mikejuk's submission paragraph states: "However, it's not all gain — the 3.3V operating voltage and the different I/O ports are going to create some compatibility problems. "
I respectfully disagree. Firstly, there are already a lot of 3.3v based Arduinos on the market. I own a JeeNode (see Jeelabs in EU, Modern Device in the USA). The JeeNode can run a 434MHz wireless radio transceiver and temperature sensor for MONTHS on a single 3.3v boosted AA battery. You could not do that with 5V. Adafruit has a tutorial on converting Arduino Unos over to 3.3v, from 5v. It's popular.
Mostly all sensors these days are 3.3v.
But most most actuators (like stepper motors) require MORE than 5V. Sure, there's some relays requiring a mere 5v.. and very few work on 3.3v... but most relays require 6V or higher. The usefulness of 5V is diminishing, so what you really want is just enough power to activate a transistor or relay.
(Some Arduino compatible chips run great at 1.8v, and sensors do also... there will come a time someday where it may make sense to run at less than 3.3v)
I see Arduino more as a collection of standards and open hardware. There are dozens of Arduino designs all of which vary slightly in terms of electrical and physical (pinout, etc) compatibility. But this too is a good thing... the Arduino platform is all about ADAPTABILITY.
No one has decreed that Dart must exclude Javascript, nor has anyone suggested that IPv6 engineers have been taken away from their pressing task to work on Dart. Your arguments are all false arguments, crafted to support your initial reaction but not really relevant to the issue.
Your comment is so well-written irony that I can not decide if you sincere in what you say, or cleverly trolling for the other side of your argument. When you are arguing for (what seems to be) more languages merely for the sake of more languages, and presenting as evidence how you personally like to dabble in every new language... well, that incites a backlash to your argument.
Google is very interested in bandwidth memory and power conservation. Google apps use a specific subset of Javascript, and they know which bits are inefficient. I would agree that Google should be free to invent a new language if it has benefits. No one gets hurt if the language runs inside JavaScript on other browsers. When it comes to working with open source and standards, Google has credibility and trust... they're not Microsoft, so I do not fear what they do in their labs. I want my phone and laptop both to be more responsive on the web, and use less power.
ECMAScript committee seems much less interested in these things, and are seem to be mostly interested in adapting ECMAScript to be the proverbial kitchen sink. I know they have some device/runtime profile stuff (somewhere), but it does not seem like a real subset standard, and not often used.
>(Or just crazy people who fear it blindly like for Nuclear).
Unnecessary trolling. If you think nuclear is feared without merit, you are not being honest with anyone including yourself.
I am aware of the pro-nuclear argument for the last few decades that failure problems are ALL due to "those old reactors, not the new designs". Allowing that argument to slide, you still have a basic fact that neither the original design manufacturers NOR the investors are interested in paying to upgrade or refit those old reactors... so they stay IN production... and the point about possible safety improvements in new designs is not realistic. Most of these old reactors have been allowed to continue producing well beyond their original lifespan and keep getting exemptions.
The other argument against nuclear is that the private owners assume all the profit, and the taxpayer assumes all costs of waste disposal. The owners simply get to (dangerously) store the waste on-site in ways that were NEVER intended.
There's more to the problem than that, Yuca mountain storage, etc. but the reality is that most industries including energy are not required to fully bond the costs of cleanup... they can simply go bankrupt one day, leaving the taxpayer to fund the costs of cleanup. Since Bush 2 gutted Superfund, it's not like the government has much capacity to clean these things up either.
Did you know that 33-66% of all electricity generated is wasted in-transit?
This is WHY nuclear power builders always never want to build in remote areas... they always want to build nukes near large populations so there is less waste and greater profit.
Despite all this, I am not 100% against nuclear - it has it's place in the energy grid. But most of the time nuclear is proposed as some sort of utopia, if only the crazy people would stop being crazy about it. The reality is that nuclear's bad image has more to do with poor behavior, and attitudes like yours which dismiss facts.
The energy debate sadly fails to ever talk much about conservation, or the parasitic losses during long-distance transmission. Transmission losses are exactly why we need to have LOCAL wind and solar power - not wind and solar farms [which have their uses] - but actual on-site, emission-free power generation. If solar power works in Germany, it works in Maine, Vermont and North Dakota (which also happens to be quite suitable for wind power, local and farm based)
While frozen land has plenty of sequestered carbon in the form of methane and peat.. the poster was asking about "eco" projects, which is quite opposite from your answer. You may have as well suggested an eco project based on drilling for oil.:-) Releasing all that trapped methane and carbon is the -last- thing humanity needs (although as the planet warms... it may release all of it anyways... the feedback loop danger that we're ignoring).
Regarding the poster's question, I believe Stirling engines work in extreme cold (if there is warmth at the other end). Also peltier electric cooling is interesting. There is plenty of wind power in cold climates.
There are not very many ecological projects suited to Alaska... fewer still that can be transported by air... which is a pity... I imagine heat pipes buried beneath the permafrost would have excellent utility..
Your post contains a number of factual errors. I'm not sure if your post was intended to be deliberately misleading, or just generate buzz (much of it in the form of corrections). Nearly every line in your post..
>"For at least 15 years I've been hearing that various postal services all over the world are "losing battle against e-mail age" while in fact that scary "e-mail age" (or Internet age, as I would call it) should be the best thing they should hope could possible happen.
Not sure what your point was here. Was it to convey that USPS etc somehow "are not" losing the communication battle, or that this was not long-ago predicted? Either are untrue.
That we are in the "email age" being a good thing is something I would agree with... but I don't see how it follows what came before in your statement. Email is good for society, but bad for the USPS.
>Never before in human history we were buying so many goods from remote locations all over the world to be delivered by... postal services! And now they want an end to Saturday delivery?
