Eh? Are you concerned about the speed of the light pulse in the cable? In that case let us just say that you are going to need a REALLY fancy cable to get any relevant improvements...
Technically they don't actually need to implement any form of encryption other than SSL for the transfer. There's already plenty of tools arround for users to encrypt their files, and truecrypt can even create an entire filesystem inside a single encrypted file. Thus all google really needs to do is to not prevent users from uploading files they have encrypted themselves. The client-side tools already exist, no need to reinvent the wheel.
The most secure would be to store a single large archive of all your files encrypted with a strong cipher, but that has the disadvantage that you have to download it all to decipher it.
Alternatively you could encrypt each file separately, which would speed up access considerably, but also leak more information about what you are storing (i.e many small files vs one big one ).
I guess if the data is sensitive enough to require the former type of encryption you shouldn't transmit it over insecure connections to begin with...
While it is true that radioactive isotopes are less radioactive the longer halflives they have, the ones with intermediate halflives can be toxic enough to be a significant health concern, yet long-lived enough to remain a problem for a very long time. As an example, an alpha emitter with a 1000 year halflife cane be quite a health hazard if ingested or inhaled, and because the halflife only denotes the time needed for half of it to decay you will need to store it for more than ten thousand years. The hundred thousand year figure is pretty much the time needed for the minor actinides in spent fuel to decay to natural uranium levels of radioactivity. You are of course correct that the waste will be less dangerous than many other forms of waste long before that, but even so apropriate recycling would cut the necessary storage time and quantity of waste by several orders of magnitude. How much depends on how careful you want to be about disposing of radioactive waste.
Yes, but if you do recycle it propperly and use fast reactor to incinerate the actinides, then you end up with 100 times less waste per amount of energy produced, and it decays to safe levels within a few hudnred years instead of hundreds of thousands of years. Using it simply for this reason would still give us hundreds of years of energy just burning existing waste.
There is some debate about if he was a cofounder of greenpeace or simply an early and important member, but I think you are referring to Dr Patrick Moore, who used to be a vocal anti nuclear campaigner, but latter has started to be a proponent, and nowadays has quite a few contacts within the industry ( something which perhaps doesn't help his credibility too much).
I suggest that all nuclear advocates should learn a bit about the nuclear fuel cycle instead of spouting second hand dumbed down PR.
When I did my undergraduate course in nuclear physics we used a textbook from 1988 which details how fast breeder reactors, which were already in operation then, could extend the energy extracted from uranium reserves by a factor of 100 or so. The technology is decades old, but it has been agressively attacked by nuclear opponents ( with the more high-profile projects shut down in the UK, US and France ). There are however a couple of such reactors operating in Russia and France.
Dare I suggest you take your own advice and learn a bit of the nuclear fuel cycle, in particular fast breeders, pyrometallurgical reprocessing, and nuclear transmutaion of waste?
It was Reagan that killed breeder reactors in the US (and effectively elsewhere). He claimed it was for proliferation concerns, but that makes no sense; more likely, he did it for economic reasons: nuclear fuel is big business for the US.
With the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992, and the appointment of Hazel O'Leary as the Secretary of Energy, there was pressure from the top to cancel the IFR. Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) and O'Leary led the opposition to the reactor, arguing that it would be a threat to non-proliferation efforts, and that it was a continuation of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project that had been canceled by Congress. Despite support for the reactor by then-Rep. Richard Durbin (D, IL) and U.S. Senators Carol Mosley Braun (D, IL) and Paul Simon (D, IL), funding for the reactor was slashed, and it was ultimately canceled in 1994.
Also, I never claimed Chernobyl wasn't bad (nor did the article ), I'm claiming organisations like greenpeace are deliberately lying about it dismissing all science saying they are wrong, with the explicit intent to try to convince the public that Nuclear power is too dangerous to be used responsibly. Solar panels contain small amounts of polluting chemicals, but if I were to push pictures of solar cells next to children with birth defects, arguing that the people who promote their use are corrupt evil capitalists who don't care about hurting babies, then I'd rightly be criticised for lying in order to intentionally mislead the public. I'm saying anti-nuclear campaigners should be held to the same standards.
