I've done stuff like this with computers for balloon payloads that go up in the stratosphere, where it's around -50 C. Here's two tricks that should help. Trick number one is build a box out of styrofoam building insulation and duct tape. Assuming you're in the US, you'll see a number printed on the insulation like "R5" or "R10." That's the thermal resistance, in BTUs, hours, deg F, and square feet. No, I'm not making that up. Guesstimate the power dissipation of the computer and use that to make the first design, then test and iterate. You'll want to stick a thermometer on the case or other convenient location. If this isn't reliable enough, then trick number two is design your insulated box to run a bit cold, and build a thermostatically controlled heater. We usually designed our own, because we like to do things the hard way, but I believe at someplace like Newark Electronics you can buy a little package that contains a heater and a bimetallic thermostat, you just supply the power.
The FSF can only take someone to court over GPL violations when it's a piece of software that they hold the copyright for. The GPL is your license to copy, provided you do what it says. If you don't do what it says, then you have no license, and if you copy anyhow, then you are infringing copyright. Only the copyright holder has standing to take you to court for infringement. But of course, anybody can write you a complaining email.
There's an important legal difference between licenses like the GPL and BSD on the one hand, and Microsoft's EULA on the other. If you violate the EULA, Microsoft can take you to court for contract violation and/or copyright infringement. But if you "violate" the GPL, the only claim you can get hit with is copyright infringement. The key difference is that you "agreed" to the EULA, which then obligates you in certain ways; but you never had to agree to the GPL.
So if you're distributing linux w/o complying with the GPL, then you are infringing the copyright of about a bazillion people, and any one of them has standing to take you to court.
Not a troll, nor flamebait - just "hacking" the 'reasonable' clause and cost in the GPL.
Maybe it would help to notice that the word "reasonable" does not appear in this section of the GPL. It says "a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution". So you don't need to be prepared to convince the judge it's "reasonable," you just have to be prepared to convince the judge it is your cost.
What very big company with enormous cash reserves is facing growing competition from open source software, and would find it convenient if said OSS got closed down by patent lawsuits, but would prefer to avoid the anti-trust prosecution that might result if they did it themselves?
Q. Why does a rabbi always answer a question with a question? A. And why should a rabbi not always answer a question with a question?
To sustain this business model, this company is going to have to make sure nobody closes the huge loopholes in patent law on which they depend. So they're going to need to spend a lot of money on lobbying, and especially on the usual astroturfing and fake-think-tank PR firms. Here's a suggestion. Don't go around hiring the same old ones, because everybody knows they're fake. Especially don't hire the ones that have been outed by the tobacco lawsuits. Instead, start your own. How much can a dozen fake grassroots organizations cost? Seems like each one will only need about one employee, so you can have the whole dozen for well under $2 million a year. And here's another suggestion: set them to work doing plausible campaigns for whatever their ostensible purpose is, then they'll look more credible when they go to work on your issue. That way they won't come out looking like Americans for Tax Reform -- you have to look hard to find those Americans reforming any tax other than the tobacco tax.
I am concerned to see the ISS referred to as a "science collaboration." What scientific groups ever asked for the ISS? What science has been done on the ISS? What results have come out? What science *will* be done on the ISS? The answer to all four questions is "None."
The NASA PR machine has used the "constant repetition" technique to get Congress and the public to believe that the ISS has something to do with science. Apparently with some success. But this does not change the fact that there is no science, and there are no results.
Perhaps Gonzales made a muddle of this issue which is so clear to you because he understands the "secrecy" laws better than you do. They do not make it a crime to publish classified information, except under specific circumstances. Basically, if the government gives you access to classified information, you are given notification of what constitutes proper handling of that information, and violating those rules is a crime. But if such a person does disclose that information improperly, the person they disclose it to is under a *much* looser set of restrictions. And in particular for a journalist to publish that information is not a crime, though Gonzales apparently wants to reinterpret the law to make it one.
You may think this is nuts, but this is what the law says. This is one reason why there a frequent clash between authorities and journalists is over revealing sources. The *source* of the classified info has committed a crime, so journalists who conceal their sources are concealing evidence in a criminal investigation.
