Slashdot Mirror

War is irrational assuming that both sides can come up with an actual estimate of how much damage they can possibly do to each other and then negotiate.

But they can't. War is messy and uncertain.

So they fight, because that's the only way to know if they can win.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/06/friction-in-theory-and-practice.html

^ read that and you will understand the logic of asymmetric warfare too

I've seen it written that Google themselves blew the whistle on this issue, but I don't know that for a fact myself (the origins of its discovery are missing details).

Sort of. It went down like this:

Random conspiracy theorists to the EU: Google is eavesdropping on wifi communications while driving around taking Street View pics!
Google: We are not eavesdropping.
EU: Hmm, are you sure you're not eavesdropping?
Google: We're not. See, we can prove it.
Google: ...
Google: Ok, we checked our records and it turns out we did eavesdrop on wifi communications. But it was accidental!
EU: I'm investigating.
US: Me too!

It was a request from German regulators which got Google to do its initial internal investigation. But following that investigation Google self-reported that it had violated EU law, instead of trying to cover it up. That's largely why I don't have a problem with these no-fine or small-fine "don't do it again" judgments against Google. It's not like other violations where the company claims all along that it did nothing wrong. Google already admitted they screwed up; they're just saying that it was an accidental screw-up not an intentionally malicious one.

c.f. Apple which basically did the same thing to build their wifi map database - pulled location and wifi data off of iPhones without notifying iPhone owners. But they just denied everything (the only way you know they did this was because they soon dropped their licensing contract with their wifi map provider), attributing it to an erroneous configuration setting. And pretty much got away with it because they didn't willingly provide regulators with evidence to make a case of it as Google has done.

While you don't want the type of mistake Google made to go unpunished, you also don't want the punishment to be so harsh as to create a big incentive for companies to cover this sort of stuff up in the future. It's easier for everyone if they self-report this stuff.

Some complementary work done at UT-austin

Instead of a membrane matching the impedence of a "meta-material" made by punching regularly spaces in a wall (kind of like a meta-material drum), the UT-austin work describe holes made with a "meta-material" approach. Basically a hole with some transverse tubes cut a regular intervals to create resonances that change the effective impedance parameters allowing pretty much lossless transmission through the hole (kind of like a meta-material horn).

The Hacker Dictionary does not even offer a pretense of objectivity - to suggest that a non-systematic summary of a straw poll on Usenet groups he frequented is sufficient for a 'social anthropologist' to draw sweeping conclusions about Hackers certainly seems like egotism. Generalising his own personal characteristics and views as being the views of all hackers is pretty much par for the course for ESR.

I was going off of the strength of what he's published; Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla, Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Art of Unix Programming, etc., all of which have been widely cited by open source proponents. But let's ignore all that, I mean, anyone can publish a book that gets picked up by one of the most respected names in the field: O'Reilly, am I right? Usenet at the time was a good representative sample of the community, in the same way Slashdot up until a few years ago was a representative sample. It is not perfect, of course, but it certainly has more weight to it than an Anonymous Coward posting a handwave.

Deepak Chopra has published several books on quantum mechanics, but that doesn't mean I have to accept his views on physics. ESR's other 'anthropological' views include the view that black people are substantially less intelligent than other races and are inherently prone to violence, and some pretty genocidal opinions. And what about his interesting views on homosexuals:

Pederasty, at least, remains a common behavior among modern homosexuals... To the extent that pederasty, pedophilic impulses, and twink fantasies are normal among homosexual men, putting one in charge of adolescent boys may after all be just as bad an idea as waltzing a man with a known predisposition for alcoholism into a room full of booze.

Am I supposed to take him seriously about these things as well?

Ultimate Terror Weapon

Medicare name correction cannot be fixed after 2 and a half years. See blog at: http://medicareharderror.blogspot.com/ #healthcare

latest games and software

To be fair, Obama didn't win the Nobel prize for ending wars. He won the prize for not being Bush.

To be fair, the genetic engineering techniques pioneered by Monsanto have enabled us to correct that.

