Seriously. Since when have businesses gone out for a "glitzy" UI? Of course, some people would use any excuse to "upgrade"....
Actually, this is the reason that windows sells at all as a server.
At the top enterprise end, little can beat a highly tuned linux server in most areas. However, for the smaller business, the idea of doing this is too frightening whilst a M$ box just seems easier.
The thing to watch out for here... OS X Leopard Server. For a significant number of small businesses, this would mean a glitzy UI, ease of use, and a pretty good feature set as a server. Not to mention that apple doesn't hit you with much in the way of per-client licenses as they make their money selling hardware.
More expensive and slightly less good performance than a well tuned linux or BSD box, but with ease of use and stability that M$ struggles to deliver on.
Converting an entire business with a lot of travelling employees to Google Apps instead of traditional apps that will work on a non-networked PC is probably still premature,
Yes, as as user of google apps, I can say its not ready yet...
For example, maintaining email lists for mail outs isn't really working yet. Even though you can redirect your gmail to another address, if you try and put that address into the email list for a group mail out it can fail. Specifically, if the address uses characters that aren't legal for a gmail address (such as an underscore), it can't be directly used as an address for a mailing list. You can create a "fake" gmail account which exists for the sole purpose of redirection, but this is hardly going to impress a business...
Combine this with the problem of actually providing feedback to google - if there is support I haven't found it in the product yet - and I'd be saying it isn't ready yet.
We have a choice - either store the energy in say a battery (with 50% roundtrip), or store it as extra coolth.
I'm not sure that battery storage is as bad as 50%. If that is your best option for storing energy for 12 hours, then cooling looks good. Somehow I don't think that that is the best case scenario for storage.
We're talking about a variation of 1C at -20C. Assuming an average outside temp of say 10C we're looking at a variation in losses of 3%. You are not going to find a battery, flywheel, fuelcell or pumped hydro system with a round trip efficiency of 97%.
Yes, but that is 3% on top of the existing losses. Its a 3% faster loss. It would depend on the loss per hour.
If, for example the losses were 5% per hour then your losses are greater. 5% per hour implies that you would return to essentially to ambient temperature after about two day (90% thermal leak assuming exponential decay). This may be unduly harsh, or it may not, depending on your insulation.
On this basis a 12 hour energy store will lose 40% of its energy.
So, it depends on how well insulated your cold store is.
I think both the article and post are misleading. Basically all they are doing is turning down the temperature at night and letting it warm up during the day. This just means that most of their energy consumption occurs at night, when there is often a surplus of electricity. It's a great idea though. Many forms of power generation cannot quickly adjust their outputs due to the wear and tear it would cause by temperature changes. I.e. coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants usually run at one output level, resulting in a lot of extra energy available at night when demand is low.
At the risk of being a bit redundant here, this is energy shifting.
It actually increases total energy requirements. Overcooling a thermal store will cause increased losses due to leakage of heat back into the store.
The only benefit is to reduce peak consumption, at the expense of increasing total consumption.
I think that there are probably better energy stores than this.
When we have enough energy from renewables and nuclear to do store the excess, the overall efficiency of the storage is probably going to be better using these sorts of technologies.
There is a natural limit to how much cooling you can do (it tops out somewhere before -273.15 degrees celcius), and the closer to the limit you push things the more leakage you get.
Because every scientist is a human being first. Why toil to understand the coils and springs of the universe if life has no purpose? Why inquire? Why even eat or breathe? Rocks and trees don't need a reason to exist. They simply do. Humans need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, because out ongoing existence is a daily choice. We are wired to require greater meaning, whether it exists or not.
So make meaning in life. Even the most fundamental christians believe in free will, so they all pretty much say the same thing too. Life has the meaning you give it, based on what you do.
Its hard, there are so many choices in what to do with life. And you have a whole planet filled run by a bunch of monkeys with oversized brains that have pretty much no idea what trouble they can cause. We have only just gotten to the level of sentience that can cause real damage to the planet.
So many things going wrong, and so little time to fix them. We are terraforming our this planet and trying to turn it into a new venus (not such a clever idea, really). People die daily from preventable diseases. Pointless wars driven by territorial drives from old parts of our limbic systems.
To believe in a higher power and/or an existence beyond death is one of several ways to ascribe meaning to your life. It requires a leap of faith to do so, but it's pretty much the most successful paradigm.
I sometimes think that if I were a god, I'd make the universe much like it is today - worlds separated by distances incomprehensibly vast. So even the experiments gone bad don't contaminate each other. And whilst I'm not really a believer in this, I do think that we are sitting on one tiny little planet surrounded by alot of cold, hard vacuum, with no real exit strategy as a species if we bugger things up here.
But I digress...
Thirdly, there's living according to your own will and conscience. This is a losing game, because nobody really wants to die and everybody eventually does. Those who delay death long enough become old and decrepit, even though nobody wants that for themselves either. Most strident atheist world-views center around coping strategies for dealing with this particular bit of Bad News.
If we get the technology right, aging and so on will not be issues. I don't know if that will happen for us, or for future generations, but there are no laws of physics that need to be broken to treat virtually any human disease. It just requires the appropriate amount of understanding and technology.
You can choose not to play this game, and make your own exit from the planet. Personally, I figure I'll get there anyway in the long run. Even immortality wont stop the universe from ending, and the big rip scenario in TFA isn't likely to be survivable by any individuals. So yes, we are all going to die. Deal with it. But its how we live our life that counts.
It would theoretically take 5 minutes to initiate this change, by someone who knows the itunes backend. Probably even less. (That is, if they add DRM on the fly, as someone early suggested, which seems crazy) If they encode all files as they get them, it would probably take a few days longer. None of this is technically difficult. Surely someone on slashdot should be able to see that.
There is a very obvious reason why they encrypt on the fly, rather than pre-encrypt.
If you pre-encrypt the music, each song goes out the same. Which means that it has the same decryption key. So you could play it on every copy of iTunes. (Unless you are assuming that iTunes works on an honour system, which it doesn't).
By encrypting on the fly, only my authorised computers have the decryption key; and apple will only authorise 5 copies at once (although you can reset this once a year). Of course, you could share your copy of iTunes decryption key (assuming you know how), but that is alot more hassle than just sharing the files....
As it happens, that's really hard. Computers copy information, that's what they do, and unfortunately people can't be trusted to just follow the rules of the system left to their own devices. Instead people do a cost:benefit analysis and think, well, it's not likely I'll be caught, so I'll go ahead and break the law. Who cares, everybody else does it anyway. So it has to be enforced at the technology level, otherwise we just screw ourselves over in the long run when content production just becomes economically unsupportable.
Currently DRM forces me to double my downloads... Once off the iTunes store for the TV shows I want to watch, then a second time to get them DRM free for long term archive.
If they came DRM free I wouldn't have to do the second download.
Please explain to me what economic model describes how DRM is protecting the revenue of content creators here.
I think its simple:
The content creators are too nervous to try and sell stuff without DRM.
Which is actually amazing - in all the history of recorded music, TV and film, until about 10 years ago nothing had significant DRM. You could tape music off the radio, video off the TV.
And yet sales of these products brought great wealth to the content producers. According to what you espouse, they should have all gone bankrupt as everyone pirated all the content.
In reality, people don't do this. Yes, they copy stuff. Always did. But they buy stuff too. And they always will, even if the DRM is removed.
Its happening now - there isn't a reason for virtually any sales of music CD's - just copy them off the internet.
