BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.
Just one more thought on this topic...another good idea (which will be less expensive than lunar disposal unless space travel gets really cheap) is disposing of the waste at the mid-ocean subduction zones. Let the terrorists try to retrieve it from a few hundred meters underground (and going deeper all the time)...when it is buried under 7,000 m. of water, in an undisclosed location.;-)
They'd be better off trying to enrich their own uranium...
That is the alternative, and pollution from traditional power generation plants is killing people every day, and sickening many more.
There is not a single permanent disposal site world-wide. no one can guarantee the safety. the U.S. government even has a website on _just this problem_. Ready-made dirty bombs are driven in trucks all over the country. GREAT IDEA.
If someone wants to kill a lot of civilians, all they need is a garage lab to produce chemical or bio agents. Much more effective, much easier to deal with, even more scary (1 gram of the right bio agent could kill millions). See the recent research on mouse pox for some really scary stuff (did that story make/.?). How 'bout a bio agent that'll only wipe out one ethnic group? The research is just about there. It is always hard to evaluate relative risk, but to me nuke power is way down the list.
BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.
Also BTW, I hope some of the recent solar energy developments lead (finally) to competitive photovoltaic power generation on a distributed basis (that'll tick off the power companies!). One of the more exciting developments is solar fabric, which can be used in curved building designs.
OK, simple fact here, when you boil water for your coffe, it boils, to 100C which is about 210F, is it not? It cools down eventualy, as would the macdonalds coffee, the simple fact is thought, coffee is hot.
Time for experimentation: Brew a pot of coffee using Mr. Coffee, and measure the temperature in the urn right after it is done brewing. It will be 160 F. or lower.
Why? Because the drip process cools the coffee off as it goes into the urn. Isn't technology amazing?:-)
McDonalds kept their coffee "artificially" hot for marketing reasons IIRC. Oops.
You know what I'd really want to see? I'd want to see a system where these cretins and leeches are actually _fined_ for bringing up such idiotic claims to a court. Not even something as ridiculous as $200,000 or anything. Slap her with a $2000 fine. Just enough to make other morons think twice before thinking, "hey, cool, who can we sue for money today?"
Pal, you are a good example of a waste of air.
This 79 year old woman made a mistake. It seems she realized that, since initially all she did was ask McDonalds to sell the coffee at a cooler temperature. It was McDonald's assinine behavior that cost it the lawsuit and all the bad publicity that came with it.
Now read this next part carefully: The coffee you make at home in your Mr. Coffee is NEVER at 180 degrees F. As has already been pointed out, that is too hot to drink, and hot enough to be considerably more dangerous than "normal" coffee. McDonald's stance on this was inexcusable (and I do recall getting a very rude surprise the first time I sipped a cup of hot coffee from McDonalds myself).
I'd be willing to bet you're under 30 years of age (most likely under 20). Someday you'll grow up - I hope.
(I do agree there are many frivolous lawsuits, and they're bad - this just wasn't one of them. As to your "Einstein" comment, that is called "sarcasm", and is actually a compliment to Einstein. I think most people who were seriously compared to Einstein would be immensely flattered. Here's a suggestion though - rather than sitting around being bitter and complaining, perhaps you should actually do something to improve the world. Apologies if you already are.)
Go over to go-mono.org and read Miguels report on the recent Microsoft Professional Developer Conference. Look for references to XAML and other plans Microsoft have for Longhorn. Check Miguels assessment of what this means for non-Microsoft desktop Operating Systems. Then check his "solution" to this.
Once you've done that, come back here and tell me with a straight face that Ximian gnome as the standard Linux desktop is a Good Thing.
Yes, there are two problems with what Miguel is doing:
1) He seems to think that Microsoft Engineering isn't an oxymoron. It is.
2) He thinks polluting the Unix/Linux programming world with Microsoft 'technology' will help Unix/Linux somehow. It won't.
The good thing about the Sun announcement is that the #1 Java company is pushing a distro with a modern JVM included as a standard feature. That will go a long ways towards balancing Mono. Java always has been, and AFAICT always will be, the answer to.Nyet. C# and.Net are weak copies of Java and it's Frameworks. Most serious companies made their choice long ago, and nothing has happened to change it.
