I bet geodesic construction, tensile strength rather than compressional, is seaworthy. If Buckminster Fuller designed these today, he'd use nanotube fiber composites, and maybe synthetic diamond bearings/joints. The diamonds are still power-hungry manufacturing, but the fibers can be made fairly cheaply. And the investment would reduce the costs even further.
I'm sure they ship the windmills on barges. Making those barges anchors for erect windmills is just more engineering. The kind that makes the current expensive immobile anchors work.
I'm not so sure that the windmills can't retain generating efficiency while bobbing up and down, so long as they're facing the wind and remaining perpendicular to its direction. If anything, it's just more engineering to accommodate the extra degrees of freedom of motion for capturing its energy.
As for relocation energy, they can use sails. That gets maximum wind efficiency, more than electrical generation, without external power input.
I envision several "colonies" of heavy solid anchors rooted in the sea floor, chained to topple-proof docking barges at the surface. With windmills on light barges sailing among them through the seasons. The tradeoff is the energy to sail among them, vs the energy to manufacture redundant windmills that sometimes stand in calm.
The real question is the difference in available energy in different places, or whether there's one place that gets that energy passing through year round. Satellite wind graphs in the article's map could make my whole vision moot.
The point is not so much the offshore location, as their mobility, as you could tell if you read my post's Subject. Mobile, as in moving. On the water.
Side point: solar/gyro. Power stations capturing all the power passing through its point, not just the wind.
What's the deal with SecondLife? Isn't it open source? If not, isn't there a SourceForge project building a server that can interop with its network?
Seems like $150K plus all the developer/activist interest would be better invested in extending access to an existing popular multiverse than just getting an unpopular one, which needs a new budget to compete.
Why don't they put these wind farms on barges floating around the seas offshore, where the winds blow steady and reliable? Relocated when economical according to satellites tracking the seasonal winds.
Barges covered with solar cells. And reverse-gyroscopes that generate power from waves and currents. They anchor landmines, don't they?
I agree. But I don't run the schools, and whoever does, disagrees. Or, more to the point, just does it differently, preferring training to actual education.
" let your tax dollars do the work in the form of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory"
I don''t begrudge the world the science (and other investigations) that Americans pay for. But that summary should read "let US tax dollars do the work".
I wonder how many of Slashdot's foreign readers who usually rail against US-centric language in posts here will complain about how they get a free ride on this research.
I offered no guarantees, only economics. Religion and politics spends a lot of money to be popularly wrong. Science is cheaper, once the science is known and the proof obtained.
If "teaching in schools" were actually a debate, there might be merit to teaching Creationism in schools. Because it would be exposed by actual debate as BS and fake pseudoscience. But that's not how teaching Creationism works - or most teaching. Most is training.
Until we fix schools to train people to think and not just behave, Creationism has no place in that dictation environment.
More people agreeing with a point of view can be obtained most cheaply by being honest and correct.
Promotion is an expensive way to compensate for being wrong. Real nonprofits don't have the extra cash to pay to be wrong but popular, unless they're fronts.
You jerkoff Republican trollMods are so deep in denial that you'll ignore the Flamebait to which I replied, and mod down my legitimate response Flame. Because you kneel in abject squalor before your Bush idol, praying feverishly that he'll breathe more deathly life into you before you all go straight to hell.
Slashdot does a lot of rounding off on those mod stats. But Democrats have a >10 point majority in the House, which impeaches. And though the Senate is itself approximately 50:50 D:R, with Democrats holding the nominal majority, it still takes 67 Senators to convict. So what? By the time Bush's gang of Republicans "clears" him of war crimes by voting their "Compassionate Conservatism", Bush's ratings will be below 20%. He'll take his party down with him in the 2008 elections that ensue.
You zombie Republican trollMods should just get over it. Because next Bush and Cheney will face the civilian trials. I hope they take the Kenny-boy Lay coward's way out, death by their own hands.
The lot of you are going straight to hell, anyway. Hope you enjoyed the ride while it lasted. You certainly didn't look happy.
