There is already a variant on this used for cooling. Hot air is pumped underground below the frostline to where everything stays nice and cool and then brought back up. It's very efficient and cheap once you have already payed the initial cost.
The reason why I detest Flash by default is that if I have ever seen a use of flash where it actually adds something to the site without taking something away, I can't remember it.
True, Flash can make downloads of, say, navigation bars smaller by using vectors rather than bitmaps. But there is an easier way: Use text in your navigation bars!
The Art of Illusion page is an example of what I'm talking about. When it was being renovated, they made the logo smaller so that you could see the content easily while still seeing the logo. Then the nav bars on the top and bottom were added. It's a nice clean design, very compatible with other browsers, even though it isn't much to look at if you associate pretty pictures with quality.
Yes. Perhaps you might also add something about how you've tried it in more than one CD player and it still doesn't work if they give you trouble. You might leave out the "fucking" part, unless you're dealing with someone particularly aggravating, in which case they probably deserve it. It's best not to put people on the defensive unless you want them that way.
I am another two-finger hunt and peck type geek who can write a nearly illegible scrawl slightly faster than I can type, and I can type fairly fast.
The problem that will keep me from this sort of thing is a big one: wrist cramps. Whenever I use a pencil/pen for more than a few words, I get these nasty un-ergonomic pains in my wrists. People are always saying that keyboards can do nasty things to your wrists (carpal tunnel syndrome and whatnot) but thankfully my slower-than-average typing rate keeps me from those complications.
I am not bound by how fast I can type, but rather by how fast I can think. Since that is considerable (modesty aside), I can still write things faster than people who look down at me for my lack of keyboarding.
But if I have to use a pen to use a computer, forget it. I'll take a good keyboard any day. Especially since I can do things like typing "ls" in a split second already.
If you wrote a Forth program that was four solid lines of text with no breaks or anything, then you are probably the evil one. Did you define your own words? Did you keep word definitions small? Did you factor out things to an extreme (as is customary in Forth)?
IIRC, the people at that debate were involved with music more that normal people would be. This survey is of ordinary people, of the sort that the RIAA will pay attention to. The RIAA has mostly ignored the protests of Slashdot, no matter how vehement, but they are more likely to pay attention to this.
Perhaps to emphasize the fact that something screwy is going on, the altitude should be set to something like -65535. This would probably also confuse people who looked at it and recognized the significance of that number (IIRC).
COMMAND.COM was a pitiful excuse for a shell that was somehow carried through many versions of Windows despite the existance of vastly superior shells like bash (with an equivalent of xterm, rxvt, eterm, whatever) that could have simply been used instead.
More recent versions have features like filename completion (I still prefer the way bash handles it), and of course there is the (old) feature that lets you access a command history. And now, finally, there are scroll bars!
About the only good thing I can say about COMMAND.COM was that it didn't crash.
Sure it is! It's XML with Microsoft Security Extensions!
That reminds me of something that MS has been doing for quite a while now: the file type reported for any HTML files is "Microsoft HTML file" (your system may vary). Will XML become Microsoft XML? I hope not.
If everything about this really is kosher, though, then everybody give a great big "Thank You!" to MS!
If asynchronous chip design became widespread, I can foresee one good thing that doesn't have anything to do with routing or capacitance: AFAIK, clock cycles would be eliminated so chip companies would finally stop saying things like, "our chip is better than theirs because ours has more gigahertz in it".
In its place, an alternate and better method of classifying chip performance would have to be put in place. What would it be? Quake benchmark results?
If you're loud at movies (shown in theaters, not at home), you deserve to be used as a test subject for nonlethal weapons like Mace. This should be obvious even to you, but your idea of a stupid movie will not coincide with what a great number of other people think. My movie watching strategy involves going to very sparsely populated showings, which minimizes the chances of some jerk like you singing uncreative al-lib lyrics during an important part of certain movies.
If it isn't too expensive, I'd like to see this used a lot more. Can existing trains be retrofitted with one of these things? Or is this just for trains of the (not too distant) future?
If you were willing to foot the extra bill for one of these in new trains that you bought (assuming that you buy trains) it would have more advantages than just efficiency and speed--can you imagine how cool this would look in an advertisement?
If they would approve even more changes, it would be nice. I think that they should open up more radio frequency to unregistered use, for one thing. This would allow more room for technology like 802.11* and Bluetooth to work with.
It would also be excellent of they would realize that with modern technology, they don't need to use so much of the radio spectrum for one TV or radio station. The spectrum is scarce, but the scarcity is largely artificial.
