If they can interbreed and produce viable offspring, then they are not separate species. Just different breeds. In humans, some would call them races. In dogs it's breeds. Isolate any population long enough and genetic drift will produce differences. It takes a very long isolation to prevent interbreeding.
For that matter, dogs and wolves are still the same species. Lots of variation, but they can still interbreed.
Horses an Asses are different species. They can interbreed, but the cross is almost always sterile. Same with horses and zebras. Or so I hear. African and Indian elephants are also different species, I think. I don't know of any fertile crosses. Lion and tiger can produce offspring, but it's sterile too.
We need better definitions for species. I still use the old one from the 60's that a species is any population whose members can reproduce fertile offspring. (This assumes male/female pairing of course.)
I understand a lot of biologists don't like that any more. It destroys too many cherished theories. But, as I am an experimentalist, I have always believed that theories were made to be broken.
I have a problem with your statement that existing natural gas lines are not suitable for hydrogen.
"Natual gas" is a mixture of methane (70 to 80%) and hydrogen (10 to 20%) with admixtures of other hydrocarbons, plus some waste gasses (water, CO2, Helium, nigrogen, other stuff that doesn't burn). The H2S they put into natural gas systems here in the US is so you can smell a leak. That is not there when they take it out of the ground. Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is added to the gas as a safety measure.
I know about the hydrogen content because I worked on a methane recovery system for coal mines once. The methane had to be cleaned up to remove/reduce oxygen, nitrogen and CO2. Then, they had to 'sweeten' the methane. (Standard natural gas has a higher BTU rating than pure methane.) There was a plant in Kentucky that produced hydrogen from methane to do the sweetening. So they piped the methane to Ky from W Va, then sold it to the gas pipelines after it was sweetened. The plant in Ky has been in operation since the 1950's. It's not a new idea.
Saying that gas lines that today handle low concentrations of hydrogen cannot handle hydrogen just doesn't seem right to me. Will there be leakage? sure. But, how much? the system can handle some leakage. There is a small amount of leakage today. We manage to deal with it.
There is leakage in every fuel dispensing system. About 25% of all the electricity generated is lost due to line impedances. Where does it go? just drive under a power line while listening to the radio. Lots gets lost as heat also. Yet we don't abandon electricity.
Gasoline evaporation has become a big concern in the last few years. We've added vapor recovery to the fuel tanks, and to the pumps at a lot of stations. 25 years ago, evaporation just happened. The world didn't end. (At least not quite, according to Mr. Gore.) Even with all the vapor recovery systems if you leave your car on blocks for a year with a full tank, see if the tank is still full after the year. Vapors are very hard to perfectly contain. Yet we still use gasoline.
The issue isn't if there is leakage, it's how much there is. The lines are a poor storage device, but a good delivery system. The hydrogen leakage over a couple of days is miniscule. Just don't expect to store it there for a long time.
By the way, I don't know of any really good long term storage for hydrogen gas. The best I've seen seems to be metal hydrides. just heat them to get the gas back. There will still be losses. The question is "Are they significant?"
There is still a lot of work to do on the whole hydrogen idea. The biggest hole righ now is generation of the gas. That's the real reason why we aren't on a hydrogen system. I saw work by a man named Billings done in the 1970's for DOE. He had a fleet of hydrogen cars. People were using them to commute up to 70 miles each way, each day. Gave up on cryo tanks. settled on metal hydrides. They made a better tank (more range, safer, shorter/simpler fillups). He even had Detroit interested for a while. What killed it was hydrogen generation. There just isn't any good long term supply. Using gasoline was half the fuel cost for the drivers.
I have come close to taking OLPC up on the 'Give One Get One' idea, just to use the computer as a reader.
Almost.
I used my old Sharp Zarus for years mostly for Ebooks. It's nice to be able to adjust the font size up to where I don't need glasses. It's convenient, and fit in my shirt pocket. The battery only lasted about 2 hours for continuous use, but I would just turn down the backlight, and make it last for 4 or 6 hours if the room light was good. I really liked it. It even had nethack. Good PDA functions, Python, word processing, spreadsheet (you only see 4 X 4 grid of cells at a time). I could have used it for MP3's if I had cared. No reader could do all of that.
I wonder how the Kindle will fare against the Eee or the OLPC. It's bound to only be a matter of a few years and there will be knock-offs of OLPC for general use. It can be set as a tablet. Backlight if you want or need it, not if you don't.
The response that the companies behind BSA will be strongly avoided is true. When enough people have been burned, the word will spread and those Companies will loose a lot of business due to "piracy" "prevention".
The truth is that fear based abusive businesses don't have a good future. Period. Microsoft and Autodesk are the two worst offenders. I knew of a business in New York that had an audit from BSA. It cost them $750K. The software in question was loaded on their network by the employee who turned them in. (Logs showed who did it.) days before he left. He had found out he was being fired. None of that mattered. To top it all off, the software had been legally purchased by the company, but that didn't matter. (And no, I didn't work there. Just knew a couple of people who did.)
The BSA approach to liscensing costs more than the software they 'protect' does. Having bought the software and registered it is no defense. When that really gets out, then many more businesses will realize, like Ball did that it's just a trap. A big con game. Realization is the first step to eliminating it. Let BSA style 'liscense management' factor into TCO calculations, and the outcome will change completely.
Read the article, it's a theory. They didn't actually build it. They just proposed it. to really do it, they need a real multispectrum transparent material with a negative index of refraction. (Same thing they need to build an invisibility chamber. Can you say "Unobtanium"?)
Experimental physics is littered with beautiful theories that never worked in practice.
Wang built a dedicated word processor in the 70's. Radio shack did it again in the 80's. Both devices died when PC's became generally available. The word processor is just a word processor, the PC can be a word processor and much much more.
