Absolutely, we bought our DC when the price dropped to $100 about a year ago. And now for $50 you get ~10 times the graphics power of the PS1 and a lot of high quality games for cheap. I'll just add a bit to your list of games to pick up:
- DOA2
- Virtua Tennis (I know tennis sounds stupid, but this is actually one of the best dreamcast games available and has been enough to make some people go out and buy a DC just to play this game)
- Jet Grind Radio
- Unreal Tournament (not quite as good as on the PC but still a fun deathmatch game)
- NFL Blitz 2001 (a great party game for up to 4 players)
- I also second the votes for Crazy Taxi (and Crazy Taxi 2 for that matter) and Soul Caliber
- Almost all of the Sega Sports games (NFL 2K2, NBA 2K2, etc) are pretty good...
Also I'd go out and pick up a bunch of controllers (get the original Sega ones, they may look and feel a little funny at first but you really do get used to them and I actually prefer them now), and get some VMUs (Visual Memory Units) both of those accessories can be had for under $10 each if you keep your eyes open.
Long live my DC! At least until I splurge on a PS2 or something:)
I've seen the 'wireless web', and it's just ugly. I didn't even use it during the free trial period. God knows I'm not going to pay for it.
You *obviously* haven't discovered WAP porn (or WAPr0n as I like to call it). My roomate has a WAP phone and WAPr0n is the coolest thing I've seen someone do with a cell phone.
nVidia's product development cycle has always been fast paced. They come out with a new GPU every 12 months and come out with a tweaked and upgraded version of that GPU 6 months later. Example: GeForce3 was a new GPU, GeForce3 Ti 200/500 was the tweak/upgrade ~6 months later. GeForce4 info coming out about now is nothing out of the ordinary for nVidia.
...it looks like you took after the box with a baseball bat. Personally I've never had anything but good experiences with UPS. I get computer parts, including monitors and cases, shipped to me all the time and I've never, ever, had one damaged in shipping. But if you knew they wouldn't insure it you shouldn't have shipped it in anything other than a bomb-proof enclosure.
I checked the rate calculator on UPS's website and they seemed to have no problems letting me declare a value of 3500 CAD for a package about the size of a G4 Tower being shipped from Winnipeg to Miami. The insurance surcharge was under $20 for that package.
Also, bubble-wrap does not constitute "well packed". If you go in and talk to the people at the service desk, they will tell you you need at least 4 inches of hard foam padding around all sides of something that heavy and expensive. If you are shipping something expensive, always find your local service desk and talk to the people out there, my local people will inspect your packaging and refuse to ship it if you haven't packed it well enough.
Heck, we even shippped a ~$500 fog machine cross-country with UPS ground and it arrived in perfect condition.
Various programs are offered including Adult Basic Education, English as a Second Language, and General Education Equivalency Preparation. Medium custody offenders have the option to participate in an Auto Body Vocational program and Office Technology course. The Main Institution offers offenders a Barbering program and Office Technology classes. The Minimum-Security Facility offers the Carpentry Program and community work crews that assist the community in maintenance and other jobs.
I personally have had several teachers in high school and college who teach or have taught classes at this facility on topics ranging from geology to psychology.
If you want to improve yourself in prison, you have options, it's just not compulsory.
So that I'm not further misunderstood, I just want to say up front that I'm not necessarily defending ATi here, but I'm not entirely convinced that they did anything (this was hardly a super controlled experiment, you'd need at least the source to Quake 3 to really do that), and if they did do what they are accused of, I'm not entirely convinced that that is so wrong.
First off, just a question. Has anyone tried using ATi's driver control panel to turn all the OpenGL quality settings up to max to see how that looks? Maybe they have just changed some default settings for Q3 that can't be changed in Q3 itself? Perhaps there was some strange incompatibility between their new drivers and Q3 that they just patched around to get the release out quicker. (Not a good practice in and of itself but certainly different from what they are being accused.)
ATi's gaffe here is that they're sacrificing quality for speed and not telling anybody about it.
