Even worse, if the nuclear reactors had NOT been shut down there would have been no accident since it was the lack of power that caused the coolant failure and the reactors were NOT damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami.
It's STUPID to build a Nuclear power plant in a fault zone. Of course Japan is one HUGE fault zone being on the Pacific 'ring of fire'. Japan has learned how to live with earthquakes and they probably have the toughest building codes (for new construction) in the world as far as earthquakes go. In fact, those nuclear power plants were NOT damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami, but rather by the lack of cooling when convention power backup failed as a result of the tsunami. The irony is that if the plant had NOT been shut down by the computers when the earthquake started it probably would NOT have been damaged as it would have been generating the necessary power to run the cooling systems.
I doubt that Japan will give up on nuclear power, though they will review all the safety systems and backups. They simply DON'T have a choice, they are a nation so dependent on electric power and have NO fossil fuels of their own. They might be able to develop geo-thermal or otec power however.
If the government needs to raise revenue, repeal the tax break for the wealthiest tax payers! This new tax idea will go over like a lead balloon with the trucking and transportation industry I hope the AFL/CIO shows their fangs. Also get rid of waste like stop paying farmers for not growing shit. I can see the idea of making people pay to support the road infrastructure, but that's what tolls on roads are for. Under current laws the states have the power to register motor vehicles so unless Uncle takes this power away I thing such a tax is unconstitutional at the moment.
In the end I doubt that the Japanese will give up on Nuclear power. They have to purchase ALL of the fossil fuel they would need to replace it and the country is very dependent on electric power for most of their transportation (Japan's rail system is almost totally electric and used by a much greater percent of the population than in the US). They will do what they SHOULD have done, replace power plants that are not hardened against seismic events with newer ones. The power plants were actually NOT damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami, but by lack of conventional power afterward. The irony is that if the plants were NOT shut down to prevent damage from the earthquake they might have been OK.
That is just plain 'revenge' IMHO. "You can't have it unless you follow my rules". Well I guess the FSF doesn't want to give the enemy anything they can use against them. M$ will just have to write their OWN code to sell to fund their lawyers in the legal battle against OS.
The GPL tries to balance on a tight rope. The GPL DOES give you freedom to do anything you want with the code EXCEPT deny anyone else the same if YOU distribute the code. The GPLv3 attempted to close a few loopholes that the GPLv2 allowed in that regard. The sticky thing is that you can't take GPL'ed source code and use it with your own code to make a 'closed source' binary application to sell. You CAN sell a software product that uses GPL'ed code, but it has to be licensed under a 'free software' license that is compatible with the version of the GPL that the original code was.
The BSD license lets you do almost ANYTHING with the code including make it part of a closed source project. Here your modifications are lost to the open source world, but the original code you started with isn't. In this regard the BSD license is like a free gift with no strings attached, while the GPL is like marrying the bosses' daughter.
The way we currently use outside nighttime illumination is very wasteful. Large powerful unshielded lamps end up throwing light where is ISN'T needed or wanted wasting power and putting more CO2 into the air. What's even worse is that by having this extra light spilling out we create glare that blinds us by killing off our sensitive night time vision. The human eye is well night adapted. Our iris can open to over 7mm (in younger people) and we have sensitive cells scattered about our retina that activate in low light. As a result we DON'T need excessive levels of light at night to have good vision, the goal should be to emulate the full moon (NOT the noon time SUN!). By creating pockets of glare you actually give the criminal element places to hide from view giving you LESS security at night not more. True there ARE places where strong outdoor night time lighting IS needed (sports stadiums and fields in parks) but here the light should only be on when needed. I often see the lights on at local sports fields all night long with NOBODY playing ball. We need a federal law that will ban wasteful outdoor lighting and set a short time table to have existing lighting that does not meet the standards removed or shut off. Doing this will save a lot of energy (need less oil), reduce power plant CO2 outputs, increase night time security, create some jobs (to replace existing lighting), and reduce light pollution.
