why even bother mixing up the concepts of power and energy ?
I agree. I've been thinking writers should just do away with the Watt altogether. The problem is that people tend to think a "Watt" is a unit of energy, rather than power. It's normal to hear "Watt" and think it's a thing you can hold in your hand, and that an appliance should use a "Watt/second", even though that's ludicrous.
The standard unit of power should be: "joule/second (Watt)". And the unit of energy, anything previously measured in kWh or BTU, should just be changed to megajoules.
Sometimes I think that the whole confusion is a conspiracy to make units intentionally incomprehensible.
There's a lot of good info in your post. Your conclusions about saving money in the winter are spot-on: insulation is the best way. Unfortunately for most homeowners, and especially renters, adding sufficient insulation is difficult.
Some of your calculations are a stretch, however. Yes, air-source heat pumps are 200% efficient. Ground-source heat pumps can be 300%, but they aren't yet commonplace. Air-source heat pumps don't work as well in extremely cold climates, so are usually supplemented with (costly) electric resistance heat.
Depending on your location and whether you have primarily gas or electric appliances already, delivered costs of energy vary. In more southernly climates, I find that air-source heat pumps come out to be slightly less costly than natural gas, given all factors other than capital costs, including furnace efficiency and delivered energy costs. But because of the cost of air-conditioning around here, my electric company gives me lower rates if I stay below a certain usage. And capital costs for heat pumps are relatively high. So personally I'm not getting rid of gas any time soon, and I'm looking at skipping electric and going straight to a more renewable form of heating.
A 100 watt light bulb, running 24/7 is more than you realize. It's 72 kWh per month. That could be 10% of an average household's electric bill. It's 18% of my average bill.
At $0.08/kWh, that's $70 a year I'm spending on flashing lights, clocks, and inefficient power supplies.
So if it's all audio, there's no possibility of malicious software since there's no software.
You're assuming computers nowadays all include analog output from their CD drives.
Most don't. Dells, for instance, don't include the cable in order to save costs.
Unless you have that analog connection, and unless your CD player software is setup to use it, the audio data is being decoded. Exploiting a flaw in this decoding is as simple as exploiting any other software bug.
[A well regulated militia,]subject, noun phrase [being necessary to the security of a free state,]participial phrase, modifies subject [the right of the people to keep and bear arms,]appositive, noun phrase, restates subject [shall not be infringed.]verb phrase
Or:
[(With a) well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,]adverb clause, elliptical clause, expresses cause [the right of the people to keep and bear arms,]subject, noun phrase [shall not be infringed.]verb phrase
Or:
[(Both a) well regulated militia,]compound subject, elliptical clause [being necessary to the security of a free state,]participial phrase, modifies first compound subject [(and) the right of the people to keep and bear arms,]compound subject, elliptical clause, noun phrase [shall not be infringed.]verb phrase
I can't imagine any other interpretations that are remotely feasible. Yours, for instance, simply ignores the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" as extraneous.
At the very most, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is equivalent to "a well regulated militia". There is no reason to assume one is dependent upon the other.
Btw, have you considered commenting on the article at the source? It's a smaller environment over there, but I kind of like that as the comments don't get lost in the sea of 1000...
Ha. Welcome to Slashdot. I didn't read your article. But I'm reading this thread, and probably a few others.
You're suggesting replacing a small, on-demand hydrogen generator with 1) a hydrogen plant, 2) distribution network, and 3) storage tanks.
The tanks alone could cost more than the electrolysis device.
Sometimes (most of the time) there is no such thing as economy of scale. Anything that 1) can be automated (most everything), 2) doesn't suffer from inherent physical limits (like Carnot efficiency), and 3) can be scaled down, should be made as small as possible.
Thanks in part to lobbying efforts by Sony, each CD-ROM carries a penalty of around $75000.
Holy crap. It would be nice to bankrupt a major corporation for abusing their customers. Using their own laws to do it would be icing on the cake. And the proceeds would go towards excellent Free Software.
