If we can send 35 billion to these banks every couple of weeks, we should damn well be able to afford $150 mill for some needed space probes. It's only the long term future of the continuing human instinct to explore our world and universe!

...defines a classic as having to break new ground? or is that just your personal opinion?

The original post doesn't say anything about limiting his readings to books announcing initial discoveries.

The Bryson book illuminates the context and connections between hundreds of scientific discoveries, as well as some of the coincidences or dumb luck that helped them come about. It somehow manages to do so in an engaging and entertaining fashion.

Keep in mind, also that many /. readers do NOT have 4 year degrees from institutions where they were forced to take a broad collection of science courses. As such, the quantity and variety of topics covered by Bryson could be a useful first exposure to many people in need of a little broader scientific perspective.

Writing biased to the Left? How? Unless you are talking about the places where he points out that it took 80 years to get the production of a harmful poluttant outlawed etc., which comes up a couple times, but that could hardly be called left leaning. He's just reporting the facts.

It's not a current classic, but will probably be one in 100 years. "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson is a phenominal read that covers all the main discoveries on most scientific disciplines. And it's somehow a page turner as well!

The original dutch article seems to show that the WRE 060 windmill actually was producing 6kW (6000 Kwh/year) as opposed to the 485kWh/year listed in the english summary. That seems to make sense as that design clearly has the most blade surface area.

At 6000Kwh one 3.3 meter diameter windmill could nearly power a US household. Add to that that the vertical shaft orientation lets you put the generator on the ground without an efficiency sapping 90 degree CV joint, plus it lets you increase capacity by adding another blade-set above the existing two without an increas in diameter (just height and horizontal loading).

So, that design seems to be the most promising to me unless I have gotten something wrong, which I'm sure someone will point out!

I also fail to see the point. Each server is going to add X amount of heat to the room as it operates, so the AC system needs to remove X amount of heat to maintain a stable temperature. Overall, the AC system has to do roughtly the same amount of work. The higher room temperature will give you a greater temperature difference for your exchnage medium (water usually), so that shouold give you some higher efficiency as you cool it with ambient outside air. Based on the previous post, however, it looks like this increased efficiency will be lost by the added power required for the CPUs to run at the higher temperature (they will actually be producing more heat than they would if running cooler). End result... Basically no real savings, just a pissed off IT team. While there may be ways to reduce data center cooling costs, this isn't it!

From the post: "Great in theory but some of the industry already bases battery figures on a two-test measurement, and the results are still wildly inaccurate"

So What?... As long as they begin to publish true measured figures (Idle & Loaded) as opposed to some guess that they would make, then spin in the marketing department, no-one can complain if their own results vary. All the manufacturer can do is publish what they can measure. Any specific user who claims that their performance differs needs to understand that that there is no more reliable way to predict performance for their specific situation. Therefor, this can only be seen as an improvement.

I did. and it sounds like there is a very strong legal case. The laws governing the conduct of prostitution are different from those governing copywrite, so what craigslist is doing really is illegal. It is illegal to "facilitate" the commitment of illegal prostitution activities, and craigslist knows that this particular section of the website is unsed widely for just this purpose. After being presented with vast amounts of evidence of this illegal activity, they have made no effors to try to weed out the illegal activity, so the Sherrif's last resort is to sue for injunctive releif. The internet is a great tool, but that doesn't mean that it is perfect or can't be used for illegal activity.

Big drawback is ease of use... The interface was designed by the engineers and really sucks, but it can do a lot and comes in a redundant pair config, so you always have a standby unit to take ofver if the first one dies.

Many readers may already know this, but Atlantis has most likely already been found, as near as we humans will probably ever be able to tell anyway.

If there was an actual place and society that inspired the fictional tale of morals and corruption spun by Plato, it was most likely the Minoan civlization on Santorini and Crete from around 1600 BC. It was an advanced (for the time) civilization wiped out (or at least dispersed forever) by the cataclismic eruption of the caldera that formed the ring structured island. This link has oner of the better discussions of the issue without all the hyperbol and passion that many 'seekers' often display.

http://www.decadevolcano.net/santorini/atlantis.htm

Yes, this bozo is a huge dumb-ass, and so are the editors for approving this story!

I'm 99% sure that if he had tried to run it, it would have siad "This program is intended for a different version of Windows...yada yada yada" and closed.

Are the editors losing their minds?

Sorry, I should have said a "dangerous" black hole can't be created by us. If you check out other posts you will see that a tiny compressed stable mass would most likely act like a nutrino and only absorb particles that actually touched the event horizon, which would be very very rare. So, most people don't believe that a stable concentrated mass can occur from the LHC, but if it did, it would take biollions of years to do any real damage. So again, why do people continue to act like this is news someone should care about?

A black hole CAN NOT BE CREATED By US!!! Even if several thousand atome worth of matter were smashed together into an area one millionth of an atomic nucleus, one thousand atoms worth of gravity doesn't amount to anything in the scale of the real world. even if these atoms stayed in that configuration for many seconds or minutes, they still don't have enough mass to create gravity that could start pulling in other matter, especially since the collisions are set-up in a very high vacume and all the surrounding matter (sensors etc.) are bolted very tightly to a very sturdy base. The fact that people continue to debate this issue just astounds me. A tiny bit of concentrated matter is still only a tiny bit of matter, no matter how much you consentrate it! Remember, a true black hole has the mass of a star in an area the size of a single atomic nucleus, so that's some pretty consentrated mass. You can hang a lead ball on a 2000 foot string next to a granite mountain face and only barely detect the deflection of the ball on the string. Gravity is a very weak force people.

I'm thinking that there is still plenty of evidence of the 8 year administration of GWB without the tightly controlled version provided by the offical whitehouse site. PLus, doesn't Google cache everything forever?

This is what's wrong with our country. The only thing that matters to anyone is stock price, so now the SEC needs to investigate the timing and details of a CEO health announcement??? How does that have anything to do with the long term outlook of the company. This is the most assinine thing I have ever heard.