I've been wondering about the whole "OMG SUN MUST OPEN JAVA"-farce every fucking time it occurs on this shitfest.
And I by now wonder about what you have in your head, theres supposed to be brains in there, but I somehow suggest the shitfest you talk about is in your head instead.
The problem with JAVA is not avaibility of source (or lack thereof), and that has been true for the last 10 or so years. The problem is that that source is effectively useless. because you cannot distribute the resulting binaries AT ALL. This is a very serious problem for people building Linux distributions and the like (and before you go that that is only a few people, maybe get it into that thing you use for a brain that this concerns all their users as well)
This is not even talking about platforms to which it would be technically pretty easy to port JAVA, but for which there is no official SUN version whatsoever (OpenBSD for example, and yes, a j2ee environment on OpenBSD makes a lot of sense), in which case you basicly end up having to have each user of such a system compile java from source.
It's about time someone invents a device to punch people in the face via TCP/IP and this device is made obligatory by law.
Well, if commenting without a clue would be the standard for this, I'm absolutely sure you are either a massochist or don't want such a device.
The point is that Java's source is not available enough if one cannot even give a direct link to the download.
By that measure, articles from the NYT are not available enough either, you need to register with them as well.. same for many others. Let me just point out that you have a very weird idea of what 'available' means.
The consequence of the way in which the source is available (specifically the licence) is that you cannot share it with friends, mirror it, or otherwise distribute it without SUN's prior explicit permission.
That however has to do with freedom and all those other things you did not want to mention. Available however it is, and has been for years.
The idea is to indeed seperate laptops into their own network segment, firewalled from the rest.
Ideally you go a bit further then that.. any laptop comming onto the network will be isolated in a segment with only that laptop and an authentication server. Before being allowed to use any servives, the laptop has to be checked on mandatory protection software being active, and has to be authenticated. After this it will still be on its own seperate network, away from 'normal' workstations.
No it can not. No matter what you do, if someone wants your information badly enough and it is somehow worth the effort for them, they can get it. That is why absolute security doesn't really exist (yeah, you can argue it does exist, just is infinitely expensive, but that means that for all practical purposes it does not exist)
It is more easily attainable the simpler the security system, and the less security systems involved. As they grow more complex and interact with each other, unforeseen consequences are more likely to appear.
2 different problems. You are absolutely right with regards to complexity usually being a problem for making things secure, but that has nothing to do with absolute security not existing.
But I can see where you come from. It's "not possible" to build a perfectly secure system, so why even try, right? No wonder we have security failure.
No, you have no fucking clue where I am comming from.
You can make things secure enough that it is not feasable for people to break your security (not feasable means it would be too expensive/time consuming, not that it is impossible). Going beyond that is extremely expensive usually, and achieves extremely little in increased security.
Saying "oh, disabled people can just stick to Word" leaves the disabled community in practically the same situation as before, except that now there's a higher chance that they'll encounter machines with some word-processor other than MS Word installed on it.
That is all true and such.. but how exactly is ODF to blame for that? I'd suggest to talk to the people who write the software that uses ODF instead.
Not harmless, given the cost of ensuring that a compromised system is free of root kits, logic bombs, sniffers, key loggers, defacements, deletions, and subtle but interesting edits to documents(*). Add the cost of handling it to preserve evidence plus analyzing and tracing the attack. If these had been commercial instead of government systems you'd also need to add the cost of downtime.
It is indeed a lot more expensive then setting a real password for the administrator accounts, yeah..
What Garry did was inexcusable, but if you want to draw a conclusion, it should be that leaving your system wide open can turn out to be very expensive.
Honestly, I think they both do. Wal-Mart's got one coming because of this and a ton of other things (Like prominently posting decals on the doors saying "Service Animals Welcome" with the international Handicapped symbol on it- but then their people tell my wife and our housemate (who are both legitimately handicapped and have two smaller, but certified service dogs) that they can't have dogs in the store. "Is it a seeing eye dog? Are you blind?" Both questions are quite bogus to ask (and open you up to a Civil suit...) per the ADA- but we get this all the time in spite of the fact that the dogs have service animal vests on them.)
Being visually impaired myself, but far from blind, I run into similar things all the time with people and companies, mostly due to them not understanding. That said, where I live I basicly have 2 options. First of all, file a complaint, unlike in the USA, this would also be a criminal case (no discrimination article in our constitution is interpreted rather broadly in this kind of thing often), and look for media attention.