Do you know where the charge in a battery is stored? It's actually in the electrolyte fluid NOT in the "plates". It should be possible to design a battery where the discharged fluid is drained and replaced with "charged" fluid. Recharging would then be just like refueling.
Philip José Farmer dreamed this up in his Riverworld novel series. In it Mark Twain built an electric riverboat powered by a "Bacapacitor" which Farmer described as a battery-capacitor hybrid.
If you are comparing the iPad (or most ANY tablet) against a laptop with the idea that one will replace the other then he has the right ideas in his blog. But a tablet will NEVER replace a conventional computer for ALL applications, only those that are purely presentation, game, or media consumption based. Creation of NEW content or data ISN'T what a tablet is good at. Also tablets can be used for things that a laptop would be poor at such as remote control of other devices via it's wifi or bluetooth RF. Apple isn't about to discontinue their line of MAC books in favor of the iPad, they know that there is a market for both (and they want to sell you one of each!).
Well I did have copies of windows 1, 2, and 3 and they were installed but found to be useless as all the applications I used were just plain old DOS based. Windows was installed only due to MAC-Envy I suppose. Windows 3.11 was finally found to be useful, along with WordPerfect for Windows. All of these were running on a 386sx computer BTW (except for windows 1 which was actually tried on an XT computer).
I had upgraded to a 486 machine when windows 95 came along. I later built a Pentium III computer which ran SE2, and we purchased a refurb HP computer from computer geeks with an Athlon cpu that ran ME. My wife's computer, along with the kids are now HP, Compaq, or Dells all with XP home. The Athlon II machine I now have dual boots between Linux with a 64 bit kernel, or Win7 32 bit. So I've skipped a few versions. I did not find ME as bad as many reported. It was no better, but no worse than SE2, and probably did have better driver support. Both SE2 and ME blue screened much more than XP (which almost never does).
"even though they have been a linux user for 25, 30 years," Anyone who claims to have been using Linux for longer than 20 years is a big BS artist. Linus released Linux in 1991 ya know!
Funny, I don't remember Linux being hard to install. Setting up X windows was a bit of a challenge, and it came with the risk of frying your monitor if you got it very wrong. In 1996 I put together a junker computer using an old 386 motherboard with 8mb of ram and a 100mb hard disk. This machine served as a test bed to try out Linux. I installed Slackware from it's gazillion floppies (downloaded painfully one at a time over a dialup modem connection). Later I got a CD rom drive onto the machine and with the Walnut Creek CD rom collection I tested out Debian and Redhat. Debian was the hardest to install, the problem being dselect. Deselect was NEVER very user friendly, and once you made a mistake it took a lot of hair pulling to fix it. I finally did figure it out on my third or fourth attempt and of all the distros I tried Debian ended up as the winner. The 386 has been replaced several times, with K6, Pentium, Pentium III, Athlon, and Athlon64 CPU machines. I did switch to Gentoo for a while hoping to get more performance out of it's custom compiled kernel and applications. Gentoo though is very bleeding edge and every time you did even a minor upgrade the risk of breaking things was great. The worst problem was all the configuration files, one for EVERY bit of software installed. Finally, after my system got itself hosed beyond repair after an upgrade I simply reformatted the disk (except for my user partition) and went back to Debian. I'm still using Debian today (sorta kinda. I'm actually running Linux Mint which is a variant of Ubuntu, which is a variant of Debian).
It's all well if they ARE using Linux code. BUT if they are in violation of the GPL, THEY need to be sued themselves and the products pulled from the market until the issue is resolved.
With Britain so close to the Arctic circle the length of daylight in the summer is already quite long so I'm not sure what the purpose of this is. If they move sunrise to 7am, this would almost make Britain the land of the midnight sun.
Slashdot Mirror
And not just in math. Consider W.A. Mozart who wrote symphonies at age 8.
Even worse, if the nuclear reactors had NOT been shut down there would have been no accident since it was the lack of power that caused the coolant failure and the reactors were NOT damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami.
