You do realize that reactors generate a lot of radioactive waste besides just used-up fuel? You can't just throw, say, radioactive water (or equipment, pipes, etc.) into a breeder reactor. The fuel waste is easy to deal with, the rest of the waste is a big problem.
If Apple open up the ipod and allow me to use it as a mass storage device with the ability to drag and drop non-DRM encumbered music from any OS and create my own playlists without installing their client software (and let's face it, if they dump DRM there's no reason for them not to), I'd buy a couple right now.
I should add, however, that you can get great espresso from just about any home machine, but ONLY with freshly ground beans. And I don't mean freshly ground at Starbucks/Gloria Jeans/etc last Monday. You need a good burr grinder at home and you need to grind only the beans you need for each cup. My grinder is a Rancilio Rocky, which is worth about twice as much as the Carezza. But it's worth it.
Absolutely correct.
So many people focus on the machine, but the grinder is definitely the most important piece of hardware.
And freshness of the beans is the most critical overall element of the equation.
During the first three days the coffee is still degassing, and makes crap, ashy tasting coffee with a frothy crema.
Depends on the roast. Darker roasts are better closer to the roast, but can go off quicker than lighter roasts. Lighter roasts take a few days of resting before they mellow.
Personally I think 3 days is the sweet spot. 7 days is the absolute maximum for me.
I can affirm that the pump-powered espresso machine is the best way to brew coffee ever(However, it's expensive.). If you're still a drip coffee fan, go for the french press. All of the essential oils and flavors stay intact, unlike filter-brewed coffee.
As a user of a La Pavoni Europiccola, I would have to respectfully quibble. Pulling by hand puts you in the driver's seat. Yes, it isn't as easy or convenient as a pump-powered machine, but for my purposes (only 2-3 doubles at a time) it can't be beat.
The keys to good espresso:
Bean selection - It takes some time, but I get an assortment of green beans, and test each variety individually. Then I build a blend based on the characteristics of the individual varieties.
Freshness - I roast my own so that I have control over the roast and freshness of the coffee. I roast in small batches, so my roasted beans are never more than 5 days old.
Grind - Your grinder is the most important equipment piece to the equation, moreso even than the espresso maker. Blades - never! Get a good burr grinder and get it dialed in to the right fineness of grind.
Tamp - Get to know your grinder, and balance the tradeoff between the grind and the tamp.
Water - Filtered water at the correct temperature. Too hot is the worst sin. It is rare to find an espresso that hasn't been 'cooked' by too-hot water. That's where the right machine/technique comes into play. That's why I prefer the lever-pull machine; to put the technique into the process.
That's not to say that a decent pump-powered machine is bad, I just prefer that final bit of control over the pull.
I've never seen roasting coffee beans produce smoke. Has anyone here ever experienced this?
I use an IRoast hot-air roaster, and yes there is plenty of smoke. A lot of the smoke comes from the chaff from the beans. But at the later stages of the roast (around 2nd crack), the beans start to give off a fair bit of smoke.
The way I deal with the smoke is to connect a piece of aluminum dryer vent hose to the top of the roaster and hang it out a window. I guess an oven vent hood would work as well, but my kitchen doesn't have one, so I make do with the dryer hose.
Webpages are not always fully interactive. But lets say if you turned up at a webpage and you saw three other people viewing it at the same time. You could chat to them, find out if they found something interesting or maybe they have a common field you need a question answered on.
The reason for this is our brains' prejudice towards patterns. Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but it does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in any given day, it is unsurprising that we sometimes encounter the same information again within a short time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information because the two instances make up the beginnings of a sequence. What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren't repeated, because they do not conform to an interesting pattern. This tendency to ignore the "uninteresting" data is an example of selective attention.
Which kind of answers a previous poster's query:
The amazing thing is that the computers only beat humans by looking at every single possibility. I think Deep Blue processed something like 200 million chess positions a second. But human grandmasters usually only consider 3 or 4 moves during their typical two-minutes of thinking. The AI guys still can't figure out how the grandmasters just "know" which 3 or 4 moves to consider.
Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the Philippines, Romania, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom require the use of a hands-free kit.
Yeah, it's the law in Germany (which has a notoriously law-abiding populace), but everybody does it.
You can stand on the corner and at any moment, one out of every 5-10 drivers is on the cell phone. At any given moment.
This is a country where people will shout at you if you cross the street against the light, but everybody drives with a phone in their ear.
It's weird, people in Germany are normally law-abiding, but definitely not when it comes to driving and cell phones.
I guess it is partly because it isn't enforced. I mean, the police could just stand on a random corner and take pictures, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. But I think there is more to it than just lack of enforcement...
