Solar and wind power are half an energy system. If you're going to use them you either need the same capacity in other power systems just sitting round in case (in which case, from a financial standpoint you may as well not build the solar/wind system), or you need some way to store surplus energy.
Now, there are a number of technologies that you could potentially use to do this, from the mundane pumped hydropower, through a whole variety of steadily more exotic technologies like flow batteries, fuel cells, and superconducting current rings, but until they get cheap you can only use intermittent energy sources as a small fraction of your grid.
Let me guess. You loved the novel, and you wanted a faithful homage to what you regard as the brilliant description of a futuristic army.
Verhoeven read the book, and noticed that the book was, at least at one level, militaristic (and arguably fascist) propaganda of the kind that convinced Germans to come invade his ancestral homeland in 1940. So, he decided to make a movie that was a pisstake on Nazi propaganda and pro-war propaganda more generally. And he did that very well, and quite subtly in parts. Watch Triumph of the Will and then watch Starship Troopers again. Or, if you're American, cast your mind back to the bullshit ra-ra media coverage you got before the Iraq invasion and then watch Starship Troopers again.
My definition of "Linux technical leader" is somebody who has shaped, in a substantial way, a major, widely-used open source project. Bill Hilf may well be a highly competent individual. But that's not what the post was about.
Aside from the obvious privacy concerns, one might suspect this system is going to generate so much data and so many false leads that the security forces are going to either a) ignore this stuff, or b) be so busy chasing things up that they'll miss the obvious-in-hindsight.
Much of this stuff is just "security theater", as Bruce Schnier puts it, anyway.
He's a real person, and has been involved in using Linux to develop websites. His speaker bio at ApacheCon 2001 describes him as having developed a number of websites using mod_perl. He has contributed a little to the apache-modules mailing list, with a total of 20 messages the list over a three year period between 1999 and 2001.
However, his name doesn't seem to appear in either the apache httpd or mod-perl credits file, and I can't dig up any evidence of him having participated in any other mailing list. He's never posted to the kernel mailing list, the perl mailing lists (on the basis that somebody using mod-perl might also be interested in Perl more generally), or anything much else.
I don't know what the guy was up to at IBM, but to describe him as a technical leader of the Linux community would appear to be a considerable exaggeration. Somebody who actively adopted Linux for business use, perhaps, but he's hardly Robinson Crusoe there.
The AMD is running at 2.2 ghz, and retails $500 less.
The second figure you quote is relevant. The first figure you quote is completely and utterly irrelevant. It's like getting excited because your Chevy V8 is only redlined at 5500 rpm, and if you could make it run at 8000 rpm it'd kick the ass of that Mazda rotary.
What matters in the end is how fast the computer in which the CPU is placed does what you want it to do, and how much the system costs (and possibly heat/fan noise and power consumption, if you care about that sort of thing). Everything else is just fanboy wankery.
Carmack commented on this on the Armadillo blog a month ago; his opinion is that only Rutan's team are close, given that they are very close to success he's not going to try a Hail Mary attempt, and nobody else is close as far as he can tell (and recent events would tend to underline this view). Furthermore, he and the rest of the Armadillo team intend to continue their rocketry work anyway.
More broadly, I believe there are plans for post X-Prize competitions in the future, where various teams would get together annually to compete for the highest launch, fastest turnaround, and so on.
Ultimately, it wouldn't surprise me, particularly if Scaled wins the X-Prize, if in a few years time we have the "Y-Prize" for orbital shots.
I was going to post a rant about the evils of journal publishers...but I don't need to. Don Knuth has posted a letter he wrote to the coeditors of an algorithms journal about the gouging commercial journal publishers engage in. Ultimately, the board resigned en masse and have started a new journal using the ACM press, which is unfortunately not open content but is at least available at a more reasonable price.
Knuth himself is a known fan of open source software and his letter shows a clear enthusiasm for the open content concept.
While I oppose the FTA because of the IP issues, you have to understand the realities of the situation. If you export to the US, and when your domestic market is as small as ours you have to export and the US is the obvious target market, you have to comply with US IP laws anyway. For better or worse, the battle between the IP rentseekers and the forces of light will basically be fought in US domestic politics, and there's comparatively little the rest of the world can do unless it bands together on the issue, which seems unlikely.
