I'd be really interested to know how well these 'chargers' could be adapted to work with other sources of power for charging the cells. I mean if we had to buy like 3 or 4 cells in order to have them charge for like 3 or 4 days to get that 300+ miles, then okay fine...
Fuel cells don't need to be "charged" like a battery - they're more like an engine that converts fuel into electricity. So you're going to be generating and storing hydrogen at home, and filling up your car's tank from there. The fuel cell converts the hydrogen from that tank into electricity. Here're are a couple of ideas:
- You probably don't need your car to have a range of 600 miles any more, since you can fill up every evening. So your car becomes lighter and even more efficient.
- Generating hydrogen isn't 100% efficient, but the waste energy (heat) can be used to heat your home and hot-water.
but to burn yet another fossil fuel is kinda like picking your evils... How soon can we get into a source that is significantly more "free"?
If hydrogen in your fuel cell is like the charge in your battery, how many different ways can you think of to charge that battery? Sure you can burn petrol in your generator (or coal, or oil, or gas), or use your friendly local nuclear power-station, or you can use wind power, solar panels, tidal power, hydro-electric...
The challenge is to optimise all of these options (and perhaps create some new ones?) for generating hydrogen. I mean sure, I can use a solar cell to generate electricity, and use that to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen, but perhaps there's a better way? Cyanobacteria? Already methane and other gases can be converted into hydrogen (and releasing CO2:( ) through methods other than burning.
I'm convinced we're going to see more real innovation in this area over the next 10 years.
Seems awfully shortsighted to me. I would hope that as we learn more about the quantum world, we will be able to develop more accurate visual models of it. Or am I missing something?
Do you mean "accurate visual" in the sense of being more like what quark looks like, or a more accurate visualisation of it's characteristics?
If you mean the former, then I think that Quantum Mechanics pretty much precludes that possibility - the more precisely a (very small) object's location is known, the less precisely it's momentum can be known (Ref.). I believe this is why electrons and the like are typically visualised as clouds.
I'm no physicist, but it seems to me that anything that looks that complex has to be made of smaller parts...
Hmm, maybe the pictures are intended to make you wonder that?
I mean, quarks are the most elementary particles that we know of, but there are still quite a few varieties of quark (remember, we used to think we could explain all forms of matter with protons, neutrons, and electrons). What makes all these quarks different? Are they elementary, or are they made of something else?
It's all about accessing that information when you need it. and I am betting you will not have a computre available when you need to access it during a major emergency.
Whereas a microfiche reader is likely to be easier to find than a PC or laptop?
Makes me start to feel old, looking at the batteries on this page and realising how many of them I remember from my childhood, but haven't seen in years.
I believe having debt is a key element in job burn out, as it is a key element that scares people into thinking they need their current job.
I'm sure that you're right about debt.
OTOH, I have no debts, just a wife and two kids, and I'm in the same situation.
I hate my job. I want to find something else, but I can't just go for it without risking that my family will have nowhere to live and nothing to eat next month.
While I am sure that there are plenty of issues still to be addressed...
- Power transmission, even at high voltages, is a lot less efficient than you might think.
- As the article said, you can utilise the heat given off by the generator in your cellar. In a power-plant, this is just waste.
- While I'm also in favor of nuclear power, power supply is interesting in that the load varies quite a lot (roughly twice as much electricity is needed during the day as at night), which complicates things. Nuclear power stations can only provide a fairly steady amount of power, so a method of supplying the peak load is also required. For this you need generators (e.g. gas) which can quickly be ramped up or down depending on the current load. Hydroelectric is just about the only method currently available for storing large amounts of power, but I think the amounts involved are just too large for a purely nuclear/hydro solution to be feasible.
This horrific person must have a similar mental illness to that of Hitler, in which he is driven to perform the most terrifying acts against humanity....
I wonder what it is about this country that brings out the worst in the human psyche? Nothing against Germany per se but I do know (from my old German girlfriend) that there are certain pathologies about analysis and logic games that thread the society.
1 - There were plenty of posts on Slashdot exposing the story as a hoax before you posted. Shame you didn't read them.
