> The thing is that much of this sort of behaviour [supplying bogus demographic data] is counter-productive to getting more accurate or
personally applicable company->consumer communication. Companies actually (gasp) use this
information to determine how to best initiate information, and what sort of information to give you.
And this is my problem... how?
Sounds like a problem for wannabe-privacy-invaders. My heart bleeds.
What about those of us who just don't want the "information" you "want to give" us, because your track record has demonstrated, time and time again, that you'll abuse it.
We don't like you. We don't trust you. And we will not cooperate with you.
BTW, isn't it interesting how Jakob Nielsen has enough money for his web site and articles - which have 10-20K of real content, and which load and render instantly, because they're only about 11-25K long?
Yet when I read a review of some game on some other site, I have to download 80K of HTML, wrappers for ad sites, another 40-50K of animated.GIFs, wait 5 seconds for it to render, and for all this work I get maybe three or four paragraphs of content, then I have to click on "next page" to do it all over again... sometimes five and six times for a single article that's (in total) about half the length of any of Jakob's articles.
Methinks there's a lesson to be had there.
Wanna cut bandwidth costs? Gimme 10K of content in 11K of HTML and one HTTP GET transaction.
It just might be cheaper than six HTTP GETs and 400K of HTML.
> clicking the ad as a way of saying "Thank you" to someone who has provided me with entertainment/information [... ] I'll do the old right-click, open in a new window, then close it as soon as something comes up -
I don't even bother to read it.
Unfortunately, while this is a good short-term solution and helps your favored site today, it doesn't solve the fundamental problem, which is that the ad hasn't resulted in a sale for the company whose banner you clicked.
Sooner or later, that company's gonna realize that despite all the hits its website has gotten, nobody's buying anything. Despite all the money it's given to its ad agency, it hasn't gotten a return on its investment.
It stops doing business via banner ads. The ad agency goes titsup.com and stops paying per clickthrough, because each clickthrough is worth less to it.
And your favorite site still goes down because it doesn't have enough revenue.
I've got nothing against clicking on the odd banner as an act of charity to a webmaster. I do it myself from time to time. But I have no illusions that it's gonna solve The Problem.
> on the internet, where the advertiser can monitor (some of) the effectiveness of an ad directly
(click-through rate),
Stop right there.
Is the effectiveness of the ad measured by the clickthrough rate or by sales figures?
If you're a site owner - clickthroughs matter because clickthroughs are what you get paid for.
But if you're the guy who owns the banner ad, all the clickthroughs in the world don't matter unless they're translated into sales.
I'd love to know what percentage of today's clickthroughs are real clickthroughs ("hey, this product looks cool") versus charity ("I like the guy's site, I'll give him $0.10 by clicking here").
An ad agency is merely a bunch con men whose job it is to fool one group of suckers (a company) into thinking the agency can fool an even bigger group of suckers (the audience).
> Advertising has been "found out" by the internet.
Amen, brother. The jig is up. If bandwidth were too cheap to meter, I wouldn't mind downloading the huge ads. But if bandwidth were too cheap to meter, I wouldn't have to see the ads, because the content provider wouldn't need the revenue the ads provide.
>Macromedia is trying to promote shockwave to make adverts more compelling.
You ad folks don't get it.
I don't go to SomethingAwful, or HardOCP, or/., or ArsTechnica, to see the ads.
I go there for the content.
Ad-sponsored or not, I'm not there to see the ads. The ads - and the more bandwidth you suck by making them more "compelling" - are an impediment to me getting what I want.
If I had an OC-3, maybe I wouldn't care. (But I'd still block all the cookies and tracking data for privacy reasons).
But as long as I have something less than an OC-3, the ads stand between me and what I want. And I don't give a rat's ass how compelling the advertisers think they are.
Until advertisers figure out that The. Web. Is. Not. TV., they'll continue to fail.
Re:I'm Sure the Chinese Will Love This....
on
Norway Bans Spam
·
· Score: 4
>But they [the Chinese gov't] can't block e-mail.
