This will only get worse because they insist on the stupid DRM schemes. If a drive crashes you can usually recover a fair portion of the data, if the drive is heavily encrypted and the crash takes out the key to your cipher, then you are fairly fucked. Sure, it is fine today when everybody and his mother has a HDMI compliant player, but with the amount of key-revocations that will likely be necessary as the scheme is cracked over and over again, sooner or latter the increasing complexity of key-management will cause them to start getting lost. The issue is further complicated by having the "plain-text" all in a central place rather than in everybody's home, a hurricane could easily take out a decade's worth of art that way. Of course none of this will happen because the people who make decisions about where the unencrypted originals are stored have a good understanding of how cryptography works, which is why we have DRM to begin with...
People say they should focus on multiple cores and not push the clock frequency and whatnot. Thing is, those are not mutually exclusive improvements. The the only real problem if you manage to create faster chips is the power consumption, and consequentially heat generation. Sure, you have to do some science to get it working in the first place, but is there actually a direct disadvantage to having chips run quicker other than power consumption? It doesn't stop you from using multiple cores, or even multiple CPUs, heck you could probably do something cunning where you run 10 minutes on one CPU, as it heats up you switch over to the another for 10 min and let it cool down. The limit to clock frequency is far from attained, the question is only one of economics. What I can see is a drop in clock frequency as they start stacking circuits in 3D as it will be harder to get the heat out of them, then the frequency will scale up again as innovative ways to cool the cpu develops. The only real place I can see the power consumption of a CPU being a big show stopper in itself ( i.e not due to limiting how densely you can pack in it etc ) is in laptops. In a desktop system you can get kilo watts of the socket, and the CPU itself doesn't produce more heat than a few light bulbs. Basically the only thing keeping the frequency down is that there are currently ways to improve CPUs that have not been previously exploited ( multiple cores etc ). Once those start to become unable to give a speed increase ( you only have so many threads etc ) the clock frequency will become important again.
As an environmentalist strongly in favor of nuclear power plants I have to say that this is probably the most retarded implementation ever.
a)You want the plant close to cities so you can use the spill heat for district heating. b)You want to transport the electricity as short a distance as possible to avoid resistance losses in the wires. c)You want the reprocessing facility to be next-doors so you can minimize the need for waste transports, thus cutting the costs associated with securing them. d)It is far easier to build a decent containment building on land. Easier = cheaper.
The only advantage I see with this project is that you can move the thing around, but quite frankly you don't want to do that since it would require you to disconnect it from the grid. For best efficiency you want to keep the reactor online for the majority of its time. 20 year refueling intervals has been suggested for some modern designs. This is a rubbish proposal as it could displace much more CO2 emissions if built efficiently. You want to maximize the useful energy output, thus maximizing the amount of coal/gas/oil that you save.
"From a strictly libertarian point of view it's your software you can license or put any restrictions..."
From a strictly libertarian point of view copyright is wrong and the government has no right to grant a coercive monopoly in such a way. What action a libertarian would take in a country where copyright law exists is down to his/her opinion about the best way to negate copyright law. Probably something like a bastard between the GPL and BSD license. I.e , you must put derivative works under the license, but there is no requirement to distribute source code. That would be a truly libertarian license, as its effect would essentially be to negate copyright. It would probably have a number of anti-patent clauses as well.
At least TiVo just stops you from running modified software on their hardware, what these guys will be doing is attempt to circumvent the LGPL by interfacing an LGPL server program using a proprietary client, thus by not distributing it they are not bound by the LGPL. Of course, LGPL programs are not the only ones vulnerable to this. Even the GPLv3 will run into problems with it. The Affero approach won't solve the problem because it will be a hassle for many free software developers, and quite frankly, it is non-free as it doesn't allow you to modify all parts of the program. I am worried that if more company's start to do this kind of thing there will be no other solution than to stick in a use-restriction. I.e, "if you let people interface the program over a network, you must make your changes public". Yes, use restrictions are very bad, but unfortunately it seems as if they might end up being necessary. I pray that these applications will turn out to be a big enough fiasco for people not to use them.
Lets face it, most Americans are more likely to take damage from Fat and Sugar than from clone food ( the former has passed smoking as cause of death I believe). Instead of pushing for labelling cloned food, stick a priminent energy-content label on each product. Now I don't mean the tiny 8pt font ones that are already there. Make it half the packaging, on the front side. People will still ignore it, but it might encourage producers to keep the fat levels down so they can have lower number on the front of their product.
