A Prius battery pack could last as much as 400,000 miles with minimal maintenance issues, according to an independent study conducted by Toyota Motor Company. The study also found that many of the first-generation Toyota Prius hybrids are still running with more than 200,000 miles with their original battery packs. This study quite interesting and it does squash any rumors that the Toyota hybrid will need its batteries replaced every five years, as most critics speculate.
The study also found a few cars in Victoria, B.C., that are still used as a taxi service. These vehicles have between 300,000 to 400,000 miles on them and are still using the same batteries installed since 2001. These findings are remarkable.
Sorry, link of parent is wrong, not sure how to get the *currently in view* location URL (Link creates a link to the original location). But just look west of Ireland.
That sort of harassment and stupidity towards a profit-making company is no surprise to those of us who grasp Richard Stallman's outright, self-professed hatred of profit making. The FSF is simply an extension of his socialist ideology. Those who think that there's a compromise, some middle ground, between capitalism and socialism, are going to be increasingly well educated by the actions of consistent socialists who will teach them otherwise.
The iPhone's App Store provides a great system for distributing and selling software with many side benefits that have been ignored (outside of Apple). For example, what are the odds of a virus-laden program getting too widely distributed? Once detected, distribution can be immediately halted and its signing key revoked. What if you're a software author looking to earn a living and would rather not make it easy for modern socialists to rip off your work? Again, the secure signing and central distribution helps ward off casual copying.
On the consumer side, it's ridiculously easy to browse and install iPhone apps without any computer interaction. There is no such model for any other smart phone. The net result is a paucity of software, and what exists is really expensive. There is no shortage of iPhone apps, and the number will continue to grow, because it *is* such cool hardware and software (absolutely unsurpassed GUI.) Most of these apps are inexpensive, a large number cost nothing.
As a result of having better stuff, Apple is growing. If FSF has a problem with that, they should stick with emitting their propaganda rather than harassing Apple employees and wasting the time of their customers.
Drivers and kernel aside, Vista changed one huge thing: through UAC, people can no longer write files to Program Files.
This is false or at least misleading. What Vista does is to dynamically redirect writes (and reads) to that, and some other locations, to a different one. MS calls it Data Redirection - see this article: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/05/FirstLook/. From the view of the program, it *is* writing/reading to Program Files, but the OS remaps it to a different directory. You can argue about whether that's a *good* idea but that is not the point here.
Unless you're an American Indian, the 300 million+ inhabitants of the U.S. are immigrants or had immigrant parents. It's the country of immigrants and they came because they were freer to make a life in the U.S. than the countries they left. Anybody who's driven across the U.S. knows that it's still relatively empty. True statistic: if half of the entire population of the rest of the world immigrated to the U.S., the population density would still be less than England (which itself still has a lot of countryside.) Anti-immigration policy is massively stupid and leads directly to outsourcing; it helps to keep out the best minds, who will boost some other country's economy, while doing little to stop the influx of the least educated from Mexico. (They too should be able to become citizens, but not at the expense of programmers and PhDs in the hard sciences.)
See http://www.taxfreegold.co.uk/rheniumpricesusdollar s.html. At the time of this posting the price of one troy ounce of rhenium was $5,950. Gold is $691.60 per troy ounce. So rhenium is over 8 times more expensive than gold, before you even add the costs of further processing. Doesn't seem very economical.
For those interested in hearing from actual scientists (rather than U.N. political hacks and social pseudo-scientists), and notable figures such as one of the original founders of Greenpeace who accurately dub environmentalists as humanity haters, I highly recommend this film, done by private Channel 4 in the U.K.:
Some things you won't hear from the shrill Global Warming propagandists: -- Natural CO2 emissions trail warming/cooling. An effect, not a cause -- Vastly more CO2 is emitted naturally than by human production -- It doesn't matter anyway. CO2 is irrelevant to the earth's temperature -- Water Vapor is a radically more important "greenhouse gas" -- Cosmic radiation affects cloud formation, which in turn affects temperature -- Solar output massively affects terrestrial weather directly -- Solar ouput indirectly affects terrestrial weather by affecting how cosmic radiation ultimately reaches the earth, affecting cloud formation -- The earth's climate is always changing, and underwent massive swings in both directions millions of years before humanity even walked the earth -- Ice ages are bad. If one was on the way, there is absolutely nothing mankind could do currently to stop it.
