The problem is this: its not like we are going to bulldose our spralling cities and start anew. We have to realise that we have to live in the what we created, changing the composition of our existing development is not really an option.
Were the houses pre-existent when the European settlers moved to America? No, they were built. The composition can be gradually changed over the timespan of a generation (~20 years) by enforcing taxes on vehicles, fuel and changing zoning laws to be more permissive.
One of the biggest problems people have with cities is that they often involve giving up personal freedom (bloomberg).
Freedom to do what? Shoot deer? Just play paintball, at least the prey is smarter.
Because by living away from commercial districts it improves our lives with reduced crime and noise
Dead wrong. It creates sleeper towns which are deserted and hence easily robbed during the day, and commercial districts which are deserted and easily robbed during the night. The key to safety is 24h community presence. You do have a point about noise, but that is nothing proper soundproofing would not solve. That leaves cost, which is the only significant factor.
As for the USA being bigger, I doubt most miles driven are trips other than to/from work, etc.
But, in short summary, how do people get aid in food shortages now? Charity, but it is forced by government, who gets their cut ("administrative expenses"). How does the free market take care of this? Charity, only through people like you and me going directly through private organizations that, while having their own administrative costs, are far more efficient and accountable.
That is a lot of neo-liberal rhetoric disproved by past history. Private charity sure did not help the Irish during the XIXth century famine, a famine caused in fact by the free market policies from the leading capitalist nation at the time (the UK). Even before that, speculation on the price of wheat led to the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon to power. The reaction of the monarchs of France to the rise in the price of bread was feeble. Ignore history at your peril.
I love free markets, but they are not a solution for everything. For disaster relief pure free market policies usually lead to short term misery and death. Most people tend to try to go by without insurance because they see no immediate benefits from it, then when the shit hits the fan, everyone gets affected, directly or indirectly.
History shows private charity is manifestly insuficient to solve a lot of problems. Government sponsored charity can be of benefit, and it saddens me to not see it used more. For example, after WWII we managed to erradicate smallpox. Why haven't we erradicated polio and malaria as well?
If a private space industry is to arise, I suspect it will have to start with expendables and/or possibly suborbital flights first.
Expendables are easier and cheaper to design than reusables, so they provide a lower barrier to market entry. Some of the leading edge technology used for expendables is useful for reusables as well. Many of the problems are similar. Once you get an expendable liquid rocket engine with regenerative cooling, you got your reusable engine right there. It may be possible to do a piecewise attempt at an economic reusable vehicle, starting with retrieval of the most expensive components (like the engine) first.
The Germans tried to jumpstart a private space industry before WWII and after WWII. Before WWII they tried to push rocket mail service, publicity flights, the works. After WWII people like Lutz Kaiser from OTRAG tried to push cheap modular expendable launch vehicles. But political problems stopped both those attempts. The people trying to push rocket mail service were banned from legally launching rockets. First by the forced Nazi militarization of the nascent industry, then the post-war democratic government feared someone would die from a rocket crashing on top of them. OTRAG had to test launch from outside Germany because of that. Unfortunately he picked third world tin-pot dictators as a source for financing, then the USA, Germany and the USSR pressured them to fold.
Had there not been a WWII and the nationalization of German rocket development, we could probably have had a booming private space industry by now.
I am hopeful Space X will succeed on their first flight and start commercial orbital launches on the cheap, but it is sure going to be hard.
The standard also paves the way for optional content protection, which is not automatically part of the standard, Lempesis said. Instead, a module could be added by manufacturers to prevent unauthorized content from being viewed on the display--a feature surely to be a hit in Hollywood.
The US Peacekeeper missile has 10 warheads with 300 kilotons each. Trident II could have 8 warheads with 300 kilotons.
The Russian Topol-M has like 1 warhead with 550 kilotons. Their old R36-M Satan missile can carry a single 25 megaton warhead, but I don't know how many of those they have left.
It is a mixed blessing. Had we erradicated all apes before HIV jumped to humans, perhaps there would be no HIV pandemic today. For e.g. we kill rats to stop the spreading of plague, and mosquitoes to stop the spreading of malaria.
Animals can be disease vectors (see Asian flu scares) or sources for cures or vaccines for certain diseases (e.g. smallpox vaccine using cowpox virus).
You put the finger in the wound. Propulsion is the fundamental problem to solve in order to have cheap access to space.
Assuming the engine was not reusable, the erosion in NERVA would have been ok. But that was 60s reactor technology.