But people still buy music CD's.
More importantly, the fallacy in the argument is that someone who gets music off the internet will somehow pay more money to these companies if the music isn't available. In fact, they may not have the money to spend, or the will to spend it that way.
Whilst someone like me is holding back on purchases when because I want to get it free of DRM also.
So in order to get people (who may never buy stuff) to not copy content, they are screwing around with people like me (who are more than willing to pay for content) by giving me the inferior product.
I get stuff from iTunes movies because its available quickly, and the quality is good. The stuff I get on the internet takes longer to download. For the shows I want to watch (eg Heroes, BSG, Stargate) I'm more than happy to pay to know that I'll get the content as fast as I can.
Bear in mind I live in Australia, and have to get the iTunes gift vouchers from the US to see this stuff.
But no way could the music industry or video industry view someone like me as being their target market. No, its the 12 year old kids with no disposable income who they are interested in forcing into the market? Right.
I'm probably the extreme example, but the general case is valid. Those with disposable income to spend on content will spend it. The competition is for how I spend my dollar. The content produces need to produce good content, and the money will come. Locking in bad content is not the winning formula here.
Here's a meta-meta opinion for you: One thing that's particularly annoying about this kind of over-moderation is that it can actually lead to the poster getting banned from posting for a significant period. The dynamic I've encountered is that population A, which likes the post, moderates it up to +5. Then population B notices it and starts moderating it down. Population A tries to "defend" the post by up-moderating to cancel out the down-mods. They fight over the post like two dogs fighting over a bone. You can easily end up with a situation where the post gets moderated down to -1, and then stays there after that. In that situation, a post that started out at 2 could end up having had 10 + mods, and 13 - mods. If you make a couple of controversial posts like this, you can easily get banned. It's happened to me (once, in the ~5 years I've been on slashdot). What's more common, and also really annoying, is what happens when you post negatively on a topic where most of the posters and moderators are fanboys. Whatever you do, don't ever make the mistake of saying something negative about BSD on a BSD topic, or something negative about Freenet on a Freenet story.
I have to agree with you about the issues of overmoderation. I think that any post which gets massively moderated in conflicting directions should be exempted normal moderation and frozen (perhaps at the posters original level).
With regard to posting an anti BSD type comment in a BSD forum... Its probably more effective to change a persons viewpoint a small bit at a time anyway. Occasionally people have sudden swings in opinion on the basis of a single overwhelming bit of evidence. More likely it will be as a result of a series of smaller dissapointments.
Not to say that your posting points were right or wrong, just that its human nature to defend yourself against someone who comes in all guns firing. A bit like what would happen if you went out into the middle of Harlem and yelled out "nigger" as loud as you could. The response is fairly predictable, and almost independent of whether you are right or wrong. You may well get lynched by the mob. And you end up with a situation where neither the original action nor the response ends up looking so clever.
Strong opinions polarise people, and this doesn't engender rational change. Everyone's limbic systems kick in in response to threat, and rational thinking stops.
No, you can't do this. The DRM from iTunes > 5 cannot be bypassed anymore (with JHymn) and iTunes up to 5 is locked out from the iTunes Store.
Fair cop. I didn't know that this had been stopped now. Certainly they didn't lock out iTunes 5 immediately. In any case you need a much later version of iTunes to get the video downloads anyway.
I certainly stand corrected on this point.
However with regard to the rest of my post, I don't recall any complaints from any customers about how bad this was. Nobody got locked out, had keys revoked, etc. Ultimately you were forced to upgrade your version of iTunes and get DRM'ed music, and that was as far as I think it went.
I actually don't have any major gripes about the FairPlay DRM right now. The concern I have is for the future - they can change the rules, unilaterally, and there is litte you can do about it. For this reason I am systematically replacing my purchased songs with mp3's. Its not that I mind paying for music (although I would much rather pay the artists than the RIAA). But if you pay for the music, its alot better if you own it truly, and you don't really own the music if its DRM'ed
If you have to have DRM (and I'm not sure you do), then apple has the best system by far because: 1. They are reasonably consistent with the rules (although they have changed them slighly in the past) 2. They have given you a way of escaping the encryption by burning and re-ripping it. 3. So far, there has been no forced obsolescence (compared with "Plays for Sure") 4. So far, they have used their bargaining power to negotiate content providers down in price, rather than pushing prices up for consumers.
The average consumer probably doesn't think about these points, all they know is that the music they buy works fine on their computer and their iPod. If apple doesn't change the rules, people will stay happy with the DRM and life will go on.
If they do change the rules, and everybody gets annoyed, well...
How big a collection of mp3's do you think will fit on to one of those new fangled 50GB HD-DVD's? You will get alot onto a dual layer DVD; but for many people a lifetime collection of mp3's will fit onto a single blu-ray or HD-DVD disk. Even without file sharing, that music disk will travel.
Apple understands the real competition isn't microsoft here. The DRM has to work for its customers or everything goes back to the napster days.
What mythical world do you live in? iTunes doesn't have every major label - last I checked, some of them refuse to sign up because "the DRM is too lax". How is Apple in control again?
Because those labels haven't been anywhere near to disrupt Apple's success and continued growth? Eventually Apple will be such a large sales channel, they have no choice but to fall in line.
I have to agree with Kjella.
Look at Apple Corp (the Beatles). I'm willing to wager money that they are about to start releasing music using iTunes. Certainly you have to wonder why else Steve Jobs had their albums splashed everywhere in his keynote speech.
The label's have two real choices: Fairplay for the iPod, or no DRM. The fact that they are starting to sell songs without DRM says how scared they are of apple.
The trouble is that if they use any other DRM, the percentage of the market that they get is so small it isn't worth having. Not to mention the debacle that microsoft produced when it abandoned its "plays for sure" platform for the Zune. I wouldn't want to be selling music to any of those WMA players - the users there might forget to blame microsoft and blame the label when the music they bought 6 months ago now can't be played on a Zune, or pretty much any new hardware that's coming out.
I'm not trying to defend apple for its DRM, but if you look at what happened with iTunes when the music store was cracked - basically they moved to a new version of iTunes but kept the old version still working, even though people were downloading music and bypassing the DRM. To my knowledge, you can still do this with the old version of iTunes if you really want to, but certainly nobody suffered from the DRM being bypassed.
The net effect of this is that the RIAA, if it wants DRM, has to use Apple. Anything else is probably worse than pointless the way microsoft is playing with WMA.
And if they have to use fairplay, they do so on apple's terms. A point which they are just starting to realise.
Outside of slashdot (an alternate reality where grandmothers use lunix and ogg vorbis is popular), who is criticizing fairplay? Is there anybody that doesn't think Zune is a turd?
Not too many people.
In truth its not very restrictive, as far as the current policies go. And apple has defended the users against abuses from the RIAA (esp with increases in pricing).
In particular, the fact that you can authorise 5 machines and an unlimited number of ipods is good.
More importantly, you can reset the list of 5 machines once per year even if you have lost all your old machines. Which means that having your music work on a new machine isn't likely to be a problem, even if your old machines get stolen or reformatted before you could deauthorise them out of your list of 5 computers.
Not to mention that you can burn the music and rip it again anyway. Sure it loses quality, but if you are buying for quality alone, you wouldn't be using either iTunes or an iPod for that matter.
I'm not surprised that iTunes isn't yet hacked. Mostly because there aren't many reasons yet why a legit user would get pissed off.
