I'm pretty sure that's a dead-end way of thinking. The cars on people's driveways are only going to last another ten years or so. It's nothing to base a long-term policy on.
I absolutely agree. I was just trying to think up any positives for this method, and that's the only thing I could think of. At first I was thinking, even if less efficient, the process might be beneficial because it would remove C02 from the atmosphere. But then I remembered that you're just going to burn the fuel and put C02 back into the atmosphere anyway. At best it's carbon neutral. So, if that's the case, then why wouldn't you simply go with one of the other carbon neutral energy storage methods?
Maybe this C02 -> gasoline method is the best. But if not, then why not just use the nuclear energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and use the hydrogen as the energy store? Or just use nuclear power plants to feed the electric grid and develop plug-in hybrids for people to charge at home? The only benefit to the C02->gas approach is that we wouldn't have to change our cars. But as you say, they're gone in 10 years anyway.
The only way to get a net gain is to add some free energy from somewhere. The only plausible source is sunlight, but there's no mention of that on their web site.
I will admit to reading neither the white paper, or any other part of their website, but I did read the grandparent's post:
The associated white paper proposed using a nuclear reactor to provide the requisite energy to drive the process.
However, the normal questions still apply:
No conversion process is 100% efficient, so why would you use an inefficient process to create a fuel to be used in our devices, and not just use the process directly?
Is your storage mechanism more efficient than just putting the energy into batteries, or other common contenders such as breaking hydrogen out of water?
Now, the answer to number 1 is the same as every other intermediate fuel source (like hydrogen). It might not be practical or possible or as efficient to have the process going on separately in each car. In this case, the proposed energy source is nuclear. So, yeah, I don't think I'd want a nuclear reactor in every car on the road. At this point you might think about question 2, "If we're just going to use nuclear as the power source anyway, are we sure that using this process and storage mechanism is better than the others out there?" In this case I'm guessing no (I don't actually know, but it's just an inkling), but maybe not, and anyway using this method wouldn't require any changes to our current cars.
-Steve
They say they have refined the manufacturing process and have learned from building this laptop how to mass produce a laptop that will sell for $98.00.
How many times do you have to hear things like this before you realize it'll never happen. That statement couldn't have been more qualified "they say... have learned... how to... will sell..." yeah right.
Tell me about it! My boss is all like, "Why did you write 100 lines of incomprehensible C code without a single comment explaining what's going on?" I'm glad I finally got some backup on this issue.
In the real world, you don't pay people for the education they have, you pay them for the education you need. So if someone with a master's degree flips burgers, he's not going to be a freakin' six figure burger-flipper.
That's exactly the problem... we need these teachers badly, and we do need them to have a high level of education, but we're not paying them accordingly. How backwards is it that we require them to get a master's degree, but then pay them less that what they could be making with that master's degree elsewhere.
Put another way - we (humanity) went from fairly small mammals to now in about 65 million years. If the dinosaurs hadn't fallen victim to $extinctionLevelEvent, they could easily have become as evolved as we are now - just a whole lot earlier. So, if intelligent/sentient life could have evolved here 60 million years ago, why wouldn't that be the case in another solar system?
Keep in mind that dinosaurs existed for 160 million years. Humans have existed for 200,000 years, and the earliest hominid fossil ever found was 7 million years old. It's a fallacy to think that dinosaurs weren't as evolved as we are now. Imagine a T. rex looking at us and thinking, "Wow, they don't even have claws and crazy big teeth. I wonder how long it would take for them to become as evolved as us."
Re:That's a pretty big job
on
Open US GPS Data?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The only two suppliers of nav map data in North America are Navteq and TeleAtlas...
It looks like Massachusetts gives this data away for free. I found that page as a reference from a Wikipedia article about some state route in Massachusetts. The data looks to be very detailed, the dataset is around 100MB. Heck, just read the Road Inventory Data Dictionary to get an idea of what they record. And yes, I know it's in an Access database, but it wouldn't be that hard to translate into whatever format one would need.
You can boil his entire quote down to the above 7 words.
I wish I could say my counting error was a clever jab at Gates' incredibly wordy original quote. But I really just can't count that early in the morning. I can't even claim that I was only counting the 'important' words, since taking out 'for', 'a', and 'of' would leave only 6 words. Though "better portal; very broad set of customers" would be an even more succinct way to say it and does have my claimed 7 words.
I'm really quite surprised no AC has tried to take me down a peg for the mistake yet.
