Personally, I have too many other important things in my life to worry about other than the fact that google saved that search for "hentai porn" last week.
Right. Like the fact that your comment will soon be one of the top ten searches for "hentai porn" because of Slashdot's pagerank.
But only if you're REALLY good at math. I'm told that the exam is a extremely difficult.
Exams. That's plural. Times 9. I'm currently working toward becoming an actuary (with a possible minor in CS, coincidentally) and I suggest you look into it if you're at all interested in math. I have a couple of family members who work closely with actuaries, and from what I hear, the career path can't be beaten. The work is incredibly difficult, but unbelievably rewarding financially. If you go through a decent program and take a few of the exams, it's not unheard of to be making six figures right out of college. Employers will also pay for you to take classes to pass the rest of the exams, and give paid time off from work to do so (i.e. you only actually work 4 days a week). Fully certified actuaries can then essentially write their own meal ticket doing whatever they desire. Early retirement (before age 50) is common, as is moonlighing as a private consultant. If that isn't good enough, IIRC, a significant portion of CEOs begin work as actuaries. Not to mention the unemployment rate for actuaries is virtually zero. There is incredible demand in the insurance industry, as well as with almost any company working in the financial sector.
To the OP: this may not be the best path for you if you're more interested more in pure and abstract mathematics, but if you can handle some mind-numbing drudgery every once in a while, it might not be a bad idea to look into becoming an actuary. The first two exams aren't all that difficult, so I highly recommend checking out some of the sample questions to see if this kind of thing might be right for you. Buy a book or two and spend some free time studying and you could be well on your way. The best of luck to ya =)
What about increased reliability? I realize a lot of this might depend on how the flash memory is interfaced, but it would be awesome to have a small built in flash chip capable of live backups of critical data. With say a spare gig of memory on the hard drive, it should be more than feasible to have data of certain folders (e.g. My Documents and system folders) in the off chance that your hard drive actually does fail. Being able to boot directly to the flash chip would be great in emergencies, and a copy of DSL/Puppy Linux/*Your favorite recovery tool* would be perfect to store there. Bonus points if you can easily (i.e. without a soldering iron) swap the flash chip to a fresh drive and do a Stage 1 Gentoo reinstall from scratch.
Come to think of it, the possiblities of RAIDing these things together could be interesting as well. With a RAID 1, all but the most paranoid wouldn't need to include the flash memory in the mirror. Or, should the flash memory get sufficiently large (say, 20-25% of the hard drive size), you could use the flash memory as dedicated parity in a RAID 4 array. Obviously this means squat if you can't interface the flash memory properly, but hey, at least the possibilities are there.
I think this is one of the most important (and most forgotten) problems regarding the Linux OSS community. I hate to generalize, but I know there are a (not-insignificant) group of people who feel that OSS projects shouldn't be ported to Windows, and instead should be reserved as a "killer app" to convince others to migrate. While the logic is understandable, the issue is that most people aren't going to plunge into something as intensive as installing a completely foreign operating system for the sake of an app or two that hasn't been ported.
Case in point, Amarok. I absolutely LOVE using it over anything Windows has to offer, and while iTunes and Winamp do the job for me on this side of the MBR, it'd be really nice to have another copy of Amarok running natively on Windows. I know at the moment, however, the consensus has been, if you want a Windows port, you're going to have to do it yourself. I realize the sources are around, but something like a Windows port is not a trivial undertaking. I don't disagree that dev time may be better spent adding features and fixing bugs, but I'm a little disappointed that its use is relegated to the uber-geek status of those who have the time, energy and knowhow to go about installing Linux.
