We grant this status to many people who have psychological impairments....... So why can't we give the same status to people who believe in ludicrous fairy tales?
Hopefully you're not making hiring decisions, since you just equated psychological impairment with religious belief, on a public forum...
Thats right, they are a judicially granted legal monopoly where no one else is allowed to compete. Since the judge is preventing a free market from developing, they must be regulated for the public good, but they are unregulated. Hence the turmoil around this issue.
Nothing new there. Their government is paid for by their oil fields, which have been in decline for years, thus they have no money to pay for government service any more. The drug trafficers have the money, and the military has the guns. Only question is, will one side win, or will there be a merge?
While it may be cost effective to crimp and cut your own cable when you are making less than 20 dollars an hour once you are making 20 dollar+ just buy it.
If you're salaried, your time is free, so you make your own cables.
If you're hourly, your time (including SS tax, health insurance, etc) is quite expensive, so you buy cables.
The only two exceptions I've seen in several decades of "IT work" were one facility where they had an inhouse cabling crew that did nothing but install cables for the then princely sum of $6/hr. It was considered their entry level IT job. They did have some liberal arts degree holders in those positions, although it was mostly a fresh-outta-highschool and some post-military crew.
The other exception was a place with a flamboyant color coding system, one color for internal LAN, one color for outside raw inet, one color for customers, one color for inside firewall inet, one for emergency jobs (during an emergency, if you run out of the appropriate color, use this color until it can be replaced), one for digital telco lines (T1, 56K, etc), one for temporary jobs, one for audio/paging, one for DC power, one for KVM over cat5 from raritan, one for RS232 signals, one for plain old telephone service analog lines (POTS), one for the digital PBX phones, and of course another complete set of colors for crossovers, if a crossover for that application makes sense (no point in a DC power crossover, although some people always seem to manufacture about 50% of theirs crossed over). The cable trays looked like a psychedelic rainbow. So they only needed to stock 10 to 20 spools of different colored bulk cable rather than hundreds (thousands?) of different color/length combinations. It was admittedly pretty convenient.
I have a chemistry background, find this area of chemistry interesting due to the challenges those chemists go thru, but have no personal involvement in the drug trade in any form. Sort of like the appeal of the "dirty jobs" show on TV, a bad day for me at the lab was contamination ruining ore sample results, or jamming a NMR tube in the NMR machine, valve falls out of the buret during a titration, spectrophotometer bulb blows at just the wrong time, solvent extraction and poured out the wrong stuff, etc. But it was always consoling to realize for a completly different type of "chemist", a bad day for them was blowing up their house, dea raids, shot by competitors, etc. So, a very bad day in a perfectly legal lab, wasn't so bad after all... Anyway:
Making LSD is said to be easy.
Utter BS. The active dose is incredibly small. You need facilties similar to nerve gas production in order to make it without tripping. A fume hood and gloves is not going to cut it. Also the intermediates and precursors, although somewhat less active than the product, are very toxic, making refining a serious issue for the end users, and production dangerous. Usually "homemade LSD" is some utterly different substance that happens to result in hallucination, essentially using "LSD" as a marketing brand name for cactus extracts, animal tranquilizers, "mushroom soup", etc.
Opium is probably as easy as Marijuana to conceal, except it requires a bit more manual work.
Do ya think? Each seed has to be individually manually bled like maple syrup and then gather the sap. Just like coke, you need a large peasant class to make enough to entertain a small relatively rich user class. I suppose you could view it like gardening, and slave away like a peasant for an entire summer, for one brief high... or maybe not worth it.
In theory, making heroine from opium is also a feasible amateur chemistry operation.
About a zillion acid-base extractions later... This is feasible, but someone smart enough to do it, is either "in the business" and doing your own product is not considered cool, or is in a "real business" thus making too much money to bother doing it themselves. It is much more profitable to outsource this work.
Breeding coca must not be that hard. I don't know how easy cocaine refinery is, however.
If you're willing to use stinky flammable solvents, not hard. The extraction process turns alot of raw material into a small amount of product and a great filthy pile of solvent contaminated waste. Think of a compost pile the size of a small mountain that is flamable. Coke only "works" if you have an army of poor peasants growing and gathering. You need acres of plants, barrels of solvents, and a way to safely (or otherwise) get rid of acres of plant waste and evaporated solvents. This works pretty well in poor semi-tropical nations. Not so good in downtown manhatten NYC. Which is why theres no such thing as homegrown coke. All that solvent vapor has to go somewhere, and into your lungs and around your water heaters pilot light are not the first choice... It's very much like growing and refining your own sugar from sugarcane, except instead of water, use flammable solvents and there is much more plant waste to get rid of. Best outsource this.
Re:When ignorance looks like this, 'tis folly to b
on
Cosmetic Neurology
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· Score: 1
I meant a drug that would make the taker of the drug more attractive, though dumb as a post.
