One point: you desalinate BY electrolysis. Then a smaller volume of brine is sent back to the ocean, to dissipate. And any ideas are just that: ideas. I love how you are so quick to reject a possible, i.e. electromagnetic energy. Remember Tesla? We need to consider every idea.
Desalination by electrolysis is much less efficient than by evaporation or by reverse osmosis. It doesn't make any sense to use electrolysis to desalinate, use the electricity for the grid and desalinate by better methods.
As far as ionosphere power goes, I don't reject "a possible". I'm just pointing out that it's something not worth wasting research money on at this time. The smart thing to do is to spend research dollars on technologies that will bear fruit in a reasonable timeframe rather than going for pie-in-the-sky ideas that may take decades of development. The idea is that if you do your research in incremental steps you are very likely to incidentally develop technologies that will get you to the more out-there concepts. It's killing two birds with one stone and it's just smart research.
I do not think we should spend another government-funded or supported dime on finding new sources of oil. Can't you even see two feet in front of your face that oil is bad for this planet?
I agree, I don't think ANY business or research should be funded by the government. The government is bad enough handling the money it needs to run itself, it makes me cringe every time someone wants to hand the government more control over money.
As for oil, yes current uses of oil are definitely not good for the long-term. The problem is that right here and now we have to use oil. Yes, we should start right now with trying to replace our oil usage with something else but you can't snap your fingers and will all the petroleum-powered vehicles to turn into electric or hydrogen powered ones. Now if you want to be obstinate and blind and pretend that we can quit oil cold turkey then go ahead. Just don't expect those of us that live in the real world to agree with you.
McCain is so old school he can only imagine increasing the supply of oil. What he and the GOP don't like is the obvious need to encourage commuting by bicycle and public transit--as we have here in NYC--so that people like me can gleefully sell their cars and live without one.
Have you been living under a rock? Here's what John McCain has said about his energy strategy:
The strategy I propose won't be another grab bag of handouts to this or that industry and a full employment act for lobbyists. It will promote the diversification and conservation of our energy sources that will in sufficient time break the dominance of oil in our transportation sector just as we diversified away from oil use in electric power generation thirty years ago; and substantially reduce the impact of our energy consumption on the planet. ...
Energy efficiency by using improved technology and practicing sensible habits in our homes, businesses and automobiles is a big part of the answer, and is something we can achieve right now. And new advances will make conservation an ever more important part of the solution. Improved light bulbs can use much less energy; smart grid technology can help homeowners and businesses lower their energy use, and breakthroughs in high tech materials can greatly improve fuel efficiency in the transportation sector.
McCain has said over and over again that offshore drilling is not a total solution, it is just needed to get our economy back on track and as a stopgap measure until other energy sources can be fully developed and implemented. If you actually go out and do some research you'll see that he has a ton of ideas on how to do this, from electric and hybrid vehicles to solar and wind energy and, yes, nuclear. He backs these ideas up with sound reasoning and solid proposals on how to encourage their development.
As to your proposals:
Electromagnetic energy taken from the ionosphere
Highly unlikely. Do you understand how high up the ionosphere is? How do you propose we keep some sort of generation equipment at an altitude of at least 50 miles? How do you propose that the energy be transported, the machinery be maintained? Somehow I think the costs of obtaining energy directly from the ionosphere will be very prohibitive, especially in the near future.
Seawater desalination by solar-cell-powered electrolosis, generating hydrogen
So you want to remove the salt from water, then electrolyze it? That will be kind of tough to do once you've made the water non-conductive don't you think? Or is it that you want to electrolyze it and then desalinate it? Wouldn't that just concentrate the salts and make it cost more energy to desalinate? This proposal makes no sense at all, if you are generating energy with solar cells then why would you go through a wasteful step such as electrolysis, just use the electricity directly and save the conversion step!
Vast swaths of the Western US need to get covered with wind farms.
This is the most reasonable thing you've said. Of course there are huge costs associated with wind farms, many areas can't use them effectively, and those that can use wind farms are already doing so. If placing a wind generator on a piece of land would produce enough electricity to pay for itself and make a profit then you can bet that the land owner will put one up. The fact that the technology has been slow to adopt shows that right now it is marginal in the cost to benefit ratio. Will this change? Sure it will but you can't expect people to waste their money right now on technology that won't provide them with a significant return.
Now I know people will say, "Then subsidize it!" That's great for the people directly benefitting from the subsidy but all it means is
It would be more analogous to the third party website proxying requests to the vendor's website, such that every request made to the scraper's website results in a corresponding request to the vendor's website.
I'd agree with you except according to the article they are not acting as a simple web proxy, instead they are filtering the content and using the information to build their own web page. This means they are providing access to the booking database while removing the presentation of the other services and revenue sources, a major component in the airline's decision to cancel the bookings.
these scrapers are usually very poorly implemented, placing obscene amounts of load onto the vendor's website.
That seems to be another point that the airline is trying to make, that these third party sites are interfering with the normal operation of the airline's web site. I've personally seen the effect of a badly written scraper and it can get very ugly very fast. I doubt that the third parties are very concerned with how their activities are affecting the airlines and they didn't bother with much optimization of their scraping.
I block all the/. script and ads anyway. So I guess I am unethical. And so are people who use the Tivo to skip commercials.
Unethical is not necessarily illegal. There is no law requiring you to load advertisements or watch commercials. You might want to do so in order to provide some revenue to a site you enjoy but that's up to you. However, in this case there are relevant legal claims to be judged.
Using the airline's website in this manner is not only illegal....
Now IANAL, but I am reasonably certain it's not. The information on the public Internet and viewable to anyone. It's no more illegal that Best Buy sending 'competitive secret shoppers' to the local Circuit City so they can match their prices. As long as these site are not misrepresenting themselves (i.e. posing as customers, giving fake CC data), I don't see how the law would have any issues with it.