Rather than trying to convince others that forsaking the warm familiarity of Windows is the only way to reap the benefits of cool OSS, we (as an open source community) should try to get the masses' collective feet wet without requiring such an ungodly effort on the user's part. Thankfully, that's starting to happen with some of the more mainstream OSS packages. Firefox has made enormous headway into the browser market, and OO.o is becoming an acceptable substitute to MS Office. What ultimately needs to happen is for these open source projects to become superior to their proprietary counterparts. Obviously, many are not yet up to snuff, but the fact that Microsoft is beginning to put its tail between its legs is a great sign. Your anecdote is a great example of (my view) the future that lay ahead of us. As users begin migrating piece by piece to open source alternatives, ultimately our applications can become OS agnostic, Linux on the desktop can continue its foray into user-friendliness (ala OSX), and more and more Average Joes, given the ability to choose freely between Linux and Windows, will readily make the plunge into FOSS.
Meh, I know Nintendo is doing something in the online venue (old downloadable Nintendo emulators and whatnot), but personally, I don't see the fun in playing SSB Brawl online. The past two semesters, I played an ungodly amount of the original SSB (the vintage 64 version), but I doubt it would've been half as fun had it been done online. Personally, half the fun in playing games like that is the trash talk that goes back and forth, the periodic cig breaks between marathon free for all sessions, and the atmosphere of having four guys crammed on a dorm room couch (all conveniently within arms reach, should a dispute need to be settled properly). Honestly, I think a significant part of the experience would be lost in online play. Not to mention the fact that the SSB franchise is the only (AFAIK) worthwhile multiplayer game that doesn't require split-screen goodness. Sure, a game of Halo across the campus LAN can be fun, but even those rarely go more than a few rooms away, and generally teams are kept within the same room. I'm sure Nintendo will have a decent online system this time around (they certainly got it right with the DS), but it won't be the reason I get a Wii.
Online will (and should) be icing on the cake, but it certainly isn't a selling point (at least for me). It might benefit a couple of games here and there, but at least for the ones I'm keenly interested in (Zelda, Metroid, and maybe a new Mario Tennis with the controller?!?) don't require an online aspect at all.
For all those doubters out there, take a minute to actually look at the service CBS and Amazon.com are offering. This isn't about getting a DVD of yesterday's 60 Minutes broadcast (we all have MythTV for that, right?), but rather for finding copies of older news stories that certainly aren't going to be broadcast again. Personally, I think the move is genius for CBS. Rather than collect dust, they're offering up these old clips for a very reasonable fee. It's a perfect example of a mega-corp actually adjusting to technological advances and embracing them. If you think about it for 30 seconds, it's really a perfect medium for the syndication of millions of archived newsreels.
Browsing through some of the clips, there's actually some really neat stuff available that would otherwise have been lost to the general public and appears to be a worthwhile trip down nostalgia lane. For example, their political section has a vast array of news clips from the 2000 Presidential election. There are a couple of pre-9/11 snippets on gasprices, and even what appears to be a segment on the Segway. Plus there's a wide variety of interviews with people like Neil Armstrong, Jonathon "Fatal1ty" Wendel, Jon Stewart, and J. K. Rowling dating back to 1999.
There's probably a rather large potential market for this kind of stuff too. It's certainly not the kind of thing you'll find a torrent for or dig up on YouTube. I know there are some interesting documentaries on there that I would certainly be inclined to purchase. And aside from the academic environment, I could imagine buying one just to get a look at how stuff used to be (and to give to your grandparents years later). As of now, there isn't much older footage (I think late 1999 is as far as it goes back), but hopefully this is just the tip of the iceberg. If they offer much older stuff I'd definitely invest in a compilation of those big historical landmark broadcasts (e.g. Pearl Harbor, Cuban Missle Crisis, etc.).
On a side note, it'd be even cooler if someone like ESPN got into the action with this. I'd die for the ability to buy old baseball and football highlights and such. Just my $.02
I agree with the ruling in principle, and I understand the rationale behind it. My question to Monday morning/. legal representatives is, does this ruling pertain to the Clearplay player as well? AFAICT, the distinction between the two is that Cleanflix physically strips the "naughty bits" from the DVD, whereas the Clearplay player simply uses a downloaded filter to automagically fast forward through unwanted scenes.
