The problem with pebble bed reactors is that it is not economical to reuse the fuel. Read about the reactor built in Germany which was for the purpose of breeding U233 from Th232.
The result of this is that while they are "safe, cheap, and modular" they will not efficiently burn the fuel we have, resulting in running out of uranium about 2 orders of magnitude sooner than we would if you run standard breeder reactors or reprocess fuel. Oh, and you haven't convinced me that new designs are not safe, the electricity that they produce not cheap, or that modular is necessarily a good thing.
It is my understanding that individual chips currently max out at 8 Gb; so t have an 8GB capacity right now you need 8 chips in your USB drive/camera/whatever. "Tomorrow" you will only need 4, meaning it should cost about half as much once the fixed costs are paid for.
Basically, we look at a galaxy and see how fast parts of it are spinning. From there, we can calculate the acceleration due to gravity on different parts of (a=v^2/r) and set this equal to the gravitational acceleration (a=GM/r^2) to find the total mass inside of whichever part we are looking at (mass outside has no net gravitational effect).
Once we have gravitationall calculated the mass distribution, we can look at normal images of the galaxy, note that we can only see 5% of that amount of mass, and declare the remaining 95% of the mass to be dark matter because we can't see it.
The current most plausible idea is that there is some other substance out there we can't see, but there are other theories involving different laws of physics, we're just not happy enough with any theory yet to abandon the others. The goal is always to make the physics fit the observations; once the observation was that the speed of light is constant, scientists concluded that there was no ether, even if they didn't understand why until 25 years later. We're just guessing that there is something we cannot see, like the way the neutrino was discovered.
According to the actual Supreme Court Opinion: One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device's lawful uses.
Thus, the fact that Grokster designed their services to be copyright-infringement-capable and advertised it as such is what resulted in their being liable for copyright infringement. While the website is not strictly incorrect, none of it is anything new from the MGM v. Grokster (2005) case.
Sure, the AMD X2 3800+ is probably a little better, but it's not 35% better so the Intel has the better performance/price ratio. More importantly, you simply can't get a dual core AMD processor for what most people consider a reasonable price for a processor (I consider $250 the most I will spend or suggest someone spend).
I don't understand your complaining that the marketing department is running things. Marketing departments are supposed to be the ones who pick a slogan. Intel finally got their marketing department out of their engineering meetings, and it looks like they are trying to maximizing performance/power now, which is something most people would love to see. If anything, they are going less to shit now than they were from 2002-2004.
Something like this happened the year before I was a frosh. Two kids go home for a weekend, friends broke in, moved out all his stuff, and turned it into a hot tub. With permission from the occupants they did it again over Prefrosh Weekend when we prospective students came to visit and it's been done on Prefrosh Weekend since then.
Caltech has a long tradition of pranks as well. Not sure if they still do it, and even these stories are second-hand, but senior ditch day was a tradition in which seniors would go off campus and booby-trap their rooms, while underclassmen tried to break in. Depending on the fiendishness of the defenses, the underclassmen would carry out various levels of pranks upon entering the room.
We still do it, though we give them puzzles to solve now too, so they can chose whether or not they want to break in the old-fashioned way or high-tech way. =)
We've done a lot of pranks in the past, and still do, but most of the recent ones tend to be within Caltech (or at MIT if we're bored) and don't get a lot of attention these days. It's sad that most cool things to prank now have security systems and assume you're a terrorist if you try bypassing them.
A quick lesson in quantum physics:
Basically, tunnelling occurs because an electron can get from one side of a potential barrier to the other without ever being in the forbidden region (the width of the barrier, where the potential energy exceeds the total energy of the electron) due to it existing as a wavefunction that does not collapse until you observe it. Anyway, the chance of an electron penetrating a simple potential barrier like the gate of a transistor is a function of the height of the barrier (voltage applied to the gate), the width of the barrier (gate length), and the energy of the electron (voltage across transistor + electron thermal energy).
So ways to decrease tunnelling include:
Longer gate, but slower. Wanting smaller transistors and faster speeds is the whole reason we're having this problem.
Increase gate voltage or decrease transistor voltage. Unfortunately these two are coupled. They might not exactly cancel each other out, but they make things difficult.
