No, the German Pebble Bed Reactor worked perfectly for 21 years. It didn't generate much power because it was only a demonstration reactor to prove the technology.
In a way it was the accident at Three Mile Island that shut that reactor down. One of the pebbles got stuck in the mechanism a couple of weeks after TMI - when the newspapers were full of "nuclear accident" scare stories. There was never any danger but the politicians decided to shut it down due to public pressure.
No...the problem is the sheer number of animals. It's pretty hard to treat them nicely when you've got to kill one every two seconds to meet the quota.
C'mon.... *EVERYBODY* knows what an AK47 looks like, it's the most iconic gun ever. If you know the name "AK47" you know what it looks like. The person who made this call was just a dumbass.
There's brand new intel-Atom based machines for $200 and they only consume about 10 watts - probably less than losses due to inefficiency in the old 486's power supply.
"Why would the solution to something that is not easily enforceable be to make it legal? "
You answered it yourself - it's not easily enforceable.
What the RIAA/MPAA is trying to do is to get the governments and police forces of the world to enforce something which can't be enforced. The amount of money which could be sunk in this black hole if they achieve it is unthinkable.
The real problem is that the RIAA has spent the last ten years with their hands over their ears going "LALALALALALALA, we're not listening". Listening to customers is usually seen as good business practice, but they're not doing it.
The world has changed, people don't listen to CDs any more, they listen to mp3, and they want the singles, not a CD with one decent track and a load of filler.
Apple listened and their iTunes business is doing very well thank you very much.
The other elephant in the 'enforcement' room is that DVD sales are booming year on year almost in line with the drop in CD sales. Maybe the public is buying DVDs instead of CDs...? Nah, it couldn't possibly be market forces at work. We'd better spend billions of tax $$$ on law enforcement to protect the buggy-whip makers, just in case...
No matter how smart you are at solving cute interview problems it's takes a loooong time to get good at writing large/complex programs in a grown-up programming language.
And yeah, most of the drop-outs were probably liars.
And most of the others will probably be deluded about their skill/talent.
There's zillions of them and I'm pretty sure that every line of code being written today violates at least one. It's the equivalent of allowing copyright of individual English words.
You mean so all the windows on my XP machine have a different look and the "minimize" buttons don't line up when I stack multiple windows on top of each other? No thanks.
That link, I don't think it goes where you think it goes.
The government promised to clean up it's "seize everything!" act back in 2000, I don't know how effective it was (seizing stuff was a good source of income - I heard of cases of large buildings being seized just because drug paraphernalia was present, not even drugs). http://www.fear.org/ is a website dedicated to this stuff.
Until recently he would also have to prove in court that he knew nothing about what it was being used for. It's kinda hard to prove a negative so there were plenty of cases of (eg.) people renting out big boats only to have the government seize them because the renter used them to transport drugs.
They also make it possible to hit the head. Without gloves you'd break your hands if you stood there punching at somebody's head. In the old days of bare-knuckle boxing most of the blows were to the body. There were a lot of bruised ribs but hardly anybody died.
Desktop CPUs are now "fast enough" for most people (and have been for a few years now). The main bottleneck in desktops is normally lack of RAM (caused by all the crap people install) and hard disks.
The interesting PC developments in the next few years will be SSDs and low-consumption CPUs.
Most people don't want mega-GPUs either - remember that Intel has more GPU market share than ATI and NVIDIA combined.
>They are also 50% larger by population. What's your point?
The point is they manage to emit far less CO2 than the USA so the USA is clearly doing something very wasteful when they really ought to leading by example.
The idea is to have something that people can maintain in the future. Maybe they didn't make the best of platform/language choices but there wasn't much else available at the time and the goal was the right one.
At least Windows is still around and can probably still run that app. If they'd chosen the "best" platform available on consumer hardware back then (maybe OS/2...) they'd have been just as badly off in the long term as if they'd stuck with MS-DOS.
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No, the German Pebble Bed Reactor worked perfectly for 21 years. It didn't generate much power because it was only a demonstration reactor to prove the technology.
In a way it was the accident at Three Mile Island that shut that reactor down. One of the pebbles got stuck in the mechanism a couple of weeks after TMI - when the newspapers were full of "nuclear accident" scare stories. There was never any danger but the politicians decided to shut it down due to public pressure.
It's not even a prerequisite for Earth living.
No...the problem is the sheer number of animals. It's pretty hard to treat them nicely when you've got to kill one every two seconds to meet the quota.
C'mon .... *EVERYBODY* knows what an AK47 looks like, it's the most iconic gun ever. If you know the name "AK47" you know what it looks like. The person who made this call was just a dumbass.
