If you finance those panels at 4% over 10 years
I'd have to be nuts to borrow money to build a PV system. The savings would barely be enough to service the debt.
Now, if you can get by with fewer/cheaper panels
No, the economics get worse if you downsize. The new requirement of TOU metering means that in summer peak hours, you pay $.36/kW.hr if you install photovoltaics, whereas if you don't install PV, you can stay with domestic D rates, which are about $.20/KW.hr. Unless the legislature admits it made a mistake and gets rid of the TOU requirement, the only way to make one of these systems economical is to have a big enough system that it supplies almost all of your electricity needs during summer peak hours.
The math with current photovoltaics will not come out in favour until the fossil fuel rises by a factor of at least 10 times.
Well, no. You simply have no idea what you're talking about. I've got a quote for a system sitting here in front of me. The return on investment is about 5% annually. Not great, but on the same order of magnitude as other relatively non-variable investments. If the cost of electricity rose by a factor of 10, then the return on investment would be 50% annually. If that day came, then everybody would go photovoltaic, even people in Anchorage with houses shaded by trees, and the electric company would go out of business.
A question: Do they still have net metering available (meter runs backwards if you overproduce)?
Yes, but they will never write you a check. They put you on yearly billing, and the best you can do is to zero out your bill at the end of the year. If you overproduce, they take the excess energy you produce, and don't pay you for it. Because of that, nobody builds a grid-tied system that overproduces.
This might actually be really useful then, as if you overbuild by 2x, those extra 4kW would be generated during the peak-price time.
It's true that the new TOU requirement has the effect of providing a very strong incentive to build the biggest possible system. However, you can't get paid for overproducing. In any case, people generally don't have enough roof space to be able to build a system that has overcapacity.
I'm in exactly the situation described in the article. I've gotten my first quote on a solar system, and will get my second quote next week. I'm trying to figure out if the whole thing makes sense financially, and the TOU requirement certainly doesn't help. Data on the quote I have:
5.2 kW nominal power, 4.4 kW output from the inverter
estimated yearly output of 7600 kW.hr
$40,900, lowered to $28,100 by rebates
468 square feet
Last year we used about 12,000 kW.hr, which cost us $2,400. We've instituted a bunch of conservation measures, which should make that figure a lot lower in the future. The critical thing is the summer months, when we'd sometimes been using 1500 kW.hr per month. This is partly the pool pump (which you have to run longer when the water temp is higher), but mainly AC. Actually although we're in Southern California, our house stays pretty cool naturally, and often we go a whole summer without turning on the AC for more than a few days, but there's always the temptation just to turn on the AC because it feels more comfortable. We just signed up for a voluntary program where Edison installs a remote control on your AC and turns it off at peak times, in return for which they give you some money. We've also started using the pool pump for fewer hours per day, which seems to be working OK as long as I'm very careful about all other aspects of pool maintenance.
If we hadn't instituted any conservation measures, and if the legislature doesn't backstep on the TOU thing (which seems to have been simply a mistake), then I'm estimating we'd only save about $1,250 per year with the solar system, which isn't much of a return on a $28k investment. Judged purely as an investment, we'd have been better off just putting the money in the bond market or something.
On the other hand, if we do the conservation measures, then the TOU might not be such a big deal, because we wouldn't be buying much energy at the summer, peak rate of $.36/kW.hr. My estimate is that if we hardly ever turn on the AC (which we've done in some summers), then the TOU thing becomes financially irrelevant to us, and the system saves us about $1,500/year, which is somewhat better. It becomes an investment sort of similar to a standard real estate investment, where you pay a bunch of money up front, and then get a steady for a long time. One big issue is that you want to make sure your system lasts long enough so that it pays for itself, and that means you want to have confidence in your warranty. The good news is that the companies I'm getting quotes from have been in business for 40 years. The bad news is that the LA Times is quoting them as saying that unless the legislature reverses the TOU requirement, they'll all go out of business within 100 days.
The real issue is global warming. If it's reasonably neutral in investment terms, then I'm inclined to do it, but it's worrisome to have this cloud of uncertainty.
It's a little pointless arguing what copyleft would be like in a world without copyright, because we're never going to live in a world without copyright.
