Electrolysis is simple to understand, it is not the most efficient or cost effective way of generating H2.
That's entirely missing the point. Of course, in our current economy, generating hydrogen from methane is cheaper. Heck, burning methane is cheaper. Re-read what I wrote: hydrogen is a transport medium for solar energy. If you don't go with solar, hydrogen isn't anywhere near as attractive.
from an infected paper cut. Pardon me while I'm not worried. And until E-mail gets the same legal standing as snail mail (complete with legally recognized notarization, authentication, and proof of delivery) we can't replace snail mail.
Huh? Sprint broadband is $50/month with installation costs from between free and $400, compared to $50/month with $500-$800 installation for the Maine effort.
As for "remoteness", there are many spots in the SF Bay Area that aren't served by anything other than wireless; people might as well live in Maine.
Another irony is that Cutler's operating system have frequently been uninstalled to run free stuff. People bought the PDP11 to install v6, v7, and 2.8/2.9BSD. The VAX was the primary platform for BSD UNIX for many years, and more VAXen were probably running BSD than VMS. And today, everybody buys PCs with various versions of Windows preloaded and installs--Linux or BSD.
Cutler was the creator of an operating system called VMS for DEC. It was proprietary, written in part in Fortran and assembly. It had some pretty nice features. But it was also horrendously insecure despite having lots of "security features" and being certified, and it was very non-orthogonal, in the way it named disks or devices, in its system calls, and in its command language. Sounds familiar? NT and 2000 really do follow in that tradition. (In my opinion, some people just shouldn't design operating systems.)
Many people would run various UNIX emulators on top of VMS, mostly shells and command line tools that gave the system some semblance of rational design. And with NT, people are doing it all again: Cygwin, the UNIX emulator from Bell Labs, and a few commercial ones. Ultimately, it's futile: you can't completely hide the underlying problems. But if you just use NT or VMS systems casually, it helps.
Sprint Broadband provides the same kind of service in major metropolitan areas. You get up to 5 Mbps at costs comparable to DSL or cable. In the SF Bay Area, Sprint Broadband actually started out as a small, local company.
It does speak of a catalyzed reaction being researched to derive the fuels from solar power, air, and water. Questions: Is it likely that such a catalytic reaction exists?
You split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis. Catalysts make the process more efficient. There are also other means being worked on for doing the same thing (biological, direct use of sunlight, etc.). Hydrogen is really not an energy source, it's an energy transport medium. Hydrogen makes the process feasible because it would let you use solar energy in desert regions to generate the hydrogen, ship it to the regions where it is needed, and then return as water to be split again.
Actually, another way of storing hydrogen is as part of various inorganic compounds, like Sodium tetrahydridoborate. There are lots of other ways of storing it as well that don't involve pressure. Even liquefied storage, however, isn't so implausible for propulsion.
Methanol is, of course, a practical alternative and may well turn out to be a good choice. But in terms of fire hazard, toxicity, and energy density, methanol also has disadvantages.
In the US, there seems to be an underlying belief that when other countries have oppressive, non-democratic governments, it's because the people there are uneducated or are simply "evil".
I think if you look at history, you'll find that that isn't the underlying cause. Rather, many countries end up with evil, undemocratic governments because the population has lost power; often they have given up power freely in the hope of achieving order and security in their country. Sometimes that gamble works, but it is the irresponsible, power-hungry dictators that have a tendency to stay around. As Ben Franklin said: "Those who trade freedom for security soon
have neither."
The US isn't all that far along that path, but it has definitely moved in that direction. This kind of legislation opens up the real possibility of serious abuse by government. People won't worry about it because they always assume that it's someone else that's in trouble because of it: "well, maybe increased profiling and surveillance of Arabs is OK", "I don't have anything to hide", and that sort of thing. The fact that Giuliani was playing around with the thought of doing an end-run around term limits is also a concern. And this kind of legislation has a "ratchet effect"--it will almost never get rolled back because, after all, what politician wants to be seen as "pro terrorist" or wants to be blamed when the FBI stands up and say "well, the politicians who voted to scrap these powers are responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians".