Setting aside the Constitution for the moment (which is apparently what this administration would like to do) there is another big issue. Gonzales, in his comments, first says that, if you work really hard, he thinks you could construe current law to say publishing classified info is a crime. Then he says that makes it his job to prosecute those people.
Well, it certainly is the job of prosecutors to go after people who have broken the law. But it is not properly the job of prosecutors to spend their time constructing convoluted and questionable legal arguments so they can jail more people. The rule of law requires that it be clear what the law says. It's the worst kind of prosecutorial malfeasance to turn the law into a pretzel so you can harrass people that Dubya finds inconvenient.
A previous comment mentioned that He3 can be made by neutron bombardment of Li6; this can also be built into the fusion process. I.e. He3 + D -> He4 + p, then p + Li6 -> He4 + He3.
Effectively the fuel is D + Li6, with He3 acting as a catalyst; He3 is not used up in the process. (Li6 is 7.5% of naturally occurring Li.)
This He3 thing keeps coming up as an economic argument for a Moon base. But in addition to the point made in the review, that much development remains to make a He3 fusion process feasible, it also requires that, during the same time, nobody finds a better solution that does not require He3. This seems like a real slender thread to hang a big Moon infrastructure project on.
Let me add one other factoid. The last time we bought some He3, it was somewhere around $5000 per mole. So even if you went with straight He3 + D, which yields about 18 MeV, the cost for the He3 alone would come to around 1 cent per kilowatt hour. My electric company charges me a bit over 4 cents per KWh, so this seems in the ballpark already, without involving the moon. Of course, global He3 production will have to grow by a zillion times if people start using it for electricity, but the resulting economy of scale should make this cost even lower.
I have used both gnome and kde as my desktop. I have the following comments to make, none of which seem to line up with anything I've read about gnome and kde.
I am aware of no functionality difference. Since I am assured that there is some difference, it must be in functionality I neither know nor care about.
I don't know why there has to be a gnome version and a kde version of every application. Like the gnome and kde versions of ghostview, neither one of which improves on the original ghostview in any way I've found.
The only difference I've found, and it's a trivial one, is that the gnome desktop looks good, and the kde desktop looks like crap. So I guess gnome has better artists. Like most Linux users, I take a lot of crap from my friends who use Windows, and when they see how amateurish kde looks, I hear about it.
I'd be interested if anyone wants to take pity on me and summarize a few differences between gnome and kde that I should care about.
My Karma is ranked too high, so I may as well fix that with this posting...
Guess you'll have to try harder, nobody modded you down.
A couple posts have addressed your first point, and though we're a bit OT here I have something to say about your second point since it often appears in misinformation about US separation of church and state. It is no part of this principle that Congress should not be influenced by religious views in drafting legislation. The principle is that the government should not help or hinder or endorse or condemn one sect or religion relative to another.
How many debates have decended into childish name-calling so that no-one is listening to anything that is being said?
Pretty much all of them. There's a good reason for this. The people with their brains turned on eventually find that they've fully discussed all there is to discuss on a subject and move on. The people with their brains turned off never get tired of name-calling back and forth.
Always refreshing to see a brief message well-packed with misinformation.
1. High field superconducting magnets don't need to use iron. They can far exceed the saturation field of iron, or any other ferromagnet.
2. Cyclotrons aren't used to accelerate electrons, they are used to accelerate ions.
3. Said accelerated ions can then participate in nuclear interactions, and I don't know of any other use for a cyclotron. I assume that's what you mean by "nuclear-splitting." In any case, radioactive materials can result. And the guy's stated intention is to make radioisotopes for medical procedures.
4. As others have pointed out, the guy is not building the cyclotron, it's being donated to him.
Seems like somewhere in the translation from this preprint to the popular press, this turned into "no dark matter after all." Let me put this in context.
There are two problems in astrophysics in which dark matter is invoked as a possible explanation. One is the "galaxy problem": galactic rotation curves imply a distribution of matter different that you would infer from looking at the luminous matter. The other is the "cosmological problem": observation of redshift vs. distance, and of the cosmic microwave background, and other similar measurements imply a total mass density in the Universe different from what you would infer from looking at the luminous matter. Each of these problems can be explained with dark matter (e.g. some kind of extremely massive particles that only participate in the weak interaction, not yet observed). Sadly, the properties of the dark matter needed to solve these two problems are not necessarily the same.
