You could of course attach those "somethings" to some kind of generator that generates electricity when they move and allow the Casimir force to bring the plates together thereby harvesting that energy (a very very tiny amount of energy), but in order to generate more energy from that effect you would need to separate the plates again which would take as much or more energy than was harvested from the effect in the first place.
*Unless* there is a plate configuration that will allow for repetitive movement. Think of a paddlewheel, with each paddle experiencing a Casimir force on an outside plate, then rotating or sliding out of the way so the wheel can move. There's a lot of challenges to overcome, so such a device is unlikely, but it may be possible.
That's why this research is so exciting -- it offers the promise of tapping into Zero Point Energy. Again, it's unlikely to pan out, but it's worth a try.
Authors also have to decide whether or not they want to eat. Once one story has sold, it's a lot easier selling sequels to it than to sell something entirely new. If they don't sell stories, they don't eat. So sequels and long-running series are the norm.
You can take notes. The Kindle store shows examples of making annotations. Why do you think they put a QWERTY keyboard on the thing?
I want a Kindle 2 just because it looks much more polished than the last version, and because I'm a huge fan of books but as my eyes get older I find myself needing zoomable text. But from every angle I look at, it's not worth the money. The books cost as much or more than paper versions, and I might lose them if the service dies or if I upgrade. I'm not keen on spending hundreds of dollars for the sake of convenience. Maybe when my eyes and the technology are another ten years more mature.
I won't touch a Sony MMO either after bad experiences with their prior games. They're competent programmers, but incompetent managers, and they seem to have palpable hatred for their users.
If you want to play a good superhero game, try City of Heroes. It's a fantastic game and it keeps getting better, with 2-4 new content releases a year for free. The CoH team have made it their goal to produce what the players want to see. It's sad that catering to the users is such a novel concept for an MMO.
Champions Online has some of the developers from CoH working on it, so it's worth watching. We'll see if they can make lightning strike twice.
One of many points you're missing in all this is that someone who writes as a living must, by necessity, join a writer's union. (In the case of SF/F, the union is SFWA.) That's the only way to get inside industry information and little things like health insurance.
The admittance requirements for the SFWA are that you be published in three magazines that they have labeled as 'professional'. So posting your own stories on the web is useless as a career move. Even posting stories to small websites makes no sense for beginning authors. They have to break into a few elite markets before their career can even begin.
Are they safe from solar storms? Yes. If a solar storm strong enough to fry your CDs hits, your main concerns will be finding oxygen to breathe, keeping your DNA in one piece, and should you tell your doctor about the annoying way you glow in the dark.
Note, however, that CDs naturally degrade over a period of from 3-20 years depending on the brand. So there's a good chance they won't survive until the next solar maximum anyway. But don't blame the sun.
Yes, this kind of hype comes up approximately every eleven years. Because the sun is on an eleven-year cycle. The last maximum was around 2003. We are now in a minimum. The next maximum should be 2014-2015, although there is some wiggle room, and this last cycle seems to have been exceptionally long.
So you can expect this hype about solar damage to come up in 2009 and last until 2012, by which time everyone will have forgotten it. Then there will be actual damage in 2014-2015 that very few people will notice. Then the media cycle of foretelling doom will repeat around 2020.
And when the Lodzians wanted their pay, Dell ran numbers and told them 'no way'. They moved to Myanmar -- like all industry stars -- where the workers get eight cents a day.
But labor still cost too much wealth. (For some workers were older than twelve!) Dell's great business plan, could not involve man: They were modeled on magical elves.
So Dell finally settled in Congo. Every PC they now make, as you know, is constructed on skimp by two apes and a chimp. (And the chimp's job security is low.)
You're missing the important fact that Fawkes is/was a 'she'. (True! Check the computer terminals in Vault 87.) Which means that she was just being a woman and letting the man (you) do the dirty work.
I *almost* agree with you. I know of two reasons to put the Beatles on a pedestal above most pop music.
One is their level of skill. You may not be impressed with their guitar work, but it has to be said that the Beatles were, at the time, the top of the game in songwriting, concert performance, and coordination between the band members.
