The article doesn't mention the beam from the orbital Ion Cannon(which belonged to GDI but was hacked) of the original Command&Conquer computer game's brotherhood of NOD ending movie which destroys alternatively the White House, The Eifeltower, The Statue of Liberty or the Brandenburger Gate, according to the choice of the player!
They PRECEEDED the somewhat similar beam attacks from above from Indepence Day.
rates of unauthorized copying ever since the very beginning. And meanwhile they have grown into the behemoth it is now. Govenments please stop wasting your citizens money with ineffective, even if possibly amusing, intellectual property indoctrination campaigns and with raiding private homes of file sharers. Instead, use it to support useful freeware and OSS, which gives a much better benefit/cost ratio to society.
It's possible that the monitor manufacturers aren't willing to give Microsoft and other proprietary operating system companies the information they need to create appropriate drivers and that the manufacturers, not Microsoft, deserve the blame for this problem.
But they do give the information to the Linux developers ? SCNR
They do want to allow patents on physical inventions and industrial processes normally patentable which include software components, but they don't want software patents like jpeg, double clicking, online shopping, etc. That is why legal expert advice is needed to get the wording right.
They are not going to let patent lawyers write the directive. They are consulting with legal experts" - certainly with at least some good and honest lawyers and alikes like the ones of the EFF - to make sure that it will be absolutely impossible for the patent office, patent lawyers and big corporations to twist the the meaning of the law to have software patents granted anyway.
Software patents have already been illegal in the EU, even if the patent office did grant them. No company however has to my knowledge ever in the EU tried to sue another company for such software patent, because they know it wouldn't stand in court.
"Microsoft starts a competition "MS Calls On Kids to Stop Thought Thieves" . Hundreds of kids spend creative effort and time to make up plots to market microsoft's intellectual property ideas and to develop them into finished movie clips.
1 of those kid wins 2000 pounds worth of audio- and video equipment. A dozen or more of them became finalists and signed the rights to their hard work away and didn't get anything in return. The other hundreds still have, for free, provided microsoft marketing with plentiful of ideas to further their own business' cause.*
Stop those thought thieves!"
This plot is hereby released into the public domain. Feel encouraged to use it if you like.
* Wich cause includes working together with the big phonographic industry labels and mpaa, to lobby politicians to ever more skew copyright and other intellectual law away from the original idea of maximum public benefit towards maximum control and profit for the established big entertainment industry corporations. The extension of the duration of copyright is an example of this. It took mental wealth away from the general public which won't be able to freely use and distribute old works which their creators have long been paid for.
Software Patents, which are monopoly rights on mathematic and logic and often trivial, are even worse in that they can block the independent creation and distribution of intellectual wealth. One reason microsoft is still reluctant to use them against OSS is, that doing so would likely destroy any chance that might still exist of getting them legislated into the EU.
It would be nice if they were going to take a video and pictures of the launch, because I find it awe-inspiring to see an SLBM splash out of the water and proceed towards space. This one time will be an opportunity to see this technology used in a constructive way instead of a test of a part of the ultimate engine of destruction.
Even if there may be no need to launch peaceful missions into space from onboard a submerged submarine in the middle of the ocean, it still looks like a very cool thing, and a good use for the rocket which otherwise might have to be scrapped!
Since the Bush administratoin reduced NASA funding and further increased military funding, it should be embarassing to them, that the first test of a solar sail hast to come through private funding, be built in Russia and launched from a russian submarine. On the other side, it looks like an example of a motivated non-government entity being able to use funding much more efficiently than NASA. I wonder if the now new ABM missiles might be eventually going to suffer a similar fate as that russian SLBM. Considering the ABM's record yet despite ideal test conditions I sure hope they will never have to be relied upon to protect an american city.
At least they're not going to use them to shoot down the satellite space launch SLBM.(Hopefully).
Tell your politicians how disappointed you are that it had to come a court battle to stop this anti-consumer measure the FCC was trying to impose. Tell them what you want, tell them about the bad effects of the entertainment-industry-lobbied DMCA. Maybe refer them to/. other discussion boards, to the EFF.
Instead of the entertainment industry adapting to new technology and the changes in society brought by them, they would rather have it the other way around. They didn't succeed in 1984, trying to ban video recorders, and they (hopefully) won't succeed today in DRM-crippling consumer video and audio equipment nor in banning p2p networks, but they're massively lobbying to try and have their way imposed on everyone.
