I was thinking exactly the same thing - I'm still sceptical, certainly, but the Scientific American story that's linked from the one above does say that "it will process 1,500 tons of garbage a day, sending 60 megawatts of electricity to the power grid (after using some to power itself).". They're definitely trying to claim that they've found a way to use random waste as a fuel source, which would be a breakthrough if true.
What worries me is a quick Google of the company. One of the top links is this interview with the company president. The fact that he keeps talking about "megawatts of energy per hour" puts my cynicism into overdrive - sure, it's not entirely damning; maybe the engineers are sitting hanging their heads at how the president doesn't understand what they're doing, but when the likelihood of their claims actually being what they say they are is this low, that really isn't who they need at the helm.
I'd say an optically scannable print-out from the electronic voting machines would be the solution to a whole lot of problems on both sides.
Touch the screen, the machine records your vote in its memory and prints out a clear form (both human and machine readable) stating how you voted. This is then placed in a box just like any normal paper ballot. The paper forms are optically scanned, and if that tally disagrees with the machine's internal database then a hand recount is automatically undertaken.
It's fast, there are far fewer potential problems with incorrectly filled forms, there's a paper trail, there's on-the-spot evidence that the machine did indeed record your vote correctly and the votes are all counted twice by design.
It's an idea that's been floating around my head for a while, and it seems workable - anyone have any ideas on where it could fall down?
I'm still amazed to hear that your university is charging you such a high rate for access (well, actually I'm surprised they're charging you at all for on-campus access); obviously connections differ depending on where you are, and the number of cables from New Zealand to the rest of the world has an impact on that, but having had a quick look around it seems that even a fairly pessimistic bit of number crunching at NZ prices has your university paying less than 1/10 of the cost they're passing on to you. Has anyone complained about this? Do they provide a reason for the inflated costs?
Actually what I'd say is even more worrying is that it won't annoy 'everyone' with the false positives. Sure, if a site like YouTube, or Gmail or even Slashdot were blocked there would be outcry, but what about all those little sites that might be blocked or might just be down? What about the single page on the whole internet with the obscure information you need that's been up on some university server since 1996?
I'd be much more inclined to believe that you'll just get a generic error bounced to your browser than an actual redirect explaining that the government required blocking is filtering out the page you want. How are you going to know what you're missing out on and what's really not there? That's perhaps an even greater worry - once they do have this in place it'd be very easy to make the whole system effectively invisible to the vast majority of users. Few people (at least nobody considered worth listening to, unfortunately) will complain about something they don't notice.
Centralised energy sources with hydrogen used as a storage medium mean that emission-scrubbing technology is far superior (one power plant chimney rather than thousands of car exhausts), a variety of renewable sources can be used (good luck on making that hydroelectric or wind-powered car otherwise), that it's easier to phase out one technology in place of another (replacing coal plants with nuclear, or scrapping the whole lot for fusion if '15 years' ever arrives) and that you don't have the multitude of problems associated with batteries (charge time, weight, cost, raw materials, and so on).
Or even 'I Am Rich' for that matter. If people want to waste their money then they should be more than welcome to; I can't believe people are calling it a scam - it works exactly as advertised and the price is clearly stated.
I'd assume it's a legal grey area - does anyone actually know whether the idea that the EULA of a compiler can limit the distribution of binaries that it outputs has ever been tested in court?
The fact that the XBMC team don't want to prod MS with a stick and blindly hope that they aren't bankrupted by defensive legal costs, of course, is entirely understandable, but I'd still think that they've got something of a case; it's not like the makers of any other tool get a say in how you use it or what you do with the product you produce with it.
Not the eee netbook, the eee box. According to AnandTech it'll just about handle 720p video; they complain about the lack of HDMI, which is a problem if you either wanted digital audio or wanted to watch DRM restricted HD content.
My guess is they would argue that brain scans are of the same family of evidence as DNA; e.g. it doesn't "testify against you", but is rather physically relevant to the case.
I guess it is a grey area (no pun intended!), but really we shouldn't even need to have that conversation. The study hasn't been peer reviewed, it's a new and relatively untested technology, what the hell are they doing admitting it at all, as testimony or as evidence?
Hell, the last time I saw MRI-based lie detection it was on Mythbusters, and even there it failed outright on one of the three people they tested it on.
