is dictated by what the RIAA and the studios are willing to accept in order to make the music available, and since they have a history of happily selling the same damn music over and over again as media becomes obsolescent, I'd say that, yes, buying Apple's proprietary format is a bad idea if the long-term survival of your music collection is an issue for you.
Sure, you can "rip mix burn" and put your tracks on a CD, but let's be realistic: the bulk of iTunes users (particularly those with an already-large collection) won't bother to back up their collections to raw CD PCM or MP3 or some other format unburdened by DRM. They will, however, be royally pissed when the day comes that their files won't play anymore, for whatever reason, and they have to go spend money to replace it all... again.
Big power plants just don't stop and start. Even the drive shafts on those things are so massive that they can never be allowed to stop turning or gravity will bend them and they'll become useless. Even when a turbogenerator is shut down for maintenance, there's a big electric motor that keeps the shafts turning slowly.
Shutting down a power plant (even a fossil-fueled one) is a big deal. They are really, really big incredibly complicated machines and if you want to turn one off you better have a damned good reason.
True, however other nations are running very successful nuclear programs, and if we can get misplaced national pride out of the picture we could probably learn a lot from France on how to run something like that. So it can be done.
Let's not forget that much of the responsibility for the state of the nuclear industry in this country can be laid squarely at the feet of John Q. Public, because he made it damned clear that he didn't want nuclear power, and Congress heeded that fundamentally irrational fear. Probably because Congress also is fundamentally irrational. Too bad we can't get people that worked up about DRM, copyright extensions and software patents. Seriously though, nukes haven't been anything but political suicide in this country since the mid-sixties. I remember when the old Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded and replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I pretty much figured that was it for nuclear power in this country, and for better or worse, I was right.
However, as we know every cloud has a silver lining. By not being major-league "early adopters" like France and England, it means that when we finally do go nuclear in a big way (and we will) we'll be availing ourselves of fifty years improvements in the technology. Much as we got stuck with lame NTSC while Europe got PAL/SECAM. Sometimes it doesn't pay to jump on the bandwagon right away.
One of Larry Niven's Known Space stories involved the discovery that all the suns at the core of the Milky Way went nova thousands of years ago... and that the wavefront would reach our part the galaxy in a few thousand years. The entire race of Puppeteers, famous cowards in the Known Space series, immediately packed up in a giant fleet and left for parts unknown. The narrator of the story remarked upon this, and the fact that humans were doing absolutely nothing. The last line of the story went something like, "Maybe we're the cowards... at the core."
Truth is, we are not particularly rational about such things as a culture. The anti-tech, anti-nuclear movment of the 1960's didn't help matters one bit, by training an entire generation of people to baseless fear of anything "nuclear".
No. The prototype you're talking about is just the latest in a long line of research tools starting with Tokamak and its brethren. It will no more be a functioning fusion power source than the glass of Coke I'm drinking at the moment. Besides, practical nuclear fusion has been "just around the corner" for the past forty years. Don't hold your breath.
And if fusion technology ever exceeds the break-even point by a margin significant enough to make it useful for power production, it will take decades of research and engineering to use it in a practical power plant. So, near-term, fission is our only viable nuclear option.
Sorry... that's just not true, although it's a fallacy oft-repeated by anti-nuclear types. Most coal fields exhibit a substantial degree of natural radioactivity, and when burned in a power plant it goes right up the stack. Fact is, you've been breathing those radioactive byproducts your entire life. Get used to it, or accept the only viable alternative.
From the Wikipedia article on the subject of coal:
Coal also contains many trace elements, including arsenic and mercury, which are dangerous if released into the environment. Coal also contains low levels of uranium, thorium, and other naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes whose release into the environment may lead to radioactive contamination.[6][7] While these substances are trace impurities, enough coal is burned that significant amounts of these substances are released, paradoxically resulting in more radioactive waste than nuclear power. [italics mine]
As Cecil Adams, author of the Straight Dope once said on this topic: "It would give me great pleasure if the Teeming Millions could learn to think rationally about these things." High-energy, technic civilization is realizing that it needs more energy dense solutions to its power needs, not less. The only two power sources capable of meeting our near-term needs are coal and nuclear, and coal is far from safe. It's time for us Americans to fucking get over our mindless, 1960's-era "no nukes, no nukes!" anti-tech knee jerking and start making some realistic choices. Do we want the lights on and clean air, do we want the lights on and lung cancer, or do we want the lights off? You decide... and if you don't, that's making a decision. Enjoy your cave.
