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That's why they put lead around it and measure radiation doing presentations.

and I suspect the fact that there are gamma spikes at the start end 
end of the process are clues as to how it works too  ;-)

wrt public acceptance isn't going to be hard.   the system instantly 
shuts off if you remove the input current, so that a simple fuse 
in the system makes it highly safe, in fact much safer than any conventional 
fossil fuel furnace in case of appliance failure..  


my own furnace had a back-fire explosion two months ago...  this 
litterally ripped off and blew the whole piping leading to the chimney 
right into the opposing wall.

wrt printer, yeah, I REALLY hope he gets the plans out, I'll build 
one for sure.  my dad has a commercial machine shop with milling 
machine and all the rest.

I'd have sooo much fun with this stuff.  building toys and physics 
experiments with my kids.

btw, the one thing I have not seen answered wrt the Rossi invention 
is if explosions are radio-actively "dirty".   

if its easy to make these systems, and then eplode on demand, (by 
a simple switch it on) it becomes a rather disturbing technology 
if the explosion itself leaves radio-active elements behind.

And it's very little matter, that's involved in the fusion (if it 
work). I don't think, it'll be a big problem, unless the process 
can run uncontrolled somehow, like a fission meltdown. It's hard 
to judge, because the claimed process isn't very well understood 
(yet).

im using the hash-a-pass concept and i even wrote a rebol implementation 
for it:
http://onetom.posterous.com/cross-platform-hash-a-pass

Very nice Tamás. But shouldn't 'paste have a different name, based 
on what it does? 'Paste implies taking data out of the clipboard 
and putting it into a target location. I know 'copy is taken though. 
:-)

:-) I've used both write-clip and cc as shortcuts.

It is designed to plug into a TV through HDMI, not USB. More likely 
it is because this platform is apparently designed for educational 
use, and is programmed by plugging it into another computer as a 
USB device. At runtime it changes the USB port to host mode, though 
not the USB plug. Perhaps they expect it to spend more time being 
programmed than used.

Depixelizing Pixel Art: Upscaling Retro 8-bit Games http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2385811,00.asp

(unfortunately, original pages and also mirros seems to be down at 
this moment)

I can see the page, and it looks like a really cool algorithm!

Imagine Mario and all the other cool 8-bit games, but with this kind 
of graphics. Makes you wanna play them again. Or is the nostalgic 
factor removed, so it is dull?

The infamous hair dryer from last year has been replaced by a heating 
resistor. They got a lot of laughs for using the hair dryer to heat 
a supercooled valve and the valve failed, because the power to the 
hair dryer was lost.

Of other things, the liquid oxygen is no longer time critical (there 
is much more of it and the vaporization system is different) and 
radar control has fewer people running around. The launch platform 
itself no longer needs to be towed by a separate boat, but is powered 
by two diesel engines. Generally it seems a lot calmer and quieter 
than last year.

The quality of the reporting is atrocious, and is in no way scientific. 
I'm embarrassed that there is not a reporter on site, who actually 
knows what he's talking about.

I wonder how difficult it is to get an agreement, to do such a thing. 
What if the rocket fails, and falls to some crowded town area?

it does not. it only has fuel to go 16 kilometers up and the area 
that it can fall in is rather large.

but it did lift off and is now coming down again.

Commodore USA has released a new video showing their office, production 
area and the progress of both the new Commodore 64 and the VIC-Slim. 

Here's the link: http://commodoreusa.net/CUSA_FacilityVideo.aspx

Yes, and the broader point is that it can also be integrated as snippets 
in GUI apps

It means he's admitting that he's going downhill. And remember the 
organisation chart Doc found a while ago?

a little lighter topic:  http://www.sublimetext.com/2

the best generic code editor ever and it's CROSS PLATFORM since the 
beginning of the year and it's beta already!

im using it for a day and no bugs so far. it costs 60 USD to get 
rid of the "buy me" dialog after every 50th save, but that's the 
only pain point, i think.

here is the list why i love it:
- knows save on focus lost

- have the intelligent filename search (with instant file preview!!!)
- can open full folders
(no need to create a project for it explicitely!!!...)
- handles proportional fonts
- handles double width characters (chinese for example)
- beautiful default color scheme with black background
- distraction free "zen" mode
- no stupid dialog box config
- cross platform; which is good because

    - i can remote control less advanced users no matter what is their 
    platform

    - i can use the same interface and shortcuts on every platform; no 
    annoyance on switching
- not extremely bloated yet...

textmate eats less memory and the initial load time is shorter, but 
it's mac only, doesnt handle double with characters and gets confused 
by the proportional font too.

