To go 500 miles you need to store as much energy as there is in 10 gallons of gasoline.
Not true. You're forgetting that electric vehicles are substantially more efficient, even after motor/controller/charging losses. The Prius isn't an accurate benchmark, because no matter what the environmentalists say, it's still an internal combustion engine powered vehicle that wastes more than 3/4 of its gas on producing heat, not propulsion.
Somewhere in the bug system is a YEARS OLD ticket, begging the tree maintainers to add one of the (otherwise very popular) alternatives to the horrendously bad etc-update tool. Numerous times people had "bumped" the ticket by replying to it, and asking what the hold-up was.
Maintainers replied with "we're BUSY", and the response was "FOR A WHOLE YEAR!?". Then the excuse changed to "we don't want to confuse the users" (emphasis added.) Apparently, gentoo users are considered too stupid or simple-minded to handle multiple choices for getting the job done. Yet gentoo has both kde and gnome, both vi and emacs.
Anyway, on a different note...from one of the emails in the article:
I'm just sick of new
"projects" spawning off without being thought out in the least, and
making us all look like jackasses. Is it honestly going to be the new
"tradition" that every single new project that starts out is going to be
completely undiscussed, poorly thought-out, poorly implemented, and
cause us all to look like a bunch of fools for weeks on end before it
*finally* gets into a half-way workable state? What ever happened to
*talking* about something before going off and announcing it to the
world as if it's some kind of completed project and ready for public
consumption?
Is this guy new or something? I remember back in 1999 or so, there were about FIFTY different mp3 players in freshmeat that all did nearly the same thing. Everyone wants their own sandbox to play in. I joke that now it's web browsers; seems to be a tutti-frutti flavor popping out every month.
Partly to thank the community, and partly as a way of getting the device into the hands of highly critical users early on, Neuros will offer an initial "beta" production run exclusively to hackers
Bzzzt, I'll take "corporate PR lines" for $500, Alex.
This is to:
"get the devices to highly technical users who will find all the bugs Neuros didn't before it gets shipped to the grandmas and grandpas of the world" Meanwhile, they get a lot of leeway for simply slapping a "beta" label on it.
get them around any brand-wide or device distribution agreements to garner them a bunch of direct sales (which are worth their weight in gold, since you're not paying a distributor- yes, even if you discount the "beta" version under the retail by a fair bit. Distributors take a BIG cut.)
get the bloggers posting (more like bragging) about how they got a device, how cool it is, etc. This gets everyone else reading the blogs whipped into a frenzy so that when they DO go on sale, everyone ignores the magazines if the thing isn't ACTUALLY the best device since the bread slicer. Apple's strategy (namely, a complete lockdown on ANY product details before it goes on sale) is similar; whip people into a pre-ordering frenzy and ship ship ship before anyone has so much as touched it.
This is a calculated PR move first and foremost; anything a corporation does is motivated almost exclusively in self-interest (more appropriately, the interests of the shareholders.) Anything about "thanking the community" is a secondary (or lower) concern. If they wanted to thank the community, they'd fold back bug fixes, feature additions, and technical innovation into the open-source software they are (no doubt) using.
Greg Garcia, a lobbyist for the high-tech industry, has been appointed to fill the new assistant secretary post for cyber security and telecommunications at the Department of Homeland Security. Garcia, a VP with the Information Technology Association of America, will try to resuscitate DHS's flagging efforts to formulate a response plan should the nation's key digital assets come under concerted attack or crumble due to some catastrophic failure.
Dude. Just put a level 10 firewall around the Gibson, keep a file on all Vanilla Ice wannabees, and have a watchlist for Powerbook Duo owners.
But how much oil did it take to make the solar cells?
Certainly no more than some percentage of its wholesale cost (cost of manufacturing includes cost of materials, energy, labor, and lots of other things like marketing, licensing fees, etc.) Panels usually pay back their RETAIL cost in a few years (depends on the area you are in, if you use a tracking mount which grossly increases their daily output, etc.) There's a substanial net gain, since they easily last another decade past their break-even point.
People whine about solar panel efficiency, but guess what? The largest power plants around are at most 30-35% thermally efficient, and that's before you figure plant-to-home transmission losses.
