" I'm sure the vast majority of iPod users have fewer than 10,000 songs. Me? About 550. That's all I want. I have no use for another 9,500 songs. My collection grows slowly but surely, but it will take decades to reach the thousands at this rate. "
I'm 47, and have about 2700 songs, going back to my first LP, Dreamboat Annie, bought in 1977. So, if I make it to 80, I might hit 5000 combined songs and pieces of classical music.
So, 10,000 tunes is definitely on the high end of the range.
If we want to scale up, we also have the USS Lexington (and the Saratoga?) from WWII, with 180,000 HP Turbo-electric drives.
Also several auxiliary ships too, because reduction gear sets were dear during the war, and because if you weren't in a hurry you could flip a switch and effectively double the poles in the motors, and get a much more efficient drive system.
More recently, the Glenard Lipscomb SSN-685 was turbo electric, and so was the little Tulibee from the late 1950's (Hull # unknown). The notion here was mostly to be quieter.
"With 10.4 coming out, it's not clear if Apple will want to EOL 10.2, even though there's apparently a substantial userbase still on it."
I'm still using 10.2.8, for instance. Support for the 10.1 series did just sort of stop, but every machine that could run 10.1 could also run 10.2. However, not every machine that could run 10.2 could also run 10.3. Support for the Beige G3's was dropped when 10.3 came out. (Probably some laptops were in this boat as well, but I don't pay attention to them.)
I suspect that the upgrades to 10.2 will be dropped when the last of those G3 machines hit 7 years old (the time set by California law for support). How long 10.3 is supported will depend on what old machines 10.4 will fail to support.
I suspect 10.4 will require AGP graphics, which will drop out the Blue & White G3s (and again some laptops.) It could even require 4X AGP, which would kill off the first G4 machines as well. Just have to wait and see, I guess.
"Don't we all look forward to the day when we can turn off the lights, not by primitive methods like getting up, but simply clicking upon our computers? "
My X-10 radio remote has been doing that for over 10 years, and it wasn't a new gadget when I bought it. This will need to be better than a light switch/dimmer to be considered an improvement. There will be uses for it, but think beyond the lights.
"Okay, let me get this straight. You're touting what you were taught in your 9th grade Earth Science class and a Popular Science cover story as evidence of broad-based consensus among actual working scientists?"
Yes! Exactly! That WAS the "broad-based consensus among actual working scientists" at that time! And then read this March's Scientific American. William Ruddiman has an interesting article basically saying the next ice age should be forming up in NE Canada as we speak. And it isn't happening.
So what is going on? Did humans start to alter the climate by taking up rice farming several thousand years ago? Is it just the fossil fuels from the last two hundred years? Is it the last gasp of warmth before the glaciers start south again (Look for a temperature chart for the previous interglacial 100 to 120 thousand years ago. There was a notable spike up, and then it crashed big time.) Does anyone KNOW what is going on? No. It's all guess work and extrapolation on all sides. That's what makes it so much fun. (And I mean that literally. To me there is nothing as much fun as having a big "We don't know" type problem dropped in my lap. R&D time! Woo-hoo! This is probably why I ended up with the doctorate, which was certainly not my plan when I started college at the ripe old age of 27.)
What I do know is: 1) Computer models which are not based on first principles are unreliable as predictors of future behavior regardless of how well they can be trained to fit past data. (The unintended result of my dissertation.) 2) The growing season in central Wisconsin is two weeks longer than it was in the 1950's. 3) Greenland is still colder now than it was when the Norseman tried to settle it a thousand years ago. If current trends continue, this will no longer be true in 50 years. 4) Contrary to previous belief, the climate can swing very fast. (Look up "Younger Dryas", and the "8200 year event". The only mechanism that seems fast enough to explain that fast a temperature swing is a shift in ocean currents, so they aren't stable either.
There are a few more bits and pieces, but you get the drift. As an aside, I grew up on a moraine in Wisconsin. I've had a long interest in climate dating from then. I used to live in Winnemucca, NV just above the former shoreline of Lake Lahonatan. I went to college at the U of Idaho in Moscow, on the Palouse, which is an area of silt dunes (loess) deposited in the last ice age. And now I live in Soap Lake, WA, on the outwash plain from the Lake Missoula floods. The Dry Falls visitor center (about the glacial history of the area) is a half hour north of here up the Grand Coulee.
Another factor in my low level of concern is I have never been under the delusion the weather or climate is stable. (Long Island to Chicago, all under a mile of ice only 25,000 years ago. Cool, man!) And the last 2 million years on this planet have been exceptionally cold by long term (geological type) standards. Just a few months ago they pulled fossils of subtropical animals out of the ground at an English construction site. The Eocene period was vastly warmer then the doomsters predictions for 2100.
As I said, I'm enjoying this immensely. (Do I buy a retirement home in Winnemucca, Greenland, or stay put?)
"Every Reputable Scientist on the Planet" believed in Global Cooling in the 70s and early 80s.
"There's a word for this argument. It's on the tip of my tongue... wait a minute, I'm thinking... hold on..."
