What? So those tons of barrels of radioactive waste aren't harmful for tens of thousands of years?
Umm... no, actually they're not. Anything that is radioactive for much longer than a century isn't putting out much radiation. Heck, you're probably breathing tons of Uranium from coal plants that lasts that long. Not to mention the uranium naturally occurring in your back yard. The stuff that's really hot only lasts for 10 seconds to 20 years. The stuff in between (i.e. 50 years to 1 century) is the most annoying, but most of that can be reprocessed and reused. The waste that comes out of it is again "hotter" so that it doesn't last long.
Fusion isn't even a lab accident yet, never mind a practical energy production source, which incidentally, will probably use hydrogen as fuel.
Fusion-schmoozion. Fusion will probably never be a viable Earth based energy source. You need the equivalent of a star to keep it going. Space is a great place to use Fusion, but most people on Earth don't like stars in their back yard.
Speaking of nuclear, I assume you are talking about fusion not generating tons of radioactive material?
No, I am not talking about those self-destructing reactors. I'm talking about a plain old fission reactor. They do *not* generate tons of waste per year. In fact, most of it can be reprocessed and reused. The stuff that's really "hot" won't last long. (10 seconds to 20 years.) And the stuff that *will* last millions of years is no more dangerous than the uranium in your back yard. Remember, mass gets converted to radiation. If it stays radioactive for a long time, it's not converting much mass. Unless you pile tons of it in one spot, you'll have a hard time distinguishing it from background radiation.
Otherwise you've got the idea. Mobile reactor can be useful in ships and heavy industrial equipment. Beyond that, the power from the nuclear grid can be stored in some chemical fashion (e.g. hydrogen cracked from water) and reused by vehicles.
For a 10MW plant only 12,500 sq Meters of collector are is needed.
Sorry, but a *tiny* nuclear power plant can generate 10MW. If some decent research would go into nuclear power, we'd have nuclear "modules" the size of sheds that get dropped into place, used for three years, then replaced. No meltdown, no Chernobyl, lots (10-100MW per module) of power. I'd obviously like the design to be certified and well tested before putting one in a heavily populated area, but the modules could easily replace or supplement the large plants immediately.
SPTII's are a lot safer than letting a nuke plant burn your skin off.
I'll concede the point though. However, a common 255 hp tractor still would need 190 kilowatts of power to operate. That's still a hell of a lot of power. You're not going to get that from a few solar panels tacked on the sides of the tractor. You can get that from diesel engines, but eventually the diesel will run out. So do we use hydrogen? How many acres of corn will it take just to power the tractor?
As for needing a nuclear reactor to power a tractor, bullshit! See my post below where I point out that the big mining dump trucks as well as trains are all electric. They use the diesel motor to power a generator which in turn powers the electric motors. All you need to do is replace the diesel motor and generator with something like a big hydrogen powered fuel cell...
I was kidding about the nuclear power plant. Mostly because it was assumed that you aren't running it off of a chemical fuel like diesel. You said yourself that the electric mine cars are hooked to a diesel generator. But you're not going to get the necessary energy out of solar panels.
Corn is solar powered. Just because it is not efficent (yet) to convert light directly to electricity, don't forget how much energy falls on every acre of land from the sun. It's just the storage method you use that may be inefficient or polluting.
How much corn does it take to generate 335 kilo-joules of energy? How long does it take for that corn to grow? I'm willing to bet that miles of traditional solar panels will still produce more power over the same amount of time. But who wants to give up hundreds of thousands of acres of land for solar power generation?
If you look at oil, you'll find an even worse energy production rate. How many thousands of years does it take nature to produce a tank of gas?
Face it. Nuclear power is the only source of power that can produce enough power to maintain our civilization long term. Nuclear fuel is plentiful here on earth and in the rest of the solar system, it can be made cheaply, and it doesn't output tons of radioactive material per day. (*cough*coal plants*cough*) Instead of developing low power density fuel cells, we should be developing micro-power plants for use in industrial equipment, and small, safe, and efficient nuclear plants to replace our aging, dirty, and expensive power grid.
Sorry if I'm getting off topic here, but fuel cells are quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine.
Using power from our very own stellar fusion reactor located at a convenient approximate 18 light minutes, is much cleaner.
That's 8 light minutes, and there are no solar panels yet that are efficient enough to drive a car, much less a tractor. Have you taken a look at how many watts it takes just to get one horsepower? You'd need a small nuclear reactor to produce enough watts to get the 450 horsepower of a tractor! (A 335 Kilowatt reactor to be exact.) Not to mention the number of batteries it would take to keep a tractor running at night.
