I figured it was a reasonably open thing since, well, they're so much cheaper than all the alternatives, and since all sorts of third parties make them. (Mine is PNY).
I was referring to a fixed-lens bridge camera (the FZ50), which I have.
Their DSLR's, however, use the Four-Thirds lens mount; while it's not totally open, it's at least an attempt to establish a standard lens system for the digital world. Sadly not many companies have signed up; Panasonic and Olympus make bodies, and Leica and Sigma additionally make lenses. (Canon and Nikon have their well-established mounts already, so they don't want to play along.) But Panasonic's at least in the "trying to do the right thing" camp.
I agree that the whole proliferation of 35mm lens mounts is a bit ridiculous.
Logitech's not being intentionally ornery with their mice; I'm sure if there were a standard for mouse-receiver communication they'd use it and not try to break it, like Microsoft does. In the absence of a standard they have to make up their own, but they're not doing intentionally to screw people up.
I have a Panasonic camera. They could have developed a proprietary memory format like Sony did, but it uses plain old cheap SD cards.
They could have made the lens threads a weird size so they could sell their own teleconverters and filters, but it's plain old 55mm, and people have quite happily screwed Olympus, Nikon, Minolta, etc. stuff onto them.
Some companies do just make useful stuff and sell it, but they're not the ones that make the news as often, since they mostly stay out of the spotlight and just sit around making stuff and money.
In the computer world, Logitech is sort of like this. They've not tried to integrate their speakers with their mice (Microsoft would find a way to do this!), and instead just try to make useful products that stand on their own merit.
Here's a hint: I'd rather use the nuclear technology that we do have than the solar technology we don't yet. Solar research is wonderful and should continue, and I hope that in fifty years the bulk of our power is solar, but today's solar research won't provide today's power. It'll provide tomorrow's power.
It is not the scientists' problem that politicians are stupid. We have a Department of Transportation using our tax money to build roads, and nobody complains; by and large the interstate system works well (although if the Germans were as IP-happy as the Americans they'd be asking for royalties on it!) If the Ron Pauls of the world complain because the Department of Energy wants to oversee energy infrastructure like the DoT oversees transportation infrastructure, they can shove it.
Power generation *is* run publically in many cases. Lots of hydro is, and we have public nuclear in the Southeast with TVA (which by most accounts is reasonably good as government programs go).
Oh, certainly. I'm not debating that at all. But here in the USA, much of our electrical power comes from coal, which is -- as you point out -- the dirtiest damn thing in the world. We need something scalable, something base-load, and something *now* to replace it, and nuclear is the only thing that fits the bill.
Where and when geothermal, solar, and wind are feasible, *use them*. I'm not advocating a nuclear-only future, only saying that at the moment it's got to be the heavy lifter until we figure out how to get TW of power out of solar/wind. There are lots of answers, and they should all be explored... but nuclear is here now, and available now. There are no slashdot stories on "People figure out how to make power out of uranium"; that's old hat. But we do have stories on "People figure out neat way to do solar-thermal"; we're in one right now. Solar-thermal is neat, and about as clean as it gets -- this is worthy research!
But I'm *posting* this using power from an old fission plant. Let's replace coal with fission, and then turn on solar/wind/tidal/geothermal/fusion/kinetic drive from Ike spinning in his grave as they become available.
Very common because most are fed purely on advertising materials and not physics and chemistry so they regurgite the same thing verbatim.
Working on a PhD in computational nuclear physics, thanks.
I'm mentioning coal vs. nuclear in a solar article because that's what we have *now*. I think solar-thermal is wonderful (on its engineering merits), and think we should research the hell out of it and try to do it. But we need to stop burning coal immediately, and the only thing that can be used currently to replace it is nuclear (or some mix of nuclear+wind). Solar can be ramped up once it works, but it doesn't at the moment.
It requires an absolutely tiny amount of uranium to run a nuclear plant, compared to the 10,000 tons/day that a 1GW coal plant uses. Uranium is rare, but you don't actually need that much *of* it. 95% of the fuel used in fission plants can be reprocessed. Coal producers are chopping off the tops of entire *mountains* in Appalachia;
"Disposal" isn't as big a problem as it's made out to be; reprocessing reduces the amount of waste produced tremendously, and storing a little waste for a time is a whole lot better than *not* storing it and dumping it into the atmosphere, as we're doing with coal.
There are other forms of power generation than nuclear, but at the moment it is the only proven, scalable, clean, and economical alternative to fossil fuels for power generation. Perhaps solar-thermal (as in this article) or geothermal or tidal power or some sort of wind power can be used to carry a lot of the load, but nuclear power is available now, and the only thing lacking is the political will to implement it.
