I thought the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy was that it doesn't work?
See that big yellow thing up in the sky?
Yeah, see where it is? 96,000,000 miles away. We have fusion bombs, we know how to cause fusion. It's containing it, sustaining the "reaction", and harvesting the energy - in a net positive way - that's the problem. Right now, we have those problems mostly solved, it's just that the energy needed to contain the fusing plasma cloud exceeds the energy created by the fusing plasma cloud. So we're losing on "net positive".
Hopefully this design will fix all that. If it's true that they can build one for $2.7B then it should be done posthaste. If I had Bill Gates' money and I believed in this I would fund it tomorrow. Early investment in fusion will be worth billions of dollars when fusion works.
Sometimes legal stuff looks like programming and we get confused by it, thinking that we need to take all of it literally. The issue here is that the "processor" for a legal document is a judge - a human. If you go before a judge and say "this doesn't work" and you can prove it then the contract isn't going to matter too much. If they have a bunch of lawyers all the better - it'll just cost them more to lose.
If you're using a product outside the intended scope or whatever that's a different story, of course.
Dude, I'm the guy who ran our LUG's webserver on a FreeBSD machine 13 years ago. I'm very familiar with BSD. Again, people like you have absolutely no idea what BSD was like before 1990. It was terrible - but it (barely) worked. And the basic paradigm was much better than anything else available at the time that I ever worked with.
As for your stupid "rm -rf" comment - "rmdir" is made to remove a directory *as long as it's empty*. That's the point. "rmdir somedir/" would give the world's stupidest error while "rmdir somedir" would remove it. I never looked at source to find the cause of the error.
What Linux brought to the table was a whole new generation interested in working on Unix. That's big. It's not directly a technological edge but it translates into that.
I used BSD Unix on a VAX 11/750 in 1988. It wasn't ready for prime time - to put it nicely. Olsen was absolutely correct. I think a lot of folks who grew up on Linux or the various free BSD spinoffs from the 90s don't appreciate just how far it's come. If you can find an old copy of "The Unix Haters Handbook" browse through it. Some of the stuff is really pedantic, but a lot of it really was problematic.
Unix had a lot of potential, though, and Linux really helped it reach that potential. It's a more coherent system than VMS. On VMS it's pretty much impossible to use piping. That alone made the shell scripts (DCL scripts, that is) many many times longer for the same functionality. The command line tools weren't made to work together. They did have standardized option parsing, though, stuff that Unix never really had but is now handled by libraries.
Up until the mid 90s you could type "rmdir something/" on most Unixes and it would give you the error "something: is a directory". Yeah, no shit sherlock.
The best thing I remember about BSD in those old days was that processes were tied to terminals. And ctrl-z still suspended processes. At the university a lot of folks were used to DOS where ctrl-z exited a program. Of course, if they were in mail and hit ctrl-z it looked like it exited.
So when we logged in the first thing we would do is type "fg". 90+% of the time a mail prompt would come up. We could then !s to get a shell as the mail user. I was never malicious. I would create a login script that would explain that ctrl-z doesn't actually exit and then destroy itself. Fun times.
So are we working to hack Swiss banks or other off-shore financial institutions, looking for tax evasion by US citizens?
It would be a dragnet, but we know there is tax evasion occurring.
Yeah, but it's typically very wealthy people who are doing that. Wealthy people who tend to donate money to political causes. Catch my drift?
Remember how Google and Apple and Microsoft and all these big companies are getting out of paying corporate income taxes by "offshoring" their income? Remember how the Democrats are going to do something about it? I get email every few days from left-wing groups telling me about this.
Look at where Google, Apple, and Microsoft employees invest their political contributions. That's why the Democrats aren't going to do something about it.
Yes. Simply stated "hey, those Constitutional protections don't apply when someone's a criminal, duhhhhh." As the FP (or someone close said) at least it's out in the open so it can be debated. However, it would be nice if the judge picks up on the fact that they perjured themselves (literally) with their first explanation of how they got into his server. I'm not holding my breath.
Aren't there any towns hit hard enough to be willing to sell themselves out for this purpose such that building a fake town isn't necessary?
Detroit or Flint. For $6M they could have (literally) bought a few square miles of uninhabited Detroit for this use. It already has streets, signs, empty houses, etc.
Yep, good luck convincing everyone that they should live on only what they "need" to survive, because the mud-hut dwellers in third world countries "deserve" to live like 2010-era Americans.
In the author's wet dreams the Americans live in mud huts. People like him have run entire countries before, read a history book to see how it turned out. Oddly, those running the country don't have to deal with scarcity of resources.