I'm not saying that I agree with the use of this directive in this manner, but it is a close enough fit use as a basis for suing the third party websites.
...but it also causes a lot of slowdowns and other problems for the people who actually go to the airline's website.
So can googlebot or any other app that crawls your site. The 3rd party brokers would have to be sending massive requests to the airline server to make any significant difference. And they very well may be doing just that. But any rookie sysadmin could easily block those request if they became a problem.
True, I'm just repeating what was claimed in the article as one of the reasons they are against the third party websites. Again this is something for a court to determine its veracity. If the sites are doing this then there is a good case that they are causing damage to the airline through their actions.
Remember that there are costs associated with running the airline's web site. Those costs are probably borne by the additional revenue of the other services offered on that website. The third parties are using the website and bypassing the extra items that fund the site, causing the airline to lose money. Eventually the customers, the third party sites, and the airline will all lose out when the airline is forced to severely lock down or close the website and sue for damages.
After clicking past the blog speedbump to the actual article I can see why the airline is doing this. The airline has their own website which handles the booking and also ties in other services like hotels, car rentals, insurance, and so on. These third party websites aren't going through an established booking system, instead they are screen scraping and acting as a front-end to the airline's website. This would be like a third party mirroring Slashdot's stories without Slashdot's advertisements, costing Slashdot revenue.
Using the airline's website in this manner is not only illegal but it also causes a lot of slowdowns and other problems for the people who actually go to the airline's website.
Now the airline is punishing the wrong people by canceling all the bookings done through the third parties. The right thing to do would be to allow the passengers to keep their bookings, but then sue the third party website. Yes, canceling the booking will cause more trouble for the third party sites but it will also mess up the customers and give them a bad impression of the airline, also hurting their business.
Maybe the easiest thing to do is to have some sort of partner network where they provide access to their booking system for the third parties for a fee while they mess up the screen scrapers with technology and lawsuits. This would make their booking system more accessible while providing a side revenue stream for people who don't use the airline's website and all the extra money makers on there.
Actually, after going back to the article and re-reading it I find that they are using pinholes to produce coherent reference light but they are only using two of them to do this, not a pattern of many of them. In the method described in the article the pattern is instead off to one side of the object to be imaged. It appears that they are using the pattern to deconvolute the final image. Since the pattern is known you can use a deconvolution function based on that pattern to re-create the original pattern in the image. This has the side effect of correcting the image of the object you wish to view, increasing the resolution of the image.
In essence they are using the pattern to calibrate their instrument in order to improve the imaging.
Whatever information one can get is present in the original diffraction pattern. "Processing" *probably* means interpolation, or convolution with the known regular array. One can only keep the same information already present, or lose information in this way. They probably mean that the pattern was smoothed so as to look nicer to the eye (which is certainly valid), but I doubt they increased resolution in any way.
It's not that the computer processing improved the resolution, it's that the computer processing is a necessary part of the process which improves the resolution.
This article talks about taking normal x-ray radiation and using that to make a hologram. Holograms are usually made from laser illumination because a laser beam is coherent light, light in which the waves are all in phase (in step) with each other. It is difficult to make an x-ray laser but there is another way to get coherent light and that is through the use of pinholes.
The major problem of pinholes is that the smaller they are the less light is let through so the dimmer the image. However a large pinhole produces a very inaccurate (low resolution) image. One answer is to use a lot of small pinholes in the place of a few large pinholes. This is a great solution which produces sharp, bright images but now there is an additional problem, each pinhole makes a separate image and all these pinholes cause multiple overlapping images, offset a tiny bit from each other. This is where the computer works. Since the original pinhole pattern is known (you created it) you can feed that pattern into the computer and it can use that pattern to "slide" all the overlapping images so they exactly fit on each other. This makes a single, bright, sharp image.
The computer is not increasing the resolution of the detector, that's fixed. What it is doing is working as part of a process to produce better images.
And BTW, Gates, plug a second mouse to a Mac and you can control the cursor using two mice automatically without any further effort. That's what you mean by innovative, right? 'Cause I can't imagine kids having to track 50 cursors swarming at the same time on the screen, but since you are innovative, I guess you can innovate a way to make cursors look different.
Actually, if you read the article, they do indeed mean more than one cursor on the screen at one time. They differentiate between them with color and possibly shape.
I can understand doing this for some uses, such as collaborative drawing or games but not as a general-use cursor. What happens when two people want to open up a menu at the same time? Both menus pop up and both activate stuff at the same time? What about if one person maximizes a window over the others? Do you split-screen, reducing the amount of screen real estate for each participant?
It seems very ugly and not worth the effort if you ask me. Again, if you have a specific program that has a very specific use for multiple mice then fine. Other than that it seems like a waste of time to me.
The hologram of the Spiroplasma bacterium was made in precisely the same way, with much brighter x-ray beams and a much shorter pulse of light. So bright was the flash of light that the sample was vaporized
I guess this means they can't use the disclaimer: "No bacteria were harmed in the making of this hologram."
Neutronium is when you've not only merged the nuclei but you've squashed the electrons down into the nucleus as well. The electrons combine with the protons to give just a mass of neutrons.
Neutrons themselves are unstable with a half life of about 12 minutes. If you reduce the pressure then neutronium will start to decay. In a neutron star the electrons cannot escape the gravity well so the star is stable.
Right, I was just glossing over the details for the sake of brevity.
Once the neutrons decay they form protons and electrons as well as a neutrino. If you could theoretically take a chunk of neutronium out of a neutron star then it would immediately begin to decay back into protons and electrons which would then combine to form atoms. Essentially you'd get back similar material to what you had put in, given some time for the neutron decay and for the remaining neutrons, protons, and electrons to combine. Of course the specific amounts of each atom would probably differ from what went into the neutron star and you'd totally lose the original shape and chemical makeup of the original material - probably due to the extreme pressures involved!
