I think your Xerox printers may be rebranded OKI (LED printing is an OKI technology). The reason they are fast is everything to do with the processor, software and print resolution, and little to do with the technology.
That said, the OKI printers seem to be good workhorses and they have some nice features (very easy consumable replacement and good reporting, for two things). Unusually, they also measure the drum life rather than assuming it to be fixed. For relatively high output, especially on faster runs, I think they are good value. They should have the advantage of relatively accurate scaling because of the fixed pitch LEDs, whereas laser printers can have scaling errors across the print due to any variations during the scan.
In fact, Xerox have done quite a good job of optimising output across their range. Marketing bull aside, their processors and software are reasonably fast in color, while some competitors advertise massive engine speeds which are dragged down to squilch by any kind of heavy color image use. Fine for hinted business pages, hopeless for photos.
Anybody with an interest in behavioral science who has spent time around dogs knows that, much as the religious Right likes to dismiss it (because they want humanity to have a unique place in the universe - Christian humility doesn't count here), dogs have behavioural patterns that it is easiest to interpret in human terms, still without excessive anthropomorphising. They may have them at the average human two year old level, but they have them. And is it surprising? Over the vast periods of time that cover the evolution of modern animals, there must have been a huge amount of opportunity for genetic makeup to develop which produced governing mechanisms of social behaviour. For dogs, the development of a pack-based society with strong internal rules seems to have worked out rather well, if only because it has fitted in in a kind of symbiotic way with human society. Currently we in the West seem to be in the middle of a vast experiment to create a society which rejects those mechanisms and regards only selfish individual behaviour as having merit. I wonder how it will all turn out? Tears before extinction time, I suspect.
Why do I think a lot of the posts on this thread are astroturfers for the NFL? Because it is unusual to have so many anti-free speech posts on a/. thread, that's why.
Wendy Seltzer is absolutely right. Her job ( as an academic lawyer involves comment on legal issues, and a corporation tried to stop her freely commenting on just such an issue because they didn't like the implied criticism. Normally when a lawyer stands up to the rich and powerful we cheer, not sneer. Dear astroturfers, football in all its varieties around the world thrives on corruption and dodgy business. No matter on what scale, people who try to clean up sport are working in the public interest. So now go back to your sad little PR jobs and fuck off, please
As the masses get closer, the heat generation increases very rapidly. In the unlikely event they are forced very close together, the heat generated melts the fuel which is then absorbed in porous graphite plates in the piston and the cylinder end, thus moderating the reaction.
Look, this is serious engineering, not some half-assed scheme. You'd expect us to have taken safety seriously, wouldn't you? (Thinks of Sellafield (AKA Windscale, aka "Perfectly safe just don't visit the beach") reactor catching fire and the burning graphite sending plutonium particles up the shaft and out into the atmosphere...)
At University we worked out the feasibility of a nuclear pogo stick. The idea is that the piston and the top end of the cylinder each contain subcritical masses of a suitable isotope. As the pogo stick compresses, the masses approach, generating heat, which expands the gas driving the stick. As the piston expands, at one point it uncovers a suitable gas to air heat exchanger through which the gas flows, cooling it and allowing the cycle to resume. (Basically a Stirling cycle). The air side of the heat exchanger is cooled by air movement.
Shielding is a bit of an issue, also ensuring that the helium used as the gas doesn't get out, though a suitable nuclear isotope would replace a slow loss of helium with alpha particles.
So there you have it, a carbon neutral, cheap and easily manufactured transport system. I'm honestly amazed we couldn't get anybody interested in manufacturing it in volume.
As an example, in the 1970s basic metal turning was being done by, inter alia:
Manual capstan lathes
Mechanical automated lathes (gear and cam)
Hydraulic lathes
Plugboard hydraulic/pneumatic lathes
Tape driven hydraulic machines.
By the 1990s, any half way decent turning shop would be using entirely CNC machines using hydraulics or electric servos. The same process of consolidation applied to milling machines, ending in the machining center. I worked in manufacturing, as first a research engineer, then a systems designer, and finally in management, between the late 70s and 2000. The consolidation and rationalisation of technology was tremendous.
