All the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity. We did not evolve to the state we are in today because one group of ape-like beings, having discovered how to make effective weapons for hunting and fire for cooking, kept the discoveries to themselves, only allowing others to make use of them on restricted terms; handing over ready-made weapons to the hunters whilst banning them from the workshop, blindfolding people whilst fires were lit, and punishing anyone who tried to study how to make axes or start a fire.
I can see a comedy sketch in there somewhere. Only thing is, in real life, it isn't funny.
Old problem. Been solved elsewhere. Was Ritchie, or Thompson, or Kernighan..... nah, probably not him..... one of the other two. Something to do with writing your own C interpreter in assembler, interpreting the compilation of the compiler and then you know you have a clean compiler {having scrupulously inspected its source for code-alteration shenanigans} that you know won't put extra code into your programs. Then you know that anything you compiled with that compiler will do exactly what the source code says it should do. Unfortunately you don't know for certain that the processor manufacturer hasn't put malicious code-altering code into their own assembly language.....
The upshot of it is, you can never be absolutely certain. But there are things you can do to make it less likely to be tamperable. For instance, separate program and data memory {hah! make the bitch write an emulator!}, and only use program-memory devices of a limited capacity {not much room for extra code in there anyway}.
The nearest to truly tamper-proof voting would be a system whereby the machinery is proportioned on a sufficiently large scale, and the entire process moves slowly enough, so that every detail can be seen by a trusted human observer without the use of any special instruments. And that is why, in this country, we do it that way.....
"Throwing out the baby with the bathwater" takes on an altogether nastier significance when you come to realise that the baby is already dead -- and it was probably the minging bathwater that killed it.....
that the companies that manufacture voting machines are not mandated to publish full specifications including technical drawings and listings of firmware, for anyone to look at, any time, for free. It's like they are trying to say mere mortals are not supposed to know the processes by which their representatives are elected.
And don't give me the hand-wringing "important proprietary secrets" crap. Firstly, all companies would be required to show their "secrets", so nobody would be gaining any unfair advantage. Secondly, what the hell is so secret about adding up a bunch of numbers anyway? And thirdly, what corporate secret is more important than the due processes of democracy?
If these companies are not prepared to let the general public - who are, after all, the rightful owners of "Government" property - scrutinise their products, thenthat alone is a good enough reason why the public should reject their products.
The EULA is not a contract, and there are certain rights that cannot be given up by entering into a contract {Unfair Contract Terms Act, 1977}.
Whilst I note your point that not everyone is able to scrutinise the source code themselves, at least they have the option to show it to an independent expert who is not in the pockets of the vendor. With closed source software, you haven't got that right. The only right you have is to bend over and be quiet, and the only control you have over events is that if you don't struggle then it won't hurt so much.
Also, there are many independent experts who spend their time just examining source code for fun. It only takes one person to point out what a piece of software is really doing. This is known by the people who write Open Source Software, so they generally don't like to write software that people might say nasty things about.
And anyway, it is impossible by definition for Open Source software to be pirated..... sort of like a nude transvestite..... I wish I could think of a better example than that.
Excuse me? Closed source software is all about exploiting vulnerable people under the guise of offering them something positive. So was the slave trade. Of course, there was much vocal opposition to the abolition of slavery -- for much the same reasons as there is opposition today to the abolition of closed source software. And, if we want to be honest, really it was not political activism that brought an end to slavery -- it was the invention of the steam engine, and later the electric motor, that put the tin lid on the whole business. Why have people doing your work for you, when machines can do it cheaper and more reliably? Fortunately, I am confident that some technological solution will render closed source software similarly irrelevant.
{Of course, the slave-trading mentality lives on today in some people. Thirty years ago you could be kicked out of a club for having the wrong colour skin. Today you can be kicked out of a club for wearing the wrong type of clothing or shoes. Don't let anyone tell you that's progress.}
Keeping your software source code secret is a false freedom. It is not really about using freedom for yourself, but about controlling other people, and denying them their freedom -- an outright excess of authority. When you write software and keep the source secret, you are denying people a basic human right -- the right to understand how the universe works, which by definition includes how the software you wrote works.
