I used to work on SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) which, unlike methanol and hydrogen fuel cells, operate at high temperature - at least several hundred degrees. On of the benefits of working at high temperatures was a much wide choice of fuel supplies and better ion mobility. In theory SOFCs should be able to run of virtually any hydrocarbon that can be got into the vapour phase at the given operating temperature, in reality I think we would probably be limited to simpler molecules though. Another benefit of SOFC is that it generates quite a bit of heat that can be used for CHP. The draw backs are that they are generally fairly large and they have poor cycling - you have to leave it running - there are plenty of possible installations though such as remote villages, disaster sites, military bases, even 24 hours buses is an option.
As for how you chose materials that's tricky. Generally what happens is someone discovers that a material shows a certain property without really knowing why. A number of chemists will then take an educated guess about what factor is causing the desirable property and make compounds that attempt to enhance said property. Once there is a family of compounds showing the same property it is usually possible to determine what feature(s) are most beneficial and optimize for them although this optimization can take a very long time.
A perfect example of this iterative process is the discovery and development of high temperature super conductors. Someone discovered one and then literally millions of similar compounds were made which slowly increased the super conducting temperature. It wasn't until quite a while after people had all but given up making compounds that the mechanism for high temperature super conducting was determined (one of the groups of SOFC compounds I was looking at were also super conductors).
I believe that some important, difficult to replicate, missions have a second unlaunched backup of the satalite which is used for debugging etc. I don't know if this satalite would have such a back up though and then there is the problem of finding a launcher.
I've often wondered why we can't have generic laws. Laws that cover a type of action rather than a very particular case of a type of action. For example we have enacted wire tapping laws so that we can listen to phone conversations why didn't we enact an eavesdropping law instead so that the required authorities could apply for permission to listen into the communications of an individual regardless of how those communications where taking place. As far as I can see this doesn't erode privacy any more than it has already been eroded and it means that we don't need all the half brained politicians making up reams and reams of new legislation (which invariably is an excuse for mission creep).
While a launch might only (hahahaha only) cost 60 million you can't just ignore all the development and production costs that went into producing the craft. That would be like a business saying to it's bank: if I don't repay my start up costs I'm profitable. I think I know what the bank would say.
I believe they collided almost head on so unless that manoeuvre was a handbrake turn I doubt they were shadowing one another (submarines not being well known for their manoeuvrability). I suspect that it's more likely a case of wrong place at the wrong time combined with good stealth technology). Actually, this does say a bit about how good the stealth technology must be since they weren't able to passively detect one another.
I can easily believe that much of the fundamental chemistry of this "alien" life could be different. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to chemically move energy around that don't require phosphorous. One thing I think we will find is a constant though is that life will be carbon based*. It's just not possible to make a wide enough range of complex molecules with any element other than carbon. Even if we look at the next best atom for making complex molecules, silicon, and the simplest lifeforms we know about the molecules that allow it to function are way beyond what can be created.
This limitation isn't because we haven't looked hard enough it's a fundamental property of the orbital structure of carbon which makes it behave significantly differently to all elements. Therefore it's probably safe to assume that all the life we find will be based on carbon.
* There is, I feel, scope for non-carbon based life based around metals but it will have been created rather than evolved completely naturally - what we would currently call a machine.
Flying spaghetti monster and all his noodley appendages, just go and read a bloody book or talk to someone or do something other than sit there watching a non-stop stream of the same five websites.
I hear that this new data centre will be run on trees that are harvested in a non-sustainable way and any small furry animals they find while chopping the trees now (especially squirrels).
This could be a bit of a blessing in disguise if they decide to try and force this issue. Why, I hear you all cry. Simply because it's completely and utterly insane. I can see why they think this might be justified after the way the music industry has played fast and loose with copyright law but the average person can see this is just wrong on every level. That means there is a chance that copyright law in general will be reviewed which should put an end to the current fiasco where people are paying good money for things they will never own in any real sense of the world.
I'm ignoring the fact that text-to-speech still sounds like Stephen Hawking with a bad cold and probably will do for the foreseeable future - why anyone would want to listen to a current generation machine voice read a book is beyond me (unless of course they can't see to read the book but, even the, surly Braille is better).
