But I dare say that military perspective is not on saving fuel costs. After all, why save money by putting in a smaller fuel tank when you can keep it the same size and use the fuel savings to fly further/faster?
It equals out to the same thing.
If you need to drop a bomb on someone 100 miles away, right now it costs you $100 in fuel to do it. If you replace all your copper with nanotubes and make the plane lighter you can do it for $90 in fuel.
If you need to drop a bomb on someone 110 miles away, right now it'll cost you $110 and you'll have to refuel somewhere along the line. Make the plane lighter with nanotubes and now you can do it for $100 in fuel and no refueling along the way.
Even if they don't make the fuel tanks smaller, they'll still be saving money.
There is very little energy wasted in copper wiring, especially in airplanes! Moving to a material of higher conductivity will result in minuscule savings, and will be nowhere remotely close to covering the cost of the (extremely expensive) materials.
They aren't going to save fuel because it is more conductive. They aren't burning tons of fuel because of transmission losses from one end of the plane to the other.
They are going to save fuel because the nanotube wires will be lighter than the copper wires we use now. Less weight == less fuel.
A fifth of an inch thick? When I initially read "sheets of carbon nanotubes" I was envisioning something on the order of micrometers thick. I'm sure this is still progress, but the story isn't as exciting as I was initially expecting it to be.
I know basically nothing about armor and weapons and whatnot...
But, while 1/5" may not be as thin as you imagined, it may very well be thinner than what is currently required. How thick a sheet of kevlar is necessary to stop a bullet?
My main computer still runs 2000! I wouldn't put it in the same category as all the "old" OSes - there's not a huge difference between it and XP, and in terms of time, XP is only slightly younger than it anyway. But XP is what many people still use, and indeed, many geeks have avoided going onto Vista.
Yeah, Windows 2000 is still a pretty solid OS. We have fewer problems with those Win2k machines than we do most WinXP machines.
The only real problem is that hardware support is starting to get a little iffy. We've had a hard time tracking down drivers for some new hardware they've had to purchase. So far we've been able to get everything working eventually... But it probably won't be long until they're forced to upgrade whether they want to or not.
I do outsourced IT support... So I run into all sorts of odd operating systems.
We've got a client, a sheet metal company, that runs some kind of plasma cutter thing off DOS 3.something
They've got another location a few hours away that runs a newer version of the same plasma cutter off Windows 2000.
Speaking of Windows 2000 - we've got a couple clients that won't run anything else. Their entire operation, all their workstations, is built on Windows 2000.
We've got a client, a truck shop, that runs a couple impact printers off Windows 98 machines. And they've got an old Mac OS 7 machine they keep around to access their old accounting program once in a while.
We had someone come in recently who was looking to purchase a new computer. They finally decided their old one just wasn't cutting it anymore. They were upgrading from Windows 3.1
We've got a couple medical offices running some older (10+ years) IBM machines... AS/400's and the like... They're running some version of AIX... Couldn't tell you which one though, because we never have to touch them. Those things are rock solid.
Why would you want a cardboard case? Is it actually beneficial in any way?
Cases are generally made from steel and/or aluminum... I thought both of those could be recycled easily already? Is cardboard actually easier to recycle than steel and aluminum?
What about grounding? Yes, I know, there are ground paths on all the power plugs on your components... But the case has always provided another grounding path. Is this no longer necessary?
What about RFI? I thought one of the major reasons to use a metal case (as opposed to the very few all-plastic ones out there) was to cut down on RF interference.
My understanding was that the majority of nasty (hard-to-recycle and/or toxic) stuff in a PC came from the PCBs, capacitors, ICs, and like kinds of things. How does a cardboard case cut down on this at all?
How durable is this cardboard anyway? I know I accidentally kick my computer at least once a week... Will this cardboard box stand up to that kind of abuse?
And the reasoning - because PCs are disposable? If your PC is disposable you're doing something wrong. Yes, they get damaged from time to time... And technology marches on... But PCs aren't disposable. It isn't like you're supposed to buy a new one every season. It isn't like you buy a new computer to match your fabulous evening gown.
And if anything is disposable in a computer, it sure as hell isn't the case. I've been re-using this same case for about 10 years now... It's a monstrously huge HP case that originally contained a storebought computer. I've replaced every single component in that case several times over, and I'm still using the same case.
Yeah, a paper computer sounds all nifty and green... But I really have to wonder at the logic. It doesn't seem to me that a cardboard case would actually improve much of anything, except maybe the manufacturer's bottom line.
C'mon people. Wake up! There are tons of operating systems out there. Some are even better than Windows! *gasp*
Yes, there are tons of operating systems out there...
But "better" is completely subjective. If the app you need only runs on Windows, then Ubuntu (even with WINE/VirtualBox/whatever) is not "better". If your users are terrified of technology and change and have only ever used Windows, Ubuntu is not better. If the hardware you need to interface only supports Windows, Ubuntu is not better.