Let's focus on what we might really be able to achieve:
Under the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, US copyrights will start expiring again in 2017. We need to make sure that when that day comes, there isn't yet another copyright extension.
We need to work against software patents, business method patents, and abuse of the patent system. We need to work for institutional change in the US patent office so they'll start rejecting completely bogus patents.
We need to repeal the DMCA.
We need to work to keep fair use legally healthy, and prevent it from being more and more circumscribed and forgotten.
We should work to change the law so that orphaned works can't remain copyrighted for a century, during which nobody is allowed to publish them.
I think that PDF should be the standard for submitting assignments. It's open, and there's no need to worry about formatting errors, or the professor accidentally pressing a key and creating spelling errors.
In fiction publishing, the most commonly used format is rtf. The spec is free and open, and unlike pdf it's designed to be an editable format. In education, I don't understand why students would submit papers electronically. I'm a teacher, and I can't imagine dealing with all my students sending me electronic files. The first thing I'd have to do would be to print them out so I could write on them --- unless they're putting comments on electronically?
The cost depends on a lot of factors, but four-color printing is indeed very expensive. The other big factor in PPB (paper, printing, and binding) costs is the length of the press run. Printing costs are almost entirely setup costs, so the unit price of producing a copy of Harry Potter is extremely low, but the unit price can be very high for a book that isn't going to sell many copies. If a black and white textbook costs $100-150, it's probably because it's specialized and doesn't sell a lot of copies. That's not to say that textbook publishing isn't a scam; it's just that color really is expensive to produce.
Is Slashdot now a forum for random cranks to publish their personal rants?
The answer to your question is yes, except that you can delete the word "now." The slashdot editors have never had enough scientific background to know science from a hole in the ground. That's why I stopped reading the science section a long time ago. Unfortunately this one was frontpaged, so I wasted time looking at it.
Huh? I don't get it. How is technology going to fix anything? Sure, it's true that there are inefficiencies in the system, like being asked for your health history over and over, as described in the article, but you're not going to wring any major change out of this dysfunctional system just by digitizing people's health histories.
Technology is part of the problem. Technology costs money, and part of the problem with the US system is that it encourages people to spend inappropriately large amounts of money.
The fundamental problem is that it's a positive feedback system that's doing what positive feedback systems always do: wig out exponentially. If you really want to see something scary, look at an itemized hospital bill that includes the costs of things like bandages. The bandages cost 10 or 100 times more than they would at the drugstore. The reason they cost so much is that insurance companies are willing to pay it. Why are insurance companies willing to pay it? Because everything else is ridiculously expensive too, and anyway the insurance companies can raise their rates to cover it. Once the insurance companies raise their rates, the health-industrial complex smells money, and raises their prices.
If you like government regulation, one very simple, sensible thing to do would be for the government to penalize people who are affluent, but have a low deductible compared to their income. If my annual income is $150,000, then they should use tax incentives to browbeat me into not buying insurance that has a deductible any lower than, say, $40,000/year. That would make me treat all these expenditures like real money, not like other people's money. All of a sudden I'd be complaining bitterly about the overpriced bandages. When a nurse pulled out one of the hospital's bandages, I'd say, "No no no-- wait, don't open that! My wife went and got some bandages from CVS. Here, use one of these."
I had a similar problem, but worse, IMO, because Wolfram refused to help me. I bought a copy of the mac version of Mathematica ca. 1992. Later, when I upgraded to a later version of MacOS, Mathematica wouldn't work. Wolfram's response was that I needed to buy a more recent version of Mathematica, at full price. Since then, I've used nothing but OSS (including Maxima) for symbolic math, and have never regretted it.
Digg is pathetic. The concept is democracy gone crazy, like those idiotic TV shows where the audience votes for who's the best performer. Whatever slashdot's shortcomings in other areas, at least they have paid editors who work at it like a real job. Reading the typical comments on digg, they all seem to be by high school students who think they know the secret to tabletop nuclear fusion, and they're all voting each other's posts up and down like crazy, based on nothing but their own biases. At least with slashdot moderation, posts are likely to be moderated by randomly chosen people who didn't get handed a license to go around voting their friends up and their enemies down.
Encryption doesn't have to be conflated with authentication. You don't need to prove who you are to secure your server's communications with clients.
Agreed. That's what this whole thread is about.
