No, it's not "very limited." Additionally, reprocessing waste (using breeder reactors, like every other nuclear-power-using nation on earth) expands the current supply by a factor of a million, given that you get ~1000x the fissionable Pu239, out of which the products can also be re-burned. Hell, if you have to, we can use those same breeders to transmute and burn thorium. There's plenty of fission power to go around.
The distortion is only due to the fact that all of our internal mechanisms are based on virtual photon transfer, and thus are affected by relative velocity. For example, dark matter, which does not interact electromagnetically, does not experience "time" in the same manner as normal matter, like you or me.
Sure, but lots of bad has come of it too. Think about how hard it is to garner enough resources to actually purchase land. Then consider what level of responsibility and critical thinking is required to get those resources. This puts a "you must be so tall" limit on who gets to make decisions for representation. It's a running joke in tech in general that the average person is a near-complete idiot, and they get to vote.
Then there's the issue that those landowners were the citizens who created wealth and contributed most to the economy and by extension, taxes. In a very real way, they were the ones paying for everything, so they have a greater interest in what gets done in government. Add to this that, having opened suffrage to everyone, the track record suggests that there's no reason whatsoever to believe that all these additional voters are making any better decisions about how government should be run as compared to the "white landowners." In fact, I submit that they make just as bad decisions (if not worse) than the landowners.
Now, before someone jumps my shit and screams, "That's Racist!" let me point out that the only thing I'm saying here is that universal suffrage is probably not a good idea, and the authors of the Constitution obviously thought so as well; they speak endlessly of the "tyranny of the majority" in the Federalist Papers, and the actual concept of non-universal suffrage is codified into law in the original document itself. We have since changed this, in the name of "fair," but it doesn't seem to be working out so well.
What I propose, then, is to reinstate some kind of barrier to entry to voting, as non-discriminatory as possible, but with the intent to maintain a degree of ability in the electorate to choose wisely. I'm all for the "landowner" clause, not so much the "white." Heinlein's solution from Starship Troopers isn't such a bad idea either, but at the same time, I think a significant cleansing of government would be in order before making entering the military in the US a generally good idea, what with the utter disregard for the soldier and his post-enlistment well-being.
In summary, while it may be unrealistic to claim that no good has come of universal suffrage, it is equally unrealistic to claim that the good has outweighed the bad.
Graphics-wise, the Dell XPS desktop systems have it beat, but for all-in-one, the XPS AIO isn't quite the value of the iMac. It has double the memory, but on all but the high end uses one step lower GPU than the iMac, further reduced by being the Mobility product line as opposed to the full-spec desktop hardware. You can't get anything larger than the 20" screen and overall it's almost impossible to get matching hardware to the iMac. The CPUs are a tick slower, there's no generic video out, like on the iMac, which can drive external monitors up to 1920x1200 and S-video/component televisions. There's two FW400 ports, but no FW800. The audio out on the iMac is optical, supports AC-3 and 5.1 surround, as opposed to the two-channel on the AIO Dell.
All this aside, the Dell desktop systems are a serious value, with available quad-cores and nVidia 8800GT video standard.
The catch with the "Mac Tax" is that while you can't configure a Mac to have less than the shipping hardware (integrated camera, gigabit ethernet, do-it-yourself RAM, firewire, etc.), when pricing against equivalent hardware, they usually are cost-equal or a hair less. In the case of the Mac Pro, the difference is almost 25% given the CPU horsepower with which the system ships. At release, it was impossible to find a four-way workstation within $1000 of Apple's hardware.
This isn't to say Apple's the value leader, quite the opposite. Their surcharge on disk and RAM borders on userous; the video choices, while current at release, are updated slowly and tend not to support the more advanced configurations (SLI). That said, I'll take Apple's build quality over almost anything else, and for me at least, OSX significantly improves my workflow over Windows. YMMV.
