... of course there is ALWAYS going to be a place for locally-run applications.
Like, if I'm out in the field collecting data for a week, carrying my equipment on my back, I'm going to be mighty miffed at having to miss carrying 5kg of rock samples back to the office because I'm going to have to carry 5kg of batteries to re-charge the Iridium box to get access to a 9600bps link to the Internet in order to fill out the expenses spreadsheet for the batteries for the Iridium and the phone bills incurred.
And we haven't even begun to get into "security". I'm trying to get a number of my colleagues (for my employers AND for competitor companies) to persuade laptop manufacturers to make laptops that have ZERO risk of wireless hacking and data theft because... this is the difficult bit... they don't have any wireless hardware. Difficult, isn't it? As a free extra, we'll aslo get to escape the risk of the wireless triggering the explosives we sometimes use. Which is great, because currently when we use explosives, we have to lock the wireless-capable (not necessarly -enabled, just -capable) equipment into an office in a steel box. Not my paranoia, but the documented procedures of the companies that handle the explosives.
Newest, brightest, shiniest, koolest technology does not necessarily equal "best", or even "appropriate". It all depends on the job to be done and the circumstances under which it needs to be done.
This is why HD-DVD and Bluray players require a network jack. It allows for old keys to be removed and new ones to be implemented, among other things.
Run that past me again, please. Does that mean what I think it does - the support services for HD-DVD and Blue Ray consist of :
mains electrical power (240VAC, or whatever you have in your country;
Some sort of display unit to put the pictures onto; and
a connection into an internet-connected network, with one of several types of network authentication processes, and permission to talk to one or several hosts on the internet.
In short, Cleetus and Do'reen (the teuchters of the Simpsons) are going to have to have significant networking skill to get the box connected and working. I can see a lot of boxes getting returned to the retailer, with demand for a refund, once the Cleetus-es of the world get to trying to hook this up.
It took the wife long enough to persuade me to get a TV ; I really can't see these new formats flying until they've disposed of this sort of barrier to uptake.
... since he regards it as essentially as abstract as playing cops and robbers with your fingers as guns.'
You allow your children to play with their fingers as if they were guns? What kind of a sick, violence- and gun- obsessed culture do you come from? It's weird enough to think of police routinely carrying guns in itself, and we know that they're trained psychopaths. But to allow children (or even adults) to think that that's "right" or even "normal"... ohhh, that's a society that's heading into serious trouble.
Oh, hang on, it's America, where the Army effectively censors the entertainment industry from showing people the real effects of violence, and where the entertainment industry collaborates with the censorship by making a "realistic" shooting mean "like you see in the movies" instead of making the movies realistic. How does that anthem go? "California über alles"
... then presumably my mobile phone jammer would also be allowed (one of the relatively sophisticated, low-power ones, not a tower-fryer). That way, the poor over-worked flight attendants wouldn't have to deal with anyone near me arguing to their neighbours to shut the fuck up and let them listen to the movie. Maybe more people complaining about not getting reception, but that's not their god-given right anyway. (And until it's part of the ticket price, I doubt the flight people are going to care.)
... if SCOTUS were to prevent companies from setting particular prices in the US. People within the US would just buy from outside the US at the best price they could get.
[slap] Hello SCOTUS, are you awake? Which part of "GLOBAL marketplace" are you having difficulty understanding? [slap] Awake yet?
Why not leave the gas guzzler at home and drive something more economical when you're going someplace by yourself?
Because to do so would make your penis shrink. Didn't you go to school on the day when they beat the message into your classmate's heads that penis size is directly proportional to car size. It's one of the basic lessons of sexual ettiquette in the west.
As Cynthia Payne ('Madam Cyn', brothel-keeper and judge-whipper extraordinaire) so eloquently put it "B. C. S. D." And she'd know.
Any literary fonts of knowledge out there who can tell me where I remember a quote from about Italians driving as if the car is a penis extension, French driving like it's a penis substitute and somethings similarly uncomplimentary about British, American and German driving.
Ten years ago the internet was just coming into the public awareness, there was tons of infrastructure growth, and lots of issues that didn't have very clear cut solutions.
Ten years ago the Internet was getting on for 20 years old ; I (not in any respect an IT person, except for using computers all day every day to do my non-computing job) had been on the net for about 5 years and was considering the costs of getting a broadband connection (128kbps, would have cost around 3 days pay/month ; I didn't get broadband until 3 years ago) ; I had recently got my first mobile phone, and I'd taken to asking people I interacted with for an email-address and a mobile number in that order ; most people I knew had an email address (hell, even my father had one, though Mum still hasn't) ; infrastructure was growing rapidly, and lots of issues didn't have clear-cut solutions. At around that time I was also seeing people writing exactly this sort of message, though I think it was a while before I discovered Slashdot so it must have been in some earlier forum.
The Internet hasn't changed much in that time, nor has IT. It was mostly fire-fighting then ; dealing with lusers who alternate between wrecking their machines, wrecking their work systems and trying to get porn at work by end-running the IT department. All that has changed is that the machines are faster and the files are bigger. One thing has gone downhill, I suppose : the Bastard Operator From Hell hasn't been allowed to use his lime pits for years. Booo.