Try reading it without "knowing" there is ice under there somewhere.
Er, I certainly didn't state "there IS ice under there". I just said that this finding is perfectly consistent with millions or billions of tons of ice being in the region regardless. (BTW the figure I saw in a more recent article was that there might be as much as 6 billion tons of water at the lunar poles.)
You, on the the other hand, stated that this meant that there weren't even "1,000s of tons" of water, which is completely incorrect. See the difference?
Here is a analysis of the various reasons that an earlier attempt (impact and look for water vapor spectral lines) might not have detected measurable water.
This article includes more analysis, and includes this pithy quote:
"The results of the most detailed radar study to date of the moon's shadowy poles don't mean the moon is bone-dry."
Also:
"Prospector found elevated levels of hydrogen -- a component of water -- around the moon's poles, with the highest readings in the perpetually shaded craters. But the evidence for ice was indirect."
They've actually figured out how to degrade civilian service over just part of the planet.
Interesting, but the discussion was revolving around the military version. It is less than clear that the U.S. can affect foreign military GPS capability without interfering with U.S. capability.
Not according to this article dated 12 Nov 2003: http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031112190119.o85meb 5z.html
Poor reading comprehension strikes again.
The radar would have detected "large deposits" within "several meters of the surface". Deeper ice, or ice that wasn't in thick sheets would have gone undetected.
To directly quote from the first paragraph of the article:
"If there is water at the lunar poles, the researchers say, it is widely scattered and permanently frozen inside the dust layers, something akin to terrestrial permafrost."
The thinking has always been that significant effort would be required to get the water. It wouldn't simply involve digging up large chunks of ice. It also is worth noting that this radar would have missed scattered pieces as large as say, a bus.
They're about 36 years late... seems like the money would be better spent on a Mars mission or even the space station.
That's what the Moon is - a very large space station in orbit 240,000 miles above the Earth.
It receives unlimited, very strong, solar energy, and provides plenty of raw materials. It also provides unlimited, very high quality industrial vacuum, and is an ideal site for optical and radio astronomy. It is also a fine launch pad for interplanetary traffic, since it has only 1/6 the gravity of Earth and no atmosphere.
Granted, it may be lacking in certain resources, but the recent discovery of 100,000,000 tons of water near the lunar South Pole certainly casts things in a new light. A sustainable colony is most likely feasible.
If we weren't mired down in massive red tape and environmental regulations, perhaps private enterprise here in the West could take a shot at competing with the Chinese government. I'm pretty sure space flight is about to become commercially viable, especially if there is a breakthrough or two. Scramjets and detonation based engines are two possibilities.
We also need a non-crewed heavy lifter that'll take the "freight into space cheap" crown. Then big lunar and interplanetary ships can be constructed in orbit.
Safe, high performance power (fission, fusion or antimatter) needs to become a reality soon for interplanetary travel. That will be the revolution in the 21st century to rival flight in the 20th.
We'll see if we can get more than a million people into space a year by 2100...well probably not me personally...;-)
it would be just silly to rely on GPS as something that'll always be available at no political cost ("you'll drop the tariffs now or we'll switch you off GPS").
That's not how GPS works. There are two GPS signals, the civilian one and the encrypted military one. The military version is more accurate than the civilion version, and in wartime civilian GPS is degraded to 100 m. accuracy instead of better than 10 m. I presume worldwide military GPS is unaffected, although that is a function of the encryption method used and whatever controls they built into "foreign-owned" military GPS sets. That is all classified and I have no direct knowledge of it. I presume our allies wouldn't tolerate unilateral shutoff in the equipment they bought.
GPS was tremendously expensive to implement, and is quite vulnerable to attack. Good luck to anyone seeking to duplicate it.
The U.S. also has plenty of the most sophisticated GPS jamming equipment, and I'm sure will have no problem jamming other systems as well, as needed.
of course, the fear here is that subpeoning investors could be construed as "intimidating people" - ie, ibm intimidating current and potential investors in sco. really, who would want to invest serious coin in a company if they thought there was a good chance they'd get a subpeona from ibm?
A $3 billion lawsuit is more materially damaging than a perfectly legal subpoena.
