Wrong movie. This sounds exactly like something you'd call Tom Selleck for!
Runaway was a forgettable Tom Selleck movie from 1984. He plays a cop in the "Runaway" division of a "near-future" police department and his job is to chase down and capture disobedient robots. Robots in the near-future of 1984 are very popular and ubiquitous in homes and workplaces, which is pretty strange, because they tend to suddenly go crazy at random times and they do things like shoot sparks, charge at you, or even fire weapons at you. (Simple coding errors I'm sure.) You'd think occasional behavior like this would make robots less popular, or put robot manufacturers out of business from accumulated liability and insurance costs, but people in the movie seem to view robots as a necessary evil. Nevertheless mutinous robots are such a problem in this future world that cities have to form entire police divisions just to handle the problem. That's the job Tom Selleck has- chasing "runaways".
The villian in the movie is a "good boy gone bad" nerdy engineer type who becomes a sociopath and releases robots that run around like insects and chase people with hypodermic syringe attachments full of vile fluids. He can also see you wherever you go because the city is full of videocameras and he can get a video feed from any one of them at any time to see what you're doing (keep in mind, this is pre-Internet) because he's just that good.
I had a Logitech Quickcam Express I bought in 1999. When XP came out I looked around for 2000/XP versions of the driver for this camera and found that Logitech seems to have a habit of ending support for their products when new versions of Windows come out. So when Longhorn comes out they won't issue new drivers. Instead they'll quickly repackage all their products in a new plastic housing, write new drivers that work on Longhorn, and package them as new advanced Longhorn-compatible products. If you approach them asking for a driver for your current equipment they'll give you some crap about how it's "not advanced enough for Longhorn" but they will give you a coupon toward the purchase of the model with the new Longhorn-compatible plastic housing. I eventually found an XP/2000 driver for my camera on a site where a guy got so pissed off he reverse engineered his and wrote a driver for it himself. It works really well. I got a new Logitech camera in the mail as a piece of promotional junk from the cable company when I switched ISPs, and I haven't even plugged it in because this one and its driver work so well.
A story on the housing market in the Gliese 876 system reported a slight rise in new housing starts, but the real news is the frenzy of speculation. According to the Gliese 876 Housing Market Letter, permits for new homes on the rocky planet and its Jupiter-like siblings "totaled 5,294,101 in April, down nearly 2 percent over the past 12 months."
The sales are phenomenal. "New-home sales reached 4,886,393 in April, up 26.2 percent from 3,871,936 in April of last year; and year-to-date closings through April totaled 16,728,439, up from 14,511,600, an increase of nearly 15.3 percent. Among resale homes on the rocky Earth-like planet, which has experienced the most rapid appreciation of any location in the Gliese system over the past 18 months due to its non-gaseous, hard rocky surface and relatively excellent schools, 12,495,153 resale homes changed owners in April, up 27.7 percent from the 9,783,765 sold this time last year. Many properties are being bought and sold sight unseen by speculators on other planets. The year-to-date resale total through April is 42,473,257, up nearly 34.9 percent from 31,497,223 sold during the same time a year ago."
Gliese 876 may be a nice place to live, but there is no way 17,000,000 households moved there so far this year, given the high surface temperature (600 K) which tends to degrade mortgage paper and other financial loan instruments, and the high surface gravity (4.7g) which encourages speculators to look for "teardowns" when choosing properties to flip. Neither can the shortage of land excuse be used, since the planet has four times the surface area of Earth. Any oceans would have boiled away in the heat, leaving a dry surface behind and dumping huge amounts of pricey real estate onto a market that has become completely uncoupled from its fundamentals. It is obvious the speculators are running wild on this planet and in huge numbers. Hang on to your hat, Gliese 876!
Re:Do we really need the extra cores?
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I once fixed some lady's machine where about 20 spyware processes were running. Now imagine she has 32 cores. I guess 640 spyware processes will be running on that thing by the time she calls anyone to fix it.
Faster, measured against what frame of reference? A marker on the equator versus the center of mass? As seen from the moon? Sol? Alpha Proxima? Vega? The center of Andromeda's galactic core?
Probably the Earth's orbital speed around the Sun.
It's far too small to be in reference to the cosmic microwave background radiation. The temperature of the CMBR varies as a dipole across the sky, with a temperature difference of 7.7 mK, because the Sun is traveling toward the Leo constellation at about 370 km/s relative to the CMBR radiation itself. It would be traveling faster but the galaxy as a whole is moving at about 600 km/s in the direction of Centaurus.
I'm not sure, but I don't think you know the difference between alpha decays, beta decays and gamma rays.