You really expect them to? I've never seen nVidia say "Yeah, we know how to improve image quality, we just don't want to do it because it might make our card slower." All any company does is say what features they DO have and then show how fast it is...they don't list all the features that they could have added (or enabled, or not disabled) if they had wanted to.
It's also important to note that the video card manufacturer has a LOT to do with the overall quality of the video image. Since nVidia licenses their chipsets to various manufacturers, there can be a broad spectrum of quality among cards with the same nVidia chip onboard. AFAIK, ATI still manufactures all of their cards themselves, so all ATI cards of the same model/rev. should be pretty much the same.
On a loosely related note, where'd you pick up a GF3 Ti 500? I just finally got one ordered yesterday because nobody online had any stock of them before then. At least for the Leadtek one I was looking for.
Clearly they are sacrificing image quality for speed.
Nvidia has been doing this for years.
Up until now, ATI has almost always had better image quality than Nvidia, especially when it comes to 2D and DVD. But all people seem to care about is 3D speed. Can you really blame a company for catering to what the people who pay the bills want?
FPS is god to alot of people, some company should come out with a video card that always displays a pure white screen, then claim it gets 168,544 FPS. Throw in a little complicated marketing speak and you could probably sell it.
This does disappoint me though as I have avoided recent Nvidia cards because of their single-dimensional focus on 3D performance. Guess I'll have to be more wary of ATI now as well.
Do you want to get into the specifics of making and maintaining the millions of ugly little windmills that are needed to make windpower practical? Multiply your estimates to account for the fact that the wind generally blows when people don't need extra electricity. Do you really want to cut down trees to set up the farms?
The turbines nowadays cost about $1million apiece and are not that ugly looking. (Just really big). They are building the world's largest wind farm about 15 miles from where I'm sitting right now, and as you can see from the pictures there, there are no trees to cut down. So far as only generating power when it's not needed, I have *never* seen the turbines not spinning up there in the 1 year plus that the pilot facility has been up.
Wind power isn't the end all solution to power generation problems, but it should not be discounted as a substantial element in future clean power generation.
Why must people keep coming out with things that make me feel like I wasted the ~$600 I spent building a wireless to wired router/bridge out of one of these (the 1030N if you are wondering). Granted I could have saved some money if I had be brave enough to try to use a DiskOnChip instead of buying a 2.5" HDD...
Oh well, when I built it I still think it was cheaper than any of the other available solutions. Except of course for the P-133 box it replaced...but I wanted something that would sit on a shelf in the garage very unobtrusively.
The Supreme Court has no obligation to even hear the case. They get to decide what cases they hear and what ones they ignore. If they believe that the lower courts ruling was correct and is not in need of clarification, they almost certainly won't hear the case.
(IANAL but I have read DMCA summary papers by the copyright office and have even read portions of the law itself).
As far as I can tell, it is still quite legal to make fair use backups of stuff you own. What the DMCA outlawed was manufacturing a product who's sole purpose was circumventing encryption and copy protection. Using my poor legal perception, it seems to me that it is still legal for end users to make the one copy, it just isn't legal to develop and sell software to do it for them.
I may be completely wrong here, but there are at least 6 specific exceptions to DMCA restrictions. Including the end customers fair use backup exception.
And here is a quote from that paper:
Section 1201 divides technological measures into two categories: measures that prevent unauthorized access to a copyrighted work and measures that prevent unauthorized copying of a copyrighted work. Making or selling devices or services that are used to circumvent either category of technological measure is prohibited in certain circumstances, described below. As to the act of circumvention in itself, the provision
prohibits circumventing the first category of technological measures, but not the second.
This distinction was employed to assure that the public will have the continued ability to make fair use of copyrighted works. Since copying of a work may be a fair use under appropriate circumstances, section 1201 does not prohibit the act of circumventing a technological measure that prevents copying. By contrast, since the fair use
doctrine is not a defense to the act of gaining unauthorized access to a work, the act of circumventing a technological measure in order to gain access is prohibited.
The making or selling devices is Dmitry's problem. The actually act of doing the circumvention is still legal, I think. (IANAL)
I wouldn't blame him for it either. But that doesn't change the fact that to a majority of the country/world, he would appear guilty. It's like when a suspect enters a modified guilty plea. They don't admit guilt, but they acknowledge that the government probably has enough evidence to convict them.