Or they think encryption should be available for all HTTP traffic instead of forcing people to pay hundreds of dollars to these "authority" rackets for something functionally equivalent and just as secure as a self-signed certificate
No, it's not functionally equivalent. The CA is supposed to verify that you really are who you say you are.
Throw a cheap 1 tb RAID0 in the machine and you've got enough space to store 20 full blu-ray movies, or more than enough to keep every major studio picture on set top boxes for the first 3 weeks of its run time, even during the summer release rush.
Sure, but what about all the other movies people want? The NY Times article talks about how one of Vudu's founders got interested in the idea because his wife couldn't find an obscure 1980's video about Marco Polo. Caching isn't going to help with that. The whole concept doesn't make sense.
You're actually interested in whether this Ckwop guy I'm speaking to now is the same guy as I spoke to last-time. [...]
When you weaken your security requirement to this position, you can remove a staggering amount of complexity.
A couple more reasons why a free certification authority is not as useful or feasible as one might think:
The traditional service is useless unless someone is going to check on the real-world credentials of the person applying for a certificate. That means there have to be office workers sitting around in cubicles processing paperwork: please fax us a copy of a recent utility bill, blah blah blah. Does that sound like fun, or does it sound like work? Does it sound like something that Mr. J. Bearded Hacker feels like doing all day as his contribution to the free information movement? Sure, theoretically you can have a web of trust based on key signing parties, etc., but in reality that's never taken off to the point where it was a useful option for most businesses.
I think a lot of people who complain about the expense of certificates are individuals who would like to set up their own apache server and take credit card transactions via https. The fact that they're worried about this particular expense tells you that they're probably hobbyists who aren't serious about running a business full time. Well, I've had some experience with taking credit card transactions for a hobby business, and I can tell you that you just don't want to do it. Setting up a merchant account is a lot of hassle. Dealing with transactions is a lot of hassle. You're actually setting up a business relationship with three or four different companies that are involved in the process, and when there's a problem, each one will blame all the others. You're dealing with customers who use stolen cards. You're telling the companies your banking info, and then as time goes on they start putting mysterious monthly charges on your account, which you have to fight them about. If you're making a living by running a restaurant, then by all means, you need to have a merchant account. If you're a hobbyist, you should find some other way to handle transactions.
..and you can always use your own editor and compile with the free compiler.
MTASC doesn't support actionscript 3.
Haxe does support actoinscript 3, but it's a different language, so it isn't source code compatible with Adobe's compilers.
MP3 is the only audio codec that's supported by flash, and the mpegla licensing terms make it illegal to distribute MP3 decoders in large numbers for free, without paying royalties. (I believe ubuntu, for example, pays royalties for the privilege of distributing it for free.)
The Version 2 Components are not freely available. That means that if you're writing a flash app, and want to do it without paying Adobe money, you have to use another gui component library, which won't be source-code compatible with the kind of flash everybody else is writing.
The license of the flash spec, http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileforma t/license/ , says "3)a. You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders.swf files."
Summary: flash is a disaster if you want to write OSS using an OSS toolchain.
But it's a better theory than QM for the simple fact that it talks about particle positions instead of observers. One assumes, after all, that physics goes on even when physicists aren't there to observe it.
Huh? QM doesn't talk about observers. The Copenhagen interpretation of QM talks about observers. To my mind, the Copenhagen interpretation is just a useful heuristic for discussing certain phenomena involving entanglement between one quantum mechanical system (my brain) and another (the experiment). The many-worlds interpretation works just fine without imputing any special properties to observers.
what are the options to set up a Linux system to reduce power usage and fan noise when idle?
I just built an amd x64 dual-core system, and it only draws 51 W for the whole system when the screen powers down. AMD has something called cool'n'quiet, which was supported automagically when I installed Ubuntu Edgy. It ramps down the cpu frequency when the processors are idle. Because the system draws so little power, I was able to disable the case fan, so now all I have running is the cpu fan and the power supply's fan, and it's extremely quiet.
However, I have never been able to get S3 sleep working on this system, and would love to get some info on how to do it. I enabled S3 in the bios, and gdm automatically detected that, and started offering me "suspend" as an option. But when I use it, the machine refuses to wake back up again.
