This may come to some surprise to you, but I just read an article where a company plans to ship water using oil tankers!
Ha. Ha. Let's see, just where are those tankers? Nope, don't see them (they have to transit the channel my house overlooks). Didn't see any yesterday when we drove by the place.
That's the point. These clowns have been talking about this for just about a decade without doing anything functional. It's easy to make PowerPoint presentations and show a pretty CG tanker trundling out of Sitka. Harder to get all of the oil out of the old rusty thing you just leased. Moties may like long chain hydrocarbons in their coffee, humans not so much.
Water is a commodity that is covered by several hundred years of law (at least in the US, I'm presuming there are similar arcane water rights laws in other countries). Thus, it can be 'owned' in the sense that certain people have the legal right to do something with it.
The world is going to be in a world of hurt because clean water is essential to society and civilization and clean, fresh water is unequally distributed around the planet. The human race is literally mining it's water - pulling it out faster than the system can replace it (think aquifers, not rivers).
But as I pointed out in my other post, it's hard to move potable water. In fact, it might be easier to run a desalinization plant. To ship in bulk you need either an ice berg (which has been proposed) or a purpose built tanker. So far, at least, the economics of water just haven't risen to the point where putting a whole bunch of money in for a tanker makes sense. Maybe later, but not as of 10/10/10.
Kindof a weird way to wake up. I have no idea what this is doing on Slashdot. FWIW, I live in Sitka and this 'concept' has been going on for about 10 years. TAB (True Alaska Bottlers - they make yet another plastic bottle filled with water) has only managed to ship a couple of hundred thousand gallons to nowhere in particular. They've done this to fulfill a contract obligation that states they have to do that. They do have potential buyers, but they don't have any way to routinely ship the product. They also don't have any money. They haven't paid a bunch of taxes, nor done a whole bunch of maintenance work on the city owned facility that their contract requires them to do. Can't do everything right, I suppose.
The big problem that TAB (and everybody else in this business has) is how to ship potable water in bulk. They've talked about converting either a tanker or a general merchant ship to take on the water but haven't been able to find the money. I've heard of standard modal containers outfitted with plastic insets - sounds reasonable as the infrastructure to move them is well developed - but I've yet to see one. It's too warm to freeze the water into an ice cube so that one's out. Ten billion 1 liter plastic bottles would be a bitch to recycle.
So I don't see this one working out at all. But we've got lots of water. 100+ inches per year falling into steep rugged terrain that just says 'dam me!'.
My card was blocked the other day (2nd time this month) after spending £2.81 for breakfast in the self service supermarket till that i do a few times a week.
You're missing the point here. Your breakfast (of bacon, ham, eggs, marmalade and Rock Star) is very high in fats, calories and low in vitamins, minerals and green scratchy things. The credit card company has a vested interest in keeping you alive (dead men don't pay bills). So by hassling you about breakfast they are hoping you go home and just eat your bunny food (or whatever it is you Brits eat at home) and live long and prosper.
Am I evil for thinking this would fun to shoot into the open windows of passing cars that play tasteless music too loudly?
Evil? No. Evil is using a real bazooka on those jackasses. I really do wish it were easier to obtain significant ordinance here in the US. Assault rifles really don't make the kind of impression that you often need with these jerkoffs.
Rather unlikely as the whole incident takes place in - wait for it - a foreign country which surprisingly, has a different constitutional and legal system as the United States. Remember, even though they speak English, they do lots of foreign things like drive on the wrong side of the road and don't pay for health care out of pocket.
As with everything else, reuse is most always better than recycling.
True enough
Royalty-free standards should be created for battery shapes and connectors, and a garbage tax should be placed on non-standard batteries.
Huh? What would this accomplish? By the time the battery is tossed, it doesn't work. So reusing it won't be of much help unless you have a particularly twisted sense of humor. Most batteries can't simply be just put back into production - remember batteries are just enclosed chemical reactions which at some point, can't keep going because of exhaustion of a component or a chemical change such that the efficiency goes to hell. Having everything standardized doesn't help with this.