... does the state department use word? Yes, in principle the same thing can happen on other systems, but Word, Windows, Office, and a fair chunk of other Microsoft applications are known for this kind of thing. If the electric circuitry of your house goes out time and time again, and each time it turns out to be your toaster, and no matter how often you send it back to be repaired it happens again. Would you eventually consider trying another brand or would you ask for your money back? Lets go further, suppose this was a known problem with the particular brand of toaster, and it happened to a large number of people, over and pver again, despite the repairs. Suppose it happened with every single modell of toaster this company made. Suppose the problem was well known and the company only made half assed efforts to fix it. Suppose every time your lights went out the people using a different modell would point and laugh at you. Would you keep paying $100 per toaster for this brand, knowing full and well that you would have to pay another $200 in three years time, or would you get a toaster from someone with an excellent track record in building them reliable, who gave it to you for free, gave you the full blueprints, was recomended by a number of certified electricians, and used half the amount of electricity as compared to your old toaster?
It is indeed easy to blame Microsoft, but to be honest, it is the people who keep giving them money for developing this crap that allow them to continue to do so. Unless you are a hard core gamer ( and even if you are ) chances are you can find everything you need on another platform. Linux, Mac, BSD.. whatever. Heck, you could set up a system allowing you to boot either of the three ( or fifteen if you like to switch between different distros ) for the cost of the Mac alone. Private users can at least refer to the gaming industry, but the state department? I bet it would be cheaper for them to hire someone to develop whatever OS-specific software they needed rather than dealing with Windows.
I'm thinking it would be a lot easier to just use the magnetic field to focus the solar wind into a small point and then let it hit a relatively small radiation shield. So instead of trying to drag along 30km of plasma, you use a superconducting ring tailing the spaceship. The magnetic field generated would deflect all incoming radiation into the centre. With some finer adjustment you could probably focus the incoming particles into a few squre centimeters where you can collect them in a small lead or uranium bottle, which would also absorb the gamma rays generated as they impact. Heck, the particle stream might even be interesting for scientific purposes. With a bit of tweaking it might even be possible to generate the electricity needed to power the thing from it. Send it through another magnetic field to separate the positive and negative particles and you got yourself a nice little DC-generator.
You missed the point. In most countries copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one. This has quite a few implications for how a claim of infringement is handled. As an example, it typically means you don't get the police confiscating your computer just to check if there is something there, and it can't land you longer jail terms than physically hurting someone. It also has a lot of implications for what level of evidence is needed. "Beyond reasonable doubt" is typical for criminal cases, whereas civil lawsuits are mostly down to who can build the strongest case. Saying something should not be a crime is not the same thing as saying it is your right. Slander and libel are not crimes as an example, they are however grounds for a civil lawsuit.
From Wikipedia: some individuals are able to hear pitches up to 22 kHz and perhaps beyond, while others are limited to about 16 kHz. The ability of most adults to hear sounds above about 8 kHz begins to deteriorate in early middle age
So, you want it above 90khz... What are you going to do with your record player ? Phone home?
All you people talking about sound quality had better be listening to some exceptionally great performance of Mozart's symphony number 40, or quite frankly you could probably get a better improvement in sound by switching artist rather than storage medium...
Do it legally... by using software where the license agreement not only permits it, but recognises it as your RIGHT to to do so. There is no need to violate copyright law, just use software written with the users in mind. You can start with: http://www.ubuntu.com/
A secure language is one you know how to use, have decent experience with, and which makes it easy to find and patch bugs. Simply put, even the most "secure" language can give security vulnerabilities if you write sloppy code without knowing your stuff.
Ever seen this?:
try{ dangerousStuff(); }
catch(MajorSecurityExceptionThatNeedsToBeDealtWith e){ //implement this latter }
Now people, don't claim that you never do it yourself, because at some point in time, when you didn't know better, you did something just as bad. This happens. It isn't the end of the world. What does cause problems, however, is ignoring the problems once you are aware of them. OpenBSD is secure, not because it has some superior language or whatever, but because they audit their code and fix problems. Windows is insecure, not because it uses poor languages [ well, not ONLY because of that... ] but because they don't fix the problems everyone know exists. Another problem is that they deliberately break their APIs to stiffle competition, meaning third parties can't really know what their code is REALLY doing, or worse yet, what it will be doing when the next update is rolled out. It is a recipie for disaster.
...must be to stop having 90% of desktop users on a series of operating systems for which the vendor has repeatedly failed miserably at adressing numerous vulnerabilities, causing widespread sabbotage, phishing and data theft costing god knows how much money every year. I mean seriously, can anyone actually come up with anything a terrorist organisation could pull off which is going to have a worse impact on the nets general stability security and performance than Microsoft windows? This is not even taking into consideration the cost of the hardware required to run a system which has between twice to four times the system requirements of the main competition, their repeated efforts to keep other companies of the market, or continued and deliberate breakage of APIs, standards and backwards compatability. I would seriously argue that at least as far as the internet is concerned, Microsoft is a MUCH greater problem than any terrorist organisation will ever be.
I am pointing this out simply because of completeness. I normally ignore trolls, but this matter is sufficiently important to warrant a propper response.
