Yep, it's V=IR
The current (I) is dependent on the resistance (R) and the voltage (V). If your body has a healthy resistance (which it does to my knowledge) then you will not get electricuted unless you pump up the voltage.
I read in another comment that 50mA will kill you thus:
V = IR
120 = 0.05R
R = 2400 Ohms
According to this site: Under dry conditions, the resistance offered by the human body may be as high as 100,000 Ohms
So you should be ok most of the time. Us in Europe with our 240V AC supplies have to offer more resistance, 4800 Ohms, although since in Britain we have earthing on all powered devices, elecution is far less likely.
People who get eletricuted must have less than 2400 Ohms resistance then - presumably - unless I've missed out some important theory..
Still Dyson Sphere's weren't quite what I proposed, but I could have clicked the guy's links, you're right. Silly me! Anyway, it's certainly not an orginal idea, these sun catching thingies are littered throughout sci-fi, I never claimed it was my idea or anything.
It was just something I'd been thinking about of late.
I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium
You assume that fusion is the only way. Personally, I see the world moving beyond fusion power fairly quickly. By far the best source of energy for our needs is the sun. Now I'm not talking about everyone having a solar panel on their roof, I'm talking massive scale harvesting of all the energy that usually is "wasted" going off to light nowhere. Say you harvest 500 square kilometers of sun that usually would only serve to show alpha centauri that out sun exists. This is an extremely unpolluting and excellent source of energy.
The problems are three fold: getting the energy back to the earth, capturing enough energy for the whole planet and dissapating all that extra energy once it's used (lots of extra heat = nasty). I figure these will all be easy to solve over the next century.
I'd be pleased to see my ideas come into being, but you must understand that in order to protect my intellectual property, I have a patent pending on the use of the sun (or any star) to facilitate life or living.
reverse the polarity, it always works in Star Trek
My God! It's so true! The solution to everything is a tacheon beam, or some hybrid neutrino ray, which doesn't work at first, (like you gotta wonder what neutrino's would do), but then Geordi suggests reversing the polarity, and low and behold it does the trick!
Don't try it in real life, like say reversing the polarity of the electricity for your laptop. It'll either do nothing at all or result in everything going up in smoke.. hang on a minute, maybe they're on to something!
This patent sounds like a strategic business move though and something that nobody else is doing...
How does that justify patetnting it though? Patents should only be granted to encourage innovation, a patent like this only creates a monopoly for one company, and actively prevents any other companies innovating in the field. The only reason Microsoft have secured this patent is so they can attempt to gain more market share in the competitive IM market.
Patents were not created to allow companies the chance for monopoly, they were created to encourage companies to take risks and invest large amounts of money in potentially profitable products and thus progress society. They are an incentive for corporations to improve out lives and our world.
All I see here is more abuse of the patent system by a greedy corporation, proposing a fairly obvious invention which cost them little to research
You can argue that they got to the patent office first and thus deserve to have it granted, but I'd argue that granting the patent has simply stagnated an interesting area of instant messaging software for some years to come. Software doesn't need patents, the products should compete on other factors like usability, interface and integration. If you can't compete without patenting, then maybe your company shouldn't thrive at all?
Anyway, as for prior art, Kopete already does this (IIRC).
Although I disagree with the "disaster after disaster" sentiment -- most of NASA's missions are officially succesful, to my knowledge -- I agree that the money should be spend elsewhere.
Currently space travel/exploration/science costs a tremendous amount of money, but gives little back (although I do agree weather prediction has probably been incredibly important for 20th century progress). My general feeling is that it's a waste of money, there are better things in which to invest. And yes this includes homeless shelters, saving the environment and promoting healthy eating.
It could also mean spending more money on reducing the cost of space travel. Why don't they cancel all programs (or most of them, whatever) for the next few years and invest heavily in research for new, cheaper methods of getting up there. Surely this would be a better use for the money?
When it's cheaper to get into space we'll be able to gain serious benefits from space travel. Things like mining asteroids, teraforming mars and diverting on-coming asteroids. Most of the programs that I hear about are either very bad value for money (even if they are of useful scientific grounding) or stupid, like raising ant farms on a space station.
