No, no.
Hard drives are actually vented. There's no pressurized compartment. They run at the same atmosphere as the rest of the machine. My error; I apparently failed to be sufficiently explicit in what I wrote. When I wrote "in the space environment," what I actually meant to say was "in the space environment, which is a vacuum, a technical word which means that there is no atmosphere..."
Price isn't the only factor here. Has anyone seen any real reliability or Environmental numbers on any of these drives yet? I know many government/military programs who would be glad to pay for it, if it could prove to increase availability in certain environments.
Well, flash storage certainly is better in the space environment. Conventional hard-disk technology requires a pressurized compartment (the heads stay separted from the disks with a thin film of air). And, of course, any technology with no moving parts is preferable-- mechanical parts have an annoying tendency to freeze up with vacuum thermal cycling.
Spirit and Opportunity are now four years into their 90-day mission on Mars, running on flash storage....
Really, is this a good thing?
The guy took CDs he bought. He ripped them to mp3. He then loaded those mp3s into some file-sharing program. Why did he do this if not for the purpose of copyright infringement? It doesn't matter for what purpose he put them into his file-sharing program. The RIAA asked for a summary judgement on the basis that he distributed the material, in a case in which the law is explicit that the word "distributed" means than an actual transfer of property took place. Since he did not, in fact, distribute the material according to the very clear legal definition of distribute, their request for a summary judgement is invalid.
Why is it good to hold to the explicit text of the law? Because, as the EFF pointed out if you expand the definition of "distribute", people can start trying to attack other people for copyright infringement even when they did not actually distribute material. If a search engine makes a list of sites based on some request, and one of those sites it lists has copyrighted material on it, is the search engine owner infringing copyright because they "made the material available"? Well, no, because there is a legal meaning of "distribute" which means only the person actually participating in the transfer of material is distributing it. Is it good to hold to this legal meaning? Hell yes.
Inflation rates fluctuate; overall, it's not clear that the Carter administration had much more of an effect on inflation rates than, say, the Nixon year inflation.
see: inflation rate 1914-2004 chart (Nixon, as you recall, has inflation so bad that the technique of dealing with it he came up with was to install wage and price controls).
In any case, to the extent that a presidential administration has an effect on the inflation rate, much of it is due to controlling, or not controlling, the deficit, and since the effect of debt continues to show up as interest payments years later, it's not clear that Carter's fiscal conservatism shouldn't be credited with the lower inflation in the early 80s.
It's a bad idea that's very close to a good idea. Remotely controlled thermostats for ten million houses would be a systems nightmare. How the heck would you debug that system, anyway?
Thegood idea, however, would be to have time-dependent pricing on power. Power production is very expensive at some times of day, typically mid-day during the air-conditioning season, and very cheap at other times of day, in fact, nearly cost-free from midnight to 5 AM, when the power plants are still turning over but nobody's using much electricity. A lot of people would revise their lifestyles to buy electricity at low rates instead of high if the price accurately reflected the actual cost of production.
Would this save the planet? Well, consider; solar panels product most power at mid-day, and more when it's sunniest and when the days are longest... so solar panels produce electricity at the *highest price* times of day-- pricing that reflected actual power cost would mean the power sold from solar panels would sell at a premium.
Of all the problems in the US electoral system, this is undoubtably the least important.
A vastly more critical glitch is that it is possible to draw congressional boundaries in such a way as to increase the influence of demographics tending toward electing one party and decrease the influence of the demographics tending toward the other, and the people who have the power to redraw districts barely even bother to hide the fact that they're doing so anymore. Solving that glitch with a means to draw boundaries that is guaranteed to be impartial, so that the elected representatives actually did reflect the preferences of the people electing them-- now that would be a serious improvement to democracy.
Odd, I went to the first link in the Slashdot story, www.domainnamenews.com/featured/domain-registrar-network-solutions-front-running-on-whois-searches/1359
and got this:
Error establishing a database connection
This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the database server at localhost. This could mean your host's database server is down.
Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
Are you sure that the database server is running?
If you're unsure what these terms mean you should probably contact your host. If you still need help you can always visit the WordPress Support Forums.
What's up with this? That's a new error message on me.
odocotron (799894) said:
Excuse me, but a great number of what I'd call 'Western' countries use other systems than pluralist votes. For example, the German Federal Diet is elected by a hybrid of the first-past-the-post election system and party-list proportional representation. Proportional systems are also used in countries like Finland, Austria, Spain and many others.)