Actually, an even better possiblity would be the folowing example. Consider a hypothetical standalone DVD utilizing the Clearplay concept. Imagine having a DVD that included all those nasty scenes, but only played them when specifically called for (akin to a director's cut DVD with the "watch with deleted scenes" option). Even better, what if the data on the DVD was left intact, but a third party menu was bootstrapped onto it? You could then choose to watch the censored movie (as programmed by a third party menu system) or simply escape to the original content of the DVD.
I'm no lawyer, but the line here seems to be drawn based upon the location of the original, unedited source material. If you have the physical DVD, the Clearplay system is legit because it falls under the same concepts that govern fast forwarding a VHS. Basically anything you do in private (without redistribution) is ok as far as the law is concerned. Cleanflix is no good because it redistributes an unauthorized, edited version of a copyrighted work. I wonder, would the ruling have been the same if the Cleanflix DVDs also included the original, unedited material?
This is cool. I must say, the grainy photos, and the idea that Microsoft is making this product don't exactly thrill me, but the idea that somebody is creating a music device with integrated wireless is an incredibly neat idea. I'm about to go off on a rather crazy, unfounded rant, but should such a device become as ubiquitous as the iPod, we could see some really cool possibilities.
Licensing issues aside, imagine going to the mall, to the park, or even being with another friend who has a compatible music device. The idea of being able to scroll through other people's music and (ideally) up/download to/from them could be (imnsho) revolutionary. I for one have had many an occasion while listening to music on the car radio from a friend's iPod where I'd be exposed to something incredibly cool that I had never heard before. Very often I might hear a handful of neat songs by various artists over the course of the night. ATM, technology forces me to a) remember these songs and b) wait till I get home to download them (either via the "usual" channels or direct connect from said friend).
This is usually not a terribly big problem, or even that big of an inconvenience for most people (including myself). But wouldn't it be cool if there was a simple interface to automagically discover nearby wireless music players and download from them at will. I realize the labels would never stand for this, and Microsoft would probably not want to piss off the RIAA, but hell, even the ability to stream files from another mobile device would be pretty neat.
It might even take off the way bluetoothing never did. I think it could make for a much more natural way of meeting people than bluetooth ever did. I think it's conceivable that while scanning through your WiPod(TM;) looking for the next song you notice another device in range and scan through their playlist instead. You either see some familiar music or listen to something really cool you've never heard before. You look around the park/campus/coffeehouse/concert venue/sporting event/whatever to see whose device it is and chances are you've just found somebody worth talking to (or at least some copyrights worth infringing).
Ok, the rant's over. I realize that my technofantasy will almost certainly never play out due to the obvious reasons (I doubt that with the iPod pentration as it is that this device will sell at all), but I figured it was worth a thought. The technology is certainly here. We just need to take advantage of it.
I don't mean to sound trollish (ok, maybe just a bit), but given ATI's track record, I doubt there's a reliable Windows driver for this card. And in all seriousness, what would you need to run in Linux that requires such a high end video card. Personally, I think it's just a bit overkill for Tux Racer.
Last I checked, 400mbps is equal to 0.4 bytes per second. I remember getting speeds like that back in the days of dial-up. Like back in the day when you picked up the phone and read off ones and zeros to your friend on the other line as he copied your fortran program by punching holes in his punch card. Oh yeah, and uphill both ways. In the snow.
Pleease don't tell me they plan on using Caller ID as a secure method of verification. Funny enough, TFA doesn't mention caller id at all, but I'd hope that something slightly more secure is actually implemented.