There is far more potential up there than we take advantage of currently and we're stuck until the the money is spent more wisely. What do people think?
If battery-powered electric vehicles were adopted, the need to recharge them using electricity from conventional power stations would produce about as much carbon dioxide as the vehicles that they replace. Emissions of sulphur dioxide would also rise by up to 85%.
It would still be a sensible way to move forward since we would be localising our pollution production - it must be easier to reduce the polluting capabilities of a few power stations than 60 million cars. Also fuel cells will only get into transport in the future. Hopefully by then we'll be generating a greater percentage of our electricity in a green fashion.
How would anyone prove that the "bug" is a bug and not just normal "reality"-type phenomenon?
Citing your own example, a blackhole == a null pointer, all current scientists think a black hole is a huge gravity well, they don't think its a bug in a matrix-like simulation we're all a part of. If someone published such a theory they'd be laughed at and branded a hippy. Everyone hangs on to reality quite firmly.
Like most people I'm a little fed up reading these stereotypical rants about Linux. Like come on! We know the packaging and ease of use issues already and I'm confident that next-generation distributions will be well on the way to solving these issues.
Anyway doesn't this guy use urpmi? That would solve his dependency issues at least. I'd love to see some of his all in one packages too. I'd expect some elements of KDE to be hundreds of megabytes in size when you include every dependency!
The bit that gets me though is the comment "at it's heart, Windows XP is a great OS", I agree that Windows XP is a pleasant OS to use for day-to-day issues, and with it common tasks are easy. However I firmly believe it is not a great OS at heart. All my years of (albeit hobbyist) experience with Windows have forced the opinion on me that at its heart Windows is a poorly designed hacked-together OS. Unix on the other hand had a much longer design process and I feel it has benefited tremendously from this.
And thus my heart will forever more be with *nix.
Otherwise, yeah, it's YALR (yet another Linux review).
Re:Eastman Kodak Doesn't Want to Make Digital Came
on
RIAA vs The Economy
·
· Score: 1
Still make 'em, well as far as I know, I just work in research. Just the other day my mate got some jpegs developed with silver halide tech using a mini lab upstairs. I'm not sure if we're selling these things yet but at the very least the development is at the finishing stages. Big machines they are too.
Pictrography donar-reciever?
Re:Eastman Kodak Doesn't Want to Make Digital Came
on
RIAA vs The Economy
·
· Score: 1
Oh come on now! You know we sell papers, plenty of different sorts at different gloss levels and drytimes. We also sell plenty of digital processing machines to produce silver halide or inkjet prints from digital camera images (I take it this is what the autochrome machines are). We also know that people produce far less hard copies when they can pick and choose images to print. Even when you take into account that people tend to get larger (and thus more expense) hard-copies it still is no-where near as profitable as the current situation is for Kodak in films and silver halide papers.
Maybe Fuji has a better handle on how to make digital profitable than Kodak does, and I wish Fuji great luck in this new industry. Kodak on the other hand is spreading it's eggs into a few new baskets.
It's not as though they're exclusively committed to the film business, you know.
They are not committed, however the vast majority of Kodak's money comes from sales of film and film consumerables. As I've said in my previous post, Kodak is a consumerables company and is not geared up to survive selling products that don't require frequent visits to the store.
Eastman Kodak Doesn't Want to Make Digital Cameras
on
RIAA vs The Economy
·
· Score: 1
I work for Kodak and I can say with some authority that Kodak is not very interested in the digital camera market. Kodak had always been, and would always like to be a consumerables company. Sales of cameras for Kodak always has meant moolah on the film and development-chemicals fronts, this is where the vast majority of Kodak's profits come from.
Since digital cameras have started eating into sales Kodak has spent a fortune on research and is anxiously trying to enter new imaging markets, for instance OLED technology is starting to look very promising.
That episode obiously had it spot on, but did it take into account the 50% risk that Ireland would win it whatever the competition and the numerous political votes that prevent ant real talent winning anyway (actually it's public voting nowadays isn't it).
The only problem with your post is I don't recognise the program..