And as bad as the USA's justice system may seem at times, I think comparing ones chances of getting a fair trial in Russia to ones chances of getting a fair trial in the USA is a little unfair.
Anyway, it all really boils down to this: If he was released on his on recognizance, he would either run for all he was worth and try to escape however he could. Or he would stay put. Without knowing the guy, it's all really just conjecture.
Yes he could do this. In fact there is a Russian consular office in San Francisco, does anybody know if a consular office is considered the soil of the country it is an office of? I know an embassy is, but the only Russian embassy in the USA is is Washington, D.C.
I don't know Dmitry so I have no idea if he would flee or if he would want to "fight for his innocence". If he fled the jurisdiction, it would be nigh unto admitting guilt.
The problem for the Russian Government if they help him escape is that they want to be our friends now (at least in the monetary sense) so they can't just go flying all their criminals out of the country. (Don't flame me for calling him a criminal, I don't agree with the DMCA, but it is currently and law and if he broke it, he's a criminal.)
Diplomatically, this kind of thing might not go over really well, it certainly wouldn't if he was a big scary criminal. With the current "low profile" nature of this case (at least in the mainstream media), I don't know if anybody would really give a rat's ass in this case.
Hey here's a thought...Maybe this whole thing is the USA's revenge for that college student accused of drug possession and jailed for 6 months in Moscow? The guy just got released today I think.
I'll get really suspicious if Dmitry serves 6 months of a 1 year sentence and is then released.:)
What this means for Dmitry Sklyarov is that it will be very hard for him to get out of jail pending trial unless he can come up with some real ties to this district and/or some other means of ensuring he remains in the U.S. for trial can satisfy the District Attorney and the court (e.g., electronic location-tracking bracelet, house arrest, etc.)
How about the fact that I'm certain they have confiscated his passport? Now sure, that doesn't mean he couldn't get out of the country, but it certainly would make it more difficult not only to leave the USA, but to enter into any other country. Doesn't seem like much of a flight risk to me...
...a battle would have left more corpses behind...
Not necessarily. The only reason that the Iceman lasted this long was that his corpse was positioned in a shallow depression. Not long after his death, his corpse was overrun by an advancing glacier, which would have obliterated him had he not been in that shallow depression. As it was, the glacier went right over the top of his depression and sealed him in there. Any other corpses that were not similarly protected from the glacier would have been eradicated.
We spent some time looking at the reasons this Iceman was preserved during our quarter on Glaciation in my Geology class last year. -Sokie
When nVidia releases nForce, DDR will suddenly have a Dual Channel configuration witha 128-bit wide memory interface. That means that a nForce board with two banks of PC2100 DDR will have about 4.2GB of bandwidth with very low latencies.
Teach me to only preview once. The first two paragraphs should read more like this:
Of course that's only accounting for currently available means of extraction.
For instance, we could economically extract fossil fuels from heavy crude and oil saturated sands (tar sands) which in the United States could yield an addtional 50 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Of course that's only accounting for currently available means on extraction.
For instance, if we could economically extract fossil fuels from oil shale and oil saturated sands (tar sands) which in the United States could yield an addtional 50 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Then there is oil shale. The Green River Formation covers about 40,000 square km in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah with deposits up to 650 metres thick. This formation contains more than 400 billion barrels of oil in the rich beds (which yield about 25 gallons of oil per ton of rock) and another 1400 billion barrels of oil in the lower-grade beds (10-25 gallons per ton). Estimates put the amount of recoverable oil in this formation at between 300 and 600 billion barrels.
Lower grade oil shales in Montana contain another 180 billion barrels of recoverable oil that would be very economical to mine because of it's high content of zinc, vanadium, and nickel.
Right now, low oil prices (yes they are relatively low) prevent oil shale extraction from being more popular. But a price increase would make large scale oil-shale extraction a much more common practice.