"Oh yeah! It's called a "lie." "
Sorry bunkie, I was there at the time (graduated from high school in 1976). In Earth Science class, (9th grade) we were taught that the glaciers were coming back any time now. The winters of '72 through '75 were vicious. Popular Science had a cover with a picture of the Sears Tower half buried in a glacier. Just as many "prestigous scientists" were floating plans for carbon back or black plastic disks to be dropped on the glaciers to hold them back as you see touting carbon sequestration today.
What was missing were the computer models. New toys are great, but they only are as good as the data going in, and the algorithm. My Ph.D. dissertation ended up being on the fallability of computer models, (neural nets specifically.)
The one data point in global warming I do trust is my recently retired uncle, who hase been farming for all of his 70+ years. He says the growing season (in central Wisconsin) is about two week longer than it was. The change from a 95 day growing season to 110 days made a big difference in what he could plant.
I also think it likely we are pushing a natural cycle faster than it would normally be going. The rate of change may cause more trouble than the actual destination.
See Scientific American, March 2005 issue for an interesting article. In fact, See the Nov 2004 issue for a discussion of rapid climate change in the past. We survived it then, we'll survive it this time too.
There is a source a future revenue that can be used to fund the calling in of the bonds. The Federal Government owns about 87% of Nevada, 67% of Alaska, 49% of California, 39% of Colorado, 68% of Utah, and 50% of Wyoming. Leave out the National Parks and wilderness areas, and that is still a lot of cold hard real estate.
Interestingly, the Federal share of New York State is only 0.4%, which is interesting when you look at the voting records of it's Senators and Representatives. They prefer the benefits of public land should only be enjoyed by others? Or do they want cheap Western vacations while keeping the jobs (on privately owned land) for themselves?
Regardless of politics, the data above is found on http://www.nwi.org/Maps/LandChart.html.
" I see no coupling of economic and political systems."
But communism works according to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
So what authority decides what my ability is, and what me need is? Why, the all knowing, all powerful State. All knowing because they say so, and have the guns to enforce it, and all powerful because they are the only ones with guns.
Re:Internal conflict is what I worry about...
on
In the Year 2020
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"Eh, with the Dollar doing as shitty as it has been" "And with the dollar so weak"
Why all the worry about the weak dollar. The damned thing has been too high for a decade. It nearly bankrupted the company I work for. (And the high dollar did bankrupt Argentina.) Now it's down, and the price of the 15% of our inputs we import is up slightly, and the price of the 90% of our production we export is up a lot. Times are good. We are even buying new equipment (from US suppliers!)
And since the Chinese have tied their currency to ours, our prices are staying down, with the notable exception of oil, which nearly everyone on Slashdot and Europe says we should use less of anyway.
If the buck drops far enough, then maybe people in the USA will stop playing accounting games and start building real hardware again. More factories means more employment, more property taxes, and more money for schools.
All in all, we should be outside chanting "Death to the Dollar!" Except it's 14 F (-10 C) outside and dropping fast (clear sky tonight), so I'm staying in, thank you:-) Where is that global warming when you need it? Waiting for next summer when it will be 104 (40 C). What idiot named this the temperate climate zone? But now I'm off-topic, so I'll leave now;
This is one of his better ideas. Consider both options.
If it works; then Mac marketshare grows, and developers pay more attention to the platform, selling more machines of all types, and a positive feedback cycle gets going.
If it fails; Apple has a clear signal that the Mac's time is drawing to a close, and consumer-friendly appliances are the future, along with some high-end stuff like SGI still does (but with POWER chips instead of Itanics.)
Looks like I just found the solution to the half-dead cassette deck in my truck. Drive motors (or belts) are acting up, but a cassette adapter works fine. Attach a shuffle, punch play, and I'm done. I don't want to play with a screen or user interface on the road anyway.
When I'm tired of that bunch of tunes, I'll just reload the widget anyway.
" the first time in years that violent crime numbers have NOT shown a consistent reduction, but are actually near levelling and showing an upward trend.."
Apparently not. On Yahoo news not 10 minutes ago was an article about violent crime going down suddenly, admittedly after a few years of increases. Crime up in recession, down as things pick up. No great new news here.
"Only 27 % if Americans (over 25) have earned college degree in 2002. Is that higher then the past years? Sure. But damn it, we are the richest Country in the word, but more then 2/3 of the people only have (at best) a high school education? That's fucking ridiculous."
Electricians don't need a college education, and a union electrician makes $26 an hour out here. With overtime, they make more in a year than I do with a Ph.D. Plumbers and carpenters, and masons all make good money. College is not necessary for a good living. More education or training or apprenticeship after high-school is needed. Sending everyone to college is pointless.
I started college at age 27 after 8 years in the Navy. There were a lot of lost teenage souls on campus who had no idea why they were there. (And this was a land grant school, not a liberal arts joint.) And they did badly, and I suspect many of them are either working outside their majors, or depressed about the job they hate, but are now stuck with. Stay out of college until you know what you want from it. It's too expensive in time and money to screw up.
