It would be nice if they could also take measures tor educe the incentive for these spammers. Basically, WoW's economy rewards players for doing things they don't enjoy, farming herbs, ore, power levelling, grinding the same mob over and over... etc. That is why people will actually pay in order to not do so. If the economy instead made fun activities much more profitable than the boring ones it would reduce the amount of spammers ( thou probably not remove them completely ) and also make the game itself a lot more fun to play. Basically, running a bot program or paying someone to do the same thing over and over should not be rewarded by the game mechanics. Playing the game with other people, completing quests, winning PvP battles etc... should be the main source of wealth in the game. As long as Blizzard insists to have the economy based on "kill monster X 500 times and hope item Y drops" you will get problems with bots and spammers.
I for one welcome our Zealot Overlord... oh wait, he has been that way since before I was born?
The damage is done alright, but it is Novell that has taken a hit to their credibility. Everyone already knew RMS was a bit of a zealot, for better or worse, this won't change that. It has however ruffled the feathers of quite a few in the FLOSS community, and it could very well cause Novell to lose supporters in favor of Redhat, IBM or even Canonical. Whatever criticism you have about RMS it is hard to deny that helping Microsoft spread their FUD and trying to get a competitive advantage by splitting the OSS community is far worse than anything Stallman has ever done.
Those who are not so technically minded and buy the thing candidly thinking that they will come home and install World of Warcraft or Photoshop and use iTunes will be having a hard time with this...
World of Warcraft runs under Wine and Cedega, but to be honest if you are looking for a gaming machine you are probably unlikely to go for a machine with a GMA950 card anyway ( thou again, World of Warcraft does run on it, albeit with lower performance than other cards ). Unless you actually work in the publishing industry the GIMP is probably a good enough replacement for Photoshop, and if you really do need Photoshop and nothing else then you are probably well aware what you need to run it. iTunes is a problem, but to be honest that is due to the DRM and there are alternatives, such as http://www.emusic.com/, which are both cheaper and give you songs in a more portable format.
I wouldn't be overly concerned. In worst case scenario you will end up buying a Windows license, so worst comes to worst you pay a bit more than having windows pre-installed and you get a computer without the OEM crapware. Quite a few Windows users would probably prefer that tbh.
Provided they start selling in Norway before I find that my present system is insufficient to meet my needs I will with high probability get a notebook from a vendor with good Linux support. If the price is fair that may very well be Dell. So, well, IF they ship to Norway, and IF they have better Linux support than my alternatives here, and IF they are priced fairly I will buy one. However, lets get one thing clear. We owe them nothing. If their Linux machines are good and fairly priced they will sell on their own merit. If not, Dell messed up. I will buy whichever notebook has the best Linux supported hardware within my budget. If that is a Dell, then it will be a dell. If it is a thinkpad, it will be a thinkpad. Tho I do admit, I am willing to tilt the scale by about $100 if I can avoid giving my money to Microsoft. Call me a zealot but the more I hear about Microsoft the more keen I am not to support that kind of behavior. MSFT is the software market version of the high school bully, which explains pretty well why geeks around the world would love to give them the finger at every opportunity.
If it is a valid claim Sony will probably settle and buy a license to use the technology, otherwise they will fight it in court. Actually, it is probably more along the lines of IF ( LICENSE.LT. (DAMAGES * P(.LOSS.) ) THEN CALL SETTLE ELSE CALL FIGHT END IF !pardon the Fortran So basically Sony will have a slightly lighter wallet after this but it is unlikely that Target will refuse to strike a good deal on the matter unless they get a better offer from the HD-DVD crowd.
I love Firefox ( or Iceweasel as it is called on Debian ) but I am running a fairly streamlined xfce install and currently fire.. err... Iceweasel, is using about the same amount of memory as the rest of the system combined. I know there are other browsers, but I really do like Iceweasel, except for the memory footprint. Seeing that I only use a fairly small subset of the features it would be nice to have a light version with just the essentials. I wouldn't suggest axing the features other users love and depend on, but perhaps provide an alternative for those of us who really don't need an advanced database for our 3-4 bookmarks ?
PS: It would also be nice if Firefox didn't highlight "Iceweasel" as a typo.
I think Beryl has a feature that lets you motion blur your terminal. I doubt it gets much worse than that. Thou I admit it was fun to have xpenguins motion blurred at the corner of the cube with semi-transparency. Some of the xfce users almost cried at the sight...
