Seems to me we should really be pushing to the 'recycling' types of reactor designs
Hmm. The purpose of a politician is to use the public's resources, to get money from special interests, to lie to and bribe voters.
Given that background, lets consider two plans here:
Non-recycled: New U costs about $25/lb long term, and the USA mined almost 17 kilotons in the peak year. That would be a bit less than a billion dollars. That'll buy a lot of votes, plus you can skim off a thousandth or so for re-election campaigns/bribes. Then you get to spend nine billion and counting on a waste facility that'll probably never be used, which will buy a lot of support and votes. Spending tax money is a loss to taxpayers, but a gain to politicians, and guess whom is in charge of how much to spend?
Recycled: No one in a position of power benefits either thru bribes, jobs, or control. Back in the cold war era, processors basically ignored all EPA and common sense rules, with threats of "security" etc. I'm sure the security theater and scare mongering would be more intense now, so the environmental devastation would be worse. So the general public also does not benefit.
Hmm. I wonder which solution our politicians will choose?
I've been using a Pentium 4 3.0GHz-powered box as a MythTV frontend/backend for more than four years.
Yeechang fails to mention that is roughly the sweet spot for a mythtv frontend. I have plenty of experience trying to get slower boxes to do myth, which can be done at some difficulty. One GHz Via C7 or whatever its called, with a semi-supported openchrome driver, now that was a challenge, but it eventually worked.
A P4 roughly 3 Gigs with about a gig of ram is enough that its no effort to set up at all. Just set up a plain old linux box and it'll work even with the plain jane VESA driver. Now you can do all this binary NVIDIA driver and XVmc and VDPAU or whatever for even better performance, but it'll "just work" on a stock plain old linux install.
You can spend more money on an even faster system for myth. But its just money down the drain, unless you're doing something totally exotic with high def, or trying to do more than five things at once like Yeechang, or attempting to do dual simultaneous displays, or trying to run a backend on the frontend machine, etc.
"certain races are statistically more likely to not be qualified for certain jobs" (as a result of how education funding is related to a neighborhood's wealth, and white people tend to be richer than everyone else).
Intellectual counterpoint, Asians. From peasant to Dr/lawyer/engineer/dentist in one generation is basically normal, for them, for cultural reasons.
Physical counterpoint, Black folks. No matter how wealthy the white neighborhood, NBA and NFL are pretty much non-blacks need not apply. I won't respect the concept of equal opportunity quotas until the NFL starts asian recruitment quotas.
There is also a staggering confusion of class and wealth in America generally. My paternal grandparents were from a upper-middle/lower-upper background (based on education and attitudes), not surprisingly with a bit of motivation and hard work ended up in the executive class. They were NOT from a wealthy neighborhood whatsoever, having grown up dirt poor during the Great Depression. I suspect, now that we're in the Great Recession, my kids generation will be another generation like my grandparents. The amount of money in the wallet appears to have virtually no causation with having the right ideas in the head.
They don't get that by knowing the speed of light, but rather by the construction of the device.
Actually, knowing the speed of light figures rather prominently in the design of the resonators in the magnetron.
Its hard to do RF design stuff that doesn't at some fundamental level involve Maxwells equations, which pretty unavoidably has a solution for light velocity...
Any pollution from the remains of these mines would only be temporary, the sea claims all things in the end and it will eventually filter out/destroy toxins on its own once its in flow is stopped.
Conservation of mass is still the rule of the land. Pollution doesn't "disappear" it just dilutes. That being said, from my memory of a week of hands on US army explosives training in the early 90s as an ammo specialist 55B:
1) All unexploded military grade explosives are somewhat toxic. In the movies, or during wartime, people mush C-4 with their bare hands, but its quite poisonous so we wore gloves in training. We were told you'll throw up in the short term, and get cancer in the long term. Best case is probably ANFO, the AN is harmless, but the FO part is literally pouring raw diesel fuel into the water, not all that nice of a thing to do. Just touching nitro dynamite gives an amazing headache, the RDX stuff is way better but still not exactly baby formula. TNT is oily gritty semisolid stuff that partially liquifies when its warm, probably not an issue in the baltic sea...
