Gold and platinum will go to the tumor... and liver... and kidneys... etc... so this isn't so perfect either. Further, ionizing heavy metals isn't the same thing as ionizing cancer cells.
A better option is probably something like the gamma knife, where multiple beams are focused to a single point within the tumor. This seems like a cheap and less effective way of evading patent law.
Yeah, we should just let ISS fall out of the sky. It's only the single most expensive object ever created. What possible science could we learn with the ISS?
And these days, it looks like "let Federal Russia do it" is the true choice being made. Fortunately Russia somehow manages manned space flight cheaper and more reliably than our unmanned missions.
It'll just be cosmonauts doing it and us stealing and looting Russian science. Not the first time in history that's happened. Oh well, we wouldn't want to spend any of the rich people's money on science and technology, would we?
MW2 sucked and was terribly overrated, but COD4? Was a much better experience single-player than most games. The Pripyat levels were just epic in particular. And while WaW's grenade-chucking-to-keep-you-moving was extremely annoying, I don't recall where Wolf3d had the Battle of Stalingrad or planting the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag.
People always like war, and it has a lot of sequels. The same is true for video games about war. Was the moniker "xxxx 2" even in use until World War 2? "World War 2 -- everything you loved about World War 1 is back. All new-diabolical enemies, new weapons, new technology, research trees, all-new Africa campaign maps, and more!"
Uhh, I've played the Rage on-rails shooter on iOS and while it is technically relatively impressive (though less so than Epic Citadel) it is not a fun game. The IP is a pretty obvious cross of Smash TV and Fallout.
Yeah, Quake etc were awesome and the source code is amazing but I'm not sure booting every dissenting voice at id did the right thing for creativity.
It was a sarcastic comment along the lines of "If only there were giant machines that could see inside the human body" from House MD.
Not completely true, but just to illustrate a point. Yes, I know NASA is still around... but things have changed for science funding in America without the cold war driving government funding, and not for the better, although I am glad the cold war is over and have no issues with Russia.
I'm shocked. If only we could form some sort of giant national space agency to compete with Russia in space. Nah, it'd be expensive, and we'd probably need a bunch of German scientists or something.
No, gold just stood out from the other elements because it didn't readily oxidize / form compounds, was relatively dense, and shiny. It was great for primitive cavemen collecting shiny rocks. It is not, however, a good study in practical value equaling its commodity value.
Gold is less practical than iron or titanium, and less practical and less valuable than pretty much any concentrated radioisotope that isn't U-238. (synthetic isotopes are the most obscenely valuable things in existence)
You can of course transmute lead into gold with the "alchemy" of physics but it's not even close to being worth the cost. And let's face it, in the zombie / post-nuclear apocalypse, lead is probably more valuable anyway. Especially when it's encased in brass and has a primer behind it.
I have a Fujitsu P1610, a tablet PC more powerful than an iPad, and have owned it for years. It's nothing new. And guess what? Gaming on it sucks, and it has little to do with the framerate -- though it's getting dated now my chief complaint with gaming on it was never the framerate, it was the interface.
That's largely true of the iPad as well, because very few games are suited for touch input (Angry Birds etc). If you want portable gaming, get a DS or PSP. The controller is king.
And yeah, I've paired Bluetooth pads and keyboards with my Droid X, and tried running emulators. Awkward.
Even my Macbook Pro which has a beautiful screen, fast GPU/CPU, kickass touchpad, etc is not fun to game on.
Portable gaming has little to do with hardware power. Even an old GBA is a better experience than machines many orders of magnitude more powerful.
I even have a tablet computer I've upgraded the RAM on (MicroDIMMs... oh so economical!!), added a solid state drive, and a larger battery. A Fujitsu P1610... weighs about 1 kg, on par with the iPad. Similar screen size. Some dude in China even upgraded the CPU on his. Microsoft continues to support tablet PCs in Windows 7. And there are many of them on the market.
So if he wants an "open" tablet PC, they certainly exist. And guess what? They suffer because they lack the cohesive and efficient mesh of hardware and software of the iPad.