Before: Nobody knew how many patents they may hold Nobody knew if they would use them Nobody knew if they would hold up in court
After: It is obvious they can't do anything They have more or less agreed not to sue anyone If they don't name the patents soon you an use it as a defence
So essentially they have just managed to clear Linux from the FUD surrounding their patent portfolio, make it obvious to business around the world they don't have the balls to do shit with it, and pretty much offered everyone a great defence against their entire patent portfolio. I mean... wow, just wow. I knew the FUD against Linux would go away soon, but that Microsoft would do it themselves without even entering the courtroom... wow. I guess the Vista slogan was right after all...
3kg laptop Same price as the Windows install Hardware is no more "free" than most Think Pads ( its an Intel chip set after all)
This is not a serious attempt. You are better off trying to get a refund from your Windows OEM license. Unless the argument is that Dell's website is easier to navigate than the Ubuntu installer this is rubbish. Way to screw it up Dell...
Seriously guys come on. "Joe average user" isn't simply some idiot who knows absolutely nothing about computers. Three years ago I didn't know if there was a GUI for Linux, today I write my own bash scripts. Yes, there are some people out there who don't know a hard drive from a CD rom, but those people are NOT what is holding Linux back. Maybe 30% of users are THAT computer illiterate, but that is no reason why Linux could not absorb the remaining 70%, or 40% or 10% or whatever. Fact is you don't have to know how to program to use Linux. You don't have to be a CS major to use Linux. At the end of the day the limiting factor is simply that to use Linux you have to make an effort, and the majority of users will use whatever is handed to them. Yes, this includes "smart" people. Take my dad as an example. He has a PHD in physics, has been doing "programing" back since when it was down to punching holes into paper cards, and he knows multiple programing languages and still use them in his research. Surely such a computer literate person would be using a *nix box? Not quite. I doubt he would even know how to use "ls". It clearly isn't because he isn't smart enough, its just that:
a) It requires effort to learn something new b) Every machine he has ever bought came with Windows c) He is ignorant about the advantages of Linux
That is all there is to it. You give "joe average", or in the above case a Physics PHD, a computer with Windows, Mac OS, BSD Unix, Linux, Solaris, whatever, he will use it because it is what he has. The vast majority of users won't bother switching operating system because it takes effort. I sincerely believe Linux is as good, if not better, than windows, but that is unfortunately not enough. If people are to switch at a rapid rate it needs to be a HUGE incentive to do so. You need to overcome people's laziness of learning new things. This is not achieved by being "just as good". It is achieved by being revolutionary and orders of magnitude superior. Linux is getting there, and people are switching. The myth that 99% of PC users are made out of "joe average" who is barely able to breathe on his own is just not accurate. I'd say that very many, if not a majority, of windows users could easily learn to use Linux. They just don't know about it, can't be arsed to switch, or are required to use Windows due to software they don't want to be without ( games being a big one ).
I'll tell you what will win cat5e, cat6, cat7, fiber and wireless. Seriously, if you have to wait X days for the movies you ordered to arrive in the mail you might just as well download them overnight. The hard drive space needed will be available before either blue-ray or HD-DVD becomes mainstream. Of course, the movie industry will shoot itself in the foot and cripple the whole thing with DRM and whatnot, so it will be done over file-sharing networks and then we will hear how the HD formats lose sales "because of piracy", and there will be more draconian copyright laws. Blue-ray will lose, HD-DVD will lose, consumers will lose, the movie industry will lose, the artists will lose, ISPs will lose as they have to deal with DMCA notices, even the lawyers will lose as they have will have to deal with bullshit like this instead of something worthwhile. Orwellian governments will win as they get another excuse to implement more privacy infringing legislation. Welcome to the the digital millennium.
Will they be available outside the US ? Quite simply, I'm not going to buy a laptop with an American keyboard layout. However, assuming the price is fair and they sell in my country I will probably get one.
If you can afford to pay $money for just the cable you can probably afford to stick decent networking in your display and amplifier. Wire it all up with standard Ethernet cables ( up to 10 gigabit over 100m with cat7 ) and the problem is solved.
