Nah, it's alright, because they communicate using WiFi, and we can jam that no problem. That's what the big thing on Takara is -- a giant wifi amplifier - basically a really large microwave oven. SO no worry about the spiders replicators getting outta control. And we have the ass-guard to back us up.
I actually don't watch it on tv. I use bittorent to download the episodes. Is this any better?
Yes my heads starts to spin when I read this stuff. My bullshit detectors go off too. But if someone with bags of money decides to start a dotcom 2.0 company in San Francisco and pay me $120,000 per year to go slap together a few applications, I'll pretend I believe.
I feel like I am reading Wired or Mondo 2000 circa 1997 when I read about Web 2.0.
Honestly, though, what novel and useful things have happened lately? The only thing I can think of is the potential that SVG (vector graphics) in mozilla offers. RSS, blogs, myspace, and most everything else I can think of just isn't exciting. VoIP has some potential. Wifi has done a lot, but I wonder if the rate of improvement in it will slacken. What else is there?
I think I'll stay with good old Internet (Web 1.3.55.89) for now, thanks.
As much as I think ICANN is a bunch of morons (.museum? gimmie a break!), I am sure things would only be worse if the UN were to gain control of the root servers.
As far as IP space goes, there are lies and liars everywhere. There's quite enough IPv4 space, if it were used correctly. Much of those problem depends on updating the infrastructure. Lots of stuff can break if you start changing netmasks, etc.
One of the really big problems is the size of the route tables when you run BGP4. Cisco router memory is expensive, and each additional route added to the BGP4 table takes up a few more bytes in (practically) all the BGP4 routers around the world. Yet, some organizations are still advertising several netblocks when they could do with one larger netblock. Why? Because there's no policy on aggregating legacy and therefore 'grandfathered' IP space - if an organization gets IP space under ARIN policy, they are forever subject to ARIN fees and policies. If the organization keeps its legacy IP space, no fees are incurred.
What needs to happen is a change in policy so that IP space can be aggregated without penalty. Fees should be charged for new IP space allocations only.
Then, I would aggregate my IP space and save some route memory for everyone.
Yes, it's the same, and it should be expected to be so. THe idea is, you have alphas and betas and then when you get something that does everything you expect it to, and you don't know about any bugs, you start publish "release candidate 1". But sometimes there are bugs, so you fix them, and put out "release candidate 2", and let all the monkeys hammer on it some more, and sure enough they break some things so you fix them and try again with 'release candidate 4' - and lo and behold, no bugs are found! at least within the deadline, at which point there's NOTHING TO FIX, so you call it 'final' or 'release' and tell the world.
Blunder that wasn't -- well, either he made a blunder by introducing a cosmological constant, or made a blunder by removing it. In either case, he madea blunder. And 10% isn't really that close, unless you're playing horseshoues or handgrenades.
I must address something that has been bothering me. At first it was just a tremor of doubt, but now it is gaining steam...will it become a roaring thunder...
EINSTEIN WAS HUMAN! Whew! I said it! He made mistakes, and not just the blunder being refered to here. For instance, he rejected much of quantum mechanics that has now become fairly well accepted. I am sure there's plenty more.
It bothers me that this man has such reverance in modern pop-sci, where he has become such a cultural icon that his fuzzy hair and moustache are an ideogram for genius. NOt only has he been wrong in the past, some parts of his lauded theories will most likely be proven wrong in the future -- but you may not hear about such proof until years later, if ever, because so few in the scientific community are willing to suggest he was in error. What if we can't ever measure gravity waves? Does that mean we aren't good enough, or does it mean that Einstein was wrong about their existance? Where is this blind faith we have in the man based? So many would seem to claim that Einstein was behind the A-bomb's invention (which he would disclaim, because he wanted to be "a man of peace"), and the contributions of others like Fermi are mere footnoes. Another fallacy is that the A-bomb ensured U.S. Victory in WW2, which is false: By the time The Bomb(s) were dropped, The Axis in Europe had been defeated, and Japan was on the brink of starvation. Neither did the invention of the A-bomb do any good against the Soviet Union, as traitors in the US and UK soon gave the USSR The Bomb.
