On the other hand, Nintendo will be the _only_ company producing fun games for the DS, and even that assuming you haven't gotten tired of Mario++, Zelda++, and Metroid++ yet.
The array of 3rd party developers that the PSP has behind it is impressive to say the least, while the only games I would even consider playing on the DS (and the Gamecube, for that matter) have been made by Nintendo itself.
Nuclear power takes a lot of energy, but it gives back a lot more energy. It is great for large-scale stationary power generation, and can generate the energy necessary to make the hydrogen for fuel cells, which in turn can take care of our mobile power needs.
While the supplies of fissionable material on this planet are not infinite, there are enough proven deposits to supply the entire planet's population at American rates of consumption for a thousand years without any improvements in technology. By that time, I would like to hope that our descendants would have either figured out fusion, or gotten the infrastructure in place to harvest fissionables from the rest of the solar system (either that, or wiped themselves off the face of the planet, but I prefer to be optimistic). One way or another, it would last us a hell of a lot longer than the planet's fossil fuels.
Another argument that I completely fail to understand is people's preoccupation with nuclear waste. There are plenty of places on this planet (deserts, mountains, frozen tundra) that cover hundredds if not thousands of square miles and will never be suitable for human habitation. A single large-scale centralized repository could be used to store all the waste from all of the world's nuclear plants. Unlike the pollution from fossil fuels, nuclear waste is solid, transportable, and quite compact. Even if the facility were to fall into disrepair or suffer a terrible accident, all that would do would be to turn an uninhabitable wasteland into a radioactive uninhabitable wasteland. Compare this with the tons of harmful particles that get released into the atmosphere each second due to the burning of fossil fuels, and I cannot see how the choice would be anything less than obvious to someone who cares about the wellbeing of the global ecosystem.
The problem with the current crop of Republicans is that instead of tax-and-spend they're borrow-and-spend, which is tax-and-spend plus interest. The government should not try to cut taxes, it should try to cut spending. Given a real long-term surplus, the taxes will take care of themselves.
All of these things are luxuries that no nation can afford in the long term. The European economies are already bleeding jobs like mad due to labor becoming prohibitively expensive with their 35-hour work weeks and 6 weeks of yearly vacations, while companies stick around only because they get massive government subsidies.
As an economy advances, some regulation and taxation becomes necessary to improve the quality of the labor pool (since automation makes most unskilled labor worthless), maintain law and order, and prevent inefficiencies from market failures, but those should be kept at the barest efficient minimum for the economy to remain truly competitive.
Any attempts at protectionism only make things worse, since imposing tariffs gets you matching tariffs from everyone else, and no modern nation's economy can survive having the world's markets closed to it (that's why embargoes are such a devastating punitive measure in world diplomacy). As big as our economy may be, the world's is bigger still, and we need it a lot more than it needs us.
What we really need to do is cut back on the frivolous regulations, break the unions, and prevent new ones from forming. Corporations are not our enemies, they are the hands that feed us, and biting them is highly inadviseable.
While Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI were both truly excellent games, neither of them was an MMORPG. Final Fantasy XI is the one you're probably thinking of. ^^
Like I said, I'd be perfectly happy having one in my back yard, especially if the alternatives are having a coal plant (smoggy) or a wind plant (noisy) there.
Though I guess a few decades of the Chinese running several dozen of them in their backyards without incident should make the case for pebble beds pretty clearly, especially once we start lagging behind China due to skyrocketing oil prices.
I think what the original comment meant to say was that if the technology were practical, some corporation would have already invented it because there are massive profits to be had through it, and therefore a $10M prize would not have had much of an effect on the technology's development one way or another.
Because there isn't as much obvious risk-free profit in reaching space, a prize can entice private individuals and companies into pursuing the research by providing money that would cover a significant part of the R&D costs whether or not the final product turns out to be marketable.
To be able to say that you have reached orbit, you have to not only go n kilomiters up (to eliminate air drag, as you said) but also achieve a certain velocity in a vector perpendicular to the pull of gravity.