In the US, most goods purchased online are delivered by UPS, FedEx, and private freight. USPS carries some of that market segment, but it is small by comparison. Please do not put all of these carriers in a large pot, stir, and then strongly imply it has something to do with USPS. It's irreverent, actually.
>They should start Sunday delivery.... and you should work for USPS, for free. Oh wait, even that would not remedy the financial issues.
>They missed the opportunity to start the biggest online payment system in the world so they should at least focus on being the best at delivering good bought on the Internet, not being worse still.
You do not understand what the USPS -is-. USPS is a particular MODE of communication - shipping paper envelopes and some boxes. This is what Congress specifies in their charter (more or less). USPS does not have a mandate to enter into competition with PayPal and Mastercard/Visa and therefore did not fail any opportunities to innovate.
>They [USPS] missed the train and now they want our help to survive. No, they did not miss the train. Congress kept USPS on a short leash, even though USPS is a quasi public/private company. USPS could -never- have innovated ahead of UPS/FedEx, nor could it have even mimicked innovations by private shipping.
For example, USPS must deliver *everywhere* in the mainland USA, no matter how remote. UPS and FedEx can simply choose not to serve communities where it is not cost-effective.
If it costs more fuel to deliver letters from Miami, FL to Boulder, CO then tough shit the USPS must still charge the same flat rate. UPS and FedEx can price accordingly to cost, and they can charge more for Saturday delivery also.
USPS was never allowed to innovate much with package tracking, and as a result people simply do not TRUST them with online purchases. I never have.
USPS has to figure out where a package is going, MULTIPLE times, with no chance for error correction or detection, rerouting, or any of that. A package sent to my work was returned before it ever got here as "no such person at address". Some USPS person simply got confused it was a business address with a "attn: [my name here]" placed below the company name and above the street address. No delivery attempt was even made (though it came to the right town); No one here refused the mail at the office.
This would be no problem if the package were UPS/FedEx, and someone would sign for it... or the carrier would call the shipper or receiver phone number for instructions.
USPS was doomed for a long time.. unfortunate that those who consider USPS to be "socialism" we should not have, they fought against making USPS self-sufficient because quite simply they wanted a hole dug so deep that USPS would perish. Personally I think USPS is being forced to dig a big hole so that conservatives can force it to raid the pension fund, the way many p
I know way more people with PS3s than XB360s. This was not true 5 years ago, but it is now and has been for years.
Because of hardware failures, most XB360 owners I know have purchased the game console more than once (THREE times in one case).
What's more interesting to me is how both platforms have become dynamic platforms with new OS features, instead of remaining static like the old PS2 and XBOX.
Next thing you know, one of the console makers will 1up the other and start supporting Linux and homebrew. Oh wait....
Why is it going to suck for Linux? I got FireFox 5 with my latest security updates, on the currently released Ubuntu 11.
Maybe you mean to say, this will such "for anyone running RHEL as a desktop". I know people who run Fedora or RHEL (or CentOS) a desktop, and yeah... it IS hell. People only seem to do it so they can "develop" their enterprise apps inside the same OS they use for their banking and Facebook (ie, development is based on CentOS, and you can run Linux, so must be easier to combine these uses on one system.. not).
I develop for CentOS, but I push the code to a real CentOS server. For a desktop, I wouldn't ever suggest running anything besides Ubunto or OS X.
Fedora and RHEL doesn't suck.. it just sucks as a desktop. Besides getting old apps, in order to get any "media" (like mp3 or flash, for developer video casts) working you have to introduce other repos which eventually clash with the OS rpms, and then things break. As a result, those Linux users tend to not apply security updates at all. All this makes "Linux" look bad.
Sorry to beat the Ubuntu drum. I know people get sick of it. At the moment, Fedora is a test bed for RHEL, which is a server centric system with no desktop polish. It's been years since Red Hat cared about the desktop...
Have you priced car or home charger for any USB-based device lately? Standardization does wonders for economies of scale.
If you don't care about price, most people care about clean drinking water and less wasted landfill space (even if you have to guilt them into it).
Why would I care that I can only charge one device... I don't think this is a valid question. When I send back my phone to be recycled, I won't be sending back the chargers. Don't need to... they're standard, and useful. You either accumulate a spare, or you can buy one off ebay cheap.
There's a bit more power variance with laptops (9v, 12v, 19v etc), but not a huge issue. A quality power supply is regulated, and could be selectable.
A lot of generic electronics and "stuff" is sold without a power supply. If you know how to read power supplies, and understand the types (transformer vs regulated/switching) you can often save those power supplies from the trash and recycle. So I have a battery powered Coleman air matress pump which requires 6v (uses 4 'D' batteries). Wire in a DC plug to those leads, remove the batteries, and plug in a (recycled) 6V DC power supply, and there ya go... it works indoors now without wasting batteries. No need to buy an AC-powered air pump.
We can't keep making stuff which is designed NOT to last. It is not sustainable.
You are not being pragmatic. You are looking at this issue through the "filter" of partisan dogma, and then describing the problem and solution so it creates the fewest conflicts with your filter.
Libertarian principles -only- work if you can get everyone else to play along.
For example, Virginia could be competitive with rural South Korea and rural Japan without government support... IF you could convince rural South Korea and rural Japan to not ask their government to wire them up at high speed. In effect, they would be asking to get crappy rural Virginia bandwidth. Why would they ever do that?
In the US, it now looks like we will not be able to successfully lobby our government to maintain network neutrality. As a result, our Internet is now going to start moving backwards as ISPs move from common carriers to actual owners of the Internet itself. If you are building the next great Internet media project, good luck attracting fiscal and brainpower capital if your idea at all steps on the toes of Comcast-NBC (as Skype, Netflix, and Google did).
Yep. Looks to me like "inkscapee" is a brand new account created this week, almost zero posts, and already submitting stories. Hmm. More likely, the summary is really a carefully-worded link designed to either create a word-link association in Google, or simply to drive traffic to earthweb.