They have already sold the card, so it doesn't matter as far as revenue who writes the best driver. Good open drivers might help sell cards. I would sure choose a good card with a good open driver.
I think it's an IP issue. They've bought into some fundamental patented IP, the license forbids releasing driver source (or it's something they have patented and it is counted as an asset on their Balance Sheet), and the patent covers something so integral to their design that it isn't worth the R&D it would take to get around it.
Even if IT could have a policy whereby we won't approve any application for use in our environment that won't run as a restricted user, we would inevitably be overruled when that new killer app from the leader in the marketspace dazzles our CEO with grand new functionality.
Sadly, this is so true. Also, when the vendor out-and-out lies about these issues to make the sale. Lesson learned - if it isn't in the contract, anything the vendor told you means jack.
...find out what restricted system areas their applications write to so that I can modify permissions in order to get their app to work without giving away full rights.
Regmon and Filemon are your friends here. It's still a pain in the ass, but it is possible. Most of the time you just need to modify ACLs on a few select reg keys, but sometimes it's something totally asinine, like needing write permissions to system32...
In Ubuntu - edit cryptic config files, several not working config utilities, nothing remotely resembling windows config panel in functionality.
Others have pointed out that you are wrong about that, but it brings to mind another issue.
I have had experiences where I needed to tweak xorg.conf to make something work correctly. In those cases, I found that the added complexity of having to edit a config file was offset by the completeness of the logging in the log file.
In other words, in the rare cases where things don't just work out of the box, there was enough information provided in the log file to tell you exactly what was going on and point you to a solution in the config file.
That is the complete opposite of my experience with Windows, where, if something doesn't work, you don't have much (or any!) information to troubleshoot the problem.
Not much of an advantage for Joe Six-Pack, but awesome for the geek who is lending Joe a hand with his computer...
If so many people want to watch it "after the fact", doesn't that imply that it has considerable financial value?
I don't know about "considerable", but yes, there is a small amount of value after the fact.
At the end of the season, I suppose hard-core fans would be willing to purchase the entire season on DVD.
But for the most part, I think the residual value is pretty low. Once you know the outcome of the match, the value of coverage after the fact is pretty low. That's not to say it's zero, but it's pretty close. Live sports coverage is a perishable commodity.
But say you are a fan living outside of the country, and you can't get the live broadcast. Why isn't it offered in some form on-line by the FA? It's offered on P2P. In the age of the internet, you have to either publish or perish.
Should a weekly football match broadcast -really- be protected for 75 years?
The "artificial scarcity" model of copyright ignores the internet at its own peril.
Copyright is not an unjust law. It exists to spur creation and innovation, and for a lot of artists, it's the only thing that allows them to afford to create the content you unjustly enjoy.
Creation? Innovation? It's a frigging football (soccer) match! It's not like the FA is a bunch of artists writing poems or whatever, it's a sport.
It's not being streamed live in competition with the live broadcast.
Football is an important part of a large part of the world's culture. It is unjust to lock it up behind copyright, that just doesn't make sense. Making it available after the fact doesn't diminish the advertising revenue (that's what this is about, revenue) of the live broadcast, there's plenty of demand for the live broadcast.
But once the match has been played, what's the problem with people being able to watch it?
This is a good example of the bad side of copyright, locking up public culture for fear of losing even a penny of corporate profit.
Damn, people, what are you doing to your browsers to make them consume so much RAM?
I was reading these anecdotes, so I thought I would give it a try.
I have FF 2.0.0.3 on WinXP (hey, I'm at work!), AdBlock Plus, AB+ Filter Uploader, DOM Inspector, FlashBlock, NoScript, and Talkback as extensions.
With 5 tabs open, (2x/., Google News, Gmail, RitzCamera*) FF uses 78KB. I opened another window and opened 36 tabs (All the news stories from the current IHT RSS feed), and I'm up to a whopping 90.4KB. Yes, that's KB, not MB.
Now I do notice an upward creep of about 4KB in mem usage after closing the window with 36 tabs, so I guess there is some mem leakage, but it would take a while to get up to even 1MB...
So, certainly, YMMV...
* Do not do business with RitzCamera, they have awful customer service!
What I'm saying is that blocking outbound port 25 isn't going to stop cleverly-written spambots.
Absolutely. But -if you are monitoring your FW logs-, you will see the not so cleverly-written ones, and they can be your "canary in the coalmine". If you are seeing any denied outbound attempts, you know that either someone (or some software) is going against policy, or you have a workstation weakness that is being exploited, and you follow up on it.