What I want to know is, why isn't this being done in the 'States as well? For the better part of the last century, steel was one of the United States' best manufactured export. The US' steel quality was the envy of the world, and sometime in the last decade or so, it's gone nonexistent. I suspect that offshoring is the primary (if not the sole) reason for the decline, and if so, it's a sad day indeed. While the Michigan and Illinois governments did plenty to ruin the environment for business in their states, this can't be the only reason.
fuck you. When was the last time you were forced to work 80-100 hour weeks because some executive, in order to keep from looking like a bumbling incompetent imbecile, forced a product rollout against corporate policy? That lasted six goddamn months for me and about 50 other engineers, and we were thrilled, when at the three-month point, we could keep the system up by merely restarting the whole cluster (about 30 machines) only once a day!
I don't get to see the sun rise. I don't get to have a pleasant evening to myself. I don't get to see my friends without some form of work-related interruption. I can't even plan to go home at a certain time, as I get caught by work as I'm heading out the door. I can't sleep for more than four hours at a time, and have been sick for the last two months due to constant exhaustion. I can't take a vacation without work calling about some moronic thing, so kindly please have a tall frosty mug of Shut The Fuck Up and Go Fuck Yourself.
considering that one part per trillion means that in an 8-ounce glass, you get one frickin' molecule, I really doubt that this is presenting any kind of selection pressure on the symbiotic bacteria in your body.
I say it's time to just stop. Seriously, let's all pick a day, in the middle of the week, and not work. Take the power back, so to speak. If things break, ignore them. If the boss calls, don't answer. We'll all get some sleep, and pay cash at the bar that evening. Our employers are ruining our lives for a pittance, and somehow think that relentless abuse of the individuals directly responsible for their organizations' engines of revenue is a good thing, and we've been cowed into believing that some kind of retribution would be forthcoming. Well, it's not, as the bulk of IT workers suffering from overwork and sleep deprivation are so critical that they couldn't be fired even if their management so desired.
Well, boo-hoo. I'm so sorry for the First-Class jerks having to be seated last. They get real chairs, plenty of room, and have paid for that. Not to be seated first even though it makes it that much more difficult for everyone else.
Pay attention much? There are exactly five mobile carriers in the US. "No," you say, "there's dozens," but they all purchase time from one of five companies that actually own the phone network. So you may be a Bill and Ted's Excellent Mobile Service customer, but in reality you're using Verizon's network, and if they go down, you go down.
It's not that customers will put up with it, it's that there are exactly zero providers willing to offer such a service. When every single vendor will simply tell the customer to go screw, what option is there? Let's say for the sake of argument that every single customer moves to another service when their existing provider has an outage. Since they're all having outages at the same rate, all it does is swirl the market about, accomplishing nothing. All the vendors will continue to have customers regardless of what they do as in almost all cases it's a situation of "where ya gonna go?" This business tactic failed for IBM in the 1980's, and is failing for Microsoft now, but where there's essentially a legal monopoly (like telecommunications) there's zero meaningful choice.
It is for precisely this reason that MS's products have so many problems. Look at Apple, for a comparison. With less than one-tenth the resources, they're beating Microsoft at their own game. Don't believe that example? Check out the OSS movement. Same thing. Everyone using the same tools to get the job done, and stuff tends to work. I've wickedly oversimplified the situation, but the broad stroke fits.
I thought the discovery that the CO2 levels follow temperature change 800 years behind (for the last half-million years or so) kinda blew the entire anthropological global climate change theory completely out of the water. In fact, it kinda proves the opposite, that we not only didn't cause this, but that there's really nothing we can do to stop it, either.
This is a salient point. Here in Dallas, we have summers that top 115 degrees F (46C), with relative humidity of over 60%. For about five months from late April to mid September (sometimes October) simply standing outside for a length of time will kill you. That's why Texas state law requires any and all business establishments to provide water free of charge to any person requesting it.