I liked Slashdot.org better when the editors picked the stories. Some days, Slashdot feels like Digg...
I tend to not take seriously anyone who tries to portray Ubunutu users as "fanboys" - they are usually *fanboys themselves*, or they're unrepentant software pirates whose roles as "software gurus" (collectors, really) are undermined by the real free software movement.
I've been a Ubuntu fan last 5 years, but started on Slackware ~ 1994. I still target development at CentOS (RHEL) but there's no way I'd put anything but Ubuntu on my desktop. Ubuntu's not perfect, but they've taken many of Debian's goals to a much much larger audience. Good for Ubuntu.
I'm not a Nokia phone user, but I used to be an avid Nokia n800 user and developer. It was an -amazing- tablet OS... but then Nokia threw out the API *twice* (or was it THREE times when they switched Maemo from GTK to Qt?). Nokia pissed off all their developers and users, because they wanted to make it a phone OS. They didn't see that Google had already won the open source phone OS war, and Nokia could never catch up and beat Android in the OS space.
Ironically, Google's been struggling to get Android running on tablets well. Tablets could and should have been a Nokia market... The n800 was awesome for it's time, 800x480 and awesome video.. it simply needed scaling up in screen size. Gmapper would download Google Maps while you drive, but this was on maemo YEARS ago. I would have paid double cost the n800 to get one with a 7" diagonal screen, but Nokia management threw it all away....
Even after Nokia halted development of Maemo, some Nokia engineers continued to help the open source community. On their own time of course, since management didn't seem to understand the opportunity that they blew, or the hostility caused by their constant mission changes...
Can you point to a reference hardware design which runs all OS, or which allows the consumer to pick? No... that does not exist yet.
So for now at least, phones are tied to the OS or vice-versa.
Someday it will never matter what platform you use, and all your data is stored in open formats, and your data can be opened in competitive software, etc. but that is a LONG way off. The phone companies in the USA spent -millions- of dollars a few years ago, trying to convince everyone why you could not keep your phone number when you switched phone carriers.
Phones just are not like commodity PC hardware, or laptops.
It's good that you are attempting to argue this based on cost, but you do realize you have ignored federal subsidies for the automotive sector, correct?
Ignoring the costs of war (just to keep the argument simpler), the feds spend less than 1% of transportation spending on rail and the rest goes to build new highways (most of which doesn't serve to help traffic, but does serve to build access to land owned by well-heeled developers).
Hidden subsidies make this argument impossible. 90% of Americans believe the federal has tax accounts for a substantial amount of the price of gas, AND that the gas tax pays for the roads. I even see letters to the local paper asking why the police don't arrest bike riders for "stealing" space on the road without paying taxes. The majority of the cost of road construction comes from 2 places: income taxes, and loans from oil rich states (who don't want to give us a reason to quit).
The places you mention do make the most sense for high speed rail, as well as pockets in Florida, urban rust belt, and parts of the west coast. DC isn't a "maybe"... if it were safe to bring a bike on the highways, you could beat traffic home whether your commute were 5 miles or 15... DC is a congested mess.
This isn't about "replacing" any method - that angle smacks of taking away choice. This is about expanding choices.
We have 2 wars going on, and we're not making any economic sacrifices for them so the day of rekoning will be that much harder. My grandmother told me stories how during WW2 you would be berated for NOT carpooling, not growing a 'victory garden', and not recycling. We were promised we could ignore looming economic problems and it would sort itself out.
For years, people who talked about "peak oil" were dismissed as making it all up for some socialist agenda. If you want to be really scared, take a look at today's headlines about Saudi Arabia misrepresenting it's oil reserves by 40%, the US government knew it but kept quiet. Thanks to Wikileaks, we know the truth now. (Although it was really kind of obvious once the rest of the word got developed, that oil couldn't remain the domain of any 1 economy)
Now we're about to EXIT a major recession - a recession which has tempered worldwide oil consumption. Other economies are bidding for the same barrels of oil, and will be able to outbid the USA because we don't MAKE anything after outsourcing and offshoring it all away. That's like playing a game of poker where you keep bluffing -and- borrowing from the other players at the table.
High speed rail won't grow our economy - nothing can do that except a return to manufacturing. But without high speed rail, we're going to lose a lot more dollars to the middle east, or maybe we'll rely on Russia for energy...
I didn't even bring up climate change, because frankly it is so politicized:-( I'm not pro-coal, but it is worth pointing out that even if some high speed electric rail were powered by dirty coal, those trains would have far lower CO2 emissions than the same number of drivers in cars. In a lot of places, cars idle for much of the time, and under the best conditions gas vehicles achieve less than 15% efficiency which is far less than a coal plant (plus a regional power plant can be upgraded to run cleaner FAR easier than all the cars in that area getting individual pollution upgrades, which is not feasable. It is interesting that energy profits are privatized, but air/land/water pollution is socialized.
Oh, and airlines? They're only cheap because the taxpayer supports them. During good years airlines do not save money for rainy day - it goes out as dividends and bonuses. Instead of investing in efficiency, airlines lobby for taxpayer-underwritten loans... which a few years later (rainy day) the airlines default on. That defaulted debt is passed on to the federal government.
So Kansas does not want to fund high speed rail, even if it helps lower our dependence on fossil fuel and even if that helps our national security?? My my my!
OK Kansas gets $1.30 in federal dollars for every $1 they pay in federal taxes. (Source: Federal Tax Burdens and Spending By State, easily googled... )
So how about we tell Kansas that if they don't want to pitch in to build HS rail -where it makes technical sense- that we'll turn highway construction back over to the states? That's a lot of Kansas pork right there.
FYI - My native state of New Hampshire gets $0.75 cents in federal spending for every $1 we pay the feds. It's nearly the same in Massachusetts and California.
