The efficiency improvements offset some of the storage problems. If you can use 1/2 of the stored energy instead of 1/4 for gasoline, it's no longer quite as important that gas has about four times the energy density. You might have to make your gas tank twice as big for the same range, but at least you don't have to make it four times as big.
Does anyone have any remarks about metallic hydrogen? It has higher energy density, but is very difficult to make and its properties aren't well understood. According to the wikipedia article, some people think it might be possible to turn hydrogen into a solid that doesn't revert back to a gas when pressure is removed.
Random trivia of the day: the core of Jupiter is thought to be made of metallic hydrogen.
It seems that if they can capture it into earth orbit, it would be more valuable where it is. It costs a lot of money to launch heavy things into space, it may be more valuable as a source of raw materials already in orbit.
It might eventually even be useful as a counterweight for a space elevator.
How could we go about creating a website with a consistent bias? A simple Slashdot-like mod points system would work wonders.
A few possibilies:
If an article is suffering from a revert war, any party can enable a "peer review" feature, which remains in effect for the next week or two. If peer review is enabled, any changes must be approved by several other users, through a system implemented similar to slashdot metamoderation. (A peer-reviewer does not choose what articles to peer review, they are selected randomly.)
Every article has a "draft" version and a "final" version (similar to odd (unstable) and even (stable) Linux kernel releases). The final version cannot be edited. In order for the draft version to become a new stable version, it must have its content frozen, then be approved by a number of people (the number of approvals required is proportional to the article's popularity). This could be implemented similar to the edit queue and voting queue of kuro5hin.
Every account has a reputation, determined by a moderation system, or derived from friend/foe lists. Each article also has a quality metric, determined by the stability of the article over time, its popularity in terms of number of readers, and its popularity in terms of citation count. In order to edit an article, the user's reputation must exceed the quality rating of the page. In other words, only the most trusted users may edit the most highly trafficed articles. Edits by less trusted users may either be denied, or sent through a peer-review process.
So, if I understand right, the host OS isn't Linux. Rather, it's a stripped down "xen" system, which boots any guest OS ported to xen. From figure 1 in the paper, it looks like you control the xen system from one of the guest OSs, rather than from the host OS, like in UML.
That's a good question. The paper describing xen is here. I'm not sure what the implementation differences are between the two, but xen managed to achieve much better performance on certain benchmarks. So, it's functionally equivilent to UML, but faster (YMMV). Maybe someone who's not too lazy to read the paper right now can tell us what they did different.
Since most audio files are ripped from stereo CDs, I suppose surround-sound MP3s aren't really all that useful for most people.
I do have one quatrophonic record lying around somewhere, but since I don't have a record player, or a sound card with a four channel input, it's kind of hard to rip it to a surround sound audio format.
Hopefully, whatever technology people are using for >2 channel audio eventually trickles down to the masses. Maybe itunes or whoever will start selling surround audio files, if they don't already.
FFTW is written in C, so I was confused what it had to do with Ocaml. According to the faq:
FFTW is written in ANSI C. Most of the code, however, was automatically generated by a program called genfft, written in the Objective Caml dialect of ML. You do not need to know ML or to have an Objective Caml compiler in order to use FFTW.
genfft is provided with the FFTW sources, which means that you can play with the code generator if you want. In this case, you need a working Objective Caml system. Objective Caml is available from the Caml web page.
I like how they show the results as a histogram of ratings. This makes it easy to distinguish a game that everyone thought was mediocre from one that a lot of people liked, but a lot of others didn't. I wish imdb, iblist, and all the other similar sites would do the same.
This concern has been brought up before. Current space elevator designs are not likely to cause damage when falling, since they have low mass compared to their cross section, much like a ribbon or a sheet of paper.
The machine tallys should always be reconciled with a paper count. The electronic counts are to provide fast initial results and to draw attention to erroneous manual counts. The manual paper counts provide credibility to the electronic count, just as the electronic count gives credibility to the manual count. If there is no manual count, the electronic count has no credibility.
Going from FC2 to FC3 broke gnome for me. Everything sort of worked, but I couldn't change any settings. After deleting a few directories (like.gconfd), everything worked fine again. For me, changing distros or versions of distros seems to always break gnome for some reason.
I had another problem where the root password I had set didn't work. (Fixing it just required rebooting in single user mode and running passwd.) I assumed I had just mistyped it, but someone else installed FC3 on a box at work and had the same thing happen. Are we both horrible typists, or is this happening to other people as well?
The problem is that snce a small part of their crop is contaminated by GM seeds, there's no practical way of getting rid of them. They don't have the option to choose not to use them if they've used them in the past (when the IP laws were different), or if any of their regular seeds ever got mixed up with GM seeds by mistake.
