. Intel had the 586-driven smart-cards, and I believe 3Com had them as well. They were intended to offload the CPU by putting parts of the stack on the card.
You're probably thinking of the i960-based cards, though Intel's PRO series adapters (not i960 based) do something similar (TCP checksumming is now builtin to the chipset and most OS drivers now know how to take advantage of that). That processor, and variants, were used in everything from network cards to RAID controllers.
They failed because the performance gain and CPU offload numbers were never enough to justify the price difference.
Ding ding ding. I forget who said it (maybe Alan Cox, but I'm REALLY not sure about that), but the opinion was along the lines that it would always be more benefitial to throw the money at a faster processor (or a second processor etc), because you'd get a performance boost everywhere. $300 buys quite a bit extra CPU horsepower these days, and there's no need for the hassles of custom drivers and such. Nowadays CPUs are just so damn fast, it's also not really necessary.
Sealand is not a country; not a single UN member recognizes it, and despite what some quack claims on his ISP homepage, it just plain isn't. It is a small island that the British decided it wasn't worth it to "reclaim" by force.
If they invaded to kill, they'd slaughter a bunch of idiots. If they invaded "nicely", a couple of British soliders would most likely be killed. Either way, a potenial PR disaster.
Honestly, the UK just doesn't give a shit about the island- not enough to drop a bomb on the place and blow it to smithereens, or anything else. They could have cut the island off long ago and starved everyone out, but even that wasn't worth it.
Several SF authors have predicted that electronics manufacturing would eventually move to space because it'd be easier to produce purer semiconductor crystals in microgravity
Siiiigh. I'm going to guess that's because SF authors heard about scientific theories/research.
Scifi authors are just people who are good at making semi-plausible science to help an otherwise boring plot along. It's like curry...the meat's pretty lackluster, so there's a strong sauce. Few of them actually envisioned stuff that wasn't already thought of by lots of other people, or at least obvious if you sat down and thought about it for a bit. For example, I've never been really impressed with Asimov's rules for robots. They're pretty plainly obvious, but nobody came up with them, because there wasn't any need (there still isn't!)
I got to wondering if traditional science fiction is just the opiate of the geek masses?
Yup, judging from how I get mod-slapped every time I post anything remotely critical of NASA, space exploration, space elevators, or the billions of dollars we spend on space "research". Slashdot is completely intolerant of anything that goes against the "group think" that space is just the biggest goddamn thing since sliced bread. The same idiots answer my posts every time. "Oh, look at all the things we got from the space program, like velcro!", which a)assumes the item in question never would have been invented if it was truly necessary, and b)ignores all the nasty stuff that's come as a result of NASA research. Mainly, every jet fighter made by the US, spy satellites, and- our deepest, darkest technology- nuclear weapons, which thanks to all that space research, we can deliver clear across the planet at the push of a few buttons. Then there are the escapists- "well, it'd probably be a good idea to start living on another planet for safety". Hey, spaceshot- how about we learn how to get things right before we go galloping off?
I strongly suggest anyone who takes space exploration seriously give the NASA Parody about "wagonnauts" (titled, I think- "how the west wasn't won") a read. It points out just how collossally stupid the whole thing is- and it was written by NASA people, making it virtually untouchable.
Every time I saw the shuttle go up, all I could see was giant wads of cash burning. Folks- the US government doesn't spend money on space exploration just because it's romantic. It spends the money because much of the research is highly applicable to military purposes, and it does a great job of lining the pockets of defense contractors.
Let's at least ATTEMPT reducing our budget deficit, feeding+sheltering the homeless, universal health care, etc. After all- what the fuck good is colonizing another planet, if we've proven we can't get any of our basic societal problems fixed HERE? Priorities, people.
Sadly, this story is more hype than fact. While the headline makes it seem like the robot is something you need insurance for, if you click through to the SF Chronicle article (and then scroll down a bit), you'll see that it was merely an accident, probably due to some bug in the navigation software.
It's just The Register, being The Register. I suppose the best way to describe the British press, in general, is the sort of furvor you see in FOX news, but AGAINST the government and corportations. To call them a bunch of sarcastic bastards is an understatement. American press takes a press release and reguritates it back to us. The British press take a press release, put their own story together about whatever it is, some background info, etc...quote a line or two and basically call it exactly like they see it, which is often, and accurately, either doubtful ("what a bunch of horse shit") or sarcastic ("right, and we'll all be using these things in our flying cars.") My examples are horrible- they're far better at it than that.
If you read their series Rage of The Machines, it's actually quite funny. Stuff about people getting trapped in public automatic-self-cleaning toilets are turned into people getting "swallowed" and "entrapped", having to be "freed from the machine's vices", etc. It's great stuff:-)
It's a more sophisticated version of the slashdot "zOMG skynet" comments...The Register keeps talking about when we'll basically have to start fighting off the machines with pitchforks in the streets.
