I'm not surprised that a tech-savvy audience like slashdotters would support nuclear power. I haven't studied the issues of safety and environmental impact, and therefore really shouldn't make claims or arguments based on hearsay. However, as a geek, I consider how much science (nuclear, materials, environmental), and technology have advanced since the last US nuclear plant was built, and I have to think that much of the fear of nuclear power is based on 1960's/1970's (Three Mile Island) and/or Soviet (as in 'back in the days of the Soviet Union', and fears about Chernobyl) technology.
Computer control and monitoring has got to be vastly improved since then. I'd also imagine we have learned much about containment and recovery from the aforementioned accidents that would help prevent anything similar in the future. Again, I haven't got enough personal basis to make any claims, but these thoughts have occurred to me.
Add to that a story I recall about someone coming up with a direct nuclear-to-energy conversion material, (line the walls of the core and of high-level storage facilities to generate additional power from previously untapped/unused radiation/byproducts), and I figure nuclear could really give us a decent chance at meeting our energy needs while reducing greenhouse gasses and dependency on foreign oil.
With enough cheap, clean power, plug-in electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles might actually make sense (since those technologies may eliminate emissions at the car, but still require the generation of power elsewhere... often not the cleanest generation at the moment).
Anyhow, IANANS (I am not a Nuclear Scientist), so I really can't offer any facts, and IANASP (I am not a stinking politician) so I can't really offer any FUD, but I believe we should give nuclear power a chance, and it appears that a lot of other geeks (for their own varying reasons) seem to believe the same.
I've got an AVR 4306 - this is my second Denon, having outgrown the "gazintas" and "gazoutas" of my previous one (which now does duty as my bedroom stereo)
I've been very VERY happy with it. I really like that this particular model upsamples all video inputs to HDMI, greatly simplifying my remote control macros and keeping the cabling from being such a tangle.
I don't think that the fact that they make a silly, overpriced cable for "golden ears" (or more likely for wannabe "golden ears") really shouldn't dissuade you from the whole company. Judge the product on features and how it sounds and how it treats your video. My guess is that you might get some decent advice, reviews, and alternatives from AVS Forum.
Quite possibly the first time I've heard a plausible explanation for high-price digital cables.... but a bit too high for my liking. I've got a fairly decent stereo system - set up for home theater, but I'm no "golden ears" and I really don't think I could tell the difference between good and great speakers, let alone between various flavors of high-end cabling.
I do love my Denon AVR 4306 receiver though - those guys make some very good mid-fi.
In addition to the 18 million regular advertising injections or hijackings, it appears charity advertisements were hijacked and replaced with Phorm advertisements.
"The advertisements were used to replaced [sic] a 'default' charity advertisement (one of Oxfam, Make Trade Fair or SOS Children's Villages) when a suitable contextual or behavioural match could be made by the PageSense system."
I'm also a software engineer and an avid gamer. I've also experienced some pretty bad pains in my right arm/hand/wrist from endless 16 hour days in front of computers. The pain got so bad that I started worrying I'd have to take time off from work. I got one of those wrist braces and changed my mice over to that baseball-looking Microsoft Natural mouse. It really did help. At work, I tilted my keyboard surface away from me (higher at the space bar than at the funciton keys) and even got one of those curved (but not split) MS natural keyboards.
All of those combined actions helped me reduce and finally eliminate the pain. I still use the mice as a sort of maintenance program, but the wrist strap is off and that damned curved keyboard (which really slowed down my typing and increased typos) is on the shelf (but ready to go). RSI and Carpal Tunnel are very real and can be very debilitating, but it's been my experience that it got so bad because I ignored the early warning signs. I'm a bit more self-aware now, and I make it a point to try and change up my seating/typing/mousing position a bit here and there so I don't go so far into painville again.
I took care of all of this myself. I did not need a doctor or a diagnosis to know I had an issue or to know what to do about it. However, if I hadn't had luck with self-treatment, it may have gotten quite costly in terms of medical help and lost time at work. I have no idea if the numbers presented in TFA are anywhere close, but it's possible to avoid or reduce the pain and debilitation if you catch it early. Don't ignore it as long as I did... it really sucks.
