I read someplace that a large oak tree provides about 10,000BTU of evaporative cooling underneath it. If everyone in the world planted 1 tree, we would have about 60,000,000,000,000BTU of cooling in about 25 years.
- Abandon capitalism (though not freedom), it drives consumerism.
- Raise taxes, if taxes are high enough, then no one will have enough money to be consumers... wait, this is kind of like getting rid of capitalism.
- Teach people the value of community, and of living for something greater than trying to attain personal nirvana. We would probably have to ban advertising since the goal of advertising is to make us feel inadequate about our current status, and offers a solutions for $19.99.
Dang, I think I just became a communist, but that went out with the 90's, so that probably won't work either.
Changing the momentum which consumerism has developed this century is not going to be an easy task. It may be faster to just embrace it, in order to help accelerate it over the cliff it may or may not be headed towards a little sooner. It may be unfortunate that billions may go with it along with our economy, ecology, environment and all, but if the evolutionists are correct, a billion years from now, it will all just be an extra thick grey layer in some rock, and some scientist from the current dominant species will be trying to figure out what amazing catastrophy could have caused such a mass extinction as they simulate possible scenarious on their newly developed toxic byproduct producing technology.
Can technology solve the problems it is creating? It seems to be creating bigger problems than it is solving.
Maybe the Unibomber was right, and we should all go back and live in small farming communities.
Personally I think the problem is that the current dominating western culture promotes greed as a good thing. It must be good, it drives our economy, creates jobs, drives people to produce, etc... Unfortunately, it lacks any balance of heart.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm going to hurry up and build my 70' composite catamaran and sail to Kenya so I can see the glaciers of Kilamanjaro before they are totally gone. Then I'll set out to answer the latest question that's been really nagging at me: "If we cut down all the trees on the earth, would the earth spin faster?" I think I'll start in the Amazon, there's a lot of big trees there.
It first flew in the early 80's, the designs are from the late 60's early 70's.
The problem with a new design is that new problems come with it. New unknowns. The shuttle is a very well known, and for space travel, reliable platform. New doesn't necessarily mean safe. Improvements could be made, but as with software, the newest software isn't the most reliable.
The real issue is that they are taking large amounts of fuel, and converting it into large amounts of kinetic energy in a very short time, then after floating around for a bit, try to dissipate that energy in a very short time. It's about like a car designed to hit a wall at 200 miles per hour without injuring the passengers. It's probably feasable, but probably not so safe.
Space flight will become safe when we can either use more time to convert the fuel to kinetic energy, and also put the breaks on a bit slower or have much greater control of the energy sources and dissipation we use. I think a space elevator is the best bet currently, but that has a lot of unknowns at this point, and is minimally a few decades away from reality.
It's true, be discrete. Though, most likely the worst case is probably they take the GPS away, and haul you down to the police station for a while, until you cough up a bit of cash. Being from North America or Europe makes you an instant target for trying to get a quick bribe. If you are out in the middle of nowhere, no one's going to care that you have a GPS, most people won't have a clue what it is. Just be careful about having anything electronic visible around the authorities. Get a small GPS unit, and keep it in your pocket.
I did a bunch of mapping in central Mali about 10 years ago. I was helping a guy map wells in abandoned towns (they were abandoned because of the Twarag war which had ended a few years earlier. He was doing a survey to see which villages had a useful water supply, and which needed work) Anyhow. It's not likely you would get in overly serious trouble for having a GPS. Bring two in case one gets confiscated or broke. A low cost Garmin GPS works just fine (they are rugged enough), I was getting acuracy to + or - 19meters when I was there. It should be much more accurate now.
With a paper map bought at your local book store, a ruler and some simple math, you can put together a quick map. Some of the other mapping software mentioned in other posts works better for custom projections, but can be much more involved and time consuming. Double AA batteries are plentiful in Africa, so powering a GPS is no problem, though when you buy them, try them while you are there and make sure they work. If you are spending serious time on a laptop out in the bush, the best bet is to have an inverter to plug into a car, or a solar panel if you want to be fancy, and have extra money to spend.
The sand in the dryer areas of West Africa can be hard on equipment. I was in a sandstorm once, my video camera was never quite the same after that. The humidity in other parts of West Africa creates it's own problems, but nothing that can't be worked around. I had and still have a Garmin GPS 45, which survived traveling a large part of the globe unscathed, and continues to work 10 years after I bought it.