Example: PLoS Code: <ABBR title="Public Library of Science">PLoS</ABBR>
Hovering over PLoS above should show the acronym's expansion (update: actually slashcode doesn't even allow ABBR tags! so the above doesn't work). However it is obvious why people don't use the ABBR tag; acronyms are there because they save people time so why on earth waste even more time by writing the acronym, it's expanded form and some miscelaneous markup!
I'd like to see Slashdot automatically add ABBR tags for known acronyms like OSS, KDE, CSS etc. Maybe I should submit the concept? I'm already instigating a system to do this for my personal web journal..
If you can recall the scare-paper featured on slashdot the other week which discussed why nanoparticles were potentially dangerous to people's health.
It suggested that nanotubes could act like asbestos if inhaled. That was one of the few points in the paper that I thought was credible. They are immensely sharp, pointy, often branched and light enough to be carried by air.
It might be dangerous in the future to dispose of your computer!
The parent is correct, it certainly is not the first time that light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity!
I refer you to the parent's link and Cambrige Display Technology. Both are well on the way in the development of applications for simple polymer molecules that emit light when a current is passed.
I know that the simplest LEP Cambridge Display Technologies discovered (PPV) is of a similar scale (if not even smaller in diameter) to nanotubes, however I can't compare efficiencies, nor do I know much about optoelectronics so I couldn't say how a wavelength of 1.5 microns (the emission quoted in the article) compares to those of LEPs (visible light so between 400 and 700 nanometers).
My point is that I dispute the article's claim that it is the first time that molecules have produced light when an electrical potential is placed across them. Perhaps IBM think that nanotube light emission is more suited to optoelectronics than OLEDS/LEPs.
If you want to learn more about LEPs I did a project on them as part of my Chemistry degree, it's hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry here and a slightly more up-to-date but not as pretty version is hosted here
Ultima7 was a game I played and played. It was so unbelievably huge and you seemed to be able to do anything you wanted. And then Windows95 came along and I could no longer play unless I rebooted into DOS mode. And then the sound didn't work, which was a shame considering how often I had to reboot Win95;-)
I was overjoyed to find that you can play Ultima 7 parts I and II with the open source Exult Engine. If you have the data files then you can (with effort) load them up and play. Exult gives a faithful rendition of the old games (although currently you can get away with more stealing and the animals talk to you). Also you can play windowed and increase the resolution (320x200 was fairly restrictive, even at the time!)
Heartily recommended to people who know the game and people who don't.
Yeah, I remember pulling Wolfenstein 3D out of the cupboard having spent one too many weekends playing Doom2. Wolf3D was so much scarier! Most of the enemies could kill you in seconds, even the lowliest trooper with the pistol could kill you with one shot if you were close enough.
Also the maps were designed to scare the pants of you, close, claustrophobic corridors, and every so often (but not too often so you expected it!) you'd turn the corner and a machine gunner would suddenly fill the screen and shout "spien!" so loudly that you'd fall backwards out of your chair with your heart ringing out like a hammer in your head.
I loved it and hated it. I would go to bed jittery and have nightmares till morning. Terrific game!
No, there's no dselect. I didn't realise dselect was so good, in fact I don't really know what it is - package selection tool isn't it? I do have a debian box, I'll have to go check dselect out. I've never used it before.
I use APT with SuSE and have found it to be excellent (although I can't compare it with other rpm distros that have apt-repositories).
I haven't used YaST to update since I installed APT4RPM, I get newer versions of important packages like Mozilla and KDE, I can update via a cron job and I dist-upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 solely with APT, I also plan to upgrade from 8.1 to 8.2 this weekend or the next.
I've experienced very few problems using APT, although I imagine Debian's packaging works better with APT since.debs are packaged with APT in mind and SuSE doesn't officially support APT.
The documentation for SuSE APT4RPM is outstanding and thorough and the mailing-lists are helpful and informative.
If you use SuSE you should really be using APT as well.
I'm not on the project or anything, just a satisfied user!
Slashdot Mirror
Forgive my misspelling of electrocuted. I have spanked myself repeatedly for the crime. It will not happen again.
