I think what the parent was meaning was that it would just "slip off" the surface of the turbine, and pass it without moving it any. A superfluid loses no energy through friction, so it can't transfer energy through friction either.
First of all, the sun has 4+ billion years of mileage on it left, so claiming we should quickly get to mars before the sun engulfs the earth is quite ridiculous. Asteroid impact, might have an impact (no pun intended), but will probably not wipe out humanity. Anything we would have to do on mars to make it habitable could be replicated on earth in case of an asteroid impact (building a self-sufficient underground community), only cheaper and easier.
I agree humanity needs to spread out, but there are two things wrt space exploration that are paramount: making access to space cheaper, and finding a way to travel to other stars in a reasonable timeframe (near to light or faster than light travel). The go-to-mars program realises neither. The back-to-moon program realises nothing at all even (there's nothing on the moon worth going there for, not even experience, since it doesn't apply to the mars situation).
What Bush SHOULD have done was fund the space elevator. That billion dollars would have taken it a long way, and once we have a space elevator, the moon and mars suddenly become relatively easy to reach. Now with the dumbass CEV idea nasa is going to build yet another horrendously expensive rocket so they can waste taxpayers money sending people where they don't need to be (the only research humans can do in space that robots can't is how to make humans survive in space, which is kind of pointless right now).
10.000 usd / kg will not take us anywhere in space cost-effectively. Rockets are doomed tech for getting stuff into space. You can not make them cheap enough for launching them to ever become profitable (except for sattelites ofcourse, but I'm talking about stuff like space mining, space assembly, space tourism and so on).
Actually, the amount of poverty is not strongly linked to economic prosperity. It IS strongly linked to the gini score (which is an application of the lorenz curve), which represents the income inequality between different layers of the population. In a perfect society, the lowest 10 percent of earners would earn 10 percent of national income, the lowest 20 would earn 20, and so on. It's when the lowest 20 percent earn only 5, that you get a problem. This is what is happening to the US. National income is rising, but income inequality is rising even stronger. This is a direct result of the natural aversion of lots of americans against the socialist ideas of wealth redistribution. Every lowered tax, every welfare cut, makes poor people poorer and rich people richer.
See this page for a comparison of gini scores. Lower is better (meaning less income inequality). Note that the US has a gini score of 40, which is on the level of countries like uzbekistan and ethiopia, while most EU countries hover around 30 (which is still quite bad). It also shows why the nordic countries are such great places to live. They have the lowest gini scores.
I bought from mp3.com, but not much. There was no minimum quality standard, so filtering out the crud took too much effort. I buy most of my music from cdbaby.com. They at least listen to the music they're selling. Plus, the categorization system on cdbaby is way better than the one mp3.com had.
Tell me again why I want to listen to *anything* this man has to say.
There once was a man named Fester, who on slashdot was called a jester. His words were refuted, his reputation was muted, but we'll hear from him again next semester.
First of all, anonymity does not exist. Someone somewhere always know it was you that released the code. All that has to happen is for them to talk. Show me an example of offending code which was released anonymous in the last few years. Even code that the creators knew was going to be a problem (like decss) was traced back to the original distributor or author.
Secondly, the BSD license guarantees escape from liability, releasing something in the public domain does not. Anyone wanting to abandon copyright, but that also wants to not get fried, will do the smart thing and use the BSD license. All the benefits if releasing something into the public domain, without the downsides.
I agree there is way too much liability nowadays, but unless the laws get changed, it's best to be smart about how you comply with the laws you disagree with.
the X video driver doesn't seem to be able to do video overlays
That laptop has a neomagic 2160 chipset.
Check out the neomagic driver manpage. The overlaymem option might be the answer to your overlay woes. Or otherwise maybe the xaa options? Try them both anyway.
only laptop kit more common running Linux than ThinkPads are Apple PowerBooks and iBooks
I don't get why someone would want to run linux on a powerbook/ibook though. I mean, linux is nice, but os x is nicer.