Roids? Pretty close... although roid users aren't by definition stupid, with these two exceptions:
1) If one dose is good, a thousand doses at the same time absolutely must be a thousand times better, after all that works brilliantly with sleep, salt intake, and alcohol drinking... Really I don't know what some of those clowns were thinking.
2) Crazy emotional response is not tightly coupled with intelligence. So when not roid raging, its possible to do calculus. But if an attempt at integration by parts doesn't work, that HP48 calculator has graphed its last equation...
I used to lift weights. I never used roids, but distantly knew some folks whom did. Its hard to lift at a club and not "know" somebody whom does. Other than above two notes, they were pretty average intelligence. So roids are pretty close to what you're discussing.
That would mean there's a short period of time where your eyes are getting a nice blast of UV. Anybody know how short it is?
A classic "when did you stop beating your wife" class of question.
The glass doesn't transmit UV at all, at any time. The only common substance that is clear and transmits UV is Quartz (or fused silica which is more or less the same substance). Because it requires a much higher temperature to work than plain ole glass, its not used much, other than in UV spectrophotometers, UV sterilization lamps, eprom eraser bulbs, etc.
However, I would not be surprised to if the Chinese "accidentally" sent us a batch of "special" helmets made using expensive quartz lenses.
Now there would theoretically be a very short intense burst of regular old plain visible light, and that might be bad for you after decades. Maybe stress on the muscles of the iris due to "flinching". Maybe the flashing might have some epilepsy inducing feature. Maybe it would mess around with night vision. But so far, no evidence of anything. The radio waves from the arc are probably relatively more dangerous, and that is pure crackpottery, so I wouldn't worry.
Except for complete failures requiring an expensive tow, or complete failures resulting in a traffic accident (stalls on dark highway just over a hill, or lost motor power and power brakes on very steep hill, or the shock of railroad tracks causes complete failure in just the wrong spot). How about complete failure resulting in death of all passengers, like during a blizzard in a rural area and they all freeze to death?
Oh, and except for spectacular failures, like bursts into flame with occupants inside, car seats full of kids, etc.
Or the battery swapping machine crushes their curious toddler. Or crushes a moron, or their pet dog. Or the unmaintained swapping gear damages the car in any way. Hard to directly destroy a car with a gas nozzle or electric plug (indirectly thru fire, I suppose), but what amounts to a multi-ton forklift could directly utterly destroy the car and/or the delicate innards of the car, or give whiplash to whomever sits in the car during the procedure, or shrapnel breaks off and someone loses an eye, etc.
And who pays for the dead battery? The renter eats the cost of "cheap" propane tanks that die in their posession, I'm sure if you drew the short straw and got the almost dead battery, and it died in your care, you will be charged the full retail cost of a brand new battery, plus the some penalties and fees, plus towing, plus of course you'll have to pay out for yet another battery to use. I can afford the liability of a propane tank that slowly predictably goes out of hydro or rusts, but I simply can not eat the cost of a dead battery that could happen at any random time.
Then there is the weird liability issue of possession of stolen property, if somebodys car gets stolen, and after passing thru the hands of 20 innocent people, you get the stolen battery. Now, how long is the jail term for receiving stolen property? Certainly after the police reclaim it you'll be out the cost of the battery plus you'll have to get towed to get a new battery, etc. At least stolen gasoline and wall outlet power doesn't have a unique serial number.
Either the "electric station" will have legally limited liability, in which case you'd be crazy to risk your life on their probably unmaintained dangerous product, or they'll have unlimited liability, in which case, as the deep pockets, they'll be sued for every accident that happens, so they'd be crazy to go into the business, or if they are crazy enough, they'll be sued into oblivion momentarily.
The whole idea of battery swapping is simply a non-starter. Its like a business model of swapping empty gas tanks for full, or transplanting full human stomachs in the place of empty ones.
I am familiar with this recall because my wife has a 2007 Prius, and I would not buy a Prius until the bugs had been worked out of the system. This was one of the two noteworthy bugs.
This problem was contamination or corrosion or something on the positive terminal resulting in increased resistance. The engine computer notes the increased internal resistance of the pack, says WTF, and sets a code. There is much debate as to the proper fix, with some dealerships swapping out the battery pack entirely, and some expending considerable labor hours completely disassembling the pack, cleaning the terminal, and reinstalling. In some countries they all swapped, in some they all rebuilt, probably depending entirely on the cost of local labor vs the cost of factory new.
Also, I would take a wild guess that Japan told them it would take 15 minutes labor each, then the dealers found out it took 3 hours, and the end result is the first few people got the reassemble procedure and PO'd techs and the last few people all got the swap procedure. Perhaps if you make an appointment they'll assume you've got the time to do the reassemble procedure, vs if you're just there for an oil change you'll get the swap procedure.