Sure, this doesn't guarantee that you don't have a problem (ie., cleverly-written malware). You must take a layered approach to security strategy to be effective. Discounting a layer because it doesn't take every single possibility into account is ridiculous. That's why you have depth built into your security strategy, because no single layer works for everything.
That is the problem with most "security solutions" that are being peddled to CIOs, they claim to be a single magic bullet when real security solutions are more about correlation and follow-up from different layers. Not sexy, but very effective.
I think it is interesting that we see "report cards" that give government agencies low grades on security, but publicly-owned corporations get a pass.
I seriously doubt that there are any botnets like this running on, say, the DoD network, yet they get a poor grade on security, while a frigging -bank- is pwned, and nobody is too bothered.
No longer is the common image one of a dirty geek coding away with some beer in their home after work. It's now a corporate sponsored coder in many cases. The populism has been defeated, which is a good thing. Populism usually fails to amount to anything because it expects the world to change for it, rather than for it to compromise with the world.
The GIMP uses several windows to contain an interface what is, semantically, one interface. That makes it totally unintuative and ugly, and I have no idea why they've not redesigned the interface yet. Do you?
No idea.
It is really useful when you have multiple monitors, though. You put the tools and dialogs on one monitor, and have the entire second monitor for the image.
Ugly? Meh, I don't really give a shit about ugly, but it does seem to bother a lot of people. But then there's gimpshop for the people who think Photoshop has a better interface.
Whatever, having all of your menus available via right-clicking on the image instead of constantly making the trip back and forth to the menu bar, that totally rocks.
All in all, I'd say today's interfaces need in-place, contextual application menus. Personally, I'd modify the system so the very first item in any right-click popup menu is a flyout containing the main application menus.
Like the GIMP does. See, not -everything- about that interface is so bad...
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So when your house is on fire, or your wife collapses and needs an ambulance, you are going to IM the Fire Department?
Better off just turning off the ringer and checking the answering machine when it's convenient for you....
Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater!
You do realize that reactors generate a lot of radioactive waste besides just used-up fuel? You can't just throw, say, radioactive water (or equipment, pipes, etc.) into a breeder reactor. The fuel waste is easy to deal with, the rest of the waste is a big problem.
Absolutely correct.
So many people focus on the machine, but the grinder is definitely the most important piece of hardware.
And freshness of the beans is the most critical overall element of the equation.
Depends on the roast. Darker roasts are better closer to the roast, but can go off quicker than lighter roasts. Lighter roasts take a few days of resting before they mellow.
Personally I think 3 days is the sweet spot. 7 days is the absolute maximum for me.
As a user of a La Pavoni Europiccola, I would have to respectfully quibble. Pulling by hand puts you in the driver's seat. Yes, it isn't as easy or convenient as a pump-powered machine, but for my purposes (only 2-3 doubles at a time) it can't be beat.
The keys to good espresso:
That's not to say that a decent pump-powered machine is bad, I just prefer that final bit of control over the pull.
I use an IRoast hot-air roaster, and yes there is plenty of smoke. A lot of the smoke comes from the chaff from the beans. But at the later stages of the roast (around 2nd crack), the beans start to give off a fair bit of smoke.
The way I deal with the smoke is to connect a piece of aluminum dryer vent hose to the top of the roaster and hang it out a window. I guess an oven vent hood would work as well, but my kitchen doesn't have one, so I make do with the dryer hose.
Um, you mean, like, this?
From your link:
Which kind of answers a previous poster's query:
Damn interesting...#;-)
Don't Feed The Trolls! IOW laugh, it was meant to be funny...
True, right now they don't care. But that doesn't make it any less important to develop Free drivers.
Richard Stallman had his realization that Free software is necessary based on his experience with a printer driver.
Yeah, it's the law in Germany (which has a notoriously law-abiding populace), but everybody does it.
You can stand on the corner and at any moment, one out of every 5-10 drivers is on the cell phone. At any given moment.
This is a country where people will shout at you if you cross the street against the light, but everybody drives with a phone in their ear.
It's weird, people in Germany are normally law-abiding, but definitely not when it comes to driving and cell phones.
I guess it is partly because it isn't enforced. I mean, the police could just stand on a random corner and take pictures, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. But I think there is more to it than just lack of enforcement...
They have already sold the card, so it doesn't matter as far as revenue who writes the best driver. Good open drivers might help sell cards. I would sure choose a good card with a good open driver.
I think it's an IP issue. They've bought into some fundamental patented IP, the license forbids releasing driver source (or it's something they have patented and it is counted as an asset on their Balance Sheet), and the patent covers something so integral to their design that it isn't worth the R&D it would take to get around it.
