I found this online:
"This came up in "Andrew's seed" last week. From that article:
The August 26 deadline is for independent and third party candidates. -- Texas Election Code - Section 192.031
Since the D's and the R's nominate by convention, and those parties have each had "a nominee for a statewide office who received a number of votes equal to at least five percent of the total number of votes received by all candidates for that office," Texas Election Code Section 181.005 applies.
Section 181.005 states:
A political party is entitled to have the names of its nominees placed on the ballot, without qualifying under Subsection (a), in each subsequent general election following a general election in which the party had a nominee for a statewide office who received a number of votes equal to at least five percent of the total number of votes received by all candidates for that office.
Both the Republicans and Democrats had candidates for statewide office in 2006 who garnered more than 5% of the vote for that office (several, actually). Therefore, both parties automatically qualify and don't have to separately qualify by submitting names arrived at by convention by any particular date. "
(end quote)
This means that Barr doesn't have a leg to stand on. The whole premise of his objection is false.
If the election goes to the House, the House may well give the presidency to McCain. Voting in the House is by state, with each state's delegation getting 1 vote. Small states love McCain.
However, if Obama fails to get the 270 and Texas votes for Barr because of this screw-up, the Presidency should go to McCain anyway--because Texas would certainly have given McCain the victory if McCain had been on Texas' ballot.
Oddly enough, I think the more enlightened faiths, such as Catholicism, *do* teach evolution and treat it as likely fact, in their parochial schools.
Apparently they don't want to create a conflict between science and religion.
Religion has always been the loser when it comes to testable predictions in the past. The smarter faiths limit themselves to teaching things that can't be proven false.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that "electricity is not involved" in an Alfven wave. You can't have an Alfven wave without a plasma, and a plasma contains charged particles, which, when involved in a wave, move and generate electric current.
FYI, the "corona" is a very hot plasma which surrounds the sun.... And which can support electric currents, and Alfven waves.
As for your claim that people are saying that Maxwell's Equations are meaningless in space, I don't know how you infer that anyone is claiming that at all, from reading the article.
Pain and discomfort for a helicopter pilot who is currently flying is a very big deal. What if he was unable to safely land the chopper? Then you would have had possible fatalities. This didn't happen this time, but negligently inflicting this type of risk on the pilot and on the general public seems like a serious crime to me.
But long ago as the series dragged on and on, I decided to boycott the whole series until it was finished. If the new author continues the serie in the same spirit as Jordan was, then it'll be another 5 books at least, and another 15 years it's done and I start reading it again.
Do you realize that the reactor core at Chernobyl was moderated with GRAPHITE? Graphite burns in air. THAT is why the radiation release was so catastropic there. US reactors are all water-moderated, not graphite-moderate, so they are inherently safer and the potential for a radiation release on that scale is much less. FURTHERMORE, Cernobyl didn't have a giant concrete western-style containment vessel over the entire place. And do you realize that US's WORST commercial nuclear accident is estimated to have killed *one* person?
The nuclear waste sites you mention are all, or almost all due to nuclear weapon manufacture, NOT commercial nuclear power.
Nuclear waste IS an issue, but it is much LESS of an issue than the *billions of tons* of toxic ash, and carbon dioxide produced by coal power, which you advocate using (not to mention lesser amounts of other nasty pollutants such as mercury, sulfur and the like--ever heard of acid rain? Toxic mercury fish? Where do you think acid rain comes from?). Further, that coal is often mined using extremely environmentally destructive strip mining.
I would like to comment that France has more nuclear power than the USA, but LESS of a problem with nuclear waste. Why is that? It is because we here in the USA are *complete idiots* about safe disposal of waste. It can be done, we're just too stupid to do it! And most of the problem is due to the ignorance and attitude of people like you!
Coal mining, burning, and transport has probably led to the deaths of millions of people. Nuclear power has NOT come CLOSE to such a death toll EVEN INCLUDING NUCLEAR WEAPON USE ON JAPAN.
And you know what? The deaths due to burning coal and other fossil fuels are going to exponentiate once much of the planet becomes refugees due to sea levels rising due to global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions!
