I think you mean MAKE
, a magzine published by O'Reilly...you heard about it first on/. actually looks like they tried the projects described; plenty of pictures too.
that i have used About.com more in the last year
than all prior time added togehter. but then I
realized that happens because about.com has increased the number of well placed google hits when I wanted to look up something. I think NYT better do their homework. I for one hate what an ad-fest about.com is and how random the value of their info is. Wikipedia, here I come. Were it not for their pushing themselves in my face via google, I would never have seen any of these ads that seem to have piqued NYT's interest.
my point was to point out to a crowd that contains hardly a soul who'd question the desireability of uniform connectivity that there are places and people who don't share that unquestioning stance.
Beside my technophobic townsfolk, here is another instance where your solution is my problem:
I work in a DOD funded lab where being awash in WiFi from off premises base stations would drive them nuts. They'd be jambing it or erecting faraday cages all over the place. We don't bring in cameraphones, we turn off cell phones...or else. Yes there is a demand and no I wouldn't personally mind replacing my cell phone with something that is more like a computer...I could
really use that. Its just/. are a rather specialized, gadget happy bunch and not unlike a convention of parapelegics telling each other "yeah lets get ramps EVERYWHERE, who needs stairs?"
Yup, thats exactly how it is in my town. development crept a a near stand-still for 30 years after the town changed zoning to require 2 acres for siting a house. It took yuppie money from the 80s and dot com money from the 90s to put up the next round of 6000sf mansions. The old people are not especially well off except for the value of their land and they vote against any expenditure the can. The new people exhibit exactly the schiziod demands you suggest: "more conservation land, and parking lots and better cell service" go figure! The utilities hate us because of the low subscriber density..we were about the last place to get cable. My next door neighbor and I were hatching a plan to put up a dish and share out the bandwidth to the neighbor hood when comcast finally brought in broad band.
As for me, having to commute to work on a mountain bike is, as they say in the ads, priceless.
...coastal preservationists
I hadn't thought of that faction. Around cape cod, you could drum up enthusiasm from four constituencies based on the premise that you would reduce beach errosion [an obviously valid premise as far as I can tell]:
1. property owners on beach front regularly lose their precious real estate because they are forbidden to erect sea walls or otherwise mar natures beauty...and they can't get much insurance because the hazard is so obvious.
2. conservationist seeking to maitain both shorebird habbitat and coastline topography of tidal flats, estuaries and marshes
3. authorities who have constant public safety headaches with what waves are doing to the coast:[a] the coast guard, [b] town police in towns with ocean-facing beaches [c] harbor masters and army corps of engineers.
4. snooty beachfront property owners who are dead set against wind farms because of what the unnatural sight would do to their precious property values. In playing this faction, you must be careful as you pit yourself against an existing pro-windfarm lobby.
The significance of this news is hardly that MIT is setting any standard and only those with MIT-envy would be prone to such a mis-reading. What I see this as signaling is a furtherance of the trend which brought Susan Hockfield, a distinguished neuroscientist, to the helm of the institution, not a physicist, EE or mathematician and only coincidentally, not a man. The trend away from being a hardware hackers haven has long been afoot. If you hit their home page today, you will probably see a headline about cancer research...that did not happen overnight.
You'd better stay anonymous! In Missoula, they
plow the snow from the bike lanes...right up to the Espresso shops and at the state level they managed to register enough voters for the Dems to hang on to some power...doesn't sound like you have ever been to Montanna and it would be better for both if you kept it that way. [and yes, cell phones work fine around town there, mine sure did.] Its becoming clear that a technophile mob is no kinder or more clear headed than a technophobic mob.
The chances that anyone who could accurately be called a Luddite actually has a/. account or even knows what/. is is kinda remote. Use your words with care so people will listen to you.
"not in my back yard" is a perfectly real part of politics, licensing and regulation in a lot of communities. The point was worth making although I could have found a less inflamatory way, as several other commentators have, of saying this "carpeting the map with WiFi" notion is not a demand outside of urban areas and maybe not even an option.
No thanks, I put out the crap pretty regularly;)
It would be useful if readers note that along with my personal opinion, most of my comment is reportage: I describe the politcial conditions as they really operate in one particular town, atypical as it may be.
in increasing numbers...That is, we have had
a net exodus of skilled workers, even though we
have the schools that train them and a contingent of biotech powerhouses [Biogen, Genzyme, Millenium Pharm. etc] and start-ups that many states would be happy to host. Most people in high tech in MA. groaned when Mitt's misguided missive hit the news last night. I only see this accelerating the departure of companies and jobs for more hospitable climates. I wonder at what point these policies, whatever their actual impact on what reasearch is legal, will create a perception that Mass is yet another state in the hands of American Ayatollahs, a place for thinking people to shun.
