I really think the GPL vs. BSD license debate really comes down to the differences in the point of view of who or what is actually "free".
In the case of the GPL, it is the code that is free; it is born free and stays free. And modifications will still keep it free. For BSD, it is the person who obtains the code that is free; the person can more or less do whatever he/she sees fit with the code.
So, I think there is a fundamental philosophical difference of which entity the freedom is assigned to.
The article seemed to be sparse on the details of what was actually going on, but if indeed the only evidence that they had a fusion reaction happening is the presence of helium-4, then they may have just detected naturally occurring helium that is present in the atmosphere (0.000524%).
A better test to see whether fusion reactions are taking place is to try to detect the a stream of neutrons which are being produced. The neutrons flux and the energy should be able to be used to differentiate the fusion neutrons from the background neutron sources, such as those caused by spontaneous fission events of heavy elements like uranium.
Also, nuclear fusion reactions tend to produce high-energy, or fast neutrons (upwards of 14 MeV with deuterium-deuterium fusion) which isn't too common unless you have some type of nuclear reaction taking place. (Here's a list of important nuclear fusion reactions important fusion reactions for those who are curious.)
Detecting helium on the other hand, seems not so out of the ordinary since there is helium in the atmosphere.
The real problems with scramjets and ramjets have been that the engine (and the vehicle) need to be brought to a speed where the ramjets can operate.
I'm sure many of you have seen videos of those German V-1 buzzbombs launched by the Germans during World War II. The reason for those launchers was to get those ramjets to operational speed -- For a ramjet to work, it must have airflow. Without it, the engine just won't light.
Scramjets are just an extension of the ramjet where the airflow within the engine is at supersonic speeds. A scramjet cannot fire unless the vehicle is brought to supersonic speeds. The NASA tests of the X-43 were conducted by first carrying the X-43 mated with a rocket up to 43,000 ft by the B-52 bomber, then dropping the rocket which carries the X-43 up to 100,000 ft and accelerates it to over Mach 6, and finally the X-43 lights its scramjets and accelerates to Mach 10.
The real problem is bringing the scramjet up to the required speeds for operation. The real revolution to space travel or suborbital travel is to achieve a single-stage-to-orbit(SSTO) system, where one doesn't need multiple stages (B-52 mothership, Pegasus rocket, etc.) in order to complete the trip.
It seems like quite a few people are out defending Firefox, but that's actually a disservice for Firefox.
What it really comes down to is to make Firefox into a browser that can convince the other 80+% of the users to switch. Saying "oh but, Firefox did it first!" or "you can just change x setting to make it better if you like" is irrelevant because when it comes down to it, it's whether the average users think it's better than the other browser. Making excuses for issues that even be perceived as problems doesn't help Firefox.
I like Firefox and upgraded to 2.0 on Tuesday, but it's not really the opinion of the Firefox crowd that really matters, it's the users still using Internet Explorer, the crowd that Firefox is really going after.
Yes, these are natural uranium ores in South Africa.
The radioactive half-life of uranium is in the order of 100 millions of years for the two common isotopes of uranium that the radioactivity of itself is not very significant.
Radioactive materials used for power-production from radioactive decay itself (see radioisotope thermoelectric generator) use radioisotopes with half-lives of tens to hundreds of years.
Whether Hong Kong is part of China or not doesn't really have a bearing. Bottom line is, McDonald's in Japan bought some USB keys from a company in Hong Kong, and those keys were infected with a trojan horse. That's the bottom line.
As for McDonald's Japan getting the blame, it's similar to the way Dell was blamed for the exploding batteries -- Although the batteries themselves was made by Sony, it was Dell laptops which were catching fire. It's their product, they need to stand behind it if it's defective.
The output of a nuclear reactor is controlled by inserting and withdrawing the control rods into the core, which controls the rate of the fission chain reaction by absorbing neutrons. (Absorbing the right number of neutrons is the key to keeping the reactor critial, where the fission events are allowed to run at a constant output, or subcritical where the chain reaction is suppressed.) The control rods are moved in and out of the reactor core using motors or other mechanisms, which usually require power.
A nuclear power plant itself needs power for the monitoring and operations of the systems that run the plant. Pumping the coolant in the cooling loops, moving the control rods in and out of the core, monitoring of the system status, and other tasks needed to run the plant, requires power.
A nuclear power plant is only producing electrical power when its stream turbines are running -- and there are times when the turbines aren't running such as during maintainance or testing, a time when the plant is referred to as being "offline." Even if the turbines aren't making power, the reactor core needs to be constantly cooled, as the radioactivity from the core (from the fissile fuel and fission products) gives off heat. Basically, at all times when the plant is still in operation (even if no power is being generated) the nuclear power plant needs power.
He's not memorizing like a regular person would.
It's been talked about on slashdot before using some memorization technique association groups of numbers with memorable patterns.
More specifically, he memorizes the digits by making a story, probably from the sound of the numbers.