I'll stop here, but I think it's time that this Einstein bubble was burst. Maybe I'll write a book.
You're jumping up and down about nothing. GSM has been in the US for a while. Systems other than GSM had been used in Europe besides GSM, and CDMA is still used throughout China. CDMA has it's advantages, so does GSM. If anyone cares, I can pull out the references.
There's many things to get annoyed at the US government for. Not standardizing on GSM is not one of them.
No, you can't. War is natural, just like evolution. Or do you believe in 'Intelligent Design'? And overty is just the name for the people on the low end of the totem pole. For instance, some people are now claiming that lack of broadband Internet makes them 'victims of poverty' - give me a break.
Does anyone remember the name of the DB software that BBN (Bolt Beranek Newman) produced? An old friend of mine was one of the last people in the world that used it.
Described the way it is, it sort of makes sense. But so does John Titor. That fact that he is being dis'd by NASA doesn't mean much - they are famous for bureacratic bungling and this wouldn't be any different. Neither does it surprise me that he hasn't received any funding. The world economy couldn't easy handle such a paradigm shift. That doesn't mean that Exxon, BP, Shell, and various governments don't have departments to do research into these types of developments. It is to their great benefit to do so, even if they don't tell the public what they discover.
I admit I'm ignorant at this level of physics. I've also learned that even friends of mine who know much more about it than I do, are too easy to judge someone as a crackpot, or portray them as a misunderstood genius, because of various personal reasons.
If there were some micro-capitalization scheme for this, I might buy in. If I could get a share of this invention for $20, I'd risk it. The chances of success are better than a lottery ticket.
You've obviously never been there. Due to preferential admission and so forth, there's now quite a number of women at MIT. Too bad most of them are foreign.
It's horrible. It looks like something Apple would come up with. I'll stick to the old logo, thanks, and delete or scratch out the new one wherever I have the ability to do so. It's a travesty!
You comments regarding the errors inherent in machine translation or cogent, but there's also much room for error with human translation. When it's REALLY IMPORTANT to get it right, I believe that multiple translators should be emplyed to do so. For instance, George H.W. Bush mumbles something that he wants to communicate to Nicolas Sarkozy. Bush's translator, who I will call Robert Johnson, is a native speaker of American English (and not for political reasons alone), who has a degree in French and fifteen years of experience as a translator. Johnson then emails the original and French version of Bush's mumblings to his counterpart in the French government, Mme. DuBois, who is a native speaker of French with a degree in English and ten years of experience as a translator, and she suggests some changes to Mr. Johnson's translation that make the meaning more clear. Johnson and DuBois agree on a final version, and submit this to Mme. DuBois' supervisor, who then chooses a translator unknown to DuBois, M. Grosjean, and has the document translated back into English. The French government sends this translation to the American government, who then assigns a Dr. George Hapgood to work with M. Grosjean, and after some discussion Grosjean and Hapgood submit the translation back to English, which is then given to George Bush, who will then raise an alarm only if there are significant deviations in meaning between what he originally said and what he received back.
I have no idea if this actually happens with important documents like peace treaties and party invitations among world leaders, but I hope that they do.
For someone living in the United States, it's probably a good idea to learn Spanish, and that won't change any time soon.
That really depends on your field of woek, and your geographic location. Certainly, if you live in Miami, you're going to need Spanish, but probably not so much if you live in Montpelier, Vermont, where some French much come in more handy. In either location, if you are a programmer, it's not nearly as crucial as if, for instance, you worked at the tourist information booth, or were a police officer. In spite of the inroads that Spanish is making into the US,it doesn't have have much economic power. It is clearly quite a different situation than English as a second language, where there are clear economic advantages to learning it. I only wish that more emphasis was placed not only on learning the basics of English, but attaining mastery of it.
This is great, now that HostAP and Centrino are in the kernel. We've needed this to be in the mainstream kernel for some time. But Atheros support is still missing, and it's just as important, if not more important, than either of those chipsets. Most people are aware of the MadWifi drivers with closed-source HAL (i.e. part of the driver is closed source), but there's also a project by OpenBSD to make a completely open source driver for the Atheros cards, called OpenHAL. It's been ported to linux: http://cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu/cvs/roofnet/release/ openhal/ - but needs testing. Please work on it!
