That's the point - the water does get consumed. The simplest (cheapest) way to cool the water after running it through the data center is to use evaporation towers. As the name implies, you lose a substantial portion of the water to evaporation. Evaporation towers are very efficient in terms of power and material costs, but they go through a lot of water. Costs a lot more to construct a closed-loop system - you need some sort of giant radiator to cool the water. Evap tower you just build a hollow box, put some sprayers at the top, a collector at the bottom, and off you go.
Why 55? Why not 45? Or 35? The slower you set the speed limit the safer, right? So why not drop it down to 25?
There is no evidence that the 55 mph national speed limit (adopted in 1974 for the US, modified in 1987 to allow some 65 mph limits, and finally abandoned in 1995) had a positive effect on safety. As I recall, safety improved for a month or two after enactment, then returned to pre-limit levels.
There is no good reason to return to 55-mph limits. Speed limits should be set for each stretch of road independently, depending on the design of the road and local conditions. Arbitrarily establishing some low-ball blanket speed limit for every road only makes driving more dangerous, as people will only grow used to ignoring your posted limit and may get into trouble when there really is good reason to slow down.
On a well-designed divided highway, safety has very little to do with the absolute cruising speed of the vehicles. It depends largely on relative speed between vehicles, and the manner in which the vehicles are driven. I've long thought that far more attention should be given to the manner in which a vehicle is being driven (e.g., cutting in and out of traffic, changing lanes w/ out signalling, passing on the right, etc.) than to the absolute speed with which a vehicle is moving.
According to all of the statistics I have seen, injury and fatality rates continue to steadily decrease (latest US statistics). I understand the point the article is trying to make - and in specific cases it is probably true - but on the whole, making vehicles and roads safer does in fact translate into an increase in overall safety in spite of the idiotic driving habits of the general public.
I tend to think that having a more extensive driver training program where drivers are exposed to poor conditions and limits of vehicle handling are a much better idea than purposely making roads and vehicles worse. Maybe even have rigorous enough testing that the incompetent are actually weeded out and not allowed to possess driver's licenses.
To be fair, the actual text of the bill only requires the images to be blurred if the Operator already identifies the building. Specifically:
This bill would prohibit an operator, as defined, of a commercial Internet Web site or online service that makes a virtual globe browser available to members of the public from providing aerial or satellite photographs or imagery of places in this state that have been identified on the Internet Web site by the operator as a school, place of worship, or government or medical building or facility unless those photographs or images have been blurred.
What? They do? I was under the impression that foreign students pay the same unsubsidized tuition that out-of-state and private college students pay.
When it comes to graduate school in the US it is very rare for any student in the sciences or engineering, foreign or domestic, to pay their own tuition (at least at larger research universities). It is nearly always paid for out of their advisor's grants or through support from the university/department (usually in exchange for an appointment as a TA or something).
It is very different for professional schools (law school, medical school) and graduate students in the humanities (not usually a whole lot of support available) where students usually have to pay their way.
Those lumens ratings seem a bit off; iirc, a normal 60-watt incandescent bulb produces around 800 - 900 lumens; why do they claim 250 lumens on the "Starlight" model is comparable to this?
The only reason I can come up with is that LED bulbs seem to be a lot more directional than incandescents, so maybe the LED bulb produces the same brightness at the spot you point it at as an incandescent, but less "general" or "fill" light. Anyone know the reasoning behind these equivalence ratings? The disparity is one of the reasons I haven't plunked down $40 to try out an LED bulb...
On the other hand, MIT has excellent shooting and fencing teams. We'll just see whose athletic program is superior when the zombie horde overruns Cambridge!
According to the all-powerful Google:define (and the Oxford Dictionary), gantlet appears to be an alternative spelling of Gauntlet. They do, in fact, mean the same thing(s).
And we are SO SAD to see them go... honestly, we are HEARTBROKEN.
On a more serious (and less flamish) note, good for them. If they don't like the regulations in California, then I'm happy to see them putting their money where their mouth is and walking away.
That said, I would guess that even before they decided to walk away from state agencies they were selling little or nothing to them anyway, so really only an advertising scheme to attract the attention of gun nuts.
