NIST has developed a cooler that uses the preferential tunnelling of hot electrons to cool a semiconductor (also reduces vibrations).
Since so many posters complained that the Peltier coolers in the A.C. described in the article are so inefficient, I thought I'd point out that there's a chance that this new NIST invention could make this sort of A.C. a more viable option than it is now.
FreeWorldDialup has been doing pretty much the same thing for years now. They even have their own pre-configured software. If you don't like the Pulver Communicator you can always get one of half a dozen other SIP phones (soft or otherwise) that work with the service. They even offer a pre-configured version of The SJPhone, which is essentially what the Gizmo folks are offering. If you want a dial-out service FWD offers a choice of affiliates who can give you that portion a-la-carte!
In the movie The 6th Day, there was something that looked like a tailless helicopter with twin blade rotors that were unusually wide and could lock into swept wing position when transitioning from helicopter mode to fast, jet assisted flight. There's a lame picture in the link that doesn't really do it justice. If anyone can find a better link...
LaTeX was my main motivation for booting up Knoppix at school.
Hmmm... latex boots... was there a whip involved or just the usual (unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; gasp; yes; umount; sleep). Either way, definitely motivating.
2,500 spinning drives!!! These folks are located in San Francisco... if there's ever an earth quake the gyroscopic effects could flip the building over! Perhaps they should mount every other drive upside down to cancel out the effect to prevent serious injury;)
I know that the advertisements on everyone sees after the main article text are not always the same, but when I first looked at this article, I saw a big Visual Studio.NET advertisement from Microsoft.
So, is it very enlightened of Microsoft to sponsor an article that implies their own misconduct, or will the ad be pulled when they figure it out?
Nice, but what about the BitTorrent Linux Mirror Project? They've been around for a while now. I think they at least deserve a mention, though they do kind of break the real advantage of BitTorrent, by re-hosting torrents. For low demand projects, this might actually make things worse.
"Since the electron mediator is based on Vitamin K3, which exists in human bodies, it excels in safety and could in the future generate power from blood as an implant-type fuel cell," the group said in a statement.
Most other bio-fuel cells under study use a metal complex, spawning concern about harm if used for implants.
imply that this bio-fuel cell is different than its predecessors because it uses non-toxic materials.
The tendency for politicians and government employees to over-classify things is fairly understandable, but the loss of trust and accountability that comes along with secrecy is damaging to any democracy. Anything that can be done to ensure that secrecy is kept to a minimum would help.
It would seem that one obvious solution would be to have some sort of civilian review board that reviews all documents that are to be classified and decides whether or not it's in the public interest to classify those documents as secret and for how long. Although it might not be a good idea to pick these people the way that juries are chosen, the process should at least make sure that these are people who are not beholden to the politicians and employees whose inclinations are to keep secrets to cover their butts.
Firefox needs to disable third party cookies by default.
Well, until they do that, I've found the Cookie Culler extension very helpful for clearing out the dead wood quickly without killing the cookies that I actually do want to keep.
As far as I know, there is one state (Idaho?) that requires the power company to pay you for any power you pump back into the system... basically if you have solar or wind, they'll let you run the meter backward if you can.
Now, with everybody charging up their cars during off peak time and driving a short distance to work, you could then plug your car into a public or office power grid terminal and have your car negotiate to sell any capacity that you don't expect to use during the peak hours when power is in demand. If done right, you can specify your bidding algorithm to earn you some money back on that power you hoarded during the night and leave you with enough power to get home, or possibly run a short, unexpected errand. If you goof up, and discover that you need more than expected and your car is pure electric instead of hybrid, then, as soon as you find out, you message your car to change it's bidding strategy and try to buy back enough to get you where you need to go by the time you need to leave, hopefully without putting you in the poor house. This could be even more fun than day-trading;)
Unfortunately, it's a total fantasy because the infrastructure would require a lot of work and the influential power-lobby would do everything in their power (Oooh! Bad pun!) to prevent it from working.
