Rare earth minerals aren't very rare, just expensive to purify. Neodymium (which you're probably referring to because it's used for wind turbine supermagnets) has about the same abundance as Lithium, and more then Gallium and Indium (which also occur only in trace amounts in bulk ores).
But when a wind turbine breaks down, you don't chuck its turbine house and massive supermagnets on the city dump, you re-use them. Reduce, Re-use, Recycle in that order.
To give an indication of Neodymium abundance: Cerium, which is the most common rare earth, 50% more than Neodymium, is used in disposable cigarette lighters as the flint (that grey metal rolling thingy). Probably because for lighting cancersticks the purity doesn't matter whereas for producing the exact Neodymium-Iron-Boron compound that maximizes magnetic field strength it does.
Some countries will just start fighting anyway, because... well... they just are like that.
I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a more overt backlash against it here in the UK, particularly given the key role of The Guardian in recent disclosures,
<sarcasm>
Oh! Didn't you know? The Guardian is no longer on-line from the UK -- it turned out that www.theguardian.com was a porn site (*) and has now disappeared behind the Huawei HomeSafe Filter Wall.
(*) well, I'm sure it's a porn site according to some people, or at least a self-harm website; you wouldn't like to get harmed because you surfed government-critical websites, NOW WOULD YOU?
</sarcasm>
Warning: message may contain sarcasm and even not be completely true at the moment.
A lot of Nokia's fundamental GSM patents were sold to some company called "Vringo" for millions (made video ringtones before and is now suing other mobile phone makers for billions). I think that's where the pea is under the cup presently.
Maybe Microsoft or Intellectual Ventures will purchase Vringo and sue everybody making mobile phones for <pinky-to-mouth-corner>ONE BILLION DOLLARS</pinky-to-mouth-corner>.
Then, they don't have to actually make any phones or sell any OSes, just extract the dane-geld.
You've got only 53 years longer to wait, then Walter M. Miller, Jr. has been R.I.P. for 70 years and it's legal to gutenbergize "A Canticle for Leibowitz" (copyright 1960) and 3D-print it into granite slabs or something.
I think your argument must have been why prof. Michael Hart (the originator of Project Gutenberg) had a strong preference for plain text files; every P.G. book had to be published as ASCII as well as whatever other formats (except if ASCII or ISO-8859-1 didn't have the correct letters but then it was to have a special "0" filename for that newfangled UTF-8).
But I think your fear is ungrounded: as long as you only buy your e-books in a publicly documented open standard format, such as PDF/A or ODF or no doubt many others, if you want to "plug it in" again in 50 years, even if you don't have the software for it anymore, anyone can (and probably has) write a new reader program based on the document's spec. I don't know much about e-book formats but most of the newer P.G. HTML titles are zipped archives (so download and print out the PKZIP spec for use in 50 years!) filled with an ordinary xyz-h.html file and the book's images. The mathematical books usually have the original LaTeX source (zipped as xyz-t.zip ) and a PDF file (xyz-pdf.pdf). PDF is also an open standard, at least PDF/A that I know of. There are no ODF P.G. e-books although I think it might be better because I'm sure they're reflowable, which PDF is not. I might make one if I can be bothered and find the time.
In any case your "expect the worst, but hope for the best" attitude w.r.t. your e-books shows you're not a victim of Stockholm Syndrome at all:-)
Then YOU don't "have" that PDF. The content owner has the PDF, and the content owner decides (until they've gone bankrupt or lost interest) whether *they* trust your DRM system enough to allow it to display the contents to you (under their rules).
I'm really not trying to split hairs here, but if that PDF file has DRM, *it's not yours*. Don't kid yourself. And if your e-book display computer doesn't obey your wishes to retain its contents, again, *it's not yours*. You may have paid your good money for it (sucker!) but not in exchange for ownership of that object and that data file. And don't get stuck into Stockholm Syndrome "but I paid for it, and I'm not stupid, therefore you're wrong and this DRM'ed e-book reader with the DRM'ed PDF file is perfectly ok". I don't care what you do with your money, that's up to you. I just believe that if you think about things in incorrect categories, the truth is often obscured, as in this case, and the only solution to the odd paradoxes is to think in a different way. This is why I think it is very important to have legislation that forces such an E-book reader as you have to come with a warning label "Warning! not a general purpose computer".