Why does everyone seem to get so up in arms when something is wrong on Wikipedia or worse when something is changed to be wrong. Do people really think that a site such as Wikipedia, where anyone can edit (just about) anything, isn't going to get abused. To be perfectly honest I'm surprised it doesn't get abused more than it does. Wikipedia is a great starting point for research it should never be the end point.
I would argue that neither C# nor.Net were research projects. Both use technologies that had been used elsewhere numerous times. The GP post was about how MS doesn't do anything with it's research not about how it can't develop products.
I don't get it with Firefox. They have (had) the goal of producing a lean and fast browser with additional functionality being provided by plugins which I think they have pretty much achieved. Personally, I think they have left out a whole host of features (such as ad blocking and quick dial for example) which should be in the core but I'll let them off because they are easy enough to add in. But including this sort of browser bling in the core is just nuts.
It's the age old problem though - you have to be seen to be doing something even if what you have is really good already. I'd actually rather they put their efforts into working harder with other browser manufacturers to make sure that pages rendered the same on every platform. While none of the alternative browsers on their own is much competition to IE if there was essentially zero cost in moving from one alternative to another there is real competition.
Couldn't agree with your more about ebooks being different. I too had a house full of books. When I last moved I brought them all with me at great effort but I did wonder at the time why I was doing it. After all most of them I would never read again (I don't tend to read books twice) and very few had emotional attachments. I got a Sony Reader for Christmas and agonized over buying DRM content for it because of the the limitations but when I really thought about it I came to the conclusion that actually it was the way forward for me for certain types of work. In fact the only thing that I now dislike about it the high price of ebooks. An ebook is currently maybe 10% cheaper than the printed version. When you consider that there is essentially no supply chain for an ebook that seems a bit off.
I got the Sony Reader for Christmas and so far I've read a few thousand pages on it. I would certainly recommend it to anyone that is an avid reader but ebooks in general aren't yet as great as the could be. Here are the positives and negatives of the Sony Reader...
Very robust: the device is encased in brushed metal.
Very long battery life: Sony claim 4000 page turns but I've been getting about 2500 to 3000 probably because I don't turn it off, even so I've only charged it twice in 45 days.
Bit too heavy: it's about the size of a paperback but as heavy as a hardback. It's quite surprising when you first pick it up but you don't notice it while reading.
Excellent presentation: As standard it comes in a very well make faux leather cover, it even has little magnets that hold the cover closed.
Reads a wide variety of formats including epub. Epub is the best format but I've got a couple of bbeb books as well. It wasl handles plain text well and has a fair stab at PDF (PDF can be zoomed but you lose diagrams).
Default memory is rather small but enough to hold about 150 books. It's easy to expand though.
No wireless but that doesn't bother me as I only connect it to the computer / network once in a blue moon.
The screen is fairly small but clear. The contrast isn't as good as printed media but I find that a benefit (I can sometimes struggle to read very high contrast text).
I mean, Paint is bundled with Windows, but that hasn't stopped anyone from making their own paint programs, now has it?
The problem with that argument is that Paint is the worst paint type program ever written. I struggle to conceive of a situation where it would actually be useful (is it even in Vista?) so there is a lot of scope for other companies to write paint type programs. IE7 on the other hand is actually a pretty well rounded piece of software that does pretty much everything a web browser needs to do. It certainly ticks all the essential boxes and most of the desirables and even has a quite a few of the "why would I even want that" boxes ticked. Competing against IE7 is hard, my hat goes off to Opera and Mozilla for doing as well as they have.
And when it comes to downloading, I find the hardest part now training people to stop downloading things!
Many thanks for providing exactly the review of Drupal and Joomla that I have been looking for. I run a site with a few hundred pages in a CMS that I wrote myself. While it's pretty powerful and does what I want I can't be bothered to maintain the code any more and would rather switch to an open source CMS. I've played with Plone and really like the way it works but I can't help feeling it will always be playing catch-up to Drupal and Joomla (I've also played with Word Press but I want a CMS not a blog). Do you have any views on Plone and other CMS's?
