A small study on 172 people, somewhat exaggerated by the government article, turned into sensationistic, anti-american crap by constantnormal, and posted by Michael for some unknown reason.
This study is on 172 children. It's a tiny study. Repeat after me: Correlation does not mean causuation. This does not take into account a myriad of socioeconomic factors.
Where do you usually have more lead plumbing? In older neighborhoods. Who lives in older neighborhoods quite often?
Lower income people!
Without the educational/social oportunities of the better off, poorer children usually score worse on IQ tests. (This shows nothing about their intelligence.) Of course, there are many, many factors that determine how one will score with their IQ. You can't just pin it on lead just because the children in this small sample scored lower on IQ tests due to trace amounts of lead.
Anyway, I'd like to see a little better editing. Lots of things happen in science every day. Slashdot shouldn't bother with tripe like this.
Elective/cosmetic surgery is available only to the rich, but it's not like those without it are suffering horribly. If genetics turns out the same way it won't be too bad.
Don't get me wrong. I'm completely in support of genetic research, and even eventually genetically engineered humans. (We need to better ourselves) I'm not rich. So I may never have the money to shell out for a facelift when I'm older. I guess I'll have to live with wrinkles, then.
But the difference between a person with an IQ of 200 that is not suseptible to any diseases and can run a mile in 4:00 and a normal person is a much bigger difference than someone with a facelift and someone without a facelift.
Genetic engineering of humans should be some sort of government program. We can't leave out the poor on this one.
Oh really? I thought the main concerns were over the increased leukemia rates near nuclear installations and the long-term storage of hazadous materials.
Increased leukemia rates near nuclear installations? Doesn't work that way. Nuclear plants emit almost no radiation. In fact, the radiation emitted by nuclear power plants is dwarfed by what is emitted from coal power plants.
The volume of all nuclear waste ever produced in the US would fit into a high school gym. Safe installations like Yucca Mountain leave no chance for leakage of waste. Anyway, PU is not that toxic compared to many substances. Take a look at this.
Ouch. The last thing I'd want is a hangover with a side of caffeine poisoning.
It would make for a killer hangover. One of the main culprits in hangovers is dehydration. Caffeine, being a dieretic, would make it much, much worse. Wouldn't help the headache much either. Coming off of caffeine often causes headaches.
I can't see this happening with Doom 3, however. While an xbox, as consoles go, is very powerful, Doom 3 would have to be extensively modified and dumbed down graphicswise to run on an xbox. I can't see why ID would take a game with graphics like Doom 3, which already has an alpha that runs great, bastardize the graphics, screw their millions of loyal followers in the PC world that they have built up since Wolfenstein, and release it exclusively on a console.
Id knows better than this. This article had no real backing. It's just hearsay. Doom 3 will be a gigantic hit. Id will release it for the PC. They'd have to be fucking stupid not to.
For making my brand-new 2Gig, 512 MRAM, 64M video, UGA laptop appear to run dog slow playing your new videos!:)
It's not Microsoft's fault. 720 hdtv has 3 times as many pixels as NTSC rez on dvds. This is uber-compressed video, compressed even more than divx. Considering full NTSC rez divx (as opposed to the 240 line stuff from Kazaa) takes about a 500 mhz computer to run really well, I think 2.4 ghz is not that outlandish.
By the time this becomes more standard, 2.4 ghz processors or greater will be the norm.
320x240 is the average DivX encode? last i checked, my smallest movie was 640x480, with the average being something like either 708 pixels wide or 800 pixels wide. maybe if youre encoding a commercial or something...
At least on Kazaa 340x240 seems to be the de facto rez. VHS rez.
Second, shouldn't TV shows that are put on DVD look super-bad ass? I assume they're filmed on something akin to 35mm. I bought my girlfriend the first three seasons of Friends on DVD. Watching them on my progressive scan player and HDTV, they don't seem to be any better than normal TV, except that there's never any fuzz (my cable gets crazy from time-to-time). It doesn't look as good as X-Men, for example. Thanks.
TV shows put on DVDs will be sharper than regular analog cable. However, it's still the same 480 lines of interlaced resolution that TV shows are. DVDs don't have greater resolution than TV does. Just less interference.
Have you seen the Bebop eps "Speak Like a Child" and "My funny Valentine." Quite a bit of character development there. You can see Faye changing throughout the series, cumulating in The Real Folk Blues.