You see this is the problem with the anti-nuclear moment. They have become so obsessed with ending everything that contains a nucleus that they see it as acceptable to dismiss any science to the contrary as "biased". The worst offenders are of course greenpeace, who will happily outright lie about it. Even using greenpeace's massively inflated numbers for the death toll from chernobyl, it would take several chernobyl style accidents per year for nuclear to even equal the death's from airpollition associated with fossil fuels. Yet the by far biggest demon in the eyes of this organisation, is the western nuclear industry.
I don't know if they simply don't know better, if they are too afraid to lose face should they change their policy, or if they just want to make themself look important, but in any case their claims are just out of touch with reality. It really does pain me to know that my country country (Sweden ) could have been on the road to virtually eliminate fossil fuels, but because of this nonsense we are still left with 50% of our energy coming from fossil sources, and the "green" party here wants to shut down the reactors that remain.
What every western country with half a bit of sense ought to do is to deploy large numbers of electric trains as alternative transportation ( maglev could even compete with airplanes in speed ), and produce the electricity with nuclear. If pressent developments in battery technology hold up, we could even have electric cars affordable within a few decades. IF we can keep the electricity price down. Sadly the latter is not going to happen by pushing for renewables that have multiple times the costs of current nuclear power plants.
Now to follow is the usual nonsense about uranium running out within 60 years, nuclear waste being impossible to deal with, and another chernobyl being just about to happen. It's all nonsense, and has been for two decades at least, yet we still burn coal rather than transmuting our nuclear waste in fast reactors ( Thank you for that one Kerry ).
I have to say you are right about it being difficult to detect compared to a cosmic ray background.
52kg of Uranium-235 ( the amount needed for a critical mass without a neutron reflector) will emit 156 neutrons per second due to spontaneous fission. The amount of uranium in an implosion-type nuclear weapon would be less since the critical mass decreases with density, but it would unavoidably contain some U-238 which has a higher spontaneous fission rate, so within an order of magnitude 100 fissions per second is probably a decent estimate.
If the detector is placed at a distance of 115cm ( half the container width) and the pit of the nuclear weapon is considered small ( r = 9cm ) then with a detector surface area of 100cm^2 the fraction of neutrons traveling in the right direction will be 0.0024, giving roughly 1-3 neutrons every 4 seconds.
In a practical scenario the neutrons would have to penetrate at least 50cm of moderating material spiked with neutron absorbing boron ( fruits / beverages / coal... ). Seeing that fission neutrons on average thermalise after diffusing through about 18cm of reactor-grade graphite, and are absorbed after about 50cm, detecting only fast neutrons is probably not going to give many counts compared to the background. Assuming 10% of the neutrons make it through without being absorbed, and that 10% of these have energies above the detector threshold (and these are probably quite high estimates), then you would expect 1-3 counts every 400seconds ( 6 minutes ).
It is worth noting that Pu-240 has a spontaneous fission rate that is more than 6 orders of magnitude higher than that of U-235, so while the camera is probably not going to be able to detect a Uranium based weapon, it may be possible to detect plutonium based ones using it.
I don't know the exact value for this type of neutron spectrum, but for graphite fast neutrons (from fission ) on average thermalise after traveling about 18cm. The hydrogen in light water has an even smaller mass than carbon, and thus moderate neutrons very effectively. I'm not quite sure what the average distance needed for thermalisation in water is, but I imagine it can't be much more than for graphite. Hydrogen is also quite a good neutron absorber.
In addition, all fruits and plants contain some boron, which is a good neutron absorber, so to thwart ( or at least significantly degrade ) the ability of a neutron based scanner, you would simply load the containers full of fruits with a high boron content, possibly adding additional boron if necessary. Using fruit as a neutron shield has the additional advantage that you can't really irradiate the entire food suply with a very large neutron flux as it would create radioactive activation products from neutron-capture.
If you want to be a real bitch you then load the fruits in cans or tins made from alloys rich in tungsten,lead,bismuth and other high-Z materials. These materials are not only very good neutron reflectors, fucking up your scanner even more, but they are also good at absorbing X-rays due to their high nuclear masses.
