Monitors are paricularly harmful to the environment because they contain quite a bit of lead.
I've never quite understood all of the concern about monitors and lead. Almost all of that lead is vitrified in the glass, just the same way that leaded crystal drinking glasses are chock full of lead. If the lead is immobilized enough to drink out of, it wouldn't seem that monitor glass would pose a major threat.
Moreover, monitors would generally end up in a landfill with some kind of containment system. People fret about the 5 pounds of lead frozen in glass and buried in a landfill, yet anybody can go down to Wal-Mart, plop down a couple of bucks for a pound of lead airgun pellets, and indiscriminately scatter them around the environment. Why no comparable outcry about that?
Re:sum zero gain
on
Water From Wind
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· Score: 3, Informative
and if the water content of oceans diminishes, the salt content increases proportionately
Umm, any water collected by these things would end up either: (a) re-evaporating locally or (b) running into a river. In the first case, there's no net change in water distribution. In the second case, the fresh water ultimately ends up in an ocean, restoring the salinity levels.
At any rate, we've been mining huge amounts of water out of ancient aquifers for decades without worrying about ocean salinity. But that is still an insignificant drop in the bucket compared to the real impact on salinity: the massive influx of fresh water that is currently coming from from melting polar ice.
1. a person who engages in the profession of architecture.
2. a person professionally engaged in the design of certain large constructions other than buildings and the like: landscape architect; naval architect.
3. the deviser, maker, or creator of anything: the architects of the Constitution of the United States.
verb (used with object)
4. to plan, organize, or structure as an architect: The house is well architected.
It looks like 3 out of 4 definitions of the term don't match your criteria. Maybe you should hold off on your wrath unless these people start wielding building blueprints and claim to be something like *Registered Architects*.
This is nothing new. The term "Computer Architecture" has been in widespread use for many decades now.
You should try that scheme the next time you buy a house. "I'm prepared to offer you $300,000 for that house!", then hand over a check for $100,000 at the closing. When the seller asks you WTF?, you can say "When I quoted $300,000, what I meant was the sum total of my mortgage payments."
Most often it is the result of grave incompetence with the interventionists.
The fundamental problem with your theory is that in the real world, there are always interventionists. It is completely unrealistic to assume that you could somehow eliminate them.
That may happen for a day or two. Then normal competition will set in, some rival vendors will set the price 5 cents lower to grab sales from would be "penny skimmers", and on average everything will even out to exactly the same price as today.
However, much of that cost difference is because the current fossil fuel infrastructure is set up at a huge industrial scale, and this solar power stuff are produced in a boutique fashion. There may not be any intrinsic reason for solar power to be more expensive if production were scaled up.
One comparable example is aluminum beverage cans. If you look at them closely, they're a marvel of precision engineering. Still, they currently don't cost much more than 5 cents per piece to make, mostly because they are cranked out by the billions every month. Now imagine that you didn't have the huge existing food industry to drive that market and only a few thousand cans were produced monthly worldwide. Because of the overhead for the elaborate process that it takes to form the cans, I'd be surprised if you could purchase aluminum pop cans for less than $20 each. However, that wouldn't mean that aluminum cans are intrinsically expensive to make with current technology; it just would mean that production rates aren't big enough to create economies of scale.
An asteroid impact by the way is just as likely and will prove probably far deadlier to
all species on the planet.
That's complete bunk. Please at least do some rudimentary analysis before spouting off.
An asteroid like the one that killed off the dinosaurs might hit every 50,000,000 years, so your lifetime risk of being killed by that is around 2 in 1 million. Far more likely is a smallish asteroid that hits an ocean and causes a tsunami that wipes out several coastal cities, maybe killing 1% of the world's population, but that's still not likely to happen more than every 10,000 years. So that's about a 1 in 1 million lifetime risk averaged over the whole population. If you add in intermediate cases, you probably get several more 1 in 1 million chances; let's say 1 in 100,000.
