You know, I half suspect that they started out with a few hundred bucks in web hosting, etc. fees and have just used the cash cycle to fund everything. Hence why they were changing on a regular basis their office before they had one.
Which would then mean that, even if they need to recall every machine, there may not even be very much in terms of unsecured creditors. As long as they pay themselves enough profit, they win either way.
No, the mercury in a "bulb" is in liquid form..... well, liquid and vapor.
The powder in a CF "bulb" is the phosphor, which is toxic and hazardous in an entirely different way.
And, because basically the same stuff is in fluorescent bulbs and white LEDs, nobody wants to make a big deal out of it.:D
Oh, and injecting mercury is not that bad. Metallic mercury is not especially dangerous, especially because your body is already equipped to excrete a reasonable amount of it. Organic mercury compounds, on the other hand, are hideously unsafe and some of them are toxic in quantities as small as a spilled drop, largely because they have an easy time crossing cell walls.
If you can't tell the difference between 1 bullshit artist and 1 expert, what makes you think that you can tell the difference between 100 bullshit artists and 100 experts or 100 bullshit publications and 100 expert publications?
Define how you can tell the difference between a real expert and a snowjob artist.
This is the problem with the current Expert Witness system (which works vaguely like you suggest). You can get expert witnesses to say all sorts of stuff and people will believe them.
The mods to hit a non-manuvering target are probably not that bad. Besides, The Aegis / SM system is already being upgraded to knock out ballistic missiles. Plus, the test results there are much better than the results from the national missile defense system.
Both the original ASAT system and the Aegis are only useful for low orbiting targets. So it's probably more useful to have it as part of a theater defense setup more than something you need to have enough warning to launch an F-15 at.
But, yah, the smart money's on it being a demonstration to Russia and China.
Indeed, the only times that I've ever purchased something directly as the result of a banner advertisement is from a very well targeted search advertisement for search terms that didn't attract too many spammers
The problem is that advertisers want to pay per-click to get per-impression results.
There's no "click" on TV or radio or newspapers, just an impression. But when people realized that there *was* a click-through to be recorded on the web, they wanted to pay for that under the assumption that click-through and impression were correlated and therefore that they could gauge if their intended audience was getting the ads by the level of click-through.
This makes things easy. If the click-through on an advertisement is high, clearly you need to keep it there. If it's low, it's clearly not properly targeted. This can be automated to run without human intervention. The survey disproves this.
So, really, what it's showing is that the web advertising market needs to be structured more like a traditional media buy.
I suspect the biggest winners in this market will be large web companies with enough folks to have an advertisement team and captured demographics information to be able to say "Sure the click-throughs are all 35 year old virgins with a crap job, but the *viewers* are actually mostly upper management level people with a wife and a mistress"
And, since this is Slashdot, we can make the logical conclusion that the companies in the article were paid by one of the aforementioned large web companies with enough folks to have an advertisement team and captured demographics information.
The problem is that a person forced into continued employment in those sorts of situations is just going to spend the whole day reading pointy-haired-boss.slashdot.org instead of doing what they are supposed to be doing.
If this is a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise to the reader.:P
The problem is that people do buy certain products or make certain actions based on spam.
This is slashdot, so I'm not going to bother giving a reference, but some reporters did find that once you click on the link, the transaction progresses in a fairly normal fashion.
The reason why drug spam is so popular is because people are actually buying it. And because the herbal viagra has been reported to contain real viagra, it'll even work.
The problem with most "green" power is that it works great in a small area.
For example, solar is just the ticket for sunny parts of the world, but next to useless in places like Seattle where it's cloudy most of the time.
Ethanol works great IN BRAZIL, largely because they've got abundant sugarcane and no petroleum reserves (at least until they found some) But sugarcane doesn't grow everywhere. And most of the other things that might work as ethanol food sources require more development. Do you really want to stake our survival as a species on something that's still fairly speculative? Just because the Manhattan Project was able to make a nuclear bomb in time doesn't mean that everything you throw a bunch of scientists at will net results.