The subpoenas were a direct result of SCO's actions. If SCO is found to be at fault, IBM will certainly have no liability whatever. IANAL, but this seems the likely outcome to me at this point.
Pardon me? It took Apple *how long* to get a fully preemptive operating system with protected memory? It's only now that anyone can dare do anything serious with Macs. Previously they've completely lacked suitability for use as serious workstations.
Sorry it took a bit to reply, I've been busy (plus your post was so silly I had trouble working up motivation).
What does it matter how long it took for Apple to decide to buy NeXT and get back on track? It happened several years ago. What does matter now is whether or not Apple's OS, other software and hardware is better than the competition's. Most impartial observers agree that it is. Look at the difference between Safari and IE for one example.
The G5s are also smoking the fastest PCs in real world tests. That is icing on the cake on top of running a clearly superior OS. Apple's laptops are also regarded as top examples of PC design. (I was sorry to see the quality control issues with the new 15" Powerbook...hope they get that worked out quickly.)
Yes, well i guess apple and microsoft are birds of a feather then aren't they.
Yes, except Apple understands software and hardware engineering. Plus Apple has released a large portion of it's OS and compiler technology to the Open Source community.
Microsoft's stuff has the simple elegance of an elephant...with gout.
i don't know why geeks rally behind apple at every turn
What is your alternative in the computer industry?
Apple is looking good mostly by comparison with it's peers.
they seem to be like any other large software coporation out there, in it for the benjamins, and nothing else.
I presume you mean "like any other large software and hardware corporation".
Just in case you weren't aware, the primary responsibility of every public for-profit company (Apple is one) is to make a profit for the shareholders. So, yes, "the benjamins". That is not a bad thing - without the profit motive very few cool new things would be produced.
Regardless of Apple's profit motive (which as I pointed out every other company has as well) it produces some of the coolest, fastest and best engineered gear out there. Apple also had the wisdom to adopt a Unix-like OS, along with many other well-chosen hardware and software standards.
All of this is more than enough reason for any self-respecting geek to salivate heavily!:-)
Does C# have anything like this, or is this easily portable to C# or any other strongly typed portable languages such as Python? It'd be nice to have another alternative to Java, which seems to cause problems for some people.
Nothing wrong with Java...it is becoming quite ubiquitous everywhere except Windows client-side programming, and it may make a comeback there. There is no production-quality C# solution for Linux, most Unixen or the Mac yet, whereas Java is quite mature and fast. gcj (though not a Java 2 VM) is also interesting and is improving rapidly. It has potential for games and embedded Java applications.
You must understand that there is a real cost to what you suggest. Certainly some people can use recreational drugs and not cause a burden to society, but there are many more who become unable to maintain gainful employment. Also, there would be plenty of people (there already are) putting a huge burden on the healthcare industry and Medicaid/Medicare programs. This would become even more out of control than it already is should legalizing any known substance occur.
Sorry I didn't get around to this earlier, but the evidence shows that legalizing drugs would most likely lead to lower use rates. It would certainly lead to lower medical costs among users, mainly because there would be no stigma in seeking medical help early, and also because the quality of the drugs and proper dosages would be known quantities.
I find it odd that Motorola, a maker of embedded microprocessors, would go with an Intel chip.
Yes, that is fairly strange. The low-power PPC chips are pretty nice.
However, the phone unit is most likely autonomous (and much more powerful than the chip unit, which may be sold and is unprofitable). Intel most likely had the best prices and specs (or convinced someone of that), and Intel got the deal.
Its really the way to do things, if you end up with a better phone product. If not, well...
The model might end up being less than 100 atoms across, though I doubt it. I'm guessing at least 500. Still quite small enough to make it a considerably different game than the larger rockets... But a question whose answer I am genuinely interested in. Anyone having tea with drexler tomorrow?
If the intent is to have a flyable model rocket, with any appreciable range, it will have to be considerably bigger than 500 atoms. It will have to contain considerable fuel and reaction mass, and it will also have to be structurally sound enough to contain the reaction or compressed gas.
