>>We don't let just any schmuck drive a car, and we need to have some reasonable regulation with regards to firearms.
I disagree with your premise. The theft, and defense of life, liberty and property happen at the point of a gun. It is a tool, not a cause. Driving is not a fundamental right of man. Defending ones life is.
Still think some regulation is acceptable? Okay. then how do you feel about some "reasonable regulation" regarding voting? (perhaps only land owners can vote? Maybe pass a test first or pay a voting tax?) Or "reasonable regulation" for freedom of speech (such as jail time if you offend someone or laws against speaking ill of the government?) Finally, how would you feel about "reasonable regulation" of ones ability to practice a religion (say we just ban Islam completely or require everyone pray to the Official State Government) Doesn't sound very appealing, does it?
All of those things I've mentioned are considered God-given, fundamental rights which the US Constitution and Bill of Rights prohibits the government from tampering with or infringing upon.
Besides, who gets to define "reasonable?" This is the definition of a slippery slope. Fundamental rights are immutable, and having politicians determine your rights is precisely the opposite of what our Constitutional Republic was designed for.
there are many more problems. just off the top of my head:
1) How much toxic materials will be required to create and maintain a 92-by-92-mile square grid. 92 *MILES*, people. like parent said, the size of New Jersey. 2) For you environmentalist types who can't tolerate the thought of drilling for oil off the coast, what do you think a 92 square mile solar blanket will do to the native wildlife? 3) How will this power be transmitted to consumers? Voltage loss is a real issue for long-distance transmission.
Why not simply build a nuclear powerplant closer to the consumers?
Americans are a complacent lot. They'll tolerate taxes and fee increases, regulation, government snooping, abridgement of century-old (and God given) rights, etc. with maybe one in ten thousand even bothering to pick up a telephone or a pen and contact their congressman or senator.
But if you fuck with their television, you'll see angry roving mobs take to the streets that make "21 days later" look like a tea party. I suspect this will not end well.
LOL! Look at the URL
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Ok, it's been a while since physics class, but I thought the whole idea of a black hole was a collapse of space/time to a singularity. Would it be more correct to say this is a measurement of the event horizon?
Compressing in a more efficient algorithm (H.264 or XVID, as you suggested) would be great, but it would require everyone who has an Over The Air decoder box to purchase new hardware. It is part of the FCC broadcast license requirement that television broadcasts be made only in "standard" formats, so this would require FCC oversight and approval, and I suspect Congressional action, as well.
So in other words, if they started work on this process to change to H264, about 20 years from now it could happen.
To be more precise, they're putting the screws to the consumer. Lower quality than Over The Air (OTA), all for a premium price.
No thanks. I'll stick with my Yagi antenna which pulls in 15 stations (many with subchannels) from 30 miles away. (Though I'm quite tempted to try a Gray-Hoverman Antenna as detailed here on Slashdot, just to see if it's better. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/14/2021223 )
I agree with your sentiment, however the problem with the "modern" census is, for many citizens, it goes far beyond the simple enumeration of all citizens proscribed by the Constitution and has become a multipage survey asking questions about plumbing, commute times, what languages are spoken at home, who raises your children, where you work, etc. It's so extensive, the government estimates it will take a person 38 minutes to complete the survey! See for yourself: http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/d02p.pdf
Use a cable-lock to deter a "theft of convenience," but also set up a motion-sensing, tracking webcam and stream the video to a network share. In addition to monitoring the efficiency of the janitorial staff, you'll also learn who keeps stealing all the good chocolates from your candy dish.
Oh, and in the off-hand chance someone takes your laptop, just pull up the video/stills from the network and you'll have all the evidence you need to get the thief fired. Just print out the images, and take a nice little stroll down to HR...
I hate to piss in the porridge, but we're talking about a government that kills people for daring to express an unpopular opinion! It murders babies (near and full-term abortions) to enforce a one-child-per-family policy, and has hundreds of other draconian policies to protect its power structure and closed society. You think it's going to give a damn about a copyrighted game? They don't and won't.