I completely agree with you. One of the better aspects of many animes is their set length. However, bebop could have gone maybe 13 more eps without getting stretched out too much.
You do realise you'd have to build the *infrastructure* to support that, don't you? Building such a power-hungry infrastructure on pillars that are kilometres tall (the Atlantic isn't shallow) isn't even close to feasible. What you're suggesting sounds more like a hovercraft, but those are *slow*.
I think the previous poster is talking about maglev trains. Magnetic levitation. There are already several test tracks around the world, including one in japan around 20 miles long. It's not nearly as expensive as it sounds. Maglev trains would travel around the speed of commercial airliners, quite a bit faster than the TGV trains in France. Although I can't see how you could build one across the Atlantic.
Produces much more fusion neutros for much less money. It is the only fusion technology I know of that has seen deployment outside research labs.
Yeah, IECs are used commonly as neutron sources. But for actual power generation, where you get more power back than you put in, you really need to look at either z pinch, toroids, or laser confinement.
Um. All those billions of dollars wasted trying get thermal fusion to work, and for what? Hot neutrons? What good are hot neutrons? They heat up your shielding, and irradiate everything else, so you end up with hundreds of tons of low-level radioactive waste (where you had a fusion plant, before) every few years.
Here's how D-T works, at least in the tokamak format, which is the most promising: You heat up the fuel, fuse it to He, etc. Neutrons get released into the lithium walls of the chamber. The lithium blocks the neutrons. The lithium is transmutated into tritium (free fuel!) and the heat can boil water and such. It is perfectly efficient. Have you ever read anything on fusion power before?
We already know, more or less, how to get kinetic fusion of (e.g.) protons with boron nuclei, which produce nice charged particles that are easy to extract the energy from, with high efficiency and without the bloody neutrons. (Google for "Farnsworth Hirsch Bussard" to find a nice article on the design.) Simple, clean, small. A little too practical, though, I suppose.
Yeah, more or less. We know a lot more about how to generate power with tokamak reactors. At princeton, they've gotten about.8 or so of their power back that they put into the reaction, with their tokamak. No other form of fusion reactor can come nearly so close in power output.
The ITER reactor, which will be complete in a few years, will be able to output more power than is put in. Later reactors may reach ignition, which is a self sustaining fusion reaction.
Anybody has calculations on how much helium is expected to be produced worldwide when fusion becomes commercial?
Haha. I'm pretty sure you were joking, but just in case you weren't. (Hey, you did get modded as informative)
Anyway, you would not believe the tiny amount of helium this would produce. Completely inconsequential. D-T fuel would have such high energy density that it would sip fuel slowly, even compared to the tiny amount used by fission reactors. Millions of times more helium would be released from the earth than could ever be produced by fusion.
Anyway, it would just float into the outer atmosphere. It is helium, after all.
A UNIX-type OS should of course be used for that true "legacy" feeling.
Of course UNIX is better than old crotchety DOS derived OSes like 98 because it is new. It's not based on some very old archaic OS made in the 60s. New! New is better! Old is bad! Computers must not be based on 20 year old technology for some reason!
Agreed. One could just as well argue that people are healthier because fewer people are "dyin' of the consumption!" People used to die of all sorts of things that doctors didn't know were forms of cancer.
"Consumption" was what tuberculosis used to be called. Now, in the 1st world at least, it is exceedingly rare and easily treated with antibiotics. But it used to kill people regularly.
Cowboy Bebop doesn't come off as particularly adult. The characters can be described with 2 or 3 adjectives, Faye is around mostly to show off her animated ass, and in general it's not as intelligent as an Hollywood action flick.
I'd have to say that the movie was about on par with a hollywood action flick. However, the tv series was on a different level entirely. Good character development, excellent animation, very dramatic, exciting, interesting overall plot and theme. Too bad it ended after only 26 episodes. Should have ran at least another season.
"Bebop" is a jazzy type of music from the 40's and 50's, which can jump around in tempos and such. For more on Bebop, check AllMusic.com [allmusic.com].
The title actually makes quite a bit of sense. The famous jazz musician Yoko Kanno does the music for Bebop. In addition, she actually had quite a bit of influence in the series. One interesting thing, is that during the opening credits, in the background, there are a few sentences about the creation of the bebop jazz style in New York in the 40's.
