hiskool is ful of uceless klasses such as histery, englesh, and ekonomiks.
i like komputers, y do i nede to lern to spel? y do i nede to no ekonomiks
and histery, that is wat king bush is fer. i kan fokus on komputers and
he wil kil the bad gise and get me jobs.
no hiskool was gud enuf for king moses, and its gud enuf fer me!
Remember that "sexist" Harvard president who talked about innate abilities
of women awhile back?
One of the things he discussed was that being a stay-at-home parent for a
year or two may significantly impair a person's career. Since mothers tend
to be the stay at home parent, guess who's career suffers? Imagine quitting
your job in 1999 to raise your baby, and re-entering the IT field in 2004?
You'd have missed the release of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, a linux
kernel or two, new stuff on the Cisco end, new security issues, etc.
When questioned about why women in Europe had more success in there careers,
he mentioned that the shorter European work year may be a factor. (Makes
sense -- imagine working crunch weeks in software -- a man is expected to
sacrifice his family during that time, a woman is not.
(He also did ask for more research on innate abilities, which is why he
was called sexist. He questioned if some fields don't appeal to women.
He might have a point -- parts of the IT industry seems to require
solitary behavior and an obsessive streak. Maybe more men then women
are inclined that way.)
I have a similar story with a small dockapp called
wmfuzzy that displays a
time string.
When I switched to OpenBSD on a laptop, it didn't work. I informed the author,
and he rewrote some code so it would. I tested it, found a few bugs,
and told them of it. Although I couldn't code C at the time, I could read
the asset reports and change the system clock so that the bugs would trigger.
Its a great feeling to submit a bug report in the morning and by the next day
have a patched version of the code to test.
Its also nice to get a point release and credit in the changelog.:)
Another time, I was playing slash'em and I found that I could get some rather strange error
messages with One-Eyed Sam in a certain scenerio. I talked to one of the
developers on IRC, narrowed down the problem, and filed a bug report.
Last I heard, it was fixed in the next release. (The bug wasn't a
game-crashing bug, just slash'em realizing that the shop didn't have a
shop keeper.)
But religion gives those who would do those things a hotline to people's
hearts.
What do you think would fly better:
"I want to ban gay marriage because I don't like them"
"I want to ban gay marriage because it says so in the bible"
How about:
"Homosexuals are mentally defective, and guess who gets a trip to the
mental hospital/gulag?"
Worked for more than one (officially atheistic) communist state.
The problem is, if you are using what religious people/institutions did as
a way to attack religion, you should look at what atheistic people/institutions
did as well.
Remember Stalin? Mao Zedong? Just more than a few notable atheists who
have participated in crimes against humanity.
Newsflash: Most doctrines can be abused to support whatever you want to do.
Religion doctrine and the lack of religion doctrine can as well. Did Stalin
kill millions because he was an atheist? Or did he kill millions because he
was an evil man who chose a system of personal philosophy that he could use to
justify it?
Any institution of power can be abused. While there isn't many traditional
institutions that promote atheism, some 'religions' could be considered
atheistic -- most notably, some sects of Buddhism, Confuscianism, and Taoism.
Unfortunately, my knowledge of the dogma of the 'Eastern' religions is weak --
so I can't tell you when specific groups did horrible things while not
believing in any sort of deities. But I have no doubt that if those
institutions had power, some people used that power to abuse others.
Humanity, isn't it great?
Footnote: I don't want to imply that every system of religious philosophy or
atheistic philosophy is evil -- there are notable atheists and religious
people who have done a great deal of good.
As the sysinternals article suggests, boot from a known clean CD and do an
"off-line" system scan. They make the point that it will never be possible
to determine with absolute certainty that a system is clean from inside the
system.
Always a good suggestion.
That being said, what is preventing a trojan from digging into the MBR
(old virus-style), then running in memory upon HDD boot and launching
the rest of its code from an "unused" section of the drive?