There is quite a bit of info on this on Google. But don't confuse it with the recall around 03, where the engine computer shut down the engine too quickly, so it would stall on the highway occasionally. That was a simple firmware flash.
Other than that, a remarkably recall free vehicle, at least compared to domestic models.
Also wear and tear weasel words do not apply until after 100K or 10 years whichever comes first.
Finally since there is no market for the batteries, there is no 3rd party market for the batteries, thus the ridiculous $3K cost is the usual dealer and OEM markup. Just like you can pay $25 for an oil drain plug at the dealer, or $1 at autozone. I am sure that in a decade you'll be able to buy a prius battery from batteries plus for perhaps $300. If I recall correctly, its just a huge array of NiMH D cells, not anything exotic at all.
I'm just glad they're finally taking this sort of shit seriously.
Very humorously ironic post.
The whole cyber command thing bugs me because its so expensive but does so little. I'm sure they'll have a huge command of generals and various other officers giving each other endless powerpoints about "synergisticly proactively defending the cyber battlefield". Trust me, no patches are going to get applied. Mostly a bunch of resume stuffing for the post-military career. Probably a lot of puzzling over how it could be that the more managers they put on the job, the slower the work gets done. Probably a lot of really pompous posing going on too, I'm leet, so leet, its classified and I can't tell you how leet I am, but trust me I'm just the most leet ever. And a lot of "I'm working so hard that you wouldn't believe it, but its all classified so I can't actually tell you what I'm working on" as he returns to his minesweeper game. I guarantee they'll have a vaguely NORAD like NOC 24x7 with dim lights and big screen TVs, with very expensive software to monitor... their departmental intranet, and maybe they'll have isc.sans.org on refresh every 30 seconds to see whats going on, maybe, but that would probably be too clueful.
All they need to do, is get more admins, more equipment, and tell them to keep up with the times, read slashdot, whatever. The last thing they need is infinitely more commanders and procedures to gum up the works even worse.
Look at addiction rates for tv, newspaper reading, pro sports, repetitive formulaic movies, reading infotainment/complimentary copy magazines, shopping for Chinese junk you dont need, and listening to top40 music.
Those are supposedly mainstream activities (although far less than a majority participates in each) so they are not classed as addictions even if they have very severe negative consequences. Gaming is now a mainstream activity, therefore by popular definition it can't be an addiction. Making the original article meaningless.
Another point not mentioned is the economics of the situation. Inherently the home device is going to raise the temperature of the appliance. Higher temp appliance means it wears out faster. Wears out faster means lots of energy spent on replacement. So, at first glance, what has been designed is a way to save cents of electricity at a cost of dollars of repair work.
I don't think the car makers will like replacing an alternator with thermoelectrics, because they are immensely big and heavy for the power required compared to an alternator, and they don't wear out as fast meaning less repair income.
how would OpenOffice be a better solution for a business customer if it doesn't come with any support for the employees?
Closed source software support is basically either 1) Read the help file or try it and see, so the user doesn't have to be able to read or think 2) Third world script reader 3) Real support is huge $$$$$$$
So, overall, you get a better support experience using google and open source than script reader in india and MS office.
Also, there is more to support than answering "how do I print?"... Such as the enormous cost of security / virus / worms plus the enormous cost of licensing documentation plus BSA audits that are only relevant for closed source products.
Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. The guy has achieved more than almost anyone on the planet
Primarily seem to be a direct result, and inseparable from:
being completely wheelchair bound and having a speech impediment
It is disrespectful toward him, for people whom don't know anything about physics, to brown nose all over the guy, just because he's handicapped. Note, I'm not saying he's a loser, its not a binary this or that response. It is more respectful of his considerable intellectual achievements to describe him as definitely well above average in his profession, rather than a polite version of condescendingly fawning over every little little achievement of a sick child.
For example, in my opinion Asimov beats him in popular science writing, Feynman beats him in actual physics and also general writing. Not coming in first or second place doesn't make him a moron, it just makes him not first or second place. Just not the greatest mind of the century, just not the greatest achievement on the planet. Still cool mind you, just not the greatest.
He is fairly comparable to Edward Belbruno, the genius inventor of low energy orbital transfers, in that both broke new ground in a very specialized area of study where they got very surprising, paradigm changing results, and wrote reasonably decent books about it. Note, you've never heard of Belbruno because he physically normal, as far as I know.
It's more respectful to declare him a very significant figure in early black hole physics and a decent writer and stop at that point, than to focus on his handicap while worshiping his achievements in a pandering manner.
Re:What about MySQL?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 2, Insightful
what does this mean for MySQL?
Probably the same thing it means for OpenOffice. Or Java.