Something else to remember about those carbon credits. When Rwanda sells you theirs, they can no longer use them to put up any electrical generation tech beyond solar, which is staggeringly expensive and very low output. As a result of this policy, the vast bulk of Africa is trapped in a pre-industrial state, with no way to climb out. Also remember that this money goes directly into the pockets of the dictatorial governments there, and not into the hands of the people.
The guy's pretty much singlehandedly responsible for the concepts and intellectual tools that describe the nature of reality at our level. Due to his work, we're now to the point of engineering electronic systems from the ground up by thinking about them, rather than getting lucky with a "that's funny" moment and making use of it.
That 40% wouldn't have remembered any of that info in the first place. It's not that these devices are replacing memory, they're augmenting memory for those for whom it's terrible, and assisting those for whom it's not.
I'm a good example. I'm cursed with remembering everything that happens to and around me. However, to make important stuff stick, I punch it into whatever media I have handy, and that cements the fact in my mind. It's a mnemonic device in my case, and an actual memory in the case of the 40% in the article.
So you're saying that less than a 1% increase in production of CO2 is enough to change the climate this much? Even with the fact that tropospheric water vapor has an order of magnitude greater effect on thermal regulation? Sorry, but knowing how effects like this pile up suggests strongly to me that the people producing these articles are pushing a pet theory. All the people screaming about warming seem to be the same ones that hate any big industry. These arguments come off as alarmist, when most of these folks agree that we'll all be dead by the time anything significant happens (if it happens at all, as a trend I've noticed is a constant downward revision of the expected impact, starting from the mid 1980s).
Sorry, it's just not enough. Furthermore, you're suggesting that a reduction of less than 1% of CO2 emissions will cool the planet? Ugh. Hey, you do know that the Earth is physically too far from Sol to maintain it's temperature without an atmosphere? It'd be really easy for us all to freeze to death. In fact, IIRC one of the worst ice ages actually got so cold at the poles that the researchers who discovered it feared that the temperature could actually drop low enough to allow CO2 to precipitate out of the air. At which point, the planet would probably freeze solid, at least at the surface, irreversibly.
Okay, for one, this one is obviously skewed. I modeled this in Excel, and wow, it's way less threatening when you actually show a real scale on the Y axis, as opposed to skewing the graph for shock value. I mean, we jump all over Tom at Tomshardware for having done this kind of thing, why should we eat it up when a "real scientist" sends it to us? We knew it's not a valid representation of the data when Tom presented it in his context, so what's different here?
Second. this guy is even worse. Where's the calculated effect of terrestrial water vapor, i.e., the stuff near the ground? It makes a way bigger difference than any of the sources listed there. In fact, compared to the CO2 value, the effect of water vapor in the troposphere wouldn't fit in that pic at all. "Anthropogenic?" Uh, sorry, but contributing less than half a percent to that CO2 value annually doesn't make all that carbon "anthropogenic."
I'm pretty much done with these people. I really fail to see how having half the highest CO2 concentrations of the past million years is going to do anything, and especially with the relatively minute contribution Homo sapiens, would be warming the world more than having an atmosphere in the first place.
Yep, actually I can. Entirely too few people in the industry realize exactly how this stuff works. In all honesty, I'd been aware of this particular aspect of v6 for a while, and didn't like it at all. Seemed like a great way to completely wreck the place.
Everybody, your host ARPs for the gateway, because your packets can't have more than one destination IP in the header!
It kills me that the guy who came up with the whole DMCA idea thought that the recording industry would continue to adapt after they modified their environment to keep from having to do so in the first place! Why would any organism continue to adapt when it could guarantee the environment wouldn't change?
What are your thoughts on Dense Plasma Focus devices? Eric Lerner's device seems feasible, save the complex electrical gear to drive the discharge into the reactants. The collapsing magnetic field acheives the inequilibrium needed to prevent most of the electron heating losses in the plasma, resulting in a significantly increased reaction rate.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not "very limited." Additionally, reprocessing waste (using breeder reactors, like every other nuclear-power-using nation on earth) expands the current supply by a factor of a million, given that you get ~1000x the fissionable Pu239, out of which the products can also be re-burned. Hell, if you have to, we can use those same breeders to transmute and burn thorium. There's plenty of fission power to go around.