Are there two million Linux users out there who'd like to help? Buy a Sony CD with the DRM malware (keep the receipt). Run it. Spend a few minutes wiping your computer clean.
Somebody can set up a website where people can post their experiences.
I know there are lots of lawyers on Slashdot. So, how about it? Who wants to be a billionaire?
Perhaps you don't understand how a DRM rootkit would work?
The way I would do it, is to take LGPL code that is already on the system, and replace it with my own code.
What Sony seems to have done, however, is take LGPL code that is already on the system, and replace it with a hacked version of that same LGPL code, without distributing the changes or an offer to provide the source.
Any idiot can see that whether the code in question is GPL or LGPL has little to do with it.
Most of this seems really obvious to me, but what the hell do I know...
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
I don't have any specific data to back that up. I'm not a biologist/virologist/etc.
But it depends in what sense you're asking. In the strict sense, absolutely the probability of surviving a flu outbreak depends to some extent on the occurrence of past flu outbreaks.
It's theorized that groups of Europeans are immune to AIDS due to surviving the black plague, and that was hundreds of years ago. Certainly having previously been exposed to a virus, even only similar viruses, confers a degree of immunity. That's the basis of immunizations. I don't know if it's accurate or not, but there's speculation that generations of people who haven't been exposed to previous flu oubreaks have less of an innate response to new outbreaks.
So, in a strict, chaotic sense, patterns can emerge on the scale of "incidence of human flu pandemic" that have little to do with the fact that genetic mutations are completely random. If a virus has to go through, say, three mutations to get from "common bird flu" to "deadly human flu", and if at each step, there is a probability of humans obtaining increased immunity to the virus before it becomes a pandemic, then the odds of going through those three mutations is different from saying "you have the same odds every time". You don't.
That's all I was saying.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Pandemics don't occur in a vacuum. The events themselves alter the probabilities.
If you're talking about a slot machine then, yes, you have the same odds every time. If you're talking about an event that, by its occurence, affects the odds of its recurrence within a period of time, then talking about being "due" is entirely appropriate. All evidence indicates that flu outbreaks are such events.
It's like looking at the weight on a pressure cooker. If steam hasn't come out in a while, you can say that it's "due" to come out soon.
You can argue that pandemics don't *have* to occur, but until we can go at least a few generations without having one, I'd say you'd be wrong.
STOP MODDING UP PEOPLE WHO SAY THIS!!!
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 0
If you're not one of the typical flu victims (elderly, very young or compromised immune system from other causes), you'll have an excellent chance to shrug it off, even if it does spread.
It seems that makes a much deadlier series of events than, for instance:
1. Weak human flu 2. Mutate to become more deadly 3. Pandemic!
Just because #2 is not likely. A parasite that finds a way to kill its host is not at a selective advantage. Whereas a parasite that is already deadly, but finds a *new* host, does have a selective advantage.
Of course this is merely wild speculation on my part.
I'm not a doctor. In fact, I'd make a crappy biologist.
But some guy on NPR said that a healthy immune response causes far more damage than the actual virus. Whereas somebody with a poor immune system might struggle through for a couple of weeks until they can get help, a healthy young person's own immune system would overreact and kill them within days.
Other people on this thread have posted more info.
One thing that is fairly certain is that the healthier you are in general, the less vulnerable you are likely to be. Of course that's true of any illness, not just flu!
That is absolutely wrong. People who know will tell you that bird flu kills those with healthy immune systems far easier than those with weak immune systems.
No, that would be infringement. It implies that your product is the same as the trademarked product. It may very well be the same, but you can't say it's the same.
The rest of it, however, and the link that EoinOL provided, would not constitute improper use of trademark. Saying things like "plays Nintendo games" or "Nintendo compatible" are statements of interoperability.
In which case, maybe it is deliberately misleading. Ie, "We need 90 days to crack encryption" sounds a lot more unavoidable than "we have such a high workload we can't get through looking at the contents of the disk before 90 days." Not to mention, the latter can also imply quite a bit of incompetence (ie, management hasn't scaled hiring/budget to the problem, or management isn't being effective, or they're all taking 2 hour lunches to watch soccer, etc.)
