I agree on all counts but I would add that there are other sources for ethanol than corn and some grow on arid land. One issue that's rarely discussed is that a lot of land is growing government subsidized crops that are essentially unneeded. If the land was used instead for ethanol or oil crops there would be a net gain. So long as the farmers get their subsidies they don't care what they grow. The problem usually comes down to a lack of communication between government departments. Much of the government opperates like warring camps competing for financial resources. If there was more cooperation in the government many of these problems would go away. Alternative sources are taboo because the oil companies are threatened by them. If it was simply a matter of wanting to stay on the oil standard we'd be romancing Canada for oil sand oil but the government has been ignoring the largest known source of oil. Why? Domestic oil companies have no control of that source. By invading Iraq we gained control of one of the largest current sources. It helps keep the domestic oil companies in control of the money. I hate to see the oil sands become the answer because that means a drastic increase in global warming. I hate the term global warming because it's deceptive. It's climate destabilization in truth. Notice the record cold and snow falls in Hawaii that no one in memory can remember seeing? It's part of the same effect and the global warming models predicted it. Everyone shouldn't be afraid of global warming it's the backlash which is global cooling that should make people afraid. Remember during the last round half of the US and virtually all of Canada was under an ice sheet. Europe is scared. Why aren't we? Just how many record hurricanes do we need in a year before some one wakes up and smells the CO2?
I'll bet a large percentage of the companies buying licenses are company looking to check for pirated code so they can sue Microsoft. A lot of companies have been waiting a lot of years to get their hands on that code. Unless everyone is wrong and the code is all in house developed it could be opening them up to a lot of lawsuits. It's annoying though that as part of the deal they aren't opening it up to software developers that could benefit from writing software that was more Windows friendly.
I'd feel better about investing in the company if they were taking home large paychecks. If they are taking $1 paycheck to help keep the company solvent while they selling billions in stock I'd worry about the future of the company. They don't seem too confident in the potential of the company. If they only cashed in a few mill a year to offset their loss of wages I wouldn't be concerned but they seem to be divesting as fast as they can without obviously destabilizing the stock. I'd say future earnings for the company are seriously in doubt. They certainly don't have faith.
If that data had porno website searches in it, you'd have the White House asking for it.
Only the Clinton White House. The Bush White House is opposed to sex. I think Clinton has all the adult websites book marked anyone. I true geeks President.
Damn, if getting Steamboat Willie on your Ipod for free is so important to you I think you have bigger issues here. Rather than get this worked up about free shit I'd pay the two bucks and chill. The fact you have to pay for something you want shouldn't be the end of the world.
It'll be a wonderful thing if it's ever made practical. In the meantime there's a nice big one that comes up once a day and there are practical ways to get energy from it.
From what it's saying 2% are definately invalid and 96% of the rest are legally questionable. Given the state of our legal system the majority of the patents may not hold up in court. Why does this matter? Possibly legal chaos. Every lawyer in the country could get rich trying to sort the mess out. If half the companies sue the other half of the companies in an effort to invailidate their patents we're talking legal gridlock. People may not live long enough to see legitimate cases come to trial. Hard to say what will actually happen but the potential is frightening.
Actually it does. It takes far less energy to cool a building which is already precooled and far less to maintain that temperature. Once a building warms it takes a lot of energy to cool the thermal mass. A lot has been done with things like water tanks and stone to absorb heat or cold then slowly release it. Different materials absorb heat differently. It's why iron is great for cooking because it holds heat. Ever take a piece of aluminum foil out of a hot oven? It's cool to the touch. If it had been made of iron you'd get burned. An old trick is to put an ice cube on a block of aluminum and one on a block of iron. It melts fast on the aluminum because it disperses the cold faster allowing the water to warm. The iron holds the cold in so it takes longer to melt. Buildings operate the same way. If the outside warms one degree the building will eventually have to cool itself one degree but only after the heat penitrates the insulation. The one degree of temperature rise has to heat not just the air but the mass of the building creating a buffer. If it never cooled down and you had no insulation there would be no benefit but all you need to do is delay the heating of the building until the temperature falls outside to offset most of the need to cool. It's why really well insulated buildings take less to heat and cool. They delay the transfer of heat and cold allowing for you to take advantage of natural heating and cooling as well as retaining the heat or coolness of the building by allowing less transfer.