The distortion is only due to the fact that all of our internal mechanisms are based on virtual photon transfer, and thus are affected by relative velocity. For example, dark matter, which does not interact electromagnetically, does not experience "time" in the same manner as normal matter, like you or me.
Sure, but lots of bad has come of it too. Think about how hard it is to garner enough resources to actually purchase land. Then consider what level of responsibility and critical thinking is required to get those resources. This puts a "you must be so tall" limit on who gets to make decisions for representation. It's a running joke in tech in general that the average person is a near-complete idiot, and they get to vote.
Then there's the issue that those landowners were the citizens who created wealth and contributed most to the economy and by extension, taxes. In a very real way, they were the ones paying for everything, so they have a greater interest in what gets done in government. Add to this that, having opened suffrage to everyone, the track record suggests that there's no reason whatsoever to believe that all these additional voters are making any better decisions about how government should be run as compared to the "white landowners." In fact, I submit that they make just as bad decisions (if not worse) than the landowners.
Now, before someone jumps my shit and screams, "That's Racist!" let me point out that the only thing I'm saying here is that universal suffrage is probably not a good idea, and the authors of the Constitution obviously thought so as well; they speak endlessly of the "tyranny of the majority" in the Federalist Papers, and the actual concept of non-universal suffrage is codified into law in the original document itself. We have since changed this, in the name of "fair," but it doesn't seem to be working out so well.
What I propose, then, is to reinstate some kind of barrier to entry to voting, as non-discriminatory as possible, but with the intent to maintain a degree of ability in the electorate to choose wisely. I'm all for the "landowner" clause, not so much the "white." Heinlein's solution from Starship Troopers isn't such a bad idea either, but at the same time, I think a significant cleansing of government would be in order before making entering the military in the US a generally good idea, what with the utter disregard for the soldier and his post-enlistment well-being.
In summary, while it may be unrealistic to claim that no good has come of universal suffrage, it is equally unrealistic to claim that the good has outweighed the bad.
Graphics-wise, the Dell XPS desktop systems have it beat, but for all-in-one, the XPS AIO isn't quite the value of the iMac. It has double the memory, but on all but the high end uses one step lower GPU than the iMac, further reduced by being the Mobility product line as opposed to the full-spec desktop hardware. You can't get anything larger than the 20" screen and overall it's almost impossible to get matching hardware to the iMac. The CPUs are a tick slower, there's no generic video out, like on the iMac, which can drive external monitors up to 1920x1200 and S-video/component televisions. There's two FW400 ports, but no FW800. The audio out on the iMac is optical, supports AC-3 and 5.1 surround, as opposed to the two-channel on the AIO Dell.
All this aside, the Dell desktop systems are a serious value, with available quad-cores and nVidia 8800GT video standard.
The catch with the "Mac Tax" is that while you can't configure a Mac to have less than the shipping hardware (integrated camera, gigabit ethernet, do-it-yourself RAM, firewire, etc.), when pricing against equivalent hardware, they usually are cost-equal or a hair less. In the case of the Mac Pro, the difference is almost 25% given the CPU horsepower with which the system ships. At release, it was impossible to find a four-way workstation within $1000 of Apple's hardware.
This isn't to say Apple's the value leader, quite the opposite. Their surcharge on disk and RAM borders on userous; the video choices, while current at release, are updated slowly and tend not to support the more advanced configurations (SLI). That said, I'll take Apple's build quality over almost anything else, and for me at least, OSX significantly improves my workflow over Windows. YMMV.
What I want to know is, why isn't this being done in the 'States as well? For the better part of the last century, steel was one of the United States' best manufactured export. The US' steel quality was the envy of the world, and sometime in the last decade or so, it's gone nonexistent. I suspect that offshoring is the primary (if not the sole) reason for the decline, and if so, it's a sad day indeed. While the Michigan and Illinois governments did plenty to ruin the environment for business in their states, this can't be the only reason.