France had that political will, and now they have the cheapest power and the cleanest air in Europe.
5. No automatic copyright for photos. There has to be some artistic quality to them.
What problem is this intended to solve? There doesn't seem to be a copyright-mafia problem with photography, as there are lots and lots of free images floating around. This proposal would lead to a lot of legal wanking; perhaps an EXIF tag for copyright status might be handy, with cameras generating "non-copyrighted" images by default until the user changes the setting. That way the decision of whether or not the image should be copyrighted is determined by the photographer as it should be, and the courts stay out of trying to determine "artistic quality".
(For instance, is a photograph of a rare animal artistic? You could argue that the photographer was just documenting its presence and not trying to make art.)
That's something I never understood. Paying $lots of a TV means you're at least getting something that *does* something -- in this case, shows a giant picture. Some people (me, you possibly) don't want this; some people do want it.
But what exactly do you get that you didn't have before if you pay $43k for a BMW? What does a luxury car *do* that your Hyundai won't? Heck, they're not even more reliable these days -- iirc a little Toyota Yaris ($11-12k) has a longer life expectancy than some of those beemers and Audis and things.
What kind of mileage do these things get? If it's >40, which I'm sure it will be (and maybe even >50), if a significant number of Americans buy them instead of the garbage that's on our roads now, it could offset some of the additional pollution from India.
Also, an improved standard of living is better for pollution control. If enough capital flows into India to make the up-front cost of nuclear plants affordable, for instance, the coal plants that are not built will offset the cars that are.
They have a bloated budget, getting anything they ask for from Congress (since we have to support the troops, right?) and the purpose of people at Boeing et al. working on military "R&D" isn't to develop equipment to "protect America's waters and interests abroad"; it's to get themselves more contracts. This after all is what the stockholders want, right?
I live in a military contracting town, and have first-hand knowledge of people not really caring whether or not anything works or is militarily useful as long as the money keeps coming.
Hint: the government IS broke, and it's because of irresponsible spending on the military, started by Reagan, slowed by Clinton, and then increased again by Bush II.
That's on your end. Suppose you're the folks at Canonical and Loquacious Llama just came out. You know that about a million people want your new release. Do you use ftp or bittorrent?
When I was an undergrad I was downloading some Linux ISO (required for work) and meanwhile playing a game of DotA, a Warcraft 3 mod.
WC3 maintains a direct connection to all the other players in the game -- it uses a P2P network model rather than client-server -- but uses a trivial amount of bandwidth (under 10 KB/sec).
The network admins saw someone with connections open to residential ISP IP addresses and using a lot of bandwidth (ignoring the connection to ftp.mandrake.com or whatever) and call me to tell me that they're killing all my open connections due to P2P download abuse.
The cost of the Iraq war is projected (by the GAO) to be around $2 trillion. That comes out to be about $300bn/year, counting the 6 years of Bush's tenure in which we'll be involved in it.
This is ten times the yearly expenditure on the NIH, yet there are more Americans who will develop (cancer | heart disease | diabetes/metabolic syndrome | clinical depression) than the entire population of Iraq.
Who's not spending their money wisely?
Yes, there is some dishonest stuff that goes on in the grant process, and the scientific community would appreciate any genuine help in stamping it out. But even if ten percent of NIH's funding is dumped in a pile and burned, NIH still produces more value per taxpayer dollar than many other things (read: the military, many forms of welfare, the military, farm subsidies, and -- right -- the military) that we spend our cash on.
It's Poisson, since fundamentally you're dealing with counting statistics. In the limit of large N (as in, 5000 out of 1000000), it is very nearly Gaussian, but for small N the difference becomes important. (One way to see this is to notice that the Gaussian distribution has tails that extend to infinity on both ends, while our probability distribution has to go to zero at zero.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather have crap in menus.
When I want to insert a formula in an OO document, alt-I O F, type in pseudo-Latex, done.
I don't want to have to grab the mouse and hunt around for a widget to click on.
Apple runs on expensive hardware; Linux runs on whatever the hell you want it to run on.
Ah, thanks for the heads-up. I didn't know that.
I figured it was a reasonably open thing since, well, they're so much cheaper than all the alternatives, and since all sorts of third parties make them. (Mine is PNY).
I was referring to a fixed-lens bridge camera (the FZ50), which I have.
Their DSLR's, however, use the Four-Thirds lens mount; while it's not totally open, it's at least an attempt to establish a standard lens system for the digital world. Sadly not many companies have signed up; Panasonic and Olympus make bodies, and Leica and Sigma additionally make lenses. (Canon and Nikon have their well-established mounts already, so they don't want to play along.) But Panasonic's at least in the "trying to do the right thing" camp.