That said, due to it being more then just a civil case, it usually doesn't get beyond having to shortly point out why their action is against the law.
While I hate 'whining' about things or claiming privileges as consequence of a handicap, I also believe I shouldn't have to defend certain consequences of it all the time (in your case the service dogs, in my case more often things like anouncement displays and such simply not working for me).
At any rate, I agree that Wal-Mart seems wrong here, but I think that is more a symptom of the society you live in then anything else.
And the politicians have one coming for all the frickin' stupid laws they've been passing of late. Much of the stuff's made us look the laughing stock to the rest of the world- or worse, made many countries that wouldn't have hated us to hate us now.
Hmm. you know, I happen to be Dutch, but I have lived and worked in the USA. From my point of view politicians are indeed causing part of that 'hate', but not due to the local laws they implement, rather, due to their 'if you don't like what we do, well, screw you' attitude to the rest of the world (rather then hating all of the USA over it, I just think you ended up with a few very bad people in government and I despise those). With regards to local laws, those make me sad and angry for the simple reason that having lived there, I can quite appreciate the nice sides of American society, and I hate to see that being destroyed.
SATA raid on VIA chipsets has worked out of the box for ages, am using it here right now, works perfectly fine. I suppose you can't eexactly say what went wrong in your case?
Apparently, patent and trademark law has changed in the last 20 years to "Patent and Trademark EVERYTHING, Including the wheel. It will get accepted, and unless you fight it out in court, and LOSE, people should pay you money for using it." Frivility is a non-issue at this point.
It seems so..
I think walmart and the other guy need a good solid kick in the pants
Rather, I'd look at those who make law.. you know, those people you (assuming you are old enough) you get to vote on every now and then..
For what I know, tucows registar business has been taken over by register4less years ago. All those that still have it as a registar are old customers (and yes, I am one of them.. only for registration services tho.. I don't want others to run my dns.. so I wasn't bothered by the ddos on their nameservers either).. Can't cause them trouble and they can't cause me trouble, so seems like a good deal for both.
Many routers with some ip filtering capability can do lookups in the routing table from their acls, thereby reducing the load on the cpu, while maintaining the flexibility of a real filter. Many more advanced filters can also do more generic radix table lookups for inbound/outbound filtering, which makes them approx as expensive as cpu based routing decisions (asic based routing is of course cheaper.. but with cheap extremely fast cpus that often doesn't really matter all that much anymore)
Plus user processes could also drive these interfaces directly so user space programs could talk to hardware without needing to load in dangerous, untrusted kernel modules (esp. from closed-source hardware vendors).
The problem with this all is that when you provide enough hardware access to such programs to actually do something, they can also do most of that stuff that makes untrusted kernel modules potentially dangerous.
Unless of course you introduce all kinds of validation... (does that program really own the memory it wants the disk to dma data into?) which will also introduce noticable overhead....
(this is an old and well known problem, it is part of what causes poor performance with traditional miucrokernels)
Their best bet probably would have been to file patents like crazy and force every graphics card company on the planet to license their stuff, but they just weren't evil enough to go that route.
Ever heard about a company called nvidia? ever read some discussions about why their Linux drivers cannot be open sourced even if nvidia would want to?
I guess because it is another option? one few people know about so far, hence for most that makes it 'news'...
NAGIOS is OSS and is an extremely mature product with a community writing modules and plugins etc etc, to monitor any aspect you wanted of your Servers/Routers/Networks/room temperatures
No, I did read through that Wikipedia link in fact. It said NOTHING ELSE on the subject, than what you posted here.
Well, since it seems really difficult, that article is part of a series about rechargable battery, and everything stated is relative to 'other types' of batteries. (not specifically cadmium, also nimh, li-ion etc).
No, it's not nearly as simple as that. Lead Acid also has the distinction of dropping it's voltage as current is consumed, making it a poor choice in many applications (including starting your car, actually)
Yes, and when its abbility to sustain a specific current is given, it is always specified as 'while the cell keeps a specific potential, often 1.2 volts, which is quite some drop from the initial 2.1, sure)
If it was such a poor match for starting your engine, can you explain me why rather then nicads, a specific type of lead acid gel battery was developed for starting cars where to risk on spilling acid is a major issue? (safety risks on impact in certain sports cars etc), interestingly in a market segment that could easily afford nicad batteries for this?
it loses much more power in a no-load situation in much less time than NiCds,
Yes.. as stated already, they have many disadvantages.. just not their abbility to handle very big current output.
and it can supply far less current in low tempuratures than NiCds.
