Can someone explain where the hydrogen comes from for these fuel cells? I've heard a variety of things, but no one seems to commit to anything.
As you say, hydrogen can be produced in a variety of different ways. Anything from fossil fuels to algae to windmills. This means that it doesn't matter where the energy comes from. When fossil fuel is cheap, your car can run on hydrogen produced from fossil fuel. When geothermal is cheap, your car can use geothermal hydrogen. The market will decide -- we would no longer be 'locked in' to a single energy source. Hydrogen is to gasoline what Java is to assembly language, if you will.
I've heard this before: imagine powering your house with the excess electricity generated by your car... what are they talking about? Cars don't generate power.
What they meant was, you could drive your car to the hydrogen refueling station, then drive it home and use it as a generator to power your house. Of course this only works until your car runs low on hydrogen, then it's off to the station again to refuel....
So what power are these cars supposed to be harnessing? Great reservoirs of hydrogen of which I am unaware?
You'll note that 75% of the Earth's surface is covered by H2O... which contains a lot of H. Of course, it takes some energy to pull the H away from the 2 O's, but that's okay, because there is a huge nuclear reactor about 93 million miles away that provides us with as much energy as we could ever need, 24 hours a day. Actually making practical use of these resources will require some engineering, but all the ingredients are there in abundance. And for the shorter term, there are less direct methods of producing hydrogen (as noted above).
Consider that for many years to come, hydrogen will be produced by splitting existing petroleum products. Same dependence on foreign oil, same refinery pollution
If we keep the same refineries, but no longer have pollution coming from the cars themselves, that would be a win. Add to that the fact that pollution controls on refineries can be improved much more easily than those on cars (because there are only a relatively small number of refineries to upgrade, and there are fewer weight, space, and cost restrictions required from the equipment that can be added to them). Add to that the fact that if/when someone comes up with a better method of generating hydrogen, he could then start selling it right away (as opposed to making everyone buy another new car first).
For those reasons, even "dirty hydrogen" is better than the status quo.
"Is everybody still inventing his own application layer protocol?"
By and large, yes... it's a symptom of the needs of applications being so varied.
(warning: blatant plug follows) For what it's worth, however, I've developed mine over the course of three years and a dozen or so projects, to the point where I think it's pretty mature and useful; it's open source, and portable to most environments, although the IETF has of course never heard of it...;^)
Personally I think that this database would be useful, although I doubt that there would be much in there that doesn't exist in the literature already
Indeed. But perhaps having information "in the literature" isn't terribly useful if the doctor doesn't have time to look it up. If the doctor has only 8 minutes to spend on each patient, I imagine a program like this could be very helpful -- sort of like a quick check for something on Google instead of having to trek down to the library for an hour or two.
Using these resources physicans are mostly right most of the time. It is unreasonable to expect more than that.
Given that a physician only has so much time in his work day, the less time it takes to look up things in the literature, the more queries he can make, and therefore the better quality his diagnoses will be.
For a 1 hour stream, a user in an NYC trading bank (I traced the IP) took 40GB to get the stream. The source file was about 4Mb.
I'm confused... why would ripping a stream take any more (or less) of the server's bandwidth than regular streaming-playback? Either way, you just need to download the contents of the stream once, whether you are saving the bytes to disk or just viewing them and then throwing them away shouldn't even be detectable by the server. Or am I missing something?
Now, imagine on a peer to peer network, some anti-social little sod stealing your stream. All your DSL bandwidth gone.
Exactly the opposite, I would think. Instead of every listener having to connect to your server to get the stream, now a good percentage of them are connecting to the "anti-social little sods'" peer-machines, and therefore not using bandwidth on your server. More likely you'd be sitting there with lots of bandwidth free, wondering where everybody went...;^)
Does anyone have info on which of these file systems might be the better one for glitch-free playback of multitrack uncompressed audio? (I'm thinking of up to 16 simultaneous streams, so effiicent throughput would be the priority -- BeOS's BFS was optimized for this sort of thing, but I don't know who in Linux-land has been focused on that aspect of performance)
If everyone in America wanted a radical change they could have voted for Nader. But most people like the status quo and the way things are.