(P.S. For those who don't know, a land grant university typically has a charter ordering it to pursue subjects of practical use for the original settlement of the area. Thus they focus on agriculture, engineering, teacher education, and hard sciences. Four to six classes of "liberal arts" is all that's required, and at least two of them are English, which you need anyway to write the reports in the other majors. The point is that land grant schools are very goal oriented, and attract practical, goal-oriented people, not the dreamy-eyed mystic types, or the "anguished wailer" class.)
Having grown up on a farm, I have been licked by more than one big wet tongue attached to a bull. They actually tend to be pretty mellow, provided (and this is the important part) none of the the cows are in heat. Then they get down right belligerant. The only thing that makes it tricky is since the bull has a vested interest, he is the first one to notice a cow in heat, so you can end up needing to jump over the fence with little warning.
Sadly, (especially for the bull) artificial insemination has basically put him out of work.
Yeah, I really want to use a reactor that uses *Liquid Sodium* as coolant (that fact alone made them incredibly hard beasts to work with - it reaks havoc on the pumps).
I hate to break this to you, but liquid sodium is less corrosive than water. In fact, almost everything is. Water just chews hell out of everything eventually. The problem with sodium-cooling is that eventually you have to boil water to make steam, and those thin tubes could spring a leak (corroding from the water side), and then the sodium and water mix, and then you will be wondering just how the Martian's Explosive Space Modulator got there.
As for pumps, liquid sodium is a conductor, so take a piece of stainless pipe, put a big magnet on the outside, and electrodes through the wall 90 degrees from the magnets, and add current. The sodium will go one way or the other. If it's the wrong way, change polarity. No moving parts needed.
From the top down; I do mean hunting rifles. Assault weapons are illegal and have been since 1933. The so-called assault weapons are semi-auto (pull trigger for every single shot.) The "assault weapons ban" banned semi-automatics based on cosmetics. (It looks military, it must be military.) Personally, I am partial to Ruger M-77s, but some people like the stamped metal and plastic look.
We agree on airbags, so-so idea poorly done, bad outcome. Agreement is possible, an encouraging sign.
The mining rules apply on Federal AND Private land. The EPA doesn't care. And on the subject of private land, when the government owns 60-80% of the land, and will not sell, your ability to have an economy at all, much less grow it, is pretty constrained. Fortunately, I expect that as the Social Security problems really start to hit, someone will decide to sell much of it off to fund the retirement checks. Then maybe we'll stop building houses on the good farmland that was homesteaded in the 1900s, and build them on the rockpiles that aren't good for anything else. But now, farmland is all you can buy, because Sam won't sell the rockpiles.
As for logging, in Washington State, the Government, powered by the environmentalist base in Seattle, now effectively controls all land within 300 feet of water. You have to get permission to cut a tree in that band around a stream, or face prosecution. You still get to pay taxes on it though. But we wouldn't want to a vacationing Seattleite to see a stump now, would we?
I used to live in the Columbia Gorge. The Columbia Gorge Commission is an unelected body based in Portland that was granted, by Federal Law, power to control all scenic aspects of the Gorge from about Maryhill to just outside of Portland, about 120 miles of river. If you live in their zone of control, you have to get permission to paint your house. And they have been known to say no.
As for the patronizing, just after the election a comment from some Kerry supporter was "All they do out there is pray, go to Walmart, and pray some more." That sounds pretty patronizing to me. And it has been bugging me for a few days. Do you NorthEast urbanites really have that little noton of what is happening out here, or even in Ohio?
I have another fine example of intruding big city ethics where they don't fit. Seattle decided that it was better to let coyotes eat livestock than to use traps to kill the coyotes. Their sensibilites are more important than our livelihoods you see. (I'm speaking collectively here, my job is at a chemical plant.) But, the law also banned mole and gopher traps. And the moles are a major problem on the West Side. So they started tearing up the suburban lawns, and "threatening property values". That was the actual phrase they used when they tried to repeal just the mole trap part of the ban. That didn't fly in the legislature, so the governor decided he wouldn't enforce the law on the West Side. We are supposed to still follow it though.
The environmentalists also want to rip out four hydro dams on the Snake River so the fish can be free. Besides the 3,000 MW of power lost, it would end barge shipping to Lewiston, the main way grain from the Palouse and Camas Prairie areas get to market. And the irrigation would pretty much stop too, so there is another bunch of farmers probably going broke.
Judging from the bad temper on your part, I must have hit close to heart. A long involved list of how people whose idea of nature is limited to the Disney view are having adverse effects on the countryside is not going to fit in a slashdot reply. And when our own Senator Patty Murray (who is from Seattle) is on record saying we rural dwellers should give up jobs at $14-$20 an hour and take jobs in Eco-tourism (minimum wage AND seasonal to boot), one gets to feeling a bit persecuted.
I don't try to boss people from New Jersey around, and wouldn't dream of telling you how to solve your bear problem. (I may giggle a bit, but I'm sure you'll figure it out in the end.) And I expect the same consideration from you.
