Honestly, this is very lame indeed: 365 Hectares? Jebus. Robert Bussard's Polywell Fusion reactor will pump out 100MW and take up the same amount of floor space as a shipping container. It'll probably be set for production about 2015 or so - making all this eco-generation utterly irrelevant.
I'm so happy about this I could burst! We are SOOOOOO close to this I can just about taste it. The world is going to be a very different place with Polywell DD Reactors. I'm trying to figure out what it means for the standard of living for the millions (Billions?) of people who currently have to spend all day searching for wood to cook their meals, and have to go to sleep when the sun goes down.
I reckon that 30 years of investing could result in teh 3rd world draggingitself out of the dark ages. Just a single cooking ring, and a single light bulb per mud hut will bring wondrous changes to these people's lives - just as it did in South Africa after Apartheid fell.
I'm really looking forward to stable economies in Africa: it could be the first time in the history of the world where the nomadic life, and the associated wars it brings leave Africa behind for good.
At Christ's College, NZ, in 1978, they ran the southern hemisphere's largest high school computer/network, a Digital PDP-11 and a whole bunch of gigantic dumb terminals. As students a few of us continually busted the system wide open, just as fast as the PC "Techs" at school, and the coders at Digital could close the holes. The fact that any file prefixed with a 9, as in "9cat" always allowed previous "Privileged Status" programs to run again, until we cracked our way in again...
However, the best and most reliable way to hack in was to simply reboot the system, and when you got the Dec-Writer output that said "RT-11 Basic Loaded", you could pop the door open on the DX01 (System) 8" floppy drive, and the boot process would fail before any security had been applied to the system, so all logins were priveleged...
When some idiot spilled the beans on that they simply put a lock on the power supply system which fed the computer with power. They didn't figure on us walking 40 metres to an electrical control panel in a small tunnel leading under the building, and flicking the circuit breaker for the computer lab, did they?:)
Then, although not a bug, we created a program to copy out the password file to readable text. Our system administrator used the following passwords for his "00" login; JFMAMJ, JASOND, BOSS, SYSAD, and the list continued, hilariously, including the name of his dog, too, from memory.
I created a hack on our school outdoor sports scoring system, which exploited the fact that if you left the username blank, and put something in the password field, it logged you on as admin... I didn't do any sports for a whole semester.:)
Acoustic optimisation can onyl get you so far. In other words, you reduce fans/propellors from "an ear damaging roar" to simply "extremely fucking loud". There's only so much you can do to quieten fans;
You can get cute and use TMD (Tip Magnetic Drive) fan blades, which have no ends (its thought that tip vortex at the end of fan blades is responsible for much of the noise associated with fans and blades) and you could spend millions designing the most efficient blades possible.
Hell, you could even bet that in a few years the next generation of memetic polyalloys (T1000 et al) or "memory metals" will even allow the actual blades to change shape depending on their rotational speed, thus reducing noise still further.
But the fact remains, on a 2000 KG car, you need at least 2000 KG of vertical thrust to keep it in the air, and 2000 KG of thrust is a LOT. Are you seriously suggesting that fan blades can be made as quiet as say - a 5-litre V8 car at 6000 rpms? No way. Not gonna happen. Not ever.
Unless some way can be made to shift large amounts of air, efficiently, with no blades at all, then the Moller thing will never be anything more than a fucking dangerous, extremely noisy experimental demonstrator.
I'm still hanging out for effective anti-gravity. After all, it's such a weak force, that 2 AA batteries should be powerful enough to keep your car airborn for a year or so. Then all you need is some way to move it about, and you only need one engine for that - so it'd be much quieter.
It's not the engines which are noisy on Moller's ultra-dangerous thing (I refuse to dignify it with the title "car" or "aircraft" as it is neither) it's the fans/propellers which make all the noise. You simply can't move lots of air without making a hell of a racket.
Look, missing something by several klicks isn't exactly dangerous is it? So what if space junk is falling? Meteors do too - and yet you don't hear about pilots complaining about the dangers of being hit by a meteor do you?