I can't imagine a ruling that would allow people to start challenging patents on "obviousness"
Really? I thought that by definition a valid patent must satisfy the requirement of being non-obvious. The problem ATM isn't with the judicial system. Generally the patents that make it into court are ruled on appropriately, but the cost of challenging a meaningless patent in court is much more than having to license the "obvious" patent. What KSR is looking for is a change in the definition of what consitiutes an obvious patent. From the CNET article:
In a brief supporting KSR's arguments (click for PDF), Microsoft and Cisco charged that the current test applied by the Federal Circuit "hurts innovation" because it establishes "far too lenient a standard for patentability." Cisco has even built up a portfolio of patents for "defensive purposes" in order to "neutralize" a proliferation of trivial patents, the brief said.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will adjust the definition of "obviousness" and these changes will make their way into the patent system itself. What we really need is a system that will routinely reject patents that are blatantly obvious, negating the patent trolling mess we have now.
Sorry to reply to myself, but there's a much easier way to do this. Simply run the link through a dereferer service. As such, the link below should work for you guys.
That link's not going to work. It looks like Tom is redirecting anything that doesn't have "tomshardware.com" in the referrer heading. Funny enough, http://slashdot.org/tomshardware.com/ is an acceptable referrer. (Are you taking notes, Taco? This means you should set up a redirect script that sends Tom's hardware links through something containing tomshardware.com in the url and append print.html to the link.)
A blank referrer works too though, so just copy and paste the link.:)
Unverifiable? Let's give it a go...
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 5, Informative
After an intensive bit of sleuthing (ok, I found thesetwo screenshots off the original blog) we can dig up just a bit more info than the Register story provided.
For your viewing pleasure:
The original ebay auction (someone might wanna grab a mirror in case ebay decides to pull that down). Up for auction is a refurbished HP laptop with a 2.8 GHz P4 with two gigs of ram, a 15" screen and a DVD+/-RW. Ironically enough, the HD capacity is not listed.
The seller, amir6626, who is no longer a registered ebay member with a feedback score of -2 (0 at the time of the auction with only one or two total feedback tops).
The buyer, spikytom, an ebay member since '02 with a score of 79 (70 at the time of the auction) with a total of 1 negative feedback.
The bid history. Of note here is the fact that the auction was sniped 20 seconds before ending for GBP$350 (roughly US$660), quite a deal on the laptop that was listed.
Personally, I think it's quite a leap to claim extortion. I'll let you guys make your own judgements, but if you ask me, it seems like nothing more than a legitimate ebayer pissed after getting tooled over by a run-of-the-mill ebay scammer. And hey, who wouldn't be? Call me crazy, but I think the blog is great. Not only does spikytom get his own creative revenge, we all get a laugh out of it.
Like I said, I'm no chemist. Obviously, your comment about density clearly shows a glaring flaw in my calculations.
I think the point I should've make clearer is the fact that the energy required to release this (relatively) miniscule amount of oxygen is astronomical (no pun intended). Even assuming that I'm wrong about my interpretation of the article and that a full one fifth of the 100g of the sample becomes oxygen, that we get a total of 20g of O2 or roughly 100L of breatheable air. In order to release this, we need to heat a quantity of 100g of SiO2 to 2500C for several hours. As the article stated, this requires the concentration of sunlight from a 12' wide dish onto a sample of just 100g. I'm not exactly sure how much energy that is (and I'm not about to try and calculate it), but it seems like an awful lot. Hopefully this technique scales incredibly well or the alternate methods of liquifying or electrocuting the sand have more promise. I realize this is fledgling technology were talking about, but it still looks like it has a long way to go.
Hmm... like I said, I might be wrong, but I'm not sure it's here. Going to the first Google hit on oxygen volume from my GP post takes us here where molar volume is given as 17.36 x 10-6 m^3/mol.
Interestingly enough, we can also click to get a definition of molar volume. You note that the standard molar volume of "most any gas" is 22.4L/mol. I think you here defined "most any gas" as one that behaves ideally: an ideal gas. From the data I see here, the conlcusion that I would come to is simply that oxygen does not behave ideally (at least under these circumstances). Although like I said, I'm no chemist, so I might just be talking out of my ass without knowing it. Either way, even 20L of oxygen created over a period of "a few hours" is far from enough to breathe.
