Reduce and Reuse. Those are the hard ones, but they have an effect. Nobody likes reducing or reusing, however.
Most brainwashed green people who recycle assume it goes away magically when they put it in the dumpster. They fail to take into account all the energy and oil that needs to be used to truck the recyclables around; the subsidies that need to be given to make it viable; the fact that nasty chemical and industrial processes need to be used to reclaim materials (paper is the best. breaking down processed paper is nasty, check out a pulp mill). The end result is that you've consumed more energy in recycling the good than producing a new good, and it's the energy consumption on this planet that's a problem. Beer bottles, on the other hand, are more than viable to recycle. Wanna know why? Because they're not melted. They're just cleaned, i.e. reused. If you had to melt them, it'd be cheaper to make new ones.
If you care about the environment, find a way to stop commuting and work from home. Not driving your car a few days a week will have an order of magnitude more effect then recycling plastic bottles.
Not that it matters, have a look around, wonder what happens when oil gets scarce, and how hard people are working on fusion. Note to americans: $2/gal gasoline prices are not sustainable, dependance on foreign oil reserves is not a good thing.
Sue the sons of bitches into the ground
on
Worst Buy
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· Score: 2
If this happened to me, I'd have a lawyer on their ass so fast it'd make your head spin. Get statements from the arresting officer AND the detective that can be used in court QUICK. You have a well documented story and this should be a no-brainer to win, and a creative lawyer should be able to do a hell of a lot better than "damage to reputation".
Best Buy should get their name in lights for eternity on the web for this. It's a disgrace, and that manager should be arrested for making false claims to the police.
I'll buy some of what you're saying - lugging EE texts to school was a chore. I don't ever want to see a backpack again, actually. I stand by what I said though - an etext would be a great reference, and useful for inschool activities - assuming you had extra batteries - but when it comes to crunch time, I want my paper edition to beat on, and any of the problems I'd be working on are all going to be on paper, too. It's too hard to ballpark circuits in a cad tool.
Ebooks -have- a niche. My point was this device isn't it. Get a notebook and a PDF browser.
The only place these things exist are in the wild fantasies of book publishers, and maybe in the heads of the RIAA if they have sound that can be hijacked. They're just a vehicle to get strict content controls on published media.
The only thing I reference electronically is API references and other programming documentation, and then only if it's occassional, otherwise I'll get a paper book and/or print the damn thing. I can scribble on paper. Paper never runs out of batteries. Paper is easily replaced - hard to beat a 600dpi printer and 500 sheets of paper for $5. Paper is easily readable in crummy light. I can fold paper up into bits and take it with me.
These devices date back to the early 90's if not before then. They've never taken off, because it's damn near impossible to compete with paper. Contrary to popular belief, paper is even environmentally friendly - anyone who thinks that these gadgets are hasn't been informed about the nastiness of semiconductor manufacturing, which makes a pulp mill look pleasant. A single tree - or maybe two or three, if you use a lot - will provide a lifetime supply of paper. Burn it when you're done and plant another tree. The futility of trucking back old paper is the subject for another rant.
E-texts make sense if you distribute the PDFs and then have them printed on demand from there - A lot of the references I use are available on PDF, and I'll print just the sections I need (and scribble all over them), and I can truck the PDF's around with me on my notebook just in case I need them. That's not the model that these guys are looking for.. and pdf's aren't going to cut it for most novels, I want something I can hold in my hand and put on my bookshelf.
"The next generation will use these.. blah blah", is a load of hooey too. I'd rather my kids use plain old crayons and newsprint spools to scribble all over and break than one of these. Even in schools, I just can't see pouring over a monitor trying to learn something complicated - the interface just doesn't match my paws.
Instead of wasting money on crappy e-text screens, how about peopel work on organic LEDs or other technologies that can let me afford dual 24" or 30" wide-aspect monitors for my desktop.
Anything which does many things, does none of them well. Get a standalone capture card, and don't by ATI unless you want miserable driver support. I got burned on a ATI TV Wonder (the software just locks my machine up constantly) and a ATI All-In-Wonder a few years ago. Nvidia chips have never caused me grief, and always have the world's best drivers, updated regulatly.
Newer model sports cars log the highest RPM and/or speed that they've hit in order to protect against overrev damage warranty claims to the valves, etc, as a result of mis-shifts to racing abuse. It is likely possible to get the codes cleared with a scan tool, but if they're non standard, there's no standard tool for doing it. The Acura Integra Type-R has been rumored to have the ability to tell if the owner has put the vehicle past redline.