I imagine that even if you could launch every single aeroplane in the world, at the same time, and simultaneously de-orbited every single piece of stuff in orbit (including GSO objects, and even the very distant objects) other than the moon, then the chances of any piece colliding with an airborne plane would still be in the tens-of-millions-to-one-against category.
Stupid media sensationalism at its very worst; nothing to see here folks - move along.
It appears, on the face of it, that this European bureaucrat is far smarter, and far more interested in her constituents' rights and freedoms than her American counterparts.
Maybe it's because there aren't multibillion dollar lobby groups in Europe working hard to corrupt and destroy their system of government? Of course, it always helps if you have a corrupt and criminal team running a country in the first place.
The other thing it could indicate is stupid people saying things they don't believe because they feel guilty about not believing, or "answer bias" where they say what they think they *should* say.
The other indication is that Americans are ignorant, mindless sheep who have no ability or training in the fine art of distinguishing fact from fiction. (This is NOT an insult: ignorance can be cured! It's the fault of the US Edumicational sys-thiny.) An almost complete lack of scepticism, and a fine ability to be lead by the nose by power-mad fucktards.
Think about it: no Internet Radio = more file sharing. Increased file sharing means more music available via P2P, and if its torrented, faster too. It also means, more dark-net p2p applications will be developed specifically to replace Internet Radio.
Great move RIAA! Now you have shot yourself in BOTH feet; how are you going to stand up?
Slashdotted? That site is the slowest lump of shit I've seen in months. (No comments about the fast lumps of shit I've seen please; none of them were aimed at ME!) Any self-respecting web server would just post an error, or at least simply fail to load the page. But 12 minutes has elapsed, and the pages are STILL loading at what I think is 14 BAUD.
The interesting part is that the whole page loads - except for the article content itself. I didn't know it was possible to force adverts ahead of text content. Weird.
I remain boggled by the universal use of "could care less" by Americans when it means the exact opposite of what you intend. In NZ we make a bit more sense, by saying "I couldn't care less" - but we say it with a funny accent, to make you laugh.
- Relatively low murder rate - Democracy in more than name only - Mostly WASP population - English Speaking - Technologically forward looking - Good infrastructure - No thought police, DMCA or Dumbya.
Just liek a work of art, today's technology products are merely abandoned, and never complete. You can ALWAYS continue to refine and improve a product, but companies require a return on investment, so development work is abandoned.
Even if work was allowed to continue, no product would ever be "complete".
The result is products which are "good enough for most of our customers".
You want Product X - well, you can have it: a) never, or b) bloody soon, but slightly less than perfect.
There was nothing unsolicited about this! Thousands of complaints over many months. Many articles in the national papers about pathetic "Go Large" plan: many users experiencing 30 secodn delays before pages STAR loading, NO email, and transfer rates less than 10KB/s.
No - there was a MAJOR move against Telecom for a long time. The Telecommunications ombudsman was involved, and so was the Commerce Commission by way of the Telecommunications Commissioner and his department.
Telecom was FORCED into this. Nothing could be less like NZ Telecom than to give away money it doesn't have to. And, they HAD to.
Thankfully, I'm on their "Unconstrained" plan with 40 GB a month for $119.90 - but my upstream and downstream is limited only by the machines I connect with. I regularly see transfer rates in excess of 600Kb/s upstream and on a good server, I'll see better than 5Mb/s downstream, averaged over a 2GB file. No complaints about my connection - except how fucking pricey it is!
But they need all the money they can get: the CVD (Chief Value Destroyer) Theresa Gattung (ex-CEO, now CVD) is leaving with a multimillion dollar handshake, despite overseeing 2.5 billion dollars lost (stolen) from shareholders funds. The fact she stood at the Telecom Boardroom table for more than 5 years, with her fingers in her ears shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" over and over again, while the government shouted "Open Up or Be Legislated against" can't be more clear. She ignored the warnings, lost Mom-and-Pop investors many many hundreds of millions of dollars, and what does she get in return? Tar and feathers, and a blacklist for any CEO job ever? NO - she takes 5 million in cash, and laughs all the way to the bank.
Fucking bitch.
