If that's true, then when the Sun runs out of juice and us, humans, have to find new means to make a living, and generate enough electricity in a dark world without a Sun to keep our computers screens lit, at least we have stuff to fish for in deep space. I mean after we ate up all of Jupiter and the other planets, nuclear converted all hydrogen/silicon/oxygen into Fe 56 and Nickel, and we need new sources of energy to live on, at least we can sail off in all kinds of directions and feed off this space dust. Yummi, I'm already tapping my belly in the name of all the future generations. Of course, assuming we'll find ways to nuclear convert things all the way to iron, but we got lots of time, assuming Last Judgement Day isn't right around the corner in 2008(again.) Lots of assumptions there...
Yup. One just needs to watch "My Fair Lady" to see discrimination among different economic classes that's so thick in the air, it can be cut with a knife. Discrimination is not race based, but manners, grooming, and economic status based for each person. You could say there is equal opportunity discrimination going on.
And then watch the big software companies set up puppet institutions to manage these donations. Then these aggressor companies will initiate new irritating initiatives just so you get irritated and donate to their puppet organizations. What a nice new revenue source! Of course they can't just take the money, but there are still valuable ways to milk this scheme: for instance they will set up nonprofit orgs that take in all these donations, and do surveys and statistical market research studies the big companies don't want to pay for in the first place with their own money - why not let the benevolent donators pay for it, then publish the results in some obscure paper the original company can 'pretend' to read it! When you donate, how do you know who you're giving your money to? At least with Unicef or PBS you're not donating 'against' an institution, but against poverty, natural disasters, uneducation, against things that don't have a face, things that can't get upset and exact revenge. For instance poverty won't say it's revenge time, but a company or a person may.
I did use preview, it's all my fault, I guess long run on and on paragraphs don't bother me as much as they do others, especially if I'm just blurting out something vague that I don't really have a structured idea of, and it just all runs together anyway. Plus it conserves space on other people's screens.
What I'd really like is a fully vertical programming environment that's more humane, lets me get to the bare metal if I want to, or be very lazy and high level, if I want to, it would do assembler, C, C++, and higher than C++ level, a set of languages where I know what each statement expands to in the lower level, where the compiler sort of holds my hand, and shows me what's going on, and I'd rather have a more plain english compiler output even if it's not optimized, or if it's optimized and difficult to follow the jumps, then a plain english description of why it's doing it. What happens when I write a statement and get a bug is too much behind the scenes for me, too much of a smoke and mirrors, too cryptic. I'm lazy and prefer writing programs the easy way, in very high level languages, say in basic, python and perl, unfortunately they lack performance because most are interpreted. There should be a way to do high level without interpretation, but instead compiling into lower level stuff, after all, instructions in one language should have a 1 to 1 matching of what happens in another language, or there could be such an optimized matching. If I was allowed to constantly inspect what each high level construct translates to in the lower level language that's still higher than assembler, in a human readable form, that could improve the overall performance and bug issues for all the levels of programming, because if there is a problem, a bug, the programmer could inspect and figure it out and submit patches. I find myself learning things mostly when I'm involved with a task at hand, if I didn't have a problem, I'd never learn about something. I'm sure most people are intelligent enough to figure things out if they really need to, but they have no transparent and easy way these days, it's all or nothing, C++ to straight assembler, and they are stuck with starting off writing a program in a difficult and low level language because that's all you can do - once you made choice and settled on a language, or even a set of libraries, you're stuck with it, and if you don't like the language code, you're welcome to look at the compiler output in assembler. I'd rather see some smoother transition layers, something that starts out very nonverbose and progressively gets more verbose and difficult as you go lower on the layers. Something that starts out as simply as drawing a few diagrams to generate some very high level code, almost in plain english, that a compiler translates into C++, that I can look at, and even see what C++ would translate into in C, and then C into assembler. Some Microchip PIC c compilers retain the original C code next to the assembler part, so it's readable what's going on. Even dotnet that's an interpreted language, that too can list the bytecode next to the original code. I'd like to see what happens, all the way to the bare metal. Yes compiling time would go up, but you could skip intermediate stages if you wanted to. One of the worst things these days is that there is no single programming environment where I can sit down and 'own' the computer, without working my ass off, unless I want to. An environment that debugs the speed of the code, shows you what happens where, what code consumes a lot of memory, what code portion took how many milliseconds to execute, and with this constant feedback, I could concentrate my efforts on the portions I'd like to concentrate on. You could have the 4 level layers called C-02, C-01, C+00, C+01, C+02, etc. C-02 equivalent to the architecture layer, C-01 to the C layer, C+00 to what currently C++ is, C+01 to something like basic or python, and C+02 to some diagramming software (like VB/VBA macro record or Visio or something similarly super-easy). You could then directly compile C+02 to C-02 if C+02 diagramming software is all you know, or go deeper in the in-between levels, depending on how much elbow-grease you'd like to put in and what your skill level is, you could go from C+02 to C+01 to C+00, each code expandable if it has a hand-coded equivalent, or just using the de
Actually, this story is a something that those watching you hope for, cuz they are bored. How many people will you find in the world that have such skills and a 1 Ghz receving dish, and are willing to come over to the dark side, to hack surveillance systems, instead of making a comfy living off of their skills? Maybe 1 in 10 million, or less. Story might as well could have been about a dual-life person: Nobel prize biologist, head of genetics research and big hospital/university caught robbing a bank or something.
I agree with you... I contracted carpal tunnel in under 3 weeks - by getting a temporary job where part of the duties was pulling brass rings on frayed braided wire ends, using a grinder, and pulling long cables on the floor to stretch them straight. After about pulling only 5 rings onto the ends of the braided wire, your hand muscles started to burn, and you had over 50 to do, then came the grinder-vibrations to work in the pain, then finally the cable pulling. Worst is that it didn't hurt right there, but when you got home, and fell asleep, you wake up because it all gets numb, and you have to shake your hands, flex your wrists, til the numbness gets bearable. Unconsciously picking up the phone while it was ringing in your mid sleep, made you drop the handset from the pain, like wtf was that, why does it hurt so badly to grab anything. It only hurts when it's rested, but it gets better when you use it. By the way, in all this, typing was the easiest thing ever, that was like the only thing I could comfortably do.