Secondly, while it might be a big deal to the readers of Slashdot and the specialised financial writers (like Ross Gittins, economics writer for the Sydney Morning Herald whose anti-FTA articles were linked to here), for the vast majority of the Australian population it's just not an vote-changing issue, particularly for the morons in the marginal seats who decide Australian elections. And winning the next election is the only thing the current "conservative" government cares about; good government is a very long way down their list of priorities.
For the benefit of our American readership, Telstra are Australia's local piece of evil incarnate. They're 51% government owned, so they combine the worst characteristics of rapacious private companies and pig-headed government bureacracy. They price-gouge to an incredible degree on access to the local loop, they deliberately delayed the introduction of DSL services so they could cream more money out of business clients using ISDN (at truly outrageous prices), and deliver shocking service to their customers (ask Bigpond broadband internet customers about the reliability).
Gittins is writing from an Australian perspective, where the debate whether the minority party should ally with minor parties in the Senate and block the FTA is getting particularly heated.
From an American perspective, however, what you should be concerned about is the kind of things that this FTA, and subsequent ones, are going to do to lock in the current, ridiculous intellectual property regime. This applies not only to software patents, but restrictions on generic drugs, copyright terms, and so on. In the next decade or so, it's highly likely that there will be serious attempts in Congress to fix some of these issues. What will likely happen, though, is that the executive will come back with the argument "You can't do that! We'll be violating the terms of the free trade agreements we signed with Australia, Albania, and Andorra" (to pick three countries of similar importance to the United States) and the bills will quietly die.
The EFF and other groups in the "less overbroad IP protection" crowd might do well to pay more attention to international treaties, IMO.
You might consider that the second and fourth-place riders were German, and the guy (Jan Ullrich) who ultimately came fourth has come second to Lance three times in the past so it's probably not so much anti-American as anti the guy who keeps beating our guys.
The other thing you have to understand is that there were hundreds of thousands of people spectating on the time trial - the commentators were saying 900,000. The crowd looked dozens deep on both sides of the road, all the way up the 16-odd kilometre (10 mile) course. The likelihood of a few drunk morons within a crowd that big is remarkably high, and given how close the spectators get to the riders it's a credit to the spectators that the riders almost always get through unmolested. Still, I have to agree with Armstrong that a time trial up that mountain wasn't a particularly good idea by the organizers - if they were going to do it, there should have been barriers the whole way up the mountain.
Be that as it may, personally I'd be just as worried about accidental interference with riders as deliberate attacks. I dunno how it actually was on the road, but there was a moment in the last stage where they were cruising (and I mean really cruising...I could have sat in the peloton at the speed they were going) through the countryside just outside Paris. Armstrong was nearly speared by an flag on a long pole. An American flag.
They also learned that there was a great deal of maintenance to be made and that all the experiments that were planned in the first place simply were not realistic. It's closer to a space survival crash course than a scientific facility since 60% of the work time in space has to be spent to make sure everything is in order.
That's incorrect. As I understood it, the reason why there's never any time for science is that he ISS was intended to have a crew of six people. If there were actually six people up there, the maintenance burden would stay the same, but you'd have three extra people to do science. Why did the ISS never have a six person crew? Because the six-person escape vehicle never got built.
And as for all the wonderful science that was to be done on the ISS - as I understand it there isn't any great clamor from actual scientists for it. How many screams from the scientific community have you heard about the ISS scale-down, compared with the huge outcry about the Hubble?
These people were investigative journalists (or playing at being investigative journalists, at least). Journalists don't sit on stories and wait for the powers that be to fix them on the quiet. It's not their job. Their job is to find stuff of concern out and publish it as widely as possible. And, generally, it is in everybody's interest to have maladministration reported widely. It tends to act as a strong disinctive to anybody else that might be tempted.
The latest research is often quite contentious; if one paper has just been published that goes against the conventional wisdom and there's not yet been time for reactions from the academic community, the Wikipedia has to be very careful if and how it reports that finding.
Secondly, in many areas, unless you're an active researcher in a specific field you may simply not be aware of the very latest stuff; it takes its time to get from conference proceedings into textbooks.
That depends on a number of factors. One is the depends on the type of writing. What's acceptable in a high-school project or an article for a daily newspaper is rather different than what's acceptable for a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Secondly, it depends on the centrality of the citation. If you're just providing context on a well-understood topic that may be outside the knowledge of your readers (perhaps you're trying to explain optical character recognition to an audience of classics scholars), a secondary source like the Wikipedia might be acceptable, but on the key points of your paper you should go as close to the primary source as possible; for instance, if you're going to discuss an improvement of Bloggs' nerfing algorithm (your implementation improves nerfiness by 50%:-) ), you should have read Bloggs' original paper and cite it.