Wikipedia has a nice article, complete with charts, showing cost per kWhr and such.
IBM has oodles of fab capacity. Don't forget Apple has dropped off the queue.
Apple was one of IBM's smallest consumers of PowerPC chips, and always was. The embedded and entertainment market dominates their "queue", and is one of the main reasons the PowerPC series never pushed as hard clock-wise as Intel does; the embedded market sees higher clock speeds as greater power consumption/heat dissipation and more (electronic and thermal) design challenges. When Apple took a hike, IBM didn't shed any tears, and said as much.
I don't have any specific numbers, but I believe Apple's purchases were under 5% of total production. You may say "well, going with Intel was a REALLY stupid idea!" Wrong- before, Apple was "the little fish using embedded-market processors for consumer computers", and the goals didn't match. Now, they're using chips specifically targeted to the markets Apple wants to be in.
working in vain to outmaneuver not just the terrorists, but the surging global market for technological innovation in which those terrorists thrive.
Terrorists (or guerilla/civil war soldiers, or the new PC "no, Iraq isn't in civil war" term: "insurgents") don't thrive in a "surging global market for technological innovation"; they thrive when something polarizes/motivates people enough to dedicate their lives to killing other people or support those who will. Like a world superpower engaging in preemptive foreign policy. Just think back to how the US itself formed; we got tired of England telling us what to do and taxing us.
We wouldn't have to spend a dime on "fighting terrorism" if we simply minded our own damn business.
Yesterday, the Big Sloshed Cheese gave a speech about how we're at war, we didn't choose this war (bullshit, we started it all) and it's either or us or THEM. Don't believe the polarizing kool-aide, people.
Usually I'm complaining that I get modded troll for posting anti-space-exploration stories and such, but I don't even know how to begin complaining about this moderation! Oh wait...
Just at first glance, I wouldn't think that using electronic devices in the gas lines would be a very good idea.
It's a perfectly fine idea, given that there is no air to support ignition. Basic middle-school chemistry, people...
This is also why the Hindenburg didn't "explode"; if there had been oxygen inside the envelope as well as hydrogen, we wouldn't have dramatic footage because the camera, cameraman, and everyone else within at least a quarter mile wouldn't have survived the thermobaric explosion. The Hindenburg burned because it was painted with chemicals that somewhat approximate solid rocket propellant (for example, aluminum oxide was one component, which is also in thermite) and -burned-.
Good luck and Godspeed to the crew on their current mission. Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science.
Easy, chief. Don't hurt your flag-waving hand too much.
Then, of course, there's the argument that if we don't get off this rock and colonize other (planets, moons), some day those problems you just mentioned will seem trivial compared to the immenent extinction of the human race. Just sayin'.
Here are some questions for you:
There are currently 5.8 billion people on the planet. I hope you have a lot of rocket ships, because even a hundredth of a percent of that number is half a million people.
The earth has air, food, and water. Where do you think those three things will come from for other planets?
How many decades do you think it'll be before we have colony on the Moon or Mars? How long until we have air, food, or water on those planets? This isn't Star Trek, sonny, and we don't have magical terraforming rockets that convert planets in a matter of years.
Perhaps we should focus on correcting environmental problems present, instead of pie in the sky escapism.
When someone asks me why we have to spend so much money on space exploration, I should have them watch a launch with my daughters. It's all about the thrill of exploration, the daring of it, the wonder of fellow humans climbing up off this planet and touching the stars.
Um...not to be cynical, and Slashdotters hate being reminded of these things, but your daughters are in awe because they don't know that:
It costs $16BN a year to keep NASA running of which $3BN is political pork, and a fair bit goes towards research which is primarily for the purposes of weapons and has nothing to do with the "quest for knowledge".
The ISS, which this mission supports, is falling apart after just a few years in space. It was supposed to last JUST 10 years after final assembly, and it hasn't even been fully assembled. Failures have ranged from oxygen generators to basic handtools to attitude correction gyros. The price tag was $100BN; that money largely went to our nation's (and other nation's) defense contractors, which build the majority of the hardware NASA uses.
