1. Back up ALL important data regularly.
2. Encrypt ALL sensitive data.
3. Get insurance on the laptop.
I bet you a new laptop that this will turn out much cheaper in the long run than a stockpile of "high-tech" anti-theft equipment.
Heck, if insurance weren't such a highly regulated industry, I'd suggest that the students themselves form their own insurance "agencies" to cover their stuff -- everyone pitches in a premium, and when the class graduates, whatever is left is refunded to the participants.
Of course, people are prone to abuse the system, and it would probably devolve into more of a headache than it's worth... Or not?
Any way you look at it, the amount of heat generated by modern CPUs is ridiculously high. Let's compare it, shall we, to the power density of the frickin' sun.
The radiant power of the sun, at the distance of about 95 million miles (i.e., Earth orbit), is 1350 watts per square meter. The radius of the sun is about 430000 miles. The ratio of the Earth's orbital distance to the sun's radius is 95000000/430000 = 221, let's call it 220 even. Now, power decreases with the square of distance, so take 220 and square it: 48400. So, the sun's radiant power is 48400*1350 watts/meter^2 = 65.3 megawatts per square meter. Yeah, I could probably have looked that up, but it's more fun to derive it.
Now, look at the power output of a typical Intel CPU. Assume a die size of 150 square millimeters, and a power consumption of 150 watts. (Pretty typical values.) That's a power density of exactly 1 megawatt per square meter.
So, the next time you buy an Intel CPU, or any CPU for that matter, remember this: the Sun itself only produces 60 times as much power per unit area as the little chip you are about to hide under that enormous heatsink and fan.
Hell, with numbers like those, I'd wager an Intel CPU produces more power per unit area than a nuclear reactor!
I think a complete desktop environment can exist, but at the very least, there needs to be much tighter collaboration and communication, all working towards the same framework and standards. Call it a "distribution within a distribution". Like how Debian operates.
On the contrary, I think the high level of collaboration is one of the weaknesses of KDE. If the thing is architected in a way that forces such a high level of interaction between people who are working on essentially unrelated parts of the environment, then the architecture needs to be fixed.
For example, in this specific case, I don't see why a new search feature should have any impact on any other part of the KDE environment, even if it's buggy as hell. Things should not be that tightly integrated. That way, certain facets of the interface can mature and stabilize while others advance.
Remember that integration at the level of user experience (i.e., a seamless desktop experience) doesn't necessarily have to be accompanied by strong dependencies among the parts. An intelligently designed infrastructure for component interactions makes it all possible. Unfortunately, the infrastructure currently used by KDE (DCOP) leaves much to be desired.
There's too much individual thinking going on, and not enough up-front planning.
In your proposed scheme, the energy ultimately comes from the food you eat. In fact, it would be more efficient to simply burn the food in a furnace and use it to run a steam generator, than to go through the extra step of being consumed by a human and converted into mechanical power.
So in a sense, it is more environmentally sound to just burn the food in the first place, because it's more efficient that way, so you get more "bang" per unit of food burned.
However, in a world where humans grow fat and have to exercise anyway in order to stay healthy, it might be a good way to convert some of those wasted calories back into useful energy. But I still think the "real" solution is for people to eat a proper amount of food in the first place.
If not, I don't really see the advantage over things like find.
Who the hell uses find to search for stuff? If you're looking for a filename, use "locate." For everything else, use a real indexed search. Grepping through your entire drive looking for something is a symptom of terminal brain damage.
It would be like looking up a name in the phone book by starting at the first page and reading each entry until you find the one you're looking for. Only morons do that.
I see. You want your searches to take literally ten thousand times longer than necessary? That's your typical speedup on around 100 gigabytes of data when using an indexed search instead of a naive brute force scan.
If you actually think grep -r is "useful" for searching hundreds of gigs of stuff, you honestly have no clue how fast search actually could be if you do it intelligently.
Google and grep are nothing alike. grep scans through data linearly looking for a pattern match. Google definitely does not work like that. It builds tremendous indexes of keywords so it doesn't have to search through all the data to find a specific keyword.