I have a buddy who lives off-the-grid. And I think it's the coolest thing ever and feel that it is highly geek-friendly. But you cannot take the results of a set of people who made it a success and try to apply these results to the rest of the world as a general solution. People in big cities like NYC do not own enough space to live off-the-grid. You can't just decree that NYC be liquidated to feed your "off-the-grid" dreamland, nor can you assume that factories that produce stuff that we need like metals or electronics can be easily made self-powered. Do you know how much power an aluminum plant takes up?
Inconclusive, at this point. There was a lot of nasty-ass stuff the veterans were exposed to, of which DU was only one of.
Also, you do need to remember that lead counterweights will also screw you up if you handle them too much. Or if you inhale vaporized zinc. Or any number of other things. The presence of radioactivity is about as indicative of the danger of a given substance as the pH.
You can't really say that nuclear power is bad because of the Hanford site.
The Hanford site is the way it is because we had to get as many nukes as we could as fast as we could to beat the Ruskies.
A properly constructed nuclear fuel cycle is not going to give results like that. Nor is a properly constructed reactor going to blow up like Chenobryl.
I mean, Solar works great... except on a cloudy day. Ethanol's unproven -- pretty much any biofuel is soundly beaten by solar in terms of energy efficiency per square foot of land. Hydro's tapped. Windmills turned out to be bird-blenders are useless with still air. Natural gas may be "clean" but it'll run out. Fusion has yet to do anything useful.
The problem is that solar, wind, and biofuels are actually not half bad for "peak" load, but most folks can't tell the difference between base and peak load.
They *DO* make products out of Uranium. Depleted uranium counterweights, for example. In fact, I've got some green Uranium glass marbles at home.
Let me fill you in on what you seem to have missed.
The longer the half-life, the lower the radiation produced. So, for example, Bismuth has a half-life of 1.9E19, so we thought it was actually stable for a long long time. And Potassium is invariably contaminated with K-40, which has a halflife of 1.2E9.
All of these items are fairly safe.
The reason why spent nuclear fuel is so damn dangerous is because it's loaded with stuff that decays in a few decades or centuries. Reprocessing will let you dispose of that crap, which is useless in a reactor anyway, save the Plutonium-239, which is too contaminated with Pu-240 to be used in a bomb, and save any depleted uranium for conversion to Plutonium and/or other uses.
If we were to say that tomorrow we were going to replace a huge chunk of the base power load of the US, we'd build them in batches in a factory. Instead, each plant is individually designed because each one needs careful approval.
Also, do not discount the extra construction that is required to follow fairly strict standards. If we were to state that nuclear plants could kill as many people a year as coal power, they could probably discharge radioactive coolant water without a second thought. Nuclear plants kill less people, discharge less harmful stuff, etc. This is probably a good thing, so it's probably better to just let them be pricier and safer instead of cheaper and dangerous.
Finally, one must not discount that the many millions of dollars come at the very very start. See, if I want to build a plant, I have to spend assloads of cash right away just to have my plant get shot down because of a bunch of whacko environmentalists who secretly believe that the solution to the problems of the world is the total destruction of society.
Which discourages folks from even bothering to start the process.
I tend to like the idea of just stuffing the waste down in the Yucca Mountain or just store it onsite in dry casks under the assumption that it'll be reprocessed at some point within the next hundred years. It's already shown outside of the US that reprocessing can and will work to dramatically reduce the size of the waste. Theoretical work shows that you can reprocess it from high-level waste to harmless with specialized reactors and somewhere between a few years and a few decades of storage time... and also mine various transmuted materials while doing it. So it's highly likely that whenever we've researched it more, we can do a better job of reprocessing than we would now.
I mean, why shouldn't we debate how to make other sources of power produce less waste? At least we have the option of not inhaling nuclear waste.
They can win a battle without firing a shot this way.
The Navy's going to be less likely to discount the Chinese navy from now on, which means that they can make a more credible threat out of invading Taiwan.
Also, it can result in the US increasing navy funding, which means that there is less money to be had for military intervention in other parts of the world, giving China a freer hand.
Finally, the Chinese government exists at the whim of their huge population. Anything to keep those folks happy.
The harassment I don't get, though. I mean, if they want some free sex, couldn't they just go to a bar and say, "Yeah, I'm a VP of a multi-billion dollar corporation, and I make nine thousand dollars an hour. Let's take my jet and go screw in the hot tub at my 4th summer place." That's because sexual harassment is not about sex, it's about power.