Solar power is a niche market. It has its uses, but general power generation is not one of them.
Other mainframes such as Unisys use EBCDIC too. I hate to say it, but a good portion of the world's data is still on Mainframes and still in EBCDIC.
When a-z are non contiguous... shudder./me misses it not.
You have to admit that the idea to control lowercase and uppercase with a single bit has it's advantages. In one operation you can test both 'a' and 'A'. ASCII makes you use test on both and use addition and subtraction instead of the more computer friendly bit flips.
The idea of being "tainted" is actually from licenses that have "trade secret" clauses. Once you sign a license like that, you *are* tainted. That being said, it's a very difficult clause to enforce. Contracts that prevent someone from working in the field for which they are educated and experienced have often been found unenforceable by courts.
(IANAL and this is not legal advice. Go talk to PJ. At least she's a paralegal.)
Apple need Microsoft Office, so I can't see them daring to touch an actually competitive office suite.
As much as running programs via X11 sucks, I use OpenOffice instead of OfficeX. At first, MSOfficeX was just too expensive. Later on I had access to OfficeX, but I was much happier with OpenOffice.
I don't have any problems with Hotmail using Mozilla running on Linux
The Rich Edit Text control works for you on Hotmail? Or do you mean that you can access your Hotmail account with Mozilla? (The discussion is about the former. We already know about the later.)
Don't you think that CodeJock/WebWizForums coded the tags to work with the different browsers? That doesn't help much with the MS "friendly" sites like HotMail and Yahoo! Mail.
I am aware of the control, but IIRC it isn't compatible with IE's implementation. So it really doesn't help with the webmail providers.
In any case, Rich Text email is highly overrated. My family can barely send an email, much less know what to do with all those formatting buttons! Sometimes, less is more.
Creative Criticism: The DHTML or whatever is used to give the advanced editing features of Exchange 2000 web mail, msn hotmail, yahoo mail, and the geocities web site editor don't work in Firebird; If they did my sister, my mom and many other web users would never use IE again.
Amusingly enough, they don't always work in IE either. My mother and sister where having problems with not being able to type in the Rich Text Control. I showed them how to turn it off every time, but it was still very annoying. I finally gave them Firebird 0.7. No rich text controls, no pop up ads, no viruses, just pure web browsing bliss. They haven't looked back.:-)
power modules, "probably nuclear is required for enough power" either one can be used for planet
You'll probably also want to add nuclear propulsion to that list. The high thrust and Isp of Nuclear Thermal Rockets are pretty much the only thing that would make a Mars mission feasible.
Re:To paraphrase another Robin Williams film
on
A New Face For Robotics
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
You're older than I am. And I remember 2 bit graphics. CGA it was called (Color Graphics Adapter, how's that for a misnomer?), and we had the amazing colors of white, black, ugly purple, and mint/cyan green. And many of those CGA adapters (*cough*PCjr*cough*) ran from shared system memory. That meant that games that said 64K of RAM, actually needed more like ~70K. Bah, 4 bit color. When I got my first EGA machine, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. 640x480 with 16(!) colors! None of them even ugly!
I remember writing a Missile launcher game in BASIC. I cranked up the resolution and played in all the colors I could muster. It was damn cool having to squint to see the two pixel plane fly overhead!
And yes, I know what EBCDIC is. I've even programmed Unisys mainframes that speak it.
COBOL. Now there was a verbose language if I ever saw one. You'd never believe how many iterations of "Business Oriented Lanugages" they went through before settling on "COmmon Business Oriented Language". SNOBOL, ALGOL, Fortran, etc. (Okay, so the last two were math oriented. They were still better than RPG.) It was no wonder that TRON portrayed business people as the bad guys. They kept trying to saddle you with ugly ass job-control OSes.
BTW, you might find it amusing that Unisys mainframes used an OS called (wait for it...) MCP! (Master Control Program) The author of TRON must have been a Burroughs hater.
Oh, and the vehicle he was taken to the pad in actualy HAS been preserved and is currenty on display next to the Saturn-V at the Kennedy Space Center. The Pad, the Crawlerway, the Crawler Transporters, the VAB and the whole of Launch Complex 39 are on the National Register of Historic Places, but somehow the actual tower which launched the rocket itself has somehow slipped through the cracks and is being disposed of.
You've *got* to be kidding me. No, wait, I take that back. Historians are notoriously picky. Everything has to be as original as possible.
I guess my difference of opinion is what is actually useful history. You think that everything about the launch should be preserved. Perhaps. But I'm an engineer, not a historian. To me, the vehicle (Saturn V & Apollo module) were the engineering feats that made the mission possible. The people were what made it happen. Those are the things that should be remembered. We can always create replicas of the other stuff, or preserve it for different reasons. (i.e. This is a gasoline powered personnel vehicle, circa 1969.)