I grant you, we SHOULD be using windmills, bicycles, sweaters, walking, transit, hydropower, and solar cells, but advocating the use of *any* carbon-emitting energy source over nuclear power is---your word-- INSANE.
Here's some more supplementary material:
Case Study: The Side Effects of a Coal Plant
A 500 megawatt coal plant produces 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours per year, enough
to power a city of about 140,000 people. It burns 1,430,000 tons of coal, uses
2.2 billion gallons of water and 146,000 tons of limestone.
It also puts out, each year:
10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide. Sulfur dioxide (SOx) is the main cause of
acid rain, which damages forests, lakes and buildings.
10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide. Nitrogen oxide (NOx) is a major cause of
smog, and also a cause of acid rain.
3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main
greenhouse gas, and is the leading cause of global warming. There are
no regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.
500 tons of small particles. Small particulates are a health hazard,
causing lung damage. Particulates smaller than 10 microns are not
regulated, but may be soon.
220 tons of hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels are made of hydrocarbons; when
they don't burn completely, they are released into the air. They are a
cause of smog.
720 tons of carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide (CO) is a poisonous gas
and contributor to global warming.
125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the smokestack
And the sun may not rise tomorrow either! There's some *remote* possibility that the Earth may stop turning suddenly or the sun may go out because of some "law of nature" which is not obeyed "in every single instance".
I would bet my life on the sun rising tomorrow. Furthermore, consider this: if some earthly living thing in billions of years of evolution had come across "forever inexhaustible non-waste producing energy", we would ALL be running on it--the selective advantage would be enormous. Instead, nearly all life runs on solar energy.
Humanity shouldn't waste its time looking for "magic" sources of energy and instead concentrate on proven reneweables or near-exhaustibles such as fusion. You deride solar and wind power as not providing "enough energy density to manufacture...", which is just outright wrong.
Wind power combined with some sort of energy storage mechanism could be the energy source of the future. *Already* certain wind plants produce energy at a lower cost than coal-fired power plants with negligible environmental impact (compared to a coal plant!).
Humanity would be far better served by investing its resources into wind capacity and into energy storage than wasting efforts looking for power sources which have no support in current, well-tested scientific theory.
I just wish I could moderate your post down a point or two for promoting pseudoscience.
Yes, nuclear waste lasts a long time. However, toxic metals in burnt coal ash last forever, they won't decay at all.
It also takes land thousands of years to recover from strip mining.
The carbon dioxide (millions of tons of it per 500MW power plant) from burning coal is also more or less permanent, and it's a LOT harder to deal with than burying some hundreds of tons of nuclear waste someplace.
It's amazing that you are "satisfied" with the disposition of billions of tons of nasty crud from coal mining, processing, and burning, which is mostly disposed of in the common environment, but can't stand the thought of burying some hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste underground in Nevada.
The world would be *far* better off if *every* coal plant was replaced with nuclear reactors.
More reading: http://langmuir.nuc.berkeley.edu/~peterm /COAL_VS_N UCLEAR.html
Yes, a drop in the bucket, but this amount of money would make a huge difference to other places in the Air Force Research Lab where real weapon development is taking place.
Take for example this low-funded project which involves trying to detect weapons in a crowd of demonstrators using radar: http://www.house.gov/hasc/openingstatement sandpres sreleases/108thcongress/04-04-21wynne.html
We could have been using that money to answer the question: can we detect armed enemies in a crowd of mostly innocent people?
So far as I can tell, the HPC shops are largely shunning the Itanium.
I have access to about 10 supercomputers at various locations: not one of them is based on the Itanium. We have clusters based on Xeons, clusters based on Opterons, machines based on Alpha 21264, IBM computers based on Power4 processors, and Cray X1s, based on their own proprietary chips.
But *not one* machine based on Itaniums. On the Top500 Supercomputing sites list, only 13/500 are using Itaniums. 14/500 are using AMD processors.....
The Itanium may be an HPC processor, but it's one that the HPC community mostly doesn't want.
