The blocking of the file formats was from September's Office 2003 Service Pack 3 update. The KB article was probably issued the same time, but it was edited yesterday (and the MSKB doesn't show the original date, just the last review date and the number of times edited).
Of course, most people don't think of a picture from yesterday as "when you were younger".
Still, as Homer and I like to say, "It's funny because it's true".
AAMOF, I'd been saying that for years and it became an ongoing joke with my wife and some of our friends. Then, my wife and I watched season two or three or so of The Simpsons on DVD, and I heard the exact wording with almost the same timing I usually used. We about fell over laughing. I guess I picked it up from the show during the original run of that episode and forgot where I'd first heard it. It's possible that I'd heard it somewhere else first, but chances are I first heard it from Homer J. Simpson. It's really amazing the staying power of a one or two-line observational joke.
That'd be the only reason I could think of to make use of precisely 13 modules. I'm still betting on the 832 GB being the capacity after space dedicated to wear-leveling is considered. No, wait, not betting. I'm too broke to bet right now. Umm, "suspecting" is a better word.
I've found that most people who aren't either professional or dedicated hobbyist cooks or serious gourmands don't really know intuitively what's going to taste good. They know they like "chicken primavera", "buffalo wings", "pizza", or "eggplant parmesan" and might look up a recipe or two to see how to make it at home (or just buy the sauce in a bottle for wings or pizza). When you get inventive with a dish, it's always best to let people try it before telling them what's in it.
I have a few examples. We have a restaurant near here that has a pizza with sourdough crust. I've heard several people groan at the thought who liked it when they tried it. My uncle hates sour cream. He won't eat it or even smell it. My mom makes a dessert with sour cream in it, but the rest of the dessert is so sweet you never taste any sour taste and whipped cream would be way too sweet for it. My uncle loves the stuff, and they joke about how his portion is made with whipped cream or Cool Whip.
One of my personal favorites is hot sauces. I love making my own and I have a cabinet of different small-batch commercial sauces. Lots of people who think they love hot, spicy foods are very surprised by hot sauces made with anything other than just ground dried peppers, white vinegar, and salt. Lots of very good hot sauces use a pepper mash in addition to or instead of ground dried peppers. Vinegars from red wine, white wine, apple cider, or other types might be used. Many have vegetables or fruits in them, like carrots, apples, mango, peach, pineapple, or blackberry. A few use food gums or oils to thicken them, while a few use water to thin them or as part of the traditional vinegar portion to cut down on the taste of vinegar. Many have herbs and spices.
One of my most prized bottles is simply a mix of pepper puree, vinegar, and salt. It's a single-crop, single-barrel reserve sauce made from hand-selected red savina peppers from a particular hot sauce producer's private farm stock. Since a hot pepper's heat, flavor, texture, and more can be affected by everything from soil nutrients to hours of sun exposure and rain levels to pruning, there are very complex differences in single-crop hot sauces from year to year. This one's called The Legend and it's from CaJohn's Fiery Foods. My current one is a 2002 vintage. It is a hotter year, but still flavorful. It needs to be used in moderation or you'll really piss off your non-chilehead friends. Still, it's peppers and not just habanero oil or capsaicin extract so if you like your stuff hot it's not going to actually literally burn your tongue. The real curiosity about sauces like this one for most people is, "they make vintages of hot sauces"? They sure do. Several companies have reserved vintage hot sauces, but few have a single-crop one sold in a wooden box. Dave's INSANITY LIMITED EDITION PRIVATE RESERVE is another vintage reserve in a wooden box, and it's good, too. It's not the same type as The Legend, but it is a good vintage reserve of another type. I'm planning on picking up some of the 2008 as I'm out my previous one.
I realize the parent is possibly just trolling, but I've got legit responses to it. I'll be back-and-forth between the solar solution for energy policy and immigration in this post, so it'll be at least partly on-topic.
Solar power installations shouldn't be any bigger targets than any other power generation. There are a number of ways more efficient than guards to deal with illegal immigration, anyway.
If the US spent more money on issuing visas to legal immigrants with background checks, we'd spend much less money on immigration issues deporting and law enforcement issues just trying to identify the people who want to come. Legal immigrants tend to pay taxes, which we're missing out on from many illegal ones.
Part of those taxes could help pay for this, and we could even power the lights in the immigration offices with solar. They'd be pretty efficient along our southern border with all the sunshine there.
If we had a legal guest worker program which collected taxes and didn't enforce the minimum wage or offer welfare or health benefits (which legal immigrants could have), has the people cleared by the US consulate near where they live and the consulate of their country near where they're going to work, and requires the household is self-supporting at legal work then lots of the "low paying jobs citizens don't want to do" would still get done but by people allowed to be here.
The apartments and houses they live in could be powered by solar, thus making it impact the US less that they're here.
Heck, with a big enough cheap and legal work force, we might even have the manpower to guard the border more effectively against the ones still trying to come across illegally. Plus, those who didn't apply for immigration (limited) or guest worker (unlimited as long as they can find and keep work) programs and tried to come across the border would have no excuse of just trying to make a legitimate living, because they'd have passed up the programs that would let them do that.