1. Price? $399.00 (US) 2. Backup books No, DRM will prevent transfer of books 3. Yes, fiasco down the road.
Things you forgot to ask about. A) connectivity? only through a cell phone network you have to pay separatly for. B) control? Remote, with Amazon or their assignees able to modify the memory of your reader remotely. C) Book Cost? 9.99, higher than a paperback. They plan to sell you 'classics' for about $2.00 each. A classic is anything you can get from Project Gutenberg for free. This could be a problem for them, but they arranged it so that the connectivity ONLY goes through Amazon. D) Image Quality? a 6 inch screen, 4 level gray scale. Expect a flash whenever the screen changes. Also expect it to take about 2 seconds to flip a page. That is typical of E ink displays. E) Give/Loan/Borrow a book? forget it. See 2 above.
I hope this helps you decide if the system is right for you. It isn't right for me. I do read books on my laptop, and have read dozens on a PDA. The age of the e-book is here now. We already know the format that will win out in the end. It is called HTML. No mention if this reader can view either HTML or ASCII text. That probably means no.
A better reader for the price seems to be the Nokia 800 series Internet Tablet. The 810 also includes a GPS, so you can tell where you are too. I'm thinking the 700 series (now less than $200.00) may be a better choice for me. Just my opinion on this last paragraph.
As long as we continue calling net access via unprotected gateways, music file downloading, etc 'STEALING' we are not going to be able to deal with the problems that are real.
It isn't stealing. For music, it is copying without permission. that is wrong, but it isn't worse than murder, as US federal law currently maintains, and it isn't 'Piracy'. Piracy is a crime that involves murder, theft and the destruction of property, with rape and enslavement frequently thrown in. None of that happens on line. It isn't even physically possible.
For net access, there are less drastic means to fix things. I run a home network that is open. I know that at least one neighbor has used it for their access. For the occasional email or light browsing, that's not a problem. I pay for the connection so that my family can use the net. As long as we are not inconvenienced, we are not harmed. My ISP has contracted with us to provide a certain level of data throughput, so they aren't out. We can't exceed our contract amount anyway. Where there is no harm, there is no reason for a stupid law.
If I were running a business this would be different. Then, I wouldn't be running it wide open. Where someone has to break in, it should be illegal, but any open network connection should be able to be used.
Can anyone show me where I'm wrong?
P.S. I did have one incident where somebody was downloading something big, and we had seriously degraded performance on our home wifi. I solved it by unplugging the wifi for 15 minutes. Never happened again. Simple solutions are the best.
So, Cisco owes 800 million in taxes on 500 million of product? Sounds like we don't have to look far to find the reason for Brazil's economic woes. That's what? something like a tax rate of 160%? Hope that's a typo in the story.
How sad that the company whose motto was "Do No Evil" seems to be in bed with the foremost practitioner of dirty politics. how far the company has fallen. First the betrayal of Chinese seeking freedom, now this.
The stated reason is a croc. By posting political ads, Move on looses any right to claim 'trademark' status. If this were to stick as a precedent, it would absolutely smother freedom of speech. Suppression of disagreement was what the Democrat party that runs Move On wanted. It's a travesty.
The other side is not spotless either, but there is no well funded Republican dirty tricks smear campaign that even comes close to the absolute libel and filth of the Move On organization. Google just lost all credibility.
The only redemption would be a blanket rejection of anything by Move On too. Do you think there is any chance of that happening?
I see from the article that the patent system is working as intended.
Patents really exist to slow the pace of innovation down to the point where the legal system can deal with it. They are also intended to protect the large economic organizations from threats by smaller corporations that may not be able or care to carry the loads for the system that the larger entities do. (However inefficiently.)
That patents promote innovation is a propaganda line that has never been true. Patents were created as a mechanism to prevent the rapid spread of a technology that threatened a royal monopoly in the late 1600s. They have always been no more than a way to slow down or stop change in the economy.
Preventing other people from using new ideas is all patents allow anyway. To really use a patent, you have to have a large amount of money to spend on lawyers. The results are usually chaotic, with the normal result being that the side with the most money wins. Often by bankrupting the other side with legal bills. Private patent holders are even told this in court, with the judge agreeing. There are exceptions, mostly when the patent owner is a law firm (Patent Troll). Even then the systems works, as the Trolls increase the cost of doing anything in a new way to the point where only truly outstanding ideas are ever doable.
The problem here is that this crowd (Slashdotters generally) doesn't understand the real reasons for the system. They are falling for the propaganda reasons, which are obviously not working. If you understand the real reasons, the system is working just fine. Those very public reasons of 'promoting innovation' are only out there to dupe the masses, and allow for the usual corruption at the top to continue.
Next thing I know, you will be claiming that drug patents reduce the cost of drugs. I guess P.T. was right, there really is one born every minute.
They sued the wrong party. Should have been Flickr. Creative commons will be able to have thier legal fees covered, if they want to. Probably won't, though.
Velociraptor was a late dinosaur. there had already been birds around for a while. Not a bird, just a distant cousin.
Indications are that all dinos had down as young, probably had feathers growing up. May have lost them, if they were the large species, may not have. All the species I am aware of had stones in the chest cavity, when found whole, indicative of a gizzard. Like birds, the large species also had hollow bones. That saves weight. In birds, it helps the power to weight ratio which is vital for flight. In dino's it made possible larger body size. Preditor/prey ratios also indicate that they were warm blooded. Footprint evidence gives speeds of up to 45 KPH. Not often, but possible. That is very impressive for an animal the size of a whale. Most all of this evidence has come up in the last 30 or so years. Dinosaurs were not birds, but were in many respects bird like. It'll be interesting to see what else we can learn about them.
from the Article, It's non-nuclear, uses explosives, magnetic field nozzle. Claims 50% more efficient than Space Shuttle engines. Starship drive. Think about that for a moment. They are claiming better Isp than a hydrogen/oxygen engine using solid explosives, and proposing a chemically powered starship. They don't have a working model, or even a real process yet. Using explosives will result in relatively massive exhaust particles, meaning low Isp. I'd like to see how their physics works out. Seems like a rocket version of perpetual motion to me.