"Yeah NASA. Could you send up another box of those extra large Band-aids? Damn Russian Statelite nailed our port side again. They really need to start making them bigger. The one meter Band-aids just aren't cutting it. Oh and no more Snoopy ones. The Europeon's are still laughing their asses off about that last batch."
Believe it or not at last word most of the motion control systems were being run on DOS. I've been out of the loop for years so it might have changed. A lot of stepper based hardware has always run on DOS. Then again early versions of Windows are pretty useless these days. Even 95 I can't see the point. Some games only run on 98 so there's still like in it. Then of coarse ME never had a reason to exist. I still have nightmares about the one install I did with it. It was an upgrade and it made most of my fonts including system ones go away. I managed to scrub it out and the magically appeared again. Win 2000 still has a lot of life left in it but NT is rapidly fading into obscurity. Some companies were hanging on with it but support is getting really sparce and support for basic things like video cards is getting hard to come by. No matter how useful it might have been eventually you have to throw in the towel and upgrade.
Cary
An actual brown dwarf isn't likely given scarce evidence but there seems to be reason to believe there are one or more large Kupier Belt objects yet to be found. I've read about gravitational anomalies for years now but they just don't seem large enough to indicate a failed star close enough to call us a near miss binary system. I guess if all the outer planets merged we'd have the makings of a brown dwarf but as we are the system seems to be one of those rare single star systems.
I'd love to see some tests with Pro Apps like Apeture and Final Cut Pro. The other telling one would be Maya for rendering. Most people don't need their word processor to run faster but higher end graphics software needs speed. The Apple tests seemed to lean on the side of graphics intensive software so I'm curious about those numbers. I did play with Apeture on one. It was a single chip dual core. Opening files and some functions hesitated but we're talking RAW files on a single chip machine. I was pretty impressed and I'm not a Mac person. I'm sure if most of that was Apeture and not the machine but it's pretty amazing either way. There definately seems to be an overall speed increase no matter who tests them. These are transitional machines and they are selling basically for what current Macs of a similar speed do. I have to believe once they settle in and the chips are better supported they will be much faster. One of the biggest benefits no one hardly talks about is hardware multitasking. I think if you started a shot rendering say in Maya then started working on a model in Modo you'd find little or no slow down if Maya was set to single node. Normally the apps would be stepping on each other. I haven't had a chance to try running multiple apps since I haven't had a chance to build out a dual chip PC system but there's a definate benefit over software multitasking. I'd give the new Mac a year to settle in before debating speed too seriously. Remember the debacle with the P4s when they came out? They cost a fortune and inspite of denials at the time turned out to be much slower because the apps weren't taking advantage of the P4 architecture. Apple switched to a whole new chipset. Having them come out faster is impressive on it's own. Even the apps that are called native I'm sure need refinements. Most of these aren't going to be optimized for dual chips. Non pro apps normally either don't take advantage or don't take full advantage. With dual core the new standard that will change.
"2007" is a funny term for "whenever we get around to it"...
Is it too early to anounce Windows 2010, which will come out in 2012 but won't perform properly until the 2015 patch but Windows 2020 should be really amazing.
This has got to be one of the more fun geek mod projects. I'm definately assembling one. Got to keep an eye out on Ebay for a suitable camera. A great new use for my notebook. I'd love to try some shots at a carnivale. The spinning rides would make for some interesting shots. I'd love to try some high res landscapes though. Could also do some stunning macro photography as well.
A Walmart was struck with an EMP weapon by terrorist. All RFID tags were wiped out causing chaos. No longer able to track customers purchases the marketing department has applied for disaster relief funds. The White House responded and FEMA was on the scene within the hour to help in the replacement of the lost tags. The President stated that allowing the customers to go untracked was a major victory for the terrorist and the situation must be resolved as quickly as possible. Haliburton is expected to deliver the new tags before the store opens tomorrow. The 50 billion dollar RFID tag replacement program was considered a bargin given the potential loss to the Walmart marketing department.
If the Robo-Cops hits the streets, the invention of small EMP grenades won't be too far behind. As an American citizen, do I have the constitutional right to bear EMP grenades? Or would EMP grenades fall into the same classification as regular explosive grenades?
Two problems with that senerio. First EMP weapons at last word were still a rumor even for the military. If they do exist they would bulky and probably produce a fair amount of radiation. It isn't that easy to produce a field strong enough to knock out electronics.