There are explosives that are non toxic like gunpowder that are not used as a military explosive but only as a propellant in naval guns (modern ones use nitro based smokeless powders). There are exotic mining explosives vaguely involving charcoal and liquid oxygen, which are not used by the military.
2) Generally speaking, the fumes/smoke/whatever of an explosive are WAY less toxic than the explosive itself. Given the choice of breathing the smoke from 1 lb of TNT, or eating 1 lb of TNT, the smoke is WAY more healthy. The smoke from C-4 is nasty and will kill you, but eating or touching unexploded C-4 will kill you WAY faster. The environment is way better off with the stuff exploded than unexploded.
3) Pest control was not an issue in the bunkers, as far as I know, aside from termites in the crates. Unexploded ammo is not good eats.
We've been using fertilizer as explosives for a long time, this really could help the plants.
Sounds good in theory, and as for practice, I have never seen quite as much greenery as the explosives range at the army base in Huntsville, at least as of the early 90s. Apparently nitrates and phosphorous are good for plants, who would have guessed? Also the equivalent of soil aeration could help on the ocean floor.
Well, so you've got two unknowns, the frequency, and the speed of light.
So, you go to google to get the speed of light, and thus calculate the frequency using the wavelength
Now, you know the experimentally determined frequency and the wavelength, so calculate the speed of light, which should be suspiciously near the previously google'd value.
Tada! Where's my Nobel prize in physics?
Seriously though, you probably aren't getting over 2 sig figs on the wavelength, and you have to take somebodys word for it on the free-running magnetron frequency, at best 2 sig figs (theres a reason the ISM bands are very wide). Combine two low accuracy numbers, one of which is a "trust us" number, and get the speed of light to maybe 1 sig fig, that being "really freaking fast".
If we incorporate a pay per email scheme, with an email costing anywhere from 1/2 to 1 cent per email
I get more paper spam in my mailbox, than email spam that slips past spamassassin.
So... if capital one sent me two credit card offers per week, for several years, and each cost at least 50 cents to print and post, that one CC company is spending $50/yr trying to win my business... but charging 1 cent per email will stop spam?
I get coupon magazines that I toss out. For over a decade, when I get a phone book, I toss it out. I get endless catalogs. All of which cost several orders of magnitude more than one cent.
Also if there's one thing the cellphone and landline business has shown, its impossible to bill in units below about one cent (per minute) or below about $20 per total bill. They will have to charge WAY more than one cent, just to recover the costs of the billing infrastructure.
I honestly don't see how knowing what groceries you bought last week
Try harder.
OTC back pain pills = ten years later, rubber stamped as pre-existing condition, medical coverage denied, go die on the street.
'guns and ammo' magazine purchased and you are, live with, work with, or are casually acquainted with a felon (essentially everyone) = Police will be informed, search warrant issued.
What about the 50:50 odds that its her ID card, in which case I'd be grateful.
I have worked in some pretty sketchy locales, oh heck just call them slums. I have seen people living in illuminated signs (hey, gets cold out here sometimes). Assuming the underclass has ID cards, adaptive signs are simply going to display ads for deodorant 24x7. Not that it wouldn't also be a good idea for the average slashdotter.
I've yet to read state regulations that allow them to deny you service you refuse to fork over the SSN. If they refuse to give you service without the SSN then contact your state regulators and open a case.
Geeze, thats all confrontational. Nice plan if you like to fight. If you don't, then just tell them you're an illegal alien. You will get service, and you will have to make a security deposit. Trust me, with illegals nearing 50% in some localities, they are not going to freeze out that enormous fraction of an entire demographic.
One problem is the instant they hear you're "an illegal" they're going to try to transfer you to a spanish speaking rep, and/or try to sell you the spanish TV channel package. Calmly explain you're an illegal alien from Canada or Ireland or Australia, etc.