You feel constrained, other people feel safe. Windows gives you the impression that it's ok that you don't really know what you're doing. That it will help you. Ofcourse, this is only an impression, and every time it breaks down I get a phonecall from my relatives, but still, impressions are important.
The free market economy's most efficient market model is free and complete competition. This requires that there are so many sellers and so many buyers that prices are set by supply and demand, rather than what's most profitable. Most of the pressure groups that use these pro-market arguments actually want to move away from a free market, and more towards an oligopoly (riaa) or monopoly (microsoft).
So, if you want to know the enemies of capitalism, just look at who is bribing the politicians.
Fair use is a right, but access to it isn't. That is, if the hardware allows fair use, it can not be made illegal, but if the hardware doesn't, and there are laws (dmca, eucd) forbidding converting the hardware to allow it, then you have no legal recourse to go hammering about how your rights have been taken away.
Still, it sucks, and both the EU parliament and US congress should wake up and realise citizens should come first, always.
Proprietary companies have the reasons and resources to fix up their one product and make it the best it can be that can do all.
Proprietary companies only need to improve their product as much as will sell copies. When there is no viable competition however (like with internet explorer, ms office and adobe photoshop), products stagnate, to the detriment of the user. This is especially obvious in photoshop, which has a lot of flaws still and yet has seen no real improvement since about version 5 or 6 (depending on where you stand on this issue).
Closed source builds what will sell, open source builds what people ask for. The two generally align, but not always.
When I was a kid I was a lego addict. I can assure you that for myself it was both about the building AND the roleplaying. I was very much into space (before I found out how outdated our space tech really is), and built lots and lots of spaceships and robots. Then I had imaginary wars. My point is that if you take away the building aspect it makes the roleplaying aspect less important, because roleplaying for me was the payoff after creatively building. Every battle was different because every ship and every robot was different.
What I liked about the space sets in my day was that the pieces were specialised for building spaceships, but not for building a specific spaceship. So you could build great-looking yet different-from-the-original spaceships without having to buy extra bricks. Imho this is mostly gone from modern lego sets.
The only set I would consider buying now is the empirial destroyer set, because it's just so freakishly huge. But, it's too expensive and I don't have the room to display it anyway.
Why do we even need to "save" files? Saving came about because permanent storage used to mean floppy disks, which were too slow to work on them live (saving could easily take a minute). Nowadays, saving is instantaneous. Ideally, I'd like something like the history in photoshop, except for having it be persistant and automatic (maintain across program launches and don't require a save to have it stored to disk). You'd be able to see a list of every change made to the document since it was created, jump back quickly to any point, and you'd never lose unsaved documents again. It might also be advisable to have multiple detail levels which batch up related changes (like, all the changes that involved creating a table and typing its contents in word), so as not to lose yourself in a morass of tiny changes.
Honestly, disk sizes and speeds have grown to the point where this is perfectly feasible. All that needs doing now is the actual programming.
NASA can't justify the existance of the space shuttle without the ISS (the space shuttle just plain sucks for launching sattelites, and all science experiments worth doing on it have already been done). So, without the ISS there would probably be no manned space flight for NASA. Some might argue though that this would be a good thing, since it's becoming painfully obvious that until we have a destination to send humans to (the main purpose of the ISS as it stands), we shouldn't be sending them up.
I even kicked it once (an accident, I swear!) and sent it sailing across the room onto a hardwood floor. No damage whatsoever (it's fitted with an iskin, so it wasn't even dented or scratched).
That only works if you use png's from img tags. If however you're loading png's from css (as with stuff that changes on hover), this doesn't work. Try for example to use transparent png's with this technique for highly accessible css tabs. You can't. You have to use gif's, with all the resulting artifacting.
What about a super high-performance company that sells already-cooled OCd systems?
I doubt there's a market in this. OC'ing a system decently usually costs about as much as you speed it up, but if you do it as a vendor, you'll have to recoup the work hours. The overclockers are more about sticking it to the man than about saving money. You're not sticking it to the man if you let someone else do the OC'ing for you, so I doubt the OC crowd will be interested in this kind of service.