Looks like a lot of MS hardware is about to be thrown out. If some enterprising surplus buyer is in the right place they might keep millions(?) of these tablet/keyboards from being physically destroyed. Has anyone ported Linux to these tablets yet?
IIRC you can't, the ARM processor Surface RT has mandatory secure boot which means only Microsoft is allowed to provide signed boot loaders and kernels. Apparently, with the i386 processor Surface (not-RT) you can jump through hoops and manage to install Fedora, but with the Surface RT it is not possible to put Linux, or anything else really, on it.
Correct me if I'm wrong! (including detailed links of course).
NO. All the eastern EU countries had the Stasi, Securitate etc. etc. up until the Wende in 1990. That's still in most people's living memory. They know what it leads, to and why they didn't like full-blown surveillance. That's almost half the EU you're talking about (not the Western Europe traditionally seen as "the EU" but still). I think this situation is different than anything before, except for countries like the former GDR where it brings back memories of "the bad old times".
I think Merkel deserves a statue in Berlin, not because I like her CDU politics ( I don't) but because she managed to be a hard-working and conscientious(sp?) leader of the Germans in one of the most difficult periods after WWII. Now I'm going to say something sexist, weird and irrational, so you can have a laugh if you disagree.
The fact that she's a woman is, in my honest opinion, of crucial importance in how the credit crisis developed in the EU. Whenever there's a big crisis, the demagogues in every country rise up and try to sway the people with their (usually macho) rhetoric. These are very, very good at politics, at pointing out the errors of the power elite. They may not always have their own solutions, but count on their macho TV imago to do the work. This is especially the case in the appeal to visceral nationalistic feelings; tickling the electorate "it's all the fault of Europe and Germany that we're now so poor! kick the government out and vote for me!".
In the Greek media, Merkel was depicted as wearing a Nazi uniform: "it's all the fault of those bloody German Nazis! Look what they turned our lovely country into!". This has had a certain effect, but the Greek government crawls onward toward solution of their tax problems and Golden Dawn didn't win the election.
I firmly believe this is because of Frau Merkel. She managed to absorb a lot of the hate and didn't reflect it back. I strongly invite you to do the following
Gedankenexperiment
Imagine, that during 2008-2012, Angela Merkel was not the bundeskänzlerin of Germany, but instead Silvio Berlusconi was magically German and had become the bundeskänzler. Silvio with his macho laugh and attitude and (to him) funny sense of humour.
Are we in WW III yet?
And that's why Angela Merkel deserves a statue despite being a CDU politician: for keeping her country and the other EU countries intact and limping onward more or less functioning, she deserves great praise for keeping the sentiments and heads cool.
I believe it's partially because she looks like your mum (stern and money-worried) instead of your uncle (annoying, rich and a practical-joker).
You're right!
Minor nitpick though: it's 16742 billion dollars at the moment, that's indeed well over 16 billion. It's easy to get confused, because your 16 billion is how much your deficit grows per week.
Thats funny. From the place that tried to exterminate Jews just a few decades ago, and to this day continues to say they need to be exterminated so the Palistinians will be happy.
I don't think anyone in the EU can stand on any high ground when it comes to morality. Not that the US government can either, but at least the US government isn't trying to exterminate millions of people or helping those who are.
How poorly you know you history... it's sickening.
