I think your system would work quite well. I don't think even a 100 jurors are needed. I would suggest an initial pool of 20. Now within that 20 of 17 say A, and 3 say B, go with A. If it's closer, say, 8-12, then enlarge the pool to 50. If it's still close expand the pool again.
One of the keys is that people should NOT be able to volunteer for Jury duty. This will keep the deck from being stacked by the self righteous. I would suggest that Jurors be selected from people who have: * Active accounts -- they are spending considerable time each day on FB * Members of multiple categories of groups. E.g. They have broad interests.
One of the criteria for abuse reports: The weight of an abuse report varies with the age and activity of the account posting it. Thus creating a new account just for the action of making an abuse report is ineffective. Similarly, making a report from an account that is moribund is ineffective. So for each account, there is 'account status/repuation'
There should be a consequence of sending falsely abusive reports.
E.g. If you have sent in 3 abuse reports that are subsequently over turned, then with each abuse report, your account loses status. Essentially you are marked as someone who chronically complains.
For abuse reports that are essentially libel (there is no semblance between the complaint and reality) the accuser loses his account for a period of time.
to enable this feature, one of the choices the juror can make is
"The complaint has no basis in fact, and appears motivated by malice. The accuser should be censured."
1. You need an external power supply. 2. Most web cameras are modest in their data requirements. Can you imagine how much your ISP would love you if you had an HD camera on your bird feeder?
It is an interesting point, however. Many cameras can be used in 'teathered' mode where a computer pulls data off the camera as fast as it's generated. My DSLR doesn't do video, so I don't know if tethered video is a possibility.
1. Resources. No it doesn't take a huge number of people. But calculate the value of a cubic kilometer of nickle iron. I'll allow you to ignore the platinum group metals in your calculations. The introduction of that much platinum would crash the market.
2. Energy. The sun shines all the time. Building flimsy mirrors to concentrate it is easy. Can be used as raw heat to melt rocks, or converted into microwaves. If microwaves don't turn out to have unintended consequences this may be the easiest way to wean ourselves off of oil.
3. Vacuum. There are a whole bunch of processes that having unlimited cheap vacuum makes possible.
4. high energy + vacuum allows easy element separation by mass spectroscopy technology.
5. Microgravity. Whole bunches of new materials may be possible.
6. Dinosaur killer interception. Once we are in space to stay, we've got a much better chance both to spot and to stop the next big rock.
Population pressure may encourage some people to live in space, but it is unlikely that people will move faster than they reproduce. (Very few emigrations reduced the population of hte source country.) It is far more likely that initially people in space will be long term contracts similar in nature to peopel working on arctic mines or oil fields today.
However cramped living facilities are entirely a result of having to lift all the mass out of Earth's gravitaional well. The slag from refining can be readily blown into glass foam, which is both a very good insulator, and strong enough to be a component in habitat construction.
Under what conditions is one person harmed NOT too many?
People aren't clams, sitting in the sand and filter feeding. Everything you do is a balance of risks accepted, and risks rejected.
What about a technology that kills 50,000 people a year in North America, and injures several times that number? Is that too many? Yet we accept that driving is dangerous, and don't think much about it.
I live next to a coal mine and power plant. This power plant releases TONS of uranium and thorium per year into the environment. I'm actaully far more concerned about the mercury.
Most of the junk coming out of Chernobyl and Fuji is short lived. The half life of mercury is, let's see. um. Forever. It's poisonous now. It will still be poisonous a billion years form now, unless we evolve a way to handle it.
Don't know if you are serious, but I'm going to pretend that you are:
1. Cosmic beams. No such animal.
2. Magnetic fields interact with other magnetic fields. Since an electron moving relative a magnetic field has a mag field of it's own, we can use a moving magnetic field to generate power or to convert moving electrons to mechanical motion.
3. The magnetic field of the earth isn't very strong -- about half a gauss. I haven't seen a way to extract energy out of it.
4. In general: There is no free lunch. The energy has to come from somewhere. Compare to gravity: You can get energy out of a gravitational field by lowering mass into the field. this is how a hydro electric dam works. If you think you can beat the system, make a table top prototype using small magnets.
Spaceflight right now is inefficient. The only way we move is by throwing mass the other way very fast, and depending on conservation of momentum. Mv = mV Throwing a kilogram backword at 2000 m/sec moves your 500 kg spaceship forward at 4 m/sec
You can do better by throwing it faster. but the specific impulse of current chemistry imposes limits. Also: chucking the mass with twice the velocity will get twice the velocity change for the space ship, but takes 4 times the energy.
The beanstalk idea is doable: We have the science for it, but not the technology. (Carbon fiber nanotubes have sufficient strength. We don't know how to make them in the length and quantity required.) It will require developing deep space infrastructure -- lots of the material is easiest (lowest energy) to get from the asteroid belt.
And we need to get our house in order. A bean stalk is a wonderful terrorist target. Cutting the stalk at synchronous orbit would have a similar effect to dropping a hydrogen bomb every 5 miles along the entire equator.
Travel between planets in reasonable times is a bit more practical:
1. You don't have to throw large amounts of mass the other way just to fight gravity. So you can use more energy to accelerate less mass. Since you are out in the sunshine, you don't have to use chemistry to provide the energy.
2. Because the interplanetary void has a low density plasma, with clever design, you can use a ring of current to interact with it, getting small but steady thrust, using the mass of the plasma instead of mass you bring with you.
3. There is also the possibility of sailing on the solar wind.
None of these are current technologies, but all of them are reasonable developments of currently known science.
I'm bullish on spaceflight, although in terms of practical economy, the moon, the asteroids (metal, some carbon) and Saturn's rings (water) are much better targets than Mars.
The bomb material has to fit together well. Small discrepencies lower the yield drastically.
Plutonium is very hard to machine. The turnings are extremely toxic, and they are flamable. I think they machined the bomb chunks in an oil bath.
One of the two, don't remember which, has multiple crystal structures, and it spontaneously changes from one crystal form to another depending on the temperature. To prevent this, it has to be alloyed. But you have to choose an alloying material that doesn't interfere with the nuclear reaction too much.