No, most people realized that Nader had no chance of winning, and so a vote for Nader was really a vote for Bush. Such "strategic voting" doesn't reflect what the American people want, only what they had to settle for.
And when you live in a democracy what most people want is what you get.
More American voters voted for Al Gore than for any other candidate. That is an undisputed fact. And yet, Mr. Gore is not in office. So let's correct that sentence to read, "in a flawed, unrepresentative faux democracy, what most people want may or may not be what you get".
I again recommend this book for more info on how our elections have been essentially "r00ted" by political interests, to the degree that they can no longer be said to represent the will of the American people.
We do. Every two years in November. It's called "voting for the guys who dole out the budget."
Unfortunately, there are only two choices on the ballot, and they are "cut NASA's funding" and "cut NASA's funding". If you think American elections actually give Americans much of a say in things, then I highly recommend this book. Modern America is a democracy in name only.
Just to give you an idea how bad it was if I downloaded 40 - 15 meg files, at least half would have CRC errors [...] I thought tcp wasnt supposed to let that happen, then again, maybee i should just blame the router. Has any one else have simular problems with cheap nat routers or is this post on topic?
Alas, I've seen this too. I wrote a file sharing program that uses TCP for file transfers, and has a download-resume feature that does an md5 checksum of the user's local file portion, and only starts the resume if the local file portion matches the corresponding portion of the uploader's file.
Every few days, I would get complaints from users that the auto-resume wasn't working. It was refusing to resume because the two file fragments' hashcodes didn't match. After going over all my checksum code checking for bugs, I finally got paranoid and added an application-computed checksum every so often to my TCP data.... and sure enough, in some cases the TCP data I sent would arrive at the downloader's machine with a checksum mismatch. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to finger a particular piece of software or hardware that causes this, but I can confirm that it does sometimes happen.:^(
The problem with TCP for an online game is that you can never THROW AWAY data that's too old or unnecessary
Well, that's not entirely true -- while it is the case that once you have called send() on the data, it can't be thrown away, it's also true that if you are maintaining an outbound message queue (to avoid blocking on a filled TCP send buffer), then you can remove or replace data that is in the outbound message queue, that hasn't been sent yet. I have used this technique with reasonable success.
However, with UDP, it's laughably easy. You just do one recvfrom() and you get a packet and it also fills in a data structure to tell you where it came from.
... or maybe you don't get the packet, because a router was loaded down and had to drop it. Now you gotta implement a timeout and retransmit protocol. Not to mention that packets may arrive out-of-order from the way they were sent, so you if ordering is important (and it usually is) you have to implement some sort of sequencing tag systems too. A few dozen hours later, you find out you've implemented something that looks suspiciously like a primitive version of TCP...:^)
So, we are rectifying our prior mistake. If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere...
Hopefully people will do just that, and said fuckup Cable Execs will realize the problems inherent in harrassing their own customers. If they are worried about people using excessive bandwidth, why not just meter or cap the user's bandwidth to a given throughput per month? Done right, most people wouldn't even notice it was happening.
Typical enivronmentalist stance: we should be using all this wonderful technology - please don't point out why it is ineffective as that makes baby Gaia cry.
Heh, I guess that came across the wrong way. I didn't mean to imply that 'green' technology is perfect, or that its problems shouldn't be discussed. What I meant was that it is a developing technology, and the problems that it does have can be and are being resolved.
Does anyone complain about [air pollution from burning coal], try to figure out how to store it? Of course not...
Of course they do. Environmentalists have been complaining about pollution from coal burning since the beginning. The fact is it's not an either/or choice between nuclear and coal. Both technologies are unacceptable, but that's okay because there are other options to choose from. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, etc. (no, don't bother to point out that all of those also have their shortcomings.... that may be so, but they are still better alternatives than coal and nuclear)
You receive what your efforts are worth. Some will _choose to starve_ for a myriad of radical reasons. Others will starve due to ineptitude. Show me the injustice.
