No, but companies tend to buy planes for the long term. They are expensive. There are plenty of planes from the 80s (and older) still in the sky. No doubt newer planes are more efficient.
A _very_ similar system was described in Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach. This book was published in 1975, and you can tell reading it. The idealism is cloying at times, but there are quite a lot of innovative and imaginative ideas in the novel.
It is a utopian look at a sustainable, healthier society. I just read it recently, and Callenbach describes printing paper that fades in a day or quicker for printing reuse.
It actually reminds me a lot of Raskin's ZoomWorld. "Pile-of-Crap" isn't so good, but having a zoom in interfance for storing data and applications is actually super intuitive and useful.
My mother gave me a copy maybe 10 years ago. It is a facinating look inside Apple, and I thought it was interesting to see how their product development worked. Also - their decisions about what NOT to do...
It is useful to see some of this within the larger copyright context of John Cage and Mike Batt's copyright dispute over Cage's piece, 4' 33". Cage's estate won that case - or rather, recieved a large settlement out of it.
Re:Nuclear decay == Remains of a supernova
on
Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
Hmm - you have a point about the radioactive elements in the Earth. However, I still think that largely it is out of our reach.
Think about what would be involved in producing just the food we need. Most nations would not have the technical capacity to grow anything to eat, even if the US could.
Well, there are shivers down my spine now...imagine if the US chose who got food and who didn't. Who lived and who died.
That would be decay releasing energy our planet originally got from the sun. It is not a renewable resource.
Your estimate of the Earth's energy potential is interesting, but think of the energy required to actually filter the material you speak of from the earth.
My concern is that I don't think we're quite ready to grow the corn alone we need using nonrenewable resources.
The sun is the source of all of our energy. Every energy cycle on Earth is ultimately perpetuated by the light we get from the sun. 10% is a huge difference. I wouldn't just be concerned about less crop growth, I would be concerned about what exactly that means.
Everything living thing on earth depends on the heat of the Earth, and depends on consuming energy from the sun itself, or from comsuming something that consumes energy from the sun.
It's not like if dimming continues our kids will be in the dark; they'll die from lack of food first.
Right now I'm most concerned with what this will do to the current developing policy of searching for renewable resources. We lose sunlight, there aren't any. Heck, then why bother. It's fossils and fusion time...
Well recycling is a nice idea, but not always a good one. Most of the time, people say "recycling" when then really mean "downcycling": reusing a material after it has gone through a process that drops its quality.
For instance, when you melt down plastic bottles, you are mixing different plastics together and introducing impurities into the "new" plastic. You now have crappy plastic. You often add some fresh material to the "recycled" material to make it usable. Overall the process is expensive, and often the chemicals used aren't terribly environmentally friendly, and you really don't know if the recycled plastic is healthy - will it off-gas into your food?
This is true for metal and paper recycling as well - any recycling where the material hasn't been designed to be cleanly extracted and recycled.
The best "recycling" is simple reuse. To not chuck the product, but to either refill or otherwise reuse the product.
It does appear we are in a worsening trend of products that are designed for short use. These are poor quality products with clever marketing. My crappy plastic containers become "single use!" and now I can sell a boatload of them.
Oh what a life I would lead, as a Spammer Bounty Hunter. Traveling across the world with a laptop in one hand and a gun in the other, I would track down those vermin, and bring them in.
I've been trying to put together a little (6-8") VGA LCD screen for plugging into headless machines for testing.
I have found that the actual LCD screen can be relatively inexpensive, while the controller is much more expensive.
Admittedly, I am looking at the low volume of the production spectrum, but I suspect that is part of the pricing issue. Your LCD controller is integrated into your laptop - you still need one for your VGA LCD screen, but it is implimented in the screen body.
Of course the system is far from perfect. Monopoly is one way that the system can break down; however, as you can see there are other options, they are just non-optimal (expensive and/or too big).
You do still have voting power with your dollars. I spend more money on many things in order to buy locally and avoid companies like Walmart.
Here in America, we are Capitalist. In Capitalism, you "vote" with your dollars. The idea being that you will reward those who make superior products with control of a market.
That's really the source of this Ask Slashdot - the asker does not want to vote for Bill Gates - and he has every right not to. That's how it works. When it works...
I was wondering that myself when I watched it...and lo and behold - a red shirt gets incinerated shortly after getting into the underground fortress. Well done.
Great little phone. I've used it in the US and all over europe.