One in five of their classmates go hungry at home or at school because their parents can't afford to give them enough food, and the government currently spends slightly more than NASA's budget to feed 7 million children a year a decent lunch. Let's not even get started about basic supply and book shortages. We're supposedly the most powerful nation in the world, but we can't but enough [food in the stomachs / textbooks in the hands] of our children so that they can recieve a sufficient education to support themselves later in life, instead of ending up working at Walmart for minimum wage.
Personally, I don't find any thrill in NASA's "exploration", which seems to consist mostly of "let's see what _______ does in space" and the nation's military and scientific elite (yes, military- many of the people you see up there are military officers) playing. There is no "daring" (save the small chance their shuttle will be destroyed) and they're not touching any stars.
No, not really. That application just shows a graph; this system collects and correlates data from many systems.
Once caveat: you can never touch the mac.
Again, no, not really. The system described (not Seismac) correlates data from many systems, and an earthquake will affect many systems. Your typing, jumping up and down, or even a big truck rumbling by, will not. Nevermind that earthquakes have a very charachteristic vibration, so individual nodes are unlikely to be fooled easily in the first place. The supernodes would look for correlation.
To really dumb it down: if an earthquake happens, PCs will see the same/similar vibration in an expanding circle pattern. Similar systems are used with microphones in some cities for gunshot detection- many of them can, with just a few 'listening stations', pinpoint gunfire to within a dozen feet.
Is he required to change his name to Mozilla Snyder now?
Well, his original name was Sam Snyder. They tried to change it to Mozilla Snyder, but the name was in use and the legal department made them go with something else, so they picked Windows Snyder instead.
Then the legal department had a case of deja vu...
Aaaaannyyywaaaay, it has the same issues DarWINE does; namely, it INSISTS on using my built-in screen as the primary monitor ie where new application windows appear (which is not how the system is set up- the external monitor is primary. XP respects this, why can't WINE?). So, running an application that puts up windows on a regular basis is a constant exercise in frustration as they CONTINUOUSLY appear on the WRONG monitor.
I tried using VirtualDub, and was never able to get the necessary components installed; sure, it supports application installers- but codecs and such are a big "go fish", and it doesn't recognize INF files, which is how some codecs and such are supplied. There were also severe graphics redraw problems. To top it off, Codeweavers now thinks any windows program disk in the drive is its job to try to install; apparently it hooked into OS X in some fashion, which will be hilarious to try and undo...
Recommendation: go with DarWINE for now, until CrossOver is cheaper or presents a more compelling reason to actually pay for such a beast, because it is barely 'beta' quality. Your other three choices are Qemu (slow), Parallels (mostly good), or Boot Camp and real XP (I can hear the "I won't soil my Macbook" comments now...get a grip, people...it works the best.) I use a combination of Parallels (for stuff that doesn't require performance/3D; yes, Parallels is supposedly working on "fully accelerated" 3D, but I'll believe it when I see it) and Boot Camp / XP (for gaming.)
Have the voters fill out a scantron-type ballot. And then have the voter/user feed that ballot through two different voting machines made by two different manufacturers.
Small counties and towns (where a few thousands dollars is a major expense) are already grumbling about electronic voting. Now you want to double the cost?
Second, didn't you use scantron forms in high school? In my school, we had to spend half an hour having the teacher read back the correct multiple-choice answers, and usually a half dozen of them would be scored incorrectly. That was roughly a 1-in-5 error rate.
Lack of leaders is not the same thing as a lack of rules, and I expect that the real problem with the Debian project is that they haven't yet gotten to the point of fully defining rules that enable decent and useful conversations while discouraging the less productive kinds of conversations.
The sad bit is that you usually need a leader to help make rules; when it comes down to it, the top couple of people most interested/involved/popular/whatever set some basic rules. Too many cooks etc. Add in egotistical or socially clueless people...and the number of practical cooks drops. Radically.
The really sad bit is that "just enough" of the people left out will devote endless amounts of time to arguing about said rules. BTDT in many clubs, for example. The best approach is to write the first draft of rules to be simple, un-evil, and able to be modified in the future, but not too easily.
