For Sale: 500,000 lbs of chemical weapons, only used once. Be the envy of your region! Buyer pays shipping.
For Sale: special aluminium tubes for building a breeder reactor capable of creating weapon's grade materials, or perhaps just nice, shiny pipes for indoor plumbing.
Unique - mobile biological weapons laboratories of an ingenious design. Guaranteed to contain no trace of any biological weapons material. Needs work.
No Reserve! Blank Nigerian documents for Uranium exports, cheap. Great gag gift. No reserve!
Rare Collector's item: Nuclear warhead of North Korean design. Discount for unstable dictators.
First edition! "The Wit and Wisdom of George W. Bush". Mint condition. Buyer pays 37 cent postage.
You bet it'll hurt Linux. It'll plant a seed of doubt. CEO's got to be CEO's by covering their asses.
SCO / MS will probably delay and delay to keep this alive as long as possible and giving it a lot of press. Even when they lose, they will have gained something: planting doubt it people's minds. Look how well it worked with OS/2.
Iraq is in defiance of the United Nations, but the United States and our parters are not.
The US is a signatory of the UN charter, which states that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." (Article 2.)
"The Star Tribune reports the House and Senate today agreed not to allow email surveillance of American citizens proposed by the Total Information Awareness program. Additionally, negotiators agreed to halt all future funding on the program without extensive consultation with Congress."
Pointy's resume says it all: "finds innovative solutions to difficult problems". What's to innovative about lying?
I got into comp sci for the wrong reasons. I like to help people and I was a student consultant. Felt great rescuing someone's term paper from a junk disk. I eventually got a masters in comp sci, then 12 years doing mostly sys admin and help desk jobs.
Maybe I burned out, but I now hate it, feels meaningless to me, unimportant. I have pushed myself and made things work well, but with little or no job satisfaction. I prefer close interaction with people but as I do more and more advanced work in th field, I spend more and more time alone in windowless basements playing with small beige boxes. Only hearing from people when they have a fire to put out. They never see or appreciate my best work. Very close to hell for me.
So, at 40, I am changing careers, starting over from scratch, going back to school for health care, probably nursing. This is the first career-thing I've had any real enthusiasm for in years. These days, that motivation does not seem like a luxury at all. If my heart isn't in it, I just can't do it.
They say we all change careers several times in life. If you feel like a square peg in a round hole, it might be time for a real change. It's hard to know when to jump and how. I'm fond of personality type testing, like Myers-Briggs, for one example. The best book I've seen on finding your passion is called "The Pathfinder".
"If you're going to get broken into... we're going to start regulating."
Gosh, by that standard, running Windows helps terrorists.
(But since Microsoft gives zillions to the GOP, we won't see much done about that. Heck, they might try to mandate running windows. Remember, laws are now being drafted directly by big business, without the cumbersum middleman of an elected representative.)
The Neanderthals went belly up about 35,000 years ago. The article says that Mars hasn't been this close in 70,000 years. Therefor, Mars hasn't been this close since *two* Neanderthals ago.
OSLO, Norway -- In a novel use of clean energy, the world's most northerly town will soon be the first to get electricity from a sub-sea power station run on tidal currents tugged by the moon. Gigantic forces in the oceans -- waves, currents, and tides -- have often proved too costly or awkward to harness, compared to wind or solar power, in global efforts to cut reliance on nuclear power or on fossil fuels blamed for global warming.
Starting in late November or early December, however, a tidal current will start turning the blades of a windmill-like turbine standing on the seabed near Kvalsund at the Arctic tip of Norway.
"We will be the first in the world to use tidal currents to generate electricity to be fed into the local grid," said Harald Johansen, managing director of Hammerfest Stroem.
Other unorthodox sub-sea experiments to generate power from tidal currents from Australia to Britain have not gotten to the stage of selling power. All the technologies mark a shift in traditional methods of exploiting the tide. Tides have previously been tapped for use in power plants in France, Canada, and Russia by building barrages to trap water in artificial lagoons at high tide. When the tide goes out, gravity sucks the water through turbines to generate electricity.
But giant damming projects are out of fashion because they can damage the ecology of rivers and coastlines. Seabed turbines, by contrast, are silent and invisible, and fish can swim around them without getting sliced up.
"Of all the renewable energy technologies, ocean energy is probably the one in the earliest stages," said Mark Hammonds at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris. "Many projects have proved to be too costly."
