From what I read in the western media, TEPCO is losing incredible amounts of money cleaning up the Fukushima mess.
The Japanese also seem less than happy ("Private panel blames TEPCO's 'systematic negligence'") [note to Slashdot readers: that Asahi Shimbun newspaper doesn't seem to have a paywall].
However, I also read that TEPCO was strongly involved in developing Sodium-Sulfur batteries to help solve the storage problem associated with large rollout of intermittent electricity generators (i.e. solar only when it's sunny and wind turbines only when it's windy). Anything else than Sodium-Sulfur or other cheap redox couples, is probably too expensive for real large-scale use.
So, I really hope that the battery division of TEPCO survives any lawsuits/bankruptcy procedures/government sanctions because they seem to be working on transitioning Japan away from the nuclear addiction and towards a very clean (but slightly explosive) technology that the rest of the world is probably eager to share.
Anybody in Japan please comment if this makes sense. I don't read Japanese and have never been there.
Apples?? I dunno.. their pulp looks too bland to be useful.
Sounds to me like the juice from Japanese Cherries contains more anthocyanins to put into your el-cheapo Grätzel solar cell.
(Are Anthocyanins actually any good for that? Could you use blueberry juice instead?)
Maybe you'd need an infinite number of carefully placed small spiky antennas to get infinite channels.
Seems like they are doing something like the interferometry of the extremely boring-looking LOFAR radiotelescope. Amirite?
What is the meaning of the word "Deuterocanon", i.e. is it a fixed list of "second-rank" books or just the most important didn't-make-it-to-the-canon books such as Jesus Sirach?
And what is the current status of the books found a while ago, i.e. the Dead Sea scrolls and other Qumran and Nag Hammadi scrolls? Are any of them those variant gospels we've heard about (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Mary Magdalene) or are those entirely fictional?
You bible translators have had 50 years to study them; time to release them to the interested masses I'd think.
i've no idea about you, but if another country manages to get humans there before the US does, it would be a slap in the face of the US when it comes to technological competence.
Naah.. speaking as a European, I think you shouldn't see it as "a slap in the face of the US when it comes to technological competence". It just means, that the cultural "focus" of the USA is not aimed at its own *technological* competence any more. You could if you wanted, but you don't want those kind of things anymore.
From our perspective, it seems you're currently more aiming for euh... let's label it juridical competence and financial world supremacy.
Hold a questionnaire amongst USA schoolkids, tally how many want to become astronauts or doctors, and how many lawyers / rich. I'm curious.
"Was Du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen!"
Dutch translation: "Stel niet uit tot morgen wat je ook nog tot overmorgen kan uitstellen";-b
Jokes aside, I think it occurs in more Germanic languages:
Dutch: "Vandaag schrijf ik een brief. Morgen schrijf ik er nog een. / Morgen zal ik er nog een schrijven."
Swedish: "Idag jag skriva en brev. Imorgon jag skriva en annan. / Imorgon jag ska skriva en annan."
I heard an anecdote that they did precisely this at Otis elevator company; to prove that a new emergency brake system worked, their director went in an elevator with the new system and then they cut the cable.
It worked. And you can't make advertisements better than this.
Depends on how many ganglia those prawns have, AND on the verisimilitude(sp?) of their simulation. AND on how many prawns we are speaking about, of course..
Both patent law and copyright law are out of balance I think. My cheap monitor is black and has rounded corners, do you think Benq should pay royalties to Apple?
I agree that it would be useful if people stopped conflating patents and copyright:
This following article helps and is very clearly written if you take the time to read it slowly:
But it is a fact that they fought the Nazi's, not an "argument".
no... sorry, but it is disingenuous (sp?) to put it like that..
I read a quote somewhere (can't be bothered to look it up but it could well have been from Lou de Jong) that went something like this:
"5% happily collaborated with the Nazis, 5% joined the resistance and fought the Nazis, and the other 90% stayed at home and kept their curtains closed."
For a seriously good (but fictional) film about the shades of grey you get in war-time and after, I suggest watching "The Assault"/"De Aanslag" by Fons Rademakers, based on the excellent book by Harry Mulisch.
Warning: film may shatter easy black-vs-white preconceptions about good and evil.
Nobody really believes that the candidates are all the exact same. Most believe there is a lesser of two evils.
We need a new voting system. I need to be able to specify more than one candidate, in case my primary choice fails.