2 - Using dead cats as fuel would not be a crime against humanity any more than using dead dinosaurs is.
3 - Sad that you feel compelled to compare germans alive today to Hitler. That ex-girlfriend of yours must have done some real damage, eh?
I try to use the rules, but if I understand you, what else matters?
TO MAKE A POINT, I'M WRITING THIS IN ALL CAPS. SOMETHING YOU WRITE SHOULD BE NOT ONLY UNDERSTANDABLE, BUT ALSO EASY TO UNDERSTAND. WHENEVER YOU WRITE IN A STYLE WHERE THE READER HAS TO WORK HARDER TO UNDERSTAND YOUR TEXT, YOU ARE REDUCING THE CLARITY OF YOUR MESSAGE. CLEAR?:)
More importantly, making your message clear is work that you should be doing yourself. In forcing your reader to do that work for you, you're showing a lack of respect for your reader. There are cases (e.g. when you're chatting with your friends) where you can make your text deliberately informal, but there's a fine line between "informal" and "bad manners". I moved to Germany several years ago, and the culture here stresses this much more to me (don't know if this "respect" idea would have even occurred to me before I moved here). For example, in german there's an informal ("Du") and a formal form ("Sie") of each verb. Trying to work out which form to use with which people is more complicated than learning the forms in the first place.:)
Aside: The german language normally capitalises all nouns, but some people I've met type all lower-case Emails. I guess it's supposed to be more casual, but since my German's not so good anyway, it hinders my understanding of the message (those capitals are actually pretty helpful in seeing the structure of a sentence), and I find it really annoying.
Disposing of the computer will be necessary sooner or later, and the costs of this will, one way or another, ultimately be passed on to the consumer.
The advantage of capitalism in this case is that placing the responsibility of disposal on the manufacturers gives them incentives to reduce those costs. Consider:
- the manufacturer chooses the materials used to build the computer.
- the manufacturer determines the costs of disassembly (quote from the car industry: "BMW designed the Z-1 sports car's recyclable all-thermoplastic skin to be strippable from the metal chassis in 20 minutes on an unassembly line mainly for environmental reasons, but that configuration also made repairs much easier.").
- the manufacturer has an incentive to make it's products last longer!
That said, I agree that any disposal fee should be paid with the purchase of the computer, if only to prevent the computers landing in dumpsters or by the side of the road.
- for online shopping I have seperate passwords which I store in my PDA, encrypted of course. So I only have to remember one password.
- for PINs that I use rarely, I usually have to write the PIN down before heading to the bank. But this is a case where you can do a simple ROT13 (umm ROT5) and/or change the order of the digits, since a thief would only have 3 tries to get the number right, and his first guess is likely to be the PIN just as it's written.
Incidentally, last week I noticed multiple sources trying to crack sshd on my server at home (the only port on my firewall that I'd left open). Firewall port closed, complaints sent to the relevant ISPs, end of the story. I hope. Glad I chose a good root PW.
OTOH, I have the following workaround for the annoying password policy at work which requires a new password every 30 days and no reusing the last 4 passwords: I have two phrases and 3 2-digit numbers, and every 30 days I switch the phrase and move to the next number. 6 combinations in all, and satisfies all password requirements. No, I don't have any porn at work which I need to protect.:)
I think you're forgetting to calculate the ratio of the repellent forces of the cat and the toast. These obviously need to be in balance before the system will hover and spin.
I suspect you need more toast than cats, maybe even too much to be easily attached to one cat's back. But the correct amount of toast can be divided into four pieces and strapped to each of the cats paws.
Note - for this to work, please remember to choose a cat that doesn't eat toast.
If you want a quick and easy way to find potentially exploitable bugs, try fuzz testing. This is as simple as it could be: feed random data (e.g., from/dev/random) into applications until you crash one. That usually means there's a buffer overflow, which you can then exploit.
Unless your/dev/random happens to pop out a buffer overflow exploit that uploads your porn collection to slashdot, writes dirty emails to your mother, snoops major Internet POPs for credit-card numbers, and sends evidence of all this to the FBI before mutating into a worm that paralyzes the Internet for two months, putting your name on the front page of every (hand-printed) newspaper in the world.
