Why is the State Department working to get the former president of Honduras reinstated when the official report from the Law Library of Congress states:

V. Was the removal of Honduran President Zelaya legal, in accordance with Honduran
constitutional and statutory law?

Available sources indicate that the judicial and legislative branches applied constitutional
and statutory law in the case against President Zelaya in a manner that was judged by the
Honduran authorities from both branches of the government to be in accordance with the
Honduran legal system.

Why are we paying for department of expert lawers to answer these kind of questions when the answers get summarily ignored? Should we be worried that the our president is supporting an executive who attempted to subvert the constitution of his country?

I got some flack on the article about the Teals Roadster for the statement that batteries need to improve by about a factor of 20 before electric cars will have the same long distance capabilities as gas powered cars so I've decided to publish a more complete explanation.

For the purposes of this exercise we'll consider a hypothetical 4-door sedan. This particular model seats 5 adults and has a large trunk capable of carrying the luggage that a family of five needs for a road trip. It has a 16 gallon gas tank and can travel 400 (highway) miles on a tank while carrying that family and their luggage. Finally, this car is equipped with a modular engine that can be removed and replaced with an electric propulsion system. Likewise the gas tank can be removed and replaced with a battery (we want to make this comparison apples-to-apples)

The efficiency of this car when powered by gasoline is about 20%. When it is powered by electricity it is about 90%. Efficiency in this context means tank(battery) to wheel. Since we are comparing the ability of these devices to store energy the efficiency of pulling crude oil out of the ground and getting into the tank as gasoline, as well as the efficiency of generating and transmitting electricity and charging the battery are outside the scope.

First let's figure our how much energy is necessary to move this family of five and their luggage 400 miles on the highway. We know that it the engine consumes 16 gallons of gasoline, which contains 1.9 gigajoules of energy. Since we also know that the engine wasted 80% of that energy the actual amount of work necessary to move this vehicle 400 miles at highway speed is 387 megajoules. In order for our car to make the exact same trip at the exact same speed on electric power, we need a battery that can store 426 megajoules (90% efficient).

How big will that battery be? To start with lets convert 426 megajoules to electrical units: 188 kilowatt-hours. Using the most optimistic numbers we have for lithium-ion batteries today gives us an energy density of 160 watt-hours/kg and 360 watt-hours/liter. Our battery will weigh 2,600 pounds (compared to 97 pounds for gasoline) and take up 138 gallons worth of space. Even if we assume that the frame of the vehicle can handle the extra weight of this battery there is no way you are going to fit it, five adults and their suitcases on your trip.

Are electric vehicles great for getting around in town? Yes. Are they ready to replace fossil fuels for long-haul travel? Not yet. When you see that batteries can store 4 kilowatt-hours per kg and 3 kilowatt-hours per liter then you'll know that batteries have caught up with gasoline in terms of vehicle energy storage.

Ever since they added comment moderation to this site I have always browsed at -1 threshold.

Now apparently this is not possible anymore with the new discussion system. I can no longer move the little slider all the way down to show all comments regardless of rating.

Bullshit.

I've been reading Slashdot for close to a decade now, and in the last week I've got my first ever foes.

Now I'm curious as to why...

The State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs Committee of the New Hampshire legislature has introduced a resolution specifying certain actions of the federal government which would nullify the constitution of the United States. They also call upon the other states in the union to adopt similar resolutions.

That any Act by the Congress of the United States, Executive Order of the President of the United States of America or Judicial Order by the Judicatories of the United States of America which assumes a power not delegated to the government of United States of America by the Constitution for the United States of America and which serves to diminish the liberty of the any of the several States or their citizens shall constitute a nullification of the Constitution for the United States of America by the government of the United States of America.

That should any such act of Congress become law or Executive Order or Judicial Order be put into force, all powers previously delegated to the United States of America by the Constitution for the United States shall revert to the several States individually. Any future government of the United States of America shall require ratification of three quarters of the States seeking to form a government of the United States of America and shall not be binding upon any State not seeking to form such a government; and

That copies of this resolution be transmitted by the house clerk to the President of the United States, each member of the United States Congress, and the presiding officers of each State's legislature.

The Past:
I played around with Jabber back in 1999/2000 when it was still new. In installed a server, set up some transports and played around with the clients of the time (I can't remember which ones). While things were initially promising I found that the system had no concept of a meta-contact. If I had a friend with Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN accounts then I had three seperate contacts. So I gave up on it and forgot about Jabber for several years.

The Present:
I don't use instant messaging much, but my wife does every day. Her family and friends live in another country where most people do not have computers in their homes. Every day her mother will go to a local internet cafe and log in to MSN (Live messenger) in order to use the webcam. Fortunately there is a MSN-compatiable Linux client (aMSN) that supports webcams (but not sound). My wife doesn't understand why she can't use voice chat to talk with her family, and wants me to install Windows so she can use the "normal messenger".