The fact of the matter is that there are an awful lot of people out there who will only use Windows - whether they actually need to or not. And if these new ARM chips can't run Windows, then they're going to have a much smaller market than Intel.
Don't you have to have some kind of license from the EPA to dispose of toxic waste? Did the producers of the waste not verify the license? There are not that many places to dispose of toxic waste. I am sure it was more than just the guys in the mafia who were in on this. I think the producers of the waste should be responsible for the clean up.
Well... First of all I don't think the EPA has jurisdiction over Italy.
Second, they're the Mafia, I don't think they worry all that much about legality.
Third, I kind of thought that the whole reason this was a story was because it was illegal.
They'll be allowed to run and play, but if they do it during school, they'll wear a heart monitor. Is this a bad thing?
Well, I don't know... But it certainly might be a bad thing.
The first thought I had, upon reading the summary, was why the hell are 7th graders wearing heart monitors?! Seriously. They're kids. They shouldn't need to monitor their hearts. Without knowing any background information or anything I'd assume that the school is simply being paranoid. They're probably worried little Timmy is going to have a heart attack if they make him run too much.
As far as it being a bad thing... Well, I have to wonder what kind of message it sends to the kids. Every time they go out to play dodgeball or whatever they're strapped into a heart monitor. As if any physical exertion is going to kill them. I suspect this might very well make some of them anxious about physical exertion without a heart monitor. They might very well learn what a target heartrate is and how to get the most out of their exercise... But they may also become frightened of what their heartrate is if they can't see the monitor.
Plus, there's the issue of funding... They're being asked to provide their own straps, which suggests the school doesn't have craptons of money sitting around. Unless it's a school for kids with heart conditions, I have to wonder about the wisdom of purchasing heart monitors at all. Couldn't that money be put to better use with more gym equipment? Or some more books? Or playground equipment?
Students might actually learn something about pulses and heart rates and fitness.
That could be useful education, certainly... But I'm not sure why they'd need to strap every kid into a heart monitor for gym class to teach this. I learned about heart rates and pulses in biology. And in health class we learned more about heart disease and whatnot. And in gym we learned all about aerobic exercise. We didn't need heart monitors for any of it.
it might actually encourage some of the lardass American kids to lose a few hundred pounds.
It might... I'm not really sure how a beeping monitor is going to convince some lardass to actually go exercise... But it might.
But of course, these poor overweight kids' lardass parents are probably sitting in front of their TV all night, listening to Fox News, so they're going to be suspicious of any goddamn thing the government does
This doesn't sound like a government thing, this sounds like a school thing.
The good news here is that these parents have a huge glob of plaque rolling down an artery that's gonna hit their heart like a steel-jacketed bullet, but then who's gonna watch Fox News?
I'm a liberal. I hate Fox News. And I'm still concerned about this. You don't have to be a nutjob to wonder why the hell they're putting little kids in heart monitors during gym class.
We had a SonicWall filter and it blocked pretty much everything. Not saying it was SonicWall's fault as we had a highly incompetent system administrator, but it was very detrimental to doing even the simplest of tasks. So I know how these students and teachers feel.
We've got a few clients who want things filtered, which means we've tried several different products to do that.
We ran a Squid/Dan's Guardian proxy for a while... But I was the only person here who could do anything with it, which made my job harder.
We set up gateways with built-in filters like the SonicWall, but I always felt their classifications were a little weird and arbitrary. Stuff got filtered that shouldn't have... Or got through that shouldn't have... And depending on how many users they had, it could get more expensive than I felt was necessary.
These days we're using OpenDNS. Anyone here can change the settings, it requires absolutely no special knowledge. The filter lists are pretty sensible... Not a whole lot blocked/allowed that shouldn't be... And the price is great.
Don't know if this is the case with Win7 or not... But traditionally an "upgrade" disc simply needs to see a qualifying Windows product somewhere. Usually I'll buy an "upgrade" disc and then do a clean install anyway... At some point during the installation it will usually complain that it can't find a qualifying product - all you have to do is throw your old Windows disc in the drive and point it at that. It will see the old Windows disc, decide that it qualifies, and continue installing.
Why would documents, music, video...etc add anything to an upgrade process? Shouldn't be system files and drivers that are affected? What exactly is done with a document or a music file that would require touching during an OS upgrade?
I'm not really sure why it takes longer with more documents, but I can confirm that it does.
My assumption is that they're playing with the profile structure again.
XP -> Vista moved everything from C:\Documents and Settings\ into C:\Users\
Win7 keeps things in C:\Users\, but there's the new "Libraries" thing... I guess it replaces some of the media folders (like "My Pictures") with some kind of database/index thing.