Tidal power exploits the gravitational pull of the moon, and to a lesser extent the sun, on the oceans as the Earth spins. The seas rise and fall in a cycle of 12 hours and 25 minutes and can cause sweeping currents along the seabed at the same time, like the ones seen off the north Norway coast.
LIGHTS FOR 1,000 HOMES
The Norwegian sub-sea turbine will have a tiny capacity of 300 killowatts and is due to expand to 20 mills from 2004, giving enough power for perhaps 1,000 homes.
Hammerfest, with 11,000 inhabitants, calls itself the world's northernmost town. Johansen reckons the project there has cost 50 million Norwegian crowns (US$6.7 million) so far and will cost 100 million by completion in 2004.
High oil prices and pledges to curb emissions of greenhouse gases as part of the Kyoto pact to limit global warming, blamed on emissions from burning coal or oil, are helping make green technologies like tidal power more attractive despite their drawbacks.
Other systems to tap the oceans range from giant snakelike tubes that generate power when rocked by waves to machines that extract power from the contrast between warm surface waters and chill temperatures at ocean depths. But experts are uncertain about the potential, especially because of sub-sea maintenance costs. Storms have wrecked many experimental ocean power stations.
"We need to harness all low-impact renewables we can develop. But offshore wind is more competitive and solar has more potential," said Greenpeace spokesman Truls Gulowsen.
The biggest tidal power plant in the world is a barrage across the La Rance river in northern France, in place since the 1960s. It has a 240-megawatt capacity, but Electricite de France has no plans to build new ones.
Canada's Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia has the highest tides in the world, at about 39 feet. Nova Scotia Power's 20 megawatt plant at Annapolis Royal, built in 1984, is the only one in North America, but the company is now focusing more on wind. "There are ecological objections to building more tidal plants along the coast," said Margaret Murphy, spokeswoman for Nova Scotia Power.
All the plants are tiny. Western-style nuclear generators typically have a capacity of 500 to 1,000 megawatts and can be counted on for reliable power generation, unlike many renewable energy sources.
QUIXOTIC POWER?
In Norway, Hammerfest Stroem reckons that building tidal turbines could become a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It notes many experts used to dismiss windmill parks, now widespread in countries like Denmark, as quixotic.
In Kvalsund, the water flows at about 8.2 feet per second apart from a pause at high and low tides. By contrast, windmills are useless in calm weather and have to be built to withstand hurricane force winds.
Solar power is a non-starter in winter in Hammerfest, where the sun sets for about two months in mid-winter. The town was the first in Europe to get street lighting almost 100 years ago.
But costs of the electricity are initially likely to be three times that of typical hydro-generated electricity in Norway. Tidal power will be added to the mix of electricity in the local grid and consumers will be obliged to swallow the cost.
The tidal turbines weigh about 200 tons including the base and are well below the keels of passing ships. They turn to face the tide when the currents change direction. The turbines are designed to be maintenance-free for three years, but divers can go down if needed.
British-based Marine Current Turbines, which plans to test a similar tidal current system off Devon in southern England next year, says that maintenance could be a problem for Hammerfest. "When you have strong enough currents for tidal energy generation, there are few slack tides when divers can work," said Peter Fraenkel, the group's technical director.
Marine Current Turbines' design, which sticks above the water, allows the turbines to be winched up to the surface. "The size of this resource is not understood," he said. He said that a British study a decade ago estimated that the eight most promising sites off the British coast alone could generate one-fifth of Britain's electricity.
I like the vision of these two in the Dark Knight Returns:
Superman: respects authority without questioning, champion of the state and it's laws, easily manipulated by his ethics, somewhat simple-minded, suckered by authoritarian propaganda. Hard-working middle-class background. Firmly believes in democracy.
Batman: definitely questions authority, champion of individual rights, breaks laws as needed, more interested in justice than doing the right thing. Aristocratic background. Firmly believes that some people are better than others.
These two are really on different sides of the political spectrum. Batman would be a hard core Libritarian or an anarchist, and Supes would likely be a puppet for the GOP.
KMAG YOYO... reportedly an MVS error. Displayed only when a theoretically impossible state occurred. Once, while testing the system, it came up. The old programmer said it meant: "kiss my *ss guys, you're on your own".
no external antennae or high gain aerials are allowed anywhere visible
Seems like visible has to be the key word. I am confident that most historic buildings have features that would allow you to hide a wireless antenna. With a little imagination.