Sure I do. For example "several watt seconds per kg" is the threshold for beta and gamma radiation. For alpha radiation it's 5% of that, even if the alphas can be stopped with paper. If you ingest or inhale an alpha emitter, there will be extreme tissue damage.
Your calculations are reasonable; you don't make your mistake until the end when you come up with 15 grams (2200 Curies) of Sr-90 and figure that's just great for personal electronics with a small form factor! I don't know if you move in Sr-90 circles, but 15 grams is a lot of pure Sr-90 to have. It would emit 30 W of heat. Its radiation would kill you in a few seconds, if you were directly exposed to it. It would deposit in your bones like calcium if it ever escaped its lucite container. Its weight would be the least of your concerns.
The Sr-90 decay nuclide Y-90m is also notorious for emitting gammas. And don't forget gammas from bremsstrahlung, which all beta radiation generates, even if it's tritium.
They would just never let you have that much fission product in your house. Guys in moon suits would show up, you'd go somewhere for questioning, and property values in your neighborhood would go down.
So.. I haven't done the calcs yet, but nuclear batteries would probably be more feasible than you are thinking from an engineering standpoint.
You obviously haven't done the calcs. Efficiency is not even the major problem here. The problem is that ionizing radiation is an extremely deadly form of energy- a median lethal dose in humans is about several watt seconds per kg of body mass. And to get even a tiny little bit of heat, you need an enormous amount of radiation.
Say we use a radioisotope to power a space heater. Efficiency is not an issue in a heater, since all it needs to do is trap the radiation in enough shielding so that all the energy is converted to heat. If the decay mode yields 10 MeV of energy, 100 watts will require 62.4 trillion decays per second, or 1700 Curies (Ci)- something nominally similar to 1700 grams of radium. For comparison, total leakage in the Three Mile Island incident was approximately 13 Ci. (Chernobyl leaked millions.) If your laptop were running on a 1700 Ci source, it wouldn't be on your lap.
Pu-238 is the sort of isotope used for generating heat via decay. It generates about a half watt per gram. You'd need to run around with several hundred grams of it to power your laptop. The Am-241 in smoke detectors generates 114 milliwatts per gram. You'd need to scrape clean about 10000 smoke detectors to get a gram of Am-241 together- and about ten million smoke detectors will generate enough power to run a laptop. In fact all the smoke detectors ever sold in the world probably contribute something around 1 kilowatt of heat to their surroundings.
These offer long life at the expense of low power. They are good for pacemakers and things in inaccessible environments where the wattage requirements aren't high but the replacement cost is huge. They are not suitable for consumer electronics stuff. A radioactive source with sufficient power to run a laptop would require significant cooling, especially when the laptop was shut off. For an idea of what it would be like, think of the RTG devices that we attach to space probes in the outer solar system. (Or that are scattered across the former Soviet Union.) Those things usually generate several hundred watts.
I was playing with POV-Ray macros a while back and came up with this example of a fractal using recursion, which is a trivial thing to do. POV-Ray has a fairly simpleminded macro system where the preprocessor keeps running, pass after pass, replacing all occurrences of any macro with its inlined definition, until no more macros (aside from their declarations) appear in the output. So you can easily create structures that replicate themselves at smaller scales.
The "FRACTAL" macro here references itself with a lower "order" variable each time, until zero is reached. It ends up rendering a huge scene with 4687 sphere primitives arranged so that each sphere has six (or more normally, five) smaller spheres attached to it, until you get to the tiniest (order==0) spheres. The resulting shape is a "spongy" octahedron that meets the definition of a fractal (at least until you reach the scale of the smallest spheres).
If you raise HIGHEST_ORDER, the load on the raytracer increases exponentially as the preprocessor produces more scene objects. (The "relationToParent" variable and the six "if" statements testing for it are there to control the exponential object explosion during preprocessing; without them, starting from order==5, the final number of spheres goes up to 9331 from 4687, as invisible/embedded spheres are included, and the rendering time for more complex scenes rises more quickly.)
Explain to me exactly how they got me to fund a system that is detrimental to my freedom?
The Real ID Act was cleverly attached by its author, Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), as a rider to a completely unrelated appropriations measure for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since voting against appropriations for troops is unAmerican, the bill along with its Orwellian rider passed easily (House 368-58, Senate 100-0).
