But the way forward is clear. Make internet surveillance legal, and a free and open society will blossom, untroubled by questions of legality

As far as the difference between deflagration and detonation, you may find this helpful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Why do I say it's hoped that they will replace scramjets? Because aerospace and military engineers are spending millions of dollars working on trying to engineer them as a replacement for scramjets and hoping they succeed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

I was apparently mistaken about there not having ever been a PDE powered flight... looks like researchers flew one for 10 seconds at an altitude of 100 feet with engines that create detonations at a frequency of 80 Hz.

I imagine a power station that could harness the power of nitroglycerin. Nitro is cheap as hell to make and releases incredible power... I'd love to try and build a plant that's buried deep in bracing rock and uses a very dense inert metallic alloy as a hydraulic fluid to harness the incredible power of cheap organic explosives.

I've talked to an accountant about this and we're both convinced this was an RCMP sting. They announced there was a vulnerability on their website about six hours before they patched it. That's either totally stupid and insane, or it was a police sting and they were just waiting to see who would be stupid enough to try and break in through the open door. Please have a seat.

Excel is about the only component in the MS Office suite that is still arguably superior. When it came out on the Mac almost 30 years ago it was revolutionary. And this is from someone who was quite adept at Visicalc and Quattro. OTOH, it is my wish that no one use MS Powerpoint anymore. It is dated and ugly. MS Word is truly useful in a few use cases, buy mostly it is just that people know how to use to get simple tasks done and teaching them how to complete those tasks differently is cost prohibitive.

Due to the way MS products are licensed, and the cost of training, and the fact that the average person gets confused easily with software, it is cheaper for large organizations to buy the MS products for use by the minority of users that actually need it.

I am sitting in a $890 chair right now. any good company will do it. I'm thinking you haven't priced real office furniture as the standard desk I am at is $2300 and it's a no frills Steelcase.

You're missing something. Diesel engines are internal combustion engines.

That's why I posted...

if you are talking about throw away worker drones or server machines, then no. There is no data on these machine, the costs to swap them out are minimal. I recall a place that had racks of a few hundred machines, a dedicated person to swap them out, and two died a day. Putting anything but the cheapest product in there would have been a waste of money. But the data machines, those were special. Probably cost more than the combined servers the fed to.

Likewise, worker bee machines that are pretty much dumb terminals are not going to use SSD. But other machines that people actually do and store work on, that may be something different.

Look, tape is on the order of penny per gigabyte. Hard disks are somewhere between 5-10 cents a gigabyte. SSD is about 50 cents a gigabyte. Many people still back up onto hard disk even though tape is more reliable. We are going to use SSD because there are benefits that justify the order of magnitude increase.

Why do you need a stitting and a standing desk? just get an engineers or draftsman chair and sit at standing level when you need to.
Or go all out and buy the power up/down desks. I prefer the tall stool chair that way I can change it up as I need.

There is zero real proof of this. Where is the 20 year study comparing the office workers to the shop workers? This is as bad as all those GNC studies on how their products make me healthier.

So sleeping under and overpass or in the park is better for them... How honorable you are to support keeping people from at least having a roof over their head.

CM is there for both preventing fuck ups and dealing with them when they occur. First things first: do you have a test environment? If not, build one. Do you have documented processes? If not, document them.

Proper change management ensures that: 1. people in the group know what is going on. 2. you have a second/third set of eyes to ensure that you have both a plan, a backout plan (or plan B in case it can't be backed out) and a test methodology to ensure that a change hasn't broken things. 3. to make you think about the implications of what you are doing, and 4. that business stakeholders are informed and know how to plan around any impact both expected and unforeseen.

If you aren't doing all of those things already, sorry dude but you are just winging it. That's efficient, etc. until one day it all goes horribly wrong and you need to figure it out on the fly how to get back to normality, with unpredictable outage durations, etc. All of that should be worked out before going live with your changes.

Yes, it sounds like a lot of faffing about for no real benefit, but really, one day it will save your arse. And really, you will be surprised at just how many effects even a single change to a production system can have.

Yes they did, I was told it was on an active account, specifically a gophone account. I had to fight to get them to deal with this. After talking to that rep I was transferred to a "manager" which had an even thicker accent.

It was the 3rd person I had to talk to after being transferred all over the place. You might follow the rules, but a LOT of your fellow reps do not. Regularly I get told different information by two different reps, it seems that either you guys do not get trained consistently or the offshore people are utterly useless.

My most recent AT&T fail. I wanted to change plans and get a new phone as I was eligible for a new one. well the CSR changed my plan and then told me I had to pay full retail for the phone because changing the plan removed my eligibility. He refused to fix it and it was only customer retention that fixed it after I said, "well then Cancel all my accounts if you can not do that"

suddenly something that was impossible was possible.

Umm.. so the article was focused on the abstract idea of increasing efficiency of thermoelectric generators. The practical idea (and even the article title) was about how it might be able to power a car more efficiently. But yet you focus right in on how it's never going to work. (Why yes, I DO understand the carnot limit of heat engines).

The article never talked about massive gains in heat efficiency for power plants, just scavenging waste heat. Right now we have massive cooling towers at power plants to get rid of waste heat, which sometimes provides problems for increased temperatures of waterways. If you could make an efficient thermoelectric device like this you might be able to take some of that waste heat and turn it into usable electricity, reducing your cooling needs and producing power at the same time. A 600MW coal plant going from a 33% efficient to 34% would produce an additional 18MW. That's not bad. At .02 a kilowatt hour, that's nearly $9000 a day.

So no, there's nothing really to "debunk" here, since no claims are really made about large gains in efficiency.

One thing that surprises me is that every talks about Byte, but not the spin off of a great column in Byte, Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar. Circuit Cellar is a bit expensive, and very technical, but if you like really making hardware it is a must. Circuit Cellar is the part of byte that was hardware making. There was another part that review and broad industry connections, another part that was software, and of course the musings of Jerry Pournelle. If you are into reading international English fiction, Granta is also a must have.