In fact, MOST of the so-called fiscally conservative red states depend on pork. The more high tech and developed states are paying through the nose to support them.
Not to imply Kansas is the biggest federal welfare queen. Depending on the year, that honor goes between Alaska, West Virginia, and New Mexico. And to be fair, Hawaii is a pretty blue state and they're big dependents on the feds but mostly the states getting less than 1:1 are blue, and ones getting more than 1:1 are red.
We could also look at the imbalance of military base distribution and base closings, which has disproportionally hit the Northeast (despite both NYC and Boston being prime terrorism targets), and move a few bases from Kansas to where there is less coverage per capita.
Good luck getting red states to sign off on high speed rail that only benefits the liberal northeast!
Technically, I don't think you are suggesting Boston to DC. That's actually a very long corridor and most ridership will ride PART of that route, not the whole thing. Well the same benefits can be applied to other congested hotspots, in Florida, Texas, Chicago and California. These are also very dense regional routes which could benefit.
If you want to take the fiscally conservative approach, you can do a LOT to help rail by working to end taxpayer welfare for the oil companies, and make the feds a minority funder for new highway construction.
Ending federal loan guarantees for the airlines would do a lot to fix transporation in the US. This is corporate welfare. Everybody KNOWS that the airlines rack up huge taxpayer underwritten loans, rack up debt, and then file for bankruptcy again and again. Shareholders privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
You'll never get the country to demand a fix if you ask them. All they'll want to know is will they pay more at the pump or airline ticket, and they don't -care- that they're actually paying MORE via subsidies. If your argument has fewer words, you always win.
>Just remember, you're going to wind up going through the same security bullshit getting on a high speed train as you would with an airplane.
Completely untrue... please check your facts. That is unless you are speculating on what "might" happen in the future, which is not an argument but a negative argument.
I don't dispute your experience - and it is common - but why blame Amtrak? Rail tracks are owned and maintained by the freight companies.
Can you imagine how car-friendly the US highway system would be if it were owned by trucking companies? You wouldn't blame your local tax driver or Greyhound for those problems, would you?
The biggest drag on rail in the USA is the fact that the federal government HEAVILY subsidizes the airlines, highway construction, and fossil fuel in general to a factor of 200 dollars for every 1 dollar spent to keep Amtrak alive. In fact Exxon Mobil was the #1 earner last year, and paid ZERO in federal taxes for 2009 (they actually got money BACK from the taxpayer).
The thing that burns me most is Sony taking their customers for GRANTED. The model of PS3 I bought -advertised- OtherOS, and it's was what nudged me into buying it (I had a PS2, but I was never really a console guy..).
Having been a home Linux user for like 16 years or so... it's taken a lot of abuse like this from Sony for me to finally admit: Sony is more evil than Microsoft. When Sony put rootkits on their music CDs, I wasn'0t affected but that was only because I ran Linux... otherwise...
Microsoft just abuses file formats, and uses monopoly tactics. Sony uses bait and switch, timeout features that take something promised away from you.. Sony presumes loyalty. The only thing Sony has going for it is the PS3.... it's been a decade since they innovated in home theatre setups and now they're just a discount brand.
The PS3 -almost- tanked as a project, and would have taken down the company. At that time, Sony was doing everything it could to win converts... including PS3. In the US at least, I can't return the PS3 or successfully sue them for false advertising... but I can remember how Sony is morally bankrupt. Even though I won't buy another console ever again, I hope Microsoft or Nintendo buries Sony.
China's status as the world's provider of cheaply manufactured goods means that their own citizens are not benefiting from that massive industrial capacity as much as they could be
China's status as the world's largest manufacturer - and soon the world's highest-tech manufacturer - plus all those IOUs they own means that they will be able to do whatever the hell they want. China's not interested in raising their standard of living too fast, if it means that a huge disparity exists between the poor and the really dirt-poor. China doesn't want the manufacturing to race to the next developing nation, and it's big enough that they know there will always be suitable numbers of desperate unemployed population to keep wages (and worker demands) very low.
But China's not stupid, they're plowing this money and tech into their military. Their submarine navy for example isn't made to carry nukes, but they ARE made to act as underwater troop carriers.
Comcast is doing WONDERS to educate the public about the importance of DNS.
Years ago, just after the SECOND major Comcast outage, I switched from Comcast nameservers to some pretty old and reliable AT&T nameservers at 4.2.2.1. Of course there was OpenDNS also but it's a pain to remember their DNS server IP addresses.
Since then I switched to Google's free DNS - same benefit, but faster and "8.8.8.8" and "8.8.4.4" is -incredibly- easy for people to remember.
Now with Comcast's THIRD major DNS outage, people resorted to using Facebook and Twitter using just their mobile phones. Guess what? Nearly everyone who bitched about Comcast got a reply from some friend, just go plug in these numbers in Network Settings... and many did! The word IS spreading....
As an n800 owner, I expected the hardware would become obsolete... eventually. I could see making the n800 with built in GPS... but then the n900 as a PHONE and then signaling to the developer base that Maemo5 will abandon the 800 + 810 user base... that hurt. Then the n900 was obsoleted before it even shipped.
Nokia gets praise for making a system that was largely open, but they weren't open enough. When a product is truly open, it can not be killed by the manufacturer.
I suspect developing for MeGoo is inly slightly more relevant than developing for the nostalgia/emulator crowd.
I'd like to see a tablet that's truly open... something that encourages hacking, as in a tablet equivalent of the Arduino platform (a popular micro processor based on open sourced hardware).
Slashdot Mirror
mikejuk's submission paragraph states: "However, it's not all gain — the 3.3V operating voltage and the different I/O ports are going to create some compatibility problems. "
I respectfully disagree. Firstly, there are already a lot of 3.3v based Arduinos on the market. I own a JeeNode (see Jeelabs in EU, Modern Device in the USA). The JeeNode can run a 434MHz wireless radio transceiver and temperature sensor for MONTHS on a single 3.3v boosted AA battery. You could not do that with 5V.
