The Italian city-states of the time weren't terribly friendly to non-conformists, actually. Galileo got off lucky. Violation of sumptuary laws, i.e. wearing clothes that were above your station (there was a hierarchy of rankings, and only the Doge himself could wear Cloth-of-Gold), resulted in the offender being found the next morning buried upside down in a shallow pond, head deep, with their legs tied to a pole (sort of like a Hipgnosis album cover). A conformist society, that, but inventive in a way that wasn't to be matched until the development of formal defenestration by Russia in the 19th century. If you wanted security it helped to have patronage, though that required you to make moral compromises at times (such as DaVinci touring around Florence with Cesare Borgia, documenting plant poisons around 1510-ish). From all this, I suspect Galileo was taking a stand on more than scientific principles (or was dreadfully naiive, perhaps).
Pity VMS time didn't make it across to NT. It was an integer, too -- number of 100 msec ticks since - wasn't it 17 Nov 1851? Ah, VMS... what a uniform programming environment that was.
Re:I wonder how that is compared to the loss from
on
2010 Bug Plagues Germany
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I was running a Y2K lab at my company from 1999 to 2000, and we found a TON of serious problems...
My wife was in charge of a Pick-based hospital IS back then. She put in a huge number of extra-long days getting the dates expanded so the hospital wouldn't have to "go manual" on 1-Jan-2000. She made the deadline, but it nearly killed her. Hospital administrators then gave her a sledge for making such a big deal over it, because clearly it was all a farce - nothing happened as a result of the date changing to year 2000.
The loss to her was any further interest in an IT career. She's now teaching immersive medieval history to a number of schools, where her work is at least appreciated by her clients.
...Admittedly control panel isn't a great implementation...
The Control Panel UI design was an early Windows OS artifact that was a direct response to the original 128k Macintosh's control panel. It doesn't need to look like that, it could be a simple admin tools branch of a normal program invocation tree (just another app folder, if you will). The way it looks is just a hold over from then. It's a legacy visual meme, nothing more.
Ahhh religion, where changing flesh into bread and blood into wine isnt considered "witchcraft". Yet all other "magics" was at one time punishable.
Hypocrisy, it loves religion.
The first thing any religion attempts is to secure an advantage over other beliefs. One of the primary methods is to acquire a seeming monopoly on magic.
There are times when I do believe that there are people out there worried that any technology is going to turn around and bite them, are concerned that texting causes cancer of the thumbs, or that too much typing causes you to ingest fatal doses of plastics through your finger tips.
Yes, but the decimated desert would be arrayed in a regular sparse matrix. (If we could just get an equation editor in Slashdot I think we'd be able to scare off most of the nay-sayers. See to it if you please, Commander.)
Spain is also investing heavily in distributed MicroCHP generation. Distributed generation is getting a lot of air play in the Iberian penninsula. Firms like Whispergen are selling family-sized units very well there I hear, and from my involvement on the SmartGrid front it seems the feeling is fairly commonly held among energy execs that encouraging distributed generation is very much in their plans. Also search Volkswagen-Lichtblick for another European example. Non-fossil generation is expected to have a significant effect on the grid over the next ten years.
This sort of news upsets me... Why do we spend countless dollars on searching for more energy if the basic problem is not addressed first: There are too many humans and until we figure out how to control human population growth we are doomed sooner or later....we'll be able to reduce human population to something that Earth can sustain.
Course manouvers. The Universe is infinite, space is big, and it's all out there for us to tap. And considering the scale of the playpen, I have utterly no qualms about invading it with our polluting presence. We could grow to a population of quintillions or more and not even be noticed on the cosmic scale. I refuse to feel sorrow over our biological imperatives. Far from feeling any sort of sorrow, I take a sunny fresh joy in watching people discussing ways to allow us to live and thrive while using what we have in the most efficient possible way, until the time comes for us to leave the nest and fly. Go Technology!
