They don't even care about that - because Phelps and his gang aren't True Believers who want other people to agree with them, they're sociopaths and professional trolls who want attention, and negative attention is the best kind because it might give them another lawsuit. The best case they can get is a town trying to ban them, but if they can't get that, then having somebody punch them when there's a cop around means they can sue the guy who did it and also sue the cops for not protecting them would work.
Free speech is the core of Fred Phelps's Troll business. Governments aren't allowed to harass him, and he can sue them if they do. If individuals harass him to an extent that's illegal, he can sue them, or sue the governments that failed to protect him. If individuals harass him in ways that aren't quite enough for a lawsuit, that's still good for publicity as long as the press spells his name correctly or close enough. You can't shut them up, because what they believe in isn't a set of religious beliefs they could doubt, it's that publicity is profitable, and shouting them down is publicity.
The way to get rid of him is for everybody to stop paying attention and the press to stop publishing his activities. The press is unlikely to do that, because he's offensive and makes good trashy news, and if he's not getting enough press, he'll find more ways to be more offensive and trashy. There needs to be a thorough enough and long enough boycott for him to stop making money, but it's not like he's got anything else to do for fun.
The real question is whether his daughter will continue with the trade after he dies. He's 80, and could live another decade or two.
Fred's got entirely no interest in being martyred for his cause, because his cause is "people paying attention to Fred Phelps" and "suing people who harass him". It's not the kind of cause you can be a martyr for - he's just a fake who wants attention, and is very good at getting it. If one of his followers got killed, he might be okay with that, because he could get a *big* lawsuit out of it.
That 60 years isn't a physical lifetime, it's a payback period - so your ROI is really really low. (Ignoring inflation, changes in energy costs, etc., it's like 1.6%... not competitive at all.)
Most articles talking about power generation are talking about electrical power, so I'd guess that.
Is this thing really cost-effective? If it's mostly a proof of concept it doesn't have to be, of course. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation:
5MW * 10 Hours/day = 50 MWH/day = 50000 kWH/day (assumes you don't get peak power all day.)
50,000 kWH/day @ 10c/kwh = $5000/day (US power prices seem to start around 10 cents per kWH, though they're higher at prime times.)
$5000/day * 300 days/year = $1.5M/year
Euro 60M is about 50 years payback at that rate. Or 25 years if it's 20c/kWH.
So it's shiny and renewable (assuming the plant lasts a long time and doesn't break down into rusty mirrors encrusted with stray salt leaks in a year or two), and not *way* out of line compared to other power sources like coal plants, but it's not aggressively cheap either.
The article isn't specific about *what* salts they're using, but says "molten salts solidify at around 425 degrees F" - NaCl's melting point is about 800 C. One of the articles they reference refers to another project that uses a mixture of sodium and potassium nitrates.
Yeah, everybody's either whining or whinging about their slow bandwidth, or bragging about their fast bandwidth. The important question is what are you *doing* with the bandwidth? Anything cool or interesting? Watching TV doesn't count, unless you've dumped your cable TV provider, and even then it's still just couch potato content.
The companies that are trying to get the US government into a bandwidth-subsidy race so we can get the biggest numbers don't really have much to offer us except basic web access, television and price/performance comparisons with each other. What are you *doing* with that bandwidth? Anything interesting? P2P file sharing was cool five years ago, we've done that now, what's the next useful or fun thing to do with the bandwidth? Facebook doesn't need a lot of bandwidth even if you're playing Farmville, YouTube seems to do just fine at 1.5-3 Mbps, email's almost still ok on dialup. Skype video recommends 512/256 or better.
Old people in Korea can apparently use internet video to see what their grocery stores have to offer, and they're a nation of gaming addicts. What can *you* do with bandwidth?
One study I saw on the Internet said that if you count GB/month instead of Gb/sec, the US is way high up the list; South Korea's first with about 25, France is #2, US is 14.x, Europe 9.x. Canada's probably more than the US (since North America's average was slightly higher than US:-) That would imply we're actually using our bandwidth for more things than most of Europe, or at least watching our Youtube at higher resolution or pirating more movies.