Check Out Most Hottest Photos Of Katrina Kaif

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--QpavhZBvxU/UHNOf86tS3I/AAAAAAAAAYc/o4FP-qmUfT0/s1600/ghostbusters-4.jpg

You never know what kind of bright lights the EPA can create though...

I immediately envisioned this (SFW)

http://boblansdorp.blogspot.com/2012/10/microphone-and-speaker-based-sonar.html We used the speakers to make clicks, and the microphone to pick up the sound :)

Google uses ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange for its SSL implementation, as long as the client is modern enough (i.e. everything except IE on Windows XP). That provides forward secrecy. Even if the NSA had the private keys, they wouldn't be able to snoop on anyone's traffic by passively sniffing - they'd have to mount an active MITM attack, and that is much harder to do, and even harder to do undetectably.

• how-bulid-30-diy-steadycam
• Frugal Floater
• Krotocam

I am fairly certain it depends on the arch/dome curvature.

Good point. I should have said that a dome can be designed so that the stresses are primarily compressive. My point was that otherwise they wouldn't have been able to build the Pantheon with unreinforced concrete. I'm always amazed at how they managed to figure out good design rules without any mathematical stress analysis. Obviously they managed, though it may have involved a few things falling down or at least having to be patched up post-construction (not that that doesn't happen nowadays). Perhaps it also had to do with only slowly evolving their design/construction techniques, rather than making big leaps.

It makes sense: if you have a very low curvature the arch/dome trends toward being a flat beam and is obviously is experiencing tension.

I thought of the same "degenerate case is flat", and there must be a point where that becomes true, but if you have a dome that's a large portion of a sphere (e.g. 180 degrees), the tensile hoop stresses occur towards the bottom, and one way of dealing that is to reduce the portion of a sphere you're using (e.g. to 140 degrees). The whole "tending towards flat" may be covered by the fact that these simple analyses apply to domes that aren't "thin", which is defined by the ratio of the thickness to the radius. IIRC thin domes are structurally called shells.

Shame it's a Saturday, otherwise we'd almost certainly have some actual structural engineers chiming in. Some interesting references:

http://masonrydesign.blogspot.com/2012/03/thickness-of-dome-walls.html

http://site.iugaza.edu.ps/marafa/files/Spherical-dome.pdf

I will say that it is a shame we don't see as many flying buttresses anymore (haha).

Why haha? Not only are those cathedrals beautiful, but they sure do last (at least if you don't bomb them). IIRC they did have a few failures while they were working things out though.

I don't understand why this Closed Cycle Brayton will work with a Thorium plant but not with a conventional nuke plant. So it would seem either that [1] a conventional plant will have the advantage of not needing water as well, or it would be cheaper or more efficient to [2] make a Thorium plant use cooling water and thus as likely they will have it.

Very insightful, pointing out the difference between use of water in the reactor and water used for (conductive) cooling. At the moment the word 'conventional' implies the use of solid fuel and a loop of water inside the reactor for moderation and cooling, and the use of phase transition (water to steam then back to water again) to drive turbines.

[1] Brayton would work with a Pebble Bed Reactor where the solid fuel is encased spherical 'pebbles' of graphite moderator and inert gas such as helium is used for cooling. There is no phase change, the helium remains a gas which varies in temperature.

One such experiment was the THTR-300 breeder in Germany, which attempted to leverage the pebble concept into reality and managed to do so from 1985-1988, despite some problems managing the solid fuel. It was not a proving ground for Brayton though, the helium was used to heat water in a Rankine (steam) cycle.

Pebble Bed Reactor designs are also considered to be "walk away safe" despite these problems. The danger of graphite igniting if the reactor is breached and the helium replaced by air seems to be overstated, but there does remain the possibility of ignition if it is reduced to dust (such as in a steam explosion, as happened at Chernobyl) or if it comes into direct contact with the solid fuel at the center of the pebble.

So both 'conventional' rod-and-pellet and Pebble Reactor manufactured pebbles both share one important characteristic --- the necessity of an extremely critical solid-fuel manufacturing process where a failure of workmanship has undesirable results.