If you had enough land, and a prevailing breeze, you wouldn't need a tower. Just build a long covered trench with a swivelling NACA duct at one end. Let the wind blow through a gently expanding plenum, top side heated by solar radiation, with a venturi constriction at the end where it exhausts. Tap the resulting accelerated air flow with a turbogenerator. You wouldn't need any part of the structure to protrude from the ground (except perhaps a vane to aim the inlet).
these couldn't be built for a small fraction the price by using an atmospheric vortex engine instead of a tower.
Interesting link. Yes, it looks like you could build a vortex that way. But there's nothing in that paper that describes how you could draw off that energy into useful work.
Wouldn't you still need a structure to provide the mechanism (presumably some form of turbine) to give you a useful circuit? Might as well combine the two concepts and let thermal loading give you a hand with the vortex.
I could easily imagine an annular ring at the top of the structure with multiple turbine ports that would take advantage of the combined effect of gas pressure & velocity sped along by both the convective power of the heat plus the annular momentum of the vortex you describe.
Hey, while we're at it, you can coat the outside of the solar turbine with solar cells. If you're going to build with Mother Nature as a power source, you might as well make use of everything.
Except 4 square miles of solar panels will generate an order of magnitude more energy than a solar chimney. Solar updraft power plants have a low initial outlay, but are very inefficient.
I'd go with four square miles of solar chimneys, myself. There are places so remote in Australia that even the taggers wouldn't find them. Nobody would find them for years, if they had the good sense to bury the cables. Personally I'd be in favour of any solution that didn't involve burning stuff you had to dig up out of the dirt.
Yeah, I have to say I'm surprised anyone would object to CIA involvement
I certainly don't, and I can be as paranoid as anybody. For years I've enjoyed the amount of geographical information you can get from their World Factbook on their public web site. It includes such things as a country's crops and other products. If they keep historical data behind that (I can't imagine them throwing any of it away) you have the ability to mine economic indicators over time for trends.
However you judge the organisation, they do have a rather large database of facts. It's a lot of data, and with data you can do science.
Every time a defendant does anything in an RIAA trial, slashdot has to report it? He's already sentenced, it's over.
I think I see it a little differently. I'm convinced the original trial was a thrown match, a deliberate loss to push the expectedly egregious damages award up the chain of appeal. The higher the court, the stronger the precedent, no?
I'm not across your legal system, wouldn't know. But if those sort of damages awards can be overturned, they should be.
Friends most certainly do let friends take their computers to Best Buy...especially if they don't want to be tech support for the rest of the friendship;)
After I log in my oldish XP box (definitely Ned Kelly's Axe of a system) I - quite unconsciously by now - click up the task manager and End any processes I'm not going to use. Old habit. If I want to print something (the rare movie ticket, perhaps) I pop into mmc and start up the spooler for that. It's amazing how quick and smooth the desktop experience can be with only a minimum set of services running.
Can you remember when system tuning was part of the sysadmin's job? A big part of it? Then you'll remember how often we got it wrong, before we rediscovered the science of minimum change + measurement of results. I guess good system tuners are so rare now that people pounce on anyone who claims the skill, and pushes an old trick of the trade out wrapped as high tech. Fail.
Herein lies a clue as to the thematic origin of Avatar: The Word for World is Forest written by Ursula K. LeGuin, released in 1976. Of course, the background affinity with Night Elves in Nagrand can't be discounted either.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you not ignore the problems at hand, and have a wee bit more sensitivity to the planet that gave us life.
And I say lift your vision or watch it die.