Don't be illusioned about one thing relating to television however - thinking you could outrun commercials. As long as most of television is financed through advertising, the tv and entertainment industry WILL(and need to) find a way to get it delivered to the majority of the viewers. If a large portion of people start to fast-forward by commercials thanks to time-shifted viewing, they might become very short and very frequent so as to not make it worthwhile to manually ff by each of them. Or they will completely move into the tv productions itselves, then expect more of the likes as James Bond car being a BMW, possibly more intrusive.
A very useful windows freeware(non-OSS) that acts as a local proxy server with custom filters to rewrite web sites on the fly on their way to the browser. All Filters are written in a reasonably potent filtering language and new ones can be written and added.
Possibilities include: - some popup blocking - convert within-frame links to normal ones - convert embedded flash animations or other plugins to clickable links - modify header information (referrer, browser name,version , caching meta tags)
That is very much the right question. The amount of sunlight that on average reaches the surface of the earth every day is multiple hundred times as the world energy consumption consumed in a whole year - including energy consumed in form of fossil fuels. Furthermore, the radiation isn't spread out evenly, over the earth's surface, but instead more conveniently concentrated, which means even less surface area needed to be covered than if it was.
Scroll down for graphic comparing the solar energy potential on earth to other energy sources' potentials (including oil, nuclear, coal): http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/ sol arworldpeace.htm
Since solar energy radiation input is so much higher than the amount of power we need, what matters much more than efficiency for more large scale photovoltaic energy production is the cost per power unit.
The gumstix has a larger surface area, the gumstix has a larger average visual cross section when viewed from a random angle. German shipping services like to define the size of a packet, for the purpose of determining fees, as the sum of of its dimensions.
Which is smaller - a gumstix or a sheet of paper ? If you say it's the gumstix, then the picotux is smaller.
Otherwise it does not make sense! The german postal service says the picotux is smaller, so the picotux is smaller; but what do shipping fees in Germany, which are paid in Euro, have to do with the size of the gumstix in comparison to the picotux ? And why am I comparing it to mice which are mammals which are rodents of the genus Mus as computer input devices ? It does not make sense. Therefore you must admit the picotux is smaller.
That's very nice for Canadians, BUT...
on
Canada Says No To DMCA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
as good as this for Canada, I'd do better lobbying my own countries' politicans for reasonable copyright and against new DMCA like "copyright police state" laws which the enterntainment is lobbying for, than posting on and reading/. where most people share a more reasonable stance on the subject anyway (even if the entertainment industrie's "We're the good guys and they're the bad guys" - Propaganda did take its toll among the/. population).
They're not. Not the big labels at least. http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/albini.html ; they're mostly bureaucrat-, lobbyist-, marketing- and lawyer-leeches that try to port and impose an inefficient and obsolete distribution system to the information age and restrict new technology and misemploy them to gain even more control, regardless of the damage to society it would cause. Think what could happen a tcpa/palladium (tcg/ngscb) like control technology gets mandated into every computer to enforce copyrights and DRM and then a not-perfectly-good government decides to increasingly use it for suveillance, censorship and control purposes.
Legal(in russia, very likely legal for people in germany too, even if the labels are trying to propagate otherwise), UNENCUMBERED BY DRM, cheap and in the format of your choice(mp3, ogg, "itunes" aac, wma,... )
Possible downside: The big labels aren't getting any of the money because they are still refusing to cooperate with the russian agency that collects the the license fees from allofmp3.com.
If you think yours in the US are high and getting higher consider them in Germany: Diesel fuel is currently at about 1 / liter, gasoline even higher. 1 / liter = 5,06 Dollars per Gallon
Of course, Germany is considerably smaller than the US; and people tend to buy more fuel efficient cars here as well, if not for caring about the environment then because gas guzzlers' owners are punished through high fuel prices resulting from the the taxes on them.
Now that the software patent proponents have failed rushing, sneaking and cheating software patents into the EU, maybe we can get the existing law, which the european patent office has been ignoring, cemented and enforced: "Computer programs aren't patentable" and neither are math, logic and art that blend to create them. Need still to communicate with our politicians and educate/inform them; why deterministic computer software is different from physical areas of science and technology where actually novel inventions can be made, etc...
The parliament opposed the attempts by the majority of the council and the commission to introduce software patents. And some people from Poland apparently saved us europeans from their ultimate attempt - Thank you, Poland.
