Why is everyone so interested in Solar power? Solar power is not gonna be the alternative fuel of the future, it just doesn't make enough power for pratical use. Fuel Cells and Hydrogen is the way to go.
Yeah, right. Who needs wind turbines, lead acid batteries are the way to go:-)
You can't compare solar power with fuel cells. Fuel cells are great for storing and transporting power. They actually do not produce power, because it's powered by hydrogen, which has to be produced in the first place using some other power source like nuclear plant, solar cells, wind turbines, thermonuclear reactors etc. And there aren't enough natural sources of hydrogen.
Everything you said is almost true- we get most of electricity from our two reactors
and we cannot afford to close them.
But I still do not understand what's all the fuss about our
nuclear plant. Let's not forget that in the first place Chernobyl's
accident was caused by a stupid human error and the lack of
automatic systems which would prevent such human stupidities.
Add to that unstable situation in Ukraine- economic crisis,
low wages, poor worker morality, and you get a disaster.
On the other hand situation in Lithuania is much different-
economics is stable and growing, and Ignalina power plant got
upgraded a lot to prevent possible problems which could be
caused by RBMK's reactor's not very perfect design. With the upgrades
we got help from our close neighbor- Sweden.
IMHO there's too much FUD surrounding this topic.
The least complaints we get from Sweden, whose
experts actually visit our power plant regularly and understand
the real situation. And trust me- they'd be the first to call the
alarm if something were potentially wrong with our plant.
I don't say that it is 100% safe (shit sometimes happens like nuclear plant accidents that
happened in countries- US, UK, Japan). I would classify our nuclear power plant not more
dangerous as other plants in well developed countries.
And the last thing- some the FUD is being spread by some of our neighbors because our electricity is cheaper and they don't like the competition
Academical and Research Network in Lithuania (LITNET) is widely using wavelan technology.
For example radio network covers entire Vilnius city (it's our capital with ~700'000 population).
We are currently using Fast Multimedia 601 now renamed to SILVER and are very happy about it. It costs you ~10000 $ (it's one PCI card) although as it's a German company and Euro's down comparing to USD it could be cheaper now.
It comes with it's own software (premiere sux comapred to it IMHO) which runs under windows NT.
Now the best part- it uses MPEG-2 (it's very useful if you're going to make DVDs, but it is also higher quality compared to MJPEG which is often used in other products). I mean it can encode one 50mbit (or lower) video stream in realtime or decode two streams in realtime with effects like fade etc. Of course more complex effects require rendering so you'd better buy a fast CPU or even dual. The soft is great, one of the vital features (working in hostile NT environment:) ) we like most is that it saves everyting you do instantly on a project without asking you (you can UNDO every action of course), so when NT crashes and you reboot you've got everything you had a second before system crashed
There are a lot of great things to tell about this product but I suggest you just go here and see for it yourself.
WARNING: I'm working for a Lithuanian reseller of this product so there could be some lack of objectivity here, although I swear I believe that everything I said is true. Oh, by the way we are not only resellers, we're also a video production company, actually we make most of the money from it, see some of our work if you want.
What will probably happen, and would seem to be the best idea, is if MegaCorp A wants to keep it's brand new copy of OfficeSuite 3000 from showing up everywhere, just coordinate a upload/request barrage of something that looks like the OS3000 but is a worm/virus/trojan whatnot, then blame it on "pirates" or "hackers", pointing out that you can only "trust a copy we put out."
Bull. The same problem exists with current warez distribution channels and in theory it is also vulnerable to the "exploit" of yours. I bet those MegaCorps would have done it many times if it worked but they obviously failed.
From url http://www.waveamerica.com/: "I will Resolve conflicts peacefully. Talk about problems openly. Treat others with respect. Walk away from a fight. Take all threats and warning signs seriously. Talk to a parent, counselor or other adult about my concerns."
Sure I'll walk away... With my black belt in karate the other guy only will be able to crawl away from it (if he's lucky)
We are, basically, animals forced by systems of our own creation, into civilization. We have ugly sides, we murder, cheat, steal, all because we are not very adapted to our envoronment. All of the uglyness of the human spirit is because it would be fundametially different were it not casted into what it is. AI, OTOH, would be designed in civilization, for civilization. They will be civilization, not it's end. They will much better reflect the ideal human spirit than the human animal ever could.