That case was the first thing I thought of when I read the article.
Actually, didn't the 2600 DeCSS case kind of set a precident? I remember Eric saying that he'd keep publishing or coming up with ways to obey the letter of the rulings but still provide access somehow until they either stopped, or until the judge got to the point of ordering him not to think, speak or even HEAR about DeCSS. I think the intention was to push so hard as to expose the insanity of the current direction of IP. At one point, they even started printing TeeShirts with the code on them to see if that would get banned.
Unfortunately, instead of people waking up to the danger these bad IP laws posed to freedom of speech and expression, the ruling that even a link to infringing material was somehow contributing to distribution stuck, and we end up with absurd stuff like the rulings referenced in the article.
FTFA: "The organization apparently hopes that others will merely feel threatened by the prospect of paying out millions of dollars and shut down voluntarily."
Some serious "chilling effect" going on here... people worrying about what they link to, and maybe even what they say in case they get swarmed with lawsuits and armies of lawyers they can't possibly hope to afford to defend against. I mean, ok, in these particular cases, the intent is kind of obvious: sharing information on where to find copies of protected intellectual property, but where does it stop? Will it get to the point where you can't tell someone to search for the 'foo bar baz' on Google"? Will it get to the point where you can't even tell someone they can search for movies / songs with the right keywords?
It occurs to me that Microsoft is either patenting this stuff to just add to its patent portfolio, or it means that they're getting serious about security.
The biggest flaw I see with Microsoft being an antivirus vendor is that it's like trying to proof read your own writing.. sometimes you see what you MEANT to say, not what you actually said. If they were that good with security, why didn't they just build that crap right into the OS in the first place.
Oh wait, their most recent security approach resulted in Vista. Well, I suppose a computer that won't even talk to its own webcam or video card, or other hardware is pretty secure... from YOU (the user).
You know, it's funny... I usually use Sladhdot as my "Can this machine reach the web" site of choice.... the reason? it's usually so damn reliable.... oh, and that's why I'm reading it right now - just checking that this computer still can access the net... and that the keyboard and mouse are ok:)
This is what I've noticed too... Most IDEs leave you with such narrow coding windows. I'd much rather have to scroll vertically than horizontally.
Besides, maybe laptops are kind of limited but if I REALLY REALLY wanted to, I could take my LCD monitor (for my desktop) and rotate it 90 degrees and get LOTS of vertical space. Years ago, I worked at a newspaper, and we had these giant CRTs that were made for showing a full tabloid-layout page. At the time, these were high-end, specialized devices. Now, you can get a $600 24" screen that has a base that allows for rotation (and some that even sense the transition and re-configure your screen for it).
Back to programming. I also spend a lot of time with two files open side-by-side, either running UltraCompare, or just manually comparing two similar sections of code - much easier for me to spot anomalies when the files are side by side than top/bottom.
Anyway, I'm really just saying "yeah, what guy-in-corner said!".
The thing is, that if one follows BlackTarw's advice, then they also make a site that will work for those of us who run addons like NoScript and FlashBlock. In a nutshell, the more accessible to the blind and sight-impaired, the better the chance that a security-conscious user will actually be able to use the site without having to open their browser up to attack.
Personally, I can't stand sites that *require* Flash and/or JavaScript in order to be usable.
IANAL, but it seems to me that if someone's homeless, they just sort of do their sloppy work and send to the last known address, and tell the court the party was served. When they don't show up, they're now guilty of contempt of court or somesuch.
Even in this case where the courts basically said "hey, you didn't properly serve him", the RIAA will correct their mistake and follow proper procedure and properly serve him. Now this guy has to go through the court system and since it's not a criminal case, I don't THINK the state needs to provide him a lawyer, so the RIAA either steamrolls him if he does show up, or they get a default judgment and/or get him sited for contempt. So this guy who has obviously already been through the meat grinder gets so far past screwed that it will take the light from screwed thee years to catch up.
Doesn't the RIAA have some 90 year old "never touched a computer in her life" granny they could be tormenting instead?
