My computer doesn't store "1" or "0" - it's based on two voltages being stored in sequences of electrical components. Nope. No 1's or 0's here, no sirree.
One the one hand, companies have to make a profit. They can't survive if they don't make a profit on every unit they sell (or at least most of the units they sell). What is a 'fair' profit? Hard to say.
That said, this doesn't really sound like a complete rip-off to me. That's because your 'cost analysis' sounds way too simplistic to me, and I think their 'costs' are a bit more than what you estimate. Sure, the process, ram, mobo might be cheap. But, to begin with, they had to hire engineers to design the thing. If you have engineers, you have salaries and benefits (granted, this is probably designed somewhere in Asia where they can pay engineers a lot less than in the US or Europe). Engineers imply managers, accountants, buildings, utilities, insurance, etc. You also need to build a manufacturing facility to assemble these things, which implies buildings, machines, labor (again, the labor is probably pretty cheap, but it's still a cost). Once they are built, you need marketing and distribution - it costs money to ship things from Asia to wherever they are being bought. On top of that, you have to build into the price of the goods not only a profit for you, but a markup for your partners who are going to sell them for you (unless you are doing *only* direct-sales, which not many companies do).
If I had to guess, I would guess that real costs are somewhere around $125, with $125 to split between resellers and the OEM (from my limited experience, seems like most companies try to go for about a 100% 'gross margin' which might sound like a lot, but when you consider they are selling low-cost goods, and not necessarily large volumes, it becomes a little more justifiable), with the OEM getting $50-75. That doesn't, actually, sound like an outrageous profit margin to me (although, again, my assumptions could be wrong).
The other thing about stuff like this - when new products are introduced to market, they will typically be more expensive than later. The thing is, the company may make *no* actual profit until they've sold some quantity - maybe 10,000, or 100,000, or some other number depending on how they setup their cost structure. If the product turns out to be fairly popular, once they've passed that magic point of profitability, they may reduce costs to increase sales volumes further, so the price on these could maybe drop to 199, then maybe eventually 149. It all depends, again, on how popular they are, I suspect.
Credit card numbers are always highly-financially valuable information, so I'm not sure how this possibly qualifies as a counter-example? The SSL in this case, as you point out, isn't to protect the transaction, which is for a small amount, but for the *credit card info* which is part of the transaction and which is very valuable.
That said, I still think the GP's point is flawed - there's lots of info which is not 'financial' info which is still important to keep private, such as login/authentication info for almost any system which needs to authenticate users (for example, I choose to use SSL for my POP3 connections to my mail server - on the one hand, the email itself, since it came over the internet, is not really private, as it could have already been read earlier in the delivery chain, but I use SSL to protect my login), private personal info of a non-financial nature like health records, or just keeping inter-personal communications between parties private (for example, protecting the voice traffic on a VoIP system, or maybe instead of using public email for communications between members of some sort of group, you decide to setup an SSL encrypted website where the users login and can send private messages to other users of the website - yes, you could use other means than a PKI for distributing the keys to users, but that's kind of complicated, and means that users cannot as easily use other computers to connect to your website [although, arguably, I suppose, if you are using a computer that doesn't belong to you, you are already exposing yourself to security threats such as keylogging, etc, on that other computer, so you shouldn't use other computers for highly sensitive stuff, but it still might make sense to SSL encrypt stuff that should remain private, but which you don't need the absolute highest levels of security]).
Thanks for the feedback. Like I said, I don't know a lot about this stuff yet. I've been trying to get info, but, it's actually harder to find good info about stuff like this than I thought it would be. I got some gleanings from Wikipedia, and a few other sources - I think I found something on the PBS website that had some essays written by two policy wonks from the Carter days, arguing the two sides of the debate, as it was seen at the time. When I wrote my post, I was working from memory as I read this less detailed than I'd like information about a month ago.
"From memory I don't think the mix was plutonium and uranium and I think the elements they were using were creating an enormous waste problem in the process."
I just found my source for that statement (I was working from memory). The wikipedia article on Fast Breeder Reactors says this:
"FBRs usually use a mixed oxide fuel core of up to 20% plutonium dioxide (PuO2) and at least 80% uranium dioxide (UO2)."
I would think, from an engineering perspective, it should be quite possible to create containers for the waste which contain the radioactivity, and could physically survive even a bad train accident? That does still leave the potential for "The Terrorists" to cause a train crash, and grab a few containers of the stuff before "the cavalry" can arrive. Somehow, though, I suspect it would be fairly difficult to get very far with those containers, or out of the country with them. I would expect they'd be large, heavy, have a unique morphology (that is, physical shape/appearance), well marked, and tagged with tracking devices in such a way that the tracking devices are very difficult to remove or interfere with, so that they'd be very difficult to smuggle. Also, I would expect the military or national guard to *already* be there, escorting the train, so that the window of opportunity is very small.
I might be misunderstanding the situation, but I thought after reprocessing, yes, it becomes much more radioactive, but that is what let's you put it in a reactor and 'burn' it for another 10 or 15 years to generate electricity, at which point the fission it's been undergoing for those years has 'cooled' it off a lot, and so it's both less radioactive *and* the waste product has a shorter half-life? I might be wrong though, and what you say might be the case. Still, it's arguably better to try to secure 'very hot' waste for 100 years than 'hot' waste for 10000+?
The parent is right. I don't know a whole lot about Nuclear Physics, but it's something I've been trying to read up on lately. The thing about 'spent' nuclear fuel, is that it still does have, as the parent points out, the potential to be reprocessed and burned again. I'm not entirely clear on this, but from what I've read, I think they can reprocess it quite a few times, until it's eventually at a fairly low energy and stable state to where, like the parent said, it's only dangerous for a short time.