It's not the least bit surprising the bloggers have just made a big deal out of what the rest of the technology community has known for a decade (China censors the internet, aka the Great Firewall) and society has known for decade(s) (China is a communist regime, hell-bent on censorship to protect itself).
What disappoints me is that nobody realizes how self-righteous we are. For example- there was an ABC news story recently about China sending in thugs to beat up people and chase them off their land when the government wants their land- which doesn't even really belong to them, anyway.
How horrid, right? Except the US government does virtually the same thing, and it's called Emminent Domain. Your house in the way of that shopping mall? Sorry. Your house belongs to the government now. And then a week later, the government sells it to that land developer who wanted to build the shopping mall. I suppose one could stretch it that we're more "civilized" about it, and spin it such that the law was originally intended to prevent one hick from standing in the way of society- but it's being used every day for exactly what it really was meant to do- give corporations a free lunch over the common man. In Boston, they razed entire neighborhoods, and split in half others, to build the northeast expressway- that hideous raised highway which is finally going away. There have been a lot of plans floated about what to do with all the prime downtown real estate this just created- everything except giving it back to the people it was stolen from in the first place. One of the more popular ideas was a park. Yeah. Great. That'll really console the people who were evicted from their own property by force.
Oh, but this is CENSORSHIP you say. Well, I tell you what? Mention a certain head of the executive branch's name in the same sentence as a chemically powered metal-launching device on the internet, and see how fast it takes for a polite gentleman from the government to knock on your door, and have a nice chat with you about not ever doing that again.
We proudly spout many of the very same things China does now. Secret searches, arrests, detentions? Check, check, and check. Government monitoring of what you read? Check, although the legislature seems to be getting around to working on that one.
My absolute favorite bit was when Rumsfield recently said that military spending for China was the 3rd highest in the world. Something like $50BN. Except guess what the US DoD budget is? THREE HUNDRED BILLION PLUS. We're #3 in the world per-capita, #1 in the WORLD total!
A company whose mission is to provide content and research services to academia gives a poor review to one of its up-and-coming competitors' offerings? Say it isn't so!
Fair enough. But at the same time:
Google search is so littered with search-optimized sites, I get pages of the same porno/fake-search-portal sites instead of results I want, and this has been true for years. Just like old search engines like Altavista and the old Yahoo search...searching has become an exercise of having to really closely scruitinize the domain and the summary to see if it sets off my "bullshit search hit" alert. More and more I find myself looking at page 2 before I find what I'm looking for.
Google Maps has no distance scale, and does quirky things (find an address, click "directions to here", enter a bad address- you get the map, but with no indication it couldn't find the address). It also doesn't remember addresses, which is, to me, one of the top features a mapping site could possibly have. I hate entering my work or home address fifty billion times. Don't make me register, just store it in a bloody cookie, ok?
Google mail...well, as a mailing list admin, don't get me started about its "quick reply" feature, which quotes the whole bloody thread AND TOP POSTS with no option to change it. I've never quite put my finger on it, but I just don't like using it, either- and no, I don't trust them just because they say their motto is "do no evil". GE's motto is "we bring good things to life", but they happily dumped toxic PCBs all over the place in western MA and hid when people tried to make them clean it up.
News.google.com sometimes presents the most hilarious combinations of related stories (or the supposedly relevant picture). I swear, you'll get an article about Coke profits, 534 related, with a picture of a Diet Pepsi can. A quarter of the entries will be from crappy sites like "bloggernews" and other rubbish. Attention Google News: BLOGGERS != JOURNALISTS. BLOGGERS = UNEMPLOYABLE COLUMNISTS.
The first rule about Google Ads is...you cannot talk about Google Ads. Period. Sorry, you can't tell anyone how it's working for you, how their customer service is, you name it. If you do- you're out. If it works so well, how come nobody is allowed to talk about it? Why can't it sell itself? I thought Google wasn't "evil"?
I always hear about how great a place Google is to work, how smart all their staff are. Okay. So why are they getting hammered by search engine optimizers, and have been for years? Core business, people! You don't buy a summer condo when your house is falling apart at the seams.
Manufacturing- it costs thousands of dollars per kg to loft materials. Nice try. Medicine? We already spend 3x more than any other country per-person on health-care and have some of the worse quality-of-life indexes around; everyone else seems to be doing the whole "health care thing" on planet earth just fine. Astronomy- we have no way to build these "huge delicate structures", and compound arrays have proven far easier to construct, operate, and repair (look at how much trouble we had with lofting Hubble- two tries. You want to put a Hubble on the MOON?). Way station for future voyages. We're doing a fine job of assembling vehicles here on earth and lobbing them to the furthest reaches of our solar system just fine. I see a huge number of problems with moon assembly (the dust, for starters) of sensitive mechanisms.
Nevermind that you're using cyclical justification. We need a moon base to make building stuff/shooting it off practical. It will be practical to have a moon base if we have stuff to build there/shoot it off.