Keep it as simple as possible, keep freqent backups of data, and don't take anything with you that you aren't willing to part with.
Because of the Apple news about switching to Intel chips, I've read a ton of articles stating that this is going to be the end of Linux, or Apple is now trying to compete with Dell or Microsoft directly. It is all a bunch of crap.
Apple has stated that Mac OS X(x86) will only run on Apple Hardware. So, really the only thing this changes is that Apple will be able to put out better performing Macs in the future. There are competitive issues when comparing processor speed and architechure that will not be in the equation as much as before, but it doesn't change the business model for Apple, it doesn't change how people will use their hardware. It doesn't change who will buy their hardware. The competitive landscape remains unchanged. They are still built like an appliance, you plug it in and it just works. You may be able to run Windows on them, but why would you buy one for this purpose? It would be cheaper to buy a dell or something like that. If anything, it goes counter culture to the Mac zealots, but they will get over it once the realize, it still looks like a Mac, Sounds like a Mac, works like a Mac; it is still a Mac in the end.
All this speculation is generated by a bunch of journalist, trying to make a buck off the sensationalism of it all. In the end a G4/5 and a x86 chip are designed for the same purpose, and can be used to accomplish the same thing.
From what I understand, we would have many MP3/Phone combinations now if it weren't for the Cell companies like Verizon, and the rest dragging there feet. The phone companies want a share of the $0.99 per song. So, they won't sell phones that have MP3 capabilities without crippling them so you can only put songs on them by transfering them over their network (and charging you for the "feature"). I was looking at a cameraphone sold by verizon. It had a flash card in it. But you couldn't images couldn't be transfered through the flash card to your computer. You had to pay a $3.00/per month fee to transfer the photos via their network to your email address. The salesman said it was because transfering pictures from via the flash card was a security problem, and would make it possible to get viruses on your phone. Yeah right. They want cell phones to work just like the POTS phones, where they charge for every little thing. Honestly, I'm surprised that Verizon doesn't charge for "backlight minutes".
Anyhow, If this way of doing business continues with the phone companies, who in the world would ever use a phone as an MP3 player if you had to pay a monthly fee to use your MP3 player as apposed to freely transfering songs back and forth. I would just carry a second device.
There were rumors that Apple and Motorola had some sort of combo device coming, but the cell companies wouldn't sell it for their network because they didn't get a cut of the song profits.
So really, what Bill says really carries no weight, it is all about the pricing models the telecoms choose to use. Maybe Microsoft will subsudize the windows phone, but but I would still avoid it, just for the sake of keeping my gear free of viruses and BSODs.
Nothing wrong with this...
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Apple hasn't done anything wrong. This is exactly the way OSS is set up to work. If someone made some software and you want to change it, you are free to do so. As long as you publish the changes. There is no rule you have to do it in a way that makes the original author happy, you aren't required to follow their vision. You are free from all that. If the original author likes what you've done, they should be able to take your work and merge it back in.
It's nice when everyone cooperates with each other, and keeps everything syncronized, but all that is frosting on the cake.
So the aliens are smart enough to pick this particular signal from all the "I Love Lucy", "Dukes of Hazzard" and "CSI" signals. They figure out how to port it to their own hardware, and this guy thinks they won't be able to crack the encryption? Next thing we know, the EIITA (Earth Industry Intergalactic Trade Association) will be notifying them they are taking legal action because "slkdfj&*#$" son of "sdlfs8dr423" is using carbon nano tubes on his model intergalactic star destroyer.
Good point. Though technology and science pretty much inseparable. I think it would be safe to say that most scientists hope that their science have applications and probably do a bit of work on that application as well. Ultimately, the result both good and bad are due to science.
it says in the title "News for nerds." Nerds dig science.
I realize this, I also realize that science is a powerful and effective paradigm and world view. My point is that it is somewhat ironic that the ability to evaluate something with objectivity and lack of bias, being one of the advantages of the scientific method, is not being actively utilized in this forum. How many here have actually taken time to understand the other side or even tried? Both Christians taking the time to understand the Scientific point of view. And those of the scientific point of view trying to understand what might be appealing about God and creation.