That's assuming you were running Vista before. If you were running XP then you have to install clean.
Honestly, I don't recommend "upgrade" installs at all - ever.
Seems to me that something always goes wrong.
I do believer there are utilities out there to help you migrate your stuff over to a Win7 install though... I don't recall - does it create a little partition for your files & settings when it does a clean install? I know Vista did that...
Although, the blond girl is hot, in that "Borg Queen" sort of way. If you're into that sort of thing, of course.
That's exactly what she reminds me of...
Pale, hair yanked back as tight as possible... The way she looks back over her shoulder to talk to you, vaguely distracted...
It's like you walked in while she was busy assimilating someone, and she's showing you her new phone to distract you from the borg-to-be she's working on...
The problem with breeders is that you get plutonium from them too witch i really don't like to be produced in any country.
What's wrong with plutonium?
If it's sufficiently reactive to be a problem, use it as fuel. Once it isn't sufficiently reactive to be used as fuel, just toss it in a bunker for a couple decades.
Is it just because it can be used to make a bomb? You know you can make a bomb from plenty of other materials much easier, right? I mean, yeah, a nuclear bomb is pretty scary... But it's also a little bit impractical.
The second thing is that failure of a nuclear power plant can produce a huge impact to the environment. I know that they have en insane number of redundancy build into the reactor but still it is operated by humans and the chance is not 0 that it might explode. I believe that the CANDU reactor is the only nuclear reactor that if anything happens is not able to explode because of it design ( no need to pull out the nuclear roods to stop the reaction) but on the other hand its efficiency is worse and it has got more waste afterwards.
There are tons of reactor designs that are passively safe - pebble bed reactors, for example. They basically can't explode/meltdown like Chernobyl did. You can walk away from them and they just kind of putter out.
You are right, but i have been at a research institute for fusion reactors before and what you realize there is that they have very limited funding mainly because politicians call it a non renewable energy. Which is true but fuel will run out after our sun will be exploded.
I'm sure fusion would be great, but it still isn't anywhere near being a viable way to generate power. Politics and funding and whatnot aside, we just don't have the technology yet.
Maybe with proper R&D funding we could get there... But it isn't the answer to today's power needs.
"Batteries" (as in the chemical variety) aren't the only way of storing power. While they're the best way of doing it small-scale, they're generally way down the bottom of the charts for national-scale power storage.
No, they aren't the only way of storing power.
I was thinking more along the lines of a ginormous capacitor or a mechanical flywheel when I wrote my original comment actually... But you'll still lose some of the original power by storing it. And you'll still lose some of the stored power when you discharge it. Nothing is 100% - regardless of how that power is being stored.
And you've still got to build your batteries, no matter what form they take. If you go with one or two ginormous ones then you've got to transmit that power and you've got the same transmission losses that you get rid of by going distributed... If you do lots of little batteries you've got less transmission loss, but now you've got to find room for your solar panels and batteries all over the place.
Again, I'm no expert. Maybe it's all viable, maybe it isn't. But any time this discussion comes up and somebody mentions the fact that you need to even out the irregular performance inherent in something like solar power, somebody else comes along and says batteries, duh! as if that answers the question. It does not. It simply creates more questions.
I still think the better solution, if you're going to do solar, is to put the collector in orbit.
Nuclear plants do have an impact on the environment too. What do you do with the toxic waste? The problem here is that you need to store it somewhere safe for thousand of years.
Wrong.
You only need to store the waste for a couple hundred years.
If the waste is reactive enough to be a real threat, it is reactive enough to be used as fuel. When it isn't reactive enough to be used as fuel anymore, it isn't reactive enough to be a real threat. Just throw it in a bunker for a couple decades and call it done.
We should be using pebble bed and breeder reactors. Better use of fuel, less production of waste, safer all-around.
Another option are fusion power plant. The research did alot of improvement during the last few years and the radio active waste has got a half-life of only a few years not really worth mentioning.
Fusion power generation is nowhere near becoming a reality.
He uses these things called "batteries" to store extra energy that's generated during the day in order to power things at night. Coupled with turning things off at night, his system generates more than enough electricity to keep things going, and can go for about 2 weeks if the weather's overcast before he has to switch to the gasoline generator to charge the batteries.
Fair enough. But you're talking about a single log cabin. If you're going to run an entire industrialized nation off this thing you're going to need a crapton of batteries. You're going to have to factor in the manufacturing cost of the batteries, the power lost charging them, the power lost discharging them... Maybe it's viable, maybe it's not - I don't know. But just saying "batteries, duh!" isn't an answer.
Now while it's unusual to have 2 weeks' straight overcast weather, it's not unheard of. But you can get past that by building a distributed network that covers a large land area. We may have about 60% cloud cover in our atmosphere, up to 80% on some days, but it's always sunny somewhere, and you can use generation from places where it is sunny to help supplement the needs/generation where it's not.