In my more paranoid days, I agree with a thesis I saw on news.admin.net-abuse.email.
Briefly, the thesis is that the best way for the PRC's government to control email use is to get themselves firewalled by the rest of the world.
It would explain the complete negligence I've seen on the part of the admins of open mail relays in.cn. The more spam that comes from.cn, the more likely that "the rest of the world" will simply add any.cn host to their DENY lists.
It won't stop you from telling your Chinese friend what's going on... but it will stop him from mailing you. And that's a big win from the point of view of the PRC government.
(Me? I bounce Chinese-relayed spam with "550 - Free Tibet" or "550 - Falun Gong thanks you", followed by a random set of characters. Makes the relay operator sweat, confuses the PRC gov't. Win-win.)
Re:This is the nicest one I know...
on
Infiltration
·
· Score: 1
>but what exactly are
people hoping to find in a nuclear sub base?
Paraphrasing Marvin the Paranoid Android:
"Nuclear subs, what else would you expect to find in a nuclear sub base?"
(Of course, since the base in question was Russian, I wouldn't be surprised if someone did find an abandoned sub... With respect to the men who crew 'em and try to maintain 'em, what your brass has done with regards to dumping near your bases is nuts.)
>A BIG case of short sightness on the part of the french was that the guns on the Maginot line
couldn't be turned around. After all, they never thought that they'd get attacked FROM french soil.
The germans flanked them.
True - but even had the guns been "turnable" - who cares? The beauty (from the point of view of a strategist) of the Blitz was that it didn't matter.
Break the line in a small place (in this case, Belgium). Blast through at high speed - hence the name blitz-krieg (lit. "lightning war"), outflank, and you've got a win-win choice: Blast the enemy to smithereens from behind, or just ignore him and drive forward as long as your air support holds out.
The Maginot line was the canonical case of "Generals are always prepared to fight the last [i.e. most recent] war".
Maginot was the right technique for the slow "human wave" mass cavalry/infrantry movements of WWI. It was a
staggeringly wrong technique for mechanized/mobile infantry with overwhelming air superiority of WWII.
That's not a criticism of the French, BTW, just a recap of military history.
Before we start dissing the French, I should point out that we 'murricans were damn lucky (or damn smart, whichever reading of Pearl you want to take) to have our carriers out of harm's way during Pearl - we basically invented modern (carrier-based, vs. battleship-based) naval warfare from scratch, and it was probably a combination of military genius (Nimitz and many others) spurred on by necessity ("Holy crap! They sank our battleship! We've got carriers and nothin' else! How are we supposed to fight?") that we pulled it off. Thankfully, we also had a couple of years and thousands of miles of ocean between "us" and "them", during which we were able to figure out how to fight and win. (Remember that until Midway and Coral Sea, we were losing the Pacific war.)
Unlike the US in the Pacific war, the French generals had 20 years of complacency, and only a couple of months to learn the new rules before the enemy was at the gate. It's small wonder they got trounced, and IMHO no stationary artillery platform, would have changed the outcome.
>I mean if duck hunters can go on strike (Good for the ducks I guess) because of losing some
ancestral hunting rights, why shouldn't there be an even bigger response to this sort of nonsense?
I was on a date with a lady named Rosen last night. As things got down to business, there was a quiet moment of pillow talk where I asked her what her ultimate fantasy was. She murmured something about "computer owners, MP3 users, and hard drive buyers refusing to use their hardware, play MP3s, and purchase hard drives... a strike, if you will...".
Then everything went black. shudder.
I'm kinda glad I don't remember what happened after that, but there you have it, another sacrifice I've made in the name of freedom. The things I do to keep you geeks informed these days, really.;-)
The question is - is it "supported" or does it "work"?
If you say you support CD-R, you imply "anything that's CD-R, if you put it in the machine, we can read it", and you imply that your customer support drones are going to have to say "Funny, it should read your CD-R. Guess you'll have to send it back if it doesn't".
