Fortunately there are more than a few of us out there that feel the same, and some are doing something about it. Whether or not that turns out to have been too little and too late, we shall see.
Sigh. In the late 1980s I had a reasonable expectation of being able to retire on the Moon, but NASA not only screwed their own pooch, they went out and started screwing everyone else's too (see the fate of DC-X for example). L5 merged with the NASA Fan Club, er, National Space Society, and Sagan's Planetary Society was always more interested in making space safe for robots, not people. Then came sixteen years of cowards and fools in the White House, and bog help us it doesn't look like that's going to change any time soon. (Some might have said "another sixteen years", but GHWB's VP Dan Quayle got the DC-X project started, which wouldn't have been possible without Reagan's BMDO ("star wars")).
China was at one time the richest and most advanced country on the planet, and they sent a fleet of ships westward at least as far as Africa, decades before Portugal's early voyages. Then they halted their own age of exploration and entered a steady relative decline that they're only now, six hundred years later, coming out of. There was a five hundred year gap between the Norse withdrawal and Europeans again settling in North America. Americans may yet go again to the Moon and then Mars and beyond, but if we don't do it soon we're likely to find immigration agents there waiting for us.
All the ingredients to make solar cells and power conduits are right there in the Lunar regolith: silicon and aluminum. Build a couple of factory crawlers, start them out someplace on the equator and have them just crawl around the whole moon, building and deploying solar cells connected to the aluminum conductor grid at the same time.
When they're done, you have a moon-circling power distribution grid, half of which is in sunlight at any given time. Okay, the initial setup may be a little beyond what we can do now, but...
(In effect, the polar 'power towers' are the same idea but with a much smaller radius.)
Roman numerals actually make a lot of sense if you're using an abacus (which the Romans had). Give each column (wire) of the abacus four 'unit' beads and a 'five' bead (or 'tens' beads and 'fify' bead for the next column, etc). Roman numerals are an easy way of representing the beads on an abacus (or vice versa).
(Also consider, 'V' is half an 'X', 'L' is half a (squared off) 'C'. Okay, that doesn't work for 'D' and 'M', but...)
You left out the folks that want to censor the internet for their various moral, political or religious reasons. (No pr0n, think of the children! No pictures of Mohammed! etc, etc).
Then there's folks like Microsoft whom I'm sure would love to, in their secret heart of hearts, find some way to disrupt the use of the internet for free software development and find a way to get their cut of every packet that flows, whether over their networks or not.
Lets face it, some folks for whatever twisted psychological reason have a desire to control other people, while others (most of us?) don't really give a rat's ass what other people are doing as long as it isn't hurting anyone or interfering with what we're doing. Those folks tend to gravitate to positions of power and pass laws to control anything that might not yet be controlled.
Hell, the press release is clearer than the EE Times piece, they'd have been better off just reprinting it.
Both are clearer than the summary, where the poster just made up the crap about "while driving".
Since the electrolysis requires a fair strong alkali in the solution (to conduct charge, pure water not being very conductive itself), it makes sense to keep that in a tank you just keep topping up with distilled water (and recapture what is created from the fuel cell if you're using fuel cells and not just burning the hydrogen). Either keep the tank in the car or in the garage, but with the latter you have to deal with users (half of whom are of below average intelligence) responsible for the hydrogen delivery system to the car...which sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Keep the whole system in the car and just plug it in, like a fancy storage battery.
Right, these are definitely externally-caused aberrations.
But these "filaments" obviously aren't dark matter, they're warp-drive starship wakes (you know, the reason why the Federation imposed a Warp 5 speed limit).
Do you also believe in Santa Claus? The Easter Bunny?
Hey, where did you think Microsoft is going to get that Unix-like architecture, the Tooth Fairy? Sorry, but she's helping out Torvalds with Linux. (Santa Claus, generous guy that he is, seems willing to help both.)
You counter that by doing a google image search for "kitten" (or whatever) and randomly selecting one from the result.
Sure, you might get the odd bad result (a pic of Atomic Kitten, for example, or one of the other really odd images that turned up when I just did such a search) but it'd be fairly bot-proof.
The power outage -- ie, some serious switch failures -- triggered the reactor shutdown. Nuclear reactors are great at supplying base load power but if all of a sudden the grid goes offline, they have nowhere to send that power and have to shut themselves down. (Power reactors don't do well with highly dynamic loads.)
It was not, as some posters seem to have misread even the summary, that the reactors went down first and caused the outage. Mind, once the reactors are down it takes longer to bring the whole grid back up, so in that sense it's contributory.