Before you start dismissing the worlds scientists as incompetent, youc ould at least read the Wikipedia articles on the matter before assuming the vast majority of the scientific comunity and every meterological institution on earth are incompetent enough that they all fail to MEASURE the solar irradiance. Global warming has been vigorously discussed in the scientific comunity since the 80ies, weather forecasts have been arround since god knows when. We have good records of how much energy the sun has been putting out ( in many ways better than the temperature record ).
Here, have a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar-cycle-dat a.png
That is the solar irradiance over the last 35 years or so.
Now don't come and tell me about a time lag, because that graph stays fairly constant yet rate of global warming has been accelerating at a steady rate ( even when the solar radiation has been on the decline of a cycle ). Now try to explain how the planet's temperature can not only increase, but doing so at a steadily icnreasing rate, while the solar irradiance remain constant or even while it decreases.
Oh, and just in case you are going to claim it reduces the CO2 content in the oceans by heating them...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
Furthermore, explain why the following shows a steady increase in perfect correlation to the rate of fossil fuel consumption and deforestation, yet doesn't show a single sudden peak at the dates of major volcanic erruptions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mauna_Loa_Carbo n_Dioxide.png
Furthermore, do explain why the following graph shows a fairly allright correlation between temperature and solar activity while CO2 remained fairly constant, only for that correlation to break down completely once CO2 starts to really shoot off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Temp-sunspot-co 2.svg
If you could also explain why solar variation which should allegedly affect the earth and mars coudl cause one of them to start heating up at a different time and why some of the solar system's planets and moons have even experienced cooling during the same period that would be nice too.
It would also be interesting to know why we would miss so heavily on CO2's potential as a greenhouse gas given that the absrobtion spectrum of CO2 is known to several significant figures of accurace, and the spectrum of radiation emitted by the earth has been carefully measured by sattelites in orbit.
Why is the fact that US law is also broken on freedom of speach a reason why this is something to ignore? I know it is hard for some people to remember, but there are more countries in the world than the US and Russia. Yea, many of them are not much better, but there is a handful in which arresting people in peaceful protest ( permit granted or not ) would actually have quite drastic consequences in the next election. Of course, we have 7-8 parties with more than a snowball's chance in hell to influence national politics, so over here voters actually have a choice. Maybe if you and your fellow countrymen cared about things like this politicians would meet more than a summer breeze's worth of resistance when deciding that anyone who looks slightly foreign and is politically convenient to lock up is an "unlawful combatant" and that the geneva convention and yoru own constitution somehow doesn't aply to people in a classification no government has ever used before...
You have a number of laws which came into force during the last ten years which everyone knows about because they make a mockery of your constitution, yet somehow the fact that actions by the Russian government "are not worse than in the US" is a reason why it isn't anything to worry about. You can blame Bush all you like, but somewhere along the line you started getting these peopel voted in rather than peopel who had quite a different attitude to the role of government.
Seriously. You have a law which makes it illegal to tell others about alternative ways to watch movies they have legally purchased. You have a law which pretty much means the police only need to accuse you for a serious enough crime to ignore your constitution and you have a law which allows the government to steal your belongings without telling you they have done so.
Maybe other parties than the big two are too small to make a difference. But by the very same argument it won't be your single vote that determines the outcome of the election, so you might just as well vote for something you believe in. Your vote doesn't matter any more if you vote for the democrats or the republcians. It isn't any more wasted if a small party doesn't get into office than if you vote for something you don't believe in. Do you really think your vote counts twice if you vote for the big guys? It's not the fact that you are voting for their main opponent that hurts politician, it is the fact that you are voting for someone that doesn't support them.
You want to run one of the most insecure systems on the market, which also comes with all kinds of rediculous restrictions and deliberately broken features, has shoddy driver support, breaks all backwards compatability, and by the looks of it will be replaced within a few years. You also want to use the version which has had most of the features stripped from it in order to save money ( when there are free alternatives available ). You furthermore want to run this in a virtual machine on a restricted hardware platform... I mean, the virtualization restriction in Vista is lame, but seriously, you're asking for it when you literarely go and hand pick all the worst bits you could possibly find for your system. This is a bit like using software developed in Visual Basic to implement a software based DRM system for selling mediocre songs encoded at 64 bit mp3 using a WEP "secured" network charging your customers using "one click transfer" investing the revenue in SCO stock and basing your offices in the US. Seriously, why not just sell your hardware on e-bay instead, at least that way you get to keep some of the investment...
Yes but most homes in even moderately cold climates will use much more energy for heating than they can get from the sun and thus it will be cheaper to use the solar energy from the sun for heating and then grab the electricity you need of the grid ( which may very well come from super efficient solar collectors). My point was not that solar cells cannot be used for economical electricity generation, but rather that they can't possibly pass the economics of a solar heating system. Thus when you discuss the future of solar energy you really ought to look at the most economic alternative available ( solar heating ). If solar heating cannot compete in price with other energy source ( maybe it can in some climates, I dunno ) then neither can solar cells. Currently solar heating can narrowly compete with an efficient heat pump driven off the grid, but if prices of heat pumps, and say Nuclear generated electricity, go down then quite frankly it doesn't look very good.