And look out for falling apples. They were great for Newton but trouble for Adam and Eve.
I suggest you take he same... whatever 6 thousand dollars and put it in a trust fund in your joint name.
She won't like it? Ash her if she'd like an extra $45,000 when she retires. That's what a 6 grand will be worth in 30 years at 7%. (Could easily be more if you invest wisely.)
Alternately, ask her if she would like her children to go to harvard or a tech school.
Ask her if she would rather live in a house or a trailer.
The two of you should be deciding what is meaningful, not a multi-billion dollar advertising (brainwashing) campaign.
And, yes, for the record, I have a girlfriend and we may well get married sometime. We will likely pick out an antique ring or a nice colored stone (saphire, etc) somewhere. I am find of a simple, clean, gold band. But I will NOT have a huge bon-fire of cash just to impress Mrs. Grundy across the street. Mrs. Grundy has been BRAIN-WASHED and should probably be pitied, but not indulged.
Mod me down, I don't care.
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>...shoot the radioactive waste into the sun...
The romans dumped lots of crude oil into the sea. They were certain it had no practical use for anything. Today we use it for many things from plastics to medicines to fuel.
And we also have a irritating substance to deal with. I hope we have the imagination to see it's potential future uses.
... attach a single-shot gun-barrel and a facial recognizion system and you have an over-used sci-fi plot-device. (Bruce Sterling probably used it first in 'Islands in the Net'.)
I shudder to think what the DOD boys might do with such a thing. At night, it would be pretty hard to detect.
Slashdot Mirror
For Sale: 500,000 lbs of chemical weapons, only used once. Be the envy of your region! Buyer pays shipping.
For Sale: special aluminium tubes for building a breeder reactor capable of creating weapon's grade materials, or perhaps just nice, shiny pipes for indoor plumbing.
Unique - mobile biological weapons laboratories of an ingenious design. Guaranteed to contain no trace of any biological weapons material. Needs work.
No Reserve! Blank Nigerian documents for Uranium exports, cheap. Great gag gift. No reserve!
Rare Collector's item: Nuclear warhead of North Korean design. Discount for unstable dictators.
First edition! "The Wit and Wisdom of George W. Bush". Mint condition. Buyer pays 37 cent postage.
He originated Cyberpunk. Way ahead of the curve.
Shockwave Rider
Stand on Zanzibar
The Sheep Look Up
Jagged Orbit
Also Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling.
=brian
on the yahoo SCOX stock message boards, list SCOX as a "strong sell".
http://messages.yahoo.com/?action=q&board=SCOX
Many people who bought into SCOX in the last few days are now very angry.
It looks kinda poorly for SCO. This exact moment would be an excellent time to sell short.
=brian
There are nukes in Iraq.
A jewish conspiracy controls the world's banks.
Linux is illegal.
Repeat it over and over and over.
You bet it'll hurt Linux. It'll plant a seed of doubt. CEO's got to be CEO's by covering their asses.
SCO / MS will probably delay and delay to keep this alive as long as possible and giving it a lot of press. Even when they lose, they will have gained something: planting doubt it people's minds. Look how well it worked with OS/2.
Hmm... postage gonna be a bitch.
=brian
Every morning, I play a game called "reading the news". Consistently scares the hell out of me.
The US is a signatory of the UN charter, which states that "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." (Article 2.)
Next!
=brian
Pointy's resume says it all: "finds innovative solutions to difficult problems". What's to innovative about lying?
=brianI got into comp sci for the wrong reasons. I like to help people and I was a student consultant. Felt great rescuing someone's term paper from a junk disk. I eventually got a masters in comp sci, then 12 years doing mostly sys admin and help desk jobs.
Maybe I burned out, but I now hate it, feels meaningless to me, unimportant. I have pushed myself and made things work well, but with little or no job satisfaction. I prefer close interaction with people but as I do more and more advanced work in th field, I spend more and more time alone in windowless basements playing with small beige boxes. Only hearing from people when they have a fire to put out. They never see or appreciate my best work. Very close to hell for me.
So, at 40, I am changing careers, starting over from scratch, going back to school for health care, probably nursing. This is the first career-thing I've had any real enthusiasm for in years. These days, that motivation does not seem like a luxury at all. If my heart isn't in it, I just can't do it.