A little research (i.e. Google, the two lecturer's names, and two of the likely compounds they're working on) revealed an abstract from the paper which, I suspect, is at the root of the press release being reported on. [SIGH] So many Slashdotters berate journalists (often with justification), then decline to go and do the basic ground work which science-educated Slashdotters should be capable of, while English/ Arts-educated journalists and PR flacks can't or don't do. [SIGH]
The researchers were : Craig Jensen (University of Hawaii), Sean McGrady, Reyna Ayabe (University of Hawaii), Ben Reddy (University of New Brunswick) The locale was : 2007 APS March Meeting , March 5-9, 2007; Denver, Colorado, Session L39: "Focus Session: Hydrogen Storage II"
So, it's not a formally-published paper as yet, but it is research that is being "reviewed by their peers". Face-to-face. Which isn't exactly easy. The abstract of the paper presented is at http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR07/Event/59811 :
"Alane, AlH$_{3}$ has many of the properties that are requisite for materials to be considered viable for onboard hydrogen storage applications. Most notibly, it contains 10.1 wt{\%} hydrogen and undergoes dehydrogenation at appreciable rates at temperatures below 100$^{\circ}$C. However, the very low, $\ge $ 6 kJ/mol, enthalpy of dehydrogenation of AlH$_{3}$ prohibits subsequent re-hydrogenation through standard gas-solid techniques except at very high pressures or very low temperatures. The extremely low solubility of gaseous H$_{2}$ in conventional organic solvents also vitiates a solution-based approach. Re-hydrogenation of Al using a supercritical fluid potentially offers a workable approach since the fluid can act as a solvent, at the same time remaining completely miscible with permanent gases like hydrogen. Recently, it has been found that mixtures of NaH and Al can be hydrogenated to sodium alanate, NaAlH$_{4}$ under modest pressures and temperatures in supercritical fluids. We have now extended these studies to the hydrogenation of Al to AlH$_{3}$. The results of these studies and experimental details will be reported."
Shortened version : getting the hydrogen back into aluminium-based materials is hard work, but it can be made easier by dissolving the hydrogen (and possibly the aluminous base) in a "supercritical fluid". They carefully don't specify the chemistry of the supercritical fluid, probably for patenting reasons. My guesses : CO2? DHMO? both might have issues with strongly reducing aluminous compounds. How about short-chain hydrocarbons or short-organic amides? A bit rough for the general public to handle, but we're talking about the re-charging of the storage material here, not pouring the stuff into your fuel tank, so I wouldn't see that as a show-stopper per se). The general public would probably not be present at this side of the fuel-system cycle.
Interesting work. I can almost hear Grignard stop turning in his grave and pricking his dead ears up.
No, because marbles didn't (and wouldn't) naturally form themselves into spheres in space. I'd just call them "artificial debris."
How about a CAI ? For the astronomically iggorant (not the parent's poster), "CAI"s are Calcium-Aluminium-Inclusions, spheroidal particles found in some types of meteorites and which give some of the oldest radiometric ages in the solar system. They show physical and chemical evidence of having been fused in the early solar nebula, and of having frozen under the influence of their own surface tension. Later they aggregated with other materials to form planetesimals ("asteroids" in recent gigayears) but retained their distinctive textures and chemistry. So they are naturally formed, sub-spherical objects which formed in an orbit around a star (most likely the Sun) and thus planets by the poster's definition. On a centimetre scale.
I always liked the "it forms a ball" line of definitions myself, which would have kept Pluto as a planet. And Ceres, Vesta, maybe a handful of other "asteroids", possibly Quaour (spelling?). Chiron? I don't have any problem with a 30-planet solar system. If Tom Lherer can set 92+ elements into a musical mnemonic, then 30 planets aren't a (serious) problem. But the way that I got around by fyngyrz's problem was to include the phrase "forming a spheroid by self-gravitation" in the definition, since we can "easily" observe the transition in the larger "asteroids". Of course, one still needs to pull a number out of a hat for how close an approximation to a sphere you want to accept. Ohhh, another controversy.
Come back to me when the Brits start basing their policy on racial purity and blaming the Jews and Slavs for all their problems.
OK, we're back. Have you seen any of the press diatribes about invading hoardes of Roma and billions of Bulgars waiting to enter the country when our political alliances extend that far? Everything from the state of the roads to the obesity of children is already being blamed on the Slavs (evidently the Jews have got their PR experts lined up much better than the Slavs. Evidence : Borat.) "Racial purity" ? The joke about thugs demanding to know if you're a Catholic Atheist or a Protestant Atheist is no joke (which is why it works as a joke); the same Thought Police attitudes extend to which football team you support (not supporting football is not an option).
Here's what happens when airplanes are flown by a remote control: (actual video of an Airbus320!)
