Re:Innovation? Yes. Better than a scooter? No.
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Is there some huge group of uncoordinated retards who cant operate a scooter or a car but can ride an IT?
Yes, there are. This is not actually news; stories about IT's true nature were available a week or so after the hype began. (I submitted, but apparently/. is none too interested in getting news out before its generally available.) Kamen is best known for his medical inventions: for example, he came up with the first wearable infusion pump, a Godsend to a certain type of diabetic who must have a steady influx of insulin to function well. In the earlier stories, IT was discussed as a mobility device for the handicapped, and although that's not the focus of the recent announcements its pretty clear that you could adjust the thing for a person with limited mobility by tweaking some of the control parameters.
The disabled, such as my 5-year-old son who suffers from Cerebral Palsy, are most often not retarded, but due to their limitations are indeed unable to operate a scooter or a car. IT may be just the thing for them. (And let me tell you, at $3000 it is priced very competitively with ordinary motorized wheelchairs.)
I would love to have the Coke/Jolt/Whoop Ass concession at this thing.
Not to mention the pay-urinal concession. Get
'em coming and going!
But not the condom concession. All those boys, and not a single one of them is going to get laid any time soon. The only use for those things in this picture are as balloons.
Although this isn't ethical or legal, it's hardly in the same ballpark as downloading MP3s. In the case of music, the people doing the stealing are getting something that's close enough in quality to the original that many of them can't tell the difference. In other words, they're stealing what the RIAA has to sell. In the case of movies, you have to degrade the quality of the picture so much that it's not even close. Yes, its still unethical, but not even the MPAA can make the argument that it's hurting DVD sales. No one who wants a DVD-quality picture is going to be satisfied with the same movie compressed down to 700MB. I sure as hell wouldn't be.
I'm not defending these foobs, I'm just saying that what they're doing isn't on the same scale as what's happening with music.
DeCSS? Explicitly developed to enable playing DVDs on Open Source computers with DVD drives. It's hardly practical to share full-length movies over networks or even to store them locally on hard drives -- although you should note that the latter use is not infringing. I for one can't think of a single use for DeCSS that's infringing under the traditional doctrine of fair use, given the current practical technological limitations. It may well be in violation of the DMCA, but that's a seriously broken law that undermines rights that consumers of intellectual property have enjoyed for a very long time. The DMCA isn't Norweigian law, anyway.
Skylarov? His product is entirely legal in the country where he wrote it. In fact, without his company's product it's Adobe's software that's illegal. It's against the law to erect technological barriers to fair use in Russia, but that's what Adobe's so-called encryption does. It's his company that ought to have been held accountable for marketing the product in the US where it was illegal; Skylarov himself as an employee had nothing to do with that. If he's guilty of anything, it's of demonstrating that Adobe's claims about the security of their encryption scheme was a total crock. Embarrassing corporations isn't illegal -- yet.
Peer-to-peer networks? All of them run on top of the Internet, which, in the event you haven't noticed, is one vast peer-to-peer network designed for freely sharing information. None of the other indexing schemes for available information, such as Gopher or even some web pages, are not fundamentally different from networks like Gnutella.
From chrisd: I bet anyday that the RIAA will sue cisco for making routers that could be used to infringe.
The RIAA is very careful to only pick on groups that can't afford better lawyers than they can. I wish they would sue; Cisco might well succeed in creating some sort of binding precedent that would put a stop to all this nonsense. The RIAA will never do that, of course...
Why does everyone insist that life has to be _exactly_ like the life that we know of.
That's not an insistence that's being made anywhere in this discussion, so I don't know who you mean by "everyone". The discussion is limited by restricting it to life as we know it, but there are very good reasons for that.
First, lets be clear what is meant by "life as we know it." It does not mean life-forms that are similar to one or more species known on earth, and it most certainly does not mean similar to us. We can be fairly confident that we'd be able to recognize any life that's chemically similar to terrestrial life -- that is, based on organic molecules similar to nucleic acids and proteins. If we find proteins, we can assign a high probability to the presence of life.
That's life as we know it, regardless of anatomy. It's the only kind of life we know about by direct observation. All else is speculation, even if backed up by credible chemistry.