Ah, now we are getting specific. Yes, at low temperatures they do far worse..
Lead acid batteries also need a much smarter charger, because under or overcharging them will do permanant damage.
Overcharging them with too high a voltage will. trickle charging at just above current battery coltage won't.
And nicads are a lot worse in handling overcharging badly..
"High current output" is a COMPLETELY arbitrary designation. It's only meaningful if you provide some numbers, or refering to it in COMPARISON TO SOMETHING ELSE.
t is of course very difficult to figure out that it was a reply to your post (and relates to it) or, *gasp* to read the pages I pointed you at.
At any rate, lead acid does not better then cadmium based batteries for delivering a high current, but in any application where high currents are required and weight/volume is less important a consideration then cost, lead acid is by far the best choice. As soon as weight starts to play a sigfnificant role, it no longer is.
And yeah, that is all 'vague' terms. You are human and are supposed to be able to interpret those, if you can't deal with such terms, go study some fuzzy logic or something. Next time you go scream for numbers maybe substantiate your own argument first.
Lead-acid batteries, invented in 1859 by French physicist Gaston Planté, are a type of galvanic cell and are the most commonly used rechargeable batteries today. They also represent the oldest design with one of the lowest energy-to-weight ratios, commonly around 30 Wh/kg. Also, the energy-to-volume ratio is low compared to other types of batteries. The power-to-weight ratio can be quite high, however. They are relatively low-cost and can supply high surge currents needed in starter motors.
So hrm.. they do have quite some disadvantages, but being unable to handle high current output is not one of them, rather the opposite actually.
The main reason why they were used in portable devices however is the 2v/cell which made it easier to create a very compact device due to needing fewer cells to achieve a required potential, the second and still valid reason is their abbility to handle high currents.
Of course they are no longer in mainstream use, an equivalent volume nicad can store more then twice the amount of energy nowadays, and there are techniques that do quite a bit better then that still. However, you may still find them in (trans)portable light equipment for film/video/photo use for example.
Concerning the tax rate, do the following maths: 21% of indirect taxes (VAT) on any products that I need (with few exceptions) 33% of direct taxes on my revenues.
First of all, on many things you need you are supposed to be paying the 'low' VAT tarrif, currently 6% where I live.
Besides, lets take a closer look at your numbers..
from every 100 euro you get, you are left with 67 after direct tax. When spending those, you pay 21% VAT, which is a bit less then 14 euro. So in total you payed just below 47 euro in taxes, which is less then 50%, not more as you are trying to suggest.
the rest: car tax, green taxes, taxes on gas (more than 50% VAT excluded) , on my cigarettes (more than 80% VAT excl.)
Noone forces you to drive a car or to smoke. I don't do the first, I do happen to smoke, but that is my own choice. I don't 'need' it in any way.
, on my home, and so on.
high tax on your house is so far the best complaint you made.
Note that the Netherlands was about to put a racist party led by Pim Fortuyn (Murdered.) at the head of the government. Once you will remind that fact you will be allowed to lecturate your neighboors about their lack of "tolerance".
What if.. he never won any elections so that is pure speculation. Regardless, there are lots of people who are easily convinced by populist politicians, definitely also here in the Netherlands.
Concerning the "North Africans" having a better life in Europe than in Texas. You simply illustrate my point, you still consider them as foreigners even if it is the third generations. I don't blame you, I've got the same feeling.
they would have been considered as Americans over there after three generations, hardly the case in Europe (the Netherlands included obivously).
You are making a big assumption there about what I think. I generally regard everyone born here as Dutch. That leaves a whole lot of first generation imigrants still.
While you are right that in the USA a 3rd generation 'imigrant' would generally be considerd 'American', many people whoms ancestors came from African or the Southern Americas can tell you a thing or two about racism.
Another extremely annoying stuff in Europe is that no matter what the topic is, the USA are worst.
Not really. Some things are quite nice there also.
Why I thought NOT using throwaway NiCd was the whole point of this article, and yet you post encouraging us slashdotters to follow you?
Well, you thought wrong, and not only that, you seem to have no clue what you are talking about.