That was an aircraft being flown under "fly-by-wire", not under remote control. There was a full flight crew on that plane, with fly jockeys pulling on the levers and pressing the pedals while the shit squirted out of their pants. I'm not sure how many of them died and how many survived. The problem on that flight was that the software designers on the job never envisaged the plane being flown the way that it was being flown, and so got into a "you can't get there from here" situation in the flight control programs. To get from where the plane was to where the plane needed to be in order to get out of the horizontal stall, it needed to get X airspeed, which the flight control program did by trading a couple of hundred feet of altitude for airspeed. Once the plane had got that extra airspeed, then the flight control program would have happily revved up the engines to provide the power to come out of the stall. It's a failure of communication between the how-to-fly manual and the how-to-impress-crowds-at-air-shows manual, when the plane was designed to fly to one manual, but was being flown to the other manual.
If you think that the "right" to purchase copyrighted music from another country without copyright laws is a "free speech" issue
While it is debatable whether AllofMP3 was following them correctly, the Russian Federation does have copyright laws.
For certain the RF does have copyright laws.
Equally, for certain, they're not the same laws as implemented in the US (or the UK, or in Outer Mongolia for what little it matters). Whether or not they're compatible with the Berne Convention, I don't know - I have a suspicion that in the early 90s they were not fully Berne-compatible, but that has been fixed over to the satisfaction of the WIPO the last few years.
Whether AllOfMP3 implement the laws properly is an even more separate question. Considering that the famous phrase "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," was uttered by a lawyer with a straight face, then I suspect that the word 'properly' there would allow enough "wriggle room" to drive a coach and horses through the statement. Plus a couple of Airbuses and a whole fleet of space shuttles.
Sounds like a sure way to piss off the religious and atheists alike:]
Why would an atheist be pissed off? Just because something evolved, doesn't mean to say that it's "right" in any sense other than it's an expedient locally-optimised solution to an environmental pressure. So to an atheist (such as myself) scientist (attested by the BSc I worked at university for, and the 20 years of practical research work that I've done), there's nothing upsetting or surprising about a sows ear like "religion" coming out of the silk purse of natural selection. It's just an odd side effect of social coherence and anthropomorphism. Of course a religious person who takes offence on behalf of the Great-Problem-Solver-Wearing-A-Negligee-In-The-Sky at this is just amusing. Like watching Borat try to get off with Pamela Anderson, but without the sex appeal. Now, if you did want to try to piss me off, perhaps you could try explaining to me why, in this modern world, intelligent humans should still allow themselves to be driven by natural selection forces instead of choosing their own direction to evolve in. But even that wouldn't piss me off much, because most humans are too ignorant (NB : ignorant =/= stupid) to see the opportunity, and the choices involved are daunting. How did Rush put it ? - "even if you don't decide, you still have made a choice".
Lying about credentials on resumes is actually fairly common and some of those liars are the best performers ever hired. But you can bet that regardless of skill or merit they wouldn't be hired if they hadn't claimed to have the paper.
And on the other hand, I've had to be involved with investigations of people who have been claiming false credentials - certificates in instrumentation installation, hazardous atmosphere power wiring, high-pressure pipe-fitting, system safety inspection and self-certification, little things like that. Quite egregious lies about courses they claimed to have passed which the colleges (claimed) had never run ; courses from colleges that didn't have a department in the area claimed ; courses from colleges that don't exist and never have existed (according to college admissions officers in the city claimed). Really blatent lies. And they got away with it for over a decade, moving from company to company as a team with a mutual non-investigation pact. To the best of my knowledge, there's still an oil platform in the Central North Sea whose entire drilling and production instrumentation is maintained by a bunch of people who lie about whether they've been trained to build/ install/ maintain/ inspect this equipment. That may not make much concern to you, but to me it's certainly disturbs my sleep when I'm at work on platforms in the area. Every time I'm hauled from my bunk by blaring klaxons to go and huddle by a lifeboat in an immersion suit the howling rain, I wonder to myself "is this because those fuckers are in charge on this rig?" Sometimes I wish that I'd kept better notes of the names of the accused, and which companies they'd worked for. But I didn't because I wasn't working on platforms at that time. I'll know better in the future. These days, when I'm involved in choosing which people to hire, I ALWAYS check out their claimed qualifications. Including talking to other people claiming similar qualifications from the same institution and time period to see if they're remembered. Fortunately we don't seem to attract the same sort of stupid liars in the sciences as instrumentation engineering companies do attract. Probably because the pay isn't as good, and the likelihood of being caught is much higher.
Lieing about being a theology professor ? The stupidest thing about it is chosing something so pathetic to claim. I mean - a theology professor? Is he fit to wash the decks with a sea-water hose? I wouldn't even be sure of that.
If you live near the sea, ... And if an earthquake strikes,
... then you didn't pay one nanosecond of attention to your friendly neighbourhood geologist when you were choosing to buy the property and frankly, you deserve what you get for building on unconsolidated soils in an earthquake zone. If you've inherited such a property, or have only recently started to think about defensive housing (in the same sense as "defensive driving"), then you need to keep your mouth very firmly shut until you've got the buyer's money cleared into your account.
In Soviet Russia. . . uhh. . . they run XP on VIC-20?
Uh, no. Last time I was there and putting together a PC for my fiancee, it was XP on a AMD PC with something like a 2GHz chip in it. Cost about $500.