Note that the rider specifies no funding. The federal ID card is left as an unfunded mandate for states to implement on their own budgets, with the usual extraconstitutional trick of threatening to withhold federal highway funds from states that fail to enact supporting state legislation. In practical terms, aside from being a fascistic federal power grab, this is a really expensive measure for the states. Unfortunately Real ID enjoys some myopic political support because it will stick it to illegal aliens. (And anyone seeking asylum, political or otherwise.) People don't realize the larger implications of a national ID card that one is forced to carry, and we just got them with hardly any public debate at all:
House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) originally introduced the bill as part of the House's intelligence community reform package in late 2004. When opposition to the provisions in the Senate threatened to kill that bill, the provisions were dropped, but the House leadership agreed to reattach them "to the first piece of legislation this session that both chambers were expected to pass" [Los Angeles Times, 1/27/05]. The Real ID Act was reintroduced in 2005 and passed the House, but apparently recognizing that the stand-alone bill lacked support in the Senate, the House leadership attached the legislation to the House version of the emergency funding bill. The Senate version did not include the measure. With bipartisan support, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced an amendment expressing the sense of the Senate that the provisions should not be in the final bill, but the amendment was ruled "non-germane" and denied a vote. Most of the Real ID provisions in the House's version survived the House-Senate conference committee and were part of the conference report that passed the House and Senate.
During the Senate debate on the final version of the bill, several senators voiced opposition to the inclusion of the Real ID provisions in the conference report, but this opposition was not reflected in the final vote of 100-0. Here are some excerpts from the debate:
* Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN): "That does not stop me from objecting and expressing my disappointment to two provisions in the bill. One is the so-called Real ID Act. Actually, unlike a lot of legislation we pass here, this is well named. This really is a national identification card for the United States of America for the first time in our history. We have never done this before, and we should not be doing it without a full debate. This Real ID provision turns 190 million driver's licenses, which are now ineffective ID cards, into more effective national identification cards. To add insult to injury, we have also slapped state governments with the bill for them. I strongly object to this. When I was governor of Tennessee, I vetoed our state ID card twice because I thought it was an infringement on civil liberties. I thought that driver's licenses are for driving. If we need an ID card, we should have an ID card." * Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI): There are many concerns I have with Real ID in addition to the process used to bring it to the floor. First, the measure is an unfunded mandate to the states. Furthermore, unless every state complies, the federal government will have to mandate the creation of a national ID. Between the creation of a new database and approval system, training for DMV workers, and struggling state budgets, Real
Coffeeshops are certainly nice places to hang out. I can see how the addition of free internet would easily cause problems in such an environment. I, personally, enjoy buying a $3.00 drink and sitting for two hours.
That's why Starbucks does so well. It certainly isn't their coffee, which is overroasted and overpriced. They provide something that has been lost in America's suburban sprawl: an agreeable public space. You can meet someone at a Starbucks, maybe conduct a little business, hang out, etc.
Before it became an absolute necessity to have a car, there were many more such places in an average community. Even if they didn't offer wifi. Now they're all gone and paved over, lost in a wasteland of McMansions and twirly suburban streets where nothing is within walking distance of anything else. So if you offer people a stupid coffeeshop as a respectable substitute, it's hugely successful.
No no no, not true at all. Americans do make things that people want and are willing to pay big money for: overpriced houses.
It used to be that we ran our economy on manufacturing. Then we made a shift to a "service economy" which lasted a couple years before the services followed the factories. This left American capital with no way to grow. The housing bubble that we are now seeing is a consequence of that capital seeking a way to increase in an industrial economy that doesn't make anything anymore. America is no longer producing real wealth. The housing bubble is a delusional way for residual capital to continue to produce wealth, even if only for a short time.
Now we run our economy on asset appreciation, and buy all other goods and services from overseas with borrowed money. The only sector of this economy that can appropriately be called "manufacturing" is the construction industry, which has perfected the creation of grotesque McMansions that require a trip in a car just to get to the nearest grocery store. Zoning laws typically forbid anything to be built within walking distance of a McMansion, except other McMansions, so as to avoid even a momentary pause in the overall housing appreciation on which the American economy (and the property tax) depends.
Paradoxically, it seems everyone wants to live in a place where nobody makes anything anymore, and has to drive to get anywhere (like say a place that sells cheap Chinese crap or oversized food portions) because these house prices just keep going through the roof! I know people who made more money last year just living in their ugly condos than coming in to work. Careers in real estate are extremely attractive at the moment. It's a way you can still make lots of money even if your limited skills prove incapable of producing real wealth. And real estate is a magnet for investors, to the detriment of real industries that need infusion of capital. What venture capitalist in his right mind is going to invest in some factory making widgets when he can sink his capital in some pricey real estate and double his money in a few years? A bubble can often crowd out other forms of investment. Nobody wants to invest in anything but houses or dotcom stocks or tulips or whatever.