This isn't to say you can't fool the ECU. Boxes exist now that take the vehicle speed sensor (VSS) input to the ECU and report a lower value than is actually being travelled to get around speed governors which are mandated by law in Japan and put in on some cars (most SUVs will not go faster than 160 km/h). This isn't to say you can't just replace the engine computer altogether, there are many products that do this already from manufactuers like Haltech, AEM, Motec, etc.
This gadget is too easy to work around, and there's no incentive for consumers to put it in their cars if they don't want to. It is a myth that high speed has anything to do with safety - it's usually the slow drivers with bad situational awareness the cause accidents.
What it is, however, is one more step towards mandated government control of vehicles, and is bad news. Changing the ECU is illegal now, because you're tampering with emissions equipment, so messing with one of these gadgets would be, too.
If legislators really gave two shits about safety on the highway, they'd make professional driver training manditory - think a few hundred hours of training, not a weekend - and reinforce that with 5 year re-evaluations of drivers. I've chosen to spend lots of money taking performance driving schools and learning how to drive, something which has saved my ass from an expensive accident more than once. A stupid little black box is not going to help the soccer mom with no idea how to merge into a 120km/h highway traffic flow, or how to do simple brake and avoid maneuvers in a top-heavy vehicle.
I'm not sure why you think there needs to be a government mandated control of such a network. The whole point of the ISM band is that it's unregulated - but I'm pretty sure that the powers that be didn't expect 802.11 technology to be quite so sucessful. 802.11 is designed to be highly tolerant of noise, and I suspect the density can get quite high, either as it is now, or with a derivative technology.
How about another model? One were everyone, or a larger percentage of the community all get a commodity wireless access point and join up in a management framework, basically managed chaos, like the Sydney Wireless. I have a couple links on my community wireless page, too. With enough network overlap, you'd have pretty good coverage - maybe better than standard cell links. The bandwidth on these technologies is quite high, and 11mbit may only be the starting point.
But oh, what a world it might be if control of the communications medium - or, perhaps better phrased, control of A communications medium - went truely into the hands of the masses. I already know of two college campuses where students are running their own dorm networks to combat draconian policies on file sharing and gaming using 802.11. What if that ramped up to city wide? What if people start setting up their own WANs, and leasing their own fiber backbones? Or hell, even running their own fiber backbones, like has been done in Sweden?
Remeber BBSes? There was no tradegy of the commons there, and those formed pretty sophisticated networks towards the end. And no doubt caused a few LEOs to have kittens then..
Uuuuh, you have a pretty twisted view of Canadian politics. We have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms here. Many Americans are not aware of this - this grants a base list of freedoms and expectations similar to your consitution. I would also sumbit that a number of our laws are a) much more sane, and b) much more intelligently enforced (for example, we don't give people 15 years in a federal FPMITAP for minor drug possession).
Unlike the US Consistution, there has been no widespread effort to undermine these freedoms, either. You can be stopped and searched without cause in the United States too, you even glorify it on Fox (ever see Cops?). It's only if you have money and intelligence to work the legal system you an enjoy those rights.
Calling Canada totalitarian is sheer trolling.. yes, there's a little too much hand holding here, and the tax rate reflects that, but things have the potential to change here. When's the last time the official political opposition in the US has been anything but democrat or republican, hrmm? Compare crime rates recently?
..and sort out the warrants later. This widespread monitoring is only due to the lack of proliferation of hard encryption (or any encryption) on the internet.
Re:The problem with all these equations...
on
Rare Earth
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· Score: 3, Informative
There may be forms of life out there that have nothing to do with amino acids or DNA or even liquid water. We really know nothing about the basic processes of life and how it develops. All we know is how we developed, and from there we assume that anyone else has to develop in the same way.
How much organic chemistry did you take? I would bet dollars to donuts that ANY life in the whole entire universe - at least, "naturally" occuring life and not an artificial intelligence created by something which is itself alive - is based on organic chemistry. Carbon is a very, very special atom. I read a quote once that stated life may one day be reclassified as a property of the carbon atom, because carbon and carbon alone can form long polymer chains. These chains are needed for forming DNA and encoding the infomation that makes you who and what you are. There is no other mechanism in the natural world for doing this, and if you were to propose one, you would likely get a nobel prize.