If you say you support CD-Rs of a certain dye type, you then have to educate the consumer about the difference between cyanine and pthallocyanine and all that other stuff. Not bloody likely. C'mon, when CD-R manufacturers change dye formulations on a month-by-month basis, even if your drones could say "Sorry, use only $FOO-stabilized cye CD-Rs", they'd never be able to answer the question "My CD-Rs are from Wal-Mart! Are they $FOO-stabilized?", because nobody knows.
Now... if CD-Rs are "unsupported", they don't have to worry. Some CD-R media types may work. Some may not. Maybe none will.
As long as Sony's up-front and says "unsupported", it's up to you to do the research and figure out if your preferred CD-R brand will work or not.
By way of analogy, how many of you have Linux "supported" on your laptop? By your ISP? Or do they merely happen to work with certain Linux configurations, with or without official support?
>Measuring line voltage doesn't take an engineering degree.
Totally true. In fact, that's how I do it all the time. I just didn't wanna get sued if someone's fingers happened to be holding onto the wrong part of the lead when they tested it... especially if they had one lead in each hand!
>You just put a well isolated and rather big tank in the middle of the house
which stores warm water.
Neat idea - my concern would be (beyond the "hard to retrofit to existing homes" issue you already described) "can this scale to apartment buildings and office buildings"?
OTOH, you've convinced me to try some experiments in my (really poorly-insulated, hey, it's the Bay Area, we don't need to heat our homes much at night!) apartment involving the blinds, a can of spray paint, and some leftover boxes from a friend's move.
During summer, I can get 10-degree variations in room temperature between rooms with windows facing in other angles. I'm wondering if I can be "clever" and turn a little more of the incomng solar into heat while I'm at work. Beats paying for electrical heat, which is the only heat I have.
Personal record is 4 kWh per day over a one-month period, with some days as low at 3 kWh. That's "computer off when not in use" and no heating, 'cuz it wasn't winter.
(Actually, there's the solution for individual power consumption - the guys with the big solar rigs on their rooftops are just like hardcore overclocking geeks. Spend $100 on a liquid cooling rig and 2 hours lapping the heatsink with 600-grit to save $100 on the CPU. So what if it's not cheaper, it's a hell of a lot more fun!)
>X-ray novae are ignited when the accretion disk gets ionised [not because o
f fusion, as Tackhead had incorrectly guessed]
The thing I like most about Slashdot is that when you make a mistake, people cal
l you on it, and you learn.
The thing I like most about the 'net is that I can hop over to Google, enter "x-
ray novae mechanism" and find a paper on a site in Japan -
Black-Hole X-Ray Transients: Th
e Effect of Irradiation on Time-Dependent Accretion
Disk Structure (OK, I had to use the Google cached copy) - and discover once
again that the universe is not only more weird than I do imagine, it's
more weird than I can imagine:
The disk instability due to the ionization of hydrogen and helium re
mains the most plausible cause of the outburst of the black-hole
candidate X-ray novae. For the orbital periods and mass-transfer rates inferred
from observations,the disk is predicted to be
unstable. A steady state is very unlikely.
> alternative formulations which give equivalent experimental
results but do not include black hole solutions, instead allowing for super-massive stellar objects
Question: In these formulations, what happens to matter when it hits the surface? (Or do they allow for "things big and dense enough to have event horizons, just without singularities inside 'em"?)
(To be absolutely precise, both the Chandra study and the Cygnus XR-1 data support the hypothesis that event horizons exist; what's inside the event horizon is an open question. Is a "black hole" a "thing from which light cannot escape" or a "thing with a singularity in the middle"?)
I live just south of South San Francisco and we're getting quick brown outs every night.
DANGER: DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING.
But if you're comfortable and know the basic safety precautions associated with line power, (and you've got nothing else to do that day) measure the voltage coming out of your socket every once in a while, and plot it on a graph.
Your "120VAC" isn't 120V all the time. The power companies know they can drop voltage to within the tolerances of most line-powered equipment, and will periodically do so in order to get the most bang for the buck. Better to take it to 115V and have 4% in reserve than to give the full 120V and have things fall apart when a steel mill goes online.