Those people willing to still break the law to get in once it's easy to get in legally would be the ones most likely to damage or steal your solar equipment.
We could also try to lift up the economies of Mexico, Guatemala, and the other countries that have a lot of emigration so that their people wouldn't want to leave so badly. Building factories or office complexes there powered by solar, where it makes lots of sense to use solar, would help their economies and the planet. That way people who don't like the illegal immigrants can have fewer of them in the US. It's win-win. And if they have their own solar power, why would they steal our equipment? So even fewer guards. It's easier to sell to people with money. It's also easier to sell to people when you have a presence in their country. Giving tax breaks to private US companies to build in Mexico and power things with solar there provides work for US and Mexican workers in Mexico, helps the economy of whatever cities the complexes are in, and gives the US a way to export more goods.
Solar power in the US and all over Central America is better for the planet than just in the US. It's also better for the economy. Heck, if we build the solar arrays in the US, we can even export the stuff initially to get the ball rolling.
There's no reason something like energy policy needs to be considered in a vacuum or in opposition to a group of people stealing the equipment. Smart policy is a good thing, and forcing the ongoing battle of rights for illegal immigrants vs. kicking illegal immigrants out to go on is about as silly as saying that we can't use solar at all because the coal miners need jobs. If we can combine two smart policies together, we can minimize our need for coal slowly and minimize our need to prosecute and deport people who want to contribute to society as well.
The design makes no sense if it's really 13. Why have 16 possibilities, three of which are invalid?
They could just as easily make a 512 GB unit with three chip select lines and only 8 flash modules if they wanted to cut costs. It'd still sell.
The flash chip cost is built into the base cost of the drive, too. It's the design and development time they need to recover on top of parts cost to make a profit. Why complicate things when it's natural to develop binary products based on powers of two?
If it really is 832 GB total but you have to count space for wear-leveling out of that, what does it really count as for storage? Why wouldn't they publish that number, since very few people will care about the portion not useful to them and might sue for improper advertising?
I think much of what people think of as magical is very often an oral and literary history of the misunderstandings and exaggerations of real, verifiable phenomena of a completely non-magical nature.
In the particular case of ley lines many possible phenomena like magnetic ores, auroras, swap gas, early morning fog over distant mountains, fault lines, weather fronts, and maybe even stratus clouds could have been seen as evidence of something we'd explain away in the days of science and skepticism. If you consider wind or water the sources of magical energy by their very nature, then the jet stream or large rivers become your ley lines.
The whole point is that people who engage in magical thinking aren't engaging in scientific thinking. There's no hypothesis. There's just belief in something and perhaps anecdotal evidence to reinforce the belief. They're not being bad scientists. They're being non-scientists.
So what are the observations? A compass goes wild along this side of this mountain, along pretty much a straight line (where the magnetite is). The air is sometimes cooler on that side of the street than this one (because it takes time for cool, dense air and warm, lighter air to mix at a weather front) when there are large storms. There are lights in the sky that dance and change color. There's a crack in the Earth, and great movement and destruction is unleashed from it (fault lines).
Now, over thousands of years, with little or no influence from science, how were the people seeing those things and talking about them supposed to explain them? The only point to be made about these explanations today is that we have a better understanding now and don't have to keep retelling the myths as anything more than myths.
Let me know when I can get the playback of your experience watching Strange Days on it.;-) Really, the hardware in the movie wasn't nearly as cool as what it was possible to do with it.
-=##### *very* small possible *partial* spoiler alert #####=-
I only have one complaint about the whole film. They used the Y2K subplot to explain the big crowds they needed for the end of the movie. Considering the characters involved in the film, there's no reason they couldn't have written a large crowd scene without dating the film's setting so readily.
Speaking of Sorcerer, its magic is something else entirely. It's a largely outcome-based game rather than specifically action-based, and the magic system in it is quite a neat play on that.
GURPS, Rifts, and D&D pretty much follow the mystical grimoire approach. Ars Magica, White Wolf's Storyteller Series (Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, Wraith, Changeling, Hunters, etc), and some others take the combined skills approach. Still others have wholly different approaches. Here's a pretty good explanation of the theory of magic in Earthdawn which explains different ways magic can be used in that game, complete with disadvantages of some of them.
The Forge is very interesting reading material for anyone who's considered writing their own RPG. There's some advanced RPG jargon there so I'd suggest starting with the site glossary. It's not a site for arguing the merits or faults of different systems you've played although those might be used as support in discussing the design of new games.
Personally, I've played games with set spells, spell research to make new spells (as some versions of D&D let you do with the right GM). I've played ones that require a combination of skills (from two to five (five!) skills for every casting. Some require each spell being taken as a character advantage in an advantage/disadvantage slot balanced game. I've played on in which the game world has special words that are foreign to the players/characters that must be learned throughout the campaign which represent factors of a spell (speaking "large" + "fire" + "ball" + "at" + character's secret magic name results in that) and learning the words as an outsider is how to become a better mage. It becomes the whole point of some adventures.