Wyoming; deer hunting, elk hunting, duck hunting, antelope hunting, trout fishing, fishing in general, snomobiling, cross country skiing, down hill skiing, snow boarding, etc, etc.
You adapt to what is in the area you live. Personally, I spent about five years in Southern Ca, and I found the beaches the least interesting place. Anza Borrego park was much more interesting, as was Cuyamaca State park. And the apples in Julian were a major surprise.
There is more to do than time to do it whereever you are, if you are paying attention.
On the main thread, I live out here in Soap Lake Washington, and find rural life entirely acceptable. And the people are, in general, very well informed and far from stupid.
And as for politics, feel free to send a copy of this paragraph to the Urban Democrat of your choice. The reason we vote Republican is because the Democrats refuse to leave us alone. Leave our guns alone. Let us buy trucks without airbags (I really don't need my head blown out the back window because I dropped the front end into a plow furrow by accident.) Stop destroying our jobs because you want cheaper vacations. (I'm thinking of Slick Willie and his war on mining, logging and ranching.) Stop patronizing us as "flyover country" (would you refer to the Jewish neighborhood as hymie town, or the black neighborhood as n***** town?) And above all, don't call us a bunch of uneducated bible-thumpers. I personally have a doctorate in metallurgical engineering to go with my cranky disposition. There are at least a dozen bachelors degrees and two masters in various engineering professions at work. And I have no idea what the accounting people might have. And our religion does not enter the job except as a sense of general ethics and politeness. So, Democrats, stop whining, come back out to farm country where you used to be strong, find out what you did wrong, and fix it.
And don't forget Travelgate, The FBI files on the departing Republican administration, the $100,000 in 6 weeks sweetheart deal on cattle futures, and the looting of Whitehouse china on her departure.
The consensus out here is that she was the main source of corruption, Slick was too busy dick-wagging to have time to steal anything. And of course doing everything possible to throw tens of thousands of miners, loggers, and ranchers out of business, and into the "booming ecotourism industry". Why the Democrats stabbed their old base in the back to lock the environmentalists they already had voting for them is a mystery I still haven't cracked.
The above is true for a batch still. For a continuous still, where feedwater enters and brine exits all the time, this is not true. Any volatiles that enter with the feed will go to the product.
Most stills over a couple liters per hour do run in continuous mode.
British North Sea oil production at or past it's peak (partly hidden by recession, and partly by the Norwegian production still going up.)
Much proven bogus intellegence going through British agencies.
A Labor (Labour?) MP, (the party of peace at any price) beating the war drums;
Post invasion, the Brits somehow end up in the Southern (oil rich) zone of Iraq.
A Brit involved with "sexed up" intel reports "commits suicide" while out on a walk.
This sounds amazing like the Lusitania all over again. (Either put munitions on a passenger ship coming back from a still neutral possible allie, or convince the enemy's spys that munitions are on board; pull the escort away, then wait for it to get sunk, and presto, a new large army for the front lines.)
(To be fair, I'm sure they expected the Lusitania to float long enough to get everyone off in the lifeboats. The second explosion, whether it was the 90 tons of "butter" (insurance claims were never collected) or a shook-up cloud of coal dust, was unexpected.)
"The big unsolved problems of nuclear power include - how do you mine fuel without killing people? If you think coal dust is bad to breathe, try breathing uranium ore dust sometime.
Solved problem, Its called solution mining and works well on roll front uranium deposits, which are quite common. See the book "Solution Mining" by Robert Bartlett, former Dean of the College of Mines and Earth Resources at the University of Idaho. (I took the graduate-level class from him.)
"Okay, now you have to enrich it."
Not necessarily. Google for CANDU reactors, no enrichment needed, but you do need heavy water.
"Now you've got spent fuel that you have to get rid of.
Where do you put it? "
Nevada, which may not be a great choice, but the only better one I've heard is loading it into a freefall torpedo and dropping it into the Aleutian trench in a high sedimentation zone, where it then gets buried in sediment, and subducted underground for a few million years.
"And what about the plant itself? Once a nuclear plant is
worn out, you have a giant heap of highly radioactive
stuff. "
entomb in place. The spent fuel is radiaoactive for 10,000 years, but the structual metals have half lives of what, 5.3 years for cobalt 60, is the one I used to worry about in the Navy after the first few days of a shutdown. 10 half lives it basically gone, so after 53 years the metal is ready for recycle. Wait 106 years if you are really paranoid.
Disclaimers; My Ph.D is from the U of I in metallurgical engineering, and I spent 8 years in Rickover's Nuclear Navy, (getting the money to go to college) and I used to work in the mining industry until the unholy trio of Clinton, Gore, and Babbit wiped out the entire career field. Now I work making silicon for solar cells, at least until some idiot Greens manage to rip out the dams that supply our electrical power, which will force the company to move overseas to a country that values people more than fish.