Or maybe they want to be able to punish people who aren't doing anything wrong, and who just happen to have encrypted hard drives.
One thing to think about though is that, without a supported OS, most hardware is essentially disposable. The only reason you can use your "old machine" as a firewall is that it is OS-neutral. Devices which rely on specialized operating systems don't get reused. They get thrown away.
Also, you didn't mention the difference in power requirements between small custom hardware and reused PCs. A couple of years of electric bills will pay for the entire box. And the power saved will pay for the difference in hardware requirements several times over.
There is definitely a place for customized hardware running a generic OS like Linux. And there is incentive for both manufacturers and users to produce and demand such devices.
Of course Linux was a win for Linksys. It's just that they were bought out by Cisco.
Linksys was in the hardware business, so Open Source was good for them. Cisco is in the "enterprise pixie dust" business, so Open Source is bad for them.
Overall, though, Open Source is good for users, which is all that really matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that you condone the use of state violence to enforce "morally ambiguous laws".
why even bother mixing up the concepts of power and energy ?
I agree. I've been thinking writers should just do away with the Watt altogether. The problem is that people tend to think a "Watt" is a unit of energy, rather than power. It's normal to hear "Watt" and think it's a thing you can hold in your hand, and that an appliance should use a "Watt/second", even though that's ludicrous.
The standard unit of power should be: "joule/second (Watt)". And the unit of energy, anything previously measured in kWh or BTU, should just be changed to megajoules.
Sometimes I think that the whole confusion is a conspiracy to make units intentionally incomprehensible.
There's a lot of good info in your post. Your conclusions about saving money in the winter are spot-on: insulation is the best way. Unfortunately for most homeowners, and especially renters, adding sufficient insulation is difficult.
Some of your calculations are a stretch, however. Yes, air-source heat pumps are 200% efficient. Ground-source heat pumps can be 300%, but they aren't yet commonplace. Air-source heat pumps don't work as well in extremely cold climates, so are usually supplemented with (costly) electric resistance heat.
Depending on your location and whether you have primarily gas or electric appliances already, delivered costs of energy vary. In more southernly climates, I find that air-source heat pumps come out to be slightly less costly than natural gas, given all factors other than capital costs, including furnace efficiency and delivered energy costs. But because of the cost of air-conditioning around here, my electric company gives me lower rates if I stay below a certain usage. And capital costs for heat pumps are relatively high. So personally I'm not getting rid of gas any time soon, and I'm looking at skipping electric and going straight to a more renewable form of heating.
A 100 watt light bulb, running 24/7 is more than you realize. It's 72 kWh per month. That could be 10% of an average household's electric bill. It's 18% of my average bill.
At $0.08/kWh, that's $70 a year I'm spending on flashing lights, clocks, and inefficient power supplies.
So if it's all audio, there's no possibility of malicious software since there's no software.
You're assuming computers nowadays all include analog output from their CD drives.
Most don't. Dells, for instance, don't include the cable in order to save costs.
Unless you have that analog connection, and unless your CD player software is setup to use it, the audio data is being decoded. Exploiting a flaw in this decoding is as simple as exploiting any other software bug.
Take your pick:
[A well regulated militia,] subject, noun phrase [being necessary to the security of a free state,] participial phrase, modifies subject [the right of the people to keep and bear arms,] appositive, noun phrase, restates subject [shall not be infringed.] verb phrase
Or:
[(With a) well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,] adverb clause, elliptical clause, expresses cause [the right of the people to keep and bear arms,] subject, noun phrase [shall not be infringed.] verb phrase
Or:
[(Both a) well regulated militia,] compound subject, elliptical clause [being necessary to the security of a free state,] participial phrase, modifies first compound subject [(and) the right of the people to keep and bear arms,] compound subject, elliptical clause, noun phrase [shall not be infringed.] verb phrase
I can't imagine any other interpretations that are remotely feasible. Yours, for instance, simply ignores the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" as extraneous.
