No, he is not full of shit... Simply because runas and sudo are two very different beasts. True, with runas you can do *some* administration and installs, but a lot of your efforts will bite the dust. At least, that is my experience. One example for you... Login to W2K as user, and start cmd as Administrator through runas. Now try to run any program from that cmd. Tough luck - none of what you run from there will work as if you are an administrator! Is it retarded or what? Now have you ever tried running IE or Explorer with runas? They won't run. But IE is needed to run Windows Update... So tough luck here. Unless you have automatic updates enabled, you WILL need to login as a real administrator to install updates. And, yes, this is a real problem for me in one of my installations: a computer that is running an LC-MSD instrument. I cannot turn on autoupdates since the machine will reboot at will, and people's experiments will get screwed up. It has to be up and logged on as a certain user at all times. So I choose the lesser evil - I update it manually. Since I do not always have a chance to do so (instrument is always in use and software startup takes 30 minutes once it has been shut down), I frequently end up 0wned and screeching my teeth. This machine was one of the 3 other similar ones on campus hit by Blaster (yes, I knew about the vulnerability, but due to totally retarded and bastardized implementations of runas and Winblows Update I could not patch in time).
ME TOO!:-)
Seriously, Softick Card Export is an excellent program, and I can't imagine using my Palm without it.
One limitation, though (at least if you are running Mac OS): once you export the card and then unmount it in Finder, USB Hotsync won't work until you do a soft reset.
I guess, this whole new politics Slashdot section quickly becomes just one big place to wage useless flame wars... Oh, well. I will definitely get flamed, too.
After reading a lot of posts on this (and similar) topics, what really did strike me is how many people from each side of the debate (both of the so-called "liberals" and "conservatives") are really narrow-minded. Even within better-than-average educated Slashdot crowd.
A lot of arguments from both sides seem to revolve around several cliche statements which actually have ABSOLUTELY NO REAL MEANING:
*Democrats will raise taxes and, by doing so, will kill economic growth
*Republicans are for small Federal government
*Both R and D parties are the same
*George Bush is a very bad man (because he is stupid, or did not show up for his guard service, or insert your favorite argument here)
*I am voting Kerry because I am "pro-choice", or I am voting Bush because I am "pro-life"
*Etc, etc
It seems like most of these statements largely come directly from the disgusting propaganda that is being broadcast by both parties through various mass media outlets. I might be wrong here since I do not have a TV, but that is the impression I have got after visiting Bush's, Kerry's, and Nader's web sites. I think that the high emotional charge that usually accompanies those statements also speaks in favor of the propaganda hypothesis - people don't just repeat some stupid mantra unless they have been brainwashed (at least, I don't want to beleive otherwise, since I am an optimist).
Why don't people just THINK when they choose their political candidate? If people were simply thinking, politicians would not have been getting a "bounce" after the convention, and things like 30-year-old National Guard record disclosures or "swift boat vet" ads would have had zero influence on the vote distribution.
Yet all this propaganda stuff seems to work rather well - just look at the poll dynamics!
Another sign of narrow mindedness is the tendency of people to start expert discussions on politically charged subjects while they have absolutely no idea about these subjects. Like renewable energy. Or pollution. Or stem cell research. Or even economics. In this latter case, there usually is a cohort of people who hate paying taxes and are using various buzzwords to argue Republicans are good; and another cohort, that argues they are bad since they spend tax dollars on Halliburton. Yet not that many people from either group have a detailed understanding of the impact any particular policy can make on their personal lives (except for direct change in federal income tax they are paying). And nobody EVER wants to RTFA. All those discussions between uninformed people are fun to read on linux.slashdot.org, but they quickly become scary as soon as their results start to influence the public policymaking.
I think that voting for any third party candidate, no matter how admirable he/she is, is useless, unless the population as a whole will start thinking. All the votes for a third-party candidate are currently guaranteed just to benefit one of the existing two big parties. As I remember, when De Tocqueville had been talking about the tyranny of the majority, he had been talking about an unfair political system similar to the one we currently observe.
For the record: I am not voting for Nader (not only for the reasons outlined above, but also because he discredited himself in my eyes by accepting help from the R party in some states).
