I think the software they are looking for is called "Adobe Acrobat"...if prices are too high for books (and I know they are) then there are three steps...
1.Scan
2.Share
3.Profit!(Or lack therof for the campus bookstore)
Re:The beginning of a true Mesh network?
on
MIT Roofnet
·
· Score: 1
I apoligize if there was an implication, it was unintentional...but with a "home grown" setup and omni antennas (like the MIT students were putting up,) I would think that 30ms would be pretty much standard. I have yet to complete the wireless system aforementioned...I am trying to find enough money (it's a rural school district) to build antenna towers tall enough to eliminate the third "middle" hop and make it true point-to-point...and not point-to-point-to-point. If not, though, I will be doing the p-2-p-2-p route, and will learn first-hand of the treacheries of latency.
That's the current direction of the economy. Look at HP...who are laying off thousands, and giving millions in bonuses to Carly Fiorina. At some point, HP will be incapable of giving massive raises...that will be the asymptote of the world economy...when business faces a contracting customer base due to their own mass "cost-cutting."...Then, I believe it will begin to reverse itself, leading to a sustained period of hyperinflation and overemployment, or, perhaps, the economy will collapse inward on itself like a Greenspanian black hole. But at some point, as I said, companies will realize that there is no longer anyone to sell to, and Adam Smith's atrophied invisible hand will bitch-slap them all.
Re:The beginning of a true Mesh network?
on
MIT Roofnet
·
· Score: 1
I got my numbers from a Linksys customer service rep. I was discussing running a telephone system through to WAP11's...and he told me that a single unit in point-to-point outside use over the distance I was talking about (1 mile of clear space) would generate 30ms of latency on average. I would imagine this has a LOT to do with interference and retries, since I am well aware of the fact that the mile of distance is covered in 1/186282 seconds. I was asking them about chaining three WAP11's together, and he said the configuration I was going to attempt would generate 100ms of latency, far too much for a telephone system. So I don't have personal experience, but I'm going by what the Linksys guy told me. Maybe he pulled them out of his ass.
You hit the nail on the head. Have you ever seen the manual for a "Gates Library" computer? The kind that Bill Gates passes out for tax breaks? It's thousands of pages thick. If you are "in charge" of the machine, you have access to a key which enables "Exec" mode...without it, you can't install any files or change anything on the machine. But of course that doesn't cover things like Blaster which install themselves through RPC...and of course, also, only "authorized" people are allowed access to the precious key to fix the machine. The point of all of this is that Bill Gates is as paranoid as any other multi-billionaire (I've had personal ties with one other before, which is where I get my thoughts on the subject.) He's completely obsessed with his OWN security, and certainly that of his corporation. But the common plebian that buys his drivel-software? Who cares.
Re:The beginning of a true Mesh network?
on
MIT Roofnet
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Linksys WAP11's and similar point-to-point wireless devices have latency up into 30-100 ms I think...because they are sort of a switch, and have to fiddle with identifying MAC addresses and such. I looked at this for a local network of mine...but with three hops, latency probably would near 500 ms. I don't have experience with this, can anyone tell me that has done this?
"If no one can their rent in America, the rent will go down." (I assume you meant if no one can PAY their rent.)
This is the crux of what I see wrong with the current globalisation trend. A case in point would be HP. They have shipped thousands of jobs overseas, and replaced them with fractionally-paid Indians. Meanwhile, Carly Fiorina is crying about their shrinking margins and weak demand. All of this job-shipping is leading to a huge deflationary spiral because of the simple fact that demand is evaporating with the jobs. Unemployed people do not go out and buy new HP computers...therefore HP MUST cut prices, or sell less. That leads to more job cuts to "maintain profitability"...and less demand. It is truly a horrible spiral to get into, but it is one that people like Fiorina are pushing on the control wheel of the economy to get into. Where does it end? At zero. Unlike inflation, where wages, prices, and values can continue to rise to infinity, at some point deflation, if not unchecked, will lead to zero prices, zero wages, and zero values. The real result will be, as a previous poster said, the demolition of the middle-class, and the consolidation of the upper-class into a cadre of a few ultra-rich; the fact that the top 1% of people, the "rich", pay 36% of taxes in this country is evidence of that process underway now. The middle class is evaporating at a rapid rate, replaced by the "lower" classes of people that work to survive, and become totally dependent on government for subsistence at some point. The writing is on the wall...and until there is a second American revolution, nothing will change for the better.