A major donor to the Democratic Party has received favorable treatment from the Obama administration, including a choice appointment to a federal advisory committee, and lavish praise from the president himself.
Yet health information technology vendor Epic Systems Corp. opposes a key administration position on health IT. Its founder, Judith Faulkner, has spoken out on numerous occasions against “interoperability” in electronic medical records technology.
So why was Faulkner appointed to a 13-member panel charged with recommending how $19 billion in stimulus money be spent? One can’t help but notice that Faulkner and other epic employees have given nearly $300,000 to Democrats since 2006.
Then again I could just recall that John Stuart Mill was moved to remark to the House of Commons: “What I stated was, that the Conservative party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract this assertion; but I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it.” (My emphasis).
Note that this has been true from the time of Mills, 1806 - 1873, so it's not a recent phenomenon.
I would hypothesize that there is a direct correlation between conservatism and stupidity; the more extreme the conservatism, the stupider the person.
I grew up in a conservative area. All of the stupidest people there were far left or far right, pretty evenly distributed. I've noticed that liberals tend to ignore really stupid liberals so they end up thinking that only conservatives can be stupid.
You see this in politics. Dan Quayle misspeaks and that makes him an idiot. Joe Biden does the same stuff and "hey, Joe just misspeaks sometimes, ha ha ha."
"Water freezes at zero and boils at one hundred. What could be simpler?"
0 is a cold winter day, and 100 is a hot summer day.
Part of the problem with this is that it's totally arbitrary - just as much as the Fahrenheit system. Why 100 degrees between freezing and boiling? Why not 10 or 1000? Why water? Why sea level on earth at normal atmospheric pressure.
The Kelvin scale at least has a proper base but the actual units are still arbitrary.
Look, I get it. I get how cool it is to be able to convert between units easily. But I'm 46 and I don't think it's ever been useful for me to know that there are 231 cubic inches in a gallon. It just doesn't matter for the vast majority of people for things they do every day. For those for whom it does matter metric is used, anyway. We always use metric in science here.
The Celsius scale is simply as arbitrary as Fahrenheit. It's okay. It's cool.
Nobody is quashing an emerging industry. What they're saying is that they don't want to have to buy electricity from everybody.
What they are saying is that they want to keep generating dirty, polluting electricity because it is profitable and easy for them. Unfortunately that has costs for society and the rest of the economy, so we are going to have to transition away from it.
They might be using nuclear in which case it's not dirty or polluting. The bottom line is that they're in the business of generating electricity in a certain way, it's pretty normal for them to keep doing what they're doing.
You might not like it. Fine. Get some folks together and build a solar energy electricity provider and sell to the grid. Others are doing it.
But don't act like existing utilities need to knock down their profitable coal plants just because you happen to not like them (even though you likely still use just as much electricity as anybody else).
"It includes exceptions for emergency situations, search-and-rescue efforts, traffic first responders, and inspection of wildfires. It allows other public agencies to use drones for other purposes — just not law enforcement."
First off, everything's an "emergency situation" now that we have a war on terror and a war on drugs. Second, this let's the use the old "inspection" ruse to use the drone as long as they can get some inspector to tag along.
I would recommend you all remember this when it's time to vote. Make stuff like this a big deal. Call them to the carpet at town hall meetings. Etc.
This. I have no problem at all if they want to split my bill into two parts, a fixed cost for just being hooked up and an incremental cost for generating the electricity I consume, as long as the two costs are calculated sanely. The proper fix is to adjust the tariffs to reflect the growing reality of universal connection without universal consumption.
That's what my electric utility already does. I do have a slight problem with this:
"But you shouldn't quash an entire emerging industry just to protect an old and established one."
Nobody is quashing an emerging industry. What they're saying is that they don't want to have to buy electricity from everybody.
Forcing them to buy electricity was a bone thrown to the solar energy, as are the various tax incentives for installing solar. I actually want to install solar myself, badly, but I would prefer this to proceed with the least government interference.
The fact that they are willing to spend a lot of money on attorney fees to challenge the laws probably means there is some other reason they don't want to do that. That's the question people should be asking.
It's called "principle", something that's uncommon in the left-wing world.
But again, why is it only automobile franchises that are the problem and not all fast food and retail franchises that are anti-competitive?
You have no idea what you're talking about. McDonald's can own stores and franchise the brand at the same time - nobody cares. I have no problem with auto dealers - the issue is that if Tesla wants to sell directly then they should be able to. The only reason to disallow it is to limit competition for entrenched players.
By the way, thanks for playing the part described above. If not you, somebody else would have. But you folks are always good for a laugh.