Slashdot Mirror
" I'm sure the vast majority of iPod users have fewer than 10,000 songs. Me? About 550. That's all I want. I have no use for another 9,500 songs. My collection grows slowly but surely, but it will take decades to reach the thousands at this rate. "
I'm 47, and have about 2700 songs, going back to my first LP, Dreamboat Annie, bought in 1977. So, if I make it to 80, I might hit 5000 combined songs and pieces of classical music.
So, 10,000 tunes is definitely on the high end of the range.
If we want to scale up, we also have the USS Lexington (and the Saratoga?) from WWII, with 180,000 HP Turbo-electric drives. Also several auxiliary ships too, because reduction gear sets were dear during the war, and because if you weren't in a hurry you could flip a switch and effectively double the poles in the motors, and get a much more efficient drive system. More recently, the Glenard Lipscomb SSN-685 was turbo electric, and so was the little Tulibee from the late 1950's (Hull # unknown). The notion here was mostly to be quieter.
"If that thing asks me if I'd like some toast, I'm going to take an axe to it. "
What if it offers to make you a cup of Advanced Tea Substitute?
"With 10.4 coming out, it's not clear if Apple will want to EOL 10.2, even though there's apparently a substantial userbase still on it."
I'm still using 10.2.8, for instance. Support for the 10.1 series did just sort of stop, but every machine that could run 10.1 could also run 10.2. However, not every machine that could run 10.2 could also run 10.3. Support for the Beige G3's was dropped when 10.3 came out. (Probably some laptops were in this boat as well, but I don't pay attention to them.)
I suspect that the upgrades to 10.2 will be dropped when the last of those G3 machines hit 7 years old (the time set by California law for support). How long 10.3 is supported will depend on what old machines 10.4 will fail to support.
I suspect 10.4 will require AGP graphics, which will drop out the Blue & White G3s (and again some laptops.) It could even require 4X AGP, which would kill off the first G4 machines as well. Just have to wait and see, I guess.
"Don't we all look forward to the day when we can turn off the lights, not by primitive methods like getting up, but simply clicking upon our computers? "
My X-10 radio remote has been doing that for over 10 years, and it wasn't a new gadget when I bought it. This will need to be better than a light switch/dimmer to be considered an improvement. There will be uses for it, but think beyond the lights.
"Okay, let me get this straight. You're touting what you were taught in your 9th grade Earth Science class and a Popular Science cover story as evidence of broad-based consensus among actual working scientists?"
Yes! Exactly! That WAS the "broad-based consensus among actual working scientists" at that time! And then read this March's Scientific American. William Ruddiman has an interesting article basically saying the next ice age should be forming up in NE Canada as we speak. And it isn't happening.
So what is going on? Did humans start to alter the climate by taking up rice farming several thousand years ago? Is it just the fossil fuels from the last two hundred years? Is it the last gasp of warmth before the glaciers start south again (Look for a temperature chart for the previous interglacial 100 to 120 thousand years ago. There was a notable spike up, and then it crashed big time.) Does anyone KNOW what is going on? No. It's all guess work and extrapolation on all sides. That's what makes it so much fun. (And I mean that literally. To me there is nothing as much fun as having a big "We don't know" type problem dropped in my lap. R&D time! Woo-hoo! This is probably why I ended up with the doctorate, which was certainly not my plan when I started college at the ripe old age of 27.)
What I do know is: 1) Computer models which are not based on first principles are unreliable as predictors of future behavior regardless of how well they can be trained to fit past data. (The unintended result of my dissertation.)
2) The growing season in central Wisconsin is two weeks longer than it was in the 1950's.
3) Greenland is still colder now than it was when the Norseman tried to settle it a thousand years ago. If current trends continue, this will no longer be true in 50 years.
4) Contrary to previous belief, the climate can swing very fast. (Look up "Younger Dryas", and the "8200 year event". The only mechanism that seems fast enough to explain that fast a temperature swing is a shift in ocean currents, so they aren't stable either.
There are a few more bits and pieces, but you get the drift. As an aside, I grew up on a moraine in Wisconsin. I've had a long interest in climate dating from then. I used to live in Winnemucca, NV just above the former shoreline of Lake Lahonatan. I went to college at the U of Idaho in Moscow, on the Palouse, which is an area of silt dunes (loess) deposited in the last ice age. And now I live in Soap Lake, WA, on the outwash plain from the Lake Missoula floods. The Dry Falls visitor center (about the glacial history of the area) is a half hour north of here up the Grand Coulee.
Another factor in my low level of concern is I have never been under the delusion the weather or climate is stable. (Long Island to Chicago, all under a mile of ice only 25,000 years ago. Cool, man!) And the last 2 million years on this planet have been exceptionally cold by long term (geological type) standards. Just a few months ago they pulled fossils of subtropical animals out of the ground at an English construction site. The Eocene period was vastly warmer then the doomsters predictions for 2100.
As I said, I'm enjoying this immensely. (Do I buy a retirement home in Winnemucca, Greenland, or stay put?)
"Every Reputable Scientist on the Planet" believed in Global Cooling in the 70s and early 80s.
... wait a minute, I'm thinking ... hold on ..."