One more time. This is Communist China. They kill their own people. They don't care about rights
Talk is cheap. All this balderdash about next-gen interfaces, 3D, voice control, blah-blah-blah and how your great ideas will revolutionize the industry. Well, let's see it! How about some examples? The windowed GUI was an obvious quantum improvement for the vast majority of computer users (yes, I realize that on/. command line is king) but there has been no movement forward for nearly 20 years. Most importantly, the GUI window paradigm worked well. Let's see your prototypes rather than just more "big ideas" or is this simply a rehash of the "one day we'll have flying cars" speech, applied to computers?
I have to admit that I didn't agree with his ideas, but Jef Raskin, RIP, (original concept for Macintosh, "Swyft", "Canon Cat") was one of the few designers who was brave enough to take a clean-slate approach to interface design and then *implement* it to see if the ideas stood up to real-world use.
>>This country desperately needs a REAL party for liberals, libertarians, and progressives.
It could use a party for real conservatives, too since this latest batch of Republicans is a spend-happy, big-government social-engineering disgrace. But even that would be a short-term solution as the real problem is that our Federal government is no longer bound by the limits of the Constitution, specifically the 10th Amendment. The Federals are supposed to just run the Navy, print the money, and mostly stay the hell out of our lives. Instead, well, we have our current situation of Bread & Circus.
10th Amendment to the Constitution reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." IOW, if the Constitution doesn't explicitly grant an authority, the Federals can't do it. What a quaint notion.
Strange. I thought it said the lower the screen resolution, the lesser the point in even bothering with ray-traced graphics. Oh wait, thats the "Common Sense Law."
Excellent observation about cooling! Boyles' law, IIRC. Yeah, A/C may be "free" in this case if they put a heat exchanger at the point where the gas is throttled. (Actually, the cooling effect may be so pronounced in humid conditions that the metering orifice may need to electrically heated in order to prevent "icing", which was a condition that carburetted automobiles dealt with 30 years ago...) Two steps forward, one step back. Hopefully we won't have to adjust the dwell on the distributor or gap the dynamo.
>.Since this car would have both an internal combustion engine and a compressed-air engine, I would guess you can get either heating or cooling fairly cheaply.
Ah, but there's the rub. From what I read, I don't think there is an internal combustion engine. Unlike current gas/electric hybrids which use the gasoline for propulsion, in this case they're simply burning the gasoline (or other fuel) as a source of heat to improve the efficiency of the compressed air charge.
If they're heating the air charge to increase the volume/pressure then I suppose that efficiency would increase as ambient air temperatures decreases, but what does this automobile do to provide passenger cabin heat? If the heat extraction from the burned fuel is efficient (and I imagine it must be) then waste heat is unavailable for the cabin.
This is one of the substantial (and as yet to date, unsolved) issues for an all-electric car serving in anywhere other than a tropical climate -- at some point you must provide heat to the cabin. Electrical resistance heat is incredibly inefficient, heat pumps are efficient above about 30 degrees F (though they are nearly worthless below that temperature), and further heat pumps have a very low thermal output (e.g. it would take FOREVER to warm a car on a 30 degree F day).
This car might succeed in Southern California or Florida... maybe texas, but seems impractical for anything other than summer use in the majority of American states. (Even the southwest -- you can die of hypothermia in the desert at night.)
It's a shame, because I'd love to have some more options for transportation other than gasoline engines.
(BTW, I never knew about electrically heated VW Beetle seats and I've been restoring them for years. I suspect that's some aftermarket "solution." The Beetles (and all aircooled VWs & Porsches) capture heat from the outside of the exhaust manifolds.)
I wish them luck for success but I too am feeling skeptical. Here's why:
>>400-500 miles per 8 gallons, or 50mpg. Pretty goddamn good for a 6-passenger vehicle. Yeah, but notice they say "six passenger vehicle" and not "vehicle with six passengers." BIG difference.
With very low-hp automobiles, the extra weight of even one passenger can have a tremendous impact upon performance and economy. (I drive a 40hp 1964 VW Beetle so I know from whence I speak). Driven alone, my car actually performs as well as most modern cars. Add a couple passengers and suddenly it's sluggish and MPG falls into the mid-20 range.
