... this still seems like a pretty trivial problem to solve. I would imagine that the vast majority of these free protons would more-or-less immediately hook up with a passing water molecule to form a hydronium ion. Put a pair of electrodes in the water, run a small amount of current through it. The H3O+ ions will be attracted to the negative pole, start soaking up electrons, and... instant hydrogen, right? And the amount of electricity required would be way less than straight up electrolysis, since the only bond you would need to break would be the loose connection between the spare proton and the water molecule.
The really interesting question, though... is this process EVER going to be able to beat regular old electrolysis in terms of cost-effectiveness? Indium don't come cheap.
I'm as annoyed by the app store/iTunes store...
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iPad Jailbroken
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· Score: 1
... as the next guy, but - I've got an iPhone with many gigs of music... all as MP3s. I don't use it for reading that much, but I have read a few books... as PDFs or HTML. There are a lot of ePub books out there. You can get tons of free video from YouTube.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the iUniverse - but "locked down content" is not really one of them. There's tons of open content out there, and iDevices play it quite nicely.
Dude, the iPad is single-tasking. So if he was typing that post with one hand, then apparently the implication that he was pleasuring himself to... Slashdot.
One idea could be to create rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen which makes very good rocket fuel.
Right, and it's not like building an entire solar powered refinery on the freaking MOON would be expensive or anything. Who's paying for that? What are they getting out of their investment?
News flash: your proposed "solution" is also absolutely wildly expensive.
Problem: earth is overpopulated. Proposed solution: ship lots of people off earth. Actually achievable solution: control our tendency to reproduce out of control. For those who haven't noticed, the population growth rate has dropped off significantly in recent decades, and shows every sign of continuing to drop. Not to mention the fact that shipping lots of people off planet would be so unimaginably expensive that it's a total non-starter.
It's NOT an easy cruise to the moon, or mars, or anyplace else out there. We need some kick-ass, no-nonsense types to decide that we are going to space, then get it done.
No. What we really need to make manned missions to various celestial bodies is some reason to actually do it. Bringing fragile humans millions of miles through space, landing them, and bringing them back safely is really, really expensive. And what do you get out of it that you can't get from unmanned probes?
Blabbering and yakking about risk has it's place, but when it becomes the primary concern, nothing gets done.
NASA (like every other serious engineering outfit) balances the amount of risk they're willing to take against the payoff they think they'll get. NASA's clients, the American people, have very sensibly decided that they're not willing to get a bunch of astronauts killed for the extremely limited payoff involved. And OBTW - it's clear that you really don't think there's any place for the discussion of risk (hint: when you refer to risk discussions as "blabbering and yakking" it kind of gives away the game).
space exploration has the potential to drive demand to new highs so even if you found this 500k gold nugget it wouldn't matter, because the process of exploring space is going to consume massive resources.
So what you're saying is that we need to get cracking on mining space, because doing all this space stuff is going to consume a lot of resources? Let's think about that one a little more carefully, shall we?
this is why we need to figure out how to escape the earths gravity for much less then $20,000 a kg (the current cheapest price).
True, for what it's worth. But when are we going to figure this out? The answer seems to range somewhere between "not for a really, really long time" and "never". Until such time as the problem of cheap access to space is solved, these questions resemble nothing so much as "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"
I'm kinda with you on the QT problem... but it really has gotten to be less of a pain in the ass in its most recent incarnation. Apple still deserves some flak for the previous versions though, which really did suck pretty hard.
... are variations on the theme of "less capable than my netbook. No flash. Lame."
Dude, the raw quantity of bits moved over the internet by these things is not the most important measure of their influence. Book publishers, game designers, newspaper publishers, etc, etc, are falling all over themselves trying to get their products into the iPad. I'm sort of lukewarm toward the device myself... but I can still see that it's going to be a huge deal.
Frequent travellers. Right now, lots of folks who fly a lot are using Kindles. This thing does everything a Kindle does, plus web browsing, movie watching, e-mail, etc, etc. And it's a lot easier to haul out of your carry on than a laptop.