I like the fridge door and the fake "filled your cube/office with packing peanuts", but the others didn't really appeal to me much.
The two that I've done for which I am most proud:
As the webmaster of a small dotcom a few years ago, I mocked up a fake This site has been closed by the federal government on suspicion of aiding and abeding terrorism. I then changed the INTERNAL DNS entries so that although the outside customers got our normal site, our employees got the "shutdown" one. There was a good 5 minutes of confusion and near bowel movements before someone realized the date (04/01)
However, the best and most geeky prank I ever played involved one of those Staples "Easy Button"s. I had a co-worker who had one at his desk. Every now and then (couple times a week) someone would get the urge to press it. I bought an Easy Button at the local Staples, and a small "record 20 seconds of digital audio" circuit boards at Radio Shack. I then dremmeled the hell out of the inside of the Easy button till I could make the Radio Shack board fit in and replace the original, and drilled a small hole for a paperclip so I could hit the record button. I also disconnected the small crappy speaker from the Radio Shack board and wired it into the one already in the Easy Button. It was a really tight fit, and it took a bit of fiddling, but I eventually had a "Please do not press this button again" Button.
I swapped out the button for his, and just waited till someone hit it. I really got a priceless reaction, though the fact that I had used my own voice precluded any attempt to feign innocense. Still, the button became the hit of the office... I showed them how to record other stuff and they kept changing it and waiting for others to come hit it. Finally, it settled down on "Hurry UP!!!" That co-worker has since left the company, but he has the button with him to this day.
Of course my guess is that it will start out so small and pick up so few particles at first that we'll have a good few thousand years before getting into the actual "we're screwed" territory...
Hopefully by then we will have found someplace else much nicer to wreck.
The particular conversation between 790 and (I think it was...) Stanley about how most civilizations that manage to avoid destroying themselves in thermonuclear war go on to destroy themselves trying to determine the mass of the Higgs boson particle.
Being a fan of Lexx, this was the first thing I thought of when I read the title of the article.
That's the first thing I thought of when I read the article... You get double-use out of the nuclear materials:
phase 1: generate power with standard fusion phase 2: take the waste to a secondary waste-to-energy facility phase 3: PROFIT!
After all, we're currently just burying (or would like to) our waste since it will be "hot" (in a radioactivity sense if not a thermal sense) for a long, long time. Why not get that extra bang for the buck? We've got the waste anyway, so why not get a bit of benefit from it.
In theory, I would think that the action of extracting some of the energy from the radiation would consume some of it... simple thermodynamics: the more efficient the energy extraction, the less waste radiation bouncing around inside the containment facility.
Hmm, maybe they could even line use this stuff directly in the primary plant as well?
I'm only speculating, but my guess is that this would have been on the minds of the inventors.
I read this story yesterday and must have filed it away in my brain. When I got in this morning, I received an internal email from our email admin saying that inbound email was broken and they were working on it.
I immediately forwarded the slashdot link to him. Too bad he was too busy fixing the problem to see it... and not answering his phone.
An hour or two later when we got the message saying it was fixed, I finally got through and he said "yep, it was something like that, but we weren't directly using that list... it was another product that apparently was".
Well, I suppose Veggie burgers are kinda close - some of that tofu fake meat is good too, though I was saddened by the demise of HuFu:p
Seriously though, many of the items in there are possible with current technology, but not with current infrastructure/adoption (self-driving cars, hypersonic passenger planes, etc). Others are just way off (lol domed cities and plastic roads), and are probably the result of imposing 1960's mindsets on 2008. (Notice there was no mention of skyrocketing fuel prices or energy issues... probably as this was just a little before the gas crunch of the 1970's)
Still, I like to see futurist predictions... especially those past ones that cover where we're supposed to be today.
I also liked that Science Channel production "2057" where they tried to show the world as it might be then. The thing in that show that really caught my interest is the part on the human body where they talk about medicine... the ambulance crew arrives for a serious injury, and before they TOUCH him, they CHECK HIS INSURANCE. Damn, they really improved the "wallet biopsy" 49 years from now.
