Right idea, wrong formula. You don't need energy storage with a density comparable to hydrocarbons, what you're looking for is energy storage + powertrain capacity comparable to hydrocarbons (liquid, liquified or gaseous). Given the terrible energy efficiency of most heat engines and the theoretical limits they will never be able to exceed (Carnot's theorem and the Rankine cycle are good starting points) and the generally excellent efficiency of electric motors you'll end up needing less than half of the energy density compared to hydrocarbons. In practice the requirements are even lower since it is much easier to get an electric drive system to run at maximum efficiency than it is for a heat engine. Electric drive systems also don't need to idle, don't require complex and energy-consuming starting/lubricating/cooling equipment and are lighter. Electric energy storage technology is up to the job of replacing the majority of private vehicles on the road now. A few more years of development and an axe to the electric energy storage patent hoarding hydrocarbon industry would kill the internal combustion engine as a viable alternative for most commuters. Why pay at the pump when you can plug it in at home for a tenth of the price?
That is, until the new electric car tax is instituted to replace income from fuel taxes of course. Just like you'll be fined when they find blue or red diesel in your tank you will be fined when you charge your car from a non-tax-metered outlet.
And, likewise, 'righties' tend to become 'lefties' through age or experience. A conservative is just a liberal who has not been financially raped, sued, bamboozled, fired, sick, pregnant, poisoned, run over by a rich sucker with a more expensive lawyer than they can afford yet.
Technology can help 'improving' your life - for whatever interpretation of the word improve. Often this potential is negated or even reversed by business strategies.
Imagine an electronic reader device which can be used to read *anything*. All you need to do is guide the device to whatever text you want to read and it appears before your eyes - or ears for those unfortunate enough not to be able to read for whatever reason - in an instant. Anything which has ever been released by any author, available to anyone.
Technology can easily make this happen, here and now.
Which is why developers should show some restraint and NOT use the latest hardware to develop on. Use it to test the final product, sure, but keep the main development cycle and especially any dogfood phases on older hardware. You will end up with software which works fine on older spec hardware. It will fly on newer boxes.
While his estimates might be off - or not - this is not relevant. Small developers banding together to pay the protection money - either to the claimant or to a lawyer - perpetuates this racket from which both the patentees as well as the lawyers feed.
Abolish these misguided patents once and for all, don't be a part in keeping up this illegal scheme.
[system complains that it does not know what program to use to open an 'application/octet-stream' file]
2) click again, dammit!
[the same complain arises]
Usually Joe Random User will give up now, muttering that 'this damn Linux is worth no shit'.
Of course the crux here is that in Linux you can not just 'run' downloaded (or attached, same thing) files as they don't have execute permission. You need to explicitly add these permissions to those files. The next hurdle can be that wherever you downloaded that file is not in the $PATH so you need to give the full path to try to execute it.
A somewhat more enlightened Linux user will understand this and know what to do to get a downloaded file to run. Hopefully this user will also understand that it is a *bad* idea to just blindly execute whatever file arrives by email. Fortunately this seems to be the case at the moment, otherwise there *would* be more Linux-based botnets. Currently the main infection vector for Linux consists of weak passwords which are found by endless ssh probing attempts. Linux users have thus far not gone on a wild 'chmod +x $HOME/downloads/see_dancing_bunnies.bin; $HOME/downloads/see_dancing_bunnies.bin' spree.
As long as I put 200 Swedish crowns (~$30) per month on my prepaid card I have free calling within the carrier's network, free 'unlimited' [1] data and 'low' [2] rates to other networks. I can change the 'plan' on this prepaid card whenever I want so if I plan to make more international calls I can change to the 'World plan' which gives me lower international rates than available on our landline (even using carrier select prefixes which have been available for a few years now). While I still feel that all this telecommunications stuff is severely overpriced - I still pay between $0.03 and $0.10 per sent SMS, up to $0.50 if the 160 byte status message happens to cross a border - it seems that this is one of the areas where we Europeans are better off than you North Americans. Of course we do pay up to twice the price for our computers and such so maybe it evens out...