There is a very simple reason why DRM-free music is likely to be more expensive than the DRMed version, it is more valuable to the consumer. Think about it, what would you rather have? Because the DRM doesn't work anyway the only real difference between DRMed and DRM free music is that DRMed music adds an extra inconvenience. This makes it less desirable to consumers and thus companies will have to charge less to get the same demand. That the price of both DRMed and DRM-free music is high compared to CDs is simply a case of cartels, limited competition and ignorance from consumers. If people only ever bought music from the cheaper sites the more expensive distributors would have no choice but to lower their prices. Prices are high because people put up with it. I don't know if it will last or not, but if the big labels don't bring their prices down I'd think it is only a question of time before some large company takes advantage of the situation and run over them when they least expect it. Just imagine what would happen if Google decided to join the game with Free advert financed downloads. The RIAA wouldn't even know what hit them...
Nice straw man you are building there... What I actually suggested was that rather than posting a 2 sentence "argument" on slashdot ( as you then proceed to do ) it would be a lot more useful if people actually went and read up on the subject. Really, I dare you. Have a look at the wikipedia article on solar variations. Have a look at the global warming article, have a look at the article on radiative forcing. If you have already decided global warming is just left-wing propaganda without even trying to read up on it from any credible source ( peer reviewed journals are quite publicly available you know ), then quite frankly you just proved my point.
Oh, btw, in cold countries that get the majority of electricity from hydroelectrics and nuclear power ( Think Canada, Sweden , Norway etc... ) heating your house with incandescent light bulbs causes much less CO2 emissions than burning oil in your basement, so I am all in favour of it where the climate is right. As for SUVs I have yet to understand why anyone would want one. They are hard to park, expensive to maintain, have a sucky mpg rating, poor acceleration and just generally suck at everything. Unless you actually spend most of your time driving off-road a regular car is better, and if you are spending most of your time off-road there are way better alternatives than a SUV. Global warming is just another reason why SUVs are shit cars. I wouldn't get one anyway.
Having spent many hours arguing with people who will jump on any conspiracy theory they can find, and who will happily trust a 2 hour program on channel 4 instead of a plethora of peer reviewed scientific journals, I don't know if I should laugh or cry at the posts in this thread. Lets get this straight once and for all, you will not debunk anything with two sentences. Simply explaining what global average temperature is, or what is meant with a greenhouse gas, or what radiative forcing refers to, requires an entire article on its own. I don't know how many times I have seen some statement along the lines of "Solar radiation changes" completely ignoring matter of relative magnitude, time-scales, research on the topic, and whatnot. At the end of the day the issue is so complex that the only one-liner that has even the slightest legitimacy is "this is what the vast majority of experts on the topic believe" and even that one requires credible references ( as so many sceptics will contest it ). Anyway, the most useful bit of text that will appear in this entire thread follows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming There you go, it isn't perfect but it is the best that will appear on slashdot.
Not convinced. Current electric cars have ranges of about 200 miles. Do you want to drive more than 200 miles without a toilet break? The recharge time ( currently between 1-4 hours for most models ) is a bigger show stopper. I don't think the energy required to produce the batteries matter either. It is dwarfed by the amount of energy needed to make the other materials in the car. As far as chemicals are concerned it is again small comapred to the rest of the car, and more importantly, contained. Spare for accidents you can send a battery back for proper disposal. You quote environmental concerns of its production, but that is not unique to batteries. Do you expect the construction of hydrogen fuel cells and storage schemes to have no environmental impact? We don't even know how we would store it, let alone what environmental problems would be involved.
Now, for hydrogen, you have tonnes of problems. The infrastructure needed to distribute it is daunting, the energy conversion efficiency is much less than batteries, there still is no viable way to store it in sufficient densities at a low cost. Sure, maybe some future technology will improve hydrogen storage, but by the same argument improvements in battery technology will increase battery performance as well. As I mentioned before, energy density is not as much of a problem as the recharge time. In other news, Toshiba has made Li-ion batteries that charge to 80% within a minute http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr290 1.htm. The thing is, suitable battery technology already exists. The main obstacle to wide scale adoption of electric cars is not technology limits, but competition from petrol. With increasing Oil prices, decreasing supplies, global warming, and expected improvements in battery performance it is only a question of time for the scales to tip. Sure, if you just look at the car maybe ( and note the maybe ) hydrogen might win out. But if you start to factor in infrastructure, energy losses in production and transportation, batteries win hands down. We already have a power grid, we don't have a worldwide hydrogen distribution system. Hydrogen has its advantages. I'd expect the aviation industry to be interested ( hard to power an airliner on batteries or recharge it every 200 km), but for cars I doubt it can beat a good lithium based battery in any area except energy density, and quite frankly that is not all there is to it.
