Yes. Coal fired plants have huge electro-static precipitators which capture almost all particulates. The captured fly-ash is so fine you can blow it through pipes to the hoppers. They either add water and dump it back into the coal pits, or sell it for filler in concrete (don't confuse it with pot-ash which is also used in concrete).
One irony of collecting fly ash is that the sulfer dioxide leaves the plume more acidic than if the fly ash were left in. But personally, I prefer that to seeing the area around a coal fired plant looking like a moon scape. You should see what the area around a smelter looks like.
What if you made the ISP through which an email is sent automatically sign each email? That removes the burden from the uninitiated user. The ISP could even have a different key per MAC address. Now you plunk any email that is not automatically signed, or is signed with a key that has been voted on as being an infected machine. Google or yahoo or each ISP could do that for you too. How many botted machines are there in the world? 100k? 500k? Not so many that you couldn't do this.
Then the question is would the ISP's make money from this (ie be motivate to make this effort)? Charge a little extra for the verification, and access to the latest votes on who is a source of spam. ISP's would be motivated to opt into the system to get more customers, and to make it possible for their customers to send trustable emails.
Who is harmed? Only guys that have infected machines. They will wonder why they can't seem to send anyone emails. Or they send it from their yahoo account.
Maybe the do not spam list guys should sponsor such a system.
"[My] energizer is bypassed like a christmas tree, so don't give me any bumps."
"Captain, [I] cann'a take anymore!"
A's or B's should eat "dead" everthing elses
on
Next-Gen Game of Life
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If it is a real "ecology", where is the waste recycling? When a higher level creature dies, it is a large collection of useful energy. In real life something would evolve to eat the corpse.
I'd like to see whether this sort of system would develop "lichen" (combination of fungus and algae), or other perpetuating synergies.
I was thinking about the project where they use Lake Ontario water cool downtown Toronto buildings. What if you used the water from your tap that has been cooled in the ground on its trip to your house?
Take the difference in temperature from your tap water to a comfy room temperature (65 to 75 degrees). The amount of energy from the amount of tap water I use in a day (a few hundred gallons) would be equivalent to the cooling that a room air conditioner could do in a couple of hours. Not enough to make a dent in a house's A/C costs.
You'd have to do something with evaporation before it would start to pay. In fact, this guy would have better luck with cooling his room if his copper tube leaked a little.
It is easier to believe the wobble is due to some temporary imbalance within the star, than to believe that a planet that size formed that close in. The chances the star "captured" it that close are also unbelievable.
Maybe something big actually hit the red dwarf and is slowly finding its way to the center of gravity.
Between the arrival of the first and second maximum, the atom in the gas will be in a different position (distance determined by the temperature of the gas). If the distance is small enough, the atom may well absorb *both* maxima, and emit them (or emit only one). Either way the stream of emissions will not be coming from the same location in space. Wouldn't this be a cause of the interference pattern observed?
I would like to be able to use this memory to store the 3D models. Anything to get stuff off the front side bus. If there is room for models *and* textures on the graphics card, the only thing on the FSB are camera commands and model modification requests.
I would be interested in seeing what effect that decompositoin would have on data rates. How big are the BSP trees describing a scene? What is the tipping point where it makes sense to download the models and modify them in place?
There are plenty of DEM/REP couples in the country. I can easily imagine a situation where someone would find it easier to lie to an exit-poller about how they voted, rather than have (another) argument with their spouse.
It was a secret ballot (for good reasons). Was it a secret poll? I doubt it.
Think the Hotel strikes are going to be resolved by then? The proposed cooling off period didn't "take". Seems like its been on for a couple of months already.
I very recently complained to Schwab IT about their online statement delivery. It comes in an email, contains an html doc that contains a java app that directly asks for my account and password info. I wrote them a letter saying how bad an idea that was, and that it encourages less sophisticated users to trust the sender too much.