So essentially, for this neutron scanner to work, it would have to pass through, at a very minium, two metres of boron-rich water ( the shortest distance from the edge of a shipping container to the centre and out again ). This water is meanwhile contained in alloys made from X-ray and Gamma ray absorbing materials, which also help scatter the neutrons in all directions, making it difficult to get a good focus. To put it into perspective, the radiation shield of a nuclear reactor is only a few metres thick, and you obviously don't want to expose your food suply to that kind of neutron flux.
most scientists working in the area saw no danger in feeding animals on the bovine equivalent of Soylent Green
Quite sure about that? Studying nuclear physics I often hear people say things along the lines of "well everyone said chernobyl was safe" which is of course complete nonsense. It is very common for people who do not like what scientists say to try to discredit the scientific process based on straw man arguments. Have a look at the global warming debate for a plethora of examples. I think you will find that in general it is not scientists, but rather private interest groups and a media addicted to sensationalism, that make these very flawed predictions. Without doubt, in 50 years time global warming will have caused quite significant damage around the globe, but because groups like greenpeace and the general media keep suggesting apocalyptic scenarios, global warming will be touted as an example of how "the scientists" were wrong, even if they are in fact spot-on.
In the same way, I predict that when nanotechnology start causing health problems ( and it will, everything we do does so to some extent ), you will have a bunch of people claiming scientists were all saying it was completely safe, and that we thus shouldn't trust science in the future, and it will be used as a reason to be scared of things that actually are more or less harmless. Possibly stem-cell treatments or similar tech.
My main point with this post? Remember these news. Remember that scientists were "concerned". Remember that it wasn't an apocalyptic prediction, that it wasn't a claim there will be no problems, just recall it. Then in a few decades time, when people start saying "Well twenty years ago scientists said..." you smack them over the head with something blunt.
Cows and sheep isn't the only thing emitting methane. Landfills emit it en-masse. Pretty much anywhere you have organic material decomposing without a ready access of oxygen you get methane.
Wouldn't it be better to just collect the methane and burn it to displace coal/oil? Sure, you still get CO2 , but methane has the highest energy yield per CO2 yield of all the hydrocarbons, and it is orders of magnitude cleaner than Coal.
I really don't think the pakistani nukes are as much aimed at the US as they are against China / India. Lets face it, as mad as Bush might be, if you have a history of military conflict with a country next-doors and they are also building nukes, then that will probably be your main concern.
In terms of deterring capability having 50 nukes and 3000 nukes is really not that much of a difference IF you can deliver them reliably. This is where the superpowers differ from the smaller nuclear weapon states. The US have a number of nuclear subs giving a second-strike capability. A country like Pakistan is much more vulnerable to a sudden surprise attack, which could theoretically leave them unable to retaliate.
My gut reaction is it looks as if KDE is moving more and more towards the "fisher-price" look. I guess this could make it a bit less frightening to new users, but do we really need everything to have "child-proof" rounded corners? There will be at least a couple of checkboxes to turn this of, right?
On a more serious note, the screenshots I have seen look quite nice in the sense that I could probably convince my mother to use this, I'm hoping it comes with a more streamlined theme as well thou.
Memory leaks are of course always bad and should be fixed, however, I have to say that a much more pressing issue is the tendancy for the interface to lock up ( especially on less powerful systems ) if one tab gets stuck loading or has to deal with a poorly coded javascript.
Mind you it is perfectly possible that the two issues are related, and since my knowledge about the inner workings of firefox are, to put it very mildly, limited, I suppose I can't really judge what kind of changes would be hard to implement and what the security implications would be etc.. I would however argue that the browser's interface failing to respond when it encounters a poorly written/ bloated webpage is a more devestating problem than a larger than necessary memory consumption.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
Is this compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines?
Heh! If I had mod points I would give you +1 informative. I guess the spellchecker isn't quite self-aware yet, and English is not my first language. ; )
I don't know what laws are like in your jurisdiction, but many European countries, and indeed the EU itself has very strict laws with regards to what restrictions you may and may not place on consumers. If a company follows these rules and a competitor is allowed to violate them without the authorities taking action, then I could very much understand that they feel pissed. It is not as much a matter about weather these laws are sensible or not, as it is a matter of them being equal for everyone. Basically, if the law requires Vodaphone to comply with A, B and C then they have all right to be pissed if their competitors can ignore A, B or C without consequences. That the consumers may or may not benefit from Vodaphone's legal action is just a side effect, and it can be debated if it is good or bad.
To use an analogy, if all your images consist of a doussin lines, then storing them as an XML encoded list of lines will occupy a lot less space than using a 1280x1024 bitmap. However, if you try to use the same XML format to store images of grainy materials, like sand, concrete etc... then you will end up storing a complicated list of lines for every single point, leading to a much larger files than if you had just used a bitmap.