Of course, there are problems: Not much room in the MBR, and the
OS may actually use the empty sector unless steps are taken to prevent
it. Would be an interesting proof-of-concept code.
*boot from CD, scan drive, find no trojans, boot from HDD, scan drive,
trojan runs.
[The law states that]... made aware that their service can(is) be used
to access material that they have reasonable grounds to
believe is child pornography or child abuse material...
what that means is that they don't have to monitor every customer to see if
they are accessing CP, but if they are made aware that their network is
being used to transport/display/store child porn they have to report it.
That's one way of interpreting the law.
The other way is that if their service (PPP or TCP/IP connection) can be
used (http/ssl/ssh/etc) to access material that is child pornography, and
they don't report it, they are in violation. I think most people would
agree that the internet can be used to access child porn. I'm assuming
ssl would be the most common protocol to do so: Its easy to use, yet
provides encryption.
Until a court decides, we don't know what interpretation is valid.
Perhaps Oz has more tech-saavy judges than the US, or perhaps their
prosecutors don't stretch laws to convict people. I doubt it.
Find the ISP of every lawmaker who voted on this bill.
Inform said ISPs of this bill.
Point out that it is impossible to monitor SSL for child porn.
Point out that VPN solutions also tend to be encrypted, making it
impossible to monitor for child porn.
Watch lawmakers revise bill after their net connections become useless
("I'm sorry sir that your internet banking and investing sites don't work,
but we had to disable that functionality because of a bill you passed.")
You mentioned virtual NES but I think you are limiting yourself unnecessarily
to games that require the lightgun.
Reading up a bit, a headmouse (4-directional movement) could be combined with
a sip/puff stick (two switches). Compare the NES controller: A D-Pad, an
A button, and a B button. Most games marginally use the start/select buttons,
if at all.
As long as its possible to map the movement of the headmouse to a button,
it seems that any game which requires two buttons and a directional pad
would be playable.
In addition, there is always the MAME project. In addition to many games that
are mostly mouse based (the lightgun gams, and trackball/spinner games such as
arkanoid, etc), many games use only a joystick and less than two buttons.
And there is always the old Atari with paddles. Two-way movement (mouse) with
one button. Gameboy games as well.
Seems to me that if they don't want their computer to be compatible with
PCI cards, they shouldn't advertise it as being compatible with PCI cards.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that advertising your hardware as
being compatible with PCI cards when its not compatible with PCI cards
would be false advertising.
PS: I got a laptop to sell you: Its compatible with 32-bit Cardbus
cards, as long as you use only 16-bit PCMCIA cards in it.;)
You could try buying an antenna for your cell, like cellphone users
used to use on cars. Try finding a spot near the ceiling where the
antenna gets reception, then run the cable to where you want to keep
your phone.
For keeping the cable tidy, find removable wallclips. In the US,
3M tends to make them, I'm not sure what brands are available in
your country.
You carry on being ignorant, OK? "No real open land"?
LMAO. What we have might not be on the same scale as the
great swathes of untouched country that you'll come across
in parts of North America but it's beautiful enough and
nowhere near to the mental picture you seem to be painting
of a landscape that's concreted over entirely.
I think its a matter of perspective. I know someone who lives
in a quite rural part of Tennessee. At least, he considers it
quite rural, and by the standards of Tennessee, it probably is.
I grew up in northern Minnesota. While visiting him, no matter
where I went, I kept getting the impression that I was 5 minutes
from town.
Where I grew up, it wasn't hard to find areas where you'd have
to walk 5 miles to find the nearest house. It wasn't hard to
find areas where you could drive for miles and miles without
seeing the lights of a house. That's what I consider
"rural".
Its all a matter of perspective.
(There is probably a reader from Montana or Alaska looking at
this and wondering how I could describe a place with homes
every 5 miles as "rural".)
The total cancer deaths added to the world over time with the Chernobyl
disaster is estimated at 1.5 milion. After some googling it appears Caesium
and Plutonium have similar effects:
The IAEA notes that, while the Chernobyl accident released as much as 400 times
the radioactive contamination of the Hiroshima bomb, it was 100 to 1000 times
less than the contamination caused by atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in
the mid-20th century. One can conclude that while the Chernobyl accident was a
local disaster, it was not a global one.