By contrast, a single pandemic within the past lifetime killed about 3% of the population. Just that event indicates a lifetime risk somewhere in the ballpark of 1 in 30. Even if that was an anomaly, there's no doubt that the pandemic risk is orders of magnitude greater than the risks from asteroids. If anything, there's currently too much hype about asteroid impacts and not enough on disease outbreaks.
The risk of gamma ray bursts is totally negligible because there are no stars within a lethal range that are at risk of going supernova.
Re:A few interesting things about the bird flu
on
Cod Enzyme Kills Bird Flu
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nevertheless, in contrast to most every other disease, an influenza pandemic *did* suddenly kill ~50 million people less than a century ago. This proves that it can happen, and nothing fundamental has changed that would prevent it from happening again. None of your hemming and hawing changes that.
The key flaw in your argument is that accidents are ACCIDENT'S
So what? The end result is what matters: thousands of US troops killed by speeding drivers in their own homeland in the past few decades, vs. ~100 troops killed by terrorists inside this country. The troops need to start protecting themselves from the threats that face them on their own soil. In fact, we should not just rely on an air war. Our ground-based forces should be setting up random checkpoints to screen for drunks and other hazardous drivers.
And you say it's harder to protect against bad driving than against terrorists. That's not true: traffic enforcement is a self-funding operation. We can actually expand our military capabilities at no cost to the law-abiding taxpayer by utilizing the revenue stream from traffic violations. Unlike terrorists, bad drivers are easy to spot, and they will be relatively docile once apprehended, especially if we use military justice legalese to eliminate annoying and inefficient formalities like traffic court cases.
The Defense Department gets involved because we've got hundreds of bases inside the United States that are potential terrorist targets.
Let's apply the same logic to other threats to our armed forces. For example: speeding on our nations highways. There are almost 2 million military personell in this country, and they're exposed to risks on our highways just like the rest of us. Statistically, on average each of us has about a 1 in 10,000 risk of being killed each year in an auto accident. That would mean that just since 9/11, probably over 1000 of our troops have been killed in accidents, not to mention thousands more serious casualties. This is a bigger loss to our military than almost any conceivable terrorist threat to our military bases would be, and about 1/3 as much as we've lost in Iraq.
Now, we can presume that most accidents involve excessive speeds. Clearly, to mitigate this huge drain on the nation's defenses, we must fight speeding. I say that it's high time that we took advantage of the assets we have to cut down on this threat. We should task the Air Force to use their fleet of unmanned drones to patroll the skies over our highways. With the advanced imaging technology, they should be able to track and evaluate nearly every vehicle on our major freeways. Once people start getting tickets with a NORAD return address nearly every time they violate the law, they're going to start thinking twice about putting our troops at risk on our roadways. It would be a huge tragedy if we as a nation are unwilling or unable to use every tool at our disposal to protect our troops.
With that in mind, it's clear that the only thing that will effectively protect us from the possibility that terrorists will cause more episodes like this one is to form a new cabinet-level agency: the Department of Offworld Security.
There's a whole lot of work for them to do. For starters: why are gels and liquids still allowed in rocket payloads? Maybe this satellite was destroyed by gels and liquids, maybe it wasn't. But don't we owe it to ourselves to be totally sure that it doesn't happen in the future?
That's all DST is: consistently applied winter hours. It's a lot simpler than trying to remember individual different winter hour times for each of hundreds of businesses.
Since very few people's work or school schedules would change, the extra time in the morning would be a uselessly short interval with a looming workday ahead of it. Plus, in the real world, only maniacs get up before they absolutely have to.
You're getting ~100 extra hours of real-world useful daylight time in exchange for spending 3 minutes per year setting your clocks. It's a net benefit. A lot of people seem to love making contrarian complaints about DST, but it's really making a mountain out of a molehill.
You think that "hot coffee" is no big deal probably because you've only dealt with "normal" coffee, which is usually around 150F/50C. (And in fact, that's about how hot it is when it comes out of my drip machine.) McDonald's was serving coffee at almost 200F/80C, which is about twice as hot relative to body temperature as most consumers would expect. What's more, they put it in insulated foam cups with lids that stop evaporation, so the coffee stays that hot for much longer than people expect.