If you run your mouth like I do on slashdot, you too will get one of these handpicked jobs that mess you up in record time, the work imported all the way from France, once they find out how quickly and well it works messing other people up too, it's like, we gotta try this on that hothead too. Needless to say I left pretty quickly, not that it was an option but I chose it anyway. The symptoms and numbness never really subside, once you have carpal tunnel, you always have carpal tunnel, it's just a lot less painful, and less noticeable, or you just get used to it more, but it comes back at the slightest wrist effort exerted. But the article was right, typing and carpal tunnel syndrome, at least in my personal experience are very unrelated, typing is like the only thing you can comfortably do if you have carpal tunnel, but try grabbing the mouse, or the telephone, and ouch. Unless you type in a really messed up way, clenching your hands so hard that your muscles burn after 5 minutes of typing, then maybe it's possible to get it from typing.
Forget terraforming? One can dream... Ever thought of bringing enough hydrogen from Jupiter to inject hydrogen bombs deep into the core of Mars, lighting them one after the other to melt the inner core, just like Earth has it, so then Mars can have a magnetic field resistant to solar wind? Once it's molten, it would probably take only a ton of hydrogen a month to sustain it molten. You could either ship it from Jupiter, or just collect the solar wind. Or just even pump the solar energy you collect somehow into the core. Then if we got really good, we could turn all that rock bound oxygen into neon, to have an oxygen/neon atmosphere instead of the oxygen/nitrogen one we got down here on Earth. (oxygen/helium that divers breathe wouldn't work because helium would escape even with a magnetic field.) This technology is probably still 200-2000 years far in the future for us, because we can't even turn hydrogen into helium in massive quantities, let alone oxygen into neon, but eventually, hey. Such terraforming silicate rock oxygen extractors cooking up neon reactors could transform any livable piece of rock of sufficient size. I don't know how much mass there is in the asteroid belt, but we might even be able to put together yet another planet to live on, and set it into orbit. Maybe in another 30,000 years? Then you could have Venus, Earth, Mars and that other planet inhabited by people, and the Earth-Moon and a couple other moons as jumping grounds/space flight pit stops. Also lots of self sustaining self-contained glass-bubble space stations all over the place. Then if any planet goes nuts and decides to start a thermonuclear war, at least there would be 3 other planets and lots of space stations with jungles, snakes, monkeys and elephants and of course people too, to carry on. One can dream, can't one?
Duh. Linux can be had for free, without a sale. You could even say linux had zero sales and you could still be missing the point, because some people might find it very useful and might be using it very happily, for free. This is not the front to attack linux from.
If you wanted to have a point to what you say, you could say about linux that people who made it were too lazy to make it good because they weren't paid, and I could believe that with good data backing it up, but it must be hard to prove that point, or we'd see it all over the place. You could also say that linux was submarined and made defective on purpose, that there was significant effort invested by the competition to bring it down, or to bring down its creators, and I would even believe that with even less data, but I'd get very pissed. "Ideally" (according to some people,) people who get paid lots of money to program should come up with better software than those that only make a comfortable sustenance at it, and are mostly fueled by compassion and the love of their art, and the recognition of their peers. Money can only buy you so much recognition in a linux coding community, but if you're the creator of some cool kernel feature, or device driver, or super optimized smp code section that everyone admires to read, now you're talking.
For the other side, there was a story on PBS about two gun-inventors, from about the 1960's, one in the US, the other in the USSR. I forget the actual gun names. They both invented roughly equivalent guns, that were robust, could be dragged through mud and still work, and the US version even saw action in Vietnam, where soldiers preferred it to the more sophisticated guns that just broke down at the slightest touch of dirt. So basically, the US inventor got very rich, while his Soviet counterpart got a medal. This is the most important difference, according to the Soviet guy, as he commented on it years later. Sooner or later that aspect catches up with people too, especially if they are like an ex soviet, currently living barely at the edge of sustenance level. Hey, after the collapse of USSR, there were PBS reports showing a guy with a family to support, whose job was to guard the nuclear warheads, saying he hasn't been paid for six months by his government, because it was so bankrupt it couldn't even send a spaceship up to the MIR space station, and an astronaut was stuck up there for like a year, until the US Space Shuttle made a trip to pick him up. So yes, soviet gun inventors care a lot about not getting paid, especially when they are hungry. Basically, if you want the freecoding linux programming community to care more about getting paid, you should find a way to starve them, but as soon as they make enough to have food, and shelter (but not soap, clothing, combs, etc, such things are unimportant to happiness, unless you want to get laid) off they go again, out of your control.
Re:Let's don't get ahead of ourselves
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Libranet On The Rocks
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I'm using the GPL 2D only nv driver, and it works fine, gives a fine resolution, super clear picture, in Knoppix 3.6, which is a Debian clone distro. True I don't play 3d games, but the official, non-GPL nvidia driver's 2D isn't better at all, and I'm just too lazy to reinstall it everytime I wipe the partition to reinstall Knoppix to the harrdrive in 20 minutes, having all my important data on separate partitions, except some emails and files I back up. Easiest way to keep your system clean and running in top shape - have a garbage heap of data drive where you toss all your junk that you may need later, and a super-clean, OS only partition, whether it's windows or linux. Everytime you mess it up, install wrong gcc, mess up your libs, clutter up your symlinks, easy does it, burn a cd from the iso image, pop in the cd, wipe, reinstall, done. No looking for needle in a haystack, just replace the haystack with a fresh one.
Actually, if you know trigonometry, it's 40cm / tangent(beach slope angle). For example, if your beach slope is 5 degrees, the tangent is 0.0875, and thus you have to drive 40 cm / 0.0875=457 cm less, or 4.5 meters less. If your beach slope is only 1 degrees, barely sloping, then the tangent is 0.0175, and you have to drive a whopping 23 meters less!
You know, we talk about nuclear proliferation, but that's nothing compared to biotech proliferation. I think that should be on top of Bush's agenda. Once you can 'write' biological viruses that attack people based on their genetic heritage, that's gonna really suck. How long til another holier than thou Hitler shows up, and decides to purify the world? You don't possess the "officially approved" genetics, so down with you. With all the computer viruses that get written targeting a specific vulnerability, you have a solution, you can switch OS's and play the security by obscurity thing, or even stay with mainstream and play the patched-it-now-you're-it cat-and-mouse game. Worst thing that happens is all the computers going down and you get really pissed, but that's about it, so what. But you can't do that to your own software, to your own DNA, can't patch it on the fly, at least not yet, and the Almighty save your souls from a world where you can. And if your own DNA 'crashes' there is no reboot, unless you believe in reincarnation. There are always two sides to everything: a good side and a bad side, a dark side and a light side. Every power has benefits and dangers. Nuclear stuff at least can provide/get converted to heating, air conditioning, food, car fuel, what not, and even if something goes wrong - even after hiroshima and nagasaki - the rest of the world goes on, people live, the eskimos, the amish, the bushmans, and the jungle people live, whales, elephants, jaguars live on, even if the modern world 'crashes'. Nuclear stuff is not contagious. But there is nothing scarier that I can think of than biotechnology, what hell can get loose once we attain sufficient knowledge to tinker with the software with too much ease. Have you seen them cows with huge titties that they can barely drag around? Yes, biotechnology at your service, providing you lots of milk. But you will always have some idiots or pranksters who think it's kewl to make a fly or a grasshopper the size of an elephant, or a super-virus that attacks anything, just like you have it with all these creative computer virus writers. Just think of the sick doctors who kill their own patients. With sufficiently developed biotech viruses filled with intent, that freely jump from bacteria to plants to animals to humans, if one gets loose to proliferate, good luck to us all. Or even if it's not as destructive, just selective enough, just think of a special SARS or bird flu that specifically targets people with slanted eyes, but won't touch anyone else. Yeah, biotech has the potential to cure illnesses, I know. But still, please meditate over that other side too, once in a while.