I am being sarcastic. Governments seem to think that taxing "sin" in whatever form (booze, cigarettes, gambling, and soon speeding) is a viable way to sustain a government. But the fact is that if all of the sudden people stopped "sinning", then the government would collapse upon itself. They depend on stupidity (lottery) and such to survive.
There are plenty of United States citizens that think this way, and see no problem with the government monitoring every aspect of people's lives to keep them "lawful." They read no literature, and know no history of the country. Nor do they care what foundation this country was built upon...They are and will be the destruction of this country morally, economically, and eventually, physically.
There will be mandatory inspections for that...and if the satellite unit cannot grab an appropriate satellite in a particular number of tries, your "CHECK ENGINE" light will come on. I'm sure that "defeating" the GPS system will be a felony under the DMCA, anway.
We've already got this on the way in the USA. OBD-III (on-board diagnostics 3) is a scheme proposed by the EPA and various other government agencies to "protect the environment." Right now, every new car has OBD-II, which constantly monitors your vehicle for emissions compliance. Wonderful, huh? Well OBD-III will incorporate a satellite transmitter in every car...if your car goes out of spec, the government will know who you are...and have the authority to revoke your registration until you get it fixed. They will also have the ability to stop your car from starting, or stop it entirely if you are determined to be a criminal or environmental outlaw. Plans are already afoot to interface the system with "smart signs"...so you could be issued a ticket directly from a "SPEED LIMIT 55" sign...for going 56. The future is here! Limitless revenue for the government!
Is it just me, or are these international diamond cartels very, very nefarious organizations? They maintain their monopoly status by threats, murder and extortion...all the while sitting on stocks of millions of diamonds that they "release" to the public as demand sees fit. If it was any other commodity industry, diamonds would be 1/100th of the price they are now...but since they are "allowed" to monopolize them, we get this artificially inflated situation. And yes, I agree wholeheartedly that it is a tradegy that human behavior is twisted to the point that we "need" to have a piece of compressed African dirt on our fingers to feel love.
Oh boy, you've hit a nerve there. If you think that a 5000-pound truck/SUV (with a 5+ liter engine) should have to get the same emissions regulations as a 1-liter tin can, then you're living in a dream land. Some people need trucks, some people need SUV's. That's a fact of life. Just because of that, I shouldn't be penalized. The the boom is SUV and truck sales was due to one fact; CAFE. People want decent-sized vehicles, and the government denied them that because of Corporate Average Fuel Economy restrictions. The average "family car" went from a decent-sized V-8 to a wheezing 4-cylinder over night. You cannot legislate public opinion...so people did the next best thing to getting a decent family car...they got a decent family truck. If the government would clamp down on light trucks, giving them a 40-mpg limit, people would start driving bigger trucks...and at some point, some people would get CDL's and drive semis. You are fighting the inevitability of something just as the RIAA/MPAA is. People want free music...people also want a decent-sized car to protect their families. They will get it one way or another. If you don't allow them to download reasonably-priced music track-by-track off of the web, then they will use Kazaa. If you try force them to drive tinny hybrid electric cars, they will buy SUV's. The boom in SUV sales was a cultural phenomenon brought upon by restrictions placed by the government...not because people like to get 10 miles per gallon or pollute the environment...Just as Kazaa was brought on by the music industry's refusal to have reasonable CD prices. I might also add that something like a Chevy Suburban gets nearly 15 miles per gallon on the highway...which is a remarkable achievement given that you're pushing nearly 8000 pounds around...Technology like fuel injection has made this possible...while at the same time drastically increasing the purchase and maintenance costs of cars...and increasing the financial pressure on the lower economic classes of this country.
Again, I am glad we can have a somewhat rational discussion on these matters. I want to re-iterate my position by saying that the government cannot and should not legislate what I drive to work in the morning. Without a Department of Automobile Qualifications, they have no idea if I really do need an SUV or pickup for whatever reason. Using a blanket assertion that nobody really needs an SUV is what leads to your statement "If you need to buy a big truck then go right ahead." Perhaps we should tax large hair dryers...or large computers. After all, your overclocked 4-GHz Pentium 4 uses lots and lots of electricity, and there's no reason any person would need that. So we need a government tax on processors over 500 MHz...If you need to buy a fast processor, go right ahead. Try to remember that your actions have consequences.