They say we all change careers several times in life. If you feel like a square peg in a round hole, it might be time for a real change. It's hard to know when to jump and how. I'm fond of personality type testing, like Myers-Briggs, for one example. The best book I've seen on finding your passion is called "The Pathfinder".
All I can say is: follow your passion.
=brian
... you can only give him more ammo.
=brian
Gosh, by that standard, running Windows helps terrorists.
(But since Microsoft gives zillions to the GOP, we won't see much done about that. Heck, they might try to mandate running windows. Remember, laws are now being drafted directly by big business, without the cumbersum middleman of an elected representative.)
Oops! Did I say that?
The Neanderthals went belly up about 35,000 years ago. The article says that Mars hasn't been this close in 70,000 years. Therefor, Mars hasn't been this close since *two* Neanderthals ago.
Neanderthal: the new unit of measure.
50 messages rated +5?
... a lot?
Isn't that kind of
OSLO, Norway -- In a novel use of clean energy, the world's most northerly town will soon be the first to get electricity from a sub-sea power station run on tidal currents tugged by the moon.
Gigantic forces in the oceans -- waves, currents, and tides -- have often proved too costly or awkward to harness, compared to wind or solar power, in global efforts to cut reliance on nuclear power or on fossil fuels blamed for global warming.
Starting in late November or early December, however, a tidal current will start turning the blades of a windmill-like turbine standing on the seabed near Kvalsund at the Arctic tip of Norway.
"We will be the first in the world to use tidal currents to generate electricity to be fed into the local grid," said Harald Johansen, managing director of Hammerfest Stroem.
Other unorthodox sub-sea experiments to generate power from tidal currents from Australia to Britain have not gotten to the stage of selling power. All the technologies mark a shift in traditional methods of exploiting the tide. Tides have previously been tapped for use in power plants in France, Canada, and Russia by building barrages to trap water in artificial lagoons at high tide. When the tide goes out, gravity sucks the water through turbines to generate electricity.
But giant damming projects are out of fashion because they can damage the ecology of rivers and coastlines. Seabed turbines, by contrast, are silent and invisible, and fish can swim around them without getting sliced up.
"Of all the renewable energy technologies, ocean energy is probably the one in the earliest stages," said Mark Hammonds at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris. "Many projects have proved to be too costly."
Tidal power exploits the gravitational pull of the moon, and to a lesser extent the sun, on the oceans as the Earth spins. The seas rise and fall in a cycle of 12 hours and 25 minutes and can cause sweeping currents along the seabed at the same time, like the ones seen off the north Norway coast.
LIGHTS FOR 1,000 HOMES
The Norwegian sub-sea turbine will have a tiny capacity of 300 killowatts and is due to expand to 20 mills from 2004, giving enough power for perhaps 1,000 homes.
Hammerfest, with 11,000 inhabitants, calls itself the world's northernmost town. Johansen reckons the project there has cost 50 million Norwegian crowns (US$6.7 million) so far and will cost 100 million by completion in 2004.
High oil prices and pledges to curb emissions of greenhouse gases as part of the Kyoto pact to limit global warming, blamed on emissions from burning coal or oil, are helping make green technologies like tidal power more attractive despite their drawbacks.
Other systems to tap the oceans range from giant snakelike tubes that generate power when rocked by waves to machines that extract power from the contrast between warm surface waters and chill temperatures at ocean depths. But experts are uncertain about the potential, especially because of sub-sea maintenance costs. Storms have wrecked many experimental ocean power stations.
"We need to harness all low-impact renewables we can develop. But offshore wind is more competitive and solar has more potential," said Greenpeace spokesman Truls Gulowsen.
The biggest tidal power plant in the world is a barrage across the La Rance river in northern France, in place since the 1960s. It has a 240-megawatt capacity, but Electricite de France has no plans to build new ones.
Canada's Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia has the highest tides in the world, at about 39 feet. Nova Scotia Power's 20 megawatt plant at Annapolis Royal, built in 1984, is the only one in North America, but the company is now focusing more on wind. "There are ecological objections to building more tidal plants along the coast," said Margaret Murphy, spokeswoman for Nova Scotia Power.
All the plants are tiny. Western-style nuclear generators typically have a capacity of 500 to 1,000 megawatts and can be counted on for reliable power generation, unlike many renewable energy sources.
QUIXOTIC POWER?