I looked into LED lights to replace the halogens in the can lighting in my living room. Couldn't justify the $40 price tag per bulb (each "bulb" actually contains between 7 and 30 led bulbs, iirc), but if the price dropped by 50%-60% I might consider them (never mind that the ones I saw don't work with dimmers, which is the reason I can't use CFL - even the CFL bulbs that are supposed to work with dimmers don't work with the electronic dimmers I have).
The energy costs due to less efficient processes to make these TVs will far outweigh any benefit.
How do you know the process to make a more efficient TV is less efficient than the process to make a less efficient TV?
The article didn't even mention any correlation between price and efficiency of TVs, so it may be that the more efficient ones are the cheaper ones (with cost presumably reflecting the efficiency of production). Sure, the electronics industry spokesperson said that the new regulation would automatically increase prices (never mind that 87% of the sets currently on the market already meet the tier 1 requirements, so presumably no change in price would occur for those models).
Just saying, you seem to be making a lot of assumptions. But you're right, switching incandesents to CFLs makes a whole lot more sense than trading in an older TV for a slightly more efficient model.
Sounds about right to me... the top 5% of wage earners earn about 60% of the wages in the country, so it seems fair that they should be paying 60% of the taxes. Wikipedia says the top 1% control 38% of the wealth while paying 34% of the taxes, so based on that it sounds like the top 1% need a small tax increase (based on IRS numbers, the top 1% looks to be those making more than $388,000 a year for 2006).
Yeah, I'm voting for Prop 1A - been following it since '97 or so (the proposition was originally supposed to appear back in 2000 or so, but they keep pushing it back). Expensive, and I doubt it will get the ridership they are projecting until a lot of additional work has gone into local transit in the destination cities, but I'm hopeful that it will kick-start our state and local governments into looking at options besides "build more roads".
Aargh. Shortly after getting a new Dell notebook a couple months ago I thought it would be really cool to be able to connect it to my HDTV. Thinking nobody would be idiotic enough to stick an analog VGA output on a nice, new laptop, especially considering the abundance of cheap DVI to VGA adapters, I went and bought a DVI to HDMI cable without actually checking the computer (my TV has several HDMI inputs, but no DVI unfortunately). Nope, turns out they did go and put a regular VGA output on it. Pretty fricking stupid. Put a damn DVI output on the thing, every piece of electronics I have seems to come with a DVI to VGA adapter (and who uses standard VGA anymore anyway?), I just tossed out three of them the other day and I just found two more in a drawer. Sometimes it seems like computer manufacturers are purposefully obtuse.
The array of different video connections on Macs does crack me up, though - it got to the point that in grad school every projector had four or five different mac-only adapters attached to it. The one person I knew who had a standard DVI output on his laptop was out of luck, though. Apple really knows how to drive accessory sales.
No kidding, their reasoning (or at least what is in the article) is nonsense. No LAN play because it isn't secure? Sounds like BS. Their intent to monetize battle.net is clearly the driving force behind this - they want to make sure you can't escape going through the battle.net gateway to play the game. Probably also being used as a form of copy protection - can't have people playing the game without checking into the central servers, now can we.
The whole Starcraft 2 as three different games smacks of EA's move towards annual game releases (Unreal Tournament, Madden, etc.). Instead of getting Starcraft 2, it sounds like we're getting Starcraft 2008, Starcraft 2009, and Starcraft 2010 . Granted, this is based on a brief article from announcements made at a convention, but it certainly sounds like Blizzard is going in a direction I don't really like.
I'll probably still buy Diablo 3, assuming I can play single player without checking in with Big Blizzard, but probably no Starcraft for me. TA was better anyway.
and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).
People keep complaining about the durability of optical media, yet in the 15 years or so I've been using CDs I've had maybe one or two that became unusable due to excessive scratches or other issues - at least for pressed CDs. Some early CD-Rs failed, but in every case it happened within a couple of months of the initial writing. Every CD-R I've written over the past 10-12 years that survived the first couple of months still works fine now, and that is with no special care - stored in jewel cases, or CD wallets, or some just tossed in a plastic bag and put in a drawer. What do people do to their optical media to screw it up so badly, and apparently so often?
Of course, the Prius is also cheaper (at listed base price) and gets better mileage (according to EPA estimates) than the Civic Hybrid. Must be the looks, though.