I would have fucked Telecom's users and shareholders over for a LOT less than that.
The return on investment is HEAVILY in favor of the F-22. There is no aircraft anywhere even close.
That is precisely WHY it's useless. There's no reason to own a nuke when your worst enemy only has a hand grenade.
No - The F22 has already fulfilled its mission nicely: made a lot of folk richer in the states where it was designed and built. THAT was the mission of the F22. Sort of like the mission of the ABMDS is to keep people employed in the states where senators required that pork.
You're looking at this issue from the viewpoint of 20th century tech.
What you do not account for is a fusion reactor the size of a shipping container, producing several megawatts, running on D/T in a non-radioactive system, designed by Dr. Bussard.
Honestly, you don't think we're going to collect sunlight to generate power do you? Come on - Prometheus might be dead for now, but the tiny fusion reactors in our near future are going to change just about every aspect of life on this planet, and beyond.
Bussard (on spherical containment vessels - as opposed ot the useless ITER/tokomak): "The physics is done. Now it's just engineering, and 200 million dollars will get us there."
OK, so the pedants say a radar gun isn't admissible as evidence of speeding for the reasons given - BUT, you can't argue with a movie with a time stamp each frame.
Film offenders moving between two points. Take the start time, the end time, and simple math gives you average speed betwene two points. No need for a radar - and you have the film evidence which would be hard to fake.
This is the same technique cops use, with their "two strips on the road" sensors, which time the delay between impacts and calculate a speed from it. No radar detector can get out of that one. (But eagle eyes, and attentive driving will.)
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you are in the USA? So you should be able to sue for "wrongful death"? Surely?
Not if you have a Motorola RAZR: it's anodized Aluminium, and damn tough if I do say so myself.
Boring. Lame. Buried.
Ooops - wrong site.
Honestly, this is very lame indeed: 365 Hectares? Jebus. Robert Bussard's Polywell Fusion reactor will pump out 100MW and take up the same amount of floor space as a shipping container. It'll probably be set for production about 2015 or so - making all this eco-generation utterly irrelevant.
I'm so happy about this I could burst! We are SOOOOOO close to this I can just about taste it. The world is going to be a very different place with Polywell DD Reactors. I'm trying to figure out what it means for the standard of living for the millions (Billions?) of people who currently have to spend all day searching for wood to cook their meals, and have to go to sleep when the sun goes down.
I reckon that 30 years of investing could result in teh 3rd world draggingitself out of the dark ages. Just a single cooking ring, and a single light bulb per mud hut will bring wondrous changes to these people's lives - just as it did in South Africa after Apartheid fell.
I'm really looking forward to stable economies in Africa: it could be the first time in the history of the world where the nomadic life, and the associated wars it brings leave Africa behind for good.
OK, so I'm dreaming...
easyGestures is much better than the gestures extension they promote.
Pie Menus are, for my money, the best UI improvement since the invention of Content Senstive Help.
At Christ's College, NZ, in 1978, they ran the southern hemisphere's largest high school computer/network, a Digital PDP-11 and a whole bunch of gigantic dumb terminals. As students a few of us continually busted the system wide open, just as fast as the PC "Techs" at school, and the coders at Digital could close the holes. The fact that any file prefixed with a 9, as in "9cat" always allowed previous "Privileged Status" programs to run again, until we cracked our way in again...
:)
:)
However, the best and most reliable way to hack in was to simply reboot the system, and when you got the Dec-Writer output that said "RT-11 Basic Loaded", you could pop the door open on the DX01 (System) 8" floppy drive, and the boot process would fail before any security had been applied to the system, so all logins were priveleged...
When some idiot spilled the beans on that they simply put a lock on the power supply system which fed the computer with power. They didn't figure on us walking 40 metres to an electrical control panel in a small tunnel leading under the building, and flicking the circuit breaker for the computer lab, did they?
Then, although not a bug, we created a program to copy out the password file to readable text. Our system administrator used the following passwords for his "00" login; JFMAMJ, JASOND, BOSS, SYSAD, and the list continued, hilariously, including the name of his dog, too, from memory.