What you forget is that THORP, as many other reprocessing plants, was built for weapons production. The water contamination, poor performance, history of leaks, proliferation problems...etc can all be attributed to the use of the PUREX scheme for reprocessing. If you instead look at schemes designed for civilian use things switch by quite a bit. Take the electroplating techniques used by Argone for the waste from their EBR-II reactor as an example. It uses salt instead of water, so no water contamination. The salt is recycled in the process and eventually collected for safe disposal with the waste. In contrast PUREX uses large amounts of that is eventually released into the environment. Furthermore, the electro refining scheme is all done remotely in radiation shielded cells so the probability of a leak into the environment is minimal. You don't have the big complex of pipes and containers which hold waste dissolved in nitric acid. The equipment needed is small enough to be included as a part of the power plant thus eliminating the need for transporting the waste between power plant and reprocessing facility. Finally because the scheme never separates plutonium from the actinides ( it only extracts uranium and the fission products ) you can't use it to produce weapons grade plutonium.
Basically it isn't reprocessing in itself that is dirty, it is the PUREX scheme that needs to be phased out. Reprocessing facilities like THORP may be modern, but they still use PUREX, with all its disadvantages.
Finally missing plutonium, while of course very serious, can't be used to make bombs unless it is weapons grade, and even then it isn't something you just don't do in your basement, you need machinery capable of cutting high power plastic explosives with the same accuracy as lenses for binoculars, not to talk about the difficulty in designing a functional device. Highly enriched U-235 would be a greater concern as a gun-triggered uranium device is comparably easy to design ( but by no means trivial ). Plutonium is a lot more difficult to use and if it is not weapons grade it is unlikely that anybody other than existing nuclear powers will be able to obtain the necessary data to make it work. You are talking about technology necessary to compress a metal sphere the size of a grapefruit into something the size of a golf ball. Have any idea what kind of force is needed to compress a metal ? Well, here's a hint, the entire weight of the Eiffel tower doesn't manage to significantly change the density of the steel it rests on. Now keep in mind that any deviation from a perfectly symmetric compression will screw over your bomb. If any one of the detonating charges is a fraction of a second late, or if it detonates with a few percent less force than the others, or if the machine that cut the shape of the explosives did not cut it in a perfectly parabolic shape, then all that will happen is that the metal will fly out where the pressure is lower. To actually get a detonation out of the damn thing you need to produce a perfectly spherically imploding shock wave. Keep in mind, this will involve knowing exactly how to shape the explosives ( you need at least two types, and you need to determine their parabolic shape based on the exact detonation velocities of each ).
Basically people like to think that once you got plutonium you are two minutes short of building a bomb. Its not quite that simple. If the plutonium isn't pure, or if it contains too much Pu-240, or if you failed to alloy it with just the right amount of gallium, or if you got the power of your explosives wrong by just a tiny bit, or if you failed to shape them perfectly right ( to the same accuracy as an optic lens ), if any of your neutronics calculations went wrong, or if your neutron initiator triggers at the wrong point, or if your tamper was slightly too heavy, or didn't reflect just the amount of neutrons you thought it did, the thing won't work. The probability that anyone other than an existing nuclear power would be able to use lost reactor grade plu
A physical disk is about to become a costly way to distribute data. To have any hope to compete with distribution over the net prices need to go down, not up, and somehow I don't see adding this technology pushing the price of the disk down. If anything I would expect a certain industry to implement the reverse, causing the disk to go opaque X days after being sold. That this would coincide with an increased price of disks is completely coincidental of course.
The thing is, there are hundreds of different GNU/Linux distributions. Solaris isn't competing against Linux, nor against GNU. It is copeting against Debian, Gentoo, Redhat, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Slackware, Suse... etc What does "making it more Linux like" even mean? Will it be more like Gentoo? More like Debian? Unless they are actually talking about the kernel I really don't see what they are planing to do, and if they are then you may consider that Debian is being ported to FreeBSD, NetBSD and GNU Hurd. This sounds more like marketing than actual policy to me.