The Italian city-states of the time weren't terribly friendly to non-conformists, actually. Galileo got off lucky. Violation of sumptuary laws, i.e. wearing clothes that were above your station (there was a hierarchy of rankings, and only the Doge himself could wear Cloth-of-Gold), resulted in the offender being found the next morning buried upside down in a shallow pond, head deep, with their legs tied to a pole (sort of like a Hipgnosis album cover). A conformist society, that, but inventive in a way that wasn't to be matched until the development of formal defenestration by Russia in the 19th century. If you wanted security it helped to have patronage, though that required you to make moral compromises at times (such as DaVinci touring around Florence with Cesare Borgia, documenting plant poisons around 1510-ish). From all this, I suspect Galileo was taking a stand on more than scientific principles (or was dreadfully naiive, perhaps).
Pity VMS time didn't make it across to NT. It was an integer, too -- number of 100 msec ticks since - wasn't it 17 Nov 1851? Ah, VMS ... what a uniform programming environment that was.
I was running a Y2K lab at my company from 1999 to 2000, and we found a TON of serious problems...
My wife was in charge of a Pick-based hospital IS back then. She put in a huge number of extra-long days getting the dates expanded so the hospital wouldn't have to "go manual" on 1-Jan-2000. She made the deadline, but it nearly killed her. Hospital administrators then gave her a sledge for making such a big deal over it, because clearly it was all a farce - nothing happened as a result of the date changing to year 2000.
The loss to her was any further interest in an IT career. She's now teaching immersive medieval history to a number of schools, where her work is at least appreciated by her clients.
...Admittedly control panel isn't a great implementation...
The Control Panel UI design was an early Windows OS artifact that was a direct response to the original 128k Macintosh's control panel. It doesn't need to look like that, it could be a simple admin tools branch of a normal program invocation tree (just another app folder, if you will). The way it looks is just a hold over from then. It's a legacy visual meme, nothing more.
Ahhh religion, where changing flesh into bread and blood into wine isnt considered "witchcraft". Yet all other "magics" was at one time punishable.
Hypocrisy, it loves religion.
The first thing any religion attempts is to secure an advantage over other beliefs. One of the primary methods is to acquire a seeming monopoly on magic.
Yet, it moves...
There are times when I do believe that there are people out there worried that any technology is going to turn around and bite them, are concerned that texting causes cancer of the thumbs, or that too much typing causes you to ingest fatal doses of plastics through your finger tips.
Are we paranoid yet?
Their flight speed is up to 5 m / s.
Would that be laden or unladen?
Yes, but the decimated desert would be arrayed in a regular sparse matrix. (If we could just get an equation editor in Slashdot I think we'd be able to scare off most of the nay-sayers. See to it if you please, Commander.)
A computer center might be a decent source of waste heat, but I don't know if silicon technology gets hot enough to be practical.
Good point, but maybe it could become a habit to use all waste heat where we can. Every watt we recover is another watt we don't have to source.
Spain is doing something similar. But different.
Spain is also investing heavily in distributed MicroCHP generation. Distributed generation is getting a lot of air play in the Iberian penninsula. Firms like Whispergen are selling family-sized units very well there I hear, and from my involvement on the SmartGrid front it seems the feeling is fairly commonly held among energy execs that encouraging distributed generation is very much in their plans. Also search Volkswagen-Lichtblick for another European example. Non-fossil generation is expected to have a significant effect on the grid over the next ten years.
This sort of news upsets me... Why do we spend countless dollars on searching for more energy if the basic problem is not addressed first: There are too many humans and until we figure out how to control human population growth we are doomed sooner or later. ...we'll be able to reduce human population to something that Earth can sustain.
Course manouvers. The Universe is infinite, space is big, and it's all out there for us to tap. And considering the scale of the playpen, I have utterly no qualms about invading it with our polluting presence. We could grow to a population of quintillions or more and not even be noticed on the cosmic scale. I refuse to feel sorrow over our biological imperatives. Far from feeling any sort of sorrow, I take a sunny fresh joy in watching people discussing ways to allow us to live and thrive while using what we have in the most efficient possible way, until the time comes for us to leave the nest and fly. Go Technology!