Just means that the LCD is backlit by LEDs rather than a cold cathode. It's a good thing, as I understand it - lower power, for one thing, but not any actual new display tech where the LEDs form the pixels as in OLED displays.
Depends on what flash tech they're using. For a long time I made the same mistake you are by equating SSD prices to the cheapest other flash memory I could find - turns out that the stuff they throw into cheap SD cards and USB sticks is often (always?) slow enough to cause performance issues if it's your main drive. I can't remember the technical differences off the top of my head, and I know that some companies do make 'normal' flash memory (CF cards, particularly) that run at extremely high speeds, but the general gist was that cheaper = slower.
The eee 901 compromises by using a 4GB, high-speed 'proper' SSD and 16GB of cheap flash. If Dell are doing the same then it's a bit pricey, but if they're using fast memory all the way then it's a decent deal.
Hate to reply to myself, but it would appear that I'm mistaken.
I was comparing the UK and US pages and simply read "From $349" and "From £299" in the same place on the equivalent pages, assuming they were the same model. Turns out the UK don't have the choice of the low-spec one yet, so I was inadvertently using the price from the 16GB/1GB RAM model - looks like a decent deal after all. Windows only, by the look, but at least it should be easy enough to wipe and replace; possibly even worth trying for a refund on the cost of the license.
I'll still be waiting until they actually ship to see how it compares to the eee 901, which is slightly cheaper and comes with an extra 4GB of disc space (although if that SSD in the Dell is a single, high speed unit unlike the eee's two-part one it could be well worth the trade off) but I'm actually very glad to see that Dell aren't going down the usual road of ripping off the Brits, and I commend them (and Asus and Acer) for that.
You'll be glad to know we've got it available in the UK. Only £299 ($528 at today's rates) for the base model. Thanks Dell.
And, just because I know it'll come up: UK VAT is 17.5%. (528/100)*82.5=$435.60 so pre-tax we're paying just under $100 premium for absolutely nothing. The eee and the Aspire one, on the other hand, are about the same price when tax is figured. The MSI Wind is similarly inflated.
I was actually waiting to see what Dell's offering was like before going out and getting a mini laptop. Looks like it's an eee for me now.
£10,000 according to the article, so your $20k estimate was pretty much bang on. I'd hate to think that a technology like this wouldn't be provided by the state health service/health insurance (delete per country), assuming that it works as advertised, though.
I'm sure it's more graceful and dignified than trying to roll a wheelchair up them.
Seriously, even if it can't yet go up stairs elegantly (and you don't know if that's the case), it's giving some serious advantages, not least of which is a sense of normalcy, without any drawbacks over a wheelchair - I don't really see the basis of your criticism.
Oh, and at least in this country sales tax is applied before the point of sale, so you can see how much something will cost based on the price tag, instead of having to do sums in your head or get a nasty surprise at the till when it's 7% more expensive than it said on the label.
I'd actually much prefer if they were required to show both prices on every label. The idea of showing the pre-tax price is to let people see how much their goods actually cost, and how much the government is getting. If they had to show both it would quickly and easily demonstrate just how much we're paying in VAT, and you'd still be able to easily see how much you would actually pay at the till. A constant reminder of a tax is better than having it lost in the prices and forgotten about.
I do accept that we get some useful services from our high taxes, but if you look at how much the government simply wastes every year, you'd see that we should be able to manage a significant reduction in costs (and therefore taxes) without actually losing any services.
Actually it's half and half between the greedy company and the greedy government in this case. UK VAT is 17.5%, so taking the figure of $629 means the tax will be $110, leaving a base price of $519. That's still $120 extra for Lenovo, as well as $110 for the government.
Yes, the abrasive in toothpaste can help to polish out the scratches, but really (especially as these are valuable/irreplaceable discs) you should just get it done professionally.
I can't vouch for any particular company, but Googling "disc resurfacing service" turns up plenty of fairly economical options. There's no point spending a few hundred on a professional resurfacing machine, nor is there in risking doing it yourself with toothpaste or metal polish and a microfibre cloth, when you can pay a couple of dollars a disc and have them done by someone who knows what they're doing in a machine that probably cost a thousand or more.
I never understood how some of the most vocal of the anti-religious thought nothing of using a book they themselves completely discount against the people they disagreed with.
It makes perfect sense, actually. Just because I don't let the bible influence my life, doesn't mean I can't use it as a tool to influence people who do live by it, or at least claim to.