Somebody else suggesting just using "find / -exec grep -H pattern {} \;" but that would be a terrible solution. It isn't indexed. To find a unique pattern, it forces a scan of half the drive on average. Come on. Looking at half the data on the drive just to find a specific pattern that exists in only one place? Why not just jump to the place it's at?
KDE is an open project. If some people want to work on a new feature, how does that have a negative effect on the rest of the environment? It's not like programmers are being "stolen" away from what they are doing to work on this -- it's open source for crying out loud!
You're thinking of the computer as a source of information only. To the FBI it is a piece of physical evidence. As in, it has things like fingerprints on it. They aren't going to just give up a piece of physical evidence unless they are absolutely sure they will never, ever need it during the investigation (which is not over until a conviction happens).
Wouldn't cracking the encryption constitute a DMCA violation? According to the DMCA, you could be using something as stupid as ROT13, but you're still "protected" because it's illegal to try to crack it, no matter how stupid the encryption scheme.
It's not lifting the weight against gravity which "wastes" energy -- a lifted weight can be used to turn a generator as it falls back down, if you want. It's the heat produced in the muscles during exercise that wastes energy.
A lot of the energy expended when you exercise just turns to heat, not useful movement.
Yeah, but the original poster was talking about lighting up the gym, not selling power. If you assume an average of 100 watts per exerciser (many people can't sustain 200 watts let alone 250), that's more than enough power to light the gym up. Especially with modern high-efficiency fluorescent lights.
I'm just glad to see otherpower.com linked on Slashdot. Well, maybe. Er.. Anyway, I'm not participating in the/. effect this time (in other words, I did not RTFA) because I've read his site a million times.
The guys at otherpower.com do cool stuff. If you're wondering, "what's the point" with the hamster nightlight, you aren't seeing the whole picture. These guys have built, on their own, dozens of pieces of creative power generator equipment -- mostly out of wood!
Click around on the site a little bit (AFTER the Slashdotting subsides) and check out the other, real stuff they do. Like, making a 3 kilowatt wind turbine using a Volvo brake assembly, neodymium magnets and hand-wound copper coils, and hand-made wooden blades. I dream of having a workshop to do that kind of stuff.
The idea of multiprocessing is to have two CPUs working on two parts of a problem at once. If that processing requires a lot of cache synchronization, things are badly broken anyway: you'll have so much locking overhead maintaining consistency at the application level that any performance impact due to cache synchronization would be unnoticeable.
Yeah.. I couldn't read TFA because the link didn't work.
Nuclear fusion?
on
Odds-on Science
·
· Score: 5, Informative
We can easily achieve nuclear fusion. The problem is controlling and sustaining it. It should read, "Fusion power plants, 100:1", not "Nuclear fusion, 100:1."
The fact is, air crashes are much more horrifying to people than car crashes, even if that's not really rational. After the first few fiery wrecks, the first dead 5 year old girl, and the first deadly crash of an air-car into an apartment building, there will be an outcry to ban them.
It isn't ever going to happen no matter how hard you wish it.
Why not look into an ultralight? In the United States at least, you don't need a license, although receiving some professional training would be wise.
And although, legally, you cannot fly an ultralight faster than 55 knots (about 63 miles per hour), you still reach your destination faster because you get to travel as the crow flies, instead of meandering on indirect surface roads.
You aren't allowed to fly an ultralight over a densely populated area, but I'm not exactly sure what the legal definition of "dense" is in this case, and at any rate, I doubt it would apply to the types of rural areas you are talking about.
It could be used to help prevent more kiddie porn. Imagine if the ruling says "if the kid does the filming, it's okay" or "if the kid does it themselves, it's okay."
I never said it was okay, or that we should simply ignore children who send out naked pictures of themselves. But don't you think it's absolutely insane to charge her with a crime? She clearly has some issues which need dealing with, but charging her with a sexual offense against herself?
Even in the situation you mention (an adult coercing a child into filming themselves), don't you think we should be going after the adult, not the child?