The biggest thing they should offer (in my opinion) is the ability to redownload your music that you have purchased. In this situation you would be getting defacto off-site storage of your music, which would be a huge plus for the service that you wouldn't get with mp3's. Unless you consider bittorrent as your off site backup.
Anyway, DRM has worked against the RIAA. They thought it would give them control over the users. Instead it has given apple control of the RIAA.
I foresee a not-too-distant future where we've bio-engineered a type of bacterium to 'eat' biomass (read: grass clippings, fall leaves, corn husks, other wastes, etc) and and produce a type of liquid hydrocarbon. That liquid hydrocarbon can be handled like gas (petrol) is now- it would use the same facilities, the same transports, etc. Heck, people could home-produce the stuff like bio-diesel is produced now.
I believe that biological productions of hydrocarbons is the main option for long distance transportation via land or air. (Ships & tankers could use nuclear power just fine).
It will be like diesel, not petrolium - diesel engines are able to take much wider sources of fuel than petrol engines as they dont require vaporisation of the fuel plus spark ignition. Rather they use compression as the method of causing combustion. This is much more robust, such that many diesel engines today can run on vegetable oil or similar.
In other words, we have a zero emission option right now - biodiesel. At least that's the theory, but in practice we burn alot of fossil fuels in the production of vegetable oil. The irony in this is that we use non-renewable oils to produce renewable oils, because it costs less to make the oil this way.
The number of bio-diesel powered vehicles in the future will probably depend on the relative cost of bio-diesel to electrical energy sources (whether they come from renewables or nuclear sources). My suspicion is that we will want to save the diesel and alcohols for planes and long distance trucks/trips. I suspect that everything else will look better to do if you have it powered by electricity. And this mostly from nuclear breeder reactors for much of this century and perhaps beyond.
Not saying that other alternatives wont occur. Just that what I describe above could be done today, with today's technology. Most other alternatives require technologies that don't yet work commercially yet.
And the greenie in me thinks that the sooner we get to this point, the better. If we can get everyone into electric cars as much as possible, then we can plug in any power source we want into the grid painlessly. This will still take us 20 years to change our cars over (10 years if we got very serious).
But at least this direction leads to a future where we can have the lifestyle that we currently have without massive CO2 emissions.
I think that this is a reasonable goal for the world to aim for - it doesn't involve telling China and India that they can never aspire to our lifestyles, and it doesn't involve telling our own peoples that we have to dramatically change our lifestyles in a negative fashion.
For this, I will happily plug my car in at the wall every night.
Seriously, plug in is dead, fuel cell or other self-contained has to be the future. And hybrid has to be the past.
No, its not. There is no self contained sustainable fuel that is remotely viable at this stage.
Your non-renewable options are: Petrol/Diesel Natural Gas
Your renewable transport options are: Hydrogen (*) Biodiesel & Alcohols (+) Electricity Other esoteric energy stores.
The joy of electricity is simple - it piggy backs off whatever we decide to power the world with for fixed structures. That solution may be nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal or hydroelectric. It really doesn't matter, as long as we can store the energy sufficiently well in a car to get around. If you think that is going to be too hard, explain to me why its going to be easier to store hydrogen, because I see alot more things running off batteries now that hydrogen energy sources.
Just my opinions here,
Happy to see what others think,
Michael
(*) Right now all hydrogen is formed from hydrocarbon sources. Its hard to hold as it destroys the metals that hold it in compressed form. It loses most of the energy put into it in the compression cycle to get it into its container so that you only get about 30% of the energy put in.
(+) Definitely an option for some parts of the world, but not really going to work well for many countries as they don't have enough arable land to make all the biomass. And to make it replace fossil fuels for cars will require so much water to irrigate the crops we will probably have to start building massive numbers of desalination plants, etc. Personally I'd rather keep the land areas untouched and go for renewables, but some countries do manage this option ok.
You can't be tried for a law that doesn't exist. IANAL, but if it wasn't against the law when you did it, you can't be arrested for it. Ignorance of the law is one thing, but ignorance of a non-existant law is quite another.
Well, actually they are trying David Hicks in Guantanamo Bay for a crimes against laws that didn't exist at the time that he was allegedly breaking them.
There are no laws (at least in Australia) against retrospective laws. I still haven't worked out what American laws an Australian citizen in Afganistan may have broken, but I suspect that he wasn't aware of them at the time if they actually existed.
Not saying he is a good or a bad person, but in many countries of the world you can be charged for breaking laws that did not exist at the time that you made the offence. Maybe there is something in some countries constitutions or similar to prevent that - there certainly isnt in Australia.
So of the two things you could get right, Microsoft chose to focus on the physical device that needs to be shipped and examined and repaired, while Apple chose to focus on the readily copied and distributed software that would otherwise need to be downloaded from the web.
Overall, I think Zune made the best choices of where to fail. Both sides are failing a little, but the Zune doesn't have any failures that can't be fixed free of charge later on down the line.
Right. Like windows XP, it doesn't have any failures that cant be fixed by a software upgrade. Its called Vista. Let me know when microsoft sends you a free copy.
If you seriously think that they will fix software problems for free, you should go have a talk with all the people who bought into "plays for sure". They got a deal worse than software upgrade. It was forced obsolescence of the worst kind. The software upgrade that those people deserve would be to remove the DRM off their music so that they can at least move that onto another player before their hardware dies. Let me know when microsoft offers that.
But I can see that you really believe that microsoft will look after you. After all, they are the ones fighting the RIAA to keep the cost of a song down and there is no way that they would just donate money to them now, like for every player that is sold.
That's a good point. Physics make frequent use of the (much) richer structure provided by the mathematics of complex numbers, quaternions, abstract vector states, you-name-it, but at the end of the day, we only measure real things, and the mathematics only helps to predict what we might (really) see. That having been said, this doesn't really seem like anything new. Perhaps it adds some subtle structure, but I'll wait until I can read a paper...
No, there are real division by zero errors in the world. They are called black holes.:)
I'm not at all a nuke booster, but this isn't true. If you use breeder reactors you can convert non-fissile U238 to Plutonium, which multiplies your available fuel (U235) by a factor of hundreds. And it's not hard to transport electricity, it's just how efficient it is. Aside from copper cables, there's the possibility of cracking water to make hydrogen. Further out, maybe superconducting cables. Also you can make portable reactors on barges and move them to where they're needed.
I'm very sceptical about hydrogen. All our current hydrogen is coming from fossil fuels, and nobody really knows how to economically make it or store it. It destroys most containers it is in, and it is so light that you cannot compress it to a useful energy density without very strong containers. All of which make it moderately bad for cars and trucks, and exceptionally bad for planes.
I think you could put induction coils under most roads in cities to recharge vehicles there, but I'm not sure that this will work long distance.
Trains will work just fine - I'm expecting to see alot more of them around in the future as electricity works well for them.
If you really think electricity is easy to store, why are people getting so interested in fuel cells for laptops?
Have you ever heard of fuel reprocessing? Have you ever heard of breeder reactors that use U-238? How about using thorium? Estimates are that we have anywhere from 10,000 to 5,000,000,000 years worth of nuclear fuel remaining with these technologies that are largely already available. If by "contentious" you mean "NIMBY" then I suppose people will have to consider whether or not they'd rather accept a lower standard of living or nuclear power. I choose the latter.
I have no great contention with what you are saying. I think nuclear is a good option, if done right.