If you merely shoot a bullet straight up, it would either go straight up and come back down (never achieving orbit in the process) or escape the Earth's gravity well, going in a straight line unless it's captured by the gravity pull of something else (let's avoid thinking about what air friction would do to a bullet fired fast enough to achieve escape velocity).
While I haven't seen any data on just how far up you'd need to go to completely eliminate air drag (and if I'm wrong, please correct me), I would imagine that 400km was chosen for the prize because the drag is pretty negligible at that point. If that is, in fact, true, then if you can achieve enough velocity at the proper vector to make one full orbit, you should be able to make n full orbits without expending any more fuel.
Wind power is not practical for large-scale power generation. Never was, never will be. We already have a clean, efficient, and safe source of power that would last us for centuries even if we we used it for all our power generation needs, and its name is nuclear.
What we really need to do is offer a prize for someone to convince all the myopic NIMBY types to give the pebble bed reactors a try. And yes, if you want to build one in my backyard, go right ahead.
The new pebble bed reactors (which is what China is deploying) are both much safer (they are physically incapable of melting down) and a lot cheaper to build than the US reactors, the last of which were built in the 70's.
There are enough confirmed sources of fissionable fuel to supply power to the world's entire population at American rates of consumption for over a thousand years. I find it extremely unlikely that over all that time we won't discover a cheaper, more efficient, and renewable source of power.
In the meantime we should stop financing our enemies through oil and befouling our own air through coal.
I think you missed the main point of his argument. Right now it is possible to acquire high quality complete copies of movies for free online, but in spite of that fact, the people who have the knowledge, the bandwidth, and the free time to do so are still buying movie tickets and ordering DVDs.
My experience has largely mirrored his, in that even in my poor college student days I was still perfectly happy to shell out the $9 for the experience of seeing a movie on a big screen in the company of my friends. Moreover, ever since I got myself a job and a disposable income, I have been steadily replacing my anime fansubs with official DVDs. That's literally thousands of dollars that I would not have spent if I could not have acquired the fansubs in the first place. And the thing is, my decision to buy the official DVDs has absolutely nothing to do with copyright law. I am buying them because I like the way they look on my shelves, I like the convenience of being able to watch them on my PS2, and I like those shows enough to want to contribute to their creators in hopes of seeing them make more.
I don't know about you, but I'd be perfectly happy to trade a little security for a lot of convenience.
No matter how much more power-efficient you manage to make your electronics, they would still run much longer (and/or much faster) on batteries that store much more power.
The problem is that in spite of having 40 years' worth of its own experience, NASA never managed to achieve something like this, or even attempted to achieve something like this. While I would be the first to proclaim that NASA's achievements in the 50's and 60's (as well as those of the Soviet space program) are shining monuments of human achievement, I also believe that NASA never got around to building on those achievements, partly due to cut budgets, partly due to internal inertia, and partly due to the whole thing being run by politicians.
NASA of the past couple of decades was too preoccupied with maintaining the status quo and blowing money on massive and expensive projects (running the shuttles, constructing the ISS) that did nothing to build on its previous achievements and bring closer the day our species leaves its cradle for good. It is not enough that reaching space is possible, it also has to be practical.
That is where the X Prize came in. The greatest achievement of Scaled Composites was not creating radical new technology, but taking existing technology and making good use of it. It is embarassing that NASA was either not able or not willing to do so itself. While this does not diminish the great achievements of the Space Race, it does indicate that the torch of progress has been passed on from the government programs to the private entrepreneurs.
While NASA is still a giant, it is now only good as a stepping stone.
The problem with DRAM is that it's volatile (data gets lost when power is turned off), and the problem with Flash is that it's ass-slow (even slower write times than hard drives), so neither of them would really work as hard drive replacements.
Assuming that this technology is non-volatile and as fast or faster than the high-end hard drives, it would make the perfect replacement for the hard drive in the storage niche, which is currently one of the biggest bottlenecks (and one of the few remaining sub-systems with moving parts) in modern computers.