It's not uncommon to read posts that suggest that having a policy of deleting logs regularly might be prudent.
I was thinking that an extra measure of protection would be to add a script to automatically delete all logs as soon as any FBI phone number appears in the caller-id of an incoming phone call. The application could use a black(-ops;)-list of known phone numbers, exchanges and id strings for lawyers, organizations or agencies that are privacy challenged to check against for automatic deletion... hey, they keep black lists, why shouldn't privacy threatened groups?
The key question is, however, whether such a thing would be legal or interpreted as obstruction of justice? Having a policy of frequent deletion as a means of limiting exposure to privacy challenges doesn't seem to be a problem, but my proposed script might be. It might be possible to argue that before an actual request is received that preemptive deletion is not any different than frequent deletion. INAL, so I don't know, but it might be interesting to see what the courts think.
SkramKoob has a cute cross-platform bookmark service that makes it fairly easy to keep your bookmarks (skramkoob reversed) in a place where you can access it from any machine. They don't do the social networking thing like the de.lirio.us and del.icio.us do, but they are very convenient and cross platform and don't make you view some huge full-sized web page to get at your links.
ILECs complain that they can't make any money. They all want in the long distance and wireless business, not the margin challenged local business and whine about how legislation prevents that and they do their best to use passive aggressive behaviour like dragging their feet on third party DSL installations.
Unlike the post office, telcos don't have to provide service to remote locations, so they don't. Residents of remote areas usually set up co-ops to run their local phone service. The strange thing is that they typically have much better service because of it even though their physical costs are higher.
Putting these two observations together, here's what I propose:
Force all ILECs to sell their local exchanges to the residents of that exchange who run them as co-ops. Allow the ILECs to change their business model to compete with long distance providers. Allow individual residents to choose from any long distance provider who's willing to hook up to their local exchange.
Do the same thing with cable providers. The local cable 'exchange' runs cables to the neighbourhood, and individual users get to choose, which cable content providers they get hooked up to with video, radio and ISP service being independently selectable.
This system allows for competition on content and services, while putting the part of the system that needs to be a monopoly in the hands of the people who are most interested in and affected by the actions of the monopoly.
There are lots of details left out here, but this should get the germ of the idea across.
Nonimaging Optics: Why bother to 'focus' at all?
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 1
Since the target is so close, why bother to actually use an optical system that focuses the light? Why not just use nonimaging optics that concentrate the light at the target. Such systems can generate phenomenal temperatures, which would probably produce much more interesting results.
Well, if you're going to be on this topic, a mention of ZOË is pretty much required.
ZOË is a sort of an archiving proxy that sits between your mail client and your mail server. It stores and indexes everything, so you can pop open a browser window and do a search on anything you've ever sent or received. Naturally, this was created before gmail.
With ZOË you don't need to worry about those pesky email folders and waiting for long searches.
Naturally, spam filtering before ZOË is a good idea.
Yeah, but if you take out the 'kelly ripa' and just search under 'camel toe' you do get some hits. The eerie thing is that Britney Spears somehow manages to make it into the first page of these search results too!
Though, as if to prove your original point, adding 'britney' to that search also gets no results.
I will never buy another Kodak camera because of a horrible experience that I had with my ancient Kodak DC50 camera. It isn't just that it was a bad camera, but that Kodak's attitude was that they wanted to use a proprietary image format and they were going to do everything they could to keep it that way. As a result, they really aren't my pictures.
To this day you can get all sorts of open source digital camera software that supports all sorts of competing cameras from that era, but NOT the DC-50. The reason is that Kodak refuses any requests for information on the data format used for pictures from that camera. Sure, there's an SDK out there, but it's win16 only and the image conversion code is pre-compiled without any source code. You can build a windows 95 compatible program around their DLL, but you can't write a program for Linux, FreeBSD or Java to read their image format. This makes the camera almost useless now because the even the windows software for the camera doesn't work with any version of Windows past Windows 98! If they had open source software on the camera or on the client side, then we wouldn't have this problem. Heck, even if they had an open format for their images, we'd have a fighting chance of being able to convert the images to some more usable format.