Yes, and all of these counting systems have problems with Arrow Impossibility. Although the details of the problems vary from system to system, they are all tracable to the Arrow Impossibility thorem.
Anomolous Cowturd (190524) said
Down under, I too am mystified by summary guy's "West" blooper. Australia uses preferential voting for most of it's elections....
Australia uses what we call instant-runoff voting. It's unfortunately very confusing that Australians call instant-runnoff voting by the name preferential. Instant runoff avoids a slight amount of the problem with multiparty balloting in that you're guaranteed that the person who wins is no worse than the second worst candidate (where "worst" is defined as "would lose to any other candidate in a one-on-one election.") But it still has the same problems.
It's worth noting, by the way, that for a rational voters the range voting system is mathematically identical to approval voting. I've always liked approval voting, but range voting is fine, too. (Either one avoids the Arrow's impossibility in the technical details.)
(a "rational voter" is defined as "a voter choosing to cast their vote to maximize the expected value of the outcome of the election." Different voters will, of course, chose different outcomes as most valuable.)
Actually, the Mac has *always* been a more productive platform than both Windows and Linux for most typical users. It's just Apple's recent resurgence that's getting folks to actually try it out.
Actually, I expect it's the prospect of Microsoft stopping support of everything but Vista that's getting people to try Apple out.
Yes, the numbers do show Linux growing at a greater percentage rate than Mac. Of course, it started at a much lower level.
I find it amusing to note that the numbers show Windows browsing outnumbering Mac browsing by a little over 12:1, and Mac outnumbering Linux by about the same amount-- so Linux is to Mac what Mac is to Windows.
A couple of years ago I would have said that, having used both, I much preferred Mac for day-to-day ease of use. Linux does seem to be getting better, though. (as opposed to Windows, which is, unaccountably, actually getting worse).
It was a GREEN laser, which puts out a lot more power than your standard red keychain ornament. No, they don't actually put out more power-- they seem brighter because the eye is more sensitive to green than to red.
One of the advertised uses for a green laser is as a "sky pointer". Green lasers are "sky pointers" because green light will scatter from the atmosphere better than red light-- so you get more of a "line" showing where you're pointing in the sky. (blue lasers scatter even better-- but the eye is most sensitive to green)
The article isn't about user interfaces that make the interface actually more usable, it seems to be entirely about interfaces that are flashy and glamorous-- eye candy (and maybe, to a small extent, touch candy.) The main problem with user interfaces today is that they are bafflingly opaque-- about the only way to learn most user interfaces is to just press all the buttons in sequence and see what they do. I hate glitz; I want function. Has anybody actually ever though about figuring out what users actually need to do, and make the things that they do most the ones that are easy?
...well, maybe I'm just crotchety because the DVD player just broke, only weeks after I finally got out most of the remote's cryptic functions learned. (The button with the diamond does this, and the button with the square plus a straight line does that, and the circle with a line through it does this... is anybody else disconcerted that, after two thousand years of refining the phonetic alphabet, in less than one generation we seem to have gone back to hieroglyphics?)
It's pretty dubious. You can't extrapolate the size of the animal from the size of a claw. Many arthropods today-- lobsters, fiddler crabs, stone crabs-- have an enlarged claw. Particularly if sexual selection acts on the size of the claw ("that guy has a really big one. Ooh! He must be fierce").
Take a look, for example, at this picture of a Fiddler crab, or even this picture of a stone crab, and then scale the "computer-generated visualization" in the article to that claw to body size, and you'll estimate that the guy is, maybe, half a meter long.
Is this for real? The proposal is that clients who do ask for a secure connection are infected, and that the ones who don't ask for a secure connection aren't infected? Isn't this, like, precisely opposite of what you'd expect?
And his response to clients who ask for a secure connection is to put a rootkit on their server?
A few of the commentators on \. have managed to translate the editorial into a proposal that actually might make some sense, but reading it as written, the proposal is the worst, most idiotic analysis I've heard today.
The problem isn't the URL shrinker services; the problem is the absurdly long URL in the first place. This is simply badly written code; as the calculation points out there's no reason at all that a URL should be lines and lines long. However, there is a tendency of coders to write script that passes along absurd numbers of parameters incorporated into the URL.
if people don't want their URLs shrunk (by some service that may be down, or at least bottlenecked, on any particular day) they should write concise URLs.
So how do you verify that the source code you reviewed is exactly the same source code compiled, installed and running on all of the machines? And it's not just the source code for the actual voting application. It's everything: OS, drivers, etc.