You're right, the Z-Machine (z-pinch) has open pools filled with oil. Oil is less dense than humans typically are, and so anyone falling in would fall to the bottom quickly.
They'd have to do just exactly what you said to get out.
Guess what, you are not "hardly a target". Script kiddies will hack your machine purely to have another platform to run DDOS attacks from, or to hack into yet other machines.
It doesn't matter who you are or what data you have. If you have an IP address, you are a target, period.
I attended an information session by someone from AMD at UCB. It was my understanding from his presentation that the tricks they were using to get up to 16 registers without compromising the ability to run existing 32-bit code made it impossible to get past 16 registers.
They would've liked to have 32 registers, but it simply couldn't be done in a backward-compatible way.
If you want more information on this, and more than a guess, AMD has much information up on its website.
Re:my question to anyone who can answer it...
on
Examining Influenza
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Well, smallpox was eradicated by immunizing everyone. There have not been any natural cases of smallpox for a long time, and there will be none unless some madman commits a crime against all of humanity by re-releasing that virus.
However, influenza, for example, infects other animals than humans. So does the bubonic plague. Complete eradication of these disease would therefore be very difficult.
Polio can be eradicated, though, and so could some others, because no other hosts than humans exist. We are well on the way to eradicating polio.
Pretty much everyone has a bad reaction to the horse "anti-venin", as the posters above called it, or "anti-venom", which is a sensible thing to call it, even if it's incorrect.
The horse serum makes you sick, it just beats dying from the snake venom, is all.
People have been remarking that there is an upper limit to the speed that CD drives can achieve. Neglecting expense, why not just have multiple lasers for read/write? Then you don't have to spin the actual disk too awfully fast, and risk shattering the media.
I think the Power4 has a real shot at taking over the customers that Alpha used to serve. It has a Real Company behind it, not a succession of laughing-stocks. I think AMD won't be able to match Power4's performance, because of all the x86 baggage.
On the other hand, IBM doesn't seem to want to market Power4 agressively, nor price it competitively in price/perf with x86. I think they could sell a lot of them if they could offer 1.5x perf at less than 2.5x the price.
If they come out with a version of the Power4 which uses significantly less power as well, it'd be very interesting to those who set up clusters of computers, as it'll reduce demand on infrastructure.
I've been sysadmin at various points for a small cluster which has had up to 6 different UNIXes:
Digital UNIX HP-UX Linux SunOS 4.1.x Ultrix Irix
Now, I was able to manage each of these pretty OK, Unixes *are* alike. However, getting patches and whatnot differs over each arch.
So crudely, I would say:
SysadminWork =
A * number of UNIXES
+ sum_i(Bi * number of machines_i)
where A is a very big constant,
i is the index of each UNIX,
Bi is a small constant, the marginal extra effort to maintain one more machine of type i
What I mean is this: for each UNIX, you have to do a fairly large amount of research + effort to learn/aquire materials and knowledge for things like upgrades.
Having done that, it's easy for you to maintain another UNIX box of that type: the cost of each extra machine is low, and you can do things efficiently via scripts.
So the least wasteful way to use your sysadmin is to have one arch/OS.
In my case, my life became progressively easier as I got rid of UNIXes and concentrated on running Linux only.
Looks like transmeta is in trouble. The description of the chip in the article (shuts down unused parts completely) makes it sound like a low-power application chip. That's exactly what Transmeta is trying to market. An intel offering in that arena can only hurt Transmeta...
Slashdot Mirror
I found this online:
"This came up in "Andrew's seed" last week. From that article: The August 26 deadline is for independent and third party candidates. -- Texas Election Code - Section 192.031 Since the D's and the R's nominate by convention, and those parties have each had "a nominee for a statewide office who received a number of votes equal to at least five percent of the total number of votes received by all candidates for that office," Texas Election Code Section 181.005 applies. Section 181.005 states: A political party is entitled to have the names of its nominees placed on the ballot, without qualifying under Subsection (a), in each subsequent general election following a general election in which the party had a nominee for a statewide office who received a number of votes equal to at least five percent of the total number of votes received by all candidates for that office. Both the Republicans and Democrats had candidates for statewide office in 2006 who garnered more than 5% of the vote for that office (several, actually). Therefore, both parties automatically qualify and don't have to separately qualify by submitting names arrived at by convention by any particular date. " (end quote)
This means that Barr doesn't have a leg to stand on. The whole premise of his objection is false.
