Yes, but it was a Good Kind Of Troll. An attempt to briefly hijack the conversation in order to trick some people into questioning some unconscious assumptions that have been having a profound effect on the common good. As opposed to the usual troll of just trying to score points in some weird Bernesian ego game.
I'll look for you on my freaks list and if you show up, I'll probably do the tit for tat thing. That seems to improve the slashdot experience. I also befriend most of those who befriend me.
They sequenced the genes of the tumours themselves.
Good point. I was making an assumption that knowing the sequence of the tumor genes would lead to easy identification of the at risk populations. Technically I should not have done that; while it seems likely that this will be shown, it is not yet proven.
But if I had not done that stretch of logic, we would not have been entertained by the kneejerk reaction to any criticism of the USA insurance dominated Health Care Profit Machine*. Which while tangential to the science being reported, is more central to the livelihood of all USA slashdot readers.
Despite their entertainment value, the apologists for the current way of funding everything having to do with health care through privatized third party payment schemes need to be taken seriously. There is way too much concern about protecting dividends, extending return on investments, and earning the individual bonuses used as carrots in such schemes. These motivations should have very little if any influence on health care research or health care delivery, but in the USA these are motivations are the dominant factors in determining what research is done and how care delivery is shaped.
[HCPM: this millenium's replacement for the now outmoded Military Industrial Complex. This is where all the MIC moneys have gone since the ways of the Cold War are no longer so profitable.]
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in America this will certainly be a boon to the health care industry. While it would have been better for the industry before the recent legislation that prevents denial of insurance for pre-existing conditions, it can still be used to set up tiered insurance charges so that people who don't have the genes will only pay a little more for insurance than they do now (doing business as it has always been done), while people who have the genes will be in a different risk group and will be required by law to pay much higher premiums than anyone has ever had to pay before. It will all be honest and above board and based on industry standard actuarial statistics....
While I am pleased to see this scientific progress, I have serious concerns about how it will play out in the politics of the American health care industry. I'm thinking that capitalism has no place at the sick bed; the profit motive has to be removed from American health care before we can begin to see the true benefits of technology.
I've read through about half the posts on this lengthy thread, and I'm disappointed with the caliber of slashdot thinking.
(Okay, no surprise there! But still...)
People here are not recognizing that if there is any kind of afterlife state, the transition from the universe of everyday physics into that state is going to be similar to the experience of an observer accelerating toward the speed of light, or another observer dropping into a black hole. Among other things, time dilation is a reasonable expectation. So what we might observe from the outside of the experience may be entirely different from the experience of the person going through the "moment of death".
Connie Willis does a good job of exploring this in her novel Passage. Anyone interested in the changes of point of view that occur at those places where one is about to exit the known universe (approaching black holes, approaching the speed of light, approaching death) should check out this book. (The book is strongly based on the research into NDEs that are the subject of this slashdot story).
Willis needs almost 600 pages to talk about this. I won't pretend to be able to summarize her work. Her book can help a person shed preconceptions they did not even know they had, and become open to new points of view, and that is not easy stuff to handle (for either the author or the reader).
Is this the same logic that says the problem of Mexican drugs being imported into the US is the US's fault?
Maybe it is.
Whether or not it is, the logic concerning the effect of USA drug laws on criminal activities is sound. If USA drug laws were revised in a rational fashion, then the cost of feeding a drug habit would plummet, and the tremendous profits in illegal drugs would disappear. Yes, there would be problems with addicts becoming more visible and perhaps even their numbers increasing somewhat, but those problems can be managed at much lower cost to society than what we have now.
To put this argument another way, ask this question: who currently benefits the most from the current USA drug laws? The answer is completely obvious: the drug cartels are the primary beneficiary. Without the USA drug laws, that whole industry could not survive.
Yeah, we'd face other societal problems. But those problems could be handled much more easily than what we now have.
The Mexicans who do enter illegally aren't exactly "stealing" great jobs from American citizens.
From personal knowledge, I can say that the situation is much worse than illegals simply filling the lower rungs of burger flipping, etc.