Minnesota has about half the population of Sweden (5.2m), about half the land area (217736 square km), it's full of Swedish people, has lots of lakes, and it's bloody cold in the winter. Bandwidth there is lower, and the summary data listed above says it's not one of the top 10 US states for bandwidth.
On the other hand, at least one similar study showing total GB/month is about 14.x for North America, vs. 9.x for Europe, with the top countries being South Korea and France with more usage than the US, rest of Europe with less, and Sweden's not in the top 5 European countries so you can't tell. (It's a hopelessly bad presentation. The average usage for North America is slightly higher than that for the US, which implies Canada is much higher, assuming they're averaging by population and not by number of countries or whatever.:-)
It's been a long time since I've looked at BitTorrent innards, and longer since I looked at Napster (:-), but I thought it was pretty standard for most P2P applications to check the round-trip time between peers, and prefer fast-responding peers when there's a choice. It's not going to get the copy from Kansas if it's faster to get it from Amsterdam or down the block.
Unfortunately, many ISPs are pretty dumb about that - they like to have a CDN server on their network, saving them inbound data traffic, but they complain about P2P being evil, even though it's really just letting their own users act as CDN servers for each other.
Compared to how long it takes to make a video and do whatever editing you're going to with it, actually uploading the video to YouTube doesn't take that long. Maybe if you've still got 128kbps upstream it takes a few minutes, but as dotwaffle says, you don't actually care because you're off in another window looking at something more interesting.
Most P2P programs I've seen over the years use ping times as a model of topology. They're crude, but not too bad, and as a greedy user what you want is fast response times and high throughput, which usually go together along with short geographical distances.
Typical homes are running some kinds of servers, at least part of the time. Maybe they're running Skype or other VOIP system, or a video conferencing program, or Bittorrent, or simply a chat program that has a listener, or they're running a multi-player game system. They're either running some kind of UPnP thing to get it past their firewall, or their running some ugly tunneling hack, unless they're the small percentage of users who actually went to the trouble of setting up their firewall to do something specific.
When I run P2P uploads, which is not very often, I use a BitTorrent client that lets me limit my upload speed so I don't swamp the upload, so it doesn't stomp on the ACKS from anything I'm downloading. Most of those are really only smart enough to do that on one computer, and it would be easier if everything supported and used IP Diffserve bits, and maybe they're better by now; I think the last time I was doing that there was an option to limit it to N kbps upstream, which was crude but good enough.
And it certainly makes more sense for me to use the terabytes of disk I have at home to serve photographs that only one or two of my relatives are going to bother looking at ("here's Cousin Fred at the cabin with Aunt Mary") rather than uploading it all to some server and parking there for ever, in addition to submitting to their intellectual property licenses for use of the stuff.
"Under God" was primarily pushed by the Knights of Columbus, who were Catholics and likely to be Democrats, though the D.A.R. and other right-wingers also liked it.
Look at Wikipedia or Google the Treasury's blurb on "In God We Trust" - it's been on coins since the mid-1800s, some paper money since the 1930s, and the only change in the 1950s was making it mandatory on all US paper money and coins. More importantly, the coins used to be silver and the bills promised to give you silver in return - so if they weren't hypocritically putting "In God We Trust" on it, they'd have had to put "Trust Us"...
I run Firefox with Adblock and NoScript, but there are enough sites where I've enabled Javascript that occasionally Firefox will still freak out and try to run away burning all the CPU. In the past, this was really annoying, as my computer would become a total dog and it would be hard to get FF killed off. Now that I have a dual-core CPU, Firefox still freaks out occasionally, and burns 100% of one core, but Windows is still capable of navigating, and I can decide whether to kill FF or wait for it to stop whatever it's doing, which it sometimes does.
The name reminds me of Jollibee, a Filipino fast-food chain that has fried chicken and random weird stuff. (There's one next to Moscone Center in San Francisco.)