In Norway, Hammerfest Stroem reckons that building tidal turbines could become a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It notes many experts used to dismiss windmill parks, now widespread in countries like Denmark, as quixotic.
In Kvalsund, the water flows at about 8.2 feet per second apart from a pause at high and low tides. By contrast, windmills are useless in calm weather and have to be built to withstand hurricane force winds.
Solar power is a non-starter in winter in Hammerfest, where the sun sets for about two months in mid-winter. The town was the first in Europe to get street lighting almost 100 years ago.
But costs of the electricity are initially likely to be three times that of typical hydro-generated electricity in Norway. Tidal power will be added to the mix of electricity in the local grid and consumers will be obliged to swallow the cost.
The tidal turbines weigh about 200 tons including the base and are well below the keels of passing ships. They turn to face the tide when the currents change direction. The turbines are designed to be maintenance-free for three years, but divers can go down if needed.
British-based Marine Current Turbines, which plans to test a similar tidal current system off Devon in southern England next year, says that maintenance could be a problem for Hammerfest. "When you have strong enough currents for tidal energy generation, there are few slack tides when divers can work," said Peter Fraenkel, the group's technical director.
Marine Current Turbines' design, which sticks above the water, allows the turbines to be winched up to the surface. "The size of this resource is not understood," he said. He said that a British study a decade ago estimated that the eight most promising sites off the British coast alone could generate one-fifth of Britain's electricity.
Copyright 2002, Reuters
I like the vision of these two in the Dark Knight Returns:
Superman: respects authority without questioning, champion of the state and it's laws, easily manipulated by his ethics, somewhat simple-minded, suckered by authoritarian propaganda. Hard-working middle-class background. Firmly believes in democracy.
Batman: definitely questions authority, champion of individual rights, breaks laws as needed, more interested in justice than doing the right thing. Aristocratic background. Firmly believes that some people are better than others.
These two are really on different sides of the political spectrum. Batman would be a hard core Libritarian or an anarchist, and Supes would likely be a puppet for the GOP.
KMAG YOYO ... reportedly an MVS error. Displayed only when a theoretically impossible state occurred. Once, while testing the system, it came up. The old programmer said it meant: "kiss my *ss guys, you're on your own".
... accept a job where "very little travel is involved".
That did it for me.
aloha,
=brian
Sounds improbable, but it is a good intro to general physics. The author / illustrator does a great job. I can't say enough about this book.
0 62 731009/qid=1031613465/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/103-635038 8-1471003
Find it at amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
=brian
... oh, wait a second, yes, yes it was. Never mind.
(This is supposed to be *funny*, damnit, laugh.)
=brian
Seems like visible has to be the key word. I am confident that most historic buildings have features that would allow you to hide a wireless antenna. With a little imagination.
And look out for falling apples. They were great for Newton but trouble for Adam and Eve.
Part of that can be easily arranged.
=brian
... but it just pissed me off too much.
... whatever 6 thousand dollars and put it in a trust fund in your joint name.
I suggest you take he same
She won't like it? Ash her if she'd like an extra $45,000 when she retires. That's what a 6 grand will be worth in 30 years at 7%. (Could easily be more if you invest wisely.)
Alternately, ask her if she would like her children to go to harvard or a tech school.
Ask her if she would rather live in a house or a trailer.
The two of you should be deciding what is meaningful, not a multi-billion dollar advertising (brainwashing) campaign.
And, yes, for the record, I have a girlfriend and we may well get married sometime. We will likely pick out an antique ring or a nice colored stone (saphire, etc) somewhere. I am find of a simple, clean, gold band. But I will NOT have a huge bon-fire of cash just to impress Mrs. Grundy across the street. Mrs. Grundy has been BRAIN-WASHED and should probably be pitied, but not indulged.
Mod me down, I don't care.
>...shoot the radioactive waste into the sun...
The romans dumped lots of crude oil into the sea. They were certain it had no practical use for anything. Today we use it for many things from plastics to medicines to fuel.
And we also have a irritating substance to deal with. I hope we have the imagination to see it's potential future uses.
=brian
... attach a single-shot gun-barrel and a facial recognizion system and you have an over-used sci-fi plot-device. (Bruce Sterling probably used it first in 'Islands in the Net'.)
I shudder to think what the DOD boys might do with such a thing. At night, it would be pretty hard to detect.
Interesting. I was going to suggets that we freeze our management. Proactively. And thaw one if they ever become useful.
=brian