Conventional reserves will power the world for 50 years, at current usage. If we were to run out of other energy sources, it would last alot less. This is because almost all nuclear reactors rely on U235, which is only 0.7% of all uranium, to maintain the reaction. All the current light water reactors use this technology.
Breeder reactors certainly overcome this limitation, but as I understand it are a much newer technology. I'm not saying they won't work, just that I'm not sure how well they will work in the long term.
Either way, Nuclear is set to be integral to energy in the near future.
Bear in mind, nuclear won't fly planes or probably drive trucks. To store that energy will require a whole technology that doesn't really work yet. One ordinary car engine with the pedal to the metal consumes enough power to light up a small village. People don't really understand that yet - the big issue is not future energy (although its an issue) - it is portable energy in the future. I don't know what the answer to this is; hopefully its biodiesel. Honestly, I don't think its nuclear, but I'd love to be wrong.
The issue is whether we can sustain our usage at current levels indefinitely. The answer is of course, no. Can we then sustain current usage until a substitute energy source comes along? Possibly.
I've spent a bit of time reading around this area, and I think you can divide the problem into a couple of areas
1. Depletion of reserves
A big problem. Oil will run out, its really a question of when. If you believe the Peak Oil proponents, we may well be in a depletion phase already. Certainly May 2005 was a peak in production which we have not yet exceeded, and the longer this goes on for the more likely that it was the true peak. Also we are currently consuming reserves at 4 times the rate we are discovering new one sources. It is unlikely that we will ever find another major producer like Saudi Arabia, and so if we haven't hit peak, we will soon enough (in the next 10 years). After that peak, we probably have 20 years or so of decreasing production.
With oil reserves limited, attention is turning to other energy sources. Natural gas and Nuclear Power are the obvious choices.
Unfortunately, natural gas isn't infinite, and while it will last a while, its loss will be accelerated by oil substitution. In other words, it will peak not long after whenever oil peaks.
Nuclear power is contentious, difficult, and actually not in infinite supply. The world would consume all the nuclear power in a couple of decades; and there isn't any easy way to make its energy available for transportation.
2. Ecological Damage
Whilst all this stored energy will run out, the bigger question that we face is: Can we really afford to ever actually use all these sources without damaging the environment too much?
Carbon Dioxide emissions are a big concern. A recent article highlights the rapid rise in CO2 that we are producing right now. Its hard to see how we an avoid terraforming the planet (in a nasty way) with current consumption of fossil fuels. There are options such as sequestration or even shading the planet from space, but its hard to know which country is going to start this process off. Perhaps more economic solutions exist, but for now all these solutions are just theories, and nobody is doing any of it yet to my knowledge.
Environmental damage from renewable resources is still an issue. Wind farms make noise and kill birds, hydro power floods large areas of the environment, solar takes out alot of space and uses a great deal of non-renewable resources to manufacture. Nuclear comes with its own set of environmental problems.
Coal, historically, is the worst offender. Most coal mines have killed more miners individually that all nuclear accidents in the world have done. Coal contains radioactive isotopes, and coal powered stations actually release a substantial amount of radiation. Also, there are a great deal of pollutants in coal - its not a really clean energy source; and in fact causes more CO2 and less H2O release as its mostly carbon - unlike natural gas, which has a lot of hydrogen in it and therefore has water as a waste product of combustion which is much better than carbon dioxide.
Renewable alternatives
The renewable resources all have problems.
Bio Diesel (and/or ethanol) is a really promising alternative, but will require huge amounts of land to be converted to fuel production to support this - perhaps as much as 25% of the surface area of the US would be required to support the US at current rates of usage. In this sense it suffers the same problems as most renewables - environmental degredation. Its hard to know where all the fresh water is going to come from to grow this fuel, let alone the land. On the
Some spammer is using an email address of mine to send spam from. So I get the people writing back, asking why I am sending them spam. And another of my domains is obviously listed somewhere as a domain where guessing user accounts might be a good idea. So I get cqoiecn@mydomain.com, zqopqwn@mydomain.com, etc. It all just sucks. I'm currently getting about 10 spams per minute.
Yes, I'm getting this too...
Bounced emails to guessed email accounts. But with forged headers saying that I'm the sender. I know that they are forged, because I have my own domain, and the "from" fields are nothing like the ones I make up when I generate a "throw away" email address. So they are guessing my email accounts (wrongly) - and they end up in my catch-all box when postfix or similar return the mail to me (with spam attached!) It sucks big time that it looks like I'm sending spam - and I doubt very much that anyone has hacked my email or guessed my account password. Stuff being sent when my computers are off, no records of this as sent mail, and use of emails addresses that have never existed.
At least I'm not getting one a minute.
I moved my domain hosting over to google as my previous provider just couldn't filter effectively and it was causing me lots of grief.
But I do worry about the number of people who are thinking I'm spamming them....
What *shocked* me was that I decided just a couple of months ago that I no longer NEED Linux for my server OS at home because OS X can do everything that I count on Linux to do for me. I've been running Linux servers at home since 1994! To realize that I'm quite content to completely move away from Linux as a platform at home was truly surprising. I have a couple of major services to convert, but soon all will be migrated to OS X, and I can decomm my Linux servers completely.
Yes, I know that feeling. I moved away from windows in 2002, getting tired of product activation as someone who was pulling their machine apart all the time.
Linux was getting to the point of being ok to use then.
But in 2004 I was finally convinced to buy an ibook, and things have gone crazy from there...
The real difference - my wife actually uses here apple laptop, but never really used the linux stuff.
I've said this before, and I belive this strongly - OS X is about as good as it gets for userland experience; its market share is on the ascent for a good reason, and its all about home users.
I can't see why OS X should succeed over Linux in any real server environment, but it does a neat job for a home user who isn't stressing the system. My G4 minimac can handle the server stuff well enough for the extremely light load I put on it (mostly as a nice way to send large files to people without killing their inboxes), and I get to play. I doubt that I'd use it if I was trying to run a server farm. On the other hand, if I was a graphic professional running a server for myself, it would make sense there.
Windows - well lets just see how well vista takes off - by that I mean, if apple's market share takes a fall because all the new apple converts go back to windows, then vista will be better than XP. I'll believe that when I see it.
Lets see if my 18% of laptop market share in the next 3-6 months pans out first...
The entire system depends upon computer voting systems without a verifiable paper trail. I thought that this issue was settled already, but apparently it is not.
I think its time for me to write a first..... Mod parent up.... This is the correct summary of the whole problem.
If you have a paper trail, just have the machine print your vote. You read the vote, decide its correct, and then put it in the ballot box. Easy, machine and human readable, auditable. The only way around this is to swap ballot papers, which is a problem in any voting system but which is generally dealt with by having independent witnesses who make sure nobody stuffs things into the ballot box that shouldn't be there.
It's up the whomever programmed the computer to decide who your vote will count towards. And, by design, you'll never be able to validate that.
Now, if you don't have a paper trail, you don't have a way to audit things properly. There is no way to be sure that the machines aren't saying one thing to the voters when they check and another thing when they tally results.
In essence, this is a technical (non) solution to a trust problem. If you don't trust the machines, you are stuffed...
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. Since when have businesses gone out for a "glitzy" UI? Of course, some people would use any excuse to "upgrade" ....
Actually, this is the reason that windows sells at all as a server.
At the top enterprise end, little can beat a highly tuned linux server in most areas. However, for the smaller business, the idea of doing this is too frightening whilst a M$ box just seems easier.