[1] I think they start lowering speed to 64 Kbit/s if I happen to go over 1 GB / month, it might be 5 GB / month as well as I never hit this limit nor would be able to with my GPRS HTC Prophet...
[2] low is relative, the price still stands in shrill contrast to the actual cost
Pfah, any spy worth his salt uses a camera. No traces, no helpful copier logs, no meddlesome Canon OCR gadgetry.
That out of the way it seems clear this trickery is not so much aimed at blocking espionage - which it won't - but more at keeping you from copying your course books. And that, dear reader, is why I keep my trusty HP 5200C in its cozy box up on the attic, ready to scan that what is deemed improper by the powers that be at my whim. It also helps that the thing is nigh indestructible and will probably outlive my machines with the required USB1 connectors.
I've tried to help them do simple things now and then, like getting a godamned photo off the phone, and it's a nightmare.
Nightmare? Why?
alias pcp='synce-pcp' pcp/Storage\ Card/images/photo.jpg/somewhere/on/your/local/box
If you'd rather use your phone as a USB mass storage device that is possible as well - just install wm5storage and you're set.
In a weird sense these Windows Mobile phones are actually quite hacker friendly. You treat them more or less like you would treat a bare-bones DOS or Windows 3.x machine by replacing anything not working the way you want it and adding what Microsoft deemed unnecessary (like the mentioned wm5storage program). It will still crash but that seems to be the norm in mobile phone land. My previous phone - a Nokia n-Gage - crashed. My wife's Sony Ericcson C702 crashes. My bowlderized HTC Prophet )which replaced the n-Gage when its screen cracked) crashes. When the thing finally dies its successor will probably crash as well... unfortunately.
...and the shiny Bang and Olufsen hifi that once graced our living room has been replaced with an MTV branded iPod dock that cost $10, not because I wanted it, but because that's the way of life at the moment.
Life's what you make it. Now, yesterday, a year ago, ten years ago, tomorrow, next week, next year, in ten years.
All those years ago you decided to pay a premium for a brand known most for its design. Some others made the same choice, most others did not. Why, then, do you now suddenly feel the need to claim that 'life is just that way' to explain the presence of an MTV-branded 'iPod' (again a product made be a company known most for its design) accessory? Some others will have made the same choices, most others will have made different ones. Nobody kept you from keeping that B&O stereo, why did you get rid of it? Was it broken? If not, what made you replace it with the aforementioned gizmo?
Was it commercials?
Was it peer pressure?
Was it a perceived urge to be 'modern'?
You have made your choices. Do not try to blame them on 'the way of life at the moment' because nobody made them for you. You did.
100 years is nothing of course. If the space race had not been about a dick size contest between two political powers but about real scientific progress those rain makers might have been pumping out gases on mars for almost half of that period by now. To a single person it might seem a daunting proposition to put effort into something which is not going to pay of before he or she is dead or gone but nevertheless this is done time and time again - just ask any middle-aged forest owner if he expects to be around to harvest those saplings he just put so much effort into planting last year.
Mathematics can not be patented, not even in the US. A computer running a program perfoming mathematic permutations however... suddenly becomes 'a method and device to...' and thus is deemed to be patentable because it is not just mathematics but 'mathematics applied using a device'. The net effect of this is that in the US mathematics is indeed patentable since there is no other sensible way to perform it except for using the device stated in the patent application - a device which happens to have been around for a long time but that is of no concern to those writing, stamping and wielding patents.
Many of those 'Chinese crap' routers are only one or two steps away from Tomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT or any of the other alternative firmware distributions. Once installed they will handle IPv6 just fine which should not come as a surprise since they're based on Linux which has done IPv6 just fine since the early 2000's.
Why yes, I do have children. And I don't have any problems with the TV waking them up as I don't have one. The computer is your friend... and the 'net of course. TV is so last century, why would you wait to be spoon-fed commercial drivel while you can find just what you want when you want it? It also has the advantage that you don't have kids craving the latest plastic doo-dahs 'as seen on TV'.
weapons, by their very nature are NOT defensive. Land mines are defensive. Bunkers are defensive. Nuclear weapons are a means of attack, thus offensive.