Their response indicated they didn't even understand what I was talking about. Should I have called it "Phishing"? I doubt it would have helped. How can a customer educate these people, and why should I have to? (Maybe someone in their IT dept reads slashdot:)
Here is my letter:
To Director of Technology,
I am disappointed in the security offered by the transaction statement I receive each month. I am required to save an html file, which when opened presents me with an account/pin dialog. - I have no way of knowing where that information is going to be sent. - I cannot verify the originator of *any* email. How can I be sure that *this* email is definitely from schwab.com? (one b or two?) If the email is spoofed, the contents of the html document are suspect, putting my password etc at risk. - Since this arrived by email, I did not initiate the connection. It is generally a bad practice to give out personal information when one did not initiate the transaction (even in a phone call). - The process required by your system encourages less sophisticated users to develop poor security habits, such as responding to emails (of unknowable origins) with personal information. - I would feel *much* more secure if I initiated an https connection to a web address that *I* know is legitimate. It is significantly less likely an https connection mechanism would be exploited than a simple email message.
Until something changes about this process, I have no alternative but to consider these emails SPAM, and am in fact getting no benefit out of receiving them.
And their response...
I appreciate your concerns regarding your request of electronic statements. In regards to your concerns, PostX technology sends an "HTML envelope" that contains the encrypted payload. This "HTML envelope" opens to present the user with a prompt for the users password. Once the password is entered the local javascript or java applet accepts the user password and decrypts the payload.
Documents sent through the PostX platform are encrypted with highly secure, industry standard algorithms. Symmetric encryption defaults to ARC4 but AES encryption algorithm is available as well. End to end encryption between users or firms assures the highest levels of confidentiality for critical, sensitive or personal data on public networks. The password is hashed with 160 bit encryption (SHA1) with a large random number. This hash is then used along with the chosen encryption algorithm to encrypt the payload. The encryption is very secure. The most venerable part of the process is the password itself.
If you still have further concerns regarding the security of the contents that you have chosen to have delivered via email, then you may want to elect to cancel this request. You may do so by following these simple steps:...blah blah...
There are always strings attached. "We'll give you this pre-release card if you promise to get the review out on the 12th.".
If they insult the manufacturers, or blow them off, they won't get an early card next time. There are only a few available anyway.
What would happen if TH had to buy a card off the shelf? They'd have late reviews. Would they still get readers? Depends if the readers want a quick review of a pre-release card, or an indepth review that can be trusted. Both readers exist.
The article talked about video feeds going out on a cable. Why not bluetooth or wifi. In fact, if these things are close enough together, they would form a completely connected redundant grid. Imagine little radio packets bouncing along the dotted lines til they get to their destination (or out to a backbone).
It is much easier for me to believe that the balls are interacting magnetically. The application of DC would have some electrical flow due to the capacitance of the ball. That would create a slight magnetic field. Since the ball cannot be "perfect", the variations in the magnetic field could easily cause angular force to be applied, and spin the balls.
Did they show how this sort of effect was removed from consideration?
> Every attempt to provide a list of "good" and "bad" sites has failed, and will always > fail, because "good" and "bad" are purely subjective.
So don't provide a list. Make a Bayesian filter that the consumers (presumably, the supervising parent/guardian) can contribute to. Before the page is displayed, it must pass the filter. The filter can adapt to each "user".
Perhaps the only requirement on these kinds of sites is that *every* page be tagged well enough to filter (or perhaps you collect tags via moderation). In other words, you need a solution to the problem of what exactly is this gif a picture of?
Given the number of years the guy was doing good business, it is easier to believe someone stole his password while he was on a business trip. I wonder if these last transactions were paid to a different account...
See if you can fast computers for a week. I mean 100%, totally cold turkey. No email. No Slashdot.
I bet you'll find out how addicted you really are. You'll get some perspective. Its not about the gory details, its about what you can do that no one else can.
I was just thinking about time-shifting power use to help avoid blackouts and high energy costs. This unit could be more efficient at energy conversion than a chemical (i.e. battery) one, and *much* more suitable for *daily* use.
Imagine using it to power a small window-mounted A/C for 5-6 hours during peak loads. Then rev it back up at 2-3am.
Couple this with an advanced on-peak/off-peak *charging* scheme by the utilities, and you'd probably have something that would pay for itself! (Well, depending how much this sucker is.)