Tell that to the Massachucets, USA residents that are up in arms about a wind farm "spoiling" their view. Wind farms are an eyesore...particularly when they cover hundreds of acres.
There is a definite problem, and it is not people with legitimate need for pickup trucks buying pickup trucks...but then the problem becomes finding who exactly is "entitled" to a pickup truck, and you end up with two solutions...let me buy whatever I want, or create a vast governmental patchwork of agencies, commissions, boards, and administrators. I believe that the latter is, in fact, more wasteful than the former. If we allow the marketplace (and NATURALLY rising gas prices, not tax-naturally) determine demand, people will buy what they want. Eliminating the "exclusivity" of ownership of a Hummer or Ford Excursion will go a long, long way to making them out of style. In the mean time, the government keeps squeezing tighter, and they become more desirable because of that.
Well I'm all for conservation...but not the way the U.S. government wants us to do it. Al Gore was (and is) a big fan of this. He is a big proponent of the increase of the CAFE standards to 80 mpg. Basically, we'd be stuck driving hybrid diesel-electric tin cans overnight...BUT when he became Vice President, what kind of car was he motoring down the streets of Washington, D.C. in? A huge double-stretched Lincoln Town Car limousene...probably getting 1 mile per gallon if he's lucky. Ditto for Clinton and the rest of his entourage touring the city. Their attitude (I mean politicians in general) is that the huddled masses should suffer while they live in luxury. I think that car choice should be that...a CHOICE, unmandated by the government's wayward, palsied hand. If I want (or NEED) to drive a pickup truck, that's my business, not yours. If you do nothing but commute to your cubicle 6 days a week, then that's nice, get a Toyota Prius or a Honda Insight...I won't care. But don't force me to do the same.
I mean that if we are beaming megawatts of energy from space, that a very simple malfunction is all that is necessary to divert that beam elsewhere...suddenly you have 10 megawatts of energy focused into a beam that will not be pleasant to tan under. It isn't out of the question that terrorist activity or a drunken operator could cause something like this. I just think it's dangerous to be "shooting" our energy back here when that gun could be pointed anywhere quite easily.
Hyrdrogen "clean" fuel is a misnomer...since the hydrogen you get from one of these California H2 stations is made from natural gas, and not electrolysis. You end up using fossil fuels just the same. Maybe some day we can switch to from-water hydrogen...but where are we going to get those petawatts of electricity to do that? Nuclear power? We can't agree on a place to get rid of our waste. Solar? It takes energy to produce those acres of panels, and you are displacing wildlife in the process. Microwave from satellites? Just wait until that satellite malfunctions and carves a 500-foot-wide trench through Manhattan. There is no "clean" solution here.
Can't someone just squash SCO and get it over with? If IBM, Redhat, Suse and whoever else would band together, I'm sure they could get enough to at least control the company's stock...I realize it would make millionaires out of the scum that run the company, but this is getting rediculous. Pretty soon they will claim ownership of Samba, too, after transplanting some of their ancient System V code. Then the lawsuits will start, and the FUD...but of course nothing but 1973 snippets of code will be available for anyone to look at...but oh boy! You Samba users really need to license our IP!
That would be the "pellet" type reactors that most people think will replace the current rod type. You take hundreds of those spheres that, individually, are sub-critical...and put them together in a big pile. They go critical and produce heat. If you want hotter, you add more to the pile...if you want cooler, you take them away. I'm not certain how much safer they are in the case of a coolant loss (core exposure,) but the pile itself is more resistant to melting into a mass; if anything, individual pellets would melt through their containment and thus reduce the reaction. But still, those pellets are not light, and the accompanying machinery and generators will be very, very heavy. I think RTG's would be a better short-term solution...of course at the expense of irradiating their surroundings.