If you buy a knife, then, just because that knife belongs to you, does that give you the freedom to stab whoever you choose? {I hope you don't think so}. Other people's real freedom to go about their business without being stabbed overrules your false freedom to stab them. In the same way, other people's right to access the source code to any software you may write overrules your false freedom to keep it secret from them.
All the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity. We did not evolve to the state we are in today because one group of ape-like beings, having discovered how to make effective weapons for hunting and fire for cooking, kept the discoveries to themselves, only allowing others to make use of them on restricted terms; handing over ready-made weapons to the hunters whilst banning them from the workshop, blindfolding people whilst fires were lit, and punishing anyone who tried to study how to make axes or start a fire.
Not sharing is theft. Which bit of that don't you understand?
There is a huge difference between quietly refusing to run if a licencing violation is suspected, and actually informing on a supposed "transgressor". The former case does not involve any third parties; it's between you and your computer. In the latter case, something unforgivable is happening. After you have bought your software, it really is none of the vendor's business what you do with it.
However, this sort of thing was inevitable, and the moral of the story is: Don't used closed-source software. At all. Period.
Until the law requires that every user of software be given the right to scrutinise the source code, these abuses of power will happen. Closed source is fundamentally no different to slavery. It is exploitation of vulnerable people under a thin disguise of doing them a favour.
They tried that {charging for other banks' ATMs} in this country, for awhile, and it died a horrible death. The banks that charged, lost customers to the ones that didn't.
Borrowing, Sharing and Favours theory says that as many other people will use your machines as your people use other people's machines. So while other banks' customers are giving your machines wear and tear, your customers are inflicting an equal amount of wear and tear on the other banks' machines. Look what happens with fags for a small-scale model..... about as many people offer you one of theirs as you offer around. Not quite scientific, I know, but you get the drift.
They do NOT have the right to prevent the use of interoperable third-party software. There was a little court case about that awhile ago, if you remember.
By your standards, the owner of a knife ought to have the right to choose for themself who they stab with it. That is false freedom and I urge you to keep re-reading it until you understand.
This is a perfect example of Microsoft exceeding its authority. MS has a legal obligation to ensure that its software is compatible with third party software. If they default on that obligation, then it would be considered "reasonable force" for third parties to undertake reverse engineering of MS software. Although, it would be nice to see someone try to claim in court what is legally theirs {i.e. some pseudocode examples, diagrams &c. that would enable a competent programmer to code a compatible client to talk to their server}.
I mean, what earthly point is there in having standards - especially when done through a system as open as the RFC system - if people don't follow them? Someone needs to send a clear and unambiguous message to Microsoft that people are not happy with their business methods.
Maybe one day it will actually be against the law to to write closed-source software. For me, that day can't come soon enough.
What's wrong with CCTV is that it does not catch criminals, it merely displaces crime to non-CCTV equipped areas. In the worst case, that can mean the blind spots of all the cameras along a street.
Back in The days, a detective would begin with a crime and look for evidence which might help them find the person who committed the crime. Todays new breed of coppers, armed with CCTV, DNA testing and sundry intrusions into privacy, begin with a person and look for evidence which might help them find a crime committed by that person. Unfortunately, since by far the vast majority of people are, as a matter of definition, innocent of any crime, then this system is unworkably inefficient. This, however, is no greater deterrent to the authorities than the cameras themselves are to the villains.
If your car windows get broken, chances are there wasn't a CCTV camera looking at it, or the villain was too heavily disguised to be recognisable, or will probably get off on some other technicality anyway if the police even manage to catch them.
Need the loo after six at night? If you believe the illegal signs put up by many pub and restaurant owners about toilets being for customers' use only {going in to use the bog surely makes one a customer?} and go in the street, chances are a camera will see you.
And the streets do belong to you, if you pay your rates {or whatever local taxes are called in your country}.
The thing about bending fibre optics that nobody ever points out, is that if you bend even an infinitely-elastic fibre optic through too tight a curve, then you will get light leakage.