For the implosion type bomb, you have to have precisely shaped explosives -- two different ones, that assemble into a sphere wrapping the hollow sphere of bomb material. These explosives have to be precisely shaped, and be very uniform in shockwave transmission speed. Then you have to set them off at exactly the right time so that they assemble a shock wave that is spherical, directed inward. If using 20,000 fps explosives, and you want a shock wave that is round to within a quarter inch, then the timing has to be uniform to within about a microsecond. This isn't easy.
I don't worry about terrorists assembling their own bomb.
At 5.5% efficient, it's not competing with solar cells yet -- but this is a prototype. We can expect better efficiency with time.
2. Rare elements.
the use of tungsten and rhodium could be a deal breaker for mass implementation. There too, however, once the solid state physics guys mix in, there may be better options.
3. Shading
The people in Georgia may not want their entire state covered. There's a fair amount of the country that shading 30 to 50 percent would make the land MORE productive.
4. Albedo
This is a big concern to me. If these solar leaves average darker than the surrounding landscape then mass implementation of them reduces the amount of sunlight reflected into space. This is one positive feedback loop in the arctic. -- Conifers are close to black from above. Tundra reflects 30-50% of light in summer and 85% in winter. As the earth warms, treeline moves north, increasing the amount of heat collected. (It also increases the snow free time of the year, increasing the heat collected.) We're already seeing significant change in the arctic.
5. Hydrogen economy. Seems to me that such a leaf is going to require a rats nest of small plumbing to collect the hydrogen. H2 is tricky to pipe around at the best of times. Collecting it in quantity will be tricky.
This isn't a show stopper. The methanol economy makes a lot more sense. Methanol has better energy density/volume at reasonable pressure, and liquids are easier to store and move around. The conversion of H2 to methanol should be possible with reasonable efficiency with the right catalysts.
I recently made the transition from Linux to Mac. As a result of that transitions:
1. ICEwm -> Spaces. I still have multiple desktops.
2. xTerm -> Terminal.
3. yum -> macports . Generally macports is a bunch slower (it does everything from source, rather than packages) but 'ports install digikam' did the right thing, although it took a lonnnnnngg time, and put a load of X11 programs I hadn't asked for.
6. Digikam + gimp -> Aperture + Photoshop. Big win.
7. Virtualbox + WinXP -> stuck. I don't have a good equivalent to Access yet.
New:
iTunes + iPhone = portable smart playlists.
Mac comes with Apache as it's built in web server.
Author complains that the environmental differences bite you. Who does major editing on server files? Let the server do it's job. Edit in an environment that lets you play music, play with your screensaver when you're stuck. (electric sheep...) and have a couple hundred windows open on 12 dual screen desktops.
In a production environment in the past:
I've always taken an old box, and run whatever OS + server software the production box did, and moved files to/from it with rsync. I've tweaked the server with ssh+vi. I've analyzed traffic with Wireshark.
I've used Mac, Linux with various desktops, NextStep, Ultrix, AIX, IRIX, HPUX. Winsnooze, Freebsd, openbsd both with just CLI, In order of usability for what I wanted to do:
1. NextStep 2. Mac 3. Linux 4. Windows 5. Other X11 (Lack of suitable applications)
I don't count the CLI machines -- their job was to be servers. Most of my career I had a workspace for each server with half a dozen xterms ssh'd into them.
As to the author's complaint about TextMate. There's lots of IDE tools out there, BBEdit, {g}vim at the bottom end for simple text editing, up to Eclipse, and Dreamweaver if you want something with more whistles.
At present my tool chain for web authoring consisted of
1. vi to edit files 2. template toolkit 2 for templating 3. MultiMarkdown for reducing tag writing 4. Perl to automate stuff. 5. apache to test pages on. 6. rsync to push updates to my server.
Getting my toolchain working on the mac took the better part of a day mostly waiting for macports, and tracking down places where I had hardcoded paths into scripts.
In passing: I have a winsooze laptop too. It also has my toolchain present on it.
Historically people have been willing to commute about an hour to work. Medieval towns were typically 3-4 miles apart. An ox moves at about 2 mph. Roads weren't straight. About an hour. While you could live on the farm, for protection people clumped together.
In the American (and Canadian) west, the township system were grids of 6 mile squares. Railways put in a siding about every 6 miles. In theory each 6 mile square had a town in it. The remnants of this can be seen in the network of community halls, and abandoned grain elevators beside the sidings.
The existence of small towns breaks this paradigm. I grew up in a town of 9,000. School was on the other side of town. I walked most days. (Taking a bit under an hour....) But you could drive anywhere in town in 15 minutes, including starting the car.
The zoning rules certainly make it harder for people to live near their work. Ways that could make it better:
1. Rezone one block in 6 business/light industrial/residential. New construction in this area must include the same amount of residential space in addition to other uses. (E.g. housing over the shops.)
2. All new residential construction has to have 1 square foot of green space for each square foot of concrete, asphalt or roof. That includes driveway, sidewalk and share of the street.
3. Encourage multiple use construction downtown. Any new building over X square feet has to have housing for 2 people for every job anticipated in new building. So a shoppng mall with 200 shops, with an average of 10 employees each has to have accomodation for 4000 people. This doesn't mean that the mall workers have to live there. It means that they can live there. And, if on the average there is a space per job, then on the average more people can commute by elevator and short walk.
4. Where possible mix buildings uses for night life (restaurants, clubs, cinama) with 8-5 light industry. This gets better use out of the parking lot.
Clever use of this could mean that half of people live close to where they work and wouldn't need to drive, leaving more room on the roads for the rest.
I use the freebie "Mouse Acceleration" A flick of my wrist sents the mouse 3000 pixels away.
I agree that there are aggravating things about the GUI, but *EVERY* gui I've used has aggravations. One of the things I like about Mac and Linux is that so much of what you can do with a GUI you can do with a CLI too. And with the macports project you can have most of the linux world too. (We now have enough computers in the house that DNS became desirable. "port install maradns" (bind would be overkill) Done.
Now if I could get Spotlight to default to searching for filenames, not content...
Suppose Apple uses Samba. Suppose they use current stable release X. They don't charge for it. It's an optional package install in the Options folder on the disk. There's a readme that directs them to the web site for source code.
For library code: My understanding is that if you link against a library, your program is infected with GPL.
Suppose you write a program whose sole purpose is to be a pipe between your application and a library. The library is now running as a separate process. You release the wrapper program. Not a big deal. It's probably less efficient, but much of the time, efficiency isn't needed. When it is, you roll your own code.