If the rest of the world decides against software patents, the US would eventually benefit, too, because it would have to abandon or at least reduce the legal parasitism and extortionism from their software industry to stay competitive.
"Hydrogen is a Boondoggle. The energy density is so low, that we might as well use batteries if we're going to power vehicles with it." -StCredZero
Energy released when oxidized:
Hydrogen: 141.86 MJ / kg Gasoline : 47.5 MJ / kg
So maybe the engineers that decided to use hydrogen for fuel for the space shuttle, liquid fueled rockets and hypersonic scramjets instead of gasoline aren't that stupid after all. The small scale storage however, as in a car tank, still takes some more space than gasoline tanks. And storage in gaseous form at high pressure presents a potential exploding hazard if the containment is broken. Liquid Hydrogen, I am told: is barely more dangerous than gasoline(just don't touch it at its liquid temperature at normal pressure of less than 20 K = -253 C = -424 F). Like gasoline in real life, it shouldn't usually explode in an accident because it can only react as much as it gets oxygen which is limited by the surface area exposed to air. Some H evaporating will cool the remaining liquid H down (same effect as is used in a refrigerator). And if it evaporates without burning up right away, it will rise up and away very quickly since it is so much lighter than air. Hydrogen reacts with oxygen from the atmoshpere (combusts) to form Dihydrogen Monoxide, which is.... On top of the higher energy density per mass unit than just about any other substance obtainable in big quantities, hydrogen has a higher combustion pressure (burns faster) than gasoline which means higher conversion efficiency can be achieved when used in internal combustion engines. Hydrogen isn't limited to be used with fuel cells, it can be used in combustion engines in the same way as gasoline is used. BMW has actually been testing a prototype since a couple of years whose engine can be fueled off liquid hydrogen as well as gasoline. It has one tank for each and can switch between them. http://www.wheels24.co.za/Wheels24/News/0,,1369-13 72_1233189,00.html http://greenvilleonline.com/news/specialreport/200 3/06/09/200306098048.htm http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_38/b3699304.ht m http://www.bmwworld.com/hydrogen/stragegy.htm http://www.google.com/
Biodiesel, even if CO2 neutral (amount absorbed during plant growth = amount released through its combustion) tend to emit some other undesirable substances into the atmosphere. But of course it IS vastly superior to fossil fuels based energy in terms of emissions.
More research and support is needed to further develop and assess promising new sustainable non-polluting energy technologies like biodiesel or hydrogen from algae and others. And to START IMPLEMENTING ones that prove viable. Unfortunately the bush administration decided to drastically cut sustainable energy research spending and energy efficiency improvement programs, and to rather grant subsidies and tax cuts of billions of dollars to coal, gas, oil and nuclear electricity generation companies(1 Site of potential interest: http://www.nationalpriorities.org/).
the other iter members went ahead and cleared the blockade that has been laid since bush reentered iter.
The first post is completely wrong about it being a "threat" to China or anyone else. China *wants* the reactor to be built in the EU instead of Japan. So does the other ITER member, Russia. If the US hadn't opposed the french location and induced Japan to resist it more strongly despite the odds, the project would have went ahead some time ago.
Unlike nuclear fission power, fusion power has enough fuel available that it could potentially supply all of the world's energy demand for thousands and even millions of years and it doesn't produce nearly as much dangerous nuclear waste nor can fusion power be used as a disguise for a nuclear weapons program. The amount of deuterium for fusion is practically unlimited - 1 kg of ordinary water contains about 1 gram of heavy water which contains deuterium instead of common hydrogen. It seems that, unlike in the past decades where the researchers said "Fusion Power will be ready soon, there are just some issues which we expect to have resolved soon if we get more money." it now is "We have the issues resolved and could build a reactor that can sustain a fusion reaction and give a net output of energy. Now we just need the money to build a reactor sufficiently large so we can prove and make sure that it works like we think it does."
Of course with such a pretty-much-as-cheap-as-coal technology available as the solartower that is so simple in its function, provides steady uninterrupted power, and about which relevant laws of nature are so well understood that it is guaranteed to work, it may be questionable if we actually have a reasonable need for fusion power on earth. Of course, solar towers need a sunny place to build them in order to be efficient and they don't need any high-tech to build either, which may well be the reason why the west has mostly stopped supporting the technology. Solar tower for large scale electricity production can be build with just basic construction materials like mostly cement, steel and glass(which is sand) and with labor. Ideal if you want to help many poor countries, but inadequate if you want them to stay poor and dependent to keep exploiting them.
