All our servers are command-line only. Everything is done by ssh or the built-in serial-to-Ethernet management port. When even the BIOS is command line, why exactly do you need your kernel to talk to you? Why can't the notebook you're using to connect to the server talk to you?
I don't really see a market for server-only operating systems though. It's too convenient to run the same thing on the server and the desktop.
If you are donating something to charity, why would you want (or be allowed) to pass that cost onto the rest of the taxpayers?
Think of it this way:
If you spend an hour doing programming for your favourite charity, that's simply an hour with no income and therefore you don't pay taxes.
If your charity doesn't need programming but does need something else, you can spend that hour working your regular job, but suddenly you can only give the charity maybe 2/3 of what that work is worth -- the rest goes to tax. This makes it more attractive to do things you're fairly bad at for the charity directly, instead of doing what you're best at and donating the proceeds. Therefore it makes sense to give you that tax back.
Am I allowed to write off my FOSS development as a charitable donation on my taxes?
Only if you claim the (fictional) income first. If you then donate the code to a registered charity, you should be able to pull it off. Best case you'll end up not paying taxes for the fictional income.
It's a bit easier to just not claim the fictional income, isn't it?
There's plenty of fissionable material. The unknown is whether it is economical to extract it. However, even 70 years should be good enough for better technologies to take over.
Not that I'm particularly in favour of nuclear, but anything is better than coal.
What happens when the uranium runs out? Then what do we use to replace nuclear?
Solar. If solar cost and efficiency improvements continue the way they are doing right now, we'll be fine in a hundred years, and the uranium ought to last that long. Should that fail, there's space based solar, there's fusion, there's reprocessing of fissionable material, there's all the non-solar "green" technologies (though they don't scale as wonderfully as solar).
Our current problems are somewhat temporary, unless they kill us or make it impossible to sustain technological improvements.
You'll waste more millions of tons of valuable materials in batteries if you're trying to avoid the grid using wind and solar. If you try natural gas, you'll run out very quickly.
Anyway, no one is stopping you from going off-grid. Try and you'll discover how expensive it is. Then try running industry without the grid, and see how well that goes. The grid is the future, and the problem isn't that we have too much of it, the problem is that we have too little. Luckily it is being expanded in many places.
ok a few items of interest, this can become a base load generation system ( yep, it can work 24 per day )
I know it can WORK 24 hours a day, it just can't compete with other fuel sources 24 hours a day. Less flexible sources such as coal, nuclear, and wind can produce power at lower marginal cost than natural gas.
Of course you can still use it even though grid electricity is cheaper, but why would you?
now if we could find a way to capture that heat, turn it into hot air, pipe it under cities to give extra warmth in the winter, bang a few more drops saved...
I would recommend using water instead of air. District heating isn't new though.
my point is that if we don't try to improve efficiency consistently, we end up wasting more resources over a longer term.
And my point is that fuel cells can get maybe 20% more electricity out of natural gas than turbines. This means that they can't dramatically alter the price of electricity compared to the price of natural gas. This again means that if you're buying one of these to produce electricity significantly cheaper than the grid can provide it, you'll be disappointed.
At some point these things will likely get cheap enough that turbines will be phased out, and that's obviously a good thing. They're a lousy investment right now if you just want to produce base-load electricity, and they're even worse for backup power -- why save on fuel when you're only running a few hours a year? The only place they have a chance right now is for peak-load use.
Well, at least it is operating at a high temp, much higher than internal combustion.
Fuel cells aren't heat engines. There's no law stopping you from having a 80% efficient fuel cell at 0 Celcius. Maybe one day we'll find the materials which can accomplish that.
The grace period is only for distribution of content in H.264. You are currently paying the license for the tools you use to CREATE the H.264, and for the tools you use to VIEW the H.264. You just don't have to pay it for using Apache to DISTRIBUTE the H.264.
Seriously - If I was willing to move out of the U.S. and good health care was on my list of needs, where should I go?
I think you will find it harder to be allowed immigration than you expect. Depending on where you go of course, but your options are probably quite limited.