Life as we know it can exist in any number of environments where it would be impossible for us to survive. Life most likely came to be on Earth in such an environment. But there are certain limits on what this environment can be like, and one of them is that liquid water must be present, or must have been present at one time. Where liquid water does not and never has been present, life as we know it cannot exist.
This may not be true for life as we don't know it. But that's the thing: we don't know! If we can't assume that it doesn't exist, we can't assume that it does exist either. Carbon-based life is the only kind we have ever observed. All else is speculation, and science is heavily biased away from speculation and towards observation. You can construct all the hypotheses you'd like; they can all be demolished with hard data no matter how reasonable they sound.
Given that, life as we know it is the only kind we can really talk about, until we actually observe some other kind of life. Surely it's useless to make guesses about whether or not this kind of life might be present when we can say nothing about the kinds of environments it requires. If it did exist, the only thing we know for sure about it is that Earth's environment is hostile to it. We do not have a single terrestrial example of non-organic life.
Well, I have always been amused by anyone that says it is impossible or even "highly unlikely" that another Earth-type planet exists (size, atmosphere, etc.).
I'm glad you have a source of amusement, but that's not what I said. I was speaking strictly of the planetary systems we've actually observed. In an area such as this where all opinions are pure speculation, it's foolish to disregard such data as we have. At the same time it's important to recognize that the type of systems we're seeing are largely artifacts of our limitations. We do not yet know how to see planets the size of Earth in other systems. They may well exist; they may well be common. Until we look for them somehow, we have no way of knowing one way or the other.
But having said that, I should point out that Earth is only "proof positive" of its own existence. At least one such planet exists; we have absolutely no data to say one way or another how much we can generalize from this (so far) unique example.
The universe is just big enough for possibility to cross over into probability.
By that argument, we should not be too surprised if one day we encounter a world consisting of a flat disk supported by four elephants standing on the back of a very large turtle.
We are probably surrounded by many planets with an atmosphere.
We certainly are. The only planets in our own Solar System that lack atmospheres are Mercury and Pluto, assuming you're among those that still count Pluto as a planet and not a gargantuan comet.
If you mean other planetary systems, then we have no data to say one way or another. We have no techniques for detecting extra-Solar planets smaller than Jupiter.
If a solar system is capable of having a Jupiter type planet, what about an Earth type planet? It isn't THAT far of a stretch.
If by "Earth type planet" you mean a relatively small rocky body rather than a gas giant, you're probably right. If you mean a planet capable of supporting life as we know it, then it is a bit of a stretch, at least in the planetary systems we've actually observed. If Jupiter were much closer to the Sun than it is, conditions on Earth would be far different than they are -- that is, if Earth existed at all. It may well be that it was Jupiter's influence that prevented a planet from forming where the asteroid belt is now. The Jupiter-like planets we've seen in other systems are generally far closer to the Sun than Jupiter is. No terrestrial planets are likely to exist inside their orbits. Outside their orbits it would be too cold for liquid water to exist.
The snap, crackle, and pop is dead easy to hear, and *entirely* absent from CD's.
But at least you get a few good plays out of vinyl.(More actually, if you maintain it properly.) CDs start out by sounding nothing at all like live music. I know there are a great many people who can't tell the difference. You're one of them? Great! Just don't go around telling everyone who can tell the difference they're wrong.
FWIW, no sound system really compares with a live performance, which is why I don't really understand audiophiles who spend enough on their sound systems to pay a string quartet to give weekly performances in their houses. And much recorded music is so over-produced that the recording medium really doesn't make much difference, so in most cases the question is probably moot. But not always.
I'm going to jump on the bandwagon of people telling you you're more full of shit than a Christmas turkey, as my dad would put it. The "people who claimed years ago that vinyls were so much better sounding than CDs" are still claiming that today, and they're right. Don't pay attention to the numbers, listen to the music! Vinyl has always sounded more like the real thing than CDs, and you don't need "golden ears" (or ears made out of any other metal, for that matter) to tell. Yes, a CD is theoretically better than vinyl when it comes to S/N ratio and dynamic range, but this superiority is almost always overcome by the losses inherent in the process of converting an analog signal to digital.