As others have mentioned, future predictions are based upon taking cutting edge technology and theories to their logical conclusion, and may get the tech part right without really being able to predict the societal impact or the impact the technology has on the society. For that kind of prediction, I honestly thing that rather than smart pills we're more likely to end up in an Idiocracy.
-- I for one WELCOME our dumbed down idiotic overlords
(Ok, not really... I didn't actually vote for Bush)
True with regard to walk/run speeds on keyboards... of course, I was referring to the bazillion other key mappings for some of the more complex rpg type games... some days, I wish I had a Chinese keyboard:)
as to the defining of the health of PC gaming - it's a fair cop - I was just talking about what keeps me interested. There is definitely a difference between keyboard/mouse and a controller pad for certain types of gaming. If consoles started offering mouse/keyboard controls (and if the games supported them) this would certainly change the equation.
Either way, I'll certainly admit that I'm not entirely up on the financial health of the industry.
EEEgads... PC Gaming is fine thank you. Sure, you can go nuts and spend more on your graphics cards than many folks spend on a whole decent gaming PC. However, I have never seen the point in folks saying "OOOH I Get 4 gazillion frames per second" when the damn monitors are refreshing at what? 60 hz for most LCDs - maybe up to oh? 120 for some really top end stuff? So, I don't see the point except that it's another form of ruler.
I love my PC games - I played Portal on a friend's Xbox and quite enjoyed it, but when I got it for my PC, I was actually able to get the medals on the speed runs - mouse and keyboard offer MUCH more precise and speedy control than the thumb sticks. For RPGs like Neverwinter and MMORPGs like WoW, I just could never see anyone making a usable control layout without a full keyboard. Consoles are great. I like that I can turn on my Wii, have a couple friends over and we have a great time. I like that I can go buy a game for the XBox and not worry that it might be too much for my system to handle, prompting a RAM or video card upgrade (the way Neverwinter Nights 2 did).
I guess it all depends. Except for that one occasion when I first got BioShock on the PC and decided to hook it up to a big LCD TV late at night and play with the full surround sound working overtime to really try to enjoy the full-on creepy factor, I usually separate my gaming: console games where I just want it to work, to be fun, to play in the living room - preferably with friends, and PC games when I want to spend some serious time fragging away or raiding.
Sure, having some totally kick-ass quad video card setup that would let me max out all the video settings at resolutions higher than 1920x1200 would be great - just as soon as I get some monitors that can display that - right now, 1920x1200 is the best I have and my current Nvidia only lags the tiniest bit on some of the newest most advanced games IF I crank absolutely everything up to max. It's not worth the money (to me) to take that next step. Even if I did, I could probably get away with either a single 9800 series or even just a normal pair of SLI type cards.
Let the early adopters pay the huge prices so they can have bragging rights and work out all the inevitable bugs while the rest of us enjoy our relatively stable, not-so-bank-busting gaming experiences. It's going to take a while before the games require all this processing power, and by then, there will be some new, even more outrageous cutting edge stuff that will only work with a handful of the latest games, and the cycle will repeat.
Digit's Law: Early adopters almost always get screwed, so never buy the bleeding edge: get the thing that was bleeding edge yesterday... learning from the mistakes of others is far more pleasant than learning from your own.
I'm no graphic artist - I'm a web application developer. I leave the heavy lifting (graphics-wise) to the pros, but I often find that I'll use Paint Shop Pro (an older pre-Corel version) for resizes, rotates, and minor alterations. Heck, I even use Paint Shop Pro just fine for my occasional dalliances in the Fark Photoshop challenges.
My point is that I too find the "Verbing" of Photoshop to be a bit inaccurate. However, people have pretty much taken it and run with it. It's not too different from many of the other linguistic corruptions/evolution (depending on your viewpoint) that goes on every day.
On the bright side, at least it will keep future etymologists busy.
Yeah, I think they're probably talking about firewalls / anti-spam appliances. I used the term "gateways" myself in another reply, but I was thinking of firewalls...