For the typical user, there are several simple things you can do to cut down on the electricity your machine uses. (1) Replace your CRT with an LCD. (2) Ditch the high-end video card that you may not need if all you're not really using the system for gaming. The onboard video on most mobos these days is perfectly fine for normal desktop stuff. (3) Get a "kill-a-watt" meter, and find out what equipment is really using what amount of electricity. I had a set of speakers that was drawing twelve watts, 24/7, even when the computer was off.
The big problem in my household is the pool pump. The damn things are infamous energy hogs. Ours accounts for approximately 50% of our energy bill every month. If you cut down the number of hours it runs every day, you get a green pool. I'm starting to get seriously motivated to get photovoltaics installed.
What you're talking about is exactly the kind of stuff discussed in the
space.com article linked to from the 2004 slashdot article. They discuss a certain electric quadrupole configuration.
This article talks about magnetic shielding. Here is a web page that gives references to a whole bunch of papers on this topic (mostly powerpoints, but look at the pdf links).
So does that mean when went sent people to space before, they got exposed to all kinds of particals and stuff? Are they still ok? If so, then do we really need this?
Or....did we fake the moon stuff? Galactic cosmic rays are the biggest, most difficult problem. For a variety of reasons, explained in the WP link, they're not a big problem for low-earth orbit space stations like the ISS. The Apollo astronauts did get exposed to a lot of radiation, but they were only out for about a week, whereas an elliptical transfer orbit to Mars takes 1.4 years round trip in interplanetary space. For anyone who's actually had to wear a radiation badge to work, the integrated dosages they've estimated for a Mars issue just sound nuts, like somebody moved a decimal place over three places by mistake. It's a huge amount of radiation, roughly on the right order of magnitude to kill a human being. The Apollo astronauts got dosages at the level where there's speculation they may be getting cataracts at a significantly higher rate than normal. Scale that up by a ratio of 1.4 years to 1 week, and you get effects that are just not on the order of magnitude that you could laugh off heroically.
This was reported on slashdot three years ago. The space.com article linked to from the 2004 slashdot summary is actually much more detailed in terms of the science. The big engineering problems with this approach still have not been solved. (1) If you're not using superconducting magnet coils, a large, static magnetic field requires a huge power supply to keep it going. That's not practical for foreseeable, near-future technologies for going to Mars, which will need to use very small payloads. (2) Superconducting magnets are unreliable, finicky beasts, at least from my experience here on earth. You need big, heavy cryostats full of liquified gases. It's not necessarily a good idea to have a vital piece of safety equipment for your spaceship depend on an inherently high-maintenance, low-reliability technology. (3) Large electric fields are hard to maintain because you get arcing and discharges. I used to work at an electrostatic accelerator that used megavolt potentials, and it would start sparking at the most inopportune times, for reasons like, e.g., someone leaving behind a speck of lint inside the accelerator. When a spark would happen, you could hear it all through the building, and the energy released was equivalent to dropping a VW bug off the roof of a building. Again, low-reliability, high maintenance. (4) Although it's possible to use tricks to get rid of some of the particles, or channel particles to a place where they're not as harmful, you still have to deal with the fact that you have particles with both signs of charge, which feel forces in opposite directions from the same field. What repels one attracts the other. Also, if the particles get channeled to a certain place, and impact on something solid, then you get extremely intense secondary radiation at that spot.
One problem with this is that there are currently no usable video codecs that are available on licensing terms that would allow them to be distributed along with a linux distro, without paying extra money. Mpegla.com only licenses codecs for free if you're distributing small numbers of copies. IIRC, Ubuntu has paid money to be able to distribute the codecs licensed by mpegla. Yes, there is ogg theora, but no, it's not usable at this point, and no, flash doesn't support it. For audio, mp3 is the only codec supported by flash, and mp3 is patent encumbered.
I really think flash is a cool technology. (Of course you want to use flashblock to avoid flash ads.) For my kids, flash is the killer app -- clubpenguin.com, etc. My older daughter has a linux box in her room, and flash games account for an awful lot of her time on that computer. In fact, I really wanted to try writing some flash games myself, just for fun. Well, I found out that the landscape is pretty desolate if you want to do flash development using OSS tools, and write flash apps that will run on OSS players. There are nasty, extremely restrictive eulas associated with some of the gui libraries. There are the issues with patents. The whole platform is really not appropriate for OSS development, IMO, although the people on osflash.org clearly disagree with me:-)
This latest nonsense with enforced ads and DRM is just one more reason, IMO, for OSS users not to touch flash with a ten-foot pole. At least java is going GPL, and java applets are a usable alternative in many cases. Wikipedia uses a pure-java ogg player, which I think is extremely cool.
they still have at least 1 ide port as part of the chip set.