Also note the relationship between rocket size and total impulse. A Saturn V can get a large payload to escape velocity. An optimally constructed 3 foot scale model could perhaps get a tiny payload 5,000 ft. (I doubt it, especially if it staged like the original). The rate that the interior volume drops versus the surface area (cube-square law) is too much to overcome. Also, if you fly it in air, friction will become a dominant force at small scale sizes.
Size does matter.;-)
I'm guessing the smallest Saturn V model that could get even a few rocket-lengths into the air would be visible to the naked eye.
I've always considered that Government should reflect the society rather than try to increasingly resist social change as a matter of policy, but I do think that there should be controls in place. Driving under the influence of anything harder than aspirin should be a crime because of the potential of harm, but to make a hardline distinction between LSD and Valium is ludicrous.
Driving under the influence of anything is not a "victimless" crime. In the case of drugs that seriously negatively effect driving capability (alchohol, valium, etc.) there should probably be a law. With other, milder, drugs you are faced with similar issues to lack of sleep, eating, using the stereo or other semi-negligent actions that decrease driver safety while still remaining perfectly legal.
The ultimate solution, of course, is autonomous cars - sometimes known as "taxis".;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Just one more thought on this topic...another good idea (which will be less expensive than lunar disposal unless space travel gets really cheap) is disposing of the waste at the mid-ocean subduction zones. Let the terrorists try to retrieve it from a few hundred meters underground (and going deeper all the time)...when it is buried under 7,000 m. of water, in an undisclosed location. ;-)
They'd be better off trying to enrich their own uranium...
Two words: Lung Cancer.
That is the alternative, and pollution from traditional power generation plants is killing people every day, and sickening many more.
There is not a single permanent disposal site world-wide. no one can guarantee the safety. the U.S. government even has a website on _just this problem_. Ready-made dirty bombs are driven in trucks all over the country. GREAT IDEA.
If someone wants to kill a lot of civilians, all they need is a garage lab to produce chemical or bio agents. Much more effective, much easier to deal with, even more scary (1 gram of the right bio agent could kill millions). See the recent research on mouse pox for some really scary stuff (did that story make /.?). How 'bout a bio agent that'll only wipe out one ethnic group? The research is just about there. It is always hard to evaluate relative risk, but to me nuke power is way down the list.
BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.
Also BTW, I hope some of the recent solar energy developments lead (finally) to competitive photovoltaic power generation on a distributed basis (that'll tick off the power companies!). One of the more exciting developments is solar fabric, which can be used in curved building designs.
Time for experimentation: Brew a pot of coffee using Mr. Coffee, and measure the temperature in the urn right after it is done brewing. It will be 160 F. or lower.
Why? Because the drip process cools the coffee off as it goes into the urn. Isn't technology amazing? :-)
McDonalds kept their coffee "artificially" hot for marketing reasons IIRC. Oops.
Pal, you are a good example of a waste of air.
This 79 year old woman made a mistake. It seems she realized that, since initially all she did was ask McDonalds to sell the coffee at a cooler temperature. It was McDonald's assinine behavior that cost it the lawsuit and all the bad publicity that came with it.
Now read this next part carefully: The coffee you make at home in your Mr. Coffee is NEVER at 180 degrees F. As has already been pointed out, that is too hot to drink, and hot enough to be considerably more dangerous than "normal" coffee. McDonald's stance on this was inexcusable (and I do recall getting a very rude surprise the first time I sipped a cup of hot coffee from McDonalds myself).
I'd be willing to bet you're under 30 years of age (most likely under 20). Someday you'll grow up - I hope.
(I do agree there are many frivolous lawsuits, and they're bad - this just wasn't one of them. As to your "Einstein" comment, that is called "sarcasm", and is actually a compliment to Einstein. I think most people who were seriously compared to Einstein would be immensely flattered. Here's a suggestion though - rather than sitting around being bitter and complaining, perhaps you should actually do something to improve the world. Apologies if you already are.)
Once you've done that, come back here and tell me with a straight face that Ximian gnome as the standard Linux desktop is a Good Thing.
Yes, there are two problems with what Miguel is doing:
1) He seems to think that Microsoft Engineering isn't an oxymoron. It is.
2) He thinks polluting the Unix/Linux programming world with Microsoft 'technology' will help Unix/Linux somehow. It won't.