Obviously when I said "individualistic" I meant that individual companies had different manufacturing philosophies and approaches. Volume manufacturing by large groups was in use in the Arsenal at Venice in Dante's day, so on your definition I guess I would have to mean the 1270s.
I think IT now is in the state manufacturing was in the 70s. To explain: Before the 70s, most volume manufacturing was quite individualistic. For instance, different car manufacturers had very different approaches to manufacturing. But individuality came at a high price in poor designs and poor quality. As manufacturing volumes ramped up (i.e. the economy grew) the cost of the firefighting become greater and greater. The result, of course, was the development of CAM and CAD, proper workforce training, and above all quality management and control. By the 1990s manufacturing was largely sorted in the larger industries. It employed far fewer people, but the results were pretty good, certainly with consumer products and cars. Nowadays, the only part of the process that tends to be manual is final assembly.
I think we are going through the same process in IT. There are a variety of methods of production and management, some of which are highly arcane. The standard of documentation and management in many companies seems to be low, to say the least. IT staff just do not understand kaizen, quality management, or any of the wider corporate things that can actually help them do their jobs better. They confuse better tools with better working practices. Strangely, in the early days of IT things were often better because the tools were limited in performance and scope and the organisation had to be built carefully around them (I was there...)
When we get past this stage, things will change. Quality will be built in to the processes. I suspect there will be far fewer applications in use, and many of the tools available will be greatly simplified. (The same ought to apply to business as a whole; it's hard to understand why the majority of office workers need Powerpoint or the decoration features in Word to do their jobs well.) Fewer people will be employed in IT, and their jobs will be better defined.
The question I don't know the answer to is what they will actually be doing.
One would think that legal expenses in any lawsuit in which there is any public interest at all should be in the public domain. The legal system is partly State funded and as such we the people have an interest in how it operates and how it interacts with external private bodies (lawyers.) This is nothing to do with client confidentiality. If we know the RIAA spent 500 hours with Sue, Grabbit & Runne (Attorneys), we may speculate on why so much time was spent on the case, but we do not actually know that the attorneys were instructed to "pop a cap in that ho's ass".
To be fair, the mnemonic I quoted was the only one that actually refers to pi indirectly in the text - because, for the classically challenged, the "immortal Syracusan" is Arximedes who identified the invariance of pi. However, the version in your link is impressive, though as literature it sucks badly and the author obviously needs to get a life.
The mnemonic that most clearly reflects its purpose is, I think
How I wish I could recollect of circle round The exact relation Archimedes found.
Now I, even I, would celebrate
In rhymes inapt the great
Immortal Syracusan rivaled nevermore
Who in his wondrous law
Passed on before
Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate
Continuing to 100000 or so is left as an exercise to the reader.
The joke is that in writing this out I have to remind myself, as a non-American English
user, that "rivaled" is spelt like that, and to do that I have to recite the numeric value of
pi up to that point...go figure
(As a tenured professor in theology at the University of Outer Fencepost, Wyoming...)
Seriously, theology is a useful subject. You may believe that religion is bunk (and if you really are a professor of theology, you probably know WHY you believe it) but millions of people do not, and understanding the background to their beliefs and probable behavioural patterns can be very useful. It's just like a marketing man for a burger chain might believe the product is horrible and never want to eat there, but can influence people's behaviour by making use of knowledge about their psychology and beliefs, and so get more footfall.
You only have to look around at things like abortion laws, education, attitudes to other cultures etc. to see that an understanding of the belief patterns of many Americans is an important subject. Why do so many Americans believe garbage like Creationism despite the sheer hugeness of the knowledge base of modern science, and the way that all the different disciplines (astronomy, geology, biology) reinforce one another? If any Government decided to try and find out, instead of kowtowing to the idiots, I would expect them to have a few liberal theologians as well as psychologists and sociologists on the panel.
And no, Bible study is not theology and more than playing stone,paper,scissors is experimental psychology.
Slashdot is, I believe, Rob Malda's blog and as such whatever he sees fit to include is proper content. In fact, the parent post is so completely up itself that it is looking at its kidneys from the inside. +5 informative? -5 troll more like. And I've just fallen for it - so it works!