Almost everyone would exercise a lot more caution handling a pot of water at a full rolling boil on their laps than a cup of coffee. However, McDonalds was selling something that looked just like the latter, but was actually almost as dangerous as the former. Moreover, they had received multiple reports of injuries due to this, and did nothing.
Even using assembler macros and prefab libraries of general-purpose assembler functions you're generally no worse off than the compiler.
I don't know how true that is, given that assembler macros and fixed assembler APIs won't be particularly good at inlining calls and then integrating the optimizations of the inlined code with the particular facets of the surrounding code for each expansion.
*and no, please don't quote the "magic compiler" myth... "modern compilers are so good nowadays that they can beat human written assembly code in just about every case". Only people who have never programmed extensively in assembly believe that.
I've programmed extensively in assembly. Your statement may be true up to a couple of thousand lines of code. Past that, to avoid going insane, you'll start using things like assembler macros and your own prefab libraries of general-purpose assembler functions. Once that happens, a compiler that can tirelessly do global optimizations is probably going to beat you hands down.
it starts at $1000, which given it's also a decently powerful modern computer
However, I doubt that most people would actually use it as a computer. A couple of years ago I put together a MythTV box, and I had the idea that as a bonus it would be handy to have a computer system in my living room. It turns out that even though it's a perfectly fine computer, I rarely if ever use it as anything other than a PVR. Even though it's directly hooked to an HDTV monitor with an HDMI cable, the resolution still isn't very good for reading text. Somehow it's a lot worse at showing high-contrast details than the equivalent pixel-count computer monitor would be; TV electronics just don't seem to be designed with text in mind.
Sitting way back on the couch makes matters worse, and using a wireless keyboard on my lap is incredibly clumsy and frustrating. Just browsing the web feels klunky, and doing any kind of serious work is out of the question. Even a lot of PC games seem to be written assuming that you're sitting upright in a chair with both a mouse and a full 104-key keyboard on a stable surface in front of you. It seems to me that investing in a high-end system for the living room would be a waste of money for most people.
You're basically saying you'll test a BMW if you can get it for the price of a Pinto.
A more accurate stupid car analogy would be the situation back when Cadillac started selling rebadged Chevrolet Cavaliers. Same crappy hardware, but with some extra bling tacked on.
Re:I've been using vi for so long...
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
I have one of those Microsoft Natural keyboards with the huge left Alt key that sits right under the left thumb. I've mapped to , and it takes only the tiniest movement to hit that combo. I like that better than having to reach for any other of the non-character keys. (In fact, like other people have pointed out, even though I hit that combo hundreds of times per day, it's now subconscious. I couldn't really recall exactly which keys it was without pulling up the editor.)
If somebody had created a CPU architecture that provided a significantly cheaper, higher-performing and less power hungry general-purpose processor than x86 derivatives, and done so *consistently* over multiple fab generations, then maybe the world would have switched. But nobody ever did, so the world hasn't switched.
Probably the reason for this is that there just isn't that much real-world performance to be gained by playing around with the user-visible view of the instruction architecture, which right now is an implementation detail that occupies a tiny corner of the die.
Slashdot Mirror
If is yes and when is now.
Capisce?
I've never quite understood all of the concern about monitors and lead. Almost all of that lead is vitrified in the glass, just the same way that leaded crystal drinking glasses are chock full of lead. If the lead is immobilized enough to drink out of, it wouldn't seem that monitor glass would pose a major threat.
Moreover, monitors would generally end up in a landfill with some kind of containment system. People fret about the 5 pounds of lead frozen in glass and buried in a landfill, yet anybody can go down to Wal-Mart, plop down a couple of bucks for a pound of lead airgun pellets, and indiscriminately scatter them around the environment. Why no comparable outcry about that?
Umm, any water collected by these things would end up either: (a) re-evaporating locally or (b) running into a river. In the first case, there's no net change in water distribution. In the second case, the fresh water ultimately ends up in an ocean, restoring the salinity levels.
At any rate, we've been mining huge amounts of water out of ancient aquifers for decades without worrying about ocean salinity. But that is still an insignificant drop in the bucket compared to the real impact on salinity: the massive influx of fresh water that is currently coming from from melting polar ice.