If the election goes to the House, the House may well give the presidency to McCain. Voting in the House is by state, with each state's delegation getting 1 vote. Small states love McCain.
However, if Obama fails to get the 270 and Texas votes for Barr because of this screw-up, the Presidency should go to McCain anyway--because Texas would certainly have given McCain the victory if McCain had been on Texas' ballot.
Oddly enough, I think the more enlightened faiths, such as Catholicism, *do* teach evolution and treat it as likely fact, in their parochial schools.
Apparently they don't want to create a conflict between science and religion.
Religion has always been the loser when it comes to testable predictions in the past.
The smarter faiths limit themselves to teaching things that can't be proven false.
Did you mean "dual 1.1 GWe" instead of "MWe"? and 1.0GWe ?
I'm not sure where you get the idea that "electricity is not involved" in an Alfven wave. You can't have an Alfven wave without a plasma, and a plasma contains charged particles, which, when involved in a wave, move and generate electric current.
FYI, the "corona" is a very hot plasma which surrounds the sun.... And which can support electric currents, and Alfven waves.
As for your claim that people are saying that Maxwell's Equations are meaningless in space, I don't know how you infer that anyone is claiming that at all, from reading the article.
Pain and discomfort for a helicopter pilot who is currently flying is a very big deal. What if he was unable to safely land the chopper? Then you would have had possible fatalities. This didn't happen this time, but negligently inflicting this type of risk on the pilot and on the general public seems like a serious crime to me.
But long ago as the series dragged on and on, I decided to boycott the whole series until it was finished.
If the new author continues the serie in the same spirit as Jordan was, then it'll be another 5 books at least,
and another 15 years it's done and I start reading it again.
--PM
Do you realize that the reactor core at Chernobyl was moderated with GRAPHITE? Graphite burns in air. THAT is why the radiation release was so catastropic there. US reactors are all water-moderated, not graphite-moderate, so they are inherently safer and the potential for a radiation release on that scale is much less. FURTHERMORE, Cernobyl didn't have a giant concrete western-style containment vessel over the entire place. And do you realize that US's WORST commercial nuclear accident is estimated to have killed *one* person?
The nuclear waste sites you mention are all, or almost all due to nuclear weapon manufacture, NOT commercial nuclear power.
Nuclear waste IS an issue, but it is much LESS of an issue than the *billions of tons* of toxic ash, and carbon dioxide produced by coal power, which you advocate using (not to mention lesser amounts of other nasty pollutants such as mercury, sulfur and the like--ever heard of acid rain? Toxic mercury fish? Where do you think acid rain comes from?). Further, that coal is often mined using extremely environmentally destructive strip mining.
I would like to comment that France has more nuclear power than the USA, but LESS of a problem with nuclear waste. Why is that? It is because we here in the USA are *complete idiots* about safe disposal of waste. It can be done, we're just too stupid to do it! And most of the problem is due to the ignorance and attitude of people like you!
Coal mining, burning, and transport has probably led to the deaths of millions of people. Nuclear power has NOT come CLOSE to such a death toll EVEN INCLUDING NUCLEAR WEAPON USE ON JAPAN.
And you know what? The deaths due to burning coal and other fossil fuels are going to exponentiate once much of the planet becomes refugees due to sea levels rising due to global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions!
I grant you, we SHOULD be using windmills, bicycles, sweaters, walking, transit, hydropower, and solar cells, but advocating the use of *any* carbon-emitting energy source over nuclear power is---your word-- INSANE.
Here's some more supplementary material:
Case Study: The Side Effects of a Coal Plant
A 500 megawatt coal plant produces 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours per year, enough
to power a city of about 140,000 people. It burns 1,430,000 tons of coal, uses
2.2 billion gallons of water and 146,000 tons of limestone.