I'm no chemist either but I did take a high school chem class a few years ago. I'm far from confident in my calculations, so feel free to correct me if I'm egregiously wrong, but AFAICT the amount of energy needed might be a limiting factor. Now, the article gives us two tidbits of information.
In Nasa's latest tests, a 12ft-wide dish was used to concentrate the sun's rays on to 100g of a substance similar to Moon soil. After a few hours, one fifth of the substance had turned into oxygen.
and
The soil contains about 45 per cent oxygen by weight, but it is mostly 'trapped' in the form of silcon dioxide.
Now assuming that one fifth of the 45% of the oxygen in the soil is 100% oxygen, we yield a total of 9g of pure oxygen. A quick trip to Google tells us that oxygen has a molecular weight of (roughly) 16. Therefore, 9g of oxygen translates to 0.5625 moles of pure oxygen. Another check of Google tells us that the volume of oxygen at STP is 17.36 x 10^-6 cubic meters/mole. We finish our Google-sponsored portion of this post by converting to give us 17.36 mL/mol. Multiplying by our previous result (0.5625*17.36) gives us a whopping 9.765 milliliters of oxygen. So how much exactly is that?
We continue our inquiry at the wonderful world of Wikipedia. We learn that the Earth's atmosphere is only 21% oxygen, so our 9.765 mL of pure oxygen effectively becomes 46.5 mL of normal air. Our final reference tells us that the average human breath exchanges 450-500 mL of air.
Putting this all together, we get a notably unimpressive result. The "few hours" that it takes to bake oxygen out of moon sand creates only enough oxygen to support one-tenth of one ordinary resting breath for one average-sized adult male.
I really hope I'm off by an order of magnitude or four, but unless I'm terribly wrong (entirely possible), this technology has a long way to go. The final line of the article does give hope, however: "Alternative methods to extract oxygen from Moon soil are also under investigation, including melting the rocks into a liquid and freeing oxygen with an electric current." Obviously NASA realizes this plan still needs work. Hopefully
Re:Can this article be even more pretentios?
on
One Small Breath For Man
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· Score: 5, Informative
Read TFA:
To extract oxygen from lunar soil, scientists used a lens-like structure to focus sunlight on to it, heating it to 2,500C.
In Nasa's latest tests, a 12ft-wide dish was used to concentrate the sun's rays on to 100g of a substance similar to Moon soil. After a few hours, one fifth of the substance had turned into oxygen.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e__3STe4jwU
The Googlebot awaits you ; )
To the OP: this may not be the best path for you if you're more interested more in pure and abstract mathematics, but if you can handle some mind-numbing drudgery every once in a while, it might not be a bad idea to look into becoming an actuary. The first two exams aren't all that difficult, so I highly recommend checking out some of the sample questions to see if this kind of thing might be right for you. Buy a book or two and spend some free time studying and you could be well on your way. The best of luck to ya =)
What about increased reliability? I realize a lot of this might depend on how the flash memory is interfaced, but it would be awesome to have a small built in flash chip capable of live backups of critical data. With say a spare gig of memory on the hard drive, it should be more than feasible to have data of certain folders (e.g. My Documents and system folders) in the off chance that your hard drive actually does fail. Being able to boot directly to the flash chip would be great in emergencies, and a copy of DSL/Puppy Linux/*Your favorite recovery tool* would be perfect to store there. Bonus points if you can easily (i.e. without a soldering iron) swap the flash chip to a fresh drive and do a Stage 1 Gentoo reinstall from scratch.
Come to think of it, the possiblities of RAIDing these things together could be interesting as well. With a RAID 1, all but the most paranoid wouldn't need to include the flash memory in the mirror. Or, should the flash memory get sufficiently large (say, 20-25% of the hard drive size), you could use the flash memory as dedicated parity in a RAID 4 array. Obviously this means squat if you can't interface the flash memory properly, but hey, at least the possibilities are there.
Yes!!