The only thing I can see that it stops is a user casually emailing a document off site. Leaks are more deliberate.
Unless your security policy also blocks most outbound ports, and does deep packet inspection on what it does let out, this appears to be just one sand bag in the stream.
Ways to move digital data offsite.
1. Media: DVD, CD, Memory Stick, portable hard drive. camera used as flash drive, phone used as a flash drive.
2. Standard file protocols ftp, ssh, sftp, http, https. The latter two would be hard to detect -- but the ratio of download to upload would be skewed for a particular host.
3. Sync files to/from my phone.
4. Teamviewer and the like. (Remote desktop protocols with file transfer capability.)
5. Tethered phone.
6. USB wireless + cantenna.
7. Running another OS in a virtual machine to evade locked down desktops.
8. In a windows shop, running 'portable apps'.
9. Embedding data in non-standard transports. E.g. Ping packets.
Stopping all of this is possible, even easy. Doing so in a way that people can still get any work done, and won't spit on IT people as they pass will be a bit more challenging.
The boys will be making eyes at the girls, telling dirty jokes and sniggering. The girls will be playing coy, and will talk about fashion, make-up, and the latest rock star hunk. Time on task will be minimal.
Until they have some understanding, the complexity of a real example will be lost on them.
Until they are numerate, they will not understand numbers thrown at them by a guide.
Field trips also require a huge amount of organizing -- to run a trip you have to: * Get signed permission from every set of parents. * Get enough parents to volunteer to help herd the beasts. (About 1 parent per 5 kids.) * Get budget approval for the trip. * Get transportation for the trip. If you use parent's cars, you have a separate permission slip from each parent whose kid will be in another parent's car. If you use school busses, you have to schedule that too. * Get permission from all the other teachers who will miss class time due to your field trip. * Depending on your school, you may have to surrender time later to make up for the time you took from other teachers.
Field trips have their place, but they are not a general answer, and generally work best to re-enforce previously learned material.
Experiments are important. Manitoba used to have a course that was 80% lab oriented. One series of experiments:
1. Measure a bunch of rectangular solids with different rulers. (Some had no mm markers.) Measure enough objects that you got blase about them and couldn't remember which ones you'd seen before. This teaches record keeping, and measurement error.
2. Weigh each object. Compare results.
3. Calculate the density of each object.
4. Repeat this experiment using other than rectangular shapes. This required learning and using some new volume formulas.
5. Classify the sets of objects. Come up with many ways to classify them. Shape, material, use.
6. Introduce materials such as beads, steel shot, lead shot, sand, pea gravel. What does density mean for these materials? How do you measure? Introduce the idea of displacement as a way to measure volume.
This was a great course. Lots of hands on. But the above took a month. They dropped the course because it didn't teach enough science -- that is, the kids didn't memorize enough science derived information. I would argue that it was the best science course most kids would ever take.
This was an easy course to fund: You needed rulers, a couple boxes full of stuff, graduated cylinders, scales, All the stuff for a class of 30 would fit on a cart.
Compare to high school physics. Most of the apparatus costs af ew hundred to 2000 bucks per set up. Most of it can be used for only 1-2 experiments.
I know of a biology grad student who was hired to replace a gal on maternity leave. He was given the class of dunderheads, and told, "Keep them busy. If they learn any science, great."
All these guys were in shop. First day he walks in gives each kid a mouse trap. "Make a live trap to catch mice"
Soon they had a collection of different traps tha would life trap mice. They went out into the local field (200 feet away. No busses, no permissions.) set the traps.
Next day they had mice. "What do we do with them?" He showed them how to weigh them, measure them, determine their age. And let them go. Reset the traps.
"How do we know if we have caught these before?" So he showed them how to band them, and this lead to keeping good lab books.
They didn't just catch mice. Voles, shrews, the occasional ground squirrel, even a toad. Each was used to compare.
They used different baits, and kept track of what worked better. Most of the kids had 10-12 traps out in the field, and were checking them after school every day.
All fall they collected information about mice. Microscopes came out to analyze mouse crap to see what they were eating. Mice were discected to teach anatomy.
Right now our ag system produces a lot more cellulose than it can use. Eg: With corn, the kernels are useful, but most of the rest of the plant is not. Sometimes this can be converted into silage, but fermenting it into some form of alchohol is another use.
Depending on how robust this system is, it might be able to use materials that contain lignan as well as celluose. This would enable it to be used for forest slash, and make make it profitable to harvest sagebrush -- which has taken over much of the high grass prairie due to over grazing.
Rice is another crop that produces huge amounts of residue. Most of our cereal grains have been bred for short stems, but there is still a lot of wheat and barley straw. In regions where there is not much in the way of livestock operations, this conversion could be attractive.
Another competing use for this material is syngas+charcoal. Charcoal is extroidinarily stable in soil, and apparently has all kinds of benefits in terms of being a nutrient collection site. Distilling straw to make wood alchohol, using the tars and the CO as heat to run the process, and heat the pig barn, and ploughing the charcoal back into the soil has potential as a anti-CO2 action.
A colleague of mine, a phys ed major when he was in school, decided to get his Masters of Education from U of P. He handed me an essay that he'd gotten a 98% on. I read it. The essay was garbage -- illogical, unfounded assumption, few references. The kind of thing that would pull a C or a D in a freshman English class.
Bad education options are not limited to for profit colleges.
I was looking for an online horticulture course. Came across University of Waterloo's program. A course cost $350, and consisted of 20 lessons with quizzes. There were 3 sample lessons online. I went through the lessons. Each lesson consisted of about 10 minutes of reading, and 10 multiple guess questions. I was able to do all 3 lessons in less than an hour.
I think it was something like 5 required and 5 optional courses made up a diploma.
I expect more bang for your buck. An online tech course should be on par with running a highschool. In our country a highschool costs about $6,000/year/student, not including the building facility, for the government to run. A high school student typically takes 6 courses in a year, each with 125 hours of required instruction time. So high school education runs about $8/hour for instructional time.
If we naively equate instructional time for student time, then the Waterloo horticulture course should have cost $30-$40.
There may be good distance learning courses out there. I haven't found them yet. Do your due diligence.
Could declining sales possibly be because they aren't producing new music worth listening to?
