take a leaf out of the solar power generators referred t oa couple of weeks ago?
Rather than having massive acapcitor banks to balance the load, what's to stop us letting the windfarm run free, using all the energy to liquefy salts (by simple heating elements with low inductance, so phase-lag isn't an issue), then feeding the heat energy into the grid via turbines?
Either that, or have a big capacitance and an invertor on each windmill.
How dare you discriminate against those poor people that can earn obscene amounts of money by learning how to pass MCSE exams without the slightest bit of computer expertise?
You, sir, are a cad, and a Unix elitist bastard. Anyone knows that true enterprise solutions only require a few mouse clicks to configure, and that manuals are for those who have overstayed their contracts.
It's about 10 minutes walk from here, and I don't slag Samba (good people working to fix a bad protocol), just SMB and Microsoft's insistence on sticking with it.
My point (well. part of it - the rest you can dismiss as devilment if you wish) is that the testing and validation of drugs goes way beyond what is sensible, because the current litigation climate forces it to.
That's why I propose to make 'caveat emptor' more important than the percieved rights of Tom, Dick and Harriet to sue the ass off a company because there may be a possibility that that company's product killed Uncle Ted, when Uncle Ted was going to die anyway of some virulent disease that the company tried to cure.
There is such a thing as too much law, and there is such a thing as too little law.
Patents and copyrights are, to my way of thinking, too much law just as much as the fulfilment of spurious lawsuits against corporations is.
Perhaps if all drugs were under a 'no warrant to perform... no liability to any damage to your systems' EULA, we'd treat the law differently.
IP includes drugs too. If no company could protect its investment in research by being allowed a limited time monopoly, then no new drugs would come to light.
Sorry to say this, old son, but you're talking crap.
A lack of pharmaceutical patents would lead only to the development of more complex formulations, and a reduction in the excessive timeframes that pharmaceutical companies have to exploit new drugs by ripping off the taxpayer/health insurer.
Let's look at how a truly free pharmaceutical system would work.
Company X develops a treatment Y for disease Z.
If Y is a simple compound, and Z is a pernicious disease, X can gain major kudos for releasing the details of Y freely, or X can develop a formulation of Y that is sufficiently complex to baffle X's competitors for a few years, allowing X to profit from Y.
If Y is a sufficiently complicated compound, X has a head start on its competitors, and should make hay while the sun shines.
I believe that the removal of pharmaceutical patents would harm stockholders in pharm companies, but would benefit the human race as a whole, since companies would be likely to turn over simple, generic compounds quickly, freeing up tax money for better healthcare. Of course, a reduction in the state regulatory framework would be required, along with the courts being required to impose the principle of 'caveat emptor' to mitigate the threat of lawsuits, but I firmly believe that the benefits of bringing drugs quickly to market, with the prospect of affordable generics for the mass of humanity, outweigh any possible gains to the legal community.
Consider it this way - using proprietary package Foo, you are reliant on the producers of the software to eliminate bugs (which most suppliers will do for no cost) and to add new features that the user base requires/requests (which normally come via new software versions, at an economic cost to you).
You may be happy with that state of affairs - most people are.
Contrast that with the free equivalent of Foo (call it GNU/Foo), where the producers and users of the software cooperate to remove bugs and add new features, and in addition you are free to take your time to read the source and add your own new features or fix bugs you have found.
Note that unless you wish to distribute the software to others, you can carry on using your own copy of the software yourself, without having to use the GPL.
But try to think of yourself as an altrusitic member of the human race - if you have fixed something, or added a feature, are you confident enough in your own abilities to continue to find work that you are prepared to release your improvements to everyone, or are you just an insecure and hidebound traditionalist who thinks that they should profit whatever they do?
The whole point of the RMS point of view, so far as I can see, is to be an altruist, and to trust to ones own skill to earn a living.
Private knowledge, however valuable in the short term, will inevitably be lost unless it is set free - to the detriment of everyone for the short term betterment of one individual, one corporation, one state, etc.
Ok - this has been marked as flamebait, but it deserves a response just the same.
I don't care what dumb yanks think, but Stallman certainly isn't dumb.
His ideas of free software have applications and implications far outside the narrow area of software - they could apply for instance to:
political writings, where free distribution is more important than profit from book sales
socially useful inventions, where the free dissemination of knowledge far outweighs the profit imperative
any area of intellectual endeavour where the producers of knowledge have enough conscience that they are willing and able to release their ideas without being influenced by greed.
It's idealism, I know - why else would the Founders have thought it necessary to implement the copyright and patent systems.
But the world needs idealists like Stallman (and Paine, Thoreau, Russell etc.) who have no interest in expanding their own personal power, but only a wish to see others allowed to learn and grow.
Re:The worst of it all...
on
SCO Nigerian Spam
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The whole point of a Nigerian scam is that the victim thinks that they're getting on the inside of some crooked scheme.
As the Q&A states, by the time SCO wins (if this worst case scenario is accepted), there will be a clean version of Linux available, because SCO will by then have had to identify the offending code in open court.
If the code is identified, it can be fixed.
