Re:In case it gets /.'ed (it's already getting slo
on
Nucular Hydrogen Economy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Uh. A 3,000 megawatt hour nuclear power plant uses a whole lot less raw materials to build than the 100 to 200 square feet per *kilowatt hour* equivalent photovoltaic system.
There are some really nasty things that go into manufacturing some PV cells. Copper Indium Diselenide (copper, indium and selnium) requires hydrogen selenide which is a really really nasty gas. All that plastic, glass, arsenic, silicon, gallium, etc.
Let's take Redhat 9; to enable IPv6 you have to go into/etc/sysconfig/network and stick the line 'NETWORKING_IPV6="yes"' in, then restart networking with 'service network restart.'
This same config file also will set auto tunneling 6to4, forwarding, router setup, etc. It is about as easy as you can get.
The Redhat CDs have IPv6 enabled applications and many patched apps as well. It even installs ping6, traceroute6, etc. by default for goodness sakes.
There are some pieces of IPv6 Linux is missing, but don't make it seem like there isn't any support. Linux currently is missing 6over4 (different from 6to4), proper TOS bit handling, IPsec ESP transport and AH tunneling modes (AH transport works), full mobility support (supposedly almost there) and a couple other minor things.
Firebird (at least I downloaded a couple days ago since it has been available for OSX for over a week) is terribly slow on MacOS X when scrolling a page or hitting page down. It drives me absolutely crazy.
Let's imagine that it costs $32 billion to design a new space vehicle like the article claims.
We know that an existing launch costs $500 million. If this cost only half as much to launch as the existing vehicle, it would only need to fly 128 times to recoup the cost of the development.
The $32 billion figure is because NASA can't stand to not create new technology every time they build something. They are always looking at lighter fuel tanks using some exotic material that has never been tested before instead of using what exists already and is already significantly cheaper than what is used in the shuttle.
I hate to say it, but NASA should be dismantled and a new agency without the 30 year legacy of ineptitude should be put in place.
Did you go out at night?? In one night I saw 3 ferrari's (2 were older though, only one was new) about 15 Skyline's, a couple souped up porsches (911TTs), more Mercedes than I can count... that was in about 3 hours of time. One thing I will not understand is Mercedes.. why buy one when you can get a Toyota Astro or Celsior.. *Shrug*
Oh see, I don't find that impressive. Today driving home on the freeway from Menlo Park to San Francisco, I sat behind a Lamborghini Diablo in traffic, passed well over a dozen porsches, quite a few Mercedes CL600 (I've see a whole lot of them in black recently), and more BMWs than I care to count (z8s, a lot of 7 series, quite a few minis, etc).
To be honest I don't even notice cars much any more. Except for maybe Lamborginis since most people don't like to drive them except when showing off, everything else just seems to fade into the background.
It is all the dot com people who blew their money on cars. Heh...
Tokyo isn't a "center city", there are dozens of "center cities" that take 30+ minutes by train to get there. Mass transit == Local Trains, and JRL does a good job on that.
New York City is exactly the same. You don't want to try walking from one of the burrows to another. The only difference is that Tokyo has much larger streets making driving possible.
Tokyo also has an extensive subway system in addition to the local train lines. Granted I'm not sure about having a subway in a city hit by earthquakes every week, but I am not a structual engineer.:)
Hence the Tokyo street racer games... if you ever go to Tokyo you will never see that many nice cars in such a short period of time.
Actually I didn't see all that many nice cars. I saw a couple neat electric mini-cars, a good number of motorcycles and a whole lot of bicycles. Of course I live in San Francisco which isn't exactly a normal.
If a human (or any animal) were left to grow with no senses and no method of communication (or the most very basic input/output, analogous to your line terminal), what sort of intelligence would develop? Probably nothing very coherent.
You assume that your biology hasn't arranged your neurons in a newly formed brain in positions that when activated, even without external stimulus, wouldn't always create some basic form of intelligence.