Oh, and incidentally, here's a classic question: What do you think the "ideal temperature" of the earth should be?:) And do you think that somehow the earth has had such a temperature before Man arrived?
I encourage anyone reading CRCulver's flat-out lies about Ayn Rand's writings to read her works for themselves. Evidently he considers her philosophy - which holds that reality has natural laws, men should use logical thinking and should have rational self-interest, that capitalism is good - is "crackpot". Objectivism is the philosophy for thinking people - and it is true that it really riles up both the religious mystics, and secular mystics who believe that "society is all".
If you love science, reasoning, don't hate yourself, like trading the things that you create for things of value created by others, and generally find that your own happiness is important to you, it's likely that you'll love Ayn Rand's writings.
If you can't stand logical thought, think that every blade of grass on earth is more important than your own life, want a handout from the government, and think that all that counts is serving others, well, there's always Jesus or Karl Marx for you...
The money that *anybody* honestly makes is nobody else's goddamned business. That is the short answer. Whether the millionaire got it from a lifetime of frugal savings, clever investments, winning the lottery, creating a business, singing songs, or whatever, it's his money and everybody else should keep their thieving hands off of it. If envious people want more money, they should stop spending time complaining and spend the time working smarter and harder.
This is really what all of the Marxist BS about "income disparity", in all of its infinite variations, is all about, rationalizations aside.
This article is a surprise only to those deluded enough to believe that environmentalists are about "less pollution" and the like. What they're about is a blind, raging hatred of humanity - everything humans do, and everything humans need to survive. Check every single story you read about environmentalists and that is the sole premise that fits every one. Try it, you'll find it clarifying.
I don't particularly care for Wikipedia, but the owner of the system, Wales, has the complete right to run it as he sees fit. Censorship is a term applicable only to government actions, because only the government can legally use force. The government cannot properly stop such statements as "All nerds are disgusting", but if somebody said in your house and you kicked them out for saying it, that is *not* censorship: you have a moral and legal right to your own property. They can say it somewhere else. The same is true for the complainers of this story, the fact that it's a privately owned internet site does not change the principle.
Governments have zero justification in a monopoly on communications. That is characteristic of dictatorship (think: the Chinese firewall) and Britain deserves better. Eliminating the BBC would remove the barricades to competition from around the world that would love to provide hundreds of channels of communication to Brits. Proposing a tax on internet connected PCs is a logical extension of the irrational powers of the BBC and it will only get worse over time.
I haven't seen any other comments address the actual environment Microsoft is addressing. This is from a New York Times article on the move:
The company's Windows Computer Cluster Server 2003 software is scheduled to become available in the first half of next year and is intended to give scientists and engineers a simple way to gain high-performance computing from their existing Microsoft desktop computers.
So, this is the same sort of distributed computing used for years for SETI@Home, etc., presumably with a nicer interface and software to facilitate scheduling remote processes with pooled results.
Dr. Bogdan Maglich came up with an interesting idea that he dubbed the Migma reactor, which involves high energy particle beams that are bent by magnetic fields to constantly loop around the center of a chamber, where they would undergo high energy collisions and enable fusion of elements at much higher temperatures than Tokamaks and related concepts. This kind of fusion can occur without neutron emission, which would be much cleaner than the radioactivity-inducing fusion reactors now under development.
First - even the guy who runs Wikipedia recently admitted that it has lots of accuracy problems. Somebody with enough expertise to take the time to write something good, will realize that it can immediately be chopped up by any anonymous hack - and probably won't waste their time in the first place. Leaving what...? I mean, would you even want to post to *Slashdot*, much less something that is supposed to be more serious such as an encyclopedia, if any AC could come along and trash your words, and you to "monitor" such trashing till the end of time?