Yep, it's V=IR The current (I) is dependent on the resistance (R) and the voltage (V). If your body has a healthy resistance (which it does to my knowledge) then you will not get electricuted unless you pump up the voltage.
I read in another comment that 50mA will kill you thus: V = IR
120 = 0.05R
R = 2400 Ohms
According to this site: Under dry conditions, the resistance offered by the human body may be as high as 100,000 Ohms
So you should be ok most of the time. Us in Europe with our 240V AC supplies have to offer more resistance, 4800 Ohms, although since in Britain we have earthing on all powered devices, elecution is far less likely.
People who get eletricuted must have less than 2400 Ohms resistance then - presumably - unless I've missed out some important theory..
Not irony, just stupidity.
Still Dyson Sphere's weren't quite what I proposed, but I could have clicked the guy's links, you're right. Silly me! Anyway, it's certainly not an orginal idea, these sun catching thingies are littered throughout sci-fi, I never claimed it was my idea or anything.
It was just something I'd been thinking about of late.
I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium
You assume that fusion is the only way. Personally, I see the world moving beyond fusion power fairly quickly. By far the best source of energy for our needs is the sun. Now I'm not talking about everyone having a solar panel on their roof, I'm talking massive scale harvesting of all the energy that usually is "wasted" going off to light nowhere. Say you harvest 500 square kilometers of sun that usually would only serve to show alpha centauri that out sun exists. This is an extremely unpolluting and excellent source of energy.
The problems are three fold: getting the energy back to the earth, capturing enough energy for the whole planet and dissapating all that extra energy once it's used (lots of extra heat = nasty). I figure these will all be easy to solve over the next century.
I'd be pleased to see my ideas come into being, but you must understand that in order to protect my intellectual property, I have a patent pending on the use of the sun (or any star) to facilitate life or living.
Many thanks,
Darl McBride
reverse the polarity, it always works in Star Trek
My God! It's so true! The solution to everything is a tacheon beam, or some hybrid neutrino ray, which doesn't work at first, (like you gotta wonder what neutrino's would do), but then Geordi suggests reversing the polarity, and low and behold it does the trick!
Don't try it in real life, like say reversing the polarity of the electricity for your laptop. It'll either do nothing at all or result in everything going up in smoke.. hang on a minute, maybe they're on to something!
This patent sounds like a strategic business move though and something that nobody else is doing...
How does that justify patetnting it though? Patents should only be granted to encourage innovation, a patent like this only creates a monopoly for one company, and actively prevents any other companies innovating in the field. The only reason Microsoft have secured this patent is so they can attempt to gain more market share in the competitive IM market.
Patents were not created to allow companies the chance for monopoly, they were created to encourage companies to take risks and invest large amounts of money in potentially profitable products and thus progress society. They are an incentive for corporations to improve out lives and our world.
All I see here is more abuse of the patent system by a greedy corporation, proposing a fairly obvious invention which cost them little to research
You can argue that they got to the patent office first and thus deserve to have it granted, but I'd argue that granting the patent has simply stagnated an interesting area of instant messaging software for some years to come. Software doesn't need patents, the products should compete on other factors like usability, interface and integration. If you can't compete without patenting, then maybe your company shouldn't thrive at all?
Anyway, as for prior art, Kopete already does this (IIRC).
Although I disagree with the "disaster after disaster" sentiment -- most of NASA's missions are officially succesful, to my knowledge -- I agree that the money should be spend elsewhere.
Currently space travel/exploration/science costs a tremendous amount of money, but gives little back (although I do agree weather prediction has probably been incredibly important for 20th century progress). My general feeling is that it's a waste of money, there are better things in which to invest. And yes this includes homeless shelters, saving the environment and promoting healthy eating.
It could also mean spending more money on reducing the cost of space travel. Why don't they cancel all programs (or most of them, whatever) for the next few years and invest heavily in research for new, cheaper methods of getting up there. Surely this would be a better use for the money?
When it's cheaper to get into space we'll be able to gain serious benefits from space travel. Things like mining asteroids, teraforming mars and diverting on-coming asteroids. Most of the programs that I hear about are either very bad value for money (even if they are of useful scientific grounding) or stupid, like raising ant farms on a space station.
