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Saudi Arabia gets 90%+ of their electricity from oil and natural gas. To make a profit on oil they have to export it, not burn it locally. To stop burning it for electricity they need something to replace it. They may be building lots of solar but they are also building nuclear. It seems they plan to build far more nuclear than solar. If solar power cannot support Saudi Arabia then it's not likely to work anywhere else either. Their lack of faith in solar power should concern us all.

A citation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The decay chain of U-238 includes many isotopes which give off beta and gamma radiation. Most of that energy is given off via alpha particles. But it's not true that a sheet of paper or your dead skin cells will block all if it.

Not quite. Its mostly alpha and beta emitters but no gamma emitters. That's why its not really so dangerous. Before it hurts you, you would get a sunburn. and probably move away. For the gamma emitters you are probably thinking of U-232 which is Uranium's answer to Pu-238. It glows red hot in high purities. It also matters what else is in the ore. If its U-238 decay products, its likely a lot more radioactive than your estimate because those decay products have much shorter half-lives than U-238 and thus emit more radiation per gram and their lower densities don't make up for the difference in half-life. Also, this radiation was almost entirely alpha radiation as evidenced by the fact it only was measurable less than 5ft from the buckets. Those measurement levels they gave were no joke and not the usual over hysteria about radiation. It would be like walking into an active x-ray machine but with no warning. That's probably not so great but not dangerous enough to lose your head over. Also, Uranium is poisonous. That's the greater danger here.

The decay chain of U-238 includes many isotopes which give off beta and gamma radiation. Most of that energy is given off via alpha particles. But it's not true that a sheet of paper or your dead skin cells will block all if it.

That said, this was uranium ore, which is typically only about 0.1% uranium. Uranium and its decay products have a radioactivity of 12,356 Bq (decays per second) per gram, so you'd expect ore to be about 12.4 Bq per gram.

In contrast, potassium chloride is commonly used as a salt substitute in low-sodium salt products. It's about 0.0118% naturally-occurring K-40, which is radioactive (beta radiation even). That gives potassium a radioactivity of about 0.032 Bq/mg = 32 Bq per gram

So the exposure visitors got from these buckets of uranium ore was probably less than you get walking past the water softener bags in the supermarket. In fact, looking at the table on page 2 of the potassium chloride link, you'd expect baked potatoes, milk, orange juice, bananas, hamburgers, and roast chicken to be more radioactive (gram per gram) than these buckets of uranium ore.

BTW, the CPU is Harvard architecture and there's no room to copy .rodata so your strings are in a different address space.
Harvard architecture basically means you have separated data and instruction cashes and buses, and often no programatic access to the "memory" where instructions/code reside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The rest of your rant is the typical "embedded is so superior, non embedded know nothing" rant. Obviously as I only part time do embedded I did not do those things often. But: they are easy. Building a web server: is not easy.

A large portion of the population hasn't.

But this is /. so its perfectly reasonable to ask if people have seen a truly nerdy bit of sci-fi TV from circa 1970.

'Correlation is not causation' is a two-way street. I can't even do 10 pushups, but I can ride a bike 100 miles in under 6 hours, no problem, but you're going to tell me I'm at higher risk of heart disease? Nonsense. I have low bodyfat percentage, high HDLs, low LDLs, high endurance, high leg strength, and lots of muscular endurance where I need it most (below the waist). Doing pushups is meaningless, overall health and fitness is everything.

That's actually not that impressive. A reasonably fit rider on a 10 speed bike should be able to pull off 25 mph.

Way to broadcast your ignorance to the world. "reasonably fit" == "actual racing cyclist" in this case.

Just try holding 25 mph on a road bike for longer than maybe 20 or 30 seconds.

And "10-speed"?!?! RUFKM? FFS, do you drink Tang after your ride, too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Personally, I can easily crank out a set of 80 pushups. If you catch me at the right moment, I can do over 100, and I'm in my 40s. Not that anyone gives a shit, but isn't it fun to brag?

Dude, you can't count over 20 without pulling off your shoes and socks and dropping your pants, and anything over 23 is just not possible.

And I suspect you'd need a magnifying glass, too.