Karma be damned! Let me be the first (I hope) to point out that the first post might not be completely off topic and may instead be an attempt at humour: "So how long until we can see this in use?" which of course we will never, unaided, actually be able to do.
If this is the case we now have an situation where we have valid complaints about an invalid comment which is usually worth complaining about. Or something like that.
The next 50 years or so are going to be a serious wake up call to the west and the US in particular I think. We have enjoyed a technological advantage over the rest of the world for a good while now but it is being eroded at a fantastic rate. That advantage has allowed us to push the rest of the world and I fear that will come back to haunt us. Back when the west was first launching things into space the knowledge, skill and equipment needed to build such machines was exceedingly difficult to come by. It's still not easy to launch a payload into space but the equipment required to build a launch vehicle is no longer hard to come by and the knowledge and skill can be fairly easily "bought".
It's not possible to spot a zombie box with a protocol (at least not one that is going to be used for simply sending email) but if the machine has to authenticate with the server before sending then immediately you have and accounting trail. Zombie boxes could be dealt with very quickly and probably in a fairly automated manner. The current black listing system works fairly well but it's rather clumsy and causes a lot of friendly fire (I've been hit several times). While I like the ability to run my own mail server for free I would be willing to cough up (one time) for a certificate for it if it meant a dramatic reduction in spam.
and I don't think it's the assurance that the LHC won't produce black holes that swallow the earth. There reason the whole LHC black hole rubbish is dismissed out of hand is simply because we have already obvesrved particles colliding with much higher energies than the LHC can produce and they didn't form black holes. Where did we observe these collions - in earth atmosphere. We built the LHC so that we could study the collisions in a controlled manner not because they are of particularl high energy.
I suspect the reason you might want to do this is so that you can use Linux tools on a Windows base platform. Kate, for example, is rather a nice editor (although I tend to use Notepad++ under Windows). Don't forget as well that KDE almost certainly has more development than the Windows desktop - although this can be a mixed blessing in my experience due to random breakage.
As others have suggested just kill explorer.exe to free your machine from the default Windows desktop.
While I agree that the benefits can be great it doesn't necessaryly mean they are always great. The problem here, I think, is that Gatehouse feel that there are a, possibly significant, number of people that just browse the headlines. Those people can go to the Boston Globe and browse Gatehouse headlines with no interaction with Gatehouse at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work on SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) which, unlike methanol and hydrogen fuel cells, operate at high temperature - at least several hundred degrees. On of the benefits of working at high temperatures was a much wide choice of fuel supplies and better ion mobility. In theory SOFCs should be able to run of virtually any hydrocarbon that can be got into the vapour phase at the given operating temperature, in reality I think we would probably be limited to simpler molecules though. Another benefit of SOFC is that it generates quite a bit of heat that can be used for CHP. The draw backs are that they are generally fairly large and they have poor cycling - you have to leave it running - there are plenty of possible installations though such as remote villages, disaster sites, military bases, even 24 hours buses is an option.
As for how you chose materials that's tricky. Generally what happens is someone discovers that a material shows a certain property without really knowing why. A number of chemists will then take an educated guess about what factor is causing the desirable property and make compounds that attempt to enhance said property. Once there is a family of compounds showing the same property it is usually possible to determine what feature(s) are most beneficial and optimize for them although this optimization can take a very long time.
A perfect example of this iterative process is the discovery and development of high temperature super conductors. Someone discovered one and then literally millions of similar compounds were made which slowly increased the super conducting temperature. It wasn't until quite a while after people had all but given up making compounds that the mechanism for high temperature super conducting was determined (one of the groups of SOFC compounds I was looking at were also super conductors).
I believe that some important, difficult to replicate, missions have a second unlaunched backup of the satalite which is used for debugging etc. I don't know if this satalite would have such a back up though and then there is the problem of finding a launcher.
I've often wondered why we can't have generic laws. Laws that cover a type of action rather than a very particular case of a type of action. For example we have enacted wire tapping laws so that we can listen to phone conversations why didn't we enact an eavesdropping law instead so that the required authorities could apply for permission to listen into the communications of an individual regardless of how those communications where taking place. As far as I can see this doesn't erode privacy any more than it has already been eroded and it means that we don't need all the half brained politicians making up reams and reams of new legislation (which invariably is an excuse for mission creep).