What people don't realize is back in the 70's, the US was looking into the possibility of setting up breeder reactors to reprocess fuel. The Carter administration made the decision to, for the time being, defer re-processing the fuel, with the given reason that they were concerned about the ability to secure the Plutonium which is produced in the re-processing. That is, breeder reactors process 'spent' Uranium into a mixture of Uranium and Plutonium, I think (which can then be used as a fuel for a plutonium power reactor). The problem is, if someone diverted even *very small* amounts of the plutonium, which might be hard to detect because of how small an amount is missing, they could over time possibly accumulate enough material to build a small but powerful bomb, or at least a dirty bomb. Steal a few grams here, a few grams there, eventually you have a few kilograms.
Plus, there was an economic argument against it at the time - Uranium was cheap and abundant, so it was simply cheaper to keep burning 'new' Uranium, than to reprocess the spent Uranium. My understanding is that, at least currently, some of the processing and enrichment necessary to turn it into Plutonium fuel, hasn't been figured out how to do very econically effectively. There have been various Breeder reactor's put up in other countries, I think I read there are some in Europe and Asia, but so far the current designs, I guess, haven't turned out to be very economically competitive against other energy sources.
Personally, as I indicate in my subject for this post, I view Yucca Mountain not as a waste site, a dumping ground, but more like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We are saving the spent Uranium until the time we need it and and have figured out the technologies necessary to efficiently and cheaply reproccess it, and how to secure it better. Because it stays 'hot' for 10000 years, it means we have plenty of time in which to figure out how to reprocess it and make an economically viable energy source out of it. In that regard, the extremely long time spans might be quite to our advantage, as it means we aren't, really, losing significant potential energy each year it's sitting in storage. In the meantime, we just keep buying 'new' Uranium and building up our strategic reserve.
While it's true that for people who understand a lot about how computer's work, and give 2 seconds' thought to it, these things are obvious, for the great mass of people, these are real 'gotchas' that people *should* be made aware of, so they can learn to avoid these problems. Lots of people would probably never think about the fact that apps might take their encrypted Word file, when they load it from their encrypted drive, and save a working-copy in an unencrypted temp directory. To computer geeks, that's a pretty obvious problem to deal with. Same with stuff like 'recently used files', etc.
True, it's not *really* a problem with TrueCrypt, per-se, but it's a problem which *affects* TrueCrypt. Even if it's not TrueCrypt's *fault* that the hidden volume is revealed, if TrueCrypt has no control over it's volumes being revealed, that's fundamentally a problem for TrueCrypt.
What's the price of a Cell vs a GPU? Nowadays, I think you can get a pretty decent GPU for less than $100? Still, I wonder if, for low-end systems, would it make sense, financially, to use a low-end CPU (like an Atom or Intel's 'economy' Pentium mobile CPUs), which wouldn't maybe be able to handle high-def video, and add on a Cell? Although, at that point, it's probably cheaper to get a Core2 CPU, and not worry about GPU or Cell.
Wow... wait... is this life, imitating video games? There's a character in Penny Arcade: On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness that would, no doubt, be delighted to assist them with this, err. . scientific study.
I've been wondering, if Cell technology were integrated into general purpose PCs, what kind of tasks it would help with. Could it be used to accellerate. . .
* High resolution video decoding, so the processor doesn't have to chug so much on it? From the article, it sounds like this might be one use of the cell?
* Grid computing - things like World Community Grid, distributed.net, SETI@home etc? I imagine this probably depends, at least in part, on the specific types of computations being done for the project you participate in, but would you commonly be able to do more computation, faster, for those types of projects if you had cell processors?
Can a GPU like one from Nvidia or ATI potentially work together *with* the cell processor to increase the GPU's capabilities? (I'd guess that would probably depend on the drivers having support for the Cell, and I'm guessing that current generation drivers probably wouldn't take any advantage of the Cell?)
This has been driving me nuts ever since the new comment system was introduced. Overall, I mostly like D2, but since the old system has allowed me to login while posting for *years*, and now suddenly I can't, it feels like a step *backwards*. I especially I hate when I've typed 2 paragraphs of text, then suddenly realize I'm not logged in. Yeah, copy-and-paste are you friend in that situation, but it's still a pain. As the parent pointed out, after logging in, you have to find the main article, then find whichever discussion thread you wanted to reply to, which can be a major waste of time.
Please, why in the world can't I login right in the comment box? I know you guys want to ajax-ify everything, but really, just having the username/password fields as part of the form with the comment summary and body was so simple and elegant, how could you possibly improve it? Since the code on the backend is already there to handle it, since the old system is still there, I can't imagine it would be terribly difficult to add this back into the new system?
Is it *possible* that the price difference, at least in part, is because Microsoft is buying higher-quality drives which will last longer, so that they don't have to deal with replacing customer hard drives? Maybe they are doing rigorous quality control and throwing away 1/3 or 1/2 of the hard drives which don't meet the standards (although, ideally, the manufacturer of the HDD should be eating that cost - which they probably are only able to afford by charging more for the drives in the first place).
I mean, I don't know, but my experience with 69 dollar hard drives is they often don't last more than 2 or 3 years. Often they are refurbs. Granted, it's been 3 or 4 years since I actually bought a hard drive, but back then the 69 dollar jobs were the refurbs. I still bought some of them, with the idea that they are cheap, I'd buy the 20 dollar 5-year replacement warranty, make sure I back up regularly, and when they die, just get another drive through warranty.
But, Microsoft can't afford to take such a casual attitude, I would think, as servicing millions of consoles to replace failing hard drives would be expensive, and quite probably a PR nightmare.
I'm confused. Didn't Yahoo get their ass handed to them by a search engine that was created at Stanford University by PhD Computer Science students, whose creators only saw significant investment after that was concluded (because they had free access to University resources, like bandwidth, computers, and power)?
I could be wrong, but I think this comes down to paid-search. There was an article just the other day on slashdot about Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and a patent Yahoo acquired when it bought Overture, which gave them a paid-search property. That is, people listing with yahoo pay to get their search rankings elevated.