It _isn't_ bells and whistle-less though. It has IR and Bluetooth - it will do WAP, act as a modem, POP mail for you and has crazy long battery life..j
the search engine world is overpopulated right now
This is just not true. Over the last year, more and more search engine companies are effectively consolidating - by licencing "search engine technology" from another company. The real down side of this is that the more popular (popular by the licencing...not by users) are a "pay" engine, whereby companies can move their listings higher in the rankings by paying a fee.
This has two main side effects.
One, there are a lot of search engines out there that are really the same search engine. Same query, same results.
Two, when you search with them, you're not really getting what you asked for, but what someone payed for.
I understand why companies are doing this - there isn't a really strong revenue model for search engines right now; banners don't cut it.
I suspect that soon, good search engines will just be a (hopefully) inexpensive pay site, where you pay $30 a year and can use that search engine.
Re:Here's a concept: mod the ads
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 1
Now this would be an interesting idea for a site. That is the sort of Value Added Service that I'd probably be interested in as well.
The EFF already provides a legal hotline for issues; someone with that kind of background would make an interesting columnist here.
This might not be perfect for slashdot, but could make a nice other slashsite. The advantage here would of course be readership. It would be very strange if there were another slash site as popular as slashdot...THAT is a test of the company writing OpenSource model.
I can think of one good reason off hand not to use slashdot as a lobby platform.
Even though slashdot does not generally report news itself but instead draws interest to certain articles, it does pose as a news service of a sort. We discuss the articles, exchanging opinions etc. If slash became a lobby platform, any objectivity that it may have had with respect to the writing here would go out the window. That is what a lobby is. A subjective opinion.
The power we have in numbers is tempting to us - many of us are the technicians and administrators that drive our technology. We control the information infrastructure.
We, more than anyone else, need to pay attention to the "other side" of tech arguments. Keeping this forum as impartial as possible is a good way of doing that.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but companies tend to buy planes for the long term. They are expensive.
There are plenty of planes from the 80s (and older) still in the sky. No doubt newer planes are more efficient.
A _very_ similar system was described in Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach. This book was published in 1975, and you can tell reading it. The idealism is cloying at times, but there are quite a lot of innovative and imaginative ideas in the novel.
It is a utopian look at a sustainable, healthier society. I just read it recently, and Callenbach describes printing paper that fades in a day or quicker for printing reuse.
It actually reminds me a lot of Raskin's ZoomWorld. "Pile-of-Crap" isn't so good, but having a zoom in interfance for storing data and applications is actually super intuitive and useful.
My mother gave me a copy maybe 10 years ago. It is a facinating look inside Apple, and I thought it was interesting to see how their product development worked. Also - their decisions about what NOT to do...
If you look, they spoke online for two years. That would be 15-17. Two years later after the rep tried to rendez-vous she'd be 19. .j
Cage's estate won that case - or rather, recieved a large settlement out of it.
This is a bit of a commentary on the ordeal.
Hmm - you have a point about the radioactive elements in the Earth. However, I still think that largely it is out of our reach.
Think about what would be involved in producing just the food we need. Most nations would not have the technical capacity to grow anything to eat, even if the US could.
Well, there are shivers down my spine now...imagine if the US chose who got food and who didn't. Who lived and who died.
That would be decay releasing energy our planet originally got from the sun. It is not a renewable resource.
Your estimate of the Earth's energy potential is interesting, but think of the energy required to actually filter the material you speak of from the earth.
My concern is that I don't think we're quite ready to grow the corn alone we need using nonrenewable resources.
The sun is the source of all of our energy. Every energy cycle on Earth is ultimately perpetuated by the light we get from the sun. 10% is a huge difference. I wouldn't just be concerned about less crop growth, I would be concerned about what exactly that means.
Everything living thing on earth depends on the heat of the Earth, and depends on consuming energy from the sun itself, or from comsuming something that consumes energy from the sun.
It's not like if dimming continues our kids will be in the dark; they'll die from lack of food first.
Right now I'm most concerned with what this will do to the current developing policy of searching for renewable resources. We lose sunlight, there aren't any. Heck, then why bother. It's fossils and fusion time...
Well recycling is a nice idea, but not always a good one. Most of the time, people say "recycling" when then really mean "downcycling": reusing a material after it has gone through a process that drops its quality.
For instance, when you melt down plastic bottles, you are mixing different plastics together and introducing impurities into the "new" plastic. You now have crappy plastic. You often add some fresh material to the "recycled" material to make it usable. Overall the process is expensive, and often the chemicals used aren't terribly environmentally friendly, and you really don't know if the recycled plastic is healthy - will it off-gas into your food?
This is true for metal and paper recycling as well - any recycling where the material hasn't been designed to be cleanly extracted and recycled.
The best "recycling" is simple reuse. To not chuck the product, but to either refill or otherwise reuse the product.