My point still stands though that the original movie was not called Flubber while the remake was, thus most people's mind shoot to the remake when thinking "flubber".
I suppose. I still think of the prof in his car, or shooting the three point dunk whenever I hear "flubber". *sigh* Lousy remakes.
Re:To paraphrase another Robin Williams film
on
A New Face For Robotics
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Bzzt! The Nutty Professor was a Jerry Lewis movie where he tried to impress a girl with a formula that made him handsome. (In the end, his mom ended up selling the formula after he decided to destroy it.) It was subject to a remake by Eddie Murphy who did a good job at destroying it.
The original "Flubber" movie was called "The Absent Minded Professor". I should know. My parents always called my by that name to poke at my absent mindedness.:-/
Re:To paraphrase another Robin Williams film
on
A New Face For Robotics
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Am I the ONLY one who thinks of the original Flubber movie instead of the one with Robin Williams? God I feel old.
String theory as such tends not to comment on dark matter (could be D0-particles, could be fish) as no-one knows how to compactify it down from 10D and break supersymmetry in a useful way.
I did realize that String Theory itself doesn't comment on it, but the multi-brane gravitation is a natural extension to String Theory. I have to say that this theory is much more appealing than some "mysterious dark matter". Dark matter always smacked of, "we can detect that something's there, but we don't know what, so therefore it's just an invisible aspect of our universe." Almost no thought goes into that kind of theory. Although I will grant that there's not much else they could do at the time, other than file it away as a curiosity that needs explaining.
...but doesn't String Theory tend to suggest that "dark matter" isn't actually dark matter, but instead is gravitation bleeding from other universes? The same theory also explains why gravity in this universe is so weak. Because most of it bleeds of into other universes via the higher dimensions, it's weak enough for you and I to move our limbs.
Slashdot Mirror
What? So those tons of barrels of radioactive waste aren't harmful for tens of thousands of years?
Umm... no, actually they're not. Anything that is radioactive for much longer than a century isn't putting out much radiation. Heck, you're probably breathing tons of Uranium from coal plants that lasts that long. Not to mention the uranium naturally occurring in your back yard. The stuff that's really hot only lasts for 10 seconds to 20 years. The stuff in between (i.e. 50 years to 1 century) is the most annoying, but most of that can be reprocessed and reused. The waste that comes out of it is again "hotter" so that it doesn't last long.
Fusion isn't even a lab accident yet, never mind a practical energy production source, which incidentally, will probably use hydrogen as fuel.
Fusion-schmoozion. Fusion will probably never be a viable Earth based energy source. You need the equivalent of a star to keep it going. Space is a great place to use Fusion, but most people on Earth don't like stars in their back yard.
Speaking of nuclear, I assume you are talking about fusion not generating tons of radioactive material?
No, I am not talking about those self-destructing reactors. I'm talking about a plain old fission reactor. They do *not* generate tons of waste per year. In fact, most of it can be reprocessed and reused. The stuff that's really "hot" won't last long. (10 seconds to 20 years.) And the stuff that *will* last millions of years is no more dangerous than the uranium in your back yard. Remember, mass gets converted to radiation. If it stays radioactive for a long time, it's not converting much mass. Unless you pile tons of it in one spot, you'll have a hard time distinguishing it from background radiation.
Otherwise you've got the idea. Mobile reactor can be useful in ships and heavy industrial equipment. Beyond that, the power from the nuclear grid can be stored in some chemical fashion (e.g. hydrogen cracked from water) and reused by vehicles.
For a 10MW plant only 12,500 sq Meters of collector are is needed.
Sorry, but a *tiny* nuclear power plant can generate 10MW. If some decent research would go into nuclear power, we'd have nuclear "modules" the size of sheds that get dropped into place, used for three years, then replaced. No meltdown, no Chernobyl, lots (10-100MW per module) of power. I'd obviously like the design to be certified and well tested before putting one in a heavily populated area, but the modules could easily replace or supplement the large plants immediately.
SPTII's are a lot safer than letting a nuke plant burn your skin off.
FUD. And you know it. Shame on you.
If one is pulling a very very huge set of tilling disks, then one might need 450HP, but man those are rare.
;-)
Not too rare.
I'll concede the point though. However, a common 255 hp tractor still would need 190 kilowatts of power to operate. That's still a hell of a lot of power. You're not going to get that from a few solar panels tacked on the sides of the tractor. You can get that from diesel engines, but eventually the diesel will run out. So do we use hydrogen? How many acres of corn will it take just to power the tractor?