No studies have been
able to point to a direct link between Chernobyl and increased cancer risks or
other health problems outside the immediately affected republics of Ukraine,
Belarus and the Russian Federation.
Quite frankly, I can't find anything to support a 1.5 million death figure.
I can't find anything to support a.15 million death figure or even a.015 million death figure. Quite honestly,
from what little research I fan find, it seems that there has been a
documented case of 1,800 people with thyroid cancer in the
area and 10 deaths due to that, in addition to those killed during/immediately
after the reactor went (about 31).
The most recent and authoritative UN report has confirmed that there is no
scientific evidence of any significant radiation-related health effects to
most people exposed to the Chernobyl disaster. The UNSCEAR* 2000 Report is
consistent with earlier WHO findings. The report points to some 1,800 cases
of thyroid cancer, but "apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a
major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 14 years after
the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer
incidence or mortality or in non-malignant disorders that could be related
to radiation exposure." As yet there is little evidence of any increase in
leukaemia, even among clean-up workers where it might be most expected.
However, these workers remain at increased risk of cancer in the long term.
The figures I'm finding are supporting 4000 - 10000 additional deaths
due to Chernobyl, out of millions affected, although those _are_ predictions
(unlike your prediction of 1.5 million deaths, I _can_ show the reasoning
behind this figure). If the 4000 - 10000 deaths prediction is right, it
will be hard to verify: the natural cancer rate will be about 800,000
cases in the affected group.
In short, Chernobyl raised the cancer rate by about 1% throughout
parts of Russia and the Ukraine. Its amazing : an obsolete, unsafe
design with unsafe practices leading to what is probably one of the
worst nuclear accidents possible only killed 4 - 10k people.
I don't mean to trivialize the deaths of cancer victims, but in the
whole scheme of things, that's nothing. 10k total predicted deaths is
less than half the deaths in one year attributed to "safe" coal power
generation in the US. Yes: The worst nuclear power accident will
have killed less people than a year's worth of expected deaths due
to normally operating coal power plants.
Its base set of commands is simple enough, and its effective.
For example, take 'd'. 'd' is for delete. 'dw' deletes a word, 'dd'
deletes a line, 'd$' deletes until the end of a line.
'y' is copy. 'yw' copies a word, 'yy' copies a line, and 'y$' copies
until the end of the line.
'c' is to change. Guess what 'cc', 'c$' and 'cw' does.
Moreso, 2dw deletes two words, as 2yw copies two words, etc.
Once you learn how one set of commands works, and you know another command,
you probably know how that command works and how to use that command to
extend the commands you currently know.
For example,/string searches for the next occurence of 'string'. Guess what
d/string and y/string does.
Sure, vim might not be the easiest UI to learn, but I seperate 'ease of learning' from 'ease of use'.
Just my $.02
PS: This post composed in vim. (Its my default editor for w3m)
The Internet has been slowly moving away from generalised, one-size-
(doesn't)-fit-all forms of communication to highly insular, segregated
forms classified according to interests and comparitive levels of mental
health, among other things.
Congratulations, you just described usenet!
Its segregated into its own catagories, subcategories, etc (such as
rec.games.roguelike.nethack or misc.invest.financial-plan) that are
devoted to specific subjects.
In addition, its standardized: I can use a variety of NNTP clients to
read messages (currently I'm using the command-line program 'slrn')
It also is rather p2p like, with no central server, but with messages
spreading from server-to-server.
I've used mailing lists, web-based forums, and newsgroups.
All have advantages and disadvantages. Web forums, being centralized,
can have nice/. style moderation.
NNTP, being standardized and decentralized, can't have/. style moderation,
but allows other tricks, such as scoring. I tend to killfile certain
subthreads I'm uninterested in, which, in the newsgroups I read, are
all the filtering I require.