Current solar cells are between 15% and 20% efficient in converting solar energy into electricity. It is obviously impossible to achieve more than 100% efficiency without violating conservation of energy. In addition a 100% conversion efficiency is impossible as that would violate the second law of thermodynamics. So basically there is a fundamental limit to how much you can reduce the cost of solar power by improving the efficiency alone. I have mentioned this before, but just look at solar heating equipment. A near perfectly black surface absorbing light to generate heat is pretty much the most efficient solar collector you can ever get. A dash of black paint will also for sure be cheaper than any solid state device to generate electricity. So unless you live in a very sunny and warm region of the earth ( i.e close to the equator) it will be more economical to use some black paint and water-filled pipes to heat your house than to use photovoltaic cells.
So lets see, photons ( quantum mechanics, or QM for short ) is absorbed into chlorophyl molecules, exciting them in the process (QM). The excited energy is then somehow transformmed to break the chemical bonds (QM) of CO2 and water molecules creating sugar molecules with a different quantum mechanical binding energy. Now who would have thought that this process could involve quantum mechanics? Yes, the article is interesting otherwise, but is there really a need to highlight the "amazing" fact that quantum mechanics is involved? Quantum mechanics isn't new, especially not the idea that it is crucial to epxlaining light ( Einstein showed that it 1905 ) so there really isn't any need to mention it in every article title that deals with molecular scale phenomena. If it is small enough it will involve QM.
Thing is, people don't understand risk, at all. This is why people worry about the acidity regulator in a soft drink ( commonly something harmless, or even healthy put under a scarey sounding codename ) when in reality the raw sugar content is likely to cause you way more harm. People are uneasy about living next to a nuclear powerplant while smoking 20 cigarettes per day. They fear their kids will be victims of paedophiles or terrorists, yet let them play next to a busy street without supervision. A friend of mine said I was stupid for paying 30 pounds per year to have my personal belongings insured, she had 300 pounds worth of clothes ( she dresses expensively) stolen from her at the airport. My dad ( who knows 3-4 programing languages ) said he was concerned about Amazon's "one click transfer" scheme, he runs Windows XP, Internet explorer and Outlook on a wireless network secured only with a weak wep key. I keep a 2048 bit PGP encrypted list of keys for my e-mail. I frequently walk home past midnight through a rather bad part of town. Very simply, people don't understand, or care, about rational risk estimates. We just act out of instinct and that is usually based on what we do. A lawyer will have a very different idea of what "risk" is than a doctor, who again has a different view of things than a polititian or a nuclear engineer. The best bit of it all is probably that there isn't any good metric for risk. The probability of a problem? The probability of damage in the event of a problem? The probability of damage in view of the probability of a problem? The estimated cost of repairing damage resulting as a result of a problem with certain probability ? The probability of personal injury or damage as a result of a problem? The cost of preventing a problem compared to the probabilistic avrage cost of not preventing it? Take a pick, they will not dictate the same type of action...
Next step is the tilt bits...
on
AMD's New DRM
·
· Score: 1
Truth is of course that this will just piss of customers. Oh well, they will learn eventually... if they don't they will get overtaken by someone else.
Yea, and there are devices capable of generating electricity from just the wind, or sunlight, or tidal waves. But they are not competitive due to the high price.
What would be interesting in this article would be:
a) What would they cost compared to a NiMH battery?
b) How long would they last?
This is why medical applications is probably the are where this is most interesting. In medicine you often want very small long-lasting power sources that doesn't require surgery to replace. Don't expect to power your house with these things. It will almost certainly be orders of magnitude cheaper to just make sure your house is properly insulated (at least if you live in a country as cold as I do ).
... then what about all the proprietary licenses out there? I mean, consider Microsoft's license for windows Vista as an example. They are allowed to install software on your machine without your consent, you are prohibited from running it in a debugger, the software can "phone home"... etc
Perhaps what is "risky" about the GPLv3 is that it grants users a plethora of rights, which is "risky" in the sense that you might get sued if you try to take those rights away... Of course, that is the entire point of it to begin with. Basically what they are trying to say is "It is risky promising users you won't try to take their rights away because you might want to screw them over in the future."
The catch is of course that with free software "developers" and "users" are often the same people. After all, all those GNU and Linux developers need a working system to create their software. It thus only makes sense for developers to try to protect their rights [ as users ] by putting their code under this "risky" license.