When the bubble pops, an enormous amount of housing will suddenly hit the market as speculators liquidate at the highest price. There will be lots of money flying around for a short while, then it will disappear and America will become a nation of overweight suckers who don't make anything trapped in their houses full of cheap Chinese shit paying adjustable rates with an average 3% equity position on properties that have lost 30-40% of their value since being purchased at bubble prices. And after treating the currency like a cheap whore for so long with overextended credit, we will find that the inflationary pressure on the dollar has driven up interest rates. As incomes collapse, the bond market will be flooded with T-bills crowding out private borrowing as the government desperately seeks capital at high interest to prosecute the wars that secure access to the oil markets upon which this house of cards has been built. It's awfully hard to fight wars when you don't make anything, but we have no choice when we live in houses that require a steady supply of gasoline just to be livable. The plan is to borrow forever and pray that the Rapture comes to save America and help us get out of actually paying all these loans back to the Asian banks who are now nervous about holding so much dollar-denominated American debt.
I suggest that if DHS wants to "buy American", they should station their field agents in houses in Atherton where the median house price was $2.5 million (when I hit Preview the first time, it may have gone up by the time I clicked Submit). Set up some cheap interest only loans at an adjustable rate. Tom Ridge just has to remember to "refi" every couple months and sell when the getting's still good, and the program will pay for itself, at least for now, maybe until the end of the term in 2008.
The proposed regulations point out that current export license requirements are based on the person's most recent citizenship, which they believe, could allow a person born in Iran to avoid licensing if they held Canadian citizenship.
Either way has anyone noticed that this list seems to have changed over the years. I swear it has, I'll have to go find some achieves of old versions.
It hasn't changed at all. My original post from Dec. 2003 has the same list of items, or at least I don't see any here that I didn't write originally.
Now I have seen variants of this list around the web, adapted to things other than spam. I've also stumbled across it in online CS course materials and antispam research papers, as comic relief I guess.
I hear what you're saying about academic institutions. They're incredibly whiny and expect everything to be free. We make very little money off of them, and they consume a large share of tech support, but we go out of our way to be nice to them because many of the same people later pop up in pharmaceutical companies in control of large quantities of cash.
Celera saw the writing on the wall. Everyone is using the public reference assembly because it's free, and in terms of contents the two are merging toward a complete consensus as they approach total coverage. You can only make money selling this kind of information while vast portions of the genome remain unknown or unavailable, and that's not true anymore.
Plus using a different assembly than other researchers cuts you off. When we import data from dbSNP, for example, we regularly drop references to positions specified in reference to Celera contigs. (Not much of a problem, since they're in the vast minority.) The Celera assembly has not been freely downloadable and redistributable, and we haven't been including a copy of it in our software (we always include a current public assembly build). Now that this has happened, I think the next build of the public assembly is going to be really good.
I recommend that Microsoft fire Ralph Reed and replace him with one of the Iranian mullahs with which he is interchangeable. Ralph is pulling in $240,000 per year from MSFT, and while I don't know what kind of cash a mullah pulls in, no way is it six figures.
So 98% of Google contributions went to Kerry. So what? Looks like Sergey wrote a big check. Groups of like-minded people will tend to want to work together, and if a group becomes successful you might naturally see a more aligned group of political opinions than if you sampled a random group of the same size.
If I want to start a goofy tech company that hires only people I agree with politically, that's my perogative. It's not like I'm discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Your political persuasion does not make you a member of a protected class. (So this is not about "discrimination against Democrats.")
Engineers donate to political candidates right and left all the time. But by design or accident, never before has an engineer's history of personal political donations been a factor in his being able to attend a technical standards meeting. Now that door has been opened.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was saying in 1998. "But surely," I said to everyone, "Bob Dole would be enjoying fellatio in the Oval Office if he had won the 1996 election!"
Quite correct -- essentially what the Bush adminstration is telling these telecom companies is that they won't be allowed to send a representative to a conference UNTIL there is a Democratic president! Sounds like a pretty good reason to donate heavily to the Democrats in the next election to me!
No, that's not what they're saying at all. They aren't preventing all Nokia engineers from attending, just the engineers from Nokia who sent personal donations to the Kerry campaign.
This is a very frightening aspect of it- a donation to Kerry can hurt your chances of employment in the tech sector later on. One might imagine this will have a very chilling effect on non-corporate political donations in the next election.
I'm not up on US politics, is this a usual thing done by most parties when in government or is this something strange?
Yes, this is a very strange thing to be happening in the United States.
It is a direct violation of the First Amendment, as it seeks to punish individuals in their professions in a direct retaliation for participating in a political process.
This will lead directly to employers checking your history of political donations before they hire you. If you can't attend telecom standards meetings, we'll just hire someone who can.
