Every climate scientist knows that water is responsible for most of the greenhouse effect -- this is not news.
The important point to remember is that in the lingo of the climate scientists, water is a "feedback" rather than a "forcing". CO2 is considered a forcing because you can affect the climate by adding to or removing it from the environment -- the levels of CO2 in the environment are not affected much by climate processes.
Water is completely different: there is so much water available on the surface of the earth that adding extra water to, or removing it from, the environment -- say, by building big condeners that feed storage tanks, or by building pumps that spray water into the air -- won't make much difference, at least once you turn the pumps or condensers off.
You have a very good point. Because, after all, we know that the police would never, say, shoot an innocent person to death on the tube because they thought he might be a terrorist. Wouldthey?
But how many of you have ever registered a copyright? If you haven't, isn't it a little disingenuous to write to the Copyright Office complaining?
Indeed, but more to the point, note this from the request for comments:
In order to ensure that preregistration can be implemented in a smoothly functioning and timely manner, the Office now seeks comments that will assist it in determining whether any eligible parties will be prevented from preregistering a claim due to browser requirements of the preregistration system. Therefore, this notice seeks information whether any potential preregistration filers would have difficulties using Internet Explorer (version 5.1 or higher) to file preregistration claims, and if so, why. More generally, in the interest of achieving support for browsers in the Office's preregistration processing environment, this notice inquires whether (and why) an eligible party who anticipates preregistering a claim on the electronic-only form will not be able to use Internet Explorer to do so, or will choose not to preregister if it is necessary to use Internet Explorer.
In other words, unless you can tell the Copyright office (1) that you plan to preregister a copyright, and (2) why you can't use IE, your comment will probably be ignored... So if you do plan to comment, tell how you will directly be affected if they adopt IE-only preregistration. I haven't seen a single proposed comment posted here that meets this standard.
Reading this article, I was reminded of the old children's story about "stone soup". You remember that one -- someone advertises that he can make soup from a stone, and various others gather around to watch this amazing feat. Well, the soup needs a little extra seasoning, so he gets someone to put in some carrots while the stone cooks, then he adds some onions, etc, etc... I think you can see where this is going.
Sure you can make a chess playing program from a spam filter.
You just need to throw in a legal move generator, and a game database, and some capture heuristics, and position displayer, etc, etc...
The problem is that *real* research produces innovations that can't always be contained to the company where the research was done. The product of research is information, which as RMS says, "wants to be free". IBM and AT&T could afford to invest in far-out, forward looking research because they were monopolies -- all of the benefits of their research would accrue to them, rather than their non-existent competitors.
It's no coincidence that now Microsoft Research has one of the top corporate CS research labs in the world: their monopoly status means that in principle, they will get the majority of the value out of their innovations. (Whether they can ship them on time or not is another matter...:-) )
Click "view as tree" at the top of the thread, and you get thre tree frame on the left that allows you to jump to particular articles, even though the articles are still all concatenated...
You can still do a deep link to a single article, if you like....
Navigate to the thread, for example this comp.arch thread. Choose the post you want to link to, and click on "Show Options". Two of the options are "print", which is a link to a "printable" version of the article, and "Show original", which is a link to the article with all the headers.
One more step (or simple URL hack) from this display is "view parsed" which gives a friendly HTML version -- for example, try this link.
First: the 200 Mbps peak bandwidth referred to is *aggregate* bandwidth -- upstream plus downstream -- for a symmetric 100/100 connection. These speeds have been talked about in the industry for some time -- see back issues of the DSL prime newsletter. The peak bandwidth in any one direction is probably 100 Mbps.
Second: The peak speeds are indeed at short distances, but they won't be limited to just those people living a block from their CO. Instead they will be delivered as FTTC (fiber-to-the-curb) or FTTP (fiber-to-the-premises), where an optical fiber runs from the CO to a local mini-DSLAM that serves a small neighborhood -- or even a single apartment building.