Now don't get me wrong, extracting liquid oil from oil shale is not the most environmentally friendly thing right now. It requires lots of water and we have to put the processed shale somewhere. But we already know that the liquid oil can be extracted simply by heating the rock sufficiently. So large scale microwave devices or even conventional vulcanization processes could be used to extract oil from the rock without needing to dig much up.
At the current US comsumption rate of about 6.5 billion barrels/year, you can see the domestic supply of alternative oil sources is quite large.
And don't forget coal! The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, even with increased usage and export, the US has a multiple CENTURY supply of coal left. About 1700 billion tons within 1000 metres of the surface (Another 2200 billion tons lie deeper). Current US coal production is about 1 billion tons per year. We export 100 million tons of that each year and use the rest. Coal can also be used to make coal gas and coal oil which are reasonable approximations of natural gas and conventional crude oil.
So in short, we aren't going to run out of conventional fossil fuels, even domestically, very soon. But things are going to have to change in the way we use them and they are going to get more expensive.
And no, I'm not promoting the use of polluting fossil fuels, I just wanted to make sure people weren't getting working into a frenzy because people tell them we will run dry of oil in 20 years.
I know I've occasionally encountered a dialog box that says "Copyrighted SPDIF CD Audio will be muted during recording." when I'm recording something to WAV. I just tried it with an Aerosmith CD and Sound Forge though and had no problems recording off of the digital audio out of my Creative PC-DVD Encore drive.
I know a Plextor 12x10x32 CD-RW I just installed had digital audio out on it right next to the standard one, so I think it's becoming more common. I'd never seen it before I got my DVD drive 2 years ago.
This whole fucking mess is just one monstrous pork-barrel: it can't work, it won't work, it'll never be finished, and the only end-product will be another house in the hills for some military contractor.
But at least you're being open minded about new technologies right?
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely, we bought our DC when the price dropped to $100 about a year ago. And now for $50 you get ~10 times the graphics power of the PS1 and a lot of high quality games for cheap. I'll just add a bit to your list of games to pick up:
:)
- DOA2
- Virtua Tennis (I know tennis sounds stupid, but this is actually one of the best dreamcast games available and has been enough to make some people go out and buy a DC just to play this game)
- Jet Grind Radio
- Unreal Tournament (not quite as good as on the PC but still a fun deathmatch game)
- NFL Blitz 2001 (a great party game for up to 4 players)
- I also second the votes for Crazy Taxi (and Crazy Taxi 2 for that matter) and Soul Caliber
- Almost all of the Sega Sports games (NFL 2K2, NBA 2K2, etc) are pretty good...
Also I'd go out and pick up a bunch of controllers (get the original Sega ones, they may look and feel a little funny at first but you really do get used to them and I actually prefer them now), and get some VMUs (Visual Memory Units) both of those accessories can be had for under $10 each if you keep your eyes open.
Long live my DC! At least until I splurge on a PS2 or something
I've seen the 'wireless web', and it's just ugly. I didn't even use it during the free trial period. God knows I'm not going to pay for it.
You *obviously* haven't discovered WAP porn (or WAPr0n as I like to call it). My roomate has a WAP phone and WAPr0n is the coolest thing I've seen someone do with a cell phone.
nVidia's product development cycle has always been fast paced. They come out with a new GPU every 12 months and come out with a tweaked and upgraded version of that GPU 6 months later. Example: GeForce3 was a new GPU, GeForce3 Ti 200/500 was the tweak/upgrade ~6 months later. GeForce4 info coming out about now is nothing out of the ordinary for nVidia.
...it looks like you took after the box with a baseball bat. Personally I've never had anything but good experiences with UPS. I get computer parts, including monitors and cases, shipped to me all the time and I've never, ever, had one damaged in shipping. But if you knew they wouldn't insure it you shouldn't have shipped it in anything other than a bomb-proof enclosure.
I checked the rate calculator on UPS's website and they seemed to have no problems letting me declare a value of 3500 CAD for a package about the size of a G4 Tower being shipped from Winnipeg to Miami. The insurance surcharge was under $20 for that package.