1. nicad batteries are rechargable, so your 'throwaway' comment is silly. 2. The purpose is to reduce, recycle and in some cases completely eliminate the use of some environmentally dangerous materials, including cadmium, which is obviously what made you make your nicad comment, but the post you are responding to nowhere mentions nicads. There exist perfectly usable nimh and even alkaine based rechargable AAA cells, so you can do what the grandparent suggests without using cadmium based batteries.
- Bureaucracy (various taxes from the city hall, the province, the region,the state and indirectly from the EU.).
As opposed to what? paying tax to the city hall, county, state and federation? the difference is in the tarrifs, not in whom you are paying. Also, realize that a lot of tax in the USA is 'hidden', ie, sales tax.
- Bureaucracy (Even if you plan to make a small modifications on your house's façade, even if it will be seen by you only, you have to ask the permission first. and Then wait for weeks to get an answer.
This is already not true where I live (Utrecht, the Netherlands) for as far as it concerns changes that are not visible for others (and that do not cause a substantial change to the construction). I am quite often in Belgium, and by just looking around at the complete disharmonic looks of the typical village and small town there, it is very clear that even if such rules as you suggest exist, you basicly always get approval for whatever change you want to make. The result is not pretty. For the record, the 2 main reasons for Dutch people to move to Belgium used to be tax and housing rules. The tax reason is gone, the housing rules are still a motivation since it is a lot easier to build/change your own house in Belgium.. and yet, most people here don't seem to have a problem with the even stricter rules.
Do you want to have a nice walk in a forest with your dog running freely around you ? You can't. The dog has to be kept on leash).
Depends on what forest you goto. There are many places where your dog can walk free. There are also places where people can walk and have their kids play without running into dog shit or having dogs disturb them all the time. Freedom comes with limits you know..
- More bureaucracy (With so many bureaucratic paper to fill in...You will forget at least one, be prepared to pay fines).
Yep, first somewhat sane argument you make.
- Taxes (I enjoy a 55% taxes rate on my revenues here in Belgium))
Then goto European court. Paying more then 50% of your total income on tax is considered a violation of human rights for a variety of reasons.
I am however sure that you only pay 55% tax over the top part of your income, and that on average it is quite a bit below 55%
- Jobs (more difficult to get a job more simple to live with state aids)
And where I live it is easier to start your own company then it is to liove on welfare.. maybe your issue is with your local (Belgium) government and their policies?
- Entrepeneurship (up to three months to launch a company due to point one two and three...You have to pass a test in front of a civil servant to proove that you are enough "smart" to manage a company). - Socialist governments considering anykind of private initiative as evil. They know better than you what is good for you.
For both, see above. Solution, vote in a better local government next time.
- Racism (you talk about diversity, but most Europeans support "white diversity only", racism/xenophoby is on the rise.).
Talk for yourself, but leave 'most Europeans' out of it. That Belgium and northern France happen to have a substantial number of people support right-wing nutcases is pretty well known, but not representative for the rest of Europe.
In a comparison, you look at which works better. With regards to that, life for say a north african in Belgium is still pretty free of racism when compared to life for a similar person in say Texas or Alabama.
I'm not saying that the problems you mention don't exist, but not at the level you are implying, and they are not very specific for Europe either.
WTF? First off, when did Lead-Acid batteries enter the discussion? You aren't going to have a portable drill with a Lead-Acid battery attached to it.
Not a portable drill maybe, but I have here an Aiwa walkman from the late 80s, which is powered by an Aiwa battery with type number PB-4. No idea if there is any info on this battery on the net, but it is a very tiny 1 cell lead acid battery (a sealed one tho)
So.. portable devices with lead acid batteries are not far fetched, and have in fact existed for a long time.
For which there has been a somewhat more expensive but much better solution from the start.. silver based button cells have a higher capacity and don't contain mercury (or at best an extremely small amount)
And getting rid of cadmium is a risky political move now that every device worth it's salt uses Lithium-Ion technology!
You might be surprised about how much ni-cad and nimh batteries are in use still.
li-ion has some nice advantages over those 2, but also has some very clear disadvantages:
- cannot deliver very high currents due to internal resistance - dangerous due to being a high pressure construction - capacity and lifespan depend a lot on temperature - deals extremely badly with 'deep cycle' discharge.
Those things make li-ion pretty much unusable for things like radio controlled (model) aircraft, electric cars (both rc model ones and 'real' ones), camera flash and any similar applications.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been wondering about the whole "OMG SUN MUST OPEN JAVA"-farce every fucking time it occurs on this shitfest.