You forgot to leave your address so we can send all the safe nuclear waste
to your backyard - I'm assuming that the reference to "Not In My Back Yard"
was an invitation to dump it in yours?
Works for me. I'll take a few of the ceramic-style storage containers,
buried 10 feet underground in my backyard.
Natural radioactivity may be a problem: The region where I live has naturally
occuring radon. I imagine that this will upset their radioactivity detectors.
Oh, and I expect a small compensation from the federal government for
digging up my backyard. Say, never having to pay taxes again.:)
One of the problems with solar energy is that its not constant.
Assume (roughly) 5 hours of effective sunlight each day. This will
vary based on location, season, and climate. Google tells me that
the average for Los Angelas is 5.5 hours/day. A location such
as Hamburg, Germany, receives 2.5 hours. But lets be generous.
US uses about 10 billion KWH each day (according to google).
Assuming that its evenly divided throughout the day, we
need to store 7.5 billion KWH each day. Again, we are being
generous: We should build a system that expects several
cloudy days of winter throughout most of the country.
I want to see your proposal for a system that can generate
over 2 billion KWH for each effective hour of sunlight a day,
with a storage system that charges at the rate of 1.5 billion
KWH and stores 7.5 billion KWH. (Note we are assuming 100%
efficiency).
Then I want to see the KWH cost of solar when you are done.
Average in the US is about $.075 KWH or so.
The main advantages that nuclear has over solar, wind, hydroelectric,
geothermal, and tidal:
We have the technology now.
This is a biggie. We know how to build nuclear power plants. Other
countries have been doing so for years. Even in the US, nuclear is a
proven energy source: IIRC, the US derives 24% of its electricity from
nuclear power.
The technology can replace full US capacity.
Look at how much energy the US uses now, and how much the US predicts it
will be using. Can solar cells, wind farms, hydroelectric, or tidal
replace that? It doesn't seem that wind nor solar can -- it doesn't have
the capacity nor the constant power generation. Hydroelectric isn't
unlimited either: sooner or later you run out of damnable rivers.
Geothermal? It seems location dependent (but I'll admit, I haven't done
my homework on this one). Tidal? How much coastline would we need again?
Relatively non-disruptive.
Hydroelectric power creates lakes and turns rivers into streams. It
changes aquatic ecosystems. How about tidal? How many shorelines are
we going to line with tidal energy power generation? What do you think that
will do to the environment? (Wind power is also relatively non-disruptive.)
Cost effective.
Nuclear has been competing with traditional electric generation for decades.
We know we can generate nuclear power at a relatively low cost. The same
can't be said for many other alternative energy sources.
Effective at limiting pollution.
No matter what "green" energy we use, there will be pollution. Check out
the byproducts created in the manufacture of solar cells. Yes, nuclear
does require some mining, and it requires proper disposal of nuclear waste.
Yet, in the end, nuclear is amazingly efficient at eliminating greenhouse
gases on a level with other green technologies.
So, lets sum up - Nuclear is:
We have the technology now.
The technology can replace full US capacity.
Relatively non-disruptive.
Cost effective.
Effective at limiting pollution.
Perhaps this is why noted scientists such as James Lovelock also advocate
nuclear power.
The main problem is the public and the greens. They are convinced that
nuclear power is unsafe, that radiation will kill us all, and they are
playing a NIMBY game with nuclear waste disposal.
To be honest, nuclear power isn't my first choice for green energy: That
would be orbital space platforms harvesting the energy of the sun, or
fusion reactors. Perhaps one day, those technologies would be feasible.
Right now, they are slightly more of a pipe dream than other green
energy. Nuclear exists now, and it works. Conservation goes only so
far -- the third world is slowly turning first world, and that will
require an enormous consumption of energy.
We need to be realistic about our energy problem and about what solutions will
work. Most alternative energy sources won't work right now. Nuclear will.
He's exploiting ideas that make perfect sense in
computer-driven fabrication but have never been applied to architecture.