I agree that the whole proliferation of 35mm lens mounts is a bit ridiculous.
Logitech's not being intentionally ornery with their mice; I'm sure if there were a standard for mouse-receiver communication they'd use it and not try to break it, like Microsoft does. In the absence of a standard they have to make up their own, but they're not doing intentionally to screw people up.
Not all companies.
I have a Panasonic camera. They could have developed a proprietary memory format like Sony did, but it uses plain old cheap SD cards.
They could have made the lens threads a weird size so they could sell their own teleconverters and filters, but it's plain old 55mm, and people have quite happily screwed Olympus, Nikon, Minolta, etc. stuff onto them.
Some companies do just make useful stuff and sell it, but they're not the ones that make the news as often, since they mostly stay out of the spotlight and just sit around making stuff and money.
In the computer world, Logitech is sort of like this. They've not tried to integrate their speakers with their mice (Microsoft would find a way to do this!), and instead just try to make useful products that stand on their own merit.
Coal is the current alternative to nuclear.
Here's a hint: I'd rather use the nuclear technology that we do have than the solar technology we don't yet. Solar research is wonderful and should continue, and I hope that in fifty years the bulk of our power is solar, but today's solar research won't provide today's power. It'll provide tomorrow's power.
What will provide today's power?
It is not the scientists' problem that politicians are stupid. We have a Department of Transportation using our tax money to build roads, and nobody complains; by and large the interstate system works well (although if the Germans were as IP-happy as the Americans they'd be asking for royalties on it!) If the Ron Pauls of the world complain because the Department of Energy wants to oversee energy infrastructure like the DoT oversees transportation infrastructure, they can shove it.
Power generation *is* run publically in many cases. Lots of hydro is, and we have public nuclear in the Southeast with TVA (which by most accounts is reasonably good as government programs go).
Oh, certainly. I'm not debating that at all. But here in the USA, much of our electrical power comes from coal, which is -- as you point out -- the dirtiest damn thing in the world. We need something scalable, something base-load, and something *now* to replace it, and nuclear is the only thing that fits the bill.
Where and when geothermal, solar, and wind are feasible, *use them*. I'm not advocating a nuclear-only future, only saying that at the moment it's got to be the heavy lifter until we figure out how to get TW of power out of solar/wind. There are lots of answers, and they should all be explored... but nuclear is here now, and available now. There are no slashdot stories on "People figure out how to make power out of uranium"; that's old hat. But we do have stories on "People figure out neat way to do solar-thermal"; we're in one right now. Solar-thermal is neat, and about as clean as it gets -- this is worthy research!
But I'm *posting* this using power from an old fission plant. Let's replace coal with fission, and then turn on solar/wind/tidal/geothermal/fusion/kinetic drive from Ike spinning in his grave as they become available.
It's not the scientists' and engineers' problem that the politicians are too war-hungry to use the solutions that we've developed responsibly.
Yes, breeder reactors can make bomb material. So don't use them for that, if you're concerned about it.
Won't it be sad if we wind up screwing up our planet because the science is advanced enough but the politics is too primitive to implement a solution?
Very common because most are fed purely on advertising materials and not physics and chemistry so they regurgite the same thing verbatim.
Working on a PhD in computational nuclear physics, thanks.
I'm mentioning coal vs. nuclear in a solar article because that's what we have *now*. I think solar-thermal is wonderful (on its engineering merits), and think we should research the hell out of it and try to do it. But we need to stop burning coal immediately, and the only thing that can be used currently to replace it is nuclear (or some mix of nuclear+wind). Solar can be ramped up once it works, but it doesn't at the moment.
What are you smoking?
It requires an absolutely tiny amount of uranium to run a nuclear plant, compared to the 10,000 tons/day that a 1GW coal plant uses. Uranium is rare, but you don't actually need that much *of* it. 95% of the fuel used in fission plants can be reprocessed. Coal producers are chopping off the tops of entire *mountains* in Appalachia;
"Disposal" isn't as big a problem as it's made out to be; reprocessing reduces the amount of waste produced tremendously, and storing a little waste for a time is a whole lot better than *not* storing it and dumping it into the atmosphere, as we're doing with coal.
There are other forms of power generation than nuclear, but at the moment it is the only proven, scalable, clean, and economical alternative to fossil fuels for power generation. Perhaps solar-thermal (as in this article) or geothermal or tidal power or some sort of wind power can be used to carry a lot of the load, but nuclear power is available now, and the only thing lacking is the political will to implement it.