No, because they have nothing to upsell above java... Expect mysql to be stabilized, and have all syntax and maybe even docs oracle-ized or oracle-ified. Sort of like "free starter version of Oracle (minus as many useful features as we can get away with)". Expect new features to pretty much be sandbagged. The key is to slow down progress as much as possible without instigating a fork. So, the transition plan to go from the nuevo-mysql to oracle, would be dump the DB on nuevo-mysql and import it on oracle. No syntax changes, no modification of source, no column type issues, etc. Could be pretty cool.
On the other hand, if they really wanted a "starter demo" version of Oracle, they did not need to buy Sun to do it.
What you did miss, is https also authenticates the site owner, assuming real signed certs, which admittedly seems kind of pointless for an anonymous network. As if citibank.i2p is really "the real citibank" aka citibank.com.
Option 3: Wait for prices to come down. In 15 years he should be able to get everything he's asking for at less than 10% of today's prices, not counting the ruggedization premium.
Easily the most intelligent, yet lowest scored, of all the comments.
Ten years ago a vaguely midrange pentium with huge storage was full of fans and moving parts in addition to the RAID array. Today, similar specs for my Soekris 5501, which is roughly the size of a big paperback book, has a single "automotive/industrial" grade HD that is semi-indestructable, costs way less than a tenth of 1999 prices, and draws about ten watts at full blast. Hooked up to a roughly cubic foot (err, 35th of a cubic meter?) AGM lead acid battery I have about 3 days of battery backup for my VOIP asterisk PBX. Even with the phones and etherswitch and cablemodem, I have about a day or two of battery backup, which is way more than sufficient for me to get around to hooking it up to the car to charge...
In summary, if you need crazy specs like that in the third world, the solution is wait a decade, then those crazy specs will be pocket change, tiny, few moving parts, and will run off a solar panel.
3.8 meters/second average is not a windy area, infact it's a Class 1 wind speed. There are many places in the U.S. that are Class 3 or better, and you'd get much different results from those areas.
Next poll up on slashdot:
Which will better meet my energy needs:
1) Solar panel in the arctic during the winter
2) Windmill located in one of the least windy areas in the entire US
The folks that got screwed where the buggy whip makers. There just aren't many ways to modify a buggy whip into something that meets a need in another market.
Sounds like you want plain ole standard commercial grade server hardware mounted in a tiny RV. Extensively shock mount a relay rack, put in somewhat bigger AC/batteries/genset than usual, and you're good to go. You can use the living quarters to house the armed guard, which will be required for expensive equipment in that corner of the world.
Trying to buy super tough server hardware will simply be more expensive than a RV and much harder to replace / maintain when it breaks.
Admittedly I'm mystified what you'd do with such immense computing power in a rural area without electricity. Maybe a really nice mythtv backend? Educate the locals using SimTractor?
You do realize that Bangladesh is like 1 foot above sea level, so no need to engineer this to last forever when its going to get washed into the sea every couple years by storms etc. Using a RV could help in the evac, assuming there is any place safe to evac to...
Alternately, split your workload transparently across maybe 50 smaller machines, and start purchasing replacements when attrition nears 75%.
No one has yet commented that about 10000 floppies roughly equals a DL-DVD. The idea of indexing and storing 10000 floppies is incredible. He would have mentioned it. Therefore he does not have more than 10000 floppies. Solution is simple. Make a directory on the hard drive, fill it with files, burn to DL-DVD on a weekly or even daily basis. Keep this weeks backup in the desk drawer (just in case you delete the wrong file). Mail two weeks ago to some sort of iron mountain-esque facility. Or stick it in the bank deposit box. Or find a friendly competitor (like utterly different specialty) and exchange backups with him.
No matter what happens, always save a copy of the Dec 31st backup for each year. On Jan 1st, after the hangover, delete any customer subdirectory that has been irrelevant for at least one entire calendar year (thus it exists in full identically on at least two end of year DVDs). Or maybe five years, or maybe whatever the statute of limitations or prison term is for that customers situation. This keeps size down after a couple decades.
This seems like a simple obvious solution, unlike all the crazy upload it to unknown people on the internet, or make a torrent of it, or email it all to your gmail account, or create a 100 TB data warehouse (for a couple floppies?) or whatever else is in the comments today.
Slashdot Mirror
We grant this status to many people who have psychological impairments. ...... So why can't we give the same status to people who believe in ludicrous fairy tales?
Hopefully you're not making hiring decisions, since you just equated psychological impairment with religious belief, on a public forum...
They are not a publically funded library.
Thats right, they are a judicially granted legal monopoly where no one else is allowed to compete. Since the judge is preventing a free market from developing, they must be regulated for the public good, but they are unregulated. Hence the turmoil around this issue.
Question: how do you burn a digital book?