Also: grandma (and other tech challenged folks). What does grandma want to do with her computer? Same deal: e-mail, web, look at pictures of the grandkids, maybe a little Facebook, maybe a few games. What does grandma actually do with her computer? Mostly play Mah-Jongg, because she's got the computer so screwed up with various adware and configuration problems that she can't even get it connected to the internet anymore (why, yes, I am speaking from experience). Grandma will need to have a tech-savvy relative to give her this as a gift, though (probably), as she won't hear about or understand the iPad on on her own.
For everyone else: I'm not so sure. If you already have an iPhone and a good laptop, and you don't travel a lot, I'm having trouble understanding why you would need this. But between the two groups described above, plus a healthy dollop of geeks who just like to buy gadgets, I think Steve is going to sell a metric assload of these things.
Yeah, I get it... April Fools day. I'm splitting a gut laughing. But for FSM's sake, why the hell did you make it so you couldn't freaking turn off the video, or at least the sound? And how about mixing some actual goddamn content in with the joke stories?
Slashdot on 01 April: even more of a waste of time than usual. I'll spend my lunch hour looking at some non-annoying website today, thanks.
There's no reason why we can't have both - data backed up/synchronized to the "cloud", and applications that can continue to run on locally cached data when the network is unavailable for whatever reason. There are still some cases where this is problematic - e.g. my iPhone Google Maps application really doesn't work in the hinterlands, as the phone won't have the maps locally stored - but this is really just a problem of caches not being big enough or smart enough to do what we need. The problem will be partly solved by brute force - it looks like flash memory will continue to get more dense for a while - and partly by increased intelligence from the applications themselves. In the case of the maps application, it's easy to envision a more evolved version of Google maps realizing that I'm about to leave a cell phone coverage area, and in the background, downloading maps I'm likely to need before it's too late to get them.
I think this is really what TFA is trying to point out, but now I'm probably in contention for the Captain Obvious prize myself.
I'm an iPhone (3G) user, and found that I really didn't miss true multi-tasking. In practice, the stuff I want to be able to run in the background are the phone, text, and e-mail applications (for obvious reasons), and the iPod app (so I can play music while I'm doing something else). Practically speaking, I never really had any need for, say, Gas Cubby (or really, any 3rd party app) to continue running in the background while I did something else. This is not to say that nobody would ever need this - I can see where people would like to do things like listen to Pandora while doing other things... but so far I've never really needed anything like this.
... you're already unsafe. If you drove 12 hours a day, you'd be averaging more than 80 mph. Even if you drove 16 hours a day, you'd be averaging around 63 mph. So one of two things is going on here: you're either 1) driving at ridiculously unsafe speeds, or 2) you're driving so long without a break that your attention is bound to be wandering. Most likely both.
I agree with the larger point - when driving cross-country, it's just not practical (or necessary, really) to hold onto the steering wheel with both hands. But 1000 miles/day? Kind of a silly exaggeration.
I think I would slit my wrists if I had to work in an office where everyone spent all day talking to their computers rather than typing and/or mousing to communicate with them. There's a reason people don't work that way, and it's not the technology (which is pretty much there now). It's that people don't want that much yammering going on all the time.
I use MS-Hohm, and the purpose of it is the same as the Google offering - but instead of connecting to a smart meter, it wants to interface with your power company's billing system somehow. Unfortunately, neither my electric nor gas utility is affiliated with MS, so I have to pound in all my usage data by hand (easier than it sounds, but still more work than I'd like). You still do get a pretty good idea of your energy usage, but it's at the monthly level. The Google thing sounds like you'd get info in real time. But they are similar in principle - both are trying to get you information on energy usage, to help you figure out how to reduce it.
