Little-known, it seems: Castro was not communist until the US opposed him.
The US created the "Cuban problem" all by itself, by interfering. The same as you casually assume it had the right to do. ("Gotten rid of Batista". How about the US gets rid of its own internal political opponents first? Oh, wait...)
IIRC they did more than this, including some overburden loosening for coal mines, and some early fracking. (What's the Russian for "Atoms for Peace"?) But ANFO and dynamite are cheaper and come in a better range of sizes, they concluded. And fracking had to be done hydraulically, which required better steel.
Besides, the N thing upset the lunatics. After the Cuban missile crisis, the Russians eventually decided it was better to keep things cool on that topic.
Shipping from Asia, to the Southeast US doesn't make a lot of economical sense when you can transfer cargo containers on the West Coast of the US or even Mexico and transfer them by rail.
Who cares about the USA? This is about:-
- Ready access to Mexico's share of the Gulf of Mexico oil-bearing formations (woefully underexploited). - Ready access to the minerals and oil in and offshore from West Africa, and cheap transport for grain from the farms that China is setting up there. - Cheaper trade with Europe, West Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and the rest of South America (and possibly South Africa; I haven't checked the distances).
Remember, the largest crude carriers (VLCCs and ULCCs) can't go through the Panama Canal. The Canal limits the size of other bulk-goods and container ships, too.
As a byproduct, competition in trans-isthmus shipping routes will benefit Chile and Peru. Lucky Chileans and Peruvians. It will likely benefit American households, too, although self-interested American companies and control freaks in the US government will scream blue murder.
One would think that a new canal has more to do with geo-politics than with economics.
At this level, they're the same thing. But: this move looks to be beneficial to more-or-less the whole world, possibly excepting ordinary West Africans (but that's not the fault of the Chinese).
Since you know Steve so well (I won't ask whether you met him before or after he died--or maybe it was you sticking all those pins in that voudoun doll of him that finally did him in), what would he be doing with all that money that's now going to go in dividends to stock-holders?
"Apple is a mobile devices company." That's Apple's description of itself, approved by SJ himself. Apple's problem is that mobile devices are becoming commodities, just like desktop devices before them.
(Google is trying to get a jump ahead by moving from mobile to pontis naribus devices, but I can't see how that will delay commodification for very long. If it takes off at all.)
Apple may yet reinvent itself as a digital personal assistance company. ("Entertain me, inform me, remind me, advise me, maintain my relationships and networks.") But the odds are against it. So...what else can Apple do with its money?
Mod this insightful. "The media are jonesing for some Apple news": that's the only story about Apple at the moment. Samzenpus needs to go on a media studies course. And a critical thinking course wouldn't hurt either.
Fusion is a way to boil water, to make steam, to spin turbines, to spin generators, to generate electricity.
Heat-engine electricity production (currently) works most economically at the gigawatt scale, and even with the E-Cat being free, a combined cycle gas turbine power plant would be more capital-efficient than an E-Cat power plant. Not to mention having a significantly shorter lead time. (That's why CCGTs are getting built: they're cheap. Non-combined gas peakers are cheaper still. The price of gas is a secondary consideration.)
Fuel is a negligible cost for fission power plants, but somehow they end up with a levelised cost of electricity as great as that from coal-fired plants. Being 'nucular', E-Cats will have a great weight of regulation dumped on them in the (unlikely) event they turn out to be a thing.
Third, fusion is just a way to boil water...as Eric Drexler likes to remind us. You still need boilers and cooling towers, steam turbines, generators, switchyards, blah blah.
All these work most economically at the gigawatt scale. A revolution cold fusion is not.
Rossi once provided a sample of copper "produced from nickel in an E-Cat". Strangely, the isotopic ratios of that sample exactly matched those of naturally occurring copper (I forget from which mine), and had no relationship to the isotopic ratios you'd expect of copper produced from commercial nickel (which Rossi said he used) under any conceivable set of low-kelvin reaction pathways. (Hard to track this report down, now; I suspect high-energy lawyer reactions got involved.)
Why are these people bothering with fusion? Fusion is pathetically inefficient, like Newcomen's fire (i.e., steam) engine. Just the wrong way to do things. The real money's in direct matter-to-energy conversion... using dark energy field resonances from tuned unobtanium crystals (or some such).
Can we reinvent the ethernet jack already? We don't need that bulky Ethernet connector, a thin form factor is more than possible. Make a new connector/jack for new hardware and release cheap adapters for people how can't upgrade their network just yet..
Citation? They've always been considered as the same thing nearly everywhere. And it's 8P8C modular connector, thank you. There are other types of eight pin, eight conductor connectors.