We evolved out of the same matter and same periodic table as everything else in the universe might. If you showed an alien a periodic table, they'd probably know right away what it was. Organic chemistry is unique, and life is enexoriably tied to it's ability to spontaneously form long, complex chains. Not life as we know it. ALL natural life. There is no other atom with the same characteristics. Period. The fact our brains can flexibly reconfigure themselves is a property that organic chemistry enables, and is absolutely necessary for intelligence and learning.
Now, that rant completed, it is also likely in the grand scheme of things, carbon based life is a step in making more complicated artificial life forms that are based on more efficient information processing which cannot naturally develop - for example, within the guts of a bank of FPGA circuits. People like to think what we do is outside nature, but everything we do - destructive, constructive, or creative - is part of a natural process, too. So perhaps the moniker artificial intelligence isn't so good.
That said, please think before you say life elsewhere would need the same requirements. Would life be different? Absolutely. But IMHO it'd be based on DNA or a similar encoding structure; and it would certainly absolutely require the prescence of water. Those are two characteristics all life - from bacteria in the crust, to hydrothermal vents. Water and Carbon.
Oh please. I build stuff all the time at home and in the lab, last time I checked, places like Maxim have -free- sample quantities in packages you can work with if you have a good iron (SOIC, et al). Getting boards done in small volume is cheap, use a tool like Eagle, which is even available for Linux (but not OS X, doh!). Spend a few bucks and get a quality board done at a internet based low volume PCB shop.
There are evil packages, but the truth is a lot of the prototyping and test work is done on hand placed boards. Even evil packages can be used if you get an adapter board, there are a few of them out there.
What's more telling is that now instead of messing with token things, and "wow, I actually got something to show up on the display", you can do some real work with your computer and designs and instruments. I realized awhile ago I was spending far too much of my time tinkering with things and not enough accomplishing things.. but I guess some of that is the Linux mentality too.:) Now I figure out what I want to accomplish and use the best tool, rather than attempting to make everything into a nail for my hammer.
For $300 or so you can even get prototype boards for FPGAs if you want to do custom hardware. $150 will get you a decent micro development system, and AVRGCC is gnu, runs on linux and windows (but not OS X:), and lets you program cheap cheap cheap AVRs to do just about anything you want. Mix with ADCs and some transistor fed relays or PWM control to do whatever. You can get software to turn your PC into a function generator to test, or if you hunt around, you can get a nice old digital oscilloscope AND a real function generator AND a bus analyser suitable for 8 bit micros (or more) for less than the cost of a PC 4 years ago.
Same thing applies for most other scientific equipment. Be careful when sourcing chemistry gear, even broken stuff, or you might have the DEA paying you a little visit if you happen to live in the USA. If high voltage fun is your bag, there's companies for that. There are even companies that sell cold fusion experiment kits - although most of the magic there seems to be in the process used to create the electrodes.
I contend there's never been a better time to BE a amateur scientist! You can actually afford to have a decent lab since last year's gear can be tracked down on the cheap.. and accomplish real work, too! How many high res night shots could you store on a $200 80gb drive? Etc, etc, etc, etc.
Now I'm really confused. If you want to give me a million dollars for a liter of oil, I can use some of that money to buy the extra 50J of energy.
That assumes that you have a place to buy the extra 50J of energy. Eventually, there will be no place to trade credits for energy - unless you burn the money! That's the problem with much of the world's oil reserves - they cannot be extracted at a energy profit. That means you have to expend energy to get the oil, beyond a certain point it's no longer workable because of the unfortunate laws of thermodynamics. You can't just create energy.
Too many people get confused. If you have 100J of energy, and it takes 150J of energy to pump a liter of oil out of the ground, even if I give you a million dollars for that liter, you can't get it out of the ground. Unless, perhaps, I give it to you in paper money that you can burn to get the extra energy. See the problem?
If this hydrogen can be extracted at a net energy profit, and there's as much as they say there might be, I'll start worrying about retirement savings again.
Ethanol is a net energy SINK. It takes more energy to produce a liter of ethanol than you get from burning it. Oil, on the other hand, is an energy source. It's there, it's concentrated, and we didn't have to expend any energy to make it - it's concentrated sunshine, like that glass of orange juice (which was brought to you by oil tractors, trucks, etc etc).
Alternatives don't work. Solar power, you make me laugh. Do you know how much energy it takes to make a solar panel? Do you know how nasty to the environment semiconductor manufacturing is? Are you aware of how inefficient solar power is? You'd need solar panel area near 100 times the land mass of the United States to come close to meeting the energy demands. That's assuming the panel doesn't take more energy to make than it produces!