I read as far as the word "foolproof" because quite frankly there is no such thing, no matter your interpretation. Once you have seen someone staple a post-it note to a floppy disk you realize just how futile designing a "foolproof" system really is.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be nice if they could also take measures tor educe the incentive for these spammers. Basically, WoW's economy rewards players for doing things they don't enjoy, farming herbs, ore, power levelling, grinding the same mob over and over... etc. That is why people will actually pay in order to not do so. If the economy instead made fun activities much more profitable than the boring ones it would reduce the amount of spammers ( thou probably not remove them completely ) and also make the game itself a lot more fun to play. Basically, running a bot program or paying someone to do the same thing over and over should not be rewarded by the game mechanics. Playing the game with other people, completing quests, winning PvP battles etc... should be the main source of wealth in the game. As long as Blizzard insists to have the economy based on "kill monster X 500 times and hope item Y drops" you will get problems with bots and spammers.
I for one welcome our Zealot Overlord ... oh wait, he has been that way since before I was born?
The damage is done alright, but it is Novell that has taken a hit to their credibility. Everyone already knew RMS was a bit of a zealot, for better or worse, this won't change that. It has however ruffled the feathers of quite a few in the FLOSS community, and it could very well cause Novell to lose supporters in favor of Redhat, IBM or even Canonical. Whatever criticism you have about RMS it is hard to deny that helping Microsoft spread their FUD and trying to get a competitive advantage by splitting the OSS community is far worse than anything Stallman has ever done.
World of Warcraft runs under Wine and Cedega, but to be honest if you are looking for a gaming machine you are probably unlikely to go for a machine with a GMA950 card anyway ( thou again, World of Warcraft does run on it, albeit with lower performance than other cards ). Unless you actually work in the publishing industry the GIMP is probably a good enough replacement for Photoshop, and if you really do need Photoshop and nothing else then you are probably well aware what you need to run it. iTunes is a problem, but to be honest that is due to the DRM and there are alternatives, such as http://www.emusic.com/, which are both cheaper and give you songs in a more portable format.
I wouldn't be overly concerned. In worst case scenario you will end up buying a Windows license, so worst comes to worst you pay a bit more than having windows pre-installed and you get a computer without the OEM crapware. Quite a few Windows users would probably prefer that tbh.
Provided they start selling in Norway before I find that my present system is insufficient to meet my needs I will with high probability get a notebook from a vendor with good Linux support. If the price is fair that may very well be Dell. So, well, IF they ship to Norway, and IF they have better Linux support than my alternatives here, and IF they are priced fairly I will buy one. However, lets get one thing clear. We owe them nothing. If their Linux machines are good and fairly priced they will sell on their own merit. If not, Dell messed up. I will buy whichever notebook has the best Linux supported hardware within my budget. If that is a Dell, then it will be a dell. If it is a thinkpad, it will be a thinkpad. Tho I do admit, I am willing to tilt the scale by about $100 if I can avoid giving my money to Microsoft. Call me a zealot but the more I hear about Microsoft the more keen I am not to support that kind of behavior. MSFT is the software market version of the high school bully, which explains pretty well why geeks around the world would love to give them the finger at every opportunity.
If it is a valid claim Sony will probably settle and buy a license to use the technology, otherwise they will fight it in court. Actually, it is probably more along the lines of .LT. (DAMAGES * P(.LOSS.) ) THEN CALL SETTLE ELSE CALL FIGHT END IF !pardon the Fortran
IF ( LICENSE
So basically Sony will have a slightly lighter wallet after this but it is unlikely that Target will refuse to strike a good deal on the matter unless they get a better offer from the HD-DVD crowd.
I love Firefox ( or Iceweasel as it is called on Debian ) but I am running a fairly streamlined xfce install and currently fire.. err... Iceweasel, is using about the same amount of memory as the rest of the system combined. I know there are other browsers, but I really do like Iceweasel, except for the memory footprint. Seeing that I only use a fairly small subset of the features it would be nice to have a light version with just the essentials. I wouldn't suggest axing the features other users love and depend on, but perhaps provide an alternative for those of us who really don't need an advanced database for our 3-4 bookmarks ?
PS: It would also be nice if Firefox didn't highlight "Iceweasel" as a typo.
I think Beryl has a feature that lets you motion blur your terminal. I doubt it gets much worse than that. Thou I admit it was fun to have xpenguins motion blurred at the corner of the cube with semi-transparency. Some of the xfce users almost cried at the sight...
So let me see here...