There is far more potential up there than we take advantage of currently and we're stuck until the the money is spent more wisely. What do people think?
It would still be a sensible way to move forward since we would be localising our pollution production - it must be easier to reduce the polluting capabilities of a few power stations than 60 million cars. Also fuel cells will only get into transport in the future. Hopefully by then we'll be generating a greater percentage of our electricity in a green fashion.
I would have said removing it and making it so the dialog automatically updates itself when the directory's contents changes is what is needed.
KDE does this.
How would anyone prove that the "bug" is a bug and not just normal "reality"-type phenomenon?
Citing your own example, a blackhole == a null pointer, all current scientists think a black hole is a huge gravity well, they don't think its a bug in a matrix-like simulation we're all a part of. If someone published such a theory they'd be laughed at and branded a hippy. Everyone hangs on to reality quite firmly.
Like most people I'm a little fed up reading these stereotypical rants about Linux. Like come on! We know the packaging and ease of use issues already and I'm confident that next-generation distributions will be well on the way to solving these issues.
Anyway doesn't this guy use urpmi? That would solve his dependency issues at least. I'd love to see some of his all in one packages too. I'd expect some elements of KDE to be hundreds of megabytes in size when you include every dependency!
The bit that gets me though is the comment "at it's heart, Windows XP is a great OS", I agree that Windows XP is a pleasant OS to use for day-to-day issues, and with it common tasks are easy. However I firmly believe it is not a great OS at heart. All my years of (albeit hobbyist) experience with Windows have forced the opinion on me that at its heart Windows is a poorly designed hacked-together OS. Unix on the other hand had a much longer design process and I feel it has benefited tremendously from this.
And thus my heart will forever more be with *nix.
Otherwise, yeah, it's YALR (yet another Linux review).
Still make 'em, well as far as I know, I just work in research. Just the other day my mate got some jpegs developed with silver halide tech using a mini lab upstairs. I'm not sure if we're selling these things yet but at the very least the development is at the finishing stages. Big machines they are too. Pictrography donar-reciever?
Oh come on now! You know we sell papers, plenty of different sorts at different gloss levels and drytimes. We also sell plenty of digital processing machines to produce silver halide or inkjet prints from digital camera images (I take it this is what the autochrome machines are). We also know that people produce far less hard copies when they can pick and choose images to print. Even when you take into account that people tend to get larger (and thus more expense) hard-copies it still is no-where near as profitable as the current situation is for Kodak in films and silver halide papers.
Maybe Fuji has a better handle on how to make digital profitable than Kodak does, and I wish Fuji great luck in this new industry. Kodak on the other hand is spreading it's eggs into a few new baskets.
They are not committed, however the vast majority of Kodak's money comes from sales of film and film consumerables. As I've said in my previous post, Kodak is a consumerables company and is not geared up to survive selling products that don't require frequent visits to the store.
I work for Kodak and I can say with some authority that Kodak is not very interested in the digital camera market. Kodak had always been, and would always like to be a consumerables company. Sales of cameras for Kodak always has meant moolah on the film and development-chemicals fronts, this is where the vast majority of Kodak's profits come from.
Since digital cameras have started eating into sales Kodak has spent a fortune on research and is anxiously trying to enter new imaging markets, for instance OLED technology is starting to look very promising.
heh :) If I had mod points, they'd be yours :)
That episode obiously had it spot on, but did it take into account the 50% risk that Ireland would win it whatever the competition and the numerous political votes that prevent ant real talent winning anyway (actually it's public voting nowadays isn't it).
The only problem with your post is I don't recognise the program..
It's so true! UK plugs and the NHS are the two reasons why I'm having trouble persuading myself to emigrate to Canada.
UK plugs are the best in the world:
I think if I ever emigrated I'd get top quality health insurance and change all the plug sockets in my house to British ones :-)
The nation's culinary skills on the otherhand are far from fabulous.. (which is probably why the supermarkets sell so much Italian food nowadays)
People should use the ABBR tag like so:
Example: PLoS
Code: <ABBR title="Public Library of Science">PLoS</ABBR>
Hovering over PLoS above should show the acronym's expansion (update: actually slashcode doesn't even allow ABBR tags! so the above doesn't work). However it is obvious why people don't use the ABBR tag; acronyms are there because they save people time so why on earth waste even more time by writing the acronym, it's expanded form and some miscelaneous markup!