Apparently they got a little NASA money, so they must know a congressman. But, I can see no way they can deliver on these promises.
Was Lyons a liability to Forbes, or was Forbes a liability for Lyons?
After all, he was only supporting the magazines editorial policy in supporting proprietary systems verses open Source.I don't think that editorial slant has changed, has it?
1. He was forced to accept that all of his sources for a series of stories were lies. (Rather with Bush's Guard service in the 70's, source MoveOn.org, Democrat party dirty tricks dept. Lyons on SCO's version of history or code or their own responsibliity.Source, SCO Group, formerly Caldera.) 2. He refused to change when confronted with the truth, insisting that the story was correct, even if based on a pack of lies. 3. He continued to insult the innocent even after having the truth thrust in his face. 4. He did all this to support the editorial bias of his superiors (editors). 5. He took the fall for the corporation. (ongoing for Lyons, recent history for Rather.) 6. Nobody bought the act, except for willing fools.
Looks to me like he almost exactly fits the Dan Rather mold. Now, he just needs to sue his bosses. Then his journey to the dark side will be complete.
IC's today are made photographically, on a flat surface. Manufacturers keep working to reduce the area needed for a component, be it transistor, resistor, capacitor or trace wire. We already know from lab work what the minimum possible sizes are for each basic component. We've come up on the minimum possible size several times in the past. Each time, it was related to the possibilities of the light source we were using. Now, we are up there in the extreme UV range, and have minimum feature sizes that are actually smaller than the wavelength used. The best commercial plants use a 45 nM wavelength. At about 30 nM, the traces (on chip wires) become unstable, and may no longer be conductors. That is a fundamental limit that clever plant engineering will not be able to surmount. Current commercial plants are using a 60 to 90 nM min. feature size, if memory serves. That means we have about 6 or 7 doublings (each doubling is about a 70% reduction in feature size and takes 2 to 3 years t realize.) That gives us 12 to 20 years.
Going to still smaller wavelengths means that the photons pack more punch. It's like trying to play billiards by shooting the cue ball with a high powered rifle. You get pieces of cue ball everywhere. When random photon collisions are pushing random atoms by several dozen radii, your nice ordered atomic lattice becomes a horrid mess. we are nearing the limits of what nature allows for photo lithography now.
Increasing chip size is not a viable solution, as the full wafer is used now. Increase chip size, and yield drops quickly. Yes, they could double the size of the chip to increase transistor count, but that would mean increasing the cost of the chip by 4X. That's not he direction we want chip cost to go.
Off in the distance, there are more real hard boundaries, beyond which no amount of effort will yield additional benefits. One of those is component size. Minimum transistor size is 7 atoms (it's been done). Minimum diode size is about 5. Minimum trace size varies with material. The best I've seen is benzene, at about 6 atoms width. Keep in mind that at room temperature, benzene is a gas. It's going to be very hard to make wires of the stuff. We really need a solid. Aluminum, silver, gold, all have been used, and all need to be 30 to 60 atoms wide or more, and several thick to be even a poor conductor. Some creative metallo-insulator engineered materials might allow for smaller trace sizes, but probably not. Please note that this is still smaller than buckytubes, which are also as tall as they are wide, creating other connection problems, so don't peddle that as a panacea. That means that the trace sizes required will probably be the final limit. Real capacitors are larger than the traces, but their size is really controlled by the number of electrons needed to operate the transistor/switch. I'm still betting on the traces as establishing the limit.
Heat dissipation is also a problem. It gets to be more of a problem as densities go up. Current best designs are operating half way to melt now. switching to silicon carbide would let us go hotter, say 400 to 800 C. Diamond/graphite bases would let it get higher still, though diamond heated to 1,200 in an oxygen atmosphere isn't going to last very long. Need some creative packaging there. Heat dissipation is the real reason we can't go 3D. The systems that tried to be true 3D, or near to it, all relied on the chips being immersed in some coolant and having channels for the coolant through the chip. Liquid nitrogen cooled some that IBM did a few years ago. bubbles were a problem. move the coolant fast enough to transport the heat before bubbling and erosion is a problem.
Some of these issues can be fixed, some can never be fixed. So, when we are fully 30 nM size with our components, it all stops. It's a problem with the wiring. Solve that, and we would be close to being able to compute with atoms. But, with what we think we can do now, the shrinkage stops in about 20 years.
Any bright kid can find a way around the automatic nanny systems. There is only one solution that works. Here's what I did. Move the computer to the Family Room, with the screen facing the door. Our family room has one wall open to the Kitchen (the most used room in the house.) Now, when either his Mother or I were there, we could see what was on the screen.
I also took to checking the computer for where he had been. I only had to point out 2 times that his attempts to delete all traces of his 2AM trips to the porn sites had missed a few traces (deleted photos. Windows never really erases a deleted file.) He stopped using the family computer for that kind of thing completely. Of course, I still checked from time to time, till he moved out on his own.
A history list that is blank is the first warning sign. A simple search for temp HTML or JPEG's will often turn up the evidence. An undelete utility is handy too. A tool that reports locations where files have been zero'd will let you know quickly if there has been an effort to tamper. It's not too hard to keep a step ahead.
For those times when one of the children try to cover up the screen, I just killed the power to the machine. Worst case, I might have to re-install the software. Lots better than losing a kid to some online pedophile.I had to let the children know that there is no privacy when safety is involved. after a couple of kills, they stopped trying to keep us out.
Watch out for Myspace (and its clones) with young girls, they trust everybody and question nothing (except the parents). The boys are marginally better. Especially after 16 or 17. My favorite news story of the last year was where the 35 year old pedophile masquerading as a 15 year old boy onnline went to the mall to pick up the 13 year old girl he had arranged a 'date' with and found out that she was really a 45 year old cop who was working with the guys probation officer.