My personal experience: Hearing a good tune on the boom box has resulted in my going out and collecting all of a singer/songwriters work:
Lorenna McKennit's "The Bonny Swans" hit the top 40. Enya's "Orinoco Flow" James Keelaghan's "Cold Missouri Water" was on CBC radio. Ditto Stan Rogers' "The Mary Ellen Carter" Empire Brass Quintett "Passages"
Radio stations used to play something new now and then. (and 3/5 of the above list was due to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) If you are only going to play oldies, and a short playlist of them, why be surprise that more and more people relegate music to Muzak -- noise to cover up the sound of the air conditioner.
Young people spend far more time watching TV and playing video games instead of listening to the radio/walkman/ipod.
The music companies could be clever about this, and insist that the price for playing the songs would be to list them, including all the info needed to buy them. Or if they have a licensing scheme for internet much as they do for radio, to make the first n plays a month for a track to be at no fee, with n being a small integer. This would encourage stations to use a larger playlist.
I would be interested too in seeing a breakdown by genre and sub-genre, both with amount of air time/ listeners and the number of sales.
I have very little desire to use my desktop by voice. However, I wiould love to operate my phone by voice. Things I would like to do with a blue tooth head set and my phone:
1. While commuting to work. "Marvin, wake up." "Yes boss?" "Email to Shirley Jones" "Ready" "Can we meet tomorrow on the status of the Filbert project." End message. Append times I've got open. Send. "Sent. Next?" "Memo to self: Investigate advantages of importing Japanese filbers. Remind me this aft at 2" "You are meeting with John at 2:00" "Fine. When I get back to the office after seeing John." "Roger that. Next? "go to sleep"
2. Inventory. Counting trees. Spruce, whtie Block 17, 1 gallon pots, 12 to 16" tall, 24 rows of 18 each. Spruce white, Block 18, 2 gallon pots, 18-30" tall, 40 rows of 12 each
Generally: Anytime I want to use a computer but a keyboard and rodent are impractical.
So it's 10 cm thick. Over how large an area? Is it fallout from a plume, and is a mile wide, and 10 miles long? Is it 500 square miles?
How fast does oil degrade on the sea floor?
Compare to other natural disasters:
1. The Mississippi jumps it's banks and drops a foot of clay on hundreds of square miles of farm land.
2. A forest fire burns 1000 square miles.
3. Mount St. Helens blows it's top, and puts a foot of powdered volcanic glass downwind.
When the Exxon Valdez incident occurred, the environmentalists shrieked that it would never recover. Two years later, numbers were still down especially amoung the top preditors, (who both can move to the next by down the coast, and who have longer reproduction cycles) but all species known there before were present.
When the latest round of time zone changes came out, a certain nameless Redmond Washington company was going to charge a very large sum for their update. (I think 40 grand site license...)
Our solution: Network Time Protocol broadcasts on the local subnet, K-9 free client on each client, and a policy to allow the user to play with the time. They could change the time zone to get it to lie for 3 weeks.
is the boxwave slideout keyboard/case. Talks to the iPhone via bluetooth.
Apple apparently now supports bluetooth keyboards for all of their devices.
There are various keyboard/docking stations for iDevices. A friend has a bluetooth folding keyboard that he carries around with his ipad. And he regularly uses remote desktop on his ipad to access his office computer.
Firstly -- a robust network needs an alternative to spanning tree. When an alternate link is discovered, it's used. I suspect that doing this for a large network is not a trivial problem.
Various proposals have been made for mesh networks. Consider the bandwidth issue. Consider a town of 10,000 covering a square mile or so. Let's suppose there is a wifi point every 100 feet. That means that a packet requires 50 repeats to get across a mile of town.
Latency?
Most of these wifi points better not be just repeaters either. Else you get packets running in circles.
The two problems are essentially identical, just different in scale.
I think to solve it, the network has to be aware of more than it's local topology. It has to understand how it's distributed in space.
I walked into a math class with a burger flipper once, and did a bit of a rant pointing out to about 3/4 of the class that this was going to be the tool they used to make a living, if they didn't change their attitude toward academic discipline.
"You can't say that to us!"
"Why?"
"You hurt our self esteem"
"Your self esteem is based on a delusion that the world owes you beer and skittles."
"It's not fair!"
"Neither is the world.
"You have a choice. The good paying jobs tend to require one of the following: 1. Willingness to work hard physically in dirty locations -- lots of those in the oil patch. Less unpleasant, but also paying less, most trades. 2. Brains -- usually requiring math -- engineering, financial analysis, programming come to mind. Writing is also one of these jobs. 3. Scholarship and memorization -- most liberal arts, medical. 4. Something illegal such as drug pushing or prostitution.
"Prostitution?"
"One of my students is dead now. Aids. Dropped out in grade 9, and made his fix money peddling his bum downtown."
Sudden silence. About 1/3 of this class were regular drug users of more than pot.
"The jobs that are left after that are mostly of the flippng burgers, pumping gas and mowing lawns category."
"And if you feel that your self esteem has been too battered, feel free to complain to your folks or to the headmaster."
The teacher in the adjacent classroom (who taught my mob social studies) applauded at the end of the rant.
It made a difference for the next month for most of the class, and for four of them it turned them around and they passed.
I prefer the idea of ranking the candidates in order. So if there are 5 candidates when I go to a poll I rank them 1,2,3,4,5.
In the first pass, the ballets are counted by first choice. Candidate C is the bottom of the list, so candidate C's votes are recounted using the second choice. This time D is at the bottom.
Now the original D votes are sorted by second choice, and the C votes are sorted by third choice.
This time A's votes are the bottom of the list.
B and E are all that's left. So now A's votes are split by which of B,E are closer to the top.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your system would work quite well. I don't think even a 100 jurors are needed. I would suggest an initial pool of 20. Now within that 20 of 17 say A, and 3 say B, go with A. If it's closer, say, 8-12, then enlarge the pool to 50. If it's still close expand the pool again.
One of the keys is that people should NOT be able to volunteer for Jury duty. This will keep the deck from being stacked by the self righteous.
I would suggest that Jurors be selected from people who have:
* Active accounts -- they are spending considerable time each day on FB
* Members of multiple categories of groups. E.g. They have broad interests.
One of the criteria for abuse reports: The weight of an abuse report varies with the age and activity of the account posting it. Thus creating a new account just for the action of making an abuse report is ineffective. Similarly, making a report from an account that is moribund is ineffective. So for each account, there is 'account status/repuation'
There should be a consequence of sending falsely abusive reports.