Also, bubble-wrap does not constitute "well packed". If you go in and talk to the people at the service desk, they will tell you you need at least 4 inches of hard foam padding around all sides of something that heavy and expensive. If you are shipping something expensive, always find your local service desk and talk to the people out there, my local people will inspect your packaging and refuse to ship it if you haven't packed it well enough.
Heck, we even shippped a ~$500 fog machine cross-country with UPS ground and it arrived in perfect condition.
Sorry about your hardware though...
Quote from the Washington State Penitentiary's homepage:
Various programs are offered including Adult Basic Education, English as a Second Language, and General Education Equivalency Preparation. Medium custody offenders have the option to participate in an Auto Body Vocational program and Office Technology course. The Main Institution offers offenders a Barbering program and Office Technology classes. The Minimum-Security Facility offers the Carpentry Program and community work crews that assist the community in maintenance and other jobs.
I personally have had several teachers in high school and college who teach or have taught classes at this facility on topics ranging from geology to psychology.
If you want to improve yourself in prison, you have options, it's just not compulsory.
So that I'm not further misunderstood, I just want to say up front that I'm not necessarily defending ATi here, but I'm not entirely convinced that they did anything (this was hardly a super controlled experiment, you'd need at least the source to Quake 3 to really do that), and if they did do what they are accused of, I'm not entirely convinced that that is so wrong.
First off, just a question. Has anyone tried using ATi's driver control panel to turn all the OpenGL quality settings up to max to see how that looks? Maybe they have just changed some default settings for Q3 that can't be changed in Q3 itself? Perhaps there was some strange incompatibility between their new drivers and Q3 that they just patched around to get the release out quicker. (Not a good practice in and of itself but certainly different from what they are being accused.)
ATi's gaffe here is that they're sacrificing quality for speed and not telling anybody about it.
You really expect them to? I've never seen nVidia say "Yeah, we know how to improve image quality, we just don't want to do it because it might make our card slower." All any company does is say what features they DO have and then show how fast it is...they don't list all the features that they could have added (or enabled, or not disabled) if they had wanted to.
It's also important to note that the video card manufacturer has a LOT to do with the overall quality of the video image. Since nVidia licenses their chipsets to various manufacturers, there can be a broad spectrum of quality among cards with the same nVidia chip onboard. AFAIK, ATI still manufactures all of their cards themselves, so all ATI cards of the same model/rev. should be pretty much the same.
On a loosely related note, where'd you pick up a GF3 Ti 500? I just finally got one ordered yesterday because nobody online had any stock of them before then. At least for the Leadtek one I was looking for.
--Sokie
Clearly they are sacrificing image quality for speed.
Nvidia has been doing this for years.
Up until now, ATI has almost always had better image quality than Nvidia, especially when it comes to 2D and DVD. But all people seem to care about is 3D speed. Can you really blame a company for catering to what the people who pay the bills want?
FPS is god to alot of people, some company should come out with a video card that always displays a pure white screen, then claim it gets 168,544 FPS. Throw in a little complicated marketing speak and you could probably sell it.
This does disappoint me though as I have avoided recent Nvidia cards because of their single-dimensional focus on 3D performance. Guess I'll have to be more wary of ATI now as well.
Do you want to get into the specifics of making and maintaining the millions of ugly little windmills that are needed to make windpower practical? Multiply your estimates to account for the fact that the wind generally blows when people don't need extra electricity. Do you really want to cut down trees to set up the farms?
The turbines nowadays cost about $1million apiece and are not that ugly looking. (Just really big). They are building the world's largest wind farm about 15 miles from where I'm sitting right now, and as you can see from the pictures there, there are no trees to cut down. So far as only generating power when it's not needed, I have *never* seen the turbines not spinning up there in the 1 year plus that the pilot facility has been up.
Wind power isn't the end all solution to power generation problems, but it should not be discounted as a substantial element in future clean power generation.
-Sokie
Why must people keep coming out with things that make me feel like I wasted the ~$600 I spent building a wireless to wired router/bridge out of one of these (the 1030N if you are wondering). Granted I could have saved some money if I had be brave enough to try to use a DiskOnChip instead of buying a 2.5" HDD...
