Every time someone finds submerged (or even simply abandoned) ruins, he claims that he has found Atlantis. Completely disregarding the only sure thing from Homer's tales, that if it even existed, Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
You can argue all you want, that "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" means "far, far away", but that still doesn't change the fact, that Cyprus, Crete, Santorini are right in the middle of Hellenistic domain!!! Hence neither "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" nor "far, far away".
Abandoned or submerged ruins of ancient civilization? Sure. Atlantis? No fucking way!
XUL is cool, but I am afraid that it might become the source of future security holes on par with ActiveX. After all, the main reason that ActiveX are insecure is that they allow third-party code to run on the behalf of my browser.
I mean, have you ever tried to click individual permissions, after careful evaluation, for a java applet that uses your local filesystem? After 15th question I just gave up and selected "yes to all", because I trusted the site it was running on, but decided never to use anything that asks me for more than 3-4 permissions.
Now, see, there's a little "chicken&egg" problem. There are no comercial FNR operational, because of enviromentalists' concerns. And they will have concerns until they see many commercial breeders operational.
Actually, they will have them then too;)
Stupid American ban on FNR doesn't help either. It's stupid because it's based on the assumption, that FNR produces weapons grade plutonium.
Have you followed the link, you would have found out, that indeed there were working breeder reactors, there is still working breeder in Japan and India is building another one.
There just isn't enough political will on one side, and there are too many "politicians" riding on enviromentalism to the offices on the other side.
What worries me is that nobody has yet found anything to do with the wastes.
Now, that's bullshit which has been uncovered just couple of days ago. And yet, like frelling creationist, you tend to "forget" the proof the next time around someone mentions nuclear energy.
For one, you can send the wastes to Sun, Moon or space. Without a spaceship that could break on the way up, using just the electromagnetic launch system, that would use about 10% of output of the nuclear energy to dispose all of its wastes. No, Sun sending it back to Earth is not a problem, sun sends tons of radioactive wastes from its own nuclear reactions to space every second.
And, you can also use breeder reactor to produce nuclear fuel instead of nuclear waste. It will produce more fuel that use, but you can also finetune it to zero balance. You can also use it transmute existing nuclear waste to non-radioactive isotopes. And it is economically viable.
If you're going to say "weapons grade plutonium", I'm going to slap you! The products of breeder reactor do contain "weapons grade isotopes" of uranium and plutonium, but in a mix that's unusable for weapons and impossible to extract with our current knowledge.
Really, the problem with fission energy is psychological, not factual. And I think it should be dealt as such.
So this really couldn't be used for core Internet routers.
Well, I believe that core Internet routers are about 1% of global router market, the rest of them rarely sees more than 100Mbit combined throughput on all WAN ports.
So, several good managed switches and couple of redundant routers on OpenBGPD would serve well over 90% of the market.
Perheaps you could put your money where your mouth is? If you are so enviromentally conscious as you claim to be, why not set up your own prize for efficient wind turbine? Is the goal worth $10 for you? Perhaps $100? Why not collect (with other enviromentally conscious people) the $10M and offer your own prize? After all, you'd need just 10,000 people -- I'm sure there are more enviromentalists in your state alone.
But of course, bitching about it on/. is easier and costs nothing. And you can feel that you did something for the enviroment at the same time...
Look at it this way: he/them could build another $50M house with 20 bedrooms, 50" plasma display in each room and five swimming pools, instead of funding this prize.
For one, (very) efficient Wind Power Station itself would give immediate cash prize to any inventor. From the market. If it doesn't happen, perhaps it can't be done in foreseable future.
And, perhaps for someone "putting your eggs in more than one basket" is more important goal than taking care of energy distribution. I understand that "worthy goals" are not universal, but you're free to set your own prize, or nag the wealthier of us to set one.
Yeah, this apeal is exactly null to people outside the countries served by ITMS. For example Poland. And even if they wanted to sell here, I believe it would still be 0.99eur per song -- I can buy cheaper CDs here, legally.
No, thanks, I'll keep my 4G MuVo and continue to buy at some other store in the format of my choice.
I don't know about Zen Micro, but my Creative MuVo 4GB works as a plain external usb storage with every modern operating system. Without any third party software.
See, unlike you I did some product research before buying this device. All the Creative HDD mp3 players before MuVo line were the crap with proprietary protocols for transferring songs. Even the newest Zen Touch still uses that crappy protocol, again revised, so it doesn't work with current GNomad.
And don't ever believe Creative reps promising reviewers "usb storage firmware upgrade" in three months. They're making this promise for over two years now, with every new player.
If I needed 20+ GB player I'd definitelly go for iRiver. As it stands now I'm more than happy with my 4G MuVo -- it just works, quality of audio output as well as battery life are great. And the battery can be replaced in about 3 seconds, unlike "some other mp3 player".