Did you know the reason why so many Jews were murdered in the Netherlands, many more (proportionally) than in other occupied countries? It was because the Amsterdam city government had a detailed database of the people, including religion, so that when the government was taken over by the Nazis in 1940, they only had too look up the addresses of the Jews. (Amsterdam has historically had lots of Jews that fled from Spain in previous centuries I believe). One of the most courageous terrorist acts in the 2nd world war in the Netherlands was the assault on the Amsterdam population register in 1943 (in Dutch); the attackers wanted to prevent this government database to be used for genocide. They all got a neckshot as thanks for it (look up Waalsdorpervlakte).
And now, l' histoire se repête... the current USA government under Obama is collecting a massive database on *everyone*, no doubt including their religious beliefs (could be Muslims for all you know!). And you're fine with that. And you just have to wait to see how all this data is going to be used in 10, 20, 50 years, by Michèle Bachmann or Nehemiah Scudder or I don't know who you want to elect as president when the going gets tough. Stupid.
N.B. although many cowardly Dutch betrayed their Jewish neighbours, many others got the Yad Vashem award. And most of my people's ancestors just "hid intheir houses with the curtains closed" as was most prudent and sensible.
I think that paragraph D.41 is important to remember:
41. Source web pages are kept on host servers connected to internet. The publisher of source web pages can make use of ‘exclusion codes’ (27) for the operation of the internet search engines. Exclusion codes advise search engines not to index or to store a source web page or to display it within the search results. (28) Their use indicates that the publisher does not want certain information on the source web page to be retrieved for dissemination through search engines.
And footnote 27 about those "exclusion codes" says:
Now I know that almost all Slashdotters already know about this, but if this passes then it means that (in the EU) it is written in law that a search engine spider isn't allowed to use stuff that you kept out with your robots.txt file.
Threaten to move to France or Russia or China then, see if that does the trick!
<voice-over person="general Turgidson">Mr President! We cannot afford a rocket scientist gap!</voice-over>
Maybe if NASA make Franklin Chang Díaz their director we'd finally see his VASIMR engine deployed for tests on the ISS. What happened to that? Did it just not work very well yet, so the mission is postponed? It was announced to be launched with one of the last space shuttle flights to the ISS (probably quite a large and heavy component). That would give your "space pickup truck" engine, and it uses Argon which is much cheaper (more abundant) than the expensive Xenon for other ion engines.
Why can't those Republican senators demand that he be the initiator for this project?
Chang Díaz also is active in environmental protection and raising awareness about climate change,...
Slashdot Mirror
Rare earth minerals aren't very rare, just expensive to purify. Neodymium (which you're probably referring to because it's used for wind turbine supermagnets) has about the same abundance as Lithium, and more then Gallium and Indium (which also occur only in trace amounts in bulk ores).
But when a wind turbine breaks down, you don't chuck its turbine house and massive supermagnets on the city dump, you re-use them. Reduce, Re-use, Recycle in that order.
To give an indication of Neodymium abundance: Cerium, which is the most common rare earth, 50% more than Neodymium, is used in disposable cigarette lighters as the flint (that grey metal rolling thingy). Probably because for lighting cancersticks the purity doesn't matter whereas for producing the exact Neodymium-Iron-Boron compound that maximizes magnetic field strength it does.
Some countries will just start fighting anyway, because... well... they just are like that.
<sarcasm>
Oh! Didn't you know? The Guardian is no longer on-line from the UK -- it turned out that www.theguardian.com was a porn site (*) and has now disappeared behind the Huawei HomeSafe Filter Wall.
(*) well, I'm sure it's a porn site according to some people, or at least a self-harm website; you wouldn't like to get harmed because you surfed government-critical websites, NOW WOULD YOU?
</sarcasm>
Warning: message may contain sarcasm and even not be completely true at the moment.
A lot of Nokia's fundamental GSM patents were sold to some company called "Vringo" for millions (made video ringtones before and is now suing other mobile phone makers for billions). I think that's where the pea is under the cup presently.
Maybe Microsoft or Intellectual Ventures will purchase Vringo and sue everybody making mobile phones for <pinky-to-mouth-corner>ONE BILLION DOLLARS</pinky-to-mouth-corner>.
