With the lovely additions in version 3 of the GPL licence/sarcasm
You have to provide the source code to any open source software (using GPLv3) that you use to provide a network service (eg: a custom web server).
Can you point out the section where this requirement is spelled out? If you would be correct, why is there a separate GNU Affero General Public License, that contains exactly this requirement, when (according to your claim) this requirement is already in the vanilla GPLv3?
if the US government made the position of say the Chinese or the Russian or whoever the hell else is at this thing's position public to the US voters, the leaders of those countries might refuse to continue negotiations.
I guess it was just an example, but just to clear it up: Neither the Chinese or the Russians are party to this treaty, it is being negotiated between western "democracies" only, like the US, the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. When the negotiations are complete, and the treaty is signed and ratified, it is supposed to be imposed on the rest of the world. "Sign, or you're not trading with us any longer".
On the other hand, launching Microsoft Word or Excel on Windows XP is extremely quick, it takes just one or two seconds on first startup. On subsequent startups, such as after the computer has been suspended, it's up in less than one second.
So providing just Lotus Notes speeds on Windows is not enough to indicate that Windows XP has performance problems. That's exactly why I presented several application startup times on both Linux and Mac.
I know faster hard-disks directly correlate to faster launch times. I'm guessing the app files are cached from launching the first time.
That's entirely correct, unless you exhaust the available memory after you quit the application but before you start it again. If you exhaust the available memory, you force the operating system to reclaim the memory used for caching disk blocks, so the next application startup will be slow because those blocks will have to be read from disk rather than read from the RAM cache.
And that's the way it is on all modern operating systems, although there are differences in how eager the system is in reclaiming the disk cache rather than using swap space when memory is scarce and applications need more. I find that Mac OS X is much more likely to use swap space than to reclaim the disk cache compared to Linux, which does not swap out applications unless the memory is really exhausted. After a full workday, the Mac usually uses at least 2 GB (but often 3-4 GB) of swap, while Linux often uses none.
And I really would prefer if the Mac would work like Linux in this matter.
That's pretty quick, but it's in line with my experience on Linux. On the other hand, try it on a Mac, then you'll get a new definition of slowness. OpenOffice.org takes some 30 seconds to fully load on my work Mac (MacBook Pro, 2.2 GHz C2D, 2 GB RAM). But OpenOffice.org is not alone in being slow on the Mac while much faster on other platforms. At work, our primary development environment is Netbeans, which takes ages (around 50-60 seconds) to get to a workable state on the Mac, but takes just around 10 seconds on a comparable Linux machine.
It would be interesting if someone could explain why Macs, even with reasonable specifications, are so slow to start many applications.
800 GW. This amounts to 1/4 of total U.S. electricity consumption. Utterly impractical.
Absolutely not. You can have a pulse laser, where each pulse is of a very high power, but where the continuous power draw is well within reasonable limits. If you send one nanosecond pulse of 800 GW laser light every second, using the time between pulses to charge big capacitors, the continuous power draw is just 800 W.
Those numbers are just an example. You could increase the pulse length to 100 nanoseconds, and still get a continuous power draw of just 80 kW, which is still very much within reasonable limits.
The car is interesting but one car for all those people doesn't make any sense. They should have a one apartment/one e-bike instead. Then everyone can ride.
This is a one-year pilot project. If the car becomes popular, additional cars will be acquired when the pilot project is concluded.
And e-bikes? No, I don't particularly believe in those here, where only half of the year is considered the motorcycle season. Who wants to drive a bike when the road is covered in snow and/or ice, of even on a dry road when the temperature is at or below 0 C? The wind chill can be pretty severe. I know, I have tried riding a snowmobile in -15 C. It was very cold, despite me being properly dressed for low temperatures.
Do you guys have a website with pictures and tech specs and so on for what you have? And what electric vehicle are you sharing?
Not really, at least yet. The building was finished five months ago, the first of three. The next building is finished in a month, and the last in seven months. The organization owning the buildings is still run by the construction company interim board, but will be transferred to the apartment owners when the last building is complete next year. At that point, we might decide to set up a web site.
There is a press release in English here, but it contains no pictures. A picture with descriptions in Swedish is available here (PDF document). But none of those say anything about the car.