WBUAAWYWIOIFA (Why bother using an acronym when you write it out in full anyway?) Seriously?
So that people don't have to waste their time guessing?
IANAL is a pretty common term and you see it all the time on Slashdot so it's reasonable to assume people know it without an explanation. Saying IAAC pays homage to that convention but it would probably leave most people scratching their heads, so I spelled it out. Seems reasonable to me but if you gotta pick nits then go for it!
So what other pithy observations do you have to add to the CHEMISTRY discussion we are having today?
What happens when the pressure is relieved? Does your theoretical neutronium (or high-density Lithium!) go back to normal?
Define normal. If matter gets compressed down to neutronium it is still the same electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. that it originally was. If you were to remove the pressure they would eventually re-combine (after a brief, but violent, expansion), forming a range of elements. Would the matter that was in the form of a toy truck still be a toy truck? Erm, lets just say it is very unlikely.
On the other hand, lithium that is compressed to the kind of pressures found deep in the Earth will probably return back to the normal forms of lithium once the pressure is removed. The electrostatic repulsive forces of electrons will ensure that the atoms push apart again. Once the atoms are further apart the interactions between the innermost electrons and other atoms will again reduce in magnitude.
Most phase changes of the sort described in the article are reversible once the conditions change although some, such as diamond, are stable at STP. Theoretically graphite is more stable at STP than diamond so diamond should convert to graphite but in reality there is a huge activation barrier so it is extremely unlikely to happen spontaneously. This is pretty rare for most substances.)
Man I hate it when you re-read something you wrote and find stupid little errors:
There is also the factor of election-electron interaction
Apparently I have the upcoming presidential election on my mind too much these days, it's even starting to creep into my chemistry...
Of course I meant electRon-electron interaction, not electIon-electron interaction. Still, I'm pretty sure that electrons will be vitally important in the upcoming elections!
Honestly this result is not unexpected. The interactions of electrons and nuclei depend on several factors: distance, energy, and charge. There is also the factor of election-electron interaction, which is where the idea of valence electrons comes about.
Normally the outermost electrons of an atom are far enough from the nucleus that the distance from the nucleus and the repulsion from the other electrons on the atom allows them to more easily interact with other atoms. This is how bonding works, an electron gets "shared" between two atoms or the electron completely jumps off the atom and turns the atom into an ion which is attracted to other, oppositely charged, ions. Yes, I'm oversimplifying quite a bit for the layman.
Every electron in an atom can interact with another atom, it's just MUCH less likely to happen for the inner electrons of an atom and the interactions of the inner electrons to other atoms are much weaker than those of the outer electrons. Increasing the pressure allows the inner electrons to interact more strongly with other atoms.
Under higher pressures and energies two things happen. First of all atoms are pressed closer to each other. This means that all of the electrons are closer to other atoms. This increases the likelihood that an electron will interact with another atom, forming a bond. The second effect is that the increased energy tends to cause the electrons in atoms to jump to higher energy states which are further out from that atom's nucleus. This means less crowding which means less repulsion from other electrons which means that each atom's nucleus is more exposed to interaction with other atom's electrons. Again, I'm oversimplifying for the layman.
The extreme of this is when the pressure is great enough that each nucleus gets close enough for the nuclear force to overcome the electrostatic repelling force between the two positively charged nuclei. When this happens you get neutronium, the core of a neutron star. Obviously you don't normally see these levels of pressure on Earth!
What is really in question is the exact numbers of the interactions. At what pressure does a certain phase of atom to atom interaction appear? How does the increased pressure affect rates of reactions between atoms? Scientists are trying to measure hard numbers of the effects of pressure on chemistry. There already is a good deal of theoretical work but the experimental work is a bit tough to do given the conditions needed.
A non-replaceable battery on your phone is a critical issue for those of us who use our cellphones frequently for business reasons. With my current phone, if I find myself on calls for four hours during during the day, and I'm worried about the battery running out of juice later in the afternoon, I can just slap in the spare, charged battery I lug around in my bag. I guess there are external chargers you can carry around and plug your iPhone into if you needed to, but then your phone rings and you're trying to do stuff with your cell plugged in to an external battery pack and whatnot.
While it would be nice to be able to quickly and easily replace the battery in an iPhone I understand why Apple didn't make it that way. It would have added significantly to the size, complexity, and cost of the iPhone.
However there are a lot of add-ons out there that provide you with more power for your iPhone if you need it. I've seen several solutions that you plug into the bottom slot of the iPhone which provide you with many more hours of run-time. They range from clunky, yet effective, battery packs which can take AA batteries to slim units that cradle your iPhone and just add a bit more thickness to it.
Yes, they cost extra past the initial cost of the iPhone but then again if you had to buy a second battery you would have had an additional cost anyways.
The real deal killer for me is ATT. Not with a gun to my head. I need my telephone to ring when somebody calls me, not go into voice mail.
I was very unsure about AT&T's service before I got the iPhone. I used to have Verizon and it was very reliable, and I know that AT&T is the re-branded Cingular which I've always heard problems about. Thankfully, I've found that AT&T's service is comperable to Verizon's. Apparently AT&T has built up Cingular's service quite a bit and really improved its reliability. I hardly ever get a dropped call or one that goes directly to voicemail, certainly no more so than I did with Verizon.
when it doesn't cost you a dime more to refine $2 gas than it does to refine $4 gas, people get kind of pissed about the price.
Of course it costs them more!
Refining takes a ton of energy, energy costs have gone up so refining costs have gone up. Not only that but construction, maintenance, and shipping costs have gone up. Refineries don't exist in a vacuum, when the price of everything else goes up so does the costs of refining. It's called inflation and it more or less affects all costs to all businesses and all consumers.
Woah, hold on there. Most Macs don't have a system administrator.
We are talking about a vulnerability for SERVERS.