What is it with Americans thinking that other countries can't advance at the same rate as they do? Or even, Ghod forsake, advance faster because other countries don't need to make the mistakes that America has made. (Actually, the "Ghod forsake" bit is probably part of America' problem - too many people waiting for the man in the nightie in the sky to come and solve their problems for them.) In western Siberia where my wife came from, they've gone (in the towns) from under 10% penetration of dial-up to about 10% penetration of broadband in the time that it takes the UK government to decide whether or not to issue a residence permit.
Thanks for the info, but wireless is definitely not on the agenda (who needs the security worries? Which reminds me to get hold of a wireless detector/ jammer before the daughter opens up her laptop to the outside world). Of course, I could try the impossible and specify absence of wireless hardware.
Do Dell use the same configuration site for America as for Europe? I wouldn't think so from the website address, the Irish accents I've encountered on their support lines in the past, the speed of shipping, etc.
I'm not seeing your point. Incompatible hardware is only a problem if you have an existing computer, and you want to run a different OS on it. If you're building the machine, as Dell is, it doesn't make any sense to purposely choose hardware that's incompatible with the OS most people (buying these machines) want to use.
So you're saying that Dell should only be allowed to ship their servers with 100% Linux compatible parts? Presumably you're one of the people who also complained when they were a 100% Microsoft lock-in.
So, your example of a (server-relevant type of hardware which has *only* examples that require MS drivers AND have EULAs that forbid writing your own driver by investigating the hardware) is? Just picking a server at random (pedge_sc1435) I get options on the processor (I believe all work with Linux or M$) ; a second processor (it's a dual-socket server, mid-range) ; awww, futz, they've crashed... reload, support services (no thanks, but also available from LUG and RH as well as M$) ; memory (also works with Linux, not aware of any counter-examples)...
They've crashed again (or are they being Slashdotted - neat trick while I'm still writing the comment!) or are just unusably slow, but the other options I can see listed are for RAID controllers, "RAID connectivity" (WTF that? iSCSI or FibreChannel or something like that?), first and second hard drives. All component classes which have FLOSS drivers for hardware implementations available. Face it, Dell are just being shills for M$. Film at eleven.
(I was considering a Dell laptop as this one gets more tired, but I'm thinking their website might prevent this. Oh dear.)
Being serious for a second, since this is (thus far) a unique find, it's not unreasonable to be extraordinarily cautious (as in "beyond ordinarily cautious") about investigations. Unless someone has a stunningly urgent reason to think that there's something wonderful in there, it's as well to leave it sealed until there's some specific project which would require information from the amphibian. Anything in there (in the way of genetic material, etc) has survived many millions of years already in there ; another few decades is unlikely to hurt. Just keep it in a cool room or even in the fridge. Of course, once there's a second amphibian of comparable age, many of these constraints evaporate. But frankly, having looked at quite a number of amber specimens myself, I doubt that it's an absolute beauty of lump.
I'm picturing the reception you get, showing up at a rally in Haz-Mat gear..
Well, as long as you're not attending a KKK spit-roast, you're likely to have quite an effect. And since most rallys are held in order to have an impact and get public notice, then a lot of the time that is exactly what you want to happen. Turning up late, 5 of you getting out of an anonymous white rental van in teflon teddy suits and breathing apparatus and "sniffing around" with a modified vacuum cleaner in the gutters near any press people... that would have an effect. Oh, sorry, that's pretty standard modus operandii at anti-GM demonstrations these decades. And anti-nuclear protests. And anti-(!white), for the last 140 years. Maybe it's been done before.
It should be noted that Russian companies usually understand these issues better, and make prices on their products sold locally more affordable.
There's a disturbing lack of "smilies", "emoticons" etc in that statement. If you're not careful you'll have the SlashDot In-house Commission on Un-American Activities hoisting you on your own petard and castigating you for even thinking of suggesting that non-Americans could possibly understand the Free Market better than Americans (or even other Westerners, excepting communist Canada). Such thought are heretical for most on SlashDot, where the "invisible hand" of that great American Adam Smith is enough of an icon to get it's own section in the index ("The Almighty Buck", which is going to be hugely embarrassing when it gets changed to "The Almighty Yuan"). [BTW, I have been using irony's big brother 'hyperbole' in this paragraph. Just thought I'd better warn some people.]
For interest, what's the official price of something well-known like WinXP Pro or Office 2003 in Moscow these days. Or Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Belgorod or wherever it is that you're familiar with?
It's annoying that this client's computer doesn't have Cyrillic input set up, otherwise I'd be able to amuse you with my atrocious Russian. Do cvedahnya.
Just to add to all the above posts refuting the claim that pirated CDs are "infected" - I live in Russia, and I've bought plenty of those here - and not a single time there was a virus, trojan, or anything of a kind on such a CD.
Actually, the editors trimmed off the second half of my submission, about how I'd brought some very capable software in Russia, and to my surprise it worked, was virus-free, and the online registration worked too. All for a $10/ 300Rb on-the-street price. (Abbyy Lingvo, a multi-linugual dictionary/ thesaurus/ pronunciation guide, if you and have a need for it. Worth recommending.) Why they chose to trim that half of the submission, I don't know (and don't particularly care), but the fact that the street price is so low must be quite scarey for Western software companies trying to increase their sales in non-Western countries. For comparison, the online price for Lingvo from the UK is "99 Euro/79,99 GBP", or about 150 USD. And obviously it's good for the "grey market". Need I add "DVD region coding" as another example of how scared content-control businesses are of non-domestic markets?