But if you're transmitting power halfway across the nation to make up for cloudy weather, you've got the same transmission losses that you get rid of by going distributed. It's the worst of both worlds - unreliable power and transmission losses. Plus all those batteries thrown in...
Better Idea: Put the solar panels in orbit, well outside the reach of atmospheric affects, and beam the power down to distributed substations.
If we were to get serious about conservation and turning stuff off when we don't need it, then we could switch to solar tomorrow.
Right, like that's going to happen. How long did it take the US to switch over to digital TV? And all that required was either buying a new TV or plugging in a box. You really think convincing everyone in the US to conserve electricity is going to work?
we should be using solar as much as we can, and use something that's not clean to make up the deficit.
Lots of solar would be good. Or wind. Or hydro. Or geothermal. Or nuclear. They'd all be an improvement over the crap that's belched into our atmosphere by coal and oil power generation.
And before you start talking about how dirty solar panels are, and how much energy is required to produce them, I'll draw your attention to this [power-technology.com]. There's other ways to use solar energy to generate power. This one uses nothing more dirty than concrete and mirrors, coupled with a large water tank and a turbine. It's so efficient that on a bright day as much as 40% of the mirrors are directed *away* from the focal point, as it produces far more energy than the system can use.
And at night it produces far less energy than the system needs.
I cannot here this boring argument about solar, wind and wave being no alternative repeated again and again. The argument does not get better over time.
The problem with solar and wind is the base load. An industrialized nation needs to have a certain amount of power available almost 24/7. What do you do on a cloudy day? Or when the wind doesn't blow?
Had we invested a fraction of the research funding that we have given to nuclear power industries into renewable energy research, we would probably already have most of our energy from renewalbe sources.
Unlikely. Nuclear power has been unpopular in the US for quite some time now. There's very little R&D spending going into it these days... Most R&D spending over the last few years has been in coal, natural gas, oil, and like kinds of things.
Nuclear power is inherently dangerous
No it isn't. Or, at least, no more inherently dangerous than producing electricity from oil or coal or natural gas or anything else...
we do not know how to deal with the waste
Yes we do. We know how to contain it. We know how to re-use it to generate more power and less waste. We know what kinds of health risks it poses. We know how long it takes to decay. We know how to transport it.
the nuclear fossil fuel will last only a couple of decades
Wrong again. Current stockpiles will only last a couple of decades in the types of reactors we currently have running in the US. But there's hundreds of years worth of fuel out there, waiting to be dug up. And if we were to start running breeder reactors we'd not only extend the life of our current stockpiles by several orders of magnitude, but we'd also have less waste to dispose of.
huge power plants are as inefficient as it gets because of the long distances electricity is transported
That's why we should be using "nuclear batteries". Drop a couple of those into a city and you don't need to transmit power more than a couple dozen miles. Much less transmission loss.
I've never understood how Social Networking sites made enough money off of JUST advertising. Maintaining a website once it reaches popularity is a costly venture.
I think the idea is that you don't have to generate any content. It's "social networking" - so your users generate all their own content by chattering away at eachother.
You need to supply bandwidth/servers/storage/whatever, but not content.
I still find it hard to believe that anyone can make enough money from advertising along to support something the size of these sites...
Wow, the DC had good games, that's for sure, but it was also plagued with one of the least comfortable controllers since the awkward devices of the 8 bit era. I can't be the only one who couldn't play a DC game too long before my thumb felt like it was shredded to ribbons. That was the sharpest D-Pad ever to grace a controller AFAIK.
Meh. I never found the Dreamcast controller all that unweildy. Lots of folks complained about it... But I just never had that hard a time with it.
The N64 controller, however, drove me up the wall.
The Visual Memory Unit was completely gimmicky as well.
The VMU had some real possibilities... But with the exception of one or two games (Skies of Arcadia) it was completely neglected. Definitely some wasted resources there.
Was probably one of the funnest games I ever played through.
Agreed.
Skies of Arcadia is definitely one of the top 3 console RPGs for me. Terrific game. Great gameplay mechanics... Fun characters... Some innovative elements...
Exploring the skies in your very own airship, discovering uncharted territories... Using the beeping of the VMU to track down those shards... Airship combat...
Wow. Seriously wish I still owned a Dreamcast and a copy of that game.
Slashdot Mirror
But I dare say that military perspective is not on saving fuel costs. After all, why save money by putting in a smaller fuel tank when you can keep it the same size and use the fuel savings to fly further/faster?
It equals out to the same thing.
If you need to drop a bomb on someone 100 miles away, right now it costs you $100 in fuel to do it. If you replace all your copper with nanotubes and make the plane lighter you can do it for $90 in fuel.