The way I see it, it's so they can charge you with lying on a gov't form later if it turns out you are a terr'ist.
Nahh, charging someone with lying on a form doesn't get the DA promoted.
Its a reading comprehension test. Some cultures always respond affirmatively to someone superior to them. Thus the hilarity of some outsourced customer service interactions. Those forms will figure out if you can read English well enough to intelligently provide the "correct" answer.
I'm working on a new technology (script based) where people log into a news site and post completely offtopic and unrelated comments drawn from a bag of on-the-surface-interesting-but-truly-vapid comments.
If you're trying to read textbooks on your iPad, your eyes may hate you.
Why? Weren't they all written on LCDs? Do your eyes hurt when you read slashdot on a LCD? How do your eye muscles know the difference between slashdot and a novel, so that they can hurt on queue?
Try using a device with e-ink
Been there, tried that, gray on gray with distracting shadows from lack of backlighting, crazy flashing flickering during each 2 second long page turn isn't going to cut it.
If you want the e-ink experience on a LCD, turn the brightness way down, the contrast way down, monochrome it, modify the display driver so each screen change takes 2 seconds and makes the whole screen flash distractingly. It would be amusing to write a KDE plugin/theme that emulates e-ink.
I will give you that my LCD based jetbook battery only lasts probably 5 to 10 hours at a charge, whereas they claim an e-ink device can run for 20-30 hours continuous on a charge. However, in my modern lifestyle, I consider myself lucky to get 3 continuous reading hours at a time, so the difference is irrelevant to me.
"And there's room for multiple playlists and audiobooks, too."
no equalizer
No interest at all to me.
no flippin' screen
If I'm watching the "flippin' screen" while chopping wood, lack of an equalizer is rapidly going to be the least of my concerns... I explicitly don't want a video watching appliance, only music and/or maybe an audiobook or itunesU series or podcast. I am easily wealthy enough to afford the right tool for each job so I don't need to compromise on a "swiss army" "SUV" style compromise.
yet it costs at least double what any other device
I checked out bestbuy.com and the closest thing to an aluminum 2G $60 shuffle is an all plastic samsung 2G for $40. Add some hacking to make it work with itunes, replace on a regular basis because the plastic case will break, eh.... I'll get the shuffle and save the hassle. Errr, except that the user interface for the shuffle sucks beyond all compare, so I guess I won't buy one. I'll wait until apple sells the 4th gen shuffle, or however long it takes to sell one that doesn't suck.
Now I will concede the point that $80 for a 4 gig shuffle plus $30 for an adapter cable so real headphones/earbuds can be used, plus some shipping/sales tax equals about $120 which is insane for a product with a sucky user interface, when an 8G nano is $150.
Slashdot Mirror
Even more impressively, the article implied in the month following the new release it was 50%.
Stating 4 out of 6 instead of 2 out of 3 implies to me there were 6 total claims.
So, is it:
4 in 6, or 2/3, or 4 out of a total of 6, or 50%.
Hmmm. 100 megabits/sec. At that rate, my 2 gig cap would be reached in
2000 megabytes * 8 bits/byte / 100 megabits per sec = 160 seconds aka 2 minutes 40 seconds
Why does anyone use adobe reader anymore?
On Winderz I use foxit, on linux I mostly use kpdf.
Other than endless exploits, and it seems subjectively to be a bit slower, would I gain anything by using adobe reader?
Seems to me we should really be pushing to the 'recycling' types of reactor designs
Hmm. The purpose of a politician is to use the public's resources, to get money from special interests, to lie to and bribe voters.
Given that background, lets consider two plans here:
Non-recycled: New U costs about $25/lb long term, and the USA mined almost 17 kilotons in the peak year. That would be a bit less than a billion dollars. That'll buy a lot of votes, plus you can skim off a thousandth or so for re-election campaigns/bribes. Then you get to spend nine billion and counting on a waste facility that'll probably never be used, which will buy a lot of support and votes. Spending tax money is a loss to taxpayers, but a gain to politicians, and guess whom is in charge of how much to spend?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United_States
Recycled: No one in a position of power benefits either thru bribes, jobs, or control. Back in the cold war era, processors basically ignored all EPA and common sense rules, with threats of "security" etc. I'm sure the security theater and scare mongering would be more intense now, so the environmental devastation would be worse. So the general public also does not benefit.