The only OC'd systems that might be interesting would be the very ultimate high-end, the ones that don't have same-speed alternatives at dell or gateway. But despite how many people claim they would like such a sytem, few people will actually shell out the dough for it, so it would be a very low-volume business indeed.
Money is a representation of the inherent value of the economy that uses it. This value is as much a matter of perception as it is of reality. Even though the US is performing better than the EU economically, the dollar is at record lows in comparison to the euro because the public perception is that the us economy is performing extremely poorly.
Also, the constantly growing foreign debts don't help. Foreign debts usually are balanced out with debts the rest of the world has with you. The US hasn't even been trying to balance out these debts, and as a result, there now is a real net foreign debt which takes money right out of the US economy.
As far as the origin of money. It was originally created as a way to make trade easier. When you trade cows for grain, both parties have to be in demand of the cows and the grain the other party has. When you trade against money, trade becomes easier and more profitable, because everyone is always in demand of money. Originally money was simply the market value of the metal it was made from (gold, silver and bronze coins), and only later the value of money was made fixed. The fluctuations resulting from this fixed price however meant that sometimes it was profitable to melt down money to sell the resulting metal. This became such a widespread problem that eventually governments switched to paper money backed by government stores of valuable metal. And then finally they figured out that they didn't really need the stores as long as people believed the money had real value, so they started selling it off (fort knox is only a token reserve in comparison to the amount of US dollars in the world). This is like how banks don't really have all the money available the clients have put into their bank accounts, because they reinvest it to make profits (which can lead to economic disasters when everyone tries to empty their bank accounts at the same time, as in argentina). Current day money did not flow from some evil plan to fool the plebs into thinking they have control, but more out of a deep need to make trade easier and cheaper.
Now, you might think that I'm arguing your point for you that money does not equate power, but actually, I think money DOES equate power. After all, more money means you can obtain more goods and services, which in turn means more power. However, money will always remain a physical representation of the true source of power, which is societal order.
Nutshell about firearms: you pull the trigger, they go boom, someone falls down dead. Exactly how these steps are performed might be interesting for gun fans, but they're really not relevant to having an opinion about how guns should be treated in society. Most people don't have the slightest idea how their car works, but that doesn't stop them from using them and having strong justified opinions about them.
Do more guns lead to more deaths? Should parents be held more responsible than they are right now if their kids kill someone with daddy's gun? These are the questions that matter, and note how they don't involve knowing anything about the technical side of how guns work and what categories of guns there are.
I think he was talking about live-action rpg's where you play yourself (instead of some medieval knight or captain kirk wannabe), which are becoming more real as time evolves. These often involve fake websites, fake emails, fake phonecalls, and real visits to locations, all meant to solve the puzzle the game is offering you, and all designed to make it look so real that you can delude yourself it is.
These might just reach the point where some people are fooled into thinking it's all real, and some crimelord is really chasing them down because they know too much.
Another voice for the 8x8 based hauppauge cards. I've got a wintv from 98-99'ish (don't remember exactly when I bought it). It has always worked flawlessly. Excellent picture quality. The windows software isn't all that great, but it suffices, and in linux there is the most excellent tvtime (which beats the crap image-quality-wise out of the widescreen 100hz tv my dad has).
Gnome and kde used to do a different thing with regards to copy and paste. But ever since gnome 2.x and kde 3.x they work identically (for text).
Also, a lot of the graphical effects in gnome and kde are realised through the render extension today. However, the render extension is horribly slow. It's not even anything remotely approaching fast for a software implementation. So, yes, X is to blame for the slow speeds of kde and gnome.
OTOH, temporarily losing his penis resulted in him starring in two porn video's (bobbitt uncut and frankenpenis), getting a penis enlargement, and jobs with both a brothel (where he broke the rule of not sleeping with the girls) and a circus (where he was fired because he couldn't stand still in a knive throwing act). I'd say that as far as making life more interesting, lorena did him a favour.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what the parent was meaning was that it would just "slip off" the surface of the turbine, and pass it without moving it any. A superfluid loses no energy through friction, so it can't transfer energy through friction either.