Amazing but true - there are printers on some networks which are accessible over the public Internet and which have their telnet ports exposed. I'm obviously not spelling out the implications here, but some people need the proverbial rocket up the backside.
Since I _am_ a Quaker, though not a very good one, and since I have the cartoon somewhere in my files if I could be bothered to look it out, and since the Amish are opposed to irrelevant technology, and since there is an anti-nuclear and WMD campaign called Ploughshare Fund, and since the Amish are a German speaking sect and ploughshare/plowshare is an English word, and since the Quakers in the UK are involved in an anti-submarine campaign called Trident Ploughshares, and for a number of other reasons too long to post here but having to do with my somewhat in-depth knowledge of both Testaments and religious history, I guess I am not.
I didn't know people thought that. But it was the Washington Post, some years ago, that published a cartoon strip suggesting that the Quakers had developed a 40-megaton nuclear plowshare. After that, using CBW to save foolish men who build their houses on the sand should be a no-brainer.
The last time I suggested white Western civilisation might be less than perfect I got modded to hell, but who cares? It was no less a person than Roger Bacon who said that every educated person needed to know Arabic, but then he was interested in the science and technology of his day, unlike most of the Church. The peak of that Islamic civilisation seems to have been the Kingdom of Granada in Spain, which had an advanced society, religious tolerance (not only were Jews and Christians welcome, but a Hebrew prayer book for women has been discovered there) and advanced technology. There is some evidence that they learned more from the Hindus than the Greeks, as books on the history of numbers point out. There are writings from that society that sound almost modern in outlook.
Unfortunately their civilisation was destroyed by a European power under the aegis of the Catholic Church. For much of recent history, Christian societies have attempted to control and dominate Islamic societies. Since the socially mobile tend to follow the ways of the dominant power, Islam has become increasingly a religion of the poor and ill educated. (I know this is a simplification, but it is a useful simplification.) We are now seeing the effects of creating a society of poor and ill-educated people with ready access to cheap weapons.
On the broader point, I tend to disagree. It is easy to blame television, the movies and the music industry for the destruction of "high" culture, but of course we don't know what "low" culture was like in largely preliterate societies. I suspect the reality is that high culture is more disseminated and understood than ever before, but whereas in the Middle Ages it might have been available to 0.1% of the population, now it is available to, say, 2%. Because mass culture now has access to the media, this fact is concealed in the sheer noise of low culture.
A genuine example, from the 1500s. A footnote to an edition of Rabelais reveals that at one public fair in France, the prostitutes wanting to operate their trade had to take part at the start of the fair in a naked public footrace. This operates on a number of levels. It would tend to discourage unhealthy or diseased prostitutes. It constituted a form of advertising. And it provided entertainment. But it also shows that, no matter what you think of current entertainment standards, they were just as bad in the 1500s.
The Still marine engine had Diesel cycle on the top of the piston and steam cycle under the piston (in a marine engine the wrist pin is not inside the piston but attached to a crosshead, with a rod attached to the piston, so this does not mean water in the crankcase.)
Like every other single attempt to add complexity for a marginal gain in efficiency, it was not a success. All engineering involves tradeoffs: combining technologies with different metallurgical, thermal, gasflow etc. requirements means that none of the combined technologies ever function with peak efficiency. (The hybrid is a rare exception because the characteristics of internal combustion engines and electric motors are complementary, but even there it has taken something like 140 years of development of IC engine powered generator technology to make it work.)
Can somebody better acquainted with the mechanics of sending a vehicle to the Moon and back please explain why Buzz Aldrin recommends taking a sextant? Or does the tried and tested technology to be used this time involve lashing the Captain to the aerial to take the latitude while the crew pile on the solar sails?
He any his wife are mini-Marcoses, if you remember the former dictators of the Phillipines. They are obsessed with accumulating money, sucking up to Big Business, getting free holidays from rock musicians and dubious foreign politicians (not sure in which category "Sir" Cliff Richard falls.) The Bush thing is just a corollary to going where the money is. The ID card scheme is a spectacularly stupid overspecified high cost project which of course is supported by the foreign companies that now supply IT to the UK Government (Siemens, EDS, Microsoft) and the Civil Service Unions who see it is a way of stemming job losses.