"There's a word for this argument. It's on the tip of my tongue
"Oh yeah! It's called a "lie." "
Sorry bunkie, I was there at the time (graduated from high school in 1976). In Earth Science class, (9th grade) we were taught that the glaciers were coming back any time now. The winters of '72 through '75 were vicious. Popular Science had a cover with a picture of the Sears Tower half buried in a glacier. Just as many "prestigous scientists" were floating plans for carbon back or black plastic disks to be dropped on the glaciers to hold them back as you see touting carbon sequestration today.
What was missing were the computer models. New toys are great, but they only are as good as the data going in, and the algorithm. My Ph.D. dissertation ended up being on the fallability of computer models, (neural nets specifically.)
The one data point in global warming I do trust is my recently retired uncle, who hase been farming for all of his 70+ years. He says the growing season (in central Wisconsin) is about two week longer than it was. The change from a 95 day growing season to 110 days made a big difference in what he could plant.
I also think it likely we are pushing a natural cycle faster than it would normally be going. The rate of change may cause more trouble than the actual destination.
See Scientific American, March 2005 issue for an interesting article. In fact, See the Nov 2004 issue for a discussion of rapid climate change in the past. We survived it then, we'll survive it this time too.
"Playback of HDTV on the other hand may take some juice, but should be easily handled by most modern processors including the mini."
So how much of HDTV decoding can one offload to the 32MB Radeon 9200 video card?
There is a source a future revenue that can be used to fund the calling in of the bonds. The Federal Government owns about 87% of Nevada, 67% of Alaska, 49% of California, 39% of Colorado, 68% of Utah, and 50% of Wyoming. Leave out the National Parks and wilderness areas, and that is still a lot of cold hard real estate.
Interestingly, the Federal share of New York State is only 0.4%, which is interesting when you look at the voting records of it's Senators and Representatives. They prefer the benefits of public land should only be enjoyed by others? Or do they want cheap Western vacations while keeping the jobs (on privately owned land) for themselves?
Regardless of politics, the data above is found on http://www.nwi.org/Maps/LandChart.html.
" I see no coupling of economic and political systems." But communism works according to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." So what authority decides what my ability is, and what me need is? Why, the all knowing, all powerful State. All knowing because they say so, and have the guns to enforce it, and all powerful because they are the only ones with guns.
"Eh, with the Dollar doing as shitty as it has been"
:-) Where is that global warming when you need it? Waiting for next summer when it will be 104 (40 C). What idiot named this the temperate climate zone? But now I'm off-topic, so I'll leave now;
"And with the dollar so weak"
Why all the worry about the weak dollar. The damned thing has been too high for a decade. It nearly bankrupted the company I work for. (And the high dollar did bankrupt Argentina.) Now it's down, and the price of the 15% of our inputs we import is up slightly, and the price of the 90% of our production we export is up a lot. Times are good. We are even buying new equipment (from US suppliers!)
And since the Chinese have tied their currency to ours, our prices are staying down, with the notable exception of oil, which nearly everyone on Slashdot and Europe says we should use less of anyway.
If the buck drops far enough, then maybe people in the USA will stop playing accounting games and start building real hardware again. More factories means more employment, more property taxes, and more money for schools.
All in all, we should be outside chanting "Death to the Dollar!" Except it's 14 F (-10 C) outside and dropping fast (clear sky tonight), so I'm staying in, thank you
This is one of his better ideas. Consider both options.
If it works; then Mac marketshare grows, and developers pay more attention to the platform, selling more machines of all types, and a positive feedback cycle gets going.
If it fails; Apple has a clear signal that the Mac's time is drawing to a close, and consumer-friendly appliances are the future, along with some high-end stuff like SGI still does (but with POWER chips instead of Itanics.)
Looks like I just found the solution to the half-dead cassette deck in my truck. Drive motors (or belts) are acting up, but a cassette adapter works fine. Attach a shuffle, punch play, and I'm done. I don't want to play with a screen or user interface on the road anyway.
When I'm tired of that bunch of tunes, I'll just reload the widget anyway.
" the first time in years that violent crime numbers have NOT shown a consistent reduction, but are actually near levelling and showing an upward trend.."
Apparently not. On Yahoo news not 10 minutes ago was an article about violent crime going down suddenly, admittedly after a few years of increases. Crime up in recession, down as things pick up. No great new news here.
"Only 27 % if Americans (over 25) have earned college degree in 2002. Is that higher then the past years? Sure. But damn it, we are the richest Country in the word, but more then 2/3 of the people only have (at best) a high school education? That's fucking ridiculous."
Electricians don't need a college education, and a union electrician makes $26 an hour out here. With overtime, they make more in a year than I do with a Ph.D. Plumbers and carpenters, and masons all make good money. College is not necessary for a good living. More education or training or apprenticeship after high-school is needed. Sending everyone to college is pointless.
I started college at age 27 after 8 years in the Navy. There were a lot of lost teenage souls on campus who had no idea why they were there. (And this was a land grant school, not a liberal arts joint.) And they did badly, and I suspect many of them are either working outside their majors, or depressed about the job they hate, but are now stuck with. Stay out of college until you know what you want from it. It's too expensive in time and money to screw up.