The other issue is if that were a risk it's possible to harden hardware electronics from EMP fields. A lot of military hardware is already. I'd be real surprised if it was ever possible to produce an EMP gernade. In some ways it's not that different than trying to make a nuclear hand gernade. They may have had them in Starship Troopers but they don't exist in the real world and there's no way to make one with current understanding of physics. Even the brief case bombs were never proven and those are considerably larger than a handgernade. I tend to believe they are possible from what I've read and seen but I'm not 100% convinced one has been made.
There's far easier ways to take out a robot than an EMP bomb. Part of the draw back to most battle robots are they aren't really that tough. You'll notice most have stuck with a wheeled or tank tread approach. Wheels and tank treads are tougher and more efficent than walking machines. A two or four legged robot would have the same frailties as well as advantages of an animal with the same number of legs. The biggest problem always is trying to make motors small enough and strong enough to make walking possible. Equalling a human for strength, speed and endurance is far harder than it looks and it's a very long way to the bionic man.
Already the leaders stay home and play armchair warfare. Next step is the soldiers stay home and play war like a video game. It's been around for years folks, it's called Robot Wars. I say the leaders of each country build the best fighting robot then they can duke it out and nobody gets hurt and we save billions of dollars. Got a border dispute? Whoever can build the best fighting machine wins? It levels the playing field, saves time and money and by far the most important it saves lives. Don't like a level playing field? Try talking out your problems like civilized people do.
There are vast amounts of copper and other valueable materials in the dumps around the world. Eventually the dumps will be gold mines given many of the materials like copper are recyclable. It's not that copper is so rare but it's been cheaper than it should have been. What it really means is our technological society depends on cheap copper like cheap oil. Oil won't run out in our lifetimes and neither will copper but but it will go up drastically in price. It may not affect the price of electronic components that use realitively little copper but it will have an affect on things like power lines. It may not be practical one day to build vast infastructures of copper lines. Localized power would solve that problem and is another reason solar may not not be a solution but it can help. Copper pipes will be one of the first to go once copper gets scarce. Pastic in some ways works better these days. Copper isn't the new gold or silver but it could it could go up three or four fold in our lifetimes which is enough to change everything.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree on all counts but I would add that there are other sources for ethanol than corn and some grow on arid land. One issue that's rarely discussed is that a lot of land is growing government subsidized crops that are essentially unneeded. If the land was used instead for ethanol or oil crops there would be a net gain. So long as the farmers get their subsidies they don't care what they grow. The problem usually comes down to a lack of communication between government departments. Much of the government opperates like warring camps competing for financial resources. If there was more cooperation in the government many of these problems would go away. Alternative sources are taboo because the oil companies are threatened by them. If it was simply a matter of wanting to stay on the oil standard we'd be romancing Canada for oil sand oil but the government has been ignoring the largest known source of oil. Why? Domestic oil companies have no control of that source. By invading Iraq we gained control of one of the largest current sources. It helps keep the domestic oil companies in control of the money. I hate to see the oil sands become the answer because that means a drastic increase in global warming. I hate the term global warming because it's deceptive. It's climate destabilization in truth. Notice the record cold and snow falls in Hawaii that no one in memory can remember seeing? It's part of the same effect and the global warming models predicted it. Everyone shouldn't be afraid of global warming it's the backlash which is global cooling that should make people afraid. Remember during the last round half of the US and virtually all of Canada was under an ice sheet. Europe is scared. Why aren't we? Just how many record hurricanes do we need in a year before some one wakes up and smells the CO2?
I'll bet a large percentage of the companies buying licenses are company looking to check for pirated code so they can sue Microsoft. A lot of companies have been waiting a lot of years to get their hands on that code. Unless everyone is wrong and the code is all in house developed it could be opening them up to a lot of lawsuits. It's annoying though that as part of the deal they aren't opening it up to software developers that could benefit from writing software that was more Windows friendly.
I'd feel better about investing in the company if they were taking home large paychecks. If they are taking $1 paycheck to help keep the company solvent while they selling billions in stock I'd worry about the future of the company. They don't seem too confident in the potential of the company. If they only cashed in a few mill a year to offset their loss of wages I wouldn't be concerned but they seem to be divesting as fast as they can without obviously destabilizing the stock. I'd say future earnings for the company are seriously in doubt. They certainly don't have faith.
Only the Clinton White House. The Bush White House is opposed to sex. I think Clinton has all the adult websites book marked anyone. I true geeks President.