But I wonder though as a layman (disclaimer!) if there is at least one major unresolvable problem with the pebble concept --- and that is how could you be confident you could take the reactor below critical in the presence of multiple mechanical failures? As compared to the salt concept where gravity alone drains the fissile salts out of reach of the graphite moderators with sub-criticality greatly assured.

[2] Though your biggest safety win arises from removing all water from within the reactor and its containment building, the power plant itself could employ water to assist in cooling. In coastal areas LFTR waste heat is envisioned to assist in desalinization.

Sorensen discusses the prospect of substituting a Brayton for a 'conventional' Rakine steam reactor here, citing concerns of efficiency and operating temperature where the heat necessary to drive Brayton places 'conventional' solid fuel configurations in jeopardy of melting.

You seem to have no idea about dutch traffic laws.
While driving on the road, I will come up to a sign that says that I have to move myself and my scooter to the bicycle path, probably because it was deemed that the following road situation is too hazardous for the scooter.
And please don't call me names, I haven't been rude to you.

Here we have signs like this: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-uZh1eqAvzak/T7Pl3mWBfLI/AAAAAAAAAj0/2PgDN807HkM/s1600/Brom-fiets+bord.png
On these bicyclepaths I am not allowed to drive on the road.

Making a car safer to drive because accidents becmoe more survivable is not the same thing as making accidents less likely, which is what we've been discussing. Those two cars will of course behave differently. Do you think that the presence of an airbag or a seat belt materially affects the car's handling? Of course not. The differences are due to a litany of other changes to cars over time.

As for that limb you're on. Don't look down:
https://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2006/060927ManneringOffset.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8198694?dopt=Abstract
http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/failure%20of%20seatbelt%20legislation.pdf
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Buckle-Up-And-Behave.html

And it's not limited to cars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IB2xRfRHOA
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/07/peltzman-effect.html
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-balance-of-risk/
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607603134/abstract
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/27/AR2009032702825.html
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61755-3/fulltext?_eventId=login
http://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/Wilson_Circumcision.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

Yes, but I'm also saddened for a generation of kids who grow up interacting w/ computers to only consume media, not to create.

Steve Jobs put forth that computers were ``bicycles for the mind'' [1] --- but this switch to tablets is taking general purpose computers out of the hands of our kids and replacing it w/ an interactive TV. While there have been some web mentionings of it [2] I can't find a copy of the ad, or a full set of the quotes. [3]

Where are the brilliant creativity and programming tools for Tablets? (and I say this as a person who uses Autodesk Sketchbook, Creaturehouse Expression, Futurewave SmartSketch, Macromedia FreeHand, Runtime Revolution and Lotus Improv on his Tablet PC)

I'd love to have a list of great creativity tools for tablets (though I wonder how much good it'll do --- I've been unsuccessful in getting my son to d/l and install Petit Computer [4] )

1 - http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Bicycle.txt
2 - http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/
3 - http://creativityandinnovation.blogspot.com/2011/10/steve-jobs-amazing-quotes.html
4 - http://www.petitcomputer.com/

Ada Korek Api Gas Fighter Indonesia

I think I know why Nokia didn't invent it.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_X_wp7kjiC0s/SluCjXZ_KmI/AAAAAAAAAMY/1mRW1VB4y3U/s1600-h/Finns+emotions.jpg

Paralells has no one to blame but themselves for this being posted publicly.

Having found exploit code published on Pastebin for Plesk through an automated Google alert, I recently attempted to contact Paralells.

I was unable to do so because I'm not a paying customer willing to pay to submit the security issue.

You can read more about this problem over at my blog. http://caffeinesecurity.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-not-to-handle-software.html

Couple this with the social unrest of the one-child per family, resulting in 30 million unmarried men, and you have the fodder stimulating a revolution.

Revolution, or war with Taiwan / US.

As soon as they figure out how to move a couple million guys across the water fast. Look out.

