Fantastic.

Let me count the ways... I just want to uninstall a game, I don't want to update Steam. I need that disk space back now, not tomorrow.

They solicited me several times to go to expensive dinners I can't afford, and now they want me to buy "which mitt" mugs. Is it a plot to attempt to drive me to the republican party? It's not going to work, I'll vote third party this time no matter what.

I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.

Here's your chance to do something for the web. When a story is posted that requires javascript, JUST SAY NO.

Requires Javascript;Didn't Read. FTW.

Fight back against douchewaffles like Gawker Media who don't understand the web.

I am getting tired of your popups, and the fact that your facebook app does not support https makes me laugh at your notion of security. I dub thee douchewaffle. Time to look for another free antivirus. Will not recommend Avira for corporate use evar.

Drupal.org now has to run scripts on your computer to render the page with styles. What idiots.

I guess it wouldn't be Civ if it didn't crash ALL THE DAMNED TIME. They appear to be allocating video memory and then never freeing it. What year is it?

heh heh

Now, I don't condone this behavior, but if you're getting ready to test a script, why not aim it at www.santaclarafurniture.com? I'm tired of them spamming CL :)

$ sudo ./survivorUpdate1.run ./survivorUpdate1.run: error while loading shared libraries: libglade-2.0.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64$ sudo ./survivorUpdate1.run ./survivorUpdate1.run: error while loading shared libraries: libglade-2.0.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

getlibs didn't fix
nothing in the faq, nothing easy to find in the bug db
hate hate hate stupid installers that add nothing.

I am in as much awe of Jobs' influence as the next guy, but we're talking about a company that under his watch set itself up as the guardian of morality. And we have people writing whole articles about how the 1984 commercial was the truth, man. It's clear that The Onion has it right. Jobs was a technological visionary, but he was also a holier-than-thou asshole. I am not glad he's dead. I'm not even sure I'm glad he won't be helming Apple. I am sure that he doesn't deserve worship any more than any of the rest of us flawed carbon units.

Cops are evil. Oh sure, not all of them, just the ones that post in fora. Note that this is the google cache, because after this page received a lot of publicity, they deleted the thread.

I posted the Boston Review story Why I Was Maced at the Wall Street Protests by Jeanne Mansfield to my Facebook wall, and it faithfully appeared ("via Links") on my wall. When my friends saw the update, however, they did not get the link. So I posted it again, and the same thing happened. And I posted the URL in a comment, and the comment disappeared. So then I posted the URL with spaces in it in another comment, and the comment did not disappear. Facebook is deliberately filtering comments containing the URL for the story. This is hardly conclusive evidence, of course. They could just be massively incompetent. Sorry, not buying it any more, not since they started releasing their code.

Here are the basic numbers on aailable geothermal vs solar power (since this has come up in discussion more than once).

The surface area of the Earth is about 5.1 x 10^14 m^2. The cross sectional area is about 1.3 x 10^14 m^2 (one quarter of the surface area, of course).

Per this paper found as a cite on wikipedia, the total heat flow out from the Earth's interior is 4.42 x 10^13 W, or 0.0867 W/m^2. Of course, the available power is much less because it's only the subsurface-surface temperature difference that's available.

Total solar irradience is 1361 W/m^2 by NASA's latest estimate (so about 1.7 x 10^17 W across the entire cross section), or about 1000 W/m^2 on the surface at noon on a cloudless day. Averaged over the day-night cycle (surface area vs cross-section, so 250 W/m^2), and taking clouds into account that's about 180 W/m^2 (I can't find a solid source on that yet, but it looks close).

So, total solar power flow is about 4000 times as large as total geothermal flow. I'm not quite sure how to estimate the (ideal) available power as a percentage of the total geothermal power flow, but if we use a WAG of 50%, then the available power from solar is also about 4000 times per square meter more than geothermal - significantly more if we average solar power only across populated latitudes.