As for needing a nuclear reactor to power a tractor, bullshit! See my post below where I point out that the big mining dump trucks as well as trains are all electric. They use the diesel motor to power a generator which in turn powers the electric motors. All you need to do is replace the diesel motor and generator with something like a big hydrogen powered fuel cell...
I was kidding about the nuclear power plant. Mostly because it was assumed that you aren't running it off of a chemical fuel like diesel. You said yourself that the electric mine cars are hooked to a diesel generator. But you're not going to get the necessary energy out of solar panels.
Corn is solar powered. Just because it is not efficent (yet) to convert light directly to electricity, don't forget how much energy falls on every acre of land from the sun. It's just the storage method you use that may be inefficient or polluting.
How much corn does it take to generate 335 kilo-joules of energy? How long does it take for that corn to grow? I'm willing to bet that miles of traditional solar panels will still produce more power over the same amount of time. But who wants to give up hundreds of thousands of acres of land for solar power generation?
If you look at oil, you'll find an even worse energy production rate. How many thousands of years does it take nature to produce a tank of gas?
Face it. Nuclear power is the only source of power that can produce enough power to maintain our civilization long term. Nuclear fuel is plentiful here on earth and in the rest of the solar system, it can be made cheaply, and it doesn't output tons of radioactive material per day. (*cough*coal plants*cough*) Instead of developing low power density fuel cells, we should be developing micro-power plants for use in industrial equipment, and small, safe, and efficient nuclear plants to replace our aging, dirty, and expensive power grid.
Sorry if I'm getting off topic here, but fuel cells are quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine.
Im just going to hold out for those Cold Fusion generators. They should probably be coming out any day now, right?
Cold Fusion has been out for a while. It just isn't very efficient. Or for that matter, very user friendly. Or programmer friendly.
Ok, it sucks! Got it? Cold Fusion sucks!
I'm sorry, what were we talking about?
Using power from our very own stellar fusion reactor located at a convenient approximate 18 light minutes, is much cleaner.
That's 8 light minutes, and there are no solar panels yet that are efficient enough to drive a car, much less a tractor. Have you taken a look at how many watts it takes just to get one horsepower? You'd need a small nuclear reactor to produce enough watts to get the 450 horsepower of a tractor! (A 335 Kilowatt reactor to be exact.) Not to mention the number of batteries it would take to keep a tractor running at night.
Solar power is a niche market. It has its uses, but general power generation is not one of them.
For all I care, IBM can HAVE EBCDIC.
/me misses it not.
Other mainframes such as Unisys use EBCDIC too. I hate to say it, but a good portion of the world's data is still on Mainframes and still in EBCDIC.
When a-z are non contiguous... shudder.
You have to admit that the idea to control lowercase and uppercase with a single bit has it's advantages. In one operation you can test both 'a' and 'A'. ASCII makes you use test on both and use addition and subtraction instead of the more computer friendly bit flips.
The idea of being "tainted" is actually from licenses that have "trade secret" clauses. Once you sign a license like that, you *are* tainted. That being said, it's a very difficult clause to enforce. Contracts that prevent someone from working in the field for which they are educated and experienced have often been found unenforceable by courts.
(IANAL and this is not legal advice. Go talk to PJ. At least she's a paralegal.)
Apple need Microsoft Office, so I can't see them daring to touch an actually competitive office suite.
As much as running programs via X11 sucks, I use OpenOffice instead of OfficeX. At first, MSOfficeX was just too expensive. Later on I had access to OfficeX, but I was much happier with OpenOffice.
Apple does not need OfficeX.
I don't have any problems with Hotmail using Mozilla running on Linux
The Rich Edit Text control works for you on Hotmail? Or do you mean that you can access your Hotmail account with Mozilla? (The discussion is about the former. We already know about the later.)
Don't you think that CodeJock/WebWizForums coded the tags to work with the different browsers? That doesn't help much with the MS "friendly" sites like HotMail and Yahoo! Mail.
I am aware of the control, but IIRC it isn't compatible with IE's implementation. So it really doesn't help with the webmail providers.
In any case, Rich Text email is highly overrated. My family can barely send an email, much less know what to do with all those formatting buttons! Sometimes, less is more.
Creative Criticism: The DHTML or whatever is used to give the advanced editing features of Exchange 2000 web mail, msn hotmail, yahoo mail, and the geocities web site editor don't work in Firebird; If they did my sister, my mom and many other web users would never use IE again.