I've even play tested one unpublished game in which the only magic was a link between two symbols dawn during a ritual trance. However, the link was so strong that whatever you did to one would happen to the other. You could talk into one, and someone in possession of the other could carry on a conversation with you. You could throw one safely in your fireplace while the other is inside an enemy's barrel of oil. You could lay one on the ground and step on it, and be transported to the other. However, if anyone unfriendly took over your other symbol, they could use it in reverse until one of the two was destroyed. If I ever give this game a name and publish a book, I hope you'll rush out to buy it.;-)
So yes, there can be quite different magic systems in games. Many of them could be used in D&D, or you could try the other games.
It's not anyone else's fault you couldn't make a weekly game night happen with some friends once you were out on your own. If you play MMO, RTS, or FPS games with friends you've just changed games and not left the gaming culture. The LAN party, online gaming clan, and multiplayer console game session around the TV are pretty much the same as a roleplaying session other than the rules and tools.
The reason we had to play games like D&D in someone's basement or around the dining room table as kids is because they were table-top games. You kind of need a table top, and if you're going to be loud about it, as most gaming groups tend to be at times, then it's good to be out of the way of the people who own the home. Now that many people are playing group games at their computers or TVs, the venue has shifted. Lots of people play in their home office/den/bedroom.
If you still prefer tabletop games to video games, there's nothing stopping you from finding some people and playing other than perhaps having a hard time finding enough other players who also still like tabletop games.
Oh, a smiley makes everything alright? Gee, and I just thought they meant humor was intended. In the context, how do you know just what humor was intended?
"I'm making fun of the same people you're trying to set straight." "You're gullible and I'm pointing it out, but here's a smiley because I don't want to seem too hard on you." "Energy doesn't move around without human intervention, you silly beast."
Imagine if you could be the prostitute, making money turning tricks, dodging cars, fighting off johns who want their money back, and running from the cops?
How about if you work for the mob boss the GTA guys are trying to kill?
What if you're a crooked construction boss who makes money building buildings on the loan shark's money. You also make protection payments so your office and your sites don't get shut down, and the GTA-type guy with a body comes to you to pay you cash to hide some bodies in a foundation you're about to pour?
Maybe you're selling one drug in one neighborhood, but you want to keep other drugs out and other gangs out to keep your profits going. Certain drugs anger the mob guys, and making illegal money in their area without giving them a cut angers them more. Do you fight it out or make a deal?
The ambulance driver and paramedic, armored car driver and guard, and more could be worked into such a game as player characters. Imagine the thrill of the armored car guys in San Andreas or Liberty City, with half the players in the game trying to rip you off.
The thing is, 13's not exactly a power of two. To access 13 modules, you'd need the same 4 control lines as 16 modules. Perhaps it's actually 16 * 64 and three are specifically for redundancy and wear leveling?
If you don't believe that short, small, dynamic bursts of energy from one point to another sometimes happen, then why don't you show us the evidence to refute it?
Do you really think all air is equally conductive? Do you think that discharges of static happen in a perfect sphere? Does the ionosphere reflect man-made radio waves only at certain angles and not natural radiation? Do clouds, hills, and deposits of metal in the ground not effect the shape of magnetic fields? DO you think magnetic fields interacting has nothing to do with electricity?
Go ahead, say you were just responding to one sentence and that you didn't read the post. Then stop responding to things you didn't read.
I didn't reply to any comment with any link in it.
I replied to a reply to a comment that had a link. That server has been at times slashdotted too.
So sorry for your sake that I don't click on every link in every post between the submission and the post to which I'm replying, but some of us have things to do besides look at goatse and myminicity redirects.
Ley lines probably do exist in some form or another. Magnetic deposits in the crust, auroras, the Earth's own main magnetic field and all kinds of things mean it's not completely improbable that lines of energy flow from one point of the globe to another naturally. The major magnetic field of the Earth from its rotating iron and nickel fore surely has fluctuations in it that cause energy imbalances. Those imbalances will be settled by moving electrons around.
That it's some mystical "mana" energy that flows from place to place is fantasy. So is the idea that the lines are permanently positioned and don't move as the fluctuations which cause the energy imbalances would cause the flow of energy to fluctuate too. The idea that a great deal of energy is included shows a basic misunderstanding of electricity since any large amount of energy would discharge into any sufficient path to ground. A nexus where two lines of energy meet but keep flowing past that point as two separate lines is pretty doubtful.
The whole ley line, nexus, and rift/gateway type of system is a great feature of fantasy fiction and role-playing games. There's no reason for scientists to bother investigating it IRL though. If someone could show some predictably repeatable phenomenon that could only be explained by magical energy of some sort, then there'd be some scientists willing to court the Nobel for finding evidence of that.
Easy. They want to find where the little green men on Mars used to have their cities!