Sometimes there is justice.
You see, there is no substitute for parental presence. There never will be. If your boss wants to really protect her children, she needs to be there with them. Not out bossing you. Sorry, that is just reality. She can't have it both ways. None of us can. She will have to pick the one that is important, and let the other one go.
Ask any competent economist. We've known for over 300 years that every monopoly costs it's society more than it provides in value. That's basic economics. Whatever else it may be, IP ("intelectual property") is a limited grant of monopoly power. In fact, that may be the only thing that the various forms of IP have in common. (They are an legal limit on freedoms of speach and action of others. Without that limiting power they would be meaningless.)
For copyright, while the proponents will swear loudly that there would be no printing, music or literature without it, history is at variance with the claims.
The greatest works of literature in the english language are generally agreed to be the body of Shakespere plays. Old Will wrote it all without any copyright for himself or others. He was paid by the Globe for each play, with a portion of the box office reciepts. In non-fiction,
I'd stack up Moores Utopia, or Platos Dialogues with Socrates against anything you might find. In Science, I'm not sure you will find the equal of Principia Mathematica in anything since. So, copyright didn't help or even motivate the best we hever had.
In Music, the greatest body of works ever was that of J.S. Bach. No copyright there. He was paid entirely by patrons. Nobility, churches, towns, etc. (A similar system to bands supported by fans today.) The only one who even came close was Mozart (W.A. not Leopold). He didn't ever have a copyright either. Go further back, the best ever singer, according to the ancient sources would have been a greek named Orphius. He never had a copyright either. So, music is not the creation of copyright in modern times. It's more the prisoner of copyright.
Hang around any musicians group long enough, and you will discover that records don't make bands money. Concerts do. Even for a major hit group. The Rolling Stones are reputed to have made money from records, several million dollars worth. Even with RIAA contracts. But, they are also reported to have taken in well over a Billion dollars from just one several year long major tour. The money for Artists is clearly not from the corporations via copyright, it's from the fans.
In publishing, there are lots of examples of publishers who make money selling only non-copyrighted works. Dover for example. The problem publishers have is that anyone selling a work without paying a copyright liscense fee to (usually) another corporation, (not the Author) is that the public pays a lower price. the publishing industry lists that as a loss to the public, where it is really a gain. Money I don't have to spend on this book/movie is money I can spend on something else I want/need.
What I see really going on here is that there is a group that wants to be paid in perpetuity for thier limited labor. Infinite reward for finite work. Nice if you can get it. The guy flipping burgers at McDonalds would like to get a deal like that too. Should you have to pay for todays meal again every day for the rest of your life? How about for 70 years after you die. It could be a debt you heirs owe. Now apply that recursivly to every meal you have ever eaten.
When you try to apply copyright concepts to real things, you quickly begin to see why it is an inherently unjust proposition.
Copyrights (and Patents) may be the only surviving forms of slavery in the Western world. (Slavery is a system where one person gets the benefits of the labor of another person on the basis of a claim the the second person is the property of the first. Copyright makes the same type of claim with regard to the time or assets of the user of works claimed by the copyright holder.)
Want stronger copyrights? Well, everybody dreams they'll be the master, not the slave.
The argument is not if copyright damages society. It does. The argument is only how much the damage is.
I have an adblocker installed, but leave it turned off. I only turn it on if I am visiting a site with really intrusive advertising, or a site that lets the ads overwhelm the content. (cover it up, and not go away.) That's maybe 1 or 2 % of the sites I visit. Both indicate bad design, by the web site, or by the advertiser.
If the web sites are worried about this, they should try to remember that they want my business.
Site operators are walking a line here. Advertising pays the bills for them. Nobody advertises on a site with no visitors. Visitors don't come to see the ads. There has to be something else to bring them there. Ads get in the way of the things the visitors want. Some balance is required.
Ad blockers exist because many people believe that the advertisers are way over the line. Some advertisers are. I have had a browser hijacked. I've been annoyed when sound files started that I didn't want by some advertiser. When that happened, the site lost a customer (Are you listening, IBM? Don't auto start ANYTHING, EVER!!!). That's what made me switch from IE to Firefox. now those abusive people want to force me to switch back? NO!!! Remember, you need me, I don't need you.
So, yes there is a war here. The site owners are caught in a crossfire. They need to keep both sides happy, or reasonably so. Antics like the boycott of Firefox will only make sure I don't give that site my business. Look at what suing your customers did for RIAA and SCO. Record sales are off over 30% from the original Napster days. SCO's stock is now worth about 1% of what it was at 5 years ago. That way lies insolvency.
I wonder how a grocery store would do if they didn't allow people to shop there?
Radio stations advertise that they limit their commercial breaks. (3 in a row anybody?) Maybe these web sites should too. After all, why start a war you know you will lose?
If they want improvements to be donated back, keeping the system as a whole unified, then GPL is the proper choice. If they just want it out there, and don't care that someone else (or several someones) will soon own it, locking them out, then BSD might be the best choice.
The differences between GPL2 and GPL3 are minor. They should pick the license based on what results they want.
They can even dual liscense, with both a BSD and a GPL trunk. That way, they can see which one works best for them.
BSD licensing is for forking. In this case, the group really doesn't want to continue being bothered with the work. BSD/MIT is probably the best choice.
The BSD people have been beating this drum for over 10 years now. 'More Free' 'soon be massive defections from Linux'. Failure of these prophecies doesn't seem to deter these people from repeating them. Don't they ever learn?
Ever since Linux passed up the BSD's in popularity, we've been hearing this. It's not new, just another excuse to say it again.
If it hasn't happened in the last 12 years, it'll never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
If they can interbreed and produce viable offspring, then they are not separate species. Just different breeds. In humans, some would call them races. In dogs it's breeds. Isolate any population long enough and genetic drift will produce differences. It takes a very long isolation to prevent interbreeding.
