ahh, i didn't see the lawyer connection, in there. so the idea is to make load of money for lawyers by having men refuse to be dna tested in paternity suits.
so how do lawyers find these guys? go to bars and instead of slipping em extasy slip them a little 'forget me' pill and then goad them into recalling the babe they got in the sack last night?
perhaps you should have stuck to the
step 1: become a paternity lawyer step 2: find a one night stander in a bar step 3: give him a forget recalled memory pill in his beer step 4: get him to recall the babe he laid last night step 5: represent him in his paternity suit step 6: Profit!
"Or for shits and giggles, how about removing all traces of memories of sex for the unwed father of a child? Would make the paternity suit industry tons of coin, I bet."
perhaps if you time traveled back to the 1950's in a time machine with 3 other scientists and crash landed in new mexico, you would find a use for the drug in paternity suits. but how to market something that scientifically can't be proven to work? since the science that makes it possible makes it obsolete (for paternity tests at least)?
or perhaps after the 1970's that failed time travel experiment from the 1950's would result in a government using the super secret modern tech needed to make such a drug possible that they retrieved from a 'weather balloon' and would widely use it to control the nation and wind up with a huge massive government that has to tax everyone and is still ten trillion dollars in debt, because mass producing all that memory wiping drug is expensive so more an more memories need to be wiped, and perhaps people become resistant to the drug after being flooded with it all their lives...
ah but that's the thing, i lost about 6 months all told of memory.
the doctor wasn't really up on his paranoid schizophrenia, and he said that the memories were probably repressed. no, no they weren't they were gone completely.
the last time it happened i only lost 3 days, i was on a different medicine then though, and there are some files of what i said and did that are very weird. my explanation for what happened was hackers broke into my computer and used the wifi connection to directly control my thoughts. i don't bring that up to my doctor of course. wifi is everywhere, and hacked computers are a dime a dozen. which lead to my going all hard wired internet with hardened firewalls that are half-open and have specific configurations settings for each pc and each os that connects to the hardened firewalls, and oh i don't run my computers at night.
but the doctor just thinks i am a computer hypochondriac, in addition to being paranoid schizophrenic.
being wiped by the cia, the nsa or homeland security, we've got the link to prove it.
ah, i feel vindicated. one of my paranoid thoughts is that people have their memories wiped of certain things they've done, knowing that science has reproduced it in mice means time travelers from the future could easily have been doing it for years now.
well, just as soon as the time machine gets proved to be possible. quantum physics is dangerously close to that with 'particles being everywhere all at once, until observed.' how can a quantum particle like a photon be everywhere all at once, until observed, unless time travel is also possible on the quantum level.
"I really doubt they got that x-ray with one pulse. I expect they had to expose for some time, making use of a LOT of billionth-of-a-second pulses."
the original cameras took over a minute to expose photographic film. sensitivity of film has progressed quite a bit for all types of media, you can now photograph in the dark. scotch tape could possibly tend to produce all the x-rays in a single direction, as far as i can tell, normal X-ray machines radiate outward in a spherical shape like ordinary lighting. since i don't know if the tape is directional, i'll just say that it could be directional caused by the way scotch tape is layered, and the way the static charge carries....
also, needing many pulses to create an x-ray is not a deal killing thing. the advantage of how little energy it takes to peel tape, inside a permanent vacuum chamber, makes portable x-ray devices a possibility. oh yeah, x-rays can be detected by electronic detectors. film generally takes more energy than electronic detectors. this has been known since the first detector capable of measuring individual photons of light created the need for an understanding of quantum mechanics.
detectors that can detect individual x-ray photons that are only a billionth of a second long might currently cost in the 7 or 8 figures, but that same tech might very well cost only in the 5 figures if you know most ambulance and most EMT firesquads are going to buy one.
i simply don't know what the cost of really high sensitivity x-ray sensors really cost, i only know my dentist switched from film to digital x-rays. if dentists are buying digital x-ray tech, then it's possible that eventually lower x-ray requiring digital x-ray tech might have the additional market of dentists because they don't like all the lead shielding, and if you can produce significantly less x-rays then you don't need as much shielding.
if dentists and regular hospitals who don't like finding new x-ray techs every 20 years because it's only safe to be an x-ray tech for 20 years... also become a market for a low x-ray required digital x-ray tech then it's possible that the cost could go as low as the 3 figures. although most likely the target sale price will still be 4 figures.
i'm just speculating here, but it's possible that low power x-ray tech will really be something that can be marketed to an ever growing medical community.
'It's kinda unlikely Scotch (brand) tape can bypass all the bottlenecks and emit copious X-rays.'
it's not about the length of the pulse, but the power of the pulse. if you only need one billionth of a second of x-rays, then scotch tape, in a vacuum is for you. the key point here is that rather than generating x-rays for a full second, you're getting a single pulse a billionth of a second in duration. this is plenty long to expose a very sensitive x-ray detector.
"Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll."
tfa said the pulse only lasted 1 billionth of a second long, meaning that indeed the static charge build up is creating a usable, but very short pulse of x-rays.
'It's much more likely they're getting electrostatic discharges in the film. The New Age loonballs call it "Kirlian Photography".
I'll be glad to eat a hat if this pans out. Until then I'll just wear it.'
this is not kirlian photography, the fact of the matter is they took an x-ray of the guys finger with a single pulse of x-rays at 1 billionth of a second of duration. i suggest you gets some ketchup for you are eating hat tonight.
"By your standards, anything that makes source code human-readable should be counted as source code, including white space or even external documentation files!"
which would put us a 10 million lines of code instead of 6.5 million. I'm actually kinda surprised that they have that little amount of documentation in the source, there must be quite a learning curve if they only need one line of documentation for 3 lines or real code.
meanwhile, vista has "Windows Vista: more than five years in the making, more than 50 million lines of code."
only 5 times as much code as the linux kernel? or is that only counting new code?
how many lines of code is linux up to, if you add all the programs used by say, the knoppix 5.3 dvd? how many lines of code is you include the entire debian repository?