On the other hand, I believe Intel has done a better job than nvidia of releasing hardware documentation for their video chips, so if you're getting a mobo whose onboard video you're planning to use, that might be a reason to prefer Intel. (I don't think Intel sells separate, retail-packaged video cards.)
What do you think of his claim that the neocortex is built out of completely identical modules, which just end up getting programmed differently for their different functions? I'm not a neuroscientist, and reading the book, I found it difficult to judge how reliable a lot of his claims were, because he often failed to say what the evidence was. I also wasn't always sure which statements were controversial, which were his idiosyncratic ideas, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If you finance those panels at 4% over 10 years
I'd have to be nuts to borrow money to build a PV system. The savings would barely be enough to service the debt.
Now, if you can get by with fewer/cheaper panels
No, the economics get worse if you downsize. The new requirement of TOU metering means that in summer peak hours, you pay $.36/kW.hr if you install photovoltaics, whereas if you don't install PV, you can stay with domestic D rates, which are about $.20/KW.hr. Unless the legislature admits it made a mistake and gets rid of the TOU requirement, the only way to make one of these systems economical is to have a big enough system that it supplies almost all of your electricity needs during summer peak hours.
The math with current photovoltaics will not come out in favour until the fossil fuel rises by a factor of at least 10 times.
Well, no. You simply have no idea what you're talking about. I've got a quote for a system sitting here in front of me. The return on investment is about 5% annually. Not great, but on the same order of magnitude as other relatively non-variable investments. If the cost of electricity rose by a factor of 10, then the return on investment would be 50% annually. If that day came, then everybody would go photovoltaic, even people in Anchorage with houses shaded by trees, and the electric company would go out of business.
A question: Do they still have net metering available (meter runs backwards if you overproduce)?
Yes, but they will never write you a check. They put you on yearly billing, and the best you can do is to zero out your bill at the end of the year. If you overproduce, they take the excess energy you produce, and don't pay you for it. Because of that, nobody builds a grid-tied system that overproduces.
This might actually be really useful then, as if you overbuild by 2x, those extra 4kW would be generated during the peak-price time.
It's true that the new TOU requirement has the effect of providing a very strong incentive to build the biggest possible system. However, you can't get paid for overproducing. In any case, people generally don't have enough roof space to be able to build a system that has overcapacity.
I'm in exactly the situation described in the article. I've gotten my first quote on a solar system, and will get my second quote next week. I'm trying to figure out if the whole thing makes sense financially, and the TOU requirement certainly doesn't help. Data on the quote I have:
- 5.2 kW nominal power, 4.4 kW output from the inverter
- estimated yearly output of 7600 kW.hr
- $40,900, lowered to $28,100 by rebates
- 468 square feet
Last year we used about 12,000 kW.hr, which cost us $2,400. We've instituted a bunch of conservation measures, which should make that figure a lot lower in the future. The critical thing is the summer months, when we'd sometimes been using 1500 kW.hr per month. This is partly the pool pump (which you have to run longer when the water temp is higher), but mainly AC. Actually although we're in Southern California, our house stays pretty cool naturally, and often we go a whole summer without turning on the AC for more than a few days, but there's always the temptation just to turn on the AC because it feels more comfortable. We just signed up for a voluntary program where Edison installs a remote control on your AC and turns it off at peak times, in return for which they give you some money. We've also started using the pool pump for fewer hours per day, which seems to be working OK as long as I'm very careful about all other aspects of pool maintenance.If we hadn't instituted any conservation measures, and if the legislature doesn't backstep on the TOU thing (which seems to have been simply a mistake), then I'm estimating we'd only save about $1,250 per year with the solar system, which isn't much of a return on a $28k investment. Judged purely as an investment, we'd have been better off just putting the money in the bond market or something.
