same misconceptions: I want to a PSP-sized phone to have a decent screen size, and I want to take it off my pocket to check the hour. Of course it should have a full-sized QWERTY keyboard to replace my netbook (not miniaturized like G1) so that I could exercise my writer's hobby on a train, and then they will be so cheap that if I want to give someone a note about some new recipe, I scribble it on my phone and give the phone for them to take (paper replacement).
Get a deal for 100 megawatts at 50KV, line saturated to 70% of its capacity 24/7 except holidays, Get a deal for 10 kilowatts at 110V saturated to 40% of its capacity in the evenings and 10% the rest of the time.
See how much you pay for KWh in the first case, how much in the second case.
Bulk trade rules apply to electricity much more than to normal goods.
Also, check how much a solar panel costs. About $1000/100W.
Considering about 15 cents/KWh energy, that's 1.5 cent/hour you save. That's 7.5 years for return of the investment, assuming no efficiency drop-off and all the infrastructure (inverter etc) for free. Now consider some 4 cents/KWh of energy a massive bulk customer like the solar panel factory pays, how long till that kind of investment is returned? 30 years? How well will the panels perform then?
Solar panels are a means of packaging bulk industrial energy into packges suitable for retail and reselling it to retail customers.
Does not include: Energy embodied in facility Labor equivalent Transportation End-of-life Unnecessary upstream energy
Other than that, the paper they use seems like spat out from random techspeak generator. "Results provide empirical support for other analytical methods" as a title of a graph? Excuse me?
Not in mood to search for a citation for an AC, but to help your imagination: they require very pure silicon. This is achieved on mass scale by distilling sand. First melting it into glass, then heating the glass till it evaporates. Boiling point of silicon: 3538K.
Currently there are available technologies that allow to reduce the energy expenditure by some 70% (and reduce the price) at cost of reducing the energy output of the resulting panels somewhat (20%?) which would make solar panels a viable solution. Unfortunately all the current major manufacturers run on the old technology and it doesn't seem the competitors will dominate the market any time soon.
Solar panels require more energy to produce than they can provide over their whole lifespan.
What about methods that skip electricity altogether, say use a solar-powered Stirling engine to compress the air or use a wind or water turbine to "wind" your car - running the engine in reverse will "refuel" it.
Of course if you use electricity for compressing the air, you get a worse footprint. Even with solar batteries (which consume a lot of energy to produce).
But put the engine in reverse and you have it pumping air, which can be achieved using a windmill. Without transforming it to electricity, just wind -> rotation -> pump -> pressure.
Just one. mov b,a The question is how many special magic registers, memory-mapped devices and such are there.
Example: if(X==0) { BEEP(); } else { BLINK(); }
All instructions are 2 bytes (of n bits each,n constant but not necessarily 8): 0 bytes command, always mov, 1 byte address of destination, 1 byte address of source
Alternate addressing modes are calculated in preprocessor, like #4 is address of a cell that contains value 4, #lab4 is address of cell that contains the address of label 4. (so #4 in fact means address where the label 'data' is)
:sub1 mov IS_ZERO_IN,X ; is X zero? mov MUL_IN_1,IS_ZERO_OUT ; multiply result of x==0 (0 or 1) mov MUL_IN_2,#4 ;... by 4 (distance between:lab1 and:lab2) mov ADD_IN_1,MUL_OUT ; Sum the result of multiplication (0 or 4)... mov ADD_IN_2,#lab1 ;...and base address of the jump mov PC,ADD_OUT ; jump either to beep or to blink :lab1 mov BEEP, #1 mov PC,#ret lab2: mov BLINK, #1 :ret mov PC,STACK_POP :data ; this is never executed; just values stored for use above mov 4,1 ; the numbers "4" and "1" referred to by #4 and #1 mov @lab1,@ret ; the addresses of the labelled points, referred to by #lab1, #ret
That's not this approach. It's "memory-map every single operation, as input register/result register." It's really a CISC except mnemonics and data share the same namespace. There's no separation for command and arguments, all arguments are pointers (if you want a fixed value, you must pick it from a range of memory that just produces all possible values) and all commands are in fact "magic registers".