Actually, he didn't dismiss you. If he had, he wouldn't have bothered responding to your post at all.
True, but he did make the typical knee-jerk reaction of Slashdotters- which is to brand an unpopular or controversial opinion or question as being a "troll" just out for reactions. This is particularly so of what I call Space Fanboys, who think that any geek who isn't in absolute favor of space-ish things must be a heathen or troll. I DID post it to get opinions, and freely admitted so- I didn't do it just to get a rise out of people, like a troll does.
Oh, so we've already discovered everything we're going to discover in space, then? You sound like those people who wanted to close the Patent Office in 1901 because there was 'nothing left to invent'.
No(hello, straw-man argument), I never said we've learned all we could. He said we were going there: "To learn how to make things that will work in space, to learn how to deal with the effects of long term spaceflight, and how to determine materials for worthiness."
I'm wondering, "After 60 years haven't we figured out how to make things work in space, hasn't Spacelab, ISS, etc taught us about long-term spaceflight physiological effects, and hasn't 60 years of lobbing stuff around the planet and across our solar system taught us all that?"
Basically, if your reasoning to get to the moon(again) is so we can learn how to get to the moon, that's a cyclic definition/justification; It'd be like exploring the desert, and justifying it by saying "we're there to learn how to explore the desert". When you've learned how to explore the desert, then what do you do? Explore it- except you've been exploring to learn how to explore. See the problem?
I'm soliciting viewpoints. Not trolling. I'm dead serious. There's a difference, and dismissing me as a troll doesn't invalidate the question.
To learn how to make things that will work in space, to learn how to deal with the effects of long term spaceflight, and how to determine materials for worthiness.
What of the previous moon trip, Skylab, the russian station, ISS, the Shuttle missions?
NOTE:"because", "because it's there", "human curiosity/wonder", and other such pie-in-the-sky BS will not wash. Justifying the billions with "hey, look, we ended up with velcro last time" also doesn't cut it. Nor does "lots of people will be employed with those billions". I'm looking for clear, useful results; not pie-in-the-sky philosophical goodies and promises worthy of a campaign speech. It's a goddamn ROCK and I want to know why we should pay a LOT of money to send a bunch of egotistical people there.
You'd think that Adaptec would be willing to spend a few $10k in order to gain $5M in revenue. Hell, I'd do it.
Who says that spending that money elsewhere doesn't mean more profit for them elsewhere? If they spend X dollars on Y, that's X dollars they could have spent on Z. If they think Z will be greater than Y, guess where the money gets spent?
It is -supremely- arrogant to assume you know more about marketing than people who have studied it, put it to use, and are good enough at it to be working for a major international corporation. I'm not saying they're perfect, but it's kind of like sitting up in the middle of an operation and saying to the surgeon, "hey, isn't that cut a little deep?"
why do companies insist on believing that by denying access to the specs, they somehow gain an advantage? It's not like telling a programmer how to communicate with the underlying hardware is going to tell them how it (the PCB/silicon) was designed
Among -many- reasons...Company A writes a driver and designs a video card, publishes the specs- Company B comes along, designs a card that works with that spec, and gets driver development for free.
I find it hard to believe that OpenBSD developers don't understand this. I think it's more likely that they're playing dumb to portray hardware developers as "evil". If they don't feel like sharing their toys with OpenBSD, fine, it's a free country...but for god sakes, stop whining about it. Theo comes off as an egotistical bastard when he posts (grossly paraphrasing), "look at how IMPORTANT we are. HOW could you POSSIBLY not want to work with us. See, I'm going to get you in TROUBLE by telling anyone who will listen, just how UNFAIR it is that you won't give us specs on your hardware." My favorite bit is when he starts talking about X million dollars in sales Adaptec could have had, and how it's "their loss!" Guess what, Theo? It's a double-digit BILLION dollar market. None of the major players really give a hoot about OpenBSD.
One wonders if Theo spends a lot of time telling women's answering machines how great he is and why said women should be dying to go out on a date with him- and when he gets a call back saying "fuck off", his response is "your loss";-)
#1 you can buy a bag of ice at the gas station/convenience store, not free but then neither is the electricity to run your freezer.
The store needs to make a profit on top of the cost of the electricity to maintain the machine, and the ice...
...supplied by the ice company which bought the machine, maintains it, and freezes the ice, and trucks it to the store from their "plant"...and make a profit.
You do realize that 1kW/hr costs about 22 cents, whereas a 20lb bag of ice costs about $5, right?
You have to move 330J of energy to freeze one gram of water, basically. We'll assume a 50% efficiency here (pretty poor, I believe). A bag of ice, say, 20lb- would need about 3 million joules (watt-seconds), or 6 million watt-seconds of electricity. That's 1662 Watt-hours, roughly.
Or about 36 cents.