Decrease the thermal energy of the electons. There are a couple ways to do this. One involves liquid nitrogen; the other involves something like making electrons climb further out of their holes to become free (fairly easy by introducing impurities into the silicon), resulting in less electron energy and so less tunnelling. Also less current in general though, so this might be prohibitive for some other reason.
Just my $0.02 since if I knew for sure I'd be making 6 figures somewhere and not applying to grad schools...
The price on these things has dropped as they halved the RAM and Flash. Basically, they now have two models where they had one: a cheaper version and the one we all know and love, they just gave the name to the cheaper one and added an "L" to make the fancier one sound better than last years model.
So how far apart are these going to be placed? I mean, are they going to be at the Lagrange points, which seem to be spread awfully far apart but might work, or somewhere else where the position is unstable and requires thrusters?
Also, what kind of instruments do these have? If we want, can we point them at other things and get useful pictures? Either way, it should be interesting.
You have negleted to mention one thing: greenhouse gasses only act as such at certain wavelengths depending on their absorption spectra. Therefore, there is a point at which adding more of any greenhouse to the atmosphere does not change the absorption spectra of the atmosphere since the absorbable light from the sun is already being fully absorbed.
I was unable to find a website explaining this or giving examples, but I remember being told at one point by a professor (2 years ago) and shown the data/graph showing it that the water vapor in the atmosphere already absorbs 100% of its absorption spectra but that since this is not the case for all this man-made junk (CFCs etc.) or CO2 that those things resulting in global warming.
According to the Wiki FAQ anyone is encouraged to work on the port of the current version with some resources they have made available and the next version (January 2006) should be cross-platform.
I don't know if there is an easy solution, other than to make Linux or OSX or another more secure operating system more simple to use - and you can go ahead and tell me that your Grandmother runs Linux and has no problems, but the ordinary computer user is looking for more than a glorified Internet/Email machine.
OS X is simple to use; the reason it hasn't become more widespread is the (seemingly - depending on what you want) more expensive hardware.
Could Windows be more secure? Yes. Definitely.
Could Linux be easier to use? Yes, and just as equally so.
Is Windows becoming more secure? I'm not really sure; SP2 is better, but no better than a $20 firewall.
Is Linux becoming easier to use? Linux is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was three years ago and still improving.
I prefer to call it a Faraday Cage and I prefer to make it myself out of tin foil as it tends to be cheaper.
From wikipedia: A Faraday cage is best understood as an approximation to an ideal hollow conductor. Electric fields produce forces on the charge carriers (i.e., electrons) within the conductor. As soon as an electric field is applied to the surface of an ideal conductor, it generates a current that causes displacement of charge inside the conductor that cancels the applied field inside. And it works exactly as you described for magnetic fields.
The problem with asking for a ZIP code is that if someone steals (whether by RFID or not) you driver's license information along with your credit card information then they have your ZIP code too.
(My dad's car got broken into last night and had his credit cards stolen.)
If what they are saying is not factual then it should be very clearly presented as nothing more than an opinion. The free flow of information like this is an integral part of capitalism.
IANAL but while I believe that the doctors can sue for false information posted online that can be shown to cause damages they would have to file a suit, prove that the information posted online is false and not solely an opinion. They have no grounds to prevent people from posting their comments and can only file a suit after the fact (that is, prior restraint is not allowed). Imagine if M$ decided to sue for every "Windows Sucks" or other anti-M$ comment on slashdot.
Unfortunately, lawsuits are expensive, but the most likely result will be some sort of disclaimer or the site simply removing the offensive (whether true or not) comments.
You just need to get the firewire cable and it will plug in fine since it has the same connector on the iPod nano as on any other non-shuffle iPod. It will cost like $10 at a store or a couple bucks on ebay.
But one interesting thing about the CJ position is that he gets to decide who writes the opinions.
The CJ only decides who writes the opinions if he is in the majority (hence the going with the majority to limit the damage) or else the senior-ranking justice in the majority decides.
Back when the court was something, they are the ones who told the police they must read rights to people. Actually, that decision gave the police more power. Think about it: once the police tell someone their rights, they know for sure that anything they get out of them is admissible evidence, because all the police had to do was read them their rights.
Back then, the courts said that people could not be taken by government for no reason. See Korematsu v. US. regarding the Japanese Internment Camps.