So, the end result is that they aren't my pictures. They're effectively Kodak's pictures because I don't have access to them anymore. I can only use the images I took with my camera as long as Kodak decides to support the product, which they don't any more.
Well, maybe I don't understand what it is that is so special about Dream Weaver's templating engine, but it sure doesn't sound like anything too special. It would be fairly easy to do the same thing with WebMacro (site down at the moment), or it's spinoff Velocity. Although both are intended as "Templating Engines" that run on the server, it's easy enough to set them up to generate static content the way that the article describes. Similarly, more extensive content management systems like Apache Forrest, which is based on Cocoon are available. I don't see what the big deal is.
Although I'm not a big fan of spin, the current political climate makes renaming things with misleading names a necessity. When you say "Digital RESTRICTIONS Management", it makes it fairly clear that it's a technology aimed at limiting personal liberties.
Although I'm not a big fan of spin, the current political climate makes renaming things with misleading names a necessity. When you say "Digital RESTRICTIONS Management", it makes it fairly clear that it's a technology aimed at limiting personal liberties.
It's a little hypocritical that an article that complains about software that puts ads on your computer is so full of ads itself.
I'm not just complaining about web page sponsorship in general, but about ones that are so intrusive that the page is hard to "read"... I mean even for my computer. You don't think I'm going to read that long article myself do you? I have my Mac 'speak' it to a file for me and listen to it on my PDA later. The problem is that this article is so full of obtrusive advertisements and other junk that you can't just highlight the whole thing and have the computer speak it. It took almost as long to copy and paste the damned thing as to read it... even with images and animations turned off!
Can you imagine how hard such sites must be for people with accessibility issues? The article was so bad that it crashed Bobby. Talk about an accessibility nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
NIST has developed a cooler that uses the preferential tunnelling of hot electrons to cool a semiconductor (also reduces vibrations).
Since so many posters complained that the Peltier coolers in the A.C. described in the article are so inefficient, I thought I'd point out that there's a chance that this new NIST invention could make this sort of A.C. a more viable option than it is now.
FreeWorldDialup has been doing pretty much the same thing for years now. They even have their own pre-configured software. If you don't like the Pulver Communicator you can always get one of half a dozen other SIP phones (soft or otherwise) that work with the service. They even offer a pre-configured version of The SJPhone, which is essentially what the Gizmo folks are offering. If you want a dial-out service FWD offers a choice of affiliates who can give you that portion a-la-carte!
So, why would you want to use Gizmo?
In the movie The 6th Day, there was something that looked like a tailless helicopter with twin blade rotors that were unusually wide and could lock into swept wing position when transitioning from helicopter mode to fast, jet assisted flight. There's a lame picture in the link that doesn't really do it justice. If anyone can find a better link...
Hmmm... latex boots... was there a whip involved or just the usual (unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; gasp; yes; umount; sleep). Either way, definitely motivating.
2,500 spinning drives!!! These folks are located in San Francisco... if there's ever an earth quake the gyroscopic effects could flip the building over! Perhaps they should mount every other drive upside down to cancel out the effect to prevent serious injury ;)
I know that the advertisements on everyone sees after the main article text are not always the same, but when I first looked at this article, I saw a big Visual Studio .NET advertisement from Microsoft.
So, is it very enlightened of Microsoft to sponsor an article that implies their own misconduct, or will the ad be pulled when they figure it out?
Nice, but what about the BitTorrent Linux Mirror Project? They've been around for a while now. I think they at least deserve a mention, though they do kind of break the real advantage of BitTorrent, by re-hosting torrents. For low demand projects, this might actually make things worse.
imply that this bio-fuel cell is different than its predecessors because it uses non-toxic materials.
Also, the older article, http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/
The tendency for politicians and government employees to over-classify things is fairly understandable, but the loss of trust and accountability that comes along with secrecy is damaging to any democracy. Anything that can be done to ensure that secrecy is kept to a minimum would help.
