We need the laws because they define the punishments. But just because there is a punishment for, say, breaking into a house and stealing a stereo, is no logical reason to not lock your front door. This is exactly the point -- it is not sufficient to just punish everyone who does something illegal. Wouldn't you like to PREVENT THE ILLEGAL ACT in the first place?
I actually slogged through the entire patent, and to my (unprofessional) eye it certainly looks like they have patented ALL methods of software breakpoints which use a "specially named void function" which is inserted at a specific place in the code by a compiler or linker. That is essentially the definition of a software breakpoint, so they basically have patented the concept of a software breakpoint in general.
Of course, we have to figure out what "specially named void function" means. If it means the function returns void, I guess we could just return an int instead to get around the patent;-)
Wouldn't nested 'if..then's be better in this case?
That requires one level of nesting for every initialized resource. That can become ridiculous very quickly. A rollback or "error ladder" is something you see in a lot of commercial AND open source code. Examples I know of include FreeType and the Linux kernel.
It's only "unclear" in the sense that a for-loop was "unclear" to you when you first learned how to use it. This is a common, generally accepted idiom for the use of goto.
That idea is absolutely preposterous. Using the value given by Google for the USA's rate of electricity consumption (about 3.7 trillion kilowatt hour in the year of 2004), and using the most optimal estimate of energy density for these supercapacitors (about 5 watts-hours per kilogram), and assuming that only HALF of the total energy must be stored (50% nighttime), you arrive at the result that we require 370 trillion kilograms of supercapacitors. That's ABOUT 400 BILLION TONS.
Why don't you get back to me when you figure out a way to manufactor 400 billion tons of nanotube supercapitors. I'm waiting patiently.
Even if we come up with some super-efficient way to transfer solar energy into useful electricity, there is one barrier that will remain:
How do we store it?
How about in the grid? Tear down the coal burning plants and replace them with gigantic flywheel plants. During the day, excess solar energy spins up the flywheels. During night, the flywheels dole out the stored energy to meet the nighttime demand. This system might be carefully calibrated so that very little excess energy is wasted (generated by the photovoltaics, but nowhere to store it). And any small amount that WAS left over could just be used to electrolyze water and you'd get a little hydrogen out of the deal.
This doesn't do anything to directly address petroleum oil consumption of vehicles. But it would reduce the significant portion of total CO2 output from fossil fuel electric power generation.
Vehicles inherently NEED a dense, easily mobile power source. This is because they, well, MOVE. We haven't figured out a way to store renewable energy in a vehicle with the same density and mobility. But instead of chucking the whole idea just because we can't see how to apply it to vehicles, at least we might make an impact on other levels.
Blah blah blah. This is a tech site. The articles are about technology. Up there, in the upper left corner, see that slogan? Does it read "News for nerds, stuff that matters, but only if it's a miracle of modern science?" No, it does not.
You don't have to jizz yourself because somebody discovered something. But remaining willfully ignorant and coming in here only to ridicule people who actually take interest in this stuff marks you as a dunce and a Luddite.
I'm confused. Are you trying to say corporations are evil, but it's ok since it helps them make money?
The OP is saying that their evil has a motive, as opposed to "pure evil" so to speak. The topic of this thread is not the motivation of the oil companies (that is not in dispute), but rather whether their motives will cause them to seek non-petroleum energy sources in the future. The short answer is "Yes, it will." The motive is profit, the behavior is (subjectively) evil, and petroleum has nothing to do with it.
Looks like this kid will have some money coming his way. The police can arrest anyone they want, really. CONVICTED this person of a crime is another matter entirely. He's clearly violated no law whatsoever, so this will never stick. On the other hand, he now has very good cause to sue the police for wrongful imprisonment.
I think he should bust out the legal brass knuckled and start polishing.
It's called "taste", something which we have an appalling lack of here in the states. All you have to do is turn on the TV for 10 seconds to realize that this is the tackiest nation on earth. Bumper stickers are just a rude reminder of that fact. I'm not usually one to care about style over substance, but bumper stickers fail on the substance front as well: how shallow are a nation's people when they will put a bumper sticker (or two or three) on their vehicle, yet they won't go to vote? Not to mention believing you can change minds with a catchy slogan pasted on a car.
I agree with you in general. No bumper stickers adorn my car. But I might be willing to make an exception for this one.
Dumbest bumper sticker in the universe? In my opinion, the stupid "Coexist" sticker made up of various religious symbols. Don't you morons realize that MOST of the religions symbolized by those icons are MASSIVELY INTOLERANT of other viewpoints? "Coexistence" is the LAST thing most people want -- they'd rather eliminate all people on the planet who disagree with them.
The programmer did not write 352 seperate drivers for web cams, he wrote drivers for 8 different camera bridge chips and different versions of those chipss.