On the other hand, if we do the conservation measures, then the TOU might not be such a big deal, because we wouldn't be buying much energy at the summer, peak rate of $.36/kW.hr. My estimate is that if we hardly ever turn on the AC (which we've done in some summers), then the TOU thing becomes financially irrelevant to us, and the system saves us about $1,500/year, which is somewhat better. It becomes an investment sort of similar to a standard real estate investment, where you pay a bunch of money up front, and then get a steady for a long time. One big issue is that you want to make sure your system lasts long enough so that it pays for itself, and that means you want to have confidence in your warranty. The good news is that the companies I'm getting quotes from have been in business for 40 years. The bad news is that the LA Times is quoting them as saying that unless the legislature reverses the TOU requirement, they'll all go out of business within 100 days.
The real issue is global warming. If it's reasonably neutral in investment terms, then I'm inclined to do it, but it's worrisome to have this cloud of uncertainty.
It's a little pointless arguing what copyleft would be like in a world without copyright, because we're never going to live in a world without copyright.
Let's focus on what we might really be able to achieve:
I think that PDF should be the standard for submitting assignments. It's open, and there's no need to worry about formatting errors, or the professor accidentally pressing a key and creating spelling errors.
In fiction publishing, the most commonly used format is rtf. The spec is free and open, and unlike pdf it's designed to be an editable format. In education, I don't understand why students would submit papers electronically. I'm a teacher, and I can't imagine dealing with all my students sending me electronic files. The first thing I'd have to do would be to print them out so I could write on them --- unless they're putting comments on electronically?
The cost depends on a lot of factors, but four-color printing is indeed very expensive. The other big factor in PPB (paper, printing, and binding) costs is the length of the press run. Printing costs are almost entirely setup costs, so the unit price of producing a copy of Harry Potter is extremely low, but the unit price can be very high for a book that isn't going to sell many copies. If a black and white textbook costs $100-150, it's probably because it's specialized and doesn't sell a lot of copies. That's not to say that textbook publishing isn't a scam; it's just that color really is expensive to produce.
Is Slashdot now a forum for random cranks to publish their personal rants?
The answer to your question is yes, except that you can delete the word "now." The slashdot editors have never had enough scientific background to know science from a hole in the ground. That's why I stopped reading the science section a long time ago. Unfortunately this one was frontpaged, so I wasted time looking at it.
Huh? I don't get it. How is technology going to fix anything? Sure, it's true that there are inefficiencies in the system, like being asked for your health history over and over, as described in the article, but you're not going to wring any major change out of this dysfunctional system just by digitizing people's health histories.
Technology is part of the problem. Technology costs money, and part of the problem with the US system is that it encourages people to spend inappropriately large amounts of money.
The fundamental problem is that it's a positive feedback system that's doing what positive feedback systems always do: wig out exponentially. If you really want to see something scary, look at an itemized hospital bill that includes the costs of things like bandages. The bandages cost 10 or 100 times more than they would at the drugstore. The reason they cost so much is that insurance companies are willing to pay it. Why are insurance companies willing to pay it? Because everything else is ridiculously expensive too, and anyway the insurance companies can raise their rates to cover it. Once the insurance companies raise their rates, the health-industrial complex smells money, and raises their prices.
If you like government regulation, one very simple, sensible thing to do would be for the government to penalize people who are affluent, but have a low deductible compared to their income. If my annual income is $150,000, then they should use tax incentives to browbeat me into not buying insurance that has a deductible any lower than, say, $40,000/year. That would make me treat all these expenditures like real money, not like other people's money. All of a sudden I'd be complaining bitterly about the overpriced bandages. When a nurse pulled out one of the hospital's bandages, I'd say, "No no no-- wait, don't open that! My wife went and got some bandages from CVS. Here, use one of these."
I had a similar problem, but worse, IMO, because Wolfram refused to help me. I bought a copy of the mac version of Mathematica ca. 1992. Later, when I upgraded to a later version of MacOS, Mathematica wouldn't work. Wolfram's response was that I needed to buy a more recent version of Mathematica, at full price. Since then, I've used nothing but OSS (including Maxima) for symbolic math, and have never regretted it.