Re:I am not a nuclear physicist...
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 1
I worked in a coal-fired thermogenerating station a couple of summers, and my dad worked in the industry for years. You would be surprised by how efficient these large power-generating systems can be. I believe they are extracting 80% of the energy in the coal. This is as compare to like 40%
for a car engine.
The fireball in the boiler heats water to steam. It then is superheated at the top of the boiler (high pressure). This superheated steam runs the highpressure side of the turbine where most of the energy is extracted. The input steam pipes actually glow cherry red. This pulls out a lot of energy. That steam is run through the boiler again (I believe) and back into the low pressure side of the turbine to pull out the last bits of energy.
The "steam" is then run through a condenser so that the nice clean water can go back through the cycle again (saves on water treatment). The pressure in the condenser is *lower* than one atmosphere. They got "all" the energy out. They even use steam pressure to run pumps and things. The big fan motors (input draft, output draft) are 3-phase electric jobs about 3000 horsepower!
OK. So where are the losses? In the generator? Well, there is no water cooling on either the turbine or the generator (which is directly connected). The steam cools itself "cools" the turbine. The generator has air blown throw, I believe. It creates a lot of ozone, so is a safety risk to the workers. Neither the turbine, nor the generator burns up with heat, just to-air heat-exchange. Same with the big fan motors. Pretty low losses of efficiency considering.
So the only real "losses" are cooling water in the condenser, and heat up the stack. The cooling pond stays thawed through a Canadian winter, but it is not that big a pond.
I've never stuck my hand in the exhaust stack, so I don't know how much heat goes up there. I have walked around the top of the boiler. Things are insulated of course, but it only gets around 100 degrees farenheit.
Then there are losses in the transmission lines, transformers, etc. That's why people argue about building close to the consumer. There is supposed to be a *lot* of loss over the high tension lines. Where a "lot" is probably 10-20%, or something "expensive". They don't burn up either, so how bad can it be?
Please don't discount the quality of the engineering that goes into the steam-mechanical-electrical cycle. I've heard that direct fuel-to-electrical fuel cells are *less* efficient than a car engine at extracting energy. And look at how much better the thermo-generating plants are than a car.
The resolution states that ICANN is going to negotiate with the given set of seven organizations.
The implication is that each of those organizations will host a registry for all the names in the domain with the suffix they are assigned. Is that right? Will they be limited in how much will they may charge per registration in the registry? Will they be required to accept registrations from any registrar, or only the existing authorized few?
Who holds the registry of the registries mapping TLD's to registry locations? Every registry? I'd hate to have to hard-code all those new locations into every implementation of whois.
The project that got me started programming for real was a graphical representation of sorting algorithms: - bubble sort - shaker sort - shell sort - quick sort - etc. The graphics could be student created, if you wish. What I did was plot the element's current list location on the X axis, against the element's value on the Y axis. Initial condition looked like fuzz. When sorted, it looked like a diagonal line.
This gets the kids learning algorithms, has some graphics, has instant gratification, provides insight into the workings of the algorithms...
BTW, the idea was based on an old 35mm movie of such algorithms. I believe it also included the famous "mouse traps and ping-pong balls" demonstration of exponential growth.
I run the soundboard at our church. One day I mic'ed the drumset so we could record to tape. The sound was run through the house mains. The drummer immediately started to complain that the sound was "mushy", particularly on the cymbals. The delay was basically through a 50ft mic cable, a 16 channel mixer, builtin amp, 50ft speaker cables, speakers and about 5ft of air. Yet that was enough for him to complain about.
I can't see how anyone will be able to get latency out of a set-up that is two-way. While you can buffer and smooth out the recording from site A at over at site B, you could not also record at site B and play it in synch with what is occurring at A.
You could possibly cause both playbacks to occur simultaneously (as measured by some "global" clock), but then *both* playbacks would not be in synch with what the musicians are doing.
You can ask how much latency is "important". My emperical sample suggests that a couple hundred feet at electrical speeds is too much.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Coal fired plants have huge electro-static precipitators which capture almost all particulates. The captured fly-ash is so fine you can blow it through pipes to the hoppers. They either add water and dump it back into the coal pits, or sell it for filler in concrete (don't confuse it with pot-ash which is also used in concrete).