Third: TI is *not* selling UDSL as an ultra-high-speed DSL, but as a "universal" DSL to make it easier (read: cheaper) to upgrade customers when the time comes. Other silicon manufacturers will be selling similar technologies... But for the DSL customer, what matters is the "when the time comes" part -- and unless your neighborhood already has FTTC/FTTP, the time isn't going to come for a little while yet.:-)
This dialogue was frustrating, because these two smart scientists seemed to be arguing past each other, about entirely different things.
Drexler seems to be saying "Molecular assemblers are possible, and you can't prove me wrong."
A lot of slashdot posters agree -- "Smalley has no proof that this is impossible".
And, if you look at the question from that perspective, Drexler and the posters are right, largely because it is *very* *very* difficult to show that something is "impossible".
But Smalley is actually arguing something else: he's saying "I've analyzed this proposal for building a molecular assembler, and let me tell you, it won't work!". And, as far as I can tell, he's probably right. Drexler and the posters, of course, say that Smalley is creating (and demolishing) a straw man. A *real* molecular assembler will work differently.
*I* say: OK, you say that was a straw man, so tell me about the REAL man. Let's see the proposal that *will* work. Don't give me arguments that say "enzymes can do it, so therefore we can too". Give me an honest design proposal. (And, while you're at it, give it to someone smarter than I am -- someone like Smalley.)
Then we have a starting place, and we can ask: Does this work? I suspect that a realistic proposal will fall prey to many of the problems that Smalley describes, but who knows?
But without a starting proposal, who knows what we're even talking about? We're not on the same page... Heck, we're not even in the same galaxy.
Chain voting is *not* a way to fraudulently change the vote, it is a way for a rich guy to pay voters for verified votes for the rich guy's candidate, which is impossible with a true secret ballot.
Rich guy somehow gets his hands on a paper ballot cast for his candidate -- maybe by going to vote himself and not putting it in the box. Rich guy can now go to someone about to vote, and say: here's a ballot cast for my candidate. You go mark your ballot for my candidate, but put my ballot in the box and bring me the ballot you marked. Rich guy makes sure that his ballot is marked in such a way that he can check that the ballot brought back by the voter is the newly marked one.
This way rich guy knows that the ballot cast by the voter was the one that rich guy marked, so he knows who the voter voted for, and can now safely pay him, and use the ballot that the voter just marked to give to the next paid voter.
This is bad if you think that being able to pay voters (which is in fact illegal) will result in the downfall of democracy. Personally, it seems to me that having politicians pay voters directly with their own money would at least be a bit more direct and efficient than the way they buy elections now, often using the taxpayers money... but I digress...
"There's been a major breakthrough," he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron's natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond.
With my fairly ancient, college-freshman level, chemistry background, I have to say that this particular quote sounded like total bullshit. A boron nucleus has charge +5, one less than carbon at +6. There's no way around that basic physical fact. So a neutral carbon crystal doped with boron will have fewer electrons than the pure carbon crystal, which means that any semiconductivity *must* be p-type. The idea of "inverting boron's natural conductivity" sounds like nonsense made up to lure investors.
I don't personally understand it. Does anyone know why inductive charging shouldn't qualify for zero emmissions?
It's simple really: standardization. The CARB decided that having a single standard for charging stations was more important than maintaining "backward compatibility" with existing vehicles.
As for why they chose conductive chargers, here's some information:
You've told us how much this costs in the 20-40 GHz frequency band, in the volumes that currently exist, presumably for military/aviation/space applications. (I.E. a tiny fraction of consumer volumes.)
Now, let's say we wanted to do this in the ordinary FM band, at about 0.1 GHz. In consumer volumes -- hundreds of thousands or millions of units per year, with all of the economies of scale that implies. Now how much does it cost?
If the signal processing at 100 Mhz isn't fast enough (and it may not be, yet, but I'll bet it's close), then how about in the AM band, at about 1 MHz? At 1 MHz, even with a single 500 MHz DSP, you have 500 DSP instructions per RF cycle -- plenty of processing time for a few linear combinations. Special purpose DSPs could probably handle 100 MHz, if you didn't ask them to do too much.