Actually there are lots of places with restrictions on how many unrelated consenting adults can live together. It's mostly college towns and beach towns, trying to keep away rowdy young people, but sometimes it's just anti-slum zoning. That obviously doesn't apply to people living in separate apartments, but some places limit those as well.
I wasn't sure if your use of the word "truffles" was referring to mushrooms, or to chocolate candies (with ground-up dried mushrooms in them) - sounds like the former. Here in the US they're usually sold either as dried mushrooms, or in chocolate (because there are other people who don't like mushroom flavors either.) I like most kinds of mushrooms, so the dried ones don't bother me, but I've never had access to fresh psilocybin mushrooms; maybe they taste worse.
Chickens are actually way late in the evolutionary process - they seem to be from about 7-10,000 years ago, evolving or being crossbred from various kinds of jungle fowl. Hard eggs were way earlier than that.
C: A chicken egg is an egg identical to the kinds of eggs laid by chickens - but it still could have been laid by a jungle fowl. (Egg wins.) D: A "Chicken" and an "Egg" are categories because humans named them, and humans have been around longer then chickens (which probably evolved from human-domesticated jungle fowl about 7-10,000 years ago), but bird eggs have been around and interesting to humans a lot longer, so we probably named the egg category before we named the chicken category. "Hey, Fred, your birds look a bit different than the jungle fowl the rest of us have - what do you call them?"
If you draw a line in the sand, some chicken will want to get to the other side.
The proto-chickens are mostly Red Jungle Fowl, which can still interbreed with modern chickens. But it wasn't necessarily a mutation thing, or natural selection - chickens are recent enough that there's a good chance it was human-guided crossbreeding.
The paper's abstract is actually about how the proteins work that let hard eggshells form.
The mothers of the first chickens were probably Red Jungle Fowl or related birds, and they're not significantly more dinosaur-like.
And there's no reason to assume natural selection based evolution here - it's more likely to have been human-guided crossbreeding between partially domesticated birds of several related species.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't even care about that - because Phelps and his gang aren't True Believers who want other people to agree with them, they're sociopaths and professional trolls who want attention, and negative attention is the best kind because it might give them another lawsuit. The best case they can get is a town trying to ban them, but if they can't get that, then having somebody punch them when there's a cop around means they can sue the guy who did it and also sue the cops for not protecting them would work.
Free speech is the core of Fred Phelps's Troll business. Governments aren't allowed to harass him, and he can sue them if they do. If individuals harass him to an extent that's illegal, he can sue them, or sue the governments that failed to protect him. If individuals harass him in ways that aren't quite enough for a lawsuit, that's still good for publicity as long as the press spells his name correctly or close enough. You can't shut them up, because what they believe in isn't a set of religious beliefs they could doubt, it's that publicity is profitable, and shouting them down is publicity.
The way to get rid of him is for everybody to stop paying attention and the press to stop publishing his activities. The press is unlikely to do that, because he's offensive and makes good trashy news, and if he's not getting enough press, he'll find more ways to be more offensive and trashy. There needs to be a thorough enough and long enough boycott for him to stop making money, but it's not like he's got anything else to do for fun.
The real question is whether his daughter will continue with the trade after he dies. He's 80, and could live another decade or two.
Fred's got entirely no interest in being martyred for his cause, because his cause is "people paying attention to Fred Phelps" and "suing people who harass him". It's not the kind of cause you can be a martyr for - he's just a fake who wants attention, and is very good at getting it. If one of his followers got killed, he might be okay with that, because he could get a *big* lawsuit out of it.
That 60 years isn't a physical lifetime, it's a payback period - so your ROI is really really low. (Ignoring inflation, changes in energy costs, etc., it's like 1.6%... not competitive at all.)
Most articles talking about power generation are talking about electrical power, so I'd guess that.