How about this for a high tension nailbiting action movie: deploying a few 27-ton hydrogen bombs on the other side of the moon, that's facing away from the planet, so it's safe because it can never be directed back to the home planet, because it's aways facing outwards. How neat is it that we got just such a moon - must be intelligent design, eh? So if anything approaches, be it a UFO invader ship undercover disguised as an asteorid, we gon pulverize it to pieces. Don't nobody mess with us, eartians, especially eartians from the Great State of Texas, because we gon send our buddy Arnold @ u to convey the message: "asta la vista, baby." How much kewler can we get? We badazz muthafukas. Then of course these things are never as safe as you think, and through a malfunction or a UFO infiltrator sabotage they find a way to get sent back at the planet, and you later find out that the asteroid terrorists were just a hoax, to coax everyone into fear, there are no UFO's, no asteroids even, that was all just a myth, a clever conspiracy, but by then it's too late, there is already chaos down on the planet, and all the nations armed to teeth with nukes as a mutually assured destruction deterrent will mutually "assure" each other when they all lose their temper and get carried away. All this in a movie, yeah. But in the real world, how about that gravity idea again? Pretty please, with cherry on top? Cuz it doesn't sound so bad! Not at all! I'll take it anyday, if it works.
"you don't own land until you've mixed your labor with it" - is a pretty nasty statement, that's what commies used to say, and I even heard a union guy say the same thing about the factory he was working in - that the CEO, board of directors, and the bosses up there do no work, they just collect the cream off the cake, when in reality it's him, the worker who owns the plant, because he's the one who's doing any work. Watch out with these arguments, because risk taking without any labor is an important thing too - wait til you open your own business and hire someone to work in it, and claim it's theirs, or when you invest your hard or not so hard earned money in the stock market, risking to lose it all, but expecting a return because of that risk, without any labor. This guy was saying all this while him and his wife were actually opening a restaurant - so he'd get to experience the other side of it first hand. It only gets unfair when there is almost absolute certainty and zero risk involved, nor labor, yet there is still a high expectation of an "unfair" return. Measuring risk, estimating risk is the easiest thing to unfairly manipulate. So in this sense, owning property on the moon, just like owning stocks, is not about control, nor labor, but about risk taking, and expectation of a profit return on that risk. Right now land on the moon is free - you want it, please, go there, sit on it, nobody will stop you, it's not a limited resource like parking spots in some places. When you figure out a way to produce space-satellite-solar-panels from moonrock, then it will have value, because lifting things off the moon with a rocket, climibing out of that gravity hole costs tremendously less than climbing out of Earth's gravity hole. Then your product, the transmitted energy, will bear a price down here on Earth, and if profitable, then there will be some demand for moon land property where it becomes a scarce resource, and it can command a price. But for now, land on the moon is free, please go ahead and use it, show us how it can be profitably used.
Besides the risk taking part above, there is also ownership by control, as you say it. At the very least, right now, when you land on the moon with an object, the ground you take up under you, you can consider that your property, because nobody can walk right through that piece of land, while you occupy it, just like nobody can walk right through that volume of space you're taking up right now while reading this, you basically 'own' that chunk of space, with your body.
When the moon-land will command a price, I wonder who the authority will be to issue property rights titles. I think as long as there is enough room on the moon for everyone to do their business, land will be free, just like it was during nomadic times. It's gonna be a first-come-first-served basis. You like that piece of crater right there because it has nice minerals in it? Be the first one to get there, and stick a flag down on it, and put a fence around it. If you're willing to invest at least in the fence material, hey, it's yours. When the top spots are occupied, and the less demanded sites are also in process of being fully taken up, then the UN will probably have a moon-registry, with who owns what patch where, and then the interested owners can engage in exchanges and trade deals, together with mere mortals down here on earth purchasing stakes and stocks in the respective moon-companies, because then, when there is something actually going on, when they represent true value, then they can command a price.
Hey, as long as down here water, air, sunshine, moonshine (and at least some information, some general education in the common body of human knowledge) is free, is a right, and I don't owe any "sovereign ruler" an "existence fee" for my "original sin" to happen to be born into this world, I'm all cool with people selling and buying moon property, especially if that means that they can do something useful with it.
Pennsylvania and Ohio have reciprocal tax agreements, where even if you telecommute, you pay your own resident state's taxes only. It's kind of neat, because less headaches for you. This is state tax only, you still have to look at local city taxes, depending on city you worked in.
Warm blood has a huge cost. Snakes can go for weeks or even months to a full year without eating, simply beause they don't need to maintain all that energy wasting hot body temperature. In water, maintaining a body temperature of 37C like mammals, or 42C like birds, might be impossible, because compared to air, the rate of heat loss in water is just so much greater. So all these fish get is something above ambient, and you can bet that they have to hunt and feed and pay very dearly with energy-cash for each extra degree. But since the heat gives them speed, extra agility, there is probably some balance point, some optimum temperature. I wonder if such optimum temperatures could be mathematically deducted, and how close these fish get to it. It's hard to stick a number on hunting success vs. agility, even if you can stick a number on agility vs. temperature. Of course when you got very plenty food, all the food in the world that you want, that temperature might come out something nonsensical, like 200C, so this temperature is probably very dependent on the available food supply too.
Ever seen a James Bond movie? He always keeps the speed limit, doesn't he? Yeah right. Laws won't stop the you getting tracked by your cellphone, the only thing they do is provide some need to jump the hoops and get around the protocols in a courtroom over inadmissable evidence. Hey, at least we got the courtroom protocols, the Constitution, voting, even if they don't always get upheld or work ideally, but it could be worse - not having any of those things would suck even worse.