It's rather disingenuous of you to say that the audio on vinyl is compressed. It is, but not in the same sense as an MP3 is a compressed digital audio signal, so your statement is misleading. In this case it means that the dynamic range has been flattened a bit, and on pop music vinyl this was generally done to increase the average level of the music, based on the idea that louder music sold better. But they do this with CDs too for no apparent reason, and to the detriment of the quality of the sound -- in fact, the practise erases the increased dynamic range that's the primary advantage of CDs over vinyl as far as I'm concerned.
I wish the popular science article had been more specific or verbose in how the whole thing would be engineered. My guess is that they'll have to somehow separate the soil from the bacterial colonies and burn the colony to collect the pure metal. The metal can then be recycled or stored safely. Separating the soil from the bacteria though is going to be very difficult.
According to the article, an artificial wetland will be constructed and the bacteria will be seeded into the layer of organic material at the bottom of the water. Runoff from the mines will be directed into the wetland and the bacteria will bind the metal. The article doesn't say, but the presumption is that the metal will remain trapped in the organic layer, and it should remain there even after the bacteria die, especially after it gets covered with new layers of sediment and organic material.
The main goal isn't necessarily to remove the metal from the environment completely -- this is mining country; the presence of metals in the environment is why they began mining there in the first place -- but to keep it contained and out of the groundwater. The main obstacle I see is keeping mine runoff confined to the wetland and keeping the wetland itself well-supplied with beer and SRB. How long does Harris propose to keep feeding it, anyway?
Now if only they can do something about the sinkholes, which is a very serious physical danger to the community.
Yeah, I remember all that, and actually had to work on an Osborne for a while. The only reason that particular job was boring was because what was supposed to be a programming job turned into a data entry marathon, with a PHB undeterred by the fact that it was brainless work that could have been done by someone earning half of what he was paying me.
Other than that, I was neither bored nor frustrated at the time, much less so than I am now in these enlightened times. Perhaps you need to be more explicit about your point here; I frankly don't see it.
Anyone who remembers computing in the early '80's should recognize that the industry wasn't going anywhere.
I worked for a shop that made most of its money selling CP/M boxes with customized software back in the early '80s, and what you say here is completely wrong. The industry was going great guns. There were dozens of players in every conceivable niche of the market, and some of them did very well for themselves indeed. Remember Altos? Eagle? Lotus? DBase II? Apple?
True, the market was a bit more fragmented than it is now. If you worked someplace that had a small system doing the bookkeeping, it probably ran CP/M or MP/M. When you went home, if you had a computer, it was probably an Apple, Commodore, TRS-80, or some such. There wasn't the crossover you see today. But so what?
It was the pairing of M$'s DOS with IBM PCs, and an open policy towards clones, that allowed the explosion of PCs seen in the mid-80's.
No. I remember clearly the introduction of the IBM PC. Sure, it had a 16-bit processor, but it also had an architecture that largely failed to take advantage of it, and there were huge libraries of existing products for 8-bit CP/M machines. The IBM PC took over the market for one reason alone: the nameplate. It was a trusim in those days that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and it overcame the reluctance of many organizations for adopting small computers.
The OS? Obviously a CP/M ripoff of some kind, and completely irrelevant to the decision to buy.
While Gates is hardly responsible for coming up with the idea of Open Source, he was certainly a key person in the expansion of the computer industry.
Nope. He was a key player in the contraction of the computer software industry, at least in terms of the number of major players. ("Major player" being defined as companies with a significant percentage of market share, not in terms of absolute size.) The dominance of MS in the software market will, I'm sure, be cited someday in economics textbooks as a classic case of market failure through the application of unfair and predatory business practises. Learn for yourself what happened to DR-DOS, just to mention one early competitor in the field of PC operating systems.
If we still had to use machine language and punch cards, there wouldn't be open source.
I programmed on a variety of boxes before MS came along, and I never once had to resort to either machine language or punch cards. And none of the users for any software I ever developed needed to be particularly sophisitcated, either. As it turned out, you didn't need to be a genius to use a menu-driven system.