Wait till you try to explain that it was just a stream of random data that you piped into 'ls'.
That one pretty irresponsible way of looking for exploits, if you ask me.;)
With a DVB (digital TV) card in my linux box downstairs, I've run video and audio (both analog and digital) cables to my TV & Surround Receiver upstairs. One serial line with an IR receiver on the end of it is the only visible part of this system in the lounge room.
The VDR software (GNU license) has built-in support for watching TV, recording, timeshifting, EPG, and editting (get rid of the ads in the stuff you want to keep). Thanks to lirc and IR receiver, it's all controlled with my TV remote control.
It has plug-ins for everything else, and I mean everything! DVD, (S)VCD, MP3, and mplayer plugins are just the stuff I have loaded, but just about anything is possible.
I have 600GB of disk in my box, loaded with recorded programs and ripped DVDs and CDs, which I can playback over the TV/stereo thanks to VDR, or from any computer in the house.
And then you have the problem that the neutron flux inside the reactor makes _everything_ radioactive. And _everything_ in the fuel processing cycle becomes radioactive.
All that radioactive stuff is waste. It must be stored carefully, for long periods of time. And noone has a solution that works both politically, geologically, and medically.
One small correction, which alters the sense of your post quite a bit. Radioactive waste can be classified as high-, intermediate-, or low-level.
High-level radioactive waste loses it's radioactivity relatively quickly: "...a newly-discharged light water reactor fuel assembly is so radioactive that it emits several hundred kilowatts of heat, but after a year this is down to 5kW and after five years, to one kilowatt." (see reference below). Low-level waste can be disposed of in a shallow landfill.
People shouldn't think that an entire nuclear power-station needs to be buried under kilometres of rock - the bulk of the waste is not highly radioactive.
Interesting. Here's a couple of thoughts coming together:
1 - China has a big advantage in cheap labour, and not just in the direction of service, like is suggested in the article, but also because the cost of goods is also mostly labour. I'm thinking about things like houses, cars, shirts, computers, etc. There's labour in the manufacture, and labour in the design.
So it makes sense for China to want to do as much as they can themselves - it's going to be cheaper to buy a shirt made in China, than one made in the US. Avoid imports. But there are still things they have to import, and energy is one of them. I guess they're not happy about that.
2 - I'm distinctly unamerican in that I believe the answer to the energy crisis is to use less, rather than produce more. I don't think we need to find an infinite source of clean energy - even if we had this technology, it would not solve all our energy problems (BTW, the same goes for other resources: Food, water, etc.). To me, "produce more", and "consume more" seems like a western disease that China is perhaps immune to? Could they have an edge here too?
So yeah, I can see that China could have both the incentive and the ability to come up with some innovations in the direction of energy.
Would we have to buy it from the Chinese? Probably not, given how happy the chinese are to steal technology (i.e. intellectual property) from us. We'd probably refuse to recognise any chinese rights to the technology.
Oops, I forgot. This is slashdot, and IP can't be stolen. Sorry about that.:)
It's not being greedy - for having done something like this, I'd like to see the other person suffer. The idea of sending a man to prison is not to make others feel happy - it's to make HIM feel bad and pay for his crime. Whether or not it works is a different issue, the idea is that you are punished for your actions.
Are you sure about that? I always thought the idea of punishments was to deter actual and potential offenders?
You'd like to see the other person suffer? That's rather small of you. Personally, I'd like to think that the intent of the law is to reduce suffering...
No, it's an encoded binary file. If you stick it all together and run uudecode on the result, you're given a binary file called 'payload', which sounds a little ominous.:)
'file' tells me it's a 120x120 jpeg image, but I haven't been able to open it in any image viewer.
Thanks for the clarification and the info. Hey Mods, why isn't the parent rated +5?
What I'm wondering is if this will lead to "3-D' chips - several layers of chips glued together and working together as a single chip. That would seem like a sure way to substantially increase performance...
I'm quizzical about the $250 loss figure reported in the article.
Yep.
Does it cost money to run an ATM? Yes. Does an ATM generate direct income? No. Ergo, they're losing the bank money.
