From what I have seen over the last 15 years is that unadministered Windows boxes are much more of a problem than unadministered Linux boxes.
When a Linux box does not get the attention it needs, it loses capabilities until it is so moribund that the user finally calls in someone to fix it, or replaces it. Or in rare instances, learns enough to become a competent computer user and start managing the box themself.
But when a Windows box goes without proper attention, it usually picks up malware, and while it eventually loses capabilities, it also represents a threat to the security of its users, and often to others. To look at this from another direction, if all Windows boxes were being properly administered, we would not have the spam and bot problems that infest the Internet.
So what it comes down to is that incompetent users should have their boxes administered by persons who know what they are doing, no matter which OS is in use.
My own belief is that some Linux distros, Ubuntu for one, are now ready for general desktop deployment. However there are still a lot of venues where there is not enough Linux support persons around for this to work. Sound bite: Linux is ready for the desktop, but many desktop environments are too ignorant of Linux to be ready for it.
LO does a fine job producing.pdf files, and a reasonably good job producing HTML. Those are the only two formats any business should be using in any final draft of any communication, internal or external.
I run LibreOffice under Ubuntu, and with the automatic updating I get a steady stream of vulnerability fixes, bug corrections, enhancements, and additional features. There is probably an average of one such update per week, and all I need to do is press a button to authorize it. This setup is much slicker than the Windows equivalents, at no cost and no hassle.
Not only that, but my copy of LO has functioned without problems when I did a major upgrade from Ubuntu v10.4 to v12.4, and when I changed the GUI front end between Unity, 2 different versions of Gnome, and KDE. (I have settled on Gnome 3 in its "Classic" form for now, as it is most familiar and I am more efficient with it than the others, but with the recent Nvidea / KDE graphics improvements, I might start using the KDE option more frequently at least while I am doing CG work).
Oh yeah, I forgot. Windows restricts you to using only one GUI, the one that Redmond thinks is best for sales at the moment. So ignore that last bit. If you do not use a Linux OS, you do not need to know anything about those options.
No it is not. If you can't tell the difference in quality and taste
Uh, no. Original statement is true, for all generally accepted definitions of the word "subjective"
Finding ways to compare and rank subjective experiences does not negate the subjectivity of the experience. If you cannot reasonably use external measures of length, weight, speed, etc in the comparison, then the quality being compared is almost certainly subjective and not objective.
Metaphors do not count.I mean, you could say that "a prime rib steak is 5 miles while a Bic Mac patty is only 3 inches", but, while true, that would generally be recognized as just plain silly.
You are measuring it wrong. So is the TFA and the damnfool study it is based on.
Organic farming is not about tastiness. It is about using farming methods that enhance the local ecosystem rather than relying on fertilizers and pesticides that cripple big parts of the ecosystem, both at the farm and downstream from its fields. The opposite of organic farming is Monsanto, Round-Up, and burning 7 Calories of diesel fuel to get 1 Calorie of lettuce to market.
That many who buy organic food find it tastier has to do with same factors that make a Thanksgiving Day turkey taste better than a turkey served up on a sweltering July day. Taste is an experience with a rich psychological component involving memories and future expectations. It is not simply a matter of signals from neurons on the tongue.
Possibly so, though it has been my experience that organic growers tend to choose cultivars for their flavor rather than other qualities, like resistance to pesticides, physical strength (13 mph tomatoes, etc), or ease of cultivating / harvesting with big machines.
Another factor is that taste is purely subjective, and influenced by a constellation of other senses, past history, and future expectations. It is very likely that knowing that a piece of food was grown on an organic farm increases its tastiness to treehuggers and others who care about whether modern farming is destroying ecosystems.
You are right, I have no idea how bookies come up with their odds numbers. Nor do I care.
I also have no idea about how to interpret the odds they come up with. What biases are inherent in people who would wager on election results? Does a onepercenter who lays down a single $100 million bet exert more influence than all the workers whose dreams were destroyed in 2007-2008 economic crash? If I were going to bet at all, I would bet that most of those whose livelihoods were broken by the assanine policies that happened between the Clinton and Obama years do not feel like they can afford to play stupid betting games right now.
So, no, I have absolutely no skills in handling bookie stuff.
Using intrade properly looks like it would take bookie skills. I never have bothered to learn those.
I like the electoral vote predictor. Its comments show a definite blue bias, but there is no bias in its handling of poll data. It uses the last polls taken in each state for data.