I agree about the lacky-like dependence of the
US on China's cheap labor and, for now, on its buying power as a consumer of a few high tech goods/services in which the US still competes. I suppose we might have similar opinions on why the US, despite a president claiming aggressive commitment to democratize the world, sits quietly by as Beijing crushes one form of democratic protest after another. But who's deluded? Where did I say "China" in my post? The US is more like Brazil than it wants to admit and less like China.
I for one do not welcome our new microwave overloads!
In my town, nobody wanted cell towers. Quest sued us just to put up one tower and the south end of town still has crappy coverage for cell phones. Yes, our town is quite rural, a hold-out against developers who want to pack the hills with developments. WE F***ING WANT IT THAT WAY! I think TFA is addressed to urban folk and technology-steeped youngsters who wouldn't even understand that they are crambing down our throats something that is a solution to a problem only they suffer. I won't be surprised if the whole business is going to be gummed up like floridated water was: years of last ditch court battling by people who don't need the communication and dont want the irradiation. Some will never be convinced that, even at low low power, the radio frequencies used for cell phones, wifi and other techology are without potential health risks.
And those developing economies are more vulnerable to the boycotting of goods made by polluters than is the US economy. Attempting to rein in the selfish and destructive practices of polluters, be they advanced or struggling industrial powers, is going to come down to how harshly the more consciencious countries are willing or dare to be in putting pressure on countries like Brazil or the US that are claiming they "can't afford" to adopt cleaner and more sustainable methods of production and energy use.
I didn't bother submitting this story when my Nature alert
came in the other day...slashdotters don't do botany.
Since I PAY GNC to put selenium in my antioxidant cocktail, I want to know where I can get some seeds
for this mustart to plant in my herb garden. Seriously? amounts, numbers, micrograms per KG of cooked leaves... some precise data is needed to determine whether we are talking about a poison or a nutritional supplement.
in planing sw dev for a defense project, the build vs buy criteria for systems that will be put to life and death use includes a "trust" criterium. Leaving aside Microsoft bashing, the rationale used in assessing that criteria is "how could there be malicious features in code that is already in use
by millions of people?...it must be ok". Whether you consider that a valid yardstick is beside the point: OSS is only the more trustworthy because you can and hundreds have examine[d] the code.
Try this door: Drug Enforcement Agency.
If a physical barrier to small [or any] boats were
thrown across the entire coastline so that they had only a few shipping portals to watch, drug interdiction rates would go up...but you'd have to
rewrite every navigation chart and add the cost for
a string of warning bouys like a blinking great wall of China.
proposing an ethically iffy DOS against Orbitz as a protest against their onerous policy has appeal but its the same slippery slope as the DOS screen savers aimed at spam hosting ISPs...one bad turn does NOT justify another. Any way, who'd get the headache at the end of the day, the $7.85/hr intern that answers that email?
Bear in mind that wave energy is 10 times more concentrated than wind and 100 more than solar - using this math alone, we might conclude that wave energy is the answer to the "least disruption" issue, if sensible emplimented.
I am sure the energy density is high...by the time a wave comes ashore, it brings with it the wind energy absorbed from miles and miles of ocean crossing. [And this wave-as-stored-wind-energy effect also accounts for why wave energy is more steady than winds which, in the best of locations, often go slack] But I must say I am far from convinced that even at the most optimistic energy densities and conversion efficiencies we could harvest commercially significant amounts of energy [i.e. get measurable decreases in CO2 etc] without putting many square miles of near-shore waters off limits to all but the power companies. Yes it is just those waters that are nearest the polluting population centers but that is also why there will be huge resistence to diversion of those waters from all the other [not just recreational] uses they now support.
All that said, I still wish you best of luck pursuing the patent...its usually a very long road. Given the head-in-the-sand policy of the US toward emission reduction and green alternatives, by the time you get that patent, global warming will have increased averge wave amplitudes so much that we won't have to set aside as many acres of ocean as might be needed today:-(
I have been unable to get my ice dispenser to shut off. maybe I should take it apart and see if it is running on WinCE. If it is, I am sure that replacing the controller with Linux+ice-daemon would solve the problem...and I hate having to reboot my fridge.
That's interesting, the subsurface aspect. Where are
there diagrams or graphics of the most likely implementations? in TFA [which I had better read]?