E.g. If you have sent in 3 abuse reports that are subsequently over turned, then with each abuse report, your account loses status. Essentially you are marked as someone who chronically complains.
For abuse reports that are essentially libel (there is no semblance between the complaint and reality) the accuser loses his account for a period of time.
to enable this feature, one of the choices the juror can make is
"The complaint has no basis in fact, and appears motivated by malice. The accuser should be censured."
Guesses:
1. You need an external power supply.
2. Most web cameras are modest in their data requirements. Can you imagine how much your ISP would love you if you had an HD camera on your bird feeder?
It is an interesting point, however. Many cameras can be used in 'teathered' mode where a computer pulls data off the camera as fast as it's generated. My DSLR doesn't do video, so I don't know if tethered video is a possibility.
1. Resources. No it doesn't take a huge number of people. But calculate the value of a cubic kilometer of nickle iron. I'll allow you to ignore the platinum group metals in your calculations. The introduction of that much platinum would crash the market.
2. Energy. The sun shines all the time. Building flimsy mirrors to concentrate it is easy. Can be used as raw heat to melt rocks, or converted into microwaves. If microwaves don't turn out to have unintended consequences this may be the easiest way to wean ourselves off of oil.
3. Vacuum. There are a whole bunch of processes that having unlimited cheap vacuum makes possible.
4. high energy + vacuum allows easy element separation by mass spectroscopy technology.
5. Microgravity. Whole bunches of new materials may be possible.
6. Dinosaur killer interception. Once we are in space to stay, we've got a much better chance both to spot and to stop the next big rock.
Population pressure may encourage some people to live in space, but it is unlikely that people will move faster than they reproduce. (Very few emigrations reduced the population of hte source country.) It is far more likely that initially people in space will be long term contracts similar in nature to peopel working on arctic mines or oil fields today.
However cramped living facilities are entirely a result of having to lift all the mass out of Earth's gravitaional well. The slag from refining can be readily blown into glass foam, which is both a very good insulator, and strong enough to be a component in habitat construction.
Under what conditions is one person harmed NOT too many?
People aren't clams, sitting in the sand and filter feeding. Everything you do is a balance of risks accepted, and risks rejected.
What about a technology that kills 50,000 people a year in North America, and injures several times that number? Is that too many? Yet we accept that driving is dangerous, and don't think much about it.
I live next to a coal mine and power plant. This power plant releases TONS of uranium and thorium per year into the environment. I'm actaully far more concerned about the mercury.
Most of the junk coming out of Chernobyl and Fuji is short lived. The half life of mercury is, let's see. um. Forever. It's poisonous now. It will still be poisonous a billion years form now, unless we evolve a way to handle it.
Heavy sigh.
Don't know if you are serious, but I'm going to pretend that you are:
1. Cosmic beams. No such animal.
2. Magnetic fields interact with other magnetic fields. Since an electron moving relative a magnetic field has a mag field of it's own, we can use a moving magnetic field to generate power or to convert moving electrons to mechanical motion.
3. The magnetic field of the earth isn't very strong -- about half a gauss. I haven't seen a way to extract energy out of it.
4. In general: There is no free lunch. The energy has to come from somewhere. Compare to gravity: You can get energy out of a gravitational field by lowering mass into the field. this is how a hydro electric dam works. If you think you can beat the system, make a table top prototype using small magnets.
Spaceflight right now is inefficient. The only way we move is by throwing mass the other way very fast, and depending on conservation of momentum.
Mv = mV Throwing a kilogram backword at 2000 m/sec moves your 500 kg spaceship forward at 4 m/sec
You can do better by throwing it faster. but the specific impulse of current chemistry imposes limits. Also: chucking the mass with twice the velocity will get twice the velocity change for the space ship, but takes 4 times the energy.
The beanstalk idea is doable: We have the science for it, but not the technology. (Carbon fiber nanotubes have sufficient strength. We don't know how to make them in the length and quantity required.) It will require developing deep space infrastructure -- lots of the material is easiest (lowest energy) to get from the asteroid belt.
And we need to get our house in order. A bean stalk is a wonderful terrorist target. Cutting the stalk at synchronous orbit would have a similar effect to dropping a hydrogen bomb every 5 miles along the entire equator.
Travel between planets in reasonable times is a bit more practical:
1. You don't have to throw large amounts of mass the other way just to fight gravity. So you can use more energy to accelerate less mass. Since you are out in the sunshine, you don't have to use chemistry to provide the energy.
2. Because the interplanetary void has a low density plasma, with clever design, you can use a ring of current to interact with it, getting small but steady thrust, using the mass of the plasma instead of mass you bring with you.
3. There is also the possibility of sailing on the solar wind.
None of these are current technologies, but all of them are reasonable developments of currently known science.
I'm bullish on spaceflight, although in terms of practical economy, the moon, the asteroids (metal, some carbon) and Saturn's rings (water) are much better targets than Mars.
Refining bomb grade material is hard.
The bomb material has to fit together well. Small discrepencies lower the yield drastically.
Plutonium is very hard to machine. The turnings are extremely toxic, and they are flamable. I think they machined the bomb chunks in an oil bath.
One of the two, don't remember which, has multiple crystal structures, and it spontaneously changes from one crystal form to another depending on the temperature. To prevent this, it has to be alloyed. But you have to choose an alloying material that doesn't interfere with the nuclear reaction too much.
For the implosion type bomb, you have to have precisely shaped explosives -- two different ones, that assemble into a sphere wrapping the hollow sphere of bomb material. These explosives have to be precisely shaped, and be very uniform in shockwave transmission speed. Then you have to set them off at exactly the right time so that they assemble a shock wave that is spherical, directed inward. If using 20,000 fps explosives, and you want a shock wave that is round to within a quarter inch, then the timing has to be uniform to within about a microsecond. This isn't easy.
I don't worry about terrorists assembling their own bomb.
1. Efficiency.
At 5.5% efficient, it's not competing with solar cells yet -- but this is a prototype. We can expect better efficiency with time.
2. Rare elements.
the use of tungsten and rhodium could be a deal breaker for mass implementation. There too, however, once the solid state physics guys mix in, there may be better options.
3. Shading
The people in Georgia may not want their entire state covered. There's a fair amount of the country that shading 30 to 50 percent would make the land MORE productive.