Sure, if you look at the existing tech that does stuff like this, it looks really expensive. That's because it was designed for high-performance, low-volume applications paid for out of the enormous US military budget, and to work at microwave frequencies.
But even high quality audio signals use well under 100 kHz of bandwith, even without digitization or compression. I think that consumer radio that used this technology could be made a lot more cheaply than you suggest.
With proper antenna design, you don't need to move the antenna to change the direction that it points.
What you need is an antenna with multiple elements, and electric circuits that can combine the signals from the elements in arbitrary combinations.
With SDR techniques, it's even easier: just digitize the signals from the elements and combine them with your signal processing software.
Changing the combinations you use is a lot faster than moving hardware. Your software could also include techniques for tracking particular stations.
Could we do this for US$20 today? Probably not. But if we can do it for US$500 today -- and I think we could -- then we could probably do it for US$20 with 5 years or so...
One of Reed's points (though the Salon article doesn't mention it) is that radio receivers don't need to be omnidirectional.
It's possible -- especially with software defined radio techniques -- for a receiver to tune in a particular direction (in addition to frequency, perhaps). Presumably we would design the receiver so that it tracked the radio source, rather then having to fiddle with the dials everytime the receiver moves. But as long as the possible transmitters aren't all in a straight line, there's no reason that a receiver built today couldn't distinguish between many transmitters on the same frequency -- even with fancy coding techniques. (You do mention this in your post -- I'm just amplifying a bit.) You might fiddle with a "direction" knob to get the station you want, then turn on a "track" feature to keep that station tuned in as you drive your car around, or whatever...
This won't make the spectrum infinite, but would expand the usable spectrum substantially... Reed phrases his arguments in ways that border on pseudo-scientific, but there are real possibilities underneath his hype.
I read (OK, skimmed) the ruling -- it contains some interesting stuff in it that many Slashdot posters are missing.
Most important: The court ruled that Rambus did not have a duty to disclose their patent applications during the SDRAM standards setting process because their patents aren't necessary to implement SDRAM. The court did say that Rambus *thought* their patents covered SDRAM, but ruled that what Rambus lawyers thought didn't matter.
So Rambus can't then use this ruling to say "OK, now we can sue everyone who makes an SDRAM chip", because if they were successful in doing so, Infineon et al could go back to court and say that the Appeals court was wrong, the patents do cover SDRAM, so Rambus did have to disclose them after all.
The court wasn't entirely complimentary to Rambus, either... Here's the choice quote:
This court has examined the claims of the cited applications as well as the relevant portions of the SDRAM standard. Based on this review, this court has determined that substantial evidence does not support the finding that these applications had claims that read on the SDRAM standard. [...]
The record shows that Rambus's claimed technology did not fall within the JEDEC disclosure duty. The record shows at most that Rambus wanted to obtain claims covering the SDRAM standard. Some of that evidence does not put Rambus in the best light. Rambus thought it could cover the SDRAM standard and tried to do so while a member of an open standards-setting committee. While such actions impeach Rambus's business ethics, the record does not contain substantial evidence that Rambus breached its duty under the EIA/JEDEC policy.
Also, Rambus patents may cover DDR SDRAM, but they quit JEDEC before JEDEC started working on DDR. The previous court decision had already said that Rambus was in the clear on DDR.
There are a few different versions of this (google comp.arch to see some examples):
"Money can buy bandwidth, but latency is given by God"
(You can always increase bandwidth by adding more bits, but the speed of light is fixed...)
Chance *is* significant, given the consequences!
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
People are posting that "3.9 in a million" is such a small probablility that even *mentioning* this is pure hype...
But considering how bad the consequences could be, 4 in a million is still worth worrying about.
After all, an asteroid of this size could certainly kill millions of people, and depending on the effect on the climate, maybe hundreds of millions. A "four in a million" chance of killing, say, 10 million people, would mean that the expected (mean) death toll from this asteroid would be about 40 people -- roughly the amount of a major train accident or minor airplane crash. I don't think this story got more play than such an accident would have...