At the moment what it shows is not necessarily representative of the country, since there have been very few polls done in the last week. But now that the conventions are over, I expect that there will be a lot of polling done, and electoral-vote.com will be as accurate as anyone can get.
Good point... my home router probably would not be much use. But forest service vehicles and logging crummies all come equiped with fairly powerful 12 volt generators, so I think it would only be a matter of finding an industrial grade router that can punch a signal through a few miles of wilderness. Maybe put a honking long whip antena on the rig...
Last point first: If those who are maintaining the protocols are so fucking stupid that they cannot adapt them to improved technology, then people are going to die. Fortunately, the persons who are responsible for developing first responder protocols are a lot smarter than some of the persons who pretend to represent them on Slashdot.
First point: the issue under discussion is whether fire trucks and other first response vehicles would benefit from having computers (with ad hoc networking capabilities). That they do not have them now is immaterial. The cost of adding an Android phone to a fire truck's equipment is minimal; that would give the truck the capability of photographing sketches or conditions at the scene that could then be sent by Internet or phone link to an off site location. That kind of Internet access would be ideal, and should be done today.
But that is not what an ad hoc network or mesh network is about. This comes into play when there are no functioning cell towers or Internet access in the area of the disaster. The Android would instead communicate with a laptop with wifi router capabilities that would seek out similar units and establish an independent mesh such that sketches and photos, etc, could be shared among the first responders. Who would follow pre-established protocols to organize themselves so their efforts were coordinated.
Catskinners often do carry cellphones with cameras; that is the ideal way of communicating just how the dozer has broken down this time, and the part number of the fitting that needs to be replaced. Logging sites and timber cruisers already have laptops that are powerful enough for a first response mesh (they are useful for on site inventory tracking, etc); they would only need the wifi router and standardized software.
I have a decade of experience as an ICU RN, so I have some idea of what EMTs do. In general, they do a fantastic job, and are very good at using some pretty sophisticated expertise to stabilize victims. As a group, you deserve the honors that you are accorded.
However EMTs are not the only first responders. For that matter, they are rarely the first ones at the scene; they usually do not arrive until someone else has called them, and it is usually someone else who shows them where the victims are. That they might not benefit from ad hoc mesh networks does not mean that other first responders would also see no benefit.
The incidents I am most familiar with are forest fires and white water boating disasters.
In both forest fires and rafting disasters, the exact locations of the problems and victims are not immediately known and the first response is often by more than one group approaching from different directions. These incidents often happen where cell towers are few and there is no Internet access. Being able to link together an ad hoc mesh network would often reduce the risks that the first responders are taking and improve the odds that they find the victims in time to do some good. It is very worrisome to be having to guess whether to put the crew to work cutting firebreak or should they be sent instead to scour the valley for a party of hikers that probably is not there any longer.
In the event of a tornado taking out a town, first responders will come in from the margins, from various directions. With cell towers out of operation and cables broken, Internet access can be problematic. An adhoc mesh would be a good way for the various first responders to develop the initial maps of the disaster, identifying where equipment is needed for rescue operations, etc. And ideally link back to the Internet.
Hurricanes: same thing on a larger scale. When Houston next gets hit by a big one, adhoc meshes among first responders are likely to become critical in determining where the boats and helicopters need to be sent first. In big cities we can expect emergency generators and redundant connectivity to keep hospitals, police, and fire stations up and running, but ad hoc meshes should have a big role in the early assessment and response to residential areas.
Forest fires present special challenges as their behavior can be unpredictable, smoke interferes with monitoring what is happening, and first responders can so easily become victims. Also these occur in areas where cell towers are few and dead areas are frequent, and the best Internet access is often by slow satellite connections. Ad hoc meshes would be very useful in assessing what the fire is doing and coordinating the activities of the first responders.
When a series of lightning strikes begins a complex forest fire, many of the first responders are separated from the guys who might be starting to do the hand drawn maps by miles of flames and roadless terrain. The responders are coming in from all directions; there is no central point that they are going to funnel through. In the Bilger Creek Complex of fires in 1987, a number of the first responders were woodsmen with bulldozers and chainsaws in the middle of it all, who had to guess where to set up fire lanes since although they were all in radio contact with each other, at that time there was no way to communicate where the fires were or where they were heading.
Lives were lost. If it had been possible to cobble together a mesh and communicate even rudimentary map data between the groups, there would have been fewer losses, and probably the fires would have been contained more quickly at less cost.
Tornados and hurricanes present similar situations: the first responders come in from all the margins. There is no central point they would funnel through. From what I have seen of earthquake news and when Mt St Helens blew its top, the same is true of tectonic events.