Windmills are the same problem. You need too many of them all over the landscape to have any benefit. Small scale? Sure. Large scale oil replacement? You are living in a dreamworld. Before you call me a freak, bush supporter, bunny-killing lunatic, or any other choice names the environmental lobby uses instead of numbers, look up some of your own. Hydrogen, biodiesel, and ethanol are not energy sources. They are energy carriers, because it takes more energy to produce them than you get from burning them. If there were huge hydrogen reserves under the earth, that would change.
There are two alternatives: Fission and Fusion, and people would rather burn up oil instead of finding ways to make nuclear power safe, or investigate safe nuclear power (Witness the flames to the cold fusion article awhile here on slashdot, of all places). Nothing else has the energy density.
Huge hydrogen deposits in the earth might be evidence of a higher power, because it will pull our bacon out of the fire. do some research as to the state of the world's petrochemical reserves. Like I said in a previous article, Global Warming won't mean much in a few years, because the oil won't be economically viable any more. Uh-oh!
There isn't that much oil left to burn anyway. Of course, when the oil is done, out comes the coal.. Lofty treaties to limit emissions are doomed by the sad fact there are no good alternatives besides nuclear power, and research into those areas is either non-existant (fission) or outright shunned (cold fusion). Anyone who thinks you can replace the per-day energy consumption of the united states with solar panels and windmills needs a crash course on thermodynamics and a hard look at numbers.
Global warming is the result of a deal with the devil we made for having an industrial society. It's too late to go back now, there's too many people on this planet - 6 billion, or so - and every last one of them wants to live like western europeans and americans.
This sounds like a troll.. but this bitching over Koyoto pisses me off. It won't work. At least Bush has the balls to recognize that, although he hasn't said it outright.
Watercooling can completely eliminate system noise. In addition, in my experience, my system was much more stable when watercooled than when it wasn't. I run simulations that can run for a day or more, and stability issues can present themselves - no more with the watercooler.
There's two reasons for you right there:). And, you can usually overclock to as high as the motherboard will allow as a side benefit.
Heya.. the sediment only appeared when I did the first test run and drain, and it was obviously copper burrs (although there was some black stuff that wasn't identifyable - this could have been water wetter percipitate). I was concerned about the larger burrs because they look like they could have damaged the magnetic impeller it uses.
However, the box is on 24/7 since then and hasn't had so much as a hiccup:). I can highly recommend it as a upper-end mod for those who want silent running.
I run a watercooled machine as my primary work box. It's great, and the noise savings were incredible. No more whirrrrrr. Fits snugly into a standard mid tower case.
I have a page up with all the details of contsruction for you who are interested. I've been running it for a few months, 24/7, and there have been no problems whatsoever. I took a few additional precautions, but the system as been moved around several times without any difficulties whatsoever and I highly recommend it to others who are interested.
If he's Canadian, he's paid for it (assuming it's CDs he copied, onto cds). If he's really honest, he can just go see the band live, where they will see a penny for their toils.
I hate to say this, but I'm going to keep banging this point into people's heads. Others should do this, too. Yes, I know it doesn't really apply to your post. In Canada, it is perfectly legal for me to possess copied works, because the government decided that they would worry about paying the artist. How about they do that isn't my problem, but for the time being, I can copy music without guilt - because I've paid a tax^h^h^hlevy on the CDs. Nothing like turning music into a public good to solve this peer to peer problem, eh. Nevermind how stupid and unworkable that is to independant artists. Or once the public is made aware of this abolution in droves, or the big kicker: If someone defends a peer-to-peer music sharing program under this law in court. That would make napster LEGAL in Canada. Oh, baby. The RIAA would riot.
This of course doesn't apply in the land of the DMCA, not to worry, we're holding (held) tribunals on what we're going to do to hop in line like good little empire citizens, too.
This CAN'T bode well for web advertising
on
AdCritic To Return
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· Score: 5, Funny
I mean, if a wildly successful site in terms of visitors who's CONTENT is nothing but ADS can't make any money, then a lot of people are going to have to pick up their marbles and go home..
Slashdot Mirror
Reduce and Reuse. Those are the hard ones, but they have an effect. Nobody likes reducing or reusing, however.