Oh well, when I built it I still think it was cheaper than any of the other available solutions. Except of course for the P-133 box it replaced...but I wanted something that would sit on a shelf in the garage very unobtrusively.
BTW: here is the box sans hard drive.
Who is going to produce music and movies and books if they aren't compensated in some way?
How about artists?
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=112673 9&lastnode_id=1037487 is where they really want to link that definition to. I think everything moved Code Red Worm to it's own node instead of making it a definition of Code Red.
The Supreme Court has no obligation to even hear the case. They get to decide what cases they hear and what ones they ignore. If they believe that the lower courts ruling was correct and is not in need of clarification, they almost certainly won't hear the case.
(IANAL but I have read DMCA summary papers by the copyright office and have even read portions of the law itself).
d f
As far as I can tell, it is still quite legal to make fair use backups of stuff you own. What the DMCA outlawed was manufacturing a product who's sole purpose was circumventing encryption and copy protection. Using my poor legal perception, it seems to me that it is still legal for end users to make the one copy, it just isn't legal to develop and sell software to do it for them.
I may be completely wrong here, but there are at least 6 specific exceptions to DMCA restrictions. Including the end customers fair use backup exception.
Here's what I found helpful:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.p
And here is a quote from that paper:
Section 1201 divides technological measures into two categories: measures that prevent unauthorized access to a copyrighted work and measures that prevent unauthorized copying of a copyrighted work. Making or selling devices or services that are used to circumvent either category of technological measure is prohibited in certain circumstances, described below. As to the act of circumvention in itself, the provision
prohibits circumventing the first category of technological measures, but not the second.
This distinction was employed to assure that the public will have the continued ability to make fair use of copyrighted works. Since copying of a work may be a fair use under appropriate circumstances, section 1201 does not prohibit the act of circumventing a technological measure that prevents copying. By contrast, since the fair use
doctrine is not a defense to the act of gaining unauthorized access to a work, the act of circumventing a technological measure in order to gain access is prohibited.
The making or selling devices is Dmitry's problem. The actually act of doing the circumvention is still legal, I think. (IANAL)
I wouldn't blame him for it either. But that doesn't change the fact that to a majority of the country/world, he would appear guilty. It's like when a suspect enters a modified guilty plea. They don't admit guilt, but they acknowledge that the government probably has enough evidence to convict them.
And as bad as the USA's justice system may seem at times, I think comparing ones chances of getting a fair trial in Russia to ones chances of getting a fair trial in the USA is a little unfair.
Anyway, it all really boils down to this: If he was released on his on recognizance, he would either run for all he was worth and try to escape however he could. Or he would stay put. Without knowing the guy, it's all really just conjecture.
Yes he could do this. In fact there is a Russian consular office in San Francisco, does anybody know if a consular office is considered the soil of the country it is an office of? I know an embassy is, but the only Russian embassy in the USA is is Washington, D.C.
:)
I don't know Dmitry so I have no idea if he would flee or if he would want to "fight for his innocence". If he fled the jurisdiction, it would be nigh unto admitting guilt.
The problem for the Russian Government if they help him escape is that they want to be our friends now (at least in the monetary sense) so they can't just go flying all their criminals out of the country. (Don't flame me for calling him a criminal, I don't agree with the DMCA, but it is currently and law and if he broke it, he's a criminal.)
Diplomatically, this kind of thing might not go over really well, it certainly wouldn't if he was a big scary criminal. With the current "low profile" nature of this case (at least in the mainstream media), I don't know if anybody would really give a rat's ass in this case.
Hey here's a thought...Maybe this whole thing is the USA's revenge for that college student accused of drug possession and jailed for 6 months in Moscow? The guy just got released today I think.
I'll get really suspicious if Dmitry serves 6 months of a 1 year sentence and is then released.
What this means for Dmitry Sklyarov is that it will be very hard for him to get out of jail pending trial unless he can come up with some real ties to this district and/or some other means of ensuring he remains in the U.S. for trial can satisfy the District Attorney and the court (e.g., electronic location-tracking bracelet, house arrest, etc.)
How about the fact that I'm certain they have confiscated his passport? Now sure, that doesn't mean he couldn't get out of the country, but it certainly would make it more difficult not only to leave the USA, but to enter into any other country. Doesn't seem like much of a flight risk to me...