I believe, however, it is a pay per click model (I might be wrong). So, what Yahoo seems to be trying to do, in letting you use their 'search results' (I put it in quotes because, when the results are paid for, I don't really consider that a search, really) without any Yahoo branding or advertising, is still probably generating revenue for them by getting clicks on their links, which they can then bill to the sites who've contracted for paid-search rankings with Yahoo. With paid search, it doesn't matter who's website the 'search result' is displayed in, as long as Yahoo can still claim a click, so it's in their interest to try to get as many sites as possible publishing their links for them.
Hell, Yahoo ought to pay *you* to display their 'search results'.
I'm confused - at an atomic scale, what is top and bottom? I thought space has no 'preferred' direction in which to define up, down, east, west, north, south? How can there be a 'bottom' particle?
You have some interesting point - it does seem like it would be easier, short term, to switch to propane. Do you have any links to info on propane synthesis? What's involved in the process? As the main article for this discussion points out, creating hydrogen gas is something that can be done fairly simply, as long as you have access to electricity and water. People could have home-based fueling systems next to their house, and a hydrogen 'gas-station' never needs trucks for delivery - just water pipes and electric lines. Part of me likes the simplicity of a setup like that - the whole idea of delivering chemical fuels on trucks which themselves require energy in the form of chemical fuel, seems somewhat inefficient - you are paying a 'tax' on transporting the energy. Granted, you still pay an energy tax to deliver water (takes energy to run the city water pumps to fill the towers), and electricity (transmission losses), but I think the energy required to move water through the pipe network, and the losses in electric transmission would be smaller than the energy used to drive a truck (I admit I could be wrong about that).
In some ways, the 'hydrogen economy' can reuse existing infrastructure (the existing electric grid and municipal water systems) in ways that most other chemical fuels might not be able to. Right now the main problem would be an adequate supply of cheap electricity - if hydrogen cars started getting put into production, and people started driving them, I think we could expect some significant rises in the price of electricity, which already isn't exactly cheap. Also, in the short term, these home-based fueling devices aren't really a solution. The article says it produces enough hydrogen to drive 25 miles. Yeah. I can't afford to have *two* cars, and with a 25-mile limit (really, 12 mile limit since I gotta get *back* home), a hydrogen powered car isn't even gonna get me to work and back (I work about 20 miles from where I live; I'd live closer to work, except I also go to school, so I chose to live close to school instead, but I'd have to drive the distance between work and school one way or another, this isn't about me wanting to live in a McMansion in the suburbs - I actually live in an efficiency apt). Let alone longer trips to, e.g. visit relatives and friends who live farther away.
Propane is definitely better in that regard, but with propane, you do necessarily have to produce the propane somewhere else, and then move the propane to the point of consumption (e.g. gas station). It's true that you could have a large propane tank at home, instead of a unit that synthesizes the fuel, but that would require re-fueling the tank somehow - I'm guessing that would mean a truck coming to your home, and at that point, why not just go to a local fueling station like we do with gasoline right now (people could have their own 200 gallon tanks at home too, but most people choose not to bother).
So, while there are more places to get propane right now, they still aren't nearly as common as you would need to really have people start driving propane vehicles. I think that, ultimately, synthetic propane suffers from many of the same problems as hydrogen, though it does have a few advantages. The main problem being, as with hydrogen, if you are going to synthesize propane, you need an energy source to do it, I would assume, because of the law of conservation of energy (I presume electricity? I can't seem to find any info on Google or Wikipedia about propane synthesis). If electricity, that means we still need to find ways to produce massive amounts of electricity, cheaply, cleanly, and safely. Which is the biggest reason, I think, that hydrogen cars cannot succeed right now.
The problem with your analysis, the way I see it (which might not line up with current law in any way, shape or form), is that it fails to recognize that corporations are fundamentally composed of people. Slashdot commentators like to reduce corporations to fancy names like Artificial Legal Entity, but those entities are created to provide some organization to the collective exercise of natural rights by groups of real people (shareholders, management, and employees - ok, mostly management, but management are people too. ..).
If I am the owner (shareholder) of a corporation, and I operate servers, I have the right to freedom of speech (and freedom of the press, which is basically just an aspect of freedom of speech, ultimately) with regards to the content I do or do not choose to host on my servers. The government should not be able to compel speech - freedom of speech also implies the freedom not to speak, not to be compelled to say something I choose not to.
Of course, with regards to services like Flikr, this raises thorny questions of liability - to whit, to what extent should Flikr be held liable for the content it hosts. After all, if the corporation Flikr wants to argue that it should have the right to take down images it does not agree with, based on freedom of speech, then it is essentially claiming that the content hosted by it represent *it's own* speech, and not the speech of others which it is merely a hosting infrastructure for - that's the real problem, that corps want to have their cake and eat it too - in one court, claim they can suppress speech they disagree with, and in another court, arguing they shouldn't be held liable for illegal content (e.g. kiddie porn, copyrighted images which weren't uploaded with the owners' permission, etc) which people might try to upload to their servers.
If you want to put up an image, article, or movie, which some corporation won't host for you, maybe you need to think about getting your own server. That still leaves the possibility of getting cut off by your ISP, but that's where contract law comes in (service agreements, where if you made sure the contract you were signing wasn't all screwed up, you can sue them for breech of contract if they cut you off) and where you can take more action to protect your own rights. With free services, the terms are never going to be fair to you. With services you actually pay for, you can negotiate terms which don't screw you.
This sounds an aweful lot like something I saw on the Discovery channel, on the FutureWeapons show, but I don't think the device I saw discussed was based on electromagnetic beams, but rather just a highly-directional sonic beam. Sort of an 'audio-laser', which was basically produced by using a specially designed speaker that doesn't radiate an extremely wide cone like conventional speakers. It had two modes - one was just an annoying noise, used to try to disperse crowds or non-lethal takedown of armed enemies, the other mode was basically a conventional speaker, where you could use it to send propaganda, psy ops, or even point-to-point communications between different military groups (although, I would assume normally they would just use radio for that, but I suppose there could be situations where something like this could be useful if you want to maintain radio silence, but easier to setup and use than an optical laser (which would require extremely precise targetting on a remote sensor, and would be prone to some interference from atmospheric disturbances/smoke/fog/etc).