Well, Jörg Schilling is pretty unhappy with people whom use Debian's wodim / cdrkit fork of his packages after his license change...
http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/linux-dist.html#violations
If you are ever wrongly accused of plagiarism (or for that matter, copyright infringement),
Your plan won't help with trademark infringement. Here are two relevant stories from mises.org:
http://blog.mises.org/archives/009859.asp
http://blog.mises.org/archives/009864.asp
He meant the propoganda we see is at level 0, not the actual situation.
I expect a Bush-like "for the sake of the economy, get out and shop" speech this week.
Mexico hovers on martial law
Nothing new there. Their government is paid for by their oil fields, which have been in decline for years, thus they have no money to pay for government service any more. The drug trafficers have the money, and the military has the guns. Only question is, will one side win, or will there be a merge?
While it may be cost effective to crimp and cut your own cable when you are making less than 20 dollars an hour once you are making 20 dollar+ just buy it.
If you're salaried, your time is free, so you make your own cables.
If you're hourly, your time (including SS tax, health insurance, etc) is quite expensive, so you buy cables.
The only two exceptions I've seen in several decades of "IT work" were one facility where they had an inhouse cabling crew that did nothing but install cables for the then princely sum of $6/hr. It was considered their entry level IT job. They did have some liberal arts degree holders in those positions, although it was mostly a fresh-outta-highschool and some post-military crew.
The other exception was a place with a flamboyant color coding system, one color for internal LAN, one color for outside raw inet, one color for customers, one color for inside firewall inet, one for emergency jobs (during an emergency, if you run out of the appropriate color, use this color until it can be replaced), one for digital telco lines (T1, 56K, etc), one for temporary jobs, one for audio/paging, one for DC power, one for KVM over cat5 from raritan, one for RS232 signals, one for plain old telephone service analog lines (POTS), one for the digital PBX phones, and of course another complete set of colors for crossovers, if a crossover for that application makes sense (no point in a DC power crossover, although some people always seem to manufacture about 50% of theirs crossed over). The cable trays looked like a psychedelic rainbow. So they only needed to stock 10 to 20 spools of different colored bulk cable rather than hundreds (thousands?) of different color/length combinations. It was admittedly pretty convenient.
I have a chemistry background, find this area of chemistry interesting due to the challenges those chemists go thru, but have no personal involvement in the drug trade in any form. Sort of like the appeal of the "dirty jobs" show on TV, a bad day for me at the lab was contamination ruining ore sample results, or jamming a NMR tube in the NMR machine, valve falls out of the buret during a titration, spectrophotometer bulb blows at just the wrong time, solvent extraction and poured out the wrong stuff, etc. But it was always consoling to realize for a completly different type of "chemist", a bad day for them was blowing up their house, dea raids, shot by competitors, etc. So, a very bad day in a perfectly legal lab, wasn't so bad after all... Anyway:
Making LSD is said to be easy.
Utter BS. The active dose is incredibly small. You need facilties similar to nerve gas production in order to make it without tripping. A fume hood and gloves is not going to cut it. Also the intermediates and precursors, although somewhat less active than the product, are very toxic, making refining a serious issue for the end users, and production dangerous. Usually "homemade LSD" is some utterly different substance that happens to result in hallucination, essentially using "LSD" as a marketing brand name for cactus extracts, animal tranquilizers, "mushroom soup", etc.
Opium is probably as easy as Marijuana to conceal, except it requires a bit more manual work.
Do ya think? Each seed has to be individually manually bled like maple syrup and then gather the sap. Just like coke, you need a large peasant class to make enough to entertain a small relatively rich user class. I suppose you could view it like gardening, and slave away like a peasant for an entire summer, for one brief high... or maybe not worth it.
In theory, making heroine from opium is also a feasible amateur chemistry operation.
About a zillion acid-base extractions later... This is feasible, but someone smart enough to do it, is either "in the business" and doing your own product is not considered cool, or is in a "real business" thus making too much money to bother doing it themselves. It is much more profitable to outsource this work.
Breeding coca must not be that hard. I don't know how easy cocaine refinery is, however.
If you're willing to use stinky flammable solvents, not hard. The extraction process turns alot of raw material into a small amount of product and a great filthy pile of solvent contaminated waste. Think of a compost pile the size of a small mountain that is flamable. Coke only "works" if you have an army of poor peasants growing and gathering. You need acres of plants, barrels of solvents, and a way to safely (or otherwise) get rid of acres of plant waste and evaporated solvents. This works pretty well in poor semi-tropical nations. Not so good in downtown manhatten NYC. Which is why theres no such thing as homegrown coke. All that solvent vapor has to go somewhere, and into your lungs and around your water heaters pilot light are not the first choice... It's very much like growing and refining your own sugar from sugarcane, except instead of water, use flammable solvents and there is much more plant waste to get rid of. Best outsource this.