I think this is one of the most important (and most forgotten) problems regarding the Linux OSS community. I hate to generalize, but I know there are a (not-insignificant) group of people who feel that OSS projects shouldn't be ported to Windows, and instead should be reserved as a "killer app" to convince others to migrate. While the logic is understandable, the issue is that most people aren't going to plunge into something as intensive as installing a completely foreign operating system for the sake of an app or two that hasn't been ported.
Case in point, Amarok. I absolutely LOVE using it over anything Windows has to offer, and while iTunes and Winamp do the job for me on this side of the MBR, it'd be really nice to have another copy of Amarok running natively on Windows. I know at the moment, however, the consensus has been, if you want a Windows port, you're going to have to do it yourself. I realize the sources are around, but something like a Windows port is not a trivial undertaking. I don't disagree that dev time may be better spent adding features and fixing bugs, but I'm a little disappointed that its use is relegated to the uber-geek status of those who have the time, energy and knowhow to go about installing Linux.
Rather than trying to convince others that forsaking the warm familiarity of Windows is the only way to reap the benefits of cool OSS, we (as an open source community) should try to get the masses' collective feet wet without requiring such an ungodly effort on the user's part. Thankfully, that's starting to happen with some of the more mainstream OSS packages. Firefox has made enormous headway into the browser market, and OO.o is becoming an acceptable substitute to MS Office. What ultimately needs to happen is for these open source projects to become superior to their proprietary counterparts. Obviously, many are not yet up to snuff, but the fact that Microsoft is beginning to put its tail between its legs is a great sign. Your anecdote is a great example of (my view) the future that lay ahead of us. As users begin migrating piece by piece to open source alternatives, ultimately our applications can become OS agnostic, Linux on the desktop can continue its foray into user-friendliness (ala OSX), and more and more Average Joes, given the ability to choose freely between Linux and Windows, will readily make the plunge into FOSS.
Meh, I know Nintendo is doing something in the online venue (old downloadable Nintendo emulators and whatnot), but personally, I don't see the fun in playing SSB Brawl online. The past two semesters, I played an ungodly amount of the original SSB (the vintage 64 version), but I doubt it would've been half as fun had it been done online. Personally, half the fun in playing games like that is the trash talk that goes back and forth, the periodic cig breaks between marathon free for all sessions, and the atmosphere of having four guys crammed on a dorm room couch (all conveniently within arms reach, should a dispute need to be settled properly). Honestly, I think a significant part of the experience would be lost in online play. Not to mention the fact that the SSB franchise is the only (AFAIK) worthwhile multiplayer game that doesn't require split-screen goodness. Sure, a game of Halo across the campus LAN can be fun, but even those rarely go more than a few rooms away, and generally teams are kept within the same room. I'm sure Nintendo will have a decent online system this time around (they certainly got it right with the DS), but it won't be the reason I get a Wii.
Online will (and should) be icing on the cake, but it certainly isn't a selling point (at least for me). It might benefit a couple of games here and there, but at least for the ones I'm keenly interested in (Zelda, Metroid, and maybe a new Mario Tennis with the controller?!?) don't require an online aspect at all.
For all those doubters out there, take a minute to actually look at the service CBS and Amazon.com are offering. This isn't about getting a DVD of yesterday's 60 Minutes broadcast (we all have MythTV for that, right?), but rather for finding copies of older news stories that certainly aren't going to be broadcast again. Personally, I think the move is genius for CBS. Rather than collect dust, they're offering up these old clips for a very reasonable fee. It's a perfect example of a mega-corp actually adjusting to technological advances and embracing them. If you think about it for 30 seconds, it's really a perfect medium for the syndication of millions of archived newsreels.
Browsing through some of the clips, there's actually some really neat stuff available that would otherwise have been lost to the general public and appears to be a worthwhile trip down nostalgia lane. For example, their political section has a vast array of news clips from the 2000 Presidential election. There are a couple of pre-9/11 snippets on gas prices, and even what appears to be a segment on the Segway. Plus there's a wide variety of interviews with people like Neil Armstrong, Jonathon "Fatal1ty" Wendel, Jon Stewart, and J. K. Rowling dating back to 1999.