This paper claims to eliminate the need for dark matter to solve the galaxy problem, but does not address the cosmology problem.
As you've probably gathered from previous replies, there are no plans for cheap small sets. And as for those converter boxes, you'll be lucky if you pay only twice what you paid for the TV you're attaching it to.
Sometimes I'm inclined to get mad about govt and industry getting together on a plan to make the TVs we've all bought worthless, with as far as I can tell no input from any consumers. But then I remember, most of what's on TV is crap, so what do I care.
It's worth noting that, if you have cable, your cable company is not required to turn off analog service when analog broadcasts stop. It's up to them whether they continue it.
I will be so bold as to predict that PBS and other public TV orgs will start offering all their shows for download, and right there is most of what's worth watching.
I expect when the time comes I'll hardly notice the absence of broadcast TV.
On the subject of predicting technological development, here's a (possibly apocryphal) story.
Financier Roger Babson had a chat with Edison, in which he observed that most of Edison's inventions grew out of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, and posed the question, what area of science did Edison think would be next to yield important technological developments. Edison's answer was, Einstein's theory of gravitation. So Babson founded an institute to encourage research in gravitation (which is still around) (by which I mean the institute; of course gravitation is still around).
At this point it's plain to see Edison was wrong. But if you look at what was known at the time, it was an insightful guess. It's just that, as progress marched on, people discovered reasons why it's going to be very hard to make handy widgets that work based on Einstein's gravity theory -- the primary reason being that, in practical terms, it's so much weaker than EM.
The first question that leaps to mind, which none of the posted info answers, is how the heck do you compare gnutella to bittorrent? I mean, the gnutella network is used only for indexing, and the transfers are done by http, whereas bittorrent is for transfers (and there is no indexing). Did they take this into account? If so, how? Not clear to me how you'd figure out which http traffic was gnutella-related.
I don't know squat about eDonkey and Fasttrack, so I don't know how these considerations apply to them.
This article at Groklaw raises an interesting point (ok, it's a really long article, and the part I'm talking about is around paragraph 4), which I will expand on somewhat, about the competition between Windows and Linux. And that is, that Linux is competition for Windows, but Windows is not competition for Linux.
Microsoft wants Windows running on every computer in the world, because they make more money that way. If a computer is running Linux that could be running Windows, then Linux is eating their lunch; so to Microsoft, Linux is competition.
On the other hand, the crowd of people who brought us Linux don't have a similar need to have every computer in the world running Linux. You could call Windows competition to Redhat, Novell, and other Linux companies, but they are a small part of the giant crowd of people that produce Linux and all the other FOSS that runs on it. There are some benefits to an expanded user base, as it expands the pool of potential contributors to improving the software. And it's gratifying. But the FOSS crowd do not share Microsoft's need to be the only OS in the world. Hence Microsoft is not competition for Linux.
Seen in this light, it's clear why Microsoft wants more "studies" as FUD fodder, and why OSDL has no interest.
While this guy did remarkable things, I was always puzzled why he (and his co-awardees) got the prize for physics. I just don't see where they advanced our understanding of physics. I've heard this prize compared to Bardeen et al, but those guys made some fundamental advances in condensed matter physics on their way to the transistor. Never could see anything like that in this case. Maybe the Nobel committee felt a need to recognize this achievement, and the physics prize seemed more appropriate than the other choices.
If I recall correctly, the first Nobel prize in physics was for a gas regulator for lighted buoys. (The winner was, of course, Swedish.) So I guess there is some precedent.
Instead of trying to impose regulations, why not just let the free market decide?
Well, let's see, in my market all the TV stations are dual broadcasting in digital, and the cable companies are dual broadcasting in digital, and all the Best Buys et al are trying to sell digital TVs, and nobody is buying them, because they don't want them.