Interesting. 2 watts, 11.25 khz per channel, 5 channels. Not enough for high throughput links, but sufficient for basic communication. Are there any rules concerning acceptable uses and/or modulation techniques? Is crypto permitted? Are there antenna gain restrictions?
No disagreement here, but how does that address the quoted point, trying to ascertain the left/right bias of CNN?
Supposing CNN fails to portray the substantive arguments of either right wingers or left wingers, then a right winger, being more familiar with right wing ideology, will say "This news channel is left leaning, because it doesn't portray the best arguments of right wingers". This right winger, not being familiar with left wing ideology (because it isn't portrayed accurately on the news) will assume that CNN is portraying the best of left-winger ideology, and is therefore left wing. Left wingers will assume that CNN is right wing, for the same reasons.
(The above paragraph assumes that "left wing" and "right wing" are a reasonable way to describe a person's political beliefs. In actuality, things are more complicated. Political beliefs are a multidimensional space.)
News media tend to portray all conflicts as differences of opinion between groups of people who don't get along. Portraying everying as a simple "matter of opinion" tends not to make those with differing opinions uncomfortable, which makes advertisers happy. By avoiding facts and substantive arguments, they can avoid upsetting their viewers' subtle biases.
I think the grandparent post was saying that CNN doesn't lean left or right, but towards entertainment and away from education. By portraying nonsense, they are firmly nonpartisan. I don't watch CNN, so I can't say if this is an accurate assessment, but it seems to be true of most news outlets in general. One possible cause may be media consolidation.
That's an interesting point. But supposing you did own the copyright, or the music in question was your own performance of a work no longer under copyright, it would still be prohibitted to transmit over ham radio.
(There is one odd exception, and that is rebroadcasts of a space shuttle transmission.)
I think the problem with HAM radio is that it's technology for its own sake. If I write good software, it can make a difference in the world. People who aren't programmers will use it, and it will make the world a better place. If I come up with new HAM radio technology, no one but HAM operators can make immediate use of it.
The practical uses of HAM radio are very limited (emergency communication is the most significant exception). Rules have been placed on the HAM bands such that they can't be used for anything remotely useful. Many ham operators consider this a feature, since it keeps away all the people who don't care about the technology and just want to use it to surf the web and check their email from remote locations. Their objections may be justified - frequency is scarce (especially on the lower frequency bands), and commercial traffic, if allowed, might make the bands unuseable.
Unfortunately, this also means that it can't have any real effect on people's lives. The Internet is a tool of social change. Ham radio is not.
The rules I'm refering to are these:
No crypto (most people regard digital signatures as ok). No ssh. No ssl. If you check your email over ham radio, everyone else can read it.
No music. Not even if you made it up yourself.
No swearing.
No business-related traffic.
These rules all ensure that HAM radio is a polite medium used by nice people who aren't going to step on each other's toes. It also means, however, that you can't use HAM radio to carry Internet traffic for non-ham radio people, due to the difficulty of policing their traffic, making sure they aren't sending or receiving prohibited data.
My opinion is that they should open up some small subset of the UHF and VHF bands to general purpose traffic. It would still require a license to use the equipment, but with content rules similar to the ISM band (whatever kind of traffic you want, as long as it's not interfering with someone else). This would allow people to use HAM radio as part of the infrastructure of the Internet.
Given how many people dream about writing games, it's surprising how few good open source games there are. Perhaps what's lacking is a good framework - few have the time and abiblity to implement a whole high-quality game from scratch.
I'm quite impressed with stratagus, though. It seems like a reasonably hackable RTS game framework.
ME-10 and ME-30 are a good example of how to do 2-d drafting right, and Solid Designer is very nice for 3-d models. Solid modeling is definitely the way to go. Construction lines for CAD is a nice concept as well. AutoCAD is a good example of what not to aspire to.
Note: I worked for HP for a summer helping out int their drafting department, but I haven't done any CAD since then (about 7 years ago), so my knowledge is a bit dated. AutoCAD might be a tolerable product now.
Yes, it is possible that the candidate won't realize that a recount is indicated. If so, the candidate is screwed in *any* system.
The candidate whould not be screwed in a system which required a count of the paper ballots to verify the electronic tally in all cases. Compared to the amount of effort people go to to actually vote, and the importance of having a trustworthy outcome, a little bit of extra work is worth it.