Most brainwashed green people who recycle assume it goes away magically when they put it in the dumpster. They fail to take into account all the energy and oil that needs to be used to truck the recyclables around; the subsidies that need to be given to make it viable; the fact that nasty chemical and industrial processes need to be used to reclaim materials (paper is the best. breaking down processed paper is nasty, check out a pulp mill). The end result is that you've consumed more energy in recycling the good than producing a new good, and it's the energy consumption on this planet that's a problem. Beer bottles, on the other hand, are more than viable to recycle. Wanna know why? Because they're not melted. They're just cleaned, i.e. reused. If you had to melt them, it'd be cheaper to make new ones.
If you care about the environment, find a way to stop commuting and work from home. Not driving your car a few days a week will have an order of magnitude more effect then recycling plastic bottles.
Not that it matters, have a look around, wonder what happens when oil gets scarce, and how hard people are working on fusion. Note to americans: $2/gal gasoline prices are not sustainable, dependance on foreign oil reserves is not a good thing.
If this happened to me, I'd have a lawyer on their ass so fast it'd make your head spin. Get statements from the arresting officer AND the detective that can be used in court QUICK. You have a well documented story and this should be a no-brainer to win, and a creative lawyer should be able to do a hell of a lot better than "damage to reputation".
Best Buy should get their name in lights for eternity on the web for this. It's a disgrace, and that manager should be arrested for making false claims to the police.
I'll buy some of what you're saying - lugging EE texts to school was a chore. I don't ever want to see a backpack again, actually. I stand by what I said though - an etext would be a great reference, and useful for inschool activities - assuming you had extra batteries - but when it comes to crunch time, I want my paper edition to beat on, and any of the problems I'd be working on are all going to be on paper, too. It's too hard to ballpark circuits in a cad tool.
Ebooks -have- a niche. My point was this device isn't it. Get a notebook and a PDF browser.
The only place these things exist are in the wild fantasies of book publishers, and maybe in the heads of the RIAA if they have sound that can be hijacked. They're just a vehicle to get strict content controls on published media.
The only thing I reference electronically is API references and other programming documentation, and then only if it's occassional, otherwise I'll get a paper book and/or print the damn thing. I can scribble on paper. Paper never runs out of batteries. Paper is easily replaced - hard to beat a 600dpi printer and 500 sheets of paper for $5. Paper is easily readable in crummy light. I can fold paper up into bits and take it with me.
These devices date back to the early 90's if not before then. They've never taken off, because it's damn near impossible to compete with paper. Contrary to popular belief, paper is even environmentally friendly - anyone who thinks that these gadgets are hasn't been informed about the nastiness of semiconductor manufacturing, which makes a pulp mill look pleasant. A single tree - or maybe two or three, if you use a lot - will provide a lifetime supply of paper. Burn it when you're done and plant another tree. The futility of trucking back old paper is the subject for another rant.
E-texts make sense if you distribute the PDFs and then have them printed on demand from there - A lot of the references I use are available on PDF, and I'll print just the sections I need (and scribble all over them), and I can truck the PDF's around with me on my notebook just in case I need them. That's not the model that these guys are looking for.. and pdf's aren't going to cut it for most novels, I want something I can hold in my hand and put on my bookshelf.
"The next generation will use these.. blah blah", is a load of hooey too. I'd rather my kids use plain old crayons and newsprint spools to scribble all over and break than one of these. Even in schools, I just can't see pouring over a monitor trying to learn something complicated - the interface just doesn't match my paws.
Instead of wasting money on crappy e-text screens, how about peopel work on organic LEDs or other technologies that can let me afford dual 24" or 30" wide-aspect monitors for my desktop.
Hahaha, this is great. Mod this guy up, this is the kind of quality trolling we haven't seen since OOG BREAK HEAD! .. Hahahaha. Excellent.
Yes, after post #453 it'll get boring. This deserves some recognition!
Anything which does many things, does none of them well. Get a standalone capture card, and don't by ATI unless you want miserable driver support. I got burned on a ATI TV Wonder (the software just locks my machine up constantly) and a ATI All-In-Wonder a few years ago. Nvidia chips have never caused me grief, and always have the world's best drivers, updated regulatly.
Newer model sports cars log the highest RPM and/or speed that they've hit in order to protect against overrev damage warranty claims to the valves, etc, as a result of mis-shifts to racing abuse. It is likely possible to get the codes cleared with a scan tool, but if they're non standard, there's no standard tool for doing it. The Acura Integra Type-R has been rumored to have the ability to tell if the owner has put the vehicle past redline.