Actually, this could be implemented as a really small handful of transistors for the actual processor and a ton of various memory-mapped peripherials. Some of them being really simple old basic logic chips for ALU.
It would mean a simple version for cheap microcontrollers would be really cheap to make, a family of compatible devices of different scale would be possible, and extending/upgrading existing instruction set would be easy too.
The above is not a conflicting statement with the 1-instruction set idea. The MOV would not be really THE instruction set. The real instructions would be "place data in register A, read result from register B" and the memory map would be the real instruction set.
But I just can't see it for anything bigger. It might be used for massively multicore processors if the address and data bus could be shared somehow. But I think it would be the bottleneck really fast.
That's interesting. I, too, never found any Linux app rivalling Irfanview for that and use it through WINE too. zgv was close but 1) it died with SVGAlib (and no, xzgv doesn't cut it), 2) it was more limited, 3) it had some nasty bugs that could crash the whole machine (SUID to access console). F-spot is an abomination. I need a quick and lean [hoto editing software, not a mammoth that tries to hijack all of my computer.
They might have tested it for 49 days, then after halfway through heavy testing and debugging, the bug just "vanished by itself" and they couldn't reproduce it.
That's what I was talking about, the cats had a big garden at their disposal and were taught to ask to go out. Except one that would peek outside, see it's raining and turn back, to leave a "hidden surprise".
A lot of the mental state - especially long term - is encoded in chemical structure of neurons; trails of more conductive or less conductive electrolytes, concentrations of neurotransmitters and so on. So it's likely memory and general psyche could be recovered. Of course temporary states - electric charges on neurons - momentary thoughts, current moods, short-term memory - will be all gone, and worse yet, will be recovered to undefined state which most likely will correspond to quite extreme shock and confusion. How deep a shock and whether recoverable or not, is the question. So it would be less like recovering a VM, more like booting a system that was switched off, with the OS and all permanent data saved to hard drive, but volatile state gone.
We aren't sure if some of essential substances won't be destroyed by freezing too. Some substances decompose unrecoverably in low temperatures, but we don't know whether they are essential for organism or can be replaced/refilled in short order. Also, -some- damage is expected and is hoped to be repaired by normal healing process, the question is the allowable extent and possible permanent damages.
Of course, this is all sci-fi and a huge gamble. It's just not as impossible as some say. There are no known showstopper problems. There may be unknown ones, and there are known risks of unknown extent - which may, or may not be showstoppers - but best to our current knowledge, it may be possible sometime.
Historians? Humanitarian organizations? Random hobbyists?
Overpopulation is an artificial problem resulting mainly from poverty, and from governments' lack of balls to regulate it. Developed countries have negative birth rates. And colonization of space -is- to be expected eventually.
Of course the risk is huge, but 1) the Pharaohs stored vast valuables in their tombs. The robbers didn't steal the corpses, but the golden sarcophagi. Who and why would steal old, long obsolete life-support aparature (unless we enter some post-apocalyptic future in which case you are fucked). 2) we may count on the society developing morally in parallel with technology. It could be expected from them to resolve the matter. 3) We are now pretty completely sure pharaohs are totally unrevivable; still as their aim was to preserve the bodies, now the mummies recovered are being preserved better than the originals ever could. Not for the same reasons but still. And I'm pretty sure if we -could- bring pharaohs of the old to life, we would, overpopulation and the fall of Great Egypt be damned.
OTOH, if in 500 years they find out that freezing does some kind of damage we didn't know about that is totally unrecoverable, and there is simply no point keeping us frozen because even the best wizards of the future won't be able to repair the loss, they may make a decision of unplugging us and that's it, the risk is calculated in.
