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They've capatured anti-hydrogen .. next is anti-CO2 and then we can 
get rid of the excess CO2!

There is no sound in space, and there is no excess CO2

Perhaps we can use this THREE YEARS, to simply revert to somethign 
like xwindows, or even EPS, which simply works, and make a new web 
that vector and scales, and is small and fast.

That's called the Next, and the web was invented on it, so we're 
supposed to already have it

That is what I had in mind when I wrote that.  I still own both a 
BW and Colour Next.

And the heavier it is the better?

Can't they bring in like 10 in remote controlled firetrucks that 
would spray water and go out for refiling while next one comes? (they 
made ad-hoc remote controlled cars in myth busters so it can't be 
that hard)

and don't japanese have all kinds of robots? (I know ratiation can 
screw electronics, but it seems it's not that hard, those chopters 
and firetrucks that they use now surely rely on electronics too)

or just construct the pipes and pumps that would use seawater near 
to constantly water it? They transport oil across continets in pipes 
no matter how far the water is, they sould be able to make a constant 
suply in there.

or probably 100 other things that seem better than driving in with 
human controlled firetrucks and flying over with a helicopter pouring 
water on it.

There is probably no money in developing equipment for handling nuclear 
accidents, if one only happens every 25 years, as it just adds to 
the cost of building reactors, reducing the financial incentive to 
build them in the first place. Also even though many reactor designs 
that are supposedly better than the current ones exist on paper or 
are in research, there is apparently not enough people working in 
the field of research and licensing to move such reactors into production.


There are reactor types that work entirely with passive cooling and 
can be evacuated for 72 hours before anything happens, but they are 
still at the research stage.


Putting the reactor in a big hole might be a good idea, but it depends 
on the location and how an earth quake would affect the hole.


It seems that many of these accidents are due to very clear design 
flaws or overriding specific safety procedures. That's a positive 
thing, because it means, it's not impossible to build very safe reactors.

unfortunately, what I call flat OOP (limited inheritance & polymorphism) 
is very effective and functional programming isn't a substitute for 
OOP.  The fact that the page talks about OOP being anti-modular, 
IMHO, clearly shows a fundamental lack of understanding for that 
paradigm.


the problem here is not OOP, its how people have granted it the "golden 
hammer" status that it never should have gotten in the first place. 
 The problem is that people have diluted the core ideas behind OOP 
by bloating it out of its purity.   


When you look at the huge mess that are the current commercial frameworks 
like java or .net, then it does seems like OOP has somehow failed, 
but in reality, going back to basics and teaching how to leverage 
OOP properly would have been a better decision IMHO.

Hmm, a subset of C and ML. Maybe the anti-modular comment refers 
to modularity in the large, e.g. system modularity, which I agree 
with. 


I'm not sure about bloating out purity though Max. Yes, the three 
legs it stands on are easy enough to list as bullet points, but even 
early works (not going back to Simula's era) like Booch's OOAD talk 
about notations and other heavy additions, along with the view that 
we needed OOP to help manage complexity, because software is inherently 
complex.

when I mentionned purity I guess I should have used a more descriptive 
sentence.


I really meant to say, objects, being used as objects.   nowadays, 
OOP (the paradigm) is used for every part of software, even parts 
for which its ill-suited.


OOP is not about the language, its about the logical step after structured 
programming.   grouping things together.


why stop at OOP, they might as well re-introduce the GOTO as a viable 
pattern.  :-)


OOP when its used without all the "advanced" object patterns, is 
incredibly effective... just look at the Amiga OS which was almost 
totally OO in its layout and use while still being coded in C.

I don't know that I would say *after* structured programming. Grouping 
by binding code and data together is not the only way, though it 
can work well. I think we're on the same page. And I agree with Brian.

@Graham and vice versa

(ignoring the issue wether that question even makes sense to ask, 
or wether the factual situation implied is indeed the case)


because the concept transcended it's OO roots and turned out to be 
more generally applicable, or even just _also_ applicable in a different 
context?

viz the success of subtyping (in programming languages) and subtype 
polymorphism which arguably rooted in "OO" (simula) have long since 
transcended this paradigm

Not in Europe or the Americas -- still prime time for announcements 
of R3 and such things,

and NZ would be at GMT

We have constant daylight savings here. That's why the time in Jakarta 
which is two hours flight to the east of us is one hour behind the 
time here. The sun is at  its highest between 1:00 and 1:30 depending 
on the season.


There was a rumour that the Prime Minister who made the change did 
so because he was fed up with the senior civil servants playing golf 
before going to work.

And the reason it persisted .. it makes sense??

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/japan-earthquake/4857821/Tsunami-hit-towns-forgot-warnings-from-ancestors


Interesting ... the Japanese had been for centuries creating stone 
tablets warning people not to build below certain points .. and these 
were serving as coastal warnings.  But in modern times they were 
in many cases ignored.