So the low probability and the high death toll kind of cancel each other out: obviously this isn't the story of the century (yet!!!), but it's worthy of mention.
From what I've seen, there are two basic types of cookbooks, at least at the extremes.
One is the kind that has been created by a single author -- or perhaps a few cooks -- who have a definitive vision of the kind of cooking that they want to tell the reader about. The author doesn't have to have come up with all of the recipes himself or herself, but s/he does collect them, test them, and adjust them to fit his or her sensibilities. My current favorite example of this is Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen, which is full of great Mexican dishes that start from authentic, traditional Mexican recipes but are "modernized", adapted for ingredients available in the US, and are just delicious.
You've probably seen the other kind of cookbook too. It has a title like A Taste Of The Eastern Springfield Kiwanis Club, and contains whatever recipes the club members sent in to whoever was assigned that task of collecting them into the cookbook. These cookbooks are uniformly terrible -- you may find a recipe that you like, but that won't tell you anything about whether you might like the next recipe.
The problem with an "Open Source" cookbook is that unless you are very careful, it's much more likely to end up like the second kind of cookbook than the first kind -- a selection of random recipes sent in by whoever seemed interested in your project.
If you decide to do an Open Source cookbook, then make an effort to make it more like the first kind than the second kind. Decide what you want the food to be like. Solicit recipes, collect them, steal them. Then test every recipe that you put in your book. Eliminate the ones you don't like, and adjust the best of the others till they're just the way that *you* like them.
This way, when I try out a recipe from the book, I know what to expect. If necessary, I can adjust for the difference between your taste and mine.
With the random "Taste of Slashdot" cookbook, I'll just be rolling the dice every time. Why bother? I'll just Google for recipes instead...
The reason that standardizing PC's works is that you can put standard cards on a standard bus, and slap in any old power supply and case. The physical design of the desktop system just isn't all that important...
With laptops, it's a whole different story: every manufacturer is trying to squeeze as much functionality and as large a screen into the thinnest, lightest case they can. The physical design of the system is *everything*.
(Of course, if you like 9 lb, 2.5" thick laptops, ignore what I just said... But I'm not going to buy one.)
Slashdot Mirror
Every climate scientist knows that water is responsible for most of the greenhouse effect -- this is not news.
The important point to remember is that in the lingo of the climate scientists, water is a "feedback" rather than a "forcing". CO2 is considered a forcing because you can affect the climate by adding to or removing it from the environment -- the levels of CO2 in the environment are not affected much by climate processes.
Water is completely different: there is so much water available on the surface of the earth that adding extra water to, or removing it from, the environment -- say, by building big condeners that feed storage tanks, or by building pumps that spray water into the air -- won't make much difference, at least once you turn the pumps or condensers off.
You can read all about it here.
The US govt might be able to take the Blackberries, but I bet they'd have trouble declaring eminent domain over the email servers in Canada...
You have a very good point. Because, after all, we know that the police would never, say, shoot an innocent person to death on the tube because they thought he might be a terrorist. Would they?
Indeed, but more to the point, note this from the request for comments:In other words, unless you can tell the Copyright office (1) that you plan to preregister a copyright, and (2) why you can't use IE, your comment will probably be ignored... So if you do plan to comment, tell how you will directly be affected if they adopt IE-only preregistration. I haven't seen a single proposed comment posted here that meets this standard.
In the US anyway, and probably in other countries with similar intellectual property laws, recipes are not covered by copyright.
Why do you think Coca-Cola keeps their recipes under strict secrecy?
So brew away -- and feel free to ignore the licensing restrictions of the CC license, at least for the recipe.
Reading this article, I was reminded of the old children's story about "stone soup". You remember that one -- someone advertises that he can make soup from a stone, and various others gather around to watch this amazing feat. Well, the soup needs a little extra seasoning, so he gets someone to put in some carrots while the stone cooks, then he adds some onions, etc, etc... I think you can see where this is going.