Fibre optics work on the principle of total internal reflection. The angle at which the light strikes the interface between glass and air is too shallow for it to get refracted out into the air, so instead it bounces off. As far as a beam of light is concerned, a length of fibre optic is just like a tube whose inside walls have a perfect mirror finish.
If you put a tight enough bend into the fibre, then the light will no longer be striking at an unrefractable angle, and therefore will escape. {You can try this with cheap 1mm. acrylic fibre if you remove the outer jacket and warm it in a pan of boiling water}.
Now, glass fibres exhibit very nice thermoplastic behaviour, and can actually be bent without breaking to tighter radii than acrylic. Unfortunately, they begin leaking light long before they break.....
Seeing how the heat pipe worked {link somewhere above, can't be bothered to find it} made me think "Stirling engine" for some reason. Then I got to thinking you could power a Stirling engine from the CPU {it must provide cooling, since it is doing work; even when only lightly loaded, it has to dissipate the heat over a wider area than it's picking up heat from}. Only thing is, I don't know what you could actually power with the engine. It probably wouldn't be fast enough to use for a hard drive.
About the only use I can think of for it is..... a fan!
Still, some case mod nut is bound to try it now anyway just to see if it can be done.
There is a device for converting heat to electricity in your gas central heating boiler. You know how you have to hold in the knob after you have sparked the piezo? You know why? The pilot flame is heating a thermocouple probe -- a heat-to-electricity converter. The current from the thermocouple passes through a bimetallic strip switch {over temperature cutout} to a solenoid valve upstream of the one which the time clock operates. The safety solenoid isn't powerful enough to pull in from rest {and it never will anyway, if you think about it} but will hold it there if it's already been pushed there by hand. If the pilot blows out, or the overheat cutout opens, the gas is shut off. Then when the time clock comes on, nothing happens until you repeat the lighting cycle. {OK, modern boilers have electronic ignition and no pilot light, I used to make the electronic controls for 'em, but there are many, many older ones out there}.
Unfortunately, you need a temperature of about 1000C and you get less than a volt out of the thing {plenty milliamps though}. One flame will heat several thermocouples, but the problem if you connect several thermocouples in series is that you need to keep the non-generating junctions cold relative to the generating ones {otherwise they generate an equal voltage but trying to push the current in the opposite direction, which doesn't help}. You need a large temperature difference over a short distance {otherwise you get voltage drop} and that goes against the natural tendency of temperatures to equalise.
If you want to use the heat chucked out by an air conditioner, I reckon the best bet would be to find a way to use it to heat your domestic hot water. I use my air con's exhaust hose as a hair drier, BTW..... of course, it means I have to put some shorts on after getting out of the shower.....
Well, since the amount of CO2 produced by burning any plant is exactly equal to the amount of CO2 consumed by the plant in its lifetime, I don't think it's too much of a problem. As long as you keep the amount of live plants near enough constant. If you're using them up faster than you grow them, it's a problem..... but thanks to private ownership of land, that's unlikely, since you can make money out of land just by growing stuff on it..... but you stop making money if you don't replant it.
I wouldn't call anything that consumes [27kg] of wood chips per day enviromentally friendly btw. The by-products of combustion are going to foul the air.
No they aren't. The products of combustion are carbon dioxide and water, which plants - the replacements you are already growing for the plants you got the wood from - turn by photosynthesis into glucose and then by polymerisation into cellulose.
IMHO this is the better way to do it. We send a few people to Mars to build the thing. They know they aren't coming back -- what they get instead is the chance to make history. We get a nuke plant somewhere where nobody is going to get too badly hurt if it blows up. In the worst possible case, we get half a dozen dead bodies on Mars. Big deal. Fags kill more than that - 120 000 a year in this country alone, that's one every 4'23". And don't even mention nuclear pollution. Remember this is space we're talking about. Space is full of radiation. Our planet just has an atmosphere that blocks most of it -- otherwise we would have groun up differently:-) Detonating a nuclear bomb in space would pollute it about as much as one drop of urine would pollute the ocean.