Bind is DNS SERVER software. The vulnerability targets SERVERS, not your home operating system. SERVER administrators should know how to patch their SERVERS.
For non-servers this is not a serious vulnerability since you have to explicitly enable Bind and set it up to use it on your system. Guess what, if you are doing that then YOU have become a SERVER ADMINISTRATOR and you better know what you are doing!
What if I'm not running 10.4.11? Will I be able to apply security patches? The answer is no. Even if a patch has nothing to do with if you are at 10.4.11 or 10.4.9 you'll have to update to the most recent version. It plays hell with anyone trying to have a stable, yet secure, environment.
If you are a normal home user there is very little reason not to update to the latest patches for your operating system. If you are running 10.4 then update to 10.4.11 or whatever! The patches are free, they fix bugs (thus more stability), and they often provide additional functionality. Wait a week or so to make sure the patch didn't break anything for other people and if everything is good then apply it yourself. If you don't want to patch then fine, you won't get the benefit of having ANY of the latest patches - that's your (poor) decision.
As for system administrators not using the latest version of the operating system, I can understand being 1 version behind while you let the bugs shake out of the newest version. However, no good system administrator runs a machine that is 2 major versions behind without having some very good reasons and without knowing what they are doing. When the time comes to patch something like Bind, that admin better know enough to go to the Bind website, download the patch, build it and install it. Yes Apple bundles up these patches occasionally as a convenience to the user but that doesn't mean you have to wait for Apple in order to patch your system, especially when you are a professional running mission-critical equipment.
Tell people you are drilling and yeah, the oil won't enter the stream for 10, 15 years but the speculative properties alone will drop crude by another $20 or $40, easy.
Actually by most industry estimates there will be a noticeable increase in oil production in just 5 years. Yes it will take 10 years or so to get the full benefit but any increase in production will help in the meantime.
Another thing to note is that 10 years ago Bill Clinton vetoed offshore drilling. If he had not done this then we would be reaping the full benefits of offshore drilling TODAY. For the Democrats to NOW use the excuse "you won't get the benefit for 10 years"...well that's just patently ridiculous.
Little bit of egg on my face as I mistakenly looked at the Senate and not the House. However it turns out that the House was due for a break on August 11th and instead took its break 10 days early.
Also, Harry Reid is the Senate Majority leader. not the House Majority Leader which is the subject of this article. Steny Hoyer is the House Majority leader.
What actually happened, of course, was that the House adjourned for its August recess. As scheduled. Just like it does every year. Presumably it was scheduled months in advance. Everyone knew it.
Except this time the minority party refused to, you know, leave. Though the government is not in session, the Republicans insist on hanging around anyway.
Plain and simple this is an effort to freeze debate on matters central to the upcoming presidential election, most notably the offshore drilling issue. This issue hinges on the theory that the current gas price crunch could be significantly helped by opening up offshore drilling, a theory heavily supported by Republican presidential candidate John McCain. The truly interesting fact is that the Majority Leader Harry Reid (a Democrat from Nevada) previously threatened to CANCEL the August recess if two key Democratic bills weren't decided in time for the recess.
As much as I love Apple, it bothers me that they do not release security patches for versions earlier than n-1 (where n is the current release).
You know that under the hood Mac OS X is Unix. It's not that hard to simply get the latest version of Bind and install it yourself. Here are some simple instructions on how to do it but it's basic stuff that any system administrator should know. (Personally, I'd install it in/usr/local instead of/usr and symlink to that rather than blowing away the version installed by Apple but then again that's something any computer admin worth his salt should also know.)
Apple doesn't patch versions of Mac OS X that are more than 1 version old because by far the majority of its users upgrade. If you look at the estimated numbers of people using Mac OS X 10.3 you can see that it's down in the low single percentage points, maybe even under 1% depending on who you ask. It just doesn't make sense for them to provide support when so very few people are affected.
Not only that but there have been some major changes in Mac OS X over the years which make it difficult to patch too far back. The differences between 10.5 and 10.4 are a lot smaller than the differences between 10.4 and 10.3. Those sort of changes are slowing down so I'd expect Apple to more easily be able to back-support more versions of its OS. By all accounts the next version, 10.6 or Snow Leopard, will just be a more refined 10.5 with very little structural changes. I'd expect that Apple will find it very easy to continue to provide patches to 10.4 for quite some time.
MS give away complete compilers, development environments and their full software development kit for free. Yes, you can pay more if you want better tools, but why should they be penalised for offering something more? In fact, Apple do they same thing.
Actually the only real differences between the ADC Online, Student, Select, and Premiere developer packages are: hardware discounts, tech support incidents, and access to Apple's Compatibility Labs (bunches of assorted computers to test your products on). The higher levels also get some freebies like the latest OS versions, a free shirt, that sort of thing.
Every level of ADC membership gets access to the same programming tools, libraries, and documentation no matter if you are a free online member or if you are paying $3,499 a year for a Premiere membership. You can get Xcode, Interface Builder, and all the rest of the Apple Developer Tools for free - they are even distributed with every copy of the operating system. And, yes, many of those tools utilize open source software to which Apple has provided some very nice graphical interfaces. Apple has also contributed a ton of improvements, new features, and bug fixes to these open source projects.
Microsoft, on the other hand, gives out the basic tools like the Visual Studio Express Editions for free but they charge for the regular version of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Professional. The Visual Studio Express Editions are complete development environments but they are missing a lot of stuff like plugin support, data designer, class designer, profiling tools and much more. The Express Editions also use a reduced library and can only compile to a reduced set of targets.
Slashdot Mirror
One point: you desalinate BY electrolysis. Then a smaller volume of brine is sent back to the ocean, to dissipate. And any ideas are just that: ideas. I love how you are so quick to reject a possible, i.e. electromagnetic energy. Remember Tesla? We need to consider every idea.