Imagine a building where the needs and desires of its inhabitants are hot-wired
to the shapes of walls and floors, which can be extended and updated ad hoc, ad
infinitum.
I have an old book around here that talks about 1890s Japanese housing,
and how certain walls would be removed or replaced in the homes according
to need:
What would be a parlour in the day would be divided into sleeping rooms
at night.
There is the obvious problem with this: In Western architecture, rooms
tend to hold big, bulky objects called furniture. Western culture
doesn't tend to sit on tatami mats and sleep on shikibutons.
In our culture, changes to living space tend not to be frequent:
We don't convert bedrooms to living rooms daily. When we do want
to remodel our homes, we tend to hire builders and remodelers.
I suspect that this will be significantly cheaper for quite awhile.
It sounds like he's trying to be innovative for the sake of being
innovative.
Slashdot Mirror
hiskool is ful of uceless klasses such as histery, englesh, and ekonomiks.
i like komputers, y do i nede to lern to spel? y do i nede to no ekonomiks and histery, that is wat king bush is fer. i kan fokus on komputers and he wil kil the bad gise and get me jobs.
no hiskool was gud enuf for king moses, and its gud enuf fer me!
Remember that "sexist" Harvard president who talked about innate abilities of women awhile back?
One of the things he discussed was that being a stay-at-home parent for a year or two may significantly impair a person's career. Since mothers tend to be the stay at home parent, guess who's career suffers? Imagine quitting your job in 1999 to raise your baby, and re-entering the IT field in 2004? You'd have missed the release of Windows 2000 and Windows XP, a linux kernel or two, new stuff on the Cisco end, new security issues, etc.
When questioned about why women in Europe had more success in there careers, he mentioned that the shorter European work year may be a factor. (Makes sense -- imagine working crunch weeks in software -- a man is expected to sacrifice his family during that time, a woman is not.
(He also did ask for more research on innate abilities, which is why he was called sexist. He questioned if some fields don't appeal to women. He might have a point -- parts of the IT industry seems to require solitary behavior and an obsessive streak. Maybe more men then women are inclined that way.)
I have a similar story with a small dockapp called wmfuzzy that displays a time string.
When I switched to OpenBSD on a laptop, it didn't work. I informed the author, and he rewrote some code so it would. I tested it, found a few bugs, and told them of it. Although I couldn't code C at the time, I could read the asset reports and change the system clock so that the bugs would trigger.
Its a great feeling to submit a bug report in the morning and by the next day have a patched version of the code to test.
Its also nice to get a point release and credit in the changelog. :)
Another time, I was playing slash'em and I found that I could get some rather strange error messages with One-Eyed Sam in a certain scenerio. I talked to one of the developers on IRC, narrowed down the problem, and filed a bug report. Last I heard, it was fixed in the next release. (The bug wasn't a game-crashing bug, just slash'em realizing that the shop didn't have a shop keeper.)
How about:
"Homosexuals are mentally defective, and guess who gets a trip to the mental hospital/gulag?"
Worked for more than one (officially atheistic) communist state.
The problem is, if you are using what religious people/institutions did as a way to attack religion, you should look at what atheistic people/institutions did as well.
Remember Stalin? Mao Zedong? Just more than a few notable atheists who have participated in crimes against humanity.
Newsflash: Most doctrines can be abused to support whatever you want to do. Religion doctrine and the lack of religion doctrine can as well. Did Stalin kill millions because he was an atheist? Or did he kill millions because he was an evil man who chose a system of personal philosophy that he could use to justify it?
Any institution of power can be abused. While there isn't many traditional institutions that promote atheism, some 'religions' could be considered atheistic -- most notably, some sects of Buddhism, Confuscianism, and Taoism. Unfortunately, my knowledge of the dogma of the 'Eastern' religions is weak -- so I can't tell you when specific groups did horrible things while not believing in any sort of deities. But I have no doubt that if those institutions had power, some people used that power to abuse others.
Humanity, isn't it great?