But it's all going to depend on how you account for that money - if you balance the costs against what a human teller would cost you'll get one number. If you also balance the costs against how much the bank would lose if they had less ATMs (much harder to calculate), you'll get another.
Like he says in the article, without ATMs he wouldn't have any customers. I guess the ATMs are overall positive to the bank's financials, but that not going to stop them from writing the "loss" off on their taxes while simultaneously charging us customers (perhaps hidden among other fees) for that loss.
Is this a valid observation or am I just a sexist?
Not valid in my experience - my colleagues (male) do just the same thing.
They jusitfy this by claiming higher interest since their money's in the bank and not in their pockets, but it smells like BS to me - I wonder what it's costing them in time and petrol to go to a machine every day.
CERN has a commitee by the name of PASTA which tracks computer technology, making predictions of future growth.
I remember reading the first such report in 1996, and finding predictions of 500GB disks in PCs for the year 2006 somewhat inconceivable. There were similar results for CPUs and memory.
I just had a quick look on the CERN website and found their latest report (2002). There's a lot of information in there, much of it quite technical, and I'm in a rush so let me leave the interested to read it, and I'll just make a few points:
- The predictions they've been making for the last 8 years have turned out to be much too conservative in some fields. - KCHF and MCHF stand for kilo-swiss-francs (803 USD) and mega-swiss-francs (803,000 USD). Yes, the people there really think in these numbers. They're scientists.:) - LHC is the next generation of CERN experiments, due to go online now in (I believe) 2007. As far as data aquisition goes: "A peak rate of 1000 MBytes/s is required, and capacity for 5000 TB per year. This is a rather minimal requirement in terms of drives. In practice, support for ~2.5 GBytes/s might be needed at LHC startup"
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be really interested to know how well these 'chargers' could be adapted to work with other sources of power for charging the cells. I mean if we had to buy like 3 or 4 cells in order to have them charge for like 3 or 4 days to get that 300+ miles, then okay fine...
:( ) through methods other than burning.
Fuel cells don't need to be "charged" like a battery - they're more like an engine that converts fuel into electricity. So you're going to be generating and storing hydrogen at home, and filling up your car's tank from there. The fuel cell converts the hydrogen from that tank into electricity. Here're are a couple of ideas:
- You probably don't need your car to have a range of 600 miles any more, since you can fill up every evening. So your car becomes lighter and even more efficient.
- Generating hydrogen isn't 100% efficient, but the waste energy (heat) can be used to heat your home and hot-water.
but to burn yet another fossil fuel is kinda like picking your evils... How soon can we get into a source that is significantly more "free"?
If hydrogen in your fuel cell is like the charge in your battery, how many different ways can you think of to charge that battery? Sure you can burn petrol in your generator (or coal, or oil, or gas), or use your friendly local nuclear power-station, or you can use wind power, solar panels, tidal power, hydro-electric...
The challenge is to optimise all of these options (and perhaps create some new ones?) for generating hydrogen. I mean sure, I can use a solar cell to generate electricity, and use that to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen, but perhaps there's a better way? Cyanobacteria? Already methane and other gases can be converted into hydrogen (and releasing CO2
I'm convinced we're going to see more real innovation in this area over the next 10 years.
Seems awfully shortsighted to me. I would hope that as we learn more about the quantum world, we will be able to develop more accurate visual models of it. Or am I missing something?
Do you mean "accurate visual" in the sense of being more like what quark looks like, or a more accurate visualisation of it's characteristics?
If you mean the former, then I think that Quantum Mechanics pretty much precludes that possibility - the more precisely a (very small) object's location is known, the less precisely it's momentum can be known (Ref.). I believe this is why electrons and the like are typically visualised as clouds.
I'm no physicist, but it seems to me that anything that looks that complex has to be made of smaller parts...
Hmm, maybe the pictures are intended to make you wonder that?
I mean, quarks are the most elementary particles that we know of, but there are still quite a few varieties of quark (remember, we used to think we could explain all forms of matter with protons, neutrons, and electrons). What makes all these quarks different? Are they elementary, or are they made of something else?
It's all about accessing that information when you need it. and I am betting you will not have a computre available when you need to access it during a major emergency.