Judging from your report and the report of that student elsewhere in this article, they're having to push pretty hard. Betcha you're running somewhere around 110V. Maybe even a bit lower.
(Again, unless you know what you're doing, do not attempt to measure the voltage at your line socket. People who do stupid things with line voltage tend to get killed.)
ObGeekToy: It'd be cool if some company manufactured a device that plugs into an outlet and displays the outlet's voltage on an LCD display. Probably wouldn't cost more than $10 to build in quantity, and that's with UL approval. Target audience: Geeks ("Look and watch the voltage fluctuate during the day!") and people with generators ("So that's why my light bulbs keep burning out!").
Speaking of envirol00nz, aren't we all glad the electric car hasn't caught on? I mean, if you thought gas[oline] prices had gone up...
(Yeah yeah, actually I think electric and hybrid vehicles are pretty cool... it's just that we'd be completely hozed, as opposed to just somewhat screwed, if the "targets" for ZEVs had actually been met...)
>Can a energy cache be built and maintained? [flywheel, etc]
Yes, but not yet.
If we can mass-produce high-temperature superconducting wire, we can build your idealized energy storage device.
For large enough tanks of liquid nitrogen, I think we may actually be at that point - there are a couple of superconductor firms that are building prototypes of "generators" that are basically trailer-truck-sized tanks of superconducting coils. Load 'em up with power when it's cheap. Sit 'em in the yard, bleeding a small amount of current out of 'em to run the motors that keep the LN3 cool until a $DISASTER strikes. Drive 'em to the disaster site and plug 'em in.
(Of course, if there's ever a coolant leak while the things are fully-charged, get the hell outa dodge...)
>Let's try implementing things like solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal power on a large scale before we conclude
nuclear fission is environmentally friendly.
Solar: And this helps you heat your home at night... how? (Note that we don't yet have superconducting storage batteries. Nor do we have cheap photovoltaics.) And this helps the Midwest and the North... how?
Wind: And you're saying that there's enough land mass for wind farms? And you're saying the same envirol00ns won't oppose the wind farms for the measurable impact they have on bird behavior? And this helps anyone living anywhere but the coastal mountains... how?
Geothermal: Nice idea, but not enough unless you're Iceland or Hawaii. (Come to think of it, all three put together aren't enough, but that's really the problem, ain't it?)
Nuclear: All the power you want, when you want it, 24/7/365. And unlike the preceding three, scalable.
Hate to break it to you, but there are real scalability problems with any zero-emission technology other than nuclear fission.
>So you're saying it's impossible to generate electricity for the needs of people without seriously polluting the
environment?
Hope you enjoy what you create.
Maybe he is. It's not nice. But "not nice" doesn't mean "not true". Deal.
Paranoid conspiracy for the day: Gov. Davis has talked about using the power of eminent domain to seize generating assets. That's loony stuff.
But what do you suppose happens when PG&E and Edison International go bankrupt (as a direct result of Davis' inaction)? If you're a creditor, maybe $0.10 on the dollar for the assets looks pretty good.
Davis "nationalizes" the assets for pennies on the dollar. Becuase there are more sheeple who'll think he's "saving them" than shareholders whom he'll have buggered with a megawatt-powered dildo.
Aaw... fuck if I care, I've got PCG and EIX put options. Already taken enough off the table to pay for my electric bill no matter what the liberals do.
That's the funny part about governments buggering shareholders to "save the people". The gummints get the votes. But there's always a buck to be made off the decline.
I'd still rather live in a state where enviro-w33nbag laws just allowed alternate power generators to fire 'em up and let 'em rip. Or better yet, where we had nuclear plants that produce zero emissions to begin with. But hey, if the enviro-freaks wanna slaughter my state's generators, the least I can do is pick up a few bucks from the corpse.
Wonder how many "poor people" have the same opportunity? (Ah, liberals, gotta love 'em for savin' the poor once again!)
