Uhhh, where in Canada is the UK gallon used for gasoline purchases? I've been to Canada many a time, gas prices up there are always cents per liter everywhere I've seen (or heard of).
The funny thing about this is that gas is rarely the major cost per mile of any vehicle. This is especially true for new cars. This is even more true for high efficiency vehicles like the Prius. In terms of cost per mile for average drivers, gas costs for the Prius are going to be lower than financing costs, let alone insurance or depreciation costs. If you're doing this to save money you're doing it for the wrong reasons.
First, if you're paying 4.50/gallon for gas in the US, you're getting raped. $2.50 is a more reasonable maximum, especially in the regions where electricity costs 6 cents / kwh.
Second, your comparison would be quite a lot more useful if you actually used similar units. A kwh is 3.6 MegaJoules, a gallon of gasoline corresponds to about 130 MegaJoules of energy, assume a moderate conversion efficiency of 20% and call it 26 megajoules. So $.06/kwh is $16/GJ, while $2.50 per gallon is $96/GJ.
The premise behind this story is that Solaris is inately superior to the various brands of Linux around. It is not. Interestingly, the same is the case for many other commercial Unix distributions. Linux is very much a high quality, professional product. More so, the reason why Solaris is becoming free is precisely because it is Solaris which is already dead. They have discovered that they cannot compete with equally good, or superior, products that have greater hardware and application support and are cheaper to own and use.
1) Photons bouncing off a mirror will impart momentum to the mirror. That's Newton's laws right there, as fundamentally a part of the fabric of the nature of reality as we know it as damned near anything else we have ever studied. If Gold were right and a Solar Sail wouldn't work, then it would mean Newton's 3rd law would be violated, and that's super bad mojo, mojo of a scale that Gold was unable to back up with sufficient evidence and argumentation in his penny-ante paper.
2) The laws of thermodynamics are not violated by the operation of Solar Sails. In any given inertial reference frame the reflected photons will be "red shifted" and have a slightly lower energy. This is how energy is conserved (since the movement of the sail represents work, and thus energy). This is also how the 2nd law of thermodynamics (non-decreasing entropy) is followed, since the redshifted photons are higher in entropy (for slightly complicated reasons) and balance the work done.
3) Light pressure is not theoretical, it has been detected, measured, and, indeed, used many times in many circumstances. Its properties have corresponded very closely (to about as many 9s as you'd like) to what has been theorized.
In short, Gold is full of crap and the New Scientist ought to be ashamed at printing his stupidity.
The core of the Earth is actually made mostly of Nickel and Iron. Heavier elements also exist but are much rarer and so don't make up much of the core. Also, there are different types of heavy elements. There are "siderophiles" like Gold, Platinum, and Iridium which prefer to hang out in Iron rather than rock and get concentrated near the core (one reason why gold is fairly rare on the Earth's crust). Then there are "lithophiles" like Uranium, Thorium, or Potassium which prefer to hang out in crustal rocks than in the more iron rich mantel or core (which is why Uranium isn't terribly rare in the crust of the Earth).
Also, the probe is only designed to decend down into part of the mantel, not necessarily all the way down to the core.
First, building your own cruise missile is a sure way to get stuck in prison longer than Kevin Mitnick, so watch your ass.
Second, if you're thinking about using GPS guidance, think again, consumer GPS receivers are designed to cut off when the speed is higher than a set value (precisely to prevent their use in this fashion).
Screw that, they should just get it over with, return the copyright laws to normal and specifically make a law taking Mickey out of the public domain in perpetuity. Yeah, it's stupid and arbitrary, just like the rest of the laws Disney et al get passed, but at least this way the damage is minimized.
This is a new type of solid rocket fuel. Current high-grade solid rocket fuels use aluminum powders and such like. All jet fuels already produce "only" CO2 and water on combustion, as do many popular liquid rocket fuels (such as LOX/LH2 and LOX/Kerosene, the two most popular rocket fuels for launch vehicles).
Gee, I hate to be a buzzkill on the whine party (would you like some cheese with that?) but I think this guy is complaining just a wee too much. The thing that I enjoyed most about Everquest was the MMO aspect (massively multiplayer online). The game itself is only roughly mediocre (though quite a lot of that is offset by the sheer size of it), but the experience can be quite enjoyable. The most fun I ever had came about through making friends in the game, playing with those friends, and interacting with other people. The "reward" for playing for me was not gathering phat lewt and uber-levels but meeting new people, earning a good reputation, and above all having fun with other people. If you're an anti-social cave dweller (and I suspect this guy is) then the MMO, and the entire fundamental design of the game, is completely wasted on you, you might as well go play Morrowind and save your 13 bucks a month.