Generally, it is probably true that the first responders are on the ground, doing the work, before the map makers have got their magic markers out of the box. It would be very nice if these guys who are already in the thick of it could become a part of a mesh network and benefit from the second wave of responders who are building the maps and beginning to coordinate activities that are already in progress.
Internet connectivity would be useful to such a mesh, but even if that is broken, the ability to send low quality photos, penciled diagrams, rough maps, and plain text lists between the first responders and the first coordinators would be damn useful.
I do not think that 'remote storage and remote processing' is all that is involved in the cloud concept. There are also a whole lot of services: back-ups, security, hardware redundancy, even, usually, low level optimization.
Basically all the low level database activity is contracted out to specialists when a company goes to a cloud provider. That can have a tremendous impact on future IT costs.
One specific example: Going with a clould means having someone else deal with hassles of background checks for the rack monkeys. Most IT managers have little training in how to manage personnel security in these days of USB sticks, and probably do not want to learn that kind of crap. They are IT managers, dammit, not idjit HR managers.
Yes,in the TFA directly linked to, there is no mention of what is to be done with the heat that is pumped out of all that CO2 in order to solidify it. There is only a brief mention that it might be somehow put to use. But how? This part of the concept needs to be developed further.
Could the heat be used to melt Antarctic ice that could be hauled by refurbished oil tankers to Saudi Arabia for irrigation and bath water? Or should it just be dumped willy-nilly into the Antarctic environment? Maybe the penguins would like a warm bath?
There is some reason why Curry invokes Jonathan Swift's proposed solution to the Irish Question in the title of TFA. I think it has to do with the heated discussions that her article is likely to generate.
Radon not being a problem except in buildings that are substandard... sometimes by design and construction, unfortunately.
Radon is not biologically active; it is only a problem where it accumulates in the air, as in mines or some high tech building designs of 30 years ago, that used radon-emitting bricks and minimal heat loss designs. Heck, it is not even chemically reactive; it is one of the inert gases. Its risks are very different from the results of a nuclear plant mishap where iodine, strontium, cesium, and other nasty bioactive radioisotopes are released, stay in the ecosystem, and accumulate in top feeders.
If you want to stop the FUD, then bring the conversation up to the level of useful discourse instead of spouting the propaganda pushed out by those who seek personal gain from a very dirty industry. You do not end FUD by throwing around the bullshit from one side of the dispute; you end it by finding out what the facts are yourself (if you are on Slashdot, you better have skills in critical reading), and using those facts to dampen down the flames.
Parent post is contributing to the FUD it protests against, just as TFA does.
Environmental radiation from uranium in the Denver area granite is no big deal, because the uranium stays locked up in the granite.
A lot of the radioactive crud released by Fuckunmeboth is from very biological active elements. Stuff that collects in your blood and in your bones, and irradiates you from the inside. Unless you do not mind the possibility of your life ending in the prolonged messiness of cancer, etc, then this stuff is something to be fearful about. Especially for those of us who eat near the top of the food chain-- you know, like tuna and beef, rather than subsisting on just the yeastie beasties in the beer.
Lincoln's Dreams. To Say Nothing of the Dog. TheDoomsday Book. Passage. Etc. Oodles of Nebula and Hugo awards, but her name rarely comes up in general discussions about sci-fi. So despite her literary successes, she qualifies as underappreciated (in the Slashdot venue).
The difficulty I have with the logic of this post, and other arguments about the can of worms the USA is opening up in using drones, is the assumption that if the USA did not develop or use this technology, then nobody else would.
That is just so bogus.
The technology for drones is becoming freely available on the open market. The only way that our future would be free of drones is if all computing devices made since 1999 were outlawed. No cellphones, no Androids, no iPads, no netbooks. Definitely no Raspberry Pi. Probably have to do away with some of the more interesting Legos, too.
Yes, we definitely have to worry about drones being used inappropriately by those who do not yet have them, but who are undoubtedly thinking about getting them. That is not connected with the USA use of them in the struggle to defang the terrorist snakes. It is an entirely separate set of issues. The only relationship between the two is that the USA use of drones in Pakistan has awakened some people to the potentially greater problems of a world with all kinds of drones. That is a good thing, even if it makes some people uncomfortable to think about it.
So rather than more spouting about all the evils that drones could cause and how nasty it is to be awakened by that buzz, what do you think could be done to manage the coming problems? Do we need a Geneva Convention to put limits on their deployment and availability? How do we get that going?