So why do the US, the UK, France, Russia and China have them then? Do they all plan to attack?
You know that what you said is bogus. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons have been seen as a deterrent for other nuclear powers to wage attack on whoever has the nukes. In that sense they are defensive, and that is also the only sense in which they have been deployed by most, if not all nuclear powers. I'd wager that even North Korea does not seriously contemplate nuking their neighbours as that would be a completely self-annihilating tactic.
I wonder if just saying that counts as the crime of glorifying terrorism in certain European countries?
No, you've got your countries mixed up - it is in the USA where you'd better watch what you're saying as before you know it you'll have ended up on some doubleplus ungood secret watchlist of suspect individuals. In Europe you tend to be frowned upon and you might run afoul of some laws in some European countries if you claimed those hicks with guns wear swastikas but for the most you'll be left alone to glorify your own ignorance.
A 'cloud in a box' it is? Now here we finally have the long sought after proof that magic smoke makes these computaboxes work. That mister Ellison must be a smart guy to trap so much of the magic smoke in a box - he claims that little box contains a whole whoppin' cloud of the stuff. Don't let it escape or your box won't be computin' any longer!
electively replacing the secret notes of our generation
Notice the difference between these two? Passing notes takes a lot of ingenuity, co-operation from the classmates between the sender and the receiver and it is - apart from the needed co-operation - basically free and self-reliant. Texting on the other hand... takes no ingenuity at all, depends on a whole technical infrastructure and a working phone and a subscription and a charged battery and it costs money - it is basically a rip-off.
Yay for note-passing, may this and coming generations rediscover the joy of sign language/tom tom (the drumming, not the turn-right-here-into-the-channel gizmo) on the benches/most words per square centimeter/best flying paper airplane message. If I were to design schools they would absorb radio waves between 800 and 2400 Mhz...
It is all well and good that you feel the need to justify your investment in Apple's products but that does not mean that 'FOSS has lost its way'. All it means it that you, for whatever reason, were swayed - by what or whom I don't know - to buy into said companies product line.
Meanwhile that free software which according to you - a new Apple user - suddenly has lost its way is happily making inroads in more and more markets. That Apple phone which you might feel the urge to buy after your switch to an Apple PC? It is in heavy competition with not one but several free software based phones. If you have not yet felt the need to replace all other computer-related products by Apple-branded versions there is a big chance that that router also is based around free software. You might even have experienced one of the benefits of this fact when you installed a more featured version of the operating system on that router - suddenly it could do much more than what was stated on the box.
There will be people who tell the opposite story of what you just told. They will, for their own reasons, have moved from Apple - or Microsoft or who knows which - products to free software. 'Apple has lost its way' they will proclaim, stating that in the beginning of the Mac OS X time they were doing their best to outcompete Microsoft and how they lately just seemed to feel the need to own everything and control every aspect of the use and where possible also the users of their products. That those people tell this tale does not make it true - you are a shining example of how Apple still appeals to some people.
I hope you enjoy using your Apple products as much as I enjoy using - and creating - free software. You are always welcome to use them, hardly any strings attached...
And here I was thinking that the likes of Diaspora could be nicely installed on my router. With a load of luck and a pitchfork I might be able to get it on there because this router has more memory than my previous laptop but you might as well forget about getting this incarnation of Diaspora running on a WRT54GL. If lightning had not struck last month I'd still be running one of those with no plans to replace it until, well, lightning would strike.
I will try to keep an eye on what they are doing but I'm really more interested in the protocols and APIs they use and develop. One it all settles down I'd create something which interacts with their implementation without all the buzz they deem necessary in some nice, compact and high performance language. It might even fit on a WRT54GL then which would give it an instant base of who knows how many nodes...
Repeat after me: NOT the tool, but the person. NOT the tool, but the person. NOT the tool...
Why would I repeat something which is false? Repeating it does not make it true.
If you want the truth and nothing but the truth you should realise that it is a combination of the tools used and the people who get to use them. If you still have any doubt about which of these tools is more susceptible to malware, well... good luck to you.