This isn't to say you can't fool the ECU. Boxes exist now that take the vehicle speed sensor (VSS) input to the ECU and report a lower value than is actually being travelled to get around speed governors which are mandated by law in Japan and put in on some cars (most SUVs will not go faster than 160 km/h). This isn't to say you can't just replace the engine computer altogether, there are many products that do this already from manufactuers like Haltech, AEM, Motec, etc.
This gadget is too easy to work around, and there's no incentive for consumers to put it in their cars if they don't want to. It is a myth that high speed has anything to do with safety - it's usually the slow drivers with bad situational awareness the cause accidents.
What it is, however, is one more step towards mandated government control of vehicles, and is bad news. Changing the ECU is illegal now, because you're tampering with emissions equipment, so messing with one of these gadgets would be, too.
If legislators really gave two shits about safety on the highway, they'd make professional driver training manditory - think a few hundred hours of training, not a weekend - and reinforce that with 5 year re-evaluations of drivers. I've chosen to spend lots of money taking performance driving schools and learning how to drive, something which has saved my ass from an expensive accident more than once. A stupid little black box is not going to help the soccer mom with no idea how to merge into a 120km/h highway traffic flow, or how to do simple brake and avoid maneuvers in a top-heavy vehicle.
I'm not sure why you think there needs to be a government mandated control of such a network. The whole point of the ISM band is that it's unregulated - but I'm pretty sure that the powers that be didn't expect 802.11 technology to be quite so sucessful. 802.11 is designed to be highly tolerant of noise, and I suspect the density can get quite high, either as it is now, or with a derivative technology.
How about another model? One were everyone, or a larger percentage of the community all get a commodity wireless access point and join up in a management framework, basically managed chaos, like the Sydney Wireless. I have a couple links on my community wireless page, too. With enough network overlap, you'd have pretty good coverage - maybe better than standard cell links. The bandwidth on these technologies is quite high, and 11mbit may only be the starting point.
But oh, what a world it might be if control of the communications medium - or, perhaps better phrased, control of A communications medium - went truely into the hands of the masses. I already know of two college campuses where students are running their own dorm networks to combat draconian policies on file sharing and gaming using 802.11. What if that ramped up to city wide? What if people start setting up their own WANs, and leasing their own fiber backbones? Or hell, even running their own fiber backbones, like has been done in Sweden?
Remeber BBSes? There was no tradegy of the commons there, and those formed pretty sophisticated networks towards the end. And no doubt caused a few LEOs to have kittens then..
Uuuuh, you have a pretty twisted view of Canadian politics. We have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms here. Many Americans are not aware of this - this grants a base list of freedoms and expectations similar to your consitution. I would also sumbit that a number of our laws are a) much more sane, and b) much more intelligently enforced (for example, we don't give people 15 years in a federal FPMITAP for minor drug possession).
Unlike the US Consistution, there has been no widespread effort to undermine these freedoms, either. You can be stopped and searched without cause in the United States too, you even glorify it on Fox (ever see Cops?). It's only if you have money and intelligence to work the legal system you an enjoy those rights.
Calling Canada totalitarian is sheer trolling.. yes, there's a little too much hand holding here, and the tax rate reflects that, but things have the potential to change here. When's the last time the official political opposition in the US has been anything but democrat or republican, hrmm? Compare crime rates recently?
..and sort out the warrants later. This widespread monitoring is only due to the lack of proliferation of hard encryption (or any encryption) on the internet.
There may be forms of life out there that have nothing to do with amino acids or DNA or even liquid water. We really know nothing about the basic processes of life and how it develops. All we know is how we developed, and from there we assume that anyone else has to develop in the same way.
How much organic chemistry did you take? I would bet dollars to donuts that ANY life in the whole entire universe - at least, "naturally" occuring life and not an artificial intelligence created by something which is itself alive - is based on organic chemistry. Carbon is a very, very special atom. I read a quote once that stated life may one day be reclassified as a property of the carbon atom, because carbon and carbon alone can form long polymer chains. These chains are needed for forming DNA and encoding the infomation that makes you who and what you are. There is no other mechanism in the natural world for doing this, and if you were to propose one, you would likely get a nobel prize.