This thread is probably not a good place to try to settle an argument by an appeal to some definition of celestial objects that was made by committee. Just saying.
Whatever you may choose to call Jupiter, its activity in the radio part of the spectrum and its electromagnetic field cannot be explained by gravitation forces without introducing a whole mess of weird conjectures that do not belong in science. There is something happening within Jupiter, producing quite a bit of energy, that we do not understand. Ignoring the findings we do not understand so that the rest can be easily explained by what somebody thinks they know is not good science. It is also not a good argument.
Back to language: in an ideal world *all* astronomers would be involved in doing astronomy, and not *some* involved instead in making up taxonomies (classification schemes) by committee. It is true that chemistry was greatly advanced by the periodic table of elements, which is a taxonomy. However it is a taxonomy that has emerged from repeatable chemistry findings, and thus a classification scheme that closely parallels what is really going on in the world. The IAU on the other hand is drawing up the lines between different classification bins based on what seems logical at this moment, but that is not the empiricism of science. It is instead the exact same activity that Galileo railed against the Church over, when the Church insisted that the World must be built according to the logic of Aristotle. It is the fallacy of reasoning beyond what the current meager evidence will support. It is worse than wrong, for it hinders efforts to actually do science and collect some real data.
Stick with empiiricism. Regard anything that arises from any other source as mere conjecture. Be willing to accept that not only do you personally not know everything, those whom you place in high authority do not know everything, either.
Typically in science the experts lead general education by pointing the way. But this is an example of a small cadre of the IAU attempting to dictate what students should be taught.
It is noted elsewhere in this thread that the proposal to redefine "planet" was introduced in the last minutes of the final session of the IAU meeting, after most of the attendees had left the hall (except for the conspirators who wanted this to happen). That does not exhonerate other IAU members-- everyone in the IAU shares responsibility for allowing their system to be gamed this way. But if the IAU worked the way it was intended to work, then this absurdity would never have happened.
My biggest gripe with the redefinition is not that it excludes Pluto, but that it is even less self-consistent than the poorly defined terminology that it replaces. Bright students recognize something is not right as soon as they hear it, although they often do not yet have the vocabulary to say what is wrong about it. What has happened here does not advance human knowledge nor make it any easier to teach science to students, quite the contrary. It confuses students and makes astronomy, and sciences in general, more muddy rather than more clear.
Eventually the IAU will retract this foolishness and either put forward some definitions that are internally consistent and possibly useful, or let things go back to the way they were, when the meaning of the word "planet" was always defined by the context in which it was used.
There really is no problem with that: words whose meanings are dependent on the context in which they are used are perfectly cromulent.
How many weeks do you spend preparing for those 2-3 weeks in an observatory? That preparation is directly analogous to the laboratory time a chemist spends in preparing his glassware and calibrating his equipment. I doubt that you would be allowed any time in the observatory without first having shown a lot of preparatory work on what you were going to observe, how you were going to observe it, how you intend to validate those observations, and the way the data you obtain could be used to confirm or reject your hypothesis. That is all part of the laboratory phase of the work.
To put this in concrete terms, when Galileo dropped those balls from the Tower at Pizza his experiment did not start when he let go of them. It started long before that, as he began arranging for the use of the Tower and the timing devices, and recruiting students as his assistants. Those pesky real world details are as critical to a successful experiment as cleaning out the retorts between uses or preparing stock solutions of known strengths. In general terms, the experimental phase begins after the means for testing the hypothesis is first formulated and efforts become focused on the details of making that testing happen.
After the 2-3 weeks in the observatory, how many weeks do you spend in preparing the raw data you have obtained for analysis? That counts as lab time, too. The experiment phase of the work does not end until you are ready to deduce new information from your findings with a definite level of confidence.
Of course I could be wrong about all this. I am merely a man with a 50+ year interest in how astronomy is done; I am not an astronomer and have no string of fancy letters I can tie on behind my name.
It is not *the* definition, it is a *stupid* definition.
As Abe once said, calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg; the dog still has only four legs.
The IAU coming up with a generally useless new definition for a word that is very much in common usage with a different meaning only shows that the IAU is capable of tremendous hubris, and is not in the service of increasing or distributing knowledge. Quite the opposite.
Jupiter may already be burning; if there was a self-sustaining nuclear reaction at its core, that would explain some of its puzzling activity. The idea of brown dwarf stars is not a new one: stars that do not emit much if any visible light, but pump out heat and particles.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I have seen over the last 15 years is that unadministered Windows boxes are much more of a problem than unadministered Linux boxes.