Sure. Imagine that when you were an infant, your parents were killed in a flood, leaving you to starve to death shortly afterwards. Would you say you "chose to starve to death", or were you simply too inept to survive? Would you say your death was "just"? If so, please give me an example of something that would be "unjust", because I don't think you know what the word means.
But then again, i guess they'd have to have some deal (if you're a 500 pound, illiterate ignoramus who can't even stand up on your own, we have the right to choose the next guy.)
Good idea, I like it.:^) I suggest that if the winner can't go (for whatever reason), s/he gets to nominate another person to go in his/her place.
I won't argue that a Simputer can be used absolutely free of expenses; that is obviously not true. I will say that it is possible for it to be useful enough to pay for itself (e.g. if you can use a Simputer to send and receive email, you save lots of money on phone calls or wasted trips). Time will tell whether or not this is actually the case.
Try reading the article next time... if you had, you'd know that the thing supports smart cards, so that it's easy for multiple people to share it (saving their personal data on a card), so a whole family/village/whatever can split the costs of buying one if necessary. You'd also know that it runs on AA batteries, not wall-outlet power.
It could possibly be proven that if everybody did that then ticket master would lose sales that it might have otherwise gotten from customers who would be enticed by other shows.
Where in the law does it say that "anything that harms TicketMaster's sales is illegal"? If TicketMaster is using a advertising mechanism that can be bypassed, maybe TicketMaster should change their advertising mechanism, rather than trying to make it illegal to bypass it.
What businesses seem to be forgetting is that the whole point of a URL is a quick way to find content. If they don't want people to find a particular piece of conent quickly, then why are they creating a URL for that content?
Personally, I've always wanted an audio version of the TiVO, so that I wouldn't miss my favorite radio shows, but rather could listen to them at my leisure (and skip past the ads). Something like this comes awfully close...
Sometimes it isn't the content that gives you away, it's the fact that you're sending traffic between point A and point B, and B talks to C, D, and E. That can be enough to tip off the wrong someone.
I would think you wouldn't send any data directly to B at all... you'd merely set up an account on eBay and start selling some junk... but in the pictures of the junk, you hide your steganographied secret messages. Your buddies pose as eBay buyers, and occasionally read your page (along with many others, for cameoflage)... but when they read your page, they "Save Image As..." and extract the secret messages.
For them to reply back to you, the same process is done in reverse. It would take a pretty sharp government to catch on to this, I think....
How would someone go about certifying their own program?, because if someone could do this, it defeats the whole purpose of Pallidum.
You're right. Palladium is an attempt to divide the world into two classes of people -- those who are "trusted" to write executable code (i.e. big companies who pay Microsoft lots of money), and those who are not (plebians, users, and small developers). I, for one, am not looking forward to second-class-citizenship based on my refusal to pay Microsoft lots of money for the right to write code.
We could all go install Redhat with openoffice tomorrow, but it just isn't worth the trouble, or else we WOULD.
Would we? You're assuming everyone is perfectly rational, and has access to all the information needed to make the correct decision. When it comes to computer software, however, most people are "lost in the dark", and so they stick with what they know works, even if something better does exist.
Not really, I am almost certain people will buy this crap by the truckload for pennies of savings. I also think most people would rather complain about their rights being taken away then spend pennies buying the unencumbered hardware
Have you heard of DivX? (the hardware, not the file format) No? Why not?;^)
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As you say, hydrogen can be produced in a variety of different ways. Anything from fossil fuels to algae to windmills. This means that it doesn't matter where the energy comes from. When fossil fuel is cheap, your car can run on hydrogen produced from fossil fuel. When geothermal is cheap, your car can use geothermal hydrogen. The market will decide -- we would no longer be 'locked in' to a single energy source. Hydrogen is to gasoline what Java is to assembly language, if you will.
I've heard this before: imagine powering your house with the excess electricity generated by your car... what are they talking about? Cars don't generate power.
What they meant was, you could drive your car to the hydrogen refueling station, then drive it home and use it as a generator to power your house. Of course this only works until your car runs low on hydrogen, then it's off to the station again to refuel....