Perhaps if NASA and Russia had been able to go on with their early space programs and had followed the success of Apollo-era projects by building a substantial, continuous manned presence in near-space things might be different. That might make a network of orbiting power satellites practical... after all, in space solar power is something. But we're a long, long way from that.
And before all you pro-solar, pro-wind, pro-tidal, pro-{insert alternative energy system here} get on my case, I have one question: do you know what a terawatt-hour is? Do you truly understand that most sophisticated maufacturing processes absolutely require reliable power? The industrialized countries are long past the point where they can survive without dependable electricity in mass quantities. To paraphrase Tim Allen: "We just need more power, that's all we need." More power, and lots of it. At our current state of technological and scientific advancement, there are very few ways to get it.
Start with one of the 7.2V keyless-chuck Makitas, or maybe a DeWalt. Useful when laying network cable down. A good toolbelt would be helpful as well. Now, depending upon whether she'll be building her own equipment, or buying commercial crap like Dells or HP/Compaqs, she may need a good set of Torx drivers. Needlenose pliers, vise-grips, a good range of screwdrivers would be wise, as well as a cable test rig. Then...
Yes, and even the live ones are shaking their heads in disgust. You know, we should harness that reciprocating motion and convert it into useful motion. Perhaps by using some kind of crank... you know, like the one that posted the article in the first place.
Anything but the instrument cluster in a car is going to be a distraction to the driver, and even that is more than some people can handle. That's the nature of having to monitor a real-time process (driving) that deals harshly with anyone paying it only half-attention.
Granted, the nature of the distraction does make a difference. Most of us can handle carrying on a conversation with a passenger without too much difficulty. However, it doesn't take much more than that to cause problems. Take that same conversation, and couple it with the act of holding an object (say, a cell phone) to one's ear while driving one-handed. Suddenly things get a bit dicey. And the cell phone doesn't even take your eyes off the road, once you've finished dialing.
So, I'm not surprised that putting a video screen with yet another complex (by automotive standards) user interface into a car is going to cause more pilot error. It's hard to enough to simply watch a movie in a car without getting into trouble, much less something with which you have to interact.
A purely audio-interactive system (without the visual display) would be much safer, but it sure has hell wouldn't look as good in the showroom.
I've been sick for the past five days and I need a good laugh. Thanks for that!
But yeah, naming is getting far out. For example, their new configuration manager is called "Pessulus". I don't know what that means and I'm afraid to find out.
You know, it would be of great comfort to me if the average Slashdot poster could learn to recognize a fucking JOKE when he or she reads it. Lighten up. You'll live longer.
Yes, well, I was typing in a rare moment of political correctness.
One of my personal favorites was his speech about gynaecologists, and how they should be free to "spread their love for women across this great land of ours." I mean, this man goes way beyond simple foot-in-mouth disorder.
I think I'd like to sneak into the MiB control room for a few minutes, to see if GWB is up on their big board of resident space aliens. I would think he probably is.
Xen virtual machines can be "live migrated" between physical hosts without stopping them. During this procedure, the memory of the virtual machine is iteratively copied to the destination without stopping its execution. A very brief stoppage of around 60-300 ms is required to perform final synchronisation before the virtual machine begins executing at its final destination, providing an illusion of seamless migration. Similar technology is used to suspend running virtual machines to disk and switch to another virtual machine, and resume the first virtual machine at a later date.
(Quote from Wikipedia)
Reminds of when I was watching the old Max Headroom show, and Max would shuffle himself off of one monitor onto a display on a portable "processing unit" and somebody would pick him up and carry him away.