I meant a drug that would make the taker of the drug more attractive, though dumb as a post.
Roids? Pretty close... although roid users aren't by definition stupid, with these two exceptions:
1) If one dose is good, a thousand doses at the same time absolutely must be a thousand times better, after all that works brilliantly with sleep, salt intake, and alcohol drinking... Really I don't know what some of those clowns were thinking.
2) Crazy emotional response is not tightly coupled with intelligence. So when not roid raging, its possible to do calculus. But if an attempt at integration by parts doesn't work, that HP48 calculator has graphed its last equation...
I used to lift weights. I never used roids, but distantly knew some folks whom did. Its hard to lift at a club and not "know" somebody whom does. Other than above two notes, they were pretty average intelligence. So roids are pretty close to what you're discussing.
able to keep more things in working memory
often rely on keeping "extraneous" elements out of consciousness
The problem is they are discussing intelligence, and you seem to be discussing some form of dialectic, thus spake the great wikipedia:
"Everything is made out of opposing forces/opposing sides (contradictions)."
Claiming intelligence is simultaneously keeping more things in working store and less things in working store, is not very convincing.
That would mean there's a short period of time where your eyes are getting a nice blast of UV. Anybody know how short it is?
A classic "when did you stop beating your wife" class of question.
The glass doesn't transmit UV at all, at any time. The only common substance that is clear and transmits UV is Quartz (or fused silica which is more or less the same substance). Because it requires a much higher temperature to work than plain ole glass, its not used much, other than in UV spectrophotometers, UV sterilization lamps, eprom eraser bulbs, etc.
However, I would not be surprised to if the Chinese "accidentally" sent us a batch of "special" helmets made using expensive quartz lenses.
Now there would theoretically be a very short intense burst of regular old plain visible light, and that might be bad for you after decades. Maybe stress on the muscles of the iris due to "flinching". Maybe the flashing might have some epilepsy inducing feature. Maybe it would mess around with night vision. But so far, no evidence of anything. The radio waves from the arc are probably relatively more dangerous, and that is pure crackpottery, so I wouldn't worry.
would solve the "I got a lousy battery" problem
Except for complete failures requiring an expensive tow, or complete failures resulting in a traffic accident (stalls on dark highway just over a hill, or lost motor power and power brakes on very steep hill, or the shock of railroad tracks causes complete failure in just the wrong spot). How about complete failure resulting in death of all passengers, like during a blizzard in a rural area and they all freeze to death?
Oh, and except for spectacular failures, like bursts into flame with occupants inside, car seats full of kids, etc.
Or the battery swapping machine crushes their curious toddler. Or crushes a moron, or their pet dog. Or the unmaintained swapping gear damages the car in any way. Hard to directly destroy a car with a gas nozzle or electric plug (indirectly thru fire, I suppose), but what amounts to a multi-ton forklift could directly utterly destroy the car and/or the delicate innards of the car, or give whiplash to whomever sits in the car during the procedure, or shrapnel breaks off and someone loses an eye, etc.
And who pays for the dead battery? The renter eats the cost of "cheap" propane tanks that die in their posession, I'm sure if you drew the short straw and got the almost dead battery, and it died in your care, you will be charged the full retail cost of a brand new battery, plus the some penalties and fees, plus towing, plus of course you'll have to pay out for yet another battery to use. I can afford the liability of a propane tank that slowly predictably goes out of hydro or rusts, but I simply can not eat the cost of a dead battery that could happen at any random time.
Then there is the weird liability issue of possession of stolen property, if somebodys car gets stolen, and after passing thru the hands of 20 innocent people, you get the stolen battery. Now, how long is the jail term for receiving stolen property? Certainly after the police reclaim it you'll be out the cost of the battery plus you'll have to get towed to get a new battery, etc. At least stolen gasoline and wall outlet power doesn't have a unique serial number.
Either the "electric station" will have legally limited liability, in which case you'd be crazy to risk your life on their probably unmaintained dangerous product, or they'll have unlimited liability, in which case, as the deep pockets, they'll be sued for every accident that happens, so they'd be crazy to go into the business, or if they are crazy enough, they'll be sued into oblivion momentarily.
The whole idea of battery swapping is simply a non-starter. Its like a business model of swapping empty gas tanks for full, or transplanting full human stomachs in the place of empty ones.
I am familiar with this recall because my wife has a 2007 Prius, and I would not buy a Prius until the bugs had been worked out of the system. This was one of the two noteworthy bugs.
This problem was contamination or corrosion or something on the positive terminal resulting in increased resistance. The engine computer notes the increased internal resistance of the pack, says WTF, and sets a code. There is much debate as to the proper fix, with some dealerships swapping out the battery pack entirely, and some expending considerable labor hours completely disassembling the pack, cleaning the terminal, and reinstalling. In some countries they all swapped, in some they all rebuilt, probably depending entirely on the cost of local labor vs the cost of factory new.