So what power are these cars supposed to be harnessing? Great reservoirs of hydrogen of which I am unaware?
You'll note that 75% of the Earth's surface is covered by H2O... which contains a lot of H. Of course, it takes some energy to pull the H away from the 2 O's, but that's okay, because there is a huge nuclear reactor about 93 million miles away that provides us with as much energy as we could ever need, 24 hours a day. Actually making practical use of these resources will require some engineering, but all the ingredients are there in abundance. And for the shorter term, there are less direct methods of producing hydrogen (as noted above).
If we keep the same refineries, but no longer have pollution coming from the cars themselves, that would be a win. Add to that the fact that pollution controls on refineries can be improved much more easily than those on cars (because there are only a relatively small number of refineries to upgrade, and there are fewer weight, space, and cost restrictions required from the equipment that can be added to them). Add to that the fact that if/when someone comes up with a better method of generating hydrogen, he could then start selling it right away (as opposed to making everyone buy another new car first).
For those reasons, even "dirty hydrogen" is better than the status quo.
By and large, yes... it's a symptom of the needs of applications being so varied.
(warning: blatant plug follows) For what it's worth, however, I've developed mine over the course of three years and a dozen or so projects, to the point where I think it's pretty mature and useful; it's open source, and portable to most environments, although the IETF has of course never heard of it... ;^)
Indeed. But perhaps having information "in the literature" isn't terribly useful if the doctor doesn't have time to look it up. If the doctor has only 8 minutes to spend on each patient, I imagine a program like this could be very helpful -- sort of like a quick check for something on Google instead of having to trek down to the library for an hour or two.
Using these resources physicans are mostly right most of the time. It is unreasonable to expect more than that.
Given that a physician only has so much time in his work day, the less time it takes to look up things in the literature, the more queries he can make, and therefore the better quality his diagnoses will be.
I'm confused... why would ripping a stream take any more (or less) of the server's bandwidth than regular streaming-playback? Either way, you just need to download the contents of the stream once, whether you are saving the bytes to disk or just viewing them and then throwing them away shouldn't even be detectable by the server. Or am I missing something?
Now, imagine on a peer to peer network, some anti-social little sod stealing your stream. All your DSL bandwidth gone.
Exactly the opposite, I would think. Instead of every listener having to connect to your server to get the stream, now a good percentage of them are connecting to the "anti-social little sods'" peer-machines, and therefore not using bandwidth on your server. More likely you'd be sitting there with lots of bandwidth free, wondering where everybody went... ;^)
Does anyone have info on which of these file systems might be the better one for glitch-free playback of multitrack uncompressed audio? (I'm thinking of up to 16 simultaneous streams, so effiicent throughput would be the priority -- BeOS's BFS was optimized for this sort of thing, but I don't know who in Linux-land has been focused on that aspect of performance)
No, most people realized that Nader had no chance of winning, and so a vote for Nader was really a vote for Bush. Such "strategic voting" doesn't reflect what the American people want, only what they had to settle for.
And when you live in a democracy what most people want is what you get.
More American voters voted for Al Gore than for any other candidate. That is an undisputed fact. And yet, Mr. Gore is not in office. So let's correct that sentence to read, "in a flawed, unrepresentative faux democracy, what most people want may or may not be what you get".
I again recommend this book for more info on how our elections have been essentially "r00ted" by political interests, to the degree that they can no longer be said to represent the will of the American people.
Unfortunately, there are only two choices on the ballot, and they are "cut NASA's funding" and "cut NASA's funding". If you think American elections actually give Americans much of a say in things, then I highly recommend this book. Modern America is a democracy in name only.
Doubtful, in this case.... this program was only available for BeOS.
Alas, I've seen this too. I wrote a file sharing program that uses TCP for file transfers, and has a download-resume feature that does an md5 checksum of the user's local file portion, and only starts the resume if the local file portion matches the corresponding portion of the uploader's file.