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Wrong movie. This sounds exactly like something you'd call Tom Selleck for!
Runaway was a forgettable Tom Selleck movie from 1984. He plays a cop in the "Runaway" division of a "near-future" police department and his job is to chase down and capture disobedient robots. Robots in the near-future of 1984 are very popular and ubiquitous in homes and workplaces, which is pretty strange, because they tend to suddenly go crazy at random times and they do things like shoot sparks, charge at you, or even fire weapons at you. (Simple coding errors I'm sure.) You'd think occasional behavior like this would make robots less popular, or put robot manufacturers out of business from accumulated liability and insurance costs, but people in the movie seem to view robots as a necessary evil. Nevertheless mutinous robots are such a problem in this future world that cities have to form entire police divisions just to handle the problem. That's the job Tom Selleck has- chasing "runaways".
The villian in the movie is a "good boy gone bad" nerdy engineer type who becomes a sociopath and releases robots that run around like insects and chase people with hypodermic syringe attachments full of vile fluids. He can also see you wherever you go because the city is full of videocameras and he can get a video feed from any one of them at any time to see what you're doing (keep in mind, this is pre-Internet) because he's just that good.
They're going to try the "my friend put the crack in my glove compartment" line.
This would be more like the cop finding rocks of crack stuck in the treads of your tires.
I had a Logitech Quickcam Express I bought in 1999. When XP came out I looked around for 2000/XP versions of the driver for this camera and found that Logitech seems to have a habit of ending support for their products when new versions of Windows come out. So when Longhorn comes out they won't issue new drivers. Instead they'll quickly repackage all their products in a new plastic housing, write new drivers that work on Longhorn, and package them as new advanced Longhorn-compatible products. If you approach them asking for a driver for your current equipment they'll give you some crap about how it's "not advanced enough for Longhorn" but they will give you a coupon toward the purchase of the model with the new Longhorn-compatible plastic housing.
I eventually found an XP/2000 driver for my camera on a site where a guy got so pissed off he reverse engineered his and wrote a driver for it himself. It works really well. I got a new Logitech camera in the mail as a piece of promotional junk from the cable company when I switched ISPs, and I haven't even plugged it in because this one and its driver work so well.
... just think of those millions of "shitty" blogs as an incredible historical resource.
I wonder how the judgment of history will be influenced by Pat Sajak's blog!
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but I sure as hell wouldn't want to move there.
A story on the housing market in the Gliese 876 system reported a slight rise in new housing starts, but the real news is the frenzy of speculation. According to the Gliese 876 Housing Market Letter, permits for new homes on the rocky planet and its Jupiter-like siblings "totaled 5,294,101 in April, down nearly 2 percent over the past 12 months."
The sales are phenomenal. "New-home sales reached 4,886,393 in April, up 26.2 percent from 3,871,936 in April of last year; and year-to-date closings through April totaled 16,728,439, up from 14,511,600, an increase of nearly 15.3 percent. Among resale homes on the rocky Earth-like planet, which has experienced the most rapid appreciation of any location in the Gliese system over the past 18 months due to its non-gaseous, hard rocky surface and relatively excellent schools, 12,495,153 resale homes changed owners in April, up 27.7 percent from the 9,783,765 sold this time last year. Many properties are being bought and sold sight unseen by speculators on other planets. The year-to-date resale total through April is 42,473,257, up nearly 34.9 percent from 31,497,223 sold during the same time a year ago."
Gliese 876 may be a nice place to live, but there is no way 17,000,000 households moved there so far this year, given the high surface temperature (600 K) which tends to degrade mortgage paper and other financial loan instruments, and the high surface gravity (4.7g) which encourages speculators to look for "teardowns" when choosing properties to flip. Neither can the shortage of land excuse be used, since the planet has four times the surface area of Earth. Any oceans would have boiled away in the heat, leaving a dry surface behind and dumping huge amounts of pricey real estate onto a market that has become completely uncoupled from its fundamentals. It is obvious the speculators are running wild on this planet and in huge numbers. Hang on to your hat, Gliese 876!
I once fixed some lady's machine where about 20 spyware processes were running. Now imagine she has 32 cores. I guess 640 spyware processes will be running on that thing by the time she calls anyone to fix it.
Faster, measured against what frame of reference? A marker on the equator versus the center of mass? As seen from the moon? Sol? Alpha Proxima? Vega? The center of Andromeda's galactic core?
Probably the Earth's orbital speed around the Sun.
It's far too small to be in reference to the cosmic microwave background radiation. The temperature of the CMBR varies as a dipole across the sky, with a temperature difference of 7.7 mK, because the Sun is traveling toward the Leo constellation at about 370 km/s relative to the CMBR radiation itself. It would be traveling faster but the galaxy as a whole is moving at about 600 km/s in the direction of Centaurus.