Heck, instincts could very well just be a formation of neurons that when your brain is switched on, always connect to eachother.
So while I doubt very much that this person would advance very far, it would have some thought activity.
A raised pattern? On a linen bill? That gets folded up a thousand times over and often sent through the washer?
I guess they could insert a security strip that was a little thicker instead of actually creating a raised pattern in the linen itself.
On the other hand, who uses paper money anyway? I don't think I've paid for anything in actual cash in quite a while with the exception of the stamp machine and parking meters.
Yes, an AVC implementation exists [hydrogenaudio.org], but it provides its own demonstration of why no one uses it yet despite the improved size and/or quality... Namely, 30-45 seconds per frame at encode time. For a full-length movie, that comes out to two or three days for a single-pass encode.
I hardly think this matters for professional encoding. There are real-time H.264 hardware encoders in development by VideoLocus and Sand Video.
Besides, it took quite a while for the old MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 reference encoders to be anything but dog slow, so I have no doubt that in a years time we'll see at least a 4x speed up with software optimization. Add that to the 2x hardware speed up and you have something that starts to look viable for quite a few applications.
There are patents covering H.264 (or MPEG-4 Part 10), but they appear to be all defensive patents and no licensing fees have ever been required for them.
H.264 was designed to give DVD quality at sub-1 Mbps levels, so it should be significantly better quality than what xvid provides at higher bitrates.
The only problem is I haven't seen a realtime decoder for it yet and I hear encoding is a major CPU hog.:)
The average home price in the United States is about $205,000. The average house price in Canada is about $187,000.
Unless the quality of Canadian homes being sold today are on average much nicer than in the US (possible, but not probable), something is wrong with that logic. My net income after buying a home rose compared to when I rented even though my mortgage payments are significantly higher than my old rent payments.
The benefit of deducting mortgage interest is of course, increased home ownership at a yonger age which lowers the dependency on the government when in retirement.
Canada actually has a lower base tax rate than the US on average.
However, Canada lacks the one major tax deduction that US citizens get that makes our taxes in practice so much lower; mortgage interest. That's right, I can pay $70,000/year in mortgage interest and deduct it straight off my federal income tax lowering my taxes to a paltry 20% a year from over 40%.
Hear hear! A lot of people miss this, eg. some of the posters above calling it a "clean energy source". It's not an energy source, at least not if the Hydrogen is created using eletrolysis. In that case it's just a battery.
I've heard this far too much. Photons are little packets (batteries) holding energy. The earth's core is just a giant battery holding in thermal heat. The sun is just a giant hydrogen battery.
There is no "source" of energy. Everything is energy. We just like to convert it into forms we can use easily.
I mean by your logic, photovoltaic cells are an energy "source", not the photons. A nuclear power plant's turbine is an energy "source," but not the plutonium. Fire is an energy "source," but coal is not.
Now if you said electricity source, maybe I'd agree with you, but otherwise you are just nitpicking.
Optical typically has the problem that the dyes used fade over time and even faster when exposed to bright light.
What you really want is something like an HD-ROM. Essentially a nano-scale microfiche (can store analog or digital) and read with an electron microscope. It is burned directly into metal, so it is rated at whatever the physical stability of the metal is.
I believe they are currently using nickel which will keep for about 1,000 years without degrading. They could use something like rubidium which will last 9,000-10,000 years without any significant care (longer if hermetically sealed).
With nickel you are looking at a heat resistance of 900 F, no EMP problems, no light problems, anti-corrosive so water isn't an issue, very good protection against radiation and can store analog so it doesn't need a computer to read.
Everyone jumped to the same "genetic" conclusion (women make lousy hunters). It could be as simple as physical and chemical changes after having children (sometimes derridingly called 'placenta brain'): perhaps women's brains go into a rapid form of job-specialization (rearing) which translates into other disadvantages.
Wouldn't this be caused by differences in genetics? Last I checked women weren't taught to change their brain chemistry growing up after child birth.