As for the great wonderfulness of science, it is a coin with two sides. On one side we can travel the world in days be easily cured of previously deadly diseases, and drink Coca-cola cheap. On the other hand, we have managed to kill more people in this century through war than in all the other wars in human history. Both sides of the coin are made possible with science.
I think the Flight Gear Fight Simulator has been using this technique for 5 years or so to model the terrain of the earth.
This may not be exactly right, but The terrain starts as a regular grid of datapoints take from DEM data which is interpolated into an irregular grid of points within certain error constraints, which preserves the contour of the scenery but drops the number of triangles needed. This has the effect of dropping out datapoints in the middle that don't contribute anything:
A quote from a paper on the Flight Gear Web Sight:
An irregular grid can often represent the same level detail as a regular grid with 4-6x fewer polygons. This is very desirable in a flight sim where both detail and rendering speed is very important.
Add a speaker to the mouse then it could make any sound you wanted when the button is pressed. Sure someone will eventually patent the "double boing", but there are more sounds available than anyone would reasonably be able to patent. What if the sound is copyrighted, could it be patented then? I suppose the RIAA would get involved then, and sue for having a mouse "beat it, beat it" Though with Michael Jackson in jail, maybe it wouldn't have enough value to pursue.
I quit watching TV years ago, and I feel like I haven't missed a thing. I get news and that sort of thing of the Internet. Every once in a while when I do spend a half hour watching TV at a friends house. I usually leave feeling like the time was wasted. There are so many other things to do that are more worthwhile than watching TV. Maybe if everyone quits watching, the MPAA would rethink their position. I kind of doubt it will happen though. Media and marketing has made controlling peoples behaviors almost into a science such that most people think TV is great entertainment.
Rather than strip support from GCC, there are many more effective tools which could have more persuasive effects. How about this:
1. Persuade the BIND developers to add a patch such that when someone looks up *.sco.com, it either returns "does not exist" or a random IP address.
2. Have SPAM Assasin bounce all +5 SPAM to sco.com.
3. Have SMTP not deliver email to sco.com Then claim this was done to helping sco out by preventing the SPAM from reaching them.
4. Squid redirects sco.com to random web page.
As other Fortune 500 companies support them through buying licenses, maybe they could be added to the list.
Things like this would send them back to the preInternet age. And also make the point of what the open source community has given them for free. What happens when it is taken away?
The point is that the Open Source community controls quite a bit of its own IP in a decentralized way which happens to be critical infrastructure of the Internet. Maybe if the community treats them as they are being treated, they would be willing to come to an agreement.
And like the genome, which has been digitized, we still have a almost no understanding of it. Kind of like scanning a bunch of puzzle pieces. So now we can store it on a CDROM, that in itself doesn't help us put all the pieces together.
Go see the BWCA (Boundary Water Canoe Area) MN, US and/or Quetico Park Canada. I've been all over North/South America, and quite a bit of Africa. This is one of my favorite places. You have to see it between June and August, otherwise it's too cold.
In 1988 I saw a video which was a summary of the congressional report describing the events that lead to the demise of the Challenger.
An interresting conclusion of the findings was that the Challenger did not actually explode, but was torn apart by aerodynamic forces. The large ball of fire was the uncombusted contents of the large external tank, which were illuminated as the SRBs flew through them.
The other thing I found interresting was that they believed that at least two astronaughts were still alive at least for a short time after the incident, because a couple of emergency oxygen valves had been turned on. Something which would only have been done while going through emergency procedures. And possibly could have been alive until the crew cabin hit the water.
It's their property, their money which made it. If they don't want you watching a movie or TV program, don't watch it. Go to the library and get the book. Read it when/where you want, it's more portable than a TV. I don't remember ever watching a TV program which was life changing. There are other things to do. Take a walk. Rather than getting a home entertainment system, buy a couple of Siberian Huskies and a sled. Try something new.
If you really don't like what they're doing, start making your own TV shows. Distribute them on the internet. When they get a following sell advertising with it, or distribute it in the way you feel is the most benefitial to mankind. Use Ogg Vorbis. Rather than complain about what they are doing come up with a plan for the right way to do it and do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I read someplace that a large oak tree provides about 10,000BTU of evaporative cooling underneath it. If everyone in the world planted 1 tree, we would have about 60,000,000,000,000BTU of cooling in about 25 years.