A new item has shown up on Ebay, Blackberry paperweights.
Hope he hasn't got any greedy family members. The lawyers will end up with it all when the jackals decend.
I sense a beer drinker. If they ever come up with a way to turn fine British beer into Budwiser I'll let you know.
Damn, if getting Steamboat Willie on your Ipod for free is so important to you I think you have bigger issues here. Rather than get this worked up about free shit I'd pay the two bucks and chill. The fact you have to pay for something you want shouldn't be the end of the world.
It'll be a wonderful thing if it's ever made practical. In the meantime there's a nice big one that comes up once a day and there are practical ways to get energy from it.
From what it's saying 2% are definately invalid and 96% of the rest are legally questionable. Given the state of our legal system the majority of the patents may not hold up in court. Why does this matter? Possibly legal chaos. Every lawyer in the country could get rich trying to sort the mess out. If half the companies sue the other half of the companies in an effort to invailidate their patents we're talking legal gridlock. People may not live long enough to see legitimate cases come to trial. Hard to say what will actually happen but the potential is frightening.
Actually it does. It takes far less energy to cool a building which is already precooled and far less to maintain that temperature. Once a building warms it takes a lot of energy to cool the thermal mass. A lot has been done with things like water tanks and stone to absorb heat or cold then slowly release it. Different materials absorb heat differently. It's why iron is great for cooking because it holds heat. Ever take a piece of aluminum foil out of a hot oven? It's cool to the touch. If it had been made of iron you'd get burned. An old trick is to put an ice cube on a block of aluminum and one on a block of iron. It melts fast on the aluminum because it disperses the cold faster allowing the water to warm. The iron holds the cold in so it takes longer to melt. Buildings operate the same way. If the outside warms one degree the building will eventually have to cool itself one degree but only after the heat penitrates the insulation. The one degree of temperature rise has to heat not just the air but the mass of the building creating a buffer. If it never cooled down and you had no insulation there would be no benefit but all you need to do is delay the heating of the building until the temperature falls outside to offset most of the need to cool. It's why really well insulated buildings take less to heat and cool. They delay the transfer of heat and cold allowing for you to take advantage of natural heating and cooling as well as retaining the heat or coolness of the building by allowing less transfer.
The last place I worked had evaporative cooling. Basically you'd sweat and the sweat evaporating would cool you. Fans improve the efficentcy.
There's some radical religious right professors that should be outed.
"Yeah NASA. Could you send up another box of those extra large Band-aids? Damn Russian Statelite nailed our port side again. They really need to start making them bigger. The one meter Band-aids just aren't cutting it. Oh and no more Snoopy ones. The Europeon's are still laughing their asses off about that last batch."
Believe it or not at last word most of the motion control systems were being run on DOS. I've been out of the loop for years so it might have changed. A lot of stepper based hardware has always run on DOS. Then again early versions of Windows are pretty useless these days. Even 95 I can't see the point. Some games only run on 98 so there's still like in it. Then of coarse ME never had a reason to exist. I still have nightmares about the one install I did with it. It was an upgrade and it made most of my fonts including system ones go away. I managed to scrub it out and the magically appeared again. Win 2000 still has a lot of life left in it but NT is rapidly fading into obscurity. Some companies were hanging on with it but support is getting really sparce and support for basic things like video cards is getting hard to come by. No matter how useful it might have been eventually you have to throw in the towel and upgrade. Cary
An actual brown dwarf isn't likely given scarce evidence but there seems to be reason to believe there are one or more large Kupier Belt objects yet to be found. I've read about gravitational anomalies for years now but they just don't seem large enough to indicate a failed star close enough to call us a near miss binary system. I guess if all the outer planets merged we'd have the makings of a brown dwarf but as we are the system seems to be one of those rare single star systems.