Then, they don't have to actually make any phones or sell any OSes, just extract the dane-geld.
The worry of the Koch brothers et al., and many of today's Slashdotters, seems to be that life will adapt in a Mad Marx kind of way instead.
You've got only 53 years longer to wait, then Walter M. Miller, Jr. has been R.I.P. for 70 years and it's legal to gutenbergize "A Canticle for Leibowitz" (copyright 1960) and 3D-print it into granite slabs or something.
YES, I've tried: http://www.pgdp.net/c/ It's not easy but it's not that hard, either. Just make sure the author has been dead for 70 years first.
I think your argument must have been why prof. Michael Hart (the originator of Project Gutenberg) had a strong preference for plain text files; every P.G. book had to be published as ASCII as well as whatever other formats (except if ASCII or ISO-8859-1 didn't have the correct letters but then it was to have a special "0" filename for that newfangled UTF-8).
:-)
But I think your fear is ungrounded: as long as you only buy your e-books in a publicly documented open standard format, such as PDF/A or ODF or no doubt many others, if you want to "plug it in" again in 50 years, even if you don't have the software for it anymore, anyone can (and probably has) write a new reader program based on the document's spec. I don't know much about e-book formats but most of the newer P.G. HTML titles are zipped archives (so download and print out the PKZIP spec for use in 50 years!) filled with an ordinary xyz-h.html file and the book's images. The mathematical books usually have the original LaTeX source (zipped as xyz-t.zip ) and a PDF file (xyz-pdf.pdf). PDF is also an open standard, at least PDF/A that I know of. There are no ODF P.G. e-books although I think it might be better because I'm sure they're reflowable, which PDF is not. I might make one if I can be bothered and find the time.
In any case your "expect the worst, but hope for the best" attitude w.r.t. your e-books shows you're not a victim of Stockholm Syndrome at all
Then YOU don't "have" that PDF. The content owner has the PDF, and the content owner decides (until they've gone bankrupt or lost interest) whether *they* trust your DRM system enough to allow it to display the contents to you (under their rules).
I'm really not trying to split hairs here, but if that PDF file has DRM, *it's not yours*. Don't kid yourself. And if your e-book display computer doesn't obey your wishes to retain its contents, again, *it's not yours*. You may have paid your good money for it (sucker!) but not in exchange for ownership of that object and that data file. And don't get stuck into Stockholm Syndrome "but I paid for it, and I'm not stupid, therefore you're wrong and this DRM'ed e-book reader with the DRM'ed PDF file is perfectly ok". I don't care what you do with your money, that's up to you. I just believe that if you think about things in incorrect categories, the truth is often obscured, as in this case, and the only solution to the odd paradoxes is to think in a different way. This is why I think it is very important to have legislation that forces such an E-book reader as you have to come with a warning label "Warning! not a general purpose computer".
IIRC you can't, the ARM processor Surface RT has mandatory secure boot which means only Microsoft is allowed to provide signed boot loaders and kernels.
Apparently, with the i386 processor Surface (not-RT) you can jump through hoops and manage to install Fedora, but with the Surface RT it is not possible to put Linux, or anything else really, on it.
Correct me if I'm wrong! (including detailed links of course).
Angela Merkel (WARNING may be NSFW)
what's even worse: if you read his message backwards, it says "you - tee - eff - ate", i wonder what it means..
NO. All the eastern EU countries had the Stasi, Securitate etc. etc. up until the Wende in 1990. That's still in most people's living memory. They know what it leads, to and why they didn't like full-blown surveillance. That's almost half the EU you're talking about (not the Western Europe traditionally seen as "the EU" but still).
I think this situation is different than anything before, except for countries like the former GDR where it brings back memories of "the bad old times".
I think Merkel deserves a statue in Berlin, not because I like her CDU politics ( I don't) but because she managed to be a hard-working and conscientious(sp?) leader of the Germans in one of the most difficult periods after WWII. Now I'm going to say something sexist, weird and irrational, so you can have a laugh if you disagree.