Nah. Fill the whole damn building with them. The lower floors will be just as lethal whether this pancakes, shears, or tips over.

I am not one to wish ill on anyone, but the Chinese will have this one coming to them. Their lust for speed and the need to "wow the world with superior Chinese methodology" will ultimately fall around their ears. They may be building cities and building at break-neck speed, but a lot of their infrastructure is rotten to the core. My prediction? The failure of their bullet train was just a glimpse of the future. I see a lot more failure from their corrupt business practices. Couple this with the social unrest of the one-child per family, resulting in 30 million unmarried men, and you have the fodder stimulating a revolution.

12 Thyroid Cancer Cases Confirmed in Fukushima Children: Preliminary Results of FY2011/FY2012 Fukushima Thyroid Examination
The Eleventh Planning Committee of the Prefecture Health Management Survey met on June 5, 2013. The preliminary data for the thyroid ultrasound examination was released to the press at the meeting.

Overall, a higher percentage of Fukushima children, tested in the Fiscal Year Heisei 24 (FY2012), are showing thyroid ultrasound abnormalities than the Fiscal Year Heisei 23 (FY2011) in all assessment categories. In addition, the average diameter of the tumor increased.

Higher percentages of children have nodules larger than 5.1 mm or cysts larger than 20.1 mm, which put them in the assessment B category, qualifying for the secondary examination consisting of thyroid blood tests, a more detailed thyroid ultrasound examination, and a fine-needle aspiration biopsy if warranted.

The press is reporting that there are 28 cases suspected of thyroid cancer out of 174,000 children tested and that 12 of the 28 have been confirmed to have papillary thyroid cancer. This is a bit misleading, as not all the children in the B assessment category in the Fiscal Year 2012 have finished or even begun the process of secondary examination. In other words, there could be more cases of thyroid cancer diagnosed in these 174,000 children.

There were 205, of 40,302 examined, qualifying for the secondary examination in FY2011, and 7 of the 12 suspected cases were confirmed to have papillary thyroid cancer. In FY2012, 16 were suspected of having thyroid cancer, and 5 of them were confirmed to have papillary thyroid cancer. However, 16 is not by any means the final count for the FY2012 group, as only 27.3% of the eligible 935 children have begun the process of the secondary examination.

  Notable is the fact that 442 of 935 eligible for the secondary examination are from Koriyama, where the appeal for a group evacuation was denied recently. To date, only 1.1% or 5 of the 442 Koriyama children underwent secondary examination, yet 2 are already suspected of having thyroid cancer.
http://fukushimavoice-eng2.blogspot.com/2013/06/12-thyroid-cancer-cases-confirmed-in.html

But you are interested in countering the Israelis making twitter posts in remembrance of their defeating Arab armies gathering to commit genocide by reenacting an actual genocide.

As is usually the case, what Zionist shitbags complain about others doing, they did first. Stuff like massacres of Palestinians and terrorist bombings of government buildings. From a bunch of immigrants from Europe, as Jews were less than 10% of the population in 1900.

Zionism == Manifest Destiny. An entirely racist sense of entitlement to other people's land, with bullshit canards to try and justify the unjustifiable.

1. We Rule! Israel Invented the Intel Core i7, the cell phone, and the cherry tomato! Half of all Nobel laureates are Jewish! We Made the Desert Bloom!

2. They Suck! They blow up buses and pizzerias, launch rockets at us, and didn't pop out of a Jewish vagina!

3. You Suck! You aren't giving Texas back to Mexico so we aren't giving back the West Bank and won't stop cleansing Jerusalem.

4, Everything Sucks! The Holocaust, Cambodia, Darfur, Iraq, etc... what's a little ethnic cleansing when G-d promised the land to us?

If you disagree you are an antisemite.

I completed this project:
http://fullfrontalgaming.blogspot.com/2013/03/building-arcade-cabinet.html

It doesn't use Mame as I'm collecting money, but does use SDL. Fully functional and good to go. Used parts from Sparkfun mainly.