Old technology ... but it did save some who paid heed and built on 
ground above the tablets

And the neighbours had built below the line?

Yes, and her family. I suppose. The tablet story wasn't mentioned, 
but she specifically built her house higher up

These tablets were pretty explicit .. warning of tsunamis after earthquakes 
yet people still went home to secure possessions, and died in the 
following tsunamis

It doesn't say anything about knowing and ignoring :-/

It takes about three generations for people to forget. Those that 
experience the disaster themselves pass it to their children and 
their grandchildren, but then the memory fades

It's now on youtube and close to 100% of the predictions came true

Institutional memory and its failings are common problems in many 
spheresl and once an institution starts making a mistake, it tends 
to repeat it every institutional generation or so.
  Military examples: http://hnn.us/articles/45305.html

   college fundraising examples: http://cooldata.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/data-disasters-courtesy-of-mordac/

Decades ago there was an article I think in Byte magazine about a 
method of backing up by printing it in some type of dense data format 
.. and you could purchase a scanner for about $300 to scan it back 
in again.  Anyone remember this?

funny how I am starting to like the guys at comodore usa !  :-o


when I read through the forum on their "fan" site, the guy in charge 
is quite level headed, knows the scene and actually embodies more 
of the spirit that went into the first commodore & amiga.   just 
do it.

he is getting bashed all the time and he replies with a good attitude. 
 I think he just was lucky (had the opportunity and will) about being 
able to license both commodore and amiga from the two different license 
owners at the same time.


If he can give me a better linux experience at a reasonable price 
I might just go and get one.   and yes... having a C64 cased PC *is* 
geeky cool.

the only problem is that they are not using any decent video cards 
in their machines, so that sucks big time.   sorry, but all of the 
intel cards are extremely sucky.   they don't even compare to 4-5 
year old mobile cards from ati and nvidia.

It appears that the VIC Pro and VIC Slim are available for purchase 
now. -- http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_Store.aspx

Yes, and this tendency seem to spread to all electronic equipment.

If just we had resource economy ... ;)

and everyone would have a 60 inch OLED screen  :-D

Wow. Recent ACM and IEEE issues have had a number of articles on 
just how fast we've moved to the cloud, and that it will only accelerate. 
They also discuss technical issues that need to be addressed, but 
I don't think any of them have said "the big cloud providers could 
go down for 30 hours."

Even though my instances and EBS volumes were in the affected zone, 
I'm not aware of any down time for  me

Kaj, what were you using to try and upload?

Amazon are blaming some network issue .. EC2 didn't actually go down, 
but the EBS did.  There was some type of cascading failure possibly 
as some type of replication went out of control and used up all available 
storage.

Anyway the post mortem will be interesting .. and hopefully Amazon 
will have a more durable product as a result.

I was using S3Sync, which is written in Ruby and more or less abandoned, 
so I was suspecting an incompatible protocol change, but I couldn't 
find anything

Kaj, the Ruby language itself is pretty clean. The *implementations* 
of the language mostly suck, and there are some problems with the 
underlying semantics that made some of the implementation problems 
inevitable. The language was designed to look pretty. However, they 
are working on making the implementation better - that's why there 
are so many implementations - and there have been some efforts to 
clean up the semantics too. It's slow going though, and they are 
slowed down in their efforts by having most of the implementations 
not run on Windows very well or at all, which cuts down on the developer 
pool drastically. It is not uncommon to have projects written in 
Ruby be converted to other languages when they get useful. Java is 
a pretty common target for these conversions - this is one of the 
reasons JRuby is relatively popular.

I have friends who program in Ruby for a living, and every one of 
them has independently asked that I redo the language from scratch, 
similar to Red or REBOL.

Ruby. I've been asked at least 6 times, by people who didn't know 
I've been asked before, but knew about my work on REBOL. One friend 
even made sure I learned Ruby just so I could tell him about the 
semantic issues of it, and possible workarounds.

btw, im seeing windows guys switching to linux or mac because of 
ruby and it's higer and higer in demand, so the developer pool is 
expanding pretty well (which i can tell u as a core member of the 
singapore ruby brigade ;)

That happens a lot. What happens more is developers not being able 
to switch away from Windows for other reasons, and so using a different 
language instead. That is why Ruby gets used more for server/web 
stuff than for client-side stuff.

Yes. Most business work is still native GUI nowadays, and most programming 
is still business work.