Other than nuclear material, which is just out of the question, your regular pump gas is pretty much the most energy dense thing you can comfortably carry around and deal with, because, being a hydrocarbon, it carries a lot of hydrogen, lot of carbon, has a 0.80 g/cm3 density at room temperature compared to 0.13 g/cm3 few Kelvin supercold liquid hydrogen. Not to mention it's a liquid, nonpressurized, easy to handle under normal conditions. Unfortunately the carbon portion of gas is responsible for all the "extra" CO2 in the atmosphere that's most likely the cause of, global warming, with, say, lake Chad getting dried up and wiped off the face of the planet. Hydrogen would cause no global warming, at least that's the theory these days against CO2, and theories are often right.
Everytime you convert energy from one form into another, you lose some. When you convert metal to hydrogen, gas to hydrogen, or any for of energy into some other form, you lose some. If you can directly milk the energy out of the metal, especially into straight electricity, then you lose the least. The most you lose when you touch a thermal way of converting energy - using a heat engine between hot and cold temperatures - you're talking massive losses, efficiencies near 10-40%, that is 60-90% goes to waste. In your internal combustion engine car most of the theoretical energy bound up in gas goes out the exhaust as heat, and you only get that 30% (or 40% with Diesel) converted into mechanical torque.
Electric to mechanical conversion efficiency is near 98%. If you carry metal around, forget converting it into H2 that you feed to an internal combustion engine that drives an alternator that charges your hybrid battery. Use the metal to just make a straight battery out of it, where the metal gets consumed. Though if this were very feasible, we'd already have battery-cars, and at the gas station you'd exchange your used up 20lb battery packs and get new ones, instead of pumping gas. But who knows what the future holds?
You're very right when it comes to hydrogen carrying capacity. You also need to haul around 24g Mg to make 2g H2, or 27g Al/3g H2. That's a big difference, though volumetrically may be competitive compared to the very low density of liquid H2 (0.13 g/cm3), or NiMH/Pt/Pd type hydrogen storage that achieves the same volumetric density, though at much higher weight. Lithium you'd need 7g Li/1g H2, beryllium(toxic) 9g Be/2g H2, and Boron 11g B/3g H2(though spontaneous reactivy is worse, so there is a reason why organic electrolyte lithium ion batteries use lithium.) Guess what? As you say it, carbon you need 12g/4g H2, but reactivity is the worst, plus, unlike any of the other stuff up to carbon, carbon oxides are gaseous and emittable. Methane is also gaseous, problematic to carry just like hydrogen gas was. As far as solids go, lithium borohydride has probably the highest hydrogen carrying capacity in a solid form that results in solid waste lithium borate, though it's expensive to make, and to recycle the lithium/boron back to the hydride.
The obvious question with this metal solution is what do you do with your metal oxide? Dump it out on the asphalt behind you? Or haul it around with you? You certainly wouldn't be able to dump lithium borate, because it's so expensive, but if we're at dumping, you might burn metallic silicon (cheap, metallurgic grade purity prepared by non-carbon routes) to make quartz which is sand, which should be OK to dump behind you. You need 28g Si/4gH2, compared to 12g C, but the energy density of Si, on a weight basis is still close to that of C, because the Silicon oxide formation releases more heat than carbon dioxide formation, on a molar basis. Problem with silicon is that it's unreactive (also meaning that it's very safe,) and barely anything bites it at room temperature, while at high temperatures (molten silicates) your engine parts would wear out. (If these engine chambers are cheap, such as graphite molds, you might have a cheap consumable engine cavity that burns silicon, somehow harvests the energy, then recycle your whole engine cavity.) So anyway, dumping silicon dioxide would create a mess on the roads, and probably cause silicosis in all the drivers, so solid effluents from your car would suck. Even a carbon dioxide effluent is preferable to silicon dioxide, but hydrogen oxide is always the most preferable.
Probably the best solution with such metals is to keep the "effluent" with you and haul it around, and exchange it at the nearest gas station. Lithium/boron stuff would still be expensive, would need recycling, but aluminium oxide capsules that you can just toss in the garbage would probably be more cost effective, even given the 27g Al/11g B ratio, because aluminum is more abundant, nontoxic, other than some correlation with the aluminum fluoride in it that may be causing Alzheimer's. As far as this Alzheimer's threat goes, there is an expensive nonfluoride aluminum production (carbochlorination), by the Alcoa/Toth aluminum company, that can even process clays into aluminum, silicon, etc, but nobody has bothered commercially so far to recylce the CO from the carbochlorination back to C and O2 via zirconia electrolysis, and even fluoride aluminum production these days releases mole per mole stoichiometric quantities of carbon, so you might as well just burn gasoline instead of aluminum, (or even silicon, pidgeon process magnesium. In fluoride/cryolite aluminum production they are coming up with new anodes (titanium diboride instead of graphite) that will require more electrical energy and be more expensive compared to cheap coal, but generate direct oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. The problem is that burning coal/carbon to carbon dioxide is the cheapest thing on the planet, replacing that with expensive electricity (hydro, nuclear, solar, wind,) well, it's just not cost competitive these days without some government push, either via regulations or via tax credits.
Still, you waste a lot of available energy just converting the metal
Server load on wikipedia is going up - who pays for that? On the other hand, the nice thing about wikipedia is that it doesn't quiver and shake and explode in your face, insulting your intelligence and dignity, like all the other advertising driven sites. Only Google ads are still and calm, I'd have no problem with those, if they get a small, designated ad section - but not like those news sites that blast a picture in the middle of some news story, and squeeze the text to a 5 letter wide column to accomodate the image. Or have a 20 sentence "content" in a thin column in the middle, and the whole page covered with about 200 sentence worth of ads. Check out www.tomshardware.com for instance. This site used to be a joy to read back in 1996-2000. Now it's way too commercialized, and probably lost a lot of its appeal because of it, including a lot of its audience. I used to go almost daily to www.tomshardware.com back then to see what's new. I was also a computer hardware enthusiast and up to date on the new things, on a daily basis. When tomshardware got excited about a recent development, I got excited too. Now I go maybe bimonthly, and I couldn't tell you what the best mobo/cpu/memory/harddisk deal today is, off the top of my head, like I used to be able to do. It's just too much crap to sift through with your eyes for it to be a pleasurable hobby. These days, instead of www.tomshardware.com, I go to wikipedia daily. When wikipedia - or, due to expenses, only its advertising supported sister site functioning properly - gets quivery full of flash ads, I'll probably stop visiting wikipedia too. It will not be very deliberate, spiteful, conscious decision to stop visiting it just because I protest or something, but it will simply lose its appeal that it currently has, just like www.tomshardware.com did.