Slashdot Mirror
This will only get worse because they insist on the stupid DRM schemes. If a drive crashes you can usually recover a fair portion of the data, if the drive is heavily encrypted and the crash takes out the key to your cipher, then you are fairly fucked. Sure, it is fine today when everybody and his mother has a HDMI compliant player, but with the amount of key-revocations that will likely be necessary as the scheme is cracked over and over again, sooner or latter the increasing complexity of key-management will cause them to start getting lost. The issue is further complicated by having the "plain-text" all in a central place rather than in everybody's home, a hurricane could easily take out a decade's worth of art that way. Of course none of this will happen because the people who make decisions about where the unencrypted originals are stored have a good understanding of how cryptography works, which is why we have DRM to begin with ...
People say they should focus on multiple cores and not push the clock frequency and whatnot. Thing is, those are not mutually exclusive improvements. The the only real problem if you manage to create faster chips is the power consumption, and consequentially heat generation. Sure, you have to do some science to get it working in the first place, but is there actually a direct disadvantage to having chips run quicker other than power consumption? It doesn't stop you from using multiple cores, or even multiple CPUs, heck you could probably do something cunning where you run 10 minutes on one CPU, as it heats up you switch over to the another for 10 min and let it cool down. The limit to clock frequency is far from attained, the question is only one of economics. What I can see is a drop in clock frequency as they start stacking circuits in 3D as it will be harder to get the heat out of them, then the frequency will scale up again as innovative ways to cool the cpu develops. The only real place I can see the power consumption of a CPU being a big show stopper in itself ( i.e not due to limiting how densely you can pack in it etc ) is in laptops. In a desktop system you can get kilo watts of the socket, and the CPU itself doesn't produce more heat than a few light bulbs. Basically the only thing keeping the frequency down is that there are currently ways to improve CPUs that have not been previously exploited ( multiple cores etc ). Once those start to become unable to give a speed increase ( you only have so many threads etc ) the clock frequency will become important again.
As an environmentalist strongly in favor of nuclear power plants I have to say that this is probably the most retarded implementation ever.
a)You want the plant close to cities so you can use the spill heat for district heating.
b)You want to transport the electricity as short a distance as possible to avoid resistance losses in the wires.
c)You want the reprocessing facility to be next-doors so you can minimize the need for waste transports, thus cutting the costs associated with securing them.
d)It is far easier to build a decent containment building on land. Easier = cheaper.
The only advantage I see with this project is that you can move the thing around, but quite frankly you don't want to do that since it would require you to disconnect it from the grid. For best efficiency you want to keep the reactor online for the majority of its time. 20 year refueling intervals has been suggested for some modern designs. This is a rubbish proposal as it could displace much more CO2 emissions if built efficiently. You want to maximize the useful energy output, thus maximizing the amount of coal/gas/oil that you save.
"From a strictly libertarian point of view it's your software you can license or put any restrictions..."
From a strictly libertarian point of view copyright is wrong and the government has no right to grant a coercive monopoly in such a way. What action a libertarian would take in a country where copyright law exists is down to his/her opinion about the best way to negate copyright law. Probably something like a bastard between the GPL and BSD license. I.e , you must put derivative works under the license, but there is no requirement to distribute source code. That would be a truly libertarian license, as its effect would essentially be to negate copyright. It would probably have a number of anti-patent clauses as well.
At least TiVo just stops you from running modified software on their hardware, what these guys will be doing is attempt to circumvent the LGPL by interfacing an LGPL server program using a proprietary client, thus by not distributing it they are not bound by the LGPL. Of course, LGPL programs are not the only ones vulnerable to this. Even the GPLv3 will run into problems with it. The Affero approach won't solve the problem because it will be a hassle for many free software developers, and quite frankly, it is non-free as it doesn't allow you to modify all parts of the program. I am worried that if more company's start to do this kind of thing there will be no other solution than to stick in a use-restriction. I.e, "if you let people interface the program over a network, you must make your changes public". Yes, use restrictions are very bad, but unfortunately it seems as if they might end up being necessary. I pray that these applications will turn out to be a big enough fiasco for people not to use them.
Lets face it, most Americans are more likely to take damage from Fat and Sugar than from clone food ( the former has passed smoking as cause of death I believe). Instead of pushing for labelling cloned food, stick a priminent energy-content label on each product. Now I don't mean the tiny 8pt font ones that are already there. Make it half the packaging, on the front side. People will still ignore it, but it might encourage producers to keep the fat levels down so they can have lower number on the front of their product.