Two is the innovation of the 'Wall of sound'. The Beatles were one of the groups that pioneered this technique and they showcased it brilliantly. But that had little to do with the band, it was the work of their producer.
So yes, the Beatles deserve to be highlighted in the annals of music history. Not as much as some people do, but they deserve more recognition than the average pop group.
I find it frightening that Perl actually does have a connection to stuffed camel dolls and needles. Maybe this comparison to voodoo is a bit more than a joke...
Fortran is the ancient greco/roman pantheon. It once ruled the world, and was used by white-haired men to throw thunderbolts around. But now it's obsolete. However, pieces of it survive in more modern religions -- most notably FORMAT statements and the prevalence of omnipotent white-haired men.
Re:Lower wattage bulbs, like Cory Doctorow?
on
Censorship By Glut
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· Score: 1
Cory Doctorow is a genuine genius, and he was destined to rise to the top of whatever field he chose.
Note, however, that is not to say that he's a genius at his chosen field. He is not a genius writer, or blogger, or lecturer, or at any one thing, really. Cory's genius is in the valuable art of self-promotion. He is a self-starter, with the confidence to undertake projects that would make entrepreneurs nervous. And once he has a project started, he has built an empire of grapevines capable of announcing his project to every corner of the earth. He really is amazing in his speciality.
This loops back to the topic of the article, too. In the absence of a meritocratic system where the best get the most attention, the true victors are those with the ability to promote themselves. I would have liked to see the Salganik study redone, but with one musician leveraging his network of friends to boost his ratings. I'd expect to see a dramatic effect.
Obscurity (not censorship; the article is misnamed) comes from a deficit of social ability, not quality. Get out there and mingle. Mingle like you were Cory Doctorow, and you will succeed.
The Netherlands has 'postponed the inevitable' for almost 800 years, now.
Of course nothing lasts forever against relentless nature. But if it lasts long enough for several human lifetimes, it's good enough. There'll be a disaster someday, but making a home for generations of people is worth that price. And maybe by the time disaster is imminent, the people will have the wisdom and ability to prevent it or get out of its way. Like the Maldives are now trying to do.
Ah, EDLIN. I wrote a relational database in DOS 3.1 using EDLIN. Looking back at those days, I must have been Superboy to complete such herculean tasks. Or maybe Bizzaro-boy, because it was stupid of me to even attempt them.
> Are you kidding? They've been running Jeremiah Wright saying "Goddamn America" steadily on DirectTV the last couple days.
That wasn't McCain, it's a 527 group.
The actual Swift Boat ads that attacked John Kerry were from a 527 also. Did the republican candidate have anything to do with them? Likely not, but there are many examples of 527s pulling their ads when the candidate they are supporting requests it. McCain could have and should have prevented the Jeremiah Wright ads or had them pulled after they began. He didn't, and hasn't. He shares culpability.
No they didn't say Obama is a bomb thrower, but it is 100% factual that Obama 'has no enemies on the left.' Riddle me this; name one close personal or professional associate of Sen. Obama that isn't a) a commununist radical, b) islamic extremist or c) part of the corrupt Chicago machine.
Are you seriously saying that EVERY PERSON Obama knows personally is a criminal or subversive? Do you realize how extreme and ridiculous you sound when putting up such a strawman? I could ask you to tell me one close person associate of McCain that isn't a) a neocon, b) a stooge for the military industrial complex, or c) criminally involved in financial scandals like the Keating savings and loan debacle. Doesn't that seem like an unfair judgement and idiotic test?
We, the public, has only heard of three or four people from Obama's past. He likely has associations with hundreds of people. That the worst they could find on him was trivial stuff like Resko, Wright, and Ayers shows how squeaky clean the man is.
You are right, sir, and I was wrong. The income statistics got mixed together in my head with wealth statistics, and I still got that wrong. My apologies.
For a more direct support to my argument, the top 5% earn 62% of GDP according to that chart. If the previous poster is correct that they pay 60% of taxes, that sounds about right to me -- pretty fair.
However, note that those charts are from 2004, and set the top 5% level at $131,000. The press keeps claiming it's at $250,000 now. So these numbers are probably out of date...which means the tax structure is, as well.
