4. There are billions of tons of uranium in seawater.
But can you economically extract it?
Dr Masao Tamada, of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, has developed a fabric made primarily of irradiated polyethylene that is able to soak up the minute amounts of uranium - around 3.3 parts per billion - in the seawater.
Dr Tamada hopes to secure funding to construct an underwater uranium farm covering nearly 400 square miles that would meet one-sixth of Japan's annual uranium requirements.Unranium From Sea Water On A Large Scale Update
The optimistic projection puts the cost at double that of the market price in 2007.
Reminds me of that girl who strolled into an airport with circuit-boards, wires and blinking lights attached to her jumper, and was surprised when security got rather twitchy. It might not have looked like a bomb to you and I
You can always trust the geek to push the big red button. Because it never occurs to him that someone might not be playing by his own set of rules.
The police were called about an AK-47 - not a "big gun I don't know the name of", but (specifically) an AK-47. Seeing as the caller specifically said AK-47, the cop's response should have been "AK-47's are perfectly legal to carry in the open."
It is idiotic to expect the 911 caller to be an expert on military grade weapons.
The only thing he really wants to do is get out of the line of fire of that big fucking gun.
Communication would be damn near impossible if every time I read a text I was not able to refer to a dictionary, but instead had to take a walk outside and poll all the halfwits hanging out the front of the local shopping mall what a given word means in a given context. I can imagine it now
How do you think a word enters a dictionary - and why do you think its meaning changes over time?
There is another way of building a dictionary: handing the work over to an often acutely nationalist academic elite whose working pace is glacial.
The Académie has completed eight editions of the [Dictionnaire de l'Académie française,] which were published in 1694, 1718, 1740, 1762, 1798, 1835, 1878, and 1935. The 8th edition of 1935 contained approximately 35,000 words.
The Académie continues work on the ninth edition, begun in 1986, of which the first volume (A to Enzyme) was published in 1992, and the second (Éocène to Mappemonde) in 2000.The finalized ninth edition is expected to contain more than 15,000 new words.
And while they called out the SWAT team for a replica gun, people shrug their shoulders at Labor Day traffic, which kills a lot more people than any shooting spree. Human beings are absolutely terrible at risk assessment.
The full weight of Labor Day traffic deaths is borne by fifty states and a population of 300 million people.
The 2006 Amish school shooting spree occurred within a one-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania.
The body count doesn't tell you everything you need to know.
Risk assessment isn't meaningful when a singular event overwhelms and devastates an entire community. When there are no mechanisms in place for recovery.
The loss of the Titanic became more than an indictment of the technology and management of the vessel.
It became an indictment of a social order in which the First Class passenger lives and Second and Third dies with her working class crew.
That - in an instant - changed the survival equation for everyone in every setting.
I've been following a lot of similar stories recently and I don't understand why agencies and institutions wouldn't build on an opensource infrastructure that they can control (e.g., something like openlife)
British Petroleum Wells Fargo NOAA The government of Ontario Naval Undersea Warfare Center CIGNA Kraft Unilever Disney Northrop Grumman Kelly Services Cisco IBM Intel Microsoft Toshiba British Telecom Nokia
The missing link is the OEM's (who have all been bullied or paid into submission), because the average user won't install Linux on their machine anyway - no matter how easy it is, most users don't understand the concept because they've been taught that computers = Windows
You don't have to bully anyone into producing for the platform that has 95% of the global desktop market.
The OEM system install has been the gold standard in the consumer market for close on to thirty years.
The computer is sold under a warranty. It works as advertised or it goes back to the seller for a refund, repair or exchange.
Computers=Windows because Windows=Software.
Everything in FOSS. Everything in proprietary and closed source.
Nice idea. But your "Software Freedom Day" is two weeks away, and you don't even have a proper website? That is why Windows and Mac will always win over Linux, they both have some concept of marketing. Linux struggles with marketing.
This is the Boston Commons launch of the FSF campaign - and not as you might suspect team mascot Ron Stoppable at play on the campus green in the dog days of August.
in the grand scheme of things, the loss of AM towers are the tiniest problems facing the nation right now.
It depends on where you live:
Hurricane season runs from the beginning of June to the end of November. The past several years have seen an overall increase in the quantity and intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico. In 2005, there were 28 named storms of which 15 became hurricanes. This proved to be the most active hurricane season in recorded history, causing billions of dollars in damage and resulting in thousands of fatalities.Hurricane Season - Know Before You Go
I'm pretty sure Take Two is doing just fine, even considering this.
Think again.
Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. said Tuesday that it swung to a loss for its third fiscal quarter as video-game sales fell sharply from the year-ago period, which benefited from the company's blockbuster "Grand Theft Auto" franchise. For the period ended July 31, Take-Two reported a net loss of $55.5 million, or 72 cents a share, compared with earnings of $51.8 million, or 67 cents a share, for the same period last year. Revenue fell 68% to $138.6 million. Take-Two Interactive swings to a loss for third quarter [Sept 1]
There is nothing much new or exciting in the pipeline. Borderlands
Slashdot Mirror
4. There are billions of tons of uranium in seawater.
But can you economically extract it?