Before:
Nobody knew how many patents they may hold
Nobody knew if they would use them
Nobody knew if they would hold up in court
After:
It is obvious they can't do anything
They have more or less agreed not to sue anyone
If they don't name the patents soon you an use it as a defence
So essentially they have just managed to clear Linux from the FUD surrounding their patent portfolio, make it obvious to business around the world they don't have the balls to do shit with it, and pretty much offered everyone a great defence against their entire patent portfolio. I mean... wow, just wow. I knew the FUD against Linux would go away soon, but that Microsoft would do it themselves without even entering the courtroom... wow. I guess the Vista slogan was right after all...
Strawman argument. Most people here want software patents abolished in general. Yes, that includes the ones Microsoft are infringing upon.
Right. So lets see if I can sum this up:
3kg laptop
Same price as the Windows install
Hardware is no more "free" than most Think Pads ( its an Intel chip set after all)
This is not a serious attempt. You are better off trying to get a refund from your Windows OEM license. Unless the argument is that Dell's website is easier to navigate than the Ubuntu installer this is rubbish. Way to screw it up Dell...
Seriously guys come on. "Joe average user" isn't simply some idiot who knows absolutely nothing about computers. Three years ago I didn't know if there was a GUI for Linux, today I write my own bash scripts. Yes, there are some people out there who don't know a hard drive from a CD rom, but those people are NOT what is holding Linux back. Maybe 30% of users are THAT computer illiterate, but that is no reason why Linux could not absorb the remaining 70%, or 40% or 10% or whatever. Fact is you don't have to know how to program to use Linux. You don't have to be a CS major to use Linux. At the end of the day the limiting factor is simply that to use Linux you have to make an effort, and the majority of users will use whatever is handed to them. Yes, this includes "smart" people. Take my dad as an example. He has a PHD in physics, has been doing "programing" back since when it was down to punching holes into paper cards, and he knows multiple programing languages and still use them in his research. Surely such a computer literate person would be using a *nix box? Not quite. I doubt he would even know how to use "ls". It clearly isn't because he isn't smart enough, its just that:
a) It requires effort to learn something new
b) Every machine he has ever bought came with Windows
c) He is ignorant about the advantages of Linux
That is all there is to it. You give "joe average", or in the above case a Physics PHD, a computer with Windows, Mac OS, BSD Unix, Linux, Solaris, whatever, he will use it because it is what he has. The vast majority of users won't bother switching operating system because it takes effort. I sincerely believe Linux is as good, if not better, than windows, but that is unfortunately not enough. If people are to switch at a rapid rate it needs to be a HUGE incentive to do so. You need to overcome people's laziness of learning new things. This is not achieved by being "just as good". It is achieved by being revolutionary and orders of magnitude superior. Linux is getting there, and people are switching. The myth that 99% of PC users are made out of "joe average" who is barely able to breathe on his own is just not accurate. I'd say that very many, if not a majority, of windows users could easily learn to use Linux. They just don't know about it, can't be arsed to switch, or are required to use Windows due to software they don't want to be without ( games being a big one ).
I'll tell you what will win cat5e, cat6, cat7, fiber and wireless. Seriously, if you have to wait X days for the movies you ordered to arrive in the mail you might just as well download them overnight. The hard drive space needed will be available before either blue-ray or HD-DVD becomes mainstream. Of course, the movie industry will shoot itself in the foot and cripple the whole thing with DRM and whatnot, so it will be done over file-sharing networks and then we will hear how the HD formats lose sales "because of piracy", and there will be more draconian copyright laws. Blue-ray will lose, HD-DVD will lose, consumers will lose, the movie industry will lose, the artists will lose, ISPs will lose as they have to deal with DMCA notices, even the lawyers will lose as they have will have to deal with bullshit like this instead of something worthwhile. Orwellian governments will win as they get another excuse to implement more privacy infringing legislation. Welcome to the the digital millennium.
Will they be available outside the US ? Quite simply, I'm not going to buy a laptop with an American keyboard layout. However, assuming the price is fair and they sell in my country I will probably get one.
Just another neo-con who wants us to think laissez-faire is communism. If OSS is communistic then this guy is the reincarnation of McCarthy.
If you can afford to pay $money for just the cable you can probably afford to stick decent networking in your display and amplifier. Wire it all up with standard Ethernet cables ( up to 10 gigabit over 100m with cat7 ) and the problem is solved.