It looks like 3 out of 4 definitions of the term don't match your criteria. Maybe you should hold off on your wrath unless these people start wielding building blueprints and claim to be something like *Registered Architects*.
This is nothing new. The term "Computer Architecture" has been in widespread use for many decades now.
You should try that scheme the next time you buy a house. "I'm prepared to offer you $300,000 for that house!", then hand over a check for $100,000 at the closing. When the seller asks you WTF?, you can say "When I quoted $300,000, what I meant was the sum total of my mortgage payments."
The fundamental problem with your theory is that in the real world, there are always interventionists. It is completely unrealistic to assume that you could somehow eliminate them.
It seems like for every listing I see, reserve price == Buy it Now price.
That may happen for a day or two. Then normal competition will set in, some rival vendors will set the price 5 cents lower to grab sales from would be "penny skimmers", and on average everything will even out to exactly the same price as today.
One comparable example is aluminum beverage cans. If you look at them closely, they're a marvel of precision engineering. Still, they currently don't cost much more than 5 cents per piece to make, mostly because they are cranked out by the billions every month. Now imagine that you didn't have the huge existing food industry to drive that market and only a few thousand cans were produced monthly worldwide. Because of the overhead for the elaborate process that it takes to form the cans, I'd be surprised if you could purchase aluminum pop cans for less than $20 each. However, that wouldn't mean that aluminum cans are intrinsically expensive to make with current technology; it just would mean that production rates aren't big enough to create economies of scale.
That's complete bunk. Please at least do some rudimentary analysis before spouting off.
An asteroid like the one that killed off the dinosaurs might hit every 50,000,000 years, so your lifetime risk of being killed by that is around 2 in 1 million. Far more likely is a smallish asteroid that hits an ocean and causes a tsunami that wipes out several coastal cities, maybe killing 1% of the world's population, but that's still not likely to happen more than every 10,000 years. So that's about a 1 in 1 million lifetime risk averaged over the whole population. If you add in intermediate cases, you probably get several more 1 in 1 million chances; let's say 1 in 100,000.
By contrast, a single pandemic within the past lifetime killed about 3% of the population. Just that event indicates a lifetime risk somewhere in the ballpark of 1 in 30. Even if that was an anomaly, there's no doubt that the pandemic risk is orders of magnitude greater than the risks from asteroids. If anything, there's currently too much hype about asteroid impacts and not enough on disease outbreaks.
The risk of gamma ray bursts is totally negligible because there are no stars within a lethal range that are at risk of going supernova.
Nevertheless, in contrast to most every other disease, an influenza pandemic *did* suddenly kill ~50 million people less than a century ago. This proves that it can happen, and nothing fundamental has changed that would prevent it from happening again. None of your hemming and hawing changes that.
Sure you could do that... if your goal was to simulate the blast effects of a small nuclear explosion.
Life just wouldn't be complete without the ability to fully experience those spastic dancing silhouettes on lowermybills.com ads.
So what? The end result is what matters: thousands of US troops killed by speeding drivers in their own homeland in the past few decades, vs. ~100 troops killed by terrorists inside this country. The troops need to start protecting themselves from the threats that face them on their own soil. In fact, we should not just rely on an air war. Our ground-based forces should be setting up random checkpoints to screen for drunks and other hazardous drivers.
And you say it's harder to protect against bad driving than against terrorists. That's not true: traffic enforcement is a self-funding operation. We can actually expand our military capabilities at no cost to the law-abiding taxpayer by utilizing the revenue stream from traffic violations. Unlike terrorists, bad drivers are easy to spot, and they will be relatively docile once apprehended, especially if we use military justice legalese to eliminate annoying and inefficient formalities like traffic court cases.