Desalination by electrolysis is much less efficient than by evaporation or by reverse osmosis. It doesn't make any sense to use electrolysis to desalinate, use the electricity for the grid and desalinate by better methods.
As far as ionosphere power goes, I don't reject "a possible". I'm just pointing out that it's something not worth wasting research money on at this time. The smart thing to do is to spend research dollars on technologies that will bear fruit in a reasonable timeframe rather than going for pie-in-the-sky ideas that may take decades of development. The idea is that if you do your research in incremental steps you are very likely to incidentally develop technologies that will get you to the more out-there concepts. It's killing two birds with one stone and it's just smart research.
I do not think we should spend another government-funded or supported dime on finding new sources of oil. Can't you even see two feet in front of your face that oil is bad for this planet?
I agree, I don't think ANY business or research should be funded by the government. The government is bad enough handling the money it needs to run itself, it makes me cringe every time someone wants to hand the government more control over money.
As for oil, yes current uses of oil are definitely not good for the long-term. The problem is that right here and now we have to use oil. Yes, we should start right now with trying to replace our oil usage with something else but you can't snap your fingers and will all the petroleum-powered vehicles to turn into electric or hydrogen powered ones. Now if you want to be obstinate and blind and pretend that we can quit oil cold turkey then go ahead. Just don't expect those of us that live in the real world to agree with you.
McCain is so old school he can only imagine increasing the supply of oil. What he and the GOP don't like is the obvious need to encourage commuting by bicycle and public transit--as we have here in NYC--so that people like me can gleefully sell their cars and live without one.
Have you been living under a rock? Here's what John McCain has said about his energy strategy:
The strategy I propose won't be another grab bag of handouts to this or that industry and a full employment act for lobbyists. It will promote the diversification and conservation of our energy sources that will in sufficient time break the dominance of oil in our transportation sector just as we diversified away from oil use in electric power generation thirty years ago; and substantially reduce the impact of our energy consumption on the planet.
...
Energy efficiency by using improved technology and practicing sensible habits in our homes, businesses and automobiles is a big part of the answer, and is something we can achieve right now. And new advances will make conservation an ever more important part of the solution. Improved light bulbs can use much less energy; smart grid technology can help homeowners and businesses lower their energy use, and breakthroughs in high tech materials can greatly improve fuel efficiency in the transportation sector.
McCain has said over and over again that offshore drilling is not a total solution, it is just needed to get our economy back on track and as a stopgap measure until other energy sources can be fully developed and implemented. If you actually go out and do some research you'll see that he has a ton of ideas on how to do this, from electric and hybrid vehicles to solar and wind energy and, yes, nuclear. He backs these ideas up with sound reasoning and solid proposals on how to encourage their development.
As to your proposals:
Electromagnetic energy taken from the ionosphere
Highly unlikely. Do you understand how high up the ionosphere is? How do you propose we keep some sort of generation equipment at an altitude of at least 50 miles? How do you propose that the energy be transported, the machinery be maintained? Somehow I think the costs of obtaining energy directly from the ionosphere will be very prohibitive, especially in the near future.
Seawater desalination by solar-cell-powered electrolosis, generating hydrogen
So you want to remove the salt from water, then electrolyze it? That will be kind of tough to do once you've made the water non-conductive don't you think? Or is it that you want to electrolyze it and then desalinate it? Wouldn't that just concentrate the salts and make it cost more energy to desalinate? This proposal makes no sense at all, if you are generating energy with solar cells then why would you go through a wasteful step such as electrolysis, just use the electricity directly and save the conversion step!
Vast swaths of the Western US need to get covered with wind farms.
This is the most reasonable thing you've said. Of course there are huge costs associated with wind farms, many areas can't use them effectively, and those that can use wind farms are already doing so. If placing a wind generator on a piece of land would produce enough electricity to pay for itself and make a profit then you can bet that the land owner will put one up. The fact that the technology has been slow to adopt shows that right now it is marginal in the cost to benefit ratio. Will this change? Sure it will but you can't expect people to waste their money right now on technology that won't provide them with a significant return.
Now I know people will say, "Then subsidize it!" That's great for the people directly benefitting from the subsidy but all it means is
It would be more analogous to the third party website proxying requests to the vendor's website, such that every request made to the scraper's website results in a corresponding request to the vendor's website.
I'd agree with you except according to the article they are not acting as a simple web proxy, instead they are filtering the content and using the information to build their own web page. This means they are providing access to the booking database while removing the presentation of the other services and revenue sources, a major component in the airline's decision to cancel the bookings.
these scrapers are usually very poorly implemented, placing obscene amounts of load onto the vendor's website.
That seems to be another point that the airline is trying to make, that these third party sites are interfering with the normal operation of the airline's web site. I've personally seen the effect of a badly written scraper and it can get very ugly very fast. I doubt that the third parties are very concerned with how their activities are affecting the airlines and they didn't bother with much optimization of their scraping.
I block all the /. script and ads anyway. So I guess I am unethical. And so are people who use the Tivo to skip commercials.
Unethical is not necessarily illegal. There is no law requiring you to load advertisements or watch commercials. You might want to do so in order to provide some revenue to a site you enjoy but that's up to you. However, in this case there are relevant legal claims to be judged.
Using the airline's website in this manner is not only illegal....
Now IANAL, but I am reasonably certain it's not. The information on the public Internet and viewable to anyone. It's no more illegal that Best Buy sending 'competitive secret shoppers' to the local Circuit City so they can match their prices. As long as these site are not misrepresenting themselves (i.e. posing as customers, giving fake CC data), I don't see how the law would have any issues with it.
According to the case at hand, the relevant bit of law is:
Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases
I'm not saying that I agree with the use of this directive in this manner, but it is a close enough fit use as a basis for suing the third party websites.
...but it also causes a lot of slowdowns and other problems for the people who actually go to the airline's website.