Exactly. They could have just called Kevin Smith and asked, "Hey... we got these angry Christians... is this worth it?" to which he could respond, "Look, you know that's a stupid question. You're calling me because I wrote 'Dogma' which fucking killed it and you know it. Read the Wiki."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

300% return on investment on a film that was WIDELY protested due to blasphemy. And then people shut up about it.

If Jesus has any flaws, or resorts to kicking arse

Like he did in the temple? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Marines, also known as naval infantry, are typically an infantry force that specializes in the support of naval and army operations at sea and on land and air, as well as the execution of their own operations. In many countries, the marines are an integral part of that state's navy. In others, it is a separate organization altogether, such as in the United States, where the Marine Corps falls under the US Department of the Navy, yet it operates independently (and similarly the UK's Royal Marines come under Her Majesty's Naval Service). Marines can also fall under a country's army like the Troupes de marine (French Marines) and Givati Brigade (Israeli Marines).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marines

'Correlation is not causation' is a two-way street. I can't even do 10 pushups, but I can ride a bike 100 miles in under 6 hours, no problem, but you're going to tell me I'm at higher risk of heart disease? Nonsense. I have low bodyfat percentage, high HDLs, low LDLs, high endurance, high leg strength, and lots of muscular endurance where I need it most (below the waist). Doing pushups is meaningless, overall health and fitness is everything.

That's actually not that impressive. A reasonably fit rider on a 10 speed bike should be able to pull off 25 mph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Personally, I can easily crank out a set of 80 pushups. If you catch me at the right moment, I can do over 100, and I'm in my 40s. Not that anyone gives a shit, but isn't it fun to brag?

Far more came out of PARC than just the GUI.

They invented ethernet networking, object orriented programing, WYSIWG, bitmap imaging, laser printers, etc (see the wiki link below). Had Xerox utilized all those developments they would have completely controlled the entire computer marketplace and would probably be the biggest computer company in the world right now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

TDS is rampant here.

No one needs to be lying. It could just be the Hawthorne effect at play. They'll want to make sure to observe this over a longer period to determine whether the productivity gains are merely a short-lived effect or if they stick around because they really are the result of a shorter work week and employees having more energy or less stress due to having additional free time.

.dev is a new generic top level domain. Google owns the .dev TLD similarly to how you own your second level domain(s), through delegation from the next higher level. ICANN is in charge of the DNS root and delegated (for a price) the .dev TLD to Google. Google is the registry. You can get domains under .dev from many ICANN accredited registrars, who will get it from the ICANN accredited registry, Google.

I thought Osborne's blunder was the biggest?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The faster way might have been Binet's Formula.

A comic featuring a Jewish superhero existed 20 years ago.

They invented not the personal computer (that would have been 1971's Kenbak-1 or 1974's Altair 8800), but "a personal computer with a graphical user interface" which implemented many of the concepts introduced in 1968.

And I agree, the Alto was more of a personal workstation ("personal" meaning a single-user computer, not a multi-user one such as a UNIX or RSX-11 server) than a personal home computer.

They invented not the personal computer (that would have been 1971's Kenbak-1 or 1974's Altair 8800), but "a personal computer with a graphical user interface" which implemented many of the concepts introduced in 1968.

And I agree, the Alto was more of a personal workstation ("personal" meaning a single-user computer, not a multi-user one such as a UNIX or RSX-11 server) than a personal home computer.

They invented not the personal computer (that would have been 1971's Kenbak-1 or 1974's Altair 8800), but "a personal computer with a graphical user interface" which implemented many of the concepts introduced in 1968.

And I agree, the Alto was more of a personal workstation ("personal" meaning a single-user computer, not a multi-user one such as a UNIX or RSX-11 server) than a personal home computer.

I thought Silicon Valley's Most Famous Blunder was announcing a new and improved product before it was ready, causing sales of your current model to tank, bankrupting your company.

Would that the Opportunist had taken the opportunity to check out Wikipedia beforehand. Forty-three of them. I especially like Bernie Rosenthal.

Our two programs were reverse a singly-linked list and copy a file. Watching recent CS grads who were weaned on a diet of Java trying to do file copy (it's important in C/C++ to know how to sling data around in buffers) was such a train wreck. In my case, I knew the basic file copy inside and out, including the performance implications of buffering.

