Yeah, 14 more reactors. Providing lots and lots of power. What do you want to do, shut down a bunch of reactors and let everyone go without electricity? That'll work real well. And I don't understand everyone's obsession on slashdot with wind power solutions-wind power isn't that great. The problem is that power is proportional to the cube of velocity-you therefore only want to use them in a few places-you can't just install them everywhere. Oh, and natural gas plants-cheap, efficient, but... what's that I see? Natural gas prices have quadrupled the last year due to these same plants? We probably shouldn't go nuts building more of them. Our best bet is still fission-water moderated, water cooled fission (unlike the RMBK reactors that are water cooled, graphite moderated.) It's all well and good to say "Ooh, but fission is bad" without thinking about the alternatives seriously.
I still play it from time to time-it's one of the few 3d shooters with character, that aren't just all "Ooh, look at the pretty graphics." I just wish I could find the plutonium pack addon somewhere. I do agree that games should be copyright released after 5 years or so-does anyone believe that 3dRealms is getting money from people buying Duke3d? I really doubt it. I'd also like to see them open-sourced... otherwise we could lose the code for good. I've heard rumors that Commander Keen (id's first game) would have been open-sourced, but the code was lost:( I don't want to see this happen to a bunch of other games.
What about all the people who live and die by using Macs? Are they going to be fully supported by the software in the classroom? And that doesn't even touch upon Linux and FreeBSD... I'd bet if you had that running in class, the teacher wouldn't even allow it. I'm having problems right now with reading documents teachers send out, because they're all in.doc and.xls. Why do people assume everyone has Microsoft Office? I doubt that 1 in 100 people on campus actually bought MS Office, the rest just pirated it. It just ticks me off-how much work would it take to save in.rtf or something so the rest of the world can see the files?
Ever seen the ads about how a child will die every few minutes? While this is true, it's not exactly correct. Something like 90% of the "children" are over 15, and are inner-city gang members. It's not that "children" are getting killed, it's teenagers that are doing it. Just something to keep in perspective.
Here. For those of you who don't follow The Onion, this story is about Micro$oft patenting ones and zeros, and forcing all other companies to pay them royalties. Probably the best example of a worst-case scenario with our patent system:P
Colin Winters
This makes very little sense-by doing this, AT&T is just alienating their customers. Who's going to say "Hey, I want to pay extra for stuff I order!" It makes me wonder if they're trying to lose money for a tax writeoff of some sort-reminds me of Catch-22, where Colonel Cathcart's job in America is to run businesses into the ground for writeoffs. AT&T is probably doing the same thing-they're making too much money and need to lose some:P
I think that this could work fairly well if it reached critical mass, but I'm worried about the security of this. Renting out your bandwith or computing power is cool, but doing so leaves huge openings for script kiddies to get in your system and root it. Hopefully some sort of extremely good security will be implemented, otherwise most of the techies who would like to use this program won't due to its security issues.
But not everyone wants a fancy, frilly laptop. A lot of people want a cheap laptop which can perform adequately. Why should you go out and buy a laptop with the fastest chip when all you're planning on doing is running a word processor, surfing the web, and playing mp3s? You don't NEED anything more, and this is Transmeta's strength-they can deliver to the low-end market. If Transmeta-based laptops started cracking the $1000 barrier, I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would start switching from desktops to laptops. I know I would.
When Al Gore said he invented the internet, we all laughed, saying that no one person did create it. Even Tim Berners-Lee wasn't the only person to create the internet... this is the same thing. You just can't take credit for something like this. Why did Red Hat even bother? Didn't they know they'd get a ton of negative feedback after this? A lot of people already compare them to Micro$oft, and this kind of stuff only serves to hurt their reputation more.
The entire U.S. immigration system needs to be overhauled. As it is, it's very hard to come from European countries to the U.S., since we have quotas on how many people we want, and we don't want more Caucasians. I have friends from Russia who have come here-they aren't allowed to work until they get their work visa. But it took them over a year and a half to get the visa. Cases like this are preposterous-how are you supposed to live for a year and a half before starting to work? As I said before, the entire immigration service needs to be overhauled and made more efficient.
I remember in Asimov's Robot Saga, that Earth had to be turned radioactive in order for humanity to colonize the stars. This could have the same effect-I'm sure in another millenium we'll have space travel, but many people might not want to leave earth. But if Hawking's correct, so much the better for humanity.