Allowing open inspection of source code doesn't solve every possible problem or thwart every possible attack by infinitely clever criminals with arbitary resources, but it helps. It separates the problem into two problems, first: is the source code secure? Does it actually count the votes? and second: is the source code provided what is actually running on the machines? In fact, there are ways to test whether a particular source does is running on a particular machine (assuming you have the compiled source code as well as the raw source, and have physical access to the machines), and if you have the source code and can verify that it's not running on the machine that the vendor said it was running on, that alone would be grounds for suspicion.
In the way voting machine are currently purchased, the vendors can tell you that the source code is proprietary, and nobody is allowed to look at it, and if they do, they can't discuss it. Nobody can verify that it actually counts the votes. Nobody can look for holes, back doors, errors, trojans, stack overflows, or any kind of flaws whatsoever.
Vote counting should be transparent and verifiable. Proprietary vote counting algorithms should not be permitted at any stage in the process.
And, what exactly is it that they're claiming is proprietary anyway? What could possibly be proprietary about the algorithm "when a vote comes in for X, add one to the total for X"?
If we learned anything from the recent cycles of elections, it's that people are inherently LESS trustworthy than machines are.
Right. Because, of course it's not the machines themselves that we worry about; it's the humans that program them, and we'd like to be able to see what they did, after they did program them.
And note, this applies to BOTH sides equally, so if you desire to blame the "mean ole conservatives" or the "damn looney liberals",.....Don't.
Exactly! This isn't a liberal or conservative or Democratic Party or Republican Party issue. It's important for everybody that the vote counting should be open and above board, and that there should be not be grounds for doubt about whether the election was rigged. In fact, it's most important to the party that wins the election that the process should be transparent.
I'm sorry, but this essay about Velikovsky basically misunderstands the nature of our measurements of Venus. The thermal balance of Venus is well understood. The part where you mention "four probes landed on Venus" is the start of where you start to misunderstand how well the planet is understood. In fact, twelve probes landed on Venus; an additional five probes have entered and measured the atmosphere. The high temperature of Venus is a straightforward effect of the thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. You can calculate it to a decent first approximation simply by understanding the adiabatic lapse rate. The temperature of Venus at the altitude in the atmosphere where it has the same atmospheric pressure as Earth is, in fact, very similar to that of Earth; adibatic lapse means that the atmosphere gets cooler with altitude (i.e., hotter as you go lower)-- the adibatic lapse on Venus is about 10 degrees (C) per kilometer (roughly comparable to Earth). Internal heat is not needed.
I do not have the time or patience to go through the many many many measurements of the thermal parameters of the Venus atmosphere and explain your misconceptions, however, orbiting probes as well as infrared and radiotelescope measurements from Earth have very well confirmed that Venus is very close to thermal equilibrium. It is not correct that there is a large internal heat source contributing significantly to the surface temperature.
Yes, in fact, the actual rover design make use of both: high temperature SiC electronics for the parts exposed to the high temperature environment, and the cooled electronics compartment for the main command and control components, which can be isolated. The SiC components are very impressive, but (so far) they're not up to the technology readiness level to make all the components for a Venus rover-- although the SiC differential amplifier is a good start
in sleep Athens, OH a company called Global Cooling is the forefront producer of such devices (and is still hand-making a good number of them).
... and, in fact, Global Cooling licensed their free-piston Stirling engine technology from Sunpower (also of Athens, Ohio), and Sunpower works with NASA Glenn on the Stirling engine development. So they really are the cousins of the Venus engines.
The legend that "Out of sight, out of mind" translated out of and back into English came out as "invisible idiot" is an ancient one. I expect that about ten thousand people have tried this using Bablefish; for what it's worth, here was my try from about ten years back.
The title of this news release certainly wins a prize in the "yeah, so?" category-- lots of starting materials make water, including, among other things, gasoline-- a significant component of your car exhaust is water vapor.
It's easy enough to release the hydrogen from hydrocarbons and burn it (to get water), leaving carbon behind-- that's essentially a description of pyrolisis. Or, if you like, it's a description of how to make charcoal.
Several years back, nanotubes had been reported as storing very large amounts of hydrogen, and a lot of groups were looking at this as a way of hydrogen storage... unfortunately, as far as I know, nobody has ever been able to confirm that observation-- they seem to store a few percent by weight, not bad, but not a breakthrough.