In the most basic terms, it's useful to remind a Christian who is trying to tell me what to do that they aren't following their book properly themselves, so they have no right to try to apply bits of it to my life.
Because we're trapping people inside their own logic.
You say "bronze age mythology", they say "word of God". You then ask them why they feel qualified to pick and choose which bits of their God's word they obey and which bits they contradict.
You're unlikely to get strong followers of a religion to buy into a mindset that runs contrary to the basic concept of faith in their book, however good an argument you present. The thing is, a reasonable amount of what their book tells them is actually rather pleasant (yes, there's plenty that isn't, too) so asking them why they aren't obeying those bits is much more likely to change their behaviour than asking them to abandon it all, good and bad.
...and that was rabid Catholic-bashing in post 4, still standing by for Christianity-bashing and something about open source.
It seemed like a logical post with reasonable citations for its assertions - would you care to explain how that constitutes "rabid Catholic-bashing" rather than reasonable criticism? Even a sensible counter-argument would be interesting.
I know, and they shouldn't have done so, that was my entire point. They approached what could have been a fair and legitimate problem from entirely the wrong angle and not only have they pissed off a lot of people, they've set a very nasty copyright precedent while they were at it.
Actually that is the point I was making. Look at it in context, the post above was trying to say that Blizzard just want to stop cheating, I was saying that they have every right to do that on their own servers, but not to do interfere in any way with what people do with their own copies (or, by extension, where they release information on how to modify your own copy).
It's not what they did, it's how they did it. It's a damn shame that they chose to use the insane 'copyright on RAM contents' argument. They did have a reasonably legitimate complaint, since (as I understand it, at least) glider causes problems on their servers which they have authority over. Trying to tell people what they can and can't do with their own game installations on their own machines is an absolute joke, but trying to set terms for what people are allowed to do on a communal service with its own rules is fair enough.
To fulfil Slashdot tradition and make a somewhat clunky and inappropriate car analogy: I can attach rockets to my car and blast along at 300mph on my own land and it's none of the manufacturer's damn business. If I then paid them to take it on their test track which had a rule saying "No rocket cars" they'd be well within their rights to kick me out.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking exactly the same thing - I'm still sceptical, certainly, but the Scientific American story that's linked from the one above does say that "it will process 1,500 tons of garbage a day, sending 60 megawatts of electricity to the power grid (after using some to power itself).". They're definitely trying to claim that they've found a way to use random waste as a fuel source, which would be a breakthrough if true.
What worries me is a quick Google of the company. One of the top links is this interview with the company president. The fact that he keeps talking about "megawatts of energy per hour" puts my cynicism into overdrive - sure, it's not entirely damning; maybe the engineers are sitting hanging their heads at how the president doesn't understand what they're doing, but when the likelihood of their claims actually being what they say they are is this low, that really isn't who they need at the helm.
I'd say an optically scannable print-out from the electronic voting machines would be the solution to a whole lot of problems on both sides.
Touch the screen, the machine records your vote in its memory and prints out a clear form (both human and machine readable) stating how you voted. This is then placed in a box just like any normal paper ballot. The paper forms are optically scanned, and if that tally disagrees with the machine's internal database then a hand recount is automatically undertaken.
It's fast, there are far fewer potential problems with incorrectly filled forms, there's a paper trail, there's on-the-spot evidence that the machine did indeed record your vote correctly and the votes are all counted twice by design.
It's an idea that's been floating around my head for a while, and it seems workable - anyone have any ideas on where it could fall down?
I'm still amazed to hear that your university is charging you such a high rate for access (well, actually I'm surprised they're charging you at all for on-campus access); obviously connections differ depending on where you are, and the number of cables from New Zealand to the rest of the world has an impact on that, but having had a quick look around it seems that even a fairly pessimistic bit of number crunching at NZ prices has your university paying less than 1/10 of the cost they're passing on to you. Has anyone complained about this? Do they provide a reason for the inflated costs?
Actually what I'd say is even more worrying is that it won't annoy 'everyone' with the false positives. Sure, if a site like YouTube, or Gmail or even Slashdot were blocked there would be outcry, but what about all those little sites that might be blocked or might just be down? What about the single page on the whole internet with the obscure information you need that's been up on some university server since 1996?