This is encouraging. I just hope that this sort of thing continues and the FCC adapts to modern technology.
THANK YOU! Your point is excellent. If nanotubes fibers become cheap--and we probably just need a market for them before they become cheap--We will be able to do all sorts of things. Multiple elevators can make points about terrorists moot (and we'd probably be on the lookout anyway), and then NASA and friends can stop piddling around with ridiculously expensive ways of getting stuff into orbit and focus on areas farther away from the earth the way they should. We could put stuff into orbit on a massive scale without most of the problems that have plagued space exploration for years, and that excites the hell out of me.
Think about being able to prefabricate modules for space statins on earth and hoist them into space. Want a huge cylinder in space? No worries; just split it up into sections and send them up. Put them together in space. I leave you to think of some more possibilities for this.
The tower shouldn't be too much more expensive to maintain than the NASA Shuttle fleet, in my estimation. The ribbon itsself would be very strong and placed in an area with very mild weather. And it would manage to lift about a ton of cargo to space every day!
That would still be very expensive, but immensely less expensive than using the current methods of reaching orbit for comparable amounts of cargo.
Of course, my estimates are open to dispute, and I could be wrong. But I don't care: the space elevator is cool!
If you want to use encryption in space but still launch from the USA, how about this: you launch your satellite without strong crypto, but with SSH or something similar (perhaps telnet if SSH is too strong), and when your satellite gets into orbit, radio up some crypto software from a computer in some place like Canada. And there you are!
I realize that you are either a troll or on crack, but Linux does have a consistent pricing: it's free. Distributions can charge money, but Linux itself can be downloaded for no price. Most distributions even let people download images of their CDs.
For what prices are charged (distros charging for CDs and the like), standardizing would be bad. Better just to let people decide on their own.
If that's your only concern, text files would still work. Just put them in CVS or use RCS or SCCS.
Although, perhaps a more elegant solution (I'm thinking about XML right now because it's easy to transform into other formats like HTML or WML) would be nice.
There was an article in Scientific American about an Internet Scale Operating System, which would have as an important part the ability to sell CPU cycles, donate them, and keep track of who owes you what. This is still offtopic, but I agree that under such a setup, I would be more likely to donate CPU cycles to someone who didn't want to patent the result or something similar.
Since lots of CPU, RAM, hard drive space, and other stuff are now available, who cares? I do. Once more computer capabilities become available, software will be made that will take advantage of them. I know that games are pushing technology forward because they are always finding some way to fill all of the capacity of modern computers. Doom 3, for example, now has souped-up lighting because computers can handle it. Realtime raytracing (and raytracing in general) could definately benefit from faster processors--and as processors become faster, neat new computationally expensive things will become widespread, because they can be.
I agree with you on some other things that could become interesting. IPV6 could allow IP addresses everywhere, which will probably be taken advantage of. It also supports packet prioritization, which would be very good for VoIP and related technologies.
Linux already runs on several non-i386 processors, and it is commonly used on these in, for example, embedded systems. Embedded systems, I think, are quite exciting. And Linux (or one of the *BSD's) will probably be the kernel of choice for those, since the idea of putting an OS on one of those is to allow the device to be programmed easily and not be noticed by the user. From that perspective, Linux is obviously superior to any harder-to-develop-for OS that you have to pay for, like Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
There is already a variant on this used for cooling. Hot air is pumped underground below the frostline to where everything stays nice and cool and then brought back up. It's very efficient and cheap once you have already payed the initial cost.
True, Flash can make downloads of, say, navigation bars smaller by using vectors rather than bitmaps. But there is an easier way: Use text in your navigation bars!
The Art of Illusion page is an example of what I'm talking about. When it was being renovated, they made the logo smaller so that you could see the content easily while still seeing the logo. Then the nav bars on the top and bottom were added. It's a nice clean design, very compatible with other browsers, even though it isn't much to look at if you associate pretty pictures with quality.
Yes. Perhaps you might also add something about how you've tried it in more than one CD player and it still doesn't work if they give you trouble. You might leave out the "fucking" part, unless you're dealing with someone particularly aggravating, in which case they probably deserve it. It's best not to put people on the defensive unless you want them that way.
The problem that will keep me from this sort of thing is a big one: wrist cramps. Whenever I use a pencil/pen for more than a few words, I get these nasty un-ergonomic pains in my wrists. People are always saying that keyboards can do nasty things to your wrists (carpal tunnel syndrome and whatnot) but thankfully my slower-than-average typing rate keeps me from those complications.