While I agree that not allowing the test drives is stupid, the whole dealer thing was to protect the consumer from purchasing a vehicle and not having any support for it. If the dealer requirement is removed so direct sells are allowed, expect an influx of inexpensive vehicles from SE Asia with no means of warranty repair or service. Yes, buyer be ware, but really, is it a good idea for the masses to be purchasing vehicles from Amazon?
I just popped in to find the token looney leftist who would inevitably show up to explain that anti-competitive crony "regulation" laws are really there to help the consumer.
By the way, if you're willing to drop another $5 each ($25 vs. $20) Lowe's has actual 65 watt replacements in the exact same package. Ironic to pay more for lower light output, but I might do it in my hallway where the Costco lights would simply be *way* too bright.
I've bought about a half-dozen of the Costco bulbs and so far no problems. You're right, they are bright, almost too bright!
The ones I've used the most have been replacements for the typical 65 watt recessed can lights. I have a mix of Philips Halogena 45 watt (reduced power halogen, "same" output as a 65 watt), normal incandescent and CFL. The Costco LEDs are by far brighter than any of the others, in some cases they seem almost too bright.
I have those, too. They are *not* replacements for 65 watt nor do they claim to be. They are replacements for 110 watt flood lights which are significantly brighter.
I have 5 of them - the roof over my kitchen glows at night now.
Except that some percentage of that increased value is going to pay for the devices being installed, and their management.
That's not as big a cost as you think. You see, these kinds of car dealers that specialize in bad-credit buyers expect to repossess the cars eventually. They don't make their money from buying a car and selling it once at a higher price; they make their money from selling, repossessing, and re-selling the same car over and over again, while collecting usurious interest payments in the intervals between sale and repossession. All these devices do is make the cycle more efficient (and thus more profitable) by shortening the time between the first non-payment and the repossession.
They also make a considerable percentage of their profit from the "downpayment" that the repo-victim will lose when they repo the car. These people require a *weekly* payment for you to keep the car, and a downpayment to get it in the first place. You'll lose all of that when they repossess. But, yes, their money is made by reselling the same car many times.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, hostile to tchnology like spell checkers....
I thought the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy was that it doesn't work?
See that big yellow thing up in the sky?
Yeah, see where it is? 96,000,000 miles away. We have fusion bombs, we know how to cause fusion. It's containing it, sustaining the "reaction", and harvesting the energy - in a net positive way - that's the problem. Right now, we have those problems mostly solved, it's just that the energy needed to contain the fusing plasma cloud exceeds the energy created by the fusing plasma cloud. So we're losing on "net positive".
Hopefully this design will fix all that. If it's true that they can build one for $2.7B then it should be done posthaste. If I had Bill Gates' money and I believed in this I would fund it tomorrow. Early investment in fusion will be worth billions of dollars when fusion works.
Sometimes legal stuff looks like programming and we get confused by it, thinking that we need to take all of it literally. The issue here is that the "processor" for a legal document is a judge - a human. If you go before a judge and say "this doesn't work" and you can prove it then the contract isn't going to matter too much. If they have a bunch of lawyers all the better - it'll just cost them more to lose.
If you're using a product outside the intended scope or whatever that's a different story, of course.
Dude, I'm the guy who ran our LUG's webserver on a FreeBSD machine 13 years ago. I'm very familiar with BSD. Again, people like you have absolutely no idea what BSD was like before 1990. It was terrible - but it (barely) worked. And the basic paradigm was much better than anything else available at the time that I ever worked with.
As for your stupid "rm -rf" comment - "rmdir" is made to remove a directory *as long as it's empty*. That's the point. "rmdir somedir/" would give the world's stupidest error while "rmdir somedir" would remove it. I never looked at source to find the cause of the error.
What Linux brought to the table was a whole new generation interested in working on Unix. That's big. It's not directly a technological edge but it translates into that.
It's been more than two years (on a three-year subscription that I can't terminate early)
So, you're worried about upholding your end of the contract even though the other side isn't upholding there end? Or did I miss something?
I used BSD Unix on a VAX 11/750 in 1988. It wasn't ready for prime time - to put it nicely. Olsen was absolutely correct. I think a lot of folks who grew up on Linux or the various free BSD spinoffs from the 90s don't appreciate just how far it's come. If you can find an old copy of "The Unix Haters Handbook" browse through it. Some of the stuff is really pedantic, but a lot of it really was problematic.
Unix had a lot of potential, though, and Linux really helped it reach that potential. It's a more coherent system than VMS. On VMS it's pretty much impossible to use piping. That alone made the shell scripts (DCL scripts, that is) many many times longer for the same functionality. The command line tools weren't made to work together. They did have standardized option parsing, though, stuff that Unix never really had but is now handled by libraries.