I am voting for Kerry since he is clearly the lesser of two evils, and he can realistically win. My vote for Kerry means that I disapprove
the "winner takes all" mentality of the current administration
Bush's careless over-the-budget spending I will be forced to pay off through my entire natural life
budget cuts for such vital agencies as NSF and NIH, yet increased spending on military and intelligence bureau
...no other program so far (and yes, I mean OpenOffice.org, too) does not even come close in speed and usability to Microsoft Word. I am sorry to admit that, and I try to avoid using Microsoft stuff as much as possible, but so far I can't imagine my life without Word.
I am a scientist, not a professional hacker, and mainly use Word for writing (chemical) papers.
While Word indeed has some annoying features (Office Assistant and "personalized menus" in the Windows version, Autocorrect in both windows and Mac versions, "antipiracy" checking on Mac), they can easily be killed. Properly configured Word is reasonably fast (on both Mac and Windows), annoyance-free, and has all the features I want.
For example, install ChemDraw (a de-facto standard chemical graphics package), draw a structure, and paste it in OpenOffice and in Word. Then double click it. Word preserves the structure intact, and it can be post-edited in ChemDraw. Not so in OpenOffice! It converts the.cdx object to a useless picture, which makes me store and track more files!
In addition, such features as tables, multi-column text, and foot/end notes are implemented almost flawlessly in Word. Not so in OpenOffice. Just try to grab a.pdf of any paper from, say, pubs.acs.org , and try to duplicate the formatting in OpenOffice.org. Good luck! Trust me, I have tried it - and got terrible results. The only two programs that succeed for me are Word (in its various incarnations from 2000/Windows to 2004/Mac), and LyX.
My affair with OpenOffice.org has started and ended tragically twice, and I am not entering that boat again. The first time I tried installing it (under Red Hat 8) was around the times of version 1.02, if I am not mistaken. What was immediately evident to me is that the program was sluggish (on a P4 mobile 2.4GHz laptop with 512M RAM). The disaster stroke me on the third day of using it. That day I have been working on a long document and saved it in the native OpenOffice format before going home. And when I tried to open it later that night, it won't open! OpenOffice corrupted the document while saving it, and nothing could be done to restore the whole day of work (and the document was due next day!). What added insult to injury was that no error message has been displayed when saving the document. The program did not crash. It just killed my document.
The second time I have tried installing OpenOffice was on my girlfriend's Fedora Core 2 laptop about a month ago. This time, the gremlins stole the ability of OpenOffice to write good.pdf files. The.pdf save feature worked the first 3 times. After that, the.pdfs were still being produced, but they were containing only gibberish. I was amazed - mainly by the fact that this impressive feat of self-destructive programming has been achieved on registry-less Linux. Bravo!
Needless to say, since then I have bought Crossover from Codeweavers and have been using my trusty Office 2000 on all my Linux machines.
As for other alternatives, don't even get me started. I still remember with horror the first time I tried to compile Abiword (I think, 0.96 at the time). That was on my SGI Octane with Irix 6.5. Abiword would not compile with SGI's native cc - there was just too much gcc specific... "features" in the code, and SGI's compiler was correctly treating all this "exxtreme programming" crap as bugs (no, I am not making this up). So gave up and compiled it with gcc. The resulting executable was showing the splash screen and immediately dumping core. I have investigated this behavior (took about half an hour with Google) and found out that is a known problem. Finally I got it to run from shell with a command line option to turn off splash. Great. I was happy. Until the moment I tried to actually edit text. Typing was fine, but Abiword dumped core as soon as I tried to switch font. Well, at this point I gave up, and I don't think I am to blame here. A week ago I've be
The Fusor article is actually very interesting. What I am wondering about is why exactly had the project been killed - apparently, it has been a success? Can anyone more physics-savvy than me comment on how reasonable such a device is as a fusion reactor? Of course, it is real hot fusion of a macroscopic scale in this case...
As for platinum, this "high density" idea is exactly the shortcoming of the infamous cold fusion paper. The problem with it is that you can't "heat" things up nearly enough through ordinary chemical interactions. Even absorbed in platinum, the internuclear distance of a D2 molecule won't change much (though the bond might break and some hairy scary Pt hydride may form). The kind of density you need to start fusion is the one you may achieve by, say, exploding the conventional fission device around your piece of Pt hydride - and that has been tried before by various governments:-)
By the way, similar ways to store hydrogen (as transition metal hydrides/adducts) are being successfully explored for fuel cell cars, and I don't think they are concerned about fusion.