Keep in mind that 99% of the point of SSD is the speed. It finally removes that hideous mechanical component that's been holding back computing performance for over a decade now. Nothing stops you from having a couple of 2TB spinning disk drives in there for holding your movies and photos and all that junk that doesn't need 100K IOPS.
You may have missed it, but the desktop is dead. The major markets of SSD are notebooks and servers. Modern servers are 1U or blade and have ~0 available PCI-e slots. Notebooks don't have any PCI-e slots either, and manufacturers can't yet make models without support for regular hard drives.
In the space ship the total travel time is 7 hours, so the 2.2 years don't apply.
Basically you can ignore relativity if you only care about what the space ship observes. If you want to fly 5000 times light speed, no problem, just keep accelerating. The rest of the world will see you stuck at slightly less than light speed, but that really isn't your problem, is it?
The eV are created directly from the ships kinetic energy. You can put it back with the propulsion system, but there will always be a loss. What's worse is that you lose momentum, which can only be replaced by catching the incoming particles and accelerating them out the back -- or by expending valuable reaction mass.
There's always the escape of the anthropic principle: Since any colonizing civilization will kill off whatever life was on the planets before, we wouldn't be here to observe the galaxy if we weren't first...
Accelerating to 99.999998% of light speed in 3.5 hours would be a somewhat dizzying experience. Especially since you'd actually experience an acceleration equivalent to going to 5000 times light speed in a pure Newtonian universe. We're talking more than 500.000km/s^2 here -- or 50 million g.
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All our servers are command-line only. Everything is done by ssh or the built-in serial-to-Ethernet management port. When even the BIOS is command line, why exactly do you need your kernel to talk to you? Why can't the notebook you're using to connect to the server talk to you?
I don't really see a market for server-only operating systems though. It's too convenient to run the same thing on the server and the desktop.
If you are donating something to charity, why would you want (or be allowed) to pass that cost onto the rest of the taxpayers?
Think of it this way:
If you spend an hour doing programming for your favourite charity, that's simply an hour with no income and therefore you don't pay taxes.
If your charity doesn't need programming but does need something else, you can spend that hour working your regular job, but suddenly you can only give the charity maybe 2/3 of what that work is worth -- the rest goes to tax. This makes it more attractive to do things you're fairly bad at for the charity directly, instead of doing what you're best at and donating the proceeds. Therefore it makes sense to give you that tax back.
Am I allowed to write off my FOSS development as a charitable donation on my taxes?
Only if you claim the (fictional) income first. If you then donate the code to a registered charity, you should be able to pull it off. Best case you'll end up not paying taxes for the fictional income.
It's a bit easier to just not claim the fictional income, isn't it?
There's plenty of fissionable material. The unknown is whether it is economical to extract it. However, even 70 years should be good enough for better technologies to take over.
Not that I'm particularly in favour of nuclear, but anything is better than coal.
What happens when the uranium runs out? Then what do we use to replace nuclear?
Solar. If solar cost and efficiency improvements continue the way they are doing right now, we'll be fine in a hundred years, and the uranium ought to last that long. Should that fail, there's space based solar, there's fusion, there's reprocessing of fissionable material, there's all the non-solar "green" technologies (though they don't scale as wonderfully as solar).
Our current problems are somewhat temporary, unless they kill us or make it impossible to sustain technological improvements.
The water is reused.
You'll waste more millions of tons of valuable materials in batteries if you're trying to avoid the grid using wind and solar. If you try natural gas, you'll run out very quickly.
Anyway, no one is stopping you from going off-grid. Try and you'll discover how expensive it is. Then try running industry without the grid, and see how well that goes. The grid is the future, and the problem isn't that we have too much of it, the problem is that we have too little. Luckily it is being expanded in many places.
Oh and this bit:
ok a few items of interest, this can become a base load generation system ( yep, it can work 24 per day )
I know it can WORK 24 hours a day, it just can't compete with other fuel sources 24 hours a day. Less flexible sources such as coal, nuclear, and wind can produce power at lower marginal cost than natural gas.