The technology this will have to beat is MRAM, which is both non-volatile and blazing fast.
Doesn't copyright affect only one's ability to copy and distribute intellectual property? Doesn't that mean that someone who legally purchases software has the legal right to do whatever they want with it, as long as they do not copy or distribute it?
After all, you can take GPL code, modify it, and never release the modifications as long as you do not distribute the code beyond your own machine(s). How is this different? How can opening packaging which you have purchased and is therefore your private property, or clicking on a button on a machine that you own be considered a legally binding contract in which you relinquish rights given to you as a consumer under the copyright law?
Because in order to get all of the rights that come with a citizenship, you must also accept all of the responsibilities that come with it. The social contract is a two-way street.
In the immortal words of Anatoli Krupnov, "Kill 'em all! Start with yourself."
Re:Nuclear has nothing to do with oil !
on
China Goes Nuclear
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· Score: 1
Coal plants aren't the only fossil fuel power plants out there. A very significant percentage of oil burned in the industrialized world is used to generate electricity rather than power vehicles. Switching power generation to nuclear would significantly reduce a nation's demand for oil and therefore reduce its dependence on it and lower its price.
Slashdot Mirror
The array of 3rd party developers that the PSP has behind it is impressive to say the least, while the only games I would even consider playing on the DS (and the Gamecube, for that matter) have been made by Nintendo itself.
Betamax did not lose to VHS because it was the better format, it lost because Betamax tapes couldn't hold 2-hour movies.
While the supplies of fissionable material on this planet are not infinite, there are enough proven deposits to supply the entire planet's population at American rates of consumption for a thousand years without any improvements in technology. By that time, I would like to hope that our descendants would have either figured out fusion, or gotten the infrastructure in place to harvest fissionables from the rest of the solar system (either that, or wiped themselves off the face of the planet, but I prefer to be optimistic). One way or another, it would last us a hell of a lot longer than the planet's fossil fuels.
Another argument that I completely fail to understand is people's preoccupation with nuclear waste. There are plenty of places on this planet (deserts, mountains, frozen tundra) that cover hundredds if not thousands of square miles and will never be suitable for human habitation. A single large-scale centralized repository could be used to store all the waste from all of the world's nuclear plants. Unlike the pollution from fossil fuels, nuclear waste is solid, transportable, and quite compact. Even if the facility were to fall into disrepair or suffer a terrible accident, all that would do would be to turn an uninhabitable wasteland into a radioactive uninhabitable wasteland. Compare this with the tons of harmful particles that get released into the atmosphere each second due to the burning of fossil fuels, and I cannot see how the choice would be anything less than obvious to someone who cares about the wellbeing of the global ecosystem.
Indeed, there's only so much space in a single set of pockets, after all.
0: The Gathering (Kosh arrives on the station, gets nearly assassinated, investigation ensues)
The problem with the current crop of Republicans is that instead of tax-and-spend they're borrow-and-spend, which is tax-and-spend plus interest. The government should not try to cut taxes, it should try to cut spending. Given a real long-term surplus, the taxes will take care of themselves.
As an economy advances, some regulation and taxation becomes necessary to improve the quality of the labor pool (since automation makes most unskilled labor worthless), maintain law and order, and prevent inefficiencies from market failures, but those should be kept at the barest efficient minimum for the economy to remain truly competitive.
Any attempts at protectionism only make things worse, since imposing tariffs gets you matching tariffs from everyone else, and no modern nation's economy can survive having the world's markets closed to it (that's why embargoes are such a devastating punitive measure in world diplomacy). As big as our economy may be, the world's is bigger still, and we need it a lot more than it needs us.
What we really need to do is cut back on the frivolous regulations, break the unions, and prevent new ones from forming. Corporations are not our enemies, they are the hands that feed us, and biting them is highly inadviseable.
While Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI were both truly excellent games, neither of them was an MMORPG. Final Fantasy XI is the one you're probably thinking of. ^^
Though I guess a few decades of the Chinese running several dozen of them in their backyards without incident should make the case for pebble beds pretty clearly, especially once we start lagging behind China due to skyrocketing oil prices.