#2 even if you used the house freezer, you shut the door and basically you're pumping heat away from the bedroom into the kitchen, obviously you won't get huge temperature differentials
Most refrigerators are virtually incapable of pumping that much heat (there's a reason they're insulated), and furthermore, are designed to work at a temperature range 60-90 degrees cooler than what you're asking of it. Ever noticed that a fridge takes forever to get from room temperature down to operating temperature?
This idea is so stupid, I can't believe I just wasted 5 minutes on this post. I want that 5 minutes of my life back.
I frequently hear discussion of the most wanted features, such as different calendar formats, integration with other handhelds, etc.
How about integration with other calendar programs.
iCal, Netscape Calendar, and Outlook- none of them actually work with each other (sorry, they DO NOT despite what anyone has told you; for example, an iCal calendar item's title won't show up properly in Mozilla Calendar.)
It's pretty astounding that a simple file format like a frigging CALENDAR can't be standardized across calendar programs which all claim to be able to use the same...uh...standard file format.
Most of the dependency on Outlook would be eliminated if all these programs generated the same invitation format emails.
Perhaps this cleaning of the administration is being done in order to facilitate a more military-centric NASA.
More? Most of what NASA does is research for the Air Force (missiles, planes, etc), and the Shuttle was used primarily for lofting spy satellites.
Did you really think that we lit off the Shuttle just to take a bunch of plants and gerbils from 4th graders to space to see how they grow? Not quite. The military is known for doing all sorts of trickery, including deployed structures and whatnot to hide what satellites look like from telescopes and other satellites. One of the first steps towards covertness was the whole "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" routine, with silly little useless experiments from school children and whatnot (spacelab provided much of the data we needed for long term effects of weightlessness in space on people, btw).
- Microsoft switch their flagship product to PPC
- Apple switch to x86
No, they've been -announced-; Neither Microsoft nor Sony have anything resembling a product ready to ship. They didn't even do the E3 demos on real hardware. Point two, Apple won't be making intel systems till 2007, when it is likely PPC systems will continue in some lines. They didn't say "in 2007 we will completely switch".
I have scuba dived since 1982 and I am rarely limited by the amount of O2 I have handy. The limiting factor for any diving to any real depth (>30 feet say) is the amount of residual nitrogen in your blood stream.
Recreational diving using Nitrox has reduced this drastically to where the limits are back to the amount of gas you can take with you.
Pure O2 is poisonous below about 32feet, if I remember correctly and if you go below about 100feet, just depending you can get high.
No. Below 32 feet on O2, you can go into involuntary spasms, and drown. It's the primary danger with rebreathers, which is why they have usually two O2 monitoring devices on them.
The "high" is on regular air, and is called Nitrogen Narcosis. It is very dangerous because it makes you very emotional and severely disrupts judgement. Not so good when you need to make a controlled ascent...
I don't see how the contraption can both be small and deliver at a high pressure while operating off of one battery.
Air in the tanks is compressed to give the most capacity, not to match depths. 34 feet of water is equal to 1 ATM (14 psi) so at 100 feet (2.94 ATMs), pressure is 41PSI.
Each breath is 3 times the volume of a surface breath, so a 3000PSI tank which held, say, 1000 breaths at the surface, now holds only 333 breaths (totally making up 1000 breaths, btw).
Even at ~32 feet you are at 1 atmosphere extra pressure.
Yeah, and so's the oxygen in the water, which you are extracting. Under pressure, more oxygen can be soluble in water. That doesn't mean there IS more oxygen in the depths. In fact, this contraption would be very useless in some waters where other gasses are predominant (like, say, around a volcanic vent). Dissolved O2 levels vary quite a bit.
Also, now that I think about it, I think the US navy has some pure O2 underwater low depth breathing rigs like this. The big advantage of those is that they produce no bubbles. Very stealthy.
They're not pure O2. They're rebreathers- although there were pure O2 rebreathers many years ago. State of the art has advanced considerably.
Look, if a cow can jump over the Moon, it's not much of a stretch to think they can get to Mars. Getting out of the Earth's gravity well is most of the challenge, really.
Yeah, but re-entry is a bitch. How well do you like your steaks done? ^_^
They may or may not be saving energy, but it's a fact that the juice is not coming from petroleum and it has the potential to come from non-polluting sources either now or in the future.
Except the largest percentage of energy in the US comes from COAL.
Every time one of those idiots charges up their car from the grid, that's more radioactive soot thrown into the air. Gee, thanks.
and why Toyota embarked on that research project in the early 1990's that resulted in the groundbreaking Prius hybrid drivetrain vehicle.
The first hybrid vehicle was produced almost a hundred years ago by one of the parent companies of what is now known as Audi.
It wasn't practical then, it isn't practical now- it is estimated that Toyota (not to mention, the Japanese government) subsidized the Prius to the tune of at least $17,000. Which means that a Prius would cost almost $40,000 if it wasn't. How many people do you think would buy one then?