Quality Control on Slashdot is low, and this is represented by the following fortune I was just provided:
"My idea of roughing it turning the air conditioner too low."
Which is a mangled version of the original quote, which went something like: "My idea of roughing it is turning the air conditioner to low". This is another example of the hazards involved in letting a spelling checking program do all of the quality control in a prose composition. Even though the sentence has two errors, neither of them were caused by spelling.
I guess Slashdot could feel in good company, though. I remember when, it the distant past, the New York Times had a special prize if you found an error on the first page of the paper. I think the prize was nominal, something such as being credited in the paper, in the corrections section or something similar. It's obvious they no longer care. It's pretty easy to find grammatical mistakes on the front page of the Time. But my favorite one of all was quite a huge and obvious one, which I hope I was not the only one to notice. When the Pope visited New York, the Times made a reference to the large number of Catholics in New York, "...the almost six Catholics...", dropping the word million. Pretty damned funny, if you ask me.
What amazes me about spelling and grammar errors is how often they are committed by people who are much more meticulous in other endeavors, pften while in the process of picking nite. So many programmers, for instance, who will make criticism over the structure of a program - its "correctness" - can't be bothered to make the elementary efforts to correct their own prose.
Yes...from America and American Indians. So too has the disease of Tobacco, and there is evidence that athritis is a condition and not a disease, and one of the causes may be a prion which came from American Indians.
The American Indians got a boatload of diseases, including smallpox and the plague, and alcohol, and gambling casinos.
The reasons why Downs Syndrome would occur more frequently in the European race, would most likely not be genetic, but societal: Downs syndrome has been shown to become more likely when the parents are older than 40 (moreso the age of the female than the male parent). People of the European race, due to societal factors, tend to have their children later in life, which would account for in increase in children with Downs Syndrome.
On another topic, I wonder how much it would cost and how I would go about getting tested for CCR5. Not that I engange in activity that would make me at high risk for HIV, nor would I do so, but it would be kind of nice to know.
I am a vegetarian. I hate PETA: I think they are a bunch of lying wusses.
First let me explain the difference between vegetarian and vegan for those of you that don't know: A vegetarian doesn't eat meat or meat products (i.e. meat fats, gravy, etc). A vegan doesn't consume any animal products, this of course includes meat and meat products, but also milk and milk products (like cheese) and eggs and egg products.
I love cheese. I eat lots of it. My reasons for not eating meat are my own, and several. Go ahead, carnivores and omnivores, eat what you want. If you are concerned about peak oil and self sufficiency, it might be good to start cutting down on the meat consumption because the nutrition that meat gives is far less efficient in power consumption than eating vegetables and grains. Much petrochemicals are required for fertilizer. As petroleum becomes more expensive, so will fetilizer and the food that depends on that fertiziler but this will be magnified by meat, particularly beef. There are ways of not using petrochemicals (mostly natural gas) for making fertilizer, of course, but these are not currently dominant. So expect that an increase in the price of oil will have a domino effect into food, which will be magnified in meats. Milk products as well, I know, I may have to cut down on that extra sharp cheddar habit.
Damned Stargate geeks...I am becoming addicted to that show. Just watched '1969' for the second time. You know, Daniel does look pretty good with those tiny glasses and his hair slicked back.
But yeah, the ancients...Merlin was one...Do you think Jesus was a goa'uld?
The GPL as it stands was successful because it's a careful balance between public rights and the rights of owners of derivates. It's well understood, tested in court, and widely used.
The GPL3 seem to want to expand the rights of the public. I am not entirely opposed to such a license existing. After all, people have the right to license their creations as they see fit. But I won't accept any software that comes with such a horribly binding contract.
What's worse is that it has the GPL stamp on it. This is going to cause confusion among many, who think that software currently licensed under the GPL2 is going to get these restrictions. Alarmist, half baked new reports will only reinforce that fear, driving users into the waiting arms of Microsoft and Sun.
I am not making any more donations to the FSF, and am actively discouraging other from doing so, while they pursue the goals of GPL3. And, if I see RMS in the halls of MIT, I am going to give him a piece of my mind. Maybe I'll even have T-shirts made up.