I fully agree with your point of view. I think I should add several things that are not totally clear from this post:
We might not be replaced by AI, it's very possible that we will become AI. Look at today's medicine- every advance in technology is used for "fixing" our bodies, for now it is mostly used for reconstruction after some kind of damage artificial or not- a car accident, aging, illness. But the time will come when technology is so advanced that we will be able to upgrade our bodies with more advanced "parts" than their biological equivalents.
Lately there have been a lot of advances in creating nerve to computer links. First it's going to be artificial sight and hearing. After that we should be able to create chips that reside on our brain that help us think- first it will be just memory chips to store information, after that logical chips that replicate functions of other parts of our brain. Who would not like to have a speedy math processor directly available at your only thought?
The conclusion is that BRAIN-COMPUTER links will be created both inside our bodies for mobile usage, and to big supercomputers or rather future desktops, we will not have to rely on these ancient secondary interfaces as monitors, keyboards. The deeper this integration will be the boundary between our intellect and machine will diminish. The time might come that we will not have to rely to our biological circuits- all our thinking will be done in the machine.
One might argue that that is not possible, and if that happens we die replaced by something- machine only replicating our thoughts. This reminds me of teleportation problem- you get killed in one place and your exact copy is assembled in another place. Is that death? I think we should leave this argument to philosophers.
I only hope that technology develops fast enough because... I dream of immortality.
P.S. to slashdot operators- I think there's a bug in reply posting mechanism. When I previewed my post in "HTML Formatted" everything was ok but i did not notice that the bottom of the page did not load with the form which let's you to chose text formatting, so when i submitted the reply my all formatting was gone. Apparently there's some default mode but there should not be one- if document gets submited and there is no information in it which formatting to apply, exception should be raised IMHO.
We are, basically, animals forced by systems of our own creation, into civilization. We have ugly sides, we murder, cheat, steal, all because we are not very adapted to our envoronment. All of the uglyness of the human spirit is because it would be fundametially different were it not casted into what it is. AI, OTOH, would be designed in civilization, for civilization. They will be civilization, not it's end. They will much better reflect the ideal human spirit than the human animal ever could. I fully agree with your point of view. I think I should add several things that are not totally clear from this post: We might not be replaced by AI, it's very possible that we will become AI. Look at today's medicine- every advance in technology is used for "fixing" our bodies, for now it is mostly used for reconstruction after some kind of damage artificial or not- a car accident, aging, illness. But the time will come when technology is so advanced that we will be able to upgrade our bodies with more advanced "parts" than their biological equivalents. Lately there have been a lot of advances in creating nerve to computer links. First it's going to be artificial sight and hearing. After that we should be able to create chips that reside on our brain that help us think- first it will be just memory chips to store information, after that logical chips that replicate functions of other parts of our brain. Who would not like to have a speedy math processor directly available at your only thought? The conclusion is that BRAIN-COMPUTER links will be created both inside our bodies for mobile usage, and to big supercomputers or rather future desktops, we will not have to rely on these ancient secondary interfaces as monitors, keyboards. The deeper this integration will be the boundary between our intellect and machine will diminish. The time might come that we will not have to rely to our biological circuits- all our thinking will be done in the machine. One might argue that that is not possible, and if that happens we die replaced by something- machine only replicating our thoughts. This reminds me of teleportation problem- you get killed in one place and your exact copy is assembled in another place. Is that death? I think we should leave this question to philosophers. I only hope that technology develops fast enough because... I dream of immortality.
So Maya is one of the last of the leaders of 3d animation to join linux bandwagon. It's a little a bit strange that it happened so late considering that SGI (owner of Alias|Wavefront) seems to be so committed to linux.
Softimage uses a very cool renderer called mental ray and it has been available for linux for a long time.
Also Pixar's Renderman (used in Toy Story) is also available for linux.
So Maya's softimage is one of the last of the leaders of 3d animation to join linux bandwagon. It's a little a bit strange that it happened so late considering that SGI (owner of Alias|Wavefront) seems to be so committed to linux.
Check out http://www.swis sinfo.net/cgi/worldtime/clock.pl?Chatham,New=Zeala nd This site sais that: "Current time in Chatham, New Zealand is: Saturday, January 1, 19100 - 05:01:44" 19100?:) Wow, I wish that could happen with my account in a bank, imagine interest accumulated in 17100 years?