Is this thing really cost-effective? If it's mostly a proof of concept it doesn't have to be, of course. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation:
So it's shiny and renewable (assuming the plant lasts a long time and doesn't break down into rusty mirrors encrusted with stray salt leaks in a year or two), and not *way* out of line compared to other power sources like coal plants, but it's not aggressively cheap either.
The article isn't specific about *what* salts they're using, but says "molten salts solidify at around 425 degrees F" - NaCl's melting point is about 800 C.
One of the articles they reference refers to another project that uses a mixture of sodium and potassium nitrates.
Yeah, everybody's either whining or whinging about their slow bandwidth, or bragging about their fast bandwidth. The important question is what are you *doing* with the bandwidth? Anything cool or interesting? Watching TV doesn't count, unless you've dumped your cable TV provider, and even then it's still just couch potato content.
The companies that are trying to get the US government into a bandwidth-subsidy race so we can get the biggest numbers don't really have much to offer us except basic web access, television and price/performance comparisons with each other. What are you *doing* with that bandwidth? Anything interesting? P2P file sharing was cool five years ago, we've done that now, what's the next useful or fun thing to do with the bandwidth? Facebook doesn't need a lot of bandwidth even if you're playing Farmville, YouTube seems to do just fine at 1.5-3 Mbps, email's almost still ok on dialup. Skype video recommends 512/256 or better.
Old people in Korea can apparently use internet video to see what their grocery stores have to offer, and they're a nation of gaming addicts. What can *you* do with bandwidth?
One study I saw on the Internet said that if you count GB/month instead of Gb/sec, the US is way high up the list; South Korea's first with about 25, France is #2, US is 14.x, Europe 9.x. Canada's probably more than the US (since North America's average was slightly higher than US :-) That would imply we're actually using our bandwidth for more things than most of Europe, or at least watching our Youtube at higher resolution or pirating more movies.
Minnesota has about half the population of Sweden (5.2m), about half the land area (217736 square km), it's full of Swedish people, has lots of lakes, and it's bloody cold in the winter. Bandwidth there is lower, and the summary data listed above says it's not one of the top 10 US states for bandwidth.
On the other hand, at least one similar study showing total GB/month is about 14.x for North America, vs. 9.x for Europe, with the top countries being South Korea and France with more usage than the US, rest of Europe with less, and Sweden's not in the top 5 European countries so you can't tell. (It's a hopelessly bad presentation. The average usage for North America is slightly higher than that for the US, which implies Canada is much higher, assuming they're averaging by population and not by number of countries or whatever. :-)
You don't like 3/5 as a fraction? My fourth grade teachers would be disappointed in you.
It's been a long time since I've looked at BitTorrent innards, and longer since I looked at Napster (:-), but I thought it was pretty standard for most P2P applications to check the round-trip time between peers, and prefer fast-responding peers when there's a choice. It's not going to get the copy from Kansas if it's faster to get it from Amsterdam or down the block.
Unfortunately, many ISPs are pretty dumb about that - they like to have a CDN server on their network, saving them inbound data traffic, but they complain about P2P being evil, even though it's really just letting their own users act as CDN servers for each other.
Compared to how long it takes to make a video and do whatever editing you're going to with it, actually uploading the video to YouTube doesn't take that long. Maybe if you've still got 128kbps upstream it takes a few minutes, but as dotwaffle says, you don't actually care because you're off in another window looking at something more interesting.
Most P2P programs I've seen over the years use ping times as a model of topology. They're crude, but not too bad, and as a greedy user what you want is fast response times and high throughput, which usually go together along with short geographical distances.
Typical homes are running some kinds of servers, at least part of the time. Maybe they're running Skype or other VOIP system, or a video conferencing program, or Bittorrent, or simply a chat program that has a listener, or they're running a multi-player game system. They're either running some kind of UPnP thing to get it past their firewall, or their running some ugly tunneling hack, unless they're the small percentage of users who actually went to the trouble of setting up their firewall to do something specific.