I'm not sure, but I don't think you know the difference between alpha decays, beta decays and gamma rays.
Sure I do. For example "several watt seconds per kg" is the threshold for beta and gamma radiation. For alpha radiation it's 5% of that, even if the alphas can be stopped with paper. If you ingest or inhale an alpha emitter, there will be extreme tissue damage.
Your calculations are reasonable; you don't make your mistake until the end when you come up with 15 grams (2200 Curies) of Sr-90 and figure that's just great for personal electronics with a small form factor! I don't know if you move in Sr-90 circles, but 15 grams is a lot of pure Sr-90 to have. It would emit 30 W of heat. Its radiation would kill you in a few seconds, if you were directly exposed to it. It would deposit in your bones like calcium if it ever escaped its lucite container. Its weight would be the least of your concerns.
The Sr-90 decay nuclide Y-90m is also notorious for emitting gammas. And don't forget gammas from bremsstrahlung, which all beta radiation generates, even if it's tritium.
They would just never let you have that much fission product in your house. Guys in moon suits would show up, you'd go somewhere for questioning, and property values in your neighborhood would go down.
So.. I haven't done the calcs yet, but nuclear batteries would probably be more feasible than you are thinking from an engineering standpoint.
You obviously haven't done the calcs. Efficiency is not even the major problem here. The problem is that ionizing radiation is an extremely deadly form of energy- a median lethal dose in humans is about several watt seconds per kg of body mass. And to get even a tiny little bit of heat, you need an enormous amount of radiation.
Say we use a radioisotope to power a space heater. Efficiency is not an issue in a heater, since all it needs to do is trap the radiation in enough shielding so that all the energy is converted to heat. If the decay mode yields 10 MeV of energy, 100 watts will require 62.4 trillion decays per second, or 1700 Curies (Ci)- something nominally similar to 1700 grams of radium. For comparison, total leakage in the Three Mile Island incident was approximately 13 Ci. (Chernobyl leaked millions.) If your laptop were running on a 1700 Ci source, it wouldn't be on your lap.
Pu-238 is the sort of isotope used for generating heat via decay. It generates about a half watt per gram. You'd need to run around with several hundred grams of it to power your laptop. The Am-241 in smoke detectors generates 114 milliwatts per gram. You'd need to scrape clean about 10000 smoke detectors to get a gram of Am-241 together- and about ten million smoke detectors will generate enough power to run a laptop. In fact all the smoke detectors ever sold in the world probably contribute something around 1 kilowatt of heat to their surroundings.
These offer long life at the expense of low power. They are good for pacemakers and things in inaccessible environments where the wattage requirements aren't high but the replacement cost is huge. They are not suitable for consumer electronics stuff.
A radioactive source with sufficient power to run a laptop would require significant cooling, especially when the laptop was shut off. For an idea of what it would be like, think of the RTG devices that we attach to space probes in the outer solar system. (Or that are scattered across the former Soviet Union.) Those things usually generate several hundred watts.
I was playing with POV-Ray macros a while back and came up with this example of a fractal using recursion, which is a trivial thing to do. POV-Ray has a fairly simpleminded macro system where the preprocessor keeps running, pass after pass, replacing all occurrences of any macro with its inlined definition, until no more macros (aside from their declarations) appear in the output. So you can easily create structures that replicate themselves at smaller scales.
//the order==0 case
The "FRACTAL" macro here references itself with a lower "order" variable each time, until zero is reached. It ends up rendering a huge scene with 4687 sphere primitives arranged so that each sphere has six (or more normally, five) smaller spheres attached to it, until you get to the tiniest (order==0) spheres. The resulting shape is a "spongy" octahedron that meets the definition of a fractal (at least until you reach the scale of the smallest spheres).
If you raise HIGHEST_ORDER, the load on the raytracer increases exponentially as the preprocessor produces more scene objects. (The "relationToParent" variable and the six "if" statements testing for it are there to control the exponential object explosion during preprocessing; without them, starting from order==5, the final number of spheres goes up to 9331 from 4687, as invisible/embedded spheres are included, and the rendering time for more complex scenes rises more quickly.)
You can make a Sierpinski gasket this way too. Recursive macros were also used in this image to render trees, albeit at a distance.
