Yes, but the stuff hitting the mooon in the past has been all-natural, and as we know, natural stuff is always safe, it's that nasty artifical stuff that'll kill you.

The key point here is actually that it's an optical-scan machine! You don't input votes on a keyboard or touchscreen but by feeding in an actual human-readable piece of paper (maybe it asks for confirmation that it read it correctly?), which then gets stored in a lockbox. This is obviously the Right Thing because it gives a built-in hardcopy audit trail.

In short, I think we're missing the SuddenOutbreakofCommonSense tag on this story...

Oh, and it's worse than that. Even if you had the power, suppose charging Li batteries was 99% efficient (I think it's more like 90%??). So of that 300KW you're charging with, 3KW is being converted to heat inside the battery while your charging - probably several times that - and it's going to be tough to manage this without frying the battery even if you have the power.

horsepower fortnight

"How much more black could it be? None. None more black."

Right now, every solar-panel production facility on the planet is supply constrained. Therefore, what NJ is doing is paying extra money to ensure that solar panels are installed in NJ, rather than in, say, Arizona, where they actually make sense without massive incentives and produce three times as much power.

Why does New Jersey hate polar bears?

I'm pissed at ATI for dropping binary support for FGLRX for Linux kernels later than 2.6.29, and was considering getting an Nvidia GPU in my next laptop, but now it looks an awful lot like Intel is getting my $50....

It was my understanding they had only dropped updated support for older cards (R500?), which are pretty well supported by the OS driver these days anyway, now that ATI is publishing specs again. Am I confused?

More likely an Exadata 3, or 2S, or something.

Exadata 1 was just preinstalled Oracle on HP hardware. Exadata 2 is essentially the same but with Sun x86 gear replacing the HP. Neither of these have the sort of numbers Oracle is promising here, and they've all but said it's Sparc. I'd guess it's a cluster of Sun T5440 (4 socket, 32 core, 256 thread) Sparc servers (which have very respectable throughput, despite marginal single-thread performance) with Oracle RAC and some sort of Sun disk array, probably with some kind of big flash/SSD component providing much of the performance boost.

A microkernel is just a performance hack. :)

Probably, but so was Linus in realising that Minix isn't actually useful, and wasn't on a path to become so.

In the end do it the only way it could have worked; backwards - shimming a microkernel underneath the Linux kernel and calling it a "hypervisor" instead, and nobody will notice it's the same thing...

You don't understand - this isn't about science, or space travel, this is about pork, pure and simple. NASA has turned into a jobs program, and easy cash for contractors based in the states of these key congressmen - to the point where now, despite their huge budget, they really can't do anything useful in terms of launch.

The Augustine commission pointed out that the whole current setup is an expensive disaster, but Congress doesn't want to hear it, because they're only interested in keeping the cash flowing to their districts and/or campaign contributors, and who gives a rat's ass if any actual science or engineering gets done?

Well, that's just a book cypher, though, and is plausibly crackable (I'd maybe gzip it first and then work from that, but it's still not random); it's only a 1-time pad if your pad is *RANDOM*. And really, really random, not pseudo-random, or randomish.

Everybody knows this is just a cover for their work towards zerglings!

The generators used on a ship are most efficient at about 80% of full power; if you run them at 20%, you waste a lot of fuel. So if you only need 20% most of the time, what you do is run the generators at 80%, 1/4 of the time (while charging batteries) and run off batteries the rest of the time.

Freedom of association and expression is a univeral human right, as well as an American value. You're so blinded by your need to scorn the latter that you can't even see the former.