But for now, not doable - pea-sized pieces of aerogel are quite common, a chunk of a liter of volume is about the limit of current resources. It is pretty much impossible to create anything bigger for now and what is created is a totally ruined skeleton of the original structure, with mere remains that hold it together in the shape, vast microscopic damage. Oh, and all liquids are displaced, not just water. That means any electrolites, all the information-holding ions in neurons, any water solutions that are pretty much essential...
Freezing retains almost 100% of body composition, minus few chemicals that decompose due to cold (not considered essential) and pretty much all the physical structure minus some (hopefully healable) damage due to parts not freezing fast enough and water forming crystals. Aerogelling would remove all liquid-based chemistry and introduce vast microscopic damage.
That's another risk, but I guess in a hundred years or so, they will remake the tech to be able to keep working without maintenance and with minimal cost for hundreds of years. A box made of aerogel, and a drop of LN2 a week - LN2 already costs something like $1/gallon and aerogel production is bound to get cheaper over time; the materials cost peanuts, it's the technology that requires expensive machinery. So even if the company goes under, some humane organization could take over and save the frozen.
Oh, the more forms there are, the more likely the customer won't make the purchase. Which encourages the sellers to limit the number of forms, which connected with this kind of laws would simply make them give up such shady practices whatsoever.
I use a virtual card. It requires me to generate a CVV2 code every time I make a new batch of purchases - the code is valid only for several hours after generating it.This makes storing it or passing to others useless. Also, I "charge" the subaccount bound to the card with the amount I want to pay, so they can't withdraw more than I consent to.
As for repeating purchases like monthly fees, either I watch for it myself, or use other methods, like bank transfer order. As a general rule, I don't allow anyone ever to withdraw money from my account without my explicit consent for every separate event of doing so.
As for daily, non-online purchases, I use a regular "flat" card, which requires the actual card for the payment, not the card number alone.
Slashdot Mirror
same misconceptions:
I want to a PSP-sized phone to have a decent screen size, and I want to take it off my pocket to check the hour. Of course it should have a full-sized QWERTY keyboard to replace my netbook (not miniaturized like G1) so that I could exercise my writer's hobby on a train, and then they will be so cheap that if I want to give someone a note about some new recipe, I scribble it on my phone and give the phone for them to take (paper replacement).
Get a deal for 100 megawatts at 50KV, line saturated to 70% of its capacity 24/7 except holidays,
Get a deal for 10 kilowatts at 110V saturated to 40% of its capacity in the evenings and 10% the rest of the time.
See how much you pay for KWh in the first case, how much in the second case.
Bulk trade rules apply to electricity much more than to normal goods.
Also, check how much a solar panel costs. About $1000/100W.
Considering about 15 cents/KWh energy, that's 1.5 cent/hour you save. That's 7.5 years for return of the investment, assuming no efficiency drop-off and all the infrastructure (inverter etc) for free. Now consider some 4 cents/KWh of energy a massive bulk customer like the solar panel factory pays, how long till that kind of investment is returned? 30 years? How well will the panels perform then?
Solar panels are a means of packaging bulk industrial energy into packges suitable for retail and reselling it to retail customers.
Does not include:
Energy embodied in facility
Labor equivalent
Transportation
End-of-life
Unnecessary upstream energy
Other than that, the paper they use seems like spat out from random techspeak generator.
"Results provide empirical support for other analytical methods" as a title of a graph? Excuse me?
Not in mood to search for a citation for an AC, but to help your imagination:
they require very pure silicon. This is achieved on mass scale by distilling sand. First melting it into glass, then heating the glass till it evaporates. Boiling point of silicon: 3538K.
Currently there are available technologies that allow to reduce the energy expenditure by some 70% (and reduce the price) at cost of reducing the energy output of the resulting panels somewhat (20%?) which would make solar panels a viable solution. Unfortunately all the current major manufacturers run on the old technology and it doesn't seem the competitors will dominate the market any time soon.
Solar panels require more energy to produce than they can provide over their whole lifespan.
What about methods that skip electricity altogether, say use a solar-powered Stirling engine to compress the air or use a wind or water turbine to "wind" your car - running the engine in reverse will "refuel" it.