One irony of collecting fly ash is that the sulfer dioxide leaves the plume more acidic than if the fly ash were left in. But personally, I prefer that to seeing the area around a coal fired plant looking like a moon scape. You should see what the area around a smelter looks like.
I'd bet that static charges on the spacecraft and bodies would have a bigger effect than gravity.
(Are they going to light this tung-sun? No. I'm thinking of Magnesium.)
What if you made the ISP through which an email is sent automatically sign each email? That removes the burden from the uninitiated user. The ISP could even have a different key per MAC address. Now you plunk any email that is not automatically signed, or is signed with a key that has been voted on as being an infected machine. Google or yahoo or each ISP could do that for you too. How many botted machines are there in the world? 100k? 500k? Not so many that you couldn't do this.
Then the question is would the ISP's make money from this (ie be motivate to make this effort)? Charge a little extra for the verification, and access to the latest votes on who is a source of spam. ISP's would be motivated to opt into the system to get more customers, and to make it possible for their customers to send trustable emails.
Who is harmed? Only guys that have infected machines. They will wonder why they can't seem to send anyone emails. Or they send it from their yahoo account.
Maybe the do not spam list guys should sponsor such a system.
"[My] energizer is bypassed like a christmas tree, so don't give me any bumps."
"Captain, [I] cann'a take anymore!"
If it is a real "ecology", where is the waste recycling? When a higher level creature dies, it is a large collection of useful energy. In real life something would evolve to eat the corpse.
I'd like to see whether this sort of system would develop "lichen" (combination of fungus and algae), or other perpetuating synergies.
I was thinking about the project where they use Lake Ontario water cool downtown Toronto buildings. What if you used the water from your tap that has been cooled in the ground on its trip to your house?
Take the difference in temperature from your tap water to a comfy room temperature (65 to 75 degrees). The amount of energy from the amount of tap water I use in a day (a few hundred gallons) would be equivalent to the cooling that a room air conditioner could do in a couple of hours. Not enough to make a dent in a house's A/C costs.
You'd have to do something with evaporation before it would start to pay. In fact, this guy would have better luck with cooling his room if his copper tube leaked a little.
It is easier to believe the wobble is due to some temporary imbalance within the star, than to believe that a planet that size formed that close in. The chances the star "captured" it that close are also unbelievable.
Maybe something big actually hit the red dwarf and is slowly finding its way to the center of gravity.
Between the arrival of the first and second maximum, the atom in the gas will be in a different position (distance determined by the temperature of the gas). If the distance is small enough, the atom may well absorb *both* maxima, and emit them (or emit only one). Either way the stream of emissions will not be coming from the same location in space. Wouldn't this be a cause of the interference pattern observed?
I would like to be able to use this memory to store the 3D models. Anything to get stuff off the front side bus. If there is room for models *and* textures on the graphics card, the only thing on the FSB are camera commands and model modification requests.
I would be interested in seeing what effect that decompositoin would have on data rates. How big are the BSP trees describing a scene? What is the tipping point where it makes sense to download the models and modify them in place?
There are plenty of DEM/REP couples in the country. I can easily imagine a situation where someone would find it easier to lie to an exit-poller about how they voted, rather than have (another) argument with their spouse.
It was a secret ballot (for good reasons). Was it a secret poll? I doubt it.
Think the Hotel strikes are going to be resolved by then? The proposed cooling off period didn't "take". Seems like its been on for a couple of months already.
I very recently complained to Schwab IT about their online statement delivery. It comes in an email, contains an html doc that contains a java app that directly asks for my account and password info. I wrote them a letter saying how bad an idea that was, and that it encourages less sophisticated users to trust the sender too much.
:)
...blah blah...
...blah...
Their response indicated they didn't even understand what I was talking about. Should I have called it "Phishing"? I doubt it would have helped. How can a customer educate these people, and why should I have to? (Maybe someone in their IT dept reads slashdot
Here is my letter:
To Director of Technology,
I am disappointed in the security offered by the transaction statement I receive each month. I am required to save an html file, which when opened presents me with an account/pin dialog.