You can boil his entire quote down to the above 7 words. Microsoft likes nothing more than to get their name/software/web properties in front of everyone's face. Adding Yahoo and all Yahoo's users to their portfolio is what they want. Imagine if all of a sudden everyone with a @yahoo.com email address automatically had a Passport account... all of a sudden Yahoo messenger is 100% compatible with MSN messenger.
So the toll makes out even, or slightly ahead at best. While the tax payers have to pick up the tab to repair the surface streets that are now getting heavier traffic because of increased pricing on toll roads.
Right... because before (currently, I suppose) when there's increased demand on the toll road they just get magic money to pay for the repairs, they don't get it from the tax payers.
I removed the Return and the bug worked for me then.
Worked for me too, I also tried to look at the file using 'more' on windows. It showed a bunch of question marks. I thought more would just be a dumb pass-through program, but maybe it uses the same decoding routine as notepad. I wanted to see if the problem was with how notepad saved the file, or how it opened the file, so I copied the file to a shared drive accessible to a unix machine and did a 'hexdump -C', the file checked out as standard ascii. I then did 'echo -n "this app can break" >> test2.txt' from the same unix machine and opened that file up in notepad and it too appeared screwed up. These two tests seem to indicate that notepad was saving the file just fine, but couldn't open a file with that text no matter how it was created.
You mentioned the pattern of spaces being the culprit, but I tried "1234 123 123 12345" and that displayed correctly. I tried various other patterns and it only seemed those matching/^[[:lower:]]{4} [[:lower:]]{3} [[:lower:]]{3} [[:lower:]]{5}$/ would do the trick. Then I tried "this app can brea]" and that too broke, other punctuation that I tried didn't cause a problem.
Seems like a really weird bug. Is there any acknowledgment of this bug from Microsoft?
I read the first article and discussion; the impression I got was that by "accelerated evolution" the author meant "more diversity", typified by this comment:
Mutations that in earlier times were fatal are now viable. They may now lead to offspring. So these mutations will live on more than before. We have more mutations surviving and spreading, we have more diversity, not less.
The idea being that everyone gets to reproduce these days and that there is no longer a heavy selection process weeding out "unfit" characteristics. Now this article seems to indicate that selection is more intense than ever. I don't see how you can have, at the same time, a more intense selection process and higher than usual diversity.
There was one car in front of us before the lights, it stopped for a while and then went. I thought "ah ha - flashing red means stop and go if clear".
Everywhere I've driven, the northeast, a blinking red light is to be treated exactly as a stop sign. So I would have done exactly as you.
It doesn't. It means "tram coming". I found this out at the end of the week we stayed there, suddenly realising I'd spent the entire week running red lights against trams...
I don't get it. If they want you to stop for a tram, why not just use a solid red which is unambiguous? Also, wouldn't your interpretation mean that the first guy you stopped behind was also running red lights against trams?
What people need to realize is that even though it is your right, it is still work.
I absolutely agree with you. There's nothing wrong with charging people to perform a service, even if that service is something individuals have a right to do themselves, there's still work involved. The difference between your LP analogy and DVDs is that it really is difficult to transfer LPs to audio files; paying for the digital copies is worth it because you'd have to buy special hardware and software and spend your time doing the conversion. That work is worth some amount of money. However with DVDs there's nothing technologically difficult about ripping, converting, and copying video from DVDs to various formats and devices. The only barrier is the DRM that the studios place on the media themselves. They're selling you a defective product on purpose, and then charging you more for a fixed version. There would be no work worth charging for if they just stopped going out of their way to make it difficult. That's not the case with your old LPs where no one is actively trying to stop you; it's just a genuinely difficult, error-prone, and time consuming process.
Have you ever been refused admission to the U.S., or been the subject of a deportation hearing or sought to obtain or assist others to obtain a visa, entry into the U.S., or any other U.S. immigration benefit by fraud or willful misrepresentation or other unlawful means? Have you attended a U.S. public elementary school on student (F) status or a public secondary school after November 30, 1996 without reimbursing the school? [ ] Yes [ ] No
I think (not certain) that you're supposed to parse that like this: "Have you ever (been refused admission to the U.S., or been the subject of a deportation hearing or sought to obtain or assist others to obtain a visa, entry into the U.S., or any other U.S. immigration benefit) by fraud or willful misrepresentation or other unlawful means?"
So the only way you would answer yes to that part is if you've been denied in the past due to fraud, not just for any random reason.
lapdesk.com
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I know it sounds funny, but if you're looking for a 'lap desk' why not check out lapdesk.com? Seriously, I have one of these (got it as a Christmas present last year, had to search google for a bit just now before I even found who made it), and it works very well. I have the "Jumbo Lap Desk", and originally used it for doing crossword puzzles, but soon found out what a great laptop desk it made. The cushion underneath is very soft and comfortable on my legs while the flat surface allows my laptop to vent properly. You can find the one I got from organize-it-online.com, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com (and amazon again... it looks like exactly the same product, but for a different price... I don't know).