(P.S. For those who don't know, a land grant university typically has a charter ordering it to pursue subjects of practical use for the original settlement of the area. Thus they focus on agriculture, engineering, teacher education, and hard sciences. Four to six classes of "liberal arts" is all that's required, and at least two of them are English, which you need anyway to write the reports in the other majors. The point is that land grant schools are very goal oriented, and attract practical, goal-oriented people, not the dreamy-eyed mystic types, or the "anguished wailer" class.)
>Think vegetarians are pansies? Go kiss a bull.
Having grown up on a farm, I have been licked by more than one big wet tongue attached to a bull. They actually tend to be pretty mellow, provided (and this is the important part) none of the the cows are in heat. Then they get down right belligerant. The only thing that makes it tricky is since the bull has a vested interest, he is the first one to notice a cow in heat, so you can end up needing to jump over the fence with little warning.
Sadly, (especially for the bull) artificial insemination has basically put him out of work.
Yeah, I really want to use a reactor that uses *Liquid Sodium* as coolant (that fact alone made them incredibly hard beasts to work with - it reaks havoc on the pumps).
I hate to break this to you, but liquid sodium is less corrosive than water. In fact, almost everything is. Water just chews hell out of everything eventually. The problem with sodium-cooling is that eventually you have to boil water to make steam, and those thin tubes could spring a leak (corroding from the water side), and then the sodium and water mix, and then you will be wondering just how the Martian's Explosive Space Modulator got there.
As for pumps, liquid sodium is a conductor, so take a piece of stainless pipe, put a big magnet on the outside, and electrodes through the wall 90 degrees from the magnets, and add current. The sodium will go one way or the other. If it's the wrong way, change polarity. No moving parts needed.
They are much easier to eat if you shoot them first. Trust me on this.
From the top down;
I do mean hunting rifles. Assault weapons are illegal and have been since 1933. The so-called assault weapons are semi-auto (pull trigger for every single shot.) The "assault weapons ban" banned semi-automatics based on cosmetics. (It looks military, it must be military.) Personally, I am partial to Ruger M-77s, but some people like the stamped metal and plastic look.
We agree on airbags, so-so idea poorly done, bad outcome. Agreement is possible, an encouraging sign.
The mining rules apply on Federal AND Private land. The EPA doesn't care. And on the subject of private land, when the government owns 60-80% of the land, and will not sell, your ability to have an economy at all, much less grow it, is pretty constrained. Fortunately, I expect that as the Social Security problems really start to hit, someone will decide to sell much of it off to fund the retirement checks. Then maybe we'll stop building houses on the good farmland that was homesteaded in the 1900s, and build them on the rockpiles that aren't good for anything else. But now, farmland is all you can buy, because Sam won't sell the rockpiles.
As for logging, in Washington State, the Government, powered by the environmentalist base in Seattle, now effectively controls all land within 300 feet of water. You have to get permission to cut a tree in that band around a stream, or face prosecution. You still get to pay taxes on it though. But we wouldn't want to a vacationing Seattleite to see a stump now, would we?
I used to live in the Columbia Gorge. The Columbia Gorge Commission is an unelected body based in Portland that was granted, by Federal Law, power to control all scenic aspects of the Gorge from about Maryhill to just outside of Portland, about 120 miles of river. If you live in their zone of control, you have to get permission to paint your house. And they have been known to say no.
As for the patronizing, just after the election a comment from some Kerry supporter was "All they do out there is pray, go to Walmart, and pray some more." That sounds pretty patronizing to me. And it has been bugging me for a few days. Do you NorthEast urbanites really have that little noton of what is happening out here, or even in Ohio?
I have another fine example of intruding big city ethics where they don't fit. Seattle decided that it was better to let coyotes eat livestock than to use traps to kill the coyotes. Their sensibilites are more important than our livelihoods you see. (I'm speaking collectively here, my job is at a chemical plant.) But, the law also banned mole and gopher traps. And the moles are a major problem on the West Side. So they started tearing up the suburban lawns, and "threatening property values". That was the actual phrase they used when they tried to repeal just the mole trap part of the ban. That didn't fly in the legislature, so the governor decided he wouldn't enforce the law on the West Side. We are supposed to still follow it though.
The environmentalists also want to rip out four hydro dams on the Snake River so the fish can be free. Besides the 3,000 MW of power lost, it would end barge shipping to Lewiston, the main way grain from the Palouse and Camas Prairie areas get to market. And the irrigation would pretty much stop too, so there is another bunch of farmers probably going broke.
Judging from the bad temper on your part, I must have hit close to heart. A long involved list of how people whose idea of nature is limited to the Disney view are having adverse effects on the countryside is not going to fit in a slashdot reply. And when our own Senator Patty Murray (who is from Seattle) is on record saying we rural dwellers should give up jobs at $14-$20 an hour and take jobs in Eco-tourism (minimum wage AND seasonal to boot), one gets to feeling a bit persecuted.