When a Linux box does not get the attention it needs, it loses capabilities until it is so moribund that the user finally calls in someone to fix it, or replaces it. Or in rare instances, learns enough to become a competent computer user and start managing the box themself.
But when a Windows box goes without proper attention, it usually picks up malware, and while it eventually loses capabilities, it also represents a threat to the security of its users, and often to others. To look at this from another direction, if all Windows boxes were being properly administered, we would not have the spam and bot problems that infest the Internet.
So what it comes down to is that incompetent users should have their boxes administered by persons who know what they are doing, no matter which OS is in use.
My own belief is that some Linux distros, Ubuntu for one, are now ready for general desktop deployment. However there are still a lot of venues where there is not enough Linux support persons around for this to work. Sound bite: Linux is ready for the desktop, but many desktop environments are too ignorant of Linux to be ready for it.
LO does a fine job producing .pdf files, and a reasonably good job producing HTML. Those are the only two formats any business should be using in any final draft of any communication, internal or external.
No.
I run LibreOffice under Ubuntu, and with the automatic updating I get a steady stream of vulnerability fixes, bug corrections, enhancements, and additional features. There is probably an average of one such update per week, and all I need to do is press a button to authorize it. This setup is much slicker than the Windows equivalents, at no cost and no hassle.
Not only that, but my copy of LO has functioned without problems when I did a major upgrade from Ubuntu v10.4 to v12.4, and when I changed the GUI front end between Unity, 2 different versions of Gnome, and KDE. (I have settled on Gnome 3 in its "Classic" form for now, as it is most familiar and I am more efficient with it than the others, but with the recent Nvidea / KDE graphics improvements, I might start using the KDE option more frequently at least while I am doing CG work).
Oh yeah, I forgot. Windows restricts you to using only one GUI, the one that Redmond thinks is best for sales at the moment. So ignore that last bit. If you do not use a Linux OS, you do not need to know anything about those options.
taste is purely subjective
No it is not. If you can't tell the difference in quality and taste
Uh, no. Original statement is true, for all generally accepted definitions of the word "subjective"
Finding ways to compare and rank subjective experiences does not negate the subjectivity of the experience. If you cannot reasonably use external measures of length, weight, speed, etc in the comparison, then the quality being compared is almost certainly subjective and not objective.
Metaphors do not count.I mean, you could say that "a prime rib steak is 5 miles while a Bic Mac patty is only 3 inches", but, while true, that would generally be recognized as just plain silly.
You are measuring it wrong. So is the TFA and the damnfool study it is based on.
Organic farming is not about tastiness. It is about using farming methods that enhance the local ecosystem rather than relying on fertilizers and pesticides that cripple big parts of the ecosystem, both at the farm and downstream from its fields. The opposite of organic farming is Monsanto, Round-Up, and burning 7 Calories of diesel fuel to get 1 Calorie of lettuce to market.
That many who buy organic food find it tastier has to do with same factors that make a Thanksgiving Day turkey taste better than a turkey served up on a sweltering July day. Taste is an experience with a rich psychological component involving memories and future expectations. It is not simply a matter of signals from neurons on the tongue.
Possibly so, though it has been my experience that organic growers tend to choose cultivars for their flavor rather than other qualities, like resistance to pesticides, physical strength (13 mph tomatoes, etc), or ease of cultivating / harvesting with big machines.
Another factor is that taste is purely subjective, and influenced by a constellation of other senses, past history, and future expectations. It is very likely that knowing that a piece of food was grown on an organic farm increases its tastiness to treehuggers and others who care about whether modern farming is destroying ecosystems.
You are right, I have no idea how bookies come up with their odds numbers. Nor do I care.
I also have no idea about how to interpret the odds they come up with. What biases are inherent in people who would wager on election results? Does a onepercenter who lays down a single $100 million bet exert more influence than all the workers whose dreams were destroyed in 2007-2008 economic crash? If I were going to bet at all, I would bet that most of those whose livelihoods were broken by the assanine policies that happened between the Clinton and Obama years do not feel like they can afford to play stupid betting games right now.
So, no, I have absolutely no skills in handling bookie stuff.
Since when does prior art require a patent?
Oh, of course. We are talking the USPO, where I understand that Apple is about to diversify and patent the cotton gin.
Using intrade properly looks like it would take bookie skills. I never have bothered to learn those.
I like the electoral vote predictor. Its comments show a definite blue bias, but there is no bias in its handling of poll data. It uses the last polls taken in each state for data.