"NASA told the contractors to build a capsule that looks just like Apollo"
If you've watched the movie Stranded- you'd recognize the Orion. Perhaps the design idea has been kicking around NASA and the producers knew abot it, but...well...they're identical in proportions and appearance.
Of course, I haven't actually seen the schematics for any (much less all) of the DoCoMo phones so I could theoretically be being fooled, but given the nearly paranoid attitude among Japanese these days over personal information, I doubt DoCoMo would take that risk.
I think greed has more to do with it than anything else; by destroying the phone instead of reselling/recycling/donating it, they protect the market for new phones. If people sold their phones instead of tossing them or letting them be destroyed, then people whose phones died and just simply needed a -working- phone, would be able to get one used instead of having to buy a new one.
Right now, SIM/provider locks are used to help artificially inflate the 'cost' of phones, and get extra money for providers on the contract side, too. I have an old "legacy" AT&T account that costs me $25/month. My phone is on the fritz, and when I asked about getting a new one from "Cingular", Cingular told me that I'd have to get a different plan. Surprise surprise- the "same" plan from Cingular is well over $30, which means that they're getting an extra $120 a year from me.
In the case of the article- they're talking about Smartphones with flash-memory devices, where you need to zero out the memory device to assure no data can be recovered, just like you have to zero a hard drive. "Normal" phones don't have any of these issues- and the article neglects to mention this clearly.
So, just pop the memory card out, pop it into a reader, and run a full format of the card, or just copy a file nearly the same size as the card to it. Done. Nothing to see here, move along, "security research" company scaring people needlessly.
PS: Your phone contains MANY toxic chemicals that DO NOT belong in a landfill. They MUST be properly recycled or donated. If you're too lazy to have it properly recycled or sell it on ebay, please donate it and its charger to a local domestic abuse shelter, as any cell phone by law must be able to dial 911.
Does the above estimate of energy savings take into consideration the energy and raw materials required to produce 110 million CFL bulbs?
Yes, considering the scale of power savings here. Over just one week of 4 hour-per-day operation, there is a 2kWHr difference between a 30W CFL and the 100W bulb it replaces, and I haven't even addressed cooling costs.
If you want further proof, look at just purchase costs. CFLs last several times longer, but cost more- yet they still last long enough that the consumer comes out ahead on replacement costs over the lifetime of the bulb.
The only problem I have yet to see addressed is that most CFLs don't work well in already-installed overhead recessed lighting; they don't like the higher temperatures, and the electronics bite the big one faster. Most people also like dimmable lights, and dimmable CFLs are much more expensive and harder to find.
Obviously, this is the kind of product that companies and perhaps even data centers will possibly take a very long and desiring look at.
Uh...I'm not so sure. It can't be expanded (and only 4 slots is pretty cheesy), 750GB drives are commanding an insane price premium (300GB drives are under $100, and 750GB drives are about twice as expensive per GB at $400), and fewer drives = slower...why one would "look long and desiring" at this is beyond me when you can get 2+3U solutions with equal density, but far superior overall capacity (y'know...6-12 slots?) letting you use cheaper disks.
I like Jason Scott's rant about Wikipedia over at ASCII [textfiles.com].
Jason Scott is an arrogant, self-impressed idiot who thinks he's god's gift to techies because he remembers "the golden days" of BBS's. I met him at my first (and last) slashdot "meetup"; he dominated the conversation amongst a table of eight, spending hours talking about his favorite subject: himself.
Slashdot Mirror
To go 500 miles you need to store as much energy as there is in 10 gallons of gasoline.
Not true. You're forgetting that electric vehicles are substantially more efficient, even after motor/controller/charging losses. The Prius isn't an accurate benchmark, because no matter what the environmentalists say, it's still an internal combustion engine powered vehicle that wastes more than 3/4 of its gas on producing heat, not propulsion.
Somewhere in the bug system is a YEARS OLD ticket, begging the tree maintainers to add one of the (otherwise very popular) alternatives to the horrendously bad etc-update tool. Numerous times people had "bumped" the ticket by replying to it, and asking what the hold-up was.