Of course if you use electricity for compressing the air, you get a worse footprint.
Even with solar batteries (which consume a lot of energy to produce).
But put the engine in reverse and you have it pumping air, which can be achieved using a windmill. Without transforming it to electricity, just wind -> rotation -> pump -> pressure.
Pure Steampunk.
or designs for which speed of FPGA is too limited. Don't forget these.
truly abysmal UI.
Just one. mov b,a
... by 4 (distance between :lab1 and :lab2) ...and base address of the jump
The question is how many special magic registers, memory-mapped devices and such are there.
Example:
if(X==0) {
BEEP();
} else {
BLINK();
}
All instructions are 2 bytes (of n bits each,n constant but not necessarily 8):
0 bytes command, always mov,
1 byte address of destination,
1 byte address of source
Alternate addressing modes are calculated in preprocessor, like #4 is address of a cell that contains value 4, #lab4 is address of cell that contains the address of label 4. (so #4 in fact means address where the label 'data' is)
:sub1
mov IS_ZERO_IN,X ; is X zero?
mov MUL_IN_1,IS_ZERO_OUT ; multiply result of x==0 (0 or 1)
mov MUL_IN_2,#4 ;
mov ADD_IN_1,MUL_OUT ; Sum the result of multiplication (0 or 4)...
mov ADD_IN_2,#lab1 ;
mov PC,ADD_OUT ; jump either to beep or to blink
:lab1
mov BEEP, #1
mov PC,#ret
lab2:
mov BLINK, #1
:ret
mov PC,STACK_POP
:data ; this is never executed; just values stored for use above
mov 4,1 ; the numbers "4" and "1" referred to by #4 and #1
mov @lab1,@ret ; the addresses of the labelled points, referred to by #lab1, #ret
That's not this approach. It's "memory-map every single operation, as input register/result register." It's really a CISC except mnemonics and data share the same namespace. There's no separation for command and arguments, all arguments are pointers (if you want a fixed value, you must pick it from a range of memory that just produces all possible values) and all commands are in fact "magic registers".
FPGA is usually the prototype phase.
Actually, this could be implemented as a really small handful of transistors for the actual processor and a ton of various memory-mapped peripherials. Some of them being really simple old basic logic chips for ALU.
It would mean a simple version for cheap microcontrollers would be really cheap to make, a family of compatible devices of different scale would be possible, and extending/upgrading existing instruction set would be easy too.
The above is not a conflicting statement with the 1-instruction set idea. The MOV would not be really THE instruction set. The real instructions would be "place data in register A, read result from register B" and the memory map would be the real instruction set.
But I just can't see it for anything bigger. It might be used for massively multicore processors if the address and data bus could be shared somehow. But I think it would be the bottleneck really fast.
That's interesting. I, too, never found any Linux app rivalling Irfanview for that and use it through WINE too.
zgv was close but 1) it died with SVGAlib (and no, xzgv doesn't cut it), 2) it was more limited, 3) it had some nasty bugs that could crash the whole machine (SUID to access console).
F-spot is an abomination. I need a quick and lean [hoto editing software, not a mammoth that tries to hijack all of my computer.
...and both are a true abomination of UI if you're used to more generic-UI gfx editing software.
They might have tested it for 49 days, then after halfway through heavy testing and debugging, the bug just "vanished by itself" and they couldn't reproduce it.
That's what I was talking about, the cats had a big garden at their disposal and were taught to ask to go out.
Except one that would peek outside, see it's raining and turn back, to leave a "hidden surprise".
try writing the piece of code that finds the least accessible hole, duct or corner in your house to defecate.
A lot of the mental state - especially long term - is encoded in chemical structure of neurons; trails of more conductive or less conductive electrolytes, concentrations of neurotransmitters and so on. So it's likely memory and general psyche could be recovered. Of course temporary states - electric charges on neurons - momentary thoughts, current moods, short-term memory - will be all gone, and worse yet, will be recovered to undefined state which most likely will correspond to quite extreme shock and confusion. How deep a shock and whether recoverable or not, is the question. So it would be less like recovering a VM, more like booting a system that was switched off, with the OS and all permanent data saved to hard drive, but volatile state gone.