I'd love to see some tests with Pro Apps like Apeture and Final Cut Pro. The other telling one would be Maya for rendering. Most people don't need their word processor to run faster but higher end graphics software needs speed. The Apple tests seemed to lean on the side of graphics intensive software so I'm curious about those numbers. I did play with Apeture on one. It was a single chip dual core. Opening files and some functions hesitated but we're talking RAW files on a single chip machine. I was pretty impressed and I'm not a Mac person. I'm sure if most of that was Apeture and not the machine but it's pretty amazing either way. There definately seems to be an overall speed increase no matter who tests them. These are transitional machines and they are selling basically for what current Macs of a similar speed do. I have to believe once they settle in and the chips are better supported they will be much faster. One of the biggest benefits no one hardly talks about is hardware multitasking. I think if you started a shot rendering say in Maya then started working on a model in Modo you'd find little or no slow down if Maya was set to single node. Normally the apps would be stepping on each other. I haven't had a chance to try running multiple apps since I haven't had a chance to build out a dual chip PC system but there's a definate benefit over software multitasking. I'd give the new Mac a year to settle in before debating speed too seriously. Remember the debacle with the P4s when they came out? They cost a fortune and inspite of denials at the time turned out to be much slower because the apps weren't taking advantage of the P4 architecture. Apple switched to a whole new chipset. Having them come out faster is impressive on it's own. Even the apps that are called native I'm sure need refinements. Most of these aren't going to be optimized for dual chips. Non pro apps normally either don't take advantage or don't take full advantage. With dual core the new standard that will change.
Is it too early to anounce Windows 2010, which will come out in 2012 but won't perform properly until the 2015 patch but Windows 2020 should be really amazing.
Is there 11 channels of porn?
This has got to be one of the more fun geek mod projects. I'm definately assembling one. Got to keep an eye out on Ebay for a suitable camera. A great new use for my notebook. I'd love to try some shots at a carnivale. The spinning rides would make for some interesting shots. I'd love to try some high res landscapes though. Could also do some stunning macro photography as well.
A Walmart was struck with an EMP weapon by terrorist. All RFID tags were wiped out causing chaos. No longer able to track customers purchases the marketing department has applied for disaster relief funds. The White House responded and FEMA was on the scene within the hour to help in the replacement of the lost tags. The President stated that allowing the customers to go untracked was a major victory for the terrorist and the situation must be resolved as quickly as possible. Haliburton is expected to deliver the new tags before the store opens tomorrow. The 50 billion dollar RFID tag replacement program was considered a bargin given the potential loss to the Walmart marketing department.
Two problems with that senerio. First EMP weapons at last word were still a rumor even for the military. If they do exist they would bulky and probably produce a fair amount of radiation. It isn't that easy to produce a field strong enough to knock out electronics.
The other issue is if that were a risk it's possible to harden hardware electronics from EMP fields. A lot of military hardware is already. I'd be real surprised if it was ever possible to produce an EMP gernade. In some ways it's not that different than trying to make a nuclear hand gernade. They may have had them in Starship Troopers but they don't exist in the real world and there's no way to make one with current understanding of physics. Even the brief case bombs were never proven and those are considerably larger than a handgernade. I tend to believe they are possible from what I've read and seen but I'm not 100% convinced one has been made.
There's far easier ways to take out a robot than an EMP bomb. Part of the draw back to most battle robots are they aren't really that tough. You'll notice most have stuck with a wheeled or tank tread approach. Wheels and tank treads are tougher and more efficent than walking machines. A two or four legged robot would have the same frailties as well as advantages of an animal with the same number of legs. The biggest problem always is trying to make motors small enough and strong enough to make walking possible. Equalling a human for strength, speed and endurance is far harder than it looks and it's a very long way to the bionic man.
Already the leaders stay home and play armchair warfare. Next step is the soldiers stay home and play war like a video game. It's been around for years folks, it's called Robot Wars. I say the leaders of each country build the best fighting robot then they can duke it out and nobody gets hurt and we save billions of dollars. Got a border dispute? Whoever can build the best fighting machine wins? It levels the playing field, saves time and money and by far the most important it saves lives. Don't like a level playing field? Try talking out your problems like civilized people do.
A picture of Michael Jackson revealed something truly shocking. He is in fact black. Apparently the rumors were true.
There are vast amounts of copper and other valueable materials in the dumps around the world. Eventually the dumps will be gold mines given many of the materials like copper are recyclable. It's not that copper is so rare but it's been cheaper than it should have been. What it really means is our technological society depends on cheap copper like cheap oil. Oil won't run out in our lifetimes and neither will copper but but it will go up drastically in price. It may not affect the price of electronic components that use realitively little copper but it will have an affect on things like power lines. It may not be practical one day to build vast infastructures of copper lines. Localized power would solve that problem and is another reason solar may not not be a solution but it can help. Copper pipes will be one of the first to go once copper gets scarce. Pastic in some ways works better these days. Copper isn't the new gold or silver but it could it could go up three or four fold in our lifetimes which is enough to change everything.