I like the linux desktop way better than the windows desktop, if business starts adopting linux, it's only a matter of time before real video games start supporting linux. no i don't count wine, or that fork of wine that tried to add support for windows only DRM and crap to get games to boot. i'm well aware of the multitude of time wasting games in linux. i do play some of them, they're nice but i don't waste that much time, at least not playing simple games.
NOTE REGARDING REDACTIONS. As paragraph 1.1 and Appendix L explain, this research was conducted pursuant to a Court Order by the Hon. Linda Feinberg of the New Jersey Superior Court. Sequoia Voting Systems filed a motion alleging that certain parts of this report contain protected trade secrets. Plaintiffs dispute Sequoia's contentions. Judge Feinberg has expressed her intention to preserve Plaintiffs' objections until the time of the hearing when she will rule on the merits of Sequoia's claims of trade secret. We are confident that the Court will then permit release of the full, unredacted report. In the interim, the Court encouraged us to release the report with redactions. Paragraphs 19.8, 19.9, 21.3, and 21.5, as well as Appendices B-G, are redacted in this release.
"But TVs have been around for a lot longer than computers have, and couchpotatoing isn't a new thing. People cooking isn't a new thing, that should already be factored in. 7pm seems to be the tail end of cooking activity."
well, lets get something straight here, LCD tvs and plasma tvs are not 'twice as efficient' as a CRT. let us be clear here, a CRT can use LESS power per square inch than a plasma tv, it all depends on what YEAR and what company built the plasma TV. the same problem can also effect LCD tv sets.
If a LCD uses fluorescent backlighting, is the exact same size as a CRT it will use about 1/2 the energy drain of a CRT, if it uses LEDs, the power drain might fall below 1/4 that of a CRT, however, this can vary widely, the type of LCD used can increase drain, the type of graphic processing unit can draw as much as 40 more watts for 'full' hd instead of standard 480i, which might draw 2 watts. it's not just one factor, it's about 3-4 factors. high end LCDs with halogen bulbs will consume around 500 watts, low end LCDs with LED lighting of about half the screen area will draw around 100 watts.
plasma, in general uses slightly more power at full brightness than a CRT, this is the trick, to get 'numbers' below a CRT they use the lowest brightness settings and then default the settings where it is usable for the typical consumer. so, don't believe the numbers. a 50" plasma will draw 750 watts at full brightness. it will draw around 500 watts at the 'minimal' brightness, which nobody can possibly use, because it's only that dim for deflated power consumption numbers.
a 20" crt will draw about 100 watts. also, keep in mind, the older sets drew a lot more power than modern sets. why? the HD tuner chips of 2 years ago took double the watts of todays HD tuners. also, there has been a lot of 'tweaking' of the power consumption numbers, they've figured out how to claim lower power consumption on newer models, when realistically when used the same the power draw is nearly identical, except for the tuner.
oh yeah, power supply efficiency and total capacity can make a huge difference in power consumption, when you don't know the exact wattage needed, you might wind up putting in a power supply that is less energy efficient, than if you know the exact draw on each rail, something that can only be known in a mature product cycle. but this is going to make less than 30 watts difference.
8 years ago, the number of people who could afford a tv set that drew 750 watts of power were few and far between. 3 years ago, the number of people who could afford 750 watt sets went up significantly. and the baseline sets were on average 100 watts higher than what people could afford 8 years ago in crts. if 90% of new televisions being sold have 100 watts higher drain than previous models in that price range it is going to have a huge impact. and as we can see, it didn't take 3 years for that to happen.
I've been researching tv sets for a long time, anticipating buying a new LCD set when i get the money. it was really hard, because i wanted a low power set and it really isn't happening in the screen size i was looking at. to give you an idea, of how bad things are, check the 'energy star' ratings for tv sets. a 50 inch HD set need only use 381 watts of power to be energy star rated. this is up from the 270 watts in revision 2 of the 3.0 spec
yeah, the government was swayed to increase the wattage of a hd set by 111 watts to 'please' the makers of sets, so any 50" set below almost 400 watts could claim to be green. 400 watts! 2 tv sets, and you've got a cheapo microwave! things will get better, but not until after they get worse. i just wish they would get levels into the energy star specification, like silver, gold, and platinum. where silver is the high wattage energy star, and platinum is the 'real' deal of low power.
this is why, you spend $10,000 to $20,000 to get solar panels on your roof, and get a 2-way meter, while simultaneously going peak/off peak power.
solar panels will last you a good deal longer than any lead acid battery system, and there is a nice tax credit (extended to 8 years from now) on you federal return, and some states also have incentives that can further lower your cost.
the nice part of solar cells is that the majority of 'peak' power occurs while the sun shines. so going to peak/off peak you can really make a huge difference, along with a solar panel array.
well, if we had ever hanged and guillotined the elites who get rich of being robber barons, maybe we'd have nuclear. the single biggest problem is that old king coal wants a big coal consumption market. it's kinda like how petroleum has a huge market, even though we import 75% of our petroleum products.
not that long ago i saw a 'plan' by google to go green and reduce both oil and coal consumption, ultimately causing 0 coal burning with a growing demand for electrical energy, and no they didn't rely on atomic power either.
it'll never happen though, because the coal industry would rather remove a couple dozen mountain tops so they can open pit mine miles and miles of coal beds. I've never personally bought that nuclear power was 'stopped' by fear of what might happen, thanks to 3 mile island. no it was stopped to save old king coal. 3-mile island didn't even go super critical, it just vented a little steam. by all measures a testimony of how safe western reactor designs were compared to soviet reactors like Chernobyl.
