Many/most countries with restrictive visas (eg. student/tourist visas) would charge/deport someone for working without suitable work permits. I know people who have been blacklisted from USA (never allowed to even land in transit in USA) for overstaying a visa by one day.
I predict this will bomb for one reason, and one reason only: music portability (through format or DRM). Anyone doing legitimate purchases of commercial tracks will have more money sunk into music than the device.
I also predict success for one reason, and one reason only: Heavy grinding by the Microsoft Machine that bulldozes their way into amy market thay want by. FUD, etc etc. The only unside being better integration into Windows (possibly).
I don't think the spyware issue is anything typical users care about. I don't think iTunes is really anything special.
Apart from the fact that "squirting" evokes images of Clinton and dresses, probably close to 0% of potential customers would have heard or registered this dopey statement. For most people it didn't even happen.
Of course I didn't RTFA, because that's cheating, but anodising and various paints can produce a reasonable result (say 70-80% effective) for pennies per sq foot. Since collected heat is proportional area * efficiency, you could get the same result by using 20-50% more area.
Slide rules: very few still in use today, but they were very important from 1620's (when they were invented) until the 1970/1980s -- 350 years.
Now, a calculator older than 5 years is a historical curiosity (although I still use a 15-year old calculator on a day-to-day basis).
What we're seeing is a shortened lifetime for calculators, software, etc. which probably makes documentation less important (excpet for historical curiosity). You would not realisticly expect any software / device you design now to be in use 350 or 2000 years from now.
Ever since the '50s (Turing et al), the big AI/robots goal has been to replicate human behaviour. Perhaps this is an unrealistic goal for now. Perhaps a more realistic goal is to try replicate the behaviour of a fly or other insect.
Last night I spent 5 minutes trying to kill a fly with a flyswat. That little sucker sure had good self-preservation instincts (better than any robot playing hide and seek). And the fly can find food, breed etc.
Burping, but ruminant animals (cows, sheep etc), produces far more methane than these animals farting. Apparently the greenhouse gas output of 1 sheep is equivalent to driving 1200km.
Lots of methane comes from anaerobic activity (rotting vegetation/sawdust, landfills, waste water processing etc). Even atural swamps and forest floor decomposition produce a lot of methane and CO2.
Methane is far worse than CO2, thus it is preferable to burn off methane than let is escape into the atmosphere. Better still to burn it and extract power.
But the major interesting factor is that the methane levels have stabilised without understanding why. Likely it is being changed into CO2 by some process which is not well understood. Likely too, all the atmospheric carbon models are way to simplistic to really predict what is going to happen 10, 50 or a hundred years out.
It is very easy to say that FOSS communities are broken, but they depend on people, which are inherently broken.
The major difference between FOSS and other communities are that the people in a FOSS community share far fewer specific goals than other communities. Some people want something fixed **now**. Others want it fixed **properly**, no matter how long that takes. Others just piss and moan.
A regular thermal power station has approx the same heat to energy conversion ratio.
This device does not make "free heat", the heat still needs to come from somewhere. However, if it is small enough and cheap enough it could be used with solar thermal concentrators and overcome all the photovoltaic problems associated with solar to electric conversion.
The knee-jerk answer is globalisation of values from watching too much American TV.
The other answer is that it is a matter of times changing in generations. The '60s kids might have had demonstrations etc, but at least their parents were giving them the "Be polite when you talk to a policeman". If you talked back to mum or a teacher then, you'd have copped a thrashing. Now, two generations on and these forces have been eroded.
When the young bull of the herd clashes with the old bull, he's not necessarily trying to win. More likely he really wants the comportable feedback that there is a strong bull in charge of the herd. Likewise, it is in a young person's nature to test the boundaries and authority. In the past, society and family gave strong boundaries. Now the boundaries are fewer, but kids still want to find them. They now just need to do more extreme things to find them, by which stage they've committed severe crimes.
First off, the apparent lack of interest thus far is only that, an **apparent** lack of interest. They've probably being cuddling in private for many years, just waiting for the right moment.
There is also a good reason to hold hack a bit. Nobody wants to flood the world with gear that goes obsolete very quickly. If they'd been trying to roll these plans out even two years back, the whole scheme would have flopped. It is better to hold back a bit until the critical mass/killer app point is reached. Also, a couple of years back, things were still blurry enough that people would have not understood Wifi vs cell phone (like some dumbfucks still don't understand Wifi vs Bluetooth). People (consumer level) are now getting sufficiently sophisticated to understand what Wifi is.
I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist, but when I see huge amounts of money/effort being pushed into activities which divert the world from more important goals I wonder.... Perhaps the idea is to really divert efforts into lost causes so that we keep our hydrocarbon habit intact.