Over the next century or so, all the "environmentalists", "green lobbies", "tree huggers" and miscellaneous Luddites around the world will succeed in their unrelenting quest to reduce the level of greenhouse gas emissions (and, incidentally, industrial output) to levels they deem "safe" for the environment. Their efforts will cause massive economic dislocation, of course, with the deaths of millions on their hands as the world's industrial machine grinds to a halt. All this in the name of "saving the environment".
However, it will turn out that the environmentalists were right all along. Man was the cause of Global Warming. None of which will matter in the long run, as the new Ice Age that's been held at bay for centuries due to Man's greenhouse gas production overwhelms the tattered remnants of civilization.
No, he probably went to a good one. And he's right. I had a girlfriend who was a college-level English instructor, and you would not believe what she had to contend with, and this was back in 1986. Of course, at that point in a student's career we're basically talking a massive failure of the primary education system. Any student that enters college and cannot write in full sentences should never have been allowed to reach that point... somebody, somewhere, before he graduated high school should have noticed that he was a functional illiterate and required remedial training! But nobody did. This happened far more often that most people would have you believe, and now twenty years later I see a lot of those same kinds of people struggling to get ahead in their careers. We've thrown plenty of money at the problem, hired plenty of teachers and administrators, and it's only gotten worse. Consequently, all I can say is that we need to return to throwing some standards at the problem and see what that does. That used to work very well for the U.S. educational system (and still works well for many foreign systems) before said system was neutered by well-meaning but functionally-idiotic types who were more concerned about a students "feelings" than the useful knowledge and skills he or she has acquired.
Q: How do you tell when your newscaster/commentator/interviewer/corporate official/elected representative/President is lying/misinforming/pulling-the-proverbial-wool-ove r-your-eyes?
Slashdot Mirror
is dictated by what the RIAA and the studios are willing to accept in order to make the music available, and since they have a history of happily selling the same damn music over and over again as media becomes obsolescent, I'd say that, yes, buying Apple's proprietary format is a bad idea if the long-term survival of your music collection is an issue for you.
... again.
Sure, you can "rip mix burn" and put your tracks on a CD, but let's be realistic: the bulk of iTunes users (particularly those with an already-large collection) won't bother to back up their collections to raw CD PCM or MP3 or some other format unburdened by DRM. They will, however, be royally pissed when the day comes that their files won't play anymore, for whatever reason, and they have to go spend money to replace it all
Big power plants just don't stop and start. Even the drive shafts on those things are so massive that they can never be allowed to stop turning or gravity will bend them and they'll become useless. Even when a turbogenerator is shut down for maintenance, there's a big electric motor that keeps the shafts turning slowly.
Shutting down a power plant (even a fossil-fueled one) is a big deal. They are really, really big incredibly complicated machines and if you want to turn one off you better have a damned good reason.
True, however other nations are running very successful nuclear programs, and if we can get misplaced national pride out of the picture we could probably learn a lot from France on how to run something like that. So it can be done.
Let's not forget that much of the responsibility for the state of the nuclear industry in this country can be laid squarely at the feet of John Q. Public, because he made it damned clear that he didn't want nuclear power, and Congress heeded that fundamentally irrational fear. Probably because Congress also is fundamentally irrational. Too bad we can't get people that worked up about DRM, copyright extensions and software patents. Seriously though, nukes haven't been anything but political suicide in this country since the mid-sixties. I remember when the old Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded and replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I pretty much figured that was it for nuclear power in this country, and for better or worse, I was right.
However, as we know every cloud has a silver lining. By not being major-league "early adopters" like France and England, it means that when we finally do go nuclear in a big way (and we will) we'll be availing ourselves of fifty years improvements in the technology. Much as we got stuck with lame NTSC while Europe got PAL/SECAM. Sometimes it doesn't pay to jump on the bandwagon right away.
One of Larry Niven's Known Space stories involved the discovery that all the suns at the core of the Milky Way went nova thousands of years ago ... and that the wavefront would reach our part the galaxy in a few thousand years. The entire race of Puppeteers, famous cowards in the Known Space series, immediately packed up in a giant fleet and left for parts unknown. The narrator of the story remarked upon this, and the fact that humans were doing absolutely nothing. The last line of the story went something like, "Maybe we're the cowards ... at the core."