Secondly - backward (e.g. "third world") countries do not, by and large, speak English. What language is Wikipedia largely written in...?
Thirdly - if somebody wants to go to the trouble of wasting paper on this effort, they should at least use a decent and reliable source. Go make a special deal with Encylopedia Brittanica - they probably have warehouses full of unsold paper containing far higher quality material than Wikipedia, in the wake of DVD-ROM technology and the net.
A very recent issue of Science magazine (the top peer reviewed scientific journal in the U.S.) has a report on the recent sequencing of the 1918 flu virus. There is now no doubt that it was an avian virus, with enough combination of genetic factors (no single one responsible) to make it both virulent and deadly. One factor that made it so deadly - it is now known - was that it could infect more deeply into the lungs than most viruses, and destroy the alveoli, the air sacs of the lungs.
The problem is that the current "bird flu" is also an avian virus, with an extremely high mortality rate in humans - and though it cannot currently pass from human to human, it might acquire the ability to do so. If it does (or, when) then the hope is that the mutated virus will have a much lower mortality rate than it does now. But even if it was "only" as bad as the 1918 virus, hundreds of millions would die.
I think most people are missing the point here. It is naive to think that it's the *spammers* who are themselves selling the products. In most cases that is probably untrue. *They provide an advertising service* to the snake-oil salesmen who hire them to send their ads as spam. The spammers themselves, then, don't have to directly care what the response ratio of the spam is, as long as they get paid by the snake-oil salesmen.
Why not make the original author of an article the only one who can control changes? (beyond Wikipedia system administrators.) The author could control a list of other users who can be authenticated to make changes because they're trusted if he wants to allow his own "personal editing team."
This would not necessarily limit the number of articles on a given subject. That's where user voting would come in. An authenticated user could give a numeric rating (say from +10 through -10, for extreme support to extreme non-support) of article quality and the current aggregate score could be used to rank/filter articles. The bigger/better an article gets, the more likely it is to get positive feedback and to be the one displayed, though people could see everything if they chose to.
If you could choose to display the top 3/4 articles by rank, it would also help to solve the "controversial topic" issue: why have just one view presented? Read several, in order of popular support (which won't necessarily equal the truth in terms of ranking.)
Ok. I thought you were implying that *anything* could be built with a couple of raw materials. You're saying, by design, lots of things could be built *using only* a handful of materials (with the implication that the resulting products would be limited by the materials properties of those few materials.) That is sensible, though I wouldn't overestimate the number of products that a person needs on a daily basis, that could be created with such a limitation.
And you think that "make anything" machines are going to exist, when? If humanity continues to exist, of course they will at some point. The context of this stuff is implicitly *the near term* - like a few years. If you think the kind of capability that I mentioned is going to be available in that time frame (or within 50 years), you're smoking some pretty strong stuff.
When we get very distributed manufacturing however, things will be built with only one or two raw materials.
That is quite ignorant. Even if such machines could use raw elements (some of which are highly reactive with other materials, such as sodium, chlorine, oxygen, etc.) there are still a significant number of naturally occuring elements. Furthermore, such a machine is radically beyond our ability to build. Take something as simple as making something out of wood. A child can do that now - as long as he has pieces of wood at the start. The "from scratch machine" would somehow need to take Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and traces of other elements to make the wood. (Not gonna happen.) Not to mention far simpler substances such as high temperature superalloys that would require thousands of degrees to create in the first place. etc.
The *last* thing that's going to happen is for rapid prototyping machines to create more complex materials, from a nano perspective, from simpler ones. For the forseeable future their feedstocks will be easy to manipulate pre-made substances of a given composition, with corresponding limitations on the uses of the final product. That isn't to say that these machines aren't fascinating and useful - but able to create anything at will? Ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
"Prius battery pack will last 10 years": http://www.newsoxy.com/toyota-prius/battery-pack-will-last-10-years.html
A Prius battery pack could last as much as 400,000 miles with minimal maintenance issues, according to an independent study conducted by Toyota Motor Company. The study also found that many of the first-generation Toyota Prius hybrids are still running with more than 200,000 miles with their original battery packs. This study quite interesting and it does squash any rumors that the Toyota hybrid will need its batteries replaced every five years, as most critics speculate.