France had that political will, and now they have the cheapest power and the cleanest air in Europe.
5. No automatic copyright for photos. There has to be some artistic quality to them.
What problem is this intended to solve? There doesn't seem to be a copyright-mafia problem with photography, as there are lots and lots of free images floating around. This proposal would lead to a lot of legal wanking; perhaps an EXIF tag for copyright status might be handy, with cameras generating "non-copyrighted" images by default until the user changes the setting. That way the decision of whether or not the image should be copyrighted is determined by the photographer as it should be, and the courts stay out of trying to determine "artistic quality".
(For instance, is a photograph of a rare animal artistic? You could argue that the photographer was just documenting its presence and not trying to make art.)
damage to Microsoft's public image.
That's like worrying about tracking mud into a pig sty.
So? The later guys can still *do* it.
There's no patent on the screwdriver, but people still make money selling screwdrivers.
That's something I never understood. Paying $lots of a TV means you're at least getting something that *does* something -- in this case, shows a giant picture. Some people (me, you possibly) don't want this; some people do want it.
But what exactly do you get that you didn't have before if you pay $43k for a BMW? What does a luxury car *do* that your Hyundai won't? Heck, they're not even more reliable these days -- iirc a little Toyota Yaris ($11-12k) has a longer life expectancy than some of those beemers and Audis and things.
What kind of mileage do these things get? If it's >40, which I'm sure it will be (and maybe even >50), if a significant number of Americans buy them instead of the garbage that's on our roads now, it could offset some of the additional pollution from India.
Also, an improved standard of living is better for pollution control. If enough capital flows into India to make the up-front cost of nuclear plants affordable, for instance, the coal plants that are not built will offset the cars that are.
Yes, to CO2. No, to particulates and sulfur dioxide and stuff like that.
It'll probably make the breathability of air better and the global warming problem worse.
Age is a fever chill every physicist must fear;
:)
He's better dead than living still,
once he's past his thirtieth year.
(on the tendency of physics people to be most productive in their youngest years)
I'll graduate when I'm 29. One year of productivity!
hard time convincing any sane person
Unfortunately, you've got to convince juries and judges, which can be easier than convincing sane people.
You're a few hundred years out of date.
The most famous incident of music "piracy" in history, perpetuated by none other than Mozart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri)
They have a bloated budget, getting anything they ask for from Congress (since we have to support the troops, right?) and the purpose of people at Boeing et al. working on military "R&D" isn't to develop equipment to "protect America's waters and interests abroad"; it's to get themselves more contracts. This after all is what the stockholders want, right?
I live in a military contracting town, and have first-hand knowledge of people not really caring whether or not anything works or is militarily useful as long as the money keeps coming.
Hint: the government IS broke, and it's because of irresponsible spending on the military, started by Reagan, slowed by Clinton, and then increased again by Bush II.
That's on your end. Suppose you're the folks at Canonical and Loquacious Llama just came out. You know that about a million people want your new release. Do you use ftp or bittorrent?
When I was an undergrad I was downloading some Linux ISO (required for work) and meanwhile playing a game of DotA, a Warcraft 3 mod.
WC3 maintains a direct connection to all the other players in the game -- it uses a P2P network model rather than client-server -- but uses a trivial amount of bandwidth (under 10 KB/sec).
The network admins saw someone with connections open to residential ISP IP addresses and using a lot of bandwidth (ignoring the connection to ftp.mandrake.com or whatever) and call me to tell me that they're killing all my open connections due to P2P download abuse.
WTF?
The cost of the Iraq war is projected (by the GAO) to be around $2 trillion. That comes out to be about $300bn/year, counting the 6 years of Bush's tenure in which we'll be involved in it.
This is ten times the yearly expenditure on the NIH, yet there are more Americans who will develop (cancer | heart disease | diabetes/metabolic syndrome | clinical depression) than the entire population of Iraq.
Who's not spending their money wisely?
Yes, there is some dishonest stuff that goes on in the grant process, and the scientific community would appreciate any genuine help in stamping it out. But even if ten percent of NIH's funding is dumped in a pile and burned, NIH still produces more value per taxpayer dollar than many other things (read: the military, many forms of welfare, the military, farm subsidies, and -- right -- the military) that we spend our cash on.
It's Poisson, since fundamentally you're dealing with counting statistics. In the limit of large N (as in, 5000 out of 1000000), it is very nearly Gaussian, but for small N the difference becomes important. (One way to see this is to notice that the Gaussian distribution has tails that extend to infinity on both ends, while our probability distribution has to go to zero at zero.)