Sadly, this is so true. Also, when the vendor out-and-out lies about these issues to make the sale. Lesson learned - if it isn't in the contract, anything the vendor told you means jack.
Regmon and Filemon are your friends here. It's still a pain in the ass, but it is possible. Most of the time you just need to modify ACLs on a few select reg keys, but sometimes it's something totally asinine, like needing write permissions to system32...
Others have pointed out that you are wrong about that, but it brings to mind another issue.
I have had experiences where I needed to tweak xorg.conf to make something work correctly. In those cases, I found that the added complexity of having to edit a config file was offset by the completeness of the logging in the log file.
In other words, in the rare cases where things don't just work out of the box, there was enough information provided in the log file to tell you exactly what was going on and point you to a solution in the config file.
That is the complete opposite of my experience with Windows, where, if something doesn't work, you don't have much (or any!) information to troubleshoot the problem.
Not much of an advantage for Joe Six-Pack, but awesome for the geek who is lending Joe a hand with his computer...
I don't know about "considerable", but yes, there is a small amount of value after the fact.
At the end of the season, I suppose hard-core fans would be willing to purchase the entire season on DVD.
But for the most part, I think the residual value is pretty low. Once you know the outcome of the match, the value of coverage after the fact is pretty low. That's not to say it's zero, but it's pretty close. Live sports coverage is a perishable commodity.
But say you are a fan living outside of the country, and you can't get the live broadcast. Why isn't it offered in some form on-line by the FA? It's offered on P2P. In the age of the internet, you have to either publish or perish.
Should a weekly football match broadcast -really- be protected for 75 years?
The "artificial scarcity" model of copyright ignores the internet at its own peril.
Creation? Innovation? It's a frigging football (soccer) match! It's not like the FA is a bunch of artists writing poems or whatever, it's a sport.
It's not being streamed live in competition with the live broadcast.
Football is an important part of a large part of the world's culture. It is unjust to lock it up behind copyright, that just doesn't make sense. Making it available after the fact doesn't diminish the advertising revenue (that's what this is about, revenue) of the live broadcast, there's plenty of demand for the live broadcast.
But once the match has been played, what's the problem with people being able to watch it?
This is a good example of the bad side of copyright, locking up public culture for fear of losing even a penny of corporate profit.
No, that's MB, not KB.<blush>
Anyway, still less than what I'm hearing from others...
Damn, people, what are you doing to your browsers to make them consume so much RAM?
I was reading these anecdotes, so I thought I would give it a try.
I have FF 2.0.0.3 on WinXP (hey, I'm at work!), AdBlock Plus, AB+ Filter Uploader, DOM Inspector, FlashBlock, NoScript, and Talkback as extensions.
With 5 tabs open, (2x /., Google News, Gmail, RitzCamera*) FF uses 78KB. I opened another window and opened 36 tabs (All the news stories from the current IHT RSS feed), and I'm up to a whopping 90.4KB. Yes, that's KB, not MB.
Now I do notice an upward creep of about 4KB in mem usage after closing the window with 36 tabs, so I guess there is some mem leakage, but it would take a while to get up to even 1MB...
So, certainly, YMMV...
* Do not do business with RitzCamera, they have awful customer service!
Absolutely. But -if you are monitoring your FW logs-, you will see the not so cleverly-written ones, and they can be your "canary in the coalmine". If you are seeing any denied outbound attempts, you know that either someone (or some software) is going against policy, or you have a workstation weakness that is being exploited, and you follow up on it.
Sure, this doesn't guarantee that you don't have a problem (ie., cleverly-written malware). You must take a layered approach to security strategy to be effective. Discounting a layer because it doesn't take every single possibility into account is ridiculous. That's why you have depth built into your security strategy, because no single layer works for everything.
That is the problem with most "security solutions" that are being peddled to CIOs, they claim to be a single magic bullet when real security solutions are more about correlation and follow-up from different layers. Not sexy, but very effective.
I think it is interesting that we see "report cards" that give government agencies low grades on security, but publicly-owned corporations get a pass.
I seriously doubt that there are any botnets like this running on, say, the DoD network, yet they get a poor grade on security, while a frigging -bank- is pwned, and nobody is too bothered.
Hmmm, how about this guy?
No idea.
It is really useful when you have multiple monitors, though. You put the tools and dialogs on one monitor, and have the entire second monitor for the image.
Ugly? Meh, I don't really give a shit about ugly, but it does seem to bother a lot of people. But then there's gimpshop for the people who think Photoshop has a better interface.
Whatever, having all of your menus available via right-clicking on the image instead of constantly making the trip back and forth to the menu bar, that totally rocks.
Like the GIMP does. See, not -everything- about that interface is so bad...