Seriously...the notion that there are bad words to use is mindboggling. Ok...so lets all get together and ban those nasty words, and then they will be replaced and other words will be used instead. I have heard the word "woman" used in a derogatory fashion more than I have heard the word "chick" used in the same way.
You make a good point, but at the same time completely miss the point of why some of us object to the use of the word "chick" in the summary. It isn't the word itself we object to (as you point out, it is ridiculous to ban specific words), it is the condescending tone that it gives the article summary that is objectionable. It is perhaps a fine distinction I am trying to make, but - it isn't referring to her as a "chick" specifically that some found offensive, it is the attitude itself that is conveyed by the submitter that is offensive. This is not to say that using the word "chick" is always inappropriate or offensive, only that it is inappropriate and offensive in this context - or at least myself and many others read it that way. Make sense?
Acetylsalicylic Acid was never patented, has been on the market since the 1800s, and is also plentiful and cheap.
From the wikipedia article on the history of aspirin: "Hoffmann was named on the US Patent as the inventor, which Sneader did not mention. Eichengrün, who left Bayer in 1908, had multiple opportunities to claim the priority and had never before 1949 done it; he neither claimed nor received any percentage of the profit from aspirin sales."
So, apparently aspirin was patented... at least in the US (assuming the article is accurate, of course). Might have only been the process for making it, though...
Completely off topic, but reminds me of something I noticed with some friends at a Japanese restaurant - one ordered a Sapporo, one ordered an Asahi, and both discovered they were actually drinking Canadian (I ordered some Sho Chiku Bai Nigori unfiltered sake, made in the traditional location - Berkeley).
Slashdot Mirror
That's the point - the water does get consumed. The simplest (cheapest) way to cool the water after running it through the data center is to use evaporation towers. As the name implies, you lose a substantial portion of the water to evaporation. Evaporation towers are very efficient in terms of power and material costs, but they go through a lot of water. Costs a lot more to construct a closed-loop system - you need some sort of giant radiator to cool the water. Evap tower you just build a hollow box, put some sprayers at the top, a collector at the bottom, and off you go.
SUVs and Subarus. People seem to think that if they have 4WD it means they can drive as fast as they want in bad conditions.
4WD helps you go - it does jack shit to help you stop.
Why 55? Why not 45? Or 35? The slower you set the speed limit the safer, right? So why not drop it down to 25?
There is no evidence that the 55 mph national speed limit (adopted in 1974 for the US, modified in 1987 to allow some 65 mph limits, and finally abandoned in 1995) had a positive effect on safety. As I recall, safety improved for a month or two after enactment, then returned to pre-limit levels.
There is no good reason to return to 55-mph limits. Speed limits should be set for each stretch of road independently, depending on the design of the road and local conditions. Arbitrarily establishing some low-ball blanket speed limit for every road only makes driving more dangerous, as people will only grow used to ignoring your posted limit and may get into trouble when there really is good reason to slow down.
On a well-designed divided highway, safety has very little to do with the absolute cruising speed of the vehicles. It depends largely on relative speed between vehicles, and the manner in which the vehicles are driven. I've long thought that far more attention should be given to the manner in which a vehicle is being driven (e.g., cutting in and out of traffic, changing lanes w/ out signalling, passing on the right, etc.) than to the absolute speed with which a vehicle is moving.
According to all of the statistics I have seen, injury and fatality rates continue to steadily decrease (latest US statistics). I understand the point the article is trying to make - and in specific cases it is probably true - but on the whole, making vehicles and roads safer does in fact translate into an increase in overall safety in spite of the idiotic driving habits of the general public.
I tend to think that having a more extensive driver training program where drivers are exposed to poor conditions and limits of vehicle handling are a much better idea than purposely making roads and vehicles worse. Maybe even have rigorous enough testing that the incompetent are actually weeded out and not allowed to possess driver's licenses.
To be fair, the actual text of the bill only requires the images to be blurred if the Operator already identifies the building. Specifically:
Still pretty dumb, though.
Our taxes pay for their education and research
What? They do? I was under the impression that foreign students pay the same unsubsidized tuition that out-of-state and private college students pay.