I can't help but think since it costs $500 million to send a small probe to Mars...that it will cost several times that to sent things like fuel rods (which are very, very heavy) and containment structures to mars. I don't know what their design is, though...maybe RadioThermal or something? Because a full-on steam reactor costs billions to build on Earth, let alone on Mars. And, like the parent says...for what?
The G4 was supposed to be the end-of-all-PC's machine too. The usual Mac supporters crowed how it had Altivec designed by Cray...and it could do gigaflops. Oooh boy that was going to put Apple back over 5 percent in sales. As I'm in the school "business", I can tell you that my former boss ordered boatloads of the things...only to see a torrent of crashed hard drives and fried motherboards. In fact they just ordered a wad more of them with 17-inch flat panels. I was never impressed by the G4's speed, really...I have yet to get on a G5, so I can't form an opinion yet.
First off...the machine of 1993 is remarkably similar to the machine of 2003. At one of my employers, we ran software on our Windows 98/2000 machines that was developed in 1983. In my opinion, things will change...but it's also nice to prepare kids for what they will encounter in the short-term, and that is Windows. Anyway, if things will change in 10 years, why not let them learn on open source Linux distros instead of expensive closed-source Macs?
The point of everything people have said to me is to give an "excuse" for retaining the Macs. But I have heard nothing good yet. I am listening, but hearing nothing but the same rhetoric that the Mac zealot teachers give me. "When learning a Mac running OSX, people at least have a chance to learn some UNIX basics, which might actually be worth something even in the future." I don't allow them to have access to the command line...and none of them could figure it out anyway. People (teachers and students) want pointy-and-clicky interfaces, not typie-and-typie. Maybe two or three kids would peck around for awhile, get some error messages, and then go back to their Flash games.
You say my post is pointless. Why? I am telling you that I am buying computers that kids have at home for them to use at school. I am saying that when they graduate, they can then move onto the same machines at their employer. What is wrong with that? Perhaps we should be teaching them Esperanto in school, since language is likely to change in the next 10 years! No matter that they speak English at home, and will speak English at work...boy we should really teach them Esperanto. Anyway, by teaching them Esperanto, it will make it easier for them to learn Spanish and other languages in the future. I reject the fallacy that buying them Macs is expanding their horizons in any way...just as teaching them Esperanto would be useless.
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I think the software they are looking for is called "Adobe Acrobat"...if prices are too high for books (and I know they are) then there are three steps... 1.Scan 2.Share 3.Profit!(Or lack therof for the campus bookstore)
I apoligize if there was an implication, it was unintentional...but with a "home grown" setup and omni antennas (like the MIT students were putting up,) I would think that 30ms would be pretty much standard. I have yet to complete the wireless system aforementioned...I am trying to find enough money (it's a rural school district) to build antenna towers tall enough to eliminate the third "middle" hop and make it true point-to-point...and not point-to-point-to-point. If not, though, I will be doing the p-2-p-2-p route, and will learn first-hand of the treacheries of latency.
That's the current direction of the economy. Look at HP...who are laying off thousands, and giving millions in bonuses to Carly Fiorina. At some point, HP will be incapable of giving massive raises...that will be the asymptote of the world economy...when business faces a contracting customer base due to their own mass "cost-cutting."...Then, I believe it will begin to reverse itself, leading to a sustained period of hyperinflation and overemployment, or, perhaps, the economy will collapse inward on itself like a Greenspanian black hole. But at some point, as I said, companies will realize that there is no longer anyone to sell to, and Adam Smith's atrophied invisible hand will bitch-slap them all.
I got my numbers from a Linksys customer service rep. I was discussing running a telephone system through to WAP11's...and he told me that a single unit in point-to-point outside use over the distance I was talking about (1 mile of clear space) would generate 30ms of latency on average. I would imagine this has a LOT to do with interference and retries, since I am well aware of the fact that the mile of distance is covered in 1/186282 seconds. I was asking them about chaining three WAP11's together, and he said the configuration I was going to attempt would generate 100ms of latency, far too much for a telephone system. So I don't have personal experience, but I'm going by what the Linksys guy told me. Maybe he pulled them out of his ass.