Slashdot Mirror
In any country, close to 50% of people have below average intelligence...
And, for that matter, exactly fifty percent are below median intelligence.
Hard drives are actually vented. There's no pressurized compartment. They run at the same atmosphere as the rest of the machine. My error; I apparently failed to be sufficiently explicit in what I wrote. When I wrote "in the space environment," what I actually meant to say was "in the space environment, which is a vacuum, a technical word which means that there is no atmosphere..."
Well, flash storage certainly is better in the space environment. Conventional hard-disk technology requires a pressurized compartment (the heads stay separted from the disks with a thin film of air). And, of course, any technology with no moving parts is preferable-- mechanical parts have an annoying tendency to freeze up with vacuum thermal cycling.
Spirit and Opportunity are now four years into their 90-day mission on Mars, running on flash storage....
The guy took CDs he bought. He ripped them to mp3. He then loaded those mp3s into some file-sharing program. Why did he do this if not for the purpose of copyright infringement? It doesn't matter for what purpose he put them into his file-sharing program. The RIAA asked for a summary judgement on the basis that he distributed the material, in a case in which the law is explicit that the word "distributed" means than an actual transfer of property took place. Since he did not, in fact, distribute the material according to the very clear legal definition of distribute, their request for a summary judgement is invalid.
Why is it good to hold to the explicit text of the law? Because, as the EFF pointed out if you expand the definition of "distribute", people can start trying to attack other people for copyright infringement even when they did not actually distribute material. If a search engine makes a list of sites based on some request, and one of those sites it lists has copyrighted material on it, is the search engine owner infringing copyright because they "made the material available"? Well, no, because there is a legal meaning of "distribute" which means only the person actually participating in the transfer of material is distributing it. Is it good to hold to this legal meaning? Hell yes.
inflation rate 1914-2004 chart
(Nixon, as you recall, has inflation so bad that the technique of dealing with it he came up with was to install wage and price controls).
In any case, to the extent that a presidential administration has an effect on the inflation rate, much of it is due to controlling, or not controlling, the deficit, and since the effect of debt continues to show up as interest payments years later, it's not clear that Carter's fiscal conservatism shouldn't be credited with the lower inflation in the early 80s.
Thegood idea, however, would be to have time-dependent pricing on power. Power production is very expensive at some times of day, typically mid-day during the air-conditioning season, and very cheap at other times of day, in fact, nearly cost-free from midnight to 5 AM, when the power plants are still turning over but nobody's using much electricity. A lot of people would revise their lifestyles to buy electricity at low rates instead of high if the price accurately reflected the actual cost of production.
Would this save the planet? Well, consider; solar panels product most power at mid-day, and more when it's sunniest and when the days are longest... so solar panels produce electricity at the *highest price* times of day-- pricing that reflected actual power cost would mean the power sold from solar panels would sell at a premium.
A vastly more critical glitch is that it is possible to draw congressional boundaries in such a way as to increase the influence of demographics tending toward electing one party and decrease the influence of the demographics tending toward the other, and the people who have the power to redraw districts barely even bother to hide the fact that they're doing so anymore. Solving that glitch with a means to draw boundaries that is guaranteed to be impartial, so that the elected representatives actually did reflect the preferences of the people electing them-- now that would be a serious improvement to democracy.
This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the database server at localhost. This could mean your host's database server is down.
Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname? Are you sure that the database server is running? If you're unsure what these terms mean you should probably contact your host. If you still need help you can always visit the WordPress Support Forums.
What's up with this? That's a new error message on me.
Yes, and all of these counting systems have problems with Arrow Impossibility. Although the details of the problems vary from system to system, they are all tracable to the Arrow Impossibility thorem.
Anomolous Cowturd (190524) said
Down under, I too am mystified by summary guy's "West" blooper. Australia uses preferential voting for most of it's elections....Australia uses what we call instant-runoff voting. It's unfortunately very confusing that Australians call instant-runnoff voting by the name preferential. Instant runoff avoids a slight amount of the problem with multiparty balloting in that you're guaranteed that the person who wins is no worse than the second worst candidate (where "worst" is defined as "would lose to any other candidate in a one-on-one election.") But it still has the same problems.
It's worth noting, by the way, that for a rational voters the range voting system is mathematically identical to approval voting. I've always liked approval voting, but range voting is fine, too. (Either one avoids the Arrow's impossibility in the technical details.) (a "rational voter" is defined as "a voter choosing to cast their vote to maximize the expected value of the outcome of the election." Different voters will, of course, chose different outcomes as most valuable.)