Seriously, though, if anyone's thinking about pointing a satellite back at Earth, why not have an archaeologist looking at the feeds for just the purpose TFS (can't read the article do to/.edness) suggests?
I think you're confusing the solar furnace and the CR5. It says 88 square meter for the solar furnace. How many of the 45-pounds-per-day CR5 barrels can there be per solar furnace? Also, what portion of the waste heat from a coal-powered electric plant could be used to heat the barrels? Surely not all the heat goes into making steam for the turbines.
If one solar furnace could power 100 of the CR5s and there's enough CO2 to satisfy them, then you're talking about 250 gallons of fuel and 4500 pounds of CO2 that's being reused instead of just released. That's 946 liters and 2041 kilograms for the rest of the world, BTW. At a meager 20 miles per gallon, that would power the coal plant's maintenance fleet 5000 vehicle miles. A day. I think they might have some spare to sell to their employees at least.
If "large numbers" means 1000 per plant on average, then you're talking about each plant making 2500 gallons of fuel a day from 45,000 pounds of CO2. Given there are around 400 fossil-fuel power plants in the US, if you could get 2500 each per day, that's 1,000,000 per day. That's 365,000,000 gallons a year. At 42 gallons (159 liters) per barrel, that's 8,690,476 barrels of fuel. Remember that crude oil needs to be refined to become petrol, too. Only about 20 gallons per barrel of crude becomes gasoline. So figure it's about double, or 17 million barrels of oil not being imported (but that forgets the propane jet fuel, heating oil, etc made from the rest of the barrel) for use as gasoline.
Here's the catch with the previous paragraph: the US consumes about 20 million barrels a day, again about half as gasoline. So 1000 of these per power plant over a year would power the US auto fleet about 2 days.
But how much CO2 are we really talking here? There are two billion tons of CO2 released by coal-fired plants each year. If we could turn 90% of that (1.8 billion tons) into fuel at a rate of 45 pounds = 2.5 gallons then we're talking about 3,600,000,000,000 pounds and 200,000,000,000 gallons per year could be made. Two hundred billion gallons of gasoline. We use 10 million per day. That's 20,000 days worth of gasoline produced each year if we could find the room and perfect the technique of installing these things. That's over 50 years of gasoline at today's usage rates that we'd make each year.
If we really can make 50 years worth of gasoline or methanol each year from coal waste we're making anyway, why not? And that's just coal-fired plants in that last math. That's not including oil-powered ones or the blast furnaces at steel foundries, cement plants, and glass factories.
Also, note in TFA where it says water steam can be turned into elemental hydrogen using the exact same equipment. That sounds a bit cheaper and a lot cleaner than most current methods. Perhaps one solar furnace boils water out of the sea, and another powers the cobalt ferrite and oxygen reaction in a bunch of the CR5 reactor barrels. It's desalinization and hydrogen production from seawater without the input of electricity for hydrolysis.
I'm not a chemist, but I wonder these what devices would do with sulfur dioxide. The CR5 works by removing oxygen from the water or CO2, but does it work on SO2? If it does, will it produce Sx, SO, S2O or S202 at between 2000 and 2600 degrees C?
Just because you prefer wine to whiskey doesn't make the drink objectively better. Even if you're talking about the alcohol recovered per acre of crop, that doesn't make the drink any better. I happen to prefer beer or whiskey to wine.
As for fuel, though, you're dead on. Nobody cares about anything but the energy content and the undesirable outputs of the process. Oil-heavy plants are much better for that. Jojoba, jatropha, algae, and rapeseed are potentially pretty useful.
It could test for a negative result to the point that we can't ever find any aliens using the expected technology that are within range for us to receive the transmissions. That wouldn't mean there are no aliens, but it'd be interesting to note that our predictions for how to find them produced nothing.
Iowa's the earliest caucus, and a caucus potentially measures the pull a candidate's organization has on a party's core membership than a primary ever does. It lets the parties see where people in a particular largely rural state will rally. This gives them a chance to see which candidates need more money and which cannot gain the support of this section of their own party no matter the bankroll.
More importantly, it doesn't take nearly as much money to reach the relatively small number of people in Iowa as it does to reach the same percentage of the populations in all the Super Tuesday states. That means the party gets a microcosm reaction on the cheap, with each candidate's camp paying most or all of their own way before the costs get too high for that. The party only wants to back someone who can at least carry the party's own voters, after all.
Since Iowa can determine who gets party funds, big newspaper endorsements, which small-share candidates throw support behind the more popular candidates, and it gets the ball rolling early, I'd say it's easier to underestimate the importance of it than overestimate it. It certainly doesn't decide the race on its own, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. Just 4 months.
The blocking of the file formats was from September's Office 2003 Service Pack 3 update. The KB article was probably issued the same time, but it was edited yesterday (and the MSKB doesn't show the original date, just the last review date and the number of times edited).
The apology was yesterday.
Of course, most people don't think of a picture from yesterday as "when you were younger".
Still, as Homer and I like to say, "It's funny because it's true".