Also, I would take a wild guess that Japan told them it would take 15 minutes labor each, then the dealers found out it took 3 hours, and the end result is the first few people got the reassemble procedure and PO'd techs and the last few people all got the swap procedure. Perhaps if you make an appointment they'll assume you've got the time to do the reassemble procedure, vs if you're just there for an oil change you'll get the swap procedure.
There is quite a bit of info on this on Google. But don't confuse it with the recall around 03, where the engine computer shut down the engine too quickly, so it would stall on the highway occasionally. That was a simple firmware flash.
Other than that, a remarkably recall free vehicle, at least compared to domestic models.
Also wear and tear weasel words do not apply until after 100K or 10 years whichever comes first.
Finally since there is no market for the batteries, there is no 3rd party market for the batteries, thus the ridiculous $3K cost is the usual dealer and OEM markup. Just like you can pay $25 for an oil drain plug at the dealer, or $1 at autozone. I am sure that in a decade you'll be able to buy a prius battery from batteries plus for perhaps $300. If I recall correctly, its just a huge array of NiMH D cells, not anything exotic at all.
I'm just glad they're finally taking this sort of shit seriously.
Very humorously ironic post.
The whole cyber command thing bugs me because its so expensive but does so little. I'm sure they'll have a huge command of generals and various other officers giving each other endless powerpoints about "synergisticly proactively defending the cyber battlefield". Trust me, no patches are going to get applied. Mostly a bunch of resume stuffing for the post-military career. Probably a lot of puzzling over how it could be that the more managers they put on the job, the slower the work gets done. Probably a lot of really pompous posing going on too, I'm leet, so leet, its classified and I can't tell you how leet I am, but trust me I'm just the most leet ever. And a lot of "I'm working so hard that you wouldn't believe it, but its all classified so I can't actually tell you what I'm working on" as he returns to his minesweeper game. I guarantee they'll have a vaguely NORAD like NOC 24x7 with dim lights and big screen TVs, with very expensive software to monitor ... their departmental intranet, and maybe they'll have isc.sans.org on refresh every 30 seconds to see whats going on, maybe, but that would probably be too clueful.
All they need to do, is get more admins, more equipment, and tell them to keep up with the times, read slashdot, whatever. The last thing they need is infinitely more commanders and procedures to gum up the works even worse.
Look at addiction rates for tv, newspaper reading, pro sports, repetitive formulaic movies, reading infotainment/complimentary copy magazines, shopping for Chinese junk you dont need, and listening to top40 music.
Those are supposedly mainstream activities (although far less than a majority participates in each) so they are not classed as addictions even if they have very severe negative consequences. Gaming is now a mainstream activity, therefore by popular definition it can't be an addiction. Making the original article meaningless.
Another point not mentioned is the economics of the situation.
Inherently the home device is going to raise the temperature of the appliance.
Higher temp appliance means it wears out faster.
Wears out faster means lots of energy spent on replacement.
So, at first glance, what has been designed is a way to save cents of electricity at a cost of dollars of repair work.
I don't think the car makers will like replacing an alternator with thermoelectrics, because they are immensely big and heavy for the power required compared to an alternator, and they don't wear out as fast meaning less repair income.
how would OpenOffice be a better solution for a business customer if it doesn't come with any support for the employees?
Closed source software support is basically either
1) Read the help file or try it and see, so the user doesn't have to be able to read or think
2) Third world script reader
3) Real support is huge $$$$$$$
So, overall, you get a better support experience using google and open source than script reader in india and MS office.
Also, there is more to support than answering "how do I print?" ... Such as the enormous cost of security / virus / worms plus the enormous cost of licensing documentation plus BSA audits that are only relevant for closed source products.
His most fawning worshipful descriptions such as:
Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. The guy has achieved more than almost anyone on the planet
Primarily seem to be a direct result, and inseparable from :
being completely wheelchair bound and having a speech impediment
It is disrespectful toward him, for people whom don't know anything about physics, to brown nose all over the guy, just because he's handicapped. Note, I'm not saying he's a loser, its not a binary this or that response. It is more respectful of his considerable intellectual achievements to describe him as definitely well above average in his profession, rather than a polite version of condescendingly fawning over every little little achievement of a sick child.
For example, in my opinion Asimov beats him in popular science writing, Feynman beats him in actual physics and also general writing. Not coming in first or second place doesn't make him a moron, it just makes him not first or second place. Just not the greatest mind of the century, just not the greatest achievement on the planet. Still cool mind you, just not the greatest.
He is fairly comparable to Edward Belbruno, the genius inventor of low energy orbital transfers, in that both broke new ground in a very specialized area of study where they got very surprising, paradigm changing results, and wrote reasonably decent books about it. Note, you've never heard of Belbruno because he physically normal, as far as I know.