Interchangeable parts were key to the industrial revolution. Sometimes we forget.
Tue, but completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
Actually, what that video shows is the damage to both hulls and a cheezy CGI simulation of what was supposed to happen. Clearly, the Chinese vessel (which, as you point out, is approximately the same size as the Japanese patrol boat) hit the other vessel with it's bow, but it isn't clear exactly how the boats managed to get themselves into that particular configuration.
So the troll post you replied to is wrong, but it isn't clear just what happened.
Why not FARK. Page views are page views. Might be nice to get the unwashed masses thinking (well, in a general manner of speaking) about something else than sex.
I was looking at the gallery page trying to figure out which viewer they used (SimpleViewer, alas, Flash), one of the comments:
This is nothing like the gamma knife, aside from that it uses radiation. They're using an MRI to guide a physical probe through the brain to the tumor where the probe then does a thermal discharge. So instead of shooting intersecting deathrays (very cool stuff by the way), they're sending a guided killbot that gets right up close.
Actually it does have a lot of similarities - they use MRI imaging to figure out which parts of the brain to fry, then use a fairly localized beam of Something Evil (gamma rays in the Gamma Knife, light energy in this device) to toast the 'bad' tissue. So it's really just another techy way of doing the same thing - minimally invasive surgery and will likely have the same efficacy (excellent to poor depending on the type of tumor) and cost shitloads of money.
Watch to see the hype (ooh! lasers!) run right past the research showing that it works just as well as extant technology and costs more.
The GIMP is an image editor roughly comparable to Photoshop and Paintshop Pro.
That's truly a hilarious statement.
Hardly. GIMP really is a good, basic pixel editor. It ISN'T Photoshop, much to the dismay of millions of users everywhere. It IS frustrating to use (just like, wait for it, Photoshop) and it does lack a number of very important features for professional work. But it's perfectly competent within it's limitations. I don't use it, I use Photoshop because I need some of those important features and I've used it since version 4 so I'm intimately acquainted with it's little weirdneses.
It's a pity no common image format or display device has more than 8 bits
We have 16 bit (and 32 bit) image formats. TIFF, PSD and even JPEG2000 (may it rest in peace). Display devices are another matter however there are 16 bit, wide gamut displays available commercially - just very expensive and thus not suitable for everyday use.
If you're complaining about any Internet browser's ability to display accurate color (no matter what the bit depth), well, you're sort of right. However, the newer browsers support the sRGB color space which is pretty much all that the vast majority of computer monitors can handle (see above complaints about 'brown').
The underlying problem is that you are trying to display an object done in a reflective medium (a painting, where incident light hits the canvas and is reflected back to your eye) with a transmissive medium (a backlight LCD most typically). That won't ever be completely correct.
It's about time they rethink this artificial theoretical/experimental barrier if all the "theories" being cooked up are so far out of the realm of verification that they might as well move to philosophy department.
I mean, it wouldn't it be surprising if they were given advanced degrees like "Doctor of Philosophy" or something like that?
Nice pickup, I said unlikely, but not impossible. The big difference here is that these viruses are inserting themselves in toto in the target genome remaining active to some degree or another. The 'ancient' viruses may well have started out like that but some millions of years ago they shut down, quit being selected for, but the sequences where never 'cleaned out'.
This has been speculated to be an important role for new gene products but likely happens rather rarely in complex multi cellular organisms. Like on the order of millions of years between successful occurrences. It certainly doesn't happen the way BadAnalogyGuy postulated to happen (and dissed Bruce Perens for no particularly good reason).
It takes >4 grams/day to overdose. It's far from "ridiculously easy". You can have 8 extra-strength Tylenol in a day and still be okay./pharmicist
Nonetheless major stupid trumps 'easy' most of the time. Acetaminophen overdose (both accidental and intentional) is one of the most common causes of liver failure in the US. (Ethanol for the win).((Ethanol + acetaminophen for bonus points in the Darwin awards)).