Adafruit has a tutorial on converting Arduino Unos over to 3.3v, from 5v. It's popular.
Mostly all sensors these days are 3.3v.
But most most actuators (like stepper motors) require MORE than 5V. Sure, there's some relays requiring a mere 5v.. and very few work on 3.3v... but most relays require 6V or higher. The usefulness of 5V is diminishing, so what you really want is just enough power to activate a transistor or relay.
(Some Arduino compatible chips run great at 1.8v, and sensors do also... there will come a time someday where it may make sense to run at less than 3.3v)
I see Arduino more as a collection of standards and open hardware. There are dozens of Arduino designs all of which vary slightly in terms of electrical and physical (pinout, etc) compatibility. But this too is a good thing... the Arduino platform is all about ADAPTABILITY.
No one has decreed that Dart must exclude Javascript, nor has anyone suggested that IPv6 engineers have been taken away from their pressing task to work on Dart. Your arguments are all false arguments, crafted to support your initial reaction but not really relevant to the issue.
Your comment is so well-written irony that I can not decide if you sincere in what you say, or cleverly trolling for the other side of your argument. When you are arguing for (what seems to be) more languages merely for the sake of more languages, and presenting as evidence how you personally like to dabble in every new language... well, that incites a backlash to your argument.
Google is very interested in bandwidth memory and power conservation. Google apps use a specific subset of Javascript, and they know which bits are inefficient. I would agree that Google should be free to invent a new language if it has benefits. No one gets hurt if the language runs inside JavaScript on other browsers. When it comes to working with open source and standards, Google has credibility and trust... they're not Microsoft, so I do not fear what they do in their labs. I want my phone and laptop both to be more responsive on the web, and use less power.
ECMAScript committee seems much less interested in these things, and are seem to be mostly interested in adapting ECMAScript to be the proverbial kitchen sink. I know they have some device/runtime profile stuff (somewhere), but it does not seem like a real subset standard, and not often used.
>(Or just crazy people who fear it blindly like for Nuclear).
Unnecessary trolling. If you think nuclear is feared without merit, you are not being honest with anyone including yourself.
I am aware of the pro-nuclear argument for the last few decades that failure problems are ALL due to "those old reactors, not the new designs". Allowing that argument to slide, you still have a basic fact that neither the original design manufacturers NOR the investors are interested in paying to upgrade or refit those old reactors... so they stay IN production... and the point about possible safety improvements in new designs is not realistic. Most of these old reactors have been allowed to continue producing well beyond their original lifespan and keep getting exemptions.
The other argument against nuclear is that the private owners assume all the profit, and the taxpayer assumes all costs of waste disposal. The owners simply get to (dangerously) store the waste on-site in ways that were NEVER intended.
There's more to the problem than that, Yuca mountain storage, etc. but the reality is that most industries including energy are not required to fully bond the costs of cleanup... they can simply go bankrupt one day, leaving the taxpayer to fund the costs of cleanup. Since Bush 2 gutted Superfund, it's not like the government has much capacity to clean these things up either.
Did you know that 33-66% of all electricity generated is wasted in-transit?
This is WHY nuclear power builders always never want to build in remote areas... they always want to build nukes near large populations so there is less waste and greater profit.
Despite all this, I am not 100% against nuclear - it has it's place in the energy grid. But most of the time nuclear is proposed as some sort of utopia, if only the crazy people would stop being crazy about it. The reality is that nuclear's bad image has more to do with poor behavior, and attitudes like yours which dismiss facts.
The energy debate sadly fails to ever talk much about conservation, or the parasitic losses during long-distance transmission. Transmission losses are exactly why we need to have LOCAL wind and solar power - not wind and solar farms [which have their uses] - but actual on-site, emission-free power generation. If solar power works in Germany, it works in Maine, Vermont and North Dakota (which also happens to be quite suitable for wind power, local and farm based)
While frozen land has plenty of sequestered carbon in the form of methane and peat.. the poster was asking about "eco" projects, which is quite opposite from your answer. You may have as well suggested an eco project based on drilling for oil. :-) Releasing all that trapped methane and carbon is the -last- thing humanity needs (although as the planet warms... it may release all of it anyways... the feedback loop danger that we're ignoring).
Regarding the poster's question, I believe Stirling engines work in extreme cold (if there is warmth at the other end). Also peltier electric cooling is interesting. There is plenty of wind power in cold climates.
There are not very many ecological projects suited to Alaska... fewer still that can be transported by air... which is a pity... I imagine heat pipes buried beneath the permafrost would have excellent utility..
Your post contains a number of factual errors. I'm not sure if your post was intended to be deliberately misleading, or just generate buzz (much of it in the form of corrections). Nearly every line in your post..
>"For at least 15 years I've been hearing that various postal services all over the world are "losing battle against e-mail age" while in fact that scary "e-mail age" (or Internet age, as I would call it) should be the best thing they should hope could possible happen.
Not sure what your point was here. Was it to convey that USPS etc somehow "are not" losing the communication battle, or that this was not long-ago predicted? Either are untrue.
That we are in the "email age" being a good thing is something I would agree with... but I don't see how it follows what came before in your statement. Email is good for society, but bad for the USPS.
>Never before in human history we were buying so many goods from remote locations all over the world to be delivered by ... postal services! And now they want an end to Saturday delivery?
In the US, most goods purchased online are delivered by UPS, FedEx, and private freight. USPS carries some of that market segment, but it is small by comparison. Please do not put all of these carriers in a large pot, stir, and then strongly imply it has something to do with USPS. It's irreverent, actually.