The study also found a few cars in Victoria, B.C., that are still used as a taxi service. These vehicles have between 300,000 to 400,000 miles on them and are still using the same batteries installed since 2001. These findings are remarkable.
[...]
Sorry, link of parent is wrong, not sure how to get the *currently in view* location URL (Link creates a link to the original location). But just look west of Ireland.
Obviously just a processing/data artifact:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=31+15'15.53N+24+15'30.53W&sll=39.679105,-105.128672&sspn=0.011015,0.019312&ie=UTF8&ll=31.25977,-24.257812&spn=3.131698,4.943848&t=h&z=8
That sort of harassment and stupidity towards a profit-making company is no surprise to those of us who grasp Richard Stallman's outright, self-professed hatred of profit making. The FSF is simply an extension of his socialist ideology. Those who think that there's a compromise, some middle ground, between capitalism and socialism, are going to be increasingly well educated by the actions of consistent socialists who will teach them otherwise.
The iPhone's App Store provides a great system for distributing and selling software with many side benefits that have been ignored (outside of Apple). For example, what are the odds of a virus-laden program getting too widely distributed? Once detected, distribution can be immediately halted and its signing key revoked. What if you're a software author looking to earn a living and would rather not make it easy for modern socialists to rip off your work? Again, the secure signing and central distribution helps ward off casual copying.
On the consumer side, it's ridiculously easy to browse and install iPhone apps without any computer interaction. There is no such model for any other smart phone. The net result is a paucity of software, and what exists is really expensive. There is no shortage of iPhone apps, and the number will continue to grow, because it *is* such cool hardware and software (absolutely unsurpassed GUI.) Most of these apps are inexpensive, a large number cost nothing.
As a result of having better stuff, Apple is growing. If FSF has a problem with that, they should stick with emitting their propaganda rather than harassing Apple employees and wasting the time of their customers.
Can you go into a little more detail on how you do that?
This is false or at least misleading. What Vista does is to dynamically redirect writes (and reads) to that, and some other locations, to a different one. MS calls it Data Redirection - see this article: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/05/FirstLook/. From the view of the program, it *is* writing/reading to Program Files, but the OS remaps it to a different directory. You can argue about whether that's a *good* idea but that is not the point here.
Oh, that must explain why small airplanes are never used for smuggling operations, and the U.S. government has no means to detect them. Right.
Unless you're an American Indian, the 300 million+ inhabitants of the U.S. are immigrants or had immigrant parents. It's the country of immigrants and they came because they were freer to make a life in the U.S. than the countries they left. Anybody who's driven across the U.S. knows that it's still relatively empty. True statistic: if half of the entire population of the rest of the world immigrated to the U.S., the population density would still be less than England (which itself still has a lot of countryside.) Anti-immigration policy is massively stupid and leads directly to outsourcing; it helps to keep out the best minds, who will boost some other country's economy, while doing little to stop the influx of the least educated from Mexico. (They too should be able to become citizens, but not at the expense of programmers and PhDs in the hard sciences.)
See http://www.taxfreegold.co.uk/rheniumpricesusdollar s.html. At the time of this posting the price of one troy ounce of rhenium was $5,950. Gold is $691.60 per troy ounce. So rhenium is over 8 times more expensive than gold, before you even add the costs of further processing. Doesn't seem very economical.
For those interested in hearing from actual scientists (rather than U.N. political hacks and social pseudo-scientists), and notable figures such as one of the original founders of Greenpeace who accurately dub environmentalists as humanity haters, I highly recommend this film, done by private Channel 4 in the U.K.:
8 11497638
:) And do you think that somehow the earth has had such a temperature before Man arrived?