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If that's true, then when the Sun runs out of juice and us, humans, have to find new means to make a living, and generate enough electricity in a dark world without a Sun to keep our computers screens lit, at least we have stuff to fish for in deep space. I mean after we ate up all of Jupiter and the other planets, nuclear converted all hydrogen/silicon/oxygen into Fe 56 and Nickel, and we need new sources of energy to live on, at least we can sail off in all kinds of directions and feed off this space dust. Yummi, I'm already tapping my belly in the name of all the future generations. Of course, assuming we'll find ways to nuclear convert things all the way to iron, but we got lots of time, assuming Last Judgement Day isn't right around the corner in 2008(again.) Lots of assumptions there...
Yup. One just needs to watch "My Fair Lady" to see discrimination among different economic classes that's so thick in the air, it can be cut with a knife. Discrimination is not race based, but manners, grooming, and economic status based for each person. You could say there is equal opportunity discrimination going on.
And then watch the big software companies set up puppet institutions to manage these donations. Then these aggressor companies will initiate new irritating initiatives just so you get irritated and donate to their puppet organizations. What a nice new revenue source! Of course they can't just take the money, but there are still valuable ways to milk this scheme: for instance they will set up nonprofit orgs that take in all these donations, and do surveys and statistical market research studies the big companies don't want to pay for in the first place with their own money - why not let the benevolent donators pay for it, then publish the results in some obscure paper the original company can 'pretend' to read it! When you donate, how do you know who you're giving your money to? At least with Unicef or PBS you're not donating 'against' an institution, but against poverty, natural disasters, uneducation, against things that don't have a face, things that can't get upset and exact revenge. For instance poverty won't say it's revenge time, but a company or a person may.
I did use preview, it's all my fault, I guess long run on and on paragraphs don't bother me as much as they do others, especially if I'm just blurting out something vague that I don't really have a structured idea of, and it just all runs together anyway. Plus it conserves space on other people's screens.
What I'd really like is a fully vertical programming environment that's more humane, lets me get to the bare metal if I want to, or be very lazy and high level, if I want to, it would do assembler, C, C++, and higher than C++ level, a set of languages where I know what each statement expands to in the lower level, where the compiler sort of holds my hand, and shows me what's going on, and I'd rather have a more plain english compiler output even if it's not optimized, or if it's optimized and difficult to follow the jumps, then a plain english description of why it's doing it. What happens when I write a statement and get a bug is too much behind the scenes for me, too much of a smoke and mirrors, too cryptic. I'm lazy and prefer writing programs the easy way, in very high level languages, say in basic, python and perl, unfortunately they lack performance because most are interpreted. There should be a way to do high level without interpretation, but instead compiling into lower level stuff, after all, instructions in one language should have a 1 to 1 matching of what happens in another language, or there could be such an optimized matching. If I was allowed to constantly inspect what each high level construct translates to in the lower level language that's still higher than assembler, in a human readable form, that could improve the overall performance and bug issues for all the levels of programming, because if there is a problem, a bug, the programmer could inspect and figure it out and submit patches. I find myself learning things mostly when I'm involved with a task at hand, if I didn't have a problem, I'd never learn about something. I'm sure most people are intelligent enough to figure things out if they really need to, but they have no transparent and easy way these days, it's all or nothing, C++ to straight assembler, and they are stuck with starting off writing a program in a difficult and low level language because that's all you can do - once you made choice and settled on a language, or even a set of libraries, you're stuck with it, and if you don't like the language code, you're welcome to look at the compiler output in assembler. I'd rather see some smoother transition layers, something that starts out very nonverbose and progressively gets more verbose and difficult as you go lower on the layers. Something that starts out as simply as drawing a few diagrams to generate some very high level code, almost in plain english, that a compiler translates into C++, that I can look at, and even see what C++ would translate into in C, and then C into assembler. Some Microchip PIC c compilers retain the original C code next to the assembler part, so it's readable what's going on. Even dotnet that's an interpreted language, that too can list the bytecode next to the original code. I'd like to see what happens, all the way to the bare metal. Yes compiling time would go up, but you could skip intermediate stages if you wanted to. One of the worst things these days is that there is no single programming environment where I can sit down and 'own' the computer, without working my ass off, unless I want to. An environment that debugs the speed of the code, shows you what happens where, what code consumes a lot of memory, what code portion took how many milliseconds to execute, and with this constant feedback, I could concentrate my efforts on the portions I'd like to concentrate on. You could have the 4 level layers called C-02, C-01, C+00, C+01, C+02, etc. C-02 equivalent to the architecture layer, C-01 to the C layer, C+00 to what currently C++ is, C+01 to something like basic or python, and C+02 to some diagramming software (like VB/VBA macro record or Visio or something similarly super-easy). You could then directly compile C+02 to C-02 if C+02 diagramming software is all you know, or go deeper in the in-between levels, depending on how much elbow-grease you'd like to put in and what your skill level is, you could go from C+02 to C+01 to C+00, each code expandable if it has a hand-coded equivalent, or just using the de
Actually, this story is a something that those watching you hope for, cuz they are bored. How many people will you find in the world that have such skills and a 1 Ghz receving dish, and are willing to come over to the dark side, to hack surveillance systems, instead of making a comfy living off of their skills? Maybe 1 in 10 million, or less. Story might as well could have been about a dual-life person: Nobel prize biologist, head of genetics research and big hospital/university caught robbing a bank or something.
I agree with you...
I contracted carpal tunnel in under 3 weeks - by getting a temporary job where part of the duties was pulling brass rings on frayed braided wire ends, using a grinder, and pulling long cables on the floor to stretch them straight. After about pulling only 5 rings onto the ends of the braided wire, your hand muscles started to burn, and you had over 50 to do, then came the grinder-vibrations to work in the pain, then finally the cable pulling. Worst is that it didn't hurt right there, but when you got home, and fell asleep, you wake up because it all gets numb, and you have to shake your hands, flex your wrists, til the numbness gets bearable. Unconsciously picking up the phone while it was ringing in your mid sleep, made you drop the handset from the pain, like wtf was that, why does it hurt so badly to grab anything. It only hurts when it's rested, but it gets better when you use it. By the way, in all this, typing was the easiest thing ever, that was like the only thing I could comfortably do.
If you run your mouth like I do on slashdot, you too will get one of these handpicked jobs that mess you up in record time, the work imported all the way from France, once they find out how quickly and well it works messing other people up too, it's like, we gotta try this on that hothead too. Needless to say I left pretty quickly, not that it was an option but I chose it anyway. The symptoms and numbness never really subside, once you have carpal tunnel, you always have carpal tunnel, it's just a lot less painful, and less noticeable, or you just get used to it more, but it comes back at the slightest wrist effort exerted. But the article was right, typing and carpal tunnel syndrome, at least in my personal experience are very unrelated, typing is like the only thing you can comfortably do if you have carpal tunnel, but try grabbing the mouse, or the telephone, and ouch. Unless you type in a really messed up way, clenching your hands so hard that your muscles burn after 5 minutes of typing, then maybe it's possible to get it from typing.