About those people... what, in your opinion, is easier to change: habits, or tools? If you say 'habits'... good luck to you again.
Slashdot Mirror
Right idea, wrong formula. You don't need energy storage with a density comparable to hydrocarbons, what you're looking for is energy storage + powertrain capacity comparable to hydrocarbons (liquid, liquified or gaseous). Given the terrible energy efficiency of most heat engines and the theoretical limits they will never be able to exceed (Carnot's theorem and the Rankine cycle are good starting points) and the generally excellent efficiency of electric motors you'll end up needing less than half of the energy density compared to hydrocarbons. In practice the requirements are even lower since it is much easier to get an electric drive system to run at maximum efficiency than it is for a heat engine. Electric drive systems also don't need to idle, don't require complex and energy-consuming starting/lubricating/cooling equipment and are lighter. Electric energy storage technology is up to the job of replacing the majority of private vehicles on the road now. A few more years of development and an axe to the electric energy storage patent hoarding hydrocarbon industry would kill the internal combustion engine as a viable alternative for most commuters. Why pay at the pump when you can plug it in at home for a tenth of the price?
That is, until the new electric car tax is instituted to replace income from fuel taxes of course. Just like you'll be fined when they find blue or red diesel in your tank you will be fined when you charge your car from a non-tax-metered outlet.
And, likewise, 'righties' tend to become 'lefties' through age or experience. A conservative is just a liberal who has not been financially raped, sued, bamboozled, fired, sick, pregnant, poisoned, run over by a rich sucker with a more expensive lawyer than they can afford yet.
May I suggest a better name for that 'pro' distribution: debian?
Technology can help 'improving' your life - for whatever interpretation of the word improve. Often this potential is negated or even reversed by business strategies.
Imagine an electronic reader device which can be used to read *anything*. All you need to do is guide the device to whatever text you want to read and it appears before your eyes - or ears for those unfortunate enough not to be able to read for whatever reason - in an instant. Anything which has ever been released by any author, available to anyone.
Technology can easily make this happen, here and now.
Which is why developers should show some restraint and NOT use the latest hardware to develop on. Use it to test the final product, sure, but keep the main development cycle and especially any dogfood phases on older hardware. You will end up with software which works fine on older spec hardware. It will fly on newer boxes.
You need oil but it should not need an oil change during the engine lifetime as the oil does not come into contact with any combustion products.
While his estimates might be off - or not - this is not relevant. Small developers banding together to pay the protection money - either to the claimant or to a lawyer - perpetuates this racket from which both the patentees as well as the lawyers feed.
Abolish these misguided patents once and for all, don't be a part in keeping up this illegal scheme.
Hmm, lemme see...
1) save attached file somewhere, try to click it
[system complains that it does not know what program to use to open an 'application/octet-stream' file]
2) click again, dammit!
[the same complain arises]
Usually Joe Random User will give up now, muttering that 'this damn Linux is worth no shit'.
Of course the crux here is that in Linux you can not just 'run' downloaded (or attached, same thing) files as they don't have execute permission. You need to explicitly add these permissions to those files. The next hurdle can be that wherever you downloaded that file is not in the $PATH so you need to give the full path to try to execute it.
A somewhat more enlightened Linux user will understand this and know what to do to get a downloaded file to run. Hopefully this user will also understand that it is a *bad* idea to just blindly execute whatever file arrives by email. Fortunately this seems to be the case at the moment, otherwise there *would* be more Linux-based botnets. Currently the main infection vector for Linux consists of weak passwords which are found by endless ssh probing attempts. Linux users have thus far not gone on a wild 'chmod +x $HOME/downloads/see_dancing_bunnies.bin; $HOME/downloads/see_dancing_bunnies.bin' spree.