You hit the nail on the head. Have you ever seen the manual for a "Gates Library" computer? The kind that Bill Gates passes out for tax breaks? It's thousands of pages thick. If you are "in charge" of the machine, you have access to a key which enables "Exec" mode...without it, you can't install any files or change anything on the machine. But of course that doesn't cover things like Blaster which install themselves through RPC...and of course, also, only "authorized" people are allowed access to the precious key to fix the machine. The point of all of this is that Bill Gates is as paranoid as any other multi-billionaire (I've had personal ties with one other before, which is where I get my thoughts on the subject.) He's completely obsessed with his OWN security, and certainly that of his corporation. But the common plebian that buys his drivel-software? Who cares.
Linksys WAP11's and similar point-to-point wireless devices have latency up into 30-100 ms I think...because they are sort of a switch, and have to fiddle with identifying MAC addresses and such. I looked at this for a local network of mine...but with three hops, latency probably would near 500 ms. I don't have experience with this, can anyone tell me that has done this?
"If no one can their rent in America, the rent will go down." (I assume you meant if no one can PAY their rent.) This is the crux of what I see wrong with the current globalisation trend. A case in point would be HP. They have shipped thousands of jobs overseas, and replaced them with fractionally-paid Indians. Meanwhile, Carly Fiorina is crying about their shrinking margins and weak demand. All of this job-shipping is leading to a huge deflationary spiral because of the simple fact that demand is evaporating with the jobs. Unemployed people do not go out and buy new HP computers...therefore HP MUST cut prices, or sell less. That leads to more job cuts to "maintain profitability"...and less demand. It is truly a horrible spiral to get into, but it is one that people like Fiorina are pushing on the control wheel of the economy to get into. Where does it end? At zero. Unlike inflation, where wages, prices, and values can continue to rise to infinity, at some point deflation, if not unchecked, will lead to zero prices, zero wages, and zero values. The real result will be, as a previous poster said, the demolition of the middle-class, and the consolidation of the upper-class into a cadre of a few ultra-rich; the fact that the top 1% of people, the "rich", pay 36% of taxes in this country is evidence of that process underway now. The middle class is evaporating at a rapid rate, replaced by the "lower" classes of people that work to survive, and become totally dependent on government for subsistence at some point. The writing is on the wall...and until there is a second American revolution, nothing will change for the better.
Who's up for a nationwide do-not-spam list?
I am being sarcastic. Governments seem to think that taxing "sin" in whatever form (booze, cigarettes, gambling, and soon speeding) is a viable way to sustain a government. But the fact is that if all of the sudden people stopped "sinning", then the government would collapse upon itself. They depend on stupidity (lottery) and such to survive.
There are plenty of United States citizens that think this way, and see no problem with the government monitoring every aspect of people's lives to keep them "lawful." They read no literature, and know no history of the country. Nor do they care what foundation this country was built upon...They are and will be the destruction of this country morally, economically, and eventually, physically.
There will be mandatory inspections for that...and if the satellite unit cannot grab an appropriate satellite in a particular number of tries, your "CHECK ENGINE" light will come on. I'm sure that "defeating" the GPS system will be a felony under the DMCA, anway.
The vehicle's speed will be computed by GPS...which, after some future decisions by courts, will be admitted as completely reliable, I'm sure.
We've already got this on the way in the USA. OBD-III (on-board diagnostics 3) is a scheme proposed by the EPA and various other government agencies to "protect the environment." Right now, every new car has OBD-II, which constantly monitors your vehicle for emissions compliance. Wonderful, huh? Well OBD-III will incorporate a satellite transmitter in every car...if your car goes out of spec, the government will know who you are...and have the authority to revoke your registration until you get it fixed. They will also have the ability to stop your car from starting, or stop it entirely if you are determined to be a criminal or environmental outlaw. Plans are already afoot to interface the system with "smart signs"...so you could be issued a ticket directly from a "SPEED LIMIT 55" sign...for going 56. The future is here! Limitless revenue for the government!
Is it just me, or are these international diamond cartels very, very nefarious organizations? They maintain their monopoly status by threats, murder and extortion...all the while sitting on stocks of millions of diamonds that they "release" to the public as demand sees fit. If it was any other commodity industry, diamonds would be 1/100th of the price they are now...but since they are "allowed" to monopolize them, we get this artificially inflated situation. And yes, I agree wholeheartedly that it is a tradegy that human behavior is twisted to the point that we "need" to have a piece of compressed African dirt on our fingers to feel love.