>>Say we halve what they claim for most practical uses (city driving), you still have 400-500 miles per 8 gallons, or 50mpg.
Judging from the tone of the press release (they don't seem to believe it) the 95mpg figure doesn't seem likely at all. And if we take half that figure, 50mpg as you suggest, it's still better than most gasoline vehicles, but roughly on par with turbodiesels. But we need to consider this a bit further. Because low-hp vehicles are greatly impacted by laden weight, if we were to take this 6-passenger vehicle and add a couple passengers I think we'd see that 50mpg figure fall further, possibly into the range of traditional gasoline vehicles which puts it well BELOW that of turbodiesels! It takes approx 35 hp to maintain 60mph in a vehicle with average aerodynamic drag. This vehicle has approx 75hp equivalent. That leaves 40hp to accelerate a vehicle with up to 900 lbs (6x150) of passengers plus the weight of the car. Subtract parasitic losses such as alternator (headlights, heating??) or a/c compressor drag (-5 hp) and it's anemic at best. Meaning it will struggle on hills, and passing on the interstate will be difficult.
Disappointing, but it helps us realize just how efficient a fuel-injected, turbo intercooled internal combustion engine is.
# of penguin stuffed animals in your possession. # of kernel builds # of ICQ shouting matches ending in "Nazi!!!" # of cans of Jolt consumed # of steps from mom's basement to side door.
Or the old standby, lines of code (including comments, of course).
In short, there's no way to automatically judge the value of a programmer based on silly metrics. How would one score for "bugs not written" or "elegance of solution"/"nasty kludge avoided"?
FOSS is worth whatever the users and the coders say.
>>I don't see how this is different to any other decision he's made, ie his favourite strategy seems to be go in with all guns blazing..?
If you're implying that he has "rushed" into conflicts, then you would be absurdly wrong.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 is a resolution by the UN Security Council, passed unanimously on November 8, 2002, offering Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations" that had been set out in several previous resolutions (Resolution 660, Resolution 661, Resolution 678, Resolution 686, Resolution 687, Resolution 688, Resolution 707, Resolution 715, Resolution 986, and Resolution 1284) source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_Security_Council_Resolution_1441
note the emphasis (mine) on preceeding resolutions? Have you no memory of the YEARS of events leading up to the second gulf war? The numerous surface-to-air firings at UN-mandated overflights, the delays and turnaways offered to the UN weapons inspectors, the state-of-the-art French interdiction jet aircraft disassembled and buried in the sand (which was traded to france in exchange for cheap oil), the oil-for-food bribery case involving corrupt UN officials, etc?? Basically, the US was enforcing, finally, the last of an exceedingly long line of UNITED NATIONS demands and the surrender terms from the first Gulf War, which Iraq never fully complied with.
However, if you're implying that he merely insists on fighting a conflict with a well-armed military, then I think we can agree. However, is that a problem? Is not the goal of armed conflict to win, and the best way to accomplish that is through application of overwhelming force. In short, I don't see the problem here.
So whichever way, either you're ill informed and/or unable to connect the dots of historical events or you don't understand the purpose of having a military.
We're talking about the MAFIAA and you expect what's right? (I'm chuckling even while I write this.) I hate to be the one to break the bad news to you, Grasshopper, but you have discovered the ugly core of the media industry. It has nothing to do with what is right. It's not about Art. It is all about squeezing as much money as possible out you as possible. And if you think your congresscritter is going to do otherwise, then I applaud your pure heart, but feel compelled to tell you that unless you have more money than Hollywood with which to bribe^h^h^h^h^hlobby, you (we?) don't have a chance.
"Our study provides compelling evidence that cancers hidden beneath the skin can be detected simply by [dogs] examining the odors of a person's breath," said Michael McCulloch, who led the research.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Also, given the 1.5 million crimes prevented, that's a one in 133 chance that you will prevent a criminal from committing a crime.
More than that, I believe, because that's based only the statistics that are reported to the government.
It's impossible to know how many crimes are stopped/prevented by responsible firearm use, which are never reported to the government.
