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Here is the paper I mentioned, and here is the USGS's take on the matter. From what I understand there are a number of ways to estimate human CO2 output, one being to add up all the fossil fuels that are being consumed globally, which is likely not terribly accurate but we're still talking about two or three orders of magnitude difference. Another estimation method uses carbon isotope ratios. I get the impression that estimating volcanic emissions is somewhat difficult, but there's a fair amount of continuous monitoring for various reasons. Terrence Gerlach, a vulcanologist with the USGS, seems to have done quite a bit of research into the subject. The nice thing about scholarly publications is that they have to tell you where the numbers come from; if one wants to find out more about either part of the estimates then you just follow the references.

In summation, parts of the estimates come from direct measurements and the other parts seem to be estimates based on fossil fuel consumption. I am sure that there's a whole world of study out there for estimating various factors.

As an aside, humans are still far from matching or exceeding the most violent outgassings that have resulted from the formation of Large Igneous Provinces. I believe the Deccan Traps and Siberian Traps released about 3 orders of magnitude more CO2 than humanity has liberated. While our current burn rate would have us match those outgassings in about a thousand years, I don't believe that our fossil fuel reserves are projected to last that long. However, Large Igneous Provinces generally took millions of years to form, not hundreds; there is every reason to believe that what we are doing to the planet is unprecedented. On the other other hand, we're mostly skipping the problems with particulate matter and sulfides that came along with volcanic eruptions. For what it's worth.

http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/

A 4-core 400mhz x86-cpu can reach 10Gb/s with 64byte packets. 98% load on any modern server doing only 52Gb/s sounds bad.

It spontaneously combines with oxygen, but at STP it usually doesn't do so at a rate that qualifies as combustion. That said, when you're working with high pressure hydrogen, sometimes it does combust, and sometimes it does so with no obvious catalyst or ignition source. Sources:

• http://conference.ing.unipi.it/ichs2005/Papers/100098.pdf
• http://www.princeton.edu/mae/people/faculty/dryer/homepage/research/hydrogen-fire-safety/movies/Dryer_et_al_CST_179_2007.pdf

Perhaps more curiously, nobody is really sure why, as far as I can tell. Either way, the point remains that you don't have to have an ignition source.

BTW, even if you did need an ignition source, I think it's safe to say that the temperatures inside or near a fusion reactor of any significant scale would probably qualify as an ignition source....

in the one article it lists a link to http://newton.dm.unipi.it/neodys/index.php?pc=1.1.8&n=2012DA14 My question is on that chart at the year 2077/02/16.12110 it has Min possible distance of all zeros. does it mean at that time it could hit us?

A specific example: Oxford

http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate_courses/courses/computer_science/computer_science_.html

Cambridge is a less good example because in the first year they make you do other stuff:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/intro/

(20 years ago or so, CS didn't exist in the first year, so you had to apply to do something else then change subjects. Now you can spend _part_ of your first year
doing it.)

Imperial College, London:

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ugprospectus/facultiesanddepartments/computing/computingcourses

And how about Pisa:

http://www.di.unipi.it/

Actually, Italy has a respectable record in search engine research ( linky1, linky2).

...without much problems, thanks to an eight-level keyboard and less-then-you-think macros. Also I can write down most commutative diagram live. Take a look at this page where I explain my method.

Additional pro is that the tex source are almost visually intelligible without compiling.

They've already licensed it to NEC for commercial use.

They might have a patent for an actual implementation of the compression algorithm, but those kind of patents are a dime a dozen: http://www.gzip.org/#faq11
For the actual technique and there's copious prior art, for example here:

In this paper we discuss the use of compression techniques to make a more eective use of the
available RAM, thus reducing the need for secondary storage. We show that in many cases memory
pages contain highly compressible data, with a very large amount of zero-valued elements. This
suggests the use of very fast compression algorithms based on static Human codes, rather than
adaptive algorithms such as LZRW1 and similar ones
[...]
Using the proposed compression algorithm, it becomes possible to use a small portion of the
physical memory as a fast, low latency, compressed swap device. This technique can greatly reduce
the latency of page faults, thus improving program's performance

Just a detail the asteroid 1950DA trajectory is known to be very close to Earth on March 16 2880.