It's a common myth that the hybrid system is what gives it such good gas mileage. It isn't. It's narrow, hard tires and good aerodynamics. Numerous older models from Toyota, Honda, GM, and other manufactuers, not to mention millions of TDI-powered cars in Europe, get the same or better gas mileage, and they're far easier to make and service; they can also run on renewable energy sources like biodiesel, whereas the Prius runs on the same gasoline as everyone else. Oh, and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to "drive them properly".
PS: on the actual subject of the article, the "initiative" isn't about saving energy. It's about pumping money into the economy from people buying the most expensive consumer goods- appliances and vehicles.
Anyway, never underestimate the ability of the government to lose things. Portions of buildings included.
I understand, and believe you. However, the VAX and its modems were most likely put there for a reason. Which is exactly my point- how did this seemingly random collection of objects get there in the first place?
First thing that pops to mind is someone building a private collection to sneak off-site piece at a time or something. They should have just pretended to have given up, slapped an alarm on the door, and waited to see who showed up.
Holy smokes, they can build spaceships, land men on the moon, but they can't take an inventory?
No, most likely they did. From the article:
Other historical treasures found in the room include old film canisters, one flown shuttle main landing tire, electrical equipment, and various miscellaneous boxes.
Huh. Historical treasures, that just happened to be in a room which nobody said they had a key to. Huh.
Records show that official ownership of this suit was transferred by NASA to the Smithsonian Institution in 1983. The suit itself has now been returned to the Smithsonian.
Anyone else starting to realize that the stuff (which spans decades, completely different programs, and sections of NASA) didn't just get up and walk (either from the Smithsonian, or more likely, from other areas at NASA, never getting to the Museum) to a locked closet nobody said they had keys for?
Sounds to me like someone at NASA was building up their own private collection, and used a room they thought they had the only key to, not realizing there was a master key system in use.
Slashdot Mirror
You're probably thinking of the i960-based cards, though Intel's PRO series adapters (not i960 based) do something similar (TCP checksumming is now builtin to the chipset and most OS drivers now know how to take advantage of that). That processor, and variants, were used in everything from network cards to RAID controllers.
They failed because the performance gain and CPU offload numbers were never enough to justify the price difference.
Ding ding ding. I forget who said it (maybe Alan Cox, but I'm REALLY not sure about that), but the opinion was along the lines that it would always be more benefitial to throw the money at a faster processor (or a second processor etc), because you'd get a performance boost everywhere. $300 buys quite a bit extra CPU horsepower these days, and there's no need for the hassles of custom drivers and such. Nowadays CPUs are just so damn fast, it's also not really necessary.
If they invaded to kill, they'd slaughter a bunch of idiots. If they invaded "nicely", a couple of British soliders would most likely be killed. Either way, a potenial PR disaster.
Honestly, the UK just doesn't give a shit about the island- not enough to drop a bomb on the place and blow it to smithereens, or anything else. They could have cut the island off long ago and starved everyone out, but even that wasn't worth it.
Siiiigh. I'm going to guess that's because SF authors heard about scientific theories/research.
Scifi authors are just people who are good at making semi-plausible science to help an otherwise boring plot along. It's like curry...the meat's pretty lackluster, so there's a strong sauce. Few of them actually envisioned stuff that wasn't already thought of by lots of other people, or at least obvious if you sat down and thought about it for a bit. For example, I've never been really impressed with Asimov's rules for robots. They're pretty plainly obvious, but nobody came up with them, because there wasn't any need (there still isn't!)
Yup, judging from how I get mod-slapped every time I post anything remotely critical of NASA, space exploration, space elevators, or the billions of dollars we spend on space "research". Slashdot is completely intolerant of anything that goes against the "group think" that space is just the biggest goddamn thing since sliced bread. The same idiots answer my posts every time. "Oh, look at all the things we got from the space program, like velcro!", which a)assumes the item in question never would have been invented if it was truly necessary, and b)ignores all the nasty stuff that's come as a result of NASA research. Mainly, every jet fighter made by the US, spy satellites, and- our deepest, darkest technology- nuclear weapons, which thanks to all that space research, we can deliver clear across the planet at the push of a few buttons. Then there are the escapists- "well, it'd probably be a good idea to start living on another planet for safety". Hey, spaceshot- how about we learn how to get things right before we go galloping off?
I strongly suggest anyone who takes space exploration seriously give the NASA Parody about "wagonnauts" (titled, I think- "how the west wasn't won") a read. It points out just how collossally stupid the whole thing is- and it was written by NASA people, making it virtually untouchable.
Every time I saw the shuttle go up, all I could see was giant wads of cash burning. Folks- the US government doesn't spend money on space exploration just because it's romantic. It spends the money because much of the research is highly applicable to military purposes, and it does a great job of lining the pockets of defense contractors.
