Point taken, but for KDE to expand on the old functionality while reducing memory footprint by 40% is not a tradeoff - it's just a flat-out improvement.
Actually that brings up a good point. I can't believe they're wanting to go faster then the SR-71, or even as fast.
Is it possible that a scramjet could produce equal thrust at higher altitudes where there is less drag, thus increasing the speed without increasing stress on the airframe?
No kidding, you don't read about this type of upgrade very often. As a cheapskate, I think this is awesome. I'll not be holding my breath for Microsoft to announce XP's new reduced memory requirements (or - dare I say it - Apple about OSX).
That's not what I'm talking about. I already have a homebrew PVR. I'm talking about an off-the-shelf way to see this online content in full screen, rather than through a web interface.
Having shows available free online is great. The still-missing component, however, is a way to view online shows (be it from youtube, nbc.com, whomever) on your TV, at your convenience. I just can't believe tivo isn't all over this.
a researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia discovered that the development of a plug-in fuel cell hybrid, with as little as 20 miles of range from rechargeable hydrogen, could cut the amount of gasoline consumed in the United States by more than 50 percent. In addition, this technology could be mass produced in the next five years.
"About 47 percent of all miles put on vehicles in a day are within the first 20 miles of travel," said Galen Suppes, associate professor of chemical engineering at MU. "Furthermore, about 50 percent of the vehicles travel 20 miles or less per day, and this 20 mile distance is usually in inner-city travel where fuel economy for conventional internal combustion engines is poor and emissions have their greatest adverse affects."
.. when business takes priority to safety especially at a nuclear reactor.
You're missing the point. The nuclear materials they produce there are used for medical diagnoses. Ceasing to give people medical care may very well outweigh the risks of keeping the reactor open.
I would assume these systems get more accurate over time as more people use routing data.
Also, besides simply waiting for the technology to mature, delivery companies in particular are in the perfect position to gather valuable routing data (instead of just taking whatever Navteq gives them). Using the GPS on their vehicles, they should be tracking how long it takes to traverse each stretch of road and each intersection or turn, all depending on the day of week, time of day, etc. A simple rule such as "prefer right turns at all intersections" is an OK start, but it could get so much more detailed.
Many American kids may be disappointed on Christmas morning because the Sony PlayStation 2 they wanted wound up in Iraq.
Both the U.S. Customs Service and the FBI are investigating the apparent transfer of large numbers of Sony PlayStation 2s to Iraq, according to military intelligence sources.... "Most Americans don't realize that each PlayStation unit contains a CPU -- every bit as powerful as the processor found in most desktop and laptop computers," said one military intelligence officer who declined to be identified.
Bonus for the "think of the children" twist on that one.
Speaking of which, here's a photo of an Iran vs Spain matchup at RoboCup 2007, which was in Atlanta, GA. (Heck, I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of those Iranian university students do run seti@home). So, the idea that they're all just a bunch of backwards lunatics living in caves, and the surprise that they could somehow acquire commodity PC parts, seems a little odd to me.
Isn't it obvious? It wasn't relativity, the family lived an extra 22 milliseconds because they drove up a mountain
After noticing your comment I read the whole article just because 22 ms sounded like an impossibly large relativistic effect for a car. It was actually 22 nanoseconds. You're off by a factor of a million.
they're still hydrocarbons, so they still emit just as much CO2 into the atmosphere as burning coal or oil
But they suck up just that same amount when you grow the next crop. (Carbon neutral).
If we suddenly switched all our fuels to ethanol, we wouldn't have enough food to eat. Add to that the fact that many resources are used in the growing and harvesting of corn
It's widely know that corn is a poor biofuel crop. But even in the US, some biofuel production is already converting over to switchgrass which is a lot more efficient. I'm hoping the efforts to genetically modify slime mold will produce something even better. Remember, even the dino oil we're so conveniently extracting today started out as plants.
Sure, we could smooth out the peaks and valleys a bit with batteries, but the bottom line is that we can't build a robust power system based on something that could go away for days, even weeks at a time.
Oil from biofuel could be stored for a long time. So could hydrogen generated from (whatever).
Next up, plug your hydrogen car into the grid as a generator. Don't bother pointing out that all this conversion will lose some efficiency; of course it will. But think about the brownouts California was suffering a few summers ago. People will pay good money to escape no air conditioning, and some transmission loss doesn't change that.
He also raises good points... computers are hardly more than advertising pipelines
That statement is so ignorant it's borderline offensive. Computers can do a whole lot more than allow clueless users to surf fluff websites. Computers were already essential to anything resembling a modern economy even before the Internet took off. Let's just ignore 99.9% of the things the OLPC could do and assume for a moment it's used for nothing but to distribute textbook content. Can you imagine how that might be valuable to people with very little access to information?
Sounds like most of the resistance is from the fishing industry, but since it's not a very well proven technology, I'd say they have a fair point. So the current plan - to do some small proof-of-concept wave farms first - seems just the right thing to do. From the end of the article:
Philip D. Moeller, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a supporter of wave and tidal energy projects, said the government was "not allowing these to go into sensitive areas." Mr. Moeller added, "We haven't defined sensitive area, but the point is we'll be cognizant of that."
He said the commission was encouraging wave energy companies to seek a new five-year "pilot license" the commission has created specifically for wave and tidal energy projects. The license, which could be gained in six months, would let companies set up a short-term wave farm to test technology and demonstrate success to wary investors. If environmental damage became evident, he said, the equipment could be removed from the ocean fairly quickly, something that is far more complicated with dams.
The significant question is not whether behaviors are controlled by one gene or several genes, but whether behavior is controlled by genetics, period. ("Gene" is just a made-up organizational construct, anyways).