Yes, catalysts indeed exist for some reactions (for example, currently I am working to elucidate the mechanism of how Cu(I) ions catalyze [3+2] cycloaddition between azides and terminal alkynes). Some of them are found by "accident", others (a minority) may be rationally designed.
Generally speaking, catalysts might act in two ways:
*by lowering the activation barrier for the original reaction mechanism through selective stabilization of the corresponding rate limiting transition state
*by changing the nature of the rate limiting step (changing the reaction mechanism to something else).
In the case of a fusion reaction the presumed mechanism is very simple: two nuclei are being brought together, and once they are sufficiently close, we've got our product.
So our rate-determining transition state in this case will happen at the point of the reaction coordinate (in thisi case, our coordinate will conveniently be internuclear distance) where E=(E coulombic)-(E weak) has the highest value.
So, we might try to imagine a catalyst that stabilizes such a transition state sufficiently for the reaction to go at room temperature... And, unfortunately, such a chemical catalyst is impossible. And here is why. In order for the chemical reaction to proceed at room temperature at all, its energy of activation needs to be of the order of 30-50 kcal/mol at most (I could look up some of my old lecture notes for exact figures, but what's important here is the order of magnitude). Now, the activation energy for the hypothetical fusion process would be on the order of some 10^7-10^8 kkcal/mol (you can come to this number in two ways - either by calculating the molar coulomb repulsion energy, or from a simple Arrhenius equation and the plasma temperatures commonly found in tokamak experiments and on the Sun). So your pure chemical interaction free energy between your hypothetical catalyst and the transition state has to be of the order of 10^7-10^8 kkcal/mol! And this is just not possible with chemical interactions (i.e. those interatomic/intermolacular interactions that are only concerning the outer electron shells). For example, a very strong covalent bond might have an energy of about 200 kcal/mol - and that is as strong as it gets! A typical hydrogen bond is 5 kcal/mol.
Now, you might think of a catalyst that changes the mechanism of the reaction... But in case of fusion, no matter what you do, you have to bring your nuclei together. And there is no chemical force that is going to come to your rescue with 10^7 kcals/mol of free energy.
Those considerations (which I have simplified a bit since I hate long typing) are exactly the ones that were overlooked by the authors of the original cold fusion paper. Indeed, they have claimed that "strained" surface of their electrode was catalyzing fusion, but they had a very faint idea of the magnitude of the activation energy of the process and of the rate of tunneling through such a barrier. Any competent chemist or physicist, though, would be well aware of this - and that is why nobody wants to publish or finance cold fusion research. Just like you might have troubles to get a grant for a research program to disprove the atomic theory:-)
I have seen other reports of cold fusion based on cavitation experiments, and, IMHO, those are somewhat more credible at least in principle (since their authors do not claim any miracle catalysis, but "just" suggest that they are able to generate an appropriate local temperature for a short time). Of course, even if those experiments will ever reach reproducibility (so far noone has obtained reliable and beleivable results), they will have only a limited practical value...
OK, I'll bite (I am a chemist:-). Those guys indeed knew how to use their calorimeter, but they did not concern themselves with any other part of science, and, hence, in the interpretation of their measurements (not in the measurement results per se) they have made several trivial mistakes. Sadly, that is the way many scientists who are in possession of some exotic/expensive piece of equipment behave. I've seen it many times. Now about cold fusion... Unfortunately, it is physically impossible, and for a reason. The Coulomb barrier to bring together 2 hydrogen nuclei is enormous, and it is the reason why 10^6 K (or maybe even hotter) temperature is normally needed to start the reaction. At more human conditions, nuclei could, of course, tunnel through the Coulomb barrier and fuse as much as they want. Problem is, this tunnelling is extremely slow (rate is actually easy to calculate - I think it will be in any college radiochemistry course), and it won't be sufficient to sustain the reaction, or even measure its heat on the macroscopic scale. The mechanism proposed by Fleischmann did not take into account the extremely high activation energy for fusion. They did have a vague concept that there should be an activation energy, and that it is probably high, but they did not realize how high it is...