Let's at least ATTEMPT reducing our budget deficit, feeding+sheltering the homeless, universal health care, etc. After all- what the fuck good is colonizing another planet, if we've proven we can't get any of our basic societal problems fixed HERE? Priorities, people.
Oops. I meant "Rise Of The Machines", not "Rage Of The Machines." Sorry...
It's just The Register, being The Register. I suppose the best way to describe the British press, in general, is the sort of furvor you see in FOX news, but AGAINST the government and corportations. To call them a bunch of sarcastic bastards is an understatement. American press takes a press release and reguritates it back to us. The British press take a press release, put their own story together about whatever it is, some background info, etc...quote a line or two and basically call it exactly like they see it, which is often, and accurately, either doubtful ("what a bunch of horse shit") or sarcastic ("right, and we'll all be using these things in our flying cars.") My examples are horrible- they're far better at it than that.
If you read their series Rage of The Machines, it's actually quite funny. Stuff about people getting trapped in public automatic-self-cleaning toilets are turned into people getting "swallowed" and "entrapped", having to be "freed from the machine's vices", etc. It's great stuff :-)
It's a more sophisticated version of the slashdot "zOMG skynet" comments...The Register keeps talking about when we'll basically have to start fighting off the machines with pitchforks in the streets.
It's not the least bit surprising the bloggers have just made a big deal out of what the rest of the technology community has known for a decade (China censors the internet, aka the Great Firewall) and society has known for decade(s) (China is a communist regime, hell-bent on censorship to protect itself).
What disappoints me is that nobody realizes how self-righteous we are. For example- there was an ABC news story recently about China sending in thugs to beat up people and chase them off their land when the government wants their land- which doesn't even really belong to them, anyway.
How horrid, right? Except the US government does virtually the same thing, and it's called Emminent Domain. Your house in the way of that shopping mall? Sorry. Your house belongs to the government now. And then a week later, the government sells it to that land developer who wanted to build the shopping mall. I suppose one could stretch it that we're more "civilized" about it, and spin it such that the law was originally intended to prevent one hick from standing in the way of society- but it's being used every day for exactly what it really was meant to do- give corporations a free lunch over the common man. In Boston, they razed entire neighborhoods, and split in half others, to build the northeast expressway- that hideous raised highway which is finally going away. There have been a lot of plans floated about what to do with all the prime downtown real estate this just created- everything except giving it back to the people it was stolen from in the first place. One of the more popular ideas was a park. Yeah. Great. That'll really console the people who were evicted from their own property by force.
Oh, but this is CENSORSHIP you say. Well, I tell you what? Mention a certain head of the executive branch's name in the same sentence as a chemically powered metal-launching device on the internet, and see how fast it takes for a polite gentleman from the government to knock on your door, and have a nice chat with you about not ever doing that again.
We proudly spout many of the very same things China does now. Secret searches, arrests, detentions? Check, check, and check. Government monitoring of what you read? Check, although the legislature seems to be getting around to working on that one.
My absolute favorite bit was when Rumsfield recently said that military spending for China was the 3rd highest in the world. Something like $50BN. Except guess what the US DoD budget is? THREE HUNDRED BILLION PLUS. We're #3 in the world per-capita, #1 in the WORLD total!
Fair enough. But at the same time:
I always hear about how great a place Google is to work, how smart all their staff are. Okay. So why are they getting hammered by search engine optimizers, and have been for years? Core business, people! You don't buy a summer condo when your house is falling apart at the seams.
Manufacturing- it costs thousands of dollars per kg to loft materials. Nice try. Medicine? We already spend 3x more than any other country per-person on health-care and have some of the worse quality-of-life indexes around; everyone else seems to be doing the whole "health care thing" on planet earth just fine. Astronomy- we have no way to build these "huge delicate structures", and compound arrays have proven far easier to construct, operate, and repair (look at how much trouble we had with lofting Hubble- two tries. You want to put a Hubble on the MOON?). Way station for future voyages. We're doing a fine job of assembling vehicles here on earth and lobbing them to the furthest reaches of our solar system just fine. I see a huge number of problems with moon assembly (the dust, for starters) of sensitive mechanisms.
Nevermind that you're using cyclical justification. We need a moon base to make building stuff/shooting it off practical. It will be practical to have a moon base if we have stuff to build there/shoot it off.
Actually, he didn't dismiss you. If he had, he wouldn't have bothered responding to your post at all.
True, but he did make the typical knee-jerk reaction of Slashdotters- which is to brand an unpopular or controversial opinion or question as being a "troll" just out for reactions. This is particularly so of what I call Space Fanboys, who think that any geek who isn't in absolute favor of space-ish things must be a heathen or troll. I DID post it to get opinions, and freely admitted so- I didn't do it just to get a rise out of people, like a troll does.
Oh, so we've already discovered everything we're going to discover in space, then? You sound like those people who wanted to close the Patent Office in 1901 because there was 'nothing left to invent'.