Whereas a microfiche reader is likely to be easier to find than a PC or laptop?
The obvious response is that the UN can go intercourse itself. :)
It uses a "Standard" 22 1/2 volt battery...
m l
Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool too. But you can still get them:
www.batterycountry.com/ShopSite/specialty-cell.ht
Makes me start to feel old, looking at the batteries on this page and realising how many of them I remember from my childhood, but haven't seen in years.
I believe having debt is a key element in job burn out, as it is a key element that scares people into thinking they need their current job.
I'm sure that you're right about debt.
OTOH, I have no debts, just a wife and two kids, and I'm in the same situation.
I hate my job. I want to find something else, but I can't just go for it without risking that my family will have nowhere to live and nothing to eat next month.
While I am sure that there are plenty of issues still to be addressed...
- Power transmission, even at high voltages, is a lot less efficient than you might think.
- As the article said, you can utilise the heat given off by the generator in your cellar. In a power-plant, this is just waste.
- While I'm also in favor of nuclear power, power supply is interesting in that the load varies quite a lot (roughly twice as much electricity is needed during the day as at night), which complicates things. Nuclear power stations can only provide a fairly steady amount of power, so a method of supplying the peak load is also required. For this you need generators (e.g. gas) which can quickly be ramped up or down depending on the current load. Hydroelectric is just about the only method currently available for storing large amounts of power, but I think the amounts involved are just too large for a purely nuclear/hydro solution to be feasible.
This horrific person must have a similar mental illness to that of Hitler, in which he is driven to perform the most terrifying acts against humanity. ...
I wonder what it is about this country that brings out the worst in the human psyche? Nothing against Germany per se but I do know (from my old German girlfriend) that there are certain pathologies about analysis and logic games that thread the society.
1 - There were plenty of posts on Slashdot exposing the story as a hoax before you posted. Shame you didn't read them.
2 - Using dead cats as fuel would not be a crime against humanity any more than using dead dinosaurs is.
3 - Sad that you feel compelled to compare germans alive today to Hitler. That ex-girlfriend of yours must have done some real damage, eh?
I try to use the rules, but if I understand you, what else matters?
:)
:)
TO MAKE A POINT, I'M WRITING THIS IN ALL CAPS. SOMETHING YOU WRITE SHOULD BE NOT ONLY UNDERSTANDABLE, BUT ALSO EASY TO UNDERSTAND. WHENEVER YOU WRITE IN A STYLE WHERE THE READER HAS TO WORK HARDER TO UNDERSTAND YOUR TEXT, YOU ARE REDUCING THE CLARITY OF YOUR MESSAGE. CLEAR?
More importantly, making your message clear is work that you should be doing yourself. In forcing your reader to do that work for you, you're showing a lack of respect for your reader.
There are cases (e.g. when you're chatting with your friends) where you can make your text deliberately informal, but there's a fine line between "informal" and "bad manners".
I moved to Germany several years ago, and the culture here stresses this much more to me (don't know if this "respect" idea would have even occurred to me before I moved here). For example, in german there's an informal ("Du") and a formal form ("Sie") of each verb. Trying to work out which form to use with which people is more complicated than learning the forms in the first place.
Aside: The german language normally capitalises all nouns, but some people I've met type all lower-case Emails. I guess it's supposed to be more casual, but since my German's not so good anyway, it hinders my understanding of the message (those capitals are actually pretty helpful in seeing the structure of a sentence), and I find it really annoying.
Disposing of the computer will be necessary sooner or later, and the costs of this will, one way or another, ultimately be passed on to the consumer.
:)
The advantage of capitalism in this case is that placing the responsibility of disposal on the manufacturers gives them incentives to reduce those costs. Consider:
- the manufacturer chooses the materials used to build the computer.
- the manufacturer determines the costs of disassembly (quote from the car industry: "BMW designed the Z-1 sports car's recyclable all-thermoplastic skin to be strippable from the metal chassis in 20 minutes on an unassembly line mainly for environmental reasons, but that configuration also made repairs much easier.").
- the manufacturer has an incentive to make it's products last longer!