>Because anyone with a bachelor's degree in biology or biochemistry could have figured that out anyway, given
the rest of the details?
And that's the scary part.
Basement nukes are hard. A group of grad students could probably build a working device from first principles, but without the fissionables for the core, they'd have nothing more than a job offer from the nearest defence contractor and a request to Please Not Port The Software To The Sony PS/2 from some well-dressed guys wearing really cool shades.
50 years from now, basement bioweapons may be a reality. You're made of all the materials you need to build 'em.
Someone else wrote that if they were in the scientists' shoes, they'd destroy the research and "hope nobody else ever figures it out."
I disagree - and give mad props to the scientists for letting this cat out of the bag. I'd rather have our bioweapons engineers aware of it and working on the fix now, not later.
Finally - is there really any fundamental difference between the "gene sequence for smallpox, patched with the human IL-4 equivalent" and the binary string used in the "Date:" buffer overflow in M$Outbreak?
The Canter & Siegel T-shirt! The McElwaine T-shirt! The Serdar Argic "Howling Through The Wires" net world tour! "Will Create Newsgroups For Food"! "The net is full, go away!" The RSA-in-Perl "munition" shirt...
Ah, the list goes on. (Anyone with these shirts and a digital camera wanna give these newbies a real "geek history through T-shirts" lesson?)
Slashdot Mirror
And this is my problem... how?
Sounds like a problem for wannabe-privacy-invaders. My heart bleeds.
What about those of us who just don't want the "information" you "want to give" us, because your track record has demonstrated, time and time again, that you'll abuse it.
We don't like you. We don't trust you. And we will not cooperate with you.
Yet when I read a review of some game on some other site, I have to download 80K of HTML, wrappers for ad sites, another 40-50K of animated .GIFs, wait 5 seconds for it to render, and for all this work I get maybe three or four paragraphs of content, then I have to click on "next page" to do it all over again... sometimes five and six times for a single article that's (in total) about half the length of any of Jakob's articles.
Methinks there's a lesson to be had there.
Wanna cut bandwidth costs? Gimme 10K of content in 11K of HTML and one HTTP GET transaction.
It just might be cheaper than six HTTP GETs and 400K of HTML.
Unfortunately, while this is a good short-term solution and helps your favored site today, it doesn't solve the fundamental problem, which is that the ad hasn't resulted in a sale for the company whose banner you clicked.
Sooner or later, that company's gonna realize that despite all the hits its website has gotten, nobody's buying anything. Despite all the money it's given to its ad agency, it hasn't gotten a return on its investment.
It stops doing business via banner ads. The ad agency goes titsup.com and stops paying per clickthrough, because each clickthrough is worth less to it.
And your favorite site still goes down because it doesn't have enough revenue.
I've got nothing against clicking on the odd banner as an act of charity to a webmaster. I do it myself from time to time. But I have no illusions that it's gonna solve The Problem.
Stop right there.
Is the effectiveness of the ad measured by the clickthrough rate or by sales figures?
If you're a site owner - clickthroughs matter because clickthroughs are what you get paid for.
But if you're the guy who owns the banner ad, all the clickthroughs in the world don't matter unless they're translated into sales.
I'd love to know what percentage of today's clickthroughs are real clickthroughs ("hey, this product looks cool") versus charity ("I like the guy's site, I'll give him $0.10 by clicking here").
An ad agency is merely a bunch con men whose job it is to fool one group of suckers (a company) into thinking the agency can fool an even bigger group of suckers (the audience).
> Advertising has been "found out" by the internet.
Amen, brother. The jig is up. If bandwidth were too cheap to meter, I wouldn't mind downloading the huge ads. But if bandwidth were too cheap to meter, I wouldn't have to see the ads, because the content provider wouldn't need the revenue the ads provide.
You ad folks don't get it.
I don't go to SomethingAwful, or HardOCP, or /., or ArsTechnica, to see the ads.
I go there for the content.
Ad-sponsored or not, I'm not there to see the ads. The ads - and the more bandwidth you suck by making them more "compelling" - are an impediment to me getting what I want.