Newer designs used pebble-bed reactor technology with SiC coated nuclear fuel. The reactor temperature was higher, so performance was higher too. To reduce erosion further Nitrogen could be used as the reaction mass instead of Hydrogen, at a decrease in ISP. This page has some info.
Ignoring GCR etc for now.
Then there are the Orion like designs using pulsed nuclear propulsion. If there was a solar system war going on, I bet these would be developed. They would make for the best military combat vehicles because of sheer acceleration. Speed is defense. Since there are no Martians and we are not at war with them, it is just too expensive to be developed.
The alternative is laser/microwave propulsion. Given current technological developments in the areas of optics and radio, I suspect they will be our ticket out of this gravity well.
The space elevator is interesting, but it depends on materials science, which is like the slowest evolving branch of science there is.
It depends on what your elevator is made of. If your elevator is made of magical pixie dust, it weighs two grams and can be lifted into orbit by a faerie.;) If it's made of a theoretical but thusfar impossible-seeming ~120 GPa nanotube fiber, it'll weigh 20 metric tons. If it's made of something we might see in our lifetimes - say, large-scale strengths and denisities similar to diamond, it'd weigh thousands to tens of thousands of metric tons. If it's made of materials that we can make in bulk now, it'd be like launching a second moon.
As long as it is relatively cheap to manufacture the elevator, you can boost a light elevator and use that to lift the heavy elevator.
Actually, there is a lot of uranium left. Those 50 to 100 years are predicted given current reserves. More uranium exploration could find further resources. Then there is plenty of uranium for e.g. in seawater which could be economically recovered. Also, current reactors do not efficiently burn the nuclear fuel. Most of the energy is left in the waste, including the generated plutonium.
Then there are the thorium reserves, which outstrip uranium.
Fission power would be enough for hundreds, possibly thousands of years of consumption, if properly developed.
The copyright system is not the only system to ensure the authors get compensated for their trouble. In fact, it only started to come into use after the printing press (basically an expensive broadcast device) was developed.
It used to be that knowledge was peer-to-peer. Either verbally transmitted, or hand-copied. Anyone who could speak or write would basically be able to produce a viable copy.
With the introduction of the printing press, it was possible for the few who owned a press to manufacture many copies at a greatly reduced cost and increased quality. Hence copyright restrictions came into the scene. Initially mostly to censor, then later to compensate authors.
Today the pendulum is slowly swinging back to peer-to-peer. Once it does, there are two choices: either to enforce draconian regulations to maintain the previous status quo (being done, will not work), or to adapt to the new circumstances.
The old way for authors to earn money was patronage. There is nothing preventing that from being done in the Internet. In fact, schemes such as Paypal and the Amazon honor system already exist and are in use.
The old scheme arguably produced better literature (e.g. the Iliad or Otello) than that written now.
Microsoft Word itself is incompatible between versions. Newer versions of Word can never render old files as they looked when they were written. New files usually cannot be read by old versions of Word. The DOC format is quite likely the most imbecile document format known to man.
I doubt the Scottish police needs more than ASCII anyway. If they used a web based solution, then they would only need a PC with a browser to work and they could do it from anywhere, even in the field, as long as they had an Internet connection.
...one reason most of You (the slashdot crowd, for example, not you in particular) don't associate "reasonable" answers with MS employees is that you often *disregard* our reasonable answers, or write them off, and just remember the times we say boneheaded things...
No, it is more like we evaluate what this guy says on one side, then we look at what the people actually in charge (Gates and Ballmer) say, then we look at what Microsoft actually *does* and the pattern is quite obvious. Microsoft would like nothing better but for Linux and Apache to die.
You know, I never understood why games developers don't just write for Linux (or indeed, any other OS), and then provide their games on a bootable disc.
CD/DVD drives are slow. Hard disks are fast. Some games are so bloated, it wouldn't work without a disk cache of a sort.
I suppose it would not be impossible to create some sort of virtual Linux filesystem on top of the user's pre-existing Windows filesystem using a hardfile for the disk cache though.
Just some Bible quotes about the things I mentioned, for reference.
Multiply:
Genesis 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 9:7 And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.
Raped her? Marry her:
Deuteronomy 22:28 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;
Deuteronomy 22:29 Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
The Bible has another interesting little episode which essentially approves rape as long as the rapist is forced to marry the woman he raped.