He lost the inauguration election held by 9 people in black robes. Strange how 90% of Black people voted for Gore in November, but in the one that counted, 100% voted for Bush.
Bush stole the election, then screwed America ever since. Anonymous Republican Coward should get over it already.
Even China's "avant garde" attack on formats which don't fill China's mafia government Treasury is behind the vanguard of the Internet. The way to do half of what China is trying is to just release the DRM-free EVD format on the Web. Codec plugins, players, and encoded content (all open source so we can tell the Chinese haven't included any trojans). Even dual DVD/EVD-R HW, so we can backup our DVDs to EVDs, with PC connections so we can move our content across the Net. EVD would quickly dilute DVD, especially if cheap Chinese HW preferred EVD for features like sharing.
The other half, which that strategy wouldn't do, is lock us into some Chinese format instead of DVD. We might not pay Chinese crony corps royalties this generation, but there's no way to stop them from using some lockin on the next gen, like when they increase density for HD-EVD, or some other creepy strategy they learned from the current Euramerican masters of the game. Releasing the format as a data format in open source rather than a HW format (ie. discs only) means that their attempt to upsell would be just another fork, which the rest of the world could ignore in favor of anyone's alternative upgrades.
I think DVD Jon should start giving code to some real "maverick" Chinese manufacturers right away.
I can tell you how to clamp a president. But where to start with Slashdot's moderation system?
20+20+20% is only 60%, not 100%
None of those mods say "Offtopic"
The net mod is -1, though it's itemized 2:1 +1 mods
More important: I argue with facts and logic for impeachment to clamp down Bush to stop his political hackery. In response to "White House Clamps Down on USGS Publishing", a story about Bush's killing science to cover up his politial hackery. That's "Offtopic"? No, that's Bush worship, political hackery killing reports on why and how to stop Bush.
First we impeach Bush. Then we get to the harder job of fixing Slashdot.
Nice try in pretending that the 2004 elections included all the new, undeniable evidence of Bush's crimes. Like the NSA warrantless wiretapping crimes, violating the FISA laws, that the NYT suppressed for over a year, sneaked across the 2004 elections, so voters couldn't use that evidence in our decisions. Or the recent destruction of Habeas Corpus. Or the catastrophic lie that Iraq is now.
You Bush worshippers had the balls to say "get over it" when you stole the 2000 election - ignoring the majority of voters who chose Gore. Then every time Bush's catastrophes burst out of their bubble into reality, you said "now's not the time to play the blame game". Now it's "old news". You sick criminals have had your day: thousands of them.
You hate the Constitution, but its rules for impeachment when reelection isn't in the works still rule the land - despite the dismantling and contempt your boy Bush has wreaked on it this whole decade.
Most Americans want Bush impeached. And when his Republican Congress is finally flushed all the way down the toilet after last month's elections finally install a Democratic Congress in January, the coverups will slow to a crawl, and the terrible truth about Bush's crimes will finally start to get something like their true reporting. He'll be lucky he doesn't get lynched by an angry mob. Impeachment is a civilized mercy. The kind that real "Compassionate Conservatives" extend to even a lying deathmonger like Bush. The kind of civilization you'll never understand, in your deluded Bush worship.
Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, the high-water mark of their "revolution's" seat count. They steadily declined in the 1996 and 1998 elections (impeaching Clinton wasn't a campaign issue for Republicans, at least not in public). They immediately impeached Clinton after the 1998 elections, a special session that took advantage of their larger 1997-8 seat count (before the new, smaller majority took office in January). They lost 2 seats (of their 230, <1%) in the 435 elections (<0.5%) in 2000, a statistically insignificant loss, and less than they'd lost since their peak. And they elected Bush, who shouldn't have had a chance.
So at worst, impeachment does no harm to the partisan majority pursuing it. Even when it's a blatant witch hunt on BS charges. At best (for that party), it chokes a president for years, destroying his "legacy", especially electing a preferred successor, even on BS charges.