I'd be much more inclined to believe that you'll just get a generic error bounced to your browser than an actual redirect explaining that the government required blocking is filtering out the page you want. How are you going to know what you're missing out on and what's really not there? That's perhaps an even greater worry - once they do have this in place it'd be very easy to make the whole system effectively invisible to the vast majority of users. Few people (at least nobody considered worth listening to, unfortunately) will complain about something they don't notice.
Centralised energy sources with hydrogen used as a storage medium mean that emission-scrubbing technology is far superior (one power plant chimney rather than thousands of car exhausts), a variety of renewable sources can be used (good luck on making that hydroelectric or wind-powered car otherwise), that it's easier to phase out one technology in place of another (replacing coal plants with nuclear, or scrapping the whole lot for fusion if '15 years' ever arrives) and that you don't have the multitude of problems associated with batteries (charge time, weight, cost, raw materials, and so on).
Or even 'I Am Rich' for that matter. If people want to waste their money then they should be more than welcome to; I can't believe people are calling it a scam - it works exactly as advertised and the price is clearly stated.
I'd assume it's a legal grey area - does anyone actually know whether the idea that the EULA of a compiler can limit the distribution of binaries that it outputs has ever been tested in court?
The fact that the XBMC team don't want to prod MS with a stick and blindly hope that they aren't bankrupted by defensive legal costs, of course, is entirely understandable, but I'd still think that they've got something of a case; it's not like the makers of any other tool get a say in how you use it or what you do with the product you produce with it.
Not the eee netbook, the eee box. According to AnandTech it'll just about handle 720p video; they complain about the lack of HDMI, which is a problem if you either wanted digital audio or wanted to watch DRM restricted HD content.
My guess is they would argue that brain scans are of the same family of evidence as DNA; e.g. it doesn't "testify against you", but is rather physically relevant to the case.
I guess it is a grey area (no pun intended!), but really we shouldn't even need to have that conversation. The study hasn't been peer reviewed, it's a new and relatively untested technology, what the hell are they doing admitting it at all, as testimony or as evidence?
Hell, the last time I saw MRI-based lie detection it was on Mythbusters, and even there it failed outright on one of the three people they tested it on.
Just means that the LCD is backlit by LEDs rather than a cold cathode. It's a good thing, as I understand it - lower power, for one thing, but not any actual new display tech where the LEDs form the pixels as in OLED displays.
Depends on what flash tech they're using. For a long time I made the same mistake you are by equating SSD prices to the cheapest other flash memory I could find - turns out that the stuff they throw into cheap SD cards and USB sticks is often (always?) slow enough to cause performance issues if it's your main drive. I can't remember the technical differences off the top of my head, and I know that some companies do make 'normal' flash memory (CF cards, particularly) that run at extremely high speeds, but the general gist was that cheaper = slower.
The eee 901 compromises by using a 4GB, high-speed 'proper' SSD and 16GB of cheap flash. If Dell are doing the same then it's a bit pricey, but if they're using fast memory all the way then it's a decent deal.
Hate to reply to myself, but it would appear that I'm mistaken.
I was comparing the UK and US pages and simply read "From $349" and "From £299" in the same place on the equivalent pages, assuming they were the same model. Turns out the UK don't have the choice of the low-spec one yet, so I was inadvertently using the price from the 16GB/1GB RAM model - looks like a decent deal after all. Windows only, by the look, but at least it should be easy enough to wipe and replace; possibly even worth trying for a refund on the cost of the license.
I'll still be waiting until they actually ship to see how it compares to the eee 901, which is slightly cheaper and comes with an extra 4GB of disc space (although if that SSD in the Dell is a single, high speed unit unlike the eee's two-part one it could be well worth the trade off) but I'm actually very glad to see that Dell aren't going down the usual road of ripping off the Brits, and I commend them (and Asus and Acer) for that.
You'll be glad to know we've got it available in the UK. Only £299 ($528 at today's rates) for the base model. Thanks Dell.
And, just because I know it'll come up: UK VAT is 17.5%. (528/100)*82.5=$435.60 so pre-tax we're paying just under $100 premium for absolutely nothing. The eee and the Aspire one, on the other hand, are about the same price when tax is figured. The MSI Wind is similarly inflated.
I was actually waiting to see what Dell's offering was like before going out and getting a mini laptop. Looks like it's an eee for me now.