When I run P2P uploads, which is not very often, I use a BitTorrent client that lets me limit my upload speed so I don't swamp the upload, so it doesn't stomp on the ACKS from anything I'm downloading. Most of those are really only smart enough to do that on one computer, and it would be easier if everything supported and used IP Diffserve bits, and maybe they're better by now; I think the last time I was doing that there was an option to limit it to N kbps upstream, which was crude but good enough.
And it certainly makes more sense for me to use the terabytes of disk I have at home to serve photographs that only one or two of my relatives are going to bother looking at ("here's Cousin Fred at the cabin with Aunt Mary") rather than uploading it all to some server and parking there for ever, in addition to submitting to their intellectual property licenses for use of the stuff.
... and it also wiped out any dinosaurs that were there...
"Under God" was primarily pushed by the Knights of Columbus, who were Catholics and likely to be Democrats, though the D.A.R. and other right-wingers also liked it.
Look at Wikipedia or Google the Treasury's blurb on "In God We Trust" - it's been on coins since the mid-1800s, some paper money since the 1930s, and the only change in the 1950s was making it mandatory on all US paper money and coins. More importantly, the coins used to be silver and the bills promised to give you silver in return - so if they weren't hypocritically putting "In God We Trust" on it, they'd have had to put "Trust Us"...
I run Firefox with Adblock and NoScript, but there are enough sites where I've enabled Javascript that occasionally Firefox will still freak out and try to run away burning all the CPU. In the past, this was really annoying, as my computer would become a total dog and it would be hard to get FF killed off.
Now that I have a dual-core CPU, Firefox still freaks out occasionally, and burns 100% of one core, but Windows is still capable of navigating, and I can decide whether to kill FF or wait for it to stop whatever it's doing, which it sometimes does.
And as far as we know, nobody in the NSA figured it out independently either.
The name reminds me of Jollibee, a Filipino fast-food chain that has fried chicken and random weird stuff. (There's one next to Moscone Center in San Francisco.)
Actually there are lots of places with restrictions on how many unrelated consenting adults can live together. It's mostly college towns and beach towns, trying to keep away rowdy young people, but sometimes it's just anti-slum zoning. That obviously doesn't apply to people living in separate apartments, but some places limit those as well.
I wasn't sure if your use of the word "truffles" was referring to mushrooms, or to chocolate candies (with ground-up dried mushrooms in them) - sounds like the former. Here in the US they're usually sold either as dried mushrooms, or in chocolate (because there are other people who don't like mushroom flavors either.) I like most kinds of mushrooms, so the dried ones don't bother me, but I've never had access to fresh psilocybin mushrooms; maybe they taste worse.
Chickens are actually way late in the evolutionary process - they seem to be from about 7-10,000 years ago, evolving or being crossbred from various kinds of jungle fowl. Hard eggs were way earlier than that.
The chicken could have also come from crossbreeding chicken-like birds, not necessarily from mutations. "Egg" still came first, though.
C: A chicken egg is an egg identical to the kinds of eggs laid by chickens - but it still could have been laid by a jungle fowl. (Egg wins.)
D: A "Chicken" and an "Egg" are categories because humans named them, and humans have been around longer then chickens (which probably evolved from human-domesticated jungle fowl about 7-10,000 years ago), but bird eggs have been around and interesting to humans a lot longer, so we probably named the egg category before we named the chicken category. "Hey, Fred, your birds look a bit different than the jungle fowl the rest of us have - what do you call them?"
If you draw a line in the sand, some chicken will want to get to the other side.
The proto-chickens are mostly Red Jungle Fowl, which can still interbreed with modern chickens. But it wasn't necessarily a mutation thing, or natural selection - chickens are recent enough that there's a good chance it was human-guided crossbreeding.
The paper's abstract is actually about how the proteins work that let hard eggshells form.
The mothers of the first chickens were probably Red Jungle Fowl or related birds, and they're not significantly more dinosaur-like.
And there's no reason to assume natural selection based evolution here - it's more likely to have been human-guided crossbreeding between partially domesticated birds of several related species.