Lossless compression works by identifying common features of a particular type of data ( in this case sound corresponding to music or converastion ) and optimising the storage algorithm after that. If you tried to use FLAC to record a sound that wasn't music or conversation, such as white noise or 30 minutes of machine gun fire, then you would probably end up with a larger file size.
So this is really ironic - Its my understating from reading hundreds and hundreds of/. posts that this isn't supposed to happen with FOSS. Only Micro$oft developers are supposed to have security bugs like this.
You misunderstood. Where FLOSS differs from microsoft is:
a)This bug was discovered by third parties because they had access to the source b)The bug is already fixed c)Even on still vulnerable systems it wouldn't give you root access d)It would have to rely on special plugins or user action e)The problem is clearly described and documented allowing users to take precautions
Compare this to a vaguely described bug in your rendering engine for animated cursors enabling arbitrary webpages to compromise kernel space, and this not being fixed for days or even weeks despite documented exploits in the wild.
As of the end of 2006, the total worldwide installed PV capacity was 5.7 gigawatt at peak. Norway, a country with a population bellow 5 million, consumes more electricity than that. Single nuclear power stations can produce more electricity. Seriously, solar will NOT solve the energy crisis in any near future. Even with an exponential growth of solar power, doubling installed capacity every 5 years, it would still be more than 50 years until you get to the same order of magnitude as PRESSENT energy consumption, and this is at peak power.
Proponents of solar power usually talk about how its efficiency is about to jump several times in the near future, but even if you improved the efficicency tenfold ( which would put you above 100% efficiency) you would still not even be within 1% of pressent energy consumption. Seriously, maybe in a century, but photovoltaics just isn't going to replace Oil before it runs out.
Solar and Wind just ins't going to solve that issue alone. Neither is nuclear, biofuels, or clean coal. It should be damn obvious from that diagram alone that we are going to need every piece of clean energy we can get our hands on. Expanding the use of nuclear and biomass 5 times, would take care of the first 50%. Carbon capture and storage with coal sticks you up at 75%, and expanding wind power 100 times can provide the remainder. All of this assumes strict energy conservation measures to keep the overall energy use at pressent levels. Of course, with the developing world industrialising this appears unlikely, so you will need some more energy, but ff we go for the optimistic goal of preventing overall energy consumption from increasing by more than 50%, then it is doable, PROVIDED we use all energy sources we can get. To reject carbon capture and storage, nuclear or other energy sources, based on some delusional pipe-dream of solar power coming to the rescue is however just wishful thinking.
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Eh? Are you concerned about the speed of the light pulse in the cable? In that case let us just say that you are going to need a REALLY fancy cable to get any relevant improvements...
Technically they don't actually need to implement any form of encryption other than SSL for the transfer. There's already plenty of tools arround for users to encrypt their files, and truecrypt can even create an entire filesystem inside a single encrypted file. Thus all google really needs to do is to not prevent users from uploading files they have encrypted themselves. The client-side tools already exist, no need to reinvent the wheel.
What kind of encryption would you use for this?
The most secure would be to store a single large archive of all your files encrypted with a strong cipher, but that has the disadvantage that you have to download it all to decipher it.
Alternatively you could encrypt each file separately, which would speed up access considerably, but also leak more information about what you are storing (i.e many small files vs one big one ).
I guess if the data is sensitive enough to require the former type of encryption you shouldn't transmit it over insecure connections to begin with...
While it is true that radioactive isotopes are less radioactive the longer halflives they have, the ones with intermediate halflives can be toxic enough to be a significant health concern, yet long-lived enough to remain a problem for a very long time. As an example, an alpha emitter with a 1000 year halflife cane be quite a health hazard if ingested or inhaled, and because the halflife only denotes the time needed for half of it to decay you will need to store it for more than ten thousand years. The hundred thousand year figure is pretty much the time needed for the minor actinides in spent fuel to decay to natural uranium levels of radioactivity. You are of course correct that the waste will be less dangerous than many other forms of waste long before that, but even so apropriate recycling would cut the necessary storage time and quantity of waste by several orders of magnitude. How much depends on how careful you want to be about disposing of radioactive waste.
Yes, but if you do recycle it propperly and use fast reactor to incinerate the actinides, then you end up with 100 times less waste per amount of energy produced, and it decays to safe levels within a few hudnred years instead of hundreds of thousands of years. Using it simply for this reason would still give us hundreds of years of energy just burning existing waste.
