Re:Near Ground Ozone _IS_ an environmental problem
on
Ozone As Pesticide
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· Score: 1
While ground-level ozone is bad for people, ground-level pesticides are worse for you. Furthermore, the real problem with ground-level ozone is that irt reacts with volitile hydrocarbons to make icky smog. This is not so much of a problem in rural areas (like, say, farms).
It seems like the advantage Peppercoin offers is that it's easier for the merchant to process. I imagine that the merchant uses regular credit card clearing to get paid for the $10 tokens, meaning they don't have to add any new external interfaces to their business process. Of course, they still need to significantly update their internal processes in order to go from 100 tokens with an average value of $.10 to approximately 1 credit card transaction with a value of $10.
Is the internet, which can be used for almost anything besides transferring actual physical objects (wouldn't that be cool!)
Totally OT, but hey:
Z-Corp makes color 3-D printers that make plastic objects. These'll generally run you under $10k.
Strata Sys makes stereolithography printers. More expensive, and not in color, but stronger. They're about $30k.
EOS GmbH makes printers that make metal parts. You can print out replacement parts for your car, rocket ship, etc. (Warning - web site uses Flash, Mozilla-squashed popups, annoying no-copy PDFs) No mention of price on the site:-/
bwt (68845) sez:
Violating the terms of the licence is only illegal if it results in copyright infringement. Fair use is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement.
I agree that there may be no copyright violation, but you're still in violation of the license, right? Doesn't that mean that the licenser can stop the licensee from using the licensed product? (I.e, the FSF could make Castle stop using the kernel code.?)
JoeBuck (7947) writes:
A three-line chunk would probably come under fair use. Also, there are some code sequences that pretty much can only be written one way; again it's fair use. The fact that it's the GPL makes no difference here.
Are you sure that it makes the GPL irrelevant? You may not be violating copyright law by using the code, but you are violating the terms of your license. As such, you are bad, and can be reasonably sued, and compelled to do what the judge tellys you to do if you lose.
Now, if it's actually 3 lines of code, you can probably say that you came up with it on your own, and the FSF would have to have some proof that you stole the code (testimony from the developer, emails, whatever).
Of course, that doesn't appear to the issue here, as the post mentioned function signatures and the like. It looks more as if this is the wholesale copying of major systems.
Site was mostly hosed when I tried to visit. Telnet got this for me: - We are starting to get the distinct impression that FMC is fucking with us on the peroxide supply situation. We keep doing the things they say (spending thousands of dollars), and they keep coming up with some other reason we still can't buy peroxide (or just not return calls for weeks). They have strung us along for a long time now, and convinced us to stop talking to Degussa, but we still don't have peroxide.
There was some talk about this a while ago, but I was a lot more hopeful about FMC, so I didn't pursue it -- maybe it is time to set up a new company on the scale of X-L Space Systems.
I don't want to be in the chemical processing business, but I would probably be willing to be an anchor customer. I want to buy $100,000 worth of peroxide this year.
One of Michael Carden's customers has one of his concentrators, and is willing to do some peroxide production for us, but I would really prefer to work with a company, even a small one, that is devoted to peroxide, and really cares about all the details, not just someone that can feed a machine.
Would any ERPS people be inter ested in actually running a business to do this? I would be happiest working with a proven production system (one of Michael's), but I could entertain notions of paying for more development work on the ERPS concentrators.
This is sort of a trial balloon here -- if FMC turns around and ships us peroxide, that is still my preferred solution.
Some Brit hacker (classican definition; one posession more intellectual curiosity than propriety) decides to write the best worm he can. He doesn't actually want to do anything bad, it's just an interesting challenge. He didn't attack anything, and the Brits didn't actually punish him or anything. Good thing he wasn't in the U.S., where he would undoubtedly be tossed in jail for a few years.