Digg is pathetic. The concept is democracy gone crazy, like those idiotic TV shows where the audience votes for who's the best performer. Whatever slashdot's shortcomings in other areas, at least they have paid editors who work at it like a real job. Reading the typical comments on digg, they all seem to be by high school students who think they know the secret to tabletop nuclear fusion, and they're all voting each other's posts up and down like crazy, based on nothing but their own biases. At least with slashdot moderation, posts are likely to be moderated by randomly chosen people who didn't get handed a license to go around voting their friends up and their enemies down.
Encryption doesn't have to be conflated with authentication. You don't need to prove who you are to secure your server's communications with clients.
Agreed. That's what this whole thread is about.
Or they think encryption should be available for all HTTP traffic instead of forcing people to pay hundreds of dollars to these "authority" rackets for something functionally equivalent and just as secure as a self-signed certificate
No, it's not functionally equivalent. The CA is supposed to verify that you really are who you say you are.
Throw a cheap 1 tb RAID0 in the machine and you've got enough space to store 20 full blu-ray movies, or more than enough to keep every major studio picture on set top boxes for the first 3 weeks of its run time, even during the summer release rush.
Sure, but what about all the other movies people want? The NY Times article talks about how one of Vudu's founders got interested in the idea because his wife couldn't find an obscure 1980's video about Marco Polo. Caching isn't going to help with that. The whole concept doesn't make sense.
A couple more reasons why a free certification authority is not as useful or feasible as one might think:
- MTASC doesn't support actionscript 3.
- Haxe does support actoinscript 3, but it's a different language, so it isn't source code compatible with Adobe's compilers.
- MP3 is the only audio codec that's supported by flash, and the mpegla licensing terms make it illegal to distribute MP3 decoders in large numbers for free, without paying royalties. (I believe ubuntu, for example, pays royalties for the privilege of distributing it for free.)
- The Version 2 Components are not freely available. That means that if you're writing a flash app, and want to do it without paying Adobe money, you have to use another gui component library, which won't be source-code compatible with the kind of flash everybody else is writing.
- The license of the flash spec, http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileform
a t/license/ , says "3)a. You may not use the Specification in any way to create or develop a runtime, client, player, executable or other program that reads or renders .swf files."
Summary: flash is a disaster if you want to write OSS using an OSS toolchain.But it's a better theory than QM for the simple fact that it talks about particle positions instead of observers. One assumes, after all, that physics goes on even when physicists aren't there to observe it.
Huh? QM doesn't talk about observers. The Copenhagen interpretation of QM talks about observers. To my mind, the Copenhagen interpretation is just a useful heuristic for discussing certain phenomena involving entanglement between one quantum mechanical system (my brain) and another (the experiment). The many-worlds interpretation works just fine without imputing any special properties to observers.
what are the options to set up a Linux system to reduce power usage and fan noise when idle?
I just built an amd x64 dual-core system, and it only draws 51 W for the whole system when the screen powers down. AMD has something called cool'n'quiet, which was supported automagically when I installed Ubuntu Edgy. It ramps down the cpu frequency when the processors are idle. Because the system draws so little power, I was able to disable the case fan, so now all I have running is the cpu fan and the power supply's fan, and it's extremely quiet.
However, I have never been able to get S3 sleep working on this system, and would love to get some info on how to do it. I enabled S3 in the bios, and gdm automatically detected that, and started offering me "suspend" as an option. But when I use it, the machine refuses to wake back up again.
For the typical user, there are several simple things you can do to cut down on the electricity your machine uses. (1) Replace your CRT with an LCD. (2) Ditch the high-end video card that you may not need if all you're not really using the system for gaming. The onboard video on most mobos these days is perfectly fine for normal desktop stuff. (3) Get a "kill-a-watt" meter, and find out what equipment is really using what amount of electricity. I had a set of speakers that was drawing twelve watts, 24/7, even when the computer was off.
The big problem in my household is the pool pump. The damn things are infamous energy hogs. Ours accounts for approximately 50% of our energy bill every month. If you cut down the number of hours it runs every day, you get a green pool. I'm starting to get seriously motivated to get photovoltaics installed.
What you're talking about is exactly the kind of stuff discussed in the space.com article linked to from the 2004 slashdot article. They discuss a certain electric quadrupole configuration. This article talks about magnetic shielding. Here is a web page that gives references to a whole bunch of papers on this topic (mostly powerpoints, but look at the pdf links).