In US terms this is the pork barrel to end pork barrels, and a way to ensure a continued revenue stream to Blair Inc when he leaves office. Because I'm sure that:
He will be "advising" those companies for a fee
She, as a human rights lawyer, will be deriving fee income from (a) civil liberties groups challenging aspects of the scheme and (b) Government departments on the other side.
This is a wonderful earning opportunbity for the Blairs, and they will not let it go without a huge fight.
Sorry, that is totally untrue
on
Interstellar Ark
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· Score: 2, Informative
What dimwit modded this informative? 500 years ago Copernicus wrote "De revolutionibus" in - er - Latin. Newton's book is called the Principia Mathematica because it, too, was written in Latin (I've read parts of the original and it is wonderfully clearly written.) Why do you think that the formal names of living things are in Latin and Greek, and that we are homo sapiens rather than Wise Man? Because Linnaeus wrote in Latin. Latin was the language of science and international scholarship until at least the nineteenth century. That's why so many of those scientists used Latin forms of their names. This demonstrates that the grandfather post is absolutely right. When a language has a background of useful communication, it is easier to keep using it than to translate into another language. Indeed, it may continue to develop. When we look at the short history of computer languages we see the same thing happening, with people constantly extending languages like FORTRAN rather than replacing them.
In fact the teaching of Latin to children who were expected to go on to professional jobs did not cease to be general (in the UK at least) until the late 20th century. By then it was largely symbolic, but it shows how long these things persist. It was also advantageous in that it made the learning of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian) so much easier.
It's also worth noting that Chaucer lived around the 700 years ago mark and it only takes a few weeks for an English educated person with a little Latin to be able to read the Canterbury Tales in the original. I can also read Dante in the original with a little help from a crib, also about 700 years ago.
Reason for Stephen Hawking reference
on
Interstellar Ark
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· Score: 1
Hawking recently claimed, for what reason I do not know, that the human race "had to" expand beyond its own planet to ensure its survival. I considered this a very silly point of view at the time and I still do.
Your special pleading is based on a science fiction view of reality. "Scouts...explorers..colonies". You may not have noticed that we can currently just about put reasonable unmanned probes on the nearest planet with an atmosphere that is not too hot. The conceptual jump from where we are to where you fantasise about is being is literally astronomical. You make so many US-geek-male assumptions in your post (good for mod points though) that it might do you good to read some of the history of your own country, including the truth about what happened in the Westward expansion, and not the sanitised version you get in school either. (A subject which interests me because my family tree includes people who trekked with Brigham Young.)
Why "Fortunately for the human race"?
on
Interstellar Ark
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· Score: 0, Troll
I venture to disagree, strongly. So far the explorers have only been fortunate, on the whole, for white men of Indo-European origin. Why is it fortunate for us that so much of the world has been conquered and overrun by the offspring of a small part of north-Western Europe? It has not exactly been fortunate for the American, Australian and South American original populations.
The lifestyle of hunter gatherers is not necessarily nasty, brutish and short. (I nearly wrote "British" there - Freudian slip.) Why is it that, when so many people get money, they want to spend it on living like hunter gatherers and nomads? Why do civilised people buy cars, and motorhomes, and boats, hunting licences, fishing gear? Why don't they want to spend their lives in cubicle farms before going home to be sold rubbish products on television? The "Civilisation" that so many people seem to want to export to the rest of the Solar System and beyond is a pretty poor thing.
As a matter of fact this was very effectively satirised by C S Lewis long ago in his book "Out of the Silent Planet", and the likes of Stephen Hawking have never come up with any kind of rebuttal. If Hawking was not so badly disabled, it would be tempting to draw out the parallels between Lewis's scientist who wants to populate the Universe with people like him, and Hawking himself. As it is, Hawking can be excused his views on the grounds of the limitations he has to live with every day. But other proponents of the spread around the Universe of WASPs have fewer excuses.
That's a load regulation technology. It's there to absorb and give out relatively small amounts of power to maintain frequency and harmonic performance of power systems. In other words, it's a capacitor rather than a battery.