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=9005566792
Some things you won't hear from the shrill Global Warming propagandists:
-- Natural CO2 emissions trail warming/cooling. An effect, not a cause
-- Vastly more CO2 is emitted naturally than by human production
-- It doesn't matter anyway. CO2 is irrelevant to the earth's temperature
-- Water Vapor is a radically more important "greenhouse gas"
-- Cosmic radiation affects cloud formation, which in turn affects temperature
-- Solar output massively affects terrestrial weather directly
-- Solar ouput indirectly affects terrestrial weather by affecting how cosmic radiation ultimately reaches the earth, affecting cloud formation
-- The earth's climate is always changing, and underwent massive swings in both directions millions of years before humanity even walked the earth
-- Ice ages are bad. If one was on the way, there is absolutely nothing mankind could do currently to stop it.
Oh, and incidentally, here's a classic question: What do you think the "ideal temperature" of the earth should be?
I encourage anyone reading CRCulver's flat-out lies about Ayn Rand's writings to read her works for themselves. Evidently he considers her philosophy - which holds that reality has natural laws, men should use logical thinking and should have rational self-interest, that capitalism is good - is "crackpot". Objectivism is the philosophy for thinking people - and it is true that it really riles up both the religious mystics, and secular mystics who believe that "society is all".
...
If you love science, reasoning, don't hate yourself, like trading the things that you create for things of value created by others, and generally find that your own happiness is important to you, it's likely that you'll love Ayn Rand's writings.
If you can't stand logical thought, think that every blade of grass on earth is more important than your own life, want a handout from the government, and think that all that counts is serving others, well, there's always Jesus or Karl Marx for you
The money that *anybody* honestly makes is nobody else's goddamned business. That is the short answer. Whether the millionaire got it from a lifetime of frugal savings, clever investments, winning the lottery, creating a business, singing songs, or whatever, it's his money and everybody else should keep their thieving hands off of it. If envious people want more money, they should stop spending time complaining and spend the time working smarter and harder.
This is really what all of the Marxist BS about "income disparity", in all of its infinite variations, is all about, rationalizations aside.
This article is a surprise only to those deluded enough to believe that environmentalists are about "less pollution" and the like. What they're about is a blind, raging hatred of humanity - everything humans do, and everything humans need to survive. Check every single story you read about environmentalists and that is the sole premise that fits every one. Try it, you'll find it clarifying.
0 7/feature1p/index.html would like to see the human race destroyed by an airborne variant of Ebola. He is far from alone.
What would they like to do about it? One, described here http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-
I don't particularly care for Wikipedia, but the owner of the system, Wales, has the complete right to run it as he sees fit. Censorship is a term applicable only to government actions, because only the government can legally use force. The government cannot properly stop such statements as "All nerds are disgusting", but if somebody said in your house and you kicked them out for saying it, that is *not* censorship: you have a moral and legal right to your own property. They can say it somewhere else. The same is true for the complainers of this story, the fact that it's a privately owned internet site does not change the principle.
It's not either-or. Different judgements for different contexts and purposes. In any case, I wouldn't call Annalee Newitz "gorgeous".
Governments have zero justification in a monopoly on communications. That is characteristic of dictatorship (think: the Chinese firewall) and Britain deserves better. Eliminating the BBC would remove the barricades to competition from around the world that would love to provide hundreds of channels of communication to Brits. Proposing a tax on internet connected PCs is a logical extension of the irrational powers of the BBC and it will only get worse over time.
So, this is the same sort of distributed computing used for years for SETI@Home, etc., presumably with a nicer interface and software to facilitate scheduling remote processes with pooled results.
Dr. Bogdan Maglich came up with an interesting idea that he dubbed the Migma reactor, which involves high energy particle beams that are bent by magnetic fields to constantly loop around the center of a chamber, where they would undergo high energy collisions and enable fusion of elements at much higher temperatures than Tokamaks and related concepts. This kind of fusion can occur without neutron emission, which would be much cleaner than the radioactivity-inducing fusion reactors now under development.
m
Some URLs are at: http://www.rexresearch.com/maglich/maglich.htm,
with a good bio page on Maglich at: http://www.hienergyinc.com/company/bio_maglich.ht
First - even the guy who runs Wikipedia recently admitted that it has lots of accuracy problems. Somebody with enough expertise to take the time to write something good, will realize that it can immediately be chopped up by any anonymous hack - and probably won't waste their time in the first place. Leaving what...? I mean, would you even want to post to *Slashdot*, much less something that is supposed to be more serious such as an encyclopedia, if any AC could come along and trash your words, and you to "monitor" such trashing till the end of time?