I created a hack on our school outdoor sports scoring system, which exploited the fact that if you left the username blank, and put something in the password field, it logged you on as admin... I didn't do any sports for a whole semester.
Acoustic optimisation can onyl get you so far. In other words, you reduce fans/propellors from "an ear damaging roar" to simply "extremely fucking loud". There's only so much you can do to quieten fans;
You can get cute and use TMD (Tip Magnetic Drive) fan blades, which have no ends (its thought that tip vortex at the end of fan blades is responsible for much of the noise associated with fans and blades) and you could spend millions designing the most efficient blades possible.
Hell, you could even bet that in a few years the next generation of memetic polyalloys (T1000 et al) or "memory metals" will even allow the actual blades to change shape depending on their rotational speed, thus reducing noise still further.
But the fact remains, on a 2000 KG car, you need at least 2000 KG of vertical thrust to keep it in the air, and 2000 KG of thrust is a LOT. Are you seriously suggesting that fan blades can be made as quiet as say - a 5-litre V8 car at 6000 rpms? No way. Not gonna happen. Not ever.
Unless some way can be made to shift large amounts of air, efficiently, with no blades at all, then the Moller thing will never be anything more than a fucking dangerous, extremely noisy experimental demonstrator.
I'm still hanging out for effective anti-gravity. After all, it's such a weak force, that 2 AA batteries should be powerful enough to keep your car airborn for a year or so. Then all you need is some way to move it about, and you only need one engine for that - so it'd be much quieter.
It's not the engines which are noisy on Moller's ultra-dangerous thing (I refuse to dignify it with the title "car" or "aircraft" as it is neither) it's the fans/propellers which make all the noise. You simply can't move lots of air without making a hell of a racket.
See: Overclocked PCs, Helicopters, Jet Engine, extractor fan, air conditioner, Vacuum cleaner...
It wouldn't matter if Moller's thing had fuel cells - it would just as noisy.
Look, missing something by several klicks isn't exactly dangerous is it? So what if space junk is falling? Meteors do too - and yet you don't hear about pilots complaining about the dangers of being hit by a meteor do you?
I imagine that even if you could launch every single aeroplane in the world, at the same time, and simultaneously de-orbited every single piece of stuff in orbit (including GSO objects, and even the very distant objects) other than the moon, then the chances of any piece colliding with an airborne plane would still be in the tens-of-millions-to-one-against category.
Stupid media sensationalism at its very worst; nothing to see here folks - move along.
New Zealand
It appears, on the face of it, that this European bureaucrat is far smarter, and far more interested in her constituents' rights and freedoms than her American counterparts.
Maybe it's because there aren't multibillion dollar lobby groups in Europe working hard to corrupt and destroy their system of government? Of course, it always helps if you have a corrupt and criminal team running a country in the first place.
The other thing it could indicate is stupid people saying things they don't believe because they feel guilty about not believing, or "answer bias" where they say what they think they *should* say.
The other indication is that Americans are ignorant, mindless sheep who have no ability or training in the fine art of distinguishing fact from fiction. (This is NOT an insult: ignorance can be cured! It's the fault of the US Edumicational sys-thiny.) An almost complete lack of scepticism, and a fine ability to be lead by the nose by power-mad fucktards.
That's great news. No, really.
Think about it: no Internet Radio = more file sharing. Increased file sharing means more music available via P2P, and if its torrented, faster too. It also means, more dark-net p2p applications will be developed specifically to replace Internet Radio.
Great move RIAA! Now you have shot yourself in BOTH feet; how are you going to stand up?
Not Available in New Zealand!
Dag-Nabbit! Who organised this stupid eclipse?
Slashdotted? That site is the slowest lump of shit I've seen in months. (No comments about the fast lumps of shit I've seen please; none of them were aimed at ME!) Any self-respecting web server would just post an error, or at least simply fail to load the page. But 12 minutes has elapsed, and the pages are STILL loading at what I think is 14 BAUD.
The interesting part is that the whole page loads - except for the article content itself. I didn't know it was possible to force adverts ahead of text content. Weird.
Executable data in DNA is life.
