I don't think this is true. It is a reactor, it just doesn't have the standard control rods and moderator in the way that conventional big reactors do. The fissile uranium is in crystals that are homogenously distributed through some sort of a moderator solution, but that's all I could work out from tfa. I'd like to hear more. As others have commented though, there is a lot more spin than info in the tfa. Still it should be clear that the thing is indeed a reactor based on a self-sustaining fission of uranium, not a device to harness the heat from a decaying isotope as was the case with Voyager. To leave big chunks of Pu-238, the radioisotope used in the Voyagers, unattended somewhere... that really would be dangerous (makes a great dirty bomb) and also very expensive, as that stuff needs to be made inside a reactor.
This is the first I've heard of the Element Hiding Helper and I'm very intrigued. My sanity has been rescued by Adblock Plus, and I'm very greatful for how it works. However, this really seems like a escalation in the war on ads, and I have mixed feelings about it. I always justify using Adblock like this: "If they wanted me to see their ads, they'd use text and not garish gifs or flash." But if we find a way to block text ads that's as easy as Ab+, won't this force the advertisers to fight back? Won't Google, for example, be forced to really turn evil? And is that really in the general interest?
Thank you for the intelligent comment. I am certainly skeptical about the magic of the market ever solving real social problems, but in this case, it seems to me that a properly competitive market wouldn't give us a bad result, with some really cheap rates for young people with no dangerous genetic conditions.
However, this would be the first step in a scary direction:
Suppose you carry a gene that would not only increase the health risks of a daughter, but also cost her an extra $1000/year in insurance payments for the rest of her life. Given this risk and the fact that IVF + genetic testing will be ever more accessible, it seems to give an extra inscentive to make sure a fertalized egg is "genetically clean" before implanting it. This is all the stuff about "designer babies" that gets people all worked up in a tizzy.
However, I'm really not sure that this is a bad outcome. So long as the screening techniques are effective, artificial selection will lead to healthier future generations. And where's the downside? I saw Gattaca, thought it was really stupid and badly conceived, and I think it's ridiculous that genetic screening would lead to biggotry. So I'm not sure there's anything here to worry about.
Wow, this place really is just like the Enterprise. I bet that the bar only serves synthohol. This looks about as fun as joining the space-navy, except that it's in your basement.
I'm one of the people who thinks we urgently need a gigantic program to build nuclear powerplants, and we need it yesterday - but neither I or anyone else I know thinks we should get rid of the other promising technologies. There are responsible ways to use hydro and wind power. Geothermal power is also worth exploring. But none of those can provide the power that we need.
And here's where I fit your caraciture: I do oppose raising energy rates and reducing consuption because it's anti-progressive, or as I prefer to say, regressive. Any extra burdens imposed on the cost of energy are going to disproportionately hurt the poor, and they've had it bad enough. Besides, it's totally unrealistic. Of course we should be doing more to insulate houses, and I strongly support government subsidies for doing that. But in a choice between reducing energy use and not reducing it while taking the risk of global climate catastrophe, Americans (maybe people in general) will choose the latter ten out of ten times. We can get mad about it or we can get realistic about it and provide them with the one clean source of power that we know how to develop on a large scale. Sucks that we'll probably have to bring in French engineers to do it right; we've really lost our technological lead in this industry!
Regarding the spent fuel, there is an obvious answer: Reprocessing. The most radioactive stuff that we bury now are the heavy metals which are actually fissile and could be used to produce more energy. The rest of the waste, if processed correctly, would be less radioactive in 30 years than the ore that was originally mined. So in the long run we'd be reducing the amount of radioactive stuff in the ground.
Yeah, because... what could people looking like that possibly be up to besides bringing democracy to my backwards little country? Suddenly it's all so plausible! I think I'll surrender right now!
I thought this development made RAF pilots wish they joined the army because at least in the army, you can do your job without looking like some doofus in a cylon costume. I admit, it's a pretty compelling argument!
I actually had to check the ratio of police to civilians to make sure the sarcasm isn't confined to the last part... and I see that it isn't, at least not according to these 2000 figures:
Portugal: 481 cops per 100,000 citizens
France: 397 cops per 100,000 citizens
USA: 238 cops per 100,000 citizens
Exactly. For Cringely to lump Google in with Microsoft as a monopoly is to dilute the whole concept of what a monopoly is - to the benefit of Microsoft, a real monopoly. If Cringely starts throwing around that word and by it meaning "powerful company with some weight to throw around" he has missed the whole point of what a monopoly is and why it's bad.