I am not bound by how fast I can type, but rather by how fast I can think. Since that is considerable (modesty aside), I can still write things faster than people who look down at me for my lack of keyboarding.
But if I have to use a pen to use a computer, forget it. I'll take a good keyboard any day. Especially since I can do things like typing "ls" in a split second already.
If not, you probably should have done so.
IIRC, the people at that debate were involved with music more that normal people would be. This survey is of ordinary people, of the sort that the RIAA will pay attention to. The RIAA has mostly ignored the protests of Slashdot, no matter how vehement, but they are more likely to pay attention to this.
Perhaps to emphasize the fact that something screwy is going on, the altitude should be set to something like -65535. This would probably also confuse people who looked at it and recognized the significance of that number (IIRC).
More recent versions have features like filename completion (I still prefer the way bash handles it), and of course there is the (old) feature that lets you access a command history. And now, finally, there are scroll bars!
About the only good thing I can say about COMMAND.COM was that it didn't crash.
That reminds me of something that MS has been doing for quite a while now: the file type reported for any HTML files is "Microsoft HTML file" (your system may vary). Will XML become Microsoft XML? I hope not.
If everything about this really is kosher, though, then everybody give a great big "Thank You!" to MS!
"Think, ``Free Speech'', not, ``Free Beer''" -RMS.
In its place, an alternate and better method of classifying chip performance would have to be put in place. What would it be? Quake benchmark results?
Blender supports Python scripts, and there are scripts to export Blender files from Blender to a number of other formats, like Renderman and POV-Ray.
If you're loud at movies (shown in theaters, not at home), you deserve to be used as a test subject for nonlethal weapons like Mace. This should be obvious even to you, but your idea of a stupid movie will not coincide with what a great number of other people think. My movie watching strategy involves going to very sparsely populated showings, which minimizes the chances of some jerk like you singing uncreative al-lib lyrics during an important part of certain movies.
If you were willing to foot the extra bill for one of these in new trains that you bought (assuming that you buy trains) it would have more advantages than just efficiency and speed--can you imagine how cool this would look in an advertisement?
FYI, there actually is a web browser called Links. It is supposed to be a lot like Lynx, but not Lynx.
Perhaps you didn't know that.
And not worry about %s or any such thing.
It would also be excellent of they would realize that with modern technology, they don't need to use so much of the radio spectrum for one TV or radio station. The spectrum is scarce, but the scarcity is largely artificial.
This is encouraging. I just hope that this sort of thing continues and the FCC adapts to modern technology.
Think about being able to prefabricate modules for space statins on earth and hoist them into space. Want a huge cylinder in space? No worries; just split it up into sections and send them up. Put them together in space. I leave you to think of some more possibilities for this.
That would still be very expensive, but immensely less expensive than using the current methods of reaching orbit for comparable amounts of cargo.
Of course, my estimates are open to dispute, and I could be wrong. But I don't care: the space elevator is cool!
If you want to use encryption in space but still launch from the USA, how about this: you launch your satellite without strong crypto, but with SSH or something similar (perhaps telnet if SSH is too strong), and when your satellite gets into orbit, radio up some crypto software from a computer in some place like Canada. And there you are!
For what prices are charged (distros charging for CDs and the like), standardizing would be bad. Better just to let people decide on their own.
Although, perhaps a more elegant solution (I'm thinking about XML right now because it's easy to transform into other formats like HTML or WML) would be nice.
I think you are confusing rsync with rlogin and friends. rsync is completely different, and it's just a coincidence that the names sound so similar.
There was an article in Scientific American about an Internet Scale Operating System, which would have as an important part the ability to sell CPU cycles, donate them, and keep track of who owes you what. This is still offtopic, but I agree that under such a setup, I would be more likely to donate CPU cycles to someone who didn't want to patent the result or something similar.
I agree with you on some other things that could become interesting. IPV6 could allow IP addresses everywhere, which will probably be taken advantage of. It also supports packet prioritization, which would be very good for VoIP and related technologies.
Linux already runs on several non-i386 processors, and it is commonly used on these in, for example, embedded systems. Embedded systems, I think, are quite exciting. And Linux (or one of the *BSD's) will probably be the kernel of choice for those, since the idea of putting an OS on one of those is to allow the device to be programmed easily and not be noticed by the user. From that perspective, Linux is obviously superior to any harder-to-develop-for OS that you have to pay for, like Windows.
I'm still excited about the future. Are you?