Oh boy, you've hit a nerve there. If you think that a 5000-pound truck/SUV (with a 5+ liter engine) should have to get the same emissions regulations as a 1-liter tin can, then you're living in a dream land. Some people need trucks, some people need SUV's. That's a fact of life. Just because of that, I shouldn't be penalized. The the boom is SUV and truck sales was due to one fact; CAFE. People want decent-sized vehicles, and the government denied them that because of Corporate Average Fuel Economy restrictions. The average "family car" went from a decent-sized V-8 to a wheezing 4-cylinder over night. You cannot legislate public opinion...so people did the next best thing to getting a decent family car...they got a decent family truck. If the government would clamp down on light trucks, giving them a 40-mpg limit, people would start driving bigger trucks...and at some point, some people would get CDL's and drive semis. You are fighting the inevitability of something just as the RIAA/MPAA is. People want free music...people also want a decent-sized car to protect their families. They will get it one way or another. If you don't allow them to download reasonably-priced music track-by-track off of the web, then they will use Kazaa. If you try force them to drive tinny hybrid electric cars, they will buy SUV's. The boom in SUV sales was a cultural phenomenon brought upon by restrictions placed by the government...not because people like to get 10 miles per gallon or pollute the environment...Just as Kazaa was brought on by the music industry's refusal to have reasonable CD prices. I might also add that something like a Chevy Suburban gets nearly 15 miles per gallon on the highway...which is a remarkable achievement given that you're pushing nearly 8000 pounds around...Technology like fuel injection has made this possible...while at the same time drastically increasing the purchase and maintenance costs of cars...and increasing the financial pressure on the lower economic classes of this country. Again, I am glad we can have a somewhat rational discussion on these matters. I want to re-iterate my position by saying that the government cannot and should not legislate what I drive to work in the morning. Without a Department of Automobile Qualifications, they have no idea if I really do need an SUV or pickup for whatever reason. Using a blanket assertion that nobody really needs an SUV is what leads to your statement "If you need to buy a big truck then go right ahead." Perhaps we should tax large hair dryers...or large computers. After all, your overclocked 4-GHz Pentium 4 uses lots and lots of electricity, and there's no reason any person would need that. So we need a government tax on processors over 500 MHz...If you need to buy a fast processor, go right ahead. Try to remember that your actions have consequences.
Tell that to the Massachucets, USA residents that are up in arms about a wind farm "spoiling" their view. Wind farms are an eyesore...particularly when they cover hundreds of acres.
There is a definite problem, and it is not people with legitimate need for pickup trucks buying pickup trucks...but then the problem becomes finding who exactly is "entitled" to a pickup truck, and you end up with two solutions...let me buy whatever I want, or create a vast governmental patchwork of agencies, commissions, boards, and administrators. I believe that the latter is, in fact, more wasteful than the former. If we allow the marketplace (and NATURALLY rising gas prices, not tax-naturally) determine demand, people will buy what they want. Eliminating the "exclusivity" of ownership of a Hummer or Ford Excursion will go a long, long way to making them out of style. In the mean time, the government keeps squeezing tighter, and they become more desirable because of that.
Well I'm all for conservation...but not the way the U.S. government wants us to do it. Al Gore was (and is) a big fan of this. He is a big proponent of the increase of the CAFE standards to 80 mpg. Basically, we'd be stuck driving hybrid diesel-electric tin cans overnight...BUT when he became Vice President, what kind of car was he motoring down the streets of Washington, D.C. in? A huge double-stretched Lincoln Town Car limousene...probably getting 1 mile per gallon if he's lucky. Ditto for Clinton and the rest of his entourage touring the city. Their attitude (I mean politicians in general) is that the huddled masses should suffer while they live in luxury. I think that car choice should be that...a CHOICE, unmandated by the government's wayward, palsied hand. If I want (or NEED) to drive a pickup truck, that's my business, not yours. If you do nothing but commute to your cubicle 6 days a week, then that's nice, get a Toyota Prius or a Honda Insight...I won't care. But don't force me to do the same.