The thing to watch out for here... OS X Leopard Server. For a significant number of small businesses, this would mean a glitzy UI, ease of use, and a pretty good feature set as a server. Not to mention that apple doesn't hit you with much in the way of per-client licenses as they make their money selling hardware.
More expensive and slightly less good performance than a well tuned linux or BSD box, but with ease of use and stability that M$ struggles to deliver on.
Just my 2c worth
Michael
Converting an entire business with a lot of travelling employees to Google Apps instead of traditional apps that will work on a non-networked PC is probably still premature,
Yes, as as user of google apps, I can say its not ready yet...
For example, maintaining email lists for mail outs isn't really working yet. Even though you can redirect your gmail to another address, if you try and put that address into the email list for a group mail out it can fail. Specifically, if the address uses characters that aren't legal for a gmail address (such as an underscore), it can't be directly used as an address for a mailing list. You can create a "fake" gmail account which exists for the sole purpose of redirection, but this is hardly going to impress a business...
Combine this with the problem of actually providing feedback to google - if there is support I haven't found it in the product yet - and I'd be saying it isn't ready yet.
Michael
Or as someone once put it, there is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
.sig
I was going to mod you up, but then I had to write this reply instead:
Great quote, thank you for my new
Michael
We have a choice - either store the energy in say a battery (with 50% roundtrip), or store it as extra coolth.
I'm not sure that battery storage is as bad as 50%. If that is your best option for storing energy for 12 hours, then cooling looks good. Somehow I don't think that that is the best case scenario for storage.
Pumped Water energy storage is 70-85% efficient.
Supercapacitator are up to 95% efficient.
That is your reference point for a 12 hour energy store.
I'm not saying that it might not be better to overcool, but just pointing out the options.
Michael
We're talking about a variation of 1C at -20C. Assuming an average outside temp of say 10C we're looking at a variation in losses of 3%. You are not going to find a battery, flywheel, fuelcell or pumped hydro system with a round trip efficiency of 97%.
Yes, but that is 3% on top of the existing losses. Its a 3% faster loss. It would depend on the loss per hour.
If, for example the losses were 5% per hour then your losses are greater. 5% per hour implies that you would return to essentially to ambient temperature after about two day (90% thermal leak assuming exponential decay). This may be unduly harsh, or it may not, depending on your insulation.
On this basis a 12 hour energy store will lose 40% of its energy.
So, it depends on how well insulated your cold store is.
Michael
I think both the article and post are misleading. Basically all they are doing is turning down the temperature at night and letting it warm up during the day. This just means that most of their energy consumption occurs at night, when there is often a surplus of electricity. It's a great idea though. Many forms of power generation cannot quickly adjust their outputs due to the wear and tear it would cause by temperature changes. I.e. coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants usually run at one output level, resulting in a lot of extra energy available at night when demand is low.
At the risk of being a bit redundant here, this is energy shifting.
It actually increases total energy requirements. Overcooling a thermal store will cause increased losses due to leakage of heat back into the store.
The only benefit is to reduce peak consumption, at the expense of increasing total consumption.
I think that there are probably better energy stores than this.
Pumping water against gravity and flow batteries come to mind as better energy stores.
When we have enough energy from renewables and nuclear to do store the excess, the overall efficiency of the storage is probably going to be better using these sorts of technologies.
There is a natural limit to how much cooling you can do (it tops out somewhere before -273.15 degrees celcius), and the closer to the limit you push things the more leakage you get.
Michael
Because every scientist is a human being first. Why toil to understand the coils and springs of the universe if life has no purpose? Why inquire? Why even eat or breathe? Rocks and trees don't need a reason to exist. They simply do. Humans need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, because out ongoing existence is a daily choice. We are wired to require greater meaning, whether it exists or not.
So make meaning in life. Even the most fundamental christians believe in free will, so they all pretty much say the same thing too. Life has the meaning you give it, based on what you do.
Its hard, there are so many choices in what to do with life. And you have a whole planet filled run by a bunch of monkeys with oversized brains that have pretty much no idea what trouble they can cause. We have only just gotten to the level of sentience that can cause real damage to the planet.
So many things going wrong, and so little time to fix them. We are terraforming our this planet and trying to turn it into a new venus (not such a clever idea, really). People die daily from preventable diseases. Pointless wars driven by territorial drives from old parts of our limbic systems.
To believe in a higher power and/or an existence beyond death is one of several ways to ascribe meaning to your life. It requires a leap of faith to do so, but it's pretty much the most successful paradigm.
I sometimes think that if I were a god, I'd make the universe much like it is today - worlds separated by distances incomprehensibly vast. So even the experiments gone bad don't contaminate each other. And whilst I'm not really a believer in this, I do think that we are sitting on one tiny little planet surrounded by alot of cold, hard vacuum, with no real exit strategy as a species if we bugger things up here.
But I digress...
Thirdly, there's living according to your own will and conscience. This is a losing game, because nobody really wants to die and everybody eventually does. Those who delay death long enough become old and decrepit, even though nobody wants that for themselves either. Most strident atheist world-views center around coping strategies for dealing with this particular bit of Bad News.
If we get the technology right, aging and so on will not be issues. I don't know if that will happen for us, or for future generations, but there are no laws of physics that need to be broken to treat virtually any human disease. It just requires the appropriate amount of understanding and technology.
You can choose not to play this game, and make your own exit from the planet. Personally, I figure I'll get there anyway in the long run. Even immortality wont stop the universe from ending, and the big rip scenario in TFA isn't likely to be survivable by any individuals. So yes, we are all going to die. Deal with it. But its how we live our life that counts.
There is so much to do, and so little time...
Michael
It would theoretically take 5 minutes to initiate this change, by someone who knows the itunes backend. Probably even less. (That is, if they add DRM on the fly, as someone early suggested, which seems crazy) If they encode all files as they get them, it would probably take a few days longer. None of this is technically difficult. Surely someone on slashdot should be able to see that.
There is a very obvious reason why they encrypt on the fly, rather than pre-encrypt.
If you pre-encrypt the music, each song goes out the same. Which means that it has the same decryption key. So you could play it on every copy of iTunes. (Unless you are assuming that iTunes works on an honour system, which it doesn't).
By encrypting on the fly, only my authorised computers have the decryption key; and apple will only authorise 5 copies at once (although you can reset this once a year). Of course, you could share your copy of iTunes decryption key (assuming you know how), but that is alot more hassle than just sharing the files....
Michael
As it happens, that's really hard. Computers copy information, that's what they do, and unfortunately people can't be trusted to just follow the rules of the system left to their own devices. Instead people do a cost:benefit analysis and think, well, it's not likely I'll be caught, so I'll go ahead and break the law. Who cares, everybody else does it anyway. So it has to be enforced at the technology level, otherwise we just screw ourselves over in the long run when content production just becomes economically unsupportable.
Currently DRM forces me to double my downloads... Once off the iTunes store for the TV shows I want to watch, then a second time to get them DRM free for long term archive.
If they came DRM free I wouldn't have to do the second download.
Please explain to me what economic model describes how DRM is protecting the revenue of content creators here.
I think its simple:
The content creators are too nervous to try and sell stuff without DRM.
Which is actually amazing - in all the history of recorded music, TV and film, until about 10 years ago nothing had significant DRM. You could tape music off the radio, video off the TV.
And yet sales of these products brought great wealth to the content producers. According to what you espouse, they should have all gone bankrupt as everyone pirated all the content.
In reality, people don't do this. Yes, they copy stuff. Always did. But they buy stuff too. And they always will, even if the DRM is removed.