I presented a solution to this long-standing problem last year to the Denver HTML5 Meetup.

Code should never be separated from data. This is possible with HTML5, JavaScript, and open source.

In the presentation, I steal and repurpose Hofstadter's analogy of DNA to an LP vinyl record, which is an information bearer, but useless without its information retriever (the record player). Like the cell of an animal, which contains both DNA and the means to "play" it, I ask why not the same with software?

My maxim is: data should always carry the code with it to play itself. It was inspired from the field I've spent 50% of my career in: non-destructive testing where, for example, X-Rays and ultrasounds are performed on safety-critical industrial parts with 50-year service lives. If one of those parts fails and kills someone, you're going to want to go back into the old data and find the earliest indication of the flaw or fault and reinspect every other part in the world like it that is still in service. And maybe you need to go back 50 years. Under such a context, not providing the code with the data could be considered an act of gross neglect.

In my presentation, I use the 1990's era trick of embedding XSL into an XML file, with the addition of the XSL now being able to use HTML5/JavaScript. Sadly, I've only gotten it work with Firefox -- the other browsers consider it a security violation.

No kidding. JQuery Mobile is ridiculously slow.

You'd be crazy to use an inefficient and over-weight library like jQuery anyway. Adding jQuery mobile to that is just asking for trouble.

Let's face it: jQuery has long outlived it's utility. It's not even viable for dealing with old browser compatibility issues on the Desktop.

Just learn JavaScript. Your users will thank you. I'll bet that you'll even ultimately save time and effort as you'll spend less time trying to squeeze acceptable performance out of Resig's cludge -- and less time trying to debug the nasty one-liners you're forced to write to get those tiny improvements.

This is dumb for a variety of reasons. jQuery lets you abstract away a ton browser inconsistencies. It also makes you alot more productive b/c you don't have to constantly event wheels...JS by itself is extremely tedious syntax wise . (do you really like document.getElementById riddling your code to the point of unreadability? I'm sure you'd say oh, i'll just write a helper. Well congrats, there you go inventing wheels) Some of the worst code I run across on the web always seems to be the guy that insists on doing things with pure javascript and he has tons of onclick handlers directly on tags and all sorts of other crap which makes sites completely unmaintainable...

No kidding. JQuery Mobile is ridiculously slow.

You'd be crazy to use an inefficient and over-weight library like jQuery anyway. Adding jQuery mobile to that is just asking for trouble.

Let's face it: jQuery has long outlived it's utility. It's not even viable for dealing with old browser compatibility issues on the Desktop.

Just learn JavaScript. Your users will thank you. I'll bet that you'll even ultimately save time and effort as you'll spend less time trying to squeeze acceptable performance out of Resig's cludge -- and less time trying to debug the nasty one-liners you're forced to write to get those tiny improvements.

This should be on slashdot because ...

If you were smart, you'd just get any one of the VESA mount Raspberry Pi cases and mount the pie on the monitor

Oh, and in a 10 second Google search, here are a few that do the same thing but you know, a long time ago.

http://blog.parts-people.com/2012/12/20/mobile-raspberry-pi-computer-build-your-own-portable-rpi-to-go/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1952418207/all-in-one-raspberry-pi-case
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/05/17/raspberry-pi-in-oak-case-with-monitor-piday-raspberrypi-raspberry_pi/

You can find all the required parts by visiting pretty much any website of a large Raspberry Pi dealer (Adafruit, Element14) that has a dedicated RaspPi section and you'll find a list of all the parts, ready made, to be shipped to you to do just this.

Its not like this guy had to even 'find parts'.

And these are cooler (alas, the don't really qualify since they don't have monitors attached):

http://supernintendopi.wordpress.com/
http://raspi64.blogspot.com/2013/03/all-buttoned-up.html

If this kind of crap post belongs on slashdot, so does everytime I take a shit, as its equally as impressive and as rare of an accomplishment.