If you need to drop a bomb on someone 110 miles away, right now it'll cost you $110 and you'll have to refuel somewhere along the line. Make the plane lighter with nanotubes and now you can do it for $100 in fuel and no refueling along the way.
Even if they don't make the fuel tanks smaller, they'll still be saving money.
"Saving millions on fuel costs"
There is very little energy wasted in copper wiring, especially in airplanes! Moving to a material of higher conductivity will result in minuscule savings, and will be nowhere remotely close to covering the cost of the (extremely expensive) materials.
They aren't going to save fuel because it is more conductive. They aren't burning tons of fuel because of transmission losses from one end of the plane to the other.
They are going to save fuel because the nanotube wires will be lighter than the copper wires we use now. Less weight == less fuel.
A fifth of an inch thick? When I initially read "sheets of carbon nanotubes" I was envisioning something on the order of micrometers thick. I'm sure this is still progress, but the story isn't as exciting as I was initially expecting it to be.
I know basically nothing about armor and weapons and whatnot...
But, while 1/5" may not be as thin as you imagined, it may very well be thinner than what is currently required. How thick a sheet of kevlar is necessary to stop a bullet?
My main computer still runs 2000! I wouldn't put it in the same category as all the "old" OSes - there's not a huge difference between it and XP, and in terms of time, XP is only slightly younger than it anyway. But XP is what many people still use, and indeed, many geeks have avoided going onto Vista.
Yeah, Windows 2000 is still a pretty solid OS. We have fewer problems with those Win2k machines than we do most WinXP machines.
The only real problem is that hardware support is starting to get a little iffy. We've had a hard time tracking down drivers for some new hardware they've had to purchase. So far we've been able to get everything working eventually... But it probably won't be long until they're forced to upgrade whether they want to or not.
I do outsourced IT support... So I run into all sorts of odd operating systems.
We've got a client, a sheet metal company, that runs some kind of plasma cutter thing off DOS 3.something
They've got another location a few hours away that runs a newer version of the same plasma cutter off Windows 2000.
Speaking of Windows 2000 - we've got a couple clients that won't run anything else. Their entire operation, all their workstations, is built on Windows 2000.
We've got a client, a truck shop, that runs a couple impact printers off Windows 98 machines. And they've got an old Mac OS 7 machine they keep around to access their old accounting program once in a while.
We had someone come in recently who was looking to purchase a new computer. They finally decided their old one just wasn't cutting it anymore. They were upgrading from Windows 3.1
We've got a couple medical offices running some older (10+ years) IBM machines... AS/400's and the like... They're running some version of AIX... Couldn't tell you which one though, because we never have to touch them. Those things are rock solid.
Why would you want a cardboard case? Is it actually beneficial in any way?
Cases are generally made from steel and/or aluminum... I thought both of those could be recycled easily already? Is cardboard actually easier to recycle than steel and aluminum?
What about grounding? Yes, I know, there are ground paths on all the power plugs on your components... But the case has always provided another grounding path. Is this no longer necessary?
What about RFI? I thought one of the major reasons to use a metal case (as opposed to the very few all-plastic ones out there) was to cut down on RF interference.
My understanding was that the majority of nasty (hard-to-recycle and/or toxic) stuff in a PC came from the PCBs, capacitors, ICs, and like kinds of things. How does a cardboard case cut down on this at all?
How durable is this cardboard anyway? I know I accidentally kick my computer at least once a week... Will this cardboard box stand up to that kind of abuse?
And the reasoning - because PCs are disposable? If your PC is disposable you're doing something wrong. Yes, they get damaged from time to time... And technology marches on... But PCs aren't disposable. It isn't like you're supposed to buy a new one every season. It isn't like you buy a new computer to match your fabulous evening gown.
And if anything is disposable in a computer, it sure as hell isn't the case. I've been re-using this same case for about 10 years now... It's a monstrously huge HP case that originally contained a storebought computer. I've replaced every single component in that case several times over, and I'm still using the same case.
Yeah, a paper computer sounds all nifty and green... But I really have to wonder at the logic. It doesn't seem to me that a cardboard case would actually improve much of anything, except maybe the manufacturer's bottom line.
I suppose Ubuntu Linux is just chopped liver.
C'mon people. Wake up! There are tons of operating systems out there. Some are even better than Windows! *gasp*
Yes, there are tons of operating systems out there...
But "better" is completely subjective. If the app you need only runs on Windows, then Ubuntu (even with WINE/VirtualBox/whatever) is not "better". If your users are terrified of technology and change and have only ever used Windows, Ubuntu is not better. If the hardware you need to interface only supports Windows, Ubuntu is not better.
The fact of the matter is that there are an awful lot of people out there who will only use Windows - whether they actually need to or not. And if these new ARM chips can't run Windows, then they're going to have a much smaller market than Intel.
they have to keep close account of their material and it is audited pretty closely as well.