Somebody mentioned fire. Easy solution: don't leave oxidising substances {like, er, oxygen} lying around all over the place. Difficult on Earth with an oxygen-rich atmosphere; easy when all your oxygen has to be piped in from somewhere. {Probably obtained by splitting some oxide or other, using energy from the nuclear plant. Human beings produce plenty of CO2 and H2O. Take one person's entire daily output of oxides, separate the oxygen out and you've got exactly one day's oxygen ration.}
And stop with the doomsday scenarios already. Entertaining the concept of failure is coming too close to failure for my liking.
Gambling at the racetrack is legal. Gambling in licenced betting shops is legal. Gambling in casinos is legal. What's the problem with gambling on the Internet?
Maybe some jurisdictions don't have the same rules of fair play or something..... I can understand someone might want to limit offshore betting, but surely the proper way to do it is to use a domain name over which you have jurisdiction. EG. William Hill use a secure server with a.uk domain name. They could have that domain name withdrawn if they get a bad reputation.
I certainly can't see anything wrong with gambling per se..... it's only a problem if someone starts spending more money than they could afford to lose, but you can do that in any number of ways..... drink..... fags..... having kids..... all of which are perfectly legal!
A proper bet at a bookie's is about one thing: can you weigh up the odds more accurately than the bookmaker? If you believe the probability of an outcome is greater than the odds would suggest, then the bet is justified. On the other hand, if the probability is worse than the odds would suggest {UK Lottery: 1 chance in [49*48*47*46*45*44*43]/[6*5*4*3*2*1] = about 14 million, as opposed to a payout of about 3.5M to 1} then you should steer clear.
And it ain't the government's job to stop people from doing stuff that might be bad for them..... let 'em learn the hard way.....
Debian. Or Slackware. Just be sure to have a copy of either Knoppix or Slackware Live CD handy. Write down what the CD auto-detected. Select appropriate odules when installing proper distro.
Now this is interesting! A life-form that can survive temperatures over 100 degrees can't be killed by boiling water. {Actually, water boils at less than 100C in most places on Earth since the atmosphere is less dense at altitude higher than sea level; therefore, with less pressure outside the liquid, the molecules don't have to have so much energy to break free from the surface tension prison}. Suddenly, heat is not the ultimate disinfectant you thought it was anymore.
Just wait till someone finds a living creature that can withstand several hundred degrees..... it'd have a real chance of surviving a fire..... now that would be scary.
Actually, I would have thought it would be more like this. Note: "Earth", "Water", "Air" and "Fire" reprsent the four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas and energy.
001 - air - gases - there is only one atmosphere.
010 - water - liquids - water now known to contain two elements in the ratio 2:1.
011 - fire - energy - fire needs fuel, heat and oxygen.
100 - earth - solids - earth was once thought to have four corners.
Actually this would be neater if Earth was 000, then we can just use two digits - AJS.
Air and Fire are associated with masculine, spiritual and software. They have odd numbers which are also associated with these properties. Earth and Water are associated with feminine, material and hardware. They have even numbers which are also associated with these properties. I'm not going to comment on the obvious gender symbolism of the one and the zero at LSB in odd numbers.....
Note to cynical moderators: Please don't mod me down -1, Beardy-Weirdy. I thought this stuff up for the express purpose of assisting New Agers to rectify their money/sense discrepancies!
I've never understood where this idea comes from. When you have sex, the number of sperm released is typically in nine figures {decimal}. Out of all those sperm, most will not fuse with an egg. Perhaps one {single birth or identical twins} or rarely two {non-identical twins}, even rarer more than two. Most likely, none of them will find an egg.
If a man has sex just once and gets his girlfriend pregnant, one sperm has done its job but there are still hundreds of millions of sperm wasted. Now if a man had sex twice a day every day for seventy years and each instance of sex conceives exactly one child, that is just over 50000 babies - and trillions of sperm. Most of which were just never going to make it. So if you had a w**k twice a day for seventy years you might have wasted trillions of sperm, but since most of them were never really going to go anywhere anyway, you have only really wasted one per shot. And there are sufficiently more sperm in a single ejaculation to make that quite insignificant by comparison.
As they say, sperm are tiny, but it only takes one of them to fill a pram!