Dr Masao Tamada, of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, has developed a fabric made primarily of irradiated polyethylene that is able to soak up the minute amounts of uranium - around 3.3 parts per billion - in the seawater.
Dr Tamada hopes to secure funding to construct an underwater uranium farm
covering nearly 400 square miles that would meet one-sixth of Japan's annual uranium requirements. Unranium From Sea Water On A Large Scale Update
The optimistic projection puts the cost at double that of the market price in 2007.
Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.
In the states, dialing the operator, dialing "0," in an emergency was drilled into kids for the better part of one hundred years.
"911" was easily recognized by AT&T's switching logic as needing special handling. The History of 911
The "9" may have been suggested by the British "999" system adopted in 1937.
I will admit, silly as it may sound, contacting rescuers via messaging in a non-critical emergency situation may not be a bad idea.
This assumes that the situation will remain stable. That is a big assumption to make - even for an adult. If you are a kid, you dial 911.
Yet you weren't able to come up with one counter-example, were you?
Microsoft negotiated a non-exclusive license for DOS.
It priced DOS at $200 less than CP/M 86.
The MS-DOS PC was a significant - and rapidly growing presence - in the PC market before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
PC hardware - and the PC manufacturer - becomes generic. It's the Microsoft OS and the OEM system install that drives sales.
Reminds me of that girl who strolled into an airport with circuit-boards, wires and blinking lights attached to her jumper, and was surprised when security got rather twitchy. It might not have looked like a bomb to you and I
You can always trust the geek to push the big red button. Because it never occurs to him that someone might not be playing by his own set of rules.
It doesn't look real at all. It is way too big.
That may be obvious in a static indoor photograph.
On the street - in shadow - in perspective, an angular view? Probably not so easy to judge.
As another poster suggested, would you want to be walking towards that gun held at the ready?
Which raises the interesting question of what happens if someone ducks or moves for cover.
The police were called about an AK-47 - not a "big gun I don't know the name of", but (specifically) an AK-47. Seeing as the caller specifically said AK-47, the cop's response should have been "AK-47's are perfectly legal to carry in the open."
It is idiotic to expect the 911 caller to be an expert on military grade weapons.
The only thing he really wants to do is get out of the line of fire of that big fucking gun.
Communication would be damn near impossible if every time I read a text I was not able to refer to a dictionary, but instead had to take a walk outside and poll all the halfwits hanging out the front of the local shopping mall what a given word means in a given context. I can imagine it now
How do you think a word enters a dictionary - and why do you think its meaning changes over time?
There is another way of building a dictionary:
handing the work over to an often acutely nationalist academic elite whose working pace is glacial.
The Académie has completed eight editions of the [Dictionnaire de l'Académie française,] which were published in 1694, 1718, 1740, 1762, 1798, 1835, 1878, and 1935. The 8th edition of 1935 contained approximately 35,000 words.
The Académie continues work on the ninth edition, begun in 1986, of which the first volume (A to Enzyme) was published in 1992, and the second (Éocène to Mappemonde) in 2000.The finalized ninth edition is expected to contain more than 15,000 new words.
And while they called out the SWAT team for a replica gun, people shrug their shoulders at Labor Day traffic, which kills a lot more people than any shooting spree. Human beings are absolutely terrible at risk assessment.
The full weight of Labor Day traffic deaths is borne by fifty states and a population of 300 million people.
The 2006 Amish school shooting spree occurred within a one-room schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania.
The body count doesn't tell you everything you need to know.
Risk assessment isn't meaningful when a singular event overwhelms and devastates an entire community. When there are no mechanisms in place for recovery.
The loss of the Titanic became more than an indictment of the technology and management of the vessel.
It became an indictment of a social order in which the First Class passenger lives and Second and Third dies with her working class crew.
That - in an instant - changed the survival equation for everyone in every setting.
It doesn't matter whether the geek thinks he recognizes a prop from the game.
It does matter that at a distance - or in shadow - the gun looks like a real - plausible - military grade weapon.
I doubt that even a SWAT team member can keep in its head every known variant design or customization.
Dell confirmed that there is no issue with return rates on their Ubuntu Dell Mini's. In fact they're running out of stock!
That tells me nothing until I know how many they had in stock.
I've been following a lot of similar stories recently and I don't understand why agencies and institutions wouldn't build on an opensource infrastructure that they can control (e.g., something like openlife)
Linden Labs has experience and resources.
Linden Labs clients include:
British Petroleum
Wells Fargo
NOAA
The government of Ontario
Naval Undersea Warfare Center
CIGNA
Kraft
Unilever
Disney
Northrop Grumman
Kelly Services
Cisco
IBM
Intel
Microsoft
Toshiba
British Telecom
Nokia
Second Life Work
Openlife is in beta and looks it.