The safety of hydrogen fuel cells is better than you'd think. If a fuel cell split open due to a crash, the chance of a "huge fireball" wouldn't be any more than from a regular car. The thing that is dangerous is that highly concentrated acid is needed in a fuel cell in order to make the electron exchange function correctly. Also, one place that we might get hydrogen from is algae. Last year, scientists found that by moving algae from an aerobic to an anaerobic environment, changing some other stuff, and back, the algae would give off very large amounts of hydrogen. If everyone had a little algae pond outside their house, we could use it to fuel our cars:). Fuel cells are the best bet for cars, though. With oil prices increasing in the future, HFCs will be the cheapest and cleanest alternative to everything else.
By doing this , Redhat is putting a bad reputation on the linux community. Sure, we all know that Red Hat isn't Linux, but many people equate the two. If Red Hat would instead release something a simple as 7.0pre1, and make it obvious that the version was expected to have bugs, things would be much better. After a while, 7.0 would finally be released without the multitude of bugs. Just like with the linux kernel-release the 7.0 series, but make it clear bugs are to be expected. Otherwise public opinion of linux will take a downturn.
Even if people were willing to pay for the right to use Napster, who would get the money? I'm assuming it'd go straight to the RIAA. Of course, from there, they'd just screw the artists as usual, and keep the money for themselves. It would be interesting if this actually came to pass-then everyone could see the hypocrisy rampant in the RIAA.
This is the kind of thing that I always think of when I hear the word "hacker." Stuff like this makes me proud to be a geek-someone with some ingenuity has put together something that was never envisioned by Palm. I hope someday I'll make something as cool in its own way:)
It's basically a distributed system, like Gnutella or Freenet, from what I read. I think this will end up being a pretty big deal with education institutes-being able to share this amount of data is going to benefit everyone. The only concern for me is the amount of bandwith this is going to consume-can you imagine downloading a few petabytes of data? Sheesh. Hopefully, though, this system will get worked out and develop into something quite useful.
All issues on the security of e-signatures aside, I'm not so sure online petitions will work. How many people other than us nerds will want to use this technology? I think the public is going to have a large fear of their identity being stolen if they use e-signatures, and they won't use them unless forced to. So most e-petitions will only have a few nerds' signatures on them. I doubt that any petition in the next few years using e-signatures will garner enough sigs to even be legally submittable. Remember, you have to have a certain number of sigs in order to submit a petition. Maybe 5 years down the road, with e-petitions and e-voting and everything else, e-signatures will finally come into play, but not now.
You doctor analogy is flawed. If I went to a doctor and said "I have a tummyache," he would understand that I have gastroentinitis or something like that. The media has gotten hacker to be used in a certain way, and like it or not, it's going to stay that way. How do you propose that we "correct" the problem? The way to correct it is for us to bitching about the hacker/cracker phrase and just accept that this is one battle we've lost. Is it really that big of a deal? No-all we're doing is impeding conversation because we somehow think that will make us superior.
Another benefit of console over computer...to play a great console game, like Soul Calibur on Dreamcast, it's $200 for the system, $50 for the game. To play something like Q3A on a computer, it's $50 for the game, plus about $2000 for the computer to run that. One is a hell of a lot more cost effective than the other.
I'm assuming that this is going to be fueled off of natural gas. Oil doesn't make much sense, and neither does coal or hydrogen. Natural gas fueling is nice, but there are some downsides. One is the fact that peaker plants, which are used to generate electricity at peak hours, have used up quite a bit of natural gas. For the first time ever, the natural gas reservoirs that the US has are not full before the winter months, when natural gas is used for heating. If a ton of people run out and do this, the supply could be depleted even more, and prices could shoot up quite a bit. I've already heard predictions that natural gas prices are going to go up a third this winter. Just some food for thought.
Everyone's talking about "you can still make a weapon", but they're missing a point: nuclear fuel for power plants is enriched at 3% or so for the US, and isn't enriched at all in Canada. To make a bomb, you need 90+% enrichment. Enriching uranium is extremely expensive, and i really doubt terrorists/third world countries have the time and resources to do it.
But will it run Duke3d? That'd be the best day of my life-running Duke3d at full speed on my linux box. I've got an old Pentium 120 that I use only for Duke...be nice to not have to boot it up, and instead use my regular box.
Microsoft, Logitech, and now Apple have optical mice. I know MS and Logitech have infrared mice as well. Why don't they release a mouse with both of these capabilities? I'd love to own one, and I'm sure that a lot of other people would too.
Security holes need to be shown in order for people to protect against them-however, what would happen if hackers stopped writing tools and distributing them to script kiddies? By their very definition, the kiddies wouldn't be able to write their own tools from just knowing about the hole. Why not just release a patch and some documentation about the hole? This would slow down the problem, at least.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, 14 more reactors. Providing lots and lots of power. What do you want to do, shut down a bunch of reactors and let everyone go without electricity? That'll work real well. And I don't understand everyone's obsession on slashdot with wind power solutions-wind power isn't that great. The problem is that power is proportional to the cube of velocity-you therefore only want to use them in a few places-you can't just install them everywhere. Oh, and natural gas plants-cheap, efficient, but... what's that I see? Natural gas prices have quadrupled the last year due to these same plants? We probably shouldn't go nuts building more of them. Our best bet is still fission-water moderated, water cooled fission (unlike the RMBK reactors that are water cooled, graphite moderated.) It's all well and good to say "Ooh, but fission is bad" without thinking about the alternatives seriously.