>They should start Sunday delivery. ... and you should work for USPS, for free. Oh wait, even that would not remedy the financial issues.
>They missed the opportunity to start the biggest online payment system in the world so they should at least focus on being the best at delivering good bought on the Internet, not being worse still.
You do not understand what the USPS -is-.
USPS is a particular MODE of communication - shipping paper envelopes and some boxes. This is what Congress specifies in their charter (more or less).
USPS does not have a mandate to enter into competition with PayPal and Mastercard/Visa and therefore did not fail any opportunities to innovate.
>They [USPS] missed the train and now they want our help to survive.
No, they did not miss the train. Congress kept USPS on a short leash, even though USPS is a quasi public/private company. USPS could -never- have innovated ahead of UPS/FedEx, nor could it have even mimicked innovations by private shipping.
For example, USPS must deliver *everywhere* in the mainland USA, no matter how remote. UPS and FedEx can simply choose not to serve communities where it is not cost-effective.
If it costs more fuel to deliver letters from Miami, FL to Boulder, CO then tough shit the USPS must still charge the same flat rate. UPS and FedEx can price accordingly to cost, and they can charge more for Saturday delivery also.
USPS was never allowed to innovate much with package tracking, and as a result people simply do not TRUST them with online purchases. I never have.
USPS has to figure out where a package is going, MULTIPLE times, with no chance for error correction or detection, rerouting, or any of that. A package sent to my work was returned before it ever got here as "no such person at address". Some USPS person simply got confused it was a business address with a "attn: [my name here]" placed below the company name and above the street address. No delivery attempt was even made (though it came to the right town); No one here refused the mail at the office.
This would be no problem if the package were UPS/FedEx, and someone would sign for it... or the carrier would call the shipper or receiver phone number for instructions.
USPS was doomed for a long time.. unfortunate that those who consider USPS to be "socialism" we should not have, they fought against making USPS self-sufficient because quite simply they wanted a hole dug so deep that USPS would perish. Personally I think USPS is being forced to dig a big hole so that conservatives can force it to raid the pension fund, the way many p
I know way more people with PS3s than XB360s. This was not true 5 years ago, but it is now and has been for years.
Because of hardware failures, most XB360 owners I know have purchased the game console more than once (THREE times in one case).
What's more interesting to me is how both platforms have become dynamic platforms with new OS features, instead of remaining static like the old PS2 and XBOX.
Next thing you know, one of the console makers will 1up the other and start supporting Linux and homebrew. Oh wait....
Why is it going to suck for Linux?
I got FireFox 5 with my latest security updates, on the currently released Ubuntu 11.
Maybe you mean to say, this will such "for anyone running RHEL as a desktop". I know people who run Fedora or RHEL (or CentOS) a desktop, and yeah... it IS hell. People only seem to do it so they can "develop" their enterprise apps inside the same OS they use for their banking and Facebook (ie, development is based on CentOS, and you can run Linux, so must be easier to combine these uses on one system.. not).
I develop for CentOS, but I push the code to a real CentOS server. For a desktop, I wouldn't ever suggest running anything besides Ubunto or OS X.
Fedora and RHEL doesn't suck.. it just sucks as a desktop. Besides getting old apps, in order to get any "media" (like mp3 or flash, for developer video casts) working you have to introduce other repos which eventually clash with the OS rpms, and then things break. As a result, those Linux users tend to not apply security updates at all. All this makes "Linux" look bad.
Sorry to beat the Ubuntu drum. I know people get sick of it. At the moment, Fedora is a test bed for RHEL, which is a server centric system with no desktop polish. It's been years since Red Hat cared about the desktop...
Have you priced car or home charger for any USB-based device lately? Standardization does wonders for economies of scale.
If you don't care about price, most people care about clean drinking water and less wasted landfill space (even if you have to guilt them into it).
Why would I care that I can only charge one device... I don't think this is a valid question.
When I send back my phone to be recycled, I won't be sending back the chargers. Don't need to... they're standard, and useful.
You either accumulate a spare, or you can buy one off ebay cheap.
There's a bit more power variance with laptops (9v, 12v, 19v etc), but not a huge issue. A quality power supply is regulated, and could be selectable.
A lot of generic electronics and "stuff" is sold without a power supply. If you know how to read power supplies, and understand the types (transformer vs regulated/switching) you can often save those power supplies from the trash and recycle. So I have a battery powered Coleman air matress pump which requires 6v (uses 4 'D' batteries). Wire in a DC plug to those leads, remove the batteries, and plug in a (recycled) 6V DC power supply, and there ya go... it works indoors now without wasting batteries. No need to buy an AC-powered air pump.
We can't keep making stuff which is designed NOT to last. It is not sustainable.
Oh, great. And at the end of the day the moral high ground is unsustainable because your country loses it's economic footing.
Ideology is just an excuse for lack of critical thinking on a per-issue basis.
You are not being pragmatic. You are looking at this issue through the "filter" of partisan dogma, and then describing the problem and solution so it creates the fewest conflicts with your filter.
Libertarian principles -only- work if you can get everyone else to play along.
For example, Virginia could be competitive with rural South Korea and rural Japan without government support... IF you could convince rural South Korea and rural Japan to not ask their government to wire them up at high speed. In effect, they would be asking to get crappy rural Virginia bandwidth. Why would they ever do that?
In the US, it now looks like we will not be able to successfully lobby our government to maintain network neutrality. As a result, our Internet is now going to start moving backwards as ISPs move from common carriers to actual owners of the Internet itself. If you are building the next great Internet media project, good luck attracting fiscal and brainpower capital if your idea at all steps on the toes of Comcast-NBC (as Skype, Netflix, and Google did).
Yep. Looks to me like "inkscapee" is a brand new account created this week, almost zero posts, and already submitting stories. Hmm. More likely, the summary is really a carefully-worded link designed to either create a word-link association in Google, or simply to drive traffic to earthweb.