8 years of dubba who claims to be a nuclear power proponent, and we won't see the ground break on a new atomic plant until 2010. the main problem is that the government put huge natural gas subsidies, to the oil industry, so like 5 times as many natural gas power plants went online as coal or nuclear.
my main point was that it's not like you buy a car, and get it to run 20 years without effort on the part of the owner. the other guy claiming 4-8 years, was probably considering it 'too much effort' to find and pay for an honest mechanic to keep a car running for more than 4-8 years, at the first sign of serious trouble they sell, or maybe even before. I never liked going to mechanics and I'm a guy, women get ripped off big time by crooked mechanics, on the assumption they know nothing about cars.
so, if you want a car to last more than 4-8 years there is significant effort to properly maintain the vehicle.
you might want to point out that cheap television sets also had horrible issues with full resolution. it wasn't that betamax had better visual quality, so much as consumer television sets lacked the quality of betamax. if joe sixpack goes into a buy more, sees a 'betamax' running on a 240 scanline set, and a vhs tape running on a another 240 scanline set, because the buy more has no 480 scan line sets... they're going to think the betmax priced $300 more is a waste of money.
people might actually buy 1080p sets if you hooked all the tv's in a buy more store up to a souped up pc running a scripted crysis demo on full settings. running them all off a piss poor 1080i source just makes people wonder why some sets cost more than others.
i hate to burst your bubble. but lets get real here. #1. tesla went carbon fiber.
"Carbon fiber on its own isn't much use, though. It's like a very thin fishing line, it is only strong in tension (when you try to break it by pulling it along its length). So, to make a panel that is strong in all directions, carbon fiber is typically woven into cloth (to give it strength in two directions) and then the carbon fiber cloth is encapsulated in plastic. In our case, it is encapsulated in epoxy resin - it has a higher specific strength than the alternatives. The epoxy is strong in compression but relatively weak in tension, so the two materials act together to produce a panel strong in tension and compression."http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/?p=50
epoxy resins weaken over time, the longer the epoxy takes to set, the longer it takes to soften. but even the slowest setting epoxy resins are going to soften within a decade. or less. forget rust, the body is just going to turn into a malleable fabric when the bond of the epoxy resin wears down. Fast Set epoxy can fail in as little as 12 months.
let's hit up aluminum next. Aluminum has metal fatigue. consider aircraft which have to be made of aluminum, they use only the purest, highest grade virgin aluminum with no recycled content at all. that's fine, we don't make 40 million airplanes a year. bicycles are often made of cheaper recycled aluminum, it's a bit hokey, but i've know people who while being obese, still managed to snap apart an aluminum frame just from trying to loose weight by cycling many miles a day. this is a huge issue for cars, a single high speed impact could snap or create fatigue fractures in the frame. causing the frame to suddenly unexpectedly come apart at highway speeds the next week, month or even years afterward.
plastic. no matter what you do with plastic, heat is the worst enemy of plastic. it also has problems with fatigue, and the chemistry to make auto grade plastic is crazy mad.
fiberglass is still glass, and glass won't last forever.
now if you had suggested building a car out of carbon nanotubes, then maybe we could be talking about 100 years of use, but still not with absolute safety. a hard rigid body creates the highest g-forces on impact, causing the most serious damage to the occupant. even if you can make a carbon fiber humvee that can take a head on with a semi and still be drivable... well not even a 5 point harness would spare your life from a head on with a semi.
just remember all the nascar drivers who have been lost before the safer barriers, and they were in crumpleable steel framed cars, not a solid non deforming carbon fiber shell forcing them to hit the harness with 1000gs for 1/1000th of a second. crumple zones save lives at current highway speeds. carbon nanotube shells designed to last 100 years would cost lives, every single year.
"Tesla makes cars. They've shipped quite a few (by their standards, amounts to a few dozen), and there is one in our area."
and the san jose plant which will be their first full scale production plant for the roadster, is unaffected by the credit crunch. their plans to build a more practical daily use vehicle and a Michigan plant, have died from the credit squeeze. so tesla will be making a sport car in a down economy and the more practical vehicle they were going to design is dead.
clearly the rich are being hit a lot less than the middle class if a product targeted at the rich is still in full swing and a product meant for soccer moms is in the toilet.
a 700 billion dollar bail out of banks failed to sustain wall street, why? the whole banking system was screwed up, and buying bad debt doesn't change fundamental flaws that were put into place to cause financial instability in the first place. I've yet to hear anyone coming up with a credible solution that does what everyone in america wants, higher standards of living, and stable jobs and financial sectors.
you do realize that hypertext was designed, tested and released, to enable cern to disseminate particle physics information to researchers around the world right? yeah, did i mention that the LHC is going to collect and discard data at an unprecedented rate, once it gets activated. as a matter of fact, if the LHC owned every datacenter in the world, and could store it's data on every home pc, they would only be able to store a single days worth of particle data collected by their instruments.
as it is they've got 10,000 processors to find and mark data worth storing. like, for instance if large amounts of matter stop traveling along the three known dimensions and start traveling in extra dimensions. they're also looking for the higgs boson, and dark mater and dark energy. oh, and they're also looking to see if particles can break the speed of light, which is one theory of the big bang.
personally when Europe disappears in a time vortex for 10,000 years i'll be glad they didn't build the LHC in my back yard.
"2008 is the coldest year of the 21st century and output from the sun is declining. Maybe Al Gore and his carbon cult followers were...wrong. "
erm, do you understand that the sun's output isn't declining, but rather is in part of a 11 year cycle? oh yeah, 11 years is an estimate, they vary from 9 year to 14 year variation. no, you don't understand that the number of sun spots is a cycle that can change like the weather, and sun spotless (nearly) years are a common (roughly every 11 years since recorded measurement in 1754)
seriously, you're calling a cyclical lull in sun spots a decline in solar output?
someone else had a nice point about 2008 temps being affected by oceanic currents, more so than anything. try actually reading a few articles about global climate change first, before bashing things you don't understand that happened to make slashdot main page.
"If it starts with 6.0 and I happen to know it is a new product I begin to doubt anything else you claim about the product. I expect those I do business with to display a high degree of integrity and this displays the opposite. Customers do not like to be lied to."