As a nomenclature Nazi I am also bound to point out that it's not a "cable", it's a patch lead that you are hunting for. The main cause of failure for cables is being chewed by rats, electricians, HVAC duct maintainers, earth-moving equipment operators and/or fishing trawlermen. Their connectors mostly get broken by vehicular impact.
What you're talking about is the "registered jack type 45" (RJ45, or 8P8C modular) plug latching clip, which has approximately nothing to do with ethernet as originally specified. A telephone company invention... surprised?
Newbie: Hi! I have a set of ideas for improving the Linux memory manager which I've laid out in this mail.
Linus: #k$^!@s!!
Ulrich: ^$#&!&*!!!!!
While excessively abrupt by Anglophone standards and not constructive, Linus's and Ulrich's responses are correct in spirit.
Unfortunately, ideas have negative value until proven otherwise. Here's what the newbie should say:
"I've been working on some tweaks to the memory manager which may be useful to others. In most circumstances they provide an performance improvement of X%; in these cases [here listed], it's Y%.
"Here are A-B performance comparisons for 1-core and multi-core ARM, for desktop x86, and for 24-core Opteron-based servers under these (small, medium, large) memory configurations for these (standard) workloads:-...."
Any fool can have ideas, and most do. Having workable ideas, and demonstrating that they work, separates you from the herd.
Index-oriented access is actually a very restrictive way of accessing large data sets and CS professionals should break out of the jail called "relational database". Not every lose part requires fixing by nail.
??? One uses an RDBMS when one wants ACIDity. If you're reading the full contents of a table directly from an RDBMS and performance is important, of course you're doing it wrong.
In my experience, though, the problem is the reverse. Most CS professsionals don't understand the purpose or capabilities of RDBMSs (although they think they do: heavyweight key-value stores, yeah?), and avoid using them. Instead, they re-implement a limited, buggy, and badly designed subset of RDBMS's capabilities in their apps -- or just say things like "there won't be a lost update, there won't be races, there won't be system failures."
...and so the contest to find the worst combination of server software technologies begins. I'm stuck somewhere between unmaintained metamorphic perl and a ghetto re-implementation of Excel Services.
PHP and... anything? PHP is a fractal mess. Few other tools can make that claim.
How does COBOL stack up against classic VB for record handling? Or older BASICs for that matter?
Much better. The Basic family has very primitive record definition capabilities compared to Cobol.
And it completely lacks a native fixed-point decimal data type. Doing accounting is... uncomfortable... without one; that's perhaps the main reason that Cobol has stuck around (after the failure of PL/1 and RPG, [no, Report Program Generator]).
Will we also have robots flying the ships that we mine asteroids with?
Space is extremely hazardous to humans, who are moreover very inefficient. (A human needs at least 500 kilos of nutrients and water, including its own body, and it only works 25% of the time.)
we'll still need people to fix those robots and keep things running
TFA asserted "most if not all jobs". That certainly includes robot repair. Faced with an unfamiliar model of robot to service, robotic technicians need no training; all they need is an internet connection to download the manual.
, the robots just help us leverage the hugely repetitive tasks like picking strawberries or drive the robots to the site to begin work, and to make sure they're all on the right task.
Direct supervision will be unnecessary unless something unexpected happens (a locust swarm ate all the strawberries, perhaps.) Perhaps in this situation the worker robots in the areas will connect together to form a Beowulf cluster to figure out a course of action. Better hope that all the really big jobs go to plan. *cough* skynet *cough*
Oh and we'll need people to make predictions about how people will become extinct by $(date() + 30y).
A perl script with a connection to the UN website can do that.
One could argue is a rather gorse underestimation of the number of unresolved issues in the world.
This is a good point. "The chief cause of problems is solutions." - Eric Sevareid.
But I do look forward to seeing the use'd robot salesman, this beauty's great she comes used before they enforced the robotic ethicacy subroutines!
The robot Mafia? "Nice little ultracapacitor you've got there. Be a shame if something happened to it."
We still have the robotic rights revolution to go through too!
Another good point. We may end up with sub-sentient robots for just this reason. But they'll still be able to do "most jobs", because (as Watson showed) all you need is a good database and some good statistical "machine learning" algorithms to beat most humans in structured forms of work. And corporations can't deal with structurelessness.
Most people will do anything to avoid thinking. Play, though: nearly everyone likes doing that, and it's much better for their health. And sometimes it even brings us remarkable new things.
Slashdot Mirror
No, a peninsula depending from the Candian mainland.
Little-known, it seems: Castro was not communist until the US opposed him.
The US created the "Cuban problem" all by itself, by interfering. The same as you casually assume it had the right to do. ("Gotten rid of Batista". How about the US gets rid of its own internal political opponents first? Oh, wait...)