Where does everyone get this idea that quantum computers have something to do with paralell universes? And they have an infinite number of variables? That doesn't quite make sense.
Quantum computers are based on interactions of qubits, which may be atoms, SQUIDs, or any number of things. They've got working quantum computers up to 7 qubits now, which means 64 operations per cycle, or what ever you want to call it. Quantum computers have nothing to do with parelell universes! Physicists aren't quite sure that they even exist.
Anyone else ever love the fact that in Trek, phasers could be set to explode... good thing they kept that in mind on this one. Hopefully they don't overheat in a heavy fire fight, eh? Could give new meaning to the term 'friendly fire'. (And I thought depleted uranium rounds where kinda dumb...)
If you think DU is dumb, you probably don't know much about it. DU is exceedingly low radioactivity. Lower that uranium ore (due to thorium content of ore) and lower than normal uranium metal. Uranium has a half life of over a billion years. Its radioactivity is too low to be dangerous.
Anyway, who cares how toxic it is? When it hits an enemy tank, the ocupants typically end up quite dead.
Yeah. There was a legit story a few days back about artificial implantable hippocampuses being developed. It's to restore long term memory function in Alzheimer's patients. But nothing about playing chess.
I believe it was in an interview at Anandtech where a rep stated that there is currently not a large enough demand for them to produced 15-19" LCDs at greater than 1280x1024.
Haha. And there is a demand for 14 inch 1600x1200 laptop displays? The manufacturers are discorving that LCDs are a big cash cow: They can make cheap low rez screens and charge big bucks for them. This will go on for a while until OLEDs come out, or some other market factor that will drive down prices.
Actually, SVCD's can only store about 30 minutes - it is the normal VCD that can hold about 74 minutes worth of video
Nope. 74 minutes. I should know. I burn tons of SVCDs. SVCDs are mpeg-2 encoded, unlike VCDs, which are mpeg. Better compression, better quality. You might be thinking of mini dvds, which are short snippets of DVD video on a CD.
Slashdot Mirror
A small study on 172 people, somewhat exaggerated by the government article, turned into sensationistic, anti-american crap by constantnormal, and posted by Michael for some unknown reason.
This study is on 172 children. It's a tiny study. Repeat after me: Correlation does not mean causuation. This does not take into account a myriad of socioeconomic factors.
Where do you usually have more lead plumbing? In older neighborhoods. Who lives in older neighborhoods quite often?
Lower income people!
Without the educational/social oportunities of the better off, poorer children usually score worse on IQ tests. (This shows nothing about their intelligence.) Of course, there are many, many factors that determine how one will score with their IQ. You can't just pin it on lead just because the children in this small sample scored lower on IQ tests due to trace amounts of lead.
Anyway, I'd like to see a little better editing. Lots of things happen in science every day. Slashdot shouldn't bother with tripe like this.
Elective/cosmetic surgery is available only to the rich, but it's not like those without it are suffering horribly. If genetics turns out the same way it won't be too bad.
Don't get me wrong. I'm completely in support of genetic research, and even eventually genetically engineered humans. (We need to better ourselves) I'm not rich. So I may never have the money to shell out for a facelift when I'm older. I guess I'll have to live with wrinkles, then.
But the difference between a person with an IQ of 200 that is not suseptible to any diseases and can run a mile in 4:00 and a normal person is a much bigger difference than someone with a facelift and someone without a facelift.
Genetic engineering of humans should be some sort of government program. We can't leave out the poor on this one.
Oh really? I thought the main concerns were over the increased leukemia rates near nuclear installations and the long-term storage of hazadous materials.
Increased leukemia rates near nuclear installations? Doesn't work that way. Nuclear plants emit almost no radiation. In fact, the radiation emitted by nuclear power plants is dwarfed by what is emitted from coal power plants.
The volume of all nuclear waste ever produced in the US would fit into a high school gym. Safe installations like Yucca Mountain leave no chance for leakage of waste. Anyway, PU is not that toxic compared to many substances. Take a look at this.
Ouch. The last thing I'd want is a hangover with a side of caffeine poisoning.
It would make for a killer hangover. One of the main culprits in hangovers is dehydration. Caffeine, being a dieretic, would make it much, much worse. Wouldn't help the headache much either. Coming off of caffeine often causes headaches.