I blame it on a severe caffeine deficiency which I shall now remedy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not surprised that a tech-savvy audience like slashdotters would support nuclear power. I haven't studied the issues of safety and environmental impact, and therefore really shouldn't make claims or arguments based on hearsay. However, as a geek, I consider how much science (nuclear, materials, environmental), and technology have advanced since the last US nuclear plant was built, and I have to think that much of the fear of nuclear power is based on 1960's/1970's (Three Mile Island) and/or Soviet (as in 'back in the days of the Soviet Union', and fears about Chernobyl) technology.
... often not the cleanest generation at the moment).
Computer control and monitoring has got to be vastly improved since then. I'd also imagine we have learned much about containment and recovery from the aforementioned accidents that would help prevent anything similar in the future. Again, I haven't got enough personal basis to make any claims, but these thoughts have occurred to me.
Add to that a story I recall about someone coming up with a direct nuclear-to-energy conversion material, (line the walls of the core and of high-level storage facilities to generate additional power from previously untapped/unused radiation/byproducts), and I figure nuclear could really give us a decent chance at meeting our energy needs while reducing greenhouse gasses and dependency on foreign oil.
With enough cheap, clean power, plug-in electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles might actually make sense (since those technologies may eliminate emissions at the car, but still require the generation of power elsewhere
Anyhow, IANANS (I am not a Nuclear Scientist), so I really can't offer any facts, and IANASP (I am not a stinking politician) so I can't really offer any FUD, but I believe we should give nuclear power a chance, and it appears that a lot of other geeks (for their own varying reasons) seem to believe the same.
I've got an AVR 4306 - this is my second Denon, having outgrown the "gazintas" and "gazoutas" of my previous one (which now does duty as my bedroom stereo)
I've been very VERY happy with it. I really like that this particular model upsamples all video inputs to HDMI, greatly simplifying my remote control macros and keeping the cabling from being such a tangle.
I don't think that the fact that they make a silly, overpriced cable for "golden ears" (or more likely for wannabe "golden ears") really shouldn't dissuade you from the whole company. Judge the product on features and how it sounds and how it treats your video. My guess is that you might get some decent advice, reviews, and alternatives from AVS Forum.
Quite possibly the first time I've heard a plausible explanation for high-price digital cables.... but a bit too high for my liking. I've got a fairly decent stereo system - set up for home theater, but I'm no "golden ears" and I really don't think I could tell the difference between good and great speakers, let alone between various flavors of high-end cabling.
I do love my Denon AVR 4306 receiver though - those guys make some very good mid-fi.
I'm also a software engineer and an avid gamer. I've also experienced some pretty bad pains in my right arm/hand/wrist from endless 16 hour days in front of computers. The pain got so bad that I started worrying I'd have to take time off from work. I got one of those wrist braces and changed my mice over to that baseball-looking Microsoft Natural mouse. It really did help. At work, I tilted my keyboard surface away from me (higher at the space bar than at the funciton keys) and even got one of those curved (but not split) MS natural keyboards.
All of those combined actions helped me reduce and finally eliminate the pain. I still use the mice as a sort of maintenance program, but the wrist strap is off and that damned curved keyboard (which really slowed down my typing and increased typos) is on the shelf (but ready to go). RSI and Carpal Tunnel are very real and can be very debilitating, but it's been my experience that it got so bad because I ignored the early warning signs. I'm a bit more self-aware now, and I make it a point to try and change up my seating/typing/mousing position a bit here and there so I don't go so far into painville again.
I took care of all of this myself. I did not need a doctor or a diagnosis to know I had an issue or to know what to do about it. However, if I hadn't had luck with self-treatment, it may have gotten quite costly in terms of medical help and lost time at work. I have no idea if the numbers presented in TFA are anywhere close, but it's possible to avoid or reduce the pain and debilitation if you catch it early. Don't ignore it as long as I did... it really sucks.
That case was the first thing I thought of when I read the article.
/preaching-to-choir
Actually, didn't the 2600 DeCSS case kind of set a precident? I remember Eric saying that he'd keep publishing or coming up with ways to obey the letter of the rulings but still provide access somehow until they either stopped, or until the judge got to the point of ordering him not to think, speak or even HEAR about DeCSS. I think the intention was to push so hard as to expose the insanity of the current direction of IP. At one point, they even started printing TeeShirts with the code on them to see if that would get banned.