For the OTP not only does require the pad to be used once, and ONLY once, and it to be sufficiently random, but the pad data also must not be known by anyone else. If you use data recorded for the SETI program, it is certain that that a potential attacker can get to know it. An attacker who considers there may be people incompetent enough to use publicly available data for their one time pad will easily break proposed SETI-based encryption with little resources.
1. Method of entering and recording votes. 2. Storage and delivery of votes for counting.
Voting with electronic storage of votes can be compromised in step 1 even if the local election staff is doing their job perfectly well. The e-voting machine could be compromised by the manufacturer and depending on their security level, by anyone else who has access to them including a monkey as well as in step 2.
Voting by verified paper ballots can only be compromised in step 2, assuming any physical safeguards that may exist, such as seals on boxes containing the ballots and people in charge who may not agree with rigging the election, are somehow circumvented.
An ideal system may sign the paper ballots with a cryptographic signature so that it could only be compromised if both the manufacturer of the voting machines and the local election staff are.
Certainly there are better systems than unverifyableinsecure DRE e-voting machines which have been plagued with bugs, hacked by a monkey and reportedly counted more than 100000 votes incorrectly and how-many-more due to more subtle and difficult to detect errors.
Slashdot Mirror
but this nice first picture looks much like a partially undressed lying woman to me.
The article doesn't mention the beam from the orbital Ion Cannon(which belonged to GDI but was hacked) of the original Command&Conquer computer game's brotherhood of NOD ending movie which destroys alternatively the White House, The Eifeltower, The Statue of Liberty or the Brandenburger Gate, according to the choice of the player!
They PRECEEDED the somewhat similar beam attacks from above from Indepence Day.
rates of unauthorized copying ever since the very beginning. And meanwhile they have grown into the behemoth it is now. Govenments please stop wasting your citizens money with ineffective, even if possibly amusing, intellectual property indoctrination campaigns and with raiding private homes of file sharers. Instead, use it to support useful freeware and OSS, which gives a much better benefit/cost ratio to society.
SCNR
They do want to allow patents on physical inventions and industrial processes normally patentable which include software components, but they don't want software patents like jpeg, double clicking, online shopping, etc. That is why legal expert advice is needed to get the wording right.
They are not going to let patent lawyers write the directive. They are consulting with legal experts" - certainly with at least some good and honest lawyers and alikes like the ones of the EFF - to make sure that it will be absolutely impossible for the patent office, patent lawyers and big corporations to twist the the meaning of the law to have software patents granted anyway.
Software patents have already been illegal in the EU, even if the patent office did grant them. No company however has to my knowledge ever in the EU tried to sue another company for such software patent, because they know it wouldn't stand in court.
"Microsoft starts a competition "MS Calls On Kids to Stop Thought Thieves" . Hundreds of kids spend creative effort and time to make up plots to market microsoft's intellectual property ideas and to develop them into finished movie clips. 1 of those kid wins 2000 pounds worth of audio- and video equipment. A dozen or more of them became finalists and signed the rights to their hard work away and didn't get anything in return. The other hundreds still have, for free, provided microsoft marketing with plentiful of ideas to further their own business' cause.* Stop those thought thieves!" This plot is hereby released into the public domain. Feel encouraged to use it if you like. * Wich cause includes working together with the big phonographic industry labels and mpaa, to lobby politicians to ever more skew copyright and other intellectual law away from the original idea of maximum public benefit towards maximum control and profit for the established big entertainment industry corporations. The extension of the duration of copyright is an example of this. It took mental wealth away from the general public which won't be able to freely use and distribute old works which their creators have long been paid for. Software Patents, which are monopoly rights on mathematic and logic and often trivial, are even worse in that they can block the independent creation and distribution of intellectual wealth. One reason microsoft is still reluctant to use them against OSS is, that doing so would likely destroy any chance that might still exist of getting them legislated into the EU.
Even if there may be no need to launch peaceful missions into space from onboard a submerged submarine in the middle of the ocean, it still looks like a very cool thing, and a good use for the rocket which otherwise might have to be scrapped!