Colin Winters
I still play it from time to time-it's one of the few 3d shooters with character, that aren't just all "Ooh, look at the pretty graphics." I just wish I could find the plutonium pack addon somewhere. I do agree that games should be copyright released after 5 years or so-does anyone believe that 3dRealms is getting money from people buying Duke3d? I really doubt it. I'd also like to see them open-sourced... otherwise we could lose the code for good. I've heard rumors that Commander Keen (id's first game) would have been open-sourced, but the code was lost :( I don't want to see this happen to a bunch of other games.
Colin Winters
What about all the people who live and die by using Macs? Are they going to be fully supported by the software in the classroom? And that doesn't even touch upon Linux and FreeBSD... I'd bet if you had that running in class, the teacher wouldn't even allow it. I'm having problems right now with reading documents teachers send out, because they're all in .doc and .xls. Why do people assume everyone has Microsoft Office? I doubt that 1 in 100 people on campus actually bought MS Office, the rest just pirated it. It just ticks me off-how much work would it take to save in .rtf or something so the rest of the world can see the files?
Colin Winters
Ever seen the ads about how a child will die every few minutes? While this is true, it's not exactly correct. Something like 90% of the "children" are over 15, and are inner-city gang members. It's not that "children" are getting killed, it's teenagers that are doing it. Just something to keep in perspective.
Colin Winters
Here. For those of you who don't follow The Onion, this story is about Micro$oft patenting ones and zeros, and forcing all other companies to pay them royalties. Probably the best example of a worst-case scenario with our patent system :P
Colin Winters
This makes very little sense-by doing this, AT&T is just alienating their customers. Who's going to say "Hey, I want to pay extra for stuff I order!" It makes me wonder if they're trying to lose money for a tax writeoff of some sort-reminds me of Catch-22, where Colonel Cathcart's job in America is to run businesses into the ground for writeoffs. AT&T is probably doing the same thing-they're making too much money and need to lose some :P
Colin Winters
I think that this could work fairly well if it reached critical mass, but I'm worried about the security of this. Renting out your bandwith or computing power is cool, but doing so leaves huge openings for script kiddies to get in your system and root it. Hopefully some sort of extremely good security will be implemented, otherwise most of the techies who would like to use this program won't due to its security issues.
Colin Winters
But not everyone wants a fancy, frilly laptop. A lot of people want a cheap laptop which can perform adequately. Why should you go out and buy a laptop with the fastest chip when all you're planning on doing is running a word processor, surfing the web, and playing mp3s? You don't NEED anything more, and this is Transmeta's strength-they can deliver to the low-end market. If Transmeta-based laptops started cracking the $1000 barrier, I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would start switching from desktops to laptops. I know I would.
Colin Winters
When Al Gore said he invented the internet, we all laughed, saying that no one person did create it. Even Tim Berners-Lee wasn't the only person to create the internet... this is the same thing. You just can't take credit for something like this. Why did Red Hat even bother? Didn't they know they'd get a ton of negative feedback after this? A lot of people already compare them to Micro$oft, and this kind of stuff only serves to hurt their reputation more.
Colin Winters
The entire U.S. immigration system needs to be overhauled. As it is, it's very hard to come from European countries to the U.S., since we have quotas on how many people we want, and we don't want more Caucasians. I have friends from Russia who have come here-they aren't allowed to work until they get their work visa. But it took them over a year and a half to get the visa. Cases like this are preposterous-how are you supposed to live for a year and a half before starting to work? As I said before, the entire immigration service needs to be overhauled and made more efficient.
Colin Winters
I remember in Asimov's Robot Saga, that Earth had to be turned radioactive in order for humanity to colonize the stars. This could have the same effect-I'm sure in another millenium we'll have space travel, but many people might not want to leave earth. But if Hawking's correct, so much the better for humanity.
Colin Winters
The safety of hydrogen fuel cells is better than you'd think. If a fuel cell split open due to a crash, the chance of a "huge fireball" wouldn't be any more than from a regular car. The thing that is dangerous is that highly concentrated acid is needed in a fuel cell in order to make the electron exchange function correctly. Also, one place that we might get hydrogen from is algae. Last year, scientists found that by moving algae from an aerobic to an anaerobic environment, changing some other stuff, and back, the algae would give off very large amounts of hydrogen. If everyone had a little algae pond outside their house, we could use it to fuel our cars :). Fuel cells are the best bet for cars, though. With oil prices increasing in the future, HFCs will be the cheapest and cleanest alternative to everything else.