Another good idea...
There's brand new intel-Atom based machines for $200 and they only consume about 10 watts - probably less than losses due to inefficiency in the old 486's power supply.
"Why would the solution to something that is not easily enforceable be to make it legal? "
You answered it yourself - it's not easily enforceable.
What the RIAA/MPAA is trying to do is to get the governments and police forces of the world to enforce something which can't be enforced. The amount of money which could be sunk in this black hole if they achieve it is unthinkable.
The real problem is that the RIAA has spent the last ten years with their hands over their ears going "LALALALALALALA, we're not listening". Listening to customers is usually seen as good business practice, but they're not doing it.
The world has changed, people don't listen to CDs any more, they listen to mp3, and they want the singles, not a CD with one decent track and a load of filler.
Apple listened and their iTunes business is doing very well thank you very much.
The other elephant in the 'enforcement' room is that DVD sales are booming year on year almost in line with the drop in CD sales. Maybe the public is buying DVDs instead of CDs...? Nah, it couldn't possibly be market forces at work. We'd better spend billions of tax $$$ on law enforcement to protect the buggy-whip makers, just in case...
No matter how smart you are at solving cute interview problems it's takes a loooong time to get good at writing large/complex programs in a grown-up programming language.
And yeah, most of the drop-outs were probably liars.
And most of the others will probably be deluded about their skill/talent.
It's about control. They want you to see them alongside *their* adverts, they want MTV to pay them for the rights to broadcast them, etc.
I'm not against *all* patents. Some algorithms have a serious amount of R&D and ingenuity behind them.
The problem is the BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS and TRIVIAL things that are being awarded patents.
Examples:
A special comparison operator for pointers: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220040230959%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20040230959&RS=DN/20040230959
Encoding of floating point numbers as non-negative integers: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220050023524%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20050023524&RS=DN/20050023524
Policy change notification: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,269,853.PN.&OS=PN/7,269,853&RS=PN/7,269,853
There's zillions of them and I'm pretty sure that every line of code being written today violates at least one. It's the equivalent of allowing copyright of individual English words.
You mean so all the windows on my XP machine have a different look and the "minimize" buttons don't line up when I stack multiple windows on top of each other? No thanks.
That link, I don't think it goes where you think it goes.
The government promised to clean up it's "seize everything!" act back in 2000, I don't know how effective it was (seizing stuff was a good source of income - I heard of cases of large buildings being seized just because drug paraphernalia was present, not even drugs). http://www.fear.org/ is a website dedicated to this stuff.
In the USA the entire building could be seized and the owner would have to reclaim it.
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/csa/853.htm#n
Until recently he would also have to prove in court that he knew nothing about what it was being used for. It's kinda hard to prove a negative so there were plenty of cases of (eg.) people renting out big boats only to have the government seize them because the renter used them to transport drugs.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-632700_ITM
War on drugs, yay!
They also make it possible to hit the head. Without gloves you'd break your hands if you stood there punching at somebody's head. In the old days of bare-knuckle boxing most of the blows were to the body. There were a lot of bruised ribs but hardly anybody died.
Well, there's also the south one, and the one near China, and....
That way everybody would be happy.
How about "glass will scratch and grind to a non-transparent finish in no time".
How can a graphics card be ill?
Desktop CPUs are now "fast enough" for most people (and have been for a few years now). The main bottleneck in desktops is normally lack of RAM (caused by all the crap people install) and hard disks.
The interesting PC developments in the next few years will be SSDs and low-consumption CPUs.
Most people don't want mega-GPUs either - remember that Intel has more GPU market share than ATI and NVIDIA combined.
a) As pointed out, somebody with the resources to do that would be a but more subtle about delivering them.
b) In this case, the smart thing to do would be to keep things quiet and send false info.
Maybe a good "DRM disaster" would teach the world more than any amount of vague handwaving by an unknown bunch of extremists.
On the other hand, fraud on the part of the deniers is just a google search away, eg. here
>They are also 50% larger by population. What's your point?
The point is they manage to emit far less CO2 than the USA so the USA is clearly doing something very wasteful when they really ought to leading by example.
While they're at it they should vote to make PI equal to three. That would simplify an awful lot of engineering calculations.
The idea is to have something that people can maintain in the future. Maybe they didn't make the best of platform/language choices but there wasn't much else available at the time and the goal was the right one.
At least Windows is still around and can probably still run that app. If they'd chosen the "best" platform available on consumer hardware back then (maybe OS/2...) they'd have been just as badly off in the long term as if they'd stuck with MS-DOS.
I don't think they chose Linux on netbooks for the reasons you think they did.