Anyhoo, meanwhile some less talented cracker releases Code Red. What do the Feds do? They keep whitehouse.gov up and running. Whee. In a real attack, the feds can't do anything. Anyone who seriously wants to do damage is not going to spend months prepping a live worm, they're going to test it privately then unleash a horde of destruction. In that case, the investigators are only going to be able to do anything after the damage has been done.
This story is a bit of propoganda fluff that tries to cover up the ineffectuality of law enforcement in this domain.
From the article:
If someone commits three felonies, they are put away for life.
Of course, this is a horrible law, mostly used to imprison non-violent criminals. It's worth pointing out that the family for whom this law was passed (their daughter was killed by a repeat sexual offender on parole) is actively campaigning against the law.
The moral is that one must be very careful when constructing laws that propose solutions to difficult problems. Any law making it legal to hack somebody's machine is subject to enormous abuse, and shold not be lightly passed.
Cell phone companies trying to screw over customers, freenets. News at 11.
They want to use 802.11 networks to "relieve congestion on cell-phone towers." In other words, "we don't like building new towers. I know, let's use the WiFi network that our customers are paying for to cheap out!" This will, of course, dramatically increase the load on the the WiFi networks, increasing the cost of commercial ones and making FreeNets more expensive to run. Your cell-phone service stays at the same price, though. This is remarkably dishonest.
Hopefully it'll backfire and people will just start using dedicated VoIP services once they realize that they're paying for the network anyway. It'll still hurt FreeNets, but at least it'll smack down the telco monopolies.
When I was employed, I didn't have anything like the time to blog. Once I was laid off, I posted often. Now that I have some freelance work, I post less.
There are certainly counterexamples. I know some folks who find it therapeutic, so they make time to blog. For them, it's a journal that they can selectively share. However, I have certainly witnessed this correlation among my friends.
neksys writes:
If the tax worked out to 1/10th of a cent on each message, the total cost to the user would be 1 penny each day - certainly not an unmanagable amount. That works out to $140,000 a day - or $51.1 million a year.
The problem is that they expect to raise almost a billion US dollars with this tax. That's closer to 2 cents per message. Now, as later posters pointed out, SMS in the UK costs on the order of 15 cents, but incomes in the UK are much higher than those in the Phillipines. (UK per capita GDP (ppp scaled): $24,700, Phillipines per capita GDP (ppp scaled): $4,000. Note that this is purchasing power parity scaled, so actual incomes in the Philipines are much lower than this indicates. Stupid CIA world factbook. 1995 numbers for the Phillipines indicate $850 raw per capita GDP, and I expect the PPP skew for the UK isn't too great.) This indicates that the equivilant cost of this tax to a Phillipino is 80 cents per message. And that, my first-world friend, is the message.
ONOIML8 sez:
"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."
Evil, says/. poster ONOIML8, is censorship. Be it by government, religious cult group, or privately held company in the "information technology" business.
That's nice. Now, let's say that some government imposes censorship over 20% of some body of information. Now, say that you can reduce this to 3%. Is it evil for you to do so? Note that you still can't get to AltaVista from China because they weren't, in your view, evil.
Say that you operate in a country that condones some types of censorship. Do you comply with that censorship and allow people to get at the other stuff, or do you resist and just get shut down?
Your statement is hard to disagree with, but not actually that useful. Arguably, Google's censorship reduces the amount of restriction of information in the world.
WPIDalamar writes:
Caffenine is a bad idea for cold rooms. It makes your blood vessels shrink a bit, bringing less warmth to your extremeties. I never understood why computer geeks working in cold labs suck down the caffenine.
Ahh, but you see, by constricting your blood vessels and restricting the flow of heat you your extermities, you're keeping it in your core. This will help you survive longer if you fall asleep there and there aren't any saint bernards handy to pull you to safety.
UCRowerG writes:
I wonder what else designers could do with that extra heat energy. If these heat pipes turn methanol into vapor, carry it to heat fans, then recondense it (due to heat loss) back into liquid.... isn't this process quite similar to how turbines work with steam? I wonder how much power could be gleaned from the extra heat. Maybe someone could design a tiny electrical generator. I doubt you could run anything significant off the power output, but I'm sure there could be some use for it, rather than simply letting that extra energy go to waste.