Recheck the page I gave you before and care to browse it thoroughly since it will answer more of your questions.
By the way i will leave you the site of NEODyS: http://newton.dm.unipi.it/cgi-bin/neodys/neoibo?riskpage:0;main

http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ip_dummynet/

Some Physical information about the asteroid and Orbital Information. The first link mentions the diameter to be 30-70m, hopefully they are gonna land on the 70m of the asteroid yea?

``the idea that the CPU can't keep up because of file transfer is insane.''

Not if they use interrupts for the networking. Gigabit Ethernet + one interrupt per packet = ???

Note: the answer is not PROFIT!!!

See also, for example, Device Polling support for FreeBSD.

To understand this agreement I think you have to first understand the XEN technology. A key piece is that para-virtualization requires modifications to the guest operating systems. This would seem to be a significant piece as to why maybe Novell made the agreement. If you look at the anouncement, virtualization is the first thing listed. So if you are going to run a Windows OS in para-virtualization, you are going to have to use a modified Windows OS. I can't see how you can modify the Windows OS without an agreement from MS that allows a customer to do so.

http://www.di.unipi.it/~scordino/sisop/Xen3.pdf

Full virtualization versus para-virtualization
There are several ways to implement virtualization. Two leading approaches are full virtualization and para-virtualization. Full virtualization is designed to provide total abstraction of the underlying physical system and creates a complete virtual system in which the guest operating systems can execute. No modification is required in the guest OS or application; the guest OS or application is not aware of the virtualized environment so they have the capability to execute on the VM just as they would on a physical system. This approach can be advantageous because it enables complete decoupling of the software from the hardware. As a result, full virtualization can streamline the migration of applications and workloads between different physical systems. Full virtualization also helps provide complete isolation of different applications, which helps make this approach highly secure. Microsoft® VirtualServer and VMware® ESX Server(TM) software are examples of full virtualization.

However, full virtualization may incur a performance penalty. The VM monitor must provide the VM with an image of an entire system, including virtual BIOS, virtual memory space, and virtual devices. The VM monitor also must create and maintain data structures for the virtual components, such as a shadow memory page table. These data structures must be updated for every corresponding access by the VMs.

In contrast, para-virtualization presents each VM with an abstraction of the hardware that is similar but not identical to the underlying physical hardware. Para-virtualization techniques require modifications to the guest operating systems that are running on the VMs. As a result, the guest operating systems are aware that they are executing on a VM--allowing for near-native performance. Para-virtualization methods are still being developed and thus have limitations, including several insecurities such as the guest OS cache data, unauthenticated connections, and so forth.

Jehovah's Witness have a theological objection to blood transfusions, but unlike Christian Scientists, not to medical treatment in general. In fact, they are quite insistent on high quality healthcare.

As such, they advocate the use of blood transfer alternatives.

There are various groups of Witnesses that advocate changing the doctrine, but, however odd it may seem to the rest of us, it's one of core teachings of the church and has survived even when other once-rejected medical technologies (organ transplants, certain immunizations) have now been accepted.

This doctrine has caused the Witnesses to push the medical community to come up with many alternatives to transfusion. These alternatives include Erythropoietin Therapy, Hemopure, a bovine-hemoglobin based blood substitute (this was quite a surprise, as previously even animal blood was considered taboo), perfluorocarbon based blood substitutes (back when I was young, I knew Witnesses who had been guinea pigs for this stuff), and a host of others. There are also specific surgical guidelines published in dealing with Witnesses.

All in all, the Witnesses are one of the main driving forces for research into lessening the need for blood transfusions. There are others to be sure (type matching, blood shortages, infectious diseases carried by tainted blood, etc.), but nothing beats having a large pool of otherwise healthy patients who are highly motivated to be test subjects.

Just a nit, but Prolog (in Abstract State Machines) and Scheme (in denotational semantics) also have formal specifications. However, I agree that it's disappointing that so few languages (3 is still a tiny number) use such an approach.

I tried to get some information about this asteroid, bu as soon as i read the word "Au" small $ signs appeared in my eyes and I was unable to read further.