The root problem is this: it makes far more sense to store surplus energy in batteries than in some intermediate, but that implies relatively slow battery charging since otherwise you have fluctuating high loads. Your solution would mean that, at any moment, the flywheels are being charged by or discharging energy greater than the average power output of the entire EV fleet. You would, in fact, need to install well over 2KW of electrical power transformation for every KW of output required. That is hardly economic.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for this particular development. But the sort of power you are looking at to charge batteries at that rate is enormous. Figure it out. If you have a battery that can, say, deliver 50KW for one hour, then to charge it in five minutes will require to deliver about 20% more than you get out (conversion efficiency) or a charge rate of 720KW. That's nearly 1000 horsepower in Library of Congress units. You aren't going to be passing that through a handy, easy to use electrical circuit any time soon.
On the other hand, overnight charging of the batteries (when power stations have spare capacity) is an extremely good idea, and indeed the dual hybrid concept good at good write up last year.
So my suggestion is: Yes, this is a really good idea, yes it is progress in terms of better flexibility of power supplies, yes it goes some way to resolve the problem that you cannot easily store electrical power by allowing it to be stored in a big distributed network of vehicles - but ten years is for too soon for it to take over as a technology.
The progressively replacement of gasoline engines by Diesel in Europe has been going on for over 20 years now, and that's probably a realistic timeframe. 20 years to get market penetration of battery vehicles, and then, only if renewable fuels turn out to be a failure, the progressive development of very high power charging stations.
I think more than a few people need to get a little perspective on this. Other than to the less well educated fraction of the United States and a few idiotic British camp followers, fortunately now exported, the word "communism" doesn't cause people to rush off screaming. Just because Rupert insists that Fox News treats guilt by association as dogma because it is lazier and cheaper than facts and debate(just like Islamic fundamentalists do...) doesn't mean that the rest of the world does, or at least not with the same knee jerk reaction to a few key words. And no, I am happily aware that many Americans are not that stupid.
The people who stand to gain most in the short to medium term from FOSS are those in poor countries with good educational systems, i.e. where the intellectual resources are there but not the cash. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but most of those countries are of the left wing statist persuasion (except, I think, for Botswana and Iran.) That means that Kerala State, Cuba, the former Soviet Union, parts of China and some other parts of India are all prime candidates to hear the FOSS message.
Russia is rising again, China and India are growing, Cuba and Venezuela are starting to change. Stallman may irritate the hell out of me at times, but his approach is spot on. When the grown ups are locked into the monopoly, preach to the kids.
The "C" word may frighten - oh, maybe 50 million Americans - but not two billion people in BRIC. What they and their governments want to know is how they can get better lives in future. One key to that is not having to pay rich people in developed countries a tax on what is essentially a commodity. Computer technology is not neutral. Spread widely, it benefits ordinary people regardless of political persuasion. Stallmann is right to spread that message.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, the OKI printers seem to be good workhorses and they have some nice features (very easy consumable replacement and good reporting, for two things). Unusually, they also measure the drum life rather than assuming it to be fixed. For relatively high output, especially on faster runs, I think they are good value. They should have the advantage of relatively accurate scaling because of the fixed pitch LEDs, whereas laser printers can have scaling errors across the print due to any variations during the scan.
In fact, Xerox have done quite a good job of optimising output across their range. Marketing bull aside, their processors and software are reasonably fast in color, while some competitors advertise massive engine speeds which are dragged down to squilch by any kind of heavy color image use. Fine for hinted business pages, hopeless for photos.
Anybody with an interest in behavioral science who has spent time around dogs knows that, much as the religious Right likes to dismiss it (because they want humanity to have a unique place in the universe - Christian humility doesn't count here), dogs have behavioural patterns that it is easiest to interpret in human terms, still without excessive anthropomorphising. They may have them at the average human two year old level, but they have them. And is it surprising? Over the vast periods of time that cover the evolution of modern animals, there must have been a huge amount of opportunity for genetic makeup to develop which produced governing mechanisms of social behaviour. For dogs, the development of a pack-based society with strong internal rules seems to have worked out rather well, if only because it has fitted in in a kind of symbiotic way with human society. Currently we in the West seem to be in the middle of a vast experiment to create a society which rejects those mechanisms and regards only selfish individual behaviour as having merit. I wonder how it will all turn out? Tears before extinction time, I suspect.