The thing is, if a non-company-affiliated programmer sees a security flaw that no one else does (possible, but not that likely), this one anonymous person could, for example, change votes and not be suspect at all
Finding a security hole isn't a problem if no one can exploit it, and you can't remote exploit a voting machine if its not connected to a network (I don't know if most voting machines are, but it doesn't sound like a good idea). Local exploits on the part of the voter should be easy to avoid (check for buffer overflows in the write-in slot code, etc...). Local exploits on the part of the election officials could be a bigger potential problem, but there has to be a vast conspiracy to effect a large election. Closed source systems can be subverted by a smaller group of people - the ones that wrote the original code.
I wouldn't trust open-source machines much more than closed-source, though. The electronic tally ought to be compared with a paper tally in all cases to verify the legitimacy of the results.
Slashdot Mirror
Geeks without borders.
The efficiency improvements offset some of the storage problems. If you can use 1/2 of the stored energy instead of 1/4 for gasoline, it's no longer quite as important that gas has about four times the energy density. You might have to make your gas tank twice as big for the same range, but at least you don't have to make it four times as big.
Does anyone have any remarks about metallic hydrogen? It has higher energy density, but is very difficult to make and its properties aren't well understood. According to the wikipedia article, some people think it might be possible to turn hydrogen into a solid that doesn't revert back to a gas when pressure is removed.
Random trivia of the day: the core of Jupiter is thought to be made of metallic hydrogen.
How does this alleviate global warming? Does biodiesel not release carbon dioxide when it burns?
It seems that if they can capture it into earth orbit, it would be more valuable where it is. It costs a lot of money to launch heavy things into space, it may be more valuable as a source of raw materials already in orbit.
It might eventually even be useful as a counterweight for a space elevator.
-jim
A few possibilies:
Or yell "BOO, BOOOOOO!" at the start of each commercial (at least for movies seen in the theatres).
I haven't tried this. I wonder how many people would think it rude, versus the number who would join in? Might the theatre kick you out?
I wonder how much the theatres get paid to advertise. I know they actually have to pay quite a bit for some of the trailers.
So, if I understand right, the host OS isn't Linux. Rather, it's a stripped down "xen" system, which boots any guest OS ported to xen. From figure 1 in the paper, it looks like you control the xen system from one of the guest OSs, rather than from the host OS, like in UML.
That's a good question. The paper describing xen is here. I'm not sure what the implementation differences are between the two, but xen managed to achieve much better performance on certain benchmarks. So, it's functionally equivilent to UML, but faster (YMMV). Maybe someone who's not too lazy to read the paper right now can tell us what they did different.
Since most audio files are ripped from stereo CDs, I suppose surround-sound MP3s aren't really all that useful for most people.
I do have one quatrophonic record lying around somewhere, but since I don't have a record player, or a sound card with a four channel input, it's kind of hard to rip it to a surround sound audio format.
Hopefully, whatever technology people are using for >2 channel audio eventually trickles down to the masses. Maybe itunes or whoever will start selling surround audio files, if they don't already.
That's cool, I guess I just never clicked on the yellow stars.
I like how they show the results as a histogram of ratings. This makes it easy to distinguish a game that everyone thought was mediocre from one that a lot of people liked, but a lot of others didn't. I wish imdb, iblist, and all the other similar sites would do the same.
This concern has been brought up before. Current space elevator designs are not likely to cause damage when falling, since they have low mass compared to their cross section, much like a ribbon or a sheet of paper.
I'm repeating the AC's reply, but..
The machine tallys should always be reconciled with a paper count. The electronic counts are to provide fast initial results and to draw attention to erroneous manual counts. The manual paper counts provide credibility to the electronic count, just as the electronic count gives credibility to the manual count. If there is no manual count, the electronic count has no credibility.
-jim
Going from FC2 to FC3 broke gnome for me. Everything sort of worked, but I couldn't change any settings. After deleting a few directories (like .gconfd), everything worked fine again. For me, changing distros or versions of distros seems to always break gnome for some reason.
I had another problem where the root password I had set didn't work. (Fixing it just required rebooting in single user mode and running passwd.) I assumed I had just mistyped it, but someone else installed FC3 on a box at work and had the same thing happen. Are we both horrible typists, or is this happening to other people as well?
Otherwise, everything seems to be working fine.
-jim
The unofficial fedora faq has pointers to rpm respositories where you can get things like the xmms-mp3 package.
-jim
The problem is that snce a small part of their crop is contaminated by GM seeds, there's no practical way of getting rid of them. They don't have the option to choose not to use them if they've used them in the past (when the IP laws were different), or if any of their regular seeds ever got mixed up with GM seeds by mistake.