Every few days, I would get complaints from users that the auto-resume wasn't working. It was refusing to resume because the two file fragments' hashcodes didn't match. After going over all my checksum code checking for bugs, I finally got paranoid and added an application-computed checksum every so often to my TCP data.... and sure enough, in some cases the TCP data I sent would arrive at the downloader's machine with a checksum mismatch. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to finger a particular piece of software or hardware that causes this, but I can confirm that it does sometimes happen. :^(
Well, that's not entirely true -- while it is the case that once you have called send() on the data, it can't be thrown away, it's also true that if you are maintaining an outbound message queue (to avoid blocking on a filled TCP send buffer), then you can remove or replace data that is in the outbound message queue, that hasn't been sent yet. I have used this technique with reasonable success.
I do agree that UDP has its place, however.
Hopefully people will do just that, and said fuckup Cable Execs will realize the problems inherent in harrassing their own customers. If they are worried about people using excessive bandwidth, why not just meter or cap the user's bandwidth to a given throughput per month? Done right, most people wouldn't even notice it was happening.
Heh, I guess that came across the wrong way. I didn't mean to imply that 'green' technology is perfect, or that its problems shouldn't be discussed. What I meant was that it is a developing technology, and the problems that it does have can be and are being resolved.
Of course they do. Environmentalists have been complaining about pollution from coal burning since the beginning. The fact is it's not an either/or choice between nuclear and coal. Both technologies are unacceptable, but that's okay because there are other options to choose from. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, etc. (no, don't bother to point out that all of those also have their shortcomings.... that may be so, but they are still better alternatives than coal and nuclear)
Sure. Imagine that when you were an infant, your parents were killed in a flood, leaving you to starve to death shortly afterwards. Would you say you "chose to starve to death", or were you simply too inept to survive? Would you say your death was "just"? If so, please give me an example of something that would be "unjust", because I don't think you know what the word means.
Good idea, I like it. :^) I suggest that if the winner can't go (for whatever reason), s/he gets to nominate another person to go in his/her place.
I won't argue that a Simputer can be used absolutely free of expenses; that is obviously not true. I will say that it is possible for it to be useful enough to pay for itself (e.g. if you can use a Simputer to send and receive email, you save lots of money on phone calls or wasted trips). Time will tell whether or not this is actually the case.
Try reading the article next time... if you had, you'd know that the thing supports smart cards, so that it's easy for multiple people to share it (saving their personal data on a card), so a whole family/village/whatever can split the costs of buying one if necessary. You'd also know that it runs on AA batteries, not wall-outlet power.
Where in the law does it say that "anything that harms TicketMaster's sales is illegal"? If TicketMaster is using a advertising mechanism that can be bypassed, maybe TicketMaster should change their advertising mechanism, rather than trying to make it illegal to bypass it.
What businesses seem to be forgetting is that the whole point of a URL is a quick way to find content. If they don't want people to find a particular piece of conent quickly, then why are they creating a URL for that content?
Personally, I've always wanted an audio version of the TiVO, so that I wouldn't miss my favorite radio shows, but rather could listen to them at my leisure (and skip past the ads). Something like this comes awfully close...
I would think you wouldn't send any data directly to B at all... you'd merely set up an account on eBay and start selling some junk... but in the pictures of the junk, you hide your steganographied secret messages. Your buddies pose as eBay buyers, and occasionally read your page (along with many others, for cameoflage)... but when they read your page, they "Save Image As..." and extract the secret messages.
For them to reply back to you, the same process is done in reverse. It would take a pretty sharp government to catch on to this, I think....
You're right. Palladium is an attempt to divide the world into two classes of people -- those who are "trusted" to write executable code (i.e. big companies who pay Microsoft lots of money), and those who are not (plebians, users, and small developers). I, for one, am not looking forward to second-class-citizenship based on my refusal to pay Microsoft lots of money for the right to write code.
Would we? You're assuming everyone is perfectly rational, and has access to all the information needed to make the correct decision. When it comes to computer software, however, most people are "lost in the dark", and so they stick with what they know works, even if something better does exist.
Have you heard of DivX? (the hardware, not the file format) No? Why not? ;^)