I honestly don't understand the problem. Men and women are physically different. Our brains are physically different (neuron density, halve independence, etc.). By default our abilities at birth are different.
That's not to say that the brain isn't an extremely flexible instrument that can't overcome quite a lot of the differences. It just means that if you don't put the extra effort into overcoming the disparity, each gender on average will be better suited to certain roles.
1) The keypairs on the card will be pre-generated when the citizen receives the card. IMHO a private key that has been in someone else's hands/machine is totally useless. This of course allows for involutary escrow..
This really depends on if the private key is generated on the card itself or on a separate machine and transferred to the card. Given decent tamper resistance, you shouldn't be too afraid of the card generating the private key.
2) The Belgian Federal Gov representative (Peter Strickx, ex-Sun, by total coincidence) plainly declared they do not want to have the necessary expertise in-house, but wants to outsource the whole thing (to Sun and ZETES, it now seems)
The Belgian Federal Government representative is an idiot.
So this will put our identities (and the authentication/non-repudiation/existence of some very important personal documents) at the mercy of a couple of *private companies*, one of them American, no less, at a time when the US is governed by a madman, that gets away with secret military tribunals and illegal warmongering..
I consider handing the management of core infrastructure to foreign private companies without any local expertise to be a terrible mistake.
Be very clear however. The US government has only so much power over private corporations. There isn't a government respresentative sitting on the boards of every major private company making sure they comply with our presidents will. These are independent entities that have their own agenda (to make money) and only deal with the government when they have to or they think they can get something out of it.
Some of the excuses, when I asked about this were that the.be gov already uses much outsourced security for its own communications!
The US 'outsources' all of its communications to private companies. Telecommunications companies, because they are core services, are under a federal regulatory body (the FCC) to make sure they continue to do everything the US needs. This works just fine.
No company has ever taken photocopies of my drivers license. That would be considered inappropriate. If they want my date of birth, ID numbers, etc., they ask me for them.
But as I said before, they start sticking medical history, family records, etc., on a card like this and you are just asking companies to abuse it.
There only real negative to a digital card is that companies can start asking for them and easily start filling their databases with your information.
Manually copying down information from the front of the card is far too time consuming and obvious. Plus, you can only fit so much information on it.
There are of course technical ways to design digital ID systems and laws you can put in place to prevent this from happening on any kind of scale, but I fear these cards were not designed with privacy in mind.
Let's see if I have this right.. you broadcast your packets on a public network where you already assume anyone can potentially get access to them, then you worry about what happens when the government steps in and asks to receive a copy of those packets?
Actually I broadcast my packets on a private network. I didn't realize that the government was running much of the internet backbone infrastructure any longer.
I imagine sticking a radiator on top of the tubing would be possible. Having a fan cooling the top of the piping was probably done to reduce the variables in the experiment.
On the codec side, well that's kind of a "well duh" statement, once it goes through a codec it is no longer "uncompressed video", am I missing some here? That device can capture raw uncompressed video and run it through a codec to compress it. There are *no* codecs for uncompressed video if you want it to stay uncompressed video; again once it goes through a codec it is no longer uncompressed.
Sure there are. There are many different color spaces, pixel arrangements, signalling (to specify silly things like framerates), etc. you can have with uncompressed video.
So there's 'no inherit speed benefit' but it takes longer to do 64 bit math on a 32 bit processor? Sounds like that is a speed difference.
What I was trying to get at is there are 32 bit CPUs with 64 bit registers. In fact, your floating point registers are all 64 bit wide on x86 CPUs. PowerPC's AltiVec unit has a 128 bit wide register for vector operations.
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Uh. A 3,000 megawatt hour nuclear power plant uses a whole lot less raw materials to build than the 100 to 200 square feet per *kilowatt hour* equivalent photovoltaic system.
There are some really nasty things that go into manufacturing some PV cells. Copper Indium Diselenide (copper, indium and selnium) requires hydrogen selenide which is a really really nasty gas. All that plastic, glass, arsenic, silicon, gallium, etc.