At best for the country, on real charges, it stops a criminal president. Even if the Senate doesn't have the 67 votes to convict and remove, because of partisan priorities of politics over justice. The impeached president's "political capital" (the influence with which most politics is transacted) is bankrupted. And the country can see some of the costs of high crimes. Which can also form the basis for civil and criminal charges, once the president leaves office. And of course deters future presidents from the same kind of unacceptable behavior.
Read the Wikipedia article on impeachment to which I linked.
What was impeaching Clinton supposed to do? Stop him getting blowjobs? Stop him lying about cheating on his wife? Maybe it worked. Who cares?
What it really was supposed to do was to combat Clinton's popularity. Which would have helped Gore follow him as president. Gore won the election, despite Clinton's temporarily dented popularity, and the Gore campaign's unwillingness to use Clinton to campaign in the shadow of the impeachment which hadn't targeted Gore (of course, for every reason).
And tie up Clinton with BS so he couldn't proceed on his agenda, which was working with a very effective overall national growth. So Clinton's last couple of years were thwarted. Which, if you look at the 12 years of Republican Congress, especially the past 6 years of total Republican Federal control, is their entire agenda: thwart Clinton, roll back the clock, do nothing, break stuff. destroy the government that we use to protect ourselves from corporate anarchy and other foreign/domestic enemies.
And "besides" that, there's the issue of justice. Bush is a criminal president. Presidents are Constitutionally immune to prosecution until they're out of office, if ever, except for the alternate procedure, impeachment, with its own justice rules that accommodate the unique political status of the accused. I thought impeachment was all BS, but at least they were going to try a president on the principle of lying to Congress, even about a trivial, personal fact. If we don't impeach Bush for his many actual heinous crimes, then we're never going to impeach a president to pursue justice. We might as well stop pretending we believe in justice, and just erect temples to gods of power and wealth.
The only way to stop Bush from using "politics" to subvert our government to his destructive corporate agenda is to impeach him. He doesn't care about "accountability moments" anymore, because he's a "lame duck", no reelection carrot to discipline his manners. And losing his Republican Congress means he's extremely dangerous, because he has nothing left to lose except his Executive privileges. Which are huge, especially since Bush has spent his 6 years remaking the government according to the Unitary Executive "theory" that is his only real ideology other than unlimited money and power. He's spending OVER $3 TRILLION of your money (paid over the rest of your life) every year, on his priorities, not yours.
Stop him now. Impeach him now. It's the only way to stop the damage before he starts "upgrading" the impeachment process itself.
I used CygWin a few times, even wrote some apps for its API. It was crude, but effective for some tasks, which could be tested thoroughly before deployment.
But the trick is a complete API that runs all KDE or GNOME apps under Windows. With a secret API mapping, so MS can control it and compete with it - roll out Linux apps that work better than the "real" ones, because they use the secret "works faster/better" API to make Windows do its thing.
CygWin proves that it can be done, has been done for years. With MS' budget and other resources, it wouldn't take long for it to use CygWin's open source to figure out how to do what CygWin does, then improve it and fold it in. A tiny fraction of the Vista effort could have done this by now. If I were Gates or Ballmer, I'd have done it, even just to have an ace in the hole.
But then, if I were Gates or Ballmer, I'd spend over $100M a year giving a team of 100 crack programmers & managers a $1M budget to make my PC the best possible PC in the world, using any MS source code they wanted. Then I'd test it on a few thousand people for another $10M. And then I'd roll it out to the public a year later, so I was always a year ahead, but the rest of the world made more apps. But they don't do anything like that. So who knows if they're making a LINE-ux emulator in their whole paranoid "no VMs" sector.
But again, they could, and that's why the MS/Novell deal stinks. And why I don't believe for a second that Novell is just "punishing MS for SCO", because MS does indeed ensure it never gets punished by anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet geodesic construction, tensile strength rather than compressional, is seaworthy. If Buckminster Fuller designed these today, he'd use nanotube fiber composites, and maybe synthetic diamond bearings/joints. The diamonds are still power-hungry manufacturing, but the fibers can be made fairly cheaply. And the investment would reduce the costs even further.