We evolved out of the same matter and same periodic table as everything else in the universe might. If you showed an alien a periodic table, they'd probably know right away what it was. Organic chemistry is unique, and life is enexoriably tied to it's ability to spontaneously form long, complex chains. Not life as we know it. ALL natural life. There is no other atom with the same characteristics. Period. The fact our brains can flexibly reconfigure themselves is a property that organic chemistry enables, and is absolutely necessary for intelligence and learning.
Now, that rant completed, it is also likely in the grand scheme of things, carbon based life is a step in making more complicated artificial life forms that are based on more efficient information processing which cannot naturally develop - for example, within the guts of a bank of FPGA circuits. People like to think what we do is outside nature, but everything we do - destructive, constructive, or creative - is part of a natural process, too. So perhaps the moniker artificial intelligence isn't so good.
That said, please think before you say life elsewhere would need the same requirements. Would life be different? Absolutely. But IMHO it'd be based on DNA or a similar encoding structure; and it would certainly absolutely require the prescence of water. Those are two characteristics all life - from bacteria in the crust, to hydrothermal vents. Water and Carbon.
Oh please. I build stuff all the time at home and in the lab, last time I checked, places like Maxim have -free- sample quantities in packages you can work with if you have a good iron (SOIC, et al). Getting boards done in small volume is cheap, use a tool like Eagle, which is even available for Linux (but not OS X, doh!). Spend a few bucks and get a quality board done at a internet based low volume PCB shop.
There are evil packages, but the truth is a lot of the prototyping and test work is done on hand placed boards. Even evil packages can be used if you get an adapter board, there are a few of them out there.
What's more telling is that now instead of messing with token things, and "wow, I actually got something to show up on the display", you can do some real work with your computer and designs and instruments. I realized awhile ago I was spending far too much of my time tinkering with things and not enough accomplishing things.. but I guess some of that is the Linux mentality too. :) Now I figure out what I want to accomplish and use the best tool, rather than attempting to make everything into a nail for my hammer.
For $300 or so you can even get prototype boards for FPGAs if you want to do custom hardware. $150 will get you a decent micro development system, and AVRGCC is gnu, runs on linux and windows (but not OS X :), and lets you program cheap cheap cheap AVRs to do just about anything you want. Mix with ADCs and some transistor fed relays or PWM control to do whatever. You can get software to turn your PC into a function generator to test, or if you hunt around, you can get a nice old digital oscilloscope AND a real function generator AND a bus analyser suitable for 8 bit micros (or more) for less than the cost of a PC 4 years ago.
Same thing applies for most other scientific equipment. Be careful when sourcing chemistry gear, even broken stuff, or you might have the DEA paying you a little visit if you happen to live in the USA. If high voltage fun is your bag, there's companies for that. There are even companies that sell cold fusion experiment kits - although most of the magic there seems to be in the process used to create the electrodes.
I contend there's never been a better time to BE a amateur scientist! You can actually afford to have a decent lab since last year's gear can be tracked down on the cheap.. and accomplish real work, too! How many high res night shots could you store on a $200 80gb drive? Etc, etc, etc, etc.
Death of amateur science predicted! Film at 11.
Now I'm really confused. If you want to give me a million dollars for a liter of oil, I can use some of that money to buy the extra 50J of energy. That assumes that you have a place to buy the extra 50J of energy. Eventually, there will be no place to trade credits for energy - unless you burn the money! That's the problem with much of the world's oil reserves - they cannot be extracted at a energy profit. That means you have to expend energy to get the oil, beyond a certain point it's no longer workable because of the unfortunate laws of thermodynamics. You can't just create energy.
Too many people get confused. If you have 100J of energy, and it takes 150J of energy to pump a liter of oil out of the ground, even if I give you a million dollars for that liter, you can't get it out of the ground. Unless, perhaps, I give it to you in paper money that you can burn to get the extra energy. See the problem?
If this hydrogen can be extracted at a net energy profit, and there's as much as they say there might be, I'll start worrying about retirement savings again.
I can think of many reasons why it will
Ethanol is a net energy SINK. It takes more energy to produce a liter of ethanol than you get from burning it. Oil, on the other hand, is an energy source. It's there, it's concentrated, and we didn't have to expend any energy to make it - it's concentrated sunshine, like that glass of orange juice (which was brought to you by oil tractors, trucks, etc etc).
Alternatives don't work. Solar power, you make me laugh. Do you know how much energy it takes to make a solar panel? Do you know how nasty to the environment semiconductor manufacturing is? Are you aware of how inefficient solar power is? You'd need solar panel area near 100 times the land mass of the United States to come close to meeting the energy demands. That's assuming the panel doesn't take more energy to make than it produces!