And that ain't fanboyism, I spent far more money on my Fujitsu P1610 than my iPad. And I like the Fujitsu. Made in Japan, transreflective sunlight readable display, etc. More capable and faster than the iPad. Yet it gets used much, much less.
There are things more important than being able to spend obscene amounts of money to buy stupid little Micro DIMM modules. (I own a 2 GB one, thank you very much)
How is the XBox more moddable? You can add... a USB hard drive that doesn't hold most of the 360's content? A USB memory stick, but only if it's less than 16GB? A proprietary hard drive, or Microsoft will invalidate yours if you try hacking one in? You can't install more RAM or a new CPU on a XBox.
The iPad is a system on a chip. SoCs don't have SODIMM sockets or a PCI Express slot to plug in your NVidia card that would devour the battery in under a second and start an electrical fire. Expecting to upgrade it is like expecting to upgrade a cell phone's CPU/RAM... basically the same thing really. The best they could do is give you a SD card slot.
And you can drop a new battery in one, it's just a PITA.
If you expect to slap together your own iPad from components you got on Newegg, good luck with that.
There is no KGB. Putting it in the title is pretty dumb and factually incorrect.
Yeah, the FSB is the success to the KGB in the Russian Federation, but if you tell a Russian there's no difference between it and the Soviet Union, half of them will probably punch you in the face.
This kind of stuff just makes Slashdot read like an amateur blog that can't be trusted for news or fact checking.
The TMA represents minor revisions to the original Soyuz. It is still a cramped, mostly-obsolete capsule on top of an ICBM.
Both the Buran and the STS are more advanced designs, and the STS has been continually updated with stuff like a glass cockpit. The capabilities of the STS and Buran far exceed that of the Soyuz.
Not trying to bash the Soyuz, but it's like comparing a Geo Metro to a semi tractor.
Couldn't we use the reactors aboard our nuclear vessels to provide some electricity if the ships aren't moving? ie, the USS Ronald Reagan and other Nimitz-class carriers have two Westinghouse A4W reactors producing 94MW each. I'm not sure if that could all be diverted to electrical transmission, but if so a few nuclear ships could temporarily provide power for a large area.
To my fellow PS3 owners: if you happen to run Folding @ Home on your PS3 ("Life with Playstation"), have you noticed that the F@H locations for Japan have shifted significantly down and to the right on the world map? Or is it just me?
You have to take into account the worldview of the anti-nuclear extremists. They believe humans are a blight upon the planet, and it can ultimately only be saved by reducing the human population. So yes, the lack of compassion for the Japanese makes sense-- they ultimately want a Japan devoid of humanity and technology. Tsunamis are massive earthquakes are simply a means to that end.
And what energy sources are better than nuclear that we've developed? Oh wait, that was just something you saw on Star Trek? Fictional sources of energy are fictional.
And how, pray tell, is Japan going to meet its domestic energy needs without fission reactors? Did your drum circle cover that topic? They already have substantial wind/solar development, and it's not enough for their small landmass and high population density.
The nuclear reactor itself was undamaged by the earthquake and tsunami anyway. It took it like a champ. What failed were the diesel generators -- internal combustion engines. Your proposed "safer" technology, as it turns out, was the weakest link.
It wasn't Chernobyl. Not even close. It's not an excuse to try to force policy upon the Japanese and rob them of the ability to choose their own energy sources.
Public perception trumps science here... in the US. Japan, on the other hand, is far more pro-nuclear, and anti-nuclear indoctrinated zealots in the US don't dictate Japanese domestic energy policy. Japan is better educated, so arguments appealing to ignorance don't work very well.
The Japanese are far more concerned about the utter devastation by the quake and tsunami. A contained nuclear problem just means they need to build a new plant, and is a small footnote to the overall disaster.
And how much radioactivity leaked from Three Mile Island? How many western plants are graphite piles like Chernobyl with no containment vessel?
And your complaint is that only people who are ignorant of science oppose nuclear energy? Well hey, I wonder why. Funny that as a nation's standards for science education increase, opposition for nuclear energy decreases.
If your argument falls apart under the light of education, science, and fact, maybe you shouldn't have been making it in the first place.