In Japanese, you can make a play on words by the sound of the numbers called goro-awase. For example, if there is a sequence of numbers such as "3341", it can be read as "sa-mi-shi-i" which means "sad". By having a series of these play on words, he can make up a story, which is much easier to remember than a sequence of numbers.
If you're curious, here is the article (in Japanese) that mentions that the guy makes a story to memorize the digits.
Bingo. It was called the Micro 2000. A quick Google search dug up a BYTE article from 1991.
According to the article, the processor was to have four CPUs (which today would be refered to as "cores"), a couple of vector processing units, a graphics unit, and 2MB cache.
From what I remember, Intel was advertising the Micro 2000 as the one chip which would take care of all the multimedia (ah, that word reminds me of the 90's) functions, more or less an system-on-a-chip.
True, general purpose processors have always won out, but it seems like we are entering a world with a lot of surplus processing power which may be able to be utlilized for graphics, sound, etc.
Either that, or we'll start having centralized computers with multicore processor(s) to which other computers connecting to do heavy processing on. Something like thin clients...
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems from the article that this is a processor with 80 floating-point units connected together rather than a functional x86 processor.
It sounds more along the line of a Cell processor competition rather than a successor to current x86 processors. With many parallel FPUs, it might be nice for graphics processing and scientific calculations (which should be easier to saturate all those cores), but for everyday computing, would it be very useful?
And perhaps, as the word "core" is gaining attention at the marketing department and the general public, the definition of a core is becoming more ambigious...
It seems like we're getting to a point where probably the only safe way to be surfing is by using a browser on a sandboxed virtual machine environment.
I'm not trying to point my finger only at Internet Explorer, but with security holes that can allow code execution, that's pretty scary. (And another case of buffer overrun? Maybe they ought to rewrite IE as managed code, but that's another topic all together.)
The Shuttle Orbiter already has automatic landing capabilities.
Although the system has never been used all the way to touchdown, the Orbiter does make most of its trip back to the ground on autopilot until the commander takes over of the controls as it nears landing.
Why not deal with a quantum mirage or other quantum mechanical effects than to try to accelerate ourselves to fractions of the speed of light? Special relativity tells us that the faster we go the massive we get, and not to mention the acceleration itself would be a huge stress to the occupants or payload, unless you want to take weeks to accelerate to high velocities.
Why bother with those complexities when you have the possibility to "travel" faster than the speed of light by using alternative methods?
Slashdot Mirror
I really think the GPL vs. BSD license debate really comes down to the differences in the point of view of who or what is actually "free".
In the case of the GPL, it is the code that is free; it is born free and stays free. And modifications will still keep it free. For BSD, it is the person who obtains the code that is free; the person can more or less do whatever he/she sees fit with the code.
So, I think there is a fundamental philosophical difference of which entity the freedom is assigned to.
The article seemed to be sparse on the details of what was actually going on, but if indeed the only evidence that they had a fusion reaction happening is the presence of helium-4, then they may have just detected naturally occurring helium that is present in the atmosphere (0.000524%).
A better test to see whether fusion reactions are taking place is to try to detect the a stream of neutrons which are being produced. The neutrons flux and the energy should be able to be used to differentiate the fusion neutrons from the background neutron sources, such as those caused by spontaneous fission events of heavy elements like uranium. Also, nuclear fusion reactions tend to produce high-energy, or fast neutrons (upwards of 14 MeV with deuterium-deuterium fusion) which isn't too common unless you have some type of nuclear reaction taking place. (Here's a list of important nuclear fusion reactions important fusion reactions for those who are curious.)
Detecting helium on the other hand, seems not so out of the ordinary since there is helium in the atmosphere.
The real problems with scramjets and ramjets have been that the engine (and the vehicle) need to be brought to a speed where the ramjets can operate.
I'm sure many of you have seen videos of those German V-1 buzzbombs launched by the Germans during World War II. The reason for those launchers was to get those ramjets to operational speed -- For a ramjet to work, it must have airflow. Without it, the engine just won't light.
Scramjets are just an extension of the ramjet where the airflow within the engine is at supersonic speeds. A scramjet cannot fire unless the vehicle is brought to supersonic speeds. The NASA tests of the X-43 were conducted by first carrying the X-43 mated with a rocket up to 43,000 ft by the B-52 bomber, then dropping the rocket which carries the X-43 up to 100,000 ft and accelerates it to over Mach 6, and finally the X-43 lights its scramjets and accelerates to Mach 10.
The real problem is bringing the scramjet up to the required speeds for operation. The real revolution to space travel or suborbital travel is to achieve a single-stage-to-orbit(SSTO) system, where one doesn't need multiple stages (B-52 mothership, Pegasus rocket, etc.) in order to complete the trip.
Yes. Target got sued by an organization representing blind people and the judge in the case has ruled that the lawsuit can proceed under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
It seems like quite a few people are out defending Firefox, but that's actually a disservice for Firefox.