Mac OSX may have been the tenth major revision (although i only really recall maybe 4 releases worthy of new major number revisions) of an operating system by apple, but it still was a version chock full of bugs, and worse patched unix vulnerabilities. is giving a 'new' os core the version number ten bad? where do we draw the line? yeah intentionally giving a brand new software a high version number is marketing silliness, but hardly the worst thing ever done by closed source companies.
a while back i was watching cringely's nerd tv, and the interview with tim o'reily was full of how while he was still writing tech manuals people hiring him wanted to document clearly broken features and how to use them, when they were completely broken, and were going to ship broken.
i mean come on, i know marketing wants to claim 'feature x works' especially if it's a prickly feature, but to expect people to create whole books and documents that document how to write broken code is just crazy. what bothers me most about closed source is that selling products is more marketing hype than actual coding. it doesn't matter what the software can do, as long as you can sell it to people. this creates a world full of broken and worthless closed source projects where the primary merit is how well salesmen can sell it to professionals. not the actual stability or security or real productivity gains, it's all about having a pitch to sell the software.
ah, but that's the problem, because while the license fee is small, it is licensed Exclusively to companies that meet the 'qualifications' that nintendo in it's infinite wisdom have deemed fit of a buying a wiiware license. compared to what they did in the nintendo entertainment system days it might not seem nearly as draconian, (i mean they don't say how many copies of a game a developer can make, like they used to) but as i understand it, they can prevent titles from launching if they're 'below par' or even contain questionable content..
getting a license isn't necessarily just a price, it's also entering into a contract with nintendo. perhaps part of the reason why nintendo had to go after different market segments with the wii to be successful with a console.
"Ok, reasoning seems a little odd here. If a movie that just came out were to have cost Millions or even Billions more than a movie that came out yesterday, it would then be 'ok' to charge 3x the price to see it? If the development of a movie or game costs X amounts of dollars and it isn't scrapped then the volume of sales at current market price should damn well be worth the risk. There are a few exceptions that go above the current market price, and those in themselves are gambles, you had better be sure that it's a big hit. As you said it's just a money grab, no excuses."
since you brought in movies we'll start there.
let's get things clear here, you saw the blair witch project movie, right? the one done for $2000 with only one paid actress that got $500? right? that is an example of how cheaply a movie can be made, the same director he got what millions to produce blair witch 2? and nobody saw that one right, it sucked, it bombed, the guy couldn't handle the money and make a decent movie. right, the point being, making something worth watching isn't just throwing money at it. somethings should only be done once.
and how much money does hollywood spend on a big movie? millions, tons of money, and yet at one point in time it cost little more than actor salaries, and options on the screenplay. the cost of producing movies has gone up as long as you rely on technology instead of storyline, and the same thing is happening with games. I have a wonderful laptop that i bought happily in 1997, I paid $1,199 for it, you know what? that system can run a few basic games, like civilization 1, wolfenstein 3-d etc, i mean come on it's a pentium 120 mhz with the F00F bug, and 48 megabytes of ram, and a small hard drive, and a floppy, no cd-rom. the types of games that were huge in 1995 cost almost nothing to code and develop and yet some of them had wonderful game play, all while fitting on a few 1.44 mb floppy diskettes. but i tell you what, nobody buys simple games. if i coded a game that could run on a pentium 120 nobody would buy it. they might go to a website with ads to play it, but they wouldn't buy it.
and now blockbuster video games are running into a major problem, they're running into the hollywood effect. it takes a game with the latest sound and graphic capabilities, to woo customers into initial purchase, and yet most games are going to be below the satisfaction level for them to tell all their friends "you gotta get this game and play me online dude!" this is really really driving up the cost of developing game engines, and game content. at some point someone has to wake up and realize, if games get any more expensive to make, nobody is going to make enough money, and the market will collapse. it already has, to a certain point. coding game engines that require 1600 pixel processing units, just doesn't offer the ROI especially in a down economy.
and yet, if someone makes a game like crysis that requires 1600 pixel processing units to run 'at max' settings, there are people, comparing screen shots of crysis running on a 1600 pixel processing unit setup, vs 'our game engine' that maybe runs fine on a card with 32 pixel processing units, and instantly saying 'that our game engine game sucks, look at how pretty crysis is with a $4,000 alienware* dude'. it's a tough job trying to make a game engine and market it, and still make money, especially in an economy where people are going to rent or warez, instead of buying.
to tie this all together, to a certain point, it's easier to 'make a prettier' game than anyone else, or a better special effects blockbuster on hollywood, than it is to really come across a storyline and tell it just right, and release it at the right time, to get everyone telling their friend to go see this movie. it doesn't cost a lot of money to make a really good movie, and i know a lot of people who play sudoku, which is the simplest popular game i can think of... it doesn't take $$$ to make a winning game concept or a winning movie concept, but
the 'if you can find them' makes me think intel is up to it's old tricks, of releasing a chip on 'paper' but not into oem channels, only to 'preferred' partners like dell. sigh, of course a chip that is only available in a $1,000 dell computer is going to sell for $1,000 and the guy who sold it to you got a whole system sans cpu they can drop a $80 dual core cpu into.
not the first time intel has done this, normally amd is really good about getting into oem channels. perhaps because so many of their sales are oem.
they work globally across all tabs though. what if i want doubleclick okayed on one tab, but not another? it's one thing to 'have to' allow one one website in one tab to play a free online game, and quite another to make every news site i'm surfing suddenly show ads, because of one site.