I don't try to boss people from New Jersey around, and wouldn't dream of telling you how to solve your bear problem. (I may giggle a bit, but I'm sure you'll figure it out in the end.) And I expect the same consideration from you.
Wyoming; deer hunting, elk hunting, duck hunting, antelope hunting, trout fishing, fishing in general, snomobiling, cross country skiing, down hill skiing, snow boarding, etc, etc.
You adapt to what is in the area you live. Personally, I spent about five years in Southern Ca, and I found the beaches the least interesting place. Anza Borrego park was much more interesting, as was Cuyamaca State park. And the apples in Julian were a major surprise.
There is more to do than time to do it whereever you are, if you are paying attention.
On the main thread, I live out here in Soap Lake Washington, and find rural life entirely acceptable. And the people are, in general, very well informed and far from stupid.
And as for politics, feel free to send a copy of this paragraph to the Urban Democrat of your choice. The reason we vote Republican is because the Democrats refuse to leave us alone. Leave our guns alone. Let us buy trucks without airbags (I really don't need my head blown out the back window because I dropped the front end into a plow furrow by accident.) Stop destroying our jobs because you want cheaper vacations. (I'm thinking of Slick Willie and his war on mining, logging and ranching.) Stop patronizing us as "flyover country" (would you refer to the Jewish neighborhood as hymie town, or the black neighborhood as n***** town?) And above all, don't call us a bunch of uneducated bible-thumpers. I personally have a doctorate in metallurgical engineering to go with my cranky disposition. There are at least a dozen bachelors degrees and two masters in various engineering professions at work. And I have no idea what the accounting people might have. And our religion does not enter the job except as a sense of general ethics and politeness. So, Democrats, stop whining, come back out to farm country where you used to be strong, find out what you did wrong, and fix it.
And don't forget Travelgate, The FBI files on the departing Republican administration, the $100,000 in 6 weeks sweetheart deal on cattle futures, and the looting of Whitehouse china on her departure.
The consensus out here is that she was the main source of corruption, Slick was too busy dick-wagging to have time to steal anything. And of course doing everything possible to throw tens of thousands of miners, loggers, and ranchers out of business, and into the "booming ecotourism industry". Why the Democrats stabbed their old base in the back to lock the environmentalists they already had voting for them is a mystery I still haven't cracked.
Buck Rogers or Duck Dogers? Is there a difference, or is it all the same once the bureaucracy gets hold of it?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Most stills over a couple liters per hour do run in continuous mode.
Something that has been bothering me for awhile.
British North Sea oil production at or past it's peak (partly hidden by recession, and partly by the Norwegian production still going up.)
Much proven bogus intellegence going through British agencies.
A Labor (Labour?) MP, (the party of peace at any price) beating the war drums;
Post invasion, the Brits somehow end up in the Southern (oil rich) zone of Iraq.
A Brit involved with "sexed up" intel reports "commits suicide" while out on a walk.
This sounds amazing like the Lusitania all over again. (Either put munitions on a passenger ship coming back from a still neutral possible allie, or convince the enemy's spys that munitions are on board; pull the escort away, then wait for it to get sunk, and presto, a new large army for the front lines.)
(To be fair, I'm sure they expected the Lusitania to float long enough to get everyone off in the lifeboats. The second explosion, whether it was the 90 tons of "butter" (insurance claims were never collected) or a shook-up cloud of coal dust, was unexpected.)
Now who's at the door this time of night...
"The big unsolved problems of nuclear power include - how do you mine fuel without killing people? If you think coal dust is bad to breathe, try breathing uranium ore dust sometime.
Solved problem, Its called solution mining and works well on roll front uranium deposits, which are quite common. See the book "Solution Mining" by Robert Bartlett, former Dean of the College of Mines and Earth Resources at the University of Idaho. (I took the graduate-level class from him.)
"Okay, now you have to enrich it."
Not necessarily. Google for CANDU reactors, no enrichment needed, but you do need heavy water.
"Now you've got spent fuel that you have to get rid of. Where do you put it? "
Nevada, which may not be a great choice, but the only better one I've heard is loading it into a freefall torpedo and dropping it into the Aleutian trench in a high sedimentation zone, where it then gets buried in sediment, and subducted underground for a few million years.
"And what about the plant itself? Once a nuclear plant is worn out, you have a giant heap of highly radioactive stuff. "
entomb in place. The spent fuel is radiaoactive for 10,000 years, but the structual metals have half lives of what, 5.3 years for cobalt 60, is the one I used to worry about in the Navy after the first few days of a shutdown. 10 half lives it basically gone, so after 53 years the metal is ready for recycle. Wait 106 years if you are really paranoid.
Disclaimers; My Ph.D is from the U of I in metallurgical engineering, and I spent 8 years in Rickover's Nuclear Navy, (getting the money to go to college) and I used to work in the mining industry until the unholy trio of Clinton, Gore, and Babbit wiped out the entire career field. Now I work making silicon for solar cells, at least until some idiot Greens manage to rip out the dams that supply our electrical power, which will force the company to move overseas to a country that values people more than fish.