So can googlebot or any other app that crawls your site. The 3rd party brokers would have to be sending massive requests to the airline server to make any significant difference. And they very well may be doing just that. But any rookie sysadmin could easily block those request if they became a problem.
True, I'm just repeating what was claimed in the article as one of the reasons they are against the third party websites. Again this is something for a court to determine its veracity. If the sites are doing this then there is a good case that they are causing damage to the airline through their actions.
Remember that there are costs associated with running the airline's web site. Those costs are probably borne by the additional revenue of the other services offered on that website. The third parties are using the website and bypassing the extra items that fund the site, causing the airline to lose money. Eventually the customers, the third party sites, and the airline will all lose out when the airline is forced to severely lock down or close the website and sue for damages.
After clicking past the blog speedbump to the actual article I can see why the airline is doing this. The airline has their own website which handles the booking and also ties in other services like hotels, car rentals, insurance, and so on. These third party websites aren't going through an established booking system, instead they are screen scraping and acting as a front-end to the airline's website. This would be like a third party mirroring Slashdot's stories without Slashdot's advertisements, costing Slashdot revenue.
Using the airline's website in this manner is not only illegal but it also causes a lot of slowdowns and other problems for the people who actually go to the airline's website.
Now the airline is punishing the wrong people by canceling all the bookings done through the third parties. The right thing to do would be to allow the passengers to keep their bookings, but then sue the third party website. Yes, canceling the booking will cause more trouble for the third party sites but it will also mess up the customers and give them a bad impression of the airline, also hurting their business.
Maybe the easiest thing to do is to have some sort of partner network where they provide access to their booking system for the third parties for a fee while they mess up the screen scrapers with technology and lawsuits. This would make their booking system more accessible while providing a side revenue stream for people who don't use the airline's website and all the extra money makers on there.
Actually, after going back to the article and re-reading it I find that they are using pinholes to produce coherent reference light but they are only using two of them to do this, not a pattern of many of them. In the method described in the article the pattern is instead off to one side of the object to be imaged. It appears that they are using the pattern to deconvolute the final image. Since the pattern is known you can use a deconvolution function based on that pattern to re-create the original pattern in the image. This has the side effect of correcting the image of the object you wish to view, increasing the resolution of the image.
In essence they are using the pattern to calibrate their instrument in order to improve the imaging.
Whatever information one can get is present in the original diffraction pattern. "Processing" *probably* means interpolation, or convolution with the known regular array. One can only keep the same information already present, or lose information in this way. They probably mean that the pattern was smoothed so as to look nicer to the eye (which is certainly valid), but I doubt they increased resolution in any way.
It's not that the computer processing improved the resolution, it's that the computer processing is a necessary part of the process which improves the resolution.
This article talks about taking normal x-ray radiation and using that to make a hologram. Holograms are usually made from laser illumination because a laser beam is coherent light, light in which the waves are all in phase (in step) with each other. It is difficult to make an x-ray laser but there is another way to get coherent light and that is through the use of pinholes.
The major problem of pinholes is that the smaller they are the less light is let through so the dimmer the image. However a large pinhole produces a very inaccurate (low resolution) image. One answer is to use a lot of small pinholes in the place of a few large pinholes. This is a great solution which produces sharp, bright images but now there is an additional problem, each pinhole makes a separate image and all these pinholes cause multiple overlapping images, offset a tiny bit from each other. This is where the computer works. Since the original pinhole pattern is known (you created it) you can feed that pattern into the computer and it can use that pattern to "slide" all the overlapping images so they exactly fit on each other. This makes a single, bright, sharp image.
The computer is not increasing the resolution of the detector, that's fixed. What it is doing is working as part of a process to produce better images.
And BTW, Gates, plug a second mouse to a Mac and you can control the cursor using two mice automatically without any further effort. That's what you mean by innovative, right? 'Cause I can't imagine kids having to track 50 cursors swarming at the same time on the screen, but since you are innovative, I guess you can innovate a way to make cursors look different.
Actually, if you read the article, they do indeed mean more than one cursor on the screen at one time. They differentiate between them with color and possibly shape.
I can understand doing this for some uses, such as collaborative drawing or games but not as a general-use cursor. What happens when two people want to open up a menu at the same time? Both menus pop up and both activate stuff at the same time? What about if one person maximizes a window over the others? Do you split-screen, reducing the amount of screen real estate for each participant?
It seems very ugly and not worth the effort if you ask me. Again, if you have a specific program that has a very specific use for multiple mice then fine. Other than that it seems like a waste of time to me.
The hologram of the Spiroplasma bacterium was made in precisely the same way, with much brighter x-ray beams and a much shorter pulse of light. So bright was the flash of light that the sample was vaporized
I guess this means they can't use the disclaimer: "No bacteria were harmed in the making of this hologram."
Neutronium is when you've not only merged the nuclei but you've squashed the electrons down into the nucleus as well. The electrons combine with the protons to give just a mass of neutrons.
Neutrons themselves are unstable with a half life of about 12 minutes. If you reduce the pressure then neutronium will start to decay. In a neutron star the electrons cannot escape the gravity well so the star is stable.
Right, I was just glossing over the details for the sake of brevity.
Once the neutrons decay they form protons and electrons as well as a neutrino. If you could theoretically take a chunk of neutronium out of a neutron star then it would immediately begin to decay back into protons and electrons which would then combine to form atoms. Essentially you'd get back similar material to what you had put in, given some time for the neutron decay and for the remaining neutrons, protons, and electrons to combine. Of course the specific amounts of each atom would probably differ from what went into the neutron star and you'd totally lose the original shape and chemical makeup of the original material - probably due to the extreme pressures involved!
WBUAAWYWIOIFA (Why bother using an acronym when you write it out in full anyway?) Seriously?
So that people don't have to waste their time guessing?