For that matter, dogs and wolves are still the same species. Lots of variation, but they can still interbreed.
Horses an Asses are different species. They can interbreed, but the cross is almost always sterile. Same with horses and zebras. Or so I hear. African and Indian elephants are also different species, I think. I don't know of any fertile crosses. Lion and tiger can produce offspring, but it's sterile too.
We need better definitions for species. I still use the old one from the 60's that a species is any population whose members can reproduce fertile offspring. (This assumes male/female pairing of course.)
I understand a lot of biologists don't like that any more. It destroys too many cherished theories. But, as I am an experimentalist, I have always believed that theories were made to be broken.
So, you have complete freedom to do as you are told and say what you are told to think.
Freedom...
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I have a problem with your statement that existing natural gas lines are not suitable for hydrogen.
"Natual gas" is a mixture of methane (70 to 80%) and hydrogen (10 to 20%) with admixtures of other hydrocarbons, plus some waste gasses (water, CO2, Helium, nigrogen, other stuff that doesn't burn). The H2S they put into natural gas systems here in the US is so you can smell a leak. That is not there when they take it out of the ground. Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is added to the gas as a safety measure.
I know about the hydrogen content because I worked on a methane recovery system for coal mines once. The methane had to be cleaned up to remove/reduce oxygen, nitrogen and CO2. Then, they had to 'sweeten' the methane. (Standard natural gas has a higher BTU rating than pure methane.) There was a plant in Kentucky that produced hydrogen from methane to do the sweetening. So they piped the methane to Ky from W Va, then sold it to the gas pipelines after it was sweetened. The plant in Ky has been in operation since the 1950's. It's not a new idea.
Saying that gas lines that today handle low concentrations of hydrogen cannot handle hydrogen just doesn't seem right to me. Will there be leakage? sure. But, how much? the system can handle some leakage. There is a small amount of leakage today. We manage to deal with it.
There is leakage in every fuel dispensing system. About 25% of all the electricity generated is lost due to line impedances. Where does it go? just drive under a power line while listening to the radio. Lots gets lost as heat also. Yet we don't abandon electricity.
Gasoline evaporation has become a big concern in the last few years. We've added vapor recovery to the fuel tanks, and to the pumps at a lot of stations. 25 years ago, evaporation just happened. The world didn't end. (At least not quite, according to Mr. Gore.) Even with all the vapor recovery systems if you leave your car on blocks for a year with a full tank, see if the tank is still full after the year. Vapors are very hard to perfectly contain. Yet we still use gasoline.
The issue isn't if there is leakage, it's how much there is. The lines are a poor storage device, but a good delivery system. The hydrogen leakage over a couple of days is miniscule. Just don't expect to store it there for a long time.
By the way, I don't know of any really good long term storage for hydrogen gas. The best I've seen seems to be metal hydrides. just heat them to get the gas back. There will still be losses. The question is "Are they significant?"
There is still a lot of work to do on the whole hydrogen idea. The biggest hole righ now is generation of the gas. That's the real reason why we aren't on a hydrogen system. I saw work by a man named Billings done in the 1970's for DOE. He had a fleet of hydrogen cars. People were using them to commute up to 70 miles each way, each day. Gave up on cryo tanks. settled on metal hydrides. They made a better tank (more range, safer, shorter/simpler fillups). He even had Detroit interested for a while. What killed it was hydrogen generation. There just isn't any good long term supply. Using gasoline was half the fuel cost for the drivers.
I have come close to taking OLPC up on the 'Give One Get One' idea, just to use the computer as a reader.
Almost.
I used my old Sharp Zarus for years mostly for Ebooks. It's nice to be able to adjust the font size up to where I don't need glasses. It's convenient, and fit in my shirt pocket. The battery only lasted about 2 hours for continuous use, but I would just turn down the backlight, and make it last for 4 or 6 hours if the room light was good. I really liked it. It even had nethack. Good PDA functions, Python, word processing, spreadsheet (you only see 4 X 4 grid of cells at a time). I could have used it for MP3's if I had cared. No reader could do all of that.
I wonder how the Kindle will fare against the Eee or the OLPC. It's bound to only be a matter of a few years and there will be knock-offs of OLPC for general use. It can be set as a tablet. Backlight if you want or need it, not if you don't.
Interesting times ahead.
The response that the companies behind BSA will be strongly avoided is true. When enough people have been burned, the word will spread and those Companies will loose a lot of business due to "piracy" "prevention".
The truth is that fear based abusive businesses don't have a good future. Period. Microsoft and Autodesk are the two worst offenders. I knew of a business in New York that had an audit from BSA. It cost them $750K. The software in question was loaded on their network by the employee who turned them in. (Logs showed who did it.) days before he left. He had found out he was being fired. None of that mattered. To top it all off, the software had been legally purchased by the company, but that didn't matter. (And no, I didn't work there. Just knew a couple of people who did.)
The BSA approach to liscensing costs more than the software they 'protect' does. Having bought the software and registered it is no defense. When that really gets out, then many more businesses will realize, like Ball did that it's just a trap. A big con game. Realization is the first step to eliminating it. Let BSA style 'liscense management' factor into TCO calculations, and the outcome will change completely.
Read the article, it's a theory. They didn't actually build it. They just proposed it. to really do it, they need a real multispectrum transparent material with a negative index of refraction. (Same thing they need to build an invisibility chamber. Can you say "Unobtanium"?)
Experimental physics is littered with beautiful theories that never worked in practice.
Show us the trapped rainbow, please.
Wang built a dedicated word processor in the 70's. Radio shack did it again in the 80's. Both devices died when PC's became generally available. The word processor is just a word processor, the PC can be a word processor and much much more.
I don't expect different results here.
Answers to your questions
1. Price? $399.00 (US)
2. Backup books No, DRM will prevent transfer of books
3. Yes, fiasco down the road.
Things you forgot to ask about.
A) connectivity? only through a cell phone network you have to pay separatly for.