I'd like to see Slashdot automatically add ABBR tags for known acronyms like OSS, KDE, CSS etc. Maybe I should submit the concept? I'm already instigating a system to do this for my personal web journal..
I don't supose you saw a sample of pure fullerenes did you? I can only imagine what interesting properties such a material would have.
Would it be an extremely fine powder? Would the individual balls bounce? Would it be a lubricant? Any ideas?
If you can recall the scare-paper featured on slashdot the other week which discussed why nanoparticles were potentially dangerous to people's health.
It suggested that nanotubes could act like asbestos if inhaled. That was one of the few points in the paper that I thought was credible. They are immensely sharp, pointy, often branched and light enough to be carried by air.
It might be dangerous in the future to dispose of your computer!
The parent is correct, it certainly is not the first time that light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity!
I refer you to the parent's link and Cambrige Display Technology. Both are well on the way in the development of applications for simple polymer molecules that emit light when a current is passed.
I know that the simplest LEP Cambridge Display Technologies discovered (PPV) is of a similar scale (if not even smaller in diameter) to nanotubes, however I can't compare efficiencies, nor do I know much about optoelectronics so I couldn't say how a wavelength of 1.5 microns (the emission quoted in the article) compares to those of LEPs (visible light so between 400 and 700 nanometers).
My point is that I dispute the article's claim that it is the first time that molecules have produced light when an electrical potential is placed across them. Perhaps IBM think that nanotube light emission is more suited to optoelectronics than OLEDS/LEPs.
If you want to learn more about LEPs I did a project on them as part of my Chemistry degree, it's hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry here and a slightly more up-to-date but not as pretty version is hosted here
Ultima7 was a game I played and played. It was so unbelievably huge and you seemed to be able to do anything you wanted. And then Windows95 came along and I could no longer play unless I rebooted into DOS mode. And then the sound didn't work, which was a shame considering how often I had to reboot Win95 ;-)
I was overjoyed to find that you can play Ultima 7 parts I and II with the open source Exult Engine. If you have the data files then you can (with effort) load them up and play. Exult gives a faithful rendition of the old games (although currently you can get away with more stealing and the animals talk to you). Also you can play windowed and increase the resolution (320x200 was fairly restrictive, even at the time!)
Heartily recommended to people who know the game and people who don't.
Screenshot1 | Screenshot2
Yeah, I remember pulling Wolfenstein 3D out of the cupboard having spent one too many weekends playing Doom2. Wolf3D was so much scarier! Most of the enemies could kill you in seconds, even the lowliest trooper with the pistol could kill you with one shot if you were close enough.
Also the maps were designed to scare the pants of you, close, claustrophobic corridors, and every so often (but not too often so you expected it!) you'd turn the corner and a machine gunner would suddenly fill the screen and shout "spien!" so loudly that you'd fall backwards out of your chair with your heart ringing out like a hammer in your head.
I loved it and hated it. I would go to bed jittery and have nightmares till morning. Terrific game!
No, there's no dselect. I didn't realise dselect was so good, in fact I don't really know what it is - package selection tool isn't it? I do have a debian box, I'll have to go check dselect out. I've never used it before.
I use APT with SuSE and have found it to be excellent (although I can't compare it with other rpm distros that have apt-repositories).
I haven't used YaST to update since I installed APT4RPM, I get newer versions of important packages like Mozilla and KDE, I can update via a cron job and I dist-upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 solely with APT, I also plan to upgrade from 8.1 to 8.2 this weekend or the next.
I've experienced very few problems using APT, although I imagine Debian's packaging works better with APT since .debs are packaged with APT in mind and SuSE doesn't officially support APT.
The documentation for SuSE APT4RPM is outstanding and thorough and the mailing-lists are helpful and informative.
If you use SuSE you should really be using APT as well.
I'm not on the project or anything, just a satisfied user!