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All the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity. We did not evolve to the state we are in today because one group of ape-like beings, having discovered how to make effective weapons for hunting and fire for cooking, kept the discoveries to themselves, only allowing others to make use of them on restricted terms; handing over ready-made weapons to the hunters whilst banning them from the workshop, blindfolding people whilst fires were lit, and punishing anyone who tried to study how to make axes or start a fire.
I can see a comedy sketch in there somewhere. Only thing is, in real life, it isn't funny.
Old problem. Been solved elsewhere. Was Ritchie, or Thompson, or Kernighan ..... nah, probably not him ..... one of the other two. Something to do with writing your own C interpreter in assembler, interpreting the compilation of the compiler and then you know you have a clean compiler {having scrupulously inspected its source for code-alteration shenanigans} that you know won't put extra code into your programs. Then you know that anything you compiled with that compiler will do exactly what the source code says it should do. Unfortunately you don't know for certain that the processor manufacturer hasn't put malicious code-altering code into their own assembly language .....
.....
The upshot of it is, you can never be absolutely certain. But there are things you can do to make it less likely to be tamperable. For instance, separate program and data memory {hah! make the bitch write an emulator!}, and only use program-memory devices of a limited capacity {not much room for extra code in there anyway}.
The nearest to truly tamper-proof voting would be a system whereby the machinery is proportioned on a sufficiently large scale, and the entire process moves slowly enough, so that every detail can be seen by a trusted human observer without the use of any special instruments. And that is why, in this country, we do it that way
"Throwing out the baby with the bathwater" takes on an altogether nastier significance when you come to realise that the baby is already dead -- and it was probably the minging bathwater that killed it .....
that the companies that manufacture voting machines are not mandated to publish full specifications including technical drawings and listings of firmware, for anyone to look at, any time, for free. It's like they are trying to say mere mortals are not supposed to know the processes by which their representatives are elected.
And don't give me the hand-wringing "important proprietary secrets" crap. Firstly, all companies would be required to show their "secrets", so nobody would be gaining any unfair advantage. Secondly, what the hell is so secret about adding up a bunch of numbers anyway? And thirdly, what corporate secret is more important than the due processes of democracy?
If these companies are not prepared to let the general public - who are, after all, the rightful owners of "Government" property - scrutinise their products, thenthat alone is a good enough reason why the public should reject their products.
The EULA is not a contract, and there are certain rights that cannot be given up by entering into a contract {Unfair Contract Terms Act, 1977}.
..... sort of like a nude transvestite ..... I wish I could think of a better example than that.
Whilst I note your point that not everyone is able to scrutinise the source code themselves, at least they have the option to show it to an independent expert who is not in the pockets of the vendor. With closed source software, you haven't got that right. The only right you have is to bend over and be quiet, and the only control you have over events is that if you don't struggle then it won't hurt so much.
Also, there are many independent experts who spend their time just examining source code for fun. It only takes one person to point out what a piece of software is really doing. This is known by the people who write Open Source Software, so they generally don't like to write software that people might say nasty things about.
And anyway, it is impossible by definition for Open Source software to be pirated
Excuse me? Closed source software is all about exploiting vulnerable people under the guise of offering them something positive. So was the slave trade. Of course, there was much vocal opposition to the abolition of slavery -- for much the same reasons as there is opposition today to the abolition of closed source software. And, if we want to be honest, really it was not political activism that brought an end to slavery -- it was the invention of the steam engine, and later the electric motor, that put the tin lid on the whole business. Why have people doing your work for you, when machines can do it cheaper and more reliably? Fortunately, I am confident that some technological solution will render closed source software similarly irrelevant.
{Of course, the slave-trading mentality lives on today in some people. Thirty years ago you could be kicked out of a club for having the wrong colour skin. Today you can be kicked out of a club for wearing the wrong type of clothing or shoes. Don't let anyone tell you that's progress.}
Keeping your software source code secret is a false freedom. It is not really about using freedom for yourself, but about controlling other people, and denying them their freedom -- an outright excess of authority. When you write software and keep the source secret, you are denying people a basic human right -- the right to understand how the universe works, which by definition includes how the software you wrote works.