It would seem that one obvious solution would be to have some sort of civilian review board that reviews all documents that are to be classified and decides whether or not it's in the public interest to classify those documents as secret and for how long. Although it might not be a good idea to pick these people the way that juries are chosen, the process should at least make sure that these are people who are not beholden to the politicians and employees whose inclinations are to keep secrets to cover their butts.
That's great that they keep the Mac version in sync with the windows version, but the poor OS/2 version is still stuck at 5.12 :(
Well, until they do that, I've found the Cookie Culler extension very helpful for clearing out the dead wood quickly without killing the cookies that I actually do want to keep.
As far as I know, there is one state (Idaho?) that requires the power company to pay you for any power you pump back into the system... basically if you have solar or wind, they'll let you run the meter backward if you can.
;)
Now, with everybody charging up their cars during off peak time and driving a short distance to work, you could then plug your car into a public or office power grid terminal and have your car negotiate to sell any capacity that you don't expect to use during the peak hours when power is in demand. If done right, you can specify your bidding algorithm to earn you some money back on that power you hoarded during the night and leave you with enough power to get home, or possibly run a short, unexpected errand. If you goof up, and discover that you need more than expected and your car is pure electric instead of hybrid, then, as soon as you find out, you message your car to change it's bidding strategy and try to buy back enough to get you where you need to go by the time you need to leave, hopefully without putting you in the poor house. This could be even more fun than day-trading
Unfortunately, it's a total fantasy because the infrastructure would require a lot of work and the influential power-lobby would do everything in their power (Oooh! Bad pun!) to prevent it from working.
It's not uncommon to read posts that suggest that having a policy of deleting logs regularly might be prudent.
I was thinking that an extra measure of protection would be to add a script to automatically delete all logs as soon as any FBI phone number appears in the caller-id of an incoming phone call. The application could use a black(-ops;)-list of known phone numbers, exchanges and id strings for lawyers, organizations or agencies that are privacy challenged to check against for automatic deletion... hey, they keep black lists, why shouldn't privacy threatened groups?
The key question is, however, whether such a thing would be legal or interpreted as obstruction of justice? Having a policy of frequent deletion as a means of limiting exposure to privacy challenges doesn't seem to be a problem, but my proposed script might be. It might be possible to argue that before an actual request is received that preemptive deletion is not any different than frequent deletion. INAL, so I don't know, but it might be interesting to see what the courts think.
SkramKoob has a cute cross-platform bookmark service that makes it fairly easy to keep your bookmarks (skramkoob reversed) in a place where you can access it from any machine. They don't do the social networking thing like the de.lirio.us and del.icio.us do, but they are very convenient and cross platform and don't make you view some huge full-sized web page to get at your links.
ILECs complain that they can't make any money. They all want in the long distance and wireless business, not the margin challenged local business and whine about how legislation prevents that and they do their best to use passive aggressive behaviour like dragging their feet on third party DSL installations.
Unlike the post office, telcos don't have to provide service to remote locations, so they don't. Residents of remote areas usually set up co-ops to run their local phone service. The strange thing is that they typically have much better service because of it even though their physical costs are higher.
Putting these two observations together, here's what I propose:
Force all ILECs to sell their local exchanges to the residents of that exchange who run them as co-ops. Allow the ILECs to change their business model to compete with long distance providers. Allow individual residents to choose from any long distance provider who's willing to hook up to their local exchange.
Do the same thing with cable providers. The local cable 'exchange' runs cables to the neighbourhood, and individual users get to choose, which cable content providers they get hooked up to with video, radio and ISP service being independently selectable.
This system allows for competition on content and services, while putting the part of the system that needs to be a monopoly in the hands of the people who are most interested in and affected by the actions of the monopoly.
There are lots of details left out here, but this should get the germ of the idea across.
Since the target is so close, why bother to actually use an optical system that focuses the light? Why not just use nonimaging optics that concentrate the light at the target. Such systems can generate phenomenal temperatures, which would probably produce much more interesting results.