Hmm. I wonder which solution our politicians will choose?
I've been using a Pentium 4 3.0GHz-powered box as a MythTV frontend/backend for more than four years.
Yeechang fails to mention that is roughly the sweet spot for a mythtv frontend. I have plenty of experience trying to get slower boxes to do myth, which can be done at some difficulty. One GHz Via C7 or whatever its called, with a semi-supported openchrome driver, now that was a challenge, but it eventually worked.
A P4 roughly 3 Gigs with about a gig of ram is enough that its no effort to set up at all. Just set up a plain old linux box and it'll work even with the plain jane VESA driver. Now you can do all this binary NVIDIA driver and XVmc and VDPAU or whatever for even better performance, but it'll "just work" on a stock plain old linux install.
You can spend more money on an even faster system for myth. But its just money down the drain, unless you're doing something totally exotic with high def, or trying to do more than five things at once like Yeechang, or attempting to do dual simultaneous displays, or trying to run a backend on the frontend machine, etc.
"certain races are statistically more likely to not be qualified for certain jobs" (as a result of how education funding is related to a neighborhood's wealth, and white people tend to be richer than everyone else).
Intellectual counterpoint, Asians. From peasant to Dr/lawyer/engineer/dentist in one generation is basically normal, for them, for cultural reasons.
Physical counterpoint, Black folks. No matter how wealthy the white neighborhood, NBA and NFL are pretty much non-blacks need not apply. I won't respect the concept of equal opportunity quotas until the NFL starts asian recruitment quotas.
There is also a staggering confusion of class and wealth in America generally. My paternal grandparents were from a upper-middle/lower-upper background (based on education and attitudes), not surprisingly with a bit of motivation and hard work ended up in the executive class. They were NOT from a wealthy neighborhood whatsoever, having grown up dirt poor during the Great Depression. I suspect, now that we're in the Great Recession, my kids generation will be another generation like my grandparents. The amount of money in the wallet appears to have virtually no causation with having the right ideas in the head.
This would be like the US going into hyper-inflation because Long Island isn't balancing the budget.
Long Island, maybe not. California, Floriduh, Nevada, Illinois, and NY all at the same time, maybe.
What exactly does a COO do, at an organization like Canonical? I don't mean vague organizational goals, like make us wealthy and cool, but specifics.
I do not mean rephrase the wikipedia entry for COO, but how would you APPLY the wikipedia entry for COO at Canonical?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_operating_officer
They don't get that by knowing the speed of light, but rather by the construction of the device.
Actually, knowing the speed of light figures rather prominently in the design of the resonators in the magnetron.
Its hard to do RF design stuff that doesn't at some fundamental level involve Maxwells equations, which pretty unavoidably has a solution for light velocity...
Any pollution from the remains of these mines would only be temporary, the sea claims all things in the end and it will eventually filter out/destroy toxins on its own once its in flow is stopped.
Conservation of mass is still the rule of the land. Pollution doesn't "disappear" it just dilutes. That being said, from my memory of a week of hands on US army explosives training in the early 90s as an ammo specialist 55B:
1) All unexploded military grade explosives are somewhat toxic. In the movies, or during wartime, people mush C-4 with their bare hands, but its quite poisonous so we wore gloves in training. We were told you'll throw up in the short term, and get cancer in the long term. Best case is probably ANFO, the AN is harmless, but the FO part is literally pouring raw diesel fuel into the water, not all that nice of a thing to do. Just touching nitro dynamite gives an amazing headache, the RDX stuff is way better but still not exactly baby formula. TNT is oily gritty semisolid stuff that partially liquifies when its warm, probably not an issue in the baltic sea...