It also puts out, each year:
10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide. Sulfur dioxide (SOx) is the main cause of
acid rain, which damages forests, lakes and buildings.
10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide. Nitrogen oxide (NOx) is a major cause of
smog, and also a cause of acid rain.
3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main
greenhouse gas, and is the leading cause of global warming. There are
no regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.
500 tons of small particles. Small particulates are a health hazard,
causing lung damage. Particulates smaller than 10 microns are not
regulated, but may be soon.
220 tons of hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels are made of hydrocarbons; when
they don't burn completely, they are released into the air. They are a
cause of smog.
720 tons of carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide (CO) is a poisonous gas
and contributor to global warming.
125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the smokestack
And the sun may not rise tomorrow either! There's some *remote* possibility that the Earth may stop turning suddenly or the sun may go out because of some "law of nature" which is not obeyed "in every single instance".
I would bet my life on the sun rising tomorrow. Furthermore, consider this: if some earthly living thing in billions of years of evolution had come across "forever inexhaustible non-waste producing energy", we would ALL be running on it--the selective advantage would be enormous. Instead, nearly all life runs on solar energy.
Humanity shouldn't waste its time looking for "magic" sources of energy and instead concentrate on proven reneweables or near-exhaustibles such as fusion. You deride solar and wind power as not providing "enough energy density to manufacture...", which is just outright wrong.
Wind power combined with some sort of energy storage mechanism could be the energy source of the future. *Already* certain wind plants produce energy at a lower cost than coal-fired power plants with negligible environmental impact (compared to a coal plant!).
Humanity would be far better served by investing its resources into wind capacity and into energy storage than wasting efforts looking for power sources which have no support in current, well-tested scientific theory.
I just wish I could moderate your post down a point or two for promoting pseudoscience.
--PeterM
So wait a sec-- you're saying that the original losses to the US Gov't of $5,000 was eventually reported in a slashdot headline as a billion dollars?
It's like an out-of-control game of telephone.
Yes, nuclear waste lasts a long time. However, toxic metals in burnt coal ash last forever, they won't decay at all.
m /COAL_VS_N UCLEAR.html
It also takes land thousands of years to recover from strip mining.
The carbon dioxide (millions of tons of it per 500MW power plant) from burning coal is also more or less permanent, and it's a LOT harder to deal with than burying some hundreds of tons of nuclear waste someplace.
It's amazing that you are "satisfied" with the disposition of billions of tons of nasty crud from coal mining, processing, and burning, which is mostly disposed of in the common environment, but can't stand the thought of burying some hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste underground in Nevada.
The world would be *far* better off if *every* coal plant was replaced with nuclear reactors.
More reading:
http://langmuir.nuc.berkeley.edu/~peter
Yes, a drop in the bucket, but this amount of money would make a huge difference to other places in the Air Force Research Lab where real weapon development is taking place.
t sandpres sreleases/108thcongress/04-04-21wynne.html
Take for example this low-funded project which involves trying to detect weapons in a crowd of demonstrators using radar:
http://www.house.gov/hasc/openingstatemen
We could have been using that money to answer the question: can we detect armed enemies in a crowd of mostly innocent people?
So far as I can tell, the HPC shops are largely shunning the Itanium.
I have access to about 10 supercomputers at various locations: not one of them is based on the Itanium. We have clusters based on Xeons, clusters based on Opterons, machines based on Alpha 21264, IBM computers based on Power4 processors, and Cray X1s, based on their own proprietary chips.
But *not one* machine based on Itaniums.
On the Top500 Supercomputing sites list, only 13/500 are using Itaniums. 14/500 are using AMD processors.....
The Itanium may be an HPC processor, but it's one that the HPC community mostly doesn't want.
--PM
You're right, the Z-Machine (z-pinch) has open pools filled with oil. Oil is less dense than humans typically are, and so anyone falling in would fall to the bottom quickly.
They'd have to do just exactly what you said to get out.