The fact that she's a woman is, in my honest opinion, of crucial importance in how the credit crisis developed in the EU. Whenever there's a big crisis, the demagogues in every country rise up and try to sway the people with their (usually macho) rhetoric. These are very, very good at politics, at pointing out the errors of the power elite. They may not always have their own solutions, but count on their macho TV imago to do the work. This is especially the case in the appeal to visceral nationalistic feelings; tickling the electorate "it's all the fault of Europe and Germany that we're now so poor! kick the government out and vote for me!".
In the Greek media, Merkel was depicted as wearing a Nazi uniform: "it's all the fault of those bloody German Nazis! Look what they turned our lovely country into!". This has had a certain effect, but the Greek government crawls onward toward solution of their tax problems and Golden Dawn didn't win the election.
I firmly believe this is because of Frau Merkel. She managed to absorb a lot of the hate and didn't reflect it back. I strongly invite you to do the following
Gedankenexperiment
Imagine, that during 2008-2012, Angela Merkel was not the bundeskänzlerin of Germany, but instead Silvio Berlusconi was magically German and had become the bundeskänzler.
Silvio with his macho laugh and attitude and (to him) funny sense of humour.
Are we in WW III yet?
And that's why Angela Merkel deserves a statue despite being a CDU politician: for keeping her country and the other EU countries intact and limping onward more or less functioning, she deserves great praise for keeping the sentiments and heads cool.
I believe it's partially because she looks like your mum (stern and money-worried) instead of your uncle (annoying, rich and a practical-joker).
hehe... oops...
You're right!
Minor nitpick though: it's 16742 billion dollars at the moment, that's indeed well over 16 billion.
It's easy to get confused, because your 16 billion is how much your deficit grows per week.
Drones are also honeybees... Just sayin'...
I'm guessing you've never seen Shrek II...
How poorly you know you history... it's sickening.
Did you know the reason why so many Jews were murdered in the Netherlands, many more (proportionally) than in other occupied countries? It was because the Amsterdam city government had a detailed database of the people, including religion, so that when the government was taken over by the Nazis in 1940, they only had too look up the addresses of the Jews. (Amsterdam has historically had lots of Jews that fled from Spain in previous centuries I believe). One of the most courageous terrorist acts in the 2nd world war in the Netherlands was the assault on the Amsterdam population register in 1943 (in Dutch); the attackers wanted to prevent this government database to be used for genocide. They all got a neckshot as thanks for it (look up Waalsdorpervlakte).
And now, l' histoire se repête... the current USA government under Obama is collecting a massive database on *everyone*, no doubt including their religious beliefs (could be Muslims for all you know!). And you're fine with that. And you just have to wait to see how all this data is going to be used in 10, 20, 50 years, by Michèle Bachmann or Nehemiah Scudder or I don't know who you want to elect as president when the going gets tough. Stupid.
N.B. although many cowardly Dutch betrayed their Jewish neighbours, many others got the Yad Vashem award. And most of my people's ancestors just "hid intheir houses with the curtains closed" as was most prudent and sensible.
What's wrong with PDF format? (genuinely curious).
Dear mr. Wales, Has Wikipedia considered the possibility of accepting donations via Flattr?
I think that paragraph D.41 is important to remember:
And footnote 27 about those "exclusion codes" says:
Now I know that almost all Slashdotters already know about this, but if this passes then it means that (in the EU) it is written in law that a search engine spider isn't allowed to use stuff that you kept out with your robots.txt file.
Thanks for that insightful comment..
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant"
. Easy to remember, easy to tell to people around you. Can be twisted the wrong way of course..
But you know it's "on the critical path" otherwise it would be much too expensive to launch everything from Earth.
Threaten to move to France or Russia or China then, see if that does the trick!
<voice-over person="general Turgidson">Mr President! We cannot afford a rocket scientist gap!</voice-over>
Why can't those Republican senators demand that he be the initiator for this project?
Oh that's why...