By the time that a good chunk of all browsers actually support ECMA 4, it's going to be a "nice to have" feature that nobody's going to be too keen on.
The road forward, in true hacker fashion, is probably to write translators so that part of your PHP, Ruby, Perl, Java, or C# code magically runs on the client, treating ECMA 3 as a vague intermediate language.
ECMA 3 can be the x86 assembly language of teh intarweb. No CPU actually executes real x86 instructions anymore, they translate it into internal RISC/VLIW-ish operations. Very few programmers write much of any raw x86 instructions anymore.
Of course, this may or may not be handy for the other ECMAScript implementations like LiveScript.
Laptop-mode solves the problem one way, without changing underlying apps, by making the write cycles bursty.
But what if you could receive a message to know that the drive had just spun up, so you could batch-commit a bunch of data and maybe do some speculative read operations?
Similarly, if you hit "Save" you really want to bypass any caching, you want it to spin up right now.
I tend to think that somebody ought to take a fine toothed comb through a fairly standard desktop linux setup with a fairly standard set of applications and daemons and ruthlessly examine every disk access.
It seems like most of the things that are desirable for a server that are merely OK on a desktop are probably really bad for laptops and there's optimizations to be made.
And I'm not just thinking of Linux here. When I use a Windows laptop, I notice the hard disk spinning up on a fairly regular basis, even when I'm doing something fairly lame like web browsing or word processing. And you know that pretty much nobody thinks about it without being prodded....
But with Linux, you could make "Lapbuntu" that would contain a set of apps that were modified to aggressively avoid using the disk unless it's already spun up by patching existing software.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I half suspect that they started out with a few hundred bucks in web hosting, etc. fees and have just used the cash cycle to fund everything. Hence why they were changing on a regular basis their office before they had one.
Which would then mean that, even if they need to recall every machine, there may not even be very much in terms of unsecured creditors. As long as they pay themselves enough profit, they win either way.
On my blog, I wrote about when HP thought they'd "solved" e-books the last time.
The only cool motion-based user interface I've found so far is MacSaber. But I do use two displays at the same time every day at work.
Well, yah, but if we want to lay blame, shouldn't it be on the methyl group bonded to the mercury just as much as the mercury atom?
I mean, without CH3 it goes back to being much less harmful, no?
No, the mercury in a "bulb" is in liquid form..... well, liquid and vapor.
:D
The powder in a CF "bulb" is the phosphor, which is toxic and hazardous in an entirely different way.
And, because basically the same stuff is in fluorescent bulbs and white LEDs, nobody wants to make a big deal out of it.
Oh, and injecting mercury is not that bad. Metallic mercury is not especially dangerous, especially because your body is already equipped to excrete a reasonable amount of it. Organic mercury compounds, on the other hand, are hideously unsafe and some of them are toxic in quantities as small as a spilled drop, largely because they have an easy time crossing cell walls.
Bah.
If you can't tell the difference between 1 bullshit artist and 1 expert, what makes you think that you can tell the difference between 100 bullshit artists and 100 experts or 100 bullshit publications and 100 expert publications?
Define how you can tell the difference between a real expert and a snowjob artist.
This is the problem with the current Expert Witness system (which works vaguely like you suggest). You can get expert witnesses to say all sorts of stuff and people will believe them.
The mods to hit a non-manuvering target are probably not that bad. Besides, The Aegis / SM system is already being upgraded to knock out ballistic missiles. Plus, the test results there are much better than the results from the national missile defense system.
Both the original ASAT system and the Aegis are only useful for low orbiting targets. So it's probably more useful to have it as part of a theater defense setup more than something you need to have enough warning to launch an F-15 at.
But, yah, the smart money's on it being a demonstration to Russia and China.
Indeed, the only times that I've ever purchased something directly as the result of a banner advertisement is from a very well targeted search advertisement for search terms that didn't attract too many spammers
(purple LEDs, if I remember correctly)
The problem is that advertisers want to pay per-click to get per-impression results.
There's no "click" on TV or radio or newspapers, just an impression. But when people realized that there *was* a click-through to be recorded on the web, they wanted to pay for that under the assumption that click-through and impression were correlated and therefore that they could gauge if their intended audience was getting the ads by the level of click-through.