There is some debate about if he was a cofounder of greenpeace or simply an early and important member, but I think you are referring to Dr Patrick Moore, who used to be a vocal anti nuclear campaigner, but latter has started to be a proponent, and nowadays has quite a few contacts within the industry ( something which perhaps doesn't help his credibility too much).
Anyway theres a few interviews with him on youtube http://youtube.com/watch?v=dnlFF-sPHyc&feature=related.
When I did my undergraduate course in nuclear physics we used a textbook from 1988 which details how fast breeder reactors, which were already in operation then, could extend the energy extracted from uranium reserves by a factor of 100 or so. The technology is decades old, but it has been agressively attacked by nuclear opponents ( with the more high-profile projects shut down in the UK, US and France ). There are however a couple of such reactors operating in Russia and France.
Dare I suggest you take your own advice and learn a bit of the nuclear fuel cycle, in particular fast breeders, pyrometallurgical reprocessing, and nuclear transmutaion of waste?
I was referring to this bit ( quoted from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor )
Also, I never claimed Chernobyl wasn't bad (nor did the article ), I'm claiming organisations like greenpeace are deliberately lying about it dismissing all science saying they are wrong, with the explicit intent to try to convince the public that Nuclear power is too dangerous to be used responsibly. Solar panels contain small amounts of polluting chemicals, but if I were to push pictures of solar cells next to children with birth defects, arguing that the people who promote their use are corrupt evil capitalists who don't care about hurting babies, then I'd rightly be criticised for lying in order to intentionally mislead the public. I'm saying anti-nuclear campaigners should be held to the same standards.
You see this is the problem with the anti-nuclear moment. They have become so obsessed with ending everything that contains a nucleus that they see it as acceptable to dismiss any science to the contrary as "biased". The worst offenders are of course greenpeace, who will happily outright lie about it. Even using greenpeace's massively inflated numbers for the death toll from chernobyl, it would take several chernobyl style accidents per year for nuclear to even equal the death's from airpollition associated with fossil fuels. Yet the by far biggest demon in the eyes of this organisation, is the western nuclear industry.
I don't know if they simply don't know better, if they are too afraid to lose face should they change their policy, or if they just want to make themself look important, but in any case their claims are just out of touch with reality. It really does pain me to know that my country country (Sweden ) could have been on the road to virtually eliminate fossil fuels, but because of this nonsense we are still left with 50% of our energy coming from fossil sources, and the "green" party here wants to shut down the reactors that remain.
What every western country with half a bit of sense ought to do is to deploy large numbers of electric trains as alternative transportation ( maglev could even compete with airplanes in speed ), and produce the electricity with nuclear. If pressent developments in battery technology hold up, we could even have electric cars affordable within a few decades. IF we can keep the electricity price down. Sadly the latter is not going to happen by pushing for renewables that have multiple times the costs of current nuclear power plants.
Now to follow is the usual nonsense about uranium running out within 60 years, nuclear waste being impossible to deal with, and another chernobyl being just about to happen. It's all nonsense, and has been for two decades at least, yet we still burn coal rather than transmuting our nuclear waste in fast reactors ( Thank you for that one Kerry ).
I have to say you are right about it being difficult to detect compared to a cosmic ray background.
... ). Seeing that fission neutrons on average thermalise after diffusing through about 18cm of reactor-grade graphite, and are absorbed after about 50cm, detecting only fast neutrons is probably not going to give many counts compared to the background. Assuming 10% of the neutrons make it through without being absorbed, and that 10% of these have energies above the detector threshold (and these are probably quite high estimates), then you would expect 1-3 counts every 400seconds ( 6 minutes ).
52kg of Uranium-235 ( the amount needed for a critical mass without a neutron reflector) will emit 156 neutrons per second due to spontaneous fission. The amount of uranium in an implosion-type nuclear weapon would be less since the critical mass decreases with density, but it would unavoidably contain some U-238 which has a higher spontaneous fission rate, so within an order of magnitude 100 fissions per second is probably a decent estimate.
If the detector is placed at a distance of 115cm ( half the container width) and the pit of the nuclear weapon is considered small ( r = 9cm ) then with a detector surface area of 100cm^2 the fraction of neutrons traveling in the right direction will be 0.0024, giving roughly 1-3 neutrons every 4 seconds.