£10,000 according to the article, so your $20k estimate was pretty much bang on. I'd hate to think that a technology like this wouldn't be provided by the state health service/health insurance (delete per country), assuming that it works as advertised, though.
I'm sure it's more graceful and dignified than trying to roll a wheelchair up them.
Seriously, even if it can't yet go up stairs elegantly (and you don't know if that's the case), it's giving some serious advantages, not least of which is a sense of normalcy, without any drawbacks over a wheelchair - I don't really see the basis of your criticism.
Oh, and at least in this country sales tax is applied before the point of sale, so you can see how much something will cost based on the price tag, instead of having to do sums in your head or get a nasty surprise at the till when it's 7% more expensive than it said on the label.
I'd actually much prefer if they were required to show both prices on every label. The idea of showing the pre-tax price is to let people see how much their goods actually cost, and how much the government is getting. If they had to show both it would quickly and easily demonstrate just how much we're paying in VAT, and you'd still be able to easily see how much you would actually pay at the till. A constant reminder of a tax is better than having it lost in the prices and forgotten about.
I do accept that we get some useful services from our high taxes, but if you look at how much the government simply wastes every year, you'd see that we should be able to manage a significant reduction in costs (and therefore taxes) without actually losing any services.
Actually it's half and half between the greedy company and the greedy government in this case. UK VAT is 17.5%, so taking the figure of $629 means the tax will be $110, leaving a base price of $519. That's still $120 extra for Lenovo, as well as $110 for the government.
...there are some disks that have 2 copies of each song, one in analog format...
No. No there aren't.
Yes, the abrasive in toothpaste can help to polish out the scratches, but really (especially as these are valuable/irreplaceable discs) you should just get it done professionally.
I can't vouch for any particular company, but Googling "disc resurfacing service" turns up plenty of fairly economical options. There's no point spending a few hundred on a professional resurfacing machine, nor is there in risking doing it yourself with toothpaste or metal polish and a microfibre cloth, when you can pay a couple of dollars a disc and have them done by someone who knows what they're doing in a machine that probably cost a thousand or more.
I never understood how some of the most vocal of the anti-religious thought nothing of using a book they themselves completely discount against the people they disagreed with.
It makes perfect sense, actually. Just because I don't let the bible influence my life, doesn't mean I can't use it as a tool to influence people who do live by it, or at least claim to.
In the most basic terms, it's useful to remind a Christian who is trying to tell me what to do that they aren't following their book properly themselves, so they have no right to try to apply bits of it to my life.
Because we're trapping people inside their own logic.
You say "bronze age mythology", they say "word of God". You then ask them why they feel qualified to pick and choose which bits of their God's word they obey and which bits they contradict.
You're unlikely to get strong followers of a religion to buy into a mindset that runs contrary to the basic concept of faith in their book, however good an argument you present. The thing is, a reasonable amount of what their book tells them is actually rather pleasant (yes, there's plenty that isn't, too) so asking them why they aren't obeying those bits is much more likely to change their behaviour than asking them to abandon it all, good and bad.
It seemed like a logical post with reasonable citations for its assertions - would you care to explain how that constitutes "rabid Catholic-bashing" rather than reasonable criticism? Even a sensible counter-argument would be interesting.
I know, and they shouldn't have done so, that was my entire point. They approached what could have been a fair and legitimate problem from entirely the wrong angle and not only have they pissed off a lot of people, they've set a very nasty copyright precedent while they were at it.
Actually that is the point I was making. Look at it in context, the post above was trying to say that Blizzard just want to stop cheating, I was saying that they have every right to do that on their own servers, but not to do interfere in any way with what people do with their own copies (or, by extension, where they release information on how to modify your own copy).
It's not what they did, it's how they did it. It's a damn shame that they chose to use the insane 'copyright on RAM contents' argument. They did have a reasonably legitimate complaint, since (as I understand it, at least) glider causes problems on their servers which they have authority over. Trying to tell people what they can and can't do with their own game installations on their own machines is an absolute joke, but trying to set terms for what people are allowed to do on a communal service with its own rules is fair enough.
To fulfil Slashdot tradition and make a somewhat clunky and inappropriate car analogy: I can attach rockets to my car and blast along at 300mph on my own land and it's none of the manufacturer's damn business. If I then paid them to take it on their test track which had a rule saying "No rocket cars" they'd be well within their rights to kick me out.