If I had an OC-3, maybe I wouldn't care. (But I'd still block all the cookies and tracking data for privacy reasons).
But as long as I have something less than an OC-3, the ads stand between me and what I want. And I don't give a rat's ass how compelling the advertisers think they are.
Until advertisers figure out that The. Web. Is. Not. TV., they'll continue to fail.
In my more paranoid days, I agree with a thesis I saw on news.admin.net-abuse.email.
Briefly, the thesis is that the best way for the PRC's government to control email use is to get themselves firewalled by the rest of the world.
It would explain the complete negligence I've seen on the part of the admins of open mail relays in .cn. The more spam that comes from .cn, the more likely that "the rest of the world" will simply add any .cn host to their DENY lists.
It won't stop you from telling your Chinese friend what's going on... but it will stop him from mailing you. And that's a big win from the point of view of the PRC government.
(Me? I bounce Chinese-relayed spam with "550 - Free Tibet" or "550 - Falun Gong thanks you", followed by a random set of characters. Makes the relay operator sweat, confuses the PRC gov't. Win-win.)
Paraphrasing Marvin the Paranoid Android: "Nuclear subs, what else would you expect to find in a nuclear sub base?"
(Of course, since the base in question was Russian, I wouldn't be surprised if someone did find an abandoned sub... With respect to the men who crew 'em and try to maintain 'em, what your brass has done with regards to dumping near your bases is nuts.)
True - but even had the guns been "turnable" - who cares? The beauty (from the point of view of a strategist) of the Blitz was that it didn't matter.
Break the line in a small place (in this case, Belgium). Blast through at high speed - hence the name blitz-krieg (lit. "lightning war"), outflank, and you've got a win-win choice: Blast the enemy to smithereens from behind, or just ignore him and drive forward as long as your air support holds out.
The Maginot line was the canonical case of "Generals are always prepared to fight the last [i.e. most recent] war". Maginot was the right technique for the slow "human wave" mass cavalry/infrantry movements of WWI. It was a staggeringly wrong technique for mechanized/mobile infantry with overwhelming air superiority of WWII.
That's not a criticism of the French, BTW, just a recap of military history.
Before we start dissing the French, I should point out that we 'murricans were damn lucky (or damn smart, whichever reading of Pearl you want to take) to have our carriers out of harm's way during Pearl - we basically invented modern (carrier-based, vs. battleship-based) naval warfare from scratch, and it was probably a combination of military genius (Nimitz and many others) spurred on by necessity ("Holy crap! They sank our battleship! We've got carriers and nothin' else! How are we supposed to fight?") that we pulled it off. Thankfully, we also had a couple of years and thousands of miles of ocean between "us" and "them", during which we were able to figure out how to fight and win. (Remember that until Midway and Coral Sea, we were losing the Pacific war.)
Unlike the US in the Pacific war, the French generals had 20 years of complacency, and only a couple of months to learn the new rules before the enemy was at the gate. It's small wonder they got trounced, and IMHO no stationary artillery platform, would have changed the outcome.
I was on a date with a lady named Rosen last night. As things got down to business, there was a quiet moment of pillow talk where I asked her what her ultimate fantasy was. She murmured something about "computer owners, MP3 users, and hard drive buyers refusing to use their hardware, play MP3s, and purchase hard drives... a strike, if you will...".
Then everything went black. shudder.
I'm kinda glad I don't remember what happened after that, but there you have it, another sacrifice I've made in the name of freedom. The things I do to keep you geeks informed these days, really. ;-)
If you say you support CD-R, you imply "anything that's CD-R, if you put it in the machine, we can read it", and you imply that your customer support drones are going to have to say "Funny, it should read your CD-R. Guess you'll have to send it back if it doesn't".