AAMOF, I'd been saying that for years and it became an ongoing joke with my wife and some of our friends. Then, my wife and I watched season two or three or so of The Simpsons on DVD, and I heard the exact wording with almost the same timing I usually used. We about fell over laughing. I guess I picked it up from the show during the original run of that episode and forgot where I'd first heard it. It's possible that I'd heard it somewhere else first, but chances are I first heard it from Homer J. Simpson. It's really amazing the staying power of a one or two-line observational joke.
NSFW!
Scam redirect!
Gay male porn video link in parent!
That'd be the only reason I could think of to make use of precisely 13 modules. I'm still betting on the 832 GB being the capacity after space dedicated to wear-leveling is considered. No, wait, not betting. I'm too broke to bet right now. Umm, "suspecting" is a better word.
I've found that most people who aren't either professional or dedicated hobbyist cooks or serious gourmands don't really know intuitively what's going to taste good. They know they like "chicken primavera", "buffalo wings", "pizza", or "eggplant parmesan" and might look up a recipe or two to see how to make it at home (or just buy the sauce in a bottle for wings or pizza). When you get inventive with a dish, it's always best to let people try it before telling them what's in it.
I have a few examples. We have a restaurant near here that has a pizza with sourdough crust. I've heard several people groan at the thought who liked it when they tried it. My uncle hates sour cream. He won't eat it or even smell it. My mom makes a dessert with sour cream in it, but the rest of the dessert is so sweet you never taste any sour taste and whipped cream would be way too sweet for it. My uncle loves the stuff, and they joke about how his portion is made with whipped cream or Cool Whip.
One of my personal favorites is hot sauces. I love making my own and I have a cabinet of different small-batch commercial sauces. Lots of people who think they love hot, spicy foods are very surprised by hot sauces made with anything other than just ground dried peppers, white vinegar, and salt. Lots of very good hot sauces use a pepper mash in addition to or instead of ground dried peppers. Vinegars from red wine, white wine, apple cider, or other types might be used. Many have vegetables or fruits in them, like carrots, apples, mango, peach, pineapple, or blackberry. A few use food gums or oils to thicken them, while a few use water to thin them or as part of the traditional vinegar portion to cut down on the taste of vinegar. Many have herbs and spices.
One of my most prized bottles is simply a mix of pepper puree, vinegar, and salt. It's a single-crop, single-barrel reserve sauce made from hand-selected red savina peppers from a particular hot sauce producer's private farm stock. Since a hot pepper's heat, flavor, texture, and more can be affected by everything from soil nutrients to hours of sun exposure and rain levels to pruning, there are very complex differences in single-crop hot sauces from year to year. This one's called The Legend and it's from CaJohn's Fiery Foods. My current one is a 2002 vintage. It is a hotter year, but still flavorful. It needs to be used in moderation or you'll really piss off your non-chilehead friends. Still, it's peppers and not just habanero oil or capsaicin extract so if you like your stuff hot it's not going to actually literally burn your tongue. The real curiosity about sauces like this one for most people is, "they make vintages of hot sauces"? They sure do. Several companies have reserved vintage hot sauces, but few have a single-crop one sold in a wooden box. Dave's INSANITY LIMITED EDITION PRIVATE RESERVE is another vintage reserve in a wooden box, and it's good, too. It's not the same type as The Legend, but it is a good vintage reserve of another type. I'm planning on picking up some of the 2008 as I'm out my previous one.
I'm not sure a Rick Astley video is very shocking, but thanks for the heads up about it being a silly redirect.
I realize the parent is possibly just trolling, but I've got legit responses to it. I'll be back-and-forth between the solar solution for energy policy and immigration in this post, so it'll be at least partly on-topic.
Solar power installations shouldn't be any bigger targets than any other power generation. There are a number of ways more efficient than guards to deal with illegal immigration, anyway.
If the US spent more money on issuing visas to legal immigrants with background checks, we'd spend much less money on immigration issues deporting and law enforcement issues just trying to identify the people who want to come. Legal immigrants tend to pay taxes, which we're missing out on from many illegal ones.
Part of those taxes could help pay for this, and we could even power the lights in the immigration offices with solar. They'd be pretty efficient along our southern border with all the sunshine there.
If we had a legal guest worker program which collected taxes and didn't enforce the minimum wage or offer welfare or health benefits (which legal immigrants could have), has the people cleared by the US consulate near where they live and the consulate of their country near where they're going to work, and requires the household is self-supporting at legal work then lots of the "low paying jobs citizens don't want to do" would still get done but by people allowed to be here.
The apartments and houses they live in could be powered by solar, thus making it impact the US less that they're here.
Heck, with a big enough cheap and legal work force, we might even have the manpower to guard the border more effectively against the ones still trying to come across illegally. Plus, those who didn't apply for immigration (limited) or guest worker (unlimited as long as they can find and keep work) programs and tried to come across the border would have no excuse of just trying to make a legitimate living, because they'd have passed up the programs that would let them do that.