Forget terraforming? One can dream... Ever thought of bringing enough hydrogen from Jupiter to inject hydrogen bombs deep into the core of Mars, lighting them one after the other to melt the inner core, just like Earth has it, so then Mars can have a magnetic field resistant to solar wind? Once it's molten, it would probably take only a ton of hydrogen a month to sustain it molten. You could either ship it from Jupiter, or just collect the solar wind. Or just even pump the solar energy you collect somehow into the core. Then if we got really good, we could turn all that rock bound oxygen into neon, to have an oxygen/neon atmosphere instead of the oxygen/nitrogen one we got down here on Earth. (oxygen/helium that divers breathe wouldn't work because helium would escape even with a magnetic field.) This technology is probably still 200-2000 years far in the future for us, because we can't even turn hydrogen into helium in massive quantities, let alone oxygen into neon, but eventually, hey. Such terraforming silicate rock oxygen extractors cooking up neon reactors could transform any livable piece of rock of sufficient size. I don't know how much mass there is in the asteroid belt, but we might even be able to put together yet another planet to live on, and set it into orbit. Maybe in another 30,000 years? Then you could have Venus, Earth, Mars and that other planet inhabited by people, and the Earth-Moon and a couple other moons as jumping grounds/space flight pit stops. Also lots of self sustaining self-contained glass-bubble space stations all over the place. Then if any planet goes nuts and decides to start a thermonuclear war, at least there would be 3 other planets and lots of space stations with jungles, snakes, monkeys and elephants and of course people too, to carry on. One can dream, can't one?
if you're an ant..
Duh. Linux can be had for free, without a sale. You could even say linux had zero sales and you could still be missing the point, because some people might find it very useful and might be using it very happily, for free. This is not the front to attack linux from.
If you wanted to have a point to what you say, you could say about linux that people who made it were too lazy to make it good because they weren't paid, and I could believe that with good data backing it up, but it must be hard to prove that point, or we'd see it all over the place. You could also say that linux was submarined and made defective on purpose, that there was significant effort invested by the competition to bring it down, or to bring down its creators, and I would even believe that with even less data, but I'd get very pissed. "Ideally" (according to some people,) people who get paid lots of money to program should come up with better software than those that only make a comfortable sustenance at it, and are mostly fueled by compassion and the love of their art, and the recognition of their peers. Money can only buy you so much recognition in a linux coding community, but if you're the creator of some cool kernel feature, or device driver, or super optimized smp code section that everyone admires to read, now you're talking.
For the other side, there was a story on PBS about two gun-inventors, from about the 1960's, one in the US, the other in the USSR. I forget the actual gun names. They both invented roughly equivalent guns, that were robust, could be dragged through mud and still work, and the US version even saw action in Vietnam, where soldiers preferred it to the more sophisticated guns that just broke down at the slightest touch of dirt. So basically, the US inventor got very rich, while his Soviet counterpart got a medal. This is the most important difference, according to the Soviet guy, as he commented on it years later. Sooner or later that aspect catches up with people too, especially if they are like an ex soviet, currently living barely at the edge of sustenance level. Hey, after the collapse of USSR, there were PBS reports showing a guy with a family to support, whose job was to guard the nuclear warheads, saying he hasn't been paid for six months by his government, because it was so bankrupt it couldn't even send a spaceship up to the MIR space station, and an astronaut was stuck up there for like a year, until the US Space Shuttle made a trip to pick him up. So yes, soviet gun inventors care a lot about not getting paid, especially when they are hungry. Basically, if you want the freecoding linux programming community to care more about getting paid, you should find a way to starve them, but as soon as they make enough to have food, and shelter (but not soap, clothing, combs, etc, such things are unimportant to happiness, unless you want to get laid) off they go again, out of your control.
I'm using the GPL 2D only nv driver, and it works fine, gives a fine resolution, super clear picture, in Knoppix 3.6, which is a Debian clone distro. True I don't play 3d games, but the official, non-GPL nvidia driver's 2D isn't better at all, and I'm just too lazy to reinstall it everytime I wipe the partition to reinstall Knoppix to the harrdrive in 20 minutes, having all my important data on separate partitions, except some emails and files I back up. Easiest way to keep your system clean and running in top shape - have a garbage heap of data drive where you toss all your junk that you may need later, and a super-clean, OS only partition, whether it's windows or linux. Everytime you mess it up, install wrong gcc, mess up your libs, clutter up your symlinks, easy does it, burn a cd from the iso image, pop in the cd, wipe, reinstall, done. No looking for needle in a haystack, just replace the haystack with a fresh one.
Actually, if you know trigonometry, it's 40cm / tangent(beach slope angle). For example, if your beach slope is 5 degrees, the tangent is 0.0875, and thus you have to drive 40 cm / 0.0875=457 cm less, or 4.5 meters less. If your beach slope is only 1 degrees, barely sloping, then the tangent is 0.0175, and you have to drive a whopping 23 meters less!
You know, we talk about nuclear proliferation, but that's nothing compared to biotech proliferation. I think that should be on top of Bush's agenda. Once you can 'write' biological viruses that attack people based on their genetic heritage, that's gonna really suck. How long til another holier than thou Hitler shows up, and decides to purify the world? You don't possess the "officially approved" genetics, so down with you. With all the computer viruses that get written targeting a specific vulnerability, you have a solution, you can switch OS's and play the security by obscurity thing, or even stay with mainstream and play the patched-it-now-you're-it cat-and-mouse game. Worst thing that happens is all the computers going down and you get really pissed, but that's about it, so what. But you can't do that to your own software, to your own DNA, can't patch it on the fly, at least not yet, and the Almighty save your souls from a world where you can. And if your own DNA 'crashes' there is no reboot, unless you believe in reincarnation. There are always two sides to everything: a good side and a bad side, a dark side and a light side. Every power has benefits and dangers. Nuclear stuff at least can provide/get converted to heating, air conditioning, food, car fuel, what not, and even if something goes wrong - even after hiroshima and nagasaki - the rest of the world goes on, people live, the eskimos, the amish, the bushmans, and the jungle people live, whales, elephants, jaguars live on, even if the modern world 'crashes'. Nuclear stuff is not contagious. But there is nothing scarier that I can think of than biotechnology, what hell can get loose once we attain sufficient knowledge to tinker with the software with too much ease. Have you seen them cows with huge titties that they can barely drag around? Yes, biotechnology at your service, providing you lots of milk. But you will always have some idiots or pranksters who think it's kewl to make a fly or a grasshopper the size of an elephant, or a super-virus that attacks anything, just like you have it with all these creative computer virus writers. Just think of the sick doctors who kill their own patients. With sufficiently developed biotech viruses filled with intent, that freely jump from bacteria to plants to animals to humans, if one gets loose to proliferate, good luck to us all. Or even if it's not as destructive, just selective enough, just think of a special SARS or bird flu that specifically targets people with slanted eyes, but won't touch anyone else. Yeah, biotech has the potential to cure illnesses, I know. But still, please meditate over that other side too, once in a while.