As long as I put 200 Swedish crowns (~$30) per month on my prepaid card I have free calling within the carrier's network, free 'unlimited' [1] data and 'low' [2] rates to other networks. I can change the 'plan' on this prepaid card whenever I want so if I plan to make more international calls I can change to the 'World plan' which gives me lower international rates than available on our landline (even using carrier select prefixes which have been available for a few years now). While I still feel that all this telecommunications stuff is severely overpriced - I still pay between $0.03 and $0.10 per sent SMS, up to $0.50 if the 160 byte status message happens to cross a border - it seems that this is one of the areas where we Europeans are better off than you North Americans. Of course we do pay up to twice the price for our computers and such so maybe it evens out...
[1] I think they start lowering speed to 64 Kbit/s if I happen to go over 1 GB / month, it might be 5 GB / month as well as I never hit this limit nor would be able to with my GPRS HTC Prophet...
[2] low is relative, the price still stands in shrill contrast to the actual cost
Pfah, any spy worth his salt uses a camera. No traces, no helpful copier logs, no meddlesome Canon OCR gadgetry.
That out of the way it seems clear this trickery is not so much aimed at blocking espionage - which it won't - but more at keeping you from copying your course books. And that, dear reader, is why I keep my trusty HP 5200C in its cozy box up on the attic, ready to scan that what is deemed improper by the powers that be at my whim. It also helps that the thing is nigh indestructible and will probably outlive my machines with the required USB1 connectors.
Nightmare? Why?
alias pcp='synce-pcp' /Storage\ Card/images/photo.jpg /somewhere/on/your/local/box
pcp
If you'd rather use your phone as a USB mass storage device that is possible as well - just install wm5storage and you're set.
In a weird sense these Windows Mobile phones are actually quite hacker friendly. You treat them more or less like you would treat a bare-bones DOS or Windows 3.x machine by replacing anything not working the way you want it and adding what Microsoft deemed unnecessary (like the mentioned wm5storage program). It will still crash but that seems to be the norm in mobile phone land. My previous phone - a Nokia n-Gage - crashed. My wife's Sony Ericcson C702 crashes. My bowlderized HTC Prophet )which replaced the n-Gage when its screen cracked) crashes. When the thing finally dies its successor will probably crash as well... unfortunately.
Life's what you make it. Now, yesterday, a year ago, ten years ago, tomorrow, next week, next year, in ten years.
All those years ago you decided to pay a premium for a brand known most for its design. Some others made the same choice, most others did not. Why, then, do you now suddenly feel the need to claim that 'life is just that way' to explain the presence of an MTV-branded 'iPod' (again a product made be a company known most for its design) accessory? Some others will have made the same choices, most others will have made different ones. Nobody kept you from keeping that B&O stereo, why did you get rid of it? Was it broken? If not, what made you replace it with the aforementioned gizmo?
Was it commercials?
Was it peer pressure?
Was it a perceived urge to be 'modern'?
You have made your choices. Do not try to blame them on 'the way of life at the moment' because nobody made them for you. You did.
100 years is nothing of course. If the space race had not been about a dick size contest between two political powers but about real scientific progress those rain makers might have been pumping out gases on mars for almost half of that period by now. To a single person it might seem a daunting proposition to put effort into something which is not going to pay of before he or she is dead or gone but nevertheless this is done time and time again - just ask any middle-aged forest owner if he expects to be around to harvest those saplings he just put so much effort into planting last year.
Mathematics can not be patented, not even in the US. A computer running a program perfoming mathematic permutations however... suddenly becomes 'a method and device to...' and thus is deemed to be patentable because it is not just mathematics but 'mathematics applied using a device'. The net effect of this is that in the US mathematics is indeed patentable since there is no other sensible way to perform it except for using the device stated in the patent application - a device which happens to have been around for a long time but that is of no concern to those writing, stamping and wielding patents.
Many of those 'Chinese crap' routers are only one or two steps away from Tomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT or any of the other alternative firmware distributions. Once installed they will handle IPv6 just fine which should not come as a surprise since they're based on Linux which has done IPv6 just fine since the early 2000's.
Why yes, I do have children. And I don't have any problems with the TV waking them up as I don't have one. The computer is your friend... and the 'net of course. TV is so last century, why would you wait to be spoon-fed commercial drivel while you can find just what you want when you want it? It also has the advantage that you don't have kids craving the latest plastic doo-dahs 'as seen on TV'.