Unfortunately, the article is extremely skimpy on any actual details, so it's hard to evaluate what this technology really does. But, even from what is available from the article, this doesn't sound like a device which would be practical for uses like advertising, since you have to target it at individuals, or small groups. Advertising is, largely, a broadcast endeavor - you want it to reach as many people as cheaply as possible, not just one or a small group of people (unless, maybe, you are advertising to the very rich, where one sale is worth millions of dollars or more, or VIPs at large corporations, where again, a single sale might be worth multi-millions of dollars).
Ok, so first Slashdot readers started to decide to skip the article that the summary links to. Now the next step in our evolution is that we post without even reading the summary. Great. I quote, from the 1 paragraph summary that you are apparently too busy to read. . .
"Called the One-Liter, because that's how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers"
I hope someone with more knowledge than I do answers, but I'll try to give my best answer, from the understanding I've gleaned so far from my Engineering Physics courses at the University I'm attending. . .
I think, at an atomic level, atoms don't actually touch. When they get close enough, I think the internal atomic forces cause them to repel each other based upon field-forces (field forces are things like magnetism, or gravity, where no contact is required for things to act upon each other), or, for some elements, start sharing electrons and form lattices/grids of evenly spaced atoms (and, again, the grid spacing is determined by a balancing of repelling and attracting field forces, I think). This is definitely an area of physics I want to learn more about, and like I said, I hope someone who truly knows the answer will comment, but that's my best answer.
A ten year cooling period proves that the globe cooled for 10 years. It's perfectly correct to say that during that 10 year period, we experienced global cooling. It might be that after that 10 year period, the globe then experienced another period of global warming. The thing about trends is, it always depends on what time frame you are actually interested in. One could go to the other extreme, and look at the last X thousand years of global history, say, from the peak of the last warm period, through the ice age, and up to the present and say that during that time frame, there is no average global warming or cooling, and that would be correct too.
The fact is, we know the earth is warming, because that is based on verifiable observations. You can't falsify observations. Now, there is something else also called Global Warming, which is the theory that man is *causing* the Earth to warm. That's a lot tougher nut, but there has to be a way to falsify that theory. One thing we can say is that the theory of Man-made Global Warming is based on the theory that certain gasses, which are released by man into the atmosphere, trap heat. That is a falsifiable theory, which has not been falsified. Experiments have indicated that the hypothesis that Carbon Dioxide, Methane, and other gasses trap heat in the atmosphere. There is another theory, that plants and other types of life forms (I think algeas and other lifeforms in the ocean) remove Carbon Dioxide, in particular, from the atmosphere, and that is a falsifiable theory. Since we know that mankind is, overall, reducing the surface area of the planet that is densely populated by plants, we can say, not absolutely surely, and possibly not falsifiable, but with with a high degree of confidence, that the earth's ability to reduce Carbon Dioxide is reduced from what it could do in the past (there is still the matter of the oceans; it may be possible that, even though the plantlife on the surface is not removing as much CO2 as it used to, maybe the ocean is removing more than it used to).
My point is, that while the big, complex 'puzzle' that is a theory like global warming, maybe cannot be falsified as a whole, you can certainly falsify the constituent pieces of the theory. If you have not been able to experimentally falsify the pieces (which are falsifiable), then the most reasonable assumption is that the theory is correct, until you have some concrete evidence or theory to show why the theory was not, in fact, correct.
That said, we should not commit economic suicide because of fear of global warming. As far as I can tell, the only reason people who are 'anti-global warming' even care about the issue is that they fear that we will enact regulations which will have a harmful effect on the economy, without really having a need to. The way I see it, global warming is, to some extent, a long term issue, and we should be thinking about long term solutions. We absolutely should be continuing to pour resources into energy research (e.g. improved designs for solar power, wind, fission, fusion, biomass - we need to explore every possibility to find cleaner, renewable energy), research into efficiency/consumption reduction, etc.
We shouldn't deny global warming, when there is so much evidence for the theory, but we also shouldn't make drastic bad choices that impoverish people, out of fear of global warming.
That's a good question. My best understanding is that you are probably correct. On the one hand, some of the ice is above the level of the water, and once it melts, it would no longer be above the level of the water (the 'tip of the iceberg' as it were, which as the ice melts, becomes part of the ocean, but was not in the ocean previously). On the other hand, water takes up more volume as a solid than as liquid.
I think it might even be that the amount of ice that sticks up out of the water is exactly proportional to the increase in volume that the water experiences as it solidifies - this would make sense, because the total weight of the ice (that is, both the part in the water and the part sticking up) should be exactly equal to the original weight of the water that became ice, but the volume is greater. IIRC my boating physics, for a solid to float, it must displace a volume of liquid water whose weight is equal to the weight of the solid object. So, that would mathematically indicate that the volume of ice above the surface has to be equal to the change in volume as the water became a solid, and that as it reverts to liquid, and shrinks, it will occupy the exact same volume as the submerged ice did. I think.
All you'd need to show is a trend that, over time, the average temperature of the atmosphere and ocean is dropping, or at least stable. It might also help to show stable or increasing glacier masses (over a large collection of glaciers distributed all over the world, and over a somewhat large period of time - doesn't have to be stable in a one year cycle - one would *expect* glaciers to shrink during 'summer' [which is going to differ between northern and southern hemisphere's, of course], and grow back during the winter - but at least over the course of a decade or two).
Slashdot Mirror
My computer doesn't store "1" or "0" - it's based on two voltages being stored in sequences of electrical components. Nope. No 1's or 0's here, no sirree.