Here is another link, I read off Hack a day a while ago: http://emerythacks.blogspot.com/2013/04/connecting-ipad-retina-lcd-to-pc.html

I also bought a few old motorola lapdocks, and one of them I gutted to just a controller and panel. Its only 1366x768, but it accepts HDMI input, and is a good conversation starter at my desk at work when I use it for the occasional 3rd monitor. Other than stuff like that, there is not much that is higher resolution you can just buy.

I can't really think of a *portable* monitor that would work. A mini-projector, and maybe a little screen to project on, would probably be your best bet.

Alternately, there's this. Someone's figured out how to drive an iPad display using DisplayPort. You'd need to do some difficult soldering, and you wouldn't end up with a very professional-looking product (no casing), but it would be portable, high-def and somewhat cheap.

There friend, you've hit the crux of it. Until we all agree on the cause we cannot in good conscience be sure that we're attacking the right problem.

Until an abundant source of non-carbon energy is up and running these things are science fiction.

If you believe that CO2 is the problem there are really only two options, (1) a return to a stone age existence by a population dramatically reduced by mass murder. Merely simplifying the lives of 7 billion people will not work. And (2) implementing large scale industrial process to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it. A bountiful carbon-neutral source of energy is required for this, it might require as much energy as we use to run our civilization. Nuclear fission is the only such possible source on the table.

The only CO2 sequestration technique that impressed me as possible was proposed by Marshall Savage in his book The Millennial Project... where floating OTEC platforms along warm equatorial waters pump cold nutrient-rich ocean water to the surface creating an algal bloom around the platform that is confined by booms. Some would be used to feed fish farms, but the bulk of it would be packaged into weighted bales and sunk into the ocean. It may have been a slow and arduous process (OTEC are only marginally possible and the best energy efficiency is ~1%) but it would at least work.

I've seen lots of global warming combative measures, and some that would induce warming to help combat an ice age... that involve synthesis of something and scattering of that something over large areas, but it all requires a clean energy budget that we just don't have. So it all comes down to energy.

In order to even consider these things we would need that proverbial 'clean, abundant and too cheap to meter' energy source.

If safe nuclear fission remains off the table and undeveloped, specifically the thorium fueled liquid fluoride molten salt reactor, it looks to me like we're screwed.

I personally never believed that pure chemical CO2 was a serious issue climate-wise, although if you believe coal is a problem (carbon black, atmospheric particulates) then we've always been on the same page.

It is no wonder that so many people fall back to the depopulation return to stone age solution. They refuse to realize it but they are really advocating mass murder by proxy --- for when the ineffective conservation phase has failed and the problem becomes worse they will elect bold courageous leaders who are not afraid to get the process rolling, and the (selective) mass murders will begin.

Mankind does encourage global warming and glacial melt via deposit of carbon black on the surface and arctic pollution. This is a particulate/aerosol problem not a purely chemical CO2 problem, which is why I think temperatures in the Antarctic have been more stable than the Arctic, the world's worst carbon polluters are in the Northern hemisphere.

Another (fascinating!) recent paper poses that our 1970~2002 use of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) was a key driver in the brief global temperature rise rather than carbon dioxide emissions.

Mankind does encourage global cooling regionally via airplane contrails, the seeding of clouds where none would otherwise form (it adds up) --- as described in this kick-ass documentary Global Dimming from BBC Horizon.

It could be ladder logic and plugboards.

" Providing for the poor is a function of government."

Um ... no it is not. Providing Defense, and PROMOTING welfare (good well being) is the goal of government. When Government provides livelihood to people it harms them often irreparably. While you may THINK you're helping you're not. Things of value are not easy to attain. If they were easy to attain, it wouldn't be valuable.

http://instructor.mstc.edu/instructor/swallerm/Struggle%20-%20Butterfly.htm

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IP1EPlCgpiU/T_9FRKcUKNI/AAAAAAAAQ0c/lX8QU5Dtq-M/s640/bears+and+food+stamps.jpg

If there's no difference, why are some GMO crops legally considered pesticides?

[citation needed]

And why has Bt corn (already being sold) been proven to cause tumors in mice?