Thanks for your comments. Even the disappointing ones at least weren't rude;)
Another idea would be wind power - sailing trains. But hey, I am glad to see that at least the idea has some credence, even if it isn't yet ready for a business plan.
I was reading about this race, and the cars involved, and the comments here on slashdot about "it s not the future" because the cars are too slow. That may be true.
But what about solar trains? I know that rail systems tend to be designed with as little rolling friction as possible, so that most of the work involved is overcoming intertia. Imagine a train, with solar cells on the roof of each boxcar connected to an electric locomotive on one end or the other. It would start like one of those circus stunts of a guy pulling a rain car with his teeth, i.e. very slowly but the solar cells powering the electric locomotives gradually add some good momentum, and things start moving at a good clip. When night falls, they gradually slow down, and come to a stop for the night.
Imagine that this is continuous, on a homogenous all-solar rail system. Because of the relative uniformity of solar radiation within the medium range, the movement of the various trains on the track will be fairly uniform. Trains should seldom have to brake, and even this braking could be be harnessed, the electric motors used as slow brakes and generators, storing the energy in batteries.
Of course, these trains would be slow. It might take weeks for cargo to get from one end of australia or the US to another. It would also only work where the rail system is pretty flat, unless the aformentioned recovery of inertia can be done with high efficieny and capacity.
It could be useful for commodities that don't have to move fast. Things like ores. Not things like food, which would go bad.
I guess the largest problem with this idea is that it would require a separate rail system, to keep the fast trains from being stuck behind these slow movers. Building such a rail system is expensive.
Right now, the primary problem is that of safety. flying car already exists. The big problem, from what I understand is getting the FAA to change the regulations to create a special class of pilot's license for these things. Once that happens, investment in large factories will drive the price down.
The problem I have with flying cars is that I am turning into a grumpy old man as I get older, and am sick of the noise caused by cars and airplanes. I'd like to move out to the country somewhere and be away from that noise. But if flying cars can just zip on over my property, i'd have less privacy and freedom from noise.
Maybe if special 'skyways' were created and that my serene castle in the country was far from it, I might be happy. But I doubt that will happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, it's alright, because they communicate using WiFi, and we can jam that no problem. That's what the big thing on Takara is -- a giant wifi amplifier - basically a really large microwave oven. SO no worry about the spiders replicators getting outta control. And we have the ass-guard to back us up.
I actually don't watch it on tv. I use bittorent to download the episodes. Is this any better?
Yes my heads starts to spin when I read this stuff. My bullshit detectors go off too. But if someone with bags of money decides to start a dotcom 2.0 company in San Francisco and pay me $120,000 per year to go slap together a few applications, I'll pretend I believe.
I feel like I am reading Wired or Mondo 2000 circa 1997 when I read about Web 2.0.
Honestly, though, what novel and useful things have happened lately? The only thing I can think of is the potential that SVG (vector graphics) in mozilla offers. RSS, blogs, myspace, and most everything else I can think of just isn't exciting. VoIP has some potential. Wifi has done a lot, but I wonder if the rate of improvement in it will slacken. What else is there?
I think I'll stay with good old Internet (Web 1.3.55.89) for now, thanks.
As much as I think ICANN is a bunch of morons (.museum? gimmie a break!), I am sure things would only be worse if the UN were to gain control of the root servers.
As far as IP space goes, there are lies and liars everywhere. There's quite enough IPv4 space, if it were used correctly. Much of those problem depends on updating the infrastructure. Lots of stuff can break if you start changing netmasks, etc.
One of the really big problems is the size of the route tables when you run BGP4. Cisco router memory is expensive, and each additional route added to the BGP4 table takes up a few more bytes in (practically) all the BGP4 routers around the world. Yet, some organizations are still advertising several netblocks when they could do with one larger netblock. Why? Because there's no policy on aggregating legacy and therefore 'grandfathered' IP space - if an organization gets IP space under ARIN policy, they are forever subject to ARIN fees and policies. If the organization keeps its legacy IP space, no fees are incurred.
What needs to happen is a change in policy so that IP space can be aggregated without penalty. Fees should be charged for new IP space allocations only.