And I by now wonder about what you have in your head, theres supposed to be brains in there, but I somehow suggest the shitfest you talk about is in your head instead.
The problem with JAVA is not avaibility of source (or lack thereof), and that has been true for the last 10 or so years. The problem is that that source is effectively useless. because you cannot distribute the resulting binaries AT ALL. This is a very serious problem for people building Linux distributions and the like (and before you go that that is only a few people, maybe get it into that thing you use for a brain that this concerns all their users as well)
This is not even talking about platforms to which it would be technically pretty easy to port JAVA, but for which there is no official SUN version whatsoever (OpenBSD for example, and yes, a j2ee environment on OpenBSD makes a lot of sense), in which case you basicly end up having to have each user of such a system compile java from source.
It's about time someone invents a device to punch people in the face via TCP/IP and this device is made obligatory by law.
Well, if commenting without a clue would be the standard for this, I'm absolutely sure you are either a massochist or don't want such a device.
The point is that Java's source is not available enough if one cannot even give a direct link to the download.
By that measure, articles from the NYT are not available enough either, you need to register with them as well.. same for many others. Let me just point out that you have a very weird idea of what 'available' means.
The consequence of the way in which the source is available (specifically the licence) is that you cannot share it with friends, mirror it, or otherwise distribute it without SUN's prior explicit permission.
That however has to do with freedom and all those other things you did not want to mention. Available however it is, and has been for years.
The idea is to indeed seperate laptops into their own network segment, firewalled from the rest.
Ideally you go a bit further then that.. any laptop comming onto the network will be isolated in a segment with only that laptop and an authentication server. Before being allowed to use any servives, the laptop has to be checked on mandatory protection software being active, and has to be authenticated. After this it will still be on its own seperate network, away from 'normal' workstations.
Yes, absolute security can exist.
No it can not. No matter what you do, if someone wants your information badly enough and it is somehow worth the effort for them, they can get it. That is why absolute security doesn't really exist (yeah, you can argue it does exist, just is infinitely expensive, but that means that for all practical purposes it does not exist)
It is more easily attainable the simpler the security system, and the less security systems involved. As they grow more complex and interact with each other, unforeseen consequences are more likely to appear.
2 different problems. You are absolutely right with regards to complexity usually being a problem for making things secure, but that has nothing to do with absolute security not existing.
But I can see where you come from. It's "not possible" to build a perfectly secure system, so why even try, right? No wonder we have security failure.
No, you have no fucking clue where I am comming from.
You can make things secure enough that it is not feasable for people to break your security (not feasable means it would be too expensive/time consuming, not that it is impossible). Going beyond that is extremely expensive usually, and achieves extremely little in increased security.
I don't think there's any such thing as "secure to a degree". You're either secure or you're not.
Ah.. absolute security exists you believe?
You disqualified yourself from having an in any way relevant opinion about information security if you really believe that.
A security team is responsible for keeping infrastructure as secure (and still usable) as possible.
Sure, educated users are an extremely important part of keeping the infrastructure as secure as possible however.
Saying "oh, disabled people can just stick to Word" leaves the disabled community in practically the same situation as before, except that now there's a higher chance that they'll encounter machines with some word-processor other than MS Word installed on it.
That is all true and such.. but how exactly is ODF to blame for that? I'd suggest to talk to the people who write the software that uses ODF instead.
Not harmless, given the cost of ensuring that a compromised system is free of root kits, logic bombs, sniffers, key loggers, defacements, deletions, and subtle but interesting edits to documents(*). Add the cost of handling it to preserve evidence plus analyzing and tracing the attack. If these had been commercial instead of government systems you'd also need to add the cost of downtime.
It is indeed a lot more expensive then setting a real password for the administrator accounts, yeah..
What Garry did was inexcusable, but if you want to draw a conclusion, it should be that leaving your system wide open can turn out to be very expensive.
Honestly, I think they both do. Wal-Mart's got one coming because of this and a ton of other things (Like prominently posting decals on the doors saying "Service Animals Welcome" with the international Handicapped symbol on it- but then their people tell my wife and our housemate (who are both legitimately handicapped and have two smaller, but certified service dogs) that they can't have dogs in the store. "Is it a seeing eye dog? Are you blind?" Both questions are quite bogus to ask (and open you up to a Civil suit...) per the ADA- but we get this all the time in spite of the fact that the dogs have service animal vests on them.)