ONE TREEEEEEEEELION DOLLARS
There is a very simple reason why DRM-free music is likely to be more expensive than the DRMed version, it is more valuable to the consumer. Think about it, what would you rather have? Because the DRM doesn't work anyway the only real difference between DRMed and DRM free music is that DRMed music adds an extra inconvenience. This makes it less desirable to consumers and thus companies will have to charge less to get the same demand. That the price of both DRMed and DRM-free music is high compared to CDs is simply a case of cartels, limited competition and ignorance from consumers. If people only ever bought music from the cheaper sites the more expensive distributors would have no choice but to lower their prices. Prices are high because people put up with it. I don't know if it will last or not, but if the big labels don't bring their prices down I'd think it is only a question of time before some large company takes advantage of the situation and run over them when they least expect it. Just imagine what would happen if Google decided to join the game with Free advert financed downloads. The RIAA wouldn't even know what hit them...
Nice straw man you are building there... What I actually suggested was that rather than posting a 2 sentence "argument" on slashdot ( as you then proceed to do ) it would be a lot more useful if people actually went and read up on the subject. Really, I dare you. Have a look at the wikipedia article on solar variations. Have a look at the global warming article, have a look at the article on radiative forcing. If you have already decided global warming is just left-wing propaganda without even trying to read up on it from any credible source ( peer reviewed journals are quite publicly available you know ), then quite frankly you just proved my point.
... ) heating your house with incandescent light bulbs causes much less CO2 emissions than burning oil in your basement, so I am all in favour of it where the climate is right. As for SUVs I have yet to understand why anyone would want one. They are hard to park, expensive to maintain, have a sucky mpg rating, poor acceleration and just generally suck at everything. Unless you actually spend most of your time driving off-road a regular car is better, and if you are spending most of your time off-road there are way better alternatives than a SUV. Global warming is just another reason why SUVs are shit cars. I wouldn't get one anyway.
Oh, btw, in cold countries that get the majority of electricity from hydroelectrics and nuclear power ( Think Canada, Sweden , Norway etc
Having spent many hours arguing with people who will jump on any conspiracy theory they can find, and who will happily trust a 2 hour program on channel 4 instead of a plethora of peer reviewed scientific journals, I don't know if I should laugh or cry at the posts in this thread. Lets get this straight once and for all, you will not debunk anything with two sentences. Simply explaining what global average temperature is, or what is meant with a greenhouse gas, or what radiative forcing refers to, requires an entire article on its own. I don't know how many times I have seen some statement along the lines of "Solar radiation changes" completely ignoring matter of relative magnitude, time-scales, research on the topic, and whatnot. At the end of the day the issue is so complex that the only one-liner that has even the slightest legitimacy is "this is what the vast majority of experts on the topic believe" and even that one requires credible references ( as so many sceptics will contest it ). Anyway, the most useful bit of text that will appear in this entire thread follows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming There you go, it isn't perfect but it is the best that will appear on slashdot.
DMCA takedown notices because they were found in the decimal representation of some movies?
Not convinced. Current electric cars have ranges of about 200 miles. Do you want to drive more than 200 miles without a toilet break? The recharge time ( currently between 1-4 hours for most models ) is a bigger show stopper. I don't think the energy required to produce the batteries matter either. It is dwarfed by the amount of energy needed to make the other materials in the car. As far as chemicals are concerned it is again small comapred to the rest of the car, and more importantly, contained. Spare for accidents you can send a battery back for proper disposal. You quote environmental concerns of its production, but that is not unique to batteries. Do you expect the construction of hydrogen fuel cells and storage schemes to have no environmental impact? We don't even know how we would store it, let alone what environmental problems would be involved.
0 1.htm. The thing is, suitable battery technology already exists. The main obstacle to wide scale adoption of electric cars is not technology limits, but competition from petrol. With increasing Oil prices, decreasing supplies, global warming, and expected improvements in battery performance it is only a question of time for the scales to tip. Sure, if you just look at the car maybe ( and note the maybe ) hydrogen might win out. But if you start to factor in infrastructure, energy losses in production and transportation, batteries win hands down. We already have a power grid, we don't have a worldwide hydrogen distribution system. Hydrogen has its advantages. I'd expect the aviation industry to be interested ( hard to power an airliner on batteries or recharge it every 200 km), but for cars I doubt it can beat a good lithium based battery in any area except energy density, and quite frankly that is not all there is to it.