#include "colors.inc"
#declare SCALING_FACTOR = 0.50;
#declare DISPLACEMENT = 1.0 + SCALING_FACTOR;
#declare HIGHEST_ORDER = 5;
#declare NO_ORIGIN = 0;
#declare POS_X = 1;
#declare NEG_X = 2;
#declare POS_Y = 3;
#declare NEG_Y = 4;
#declare POS_Z = 5;
#declare NEG_Z = 6;
#macro FRACTAL (order, relationToParent)
#if (order)
union {
sphere {<0,0,0>, 1 TEXTURE(order)}
#if (relationToParent != NEG_X)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, POS_X) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate DISPLACEMENT * x}
#end
#if (relationToParent != POS_X)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, NEG_X) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate -DISPLACEMENT * x}
#end
#if (relationToParent != NEG_Y)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, POS_Y) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate DISPLACEMENT * y}
#end
#if (relationToParent != POS_Y)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, NEG_Y) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate -DISPLACEMENT * y}
#end
#if (relationToParent != NEG_Z)
object {FRACTAL(order-1, POS_Z) scale SCALING_FACTOR translate DISPLACEMENT * z}
#end
#if (relationToParent != POS_Z)
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The Real ID Act was cleverly attached by its author, Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), as a rider to a completely unrelated appropriations measure for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since voting against appropriations for troops is unAmerican, the bill along with its Orwellian rider passed easily (House 368-58, Senate 100-0).
Note that the rider specifies no funding. The federal ID card is left as an unfunded mandate for states to implement on their own budgets, with the usual extraconstitutional trick of threatening to withhold federal highway funds from states that fail to enact supporting state legislation. In practical terms, aside from being a fascistic federal power grab, this is a really expensive measure for the states. Unfortunately Real ID enjoys some myopic political support because it will stick it to illegal aliens. (And anyone seeking asylum, political or otherwise.) People don't realize the larger implications of a national ID card that one is forced to carry, and we just got them with hardly any public debate at all:
Coffeeshops are certainly nice places to hang out. I can see how the addition of free internet would easily cause problems in such an environment. I, personally, enjoy buying a $3.00 drink and sitting for two hours.
That's why Starbucks does so well. It certainly isn't their coffee, which is overroasted and overpriced. They provide something that has been lost in America's suburban sprawl: an agreeable public space. You can meet someone at a Starbucks, maybe conduct a little business, hang out, etc.
Before it became an absolute necessity to have a car, there were many more such places in an average community. Even if they didn't offer wifi. Now they're all gone and paved over, lost in a wasteland of McMansions and twirly suburban streets where nothing is within walking distance of anything else. So if you offer people a stupid coffeeshop as a respectable substitute, it's hugely successful.
No no no, not true at all. Americans do make things that people want and are willing to pay big money for: overpriced houses.
It used to be that we ran our economy on manufacturing. Then we made a shift to a "service economy" which lasted a couple years before the services followed the factories. This left American capital with no way to grow. The housing bubble that we are now seeing is a consequence of that capital seeking a way to increase in an industrial economy that doesn't make anything anymore. America is no longer producing real wealth. The housing bubble is a delusional way for residual capital to continue to produce wealth, even if only for a short time.
Now we run our economy on asset appreciation, and buy all other goods and services from overseas with borrowed money. The only sector of this economy that can appropriately be called "manufacturing" is the construction industry, which has perfected the creation of grotesque McMansions that require a trip in a car just to get to the nearest grocery store. Zoning laws typically forbid anything to be built within walking distance of a McMansion, except other McMansions, so as to avoid even a momentary pause in the overall housing appreciation on which the American economy (and the property tax) depends.
Paradoxically, it seems everyone wants to live in a place where nobody makes anything anymore, and has to drive to get anywhere (like say a place that sells cheap Chinese crap or oversized food portions) because these house prices just keep going through the roof! I know people who made more money last year just living in their ugly condos than coming in to work. Careers in real estate are extremely attractive at the moment. It's a way you can still make lots of money even if your limited skills prove incapable of producing real wealth. And real estate is a magnet for investors, to the detriment of real industries that need infusion of capital. What venture capitalist in his right mind is going to invest in some factory making widgets when he can sink his capital in some pricey real estate and double his money in a few years? A bubble can often crowd out other forms of investment. Nobody wants to invest in anything but houses or dotcom stocks or tulips or whatever.
When the bubble pops, an enormous amount of housing will suddenly hit the market as speculators liquidate at the highest price. There will be lots of money flying around for a short while, then it will disappear and America will become a nation of overweight suckers who don't make anything trapped in their houses full of cheap Chinese shit paying adjustable rates with an average 3% equity position on properties that have lost 30-40% of their value since being purchased at bubble prices. And after treating the currency like a cheap whore for so long with overextended credit, we will find that the inflationary pressure on the dollar has driven up interest rates. As incomes collapse, the bond market will be flooded with T-bills crowding out private borrowing as the government desperately seeks capital at high interest to prosecute the wars that secure access to the oil markets upon which this house of cards has been built. It's awfully hard to fight wars when you don't make anything, but we have no choice when we live in houses that require a steady supply of gasoline just to be livable. The plan is to borrow forever and pray that the Rapture comes to save America and help us get out of actually paying all these loans back to the Asian banks who are now nervous about holding so much dollar-denominated American debt.