Read your history, and come to terms with the fact that the US political system isn't magically immune from evolving in undemocratic directions. And evaluate risks carefully. Then, make a reasoned decision as to whether giving up civil liberties is really justified by what is still a very small personal risk from terrorist attacks.
Does anyone on/. live in the Klamath Basin area of Oregon? With the flap over the Dept. of Interior and the irrigation mess there and general resentment of federal government trashing the farm econom,y for sucker fish these days, it would be a good area for the Libertarians to campaign in.
Which flap do you mean? Are you referring to the fact that the government allowed (and apparently encouraged) farmers to settle in an area with insufficient rainfall and a fragile ecology? And that they allowed farmers to damage the Indian lands?
You are right, this is the government's fault and the government needs to right this wrong. But the way to fix it is not by completely destroying the ecosystem, it is by relocating the farmers that live there and paying them compensation.
The RIAA sure didn't seem to think so in their letter to Felten. That's why Felten wants the phrase "it seems" to be established as a legal precedent, and that's why he is asking for declaratory judgement.
I don't understand your proposal. If there is no database -- there is nothing but these cards -- how does that identify anybody? Even if the card was difficult to forge, it would still be possible.
Of course, it "would be possible", but it would be much more difficult than the current, ad-hoc system of identity documents. The current identity documents we have were generally never designed to be physically very secure, and that works to the detriment of us, the citizens.
So the number is in a national database, but the other information is not? The verification of the number shows that it was assigned, and the fact that it is printed on a card with my picture means that I am really who I say I am. Do I have that right?
No, there is no single global database for verification. The number would be machine readable only so that any particular organization (drivers licence bureau, airline, etc.) could keep their own database using a unique identifier and pull up their record on you. That is something they will do anyway--you might as well make it easy and reliable.
If the government is using this for all those things, how would it not be big brotherish? I guess if the database that is used to verify my number doesn't record who is querying (which security check-in or which financial institution) and when, then I can believe that. Do you think such a system would be made that way, though?
Government agencies do, and will continue to, keep databases for various purposes--they have to in order to function. The key difference to other national ID card proposals is that the ID card I'm proposing doesn't rely on a central database for its verification--it only relies on physical security.
As such, it's a conservative, incremental step, replacing a variety of ID cards with very poor physical security we are using now with something that is physically a bit more secure and standardized but otherwise doesn't add any new database capabilities. Standardization makes it much easier for people to spot fakes (would you really know a fake Nebraska driver's license if you saw one? if there was one standard national ID card, you'd be able to spot a fake) and it would replace a poor, memorable, easily guessable identifier, the social security number, with something that's hard to remember casually and hard to collide with accidentally. And I think that would be an improvement over what we have now.
The checksum algorithm is there to help avoid typos, not to ensure that the card isn't fake. Authenticity is ensured only through physical means (watermarks, holograms, etc.).
I think many of the proposals and actions that have followed the 9/11 attacks use the attacks to push agendas that people have had for a long time. That's true as much for Ashcroft's limitations on civil liberties, even more defense funding, the secrecy and lack of transparency of the current administration, as well as these corporate proposals for "help". I don't think this is deliberate: I think the Bush administration, as well as these companies, really believe that what they are proposing is "for the best of the country", and they probably believe as well that they would be making the same proposals if they didn't have a stake in the matter.
But we known from many studies and long experience that you cannot be objective if you have a stake in the matter, no matter how much you try. That's why scientists conduct double-blind studies. And that's why we should scrutinize both administration policies and corporate proposals very, very carefully.