I liked Slashdot.org better when the editors picked the stories. Some days, Slashdot feels like Digg...
I tend to not take seriously anyone who tries to portray Ubunutu users as "fanboys" - they are usually *fanboys themselves*, or they're unrepentant software pirates whose roles as "software gurus" (collectors, really) are undermined by the real free software movement.
I've been a Ubuntu fan last 5 years, but started on Slackware ~ 1994. I still target development at CentOS (RHEL) but there's no way I'd put anything but Ubuntu on my desktop. Ubuntu's not perfect, but they've taken many of Debian's goals to a much much larger audience. Good for Ubuntu.
Agreed.
I'm not a Nokia phone user, but I used to be an avid Nokia n800 user and developer. It was an -amazing- tablet OS... but then Nokia threw out the API *twice* (or was it THREE times when they switched Maemo from GTK to Qt?). Nokia pissed off all their developers and users, because they wanted to make it a phone OS. They didn't see that Google had already won the open source phone OS war, and Nokia could never catch up and beat Android in the OS space.
Ironically, Google's been struggling to get Android running on tablets well. Tablets could and should have been a Nokia market...
The n800 was awesome for it's time, 800x480 and awesome video.. it simply needed scaling up in screen size.
Gmapper would download Google Maps while you drive, but this was on maemo YEARS ago.
I would have paid double cost the n800 to get one with a 7" diagonal screen, but Nokia management threw it all away....
Even after Nokia halted development of Maemo, some Nokia engineers continued to help the open source community. On their own time of course, since management didn't seem to understand the opportunity that they blew, or the hostility caused by their constant mission changes...
Can you point to a reference hardware design which runs all OS, or which allows the consumer to pick?
No... that does not exist yet.
So for now at least, phones are tied to the OS or vice-versa.
Someday it will never matter what platform you use, and all your data is stored in open formats, and your data can be opened in competitive software, etc. but that is a LONG way off. The phone companies in the USA spent -millions- of dollars a few years ago, trying to convince everyone why you could not keep your phone number when you switched phone carriers.
Phones just are not like commodity PC hardware, or laptops.
It's good that you are attempting to argue this based on cost, but you do realize you have ignored federal subsidies for the automotive sector, correct?
Ignoring the costs of war (just to keep the argument simpler), the feds spend less than 1% of transportation spending on rail and the rest goes to build new highways (most of which doesn't serve to help traffic, but does serve to build access to land owned by well-heeled developers).
Hidden subsidies make this argument impossible. 90% of Americans believe the federal has tax accounts for a substantial amount of the price of gas, AND that the gas tax pays for the roads. I even see letters to the local paper asking why the police don't arrest bike riders for "stealing" space on the road without paying taxes. The majority of the cost of road construction comes from 2 places: income taxes, and loans from oil rich states (who don't want to give us a reason to quit).
The places you mention do make the most sense for high speed rail, as well as pockets in Florida, urban rust belt, and parts of the west coast. DC isn't a "maybe"... if it were safe to bring a bike on the highways, you could beat traffic home whether your commute were 5 miles or 15... DC is a congested mess.
This isn't about "replacing" any method - that angle smacks of taking away choice. This is about expanding choices.
We have 2 wars going on, and we're not making any economic sacrifices for them so the day of rekoning will be that much harder. My grandmother told me stories how during WW2 you would be berated for NOT carpooling, not growing a 'victory garden', and not recycling. We were promised we could ignore looming economic problems and it would sort itself out.
For years, people who talked about "peak oil" were dismissed as making it all up for some socialist agenda. If you want to be really scared, take a look at today's headlines about Saudi Arabia misrepresenting it's oil reserves by 40%, the US government knew it but kept quiet. Thanks to Wikileaks, we know the truth now. (Although it was really kind of obvious once the rest of the word got developed, that oil couldn't remain the domain of any 1 economy)
Now we're about to EXIT a major recession - a recession which has tempered worldwide oil consumption. Other economies are bidding for the same barrels of oil, and will be able to outbid the USA because we don't MAKE anything after outsourcing and offshoring it all away. That's like playing a game of poker where you keep bluffing -and- borrowing from the other players at the table.
High speed rail won't grow our economy - nothing can do that except a return to manufacturing. But without high speed rail, we're going to lose a lot more dollars to the middle east, or maybe we'll rely on Russia for energy...
I didn't even bring up climate change, because frankly it is so politicized :-(
I'm not pro-coal, but it is worth pointing out that even if some high speed electric rail were powered by dirty coal, those trains would have far lower CO2 emissions than the same number of drivers in cars. In a lot of places, cars idle for much of the time, and under the best conditions gas vehicles achieve less than 15% efficiency which is far less than a coal plant (plus a regional power plant can be upgraded to run cleaner FAR easier than all the cars in that area getting individual pollution upgrades, which is not feasable. It is interesting that energy profits are privatized, but air/land/water pollution is socialized.
Oh, and airlines? They're only cheap because the taxpayer supports them.
During good years airlines do not save money for rainy day - it goes out as dividends and bonuses. Instead of investing in efficiency, airlines lobby for taxpayer-underwritten loans... which a few years later (rainy day) the airlines default on. That defaulted debt is passed on to the federal government.
So Kansas does not want to fund high speed rail, even if it helps lower our dependence on fossil fuel and even if that helps our national security??
My my my!
OK
Kansas gets $1.30 in federal dollars for every $1 they pay in federal taxes.
(Source: Federal Tax Burdens and Spending By State, easily googled... )
So how about we tell Kansas that if they don't want to pitch in to build HS rail -where it makes technical sense- that we'll turn highway construction back over to the states? That's a lot of Kansas pork right there.
FYI - My native state of New Hampshire gets $0.75 cents in federal spending for every $1 we pay the feds. It's nearly the same in Massachusetts and California.