Microwave beams from space being directed to a truck in the middle of a friendly camp. Brings a whole new meaning to the term friendly fire.
While a launch might only (hahahaha only) cost 60 million you can't just ignore all the development and production costs that went into producing the craft. That would be like a business saying to it's bank: if I don't repay my start up costs I'm profitable. I think I know what the bank would say.
I struggle to see this as a jet pack. It's more a small boat with a very strange propulsion system. Having said that I wouldn't mind having a go.
I believe they collided almost head on so unless that manoeuvre was a handbrake turn I doubt they were shadowing one another (submarines not being well known for their manoeuvrability). I suspect that it's more likely a case of wrong place at the wrong time combined with good stealth technology). Actually, this does say a bit about how good the stealth technology must be since they weren't able to passively detect one another.
I can easily believe that much of the fundamental chemistry of this "alien" life could be different. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to chemically move energy around that don't require phosphorous. One thing I think we will find is a constant though is that life will be carbon based*. It's just not possible to make a wide enough range of complex molecules with any element other than carbon. Even if we look at the next best atom for making complex molecules, silicon, and the simplest lifeforms we know about the molecules that allow it to function are way beyond what can be created.
This limitation isn't because we haven't looked hard enough it's a fundamental property of the orbital structure of carbon which makes it behave significantly differently to all elements. Therefore it's probably safe to assume that all the life we find will be based on carbon.
* There is, I feel, scope for non-carbon based life based around metals but it will have been created rather than evolved completely naturally - what we would currently call a machine.
Flying spaghetti monster and all his noodley appendages, just go and read a bloody book or talk to someone or do something other than sit there watching a non-stop stream of the same five websites.
I hear that this new data centre will be run on trees that are harvested in a non-sustainable way and any small furry animals they find while chopping the trees now (especially squirrels).
This could be a bit of a blessing in disguise if they decide to try and force this issue. Why, I hear you all cry. Simply because it's completely and utterly insane. I can see why they think this might be justified after the way the music industry has played fast and loose with copyright law but the average person can see this is just wrong on every level. That means there is a chance that copyright law in general will be reviewed which should put an end to the current fiasco where people are paying good money for things they will never own in any real sense of the world.
I'm ignoring the fact that text-to-speech still sounds like Stephen Hawking with a bad cold and probably will do for the foreseeable future - why anyone would want to listen to a current generation machine voice read a book is beyond me (unless of course they can't see to read the book but, even the, surly Braille is better).
Why does everyone seem to get so up in arms when something is wrong on Wikipedia or worse when something is changed to be wrong. Do people really think that a site such as Wikipedia, where anyone can edit (just about) anything, isn't going to get abused. To be perfectly honest I'm surprised it doesn't get abused more than it does. Wikipedia is a great starting point for research it should never be the end point.
I would argue that neither C# nor .Net were research projects. Both use technologies that had been used elsewhere numerous times. The GP post was about how MS doesn't do anything with it's research not about how it can't develop products.
I don't get it with Firefox. They have (had) the goal of producing a lean and fast browser with additional functionality being provided by plugins which I think they have pretty much achieved. Personally, I think they have left out a whole host of features (such as ad blocking and quick dial for example) which should be in the core but I'll let them off because they are easy enough to add in. But including this sort of browser bling in the core is just nuts.
It's the age old problem though - you have to be seen to be doing something even if what you have is really good already. I'd actually rather they put their efforts into working harder with other browser manufacturers to make sure that pages rendered the same on every platform. While none of the alternative browsers on their own is much competition to IE if there was essentially zero cost in moving from one alternative to another there is real competition.
Couldn't agree with your more about ebooks being different. I too had a house full of books. When I last moved I brought them all with me at great effort but I did wonder at the time why I was doing it. After all most of them I would never read again (I don't tend to read books twice) and very few had emotional attachments. I got a Sony Reader for Christmas and agonized over buying DRM content for it because of the the limitations but when I really thought about it I came to the conclusion that actually it was the way forward for me for certain types of work. In fact the only thing that I now dislike about it the high price of ebooks. An ebook is currently maybe 10% cheaper than the printed version. When you consider that there is essentially no supply chain for an ebook that seems a bit off.
