GM crops make a negligible difference to third world countries. The yields on GM crops are only marginally better than for regular crops, the difference is only significant for those huge agribusinesses who have tens of thousands of acres of the stuff.
It's war, corruption, disease and import tariffs which decimate the farming populations of third world countries. What they need is good stable government and fair trade with the developed world, not GM crops.
"radical conservation in energy transmission and use"
He says this like it's an insignificant thing. It's not. We literally throw away approximately 60% of the energy used to produce electricity as "waste heat". And this is at the power station itself (including nuclear)!
We then go on to use most of the 40% of the energy we have actually transmitted to produce more heat. It's not what could be classed as clever.
Changing this single inefficiency in our energy generation sector would do the job. It's not even particularly radical, the solution is a couple of hundred years old, it's just that until very recently it's been cheaper to just pump in more oil, gas or coal.
There are some fundamental design flaws with conventional mass transit which the car basically just about gets round. It's to do with the difference between an individual transport vehicle and a group transport vehicle.
All of the conventional mass transit systems are group transport vehicles. The car is an individual transport vehicle and this means there is simply no way that the car can be replaced by any of the existing conventional public transport systems.
More details on why here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/A3896409
Your statement that it's twice as fast and cheap to use conventional public transpor is only true in a *very* limited set of circumstances which are not valid (and *cannot* be valid) for the majority of the population.
A) You have to start or live near a station. B) Your destination must also be near a station. C) The train must have a very frequent schedule. D) The train must be an express or limited stop train.
If these circumstances are not true you then have to:
A) Walk or travel to the station, increasing journey time. B) Walk or travel to your final destination or indeed *make additional journeys*, all of which increase the journey time. C) Wait for the train to arrive on schedule, increasing the journey time. D) The vehicle *must* stop to let people on and off, this *drastically* reduces the average speed and increases drastically the journey time. You can only increase the average speed by denying people access to the vehicle (an express). In a group vehicle, speed and therefore journey time is a tradeoff between performance and access.
Because these circumstances are rarely true and indeed *cannot* be true for the majority of the population the performance of conventional public transport is always and must always be poor and the overwhelming majority of journeys are and will continue to be made by the car. The only thing which will change this is a mass transit system which is based on *individual vehicles* rather than group vehicles with their absolutely fundamental limitations.
A public mass transit system which is fully computer controlled and which avoids virtually all of the fundamental problems of existing mass transit systems.
There's a slightly differently engineered American system which does the same thing:
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
And an overview of the underlying concept beneath both technologies.
You'll need tanks, proton exchange membranes, electricity and some sort of feedstock. Plus compressors or cryo coolers, pumps etc.
Maybe someone will package it all up into a handy wee box. Or maybe with the increasingly rapid advancements in battery technologies it'll be easier to just plug a battery vehicle into the mains, or the solar panel you have on the roof of your house.
It is to scare young children into hiding behind the sofa. I suspect we're all just that little bit too old for it. Having said that my nearly OAP parents schedule their dinner times round it.
Think horror for 5-10 year olds.
Yes, now that they've fixed all the limitations
on
Daleks Return to Dr Who
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The Daleks can rule the world....
Hang on a minute... What if we made all the doors just that bit too narrow for them to get through!!!
If I'm going to be running network cable all over a building, I want something that'll last a bit longer than twisted pair copper. If the users want to drop back down to copper on their end then fine but I don't fancy having to re-cable every 5-10 years just to keep up.
It isn't simple to solve. Especially with closed source software like Novel, NT, W2K, Solaris etc.
It's getting there though, Kerberos is about the closest thing you'll get to a single sign on. All the unix systems support it, Windows supports it and most of the web servers support it as well. Very few business applications support it though. It's a pain in the arse to set up and requires support from the highest levels of management in an organisation. Usually there are higher priorities for the IT budget.
BTW, aren't some laptop touchpads ridiculously f*cking sensitive?
Single sign on and single login are very important if you are going to attempt to enforce strong passwords. People will simply write their multiple strong passwords down along with helpful hints on what they are for.
The corollary of this is that if you do have single sign on and/or single login then you should be enforcing strong passwords as a weak password provides access to everything.
BTW, at the moment, the closest thing to single sign on is Kerberos.
It certainly makes you healthier if you do it right and I agree it's worth walking and cycling around but do you have any idea how much exercise you have to do to over and above normal in order to burn off calories?
20 minutes of walking, 70 kcalories so a *single* mars bar with 230 kcalories will be burned off in about *an hour* of walking, around 3 miles.
A 6 minute mile, 100 kcalories so you need to run 2 and a half miles to burn off a single mars bar.
And we're not even talking about large numbers of calories here. 1 lb of fat is around 4000 calories, or *40 miles* of running.