Gates' comments were perhaps worded less specifically than they should have been, but the Open Source community is likely also guilty of jumping on the comment more than necessary.
The "Open Source community" should do whatever it takes to keep BG honest.
Re:Not to sound like an asshole, but...
on
Message from Kabul
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· Score: 2
What business is it of ours how women are treated in Afghanistan?
I think Marley's Ghost said it best:
'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'
Besides, it's not as simple as know-nothings such as yourself would have it. Try looking into conditions for women in Afghanistan before the Taliban arrived before issuing pronouncements on what they'd choose for themselves given the chance.
Your examples demolish the point you're trying to make. You might not have been stupid, but plenty of others were. Did you say "no" to projects with patently unsound business plans? Great! But there were obviously lots of people, including VCs, who said "yes" instead. Of course you had to think about it! Would that more people in your position had done the same thing!
That's not luck. That's smarts. You had them. It's clear that a great many people did not.
Y'know, this is high school physics. (Or ought to be; it was when I was a teenager.) You never float about because of a "lack of gravity." Similarly, you don't really need gravity to plant your feet firmly on the ground. What you need is acceleration. The force that supplies this acceleration is irrelevant to the effect. In the neighborhood of a massive body like the Earth, the force of gravity provides it. On orbit, an astronaut floats around not because there's no gravity -- there obviously is; that's why his spacecraft is orbiting instead of flying away -- but because his entire frame of reference, including the floor he would otherwise be standing on, is being accelerated at the same rate towards the center of the Earth. The craft remains in orbit instead of falling because it begins with enough "horizontal" velocity to "miss" the earth by the radius of the orbit, to put it in the simplest possible terms. Orbits decay when something acts on the "horizontal" velocity to decrease it. That's why the best way to achieve re-entry isn't to aim your vehicle at the earth, but to slow it down. Eventually, it slows down enough so that it no longer "misses". Vehicles in low orbits can have their orbits decay from the very small amount of air resistance due to the tenuous upper atmosphere they're within. Lacking air resistance or some other kind of force to slow it down, a vehicle can stay in orbit indefinitely.
Horizontal is in quotes above because it's not quite the right word. More properly, it's a velocity vector normal (or perpendicular) to the acceleration vector. Since the direction of the acceleration vector keeps changing as the position of the vehicle changes, the velocity vector keeps changing too -- as it must; there's an acceleration acting on it. The equations to compute the initial velocity needed to keep a vehicle in orbit at a particular altitude are not complex.
This is exactly the same physics that keeps the Earth orbiting the Sun and the Moon orbiting the Earth, just on a smaller scale.
The writers of Star Trek never understood how this worked. In TOS there were a number of episodes where the engines had been damaged or sabotaged and the orbit was somehow rapidly decaying. Only a moron would have put them into such a low orbit that it needed constant thrust from the engines to maintain it in the first place.
"Weightlessness" is also achievable by falling at the same acceleration imposed by the force of gravity. For the Earth, that's about 9.8 m/sec^2. Astronauts train at weightlessness for brief periods by doing just that -- they get into a specially modified cargo plane, fly up as high as it will go, then pull into a steep dive. They float around inside the plane just as they would on orbit for as long as the dive lasts.
The balloon will never be travelling anywhere near fast enought for any of this to occur.
Um... I am the poster. The question asked by btellier was about why the proposed scheme has not already been done. The answer is that it was not intended as a hydrogen-cracking facility, but as an electrical generation station. I chose to answer the question in terms of why this method is not widely used to generate electricity -- there is, in fact, only a single experimental plant off the coast of Hawaii. Producing hydrogen with it has not yet been suggested, mostly because there's not a very large market for hydrogen and current methods meed the demand adequately. Obviously that will change should hydrogen suddenly become the fuel of choice. The problem is that although it's the most common element in the universe, it's rare in elemental form on Earth, so energy must be expended to separate it from the compounds its found in. Hydrogen thus becomes a method of energy *storage* but cannot itself be an energy *source*. It's therefore a good idea to find methods of producing it that draw on entirely new sources of energy if we are ever to cut back or eliminate the use of fossil fuels. OTEC is one possible method.