I could bottle and sell air to people, and generate a lot of wealth for myself (assuming I could get people to buy it from me), but this isn't creating wealth. People may need air to live, but they can get it for free in most places, so me selling it to them doesn't create wealth, it only harvests it from suckers.
Hey, people and companies make good money selling bottled air. There's always a value-add, though. Dive stores sell compressed, filtered air to scuba divers, and 3000-psi compressors don't come cheap. Companies like Praxair and Air Liquide sell compressed or liquified components of air (nitrogen, oxygen, argon, etc); the value-add there is obvious too.
It's adding that value that creates wealth, and none of the above companies even try to sell air to people that just want to breathe (above water). (In fact, I believe the latter both refuse to sell to "oxygen bars" because of the lack of safety standards in same.)
Just nit-picking, I completely agree with your other points. (And come to think of it, back when I was diving, my regular dive store didn't charge for the air, but for the labor of filling the tank, thus avoiding sales tax on it.)
As I stated above, the users of Microsoft's (or Adobe's or whoever's) products use those products to make themselves wealthy. I believe this fact quite handily proves my point.
It proves no such thing. A skilled blackjack player can use casinos to make himself wealthy; that still doesn't mean that the casino created the wealth, nor even that the blackjack player did.
Users of free software such as Linux, OpenOffice, Cinepaint (aka Film Gimp) can and do use those products to make themselves wealthy. In this there is no difference between free and proprietary software; either the creators of each both create wealth, or neither of them do. To the extent that the cost of proprietary software creates a drag on the wealth-creation efforts of the users of that software, then arguably free software creates more wealth than the proprietary sort.
Microsoft's [...] products make many within the company wealthy.
That doesn't prove that Microsoft creates wealth. Drug dealers products make many in their supply chain wealthy. Protection rackets make the mobsters running them wealthy. Casinos make plenty of people wealthy, most of them casino owners. None of them create wealth, they just harvest it -- same as tax collectors.
shutting down the phone towers seems the easiest way to keep everyone's location hidden at night.
Actually that's a totally useless way of doing it, unless you're assuming that the telco is the only one that can own/operate a cell phone tower. Mobile cell phone towers are off-the-shelf equipment, telcos set them up in areas of temporary high demand (eg, for post disaster media circuses, they'll set one up nearby for a few weeks or so -- it's just a small trailer and an antenna mast). For tracking purposes, they wouldn't even have to hook it into the regular telephone network.
That's just off-the-shelf. If the military really wants to track cellphones (or anything else that emits enough RF to detect), they could have custom-built gear that can narrow it down much better than cell towers can. (Steerable -- mechanical or electronic -- beam antennas, for example.)
There are serious questions regarding the safety of immunizations, especially regarding thimerosal preservatives.
Thimerosal preservatives haven't been used in vaccines for children in years. Long enough, in fact, that the much ballyhooed (but never demonstrated) link between that and autism has been disproven because autism rates haven't decreased since the discontinuance of thimerosal.
To include GPU cores on-chip with the CPU
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
The next generations of multi-core CPUs will start including GPUs on them also, eliminating (or at least reducing) bandwidth bottlenecks between the main and video processors. AMD wanted GPU technology in-house, and that's why they bought ATI.
On a related note, AMD just released the 3D programming specs for their R5xx series chips (R6xx coming soon).
The real money is in the high end anyway -- consumer grade stuff may see high volumes but at very low margins, and AMD's technology does make a difference at the high end.
Actually ballistic beats out scramjets. Forty minutes or less to anywhere on the planet. Well, plus a few minutes to slow down for a more reasonable landing.
Well, you were right that the environment on the Moon is more predictable than Mars. I just pointed out that predictable and easy aren't necessarily synonymous. In some ways they could be, others not.
But I've long given up trying to predict what moderators will do -- I've had stuff +4 insightful and -1 troll, obviously that post ticked off somebody with mod points.
That means absolutely nothing. Most if not all companies the size of Fortune 500 companies run a little bit of everything, from the most obscure hardware and OS you've ever heard of to whatever Microsoft is pushing. Just because "a large number of them are making their plans for post SP1" doesn't prove a thing -- they're probably also making their plans for the next version of Tandem Non-stop, figuring out when to retire their old VAXes, and planning their RedHat AS 4 to RedHat AS 5 upgrades.
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Bravo, sir! Very well said.
Fortunately there are more than a few of us out there that feel the same, and some are doing something about it. Whether or not that turns out to have been too little and too late, we shall see.