Maybe what he's doing instead is looking for a nasty word to call corporate practices he doesn't approve of, like undermining small companies after stealing their business model. Yes that's dirty, but it has nothing to do with monopolies. Any big company could do that. Monopolies charge arbitrary and excessive prices because they provide a necessary product that their customers cannot refuse, because they have no market alternative. There is not a single Google service that is anything like that.
I don't mean this as a troll, but it seems to me that a lot needs to come together before somebody can produce a good video. If you put a professional DSLR in the hands of an amateur like me as he travels the world, he will almost certainly take five or ten excellent pictures in a year. Sometimes you just get blessed with excellent natural illumination on an interesting scene, and the camera chooses just the right shutter settings. For me, roughly one out of a thousand pictures is a masterpiece and ten are quite good. It's those few pictures that I upload and show to friends, and they make me look like a far better photographer than I really am.
However, a whole lot more needs to come together before amateurs get lucky with a video. It just can't be done spontaneously like photography. You have to plan, write, act, block, illuminate and a million other things - which is why so many names roll by at the end of every professional movie. Compared to photographs, many more separate things need to go right before a good video is produced. And all those things coming together by luck is incredibly unlikely. So the future of amateur video will still look like YouTube, but in HD.
It's pretty fuckin lame for Kodak to be taking credit for the digital camera. For the entirety of the space race, we have been using digital photography. The Mariner and Voyager probes, for example, had some excellent digital cameras - they weren't exactly sending negatives back to an Earth-based lab! Voyager cameras were basically 60's technology, but some Voyager pictures of the gas planets and their moons have still not been surpassed.
I'm pretty sure that the plans are to build these things in geosynchronous orbit, so the satellite doesn't move relative to its receiving station - which would be some equatorial platform floating somewhere between the US and Africa.
In space, nobody needs to wash those things. I'm not trying to make a joke; dirt is a serious issue when we're talking about gigantic, fragile surfaces.
Another advantage is that the array could be pointed directly at the sun permanently, whereas on Earth, you need to keep swiveling it.
Yeah, seriously! I think that cheap, huge disks are the #1 reason that's driving a continued interest in filesharing. It's not that there's more bandwidth and interest. It's just that millions of people have giant file collections that they share, and ever more space to make them more giant. It not only increases demand, but also huge increases in the supply. That's all about cheap hard drives. I had a good friend fifteen years ago with hundreds of records - an incredible collection by standards of the day. Now ordinary kids have that much music! I'm sure the RIAA want to kill these magneto-physicists... Oh well, back to suing kids...
I totally agree with every point made in your post. Sure, Jackson's Hobbit would have some neat effects, but I'm sure it would the characters would be destroyed by Jackson's clumsy hands. I agree with you that the ents were totally robbed of their dignity and wisdom in Jacson's portrayal, as was Gimli, Theodan and others. Thirteen dwarves and Bilbo - ugh, I shudder to think what Jackson would make of them.
Um, learn something about what the world was like a hundred years ago instead of talking out of your ass. If you saw 1907 Oxford, you'd see very few professors with any personal faith in religion - not even in the theology department! Ignorant people often assume without evidence that somehow we're less religious and becoming more tolerant of atheism, when the truth is the opposite. Religion, especially in the USA, is penetrating ever deeper into our culture and laws. The USA was least religious when it was founded. Somebody like Thomas Jefferson would never be elected for a fucking city council seat in today's climate, because he was very open about saying that he thought that God did not hear or answer prayers, all the Jesus stuff is crap, and all God did was set the universe in motion and never touched it again.
In sum, we are not making progress. A hundred years ago, they would laugh at an Oxford professor who went around attacking other academics for thinking that religion is better than science at revealing the truth about the world. But that's because the only people who thought this in 1907 were considered fringe loonies, not worth bothering with. Now, attacking the same loonie position is... ooh, controversial. And Dawkins is what, brave for doing so? You call that progress?
You know, there are many ways for Skype to make revenue, and you can make money from having lots of users even without sliming them head to toe with ads. Skype could enter hardware deals, for example. But here's the piece of hardware that I've been dreaming about.