... does the state department use word? Yes, in principle the same thing can happen on other systems, but Word, Windows, Office, and a fair chunk of other Microsoft applications are known for this kind of thing. If the electric circuitry of your house goes out time and time again, and each time it turns out to be your toaster, and no matter how often you send it back to be repaired it happens again. Would you eventually consider trying another brand or would you ask for your money back? Lets go further, suppose this was a known problem with the particular brand of toaster, and it happened to a large number of people, over and pver again, despite the repairs. Suppose it happened with every single modell of toaster this company made. Suppose the problem was well known and the company only made half assed efforts to fix it. Suppose every time your lights went out the people using a different modell would point and laugh at you. Would you keep paying $100 per toaster for this brand, knowing full and well that you would have to pay another $200 in three years time, or would you get a toaster from someone with an excellent track record in building them reliable, who gave it to you for free, gave you the full blueprints, was recomended by a number of certified electricians, and used half the amount of electricity as compared to your old toaster?
.. whatever. Heck, you could set up a system allowing you to boot either of the three ( or fifteen if you like to switch between different distros ) for the cost of the Mac alone. Private users can at least refer to the gaming industry, but the state department? I bet it would be cheaper for them to hire someone to develop whatever OS-specific software they needed rather than dealing with Windows.
It is indeed easy to blame Microsoft, but to be honest, it is the people who keep giving them money for developing this crap that allow them to continue to do so. Unless you are a hard core gamer ( and even if you are ) chances are you can find everything you need on another platform. Linux, Mac, BSD
I'm thinking it would be a lot easier to just use the magnetic field to focus the solar wind into a small point and then let it hit a relatively small radiation shield. So instead of trying to drag along 30km of plasma, you use a superconducting ring tailing the spaceship. The magnetic field generated would deflect all incoming radiation into the centre. With some finer adjustment you could probably focus the incoming particles into a few squre centimeters where you can collect them in a small lead or uranium bottle, which would also absorb the gamma rays generated as they impact. Heck, the particle stream might even be interesting for scientific purposes. With a bit of tweaking it might even be possible to generate the electricity needed to power the thing from it. Send it through another magnetic field to separate the positive and negative particles and you got yourself a nice little DC-generator.
You missed the point. In most countries copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one. This has quite a few implications for how a claim of infringement is handled. As an example, it typically means you don't get the police confiscating your computer just to check if there is something there, and it can't land you longer jail terms than physically hurting someone. It also has a lot of implications for what level of evidence is needed. "Beyond reasonable doubt" is typical for criminal cases, whereas civil lawsuits are mostly down to who can build the strongest case. Saying something should not be a crime is not the same thing as saying it is your right. Slander and libel are not crimes as an example, they are however grounds for a civil lawsuit.
From Wikipedia:
some individuals are able to hear pitches up to 22 kHz and perhaps beyond, while others are limited to about 16 kHz. The ability of most adults to hear sounds above about 8 kHz begins to deteriorate in early middle age
So, you want it above 90khz... What are you going to do with your record player ? Phone home?
All you people talking about sound quality had better be listening to some exceptionally great performance of Mozart's symphony number 40, or quite frankly you could probably get a better improvement in sound by switching artist rather than storage medium...
Gotta love xkcd : )
http://www.xkcd.com/c54.html
Do it legally... by using software where the license agreement not only permits it, but recognises it as your RIGHT to to do so. There is no need to violate copyright law, just use software written with the users in mind. You can start with: http://www.ubuntu.com/
A secure language is one you know how to use, have decent experience with, and which makes it easy to find and patch bugs. Simply put, even the most "secure" language can give security vulnerabilities if you write sloppy code without knowing your stuff.
h e){
//implement this latter
... ] but because they don't fix the problems everyone know exists. Another problem is that they deliberately break their APIs to stiffle competition, meaning third parties can't really know what their code is REALLY doing, or worse yet, what it will be doing when the next update is rolled out. It is a recipie for disaster.
Ever seen this?:
try{
dangerousStuff();
}
catch(MajorSecurityExceptionThatNeedsToBeDealtWit
}
Now people, don't claim that you never do it yourself, because at some point in time, when you didn't know better, you did something just as bad. This happens. It isn't the end of the world. What does cause problems, however, is ignoring the problems once you are aware of them. OpenBSD is secure, not because it has some superior language or whatever, but because they audit their code and fix problems. Windows is insecure, not because it uses poor languages [ well, not ONLY because of that
...must be to stop having 90% of desktop users on a series of operating systems for which the vendor has repeatedly failed miserably at adressing numerous vulnerabilities, causing widespread sabbotage, phishing and data theft costing god knows how much money every year. I mean seriously, can anyone actually come up with anything a terrorist organisation could pull off which is going to have a worse impact on the nets general stability security and performance than Microsoft windows? This is not even taking into consideration the cost of the hardware required to run a system which has between twice to four times the system requirements of the main competition, their repeated efforts to keep other companies of the market, or continued and deliberate breakage of APIs, standards and backwards compatability. I would seriously argue that at least as far as the internet is concerned, Microsoft is a MUCH greater problem than any terrorist organisation will ever be.
