See..

http://opencores.org/

"'on arse most of the day'"

All the more reason to have sufficient exercise if you do have a sedentary job. Even some quite intelligent people think that exercise is merely an aid to loosing weight whereas exercise, reasonable weight and diet are all independent markers for longevity.

Reminds me ..

that someone a long time ago (17 or 18th century I think ) said " make time for exercise now or time for illness later"

Not gone into this in detail but it seems readily available...

http://source.android.com/source/download.html

http://android.git.kernel.org/

"The Android build is routinely tested on recent versions of Ubuntu (6.06 and later),"

One word

....claim !

"an adept, intelligent programmer"

First BASIC I ever had was a 6502 (UK101) with a whopping great bug in the garbage collector. That's how good he was.

"When we can get a solar panel that can literally power an entire car"

I think peak sunlight is only ~1kW/m^2. So I don't think we will ever see that except for exotic, lightweight cars running in a very sunny climate.

"With open source, the barriers to entry are lower."

Nonsense !

"happened in Linux"

After following the link it looks as though this 'attempt' was spotted quickly and wouldn't have made it to the compiled code stage anyway.

"cannonballs"

Probably just pass straight through relatively thin skinned ships. Might be nasty but not terminal.

"how to get Skype to work with webcam on my Linux box"

Funny it works on all 7 of mine ! - and they are all different hardware

"6-8 hours on the command line it takes"

Well I support 7 Linux systems and whilst I agree that they are stable, reliable and require little attention I can't agree with the difficulty of configuration. Using SUSE 11.2 I NEVER use the command line to install/configure and the last machine took 20 mins from start to finish (+ updates )

"..three spatial dimensions.."

Agreed, but I think the real magic is being able to tune the electronic properties merely by tweaking the size of the dots

"Note to self, only replace fuses with the correct values."

I doubt a 2amp fuse would have saved you - something was very wrong. Fuses are just not that sensitive anyway

Pretty impressive !

"until he sent pics from the exploded laptop "

And still able to connect to the interwebs !

"the pentane was driven off by heating to be replaced by air diffusing in"

Pentane should diffuse out readily even in closed cell foam

"OS coders will start to create the most nasty viruses"

That's a great way to win hearts and minds FFS !!

I think I'd like to pretend that you didn't say this

Re : Linux processors

"1.57 million cores dedicated to processing calculations, with another 98,304 cores for running the Linux kernel..."

Re : Paradox

A well-run company should return the $40 billion to its shareholders if it thought it had to spend all of it just to survive

"it's just a thought experiment."

It doesn't mean anything -especially in relation to the article and your comments about it

The space traveler example is more commonly called the twins paradox by the way

"society has that much cheap energy"

Energy will never be cheap !

Re : Point 2

So how come synchronized clocks with both train, stationary observer and moving observer will show essentially the same time throughout your 'experiment' and indeed after it ?

Measurements will only differ significantly at close to light speeds etc. unless the measurements are over large timescales

(Yes, I know this has been shown even with satellite clocks and commercial airliners but the time difference is very small, even with GPS satellites the velocity component of the relativity effects only equals ~7e-6 seconds/day - DLZ is claiming something - I'm not sure what I must say)

@ravenviz

"This is great news.."

Except for the horrendous amount of energy involved to make it - rather more than 11e-9 J I expect

Re : Photons...

This is basically nonsense.

Mass ( and energy ) do distort spacetime and light can be 'bent' by this but the amount of mass required to significantly do this is HUGE, otherwise you'd see gravitational lensing at every street corner Yet light slows reproducibly in even the smallest amount of material no matter how long the path.

"is that spacetime is distorted by mass."

Don't think this is correct. Spacetime is distorted by mass but that's not the explanation for 'slowing'

My understanding is that it is 'slowed' by interaction with the fields in the material & scattering - the photons do travel at c in the vacuum between particles.

"If mankind continues making progress.......colonising space will be easy"

Oh, really ?

"I can never understand why the idea of saving electricity..."

Agree entirely. In the UK 1 W..year ~~ £1

I too shifted to a dual core atom when they became available for my file/print/misc server

Ah but ..

The follow-on to nothing traveling faster than bad news was that a certain race developed faster-than-light travel in ships powered by bad news but eventually gave up visiting other star systems because they were always unpopular when they arrived.

@Red Bren

With a monumental amount more quality control, Microsoft could eliminate Trend's raison d'être...

There fixed it

"I mean in nature, nothing is faster."

According to "The Hitchhiker's Guide..." nothing travels faster than light EXCEPT bad news.

"I drove a Tesla to Land's End from London "

How much did the hotels cost on the way ?

"tricks left in his selves."

Christmas is coming - do you mean ELVES ?

Are they (much) more than 3kW?

They are indeed - although in the UK a ring main is 30A.

HOWEVER the real point is that there isn't enough generating capacity to charge vast numbers of electric vehicles esp. if people want rapid charging

Nice..

Asimov reference

Hardware requirements

From OpenSUSE 11.3 (current release)

The following requirements should be met to ensure smooth operation of openSUSE 11.3:

* Processor: Intel: Pentium 1-4, Xeon or newer; AMD: Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, Athlon 64, Sempron, Opteron or newer

* Main memory: At least 256 MB; 512 MB recommended

* Hard disk: At least 500 MB for minimal system; 2.5 GB recommended for standard system

* Sound and graphics cards: Supports most modern sound and graphics card

Presumably they are wrong too. Firefox is the default browser and OO is included

But

why does it zap your mind ? - it's just physics

"Firefox is sitting at 335MB "

105MB + 20 shared here

Total load with KDE + firefox ( 5 tabs) + Thunderbird + Dolphin + Sys Mon and all the services = 430MB

"512MB is just about enough to run Firefox *or* OO.o"

Nonsense

"So why would anyone be surprised "

I'm not surprised you're anonymous !

"we want CHOICE "

Just like our desktops ??

Energy Required. →

True enough about the energy demands but it is truly awesome. To get 1 tonne to 10% light speed takes the equivalent of ~1e11 MW.hrs and the same again to slow down

( or ~~£10 billion at UK electricity prices )

"herding animals via GPS"

If there is a valid patent for "herding animals via GPS" then herding sheep falls under the category of obvious in the strict patent sense.

"it took 5mn to load.."

OpenOffice takes ~ 10 secs to load & load a quite large spreadsheet from a network drive on my system even using an old celeron laptop. So something's wrong

OpenSUSE 11.2 and OO 3.1.1.4

Yes, OO is not quite as good as Office and indeed using v large spreadsheets it's too slow but for most people it's fine

"we are the only technological spacefaring race ....."

OR the only method of travel is sub-light and too slow and energy intensive to allow any sig. expansion

"so I estimate there are at most 42....."

I guess the downvoters haven't read "Hitchhikers...."

Re : Pah!

It's accuracy is known to ~50 parts per billion which is rather better than the Hubble constant which is ~ +/- 2%

AFAIK