Slashdot Mirror
No, he is not full of shit...
Simply because runas and sudo are two very different beasts.
True, with runas you can do *some* administration and installs, but a lot of your efforts will bite the dust. At least, that is my experience.
One example for you... Login to W2K as user, and start cmd as Administrator through runas. Now try to run any program from that cmd. Tough luck - none of what you run from there will work as if you are an administrator! Is it retarded or what?
Now have you ever tried running IE or Explorer with runas? They won't run. But IE is needed to run Windows Update... So tough luck here. Unless you have automatic updates enabled, you WILL need to login as a real administrator to install updates. And, yes, this is a real problem for me in one of my installations: a computer that is running an LC-MSD instrument. I cannot turn on autoupdates since the machine will reboot at will, and people's experiments will get screwed up. It has to be up and logged on as a certain user at all times. So I choose the lesser evil - I update it manually. Since I do not always have a chance to do so (instrument is always in use and software startup takes 30 minutes once it has been shut down), I frequently end up 0wned and screeching my teeth. This machine was one of the 3 other similar ones on campus hit by Blaster (yes, I knew about the vulnerability, but due to totally retarded and bastardized implementations of runas and Winblows Update I could not patch in time).
ME TOO! :-)
Seriously, Softick Card Export is an excellent program, and I can't imagine using my Palm without it.
One limitation, though (at least if you are running Mac OS): once you export the card and then unmount it in Finder, USB Hotsync won't work until you do a soft reset.
I guess, this whole new politics Slashdot section quickly becomes just one big place to wage useless flame wars... Oh, well. I will definitely get flamed, too.
After reading a lot of posts on this (and similar) topics, what really did strike me is how many people from each side of the debate (both of the so-called "liberals" and "conservatives") are really narrow-minded. Even within better-than-average educated Slashdot crowd.
A lot of arguments from both sides seem to revolve around several cliche statements which actually have ABSOLUTELY NO REAL MEANING:
*Democrats will raise taxes and, by doing so, will kill economic growth
*Republicans are for small Federal government
*Both R and D parties are the same
*George Bush is a very bad man (because he is stupid, or did not show up for his guard service, or insert your favorite argument here)
*I am voting Kerry because I am "pro-choice", or I am voting Bush because I am "pro-life"
*Etc, etc
It seems like most of these statements largely come directly from the disgusting propaganda that is being broadcast by both parties through various mass media outlets. I might be wrong here since I do not have a TV, but that is the impression I have got after visiting Bush's, Kerry's, and Nader's web sites. I think that the high emotional charge that usually accompanies those statements also speaks in favor of the propaganda hypothesis - people don't just repeat some stupid mantra unless they have been brainwashed (at least, I don't want to beleive otherwise, since I am an optimist).
Why don't people just THINK when they choose their political candidate? If people were simply thinking, politicians would not have been getting a "bounce" after the convention, and things like 30-year-old National Guard record disclosures or "swift boat vet" ads would have had zero influence on the vote distribution.
Yet all this propaganda stuff seems to work rather well - just look at the poll dynamics!
Another sign of narrow mindedness is the tendency of people to start expert discussions on politically charged subjects while they have absolutely no idea about these subjects. Like renewable energy. Or pollution. Or stem cell research. Or even economics. In this latter case, there usually is a cohort of people who hate paying taxes and are using various buzzwords to argue Republicans are good; and another cohort, that argues they are bad since they spend tax dollars on Halliburton. Yet not that many people from either group have a detailed understanding of the impact any particular policy can make on their personal lives (except for direct change in federal income tax they are paying). And nobody EVER wants to RTFA. All those discussions between uninformed people are fun to read on linux.slashdot.org, but they quickly become scary as soon as their results start to influence the public policymaking.
I think that voting for any third party candidate, no matter how admirable he/she is, is useless, unless the population as a whole will start thinking. All the votes for a third-party candidate are currently guaranteed just to benefit one of the existing two big parties. As I remember, when De Tocqueville had been talking about the tyranny of the majority, he had been talking about an unfair political system similar to the one we currently observe.