It does appear we are in a worsening trend of products that are designed for short use. These are poor quality products with clever marketing. My crappy plastic containers become "single use!" and now I can sell a boatload of them.
I won't be buying disposable DVDs any time soon.
And because it's XML-based, it means all this data will easily be searchable
*boggle* XML doesn't exactly lend itself to searchability.
I mean, there exists XML:DB, but it is FAR from optimal for searching. Certainly not "easily searchable."
Unless, of course, they are accustomed the the data being processed being unlabeled; then I guess some standard markup might be useful.
Oh what a life I would lead, as a Spammer Bounty Hunter. Traveling across the world with a laptop in one hand and a gun in the other, I would track down those vermin, and bring them in.
It would be a lonely life, but full of adventure.
[Cue Theme Music]
I've been trying to put together a little (6-8") VGA LCD screen for plugging into headless machines for testing.
I have found that the actual LCD screen can be relatively inexpensive, while the controller is much more expensive.
Admittedly, I am looking at the low volume of the production spectrum, but I suspect that is part of the pricing issue. Your LCD controller is integrated into your laptop - you still need one for your VGA LCD screen, but it is implimented in the screen body.
Hey - I've heard about something like this...it was called...
Oh, right...karma.
Of course the system is far from perfect.
Monopoly is one way that the system can break down; however, as you can see there are other options, they are just non-optimal (expensive and/or too big).
You do still have voting power with your dollars.
I spend more money on many things in order to buy locally and avoid companies like Walmart.
Well...yes you do.
Here in America, we are Capitalist.
In Capitalism, you "vote" with your dollars. The idea being that you will reward those who make superior products with control of a market.
That's really the source of this Ask Slashdot - the asker does not want to vote for Bill Gates - and he has every right not to. That's how it works. When it works...
I was wondering that myself when I watched it...and lo and behold - a red shirt gets incinerated shortly after getting into the underground fortress. Well done.
I own a t39.
.j
Great little phone. I've used it in the US and all over europe.
It _isn't_ bells and whistle-less though.
It has IR and Bluetooth - it will do WAP, act as a modem, POP mail for you and has crazy long battery life.
Here here.
Having a nice salary is nice, but your job is what you are spending your time on.
I'd take a somewhat lower salary for a job that I'd really enjoy doing and did not prevent me from living in a good way.
The way you live is what is important - hey, if the newest toy makes you happy, that's great. Maybe you should do some self examinating though.
I hope they're real careful when they bring back that water sample...who knows what's in it?
This really could be a good idea.
It is known that a good chunk of the technological advances on the internet have been driven by the porn industry.
Money is money - anyone have any info on ties between these verbal entertainment industries and the not so verbal (at this time) porn industry?
The public eye might blink a few times if there was some overlap...maybe disney is secretly behind some large scale porn farm.
This is just not true. Over the last year, more and more search engine companies are effectively consolidating - by licencing "search engine technology" from another company. The real down side of this is that the more popular (popular by the licencing...not by users) are a "pay" engine, whereby companies can move their listings higher in the rankings by paying a fee.
This has two main side effects.
One, there are a lot of search engines out there that are really the same search engine. Same query, same results.
Two, when you search with them, you're not really getting what you asked for, but what someone payed for.
I understand why companies are doing this - there isn't a really strong revenue model for search engines right now; banners don't cut it.
I suspect that soon, good search engines will just be a (hopefully) inexpensive pay site, where you pay $30 a year and can use that search engine.
I'd say your pun doesn't have a leg to stand on.
.j
Now this would be an interesting idea for a site. That is the sort of Value Added Service that I'd probably be interested in as well.
The EFF already provides a legal hotline for issues; someone with that kind of background would make an interesting columnist here.
This might not be perfect for slashdot, but could make a nice other slashsite. The advantage here would of course be readership. It would be very strange if there were another slash site as popular as slashdot...THAT is a test of the company writing OpenSource model.
Cut down on some IANALs, anyway...
Even though slashdot does not generally report news itself but instead draws interest to certain articles, it does pose as a news service of a sort. We discuss the articles, exchanging opinions etc. If slash became a lobby platform, any objectivity that it may have had with respect to the writing here would go out the window. That is what a lobby is. A subjective opinion.
The power we have in numbers is tempting to us - many of us are the technicians and administrators that drive our technology. We control the information infrastructure.
We, more than anyone else, need to pay attention to the "other side" of tech arguments. Keeping this forum as impartial as possible is a good way of doing that.
If you are American and looking to protect our use of encryption in America, you may wish to check out Americans for the Preservation of Information Security.