The good thing about the Sun announcement is that the #1 Java company is pushing a distro with a modern JVM included as a standard feature. That will go a long ways towards balancing Mono. Java always has been, and AFAICT always will be, the answer to .Nyet. C# and .Net are weak copies of Java and it's Frameworks. Most serious companies made their choice long ago, and nothing has happened to change it.
Er, I certainly didn't state "there IS ice under there". I just said that this finding is perfectly consistent with millions or billions of tons of ice being in the region regardless. (BTW the figure I saw in a more recent article was that there might be as much as 6 billion tons of water at the lunar poles.)
You, on the the other hand, stated that this meant that there weren't even "1,000s of tons" of water, which is completely incorrect. See the difference?
This is a good article about the initial discovery.
Here is a analysis of the various reasons that an earlier attempt (impact and look for water vapor spectral lines) might not have detected measurable water.
This article includes more analysis, and includes this pithy quote:
"The results of the most detailed radar study to date of the moon's shadowy poles don't mean the moon is bone-dry."
Also:
"Prospector found elevated levels of hydrogen -- a component of water -- around the moon's poles, with the highest readings in the perpetually shaded craters. But the evidence for ice was indirect."
Hope that helped!
Interesting, but the discussion was revolving around the military version. It is less than clear that the U.S. can affect foreign military GPS capability without interfering with U.S. capability.
Interesting question though. ;-)
Poor reading comprehension strikes again.
The radar would have detected "large deposits" within "several meters of the surface". Deeper ice, or ice that wasn't in thick sheets would have gone undetected.
To directly quote from the first paragraph of the article:
"If there is water at the lunar poles, the researchers say, it is widely scattered and permanently frozen inside the dust layers, something akin to terrestrial permafrost."
The thinking has always been that significant effort would be required to get the water. It wouldn't simply involve digging up large chunks of ice. It also is worth noting that this radar would have missed scattered pieces as large as say, a bus.
Timely article though.. ;-)
That's what the Moon is - a very large space station in orbit 240,000 miles above the Earth.
It receives unlimited, very strong, solar energy, and provides plenty of raw materials. It also provides unlimited, very high quality industrial vacuum, and is an ideal site for optical and radio astronomy. It is also a fine launch pad for interplanetary traffic, since it has only 1/6 the gravity of Earth and no atmosphere.
Granted, it may be lacking in certain resources, but the recent discovery of 100,000,000 tons of water near the lunar South Pole certainly casts things in a new light. A sustainable colony is most likely feasible.
If we weren't mired down in massive red tape and environmental regulations, perhaps private enterprise here in the West could take a shot at competing with the Chinese government. I'm pretty sure space flight is about to become commercially viable, especially if there is a breakthrough or two. Scramjets and detonation based engines are two possibilities.
We also need a non-crewed heavy lifter that'll take the "freight into space cheap" crown. Then big lunar and interplanetary ships can be constructed in orbit.
Safe, high performance power (fission, fusion or antimatter) needs to become a reality soon for interplanetary travel. That will be the revolution in the 21st century to rival flight in the 20th.
We'll see if we can get more than a million people into space a year by 2100...well probably not me personally... ;-)
That's not how GPS works. There are two GPS signals, the civilian one and the encrypted military one. The military version is more accurate than the civilion version, and in wartime civilian GPS is degraded to 100 m. accuracy instead of better than 10 m. I presume worldwide military GPS is unaffected, although that is a function of the encryption method used and whatever controls they built into "foreign-owned" military GPS sets. That is all classified and I have no direct knowledge of it. I presume our allies wouldn't tolerate unilateral shutoff in the equipment they bought.
GPS was tremendously expensive to implement, and is quite vulnerable to attack. Good luck to anyone seeking to duplicate it.
The U.S. also has plenty of the most sophisticated GPS jamming equipment, and I'm sure will have no problem jamming other systems as well, as needed.
though, if the whole nation relies on that maybe it makes sense.
Israel relies on US military hardware and goodwill in a wide range of areas. No surprise there.
Many NATO allies also use GPS-dependent equipment.
A $3 billion lawsuit is more materially damaging than a perfectly legal subpoena.