For the record: I am not voting for Nader (not only for the reasons outlined above, but also because he discredited himself in my eyes by accepting help from the R party in some states).
I am voting for Kerry since he is clearly the lesser of two evils, and he can realistically win. My vote for Kerry means that I disapprove
the "winner takes all" mentality of the current administration
Bush's careless over-the-budget spending I will be forced to pay off through my entire natural life
budget cuts for such vital agencies as NSF and NIH, yet increased spending on military and intelligence bureau
...no other program so far (and yes, I mean OpenOffice.org, too) does not even come close in speed and usability to Microsoft Word. I am sorry to admit that, and I try to avoid using Microsoft stuff as much as possible, but so far I can't imagine my life without Word.
I am a scientist, not a professional hacker, and mainly use Word for writing (chemical) papers.
While Word indeed has some annoying features (Office Assistant and "personalized menus" in the Windows version, Autocorrect in both windows and Mac versions, "antipiracy" checking on Mac), they can easily be killed. Properly configured Word is reasonably fast (on both Mac and Windows), annoyance-free, and has all the features I want.
For example, install ChemDraw (a de-facto standard chemical graphics package), draw a structure, and paste it in OpenOffice and in Word. Then double click it. Word preserves the structure intact, and it can be post-edited in ChemDraw. Not so in OpenOffice! It converts the .cdx object to a useless picture, which makes me store and track more files!
In addition, such features as tables, multi-column text, and foot/end notes are implemented almost flawlessly in Word. Not so in OpenOffice. Just try to grab a .pdf of any paper from, say, pubs.acs.org , and try to duplicate the formatting in OpenOffice.org. Good luck! Trust me, I have tried it - and got terrible results. The only two programs that succeed for me are Word (in its various incarnations from 2000/Windows to 2004/Mac), and LyX.
My affair with OpenOffice.org has started and ended tragically twice, and I am not entering that boat again. The first time I tried installing it (under Red Hat 8) was around the times of version 1.02, if I am not mistaken. What was immediately evident to me is that the program was sluggish (on a P4 mobile 2.4GHz laptop with 512M RAM). The disaster stroke me on the third day of using it. That day I have been working on a long document and saved it in the native OpenOffice format before going home. And when I tried to open it later that night, it won't open! OpenOffice corrupted the document while saving it, and nothing could be done to restore the whole day of work (and the document was due next day!). What added insult to injury was that no error message has been displayed when saving the document. The program did not crash. It just killed my document.
The second time I have tried installing OpenOffice was on my girlfriend's Fedora Core 2 laptop about a month ago. This time, the gremlins stole the ability of OpenOffice to write good .pdf files. The .pdf save feature worked the first 3 times. After that, the .pdfs were still being produced, but they were containing only gibberish. I was amazed - mainly by the fact that this impressive feat of self-destructive programming has been achieved on registry-less Linux. Bravo!
Needless to say, since then I have bought Crossover from Codeweavers and have been using my trusty Office 2000 on all my Linux machines.
As for other alternatives, don't even get me started. I still remember with horror the first time I tried to compile Abiword (I think, 0.96 at the time). That was on my SGI Octane with Irix 6.5. Abiword would not compile with SGI's native cc - there was just too much gcc specific... "features" in the code, and SGI's compiler was correctly treating all this "exxtreme programming" crap as bugs (no, I am not making this up). So gave up and compiled it with gcc. The resulting executable was showing the splash screen and immediately dumping core. I have investigated this behavior (took about half an hour with Google) and found out that is a known problem. Finally I got it to run from shell with a command line option to turn off splash. Great. I was happy. Until the moment I tried to actually edit text. Typing was fine, but Abiword dumped core as soon as I tried to switch font. Well, at this point I gave up, and I don't think I am to blame here. A week ago I've be
The Fusor article is actually very interesting. What I am wondering about is why exactly had the project been killed - apparently, it has been a success? Can anyone more physics-savvy than me comment on how reasonable such a device is as a fusion reactor? Of course, it is real hot fusion of a macroscopic scale in this case...