Pekr: yes, and it knows the multi-line edit too, just like textmate

TomBon: code folding would require code analysis. i don't expect 
a generic code editor go that far. if u really miss folding, go and 
suck with some bloatware IDE and suffer from all it's pitfalls...


i would rather organize my code in a way where folding wouldnt help 
much with reading...

i see u were contributing to a thread which started as a "scite on 
mac" topic and turned into an "oh, wait, it's not that obvious how 
to get gtk for a mac" pondering

scite is dual-platform only and geany has windows binaries only according 
to their official site.
why do u have to bullshit us saying it's crossplatform?
even this sublime thing was windows only until last year!

that was the only reason i mentioned it here, because the same version 
is available on the 3 major platforms (with proper font handling, 
unlike rebol..)

well both are win and x,  mac is no major platform. it's a toy ;-)

I was also asked about the Amiga, and I put REBOL and Red in there, 
too

Tamas - I actually don't use Sublime Edit for Rebol these days. The 
syntax file I have is from SE 1 - not sure it would work with 2 or 
how much it colored various keywords. If you want I can zip up what 
I have and you can try it out.

Love it............and yeah, not going to happen.

It's just bits and bytes set in a certain way, and they can be changed 
anytime. From a philosophical viewpoint, there's something fundamental 
different between software and a house.

red thread is rolling quickly so not to be overlooked: interresting 
toy for cheap: http://www.raspberrypi.org/ARM based 700MHz core 
256MB RAM 100 Mb Lan 2 USB ports, SD card reader  some (not exactly 
stated how many) GPIO, 1W power under full load, Quake3 and HD movie 
playing demonstrated. Linux supported from producer, but architecture 
not restricted to linux only.

could this be the project Carl is working on !? it is an embedded 
linux, its also more TV than computer since it supports only TV outputs. 
 Carl's low memory using Amiga Exec Background would make him a prime 
candidate for working on this project which has to boot Linux and 
allow HD decoding within only 128 MB (os+gpu Shared) RAM .

though if you have entangled pair, and you determine the spin direction 
of one pair, then the spin of the other is then set.  But .. the 
knowledge of the other spin is only known at the site where the first 
determination was made, and that information can not travel to the 
other site faster than light so perhaps the limit applies to that 
information?

Actually, despite the rift between Rossi and Defkalion, it seems 
that Defkalion is still on track to show their own tech (Rossi derived, 
I guess) in the near term. They just re-opened their forums.

and Rossi's own demo for October is still supposed to happen

Amazon announces crazy Kindle prices and their $199 tablet

it bugs me that they forked Android (based on a version prior to 
2.2) - that's a second strike. The first was that they bought Touchco, 
a very promising tech company which had one of the best and cheapest 
touchscreen implementations ($10/sq ft), good for both stylus and 
fingers. This should have been technology for the masses, not restricted 
to Amazon. Oh well, I guess it's still for the masses if they sell 
enough tablets with that tech, at some point. Forking Android though, 
screw them. With their user base, they have the potential to upset 
the Android cart.

Amazon is cool but they seem to have the MS mentality of ignoring 
standards... "embrace and extend" i guess...

Looks cool. I'm wondering, why spacecrafts always have a smooth surface. 
Pinguins are known to have very little resistance, when they move 
through water, and they don't have a smooth surface because they 
used to have feathers. Sharks have a rough surface, I guess this 
also mean less resistance, when they move through water. A golf ball 
fly longer with all its little bulges, than if it had a smooth surface. 
Yet spacecrafts have smooth surfaces.

About shark skin and swimsuits:

http://www.curiocity.ca/everyday-science/sports/item/1001-sharks-in-the-pool.html

And RIM has slashed $200 off their playbook line ...

A golf ball fly longer with all its little bulges


Other way around, it has dimples, and a sharks skin is sort of like 
plates, and work the same way.

Yeah, I realized, the correct word is "dimples". "Bulges" and "dimples" 
are not too familar words to me.

In danish, it's the same word, "buler", even if they go in or out 
of the surface. Sometimes the word "fordybninger" is used, and those 
only go into the surface.

Android 2.2 and 256Mb ram.  REBOL not preloaded

It's very impressive how he turned around Apple and how all the dots 
connected. The difference is, that he knew it upfront and we see 
it afterwards. That's what makes a great entrepreneur.

Yes, Steve was not really an inventor as he evented pretty nothing.

But he was the visionar who see what invention could be a progress 
for people way of life.

And he has also a good sense of design to make inventions "love-able" 
by people.

Leadership and invention must be mutually exclusive qualities :(

http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2685


neutrinos were not travelling faster than light speed ... the experiment 
did not account for the GPS satellites being in a different referencec 
frame.  They calculated to account for this and found the missing 
32 nanoseconds

As I understand it, the GPS satellite that does the timing is moving 
much faster than the earth and is in a different reference frame. 
 In the experiment, the neutrino source is moving towards the satellite 
and so the neutrinos appear sto be travelling a shorter distance 
in the GPS's frame of reference.

yes QNX is cool, some years ago I was looking for a microkernel OS 
and have checked QNX. a stable and fast OS combined with a GUI called 
photon.  

one of the cleanest GUI I have seen so far. perhaps MINIX with something 
like photon will evolve some day for a full server/desktop enviroment.