I am pointing this out simply because of completeness. I normally ignore trolls, but this matter is sufficiently important to warrant a propper response. Before you start dismissing the worlds scientists as incompetent, youc ould at least read the Wikipedia articles on the matter before assuming the vast majority of the scientific comunity and every meterological institution on earth are incompetent enough that they all fail to MEASURE the solar irradiance. Global warming has been vigorously discussed in the scientific comunity since the 80ies, weather forecasts have been arround since god knows when. We have good records of how much energy the sun has been putting out ( in many ways better than the temperature record ). Here, have a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar-cycle-dat a.png
That is the solar irradiance over the last 35 years or so.
Now don't come and tell me about a time lag, because that graph stays fairly constant yet rate of global warming has been accelerating at a steady rate ( even when the solar radiation has been on the decline of a cycle ). Now try to explain how the planet's temperature can not only increase, but doing so at a steadily icnreasing rate, while the solar irradiance remain constant or even while it decreases.
Oh, and just in case you are going to claim it reduces the CO2 content in the oceans by heating them...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
Furthermore, explain why the following shows a steady increase in perfect correlation to the rate of fossil fuel consumption and deforestation, yet doesn't show a single sudden peak at the dates of major volcanic erruptions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mauna_Loa_Carbo n_Dioxide.png
Furthermore, do explain why the following graph shows a fairly allright correlation between temperature and solar activity while CO2 remained fairly constant, only for that correlation to break down completely once CO2 starts to really shoot off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Temp-sunspot-co 2.svg
If you could also explain why solar variation which should allegedly affect the earth and mars coudl cause one of them to start heating up at a different time and why some of the solar system's planets and moons have even experienced cooling during the same period that would be nice too.
It would also be interesting to know why we would miss so heavily on CO2's potential as a greenhouse gas given that the absrobtion spectrum of CO2 is known to several significant figures of accurace, and the spectrum of radiation emitted by the earth has been carefully measured by sattelites in orbit.
Why is the fact that US law is also broken on freedom of speach a reason why this is something to ignore? I know it is hard for some people to remember, but there are more countries in the world than the US and Russia. Yea, many of them are not much better, but there is a handful in which arresting people in peaceful protest ( permit granted or not ) would actually have quite drastic consequences in the next election. Of course, we have 7-8 parties with more than a snowball's chance in hell to influence national politics, so over here voters actually have a choice. Maybe if you and your fellow countrymen cared about things like this politicians would meet more than a summer breeze's worth of resistance when deciding that anyone who looks slightly foreign and is politically convenient to lock up is an "unlawful combatant" and that the geneva convention and yoru own constitution somehow doesn't aply to people in a classification no government has ever used before... You have a number of laws which came into force during the last ten years which everyone knows about because they make a mockery of your constitution, yet somehow the fact that actions by the Russian government "are not worse than in the US" is a reason why it isn't anything to worry about. You can blame Bush all you like, but somewhere along the line you started getting these peopel voted in rather than peopel who had quite a different attitude to the role of government. Seriously. You have a law which makes it illegal to tell others about alternative ways to watch movies they have legally purchased. You have a law which pretty much means the police only need to accuse you for a serious enough crime to ignore your constitution and you have a law which allows the government to steal your belongings without telling you they have done so. Maybe other parties than the big two are too small to make a difference. But by the very same argument it won't be your single vote that determines the outcome of the election, so you might just as well vote for something you believe in. Your vote doesn't matter any more if you vote for the democrats or the republcians. It isn't any more wasted if a small party doesn't get into office than if you vote for something you don't believe in. Do you really think your vote counts twice if you vote for the big guys? It's not the fact that you are voting for their main opponent that hurts politician, it is the fact that you are voting for someone that doesn't support them.
You want to run one of the most insecure systems on the market, which also comes with all kinds of rediculous restrictions and deliberately broken features, has shoddy driver support, breaks all backwards compatability, and by the looks of it will be replaced within a few years. You also want to use the version which has had most of the features stripped from it in order to save money ( when there are free alternatives available ). You furthermore want to run this in a virtual machine on a restricted hardware platform... I mean, the virtualization restriction in Vista is lame, but seriously, you're asking for it when you literarely go and hand pick all the worst bits you could possibly find for your system. This is a bit like using software developed in Visual Basic to implement a software based DRM system for selling mediocre songs encoded at 64 bit mp3 using a WEP "secured" network charging your customers using "one click transfer" investing the revenue in SCO stock and basing your offices in the US. Seriously, why not just sell your hardware on e-bay instead, at least that way you get to keep some of the investment...
Yes but most homes in even moderately cold climates will use much more energy for heating than they can get from the sun and thus it will be cheaper to use the solar energy from the sun for heating and then grab the electricity you need of the grid ( which may very well come from super efficient solar collectors). My point was not that solar cells cannot be used for economical electricity generation, but rather that they can't possibly pass the economics of a solar heating system. Thus when you discuss the future of solar energy you really ought to look at the most economic alternative available ( solar heating ). If solar heating cannot compete in price with other energy source ( maybe it can in some climates, I dunno ) then neither can solar cells. Currently solar heating can narrowly compete with an efficient heat pump driven off the grid, but if prices of heat pumps, and say Nuclear generated electricity, go down then quite frankly it doesn't look very good.