Well, if you're going to be on this topic, a mention of ZOË is pretty much required.
ZOË is a sort of an archiving proxy that sits between your mail client and your mail server. It stores and indexes everything, so you can pop open a browser window and do a search on anything you've ever sent or received. Naturally, this was created before gmail.
With ZOË you don't need to worry about those pesky email folders and waiting for long searches.
Naturally, spam filtering before ZOË is a good idea.
By that reasoning, they really should've included the Curta Calculator as the ultimate pre-electronics mobile computing device.
There's also an audio presentation from Pop!Tech 2004 on IT Conversations
Yeah, but if you take out the 'kelly ripa' and just search under 'camel toe' you do get some hits. The eerie thing is that Britney Spears somehow manages to make it into the first page of these search results too!
Though, as if to prove your original point, adding 'britney' to that search also gets no results.
P.S. You'll almost certainly like cameltoe.bolt.com
I will never buy another Kodak camera because of a horrible experience that I had with my ancient Kodak DC50 camera. It isn't just that it was a bad camera, but that Kodak's attitude was that they wanted to use a proprietary image format and they were going to do everything they could to keep it that way. As a result, they really aren't my pictures.
To this day you can get all sorts of open source digital camera software that supports all sorts of competing cameras from that era, but NOT the DC-50. The reason is that Kodak refuses any requests for information on the data format used for pictures from that camera. Sure, there's an SDK out there, but it's win16 only and the image conversion code is pre-compiled without any source code. You can build a windows 95 compatible program around their DLL, but you can't write a program for Linux, FreeBSD or Java to read their image format. This makes the camera almost useless now because the even the windows software for the camera doesn't work with any version of Windows past Windows 98! If they had open source software on the camera or on the client side, then we wouldn't have this problem. Heck, even if they had an open format for their images, we'd have a fighting chance of being able to convert the images to some more usable format.
So, the end result is that they aren't my pictures. They're effectively Kodak's pictures because I don't have access to them anymore. I can only use the images I took with my camera as long as Kodak decides to support the product, which they don't any more.
Well, maybe I don't understand what it is that is so special about Dream Weaver's templating engine, but it sure doesn't sound like anything too special. It would be fairly easy to do the same thing with WebMacro (site down at the moment), or it's spinoff Velocity. Although both are intended as "Templating Engines" that run on the server, it's easy enough to set them up to generate static content the way that the article describes. Similarly, more extensive content management systems like Apache Forrest, which is based on Cocoon are available. I don't see what the big deal is.
I was amused to see that in a recent interview with Richard M. Stallman he referred to DRM as Digital RESTRICTIONS Management.
Although I'm not a big fan of spin, the current political climate makes renaming things with misleading names a necessity. When you say "Digital RESTRICTIONS Management", it makes it fairly clear that it's a technology aimed at limiting personal liberties.
P.S. Yes, I know this is a repost, but...
I was amused to see that in a recent interview with Richard M. Stallman he referred to DRM as Digital RESTRICTIONS Management.
Although I'm not a big fan of spin, the current political climate makes renaming things with misleading names a necessity. When you say "Digital RESTRICTIONS Management", it makes it fairly clear that it's a technology aimed at limiting personal liberties.
It's a little hypocritical that an article that complains about software that puts ads on your computer is so full of ads itself.
I'm not just complaining about web page sponsorship in general, but about ones that are so intrusive that the page is hard to "read"... I mean even for my computer. You don't think I'm going to read that long article myself do you? I have my Mac 'speak' it to a file for me and listen to it on my PDA later. The problem is that this article is so full of obtrusive advertisements and other junk that you can't just highlight the whole thing and have the computer speak it. It took almost as long to copy and paste the damned thing as to read it... even with images and animations turned off!
Can you imagine how hard such sites must be for people with accessibility issues? The article was so bad that it crashed Bobby. Talk about an accessibility nightmare.