Because there isn't as much obvious risk-free profit in reaching space, a prize can entice private individuals and companies into pursuing the research by providing money that would cover a significant part of the R&D costs whether or not the final product turns out to be marketable.
If you merely shoot a bullet straight up, it would either go straight up and come back down (never achieving orbit in the process) or escape the Earth's gravity well, going in a straight line unless it's captured by the gravity pull of something else (let's avoid thinking about what air friction would do to a bullet fired fast enough to achieve escape velocity).
While I haven't seen any data on just how far up you'd need to go to completely eliminate air drag (and if I'm wrong, please correct me), I would imagine that 400km was chosen for the prize because the drag is pretty negligible at that point. If that is, in fact, true, then if you can achieve enough velocity at the proper vector to make one full orbit, you should be able to make n full orbits without expending any more fuel.
What we really need to do is offer a prize for someone to convince all the myopic NIMBY types to give the pebble bed reactors a try. And yes, if you want to build one in my backyard, go right ahead.
Dude, that's so November 2nd
The new pebble bed reactors (which is what China is deploying) are both much safer (they are physically incapable of melting down) and a lot cheaper to build than the US reactors, the last of which were built in the 70's.
In the meantime we should stop financing our enemies through oil and befouling our own air through coal.
But what kind of bandwidth do you get there? ^^
My experience has largely mirrored his, in that even in my poor college student days I was still perfectly happy to shell out the $9 for the experience of seeing a movie on a big screen in the company of my friends. Moreover, ever since I got myself a job and a disposable income, I have been steadily replacing my anime fansubs with official DVDs. That's literally thousands of dollars that I would not have spent if I could not have acquired the fansubs in the first place. And the thing is, my decision to buy the official DVDs has absolutely nothing to do with copyright law. I am buying them because I like the way they look on my shelves, I like the convenience of being able to watch them on my PS2, and I like those shows enough to want to contribute to their creators in hopes of seeing them make more.
No matter how much more power-efficient you manage to make your electronics, they would still run much longer (and/or much faster) on batteries that store much more power.
NASA of the past couple of decades was too preoccupied with maintaining the status quo and blowing money on massive and expensive projects (running the shuttles, constructing the ISS) that did nothing to build on its previous achievements and bring closer the day our species leaves its cradle for good. It is not enough that reaching space is possible, it also has to be practical.
That is where the X Prize came in. The greatest achievement of Scaled Composites was not creating radical new technology, but taking existing technology and making good use of it. It is embarassing that NASA was either not able or not willing to do so itself. While this does not diminish the great achievements of the Space Race, it does indicate that the torch of progress has been passed on from the government programs to the private entrepreneurs.
While NASA is still a giant, it is now only good as a stepping stone.
Assuming that this technology is non-volatile and as fast or faster than the high-end hard drives, it would make the perfect replacement for the hard drive in the storage niche, which is currently one of the biggest bottlenecks (and one of the few remaining sub-systems with moving parts) in modern computers.
The technology this will have to beat is MRAM, which is both non-volatile and blazing fast.
After all, you can take GPL code, modify it, and never release the modifications as long as you do not distribute the code beyond your own machine(s). How is this different? How can opening packaging which you have purchased and is therefore your private property, or clicking on a button on a machine that you own be considered a legally binding contract in which you relinquish rights given to you as a consumer under the copyright law?
Because in order to get all of the rights that come with a citizenship, you must also accept all of the responsibilities that come with it. The social contract is a two-way street.
After all, W never made a 180-degree turn in his views and pretended that that's the way he was going all along, right?
In the immortal words of Anatoli Krupnov, "Kill 'em all! Start with yourself."
Coal plants aren't the only fossil fuel power plants out there. A very significant percentage of oil burned in the industrialized world is used to generate electricity rather than power vehicles. Switching power generation to nuclear would significantly reduce a nation's demand for oil and therefore reduce its dependence on it and lower its price.