Some perspective on the passing of Jobs and Ritchie:
http://stream.cheatha.de/post/178915020/Image


(Should maybe have been in Humour, but I wasn't sure, if it's funny.) 
:)

This is what Elop just killed - http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/22/nokia-n9-review/
, making Nokia MS OEM, with zero differentiating factor to HTC and 
Samsung WP7 based phones ...

It looks like they took Mono's existing compiler-as-a-service concept 
and went with it.

I guess that's one of the benefits of the cross-propagation of ideas 
between MS's .NET group and their community.

Looks like it borrowed from Nemerle as well - the closest thing to 
REBOL with a C-like syntax that you could get back in 2005. I lost 
interest in Nemerle when they started supporting indentation-based 
syntax (that's a real turn-off) and when C# started adopting many 
of its features (such as what MS calls LINQ now). Roslyn is basically 
Mono.Compiler + LINQ.

We're using MS Entity Framework for a project and I must say that 
its the first API/framework from MS which, I think,  makes our job 
factually easier.   i.e.  it doesn't just re-engineer the same concept 
with new syntax.   Its an actual improvement in how a team can organise 
larg'ish project.

The Rossi test was completed yesterday, unfortunately again in secrecy 
and with only sparse data available.

NXP is about to manufacture DIP-packaged ARMs (Cortex-M0):

http://www.nxp.com/news/press-releases/2011/10/nxp-cortex-m0-microcontrollers-in-high-volume-tssop-and-so-packages-target-8-16-bit-applications.html


http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers/cortex_m0/lpc1100l/LPC1114FN28.html

Why would you think it irrelevant if you believe that it works and 
it is the basis of the same systems you still use today?

I think here is quite good reading what's going on in Adobe - http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-on-flash-player-for-mobile-browsers-the-flash-platform-and-the-future-of-flash/

Adobe managers really love HTML5, they are slowly leaving Flex as 
well:


Given our experiences innovating on Flex, we are extremely well positioned 
to positively contribute to the advancement of HTML5 development, 
starting with mobile applications. In fact, many of the engineers 
and product managers who worked on Flex SDK will be moving to work 
on our HTML efforts...

http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html

And I think MIPS had a custom R6 NDK version for MIPS. No idea about 
a R7.

Ah, and http://developer.mips.com/android/says the ICS sources are 
coming "mid december".

And maybe the R2 2.5 MIPS builds still work :)

And I'd like to apologize for that. The ARM build was made for my 
HP Jornada handheld pc (a netbook precursor) which had a hardware 
keyboard, then never updated to support virtual keyboards. Or the 
clipboard or command line either, but those weren't my fault.

HP paid $1.2bn for the IP and gives it freely to the OS community 
:)

At 4 pm Pacific on Sunday the 11th, HP will be selling 16gb and 32gb 
Touchpads for $99 and $149 respectively at their HP store on eBay

http://stores.ebay.com/hewlettpackard

So, we now have apparently the best mobile OS now open source, and 
we have a number of rebol clones appearing ... is there any synergy 
that can be built from this?

that looks fat, ugly, and far from the concept images we saw in the 
past. India's tablet beats it imo. This OLPC project was overhyped 
from the very beginning imo- http://www.ubislate.com/

Well, one should probably not underestimate the design of the XO-3. 
I wonder which one breaks first, if a child uses one of each for 
a year. Also, the OLPC contains much more beefy educational software, 
specific inputs for measuring equipment and low-voltage charge input 
for mechanical charging with handcrank and solar charging.


The cover can double as a solar panel with built-in battery pack, 
which you take off and leave out in the sun. When it's charged, put 
the cover on the back and the tablet runs off that battery.


When comparing the UI responsiveness, there is pretty much no contest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0OuUr1pZBE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5D06XQ1f3o

But the Ubislate is likely much cheaper to produce.

Henrik - I simply don't like things green, government funded, or 
done from public or any other dotations, especially when done fanatically. 
And OLPC is a so so project for me. Was OLPC1 or 2 any significant 
success? Well, Genesi, a commercial entity,might have better HW to 
share. As for tablet, I can't see much innovations there. Such projects 
feel like scientists got money to play, but with not much normal 
commercial focus. From such pov, and being funded by top companies 
like AMD, Intel, Google, I would expect a significant and radical 
innovative design, but it is not imo. One of reasons imo is, that 
none of those companies are willing to ruin their own market ....