Or, you can *STOP STUFFING YOUR FACE WITH CRAP*, do some occasional form of exercise you enjoy to keep your muscles marginally toned and heart beating and allow your natural metabolic processes to burn fat for you.
The irony is that someone's going to splat an news server onto another port, start dumping RSS feeds into a group heirarchy and charge muppets a fortune for it. I can just see it now.
Which would automatically gather all of the RSS feeds into a single location we could then just subscribe to that one server and pick all the feeds we like...
"I think the "Open Source" model can be extended to all aspects of society."
I think it can only be extended to aspects of society where changes, copying or duplication are trivial and essentially without cost. i.e. information.
Not the cost of being compliant. The cost of being compliant is the time and effort of getting a bunch of people to make sure it works before going to be tested. How much does a team of people cost on an ongoing basis?
1: Realtime encryption is for relatively small amounts of data. An average file server these days is quarter to half a terrabyte, never mind something big like a data warehouse which is most likely to contain customer information. You have to be able to perform a full of one of these within your backup window, say 6 hours. Your backup system needs to be capable of 140MB/s or more, not 50MB/s like a commodity encryption card, 140MB/s or more... It's hard enough getting the data off of disk that fast never mind attempting to push it through encryption.
2: Hardware encryption is expensive, (still not fast enough) and a royal pain in the arse to manage. But here's the killer. It has to be supported on all of the hardware and software platforms your sensitive data might get onto; Sun hardware, IBM Power hardware, IBM mainframe hardware, HP ix86 Linux hardware, ix86 Windows hardware etc etc.
"If your backup software/system doesn't support encryption, it was designed for home-users (despite what it claims)."
Oh, they support it, but as I mentioned, it's only for small amounts of data. The data warehouse installed to hold customer information by a medium sized supermarket chain here in the UK was 20TB in size, around 10 years ago.
Simply saying yeah they should just encrypt it tells me that you have little or no experience in a large heterogenous environment.
Slashdot Mirror
GM crops make a negligible difference to third world countries. The yields on GM crops are only marginally better than for regular crops, the difference is only significant for those huge agribusinesses who have tens of thousands of acres of the stuff.
It's war, corruption, disease and import tariffs which decimate the farming populations of third world countries. What they need is good stable government and fair trade with the developed world, not GM crops.
"radical conservation in energy transmission and use"
He says this like it's an insignificant thing. It's not. We literally throw away approximately 60% of the energy used to produce electricity as "waste heat". And this is at the power station itself (including nuclear)!
We then go on to use most of the 40% of the energy we have actually transmitted to produce more heat. It's not what could be classed as clever.
Changing this single inefficiency in our energy generation sector would do the job. It's not even particularly radical, the solution is a couple of hundred years old, it's just that until very recently it's been cheaper to just pump in more oil, gas or coal.
There are some fundamental design flaws with conventional mass transit which the car basically just about gets round. It's to do with the difference between an individual transport vehicle and a group transport vehicle.
All of the conventional mass transit systems are group transport vehicles. The car is an individual transport vehicle and this means there is simply no way that the car can be replaced by any of the existing conventional public transport systems.
More details on why here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ican/A3896409
Your statement that it's twice as fast and cheap to use conventional public transpor is only true in a *very* limited set of circumstances which are not valid (and *cannot* be valid) for the majority of the population.
A) You have to start or live near a station.
B) Your destination must also be near a station.
C) The train must have a very frequent schedule.
D) The train must be an express or limited stop train.
If these circumstances are not true you then have to:
A) Walk or travel to the station, increasing journey time.
B) Walk or travel to your final destination or indeed *make additional journeys*, all of which increase the journey time.
C) Wait for the train to arrive on schedule, increasing the journey time.
D) The vehicle *must* stop to let people on and off, this *drastically* reduces the average speed and increases drastically the journey time. You can only increase the average speed by denying people access to the vehicle (an express). In a group vehicle, speed and therefore journey time is a tradeoff between performance and access.
Because these circumstances are rarely true and indeed *cannot* be true for the majority of the population the performance of conventional public transport is always and must always be poor and the overwhelming majority of journeys are and will continue to be made by the car. The only thing which will change this is a mass transit system which is based on *individual vehicles* rather than group vehicles with their absolutely fundamental limitations.
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
A public mass transit system which is fully computer controlled and which avoids virtually all of the fundamental problems of existing mass transit systems.
There's a slightly differently engineered American system which does the same thing:
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
And an overview of the underlying concept beneath both technologies.
http://www.personalrapidtransit.com/
And here they are trying to have software patents enforced within Europe? What is it that Homer says? Doh!
You'll need tanks, proton exchange membranes, electricity and some sort of feedstock. Plus compressors or cryo coolers, pumps etc.