This makes things easy. If the click-through on an advertisement is high, clearly you need to keep it there. If it's low, it's clearly not properly targeted. This can be automated to run without human intervention. The survey disproves this.
So, really, what it's showing is that the web advertising market needs to be structured more like a traditional media buy.
I suspect the biggest winners in this market will be large web companies with enough folks to have an advertisement team and captured demographics information to be able to say "Sure the click-throughs are all 35 year old virgins with a crap job, but the *viewers* are actually mostly upper management level people with a wife and a mistress"
And, since this is Slashdot, we can make the logical conclusion that the companies in the article were paid by one of the aforementioned large web companies with enough folks to have an advertisement team and captured demographics information.
The problem is that a person forced into continued employment in those sorts of situations is just going to spend the whole day reading pointy-haired-boss.slashdot.org instead of doing what they are supposed to be doing.
:P
If this is a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise to the reader.
You are living in la la land.
The problem is that people do buy certain products or make certain actions based on spam.
This is slashdot, so I'm not going to bother giving a reference, but some reporters did find that once you click on the link, the transaction progresses in a fairly normal fashion.
The reason why drug spam is so popular is because people are actually buying it. And because the herbal viagra has been reported to contain real viagra, it'll even work.
succinctly, {nerd} XOR {AT&T droid}.
With the notable exception of the research labs.
The problem with most "green" power is that it works great in a small area.
For example, solar is just the ticket for sunny parts of the world, but next to useless in places like Seattle where it's cloudy most of the time.
Ethanol works great IN BRAZIL, largely because they've got abundant sugarcane and no petroleum reserves (at least until they found some) But sugarcane doesn't grow everywhere. And most of the other things that might work as ethanol food sources require more development. Do you really want to stake our survival as a species on something that's still fairly speculative? Just because the Manhattan Project was able to make a nuclear bomb in time doesn't mean that everything you throw a bunch of scientists at will net results.
I have a buddy who lives off-the-grid. And I think it's the coolest thing ever and feel that it is highly geek-friendly. But you cannot take the results of a set of people who made it a success and try to apply these results to the rest of the world as a general solution. People in big cities like NYC do not own enough space to live off-the-grid. You can't just decree that NYC be liquidated to feed your "off-the-grid" dreamland, nor can you assume that factories that produce stuff that we need like metals or electronics can be easily made self-powered. Do you know how much power an aluminum plant takes up?
Inconclusive, at this point. There was a lot of nasty-ass stuff the veterans were exposed to, of which DU was only one of.
Also, you do need to remember that lead counterweights will also screw you up if you handle them too much. Or if you inhale vaporized zinc. Or any number of other things. The presence of radioactivity is about as indicative of the danger of a given substance as the pH.
You can't really say that nuclear power is bad because of the Hanford site.
The Hanford site is the way it is because we had to get as many nukes as we could as fast as we could to beat the Ruskies.
A properly constructed nuclear fuel cycle is not going to give results like that. Nor is a properly constructed reactor going to blow up like Chenobryl.
What other sources?
I mean, Solar works great... except on a cloudy day. Ethanol's unproven -- pretty much any biofuel is soundly beaten by solar in terms of energy efficiency per square foot of land. Hydro's tapped. Windmills turned out to be bird-blenders are useless with still air. Natural gas may be "clean" but it'll run out. Fusion has yet to do anything useful.
The problem is that solar, wind, and biofuels are actually not half bad for "peak" load, but most folks can't tell the difference between base and peak load.
Funny you mention this.
They *DO* make products out of Uranium. Depleted uranium counterweights, for example. In fact, I've got some green Uranium glass marbles at home.
Let me fill you in on what you seem to have missed.
The longer the half-life, the lower the radiation produced. So, for example, Bismuth has a half-life of 1.9E19, so we thought it was actually stable for a long long time. And Potassium is invariably contaminated with K-40, which has a halflife of 1.2E9.
All of these items are fairly safe.
The reason why spent nuclear fuel is so damn dangerous is because it's loaded with stuff that decays in a few decades or centuries. Reprocessing will let you dispose of that crap, which is useless in a reactor anyway, save the Plutonium-239, which is too contaminated with Pu-240 to be used in a bomb, and save any depleted uranium for conversion to Plutonium and/or other uses.