[citation needed] If you mean Seralini's study, that's hilarious.

Nobody tests this stuff.

BWAHAHAHA!

Truth is, we don't know yet if they're safe.

Conventionally bred crops and other plants have NO testing for safety and can and have been harmful. GMO food, OTOH, goes through a variety of tests to show a reasonable level of safety. Why wouldn't a company do this? You think that companies would be ok with insufficient testing that might allow a dangerous product to hit the market, opening them up to a large scale class action lawsuit that could potentially kill that company off?

And personally, I think I should have the right to not be used as a lab rat for such experiments.

You're right; that's why these experiments are done. Using actual lab rats.

Personally, I wouldn't bet on anything but fusion (when/if it is perfected.)

I have read studies that say we have enough nuclear fuel for the next 2000 years (or at least 300-500, if demands increase faster than predicted).
Then again, there are studies that say we could be out of easily accessible ore by the next century.

Examples:
Nuclear power is not sustainable
Nuclear power is sustainable

Is it a good idea to switch over to 100% nuclear, if there is any doubt that it will last beyond 2100s?

Asteroid mining could potentially solve this (IMO), or maybe just skip nuclear and invest in fusion more.

Anyway, my $0.02

great joob man very amazing post for me :-) healthy breakfast meals healthy breakfast ideas

great joob man very amazing post for me :-) healthy breakfast meals healthy breakfast ideas

So limit outdoor activity, and bury the colony shelters so that you can leverage inxpensive dirt for shielding.

Say, with sandbags packed with martian regolith.

(With a solar sintering machine, and "refined 19th century tech*", you could produce all the glass fiber sandbags you could possibly ever want on mars.)

* 19th century version
*refined modern and cheap consumer version

[For the imagination impaired, you use the solar sintering machine to produce a small, stationary bead of melted glass from abundant martian regolith, use a steel mandril to pull several glass fiber pulls off that bead, thread them through some eye-hooks in a halfcircle around the bead, then thread them through one last eye-hook as a bundle, and then feed the bundle into the knitting machine. Turn the crank, and a continuous tube of knitted glass fiber gets pooped out. Cut the "sock" at desired lengths, and use more glass fiber in a handheld bag stitcher to close the end, and stuff them with martian regolith. You can then stack them up to make 1950s style bunkers around the the habitat structures, which will not only keep the wind off of them, but also provide radiation shielding on the cheap for the colony. The total equipment needed would be well under 20kg, and would allow unlimited sandbag production at the colony site.]

So limit outdoor activity, and bury the colony shelters so that you can leverage inxpensive dirt for shielding.

Say, with sandbags packed with martian regolith.

(With a solar sintering machine, and "refined 19th century tech*", you could produce all the glass fiber sandbags you could possibly ever want on mars.)

* 19th century version
*refined modern and cheap consumer version

[For the imagination impaired, you use the solar sintering machine to produce a small, stationary bead of melted glass from abundant martian regolith, use a steel mandril to pull several glass fiber pulls off that bead, thread them through some eye-hooks in a halfcircle around the bead, then thread them through one last eye-hook as a bundle, and then feed the bundle into the knitting machine. Turn the crank, and a continuous tube of knitted glass fiber gets pooped out. Cut the "sock" at desired lengths, and use more glass fiber in a handheld bag stitcher to close the end, and stuff them with martian regolith. You can then stack them up to make 1950s style bunkers around the the habitat structures, which will not only keep the wind off of them, but also provide radiation shielding on the cheap for the colony. The total equipment needed would be well under 20kg, and would allow unlimited sandbag production at the colony site.]

I originally thought this way, but I read the following and it made me think there might be a point to it afterall: http://thepietythatliesbetween.blogspot.com/2013/02/assault-weapons-as-symbols.html

Basically: While "assault rifles" are usually functionally identical to hunting rifles they are symbols of something else, and symbols are very powerful things and have definite effects on us. Regulating something for "symbolic" reasons isn't necessarily a bad idea, although it might be legally suspect in some jurisdictions (like the entire US). It's a good read.