Colin Winters
By doing this , Redhat is putting a bad reputation on the linux community. Sure, we all know that Red Hat isn't Linux, but many people equate the two. If Red Hat would instead release something a simple as 7.0pre1, and make it obvious that the version was expected to have bugs, things would be much better. After a while, 7.0 would finally be released without the multitude of bugs. Just like with the linux kernel-release the 7.0 series, but make it clear bugs are to be expected. Otherwise public opinion of linux will take a downturn.
Colin Winters
Somehow, I doubt that the PS2 controllers will be as easy to clean as a keyboard is :P
Colin Winters
Even if people were willing to pay for the right to use Napster, who would get the money? I'm assuming it'd go straight to the RIAA. Of course, from there, they'd just screw the artists as usual, and keep the money for themselves. It would be interesting if this actually came to pass-then everyone could see the hypocrisy rampant in the RIAA.
Colin Winters
This is the kind of thing that I always think of when I hear the word "hacker." Stuff like this makes me proud to be a geek-someone with some ingenuity has put together something that was never envisioned by Palm. I hope someday I'll make something as cool in its own way :)
Colin Winters
It's basically a distributed system, like Gnutella or Freenet, from what I read. I think this will end up being a pretty big deal with education institutes-being able to share this amount of data is going to benefit everyone. The only concern for me is the amount of bandwith this is going to consume-can you imagine downloading a few petabytes of data? Sheesh. Hopefully, though, this system will get worked out and develop into something quite useful.
Colin Winters
All issues on the security of e-signatures aside, I'm not so sure online petitions will work. How many people other than us nerds will want to use this technology? I think the public is going to have a large fear of their identity being stolen if they use e-signatures, and they won't use them unless forced to. So most e-petitions will only have a few nerds' signatures on them. I doubt that any petition in the next few years using e-signatures will garner enough sigs to even be legally submittable. Remember, you have to have a certain number of sigs in order to submit a petition. Maybe 5 years down the road, with e-petitions and e-voting and everything else, e-signatures will finally come into play, but not now.
Colin Winters
You doctor analogy is flawed. If I went to a doctor and said "I have a tummyache," he would understand that I have gastroentinitis or something like that. The media has gotten hacker to be used in a certain way, and like it or not, it's going to stay that way. How do you propose that we "correct" the problem? The way to correct it is for us to bitching about the hacker/cracker phrase and just accept that this is one battle we've lost. Is it really that big of a deal? No-all we're doing is impeding conversation because we somehow think that will make us superior.
Colin Winters
Another benefit of console over computer...to play a great console game, like Soul Calibur on Dreamcast, it's $200 for the system, $50 for the game. To play something like Q3A on a computer, it's $50 for the game, plus about $2000 for the computer to run that. One is a hell of a lot more cost effective than the other.
I'm assuming that this is going to be fueled off of natural gas. Oil doesn't make much sense, and neither does coal or hydrogen. Natural gas fueling is nice, but there are some downsides. One is the fact that peaker plants, which are used to generate electricity at peak hours, have used up quite a bit of natural gas. For the first time ever, the natural gas reservoirs that the US has are not full before the winter months, when natural gas is used for heating. If a ton of people run out and do this, the supply could be depleted even more, and prices could shoot up quite a bit. I've already heard predictions that natural gas prices are going to go up a third this winter. Just some food for thought.
Colin Winters
Everyone's talking about "you can still make a weapon", but they're missing a point: nuclear fuel for power plants is enriched at 3% or so for the US, and isn't enriched at all in Canada. To make a bomb, you need 90+% enrichment. Enriching uranium is extremely expensive, and i really doubt terrorists/third world countries have the time and resources to do it.
Colin Winters
But will it run Duke3d? That'd be the best day of my life-running Duke3d at full speed on my linux box. I've got an old Pentium 120 that I use only for Duke...be nice to not have to boot it up, and instead use my regular box.
Colin Winters
Microsoft, Logitech, and now Apple have optical mice. I know MS and Logitech have infrared mice as well. Why don't they release a mouse with both of these capabilities? I'd love to own one, and I'm sure that a lot of other people would too.
Colin Winters
Security holes need to be shown in order for people to protect against them-however, what would happen if hackers stopped writing tools and distributing them to script kiddies? By their very definition, the kiddies wouldn't be able to write their own tools from just knowing about the hole. Why not just release a patch and some documentation about the hole? This would slow down the problem, at least.
Colin Winters