Truth is, we are not particularly rational about such things as a culture. The anti-tech, anti-nuclear movment of the 1960's didn't help matters one bit, by training an entire generation of people to baseless fear of anything "nuclear".
No. The prototype you're talking about is just the latest in a long line of research tools starting with Tokamak and its brethren. It will no more be a functioning fusion power source than the glass of Coke I'm drinking at the moment. Besides, practical nuclear fusion has been "just around the corner" for the past forty years. Don't hold your breath.
And if fusion technology ever exceeds the break-even point by a margin significant enough to make it useful for power production, it will take decades of research and engineering to use it in a practical power plant. So, near-term, fission is our only viable nuclear option.
Well ... I guess it depends entirely upon your definition of "power" ...
Sorry ... that's just not true, although it's a fallacy oft-repeated by anti-nuclear types. Most coal fields exhibit a substantial degree of natural radioactivity, and when burned in a power plant it goes right up the stack. Fact is, you've been breathing those radioactive byproducts your entire life. Get used to it, or accept the only viable alternative.
... and if you don't, that's making a decision. Enjoy your cave.
... after all, in space solar power is something. But we're a long, long way from that.
From the Wikipedia article on the subject of coal:
Coal also contains many trace elements, including arsenic and mercury, which are dangerous if released into the environment. Coal also contains low levels of uranium, thorium, and other naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes whose release into the environment may lead to radioactive contamination.[6][7] While these substances are trace impurities, enough coal is burned that significant amounts of these substances are released, paradoxically resulting in more radioactive waste than nuclear power. [italics mine]
As Cecil Adams, author of the Straight Dope once said on this topic: "It would give me great pleasure if the Teeming Millions could learn to think rationally about these things." High-energy, technic civilization is realizing that it needs more energy dense solutions to its power needs, not less. The only two power sources capable of meeting our near-term needs are coal and nuclear, and coal is far from safe. It's time for us Americans to fucking get over our mindless, 1960's-era "no nukes, no nukes!" anti-tech knee jerking and start making some realistic choices. Do we want the lights on and clean air, do we want the lights on and lung cancer, or do we want the lights off? You decide
Perhaps if NASA and Russia had been able to go on with their early space programs and had followed the success of Apollo-era projects by building a substantial, continuous manned presence in near-space things might be different. That might make a network of orbiting power satellites practical
And before all you pro-solar, pro-wind, pro-tidal, pro-{insert alternative energy system here} get on my case, I have one question: do you know what a terawatt-hour is? Do you truly understand that most sophisticated maufacturing processes absolutely require reliable power? The industrialized countries are long past the point where they can survive without dependable electricity in mass quantities. To paraphrase Tim Allen: "We just need more power, that's all we need." More power, and lots of it. At our current state of technological and scientific advancement, there are very few ways to get it.
Start with one of the 7.2V keyless-chuck Makitas, or maybe a DeWalt. Useful when laying network cable down. A good toolbelt would be helpful as well. Now, depending upon whether she'll be building her own equipment, or buying commercial crap like Dells or HP/Compaqs, she may need a good set of Torx drivers. Needlenose pliers, vise-grips, a good range of screwdrivers would be wise, as well as a cable test rig. Then ...
Walter S. Tevis.
No, the reason we won't know about the guy who invented it is because the oil and power companies will quietly have him shot.
Yes, and even the live ones are shaking their heads in disgust. You know, we should harness that reciprocating motion and convert it into useful motion. Perhaps by using some kind of crank ... you know, like the one that posted the article in the first place.
Anything but the instrument cluster in a car is going to be a distraction to the driver, and even that is more than some people can handle. That's the nature of having to monitor a real-time process (driving) that deals harshly with anyone paying it only half-attention.