IANAL is a pretty common term and you see it all the time on Slashdot so it's reasonable to assume people know it without an explanation. Saying IAAC pays homage to that convention but it would probably leave most people scratching their heads, so I spelled it out. Seems reasonable to me but if you gotta pick nits then go for it!
So what other pithy observations do you have to add to the CHEMISTRY discussion we are having today?
What happens when the pressure is relieved?
Does your theoretical neutronium (or high-density Lithium!) go back to normal?
Define normal. If matter gets compressed down to neutronium it is still the same electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. that it originally was. If you were to remove the pressure they would eventually re-combine (after a brief, but violent, expansion), forming a range of elements. Would the matter that was in the form of a toy truck still be a toy truck? Erm, lets just say it is very unlikely.
On the other hand, lithium that is compressed to the kind of pressures found deep in the Earth will probably return back to the normal forms of lithium once the pressure is removed. The electrostatic repulsive forces of electrons will ensure that the atoms push apart again. Once the atoms are further apart the interactions between the innermost electrons and other atoms will again reduce in magnitude.
Most phase changes of the sort described in the article are reversible once the conditions change although some, such as diamond, are stable at STP. Theoretically graphite is more stable at STP than diamond so diamond should convert to graphite but in reality there is a huge activation barrier so it is extremely unlikely to happen spontaneously. This is pretty rare for most substances.)
A link would be nice.
As usual, Wikipedia is your friend: linky
However, his ideas were so grond breaking that the word itself has changed/added meaning to accommodate him.
I just want to know: what did the poor gronds ever do to Francis Crick that they deserved to be broken?
Man I hate it when you re-read something you wrote and find stupid little errors:
There is also the factor of election-electron interaction
Apparently I have the upcoming presidential election on my mind too much these days, it's even starting to creep into my chemistry...
Of course I meant electRon-electron interaction, not electIon-electron interaction. Still, I'm pretty sure that electrons will be vitally important in the upcoming elections!
IAAC (I am a chemist)
Honestly this result is not unexpected. The interactions of electrons and nuclei depend on several factors: distance, energy, and charge. There is also the factor of election-electron interaction, which is where the idea of valence electrons comes about.
Normally the outermost electrons of an atom are far enough from the nucleus that the distance from the nucleus and the repulsion from the other electrons on the atom allows them to more easily interact with other atoms. This is how bonding works, an electron gets "shared" between two atoms or the electron completely jumps off the atom and turns the atom into an ion which is attracted to other, oppositely charged, ions. Yes, I'm oversimplifying quite a bit for the layman.
Every electron in an atom can interact with another atom, it's just MUCH less likely to happen for the inner electrons of an atom and the interactions of the inner electrons to other atoms are much weaker than those of the outer electrons. Increasing the pressure allows the inner electrons to interact more strongly with other atoms.
Under higher pressures and energies two things happen. First of all atoms are pressed closer to each other. This means that all of the electrons are closer to other atoms. This increases the likelihood that an electron will interact with another atom, forming a bond. The second effect is that the increased energy tends to cause the electrons in atoms to jump to higher energy states which are further out from that atom's nucleus. This means less crowding which means less repulsion from other electrons which means that each atom's nucleus is more exposed to interaction with other atom's electrons. Again, I'm oversimplifying for the layman.
The extreme of this is when the pressure is great enough that each nucleus gets close enough for the nuclear force to overcome the electrostatic repelling force between the two positively charged nuclei. When this happens you get neutronium, the core of a neutron star. Obviously you don't normally see these levels of pressure on Earth!
What is really in question is the exact numbers of the interactions. At what pressure does a certain phase of atom to atom interaction appear? How does the increased pressure affect rates of reactions between atoms? Scientists are trying to measure hard numbers of the effects of pressure on chemistry. There already is a good deal of theoretical work but the experimental work is a bit tough to do given the conditions needed.
A non-replaceable battery on your phone is a critical issue for those of us who use our cellphones frequently for business reasons. With my current phone, if I find myself on calls for four hours during during the day, and I'm worried about the battery running out of juice later in the afternoon, I can just slap in the spare, charged battery I lug around in my bag. I guess there are external chargers you can carry around and plug your iPhone into if you needed to, but then your phone rings and you're trying to do stuff with your cell plugged in to an external battery pack and whatnot.
While it would be nice to be able to quickly and easily replace the battery in an iPhone I understand why Apple didn't make it that way. It would have added significantly to the size, complexity, and cost of the iPhone.
However there are a lot of add-ons out there that provide you with more power for your iPhone if you need it. I've seen several solutions that you plug into the bottom slot of the iPhone which provide you with many more hours of run-time. They range from clunky, yet effective, battery packs which can take AA batteries to slim units that cradle your iPhone and just add a bit more thickness to it.
Yes, they cost extra past the initial cost of the iPhone but then again if you had to buy a second battery you would have had an additional cost anyways.
The real deal killer for me is ATT. Not with a gun to my head. I need my telephone to ring when somebody calls me, not go into voice mail.
I was very unsure about AT&T's service before I got the iPhone. I used to have Verizon and it was very reliable, and I know that AT&T is the re-branded Cingular which I've always heard problems about. Thankfully, I've found that AT&T's service is comperable to Verizon's. Apparently AT&T has built up Cingular's service quite a bit and really improved its reliability. I hardly ever get a dropped call or one that goes directly to voicemail, certainly no more so than I did with Verizon.
when it doesn't cost you a dime more to refine $2 gas than it does to refine $4 gas, people get kind of pissed about the price.
Of course it costs them more!
Refining takes a ton of energy, energy costs have gone up so refining costs have gone up. Not only that but construction, maintenance, and shipping costs have gone up. Refineries don't exist in a vacuum, when the price of everything else goes up so does the costs of refining. It's called inflation and it more or less affects all costs to all businesses and all consumers.
Woah, hold on there. Most Macs don't have a system administrator.
We are talking about a vulnerability for SERVERS.