It would have to be a pretty clever design that actually harvested much kenetic energy in waves without coming near enough to the surface to be ugly or to interfere with navigation, coastal fishing, wildlife, surfing and kayaking...Just because it doesn't wreck the view from a beach cottage doesn't mean it won't wreck a lot of habitat. Wind power, after all, is an eyesore but with negligable footprint in the tidal flats and bays for which is its proposed. I can't see any way that wave energy obtained is not proportional to the acerage of generators deployed. Which technology is really less disruptive to the livelihood of animals and humans that work/live in the waters at land's end? Visual Bargain...didn't Microsoft develop that;?)
Given the trend of governments, especially those in the EU, toward use of FOSS to run their bureaucracies, I would expect that a ploy by
Microsoft like the one reported could blow up in their face. What would stop Rassmussen from saying to Gates "OK, you fire the 800 programmers. While they are looking for work, we will fund their unemployment insurance with the money we save by dumping Microsoft OS and Office products. In fact, maybe some of those displaced workers would not mind helping us install and configure Linux, Firefox and Open Office in all our departments." The Danes are
not noted for caving in to aggressive ulitmatims.
There are some execellent comments under "want more on the subject?" but what do they have to do with wave powered generation? Those comments I will be bookmarking because I do want to make my own watts and I don't want to be owned by NSTAR or help piss away fossil fuel into the sky.
But on the topic...TFA says is if... 25% of the available wave power were used at 50% efficiency..." it would equal all current hydro electric. Well maybe...but what does that mean? does that mean lining 1/4 of our nations coast line with a flotilla of generators? That would be uglier shit than all the dams and coal-fired powerplants combined! Yes, its "green" but only if they paint all those thousands of miles/acres of wave harnessing generators with green paint. Not gonna fly! You'll get your juice this way a lot sooner.
because only california has a law requring such notice? What I mean is: Aren't there people outside of california whose personal information may have
been taken?
Well, you get modded "insightful", with which I agree. now its the market's turn to mod the motorolapple and nokiasoft phonepods...how many months before we see profits saying "insightful" or losses saying "overrated"? I have exactly the same issues with the Microsoft/Nokia mediaphoney deal.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean MAKE , a magzine published by O'Reilly...you heard about it first on /. actually looks like they tried the projects described; plenty of pictures too.
that i have used About.com more in the last year than all prior time added togehter. but then I realized that happens because about.com has increased the number of well placed google hits when I wanted to look up something. I think NYT better do their homework. I for one hate what an ad-fest about.com is and how random the value of their info is. Wikipedia, here I come. Were it not for their pushing themselves in my face via google, I would never have seen any of these ads that seem to have piqued NYT's interest.
my point was to point out to a crowd that contains hardly a soul who'd question the desireability of uniform connectivity that there are places and people who don't share that unquestioning stance. Beside my technophobic townsfolk, here is another instance where your solution is my problem: /. are a rather specialized, gadget happy bunch and not unlike a convention of parapelegics telling each other "yeah lets get ramps EVERYWHERE, who needs stairs?"
I work in a DOD funded lab where being awash in WiFi from off premises base stations would drive them nuts. They'd be jambing it or erecting faraday cages all over the place. We don't bring in cameraphones, we turn off cell phones...or else.
Yes there is a demand and no I wouldn't personally mind replacing my cell phone with something that is more like a computer...I could really use that. Its just
Yup, thats exactly how it is in my town.
development crept a a near stand-still for 30 years after the town changed zoning to require 2 acres for siting a house. It took yuppie money from the 80s and dot com money from the 90s to put up the next round of 6000sf mansions. The old people are not especially well off except for the value of their land and they vote against any expenditure the can. The new people exhibit exactly the schiziod demands you suggest: "more conservation land, and parking lots and better cell service" go figure! The utilities hate us because of the low subscriber density..we were about the last place to get cable. My next door neighbor and I were hatching a plan to put up a dish and share out the bandwidth to the neighbor hood when comcast finally brought in broad band.
As for me, having to commute to work on a mountain bike is, as they say in the ads, priceless.