I think this will prove to be the key issue.
I doubt if anyone's got a receipt from the Mafia. I doubt if there's a signed contract to dispose of ## barrels of toxic waste illegally.
Either there's no paper trail at all, or there's been enough bribery and forgery to make that paper trail borderline useless.
Don't you have to have some kind of license from the EPA to dispose of toxic waste? Did the producers of the waste not verify the license? There are not that many places to dispose of toxic waste. I am sure it was more than just the guys in the mafia who were in on this. I think the producers of the waste should be responsible for the clean up.
Well... First of all I don't think the EPA has jurisdiction over Italy.
Second, they're the Mafia, I don't think they worry all that much about legality.
Third, I kind of thought that the whole reason this was a story was because it was illegal.
They'll be allowed to run and play, but if they do it during school, they'll wear a heart monitor. Is this a bad thing?
Well, I don't know... But it certainly might be a bad thing.
The first thought I had, upon reading the summary, was why the hell are 7th graders wearing heart monitors?! Seriously. They're kids. They shouldn't need to monitor their hearts. Without knowing any background information or anything I'd assume that the school is simply being paranoid. They're probably worried little Timmy is going to have a heart attack if they make him run too much.
As far as it being a bad thing... Well, I have to wonder what kind of message it sends to the kids. Every time they go out to play dodgeball or whatever they're strapped into a heart monitor. As if any physical exertion is going to kill them. I suspect this might very well make some of them anxious about physical exertion without a heart monitor. They might very well learn what a target heartrate is and how to get the most out of their exercise... But they may also become frightened of what their heartrate is if they can't see the monitor.
Plus, there's the issue of funding... They're being asked to provide their own straps, which suggests the school doesn't have craptons of money sitting around. Unless it's a school for kids with heart conditions, I have to wonder about the wisdom of purchasing heart monitors at all. Couldn't that money be put to better use with more gym equipment? Or some more books? Or playground equipment?
Students might actually learn something about pulses and heart rates and fitness.
That could be useful education, certainly... But I'm not sure why they'd need to strap every kid into a heart monitor for gym class to teach this. I learned about heart rates and pulses in biology. And in health class we learned more about heart disease and whatnot. And in gym we learned all about aerobic exercise. We didn't need heart monitors for any of it.
it might actually encourage some of the lardass American kids to lose a few hundred pounds.
It might... I'm not really sure how a beeping monitor is going to convince some lardass to actually go exercise... But it might.
But of course, these poor overweight kids' lardass parents are probably sitting in front of their TV all night, listening to Fox News, so they're going to be suspicious of any goddamn thing the government does
This doesn't sound like a government thing, this sounds like a school thing.
The good news here is that these parents have a huge glob of plaque rolling down an artery that's gonna hit their heart like a steel-jacketed bullet, but then who's gonna watch Fox News?
I'm a liberal. I hate Fox News. And I'm still concerned about this. You don't have to be a nutjob to wonder why the hell they're putting little kids in heart monitors during gym class.
We had a SonicWall filter and it blocked pretty much everything. Not saying it was SonicWall's fault as we had a highly incompetent system administrator, but it was very detrimental to doing even the simplest of tasks. So I know how these students and teachers feel.
We've got a few clients who want things filtered, which means we've tried several different products to do that.
We ran a Squid/Dan's Guardian proxy for a while... But I was the only person here who could do anything with it, which made my job harder.
We set up gateways with built-in filters like the SonicWall, but I always felt their classifications were a little weird and arbitrary. Stuff got filtered that shouldn't have... Or got through that shouldn't have... And depending on how many users they had, it could get more expensive than I felt was necessary.
These days we're using OpenDNS. Anyone here can change the settings, it requires absolutely no special knowledge. The filter lists are pretty sensible... Not a whole lot blocked/allowed that shouldn't be... And the price is great.
I know "upgrades" are usually cheaper
Don't know if this is the case with Win7 or not... But traditionally an "upgrade" disc simply needs to see a qualifying Windows product somewhere. Usually I'll buy an "upgrade" disc and then do a clean install anyway... At some point during the installation it will usually complain that it can't find a qualifying product - all you have to do is throw your old Windows disc in the drive and point it at that. It will see the old Windows disc, decide that it qualifies, and continue installing.
Why would documents, music, video...etc add anything to an upgrade process? Shouldn't be system files and drivers that are affected? What exactly is done with a document or a music file that would require touching during an OS upgrade?
I'm not really sure why it takes longer with more documents, but I can confirm that it does.
My assumption is that they're playing with the profile structure again.
XP -> Vista moved everything from C:\Documents and Settings\ into C:\Users\
Win7 keeps things in C:\Users\, but there's the new "Libraries" thing... I guess it replaces some of the media folders (like "My Pictures") with some kind of database/index thing.