When it comes to graduate school in the US it is very rare for any student in the sciences or engineering, foreign or domestic, to pay their own tuition (at least at larger research universities). It is nearly always paid for out of their advisor's grants or through support from the university/department (usually in exchange for an appointment as a TA or something).
It is very different for professional schools (law school, medical school) and graduate students in the humanities (not usually a whole lot of support available) where students usually have to pay their way.
Those lumens ratings seem a bit off; iirc, a normal 60-watt incandescent bulb produces around 800 - 900 lumens; why do they claim 250 lumens on the "Starlight" model is comparable to this?
The only reason I can come up with is that LED bulbs seem to be a lot more directional than incandescents, so maybe the LED bulb produces the same brightness at the spot you point it at as an incandescent, but less "general" or "fill" light. Anyone know the reasoning behind these equivalence ratings? The disparity is one of the reasons I haven't plunked down $40 to try out an LED bulb...
On the other hand, MIT has excellent shooting and fencing teams. We'll just see whose athletic program is superior when the zombie horde overruns Cambridge!
What, is Harvard back in session?
According to the all-powerful Google:define (and the Oxford Dictionary), gantlet appears to be an alternative spelling of Gauntlet. They do, in fact, mean the same thing(s).
Thanks for playing, though.
And we are SO SAD to see them go... honestly, we are HEARTBROKEN.
On a more serious (and less flamish) note, good for them. If they don't like the regulations in California, then I'm happy to see them putting their money where their mouth is and walking away.
That said, I would guess that even before they decided to walk away from state agencies they were selling little or nothing to them anyway, so really only an advertising scheme to attract the attention of gun nuts.
I looked into LED lights to replace the halogens in the can lighting in my living room. Couldn't justify the $40 price tag per bulb (each "bulb" actually contains between 7 and 30 led bulbs, iirc), but if the price dropped by 50%-60% I might consider them (never mind that the ones I saw don't work with dimmers, which is the reason I can't use CFL - even the CFL bulbs that are supposed to work with dimmers don't work with the electronic dimmers I have).
The energy costs due to less efficient processes to make these TVs will far outweigh any benefit.
How do you know the process to make a more efficient TV is less efficient than the process to make a less efficient TV?
The article didn't even mention any correlation between price and efficiency of TVs, so it may be that the more efficient ones are the cheaper ones (with cost presumably reflecting the efficiency of production). Sure, the electronics industry spokesperson said that the new regulation would automatically increase prices (never mind that 87% of the sets currently on the market already meet the tier 1 requirements, so presumably no change in price would occur for those models).
Just saying, you seem to be making a lot of assumptions. But you're right, switching incandesents to CFLs makes a whole lot more sense than trading in an older TV for a slightly more efficient model.
If you follow the females, you will figure out where the next job boom will be.
I tried that, and all I got was this lousy jail cell.
Yay, time for some cheap Chinese knock-offs. Just watch out for the lead paint!
I wonder if there will soon be a whole section of Lego-compatible bricks in the toy store.
We zijn net opgekocht door een Nederlands bedrijf, dus moet ik borstel op mijn Nederlands.
Sounds about right to me... the top 5% of wage earners earn about 60% of the wages in the country, so it seems fair that they should be paying 60% of the taxes.
Wikipedia says the top 1% control 38% of the wealth while paying 34% of the taxes, so based on that it sounds like the top 1% need a small tax increase (based on IRS numbers, the top 1% looks to be those making more than $388,000 a year for 2006).
Great, it finally looks like we might start catching up to where the Japanese were 40 years ago, and now they have to go and make the jump to MagLev.
Yeah, I'm voting for Prop 1A - been following it since '97 or so (the proposition was originally supposed to appear back in 2000 or so, but they keep pushing it back). Expensive, and I doubt it will get the ridership they are projecting until a lot of additional work has gone into local transit in the destination cities, but I'm hopeful that it will kick-start our state and local governments into looking at options besides "build more roads".
standard VGA output
Aargh. Shortly after getting a new Dell notebook a couple months ago I thought it would be really cool to be able to connect it to my HDTV. Thinking nobody would be idiotic enough to stick an analog VGA output on a nice, new laptop, especially considering the abundance of cheap DVI to VGA adapters, I went and bought a DVI to HDMI cable without actually checking the computer (my TV has several HDMI inputs, but no DVI unfortunately).