Sure you can make a chess playing program from a spam filter.
You just need to throw in a legal move generator, and a game database, and some capture heuristics, and position displayer, etc, etc...
Real research doesn't produce growth this quarter
:-) )
The problem is that *real* research produces innovations that can't always be contained to the company where the research was done. The product of research is information, which as RMS says, "wants to be free". IBM and AT&T could afford to invest in far-out, forward looking research because they were monopolies -- all of the benefits of their research would accrue to them, rather than their non-existent competitors.
It's no coincidence that now Microsoft Research has one of the top corporate CS research labs in the world: their monopoly status means that in principle, they will get the majority of the value out of their innovations. (Whether they can ship them on time or not is another matter...
Click "view as tree" at the top of the thread, and you get thre tree frame on the left that allows you to jump to particular articles, even though the articles are still all concatenated...
You can still do a deep link to a single article, if you like....
Navigate to the thread, for example this comp.arch thread. Choose the post you want to link to, and click on "Show Options". Two of the options are "print", which is a link to a "printable" version of the article, and "Show original", which is a link to the article with all the headers.
One more step (or simple URL hack) from this display is "view parsed" which gives a friendly HTML version -- for example, try this link.
Boy, nobody seems to have read this very carefully -- including the ZDNET reporter wrote the original article.
:-)
Here are the relevant TI pages: their press release, and their UDSL home page.
First: the 200 Mbps peak bandwidth referred to is *aggregate* bandwidth -- upstream plus downstream -- for a symmetric 100/100 connection. These speeds have been talked about in the industry for some time -- see back issues of the DSL prime newsletter. The peak bandwidth in any one direction is probably 100 Mbps.
Second: The peak speeds are indeed at short distances, but they won't be limited to just those people living a block from their CO. Instead they will be delivered as FTTC (fiber-to-the-curb) or FTTP (fiber-to-the-premises), where an optical fiber runs from the CO to a local mini-DSLAM that serves a small neighborhood -- or even a single apartment building.
Third: TI is *not* selling UDSL as an ultra-high-speed DSL, but as a "universal" DSL to make it easier (read: cheaper) to upgrade customers when the time comes. Other silicon manufacturers will be selling similar technologies... But for the DSL customer, what matters is the "when the time comes" part -- and unless your neighborhood already has FTTC/FTTP, the time isn't going to come for a little while yet.
But it will come.
Not to mention that even adaptive optics don't help you see through clouds...
This dialogue was frustrating, because these two smart scientists seemed to be arguing past each other, about entirely different things.
Drexler seems to be saying "Molecular assemblers are possible, and you can't prove me wrong."
A lot of slashdot posters agree -- "Smalley has no proof that this is impossible".
And, if you look at the question from that perspective, Drexler and the posters are right, largely because it is *very* *very* difficult to show that something is "impossible".
But Smalley is actually arguing something else: he's saying "I've analyzed this proposal for building a molecular assembler, and let me tell you, it won't work!". And, as far as I can tell, he's probably right. Drexler and the posters, of course, say that Smalley is creating (and demolishing) a straw man. A *real* molecular assembler will work differently.
*I* say: OK, you say that was a straw man, so tell me about the REAL man. Let's see the proposal that *will* work. Don't give me arguments that say "enzymes can do it, so therefore we can too". Give me an honest design proposal. (And, while you're at it, give it to someone smarter than I am -- someone like Smalley.)
Then we have a starting place, and we can ask: Does this work? I suspect that a realistic proposal will fall prey to many of the problems that Smalley describes, but who knows?
But without a starting proposal, who knows what we're even talking about? We're not on the same page... Heck, we're not even in the same galaxy.
Here's my guess:
Chain voting is *not* a way to fraudulently change the vote, it is a way for a rich guy to pay voters for verified votes for the rich guy's candidate, which is impossible with a true secret ballot.