Slashdot Mirror
Ha. Ha. Let's see, just where are those tankers? Nope, don't see them (they have to transit the channel my house overlooks). Didn't see any yesterday when we drove by the place.
That's the point. These clowns have been talking about this for just about a decade without doing anything functional. It's easy to make PowerPoint presentations and show a pretty CG tanker trundling out of Sitka. Harder to get all of the oil out of the old rusty thing you just leased. Moties may like long chain hydrocarbons in their coffee, humans not so much.
Details matter.
Water is a commodity that is covered by several hundred years of law (at least in the US, I'm presuming there are similar arcane water rights laws in other countries). Thus, it can be 'owned' in the sense that certain people have the legal right to do something with it.
The world is going to be in a world of hurt because clean water is essential to society and civilization and clean, fresh water is unequally distributed around the planet. The human race is literally mining it's water - pulling it out faster than the system can replace it (think aquifers, not rivers).
But as I pointed out in my other post, it's hard to move potable water. In fact, it might be easier to run a desalinization plant. To ship in bulk you need either an ice berg (which has been proposed) or a purpose built tanker. So far, at least, the economics of water just haven't risen to the point where putting a whole bunch of money in for a tanker makes sense. Maybe later, but not as of 10/10/10.
Kindof a weird way to wake up. I have no idea what this is doing on Slashdot. FWIW, I live in Sitka and this 'concept' has been going on for about 10 years. TAB (True Alaska Bottlers - they make yet another plastic bottle filled with water) has only managed to ship a couple of hundred thousand gallons to nowhere in particular. They've done this to fulfill a contract obligation that states they have to do that. They do have potential buyers, but they don't have any way to routinely ship the product. They also don't have any money. They haven't paid a bunch of taxes, nor done a whole bunch of maintenance work on the city owned facility that their contract requires them to do. Can't do everything right, I suppose.
The big problem that TAB (and everybody else in this business has) is how to ship potable water in bulk. They've talked about converting either a tanker or a general merchant ship to take on the water but haven't been able to find the money. I've heard of standard modal containers outfitted with plastic insets - sounds reasonable as the infrastructure to move them is well developed - but I've yet to see one. It's too warm to freeze the water into an ice cube so that one's out. Ten billion 1 liter plastic bottles would be a bitch to recycle.
So I don't see this one working out at all. But we've got lots of water. 100+ inches per year falling into steep rugged terrain that just says 'dam me!'.
You're missing the point here. Your breakfast (of bacon, ham, eggs, marmalade and Rock Star) is very high in fats, calories and low in vitamins, minerals and green scratchy things. The credit card company has a vested interest in keeping you alive (dead men don't pay bills). So by hassling you about breakfast they are hoping you go home and just eat your bunny food (or whatever it is you Brits eat at home) and live long and prosper.
Think out of the box here, son.
Evil? No. Evil is using a real bazooka on those jackasses. I really do wish it were easier to obtain significant ordinance here in the US. Assault rifles really don't make the kind of impression that you often need with these jerkoffs.
No imagination, that's what.
Rather unlikely as the whole incident takes place in - wait for it - a foreign country which surprisingly, has a different constitutional and legal system as the United States. Remember, even though they speak English, they do lots of foreign things like drive on the wrong side of the road and don't pay for health care out of pocket.
True enough
Huh? What would this accomplish? By the time the battery is tossed, it doesn't work. So reusing it won't be of much help unless you have a particularly twisted sense of humor. Most batteries can't simply be just put back into production - remember batteries are just enclosed chemical reactions which at some point, can't keep going because of exhaustion of a component or a chemical change such that the efficiency goes to hell. Having everything standardized doesn't help with this.