What's fascinating about this is that you believe that crap.
It doesn't matter whether I believe that "crap." It matters a lot whether WalMart believes it.
The missing link is the OEM's (who have all been bullied or paid into submission), because the average user won't install Linux on their machine anyway - no matter how easy it is, most users don't understand the concept because they've been taught that computers = Windows
You don't have to bully anyone into producing for the platform that has 95% of the global desktop market.
The OEM system install has been the gold standard in the consumer market for close on to thirty years.
The computer is sold under a warranty. It works as advertised or it goes back to the seller for a refund, repair or exchange.
Computers=Windows because Windows=Software.
Everything in FOSS. Everything in proprietary and closed source.
Product available at every price point.
Freeware. Shareware. Online distribution. Retail boxed.
The classics of MSDOS and Windows PC gaming at $5.99 and $10. Gog.com DRM free. Ready to run on Vista and Win 7.
Nice idea. But your "Software Freedom Day" is two weeks away, and you don't even have a proper website? That is why Windows and Mac will always win over Linux, they both have some concept of marketing. Linux struggles with marketing.
For the marketing geek with a morbid sense of humor: Free Software Foundation - Windows 7 Sins 209 Views.
This is the Boston Commons launch of the FSF campaign - and not as you might suspect team mascot Ron Stoppable at play on the campus green in the dog days of August.
You know what the next step is, right? (It's not PROFIT!, but it's not far either.)
The Net Applications stats for August have Win 7 at 1.18% and Linux at 0.94%. Operating System Market Share
The developer-oriented w3Schools OS Platform Stats show Linux at 4.2% and Win 7 at 2.5%.
But Win 7 went from 0% to 2.5% in eight months. - and it got there with zero OEM system installs.
It took Linux six damn years to claw its way up from 2% to 4%.
Why do I say that? Because you don't see BMW giving free training videos to car salesmen comparing their cars to say GM or Chrysler or Ford, do you?
You won't see the BMW training video unless you are a BMW salesman.
But BMW does "educate" their sales force.
That is instinctive in any business that has a sales force - and the automobile manufacturers have been masters of the game since 1896.
New BMW Adds Put The Competition In Their Place
I seem to remember Linux supporting more hardware then any other OS...
Support for obscure hardware of no interest to your target audience is not a bullet point.
WiFi that works from the moment you unpack the box is.
It's completely unethical for bestbuy to go along with microsoft on pushing this course onto their employees. Though I can't say I'm surprised.
Why is it unethical when the Windows product represents 99% of your PC sales?
You want to change the ground game?
Bring in some new players.
Someone whose notion of marketing OEM Linux goes beyond dusting the pallets on the Sam's Club floor.
I'll take the damn course if it'll get me a $10 copy of Win 7.
Well of course you would.
Same as you would take the course for Snow Leopard and The Mac Box for if you were working the Apple store.
It looks damn good to your boss to see you making that extra effort to move product.
But there is no one working the streets to get a sales force pumped up about the OEM Linux box. Assuming you have one in stock.
the group's North American press office in Washington, D.C., issued a news release and posted an item on its national Web site Friday saying it was.
When an eco-terrorist organization claims responsibility for another eco-terrorist act, people are going to take them at their word.
in the grand scheme of things, the loss of AM towers are the tiniest problems facing the nation right now.
It depends on where you live:
Hurricane season runs from the beginning of June to the end of November. The past several years have seen an overall increase in the quantity and intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico. In 2005, there were 28 named storms of which 15 became hurricanes. This proved to be the most active hurricane season in recorded history, causing billions of dollars in damage and resulting in thousands of fatalities. Hurricane Season - Know Before You Go
It depends on your profession:
WILL AM 580 Agricultural Broadcasting
Trucking Radio
The legal system in the US is fixated on maintaining the status quo when it comes to major corporations.
The legal systems in the U.S. tend to preserve the status quo in any litigation until a final decision is rendered.
Microsoft is a multi-national with $60 billion in revenues and no significant debt. It is in no way seriously threatened.
But a similar injunction against a geek's one-man operation would be ruinous.
- railroads were funded *privately* not publicly.
The western railroad was funded by enormous land grants.
The western railroad profited from countless indirect subsidies to those who needed its services - the cattleman, the mine owner, the timber baron.
The "recovery" in 22 was short-lived and did not reach the agricultural sector.
I'm pretty sure Take Two is doing just fine, even considering this.
Think again.
Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. said Tuesday that it swung to a loss for its third fiscal quarter as video-game sales fell sharply from the year-ago period, which benefited from the company's blockbuster "Grand Theft Auto" franchise.
For the period ended July 31, Take-Two reported a net loss of $55.5 million, or 72 cents a share, compared with earnings of $51.8 million, or 67 cents a share, for the same period last year.
Revenue fell 68% to $138.6 million.
Take-Two Interactive swings to a loss for third quarter
[Sept 1]
There is nothing much new or exciting in the pipeline. Borderlands