Finally, this criticism implies that general-purpose encyclopedias are widely cited in scholarly works. That's not done; even if they are expertly written and fact-checked, they are usually many years behind the latest research in an area.
I've been considering this for awhile, and I think the best solution is to convert the energy to fuel. Specifically, anti-matter. If we can develop an effective way to extract energy from matter/antimatter annihilation, then we could use Solar Energy to power antimatter fuel plants.
And if we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs - if we had some eggs.
Antimatter might be a very dense way of storing energy, but making it is incredibly inefficient (PDF). The efficiency of current particle accelerators is about 0.0001% (in terms of energy in/energy stored in antimatter out), and the best that the physicsts seem to think we can do in the near term is about 0.01%. You'd probably get better energy efficiency by putting mirrors in orbit, shining extra light on a plantation in Canada, and running a wood-fired turbine on the extra wood grown.
Antimatter is cool, but it's not going to be widely used as the world's ultimate battery in your or my lifetime.
As has been shown repeatedly in the past - paper ballots are just as shoddy at determining the winner as electronic ballots are showing to be.
Nobody said that paper ballots were perfect, but a manual system is a lot harder to rig. A single dodgy programmer can rig a whole election with an all-electronic system; and you'll never prove he did it. It requires the collusion of a lot more people (a bunch of election officials, ordinary citizens with all manner of private political views who've been hired for the night to do the grunt work, and scrutineers from the major parties) with a paper system.
Even with a no-fly zone it would still be relatively easy to take down the elevator, think missile.
There are thousands of other targets which would be far, far easier to hit than a physically tiny (in cross-section) ribbon hundreds of miles off the coast of South America (or Australia, another possibile site that's been considered) - not to mention the ease with which such a target could be defended by declaring exclusion zones around it and patrolling such with warships.
If you're going to launch a missile at it, could you identify where such a substantial missile is going to be constructed and launched; they are not trivial engineering projects. In any case, the missile would have to be targetted very accurately to give it a significant change of damaging the ribbon (particularly if you use your brain and anchor the ribbon at multiple points such that the loss of any one anchor point won't result in the loss of the tether). If these supposed terrorists have nuclear weapons, we have bigger problems.
And a conventional military attack on the ribbon would be dealt with the same way as an attack on any other possession of a soveriegn nation - you go make war on the people who've done it. And while the US has demonstrated that it's not very good at dealing with insurgency, it remains rather handy at destroying conventional militaries.
While I like Linux for any number of reasons, the operating system really isn't the issue here. Ultimately, open source does notguarantee that the code you have compiled is that which the machine executes; see the classic article by Ken Thompson, the co-inventor of Unix, on the matter.
Given that, the only practical solution is to do the ultimate count on the basis of a voter-verified human-readable paper ballot, which no software can screw up.
H.R. 6969, the Help Enrich Key Donors Act, was the subject of intense negotiation in the house Ways and Means Committee today. Rep. Fred Nurk (R-CA) stated that the bill would stay in committee unless his amendment to burn at the stake anybody that watches a rented movie twice before they return it is adopted, while Rep. June Cleaver (D-OR) echoed the concerns of teacher unions about a provision that required teachers to pass the standardised test they were giving to their student.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, the equivalent version of the bill has been approved narrowly but looks set to cause considerable difficulties in conference if the House bill makes its way out of committee and is approved by the full House, due to an amendment sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KA) authorizing the expenditure of $50 million on lollipops for children with cancer and $50 billion for the continued development of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Non-Lethal (and non-functioning) Missile Defence Program. House Republicans are concerned about the lack of funding for a program with the name "Ronald Reagan" in it.
The White House, whilst praising the addition of the RRMNMD program funding to the bill, nevertheless is under pressure by prominent Christian supporters to veto the bill over claims the it contains foriegn aid funding to countries where discussing birth control with teenagers is not a crime incurring the death penalty. In addition, a coalition of the ACLU, MPAA, and the AARP have announced they plan a court challenge to some of the bill's provisions. Likely to end up in the Supreme Court if the bill is ultimately passed, experienced court watchers are already placing their bets on the balance of the likely court challenge.
Well-informed sources, when questioned about the issue, stated "what's this bill actually about again?"
Sure, the wheels of European bureacracy are arcane, but the ones in Washington can be just as obscure.