In case people were wondering what the Japanese section of the google zeitgeist translated to:
1. Ragnarok (e.g. Ragnarok Online, an MMORPG) 2. Gundam 3. ADSL 4. Tanaka Kouichi (A pioneer in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy who recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry) 5. Nobel Prize 6. JA Net banking (online banking at JA bank) 7. Harry Potter 8. Shimadzu Factory (FYI, Tanaka Kouichi works at Shimadzu) 9. Ring tones 10. North Korea
Everyone who's whining about the line "she talks about physics like it's cooking," should shut their pie holes. The reason that line is in there is not because the writer is sexist, it's because she DOES talk about physics like it's cooking ("to take this ingredient and another one there and stick something together").
Complete and utter stupidity. It's nothing more than a hardon for futurama. Video mail, voice messages, big fancy screens, surround sound, yeah, I think they've been watching too much scifi. Security? Productivity? Organization? Reliability? Data backup? User interface? Learning curve? Apparently these things will not be a concern in "the future" because MS says we'll need surround sound email messages more.
Long after betamax died in the consumer market it continued very strong in the professional market. Up until very recently quite a lot of TV studios (especially local stations) used betamax equipment. The reason it is being discontinued now is not because of obstinance but because of the switchover to digital camcorders, and video editing.
I'm glad that I can get this kind of important, breaking news from slashdot, since my subscription to "Duh!" magazine ran out a few months ago.
It's not about the amino acid, it's about the tRNA
on
New Amino Acid Discovered
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's very difficult to glean the details of the paper from the abstract alone, but I think I know what's going on. Firstly, this is *not* the first discovery of a non-standard amino acid in nature. There are several rare amino acids that are used by various organisms (usually bacteria) that are not in the "official" registrar of 21 AAs. However, in those cases the amino acid is simply a stand in replacement for a very similar amino acid. Essentially the only thing that need to be changed in that case is the enzyme that produces the amino acid.
This case is special not because of the use of a non-standard amino acid, but because it is an *additional* amino acid rather than a replacement. This means that the machinery of translation of an RNA codon to an amino acid (via tRNA) and the construction of the amino acid (via an enzyme) exists in parallel with the machinery for all the other existing amino acids. This is remarkably interesting because it represents a much larger genetic difference in the amino acid translating machinery, and a difference which we have never seen before.
Not really that much of a spread of technologies, mostly just small-scale molecular/DNA computing and quantum computing. If you ask me the real front runners for next gen computing are RSFQ, spintronics, and massively parallel "quasi-processors" / reconfigurable computers (such as RAW and "smart memory"). More the kind of thing you'll see on your desktop 5-10 years from now rather than in the lab and still needing another decade to fully develop.
Um, no, they aren't. They're good for public-key and symmetric encryption, but, despite what you learned at the university, public-key and symmetric aren't the only choices available.
I'd like to plug in a one-time pad, if that's OK with you. Utterly unbreakable. I like that. OpenPGP doesn't seem to easily support that.
Umm, call me crazy but I think that one-time-pads are a form of secret-key symmetric cipher. I'm fairly sure the RFC is sufficiently flexible to allow such a thing.
Otherwise, the rest of your post is just garbage. Weak but "unknown" algorithms do not provide security, even millions of them. Only strong algorithms provide security. If you really want to make the NSA fume then use RSA with an 8192-bit key, yeah they ain't gonna bust that one for a good long while if they don't have the private key.
I agree completely, it should be on every programmer's bookshelf. You can hardly call yourself a professional software engineer if you have not read this book.
Personally, I like documenting backwards. Start with the requirements, work to the architecture, then get into writing PDL (Program Design Language). Essentially, you write out as detailed instructions on what the routine does as you can, without getting to the nitty gritty. It describes the intent of the code, not the code itself. It morphs into excellent comments when you expand it out into full code, and it also has the nice little advantage that it's at a high enough level that it's applicable to multiple languages (if you should desire to switch).
You have to know the magic words
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
When you get the runaround for something, especially if it involves money, there are a few magic phrases that almost always work.
1. I would like to speak to your manager (use this if you've been on hold too long for something simple)
2. Something to the effect of: if you do not take care of this promply (i.e. right f'ing now!) I will dispute the charges with my bank/credit company.
3. I will never do business with you again and I will specifically recommend to all my friends, family, coworkers, and business clients not to use your service.
Oh yeah you better bet that's the kind of thing that gets those bastards' attention. They don't care about you, they don't care about anything except money. You are a paying customer, it's your damn money, and if need be you should throw that weight around.