It's STUPID to build a Nuclear power plant in a fault zone. Of course Japan is one HUGE fault zone being on the Pacific 'ring of fire'. Japan has learned how to live with earthquakes and they probably have the toughest building codes (for new construction) in the world as far as earthquakes go. In fact, those nuclear power plants were NOT damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami, but rather by the lack of cooling when convention power backup failed as a result of the tsunami. The irony is that if the plant had NOT been shut down by the computers when the earthquake started it probably would NOT have been damaged as it would have been generating the necessary power to run the cooling systems.
I doubt that Japan will give up on nuclear power, though they will review all the safety systems and backups. They simply DON'T have a choice, they are a nation so dependent on electric power and have NO fossil fuels of their own. They might be able to develop geo-thermal or otec power however.
If the government needs to raise revenue, repeal the tax break for the wealthiest tax payers! This new tax idea will go over like a lead balloon with the trucking and transportation industry I hope the AFL/CIO shows their fangs. Also get rid of waste like stop paying farmers for not growing shit.
I can see the idea of making people pay to support the road infrastructure, but that's what tolls on roads are for. Under current laws the states have the power to register motor vehicles so unless Uncle takes this power away I thing such a tax is unconstitutional at the moment.
In the end I doubt that the Japanese will give up on Nuclear power. They have to purchase ALL of the fossil fuel they would need to replace it and the country is very dependent on electric power for most of their transportation (Japan's rail system is almost totally electric and used by a much greater percent of the population than in the US). They will do what they SHOULD have done, replace power plants that are not hardened against seismic events with newer ones. The power plants were actually NOT damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami, but by lack of conventional power afterward. The irony is that if the plants were NOT shut down to prevent damage from the earthquake they might have been OK.
That is just plain 'revenge' IMHO. "You can't have it unless you follow my rules". Well I guess the FSF doesn't want to give the enemy anything they can use against them. M$ will just have to write their OWN code to sell to fund their lawyers in the legal battle against OS.
The GPL tries to balance on a tight rope. The GPL DOES give you freedom to do anything you want with the code EXCEPT deny anyone else the same if YOU distribute the code. The GPLv3 attempted to close a few loopholes that the GPLv2 allowed in that regard. The sticky thing is that you can't take GPL'ed source code and use it with your own code to make a 'closed source' binary application to sell. You CAN sell a software product that uses GPL'ed code, but it has to be licensed under a 'free software' license that is compatible with the version of the GPL that the original code was.
The BSD license lets you do almost ANYTHING with the code including make it part of a closed source project. Here your modifications are lost to the open source world, but the original code you started with isn't. In this regard the BSD license is like a free gift with no strings attached, while the GPL is like marrying the bosses' daughter.
Maybe their CD printer is in Japan?
About half of the national debt.
The way we currently use outside nighttime illumination is very wasteful. Large powerful unshielded lamps end up throwing light where is ISN'T needed or wanted wasting power and putting more CO2 into the air. What's even worse is that by having this extra light spilling out we create glare that blinds us by killing off our sensitive night time vision. The human eye is well night adapted. Our iris can open to over 7mm (in younger people) and we have sensitive cells scattered about our retina that activate in low light. As a result we DON'T need excessive levels of light at night to have good vision, the goal should be to emulate the full moon (NOT the noon time SUN!). By creating pockets of glare you actually give the criminal element places to hide from view giving you LESS security at night not more. True there ARE places where strong outdoor night time lighting IS needed (sports stadiums and fields in parks) but here the light should only be on when needed. I often see the lights on at local sports fields all night long with NOBODY playing ball. We need a federal law that will ban wasteful outdoor lighting and set a short time table to have existing lighting that does not meet the standards removed or shut off. Doing this will save a lot of energy (need less oil), reduce power plant CO2 outputs, increase night time security, create some jobs (to replace existing lighting), and reduce light pollution.
Do you know where the charge in a battery is stored? It's actually in the electrolyte fluid NOT in the "plates".
It should be possible to design a battery where the discharged fluid is drained and replaced with "charged" fluid.
Recharging would then be just like refueling.