Or skip the buffering. I wrote an example using mmap() for Ultrix / 4.3BSD on a VAX-11/785 back in 1991 to demonstrate Unix memory mapping to a colleague at NASA LaRC who was coming from CDC NOS and NOS/VE [ my opinion is that NOS stands for Not an Operating System :-) ]. The program cats files to stdout, but could be changed to copy to a destination. The benefit here is that the OS does *all* the paging/buffering for you and (literally almost) all the run-time is accounted for as system time. The 50 line program still compiles cleanly on Ubuntu 16.04. (snippets below)

void *map;
struct stat stats;
int fd = open(argv[i], O_RDONLY, 0);
fstat(fd, &stats)
map = mmap(0, (off_t)stats.st_size, PROT_READ, (MAP_SHARED), fd, 0);
write(1, map, stats.st_size);
munmap(map, stats.st_size);
close(fd);

Jesus is the third rail of popular culture - you touch it and you die - as John Lennon famously discovered.

There's the Japanese version.
Saint Young Men

No wired network is a killer in some settings.

Do you think these use cases are ones Apple actually gives a shit about? For those who care there are USB-C and Thunderbolt docking stations available and they work fine. Personally I'm with you and would rather have a 8P8C ethernet port built in but clearly I'm not the customer Apple is courting.

There are more than a few countries in Europe.

The Swiss use apostrophes: 1'000'000
Most of us use spaces though: 1 000 000
(hey, spaces are the SI standard too!)

Here's a pretty decent overview.

... there was a programming language designed specifically for that

DRM-free game stores do exist. Mainly for indie games... but there's a lot of good indie games these days, so that's not overly limiting. Check if the games you want are available on GOG, itch.io, or Humble Store.

DRM-free game stores do exist. Mainly for indie games... but there's a lot of good indie games these days, so that's not overly limiting. Check if the games you want are available on GOG, itch.io, or Humble Store.

DRM-free game stores do exist. Mainly for indie games... but there's a lot of good indie games these days, so that's not overly limiting. Check if the games you want are available on GOG, itch.io, or Humble Store.

One of the more famous experiments was done to disprove a bet against a flat earther in England. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... The scientist was Alfred Russel Wallace, essentially the co-discoverer of evolution who was a bit naive in thinking that the flat earther would ever actually pay up when losing the bet.

What kind of disaster that wipes out humanity on the Earth, even closed habitats, that will be recovered from in only a 100 years do you envision?

First of all, there are no operational closed habitats on Earth right now. Nuclear bunkers are not sealed off and their supplies are slowly consumed, not renewed. They're also not permanently manned, which means sudden events could wipe out their potential users before they even come into the picture.

There's at least one hollowed out mountain in Colorado, designed to withstand multiple nuclear blasts, with basically a cities population permanently there. Being an ultimate nuclear bunker, have to assume it is sealed off, or can be quickly sealed off, with a lot of supplies and capabilities of becoming as self-sufficient as any space colony.
Here's a list that not only includes Mt Cheyenne but another 2 very large bunkers, https://www.oddee.com/item_991... . While true that they're only designed for a couple of months of self-sufficiency, it would be a lot easier to make one self-sufficient for the long haul then building a self-sufficient space colony.
Who knows what other nations have, I'd guess at least Russia and China are also well setup.

As for scenarios, I'll defer to Wikipedia's page. Risks from AI, bioterrorism, volcanism or asteroids are all limited to Earth. Machines controlled by AI would stop working a few decades after all of the mechanics are killed off. Superviruses also need human hosts to survive. Volcanism might last anywhere from a few decades to a few millennia. And asteroid impacts only affect Earth for a few decades.

The only scenario that might affect space colonies is alien invasion. But even then, aliens would have a much easier time locating a habitable planet than a comparably tiny space colony.

There's also the possibility of several of them happening at the same time, e.g. asteroid impact putting a heavy strain on society, leading to war and bioterrorism. Aliens might also use an asteroid or bioweapons to avoid revealing themselves.

Most all those, while civilization ending, are unlikely to wipe out humanity, and the ones that might, are also likely to wipe out a space colony. Viruses that can wipe out humanity are likely to also affect the colony, there's going to be lots of traffic. Ai, could hunt down the colony and even a large enough metoeriite is likely to blast a lot of rock into space making the whole inner system dangerous. Even Aliens that can destroy the Earths eco-system would be just as capable of destroying space colonies.