Heh, ow, my sides hurt now. It's even more sad/funny since I think most of us have similar stories, probably about tech stuff (like "my cup holder broke").
Jedi battles! Slap in the standard good plot with mythic overtones like the other Star Wars films (the good ones anyway) and I'll stand in line to watch it more than once.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh, where in Canada is the UK gallon used for gasoline purchases? I've been to Canada many a time, gas prices up there are always cents per liter everywhere I've seen (or heard of).
The funny thing about this is that gas is rarely the major cost per mile of any vehicle. This is especially true for new cars. This is even more true for high efficiency vehicles like the Prius. In terms of cost per mile for average drivers, gas costs for the Prius are going to be lower than financing costs, let alone insurance or depreciation costs. If you're doing this to save money you're doing it for the wrong reasons.
First, if you're paying 4.50/gallon for gas in the US, you're getting raped. $2.50 is a more reasonable maximum, especially in the regions where electricity costs 6 cents / kwh.
Second, your comparison would be quite a lot more useful if you actually used similar units. A kwh is 3.6 MegaJoules, a gallon of gasoline corresponds to about 130 MegaJoules of energy, assume a moderate conversion efficiency of 20% and call it 26 megajoules. So $.06/kwh is $16/GJ, while $2.50 per gallon is $96/GJ.
The premise behind this story is that Solaris is inately superior to the various brands of Linux around. It is not. Interestingly, the same is the case for many other commercial Unix distributions. Linux is very much a high quality, professional product. More so, the reason why Solaris is becoming free is precisely because it is Solaris which is already dead. They have discovered that they cannot compete with equally good, or superior, products that have greater hardware and application support and are cheaper to own and use.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey. 8,216 square degrees imaged and over 6 terabytes of data collected to date, and counting.
Let me sum up quickly.
1) Photons bouncing off a mirror will impart momentum to the mirror. That's Newton's laws right there, as fundamentally a part of the fabric of the nature of reality as we know it as damned near anything else we have ever studied. If Gold were right and a Solar Sail wouldn't work, then it would mean Newton's 3rd law would be violated, and that's super bad mojo, mojo of a scale that Gold was unable to back up with sufficient evidence and argumentation in his penny-ante paper.
2) The laws of thermodynamics are not violated by the operation of Solar Sails. In any given inertial reference frame the reflected photons will be "red shifted" and have a slightly lower energy. This is how energy is conserved (since the movement of the sail represents work, and thus energy). This is also how the 2nd law of thermodynamics (non-decreasing entropy) is followed, since the redshifted photons are higher in entropy (for slightly complicated reasons) and balance the work done.
3) Light pressure is not theoretical, it has been detected, measured, and, indeed, used many times in many circumstances. Its properties have corresponded very closely (to about as many 9s as you'd like) to what has been theorized.
In short, Gold is full of crap and the New Scientist ought to be ashamed at printing his stupidity.
The core of the Earth is actually made mostly of Nickel and Iron. Heavier elements also exist but are much rarer and so don't make up much of the core. Also, there are different types of heavy elements. There are "siderophiles" like Gold, Platinum, and Iridium which prefer to hang out in Iron rather than rock and get concentrated near the core (one reason why gold is fairly rare on the Earth's crust). Then there are "lithophiles" like Uranium, Thorium, or Potassium which prefer to hang out in crustal rocks than in the more iron rich mantel or core (which is why Uranium isn't terribly rare in the crust of the Earth).
Also, the probe is only designed to decend down into part of the mantel, not necessarily all the way down to the core.
First, building your own cruise missile is a sure way to get stuck in prison longer than Kevin Mitnick, so watch your ass.
Second, if you're thinking about using GPS guidance, think again, consumer GPS receivers are designed to cut off when the speed is higher than a set value (precisely to prevent their use in this fashion).
Screw that, they should just get it over with, return the copyright laws to normal and specifically make a law taking Mickey out of the public domain in perpetuity. Yeah, it's stupid and arbitrary, just like the rest of the laws Disney et al get passed, but at least this way the damage is minimized.
This is a new type of solid rocket fuel. Current high-grade solid rocket fuels use aluminum powders and such like. All jet fuels already produce "only" CO2 and water on combustion, as do many popular liquid rocket fuels (such as LOX/LH2 and LOX/Kerosene, the two most popular rocket fuels for launch vehicles).