IIRC they did more than this, including some overburden loosening for coal mines, and some early fracking. (What's the Russian for "Atoms for Peace"?) But ANFO and dynamite are cheaper and come in a better range of sizes, they concluded. And fracking had to be done hydraulically, which required better steel.
Besides, the N thing upset the lunatics. After the Cuban missile crisis, the Russians eventually decided it was better to keep things cool on that topic.
Shipping from Asia, to the Southeast US doesn't make a lot of economical sense when you can transfer cargo containers on the West Coast of the US or even Mexico and transfer them by rail.
Who cares about the USA? This is about:-
- Ready access to Mexico's share of the Gulf of Mexico oil-bearing formations (woefully underexploited).
- Ready access to the minerals and oil in and offshore from West Africa, and cheap transport for grain from the farms that China is setting up there.
- Cheaper trade with Europe, West Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and the rest of South America (and possibly South Africa; I haven't checked the distances).
Remember, the largest crude carriers (VLCCs and ULCCs) can't go through the Panama Canal. The Canal limits the size of other bulk-goods and container ships, too.
As a byproduct, competition in trans-isthmus shipping routes will benefit Chile and Peru. Lucky Chileans and Peruvians. It will likely benefit American households, too, although self-interested American companies and control freaks in the US government will scream blue murder.
One would think that a new canal has more to do with geo-politics than with economics.
At this level, they're the same thing. But: this move looks to be beneficial to more-or-less the whole world, possibly excepting ordinary West Africans (but that's not the fault of the Chinese).
Bruce Schneier points out one of the ways in this essay.
You have to wait until the market works it out.
But it always does in the long run. Of course in the long run we're all dead.
... of constipation, it sound like.
See, that's the thing about business reputations. It only takes one bad egg to stink out the house.
Since you know Steve so well (I won't ask whether you met him before or after he died--or maybe it was you sticking all those pins in that voudoun doll of him that finally did him in), what would he be doing with all that money that's now going to go in dividends to stock-holders?
"Apple is a mobile devices company." That's Apple's description of itself, approved by SJ himself. Apple's problem is that mobile devices are becoming commodities, just like desktop devices before them.
(Google is trying to get a jump ahead by moving from mobile to pontis naribus devices, but I can't see how that will delay commodification for very long. If it takes off at all.)
Apple may yet reinvent itself as a digital personal assistance company. ("Entertain me, inform me, remind me, advise me, maintain my relationships and networks.") But the odds are against it. So...what else can Apple do with its money?
Mod this insightful. "The media are jonesing for some Apple news": that's the only story about Apple at the moment. Samzenpus needs to go on a media studies course. And a critical thinking course wouldn't hurt either.
Fusion is a way to boil water, to make steam, to spin turbines, to spin generators, to generate electricity.
Heat-engine electricity production (currently) works most economically at the gigawatt scale, and even with the E-Cat being free, a combined cycle gas turbine power plant would be more capital-efficient than an E-Cat power plant. Not to mention having a significantly shorter lead time. (That's why CCGTs are getting built: they're cheap. Non-combined gas peakers are cheaper still. The price of gas is a secondary consideration.)
Fuel is a negligible cost for fission power plants, but somehow they end up with a levelised cost of electricity as great as that from coal-fired plants. Being 'nucular', E-Cats will have a great weight of regulation dumped on them in the (unlikely) event they turn out to be a thing.
By all means watch, but don't expect anything.
Third, fusion is just a way to boil water...as Eric Drexler likes to remind us. You still need boilers and cooling towers, steam turbines, generators, switchyards, blah blah.
All these work most economically at the gigawatt scale. A revolution cold fusion is not.
... and terahertz.
Rossi once provided a sample of copper "produced from nickel in an E-Cat". Strangely, the isotopic ratios of that sample exactly matched those of naturally occurring copper (I forget from which mine), and had no relationship to the isotopic ratios you'd expect of copper produced from commercial nickel (which Rossi said he used) under any conceivable set of low-kelvin reaction pathways. (Hard to track this report down, now; I suspect high-energy lawyer reactions got involved.)
Why are these people bothering with fusion? Fusion is pathetically inefficient, like Newcomen's fire (i.e., steam) engine. Just the wrong way to do things. The real money's in direct matter-to-energy conversion ... using dark energy field resonances from tuned unobtanium crystals (or some such).
Can we reinvent the ethernet jack already? We don't need that bulky Ethernet connector, a thin form factor is more than possible. Make a new connector/jack for new hardware and release cheap adapters for people how can't upgrade their network just yet..
Done. It's called the 802.11n patch antenna.
Citation? They've always been considered as the same thing nearly everywhere. And it's 8P8C modular connector, thank you. There are other types of eight pin, eight conductor connectors.