As for closed habitats in space, there is always going to be leakage.

There's ways to minimize leakage such that it's not a real concern for millennia, for example by building a double-hulled vessel. Entrances could be welded shut for decades at a time and only cut open to perform exterior maintenance. Building bigger also helps, since being 10 times as large increases the surface area by 100x and the volume by 1000x.

I think your being very optimistic about leakage through solid rock and metal as well as not considering what you're going to do for power. How long is nuclear fuel good for before needing reprocessed?

And while it might be possible to live for generations without advanced technology, it is going to be needed at some point, if only to re-colonize the Earth.

Since they don't need it for almost their entire stay, it can be stored at the beginning and left alone until they need it. Machinery generally don't degrade in a freezing vacuum.

Good luck getting a civilization that has had generations of not using technology up to speed in building space craft etc. Just think of how much things have changed on Earth in a couple of hundred years.

There's lots of reasons to go into space and attempt colonization but enough self-sufficiency to survive the end of the world is along ways down the timeline.

Yeah, and junk DNA is just all the parenthesis needed to run the code

Pfft! Mine is written in LOLcode.

It's part of the executive branch --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Also, there's no evidence that Glaxo Kline Smith has an ownership stake in Human Genome Sciences.

What kind of dumb shill are you that you can't even validate things available on Wiki or expect others to be able to do so? GSK bought them out in whole for 3.6 billion a few years after buying a controlling stake in order to kill the research.

"What language is the humans' cerebral cortex written in?"

Brainfuck, duh!

Maybe, just maybe, Google Books is a poor choice for a tool. As big as it is, it's going to be spotty, and weighted toward more recent, digital, texts, and ones that are sufficiently available for scanning.

Better to use something that represents actual research. If English is your focus, which it seems to be given your current line of attack, it might be better to look in the full Oxford English Dictionary, readily available in and through your local library, even digitally.

My neighborhood (downtown San Diego neighborhood) built a Safeway. Then Safeway started allowing homeless people to park overnight. Then charities arrived to feed the homeless in the parking lot. Then the homeless from the surrounding area started migrating into the neighborhood, leading to overcrowding. Then a homeless serial killer started going around killing other homeless with gas fires. Then the state banned plastic bags, which the homeless used for cleaning up after taking a shit. Then the hepatities epidemic began, leading to dozens of people dead.

I've heard this story before!

It might be profitable, if it were allowed to exist, and could be monopolized. See Targeted Alpha Therapy; a means to treat the worst cancers, which may be applied to HIV and drug-resistant bacteria as well. This has proven very effective in limited trials, but we don't have the material to expand research and treatments. Bi-213 is the best isotope, and produced in quantity as a byproduct of the thorium fuel cycle.

Umm what?

subsets of evangelicals such as calvinists

a literal requirement of a 6000 year old world

Noahs flood happened

everything else, exactly as described

to arrive at proof of their own personal salvation and the damnation of others, and these are so irreconcilably falsified by science, evolution, etc, that clearly either their beliefs or science must be utterly wrong.

I am not certain why you think of of the things you listed makes someone a Calvinist, but Calvinists tend to be some of the most logical, rational and academically sound theologians out there. I think you may be thinking of Theonomists, which claim to be Calvinists, but Calvinists abjure Theonomy and it is considered as a Heresy.

For the record, Calvinism requires on read scripture literally, not literalistically. This means poetry is treated as poetry, history as history, a metaphor as a well metaphor. Try reading a single article from Turretin's Institutes of Elenctic Theology. It was one of the first systematic christian theologies

Your caricature is inaccurate. Many Libertarians oppose intellectual property rights. Others support reforms of the existing system.

Libertarian perspectives on intellectual property

Responding in a timely manner shows that you are conscientious -- organized, dependable and hardworking. And that matters. In a comprehensive analysis of people in hundreds of occupations, conscientiousness was the single best personality predictor of job performance. (It turns out that people who are rude online tend to be rude offline, too.)

Conscientiousness is one of the Big Five, which together with your IQ, can predict work performance quite well. Being conscientious, among other things, implies that you naturally try to respond in a timely manner. But that doesn't mean that forcing yourself to answer emails more rapidly makes you more conscientious, nor that answering emails more rapidly will affect overall work performance. In other words: forcing non-conscientious people to reply quickly may just end up decorrelating reply time from conscientiousness, instead of boosting their overall work performance.