Gee, I hate to be a buzzkill on the whine party (would you like some cheese with that?) but I think this guy is complaining just a wee too much. The thing that I enjoyed most about Everquest was
the MMO aspect (massively multiplayer online). The game itself is only roughly mediocre (though quite a lot of that is offset by the sheer size of it), but the experience can be quite enjoyable. The most fun I ever had came about through making friends in the game, playing with those friends, and interacting with other people. The "reward" for playing for me was not gathering phat lewt and uber-levels but meeting new people, earning a good reputation, and above all having fun with other people. If you're an anti-social cave dweller (and I suspect this guy is) then the MMO, and the entire fundamental design of the game, is completely wasted on you, you might as well go play Morrowind and save your 13 bucks a month.
In case people were wondering what the Japanese section of the google zeitgeist translated to:
1. Ragnarok (e.g. Ragnarok Online, an MMORPG)
2. Gundam
3. ADSL
4. Tanaka Kouichi (A pioneer in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy who recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry)
5. Nobel Prize
6. JA Net banking (online banking at JA bank)
7. Harry Potter
8. Shimadzu Factory (FYI, Tanaka Kouichi works at Shimadzu)
9. Ring tones
10. North Korea
Everyone who's whining about the line "she talks about physics like it's cooking," should shut their pie holes. The reason that line is in there is not because the writer is sexist, it's because she DOES talk about physics like it's cooking ("to take this ingredient and another one there and stick something together").
Complete and utter stupidity. It's nothing more than a hardon for futurama. Video mail, voice messages, big fancy screens, surround sound, yeah, I think they've been watching too much scifi. Security? Productivity? Organization? Reliability? Data backup? User interface? Learning curve? Apparently these things will not be a concern in "the future" because MS says we'll need surround sound email messages more.
Long after betamax died in the consumer market it continued very strong in the professional market. Up until very recently quite a lot of TV studios (especially local stations) used betamax equipment. The reason it is being discontinued now is not because of obstinance but because of the switchover to digital camcorders, and video editing.
I'm glad that I can get this kind of important, breaking news from slashdot, since my subscription to "Duh!" magazine ran out a few months ago.
This case is special not because of the use of a non-standard amino acid, but because it is an *additional* amino acid rather than a replacement. This means that the machinery of translation of an RNA codon to an amino acid (via tRNA) and the construction of the amino acid (via an enzyme) exists in parallel with the machinery for all the other existing amino acids. This is remarkably interesting because it represents a much larger genetic difference in the amino acid translating machinery, and a difference which we have never seen before.
Not really that much of a spread of technologies, mostly just small-scale molecular/DNA computing and quantum computing. If you ask me the real front runners for next gen computing are RSFQ, spintronics, and massively parallel "quasi-processors" / reconfigurable computers (such as RAW and "smart memory"). More the kind of thing you'll see on your desktop 5-10 years from now rather than in the lab and still needing another decade to fully develop.
I'd like to plug in a one-time pad, if that's OK with you. Utterly unbreakable. I like that. OpenPGP doesn't seem to easily support that.
Umm, call me crazy but I think that one-time-pads are a form of secret-key symmetric cipher. I'm fairly sure the RFC is sufficiently flexible to allow such a thing.
Otherwise, the rest of your post is just garbage. Weak but "unknown" algorithms do not provide security, even millions of them. Only strong algorithms provide security. If you really want to make the NSA fume then use RSA with an 8192-bit key, yeah they ain't gonna bust that one for a good long while if they don't have the private key.
I agree completely, it should be on every programmer's bookshelf. You can hardly call yourself a professional software engineer if you have not read this book.
Personally, I like documenting backwards. Start with the requirements, work to the architecture, then get into writing PDL (Program Design Language). Essentially, you write out as detailed instructions on what the routine does as you can, without getting to the nitty gritty. It describes the intent of the code, not the code itself. It morphs into excellent comments when you expand it out into full code, and it also has the nice little advantage that it's at a high enough level that it's applicable to multiple languages (if you should desire to switch).
1. I would like to speak to your manager (use this if you've been on hold too long for something simple)
2. Something to the effect of: if you do not take care of this promply (i.e. right f'ing now!) I will dispute the charges with my bank/credit company.
3. I will never do business with you again and I will specifically recommend to all my friends, family, coworkers, and business clients not to use your service.
Oh yeah you better bet that's the kind of thing that gets those bastards' attention. They don't care about you, they don't care about anything except money. You are a paying customer, it's your damn money, and if need be you should throw that weight around.
Maybe my settings are broken for stuff like that.
Maybe they're broken intentionally.
Heh, ow, my sides hurt now. It's even more sad/funny since I think most of us have similar stories, probably about tech stuff (like "my cup holder broke").
Jedi battles! Slap in the standard good plot with mythic overtones like the other Star Wars films (the good ones anyway) and I'll stand in line to watch it more than once.