The problem with solutions like this is that the power generation step interferes with the cooling step. In other words, the inefficiency in the power generation reduces the efficiency of the cooling. However, the whole point of this is cooling, which means that you have to put in bigger, heavier cooling mechanisms to cope with the reduced efficiency.
It might be worth it if you could come up with a super-efficient generator, but that's pretty unlikely. Furthermore, the temperature gradients here are pretty low (boiling point of methanol vs. room temp), so there's not a whole lot of ooomph to drive your generator. Heat pipe designers are pretty happy when they can use this thermal gradient just to power their heat pipe convection, actual generation seems a long way off.
I see nothing in this article that distinguishes this "smart" heat pipe from standard heat pipes that have existed for quite some time.
It's an incremental improvement on a standard heat pipe. The most advanced laptop heat pipes today are phase change, a volatile liquid is heated to a gas and flows out to the cooling fins. These tend to use natural convection to work.
This device (as is says at the end of the article) uses capillary action to move the cooling liquid from the hot side to the cool side. It doesn't say if this is more efficient than phase change. I expect that it would work better in non-stationary applications, where a phase change material would just get mixed up. They list military wearables as a potential application.
I've been using Strata 3D for years. It's no Maya, but it's got a fairly decent modeler and a decent ray-tracer. I like it because it's pretty straightforward to use (as opposed to, say, Blender). New versions have IK and all that junk, and the animation support is almost good. (Note that these are compared to some theoretical package that's easy to use and powerful. AFAIK, such a thing doesn't exist.) Anyway, there's a demo in their online store, try it out. (The MacOSX version doesn't have a demo yet, but 3.7 runs fine under Classic.)
Parent is not "informative," parent is "Wrong"
on
My Compost Bin And I
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· Score: 3, Informative
Who cares about the compost getting wet when it rains? So long as the drainage is fairly good, a bit of rain won't hurt
Wet compost is bad. Compost must be moist in order to work. Wet compost gets moldy, mold is bad. (See below)
It looks like it is sitting in the sun. That's going to really stink in the summer. Instead of being a nice place friendly mold/fungi/insects to hang out, it is just going to attact wasps and roaches in the summer.
Heat is good. The bacteria that make compost go like heat. The mold and fungus make stuff smell bad, they don't particularly like it hot. (Warm, yes. Hot, no.)
How do the worms get in? Worms really help to make good compost. They mix it around, while eating much nasty bacteria.
Worm composting is an entirely different process from bacterial composting. Worm composting has its good points (like it gives you non-smelly organic fertilizer [aka worm pee]), but it's a lot harder than regualr composting.
why don't you instead turn the compost bins into electricity generators.
Because composing is an aerobic process. The electricity generation stuff converts biomass to methane, which is burned to boil water, drive a turbine, run a fuel cell, etc. This process is significantly trickier, and not something you can do with crap lying around the average house.
Compost is good for your soil. It has a decent amount of nutrients, retains water well, and does not hold excess water (it provides good drainage). In areas with very sandy or clay-ful soil, composting is the only economical way to get decent growing conditions.
Composting takes most of the stuff that makes your trash smell bad and makes it not smell bad. (Meat, dairy, eggs do not got in the compost.) If your compost sk1llz don't suck, your compost pile doesn't smell bad. This is especially good if you forget to take out the trash sometimes.
Composting keeps material out of landfills. Organic matter in landfills doesn't decompose. In a compost pile, it does. Leaves and grass will shrink by like a factor of 5 when composted. This is why many municipalities are subsidizing compost bins for their residents; it's cheaper than landfilling.
Compost piles are bad (except for grass and leaves). Compost bins are good. They have small enough holes that vermin don't get in. They're contained, insulated, and keep a more constant moisture level; this encourages aerobic decomposition (as opposed to rotting). Meat/bones, oil, and dairy do not go in the compost!