If there is a master race, who gets to decide which race it is?
Obviously that would be decided by genocidal warfare. The fact that Germany lost WWII doesn't speak too well for Hitler's theories. (On the other hand Germany's kill ratio was pretty high; they probably could have wiped out any adversary of comparable population to themselves.)
Maybe the dexterity is there, but I think there's some ways to go for the AI to do those other complicated tasks that can't be fully scripted.
I think laundry would be a very interesting problem because it requires you to work with fabric, which has "characteristics" rather than a particular shape. Forget rigid transformations! Maybe it has been researched, I haven't looked into it.
Robots offer an advantage over humans when every repeated action needs to be identical.
That's pretty much like surgery. Most medicine isn't about making up stuff on the spot or putting "your own riff" on a procedure, it's about carrying out a specific procedure in a specific way. Of course it's adapted to the specific variations in each body, but that's not necessarily so hard. A lot of it is like airline pilots. What they do is very easy, but we respect them because it's so important.
The vast majority of musical performances are already automated. A CD player is a robot which continuously moves its sensor and uses what it sees to create music. We give this robot no credit, instead we see right past any number of layers of technology all the way back to the person who originally "performed" the music (even though there never was any such live performance that sounded anything like the finished product). It will always be this way. When there's a #1 hit song written by AI, we won't think "wow that AI is amazing" we'll think "wow the people who created that program are great" (or horrible, depending on if you like the song).
Mod parent up! It's one thing to weld a door on a car but quite another to find a shirt in the dryer, iron it, undo all but the top botton, and hang it in the closet.
On the other hand, the legal punishment for murder (up to and including death) is far worse than for fornication (none). That means your analysis is missing something about how the US perceives the relative seriousness.
From the article: "Microsoft's call for changes to the system that would add features but increase its price could provoke a backlash from OLPC purists who maintain that the XO must be produced at the lowest cost possible."
Then I guess I'm a "purist" on this one. An internal SD slot would be nice, but then so would a Core 2 Duo... you have to draw the line and when you're shooting for $100 you have to draw it very soon. I don't think the OLPC will succeed by conforming to Wintel; by definition, if Microsoft really understood this niche, it wouldn't exist for OLPC to fill!
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Point taken, but for KDE to expand on the old functionality while reducing memory footprint by 40% is not a tradeoff - it's just a flat-out improvement.
No kidding, you don't read about this type of upgrade very often. As a cheapskate, I think this is awesome. I'll not be holding my breath for Microsoft to announce XP's new reduced memory requirements (or - dare I say it - Apple about OSX).
That's not what I'm talking about. I already have a homebrew PVR. I'm talking about an off-the-shelf way to see this online content in full screen, rather than through a web interface.
Having shows available free online is great. The still-missing component, however, is a way to view online shows (be it from youtube, nbc.com, whomever) on your TV, at your convenience. I just can't believe tivo isn't all over this.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031015031752.htm
a researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia discovered that the development of a plug-in fuel cell hybrid, with as little as 20 miles of range from rechargeable hydrogen, could cut the amount of gasoline consumed in the United States by more than 50 percent. In addition, this technology could be mass produced in the next five years.
"About 47 percent of all miles put on vehicles in a day are within the first 20 miles of travel," said Galen Suppes, associate professor of chemical engineering at MU. "Furthermore, about 50 percent of the vehicles travel 20 miles or less per day, and this 20 mile distance is usually in inner-city travel where fuel economy for conventional internal combustion engines is poor and emissions have their greatest adverse affects."
Also, besides simply waiting for the technology to mature, delivery companies in particular are in the perfect position to gather valuable routing data (instead of just taking whatever Navteq gives them). Using the GPS on their vehicles, they should be tracking how long it takes to traverse each stretch of road and each intersection or turn, all depending on the day of week, time of day, etc. A simple rule such as "prefer right turns at all intersections" is an OK start, but it could get so much more detailed.
Speaking of which, here's a photo of an Iran vs Spain matchup at RoboCup 2007, which was in Atlanta, GA. (Heck, I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of those Iranian university students do run seti@home). So, the idea that they're all just a bunch of backwards lunatics living in caves, and the surprise that they could somehow acquire commodity PC parts, seems a little odd to me.
Next up, plug your hydrogen car into the grid as a generator. Don't bother pointing out that all this conversion will lose some efficiency; of course it will. But think about the brownouts California was suffering a few summers ago. People will pay good money to escape no air conditioning, and some transmission loss doesn't change that.
The significant question is not whether behaviors are controlled by one gene or several genes, but whether behavior is controlled by genetics, period. ("Gene" is just a made-up organizational construct, anyways).
The vast majority of musical performances are already automated. A CD player is a robot which continuously moves its sensor and uses what it sees to create music. We give this robot no credit, instead we see right past any number of layers of technology all the way back to the person who originally "performed" the music (even though there never was any such live performance that sounded anything like the finished product). It will always be this way. When there's a #1 hit song written by AI, we won't think "wow that AI is amazing" we'll think "wow the people who created that program are great" (or horrible, depending on if you like the song).
Mod parent up! It's one thing to weld a door on a car but quite another to find a shirt in the dryer, iron it, undo all but the top botton, and hang it in the closet.
On the other hand, the legal punishment for murder (up to and including death) is far worse than for fornication (none). That means your analysis is missing something about how the US perceives the relative seriousness.
Then I guess I'm a "purist" on this one. An internal SD slot would be nice, but then so would a Core 2 Duo... you have to draw the line and when you're shooting for $100 you have to draw it very soon. I don't think the OLPC will succeed by conforming to Wintel; by definition, if Microsoft really understood this niche, it wouldn't exist for OLPC to fill!