I can't see this happening with Doom 3, however. While an xbox, as consoles go, is very powerful, Doom 3 would have to be extensively modified and dumbed down graphicswise to run on an xbox. I can't see why ID would take a game with graphics like Doom 3, which already has an alpha that runs great, bastardize the graphics, screw their millions of loyal followers in the PC world that they have built up since Wolfenstein, and release it exclusively on a console.
Id knows better than this. This article had no real backing. It's just hearsay. Doom 3 will be a gigantic hit. Id will release it for the PC. They'd have to be fucking stupid not to.
For making my brand-new 2Gig, 512 MRAM, 64M video, UGA laptop appear to run dog slow playing your new videos! :)
It's not Microsoft's fault. 720 hdtv has 3 times as many pixels as NTSC rez on dvds. This is uber-compressed video, compressed even more than divx. Considering full NTSC rez divx (as opposed to the 240 line stuff from Kazaa) takes about a 500 mhz computer to run really well, I think 2.4 ghz is not that outlandish.
By the time this becomes more standard, 2.4 ghz processors or greater will be the norm.
320x240 is the average DivX encode? last i checked, my smallest movie was 640x480, with the average being something like either 708 pixels wide or 800 pixels wide. maybe if youre encoding a commercial or something...
At least on Kazaa 340x240 seems to be the de facto rez. VHS rez.
Second, shouldn't TV shows that are put on DVD look super-bad ass? I assume they're filmed on something akin to 35mm. I bought my girlfriend the first three seasons of Friends on DVD. Watching them on my progressive scan player and HDTV, they don't seem to be any better than normal TV, except that there's never any fuzz (my cable gets crazy from time-to-time). It doesn't look as good as X-Men, for example. Thanks.
TV shows put on DVDs will be sharper than regular analog cable. However, it's still the same 480 lines of interlaced resolution that TV shows are. DVDs don't have greater resolution than TV does. Just less interference.
Have you seen the Bebop eps "Speak Like a Child" and "My funny Valentine." Quite a bit of character development there. You can see Faye changing throughout the series, cumulating in The Real Folk Blues.
I completely agree with you. One of the better aspects of many animes is their set length. However, bebop could have gone maybe 13 more eps without getting stretched out too much.
You do realise you'd have to build the *infrastructure* to support that, don't you? Building such a power-hungry infrastructure on pillars that are kilometres tall (the Atlantic isn't shallow) isn't even close to feasible. What you're suggesting sounds more like a hovercraft, but those are *slow*.
I think the previous poster is talking about maglev trains. Magnetic levitation. There are already several test tracks around the world, including one in japan around 20 miles long. It's not nearly as expensive as it sounds. Maglev trains would travel around the speed of commercial airliners, quite a bit faster than the TGV trains in France. Although I can't see how you could build one across the Atlantic.
Produces much more fusion neutros for much less money. It is the only fusion technology I know of that has seen deployment outside research labs.
Yeah, IECs are used commonly as neutron sources. But for actual power generation, where you get more power back than you put in, you really need to look at either z pinch, toroids, or laser confinement.
Um.
.8 or so of their power back that they put into the reaction, with their tokamak. No other form of fusion reactor can come nearly so close in power output.
All those billions of dollars wasted trying get thermal fusion to work, and for what? Hot neutrons? What good are hot neutrons? They heat up your shielding, and irradiate everything else, so you end up with hundreds of tons of low-level radioactive waste (where you had a fusion plant, before) every few years.
Here's how D-T works, at least in the tokamak format, which is the most promising: You heat up the fuel, fuse it to He, etc. Neutrons get released into the lithium walls of the chamber. The lithium blocks the neutrons. The lithium is transmutated into tritium (free fuel!) and the heat can boil water and such. It is perfectly efficient. Have you ever read anything on fusion power before?
We already know, more or less, how to get kinetic fusion of (e.g.) protons with boron nuclei, which produce nice charged particles that are easy to extract the energy from, with high efficiency and without the bloody neutrons. (Google for "Farnsworth Hirsch Bussard" to find a nice article on the design.) Simple, clean, small. A little too practical, though, I suppose.
Yeah, more or less. We know a lot more about how to generate power with tokamak reactors. At princeton, they've gotten about
The ITER reactor, which will be complete in a few years, will be able to output more power than is put in. Later reactors may reach ignition, which is a self sustaining fusion reaction.
Anybody has calculations on how much helium is expected to be produced worldwide when fusion becomes commercial?