Being visually impaired myself, but far from blind, I run into similar things all the time with people and companies, mostly due to them not understanding. That said, where I live I basicly have 2 options. First of all, file a complaint, unlike in the USA, this would also be a criminal case (no discrimination article in our constitution is interpreted rather broadly in this kind of thing often), and look for media attention.
That said, due to it being more then just a civil case, it usually doesn't get beyond having to shortly point out why their action is against the law.
While I hate 'whining' about things or claiming privileges as consequence of a handicap, I also believe I shouldn't have to defend certain consequences of it all the time (in your case the service dogs, in my case more often things like anouncement displays and such simply not working for me).
At any rate, I agree that Wal-Mart seems wrong here, but I think that is more a symptom of the society you live in then anything else.
And the politicians have one coming for all the frickin' stupid laws they've been passing of late. Much of the stuff's made us look the laughing stock to the rest of the world- or worse, made many countries that wouldn't have hated us to hate us now.
Hmm. you know, I happen to be Dutch, but I have lived and worked in the USA. From my point of view politicians are indeed causing part of that 'hate', but not due to the local laws they implement, rather, due to their 'if you don't like what we do, well, screw you' attitude to the rest of the world (rather then hating all of the USA over it, I just think you ended up with a few very bad people in government and I despise those). With regards to local laws, those make me sad and angry for the simple reason that having lived there, I can quite appreciate the nice sides of American society, and I hate to see that being destroyed.
SATA raid on VIA chipsets has worked out of the box for ages, am using it here right now, works perfectly fine. I suppose you can't eexactly say what went wrong in your case?
Apparently, patent and trademark law has changed in the last 20 years to
"Patent and Trademark EVERYTHING, Including the wheel. It will get accepted, and unless you fight it out in court, and LOSE, people should pay you money for using it."
Frivility is a non-issue at this point.
It seems so..
I think walmart and the other guy need a good solid kick in the pants
Rather, I'd look at those who make law.. you know, those people you (assuming you are old enough) you get to vote on every now and then..
For what I know, tucows registar business has been taken over by register4less years ago.
All those that still have it as a registar are old customers (and yes, I am one of them.. only for registration services tho.. I don't want others to run my dns.. so I wasn't bothered by the ddos on their nameservers either).. Can't cause them trouble and they can't cause me trouble, so seems like a good deal for both.
Many routers with some ip filtering capability can do lookups in the routing table from their acls, thereby reducing the load on the cpu, while maintaining the flexibility of a real filter. Many more advanced filters can also do more generic radix table lookups for inbound/outbound filtering, which makes them approx as expensive as cpu based routing decisions (asic based routing is of course cheaper.. but with cheap extremely fast cpus that often doesn't really matter all that much anymore)
Plus user processes could also drive these interfaces directly so user space programs could talk to hardware without needing to load in dangerous, untrusted kernel modules (esp. from closed-source hardware vendors).
The problem with this all is that when you provide enough hardware access to such programs to actually do something, they can also do most of that stuff that makes untrusted kernel modules potentially dangerous.
Unless of course you introduce all kinds of validation... (does that program really own the memory it wants the disk to dma data into?) which will also introduce noticable overhead....
(this is an old and well known problem, it is part of what causes poor performance with traditional miucrokernels)
Their best bet probably would have been to file patents like crazy and force every graphics card company on the planet to license their stuff, but they just weren't evil enough to go that route.
Ever heard about a company called nvidia? ever read some discussions about why their Linux drivers cannot be open sourced even if nvidia would want to?
Im not sure i follow why this is newsworthy.
I guess because it is another option? one few people know about so far, hence for most that makes it 'news'...
NAGIOS is OSS and is an extremely mature product with a community writing modules and plugins etc etc, to monitor any aspect you wanted of your Servers/Routers/Networks/room temperatures
Same for Zabbix...
i mean anything. Why would anyone bother?
1. because people want to do things differently, there isn't a single best solution for many problems.
2. because having a monoculture is bad. Choice is only possible when there is more then one option.
And some more reasons..
No, I did read through that Wikipedia link in fact. It said NOTHING ELSE on the subject, than what you posted here.
Well, since it seems really difficult, that article is part of a series about rechargable battery, and everything stated is relative to 'other types' of batteries. (not specifically cadmium, also nimh, li-ion etc).