Footnote: I don't want to imply that every system of religious philosophy or atheistic philosophy is evil -- there are notable atheists and religious people who have done a great deal of good.
Always a good suggestion.
That being said, what is preventing a trojan from digging into the MBR (old virus-style), then running in memory upon HDD boot and launching the rest of its code from an "unused" section of the drive?
Of course, there are problems: Not much room in the MBR, and the OS may actually use the empty sector unless steps are taken to prevent it. Would be an interesting proof-of-concept code.
*boot from CD, scan drive, find no trojans, boot from HDD, scan drive, trojan runs.
That's one way of interpreting the law.
The other way is that if their service (PPP or TCP/IP connection) can be used (http/ssl/ssh/etc) to access material that is child pornography, and they don't report it, they are in violation. I think most people would agree that the internet can be used to access child porn. I'm assuming ssl would be the most common protocol to do so: Its easy to use, yet provides encryption.
Until a court decides, we don't know what interpretation is valid.
Perhaps Oz has more tech-saavy judges than the US, or perhaps their prosecutors don't stretch laws to convict people. I doubt it.
You mentioned virtual NES but I think you are limiting yourself unnecessarily to games that require the lightgun.
Reading up a bit, a headmouse (4-directional movement) could be combined with a sip/puff stick (two switches). Compare the NES controller: A D-Pad, an A button, and a B button. Most games marginally use the start/select buttons, if at all.
As long as its possible to map the movement of the headmouse to a button, it seems that any game which requires two buttons and a directional pad would be playable.
In addition, there is always the MAME project. In addition to many games that are mostly mouse based (the lightgun gams, and trackball/spinner games such as arkanoid, etc), many games use only a joystick and less than two buttons.
And there is always the old Atari with paddles. Two-way movement (mouse) with one button. Gameboy games as well.
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that advertising your hardware as being compatible with PCI cards when its not compatible with PCI cards would be false advertising.
PS: I got a laptop to sell you: Its compatible with 32-bit Cardbus cards, as long as you use only 16-bit PCMCIA cards in it. ;)
You could try buying an antenna for your cell, like cellphone users used to use on cars. Try finding a spot near the ceiling where the antenna gets reception, then run the cable to where you want to keep your phone.
For keeping the cable tidy, find removable wallclips. In the US, 3M tends to make them, I'm not sure what brands are available in your country.
I'm looking at John Gofman on the net, and he seems to be pretty controversial.
For example, he believes that 75% of all breast cancer in the US was caused by medical X-rays!
The environmental groups are quick to cite his work, but many respected scientists in the nuclear field seem to consider him a quack.
Got another reference?
I think its a matter of perspective. I know someone who lives in a quite rural part of Tennessee. At least, he considers it quite rural, and by the standards of Tennessee, it probably is.
I grew up in northern Minnesota. While visiting him, no matter where I went, I kept getting the impression that I was 5 minutes from town.
Where I grew up, it wasn't hard to find areas where you'd have to walk 5 miles to find the nearest house. It wasn't hard to find areas where you could drive for miles and miles without seeing the lights of a house. That's what I consider "rural".
Its all a matter of perspective.
(There is probably a reader from Montana or Alaska looking at this and wondering how I could describe a place with homes every 5 miles as "rural".)
Reference for the 1.5 megedeath estimate?
Wikipedia tells me the following:
The IAEA notes that, while the Chernobyl accident released as much as 400 times the radioactive contamination of the Hiroshima bomb, it was 100 to 1000 times less than the contamination caused by atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in the mid-20th century. One can conclude that while the Chernobyl accident was a local disaster, it was not a global one.
IAEA tells me:
No studies have been able to point to a direct link between Chernobyl and increased cancer risks or other health problems outside the immediately affected republics of Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation.
Quite frankly, I can't find anything to support a 1.5 million death figure. I can't find anything to support a .15 million death figure or even a .015 million death figure. Quite honestly,
from what little research I fan find, it seems that there has been a
documented case of 1,800 people with thyroid cancer in the
area and 10 deaths due to that, in addition to those killed during/immediately
after the reactor went (about 31).