Up until the mid 90s you could type "rmdir something/" on most Unixes and it would give you the error "something: is a directory". Yeah, no shit sherlock.
The best thing I remember about BSD in those old days was that processes were tied to terminals. And ctrl-z still suspended processes. At the university a lot of folks were used to DOS where ctrl-z exited a program. Of course, if they were in mail and hit ctrl-z it looked like it exited.
So when we logged in the first thing we would do is type "fg". 90+% of the time a mail prompt would come up. We could then !s to get a shell as the mail user. I was never malicious. I would create a login script that would explain that ctrl-z doesn't actually exit and then destroy itself. Fun times.
By our own lethargy. This stuff needs to start making congressmen and presidents lose their next election, then it'll change.
So are we working to hack Swiss banks or other off-shore financial institutions, looking for tax evasion by US citizens?
It would be a dragnet, but we know there is tax evasion occurring.
Yeah, but it's typically very wealthy people who are doing that. Wealthy people who tend to donate money to political causes. Catch my drift?
Remember how Google and Apple and Microsoft and all these big companies are getting out of paying corporate income taxes by "offshoring" their income? Remember how the Democrats are going to do something about it? I get email every few days from left-wing groups telling me about this.
Look at where Google, Apple, and Microsoft employees invest their political contributions. That's why the Democrats aren't going to do something about it.
Yes. Simply stated "hey, those Constitutional protections don't apply when someone's a criminal, duhhhhh." As the FP (or someone close said) at least it's out in the open so it can be debated. However, it would be nice if the judge picks up on the fact that they perjured themselves (literally) with their first explanation of how they got into his server. I'm not holding my breath.
Aren't there any towns hit hard enough to be willing to sell themselves out for this purpose such that building a fake town isn't necessary?
Detroit or Flint. For $6M they could have (literally) bought a few square miles of uninhabited Detroit for this use. It already has streets, signs, empty houses, etc.
Yep, good luck convincing everyone that they should live on only what they "need" to survive, because the mud-hut dwellers in third world countries "deserve" to live like 2010-era Americans.
In the author's wet dreams the Americans live in mud huts. People like him have run entire countries before, read a history book to see how it turned out. Oddly, those running the country don't have to deal with scarcity of resources.
http://www.celebritynetworth.c...
Ah, yes, Judith Faulkner:
http://dailysignal.com/2011/08...
A major donor to the Democratic Party has received favorable treatment from the Obama administration, including a choice appointment to a federal advisory committee, and lavish praise from the president himself.
Yet health information technology vendor Epic Systems Corp. opposes a key administration position on health IT. Its founder, Judith Faulkner, has spoken out on numerous occasions against “interoperability” in electronic medical records technology.
So why was Faulkner appointed to a 13-member panel charged with recommending how $19 billion in stimulus money be spent? One can’t help but notice that Faulkner and other epic employees have given nearly $300,000 to Democrats since 2006.
Read the rest of it.
Actual link:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.g...
That's because of drought, not because of something stupid and short sighted.
Note that this has been true from the time of Mills, 1806 - 1873, so it's not a recent phenomenon.
I would hypothesize that there is a direct correlation between conservatism and stupidity; the more extreme the conservatism, the stupider the person.
I grew up in a conservative area. All of the stupidest people there were far left or far right, pretty evenly distributed. I've noticed that liberals tend to ignore really stupid liberals so they end up thinking that only conservatives can be stupid.
You see this in politics. Dan Quayle misspeaks and that makes him an idiot. Joe Biden does the same stuff and "hey, Joe just misspeaks sometimes, ha ha ha."
"Water freezes at zero and boils at one hundred. What could be simpler?"
0 is a cold winter day, and 100 is a hot summer day.
Part of the problem with this is that it's totally arbitrary - just as much as the Fahrenheit system. Why 100 degrees between freezing and boiling? Why not 10 or 1000? Why water? Why sea level on earth at normal atmospheric pressure.
The Kelvin scale at least has a proper base but the actual units are still arbitrary.
Look, I get it. I get how cool it is to be able to convert between units easily. But I'm 46 and I don't think it's ever been useful for me to know that there are 231 cubic inches in a gallon. It just doesn't matter for the vast majority of people for things they do every day. For those for whom it does matter metric is used, anyway. We always use metric in science here.
The Celsius scale is simply as arbitrary as Fahrenheit. It's okay. It's cool.
News flash, genius, we already have nukes. And we've used them. You don't have to trust us - it's too late.