How about this for a high tension nailbiting action movie: deploying a few 27-ton hydrogen bombs on the other side of the moon, that's facing away from the planet, so it's safe because it can never be directed back to the home planet, because it's aways facing outwards. How neat is it that we got just such a moon - must be intelligent design, eh? So if anything approaches, be it a UFO invader ship undercover disguised as an asteorid, we gon pulverize it to pieces. Don't nobody mess with us, eartians, especially eartians from the Great State of Texas, because we gon send our buddy Arnold @ u to convey the message: "asta la vista, baby." How much kewler can we get? We badazz muthafukas. Then of course these things are never as safe as you think, and through a malfunction or a UFO infiltrator sabotage they find a way to get sent back at the planet, and you later find out that the asteroid terrorists were just a hoax, to coax everyone into fear, there are no UFO's, no asteroids even, that was all just a myth, a clever conspiracy, but by then it's too late, there is already chaos down on the planet, and all the nations armed to teeth with nukes as a mutually assured destruction deterrent will mutually "assure" each other when they all lose their temper and get carried away. All this in a movie, yeah. But in the real world, how about that gravity idea again? Pretty please, with cherry on top? Cuz it doesn't sound so bad! Not at all! I'll take it anyday, if it works.
"you don't own land until you've mixed your labor with it" - is a pretty nasty statement, that's what commies used to say, and I even heard a union guy say the same thing about the factory he was working in - that the CEO, board of directors, and the bosses up there do no work, they just collect the cream off the cake, when in reality it's him, the worker who owns the plant, because he's the one who's doing any work. Watch out with these arguments, because risk taking without any labor is an important thing too - wait til you open your own business and hire someone to work in it, and claim it's theirs, or when you invest your hard or not so hard earned money in the stock market, risking to lose it all, but expecting a return because of that risk, without any labor. This guy was saying all this while him and his wife were actually opening a restaurant - so he'd get to experience the other side of it first hand. It only gets unfair when there is almost absolute certainty and zero risk involved, nor labor, yet there is still a high expectation of an "unfair" return. Measuring risk, estimating risk is the easiest thing to unfairly manipulate.
So in this sense, owning property on the moon, just like owning stocks, is not about control, nor labor, but about risk taking, and expectation of a profit return on that risk. Right now land on the moon is free - you want it, please, go there, sit on it, nobody will stop you, it's not a limited resource like parking spots in some places. When you figure out a way to produce space-satellite-solar-panels from moonrock, then it will have value, because lifting things off the moon with a rocket, climibing out of that gravity hole costs tremendously less than climbing out of Earth's gravity hole. Then your product, the transmitted energy, will bear a price down here on Earth, and if profitable, then there will be some demand for moon land property where it becomes a scarce resource, and it can command a price. But for now, land on the moon is free, please go ahead and use it, show us how it can be profitably used.
Besides the risk taking part above, there is also ownership by control, as you say it. At the very least, right now, when you land on the moon with an object, the ground you take up under you, you can consider that your property, because nobody can walk right through that piece of land, while you occupy it, just like nobody can walk right through that volume of space you're taking up right now while reading this, you basically 'own' that chunk of space, with your body.
When the moon-land will command a price, I wonder who the authority will be to issue property rights titles. I think as long as there is enough room on the moon for everyone to do their business, land will be free, just like it was during nomadic times. It's gonna be a first-come-first-served basis. You like that piece of crater right there because it has nice minerals in it? Be the first one to get there, and stick a flag down on it, and put a fence around it. If you're willing to invest at least in the fence material, hey, it's yours. When the top spots are occupied, and the less demanded sites are also in process of being fully taken up, then the UN will probably have a moon-registry, with who owns what patch where, and then the interested owners can engage in exchanges and trade deals, together with mere mortals down here on earth purchasing stakes and stocks in the respective moon-companies, because then, when there is something actually going on, when they represent true value, then they can command a price.
Hey, as long as down here water, air, sunshine, moonshine (and at least some information, some general education in the common body of human knowledge) is free, is a right, and I don't owe any "sovereign ruler" an "existence fee" for my "original sin" to happen to be born into this world, I'm all cool with people selling and buying moon property, especially if that means that they can do something useful with it.
Pennsylvania and Ohio have reciprocal tax agreements, where even if you telecommute, you pay your own resident state's taxes only. It's kind of neat, because less headaches for you. This is state tax only, you still have to look at local city taxes, depending on city you worked in.
Warm blood has a huge cost. Snakes can go for weeks or even months to a full year without eating, simply beause they don't need to maintain all that energy wasting hot body temperature. In water, maintaining a body temperature of 37C like mammals, or 42C like birds, might be impossible, because compared to air, the rate of heat loss in water is just so much greater. So all these fish get is something above ambient, and you can bet that they have to hunt and feed and pay very dearly with energy-cash for each extra degree. But since the heat gives them speed, extra agility, there is probably some balance point, some optimum temperature. I wonder if such optimum temperatures could be mathematically deducted, and how close these fish get to it. It's hard to stick a number on hunting success vs. agility, even if you can stick a number on agility vs. temperature. Of course when you got very plenty food, all the food in the world that you want, that temperature might come out something nonsensical, like 200C, so this temperature is probably very dependent on the available food supply too.
Umm... do I have to answer that?
Ever seen a James Bond movie? He always keeps the speed limit, doesn't he? Yeah right. Laws won't stop the you getting tracked by your cellphone, the only thing they do is provide some need to jump the hoops and get around the protocols in a courtroom over inadmissable evidence. Hey, at least we got the courtroom protocols, the Constitution, voting, even if they don't always get upheld or work ideally, but it could be worse - not having any of those things would suck even worse.
Ever hear of William Tell?
Blah, autofill browser setting, I messed up the post title again.
I still giggle when I talk to an SBC service rep, and the discussion finally finishes with them saying:
"Thank you for choosing SBC!"
This is more like chemistry, not physics.