To be a viable energy source, you don't just need to prove it can work in theory, but also need to reach a low enogh $ per Watt threshold.
One of my pet hates is the way the photovoltaic industry showcases products through the Austalian solar race. This, and most of the competition between the PV labs, focusses on efficiency (light->electricity), and not the more important goal of reaching low $ per W. For example, the top-end vehicles in the Australian solar race will have PV panels costing tens of thousands of dollars - not exactly practical for real purposes.
For most practical energy purposes, $/W is all that matters. So what if it is only 5% efficient.... I'll tile my roof with the stuff.
I know there is the camp that says that all the bleeding edge research will give spin-offs (like how space flights gave us non-stick frying pans... yeah right), but that is a myth. It is like suggesting that Formula 1 engine design will give better engines for everyday use. This is just not so. The goals of F1 engine design are to give max power for a couple of hours; it does not matter if the engine blows up after 4 hours of use or if it has to be stripped and rebuilt after every race. That mindset is completely hopeless for everyday vehicles.
See. This is a very bright kid. His mother says so. By 5 he was playing chemistry sets, and by 9 was changing batteries.
FOR FUCK SAKES PEOPLE: I know many kids, including myself & my own two kids who did simple chemistry set stuff at less than 5 and tasks more complex than changing batteries in cars long before 9, and explosives etc before ten.
I doubt this is real fusion & will remain sceptical until somebody in a white lab coat and thick glasses confirms it. Sorry mom, your opinion doesn't count.
The cops don't carry guns. A number of cops carry tasers, introduced this year, but have to attend a training course on how to use them, protocol, etc. During this course, some of the cops get shot with the taser so everyone can see what's involved. If they use the tasers (even draw them from their holsters), they have to fill out shitloads of paperwork. Of the times that the tasers have been drawn, in most situations the suspect has submitted and has not had to be shot.
Sure, a guidance system will have accelerometers, but by far the more important part is the gyro. The Wii does not have a gyro. While silicon gyros do exist, they're still relatively large and expensive.
It is pretty arrogant to assume that our transient information is so important. SOme huge % of email is spam, some huge % of the web is just crap. Surely keeping all this stuff is a complete waste of time?
I am not at all adverse to people making models, nor even making guesses. That is all science is: a set of models and guesses. However these models are very often based on pretty dodgy assumptions and often don't scale well. "Scientific" announcements should be made in ways that make this clear.
The models used here might be completely accurate. They might also be just a reasonable approximation for some coditions, and might be an appaling approximation when you step outside those conditions. A bit like Newtonian physics: fine at 100mph, but pretty crappy at 0.9C. Except though that Newton at least had the presence of mind to say that his laws of motion were the best he could come up with at the time and with the tools available and would likely fall apart under certain conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
The RealWorld is completely suck in the UK. Crap weather, crap beaches, crap everything. No wonder they want to lose themselves in a little HD world.
Many/most countries with restrictive visas (eg. student/tourist visas) would charge/deport someone for working without suitable work permits. I know people who have been blacklisted from USA (never allowed to even land in transit in USA) for overstaying a visa by one day.
So instead of your roofing blowing off, now your whole house blows away!
I also predict success for one reason, and one reason only: Heavy grinding by the Microsoft Machine that bulldozes their way into amy market thay want by. FUD, etc etc. The only unside being better integration into Windows (possibly).
I don't think the spyware issue is anything typical users care about. I don't think iTunes is really anything special.
Apart from the fact that "squirting" evokes images of Clinton and dresses, probably close to 0% of potential customers would have heard or registered this dopey statement. For most people it didn't even happen.
Lots of selling points: No office space costs. Employees pay for own coffee. Envionmentally friendly. It is the new wave.
Of course I didn't RTFA, because that's cheating, but anodising and various paints can produce a reasonable result (say 70-80% effective) for pennies per sq foot. Since collected heat is proportional area * efficiency, you could get the same result by using 20-50% more area.
Slide rules: very few still in use today, but they were very important from 1620's (when they were invented) until the 1970/1980s -- 350 years.
Now, a calculator older than 5 years is a historical curiosity (although I still use a 15-year old calculator on a day-to-day basis).
What we're seeing is a shortened lifetime for calculators, software, etc. which probably makes documentation less important (excpet for historical curiosity). You would not realisticly expect any software / device you design now to be in use 350 or 2000 years from now.
I agree not to leave this thing lying around for people to discover in 2000 years time. I agree not to reverse engineer this device......
Homeschooling.
do you really want to be embraced by a Frenchman?
Last night I spent 5 minutes trying to kill a fly with a flyswat. That little sucker sure had good self-preservation instincts (better than any robot playing hide and seek). And the fly can find food, breed etc.