I don't have time to go through the commentary further, but I see that other commentators have been misunderstanding my point that 'the street price is (say) $2, but the download price $7-10.' That download price is calculated from the $0.10 price cited per megabyte, and is based on a vague memory of ~80MB for OpenOffice.Org. It seems that there are a lot of people on Slashdot whose appreciation of modern connectivity could seriously benefit from spending a month using dial-up on a phone service which charges £0.04 ($0.08) per minute regardless of whether you're downloading, uploading, or thinking. Actually, I could see the courts using that as a punishment for cyber-first-offenders - you can choose between having enough money to eat, or to update your MyArmpit profile. Much more painful than simply siezing a convict's computer. But limp countries with injunctions against "cruel and unusual punishment" would probably object. Surely the point of punishment is to be cruel, and since every person is unique, then surely every appropriate punishment would be unusual. Raises the fun question of whether you want an "appropriate" punishment or an inappropriate punishment? I saw a cartoon recently... Mark Stanley's 'FreeFall' IIRC, that pointed out that "All humans are unique, like snowflakes with a 250 centrigrade combustion temperature."
Slashdot Mirror
... of course there is ALWAYS going to be a place for locally-run applications.
... this is the difficult bit ... they don't have any wireless hardware. Difficult, isn't it? As a free extra, we'll aslo get to escape the risk of the wireless triggering the explosives we sometimes use. Which is great, because currently when we use explosives, we have to lock the wireless-capable (not necessarly -enabled, just -capable) equipment into an office in a steel box. Not my paranoia, but the documented procedures of the companies that handle the explosives.
Like, if I'm out in the field collecting data for a week, carrying my equipment on my back, I'm going to be mighty miffed at having to miss carrying 5kg of rock samples back to the office because I'm going to have to carry 5kg of batteries to re-charge the Iridium box to get access to a 9600bps link to the Internet in order to fill out the expenses spreadsheet for the batteries for the Iridium and the phone bills incurred.
And we haven't even begun to get into "security". I'm trying to get a number of my colleagues (for my employers AND for competitor companies) to persuade laptop manufacturers to make laptops that have ZERO risk of wireless hacking and data theft because
Newest, brightest, shiniest, koolest technology does not necessarily equal "best", or even "appropriate". It all depends on the job to be done and the circumstances under which it needs to be done.
Run that past me again, please.
Does that mean what I think it does - the support services for HD-DVD and Blue Ray consist of :
In short, Cleetus and Do'reen (the teuchters of the Simpsons) are going to have to have significant networking skill to get the box connected and working.
I can see a lot of boxes getting returned to the retailer, with demand for a refund, once the Cleetus-es of the world get to trying to hook this up.
It took the wife long enough to persuade me to get a TV ; I really can't see these new formats flying until they've disposed of this sort of barrier to uptake.
You allow your children to play with their fingers as if they were guns? What kind of a sick, violence- and gun- obsessed culture do you come from? It's weird enough to think of police routinely carrying guns in itself, and we know that they're trained psychopaths. But to allow children (or even adults) to think that that's "right" or even "normal"
Oh, hang on, it's America, where the Army effectively censors the entertainment industry from showing people the real effects of violence, and where the entertainment industry collaborates with the censorship by making a "realistic" shooting mean "like you see in the movies" instead of making the movies realistic. How does that anthem go? "California über alles"
... then presumably my mobile phone jammer would also be allowed (one of the relatively sophisticated, low-power ones, not a tower-fryer). That way, the poor over-worked flight attendants wouldn't have to deal with anyone near me arguing to their neighbours to shut the fuck up and let them listen to the movie. Maybe more people complaining about not getting reception, but that's not their god-given right anyway. (And until it's part of the ticket price, I doubt the flight people are going to care.)
... if SCOTUS were to prevent companies from setting particular prices in the US. People within the US would just buy from outside the US at the best price they could get.
[slap]
Hello SCOTUS, are you awake?
Which part of "GLOBAL marketplace" are you having difficulty understanding?
[slap]
Awake yet?
Because to do so would make your penis shrink.
Didn't you go to school on the day when they beat the message into your classmate's heads that penis size is directly proportional to car size. It's one of the basic lessons of sexual ettiquette in the west.
As Cynthia Payne ('Madam Cyn', brothel-keeper and judge-whipper extraordinaire) so eloquently put it "B. C. S. D." And she'd know.
Any literary fonts of knowledge out there who can tell me where I remember a quote from about Italians driving as if the car is a penis extension, French driving like it's a penis substitute and somethings similarly uncomplimentary about British, American and German driving.
Probably just as well - all the dust from the punched holes in the paper plays havoc with my sinuses.
No, it's not allowed, it's obligatory.