>>We don't let just any schmuck drive a car, and we need to have some reasonable regulation with regards to firearms.
I disagree with your premise. The theft, and defense of life, liberty and property happen at the point of a gun. It is a tool, not a cause. Driving is not a fundamental right of man. Defending ones life is.
Still think some regulation is acceptable? Okay. then how do you feel about some "reasonable regulation" regarding voting? (perhaps only land owners can vote? Maybe pass a test first or pay a voting tax?) Or "reasonable regulation" for freedom of speech (such as jail time if you offend someone or laws against speaking ill of the government?) Finally, how would you feel about "reasonable regulation" of ones ability to practice a religion (say we just ban Islam completely or require everyone pray to the Official State Government) Doesn't sound very appealing, does it?
All of those things I've mentioned are considered God-given, fundamental rights which the US Constitution and Bill of Rights prohibits the government from tampering with or infringing upon.
Besides, who gets to define "reasonable?" This is the definition of a slippery slope. Fundamental rights are immutable, and having politicians determine your rights is precisely the opposite of what our Constitutional Republic was designed for.
Reasonable Regulation often isn't.
Right.
It's not costing anything. It's competing. Very effectively, I might add.
In the same frame of mind, I'd be curious to know if this group also considers IT a "liability."
there are many more problems. just off the top of my head:
1) How much toxic materials will be required to create and maintain a 92-by-92-mile square grid. 92 *MILES*, people. like parent said, the size of New Jersey.
2) For you environmentalist types who can't tolerate the thought of drilling for oil off the coast, what do you think a 92 square mile solar blanket will do to the native wildlife?
3) How will this power be transmitted to consumers? Voltage loss is a real issue for long-distance transmission.
Why not simply build a nuclear powerplant closer to the consumers?
Or so the Illuminati would have you believe.
Americans are a complacent lot. They'll tolerate taxes and fee increases, regulation, government snooping, abridgement of century-old (and God given) rights, etc. with maybe one in ten thousand even bothering to pick up a telephone or a pen and contact their congressman or senator.
But if you fuck with their television, you'll see angry roving mobs take to the streets that make "21 days later" look like a tea party. I suspect this will not end well.
"http: // blog.mlive.com/ flintjournal /newsnow/2008/04/ post_moto_kid_death_story_here.html"
"post moto kid death story here" ?!?
I'm thinking that there must be a "part two" to this tale!
Ok, it's been a while since physics class, but I thought the whole idea of a black hole was a collapse of space/time to a singularity. Would it be more correct to say this is a measurement of the event horizon?
Compressing in a more efficient algorithm (H.264 or XVID, as you suggested) would be great, but it would require everyone who has an Over The Air decoder box to purchase new hardware. It is part of the FCC broadcast license requirement that television broadcasts be made only in "standard" formats, so this would require FCC oversight and approval, and I suspect Congressional action, as well.
So in other words, if they started work on this process to change to H264, about 20 years from now it could happen.
To be more precise, they're putting the screws to the consumer. Lower quality than Over The Air (OTA), all for a premium price.
No thanks. I'll stick with my Yagi antenna which pulls in 15 stations (many with subchannels) from 30 miles away. (Though I'm quite tempted to try a Gray-Hoverman Antenna as detailed here on Slashdot, just to see if it's better. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/14/2021223 )
I agree with your sentiment, however the problem with the "modern" census is, for many citizens, it goes far beyond the simple enumeration of all citizens proscribed by the Constitution and has become a multipage survey asking questions about plumbing, commute times, what languages are spoken at home, who raises your children, where you work, etc. It's so extensive, the government estimates it will take a person 38 minutes to complete the survey!
See for yourself: http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/d02p.pdf
Use a cable-lock to deter a "theft of convenience," but also set up a motion-sensing, tracking webcam and stream the video to a network share. In addition to monitoring the efficiency of the janitorial staff, you'll also learn who keeps stealing all the good chocolates from your candy dish.