Yeah, coal energy is cheap. Because we pay the true costs much later. And they are far more damaging to human life than nuclear energy. Coal is cheap, but it's not worth it.
The problems Japan faces with clean-up aren't so easily detected as radioactivity. In that scale of disaster, you seek the leakage of a great many nasty things with absolutely no half-life, high carcinogenicity, and low LD50s. Those massive industrial tanks of chemicals aren't built as sturdy as nuclear reactor vessels.
Not everyone on the left hates nuclear energy. Not everyone on the right thinks evolution is a lie. The extremist fringes in either direction get a lot of media attention, but their screen time doesn't reflect the significance of their beliefs.
Yeah, well... let's not forget that per megawatt coal emits more nuclear waste than nuclear energy. And in the US, arguing against nuclear is arguing for coal. This isn't true in every country, and it depends on the available local resources and population density... but I would imagine is the case for the UK and Japan as well. I'm all for using wind, etc where it makes sense, but the notion solar is going to replace coal and nuclear is pure fantasy.
Also, I see a lot of people thinking uranium isn't radioactive before it's mined, or something like that. Uraninite ore is 90% uranium. It's *hot*, and it's lying all over on the ground in the southwest US, in mesa country. You can find a ton of it on eBay, because people walk around with their scintillation counters, find it, and sell it for profit. That ore is so hot you can drop it directly into a CANDU-type heavy water reactor and it will produce energy.
On top of that, uranium and thorium are incredibly abundant... moreso than even tin. You've even got them below your house. Turn an old CRT on, and then use a wet cloth to wipe down the dust on it. Your geiger counter will jump from 60 CPM (background) to 1300 CPM or so. That's from radon decay products. You're breathing them in, right now.
Why should we let the uranium just sit around irradiating random things when it could be generating energy instead? Radioactive stuff is going to be there whether we use it or not. Might as well use it.
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Gold and platinum will go to the tumor... and liver... and kidneys... etc... so this isn't so perfect either. Further, ionizing heavy metals isn't the same thing as ionizing cancer cells.
A better option is probably something like the gamma knife, where multiple beams are focused to a single point within the tumor. This seems like a cheap and less effective way of evading patent law.
Yeah, we should just let ISS fall out of the sky. It's only the single most expensive object ever created. What possible science could we learn with the ISS?
And these days, it looks like "let Federal Russia do it" is the true choice being made. Fortunately Russia somehow manages manned space flight cheaper and more reliably than our unmanned missions.
It'll just be cosmonauts doing it and us stealing and looting Russian science. Not the first time in history that's happened. Oh well, we wouldn't want to spend any of the rich people's money on science and technology, would we?
MW2 sucked and was terribly overrated, but COD4? Was a much better experience single-player than most games. The Pripyat levels were just epic in particular. And while WaW's grenade-chucking-to-keep-you-moving was extremely annoying, I don't recall where Wolf3d had the Battle of Stalingrad or planting the Soviet flag on the roof of the Reichstag.
People always like war, and it has a lot of sequels. The same is true for video games about war. Was the moniker "xxxx 2" even in use until World War 2? "World War 2 -- everything you loved about World War 1 is back. All new-diabolical enemies, new weapons, new technology, research trees, all-new Africa campaign maps, and more!"
Uhh, I've played the Rage on-rails shooter on iOS and while it is technically relatively impressive (though less so than Epic Citadel) it is not a fun game. The IP is a pretty obvious cross of Smash TV and Fallout.
Yeah, Quake etc were awesome and the source code is amazing but I'm not sure booting every dissenting voice at id did the right thing for creativity.
It was a sarcastic comment along the lines of "If only there were giant machines that could see inside the human body" from House MD.
Not completely true, but just to illustrate a point. Yes, I know NASA is still around... but things have changed for science funding in America without the cold war driving government funding, and not for the better, although I am glad the cold war is over and have no issues with Russia.
I'm shocked. If only we could form some sort of giant national space agency to compete with Russia in space. Nah, it'd be expensive, and we'd probably need a bunch of German scientists or something.