A few ideas...
- Abandon capitalism (though not freedom), it drives consumerism.
- Raise taxes, if taxes are high enough, then no one will have enough money to be consumers... wait, this is kind of like getting rid of capitalism.
- Teach people the value of community, and of living for something greater than trying to attain personal nirvana. We would probably have to ban advertising since the goal of advertising is to make us feel inadequate about our current status, and offers a solutions for $19.99.
Dang, I think I just became a communist, but that went out with the 90's, so that probably won't work either.
Changing the momentum which consumerism has developed this century is not going to be an easy task. It may be faster to just embrace it, in order to help accelerate it over the cliff it may or may not be headed towards a little sooner. It may be unfortunate that billions may go with it along with our economy, ecology, environment and all, but if the evolutionists are correct, a billion years from now, it will all just be an extra thick grey layer in some rock, and some scientist from the current dominant species will be trying to figure out what amazing catastrophy could have caused such a mass extinction as they simulate possible scenarious on their newly developed toxic byproduct producing technology.
Can technology solve the problems it is creating? It seems to be creating bigger problems than it is solving.
Maybe the Unibomber was right, and we should all go back and live in small farming communities.
Personally I think the problem is that the current dominating western culture promotes greed as a good thing. It must be good, it drives our economy, creates jobs, drives people to produce, etc... Unfortunately, it lacks any balance of heart.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm going to hurry up and build my 70' composite catamaran and sail to Kenya so I can see the glaciers of Kilamanjaro before they are totally gone. Then I'll set out to answer the latest question that's been really nagging at me: "If we cut down all the trees on the earth, would the earth spin faster?" I think I'll start in the Amazon, there's a lot of big trees there.
It first flew in the early 80's, the designs are from the late 60's early 70's.
The problem with a new design is that new problems come with it. New unknowns. The shuttle is a very well known, and for space travel, reliable platform. New doesn't necessarily mean safe. Improvements could be made, but as with software, the newest software isn't the most reliable.
The real issue is that they are taking large amounts of fuel, and converting it into large amounts of kinetic energy in a very short time, then after floating around for a bit, try to dissipate that energy in a very short time. It's about like a car designed to hit a wall at 200 miles per hour without injuring the passengers. It's probably feasable, but probably not so safe.
Space flight will become safe when we can either use more time to convert the fuel to kinetic energy, and also put the breaks on a bit slower or have much greater control of the energy sources and dissipation we use. I think a space elevator is the best bet currently, but that has a lot of unknowns at this point, and is minimally a few decades away from reality.
It's true, be discrete. Though, most likely the worst case is probably they take the GPS away, and haul you down to the police station for a while, until you cough up a bit of cash. Being from North America or Europe makes you an instant target for trying to get a quick bribe. If you are out in the middle of nowhere, no one's going to care that you have a GPS, most people won't have a clue what it is. Just be careful about having anything electronic visible around the authorities. Get a small GPS unit, and keep it in your pocket.
I did a bunch of mapping in central Mali about 10 years ago. I was helping a guy map wells in abandoned towns (they were abandoned because of the Twarag war which had ended a few years earlier. He was doing a survey to see which villages had a useful water supply, and which needed work) Anyhow. It's not likely you would get in overly serious trouble for having a GPS. Bring two in case one gets confiscated or broke. A low cost Garmin GPS works just fine (they are rugged enough), I was getting acuracy to + or - 19meters when I was there. It should be much more accurate now.
With a paper map bought at your local book store, a ruler and some simple math, you can put together a quick map. Some of the other mapping software mentioned in other posts works better for custom projections, but can be much more involved and time consuming. Double AA batteries are plentiful in Africa, so powering a GPS is no problem, though when you buy them, try them while you are there and make sure they work. If you are spending serious time on a laptop out in the bush, the best bet is to have an inverter to plug into a car, or a solar panel if you want to be fancy, and have extra money to spend.
The sand in the dryer areas of West Africa can be hard on equipment. I was in a sandstorm once, my video camera was never quite the same after that. The humidity in other parts of West Africa creates it's own problems, but nothing that can't be worked around. I had and still have a Garmin GPS 45, which survived traveling a large part of the globe unscathed, and continues to work 10 years after I bought it.