Haha. I'm pretty sure you were joking, but just in case you weren't. (Hey, you did get modded as informative)
Anyway, you would not believe the tiny amount of helium this would produce. Completely inconsequential. D-T fuel would have such high energy density that it would sip fuel slowly, even compared to the tiny amount used by fission reactors. Millions of times more helium would be released from the earth than could ever be produced by fusion.
Anyway, it would just float into the outer atmosphere. It is helium, after all.
A UNIX-type OS should of course be used for that true "legacy" feeling.
Of course UNIX is better than old crotchety DOS derived OSes like 98 because it is new. It's not based on some very old archaic OS made in the 60s. New! New is better! Old is bad! Computers must not be based on 20 year old technology for some reason!
Agreed. One could just as well argue that people are healthier because fewer people are "dyin' of the consumption!" People used to die of all sorts of things that doctors didn't know were forms of cancer.
"Consumption" was what tuberculosis used to be called. Now, in the 1st world at least, it is exceedingly rare and easily treated with antibiotics. But it used to kill people regularly.
Cowboy Bebop doesn't come off as particularly adult. The characters can be described with 2 or 3 adjectives, Faye is around mostly to show off her animated ass, and in general it's not as intelligent as an Hollywood action flick.
I'd have to say that the movie was about on par with a hollywood action flick. However, the tv series was on a different level entirely. Good character development, excellent animation, very dramatic, exciting, interesting overall plot and theme. Too bad it ended after only 26 episodes. Should have ran at least another season.
"Bebop" is a jazzy type of music from the 40's and 50's, which can jump around in tempos and such. For more on Bebop, check AllMusic.com [allmusic.com].
The title actually makes quite a bit of sense. The famous jazz musician Yoko Kanno does the music for Bebop. In addition, she actually had quite a bit of influence in the series. One interesting thing, is that during the opening credits, in the background, there are a few sentences about the creation of the bebop jazz style in New York in the 40's.
I thought it was a fake Slashdot anime name based on "Cowboy Neal". It certainly doesn't sound Japanese.
Never heard of Cowboy Bebop? It's one of the best anime TV shows ever made. (The best, IMHO) Dowload the series off of Kazaa. It's wonderful.
Try WindowMaker. Its my favorite when using my old p166 adn its themeable and looks really cool. Uses very little resources as well.
Windowmaker is my favorite. I just really love the dock style of GUI. I even use it on my more powerful Athlon.
Where does everyone get this idea that quantum computers have something to do with paralell universes? And they have an infinite number of variables? That doesn't quite make sense.
Quantum computers are based on interactions of qubits, which may be atoms, SQUIDs, or any number of things. They've got working quantum computers up to 7 qubits now, which means 64 operations per cycle, or what ever you want to call it. Quantum computers have nothing to do with parelell universes! Physicists aren't quite sure that they even exist.
Anyone else ever love the fact that in Trek, phasers could be set to explode... good thing they kept that in mind on this one. Hopefully they don't overheat in a heavy fire fight, eh? Could give new meaning to the term 'friendly fire'. (And I thought depleted uranium rounds where kinda dumb...)
If you think DU is dumb, you probably don't know much about it. DU is exceedingly low radioactivity. Lower that uranium ore (due to thorium content of ore) and lower than normal uranium metal. Uranium has a half life of over a billion years. Its radioactivity is too low to be dangerous.
Anyway, who cares how toxic it is? When it hits an enemy tank, the ocupants typically end up quite dead.
Yeah. There was a legit story a few days back about artificial implantable hippocampuses being developed. It's to restore long term memory function in Alzheimer's patients. But nothing about playing chess.
I believe it was in an interview at Anandtech where a rep stated that there is currently not a large enough demand for them to produced 15-19" LCDs at greater than 1280x1024.
Haha. And there is a demand for 14 inch 1600x1200 laptop displays? The manufacturers are discorving that LCDs are a big cash cow: They can make cheap low rez screens and charge big bucks for them. This will go on for a while until OLEDs come out, or some other market factor that will drive down prices.
Actually, SVCD's can only store about 30 minutes - it is the normal VCD that can hold about 74 minutes worth of video
Nope. 74 minutes. I should know. I burn tons of SVCDs. SVCDs are mpeg-2 encoded, unlike VCDs, which are mpeg. Better compression, better quality. You might be thinking of mini dvds, which are short snippets of DVD video on a CD.