The core of the .NET Framework, and what has been patented by Microsoft falls under the ECMA/ISO submission. Jim Miller at Microsoft has made a statement on the patents covering ISO/ECMA, (he is one of the inventors listed in the patent): http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/ and http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-ssc li/msg00218.html.

Basically a grant is given to anyone who want to implement[sic] those components for free and for any purpose. [emphasis mine]

>> Like quarks ... where's the objective verification

In the Large Hadron Collider you will find the answer. Here or here or a more wider search

>>What about the hadron boot-strap? Branes?

Not sure what you mean about boot-strap, but as for the Hadron family, look for..."Large Hadron Collider"

You may not SEE them, but evidences are conclusive enough. When experiences match theory closely, it holds proof of existence.

>Branes

Branes..ah! Branes...Wait for the next version of the LHC. We'll know if it's just theory or not in a few years, so hold your breath! Even more! The Higgs boson might give up to the LHC and show up at last (he's the one supposedly responsible for giving its mass to a particle - so it's somewhat a big deal). And the nice thing is that, since it's theory (again), we'll soon be fixed on wherever it exists or not. If not, other theories will try to explain mass and will be tested. Until we find out.

>>I think we take a lot on faith without realising it. Much of that is based on someone elses faith too!

That is where your mistake is. Science is not faith-based but fact-based. Faith has no room in the scientific process. Confidence in one's experiments or theory is only confidence and has to be tested to be considered valid.

>>And I don't see Occam's razor as being a logical method.

The Occam's razor is not a method for conducting science, it is a simple thought and a guidance as to where to look at: the most simplest explanation is the first you should consider. It assumes (generally rightfully) that nature takes the shortest paths. As do humans. But again, it is not a method - at all.

This tends to create a hell of a lot more interrupts for the processor to handle (a condition made worse by the deeper pipelines in processors like the P4). If you can offload the processing of the frames a bit, just enough to give a processor a chance to get something done, you could dramatically improve performance.

You see the problem is George Lucas is inherantly evil, notice the striking similarilty between George Lucas and Sien Fienn's Gerry Adams:

Gerry Adams

George Lucas

And Neodsys confirms this. They seem to be very sure of the position, the stretching is very small. But it will be visible to the naked eye!

strange, that date is not on NEODyS' list of close approaches: http://newton.dm.unipi.it/cgi-bin/neodys/neoibo?ob jects:2004MN4;main

There are numbers besides the Torino scale. The press doesn't use them because they're not as easy to explain. A value of 4 on the Torino scale explicitly means that the public should not be at all concerned or even really aware of the possible impact. It is meant to attract the attention of other astronomers so that more measurements can be done.

As far as a measure of progress, here's a simple one. At 100% progress the probability of impact is either 100% or 0%. Intermediate progress is the width of the window in which the impact might occur. If this window narrows to such a point that it does not include the earth, you get a 0% probability. If the earth is bigger than the entire window, you get a 100% probability. Anything else means there is more work to be done. The rate at which the window narrows will depend on the orbit of the asteroid, but that would give you a rough idea of when you'd be 100% sure.

If you are really curious, the locations and time of every observation that contributes to this is available online. It's interesting to note that more observations were done today than any other day. This is a direct result of the object being identified as an object of interest on the Torino scale.

I presume you found the 1 in 45 chance at this page: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2004mn4.html

I've been checking an alternate NEO site, and they're reporting a 1 in 43 chance: http://newton.dm.unipi.it/cgi-bin/neodys/neoibo?ri skpage:0;main

I don't know which site is reporting the most recent data.

http://newton.dm.unipi.it/cgi-bin/neodys/neoibo?ob jects:2004MN4;main lists previous close approaches, too.

IANAA, but it seems like my cross referencing idea with the fact that previous approaches didn't result in impact could be worth investigating. One thing I currently can't understand is why the listed "minimum possible distance" is a few magnitudes more than an Earth radius for the 2029 encounter. Maybe that's the mean trajectory fit with the current observations, but what's nominal distance, then?