At the moment what it shows is not necessarily representative of the country, since there have been very few polls done in the last week. But now that the conventions are over, I expect that there will be a lot of polling done, and electoral-vote.com will be as accurate as anyone can get.
Good point... my home router probably would not be much use. But forest service vehicles and logging crummies all come equiped with fairly powerful 12 volt generators, so I think it would only be a matter of finding an industrial grade router that can punch a signal through a few miles of wilderness. Maybe put a honking long whip antena on the rig...
Last point first: If those who are maintaining the protocols are so fucking stupid that they cannot adapt them to improved technology, then people are going to die. Fortunately, the persons who are responsible for developing first responder protocols are a lot smarter than some of the persons who pretend to represent them on Slashdot.
First point: the issue under discussion is whether fire trucks and other first response vehicles would benefit from having computers (with ad hoc networking capabilities). That they do not have them now is immaterial. The cost of adding an Android phone to a fire truck's equipment is minimal; that would give the truck the capability of photographing sketches or conditions at the scene that could then be sent by Internet or phone link to an off site location. That kind of Internet access would be ideal, and should be done today.
But that is not what an ad hoc network or mesh network is about. This comes into play when there are no functioning cell towers or Internet access in the area of the disaster. The Android would instead communicate with a laptop with wifi router capabilities that would seek out similar units and establish an independent mesh such that sketches and photos, etc, could be shared among the first responders. Who would follow pre-established protocols to organize themselves so their efforts were coordinated.
Catskinners often do carry cellphones with cameras; that is the ideal way of communicating just how the dozer has broken down this time, and the part number of the fitting that needs to be replaced. Logging sites and timber cruisers already have laptops that are powerful enough for a first response mesh (they are useful for on site inventory tracking, etc); they would only need the wifi router and standardized software.
I have a decade of experience as an ICU RN, so I have some idea of what EMTs do. In general, they do a fantastic job, and are very good at using some pretty sophisticated expertise to stabilize victims. As a group, you deserve the honors that you are accorded.
However EMTs are not the only first responders. For that matter, they are rarely the first ones at the scene; they usually do not arrive until someone else has called them, and it is usually someone else who shows them where the victims are. That they might not benefit from ad hoc mesh networks does not mean that other first responders would also see no benefit.
The incidents I am most familiar with are forest fires and white water boating disasters.
In both forest fires and rafting disasters, the exact locations of the problems and victims are not immediately known and the first response is often by more than one group approaching from different directions. These incidents often happen where cell towers are few and there is no Internet access. Being able to link together an ad hoc mesh network would often reduce the risks that the first responders are taking and improve the odds that they find the victims in time to do some good. It is very worrisome to be having to guess whether to put the crew to work cutting firebreak or should they be sent instead to scour the valley for a party of hikers that probably is not there any longer.
In the event of a tornado taking out a town, first responders will come in from the margins, from various directions. With cell towers out of operation and cables broken, Internet access can be problematic. An adhoc mesh would be a good way for the various first responders to develop the initial maps of the disaster, identifying where equipment is needed for rescue operations, etc. And ideally link back to the Internet.
Hurricanes: same thing on a larger scale. When Houston next gets hit by a big one, adhoc meshes among first responders are likely to become critical in determining where the boats and helicopters need to be sent first. In big cities we can expect emergency generators and redundant connectivity to keep hospitals, police, and fire stations up and running, but ad hoc meshes should have a big role in the early assessment and response to residential areas.
Forest fires present special challenges as their behavior can be unpredictable, smoke interferes with monitoring what is happening, and first responders can so easily become victims. Also these occur in areas where cell towers are few and dead areas are frequent, and the best Internet access is often by slow satellite connections. Ad hoc meshes would be very useful in assessing what the fire is doing and coordinating the activities of the first responders.
No, parent post is dead wrong.
When a series of lightning strikes begins a complex forest fire, many of the first responders are separated from the guys who might be starting to do the hand drawn maps by miles of flames and roadless terrain. The responders are coming in from all directions; there is no central point that they are going to funnel through. In the Bilger Creek Complex of fires in 1987, a number of the first responders were woodsmen with bulldozers and chainsaws in the middle of it all, who had to guess where to set up fire lanes since although they were all in radio contact with each other, at that time there was no way to communicate where the fires were or where they were heading.
Lives were lost. If it had been possible to cobble together a mesh and communicate even rudimentary map data between the groups, there would have been fewer losses, and probably the fires would have been contained more quickly at less cost.