So, you see, the free market isn't coming up with the decision that the FCC wants. Hence, regulation is needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done stuff like this with computers for balloon payloads that go up in the stratosphere, where it's around -50 C. Here's two tricks that should help. Trick number one is build a box out of styrofoam building insulation and duct tape. Assuming you're in the US, you'll see a number printed on the insulation like "R5" or "R10." That's the thermal resistance, in BTUs, hours, deg F, and square feet. No, I'm not making that up. Guesstimate the power dissipation of the computer and use that to make the first design, then test and iterate. You'll want to stick a thermometer on the case or other convenient location. If this isn't reliable enough, then trick number two is design your insulated box to run a bit cold, and build a thermostatically controlled heater. We usually designed our own, because we like to do things the hard way, but I believe at someplace like Newark Electronics you can buy a little package that contains a heater and a bimetallic thermostat, you just supply the power.
There's an important legal difference between licenses like the GPL and BSD on the one hand, and Microsoft's EULA on the other. If you violate the EULA, Microsoft can take you to court for contract violation and/or copyright infringement. But if you "violate" the GPL, the only claim you can get hit with is copyright infringement. The key difference is that you "agreed" to the EULA, which then obligates you in certain ways; but you never had to agree to the GPL.
So if you're distributing linux w/o complying with the GPL, then you are infringing the copyright of about a bazillion people, and any one of them has standing to take you to court.
What very big company with enormous cash reserves is facing growing competition from open source software, and would find it convenient if said OSS got closed down by patent lawsuits, but would prefer to avoid the anti-trust prosecution that might result if they did it themselves?
Q. Why does a rabbi always answer a question with a question?
A. And why should a rabbi not always answer a question with a question?
To sustain this business model, this company is going to have to make sure nobody closes the huge loopholes in patent law on which they depend. So they're going to need to spend a lot of money on lobbying, and especially on the usual astroturfing and fake-think-tank PR firms. Here's a suggestion. Don't go around hiring the same old ones, because everybody knows they're fake. Especially don't hire the ones that have been outed by the tobacco lawsuits. Instead, start your own. How much can a dozen fake grassroots organizations cost? Seems like each one will only need about one employee, so you can have the whole dozen for well under $2 million a year. And here's another suggestion: set them to work doing plausible campaigns for whatever their ostensible purpose is, then they'll look more credible when they go to work on your issue. That way they won't come out looking like Americans for Tax Reform -- you have to look hard to find those Americans reforming any tax other than the tobacco tax.
The NASA PR machine has used the "constant repetition" technique to get Congress and the public to believe that the ISS has something to do with science. Apparently with some success. But this does not change the fact that there is no science, and there are no results.
You may think this is nuts, but this is what the law says. This is one reason why there a frequent clash between authorities and journalists is over revealing sources. The *source* of the classified info has committed a crime, so journalists who conceal their sources are concealing evidence in a criminal investigation.
Well, it certainly is the job of prosecutors to go after people who have broken the law. But it is not properly the job of prosecutors to spend their time constructing convoluted and questionable legal arguments so they can jail more people. The rule of law requires that it be clear what the law says. It's the worst kind of prosecutorial malfeasance to turn the law into a pretzel so you can harrass people that Dubya finds inconvenient.
See e.g. the fusion faq.
This He3 thing keeps coming up as an economic argument for a Moon base. But in addition to the point made in the review, that much development remains to make a He3 fusion process feasible, it also requires that, during the same time, nobody finds a better solution that does not require He3. This seems like a real slender thread to hang a big Moon infrastructure project on.
Let me add one other factoid. The last time we bought some He3, it was somewhere around $5000 per mole. So even if you went with straight He3 + D, which yields about 18 MeV, the cost for the He3 alone would come to around 1 cent per kilowatt hour. My electric company charges me a bit over 4 cents per KWh, so this seems in the ballpark already, without involving the moon. Of course, global He3 production will have to grow by a zillion times if people start using it for electricity, but the resulting economy of scale should make this cost even lower.
- I am aware of no functionality difference. Since I am assured that there is some difference, it must be in functionality I neither know nor care about.
- I don't know why there has to be a gnome version and a kde version of every application. Like the gnome and kde versions of ghostview, neither one of which improves on the original ghostview in any way I've found.
- The only difference I've found, and it's a trivial one, is that the gnome desktop looks good, and the kde desktop looks like crap. So I guess gnome has better artists. Like most Linux users, I take a lot of crap from my friends who use Windows, and when they see how amateurish kde looks, I hear about it.