Actually, the web is more of a zero-client, not just thin. The browser is a given, so it literally takes no additional software at all on the client side to implement quite a lot of functionality.
Face it, thin- and zero-client architectures are going to become more and more popular for everything, because it leaves much more control in the hands of the service provider, which in turn allows more flexibility in business models.
And I don't think the web is a bad medium for those architectures at all.
How are you going to move the laser without a motor?
Perhaps develop some kind of substance which changes refractive index when voltage is applied to it? In fact, I think certain piezoelectric materials fit the bill.
Or, perhaps shoot the laser through a water bath -- electrodes in the water bath can cause small bubbles of hydrogen gas to form in specific locations. As the laser passes (or does not pass) through a bubble, its path will be altered.
How about shooting the laser at a piece of charged foil. The foil can be moved by controlling the voltage on a nearby electrode.
I can think of a zillion ways to do it without a motor.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Back up ALL important data regularly.
2. Encrypt ALL sensitive data.
3. Get insurance on the laptop.
I bet you a new laptop that this will turn out much cheaper in the long run than a stockpile of "high-tech" anti-theft equipment.
Heck, if insurance weren't such a highly regulated industry, I'd suggest that the students themselves form their own insurance "agencies" to cover their stuff -- everyone pitches in a premium, and when the class graduates, whatever is left is refunded to the participants.
Of course, people are prone to abuse the system, and it would probably devolve into more of a headache than it's worth... Or not?
The radiant power of the sun, at the distance of about 95 million miles (i.e., Earth orbit), is 1350 watts per square meter. The radius of the sun is about 430000 miles. The ratio of the Earth's orbital distance to the sun's radius is 95000000/430000 = 221, let's call it 220 even. Now, power decreases with the square of distance, so take 220 and square it: 48400. So, the sun's radiant power is 48400*1350 watts/meter^2 = 65.3 megawatts per square meter. Yeah, I could probably have looked that up, but it's more fun to derive it.
Now, look at the power output of a typical Intel CPU. Assume a die size of 150 square millimeters, and a power consumption of 150 watts. (Pretty typical values.) That's a power density of exactly 1 megawatt per square meter.
So, the next time you buy an Intel CPU, or any CPU for that matter, remember this: the Sun itself only produces 60 times as much power per unit area as the little chip you are about to hide under that enormous heatsink and fan.
Hell, with numbers like those, I'd wager an Intel CPU produces more power per unit area than a nuclear reactor!
On the contrary, I think the high level of collaboration is one of the weaknesses of KDE. If the thing is architected in a way that forces such a high level of interaction between people who are working on essentially unrelated parts of the environment, then the architecture needs to be fixed.
For example, in this specific case, I don't see why a new search feature should have any impact on any other part of the KDE environment, even if it's buggy as hell. Things should not be that tightly integrated. That way, certain facets of the interface can mature and stabilize while others advance.
Remember that integration at the level of user experience (i.e., a seamless desktop experience) doesn't necessarily have to be accompanied by strong dependencies among the parts. An intelligently designed infrastructure for component interactions makes it all possible. Unfortunately, the infrastructure currently used by KDE (DCOP) leaves much to be desired.
There's too much individual thinking going on, and not enough up-front planning.
So in a sense, it is more environmentally sound to just burn the food in the first place, because it's more efficient that way, so you get more "bang" per unit of food burned.
However, in a world where humans grow fat and have to exercise anyway in order to stay healthy, it might be a good way to convert some of those wasted calories back into useful energy. But I still think the "real" solution is for people to eat a proper amount of food in the first place.
Fields... Farm equipment... Get it?! Hahahahahhaha!
Sorry.
Who the hell uses find to search for stuff? If you're looking for a filename, use "locate." For everything else, use a real indexed search. Grepping through your entire drive looking for something is a symptom of terminal brain damage.
It would be like looking up a name in the phone book by starting at the first page and reading each entry until you find the one you're looking for. Only morons do that.
If you actually think grep -r is "useful" for searching hundreds of gigs of stuff, you honestly have no clue how fast search actually could be if you do it intelligently.