There are explosives that are non toxic like gunpowder that are not used as a military explosive but only as a propellant in naval guns (modern ones use nitro based smokeless powders). There are exotic mining explosives vaguely involving charcoal and liquid oxygen, which are not used by the military.
2) Generally speaking, the fumes/smoke/whatever of an explosive are WAY less toxic than the explosive itself. Given the choice of breathing the smoke from 1 lb of TNT, or eating 1 lb of TNT, the smoke is WAY more healthy. The smoke from C-4 is nasty and will kill you, but eating or touching unexploded C-4 will kill you WAY faster. The environment is way better off with the stuff exploded than unexploded.
3) Pest control was not an issue in the bunkers, as far as I know, aside from termites in the crates. Unexploded ammo is not good eats.
We've been using fertilizer as explosives for a long time, this really could help the plants.
Sounds good in theory, and as for practice, I have never seen quite as much greenery as the explosives range at the army base in Huntsville, at least as of the early 90s. Apparently nitrates and phosphorous are good for plants, who would have guessed? Also the equivalent of soil aeration could help on the ocean floor.
Well, so you've got two unknowns, the frequency, and the speed of light.
So, you go to google to get the speed of light, and thus calculate the frequency using the wavelength
Now, you know the experimentally determined frequency and the wavelength, so calculate the speed of light, which should be suspiciously near the previously google'd value.
Tada! Where's my Nobel prize in physics?
Seriously though, you probably aren't getting over 2 sig figs on the wavelength, and you have to take somebodys word for it on the free-running magnetron frequency, at best 2 sig figs (theres a reason the ISM bands are very wide). Combine two low accuracy numbers, one of which is a "trust us" number, and get the speed of light to maybe 1 sig fig, that being "really freaking fast".
If we incorporate a pay per email scheme, with an email costing anywhere from 1/2 to 1 cent per email
I get more paper spam in my mailbox, than email spam that slips past spamassassin.
So... if capital one sent me two credit card offers per week, for several years, and each cost at least 50 cents to print and post, that one CC company is spending $50/yr trying to win my business... but charging 1 cent per email will stop spam?
I get coupon magazines that I toss out. For over a decade, when I get a phone book, I toss it out. I get endless catalogs. All of which cost several orders of magnitude more than one cent.
Also if there's one thing the cellphone and landline business has shown, its impossible to bill in units below about one cent (per minute) or below about $20 per total bill. They will have to charge WAY more than one cent, just to recover the costs of the billing infrastructure.
I hear a challenge Hells Angels/Mongols/Pagans/Insert your club here.
It makes you wonder if one of his competitors faked the whole thing to put a hit out on him.
I think life would be lovely if everywhere I went, everyone knew what I wanted.
I think most attractive women would get tired of hearing it rather quickly, although a subset would probably enjoy it immensely.
I honestly don't see how knowing what groceries you bought last week
Try harder.
OTC back pain pills = ten years later, rubber stamped as pre-existing condition, medical coverage denied, go die on the street.
'guns and ammo' magazine purchased and you are, live with, work with, or are casually acquainted with a felon (essentially everyone) = Police will be informed, search warrant issued.
What about the 50:50 odds that its her ID card, in which case I'd be grateful.
I have worked in some pretty sketchy locales, oh heck just call them slums. I have seen people living in illuminated signs (hey, gets cold out here sometimes). Assuming the underclass has ID cards, adaptive signs are simply going to display ads for deodorant 24x7. Not that it wouldn't also be a good idea for the average slashdotter.
In related news: Greece is intent on making cash transactions of more than 1500 EUR illegal from 2011 on
Note, Greece is basically a failed state, at least financially. Why does this always happen to countries a couple years after hosting the Olympics?
Soon, thru inflation, 1500 EUR in Greece will barely buy a cup of coffee.
I've yet to read state regulations that allow them to deny you service you refuse to fork over the SSN. If they refuse to give you service without the SSN then contact your state regulators and open a case.