At the very most, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is equivalent to "a well regulated militia". There is no reason to assume one is dependent upon the other.
Btw, have you considered commenting on the article at the source? It's a smaller environment over there, but I kind of like that as the comments don't get lost in the sea of 1000...
Ha. Welcome to Slashdot. I didn't read your article. But I'm reading this thread, and probably a few others.
Why is this so confusing?
You're suggesting replacing a small, on-demand hydrogen generator with 1) a hydrogen plant, 2) distribution network, and 3) storage tanks.
The tanks alone could cost more than the electrolysis device.
Sometimes (most of the time) there is no such thing as economy of scale. Anything that 1) can be automated (most everything), 2) doesn't suffer from inherent physical limits (like Carnot efficiency), and 3) can be scaled down, should be made as small as possible.
These rocks are heating at a constant rate, due to nuclear pollution!!
If the rocks keep getting hotter, we don't know what could happen. They could reach a tipping point and cause devastating ecological damage!!!
Clearly we must do something to stop this global warming before it gets out of hand!!!
Your anti-global-cooling attitude reveals you as a shill for big oil and other dino-fuel monopolists.
Thanks in part to lobbying efforts by Sony, each CD-ROM carries a penalty of around $75000.
Holy crap. It would be nice to bankrupt a major corporation for abusing their customers. Using their own laws to do it would be icing on the cake. And the proceeds would go towards excellent Free Software.
Are there two million Linux users out there who'd like to help? Buy a Sony CD with the DRM malware (keep the receipt). Run it. Spend a few minutes wiping your computer clean.
Somebody can set up a website where people can post their experiences.
I know there are lots of lawyers on Slashdot. So, how about it? Who wants to be a billionaire?
To remind everyone what that asswipe Orrin Hatch said about copyright infringement:
"There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws,"
Perhaps you don't understand how a DRM rootkit would work?
The way I would do it, is to take LGPL code that is already on the system, and replace it with my own code.
What Sony seems to have done, however, is take LGPL code that is already on the system, and replace it with a hacked version of that same LGPL code, without distributing the changes or an offer to provide the source.
Any idiot can see that whether the code in question is GPL or LGPL has little to do with it.
If they just linked against it as a library, well, the LGPL exists for exactly that reason.
Nobody has pointed it out yet, so I guess I will. Just reading the summary will tell you that this is not the case:
Sony DRM software (or rootkit, if you may prefer) contains code from the LAME MP3 encoder project, which is licensed under the LGPL.
This is not "linking" to LGPL code, this is distributing LGPL code, which has probably been modified.
I would just tell you to Google yourself, but you're being annoying, so here:
It was actually smallpox.
Whenever a large population of non-immunes exists, epidemics happen.
The model does not aim to predict the emergence of new strains of influenza, but it does suggest that a short-lived general immunity to the virus might affect the virus's evolution.
The model takes into account the effects of specific immunization against viral strains, but also infectivity randomness and the presence of a short lived strain-transcending immunity recently suggested in the literature.
A pandemic is possible when an influenza A virus makes a dramatic change (i.e., "shift") and acquires a new H or H+N. This shift results in a new or "novel" virus to which the general population has no immunity... Since, by definition, a novel virus is a virus that has never previously infected humans, or hasn't infected humans for a long time, it's likely that almost no one will have immunity, or antibody to protect them against the novel virus. If the novel virus is related to a virus that circulated long ago, older people might have some level of immunity.
Most of this seems really obvious to me, but what the hell do I know...
I don't have any specific data to back that up. I'm not a biologist/virologist/etc.
But it depends in what sense you're asking. In the strict sense, absolutely the probability of surviving a flu outbreak depends to some extent on the occurrence of past flu outbreaks.
It's theorized that groups of Europeans are immune to AIDS due to surviving the black plague, and that was hundreds of years ago. Certainly having previously been exposed to a virus, even only similar viruses, confers a degree of immunity. That's the basis of immunizations. I don't know if it's accurate or not, but there's speculation that generations of people who haven't been exposed to previous flu oubreaks have less of an innate response to new outbreaks.