I'm sure they ship the windmills on barges. Making those barges anchors for erect windmills is just more engineering. The kind that makes the current expensive immobile anchors work.
I'm not so sure that the windmills can't retain generating efficiency while bobbing up and down, so long as they're facing the wind and remaining perpendicular to its direction. If anything, it's just more engineering to accommodate the extra degrees of freedom of motion for capturing its energy.
As for relocation energy, they can use sails. That gets maximum wind efficiency, more than electrical generation, without external power input.
I envision several "colonies" of heavy solid anchors rooted in the sea floor, chained to topple-proof docking barges at the surface. With windmills on light barges sailing among them through the seasons. The tradeoff is the energy to sail among them, vs the energy to manufacture redundant windmills that sometimes stand in calm.
The real question is the difference in available energy in different places, or whether there's one place that gets that energy passing through year round. Satellite wind graphs in the article's map could make my whole vision moot.
The point is not so much the offshore location, as their mobility, as you could tell if you read my post's Subject. Mobile, as in moving. On the water.
Side point: solar/gyro. Power stations capturing all the power passing through its point, not just the wind.
What's the deal with SecondLife? Isn't it open source? If not, isn't there a SourceForge project building a server that can interop with its network?
Seems like $150K plus all the developer/activist interest would be better invested in extending access to an existing popular multiverse than just getting an unpopular one, which needs a new budget to compete.
Why don't they put these wind farms on barges floating around the seas offshore, where the winds blow steady and reliable? Relocated when economical according to satellites tracking the seasonal winds.
Barges covered with solar cells. And reverse-gyroscopes that generate power from waves and currents. They anchor landmines, don't they?
I agree. But I don't run the schools, and whoever does, disagrees. Or, more to the point, just does it differently, preferring training to actual education.
I guess when Russian mafia politics starts poisoning people with rare nuke byproducts, right when Russian mafia politics rolls out new ICBMs, and Russian mafia politics steals huge oil/gas operations for their favorite clients, smart Russians start to work together against their mafia government.
But is it too late for them to do anything but inspire a new generation of gulags?
" let your tax dollars do the work in the form of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory"
I don''t begrudge the world the science (and other investigations) that Americans pay for. But that summary should read "let US tax dollars do the work".
I wonder how many of Slashdot's foreign readers who usually rail against US-centric language in posts here will complain about how they get a free ride on this research.
I offered no guarantees, only economics. Religion and politics spends a lot of money to be popularly wrong. Science is cheaper, once the science is known and the proof obtained.
If "teaching in schools" were actually a debate, there might be merit to teaching Creationism in schools. Because it would be exposed by actual debate as BS and fake pseudoscience. But that's not how teaching Creationism works - or most teaching. Most is training.
Until we fix schools to train people to think and not just behave, Creationism has no place in that dictation environment.
More people agreeing with a point of view can be obtained most cheaply by being honest and correct.
Promotion is an expensive way to compensate for being wrong. Real nonprofits don't have the extra cash to pay to be wrong but popular, unless they're fronts.
How about the NYT just never publishes John Markoff again, because he's a shallow liar who just likes what Microsoft likes?
Moderation 0
50% Flamebait
50% Insightful
You jerkoff Republican trollMods are so deep in denial that you'll ignore the Flamebait to which I replied, and mod down my legitimate response Flame. Because you kneel in abject squalor before your Bush idol, praying feverishly that he'll breathe more deathly life into you before you all go straight to hell.
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow.
Moderation 0
50% Troll
50% Insightful
Slashdot does a lot of rounding off on those mod stats. But Democrats have a >10 point majority in the House, which impeaches. And though the Senate is itself approximately 50:50 D:R, with Democrats holding the nominal majority, it still takes 67 Senators to convict. So what? By the time Bush's gang of Republicans "clears" him of war crimes by voting their "Compassionate Conservatism", Bush's ratings will be below 20%. He'll take his party down with him in the 2008 elections that ensue.
You zombie Republican trollMods should just get over it. Because next Bush and Cheney will face the civilian trials. I hope they take the Kenny-boy Lay coward's way out, death by their own hands.