Ten years ago the Internet was getting on for 20 years old ; I (not in any respect an IT person, except for using computers all day every day to do my non-computing job) had been on the net for about 5 years and was considering the costs of getting a broadband connection (128kbps, would have cost around 3 days pay/month ; I didn't get broadband until 3 years ago) ; I had recently got my first mobile phone, and I'd taken to asking people I interacted with for an email-address and a mobile number in that order ; most people I knew had an email address (hell, even my father had one, though Mum still hasn't) ; infrastructure was growing rapidly, and lots of issues didn't have clear-cut solutions.
At around that time I was also seeing people writing exactly this sort of message, though I think it was a while before I discovered Slashdot so it must have been in some earlier forum.
The Internet hasn't changed much in that time, nor has IT. It was mostly fire-fighting then ; dealing with lusers who alternate between wrecking their machines, wrecking their work systems and trying to get porn at work by end-running the IT department. All that has changed is that the machines are faster and the files are bigger.
One thing has gone downhill, I suppose : the Bastard Operator From Hell hasn't been allowed to use his lime pits for years. Booo.
A little research (i.e. Google, the two lecturer's names, and two of the likely compounds they're working on) revealed an abstract from the paper which, I suspect, is at the root of the press release being reported on.
[SIGH] So many Slashdotters berate journalists (often with justification), then decline to go and do the basic ground work which science-educated Slashdotters should be capable of, while English/ Arts-educated journalists and PR flacks can't or don't do. [SIGH]
The researchers were : Craig Jensen (University of Hawaii), Sean McGrady, Reyna Ayabe (University of Hawaii), Ben Reddy (University of New Brunswick)
The locale was : 2007 APS March Meeting , March 5-9, 2007; Denver, Colorado, Session L39: "Focus Session: Hydrogen Storage II"
So, it's not a formally-published paper as yet, but it is research that is being "reviewed by their peers". Face-to-face. Which isn't exactly easy.
The abstract of the paper presented is at http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR07/Event/59811 :
"Alane, AlH$_{3}$ has many of the properties that are requisite for materials to be considered viable for onboard hydrogen storage applications. Most notibly, it contains 10.1 wt{\%} hydrogen and undergoes dehydrogenation at appreciable rates at temperatures below 100$^{\circ}$C. However, the very low, $\ge $ 6 kJ/mol, enthalpy of dehydrogenation of AlH$_{3}$ prohibits subsequent re-hydrogenation through standard gas-solid techniques except at very high pressures or very low temperatures. The extremely low solubility of gaseous H$_{2}$ in conventional organic solvents also vitiates a solution-based approach. Re-hydrogenation of Al using a supercritical fluid potentially offers a workable approach since the fluid can act as a solvent, at the same time remaining completely miscible with permanent gases like hydrogen. Recently, it has been found that mixtures of NaH and Al can be hydrogenated to sodium alanate, NaAlH$_{4}$ under modest pressures and temperatures in supercritical fluids. We have now extended these studies to the hydrogenation of Al to AlH$_{3}$. The results of these studies and experimental details will be reported."
Shortened version : getting the hydrogen back into aluminium-based materials is hard work, but it can be made easier by dissolving the hydrogen (and possibly the aluminous base) in a "supercritical fluid".
They carefully don't specify the chemistry of the supercritical fluid, probably for patenting reasons. My guesses : CO2? DHMO? both might have issues with strongly reducing aluminous compounds. How about short-chain hydrocarbons or short-organic amides? A bit rough for the general public to handle, but we're talking about the re-charging of the storage material here, not pouring the stuff into your fuel tank, so I wouldn't see that as a show-stopper per se). The general public would probably not be present at this side of the fuel-system cycle.
Interesting work. I can almost hear Grignard stop turning in his grave and pricking his dead ears up.
How about a CAI ?
For the astronomically iggorant (not the parent's poster), "CAI"s are Calcium-Aluminium-Inclusions, spheroidal particles found in some types of meteorites and which give some of the oldest radiometric ages in the solar system. They show physical and chemical evidence of having been fused in the early solar nebula, and of having frozen under the influence of their own surface tension. Later they aggregated with other materials to form planetesimals ("asteroids" in recent gigayears) but retained their distinctive textures and chemistry. So they are naturally formed, sub-spherical objects which formed in an orbit around a star (most likely the Sun) and thus planets by the poster's definition. On a centimetre scale.
I always liked the "it forms a ball" line of definitions myself, which would have kept Pluto as a planet. And Ceres, Vesta, maybe a handful of other "asteroids", possibly Quaour (spelling?). Chiron? I don't have any problem with a 30-planet solar system. If Tom Lherer can set 92+ elements into a musical mnemonic, then 30 planets aren't a (serious) problem. But the way that I got around by fyngyrz's problem was to include the phrase "forming a spheroid by self-gravitation" in the definition, since we can "easily" observe the transition in the larger "asteroids".
Of course, one still needs to pull a number out of a hat for how close an approximation to a sphere you want to accept. Ohhh, another controversy.
OK, we're back.
Have you seen any of the press diatribes about invading hoardes of Roma and billions of Bulgars waiting to enter the country when our political alliances extend that far? Everything from the state of the roads to the obesity of children is already being blamed on the Slavs (evidently the Jews have got their PR experts lined up much better than the Slavs. Evidence : Borat.)
"Racial purity" ? The joke about thugs demanding to know if you're a Catholic Atheist or a Protestant Atheist is no joke (which is why it works as a joke); the same Thought Police attitudes extend to which football team you support (not supporting football is not an option).