Tornados and hurricanes present similar situations: the first responders come in from all the margins. There is no central point they would funnel through. From what I have seen of earthquake news and when Mt St Helens blew its top, the same is true of tectonic events.
Generally, it is probably true that the first responders are on the ground, doing the work, before the map makers have got their magic markers out of the box. It would be very nice if these guys who are already in the thick of it could become a part of a mesh network and benefit from the second wave of responders who are building the maps and beginning to coordinate activities that are already in progress.
Internet connectivity would be useful to such a mesh, but even if that is broken, the ability to send low quality photos, penciled diagrams, rough maps, and plain text lists between the first responders and the first coordinators would be damn useful.
I do not think that 'remote storage and remote processing' is all that is involved in the cloud concept. There are also a whole lot of services: back-ups, security, hardware redundancy, even, usually, low level optimization.
Basically all the low level database activity is contracted out to specialists when a company goes to a cloud provider. That can have a tremendous impact on future IT costs.
One specific example: Going with a clould means having someone else deal with hassles of background checks for the rack monkeys. Most IT managers have little training in how to manage personnel security in these days of USB sticks, and probably do not want to learn that kind of crap. They are IT managers, dammit, not idjit HR managers.
Yes,in the TFA directly linked to, there is no mention of what is to be done with the heat that is pumped out of all that CO2 in order to solidify it. There is only a brief mention that it might be somehow put to use. But how? This part of the concept needs to be developed further.
Could the heat be used to melt Antarctic ice that could be hauled by refurbished oil tankers to Saudi Arabia for irrigation and bath water? Or should it just be dumped willy-nilly into the Antarctic environment? Maybe the penguins would like a warm bath?
There is some reason why Curry invokes Jonathan Swift's proposed solution to the Irish Question in the title of TFA. I think it has to do with the heated discussions that her article is likely to generate.
Radon not being a problem except in buildings that are substandard... sometimes by design and construction, unfortunately.
Radon is not biologically active; it is only a problem where it accumulates in the air, as in mines or some high tech building designs of 30 years ago, that used radon-emitting bricks and minimal heat loss designs. Heck, it is not even chemically reactive; it is one of the inert gases. Its risks are very different from the results of a nuclear plant mishap where iodine, strontium, cesium, and other nasty bioactive radioisotopes are released, stay in the ecosystem, and accumulate in top feeders.
If you want to stop the FUD, then bring the conversation up to the level of useful discourse instead of spouting the propaganda pushed out by those who seek personal gain from a very dirty industry. You do not end FUD by throwing around the bullshit from one side of the dispute; you end it by finding out what the facts are yourself (if you are on Slashdot, you better have skills in critical reading), and using those facts to dampen down the flames.
Parent post is contributing to the FUD it protests against, just as TFA does.
Environmental radiation from uranium in the Denver area granite is no big deal, because the uranium stays locked up in the granite.
A lot of the radioactive crud released by Fuckunmeboth is from very biological active elements. Stuff that collects in your blood and in your bones, and irradiates you from the inside. Unless you do not mind the possibility of your life ending in the prolonged messiness of cancer, etc, then this stuff is something to be fearful about. Especially for those of us who eat near the top of the food chain-- you know, like tuna and beef, rather than subsisting on just the yeastie beasties in the beer.
Lincoln's Dreams. To Say Nothing of the Dog. TheDoomsday Book. Passage. Etc. Oodles of Nebula and Hugo awards, but her name rarely comes up in general discussions about sci-fi. So despite her literary successes, she qualifies as underappreciated (in the Slashdot venue).
The difficulty I have with the logic of this post, and other arguments about the can of worms the USA is opening up in using drones, is the assumption that if the USA did not develop or use this technology, then nobody else would.
That is just so bogus.
The technology for drones is becoming freely available on the open market. The only way that our future would be free of drones is if all computing devices made since 1999 were outlawed. No cellphones, no Androids, no iPads, no netbooks. Definitely no Raspberry Pi. Probably have to do away with some of the more interesting Legos, too.
Yes, we definitely have to worry about drones being used inappropriately by those who do not yet have them, but who are undoubtedly thinking about getting them. That is not connected with the USA use of them in the struggle to defang the terrorist snakes. It is an entirely separate set of issues. The only relationship between the two is that the USA use of drones in Pakistan has awakened some people to the potentially greater problems of a world with all kinds of drones. That is a good thing, even if it makes some people uncomfortable to think about it.
So rather than more spouting about all the evils that drones could cause and how nasty it is to be awakened by that buzz, what do you think could be done to manage the coming problems? Do we need a Geneva Convention to put limits on their deployment and availability? How do we get that going?