So, in a strict, chaotic sense, patterns can emerge on the scale of "incidence of human flu pandemic" that have little to do with the fact that genetic mutations are completely random. If a virus has to go through, say, three mutations to get from "common bird flu" to "deadly human flu", and if at each step, there is a probability of humans obtaining increased immunity to the virus before it becomes a pandemic, then the odds of going through those three mutations is different from saying "you have the same odds every time". You don't.
That's all I was saying.
Pandemics don't occur in a vacuum. The events themselves alter the probabilities.
If you're talking about a slot machine then, yes, you have the same odds every time. If you're talking about an event that, by its occurence, affects the odds of its recurrence within a period of time, then talking about being "due" is entirely appropriate. All evidence indicates that flu outbreaks are such events.
It's like looking at the weight on a pressure cooker. If steam hasn't come out in a while, you can say that it's "due" to come out soon.
You can argue that pandemics don't *have* to occur, but until we can go at least a few generations without having one, I'd say you'd be wrong.
If you're not one of the typical flu victims (elderly, very young or compromised immune system from other causes), you'll have an excellent chance to shrug it off, even if it does spread.
It's wrong.
It seems that makes a much deadlier series of events than, for instance:
1. Weak human flu
2. Mutate to become more deadly
3. Pandemic!
Just because #2 is not likely. A parasite that finds a way to kill its host is not at a selective advantage. Whereas a parasite that is already deadly, but finds a *new* host, does have a selective advantage.
Of course this is merely wild speculation on my part.
I'm not a doctor. In fact, I'd make a crappy biologist.
But some guy on NPR said that a healthy immune response causes far more damage than the actual virus. Whereas somebody with a poor immune system might struggle through for a couple of weeks until they can get help, a healthy young person's own immune system would overreact and kill them within days.
Other people on this thread have posted more info.
I'd tell them to start running or get in shape so that they'd better be able to combat the virus.
And like everyone else who has said that in this thread, you'd be wrong.
One thing that is fairly certain is that the healthier you are in general, the less vulnerable you are likely to be. Of course that's true of any illness, not just flu!
That is absolutely wrong. People who know will tell you that bird flu kills those with healthy immune systems far easier than those with weak immune systems.
We copied the Nintendo Entertainment System!
No, that would be infringement. It implies that your product is the same as the trademarked product. It may very well be the same, but you can't say it's the same.
The rest of it, however, and the link that EoinOL provided, would not constitute improper use of trademark. Saying things like "plays Nintendo games" or "Nintendo compatible" are statements of interoperability.
In which case, maybe it is deliberately misleading. Ie, "We need 90 days to crack encryption" sounds a lot more unavoidable than "we have such a high workload we can't get through looking at the contents of the disk before 90 days." Not to mention, the latter can also imply quite a bit of incompetence (ie, management hasn't scaled hiring/budget to the problem, or management isn't being effective, or they're all taking 2 hour lunches to watch soccer, etc.)
Or maybe they want to be able to punish people who aren't doing anything wrong, and who just happen to have encrypted hard drives.
One thing to think about though is that, without a supported OS, most hardware is essentially disposable. The only reason you can use your "old machine" as a firewall is that it is OS-neutral. Devices which rely on specialized operating systems don't get reused. They get thrown away.
Also, you didn't mention the difference in power requirements between small custom hardware and reused PCs. A couple of years of electric bills will pay for the entire box. And the power saved will pay for the difference in hardware requirements several times over.
There is definitely a place for customized hardware running a generic OS like Linux. And there is incentive for both manufacturers and users to produce and demand such devices.
Of course Linux was a win for Linksys. It's just that they were bought out by Cisco.
Linksys was in the hardware business, so Open Source was good for them. Cisco is in the "enterprise pixie dust" business, so Open Source is bad for them.
Overall, though, Open Source is good for users, which is all that really matters.