Since the Bush administratoin reduced NASA funding and further increased military funding, it should be embarassing to them, that the first test of a solar sail hast to come through private funding, be built in Russia and launched from a russian submarine. On the other side, it looks like an example of a motivated non-government entity being able to use funding much more efficiently than NASA. I wonder if the now new ABM missiles might be eventually going to suffer a similar fate as that russian SLBM. Considering the ABM's record yet despite ideal test conditions I sure hope they will never have to be relied upon to protect an american city.
At least they're not going to use them to shoot down the satellite space launch SLBM.(Hopefully).
Tell your politicians how disappointed you are that it had to come a court battle to stop this anti-consumer measure the FCC was trying to impose. Tell them what you want, tell them about the bad effects of the entertainment-industry-lobbied DMCA. Maybe refer them to /. other discussion boards, to the EFF.
Instead of the entertainment industry adapting to new technology and the changes in society brought by them, they would rather have it the other way around. They didn't succeed in 1984, trying to ban video recorders, and they (hopefully) won't succeed today in DRM-crippling consumer video and audio equipment nor in banning p2p networks, but they're massively lobbying to try and have their way imposed on everyone.
Don't be illusioned about one thing relating to television however - thinking you could outrun commercials.
As long as most of television is financed through advertising, the tv and entertainment industry WILL(and need to) find a way to get it delivered to the majority of the viewers. If a large portion of people start to fast-forward by commercials thanks to time-shifted viewing, they might become very short and very frequent so as to not make it worthwhile to manually ff by each of them. Or they will completely move into the tv productions itselves, then expect more of the likes as James Bond car being a BMW, possibly more intrusive.
"I was privileged to receive a pre-publication copy."
means
"I was recruited to advertise for it on slashdot."
S(FAFABI*)CNR
*for any false accusations, but I
Always put any new transistor technology in your webserver before announcing it on slashdot.
Anyway, if it will be used for CPUs, with 6000Ghz its good for another 16 years of Moore's Law.
A very useful windows freeware(non-OSS) that acts as a local proxy server with custom filters to rewrite web sites on the fly on their way to the browser. All Filters are written in a reasonably potent filtering language and new ones can be written and added.
b tnG=Google+Search
Possibilities include:
- some popup blocking
- convert within-frame links to normal ones
- convert embedded flash animations or other plugins to clickable links
- modify header information (referrer, browser name,version , caching meta tags)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=proxomitron&
That is very much the right question. The amount of sunlight that on average reaches the surface of the earth every day is multiple hundred times as the world energy consumption consumed in a whole year - including energy consumed in form of fossil fuels. Furthermore, the radiation isn't spread out evenly, over the earth's surface, but instead more conveniently concentrated, which means even less surface area needed to be covered than if it was.
:/ sol arworldpeace.htm
Scroll down for graphic comparing the solar energy potential on earth to other energy sources' potentials (including oil, nuclear, coal)
http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents
Since solar energy radiation input is so much higher than the amount of power we need, what matters much more than efficiency for more large scale photovoltaic energy production is the cost per power unit.
The gumstix has a larger surface area, the gumstix has a larger average visual cross section when viewed from a random angle. German shipping services like to define the size of a packet, for the purpose of determining fees, as the sum of of its dimensions.
Which is smaller - a gumstix or a sheet of paper ? If you say it's the gumstix, then the picotux is smaller.
Otherwise it does not make sense! The german postal service says the picotux is smaller, so the picotux is smaller; but what do shipping fees in Germany, which are paid in Euro, have to do with the size of the gumstix in comparison to the picotux ? And why am I comparing it to mice which are mammals which are rodents of the genus Mus as computer input devices ? It does not make sense.
Therefore you must admit the picotux is smaller.
as good as this for Canada, I'd do better lobbying my own countries' politicans for reasonable copyright and against new DMCA like "copyright police state" laws which the enterntainment is lobbying for, than posting on and reading /. where most people share a more reasonable stance on the subject anyway (even if the entertainment industrie's "We're the good guys and they're the bad guys" - Propaganda did take its toll among the /. population) .
i .html ; they're mostly bureaucrat-, lobbyist-, marketing- and lawyer-leeches that try to port and impose an inefficient and obsolete distribution system to the information age and restrict new technology and misemploy them to gain even more control, regardless of the damage to society it would cause. Think what could happen a tcpa/palladium (tcg/ngscb) like control technology gets mandated into every computer to enforce copyrights and DRM and then a not-perfectly-good government decides to increasingly use it for suveillance, censorship and control purposes.