One could even wonder if the minimum possible distance gets listed incorrectly if it's on the opposite side of the Earth compared to the nominal distance. (If the mean trajectory crosses it on one side and the one farthest away actually crosses the Earth on the other side.)

The most important point in all this -- will we be able to play Duke Nukem Forever while awaiting our Doom?

ecip.com I call it Error Correcting IP, and used it to stream live video from Sri Lanka in 1997 with Arthur C. Clarke Hal's Birthday
it was a 64K shared line with 90% packet loss, I received 60Kbps for the video stream. ( I have the video to prove it )

We even filled preliminary patents on this back in 1996 but they were never followed through with.

Luigi Rizzo (now head of the FreeBSD project)also did some excellent work on this also. http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/fec.html
He calls it Erasure codes.

Which is more accurate since UDP doesn't have errors, it either come across 99.999% perfect or not at all.
So there is more information then in an error situation where ever bit is questionable.

What this means almost 1/2 the hamming distance in the codes in needed to correct an errasure verses and error.

Turns out the Error/Erasure correcting scheme it critical and not obvious. I spent almost 5 years working on this part time before it started making some real breakthroughs.

My original system was designed for 25% packet loss (not uncommon in 1996).
In the inital idea we added 1 exored packet for every three data packets, but at 25% packet loss, it turns out that it didn't increase reliablity at all! Working this out with probablities was a major eye opener!

Even when you work the problem out you realize you will still need some retransmissions to make up for lost packets, there is no possible solutions without this.

I have been trying to find people to help opensource this since I have working far too hard just to survive since 2000 to even consider taking on another task.

Anyone interested in my research and carring this forward please see my site and contact me.

John L. Sokol

This is plenty fast enough for most edge routers, but clearly not going to compete with a Cisco CRS-1 or Juniper core router.

But most of the software in a router is control-plane (routing protocols and the like) and this is what XORP has focussed on to-date. As more people get involved with the project, we'll be able to do more things.

A decade ago no-one thought we'd be running Linux on a supercomputer. But we are. If we can get to the point where XORP is stable enough and fully featured enough for carrier-grade routers, who knows what hardware people will run it on in a few years time.

We are however very committed to keeping XORP as an open-source platform. No matter who uses it commercially, in the long run the only way to open up the router software market is for many boxes from many vendors to run a common open base software platform. With luck and with a lot of help, maybe that can be XORP.

- Mark Handley, XORP Project

2) How does the system deal with engine/linkage issues. Cars don't provide smooth power/steering at all times. If the engine is out of tune or has a catchy throttle, can the system deal with that as well as/better than a human?

The same way a human does it, feedback control. i.e. You measure your acceleration, and you adjust the throttle until you get the value you want. With the right control system, the computer should be able to do a better job than a person. This is actually a famous problem in controls, and has been much studied. I was a bit disappointed that the article talked more about the mechanics of interfacing with the car, but maybe they consider the controller a "solved problem"

3) How is it told where to park? It would have been nice if it was clear in the video what the driver did to tell it that. The article alludes to some sort of analysis system for this, but I like pretty pictures. ;)

It looks like it just scans to the car's right for a space large enough to hold the car. It alerts you when it finds one, and you probably just hit a button to "go to most recent available space". Since this is a prototype, it probably doesn't have a very sophisticated UI.

More bandwidth for the rest of us.

Why? For speed?

Conventional trains routinely hit 320 km/h FOR LONG STRETCHES AND DURATIONS (not just for 10km portion out of a 700 km journey), and have gone as fast as 515 km/h in tests.

The sheer complexity of the switches (*) guarantees that the resulting network will be much less flexible than an ordinary conventional high-speed rail whose switches are of the ultra-simple time-tested conventional design.

What does speed gives you? Since the energy expenditure squares each time the speed is doubled, you soon hit a wall where the energy efficiency drops well below an aircraft.

For example, a 1200 km trip (New-York_Chicago) Speed time saved* Energy How much more than
100 12 10000 at 100 km/h
200 6 6 40000 4 times
300 4 2 90000 9 times
400 3 1 160000 16 times
500 2.4 0.6 250000 25 times
600 2 0.4 360000 36 times
700 1.71 0.29 490000 49 times
* from previous time Fucking slashcode that won't let PRE pass. Fuck it (and cowboy neal too, at the same time).