Tue, but completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
Actually, what that video shows is the damage to both hulls and a cheezy CGI simulation of what was supposed to happen. Clearly, the Chinese vessel (which, as you point out, is approximately the same size as the Japanese patrol boat) hit the other vessel with it's bow, but it isn't clear exactly how the boats managed to get themselves into that particular configuration.
So the troll post you replied to is wrong, but it isn't clear just what happened.
I was looking at the gallery page trying to figure out which viewer they used (SimpleViewer, alas, Flash), one of the comments:
caught my eye. Some things never change.
Tim, Tim Benzidrine
Hash, Boo, Valvoline
Clean, Clean, Clean for Gene
First, Second, Neutral, Park
Hie thee Hence, you leafy Narc!
(always wanted to do that)
How about we put a shock collar on both of them? One that goes to 11.
One of us is missing a few years in the remembering department. I distinctly recall George W. Bush being president.
Was that just a very, very bad dream?
Hey, I just pulled out my trusty Celestron - I don't see it. Did they mark it with anything?
I told you that this would start a flame war.
Slashdotters are so much fun.
Actually it does have a lot of similarities - they use MRI imaging to figure out which parts of the brain to fry, then use a fairly localized beam of Something Evil (gamma rays in the Gamma Knife, light energy in this device) to toast the 'bad' tissue. So it's really just another techy way of doing the same thing - minimally invasive surgery and will likely have the same efficacy (excellent to poor depending on the type of tumor) and cost shitloads of money.
/grouchy cynical mode OFF temporarily
Watch to see the hype (ooh! lasers!) run right past the research showing that it works just as well as extant technology and costs more.
Hardly. GIMP really is a good, basic pixel editor. It ISN'T Photoshop, much to the dismay of millions of users everywhere. It IS frustrating to use (just like, wait for it, Photoshop) and it does lack a number of very important features for professional work. But it's perfectly competent within it's limitations. I don't use it, I use Photoshop because I need some of those important features and I've used it since version 4 so I'm intimately acquainted with it's little weirdneses.
/Start GIMP-Photoshop flame wars ...
But it's certainly roughly comparable.
We have 16 bit (and 32 bit) image formats. TIFF, PSD and even JPEG2000 (may it rest in peace). Display devices are another matter however there are 16 bit, wide gamut displays available commercially - just very expensive and thus not suitable for everyday use.
If you're complaining about any Internet browser's ability to display accurate color (no matter what the bit depth), well, you're sort of right. However, the newer browsers support the sRGB color space which is pretty much all that the vast majority of computer monitors can handle (see above complaints about 'brown').
The underlying problem is that you are trying to display an object done in a reflective medium (a painting, where incident light hits the canvas and is reflected back to your eye) with a transmissive medium (a backlight LCD most typically). That won't ever be completely correct.
BP and Trans Ocean had enough stupidity points to blow the Deepwater Horizon up without help from anybody else. No additional boogy men needed.
Like under the bar stools?
I mean, it wouldn't it be surprising if they were given advanced degrees like "Doctor of Philosophy" or something like that?
Nice pickup, I said unlikely, but not impossible. The big difference here is that these viruses are inserting themselves in toto in the target genome remaining active to some degree or another. The 'ancient' viruses may well have started out like that but some millions of years ago they shut down, quit being selected for, but the sequences where never 'cleaned out'.
This has been speculated to be an important role for new gene products but likely happens rather rarely in complex multi cellular organisms. Like on the order of millions of years between successful occurrences. It certainly doesn't happen the way BadAnalogyGuy postulated to happen (and dissed Bruce Perens for no particularly good reason).
Nonetheless major stupid trumps 'easy' most of the time. Acetaminophen overdose (both accidental and intentional) is one of the most common causes of liver failure in the US. (Ethanol for the win).((Ethanol + acetaminophen for bonus points in the Darwin awards)).
Since they're stuffed with acetaminophen / paracetamol / Tylenol (whatever you like to call it) that just might work.
Then again, it might not.
Compare that to the last 'record run' for a US train (from the Wikipedia article).
1934.
Sigh.