They're not. Not the big labels at least. http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/albin
Legal(in russia, very likely legal for people in germany too, even if the labels are trying to propagate otherwise), UNENCUMBERED BY DRM, cheap and in the format of your choice(mp3, ogg, "itunes" aac, wma, ... )
Possible downside: The big labels aren't getting any of the money because they are still refusing to cooperate with the russian agency that collects the the license fees from allofmp3.com.
If you think yours in the US are high and getting higher consider them in Germany:
Diesel fuel is currently at about 1 / liter, gasoline even higher.
1 / liter = 5,06 Dollars per Gallon
Of course, Germany is considerably smaller than the US; and people tend to buy more fuel efficient cars here as well, if not for caring about the environment then because gas guzzlers' owners are punished through high fuel prices resulting from the the taxes on them.
You have forgotten about fair use.
[MyDigitalRestrictionsManagement Restrictions="0e0018200a" cipher="ROT13"]
Abj GUVF vf gur jnl gb ryvzvangr snve hfr...
Naq LBH orggre qb erfgenva sebz dhbgvat guvf Grkg. Npghnyyl, ol rira ernqvat vg, lbh ner evtug abj va ivbyngvba bs gur QZPN naq yvnoyr sbe olcnffvat bs pbcl cebgrpgvba. Rkprcg vs lbh ner hfvat gur "ZlQvtvgnyErfgevpgvbaZnantre" fbsgjner gb ivrj vg va juvpu pnfr 10 Qbyynef unir whfg orra nhgbzngvpnyyl qrqhpgrq sebz lbhe nppbhag!
[/MyDigitalRestrictionsManagement]
You have forgotten about fair use.
Abj GUVF vf gur jnl gb ryvzvangr snve hfr...
Naq LBH orggre qb erfgenva sebz dhbgvat guvf Grkg. Npghnyyl, ol rira ernqvat vg, lbh ner evtug abj va ivbyngvba bs gur QZPN naq yvnoyr sbe olcnffvat bs pbcl cebgrpgvba. Rkprcg vs lbh ner hfvat gur "ZlQvtvgnyErfgevpgvbaZnantre" fbsgjner gb ivrj vg va juvpu pnfr 10 Qbyynef unir whfg orra nhgbzngvpnyyl qrqhpgrq sebz lbhe nppbhag!
Now that the software patent proponents have failed rushing, sneaking and cheating software patents into the EU, maybe we can get the existing law, which the european patent office has been ignoring, cemented and enforced: "Computer programs aren't patentable" and neither are math, logic and art that blend to create them. Need still to communicate with our politicians and educate/inform them; why deterministic computer software is different from physical areas of science and technology where actually novel inventions can be made, etc...
.
The parliament opposed the attempts by the majority of the council and the commission to introduce software patents. And some people from Poland apparently saved us europeans from their ultimate attempt - Thank you, Poland
If the rest of the world decides against software patents, the US would eventually benefit, too, because it would have to abandon or at least reduce the legal parasitism and extortionism from their software industry to stay competitive.
Especially when tired, I had occasionally thought of doing a save game before doing something pleasing, like eating a good meal.
Now I wonder why there are no records of people who'd save before trying something risky/stupid/dangerous...
Energy released when oxidized:
Hydrogen: 141.86 MJ / kg
Gasoline : 47.5 MJ / kg
So maybe the engineers that decided to use hydrogen for fuel for the space shuttle, liquid fueled rockets and hypersonic scramjets instead of gasoline aren't that stupid after all.
The small scale storage however, as in a car tank, still takes some more space than gasoline tanks. And storage in gaseous form at high pressure presents a potential exploding hazard if the containment is broken. Liquid Hydrogen, I am told: is barely more dangerous than gasoline(just don't touch it at its liquid temperature at normal pressure of less than 20 K = -253 C = -424 F). Like gasoline in real life, it shouldn't usually explode in an accident because it can only react as much as it gets oxygen which is limited by the surface area exposed to air. Some H evaporating will cool the remaining liquid H down (same effect as is used in a refrigerator). And if it evaporates without burning up right away, it will rise up and away very quickly since it is so much lighter than air.