Let's take Redhat 9; to enable IPv6 you have to go into /etc/sysconfig/network and stick the line 'NETWORKING_IPV6="yes"' in, then restart networking with 'service network restart.'
This same config file also will set auto tunneling 6to4, forwarding, router setup, etc. It is about as easy as you can get.
The Redhat CDs have IPv6 enabled applications and many patched apps as well. It even installs ping6, traceroute6, etc. by default for goodness sakes.
There are some pieces of IPv6 Linux is missing, but don't make it seem like there isn't any support. Linux currently is missing 6over4 (different from 6to4), proper TOS bit handling, IPsec ESP transport and AH tunneling modes (AH transport works), full mobility support (supposedly almost there) and a couple other minor things.
Firebird (at least I downloaded a couple days ago since it has been available for OSX for over a week) is terribly slow on MacOS X when scrolling a page or hitting page down. It drives me absolutely crazy.
Let's imagine that it costs $32 billion to design a new space vehicle like the article claims.
We know that an existing launch costs $500 million. If this cost only half as much to launch as the existing vehicle, it would only need to fly 128 times to recoup the cost of the development.
The $32 billion figure is because NASA can't stand to not create new technology every time they build something. They are always looking at lighter fuel tanks using some exotic material that has never been tested before instead of using what exists already and is already significantly cheaper than what is used in the shuttle.
I hate to say it, but NASA should be dismantled and a new agency without the 30 year legacy of ineptitude should be put in place.
Did you go out at night?? In one night I saw 3 ferrari's (2 were older though, only one was new) about 15 Skyline's, a couple souped up porsches (911TTs), more Mercedes than I can count... that was in about 3 hours of time. One thing I will not understand is Mercedes.. why buy one when you can get a Toyota Astro or Celsior.. *Shrug*
Oh see, I don't find that impressive. Today driving home on the freeway from Menlo Park to San Francisco, I sat behind a Lamborghini Diablo in traffic, passed well over a dozen porsches, quite a few Mercedes CL600 (I've see a whole lot of them in black recently), and more BMWs than I care to count (z8s, a lot of 7 series, quite a few minis, etc).
To be honest I don't even notice cars much any more. Except for maybe Lamborginis since most people don't like to drive them except when showing off, everything else just seems to fade into the background.
It is all the dot com people who blew their money on cars. Heh...
Tokyo isn't a "center city", there are dozens of "center cities" that take 30+ minutes by train to get there. Mass transit == Local Trains, and JRL does a good job on that.
:)
New York City is exactly the same. You don't want to try walking from one of the burrows to another. The only difference is that Tokyo has much larger streets making driving possible.
Tokyo also has an extensive subway system in addition to the local train lines. Granted I'm not sure about having a subway in a city hit by earthquakes every week, but I am not a structual engineer.
Hence the Tokyo street racer games... if you ever go to Tokyo you will never see that many nice cars in such a short period of time.
Actually I didn't see all that many nice cars. I saw a couple neat electric mini-cars, a good number of motorcycles and a whole lot of bicycles. Of course I live in San Francisco which isn't exactly a normal.
If a human (or any animal) were left to grow with no senses and no method of communication (or the most very basic input/output, analogous to your line terminal), what sort of intelligence would develop? Probably nothing very coherent.
You assume that your biology hasn't arranged your neurons in a newly formed brain in positions that when activated, even without external stimulus, wouldn't always create some basic form of intelligence.
Heck, instincts could very well just be a formation of neurons that when your brain is switched on, always connect to eachother.
So while I doubt very much that this person would advance very far, it would have some thought activity.
A raised pattern? On a linen bill? That gets folded up a thousand times over and often sent through the washer?
I guess they could insert a security strip that was a little thicker instead of actually creating a raised pattern in the linen itself.
On the other hand, who uses paper money anyway? I don't think I've paid for anything in actual cash in quite a while with the exception of the stamp machine and parking meters.