Its happening now - there isn't a reason for virtually any sales of music CD's - just copy them off the internet.
But people still buy music CD's.
More importantly, the fallacy in the argument is that someone who gets music off the internet will somehow pay more money to these companies if the music isn't available. In fact, they may not have the money to spend, or the will to spend it that way.
Whilst someone like me is holding back on purchases when because I want to get it free of DRM also.
So in order to get people (who may never buy stuff) to not copy content, they are screwing around with people like me (who are more than willing to pay for content) by giving me the inferior product.
I get stuff from iTunes movies because its available quickly, and the quality is good. The stuff I get on the internet takes longer to download. For the shows I want to watch (eg Heroes, BSG, Stargate) I'm more than happy to pay to know that I'll get the content as fast as I can.
Bear in mind I live in Australia, and have to get the iTunes gift vouchers from the US to see this stuff.
But no way could the music industry or video industry view someone like me as being their target market. No, its the 12 year old kids with no disposable income who they are interested in forcing into the market? Right.
I'm probably the extreme example, but the general case is valid. Those with disposable income to spend on content will spend it. The competition is for how I spend my dollar. The content produces need to produce good content, and the money will come. Locking in bad content is not the winning formula here.
Michael
Reposting other people's comments from old stories, are we? Welcome to my foe list.
Join the long queue
Here's a meta-meta opinion for you: One thing that's particularly annoying about this kind of over-moderation is that it can actually lead to the poster getting banned from posting for a significant period. The dynamic I've encountered is that population A, which likes the post, moderates it up to +5. Then population B notices it and starts moderating it down. Population A tries to "defend" the post by up-moderating to cancel out the down-mods. They fight over the post like two dogs fighting over a bone. You can easily end up with a situation where the post gets moderated down to -1, and then stays there after that. In that situation, a post that started out at 2 could end up having had 10 + mods, and 13 - mods. If you make a couple of controversial posts like this, you can easily get banned. It's happened to me (once, in the ~5 years I've been on slashdot). What's more common, and also really annoying, is what happens when you post negatively on a topic where most of the posters and moderators are fanboys. Whatever you do, don't ever make the mistake of saying something negative about BSD on a BSD topic, or something negative about Freenet on a Freenet story.
I have to agree with you about the issues of overmoderation. I think that any post which gets massively moderated in conflicting directions should be exempted normal moderation and frozen (perhaps at the posters original level).
With regard to posting an anti BSD type comment in a BSD forum... Its probably more effective to change a persons viewpoint a small bit at a time anyway. Occasionally people have sudden swings in opinion on the basis of a single overwhelming bit of evidence. More likely it will be as a result of a series of smaller dissapointments.
Not to say that your posting points were right or wrong, just that its human nature to defend yourself against someone who comes in all guns firing. A bit like what would happen if you went out into the middle of Harlem and yelled out "nigger" as loud as you could. The response is fairly predictable, and almost independent of whether you are right or wrong. You may well get lynched by the mob. And you end up with a situation where neither the original action nor the response ends up looking so clever.
Strong opinions polarise people, and this doesn't engender rational change. Everyone's limbic systems kick in in response to threat, and rational thinking stops.
Just my thoughts,
Michael
No, you can't do this. The DRM from iTunes > 5 cannot be bypassed anymore (with JHymn) and iTunes up to 5 is locked out from the iTunes Store.
Fair cop. I didn't know that this had been stopped now. Certainly they didn't lock out iTunes 5 immediately. In any case you need a much later version of iTunes to get the video downloads anyway.
I certainly stand corrected on this point.
However with regard to the rest of my post, I don't recall any complaints from any customers about how bad this was. Nobody got locked out, had keys revoked, etc. Ultimately you were forced to upgrade your version of iTunes and get DRM'ed music, and that was as far as I think it went.
I actually don't have any major gripes about the FairPlay DRM right now. The concern I have is for the future - they can change the rules, unilaterally, and there is litte you can do about it. For this reason I am systematically replacing my purchased songs with mp3's. Its not that I mind paying for music (although I would much rather pay the artists than the RIAA). But if you pay for the music, its alot better if you own it truly, and you don't really own the music if its DRM'ed
If you have to have DRM (and I'm not sure you do), then apple has the best system by far because:
1. They are reasonably consistent with the rules (although they have changed them slighly in the past)
2. They have given you a way of escaping the encryption by burning and re-ripping it.
3. So far, there has been no forced obsolescence (compared with "Plays for Sure")
4. So far, they have used their bargaining power to negotiate content providers down in price, rather than pushing prices up for consumers.
The average consumer probably doesn't think about these points, all they know is that the music they buy works fine on their computer and their iPod. If apple doesn't change the rules, people will stay happy with the DRM and life will go on.
If they do change the rules, and everybody gets annoyed, well...
How big a collection of mp3's do you think will fit on to one of those new fangled 50GB HD-DVD's? You will get alot onto a dual layer DVD; but for many people a lifetime collection of mp3's will fit onto a single blu-ray or HD-DVD disk. Even without file sharing, that music disk will travel.
Apple understands the real competition isn't microsoft here. The DRM has to work for its customers or everything goes back to the napster days.
Michael
What mythical world do you live in? iTunes doesn't have every major label - last I checked, some of them refuse to sign up because "the DRM is too lax". How is Apple in control again?
Because those labels haven't been anywhere near to disrupt Apple's success and continued growth? Eventually Apple will be such a large sales channel, they have no choice but to fall in line.
I have to agree with Kjella.
Look at Apple Corp (the Beatles). I'm willing to wager money that they are about to start releasing music using iTunes. Certainly you have to wonder why else Steve Jobs had their albums splashed everywhere in his keynote speech.
The label's have two real choices: Fairplay for the iPod, or no DRM. The fact that they are starting to sell songs without DRM says how scared they are of apple.
The trouble is that if they use any other DRM, the percentage of the market that they get is so small it isn't worth having. Not to mention the debacle that microsoft produced when it abandoned its "plays for sure" platform for the Zune. I wouldn't want to be selling music to any of those WMA players - the users there might forget to blame microsoft and blame the label when the music they bought 6 months ago now can't be played on a Zune, or pretty much any new hardware that's coming out.
I'm not trying to defend apple for its DRM, but if you look at what happened with iTunes when the music store was cracked - basically they moved to a new version of iTunes but kept the old version still working, even though people were downloading music and bypassing the DRM. To my knowledge, you can still do this with the old version of iTunes if you really want to, but certainly nobody suffered from the DRM being bypassed.
The net effect of this is that the RIAA, if it wants DRM, has to use Apple. Anything else is probably worse than pointless the way microsoft is playing with WMA.
And if they have to use fairplay, they do so on apple's terms. A point which they are just starting to realise.
Michael
Outside of slashdot (an alternate reality where grandmothers use lunix and ogg vorbis is popular), who is criticizing fairplay? Is there anybody that doesn't think Zune is a turd?
Not too many people.
In truth its not very restrictive, as far as the current policies go. And apple has defended the users against abuses from the RIAA (esp with increases in pricing).
In particular, the fact that you can authorise 5 machines and an unlimited number of ipods is good.
More importantly, you can reset the list of 5 machines once per year even if you have lost all your old machines. Which means that having your music work on a new machine isn't likely to be a problem, even if your old machines get stolen or reformatted before you could deauthorise them out of your list of 5 computers.