It was 4 months or so ago when I read them, so I don't have the link. 
I was looking at job stats at the time to see what to learn next. 
I wouldn't be surprised if the trend was to more web programming 
in the future, because a lot of developers are looking for excuses 
to use Linux on the servers, and ways to support the OSX laptops 
they do their audio stuff on, while the businesses they support are 
all running Windows on the client. I've seen a lot of consultants 
try to push web-based stuff because they hate Windows, but it doesn't 
work very well a lot of the time. Still, developer pressure is cumulative, 
so eventual change seems likely.

Yes, one of the analysis companies, and it wasn't pushing an agends 
(not hired by MS).

Most of the Ruby programmers I know have Mac laptops because they 
make electronic music on the side, and picked Ruby because of its 
OSX support. The rest run Linux on the desktop. Some do both.

If it's true, it would hardly be a reason for MS to abandon their 
desktop toolkits and push HTML5

MS is pushing HTML5 in order to convince developers to not abandon 
IE. Programmers who have to do business work have to run their stuff 
on web browsers with no HTML5 support. Despite what MS says in the 
HTML5 presentations, they aren't abandoning desktop development tools 
or Silverlight any time soon. The HTML5 guys are in a different, 
competing department, so they have no say over whether the desktop 
development tools go away. Only the developers who are outside of 
MS and use their tools have any say.

For that matter, MS's Windows 8 plans are going to depend a great 
deal on improvements to their desktop/tablet/phone development tools, 
since it will have to support 3 platforms: x86, x64 and ARM. The 
.NET tools are critical to that, the same way that LLVM is critical 
to Apple.

And Chris turned my version into a protocol

And now the latest version of R3 doesn't run on Syllable, either

the limitation with the R2 and R3 interface is that you can't upload 
large files

Sorry, but all this spells immature, and that's no way to build products

If you port that to Syllable Desktop and downsize it one or two orders 
of magnitudes, I'm willing to have a look :-)

And I pre-paid for a 3 year Windows instance a month or so ago :(

And besides, they run the machines that cut out the wooden shoes

and the wooden shoes are burnt to make steam?

And here's a picture of my turbine http://www.compkarori.com/images/air403.gif

which creates vortices and lots of noise

I was going to short it during the night which basically puts a break 
on the whole thing.  And leave it going during the day

I think you can even create tiles of the PV panels and use them to 
cover the roof

And I think I've seen flexible ones that can wrap around objects

To maximize the benefits from PV panels you need to track the sun 
and not the wind!

Most passive sun trackers use an inert gas which vapourises and condenses 
elsewhere changing the balance so that the whole thing pivots with 
the change in weight redistribution

And sadly the Savonius design is very inefficient.  I helped my child 
build one for her science fare though .. still got it.

It could be interesting to compare prices of electricity around the 
world. Also the prices, Reichart and Max give, are they total prices 
incl. all vat, tax and distribution?


In Denmark, where I live, we pay around DKK 2.00 in total per kWh, 
that's USD 0.39 per kWh. 1/5 of that is vat (danish: "moms"), almost 
half is a special tax on electricity, and the rest is split in actual 
price of electricity and its distribution. See pie diagram here:

http://www.dongenergy.dk/privat/El/omelprisen/Pages/om elprisen.aspx


In Denmark 25% of our electricity comes from wind mills, many located 
in the ocean. If some of you pay 0.075/kWh, that seems very cheap.

Geomol, you have perhaps noticed, there is a discussion of the merit 
of the wind mills, due to the enormous expense on building and maintaining 
them.

The brilliance of the electricity tax, is that it doesn't make economical 
sense to switch to solar or wind, since it's not a tax on the source, 
but on electricity in general. The best way is probably to have your 
own solar installation and use the government's program for allowing 
you to sell electricity back to the power plant by having it hooked 
up to the grid instead of using it to supply your own house. Each 
user is allowed up to a 6 kW installation.

I just noticed, we also have to pay subscriptions, DKK 12.50/month 
for el, DKK 67.50/month network (electricity network, I guess). That 
USD 15.57 per month in subscriptions.


So to get full price, I should figure out, how many kWh, I use for 
a whole year, times price per kWh, add subscriptions and divide by 
kWh, then I have full price per kWh.

the cost of windmills energy depends on the quality of the winds. 
 they can be amongst the most efficient power sources because the 
very low initial cost and upgrade costs.  ultimately, when we'll 
know how to harvest the sun properly, probably through chemical photosyntesis(nature 
is rarely wrong)   every other energy source will seem "dum", a part 
from fusion when we find a cost-effective way to do it.

The biggest news, and most promising, seems to be around the Rossi 
process. It's amazing how something of this magnitude is not covered 
by popular press. Not surprising, because of the bad rap the field 
got at its start, but the lack of coverage says a lot about how the 
scientific establishment operates.

With all the recent problems in Japan and the rapidly increasing 
cost of oil, something that is this close to being usable in production 
is being totally ignored.