Bind is DNS SERVER software. The vulnerability targets SERVERS, not your home operating system. SERVER administrators should know how to patch their SERVERS.
For non-servers this is not a serious vulnerability since you have to explicitly enable Bind and set it up to use it on your system. Guess what, if you are doing that then YOU have become a SERVER ADMINISTRATOR and you better know what you are doing!
What if I'm not running 10.4.11? Will I be able to apply security patches? The answer is no. Even if a patch has nothing to do with if you are at 10.4.11 or 10.4.9 you'll have to update to the most recent version. It plays hell with anyone trying to have a stable, yet secure, environment.
If you are a normal home user there is very little reason not to update to the latest patches for your operating system. If you are running 10.4 then update to 10.4.11 or whatever! The patches are free, they fix bugs (thus more stability), and they often provide additional functionality. Wait a week or so to make sure the patch didn't break anything for other people and if everything is good then apply it yourself. If you don't want to patch then fine, you won't get the benefit of having ANY of the latest patches - that's your (poor) decision.
As for system administrators not using the latest version of the operating system, I can understand being 1 version behind while you let the bugs shake out of the newest version. However, no good system administrator runs a machine that is 2 major versions behind without having some very good reasons and without knowing what they are doing. When the time comes to patch something like Bind, that admin better know enough to go to the Bind website, download the patch, build it and install it. Yes Apple bundles up these patches occasionally as a convenience to the user but that doesn't mean you have to wait for Apple in order to patch your system, especially when you are a professional running mission-critical equipment.
Tell people you are drilling and yeah, the oil won't enter the stream for 10, 15 years but the speculative properties alone will drop crude by another $20 or $40, easy.
Actually by most industry estimates there will be a noticeable increase in oil production in just 5 years. Yes it will take 10 years or so to get the full benefit but any increase in production will help in the meantime.
Another thing to note is that 10 years ago Bill Clinton vetoed offshore drilling. If he had not done this then we would be reaping the full benefits of offshore drilling TODAY. For the Democrats to NOW use the excuse "you won't get the benefit for 10 years"...well that's just patently ridiculous.
Little bit of egg on my face as I mistakenly looked at the Senate and not the House. However it turns out that the House was due for a break on August 11th and instead took its break 10 days early.
Also, Harry Reid is the Senate Majority leader. not the House Majority Leader which is the subject of this article. Steny Hoyer is the House Majority leader.
What actually happened, of course, was that the House adjourned for its August recess. As scheduled. Just like it does every year. Presumably it was scheduled months in advance. Everyone knew it.
Except this time the minority party refused to, you know, leave. Though the government is not in session, the Republicans insist on hanging around anyway.
Actually, Congress is going into recess a week earlier than they had planned. You can see here the original date for them to start August recess was August 9th.
Plain and simple this is an effort to freeze debate on matters central to the upcoming presidential election, most notably the offshore drilling issue. This issue hinges on the theory that the current gas price crunch could be significantly helped by opening up offshore drilling, a theory heavily supported by Republican presidential candidate John McCain. The truly interesting fact is that the Majority Leader Harry Reid (a Democrat from Nevada) previously threatened to CANCEL the August recess if two key Democratic bills weren't decided in time for the recess.
Smells a bit of hypocrisy if you ask me.
As much as I love Apple, it bothers me that they do not release security patches for versions earlier than n-1 (where n is the current release).
You know that under the hood Mac OS X is Unix. It's not that hard to simply get the latest version of Bind and install it yourself. Here are some simple instructions on how to do it but it's basic stuff that any system administrator should know. (Personally, I'd install it in /usr/local instead of /usr and symlink to that rather than blowing away the version installed by Apple but then again that's something any computer admin worth his salt should also know.)
Apple doesn't patch versions of Mac OS X that are more than 1 version old because by far the majority of its users upgrade. If you look at the estimated numbers of people using Mac OS X 10.3 you can see that it's down in the low single percentage points, maybe even under 1% depending on who you ask. It just doesn't make sense for them to provide support when so very few people are affected.
Not only that but there have been some major changes in Mac OS X over the years which make it difficult to patch too far back. The differences between 10.5 and 10.4 are a lot smaller than the differences between 10.4 and 10.3. Those sort of changes are slowing down so I'd expect Apple to more easily be able to back-support more versions of its OS. By all accounts the next version, 10.6 or Snow Leopard, will just be a more refined 10.5 with very little structural changes. I'd expect that Apple will find it very easy to continue to provide patches to 10.4 for quite some time.
MS give away complete compilers, development environments and their full software development kit for free. Yes, you can pay more if you want better tools, but why should they be penalised for offering something more? In fact, Apple do they same thing.
Actually the only real differences between the ADC Online, Student, Select, and Premiere developer packages are: hardware discounts, tech support incidents, and access to Apple's Compatibility Labs (bunches of assorted computers to test your products on). The higher levels also get some freebies like the latest OS versions, a free shirt, that sort of thing.
Every level of ADC membership gets access to the same programming tools, libraries, and documentation no matter if you are a free online member or if you are paying $3,499 a year for a Premiere membership. You can get Xcode, Interface Builder, and all the rest of the Apple Developer Tools for free - they are even distributed with every copy of the operating system. And, yes, many of those tools utilize open source software to which Apple has provided some very nice graphical interfaces. Apple has also contributed a ton of improvements, new features, and bug fixes to these open source projects.
Microsoft, on the other hand, gives out the basic tools like the Visual Studio Express Editions for free but they charge for the regular version of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Professional. The Visual Studio Express Editions are complete development environments but they are missing a lot of stuff like plugin support, data designer, class designer, profiling tools and much more. The Express Editions also use a reduced library and can only compile to a reduced set of targets.
There's a good comparison of all the editions of Visual Studio on Wikipedia, of course.
Profanity on AT&T's network will be fined at $0.99 per incident
You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.