You can send whatever you want, in some countries it isn't illegal to host torrents, since they don't contain any copyrighted information. Just the pointers to places where you can find people hosting the files themselves.
Scratch it, 10g wouldn't kill trained ppl in acceleration suits, but the actual acceleration needed for launching from Earth to space in 2km mass driver is 10000g (100km/s^2).
If you bothered to follow the link you would found out that the cost of launching nuclear waste using electromagnetic mass drive could cost 10% of nuclear powerplant's output.
Sure, such mass driver doesn't work for launching people -- 10g would kill them in an instant. But launching resources is a good thing in itself.
Did you bother to follow the link? It was about a mass driver. Apparently you can build a 2km long mass driver that will accelerate anything inside with 10g so at the exit it will reach escape velocity.
And all this for 10% of total output of nuclear power plant to launch all its waste into space. Wether you send it to Sun, Moon or high orbit (or even solar orbit) is your choice.
Did you actually follow the link? I was talking about "mass driver" -- electromagnetic gun that speeds mass with 10g acceleration. With 2km mass driver you get escape velocity at the exit point.
Add to this some small reaction rockets and simple navigation computer. There's nothing to go wrong, since by the time the mass exits launch tunnel it is already out of "gravitational well".
Just point it towards the sun and you're set, it will fall onto it. Or alternativelly you can send it to Moon. Leaving it in space (even on high orbit) wouldn't be the best idea.
And the cost? By some estimation nuclear power plant will use ~10% of its output for launching its waste. Just follow the fucking link.
Just launch it to the Sun. It's cheaper and safer than you think, and there's already lots of radioactivity, so our tiny amounts of nuclear waste won't make a difference.
I think this is more or less irrelevant, because......for the premium on these "large" scsi drives you can buy several times more space in ATA/SATA drives, connect them to some SMART controller and join them in stripping mode, achieving higher peak as well as continuous bandwidth.
What's really interesting, is that there are controllers visible by computer as SCSI drive which allow you to connect lots of cheap ATA/SATA drives and configure them however you like.
These overpriced, overhyped scsi drives IMO are for the same people that buy "gold-coated-plug optical tos-link cables" and "distilled water for cleaning CDs" for couple of bucks per ounce.
Robert
PS Yes, I really saw those gold-coated optical cables.
If you want to mod me down, look for Russian rocket engines bought lately for installation in American crafts (saw something about it on Discovery the other day).
Probably because America was playing with Apple then.
No, really. IIRC when ZX80/ZX81/ZX Spectrum were storming Europe, Apple and Apple II were doing fine in the US. So the Apple machines were never heard of here, while Sinclair machines were almost unknown in the US.
I don't know why modern political-reformists are so fixated on IRV. Of all the technical criteria of "fair voting" IRV fulfills NONE. In this respect it's worse even than "majority vote".
I mean, why would you want to go with a voting scheme, that makes possible situation that adding votes for a candidate causes him to lose, and converselly, removing votes for a candidate causes him to win?
Why not go directly with "aproval" or even "condorcet"?
Robert
PS Go, read the above link to find out what's exactly wrong with IRV.
While we're at it, they could throw in decent tvout to this card. Just a simple framebuffer with ability to sync to vert refresh, double/triple buffering. And independent from main display. It doesn't even has to have backend scaller, processors are fast enough to scale DivX to 720x576 in real time.
Hell, I would pay up to $50 for a simple PCI card with low resolution (enough for PAL/NTSC), tvout, vert sync, double/triple buffering and good support in mplayer (so it means completelly open specs).
Robert
PS No, there are no cards on the market in the price range of up to $200 that match all those specs.
PPS No, dxr3 doesn't count, one has to compress video to mpeg1/mpeg2 in order to play it on this card, which results in lower quality. And because of this it eats too much cpu, as well as there are constant problems with a/v sync.
Real audiophiles (no that does not mean they have sex with their hi-fi) use analog because they claim that CD's loose to much of the music. Just because we don't "hear" it doesn't mean we don't "hear" it. Apparently.
Are those the same people who also claim that CDR-Audio sounds better than Audio recorded on CDR-Data?
Slashdot Mirror
Every time someone finds submerged (or even simply abandoned) ruins, he claims that he has found Atlantis. Completely disregarding the only sure thing from Homer's tales, that if it even existed, Atlantis was beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
You can argue all you want, that "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" means "far, far away", but that still doesn't change the fact, that Cyprus, Crete, Santorini are right in the middle of Hellenistic domain!!! Hence neither "beyond the Pillars of Hercules" nor "far, far away".
Abandoned or submerged ruins of ancient civilization? Sure. Atlantis? No fucking way!
Move along, nothing to see here.