The Clinton administration didn't do much beyond nurturing the policies that Gore had championed. It was enough, though, and had a huge effect. Without these initiatives, the fiber optic backbone and the invention of the web browser are two things that might have only appeared years later, if at all.
So yes, the 42nd presidency had a huge effect on the economy of the US.
Wait a minute. 'Socialist' and 'Capitalist' are words, with definitions and meanings. You can't redefine them just because you don't agree with the dictionary.
By any reasonable definition, Obama is *not* a socialist. He's a moderate capitalist -- to the right of Clinton, for god's sake.
Assuming you're not a troll, the rest of your post is just hard-core ignorance. Look up 'redistributive change' and realize that it has nothing to do with money -- it's a specific legal term that applies to civil rights.
The right-wing has hit Obama in any way they could, and that includes redefining words and phrases in any way that gives them an attack angle. They are lying to you, and you apparently are eating it up.
Stop drinking the cool-aid, man. Really. For your own sake.
60% of taxes of paid by the top 5% of earners, true.
But 90% of total wages are earned by the top 1%.
Combine those two statistics and you see that very rich people are not paying their fair share of taxes.
The inequality of the tax structure pales in comparison to the inequality of earnings in this country. In a fair economy, the tax curve and wage curve should be similar if not identical. I'm happy that at last, one presidential candidate seems to understand this.
Slashdot Mirror
You could of course attach those "somethings" to some kind of generator that generates electricity when they move and allow the Casimir force to bring the plates together thereby harvesting that energy (a very very tiny amount of energy), but in order to generate more energy from that effect you would need to separate the plates again which would take as much or more energy than was harvested from the effect in the first place.
*Unless* there is a plate configuration that will allow for repetitive movement. Think of a paddlewheel, with each paddle experiencing a Casimir force on an outside plate, then rotating or sliding out of the way so the wheel can move. There's a lot of challenges to overcome, so such a device is unlikely, but it may be possible.
That's why this research is so exciting -- it offers the promise of tapping into Zero Point Energy. Again, it's unlikely to pan out, but it's worth a try.
Authors also have to decide whether or not they want to eat. Once one story has sold, it's a lot easier selling sequels to it than to sell something entirely new. If they don't sell stories, they don't eat. So sequels and long-running series are the norm.
You can take notes. The Kindle store shows examples of making annotations. Why do you think they put a QWERTY keyboard on the thing?
I want a Kindle 2 just because it looks much more polished than the last version, and because I'm a huge fan of books but as my eyes get older I find myself needing zoomable text. But from every angle I look at, it's not worth the money. The books cost as much or more than paper versions, and I might lose them if the service dies or if I upgrade. I'm not keen on spending hundreds of dollars for the sake of convenience. Maybe when my eyes and the technology are another ten years more mature.
Interesting. Someone needs to mod you up.
I won't touch a Sony MMO either after bad experiences with their prior games. They're competent programmers, but incompetent managers, and they seem to have palpable hatred for their users.
If you want to play a good superhero game, try City of Heroes. It's a fantastic game and it keeps getting better, with 2-4 new content releases a year for free. The CoH team have made it their goal to produce what the players want to see. It's sad that catering to the users is such a novel concept for an MMO.
Champions Online has some of the developers from CoH working on it, so it's worth watching. We'll see if they can make lightning strike twice.
One of many points you're missing in all this is that someone who writes as a living must, by necessity, join a writer's union. (In the case of SF/F, the union is SFWA.) That's the only way to get inside industry information and little things like health insurance.
The admittance requirements for the SFWA are that you be published in three magazines that they have labeled as 'professional'. So posting your own stories on the web is useless as a career move. Even posting stories to small websites makes no sense for beginning authors. They have to break into a few elite markets before their career can even begin.
And with the markets dwindling in number...
I wonder which will be first to market -- marijuana spiked coffee, or coffee-flavored marijuana?
Are they safe from solar storms? Yes. If a solar storm strong enough to fry your CDs hits, your main concerns will be finding oxygen to breathe, keeping your DNA in one piece, and should you tell your doctor about the annoying way you glow in the dark.