I do actually think a national ID system would actually be a good thing. But I think its purpose should only be to allow people to identify themselves reliably to other humans and to establish their residency status. As such, it should involve neither smartcards nor Java nor Oracle software. In fact, I don't think it should involve a national database at all. Rather, it should be a difficult-to-forge physical artifact with picture, name, thumbprint, and a 40 digit unique number with checksum (the length making it difficult to remember from casual observation, and to make it difficult to invent existing numbers). The number should be printed in an OCR font so that it can be read and verified, but the rest of the information on the card should be deliberately hard to capture by automatic means. Such a card could then be used to establish identity for purposes like immigration, security check-ins, financial transactions, etc. Yet it would resist the creation of a "big brother" database probably better than our current ad-hoc system based on social security numbers.
Such a system would be of no commercial value to McNealy or Ellison. Would they still support it?Well...
there is a Tux connection, too...
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 2
Just take a look at the Sesame Workshop statement (from FoxNews):
Sesame Workshop issued a statement saying it was very unhappy with the sudden connection between a lovable character with a penchant for penguins [emphasis added] and bottlecaps and the most wanted man in the world.
If my math is right, 1km would correspond to a delay of 6 usec; that's an eternity by modern processor standards, not to mention hardware clocks. Furthermore, the handheld doesn't need to keep the time, the tower does. And the phone can take whatever time it needs to respond to each ping, as long as the time is fairly constant (its latency just becomes another unknown in the triangulation).
lots of things are "very important"
on
GPS Meets PCS
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· Score: 2
How much does deployment of E911 cost? A few billion dollars in equipment costs for the operators, plus, say, $20 per phone? Now, among all the deaths in the nation, how many are due do the kind of scenario you describe? I bet with billions of dollars and a $20 tax on each cell phone sold, we could save a lot more lives than by implementing E911 service.
E911 service could have been addressed by the market: you are worried about it, you want the feature, you buy a GPS-enhanced cell phone that transmits your location using a simple audio code. I think consumers would not have gone for it.
The fact that E911 service was legislated and made a requirementand the fact that phone companies didn't fight it harder suggests to me that it isn't about saving a few lives, it's a combination of a desire by law enforcement to be able to track mobile phone users as part of crime fighting, and a desire of phone companies and advertisers to locate users and stolen phones.
Re:Idea after being mugged last year...
on
GPS Meets PCS
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· Score: 2
Fumbling around in your pockets to push a panic button on a device while someone is mugging you qualifies you for the Darwin award. Not only is it likely to get you killed, by the time help arrives, whatever was going to happen would already have happened. Do what the guy with the knife says or fight; don't indulge your geekdom in that kind of situation.
But for arugement's sake, lets say your car is stolen and your phone with the GPS system is in the car. If the GPS is enabled at all times you could theoreticly goto your service provider or the police and they could pin-point the location of your stolen vechical.
If that kind of hypothetical scenario keeps you up at night, you can turn on GPS on your cell phone; that's no reason to deprive others of the ability to do so. Personally, if I were worried about my car getting stolen, I'd buy a Lojack or something like it, a system that is actually built for that purpose.
You are better off putting the memory into your computer and using your operating system to cache data--that way, the memory is used where it is needed most.
Of course, if you are hitting that dreaded 4 Gbyte limit, you can't do that (how could they have been so stupid to design a chip that could only address 4 Gbytes:-).
May I put in another plug for a German engineering toy, Fischer Technik (US distributor) and Fischer Technik (parent company)? No, I don't own their stock or get any kind of bonus, I just think it's a great system that deserves to be more widely known. The picture you see on the US distributor's site is pretty typical of what kids used to build with it: highly functional designs that don't try to imitate looks. It's the ultimate geek toy for the budding engineer.
Not at all. On some problems, manual storage management is faster, on many GC is faster.
the run time of a program that uses it becomes less predictable,
The only real-time, predictable dynamic memory management systems I have ever seen have been based on garbage collection. Theoretically, it's possible to implement real-time, predictable manual storage allocators, but nobody ever seems to.
and because it blurs the point at which an object is destructed releasing other resources (like files) becomes problematic.