The whole point of the Old Testament is about spreading God's chosen few over the face of the Earth. So anything which boosts the number of children born (rape, polygamy, daughters getting pregnant from their own father) while ensuring that women only get one sexual partner to delay disease transmission by sex, is permissible.
IIRC LDT (now known as HyperTransport) came from API (Alpha Processor Incorporated) and was supposed to be shared with AMD. API was a DEC Alpha licensee, not DEC. AFAIK Alpha never used LDT and APIs team was bought by AMD after the Alpha debacle.
As for the P4s innovation in arithmetic logic (double-speed arithmetic units), it proved to be so good that the P4s successor will not seemingly have that wonderful *ahem* innovation. It probably makes the CPU too hot.
Trace caches are interesting. But you have to see that the Athlon actually uses a pretty good scheme of its own with pre-decode bits. It is not your dads P6 that is for sure. As for P6, while wonderful in its day, it borrowed extensively from ideas which were shown in Cyrix processors first (i.e. X86 executed on a RISCy backend). Sure it improved upon them, but wholly original it was not.
Actually I think VIA used TSMC plants. Cyrix was a very old company which held certain patents which might be a thorn if Intel decided to go against them for making a clone CPU with the same ISA.
Because TSMC had certain manufacturing issues IIRC they switched to IBM for the manufacturing for a time. Not sure where they fab them now.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer something like number of fatalities due to violent crime.
Were the houses pre-existent when the European settlers moved to America? No, they were built. The composition can be gradually changed over the timespan of a generation (~20 years) by enforcing taxes on vehicles, fuel and changing zoning laws to be more permissive.
One of the biggest problems people have with cities is that they often involve giving up personal freedom (bloomberg).
Freedom to do what? Shoot deer? Just play paintball, at least the prey is smarter.
Dead wrong. It creates sleeper towns which are deserted and hence easily robbed during the day, and commercial districts which are deserted and easily robbed during the night. The key to safety is 24h community presence. You do have a point about noise, but that is nothing proper soundproofing would not solve. That leaves cost, which is the only significant factor.
As for the USA being bigger, I doubt most miles driven are trips other than to/from work, etc.
That is a lot of neo-liberal rhetoric disproved by past history. Private charity sure did not help the Irish during the XIXth century famine, a famine caused in fact by the free market policies from the leading capitalist nation at the time (the UK). Even before that, speculation on the price of wheat led to the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon to power. The reaction of the monarchs of France to the rise in the price of bread was feeble. Ignore history at your peril.
I love free markets, but they are not a solution for everything. For disaster relief pure free market policies usually lead to short term misery and death. Most people tend to try to go by without insurance because they see no immediate benefits from it, then when the shit hits the fan, everyone gets affected, directly or indirectly.
History shows private charity is manifestly insuficient to solve a lot of problems. Government sponsored charity can be of benefit, and it saddens me to not see it used more. For example, after WWII we managed to erradicate smallpox. Why haven't we erradicated polio and malaria as well?
Expendables are easier and cheaper to design than reusables, so they provide a lower barrier to market entry. Some of the leading edge technology used for expendables is useful for reusables as well. Many of the problems are similar. Once you get an expendable liquid rocket engine with regenerative cooling, you got your reusable engine right there. It may be possible to do a piecewise attempt at an economic reusable vehicle, starting with retrieval of the most expensive components (like the engine) first.
The Germans tried to jumpstart a private space industry before WWII and after WWII. Before WWII they tried to push rocket mail service, publicity flights, the works. After WWII people like Lutz Kaiser from OTRAG tried to push cheap modular expendable launch vehicles. But political problems stopped both those attempts. The people trying to push rocket mail service were banned from legally launching rockets. First by the forced Nazi militarization of the nascent industry, then the post-war democratic government feared someone would die from a rocket crashing on top of them. OTRAG had to test launch from outside Germany because of that. Unfortunately he picked third world tin-pot dictators as a source for financing, then the USA, Germany and the USSR pressured them to fold.
Had there not been a WWII and the nationalization of German rocket development, we could probably have had a booming private space industry by now.
I am hopeful Space X will succeed on their first flight and start commercial orbital launches on the cheap, but it is sure going to be hard.
Pulsejets are too noisy for use on a civilian transport.
Hey, at least its optional.
The US Peacekeeper missile has 10 warheads with 300 kilotons each. Trident II could have 8 warheads with 300 kilotons.
The Russian Topol-M has like 1 warhead with 550 kilotons. Their old R36-M Satan missile can carry a single 25 megaton warhead, but I don't know how many of those they have left.