In a practical scenario the neutrons would have to penetrate at least 50cm of moderating material spiked with neutron absorbing boron ( fruits / beverages / coal
It is worth noting that Pu-240 has a spontaneous fission rate that is more than 6 orders of magnitude higher than that of U-235, so while the camera is probably not going to be able to detect a Uranium based weapon, it may be possible to detect plutonium based ones using it.
I don't know the exact value for this type of neutron spectrum, but for graphite fast neutrons (from fission ) on average thermalise after traveling about 18cm. The hydrogen in light water has an even smaller mass than carbon, and thus moderate neutrons very effectively. I'm not quite sure what the average distance needed for thermalisation in water is, but I imagine it can't be much more than for graphite. Hydrogen is also quite a good neutron absorber.
In addition, all fruits and plants contain some boron, which is a good neutron absorber, so to thwart ( or at least significantly degrade ) the ability of a neutron based scanner, you would simply load the containers full of fruits with a high boron content, possibly adding additional boron if necessary. Using fruit as a neutron shield has the additional advantage that you can't really irradiate the entire food suply with a very large neutron flux as it would create radioactive activation products from neutron-capture.
If you want to be a real bitch you then load the fruits in cans or tins made from alloys rich in tungsten,lead,bismuth and other high-Z materials. These materials are not only very good neutron reflectors, fucking up your scanner even more, but they are also good at absorbing X-rays due to their high nuclear masses.
So essentially, for this neutron scanner to work, it would have to pass through, at a very minium, two metres of boron-rich water ( the shortest distance from the edge of a shipping container to the centre and out again ). This water is meanwhile contained in alloys made from X-ray and Gamma ray absorbing materials, which also help scatter the neutrons in all directions, making it difficult to get a good focus. To put it into perspective, the radiation shield of a nuclear reactor is only a few metres thick, and you obviously don't want to expose your food suply to that kind of neutron flux.
Quite sure about that? Studying nuclear physics I often hear people say things along the lines of "well everyone said chernobyl was safe" which is of course complete nonsense. It is very common for people who do not like what scientists say to try to discredit the scientific process based on straw man arguments. Have a look at the global warming debate for a plethora of examples. I think you will find that in general it is not scientists, but rather private interest groups and a media addicted to sensationalism, that make these very flawed predictions. Without doubt, in 50 years time global warming will have caused quite significant damage around the globe, but because groups like greenpeace and the general media keep suggesting apocalyptic scenarios, global warming will be touted as an example of how "the scientists" were wrong, even if they are in fact spot-on.
In the same way, I predict that when nanotechnology start causing health problems ( and it will, everything we do does so to some extent ), you will have a bunch of people claiming scientists were all saying it was completely safe, and that we thus shouldn't trust science in the future, and it will be used as a reason to be scared of things that actually are more or less harmless. Possibly stem-cell treatments or similar tech.
My main point with this post? Remember these news. Remember that scientists were "concerned". Remember that it wasn't an apocalyptic prediction, that it wasn't a claim there will be no problems, just recall it. Then in a few decades time, when people start saying "Well twenty years ago scientists said..." you smack them over the head with something blunt.
Cows and sheep isn't the only thing emitting methane. Landfills emit it en-masse. Pretty much anywhere you have organic material decomposing without a ready access of oxygen you get methane.
Wouldn't it be better to just collect the methane and burn it to displace coal/oil? Sure, you still get CO2 , but methane has the highest energy yield per CO2 yield of all the hydrocarbons, and it is orders of magnitude cleaner than Coal.
I really don't think the pakistani nukes are as much aimed at the US as they are against China / India. Lets face it, as mad as Bush might be, if you have a history of military conflict with a country next-doors and they are also building nukes, then that will probably be your main concern.
In terms of deterring capability having 50 nukes and 3000 nukes is really not that much of a difference IF you can deliver them reliably. This is where the superpowers differ from the smaller nuclear weapon states. The US have a number of nuclear subs giving a second-strike capability. A country like Pakistan is much more vulnerable to a sudden surprise attack, which could theoretically leave them unable to retaliate.
Keep laughing, Nokia started out as a wood-pulp mill...
My gut reaction is it looks as if KDE is moving more and more towards the "fisher-price" look. I guess this could make it a bit less frightening to new users, but do we really need everything to have "child-proof" rounded corners? There will be at least a couple of checkboxes to turn this of, right?