Maintainers replied with "we're BUSY", and the response was "FOR A WHOLE YEAR!?". Then the excuse changed to "we don't want to confuse the users" (emphasis added.) Apparently, gentoo users are considered too stupid or simple-minded to handle multiple choices for getting the job done. Yet gentoo has both kde and gnome, both vi and emacs.
Anyway, on a different note...from one of the emails in the article:
I'm just sick of new "projects" spawning off without being thought out in the least, and making us all look like jackasses. Is it honestly going to be the new "tradition" that every single new project that starts out is going to be completely undiscussed, poorly thought-out, poorly implemented, and cause us all to look like a bunch of fools for weeks on end before it *finally* gets into a half-way workable state? What ever happened to *talking* about something before going off and announcing it to the world as if it's some kind of completed project and ready for public consumption?
Is this guy new or something? I remember back in 1999 or so, there were about FIFTY different mp3 players in freshmeat that all did nearly the same thing. Everyone wants their own sandbox to play in. I joke that now it's web browsers; seems to be a tutti-frutti flavor popping out every month.
Partly to thank the community, and partly as a way of getting the device into the hands of highly critical users early on, Neuros will offer an initial "beta" production run exclusively to hackers
Bzzzt, I'll take "corporate PR lines" for $500, Alex.
This is to:
This is a calculated PR move first and foremost; anything a corporation does is motivated almost exclusively in self-interest (more appropriately, the interests of the shareholders.) Anything about "thanking the community" is a secondary (or lower) concern. If they wanted to thank the community, they'd fold back bug fixes, feature additions, and technical innovation into the open-source software they are (no doubt) using.
Dude. Just put a level 10 firewall around the Gibson, keep a file on all Vanilla Ice wannabees, and have a watchlist for Powerbook Duo owners.
But how much oil did it take to make the solar cells?
Certainly no more than some percentage of its wholesale cost (cost of manufacturing includes cost of materials, energy, labor, and lots of other things like marketing, licensing fees, etc.) Panels usually pay back their RETAIL cost in a few years (depends on the area you are in, if you use a tracking mount which grossly increases their daily output, etc.) There's a substanial net gain, since they easily last another decade past their break-even point.
People whine about solar panel efficiency, but guess what? The largest power plants around are at most 30-35% thermally efficient, and that's before you figure plant-to-home transmission losses.
Wikipedia has a nice article, complete with charts, showing cost per kWhr and such.
IBM has oodles of fab capacity. Don't forget Apple has dropped off the queue.
Apple was one of IBM's smallest consumers of PowerPC chips, and always was. The embedded and entertainment market dominates their "queue", and is one of the main reasons the PowerPC series never pushed as hard clock-wise as Intel does; the embedded market sees higher clock speeds as greater power consumption/heat dissipation and more (electronic and thermal) design challenges. When Apple took a hike, IBM didn't shed any tears, and said as much.
I don't have any specific numbers, but I believe Apple's purchases were under 5% of total production. You may say "well, going with Intel was a REALLY stupid idea!" Wrong- before, Apple was "the little fish using embedded-market processors for consumer computers", and the goals didn't match. Now, they're using chips specifically targeted to the markets Apple wants to be in.
working in vain to outmaneuver not just the terrorists, but the surging global market for technological innovation in which those terrorists thrive.
Terrorists (or guerilla/civil war soldiers, or the new PC "no, Iraq isn't in civil war" term: "insurgents") don't thrive in a "surging global market for technological innovation"; they thrive when something polarizes/motivates people enough to dedicate their lives to killing other people or support those who will. Like a world superpower engaging in preemptive foreign policy. Just think back to how the US itself formed; we got tired of England telling us what to do and taxing us.
We wouldn't have to spend a dime on "fighting terrorism" if we simply minded our own damn business.
Yesterday, the Big Sloshed Cheese gave a speech about how we're at war, we didn't choose this war (bullshit, we started it all) and it's either or us or THEM. Don't believe the polarizing kool-aide, people.
Usually I'm complaining that I get modded troll for posting anti-space-exploration stories and such, but I don't even know how to begin complaining about this moderation! Oh wait...
It's a perfectly fine idea, given that there is no air to support ignition. Basic middle-school chemistry, people...