It's more respectful to declare him a very significant figure in early black hole physics and a decent writer and stop at that point, than to focus on his handicap while worshiping his achievements in a pandering manner.
what does this mean for MySQL?
Probably the same thing it means for OpenOffice. Or Java.
No, because they have nothing to upsell above java ... Expect mysql to be stabilized, and have all syntax and maybe even docs oracle-ized or oracle-ified. Sort of like "free starter version of Oracle (minus as many useful features as we can get away with)". Expect new features to pretty much be sandbagged. The key is to slow down progress as much as possible without instigating a fork. So, the transition plan to go from the nuevo-mysql to oracle, would be dump the DB on nuevo-mysql and import it on oracle. No syntax changes, no modification of source, no column type issues, etc. Could be pretty cool.
On the other hand, if they really wanted a "starter demo" version of Oracle, they did not need to buy Sun to do it.
Within I2P
possibly corrupt exit nodes
Those two things don't work together...
What you did miss, is https also authenticates the site owner, assuming real signed certs, which admittedly seems kind of pointless for an anonymous network. As if citibank.i2p is really "the real citibank" aka citibank.com.
Option 3: Wait for prices to come down. In 15 years he should be able to get everything he's asking for at less than 10% of today's prices, not counting the ruggedization premium.
Easily the most intelligent, yet lowest scored, of all the comments.
Ten years ago a vaguely midrange pentium with huge storage was full of fans and moving parts in addition to the RAID array. Today, similar specs for my Soekris 5501, which is roughly the size of a big paperback book, has a single "automotive/industrial" grade HD that is semi-indestructable, costs way less than a tenth of 1999 prices, and draws about ten watts at full blast. Hooked up to a roughly cubic foot (err, 35th of a cubic meter?) AGM lead acid battery I have about 3 days of battery backup for my VOIP asterisk PBX. Even with the phones and etherswitch and cablemodem, I have about a day or two of battery backup, which is way more than sufficient for me to get around to hooking it up to the car to charge...
In summary, if you need crazy specs like that in the third world, the solution is wait a decade, then those crazy specs will be pocket change, tiny, few moving parts, and will run off a solar panel.
3.8 meters/second average is not a windy area, infact it's a Class 1 wind speed. There are many places in the U.S. that are Class 3 or better, and you'd get much different results from those areas.
Next poll up on slashdot:
Which will better meet my energy needs:
1) Solar panel in the arctic during the winter
2) Windmill located in one of the least windy areas in the entire US
3) Gas generator (minus the gas)
4) Cowboy Neal
The folks that got screwed where the buggy whip makers. There just aren't many ways to modify a buggy whip into something that meets a need in another market.
Ummm, try the booming erotic services market.
Sounds like you want plain ole standard commercial grade server hardware mounted in a tiny RV.
Extensively shock mount a relay rack, put in somewhat bigger AC/batteries/genset than usual, and you're good to go.
You can use the living quarters to house the armed guard, which will be required for expensive equipment in that corner of the world.
Trying to buy super tough server hardware will simply be more expensive than a RV and much harder to replace / maintain when it breaks.
Admittedly I'm mystified what you'd do with such immense computing power in a rural area without electricity. Maybe a really nice mythtv backend? Educate the locals using SimTractor?
You do realize that Bangladesh is like 1 foot above sea level, so no need to engineer this to last forever when its going to get washed into the sea every couple years by storms etc. Using a RV could help in the evac, assuming there is any place safe to evac to...
Alternately, split your workload transparently across maybe 50 smaller machines, and start purchasing replacements when attrition nears 75%.
No one has yet commented that about 10000 floppies roughly equals a DL-DVD.
The idea of indexing and storing 10000 floppies is incredible. He would have mentioned it.
Therefore he does not have more than 10000 floppies.
Solution is simple.
Make a directory on the hard drive, fill it with files, burn to DL-DVD on a weekly or even daily basis.
Keep this weeks backup in the desk drawer (just in case you delete the wrong file).
Mail two weeks ago to some sort of iron mountain-esque facility. Or stick it in the bank deposit box. Or find a friendly competitor (like utterly different specialty) and exchange backups with him.
No matter what happens, always save a copy of the Dec 31st backup for each year. On Jan 1st, after the hangover, delete any customer subdirectory that has been irrelevant for at least one entire calendar year (thus it exists in full identically on at least two end of year DVDs). Or maybe five years, or maybe whatever the statute of limitations or prison term is for that customers situation. This keeps size down after a couple decades.
This seems like a simple obvious solution, unlike all the crazy upload it to unknown people on the internet, or make a torrent of it, or email it all to your gmail account, or create a 100 TB data warehouse (for a couple floppies?) or whatever else is in the comments today.