That government could not look at your reading list and label you as a terrorist because you read Carol Marx. Not a terrorist no. But you could get labeled a communist for attending a single Socialist Party meeting before WWII. And don't forget the Alien and Sedition Acts. This comment is more about the government than the court so that's all I really have to say.
Do you know how many Joe McCarthy's there are in government, and how the courts have stopped them? You do know that the courts didn't stop Senator Joe McCarthy, that the trials were all Senate hearings and that he eventually just lost popularity.
Why did Rehnquist not retire? Why did he stay when he was sick? Was he this sick? He probably didn't know when he was going to die and wanted to decide the abortion case once O'Connor gets replaced (hoping by someone pro-life) since there will be an abortion case on the docket for the end of November.
Re:I don't get it? ; onboard ; memory ; solid stat
on
Intel and Laptop RAID?
·
· Score: 1
First, this feature is probably targeted at "Desktop Replacement Users" whose users care less about weight and battery life and more about their penis length^H^H computer features and hard drive space. The other group is the paranoid about data security, who want a constant backup hard drive to keep their laptop going even if a drive fails.
One note about battery life, I think the power consumed by a drive (assuming constant mass distribution) is proportional to rpm^{3/2} which means that a 7200 RPM drive consumes more than twice as much power as a 4200 RPM drive, so it would actually use less power to have 2 4200 RPM drives instead of a single 7200 RPM drive.
Second, you've explained why onboard video sucks up memory bandwidth but most laptops (ok, at least the Apple Powerbooks) have dedicated video RAM. In addition, in a RAID 0 configuration the drive uses no more bandwidth, because you are transferring the same amount of data as you would with only one drive. Even in a RAID 1 configuration, you transfer the same data twice so you still only need to read from RAM once. Yes, software RAID uses more of your CPU, but I have a software RAID 5 array set up on my 1.8 GHz P4 (that I use to backup my Powerbook) and I have no issues with too much CPU overhead.
Dude, no one is making you use RAID on your next laptop, but some people might find it useful so Intel is making it possible. Not to mention, once flash hard drives are out, you might just want RAID on your laptop.
Finally, if you want to support solid state hard drives, buy a USB key or several and support the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with pebble bed reactors is that it is not economical to reuse the fuel. Read about the reactor built in Germany which was for the purpose of breeding U233 from Th232.
The result of this is that while they are "safe, cheap, and modular" they will not efficiently burn the fuel we have, resulting in running out of uranium about 2 orders of magnitude sooner than we would if you run standard breeder reactors or reprocess fuel. Oh, and you haven't convinced me that new designs are not safe, the electricity that they produce not cheap, or that modular is necessarily a good thing.
Then you wouldn't lose any settings or personal information.
It is my understanding that individual chips currently max out at 8 Gb; so t have an 8GB capacity right now you need 8 chips in your USB drive/camera/whatever. "Tomorrow" you will only need 4, meaning it should cost about half as much once the fixed costs are paid for.
Basically, we look at a galaxy and see how fast parts of it are spinning. From there, we can calculate the acceleration due to gravity on different parts of (a=v^2/r) and set this equal to the gravitational acceleration (a=GM/r^2) to find the total mass inside of whichever part we are looking at (mass outside has no net gravitational effect).
Once we have gravitationall calculated the mass distribution, we can look at normal images of the galaxy, note that we can only see 5% of that amount of mass, and declare the remaining 95% of the mass to be dark matter because we can't see it.
The current most plausible idea is that there is some other substance out there we can't see, but there are other theories involving different laws of physics, we're just not happy enough with any theory yet to abandon the others. The goal is always to make the physics fit the observations; once the observation was that the speed of light is constant, scientists concluded that there was no ether, even if they didn't understand why until 25 years later. We're just guessing that there is something we cannot see, like the way the neutrino was discovered.
According to the actual Supreme Court Opinion: One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device's lawful uses.
Thus, the fact that Grokster designed their services to be copyright-infringement-capable and advertised it as such is what resulted in their being liable for copyright infringement. While the website is not strictly incorrect, none of it is anything new from the MGM v. Grokster (2005) case.
Let's talk processor's someone might buy (prices from Fry's):
PentiumD 820 2.8 GHz = $250
AMD X2 3800+ 2.0 GHz = $330
Sure, the AMD X2 3800+ is probably a little better, but it's not 35% better so the Intel has the better performance/price ratio. More importantly, you simply can't get a dual core AMD processor for what most people consider a reasonable price for a processor (I consider $250 the most I will spend or suggest someone spend).