The lot of you are going straight to hell, anyway. Hope you enjoyed the ride while it lasted. You certainly didn't look happy.
By "unfortunately infamous" do you mean "No page with that title exists", or "The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."?
He lost the inauguration election held by 9 people in black robes. Strange how 90% of Black people voted for Gore in November, but in the one that counted, 100% voted for Bush.
Bush stole the election, then screwed America ever since. Anonymous Republican Coward should get over it already.
Even China's "avant garde" attack on formats which don't fill China's mafia government Treasury is behind the vanguard of the Internet. The way to do half of what China is trying is to just release the DRM-free EVD format on the Web. Codec plugins, players, and encoded content (all open source so we can tell the Chinese haven't included any trojans). Even dual DVD/EVD-R HW, so we can backup our DVDs to EVDs, with PC connections so we can move our content across the Net. EVD would quickly dilute DVD, especially if cheap Chinese HW preferred EVD for features like sharing.
The other half, which that strategy wouldn't do, is lock us into some Chinese format instead of DVD. We might not pay Chinese crony corps royalties this generation, but there's no way to stop them from using some lockin on the next gen, like when they increase density for HD-EVD, or some other creepy strategy they learned from the current Euramerican masters of the game. Releasing the format as a data format in open source rather than a HW format (ie. discs only) means that their attempt to upsell would be just another fork, which the rest of the world could ignore in favor of anyone's alternative upgrades.
I think DVD Jon should start giving code to some real "maverick" Chinese manufacturers right away.
Moderation 0
20% Insightful
20% Interesting
20% Overrated
I can tell you how to clamp a president. But where to start with Slashdot's moderation system?
More important: I argue with facts and logic for impeachment to clamp down Bush to stop his political hackery. In response to "White House Clamps Down on USGS Publishing", a story about Bush's killing science to cover up his politial hackery. That's "Offtopic"? No, that's Bush worship, political hackery killing reports on why and how to stop Bush.
First we impeach Bush. Then we get to the harder job of fixing Slashdot.
Keith Richards' personal special effects include "life after death" for over 30 years.
If you download Keef, realize that the music biz learned a long time ago that he's impossible to delete.
Nice try in pretending that the 2004 elections included all the new, undeniable evidence of Bush's crimes. Like the NSA warrantless wiretapping crimes, violating the FISA laws, that the NYT suppressed for over a year, sneaked across the 2004 elections, so voters couldn't use that evidence in our decisions. Or the recent destruction of Habeas Corpus. Or the catastrophic lie that Iraq is now.
You Bush worshippers had the balls to say "get over it" when you stole the 2000 election - ignoring the majority of voters who chose Gore. Then every time Bush's catastrophes burst out of their bubble into reality, you said "now's not the time to play the blame game". Now it's "old news". You sick criminals have had your day: thousands of them.
You hate the Constitution, but its rules for impeachment when reelection isn't in the works still rule the land - despite the dismantling and contempt your boy Bush has wreaked on it this whole decade.
Most Americans want Bush impeached. And when his Republican Congress is finally flushed all the way down the toilet after last month's elections finally install a Democratic Congress in January, the coverups will slow to a crawl, and the terrible truth about Bush's crimes will finally start to get something like their true reporting. He'll be lucky he doesn't get lynched by an angry mob. Impeachment is a civilized mercy. The kind that real "Compassionate Conservatives" extend to even a lying deathmonger like Bush. The kind of civilization you'll never understand, in your deluded Bush worship.
Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, the high-water mark of their "revolution's" seat count. They steadily declined in the 1996 and 1998 elections (impeaching Clinton wasn't a campaign issue for Republicans, at least not in public). They immediately impeached Clinton after the 1998 elections, a special session that took advantage of their larger 1997-8 seat count (before the new, smaller majority took office in January). They lost 2 seats (of their 230, <1%) in the 435 elections (<0.5%) in 2000, a statistically insignificant loss, and less than they'd lost since their peak. And they elected Bush, who shouldn't have had a chance.