No, gold just stood out from the other elements because it didn't readily oxidize / form compounds, was relatively dense, and shiny. It was great for primitive cavemen collecting shiny rocks. It is not, however, a good study in practical value equaling its commodity value. Gold is less practical than iron or titanium, and less practical and less valuable than pretty much any concentrated radioisotope that isn't U-238. (synthetic isotopes are the most obscenely valuable things in existence) You can of course transmute lead into gold with the "alchemy" of physics but it's not even close to being worth the cost. And let's face it, in the zombie / post-nuclear apocalypse, lead is probably more valuable anyway. Especially when it's encased in brass and has a primer behind it.
Yeah, there's no anti-nuclear hysteria. That's why *nuclear* magnetic resonance imaging is so popular. Oh wait!
I have a Fujitsu P1610, a tablet PC more powerful than an iPad, and have owned it for years. It's nothing new. And guess what? Gaming on it sucks, and it has little to do with the framerate -- though it's getting dated now my chief complaint with gaming on it was never the framerate, it was the interface.
That's largely true of the iPad as well, because very few games are suited for touch input (Angry Birds etc). If you want portable gaming, get a DS or PSP. The controller is king.
And yeah, I've paired Bluetooth pads and keyboards with my Droid X, and tried running emulators. Awkward.
Even my Macbook Pro which has a beautiful screen, fast GPU/CPU, kickass touchpad, etc is not fun to game on.
Portable gaming has little to do with hardware power. Even an old GBA is a better experience than machines many orders of magnitude more powerful.
I even have a tablet computer I've upgraded the RAM on (MicroDIMMs... oh so economical!!), added a solid state drive, and a larger battery. A Fujitsu P1610 ... weighs about 1 kg, on par with the iPad. Similar screen size. Some dude in China even upgraded the CPU on his. Microsoft continues to support tablet PCs in Windows 7. And there are many of them on the market.
So if he wants an "open" tablet PC, they certainly exist. And guess what? They suffer because they lack the cohesive and efficient mesh of hardware and software of the iPad.
And that ain't fanboyism, I spent far more money on my Fujitsu P1610 than my iPad. And I like the Fujitsu. Made in Japan, transreflective sunlight readable display, etc. More capable and faster than the iPad. Yet it gets used much, much less.
There are things more important than being able to spend obscene amounts of money to buy stupid little Micro DIMM modules. (I own a 2 GB one, thank you very much)
How is the XBox more moddable? You can add... a USB hard drive that doesn't hold most of the 360's content? A USB memory stick, but only if it's less than 16GB? A proprietary hard drive, or Microsoft will invalidate yours if you try hacking one in? You can't install more RAM or a new CPU on a XBox.
The iPad is a system on a chip. SoCs don't have SODIMM sockets or a PCI Express slot to plug in your NVidia card that would devour the battery in under a second and start an electrical fire. Expecting to upgrade it is like expecting to upgrade a cell phone's CPU/RAM... basically the same thing really. The best they could do is give you a SD card slot.
And you can drop a new battery in one, it's just a PITA.
If you expect to slap together your own iPad from components you got on Newegg, good luck with that.
There is no KGB. Putting it in the title is pretty dumb and factually incorrect.
Yeah, the FSB is the success to the KGB in the Russian Federation, but if you tell a Russian there's no difference between it and the Soviet Union, half of them will probably punch you in the face.
This kind of stuff just makes Slashdot read like an amateur blog that can't be trusted for news or fact checking.
The TMA represents minor revisions to the original Soyuz. It is still a cramped, mostly-obsolete capsule on top of an ICBM.
Both the Buran and the STS are more advanced designs, and the STS has been continually updated with stuff like a glass cockpit. The capabilities of the STS and Buran far exceed that of the Soyuz.
Not trying to bash the Soyuz, but it's like comparing a Geo Metro to a semi tractor.
Couldn't we use the reactors aboard our nuclear vessels to provide some electricity if the ships aren't moving? ie, the USS Ronald Reagan and other Nimitz-class carriers have two Westinghouse A4W reactors producing 94MW each. I'm not sure if that could all be diverted to electrical transmission, but if so a few nuclear ships could temporarily provide power for a large area.