- I have no way of knowing where that information is going to be sent.
- I cannot verify the originator of *any* email. How can I be sure that *this* email is definitely from schwab.com? (one b or two?) If the email is spoofed, the contents of the html document are suspect, putting my password etc at risk.
- Since this arrived by email, I did not initiate the connection. It is generally a bad practice to give out personal information when one did not initiate the transaction (even in a phone call).
- The process required by your system encourages less sophisticated users to develop poor security habits, such as responding to emails (of unknowable origins) with personal information.
- I would feel *much* more secure if I initiated an https connection to a web address that *I* know is legitimate. It is significantly less likely an https connection mechanism would be exploited than a simple email message.
Until something changes about this process, I have no alternative but to consider these emails SPAM, and am in fact getting no benefit out of receiving them.
And their response...
I appreciate your concerns regarding your request of electronic statements. In regards to your concerns, PostX technology sends an "HTML envelope" that contains the encrypted payload. This "HTML envelope" opens to present the user with a prompt for the users password. Once the password is entered the local javascript or java applet accepts the user password and decrypts
the payload.
Documents sent through the PostX platform are encrypted with highly secure, industry standard algorithms. Symmetric encryption defaults to ARC4 but AES encryption algorithm is available as well. End to end encryption between users or firms assures the highest levels of confidentiality for critical, sensitive or personal data on public networks. The password is hashed with 160 bit encryption (SHA1) with a large random number. This hash is then used along with the chosen encryption algorithm to encrypt the payload. The encryption is very secure. The most venerable part of the process is the password itself.
If you still have further concerns regarding the security of the contents that you have chosen to have delivered via email, then you may want to elect to cancel this request. You may do so by following these simple steps:
Sincerely,
There are always strings attached. "We'll give you this pre-release card if you promise to get the review out on the 12th.".
If they insult the manufacturers, or blow them off, they won't get an early card next time. There are only a few available anyway.
What would happen if TH had to buy a card off the shelf? They'd have late reviews. Would they still get readers? Depends if the readers want a quick review of a pre-release card, or an indepth review that can be trusted. Both readers exist.
The article talked about video feeds going out on a cable. Why not bluetooth or wifi. In fact, if these things are close enough together, they would form a completely connected redundant grid. Imagine little radio packets bouncing along the dotted lines til they get to their destination (or out to a backbone).
It is much easier for me to believe that the balls are interacting magnetically. The application of DC would have some electrical flow due to the capacitance of the ball. That would create a slight magnetic field. Since the ball cannot be "perfect", the variations in the magnetic field could easily cause angular force to be applied, and spin the balls.
Did they show how this sort of effect was removed from consideration?
We already have.
> Every attempt to provide a list of "good" and "bad" sites has failed, and will always
> fail, because "good" and "bad" are purely subjective.
So don't provide a list. Make a Bayesian filter that the consumers (presumably, the supervising parent/guardian) can contribute to. Before the page is displayed, it must pass the filter. The filter can adapt to each "user".
Perhaps the only requirement on these kinds of sites is that *every* page be tagged well enough to filter (or perhaps you collect tags via moderation). In other words, you need a solution to the problem of what exactly is this gif a picture of?
Then you meta-moderate the tagging.
So just mmap it as a device. It'd go through the IO bus and skip RAM, no?
Given the number of years the guy was doing good business, it is easier to believe someone stole his password while he was on a business trip. I wonder if these last transactions were paid to a different account...
See if you can fast computers for a week. I mean 100%, totally cold turkey. No email. No Slashdot.
I bet you'll find out how addicted you really are. You'll get some perspective. Its not about the gory details, its about what you can do that no one else can.
I was just thinking about time-shifting power use to help avoid blackouts and high energy costs. This unit could be more efficient at energy conversion than a chemical (i.e. battery) one, and *much* more suitable for *daily* use.
Imagine using it to power a small window-mounted A/C for 5-6 hours during peak loads. Then rev it back up at 2-3am.