The version I have is around $15, but it looks like the manufacturer has plenty of fancier models as well.
Did you read your own links? The first one clearly states that the section you quoted was just applicable for one memory allocation technique on one type of operating system (malloc on Unix).
Yes, I read all the links, plus several others. This is a little more of what the onlamp.com link mentioned:
There are also alternatives to malloc. For example, a program linked to the mapmalloc library will return dynamically allocated memory to the operating system when it calls free. While no change in the code is necessary, the price is that memory allocation takes about five times longer.
Now obviously there may be other methods to return memory to the OS, but it's still a very difficult problem due to fragmentation (and according to other posters, Firefox does indeed return at least some of its memory to the OS).
Close all the tabs except one, go to about:blank (or whatever firefox calls it).
Notice how the memory use doesnt go down?
These are pretty much textbook definitions of memory leaking, firefox is consuming memory when it needs it, but then not giving the memory back when its done.
It is impossible to tell whether a block of memory has been freed just by looking at it. You must keep track of that yourself. An additional point is that malloc does not normally return the freed memory to the operating system; it remains owned by the process until it terminates. The process can reuse it the next time it requests more memory, but other programs will not have access to it, even if no other memory is available. As a corollary, then, the memory footprint of a program is the size of the largest allocation(s) made at any one time. Thus it is always wise to free objects you do not need, especially large ones as soon as possible, to minimize this footprint.
In addition, according to perlmonks.com (and apparently perldoc -q "program shrinks"):
You can't. On most operating systems, memory allocated to a program can never be returned to the system. That's why long-running programs sometimes re-exec themselves. Some operating systems (notably, FreeBSD and Linux) allegedly reclaim large chunks of memory that is no longer used, but it doesn't appear to happen with Perl (yet). The Mac appears to be the only platform that will reliably (albeit, slowly) return memory to the OS.
Obviously this last quote was about Perl, but being written in C and relying on C's malloc and free, it'll have the same memory issues.
Assuming you choose different numbers for each ticket, your odds of winning would go up however your odds of losing go up at the same level. Take your 50/50 example. You buy 1 ticket you have an equal chance to win and lose. you buy 2 tickets you have a 100% to win one and 100% to lose one. still 50/50 odds. In other words buy 1 ticket or 2 each have the same odds. The real question you should ask yourself is how much voluntary tax do you want to pay? I pay enough in tax's, therefore I don't pay extra to the lotto.
Wow, you really don't understand math. Don't worry about it though, the other two replies to this 50/50 drawing question don't understand the situation either. A 50/50 drawing isn't a drawing where you have a 50% chance of winning, it means that of all the money collected for the drawing 50% goes to the winner, and 50% goes to the person holding the drawing.
If an organization holds one of these drawings and sells 100 tickets for $1 a ticket and doesn't take any cut (all the winnings go to the winner). Then a ticket holder has a 1 in 100 chance of winning. If a person played all the time under these conditions then you could expect them to win about 1 out of every 100 times they played. Since the winnings are $100, over time this person would come out even. If say this person had actually been buying 2 tickets, his chances of winning would be 2 in 100, but he had to spend $2 to do so. Over 100 drawings he'll have spent $200 dollars and probably won about twice which would get him $200; still even.
Now if this organization holds a 50/50 drawing and you buy a single ticket each time you'll spend $100 over 100 drawings and will probably win once for $50. Over the long haul under these conditions, you'll lose half the money you spend on tickets. If you buy two tickets to each drawing under these conditions, you'll spend $200 over 100 drawings and will probably win twice for $100. Still half your money gone.
In 50/50 drawings, buying extra tickets does increase your odds of winning, but you have to spend proportionally more money to do so, negating the increased odds of winning.
Also, in a 50/50 drawing only one person can win, and one person is guaranteed to win. In a lottery, this isn't true, the numbers are independent multiple people can pick the winning number, and it's also possible for no one to pick the winning number. I don't know how the odds would change for buying multiple tickets in this scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
I absolutely agree. I was just trying to think up any positives for this method, and that's the only thing I could think of. At first I was thinking, even if less efficient, the process might be beneficial because it would remove C02 from the atmosphere. But then I remembered that you're just going to burn the fuel and put C02 back into the atmosphere anyway. At best it's carbon neutral. So, if that's the case, then why wouldn't you simply go with one of the other carbon neutral energy storage methods?