If you buy a knife, then, just because that knife belongs to you, does that give you the freedom to stab whoever you choose? {I hope you don't think so}. Other people's real freedom to go about their business without being stabbed overrules your false freedom to stab them. In the same way, other people's right to access the source code to any software you may write overrules your false freedom to keep it secret from them.
All the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity. We did not evolve to the state we are in today because one group of ape-like beings, having discovered how to make effective weapons for hunting and fire for cooking, kept the discoveries to themselves, only allowing others to make use of them on restricted terms; handing over ready-made weapons to the hunters whilst banning them from the workshop, blindfolding people whilst fires were lit, and punishing anyone who tried to study how to make axes or start a fire.
Not sharing is theft. Which bit of that don't you understand?
There is a huge difference between quietly refusing to run if a licencing violation is suspected, and actually informing on a supposed "transgressor". The former case does not involve any third parties; it's between you and your computer. In the latter case, something unforgivable is happening. After you have bought your software, it really is none of the vendor's business what you do with it.
However, this sort of thing was inevitable, and the moral of the story is: Don't used closed-source software. At all. Period.
Until the law requires that every user of software be given the right to scrutinise the source code, these abuses of power will happen. Closed source is fundamentally no different to slavery. It is exploitation of vulnerable people under a thin disguise of doing them a favour.
They tried that {charging for other banks' ATMs} in this country, for awhile, and it died a horrible death. The banks that charged, lost customers to the ones that didn't.
..... about as many people offer you one of theirs as you offer around. Not quite scientific, I know, but you get the drift.
Borrowing, Sharing and Favours theory says that as many other people will use your machines as your people use other people's machines. So while other banks' customers are giving your machines wear and tear, your customers are inflicting an equal amount of wear and tear on the other banks' machines. Look what happens with fags for a small-scale model
They do NOT have the right to prevent the use of interoperable third-party software. There was a little court case about that awhile ago, if you remember.
By your standards, the owner of a knife ought to have the right to choose for themself who they stab with it. That is false freedom and I urge you to keep re-reading it until you understand.
This is a perfect example of Microsoft exceeding its authority. MS has a legal obligation to ensure that its software is compatible with third party software. If they default on that obligation, then it would be considered "reasonable force" for third parties to undertake reverse engineering of MS software. Although, it would be nice to see someone try to claim in court what is legally theirs {i.e. some pseudocode examples, diagrams &c. that would enable a competent programmer to code a compatible client to talk to their server}.
I mean, what earthly point is there in having standards - especially when done through a system as open as the RFC system - if people don't follow them? Someone needs to send a clear and unambiguous message to Microsoft that people are not happy with their business methods.
Maybe one day it will actually be against the law to to write closed-source software. For me, that day can't come soon enough.
I'd heard something like an urban legend about a company giving Bill the finger ..... so it's true then? Good for Ernie Ball.
.....
Something positive will come out of this. Someone will be inspired to help fill the gaps. These things are certain.
Maybe I should learn to play the guitar just because of this
What's wrong with CCTV is that it does not catch criminals, it merely displaces crime to non-CCTV equipped areas. In the worst case, that can mean the blind spots of all the cameras along a street.
Back in The days, a detective would begin with a crime and look for evidence which might help them find the person who committed the crime. Todays new breed of coppers, armed with CCTV, DNA testing and sundry intrusions into privacy, begin with a person and look for evidence which might help them find a crime committed by that person. Unfortunately, since by far the vast majority of people are, as a matter of definition, innocent of any crime, then this system is unworkably inefficient. This, however, is no greater deterrent to the authorities than the cameras themselves are to the villains.
If your car windows get broken, chances are there wasn't a CCTV camera looking at it, or the villain was too heavily disguised to be recognisable, or will probably get off on some other technicality anyway if the police even manage to catch them.
Need the loo after six at night? If you believe the illegal signs put up by many pub and restaurant owners about toilets being for customers' use only {going in to use the bog surely makes one a customer?} and go in the street, chances are a camera will see you.
And the streets do belong to you, if you pay your rates {or whatever local taxes are called in your country}.