That's assuming you were running Vista before. If you were running XP then you have to install clean.
Honestly, I don't recommend "upgrade" installs at all - ever.
Seems to me that something always goes wrong.
I do believer there are utilities out there to help you migrate your stuff over to a Win7 install though... I don't recall - does it create a little partition for your files & settings when it does a clean install? I know Vista did that...
Although, the blond girl is hot, in that "Borg Queen" sort of way. If you're into that sort of thing, of course.
That's exactly what she reminds me of...
Pale, hair yanked back as tight as possible... The way she looks back over her shoulder to talk to you, vaguely distracted...
It's like you walked in while she was busy assimilating someone, and she's showing you her new phone to distract you from the borg-to-be she's working on...
Yeah... Except those Pre commercials are creepy as hell.
The problem with breeders is that you get plutonium from them too witch i really don't like to be produced in any country.
What's wrong with plutonium?
If it's sufficiently reactive to be a problem, use it as fuel. Once it isn't sufficiently reactive to be used as fuel, just toss it in a bunker for a couple decades.
Is it just because it can be used to make a bomb? You know you can make a bomb from plenty of other materials much easier, right? I mean, yeah, a nuclear bomb is pretty scary... But it's also a little bit impractical.
The second thing is that failure of a nuclear power plant can produce a huge impact to the environment. I know that they have en insane number of redundancy build into the reactor but still it is operated by humans and the chance is not 0 that it might explode. I believe that the CANDU reactor is the only nuclear reactor that if anything happens is not able to explode because of it design ( no need to pull out the nuclear roods to stop the reaction) but on the other hand its efficiency is worse and it has got more waste afterwards.
There are tons of reactor designs that are passively safe - pebble bed reactors, for example. They basically can't explode/meltdown like Chernobyl did. You can walk away from them and they just kind of putter out.
You are right, but i have been at a research institute for fusion reactors before and what you realize there is that they have very limited funding mainly because politicians call it a non renewable energy. Which is true but fuel will run out after our sun will be exploded.
I'm sure fusion would be great, but it still isn't anywhere near being a viable way to generate power. Politics and funding and whatnot aside, we just don't have the technology yet.
Maybe with proper R&D funding we could get there... But it isn't the answer to today's power needs.
"Batteries" (as in the chemical variety) aren't the only way of storing power. While they're the best way of doing it small-scale, they're generally way down the bottom of the charts for national-scale power storage.
No, they aren't the only way of storing power.
I was thinking more along the lines of a ginormous capacitor or a mechanical flywheel when I wrote my original comment actually... But you'll still lose some of the original power by storing it. And you'll still lose some of the stored power when you discharge it. Nothing is 100% - regardless of how that power is being stored.
And you've still got to build your batteries, no matter what form they take. If you go with one or two ginormous ones then you've got to transmit that power and you've got the same transmission losses that you get rid of by going distributed... If you do lots of little batteries you've got less transmission loss, but now you've got to find room for your solar panels and batteries all over the place.
Again, I'm no expert. Maybe it's all viable, maybe it isn't. But any time this discussion comes up and somebody mentions the fact that you need to even out the irregular performance inherent in something like solar power, somebody else comes along and says batteries, duh! as if that answers the question. It does not. It simply creates more questions.
I still think the better solution, if you're going to do solar, is to put the collector in orbit.
Nuclear plants do have an impact on the environment too. What do you do with the toxic waste? The problem here is that you need to store it somewhere safe for thousand of years.
Wrong.
You only need to store the waste for a couple hundred years.
If the waste is reactive enough to be a real threat, it is reactive enough to be used as fuel. When it isn't reactive enough to be used as fuel anymore, it isn't reactive enough to be a real threat. Just throw it in a bunker for a couple decades and call it done.
We should be using pebble bed and breeder reactors. Better use of fuel, less production of waste, safer all-around.
Another option are fusion power plant. The research did alot of improvement during the last few years and the radio active waste has got a half-life of only a few years not really worth mentioning.
Fusion power generation is nowhere near becoming a reality.
He uses these things called "batteries" to store extra energy that's generated during the day in order to power things at night. Coupled with turning things off at night, his system generates more than enough electricity to keep things going, and can go for about 2 weeks if the weather's overcast before he has to switch to the gasoline generator to charge the batteries.
Fair enough. But you're talking about a single log cabin. If you're going to run an entire industrialized nation off this thing you're going to need a crapton of batteries. You're going to have to factor in the manufacturing cost of the batteries, the power lost charging them, the power lost discharging them... Maybe it's viable, maybe it's not - I don't know. But just saying "batteries, duh!" isn't an answer.