Somebody else suggesting just using "find / -exec grep -H pattern {} \;" but that would be a terrible solution. It isn't indexed. To find a unique pattern, it forces a scan of half the drive on average. Come on. Looking at half the data on the drive just to find a specific pattern that exists in only one place? Why not just jump to the place it's at?
This is what indexes are for.
KDE is an open project. If some people want to work on a new feature, how does that have a negative effect on the rest of the environment? It's not like programmers are being "stolen" away from what they are doing to work on this -- it's open source for crying out loud!
You're thinking of the computer as a source of information only. To the FBI it is a piece of physical evidence. As in, it has things like fingerprints on it. They aren't going to just give up a piece of physical evidence unless they are absolutely sure they will never, ever need it during the investigation (which is not over until a conviction happens).
Wouldn't cracking the encryption constitute a DMCA violation? According to the DMCA, you could be using something as stupid as ROT13, but you're still "protected" because it's illegal to try to crack it, no matter how stupid the encryption scheme.
A lot of the energy expended when you exercise just turns to heat, not useful movement.
Yeah, but the original poster was talking about lighting up the gym, not selling power. If you assume an average of 100 watts per exerciser (many people can't sustain 200 watts let alone 250), that's more than enough power to light the gym up. Especially with modern high-efficiency fluorescent lights.
The guys at otherpower.com do cool stuff. If you're wondering, "what's the point" with the hamster nightlight, you aren't seeing the whole picture. These guys have built, on their own, dozens of pieces of creative power generator equipment -- mostly out of wood!
Click around on the site a little bit (AFTER the Slashdotting subsides) and check out the other, real stuff they do. Like, making a 3 kilowatt wind turbine using a Volvo brake assembly, neodymium magnets and hand-wound copper coils, and hand-made wooden blades. I dream of having a workshop to do that kind of stuff.
Because reasonable people understand that it doesn't matter, and take pleasure in making people like you "apoplectic?"
I'll try... Hmm, maybe because the guy hasn't been convicted yet?
Do you actually think it's common practice for the cops or feds to return evidence before a case is closed?
The idea of multiprocessing is to have two CPUs working on two parts of a problem at once. If that processing requires a lot of cache synchronization, things are badly broken anyway: you'll have so much locking overhead maintaining consistency at the application level that any performance impact due to cache synchronization would be unnoticeable.
Yeah.. I couldn't read TFA because the link didn't work.
We can easily achieve nuclear fusion. The problem is controlling and sustaining it. It should read, "Fusion power plants, 100:1", not "Nuclear fusion, 100:1."
It isn't ever going to happen no matter how hard you wish it.
And although, legally, you cannot fly an ultralight faster than 55 knots (about 63 miles per hour), you still reach your destination faster because you get to travel as the crow flies, instead of meandering on indirect surface roads.
You aren't allowed to fly an ultralight over a densely populated area, but I'm not exactly sure what the legal definition of "dense" is in this case, and at any rate, I doubt it would apply to the types of rural areas you are talking about.
I never said it was okay, or that we should simply ignore children who send out naked pictures of themselves. But don't you think it's absolutely insane to charge her with a crime? She clearly has some issues which need dealing with, but charging her with a sexual offense against herself?
Even in the situation you mention (an adult coercing a child into filming themselves), don't you think we should be going after the adult, not the child?
If she is actually convicted of that, then we live in a sick, sick nation indeed.
Face it, thin- and zero-client architectures are going to become more and more popular for everything, because it leaves much more control in the hands of the service provider, which in turn allows more flexibility in business models.
And I don't think the web is a bad medium for those architectures at all.
Perhaps develop some kind of substance which changes refractive index when voltage is applied to it? In fact, I think certain piezoelectric materials fit the bill.
Or, perhaps shoot the laser through a water bath -- electrodes in the water bath can cause small bubbles of hydrogen gas to form in specific locations. As the laser passes (or does not pass) through a bubble, its path will be altered.
How about shooting the laser at a piece of charged foil. The foil can be moved by controlling the voltage on a nearby electrode.
I can think of a zillion ways to do it without a motor.