Slashdot Mirror
ahh, i didn't see the lawyer connection, in there. so the idea is to make load of money for lawyers by having men refuse to be dna tested in paternity suits.
so how do lawyers find these guys? go to bars and instead of slipping em extasy slip them a little 'forget me' pill and then goad them into recalling the babe they got in the sack last night?
perhaps you should have stuck to the
step 1: become a paternity lawyer
step 2: find a one night stander in a bar
step 3: give him a forget recalled memory pill in his beer
step 4: get him to recall the babe he laid last night
step 5: represent him in his paternity suit
step 6: Profit!
format, although there is no ellipse
what did yooooooooo aaaa .... *drools over kybord having forgotten how to type*
"Or for shits and giggles, how about removing all traces of memories of sex for the unwed father of a child? Would make the paternity suit industry tons of coin, I bet."
the 1990's called, we use DNA to figure out who isn't cleaning up their dog poophttp://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/17/160246&from=rss, paternity suits likewise are solved with DNA tests.
perhaps if you time traveled back to the 1950's in a time machine with 3 other scientists and crash landed in new mexico, you would find a use for the drug in paternity suits. but how to market something that scientifically can't be proven to work? since the science that makes it possible makes it obsolete (for paternity tests at least)?
or perhaps after the 1970's that failed time travel experiment from the 1950's would result in a government using the super secret modern tech needed to make such a drug possible that they retrieved from a 'weather balloon' and would widely use it to control the nation and wind up with a huge massive government that has to tax everyone and is still ten trillion dollars in debt, because mass producing all that memory wiping drug is expensive so more an more memories need to be wiped, and perhaps people become resistant to the drug after being flooded with it all their lives...
ah but that's the thing, i lost about 6 months all told of memory.
the doctor wasn't really up on his paranoid schizophrenia, and he said that the memories were probably repressed. no, no they weren't they were gone completely.
the last time it happened i only lost 3 days, i was on a different medicine then though, and there are some files of what i said and did that are very weird. my explanation for what happened was hackers broke into my computer and used the wifi connection to directly control my thoughts. i don't bring that up to my doctor of course. wifi is everywhere, and hacked computers are a dime a dozen. which lead to my going all hard wired internet with hardened firewalls that are half-open and have specific configurations settings for each pc and each os that connects to the hardened firewalls, and oh i don't run my computers at night.
but the doctor just thinks i am a computer hypochondriac, in addition to being paranoid schizophrenic.
being wiped by the cia, the nsa or homeland security, we've got the link to prove it.
ah, i feel vindicated. one of my paranoid thoughts is that people have their memories wiped of certain things they've done, knowing that science has reproduced it in mice means time travelers from the future could easily have been doing it for years now.
well, just as soon as the time machine gets proved to be possible. quantum physics is dangerously close to that with 'particles being everywhere all at once, until observed.' how can a quantum particle like a photon be everywhere all at once, until observed, unless time travel is also possible on the quantum level.
"I really doubt they got that x-ray with one pulse. I expect they had to expose for some time, making use of a LOT of billionth-of-a-second pulses."
the original cameras took over a minute to expose photographic film. sensitivity of film has progressed quite a bit for all types of media, you can now photograph in the dark. scotch tape could possibly tend to produce all the x-rays in a single direction, as far as i can tell, normal X-ray machines radiate outward in a spherical shape like ordinary lighting. since i don't know if the tape is directional, i'll just say that it could be directional caused by the way scotch tape is layered, and the way the static charge carries....
also, needing many pulses to create an x-ray is not a deal killing thing. the advantage of how little energy it takes to peel tape, inside a permanent vacuum chamber, makes portable x-ray devices a possibility. oh yeah, x-rays can be detected by electronic detectors. film generally takes more energy than electronic detectors. this has been known since the first detector capable of measuring individual photons of light created the need for an understanding of quantum mechanics.
detectors that can detect individual x-ray photons that are only a billionth of a second long might currently cost in the 7 or 8 figures, but that same tech might very well cost only in the 5 figures if you know most ambulance and most EMT firesquads are going to buy one.
i simply don't know what the cost of really high sensitivity x-ray sensors really cost, i only know my dentist switched from film to digital x-rays. if dentists are buying digital x-ray tech, then it's possible that eventually lower x-ray requiring digital x-ray tech might have the additional market of dentists because they don't like all the lead shielding, and if you can produce significantly less x-rays then you don't need as much shielding.
if dentists and regular hospitals who don't like finding new x-ray techs every 20 years because it's only safe to be an x-ray tech for 20 years... also become a market for a low x-ray required digital x-ray tech then it's possible that the cost could go as low as the 3 figures. although most likely the target sale price will still be 4 figures.
i'm just speculating here, but it's possible that low power x-ray tech will really be something that can be marketed to an ever growing medical community.
'It's kinda unlikely Scotch (brand) tape can bypass all the bottlenecks and emit copious X-rays.'
it's not about the length of the pulse, but the power of the pulse. if you only need one billionth of a second of x-rays, then scotch tape, in a vacuum is for you. the key point here is that rather than generating x-rays for a full second, you're getting a single pulse a billionth of a second in duration. this is plenty long to expose a very sensitive x-ray detector.
"Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll."
tfa said the pulse only lasted 1 billionth of a second long, meaning that indeed the static charge build up is creating a usable, but very short pulse of x-rays.
'It's much more likely they're getting electrostatic discharges in the film. The New Age loonballs call it "Kirlian Photography".
I'll be glad to eat a hat if this pans out. Until then I'll just wear it.'
this is not kirlian photography, the fact of the matter is they took an x-ray of the guys finger with a single pulse of x-rays at 1 billionth of a second of duration. i suggest you gets some ketchup for you are eating hat tonight.
"By your standards, anything that makes source code human-readable should be counted as source code, including white space or even external documentation files!"
which would put us a 10 million lines of code instead of 6.5 million. I'm actually kinda surprised that they have that little amount of documentation in the source, there must be quite a learning curve if they only need one line of documentation for 3 lines or real code.
meanwhile, vista has "Windows Vista: more than five years in the making, more than 50 million lines of code."
only 5 times as much code as the linux kernel? or is that only counting new code?
how many lines of code is linux up to, if you add all the programs used by say, the knoppix 5.3 dvd? how many lines of code is you include the entire debian repository?