Not necessarily.
If we were to say that tomorrow we were going to replace a huge chunk of the base power load of the US, we'd build them in batches in a factory. Instead, each plant is individually designed because each one needs careful approval.
Also, do not discount the extra construction that is required to follow fairly strict standards. If we were to state that nuclear plants could kill as many people a year as coal power, they could probably discharge radioactive coolant water without a second thought. Nuclear plants kill less people, discharge less harmful stuff, etc. This is probably a good thing, so it's probably better to just let them be pricier and safer instead of cheaper and dangerous.
Finally, one must not discount that the many millions of dollars come at the very very start. See, if I want to build a plant, I have to spend assloads of cash right away just to have my plant get shot down because of a bunch of whacko environmentalists who secretly believe that the solution to the problems of the world is the total destruction of society.
Which discourages folks from even bothering to start the process.
I tend to like the idea of just stuffing the waste down in the Yucca Mountain or just store it onsite in dry casks under the assumption that it'll be reprocessed at some point within the next hundred years. It's already shown outside of the US that reprocessing can and will work to dramatically reduce the size of the waste. Theoretical work shows that you can reprocess it from high-level waste to harmless with specialized reactors and somewhere between a few years and a few decades of storage time... and also mine various transmuted materials while doing it. So it's highly likely that whenever we've researched it more, we can do a better job of reprocessing than we would now.
I mean, why shouldn't we debate how to make other sources of power produce less waste? At least we have the option of not inhaling nuclear waste.
They can win a battle without firing a shot this way.
The Navy's going to be less likely to discount the Chinese navy from now on, which means that they can make a more credible threat out of invading Taiwan.
Also, it can result in the US increasing navy funding, which means that there is less money to be had for military intervention in other parts of the world, giving China a freer hand.
Finally, the Chinese government exists at the whim of their huge population. Anything to keep those folks happy.
Well, do you tear down your failed electronics to see why it failed? I don't, I just junk the sucker.
Could be tons and tons of tin whisker failures. Well, might be in the future, now that all of the lead-based electronics are gone.
The harassment I don't get, though. I mean, if they want some free sex, couldn't they just go to a bar and say, "Yeah, I'm a VP of a multi-billion dollar corporation, and I make nine thousand dollars an hour. Let's take my jet and go screw in the hot tub at my 4th summer place."
That's because sexual harassment is not about sex, it's about power.
By the time that a good chunk of all browsers actually support ECMA 4, it's going to be a "nice to have" feature that nobody's going to be too keen on.
The road forward, in true hacker fashion, is probably to write translators so that part of your PHP, Ruby, Perl, Java, or C# code magically runs on the client, treating ECMA 3 as a vague intermediate language.
ECMA 3 can be the x86 assembly language of teh intarweb. No CPU actually executes real x86 instructions anymore, they translate it into internal RISC/VLIW-ish operations. Very few programmers write much of any raw x86 instructions anymore.
Of course, this may or may not be handy for the other ECMAScript implementations like LiveScript.
Almost, but not quite.
Laptop-mode solves the problem one way, without changing underlying apps, by making the write cycles bursty.
But what if you could receive a message to know that the drive had just spun up, so you could batch-commit a bunch of data and maybe do some speculative read operations?
Similarly, if you hit "Save" you really want to bypass any caching, you want it to spin up right now.
Not all disk operations are created equal.
I tend to think that somebody ought to take a fine toothed comb through a fairly standard desktop linux setup with a fairly standard set of applications and daemons and ruthlessly examine every disk access.
It seems like most of the things that are desirable for a server that are merely OK on a desktop are probably really bad for laptops and there's optimizations to be made.
And I'm not just thinking of Linux here. When I use a Windows laptop, I notice the hard disk spinning up on a fairly regular basis, even when I'm doing something fairly lame like web browsing or word processing. And you know that pretty much nobody thinks about it without being prodded....
But with Linux, you could make "Lapbuntu" that would contain a set of apps that were modified to aggressively avoid using the disk unless it's already spun up by patching existing software.
You know, I think that Slashdotters are not nearly as horny as we'd think.
There was an increase in traffic, but not that much.