There's probably a rather large potential market for this kind of stuff too. It's certainly not the kind of thing you'll find a torrent for or dig up on YouTube. I know there are some interesting documentaries on there that I would certainly be inclined to purchase. And aside from the academic environment, I could imagine buying one just to get a look at how stuff used to be (and to give to your grandparents years later). As of now, there isn't much older footage (I think late 1999 is as far as it goes back), but hopefully this is just the tip of the iceberg. If they offer much older stuff I'd definitely invest in a compilation of those big historical landmark broadcasts (e.g. Pearl Harbor, Cuban Missle Crisis, etc.).
On a side note, it'd be even cooler if someone like ESPN got into the action with this. I'd die for the ability to buy old baseball and football highlights and such. Just my $.02
; )
I agree with the ruling in principle, and I understand the rationale behind it. My question to Monday morning /. legal representatives is, does this ruling pertain to the Clearplay player as well? AFAICT, the distinction between the two is that Cleanflix physically strips the "naughty bits" from the DVD, whereas the Clearplay player simply uses a downloaded filter to automagically fast forward through unwanted scenes.
Actually, an even better possiblity would be the folowing example. Consider a hypothetical standalone DVD utilizing the Clearplay concept. Imagine having a DVD that included all those nasty scenes, but only played them when specifically called for (akin to a director's cut DVD with the "watch with deleted scenes" option). Even better, what if the data on the DVD was left intact, but a third party menu was bootstrapped onto it? You could then choose to watch the censored movie (as programmed by a third party menu system) or simply escape to the original content of the DVD.
I'm no lawyer, but the line here seems to be drawn based upon the location of the original, unedited source material. If you have the physical DVD, the Clearplay system is legit because it falls under the same concepts that govern fast forwarding a VHS. Basically anything you do in private (without redistribution) is ok as far as the law is concerned. Cleanflix is no good because it redistributes an unauthorized, edited version of a copyrighted work. I wonder, would the ruling have been the same if the Cleanflix DVDs also included the original, unedited material?
This is cool. I must say, the grainy photos, and the idea that Microsoft is making this product don't exactly thrill me, but the idea that somebody is creating a music device with integrated wireless is an incredibly neat idea. I'm about to go off on a rather crazy, unfounded rant, but should such a device become as ubiquitous as the iPod, we could see some really cool possibilities.
;) looking for the next song you notice another device in range and scan through their playlist instead. You either see some familiar music or listen to something really cool you've never heard before. You look around the park/campus/coffeehouse/concert venue/sporting event/whatever to see whose device it is and chances are you've just found somebody worth talking to (or at least some copyrights worth infringing).
Licensing issues aside, imagine going to the mall, to the park, or even being with another friend who has a compatible music device. The idea of being able to scroll through other people's music and (ideally) up/download to/from them could be (imnsho) revolutionary. I for one have had many an occasion while listening to music on the car radio from a friend's iPod where I'd be exposed to something incredibly cool that I had never heard before. Very often I might hear a handful of neat songs by various artists over the course of the night. ATM, technology forces me to a) remember these songs and b) wait till I get home to download them (either via the "usual" channels or direct connect from said friend).
This is usually not a terribly big problem, or even that big of an inconvenience for most people (including myself). But wouldn't it be cool if there was a simple interface to automagically discover nearby wireless music players and download from them at will. I realize the labels would never stand for this, and Microsoft would probably not want to piss off the RIAA, but hell, even the ability to stream files from another mobile device would be pretty neat.
It might even take off the way bluetoothing never did. I think it could make for a much more natural way of meeting people than bluetooth ever did. I think it's conceivable that while scanning through your WiPod(TM
Ok, the rant's over. I realize that my technofantasy will almost certainly never play out due to the obvious reasons (I doubt that with the iPod pentration as it is that this device will sell at all), but I figured it was worth a thought. The technology is certainly here. We just need to take advantage of it.