So, each time you increase speed by 100 km/h, your energy use soars so much that for saving a paltry quarter-hour, you spend 13 times more energy than needed to go at 100 km/h!!!

This is the reason french TGVs only run at 300 km/h. They are designed for 400 km/h and routinely hit 450 km/h for demos but running them at 400 km/h would be too expensive for the tiny amount if time gained.

A high-speed maglev runs at the surface, where the air resistance is waaaaay much higher than for an aircraft at 35,000 feet. So the energy expenditure per seat IS GOING TO BE HIGHER than an airplane!

Even though the speed of sound is much higher on the ground than at 60,000 feet (where Concorde used to fly), 1000 km/h maglev trains will need very long viaducts and tunnels to avoid becoming high-speed stomach wrenching roller-coaster rides.

The only way a maglev could be useful is running within an evacuated tunnel in a long journey.

In theory, the trains could run at the orbital speed of the altitude they are; energy expenditure would then be zero (all you'd need is to accelerate the train to speed, and you'd recover most of that energy by decellerating it at destination). But the costs of digging tunnels that would be so perfectly aligned, immune to geological havoc (crossing from one tectonic plate to another isn't really a walk in the park) and to keep the thing perfectly evacuated would likely be prohibitive (and maintenance guys would need to work in spacesuits...). Such money should be spent instead for a space elevator.

Dummynet

Quote from the above linked page:
Unlike other traffic shaping packages which run in userland, dummynet has a very little overhead, as all processing is done within the kernel. There is no data copying involved to move packets through pipes, just a bit of pointer shuffling, and the implementation is able to handle thousands of pipes with O(log N) cost, where N is the number of active pipes.

All you need is an old PC, two NICs. You can boot Dummynet (running on PicoBSD) from a floppy..

Can someone point to where Microsoft has said that .NET/C# and all associated patents are royalty-free?

Jim Miller of Microsoft on the .NET patents
quote:
"But Microsoft (and our co-sponsors, Intel and Hewlett-Packard) went further and have agreed that our patents essential to implementing C# and CLI will be available on a "royalty-free and otherwise RAND" basis for this purpose."

uhh.. can I get that in writing, Jim?
I don't know about ya'll, but I'm sure as hell
not going to trust Microsoft. Especially when
they become backed into a corner by gnu/linux.

I think we need to mirror any apps developed with mono. Mirrored in a "safe" language.

see Mono's FAQ#131 from the horses mouth.
They must be _insane_ to trust Microsoft.

-metric

Yes, Microsoft is acknowledging the use of BSD licensed code. I don't know if they are doing it in the source code, but since they are putting copyright notices in the release notes for their software they probably have copyright notices in the source code too. Look at the copyright information on their page, they not only honor Berkeley but also a lot of other people that have been actively contributing to various BSD software such as Luigi Rizzo.

FWIW, TGV's 300+mi/h was done on a specially-built straight downhill stretch of the tracks.

The French were right 30 years ago by scrapping the Aerotrain project (pictures, films) in favour of the TGV...

It wasn't on a test track.

It wasn't on a test track in the sense that it was only used for this speed record. But this section of the Atlantic line was specifically build for high speed test, meaning even less curve radii than on the standard 300km/h-high speed tracks. And also on this track, they had to do some alteration specifically for the ultra high speed runs, namely increasing the tension of the electric wire by more than 50%.
And the TGV train was heavily modified, including being shortened from ten trailers to four, bigger wheels and the removal of one pantograph. This speed record is an awesome achievement, but to reach it once under special test conditions is still different then reaching these speeds on regular service.

It wasn't on a test track.

It wasn't on a test track in the sense that it was only used for this speed record. But this section of the Atlantic line was specifically build for high speed test, meaning even less curve radii than on the standard 300km/h-high speed tracks. And also on this track, they had to do some alteration specifically for the ultra high speed runs, namely increasing the tension of the electric wire by more than 50%.
And the TGV train was heavily modified, including being shortened from ten trailers to four, bigger wheels and the removal of one pantograph. This speed record is an awesome achievement, but to reach it once under special test conditions is still different then reaching these speeds on regular service.