What it really comes down to is to make Firefox into a browser that can convince the other 80+% of the users to switch. Saying "oh but, Firefox did it first!" or "you can just change x setting to make it better if you like" is irrelevant because when it comes down to it, it's whether the average users think it's better than the other browser. Making excuses for issues that even be perceived as problems doesn't help Firefox.
I like Firefox and upgraded to 2.0 on Tuesday, but it's not really the opinion of the Firefox crowd that really matters, it's the users still using Internet Explorer, the crowd that Firefox is really going after.
Yes, these are natural uranium ores in South Africa.
The radioactive half-life of uranium is in the order of 100 millions of years for the two common isotopes of uranium that the radioactivity of itself is not very significant.
Radioactive materials used for power-production from radioactive decay itself (see radioisotope thermoelectric generator) use radioisotopes with half-lives of tens to hundreds of years.
Whether Hong Kong is part of China or not doesn't really have a bearing. Bottom line is, McDonald's in Japan bought some USB keys from a company in Hong Kong, and those keys were infected with a trojan horse. That's the bottom line.
As for McDonald's Japan getting the blame, it's similar to the way Dell was blamed for the exploding batteries -- Although the batteries themselves was made by Sony, it was Dell laptops which were catching fire. It's their product, they need to stand behind it if it's defective.
The output of a nuclear reactor is controlled by inserting and withdrawing the control rods into the core, which controls the rate of the fission chain reaction by absorbing neutrons. (Absorbing the right number of neutrons is the key to keeping the reactor critial, where the fission events are allowed to run at a constant output, or subcritical where the chain reaction is suppressed.) The control rods are moved in and out of the reactor core using motors or other mechanisms, which usually require power.
A nuclear power plant itself needs power for the monitoring and operations of the systems that run the plant. Pumping the coolant in the cooling loops, moving the control rods in and out of the core, monitoring of the system status, and other tasks needed to run the plant, requires power.
A nuclear power plant is only producing electrical power when its stream turbines are running -- and there are times when the turbines aren't running such as during maintainance or testing, a time when the plant is referred to as being "offline." Even if the turbines aren't making power, the reactor core needs to be constantly cooled, as the radioactivity from the core (from the fissile fuel and fission products) gives off heat. Basically, at all times when the plant is still in operation (even if no power is being generated) the nuclear power plant needs power.
More specifically, he memorizes the digits by making a story, probably from the sound of the numbers.
In Japanese, you can make a play on words by the sound of the numbers called goro-awase. For example, if there is a sequence of numbers such as "3341", it can be read as "sa-mi-shi-i" which means "sad". By having a series of these play on words, he can make up a story, which is much easier to remember than a sequence of numbers.
If you're curious, here is the article (in Japanese) that mentions that the guy makes a story to memorize the digits.
Bingo. It was called the Micro 2000. A quick Google search dug up a BYTE article from 1991.
According to the article, the processor was to have four CPUs (which today would be refered to as "cores"), a couple of vector processing units, a graphics unit, and 2MB cache.
From what I remember, Intel was advertising the Micro 2000 as the one chip which would take care of all the multimedia (ah, that word reminds me of the 90's) functions, more or less an system-on-a-chip.
True, general purpose processors have always won out, but it seems like we are entering a world with a lot of surplus processing power which may be able to be utlilized for graphics, sound, etc.
Either that, or we'll start having centralized computers with multicore processor(s) to which other computers connecting to do heavy processing on. Something like thin clients...
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems from the article that this is a processor with 80 floating-point units connected together rather than a functional x86 processor.
It sounds more along the line of a Cell processor competition rather than a successor to current x86 processors. With many parallel FPUs, it might be nice for graphics processing and scientific calculations (which should be easier to saturate all those cores), but for everyday computing, would it be very useful?
And perhaps, as the word "core" is gaining attention at the marketing department and the general public, the definition of a core is becoming more ambigious...
It seems like we're getting to a point where probably the only safe way to be surfing is by using a browser on a sandboxed virtual machine environment.
I'm not trying to point my finger only at Internet Explorer, but with security holes that can allow code execution, that's pretty scary. (And another case of buffer overrun? Maybe they ought to rewrite IE as managed code, but that's another topic all together.)
The Shuttle Orbiter already has automatic landing capabilities. Although the system has never been used all the way to touchdown, the Orbiter does make most of its trip back to the ground on autopilot until the commander takes over of the controls as it nears landing.
Why not deal with a quantum mirage or other quantum mechanical effects than to try to accelerate ourselves to fractions of the speed of light? Special relativity tells us that the faster we go the massive we get, and not to mention the acceleration itself would be a huge stress to the occupants or payload, unless you want to take weeks to accelerate to high velocities.
Why bother with those complexities when you have the possibility to "travel" faster than the speed of light by using alternative methods?