Rich guy somehow gets his hands on a paper ballot cast for his candidate -- maybe by going to vote himself and not putting it in the box. Rich guy can now go to someone about to vote, and say: here's a ballot cast for my candidate. You go mark your ballot for my candidate, but put my ballot in the box and bring me the ballot you marked. Rich guy makes sure that his ballot is marked in such a way that he can check that the ballot brought back by the voter is the newly marked one.
This way rich guy knows that the ballot cast by the voter was the one that rich guy marked, so he knows who the voter voted for, and can now safely pay him, and use the ballot that the voter just marked to give to the next paid voter.
This is bad if you think that being able to pay voters (which is in fact illegal) will result in the downfall of democracy. Personally, it seems to me that having politicians pay voters directly with their own money would at least be a bit more direct and efficient than the way they buy elections now, often using the taxpayers money... but I digress...
With my fairly ancient, college-freshman level, chemistry background, I have to say that this particular quote sounded like total bullshit. A boron nucleus has charge +5, one less than carbon at +6. There's no way around that basic physical fact. So a neutral carbon crystal doped with boron will have fewer electrons than the pure carbon crystal, which means that any semiconductivity *must* be p-type. The idea of "inverting boron's natural conductivity" sounds like nonsense made up to lure investors.
Would the OP comment here?
It's simple really: standardization. The CARB decided that having a single standard for charging stations was more important than maintaining "backward compatibility" with existing vehicles.
As for why they chose conductive chargers, here's some information:
A CARB staff paper on charger infrastructure
The official regulatory statement of reasons for why they chose conductive, including rebuttals to various statements by interested parties.
OK, you're the expert.
You've told us how much this costs in the 20-40 GHz frequency band, in the volumes that currently exist, presumably for military/aviation/space applications. (I.E. a tiny fraction of consumer volumes.)
Now, let's say we wanted to do this in the ordinary FM band, at about 0.1 GHz. In consumer volumes -- hundreds of thousands or millions of units per year, with all of the economies of scale that implies. Now how much does it cost?
If the signal processing at 100 Mhz isn't fast enough (and it may not be, yet, but I'll bet it's close), then how about in the AM band, at about 1 MHz? At 1 MHz, even with a single 500 MHz DSP, you have 500 DSP instructions per RF cycle -- plenty of processing time for a few linear combinations. Special purpose DSPs could probably handle 100 MHz, if you didn't ask them to do too much.
Sure, if you look at the existing tech that does stuff like this, it looks really expensive. That's because it was designed for high-performance, low-volume applications paid for out of the enormous US military budget, and to work at microwave frequencies.
But even high quality audio signals use well under 100 kHz of bandwith, even without digitization or compression. I think that consumer radio that used this technology could be made a lot more cheaply than you suggest.
OK, there would be some details to work out, but with software-designed radio techiques, that would :-)
be a simple matter of programming.
Seriously: of course it's hard, but it might be possible, and what's hard (expensive) today is often easy (cheap) tomorrow.
With proper antenna design, you don't need to move the antenna to change the direction that it points.
What you need is an antenna with multiple elements, and electric circuits that can combine the signals from the elements in arbitrary combinations.
With SDR techniques, it's even easier: just digitize the signals from the elements and combine them with your signal processing software.
Changing the combinations you use is a lot faster than moving hardware. Your software could also include techniques for tracking particular stations.
Could we do this for US$20 today? Probably not. But if we can do it for US$500 today -- and I think we could -- then we could probably do it for US$20 with 5 years or so...
One of Reed's points (though the Salon article doesn't mention it) is that radio receivers don't need to be omnidirectional.
It's possible -- especially with software defined radio techniques -- for a receiver to tune in a particular direction (in addition to frequency, perhaps). Presumably we would design the receiver so that it tracked the radio source, rather then having to fiddle with the dials everytime the receiver moves. But as long as the possible transmitters aren't all in a straight line, there's no reason that a receiver built today couldn't distinguish between many transmitters on the same frequency -- even with fancy coding techniques. (You do mention this in your post -- I'm just amplifying a bit.) You might fiddle with a "direction" knob to get the station you want, then turn on a "track" feature to keep that station tuned in as you drive your car around, or whatever...