I like the linux desktop way better than the windows desktop, if business starts adopting linux, it's only a matter of time before real video games start supporting linux. no i don't count wine, or that fork of wine that tried to add support for windows only DRM and crap to get games to boot. i'm well aware of the multitude of time wasting games in linux. i do play some of them, they're nice but i don't waste that much time, at least not playing simple games.
"That's quite a lot of fud with not much to back it up with."
damn lameness filter, the 9 megabyte pdf is not FUD, it was a court ordered analysis of the voter system used in new jersey. http://coblitz.codeen.org/citp.princeton.edu/voting/advantage/advantage-insecurities-redacted.pdf
NOTE REGARDING REDACTIONS. As paragraph 1.1 and Appendix L explain, this research was conducted pursuant to a Court Order by the Hon. Linda Feinberg of the New Jersey Superior Court. Sequoia Voting Systems filed a motion alleging that certain parts of this report contain protected trade secrets. Plaintiffs dispute Sequoia's contentions. Judge Feinberg has expressed her intention to preserve Plaintiffs' objections until the time of the hearing when she will rule on the merits of Sequoia's claims of trade secret. We are confident that the Court will then permit release of the full, unredacted report. In the interim, the Court encouraged us to release the report with redactions. Paragraphs 19.8, 19.9, 21.3, and 21.5, as well as Appendices B-G, are redacted in this release.
"But TVs have been around for a lot longer than computers have, and couchpotatoing isn't a new thing. People cooking isn't a new thing, that should already be factored in. 7pm seems to be the tail end of cooking activity."
well, lets get something straight here, LCD tvs and plasma tvs are not 'twice as efficient' as a CRT. let us be clear here, a CRT can use LESS power per square inch than a plasma tv, it all depends on what YEAR and what company built the plasma TV. the same problem can also effect LCD tv sets.
If a LCD uses fluorescent backlighting, is the exact same size as a CRT it will use about 1/2 the energy drain of a CRT, if it uses LEDs, the power drain might fall below 1/4 that of a CRT, however, this can vary widely, the type of LCD used can increase drain, the type of graphic processing unit can draw as much as 40 more watts for 'full' hd instead of standard 480i, which might draw 2 watts. it's not just one factor, it's about 3-4 factors. high end LCDs with halogen bulbs will consume around 500 watts, low end LCDs with LED lighting of about half the screen area will draw around 100 watts.
plasma, in general uses slightly more power at full brightness than a CRT, this is the trick, to get 'numbers' below a CRT they use the lowest brightness settings and then default the settings where it is usable for the typical consumer. so, don't believe the numbers. a 50" plasma will draw 750 watts at full brightness. it will draw around 500 watts at the 'minimal' brightness, which nobody can possibly use, because it's only that dim for deflated power consumption numbers.
a 20" crt will draw about 100 watts. also, keep in mind, the older sets drew a lot more power than modern sets. why? the HD tuner chips of 2 years ago took double the watts of todays HD tuners. also, there has been a lot of 'tweaking' of the power consumption numbers, they've figured out how to claim lower power consumption on newer models, when realistically when used the same the power draw is nearly identical, except for the tuner.
oh yeah, power supply efficiency and total capacity can make a huge difference in power consumption, when you don't know the exact wattage needed, you might wind up putting in a power supply that is less energy efficient, than if you know the exact draw on each rail, something that can only be known in a mature product cycle. but this is going to make less than 30 watts difference.
8 years ago, the number of people who could afford a tv set that drew 750 watts of power were few and far between. 3 years ago, the number of people who could afford 750 watt sets went up significantly. and the baseline sets were on average 100 watts higher than what people could afford 8 years ago in crts. if 90% of new televisions being sold have 100 watts higher drain than previous models in that price range it is going to have a huge impact. and as we can see, it didn't take 3 years for that to happen.
I've been researching tv sets for a long time, anticipating buying a new LCD set when i get the money. it was really hard, because i wanted a low power set and it really isn't happening in the screen size i was looking at. to give you an idea, of how bad things are, check the 'energy star' ratings for tv sets. a 50 inch HD set need only use 381 watts of power to be energy star rated. this is up from the 270 watts in revision 2 of the 3.0 spec
yeah, the government was swayed to increase the wattage of a hd set by 111 watts to 'please' the makers of sets, so any 50" set below almost 400 watts could claim to be green. 400 watts! 2 tv sets, and you've got a cheapo microwave! things will get better, but not until after they get worse. i just wish they would get levels into the energy star specification, like silver, gold, and platinum. where silver is the high wattage energy star, and platinum is the 'real' deal of low power.
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/par
this is why, you spend $10,000 to $20,000 to get solar panels on your roof, and get a 2-way meter, while simultaneously going peak/off peak power.
solar panels will last you a good deal longer than any lead acid battery system, and there is a nice tax credit (extended to 8 years from now) on you federal return, and some states also have incentives that can further lower your cost.
the nice part of solar cells is that the majority of 'peak' power occurs while the sun shines. so going to peak/off peak you can really make a huge difference, along with a solar panel array.
well, if we had ever hanged and guillotined the elites who get rich of being robber barons, maybe we'd have nuclear. the single biggest problem is that old king coal wants a big coal consumption market. it's kinda like how petroleum has a huge market, even though we import 75% of our petroleum products.
not that long ago i saw a 'plan' by google to go green and reduce both oil and coal consumption, ultimately causing 0 coal burning with a growing demand for electrical energy, and no they didn't rely on atomic power either.
it'll never happen though, because the coal industry would rather remove a couple dozen mountain tops so they can open pit mine miles and miles of coal beds. I've never personally bought that nuclear power was 'stopped' by fear of what might happen, thanks to 3 mile island. no it was stopped to save old king coal. 3-mile island didn't even go super critical, it just vented a little steam. by all measures a testimony of how safe western reactor designs were compared to soviet reactors like Chernobyl.