Those people willing to still break the law to get in once it's easy to get in legally would be the ones most likely to damage or steal your solar equipment.
We could also try to lift up the economies of Mexico, Guatemala, and the other countries that have a lot of emigration so that their people wouldn't want to leave so badly. Building factories or office complexes there powered by solar, where it makes lots of sense to use solar, would help their economies and the planet. That way people who don't like the illegal immigrants can have fewer of them in the US. It's win-win. And if they have their own solar power, why would they steal our equipment? So even fewer guards. It's easier to sell to people with money. It's also easier to sell to people when you have a presence in their country. Giving tax breaks to private US companies to build in Mexico and power things with solar there provides work for US and Mexican workers in Mexico, helps the economy of whatever cities the complexes are in, and gives the US a way to export more goods.
Solar power in the US and all over Central America is better for the planet than just in the US. It's also better for the economy. Heck, if we build the solar arrays in the US, we can even export the stuff initially to get the ball rolling.
There's no reason something like energy policy needs to be considered in a vacuum or in opposition to a group of people stealing the equipment. Smart policy is a good thing, and forcing the ongoing battle of rights for illegal immigrants vs. kicking illegal immigrants out to go on is about as silly as saying that we can't use solar at all because the coal miners need jobs. If we can combine two smart policies together, we can minimize our need for coal slowly and minimize our need to prosecute and deport people who want to contribute to society as well.
The design makes no sense if it's really 13. Why have 16 possibilities, three of which are invalid?
They could just as easily make a 512 GB unit with three chip select lines and only 8 flash modules if they wanted to cut costs. It'd still sell.
The flash chip cost is built into the base cost of the drive, too. It's the design and development time they need to recover on top of parts cost to make a profit. Why complicate things when it's natural to develop binary products based on powers of two?
If it really is 832 GB total but you have to count space for wear-leveling out of that, what does it really count as for storage? Why wouldn't they publish that number, since very few people will care about the portion not useful to them and might sue for improper advertising?
I think much of what people think of as magical is very often an oral and literary history of the misunderstandings and exaggerations of real, verifiable phenomena of a completely non-magical nature.
In the particular case of ley lines many possible phenomena like magnetic ores, auroras, swap gas, early morning fog over distant mountains, fault lines, weather fronts, and maybe even stratus clouds could have been seen as evidence of something we'd explain away in the days of science and skepticism. If you consider wind or water the sources of magical energy by their very nature, then the jet stream or large rivers become your ley lines.
The whole point is that people who engage in magical thinking aren't engaging in scientific thinking. There's no hypothesis. There's just belief in something and perhaps anecdotal evidence to reinforce the belief. They're not being bad scientists. They're being non-scientists.
So what are the observations? A compass goes wild along this side of this mountain, along pretty much a straight line (where the magnetite is). The air is sometimes cooler on that side of the street than this one (because it takes time for cool, dense air and warm, lighter air to mix at a weather front) when there are large storms. There are lights in the sky that dance and change color. There's a crack in the Earth, and great movement and destruction is unleashed from it (fault lines).
Now, over thousands of years, with little or no influence from science, how were the people seeing those things and talking about them supposed to explain them? The only point to be made about these explanations today is that we have a better understanding now and don't have to keep retelling the myths as anything more than myths.
Let me know when I can get the playback of your experience watching Strange Days on it. ;-) Really, the hardware in the movie wasn't nearly as cool as what it was possible to do with it.
-=##### *very* small possible *partial* spoiler alert #####=-
I only have one complaint about the whole film. They used the Y2K subplot to explain the big crowds they needed for the end of the movie. Considering the characters involved in the film, there's no reason they couldn't have written a large crowd scene without dating the film's setting so readily.
It's been done. It's just not in the games you're familiar with, apparently.
;-)
A magic system for Fudge which works much the way you describe
the system in Ars Magica is quite similar
Here are some discussions about magic systems:
a discussion of different systems
another discussion, led off by Ron Edwards of the Sorcerer RPG
Speaking of Sorcerer, its magic is something else entirely. It's a largely outcome-based game rather than specifically action-based, and the magic system in it is quite a neat play on that.
GURPS, Rifts, and D&D pretty much follow the mystical grimoire approach. Ars Magica, White Wolf's Storyteller Series (Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, Wraith, Changeling, Hunters, etc), and some others take the combined skills approach. Still others have wholly different approaches. Here's a pretty good explanation of the theory of magic in Earthdawn which explains different ways magic can be used in that game, complete with disadvantages of some of them.
The Forge is very interesting reading material for anyone who's considered writing their own RPG. There's some advanced RPG jargon there so I'd suggest starting with the site glossary. It's not a site for arguing the merits or faults of different systems you've played although those might be used as support in discussing the design of new games.