Then, I would aggregate my IP space and save some route memory for everyone.
Yes, it's the same, and it should be expected to be so. THe idea is, you have alphas and betas and then when you get something that does everything you expect it to, and you don't know about any bugs, you start publish "release candidate 1". But sometimes there are bugs, so you fix them, and put out "release candidate 2", and let all the monkeys hammer on it some more, and sure enough they break some things so you fix them and try again with 'release candidate 4' - and lo and behold, no bugs are found! at least within the deadline, at which point there's NOTHING TO FIX, so you call it 'final' or 'release' and tell the world.
Blunder that wasn't -- well, either he made a blunder by introducing a cosmological constant, or made a blunder by removing it. In either case, he madea blunder. And 10% isn't really that close, unless you're playing horseshoues or handgrenades.
I must address something that has been bothering me. At first it was just a tremor of doubt, but now it is gaining steam...will it become a roaring thunder...
EINSTEIN WAS HUMAN! Whew! I said it! He made mistakes, and not just the blunder being refered to here. For instance, he rejected much of quantum mechanics that has now become fairly well accepted. I am sure there's plenty more.
It bothers me that this man has such reverance in modern pop-sci, where he has become such a cultural icon that his fuzzy hair and moustache are an ideogram for genius. NOt only has he been wrong in the past, some parts of his lauded theories will most likely be proven wrong in the future -- but you may not hear about such proof until years later, if ever, because so few in the scientific community are willing to suggest he was in error. What if we can't ever measure gravity waves? Does that mean we aren't good enough, or does it mean that Einstein was wrong about their existance? Where is this blind faith we have in the man based? So many would seem to claim that Einstein was behind the A-bomb's invention (which he would disclaim, because he wanted to be "a man of peace"), and the contributions of others like Fermi are mere footnoes. Another fallacy is that the A-bomb ensured U.S. Victory in WW2, which is false: By the time The Bomb(s) were dropped, The Axis in Europe had been defeated, and Japan was on the brink of starvation. Neither did the invention of the A-bomb do any good against the Soviet Union, as traitors in the US and UK soon gave the USSR The Bomb.
I'll stop here, but I think it's time that this Einstein bubble was burst. Maybe I'll write a book.
I always liked the Tanglewood processor because it was named after something in my hometown.
You're jumping up and down about nothing. GSM has been in the US for a while. Systems other than GSM had been used in Europe besides GSM, and CDMA is still used throughout China. CDMA has it's advantages, so does GSM. If anyone cares, I can pull out the references.
There's many things to get annoyed at the US government for. Not standardizing on GSM is not one of them.
No, you can't. War is natural, just like evolution. Or do you believe in 'Intelligent Design'? And overty is just the name for the people on the low end of the totem pole. For instance, some people are now claiming that lack of broadband Internet makes them 'victims of poverty' - give me a break.
Does anyone remember the name of the DB software that BBN (Bolt Beranek Newman) produced? An old friend of mine was one of the last people in the world that used it.
Described the way it is, it sort of makes sense. But so does John Titor. That fact that he is being dis'd by NASA doesn't mean much - they are famous for bureacratic bungling and this wouldn't be any different. Neither does it surprise me that he hasn't received any funding. The world economy couldn't easy handle such a paradigm shift. That doesn't mean that Exxon, BP, Shell, and various governments don't have departments to do research into these types of developments. It is to their great benefit to do so, even if they don't tell the public what they discover.
I admit I'm ignorant at this level of physics. I've also learned that even friends of mine who know much more about it than I do, are too easy to judge someone as a crackpot, or portray them as a misunderstood genius, because of various personal reasons.
If there were some micro-capitalization scheme for this, I might buy in. If I could get a share of this invention for $20, I'd risk it. The chances of success are better than a lottery ticket.
You've obviously never been there. Due to preferential admission and so forth, there's now quite a number of women at MIT. Too bad most of them are foreign.
Let me guess...did they look in the exact center of the Cathedral for is remains?
It's horrible. It looks like something Apple would come up with. I'll stick to the old logo, thanks, and delete or scratch out the new one wherever I have the ability to do so. It's a travesty!