And not to worry; we'll have that well cracked soon enough.
I remain boggled by the universal use of "could care less" by Americans when it means the exact opposite of what you intend. In NZ we make a bit more sense, by saying "I couldn't care less" - but we say it with a funny accent, to make you laugh.
Try New Zealand:
- Relatively low murder rate
- Democracy in more than name only
- Mostly WASP population
- English Speaking
- Technologically forward looking
- Good infrastructure
- No thought police, DMCA or Dumbya.
I stopped reading the intro as soon as I read "gotten ahold".
That's a sure sign I've forgotten more English than the poster ever knew.
"It'll cost a lot of money to re-encode our entire catalog in MP3 format. We want our customers to pay that."
Have you ever heard of "Batch Processing"? o_O
The whole job would take one guy one morning: and a whole bunch of CPU cycles.
Just liek a work of art, today's technology products are merely abandoned, and never complete. You can ALWAYS continue to refine and improve a product, but companies require a return on investment, so development work is abandoned.
Even if work was allowed to continue, no product would ever be "complete".
The result is products which are "good enough for most of our customers".
You want Product X - well, you can have it:
a) never, or
b) bloody soon, but slightly less than perfect.
Which do you choose?
There was nothing unsolicited about this! Thousands of complaints over many months. Many articles in the national papers about pathetic "Go Large" plan: many users experiencing 30 secodn delays before pages STAR loading, NO email, and transfer rates less than 10KB/s.
No - there was a MAJOR move against Telecom for a long time. The Telecommunications ombudsman was involved, and so was the Commerce Commission by way of the Telecommunications Commissioner and his department.
Telecom was FORCED into this. Nothing could be less like NZ Telecom than to give away money it doesn't have to. And, they HAD to.
Thankfully, I'm on their "Unconstrained" plan with 40 GB a month for $119.90 - but my upstream and downstream is limited only by the machines I connect with. I regularly see transfer rates in excess of 600Kb/s upstream and on a good server, I'll see better than 5Mb/s downstream, averaged over a 2GB file. No complaints about my connection - except how fucking pricey it is!
But they need all the money they can get: the CVD (Chief Value Destroyer) Theresa Gattung (ex-CEO, now CVD) is leaving with a multimillion dollar handshake, despite overseeing 2.5 billion dollars lost (stolen) from shareholders funds. The fact she stood at the Telecom Boardroom table for more than 5 years, with her fingers in her ears shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" over and over again, while the government shouted "Open Up or Be Legislated against" can't be more clear. She ignored the warnings, lost Mom-and-Pop investors many many hundreds of millions of dollars, and what does she get in return? Tar and feathers, and a blacklist for any CEO job ever? NO - she takes 5 million in cash, and laughs all the way to the bank.
Fucking bitch.
I would have fucked Telecom's users and shareholders over for a LOT less than that.
No - The F22 has already fulfilled its mission nicely: made a lot of folk richer in the states where it was designed and built. THAT was the mission of the F22. Sort of like the mission of the ABMDS is to keep people employed in the states where senators required that pork.
You're looking at this issue from the viewpoint of 20th century tech.
What you do not account for is a fusion reactor the size of a shipping container, producing several megawatts, running on D/T in a non-radioactive system, designed by Dr. Bussard.
Honestly, you don't think we're going to collect sunlight to generate power do you? Come on - Prometheus might be dead for now, but the tiny fusion reactors in our near future are going to change just about every aspect of life on this planet, and beyond.
Bussard (on spherical containment vessels - as opposed ot the useless ITER/tokomak): "The physics is done. Now it's just engineering, and 200 million dollars will get us there."
OK, so the pedants say a radar gun isn't admissible as evidence of speeding for the reasons given - BUT, you can't argue with a movie with a time stamp each frame.
Film offenders moving between two points. Take the start time, the end time, and simple math gives you average speed betwene two points. No need for a radar - and you have the film evidence which would be hard to fake.
This is the same technique cops use, with their "two strips on the road" sensors, which time the delay between impacts and calculate a speed from it. No radar detector can get out of that one. (But eagle eyes, and attentive driving will.)