Keep it as simple as possible, keep freqent backups of data, and don't take anything with you that you aren't willing to part with.
Have fun
Symphony looks nice.
Because of the Apple news about switching to Intel chips, I've read a ton of articles stating that this is going to be the end of Linux, or Apple is now trying to compete with Dell or Microsoft directly. It is all a bunch of crap.
Apple has stated that Mac OS X(x86) will only run on Apple Hardware. So, really the only thing this changes is that Apple will be able to put out better performing Macs in the future. There are competitive issues when comparing processor speed and architechure that will not be in the equation as much as before, but it doesn't change the business model for Apple, it doesn't change how people will use their hardware. It doesn't change who will buy their hardware. The competitive landscape remains unchanged. They are still built like an appliance, you plug it in and it just works. You may be able to run Windows on them, but why would you buy one for this purpose? It would be cheaper to buy a dell or something like that. If anything, it goes counter culture to the Mac zealots, but they will get over it once the realize, it still looks like a Mac, Sounds like a Mac, works like a Mac; it is still a Mac in the end.
All this speculation is generated by a bunch of journalist, trying to make a buck off the sensationalism of it all. In the end a G4/5 and a x86 chip are designed for the same purpose, and can be used to accomplish the same thing.
my 2 cents.
From what I understand, we would have many MP3/Phone combinations now if it weren't for the Cell companies like Verizon, and the rest dragging there feet. The phone companies want a share of the $0.99 per song. So, they won't sell phones that have MP3 capabilities without crippling them so you can only put songs on them by transfering them over their network (and charging you for the "feature"). I was looking at a cameraphone sold by verizon. It had a flash card in it. But you couldn't images couldn't be transfered through the flash card to your computer. You had to pay a $3.00/per month fee to transfer the photos via their network to your email address. The salesman said it was because transfering pictures from via the flash card was a security problem, and would make it possible to get viruses on your phone. Yeah right. They want cell phones to work just like the POTS phones, where they charge for every little thing. Honestly, I'm surprised that Verizon doesn't charge for "backlight minutes".
Anyhow, If this way of doing business continues with the phone companies, who in the world would ever use a phone as an MP3 player if you had to pay a monthly fee to use your MP3 player as apposed to freely transfering songs back and forth. I would just carry a second device.
There were rumors that Apple and Motorola had some sort of combo device coming, but the cell companies wouldn't sell it for their network because they didn't get a cut of the song profits.
So really, what Bill says really carries no weight, it is all about the pricing models the telecoms choose to use. Maybe Microsoft will subsudize the windows phone, but but I would still avoid it, just for the sake of keeping my gear free of viruses and BSODs.
Apple hasn't done anything wrong. This is exactly the way OSS is set up to work. If someone made some software and you want to change it, you are free to do so. As long as you publish the changes. There is no rule you have to do it in a way that makes the original author happy, you aren't required to follow their vision. You are free from all that. If the original author likes what you've done, they should be able to take your work and merge it back in.
It's nice when everyone cooperates with each other, and keeps everything syncronized, but all that is frosting on the cake.
So the aliens are smart enough to pick this particular signal from all the "I Love Lucy", "Dukes of Hazzard" and "CSI" signals. They figure out how to port it to their own hardware, and this guy thinks they won't be able to crack the encryption? Next thing we know, the EIITA (Earth Industry Intergalactic Trade Association) will be notifying them they are taking legal action because "slkdfj&*#$" son of "sdlfs8dr423" is using carbon nano tubes on his model intergalactic star destroyer.
We know that's in a different galaxy... far far away...
Good point. Though technology and science pretty much inseparable. I think it would be safe to say that most scientists hope that their science have applications and probably do a bit of work on that application as well. Ultimately, the result both good and bad are due to science.
it says in the title "News for nerds." Nerds dig science.
I realize this, I also realize that science is a powerful and effective paradigm and world view. My point is that it is somewhat ironic that the ability to evaluate something with objectivity and lack of bias, being one of the advantages of the scientific method, is not being actively utilized in this forum. How many here have actually taken time to understand the other side or even tried? Both Christians taking the time to understand the Scientific point of view. And those of the scientific point of view trying to understand what might be appealing about God and creation.