I'll bet London to a brick you're probably some breed of Neanderthal^Wconservative, so I'll point you in the direction of these papers, many of them by a guy called Paul Weyrich who on other issues seems to be about as conservative as they come. Basically, people like yourself ignore the truly gargantuan subsidies that go to road funding.
Haven't seen Bring It On. Aussies, as a general rule, don't have a cheerleader fetish. We don't need people to tell us when and how to cheer at a sporting event either...
Slashdot Mirror
Are you telling me there's been any genuinely significant improvement in Microsoft Office in the last 5 years?
Now, there are a number of technologies that you could potentially use to do this, from the mundane pumped hydropower, through a whole variety of steadily more exotic technologies like flow batteries, fuel cells, and superconducting current rings, but until they get cheap you can only use intermittent energy sources as a small fraction of your grid.
Verhoeven read the book, and noticed that the book was, at least at one level, militaristic (and arguably fascist) propaganda of the kind that convinced Germans to come invade his ancestral homeland in 1940. So, he decided to make a movie that was a pisstake on Nazi propaganda and pro-war propaganda more generally. And he did that very well, and quite subtly in parts. Watch Triumph of the Will and then watch Starship Troopers again. Or, if you're American, cast your mind back to the bullshit ra-ra media coverage you got before the Iraq invasion and then watch Starship Troopers again.
My definition of "Linux technical leader" is somebody who has shaped, in a substantial way, a major, widely-used open source project. Bill Hilf may well be a highly competent individual. But that's not what the post was about.
Much of this stuff is just "security theater", as Bruce Schnier puts it, anyway.
However, his name doesn't seem to appear in either the apache httpd or mod-perl credits file, and I can't dig up any evidence of him having participated in any other mailing list. He's never posted to the kernel mailing list, the perl mailing lists (on the basis that somebody using mod-perl might also be interested in Perl more generally), or anything much else.
I don't know what the guy was up to at IBM, but to describe him as a technical leader of the Linux community would appear to be a considerable exaggeration. Somebody who actively adopted Linux for business use, perhaps, but he's hardly Robinson Crusoe there.
The second figure you quote is relevant. The first figure you quote is completely and utterly irrelevant. It's like getting excited because your Chevy V8 is only redlined at 5500 rpm, and if you could make it run at 8000 rpm it'd kick the ass of that Mazda rotary.
What matters in the end is how fast the computer in which the CPU is placed does what you want it to do, and how much the system costs (and possibly heat/fan noise and power consumption, if you care about that sort of thing). Everything else is just fanboy wankery.
More broadly, I believe there are plans for post X-Prize competitions in the future, where various teams would get together annually to compete for the highest launch, fastest turnaround, and so on.
Ultimately, it wouldn't surprise me, particularly if Scaled wins the X-Prize, if in a few years time we have the "Y-Prize" for orbital shots.
Knuth himself is a known fan of open source software and his letter shows a clear enthusiasm for the open content concept.
Secondly, while it might be a big deal to the readers of Slashdot and the specialised financial writers (like Ross Gittins, economics writer for the Sydney Morning Herald whose anti-FTA articles were linked to here), for the vast majority of the Australian population it's just not an vote-changing issue, particularly for the morons in the marginal seats who decide Australian elections. And winning the next election is the only thing the current "conservative" government cares about; good government is a very long way down their list of priorities.
For the benefit of our American readership, Telstra are Australia's local piece of evil incarnate. They're 51% government owned, so they combine the worst characteristics of rapacious private companies and pig-headed government bureacracy. They price-gouge to an incredible degree on access to the local loop, they deliberately delayed the introduction of DSL services so they could cream more money out of business clients using ISDN (at truly outrageous prices), and deliver shocking service to their customers (ask Bigpond broadband internet customers about the reliability).
From an American perspective, however, what you should be concerned about is the kind of things that this FTA, and subsequent ones, are going to do to lock in the current, ridiculous intellectual property regime. This applies not only to software patents, but restrictions on generic drugs, copyright terms, and so on. In the next decade or so, it's highly likely that there will be serious attempts in Congress to fix some of these issues. What will likely happen, though, is that the executive will come back with the argument "You can't do that! We'll be violating the terms of the free trade agreements we signed with Australia, Albania, and Andorra" (to pick three countries of similar importance to the United States) and the bills will quietly die.
The EFF and other groups in the "less overbroad IP protection" crowd might do well to pay more attention to international treaties, IMO.