4. Albedo
This is a big concern to me. If these solar leaves average darker than the surrounding landscape then mass implementation of them reduces the amount of sunlight reflected into space. This is one positive feedback loop in the arctic. -- Conifers are close to black from above. Tundra reflects 30-50% of light in summer and 85% in winter. As the earth warms, treeline moves north, increasing the amount of heat collected. (It also increases the snow free time of the year, increasing the heat collected.) We're already seeing significant change in the arctic.
5. Hydrogen economy. Seems to me that such a leaf is going to require a rats nest of small plumbing to collect the hydrogen. H2 is tricky to pipe around at the best of times. Collecting it in quantity will be tricky.
This isn't a show stopper. The methanol economy makes a lot more sense. Methanol has better energy density/volume at reasonable pressure, and liquids are easier to store and move around. The conversion of H2 to methanol should be possible with reasonable efficiency with the right catalysts.
I recently made the transition from Linux to Mac. As a result of that transitions:
1. ICEwm -> Spaces. I still have multiple desktops.
2. xTerm -> Terminal.
3. yum -> macports . Generally macports is a bunch slower (it does everything from source, rather than packages) but 'ports install digikam' did the right thing, although it took a lonnnnnngg time, and put a load of X11 programs I hadn't asked for.
4. vi -> vi.
5. Firefox +Opera +Chrome -> Firefox + Opera + Chrome + Safari
6. Digikam + gimp -> Aperture + Photoshop. Big win.
7. Virtualbox + WinXP -> stuck. I don't have a good equivalent to Access yet.
New:
iTunes + iPhone = portable smart playlists.
Mac comes with Apache as it's built in web server.
Author complains that the environmental differences bite you. Who does major editing on server files? Let the server do it's job. Edit in an environment that lets you play music, play with your screensaver when you're stuck. (electric sheep...) and have a couple hundred windows open on 12 dual screen desktops.
In a production environment in the past:
I've always taken an old box, and run whatever OS + server software the production box did, and moved files to/from it with rsync. I've tweaked the server with ssh+vi. I've analyzed traffic with Wireshark.
I've used Mac, Linux with various desktops, NextStep, Ultrix, AIX, IRIX, HPUX. Winsnooze, Freebsd, openbsd both with just CLI, In order of usability for what I wanted to do:
1. NextStep
2. Mac
3. Linux
4. Windows
5. Other X11 (Lack of suitable applications)
I don't count the CLI machines -- their job was to be servers. Most of my career I had a workspace for each server with half a dozen xterms ssh'd into them.
As to the author's complaint about TextMate. There's lots of IDE tools out there, BBEdit, {g}vim at the bottom end for simple text editing, up to Eclipse, and Dreamweaver if you want something with more whistles.
At present my tool chain for web authoring consisted of
1. vi to edit files
2. template toolkit 2 for templating
3. MultiMarkdown for reducing tag writing
4. Perl to automate stuff.
5. apache to test pages on.
6. rsync to push updates to my server.
Getting my toolchain working on the mac took the better part of a day mostly waiting for macports, and tracking down places where I had hardcoded paths into scripts.
In passing: I have a winsooze laptop too. It also has my toolchain present on it.
Historically people have been willing to commute about an hour to work. Medieval towns were typically 3-4 miles apart. An ox moves at about 2 mph. Roads weren't straight. About an hour. While you could live on the farm, for protection people clumped together.
In the American (and Canadian) west, the township system were grids of 6 mile squares. Railways put in a siding about every 6 miles. In theory each 6 mile square had a town in it. The remnants of this can be seen in the network of community halls, and abandoned grain elevators beside the sidings.
The existence of small towns breaks this paradigm. I grew up in a town of 9,000. School was on the other side of town. I walked most days. (Taking a bit under an hour....) But you could drive anywhere in town in 15 minutes, including starting the car.
The zoning rules certainly make it harder for people to live near their work. Ways that could make it better:
1. Rezone one block in 6 business/light industrial/residential. New construction in this area must include the same amount of residential space in addition to other uses. (E.g. housing over the shops.)
2. All new residential construction has to have 1 square foot of green space for each square foot of concrete, asphalt or roof. That includes driveway, sidewalk and share of the street.
3. Encourage multiple use construction downtown. Any new building over X square feet has to have housing for 2 people for every job anticipated in new building. So a shoppng mall with 200 shops, with an average of 10 employees each has to have accomodation for 4000 people. This doesn't mean that the mall workers have to live there. It means that they can live there. And, if on the average there is a space per job, then on the average more people can commute by elevator and short walk.
4. Where possible mix buildings uses for night life (restaurants, clubs, cinama) with 8-5 light industry. This gets better use out of the parking lot.
Clever use of this could mean that half of people live close to where they work and wouldn't need to drive, leaving more room on the roads for the rest.
I use the freebie "Mouse Acceleration" A flick of my wrist sents the mouse 3000 pixels away.
I agree that there are aggravating things about the GUI, but *EVERY* gui I've used has aggravations. One of the things I like about Mac and Linux is that so much of what you can do with a GUI you can do with a CLI too. And with the macports project you can have most of the linux world too. (We now have enough computers in the house that DNS became desirable. "port install maradns" (bind would be overkill) Done.
Now if I could get Spotlight to default to searching for filenames, not content...
I don't understand why GPL 3 is an issue.
Suppose Apple uses Samba. Suppose they use current stable release X. They don't charge for it. It's an optional package install in the Options folder on the disk. There's a readme that directs them to the web site for source code.
For library code: My understanding is that if you link against a library, your program is infected with GPL.
Suppose you write a program whose sole purpose is to be a pipe between your application and a library. The library is now running as a separate process. You release the wrapper program. Not a big deal.
It's probably less efficient, but much of the time, efficiency isn't needed. When it is, you roll your own code.
It's not clear to me how this improves security.
The only thing I can see that it stops is a user casually emailing a document off site. Leaks are more deliberate.
Unless your security policy also blocks most outbound ports, and does deep packet inspection on what it does let out, this appears to be just one sand bag in the stream.
Ways to move digital data offsite.
1. Media: DVD, CD, Memory Stick, portable hard drive. camera used as flash drive, phone used as a flash drive.
2. Standard file protocols ftp, ssh, sftp, http, https. The latter two would be hard to detect -- but the ratio of download to upload would be skewed for a particular host.