Yes, there are two models. Old one, 366MHz, you found video for, 
and 7+ version, with following specs: http://www.ubislate.com/specifications.html

if we stick to specs, they are still quite a bit smaller than the 
OLPC XO-3, and is still not designed for educational use, other than 
being cheap. For children in India, price may be a valid point to 
simply allow it to spread, but the OLPC is designed in and out for 
educational use.

It seems they are just using a div tag. I run an adblocker in Chrome 
and did not notice the blackout at all.

Still have the blackout here ..and i see some fora are following 
this lead by closing down for the day.

I guess it depends on whether you know it's correct? I find it fairly 
reliable with having collections of information that would otherwise 
be hard or time consuming to gather. This is both for general topics 
and very specific topics. If I want to read up on the latest news 
on a developing technology (like Polywell fusion), I go there. Importantly, 
I also use the talk page to see, whether information has been removed 
or corrected for various reasons.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360?tag=nl.e539

I think, wikipedia is fine for basic facts, like what is the atomic 
weight of oxygen, or when did that person live, etc. With deeper 
questions, I feel, it become more and more unreliable.

Maybe not more and more reliable over time, but more reliable, the 
deeper the question is.

With deeper questions, I feel, it become more and more unreliable

 - this is a general statement that is not reliable as far as I can 
 tell. The Wikipedia is surprisingly reliable even when deep knowledge 
 is looked up, as well as it is possible to find even some surprisingly 
 basic facts that are not correct. I find Wikipedia surprisingly accurate 
 and correct, especially taking into account how it is being written. 
 For example, the last Wikipedia article I read contained informations 
 (correct, I have to add) which I did not find in the Stanford encyclopedia...

(the infromations were not even correct and missing from Stanford, 
but they were such that they made the corresponding paragraph in 
the Stanford encyclopedia incorrect, in fact)

(and form a basis for macros)

Ladislav, you seem to be measuring for positives, not for negatives, 
false negatives, or even false positives.  One of our former AltME 
members here was a Wikipedia "editor".  all he did was fix blatant 
mistakes, sabotaged data, etc.

I would send him errors I found every month.


I would simply argue that the accuracy of the data is the same as 
any academic paper, and a “function” of the number of eyes that notice 
something.

...and that example was not just "positive", it made the corresponding 
paragraph in the other encyclopedia incorrect exactly because it 
was supposed to be a complete list of available alternatives

However, I do not want to pretend that I use any measuring methodology; 
neither the statement "With deeper questions, I feel, it become more 
and more unreliable" did, though.

I think we agree it is "useful".  But, for example, I would never 
take ANY fact offered on Wikipedia and assume it is "true" without 
my own separate confirmation.  Nor would i use Wikipedia + some other 
source "together" to equal truth.  In other words, I would use Wikipedia 
to learn "about" a fact, and then judge a seprate source on its own.

But, for example, I would never take ANY fact offered on Wikipedia 
and assume it is 

true" without my own separate confirmation." - maybe there is a difference 
between domains, as Graham pointed out.


For example, I found it funny that Randall Holmes not just put a 
fact into a WP article, but he also wrote a (mathematical) proof 
in it, while some (poor thinker, IMO) marked the fact (which was 
mathematically correctly proven at the place) as doubtful, since 
there was no reference to some published article (LOL).

Nor would i use Wikipedia + some other source 

together" to equal truth." - well, I learned better from my experience. 
I was suggested the Standford encyclopedia as a reliable source on 
the problem I wanted to solve and found out that WP was corrected 
one point I wanted to find.

'In other words, I would use Wikipedia to learn "about" a fact, and 
then judge a seprate source on its own' - well, on the other hand, 
this is usually what you should do with any encyclopedia; find the 
pointers to sources where you can learn more, which is what Wikipedia 
does well enough for me

Both your example you gave of the "poor thinker" and Stanford would 
be examples of  other states like I mentioned as false negatives/positives. 
But these are all still anecdotal of course.  The question is not 
how many successes you can come up with, but how many failures anyone 
can find vs. a control (even “Stanford”).


So we are speaking to “trust” + domain.  For me, my trust is low, 
regardless of domain, with some domains being really poor.

hence John's "I [feel], it become more and more unreliable."

I too [feel] (and have a lot of examples) of it not be releable for 
me.

The question is not how many successes you can come up with...

 - interesting! However, my point is totally different. For me, an 
 encyclopedia is useful if I can learn about a fact something new 
 and find also pointers to relevant sources. When this holds for every 
 subject I look up (which it does for *my* usage of the WP), then 
 I do not need anything more.

And, when I judge also whether the recent (new) informations are 
mentioned, the WP is almost unbeatable

Certainly, there are many cases when I looked up an article, found 
the information I needed, and as a "thank you" I corrected something 
in the article (a typo, missing reference to a source, or even a 
correction of a formulation, etc...)