Wendy Seltzer is absolutely right. Her job ( as an academic lawyer involves comment on legal issues, and a corporation tried to stop her freely commenting on just such an issue because they didn't like the implied criticism. Normally when a lawyer stands up to the rich and powerful we cheer, not sneer. Dear astroturfers, football in all its varieties around the world thrives on corruption and dodgy business. No matter on what scale, people who try to clean up sport are working in the public interest. So now go back to your sad little PR jobs and fuck off, please
Look, this is serious engineering, not some half-assed scheme. You'd expect us to have taken safety seriously, wouldn't you? (Thinks of Sellafield (AKA Windscale, aka "Perfectly safe just don't visit the beach") reactor catching fire and the burning graphite sending plutonium particles up the shaft and out into the atmosphere...)
Shielding is a bit of an issue, also ensuring that the helium used as the gas doesn't get out, though a suitable nuclear isotope would replace a slow loss of helium with alpha particles.
So there you have it, a carbon neutral, cheap and easily manufactured transport system. I'm honestly amazed we couldn't get anybody interested in manufacturing it in volume.
- Manual capstan lathes
- Mechanical automated lathes (gear and cam)
- Hydraulic lathes
- Plugboard hydraulic/pneumatic lathes
- Tape driven hydraulic machines.
By the 1990s, any half way decent turning shop would be using entirely CNC machines using hydraulics or electric servos. The same process of consolidation applied to milling machines, ending in the machining center. I worked in manufacturing, as first a research engineer, then a systems designer, and finally in management, between the late 70s and 2000. The consolidation and rationalisation of technology was tremendous.Obviously when I said "individualistic" I meant that individual companies had different manufacturing philosophies and approaches. Volume manufacturing by large groups was in use in the Arsenal at Venice in Dante's day, so on your definition I guess I would have to mean the 1270s.
I think we are going through the same process in IT. There are a variety of methods of production and management, some of which are highly arcane. The standard of documentation and management in many companies seems to be low, to say the least. IT staff just do not understand kaizen, quality management, or any of the wider corporate things that can actually help them do their jobs better. They confuse better tools with better working practices. Strangely, in the early days of IT things were often better because the tools were limited in performance and scope and the organisation had to be built carefully around them (I was there...)
When we get past this stage, things will change. Quality will be built in to the processes. I suspect there will be far fewer applications in use, and many of the tools available will be greatly simplified. (The same ought to apply to business as a whole; it's hard to understand why the majority of office workers need Powerpoint or the decoration features in Word to do their jobs well.) Fewer people will be employed in IT, and their jobs will be better defined.
The question I don't know the answer to is what they will actually be doing.
One would think that legal expenses in any lawsuit in which there is any public interest at all should be in the public domain. The legal system is partly State funded and as such we the people have an interest in how it operates and how it interacts with external private bodies (lawyers.) This is nothing to do with client confidentiality. If we know the RIAA spent 500 hours with Sue, Grabbit & Runne (Attorneys), we may speculate on why so much time was spent on the case, but we do not actually know that the attorneys were instructed to "pop a cap in that ho's ass".
To be fair, the mnemonic I quoted was the only one that actually refers to pi indirectly in the text - because, for the classically challenged, the "immortal Syracusan" is Arximedes who identified the invariance of pi. However, the version in your link is impressive, though as literature it sucks badly and the author obviously needs to get a life.
The mnemonic that most clearly reflects its purpose is, I think
How I wish I could recollect of circle round
The exact relation Archimedes found.
Short, but to the point.
In rhymes inapt the great
Immortal Syracusan rivaled nevermore
Who in his wondrous law
Passed on before
Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate
Continuing to 100000 or so is left as an exercise to the reader.
The joke is that in writing this out I have to remind myself, as a non-American English user, that "rivaled" is spelt like that, and to do that I have to recite the numeric value of pi up to that point...go figure
Seriously, theology is a useful subject. You may believe that religion is bunk (and if you really are a professor of theology, you probably know WHY you believe it) but millions of people do not, and understanding the background to their beliefs and probable behavioural patterns can be very useful. It's just like a marketing man for a burger chain might believe the product is horrible and never want to eat there, but can influence people's behaviour by making use of knowledge about their psychology and beliefs, and so get more footfall.