This is also why the Hindenburg didn't "explode"; if there had been oxygen inside the envelope as well as hydrogen, we wouldn't have dramatic footage because the camera, cameraman, and everyone else within at least a quarter mile wouldn't have survived the thermobaric explosion. The Hindenburg burned because it was painted with chemicals that somewhat approximate solid rocket propellant (for example, aluminum oxide was one component, which is also in thermite) and -burned-.
"We're intrigued by the technology, but we never got that far in our discussions," says a gas company spokeswoman.
"...because everyone kept making jokes about explosive growth at the meetings", she said with a sigh.
Good luck and Godspeed to the crew on their current mission. Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science.
Easy, chief. Don't hurt your flag-waving hand too much.
Here are some questions for you:
Perhaps we should focus on correcting environmental problems present, instead of pie in the sky escapism.
Am I the only one who just doesn't care? Here I go, for yet another round of 'Troll' moderation points for expressing an opinion against human space exploration.
When someone asks me why we have to spend so much money on space exploration, I should have them watch a launch with my daughters. It's all about the thrill of exploration, the daring of it, the wonder of fellow humans climbing up off this planet and touching the stars.
Um...not to be cynical, and Slashdotters hate being reminded of these things, but your daughters are in awe because they don't know that:
Personally, I don't find any thrill in NASA's "exploration", which seems to consist mostly of "let's see what _______ does in space" and the nation's military and scientific elite (yes, military- many of the people you see up there are military officers) playing. There is no "daring" (save the small chance their shuttle will be destroyed) and they're not touching any stars.
Does a similar thing.
No, not really. That application just shows a graph; this system collects and correlates data from many systems.
Once caveat: you can never touch the mac.
Again, no, not really. The system described (not Seismac) correlates data from many systems, and an earthquake will affect many systems. Your typing, jumping up and down, or even a big truck rumbling by, will not. Nevermind that earthquakes have a very charachteristic vibration, so individual nodes are unlikely to be fooled easily in the first place. The supernodes would look for correlation.
To really dumb it down: if an earthquake happens, PCs will see the same/similar vibration in an expanding circle pattern. Similar systems are used with microphones in some cities for gunshot detection- many of them can, with just a few 'listening stations', pinpoint gunfire to within a dozen feet.
Is he required to change his name to Mozilla Snyder now?
Well, his original name was Sam Snyder. They tried to change it to Mozilla Snyder, but the name was in use and the legal department made them go with something else, so they picked Windows Snyder instead.
Then the legal department had a case of deja vu...
Aaaaannyyywaaaay, it has the same issues DarWINE does; namely, it INSISTS on using my built-in screen as the primary monitor ie where new application windows appear (which is not how the system is set up- the external monitor is primary. XP respects this, why can't WINE?). So, running an application that puts up windows on a regular basis is a constant exercise in frustration as they CONTINUOUSLY appear on the WRONG monitor.
I tried using VirtualDub, and was never able to get the necessary components installed; sure, it supports application installers- but codecs and such are a big "go fish", and it doesn't recognize INF files, which is how some codecs and such are supplied. There were also severe graphics redraw problems. To top it off, Codeweavers now thinks any windows program disk in the drive is its job to try to install; apparently it hooked into OS X in some fashion, which will be hilarious to try and undo...
Recommendation: go with DarWINE for now, until CrossOver is cheaper or presents a more compelling reason to actually pay for such a beast, because it is barely 'beta' quality. Your other three choices are Qemu (slow), Parallels (mostly good), or Boot Camp and real XP (I can hear the "I won't soil my Macbook" comments now...get a grip, people...it works the best.) I use a combination of Parallels (for stuff that doesn't require performance/3D; yes, Parallels is supposedly working on "fully accelerated" 3D, but I'll believe it when I see it) and Boot Camp / XP (for gaming.)
Small counties and towns (where a few thousands dollars is a major expense) are already grumbling about electronic voting. Now you want to double the cost?
Second, didn't you use scantron forms in high school? In my school, we had to spend half an hour having the teacher read back the correct multiple-choice answers, and usually a half dozen of them would be scored incorrectly. That was roughly a 1-in-5 error rate.