I certainly agree with the article- we have a big problem.
But maybe there could be some sollutions. Smaller companies could create joint funds for defence in courts. Not every company on internet is being sued, so IMHO quite small payments could acumulate enougth money to defend the company (member of the fund) which gets sued.
PTax98 is a first stab at tax software for Linux. You must have Perl/Tk installed in order to use it. Note this is alpha software, and is not recommended for doing actual tax returns. PTax98 computes the 1998 Federal 1040EZ. No other tax form is supported at present. You enter the data into the blanks and check a few buttons, and it computes your taxes. It doesn't do the Earned Income Credit yet; you can compute that by hand and enter it if you qualify. It does not produce printed output, you must copy the results to an official IRS form.
I don't know about you, but I still like knowing where my brain ends and other sources of thought begin. What you describe above sounds a bit like the ultimate two-way subliminal.
Not really. Of course if it would be invented right now it would be too dangerous to start selling it to end consumer, something unpredictable could happen. These steps should be followed: 1. Science has to fully understand how our own brain works. 2. We have to understand artificial intelligence (now there's only speculation could it be controlled, weather it could take over the world or not..)
If these steps were met, having our brains connected to fully controllable AI's would be nice IMHO. It could be a good way to extend our limited brainpower.
Being able to tell the computer what are you thinking is nice but not enougth to reach full harmony. This would be only a perfect input interface. But what about output? I'm sick of those clumsy monitors on our desks, having to use eyes to access information.
The next and ultimate step would be- COMPUTING ACTIVATED THOUGHT (computer directly influencing our minds, bypassing such silly biological interfaces as eyes, ears..)
Anyone remember x-files series where some hacker stole super secret info from government about alien stuff, later he gave it to Mulder. The funny part is that while government tried to retrieve the tape (with digital data) at any cost, poor Mulder by some unknown reason was not able to make any copies of it and eventually lost the original (as it always happens on x-files). And after bad guys retrieved the tape, they did not even question themselves if there were any copies made of it. Maybe that's because you cannot copy/steal data if it is encrypted.:)
I bet that in the near future, cars will have IPs, so that they can remotely talk to the mehanics' computers. And while we're at it, have a thing, where if someone steals your car, they can find out where the IP is located at.
I don't think it will stop car steeling, but dumb thieves will have to go away. Then only hackers will be competent enougth to steel cars.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is everyone so interested in Solar power? Solar power is not gonna be the alternative fuel of the future, it just doesn't make enough power for pratical use. Fuel Cells and Hydrogen is the way to go.
:-)
Yeah, right. Who needs wind turbines, lead acid batteries are the way to go
You can't compare solar power with fuel cells. Fuel cells are great for storing and transporting power. They actually do not produce power, because it's powered by hydrogen, which has to be produced in the first place using some other power source like nuclear plant, solar cells, wind turbines, thermonuclear reactors etc. And there aren't enough natural sources of hydrogen.
But I still do not understand what's all the fuss about our nuclear plant. Let's not forget that in the first place Chernobyl's accident was caused by a stupid human error and the lack of automatic systems which would prevent such human stupidities. Add to that unstable situation in Ukraine- economic crisis, low wages, poor worker morality, and you get a disaster.
On the other hand situation in Lithuania is much different- economics is stable and growing, and Ignalina power plant got upgraded a lot to prevent possible problems which could be caused by RBMK's reactor's not very perfect design. With the upgrades we got help from our close neighbor- Sweden.
IMHO there's too much FUD surrounding this topic. The least complaints we get from Sweden, whose experts actually visit our power plant regularly and understand the real situation. And trust me- they'd be the first to call the alarm if something were potentially wrong with our plant.
I don't say that it is 100% safe (shit sometimes happens like nuclear plant accidents that happened in countries- US, UK, Japan). I would classify our nuclear power plant not more dangerous as other plants in well developed countries.
And the last thing- some the FUD is being spread by some of our neighbors because our electricity is cheaper and they don't like the competition
Wait till it becomes at least Beta.
Academical and Research Network in Lithuania (LITNET) is widely using wavelan technology. For example radio network covers entire Vilnius city (it's our capital with ~700'000 population).
Check out the map of this network (I'm very lucky to live on one of those small red dots :)). We've recently upgraded most of our wavelans in Vilnius from 2mbit/s to 10mbit/s. It's a pitty this network has only 2mbit connection to the world.