Per Article 1, Section 2: "The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
In other words, the government already has the power to ask what they want to ask in the Census. You people who want the Constitution to spell out in detail every activity the government might need to do crack me up. The Constitution is supposed to be an overall guide for running the government, not a detailed "here's how you do this" manual. If that was the case, nothing would ever get done because of the difficulty of passing amendments. Just as an example: the constitution only says that Congress shall "raise an Army". It doesn't say how big the Army should be, what can be done with the Army, how it can be equipped/armed, etc, etc. All that is (quite properly) left up to actual legislation. If we had to do figure all that out by passing constitutional amendments, the process of establishing the Army would take decades, would require the Constitution to balloon to millions of pages, and we'd have long ago been invaded by some other country with a form of government that actually works.
The idea that you can't do anything not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution is just dumb, and this was settled in law in like the freaking Jefferson administration (read about the Louisiana Purchase).
The racial data requested is pretty coarse-grained - they want to know if you're white, black, native American, or one of several Asian or Pacific Islander subgroups (not really sure why the Asian ethnicities are resolved so much more than other major groups, but whatever). They ask if you're hispanic in a separate question. There's no way to know, though, if you're of Arab descent from the census response. I suppose you could still round up individual Asian groups in some sort of detention camp scenario... but how likely is that, really? This is a whole lot of ado over not much of anything - the "controversy" is mostly being driven by a bunch of nutballs who will take absolutely any opportunity to screw with the evil government.
... is that it's "proliferation-resistant". These reactors use depleted uranium as fuel, and the waste products are such that you can't make nuclear weapons out of them. I suppose there's still a worry about the production of "dirty bombs", but my feeling is that that's more of a concern in theory than reality. From what I've read, it's kind of hard to make a dirty bomb that actually contaminates a wide area.
... the upshot: don't hold your breath. It turns out that achieving (or surpassing) energy break-even, as difficult as it is, is actually the least of your problems. Among the others: such reactors use deuterium/tritium fusion processes, and while deuterium is relatively plentiful on earth, tritium (with a half-life of around 5 days) is not. The reactor would need to breed its own tritium, and would need to do so with nearly 100% efficiency (in other words, virtually all the deuterium supplied to the breeding process would have to be converted to tritium for later fusion). If efficiency falls even slightly too low, the reactor runs out of fuel. We don't have a clue how to produce tritium with that kind of efficiency.
Also, a fusion reactor would cost huge amounts of money to build, which means that it needs to run as close to 24/7 as possible to recoup the investment. We likewise don't have a clue how to keep feeding fuel into the system and removing the waste products - the laser fusion systems require fuel pellets to be fed into the system at a pretty high rate... and the machinery that does this needs to do it while being exposed to several tiny fusion explosions per second. The tokamak based systems need to pump in D/T at pretty steady rates, and remove He... while the fusion reaction is still going on. These are very, very difficult engineering problems, and work on them has scarcely begun.
Finally, no one really knows how to extract energy from the reactor in useful form - in a fission reactor, fissioning atoms heat up the bulk material of the reactor, and heat is carried away by some fluid, which then turns a turbine. In a fusion reactor, your energy is produced mainly in the form of neutrons (don't remember if these are slow, fast, or what)... and you get this energy out of the system... how? Again, work on this question has barely begun.
This is not to say that fusion would NEVER work as a means of energy generation... but it does mean that we're not close. For the foreseeable future, nuclear energy is going to continue to mean fission (for better or worse).
Just because they're selling the security updates doesn't mean they're in violation. I think it's highly likely that Sun/Oracle will go right ahead and sell their updates, and make the source code available (via the web?) for the GNU parts. Offering the source for the GNU packages wouldn't cut into their sales much, as most of their customers are probably not inclined to compile this code for themselves anyway (if they were, my thinking is that they probably wouldn't be running Sun). And even if they were, they'd miss out on updates to the proprietary parts of the code.
I'm having trouble seeing what the big deal is here.
Sure, if they could force a bunch of people to get more expensive surgeries, they'd make more money. But really, how would that work? Insurance goons show up at my door and drill out my kneecaps if I don't get my appendix removed?