If you say you support CD-Rs of a certain dye type, you then have to educate the consumer about the difference between cyanine and pthallocyanine and all that other stuff. Not bloody likely. C'mon, when CD-R manufacturers change dye formulations on a month-by-month basis, even if your drones could say "Sorry, use only $FOO-stabilized cye CD-Rs", they'd never be able to answer the question "My CD-Rs are from Wal-Mart! Are they $FOO-stabilized?", because nobody knows.
Now... if CD-Rs are "unsupported", they don't have to worry. Some CD-R media types may work. Some may not. Maybe none will. As long as Sony's up-front and says "unsupported", it's up to you to do the research and figure out if your preferred CD-R brand will work or not.
By way of analogy, how many of you have Linux "supported" on your laptop? By your ISP? Or do they merely happen to work with certain Linux configurations, with or without official support?
Totally true. In fact, that's how I do it all the time. I just didn't wanna get sued if someone's fingers happened to be holding onto the wrong part of the lead when they tested it... especially if they had one lead in each hand!
Neat idea - my concern would be (beyond the "hard to retrofit to existing homes" issue you already described) "can this scale to apartment buildings and office buildings"?
OTOH, you've convinced me to try some experiments in my (really poorly-insulated, hey, it's the Bay Area, we don't need to heat our homes much at night!) apartment involving the blinds, a can of spray paint, and some leftover boxes from a friend's move.
During summer, I can get 10-degree variations in room temperature between rooms with windows facing in other angles. I'm wondering if I can be "clever" and turn a little more of the incomng solar into heat while I'm at work. Beats paying for electrical heat, which is the only heat I have.
Personal record is 4 kWh per day over a one-month period, with some days as low at 3 kWh. That's "computer off when not in use" and no heating, 'cuz it wasn't winter.
(Actually, there's the solution for individual power consumption - the guys with the big solar rigs on their rooftops are just like hardcore overclocking geeks. Spend $100 on a liquid cooling rig and 2 hours lapping the heatsink with 600-grit to save $100 on the CPU. So what if it's not cheaper, it's a hell of a lot more fun!)
The thing I like most about Slashdot is that when you make a mistake, people cal l you on it, and you learn.
The thing I like most about the 'net is that I can hop over to Google, enter "x- ray novae mechanism" and find a paper on a site in Japan - Black-Hole X-Ray Transients: Th e Effect of Irradiation on Time-Dependent Accretion Disk Structure (OK, I had to use the Google cached copy) - and discover once again that the universe is not only more weird than I do imagine, it's more weird than I can imagine:
High-energy astrophysics rocks.
Question: In these formulations, what happens to matter when it hits the surface? (Or do they allow for "things big and dense enough to have event horizons, just without singularities inside 'em"?)
(To be absolutely precise, both the Chandra study and the Cygnus XR-1 data support the hypothesis that event horizons exist; what's inside the event horizon is an open question. Is a "black hole" a "thing from which light cannot escape" or a "thing with a singularity in the middle"?)
(Good call - it serves me right for being verbose to the point of Katzianness!)
DANGER: DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING.
But if you're comfortable and know the basic safety precautions associated with line power, (and you've got nothing else to do that day) measure the voltage coming out of your socket every once in a while, and plot it on a graph.
Your "120VAC" isn't 120V all the time. The power companies know they can drop voltage to within the tolerances of most line-powered equipment, and will periodically do so in order to get the most bang for the buck. Better to take it to 115V and have 4% in reserve than to give the full 120V and have things fall apart when a steel mill goes online.
Judging from your report and the report of that student elsewhere in this article, they're having to push pretty hard. Betcha you're running somewhere around 110V. Maybe even a bit lower.
(Again, unless you know what you're doing, do not attempt to measure the voltage at your line socket. People who do stupid things with line voltage tend to get killed.)
ObGeekToy: It'd be cool if some company manufactured a device that plugs into an outlet and displays the outlet's voltage on an LCD display. Probably wouldn't cost more than $10 to build in quantity, and that's with UL approval. Target audience: Geeks ("Look and watch the voltage fluctuate during the day!") and people with generators ("So that's why my light bulbs keep burning out!").