Let them.
So why do the US, the UK, France, Russia and China have them then? Do they all plan to attack?
You know that what you said is bogus. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons have been seen as a deterrent for other nuclear powers to wage attack on whoever has the nukes. In that sense they are defensive, and that is also the only sense in which they have been deployed by most, if not all nuclear powers. I'd wager that even North Korea does not seriously contemplate nuking their neighbours as that would be a completely self-annihilating tactic.
No, you've got your countries mixed up - it is in the USA where you'd better watch what you're saying as before you know it you'll have ended up on some doubleplus ungood secret watchlist of suspect individuals. In Europe you tend to be frowned upon and you might run afoul of some laws in some European countries if you claimed those hicks with guns wear swastikas but for the most you'll be left alone to glorify your own ignorance.
A 'cloud in a box' it is? Now here we finally have the long sought after proof that magic smoke makes these computaboxes work. That mister Ellison must be a smart guy to trap so much of the magic smoke in a box - he claims that little box contains a whole whoppin' cloud of the stuff. Don't let it escape or your box won't be computin' any longer!
Notice the difference between these two? Passing notes takes a lot of ingenuity, co-operation from the classmates between the sender and the receiver and it is - apart from the needed co-operation - basically free and self-reliant. Texting on the other hand... takes no ingenuity at all, depends on a whole technical infrastructure and a working phone and a subscription and a charged battery and it costs money - it is basically a rip-off.
Yay for note-passing, may this and coming generations rediscover the joy of sign language/tom tom (the drumming, not the turn-right-here-into-the-channel gizmo) on the benches/most words per square centimeter/best flying paper airplane message. If I were to design schools they would absorb radio waves between 800 and 2400 Mhz...
It is all well and good that you feel the need to justify your investment in Apple's products but that does not mean that 'FOSS has lost its way'. All it means it that you, for whatever reason, were swayed - by what or whom I don't know - to buy into said companies product line.
Meanwhile that free software which according to you - a new Apple user - suddenly has lost its way is happily making inroads in more and more markets. That Apple phone which you might feel the urge to buy after your switch to an Apple PC? It is in heavy competition with not one but several free software based phones. If you have not yet felt the need to replace all other computer-related products by Apple-branded versions there is a big chance that that router also is based around free software. You might even have experienced one of the benefits of this fact when you installed a more featured version of the operating system on that router - suddenly it could do much more than what was stated on the box.
There will be people who tell the opposite story of what you just told. They will, for their own reasons, have moved from Apple - or Microsoft or who knows which - products to free software. 'Apple has lost its way' they will proclaim, stating that in the beginning of the Mac OS X time they were doing their best to outcompete Microsoft and how they lately just seemed to feel the need to own everything and control every aspect of the use and where possible also the users of their products. That those people tell this tale does not make it true - you are a shining example of how Apple still appeals to some people.
I hope you enjoy using your Apple products as much as I enjoy using - and creating - free software. You are always welcome to use them, hardly any strings attached...
And here I was thinking that the likes of Diaspora could be nicely installed on my router. With a load of luck and a pitchfork I might be able to get it on there because this router has more memory than my previous laptop but you might as well forget about getting this incarnation of Diaspora running on a WRT54GL. If lightning had not struck last month I'd still be running one of those with no plans to replace it until, well, lightning would strike.
I will try to keep an eye on what they are doing but I'm really more interested in the protocols and APIs they use and develop. One it all settles down I'd create something which interacts with their implementation without all the buzz they deem necessary in some nice, compact and high performance language. It might even fit on a WRT54GL then which would give it an instant base of who knows how many nodes...
In rfc 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) He should find all he needs to configure his pigeon network.
Why would I repeat something which is false? Repeating it does not make it true.
If you want the truth and nothing but the truth you should realise that it is a combination of the tools used and the people who get to use them. If you still have any doubt about which of these tools is more susceptible to malware, well... good luck to you.
About those people... what, in your opinion, is easier to change: habits, or tools? If you say 'habits'... good luck to you again.