One the one hand, companies have to make a profit. They can't survive if they don't make a profit on every unit they sell (or at least most of the units they sell). What is a 'fair' profit? Hard to say.
That said, this doesn't really sound like a complete rip-off to me. That's because your 'cost analysis' sounds way too simplistic to me, and I think their 'costs' are a bit more than what you estimate. Sure, the process, ram, mobo might be cheap. But, to begin with, they had to hire engineers to design the thing. If you have engineers, you have salaries and benefits (granted, this is probably designed somewhere in Asia where they can pay engineers a lot less than in the US or Europe). Engineers imply managers, accountants, buildings, utilities, insurance, etc. You also need to build a manufacturing facility to assemble these things, which implies buildings, machines, labor (again, the labor is probably pretty cheap, but it's still a cost). Once they are built, you need marketing and distribution - it costs money to ship things from Asia to wherever they are being bought. On top of that, you have to build into the price of the goods not only a profit for you, but a markup for your partners who are going to sell them for you (unless you are doing *only* direct-sales, which not many companies do).
If I had to guess, I would guess that real costs are somewhere around $125, with $125 to split between resellers and the OEM (from my limited experience, seems like most companies try to go for about a 100% 'gross margin' which might sound like a lot, but when you consider they are selling low-cost goods, and not necessarily large volumes, it becomes a little more justifiable), with the OEM getting $50-75. That doesn't, actually, sound like an outrageous profit margin to me (although, again, my assumptions could be wrong).
The other thing about stuff like this - when new products are introduced to market, they will typically be more expensive than later. The thing is, the company may make *no* actual profit until they've sold some quantity - maybe 10,000, or 100,000, or some other number depending on how they setup their cost structure. If the product turns out to be fairly popular, once they've passed that magic point of profitability, they may reduce costs to increase sales volumes further, so the price on these could maybe drop to 199, then maybe eventually 149. It all depends, again, on how popular they are, I suspect.
Credit card numbers are always highly-financially valuable information, so I'm not sure how this possibly qualifies as a counter-example? The SSL in this case, as you point out, isn't to protect the transaction, which is for a small amount, but for the *credit card info* which is part of the transaction and which is very valuable.
That said, I still think the GP's point is flawed - there's lots of info which is not 'financial' info which is still important to keep private, such as login/authentication info for almost any system which needs to authenticate users (for example, I choose to use SSL for my POP3 connections to my mail server - on the one hand, the email itself, since it came over the internet, is not really private, as it could have already been read earlier in the delivery chain, but I use SSL to protect my login), private personal info of a non-financial nature like health records, or just keeping inter-personal communications between parties private (for example, protecting the voice traffic on a VoIP system, or maybe instead of using public email for communications between members of some sort of group, you decide to setup an SSL encrypted website where the users login and can send private messages to other users of the website - yes, you could use other means than a PKI for distributing the keys to users, but that's kind of complicated, and means that users cannot as easily use other computers to connect to your website [although, arguably, I suppose, if you are using a computer that doesn't belong to you, you are already exposing yourself to security threats such as keylogging, etc, on that other computer, so you shouldn't use other computers for highly sensitive stuff, but it still might make sense to SSL encrypt stuff that should remain private, but which you don't need the absolute highest levels of security]).
Thanks for the feedback. Like I said, I don't know a lot about this stuff yet. I've been trying to get info, but, it's actually harder to find good info about stuff like this than I thought it would be. I got some gleanings from Wikipedia, and a few other sources - I think I found something on the PBS website that had some essays written by two policy wonks from the Carter days, arguing the two sides of the debate, as it was seen at the time. When I wrote my post, I was working from memory as I read this less detailed than I'd like information about a month ago.
"From memory I don't think the mix was plutonium and uranium and I think the elements they were using were creating an enormous waste problem in the process."
I just found my source for that statement (I was working from memory). The wikipedia article on Fast Breeder Reactors says this:
"FBRs usually use a mixed oxide fuel core of up to 20% plutonium dioxide (PuO2) and at least 80% uranium dioxide (UO2)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Fun_Ball
I would think, from an engineering perspective, it should be quite possible to create containers for the waste which contain the radioactivity, and could physically survive even a bad train accident? That does still leave the potential for "The Terrorists" to cause a train crash, and grab a few containers of the stuff before "the cavalry" can arrive. Somehow, though, I suspect it would be fairly difficult to get very far with those containers, or out of the country with them. I would expect they'd be large, heavy, have a unique morphology (that is, physical shape/appearance), well marked, and tagged with tracking devices in such a way that the tracking devices are very difficult to remove or interfere with, so that they'd be very difficult to smuggle. Also, I would expect the military or national guard to *already* be there, escorting the train, so that the window of opportunity is very small.
I might be misunderstanding the situation, but I thought after reprocessing, yes, it becomes much more radioactive, but that is what let's you put it in a reactor and 'burn' it for another 10 or 15 years to generate electricity, at which point the fission it's been undergoing for those years has 'cooled' it off a lot, and so it's both less radioactive *and* the waste product has a shorter half-life? I might be wrong though, and what you say might be the case. Still, it's arguably better to try to secure 'very hot' waste for 100 years than 'hot' waste for 10000+?
The parent is right. I don't know a whole lot about Nuclear Physics, but it's something I've been trying to read up on lately. The thing about 'spent' nuclear fuel, is that it still does have, as the parent points out, the potential to be reprocessed and burned again. I'm not entirely clear on this, but from what I've read, I think they can reprocess it quite a few times, until it's eventually at a fairly low energy and stable state to where, like the parent said, it's only dangerous for a short time.