It's basically a router... and an AppleTV. It is optimized for low power consumption and has an unused SATA port for an extra hard drive. It isn't hobbled so it can run OSX programs like bittorrent, which can be controlled remotely through something like a nice web interface. But here's the killer feature: It's this thing's remote control. This remote is rather big, because it has a nice LCD. In communicates with the base station through Bluetooth, and has a nice interface for scrolling through media files tht live on the network. That in itself would be awesome: to be able to easily play my whole music collection on my fancy living room stereo, controlled by a nice remote from my couch.
But here's the real killer feature: Skype.
You see, the remote control would have a speaker and a little microphone, and it would ring. It would do Skype. You could dial with it like with a phone, you can skype-to-skype with it, and it would feel like a normal phone. Skype desparately needs that. The whole headphones+microphone thing makes Skype look lame.
So yeah, listen device manufacturers: The killer living room convergence device should not require me to turn on the TV to work the interface. Maybe I just want to play some music! Of course, to do that I need to be able to browse through my network, and that's why the remote needs to have a decent little LCD. But if you're going to have a remote that smart, it might as well do Skype also. This is what the AppleTV should have been, maybe still could be, if Jobs didn't have such a fetish about removing as many buttons as possible.
It really wouldn't be wise of Navteq to start leaning on its customers like Garmin and Google. You know Google are just looking for an excuse to launch their own information-collecting satellite! Google wants to know what's in your yard as well as what's on your hard drive - they want to know everything! But seriously, I think that mapping services will get more competition with time. Sure Navteq has some inertia, but if Google or Gramin switched to a different data provider, people would barely notice. As mapping satellites get cheaper and the demand for resolution hits a wall (partly because of privacy concerns) there will be many data sources that will do the job, and they will only compete on price. That's not a happy future for Navteq, now Nokia.
I know this isn't some sort of a revolutionary transformation of Office. It's just making webspace available for storing docs, in case you work on the same docs from more than one location. That much is a good idea. The reason why my gradebooks are in the Google spreadsheet is because I sometimes ammend them from any one of four locations.
But the piracy-fightning motivations of this should not be ignored: For the first time, Microsoft can say that a legit version of Office can actually do something useful that a pirated version can't do. It's very easy for them to make sure that pirated versions will not pass the authentication you need to sign up for the webspace they offer.
Another thing they hope for: Once users start building up big collection of files that are hosted on Microsoft servers, this becomes a significant new source of lockin. Competitors need to react now if they want to prevent this. There is a straightforward way to do this: Google could give out some online storage space and make it so that space is mountable like a networked drive from any computer. MS users could just load and save their documents on this drive, say Z:\, and they could be sure that local hardware failures won't wipe them and that any changes made from one location will show up when the file is opened later from another.
I know there are little hacks that allow this already, but they have severe limitations, plus they're hacks. But the existence of the clever hacks gives all the more reason for Google to do this officially.
Thank you for this informative post. I wouldn't be able to understand Mozilla code even if I treid, but as a frequent user of Firefox, I already suspected something like this must be going on in the background. So here's a question: How much of this trouble is "inside" Gecko and how much is "outside"? Isn't all the XUL stuff just for the interface? Does Galeon, Epiphany, Camino and every other Gecko-based browser have similar problems? And if not, wouldn't it be worth it to aim at a Firefox 4.0 without XUL?
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I don't think this is true. It is a reactor, it just doesn't have the standard control rods and moderator in the way that conventional big reactors do. The fissile uranium is in crystals that are homogenously distributed through some sort of a moderator solution, but that's all I could work out from tfa. I'd like to hear more. As others have commented though, there is a lot more spin than info in the tfa. Still it should be clear that the thing is indeed a reactor based on a self-sustaining fission of uranium, not a device to harness the heat from a decaying isotope as was the case with Voyager. To leave big chunks of Pu-238, the radioisotope used in the Voyagers, unattended somewhere... that really would be dangerous (makes a great dirty bomb) and also very expensive, as that stuff needs to be made inside a reactor.
This is the first I've heard of the Element Hiding Helper and I'm very intrigued. My sanity has been rescued by Adblock Plus, and I'm very greatful for how it works. However, this really seems like a escalation in the war on ads, and I have mixed feelings about it. I always justify using Adblock like this: "If they wanted me to see their ads, they'd use text and not garish gifs or flash." But if we find a way to block text ads that's as easy as Ab+, won't this force the advertisers to fight back? Won't Google, for example, be forced to really turn evil? And is that really in the general interest?