Granted, the nature of the distraction does make a difference. Most of us can handle carrying on a conversation with a passenger without too much difficulty. However, it doesn't take much more than that to cause problems. Take that same conversation, and couple it with the act of holding an object (say, a cell phone) to one's ear while driving one-handed. Suddenly things get a bit dicey. And the cell phone doesn't even take your eyes off the road, once you've finished dialing.
So, I'm not surprised that putting a video screen with yet another complex (by automotive standards) user interface into a car is going to cause more pilot error. It's hard to enough to simply watch a movie in a car without getting into trouble, much less something with which you have to interact.
A purely audio-interactive system (without the visual display) would be much safer, but it sure has hell wouldn't look as good in the showroom.
how you can be struck by a hole?
Well, as Johnny Carson used to say: "I ... did not know that."
I've been sick for the past five days and I need a good laugh. Thanks for that!
But yeah, naming is getting far out. For example, their new configuration manager is called "Pessulus". I don't know what that means and I'm afraid to find out.
Yes, they'll be building CPUs out of a new subatomic particle called a "Mooreon."
In her case, more like all fifty plus Puerto Rico.
You know, it would be of great comfort to me if the average Slashdot poster could learn to recognize a fucking JOKE when he or she reads it. Lighten up. You'll live longer.
Sheesh.
Yes, well, I was typing in a rare moment of political correctness.
One of my personal favorites was his speech about gynaecologists, and how they should be free to "spread their love for women across this great land of ours." I mean, this man goes way beyond simple foot-in-mouth disorder.
I think I'd like to sneak into the MiB control room for a few minutes, to see if GWB is up on their big board of resident space aliens. I would think he probably is.
Xen virtual machines can be "live migrated" between physical hosts without stopping them. During this procedure, the memory of the virtual machine is iteratively copied to the destination without stopping its execution. A very brief stoppage of around 60-300 ms is required to perform final synchronisation before the virtual machine begins executing at its final destination, providing an illusion of seamless migration. Similar technology is used to suspend running virtual machines to disk and switch to another virtual machine, and resume the first virtual machine at a later date.
(Quote from Wikipedia)
Reminds of when I was watching the old Max Headroom show, and Max would shuffle himself off of one monitor onto a display on a portable "processing unit" and somebody would pick him up and carry him away.
Over the next century or so, all the "environmentalists", "green lobbies", "tree huggers" and miscellaneous Luddites around the world will succeed in their unrelenting quest to reduce the level of greenhouse gas emissions (and, incidentally, industrial output) to levels they deem "safe" for the environment. Their efforts will cause massive economic dislocation, of course, with the deaths of millions on their hands as the world's industrial machine grinds to a halt. All this in the name of "saving the environment".
However, it will turn out that the environmentalists were right all along. Man was the cause of Global Warming. None of which will matter in the long run, as the new Ice Age that's been held at bay for centuries due to Man's greenhouse gas production overwhelms the tattered remnants of civilization.
True ... although Mr. Bush is becoming more and more of a negative example with each passing day.
No, he probably went to a good one. And he's right. I had a girlfriend who was a college-level English instructor, and you would not believe what she had to contend with, and this was back in 1986. Of course, at that point in a student's career we're basically talking a massive failure of the primary education system. Any student that enters college and cannot write in full sentences should never have been allowed to reach that point ... somebody, somewhere, before he graduated high school should have noticed that he was a functional illiterate and required remedial training! But nobody did. This happened far more often that most people would have you believe, and now twenty years later I see a lot of those same kinds of people struggling to get ahead in their careers. We've thrown plenty of money at the problem, hired plenty of teachers and administrators, and it's only gotten worse. Consequently, all I can say is that we need to return to throwing some standards at the problem and see what that does. That used to work very well for the U.S. educational system (and still works well for many foreign systems) before said system was neutered by well-meaning but functionally-idiotic types who were more concerned about a students "feelings" than the useful knowledge and skills he or she has acquired.
Q: How do you tell when your newscaster/commentator/interviewer/corporate official/elected representative/President is lying/misinforming/pulling-the-proverbial-wool-ove r-your-eyes?
A: His lips move.
so long as the big guys don't run out of money to keep buying up the little guys.