Secondly - backward (e.g. "third world") countries do not, by and large, speak English. What language is Wikipedia largely written in...?
Thirdly - if somebody wants to go to the trouble of wasting paper on this effort, they should at least use a decent and reliable source. Go make a special deal with Encylopedia Brittanica - they probably have warehouses full of unsold paper containing far higher quality material than Wikipedia, in the wake of DVD-ROM technology and the net.
A very recent issue of Science magazine (the top peer reviewed scientific journal in the U.S.) has a report on the recent sequencing of the 1918 flu virus. There is now no doubt that it was an avian virus, with enough combination of genetic factors (no single one responsible) to make it both virulent and deadly. One factor that made it so deadly - it is now known - was that it could infect more deeply into the lungs than most viruses, and destroy the alveoli, the air sacs of the lungs.
The problem is that the current "bird flu" is also an avian virus, with an extremely high mortality rate in humans - and though it cannot currently pass from human to human, it might acquire the ability to do so. If it does (or, when) then the hope is that the mutated virus will have a much lower mortality rate than it does now. But even if it was "only" as bad as the 1918 virus, hundreds of millions would die.
I think most people are missing the point here. It is naive to think that it's the *spammers* who are themselves selling the products. In most cases that is probably untrue. *They provide an advertising service* to the snake-oil salesmen who hire them to send their ads as spam. The spammers themselves, then, don't have to directly care what the response ratio of the spam is, as long as they get paid by the snake-oil salesmen.
Why not make the original author of an article the only one who can control changes? (beyond Wikipedia system administrators.) The author could control a list of other users who can be authenticated to make changes because they're trusted if he wants to allow his own "personal editing team."
This would not necessarily limit the number of articles on a given subject. That's where user voting would come in. An authenticated user could give a numeric rating (say from +10 through -10, for extreme support to extreme non-support) of article quality and the current aggregate score could be used to rank/filter articles. The bigger/better an article gets, the more likely it is to get positive feedback and to be the one displayed, though people could see everything if they chose to.
If you could choose to display the top 3/4 articles by rank, it would also help to solve the "controversial topic" issue: why have just one view presented? Read several, in order of popular support (which won't necessarily equal the truth in terms of ranking.)
Ok. I thought you were implying that *anything* could be built with a couple of raw materials. You're saying, by design, lots of things could be built *using only* a handful of materials (with the implication that the resulting products would be limited by the materials properties of those few materials.) That is sensible, though I wouldn't overestimate the number of products that a person needs on a daily basis, that could be created with such a limitation.
And you think that "make anything" machines are going to exist, when? If humanity continues to exist, of course they will at some point. The context of this stuff is implicitly *the near term* - like a few years. If you think the kind of capability that I mentioned is going to be available in that time frame (or within 50 years), you're smoking some pretty strong stuff.
That is quite ignorant. Even if such machines could use raw elements (some of which are highly reactive with other materials, such as sodium, chlorine, oxygen, etc.) there are still a significant number of naturally occuring elements. Furthermore, such a machine is radically beyond our ability to build. Take something as simple as making something out of wood. A child can do that now - as long as he has pieces of wood at the start. The "from scratch machine" would somehow need to take Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and traces of other elements to make the wood. (Not gonna happen.) Not to mention far simpler substances such as high temperature superalloys that would require thousands of degrees to create in the first place. etc.
The *last* thing that's going to happen is for rapid prototyping machines to create more complex materials, from a nano perspective, from simpler ones. For the forseeable future their feedstocks will be easy to manipulate pre-made substances of a given composition, with corresponding limitations on the uses of the final product. That isn't to say that these machines aren't fascinating and useful - but able to create anything at will? Ridiculous.