Note, however, that CDs naturally degrade over a period of from 3-20 years depending on the brand. So there's a good chance they won't survive until the next solar maximum anyway. But don't blame the sun.
Yes, this kind of hype comes up approximately every eleven years. Because the sun is on an eleven-year cycle. The last maximum was around 2003. We are now in a minimum. The next maximum should be 2014-2015, although there is some wiggle room, and this last cycle seems to have been exceptionally long.
So you can expect this hype about solar damage to come up in 2009 and last until 2012, by which time everyone will have forgotten it. Then there will be actual damage in 2014-2015 that very few people will notice. Then the media cycle of foretelling doom will repeat around 2020.
And when the Lodzians wanted their pay,
Dell ran numbers and told them 'no way'.
They moved to Myanmar --
like all industry stars --
where the workers get eight cents a day.
But labor still cost too much wealth.
(For some workers were older than twelve!)
Dell's great business plan,
could not involve man:
They were modeled on magical elves.
So Dell finally settled in Congo.
Every PC they now make, as you know,
is constructed on skimp
by two apes and a chimp.
(And the chimp's job security is low.)
You're missing the important fact that Fawkes is/was a 'she'. (True! Check the computer terminals in Vault 87.) Which means that she was just being a woman and letting the man (you) do the dirty work.
(To any women here: I kid, I kid. ;) )
I *almost* agree with you. I know of two reasons to put the Beatles on a pedestal above most pop music.
One is their level of skill. You may not be impressed with their guitar work, but it has to be said that the Beatles were, at the time, the top of the game in songwriting, concert performance, and coordination between the band members.
Two is the innovation of the 'Wall of sound'. The Beatles were one of the groups that pioneered this technique and they showcased it brilliantly. But that had little to do with the band, it was the work of their producer.
So yes, the Beatles deserve to be highlighted in the annals of music history. Not as much as some people do, but they deserve more recognition than the average pop group.
I find it frightening that Perl actually does have a connection to stuffed camel dolls and needles. Maybe this comparison to voodoo is a bit more than a joke...
Fortran is the ancient greco/roman pantheon. It once ruled the world, and was used by white-haired men to throw thunderbolts around. But now it's obsolete. However, pieces of it survive in more modern religions -- most notably FORMAT statements and the prevalence of omnipotent white-haired men.
Cory Doctorow is a genuine genius, and he was destined to rise to the top of whatever field he chose.
Note, however, that is not to say that he's a genius at his chosen field. He is not a genius writer, or blogger, or lecturer, or at any one thing, really. Cory's genius is in the valuable art of self-promotion. He is a self-starter, with the confidence to undertake projects that would make entrepreneurs nervous. And once he has a project started, he has built an empire of grapevines capable of announcing his project to every corner of the earth. He really is amazing in his speciality.
This loops back to the topic of the article, too. In the absence of a meritocratic system where the best get the most attention, the true victors are those with the ability to promote themselves. I would have liked to see the Salganik study redone, but with one musician leveraging his network of friends to boost his ratings. I'd expect to see a dramatic effect.
Obscurity (not censorship; the article is misnamed) comes from a deficit of social ability, not quality. Get out there and mingle. Mingle like you were Cory Doctorow, and you will succeed.
But he wasn't always that way. Snow Crash was sharp and fast-paced. Diamond Age had some slow parts but in general was pretty tight.
The Netherlands has 'postponed the inevitable' for almost 800 years, now.
Of course nothing lasts forever against relentless nature. But if it lasts long enough for several human lifetimes, it's good enough. There'll be a disaster someday, but making a home for generations of people is worth that price. And maybe by the time disaster is imminent, the people will have the wisdom and ability to prevent it or get out of its way. Like the Maldives are now trying to do.
Although oil prices have crashed (a temporary situation), the oil companies are still raking in record profits. Not only records for their industry, but setting new records for any industry on the planet.
If there is ever a situation where a windfall profits tax was desirable, it would seem to apply now.
Ah, EDLIN. I wrote a relational database in DOS 3.1 using EDLIN. Looking back at those days, I must have been Superboy to complete such herculean tasks. Or maybe Bizzaro-boy, because it was stupid of me to even attempt them.