The subpoenas were a direct result of SCO's actions. If SCO is found to be at fault, IBM will certainly have no liability whatever. IANAL, but this seems the likely outcome to me at this point.
Sorry it took a bit to reply, I've been busy (plus your post was so silly I had trouble working up motivation).
What does it matter how long it took for Apple to decide to buy NeXT and get back on track? It happened several years ago. What does matter now is whether or not Apple's OS, other software and hardware is better than the competition's. Most impartial observers agree that it is. Look at the difference between Safari and IE for one example.
The G5s are also smoking the fastest PCs in real world tests. That is icing on the cake on top of running a clearly superior OS. Apple's laptops are also regarded as top examples of PC design. (I was sorry to see the quality control issues with the new 15" Powerbook...hope they get that worked out quickly.)
I hope that clears things up...
One difference would be that the Foresight Exchange doesn't offer prizes. It probably has trouble attracting enough qualified players though...
Yes, except Apple understands software and hardware engineering. Plus Apple has released a large portion of it's OS and compiler technology to the Open Source community.
Microsoft's stuff has the simple elegance of an elephant...with gout.
Yeah, just imagine if Internet Explorer disabled Netscape when it was installed...
What is your alternative in the computer industry?
Apple is looking good mostly by comparison with it's peers.
they seem to be like any other large software coporation out there, in it for the benjamins, and nothing else.
I presume you mean "like any other large software and hardware corporation".
Just in case you weren't aware, the primary responsibility of every public for-profit company (Apple is one) is to make a profit for the shareholders. So, yes, "the benjamins". That is not a bad thing - without the profit motive very few cool new things would be produced.
Regardless of Apple's profit motive (which as I pointed out every other company has as well) it produces some of the coolest, fastest and best engineered gear out there. Apple also had the wisdom to adopt a Unix-like OS, along with many other well-chosen hardware and software standards.
All of this is more than enough reason for any self-respecting geek to salivate heavily! :-)
Well I find him...Untouchable!
Nothing wrong with Java...it is becoming quite ubiquitous everywhere except Windows client-side programming, and it may make a comeback there. There is no production-quality C# solution for Linux, most Unixen or the Mac yet, whereas Java is quite mature and fast. gcj (though not a Java 2 VM) is also interesting and is improving rapidly. It has potential for games and embedded Java applications.
Sorry I didn't get around to this earlier, but the evidence shows that legalizing drugs would most likely lead to lower use rates. It would certainly lead to lower medical costs among users, mainly because there would be no stigma in seeking medical help early, and also because the quality of the drugs and proper dosages would be known quantities.
Strange, but true.
I was referring to the specs...the styling is decidedly ordinary. Maybe it's highly ruggedized? ;-)
The screen res isn't bad though...interesting device!
Yes, that is fairly strange. The low-power PPC chips are pretty nice.
However, the phone unit is most likely autonomous (and much more powerful than the chip unit, which may be sold and is unprofitable). Intel most likely had the best prices and specs (or convinced someone of that), and Intel got the deal.
Its really the way to do things, if you end up with a better phone product. If not, well...
What's the screen resolution?
If the intent is to have a flyable model rocket, with any appreciable range, it will have to be considerably bigger than 500 atoms. It will have to contain considerable fuel and reaction mass, and it will also have to be structurally sound enough to contain the reaction or compressed gas.
Also note the relationship between rocket size and total impulse. A Saturn V can get a large payload to escape velocity. An optimally constructed 3 foot scale model could perhaps get a tiny payload 5,000 ft. (I doubt it, especially if it staged like the original). The rate that the interior volume drops versus the surface area (cube-square law) is too much to overcome. Also, if you fly it in air, friction will become a dominant force at small scale sizes.
Size does matter. ;-)
I'm guessing the smallest Saturn V model that could get even a few rocket-lengths into the air would be visible to the naked eye.
Driving under the influence of anything is not a "victimless" crime. In the case of drugs that seriously negatively effect driving capability (alchohol, valium, etc.) there should probably be a law. With other, milder, drugs you are faced with similar issues to lack of sleep, eating, using the stereo or other semi-negligent actions that decrease driver safety while still remaining perfectly legal.
The ultimate solution, of course, is autonomous cars - sometimes known as "taxis". ;-)