No, it's not nearly as simple as that. Lead Acid also has the distinction of dropping it's voltage as current is consumed, making it a poor choice in many applications (including starting your car, actually)
Yes, and when its abbility to sustain a specific current is given, it is always specified as 'while the cell keeps a specific potential, often 1.2 volts, which is quite some drop from the initial 2.1, sure)
If it was such a poor match for starting your engine, can you explain me why rather then nicads, a specific type of lead acid gel battery was developed for starting cars where to risk on spilling acid is a major issue? (safety risks on impact in certain sports cars etc), interestingly in a market segment that could easily afford nicad batteries for this?
it loses much more power in a no-load situation in much less time than NiCds,
Yes.. as stated already, they have many disadvantages.. just not their abbility to handle very big current output.
and it can supply far less current in low tempuratures than NiCds.
Ah, now we are getting specific. Yes, at low temperatures they do far worse..
Lead acid batteries also need a much smarter charger, because under or overcharging them will do permanant damage.
Overcharging them with too high a voltage will. trickle charging at just above current battery coltage won't.
And nicads are a lot worse in handling overcharging badly..
"High current output" is a COMPLETELY arbitrary designation. It's only meaningful if you provide some numbers, or refering to it in COMPARISON TO SOMETHING ELSE.
t is of course very difficult to figure out that it was a reply to your post (and relates to it) or, *gasp* to read the pages I pointed you at.
At any rate, lead acid does not better then cadmium based batteries for delivering a high current, but in any application where high currents are required and weight/volume is less important a consideration then cost, lead acid is by far the best choice. As soon as weight starts to play a sigfnificant role, it no longer is.
And yeah, that is all 'vague' terms. You are human and are supposed to be able to interpret those, if you can't deal with such terms, go study some fuzzy logic or something. Next time you go scream for numbers maybe substantiate your own argument first.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-acid_battery
So hrm.. they do have quite some disadvantages, but being unable to handle high current output is not one of them, rather the opposite actually.
The main reason why they were used in portable devices however is the 2v/cell which made it easier to create a very compact device due to needing fewer cells to achieve a required potential, the second and still valid reason is their abbility to handle high currents.
Of course they are no longer in mainstream use, an equivalent volume nicad can store more then twice the amount of energy nowadays, and there are techniques that do quite a bit better then that still. However, you may still find them in (trans)portable light equipment for film/video/photo use for example.
Concerning the tax rate, do the following maths:
21% of indirect taxes (VAT) on any products that I need (with few exceptions)
33% of direct taxes on my revenues.
First of all, on many things you need you are supposed to be paying the 'low' VAT tarrif, currently 6% where I live.
Besides, lets take a closer look at your numbers..
from every 100 euro you get, you are left with 67 after direct tax. When spending those, you pay 21% VAT, which is a bit less then 14 euro. So in total you payed just below 47 euro in taxes, which is less then 50%, not more as you are trying to suggest.
the rest: car tax, green taxes, taxes on gas (more than 50% VAT excluded) , on my cigarettes (more than 80% VAT excl.)
Noone forces you to drive a car or to smoke. I don't do the first, I do happen to smoke, but that is my own choice. I don't 'need' it in any way.
, on my home, and so on.
high tax on your house is so far the best complaint you made.
Note that the Netherlands was about to put a racist party led by Pim Fortuyn (Murdered.) at the head of the government. Once you will remind that fact you will be allowed to lecturate your neighboors about their lack of "tolerance".
What if.. he never won any elections so that is pure speculation. Regardless, there are lots of people who are easily convinced by populist politicians, definitely also here in the Netherlands.
Concerning the "North Africans" having a better life in Europe than in Texas. You simply illustrate my point, you still consider them as foreigners even if it is the third generations. I don't blame you, I've got the same feeling.
they would have been considered as Americans over there after three generations, hardly the case in Europe (the Netherlands included obivously).
You are making a big assumption there about what I think. I generally regard everyone born here as Dutch. That leaves a whole lot of first generation imigrants still.
While you are right that in the USA a 3rd generation 'imigrant' would generally be considerd 'American', many people whoms ancestors came from African or the Southern Americas can tell you a thing or two about racism.
Another extremely annoying stuff in Europe is that no matter what the topic is, the USA are worst.
Not really. Some things are quite nice there also.
Why I thought NOT using throwaway NiCd was the whole point of this article, and yet you post encouraging us slashdotters to follow you?
Well, you thought wrong, and not only that, you seem to have no clue what you are talking about.
1. nicad batteries are rechargable, so your 'throwaway' comment is silly.