First of all, the sun has 4+ billion years of mileage on it left, so claiming we should quickly get to mars before the sun engulfs the earth is quite ridiculous. Asteroid impact, might have an impact (no pun intended), but will probably not wipe out humanity. Anything we would have to do on mars to make it habitable could be replicated on earth in case of an asteroid impact (building a self-sufficient underground community), only cheaper and easier.
I agree humanity needs to spread out, but there are two things wrt space exploration that are paramount: making access to space cheaper, and finding a way to travel to other stars in a reasonable timeframe (near to light or faster than light travel). The go-to-mars program realises neither. The back-to-moon program realises nothing at all even (there's nothing on the moon worth going there for, not even experience, since it doesn't apply to the mars situation).
What Bush SHOULD have done was fund the space elevator. That billion dollars would have taken it a long way, and once we have a space elevator, the moon and mars suddenly become relatively easy to reach. Now with the dumbass CEV idea nasa is going to build yet another horrendously expensive rocket so they can waste taxpayers money sending people where they don't need to be (the only research humans can do in space that robots can't is how to make humans survive in space, which is kind of pointless right now).
10.000 usd / kg will not take us anywhere in space cost-effectively. Rockets are doomed tech for getting stuff into space. You can not make them cheap enough for launching them to ever become profitable (except for sattelites ofcourse, but I'm talking about stuff like space mining, space assembly, space tourism and so on).
Actually, the amount of poverty is not strongly linked to economic prosperity. It IS strongly linked to the gini score (which is an application of the lorenz curve), which represents the income inequality between different layers of the population. In a perfect society, the lowest 10 percent of earners would earn 10 percent of national income, the lowest 20 would earn 20, and so on. It's when the lowest 20 percent earn only 5, that you get a problem. This is what is happening to the US. National income is rising, but income inequality is rising even stronger. This is a direct result of the natural aversion of lots of americans against the socialist ideas of wealth redistribution. Every lowered tax, every welfare cut, makes poor people poorer and rich people richer.
See this page for a comparison of gini scores. Lower is better (meaning less income inequality). Note that the US has a gini score of 40, which is on the level of countries like uzbekistan and ethiopia, while most EU countries hover around 30 (which is still quite bad). It also shows why the nordic countries are such great places to live. They have the lowest gini scores.
I bought from mp3.com, but not much. There was no minimum quality standard, so filtering out the crud took too much effort. I buy most of my music from cdbaby.com. They at least listen to the music they're selling. Plus, the categorization system on cdbaby is way better than the one mp3.com had.
More Outright Lies from David Fester
Tell me again why I want to listen to *anything* this man has to say.
There once was a man named Fester,
who on slashdot was called a jester.
His words were refuted,
his reputation was muted,
but we'll hear from him again next semester.
First of all, anonymity does not exist. Someone somewhere always know it was you that released the code. All that has to happen is for them to talk. Show me an example of offending code which was released anonymous in the last few years. Even code that the creators knew was going to be a problem (like decss) was traced back to the original distributor or author.
Secondly, the BSD license guarantees escape from liability, releasing something in the public domain does not. Anyone wanting to abandon copyright, but that also wants to not get fried, will do the smart thing and use the BSD license. All the benefits if releasing something into the public domain, without the downsides.
I agree there is way too much liability nowadays, but unless the laws get changed, it's best to be smart about how you comply with the laws you disagree with.
the X video driver doesn't seem to be able to do video overlays
That laptop has a neomagic 2160 chipset.
Check out the neomagic driver manpage. The overlaymem option might be the answer to your overlay woes. Or otherwise maybe the xaa options? Try them both anyway.
only laptop kit more common running Linux than ThinkPads are Apple PowerBooks and iBooks
I don't get why someone would want to run linux on a powerbook/ibook though. I mean, linux is nice, but os x is nicer.
You feel constrained, other people feel safe. Windows gives you the impression that it's ok that you don't really know what you're doing. That it will help you. Ofcourse, this is only an impression, and every time it breaks down I get a phonecall from my relatives, but still, impressions are important.