Personally, I've played games with set spells, spell research to make new spells (as some versions of D&D let you do with the right GM). I've played ones that require a combination of skills (from two to five (five!) skills for every casting. Some require each spell being taken as a character advantage in an advantage/disadvantage slot balanced game. I've played on in which the game world has special words that are foreign to the players/characters that must be learned throughout the campaign which represent factors of a spell (speaking "large" + "fire" + "ball" + "at" + character's secret magic name results in that) and learning the words as an outsider is how to become a better mage. It becomes the whole point of some adventures.
I've even play tested one unpublished game in which the only magic was a link between two symbols dawn during a ritual trance. However, the link was so strong that whatever you did to one would happen to the other. You could talk into one, and someone in possession of the other could carry on a conversation with you. You could throw one safely in your fireplace while the other is inside an enemy's barrel of oil. You could lay one on the ground and step on it, and be transported to the other. However, if anyone unfriendly took over your other symbol, they could use it in reverse until one of the two was destroyed. If I ever give this game a name and publish a book, I hope you'll rush out to buy it.
So yes, there can be quite different magic systems in games. Many of them could be used in D&D, or you could try the other games.
It's not anyone else's fault you couldn't make a weekly game night happen with some friends once you were out on your own. If you play MMO, RTS, or FPS games with friends you've just changed games and not left the gaming culture. The LAN party, online gaming clan, and multiplayer console game session around the TV are pretty much the same as a roleplaying session other than the rules and tools.
The reason we had to play games like D&D in someone's basement or around the dining room table as kids is because they were table-top games. You kind of need a table top, and if you're going to be loud about it, as most gaming groups tend to be at times, then it's good to be out of the way of the people who own the home. Now that many people are playing group games at their computers or TVs, the venue has shifted. Lots of people play in their home office/den/bedroom.
If you still prefer tabletop games to video games, there's nothing stopping you from finding some people and playing other than perhaps having a hard time finding enough other players who also still like tabletop games.
Oh, a smiley makes everything alright? Gee, and I just thought they meant humor was intended. In the context, how do you know just what humor was intended?
"I'm making fun of the same people you're trying to set straight."
"You're gullible and I'm pointing it out, but here's a smiley because I don't want to seem too hard on you."
"Energy doesn't move around without human intervention, you silly beast."
Which one, definitively now, was it?
Imagine if you could be the prostitute, making money turning tricks, dodging cars, fighting off johns who want their money back, and running from the cops?
How about if you work for the mob boss the GTA guys are trying to kill?
What if you're a crooked construction boss who makes money building buildings on the loan shark's money. You also make protection payments so your office and your sites don't get shut down, and the GTA-type guy with a body comes to you to pay you cash to hide some bodies in a foundation you're about to pour?
Maybe you're selling one drug in one neighborhood, but you want to keep other drugs out and other gangs out to keep your profits going. Certain drugs anger the mob guys, and making illegal money in their area without giving them a cut angers them more. Do you fight it out or make a deal?
The ambulance driver and paramedic, armored car driver and guard, and more could be worked into such a game as player characters. Imagine the thrill of the armored car guys in San Andreas or Liberty City, with half the players in the game trying to rip you off.
That's one of the best arguments for wide-open game play I've ever read or heard. I might have to find a cheap copy of the game so I can do just that.
The thing is, 13's not exactly a power of two. To access 13 modules, you'd need the same 4 control lines as 16 modules. Perhaps it's actually 16 * 64 and three are specifically for redundancy and wear leveling?
If you don't believe that short, small, dynamic bursts of energy from one point to another sometimes happen, then why don't you show us the evidence to refute it?
Do you really think all air is equally conductive? Do you think that discharges of static happen in a perfect sphere? Does the ionosphere reflect man-made radio waves only at certain angles and not natural radiation? Do clouds, hills, and deposits of metal in the ground not effect the shape of magnetic fields? DO you think magnetic fields interacting has nothing to do with electricity?
Go ahead, say you were just responding to one sentence and that you didn't read the post. Then stop responding to things you didn't read.
I didn't reply to any comment with any link in it.
I replied to a reply to a comment that had a link. That server has been at times slashdotted too.
So sorry for your sake that I don't click on every link in every post between the submission and the post to which I'm replying, but some of us have things to do besides look at goatse and myminicity redirects.
Ley lines probably do exist in some form or another. Magnetic deposits in the crust, auroras, the Earth's own main magnetic field and all kinds of things mean it's not completely improbable that lines of energy flow from one point of the globe to another naturally. The major magnetic field of the Earth from its rotating iron and nickel fore surely has fluctuations in it that cause energy imbalances. Those imbalances will be settled by moving electrons around.
That it's some mystical "mana" energy that flows from place to place is fantasy. So is the idea that the lines are permanently positioned and don't move as the fluctuations which cause the energy imbalances would cause the flow of energy to fluctuate too. The idea that a great deal of energy is included shows a basic misunderstanding of electricity since any large amount of energy would discharge into any sufficient path to ground. A nexus where two lines of energy meet but keep flowing past that point as two separate lines is pretty doubtful.