3. Sync files to/from my phone.
4. Teamviewer and the like. (Remote desktop protocols with file transfer capability.)
5. Tethered phone.
6. USB wireless + cantenna.
7. Running another OS in a virtual machine to evade locked down desktops.
8. In a windows shop, running 'portable apps'.
9. Embedding data in non-standard transports. E.g. Ping packets.
Stopping all of this is possible, even easy. Doing so in a way that people can still get any work done, and won't spit on IT people as they pass will be a bit more challenging.
Field trips with grade 8's. Right.
The boys will be making eyes at the girls, telling dirty jokes and sniggering. The girls will be playing coy, and will talk about fashion, make-up, and the latest rock star hunk. Time on task will be minimal.
Until they have some understanding, the complexity of a real example will be lost on them.
Until they are numerate, they will not understand numbers thrown at them by a guide.
Field trips also require a huge amount of organizing -- to run a trip you have to:
* Get signed permission from every set of parents.
* Get enough parents to volunteer to help herd the beasts. (About 1 parent per 5 kids.)
* Get budget approval for the trip.
* Get transportation for the trip. If you use parent's cars, you have a separate permission slip from each parent whose kid will be in another parent's car. If you use school busses, you have to schedule that too.
* Get permission from all the other teachers who will miss class time due to your field trip.
* Depending on your school, you may have to surrender time later to make up for the time you took from other teachers.
Field trips have their place, but they are not a general answer, and generally work best to re-enforce previously learned material.
Experiments are important. Manitoba used to have a course that was 80% lab oriented. One series of experiments:
1. Measure a bunch of rectangular solids with different rulers. (Some had no mm markers.) Measure enough objects that you got blase about them and couldn't remember which ones you'd seen before. This teaches record keeping, and measurement error.
2. Weigh each object. Compare results.
3. Calculate the density of each object.
4. Repeat this experiment using other than rectangular shapes. This required learning and using some new volume formulas.
5. Classify the sets of objects. Come up with many ways to classify them. Shape, material, use.
6. Introduce materials such as beads, steel shot, lead shot, sand, pea gravel. What does density mean for these materials? How do you measure? Introduce the idea of displacement as a way to measure volume.
This was a great course. Lots of hands on. But the above took a month. They dropped the course because it didn't teach enough science -- that is, the kids didn't memorize enough science derived information. I would argue that it was the best science course most kids would ever take.
This was an easy course to fund: You needed rulers, a couple boxes full of stuff, graduated cylinders, scales, All the stuff for a class of 30 would fit on a cart.
Compare to high school physics. Most of the apparatus costs af ew hundred to 2000 bucks per set up. Most of it can be used for only 1-2 experiments.
I know of a biology grad student who was hired to replace a gal on maternity leave. He was given the class of dunderheads, and told, "Keep them busy. If they learn any science, great."
All these guys were in shop. First day he walks in gives each kid a mouse trap. "Make a live trap to catch mice"
Soon they had a collection of different traps tha would life trap mice. They went out into the local field (200 feet away. No busses, no permissions.) set the traps.
Next day they had mice. "What do we do with them?" He showed them how to weigh them, measure them, determine their age. And let them go. Reset the traps.
"How do we know if we have caught these before?" So he showed them how to band them, and this lead to keeping good lab books.
They didn't just catch mice. Voles, shrews, the occasional ground squirrel, even a toad. Each was used to compare.
They used different baits, and kept track of what worked better. Most of the kids had 10-12 traps out in the field, and were checking them after school every day.
All fall they collected information about mice. Microscopes came out to analyze mouse crap to see what they were eating. Mice were discected to teach anatomy.
Irridum, thick bar. Hmm. $990/troy oz. Hmm.
Density -- just under osmium at 22.56
So, a 30 cm x 1 cm bar would have a volume of about 22 cm3, and a mass just over half a kilogram. At 31 grams per troy oz $16,000.
Now other features:
Young's modulus 528 GPa
Shear Modulus 210
Bulk modulus 320
Brinnell Hardness 1670 MPa
Compare to lead:
YM 16 Gpa
SM 5.6 GPa
BM 46 GPa
Brinell 38 Mpa
Iron
211
82
170
490
There is a reason that iron is alloyed. Pure iron is hard to work.
This is a material that is several times as stiff.
What gave you the idea that you could bend a 'thick' bar bare handed?
Right now our ag system produces a lot more cellulose than it can use. Eg: With corn, the kernels are useful, but most of the rest of the plant is not. Sometimes this can be converted into silage, but fermenting it into some form of alchohol is another use.
Depending on how robust this system is, it might be able to use materials that contain lignan as well as celluose. This would enable it to be used for forest slash, and make make it profitable to harvest sagebrush -- which has taken over much of the high grass prairie due to over grazing.
Rice is another crop that produces huge amounts of residue. Most of our cereal grains have been bred for short stems, but there is still a lot of wheat and barley straw. In regions where there is not much in the way of livestock operations, this conversion could be attractive.
Another competing use for this material is syngas+charcoal. Charcoal is extroidinarily stable in soil, and apparently has all kinds of benefits in terms of being a nutrient collection site. Distilling straw to make wood alchohol, using the tars and the CO as heat to run the process, and heat the pig barn, and ploughing the charcoal back into the soil has potential as a anti-CO2 action.
A colleague of mine, a phys ed major when he was in school, decided to get his Masters of Education from U of P. He handed me an essay that he'd gotten a 98% on. I read it. The essay was garbage -- illogical, unfounded assumption, few references. The kind of thing that would pull a C or a D in a freshman English class.
Bad education options are not limited to for profit colleges.
I was looking for an online horticulture course. Came across University of Waterloo's program. A course cost $350, and consisted of 20 lessons with quizzes. There were 3 sample lessons online. I went through the lessons. Each lesson consisted of about 10 minutes of reading, and 10 multiple guess questions. I was able to do all 3 lessons in less than an hour.
I think it was something like 5 required and 5 optional courses made up a diploma.
I expect more bang for your buck. An online tech course should be on par with running a highschool. In our country a highschool costs about $6,000/year/student, not including the building facility, for the government to run. A high school student typically takes 6 courses in a year, each with 125 hours of required instruction time. So high school education runs about $8/hour for instructional time.
If we naively equate instructional time for student time, then the Waterloo horticulture course should have cost $30-$40.