B) control? Remote, with Amazon or their assignees able to modify the memory of your reader remotely.
C) Book Cost? 9.99, higher than a paperback. They plan to sell you 'classics' for about $2.00 each. A classic is anything you can get from Project Gutenberg for free. This could be a problem for them, but they arranged it so that the connectivity ONLY goes through Amazon.
D) Image Quality? a 6 inch screen, 4 level gray scale. Expect a flash whenever the screen changes. Also expect it to take about 2 seconds to flip a page. That is typical of E ink displays.
E) Give/Loan/Borrow a book? forget it. See 2 above.
I hope this helps you decide if the system is right for you. It isn't right for me. I do read books on my laptop, and have read dozens on a PDA. The age of the e-book is here now. We already know the format that will win out in the end. It is called HTML. No mention if this reader can view either HTML or ASCII text. That probably means no.
A better reader for the price seems to be the Nokia 800 series Internet Tablet. The 810 also includes a GPS, so you can tell where you are too. I'm thinking the 700 series (now less than $200.00) may be a better choice for me. Just my opinion on this last paragraph.
As long as we continue calling net access via unprotected gateways, music file downloading, etc 'STEALING' we are not going to be able to deal with the problems that are real.
It isn't stealing. For music, it is copying without permission. that is wrong, but it isn't worse than murder, as US federal law currently maintains, and it isn't 'Piracy'. Piracy is a crime that involves murder, theft and the destruction of property, with rape and enslavement frequently thrown in. None of that happens on line. It isn't even physically possible.
For net access, there are less drastic means to fix things. I run a home network that is open. I know that at least one neighbor has used it for their access. For the occasional email or light browsing, that's not a problem. I pay for the connection so that my family can use the net. As long as we are not inconvenienced, we are not harmed. My ISP has contracted with us to provide a certain level of data throughput, so they aren't out. We can't exceed our contract amount anyway. Where there is no harm, there is no reason for a stupid law.
If I were running a business this would be different. Then, I wouldn't be running it wide open. Where someone has to break in, it should be illegal, but any open network connection should be able to be used.
Can anyone show me where I'm wrong?
P.S. I did have one incident where somebody was downloading something big, and we had seriously degraded performance on our home wifi. I solved it by unplugging the wifi for 15 minutes. Never happened again. Simple solutions are the best.
Nuff said
Does this mean that they are going back to the microkernal design they inched away from to get added reliability? If so, the BSOD comes roaring back.
OR
Does this mean that they are redesigning the portable windows system (CE) yet again?
We may have to wait through 3 more years of marketing to find out.
So, Cisco owes 800 million in taxes on 500 million of product? Sounds like we don't have to look far to find the reason for Brazil's economic woes. That's what? something like a tax rate of 160%? Hope that's a typo in the story.
How sad that the company whose motto was "Do No Evil" seems to be in bed with the foremost practitioner of dirty politics. how far the company has fallen. First the betrayal of Chinese seeking freedom, now this.
The stated reason is a croc. By posting political ads, Move on looses any right to claim 'trademark' status. If this were to stick as a precedent, it would absolutely smother freedom of speech. Suppression of disagreement was what the Democrat party that runs Move On wanted. It's a travesty.
The other side is not spotless either, but there is no well funded Republican dirty tricks smear campaign that even comes close to the absolute libel and filth of the Move On organization. Google just lost all credibility.
The only redemption would be a blanket rejection of anything by Move On too. Do you think there is any chance of that happening?
I see from the article that the patent system is working as intended.
Patents really exist to slow the pace of innovation down to the point where the legal system can deal with it. They are also intended to protect the large economic organizations from threats by smaller corporations that may not be able or care to carry the loads for the system that the larger entities do. (However inefficiently.)
That patents promote innovation is a propaganda line that has never been true. Patents were created as a mechanism to prevent the rapid spread of a technology that threatened a royal monopoly in the late 1600s. They have always been no more than a way to slow down or stop change in the economy.
Preventing other people from using new ideas is all patents allow anyway. To really use a patent, you have to have a large amount of money to spend on lawyers. The results are usually chaotic, with the normal result being that the side with the most money wins. Often by bankrupting the other side with legal bills. Private patent holders are even told this in court, with the judge agreeing. There are exceptions, mostly when the patent owner is a law firm (Patent Troll). Even then the systems works, as the Trolls increase the cost of doing anything in a new way to the point where only truly outstanding ideas are ever doable.
The problem here is that this crowd (Slashdotters generally) doesn't understand the real reasons for the system. They are falling for the propaganda reasons, which are obviously not working. If you understand the real reasons, the system is working just fine. Those very public reasons of 'promoting innovation' are only out there to dupe the masses, and allow for the usual corruption at the top to continue.
Next thing I know, you will be claiming that drug patents reduce the cost of drugs. I guess P.T. was right, there really is one born every minute.
They sued the wrong party. Should have been Flickr. Creative commons will be able to have thier legal fees covered, if they want to. Probably won't, though.
Velociraptor was a late dinosaur. there had already been birds around for a while. Not a bird, just a distant cousin.
Indications are that all dinos had down as young, probably had feathers growing up. May have lost them, if they were the large species, may not have. All the species I am aware of had stones in the chest cavity, when found whole, indicative of a gizzard. Like birds, the large species also had hollow bones. That saves weight. In birds, it helps the power to weight ratio which is vital for flight. In dino's it made possible larger body size. Preditor/prey ratios also indicate that they were warm blooded. Footprint evidence gives speeds of up to 45 KPH. Not often, but possible. That is very impressive for an animal the size of a whale. Most all of this evidence has come up in the last 30 or so years. Dinosaurs were not birds, but were in many respects bird like. It'll be interesting to see what else we can learn about them.
from the Article, It's non-nuclear, uses explosives, magnetic field nozzle. Claims 50% more efficient than Space Shuttle engines. Starship drive. Think about that for a moment. They are claiming better Isp than a hydrogen/oxygen engine using solid explosives, and proposing a chemically powered starship. They don't have a working model, or even a real process yet. Using explosives will result in relatively massive exhaust particles, meaning low Isp. I'd like to see how their physics works out. Seems like a rocket version of perpetual motion to me. Apparently they got a little NASA money, so they must know a congressman. But, I can see no way they can deliver on these promises.