These few simple rules pretty much ensure that compost is not a nuisance for your neighbors.
I don't get it. Why all the work on the tiles on top, why would you want to keep rain out of your compost heap? Doesn't the moisture help with the decomposition? Could someone enlighten me on this before i ask four questions in a row?
As others have pointed out, too much moisture is bad. Also, the roof can help keep in heat (although this one doesn't look great for that). Heat is good. Heat speeds up decomposition, discourages weeds, and kills off pathogens.
I made a composter out of a plastic 55 gallon garbage can with a locking lid. Holes in the bottom and sides, none in the top. When I'm paying attention to moisture levels and adding at the right nitrogen/carbon mix, it gets hot enough to steam. The locking lid keeps out raccoons, too.
Slashdot Mirror
While ground-level ozone is bad for people, ground-level pesticides are worse for you. Furthermore, the real problem with ground-level ozone is that irt reacts with volitile hydrocarbons to make icky smog. This is not so much of a problem in rural areas (like, say, farms).
It seems like the advantage Peppercoin offers is that it's easier for the merchant to process. I imagine that the merchant uses regular credit card clearing to get paid for the $10 tokens, meaning they don't have to add any new external interfaces to their business process. Of course, they still need to significantly update their internal processes in order to go from 100 tokens with an average value of $.10 to approximately 1 credit card transaction with a value of $10.
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/websql/prod/ecfs
Took me a while to find it, but maybe I'm just spacy.
- Z-Corp makes color 3-D printers that make plastic objects. These'll generally run you under $10k.
- Strata Sys makes stereolithography printers. More expensive, and not in color, but stronger. They're about $30k.
- EOS GmbH makes printers that make metal parts. You can print out replacement parts for your car, rocket ship, etc. (Warning - web site uses Flash, Mozilla-squashed popups, annoying no-copy PDFs) No mention of price on the site
:-/
If you don't want to sping fr a printer of your own there are lots of people who will do it for you.Ah, I'm an idiot, then. Thanks for the clarification. Oh, and if you happen to read this and have points, mod up the parent. :-)
Now, if it's actually 3 lines of code, you can probably say that you came up with it on your own, and the FSF would have to have some proof that you stole the code (testimony from the developer, emails, whatever).
Of course, that doesn't appear to the issue here, as the post mentioned function signatures and the like. It looks more as if this is the wholesale copying of major systems.
Site was mostly hosed when I tried to visit. Telnet got this for me:
-
We are starting to get the distinct impression that FMC is fucking with us on the peroxide supply situation. We keep doing the things they say (spending thousands of dollars), and they keep coming up with some other reason we still can't buy peroxide (or just not return calls for weeks). They have strung us along for a long time now, and convinced us to stop talking to Degussa, but we still don't have peroxide.
There was some talk about this a while ago, but I was a lot more hopeful about FMC, so I didn't pursue it -- maybe it is time to set up a new company on the scale of X-L Space Systems.
I don't want to be in the chemical processing business, but I would probably be willing to be an anchor customer. I want to buy $100,000 worth of peroxide this year.
One of Michael Carden's customers has one of his concentrators, and is willing to do some peroxide production for us, but I would really prefer to work with a company, even a small one, that is devoted to peroxide, and really cares about all the details, not just someone that can feed a machine.
Would any ERPS people be inter ested in actually running a business to do this? I would be happiest working with a proven production system (one of Michael's), but I could entertain notions of paying for more development work on the ERPS concentrators.
This is sort of a trial balloon here -- if FMC turns around and ships us peroxide, that is still my preferred solution.
John Carmack
Here'e how the story looks to me:
Some Brit hacker (classican definition; one posession more intellectual curiosity than propriety) decides to write the best worm he can. He doesn't actually want to do anything bad, it's just an interesting challenge. He didn't attack anything, and the Brits didn't actually punish him or anything. Good thing he wasn't in the U.S., where he would undoubtedly be tossed in jail for a few years.