Surface Maglev has no future; the speed increase over conventionnal rail IS NOT WORTH IT for the added expense in relation to the time gained.

Maglev could have some chances in an evacuated tunnel, but the horrenduous infrastructure costs will see that it will not see the light of day...

see the close approach table here - note the the distances on this chart are typically in single digit earth radii.

See also this data on the NEODyS home page

It means that any space alien or mad scientist with a grudge could give it a nudge to do something nasty.

Note also that the orbit simulations link given above seems to be calculated with old data. showing no collision in 2014

Hmm ... yes, I noticed that link (hint, hint ;-) ... HTML is your friend).

I also noticed some detailed information about the giant rock itself.

And, in the pretty graphics department, you can bring up a Java orbit simulation. It's interesting to see that the plane of this thing is almost perpendicular to the Earth's.

But my setup uses ipfw and not as in the example pf, I am not sure it's possible to setup ALTQ with ipfw (ideas are welcome!!). IPFW does support bandwith throttling in combination with Dummynet.

Here is another white paper I found: Managing traffic with ALTQ.

Beppe,

As one of the inventors on that patent as well as the person heading up
the standardization efforts for the CLI, I'd like to explain why I've
never felt the two are in conflict.

The ECMA process requires that all patents held by member companies that
are essential for implementing its standards are available under
"reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms" for the purpose of
implementing those Standards. This is the normal condition used in all
International Standards organizations, including both ECMA and ISO.

But Microsoft (and our co-sponsors, Intel and Hewlett-Packard) went
further and have agreed that our patents essential to implementing C#
and CLI will be available on a "royalty-free and otherwise RAND" basis
for this purpose.

Furthermore, our release of the Rotor source code base with a specific
license on its use gives wide use to our patents for a particular
(non-commercial) purpose, and as we explicitly state we are open to
additional licenses for other purposes.

--Jim

It should also be noted that the FEC libraries that are being passed around now (including the Java library from Swarmcast) are all based upon the Vandermonde FEC library provided by Luigi Rizzo. This seed has sprouted the Java library previously mentioned as well as Python bindings that will appear soon coming from the MNet and HiveCache efforts.

And I think your journal is really about CR20. I can't find anything about any asteroid called CD30.

And I think your journal is really about CR20. I can't find anything about any asteroid called CD30.

"It is however forseeable that future TGV designs could run in revenue service at speeds of 360 km/h (224 mph)... "on the condition that it be economically viable, and that a braking system be developped to bypass wheel-rail contact," says Roger Gérin, joint TGV production director."

TGV do not run at even 400 Kmh in production. The Maglev system will do that and the tests they have just run are part of the work up to running those speeds commercially.

"Running at over 500 km/h (311 mph) with a specially prepared trainset on brand new track is an accomplishment, but one should not expect such speeds to be possible in commercial service anytime soon."

If the maglev speeds are reproducable in a production - ie passenger carrying - environment then this is a major achievement and certainly seems to be what they are aiming for.

which is described here. And it's network described here

> The french TGV (the fastest - 515 km/h that's 320 miles per hour)
> is a souped-up ordinary train.

Pretty "ordinary" yes... but there's one striking feature that differs from ordinary trains:

On a normal carriage, you have two boogie wheel pairs, one on each end of the carriage. On the TGV two carriages shares the same boogie in the intersection. Picture here: TGV boogie

This picture is actually from a tilting prototype of the TGV.

You can read more about the modifications to the TGV (Train Grande Vitesse) here, and some history here.

> The french TGV (the fastest - 515 km/h that's 320 miles per hour)
> is a souped-up ordinary train.

Pretty "ordinary" yes... but there's one striking feature that differs from ordinary trains:

On a normal carriage, you have two boogie wheel pairs, one on each end of the carriage. On the TGV two carriages shares the same boogie in the intersection. Picture here: TGV boogie

This picture is actually from a tilting prototype of the TGV.

You can read more about the modifications to the TGV (Train Grande Vitesse) here, and some history here.