Oh, and in the off-hand chance someone takes your laptop, just pull up the video/stills from the network and you'll have all the evidence you need to get the thief fired. Just print out the images, and take a nice little stroll down to HR...
http://www.fullspectrumsolutions.com/cri_explained.htm
Provides a table of other light sources for comparison and a bit of discussion about color theory.but to answer your point, yes a six thousand degree F bulb would be impractical for home use.
I hate to piss in the porridge, but we're talking about a government that kills people for daring to express an unpopular opinion! It murders babies (near and full-term abortions) to enforce a one-child-per-family policy, and has hundreds of other draconian policies to protect its power structure and closed society. You think it's going to give a damn about a copyrighted game? They don't and won't.
One more time. This is Communist China. They kill their own people. They don't care about rights
Talk is cheap. All this balderdash about next-gen interfaces, 3D, voice control, blah-blah-blah and how your great ideas will revolutionize the industry. Well, let's see it! How about some examples? The windowed GUI was an obvious quantum improvement for the vast majority of computer users (yes, I realize that on /. command line is king) but there has been no movement forward for nearly 20 years. Most importantly, the GUI window paradigm worked well. Let's see your prototypes rather than just more "big ideas" or is this simply a rehash of the "one day we'll have flying cars" speech, applied to computers?
I have to admit that I didn't agree with his ideas, but Jef Raskin, RIP, (original concept for Macintosh, "Swyft", "Canon Cat") was one of the few designers who was brave enough to take a clean-slate approach to interface design and then *implement* it to see if the ideas stood up to real-world use.
>>This country desperately needs a REAL party for liberals, libertarians, and progressives.
It could use a party for real conservatives, too since this latest batch of Republicans is a spend-happy, big-government social-engineering disgrace. But even that would be a short-term solution as the real problem is that our Federal government is no longer bound by the limits of the Constitution, specifically the 10th Amendment. The Federals are supposed to just run the Navy, print the money, and mostly stay the hell out of our lives. Instead, well, we have our current situation of Bread & Circus.
10th Amendment to the Constitution reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." IOW, if the Constitution doesn't explicitly grant an authority, the Federals can't do it. What a quaint notion.
Strange. I thought it said the lower the screen resolution, the lesser the point in even bothering with ray-traced graphics. Oh wait, thats the "Common Sense Law."
Why not cover the roofline with solar panels. While your car is sitting in the parking lot it could be "refueling" by running an air compressor.
Excellent observation about cooling! Boyles' law, IIRC. Yeah, A/C may be "free" in this case if they put a heat exchanger at the point where the gas is throttled. (Actually, the cooling effect may be so pronounced in humid conditions that the metering orifice may need to electrically heated in order to prevent "icing", which was a condition that carburetted automobiles dealt with 30 years ago...) Two steps forward, one step back. Hopefully we won't have to adjust the dwell on the distributor or gap the dynamo.
>.Since this car would have both an internal combustion engine and a compressed-air engine, I would guess you can get either heating or cooling fairly cheaply.
Ah, but there's the rub. From what I read, I don't think there is an internal combustion engine. Unlike current gas/electric hybrids which use the gasoline for propulsion, in this case they're simply burning the gasoline (or other fuel) as a source of heat to improve the efficiency of the compressed air charge.
If they're heating the air charge to increase the volume/pressure then I suppose that efficiency would increase as ambient air temperatures decreases, but what does this automobile do to provide passenger cabin heat? If the heat extraction from the burned fuel is efficient (and I imagine it must be) then waste heat is unavailable for the cabin.
This is one of the substantial (and as yet to date, unsolved) issues for an all-electric car serving in anywhere other than a tropical climate -- at some point you must provide heat to the cabin. Electrical resistance heat is incredibly inefficient, heat pumps are efficient above about 30 degrees F (though they are nearly worthless below that temperature), and further heat pumps have a very low thermal output (e.g. it would take FOREVER to warm a car on a 30 degree F day).
This car might succeed in Southern California or Florida... maybe texas, but seems impractical for anything other than summer use in the majority of American states. (Even the southwest -- you can die of hypothermia in the desert at night.)
It's a shame, because I'd love to have some more options for transportation other than gasoline engines.