:-)
Amusingly enough, they don't always work in IE either. My mother and sister where having problems with not being able to type in the Rich Text Control. I showed them how to turn it off every time, but it was still very annoying. I finally gave them Firebird 0.7. No rich text controls, no pop up ads, no viruses, just pure web browsing bliss. They haven't looked back.
power modules, "probably nuclear is required for enough power" either one can be used for planet
You'll probably also want to add nuclear propulsion to that list. The high thrust and Isp of Nuclear Thermal Rockets are pretty much the only thing that would make a Mars mission feasible.
You're older than I am. And I remember 2 bit graphics. CGA it was called (Color Graphics Adapter, how's that for a misnomer?), and we had the amazing colors of white, black, ugly purple, and mint/cyan green. And many of those CGA adapters (*cough*PCjr*cough*) ran from shared system memory. That meant that games that said 64K of RAM, actually needed more like ~70K. Bah, 4 bit color. When I got my first EGA machine, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. 640x480 with 16(!) colors! None of them even ugly!
I remember writing a Missile launcher game in BASIC. I cranked up the resolution and played in all the colors I could muster. It was damn cool having to squint to see the two pixel plane fly overhead!
And yes, I know what EBCDIC is. I've even programmed Unisys mainframes that speak it.
COBOL. Now there was a verbose language if I ever saw one. You'd never believe how many iterations of "Business Oriented Lanugages" they went through before settling on "COmmon Business Oriented Language". SNOBOL, ALGOL, Fortran, etc. (Okay, so the last two were math oriented. They were still better than RPG.) It was no wonder that TRON portrayed business people as the bad guys. They kept trying to saddle you with ugly ass job-control OSes.
BTW, you might find it amusing that Unisys mainframes used an OS called (wait for it...) MCP! (Master Control Program) The author of TRON must have been a Burroughs hater.
Oh, and the vehicle he was taken to the pad in actualy HAS been preserved and is currenty on display next to the Saturn-V at the Kennedy Space Center. The Pad, the Crawlerway, the Crawler Transporters, the VAB and the whole of Launch Complex 39 are on the National Register of Historic Places, but somehow the actual tower which launched the rocket itself has somehow slipped through the cracks and is being disposed of.
You've *got* to be kidding me. No, wait, I take that back. Historians are notoriously picky. Everything has to be as original as possible.
I guess my difference of opinion is what is actually useful history. You think that everything about the launch should be preserved. Perhaps. But I'm an engineer, not a historian. To me, the vehicle (Saturn V & Apollo module) were the engineering feats that made the mission possible. The people were what made it happen. Those are the things that should be remembered. We can always create replicas of the other stuff, or preserve it for different reasons. (i.e. This is a gasoline powered personnel vehicle, circa 1969.)
I'm only 27, and I didn't even know Robin Williams remade that movie.
:-P
You want to hear the scary part? I several years younger than you are.
Kids these days. No respect for the classics. Bah.
Thanks a lump. And I'm probably *still* younger than 60% of Slashdot!
And how old are you, m'boy?
My point still stands though that the original movie was not called Flubber while the remake was, thus most people's mind shoot to the remake when thinking "flubber".
I suppose. I still think of the prof in his car, or shooting the three point dunk whenever I hear "flubber". *sigh* Lousy remakes.
Bzzt! The Nutty Professor was a Jerry Lewis movie where he tried to impress a girl with a formula that made him handsome. (In the end, his mom ended up selling the formula after he decided to destroy it.) It was subject to a remake by Eddie Murphy who did a good job at destroying it.
:-/
The original "Flubber" movie was called "The Absent Minded Professor". I should know. My parents always called my by that name to poke at my absent mindedness.
Am I the ONLY one who thinks of the original Flubber movie instead of the one with Robin Williams? God I feel old.
Does it make you fly? Or bounce like a super-hero?
Somebody give this guy some mod points.
String theory as such tends not to comment on dark matter (could be D0-particles, could be fish) as no-one knows how to compactify it down from 10D and break supersymmetry in a useful way.
I did realize that String Theory itself doesn't comment on it, but the multi-brane gravitation is a natural extension to String Theory. I have to say that this theory is much more appealing than some "mysterious dark matter". Dark matter always smacked of, "we can detect that something's there, but we don't know what, so therefore it's just an invisible aspect of our universe." Almost no thought goes into that kind of theory. Although I will grant that there's not much else they could do at the time, other than file it away as a curiosity that needs explaining.
...but doesn't String Theory tend to suggest that "dark matter" isn't actually dark matter, but instead is gravitation bleeding from other universes? The same theory also explains why gravity in this universe is so weak. Because most of it bleeds of into other universes via the higher dimensions, it's weak enough for you and I to move our limbs.