I also found this (biased?) report which states:
The most recent and authoritative UN report has confirmed that there is no scientific evidence of any significant radiation-related health effects to most people exposed to the Chernobyl disaster. The UNSCEAR* 2000 Report is consistent with earlier WHO findings. The report points to some 1,800 cases of thyroid cancer, but "apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 14 years after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality or in non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure." As yet there is little evidence of any increase in leukaemia, even among clean-up workers where it might be most expected. However, these workers remain at increased risk of cancer in the long term.
The figures I'm finding are supporting 4000 - 10000 additional deaths due to Chernobyl, out of millions affected, although those _are_ predictions (unlike your prediction of 1.5 million deaths, I _can_ show the reasoning behind this figure). If the 4000 - 10000 deaths prediction is right, it will be hard to verify: the natural cancer rate will be about 800,000 cases in the affected group.
In short, Chernobyl raised the cancer rate by about 1% throughout parts of Russia and the Ukraine. Its amazing : an obsolete, unsafe design with unsafe practices leading to what is probably one of the worst nuclear accidents possible only killed 4 - 10k people.
I don't mean to trivialize the deaths of cancer victims, but in the whole scheme of things, that's nothing. 10k total predicted deaths is less than half the deaths in one year attributed to "safe" coal power generation in the US. Yes: The worst nuclear power accident will have killed less people than a year's worth of expected deaths due to normally operating coal power plants.
Vim.
No, don't laugh.
Its base set of commands is simple enough, and its effective.
For example, take 'd'. 'd' is for delete. 'dw' deletes a word, 'dd' deletes a line, 'd$' deletes until the end of a line.
'y' is copy. 'yw' copies a word, 'yy' copies a line, and 'y$' copies until the end of the line.
'c' is to change. Guess what 'cc', 'c$' and 'cw' does.
Moreso, 2dw deletes two words, as 2yw copies two words, etc.
Once you learn how one set of commands works, and you know another command, you probably know how that command works and how to use that command to extend the commands you currently know.
For example, /string searches for the next occurence of 'string'. Guess what
d/string and y/string does.
Sure, vim might not be the easiest UI to learn, but I seperate 'ease of learning' from 'ease of use'.
Just my $.02
PS: This post composed in vim. (Its my default editor for w3m)
Congratulations, you just described usenet!
Its segregated into its own catagories, subcategories, etc (such as rec.games.roguelike.nethack or misc.invest.financial-plan) that are devoted to specific subjects.
In addition, its standardized: I can use a variety of NNTP clients to read messages (currently I'm using the command-line program 'slrn')
It also is rather p2p like, with no central server, but with messages spreading from server-to-server.
I've used mailing lists, web-based forums, and newsgroups. All have advantages and disadvantages. Web forums, being centralized, can have nice /. style moderation.
NNTP, being standardized and decentralized, can't have /. style moderation,
but allows other tricks, such as scoring. I tend to killfile certain
subthreads I'm uninterested in, which, in the newsgroups I read, are
all the filtering I require.
About a month ago, I needed a mechanism for password hashes.
After some research, I decided that SHA1 was more secure than MD5.
So I hunted down some good public domain SHA1 code, read through it, and added it to my code.
Thanks /.!
Works for me. I'll take a few of the ceramic-style storage containers, buried 10 feet underground in my backyard.
Natural radioactivity may be a problem: The region where I live has naturally occuring radon. I imagine that this will upset their radioactivity detectors.
Oh, and I expect a small compensation from the federal government for digging up my backyard. Say, never having to pay taxes again. :)
One of the problems with solar energy is that its not constant.
Assume (roughly) 5 hours of effective sunlight each day. This will vary based on location, season, and climate. Google tells me that the average for Los Angelas is 5.5 hours/day. A location such as Hamburg, Germany, receives 2.5 hours. But lets be generous.