The whole ley line, nexus, and rift/gateway type of system is a great feature of fantasy fiction and role-playing games. There's no reason for scientists to bother investigating it IRL though. If someone could show some predictably repeatable phenomenon that could only be explained by magical energy of some sort, then there'd be some scientists willing to court the Nobel for finding evidence of that.
Easy. They want to find where the little green men on Mars used to have their cities!
/.edness) suggests?
Seriously, though, if anyone's thinking about pointing a satellite back at Earth, why not have an archaeologist looking at the feeds for just the purpose TFS (can't read the article do to
I think you're confusing the solar furnace and the CR5. It says 88 square meter for the solar furnace. How many of the 45-pounds-per-day CR5 barrels can there be per solar furnace? Also, what portion of the waste heat from a coal-powered electric plant could be used to heat the barrels? Surely not all the heat goes into making steam for the turbines.
If one solar furnace could power 100 of the CR5s and there's enough CO2 to satisfy them, then you're talking about 250 gallons of fuel and 4500 pounds of CO2 that's being reused instead of just released. That's 946 liters and 2041 kilograms for the rest of the world, BTW. At a meager 20 miles per gallon, that would power the coal plant's maintenance fleet 5000 vehicle miles. A day. I think they might have some spare to sell to their employees at least.
If "large numbers" means 1000 per plant on average, then you're talking about each plant making 2500 gallons of fuel a day from 45,000 pounds of CO2. Given there are around 400 fossil-fuel power plants in the US, if you could get 2500 each per day, that's 1,000,000 per day. That's 365,000,000 gallons a year. At 42 gallons (159 liters) per barrel, that's 8,690,476 barrels of fuel. Remember that crude oil needs to be refined to become petrol, too. Only about 20 gallons per barrel of crude becomes gasoline. So figure it's about double, or 17 million barrels of oil not being imported (but that forgets the propane jet fuel, heating oil, etc made from the rest of the barrel) for use as gasoline.
Here's the catch with the previous paragraph: the US consumes about 20 million barrels a day, again about half as gasoline. So 1000 of these per power plant over a year would power the US auto fleet about 2 days.
But how much CO2 are we really talking here? There are two billion tons of CO2 released by coal-fired plants each year. If we could turn 90% of that (1.8 billion tons) into fuel at a rate of 45 pounds = 2.5 gallons then we're talking about 3,600,000,000,000 pounds and 200,000,000,000 gallons per year could be made. Two hundred billion gallons of gasoline. We use 10 million per day. That's 20,000 days worth of gasoline produced each year if we could find the room and perfect the technique of installing these things. That's over 50 years of gasoline at today's usage rates that we'd make each year.
If we really can make 50 years worth of gasoline or methanol each year from coal waste we're making anyway, why not? And that's just coal-fired plants in that last math. That's not including oil-powered ones or the blast furnaces at steel foundries, cement plants, and glass factories.
Also, note in TFA where it says water steam can be turned into elemental hydrogen using the exact same equipment. That sounds a bit cheaper and a lot cleaner than most current methods. Perhaps one solar furnace boils water out of the sea, and another powers the cobalt ferrite and oxygen reaction in a bunch of the CR5 reactor barrels. It's desalinization and hydrogen production from seawater without the input of electricity for hydrolysis.
I'm not a chemist, but I wonder these what devices would do with sulfur dioxide. The CR5 works by removing oxygen from the water or CO2, but does it work on SO2? If it does, will it produce Sx, SO, S2O or S202 at between 2000 and 2600 degrees C?
Just because you prefer wine to whiskey doesn't make the drink objectively better. Even if you're talking about the alcohol recovered per acre of crop, that doesn't make the drink any better. I happen to prefer beer or whiskey to wine.
As for fuel, though, you're dead on. Nobody cares about anything but the energy content and the undesirable outputs of the process. Oil-heavy plants are much better for that. Jojoba, jatropha, algae, and rapeseed are potentially pretty useful.
Jan Hammer's bells are, like, totally Tubular.
It could test for a negative result to the point that we can't ever find any aliens using the expected technology that are within range for us to receive the transmissions. That wouldn't mean there are no aliens, but it'd be interesting to note that our predictions for how to find them produced nothing.
Iowa's the earliest caucus, and a caucus potentially measures the pull a candidate's organization has on a party's core membership than a primary ever does. It lets the parties see where people in a particular largely rural state will rally. This gives them a chance to see which candidates need more money and which cannot gain the support of this section of their own party no matter the bankroll.
More importantly, it doesn't take nearly as much money to reach the relatively small number of people in Iowa as it does to reach the same percentage of the populations in all the Super Tuesday states. That means the party gets a microcosm reaction on the cheap, with each candidate's camp paying most or all of their own way before the costs get too high for that. The party only wants to back someone who can at least carry the party's own voters, after all.
Since Iowa can determine who gets party funds, big newspaper endorsements, which small-share candidates throw support behind the more popular candidates, and it gets the ball rolling early, I'd say it's easier to underestimate the importance of it than overestimate it. It certainly doesn't decide the race on its own, though.