Sure, the LCOSS is intended to crash, but I bet NASA will announce eventually that the probe missed, made a soft landing instead and is now sending data from the surface. Way to lower expectations, guys.
Putting hard things in the navigable waters is the bad idea as far as I am concerned.
Great, another form of NIMBY to contend with. The oceans are plenty big enough to allow for a few manmade structures here and there. It's not as if they've parked their turbine in the middle of the only available highway. And it's not as if this turbine is easily overlooked, either.
Besides, if we follow your argument, we wouldn't be able to use ships at all.
And that satellite collision had nothing to do with radar. Nobody puts any anti-collision hardware on board satellites.
--- have found possible new celestial phenomenon - stop - proof sent as electronumerical photograph following this message - stop - hcdejong - ends - START teletype-mime-v1.0 - 00011110101 11010101010 101101 110 1110101 0110 1010 10101 0101 1
continuing the line including producing accessories such as the vital battery and charger components.
If such accessories are vital, the damn toy should have been designed to accept generic batteries and charger instead of @#$$% proprietary consumables. This is one of the suckier aspects of capitalism.
Right, much like the nuclear program never resulted in anything useful. Or the rocket program. Or the jet engine. Or ARPANET.
Wartime/military. Military/cold war propaganda. British, not American, and wartime/military. Military. Granted, there have been significant civilian/peaceful side effects, but none of these projects were started by the US Government with civilian goals in mind.
Uh? VLC's default hotkey scheme may not be the best, but it's completely configurable which earns it +1000 karma points over just about every other player I've tried.
Apart from the issues of control over your data, access times etc:
One of the nice things about today's OSes is that they've forced applications to become reasonably consistent and interoperable. All my applications have similar UI, and the services offered by the OS mean that the apps can talk to each other.
Degrading the OS to just a host for the browser means you give up these services, and once again every application is a kingdom unto itself. The state of online apps today is similar to the less-functional, less visible OSes from 25 years ago, including the horrible and inconsistent UI, the lack of flexibility (no scripting, for instance), and the total lack of communication between apps hosted on different sites. And this time, because the apps are hosted on different sites, there's no OS vendor that can enforce consistecy and interoperability.
* Part of the reason is that Latex is not just about formulas. It's also about styles, lists, bibliography, cross referencing within your doc, etc, which WYSIWYG has not been able to get right so far, and for the needs of power-users, I suspect it never will.
Word != "every WYSIWYG editor on the market". You can do much better. FrameMaker, for instance has actual WYSIWYG (rather than Word's pathetic attempts at it), does styles, lists, xrefs flawlessly (and bibliography to an extent, not familiar enough with TeX to say if they're equivalent), and can separate style from content while still being WYSIWYG. Granted, FrameMaker is geared more towards technical manuals than scientific papers (so there's lots of features for reusing text, but its formula editor may be less extensive than TeX's capabilities), but it has sure met the needs of this power user (and I've been writing nonstop for the past 12 years).
Keyboard shortcuts are a must. Preferably for every single function in the program [1]. This gets more important if you decide to forego the OS standard widgets for menus etc. I've been working with a few programs that copy the MS Office Ribbon, and they're a nightmare to control from anything but the mouse. This is not just a problem for mouse-phobes, but macro/scripting applications like QuicKeys (which I use extensively) suffer as well: QuicKeys offers no mechanism for selecting items in a ribbon; you could set up mouse clicks, but since ribbons tend to grow and shrink, I find that doesn't work too well.
Also, if you optimize the UI for a single use case, make sure it's the correct one. One program I use always selects the wrong ribbon when I click inside a table.
1: even better: allow the user to configure all shortcuts to their liking. VLC gets this right. Most programs don't, and offer needlessly complicated shortcuts to boot.
The voicemail system of my previous phone provider was able to forward voicemails as audio attachments to an email. That avoids the speech-to-text problem, at the cost of making the email a lot larger (they used to send the audio as uncompressed WAV).
IIRC the cost of refueling was a major factor in that decision. Early designs needed refueling every few years, and this is a process that takes months.
Some additional data: according to this page, in 1993 a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier cost 20% more to operate than a conventional-powered carrier, mainly due to the extra cost of refueling and decommissioning (ie removal of the irradiated parts).
It seems to me that the Russians have realized that oil is something you want to use where replacing it is hard, i.e. in vehicles, not where you can easily replace it with something else (i.e. large stationary installations).
The Russians have been operating nuclear-powered icebreakers in that area for decades. This seems to be a similar design, just with a big generator attached.
This is already being done. Several European nuclear plants use fuel that consists in part of high-grade uranium from dismantled Russian warheads.