Some dissipates back into space, some is stored in the form of dead animals or plants, some is used up catalyzing natural chemical reactions, etc.
Animals can be disease vectors (see Asian flu scares) or sources for cures or vaccines for certain diseases (e.g. smallpox vaccine using cowpox virus).
Assuming the engine was not reusable, the erosion in NERVA would have been ok. But that was 60s reactor technology.
Newer designs used pebble-bed reactor technology with SiC coated nuclear fuel. The reactor temperature was higher, so performance was higher too. To reduce erosion further Nitrogen could be used as the reaction mass instead of Hydrogen, at a decrease in ISP. This page has some info.
Ignoring GCR etc for now.
Then there are the Orion like designs using pulsed nuclear propulsion. If there was a solar system war going on, I bet these would be developed. They would make for the best military combat vehicles because of sheer acceleration. Speed is defense. Since there are no Martians and we are not at war with them, it is just too expensive to be developed.
The alternative is laser/microwave propulsion. Given current technological developments in the areas of optics and radio, I suspect they will be our ticket out of this gravity well.
The space elevator is interesting, but it depends on materials science, which is like the slowest evolving branch of science there is.
As long as it is relatively cheap to manufacture the elevator, you can boost a light elevator and use that to lift the heavy elevator.
Then there are the thorium reserves, which outstrip uranium.
Fission power would be enough for hundreds, possibly thousands of years of consumption, if properly developed.
They also gave the ScummVM team the source code to integrate into ScummVM proper.
It used to be that knowledge was peer-to-peer. Either verbally transmitted, or hand-copied. Anyone who could speak or write would basically be able to produce a viable copy.
With the introduction of the printing press, it was possible for the few who owned a press to manufacture many copies at a greatly reduced cost and increased quality. Hence copyright restrictions came into the scene. Initially mostly to censor, then later to compensate authors.
Today the pendulum is slowly swinging back to peer-to-peer. Once it does, there are two choices: either to enforce draconian regulations to maintain the previous status quo (being done, will not work), or to adapt to the new circumstances.
The old way for authors to earn money was patronage. There is nothing preventing that from being done in the Internet. In fact, schemes such as Paypal and the Amazon honor system already exist and are in use.
The old scheme arguably produced better literature (e.g. the Iliad or Otello) than that written now.
Why did you not just use PDF or HTML export?
I doubt the Scottish police needs more than ASCII anyway. If they used a web based solution, then they would only need a PC with a browser to work and they could do it from anywhere, even in the field, as long as they had an Internet connection.
Most Physicists I know can code. FORTRAN and C. In fact, they need to learn it during College.
No, it is more like we evaluate what this guy says on one side, then we look at what the people actually in charge (Gates and Ballmer) say, then we look at what Microsoft actually *does* and the pattern is quite obvious. Microsoft would like nothing better but for Linux and Apache to die.
The Japanese used chemical weapons against civilians in China during WWII.
CD/DVD drives are slow. Hard disks are fast. Some games are so bloated, it wouldn't work without a disk cache of a sort.
I suppose it would not be impossible to create some sort of virtual Linux filesystem on top of the user's pre-existing Windows filesystem using a hardfile for the disk cache though.
Multiply:
Genesis 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 9:7 And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.
Raped her? Marry her:
Deuteronomy 22:28 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;
Deuteronomy 22:29 Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.
The Bible has another interesting little episode which essentially approves rape as long as the rapist is forced to marry the woman he raped.
The whole point of the Old Testament is about spreading God's chosen few over the face of the Earth. So anything which boosts the number of children born (rape, polygamy, daughters getting pregnant from their own father) while ensuring that women only get one sexual partner to delay disease transmission by sex, is permissible.
As for the P4s innovation in arithmetic logic (double-speed arithmetic units), it proved to be so good that the P4s successor will not seemingly have that wonderful *ahem* innovation. It probably makes the CPU too hot.
Trace caches are interesting. But you have to see that the Athlon actually uses a pretty good scheme of its own with pre-decode bits. It is not your dads P6 that is for sure. As for P6, while wonderful in its day, it borrowed extensively from ideas which were shown in Cyrix processors first (i.e. X86 executed on a RISCy backend). Sure it improved upon them, but wholly original it was not.
Because TSMC had certain manufacturing issues IIRC they switched to IBM for the manufacturing for a time. Not sure where they fab them now.