2. The purpose is to reduce, recycle and in some cases completely eliminate the use of some environmentally dangerous materials, including cadmium, which is obviously what made you make your nicad comment, but the post you are responding to nowhere mentions nicads. There exist perfectly usable nimh and even alkaine based rechargable AAA cells, so you can do what the grandparent suggests without using cadmium based batteries.
Hmm, lets see...
- Bureaucracy (various taxes from the city hall, the province, the region,the state and indirectly from the EU.).
As opposed to what? paying tax to the city hall, county, state and federation? the difference is in the tarrifs, not in whom you are paying.
Also, realize that a lot of tax in the USA is 'hidden', ie, sales tax.
- Bureaucracy (Even if you plan to make a small modifications on your house's façade, even if it will be seen by you only, you have to ask the permission first. and Then wait for weeks to get an answer.
This is already not true where I live (Utrecht, the Netherlands) for as far as it concerns changes that are not visible for others (and that do not cause a substantial change to the construction). I am quite often in Belgium, and by just looking around at the complete disharmonic looks of the typical village and small town there, it is very clear that even if such rules as you suggest exist, you basicly always get approval for whatever change you want to make. The result is not pretty. For the record, the 2 main reasons for Dutch people to move to Belgium used to be tax and housing rules. The tax reason is gone, the housing rules are still a motivation since it is a lot easier to build/change your own house in Belgium.. and yet, most people here don't seem to have a problem with the even stricter rules.
Do you want to have a nice walk in a forest with your dog running freely around you ? You can't. The dog has to be kept on leash).
Depends on what forest you goto. There are many places where your dog can walk free. There are also places where people can walk and have their kids play without running into dog shit or having dogs disturb them all the time. Freedom comes with limits you know..
- More bureaucracy (With so many bureaucratic paper to fill in...You will forget at least one, be prepared to pay fines).
Yep, first somewhat sane argument you make.
- Taxes (I enjoy a 55% taxes rate on my revenues here in Belgium))
Then goto European court. Paying more then 50% of your total income on tax is considered a violation of human rights for a variety of reasons.
I am however sure that you only pay 55% tax over the top part of your income, and that on average it is quite a bit below 55%
- Jobs (more difficult to get a job more simple to live with state aids)
And where I live it is easier to start your own company then it is to liove on welfare.. maybe your issue is with your local (Belgium) government and their policies?
- Entrepeneurship (up to three months to launch a company due to point one two and three...You have to pass a test in front of a civil servant to proove that you are enough "smart" to manage a company).
- Socialist governments considering anykind of private initiative as evil. They know better than you what is good for you.
For both, see above. Solution, vote in a better local government next time.
- Racism (you talk about diversity, but most Europeans support "white diversity only", racism/xenophoby is on the rise.).
Talk for yourself, but leave 'most Europeans' out of it.
That Belgium and northern France happen to have a substantial number of people support right-wing nutcases is pretty well known, but not representative for the rest of Europe.
In a comparison, you look at which works better. With regards to that, life for say a north african in Belgium is still pretty free of racism when compared to life for a similar person in say Texas or Alabama.
I'm not saying that the problems you mention don't exist, but not at the level you are implying, and they are not very specific for Europe either.
Most of your post is quite true, however:
WTF? First off, when did Lead-Acid batteries enter the discussion? You aren't going to have a portable drill with a Lead-Acid battery attached to it.
Not a portable drill maybe, but I have here an Aiwa walkman from the late 80s, which is powered by an Aiwa battery with type number PB-4. No idea if there is any info on this battery on the net, but it is a very tiny 1 cell lead acid battery (a sealed one tho)
So.. portable devices with lead acid batteries are not far fetched, and have in fact existed for a long time.
Mercury batteries are still widespread in watches
For which there has been a somewhat more expensive but much better solution from the start.. silver based button cells have a higher capacity and don't contain mercury (or at best an extremely small amount)
And getting rid of cadmium is a risky political move now that every device worth it's salt uses Lithium-Ion technology!
You might be surprised about how much ni-cad and nimh batteries are in use still.
li-ion has some nice advantages over those 2, but also has some very clear disadvantages:
- cannot deliver very high currents due to internal resistance
- dangerous due to being a high pressure construction
- capacity and lifespan depend a lot on temperature
- deals extremely badly with 'deep cycle' discharge.
Those things make li-ion pretty much unusable for things like radio controlled (model) aircraft, electric cars (both rc model ones and 'real' ones), camera flash and any similar applications.