Yes, an AVC implementation exists [hydrogenaudio.org], but it provides its own demonstration of why no one uses it yet despite the improved size and/or quality... Namely, 30-45 seconds per frame at encode time. For a full-length movie, that comes out to two or three days for a single-pass encode.
I hardly think this matters for professional encoding. There are real-time H.264 hardware encoders in development by VideoLocus and Sand Video.
Besides, it took quite a while for the old MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 reference encoders to be anything but dog slow, so I have no doubt that in a years time we'll see at least a 4x speed up with software optimization. Add that to the 2x hardware speed up and you have something that starts to look viable for quite a few applications.
There are patents covering H.264 (or MPEG-4 Part 10), but they appear to be all defensive patents and no licensing fees have ever been required for them.
:)
H.264 was designed to give DVD quality at sub-1 Mbps levels, so it should be significantly better quality than what xvid provides at higher bitrates.
The only problem is I haven't seen a realtime decoder for it yet and I hear encoding is a major CPU hog.
Personally I dig Avant Garde's style. These speakers both look and sound excellent... of course they do cost a 'kajillion' dollars. :)
The average home price in the United States is about $205,000. The average house price in Canada is about $187,000.
Unless the quality of Canadian homes being sold today are on average much nicer than in the US (possible, but not probable), something is wrong with that logic. My net income after buying a home rose compared to when I rented even though my mortgage payments are significantly higher than my old rent payments.
The benefit of deducting mortgage interest is of course, increased home ownership at a yonger age which lowers the dependency on the government when in retirement.
Penicillin was discovered by a Scottish man Sir Alexander Fleming while in London by accident.
If you're going to try to be an advocate for your own country, please try a little harder to at least get your facts straight.
It is no secret that the US pharmaceuticals/biotech industry is many times larger than the one that exists in Canada (even per-capita).
We're talking Pfizer (New York), Johnson & Johnson (New Jersey), Merck (New Jersey), Amgen (California), Eli Lily (Indiana), etc.
Heck, Pfizer alone dwarfs everyone else.
Canada actually has a lower base tax rate than the US on average.
However, Canada lacks the one major tax deduction that US citizens get that makes our taxes in practice so much lower; mortgage interest. That's right, I can pay $70,000/year in mortgage interest and deduct it straight off my federal income tax lowering my taxes to a paltry 20% a year from over 40%.
You really can't beat that with a stick.
Huh, what about, "needed a feature that wasn't there."
That is the main reason why I contribute to Open Source projects. I need something, it isn't there, I open the source and add it.
Maybe this is a list of why one would start an Open Source project?
Hear hear! A lot of people miss this, eg. some of the posters above calling it a "clean energy source". It's not an energy source, at least not if the Hydrogen is created using eletrolysis. In that case it's just a battery.
I've heard this far too much. Photons are little packets (batteries) holding energy. The earth's core is just a giant battery holding in thermal heat. The sun is just a giant hydrogen battery.
There is no "source" of energy. Everything is energy. We just like to convert it into forms we can use easily.
I mean by your logic, photovoltaic cells are an energy "source", not the photons. A nuclear power plant's turbine is an energy "source," but not the plutonium. Fire is an energy "source," but coal is not.
Now if you said electricity source, maybe I'd agree with you, but otherwise you are just nitpicking.
Optical typically has the problem that the dyes used fade over time and even faster when exposed to bright light.
What you really want is something like an HD-ROM. Essentially a nano-scale microfiche (can store analog or digital) and read with an electron microscope. It is burned directly into metal, so it is rated at whatever the physical stability of the metal is.
I believe they are currently using nickel which will keep for about 1,000 years without degrading. They could use something like rubidium which will last 9,000-10,000 years without any significant care (longer if hermetically sealed).
With nickel you are looking at a heat resistance of 900 F, no EMP problems, no light problems, anti-corrosive so water isn't an issue, very good protection against radiation and can store analog so it doesn't need a computer to read.