I was on an informational meeting about the carpool recently though, and there they told us about the car. It is a Buddy, a Norwegian-manufactured city car with a 72V 13 kW electric motor and lead batteries. The top speed is 80 km/h (50 mph), and the range is 80-120 km (50-75 miles). It takes 6-8 hours to fully recharge the batteries. It has three seats and a minimal luggage compartment. In safety classification, it is regarded as a motorcycle (you can guess what that means).
And is the building built to passive house or superinsulation standards?
Neither of those. It is a fairly regular apartment building, with central heating, no heat recycling (AFAIK) or other unusual energy conservation technologies. It is equipped with triple glazing panes in the windows, and low-energy appliances, but the former is the norm in all new construction here since at least a decade, and the latter is pretty common too.
The poisons you spoke of are actinides and lathanides, which are different elements, and are not isotopes of uranium or plutonium. As a result, they can be removed using chemical processes.
That may be partially true, but IIRC those elements are hard to separate through chemical processes because they have very similar chemical characteristics.
If you make your own power onsite..electricity and transportation fuel, whether that is electricity as well or some liquid biofuels (or maybe hydrogen in the future from water) you won't be boycotting yourself or charging yourself an extra fat skim.
I agree. In fact, we are already doing that in my apartment building. The roof is covered with around 35 m^2 of photovoltaic panels, which are expected to provide 3500 kWh annually, and there is a carpool of one electric car (more will be added if the project is successful) to be used by the apartment owners. Sure, the power provided by the panels is not much, but then this is a one-year pilot project between the construction company (Skanska) that built our apartment building and the local power supplier (Fortum), intended to work out how to handle issues like consumers also becoming small-time producers (the electricity grid isn't really designed for this), and the feasibility of using electric cars for real-life local transportation needs.
there is no safe way to have nuke power without having weapons potential
Except for fusion power, which is certainly nuclear, but does not have any weapons potential.
Then skip the breeder part. A fast reactor is a reactor with a fast neutron spectrum, it does not necessarily breed new fuel. Sure, there are fast breeders, but there are also fast non-breeders. Using the term "fast breeder" for both categories is just plain wrong.
Unfortunately, many deserts are in politically unstable regions. You wouldn't want people like Muammar Qaddafi in control of your electricity production.
The problem is that the US refuses to build breeder reactors.
No, the problem is that the US, like Sweden (where I live), refuses to build reprocessing facilities. Reprocessing is not a nuclear process, and does not use a breeder reactor to create the new fuel. The process mainly consists of separating the usable fuel from nuclear poisons (i.e. substances that accumulates during the operation of the reactor, and causes the chain reaction to slow down). The spent fuel is converted into gaseous form, the nuclear poisons and other unwanted materials are separated from the usable fuel (usually in centrifuges), and the remaining fuel is reconverted into the common ceramic form for reinsertion into a reactor. No breeder is necessary.
no stupid hideous wars will be fought over solar tech.
There is one exception though: There are people that propose building solar panels in the Sahara desert, and then building long power lines to Europe to transfer the generated power. It sounds fine until you realize that it means that Muammar Qaddafi and his pals can turn off the light in your home if he gets worked up for some reason. That's not a situation I'd approve of. And it sounds doubly stupid in the context of "getting off dependence on foreign (read: middle eastern) oil". That would be like going out of the ashes and into the fire.
In nature uranium contains "pockets" of plutonium, or plutonium is refined from urainium, plutonium is scarcer.
No, it doesn't, except possibly in trace quantities. Pu-239, the plutonium isotope used in nuclear weapons and certain reactors, have a geologically short half-life of just 24000 years, so practically all of what may have been on Earth when it formed is long gone by now.
So, plutonium isn't extracted from natural uranium, it is created by irradiating natural or depleted uranium with neutrons, e.g. by surrounding a normal reactor with a blanket of natural/depleted uranium, where some of it is slowly converted to plutonium through the heavy neutron bombardment caused by the reactor operation.
Slashdot Mirror
With the lovely additions in version 3 of the GPL licence /sarcasm
You have to provide the source code to any open source software (using GPLv3) that you use to provide a network service (eg: a custom web server).
Can you point out the section where this requirement is spelled out? If you would be correct, why is there a separate GNU Affero General Public License, that contains exactly this requirement, when (according to your claim) this requirement is already in the vanilla GPLv3?
Reminds me of IBM, which IIRC sold tabulating machines to the Nazis to increase killing efficiency in the Nazi concentration camps.
Although we in the US and EU believe in openness, a lot of countries like China or Saudi Arabia do not.
Neither China or Saudi Arabia are parties in the treaty negotiations.