Anyhoo, meanwhile some less talented cracker releases Code Red. What do the Feds do? They keep whitehouse.gov up and running. Whee. In a real attack, the feds can't do anything. Anyone who seriously wants to do damage is not going to spend months prepping a live worm, they're going to test it privately then unleash a horde of destruction. In that case, the investigators are only going to be able to do anything after the damage has been done.
This story is a bit of propoganda fluff that tries to cover up the ineffectuality of law enforcement in this domain.
The moral is that one must be very careful when constructing laws that propose solutions to difficult problems. Any law making it legal to hack somebody's machine is subject to enormous abuse, and shold not be lightly passed.
Cell phone companies trying to screw over customers, freenets. News at 11.
They want to use 802.11 networks to "relieve congestion on cell-phone towers." In other words, "we don't like building new towers. I know, let's use the WiFi network that our customers are paying for to cheap out!" This will, of course, dramatically increase the load on the the WiFi networks, increasing the cost of commercial ones and making FreeNets more expensive to run. Your cell-phone service stays at the same price, though. This is remarkably dishonest.
Hopefully it'll backfire and people will just start using dedicated VoIP services once they realize that they're paying for the network anyway. It'll still hurt FreeNets, but at least it'll smack down the telco monopolies.
FYI, at one of the cited studies that stated that Linux's TCO was lower was sponsored byRedHat, another by IBM.
"It depends" seems to mean "It depends on who's sponsoring the study."
When I was employed, I didn't have anything like the time to blog. Once I was laid off, I posted often. Now that I have some freelance work, I post less.
There are certainly counterexamples. I know some folks who find it therapeutic, so they make time to blog. For them, it's a journal that they can selectively share. However, I have certainly witnessed this correlation among my friends.
Say that you operate in a country that condones some types of censorship. Do you comply with that censorship and allow people to get at the other stuff, or do you resist and just get shut down?
Your statement is hard to disagree with, but not actually that useful. Arguably, Google's censorship reduces the amount of restriction of information in the world.
It might be worth it if you could come up with a super-efficient generator, but that's pretty unlikely. Furthermore, the temperature gradients here are pretty low (boiling point of methanol vs. room temp), so there's not a whole lot of ooomph to drive your generator. Heat pipe designers are pretty happy when they can use this thermal gradient just to power their heat pipe convection, actual generation seems a long way off.
This device (as is says at the end of the article) uses capillary action to move the cooling liquid from the hot side to the cool side. It doesn't say if this is more efficient than phase change. I expect that it would work better in non-stationary applications, where a phase change material would just get mixed up. They list military wearables as a potential application.
Hrm, "they do consider the hacker to be a professional rather than recreational due to the large number of networks he hacked."
/. reader? This is so cool! I thought I was unemployed, but no, here I am, practicing my profession *right now!* Rawk!
Wow, I guess I'm a professional
I've been using Strata 3D for years. It's no Maya, but it's got a fairly decent modeler and a decent ray-tracer. I like it because it's pretty straightforward to use (as opposed to, say, Blender). New versions have IK and all that junk, and the animation support is almost good. (Note that these are compared to some theoretical package that's easy to use and powerful. AFAIK, such a thing doesn't exist.) Anyway, there's a demo in their online store, try it out. (The MacOSX version doesn't have a demo yet, but 3.7 runs fine under Classic.)
These few simple rules pretty much ensure that compost is not a nuisance for your neighbors.
As others have pointed out, too much moisture is bad. Also, the roof can help keep in heat (although this one doesn't look great for that). Heat is good. Heat speeds up decomposition, discourages weeds, and kills off pathogens.
I made a composter out of a plastic 55 gallon garbage can with a locking lid. Holes in the bottom and sides, none in the top. When I'm paying attention to moisture levels and adding at the right nitrogen/carbon mix, it gets hot enough to steam. The locking lid keeps out raccoons, too.