...coastal preservationists I hadn't thought of that faction. Around cape cod, you could drum up enthusiasm from four constituencies based on the premise that you would reduce beach errosion [an obviously valid premise as far as I can tell]: 1. property owners on beach front regularly lose their precious real estate because they are forbidden to erect sea walls or otherwise mar natures beauty...and they can't get much insurance because the hazard is so obvious. 2. conservationist seeking to maitain both shorebird habbitat and coastline topography of tidal flats, estuaries and marshes 3. authorities who have constant public safety headaches with what waves are doing to the coast:[a] the coast guard, [b] town police in towns with ocean-facing beaches [c] harbor masters and army corps of engineers. 4. snooty beachfront property owners who are dead set against wind farms because of what the unnatural sight would do to their precious property values. In playing this faction, you must be careful as you pit yourself against an existing pro-windfarm lobby.
The significance of this news is hardly that MIT is setting any standard and only those with MIT-envy would be prone to such a mis-reading. What I see this as signaling is a furtherance of the trend which brought Susan Hockfield, a distinguished neuroscientist, to the helm of the institution, not a physicist, EE or mathematician and only coincidentally, not a man. The trend away from being a hardware hackers haven has long been afoot. If you hit their home page today, you will probably see a headline about cancer research...that did not happen overnight.
You'd better stay anonymous! In Missoula, they plow the snow from the bike lanes...right up to the Espresso shops and at the state level they managed to register enough voters for the Dems to hang on to some power...doesn't sound like you have ever been to Montanna and it would be better for both if you kept it that way. [and yes, cell phones work fine around town there, mine sure did.] /. account or even knows what /. is is kinda remote. Use your words with care so people will listen to you.
Its becoming clear that a technophile mob is no kinder or more clear headed than a technophobic mob. The chances that anyone who could accurately be called a Luddite actually has a
"not in my back yard" is a perfectly real part of politics, licensing and regulation in a lot of communities. The point was worth making although I could have found a less inflamatory way, as several other commentators have, of saying this "carpeting the map with WiFi" notion is not a demand outside of urban areas and maybe not even an option.
No thanks, I put out the crap pretty regularly;)
It would be useful if readers note that along with my personal opinion, most of my comment is reportage: I describe the politcial conditions as they really operate in one particular town, atypical as it may be.
in increasing numbers...That is, we have had a net exodus of skilled workers, even though we have the schools that train them and a contingent of biotech powerhouses [Biogen, Genzyme, Millenium Pharm. etc] and start-ups that many states would be happy to host. Most people in high tech in MA. groaned when Mitt's misguided missive hit the news last night. I only see this accelerating the departure of companies and jobs for more hospitable climates. I wonder at what point these policies, whatever their actual impact on what reasearch is legal, will create a perception that Mass is yet another state in the hands of American Ayatollahs, a place for thinking people to shun.
I agree about the lacky-like dependence of the US on China's cheap labor and, for now, on its buying power as a consumer of a few high tech goods/services in which the US still competes. I suppose we might have similar opinions on why the US, despite a president claiming aggressive commitment to democratize the world, sits quietly by as Beijing crushes one form of democratic protest after another.
But who's deluded? Where did I say "China" in my post? The US is more like Brazil than it wants to admit and less like China.
I for one do not welcome our new microwave overloads!
In my town, nobody wanted cell towers. Quest sued us just to put up one tower and the south end of town still has crappy coverage for cell phones. Yes, our town is quite rural, a hold-out against developers who want to pack the hills with developments. WE F***ING WANT IT THAT WAY! I think TFA is addressed to urban folk and technology-steeped youngsters who wouldn't even understand that they are crambing down our throats something that is a solution to a problem only they suffer. I won't be surprised if the whole business is going to be gummed up like floridated water was: years of last ditch court battling by people who don't need the communication and dont want the irradiation. Some will never be convinced that, even at low low power, the radio frequencies used for cell phones, wifi and other techology are without potential health risks.
And those developing economies are more vulnerable to the boycotting of goods made by polluters than is the US economy. Attempting to rein in the selfish and destructive practices of polluters, be they advanced or struggling industrial powers, is going to come down to how harshly the more consciencious countries are willing or dare to be in putting pressure on countries like Brazil or the US that are claiming they "can't afford" to adopt cleaner and more sustainable methods of production and energy use.
I didn't bother submitting this story when my Nature alert came in the other day...slashdotters don't do botany.
Since I PAY GNC to put selenium in my antioxidant cocktail, I want to know where I can get some seeds for this mustart to plant in my herb garden. Seriously? amounts, numbers, micrograms per KG of cooked leaves... some precise data is needed to determine whether we are talking about a poison or a nutritional supplement.
in planing sw dev for a defense project, the build vs buy criteria for systems that will be put to life and death use includes a "trust" criterium. Leaving aside Microsoft bashing, the rationale used in assessing that criteria is "how could there be malicious features in code that is already in use by millions of people?...it must be ok". Whether you consider that a valid yardstick is beside the point: OSS is only the more trustworthy because you can and hundreds have examine[d] the code.