So sad.
fuck you. When was the last time you were forced to work 80-100 hour weeks because some executive, in order to keep from looking like a bumbling incompetent imbecile, forced a product rollout against corporate policy? That lasted six goddamn months for me and about 50 other engineers, and we were thrilled, when at the three-month point, we could keep the system up by merely restarting the whole cluster (about 30 machines) only once a day!
I don't get to see the sun rise. I don't get to have a pleasant evening to myself. I don't get to see my friends without some form of work-related interruption. I can't even plan to go home at a certain time, as I get caught by work as I'm heading out the door. I can't sleep for more than four hours at a time, and have been sick for the last two months due to constant exhaustion. I can't take a vacation without work calling about some moronic thing, so kindly please have a tall frosty mug of Shut The Fuck Up and Go Fuck Yourself.
considering that one part per trillion means that in an 8-ounce glass, you get one frickin' molecule, I really doubt that this is presenting any kind of selection pressure on the symbiotic bacteria in your body.
I say it's time to just stop. Seriously, let's all pick a day, in the middle of the week, and not work. Take the power back, so to speak. If things break, ignore them. If the boss calls, don't answer. We'll all get some sleep, and pay cash at the bar that evening. Our employers are ruining our lives for a pittance, and somehow think that relentless abuse of the individuals directly responsible for their organizations' engines of revenue is a good thing, and we've been cowed into believing that some kind of retribution would be forthcoming. Well, it's not, as the bulk of IT workers suffering from overwork and sleep deprivation are so critical that they couldn't be fired even if their management so desired.
Well, boo-hoo. I'm so sorry for the First-Class jerks having to be seated last. They get real chairs, plenty of room, and have paid for that. Not to be seated first even though it makes it that much more difficult for everyone else.
Pay attention much? There are exactly five mobile carriers in the US. "No," you say, "there's dozens," but they all purchase time from one of five companies that actually own the phone network. So you may be a Bill and Ted's Excellent Mobile Service customer, but in reality you're using Verizon's network, and if they go down, you go down.
It's not that customers will put up with it, it's that there are exactly zero providers willing to offer such a service. When every single vendor will simply tell the customer to go screw, what option is there? Let's say for the sake of argument that every single customer moves to another service when their existing provider has an outage. Since they're all having outages at the same rate, all it does is swirl the market about, accomplishing nothing. All the vendors will continue to have customers regardless of what they do as in almost all cases it's a situation of "where ya gonna go?" This business tactic failed for IBM in the 1980's, and is failing for Microsoft now, but where there's essentially a legal monopoly (like telecommunications) there's zero meaningful choice.
It is for precisely this reason that MS's products have so many problems. Look at Apple, for a comparison. With less than one-tenth the resources, they're beating Microsoft at their own game. Don't believe that example? Check out the OSS movement. Same thing. Everyone using the same tools to get the job done, and stuff tends to work. I've wickedly oversimplified the situation, but the broad stroke fits.
Maybe we can get Anonymous to take this on when they're done w/ the CoS...
:)
One can hope
I thought the discovery that the CO2 levels follow temperature change 800 years behind (for the last half-million years or so) kinda blew the entire anthropological global climate change theory completely out of the water. In fact, it kinda proves the opposite, that we not only didn't cause this, but that there's really nothing we can do to stop it, either.
I wish I had mod points.
This is a salient point. Here in Dallas, we have summers that top 115 degrees F (46C), with relative humidity of over 60%. For about five months from late April to mid September (sometimes October) simply standing outside for a length of time will kill you. That's why Texas state law requires any and all business establishments to provide water free of charge to any person requesting it.
Something else to remember about those carbon credits. When Rwanda sells you theirs, they can no longer use them to put up any electrical generation tech beyond solar, which is staggeringly expensive and very low output. As a result of this policy, the vast bulk of Africa is trapped in a pre-industrial state, with no way to climb out. Also remember that this money goes directly into the pockets of the dictatorial governments there, and not into the hands of the people.