-jim
Interesting. 2 watts, 11.25 khz per channel, 5 channels. Not enough for high throughput links, but sufficient for basic communication. Are there any rules concerning acceptable uses and/or modulation techniques? Is crypto permitted? Are there antenna gain restrictions?
-jim
Supposing CNN fails to portray the substantive arguments of either right wingers or left wingers, then a right winger, being more familiar with right wing ideology, will say "This news channel is left leaning, because it doesn't portray the best arguments of right wingers". This right winger, not being familiar with left wing ideology (because it isn't portrayed accurately on the news) will assume that CNN is portraying the best of left-winger ideology, and is therefore left wing. Left wingers will assume that CNN is right wing, for the same reasons.
(The above paragraph assumes that "left wing" and "right wing" are a reasonable way to describe a person's political beliefs. In actuality, things are more complicated. Political beliefs are a multidimensional space.)
News media tend to portray all conflicts as differences of opinion between groups of people who don't get along. Portraying everying as a simple "matter of opinion" tends not to make those with differing opinions uncomfortable, which makes advertisers happy. By avoiding facts and substantive arguments, they can avoid upsetting their viewers' subtle biases.
I think the grandparent post was saying that CNN doesn't lean left or right, but towards entertainment and away from education. By portraying nonsense, they are firmly nonpartisan. I don't watch CNN, so I can't say if this is an accurate assessment, but it seems to be true of most news outlets in general. One possible cause may be media consolidation.
-jim
That's an interesting point. But supposing you did own the copyright, or the music in question was your own performance of a work no longer under copyright, it would still be prohibitted to transmit over ham radio.
(There is one odd exception, and that is rebroadcasts of a space shuttle transmission.)
-jim
I think the problem with HAM radio is that it's technology for its own sake. If I write good software, it can make a difference in the world. People who aren't programmers will use it, and it will make the world a better place. If I come up with new HAM radio technology, no one but HAM operators can make immediate use of it.
The practical uses of HAM radio are very limited (emergency communication is the most significant exception). Rules have been placed on the HAM bands such that they can't be used for anything remotely useful. Many ham operators consider this a feature, since it keeps away all the people who don't care about the technology and just want to use it to surf the web and check their email from remote locations. Their objections may be justified - frequency is scarce (especially on the lower frequency bands), and commercial traffic, if allowed, might make the bands unuseable.
Unfortunately, this also means that it can't have any real effect on people's lives. The Internet is a tool of social change. Ham radio is not.
The rules I'm refering to are these:
These rules all ensure that HAM radio is a polite medium used by nice people who aren't going to step on each other's toes. It also means, however, that you can't use HAM radio to carry Internet traffic for non-ham radio people, due to the difficulty of policing their traffic, making sure they aren't sending or receiving prohibited data.
My opinion is that they should open up some small subset of the UHF and VHF bands to general purpose traffic. It would still require a license to use the equipment, but with content rules similar to the ISM band (whatever kind of traffic you want, as long as it's not interfering with someone else). This would allow people to use HAM radio as part of the infrastructure of the Internet.
-jim (KE7BGU)
Given how many people dream about writing games, it's surprising how few good open source games there are. Perhaps what's lacking is a good framework - few have the time and abiblity to implement a whole high-quality game from scratch.
I'm quite impressed with stratagus, though. It seems like a reasonably hackable RTS game framework.
-jim
ME-10 and ME-30 are a good example of how to do 2-d drafting right, and Solid Designer is very nice for 3-d models. Solid modeling is definitely the way to go. Construction lines for CAD is a nice concept as well. AutoCAD is a good example of what not to aspire to.
Note: I worked for HP for a summer helping out int their drafting department, but I haven't done any CAD since then (about 7 years ago), so my knowledge is a bit dated. AutoCAD might be a tolerable product now.
-jim
The candidate whould not be screwed in a system which required a count of the paper ballots to verify the electronic tally in all cases. Compared to the amount of effort people go to to actually vote, and the importance of having a trustworthy outcome, a little bit of extra work is worth it.
-jim
Finding a security hole isn't a problem if no one can exploit it, and you can't remote exploit a voting machine if its not connected to a network (I don't know if most voting machines are, but it doesn't sound like a good idea). Local exploits on the part of the voter should be easy to avoid (check for buffer overflows in the write-in slot code, etc...). Local exploits on the part of the election officials could be a bigger potential problem, but there has to be a vast conspiracy to effect a large election. Closed source systems can be subverted by a smaller group of people - the ones that wrote the original code.
I wouldn't trust open-source machines much more than closed-source, though. The electronic tally ought to be compared with a paper tally in all cases to verify the legitimacy of the results.
-jim