There may be good distance learning courses out there. I haven't found them yet. Do your due diligence.
Could declining sales possibly be because they aren't producing new music worth listening to?
My personal experience: Hearing a good tune on the boom box has resulted in my going out and collecting all of a singer/songwriters work:
Lorenna McKennit's "The Bonny Swans" hit the top 40.
Enya's "Orinoco Flow"
James Keelaghan's "Cold Missouri Water" was on CBC radio.
Ditto Stan Rogers' "The Mary Ellen Carter"
Empire Brass Quintett "Passages"
Radio stations used to play something new now and then. (and 3/5 of the above list was due to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) If you are only going to play oldies, and a short playlist of them, why be surprise that more and more people relegate music to Muzak -- noise to cover up the sound of the air conditioner.
Young people spend far more time watching TV and playing video games instead of listening to the radio/walkman/ipod.
The music companies could be clever about this, and insist that the price for playing the songs would be to list them, including all the info needed to buy them. Or if they have a licensing scheme for internet much as they do for radio, to make the first n plays a month for a track to be at no fee, with n being a small integer. This would encourage stations to use a larger playlist.
I would be interested too in seeing a breakdown by genre and sub-genre, both with amount of air time/ listeners and the number of sales.
I have very little desire to use my desktop by voice. However, I wiould love to operate my phone by voice. Things I would like to do with a blue tooth head set and my phone:
1. While commuting to work.
"Marvin, wake up."
"Yes boss?"
"Email to Shirley Jones"
"Ready"
"Can we meet tomorrow on the status of the Filbert project." End message. Append times I've got open. Send.
"Sent. Next?"
"Memo to self: Investigate advantages of importing Japanese filbers. Remind me this aft at 2"
"You are meeting with John at 2:00"
"Fine. When I get back to the office after seeing John."
"Roger that. Next?
"go to sleep"
2. Inventory. Counting trees.
Spruce, whtie Block 17, 1 gallon pots, 12 to 16" tall, 24 rows of 18 each.
Spruce white, Block 18, 2 gallon pots, 18-30" tall, 40 rows of 12 each
Generally: Anytime I want to use a computer but a keyboard and rodent are impractical.
So it's 10 cm thick. Over how large an area? Is it fallout from a plume, and is a mile wide, and 10 miles long? Is it 500 square miles?
How fast does oil degrade on the sea floor?
Compare to other natural disasters:
1. The Mississippi jumps it's banks and drops a foot of clay on hundreds of square miles of farm land.
2. A forest fire burns 1000 square miles.
3. Mount St. Helens blows it's top, and puts a foot of powdered volcanic glass downwind.
When the Exxon Valdez incident occurred, the environmentalists shrieked that it would never recover. Two years later, numbers were still down especially amoung the top preditors, (who both can move to the next by down the coast, and who have longer reproduction cycles) but all species known there before were present.
When the latest round of time zone changes came out, a certain nameless Redmond Washington company was going to charge a very large sum for their update. (I think 40 grand site license...)
Our solution: Network Time Protocol broadcasts on the local subnet, K-9 free client on each client, and a policy to allow the user to play with the time. They could change the time zone to get it to lie for 3 weeks.
Actually, try googling
keyboard iphone
and you will find several aftermarket solutions to the hard keyboard issue.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/want-a-slide-out-keyboard-for-your-iphone-4-youre-in-luck/10462
is the boxwave slideout keyboard/case. Talks to the iPhone via bluetooth.
Apple apparently now supports bluetooth keyboards for all of their devices.
There are various keyboard/docking stations for iDevices. A friend has a bluetooth folding keyboard that he carries around with his ipad. And he regularly uses remote desktop on his ipad to access his office computer.
Firstly -- a robust network needs an alternative to spanning tree. When an alternate link is discovered, it's used. I suspect that doing this for a large network is not a trivial problem.
Various proposals have been made for mesh networks. Consider the bandwidth issue. Consider a town of 10,000 covering a square mile or so. Let's suppose there is a wifi point every 100 feet. That means that a packet requires 50 repeats to get across a mile of town.
Latency?
Most of these wifi points better not be just repeaters either. Else you get packets running in circles.
The two problems are essentially identical, just different in scale.
I think to solve it, the network has to be aware of more than it's local topology. It has to understand how it's distributed in space.
I walked into a math class with a burger flipper once, and did a bit of a rant pointing out to about 3/4 of the class that this was going to be the tool they used to make a living, if they didn't change their attitude toward academic discipline.
"You can't say that to us!"
"Why?"
"You hurt our self esteem"
"Your self esteem is based on a delusion that the world owes you beer and skittles."
"It's not fair!"
"Neither is the world.
"You have a choice. The good paying jobs tend to require one of the following: 1. Willingness to work hard physically in dirty locations -- lots of those in the oil patch. Less unpleasant, but also paying less, most trades. 2. Brains -- usually requiring math -- engineering, financial analysis, programming come to mind. Writing is also one of these jobs. 3. Scholarship and memorization -- most liberal arts, medical. 4. Something illegal such as drug pushing or prostitution.
"Prostitution?"
"One of my students is dead now. Aids. Dropped out in grade 9, and made his fix money peddling his bum downtown."
Sudden silence. About 1/3 of this class were regular drug users of more than pot.
"The jobs that are left after that are mostly of the flippng burgers, pumping gas and mowing lawns category."
"And if you feel that your self esteem has been too battered, feel free to complain to your folks or to the headmaster."
The teacher in the adjacent classroom (who taught my mob social studies) applauded at the end of the rant.
It made a difference for the next month for most of the class, and for four of them it turned them around and they passed.
I prefer the idea of ranking the candidates in order. So if there are 5 candidates when I go to a poll I rank them 1,2,3,4,5.
In the first pass, the ballets are counted by first choice. Candidate C is the bottom of the list, so candidate C's votes are recounted using the second choice. This time D is at the bottom.
Now the original D votes are sorted by second choice, and the C votes are sorted by third choice.
This time A's votes are the bottom of the list.
B and E are all that's left. So now A's votes are split by which of B,E are closer to the top.
We have a Subaru Outback. It takes everything the heater can produce to get the car warm at highway speeds at -30C.
I would also worry about how well such a vehicle will do in 8 inches of fresh snow.
Or on the 6" deep frozen ruts because City of Edmonton doesn't clean snow off of residential streets