That said, I agree that any disposal fee should be paid with the purchase of the computer, if only to prevent the computers landing in dumpsters or by the side of the road.
See also "Natural Capitalism", chapter 4, for some interesting facts on recycling.
That's what I did, and it works great. You can also save money on not needing a flashy case.
A disadvantage would be if you often need to swap CDs/DVDs...
Here're a couple of ideas which I use:
:)
- for online shopping I have seperate passwords which I store in my PDA, encrypted of course. So I only have to remember one password.
- for PINs that I use rarely, I usually have to write the PIN down before heading to the bank. But this is a case where you can do a simple ROT13 (umm ROT5) and/or change the order of the digits, since a thief would only have 3 tries to get the number right, and his first guess is likely to be the PIN just as it's written.
Incidentally, last week I noticed multiple sources trying to crack sshd on my server at home (the only port on my firewall that I'd left open). Firewall port closed, complaints sent to the relevant ISPs, end of the story. I hope. Glad I chose a good root PW.
OTOH, I have the following workaround for the annoying password policy at work which requires a new password every 30 days and no reusing the last 4 passwords: I have two phrases and 3 2-digit numbers, and every 30 days I switch the phrase and move to the next number. 6 combinations in all, and satisfies all password requirements. No, I don't have any porn at work which I need to protect.
I think you're forgetting to calculate the ratio of the repellent forces of the cat and the toast. These obviously need to be in balance before the system will hover and spin.
I suspect you need more toast than cats, maybe even too much to be easily attached to one cat's back. But the correct amount of toast can be divided into four pieces and strapped to each of the cats paws.
Note - for this to work, please remember to choose a cat that doesn't eat toast.
If you want a quick and easy way to find potentially exploitable bugs, try fuzz testing. This is as simple as it could be: feed random data (e.g., from /dev/random) into applications until you crash one. That usually means there's a buffer overflow, which you can then exploit.
/dev/random happens to pop out a buffer overflow exploit that uploads your porn collection to slashdot, writes dirty emails to your mother, snoops major Internet POPs for credit-card numbers, and sends evidence of all this to the FBI before mutating into a worm that paralyzes the Internet for two months, putting your name on the front page of every (hand-printed) newspaper in the world.
;)
Unless your
Wait till you try to explain that it was just a stream of random data that you piped into 'ls'.
That one pretty irresponsible way of looking for exploits, if you ask me.
VDR
With a DVB (digital TV) card in my linux box downstairs, I've run video and audio (both analog and digital) cables to my TV & Surround Receiver upstairs. One serial line with an IR receiver on the end of it is the only visible part of this system in the lounge room.
The VDR software (GNU license) has built-in support for watching TV, recording, timeshifting, EPG, and editting (get rid of the ads in the stuff you want to keep). Thanks to lirc and IR receiver, it's all controlled with my TV remote control.
It has plug-ins for everything else, and I mean everything! DVD, (S)VCD, MP3, and mplayer plugins are just the stuff I have loaded, but just about anything is possible.
I have 600GB of disk in my box, loaded with recorded programs and ripped DVDs and CDs, which I can playback over the TV/stereo thanks to VDR, or from any computer in the house.
Anyone else picturing one huge piece of popcorn, vaguely CD shaped, filling your whole microwave?
No? Just wondering...
And then you have the problem that the neutron flux inside the reactor makes _everything_ radioactive. And _everything_ in the fuel processing cycle becomes radioactive.
All that radioactive stuff is waste. It must be stored carefully, for long periods of time. And noone has a solution that works both politically, geologically, and medically.
One small correction, which alters the sense of your post quite a bit. Radioactive waste can be classified as high-, intermediate-, or low-level.
High-level radioactive waste loses it's radioactivity relatively quickly: "...a newly-discharged light water reactor fuel assembly is so radioactive that it emits several hundred kilowatts of heat, but after a year this is down to 5kW and after five years, to one kilowatt." (see reference below). Low-level waste can be disposed of in a shallow landfill.
People shouldn't think that an entire nuclear power-station needs to be buried under kilometres of rock - the bulk of the waste is not highly radioactive.
See http://www.uic.com.au/ne5.htm for some really good reading about nuclear waste disposal.