I mean that if we are beaming megawatts of energy from space, that a very simple malfunction is all that is necessary to divert that beam elsewhere...suddenly you have 10 megawatts of energy focused into a beam that will not be pleasant to tan under. It isn't out of the question that terrorist activity or a drunken operator could cause something like this. I just think it's dangerous to be "shooting" our energy back here when that gun could be pointed anywhere quite easily.
Hyrdrogen "clean" fuel is a misnomer...since the hydrogen you get from one of these California H2 stations is made from natural gas, and not electrolysis. You end up using fossil fuels just the same. Maybe some day we can switch to from-water hydrogen...but where are we going to get those petawatts of electricity to do that? Nuclear power? We can't agree on a place to get rid of our waste. Solar? It takes energy to produce those acres of panels, and you are displacing wildlife in the process. Microwave from satellites? Just wait until that satellite malfunctions and carves a 500-foot-wide trench through Manhattan. There is no "clean" solution here.
Can't someone just squash SCO and get it over with? If IBM, Redhat, Suse and whoever else would band together, I'm sure they could get enough to at least control the company's stock...I realize it would make millionaires out of the scum that run the company, but this is getting rediculous. Pretty soon they will claim ownership of Samba, too, after transplanting some of their ancient System V code. Then the lawsuits will start, and the FUD...but of course nothing but 1973 snippets of code will be available for anyone to look at...but oh boy! You Samba users really need to license our IP!
That would be the "pellet" type reactors that most people think will replace the current rod type. You take hundreds of those spheres that, individually, are sub-critical...and put them together in a big pile. They go critical and produce heat. If you want hotter, you add more to the pile...if you want cooler, you take them away. I'm not certain how much safer they are in the case of a coolant loss (core exposure,) but the pile itself is more resistant to melting into a mass; if anything, individual pellets would melt through their containment and thus reduce the reaction. But still, those pellets are not light, and the accompanying machinery and generators will be very, very heavy. I think RTG's would be a better short-term solution...of course at the expense of irradiating their surroundings.
I can't help but think since it costs $500 million to send a small probe to Mars...that it will cost several times that to sent things like fuel rods (which are very, very heavy) and containment structures to mars. I don't know what their design is, though...maybe RadioThermal or something? Because a full-on steam reactor costs billions to build on Earth, let alone on Mars. And, like the parent says...for what?
The G4 was supposed to be the end-of-all-PC's machine too. The usual Mac supporters crowed how it had Altivec designed by Cray...and it could do gigaflops. Oooh boy that was going to put Apple back over 5 percent in sales. As I'm in the school "business", I can tell you that my former boss ordered boatloads of the things...only to see a torrent of crashed hard drives and fried motherboards. In fact they just ordered a wad more of them with 17-inch flat panels. I was never impressed by the G4's speed, really...I have yet to get on a G5, so I can't form an opinion yet.
First off...the machine of 1993 is remarkably similar to the machine of 2003. At one of my employers, we ran software on our Windows 98/2000 machines that was developed in 1983. In my opinion, things will change...but it's also nice to prepare kids for what they will encounter in the short-term, and that is Windows. Anyway, if things will change in 10 years, why not let them learn on open source Linux distros instead of expensive closed-source Macs? The point of everything people have said to me is to give an "excuse" for retaining the Macs. But I have heard nothing good yet. I am listening, but hearing nothing but the same rhetoric that the Mac zealot teachers give me. "When learning a Mac running OSX, people at least have a chance to learn some UNIX basics, which might actually be worth something even in the future." I don't allow them to have access to the command line...and none of them could figure it out anyway. People (teachers and students) want pointy-and-clicky interfaces, not typie-and-typie. Maybe two or three kids would peck around for awhile, get some error messages, and then go back to their Flash games. You say my post is pointless. Why? I am telling you that I am buying computers that kids have at home for them to use at school. I am saying that when they graduate, they can then move onto the same machines at their employer. What is wrong with that? Perhaps we should be teaching them Esperanto in school, since language is likely to change in the next 10 years! No matter that they speak English at home, and will speak English at work...boy we should really teach them Esperanto. Anyway, by teaching them Esperanto, it will make it easier for them to learn Spanish and other languages in the future. I reject the fallacy that buying them Macs is expanding their horizons in any way...just as teaching them Esperanto would be useless.