Maybe someone will package it all up into a handy wee box. Or maybe with the increasingly rapid advancements in battery technologies it'll be easier to just plug a battery vehicle into the mains, or the solar panel you have on the roof of your house.
"Does it scare anyone else how lazy our news media has gotten?"
Go back to sleep and don't worry about it. Your politicians have it covered.
So why aren't we applying the same kind of thinking to power generation? 40% efficiency, 60% "waste" heat, at a couple of hundred C.
It is to scare young children into hiding behind the sofa. I suspect we're all just that little bit too old for it. Having said that my nearly OAP parents schedule their dinner times round it.
Think horror for 5-10 year olds.
The Daleks can rule the world....
Hang on a minute... What if we made all the doors just that bit too narrow for them to get through!!!
Ha ha! Foiled again!
Isn't Apple Microsoft's market research department?
If I'm going to be running network cable all over a building, I want something that'll last a bit longer than twisted pair copper. If the users want to drop back down to copper on their end then fine but I don't fancy having to re-cable every 5-10 years just to keep up.
It isn't simple to solve. Especially with closed source software like Novel, NT, W2K, Solaris etc.
It's getting there though, Kerberos is about the closest thing you'll get to a single sign on. All the unix systems support it, Windows supports it and most of the web servers support it as well. Very few business applications support it though. It's a pain in the arse to set up and requires support from the highest levels of management in an organisation. Usually there are higher priorities for the IT budget.
BTW, aren't some laptop touchpads ridiculously f*cking sensitive?
Single sign on and single login are very important if you are going to attempt to enforce strong passwords. People will simply write their multiple strong passwords down along with helpful hints on what they are for.
The corollary of this is that if you do have single sign on and/or single login then you should be enforcing strong passwords as a weak password provides access to everything.
BTW, at the moment, the closest thing to single sign on is Kerberos.
It certainly makes you healthier if you do it right and I agree it's worth walking and cycling around but do you have any idea how much exercise you have to do to over and above normal in order to burn off calories?
20 minutes of walking, 70 kcalories so a *single* mars bar with 230 kcalories will be burned off in about *an hour* of walking, around 3 miles.
A 6 minute mile, 100 kcalories so you need to run 2 and a half miles to burn off a single mars bar.
And we're not even talking about large numbers of calories here. 1 lb of fat is around 4000 calories, or *40 miles* of running.
Or, you can *STOP STUFFING YOUR FACE WITH CRAP*, do some occasional form of exercise you enjoy to keep your muscles marginally toned and heart beating and allow your natural metabolic processes to burn fat for you.
The irony is that someone's going to splat an news server onto another port, start dumping RSS feeds into a group heirarchy and charge muppets a fortune for it. I can just see it now.
Which would automatically gather all of the RSS feeds into a single location we could then just subscribe to that one server and pick all the feeds we like...
Hang on, where have I heard of this before?
It's always worth having several of them lying about. When ID cards arrive in the UK, I plan to get a few of those too.
"I think the "Open Source" model can be extended to all aspects of society."
I think it can only be extended to aspects of society where changes, copying or duplication are trivial and essentially without cost. i.e. information.
Up to 10 years in prison for copyright infringment but only 2 years in prison for interfering with the democratic process.
That says it right there. Copyright is far more important than democracy.
Not the cost of being compliant. The cost of being compliant is the time and effort of getting a bunch of people to make sure it works before going to be tested. How much does a team of people cost on an ongoing basis?
1: Realtime encryption is for relatively small amounts of data. An average file server these days is quarter to half a terrabyte, never mind something big like a data warehouse which is most likely to contain customer information. You have to be able to perform a full of one of these within your backup window, say 6 hours. Your backup system needs to be capable of 140MB/s or more, not 50MB/s like a commodity encryption card, 140MB/s or more... It's hard enough getting the data off of disk that fast never mind attempting to push it through encryption.
2: Hardware encryption is expensive, (still not fast enough) and a royal pain in the arse to manage. But here's the killer. It has to be supported on all of the hardware and software platforms your sensitive data might get onto; Sun hardware, IBM Power hardware, IBM mainframe hardware, HP ix86 Linux hardware, ix86 Windows hardware etc etc.
"If your backup software/system doesn't support encryption, it was designed for home-users (despite what it claims)."
Oh, they support it, but as I mentioned, it's only for small amounts of data. The data warehouse installed to hold customer information by a medium sized supermarket chain here in the UK was 20TB in size, around 10 years ago.
Simply saying yeah they should just encrypt it tells me that you have little or no experience in a large heterogenous environment.
10Mb/s isn't remotely fast enough, by an order of magnitude. Try encrypting data at 100MB/s.
I'll come back and ask you how you're getting on in a month or two.
Sure, *indexing* goes faster. Everything else slows down when you have indexes being updated constantly.