In fact, MOST of the so-called fiscally conservative red states depend on pork. The more high tech and developed states are paying through the nose to support them.
Not to imply Kansas is the biggest federal welfare queen. Depending on the year, that honor goes between Alaska, West Virginia, and New Mexico. And to be fair, Hawaii is a pretty blue state and they're big dependents on the feds but mostly the states getting less than 1:1 are blue, and ones getting more than 1:1 are red.
We could also look at the imbalance of military base distribution and base closings, which has disproportionally hit the Northeast (despite both NYC and Boston being prime terrorism targets), and move a few bases from Kansas to where there is less coverage per capita.
If we want to play regional games, we can..
Good luck getting red states to sign off on high speed rail that only benefits the liberal northeast!
Technically, I don't think you are suggesting Boston to DC. That's actually a very long corridor and most ridership will ride PART of that route, not the whole thing. Well the same benefits can be applied to other congested hotspots, in Florida, Texas, Chicago and California. These are also very dense regional routes which could benefit.
If you want to take the fiscally conservative approach, you can do a LOT to help rail by working to end taxpayer welfare for the oil companies, and make the feds a minority funder for new highway construction.
Ending federal loan guarantees for the airlines would do a lot to fix transporation in the US. This is corporate welfare. Everybody KNOWS that the airlines rack up huge taxpayer underwritten loans, rack up debt, and then file for bankruptcy again and again. Shareholders privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
You'll never get the country to demand a fix if you ask them. All they'll want to know is will they pay more at the pump or airline ticket, and they don't -care- that they're actually paying MORE via subsidies. If your argument has fewer words, you always win.
>Just remember, you're going to wind up going through the same security bullshit getting on a high speed train as you would with an airplane.
Completely untrue... please check your facts. That is unless you are speculating on what "might" happen in the future, which is not an argument but a negative argument.
I don't dispute your experience - and it is common - but why blame Amtrak? Rail tracks are owned and maintained by the freight companies.
Can you imagine how car-friendly the US highway system would be if it were owned by trucking companies? You wouldn't blame your local tax driver or Greyhound for those problems, would you?
The biggest drag on rail in the USA is the fact that the federal government HEAVILY subsidizes the airlines, highway construction, and fossil fuel in general to a factor of 200 dollars for every 1 dollar spent to keep Amtrak alive. In fact Exxon Mobil was the #1 earner last year, and paid ZERO in federal taxes for 2009 (they actually got money BACK from the taxpayer).
The thing that burns me most is Sony taking their customers for GRANTED. The model of PS3 I bought -advertised- OtherOS, and it's was what nudged me into buying it (I had a PS2, but I was never really a console guy..).
Having been a home Linux user for like 16 years or so... it's taken a lot of abuse like this from Sony for me to finally admit: Sony is more evil than Microsoft. When Sony put rootkits on their music CDs, I wasn'0t affected but that was only because I ran Linux... otherwise...
Microsoft just abuses file formats, and uses monopoly tactics. Sony uses bait and switch, timeout features that take something promised away from you.. Sony presumes loyalty. The only thing Sony has going for it is the PS3.... it's been a decade since they innovated in home theatre setups and now they're just a discount brand.
The PS3 -almost- tanked as a project, and would have taken down the company. At that time, Sony was doing everything it could to win converts... including PS3. In the US at least, I can't return the PS3 or successfully sue them for false advertising... but I can remember how Sony is morally bankrupt. Even though I won't buy another console ever again, I hope Microsoft or Nintendo buries Sony.
China's status as the world's provider of cheaply manufactured goods means that their own citizens are not benefiting from that massive industrial capacity as much as they could be
China's status as the world's largest manufacturer - and soon the world's highest-tech manufacturer - plus all those IOUs they own means that they will be able to do whatever the hell they want. China's not interested in raising their standard of living too fast, if it means that a huge disparity exists between the poor and the really dirt-poor. China doesn't want the manufacturing to race to the next developing nation, and it's big enough that they know there will always be suitable numbers of desperate unemployed population to keep wages (and worker demands) very low.
But China's not stupid, they're plowing this money and tech into their military. Their submarine navy for example isn't made to carry nukes, but they ARE made to act as underwater troop carriers.
They seem to have all the same functions as the free press, albiet without any hollywood gossip or corporate owners.
Is there some legal definition which excludes WikiLeaks from being called a media organization?
He says it as "th3j35t3r" because he is a Lisp programmer...
Comcast is doing WONDERS to educate the public about the importance of DNS.
Years ago, just after the SECOND major Comcast outage, I switched from Comcast nameservers to some pretty old and reliable AT&T nameservers at 4.2.2.1. Of course there was OpenDNS also but it's a pain to remember their DNS server IP addresses.
Since then I switched to Google's free DNS - same benefit, but faster and "8.8.8.8" and "8.8.4.4" is -incredibly- easy for people to remember.
Now with Comcast's THIRD major DNS outage, people resorted to using Facebook and Twitter using just their mobile phones. Guess what? Nearly everyone who bitched about Comcast got a reply from some friend, just go plug in these numbers in Network Settings... and many did! The word IS spreading....
Nokia *alienated* their user base, sadly.
As an n800 owner, I expected the hardware would become obsolete... eventually. I could see making the n800 with built in GPS... but then the n900 as a PHONE and then signaling to the developer base that Maemo5 will abandon the 800 + 810 user base... that hurt. Then the n900 was obsoleted before it even shipped.
Nokia gets praise for making a system that was largely open, but they weren't open enough. When a product is truly open, it can not be killed by the manufacturer.
I suspect developing for MeGoo is inly slightly more relevant than developing for the nostalgia/emulator crowd.
I'd like to see a tablet that's truly open... something that encourages hacking, as in a tablet equivalent of the Arduino platform (a popular micro processor based on open sourced hardware).