That's probably what the Ambassador means by "walking away from the table".
I'd rather think that he is referring to the MAFIAA.
if the US government made the position of say the Chinese or the Russian or whoever the hell else is at this thing's position public to the US voters, the leaders of those countries might refuse to continue negotiations.
I guess it was just an example, but just to clear it up: Neither the Chinese or the Russians are party to this treaty, it is being negotiated between western "democracies" only, like the US, the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. When the negotiations are complete, and the treaty is signed and ratified, it is supposed to be imposed on the rest of the world. "Sign, or you're not trading with us any longer".
Lotus Notes is off-the-scale of slow apps.
It makes me think of the HP web site, which is probably the slowest of the websites I use every now and then. It is mind-bogglingly slow.
On the other hand, launching Microsoft Word or Excel on Windows XP is extremely quick, it takes just one or two seconds on first startup. On subsequent startups, such as after the computer has been suspended, it's up in less than one second.
So providing just Lotus Notes speeds on Windows is not enough to indicate that Windows XP has performance problems. That's exactly why I presented several application startup times on both Linux and Mac.
I know faster hard-disks directly correlate to faster launch times. I'm guessing the app files are cached from launching the first time.
That's entirely correct, unless you exhaust the available memory after you quit the application but before you start it again. If you exhaust the available memory, you force the operating system to reclaim the memory used for caching disk blocks, so the next application startup will be slow because those blocks will have to be read from disk rather than read from the RAM cache.
And that's the way it is on all modern operating systems, although there are differences in how eager the system is in reclaiming the disk cache rather than using swap space when memory is scarce and applications need more. I find that Mac OS X is much more likely to use swap space than to reclaim the disk cache compared to Linux, which does not swap out applications unless the memory is really exhausted. After a full workday, the Mac usually uses at least 2 GB (but often 3-4 GB) of swap, while Linux often uses none.
And I really would prefer if the Mac would work like Linux in this matter.
I see. I haven't played MW2 (or any other CoD game) myself, so I didn't realize it was a game reference. :)
OOo Calc takes seven seconds to start from cold.
That's pretty quick, but it's in line with my experience on Linux. On the other hand, try it on a Mac, then you'll get a new definition of slowness. OpenOffice.org takes some 30 seconds to fully load on my work Mac (MacBook Pro, 2.2 GHz C2D, 2 GB RAM). But OpenOffice.org is not alone in being slow on the Mac while much faster on other platforms. At work, our primary development environment is Netbeans, which takes ages (around 50-60 seconds) to get to a workable state on the Mac, but takes just around 10 seconds on a comparable Linux machine.
It would be interesting if someone could explain why Macs, even with reasonable specifications, are so slow to start many applications.
100 years ago? Where wars were fought on foot and were mostly civil wars, or simple trade disputes?
Yeah, like WWI (which started 95 years ago).
the only problem is it could destroy the ISS.
As well as a multitude of other spacecraft.
1. A hostile power is nuclear armed and you are not.
Well, we are already in that situation, just like many other countries. So it's not like it's a new situation, except it would be for the US.
Except that machine (the Tsar Bomba) blew itself apart during the energy release. :)
800 GW. This amounts to 1/4 of total U.S. electricity consumption. Utterly impractical.
Absolutely not. You can have a pulse laser, where each pulse is of a very high power, but where the continuous power draw is well within reasonable limits. If you send one nanosecond pulse of 800 GW laser light every second, using the time between pulses to charge big capacitors, the continuous power draw is just 800 W.
Those numbers are just an example. You could increase the pulse length to 100 nanoseconds, and still get a continuous power draw of just 80 kW, which is still very much within reasonable limits.
The car is interesting but one car for all those people doesn't make any sense. They should have a one apartment/one e-bike instead. Then everyone can ride.
This is a one-year pilot project. If the car becomes popular, additional cars will be acquired when the pilot project is concluded.
And e-bikes? No, I don't particularly believe in those here, where only half of the year is considered the motorcycle season. Who wants to drive a bike when the road is covered in snow and/or ice, of even on a dry road when the temperature is at or below 0 C? The wind chill can be pretty severe. I know, I have tried riding a snowmobile in -15 C. It was very cold, despite me being properly dressed for low temperatures.
Radiation pressure?
Do you guys have a website with pictures and tech specs and so on for what you have? And what electric vehicle are you sharing?