You only have to look around at things like abortion laws, education, attitudes to other cultures etc. to see that an understanding of the belief patterns of many Americans is an important subject. Why do so many Americans believe garbage like Creationism despite the sheer hugeness of the knowledge base of modern science, and the way that all the different disciplines (astronomy, geology, biology) reinforce one another? If any Government decided to try and find out, instead of kowtowing to the idiots, I would expect them to have a few liberal theologians as well as psychologists and sociologists on the panel.
And no, Bible study is not theology and more than playing stone,paper,scissors is experimental psychology.
Slashdot is, I believe, Rob Malda's blog and as such whatever he sees fit to include is proper content. In fact, the parent post is so completely up itself that it is looking at its kidneys from the inside. +5 informative? -5 troll more like. And I've just fallen for it - so it works!
Amazing but true - there are printers on some networks which are accessible over the public Internet and which have their telnet ports exposed. I'm obviously not spelling out the implications here, but some people need the proverbial rocket up the backside.
Since I _am_ a Quaker, though not a very good one, and since I have the cartoon somewhere in my files if I could be bothered to look it out, and since the Amish are opposed to irrelevant technology, and since there is an anti-nuclear and WMD campaign called Ploughshare Fund, and since the Amish are a German speaking sect and ploughshare/plowshare is an English word, and since the Quakers in the UK are involved in an anti-submarine campaign called Trident Ploughshares, and for a number of other reasons too long to post here but having to do with my somewhat in-depth knowledge of both Testaments and religious history, I guess I am not.
I didn't know people thought that. But it was the Washington Post, some years ago, that published a cartoon strip suggesting that the Quakers had developed a 40-megaton nuclear plowshare. After that, using CBW to save foolish men who build their houses on the sand should be a no-brainer.
Unfortunately their civilisation was destroyed by a European power under the aegis of the Catholic Church. For much of recent history, Christian societies have attempted to control and dominate Islamic societies. Since the socially mobile tend to follow the ways of the dominant power, Islam has become increasingly a religion of the poor and ill educated. (I know this is a simplification, but it is a useful simplification.) We are now seeing the effects of creating a society of poor and ill-educated people with ready access to cheap weapons.
On the broader point, I tend to disagree. It is easy to blame television, the movies and the music industry for the destruction of "high" culture, but of course we don't know what "low" culture was like in largely preliterate societies. I suspect the reality is that high culture is more disseminated and understood than ever before, but whereas in the Middle Ages it might have been available to 0.1% of the population, now it is available to, say, 2%. Because mass culture now has access to the media, this fact is concealed in the sheer noise of low culture.
A genuine example, from the 1500s. A footnote to an edition of Rabelais reveals that at one public fair in France, the prostitutes wanting to operate their trade had to take part at the start of the fair in a naked public footrace. This operates on a number of levels. It would tend to discourage unhealthy or diseased prostitutes. It constituted a form of advertising. And it provided entertainment. But it also shows that, no matter what you think of current entertainment standards, they were just as bad in the 1500s.
Like every other single attempt to add complexity for a marginal gain in efficiency, it was not a success. All engineering involves tradeoffs: combining technologies with different metallurgical, thermal, gasflow etc. requirements means that none of the combined technologies ever function with peak efficiency. (The hybrid is a rare exception because the characteristics of internal combustion engines and electric motors are complementary, but even there it has taken something like 140 years of development of IC engine powered generator technology to make it work.)
Can somebody better acquainted with the mechanics of sending a vehicle to the Moon and back please explain why Buzz Aldrin recommends taking a sextant? Or does the tried and tested technology to be used this time involve lashing the Captain to the aerial to take the latitude while the crew pile on the solar sails?
In US terms this is the pork barrel to end pork barrels, and a way to ensure a continued revenue stream to Blair Inc when he leaves office. Because I'm sure that:
He will be "advising" those companies for a fee
She, as a human rights lawyer, will be deriving fee income from (a) civil liberties groups challenging aspects of the scheme and (b) Government departments on the other side.