If you wish to learn more about technology we use go here, to learn more about Litnet go here
It comes with it's own software (premiere sux comapred to it IMHO) which runs under windows NT.
Now the best part- it uses MPEG-2 (it's very useful if you're going to make DVDs, but it is also higher quality compared to MJPEG which is often used in other products). I mean it can encode one 50mbit (or lower) video stream in realtime or decode two streams in realtime with effects like fade etc. Of course more complex effects require rendering so you'd better buy a fast CPU or even dual. The soft is great, one of the vital features (working in hostile NT environment :) ) we like most is that it saves everyting you do instantly on a project without asking you (you can UNDO every action of course), so when NT crashes and you reboot you've got everything you had a second before system crashed
There are a lot of great things to tell about this product but I suggest you just go here and see for it yourself.
WARNING: I'm working for a Lithuanian reseller of this product so there could be some lack of objectivity here, although I swear I believe that everything I said is true. Oh, by the way we are not only resellers, we're also a video production company, actually we make most of the money from it, see some of our work if you want.
Bull. The same problem exists with current warez distribution channels and in theory it is also vulnerable to the "exploit" of yours. I bet those MegaCorps would have done it many times if it worked but they obviously failed.
"I will
Resolve conflicts peacefully.
Talk about problems openly.
Treat others with respect.
Walk away from a fight.
Take all threats and warning signs seriously.
Talk to a parent, counselor or other adult about
my concerns."
Sure I'll walk away... With my black belt in karate the other guy only will be able to crawl away from it (if he's lucky)
Yeah, but animal activists killed that project.
P.S. imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
AI, OTOH, would be designed in civilization, for civilization. They will be civilization, not it's end. They will much better reflect the ideal human spirit than the human animal ever could.
I fully agree with your point of view. I think I should add several things that are not totally clear from this post:
We might not be replaced by AI, it's very possible that we will become AI. Look at today's medicine- every advance in technology is used for "fixing" our bodies, for now it is mostly used for reconstruction after some kind of damage artificial or not- a car accident, aging, illness. But the time will come when technology is so advanced that we will be able to upgrade our bodies with more advanced "parts" than their biological equivalents.
Lately there have been a lot of advances in creating nerve to computer links. First it's going to be artificial sight and hearing. After that we should be able to create chips that reside on our brain that help us think- first it will be just memory chips to store information, after that logical chips that replicate functions of other parts of our brain. Who would not like to have a speedy math processor directly available at your only thought?
The conclusion is that BRAIN-COMPUTER links will be created both inside our bodies for mobile usage, and to big supercomputers or rather future desktops, we will not have to rely on these ancient secondary interfaces as monitors, keyboards. The deeper this integration will be the boundary between our intellect and machine will diminish. The time might come that we will not have to rely to our biological circuits- all our thinking will be done in the machine.
One might argue that that is not possible, and if that happens we die replaced by something- machine only replicating our thoughts. This reminds me of teleportation problem- you get killed in one place and your exact copy is assembled in another place. Is that death? I think we should leave this argument to philosophers.
I only hope that technology develops fast enough because... I dream of immortality.
P.S. to slashdot operators- I think there's a bug in reply posting mechanism. When I previewed my post in "HTML Formatted" everything was ok but i did not notice that the bottom of the page did not load with the form which let's you to chose text formatting, so when i submitted the reply my all formatting was gone. Apparently there's some default mode but there should not be one- if document gets submited and there is no information in it which formatting to apply, exception should be raised IMHO.