OTEC is fairly limited as an electrical generation plant, which is what it was originally conceived as, because it really needs to be situated in tropical waters to work well. There's an experimental plant off the coast of Hawaii, which admittedly doesn't produce any net power largely because it's made from parts designed for other purposes and so operates suboptimally. (Its primary purpose right now is to validate a particular design of heat exchanger.) But the location requirements imposes insuperable tramsmission obstacles. It's just not practical to transmit the electricity from tropical oceans to the industrialized countries that need the power.
Hydrogen doesn't have that limitation, but it's also not now a mainstream power source. If proton exchange membrane fuel cells come into common use, that will undoubtedly change. But as things are, it's just not profitable enough to make it worth the capital investment.
I work for Lockheed Martin. Many years before the merger that created this company, when I worked for what was then called Lockheed Missiles & Space Co., there was a series of articles in the company rag talking about a technology we were developing that generated electricity from the temperature differential between shallow and deep seawater. This was back in the early 1980's. The process is called OTEC for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, and there's a a bit of information about it available online.
Such a plant could generate enough electricity to pump seawater up and crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. It would be a whole hell of a lot cleaner than oil rigs on offshore platforms, and could in fact be set up on oil platforms in tropical regions (like the Gulf of Mexico) that no longer produce enough crude oil to be profitable, or that must be shut down over environmental concerns. OTEC plants are very clean, very safe, and fairly inexpensive to run. They could be a viable method for producing hydrogen almost for free.
My information was from dead tree publications, so I had to do a little Google search here to turn up something on the web. The positions of the continents can be reconstructed at any period in history here. An elementary reference on paleoclimates can be found here. That last site appears to require IE to view all available features.
As a side note-it is my understanding that CO2 levels during the time of the dinosaurs were much higher than they are today. The Earth can handle huge changes with relatively little environmental impact.
Actually, the environment at the time of the dinosaurs was hugely different. Earth had no polar ice caps, and the continents were arranged differently. In the dinosarus' heyday around the middle of the Jurassic, the Atlantic Ocean didn't exist. The bulk of the land was grouped into an enormous crescent surrounding what is now the Indian Ocean. The coasts were warm and humid; the continental interior was desert. It was a world utterly unlike that we live in today, and we probably could not have flourished in it.
There's a guy on eBay who sells older Alpha hardware. They're mostly build-it-yourself systems, though, and don't always conform to any standard PC formfactor, so YMMV greatly.
Other Alpha systems are also not difficult to locate in eBay's Computer section. Just do a search on "alpha". The machines of interest aren't difficult to locate in the results, as there are rarely more than 4 pages' worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there are. This is not actually news; stories about IT's true nature were available a week or so after the hype began. (I submitted, but apparently /. is none too interested in getting news out before its generally available.) Kamen is best known for his medical inventions: for example, he came up with the first wearable infusion pump, a Godsend to a certain type of diabetic who must have a steady influx of insulin to function well. In the earlier stories, IT was discussed as a mobility device for the handicapped, and although that's not the focus of the recent announcements its pretty clear that you could adjust the thing for a person with limited mobility by tweaking some of the control parameters.
The disabled, such as my 5-year-old son who suffers from Cerebral Palsy, are most often not retarded, but due to their limitations are indeed unable to operate a scooter or a car. IT may be just the thing for them. (And let me tell you, at $3000 it is priced very competitively with ordinary motorized wheelchairs.)
I'm not defending these foobs, I'm just saying that what they're doing isn't on the same scale as what's happening with music.
DeCSS? Explicitly developed to enable playing DVDs on Open Source computers with DVD drives. It's hardly practical to share full-length movies over networks or even to store them locally on hard drives -- although you should note that the latter use is not infringing. I for one can't think of a single use for DeCSS that's infringing under the traditional doctrine of fair use, given the current practical technological limitations. It may well be in violation of the DMCA, but that's a seriously broken law that undermines rights that consumers of intellectual property have enjoyed for a very long time. The DMCA isn't Norweigian law, anyway.