You comments regarding the errors inherent in machine translation or cogent, but there's also much room for error with human translation. When it's REALLY IMPORTANT to get it right, I believe that multiple translators should be emplyed to do so. For instance, George H.W. Bush mumbles something that he wants to communicate to Nicolas Sarkozy. Bush's translator, who I will call Robert Johnson, is a native speaker of American English (and not for political reasons alone), who has a degree in French and fifteen years of experience as a translator. Johnson then emails the original and French version of Bush's mumblings to his counterpart in the French government, Mme. DuBois, who is a native speaker of French with a degree in English and ten years of experience as a translator, and she suggests some changes to Mr. Johnson's translation that make the meaning more clear. Johnson and DuBois agree on a final version, and submit this to Mme. DuBois' supervisor, who then chooses a translator unknown to DuBois, M. Grosjean, and has the document translated back into English. The French government sends this translation to the American government, who then assigns a Dr. George Hapgood to work with M. Grosjean, and after some discussion Grosjean and Hapgood submit the translation back to English, which is then given to George Bush, who will then raise an alarm only if there are significant deviations in meaning between what he originally said and what he received back.
I have no idea if this actually happens with important documents like peace treaties and party invitations among world leaders, but I hope that they do.
That really depends on your field of woek, and your geographic location. Certainly, if you live in Miami, you're going to need Spanish, but probably not so much if you live in Montpelier, Vermont, where some French much come in more handy. In either location, if you are a programmer, it's not nearly as crucial as if, for instance, you worked at the tourist information booth, or were a police officer. In spite of the inroads that Spanish is making into the US,it doesn't have have much economic power. It is clearly quite a different situation than English as a second language, where there are clear economic advantages to learning it. I only wish that more emphasis was placed not only on learning the basics of English, but attaining mastery of it.
This is great, now that HostAP and Centrino are in the kernel. We've needed this to be in the mainstream kernel for some time. But Atheros support is still missing, and it's just as important, if not more important, than either of those chipsets. Most people are aware of the MadWifi drivers with closed-source HAL (i.e. part of the driver is closed source), but there's also a project by OpenBSD to make a completely open source driver for the Atheros cards, called OpenHAL. It's been ported to linux: http://cvs.pdos.csail.mit.edu/cvs/roofnet/release/ openhal/ - but needs testing. Please work on it!
So this is off topic, so what...I can afford it.
Quality Control on Slashdot is low, and this is represented by the following fortune I was just provided:
"My idea of roughing it turning the air conditioner too low."
Which is a mangled version of the original quote, which went something like: "My idea of roughing it is turning the air conditioner to low". This is another example of the hazards involved in letting a spelling checking program do all of the quality control in a prose composition. Even though the sentence has two errors, neither of them were caused by spelling.
I guess Slashdot could feel in good company, though. I remember when, it the distant past, the New York Times had a special prize if you found an error on the first page of the paper. I think the prize was nominal, something such as being credited in the paper, in the corrections section or something similar. It's obvious they no longer care. It's pretty easy to find grammatical mistakes on the front page of the Time. But my favorite one of all was quite a huge and obvious one, which I hope I was not the only one to notice. When the Pope visited New York, the Times made a reference to the large number of Catholics in New York, "...the almost six Catholics...", dropping the word million. Pretty damned funny, if you ask me.
What amazes me about spelling and grammar errors is how often they are committed by people who are much more meticulous in other endeavors, pften while in the process of picking nite. So many programmers, for instance, who will make criticism over the structure of a program - its "correctness" - can't be bothered to make the elementary efforts to correct their own prose.
Yes...from America and American Indians. So too has the disease of Tobacco, and there is evidence that athritis is a condition and not a disease, and one of the causes may be a prion which came from American Indians.
The American Indians got a boatload of diseases, including smallpox and the plague, and alcohol, and gambling casinos.
The reasons why Downs Syndrome would occur more frequently in the European race, would most likely not be genetic, but societal: Downs syndrome has been shown to become more likely when the parents are older than 40 (moreso the age of the female than the male parent). People of the European race, due to societal factors, tend to have their children later in life, which would account for in increase in children with Downs Syndrome.
On another topic, I wonder how much it would cost and how I would go about getting tested for CCR5. Not that I engange in activity that would make me at high risk for HIV, nor would I do so, but it would be kind of nice to know.