Try this door: Drug Enforcement Agency.
If a physical barrier to small [or any] boats were thrown across the entire coastline so that they had only a few shipping portals to watch, drug interdiction rates would go up...but you'd have to rewrite every navigation chart and add the cost for a string of warning bouys like a blinking great wall of China.
proposing an ethically iffy DOS against Orbitz as a protest against their onerous policy has appeal but its the same slippery slope as the DOS screen savers aimed at spam hosting ISPs...one bad turn does NOT justify another. Any way, who'd get the headache at the end of the day, the $7.85/hr intern that answers that email?
well , I guess the mods all ran away to pay homage to sexier topics...too bad because your's is an insightful observation.
Bear in mind that wave energy is 10 times more concentrated than wind and 100 more than solar - using this math alone, we might conclude that wave energy is the answer to the "least disruption" issue, if sensible emplimented. :-(
I am sure the energy density is high...by the time a wave comes ashore, it brings with it the wind energy absorbed from miles and miles of ocean crossing. [And this wave-as-stored-wind-energy effect also accounts for why wave energy is more steady than winds which, in the best of locations, often go slack] But I must say I am far from convinced that even at the most optimistic energy densities and conversion efficiencies we could harvest commercially significant amounts of energy [i.e. get measurable decreases in CO2 etc] without putting many square miles of near-shore waters off limits to all but the power companies. Yes it is just those waters that are nearest the polluting population centers but that is also why there will be huge resistence to diversion of those waters from all the other [not just recreational] uses they now support.
All that said, I still wish you best of luck pursuing the patent...its usually a very long road. Given the head-in-the-sand policy of the US toward emission reduction and green alternatives, by the time you get that patent, global warming will have increased averge wave amplitudes so much that we won't have to set aside as many acres of ocean as might be needed today
I have been unable to get my ice dispenser to shut off. maybe I should take it apart and see if it is running on WinCE. If it is, I am sure that replacing the controller with Linux+ice-daemon would solve the problem...and I hate having to reboot my fridge.
That's interesting, the subsurface aspect. Where are there diagrams or graphics of the most likely implementations? in TFA [which I had better read]? It would have to be a pretty clever design that actually harvested much kenetic energy in waves without coming near enough to the surface to be ugly or to interfere with navigation, coastal fishing, wildlife, surfing and kayaking...Just because it doesn't wreck the view from a beach cottage doesn't mean it won't wreck a lot of habitat. Wind power, after all, is an eyesore but with negligable footprint in the tidal flats and bays for which is its proposed. I can't see any way that wave energy obtained is not proportional to the acerage of generators deployed. Which technology is really less disruptive to the livelihood of animals and humans that work/live in the waters at land's end? ;?)
Visual Bargain...didn't Microsoft develop that
Given the trend of governments, especially those in the EU, toward use of FOSS to run their bureaucracies, I would expect that a ploy by Microsoft like the one reported could blow up in their face. What would stop Rassmussen from saying to Gates "OK, you fire the 800 programmers. While they are looking for work, we will fund their unemployment insurance with the money we save by dumping Microsoft OS and Office products. In fact, maybe some of those displaced workers would not mind helping us install and configure Linux, Firefox and Open Office in all our departments." The Danes are not noted for caving in to aggressive ulitmatims.
There are some execellent comments under "want more on the subject?" but what do they have to do with wave powered generation? Those comments I will be bookmarking because I do want to make my own watts and I don't want to be owned by NSTAR or help piss away fossil fuel into the sky. ... 25% of the available wave power were used at 50% efficiency..." it would equal all current hydro electric. Well maybe...but what does that mean? does that mean lining 1/4 of our nations coast line with a flotilla of generators? That would be uglier shit than all the dams and coal-fired powerplants combined! Yes, its "green" but only if they paint all those thousands of miles/acres of wave harnessing generators with green paint. Not gonna fly! You'll get your juice this way a lot sooner.
But on the topic...TFA says is if
because only california has a law requring such notice? What I mean is: Aren't there people outside of california whose personal information may have been taken?
Well, you get modded "insightful", with which I agree. now its the market's turn to mod the motorolapple and nokiasoft phonepods...how many months before we see profits saying "insightful" or losses saying "overrated"? I have exactly the same issues with the Microsoft/Nokia mediaphoney deal.