Skylarov? His product is entirely legal in the country where he wrote it. In fact, without his company's product it's Adobe's software that's illegal. It's against the law to erect technological barriers to fair use in Russia, but that's what Adobe's so-called encryption does. It's his company that ought to have been held accountable for marketing the product in the US where it was illegal; Skylarov himself as an employee had nothing to do with that. If he's guilty of anything, it's of demonstrating that Adobe's claims about the security of their encryption scheme was a total crock. Embarrassing corporations isn't illegal -- yet.
Peer-to-peer networks? All of them run on top of the Internet, which, in the event you haven't noticed, is one vast peer-to-peer network designed for freely sharing information. None of the other indexing schemes for available information, such as Gopher or even some web pages, are not fundamentally different from networks like Gnutella.
The RIAA is very careful to only pick on groups that can't afford better lawyers than they can. I wish they would sue; Cisco might well succeed in creating some sort of binding precedent that would put a stop to all this nonsense. The RIAA will never do that, of course...
That's not an insistence that's being made anywhere in this discussion, so I don't know who you mean by "everyone". The discussion is limited by restricting it to life as we know it, but there are very good reasons for that.
First, lets be clear what is meant by "life as we know it." It does not mean life-forms that are similar to one or more species known on earth, and it most certainly does not mean similar to us. We can be fairly confident that we'd be able to recognize any life that's chemically similar to terrestrial life -- that is, based on organic molecules similar to nucleic acids and proteins. If we find proteins, we can assign a high probability to the presence of life.
That's life as we know it, regardless of anatomy. It's the only kind of life we know about by direct observation. All else is speculation, even if backed up by credible chemistry.
Life as we know it can exist in any number of environments where it would be impossible for us to survive. Life most likely came to be on Earth in such an environment. But there are certain limits on what this environment can be like, and one of them is that liquid water must be present, or must have been present at one time. Where liquid water does not and never has been present, life as we know it cannot exist.
This may not be true for life as we don't know it. But that's the thing: we don't know! If we can't assume that it doesn't exist, we can't assume that it does exist either. Carbon-based life is the only kind we have ever observed. All else is speculation, and science is heavily biased away from speculation and towards observation. You can construct all the hypotheses you'd like; they can all be demolished with hard data no matter how reasonable they sound.
Given that, life as we know it is the only kind we can really talk about, until we actually observe some other kind of life. Surely it's useless to make guesses about whether or not this kind of life might be present when we can say nothing about the kinds of environments it requires. If it did exist, the only thing we know for sure about it is that Earth's environment is hostile to it. We do not have a single terrestrial example of non-organic life.
Do I date myself if I say that Pluto didn't have an atmosphere when I was learning about Solar astronomy for the first time?
I'm glad you have a source of amusement, but that's not what I said. I was speaking strictly of the planetary systems we've actually observed. In an area such as this where all opinions are pure speculation, it's foolish to disregard such data as we have. At the same time it's important to recognize that the type of systems we're seeing are largely artifacts of our limitations. We do not yet know how to see planets the size of Earth in other systems. They may well exist; they may well be common. Until we look for them somehow, we have no way of knowing one way or the other.
But having said that, I should point out that Earth is only "proof positive" of its own existence. At least one such planet exists; we have absolutely no data to say one way or another how much we can generalize from this (so far) unique example.
The universe is just big enough for possibility to cross over into probability.
By that argument, we should not be too surprised if one day we encounter a world consisting of a flat disk supported by four elephants standing on the back of a very large turtle.
We certainly are. The only planets in our own Solar System that lack atmospheres are Mercury and Pluto, assuming you're among those that still count Pluto as a planet and not a gargantuan comet.
If you mean other planetary systems, then we have no data to say one way or another. We have no techniques for detecting extra-Solar planets smaller than Jupiter.
If a solar system is capable of having a Jupiter type planet, what about an Earth type planet? It isn't THAT far of a stretch.
If by "Earth type planet" you mean a relatively small rocky body rather than a gas giant, you're probably right. If you mean a planet capable of supporting life as we know it, then it is a bit of a stretch, at least in the planetary systems we've actually observed. If Jupiter were much closer to the Sun than it is, conditions on Earth would be far different than they are -- that is, if Earth existed at all. It may well be that it was Jupiter's influence that prevented a planet from forming where the asteroid belt is now. The Jupiter-like planets we've seen in other systems are generally far closer to the Sun than Jupiter is. No terrestrial planets are likely to exist inside their orbits. Outside their orbits it would be too cold for liquid water to exist.