I'd be interested if anyone wants to take pity on me and summarize a few differences between gnome and kde that I should care about.A couple posts have addressed your first point, and though we're a bit OT here I have something to say about your second point since it often appears in misinformation about US separation of church and state. It is no part of this principle that Congress should not be influenced by religious views in drafting legislation. The principle is that the government should not help or hinder or endorse or condemn one sect or religion relative to another.
Always refreshing to see a brief message well-packed with misinformation.
1. High field superconducting magnets don't need to use iron. They can far exceed the saturation field of iron, or any other ferromagnet.
2. Cyclotrons aren't used to accelerate electrons, they are used to accelerate ions.
3. Said accelerated ions can then participate in nuclear interactions, and I don't know of any other use for a cyclotron. I assume that's what you mean by "nuclear-splitting." In any case, radioactive materials can result. And the guy's stated intention is to make radioisotopes for medical procedures.
4. As others have pointed out, the guy is not building the cyclotron, it's being donated to him.
There are two problems in astrophysics in which dark matter is invoked as a possible explanation. One is the "galaxy problem": galactic rotation curves imply a distribution of matter different that you would infer from looking at the luminous matter. The other is the "cosmological problem": observation of redshift vs. distance, and of the cosmic microwave background, and other similar measurements imply a total mass density in the Universe different from what you would infer from looking at the luminous matter. Each of these problems can be explained with dark matter (e.g. some kind of extremely massive particles that only participate in the weak interaction, not yet observed). Sadly, the properties of the dark matter needed to solve these two problems are not necessarily the same.
This paper claims to eliminate the need for dark matter to solve the galaxy problem, but does not address the cosmology problem.
Sometimes I'm inclined to get mad about govt and industry getting together on a plan to make the TVs we've all bought worthless, with as far as I can tell no input from any consumers. But then I remember, most of what's on TV is crap, so what do I care.
It's worth noting that, if you have cable, your cable company is not required to turn off analog service when analog broadcasts stop. It's up to them whether they continue it.
I will be so bold as to predict that PBS and other public TV orgs will start offering all their shows for download, and right there is most of what's worth watching.
I expect when the time comes I'll hardly notice the absence of broadcast TV.
Good point. I'd overlooked that one.
Anybody know what's on the new civilian channel? e.g. is it the same kinda stuff as the two existing channels, on a new carrier? Or is it a new code?
Financier Roger Babson had a chat with Edison, in which he observed that most of Edison's inventions grew out of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, and posed the question, what area of science did Edison think would be next to yield important technological developments. Edison's answer was, Einstein's theory of gravitation. So Babson founded an institute to encourage research in gravitation (which is still around) (by which I mean the institute; of course gravitation is still around).
At this point it's plain to see Edison was wrong. But if you look at what was known at the time, it was an insightful guess. It's just that, as progress marched on, people discovered reasons why it's going to be very hard to make handy widgets that work based on Einstein's gravity theory -- the primary reason being that, in practical terms, it's so much weaker than EM.
I don't know squat about eDonkey and Fasttrack, so I don't know how these considerations apply to them.
Microsoft wants Windows running on every computer in the world, because they make more money that way. If a computer is running Linux that could be running Windows, then Linux is eating their lunch; so to Microsoft, Linux is competition.
On the other hand, the crowd of people who brought us Linux don't have a similar need to have every computer in the world running Linux. You could call Windows competition to Redhat, Novell, and other Linux companies, but they are a small part of the giant crowd of people that produce Linux and all the other FOSS that runs on it. There are some benefits to an expanded user base, as it expands the pool of potential contributors to improving the software. And it's gratifying. But the FOSS crowd do not share Microsoft's need to be the only OS in the world. Hence Microsoft is not competition for Linux.
Seen in this light, it's clear why Microsoft wants more "studies" as FUD fodder, and why OSDL has no interest.
If I recall correctly, the first Nobel prize in physics was for a gas regulator for lighted buoys. (The winner was, of course, Swedish.) So I guess there is some precedent.
You know what they say -- if it wasn't for Edison, we'd all be surfing the web by candlelight.
But we do have an option, since so far the FCC hasn't ruled that every home is required to have a TV.
So, you see, the free market isn't coming up with the decision that the FCC wants. Hence, regulation is needed.