So the solution is simple - ignore SCO until doomsday or they win the court case (whichever comes first), then upgrade to the newly de-SCOd Linux, and flip McBride and Sontag the bird.
Yep - it's our National Grid that took over NiMo, got rid of some 800 jobs (mainly in engineering), and pocketed an extra $90 million per year in profit.
These are the people that have done the same to the UK grid, resulting in vastly increased downtime during the regular line failures caused by winter storms.
Last winter, we had to import French power engineers to get the lines fixed, and communities were without electricity for up to a week.
Still - it could be worse - Railtrack virtually banned preventative maintenance on our railways when rail was privatised, bumped up the contractor costs so that new rail builds were uneconomic, and eventually failed while walking away with the property portfolio worth around $9 billion. Imagine if they had taken over!
Back at the end of the 1980s, I worked for a US firm with manufacturing plants in France.
Because the French Government of the time made encrypiting emails illegal, we were under strict instructions not to send any technical information to our French colleagues via email - we had to use the postal service instead.
The idea of a PDE, so far as I can make out, is to gain maximum thrust from minimum fuel, using detonation rather than deflagration to make that possible.
Even the Pratt & Whitney has a rotating valve plate, and to me at least, the idea of using ordinary automotive exhaust gases to provide the initial shock wave is extremely neat.
They might get even better performance using a diesel engine - if they screw with the exhaust valve timings, they should be able to get very high speed shock waves in the exhaust flow.
You're right though - it looked like a very pristine engine.
While the 'spin current' described is free of dissipation, Stern-Gerlach detectors require the electrons themselves to be moving.
Moving electrons = standard electric current = dissipation of energy in non-superconductors.
So in order to detect the spin, we need at least some current, and will inevitably generate some heat.
I'm sure that there are ways around this, but currently available detectors aren't likely to feature in the eventual solution.
Re:Another "thing" they are working on - In Israel
on
Building a Better Bomb
·
· Score: 1
Those would be the 'terrorists' that haven't been tried and convicted, who happen to be targeted as they are driving down the road?
The 'terrorists' who happen to operate out of the densely populated urban areas in which they live?
The 'terrorists' who are in fact resisting an illegal and brutal occupation?
It's very nice that the Israelis can effectively take out a car with minimal damage outside the vehicle (when they hit it, that is), but it doesn't make extrajudicial assasinations right.
There's still a hardcore (~20%) nationalist vote in Wales, but South Wales is now so Anglicised that Labour tend to win in elections, and since that's where most of the population is, there's little hope of a proper Welsh state now or in the future.
Still, we Celts can dream.
Up North, the Scottish Socialists are as good a bet for future success - they are nationalist, but have more attractive policies for the urban areas.
Sorry, I'm Welsh and an admirer of the Chartists myself.
You have to admit, though, that easter1916 does have connotations. Personally, I agree with what the IRA was doing then - fighting on the barricades against the troops is a lot different than bombing shopping arcades.
Slashdot Mirror
That has to be the ultimate insult.
Couldn't think of a proper car to beat a Honda, or were you just going for the worst case scenario?
There are more important things than straight line speed, but I can't think of them right now.
Rather than having massive acapcitor banks to balance the load, what's to stop us letting the windfarm run free, using all the energy to liquefy salts (by simple heating elements with low inductance, so phase-lag isn't an issue), then feeding the heat energy into the grid via turbines?
Either that, or have a big capacitance and an invertor on each windmill.
How dare you discriminate against those poor people that can earn obscene amounts of money by learning how to pass MCSE exams without the slightest bit of computer expertise?
You, sir, are a cad, and a Unix elitist bastard. Anyone knows that true enterprise solutions only require a few mouse clicks to configure, and that manuals are for those who have overstayed their contracts.
Have to say I agree with you 100% though ; /.
If it's the UK, try Hadfield (aka Royston Vaisey)
It's about 10 minutes walk from here, and I don't slag Samba (good people working to fix a bad protocol), just SMB and Microsoft's insistence on sticking with it.
Are you local?
My point (well. part of it - the rest you can dismiss as devilment if you wish) is that the testing and validation of drugs goes way beyond what is sensible, because the current litigation climate forces it to.
That's why I propose to make 'caveat emptor' more important than the percieved rights of Tom, Dick and Harriet to sue the ass off a company because there may be a possibility that that company's product killed Uncle Ted, when Uncle Ted was going to die anyway of some virulent disease that the company tried to cure.
There is such a thing as too much law, and there is such a thing as too little law.
Patents and copyrights are, to my way of thinking, too much law just as much as the fulfilment of spurious lawsuits against corporations is.
Perhaps if all drugs were under a 'no warrant to perform... no liability to any damage to your systems' EULA, we'd treat the law differently.
Sorry to say this, old son, but you're talking crap.
A lack of pharmaceutical patents would lead only to the development of more complex formulations, and a reduction in the excessive timeframes that pharmaceutical companies have to exploit new drugs by ripping off the taxpayer/health insurer.
Let's look at how a truly free pharmaceutical system would work.
Company X develops a treatment Y for disease Z.
If Y is a simple compound, and Z is a pernicious disease, X can gain major kudos for releasing the details of Y freely, or X can develop a formulation of Y that is sufficiently complex to baffle X's competitors for a few years, allowing X to profit from Y.