But at least you get a few good plays out of vinyl.(More actually, if you maintain it properly.) CDs start out by sounding nothing at all like live music. I know there are a great many people who can't tell the difference. You're one of them? Great! Just don't go around telling everyone who can tell the difference they're wrong.
FWIW, no sound system really compares with a live performance, which is why I don't really understand audiophiles who spend enough on their sound systems to pay a string quartet to give weekly performances in their houses. And much recorded music is so over-produced that the recording medium really doesn't make much difference, so in most cases the question is probably moot. But not always.
It's rather disingenuous of you to say that the audio on vinyl is compressed. It is, but not in the same sense as an MP3 is a compressed digital audio signal, so your statement is misleading. In this case it means that the dynamic range has been flattened a bit, and on pop music vinyl this was generally done to increase the average level of the music, based on the idea that louder music sold better. But they do this with CDs too for no apparent reason, and to the detriment of the quality of the sound -- in fact, the practise erases the increased dynamic range that's the primary advantage of CDs over vinyl as far as I'm concerned.
According to the article, an artificial wetland will be constructed and the bacteria will be seeded into the layer of organic material at the bottom of the water. Runoff from the mines will be directed into the wetland and the bacteria will bind the metal. The article doesn't say, but the presumption is that the metal will remain trapped in the organic layer, and it should remain there even after the bacteria die, especially after it gets covered with new layers of sediment and organic material.
The main goal isn't necessarily to remove the metal from the environment completely -- this is mining country; the presence of metals in the environment is why they began mining there in the first place -- but to keep it contained and out of the groundwater. The main obstacle I see is keeping mine runoff confined to the wetland and keeping the wetland itself well-supplied with beer and SRB. How long does Harris propose to keep feeding it, anyway?
Now if only they can do something about the sinkholes, which is a very serious physical danger to the community.
Yes, the very thing! Thanks.
Other than that, I was neither bored nor frustrated at the time, much less so than I am now in these enlightened times. Perhaps you need to be more explicit about your point here; I frankly don't see it.
I worked for a shop that made most of its money selling CP/M boxes with customized software back in the early '80s, and what you say here is completely wrong. The industry was going great guns. There were dozens of players in every conceivable niche of the market, and some of them did very well for themselves indeed. Remember Altos? Eagle? Lotus? DBase II? Apple?
True, the market was a bit more fragmented than it is now. If you worked someplace that had a small system doing the bookkeeping, it probably ran CP/M or MP/M. When you went home, if you had a computer, it was probably an Apple, Commodore, TRS-80, or some such. There wasn't the crossover you see today. But so what?
It was the pairing of M$'s DOS with IBM PCs, and an open policy towards clones, that allowed the explosion of PCs seen in the mid-80's.
No. I remember clearly the introduction of the IBM PC. Sure, it had a 16-bit processor, but it also had an architecture that largely failed to take advantage of it, and there were huge libraries of existing products for 8-bit CP/M machines. The IBM PC took over the market for one reason alone: the nameplate. It was a trusim in those days that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and it overcame the reluctance of many organizations for adopting small computers.The OS? Obviously a CP/M ripoff of some kind, and completely irrelevant to the decision to buy.
While Gates is hardly responsible for coming up with the idea of Open Source, he was certainly a key person in the expansion of the computer industry.
Nope. He was a key player in the contraction of the computer software industry, at least in terms of the number of major players. ("Major player" being defined as companies with a significant percentage of market share, not in terms of absolute size.) The dominance of MS in the software market will, I'm sure, be cited someday in economics textbooks as a classic case of market failure through the application of unfair and predatory business practises. Learn for yourself what happened to DR-DOS, just to mention one early competitor in the field of PC operating systems.
If we still had to use machine language and punch cards, there wouldn't be open source.
I programmed on a variety of boxes before MS came along, and I never once had to resort to either machine language or punch cards. And none of the users for any software I ever developed needed to be particularly sophisitcated, either. As it turned out, you didn't need to be a genius to use a menu-driven system.