Unfortunately, instead of people waking up to the danger these bad IP laws posed to freedom of speech and expression, the ruling that even a link to infringing material was somehow contributing to distribution stuck, and we end up with absurd stuff like the rulings referenced in the article.
FTFA:
"The organization apparently hopes that others will merely feel threatened by the prospect of paying out millions of dollars and shut down voluntarily."
Some serious "chilling effect" going on here... people worrying about what they link to, and maybe even what they say in case they get swarmed with lawsuits and armies of lawyers they can't possibly hope to afford to defend against. I mean, ok, in these particular cases, the intent is kind of obvious: sharing information on where to find copies of protected intellectual property, but where does it stop? Will it get to the point where you can't tell someone to search for the 'foo bar baz' on Google"? Will it get to the point where you can't even tell someone they can search for movies / songs with the right keywords?
okay...
Actually, I agree with a lot of others - there are two possibilities that immediately pop into mind:
1) It's just the Cult of Steventology (again)
2) It's Improv Everywhere or some other form of street theater.
It occurs to me that Microsoft is either patenting this stuff to just add to its patent portfolio, or it means that they're getting serious about security.
The biggest flaw I see with Microsoft being an antivirus vendor is that it's like trying to proof read your own writing.. sometimes you see what you MEANT to say, not what you actually said. If they were that good with security, why didn't they just build that crap right into the OS in the first place.
Oh wait, their most recent security approach resulted in Vista. Well, I suppose a computer that won't even talk to its own webcam or video card, or other hardware is pretty secure... from YOU (the user).
You know, it's funny... I usually use Sladhdot as my "Can this machine reach the web" site of choice.... the reason? it's usually so damn reliable.... oh, and that's why I'm reading it right now - just checking that this computer still can access the net... and that the keyboard and mouse are ok :)
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, but I believe that the word "spam" most definitely crossed my mind.
The fight over the text box reminds me of the ludicrous (in my opinion) "mice should only have one button" that Jobs/Apple has taken for so long.
To me, it really feels like Pidgin is guilty of the same "our design ideals are more important that the wishes of users" arrogance.
This is what I've noticed too... Most IDEs leave you with such narrow coding windows. I'd much rather have to scroll vertically than horizontally.
Besides, maybe laptops are kind of limited but if I REALLY REALLY wanted to, I could take my LCD monitor (for my desktop) and rotate it 90 degrees and get LOTS of vertical space. Years ago, I worked at a newspaper, and we had these giant CRTs that were made for showing a full tabloid-layout page. At the time, these were high-end, specialized devices. Now, you can get a $600 24" screen that has a base that allows for rotation (and some that even sense the transition and re-configure your screen for it).
Back to programming. I also spend a lot of time with two files open side-by-side, either running UltraCompare, or just manually comparing two similar sections of code - much easier for me to spot anomalies when the files are side by side than top/bottom.
Anyway, I'm really just saying "yeah, what guy-in-corner said!".
The thing is, that if one follows BlackTarw's advice, then they also make a site that will work for those of us who run addons like NoScript and FlashBlock. In a nutshell, the more accessible to the blind and sight-impaired, the better the chance that a security-conscious user will actually be able to use the site without having to open their browser up to attack.
Personally, I can't stand sites that *require* Flash and/or JavaScript in order to be usable.
Well,
IANAL, but it seems to me that if someone's homeless, they just sort of do their sloppy work and send to the last known address, and tell the court the party was served. When they don't show up, they're now guilty of contempt of court or somesuch.
Even in this case where the courts basically said "hey, you didn't properly serve him", the RIAA will correct their mistake and follow proper procedure and properly serve him. Now this guy has to go through the court system and since it's not a criminal case, I don't THINK the state needs to provide him a lawyer, so the RIAA either steamrolls him if he does show up, or they get a default judgment and/or get him sited for contempt. So this guy who has obviously already been through the meat grinder gets so far past screwed that it will take the light from screwed thee years to catch up.
Doesn't the RIAA have some 90 year old "never touched a computer in her life" granny they could be tormenting instead?