To my fellow PS3 owners: if you happen to run Folding @ Home on your PS3 ("Life with Playstation"), have you noticed that the F@H locations for Japan have shifted significantly down and to the right on the world map? Or is it just me?
You have to take into account the worldview of the anti-nuclear extremists. They believe humans are a blight upon the planet, and it can ultimately only be saved by reducing the human population. So yes, the lack of compassion for the Japanese makes sense-- they ultimately want a Japan devoid of humanity and technology. Tsunamis are massive earthquakes are simply a means to that end.
Err, sorry, that was supposed to be a reply to the parent. After reading a couple pages of anti-nuclear ignorance I get a little annoyed.
And what energy sources are better than nuclear that we've developed? Oh wait, that was just something you saw on Star Trek? Fictional sources of energy are fictional.
And how, pray tell, is Japan going to meet its domestic energy needs without fission reactors? Did your drum circle cover that topic? They already have substantial wind/solar development, and it's not enough for their small landmass and high population density.
The nuclear reactor itself was undamaged by the earthquake and tsunami anyway. It took it like a champ. What failed were the diesel generators -- internal combustion engines. Your proposed "safer" technology, as it turns out, was the weakest link.
It wasn't Chernobyl. Not even close. It's not an excuse to try to force policy upon the Japanese and rob them of the ability to choose their own energy sources.
Public perception trumps science here... in the US. Japan, on the other hand, is far more pro-nuclear, and anti-nuclear indoctrinated zealots in the US don't dictate Japanese domestic energy policy. Japan is better educated, so arguments appealing to ignorance don't work very well.
The Japanese are far more concerned about the utter devastation by the quake and tsunami. A contained nuclear problem just means they need to build a new plant, and is a small footnote to the overall disaster.
And how much radioactivity leaked from Three Mile Island? How many western plants are graphite piles like Chernobyl with no containment vessel?
And your complaint is that only people who are ignorant of science oppose nuclear energy? Well hey, I wonder why. Funny that as a nation's standards for science education increase, opposition for nuclear energy decreases.
If your argument falls apart under the light of education, science, and fact, maybe you shouldn't have been making it in the first place.
Yeah, coal energy is cheap. Because we pay the true costs much later. And they are far more damaging to human life than nuclear energy. Coal is cheap, but it's not worth it.
The problems Japan faces with clean-up aren't so easily detected as radioactivity. In that scale of disaster, you seek the leakage of a great many nasty things with absolutely no half-life, high carcinogenicity, and low LD50s. Those massive industrial tanks of chemicals aren't built as sturdy as nuclear reactor vessels.
Not everyone on the left hates nuclear energy. Not everyone on the right thinks evolution is a lie. The extremist fringes in either direction get a lot of media attention, but their screen time doesn't reflect the significance of their beliefs.
Yeah, well... let's not forget that per megawatt coal emits more nuclear waste than nuclear energy. And in the US, arguing against nuclear is arguing for coal. This isn't true in every country, and it depends on the available local resources and population density... but I would imagine is the case for the UK and Japan as well. I'm all for using wind, etc where it makes sense, but the notion solar is going to replace coal and nuclear is pure fantasy.
Also, I see a lot of people thinking uranium isn't radioactive before it's mined, or something like that. Uraninite ore is 90% uranium. It's *hot*, and it's lying all over on the ground in the southwest US, in mesa country. You can find a ton of it on eBay, because people walk around with their scintillation counters, find it, and sell it for profit. That ore is so hot you can drop it directly into a CANDU-type heavy water reactor and it will produce energy.
On top of that, uranium and thorium are incredibly abundant... moreso than even tin. You've even got them below your house. Turn an old CRT on, and then use a wet cloth to wipe down the dust on it. Your geiger counter will jump from 60 CPM (background) to 1300 CPM or so. That's from radon decay products. You're breathing them in, right now.
Why should we let the uranium just sit around irradiating random things when it could be generating energy instead? Radioactive stuff is going to be there whether we use it or not. Might as well use it.