I don't mean to sound trollish (ok, maybe just a bit), but given ATI's track record, I doubt there's a reliable Windows driver for this card. And in all seriousness, what would you need to run in Linux that requires such a high end video card. Personally, I think it's just a bit overkill for Tux Racer.
Last I checked, 400mbps is equal to 0.4 bytes per second. I remember getting speeds like that back in the days of dial-up. Like back in the day when you picked up the phone and read off ones and zeros to your friend on the other line as he copied your fortran program by punching holes in his punch card. Oh yeah, and uphill both ways. In the snow.
; )
[/toungeincheek]
Pleease don't tell me they plan on using Caller ID as a secure method of verification. Funny enough, TFA doesn't mention caller id at all, but I'd hope that something slightly more secure is actually implemented.
Women are like Voltron, the more you can hook up, the better it gets.
(My apologies to RvB. The joke had to be made)
; )
http://ultimod.org/?url=http://www.tomshardware.co m/2006/06/12/your_diy_gaming_rig_for_720/print.htm l
Use this url if you're too lazy to copy and paste. It should strip the referer header and take you straight to the one-page print version.
; )
http://ultimod.org/?url=http://www.tomshardware.co m/2006/05/31/windows_vista/print.html
A blank referrer works too though, so just copy and paste the link. :)
For your viewing pleasure:
Personally, I think it's quite a leap to claim extortion. I'll let you guys make your own judgements, but if you ask me, it seems like nothing more than a legitimate ebayer pissed after getting tooled over by a run-of-the-mill ebay scammer. And hey, who wouldn't be? Call me crazy, but I think the blog is great. Not only does spikytom get his own creative revenge, we all get a laugh out of it.I think the point I should've make clearer is the fact that the energy required to release this (relatively) miniscule amount of oxygen is astronomical (no pun intended). Even assuming that I'm wrong about my interpretation of the article and that a full one fifth of the 100g of the sample becomes oxygen, that we get a total of 20g of O2 or roughly 100L of breatheable air. In order to release this, we need to heat a quantity of 100g of SiO2 to 2500C for several hours. As the article stated, this requires the concentration of sunlight from a 12' wide dish onto a sample of just 100g. I'm not exactly sure how much energy that is (and I'm not about to try and calculate it), but it seems like an awful lot. Hopefully this technique scales incredibly well or the alternate methods of liquifying or electrocuting the sand have more promise. I realize this is fledgling technology were talking about, but it still looks like it has a long way to go.
Interestingly enough, we can also click to get a definition of molar volume. You note that the standard molar volume of "most any gas" is 22.4L/mol. I think you here defined "most any gas" as one that behaves ideally: an ideal gas. From the data I see here, the conlcusion that I would come to is simply that oxygen does not behave ideally (at least under these circumstances). Although like I said, I'm no chemist, so I might just be talking out of my ass without knowing it. Either way, even 20L of oxygen created over a period of "a few hours" is far from enough to breathe.
We continue our inquiry at the wonderful world of Wikipedia. We learn that the Earth's atmosphere is only 21% oxygen, so our 9.765 mL of pure oxygen effectively becomes 46.5 mL of normal air. Our final reference tells us that the average human breath exchanges 450-500 mL of air.
Putting this all together, we get a notably unimpressive result. The "few hours" that it takes to bake oxygen out of moon sand creates only enough oxygen to support one-tenth of one ordinary resting breath for one average-sized adult male.
I really hope I'm off by an order of magnitude or four, but unless I'm terribly wrong (entirely possible), this technology has a long way to go. The final line of the article does give hope, however: "Alternative methods to extract oxygen from Moon soil are also under investigation, including melting the rocks into a liquid and freeing oxygen with an electric current." Obviously NASA realizes this plan still needs work. Hopefully