This won't make the spectrum infinite, but would expand the usable spectrum substantially... Reed phrases his arguments in ways that border on pseudo-scientific, but there are real possibilities underneath his hype.
Most important: The court ruled that Rambus did not have a duty to disclose their patent applications during the SDRAM standards setting process because their patents aren't necessary to implement SDRAM. The court did say that Rambus *thought* their patents covered SDRAM, but ruled that what Rambus lawyers thought didn't matter.
So Rambus can't then use this ruling to say "OK, now we can sue everyone who makes an SDRAM chip", because if they were successful in doing so, Infineon et al could go back to court and say that the Appeals court was wrong, the patents do cover SDRAM, so Rambus did have to disclose them after all.
The court wasn't entirely complimentary to Rambus, either... Here's the choice quote:
Also, Rambus patents may cover DDR SDRAM, but they quit JEDEC before JEDEC started working on DDR. The previous court decision had already said that Rambus was in the clear on DDR.
There are a few different versions of this (google comp.arch to see some examples):
"Money can buy bandwidth, but latency is given by God"
(You can always increase bandwidth by adding more bits, but the speed of light is fixed...)
People are posting that "3.9 in a million" is such a small probablility that even *mentioning* this is pure hype...
But considering how bad the consequences could be, 4 in a million is still worth worrying about.
After all, an asteroid of this size could certainly kill millions of people, and depending on the effect on the climate, maybe hundreds of millions. A "four in a million" chance of killing, say, 10 million people, would mean that the expected (mean) death toll from this asteroid would be about 40 people -- roughly the amount of a major train accident or minor airplane crash. I don't think this story got more play than such an accident would have...
So the low probability and the high death toll kind of cancel each other out: obviously this isn't the story of the century (yet!!!), but it's worthy of mention.
From what I've seen, there are two basic types of cookbooks, at least at the extremes.
One is the kind that has been created by a single author -- or perhaps a few cooks -- who have a definitive vision of the kind of cooking that they want to tell the reader about. The author doesn't have to have come up with all of the recipes himself or herself, but s/he does collect them, test them, and adjust them to fit his or her sensibilities. My current favorite example of this is Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen, which is full of great Mexican dishes that start from authentic, traditional Mexican recipes but are "modernized", adapted for ingredients available in the US, and are just delicious.
You've probably seen the other kind of cookbook too. It has a title like A Taste Of The Eastern Springfield Kiwanis Club, and contains whatever recipes the club members sent in to whoever was assigned that task of collecting them into the cookbook. These cookbooks are uniformly terrible -- you may find a recipe that you like, but that won't tell you anything about whether you might like the next recipe.
The problem with an "Open Source" cookbook is that unless you are very careful, it's much more likely to end up like the second kind of cookbook than the first kind -- a selection of random recipes sent in by whoever seemed interested in your project.
If you decide to do an Open Source cookbook, then make an effort to make it more like the first kind than the second kind. Decide what you want the food to be like. Solicit recipes, collect them, steal them. Then test every recipe that you put in your book. Eliminate the ones you don't like, and adjust the best of the others till they're just the way that *you* like them.
This way, when I try out a recipe from the book, I know what to expect. If necessary, I can adjust for the difference between your taste and mine.
With the random "Taste of Slashdot" cookbook, I'll just be rolling the dice every time. Why bother? I'll just Google for recipes instead...
Good luck with your project!
Take a look at Julia Child's The Way to Cook. It may be what you are looking for (at a fairly high level; not much on leftovers).
The reason that standardizing PC's works is that you can put standard cards on a standard bus, and slap in any old power supply and case. The physical design of the desktop system just isn't all that important...
With laptops, it's a whole different story: every manufacturer is trying to squeeze as much functionality and as large a screen into the thinnest, lightest case they can. The physical design of the system is *everything*.
(Of course, if you like 9 lb, 2.5" thick laptops, ignore what I just said... But I'm not going to buy one.)