Sigh. In the late 1980s I had a reasonable expectation of being able to retire on the Moon, but NASA not only screwed their own pooch, they went out and started screwing everyone else's too (see the fate of DC-X for example). L5 merged with the NASA Fan Club, er, National Space Society, and Sagan's Planetary Society was always more interested in making space safe for robots, not people. Then came sixteen years of cowards and fools in the White House, and bog help us it doesn't look like that's going to change any time soon. (Some might have said "another sixteen years", but GHWB's VP Dan Quayle got the DC-X project started, which wouldn't have been possible without Reagan's BMDO ("star wars")).
China was at one time the richest and most advanced country on the planet, and they sent a fleet of ships westward at least as far as Africa, decades before Portugal's early voyages. Then they halted their own age of exploration and entered a steady relative decline that they're only now, six hundred years later, coming out of. There was a five hundred year gap between the Norse withdrawal and Europeans again settling in North America. Americans may yet go again to the Moon and then Mars and beyond, but if we don't do it soon we're likely to find immigration agents there waiting for us.
All the ingredients to make solar cells and power conduits are right there in the Lunar regolith: silicon and aluminum. Build a couple of factory crawlers, start them out someplace on the equator and have them just crawl around the whole moon, building and deploying solar cells connected to the aluminum conductor grid at the same time.
When they're done, you have a moon-circling power distribution grid, half of which is in sunlight at any given time. Okay, the initial setup may be a little beyond what we can do now, but...
(In effect, the polar 'power towers' are the same idea but with a much smaller radius.)
Roman numerals actually make a lot of sense if you're using an abacus (which the Romans had). Give each column (wire) of the abacus four 'unit' beads and a 'five' bead (or 'tens' beads and 'fify' bead for the next column, etc). Roman numerals are an easy way of representing the beads on an abacus (or vice versa).
(Also consider, 'V' is half an 'X', 'L' is half a (squared off) 'C'. Okay, that doesn't work for 'D' and 'M', but...)
If strawberry pickers were paid at the same rates as the average desk worker, we'd have robotic strawberry pickers by now.
You left out the folks that want to censor the internet for their various moral, political or religious reasons. (No pr0n, think of the children! No pictures of Mohammed! etc, etc).
Then there's folks like Microsoft whom I'm sure would love to, in their secret heart of hearts, find some way to disrupt the use of the internet for free software development and find a way to get their cut of every packet that flows, whether over their networks or not.
Lets face it, some folks for whatever twisted psychological reason have a desire to control other people, while others (most of us?) don't really give a rat's ass what other people are doing as long as it isn't hurting anyone or interfering with what we're doing. Those folks tend to gravitate to positions of power and pass laws to control anything that might not yet be controlled.
Gotta love it. Parent has +1 informative, +1 interesting, yet -1 troll. I guess there's some Microsoft shill out there today with mod points.
Hell, the press release is clearer than the EE Times piece, they'd have been better off just reprinting it.
Both are clearer than the summary, where the poster just made up the crap about "while driving".
Since the electrolysis requires a fair strong alkali in the solution (to conduct charge, pure water not being very conductive itself), it makes sense to keep that in a tank you just keep topping up with distilled water (and recapture what is created from the fuel cell if you're using fuel cells and not just burning the hydrogen). Either keep the tank in the car or in the garage, but with the latter you have to deal with users (half of whom are of below average intelligence) responsible for the hydrogen delivery system to the car...which sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Keep the whole system in the car and just plug it in, like a fancy storage battery.
Right, these are definitely externally-caused aberrations.
But these "filaments" obviously aren't dark matter, they're warp-drive starship wakes (you know, the reason why the Federation imposed a Warp 5 speed limit).
Of course, that would be Microsoft UNG, or MUNG.
Figures.
Do you also believe in Santa Claus? The Easter Bunny?
Hey, where did you think Microsoft is going to get that Unix-like architecture, the Tooth Fairy? Sorry, but she's helping out Torvalds with Linux. (Santa Claus, generous guy that he is, seems willing to help both.)
You counter that by doing a google image search for "kitten" (or whatever) and randomly selecting one from the result.
Sure, you might get the odd bad result (a pic of Atomic Kitten, for example, or one of the other really odd images that turned up when I just did such a search) but it'd be fairly bot-proof.
It's sad that a bunch of anime nerds can beat out a full team of PhD holding Google Employees.
;-)
No, it's sad that a bunch of anime nerds think their captcha system guards a forum that any spammers would find worth caring about.
The power outage -- ie, some serious switch failures -- triggered the reactor shutdown. Nuclear reactors are great at supplying base load power but if all of a sudden the grid goes offline, they have nowhere to send that power and have to shut themselves down. (Power reactors don't do well with highly dynamic loads.)