Other than nuclear material, which is just out of the question, your regular pump gas is pretty much the most energy dense thing you can comfortably carry around and deal with, because, being a hydrocarbon, it carries a lot of hydrogen, lot of carbon, has a 0.80 g/cm3 density at room temperature compared to 0.13 g/cm3 few Kelvin supercold liquid hydrogen. Not to mention it's a liquid, nonpressurized, easy to handle under normal conditions. Unfortunately the carbon portion of gas is responsible for all the "extra" CO2 in the atmosphere that's most likely the cause of, global warming, with, say, lake Chad getting dried up and wiped off the face of the planet. Hydrogen would cause no global warming, at least that's the theory these days against CO2, and theories are often right.
Everytime you convert energy from one form into another, you lose some. When you convert metal to hydrogen, gas to hydrogen, or any for of energy into some other form, you lose some. If you can directly milk the energy out of the metal, especially into straight electricity, then you lose the least.
The most you lose when you touch a thermal way of converting energy - using a heat engine between hot and cold temperatures - you're talking massive losses, efficiencies near 10-40%, that is 60-90% goes to waste. In your internal combustion engine car most of the theoretical energy bound up in gas goes out the exhaust as heat, and you only get that 30% (or 40% with Diesel) converted into mechanical torque.
Electric to mechanical conversion efficiency is near 98%. If you carry metal around, forget converting it into H2 that you feed to an internal combustion engine that drives an alternator that charges your hybrid battery. Use the metal to just make a straight battery out of it, where the metal gets consumed. Though if this were very feasible, we'd already have battery-cars, and at the gas station you'd exchange your used up 20lb battery packs and get new ones, instead of pumping gas. But who knows what the future holds?
You're very right when it comes to hydrogen carrying capacity. You also need to haul around 24g Mg to make 2g H2, or 27g Al/3g H2. That's a big difference, though volumetrically may be competitive compared to the very low density of liquid H2 (0.13 g/cm3), or NiMH/Pt/Pd type hydrogen storage that achieves the same volumetric density, though at much higher weight. /4g H2, but reactivity is the worst, plus, unlike any of the other stuff up to carbon, carbon oxides are gaseous and emittable. Methane is also gaseous, problematic to carry just like hydrogen gas was. As far as solids go, lithium borohydride has probably the highest hydrogen carrying capacity in a solid form that results in solid waste lithium borate, though it's expensive to make, and to recycle the lithium/boron back to the hydride.
Lithium you'd need 7g Li/1g H2, beryllium(toxic) 9g Be/2g H2, and Boron 11g B/3g H2(though spontaneous reactivy is worse, so there is a reason why organic electrolyte lithium ion batteries use lithium.) Guess what? As you say it, carbon you need 12g
The obvious question with this metal solution is what do you do with your metal oxide? Dump it out on the asphalt behind you? Or haul it around with you? You certainly wouldn't be able to dump lithium borate, because it's so expensive, but if we're at dumping, you might burn metallic silicon (cheap, metallurgic grade purity prepared by non-carbon routes) to make quartz which is sand, which should be OK to dump behind you. You need 28g Si/4gH2, compared to 12g C, but the energy density of Si, on a weight basis is still close to that of C, because the Silicon oxide formation releases more heat than carbon dioxide formation, on a molar basis. Problem with silicon is that it's unreactive (also meaning that it's very safe,) and barely anything bites it at room temperature, while at high temperatures (molten silicates) your engine parts would wear out. (If these engine chambers are cheap, such as graphite molds, you might have a cheap consumable engine cavity that burns silicon, somehow harvests the energy, then recycle your whole engine cavity.) So anyway, dumping silicon dioxide would create a mess on the roads, and probably cause silicosis in all the drivers, so solid effluents from your car would suck. Even a carbon dioxide effluent is preferable to silicon dioxide, but hydrogen oxide is always the most preferable.
Probably the best solution with such metals is to keep the "effluent" with you and haul it around, and exchange it at the nearest gas station. Lithium/boron stuff would still be expensive, would need recycling, but aluminium oxide capsules that you can just toss in the garbage would probably be more cost effective, even given the 27g Al/11g B ratio, because aluminum is more abundant, nontoxic, other than some correlation with the aluminum fluoride in it that may be causing Alzheimer's. As far as this Alzheimer's threat goes, there is an expensive nonfluoride aluminum production (carbochlorination), by the Alcoa/Toth aluminum company, that can even process clays into aluminum, silicon, etc, but nobody has bothered commercially so far to recylce the CO from the carbochlorination back to C and O2 via zirconia electrolysis, and even fluoride aluminum production these days releases mole per mole stoichiometric quantities of carbon, so you might as well just burn gasoline instead of aluminum, (or even silicon, pidgeon process magnesium. In fluoride/cryolite aluminum production they are coming up with new anodes (titanium diboride instead of graphite) that will require more electrical energy and be more expensive compared to cheap coal, but generate direct oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. The problem is that burning coal/carbon to carbon dioxide is the cheapest thing on the planet, replacing that with expensive electricity (hydro, nuclear, solar, wind,) well, it's just not cost competitive these days without some government push, either via regulations or via tax credits.
Still, you waste a lot of available energy just converting the metal
Server load on wikipedia is going up - who pays for that? On the other hand, the nice thing about wikipedia is that it doesn't quiver and shake and explode in your face, insulting your intelligence and dignity, like all the other advertising driven sites. Only Google ads are still and calm, I'd have no problem with those, if they get a small, designated ad section - but not like those news sites that blast a picture in the middle of some news story, and squeeze the text to a 5 letter wide column to accomodate the image. Or have a 20 sentence "content" in a thin column in the middle, and the whole page covered with about 200 sentence worth of ads. Check out www.tomshardware.com for instance. This site used to be a joy to read back in 1996-2000. Now it's way too commercialized, and probably lost a lot of its appeal because of it, including a lot of its audience. I used to go almost daily to www.tomshardware.com back then to see what's new. I was also a computer hardware enthusiast and up to date on the new things, on a daily basis. When tomshardware got excited about a recent development, I got excited too. Now I go maybe bimonthly, and I couldn't tell you what the best mobo/cpu/memory/harddisk deal today is, off the top of my head, like I used to be able to do. It's just too much crap to sift through with your eyes for it to be a pleasurable hobby. These days, instead of www.tomshardware.com, I go to wikipedia daily. When wikipedia - or, due to expenses, only its advertising supported sister site functioning properly - gets quivery full of flash ads, I'll probably stop visiting wikipedia too. It will not be very deliberate, spiteful, conscious decision to stop visiting it just because I protest or something, but it will simply lose its appeal that it currently has, just like www.tomshardware.com did.