~sigh~
I like the fridge door and the fake "filled your cube/office with packing peanuts", but the others didn't really appeal to me much.
The two that I've done for which I am most proud:
As the webmaster of a small dotcom a few years ago, I mocked up a fake This site has been closed by the federal government on suspicion of aiding and abeding terrorism. I then changed the INTERNAL DNS entries so that although the outside customers got our normal site, our employees got the "shutdown" one. There was a good 5 minutes of confusion and near bowel movements before someone realized the date (04/01)
However, the best and most geeky prank I ever played involved one of those Staples "Easy Button"s. I had a co-worker who had one at his desk. Every now and then (couple times a week) someone would get the urge to press it. I bought an Easy Button at the local Staples, and a small "record 20 seconds of digital audio" circuit boards at Radio Shack. I then dremmeled the hell out of the inside of the Easy button till I could make the Radio Shack board fit in and replace the original, and drilled a small hole for a paperclip so I could hit the record button. I also disconnected the small crappy speaker from the Radio Shack board and wired it into the one already in the Easy Button. It was a really tight fit, and it took a bit of fiddling, but I eventually had a "Please do not press this button again" Button.
I swapped out the button for his, and just waited till someone hit it. I really got a priceless reaction, though the fact that I had used my own voice precluded any attempt to feign innocense. Still, the button became the hit of the office... I showed them how to record other stuff and they kept changing it and waiting for others to come hit it. Finally, it settled down on "Hurry UP!!!" That co-worker has since left the company, but he has the button with him to this day.
Of course my guess is that it will start out so small and pick up so few particles at first that we'll have a good few thousand years before getting into the actual "we're screwed" territory...
Hopefully by then we will have found someplace else much nicer to wreck.
The particular conversation between 790 and (I think it was...) Stanley about how most civilizations that manage to avoid destroying themselves in thermonuclear war go on to destroy themselves trying to determine the mass of the Higgs boson particle.
Being a fan of Lexx, this was the first thing I thought of when I read the title of the article.
Apparently, Lexx was not the only fiction to include a reference to the Higgs boson
That's the first thing I thought of when I read the article... You get double-use out of the nuclear materials:
phase 1: generate power with standard fusion
phase 2: take the waste to a secondary waste-to-energy facility
phase 3: PROFIT!
After all, we're currently just burying (or would like to) our waste since it will be "hot" (in a radioactivity sense if not a thermal sense) for a long, long time. Why not get that extra bang for the buck? We've got the waste anyway, so why not get a bit of benefit from it.
In theory, I would think that the action of extracting some of the energy from the radiation would consume some of it... simple thermodynamics: the more efficient the energy extraction, the less waste radiation bouncing around inside the containment facility.
Hmm, maybe they could even line use this stuff directly in the primary plant as well?
I'm only speculating, but my guess is that this would have been on the minds of the inventors.
I read this story yesterday and must have filed it away in my brain. When I got in this morning, I received an internal email from our email admin saying that inbound email was broken and they were working on it.
... and not answering his phone.
I immediately forwarded the slashdot link to him. Too bad he was too busy fixing the problem to see it
An hour or two later when we got the message saying it was fixed, I finally got through and he said "yep, it was something like that, but we weren't directly using that list... it was another product that apparently was".
It woulda been a nice save - lol
Seriously though, many of the items in there are possible with current technology, but not with current infrastructure/adoption (self-driving cars, hypersonic passenger planes, etc). Others are just way off (lol domed cities and plastic roads), and are probably the result of imposing 1960's mindsets on 2008. (Notice there was no mention of skyrocketing fuel prices or energy issues... probably as this was just a little before the gas crunch of the 1970's)
Still, I like to see futurist predictions... especially those past ones that cover where we're supposed to be today.
I also liked that Science Channel production "2057" where they tried to show the world as it might be then. The thing in that show that really caught my interest is the part on the human body where they talk about medicine... the ambulance crew arrives for a serious injury, and before they TOUCH him, they CHECK HIS INSURANCE. Damn, they really improved the "wallet biopsy" 49 years from now.