If what you're saying is that this rule would force insurers to pay for insurance that they should have been paying for all along... um, what was the problem again?
Slashdot Mirror
... this still seems like a pretty trivial problem to solve. I would imagine that the vast majority of these free protons would more-or-less immediately hook up with a passing water molecule to form a hydronium ion. Put a pair of electrodes in the water, run a small amount of current through it. The H3O+ ions will be attracted to the negative pole, start soaking up electrons, and... instant hydrogen, right? And the amount of electricity required would be way less than straight up electrolysis, since the only bond you would need to break would be the loose connection between the spare proton and the water molecule.
The really interesting question, though... is this process EVER going to be able to beat regular old electrolysis in terms of cost-effectiveness? Indium don't come cheap.
... as the next guy, but - I've got an iPhone with many gigs of music... all as MP3s. I don't use it for reading that much, but I have read a few books... as PDFs or HTML. There are a lot of ePub books out there. You can get tons of free video from YouTube.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the iUniverse - but "locked down content" is not really one of them. There's tons of open content out there, and iDevices play it quite nicely.
Dude, the iPad is single-tasking. So if he was typing that post with one hand, then apparently the implication that he was pleasuring himself to... Slashdot.
I need to go clean my brain now...
Since they never found the weapon in question, how did they even know which safety mechanisms had failed and which were still functioning?
Right, and it's not like building an entire solar powered refinery on the freaking MOON would be expensive or anything. Who's paying for that? What are they getting out of their investment?
News flash: your proposed "solution" is also absolutely wildly expensive.
Problem: earth is overpopulated. Proposed solution: ship lots of people off earth. Actually achievable solution: control our tendency to reproduce out of control. For those who haven't noticed, the population growth rate has dropped off significantly in recent decades, and shows every sign of continuing to drop. Not to mention the fact that shipping lots of people off planet would be so unimaginably expensive that it's a total non-starter.
No. What we really need to make manned missions to various celestial bodies is some reason to actually do it. Bringing fragile humans millions of miles through space, landing them, and bringing them back safely is really, really expensive. And what do you get out of it that you can't get from unmanned probes?
NASA (like every other serious engineering outfit) balances the amount of risk they're willing to take against the payoff they think they'll get. NASA's clients, the American people, have very sensibly decided that they're not willing to get a bunch of astronauts killed for the extremely limited payoff involved. And OBTW - it's clear that you really don't think there's any place for the discussion of risk (hint: when you refer to risk discussions as "blabbering and yakking" it kind of gives away the game).
So what you're saying is that we need to get cracking on mining space, because doing all this space stuff is going to consume a lot of resources? Let's think about that one a little more carefully, shall we?
True, for what it's worth. But when are we going to figure this out? The answer seems to range somewhere between "not for a really, really long time" and "never". Until such time as the problem of cheap access to space is solved, these questions resemble nothing so much as "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"
I'm kinda with you on the QT problem... but it really has gotten to be less of a pain in the ass in its most recent incarnation. Apple still deserves some flak for the previous versions though, which really did suck pretty hard.
... are variations on the theme of "less capable than my netbook. No flash. Lame."
Dude, the raw quantity of bits moved over the internet by these things is not the most important measure of their influence. Book publishers, game designers, newspaper publishers, etc, etc, are falling all over themselves trying to get their products into the iPad. I'm sort of lukewarm toward the device myself... but I can still see that it's going to be a huge deal.
Frequent travellers. Right now, lots of folks who fly a lot are using Kindles. This thing does everything a Kindle does, plus web browsing, movie watching, e-mail, etc, etc. And it's a lot easier to haul out of your carry on than a laptop.