Robert
XUL is cool, but I am afraid that it might become the source of future security holes on par with ActiveX. After all, the main reason that ActiveX are insecure is that they allow third-party code to run on the behalf of my browser.
I mean, have you ever tried to click individual permissions, after careful evaluation, for a java applet that uses your local filesystem? After 15th question I just gave up and selected "yes to all", because I trusted the site it was running on, but decided never to use anything that asks me for more than 3-4 permissions.
Robert
Now, see, there's a little "chicken&egg" problem. There are no comercial FNR operational, because of enviromentalists' concerns. And they will have concerns until they see many commercial breeders operational.
;)
Actually, they will have them then too
Stupid American ban on FNR doesn't help either. It's stupid because it's based on the assumption, that FNR produces weapons grade plutonium.
Well, we'll have to wait for the Indian FNR.
Robert
Have you followed the link, you would have found out, that indeed there were working breeder reactors, there is still working breeder in Japan and India is building another one.
There just isn't enough political will on one side, and there are too many "politicians" riding on enviromentalism to the offices on the other side.
Robert
What worries me is that nobody has yet found anything to do with the wastes.
Now, that's bullshit which has been uncovered just couple of days ago. And yet, like frelling creationist, you tend to "forget" the proof the next time around someone mentions nuclear energy.
For one, you can send the wastes to Sun, Moon or space. Without a spaceship that could break on the way up, using just the electromagnetic launch system, that would use about 10% of output of the nuclear energy to dispose all of its wastes. No, Sun sending it back to Earth is not a problem, sun sends tons of radioactive wastes from its own nuclear reactions to space every second.
And, you can also use breeder reactor to produce nuclear fuel instead of nuclear waste. It will produce more fuel that use, but you can also finetune it to zero balance. You can also use it transmute existing nuclear waste to non-radioactive isotopes. And it is economically viable.
If you're going to say "weapons grade plutonium", I'm going to slap you! The products of breeder reactor do contain "weapons grade isotopes" of uranium and plutonium, but in a mix that's unusable for weapons and impossible to extract with our current knowledge.
Really, the problem with fission energy is psychological, not factual. And I think it should be dealt as such.
Robert
So this really couldn't be used for core Internet routers.
Well, I believe that core Internet routers are about 1% of global router market, the rest of them rarely sees more than 100Mbit combined throughput on all WAN ports.
So, several good managed switches and couple of redundant routers on OpenBGPD would serve well over 90% of the market.
Robert
Prize for an efficient Wind Power Station.
/. is easier and costs nothing. And you can feel that you did something for the enviroment at the same time...
Something just hit me.
Perheaps you could put your money where your mouth is? If you are so enviromentally conscious as you claim to be, why not set up your own prize for efficient wind turbine? Is the goal worth $10 for you? Perhaps $100? Why not collect (with other enviromentally conscious people) the $10M and offer your own prize? After all, you'd need just 10,000 people -- I'm sure there are more enviromentalists in your state alone.
But of course, bitching about it on
Robert
Look at it this way: he/them could build another $50M house with 20 bedrooms, 50" plasma display in each room and five swimming pools, instead of funding this prize.
For one, (very) efficient Wind Power Station itself would give immediate cash prize to any inventor. From the market. If it doesn't happen, perhaps it can't be done in foreseable future.
And, perhaps for someone "putting your eggs in more than one basket" is more important goal than taking care of energy distribution. I understand that "worthy goals" are not universal, but you're free to set your own prize, or nag the wealthier of us to set one.
Robert
Leave religion out of this, this is stupidity.
I mean, I live in the country with >90% monoreligious majority which has no problem with evolution as well as non-literal interpretation of Bible.
Robert
Yeah, this apeal is exactly null to people outside the countries served by ITMS. For example Poland. And even if they wanted to sell here, I believe it would still be 0.99eur per song -- I can buy cheaper CDs here, legally.
No, thanks, I'll keep my 4G MuVo and continue to buy at some other store in the format of my choice.
Robert
I don't know about Zen Micro, but my Creative MuVo 4GB works as a plain external usb storage with every modern operating system. Without any third party software.
See, unlike you I did some product research before buying this device. All the Creative HDD mp3 players before MuVo line were the crap with proprietary protocols for transferring songs. Even the newest Zen Touch still uses that crappy protocol, again revised, so it doesn't work with current GNomad.
And don't ever believe Creative reps promising reviewers "usb storage firmware upgrade" in three months. They're making this promise for over two years now, with every new player.
If I needed 20+ GB player I'd definitelly go for iRiver. As it stands now I'm more than happy with my 4G MuVo -- it just works, quality of audio output as well as battery life are great. And the battery can be replaced in about 3 seconds, unlike "some other mp3 player".