Philip José Farmer dreamed this up in his Riverworld novel series. In it Mark Twain built an electric riverboat powered by a "Bacapacitor" which Farmer described as a battery-capacitor hybrid.
If you are comparing the iPad (or most ANY tablet) against a laptop with the idea that one will replace the other then he has the right ideas in his blog. But a tablet will NEVER replace a conventional computer for ALL applications, only those that are purely presentation, game, or media consumption based. Creation of NEW content or data ISN'T what a tablet is good at. Also tablets can be used for things that a laptop would be poor at such as remote control of other devices via it's wifi or bluetooth RF. Apple isn't about to discontinue their line of MAC books in favor of the iPad, they know that there is a market for both (and they want to sell you one of each!).
IIRC there was an SF story by A.C. Clark where a space craft used a huge block of ice as a radiation shield.
Well I did have copies of windows 1, 2, and 3 and they were installed but found to be useless as all the applications I used were just plain old DOS based. Windows was installed only due to MAC-Envy I suppose. Windows 3.11 was finally found to be useful, along with WordPerfect for Windows. All of these were running on a 386sx computer BTW (except for windows 1 which was actually tried on an XT computer).
I had upgraded to a 486 machine when windows 95 came along. I later built a Pentium III computer which ran SE2, and we purchased a refurb HP computer from computer geeks with an Athlon cpu that ran ME. My wife's computer, along with the kids are now HP, Compaq, or Dells all with XP home. The Athlon II machine I now have dual boots between Linux with a 64 bit kernel, or Win7 32 bit. So I've skipped a few versions. I did not find ME as bad as many reported. It was no better, but no worse than SE2, and probably did have better driver support. Both SE2 and ME blue screened much more than XP (which almost never does).
Isn't that what this site is for?
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
Like the Hindenburg?
"even though they have been a linux user for 25, 30 years,"
Anyone who claims to have been using Linux for longer than 20 years is a big BS artist. Linus released Linux in 1991 ya know!
Funny, I don't remember Linux being hard to install. Setting up X windows was a bit of a challenge, and it came with the risk of frying your monitor if you got it very wrong. In 1996 I put together a junker computer using an old 386 motherboard with 8mb of ram and a 100mb hard disk. This machine served as a test bed to try out Linux. I installed Slackware from it's gazillion floppies (downloaded painfully one at a time over a dialup modem connection). Later I got a CD rom drive onto the machine and with the Walnut Creek CD rom collection I tested out Debian and Redhat. Debian was the hardest to install, the problem being dselect. Deselect was NEVER very user friendly, and once you made a mistake it took a lot of hair pulling to fix it. I finally did figure it out on my third or fourth attempt and of all the distros I tried Debian ended up as the winner. The 386 has been replaced several times, with K6, Pentium, Pentium III, Athlon, and Athlon64 CPU machines. I did switch to Gentoo for a while hoping to get more performance out of it's custom compiled kernel and applications. Gentoo though is very bleeding edge and every time you did even a minor upgrade the risk of breaking things was great. The worst problem was all the configuration files, one for EVERY bit of software installed. Finally, after my system got itself hosed beyond repair after an upgrade I simply reformatted the disk (except for my user partition) and went back to Debian. I'm still using Debian today (sorta kinda. I'm actually running Linux Mint which is a variant of Ubuntu, which is a variant of Debian).
It's all well if they ARE using Linux code. BUT if they are in violation of the GPL, THEY need to be sued themselves and the products pulled from the market until the issue is resolved.
Er, how would you know? (maybe I don't WANT to know!)
That's about as funny as a submarine with screen doors.
Would you believe a cigarette machine in a cancer ward?
Another possible use for He3 is in fusion reactors that can directly generate electricity with little radioactive by-product.
With Britain so close to the Arctic circle the length of daylight in the summer is already quite long so I'm not sure what the purpose of this is.
If they move sunrise to 7am, this would almost make Britain the land of the midnight sun.
That's "Darkness Amplification by Stimulated Absorbance of Radiation"