As a nomenclature Nazi I am also bound to point out that it's not a "cable", it's a patch lead that you are hunting for. The main cause of failure for cables is being chewed by rats, electricians, HVAC duct maintainers, earth-moving equipment operators and/or fishing trawlermen. Their connectors mostly get broken by vehicular impact.
What you're talking about is the "registered jack type 45" (RJ45, or 8P8C modular) plug latching clip, which has approximately nothing to do with ethernet as originally specified. A telephone company invention... surprised?
Bad faith? Bad general knowledge, bad research.
CRI = colour rendering index, in case you were wondering. High CRI is a must for retail lighting (who knew?); but it's good everywhere.
not-immediately-obvious
Rather. 60,000 years between the invention of spears and the invention of these (as far as we know). That's only "immediate" to geologists.
"Engrained"? What?
It's a punning reference to the "wooden table" meme on The Daily WTF.
Newbie: Hi! I have a set of ideas for improving the Linux memory manager which I've laid out in this mail.
Linus: #k$^!@s!!
Ulrich: ^$#&!&*!!!!!
While excessively abrupt by Anglophone standards and not constructive, Linus's and Ulrich's responses are correct in spirit.
Unfortunately, ideas have negative value until proven otherwise. Here's what the newbie should say:
"I've been working on some tweaks to the memory manager which may be useful to others. In most circumstances they provide an performance improvement of X%; in these cases [here listed], it's Y%.
"Here are A-B performance comparisons for 1-core and multi-core ARM, for desktop x86, and for 24-core Opteron-based servers under these (small, medium, large) memory configurations for these (standard) workloads:- ...."
Any fool can have ideas, and most do. Having workable ideas, and demonstrating that they work, separates you from the herd.
Index-oriented access is actually a very restrictive way of accessing large data sets and CS professionals should break out of the jail called "relational database". Not every lose part requires fixing by nail.
??? One uses an RDBMS when one wants ACIDity. If you're reading the full contents of a table directly from an RDBMS and performance is important, of course you're doing it wrong.
In my experience, though, the problem is the reverse. Most CS professsionals don't understand the purpose or capabilities of RDBMSs (although they think they do: heavyweight key-value stores, yeah?), and avoid using them. Instead, they re-implement a limited, buggy, and badly designed subset of RDBMS's capabilities in their apps -- or just say things like "there won't be a lost update, there won't be races, there won't be system failures."
...and so the contest to find the worst combination of server software technologies begins. I'm stuck somewhere between unmaintained metamorphic perl and a ghetto re-implementation of Excel Services.
PHP and ... anything? PHP is a fractal mess. Few other tools can make that claim.
How does COBOL stack up against classic VB for record handling? Or older BASICs for that matter?
Much better. The Basic family has very primitive record definition capabilities compared to Cobol.
And it completely lacks a native fixed-point decimal data type. Doing accounting is ... uncomfortable ... without one; that's perhaps the main reason that Cobol has stuck around (after the failure of PL/1 and RPG, [no, Report Program Generator]).
Will we also have robots flying the ships that we mine asteroids with?
Space is extremely hazardous to humans, who are moreover very inefficient. (A human needs at least 500 kilos of nutrients and water, including its own body, and it only works 25% of the time.)
we'll still need people to fix those robots and keep things running
TFA asserted "most if not all jobs". That certainly includes robot repair. Faced with an unfamiliar model of robot to service, robotic technicians need no training; all they need is an internet connection to download the manual.
, the robots just help us leverage the hugely repetitive tasks like picking strawberries or drive the robots to the site to begin work, and to make sure they're all on the right task.
Direct supervision will be unnecessary unless something unexpected happens (a locust swarm ate all the strawberries, perhaps.) Perhaps in this situation the worker robots in the areas will connect together to form a Beowulf cluster to figure out a course of action. Better hope that all the really big jobs go to plan. *cough* skynet *cough*
Oh and we'll need people to make predictions about how people will become extinct by $(date() + 30y).
A perl script with a connection to the UN website can do that.
One could argue is a rather gorse underestimation of the number of unresolved issues in the world.
This is a good point. "The chief cause of problems is solutions." - Eric Sevareid.
But I do look forward to seeing the use'd robot salesman, this beauty's great she comes used before they enforced the robotic ethicacy subroutines!
The robot Mafia? "Nice little ultracapacitor you've got there. Be a shame if something happened to it."
We still have the robotic rights revolution to go through too!
Another good point. We may end up with sub-sentient robots for just this reason. But they'll still be able to do "most jobs", because (as Watson showed) all you need is a good database and some good statistical "machine learning" algorithms to beat most humans in structured forms of work. And corporations can't deal with structurelessness.
Machines should work. People should play.
Most people will do anything to avoid thinking. Play, though: nearly everyone likes doing that, and it's much better for their health. And sometimes it even brings us remarkable new things.