Now while it's unusual to have 2 weeks' straight overcast weather, it's not unheard of. But you can get past that by building a distributed network that covers a large land area. We may have about 60% cloud cover in our atmosphere, up to 80% on some days, but it's always sunny somewhere, and you can use generation from places where it is sunny to help supplement the needs/generation where it's not.
But if you're transmitting power halfway across the nation to make up for cloudy weather, you've got the same transmission losses that you get rid of by going distributed. It's the worst of both worlds - unreliable power and transmission losses. Plus all those batteries thrown in...
Better Idea: Put the solar panels in orbit, well outside the reach of atmospheric affects, and beam the power down to distributed substations.
If we were to get serious about conservation and turning stuff off when we don't need it, then we could switch to solar tomorrow.
Right, like that's going to happen. How long did it take the US to switch over to digital TV? And all that required was either buying a new TV or plugging in a box. You really think convincing everyone in the US to conserve electricity is going to work?
we should be using solar as much as we can, and use something that's not clean to make up the deficit.
Lots of solar would be good. Or wind. Or hydro. Or geothermal. Or nuclear. They'd all be an improvement over the crap that's belched into our atmosphere by coal and oil power generation.
And before you start talking about how dirty solar panels are, and how much energy is required to produce them, I'll draw your attention to this [power-technology.com]. There's other ways to use solar energy to generate power. This one uses nothing more dirty than concrete and mirrors, coupled with a large water tank and a turbine. It's so efficient that on a bright day as much as 40% of the mirrors are directed *away* from the focal point, as it produces far more energy than the system can use.
And at night it produces far less energy than the system needs.
I cannot here this boring argument about solar, wind and wave being no alternative repeated again and again. The argument does not get better over time.
The problem with solar and wind is the base load. An industrialized nation needs to have a certain amount of power available almost 24/7. What do you do on a cloudy day? Or when the wind doesn't blow?
Had we invested a fraction of the research funding that we have given to nuclear power industries into renewable energy research, we would probably already have most of our energy from renewalbe sources.
Unlikely. Nuclear power has been unpopular in the US for quite some time now. There's very little R&D spending going into it these days... Most R&D spending over the last few years has been in coal, natural gas, oil, and like kinds of things.
Nuclear power is inherently dangerous
No it isn't. Or, at least, no more inherently dangerous than producing electricity from oil or coal or natural gas or anything else...
we do not know how to deal with the waste
Yes we do. We know how to contain it. We know how to re-use it to generate more power and less waste. We know what kinds of health risks it poses. We know how long it takes to decay. We know how to transport it.
the nuclear fossil fuel will last only a couple of decades
Wrong again. Current stockpiles will only last a couple of decades in the types of reactors we currently have running in the US. But there's hundreds of years worth of fuel out there, waiting to be dug up. And if we were to start running breeder reactors we'd not only extend the life of our current stockpiles by several orders of magnitude, but we'd also have less waste to dispose of.
huge power plants are as inefficient as it gets because of the long distances electricity is transported
That's why we should be using "nuclear batteries". Drop a couple of those into a city and you don't need to transmit power more than a couple dozen miles. Much less transmission loss.
I've never understood how Social Networking sites made enough money off of JUST advertising. Maintaining a website once it reaches popularity is a costly venture.
I think the idea is that you don't have to generate any content. It's "social networking" - so your users generate all their own content by chattering away at eachother.
You need to supply bandwidth/servers/storage/whatever, but not content.
I still find it hard to believe that anyone can make enough money from advertising along to support something the size of these sites...
Wow, the DC had good games, that's for sure, but it was also plagued with one of the least comfortable controllers since the awkward devices of the 8 bit era. I can't be the only one who couldn't play a DC game too long before my thumb felt like it was shredded to ribbons. That was the sharpest D-Pad ever to grace a controller AFAIK.
Meh. I never found the Dreamcast controller all that unweildy. Lots of folks complained about it... But I just never had that hard a time with it.
The N64 controller, however, drove me up the wall.
The Visual Memory Unit was completely gimmicky as well.
The VMU had some real possibilities... But with the exception of one or two games (Skies of Arcadia) it was completely neglected. Definitely some wasted resources there.
Was probably one of the funnest games I ever played through.
Agreed.
Skies of Arcadia is definitely one of the top 3 console RPGs for me. Terrific game. Great gameplay mechanics... Fun characters... Some innovative elements...
Exploring the skies in your very own airship, discovering uncharted territories... Using the beeping of the VMU to track down those shards... Airship combat...
Wow. Seriously wish I still owned a Dreamcast and a copy of that game.
If I have to wear any sort of headgear, even paper glasses, it's a no deal. I like to multitask when I watch TV.
Agreed. No way in hell I'm wearing anything extra to watch TV on a daily basis.
Maybe the occasional special program or event... I could probably put on some goofy glasses to watch the Super Bowl, for example...
But on a day-to-day basis? Not happening.