If you had enough land, and a prevailing breeze, you wouldn't need a tower. Just build a long covered trench with a swivelling NACA duct at one end. Let the wind blow through a gently expanding plenum, top side heated by solar radiation, with a venturi constriction at the end where it exhausts. Tap the resulting accelerated air flow with a turbogenerator. You wouldn't need any part of the structure to protrude from the ground (except perhaps a vane to aim the inlet).
you spelled HOLE wrong...
Per hops asia result of depending on spill chick.
Most of the nuclear waste in the US is recyclable.
Yes, but sunshine is a heck of a lot cheaper to recycle.
I'm using recycled photons, in fact, as we speak.
these couldn't be built for a small fraction the price by using an atmospheric vortex engine instead of a tower.
Interesting link. Yes, it looks like you could build a vortex that way. But there's nothing in that paper that describes how you could draw off that energy into useful work.
Wouldn't you still need a structure to provide the mechanism (presumably some form of turbine) to give you a useful circuit? Might as well combine the two concepts and let thermal loading give you a hand with the vortex.
I could easily imagine an annular ring at the top of the structure with multiple turbine ports that would take advantage of the combined effect of gas pressure & velocity sped along by both the convective power of the heat plus the annular momentum of the vortex you describe.
Hey, while we're at it, you can coat the outside of the solar turbine with solar cells. If you're going to build with Mother Nature as a power source, you might as well make use of everything.
Except 4 square miles of solar panels will generate an order of magnitude more energy than a solar chimney. Solar updraft power plants have a low initial outlay, but are very inefficient.
I'd go with four square miles of solar chimneys, myself. There are places so remote in Australia that even the taggers wouldn't find them. Nobody would find them for years, if they had the good sense to bury the cables. Personally I'd be in favour of any solution that didn't involve burning stuff you had to dig up out of the dirt.
...The American corporation will in turn import all the raw materials from china...
Who will, of course, have bought said materials from us anyway. Good old Australian iron and coal. I don't mind, really. (*cough*)~
Yeah, I have to say I'm surprised anyone would object to CIA involvement
I certainly don't, and I can be as paranoid as anybody. For years I've enjoyed the amount of geographical information you can get from their World Factbook on their public web site. It includes such things as a country's crops and other products. If they keep historical data behind that (I can't imagine them throwing any of it away) you have the ability to mine economic indicators over time for trends.
However you judge the organisation, they do have a rather large database of facts. It's a lot of data, and with data you can do science.
Yet another one who doesn't know the difference between weather, season, and climate.
That's easy. Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. Seasons are Spring, Summer, Football, and Mud.
(att:RAH)
Every time a defendant does anything in an RIAA trial, slashdot has to report it? He's already sentenced, it's over.
I think I see it a little differently. I'm convinced the original trial was a thrown match, a deliberate loss to push the expectedly egregious damages award up the chain of appeal. The higher the court, the stronger the precedent, no?
I'm not across your legal system, wouldn't know. But if those sort of damages awards can be overturned, they should be.
Friends most certainly do let friends take their computers to Best Buy...especially if they don't want to be tech support for the rest of the friendship ;)
Sometimes a bit of prevention will help you there.
After I log in my oldish XP box (definitely Ned Kelly's Axe of a system) I - quite unconsciously by now - click up the task manager and End any processes I'm not going to use. Old habit. If I want to print something (the rare movie ticket, perhaps) I pop into mmc and start up the spooler for that. It's amazing how quick and smooth the desktop experience can be with only a minimum set of services running.
Can you remember when system tuning was part of the sysadmin's job? A big part of it? Then you'll remember how often we got it wrong, before we rediscovered the science of minimum change + measurement of results. I guess good system tuners are so rare now that people pounce on anyone who claims the skill, and pushes an old trick of the trade out wrapped as high tech. Fail.
Herein lies a clue as to the thematic origin of Avatar: The Word for World is Forest written by Ursula K. LeGuin, released in 1976. Of course, the background affinity with Night Elves in Nagrand can't be discounted either.