I don't understand your complaining that the marketing department is running things. Marketing departments are supposed to be the ones who pick a slogan. Intel finally got their marketing department out of their engineering meetings, and it looks like they are trying to maximizing performance/power now, which is something most people would love to see. If anything, they are going less to shit now than they were from 2002-2004.
Something like this happened the year before I was a frosh. Two kids go home for a weekend, friends broke in, moved out all his stuff, and turned it into a hot tub. With permission from the occupants they did it again over Prefrosh Weekend when we prospective students came to visit and it's been done on Prefrosh Weekend since then.
Caltech has a long tradition of pranks as well. Not sure if they still do it, and even these stories are second-hand, but senior ditch day was a tradition in which seniors would go off campus and booby-trap their rooms, while underclassmen tried to break in. Depending on the fiendishness of the defenses, the underclassmen would carry out various levels of pranks upon entering the room.
We still do it, though we give them puzzles to solve now too, so they can chose whether or not they want to break in the old-fashioned way or high-tech way. =)
We've done a lot of pranks in the past, and still do, but most of the recent ones tend to be within Caltech (or at MIT if we're bored) and don't get a lot of attention these days. It's sad that most cool things to prank now have security systems and assume you're a terrorist if you try bypassing them.
Now go to bed, Ditch Day is tomorrow.
A quick lesson in quantum physics:
Basically, tunnelling occurs because an electron can get from one side of a potential barrier to the other without ever being in the forbidden region (the width of the barrier, where the potential energy exceeds the total energy of the electron) due to it existing as a wavefunction that does not collapse until you observe it. Anyway, the chance of an electron penetrating a simple potential barrier like the gate of a transistor is a function of the height of the barrier (voltage applied to the gate), the width of the barrier (gate length), and the energy of the electron (voltage across transistor + electron thermal energy).
So ways to decrease tunnelling include:
Just my $0.02 since if I knew for sure I'd be making 6 figures somewhere and not applying to grad schools...
The price on these things has dropped as they halved the RAM and Flash. Basically, they now have two models where they had one: a cheaper version and the one we all know and love, they just gave the name to the cheaper one and added an "L" to make the fancier one sound better than last years model.
So how far apart are these going to be placed? I mean, are they going to be at the Lagrange points, which seem to be spread awfully far apart but might work, or somewhere else where the position is unstable and requires thrusters?
Also, what kind of instruments do these have? If we want, can we point them at other things and get useful pictures? Either way, it should be interesting.
You have negleted to mention one thing: greenhouse gasses only act as such at certain wavelengths depending on their absorption spectra. Therefore, there is a point at which adding more of any greenhouse to the atmosphere does not change the absorption spectra of the atmosphere since the absorbable light from the sun is already being fully absorbed.
I was unable to find a website explaining this or giving examples, but I remember being told at one point by a professor (2 years ago) and shown the data/graph showing it that the water vapor in the atmosphere already absorbs 100% of its absorption spectra but that since this is not the case for all this man-made junk (CFCs etc.) or CO2 that those things resulting in global warming.
Anyway, here is a link I found remotely interesting: http://www.spaceguarduk.com/cd/dict/dictionary/inf rared.htm/A.
When you zoom in all the way, is it made of cheese?
Try it.
According to the Wiki FAQ anyone is encouraged to work on the port of the current version with some resources they have made available and the next version (January 2006) should be cross-platform.
The next one will be called the Astronomically Large Telescope.
I don't know if there is an easy solution, other than to make Linux or OSX or another more secure operating system more simple to use - and you can go ahead and tell me that your Grandmother runs Linux and has no problems, but the ordinary computer user is looking for more than a glorified Internet/Email machine.
OS X is simple to use; the reason it hasn't become more widespread is the (seemingly - depending on what you want) more expensive hardware.
Could Windows be more secure? Yes. Definitely.
Could Linux be easier to use? Yes, and just as equally so.
Is Windows becoming more secure? I'm not really sure; SP2 is better, but no better than a $20 firewall.
Is Linux becoming easier to use? Linux is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was three years ago and still improving.
Among office workers 26% aren't sure what a firewall does and therefore have been tempted to turn it off.