(BTW, I never knew about electrically heated VW Beetle seats and I've been restoring them for years. I suspect that's some aftermarket "solution." The Beetles (and all aircooled VWs & Porsches) capture heat from the outside of the exhaust manifolds.)
I wish them luck for success but I too am feeling skeptical. Here's why:
>>400-500 miles per 8 gallons, or 50mpg. Pretty goddamn good for a 6-passenger vehicle.
Yeah, but notice they say "six passenger vehicle" and not "vehicle with six passengers." BIG difference.
With very low-hp automobiles, the extra weight of even one passenger can have a tremendous impact upon performance and economy. (I drive a 40hp 1964 VW Beetle so I know from whence I speak). Driven alone, my car actually performs as well as most modern cars. Add a couple passengers and suddenly it's sluggish and MPG falls into the mid-20 range.
>>Say we halve what they claim for most practical uses (city driving), you still have 400-500 miles per 8 gallons, or 50mpg.
Judging from the tone of the press release (they don't seem to believe it) the 95mpg figure doesn't seem likely at all. And if we take half that figure, 50mpg as you suggest, it's still better than most gasoline vehicles, but roughly on par with turbodiesels. But we need to consider this a bit further. Because low-hp vehicles are greatly impacted by laden weight, if we were to take this 6-passenger vehicle and add a couple passengers I think we'd see that 50mpg figure fall further, possibly into the range of traditional gasoline vehicles which puts it well BELOW that of turbodiesels! It takes approx 35 hp to maintain 60mph in a vehicle with average aerodynamic drag. This vehicle has approx 75hp equivalent. That leaves 40hp to accelerate a vehicle with up to 900 lbs (6x150) of passengers plus the weight of the car. Subtract parasitic losses such as alternator (headlights, heating??) or a/c compressor drag (-5 hp) and it's anemic at best. Meaning it will struggle on hills, and passing on the interstate will be difficult.
Disappointing, but it helps us realize just how efficient a fuel-injected, turbo intercooled internal combustion engine is.
# of penguin stuffed animals in your possession.
# of kernel builds
# of ICQ shouting matches ending in "Nazi!!!"
# of cans of Jolt consumed
# of steps from mom's basement to side door.
Or the old standby, lines of code (including comments, of course).
In short, there's no way to automatically judge the value of a programmer based on silly metrics. How would one score for "bugs not written" or "elegance of solution"/"nasty kludge avoided"?
FOSS is worth whatever the users and the coders say.
If you're implying that he has "rushed" into conflicts, then you would be absurdly wrong. note the emphasis (mine) on preceeding resolutions? Have you no memory of the YEARS of events leading up to the second gulf war? The numerous surface-to-air firings at UN-mandated overflights, the delays and turnaways offered to the UN weapons inspectors, the state-of-the-art French interdiction jet aircraft disassembled and buried in the sand (which was traded to france in exchange for cheap oil), the oil-for-food bribery case involving corrupt UN officials, etc??
Basically, the US was enforcing, finally, the last of an exceedingly long line of UNITED NATIONS demands and the surrender terms from the first Gulf War, which Iraq never fully complied with.
However, if you're implying that he merely insists on fighting a conflict with a well-armed military, then I think we can agree. However, is that a problem? Is not the goal of armed conflict to win, and the best way to accomplish that is through application of overwhelming force. In short, I don't see the problem here.
So whichever way, either you're ill informed and/or unable to connect the dots of historical events or you don't understand the purpose of having a military.
>That doesn't seem right though.
We're talking about the MAFIAA and you expect what's right? (I'm chuckling even while I write this.) I hate to be the one to break the bad news to you, Grasshopper, but you have discovered the ugly core of the media industry. It has nothing to do with what is right. It's not about Art. It is all about squeezing as much money as possible out you as possible. And if you think your congresscritter is going to do otherwise, then I applaud your pure heart, but feel compelled to tell you that unless you have more money than Hollywood with which to bribe^h^h^h^h^hlobby, you (we?) don't have a chance.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0112_060112_dog_cancer.html
Two additional anecdotal stories of early cancer detection by dogs:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-09-24-cancer-sniffing_x.htm