If Y is a sufficiently complicated compound, X has a head start on its competitors, and should make hay while the sun shines.
I believe that the removal of pharmaceutical patents would harm stockholders in pharm companies, but would benefit the human race as a whole, since companies would be likely to turn over simple, generic compounds quickly, freeing up tax money for better healthcare. Of course, a reduction in the state regulatory framework would be required, along with the courts being required to impose the principle of 'caveat emptor' to mitigate the threat of lawsuits, but I firmly believe that the benefits of bringing drugs quickly to market, with the prospect of affordable generics for the mass of humanity, outweigh any possible gains to the legal community.
You may be happy with that state of affairs - most people are.
Contrast that with the free equivalent of Foo (call it GNU/Foo), where the producers and users of the software cooperate to remove bugs and add new features, and in addition you are free to take your time to read the source and add your own new features or fix bugs you have found.
Note that unless you wish to distribute the software to others, you can carry on using your own copy of the software yourself, without having to use the GPL.
But try to think of yourself as an altrusitic member of the human race - if you have fixed something, or added a feature, are you confident enough in your own abilities to continue to find work that you are prepared to release your improvements to everyone, or are you just an insecure and hidebound traditionalist who thinks that they should profit whatever they do?
The whole point of the RMS point of view, so far as I can see, is to be an altruist, and to trust to ones own skill to earn a living.
Private knowledge, however valuable in the short term, will inevitably be lost unless it is set free - to the detriment of everyone for the short term betterment of one individual, one corporation, one state, etc.
Ramble over.
One word.
Spam.
Maybe by the time you're a release candidate, you'll have stopped getting pissed off by PC language usage.
There are egregiously stupid examples of politically correct usage, but using 'she' interchangably with 'he' is one of the less offensive.
When Babbage was creating his Difference Engines, who do you think was involved in working out with him how algorithms could be implemented on them?
Ada fscking Lovelace, that's who. Byron's niece, and definitely a human of the female gender.
From contemporary engravings, she was damn attractive, too.
I don't care what dumb yanks think, but Stallman certainly isn't dumb.
His ideas of free software have applications and implications far outside the narrow area of software - they could apply for instance to:
political writings, where free distribution is more important than profit from book sales
socially useful inventions, where the free dissemination of knowledge far outweighs the profit imperative
any area of intellectual endeavour where the producers of knowledge have enough conscience that they are willing and able to release their ideas without being influenced by greed.
It's idealism, I know - why else would the Founders have thought it necessary to implement the copyright and patent systems.
But the world needs idealists like Stallman (and Paine, Thoreau, Russell etc.) who have no interest in expanding their own personal power, but only a wish to see others allowed to learn and grow.
And the SCO pump-and-dump is what, precisely?
If the code is identified, it can be fixed.
So the solution is simple - ignore SCO until doomsday or they win the court case (whichever comes first), then upgrade to the newly de-SCOd Linux, and flip McBride and Sontag the bird.
These are the people that have done the same to the UK grid, resulting in vastly increased downtime during the regular line failures caused by winter storms.
Last winter, we had to import French power engineers to get the lines fixed, and communities were without electricity for up to a week.
Still - it could be worse - Railtrack virtually banned preventative maintenance on our railways when rail was privatised, bumped up the contractor costs so that new rail builds were uneconomic, and eventually failed while walking away with the property portfolio worth around $9 billion. Imagine if they had taken over!
Dontcha just love deregulation?
Because the French Government of the time made encrypiting emails illegal, we were under strict instructions not to send any technical information to our French colleagues via email - we had to use the postal service instead.
Even the Pratt & Whitney has a rotating valve plate, and to me at least, the idea of using ordinary automotive exhaust gases to provide the initial shock wave is extremely neat.
They might get even better performance using a diesel engine - if they screw with the exhaust valve timings, they should be able to get very high speed shock waves in the exhaust flow.
You're right though - it looked like a very pristine engine.
No - the reason why it isn't used is because the vast majority of it was erroneous, muddleheaded, and generally unsound scientifically.
While the 'spin current' described is free of dissipation, Stern-Gerlach detectors require the electrons themselves to be moving.
Moving electrons = standard electric current = dissipation of energy in non-superconductors.
So in order to detect the spin, we need at least some current, and will inevitably generate some heat.
I'm sure that there are ways around this, but currently available detectors aren't likely to feature in the eventual solution.
The 'terrorists' who happen to operate out of the densely populated urban areas in which they live?
The 'terrorists' who are in fact resisting an illegal and brutal occupation?
It's very nice that the Israelis can effectively take out a car with minimal damage outside the vehicle (when they hit it, that is), but it doesn't make extrajudicial assasinations right.
Still, we Celts can dream.
Up North, the Scottish Socialists are as good a bet for future success - they are nationalist, but have more attractive policies for the urban areas.
You have to admit, though, that easter1916 does have connotations. Personally, I agree with what the IRA was doing then - fighting on the barricades against the troops is a lot different than bombing shopping arcades.
I'd assumed you were an American - my bad.