The thing about bending fibre optics that nobody ever points out, is that if you bend even an infinitely-elastic fibre optic through too tight a curve, then you will get light leakage.
.....
Fibre optics work on the principle of total internal reflection. The angle at which the light strikes the interface between glass and air is too shallow for it to get refracted out into the air, so instead it bounces off. As far as a beam of light is concerned, a length of fibre optic is just like a tube whose inside walls have a perfect mirror finish.
If you put a tight enough bend into the fibre, then the light will no longer be striking at an unrefractable angle, and therefore will escape. {You can try this with cheap 1mm. acrylic fibre if you remove the outer jacket and warm it in a pan of boiling water}.
Now, glass fibres exhibit very nice thermoplastic behaviour, and can actually be bent without breaking to tighter radii than acrylic. Unfortunately, they begin leaking light long before they break
Seeing how the heat pipe worked {link somewhere above, can't be bothered to find it} made me think "Stirling engine" for some reason. Then I got to thinking you could power a Stirling engine from the CPU {it must provide cooling, since it is doing work; even when only lightly loaded, it has to dissipate the heat over a wider area than it's picking up heat from}. Only thing is, I don't know what you could actually power with the engine. It probably wouldn't be fast enough to use for a hard drive.
..... a fan!
About the only use I can think of for it is
Still, some case mod nut is bound to try it now anyway just to see if it can be done.
There is a device for converting heat to electricity in your gas central heating boiler. You know how you have to hold in the knob after you have sparked the piezo? You know why? The pilot flame is heating a thermocouple probe -- a heat-to-electricity converter. The current from the thermocouple passes through a bimetallic strip switch {over temperature cutout} to a solenoid valve upstream of the one which the time clock operates. The safety solenoid isn't powerful enough to pull in from rest {and it never will anyway, if you think about it} but will hold it there if it's already been pushed there by hand. If the pilot blows out, or the overheat cutout opens, the gas is shut off. Then when the time clock comes on, nothing happens until you repeat the lighting cycle. {OK, modern boilers have electronic ignition and no pilot light, I used to make the electronic controls for 'em, but there are many, many older ones out there}.
..... of course, it means I have to put some shorts on after getting out of the shower .....
Unfortunately, you need a temperature of about 1000C and you get less than a volt out of the thing {plenty milliamps though}. One flame will heat several thermocouples, but the problem if you connect several thermocouples in series is that you need to keep the non-generating junctions cold relative to the generating ones {otherwise they generate an equal voltage but trying to push the current in the opposite direction, which doesn't help}. You need a large temperature difference over a short distance {otherwise you get voltage drop} and that goes against the natural tendency of temperatures to equalise.
If you want to use the heat chucked out by an air conditioner, I reckon the best bet would be to find a way to use it to heat your domestic hot water. I use my air con's exhaust hose as a hair drier, BTW
Well, since the amount of CO2 produced by burning any plant is exactly equal to the amount of CO2 consumed by the plant in its lifetime, I don't think it's too much of a problem. As long as you keep the amount of live plants near enough constant. If you're using them up faster than you grow them, it's a problem ..... but thanks to private ownership of land, that's unlikely, since you can make money out of land just by growing stuff on it ..... but you stop making money if you don't replant it.
IMHO this is the better way to do it. We send a few people to Mars to build the thing. They know they aren't coming back -- what they get instead is the chance to make history. We get a nuke plant somewhere where nobody is going to get too badly hurt if it blows up. In the worst possible case, we get half a dozen dead bodies on Mars. Big deal. Fags kill more than that - 120 000 a year in this country alone, that's one every 4'23". And don't even mention nuclear pollution. Remember this is space we're talking about. Space is full of radiation. Our planet just has an atmosphere that blocks most of it -- otherwise we would have groun up differently :-) Detonating a nuclear bomb in space would pollute it about as much as one drop of urine would pollute the ocean.