Nope, turns out they did go and put a regular VGA output on it. Pretty fricking stupid. Put a damn DVI output on the thing, every piece of electronics I have seems to come with a DVI to VGA adapter (and who uses standard VGA anymore anyway?), I just tossed out three of them the other day and I just found two more in a drawer. Sometimes it seems like computer manufacturers are purposefully obtuse.
The array of different video connections on Macs does crack me up, though - it got to the point that in grad school every projector had four or five different mac-only adapters attached to it. The one person I knew who had a standard DVI output on his laptop was out of luck, though. Apple really knows how to drive accessory sales.
Furthermore, /.-ers should be overjoyed at a connector that is royalty/license-free.
And yet still costs more than those royalty/license-laden connectors... funny how that works.
No kidding, their reasoning (or at least what is in the article) is nonsense. No LAN play because it isn't secure? Sounds like BS. Their intent to monetize battle.net is clearly the driving force behind this - they want to make sure you can't escape going through the battle.net gateway to play the game. Probably also being used as a form of copy protection - can't have people playing the game without checking into the central servers, now can we.
The whole Starcraft 2 as three different games smacks of EA's move towards annual game releases (Unreal Tournament, Madden, etc.). Instead of getting Starcraft 2, it sounds like we're getting Starcraft 2008, Starcraft 2009, and Starcraft 2010 . Granted, this is based on a brief article from announcements made at a convention, but it certainly sounds like Blizzard is going in a direction I don't really like.
I'll probably still buy Diablo 3, assuming I can play single player without checking in with Big Blizzard, but probably no Starcraft for me. TA was better anyway.
and on a *much* more serious note, stop waxing lyrical about the storage capacity and start talking about the durability, its life span, its resistance to UV, its archival qualities. I would be much more interested in a 4GB disk that actually had a change of lasting >10 years in a normal environment (for me..? room temp, light sealed bag).
People keep complaining about the durability of optical media, yet in the 15 years or so I've been using CDs I've had maybe one or two that became unusable due to excessive scratches or other issues - at least for pressed CDs. Some early CD-Rs failed, but in every case it happened within a couple of months of the initial writing. Every CD-R I've written over the past 10-12 years that survived the first couple of months still works fine now, and that is with no special care - stored in jewel cases, or CD wallets, or some just tossed in a plastic bag and put in a drawer. What do people do to their optical media to screw it up so badly, and apparently so often?
Of course, the Prius is also cheaper (at listed base price) and gets better mileage (according to EPA estimates) than the Civic Hybrid. Must be the looks, though.
Nah... Blackwater has severely limited blue-water capabilities.
Seriously...the notion that there are bad words to use is mindboggling. Ok...so lets all get together and ban those nasty words, and then they will be replaced and other words will be used instead. I have heard the word "woman" used in a derogatory fashion more than I have heard the word "chick" used in the same way.
You make a good point, but at the same time completely miss the point of why some of us object to the use of the word "chick" in the summary. It isn't the word itself we object to (as you point out, it is ridiculous to ban specific words), it is the condescending tone that it gives the article summary that is objectionable.
It is perhaps a fine distinction I am trying to make, but - it isn't referring to her as a "chick" specifically that some found offensive, it is the attitude itself that is conveyed by the submitter that is offensive.
This is not to say that using the word "chick" is always inappropriate or offensive, only that it is inappropriate and offensive in this context - or at least myself and many others read it that way.
Make sense?
Acetylsalicylic Acid was never patented, has been on the market since the 1800s, and is also plentiful and cheap.
From the wikipedia article on the history of aspirin: "Hoffmann was named on the US Patent as the inventor, which Sneader did not mention. Eichengrün, who left Bayer in 1908, had multiple opportunities to claim the priority and had never before 1949 done it; he neither claimed nor received any percentage of the profit from aspirin sales."
So, apparently aspirin was patented... at least in the US (assuming the article is accurate, of course). Might have only been the process for making it, though...
Completely off topic, but reminds me of something I noticed with some friends at a Japanese restaurant - one ordered a Sapporo, one ordered an Asahi, and both discovered they were actually drinking Canadian (I ordered some Sho Chiku Bai Nigori unfiltered sake, made in the traditional location - Berkeley).