8 years of dubba who claims to be a nuclear power proponent, and we won't see the ground break on a new atomic plant until 2010. the main problem is that the government put huge natural gas subsidies, to the oil industry, so like 5 times as many natural gas power plants went online as coal or nuclear.
my main point was that it's not like you buy a car, and get it to run 20 years without effort on the part of the owner. the other guy claiming 4-8 years, was probably considering it 'too much effort' to find and pay for an honest mechanic to keep a car running for more than 4-8 years, at the first sign of serious trouble they sell, or maybe even before. I never liked going to mechanics and I'm a guy, women get ripped off big time by crooked mechanics, on the assumption they know nothing about cars.
so, if you want a car to last more than 4-8 years there is significant effort to properly maintain the vehicle.
you might want to point out that cheap television sets also had horrible issues with full resolution. it wasn't that betamax had better visual quality, so much as consumer television sets lacked the quality of betamax. if joe sixpack goes into a buy more, sees a 'betamax' running on a 240 scanline set, and a vhs tape running on a another 240 scanline set, because the buy more has no 480 scan line sets... they're going to think the betmax priced $300 more is a waste of money.
people might actually buy 1080p sets if you hooked all the tv's in a buy more store up to a souped up pc running a scripted crysis demo on full settings. running them all off a piss poor 1080i source just makes people wonder why some sets cost more than others.
cars shockingly enough can be made to run by fixing parts that fail as they fail.
i dare you to run a car for 8 years with only fluid changes, plugs, brake pads, and tires.
plenty of problems crop up after 90,000 miles that can only be fixed by replacing worn parts.
i hate to burst your bubble. but lets get real here. #1. tesla went carbon fiber.
"Carbon fiber on its own isn't much use, though. It's like a very thin fishing line, it is only strong in tension (when you try to break it by pulling it along its length). So, to make a panel that is strong in all directions, carbon fiber is typically woven into cloth (to give it strength in two directions) and then the carbon fiber cloth is encapsulated in plastic. In our case, it is encapsulated in epoxy resin - it has a higher specific strength than the alternatives. The epoxy is strong in compression but relatively weak in tension, so the two materials act together to produce a panel strong in tension and compression."http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/?p=50
epoxy resins weaken over time, the longer the epoxy takes to set, the longer it takes to soften. but even the slowest setting epoxy resins are going to soften within a decade. or less. forget rust, the body is just going to turn into a malleable fabric when the bond of the epoxy resin wears down. Fast Set epoxy can fail in as little as 12 months.
let's hit up aluminum next. Aluminum has metal fatigue. consider aircraft which have to be made of aluminum, they use only the purest, highest grade virgin aluminum with no recycled content at all. that's fine, we don't make 40 million airplanes a year. bicycles are often made of cheaper recycled aluminum, it's a bit hokey, but i've know people who while being obese, still managed to snap apart an aluminum frame just from trying to loose weight by cycling many miles a day. this is a huge issue for cars, a single high speed impact could snap or create fatigue fractures in the frame. causing the frame to suddenly unexpectedly come apart at highway speeds the next week, month or even years afterward.
plastic. no matter what you do with plastic, heat is the worst enemy of plastic. it also has problems with fatigue, and the chemistry to make auto grade plastic is crazy mad.
fiberglass is still glass, and glass won't last forever.
now if you had suggested building a car out of carbon nanotubes, then maybe we could be talking about 100 years of use, but still not with absolute safety. a hard rigid body creates the highest g-forces on impact, causing the most serious damage to the occupant. even if you can make a carbon fiber humvee that can take a head on with a semi and still be drivable... well not even a 5 point harness would spare your life from a head on with a semi.
just remember all the nascar drivers who have been lost before the safer barriers, and they were in crumpleable steel framed cars, not a solid non deforming carbon fiber shell forcing them to hit the harness with 1000gs for 1/1000th of a second. crumple zones save lives at current highway speeds. carbon nanotube shells designed to last 100 years would cost lives, every single year.
"Tesla makes cars. They've shipped quite a few (by their standards, amounts to a few dozen), and there is one in our area."
and the san jose plant which will be their first full scale production plant for the roadster, is unaffected by the credit crunch. their plans to build a more practical daily use vehicle and a Michigan plant, have died from the credit squeeze. so tesla will be making a sport car in a down economy and the more practical vehicle they were going to design is dead.
clearly the rich are being hit a lot less than the middle class if a product targeted at the rich is still in full swing and a product meant for soccer moms is in the toilet.
a 700 billion dollar bail out of banks failed to sustain wall street, why? the whole banking system was screwed up, and buying bad debt doesn't change fundamental flaws that were put into place to cause financial instability in the first place. I've yet to hear anyone coming up with a credible solution that does what everyone in america wants, higher standards of living, and stable jobs and financial sectors.
you do realize that hypertext was designed, tested and released, to enable cern to disseminate particle physics information to researchers around the world right? yeah, did i mention that the LHC is going to collect and discard data at an unprecedented rate, once it gets activated. as a matter of fact, if the LHC owned every datacenter in the world, and could store it's data on every home pc, they would only be able to store a single days worth of particle data collected by their instruments.
as it is they've got 10,000 processors to find and mark data worth storing. like, for instance if large amounts of matter stop traveling along the three known dimensions and start traveling in extra dimensions. they're also looking for the higgs boson, and dark mater and dark energy. oh, and they're also looking to see if particles can break the speed of light, which is one theory of the big bang.
personally when Europe disappears in a time vortex for 10,000 years i'll be glad they didn't build the LHC in my back yard.
"2008 is the coldest year of the 21st century and output from the sun is declining.
Maybe Al Gore and his carbon cult followers were...wrong. "
erm, do you understand that the sun's output isn't declining, but rather is in part of a 11 year cycle? oh yeah, 11 years is an estimate, they vary from 9 year to 14 year variation. no, you don't understand that the number of sun spots is a cycle that can change like the weather, and sun spotless (nearly) years are a common (roughly every 11 years since recorded measurement in 1754)
seriously, you're calling a cyclical lull in sun spots a decline in solar output?
someone else had a nice point about 2008 temps being affected by oceanic currents, more so than anything. try actually reading a few articles about global climate change first, before bashing things you don't understand that happened to make slashdot main page.