Actually, I expect it's the prospect of Microsoft stopping support of everything but Vista that's getting people to try Apple out.
I find it amusing to note that the numbers show Windows browsing outnumbering Mac browsing by a little over 12:1, and Mac outnumbering Linux by about the same amount-- so Linux is to Mac what Mac is to Windows.
A couple of years ago I would have said that, having used both, I much preferred Mac for day-to-day ease of use. Linux does seem to be getting better, though. (as opposed to Windows, which is, unaccountably, actually getting worse).
...well, maybe I'm just crotchety because the DVD player just broke, only weeks after I finally got out most of the remote's cryptic functions learned. (The button with the diamond does this, and the button with the square plus a straight line does that, and the circle with a line through it does this... is anybody else disconcerted that, after two thousand years of refining the phonetic alphabet, in less than one generation we seem to have gone back to hieroglyphics?)
Take a look, for example, at this picture of a Fiddler crab, or even this picture of a stone crab, and then scale the "computer-generated visualization" in the article to that claw to body size, and you'll estimate that the guy is, maybe, half a meter long.
A few of the commentators on \. have managed to translate the editorial into a proposal that actually might make some sense, but reading it as written, the proposal is the worst, most idiotic analysis I've heard today.
if people don't want their URLs shrunk (by some service that may be down, or at least bottlenecked, on any particular day) they should write concise URLs.
Allowing open inspection of source code doesn't solve every possible problem or thwart every possible attack by infinitely clever criminals with arbitary resources, but it helps. It separates the problem into two problems, first: is the source code secure? Does it actually count the votes? and second: is the source code provided what is actually running on the machines? In fact, there are ways to test whether a particular source does is running on a particular machine (assuming you have the compiled source code as well as the raw source, and have physical access to the machines), and if you have the source code and can verify that it's not running on the machine that the vendor said it was running on, that alone would be grounds for suspicion.
In the way voting machine are currently purchased, the vendors can tell you that the source code is proprietary, and nobody is allowed to look at it, and if they do, they can't discuss it. Nobody can verify that it actually counts the votes. Nobody can look for holes, back doors, errors, trojans, stack overflows, or any kind of flaws whatsoever.
Vote counting should be transparent and verifiable. Proprietary vote counting algorithms should not be permitted at any stage in the process.
And, what exactly is it that they're claiming is proprietary anyway? What could possibly be proprietary about the algorithm "when a vote comes in for X, add one to the total for X"?
Right. Because, of course it's not the machines themselves that we worry about; it's the humans that program them, and we'd like to be able to see what they did, after they did program them.
And note, this applies to BOTH sides equally, so if you desire to blame the "mean ole conservatives" or the "damn looney liberals",.....Don't.Exactly! This isn't a liberal or conservative or Democratic Party or Republican Party issue. It's important for everybody that the vote counting should be open and above board, and that there should be not be grounds for doubt about whether the election was rigged. In fact, it's most important to the party that wins the election that the process should be transparent.
I do not have the time or patience to go through the many many many measurements of the thermal parameters of the Venus atmosphere and explain your misconceptions, however, orbiting probes as well as infrared and radiotelescope measurements from Earth have very well confirmed that Venus is very close to thermal equilibrium. It is not correct that there is a large internal heat source contributing significantly to the surface temperature.
Yes, in fact, the actual rover design make use of both: high temperature SiC electronics for the parts exposed to the high temperature environment, and the cooled electronics compartment for the main command and control components, which can be isolated. The SiC components are very impressive, but (so far) they're not up to the technology readiness level to make all the components for a Venus rover-- although the SiC differential amplifier is a good start
Water lowers the viscosity of magma.
... and, in fact, Global Cooling licensed their free-piston Stirling engine technology from Sunpower (also of Athens, Ohio), and Sunpower works with NASA Glenn on the Stirling engine development. So they really are the cousins of the Venus engines.
I didn't think to try Dutch to Hebrew, though!
It's easy enough to release the hydrogen from hydrocarbons and burn it (to get water), leaving carbon behind-- that's essentially a description of pyrolisis. Or, if you like, it's a description of how to make charcoal.
Several years back, nanotubes had been reported as storing very large amounts of hydrogen, and a lot of groups were looking at this as a way of hydrogen storage... unfortunately, as far as I know, nobody has ever been able to confirm that observation-- they seem to store a few percent by weight, not bad, but not a breakthrough.