Also: grandma (and other tech challenged folks). What does grandma want to do with her computer? Same deal: e-mail, web, look at pictures of the grandkids, maybe a little Facebook, maybe a few games. What does grandma actually do with her computer? Mostly play Mah-Jongg, because she's got the computer so screwed up with various adware and configuration problems that she can't even get it connected to the internet anymore (why, yes, I am speaking from experience). Grandma will need to have a tech-savvy relative to give her this as a gift, though (probably), as she won't hear about or understand the iPad on on her own.
For everyone else: I'm not so sure. If you already have an iPhone and a good laptop, and you don't travel a lot, I'm having trouble understanding why you would need this. But between the two groups described above, plus a healthy dollop of geeks who just like to buy gadgets, I think Steve is going to sell a metric assload of these things.
Yeah, I get it... April Fools day. I'm splitting a gut laughing. But for FSM's sake, why the hell did you make it so you couldn't freaking turn off the video, or at least the sound? And how about mixing some actual goddamn content in with the joke stories?
Slashdot on 01 April: even more of a waste of time than usual. I'll spend my lunch hour looking at some non-annoying website today, thanks.
There's no reason why we can't have both - data backed up/synchronized to the "cloud", and applications that can continue to run on locally cached data when the network is unavailable for whatever reason. There are still some cases where this is problematic - e.g. my iPhone Google Maps application really doesn't work in the hinterlands, as the phone won't have the maps locally stored - but this is really just a problem of caches not being big enough or smart enough to do what we need. The problem will be partly solved by brute force - it looks like flash memory will continue to get more dense for a while - and partly by increased intelligence from the applications themselves. In the case of the maps application, it's easy to envision a more evolved version of Google maps realizing that I'm about to leave a cell phone coverage area, and in the background, downloading maps I'm likely to need before it's too late to get them.
I think this is really what TFA is trying to point out, but now I'm probably in contention for the Captain Obvious prize myself.
I'm an iPhone (3G) user, and found that I really didn't miss true multi-tasking. In practice, the stuff I want to be able to run in the background are the phone, text, and e-mail applications (for obvious reasons), and the iPod app (so I can play music while I'm doing something else). Practically speaking, I never really had any need for, say, Gas Cubby (or really, any 3rd party app) to continue running in the background while I did something else. This is not to say that nobody would ever need this - I can see where people would like to do things like listen to Pandora while doing other things... but so far I've never really needed anything like this.
... you're already unsafe. If you drove 12 hours a day, you'd be averaging more than 80 mph. Even if you drove 16 hours a day, you'd be averaging around 63 mph. So one of two things is going on here: you're either 1) driving at ridiculously unsafe speeds, or 2) you're driving so long without a break that your attention is bound to be wandering. Most likely both.
I agree with the larger point - when driving cross-country, it's just not practical (or necessary, really) to hold onto the steering wheel with both hands. But 1000 miles/day? Kind of a silly exaggeration.
I think I would slit my wrists if I had to work in an office where everyone spent all day talking to their computers rather than typing and/or mousing to communicate with them. There's a reason people don't work that way, and it's not the technology (which is pretty much there now). It's that people don't want that much yammering going on all the time.
I use MS-Hohm, and the purpose of it is the same as the Google offering - but instead of connecting to a smart meter, it wants to interface with your power company's billing system somehow. Unfortunately, neither my electric nor gas utility is affiliated with MS, so I have to pound in all my usage data by hand (easier than it sounds, but still more work than I'd like). You still do get a pretty good idea of your energy usage, but it's at the monthly level. The Google thing sounds like you'd get info in real time. But they are similar in principle - both are trying to get you information on energy usage, to help you figure out how to reduce it.
Per Article 1, Section 2: "The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
In other words, the government already has the power to ask what they want to ask in the Census. You people who want the Constitution to spell out in detail every activity the government might need to do crack me up. The Constitution is supposed to be an overall guide for running the government, not a detailed "here's how you do this" manual. If that was the case, nothing would ever get done because of the difficulty of passing amendments. Just as an example: the constitution only says that Congress shall "raise an Army". It doesn't say how big the Army should be, what can be done with the Army, how it can be equipped/armed, etc, etc. All that is (quite properly) left up to actual legislation. If we had to do figure all that out by passing constitutional amendments, the process of establishing the Army would take decades, would require the Constitution to balloon to millions of pages, and we'd have long ago been invaded by some other country with a form of government that actually works.