That was an aircraft being flown under "fly-by-wire", not under remote control. There was a full flight crew on that plane, with fly jockeys pulling on the levers and pressing the pedals while the shit squirted out of their pants. I'm not sure how many of them died and how many survived.
The problem on that flight was that the software designers on the job never envisaged the plane being flown the way that it was being flown, and so got into a "you can't get there from here" situation in the flight control programs. To get from where the plane was to where the plane needed to be in order to get out of the horizontal stall, it needed to get X airspeed, which the flight control program did by trading a couple of hundred feet of altitude for airspeed. Once the plane had got that extra airspeed, then the flight control program would have happily revved up the engines to provide the power to come out of the stall.
It's a failure of communication between the how-to-fly manual and the how-to-impress-crowds-at-air-shows manual, when the plane was designed to fly to one manual, but was being flown to the other manual.
For certain the RF does have copyright laws.
Equally, for certain, they're not the same laws as implemented in the US (or the UK, or in Outer Mongolia for what little it matters). Whether or not they're compatible with the Berne Convention, I don't know - I have a suspicion that in the early 90s they were not fully Berne-compatible, but that has been fixed over to the satisfaction of the WIPO the last few years.
Whether AllOfMP3 implement the laws properly is an even more separate question. Considering that the famous phrase "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," was uttered by a lawyer with a straight face, then I suspect that the word 'properly' there would allow enough "wriggle room" to drive a coach and horses through the statement. Plus a couple of Airbuses and a whole fleet of space shuttles.
Why would an atheist be pissed off?
Just because something evolved, doesn't mean to say that it's "right" in any sense other than it's an expedient locally-optimised solution to an environmental pressure. So to an atheist (such as myself) scientist (attested by the BSc I worked at university for, and the 20 years of practical research work that I've done), there's nothing upsetting or surprising about a sows ear like "religion" coming out of the silk purse of natural selection. It's just an odd side effect of social coherence and anthropomorphism.
Of course a religious person who takes offence on behalf of the Great-Problem-Solver-Wearing-A-Negligee-In-The-Sk
Now, if you did want to try to piss me off, perhaps you could try explaining to me why, in this modern world, intelligent humans should still allow themselves to be driven by natural selection forces instead of choosing their own direction to evolve in. But even that wouldn't piss me off much, because most humans are too ignorant (NB : ignorant =/= stupid) to see the opportunity, and the choices involved are daunting.
How did Rush put it ? - "even if you don't decide, you still have made a choice".
And on the other hand, I've had to be involved with investigations of people who have been claiming false credentials - certificates in instrumentation installation, hazardous atmosphere power wiring, high-pressure pipe-fitting, system safety inspection and self-certification, little things like that. Quite egregious lies about courses they claimed to have passed which the colleges (claimed) had never run ; courses from colleges that didn't have a department in the area claimed ; courses from colleges that don't exist and never have existed (according to college admissions officers in the city claimed). Really blatent lies. And they got away with it for over a decade, moving from company to company as a team with a mutual non-investigation pact.
To the best of my knowledge, there's still an oil platform in the Central North Sea whose entire drilling and production instrumentation is maintained by a bunch of people who lie about whether they've been trained to build/ install/ maintain/ inspect this equipment. That may not make much concern to you, but to me it's certainly disturbs my sleep when I'm at work on platforms in the area. Every time I'm hauled from my bunk by blaring klaxons to go and huddle by a lifeboat in an immersion suit the howling rain, I wonder to myself "is this because those fuckers are in charge on this rig?"
Sometimes I wish that I'd kept better notes of the names of the accused, and which companies they'd worked for. But I didn't because I wasn't working on platforms at that time. I'll know better in the future.
These days, when I'm involved in choosing which people to hire, I ALWAYS check out their claimed qualifications. Including talking to other people claiming similar qualifications from the same institution and time period to see if they're remembered. Fortunately we don't seem to attract the same sort of stupid liars in the sciences as instrumentation engineering companies do attract. Probably because the pay isn't as good, and the likelihood of being caught is much higher.
Lieing about being a theology professor ? The stupidest thing about it is chosing something so pathetic to claim. I mean - a theology professor? Is he fit to wash the decks with a sea-water hose? I wouldn't even be sure of that.
If you've inherited such a property, or have only recently started to think about defensive housing (in the same sense as "defensive driving"), then you need to keep your mouth very firmly shut until you've got the buyer's money cleared into your account.
Isn't there an option to be utterly disinterested due to the unlikihood of seeing it for years to come?
Uh, no. Last time I was there and putting together a PC for my fiancee, it was XP on a AMD PC with something like a 2GHz chip in it. Cost about $500.
What is it with Americans thinking that other countries can't advance at the same rate as they do? Or even, Ghod forsake, advance faster because other countries don't need to make the mistakes that America has made. (Actually, the "Ghod forsake" bit is probably part of America' problem - too many people waiting for the man in the nightie in the sky to come and solve their problems for them.) In western Siberia where my wife came from, they've gone (in the towns) from under 10% penetration of dial-up to about 10% penetration of broadband in the time that it takes the UK government to decide whether or not to issue a residence permit.