Not necessarily. The only reason that the Iceman lasted this long was that his corpse was positioned in a shallow depression. Not long after his death, his corpse was overrun by an advancing glacier, which would have obliterated him had he not been in that shallow depression. As it was, the glacier went right over the top of his depression and sealed him in there. Any other corpses that were not similarly protected from the glacier would have been eradicated.
We spent some time looking at the reasons this Iceman was preserved during our quarter on Glaciation in my Geology class last year.
-Sokie
When nVidia releases nForce, DDR will suddenly have a Dual Channel configuration witha 128-bit wide memory interface. That means that a nForce board with two banks of PC2100 DDR will have about 4.2GB of bandwidth with very low latencies.
Relevant THG Page
Of course this is all still theoretical, but if it turns out to be true, DDR will have a higher bandwidth and drastically lower latencies than RDRAM.
-Sokie
Interesting that you seem to associate using Debian with super-villiany. Interesting indeed....
-Sokie
Teach me to only preview once. The first two paragraphs should read more like this:
Of course that's only accounting for currently available means of extraction.
For instance, we could economically extract fossil fuels from heavy crude and oil saturated sands (tar sands) which in the United States could yield an addtional 50 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
-Sokie
Of course that's only accounting for currently available means on extraction.
For instance, if we could economically extract fossil fuels from oil shale and oil saturated sands (tar sands) which in the United States could yield an addtional 50 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Then there is oil shale. The Green River Formation covers about 40,000 square km in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah with deposits up to 650 metres thick. This formation contains more than 400 billion barrels of oil in the rich beds (which yield about 25 gallons of oil per ton of rock) and another 1400 billion barrels of oil in the lower-grade beds (10-25 gallons per ton). Estimates put the amount of recoverable oil in this formation at between 300 and 600 billion barrels.
Lower grade oil shales in Montana contain another 180 billion barrels of recoverable oil that would be very economical to mine because of it's high content of zinc, vanadium, and nickel.
Right now, low oil prices (yes they are relatively low) prevent oil shale extraction from being more popular. But a price increase would make large scale oil-shale extraction a much more common practice.
Now don't get me wrong, extracting liquid oil from oil shale is not the most environmentally friendly thing right now. It requires lots of water and we have to put the processed shale somewhere. But we already know that the liquid oil can be extracted simply by heating the rock sufficiently. So large scale microwave devices or even conventional vulcanization processes could be used to extract oil from the rock without needing to dig much up.
At the current US comsumption rate of about 6.5 billion barrels/year, you can see the domestic supply of alternative oil sources is quite large.
And don't forget coal! The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, even with increased usage and export, the US has a multiple CENTURY supply of coal left. About 1700 billion tons within 1000 metres of the surface (Another 2200 billion tons lie deeper). Current US coal production is about 1 billion tons per year. We export 100 million tons of that each year and use the rest. Coal can also be used to make coal gas and coal oil which are reasonable approximations of natural gas and conventional crude oil.
So in short, we aren't going to run out of conventional fossil fuels, even domestically, very soon. But things are going to have to change in the way we use them and they are going to get more expensive.
And no, I'm not promoting the use of polluting fossil fuels, I just wanted to make sure people weren't getting working into a frenzy because people tell them we will run dry of oil in 20 years.
-Sokie
I know I've occasionally encountered a dialog box that says "Copyrighted SPDIF CD Audio will be muted during recording." when I'm recording something to WAV. I just tried it with an Aerosmith CD and Sound Forge though and had no problems recording off of the digital audio out of my Creative PC-DVD Encore drive.
I know a Plextor 12x10x32 CD-RW I just installed had digital audio out on it right next to the standard one, so I think it's becoming more common. I'd never seen it before I got my DVD drive 2 years ago.
-Sokie
But at least you're being open minded about new technologies right?
-Sokie
Good enough for me! :)
-Sokie
Does this mean more than 4 hosting companies worldwide will not say "PostgreSQ-WHAT?" when I ask them about database options?
-Sokie