Electric power is hard to use for e.g. dump trucks. Even excavators move around so much that the risk of severing MW-rated power cables is too great. A hydrogen generation plant may be the answer, but that's rather inefficient. A nuclear powerplant weighs a lot, the current naval reactors are around 1000 metric tons. Smaller designs are feasible, but I suspect you get to a lower limit where you can't apply enough shielding (see the experiments to put a nuclear reactor aboard an airplane, the NB-36).
28.8 billion kWh/year is more than enough to 'change the power plants operating conditions'. A 125 MWe unit (the output of one generator of a nearby power station) delivers about 1 billion kWh/y, so shutting down all PCs at night would make a significant dent in the base load.
We really don't know how much oil there is down there, but it's not running out anytime soon.
We've a much better idea of how much oil is down there than in the 1920s. We've already found the easy/cheap-to-exploit stuff, any future finds will be more expensive than what we have now.
According to TFA, Shell have been investing in production facilities (wind farms), in that case they'd be selling energy, not technology. I seem to remember they used to be one of the biggest investors in PV plants, for which your comment would be true.
As for natural Gas, its completely clean..... It's even burning a renewable resource.
Natural gas is relatively clean in that there are very few byproducts (NOx etc.), but it still produces large amounts of CO2. And methane isn't renewable. Neither is hydrogen: we can produce hydrogen, but that invariably takes more power than a turbine burning hydrogen can produce so you're better off using the input power for the hydrogen generation process directly.
In the early '90s, $20k wasn't an unusual price for a tricked-out Mac. Machines like the IIfx and Quadra 950 cost damn near five figures in base spec; high-end video cards and accellerators weren't cheap either.
For this to be useful, the theatre would have to identify who's in which seat, which means a. showing ID when you buy tickets (and retaining the seating data for weeks or months) b. assigned seating.
It's almost as if they don't want people to go to the movie theatre any more.
I've run a Mini G4 off of an external disk for a year or two. This FireWire disk was the boot device, I even removed the internal disk. It was fast, and it seemed a bit quieter as well (less heat load in the Mini, so the fan rarely came on). The only problem with that setup is sleep/hibernate. Despite a hack that enables hibernation, in this configuration the computer would not hibernate at all. Sleep was iffy as well, with quite a few wakeup attempts ending in an unresponsive computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, the LCOSS is intended to crash, but I bet NASA will announce eventually that the probe missed, made a soft landing instead and is now sending data from the surface. Way to lower expectations, guys.
Putting hard things in the navigable waters is the bad idea as far as I am concerned.
Great, another form of NIMBY to contend with. The oceans are plenty big enough to allow for a few manmade structures here and there. It's not as if they've parked their turbine in the middle of the only available highway. And it's not as if this turbine is easily overlooked, either.
Besides, if we follow your argument, we wouldn't be able to use ships at all.
And that satellite collision had nothing to do with radar. Nobody puts any anti-collision hardware on board satellites.
IAU Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams
Telegrams?
continuing the line including producing accessories such as the vital battery and charger components.
If such accessories are vital, the damn toy should have been designed to accept generic batteries and charger instead of @#$$% proprietary consumables. This is one of the suckier aspects of capitalism.
Right, much like the nuclear program never resulted in anything useful. Or the rocket program. Or the jet engine. Or ARPANET.
Wartime/military. Military/cold war propaganda. British, not American, and wartime/military. Military. Granted, there have been significant civilian/peaceful side effects, but none of these projects were started by the US Government with civilian goals in mind.
GP omitted 'civilian', but was otherwise spot on.
compatibility prioritized over...
-A good hotkey scheme
Uh? VLC's default hotkey scheme may not be the best, but it's completely configurable which earns it +1000 karma points over just about every other player I've tried.
Apart from the issues of control over your data, access times etc:
One of the nice things about today's OSes is that they've forced applications to become reasonably consistent and interoperable. All my applications have similar UI, and the services offered by the OS mean that the apps can talk to each other.
Degrading the OS to just a host for the browser means you give up these services, and once again every application is a kingdom unto itself. The state of online apps today is similar to the less-functional, less visible OSes from 25 years ago, including the horrible and inconsistent UI, the lack of flexibility (no scripting, for instance), and the total lack of communication between apps hosted on different sites.
And this time, because the apps are hosted on different sites, there's no OS vendor that can enforce consistecy and interoperability.
* Part of the reason is that Latex is not just about formulas. It's also about styles, lists, bibliography, cross referencing within your doc, etc, which WYSIWYG has not been able to get right so far, and for the needs of power-users, I suspect it never will.
Word != "every WYSIWYG editor on the market". You can do much better. FrameMaker, for instance has actual WYSIWYG (rather than Word's pathetic attempts at it), does styles, lists, xrefs flawlessly (and bibliography to an extent, not familiar enough with TeX to say if they're equivalent), and can separate style from content while still being WYSIWYG.