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/05/disclosure-timeline-for-vulnerabilities.html

I recently got an old BASIC program running from Dragon Magazine. The entire thing can be run in a browser today.
http://randomwizard.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-electric-eye.html

Ragica,

The problem with your analysis is 1) there never was data ten years ago, 2) the "report" from ten years ago is still being circulated as "fact" in 2013, 3) African geeks (who fly to EU to buy the TVs and CRT computer monitors, etc.) are being profiled and arrested NOW. See Interpol 2013 press release on the arrests of 40 Africans in Europe. http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2013/03/reuse-while-black-presumed-guilty.html

The NGO's are promoting passage of a law (through a "big shred" industry group, CAER), which seems to be the "self reported by industry" smoking gun. CAER also published the phony data in 2013, see link to CAER "study" (repeating claim that 80% of exports are dumped) http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2013/03/caer-is-wrong-about-e-waste-just-wrong.html

So, believe it or not, most of the anger at BAN and Greenpeace is from Environmentalists and Peace Corps volunteers, like myself. I grew up in the deep South USA, and would compare the firehose of disinformation by these NGOs to the firefighters in Birgmingham Alabama, who used their water to hose down civil rights marchers. The firefighters in Birmingham were not "bad people", and I don't "attack them". But Africans are getting arrested despite detailed studies of the goods they import into Africa which find higher reuse rates than brand new product sold there. That seems to me more than a little ridiculous, and entirely pathetic. Are you ok with the Interpol arrests based on the 80-90% "primitive dumping" number? Should the Board of Directors of Greenpeace feel at peace with it?

Ragica,

The problem with your analysis is 1) there never was data ten years ago, 2) the "report" from ten years ago is still being circulated as "fact" in 2013, 3) African geeks (who fly to EU to buy the TVs and CRT computer monitors, etc.) are being profiled and arrested NOW. See Interpol 2013 press release on the arrests of 40 Africans in Europe. http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2013/03/reuse-while-black-presumed-guilty.html

The NGO's are promoting passage of a law (through a "big shred" industry group, CAER), which seems to be the "self reported by industry" smoking gun. CAER also published the phony data in 2013, see link to CAER "study" (repeating claim that 80% of exports are dumped) http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2013/03/caer-is-wrong-about-e-waste-just-wrong.html

So, believe it or not, most of the anger at BAN and Greenpeace is from Environmentalists and Peace Corps volunteers, like myself. I grew up in the deep South USA, and would compare the firehose of disinformation by these NGOs to the firefighters in Birgmingham Alabama, who used their water to hose down civil rights marchers. The firefighters in Birmingham were not "bad people", and I don't "attack them". But Africans are getting arrested despite detailed studies of the goods they import into Africa which find higher reuse rates than brand new product sold there. That seems to me more than a little ridiculous, and entirely pathetic. Are you ok with the Interpol arrests based on the 80-90% "primitive dumping" number? Should the Board of Directors of Greenpeace feel at peace with it?

I've myself gone to such meetings and it's quite astonishing the kind of utter rubbish that's being peddled as 'fact'.
When I get up and ask questions the organisers get nervous and the press interested :)
But these agitators seem to get away with it, at least for now.

As an example in my town they showed this slide that 'proves' how water is affected.
The scale is so ridiculous I can't imagine why we haven't produced this shallow gas a century ago.

Fact is the shale in my region sits below 3500 m (~10,000ft.)
Above it are huge salt layers that cap the Slochteren formation, the largest but 3/4 depleted on-shore gas field in Europe.
Would there be any leaks from the frack they'd logically end up in this reservoir.

A lady from the public jumped up and cried "Where should we go once our water is polluted", the organisers agreed with her, this crime should be stopped!
In the mean time they 'forget' to mention polluted water is produced at every conventional oil- and gas field, something that in this part of Europe has never been an issue.
But with shale gas it should be?

Thanks Cheney/Bush for fucking up a good idea with irresponsible legislation.

is apple -1 is the best?????????
manik