On a more serious note, the screenshots I have seen look quite nice in the sense that I could probably convince my mother to use this, I'm hoping it comes with a more streamlined theme as well thou.
Memory leaks are of course always bad and should be fixed, however, I have to say that a much more pressing issue is the tendancy for the interface to lock up ( especially on less powerful systems ) if one tab gets stuck loading or has to deal with a poorly coded javascript.
Mind you it is perfectly possible that the two issues are related, and since my knowledge about the inner workings of firefox are, to put it very mildly, limited, I suppose I can't really judge what kind of changes would be hard to implement and what the security implications would be etc.. I would however argue that the browser's interface failing to respond when it encounters a poorly written/ bloated webpage is a more devestating problem than a larger than necessary memory consumption.
Is this compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines?
Heh! If I had mod points I would give you +1 informative. I guess the spellchecker isn't quite self-aware yet, and English is not my first language. ; )
I don't know what laws are like in your jurisdiction, but many European countries, and indeed the EU itself has very strict laws with regards to what restrictions you may and may not place on consumers. If a company follows these rules and a competitor is allowed to violate them without the authorities taking action, then I could very much understand that they feel pissed. It is not as much a matter about weather these laws are sensible or not, as it is a matter of them being equal for everyone. Basically, if the law requires Vodaphone to comply with A, B and C then they have all right to be pissed if their competitors can ignore A, B or C without consequences. That the consumers may or may not benefit from Vodaphone's legal action is just a side effect, and it can be debated if it is good or bad.
To use an analogy, if all your images consist of a doussin lines, then storing them as an XML encoded list of lines will occupy a lot less space than using a 1280x1024 bitmap. However, if you try to use the same XML format to store images of grainy materials, like sand, concrete etc... then you will end up storing a complicated list of lines for every single point, leading to a much larger files than if you had just used a bitmap.
Lossless compression works by identifying common features of a particular type of data ( in this case sound corresponding to music or converastion ) and optimising the storage algorithm after that. If you tried to use FLAC to record a sound that wasn't music or conversation, such as white noise or 30 minutes of machine gun fire, then you would probably end up with a larger file size.
You misunderstood. Where FLOSS differs from microsoft is:
a)This bug was discovered by third parties because they had access to the source
b)The bug is already fixed
c)Even on still vulnerable systems it wouldn't give you root access
d)It would have to rely on special plugins or user action
e)The problem is clearly described and documented allowing users to take precautions
Compare this to a vaguely described bug in your rendering engine for animated cursors enabling arbitrary webpages to compromise kernel space, and this not being fixed for days or even weeks despite documented exploits in the wild.
Somehow I don't see the irony.
As of the end of 2006, the total worldwide installed PV capacity was 5.7 gigawatt at peak. Norway, a country with a population bellow 5 million, consumes more electricity than that. Single nuclear power stations can produce more electricity. Seriously, solar will NOT solve the energy crisis in any near future. Even with an exponential growth of solar power, doubling installed capacity every 5 years, it would still be more than 50 years until you get to the same order of magnitude as PRESSENT energy consumption, and this is at peak power.
Proponents of solar power usually talk about how its efficiency is about to jump several times in the near future, but even if you improved the efficicency tenfold ( which would put you above 100% efficiency) you would still not even be within 1% of pressent energy consumption. Seriously, maybe in a century, but photovoltaics just isn't going to replace Oil before it runs out.
To get a slight idea about what will be required to phase out fossil fuels, have a look at this diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg
Solar and Wind just ins't going to solve that issue alone. Neither is nuclear, biofuels, or clean coal. It should be damn obvious from that diagram alone that we are going to need every piece of clean energy we can get our hands on. Expanding the use of nuclear and biomass 5 times, would take care of the first 50%. Carbon capture and storage with coal sticks you up at 75%, and expanding wind power 100 times can provide the remainder. All of this assumes strict energy conservation measures to keep the overall energy use at pressent levels. Of course, with the developing world industrialising this appears unlikely, so you will need some more energy, but ff we go for the optimistic goal of preventing overall energy consumption from increasing by more than 50%, then it is doable, PROVIDED we use all energy sources we can get. To reject carbon capture and storage, nuclear or other energy sources, based on some delusional pipe-dream of solar power coming to the rescue is however just wishful thinking.