They funded the early research too from 1992 to 2005, but funding 
ran out in 2005 and a lack of results could not get the research 
funding renewed. It's a near miracle that the research started again. 
this happened, because the main researcher, Robert Bussard was going 
through test data from their last burnt out prototype and discovered 
interesting numbers that suggested that the principle actually works. 
Still no funding, and Bussard went public to get funding, even setting 
up a paypal account. Bussard then died in 2007 and other researchers 
took over the funding issue. They got the US Navy to start funding 
it again, built another prototype to verify the results and they 
turned out good. After this a plan was posted for more prototypes 
and then they went silent.

What I find amusing is that Robert Bussard worked on ITER early on, 
saw that it wouldn't work and left and basically worked in a garage 
for 10 years with speaker magnets for pocket money, while ITER received 
billions for barely any progress.

Polywell is gigawatt class fusion and is not likely to be something 
you put in your car, so LENR might supplement it well, if it can 
be done small-scale.

Polywell is advantagous over ITER in that the design is much, much 
simpler. The output is electricity and helium, so no conversion is 
needed to put it on a grid. There are still arguments over whether 
neutron radiation will be produced, when used with the pb11 fuel, 
but if not, then none will be produced, as there will be with ITER.


The disadvantage is the requirement for size, which probably is going 
to be more than 3x3x3 meters for a small-scale system, but it's still 
small enough to put in a submarine or a ship. The other disadvantage 
is that you probably will need 1-10 MW plant in front of it to start 
it, but once the process starts, it runs on its own.


Another point is safety: If you add too much or too little fuel, 
the process simply stops.

We won't know, as the state of development is still in understanding 
the physics and there is no public device that has worked for longer 
than a few milliseconds. After that, there are still engineering 
issues to overcome to build a production device. The researchers 
last said that the first real device could be in operation within 
5-10 years, which still is 50 years before ITER.


As far as I can tell, LENR is further ahead. But from what I can 
see, they are not in direct competition with eachother and there 
is a need for real table-top fusion.

Rossi is an engineer - he's spent a good amount of his life on this 
and lots of his own finances - up until now, it's been out of his 
pocket. Why doesn't it seem reasonable to want to profit from something 
like this?

the best discussion on this subject is on the vortex list. If the 
subject is of interest, start around mid-January when the news broke 
and work forwards. You'll find lots of very qualified people discussing 
Rossi. My take from what I've read is that this isn't a scam - there's 
been lots of precedent over the last two decades. Rossi has finally 
gotten a repeatable, consistent process, that's all.

http://www.mail-archive.com/[vortex-l-:-eskimo-:-com]

the main IP he's trying to protect is in the composition of the catayst 
he uses along with the main ingredients of the reaction, regular 
hydrogen and nickel

the post for the Jan conference is here. Start at page 1 and work 
forward and you'll get a very good sense for how this whole thing 
is being perceived

http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360#comments

and usually, the terms have to be "reasonable"

he has had a prototype unit (about 10kW if I recall) heating a building 
for about a year prior to the public announcement. The plant(s) (there 
will be one in Greece and one somewhere else, I think) coming this 
year, hopefully, will be the validation of the process everyone is 
demanding. If you read at the above links, you'll see that his intent 
isn't to stop the technology from being used by as many people as 
possible.

And no VCs jumped on the wagon yet? Can't believe it.

Robert, production is ~ 0.01/kwh   so very cheap...   and the minimal 
size is the actual device we see... 50x50x100 cm...  this is very 
cool... it means we could actually see "home-sized" units in time.

production for units is 2011, with first shipments by year's end.... 
I mean... this is major.  its not "future" tech...

 its possibly the biggest energy revolution of the century, and it 
 went totally under the radar.

me too, I'd install a unit for myself and my neighbor. with a closed, 
permanent loop for heating and cooling.

meanwhile - we've kept on crapping on the planet, and even now, with 
the stuff happening in Japan, plans are underway in different parts 
of the world to move ahead with new nuclear fission reactors

the world is just waiting for a way to make energy without the requirement 
of special geographical resources.   this might very well be it. 
  nickel is a pretty abundant resource and there are mines all over 
the world.

and well, I hope there will never be a shortage of hydrogen  ;-)

if, within a decade, it has be proven that the device is as safe 
as traditional oil furnaces are (we all accept that we have a bomb 
in our houses... so I don't see this as being any more dangerous).


I'd say that we are talking about a shift in the need for huge powerplants, 
in the long run.  if, I can use a kg of nickel for a few hundred 
bucks, to heat/cool my house and its water for a few years... why 
would I even consider using electricity/oil/gaz instead?

and reduced dependency on fossil fuels as well.

my fear is that the "nuclear" aspect of this process, especially 
at this time, will cause alarmists who don't know the difference 
between fission and fusion to oppose it