Robert
You can send whatever you want, in some countries it isn't illegal to host torrents, since they don't contain any copyrighted information. Just the pointers to places where you can find people hosting the files themselves.
Robert
Exactly ;)
;)
The aquiantance of mine owns apartment building in the center of Cracow/Poland which was built in 16th century, and it's no big deal.
Go, find such buildings in USA
Robert
Scratch it, 10g wouldn't kill trained ppl in acceleration suits, but the actual acceleration needed for launching from Earth to space in 2km mass driver is 10000g (100km/s^2).
Robert
If you bothered to follow the link you would found out that the cost of launching nuclear waste using electromagnetic mass drive could cost 10% of nuclear powerplant's output.
Sure, such mass driver doesn't work for launching people -- 10g would kill them in an instant. But launching resources is a good thing in itself.
Robert
Did you bother to follow the link? It was about a mass driver. Apparently you can build a 2km long mass driver that will accelerate anything inside with 10g so at the exit it will reach escape velocity.
And all this for 10% of total output of nuclear power plant to launch all its waste into space. Wether you send it to Sun, Moon or high orbit (or even solar orbit) is your choice.
Robert
Did you actually follow the link? I was talking about "mass driver" -- electromagnetic gun that speeds mass with 10g acceleration. With 2km mass driver you get escape velocity at the exit point.
Add to this some small reaction rockets and simple navigation computer. There's nothing to go wrong, since by the time the mass exits launch tunnel it is already out of "gravitational well".
Just point it towards the sun and you're set, it will fall onto it. Or alternativelly you can send it to Moon. Leaving it in space (even on high orbit) wouldn't be the best idea.
And the cost? By some estimation nuclear power plant will use ~10% of its output for launching its waste. Just follow the fucking link.
Robert
(d) In whose backyard does the nuclear waste go?
Nobody's.
Just launch it to the Sun. It's cheaper and safer than you think, and there's already lots of radioactivity, so our tiny amounts of nuclear waste won't make a difference.
Robert
I think this is more or less irrelevant, because... ...for the premium on these "large" scsi drives you can buy several times more space in ATA/SATA drives, connect them to some SMART controller and join them in stripping mode, achieving higher peak as well as continuous bandwidth.
What's really interesting, is that there are controllers visible by computer as SCSI drive which allow you to connect lots of cheap ATA/SATA drives and configure them however you like.
These overpriced, overhyped scsi drives IMO are for the same people that buy "gold-coated-plug optical tos-link cables" and "distilled water for cleaning CDs" for couple of bucks per ounce.
Robert
PS Yes, I really saw those gold-coated optical cables.
And Russians built better and cheaper rockets...
If you want to mod me down, look for Russian rocket engines bought lately for installation in American crafts (saw something about it on Discovery the other day).
Robert
It isn't that great an equation.
I distinctly remember reading somewhere, that there is nothing special about the equation
e^{i\pi} = -1 % (TeX notation)
It's just the consequence of the way that exponentiation on complex numbers is defined.
Sorry, can't find the link to it now.
Robert
Probably because America was playing with Apple then.
No, really. IIRC when ZX80/ZX81/ZX Spectrum were storming Europe, Apple and Apple II were doing fine in the US. So the Apple machines were never heard of here, while Sinclair machines were almost unknown in the US.
Robert
I don't know why modern political-reformists are so fixated on IRV. Of all the technical criteria of "fair voting" IRV fulfills NONE. In this respect it's worse even than "majority vote".
I mean, why would you want to go with a voting scheme, that makes possible situation that adding votes for a candidate causes him to lose, and converselly, removing votes for a candidate causes him to win?
Why not go directly with "aproval" or even "condorcet"?
Robert
PS Go, read the above link to find out what's exactly wrong with IRV.
While we're at it, they could throw in decent tvout to this card. Just a simple framebuffer with ability to sync to vert refresh, double/triple buffering. And independent from main display. It doesn't even has to have backend scaller, processors are fast enough to scale DivX to 720x576 in real time.
Hell, I would pay up to $50 for a simple PCI card with low resolution (enough for PAL/NTSC), tvout, vert sync, double/triple buffering and good support in mplayer (so it means completelly open specs).
Robert
PS No, there are no cards on the market in the price range of up to $200 that match all those specs.
PPS No, dxr3 doesn't count, one has to compress video to mpeg1/mpeg2 in order to play it on this card, which results in lower quality. And because of this it eats too much cpu, as well as there are constant problems with a/v sync.
Real audiophiles (no that does not mean they have sex with their hi-fi) use analog because they claim that CD's loose to much of the music. Just because we don't "hear" it doesn't mean we don't "hear" it. Apparently.
Are those the same people who also claim that CDR-Audio sounds better than Audio recorded on CDR-Data?
Robert