I suggest that if DHS wants to "buy American", they should station their field agents in houses in Atherton where the median house price was $2.5 million (when I hit Preview the first time, it may have gone up by the time I clicked Submit). Set up some cheap interest only loans at an adjustable rate. Tom Ridge just has to remember to "refi" every couple months and sell when the getting's still good, and the program will pay for itself, at least for now, maybe until the end of the term in 2008.
The proposed regulations point out that current export license requirements are based on the person's most recent citizenship, which they believe, could allow a person born in Iran to avoid licensing if they held Canadian citizenship.
In other words, not a "real" Canadian.
Either way has anyone noticed that this list seems to have changed over the years. I swear it has, I'll have to go find some achieves of old versions.
It hasn't changed at all. My original post from Dec. 2003 has the same list of items, or at least I don't see any here that I didn't write originally.
Now I have seen variants of this list around the web, adapted to things other than spam. I've also stumbled across it in online CS course materials and antispam research papers, as comic relief I guess.
No, it's spelled correctly. ROSD is how "Red Screen Of Death" is spelled on Little-Endian systems.
I hear what you're saying about academic institutions. They're incredibly whiny and expect everything to be free. We make very little money off of them, and they consume a large share of tech support, but we go out of our way to be nice to them because many of the same people later pop up in pharmaceutical companies in control of large quantities of cash.
Celera saw the writing on the wall. Everyone is using the public reference assembly because it's free, and in terms of contents the two are merging toward a complete consensus as they approach total coverage. You can only make money selling this kind of information while vast portions of the genome remain unknown or unavailable, and that's not true anymore.
Plus using a different assembly than other researchers cuts you off. When we import data from dbSNP, for example, we regularly drop references to positions specified in reference to Celera contigs. (Not much of a problem, since they're in the vast minority.) The Celera assembly has not been freely downloadable and redistributable, and we haven't been including a copy of it in our software (we always include a current public assembly build). Now that this has happened, I think the next build of the public assembly is going to be really good.
I disagree with Mr. Gates. What this country needs is more rich people like him, not more programmers writing crappy code.
I recommend that Microsoft fire Ralph Reed and replace him with one of the Iranian mullahs with which he is interchangeable. Ralph is pulling in $240,000 per year from MSFT, and while I don't know what kind of cash a mullah pulls in, no way is it six figures.
You forgot your physics. "Atomic particles" usually refers to atoms.
So 98% of Google contributions went to Kerry. So what? Looks like Sergey wrote a big check. Groups of like-minded people will tend to want to work together, and if a group becomes successful you might naturally see a more aligned group of political opinions than if you sampled a random group of the same size.
If I want to start a goofy tech company that hires only people I agree with politically, that's my perogative. It's not like I'm discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Your political persuasion does not make you a member of a protected class. (So this is not about "discrimination against Democrats.")
Engineers donate to political candidates right and left all the time. But by design or accident, never before has an engineer's history of personal political donations been a factor in his being able to attend a technical standards meeting. Now that door has been opened.
That Kerry wouldn't have done the same?
This is exactly the kind of thing I was saying in 1998. "But surely," I said to everyone, "Bob Dole would be enjoying fellatio in the Oval Office if he had won the 1996 election!"
See? I'm fair and balanced.
Quite correct -- essentially what the Bush adminstration is telling these telecom companies is that they won't be allowed to send a representative to a conference UNTIL there is a Democratic president! Sounds like a pretty good reason to donate heavily to the Democrats in the next election to me!
No, that's not what they're saying at all. They aren't preventing all Nokia engineers from attending, just the engineers from Nokia who sent personal donations to the Kerry campaign.
This is a very frightening aspect of it- a donation to Kerry can hurt your chances of employment in the tech sector later on. One might imagine this will have a very chilling effect on non-corporate political donations in the next election.
I'm not up on US politics, is this a usual thing done by most parties when in government or is this something strange?
Yes, this is a very strange thing to be happening in the United States.
It is a direct violation of the First Amendment, as it seeks to punish individuals in their professions in a direct retaliation for participating in a political process.
This will lead directly to employers checking your history of political donations before they hire you. If you can't attend telecom standards meetings, we'll just hire someone who can.