No(hello, straw-man argument), I never said we've learned all we could. He said we were going there: "To learn how to make things that will work in space, to learn how to deal with the effects of long term spaceflight, and how to determine materials for worthiness."
I'm wondering, "After 60 years haven't we figured out how to make things work in space, hasn't Spacelab, ISS, etc taught us about long-term spaceflight physiological effects, and hasn't 60 years of lobbing stuff around the planet and across our solar system taught us all that?"
Basically, if your reasoning to get to the moon(again) is so we can learn how to get to the moon, that's a cyclic definition/justification; It'd be like exploring the desert, and justifying it by saying "we're there to learn how to explore the desert". When you've learned how to explore the desert, then what do you do? Explore it- except you've been exploring to learn how to explore. See the problem?
Why eh? Ill take a stab at a troll..
I'm soliciting viewpoints. Not trolling. I'm dead serious. There's a difference, and dismissing me as a troll doesn't invalidate the question.
To learn how to make things that will work in space, to learn how to deal with the effects of long term spaceflight, and how to determine materials for worthiness.
What of the previous moon trip, Skylab, the russian station, ISS, the Shuttle missions?
Seriously. Why?
NOTE:"because", "because it's there", "human curiosity/wonder", and other such pie-in-the-sky BS will not wash. Justifying the billions with "hey, look, we ended up with velcro last time" also doesn't cut it. Nor does "lots of people will be employed with those billions". I'm looking for clear, useful results; not pie-in-the-sky philosophical goodies and promises worthy of a campaign speech. It's a goddamn ROCK and I want to know why we should pay a LOT of money to send a bunch of egotistical people there.
I challenge thee, Space Fanboys of Slashdot.
Who says that spending that money elsewhere doesn't mean more profit for them elsewhere? If they spend X dollars on Y, that's X dollars they could have spent on Z. If they think Z will be greater than Y, guess where the money gets spent?
It is -supremely- arrogant to assume you know more about marketing than people who have studied it, put it to use, and are good enough at it to be working for a major international corporation. I'm not saying they're perfect, but it's kind of like sitting up in the middle of an operation and saying to the surgeon, "hey, isn't that cut a little deep?"
Among -many- reasons...Company A writes a driver and designs a video card, publishes the specs- Company B comes along, designs a card that works with that spec, and gets driver development for free.
I find it hard to believe that OpenBSD developers don't understand this. I think it's more likely that they're playing dumb to portray hardware developers as "evil". If they don't feel like sharing their toys with OpenBSD, fine, it's a free country...but for god sakes, stop whining about it. Theo comes off as an egotistical bastard when he posts (grossly paraphrasing), "look at how IMPORTANT we are. HOW could you POSSIBLY not want to work with us. See, I'm going to get you in TROUBLE by telling anyone who will listen, just how UNFAIR it is that you won't give us specs on your hardware." My favorite bit is when he starts talking about X million dollars in sales Adaptec could have had, and how it's "their loss!" Guess what, Theo? It's a double-digit BILLION dollar market. None of the major players really give a hoot about OpenBSD.
One wonders if Theo spends a lot of time telling women's answering machines how great he is and why said women should be dying to go out on a date with him- and when he gets a call back saying "fuck off", his response is "your loss" ;-)
The store needs to make a profit on top of the cost of the electricity to maintain the machine, and the ice...
...supplied by the ice company which bought the machine, maintains it, and freezes the ice, and trucks it to the store from their "plant"...and make a profit.
You do realize that 1kW/hr costs about 22 cents, whereas a 20lb bag of ice costs about $5, right?
You have to move 330J of energy to freeze one gram of water, basically. We'll assume a 50% efficiency here (pretty poor, I believe). A bag of ice, say, 20lb- would need about 3 million joules (watt-seconds), or 6 million watt-seconds of electricity. That's 1662 Watt-hours, roughly.
Or about 36 cents.
#2 even if you used the house freezer, you shut the door and basically you're pumping heat away from the bedroom into the kitchen, obviously you won't get huge temperature differentials
Most refrigerators are virtually incapable of pumping that much heat (there's a reason they're insulated), and furthermore, are designed to work at a temperature range 60-90 degrees cooler than what you're asking of it. Ever noticed that a fridge takes forever to get from room temperature down to operating temperature?
This idea is so stupid, I can't believe I just wasted 5 minutes on this post. I want that 5 minutes of my life back.
How about integration with other calendar programs.
iCal, Netscape Calendar, and Outlook- none of them actually work with each other (sorry, they DO NOT despite what anyone has told you; for example, an iCal calendar item's title won't show up properly in Mozilla Calendar.)
It's pretty astounding that a simple file format like a frigging CALENDAR can't be standardized across calendar programs which all claim to be able to use the same...uh...standard file format.
Most of the dependency on Outlook would be eliminated if all these programs generated the same invitation format emails.