As for platinum, this "high density" idea is exactly the shortcoming of the infamous cold fusion paper. The problem with it is that you can't "heat" things up nearly enough through ordinary chemical interactions. Even absorbed in platinum, the internuclear distance of a D2 molecule won't change much (though the bond might break and some hairy scary Pt hydride may form). The kind of density you need to start fusion is the one you may achieve by, say, exploding the conventional fission device around your piece of Pt hydride - and that has been tried before by various governments :-)
By the way, similar ways to store hydrogen (as transition metal hydrides/adducts) are being successfully explored for fuel cell cars, and I don't think they are concerned about fusion.
Generally speaking, catalysts might act in two ways:
*by lowering the activation barrier for the original reaction mechanism through selective stabilization of the corresponding rate limiting transition state
*by changing the nature of the rate limiting step (changing the reaction mechanism to something else).
In the case of a fusion reaction the presumed mechanism is very simple: two nuclei are being brought together, and once they are sufficiently close, we've got our product.
So our rate-determining transition state in this case will happen at the point of the reaction coordinate (in thisi case, our coordinate will conveniently be internuclear distance) where E=(E coulombic)-(E weak) has the highest value.
So, we might try to imagine a catalyst that stabilizes such a transition state sufficiently for the reaction to go at room temperature... And, unfortunately, such a chemical catalyst is impossible. And here is why. In order for the chemical reaction to proceed at room temperature at all, its energy of activation needs to be of the order of 30-50 kcal/mol at most (I could look up some of my old lecture notes for exact figures, but what's important here is the order of magnitude). Now, the activation energy for the hypothetical fusion process would be on the order of some 10^7-10^8 kkcal/mol (you can come to this number in two ways - either by calculating the molar coulomb repulsion energy, or from a simple Arrhenius equation and the plasma temperatures commonly found in tokamak experiments and on the Sun). So your pure chemical interaction free energy between your hypothetical catalyst and the transition state has to be of the order of 10^7-10^8 kkcal/mol! And this is just not possible with chemical interactions (i.e. those interatomic/intermolacular interactions that are only concerning the outer electron shells). For example, a very strong covalent bond might have an energy of about 200 kcal/mol - and that is as strong as it gets! A typical hydrogen bond is 5 kcal/mol.
Now, you might think of a catalyst that changes the mechanism of the reaction... But in case of fusion, no matter what you do, you have to bring your nuclei together. And there is no chemical force that is going to come to your rescue with 10^7 kcals/mol of free energy.
Those considerations (which I have simplified a bit since I hate long typing) are exactly the ones that were overlooked by the authors of the original cold fusion paper. Indeed, they have claimed that "strained" surface of their electrode was catalyzing fusion, but they had a very faint idea of the magnitude of the activation energy of the process and of the rate of tunneling through such a barrier. Any competent chemist or physicist, though, would be well aware of this - and that is why nobody wants to publish or finance cold fusion research. Just like you might have troubles to get a grant for a research program to disprove the atomic theory :-)
I have seen other reports of cold fusion based on cavitation experiments, and, IMHO, those are somewhat more credible at least in principle (since their authors do not claim any miracle catalysis, but "just" suggest that they are able to generate an appropriate local temperature for a short time). Of course, even if those experiments will ever reach reproducibility (so far noone has obtained reliable and beleivable results), they will have only a limited practical value...
OK, I'll bite (I am a chemist :-).
Those guys indeed knew how to use their calorimeter, but they did not concern themselves with any other part of science, and, hence, in the interpretation of their measurements (not in the measurement results per se) they have made several trivial mistakes. Sadly, that is the way many scientists who are in possession of some exotic/expensive piece of equipment behave. I've seen it many times.
Now about cold fusion... Unfortunately, it is physically impossible, and for a reason. The Coulomb barrier to bring together 2 hydrogen nuclei is enormous, and it is the reason why 10^6 K (or maybe even hotter) temperature is normally needed to start the reaction. At more human conditions, nuclei could, of course, tunnel through the Coulomb barrier and fuse as much as they want. Problem is, this tunnelling is extremely slow (rate is actually easy to calculate - I think it will be in any college radiochemistry course), and it won't be sufficient to sustain the reaction, or even measure its heat on the macroscopic scale.
The mechanism proposed by Fleischmann did not take into account the extremely high activation energy for fusion. They did have a vague concept that there should be an activation energy, and that it is probably high, but they did not realize how high it is...