Was Lyons a liability to Forbes, or was Forbes a liability for Lyons? After all, he was only supporting the magazines editorial policy in supporting proprietary systems verses open Source.I don't think that editorial slant has changed, has it?
on more than one level.
1. He was forced to accept that all of his sources for a series of stories were lies. (Rather with Bush's Guard service in the 70's, source MoveOn.org, Democrat party dirty tricks dept. Lyons on SCO's version of history or code or their own responsibliity.Source, SCO Group, formerly Caldera.)
2. He refused to change when confronted with the truth, insisting that the story was correct, even if based on a pack of lies.
3. He continued to insult the innocent even after having the truth thrust in his face.
4. He did all this to support the editorial bias of his superiors (editors).
5. He took the fall for the corporation. (ongoing for Lyons, recent history for Rather.)
6. Nobody bought the act, except for willing fools.
Looks to me like he almost exactly fits the Dan Rather mold. Now, he just needs to sue his bosses. Then his journey to the dark side will be complete.
IC's today are made photographically, on a flat surface. Manufacturers keep working to reduce the area needed for a component, be it transistor, resistor, capacitor or trace wire. We already know from lab work what the minimum possible sizes are for each basic component. We've come up on the minimum possible size several times in the past. Each time, it was related to the possibilities of the light source we were using. Now, we are up there in the extreme UV range, and have minimum feature sizes that are actually smaller than the wavelength used. The best commercial plants use a 45 nM wavelength. At about 30 nM, the traces (on chip wires) become unstable, and may no longer be conductors. That is a fundamental limit that clever plant engineering will not be able to surmount. Current commercial plants are using a 60 to 90 nM min. feature size, if memory serves. That means we have about 6 or 7 doublings (each doubling is about a 70% reduction in feature size and takes 2 to 3 years t realize.) That gives us 12 to 20 years.
Going to still smaller wavelengths means that the photons pack more punch. It's like trying to play billiards by shooting the cue ball with a high powered rifle. You get pieces of cue ball everywhere. When random photon collisions are pushing random atoms by several dozen radii, your nice ordered atomic lattice becomes a horrid mess. we are nearing the limits of what nature allows for photo lithography now.
Increasing chip size is not a viable solution, as the full wafer is used now. Increase chip size, and yield drops quickly. Yes, they could double the size of the chip to increase transistor count, but that would mean increasing the cost of the chip by 4X. That's not he direction we want chip cost to go.
Off in the distance, there are more real hard boundaries, beyond which no amount of effort will yield additional benefits. One of those is component size. Minimum transistor size is 7 atoms (it's been done). Minimum diode size is about 5. Minimum trace size varies with material. The best I've seen is benzene, at about 6 atoms width. Keep in mind that at room temperature, benzene is a gas. It's going to be very hard to make wires of the stuff. We really need a solid. Aluminum, silver, gold, all have been used, and all need to be 30 to 60 atoms wide or more, and several thick to be even a poor conductor. Some creative metallo-insulator engineered materials might allow for smaller trace sizes, but probably not. Please note that this is still smaller than buckytubes, which are also as tall as they are wide, creating other connection problems, so don't peddle that as a panacea. That means that the trace sizes required will probably be the final limit. Real capacitors are larger than the traces, but their size is really controlled by the number of electrons needed to operate the transistor/switch. I'm still betting on the traces as establishing the limit.
Heat dissipation is also a problem. It gets to be more of a problem as densities go up. Current best designs are operating half way to melt now. switching to silicon carbide would let us go hotter, say 400 to 800 C. Diamond/graphite bases would let it get higher still, though diamond heated to 1,200 in an oxygen atmosphere isn't going to last very long. Need some creative packaging there. Heat dissipation is the real reason we can't go 3D. The systems that tried to be true 3D, or near to it, all relied on the chips being immersed in some coolant and having channels for the coolant through the chip. Liquid nitrogen cooled some that IBM did a few years ago. bubbles were a problem. move the coolant fast enough to transport the heat before bubbling and erosion is a problem.
Some of these issues can be fixed, some can never be fixed. So, when we are fully 30 nM size with our components, it all stops. It's a problem with the wiring. Solve that, and we would be close to being able to compute with atoms. But, with what we think we can do now, the shrinkage stops in about 20 years.
Enjoy it while you can.
Looks like you
Any bright kid can find a way around the automatic nanny systems. There is only one solution that works. Here's what I did. Move the computer to the Family Room, with the screen facing the door. Our family room has one wall open to the Kitchen (the most used room in the house.) Now, when either his Mother or I were there, we could see what was on the screen.
I also took to checking the computer for where he had been. I only had to point out 2 times that his attempts to delete all traces of his 2AM trips to the porn sites had missed a few traces (deleted photos. Windows never really erases a deleted file.) He stopped using the family computer for that kind of thing completely. Of course, I still checked from time to time, till he moved out on his own.
A history list that is blank is the first warning sign. A simple search for temp HTML or JPEG's will often turn up the evidence. An undelete utility is handy too. A tool that reports locations where files have been zero'd will let you know quickly if there has been an effort to tamper. It's not too hard to keep a step ahead.
For those times when one of the children try to cover up the screen, I just killed the power to the machine. Worst case, I might have to re-install the software. Lots better than losing a kid to some online pedophile.I had to let the children know that there is no privacy when safety is involved. after a couple of kills, they stopped trying to keep us out.