This is a wonderful earning opportunbity for the Blairs, and they will not let it go without a huge fight.
In fact the teaching of Latin to children who were expected to go on to professional jobs did not cease to be general (in the UK at least) until the late 20th century. By then it was largely symbolic, but it shows how long these things persist. It was also advantageous in that it made the learning of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian) so much easier.
It's also worth noting that Chaucer lived around the 700 years ago mark and it only takes a few weeks for an English educated person with a little Latin to be able to read the Canterbury Tales in the original. I can also read Dante in the original with a little help from a crib, also about 700 years ago.
Your special pleading is based on a science fiction view of reality. "Scouts...explorers..colonies". You may not have noticed that we can currently just about put reasonable unmanned probes on the nearest planet with an atmosphere that is not too hot. The conceptual jump from where we are to where you fantasise about is being is literally astronomical. You make so many US-geek-male assumptions in your post (good for mod points though) that it might do you good to read some of the history of your own country, including the truth about what happened in the Westward expansion, and not the sanitised version you get in school either. (A subject which interests me because my family tree includes people who trekked with Brigham Young.)
The lifestyle of hunter gatherers is not necessarily nasty, brutish and short. (I nearly wrote "British" there - Freudian slip.) Why is it that, when so many people get money, they want to spend it on living like hunter gatherers and nomads? Why do civilised people buy cars, and motorhomes, and boats, hunting licences, fishing gear? Why don't they want to spend their lives in cubicle farms before going home to be sold rubbish products on television?
The "Civilisation" that so many people seem to want to export to the rest of the Solar System and beyond is a pretty poor thing.
As a matter of fact this was very effectively satirised by C S Lewis long ago in his book "Out of the Silent Planet", and the likes of Stephen Hawking have never come up with any kind of rebuttal. If Hawking was not so badly disabled, it would be tempting to draw out the parallels between Lewis's scientist who wants to populate the Universe with people like him, and Hawking himself. As it is, Hawking can be excused his views on the grounds of the limitations he has to live with every day. But other proponents of the spread around the Universe of WASPs have fewer excuses.
The root problem is this: it makes far more sense to store surplus energy in batteries than in some intermediate, but that implies relatively slow battery charging since otherwise you have fluctuating high loads. Your solution would mean that, at any moment, the flywheels are being charged by or discharging energy greater than the average power output of the entire EV fleet. You would, in fact, need to install well over 2KW of electrical power transformation for every KW of output required. That is hardly economic.
On the other hand, overnight charging of the batteries (when power stations have spare capacity) is an extremely good idea, and indeed the dual hybrid concept good at good write up last year.
So my suggestion is: Yes, this is a really good idea, yes it is progress in terms of better flexibility of power supplies, yes it goes some way to resolve the problem that you cannot easily store electrical power by allowing it to be stored in a big distributed network of vehicles - but ten years is for too soon for it to take over as a technology.
The progressively replacement of gasoline engines by Diesel in Europe has been going on for over 20 years now, and that's probably a realistic timeframe. 20 years to get market penetration of battery vehicles, and then, only if renewable fuels turn out to be a failure, the progressive development of very high power charging stations.
The people who stand to gain most in the short to medium term from FOSS are those in poor countries with good educational systems, i.e. where the intellectual resources are there but not the cash. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but most of those countries are of the left wing statist persuasion (except, I think, for Botswana and Iran.) That means that Kerala State, Cuba, the former Soviet Union, parts of China and some other parts of India are all prime candidates to hear the FOSS message.
Russia is rising again, China and India are growing, Cuba and Venezuela are starting to change. Stallman may irritate the hell out of me at times, but his approach is spot on. When the grown ups are locked into the monopoly, preach to the kids.
The "C" word may frighten - oh, maybe 50 million Americans - but not two billion people in BRIC. What they and their governments want to know is how they can get better lives in future. One key to that is not having to pay rich people in developed countries a tax on what is essentially a commodity. Computer technology is not neutral. Spread widely, it benefits ordinary people regardless of political persuasion. Stallmann is right to spread that message.