I guess I'm just too impulsive to ever put off my longing - right now, I'm feeling an indeferrable longing for a proofreader at Slashdot!
Really?
However, this would be the first step in a scary direction:
Suppose you carry a gene that would not only increase the health risks of a daughter, but also cost her an extra $1000/year in insurance payments for the rest of her life. Given this risk and the fact that IVF + genetic testing will be ever more accessible, it seems to give an extra inscentive to make sure a fertalized egg is "genetically clean" before implanting it. This is all the stuff about "designer babies" that gets people all worked up in a tizzy.
However, I'm really not sure that this is a bad outcome. So long as the screening techniques are effective, artificial selection will lead to healthier future generations. And where's the downside? I saw Gattaca, thought it was really stupid and badly conceived, and I think it's ridiculous that genetic screening would lead to biggotry. So I'm not sure there's anything here to worry about.
Wow, this place really is just like the Enterprise. I bet that the bar only serves synthohol. This looks about as fun as joining the space-navy, except that it's in your basement.
And here's where I fit your caraciture: I do oppose raising energy rates and reducing consuption because it's anti-progressive, or as I prefer to say, regressive. Any extra burdens imposed on the cost of energy are going to disproportionately hurt the poor, and they've had it bad enough. Besides, it's totally unrealistic. Of course we should be doing more to insulate houses, and I strongly support government subsidies for doing that. But in a choice between reducing energy use and not reducing it while taking the risk of global climate catastrophe, Americans (maybe people in general) will choose the latter ten out of ten times. We can get mad about it or we can get realistic about it and provide them with the one clean source of power that we know how to develop on a large scale. Sucks that we'll probably have to bring in French engineers to do it right; we've really lost our technological lead in this industry!
Regarding the spent fuel, there is an obvious answer: Reprocessing. The most radioactive stuff that we bury now are the heavy metals which are actually fissile and could be used to produce more energy. The rest of the waste, if processed correctly, would be less radioactive in 30 years than the ore that was originally mined. So in the long run we'd be reducing the amount of radioactive stuff in the ground.
Yeah, because ... what could people looking like that possibly be up to besides bringing democracy to my backwards little country? Suddenly it's all so plausible! I think I'll surrender right now!
I thought this development made RAF pilots wish they joined the army because at least in the army, you can do your job without looking like some doofus in a cylon costume. I admit, it's a pretty compelling argument!
Portugal: 481 cops per 100,000 citizens
France: 397 cops per 100,000 citizens
USA: 238 cops per 100,000 citizens
Maybe what he's doing instead is looking for a nasty word to call corporate practices he doesn't approve of, like undermining small companies after stealing their business model. Yes that's dirty, but it has nothing to do with monopolies. Any big company could do that. Monopolies charge arbitrary and excessive prices because they provide a necessary product that their customers cannot refuse, because they have no market alternative. There is not a single Google service that is anything like that.
However, a whole lot more needs to come together before amateurs get lucky with a video. It just can't be done spontaneously like photography. You have to plan, write, act, block, illuminate and a million other things - which is why so many names roll by at the end of every professional movie. Compared to photographs, many more separate things need to go right before a good video is produced. And all those things coming together by luck is incredibly unlikely. So the future of amateur video will still look like YouTube, but in HD.
It's pretty fuckin lame for Kodak to be taking credit for the digital camera. For the entirety of the space race, we have been using digital photography. The Mariner and Voyager probes, for example, had some excellent digital cameras - they weren't exactly sending negatives back to an Earth-based lab! Voyager cameras were basically 60's technology, but some Voyager pictures of the gas planets and their moons have still not been surpassed.
I'm pretty sure that the plans are to build these things in geosynchronous orbit, so the satellite doesn't move relative to its receiving station - which would be some equatorial platform floating somewhere between the US and Africa.
Another advantage is that the array could be pointed directly at the sun permanently, whereas on Earth, you need to keep swiveling it.