In the event you're serious:
The guy's pretty much singlehandedly responsible for the concepts and intellectual tools that describe the nature of reality at our level. Due to his work, we're now to the point of engineering electronic systems from the ground up by thinking about them, rather than getting lucky with a "that's funny" moment and making use of it.
That 40% wouldn't have remembered any of that info in the first place. It's not that these devices are replacing memory, they're augmenting memory for those for whom it's terrible, and assisting those for whom it's not.
I'm a good example. I'm cursed with remembering everything that happens to and around me. However, to make important stuff stick, I punch it into whatever media I have handy, and that cements the fact in my mind. It's a mnemonic device in my case, and an actual memory in the case of the 40% in the article.
So you're saying that less than a 1% increase in production of CO2 is enough to change the climate this much? Even with the fact that tropospheric water vapor has an order of magnitude greater effect on thermal regulation? Sorry, but knowing how effects like this pile up suggests strongly to me that the people producing these articles are pushing a pet theory. All the people screaming about warming seem to be the same ones that hate any big industry. These arguments come off as alarmist, when most of these folks agree that we'll all be dead by the time anything significant happens (if it happens at all, as a trend I've noticed is a constant downward revision of the expected impact, starting from the mid 1980s).
Sorry, it's just not enough. Furthermore, you're suggesting that a reduction of less than 1% of CO2 emissions will cool the planet? Ugh. Hey, you do know that the Earth is physically too far from Sol to maintain it's temperature without an atmosphere? It'd be really easy for us all to freeze to death. In fact, IIRC one of the worst ice ages actually got so cold at the poles that the researchers who discovered it feared that the temperature could actually drop low enough to allow CO2 to precipitate out of the air. At which point, the planet would probably freeze solid, at least at the surface, irreversibly.
Okay, for one, this one is obviously skewed. I modeled this in Excel, and wow, it's way less threatening when you actually show a real scale on the Y axis, as opposed to skewing the graph for shock value. I mean, we jump all over Tom at Tomshardware for having done this kind of thing, why should we eat it up when a "real scientist" sends it to us? We knew it's not a valid representation of the data when Tom presented it in his context, so what's different here?
Second. this guy is even worse. Where's the calculated effect of terrestrial water vapor, i.e., the stuff near the ground? It makes a way bigger difference than any of the sources listed there. In fact, compared to the CO2 value, the effect of water vapor in the troposphere wouldn't fit in that pic at all. "Anthropogenic?" Uh, sorry, but contributing less than half a percent to that CO2 value annually doesn't make all that carbon "anthropogenic."
I'm pretty much done with these people. I really fail to see how having half the highest CO2 concentrations of the past million years is going to do anything, and especially with the relatively minute contribution Homo sapiens, would be warming the world more than having an atmosphere in the first place.
Smells like scare tactics to me.
Yep, actually I can. Entirely too few people in the industry realize exactly how this stuff works. In all honesty, I'd been aware of this particular aspect of v6 for a while, and didn't like it at all. Seemed like a great way to completely wreck the place.
/v4 only
//been doing this too long
Everybody, your host ARPs for the gateway, because your packets can't have more than one destination IP in the header!
Now all that remains is to put a pint of seawater on the moon with the appropriately inscribed air cylinder shipping label.
/obscure, see if you can get it.
It kills me that the guy who came up with the whole DMCA idea thought that the recording industry would continue to adapt after they modified their environment to keep from having to do so in the first place! Why would any organism continue to adapt when it could guarantee the environment wouldn't change?
blacker than the blackest black times infinity...
What are your thoughts on Dense Plasma Focus devices? Eric Lerner's device seems feasible, save the complex electrical gear to drive the discharge into the reactants. The collapsing magnetic field acheives the inequilibrium needed to prevent most of the electron heating losses in the plasma, resulting in a significantly increased reaction rate.