"Free Trade, Capitalism forever"
The free market economy's most efficient market model is free and complete competition. This requires that there are so many sellers and so many buyers that prices are set by supply and demand, rather than what's most profitable. Most of the pressure groups that use these pro-market arguments actually want to move away from a free market, and more towards an oligopoly (riaa) or monopoly (microsoft).
So, if you want to know the enemies of capitalism, just look at who is bribing the politicians.
Fair use is a right, but access to it isn't. That is, if the hardware allows fair use, it can not be made illegal, but if the hardware doesn't, and there are laws (dmca, eucd) forbidding converting the hardware to allow it, then you have no legal recourse to go hammering about how your rights have been taken away.
Still, it sucks, and both the EU parliament and US congress should wake up and realise citizens should come first, always.
Proprietary companies have the reasons and resources to fix up their one product and make it the best it can be that can do all.
Proprietary companies only need to improve their product as much as will sell copies. When there is no viable competition however (like with internet explorer, ms office and adobe photoshop), products stagnate, to the detriment of the user. This is especially obvious in photoshop, which has a lot of flaws still and yet has seen no real improvement since about version 5 or 6 (depending on where you stand on this issue).
Closed source builds what will sell, open source builds what people ask for. The two generally align, but not always.
When I was a kid I was a lego addict. I can assure you that for myself it was both about the building AND the roleplaying. I was very much into space (before I found out how outdated our space tech really is), and built lots and lots of spaceships and robots. Then I had imaginary wars. My point is that if you take away the building aspect it makes the roleplaying aspect less important, because roleplaying for me was the payoff after creatively building. Every battle was different because every ship and every robot was different.
What I liked about the space sets in my day was that the pieces were specialised for building spaceships, but not for building a specific spaceship. So you could build great-looking yet different-from-the-original spaceships without having to buy extra bricks. Imho this is mostly gone from modern lego sets.
The only set I would consider buying now is the empirial destroyer set, because it's just so freakishly huge. But, it's too expensive and I don't have the room to display it anyway.
Why do we even need to "save" files? Saving came about because permanent storage used to mean floppy disks, which were too slow to work on them live (saving could easily take a minute). Nowadays, saving is instantaneous. Ideally, I'd like something like the history in photoshop, except for having it be persistant and automatic (maintain across program launches and don't require a save to have it stored to disk). You'd be able to see a list of every change made to the document since it was created, jump back quickly to any point, and you'd never lose unsaved documents again. It might also be advisable to have multiple detail levels which batch up related changes (like, all the changes that involved creating a table and typing its contents in word), so as not to lose yourself in a morass of tiny changes.
Honestly, disk sizes and speeds have grown to the point where this is perfectly feasible. All that needs doing now is the actual programming.
NASA can't justify the existance of the space shuttle without the ISS (the space shuttle just plain sucks for launching sattelites, and all science experiments worth doing on it have already been done). So, without the ISS there would probably be no manned space flight for NASA. Some might argue though that this would be a good thing, since it's becoming painfully obvious that until we have a destination to send humans to (the main purpose of the ISS as it stands), we shouldn't be sending them up.
In theory, you're right, in practice however I've yet to see an ipod damaged this way.
I even kicked it once (an accident, I swear!) and sent it sailing across the room onto a hardwood floor. No damage whatsoever (it's fitted with an iskin, so it wasn't even dented or scratched).
That only works if you use png's from img tags. If however you're loading png's from css (as with stuff that changes on hover), this doesn't work. Try for example to use transparent png's with this technique for highly accessible css tabs. You can't. You have to use gif's, with all the resulting artifacting.
What about a super high-performance company that sells already-cooled OCd systems?
I doubt there's a market in this. OC'ing a system decently usually costs about as much as you speed it up, but if you do it as a vendor, you'll have to recoup the work hours. The overclockers are more about sticking it to the man than about saving money. You're not sticking it to the man if you let someone else do the OC'ing for you, so I doubt the OC crowd will be interested in this kind of service.