Granted, FrameMaker is geared more towards technical manuals than scientific papers (so there's lots of features for reusing text, but its formula editor may be less extensive than TeX's capabilities), but it has sure met the needs of this power user (and I've been writing nonstop for the past 12 years).
a two-thousand ton manned space ship
By the time it reaches Hubble, the Shuttle weighs around 109 metric tons, not 2000.
Keyboard shortcuts are a must. Preferably for every single function in the program [1]. This gets more important if you decide to forego the OS standard widgets for menus etc.
I've been working with a few programs that copy the MS Office Ribbon, and they're a nightmare to control from anything but the mouse. This is not just a problem for mouse-phobes, but macro/scripting applications like QuicKeys (which I use extensively) suffer as well: QuicKeys offers no mechanism for selecting items in a ribbon; you could set up mouse clicks, but since ribbons tend to grow and shrink, I find that doesn't work too well.
Also, if you optimize the UI for a single use case, make sure it's the correct one. One program I use always selects the wrong ribbon when I click inside a table.
1: even better: allow the user to configure all shortcuts to their liking. VLC gets this right. Most programs don't, and offer needlessly complicated shortcuts to boot.
The voicemail system of my previous phone provider was able to forward voicemails as audio attachments to an email. That avoids the speech-to-text problem, at the cost of making the email a lot larger (they used to send the audio as uncompressed WAV).
a Canon instead.
IIRC the cost of refueling was a major factor in that decision. Early designs needed refueling every few years, and this is a process that takes months.
Some additional data: according to this page, in 1993 a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier cost 20% more to operate than a conventional-powered carrier, mainly due to the extra cost of refueling and decommissioning (ie removal of the irradiated parts).
It seems to me that the Russians have realized that oil is something you want to use where replacing it is hard, i.e. in vehicles, not where you can easily replace it with something else (i.e. large stationary installations).
The Russians have been operating nuclear-powered icebreakers in that area for decades. This seems to be a similar design, just with a big generator attached.
However you produce it, 70 MW of electrical power is going to have a lot of heat associated with it.
This is already being done. Several European nuclear plants use fuel that consists in part of high-grade uranium from dismantled Russian warheads.
Electric power is hard to use for e.g. dump trucks. Even excavators move around so much that the risk of severing MW-rated power cables is too great. A hydrogen generation plant may be the answer, but that's rather inefficient. A nuclear powerplant weighs a lot, the current naval reactors are around 1000 metric tons. Smaller designs are feasible, but I suspect you get to a lower limit where you can't apply enough shielding (see the experiments to put a nuclear reactor aboard an airplane, the NB-36).
28.8 billion kWh/year is more than enough to 'change the power plants operating conditions'. A 125 MWe unit (the output of one generator of a nearby power station) delivers about 1 billion kWh/y, so shutting down all PCs at night would make a significant dent in the base load.
We really don't know how much oil there is down there, but it's not running out anytime soon.
We've a much better idea of how much oil is down there than in the 1920s. We've already found the easy/cheap-to-exploit stuff, any future finds will be more expensive than what we have now.
According to TFA, Shell have been investing in production facilities (wind farms), in that case they'd be selling energy, not technology.
I seem to remember they used to be one of the biggest investors in PV plants, for which your comment would be true.
Shows you what you know...
Fact #1: Bats = bugs
and what group of species seems to be able to survive anything? Huh?
As for natural Gas, its completely clean. .... It's even burning a renewable resource.
Natural gas is relatively clean in that there are very few byproducts (NOx etc.), but it still produces large amounts of CO2. And methane isn't renewable. Neither is hydrogen: we can produce hydrogen, but that invariably takes more power than a turbine burning hydrogen can produce so you're better off using the input power for the hydrogen generation process directly.
In the early '90s, $20k wasn't an unusual price for a tricked-out Mac. Machines like the IIfx and Quadra 950 cost damn near five figures in base spec; high-end video cards and accellerators weren't cheap either.
6 years later, I got such a machine for free...
For this to be useful, the theatre would have to identify who's in which seat, which means
a. showing ID when you buy tickets (and retaining the seating data for weeks or months)
b. assigned seating.
It's almost as if they don't want people to go to the movie theatre any more.
I've run a Mini G4 off of an external disk for a year or two. This FireWire disk was the boot device, I even removed the internal disk. It was fast, and it seemed a bit quieter as well (less heat load in the Mini, so the fan rarely came on).
The only problem with that setup is sleep/hibernate. Despite a hack that enables hibernation, in this configuration the computer would not hibernate at all.
Sleep was iffy as well, with quite a few wakeup attempts ending in an unresponsive computer.