The other thing you have to understand is that there were hundreds of thousands of people spectating on the time trial - the commentators were saying 900,000. The crowd looked dozens deep on both sides of the road, all the way up the 16-odd kilometre (10 mile) course. The likelihood of a few drunk morons within a crowd that big is remarkably high, and given how close the spectators get to the riders it's a credit to the spectators that the riders almost always get through unmolested. Still, I have to agree with Armstrong that a time trial up that mountain wasn't a particularly good idea by the organizers - if they were going to do it, there should have been barriers the whole way up the mountain.
Be that as it may, personally I'd be just as worried about accidental interference with riders as deliberate attacks. I dunno how it actually was on the road, but there was a moment in the last stage where they were cruising (and I mean really cruising...I could have sat in the peloton at the speed they were going) through the countryside just outside Paris. Armstrong was nearly speared by an flag on a long pole. An American flag.
That's incorrect. As I understood it, the reason why there's never any time for science is that he ISS was intended to have a crew of six people. If there were actually six people up there, the maintenance burden would stay the same, but you'd have three extra people to do science. Why did the ISS never have a six person crew? Because the six-person escape vehicle never got built.
And as for all the wonderful science that was to be done on the ISS - as I understand it there isn't any great clamor from actual scientists for it. How many screams from the scientific community have you heard about the ISS scale-down, compared with the huge outcry about the Hubble?
These people were investigative journalists (or playing at being investigative journalists, at least). Journalists don't sit on stories and wait for the powers that be to fix them on the quiet. It's not their job. Their job is to find stuff of concern out and publish it as widely as possible. And, generally, it is in everybody's interest to have maladministration reported widely. It tends to act as a strong disinctive to anybody else that might be tempted.
Secondly, in many areas, unless you're an active researcher in a specific field you may simply not be aware of the very latest stuff; it takes its time to get from conference proceedings into textbooks.
Finally, this criticism implies that general-purpose encyclopedias are widely cited in scholarly works. That's not done; even if they are expertly written and fact-checked, they are usually many years behind the latest research in an area.
And if we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs - if we had some eggs.
Antimatter might be a very dense way of storing energy, but making it is incredibly inefficient (PDF). The efficiency of current particle accelerators is about 0.0001% (in terms of energy in/energy stored in antimatter out), and the best that the physicsts seem to think we can do in the near term is about 0.01%. You'd probably get better energy efficiency by putting mirrors in orbit, shining extra light on a plantation in Canada, and running a wood-fired turbine on the extra wood grown.
Antimatter is cool, but it's not going to be widely used as the world's ultimate battery in your or my lifetime.
Nobody said that paper ballots were perfect, but a manual system is a lot harder to rig. A single dodgy programmer can rig a whole election with an all-electronic system; and you'll never prove he did it. It requires the collusion of a lot more people (a bunch of election officials, ordinary citizens with all manner of private political views who've been hired for the night to do the grunt work, and scrutineers from the major parties) with a paper system.
There are thousands of other targets which would be far, far easier to hit than a physically tiny (in cross-section) ribbon hundreds of miles off the coast of South America (or Australia, another possibile site that's been considered) - not to mention the ease with which such a target could be defended by declaring exclusion zones around it and patrolling such with warships.
If you're going to launch a missile at it, could you identify where such a substantial missile is going to be constructed and launched; they are not trivial engineering projects. In any case, the missile would have to be targetted very accurately to give it a significant change of damaging the ribbon (particularly if you use your brain and anchor the ribbon at multiple points such that the loss of any one anchor point won't result in the loss of the tether). If these supposed terrorists have nuclear weapons, we have bigger problems.
And a conventional military attack on the ribbon would be dealt with the same way as an attack on any other possession of a soveriegn nation - you go make war on the people who've done it. And while the US has demonstrated that it's not very good at dealing with insurgency, it remains rather handy at destroying conventional militaries.
Given that, the only practical solution is to do the ultimate count on the basis of a voter-verified human-readable paper ballot, which no software can screw up.
Sure, the wheels of European bureacracy are arcane, but the ones in Washington can be just as obscure.
I'll bet London to a brick you're probably some breed of Neanderthal^Wconservative, so I'll point you in the direction of these papers, many of them by a guy called Paul Weyrich who on other issues seems to be about as conservative as they come. Basically, people like yourself ignore the truly gargantuan subsidies that go to road funding.
Haven't seen Bring It On. Aussies, as a general rule, don't have a cheerleader fetish. We don't need people to tell us when and how to cheer at a sporting event either...