Well, looking from the outside, there's a possible solution:
Form a political party which pledges to do only one thing: reform the constitution to allow for proportional representation voting (multi-party system), and then immediately have elections again.
It's the *only* way, because I thought there was a scientific study that showed that a two-party system is difficult to get rid of using normal elections.
That would put the USA more in line with more normal countries where there is a lively, albeit sometimes not very long lasting, sequence of coalition governments, and where it is normal for the people to vote for the party they like best, not just the left- and right-half of the Party of Power.
Such as Italy for example (OK.. *bad* example...).
You'll have to do it, because 1. I am not American and 2. I don't have the time.
PS If you'd already had done that, you wouldn't have had to suffer 8 years of G.W. Bush. Think about it.
Well that's the thing. It's not places like New York City that need to be moved, but rather low-lying pacific islands.
No, I disagree:
Look at this NASA picture: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55167.
Then, think: why is it that you can recognize the outline of the continents?
Almost all transcontinental container traffic goes by boat. Harbor cities is where the commerce is, so that's where the people move to for work.
When harbor cities such as Shanghai, New York, Rotterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Antwerp need rebuilding because of rising sealevel, watch what happens to the price of bananas. Or coffee. Or cars.
Doesn't matter if it takes 50 or 150 years; most of the large harbor cities are much older than that. It would still be an enormously painful and expensive investment.
And that's only talking about the economy; but giving up or relocating all the coastal churches, libraries, musea etc. because of 7 meter sea level rise also has a price tag.
To conclude: the picture in this (Dutch) Wikipedia article shows what half of the Netherlands looked like in Roman times: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdronken_Land_van_Saeftinghe. The real-estate brokers don't want those times to return:-) not after 57 years of paying taxes to raise the country's flood defenses to the current (inadequate) level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works (N.B. note the cost calculation in that article:-) )
Slashdot Mirror
From what I read in the western media, TEPCO is losing incredible amounts of money cleaning up the Fukushima mess.
The Japanese also seem less than happy ("Private panel blames TEPCO's 'systematic negligence'") [note to Slashdot readers: that Asahi Shimbun newspaper doesn't seem to have a paywall].
However, I also read that TEPCO was strongly involved in developing Sodium-Sulfur batteries to help solve the storage problem associated with large rollout of intermittent electricity generators (i.e. solar only when it's sunny and wind turbines only when it's windy). Anything else than Sodium-Sulfur or other cheap redox couples, is probably too expensive for real large-scale use.
So, I really hope that the battery division of TEPCO survives any lawsuits/bankruptcy procedures/government sanctions because they seem to be working on transitioning Japan away from the nuclear addiction and towards a very clean (but slightly explosive) technology that the rest of the world is probably eager to share.
Anybody in Japan please comment if this makes sense. I don't read Japanese and have never been there.
Apples?? I dunno.. their pulp looks too bland to be useful.
Sounds to me like the juice from Japanese Cherries contains more anthocyanins to put into your el-cheapo Grätzel solar cell. (Are Anthocyanins actually any good for that? Could you use blueberry juice instead?)
Maybe you'd need an infinite number of carefully placed small spiky antennas to get infinite channels.
Seems like they are doing something like the interferometry of the extremely boring-looking LOFAR radiotelescope.
Amirite?
That Gregorian calendar issue was for the Microsoft Excel OOXML bug canonized as a feature...
Umm... is this some kind of advertisement for demanding euros as payment when doing business in the USA?
What is the meaning of the word "Deuterocanon", i.e. is it a fixed list of "second-rank" books or just the most important didn't-make-it-to-the-canon books such as Jesus Sirach?
And what is the current status of the books found a while ago, i.e. the Dead Sea scrolls and other Qumran and Nag Hammadi scrolls? Are any of them those variant gospels we've heard about (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Mary Magdalene) or are those entirely fictional?
You bible translators have had 50 years to study them; time to release them to the interested masses I'd think.
Naah.. speaking as a European, I think you shouldn't see it as "a slap in the face of the US when it comes to technological competence". It just means, that the cultural "focus" of the USA is not aimed at its own *technological* competence any more. You could if you wanted, but you don't want those kind of things anymore.
From our perspective, it seems you're currently more aiming for euh... let's label it juridical competence and financial world supremacy.
Hold a questionnaire amongst USA schoolkids, tally how many want to become astronauts or doctors, and how many lawyers / rich. I'm curious.
Well then you should rejoice, because this guy is creating 1 paying job vacancy for one of your many friends to fill up!