We are, basically, animals forced by systems of our own creation, into civilization. We have ugly sides, we murder, cheat, steal, all because we are not very adapted to our envoronment. All of the uglyness of the human spirit is because it would be fundametially different were it not casted into what it is. AI, OTOH, would be designed in civilization, for civilization. They will be civilization, not it's end. They will much better reflect the ideal human spirit than the human animal ever could. I fully agree with your point of view. I think I should add several things that are not totally clear from this post: We might not be replaced by AI, it's very possible that we will become AI. Look at today's medicine- every advance in technology is used for "fixing" our bodies, for now it is mostly used for reconstruction after some kind of damage artificial or not- a car accident, aging, illness. But the time will come when technology is so advanced that we will be able to upgrade our bodies with more advanced "parts" than their biological equivalents. Lately there have been a lot of advances in creating nerve to computer links. First it's going to be artificial sight and hearing. After that we should be able to create chips that reside on our brain that help us think- first it will be just memory chips to store information, after that logical chips that replicate functions of other parts of our brain. Who would not like to have a speedy math processor directly available at your only thought? The conclusion is that BRAIN-COMPUTER links will be created both inside our bodies for mobile usage, and to big supercomputers or rather future desktops, we will not have to rely on these ancient secondary interfaces as monitors, keyboards. The deeper this integration will be the boundary between our intellect and machine will diminish. The time might come that we will not have to rely to our biological circuits- all our thinking will be done in the machine. One might argue that that is not possible, and if that happens we die replaced by something- machine only replicating our thoughts. This reminds me of teleportation problem- you get killed in one place and your exact copy is assembled in another place. Is that death? I think we should leave this question to philosophers. I only hope that technology develops fast enough because... I dream of immortality.
Does not this annoy you when sometimes Esc button in Opera does not work when you desperately need to stop loading a page (or posting something)?
the last paragraph had to be:
So Maya is one of the last of the leaders of 3d animation to join linux bandwagon. It's a little a bit strange that it happened so late considering that SGI (owner of Alias|Wavefront) seems to be so committed to linux.
No big deal.
Softimage uses a very cool renderer called mental ray and it has been available for linux for a long time.
Also Pixar's Renderman (used in Toy Story) is also available for linux.
So Maya's softimage is one of the last of the leaders of 3d animation to join linux bandwagon. It's a little a bit strange that it happened so late considering that SGI (owner of Alias|Wavefront) seems to be so committed to linux.
Check out http://www.swis sinfo.net/cgi/worldtime/clock.pl?Chatham,New=Zeala nd :)
This site sais that:
"Current time in Chatham, New Zealand is:
Saturday, January 1, 19100 - 05:01:44"
19100?
Wow, I wish that could happen with my account in a bank, imagine interest accumulated in 17100 years?
I certainly agree with the article- we have a big problem.
But maybe there could be some sollutions. Smaller companies could create joint funds for defence in courts. Not every company on internet is being sued, so IMHO quite small payments could acumulate enougth money to defend the company (member of the fund) which gets sued.
Maybe insurance companies could do this too.
PTax98 is a first stab at tax software for Linux. You must have Perl/Tk installed in order to use it. Note this is alpha software, and is not recommended for doing actual tax returns. PTax98 computes the 1998 Federal 1040EZ. No other tax form is supported at present. You enter the data into the blanks and check a few buttons, and it computes your taxes. It doesn't do the Earned Income Credit yet; you can compute that by hand and enter it if you qualify. It does not produce printed output, you must copy the results to an official IRS form.
I don't know about you, but I still like knowing where my brain ends and other sources of thought begin. What you describe above sounds a bit like the ultimate two-way subliminal.
Not really. Of course if it would be invented right now it would be too dangerous to start selling it to end consumer, something unpredictable could happen.
These steps should be followed:
1. Science has to fully understand how our own brain works.
2. We have to understand artificial intelligence (now there's only speculation could it be controlled, weather it could take over the world or not..)
If these steps were met, having our brains connected to fully controllable AI's would be nice IMHO. It could be a good way to extend our limited brainpower.
Being able to tell the computer what are you thinking is nice but not enougth to reach full harmony. This would be only a perfect input interface. But what about output? I'm sick of those clumsy monitors on our desks, having to use eyes to access information.
The next and ultimate step would be- COMPUTING ACTIVATED THOUGHT (computer directly influencing our minds, bypassing such silly biological interfaces as eyes, ears..)
Anyone remember x-files series where some hacker stole super secret info from government about alien stuff, later he gave it to Mulder. The funny part is that while government tried to retrieve the tape (with digital data) at any cost, poor Mulder by some unknown reason was not able to make any copies of it and eventually lost the original (as it always happens on x-files). And after bad guys retrieved the tape, they did not even question themselves if there were any copies made of it. Maybe that's because you cannot copy/steal data if it is encrypted. :)
I bet that in the near future, cars will have IPs, so that they can remotely talk to the mehanics' computers. And while we're at it, have a thing, where if someone steals your car, they can find out where the IP is located at.
I don't think it will stop car steeling, but dumb thieves will have to go away. Then only hackers will be competent enougth to steel cars.