Current solar cells are between 15% and 20% efficient in converting solar energy into electricity. It is obviously impossible to achieve more than 100% efficiency without violating conservation of energy. In addition a 100% conversion efficiency is impossible as that would violate the second law of thermodynamics. So basically there is a fundamental limit to how much you can reduce the cost of solar power by improving the efficiency alone. I have mentioned this before, but just look at solar heating equipment. A near perfectly black surface absorbing light to generate heat is pretty much the most efficient solar collector you can ever get. A dash of black paint will also for sure be cheaper than any solid state device to generate electricity. So unless you live in a very sunny and warm region of the earth ( i.e close to the equator) it will be more economical to use some black paint and water-filled pipes to heat your house than to use photovoltaic cells.
So lets see, photons ( quantum mechanics, or QM for short ) is absorbed into chlorophyl molecules, exciting them in the process (QM). The excited energy is then somehow transformmed to break the chemical bonds (QM) of CO2 and water molecules creating sugar molecules with a different quantum mechanical binding energy. Now who would have thought that this process could involve quantum mechanics? Yes, the article is interesting otherwise, but is there really a need to highlight the "amazing" fact that quantum mechanics is involved? Quantum mechanics isn't new, especially not the idea that it is crucial to epxlaining light ( Einstein showed that it 1905 ) so there really isn't any need to mention it in every article title that deals with molecular scale phenomena. If it is small enough it will involve QM.
Thing is, people don't understand risk, at all. This is why people worry about the acidity regulator in a soft drink ( commonly something harmless, or even healthy put under a scarey sounding codename ) when in reality the raw sugar content is likely to cause you way more harm. People are uneasy about living next to a nuclear powerplant while smoking 20 cigarettes per day. They fear their kids will be victims of paedophiles or terrorists, yet let them play next to a busy street without supervision. A friend of mine said I was stupid for paying 30 pounds per year to have my personal belongings insured, she had 300 pounds worth of clothes ( she dresses expensively) stolen from her at the airport. My dad ( who knows 3-4 programing languages ) said he was concerned about Amazon's "one click transfer" scheme, he runs Windows XP, Internet explorer and Outlook on a wireless network secured only with a weak wep key. I keep a 2048 bit PGP encrypted list of keys for my e-mail. I frequently walk home past midnight through a rather bad part of town. Very simply, people don't understand, or care, about rational risk estimates. We just act out of instinct and that is usually based on what we do. A lawyer will have a very different idea of what "risk" is than a doctor, who again has a different view of things than a polititian or a nuclear engineer. The best bit of it all is probably that there isn't any good metric for risk. The probability of a problem? The probability of damage in the event of a problem? The probability of damage in view of the probability of a problem? The estimated cost of repairing damage resulting as a result of a problem with certain probability ? The probability of personal injury or damage as a result of a problem? The cost of preventing a problem compared to the probabilistic avrage cost of not preventing it? Take a pick, they will not dictate the same type of action...
This was predicted some time ago... http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_c ost.html#hardware
c ost.html#oss
We know that DRM doesn't work ( no really ) so I'm guessing this is just ATI responding to Microsoft's attempt to stop Linux on the desktop. Same paper again http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_
Truth is of course that this will just piss of customers. Oh well, they will learn eventually... if they don't they will get overtaken by someone else.
Yea, and there are devices capable of generating electricity from just the wind, or sunlight, or tidal waves. But they are not competitive due to the high price.
What would be interesting in this article would be:
a) What would they cost compared to a NiMH battery?
b) How long would they last?
This is why medical applications is probably the are where this is most interesting. In medicine you often want very small long-lasting power sources that doesn't require surgery to replace. Don't expect to power your house with these things. It will almost certainly be orders of magnitude cheaper to just make sure your house is properly insulated (at least if you live in a country as cold as I do ).
... then what about all the proprietary licenses out there? I mean, consider Microsoft's license for windows Vista as an example. They are allowed to install software on your machine without your consent, you are prohibited from running it in a debugger, the software can "phone home" ... etc
Perhaps what is "risky" about the GPLv3 is that it grants users a plethora of rights, which is "risky" in the sense that you might get sued if you try to take those rights away... Of course, that is the entire point of it to begin with. Basically what they are trying to say is "It is risky promising users you won't try to take their rights away because you might want to screw them over in the future."
The catch is of course that with free software "developers" and "users" are often the same people. After all, all those GNU and Linux developers need a working system to create their software. It thus only makes sense for developers to try to protect their rights [ as users ] by putting their code under this "risky" license.