Gates' comments were perhaps worded less specifically than they should have been, but the Open Source community is likely also guilty of jumping on the comment more than necessary.
The "Open Source community" should do whatever it takes to keep BG honest.
I think Marley's Ghost said it best:
Besides, it's not as simple as know-nothings such as yourself would have it. Try looking into conditions for women in Afghanistan before the Taliban arrived before issuing pronouncements on what they'd choose for themselves given the chance.That's not luck. That's smarts. You had them. It's clear that a great many people did not.
Down, not across.
Horizontal is in quotes above because it's not quite the right word. More properly, it's a velocity vector normal (or perpendicular) to the acceleration vector. Since the direction of the acceleration vector keeps changing as the position of the vehicle changes, the velocity vector keeps changing too -- as it must; there's an acceleration acting on it. The equations to compute the initial velocity needed to keep a vehicle in orbit at a particular altitude are not complex.
This is exactly the same physics that keeps the Earth orbiting the Sun and the Moon orbiting the Earth, just on a smaller scale.
The writers of Star Trek never understood how this worked. In TOS there were a number of episodes where the engines had been damaged or sabotaged and the orbit was somehow rapidly decaying. Only a moron would have put them into such a low orbit that it needed constant thrust from the engines to maintain it in the first place.
"Weightlessness" is also achievable by falling at the same acceleration imposed by the force of gravity. For the Earth, that's about 9.8 m/sec^2. Astronauts train at weightlessness for brief periods by doing just that -- they get into a specially modified cargo plane, fly up as high as it will go, then pull into a steep dive. They float around inside the plane just as they would on orbit for as long as the dive lasts.
The balloon will never be travelling anywhere near fast enought for any of this to occur.
Um... I am the poster. The question asked by btellier was about why the proposed scheme has not already been done. The answer is that it was not intended as a hydrogen-cracking facility, but as an electrical generation station. I chose to answer the question in terms of why this method is not widely used to generate electricity -- there is, in fact, only a single experimental plant off the coast of Hawaii. Producing hydrogen with it has not yet been suggested, mostly because there's not a very large market for hydrogen and current methods meed the demand adequately. Obviously that will change should hydrogen suddenly become the fuel of choice. The problem is that although it's the most common element in the universe, it's rare in elemental form on Earth, so energy must be expended to separate it from the compounds its found in. Hydrogen thus becomes a method of energy *storage* but cannot itself be an energy *source*. It's therefore a good idea to find methods of producing it that draw on entirely new sources of energy if we are ever to cut back or eliminate the use of fossil fuels. OTEC is one possible method.
Hydrogen doesn't have that limitation, but it's also not now a mainstream power source. If proton exchange membrane fuel cells come into common use, that will undoubtedly change. But as things are, it's just not profitable enough to make it worth the capital investment.
Such a plant could generate enough electricity to pump seawater up and crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. It would be a whole hell of a lot cleaner than oil rigs on offshore platforms, and could in fact be set up on oil platforms in tropical regions (like the Gulf of Mexico) that no longer produce enough crude oil to be profitable, or that must be shut down over environmental concerns. OTEC plants are very clean, very safe, and fairly inexpensive to run. They could be a viable method for producing hydrogen almost for free.
My information was from dead tree publications, so I had to do a little Google search here to turn up something on the web. The positions of the continents can be reconstructed at any period in history here. An elementary reference on paleoclimates can be found here. That last site appears to require IE to view all available features.
Actually, the environment at the time of the dinosaurs was hugely different. Earth had no polar ice caps, and the continents were arranged differently. In the dinosarus' heyday around the middle of the Jurassic, the Atlantic Ocean didn't exist. The bulk of the land was grouped into an enormous crescent surrounding what is now the Indian Ocean. The coasts were warm and humid; the continental interior was desert. It was a world utterly unlike that we live in today, and we probably could not have flourished in it.
Other Alpha systems are also not difficult to locate in eBay's Computer section. Just do a search on "alpha". The machines of interest aren't difficult to locate in the results, as there are rarely more than 4 pages' worth.