So by now Jabber/XMPP should be ready, right? The audio/video protocol Jingle was released a few years ago by Google and several IM clients support various forms of audio/video chat so by now surely all the pieces are put together...

No.

I decided this morning to study up on Jabber again. Fully expecting to find enlightenment, I open up a browser and search for "gentoo jabber howto".

...so apparently there's not much activity. I dig a little deeper and find that wikipedia has some information. Now there are seven server programs to choose from. Some projects are dead, some are commercial, a few are written in java and ...erlang?

jabberd-2 seems to be the successor of the server program I used before. It does support transports for the network I am most interested in (pymsn-t). Unfortunately pymsn-t seems to be unmaintained. On the plus side we have a someone wanting to continue development.

Digging deeper into that thread, someone actually suggests that a XMPP user should be able to send files to a MSN client user, but not receive them in order to push adoption of XMPP! Good idea - deliberately make a program feature-incomplete to subtly break backwards compatability with older programs. (where have I heard that before?)

So I'm back to square one. My wife can do video chat, but not voice chat with her family. No solution exists that will let me install one XMPP client and communicate everyone, regardless of the network they use (even if I'm willing to run the server myself). Maybe in a few more years.

There needs to be an equivelant of bash.org for memoriable slashdot quotes.

Possibly, however doctors and scientists tend to have stricter standards of proof than "making shit up" or "google searching".

-st0rmshad0w

Soccer moms will be the downfall of western society. Hordes of unvaccinated kids that live in super sterile conditions so they never develop an actual immune system that then get crammed into overcrowded daycares cause mommy and daddy have to work four jobs to pay for the house, white picket fence and the "think of the children" special edition SUV will be the source of the next great pandemic.

-Duradin

the theory of advertising is that even if you don't like the ad, that it makes an association between the brand and the product.

Those jingles are powerful, I still remember old one from years ago.

Like last night when I drove past a gas station and heard this in my mind: "Quick Trip makes today's pancaaaaaakes"

Um...

Dorothy: Hello XXXX.
XXXXXXXXX: Hello
Dorothy: Welcome to HP Total Care for Pavilion Notebooks. My name is Dorothy. How may I assist you today?
XXXXXXXXX: How do I find a compatable docking station for this model of laptop?
Dorothy: I understand that you want the docking station for your notebook model. Am I correct?
XXXXXXXXX: yes
Dorothy: Sure, I will help you with this regard.
Dorothy: To proceed further, could you give me the serial and product number of the notebook?
XXXXXXXXX: **********
XXXXXXXXX: ******
Dorothy: Thank you for the information.
Dorothy: Could I have a few minutes of your time while I look at the computer's configuration in my database?
XXXXXXXXX: OK
Dorothy: Could I have 2-3 minutes of time to check for the exact information?
XXXXXXXXX: ok
Dorothy: Thank you for your time and patience.
Dorothy: I apologize for the delay.
XXXXXXXXX: no problem
Dorothy: Let me explain in this regard.
Dorothy: As you notebook does not have the expansion port to your notebook.
Dorothy: However it is not possible to connect your notebook to expansion base.
XXXXXXXXX: ok
XXXXXXXXX: thank you
Dorothy: as I searched the entired database.
XXXXXXXXX: sorry for the inconvience

Why is Google better at finding old Slashdot stories than Slashdot is?

I was trying to find some old story I remembered about some TV executive that said that all people who skip commercials are thieves.

I typed my query into Google:

site:slashdot.org PVR commercial theft

Result: The exact story I was looking for was the top result.

Try typing "PVR commercial theft" into the slashdot search bar and see what happens...

My uncle is an assistant for a senator in a state legislature. Recently, they enacted a bill requiring government documents to be stored and transmitted in "electronic format."

Unfortunately the state agencies complied by scanning all the paper forms into PDF format. So now, he and his colleges are drafting a new bill and want to clarify that the electronic documents must be capable of being edited. They don't want to specify a particular document format, to prevent getting locked in to a specific technology.

I can't think of the specific term he's looking for, so I'm asking Slashdot. Here's your change to influence the law of a rather large state. What term would describe electronic documents that can have their data manipulated, instead of storing it as a graphical black box?

Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. Economists love incentives. They love to dream them up and enact them, study them and tinker with them. The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he can not fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme. His solution may not always be pretty - it may involve coercion or exorbitant penalties or the violation of civil liberties - but the original problem, rest assured, will be fixed.

I'm falling down the slippery slope. I just added another slashdot friend for no particular reason, and now I'm making another journal entry. Soon, I'll be completely overcome by the dark side. Mostly this entry is here so my most-visible journal entry doesn't have "fuck" in it.

...
...shit

Battlestar Galactica continues in 2008 ?????????????????

WHAT THE FUCK?!?

It seems that Linus has given approval to merge Con Kolivas's new super cool process scheduler into mainline.

The 2.6 version of the process scheduler has been a mixed blessing from the beginning. This scheduler has the potential to fix the last(only?) significant regression incurred in the 2.4 to 2.6 transition.