Hydrogen reacts with oxygen from the atmoshpere (combusts) to form Dihydrogen Monoxide, which is
On top of the higher energy density per mass unit than just about any other substance obtainable in big quantities, hydrogen has a higher combustion pressure (burns faster) than gasoline which means higher conversion efficiency can be achieved when used in internal combustion engines. Hydrogen isn't limited to be used with fuel cells, it can be used in combustion engines in the same way as gasoline is used. BMW has actually been testing a prototype since a couple of years whose engine can be fueled off liquid hydrogen as well as gasoline. It has one tank for each and can switch between them.
http://www.wheels24.co.za/Wheels24/News/0,,1369-1
http://greenvilleonline.com/news/specialreport/20
http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_38/b3699304.h
http://www.bmwworld.com/hydrogen/stragegy.htm
http://www.google.com/
It is expected go into series production "soon" . They've built a racing car demonstrator based on the technology as well. http://www.rsportscars.com/eng/articles/bmw_hydro
Biodiesel, even if CO2 neutral (amount absorbed during plant growth = amount released through its combustion) tend to emit some other undesirable substances into the atmosphere. But of course it IS vastly superior to fossil fuels based energy in terms of emissions.
More research and support is needed to further develop and assess promising new sustainable non-polluting energy technologies like biodiesel or hydrogen from algae and others. And to START IMPLEMENTING ones that prove viable.
Unfortunately the bush administration decided to drastically cut sustainable energy research spending and energy efficiency improvement programs, and to rather grant subsidies and tax cuts of billions of dollars to coal, gas, oil and nuclear electricity generation companies(1 Site of potential interest: http://www.nationalpriorities.org/).
the other iter members went ahead and cleared the blockade that has been laid since bush reentered iter.
The first post is completely wrong about it being a "threat" to China or anyone else. China *wants* the reactor to be built in the EU instead of Japan. So does the other ITER member, Russia. If the US hadn't opposed the french location and induced Japan to resist it more strongly despite the odds, the project would have went ahead some time ago.
Unlike nuclear fission power, fusion power has enough fuel available that it could potentially supply all of the world's energy demand for thousands and even millions of years and it doesn't produce nearly as much dangerous nuclear waste nor can fusion power be used as a disguise for a nuclear weapons program. The amount of deuterium for fusion is practically unlimited - 1 kg of ordinary water contains about 1 gram of heavy water which contains deuterium instead of common hydrogen. It seems that, unlike in the past decades where the researchers said "Fusion Power will be ready soon, there are just some issues which we expect to have resolved soon if we get more money." it now is "We have the issues resolved and could build a reactor that can sustain a fusion reaction and give a net output of energy. Now we just need the money to build a reactor sufficiently large so we can prove and make sure that it works like we think it does."
Of course with such a pretty-much-as-cheap-as-coal technology available as the solar tower that is so simple in its function, provides steady uninterrupted power, and about which relevant laws of nature are so well understood that it is guaranteed to work, it may be questionable if we actually have a reasonable need for fusion power on earth. Of course, solar towers need a sunny place to build them in order to be efficient and they don't need any high-tech to build either, which may well be the reason why the west has mostly stopped supporting the technology. Solar tower for large scale electricity production can be build with just basic construction materials like mostly cement, steel and glass(which is sand) and with labor. Ideal if you want to help many poor countries, but inadequate if you want them to stay poor and dependent to keep exploiting them.
For the OTP not only does require the pad to be used once, and ONLY once, and it to be sufficiently random, but the pad data also must not be known by anyone else. If you use data recorded for the SETI program, it is certain that that a potential attacker can get to know it. An attacker who considers there may be people incompetent enough to use publicly available data for their one time pad will easily break proposed SETI-based encryption with little resources.
1. Method of entering and recording votes.
.
2. Storage and delivery of votes for counting.
Voting with electronic storage of votes can be compromised in step 1 even if the local election staff is doing their job perfectly well. The e-voting machine could be compromised by the manufacturer and depending on their security level, by anyone else who has access to them including a monkey as well as in step 2
Voting by verified paper ballots can only be compromised in step 2, assuming any physical safeguards that may exist, such as seals on boxes containing the ballots and people in charge who may not agree with rigging the election, are somehow circumvented.
An ideal system may sign the paper ballots with a cryptographic signature so that it could only be compromised if both the manufacturer of the voting machines and the local election staff are.
Certainly there are better systems than unverifyable insecure DRE e-voting machines which have been plagued with bugs, hacked by a monkey and reportedly counted more than 100000 votes incorrectly and how-many-more due to more subtle and difficult to detect errors.