Resources whose release has externally visible effects should be released manually, with safety checks. Unreferenced memory is a special case because it can be freed without any effect on the program and because checking access to it is too expensive.
Oh, and C++ has had reflection (aka RTI) for some years. It is an add on - just like it is for Java
C++ RTTI only gives you "instanceof". Java reflection gives you access to fields and methods (and it's not an "add on").
without giving a creditible alternative to C++. Then you come along and suggest C# - a language that is not available on Linux yet! [...] Notice that componentisation was not on the list [for Java].
That may be your list. In fact, Java is succeeding so spectacularly because it makes reuse and componentization much easier than C++. And, yes, Microsoft copied Java for just that reason. Now, why is KDE still mucking around with C++?
Yes, I fully agree with both your premise and your conclusion: it is a lot harder to build object-based applications in the Gnome environment than in KDE. And your point is?
The purpose of garbage collection isn't to eliminate memory leaks, it is to enable runtime safety (important when building software from lots of components).
Destructors or reference counting in C++ are not substitutes for garbage collection because they don't accomplish the two things garbage collection accomplishes: runtime safety and factoring resource management out of interfaces.
Reference counting or manual storage management are neither cheap nor predictable.
The similarity between Java and C++ is mostly syntax; in terms of semantics, the languages are very different.
C/C++ lack reflection and runtime safety, both of which are very important features for building large, reliable software systems from components. You can emulate reflection and try to substitute testing for runtime safety, but it's a lot more work.
I should note that I have used C++ since before cfront was released to the public, and I think C++ is a great language a number of specific purposes. Smart people can craft very efficient software and debug it in C++. But for getting a job done quickly, for working in large groups with people with different kinds of backgrounds, and for building reliable software from lots of components that are composed at runtime, Java and languages like it are simply better in my experience. And Microsoft, Apple, and many other companies seem to have drawn the same conclusion.
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That's entirely missing the point. Of course, in our current economy, generating hydrogen from methane is cheaper. Heck, burning methane is cheaper. Re-read what I wrote: hydrogen is a transport medium for solar energy. If you don't go with solar, hydrogen isn't anywhere near as attractive.
from an infected paper cut. Pardon me while I'm not worried. And until E-mail gets the same legal standing as snail mail (complete with legally recognized notarization, authentication, and proof of delivery) we can't replace snail mail.
As for "remoteness", there are many spots in the SF Bay Area that aren't served by anything other than wireless; people might as well live in Maine.
Another irony is that Cutler's operating system have frequently been uninstalled to run free stuff. People bought the PDP11 to install v6, v7, and 2.8/2.9BSD. The VAX was the primary platform for BSD UNIX for many years, and more VAXen were probably running BSD than VMS. And today, everybody buys PCs with various versions of Windows preloaded and installs--Linux or BSD.
Many people would run various UNIX emulators on top of VMS, mostly shells and command line tools that gave the system some semblance of rational design. And with NT, people are doing it all again: Cygwin, the UNIX emulator from Bell Labs, and a few commercial ones. Ultimately, it's futile: you can't completely hide the underlying problems. But if you just use NT or VMS systems casually, it helps.
Sprint Broadband provides the same kind of service in major metropolitan areas. You get up to 5 Mbps at costs comparable to DSL or cable. In the SF Bay Area, Sprint Broadband actually started out as a small, local company.
You split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis. Catalysts make the process more efficient. There are also other means being worked on for doing the same thing (biological, direct use of sunlight, etc.). Hydrogen is really not an energy source, it's an energy transport medium. Hydrogen makes the process feasible because it would let you use solar energy in desert regions to generate the hydrogen, ship it to the regions where it is needed, and then return as water to be split again.
Methanol is, of course, a practical alternative and may well turn out to be a good choice. But in terms of fire hazard, toxicity, and energy density, methanol also has disadvantages.