This thread is probably not a good place to try to settle an argument by an appeal to some definition of celestial objects that was made by committee. Just saying.
Whatever you may choose to call Jupiter, its activity in the radio part of the spectrum and its electromagnetic field cannot be explained by gravitation forces without introducing a whole mess of weird conjectures that do not belong in science. There is something happening within Jupiter, producing quite a bit of energy, that we do not understand. Ignoring the findings we do not understand so that the rest can be easily explained by what somebody thinks they know is not good science. It is also not a good argument.
Back to language: in an ideal world *all* astronomers would be involved in doing astronomy, and not *some* involved instead in making up taxonomies (classification schemes) by committee. It is true that chemistry was greatly advanced by the periodic table of elements, which is a taxonomy. However it is a taxonomy that has emerged from repeatable chemistry findings, and thus a classification scheme that closely parallels what is really going on in the world. The IAU on the other hand is drawing up the lines between different classification bins based on what seems logical at this moment, but that is not the empiricism of science. It is instead the exact same activity that Galileo railed against the Church over, when the Church insisted that the World must be built according to the logic of Aristotle. It is the fallacy of reasoning beyond what the current meager evidence will support. It is worse than wrong, for it hinders efforts to actually do science and collect some real data.
Stick with empiiricism. Regard anything that arises from any other source as mere conjecture. Be willing to accept that not only do you personally not know everything, those whom you place in high authority do not know everything, either.
Typically in science the experts lead general education by pointing the way. But this is an example of a small cadre of the IAU attempting to dictate what students should be taught.
It is noted elsewhere in this thread that the proposal to redefine "planet" was introduced in the last minutes of the final session of the IAU meeting, after most of the attendees had left the hall (except for the conspirators who wanted this to happen). That does not exhonerate other IAU members-- everyone in the IAU shares responsibility for allowing their system to be gamed this way. But if the IAU worked the way it was intended to work, then this absurdity would never have happened.
My biggest gripe with the redefinition is not that it excludes Pluto, but that it is even less self-consistent than the poorly defined terminology that it replaces. Bright students recognize something is not right as soon as they hear it, although they often do not yet have the vocabulary to say what is wrong about it. What has happened here does not advance human knowledge nor make it any easier to teach science to students, quite the contrary. It confuses students and makes astronomy, and sciences in general, more muddy rather than more clear.
Eventually the IAU will retract this foolishness and either put forward some definitions that are internally consistent and possibly useful, or let things go back to the way they were, when the meaning of the word "planet" was always defined by the context in which it was used.
There really is no problem with that: words whose meanings are dependent on the context in which they are used are perfectly cromulent.
How many weeks do you spend preparing for those 2-3 weeks in an observatory? That preparation is directly analogous to the laboratory time a chemist spends in preparing his glassware and calibrating his equipment. I doubt that you would be allowed any time in the observatory without first having shown a lot of preparatory work on what you were going to observe, how you were going to observe it, how you intend to validate those observations, and the way the data you obtain could be used to confirm or reject your hypothesis. That is all part of the laboratory phase of the work.
To put this in concrete terms, when Galileo dropped those balls from the Tower at Pizza his experiment did not start when he let go of them. It started long before that, as he began arranging for the use of the Tower and the timing devices, and recruiting students as his assistants. Those pesky real world details are as critical to a successful experiment as cleaning out the retorts between uses or preparing stock solutions of known strengths. In general terms, the experimental phase begins after the means for testing the hypothesis is first formulated and efforts become focused on the details of making that testing happen.
After the 2-3 weeks in the observatory, how many weeks do you spend in preparing the raw data you have obtained for analysis? That counts as lab time, too. The experiment phase of the work does not end until you are ready to deduce new information from your findings with a definite level of confidence.
Of course I could be wrong about all this. I am merely a man with a 50+ year interest in how astronomy is done; I am not an astronomer and have no string of fancy letters I can tie on behind my name.
It is not *the* definition, it is a *stupid* definition.
As Abe once said, calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg; the dog still has only four legs.
The IAU coming up with a generally useless new definition for a word that is very much in common usage with a different meaning only shows that the IAU is capable of tremendous hubris, and is not in the service of increasing or distributing knowledge. Quite the opposite.
Jupiter may already be burning; if there was a self-sustaining nuclear reaction at its core, that would explain some of its puzzling activity. The idea of brown dwarf stars is not a new one: stars that do not emit much if any visible light, but pump out heat and particles.