More? Most of what NASA does is research for the Air Force (missiles, planes, etc), and the Shuttle was used primarily for lofting spy satellites.
Did you really think that we lit off the Shuttle just to take a bunch of plants and gerbils from 4th graders to space to see how they grow? Not quite. The military is known for doing all sorts of trickery, including deployed structures and whatnot to hide what satellites look like from telescopes and other satellites. One of the first steps towards covertness was the whole "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" routine, with silly little useless experiments from school children and whatnot (spacelab provided much of the data we needed for long term effects of weightlessness in space on people, btw).
- Apple switch to x86
No, they've been -announced-; Neither Microsoft nor Sony have anything resembling a product ready to ship. They didn't even do the E3 demos on real hardware. Point two, Apple won't be making intel systems till 2007, when it is likely PPC systems will continue in some lines. They didn't say "in 2007 we will completely switch".
Recreational diving using Nitrox has reduced this drastically to where the limits are back to the amount of gas you can take with you.
Pure O2 is poisonous below about 32feet, if I remember correctly and if you go below about 100feet, just depending you can get high.
No. Below 32 feet on O2, you can go into involuntary spasms, and drown. It's the primary danger with rebreathers, which is why they have usually two O2 monitoring devices on them.
The "high" is on regular air, and is called Nitrogen Narcosis. It is very dangerous because it makes you very emotional and severely disrupts judgement. Not so good when you need to make a controlled ascent...
I don't see how the contraption can both be small and deliver at a high pressure while operating off of one battery.
Air in the tanks is compressed to give the most capacity, not to match depths. 34 feet of water is equal to 1 ATM (14 psi) so at 100 feet (2.94 ATMs), pressure is 41PSI.
Each breath is 3 times the volume of a surface breath, so a 3000PSI tank which held, say, 1000 breaths at the surface, now holds only 333 breaths (totally making up 1000 breaths, btw).
Even at ~32 feet you are at 1 atmosphere extra pressure.
Yeah, and so's the oxygen in the water, which you are extracting. Under pressure, more oxygen can be soluble in water. That doesn't mean there IS more oxygen in the depths. In fact, this contraption would be very useless in some waters where other gasses are predominant (like, say, around a volcanic vent). Dissolved O2 levels vary quite a bit.
Also, now that I think about it, I think the US navy has some pure O2 underwater low depth breathing rigs like this. The big advantage of those is that they produce no bubbles. Very stealthy.
They're not pure O2. They're rebreathers- although there were pure O2 rebreathers many years ago. State of the art has advanced considerably.
Stupid mods. That's INFORMATIVE!
On a serious note, however- people, we need to start meta-moderating more.
Yeah, but re-entry is a bitch. How well do you like your steaks done? ^_^
Except the largest percentage of energy in the US comes from COAL.
Every time one of those idiots charges up their car from the grid, that's more radioactive soot thrown into the air. Gee, thanks.
The first hybrid vehicle was produced almost a hundred years ago by one of the parent companies of what is now known as Audi.
It wasn't practical then, it isn't practical now- it is estimated that Toyota (not to mention, the Japanese government) subsidized the Prius to the tune of at least $17,000. Which means that a Prius would cost almost $40,000 if it wasn't. How many people do you think would buy one then?
It's a common myth that the hybrid system is what gives it such good gas mileage. It isn't. It's narrow, hard tires and good aerodynamics. Numerous older models from Toyota, Honda, GM, and other manufactuers, not to mention millions of TDI-powered cars in Europe, get the same or better gas mileage, and they're far easier to make and service; they can also run on renewable energy sources like biodiesel, whereas the Prius runs on the same gasoline as everyone else. Oh, and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to "drive them properly".
PS: on the actual subject of the article, the "initiative" isn't about saving energy. It's about pumping money into the economy from people buying the most expensive consumer goods- appliances and vehicles.
I understand, and believe you. However, the VAX and its modems were most likely put there for a reason. Which is exactly my point- how did this seemingly random collection of objects get there in the first place?
First thing that pops to mind is someone building a private collection to sneak off-site piece at a time or something. They should have just pretended to have given up, slapped an alarm on the door, and waited to see who showed up.
No, most likely they did. From the article:
Other historical treasures found in the room include old film canisters, one flown shuttle main landing tire, electrical equipment, and various miscellaneous boxes.
Huh. Historical treasures, that just happened to be in a room which nobody said they had a key to. Huh.
Records show that official ownership of this suit was transferred by NASA to the Smithsonian Institution in 1983. The suit itself has now been returned to the Smithsonian.
Anyone else starting to realize that the stuff (which spans decades, completely different programs, and sections of NASA) didn't just get up and walk (either from the Smithsonian, or more likely, from other areas at NASA, never getting to the Museum) to a locked closet nobody said they had keys for?
Sounds to me like someone at NASA was building up their own private collection, and used a room they thought they had the only key to, not realizing there was a master key system in use.