As others have mentioned, future predictions are based upon taking cutting edge technology and theories to their logical conclusion, and may get the tech part right without really being able to predict the societal impact or the impact the technology has on the society. For that kind of prediction, I honestly thing that rather than smart pills we're more likely to end up in an Idiocracy.
-- I for one WELCOME our dumbed down idiotic overlords
(Ok, not really... I didn't actually vote for Bush)
True with regard to walk/run speeds on keyboards... of course, I was referring to the bazillion other key mappings for some of the more complex rpg type games... some days, I wish I had a Chinese keyboard :)
as to the defining of the health of PC gaming - it's a fair cop - I was just talking about what keeps me interested. There is definitely a difference between keyboard/mouse and a controller pad for certain types of gaming. If consoles started offering mouse/keyboard controls (and if the games supported them) this would certainly change the equation.
Either way, I'll certainly admit that I'm not entirely up on the financial health of the industry.
EEEgads... PC Gaming is fine thank you. Sure, you can go nuts and spend more on your graphics cards than many folks spend on a whole decent gaming PC. However, I have never seen the point in folks saying "OOOH I Get 4 gazillion frames per second" when the damn monitors are refreshing at what? 60 hz for most LCDs - maybe up to oh? 120 for some really top end stuff? So, I don't see the point except that it's another form of ruler.
I love my PC games - I played Portal on a friend's Xbox and quite enjoyed it, but when I got it for my PC, I was actually able to get the medals on the speed runs - mouse and keyboard offer MUCH more precise and speedy control than the thumb sticks. For RPGs like Neverwinter and MMORPGs like WoW, I just could never see anyone making a usable control layout without a full keyboard. Consoles are great. I like that I can turn on my Wii, have a couple friends over and we have a great time. I like that I can go buy a game for the XBox and not worry that it might be too much for my system to handle, prompting a RAM or video card upgrade (the way Neverwinter Nights 2 did).
I guess it all depends. Except for that one occasion when I first got BioShock on the PC and decided to hook it up to a big LCD TV late at night and play with the full surround sound working overtime to really try to enjoy the full-on creepy factor, I usually separate my gaming: console games where I just want it to work, to be fun, to play in the living room - preferably with friends, and PC games when I want to spend some serious time fragging away or raiding.
Sure, having some totally kick-ass quad video card setup that would let me max out all the video settings at resolutions higher than 1920x1200 would be great - just as soon as I get some monitors that can display that - right now, 1920x1200 is the best I have and my current Nvidia only lags the tiniest bit on some of the newest most advanced games IF I crank absolutely everything up to max. It's not worth the money (to me) to take that next step. Even if I did, I could probably get away with either a single 9800 series or even just a normal pair of SLI type cards.
Let the early adopters pay the huge prices so they can have bragging rights and work out all the inevitable bugs while the rest of us enjoy our relatively stable, not-so-bank-busting gaming experiences. It's going to take a while before the games require all this processing power, and by then, there will be some new, even more outrageous cutting edge stuff that will only work with a handful of the latest games, and the cycle will repeat.
Digit's Law: Early adopters almost always get screwed, so never buy the bleeding edge: get the thing that was bleeding edge yesterday... learning from the mistakes of others is far more pleasant than learning from your own.
Actually an interesting point there.
I'm no graphic artist - I'm a web application developer. I leave the heavy lifting (graphics-wise) to the pros, but I often find that I'll use Paint Shop Pro (an older pre-Corel version) for resizes, rotates, and minor alterations. Heck, I even use Paint Shop Pro just fine for my occasional dalliances in the Fark Photoshop challenges.
My point is that I too find the "Verbing" of Photoshop to be a bit inaccurate. However, people have pretty much taken it and run with it. It's not too different from many of the other linguistic corruptions/evolution (depending on your viewpoint) that goes on every day.
On the bright side, at least it will keep future etymologists busy.
Once they stop trying to cripple expensive home theatre kit with all their useless DRM, then people will buy it. :)
Yeah, I think they're probably talking about firewalls / anti-spam appliances. I used the term "gateways" myself in another reply, but I was thinking of firewalls...
I blame it on a severe caffeine deficiency which I shall now remedy.