What people don't realize is back in the 70's, the US was looking into the possibility of setting up breeder reactors to reprocess fuel. The Carter administration made the decision to, for the time being, defer re-processing the fuel, with the given reason that they were concerned about the ability to secure the Plutonium which is produced in the re-processing. That is, breeder reactors process 'spent' Uranium into a mixture of Uranium and Plutonium, I think (which can then be used as a fuel for a plutonium power reactor). The problem is, if someone diverted even *very small* amounts of the plutonium, which might be hard to detect because of how small an amount is missing, they could over time possibly accumulate enough material to build a small but powerful bomb, or at least a dirty bomb. Steal a few grams here, a few grams there, eventually you have a few kilograms.
Plus, there was an economic argument against it at the time - Uranium was cheap and abundant, so it was simply cheaper to keep burning 'new' Uranium, than to reprocess the spent Uranium. My understanding is that, at least currently, some of the processing and enrichment necessary to turn it into Plutonium fuel, hasn't been figured out how to do very econically effectively. There have been various Breeder reactor's put up in other countries, I think I read there are some in Europe and Asia, but so far the current designs, I guess, haven't turned out to be very economically competitive against other energy sources.
Personally, as I indicate in my subject for this post, I view Yucca Mountain not as a waste site, a dumping ground, but more like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We are saving the spent Uranium until the time we need it and and have figured out the technologies necessary to efficiently and cheaply reproccess it, and how to secure it better. Because it stays 'hot' for 10000 years, it means we have plenty of time in which to figure out how to reprocess it and make an economically viable energy source out of it. In that regard, the extremely long time spans might be quite to our advantage, as it means we aren't, really, losing significant potential energy each year it's sitting in storage. In the meantime, we just keep buying 'new' Uranium and building up our strategic reserve.
While it's true that for people who understand a lot about how computer's work, and give 2 seconds' thought to it, these things are obvious, for the great mass of people, these are real 'gotchas' that people *should* be made aware of, so they can learn to avoid these problems. Lots of people would probably never think about the fact that apps might take their encrypted Word file, when they load it from their encrypted drive, and save a working-copy in an unencrypted temp directory. To computer geeks, that's a pretty obvious problem to deal with. Same with stuff like 'recently used files', etc.
True, it's not *really* a problem with TrueCrypt, per-se, but it's a problem which *affects* TrueCrypt. Even if it's not TrueCrypt's *fault* that the hidden volume is revealed, if TrueCrypt has no control over it's volumes being revealed, that's fundamentally a problem for TrueCrypt.
What's the price of a Cell vs a GPU? Nowadays, I think you can get a pretty decent GPU for less than $100? Still, I wonder if, for low-end systems, would it make sense, financially, to use a low-end CPU (like an Atom or Intel's 'economy' Pentium mobile CPUs), which wouldn't maybe be able to handle high-def video, and add on a Cell? Although, at that point, it's probably cheaper to get a Core2 CPU, and not worry about GPU or Cell.
Wow... wait... is this life, imitating video games? There's a character in Penny Arcade: On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness that would, no doubt, be delighted to assist them with this, err. . scientific study.
I've been wondering, if Cell technology were integrated into general purpose PCs, what kind of tasks it would help with. Could it be used to accellerate. . .
* Crypto functions (like whole-disk encryption, or encrypted volumes (like TrueCrypt)?
* High resolution video decoding, so the processor doesn't have to chug so much on it? From the article, it sounds like this might be one use of the cell?
* Grid computing - things like World Community Grid, distributed.net, SETI@home etc? I imagine this probably depends, at least in part, on the specific types of computations being done for the project you participate in, but would you commonly be able to do more computation, faster, for those types of projects if you had cell processors?
Can a GPU like one from Nvidia or ATI potentially work together *with* the cell processor to increase the GPU's capabilities? (I'd guess that would probably depend on the drivers having support for the Cell, and I'm guessing that current generation drivers probably wouldn't take any advantage of the Cell?)
This has been driving me nuts ever since the new comment system was introduced. Overall, I mostly like D2, but since the old system has allowed me to login while posting for *years*, and now suddenly I can't, it feels like a step *backwards*. I especially I hate when I've typed 2 paragraphs of text, then suddenly realize I'm not logged in. Yeah, copy-and-paste are you friend in that situation, but it's still a pain. As the parent pointed out, after logging in, you have to find the main article, then find whichever discussion thread you wanted to reply to, which can be a major waste of time.
Please, why in the world can't I login right in the comment box? I know you guys want to ajax-ify everything, but really, just having the username/password fields as part of the form with the comment summary and body was so simple and elegant, how could you possibly improve it? Since the code on the backend is already there to handle it, since the old system is still there, I can't imagine it would be terribly difficult to add this back into the new system?
To give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. . .
Is it *possible* that the price difference, at least in part, is because Microsoft is buying higher-quality drives which will last longer, so that they don't have to deal with replacing customer hard drives? Maybe they are doing rigorous quality control and throwing away 1/3 or 1/2 of the hard drives which don't meet the standards (although, ideally, the manufacturer of the HDD should be eating that cost - which they probably are only able to afford by charging more for the drives in the first place).
I mean, I don't know, but my experience with 69 dollar hard drives is they often don't last more than 2 or 3 years. Often they are refurbs. Granted, it's been 3 or 4 years since I actually bought a hard drive, but back then the 69 dollar jobs were the refurbs. I still bought some of them, with the idea that they are cheap, I'd buy the 20 dollar 5-year replacement warranty, make sure I back up regularly, and when they die, just get another drive through warranty.
But, Microsoft can't afford to take such a casual attitude, I would think, as servicing millions of consoles to replace failing hard drives would be expensive, and quite probably a PR nightmare.
I'm confused. Didn't Yahoo get their ass handed to them by a search engine that was created at Stanford University by PhD Computer Science students , whose creators only saw significant investment after that was concluded (because they had free access to University resources, like bandwidth, computers, and power)?
I could be wrong, but I think this comes down to paid-search. There was an article just the other day on slashdot about Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and a patent Yahoo acquired when it bought Overture, which gave them a paid-search property. That is, people listing with yahoo pay to get their search rankings elevated.