Not to mention that you can burn the music and rip it again anyway. Sure it loses quality, but if you are buying for quality alone, you wouldn't be using either iTunes or an iPod for that matter.
I'm not surprised that iTunes isn't yet hacked. Mostly because there aren't many reasons yet why a legit user would get pissed off.
The biggest thing they should offer (in my opinion) is the ability to redownload your music that you have purchased. In this situation you would be getting defacto off-site storage of your music, which would be a huge plus for the service that you wouldn't get with mp3's. Unless you consider bittorrent as your off site backup.
Anyway, DRM has worked against the RIAA. They thought it would give them control over the users. Instead it has given apple control of the RIAA.
Michael
I foresee a not-too-distant future where we've bio-engineered a type of bacterium to 'eat' biomass (read: grass clippings, fall leaves, corn husks, other wastes, etc) and and produce a type of liquid hydrocarbon. That liquid hydrocarbon can be handled like gas (petrol) is now- it would use the same facilities, the same transports, etc. Heck, people could home-produce the stuff like bio-diesel is produced now.
I believe that biological productions of hydrocarbons is the main option for long distance transportation via land or air. (Ships & tankers could use nuclear power just fine).
It will be like diesel, not petrolium - diesel engines are able to take much wider sources of fuel than petrol engines as they dont require vaporisation of the fuel plus spark ignition. Rather they use compression as the method of causing combustion. This is much more robust, such that many diesel engines today can run on vegetable oil or similar.
In other words, we have a zero emission option right now - biodiesel. At least that's the theory, but in practice we burn alot of fossil fuels in the production of vegetable oil. The irony in this is that we use non-renewable oils to produce renewable oils, because it costs less to make the oil this way.
The number of bio-diesel powered vehicles in the future will probably depend on the relative cost of bio-diesel to electrical energy sources (whether they come from renewables or nuclear sources). My suspicion is that we will want to save the diesel and alcohols for planes and long distance trucks/trips. I suspect that everything else will look better to do if you have it powered by electricity. And this mostly from nuclear breeder reactors for much of this century and perhaps beyond.
Not saying that other alternatives wont occur. Just that what I describe above could be done today, with today's technology. Most other alternatives require technologies that don't yet work commercially yet.
And the greenie in me thinks that the sooner we get to this point, the better. If we can get everyone into electric cars as much as possible, then we can plug in any power source we want into the grid painlessly. This will still take us 20 years to change our cars over (10 years if we got very serious).
But at least this direction leads to a future where we can have the lifestyle that we currently have without massive CO2 emissions.
I think that this is a reasonable goal for the world to aim for - it doesn't involve telling China and India that they can never aspire to our lifestyles, and it doesn't involve telling our own peoples that we have to dramatically change our lifestyles in a negative fashion.
For this, I will happily plug my car in at the wall every night.
Michael
Seriously, plug in is dead, fuel cell or other self-contained has to be the future. And hybrid has to be the past.
No, its not. There is no self contained sustainable fuel that is remotely viable at this stage.
Your non-renewable options are:
Petrol/Diesel
Natural Gas
Your renewable transport options are:
Hydrogen (*)
Biodiesel & Alcohols (+)
Electricity
Other esoteric energy stores.
The joy of electricity is simple - it piggy backs off whatever we decide to power the world with for fixed structures. That solution may be nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal or hydroelectric. It really doesn't matter, as long as we can store the energy sufficiently well in a car to get around. If you think that is going to be too hard, explain to me why its going to be easier to store hydrogen, because I see alot more things running off batteries now that hydrogen energy sources.
Just my opinions here,
Happy to see what others think,
Michael
(*) Right now all hydrogen is formed from hydrocarbon sources. Its hard to hold as it destroys the metals that hold it in compressed form. It loses most of the energy put into it in the compression cycle to get it into its container so that you only get about 30% of the energy put in.
(+) Definitely an option for some parts of the world, but not really going to work well for many countries as they don't have enough arable land to make all the biomass. And to make it replace fossil fuels for cars will require so much water to irrigate the crops we will probably have to start building massive numbers of desalination plants, etc. Personally I'd rather keep the land areas untouched and go for renewables, but some countries do manage this option ok.
You can't be tried for a law that doesn't exist. IANAL, but if it wasn't against the law when you did it, you can't be arrested for it. Ignorance of the law is one thing, but ignorance of a non-existant law is quite another.
Well, actually they are trying David Hicks in Guantanamo Bay for a crimes against laws that didn't exist at the time that he was allegedly breaking them.
There are no laws (at least in Australia) against retrospective laws. I still haven't worked out what American laws an Australian citizen in Afganistan may have broken, but I suspect that he wasn't aware of them at the time if they actually existed.
Not saying he is a good or a bad person, but in many countries of the world you can be charged for breaking laws that did not exist at the time that you made the offence. Maybe there is something in some countries constitutions or similar to prevent that - there certainly isnt in Australia.
Michael
So of the two things you could get right, Microsoft chose to focus on the physical device that needs to be shipped and examined and repaired, while Apple chose to focus on the readily copied and distributed software that would otherwise need to be downloaded from the web.
Overall, I think Zune made the best choices of where to fail. Both sides are failing a little, but the Zune doesn't have any failures that can't be fixed free of charge later on down the line.
Right. Like windows XP, it doesn't have any failures that cant be fixed by a software upgrade. Its called Vista. Let me know when microsoft sends you a free copy.
If you seriously think that they will fix software problems for free, you should go have a talk with all the people who bought into "plays for sure". They got a deal worse than software upgrade. It was forced obsolescence of the worst kind. The software upgrade that those people deserve would be to remove the DRM off their music so that they can at least move that onto another player before their hardware dies. Let me know when microsoft offers that.
But I can see that you really believe that microsoft will look after you. After all, they are the ones fighting the RIAA to keep the cost of a song down and there is no way that they would just donate money to them now, like for every player that is sold.
Michael
That's a good point. Physics make frequent use of the (much) richer structure provided by the mathematics of complex numbers, quaternions, abstract vector states, you-name-it, but at the end of the day, we only measure real things, and the mathematics only helps to predict what we might (really) see. That having been said, this doesn't really seem like anything new. Perhaps it adds some subtle structure, but I'll wait until I can read a paper...
:)
No, there are real division by zero errors in the world. They are called black holes.
Michael
I'm not at all a nuke booster, but this isn't true. If you use breeder reactors you can convert non-fissile U238 to Plutonium, which multiplies your available fuel (U235) by a factor of hundreds. And it's not hard to transport electricity, it's just how efficient it is. Aside from copper cables, there's the possibility of cracking water to make hydrogen. Further out, maybe superconducting cables. Also you can make portable reactors on barges and move them to where they're needed.
I'm very sceptical about hydrogen. All our current hydrogen is coming from fossil fuels, and nobody really knows how to economically make it or store it. It destroys most containers it is in, and it is so light that you cannot compress it to a useful energy density without very strong containers. All of which make it moderately bad for cars and trucks, and exceptionally bad for planes.
I think you could put induction coils under most roads in cities to recharge vehicles there, but I'm not sure that this will work long distance.
Trains will work just fine - I'm expecting to see alot more of them around in the future as electricity works well for them.
If you really think electricity is easy to store, why are people getting so interested in fuel cells for laptops?
Michael
Have you ever heard of fuel reprocessing? Have you ever heard of breeder reactors that use U-238? How about using thorium? Estimates are that we have anywhere from 10,000 to 5,000,000,000 years worth of nuclear fuel remaining with these technologies that are largely already available. If by "contentious" you mean "NIMBY" then I suppose people will have to consider whether or not they'd rather accept a lower standard of living or nuclear power. I choose the latter.