I got the Sony Reader for Christmas and so far I've read a few thousand pages on it. I would certainly recommend it to anyone that is an avid reader but ebooks in general aren't yet as great as the could be. Here are the positives and negatives of the Sony Reader...
I mean, Paint is bundled with Windows, but that hasn't stopped anyone from making their own paint programs, now has it?
The problem with that argument is that Paint is the worst paint type program ever written. I struggle to conceive of a situation where it would actually be useful (is it even in Vista?) so there is a lot of scope for other companies to write paint type programs. IE7 on the other hand is actually a pretty well rounded piece of software that does pretty much everything a web browser needs to do. It certainly ticks all the essential boxes and most of the desirables and even has a quite a few of the "why would I even want that" boxes ticked. Competing against IE7 is hard, my hat goes off to Opera and Mozilla for doing as well as they have.
And when it comes to downloading, I find the hardest part now training people to stop downloading things!
Many thanks for providing exactly the review of Drupal and Joomla that I have been looking for. I run a site with a few hundred pages in a CMS that I wrote myself. While it's pretty powerful and does what I want I can't be bothered to maintain the code any more and would rather switch to an open source CMS. I've played with Plone and really like the way it works but I can't help feeling it will always be playing catch-up to Drupal and Joomla (I've also played with Word Press but I want a CMS not a blog). Do you have any views on Plone and other CMS's?
Karma be damned! Let me be the first (I hope) to point out that the first post might not be completely off topic and may instead be an attempt at humour: "So how long until we can see this in use?" which of course we will never, unaided, actually be able to do.
If this is the case we now have an situation where we have valid complaints about an invalid comment which is usually worth complaining about. Or something like that.
Goa'uld! If their eyes start glowing after "treatment" you know it's bad. Don't forget, the head shot is the only true stopper.
The next 50 years or so are going to be a serious wake up call to the west and the US in particular I think. We have enjoyed a technological advantage over the rest of the world for a good while now but it is being eroded at a fantastic rate. That advantage has allowed us to push the rest of the world and I fear that will come back to haunt us. Back when the west was first launching things into space the knowledge, skill and equipment needed to build such machines was exceedingly difficult to come by. It's still not easy to launch a payload into space but the equipment required to build a launch vehicle is no longer hard to come by and the knowledge and skill can be fairly easily "bought".
It's not possible to spot a zombie box with a protocol (at least not one that is going to be used for simply sending email) but if the machine has to authenticate with the server before sending then immediately you have and accounting trail. Zombie boxes could be dealt with very quickly and probably in a fairly automated manner. The current black listing system works fairly well but it's rather clumsy and causes a lot of friendly fire (I've been hit several times). While I like the ability to run my own mail server for free I would be willing to cough up (one time) for a certificate for it if it meant a dramatic reduction in spam.
and I don't think it's the assurance that the LHC won't produce black holes that swallow the earth. There reason the whole LHC black hole rubbish is dismissed out of hand is simply because we have already obvesrved particles colliding with much higher energies than the LHC can produce and they didn't form black holes. Where did we observe these collions - in earth atmosphere. We built the LHC so that we could study the collisions in a controlled manner not because they are of particularl high energy.
I suspect the reason you might want to do this is so that you can use Linux tools on a Windows base platform. Kate, for example, is rather a nice editor (although I tend to use Notepad++ under Windows). Don't forget as well that KDE almost certainly has more development than the Windows desktop - although this can be a mixed blessing in my experience due to random breakage.
As others have suggested just kill explorer.exe to free your machine from the default Windows desktop.
While I agree that the benefits can be great it doesn't necessaryly mean they are always great. The problem here, I think, is that Gatehouse feel that there are a, possibly significant, number of people that just browse the headlines. Those people can go to the Boston Globe and browse Gatehouse headlines with no interaction with Gatehouse at all.