"If it starts with 6.0 and I happen to know it is a new product I begin to doubt anything else you claim about the product. I expect those I do business with to display a high degree of integrity and this displays the opposite. Customers do not like to be lied to."
Mac OSX may have been the tenth major revision (although i only really recall maybe 4 releases worthy of new major number revisions) of an operating system by apple, but it still was a version chock full of bugs, and worse patched unix vulnerabilities. is giving a 'new' os core the version number ten bad? where do we draw the line? yeah intentionally giving a brand new software a high version number is marketing silliness, but hardly the worst thing ever done by closed source companies.
a while back i was watching cringely's nerd tv, and the interview with tim o'reily was full of how while he was still writing tech manuals people hiring him wanted to document clearly broken features and how to use them, when they were completely broken, and were going to ship broken.
i mean come on, i know marketing wants to claim 'feature x works' especially if it's a prickly feature, but to expect people to create whole books and documents that document how to write broken code is just crazy. what bothers me most about closed source is that selling products is more marketing hype than actual coding. it doesn't matter what the software can do, as long as you can sell it to people. this creates a world full of broken and worthless closed source projects where the primary merit is how well salesmen can sell it to professionals. not the actual stability or security or real productivity gains, it's all about having a pitch to sell the software.
"WiiWare licenses apparently cost under ~3k."
ah, but that's the problem, because while the license fee is small, it is licensed Exclusively to companies that meet the 'qualifications' that nintendo in it's infinite wisdom have deemed fit of a buying a wiiware license. compared to what they did in the nintendo entertainment system days it might not seem nearly as draconian, (i mean they don't say how many copies of a game a developer can make, like they used to) but as i understand it, they can prevent titles from launching if they're 'below par' or even contain questionable content..
getting a license isn't necessarily just a price, it's also entering into a contract with nintendo. perhaps part of the reason why nintendo had to go after different market segments with the wii to be successful with a console.
"Ok, reasoning seems a little odd here. If a movie that just came out were to have cost Millions or even Billions more than a movie that came out yesterday, it would then be 'ok' to charge 3x the price to see it? If the development of a movie or game costs X amounts of dollars and it isn't scrapped then the volume of sales at current market price should damn well be worth the risk. There are a few exceptions that go above the current market price, and those in themselves are gambles, you had better be sure that it's a big hit.
As you said it's just a money grab, no excuses."
since you brought in movies we'll start there.
let's get things clear here, you saw the blair witch project movie, right? the one done for $2000 with only one paid actress that got $500? right? that is an example of how cheaply a movie can be made, the same director he got what millions to produce blair witch 2? and nobody saw that one right, it sucked, it bombed, the guy couldn't handle the money and make a decent movie. right, the point being, making something worth watching isn't just throwing money at it. somethings should only be done once.
and how much money does hollywood spend on a big movie? millions, tons of money, and yet at one point in time it cost little more than actor salaries, and options on the screenplay. the cost of producing movies has gone up as long as you rely on technology instead of storyline, and the same thing is happening with games. I have a wonderful laptop that i bought happily in 1997, I paid $1,199 for it, you know what? that system can run a few basic games, like civilization 1, wolfenstein 3-d etc, i mean come on it's a pentium 120 mhz with the F00F bug, and 48 megabytes of ram, and a small hard drive, and a floppy, no cd-rom. the types of games that were huge in 1995 cost almost nothing to code and develop and yet some of them had wonderful game play, all while fitting on a few 1.44 mb floppy diskettes. but i tell you what, nobody buys simple games. if i coded a game that could run on a pentium 120 nobody would buy it. they might go to a website with ads to play it, but they wouldn't buy it.
and now blockbuster video games are running into a major problem, they're running into the hollywood effect. it takes a game with the latest sound and graphic capabilities, to woo customers into initial purchase, and yet most games are going to be below the satisfaction level for them to tell all their friends "you gotta get this game and play me online dude!" this is really really driving up the cost of developing game engines, and game content. at some point someone has to wake up and realize, if games get any more expensive to make, nobody is going to make enough money, and the market will collapse. it already has, to a certain point. coding game engines that require 1600 pixel processing units, just doesn't offer the ROI especially in a down economy.
and yet, if someone makes a game like crysis that requires 1600 pixel processing units to run 'at max' settings, there are people, comparing screen shots of crysis running on a 1600 pixel processing unit setup, vs 'our game engine' that maybe runs fine on a card with 32 pixel processing units, and instantly saying 'that our game engine game sucks, look at how pretty crysis is with a $4,000 alienware* dude'. it's a tough job trying to make a game engine and market it, and still make money, especially in an economy where people are going to rent or warez, instead of buying.
to tie this all together, to a certain point, it's easier to 'make a prettier' game than anyone else, or a better special effects blockbuster on hollywood, than it is to really come across a storyline and tell it just right, and release it at the right time, to get everyone telling their friend to go see this movie. it doesn't cost a lot of money to make a really good movie, and i know a lot of people who play sudoku, which is the simplest popular game i can think of... it doesn't take $$$ to make a winning game concept or a winning movie concept, but
the 'if you can find them' makes me think intel is up to it's old tricks, of releasing a chip on 'paper' but not into oem channels, only to 'preferred' partners like dell. sigh, of course a chip that is only available in a $1,000 dell computer is going to sell for $1,000 and the guy who sold it to you got a whole system sans cpu they can drop a $80 dual core cpu into.
not the first time intel has done this, normally amd is really good about getting into oem channels. perhaps because so many of their sales are oem.
nice, but you forgot the big one.
"the neutrality of this article has been disputed"
they work globally across all tabs though. what if i want doubleclick okayed on one tab, but not another? it's one thing to 'have to' allow one one website in one tab to play a free online game, and quite another to make every news site i'm surfing suddenly show ads, because of one site.