I am a vegetarian. I hate PETA: I think they are a bunch of lying wusses.
First let me explain the difference between vegetarian and vegan for those of you that don't know: A vegetarian doesn't eat meat or meat products (i.e. meat fats, gravy, etc). A vegan doesn't consume any animal products, this of course includes meat and meat products, but also milk and milk products (like cheese) and eggs and egg products.
I love cheese. I eat lots of it. My reasons for not eating meat are my own, and several. Go ahead, carnivores and omnivores, eat what you want. If you are concerned about peak oil and self sufficiency, it might be good to start cutting down on the meat consumption because the nutrition that meat gives is far less efficient in power consumption than eating vegetables and grains. Much petrochemicals are required for fertilizer. As petroleum becomes more expensive, so will fetilizer and the food that depends on that fertiziler but this will be magnified by meat, particularly beef. There are ways of not using petrochemicals (mostly natural gas) for making fertilizer, of course, but these are not currently dominant. So expect that an increase in the price of oil will have a domino effect into food, which will be magnified in meats. Milk products as well, I know, I may have to cut down on that extra sharp cheddar habit.
Damned Stargate geeks...I am becoming addicted to that show. Just watched '1969' for the second time. You know, Daniel does look pretty good with those tiny glasses and his hair slicked back.
But yeah, the ancients...Merlin was one...Do you think Jesus was a goa'uld?
The GPL as it stands was successful because it's a careful balance between public rights and the rights of owners of derivates. It's well understood, tested in court, and widely used.
The GPL3 seem to want to expand the rights of the public. I am not entirely opposed to such a license existing. After all, people have the right to license their creations as they see fit. But I won't accept any software that comes with such a horribly binding contract.
What's worse is that it has the GPL stamp on it. This is going to cause confusion among many, who think that software currently licensed under the GPL2 is going to get these restrictions. Alarmist, half baked new reports will only reinforce that fear, driving users into the waiting arms of Microsoft and Sun.
I am not making any more donations to the FSF, and am actively discouraging other from doing so, while they pursue the goals of GPL3. And, if I see RMS in the halls of MIT, I am going to give him a piece of my mind. Maybe I'll even have T-shirts made up.
Thanks for your comments. Even the disappointing ones at least weren't rude ;)
Another idea would be wind power - sailing trains. But hey, I am glad to see that at least the idea has some credence, even if it isn't yet ready for a business plan.
I was reading about this race, and the cars involved, and the comments here on slashdot about "it
s not the future" because the cars are too slow. That may be true.
But what about solar trains? I know that rail systems tend to be designed with as little rolling friction as possible, so that most of the work involved is overcoming intertia. Imagine a train, with solar cells on the roof of each boxcar connected to an electric locomotive on one end or the other. It would start like one of those circus stunts of a guy pulling a rain car with his teeth, i.e. very slowly but the solar cells powering the electric locomotives gradually add some good momentum, and things start moving at a good clip. When night falls, they gradually slow down, and come to a stop for the night.
Imagine that this is continuous, on a homogenous all-solar rail system. Because of the relative uniformity of solar radiation within the medium range, the movement of the various trains on the track will be fairly uniform. Trains should seldom have to brake, and even this braking could be be harnessed, the electric motors used as slow brakes and generators, storing the energy in batteries.
Of course, these trains would be slow. It might take weeks for cargo to get from one end of australia or the US to another. It would also only work where the rail system is pretty flat, unless the aformentioned recovery of inertia can be done with high efficieny and capacity.
It could be useful for commodities that don't have to move fast. Things like ores. Not things like food, which would go bad.
I guess the largest problem with this idea is that it would require a separate rail system, to keep the fast trains from being stuck behind these slow movers. Building such a rail system is expensive.
The problem I have with flying cars is that I am turning into a grumpy old man as I get older, and am sick of the noise caused by cars and airplanes. I'd like to move out to the country somewhere and be away from that noise. But if flying cars can just zip on over my property, i'd have less privacy and freedom from noise.
Maybe if special 'skyways' were created and that my serene castle in the country was far from it, I might be happy. But I doubt that will happen.