Just tell them it's an e-condom.
I prefer to call it a Faraday Cage and I prefer to make it myself out of tin foil as it tends to be cheaper.
From wikipedia: A Faraday cage is best understood as an approximation to an ideal hollow conductor. Electric fields produce forces on the charge carriers (i.e., electrons) within the conductor. As soon as an electric field is applied to the surface of an ideal conductor, it generates a current that causes displacement of charge inside the conductor that cancels the applied field inside.
And it works exactly as you described for magnetic fields.
Yay physics.
The problem with asking for a ZIP code is that if someone steals (whether by RFID or not) you driver's license information along with your credit card information then they have your ZIP code too.
(My dad's car got broken into last night and had his credit cards stolen.)
If what they are saying is not factual then it should be very clearly presented as nothing more than an opinion. The free flow of information like this is an integral part of capitalism.
IANAL but while I believe that the doctors can sue for false information posted online that can be shown to cause damages they would have to file a suit, prove that the information posted online is false and not solely an opinion. They have no grounds to prevent people from posting their comments and can only file a suit after the fact (that is, prior restraint is not allowed). Imagine if M$ decided to sue for every "Windows Sucks" or other anti-M$ comment on slashdot.
Unfortunately, lawsuits are expensive, but the most likely result will be some sort of disclaimer or the site simply removing the offensive (whether true or not) comments.
I think that the evolution of the human brain is clearly a Miserable Failure.
You just need to get the firewire cable and it will plug in fine since it has the same connector on the iPod nano as on any other non-shuffle iPod. It will cost like $10 at a store or a couple bucks on ebay.
But one interesting thing about the CJ position is that he gets to decide who writes the opinions.
The CJ only decides who writes the opinions if he is in the majority (hence the going with the majority to limit the damage) or else the senior-ranking justice in the majority decides.
A couple things:
Back when the court was something, they are the ones who told the police they must read rights to people.
Actually, that decision gave the police more power. Think about it: once the police tell someone their rights, they know for sure that anything they get out of them is admissible evidence, because all the police had to do was read them their rights.
Back then, the courts said that people could not be taken by government for no reason.
See Korematsu v. US. regarding the Japanese Internment Camps.
That government could not look at your reading list and label you as a terrorist because you read Carol Marx.
Not a terrorist no. But you could get labeled a communist for attending a single Socialist Party meeting before WWII. And don't forget the Alien and Sedition Acts. This comment is more about the government than the court so that's all I really have to say.
Do you know how many Joe McCarthy's there are in government, and how the courts have stopped them?
You do know that the courts didn't stop Senator Joe McCarthy, that the trials were all Senate hearings and that he eventually just lost popularity.
Why did Rehnquist not retire? Why did he stay when he was sick? Was he this sick?
He probably didn't know when he was going to die and wanted to decide the abortion case once O'Connor gets replaced (hoping by someone pro-life) since there will be an abortion case on the docket for the end of November.
First, this feature is probably targeted at "Desktop Replacement Users" whose users care less about weight and battery life and more about their penis length^H^H computer features and hard drive space. The other group is the paranoid about data security, who want a constant backup hard drive to keep their laptop going even if a drive fails.
One note about battery life, I think the power consumed by a drive (assuming constant mass distribution) is proportional to rpm^{3/2} which means that a 7200 RPM drive consumes more than twice as much power as a 4200 RPM drive, so it would actually use less power to have 2 4200 RPM drives instead of a single 7200 RPM drive.
Second, you've explained why onboard video sucks up memory bandwidth but most laptops (ok, at least the Apple Powerbooks) have dedicated video RAM. In addition, in a RAID 0 configuration the drive uses no more bandwidth, because you are transferring the same amount of data as you would with only one drive. Even in a RAID 1 configuration, you transfer the same data twice so you still only need to read from RAM once. Yes, software RAID uses more of your CPU, but I have a software RAID 5 array set up on my 1.8 GHz P4 (that I use to backup my Powerbook) and I have no issues with too much CPU overhead.
Dude, no one is making you use RAID on your next laptop, but some people might find it useful so Intel is making it possible. Not to mention, once flash hard drives are out, you might just want RAID on your laptop.
Finally, if you want to support solid state hard drives, buy a USB key or several and support the industry.