Maybe this C02 -> gasoline method is the best. But if not, then why not just use the nuclear energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and use the hydrogen as the energy store? Or just use nuclear power plants to feed the electric grid and develop plug-in hybrids for people to charge at home? The only benefit to the C02->gas approach is that we wouldn't have to change our cars. But as you say, they're gone in 10 years anyway.
I will admit to reading neither the white paper, or any other part of their website, but I did read the grandparent's post:
However, the normal questions still apply:
Now, the answer to number 1 is the same as every other intermediate fuel source (like hydrogen). It might not be practical or possible or as efficient to have the process going on separately in each car. In this case, the proposed energy source is nuclear. So, yeah, I don't think I'd want a nuclear reactor in every car on the road. At this point you might think about question 2, "If we're just going to use nuclear as the power source anyway, are we sure that using this process and storage mechanism is better than the others out there?" In this case I'm guessing no (I don't actually know, but it's just an inkling), but maybe not, and anyway using this method wouldn't require any changes to our current cars. -Steve
I think you'd have more luck colliding 2 black holes with 1 cup.
I know, I get these emails all the time, he's trying to sell you RiT@1iN. It's obviously a fraud though, he doesn't even spell it right.
Tell me about it! My boss is all like, "Why did you write 100 lines of incomprehensible C code without a single comment explaining what's going on?" I'm glad I finally got some backup on this issue.
That's exactly the problem... we need these teachers badly, and we do need them to have a high level of education, but we're not paying them accordingly. How backwards is it that we require them to get a master's degree, but then pay them less that what they could be making with that master's degree elsewhere.
Keep in mind that dinosaurs existed for 160 million years. Humans have existed for 200,000 years, and the earliest hominid fossil ever found was 7 million years old. It's a fallacy to think that dinosaurs weren't as evolved as we are now. Imagine a T. rex looking at us and thinking, "Wow, they don't even have claws and crazy big teeth. I wonder how long it would take for them to become as evolved as us."
It looks like Massachusetts gives this data away for free. I found that page as a reference from a Wikipedia article about some state route in Massachusetts. The data looks to be very detailed, the dataset is around 100MB. Heck, just read the Road Inventory Data Dictionary to get an idea of what they record. And yes, I know it's in an Access database, but it wouldn't be that hard to translate into whatever format one would need.
I wish I could say my counting error was a clever jab at Gates' incredibly wordy original quote. But I really just can't count that early in the morning. I can't even claim that I was only counting the 'important' words, since taking out 'for', 'a', and 'of' would leave only 6 words. Though "better portal; very broad set of customers" would be an even more succinct way to say it and does have my claimed 7 words.
I'm really quite surprised no AC has tried to take me down a peg for the mistake yet.
You can boil his entire quote down to the above 7 words. Microsoft likes nothing more than to get their name/software/web properties in front of everyone's face. Adding Yahoo and all Yahoo's users to their portfolio is what they want. Imagine if all of a sudden everyone with a @yahoo.com email address automatically had a Passport account... all of a sudden Yahoo messenger is 100% compatible with MSN messenger.
I would sincerely love it if latex syntax became the standard for faux markup on slashdot instead of <sigh>html</sigh>.
Right... because before (currently, I suppose) when there's increased demand on the toll road they just get magic money to pay for the repairs, they don't get it from the tax payers.
Worked for me too, I also tried to look at the file using 'more' on windows. It showed a bunch of question marks. I thought more would just be a dumb pass-through program, but maybe it uses the same decoding routine as notepad. I wanted to see if the problem was with how notepad saved the file, or how it opened the file, so I copied the file to a shared drive accessible to a unix machine and did a 'hexdump -C', the file checked out as standard ascii. I then did 'echo -n "this app can break" >> test2.txt' from the same unix machine and opened that file up in notepad and it too appeared screwed up. These two tests seem to indicate that notepad was saving the file just fine, but couldn't open a file with that text no matter how it was created.
You mentioned the pattern of spaces being the culprit, but I tried "1234 123 123 12345" and that displayed correctly. I tried various other patterns and it only seemed those matching /^[[:lower:]]{4} [[:lower:]]{3} [[:lower:]]{3} [[:lower:]]{5}$/ would do the trick. Then I tried "this app can brea]" and that too broke, other punctuation that I tried didn't cause a problem.
Seems like a really weird bug. Is there any acknowledgment of this bug from Microsoft?