So does that mean when went sent people to space before, they got exposed to all kinds of particals and stuff? Are they still ok? If so, then do we really need this? Or....did we fake the moon stuff?
Galactic cosmic rays are the biggest, most difficult problem. For a variety of reasons, explained in the WP link, they're not a big problem for low-earth orbit space stations like the ISS. The Apollo astronauts did get exposed to a lot of radiation, but they were only out for about a week, whereas an elliptical transfer orbit to Mars takes 1.4 years round trip in interplanetary space. For anyone who's actually had to wear a radiation badge to work, the integrated dosages they've estimated for a Mars issue just sound nuts, like somebody moved a decimal place over three places by mistake. It's a huge amount of radiation, roughly on the right order of magnitude to kill a human being. The Apollo astronauts got dosages at the level where there's speculation they may be getting cataracts at a significantly higher rate than normal. Scale that up by a ratio of 1.4 years to 1 week, and you get effects that are just not on the order of magnitude that you could laugh off heroically.
This was reported on slashdot three years ago. The space.com article linked to from the 2004 slashdot summary is actually much more detailed in terms of the science. The big engineering problems with this approach still have not been solved. (1) If you're not using superconducting magnet coils, a large, static magnetic field requires a huge power supply to keep it going. That's not practical for foreseeable, near-future technologies for going to Mars, which will need to use very small payloads. (2) Superconducting magnets are unreliable, finicky beasts, at least from my experience here on earth. You need big, heavy cryostats full of liquified gases. It's not necessarily a good idea to have a vital piece of safety equipment for your spaceship depend on an inherently high-maintenance, low-reliability technology. (3) Large electric fields are hard to maintain because you get arcing and discharges. I used to work at an electrostatic accelerator that used megavolt potentials, and it would start sparking at the most inopportune times, for reasons like, e.g., someone leaving behind a speck of lint inside the accelerator. When a spark would happen, you could hear it all through the building, and the energy released was equivalent to dropping a VW bug off the roof of a building. Again, low-reliability, high maintenance. (4) Although it's possible to use tricks to get rid of some of the particles, or channel particles to a place where they're not as harmful, you still have to deal with the fact that you have particles with both signs of charge, which feel forces in opposite directions from the same field. What repels one attracts the other. Also, if the particles get channeled to a certain place, and impact on something solid, then you get extremely intense secondary radiation at that spot.
One problem with this is that there are currently no usable video codecs that are available on licensing terms that would allow them to be distributed along with a linux distro, without paying extra money. Mpegla.com only licenses codecs for free if you're distributing small numbers of copies. IIRC, Ubuntu has paid money to be able to distribute the codecs licensed by mpegla. Yes, there is ogg theora, but no, it's not usable at this point, and no, flash doesn't support it. For audio, mp3 is the only codec supported by flash, and mp3 is patent encumbered.
I really think flash is a cool technology. (Of course you want to use flashblock to avoid flash ads.) For my kids, flash is the killer app -- clubpenguin.com, etc. My older daughter has a linux box in her room, and flash games account for an awful lot of her time on that computer. In fact, I really wanted to try writing some flash games myself, just for fun. Well, I found out that the landscape is pretty desolate if you want to do flash development using OSS tools, and write flash apps that will run on OSS players. There are nasty, extremely restrictive eulas associated with some of the gui libraries. There are the issues with patents. The whole platform is really not appropriate for OSS development, IMO, although the people on osflash.org clearly disagree with me :-)
This latest nonsense with enforced ads and DRM is just one more reason, IMO, for OSS users not to touch flash with a ten-foot pole. At least java is going GPL, and java applets are a usable alternative in many cases. Wikipedia uses a pure-java ogg player, which I think is extremely cool.
they still have at least 1 ide port as part of the chip set.
On the other hand, I believe Intel has done a better job than nvidia of releasing hardware documentation for their video chips, so if you're getting a mobo whose onboard video you're planning to use, that might be a reason to prefer Intel. (I don't think Intel sells separate, retail-packaged video cards.)
What do you think of his claim that the neocortex is built out of completely identical modules, which just end up getting programmed differently for their different functions? I'm not a neuroscientist, and reading the book, I found it difficult to judge how reliable a lot of his claims were, because he often failed to say what the evidence was. I also wasn't always sure which statements were controversial, which were his idiosyncratic ideas, etc.