As an analogy, imagine that you could design 8 different car alternators that, collectively, could function properly in 352 different models of cars. Aren't you more impressed by what the guy managed to AVOID doing, rather than what he would have wasted his time doing that wasn't necessary?
He didn't made 253 different drivers, but one driver that works on 253 different webcams that have a lot in common.
Writing a solid core that easily integrates with over 253 device-specific modules is something to be DAMNED impressed by. I always love it when I'm given some new requirement at work, and it just fits right in to my existing infrastructure almost effortlessly. It means I designed the thing properly in the first place. This guy has done that, 253 times.
Have you never heard of a "phased array?" It is easy to cause an oscillating field to appear in a relatively small region of space. To allow a significant amount of field to leak would be stupid from an efficiency standpoint, not just a health standpoint.
That's no damn reason to say that nuclear power isn't a good option. Just because humanity is a pathetic mess doesn't change the fact that nuclear power could provide for our energy needs a hundred times over, for thousands of years. The flaw is in HUMANITY, not nuclear power.
If they'd simply allow the construction of breeder reactors to reprocess the waste into more fuel, the waste problem with nuclear virtually vanishes.
But then the plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists! Who want to kill us because we are messing around on their home soil! And we are messing around on their home soil because we want to ensure that we have an adequate supply of oil! And we need that adequate supply of oil because we have an energy crisis! Oh, wait a second, I just realized something!
I can squint my eyes and fork over some cash in order to help counter the effects of stupid people, or I can sit around bitching about other people trashing everything, and the world blows up anyway. I think I'll go with the former option.
Worse, it seems that everything came back with the rocket. So, really, what happened is one ounce of Doohan's ashes made a round-trip jaunt to sub-orbital space. They spent maybe a couple minutes there and now all of his ashes are back on Earth.
And your point is? We sure as hell HOPE that our astronauts COME BACK from their missions. He travelled high enough to earn a set of civilian Astronaut Wings. And like a real astronaut, he came back when he was done. I'm sure he'd be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
We need the laws because they define the punishments. But just because there is a punishment for, say, breaking into a house and stealing a stereo, is no logical reason to not lock your front door. This is exactly the point -- it is not sufficient to just punish everyone who does something illegal. Wouldn't you like to PREVENT THE ILLEGAL ACT in the first place?
Why bother improving security when you can just pass a law enabling you to arrest or expel anybody who tries anything funny?
After all, we all know that the most dangerous elements of our society are stopped by LAWS, right?
I actually slogged through the entire patent, and to my (unprofessional) eye it certainly looks like they have patented ALL methods of software breakpoints which use a "specially named void function" which is inserted at a specific place in the code by a compiler or linker. That is essentially the definition of a software breakpoint, so they basically have patented the concept of a software breakpoint in general.
Of course, we have to figure out what "specially named void function" means. If it means the function returns void, I guess we could just return an int instead to get around the patent ;-)
Wouldn't nested 'if..then's be better in this case?
That requires one level of nesting for every initialized resource. That can become ridiculous very quickly. A rollback or "error ladder" is something you see in a lot of commercial AND open source code. Examples I know of include FreeType and the Linux kernel.
It's only "unclear" in the sense that a for-loop was "unclear" to you when you first learned how to use it. This is a common, generally accepted idiom for the use of goto.
Jesus, my proofreading is awful today. I even previewed that.
That idea is absolutely preposterous. Using the value given by Google for the USA's rate of electricity consumption (about 3.7 trillion kilowatt hour in the year of 2004), and using the most optimal estimate of energy density for these supercapacitors (about 5 watts-hours per kilogram), and assuming that only HALF of the total energy must be stored (50% nighttime), you arrive at the result that we require 370 trillion kilograms of supercapacitors. That's ABOUT 400 BILLION TONS.
Why don't you get back to me when you figure out a way to manufactor 400 billion tons of nanotube supercapitors. I'm waiting patiently.
Even if we come up with some super-efficient way to transfer solar energy into useful electricity, there is one barrier that will remain: How do we store it?
How about in the grid? Tear down the coal burning plants and replace them with gigantic flywheel plants. During the day, excess solar energy spins up the flywheels. During night, the flywheels dole out the stored energy to meet the nighttime demand. This system might be carefully calibrated so that very little excess energy is wasted (generated by the photovoltaics, but nowhere to store it). And any small amount that WAS left over could just be used to electrolyze water and you'd get a little hydrogen out of the deal.
This doesn't do anything to directly address petroleum oil consumption of vehicles. But it would reduce the significant portion of total CO2 output from fossil fuel electric power generation.
Vehicles inherently NEED a dense, easily mobile power source. This is because they, well, MOVE. We haven't figured out a way to store renewable energy in a vehicle with the same density and mobility. But instead of chucking the whole idea just because we can't see how to apply it to vehicles, at least we might make an impact on other levels.