Geeze, thats all confrontational. Nice plan if you like to fight. If you don't, then just tell them you're an illegal alien. You will get service, and you will have to make a security deposit. Trust me, with illegals nearing 50% in some localities, they are not going to freeze out that enormous fraction of an entire demographic.
One problem is the instant they hear you're "an illegal" they're going to try to transfer you to a spanish speaking rep, and/or try to sell you the spanish TV channel package. Calmly explain you're an illegal alien from Canada or Ireland or Australia, etc.
Well the thought of the building blocks for life to have just "formed" on earth is too far fetched.
Basically you're promoting "vitalism"
Organic chemistry dropped vitalism around 1828 more or less due to Wohler synthesis.
Looks like biology still hasn't made that advance yet, OR your belief is a bit out of date, out of step with modern bio beliefs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wohler_synthesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism
I am pretty sure that it will be a long time before the Olympic Committee manages to run their ice resurfacers the 29,000 times needed to break even.
I live near an Olympic ice skating training facility. One of only eleven 400 meter indoor ovals in the world, so they say. Its 18 years old.
29000 / resurface 4 times a day / 365 train every day = 19.8 years.
The way I see it, it's so they can charge you with lying on a gov't form later if it turns out you are a terr'ist.
Nahh, charging someone with lying on a form doesn't get the DA promoted.
Its a reading comprehension test. Some cultures always respond affirmatively to someone superior to them. Thus the hilarity of some outsourced customer service interactions. Those forms will figure out if you can read English well enough to intelligently provide the "correct" answer.
I'm working on a new technology (script based) where people log into a news site and post completely offtopic and unrelated comments drawn from a bag of on-the-surface-interesting-but-truly-vapid comments.
You're in the talk radio business?
If you're trying to read textbooks on your iPad, your eyes may hate you.
Why? Weren't they all written on LCDs? Do your eyes hurt when you read slashdot on a LCD? How do your eye muscles know the difference between slashdot and a novel, so that they can hurt on queue?
Try using a device with e-ink
Been there, tried that, gray on gray with distracting shadows from lack of backlighting, crazy flashing flickering during each 2 second long page turn isn't going to cut it.
If you want the e-ink experience on a LCD, turn the brightness way down, the contrast way down, monochrome it, modify the display driver so each screen change takes 2 seconds and makes the whole screen flash distractingly. It would be amusing to write a KDE plugin/theme that emulates e-ink.
I will give you that my LCD based jetbook battery only lasts probably 5 to 10 hours at a charge, whereas they claim an e-ink device can run for 20-30 hours continuous on a charge. However, in my modern lifestyle, I consider myself lucky to get 3 continuous reading hours at a time, so the difference is irrelevant to me.
It's an MP3 player only the ability to play songs randomly.
http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/features.html
"Flip it to the middle, and your songs play in order."
No playlists
http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/features.html
"And there's room for multiple playlists and audiobooks, too."
no equalizer
No interest at all to me.
no flippin' screen
If I'm watching the "flippin' screen" while chopping wood, lack of an equalizer is rapidly going to be the least of my concerns... I explicitly don't want a video watching appliance, only music and/or maybe an audiobook or itunesU series or podcast. I am easily wealthy enough to afford the right tool for each job so I don't need to compromise on a "swiss army" "SUV" style compromise.
yet it costs at least double what any other device
I checked out bestbuy.com and the closest thing to an aluminum 2G $60 shuffle is an all plastic samsung 2G for $40. Add some hacking to make it work with itunes, replace on a regular basis because the plastic case will break, eh.... I'll get the shuffle and save the hassle. Errr, except that the user interface for the shuffle sucks beyond all compare, so I guess I won't buy one. I'll wait until apple sells the 4th gen shuffle, or however long it takes to sell one that doesn't suck.
Now I will concede the point that $80 for a 4 gig shuffle plus $30 for an adapter cable so real headphones/earbuds can be used, plus some shipping/sales tax equals about $120 which is insane for a product with a sucky user interface, when an 8G nano is $150.