Somebody mentioned fire. Easy solution: don't leave oxidising substances {like, er, oxygen} lying around all over the place. Difficult on Earth with an oxygen-rich atmosphere; easy when all your oxygen has to be piped in from somewhere. {Probably obtained by splitting some oxide or other, using energy from the nuclear plant. Human beings produce plenty of CO2 and H2O. Take one person's entire daily output of oxides, separate the oxygen out and you've got exactly one day's oxygen ration.}
And stop with the doomsday scenarios already. Entertaining the concept of failure is coming too close to failure for my liking.
Gambling at the racetrack is legal. Gambling in licenced betting shops is legal. Gambling in casinos is legal. What's the problem with gambling on the Internet?
..... I can understand someone might want to limit offshore betting, but surely the proper way to do it is to use a domain name over which you have jurisdiction. EG. William Hill use a secure server with a .uk domain name. They could have that domain name withdrawn if they get a bad reputation.
..... it's only a problem if someone starts spending more money than they could afford to lose, but you can do that in any number of ways ..... drink ..... fags ..... having kids ..... all of which are perfectly legal!
..... let 'em learn the hard way .....
Maybe some jurisdictions don't have the same rules of fair play or something
I certainly can't see anything wrong with gambling per se
A proper bet at a bookie's is about one thing: can you weigh up the odds more accurately than the bookmaker? If you believe the probability of an outcome is greater than the odds would suggest, then the bet is justified. On the other hand, if the probability is worse than the odds would suggest {UK Lottery: 1 chance in [49*48*47*46*45*44*43]/[6*5*4*3*2*1] = about 14 million, as opposed to a payout of about 3.5M to 1} then you should steer clear.
And it ain't the government's job to stop people from doing stuff that might be bad for them
Debian. Or Slackware. Just be sure to have a copy of either Knoppix or Slackware Live CD handy. Write down what the CD auto-detected. Select appropriate odules when installing proper distro.
And MySQL for the database.
Now this is interesting! A life-form that can survive temperatures over 100 degrees can't be killed by boiling water. {Actually, water boils at less than 100C in most places on Earth since the atmosphere is less dense at altitude higher than sea level; therefore, with less pressure outside the liquid, the molecules don't have to have so much energy to break free from the surface tension prison}. Suddenly, heat is not the ultimate disinfectant you thought it was anymore.
..... it'd have a real chance of surviving a fire ..... now that would be scary.
Just wait till someone finds a living creature that can withstand several hundred degrees
- 001 - air - gases - there is only one atmosphere.
- 010 - water - liquids - water now known to contain two elements in the ratio 2:1.
- 011 - fire - energy - fire needs fuel, heat and oxygen.
- 100 - earth - solids - earth was once thought to have four corners.
Actually this would be neater if Earth was 000, then we can just use two digits - AJS.Air and Fire are associated with masculine, spiritual and software. They have odd numbers which are also associated with these properties. Earth and Water are associated with feminine, material and hardware. They have even numbers which are also associated with these properties. I'm not going to comment on the obvious gender symbolism of the one and the zero at LSB in odd numbers
Note to cynical moderators: Please don't mod me down -1, Beardy-Weirdy. I thought this stuff up for the express purpose of assisting New Agers to rectify their money/sense discrepancies!
Well, we already have a Nobelium and a Mendelevium. So how about Nobelievium? We could give it the chemical symbol Bs.
I'm expecting a large quantity of Bs to be discovered, once it has been identified!
I've never understood where this idea comes from. When you have sex, the number of sperm released is typically in nine figures {decimal}. Out of all those sperm, most will not fuse with an egg. Perhaps one {single birth or identical twins} or rarely two {non-identical twins}, even rarer more than two. Most likely, none of them will find an egg.
If a man has sex just once and gets his girlfriend pregnant, one sperm has done its job but there are still hundreds of millions of sperm wasted. Now if a man had sex twice a day every day for seventy years and each instance of sex conceives exactly one child, that is just over 50000 babies - and trillions of sperm. Most of which were just never going to make it. So if you had a w**k twice a day for seventy years you might have wasted trillions of sperm, but since most of them were never really going to go anywhere anyway, you have only really wasted one per shot. And there are sufficiently more sperm in a single ejaculation to make that quite insignificant by comparison.
As they say, sperm are tiny, but it only takes one of them to fill a pram!