TLDR: Correlations in human behavior tend to change if you try to force new behavioral patterns on them.

What kind of disaster that wipes out humanity on the Earth, even closed habitats, that will be recovered from in only a 100 years do you envision?

First of all, there are no operational closed habitats on Earth right now. Nuclear bunkers are not sealed off and their supplies are slowly consumed, not renewed. They're also not permanently manned, which means sudden events could wipe out their potential users before they even come into the picture.

As for scenarios, I'll defer to Wikipedia's page. Risks from AI, bioterrorism, volcanism or asteroids are all limited to Earth. Machines controlled by AI would stop working a few decades after all of the mechanics are killed off. Superviruses also need human hosts to survive. Volcanism might last anywhere from a few decades to a few millennia. And asteroid impacts only affect Earth for a few decades.

The only scenario that might affect space colonies is alien invasion. But even then, aliens would have a much easier time locating a habitable planet than a comparably tiny space colony.

There's also the possibility of several of them happening at the same time, e.g. asteroid impact putting a heavy strain on society, leading to war and bioterrorism. Aliens might also use an asteroid or bioweapons to avoid revealing themselves.

As for closed habitats in space, there is always going to be leakage.

There's ways to minimize leakage such that it's not a real concern for millennia, for example by building a double-hulled vessel. Entrances could be welded shut for decades at a time and only cut open to perform exterior maintenance. Building bigger also helps, since being 10 times as large increases the surface area by 100x and the volume by 1000x.

And while it might be possible to live for generations without advanced technology, it is going to be needed at some point, if only to re-colonize the Earth.

Since they don't need it for almost their entire stay, it can be stored at the beginning and left alone until they need it. Machinery generally don't degrade in a freezing vacuum.

Bill Shorten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Likely to be Australia's Next Prime minister and most of his party are former Union Leaders and when they win the leader is either former union leader or union managemnt of some sort. While this may not be the case in the US we have a problem with unions in Australia https://www.theguardian.com/au... Note the US is one country on slashdot, the rest of the world is represented here also

Yes we have a problem with unions, but we would definitely be worse off without them. Going of the most recent royal commission we also have a problem with banks but we would be worse without them. And spoiler alert here but we have a problem with aged care in this country. It's pretty unfair to use the results of a royal commission, most of which have already been dealt with, to claim we have a major problem, they have proven quite crucial in dealing with hidden problems before they get too out of control to deal with.

You are literally wrong. There was no such concept of fourth world. Third World was unaligned countries, India and so forth. These terms are in common usage and for you to invent new ones is utterly retarded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The Second World is a term that was used during the Cold War to refer to the industrial socialist states that were under the influence of the Soviet Union."

Seriously, nobody's fool enough to let the government be the power company.

There are plenty of places in America with government run municipal power.

Municipal electric utilities in the United States

They generally work well. Electrical power is a natural monopoly, so free market competition isn't really an alternative anyway.

I will stick with Firefox for a truly independent browser

Aaah, yes, the browser from the truly independent Mozilla organization.

In 2006, the Mozilla Foundation received US$66.8 million in revenues, of which US$61.5 million is attributed to "search royalties" from Google.

From 2004 to 2014, the foundation had a deal with Google to make Google Search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site was also made the default home page of Firefox. The original contract expired in November 2006. However, Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and again through 2011. On December 20, 2011, Mozilla announced that the contract was once again renewed for at least three years to November 2014, at three times the amount previously paid, or nearly US$300 million annually. Approximately 90% of Mozilla’s royalties revenue for 2014 was derived from this contract.

In November 2014, Mozilla signed a five-year partnership (effective December 2014) with Yahoo!, making Yahoo! Search the default search engine for Firefox in North America. The default search engine in Russia will be Yandex, and in China, Baidu. Due to Mozilla's financial release timetables, the results of the Yahoo! contract will not be public until November 2016.

In November 2017, however, Mozilla announced that it was switching back to Google as the default search engine. This represented an early termination of its Yahoo partnership.

If you want truly independent, 90% funded by google isn't what you want. I don't know what the answer is, but it's not Firefox.