So at worst, impeachment does no harm to the partisan majority pursuing it. Even when it's a blatant witch hunt on BS charges. At best (for that party), it chokes a president for years, destroying his "legacy", especially electing a preferred successor, even on BS charges.
At best for the country, on real charges, it stops a criminal president. Even if the Senate doesn't have the 67 votes to convict and remove, because of partisan priorities of politics over justice. The impeached president's "political capital" (the influence with which most politics is transacted) is bankrupted. And the country can see some of the costs of high crimes. Which can also form the basis for civil and criminal charges, once the president leaves office. And of course deters future presidents from the same kind of unacceptable behavior.
Read the Wikipedia article on impeachment to which I linked.
What was impeaching Clinton supposed to do? Stop him getting blowjobs? Stop him lying about cheating on his wife? Maybe it worked. Who cares?
What it really was supposed to do was to combat Clinton's popularity. Which would have helped Gore follow him as president. Gore won the election, despite Clinton's temporarily dented popularity, and the Gore campaign's unwillingness to use Clinton to campaign in the shadow of the impeachment which hadn't targeted Gore (of course, for every reason).
And tie up Clinton with BS so he couldn't proceed on his agenda, which was working with a very effective overall national growth. So Clinton's last couple of years were thwarted. Which, if you look at the 12 years of Republican Congress, especially the past 6 years of total Republican Federal control, is their entire agenda: thwart Clinton, roll back the clock, do nothing, break stuff. destroy the government that we use to protect ourselves from corporate anarchy and other foreign/domestic enemies.
And "besides" that, there's the issue of justice. Bush is a criminal president. Presidents are Constitutionally immune to prosecution until they're out of office, if ever, except for the alternate procedure, impeachment, with its own justice rules that accommodate the unique political status of the accused. I thought impeachment was all BS, but at least they were going to try a president on the principle of lying to Congress, even about a trivial, personal fact. If we don't impeach Bush for his many actual heinous crimes, then we're never going to impeach a president to pursue justice. We might as well stop pretending we believe in justice, and just erect temples to gods of power and wealth.
The only way to stop Bush from using "politics" to subvert our government to his destructive corporate agenda is to impeach him. He doesn't care about "accountability moments" anymore, because he's a "lame duck", no reelection carrot to discipline his manners. And losing his Republican Congress means he's extremely dangerous, because he has nothing left to lose except his Executive privileges. Which are huge, especially since Bush has spent his 6 years remaking the government according to the Unitary Executive "theory" that is his only real ideology other than unlimited money and power. He's spending OVER $3 TRILLION of your money (paid over the rest of your life) every year, on his priorities, not yours.
Stop him now. Impeach him now. It's the only way to stop the damage before he starts "upgrading" the impeachment process itself.
It's lonely at the top.
I used CygWin a few times, even wrote some apps for its API. It was crude, but effective for some tasks, which could be tested thoroughly before deployment.
But the trick is a complete API that runs all KDE or GNOME apps under Windows. With a secret API mapping, so MS can control it and compete with it - roll out Linux apps that work better than the "real" ones, because they use the secret "works faster/better" API to make Windows do its thing.
CygWin proves that it can be done, has been done for years. With MS' budget and other resources, it wouldn't take long for it to use CygWin's open source to figure out how to do what CygWin does, then improve it and fold it in. A tiny fraction of the Vista effort could have done this by now. If I were Gates or Ballmer, I'd have done it, even just to have an ace in the hole.
But then, if I were Gates or Ballmer, I'd spend over $100M a year giving a team of 100 crack programmers & managers a $1M budget to make my PC the best possible PC in the world, using any MS source code they wanted. Then I'd test it on a few thousand people for another $10M. And then I'd roll it out to the public a year later, so I was always a year ahead, but the rest of the world made more apps. But they don't do anything like that. So who knows if they're making a LINE-ux emulator in their whole paranoid "no VMs" sector.
But again, they could, and that's why the MS/Novell deal stinks. And why I don't believe for a second that Novell is just "punishing MS for SCO", because MS does indeed ensure it never gets punished by anyone.