Yeah, seriously! I think that cheap, huge disks are the #1 reason that's driving a continued interest in filesharing. It's not that there's more bandwidth and interest. It's just that millions of people have giant file collections that they share, and ever more space to make them more giant. It not only increases demand, but also huge increases in the supply. That's all about cheap hard drives. I had a good friend fifteen years ago with hundreds of records - an incredible collection by standards of the day. Now ordinary kids have that much music! I'm sure the RIAA want to kill these magneto-physicists... Oh well, back to suing kids...
I totally agree with every point made in your post. Sure, Jackson's Hobbit would have some neat effects, but I'm sure it would the characters would be destroyed by Jackson's clumsy hands. I agree with you that the ents were totally robbed of their dignity and wisdom in Jacson's portrayal, as was Gimli, Theodan and others. Thirteen dwarves and Bilbo - ugh, I shudder to think what Jackson would make of them.
In sum, we are not making progress. A hundred years ago, they would laugh at an Oxford professor who went around attacking other academics for thinking that religion is better than science at revealing the truth about the world. But that's because the only people who thought this in 1907 were considered fringe loonies, not worth bothering with. Now, attacking the same loonie position is ... ooh, controversial. And Dawkins is what, brave for doing so? You call that progress?
First customer: Steve Jobs
It's basically a router... and an AppleTV. It is optimized for low power consumption and has an unused SATA port for an extra hard drive. It isn't hobbled so it can run OSX programs like bittorrent, which can be controlled remotely through something like a nice web interface. But here's the killer feature: It's this thing's remote control. This remote is rather big, because it has a nice LCD. In communicates with the base station through Bluetooth, and has a nice interface for scrolling through media files tht live on the network. That in itself would be awesome: to be able to easily play my whole music collection on my fancy living room stereo, controlled by a nice remote from my couch.
But here's the real killer feature: Skype.
You see, the remote control would have a speaker and a little microphone, and it would ring. It would do Skype. You could dial with it like with a phone, you can skype-to-skype with it, and it would feel like a normal phone. Skype desparately needs that. The whole headphones+microphone thing makes Skype look lame.
So yeah, listen device manufacturers: The killer living room convergence device should not require me to turn on the TV to work the interface. Maybe I just want to play some music! Of course, to do that I need to be able to browse through my network, and that's why the remote needs to have a decent little LCD. But if you're going to have a remote that smart, it might as well do Skype also. This is what the AppleTV should have been, maybe still could be, if Jobs didn't have such a fetish about removing as many buttons as possible.
It really wouldn't be wise of Navteq to start leaning on its customers like Garmin and Google. You know Google are just looking for an excuse to launch their own information-collecting satellite! Google wants to know what's in your yard as well as what's on your hard drive - they want to know everything! But seriously, I think that mapping services will get more competition with time. Sure Navteq has some inertia, but if Google or Gramin switched to a different data provider, people would barely notice. As mapping satellites get cheaper and the demand for resolution hits a wall (partly because of privacy concerns) there will be many data sources that will do the job, and they will only compete on price. That's not a happy future for Navteq, now Nokia.
But the piracy-fightning motivations of this should not be ignored: For the first time, Microsoft can say that a legit version of Office can actually do something useful that a pirated version can't do. It's very easy for them to make sure that pirated versions will not pass the authentication you need to sign up for the webspace they offer.
Another thing they hope for: Once users start building up big collection of files that are hosted on Microsoft servers, this becomes a significant new source of lockin. Competitors need to react now if they want to prevent this. There is a straightforward way to do this: Google could give out some online storage space and make it so that space is mountable like a networked drive from any computer. MS users could just load and save their documents on this drive, say Z:\, and they could be sure that local hardware failures won't wipe them and that any changes made from one location will show up when the file is opened later from another.
I know there are little hacks that allow this already, but they have severe limitations, plus they're hacks. But the existence of the clever hacks gives all the more reason for Google to do this officially.
Yeah, I don't wanna be standing there when the terrorist rolls a natural 20! Ouch.
Thank you for this informative post. I wouldn't be able to understand Mozilla code even if I treid, but as a frequent user of Firefox, I already suspected something like this must be going on in the background. So here's a question: How much of this trouble is "inside" Gecko and how much is "outside"? Isn't all the XUL stuff just for the interface? Does Galeon, Epiphany, Camino and every other Gecko-based browser have similar problems? And if not, wouldn't it be worth it to aim at a Firefox 4.0 without XUL?