I believe, however, it is a pay per click model (I might be wrong). So, what Yahoo seems to be trying to do, in letting you use their 'search results' (I put it in quotes because, when the results are paid for, I don't really consider that a search, really) without any Yahoo branding or advertising, is still probably generating revenue for them by getting clicks on their links, which they can then bill to the sites who've contracted for paid-search rankings with Yahoo. With paid search, it doesn't matter who's website the 'search result' is displayed in, as long as Yahoo can still claim a click, so it's in their interest to try to get as many sites as possible publishing their links for them.
Hell, Yahoo ought to pay *you* to display their 'search results'.
I'm confused - at an atomic scale, what is top and bottom? I thought space has no 'preferred' direction in which to define up, down, east, west, north, south? How can there be a 'bottom' particle?
(Sorry, couldn't resist).
You have some interesting point - it does seem like it would be easier, short term, to switch to propane. Do you have any links to info on propane synthesis? What's involved in the process? As the main article for this discussion points out, creating hydrogen gas is something that can be done fairly simply, as long as you have access to electricity and water. People could have home-based fueling systems next to their house, and a hydrogen 'gas-station' never needs trucks for delivery - just water pipes and electric lines. Part of me likes the simplicity of a setup like that - the whole idea of delivering chemical fuels on trucks which themselves require energy in the form of chemical fuel, seems somewhat inefficient - you are paying a 'tax' on transporting the energy. Granted, you still pay an energy tax to deliver water (takes energy to run the city water pumps to fill the towers), and electricity (transmission losses), but I think the energy required to move water through the pipe network, and the losses in electric transmission would be smaller than the energy used to drive a truck (I admit I could be wrong about that).
In some ways, the 'hydrogen economy' can reuse existing infrastructure (the existing electric grid and municipal water systems) in ways that most other chemical fuels might not be able to. Right now the main problem would be an adequate supply of cheap electricity - if hydrogen cars started getting put into production, and people started driving them, I think we could expect some significant rises in the price of electricity, which already isn't exactly cheap. Also, in the short term, these home-based fueling devices aren't really a solution. The article says it produces enough hydrogen to drive 25 miles. Yeah. I can't afford to have *two* cars, and with a 25-mile limit (really, 12 mile limit since I gotta get *back* home), a hydrogen powered car isn't even gonna get me to work and back (I work about 20 miles from where I live; I'd live closer to work, except I also go to school, so I chose to live close to school instead, but I'd have to drive the distance between work and school one way or another, this isn't about me wanting to live in a McMansion in the suburbs - I actually live in an efficiency apt). Let alone longer trips to, e.g. visit relatives and friends who live farther away.
Propane is definitely better in that regard, but with propane, you do necessarily have to produce the propane somewhere else, and then move the propane to the point of consumption (e.g. gas station). It's true that you could have a large propane tank at home, instead of a unit that synthesizes the fuel, but that would require re-fueling the tank somehow - I'm guessing that would mean a truck coming to your home, and at that point, why not just go to a local fueling station like we do with gasoline right now (people could have their own 200 gallon tanks at home too, but most people choose not to bother).
So, while there are more places to get propane right now, they still aren't nearly as common as you would need to really have people start driving propane vehicles. I think that, ultimately, synthetic propane suffers from many of the same problems as hydrogen, though it does have a few advantages. The main problem being, as with hydrogen, if you are going to synthesize propane, you need an energy source to do it, I would assume, because of the law of conservation of energy (I presume electricity? I can't seem to find any info on Google or Wikipedia about propane synthesis). If electricity, that means we still need to find ways to produce massive amounts of electricity, cheaply, cleanly, and safely. Which is the biggest reason, I think, that hydrogen cars cannot succeed right now.
The problem with your analysis, the way I see it (which might not line up with current law in any way, shape or form), is that it fails to recognize that corporations are fundamentally composed of people. Slashdot commentators like to reduce corporations to fancy names like Artificial Legal Entity, but those entities are created to provide some organization to the collective exercise of natural rights by groups of real people (shareholders, management, and employees - ok, mostly management, but management are people too. . .).
If I am the owner (shareholder) of a corporation, and I operate servers, I have the right to freedom of speech (and freedom of the press, which is basically just an aspect of freedom of speech, ultimately) with regards to the content I do or do not choose to host on my servers. The government should not be able to compel speech - freedom of speech also implies the freedom not to speak, not to be compelled to say something I choose not to.
Of course, with regards to services like Flikr, this raises thorny questions of liability - to whit, to what extent should Flikr be held liable for the content it hosts. After all, if the corporation Flikr wants to argue that it should have the right to take down images it does not agree with, based on freedom of speech, then it is essentially claiming that the content hosted by it represent *it's own* speech, and not the speech of others which it is merely a hosting infrastructure for - that's the real problem, that corps want to have their cake and eat it too - in one court, claim they can suppress speech they disagree with, and in another court, arguing they shouldn't be held liable for illegal content (e.g. kiddie porn, copyrighted images which weren't uploaded with the owners' permission, etc) which people might try to upload to their servers.
If you want to put up an image, article, or movie, which some corporation won't host for you, maybe you need to think about getting your own server. That still leaves the possibility of getting cut off by your ISP, but that's where contract law comes in (service agreements, where if you made sure the contract you were signing wasn't all screwed up, you can sue them for breech of contract if they cut you off) and where you can take more action to protect your own rights. With free services, the terms are never going to be fair to you. With services you actually pay for, you can negotiate terms which don't screw you.