Nobody is quashing an emerging industry. What they're saying is that they don't want to have to buy electricity from everybody.
What they are saying is that they want to keep generating dirty, polluting electricity because it is profitable and easy for them. Unfortunately that has costs for society and the rest of the economy, so we are going to have to transition away from it.
They might be using nuclear in which case it's not dirty or polluting. The bottom line is that they're in the business of generating electricity in a certain way, it's pretty normal for them to keep doing what they're doing.
You might not like it. Fine. Get some folks together and build a solar energy electricity provider and sell to the grid. Others are doing it.
But don't act like existing utilities need to knock down their profitable coal plants just because you happen to not like them (even though you likely still use just as much electricity as anybody else).
I love this part, too:
"It includes exceptions for emergency situations, search-and-rescue efforts, traffic first responders, and inspection of wildfires. It allows other public agencies to use drones for other purposes — just not law enforcement."
First off, everything's an "emergency situation" now that we have a war on terror and a war on drugs. Second, this let's the use the old "inspection" ruse to use the drone as long as they can get some inspector to tag along.
I would recommend you all remember this when it's time to vote. Make stuff like this a big deal. Call them to the carpet at town hall meetings. Etc.
This. I have no problem at all if they want to split my bill into two parts, a fixed cost for just being hooked up and an incremental cost for generating the electricity I consume, as long as the two costs are calculated sanely. The proper fix is to adjust the tariffs to reflect the growing reality of universal connection without universal consumption.
That's what my electric utility already does. I do have a slight problem with this:
"But you shouldn't quash an entire emerging industry just to protect an old and established one."
Nobody is quashing an emerging industry. What they're saying is that they don't want to have to buy electricity from everybody.
Forcing them to buy electricity was a bone thrown to the solar energy, as are the various tax incentives for installing solar. I actually want to install solar myself, badly, but I would prefer this to proceed with the least government interference.
The fact that they are willing to spend a lot of money on attorney fees to challenge the laws probably means there is some other reason they don't want to do that. That's the question people should be asking.
It's called "principle", something that's uncommon in the left-wing world.
But again, why is it only automobile franchises that are the problem and not all fast food and retail franchises that are anti-competitive?
You have no idea what you're talking about. McDonald's can own stores and franchise the brand at the same time - nobody cares. I have no problem with auto dealers - the issue is that if Tesla wants to sell directly then they should be able to. The only reason to disallow it is to limit competition for entrenched players.
By the way, thanks for playing the part described above. If not you, somebody else would have. But you folks are always good for a laugh.
While I agree that not allowing the test drives is stupid, the whole dealer thing was to protect the consumer from purchasing a vehicle and not having any support for it. If the dealer requirement is removed so direct sells are allowed, expect an influx of inexpensive vehicles from SE Asia with no means of warranty repair or service. Yes, buyer be ware, but really, is it a good idea for the masses to be purchasing vehicles from Amazon?
I just popped in to find the token looney leftist who would inevitably show up to explain that anti-competitive crony "regulation" laws are really there to help the consumer.
Looks like Dcnjoe60 won....
By the way, if you're willing to drop another $5 each ($25 vs. $20) Lowe's has actual 65 watt replacements in the exact same package. Ironic to pay more for lower light output, but I might do it in my hallway where the Costco lights would simply be *way* too bright.
I've bought about a half-dozen of the Costco bulbs and so far no problems. You're right, they are bright, almost too bright!
The ones I've used the most have been replacements for the typical 65 watt recessed can lights. I have a mix of Philips Halogena 45 watt (reduced power halogen, "same" output as a 65 watt), normal incandescent and CFL. The Costco LEDs are by far brighter than any of the others, in some cases they seem almost too bright.
I have those, too. They are *not* replacements for 65 watt nor do they claim to be. They are replacements for 110 watt flood lights which are significantly brighter.
I have 5 of them - the roof over my kitchen glows at night now.
That's not as big a cost as you think. You see, these kinds of car dealers that specialize in bad-credit buyers expect to repossess the cars eventually. They don't make their money from buying a car and selling it once at a higher price; they make their money from selling, repossessing, and re-selling the same car over and over again, while collecting usurious interest payments in the intervals between sale and repossession. All these devices do is make the cycle more efficient (and thus more profitable) by shortening the time between the first non-payment and the repossession.
They also make a considerable percentage of their profit from the "downpayment" that the repo-victim will lose when they repo the car. These people require a *weekly* payment for you to keep the car, and a downpayment to get it in the first place. You'll lose all of that when they repossess. But, yes, their money is made by reselling the same car many times.