Watch out for Myspace (and its clones) with young girls, they trust everybody and question nothing (except the parents). The boys are marginally better. Especially after 16 or 17. My favorite news story of the last year was where the 35 year old pedophile masquerading as a 15 year old boy onnline went to the mall to pick up the 13 year old girl he had arranged a 'date' with and found out that she was really a 45 year old cop who was working with the guys probation officer.
Sometimes there is justice.
You see, there is no substitute for parental presence. There never will be. If your boss wants to really protect her children, she needs to be there with them. Not out bossing you. Sorry, that is just reality. She can't have it both ways. None of us can. She will have to pick the one that is important, and let the other one go.
Ask any competent economist. We've known for over 300 years that every monopoly costs it's society more than it provides in value. That's basic economics. Whatever else it may be, IP ("intelectual property") is a limited grant of monopoly power. In fact, that may be the only thing that the various forms of IP have in common. (They are an legal limit on freedoms of speach and action of others. Without that limiting power they would be meaningless.)
For copyright, while the proponents will swear loudly that there would be no printing, music or literature without it, history is at variance with the claims.
The greatest works of literature in the english language are generally agreed to be the body of Shakespere plays. Old Will wrote it all without any copyright for himself or others. He was paid by the Globe for each play, with a portion of the box office reciepts. In non-fiction,
I'd stack up Moores Utopia, or Platos Dialogues with Socrates against anything you might find. In Science, I'm not sure you will find the equal of Principia Mathematica in anything since. So, copyright didn't help or even motivate the best we hever had.
In Music, the greatest body of works ever was that of J.S. Bach. No copyright there. He was paid entirely by patrons. Nobility, churches, towns, etc. (A similar system to bands supported by fans today.) The only one who even came close was Mozart (W.A. not Leopold). He didn't ever have a copyright either. Go further back, the best ever singer, according to the ancient sources would have been a greek named Orphius. He never had a copyright either. So, music is not the creation of copyright in modern times. It's more the prisoner of copyright.
Hang around any musicians group long enough, and you will discover that records don't make bands money. Concerts do. Even for a major hit group. The Rolling Stones are reputed to have made money from records, several million dollars worth. Even with RIAA contracts. But, they are also reported to have taken in well over a Billion dollars from just one several year long major tour. The money for Artists is clearly not from the corporations via copyright, it's from the fans.
In publishing, there are lots of examples of publishers who make money selling only non-copyrighted works. Dover for example. The problem publishers have is that anyone selling a work without paying a copyright liscense fee to (usually) another corporation, (not the Author) is that the public pays a lower price. the publishing industry lists that as a loss to the public, where it is really a gain. Money I don't have to spend on this book/movie is money I can spend on something else I want/need.
What I see really going on here is that there is a group that wants to be paid in perpetuity for thier limited labor. Infinite reward for finite work. Nice if you can get it. The guy flipping burgers at McDonalds would like to get a deal like that too. Should you have to pay for todays meal again every day for the rest of your life? How about for 70 years after you die. It could be a debt you heirs owe. Now apply that recursivly to every meal you have ever eaten.
When you try to apply copyright concepts to real things, you quickly begin to see why it is an inherently unjust proposition.
Copyrights (and Patents) may be the only surviving forms of slavery in the Western world. (Slavery is a system where one person gets the benefits of the labor of another person on the basis of a claim the the second person is the property of the first. Copyright makes the same type of claim with regard to the time or assets of the user of works claimed by the copyright holder.)
Want stronger copyrights? Well, everybody dreams they'll be the master, not the slave.
The argument is not if copyright damages society. It does. The argument is only how much the damage is.
I have an adblocker installed, but leave it turned off. I only turn it on if I am visiting a site with really intrusive advertising, or a site that lets the ads overwhelm the content. (cover it up, and not go away.) That's maybe 1 or 2 % of the sites I visit. Both indicate bad design, by the web site, or by the advertiser.
If the web sites are worried about this, they should try to remember that they want my business.
Site operators are walking a line here. Advertising pays the bills for them. Nobody advertises on a site with no visitors. Visitors don't come to see the ads. There has to be something else to bring them there. Ads get in the way of the things the visitors want. Some balance is required.
Ad blockers exist because many people believe that the advertisers are way over the line. Some advertisers are. I have had a browser hijacked. I've been annoyed when sound files started that I didn't want by some advertiser. When that happened, the site lost a customer (Are you listening, IBM? Don't auto start ANYTHING, EVER!!!). That's what made me switch from IE to Firefox. now those abusive people want to force me to switch back? NO!!! Remember, you need me, I don't need you.
So, yes there is a war here. The site owners are caught in a crossfire. They need to keep both sides happy, or reasonably so. Antics like the boycott of Firefox will only make sure I don't give that site my business. Look at what suing your customers did for RIAA and SCO. Record sales are off over 30% from the original Napster days. SCO's stock is now worth about 1% of what it was at 5 years ago. That way lies insolvency.
I wonder how a grocery store would do if they didn't allow people to shop there?
Radio stations advertise that they limit their commercial breaks. (3 in a row anybody?) Maybe these web sites should too. After all, why start a war you know you will lose?
If they want improvements to be donated back, keeping the system as a whole unified, then GPL is the proper choice. If they just want it out there, and don't care that someone else (or several someones) will soon own it, locking them out, then BSD might be the best choice.
The differences between GPL2 and GPL3 are minor. They should pick the license based on what results they want.
They can even dual liscense, with both a BSD and a GPL trunk. That way, they can see which one works best for them.
BSD licensing is for forking. In this case, the group really doesn't want to continue being bothered with the work. BSD/MIT is probably the best choice.
The BSD people have been beating this drum for over 10 years now. 'More Free' 'soon be massive defections from Linux'. Failure of these prophecies doesn't seem to deter these people from repeating them. Don't they ever learn?
Ever since Linux passed up the BSD's in popularity, we've been hearing this. It's not new, just another excuse to say it again.
If it hasn't happened in the last 12 years, it'll never happen.
Why do they still report this garbage?