US uses about 10 billion KWH each day (according to google). Assuming that its evenly divided throughout the day, we need to store 7.5 billion KWH each day. Again, we are being generous: We should build a system that expects several cloudy days of winter throughout most of the country.
I want to see your proposal for a system that can generate over 2 billion KWH for each effective hour of sunlight a day, with a storage system that charges at the rate of 1.5 billion KWH and stores 7.5 billion KWH. (Note we are assuming 100% efficiency).
Then I want to see the KWH cost of solar when you are done. Average in the US is about $.075 KWH or so.
The main advantages that nuclear has over solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and tidal:
This is a biggie. We know how to build nuclear power plants. Other countries have been doing so for years. Even in the US, nuclear is a proven energy source: IIRC, the US derives 24% of its electricity from nuclear power.
Look at how much energy the US uses now, and how much the US predicts it will be using. Can solar cells, wind farms, hydroelectric, or tidal replace that? It doesn't seem that wind nor solar can -- it doesn't have the capacity nor the constant power generation. Hydroelectric isn't unlimited either: sooner or later you run out of damnable rivers. Geothermal? It seems location dependent (but I'll admit, I haven't done my homework on this one). Tidal? How much coastline would we need again?
Hydroelectric power creates lakes and turns rivers into streams. It changes aquatic ecosystems. How about tidal? How many shorelines are we going to line with tidal energy power generation? What do you think that will do to the environment? (Wind power is also relatively non-disruptive.)
Nuclear has been competing with traditional electric generation for decades. We know we can generate nuclear power at a relatively low cost. The same can't be said for many other alternative energy sources.
Effective at limiting pollution.
No matter what "green" energy we use, there will be pollution. Check out the byproducts created in the manufacture of solar cells. Yes, nuclear does require some mining, and it requires proper disposal of nuclear waste. Yet, in the end, nuclear is amazingly efficient at eliminating greenhouse gases on a level with other green technologies.
So, lets sum up - Nuclear is:
Perhaps this is why noted scientists such as James Lovelock also advocate nuclear power.
The main problem is the public and the greens. They are convinced that nuclear power is unsafe, that radiation will kill us all, and they are playing a NIMBY game with nuclear waste disposal.
To be honest, nuclear power isn't my first choice for green energy: That would be orbital space platforms harvesting the energy of the sun, or fusion reactors. Perhaps one day, those technologies would be feasible. Right now, they are slightly more of a pipe dream than other green energy. Nuclear exists now, and it works. Conservation goes only so far -- the third world is slowly turning first world, and that will require an enormous consumption of energy.
We need to be realistic about our energy problem and about what solutions will work. Most alternative energy sources won't work right now. Nuclear will.
So basically, according to you, sexual reproduction is preferred in organisms with brains because those brains can select better genes (mates).
It sounds plausible, but how do you explain the vast amount of sexual reproduction in plants? Last time I checked, they don't have brains.
From the article:
I have an old book around here that talks about 1890s Japanese housing, and how certain walls would be removed or replaced in the homes according to need:
What would be a parlour in the day would be divided into sleeping rooms at night.
There is the obvious problem with this: In Western architecture, rooms tend to hold big, bulky objects called furniture. Western culture doesn't tend to sit on tatami mats and sleep on shikibutons.
In our culture, changes to living space tend not to be frequent: We don't convert bedrooms to living rooms daily. When we do want to remodel our homes, we tend to hire builders and remodelers. I suspect that this will be significantly cheaper for quite awhile.
It sounds like he's trying to be innovative for the sake of being innovative.
Depending one what he's supposed to do, there is always free shell accounts under unix/linux which may work.
Since he is learning ASM, would a 486 or early pentium be "fast enough"?
If so, why not try hitting a local thrift store and looking what they have -- keep the receipt as well for your taxes.
When you are done with it, throw on a lightweight linux distro and donate it back to them. :)
[ Snip nutjob ranting ]
Since you know what people are really thinking, you must be making a killing in the stock markets.