I think if you look at history, you'll find that that isn't the underlying cause. Rather, many countries end up with evil, undemocratic governments because the population has lost power; often they have given up power freely in the hope of achieving order and security in their country. Sometimes that gamble works, but it is the irresponsible, power-hungry dictators that have a tendency to stay around. As Ben Franklin said: "Those who trade freedom for security soon have neither."
The US isn't all that far along that path, but it has definitely moved in that direction. This kind of legislation opens up the real possibility of serious abuse by government. People won't worry about it because they always assume that it's someone else that's in trouble because of it: "well, maybe increased profiling and surveillance of Arabs is OK", "I don't have anything to hide", and that sort of thing. The fact that Giuliani was playing around with the thought of doing an end-run around term limits is also a concern. And this kind of legislation has a "ratchet effect"--it will almost never get rolled back because, after all, what politician wants to be seen as "pro terrorist" or wants to be blamed when the FBI stands up and say "well, the politicians who voted to scrap these powers are responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians".
Read your history, and come to terms with the fact that the US political system isn't magically immune from evolving in undemocratic directions. And evaluate risks carefully. Then, make a reasoned decision as to whether giving up civil liberties is really justified by what is still a very small personal risk from terrorist attacks.
Which flap do you mean? Are you referring to the fact that the government allowed (and apparently encouraged) farmers to settle in an area with insufficient rainfall and a fragile ecology? And that they allowed farmers to damage the Indian lands?
You are right, this is the government's fault and the government needs to right this wrong. But the way to fix it is not by completely destroying the ecosystem, it is by relocating the farmers that live there and paying them compensation.
The RIAA sure didn't seem to think so in their letter to Felten. That's why Felten wants the phrase "it seems" to be established as a legal precedent, and that's why he is asking for declaratory judgement.
Of course, it "would be possible", but it would be much more difficult than the current, ad-hoc system of identity documents. The current identity documents we have were generally never designed to be physically very secure, and that works to the detriment of us, the citizens.
So the number is in a national database, but the other information is not? The verification of the number shows that it was assigned, and the fact that it is printed on a card with my picture means that I am really who I say I am. Do I have that right?
No, there is no single global database for verification. The number would be machine readable only so that any particular organization (drivers licence bureau, airline, etc.) could keep their own database using a unique identifier and pull up their record on you. That is something they will do anyway--you might as well make it easy and reliable.
If the government is using this for all those things, how would it not be big brotherish? I guess if the database that is used to verify my number doesn't record who is querying (which security check-in or which financial institution) and when, then I can believe that. Do you think such a system would be made that way, though?
Government agencies do, and will continue to, keep databases for various purposes--they have to in order to function. The key difference to other national ID card proposals is that the ID card I'm proposing doesn't rely on a central database for its verification--it only relies on physical security.
As such, it's a conservative, incremental step, replacing a variety of ID cards with very poor physical security we are using now with something that is physically a bit more secure and standardized but otherwise doesn't add any new database capabilities. Standardization makes it much easier for people to spot fakes (would you really know a fake Nebraska driver's license if you saw one? if there was one standard national ID card, you'd be able to spot a fake) and it would replace a poor, memorable, easily guessable identifier, the social security number, with something that's hard to remember casually and hard to collide with accidentally. And I think that would be an improvement over what we have now.
The checksum algorithm is there to help avoid typos, not to ensure that the card isn't fake. Authenticity is ensured only through physical means (watermarks, holograms, etc.).
But we known from many studies and long experience that you cannot be objective if you have a stake in the matter, no matter how much you try. That's why scientists conduct double-blind studies. And that's why we should scrutinize both administration policies and corporate proposals very, very carefully.