The idea that you can't do anything not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution is just dumb, and this was settled in law in like the freaking Jefferson administration (read about the Louisiana Purchase).
The actual form can be seen online here.
The racial data requested is pretty coarse-grained - they want to know if you're white, black, native American, or one of several Asian or Pacific Islander subgroups (not really sure why the Asian ethnicities are resolved so much more than other major groups, but whatever). They ask if you're hispanic in a separate question. There's no way to know, though, if you're of Arab descent from the census response. I suppose you could still round up individual Asian groups in some sort of detention camp scenario... but how likely is that, really? This is a whole lot of ado over not much of anything - the "controversy" is mostly being driven by a bunch of nutballs who will take absolutely any opportunity to screw with the evil government.
I looked at that article, saw 4,508 days... and read it as 4.508 days. My mistake.
... is that it's "proliferation-resistant". These reactors use depleted uranium as fuel, and the waste products are such that you can't make nuclear weapons out of them. I suppose there's still a worry about the production of "dirty bombs", but my feeling is that that's more of a concern in theory than reality. From what I've read, it's kind of hard to make a dirty bomb that actually contaminates a wide area.
... the upshot: don't hold your breath. It turns out that achieving (or surpassing) energy break-even, as difficult as it is, is actually the least of your problems. Among the others: such reactors use deuterium/tritium fusion processes, and while deuterium is relatively plentiful on earth, tritium (with a half-life of around 5 days) is not. The reactor would need to breed its own tritium, and would need to do so with nearly 100% efficiency (in other words, virtually all the deuterium supplied to the breeding process would have to be converted to tritium for later fusion). If efficiency falls even slightly too low, the reactor runs out of fuel. We don't have a clue how to produce tritium with that kind of efficiency.
Also, a fusion reactor would cost huge amounts of money to build, which means that it needs to run as close to 24/7 as possible to recoup the investment. We likewise don't have a clue how to keep feeding fuel into the system and removing the waste products - the laser fusion systems require fuel pellets to be fed into the system at a pretty high rate... and the machinery that does this needs to do it while being exposed to several tiny fusion explosions per second. The tokamak based systems need to pump in D/T at pretty steady rates, and remove He... while the fusion reaction is still going on. These are very, very difficult engineering problems, and work on them has scarcely begun.
Finally, no one really knows how to extract energy from the reactor in useful form - in a fission reactor, fissioning atoms heat up the bulk material of the reactor, and heat is carried away by some fluid, which then turns a turbine. In a fusion reactor, your energy is produced mainly in the form of neutrons (don't remember if these are slow, fast, or what)... and you get this energy out of the system... how? Again, work on this question has barely begun.
This is not to say that fusion would NEVER work as a means of energy generation... but it does mean that we're not close. For the foreseeable future, nuclear energy is going to continue to mean fission (for better or worse).
Just because they're selling the security updates doesn't mean they're in violation. I think it's highly likely that Sun/Oracle will go right ahead and sell their updates, and make the source code available (via the web?) for the GNU parts. Offering the source for the GNU packages wouldn't cut into their sales much, as most of their customers are probably not inclined to compile this code for themselves anyway (if they were, my thinking is that they probably wouldn't be running Sun). And even if they were, they'd miss out on updates to the proprietary parts of the code.
I'm having trouble seeing what the big deal is here.
Sure, if they could force a bunch of people to get more expensive surgeries, they'd make more money. But really, how would that work? Insurance goons show up at my door and drill out my kneecaps if I don't get my appendix removed?
If what you're saying is that this rule would force insurers to pay for insurance that they should have been paying for all along... um, what was the problem again?