Not really, at least yet. The building was finished five months ago, the first of three. The next building is finished in a month, and the last in seven months. The organization owning the buildings is still run by the construction company interim board, but will be transferred to the apartment owners when the last building is complete next year. At that point, we might decide to set up a web site.
There is a press release in English here, but it contains no pictures. A picture with descriptions in Swedish is available here (PDF document). But none of those say anything about the car.
I was on an informational meeting about the carpool recently though, and there they told us about the car. It is a Buddy, a Norwegian-manufactured city car with a 72V 13 kW electric motor and lead batteries. The top speed is 80 km/h (50 mph), and the range is 80-120 km (50-75 miles). It takes 6-8 hours to fully recharge the batteries. It has three seats and a minimal luggage compartment. In safety classification, it is regarded as a motorcycle (you can guess what that means).
And is the building built to passive house or superinsulation standards?
Neither of those. It is a fairly regular apartment building, with central heating, no heat recycling (AFAIK) or other unusual energy conservation technologies. It is equipped with triple glazing panes in the windows, and low-energy appliances, but the former is the norm in all new construction here since at least a decade, and the latter is pretty common too.
The poisons you spoke of are actinides and lathanides, which are different elements, and are not isotopes of uranium or plutonium. As a result, they can be removed using chemical processes.
That may be partially true, but IIRC those elements are hard to separate through chemical processes because they have very similar chemical characteristics.
If you make your own power onsite..electricity and transportation fuel, whether that is electricity as well or some liquid biofuels (or maybe hydrogen in the future from water) you won't be boycotting yourself or charging yourself an extra fat skim.
I agree. In fact, we are already doing that in my apartment building. The roof is covered with around 35 m^2 of photovoltaic panels, which are expected to provide 3500 kWh annually, and there is a carpool of one electric car (more will be added if the project is successful) to be used by the apartment owners. Sure, the power provided by the panels is not much, but then this is a one-year pilot project between the construction company (Skanska) that built our apartment building and the local power supplier (Fortum), intended to work out how to handle issues like consumers also becoming small-time producers (the electricity grid isn't really designed for this), and the feasibility of using electric cars for real-life local transportation needs.
there is no safe way to have nuke power without having weapons potential
Except for fusion power, which is certainly nuclear, but does not have any weapons potential.
Make. Power. With. Fast. Reactors.
Then skip the breeder part. A fast reactor is a reactor with a fast neutron spectrum, it does not necessarily breed new fuel. Sure, there are fast breeders, but there are also fast non-breeders. Using the term "fast breeder" for both categories is just plain wrong.
May be we should build a big-bang-powered plant?
That's easy, just run the LHC in reverse. /s
Unfortunately, many deserts are in politically unstable regions. You wouldn't want people like Muammar Qaddafi in control of your electricity production.
The problem is that the US refuses to build breeder reactors.
No, the problem is that the US, like Sweden (where I live), refuses to build reprocessing facilities. Reprocessing is not a nuclear process, and does not use a breeder reactor to create the new fuel. The process mainly consists of separating the usable fuel from nuclear poisons (i.e. substances that accumulates during the operation of the reactor, and causes the chain reaction to slow down). The spent fuel is converted into gaseous form, the nuclear poisons and other unwanted materials are separated from the usable fuel (usually in centrifuges), and the remaining fuel is reconverted into the common ceramic form for reinsertion into a reactor. No breeder is necessary.
no stupid hideous wars will be fought over solar tech.
There is one exception though: There are people that propose building solar panels in the Sahara desert, and then building long power lines to Europe to transfer the generated power. It sounds fine until you realize that it means that Muammar Qaddafi and his pals can turn off the light in your home if he gets worked up for some reason. That's not a situation I'd approve of. And it sounds doubly stupid in the context of "getting off dependence on foreign (read: middle eastern) oil". That would be like going out of the ashes and into the fire.
In nature uranium contains "pockets" of plutonium, or plutonium is refined from urainium, plutonium is scarcer.
No, it doesn't, except possibly in trace quantities. Pu-239, the plutonium isotope used in nuclear weapons and certain reactors, have a geologically short half-life of just 24000 years, so practically all of what may have been on Earth when it formed is long gone by now.
So, plutonium isn't extracted from natural uranium, it is created by irradiating natural or depleted uranium with neutrons, e.g. by surrounding a normal reactor with a blanket of natural/depleted uranium, where some of it is slowly converted to plutonium through the heavy neutron bombardment caused by the reactor operation.