Blah blah blah. This is a tech site. The articles are about technology. Up there, in the upper left corner, see that slogan? Does it read "News for nerds, stuff that matters, but only if it's a miracle of modern science?" No, it does not.
You don't have to jizz yourself because somebody discovered something. But remaining willfully ignorant and coming in here only to ridicule people who actually take interest in this stuff marks you as a dunce and a Luddite.
I'm confused. Are you trying to say corporations are evil, but it's ok since it helps them make money?
The OP is saying that their evil has a motive, as opposed to "pure evil" so to speak. The topic of this thread is not the motivation of the oil companies (that is not in dispute), but rather whether their motives will cause them to seek non-petroleum energy sources in the future. The short answer is "Yes, it will." The motive is profit, the behavior is (subjectively) evil, and petroleum has nothing to do with it.Looks like this kid will have some money coming his way. The police can arrest anyone they want, really. CONVICTED this person of a crime is another matter entirely. He's clearly violated no law whatsoever, so this will never stick. On the other hand, he now has very good cause to sue the police for wrongful imprisonment. I think he should bust out the legal brass knuckled and start polishing.
Nice, though I can't quite see how you encoded it...
Black is 0, white is 1, read the image as a sequence of bits from upper-left to lower-right. What, you don't know how to "read" a bitmap? ;-)
It's called "taste", something which we have an appalling lack of here in the states. All you have to do is turn on the TV for 10 seconds to realize that this is the tackiest nation on earth. Bumper stickers are just a rude reminder of that fact. I'm not usually one to care about style over substance, but bumper stickers fail on the substance front as well: how shallow are a nation's people when they will put a bumper sticker (or two or three) on their vehicle, yet they won't go to vote? Not to mention believing you can change minds with a catchy slogan pasted on a car.
I agree with you in general. No bumper stickers adorn my car. But I might be willing to make an exception for this one.
Dumbest bumper sticker in the universe? In my opinion, the stupid "Coexist" sticker made up of various religious symbols. Don't you morons realize that MOST of the religions symbolized by those icons are MASSIVELY INTOLERANT of other viewpoints? "Coexistence" is the LAST thing most people want -- they'd rather eliminate all people on the planet who disagree with them.
Treating that number as a big-endian quantity, the representation in decimal is:
13256278887989457651018865901401704640I want to get this printed up on a bumper sticker. Can anyone recommend a good vendor?
Spoken like someone who's never programmed a device. Congratulations, you're a moron.
The programmer did not write 352 seperate drivers for web cams, he wrote drivers for 8 different camera bridge chips and different versions of those chipss.
As an analogy, imagine that you could design 8 different car alternators that, collectively, could function properly in 352 different models of cars. Aren't you more impressed by what the guy managed to AVOID doing, rather than what he would have wasted his time doing that wasn't necessary?He didn't made 253 different drivers, but one driver that works on 253 different webcams that have a lot in common.
Writing a solid core that easily integrates with over 253 device-specific modules is something to be DAMNED impressed by. I always love it when I'm given some new requirement at work, and it just fits right in to my existing infrastructure almost effortlessly. It means I designed the thing properly in the first place. This guy has done that, 253 times.Have you never heard of a "phased array?" It is easy to cause an oscillating field to appear in a relatively small region of space. To allow a significant amount of field to leak would be stupid from an efficiency standpoint, not just a health standpoint.
The point is, the ways of humanity can be changed. The laws of physics cannot. So this problem is not necessarily hopeless.
That's no damn reason to say that nuclear power isn't a good option. Just because humanity is a pathetic mess doesn't change the fact that nuclear power could provide for our energy needs a hundred times over, for thousands of years. The flaw is in HUMANITY, not nuclear power.
As our understanding of the physical world increases, it should be possible to extract electrons directly from the items undergoing fission.
I am astonished by the number of physical misunderstandings you must have that would cause you to write such a sentence.If they'd simply allow the construction of breeder reactors to reprocess the waste into more fuel, the waste problem with nuclear virtually vanishes.
But then the plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists! Who want to kill us because we are messing around on their home soil! And we are messing around on their home soil because we want to ensure that we have an adequate supply of oil! And we need that adequate supply of oil because we have an energy crisis! Oh, wait a second, I just realized something!I can squint my eyes and fork over some cash in order to help counter the effects of stupid people, or I can sit around bitching about other people trashing everything, and the world blows up anyway. I think I'll go with the former option.
Worse, it seems that everything came back with the rocket. So, really, what happened is one ounce of Doohan's ashes made a round-trip jaunt to sub-orbital space. They spent maybe a couple minutes there and now all of his ashes are back on Earth.
And your point is? We sure as hell HOPE that our astronauts COME BACK from their missions. He travelled high enough to earn a set of civilian Astronaut Wings. And like a real astronaut, he came back when he was done. I'm sure he'd be happy.
I can attest -- class of 2002. And from what I hear it's even better since then!