Windmills are the same problem. You need too many of them all over the landscape to have any benefit. Small scale? Sure. Large scale oil replacement? You are living in a dreamworld. Before you call me a freak, bush supporter, bunny-killing lunatic, or any other choice names the environmental lobby uses instead of numbers, look up some of your own. Hydrogen, biodiesel, and ethanol are not energy sources. They are energy carriers, because it takes more energy to produce them than you get from burning them. If there were huge hydrogen reserves under the earth, that would change.
There are two alternatives: Fission and Fusion, and people would rather burn up oil instead of finding ways to make nuclear power safe, or investigate safe nuclear power (Witness the flames to the cold fusion article awhile here on slashdot, of all places). Nothing else has the energy density.
Huge hydrogen deposits in the earth might be evidence of a higher power, because it will pull our bacon out of the fire. do some research as to the state of the world's petrochemical reserves. Like I said in a previous article, Global Warming won't mean much in a few years, because the oil won't be economically viable any more. Uh-oh!
You look at that headline and see: "Learn About Ximian and Gnome from Natile Portman"
Whatever happened to the hot grits and OOG.. heh
Funny when the only thing you can flame there is spelling (and I'm Canadian, which makes it difficult to be a Bush aide..)
There isn't that much oil left to burn anyway. Of course, when the oil is done, out comes the coal.. Lofty treaties to limit emissions are doomed by the sad fact there are no good alternatives besides nuclear power, and research into those areas is either non-existant (fission) or outright shunned (cold fusion). Anyone who thinks you can replace the per-day energy consumption of the united states with solar panels and windmills needs a crash course on thermodynamics and a hard look at numbers.
Global warming is the result of a deal with the devil we made for having an industrial society. It's too late to go back now, there's too many people on this planet - 6 billion, or so - and every last one of them wants to live like western europeans and americans.
This sounds like a troll.. but this bitching over Koyoto pisses me off. It won't work. At least Bush has the balls to recognize that, although he hasn't said it outright.
Watercooling can completely eliminate system noise. In addition, in my experience, my system was much more stable when watercooled than when it wasn't. I run simulations that can run for a day or more, and stability issues can present themselves - no more with the watercooler.
:). And, you can usually overclock to as high as the motherboard will allow as a side benefit.
There's two reasons for you right there
Heya.. the sediment only appeared when I did the first test run and drain, and it was obviously copper burrs (although there was some black stuff that wasn't identifyable - this could have been water wetter percipitate). I was concerned about the larger burrs because they look like they could have damaged the magnetic impeller it uses.
:). I can highly recommend it as a upper-end mod for those who want silent running.
:-).
However, the box is on 24/7 since then and hasn't had so much as a hiccup
Thanks for the compliments on the page, too
I run a watercooled machine as my primary work box. It's great, and the noise savings were incredible. No more whirrrrrr. Fits snugly into a standard mid tower case.
I have a page up with all the details of contsruction for you who are interested. I've been running it for a few months, 24/7, and there have been no problems whatsoever. I took a few additional precautions, but the system as been moved around several times without any difficulties whatsoever and I highly recommend it to others who are interested.
That's just being dishonest.
If he's Canadian, he's paid for it (assuming it's CDs he copied, onto cds). If he's really honest, he can just go see the band live, where they will see a penny for their toils.
I hate to say this, but I'm going to keep banging this point into people's heads. Others should do this, too. Yes, I know it doesn't really apply to your post. In Canada, it is perfectly legal for me to possess copied works, because the government decided that they would worry about paying the artist. How about they do that isn't my problem, but for the time being, I can copy music without guilt - because I've paid a tax^h^h^hlevy on the CDs. Nothing like turning music into a public good to solve this peer to peer problem, eh. Nevermind how stupid and unworkable that is to independant artists. Or once the public is made aware of this abolution in droves, or the big kicker: If someone defends a peer-to-peer music sharing program under this law in court. That would make napster LEGAL in Canada. Oh, baby. The RIAA would riot.
This of course doesn't apply in the land of the DMCA, not to worry, we're holding (held) tribunals on what we're going to do to hop in line like good little empire citizens, too.
I mean, if a wildly successful site in terms of visitors who's CONTENT is nothing but ADS can't make any money, then a lot of people are going to have to pick up their marbles and go home..