Lots of methane comes from anaerobic activity (rotting vegetation/sawdust, landfills, waste water processing etc). Even atural swamps and forest floor decomposition produce a lot of methane and CO2.
Methane is far worse than CO2, thus it is preferable to burn off methane than let is escape into the atmosphere. Better still to burn it and extract power.
But the major interesting factor is that the methane levels have stabilised without understanding why. Likely it is being changed into CO2 by some process which is not well understood. Likely too, all the atmospheric carbon models are way to simplistic to really predict what is going to happen 10, 50 or a hundred years out.
The major difference between FOSS and other communities are that the people in a FOSS community share far fewer specific goals than other communities. Some people want something fixed **now**. Others want it fixed **properly**, no matter how long that takes. Others just piss and moan.
This device does not make "free heat", the heat still needs to come from somewhere. However, if it is small enough and cheap enough it could be used with solar thermal concentrators and overcome all the photovoltaic problems associated with solar to electric conversion.
The other answer is that it is a matter of times changing in generations. The '60s kids might have had demonstrations etc, but at least their parents were giving them the "Be polite when you talk to a policeman". If you talked back to mum or a teacher then, you'd have copped a thrashing. Now, two generations on and these forces have been eroded.
When the young bull of the herd clashes with the old bull, he's not necessarily trying to win. More likely he really wants the comportable feedback that there is a strong bull in charge of the herd. Likewise, it is in a young person's nature to test the boundaries and authority. In the past, society and family gave strong boundaries. Now the boundaries are fewer, but kids still want to find them. They now just need to do more extreme things to find them, by which stage they've committed severe crimes.
There is also a good reason to hold hack a bit. Nobody wants to flood the world with gear that goes obsolete very quickly. If they'd been trying to roll these plans out even two years back, the whole scheme would have flopped. It is better to hold back a bit until the critical mass/killer app point is reached. Also, a couple of years back, things were still blurry enough that people would have not understood Wifi vs cell phone (like some dumbfucks still don't understand Wifi vs Bluetooth). People (consumer level) are now getting sufficiently sophisticated to understand what Wifi is.
Now is the time to scramble in this space.
If you want the moon to be a planet, and greased the right palms, you could probably swing it.
To be a viable energy source, you don't just need to prove it can work in theory, but also need to reach a low enogh $ per Watt threshold.
One of my pet hates is the way the photovoltaic industry showcases products through the Austalian solar race. This, and most of the competition between the PV labs, focusses on efficiency (light->electricity), and not the more important goal of reaching low $ per W. For example, the top-end vehicles in the Australian solar race will have PV panels costing tens of thousands of dollars - not exactly practical for real purposes.
For most practical energy purposes, $/W is all that matters. So what if it is only 5% efficient.... I'll tile my roof with the stuff.
I know there is the camp that says that all the bleeding edge research will give spin-offs (like how space flights gave us non-stick frying pans... yeah right), but that is a myth. It is like suggesting that Formula 1 engine design will give better engines for everyday use. This is just not so. The goals of F1 engine design are to give max power for a couple of hours; it does not matter if the engine blows up after 4 hours of use or if it has to be stripped and rebuilt after every race. That mindset is completely hopeless for everyday vehicles.
FOR FUCK SAKES PEOPLE: I know many kids, including myself & my own two kids who did simple chemistry set stuff at less than 5 and tasks more complex than changing batteries in cars long before 9, and explosives etc before ten.
I doubt this is real fusion & will remain sceptical until somebody in a white lab coat and thick glasses confirms it. Sorry mom, your opinion doesn't count.
"I will not sit by..." No, but you'll hide in your little AC hole which is even more pathetic!
The cops don't carry guns. A number of cops carry tasers, introduced this year, but have to attend a training course on how to use them, protocol, etc. During this course, some of the cops get shot with the taser so everyone can see what's involved. If they use the tasers (even draw them from their holsters), they have to fill out shitloads of paperwork. Of the times that the tasers have been drawn, in most situations the suspect has submitted and has not had to be shot.
Sure, a guidance system will have accelerometers, but by far the more important part is the gyro. The Wii does not have a gyro. While silicon gyros do exist, they're still relatively large and expensive.
Most accelerometers can survive 3000G or so.
The models used here might be completely accurate. They might also be just a reasonable approximation for some coditions, and might be an appaling approximation when you step outside those conditions. A bit like Newtonian physics: fine at 100mph, but pretty crappy at 0.9C. Except though that Newton at least had the presence of mind to say that his laws of motion were the best he could come up with at the time and with the tools available and would likely fall apart under certain conditions.