Thanks for the info, but wireless is definitely not on the agenda (who needs the security worries? Which reminds me to get hold of a wireless detector/ jammer before the daughter opens up her laptop to the outside world). Of course, I could try the impossible and specify absence of wireless hardware.
Do Dell use the same configuration site for America as for Europe? I wouldn't think so from the website address, the Irish accents I've encountered on their support lines in the past, the speed of shipping, etc.
So, your example of a (server-relevant type of hardware which has *only* examples that require MS drivers AND have EULAs that forbid writing your own driver by investigating the hardware) is?
Just picking a server at random (pedge_sc1435) I get options on the processor (I believe all work with Linux or M$) ; a second processor (it's a dual-socket server, mid-range) ; awww, futz, they've crashed
They've crashed again (or are they being Slashdotted - neat trick while I'm still writing the comment!) or are just unusably slow, but the other options I can see listed are for RAID controllers, "RAID connectivity" (WTF that? iSCSI or FibreChannel or something like that?), first and second hard drives. All component classes which have FLOSS drivers for hardware implementations available.
Face it, Dell are just being shills for M$. Film at eleven.
(I was considering a Dell laptop as this one gets more tired, but I'm thinking their website might prevent this. Oh dear.)
Being serious for a second, since this is (thus far) a unique find, it's not unreasonable to be extraordinarily cautious (as in "beyond ordinarily cautious") about investigations. Unless someone has a stunningly urgent reason to think that there's something wonderful in there, it's as well to leave it sealed until there's some specific project which would require information from the amphibian. Anything in there (in the way of genetic material, etc) has survived many millions of years already in there ; another few decades is unlikely to hurt. Just keep it in a cool room or even in the fridge.
Of course, once there's a second amphibian of comparable age, many of these constraints evaporate. But frankly, having looked at quite a number of amber specimens myself, I doubt that it's an absolute beauty of lump.
Well, as long as you're not attending a KKK spit-roast, you're likely to have quite an effect. And since most rallys are held in order to have an impact and get public notice, then a lot of the time that is exactly what you want to happen. Turning up late, 5 of you getting out of an anonymous white rental van in teflon teddy suits and breathing apparatus and "sniffing around" with a modified vacuum cleaner in the gutters near any press people
Oh, sorry, that's pretty standard modus operandii at anti-GM demonstrations these decades. And anti-nuclear protests. And anti-(!white), for the last 140 years. Maybe it's been done before.
There's a disturbing lack of "smilies", "emoticons" etc in that statement. If you're not careful you'll have the SlashDot In-house Commission on Un-American Activities hoisting you on your own petard and castigating you for even thinking of suggesting that non-Americans could possibly understand the Free Market better than Americans (or even other Westerners, excepting communist Canada). Such thought are heretical for most on SlashDot, where the "invisible hand" of that great American Adam Smith is enough of an icon to get it's own section in the index ("The Almighty Buck", which is going to be hugely embarrassing when it gets changed to "The Almighty Yuan"). [BTW, I have been using irony's big brother 'hyperbole' in this paragraph. Just thought I'd better warn some people.]
For interest, what's the official price of something well-known like WinXP Pro or Office 2003 in Moscow these days. Or Ekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Belgorod or wherever it is that you're familiar with?
It's annoying that this client's computer doesn't have Cyrillic input set up, otherwise I'd be able to amuse you with my atrocious Russian.
Do cvedahnya.
Actually, the editors trimmed off the second half of my submission, about how I'd brought some very capable software in Russia, and to my surprise it worked, was virus-free, and the online registration worked too. All for a $10/ 300Rb on-the-street price. (Abbyy Lingvo, a multi-linugual dictionary/ thesaurus/ pronunciation guide, if you and have a need for it. Worth recommending.) Why they chose to trim that half of the submission, I don't know (and don't particularly care), but the fact that the street price is so low must be quite scarey for Western software companies trying to increase their sales in non-Western countries. For comparison, the online price for Lingvo from the UK is "99 Euro/79,99 GBP", or about 150 USD. And obviously it's good for the "grey market". Need I add "DVD region coding" as another example of how scared content-control businesses are of non-domestic markets?
I don't have time to go through the commentary further, but I see that other commentators have been misunderstanding my point that 'the street price is (say) $2, but the download price $7-10.' That download price is calculated from the $0.10 price cited per megabyte, and is based on a vague memory of ~80MB for OpenOffice.Org. It seems that there are a lot of people on Slashdot whose appreciation of modern connectivity could seriously benefit from spending a month using dial-up on a phone service which charges £0.04 ($0.08) per minute regardless of whether you're downloading, uploading, or thinking.
Actually, I could see the courts using that as a punishment for cyber-first-offenders - you can choose between having enough money to eat, or to update your MyArmpit profile. Much more painful than simply siezing a convict's computer. But limp countries with injunctions against "cruel and unusual punishment" would probably object. Surely the point of punishment is to be cruel, and since every person is unique, then surely every appropriate punishment would be unusual. Raises the fun question of whether you want an "appropriate" punishment or an inappropriate punishment?
I saw a cartoon recently