Couple this with an advanced on-peak/off-peak *charging* scheme by the utilities, and you'd probably have something that would pay for itself! (Well, depending how much this sucker is.)
I worked in a coal-fired thermogenerating station a couple of summers, and my dad worked in the industry for years. You would be surprised by how efficient these large power-generating systems can be. I believe they are extracting 80% of the energy in the coal. This is as compare to like 40%
for a car engine.
The fireball in the boiler heats water to steam. It then is superheated at the top of the boiler (high pressure). This superheated steam runs the highpressure side of the turbine where most of the energy is extracted. The input steam pipes actually glow cherry red. This pulls out a lot of energy. That steam is run through the boiler again (I believe) and back into the low pressure side of the turbine to pull out the last bits of energy.
The "steam" is then run through a condenser so that the nice clean water can go back through the cycle again (saves on water treatment). The pressure in the condenser is *lower* than one atmosphere. They got "all" the energy out. They even use steam pressure to run pumps and things. The big fan motors (input draft, output draft) are 3-phase electric jobs about 3000 horsepower!
OK. So where are the losses? In the generator? Well, there is no water cooling on either the turbine or the generator (which is directly connected). The steam cools itself "cools" the turbine. The generator has air blown throw, I believe. It creates a lot of ozone, so is a safety risk to the workers. Neither the turbine, nor the generator burns up with heat, just to-air heat-exchange. Same with the big fan motors. Pretty low losses of efficiency considering.
So the only real "losses" are cooling water in the condenser, and heat up the stack. The cooling pond stays thawed through a Canadian winter, but it is not that big a pond.
I've never stuck my hand in the exhaust stack, so I don't know how much heat goes up there. I have walked around the top of the boiler. Things are insulated of course, but it only gets around 100 degrees farenheit.
Then there are losses in the transmission lines, transformers, etc. That's why people argue about building close to the consumer. There is supposed to be a *lot* of loss over the high tension lines. Where a "lot" is probably 10-20%, or something "expensive". They don't burn up either, so how bad can it be?
Please don't discount the quality of the engineering that goes into the steam-mechanical-electrical cycle. I've heard that direct fuel-to-electrical fuel cells are *less* efficient than a car engine at extracting energy. And look at how much better the thermo-generating plants are than a car.
Darrin
The resolution states that ICANN is going to negotiate with the given set of seven organizations.
The implication is that each of those organizations will host a registry for all the names in the domain with the suffix they are assigned. Is that right? Will they be limited in how much will they may charge per registration in the registry? Will they be required to accept registrations from any registrar, or only the existing authorized few?
Who holds the registry of the registries mapping TLD's to registry locations? Every registry? I'd hate to have to hard-code all those new locations into every implementation of whois.
The project that got me started programming for real was a graphical representation of sorting algorithms:
- bubble sort
- shaker sort
- shell sort
- quick sort
- etc.
The graphics could be student created, if you wish. What I did was plot the element's current list location on the X axis, against the element's value on the Y axis. Initial condition looked like fuzz. When sorted, it looked like a diagonal line.
This gets the kids learning algorithms, has some graphics, has instant gratification, provides insight into the workings of the algorithms...
BTW, the idea was based on an old 35mm movie of such algorithms. I believe it also included the famous "mouse traps and ping-pong balls" demonstration of exponential growth.
Good luck.
I run the soundboard at our church. One day I
mic'ed the drumset so we could record to tape.
The sound was run through the house mains. The
drummer immediately started to complain that the sound was "mushy", particularly on the cymbals. The delay was basically through a 50ft mic cable, a 16 channel mixer, builtin amp, 50ft speaker cables, speakers and about 5ft of air. Yet that was enough for him to complain about.
I can't see how anyone will be able to get latency out of a set-up that is two-way. While you can buffer and smooth out the recording from site A at over at site B, you could not also record at site B and play it in synch with what is occurring at A.
You could possibly cause both playbacks to occur simultaneously (as measured by some "global" clock), but then *both* playbacks would not be in synch with what the musicians are doing.
You can ask how much latency is "important". My emperical sample suggests that a couple hundred feet at electrical speeds is too much.
Darrin