This sounds an aweful lot like something I saw on the Discovery channel, on the FutureWeapons show, but I don't think the device I saw discussed was based on electromagnetic beams, but rather just a highly-directional sonic beam. Sort of an 'audio-laser', which was basically produced by using a specially designed speaker that doesn't radiate an extremely wide cone like conventional speakers. It had two modes - one was just an annoying noise, used to try to disperse crowds or non-lethal takedown of armed enemies, the other mode was basically a conventional speaker, where you could use it to send propaganda, psy ops, or even point-to-point communications between different military groups (although, I would assume normally they would just use radio for that, but I suppose there could be situations where something like this could be useful if you want to maintain radio silence, but easier to setup and use than an optical laser (which would require extremely precise targetting on a remote sensor, and would be prone to some interference from atmospheric disturbances/smoke/fog/etc).
Unfortunately, the article is extremely skimpy on any actual details, so it's hard to evaluate what this technology really does. But, even from what is available from the article, this doesn't sound like a device which would be practical for uses like advertising, since you have to target it at individuals, or small groups. Advertising is, largely, a broadcast endeavor - you want it to reach as many people as cheaply as possible, not just one or a small group of people (unless, maybe, you are advertising to the very rich, where one sale is worth millions of dollars or more, or VIPs at large corporations, where again, a single sale might be worth multi-millions of dollars).
Ok, so first Slashdot readers started to decide to skip the article that the summary links to. Now the next step in our evolution is that we post without even reading the summary. Great. I quote, from the 1 paragraph summary that you are apparently too busy to read. . .
"Called the One-Liter, because that's how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers"
There you go.
I hope someone with more knowledge than I do answers, but I'll try to give my best answer, from the understanding I've gleaned so far from my Engineering Physics courses at the University I'm attending. . .
I think, at an atomic level, atoms don't actually touch. When they get close enough, I think the internal atomic forces cause them to repel each other based upon field-forces (field forces are things like magnetism, or gravity, where no contact is required for things to act upon each other), or, for some elements, start sharing electrons and form lattices/grids of evenly spaced atoms (and, again, the grid spacing is determined by a balancing of repelling and attracting field forces, I think). This is definitely an area of physics I want to learn more about, and like I said, I hope someone who truly knows the answer will comment, but that's my best answer.
A ten year cooling period proves that the globe cooled for 10 years. It's perfectly correct to say that during that 10 year period, we experienced global cooling. It might be that after that 10 year period, the globe then experienced another period of global warming. The thing about trends is, it always depends on what time frame you are actually interested in. One could go to the other extreme, and look at the last X thousand years of global history, say, from the peak of the last warm period, through the ice age, and up to the present and say that during that time frame, there is no average global warming or cooling, and that would be correct too.
The fact is, we know the earth is warming, because that is based on verifiable observations. You can't falsify observations. Now, there is something else also called Global Warming, which is the theory that man is *causing* the Earth to warm. That's a lot tougher nut, but there has to be a way to falsify that theory. One thing we can say is that the theory of Man-made Global Warming is based on the theory that certain gasses, which are released by man into the atmosphere, trap heat. That is a falsifiable theory, which has not been falsified. Experiments have indicated that the hypothesis that Carbon Dioxide, Methane, and other gasses trap heat in the atmosphere. There is another theory, that plants and other types of life forms (I think algeas and other lifeforms in the ocean) remove Carbon Dioxide, in particular, from the atmosphere, and that is a falsifiable theory. Since we know that mankind is, overall, reducing the surface area of the planet that is densely populated by plants, we can say, not absolutely surely, and possibly not falsifiable, but with with a high degree of confidence, that the earth's ability to reduce Carbon Dioxide is reduced from what it could do in the past (there is still the matter of the oceans; it may be possible that, even though the plantlife on the surface is not removing as much CO2 as it used to, maybe the ocean is removing more than it used to).
My point is, that while the big, complex 'puzzle' that is a theory like global warming, maybe cannot be falsified as a whole, you can certainly falsify the constituent pieces of the theory. If you have not been able to experimentally falsify the pieces (which are falsifiable), then the most reasonable assumption is that the theory is correct, until you have some concrete evidence or theory to show why the theory was not, in fact, correct.
That said, we should not commit economic suicide because of fear of global warming. As far as I can tell, the only reason people who are 'anti-global warming' even care about the issue is that they fear that we will enact regulations which will have a harmful effect on the economy, without really having a need to. The way I see it, global warming is, to some extent, a long term issue, and we should be thinking about long term solutions. We absolutely should be continuing to pour resources into energy research (e.g. improved designs for solar power, wind, fission, fusion, biomass - we need to explore every possibility to find cleaner, renewable energy), research into efficiency/consumption reduction, etc.
We shouldn't deny global warming, when there is so much evidence for the theory, but we also shouldn't make drastic bad choices that impoverish people, out of fear of global warming.
That's a good question. My best understanding is that you are probably correct. On the one hand, some of the ice is above the level of the water, and once it melts, it would no longer be above the level of the water (the 'tip of the iceberg' as it were, which as the ice melts, becomes part of the ocean, but was not in the ocean previously). On the other hand, water takes up more volume as a solid than as liquid.
I think it might even be that the amount of ice that sticks up out of the water is exactly proportional to the increase in volume that the water experiences as it solidifies - this would make sense, because the total weight of the ice (that is, both the part in the water and the part sticking up) should be exactly equal to the original weight of the water that became ice, but the volume is greater. IIRC my boating physics, for a solid to float, it must displace a volume of liquid water whose weight is equal to the weight of the solid object. So, that would mathematically indicate that the volume of ice above the surface has to be equal to the change in volume as the water became a solid, and that as it reverts to liquid, and shrinks, it will occupy the exact same volume as the submerged ice did. I think.
All you'd need to show is a trend that, over time, the average temperature of the atmosphere and ocean is dropping, or at least stable. It might also help to show stable or increasing glacier masses (over a large collection of glaciers distributed all over the world, and over a somewhat large period of time - doesn't have to be stable in a one year cycle - one would *expect* glaciers to shrink during 'summer' [which is going to differ between northern and southern hemisphere's, of course], and grow back during the winter - but at least over the course of a decade or two).