The only OC'd systems that might be interesting would be the very ultimate high-end, the ones that don't have same-speed alternatives at dell or gateway. But despite how many people claim they would like such a sytem, few people will actually shell out the dough for it, so it would be a very low-volume business indeed.
Money is a representation of the inherent value of the economy that uses it. This value is as much a matter of perception as it is of reality. Even though the US is performing better than the EU economically, the dollar is at record lows in comparison to the euro because the public perception is that the us economy is performing extremely poorly.
Also, the constantly growing foreign debts don't help. Foreign debts usually are balanced out with debts the rest of the world has with you. The US hasn't even been trying to balance out these debts, and as a result, there now is a real net foreign debt which takes money right out of the US economy.
As far as the origin of money. It was originally created as a way to make trade easier. When you trade cows for grain, both parties have to be in demand of the cows and the grain the other party has. When you trade against money, trade becomes easier and more profitable, because everyone is always in demand of money. Originally money was simply the market value of the metal it was made from (gold, silver and bronze coins), and only later the value of money was made fixed. The fluctuations resulting from this fixed price however meant that sometimes it was profitable to melt down money to sell the resulting metal. This became such a widespread problem that eventually governments switched to paper money backed by government stores of valuable metal. And then finally they figured out that they didn't really need the stores as long as people believed the money had real value, so they started selling it off (fort knox is only a token reserve in comparison to the amount of US dollars in the world). This is like how banks don't really have all the money available the clients have put into their bank accounts, because they reinvest it to make profits (which can lead to economic disasters when everyone tries to empty their bank accounts at the same time, as in argentina). Current day money did not flow from some evil plan to fool the plebs into thinking they have control, but more out of a deep need to make trade easier and cheaper.
Now, you might think that I'm arguing your point for you that money does not equate power, but actually, I think money DOES equate power. After all, more money means you can obtain more goods and services, which in turn means more power. However, money will always remain a physical representation of the true source of power, which is societal order.
Nutshell about firearms: you pull the trigger, they go boom, someone falls down dead. Exactly how these steps are performed might be interesting for gun fans, but they're really not relevant to having an opinion about how guns should be treated in society. Most people don't have the slightest idea how their car works, but that doesn't stop them from using them and having strong justified opinions about them.
Do more guns lead to more deaths? Should parents be held more responsible than they are right now if their kids kill someone with daddy's gun? These are the questions that matter, and note how they don't involve knowing anything about the technical side of how guns work and what categories of guns there are.
I think he was talking about live-action rpg's where you play yourself (instead of some medieval knight or captain kirk wannabe), which are becoming more real as time evolves. These often involve fake websites, fake emails, fake phonecalls, and real visits to locations, all meant to solve the puzzle the game is offering you, and all designed to make it look so real that you can delude yourself it is.
These might just reach the point where some people are fooled into thinking it's all real, and some crimelord is really chasing them down because they know too much.
Another voice for the 8x8 based hauppauge cards. I've got a wintv from 98-99'ish (don't remember exactly when I bought it). It has always worked flawlessly. Excellent picture quality. The windows software isn't all that great, but it suffices, and in linux there is the most excellent tvtime (which beats the crap image-quality-wise out of the widescreen 100hz tv my dad has).
Gnome and kde used to do a different thing with regards to copy and paste. But ever since gnome 2.x and kde 3.x they work identically (for text).
Also, a lot of the graphical effects in gnome and kde are realised through the render extension today. However, the render extension is horribly slow. It's not even anything remotely approaching fast for a software implementation. So, yes, X is to blame for the slow speeds of kde and gnome.
OTOH, temporarily losing his penis resulted in him starring in two porn video's (bobbitt uncut and frankenpenis), getting a penis enlargement, and jobs with both a brothel (where he broke the rule of not sleeping with the girls) and a circus (where he was fired because he couldn't stand still in a knive throwing act). I'd say that as far as making life more interesting, lorena did him a favour.
Whoops, got the 7 with a lot of 0's thing wrong, it should be 70000000000000. Still plenty.