Lack of leaders is not the same thing as a lack of rules, and I expect that the real problem with the Debian project is that they haven't yet gotten to the point of fully defining rules that enable decent and useful conversations while discouraging the less productive kinds of conversations.
The sad bit is that you usually need a leader to help make rules; when it comes down to it, the top couple of people most interested/involved/popular/whatever set some basic rules. Too many cooks etc. Add in egotistical or socially clueless people...and the number of practical cooks drops. Radically.
The really sad bit is that "just enough" of the people left out will devote endless amounts of time to arguing about said rules. BTDT in many clubs, for example. The best approach is to write the first draft of rules to be simple, un-evil, and able to be modified in the future, but not too easily.
Whoa.... if-then-else loops!? Truely, a marvellous new feature from Google that will revolutionise the intertubes
I beg to differ; it's perfect for the blogging crowd.
IF $mood == "angsty" THEN display(AngryKittenGIF), SetBackground(Black)
If you've watched the movie Stranded- you'd recognize the Orion. Perhaps the design idea has been kicking around NASA and the producers knew abot it, but...well...they're identical in proportions and appearance.
Of course, I haven't actually seen the schematics for any (much less all) of the DoCoMo phones so I could theoretically be being fooled, but given the nearly paranoid attitude among Japanese these days over personal information, I doubt DoCoMo would take that risk.
I think greed has more to do with it than anything else; by destroying the phone instead of reselling/recycling/donating it, they protect the market for new phones. If people sold their phones instead of tossing them or letting them be destroyed, then people whose phones died and just simply needed a -working- phone, would be able to get one used instead of having to buy a new one.
Right now, SIM/provider locks are used to help artificially inflate the 'cost' of phones, and get extra money for providers on the contract side, too. I have an old "legacy" AT&T account that costs me $25/month. My phone is on the fritz, and when I asked about getting a new one from "Cingular", Cingular told me that I'd have to get a different plan. Surprise surprise- the "same" plan from Cingular is well over $30, which means that they're getting an extra $120 a year from me.
In the case of the article- they're talking about Smartphones with flash-memory devices, where you need to zero out the memory device to assure no data can be recovered, just like you have to zero a hard drive. "Normal" phones don't have any of these issues- and the article neglects to mention this clearly.
So, just pop the memory card out, pop it into a reader, and run a full format of the card, or just copy a file nearly the same size as the card to it. Done. Nothing to see here, move along, "security research" company scaring people needlessly.
PS: Your phone contains MANY toxic chemicals that DO NOT belong in a landfill. They MUST be properly recycled or donated. If you're too lazy to have it properly recycled or sell it on ebay, please donate it and its charger to a local domestic abuse shelter, as any cell phone by law must be able to dial 911.
Yes, considering the scale of power savings here. Over just one week of 4 hour-per-day operation, there is a 2kWHr difference between a 30W CFL and the 100W bulb it replaces, and I haven't even addressed cooling costs.
If you want further proof, look at just purchase costs. CFLs last several times longer, but cost more- yet they still last long enough that the consumer comes out ahead on replacement costs over the lifetime of the bulb.
The only problem I have yet to see addressed is that most CFLs don't work well in already-installed overhead recessed lighting; they don't like the higher temperatures, and the electronics bite the big one faster. Most people also like dimmable lights, and dimmable CFLs are much more expensive and harder to find.
Uh...I'm not so sure. It can't be expanded (and only 4 slots is pretty cheesy), 750GB drives are commanding an insane price premium (300GB drives are under $100, and 750GB drives are about twice as expensive per GB at $400), and fewer drives = slower...why one would "look long and desiring" at this is beyond me when you can get 2+3U solutions with equal density, but far superior overall capacity (y'know...6-12 slots?) letting you use cheaper disks.
There's also the missing software component...
I like Jason Scott's rant about Wikipedia over at ASCII [textfiles.com].
Jason Scott is an arrogant, self-impressed idiot who thinks he's god's gift to techies because he remembers "the golden days" of BBS's. I met him at my first (and last) slashdot "meetup"; he dominated the conversation amongst a table of eight, spending hours talking about his favorite subject: himself.