Let's apply the same logic to other threats to our armed forces. For example: speeding on our nations highways. There are almost 2 million military personell in this country, and they're exposed to risks on our highways just like the rest of us. Statistically, on average each of us has about a 1 in 10,000 risk of being killed each year in an auto accident. That would mean that just since 9/11, probably over 1000 of our troops have been killed in accidents, not to mention thousands more serious casualties. This is a bigger loss to our military than almost any conceivable terrorist threat to our military bases would be, and about 1/3 as much as we've lost in Iraq.
Now, we can presume that most accidents involve excessive speeds. Clearly, to mitigate this huge drain on the nation's defenses, we must fight speeding. I say that it's high time that we took advantage of the assets we have to cut down on this threat. We should task the Air Force to use their fleet of unmanned drones to patroll the skies over our highways. With the advanced imaging technology, they should be able to track and evaluate nearly every vehicle on our major freeways. Once people start getting tickets with a NORAD return address nearly every time they violate the law, they're going to start thinking twice about putting our troops at risk on our roadways. It would be a huge tragedy if we as a nation are unwilling or unable to use every tool at our disposal to protect our troops.
With that in mind, it's clear that the only thing that will effectively protect us from the possibility that terrorists will cause more episodes like this one is to form a new cabinet-level agency: the Department of Offworld Security.
There's a whole lot of work for them to do. For starters: why are gels and liquids still allowed in rocket payloads? Maybe this satellite was destroyed by gels and liquids, maybe it wasn't. But don't we owe it to ourselves to be totally sure that it doesn't happen in the future?
That's all DST is: consistently applied winter hours. It's a lot simpler than trying to remember individual different winter hour times for each of hundreds of businesses.
Since very few people's work or school schedules would change, the extra time in the morning would be a uselessly short interval with a looming workday ahead of it. Plus, in the real world, only maniacs get up before they absolutely have to.
You're getting ~100 extra hours of real-world useful daylight time in exchange for spending 3 minutes per year setting your clocks. It's a net benefit. A lot of people seem to love making contrarian complaints about DST, but it's really making a mountain out of a molehill.
Almost everyone would exercise a lot more caution handling a pot of water at a full rolling boil on their laps than a cup of coffee. However, McDonalds was selling something that looked just like the latter, but was actually almost as dangerous as the former. Moreover, they had received multiple reports of injuries due to this, and did nothing.
I don't know how true that is, given that assembler macros and fixed assembler APIs won't be particularly good at inlining calls and then integrating the optimizations of the inlined code with the particular facets of the surrounding code for each expansion.
I've programmed extensively in assembly. Your statement may be true up to a couple of thousand lines of code. Past that, to avoid going insane, you'll start using things like assembler macros and your own prefab libraries of general-purpose assembler functions. Once that happens, a compiler that can tirelessly do global optimizations is probably going to beat you hands down.
However, I doubt that most people would actually use it as a computer. A couple of years ago I put together a MythTV box, and I had the idea that as a bonus it would be handy to have a computer system in my living room. It turns out that even though it's a perfectly fine computer, I rarely if ever use it as anything other than a PVR. Even though it's directly hooked to an HDTV monitor with an HDMI cable, the resolution still isn't very good for reading text. Somehow it's a lot worse at showing high-contrast details than the equivalent pixel-count computer monitor would be; TV electronics just don't seem to be designed with text in mind.
Sitting way back on the couch makes matters worse, and using a wireless keyboard on my lap is incredibly clumsy and frustrating. Just browsing the web feels klunky, and doing any kind of serious work is out of the question. Even a lot of PC games seem to be written assuming that you're sitting upright in a chair with both a mouse and a full 104-key keyboard on a stable surface in front of you. It seems to me that investing in a high-end system for the living room would be a waste of money for most people.
I have one of those Microsoft Natural keyboards with the huge left Alt key that sits right under the left thumb. I've mapped to , and it takes only the tiniest movement to hit that combo. I like that better than having to reach for any other of the non-character keys. (In fact, like other people have pointed out, even though I hit that combo hundreds of times per day, it's now subconscious. I couldn't really recall exactly which keys it was without pulling up the editor.)
Probably the reason for this is that there just isn't that much real-world performance to be gained by playing around with the user-visible view of the instruction architecture, which right now is an implementation detail that occupies a tiny corner of the die.