> Are you kidding? They've been running Jeremiah Wright saying "Goddamn America" steadily on DirectTV the last couple days.
That wasn't McCain, it's a 527 group.
The actual Swift Boat ads that attacked John Kerry were from a 527 also. Did the republican candidate have anything to do with them? Likely not, but there are many examples of 527s pulling their ads when the candidate they are supporting requests it. McCain could have and should have prevented the Jeremiah Wright ads or had them pulled after they began. He didn't, and hasn't. He shares culpability.
No they didn't say Obama is a bomb thrower, but it is 100% factual that Obama 'has no enemies on the left.' Riddle me this; name one close personal or professional associate of Sen. Obama that isn't a) a commununist radical, b) islamic extremist or c) part of the corrupt Chicago machine.
Are you seriously saying that EVERY PERSON Obama knows personally is a criminal or subversive? Do you realize how extreme and ridiculous you sound when putting up such a strawman? I could ask you to tell me one close person associate of McCain that isn't a) a neocon, b) a stooge for the military industrial complex, or c) criminally involved in financial scandals like the Keating savings and loan debacle. Doesn't that seem like an unfair judgement and idiotic test?
We, the public, has only heard of three or four people from Obama's past. He likely has associations with hundreds of people. That the worst they could find on him was trivial stuff like Resko, Wright, and Ayers shows how squeaky clean the man is.
- Obama's lack of experience -- if he is elected, the 4 year presidential term will be the longest job he's ever held
Just wanted to quash a little bit of FUD, here. Obama was a constitutional law professor for twelve years and a state senator for seven years.
You are right, sir, and I was wrong. The income statistics got mixed together in my head with wealth statistics, and I still got that wrong. My apologies.
Here are better numbers, in graph form. The top 1% of wage earners gets about 53% of GDP.
For a more direct support to my argument, the top 5% earn 62% of GDP according to that chart. If the previous poster is correct that they pay 60% of taxes, that sounds about right to me -- pretty fair.
However, note that those charts are from 2004, and set the top 5% level at $131,000. The press keeps claiming it's at $250,000 now. So these numbers are probably out of date...which means the tax structure is, as well.
My assumption was wrong. You are a troll.
In one post, you tried to redefine socialism just as I told you not to do, you ignore the clarification I gave you on the 'redistributive change' canard, and then you tell me to read a link that you never provided (and the link that I think you wanted to give me doesn't support your point, but rather mine).
If that's not the work of a troll, it's a sad commentary on how willful and blind ignorance can be.
The internet as we know it exists in large part due to the NII (National Information Infrastructure) initiative, which was proposed and championed by then Senator Al Gore in 1991. A reference to this act is why Gore said he had 'invented the internet'.
The Clinton administration didn't do much beyond nurturing the policies that Gore had championed. It was enough, though, and had a huge effect. Without these initiatives, the fiber optic backbone and the invention of the web browser are two things that might have only appeared years later, if at all.
So yes, the 42nd presidency had a huge effect on the economy of the US.
Wait a minute. 'Socialist' and 'Capitalist' are words, with definitions and meanings. You can't redefine them just because you don't agree with the dictionary.
By any reasonable definition, Obama is *not* a socialist. He's a moderate capitalist -- to the right of Clinton, for god's sake.
Assuming you're not a troll, the rest of your post is just hard-core ignorance. Look up 'redistributive change' and realize that it has nothing to do with money -- it's a specific legal term that applies to civil rights.
The right-wing has hit Obama in any way they could, and that includes redefining words and phrases in any way that gives them an attack angle. They are lying to you, and you apparently are eating it up.
Stop drinking the cool-aid, man. Really. For your own sake.
60% of taxes of paid by the top 5% of earners, true.
But 90% of total wages are earned by the top 1%.
Combine those two statistics and you see that very rich people are not paying their fair share of taxes.
The inequality of the tax structure pales in comparison to the inequality of earnings in this country. In a fair economy, the tax curve and wage curve should be similar if not identical. I'm happy that at last, one presidential candidate seems to understand this.