It was not, as some posters seem to have misread even the summary, that the reactors went down first and caused the outage. Mind, once the reactors are down it takes longer to bring the whole grid back up, so in that sense it's contributory.
I could bottle and sell air to people, and generate a lot of wealth for myself (assuming I could get people to buy it from me), but this isn't creating wealth. People may need air to live, but they can get it for free in most places, so me selling it to them doesn't create wealth, it only harvests it from suckers.
Hey, people and companies make good money selling bottled air. There's always a value-add, though. Dive stores sell compressed, filtered air to scuba divers, and 3000-psi compressors don't come cheap. Companies like Praxair and Air Liquide sell compressed or liquified components of air (nitrogen, oxygen, argon, etc); the value-add there is obvious too.
It's adding that value that creates wealth, and none of the above companies even try to sell air to people that just want to breathe (above water). (In fact, I believe the latter both refuse to sell to "oxygen bars" because of the lack of safety standards in same.)
Just nit-picking, I completely agree with your other points. (And come to think of it, back when I was diving, my regular dive store didn't charge for the air, but for the labor of filling the tank, thus avoiding sales tax on it.)
As I stated above, the users of Microsoft's (or Adobe's or whoever's) products use those products to make themselves wealthy. I believe this fact quite handily proves my point.
It proves no such thing. A skilled blackjack player can use casinos to make himself wealthy; that still doesn't mean that the casino created the wealth, nor even that the blackjack player did.
Users of free software such as Linux, OpenOffice, Cinepaint (aka Film Gimp) can and do use those products to make themselves wealthy. In this there is no difference between free and proprietary software; either the creators of each both create wealth, or neither of them do. To the extent that the cost of proprietary software creates a drag on the wealth-creation efforts of the users of that software, then arguably free software creates more wealth than the proprietary sort.
Microsoft's [...] products make many within the company wealthy.
That doesn't prove that Microsoft creates wealth. Drug dealers products make many in their supply chain wealthy. Protection rackets make the mobsters running them wealthy. Casinos make plenty of people wealthy, most of them casino owners. None of them create wealth, they just harvest it -- same as tax collectors.
Well, in the middle of nowhere you may only be within range of one tower, which makes triangulation rather problematic.
shutting down the phone towers seems the easiest way to keep everyone's location hidden at night.
Actually that's a totally useless way of doing it, unless you're assuming that the telco is the only one that can own/operate a cell phone tower. Mobile cell phone towers are off-the-shelf equipment, telcos set them up in areas of temporary high demand (eg, for post disaster media circuses, they'll set one up nearby for a few weeks or so -- it's just a small trailer and an antenna mast). For tracking purposes, they wouldn't even have to hook it into the regular telephone network.
That's just off-the-shelf. If the military really wants to track cellphones (or anything else that emits enough RF to detect), they could have custom-built gear that can narrow it down much better than cell towers can. (Steerable -- mechanical or electronic -- beam antennas, for example.)
Clearly we should find a way for Britney Spears to popularize good science.
What, you mean like Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics?
There are serious questions regarding the safety of immunizations, especially regarding thimerosal preservatives.
Thimerosal preservatives haven't been used in vaccines for children in years. Long enough, in fact, that the much ballyhooed (but never demonstrated) link between that and autism has been disproven because autism rates haven't decreased since the discontinuance of thimerosal.
The next generations of multi-core CPUs will start including GPUs on them also, eliminating (or at least reducing) bandwidth bottlenecks between the main and video processors. AMD wanted GPU technology in-house, and that's why they bought ATI.
On a related note, AMD just released the 3D programming specs for their R5xx series chips (R6xx coming soon).
The real money is in the high end anyway -- consumer grade stuff may see high volumes but at very low margins, and AMD's technology does make a difference at the high end.
Wrongo. The code just tells you what it does. Comments tell you what it's supposed to do.
Actually ballistic beats out scramjets. Forty minutes or less to anywhere on the planet. Well, plus a few minutes to slow down for a more reasonable landing.
Well, you were right that the environment on the Moon is more predictable than Mars. I just pointed out that predictable and easy aren't necessarily synonymous. In some ways they could be, others not.
But I've long given up trying to predict what moderators will do -- I've had stuff +4 insightful and -1 troll, obviously that post ticked off somebody with mod points.
That means absolutely nothing. Most if not all companies the size of Fortune 500 companies run a little bit of everything, from the most obscure hardware and OS you've ever heard of to whatever Microsoft is pushing. Just because "a large number of them are making their plans for post SP1" doesn't prove a thing -- they're probably also making their plans for the next version of Tandem Non-stop, figuring out when to retire their old VAXes, and planning their RedHat AS 4 to RedHat AS 5 upgrades.