Of course you can still use it even though grid electricity is cheaper, but why would you?
now if we could find a way to capture that heat, turn it into hot air, pipe it under cities to give extra warmth in the winter, bang a few more drops saved...
I would recommend using water instead of air. District heating isn't new though.
Transmission lines lose less than 10% of the power. They don't change the equation very much.
my point is that if we don't try to improve efficiency consistently, we end up wasting more resources over a longer term.
And my point is that fuel cells can get maybe 20% more electricity out of natural gas than turbines. This means that they can't dramatically alter the price of electricity compared to the price of natural gas. This again means that if you're buying one of these to produce electricity significantly cheaper than the grid can provide it, you'll be disappointed.
At some point these things will likely get cheap enough that turbines will be phased out, and that's obviously a good thing. They're a lousy investment right now if you just want to produce base-load electricity, and they're even worse for backup power -- why save on fuel when you're only running a few hours a year? The only place they have a chance right now is for peak-load use.
Well, at least it is operating at a high temp, much higher than internal combustion.
Fuel cells aren't heat engines. There's no law stopping you from having a 80% efficient fuel cell at 0 Celcius. Maybe one day we'll find the materials which can accomplish that.
Betting on natural gas prices rising slower than electricity prices seems a pretty dumb bet to me, personally.
Indeed. Since natural gas is so easy to turn into electricity, it's unlikely that it'll ever get cheap without electricity becoming cheap as well.
Fuel cells aren't THAT much more efficient than large gas turbines + generators anyway.
The grace period is only for distribution of content in H.264. You are currently paying the license for the tools you use to CREATE the H.264, and for the tools you use to VIEW the H.264. You just don't have to pay it for using Apache to DISTRIBUTE the H.264.
I can't get high speed fax (>14k4) on my fax-to-email system, because that's based on V.34 and patented.
Seriously - If I was willing to move out of the U.S. and good health care was on my list of needs, where should I go?
I think you will find it harder to be allowed immigration than you expect. Depending on where you go of course, but your options are probably quite limited.
Keep in mind that 99% of the point of SSD is the speed. It finally removes that hideous mechanical component that's been holding back computing performance for over a decade now. Nothing stops you from having a couple of 2TB spinning disk drives in there for holding your movies and photos and all that junk that doesn't need 100K IOPS.
You may have missed it, but the desktop is dead. The major markets of SSD are notebooks and servers. Modern servers are 1U or blade and have ~0 available PCI-e slots. Notebooks don't have any PCI-e slots either, and manufacturers can't yet make models without support for regular hard drives.
Electrons travel at the speed of light (in a vacuum).
Electrons have rest mass. They don't travel at the speed of light.
In the space ship the total travel time is 7 hours, so the 2.2 years don't apply.
Basically you can ignore relativity if you only care about what the space ship observes. If you want to fly 5000 times light speed, no problem, just keep accelerating. The rest of the world will see you stuck at slightly less than light speed, but that really isn't your problem, is it?
Apples and oranges. Speed != acceleration.
I simply omitted the "in 3.5 hours" which were in the previous sentence. I presumed my readers would be sentient.
Aerodynamic in the Earth sense of the word doesn't matter. You can make the ship any shape you want, all that counts is your cross-section.
The eV are created directly from the ships kinetic energy. You can put it back with the propulsion system, but there will always be a loss. What's worse is that you lose momentum, which can only be replaced by catching the incoming particles and accelerating them out the back -- or by expending valuable reaction mass.
There's always the escape of the anthropic principle: Since any colonizing civilization will kill off whatever life was on the planets before, we wouldn't be here to observe the galaxy if we weren't first...
True, but do YOU want to ride the LHC?
Accelerating to 99.999998% of light speed in 3.5 hours would be a somewhat dizzying experience. Especially since you'd actually experience an acceleration equivalent to going to 5000 times light speed in a pure Newtonian universe. We're talking more than 500.000km/s^2 here -- or 50 million g.