Everyone jumped to the same "genetic" conclusion (women make lousy hunters). It could be as simple as physical and chemical changes after having children (sometimes derridingly called 'placenta brain'): perhaps women's brains go into a rapid form of job-specialization (rearing) which translates into other disadvantages.
Wouldn't this be caused by differences in genetics? Last I checked women weren't taught to change their brain chemistry growing up after child birth.
I honestly don't understand the problem. Men and women are physically different. Our brains are physically different (neuron density, halve independence, etc.). By default our abilities at birth are different.
That's not to say that the brain isn't an extremely flexible instrument that can't overcome quite a lot of the differences. It just means that if you don't put the extra effort into overcoming the disparity, each gender on average will be better suited to certain roles.
1) The keypairs on the card will be pre-generated when the citizen receives the card. IMHO a private key that has been in someone else's hands/machine is totally useless. This of course allows for involutary escrow..
.be gov already uses much outsourced security for its own communications!
This really depends on if the private key is generated on the card itself or on a separate machine and transferred to the card. Given decent tamper resistance, you shouldn't be too afraid of the card generating the private key.
2) The Belgian Federal Gov representative (Peter Strickx, ex-Sun, by total coincidence) plainly declared they do not want to have the necessary expertise in-house, but wants to outsource the whole thing (to Sun and ZETES, it now seems)
The Belgian Federal Government representative is an idiot.
So this will put our identities (and the authentication/non-repudiation/existence of some very important personal documents) at the mercy of a couple of *private companies*, one of them American, no less, at a time when the US is governed by a madman, that gets away with secret military tribunals and illegal warmongering..
I consider handing the management of core infrastructure to foreign private companies without any local expertise to be a terrible mistake.
Be very clear however. The US government has only so much power over private corporations. There isn't a government respresentative sitting on the boards of every major private company making sure they comply with our presidents will. These are independent entities that have their own agenda (to make money) and only deal with the government when they have to or they think they can get something out of it.
Some of the excuses, when I asked about this were that the
The US 'outsources' all of its communications to private companies. Telecommunications companies, because they are core services, are under a federal regulatory body (the FCC) to make sure they continue to do everything the US needs. This works just fine.
No company has ever taken photocopies of my drivers license. That would be considered inappropriate. If they want my date of birth, ID numbers, etc., they ask me for them.
But as I said before, they start sticking medical history, family records, etc., on a card like this and you are just asking companies to abuse it.
There only real negative to a digital card is that companies can start asking for them and easily start filling their databases with your information.
Manually copying down information from the front of the card is far too time consuming and obvious. Plus, you can only fit so much information on it.
There are of course technical ways to design digital ID systems and laws you can put in place to prevent this from happening on any kind of scale, but I fear these cards were not designed with privacy in mind.
Let's see if I have this right.. you broadcast your packets on a public network where you already assume anyone can potentially get access to them, then you worry about what happens when the government steps in and asks to receive a copy of those packets?
Actually I broadcast my packets on a private network. I didn't realize that the government was running much of the internet backbone infrastructure any longer.
I imagine sticking a radiator on top of the tubing would be possible. Having a fan cooling the top of the piping was probably done to reduce the variables in the experiment.
On the codec side, well that's kind of a "well duh" statement, once it goes through a codec it is no longer "uncompressed video", am I missing some here? That device can capture raw uncompressed video and run it through a codec to compress it. There are *no* codecs for uncompressed video if you want it to stay uncompressed video; again once it goes through a codec it is no longer uncompressed.
Sure there are. There are many different color spaces, pixel arrangements, signalling (to specify silly things like framerates), etc. you can have with uncompressed video.
So there's 'no inherit speed benefit' but it takes longer to do 64 bit math on a 32 bit processor? Sounds like that is a speed difference.
What I was trying to get at is there are 32 bit CPUs with 64 bit registers. In fact, your floating point registers are all 64 bit wide on x86 CPUs. PowerPC's AltiVec unit has a 128 bit wide register for vector operations.