I have no great contention with what you are saying. I think nuclear is a good option, if done right.
Conventional reserves will power the world for 50 years, at current usage. If we were to run out of other energy sources, it would last alot less. This is because almost all nuclear reactors rely on U235, which is only 0.7% of all uranium, to maintain the reaction. All the current light water reactors use this technology.
Breeder reactors certainly overcome this limitation, but as I understand it are a much newer technology. I'm not saying they won't work, just that I'm not sure how well they will work in the long term.
Either way, Nuclear is set to be integral to energy in the near future.
Bear in mind, nuclear won't fly planes or probably drive trucks. To store that energy will require a whole technology that doesn't really work yet. One ordinary car engine with the pedal to the metal consumes enough power to light up a small village. People don't really understand that yet - the big issue is not future energy (although its an issue) - it is portable energy in the future. I don't know what the answer to this is; hopefully its biodiesel. Honestly, I don't think its nuclear, but I'd love to be wrong.
Michael
The issue is whether we can sustain our usage at current levels indefinitely. The answer is of course, no. Can we then sustain current usage until a substitute energy source comes along? Possibly.
I've spent a bit of time reading around this area, and I think you can divide the problem into a couple of areas
1. Depletion of reserves
A big problem. Oil will run out, its really a question of when. If you believe the Peak Oil proponents, we may well be in a depletion phase already. Certainly May 2005 was a peak in production which we have not yet exceeded, and the longer this goes on for the more likely that it was the true peak. Also we are currently consuming reserves at 4 times the rate we are discovering new one sources. It is unlikely that we will ever find another major producer like Saudi Arabia, and so if we haven't hit peak, we will soon enough (in the next 10 years). After that peak, we probably have 20 years or so of decreasing production.
With oil reserves limited, attention is turning to other energy sources. Natural gas and Nuclear Power are the obvious choices.
Unfortunately, natural gas isn't infinite, and while it will last a while, its loss will be accelerated by oil substitution. In other words, it will peak not long after whenever oil peaks.
Nuclear power is contentious, difficult, and actually not in infinite supply. The world would consume all the nuclear power in a couple of decades; and there isn't any easy way to make its energy available for transportation.
2. Ecological Damage
Whilst all this stored energy will run out, the bigger question that we face is: Can we really afford to ever actually use all these sources without damaging the environment too much?
Carbon Dioxide emissions are a big concern. A recent article highlights the rapid rise in CO2 that we are producing right now. Its hard to see how we an avoid terraforming the planet (in a nasty way) with current consumption of fossil fuels. There are options such as sequestration or even shading the planet from space, but its hard to know which country is going to start this process off. Perhaps more economic solutions exist, but for now all these solutions are just theories, and nobody is doing any of it yet to my knowledge.
Environmental damage from renewable resources is still an issue. Wind farms make noise and kill birds, hydro power floods large areas of the environment, solar takes out alot of space and uses a great deal of non-renewable resources to manufacture. Nuclear comes with its own set of environmental problems.
Coal, historically, is the worst offender. Most coal mines have killed more miners individually that all nuclear accidents in the world have done. Coal contains radioactive isotopes, and coal powered stations actually release a substantial amount of radiation. Also, there are a great deal of pollutants in coal - its not a really clean energy source; and in fact causes more CO2 and less H2O release as its mostly carbon - unlike natural gas, which has a lot of hydrogen in it and therefore has water as a waste product of combustion which is much better than carbon dioxide.
Renewable alternatives
The renewable resources all have problems.
Bio Diesel (and/or ethanol) is a really promising alternative, but will require huge amounts of land to be converted to fuel production to support this - perhaps as much as 25% of the surface area of the US would be required to support the US at current rates of usage. In this sense it suffers the same problems as most renewables - environmental degredation. Its hard to know where all the fresh water is going to come from to grow this fuel, let alone the land. On the
Some spammer is using an email address of mine to send spam from. So I get the people writing back, asking why I am sending them spam. And another of my domains is obviously listed somewhere as a domain where guessing user accounts might be a good idea. So I get cqoiecn@mydomain.com, zqopqwn@mydomain.com, etc. It all just sucks. I'm currently getting about 10 spams per minute.
Yes, I'm getting this too...
Bounced emails to guessed email accounts. But with forged headers saying that I'm the sender. I know that they are forged, because I have my own domain, and the "from" fields are nothing like the ones I make up when I generate a "throw away" email address. So they are guessing my email accounts (wrongly) - and they end up in my catch-all box when postfix or similar return the mail to me (with spam attached!) It sucks big time that it looks like I'm sending spam - and I doubt very much that anyone has hacked my email or guessed my account password. Stuff being sent when my computers are off, no records of this as sent mail, and use of emails addresses that have never existed.
At least I'm not getting one a minute.
I moved my domain hosting over to google as my previous provider just couldn't filter effectively and it was causing me lots of grief.
But I do worry about the number of people who are thinking I'm spamming them....
Michael
What *shocked* me was that I decided just a couple of months ago that I no longer NEED Linux for my server OS at home because OS X can do everything that I count on Linux to do for me. I've been running Linux servers at home since 1994! To realize that I'm quite content to completely move away from Linux as a platform at home was truly surprising. I have a couple of major services to convert, but soon all will be migrated to OS X, and I can decomm my Linux servers completely.
Yes, I know that feeling. I moved away from windows in 2002, getting tired of product activation as someone who was pulling their machine apart all the time.
Linux was getting to the point of being ok to use then.
But in 2004 I was finally convinced to buy an ibook, and things have gone crazy from there...
The real difference - my wife actually uses here apple laptop, but never really used the linux stuff.
I've said this before, and I belive this strongly - OS X is about as good as it gets for userland experience; its market share is on the ascent for a good reason, and its all about home users.
I can't see why OS X should succeed over Linux in any real server environment, but it does a neat job for a home user who isn't stressing the system. My G4 minimac can handle the server stuff well enough for the extremely light load I put on it (mostly as a nice way to send large files to people without killing their inboxes), and I get to play. I doubt that I'd use it if I was trying to run a server farm. On the other hand, if I was a graphic professional running a server for myself, it would make sense there.
Windows - well lets just see how well vista takes off - by that I mean, if apple's market share takes a fall because all the new apple converts go back to windows, then vista will be better than XP. I'll believe that when I see it.
Lets see if my 18% of laptop market share in the next 3-6 months pans out first...
Michael
The entire system depends upon computer voting systems without a verifiable paper trail. I thought that this issue was settled already, but apparently it is not.
..... Mod parent up.... This is the correct summary of the whole problem.
I think its time for me to write a first
If you have a paper trail, just have the machine print your vote. You read the vote, decide its correct, and then put it in the ballot box. Easy, machine and human readable, auditable. The only way around this is to swap ballot papers, which is a problem in any voting system but which is generally dealt with by having independent witnesses who make sure nobody stuffs things into the ballot box that shouldn't be there.
It's up the whomever programmed the computer to decide who your vote will count towards. And, by design, you'll never be able to validate that.
Now, if you don't have a paper trail, you don't have a way to audit things properly. There is no way to be sure that the machines aren't saying one thing to the voters when they check and another thing when they tally results.
In essence, this is a technical (non) solution to a trust problem. If you don't trust the machines, you are stuffed...
My 2c worth,
Michael Veltman