As for the great wonderfulness of science, it is a coin with two sides. On one side we can travel the world in days be easily cured of previously deadly diseases, and drink Coca-cola cheap. On the other hand, we have managed to kill more people in this century through war than in all the other wars in human history. Both sides of the coin are made possible with science.
It never ceases to amaze me how dogmatic slashdotters are about their belief in science. You put the right wing christians to shame!
This may not be exactly right, but The terrain starts as a regular grid of datapoints take from DEM data which is interpolated into an irregular grid of points within certain error constraints, which preserves the contour of the scenery but drops the number of triangles needed. This has the effect of dropping out datapoints in the middle that don't contribute anything:
A quote from a paper on the Flight Gear Web Sight:
So double clicking is patented.
Add a speaker to the mouse then it could make any sound you wanted when the button is pressed. Sure someone will eventually patent the "double boing", but there are more sounds available than anyone would reasonably be able to patent. What if the sound is copyrighted, could it be patented then? I suppose the RIAA would get involved then, and sue for having a mouse "beat it, beat it" Though with Michael Jackson in jail, maybe it wouldn't have enough value to pursue.
I quit watching TV years ago, and I feel like I haven't missed a thing. I get news and that sort of thing of the Internet. Every once in a while when I do spend a half hour watching TV at a friends house. I usually leave feeling like the time was wasted. There are so many other things to do that are more worthwhile than watching TV. Maybe if everyone quits watching, the MPAA would rethink their position. I kind of doubt it will happen though. Media and marketing has made controlling peoples behaviors almost into a science such that most people think TV is great entertainment.
So why not subpoena everyone, to make things as slow and difficult as possible? I'm surprised Elvis and Bigfoot aren't on the list.
Not to mention Chewbacca.
Rather than strip support from GCC, there are many more effective tools which could have more persuasive effects. How about this:
1. Persuade the BIND developers to add a patch such that when someone looks up *.sco.com, it either returns "does not exist" or a random IP address.
2. Have SPAM Assasin bounce all +5 SPAM to sco.com.
3. Have SMTP not deliver email to sco.com Then claim this was done to helping sco out by preventing the SPAM from reaching them.
4. Squid redirects sco.com to random web page.
As other Fortune 500 companies support them through buying licenses, maybe they could be added to the list.
Things like this would send them back to the preInternet age. And also make the point of what the open source community has given them for free. What happens when it is taken away?
The point is that the Open Source community controls quite a bit of its own IP in a decentralized way which happens to be critical infrastructure of the Internet. Maybe if the community treats them as they are being treated, they would be willing to come to an agreement.
And like the genome, which has been digitized, we still have a almost no understanding of it. Kind of like scanning a bunch of puzzle pieces. So now we can store it on a CDROM, that in itself doesn't help us put all the pieces together.
Go see the BWCA (Boundary Water Canoe Area) MN, US and/or Quetico Park Canada. I've been all over North/South America, and quite a bit of Africa. This is one of my favorite places. You have to see it between June and August, otherwise it's too cold.
In 1988 I saw a video which was a summary of the congressional report describing the events that lead to the demise of the Challenger.
An interresting conclusion of the findings was that the Challenger did not actually explode, but was torn apart by aerodynamic forces. The large ball of fire was the uncombusted contents of the large external tank, which were illuminated as the SRBs flew through them.
The other thing I found interresting was that they believed that at least two astronaughts were still alive at least for a short time after the incident, because a couple of emergency oxygen valves had been turned on. Something which would only have been done while going through emergency procedures. And possibly could have been alive until the crew cabin hit the water.
It's their property, their money which made it. If they don't want you watching a movie or TV program, don't watch it. Go to the library and get the book. Read it when/where you want, it's more portable than a TV. I don't remember ever watching a TV program which was life changing. There are other things to do. Take a walk. Rather than getting a home entertainment system, buy a couple of Siberian Huskies and a sled. Try something new.
If you really don't like what they're doing, start making your own TV shows. Distribute them on the internet. When they get a following sell advertising with it, or distribute it in the way you feel is the most benefitial to mankind. Use Ogg Vorbis. Rather than complain about what they are doing come up with a plan for the right way to do it and do it.