--PM
Obviously, you should believe in whatever faith predicts the nastiest, most horrible afterlife for the infidel.
That's the way to maximize your return under Pascal's hypothesis.
BTW, if you don't believe in my religion, in the afterlife you will be tormented horribly for eternity by Bill and George. You know who I mean.
Membership in my church protects you from that afterlife, and only $5 is required. Believe,
and donte now!
But then they'll get skin cancer.
You just can't win.
Guess what, you are not "hardly a target". Script kiddies will hack your machine purely to have another platform to run DDOS attacks from, or to hack into yet other machines.
It doesn't matter who you are or what data you have. If you have an IP address, you are a target, period.
I attended an information session by someone from AMD at UCB. It was my understanding from his presentation that the tricks they were using to get up to 16 registers without compromising the ability to run existing 32-bit code made it impossible to get past 16 registers.
They would've liked to have 32 registers, but it simply couldn't be done in a backward-compatible way.
If you want more information on this, and more than a guess, AMD has much information up on its website.
Well, smallpox was eradicated by immunizing everyone. There have not been any natural cases of smallpox for a long time, and there will be none unless some madman commits a crime against all of humanity by re-releasing that virus.
However, influenza, for example, infects other animals than humans. So does the bubonic plague. Complete eradication of these disease would therefore be very difficult.
Polio can be eradicated, though, and so could some others, because no other hosts than humans exist. We are well on the way to eradicating polio.
Pretty much everyone has a bad reaction to the horse "anti-venin", as the posters above called it, or "anti-venom", which is a sensible thing to call it, even if it's incorrect.
The horse serum makes you sick, it just beats dying from the snake venom, is all.
PM
People have been remarking that there is an upper limit to the speed that CD drives can achieve. Neglecting expense, why not just have multiple lasers for read/write? Then you don't have to spin the actual disk too awfully fast, and risk shattering the media.
I think the Power4 has a real shot at taking over the customers that Alpha used to serve. It has a Real Company behind it, not a succession of laughing-stocks. I think AMD won't be able to match Power4's performance, because of all the x86 baggage.
On the other hand, IBM doesn't seem to want to market Power4 agressively, nor price it competitively in price/perf with x86. I think they could sell a lot of them if they could offer 1.5x perf at less than 2.5x the price.
If they come out with a version of the Power4 which uses significantly less power as well, it'd be very interesting to those who set up clusters of computers, as it'll reduce demand on infrastructure.
PeterM
Hello,
I've been sysadmin at various points for
a small cluster which has had up to 6
different UNIXes:
Digital UNIX
HP-UX
Linux
SunOS 4.1.x
Ultrix
Irix
Now, I was able to manage each of these pretty
OK, Unixes *are* alike. However, getting patches
and whatnot differs over each arch.
So crudely, I would say:
SysadminWork =
A * number of UNIXES
+ sum_i(Bi * number of machines_i)
where A is a very big constant,
i is the index of each UNIX,
Bi is a small constant, the marginal extra
effort to maintain one more machine of type i
What I mean is this:
for each UNIX, you have to do a fairly large
amount of research + effort to learn/aquire
materials and knowledge for things like upgrades.
Having done that, it's easy for you to maintain
another UNIX box of that type: the cost of each
extra machine is low, and you can do things
efficiently via scripts.
So the least wasteful way to use your sysadmin
is to have one arch/OS.
In my case, my life became progressively easier
as I got rid of UNIXes and concentrated on running
Linux only.
Looks like transmeta is in trouble. The description of the chip in the article (shuts down unused parts completely) makes it sound like a low-power application chip. That's exactly what Transmeta is trying to market. An intel offering in that arena can only hurt Transmeta...
PeterM
I was under the impression that electric motors
were already quite efficient.
I looked at some numbers, and even without these
new magnets, electric motors are often 90%
efficient or better.
I tend to think that the primary gain of a better
magnet is, if anything, the ability to make
the motors smaller.
I think the main waste of power in an electric
motor has nothing to do with the strength
of the magnet, but rather resistive losses
in the coils.