Now, for hydrogen, you have tonnes of problems. The infrastructure needed to distribute it is daunting, the energy conversion efficiency is much less than batteries, there still is no viable way to store it in sufficient densities at a low cost. Sure, maybe some future technology will improve hydrogen storage, but by the same argument improvements in battery technology will increase battery performance as well. As I mentioned before, energy density is not as much of a problem as the recharge time. In other news, Toshiba has made Li-ion batteries that charge to 80% within a minute http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr29
What you forget is that THORP, as many other reprocessing plants, was built for weapons production. The water contamination, poor performance, history of leaks, proliferation problems...etc can all be attributed to the use of the PUREX scheme for reprocessing. If you instead look at schemes designed for civilian use things switch by quite a bit. Take the electroplating techniques used by Argone for the waste from their EBR-II reactor as an example. It uses salt instead of water, so no water contamination. The salt is recycled in the process and eventually collected for safe disposal with the waste. In contrast PUREX uses large amounts of that is eventually released into the environment. Furthermore, the electro refining scheme is all done remotely in radiation shielded cells so the probability of a leak into the environment is minimal. You don't have the big complex of pipes and containers which hold waste dissolved in nitric acid. The equipment needed is small enough to be included as a part of the power plant thus eliminating the need for transporting the waste between power plant and reprocessing facility. Finally because the scheme never separates plutonium from the actinides ( it only extracts uranium and the fission products ) you can't use it to produce weapons grade plutonium.
Basically it isn't reprocessing in itself that is dirty, it is the PUREX scheme that needs to be phased out. Reprocessing facilities like THORP may be modern, but they still use PUREX, with all its disadvantages.
Finally missing plutonium, while of course very serious, can't be used to make bombs unless it is weapons grade, and even then it isn't something you just don't do in your basement, you need machinery capable of cutting high power plastic explosives with the same accuracy as lenses for binoculars, not to talk about the difficulty in designing a functional device. Highly enriched U-235 would be a greater concern as a gun-triggered uranium device is comparably easy to design ( but by no means trivial ). Plutonium is a lot more difficult to use and if it is not weapons grade it is unlikely that anybody other than existing nuclear powers will be able to obtain the necessary data to make it work. You are talking about technology necessary to compress a metal sphere the size of a grapefruit into something the size of a golf ball. Have any idea what kind of force is needed to compress a metal ? Well, here's a hint, the entire weight of the Eiffel tower doesn't manage to significantly change the density of the steel it rests on. Now keep in mind that any deviation from a perfectly symmetric compression will screw over your bomb. If any one of the detonating charges is a fraction of a second late, or if it detonates with a few percent less force than the others, or if the machine that cut the shape of the explosives did not cut it in a perfectly parabolic shape, then all that will happen is that the metal will fly out where the pressure is lower. To actually get a detonation out of the damn thing you need to produce a perfectly spherically imploding shock wave. Keep in mind, this will involve knowing exactly how to shape the explosives ( you need at least two types, and you need to determine their parabolic shape based on the exact detonation velocities of each ).
Basically people like to think that once you got plutonium you are two minutes short of building a bomb. Its not quite that simple. If the plutonium isn't pure, or if it contains too much Pu-240, or if you failed to alloy it with just the right amount of gallium, or if you got the power of your explosives wrong by just a tiny bit, or if you failed to shape them perfectly right ( to the same accuracy as an optic lens ), if any of your neutronics calculations went wrong, or if your neutron initiator triggers at the wrong point, or if your tamper was slightly too heavy, or didn't reflect just the amount of neutrons you thought it did, the thing won't work. The probability that anyone other than an existing nuclear power would be able to use lost reactor grade plu
A physical disk is about to become a costly way to distribute data. To have any hope to compete with distribution over the net prices need to go down, not up, and somehow I don't see adding this technology pushing the price of the disk down. If anything I would expect a certain industry to implement the reverse, causing the disk to go opaque X days after being sold. That this would coincide with an increased price of disks is completely coincidental of course.
The thing is, there are hundreds of different GNU/Linux distributions. Solaris isn't competing against Linux, nor against GNU. It is copeting against Debian, Gentoo, Redhat, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Slackware, Suse ... etc What does "making it more Linux like" even mean? Will it be more like Gentoo? More like Debian? Unless they are actually talking about the kernel I really don't see what they are planing to do, and if they are then you may consider that Debian is being ported to FreeBSD, NetBSD and GNU Hurd. This sounds more like marketing than actual policy to me.
I read as far as the word "foolproof" because quite frankly there is no such thing, no matter your interpretation. Once you have seen someone staple a post-it note to a floppy disk you realize just how futile designing a "foolproof" system really is.