So any vehicle bought now and kept for 7 years, count on paying upwards of $6.00/gal later in its life. That changes the break-even point, just a little.
BTW, the Prius just doesn't have the necessary headroom for tall people. In the efficient vehicle category that you can wrap around a tall person, the Honda Accord looks pretty good. Some of the VWs look good too, as well as having TDI engines. But Consumer Reports hates them for long-term.
Oh no! Free software violates Microsoft patents! And we know how valuable those patents ALL are!
We'd better shut down the infringing software.
Shutdown that pesky BIND. That means you, too, root servers.
Shutdown that horrible infringing Apache, and all of those evil websites using it.
Oh, and don't forget sendmail, postfix, and exim.
And how about all of that silly routing software, arp, and such.
Weren't patents recently "reformed" to grant coverage to "first to file" instead of "first to invent"?
Sometimes I really think the best way to fight idiots is to give them what they're asking for ALL of it, and COMPLETELY. Let Microsoft just TRY to rebuild the internet, or anything remotely like it - using Microsoft sofware and ONLY Microsoft software.
What IDIOTS we've become in the USA. The handwriting is on the wall for the demise of our greatness, and this is only one sign. (Actually a BIG sign - facts, information, and ideas are under assault from many sides.)
What he (LWATCDR) said...
But I typically buy somewhere near the bottom, so "a little extra" to get the Intel board turns out to be a lot extra. Usually for graphics there's a "nutritionally complete" point where the card has full capabilities, though not as fast a clock or not as many pipes as the expensive cards, and avoids crap like TurboCache. My ATI 8500LE and nV 5700LE were both good cards, in that respect. Unfortunately I did a poor job on my current nV 6200, nor realizing that it had a half-width bus, when I bought it.
I'm not a hard-core gamer, but every now and then. Plus if anyone would ever get back into full 3D visualization/exploration like Uru Myst...
Or Intel could release their now stuff on a standalone video card.
I have owned or made purchasing decisions for 6 3D graphics cards.
* 2 were Matrox G400s, based on their being the first mainstream card to get 3D hardware support under Linux. I even ran Utah-GLX on one.
* 1 was an ATI Radeon 8500LE, based on price/performance and the existence of the open source R200 drivers.
* 3 are nVidia cards, since there's no competitive contemporary open source 3D any more, and the quality of nVidia's binary seems to be better. There are reverse-engineering efforts on both, but it's unclear who will be the clear winner on this.
So I *have* put my money where my mouth is, and will continue to do so.
I also recommend hardware for friends and co-workers, and this is a factor. Even for a friend who is only going to use Windows, if all else is equal I would advise that he "reward" the company for its Linux support. Notice that in this case I said, "all else is equal," and let the friend know why I gave the advice I did.
A college friend's Chrysler had this back in the mid 70's, except the light came on when you were being wasteful. Every now and then he tried to drive in such a way as to keep it lit as much as possible, just to be contrarian.
So it was our job to do so?
We were anointed probation officers?
But more to the point, and where we are today... When Congress attempts to do something by passing a law, we speak quite fervently about the unintended consequences of that law. Anything any of us does has consequences, some intended, some not. The pragmatic issue is whether the unintended consequences outweigh the intended ones.
This wasn't rocket science. GHW Bush knew what the unintended consequences would be, and at the time he spoke of "fine tuning" the military and economic strength left for Saddam Hussein. The goal was enough to maintain a nation, but too little to threaten neighbors. Perhaps he stopped pounding them a little early, but he also knew the risks of landing just where we are, today.
The real problem with the Iraq war isn't now, and didn't start back in November. It began even before the war. Even if you forgive the entire intelligence fiasco, the entire thing was under-resourced. Even after toppling Saddam Hussein, we might have had 30-90 days to make their lives better, and we *would* have been welcomed as liberators. Instead, our soldiers watched their people loot, we didn't have the proper strength, training, or policies to do correct policing anyway, and it seems that "Iraq reconstruction" was really a feeding trough for US corporations. (Instead of putting Iraqis back to work, which *would* have helped more than most anything else we did.)
There's no good way out, now. Perhaps re-instituting the draft and getting our strength there up to 500,000 might do the job, but it's also possible that the well is SO poisoned after 4 years of fiddling around that even a real strength buildup wouldn't do it.
From what I understand, the problem isn't getting U-235 to go boom, it's getting U-235.
You're quite literally sorting atom-by-atom, putting the U-238 in one bucket and the U-235 in the other, a 2% sort-by-weight problem. But really it's even worse than that, because one always hears about Uranium hexa-Fluoride, so it isn't 235 vs 238, you have to add 54 to each. That changes a 2.1% weight difference into a 1.7% difference. That's why they talk about thousands of centrifuges for refining.
So from what I understand, some sort of nuclear bomb really isn't hard, given the material. Of course making a *small* bomb really IS hard, as is getting the fissile material.