Sorry. My Swedish sucks :-(
Dutch translation: "Stel niet uit tot morgen wat je ook nog tot overmorgen kan uitstellen" ;-b
Jokes aside, I think it occurs in more Germanic languages:
Dutch: "Vandaag schrijf ik een brief. Morgen schrijf ik er nog een. / Morgen zal ik er nog een schrijven."
Swedish: "Idag jag skriva en brev. Imorgon jag skriva en annan. / Imorgon jag ska skriva en annan."
His excellency the minister of Overkill. I don't know if he can be trusted to fly a Space Shuttle though..
I heard an anecdote that they did precisely this at Otis elevator company; to prove that a new emergency brake system worked, their director went in an elevator with the new system and then they cut the cable. It worked. And you can't make advertisements better than this.
I imagine the police would start an investigation if they accidentally looked into Gunther von Hagens' experimentation shed before he became famous..
Depends on how many ganglia those prawns have, AND on the verisimilitude(sp?) of their simulation. AND on how many prawns we are speaking about, of course..
Both patent law and copyright law are out of balance I think. My cheap monitor is black and has rounded corners, do you think Benq should pay royalties to Apple?
I agree that it would be useful if people stopped conflating patents and copyright:
This following article helps and is very clearly written if you take the time to read it slowly:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
And yes, it's written by Richard M. Stallman. Go read it anyway. Seriously.
This handy article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/) may help you rephrase these numbers.
FTFY.
Years ago I saw an advertisement for an expensive security product to protect IIS webservers.
What it did was, make it look from the outside as if the website was running Apache instead of IIS.
So that crackers wouldn't bother and go for an easier target instead.
no... sorry, but it is disingenuous (sp?) to put it like that..
I read a quote somewhere (can't be bothered to look it up but it could well have been from Lou de Jong) that went something like this:
"5% happily collaborated with the Nazis, 5% joined the resistance and fought the Nazis, and the other 90% stayed at home and kept their curtains closed."
For a seriously good (but fictional) film about the shades of grey you get in war-time and after, I suggest watching "The Assault"/"De Aanslag" by Fons Rademakers, based on the excellent book by Harry Mulisch.
Warning: film may shatter easy black-vs-white preconceptions about good and evil.
Well, looking from the outside, there's a possible solution:
Form a political party which pledges to do only one thing: reform the constitution to allow for proportional representation voting (multi-party system), and then immediately have elections again.
It's the *only* way, because I thought there was a scientific study that showed that a two-party system is difficult to get rid of using normal elections.
That would put the USA more in line with more normal countries where there is a lively, albeit sometimes not very long lasting, sequence of coalition governments, and where it is normal for the people to vote for the party they like best, not just the left- and right-half of the Party of Power.
Such as Italy for example (OK.. *bad* example...).
You'll have to do it, because 1. I am not American and 2. I don't have the time.
PS If you'd already had done that, you wouldn't have had to suffer 8 years of G.W. Bush. Think about it.
You misunderstand; that was a modern *surround-3D* effect.
IANAEE, but it seems DC is used for long-distance high-power transmission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects.
And what about the plans for the cables from the Maghreb countries to Southern Europe to transport all of that abundant Sahara sunshine.
hrmpf. Not according to the Vafrúðnismál.
Please leave the Clathrate gun out of this, because it's scary.
Besides surely not all Siberian scientists agree on the kilometer-wide burpings from the East Siberian sea observed recently.
No, I disagree:
:-) not after 57 years of paying taxes to raise the country's flood defenses to the current (inadequate) level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works (N.B. note the cost calculation in that article :-) )
Look at this NASA picture: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55167.
Then, think: why is it that you can recognize the outline of the continents?
Almost all transcontinental container traffic goes by boat. Harbor cities is where the commerce is, so that's where the people move to for work.
When harbor cities such as Shanghai, New York, Rotterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Antwerp need rebuilding because of rising sealevel, watch what happens to the price of bananas. Or coffee. Or cars.
Doesn't matter if it takes 50 or 150 years; most of the large harbor cities are much older than that. It would still be an enormously painful and expensive investment.
And that's only talking about the economy; but giving up or relocating all the coastal churches, libraries, musea etc. because of 7 meter sea level rise also has a price tag.
To conclude: the picture in this (Dutch) Wikipedia article shows what half of the Netherlands looked like in Roman times: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdronken_Land_van_Saeftinghe. The real-estate brokers don't want those times to return