Interesting. Here's a couple of thoughts coming together:
:)
1 - China has a big advantage in cheap labour, and not just in the direction of service, like is suggested in the article, but also because the cost of goods is also mostly labour. I'm thinking about things like houses, cars, shirts, computers, etc. There's labour in the manufacture, and labour in the design.
So it makes sense for China to want to do as much as they can themselves - it's going to be cheaper to buy a shirt made in China, than one made in the US. Avoid imports. But there are still things they have to import, and energy is one of them. I guess they're not happy about that.
2 - I'm distinctly unamerican in that I believe the answer to the energy crisis is to use less, rather than produce more. I don't think we need to find an infinite source of clean energy - even if we had this technology, it would not solve all our energy problems (BTW, the same goes for other resources: Food, water, etc.). To me, "produce more", and "consume more" seems like a western disease that China is perhaps immune to? Could they have an edge here too?
So yeah, I can see that China could have both the incentive and the ability to come up with some innovations in the direction of energy.
Would we have to buy it from the Chinese? Probably not, given how happy the chinese are to steal technology (i.e. intellectual property) from us. We'd probably refuse to recognise any chinese rights to the technology.
Oops, I forgot. This is slashdot, and IP can't be stolen. Sorry about that.
It's not being greedy - for having done something like this, I'd like to see the other person suffer. The idea of sending a man to prison is not to make others feel happy - it's to make HIM feel bad and pay for his crime. Whether or not it works is a different issue, the idea is that you are punished for your actions.
Are you sure about that? I always thought the idea of punishments was to deter actual and potential offenders?
You'd like to see the other person suffer? That's rather small of you. Personally, I'd like to think that the intent of the law is to reduce suffering...
No, it's an encoded binary file. If you stick it all together and run uudecode on the result, you're given a binary file called 'payload', which sounds a little ominous. :)
'file' tells me it's a 120x120 jpeg image, but I haven't been able to open it in any image viewer.
Maybe I pasted it all together wrong?
Thanks for the clarification and the info. Hey Mods, why isn't the parent rated +5?
What I'm wondering is if this will lead to "3-D' chips - several layers of chips glued together and working together as a single chip. That would seem like a sure way to substantially increase performance...
I'm quizzical about the $250 loss figure reported in the article.
Yep.
Does it cost money to run an ATM? Yes. Does an ATM generate direct income? No. Ergo, they're losing the bank money.
But it's all going to depend on how you account for that money - if you balance the costs against what a human teller would cost you'll get one number. If you also balance the costs against how much the bank would lose if they had less ATMs (much harder to calculate), you'll get another.
Like he says in the article, without ATMs he wouldn't have any customers. I guess the ATMs are overall positive to the bank's financials, but that not going to stop them from writing the "loss" off on their taxes while simultaneously charging us customers (perhaps hidden among other fees) for that loss.
IANAA
Is this a valid observation or am I just a sexist?
Not valid in my experience - my colleagues (male) do just the same thing.
They jusitfy this by claiming higher interest since their money's in the bank and not in their pockets, but it smells like BS to me - I wonder what it's costing them in time and petrol to go to a machine every day.
CERN has a commitee by the name of PASTA which tracks computer technology, making predictions of future growth.
:)
I remember reading the first such report in 1996, and finding predictions of 500GB disks in PCs for the year 2006 somewhat inconceivable. There were similar results for CPUs and memory.
I just had a quick look on the CERN website and found their latest report (2002). There's a lot of information in there, much of it quite technical, and I'm in a rush so let me leave the interested to read it, and I'll just make a few points:
- The predictions they've been making for the last 8 years have turned out to be much too conservative in some fields.
- KCHF and MCHF stand for kilo-swiss-francs (803 USD) and mega-swiss-francs (803,000 USD). Yes, the people there really think in these numbers. They're scientists.
- LHC is the next generation of CERN experiments, due to go online now in (I believe) 2007. As far as data aquisition goes: "A peak rate of 1000 MBytes/s is required, and capacity for 5000 TB per year. This is a rather minimal requirement in terms of drives. In practice, support for ~2.5 GBytes/s might be needed at LHC startup"