I read the first article and discussion; the impression I got was that by "accelerated evolution" the author meant "more diversity", typified by this comment:
The idea being that everyone gets to reproduce these days and that there is no longer a heavy selection process weeding out "unfit" characteristics. Now this article seems to indicate that selection is more intense than ever. I don't see how you can have, at the same time, a more intense selection process and higher than usual diversity.
Everywhere I've driven, the northeast, a blinking red light is to be treated exactly as a stop sign. So I would have done exactly as you.
I don't get it. If they want you to stop for a tram, why not just use a solid red which is unambiguous? Also, wouldn't your interpretation mean that the first guy you stopped behind was also running red lights against trams?
Why did the summary link to just the second page of a two page article? Here's the full article on one page.
I absolutely agree with you. There's nothing wrong with charging people to perform a service, even if that service is something individuals have a right to do themselves, there's still work involved. The difference between your LP analogy and DVDs is that it really is difficult to transfer LPs to audio files; paying for the digital copies is worth it because you'd have to buy special hardware and software and spend your time doing the conversion. That work is worth some amount of money. However with DVDs there's nothing technologically difficult about ripping, converting, and copying video from DVDs to various formats and devices. The only barrier is the DRM that the studios place on the media themselves. They're selling you a defective product on purpose, and then charging you more for a fixed version. There would be no work worth charging for if they just stopped going out of their way to make it difficult. That's not the case with your old LPs where no one is actively trying to stop you; it's just a genuinely difficult, error-prone, and time consuming process.
I think (not certain) that you're supposed to parse that like this: "Have you ever (been refused admission to the U.S., or been the subject of a deportation hearing or sought to obtain or assist others to obtain a visa, entry into the U.S., or any other U.S. immigration benefit) by fraud or willful misrepresentation or other unlawful means?"
So the only way you would answer yes to that part is if you've been denied in the past due to fraud, not just for any random reason.
I know it sounds funny, but if you're looking for a 'lap desk' why not check out lapdesk.com? Seriously, I have one of these (got it as a Christmas present last year, had to search google for a bit just now before I even found who made it), and it works very well. I have the "Jumbo Lap Desk", and originally used it for doing crossword puzzles, but soon found out what a great laptop desk it made. The cushion underneath is very soft and comfortable on my legs while the flat surface allows my laptop to vent properly. You can find the one I got from organize-it-online.com, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com (and amazon again... it looks like exactly the same product, but for a different price... I don't know).
The version I have is around $15, but it looks like the manufacturer has plenty of fancier models as well.
Yes, I read all the links, plus several others. This is a little more of what the onlamp.com link mentioned:
Now obviously there may be other methods to return memory to the OS, but it's still a very difficult problem due to fragmentation (and according to other posters, Firefox does indeed return at least some of its memory to the OS).
Heck, if I were God, I would have done it just for the irony.
No, these are pretty much textbook definitions of normal memory usage:
In addition, according to perlmonks.com (and apparently perldoc -q "program shrinks"):
Obviously this last quote was about Perl, but being written in C and relying on C's malloc and free, it'll have the same memory issues.
Wow, you really don't understand math. Don't worry about it though, the other two replies to this 50/50 drawing question don't understand the situation either. A 50/50 drawing isn't a drawing where you have a 50% chance of winning, it means that of all the money collected for the drawing 50% goes to the winner, and 50% goes to the person holding the drawing.
If an organization holds one of these drawings and sells 100 tickets for $1 a ticket and doesn't take any cut (all the winnings go to the winner). Then a ticket holder has a 1 in 100 chance of winning. If a person played all the time under these conditions then you could expect them to win about 1 out of every 100 times they played. Since the winnings are $100, over time this person would come out even. If say this person had actually been buying 2 tickets, his chances of winning would be 2 in 100, but he had to spend $2 to do so. Over 100 drawings he'll have spent $200 dollars and probably won about twice which would get him $200; still even.
Now if this organization holds a 50/50 drawing and you buy a single ticket each time you'll spend $100 over 100 drawings and will probably win once for $50. Over the long haul under these conditions, you'll lose half the money you spend on tickets. If you buy two tickets to each drawing under these conditions, you'll spend $200 over 100 drawings and will probably win twice for $100. Still half your money gone.
In 50/50 drawings, buying extra tickets does increase your odds of winning, but you have to spend proportionally more money to do so, negating the increased odds of winning.
Also, in a 50/50 drawing only one person can win, and one person is guaranteed to win. In a lottery, this isn't true, the numbers are independent multiple people can pick the winning number, and it's also possible for no one to pick the winning number. I don't know how the odds would change for buying multiple tickets in this scenario.