(Yeah yeah, actually I think electric and hybrid vehicles are pretty cool... it's just that we'd be completely hozed, as opposed to just somewhat screwed, if the "targets" for ZEVs had actually been met...)
Umm... you're worried about the grues? Just bring a lantern! (sorry, couldn't resist your .sig ;)
Yes, but not yet.
If we can mass-produce high-temperature superconducting wire, we can build your idealized energy storage device.
For large enough tanks of liquid nitrogen, I think we may actually be at that point - there are a couple of superconductor firms that are building prototypes of "generators" that are basically trailer-truck-sized tanks of superconducting coils. Load 'em up with power when it's cheap. Sit 'em in the yard, bleeding a small amount of current out of 'em to run the motors that keep the LN3 cool until a $DISASTER strikes. Drive 'em to the disaster site and plug 'em in.
(Of course, if there's ever a coolant leak while the things are fully-charged, get the hell outa dodge...)
Five minutes of blackout (well, 5 minutes beyond what their backup generators can bear) at Intel's fab oughta do the trick ;-)
Solar: And this helps you heat your home at night... how? (Note that we don't yet have superconducting storage batteries. Nor do we have cheap photovoltaics.) And this helps the Midwest and the North... how?
Wind: And you're saying that there's enough land mass for wind farms? And you're saying the same envirol00ns won't oppose the wind farms for the measurable impact they have on bird behavior? And this helps anyone living anywhere but the coastal mountains... how?
Geothermal: Nice idea, but not enough unless you're Iceland or Hawaii. (Come to think of it, all three put together aren't enough, but that's really the problem, ain't it?)
Nuclear: All the power you want, when you want it, 24/7/365. And unlike the preceding three, scalable.
Hate to break it to you, but there are real scalability problems with any zero-emission technology other than nuclear fission.
Maybe he is. It's not nice. But "not nice" doesn't mean "not true". Deal.
Paranoid conspiracy for the day: Gov. Davis has talked about using the power of eminent domain to seize generating assets. That's loony stuff.
But what do you suppose happens when PG&E and Edison International go bankrupt (as a direct result of Davis' inaction)? If you're a creditor, maybe $0.10 on the dollar for the assets looks pretty good.
Davis "nationalizes" the assets for pennies on the dollar. Becuase there are more sheeple who'll think he's "saving them" than shareholders whom he'll have buggered with a megawatt-powered dildo.
Aaw... fuck if I care, I've got PCG and EIX put options. Already taken enough off the table to pay for my electric bill no matter what the liberals do.
That's the funny part about governments buggering shareholders to "save the people". The gummints get the votes. But there's always a buck to be made off the decline.
I'd still rather live in a state where enviro-w33nbag laws just allowed alternate power generators to fire 'em up and let 'em rip. Or better yet, where we had nuclear plants that produce zero emissions to begin with. But hey, if the enviro-freaks wanna slaughter my state's generators, the least I can do is pick up a few bucks from the corpse.
Wonder how many "poor people" have the same opportunity? (Ah, liberals, gotta love 'em for savin' the poor once again!)
And that's the scary part.
Basement nukes are hard. A group of grad students could probably build a working device from first principles, but without the fissionables for the core, they'd have nothing more than a job offer from the nearest defence contractor and a request to Please Not Port The Software To The Sony PS/2 from some well-dressed guys wearing really cool shades.
50 years from now, basement bioweapons may be a reality. You're made of all the materials you need to build 'em.
Someone else wrote that if they were in the scientists' shoes, they'd destroy the research and "hope nobody else ever figures it out."
I disagree - and give mad props to the scientists for letting this cat out of the bag. I'd rather have our bioweapons engineers aware of it and working on the fix now, not later.
Finally - is there really any fundamental difference between the "gene sequence for smallpox, patched with the human IL-4 equivalent" and the binary string used in the "Date:" buffer overflow in M$Outbreak?
Security through obscurity never works.
Ah, the list goes on. (Anyone with these shirts and a digital camera wanna give these newbies a real "geek history through T-shirts" lesson?)