We aren't sure if some of essential substances won't be destroyed by freezing too. Some substances decompose unrecoverably in low temperatures, but we don't know whether they are essential for organism or can be replaced/refilled in short order. Also, -some- damage is expected and is hoped to be repaired by normal healing process, the question is the allowable extent and possible permanent damages.
Of course, this is all sci-fi and a huge gamble. It's just not as impossible as some say. There are no known showstopper problems. There may be unknown ones, and there are known risks of unknown extent - which may, or may not be showstoppers - but best to our current knowledge, it may be possible sometime.
Historians?
Humanitarian organizations?
Random hobbyists?
Overpopulation is an artificial problem resulting mainly from poverty, and from governments' lack of balls to regulate it. Developed countries have negative birth rates. And colonization of space -is- to be expected eventually.
Of course the risk is huge, but 1) the Pharaohs stored vast valuables in their tombs. The robbers didn't steal the corpses, but the golden sarcophagi. Who and why would steal old, long obsolete life-support aparature (unless we enter some post-apocalyptic future in which case you are fucked). 2) we may count on the society developing morally in parallel with technology. It could be expected from them to resolve the matter. 3) We are now pretty completely sure pharaohs are totally unrevivable; still as their aim was to preserve the bodies, now the mummies recovered are being preserved better than the originals ever could. Not for the same reasons but still. And I'm pretty sure if we -could- bring pharaohs of the old to life, we would, overpopulation and the fall of Great Egypt be damned.
OTOH, if in 500 years they find out that freezing does some kind of damage we didn't know about that is totally unrecoverable, and there is simply no point keeping us frozen because even the best wizards of the future won't be able to repair the loss, they may make a decision of unplugging us and that's it, the risk is calculated in.
Now antiseptics will get on a list of controlled substances used to hide location of mines.
40lb? More like 10-20...
But for now, not doable - pea-sized pieces of aerogel are quite common, a chunk of a liter of volume is about the limit of current resources. It is pretty much impossible to create anything bigger for now and what is created is a totally ruined skeleton of the original structure, with mere remains that hold it together in the shape, vast microscopic damage. Oh, and all liquids are displaced, not just water. That means any electrolites, all the information-holding ions in neurons, any water solutions that are pretty much essential...
Freezing retains almost 100% of body composition, minus few chemicals that decompose due to cold (not considered essential) and pretty much all the physical structure minus some (hopefully healable) damage due to parts not freezing fast enough and water forming crystals. Aerogelling would remove all liquid-based chemistry and introduce vast microscopic damage.
Lunar Uranium mines before 2013?
That's another risk, but I guess in a hundred years or so, they will remake the tech to be able to keep working without maintenance and with minimal cost for hundreds of years. A box made of aerogel, and a drop of LN2 a week - LN2 already costs something like $1/gallon and aerogel production is bound to get cheaper over time; the materials cost peanuts, it's the technology that requires expensive machinery. So even if the company goes under, some humane organization could take over and save the frozen.
Oh, the more forms there are, the more likely the customer won't make the purchase. Which encourages the sellers to limit the number of forms, which connected with this kind of laws would simply make them give up such shady practices whatsoever.
I use a virtual card. It requires me to generate a CVV2 code every time I make a new batch of purchases - the code is valid only for several hours after generating it.This makes storing it or passing to others useless. Also, I "charge" the subaccount bound to the card with the amount I want to pay, so they can't withdraw more than I consent to.
As for repeating purchases like monthly fees, either I watch for it myself, or use other methods, like bank transfer order. As a general rule, I don't allow anyone ever to withdraw money from my account without my explicit consent for every separate event of doing so.
As for daily, non-online purchases, I use a regular "flat" card, which requires the actual card for the payment, not the card number alone.
There is no such law? ...scary...
So what is there to stop a gas station owner in backwater Kentucky to publish my CC number online?