I do actually think a national ID system would actually be a good thing. But I think its purpose should only be to allow people to identify themselves reliably to other humans and to establish their residency status. As such, it should involve neither smartcards nor Java nor Oracle software. In fact, I don't think it should involve a national database at all. Rather, it should be a difficult-to-forge physical artifact with picture, name, thumbprint, and a 40 digit unique number with checksum (the length making it difficult to remember from casual observation, and to make it difficult to invent existing numbers). The number should be printed in an OCR font so that it can be read and verified, but the rest of the information on the card should be deliberately hard to capture by automatic means. Such a card could then be used to establish identity for purposes like immigration, security check-ins, financial transactions, etc. Yet it would resist the creation of a "big brother" database probably better than our current ad-hoc system based on social security numbers.
Such a system would be of no commercial value to McNealy or Ellison. Would they still support it?Well...
Where will it all end?
If my math is right, 1km would correspond to a delay of 6 usec; that's an eternity by modern processor standards, not to mention hardware clocks. Furthermore, the handheld doesn't need to keep the time, the tower does. And the phone can take whatever time it needs to respond to each ping, as long as the time is fairly constant (its latency just becomes another unknown in the triangulation).
E911 service could have been addressed by the market: you are worried about it, you want the feature, you buy a GPS-enhanced cell phone that transmits your location using a simple audio code. I think consumers would not have gone for it.
The fact that E911 service was legislated and made a requirementand the fact that phone companies didn't fight it harder suggests to me that it isn't about saving a few lives, it's a combination of a desire by law enforcement to be able to track mobile phone users as part of crime fighting, and a desire of phone companies and advertisers to locate users and stolen phones.
Fumbling around in your pockets to push a panic button on a device while someone is mugging you qualifies you for the Darwin award. Not only is it likely to get you killed, by the time help arrives, whatever was going to happen would already have happened. Do what the guy with the knife says or fight; don't indulge your geekdom in that kind of situation.
If that kind of hypothetical scenario keeps you up at night, you can turn on GPS on your cell phone; that's no reason to deprive others of the ability to do so. Personally, if I were worried about my car getting stolen, I'd buy a Lojack or something like it, a system that is actually built for that purpose.
Of course, if you are hitting that dreaded 4 Gbyte limit, you can't do that (how could they have been so stupid to design a chip that could only address 4 Gbytes :-).
May I put in another plug for a German engineering toy, Fischer Technik (US distributor) and Fischer Technik (parent company)? No, I don't own their stock or get any kind of bonus, I just think it's a great system that deserves to be more widely known. The picture you see on the US distributor's site is pretty typical of what kids used to build with it: highly functional designs that don't try to imitate looks. It's the ultimate geek toy for the budding engineer.
Not at all. On some problems, manual storage management is faster, on many GC is faster.
the run time of a program that uses it becomes less predictable,
The only real-time, predictable dynamic memory management systems I have ever seen have been based on garbage collection. Theoretically, it's possible to implement real-time, predictable manual storage allocators, but nobody ever seems to.
and because it blurs the point at which an object is destructed releasing other resources (like files) becomes problematic.
Resources whose release has externally visible effects should be released manually, with safety checks. Unreferenced memory is a special case because it can be freed without any effect on the program and because checking access to it is too expensive.
Oh, and C++ has had reflection (aka RTI) for some years. It is an add on - just like it is for Java
C++ RTTI only gives you "instanceof". Java reflection gives you access to fields and methods (and it's not an "add on").
That may be your list. In fact, Java is succeeding so spectacularly because it makes reuse and componentization much easier than C++. And, yes, Microsoft copied Java for just that reason. Now, why is KDE still mucking around with C++?
Yes, I fully agree with both your premise and your conclusion: it is a lot harder to build object-based applications in the Gnome environment than in KDE. And your point is?
I should note that I have used C++ since before cfront was released to the public, and I think C++ is a great language a number of specific purposes. Smart people can craft very efficient software and debug it in C++. But for getting a job done quickly, for working in large groups with people with different kinds of backgrounds, and for building reliable software from lots of components that are composed at runtime, Java and languages like it are simply better in my experience. And Microsoft, Apple, and many other companies seem to have drawn the same conclusion.