In Portland OR, illegals are doing self-destructive jobs like scraping lead paint from Victorian houses, removing asbestos, and so on. Without knowledge about the risks they are taking, or training or equipment that are required by law to do the job right. I do not have direct knowledge of what is going on elsewhere in the country, but I think the pattern is clear: whenever there is high risk work that could be done by untrained labor but where there are health and safety laws requiring an expensive approach, there will be scumbags who contract to do the work under the table with untrained illegals without proper gear who are unknowingly poisoning themselves. Whether this be asbestos removal before renovation of older houses, or harvesting crops too soon after pesticide applications, or otherwise working in toxic environments.
We need to see the existing laws revised. But we also need to consider new laws, that will target those who exploit illegals and put them in the same despicable category as slave traders.
From what I've seen and heard this 'hidden' information is hidden on a purpose - most such sites I've ever encountered are trafficking (child) porn, software, audio and video
My first reaction was to respond "bullshit!", but on further reflection I realized that parent post is legitimate within the context of an extremely narrow point of view. It isn't so much an example of bullshit as an example of limited thinking of someone who knows very little about a subject, but thinks he knows it all.
As a writer of fiction, I use the darknet extensively: I've got hidden wikis and websites where I collect information I don't yet want to share publicly, and where I compose rough drafts that I want to share with only a selected few. I am sure that I am not alone in this approach. I can't imagine any new authors of the 21st century who are not doing the same kind of thing.
Most of the darknet is benign. Most of it is the aggregate of the huge number of private conversations that go on within the global crowd. There is nothing sinsiter about this, nor does it contradict the "information wants to be free" imperative. Since for the most part these conversations have to do with things that might eventually become information, but are in their nascent period, where they are confused, incomplete pieces that a private group is trying to make sense of.
AFAIK, high speed flywheel storage is the best general purpose means of storing power.
That said, if there are geologic formations that could be exploited for compressed air storage, or topographic features that could be exploited for hydro storage, then in those situations it would make sense to do so.
Here's an interesting exercise: coal is currently mined in the North American Rocky Mountains and shipped down to nearly sea level by train to its point of use. If these trains used regenerative braking to charge flywheel batteries mounted on gimbals in special cars, how much electricity could be captured as each tonne of coal is dropped several thousand feet?
Crappy code exists because it works. It matters not how elegant a solution is; it matters that such is, in fact, a solution.
Code is like government: it doesn't have to be good; it only has to be good enough.
Good enough to appear to be usable. Good enough that the benefits of its use look like they will outweigh the costs of dealing with its bugs. For way too many people involved in marketing software, it only has to be good enough to look better than any competitor products, and even then only that good for long enough for the customer to begin to rely on it.
So, no, I disagree with the second quote: crappy code doesn't even have to work. It only has to look like it is working for long enough that the customer cannot afford to replace it.
Coding and software development in general needs a level of professionalism at least as great as civil engineering, medicine and surgery, and architecture. The current model is much too academic to instill the kind of internalised professional behavior that society needs. It is only through that kind of individual professional standards, with support of a fully developed professional community, that marketing and other external forces that work to degrade coding quality can be held at bay.
</rant>
Suggest starting with Jupiter, with focus on its moons and (if you are lucky with your choice of nights) changes in their positions relative to Jupiter. Tie this in with Galileo as the prototypical scientific mind questioning the authorities of his day. (Remember that Galileo came to recognize the Sun's central position in the Solar System after watching the dance of Jupiter's moons).
Also Saturn. With luck the rings will be evident.
Save the Moon for last. Nights that best for Jupiter and Saturn are going to be moon-less nights, but OTOH you can do more with the Moon with 10x binoculars than with a 4 inch telescope: you need the wider field of view to figure out what you are looking at.
You can probably find an amateur astronomer in your town who would be interested in helping with a project like this. In fact this kind of thing could easily become the focus for a series of star parties.
E-bikes are bringing a couple of new problems to bicycling.
I live in Portland Oregon, and I put about 3,000 miles on my bike last year. I'll probably double that this year, since I'm riding through the winter for the first time since I was a kid.
We've started to see e-bikes last summer, and two problems are emerging:
First, when you put a redneck on an e-bike, you don't lose the redneck. Instead you've now got rednecks on the bike paths and the bike lanes. They disrupt the courtesy and mutual cooperation between strangers that makes cycling in crowded conditions work.
Second, the e-bikes are being bought and used by lots of persons who have no experience with bicycling. On a pedal bike it takes a season or more for a new rider to learn the shifting, cadence, and other tricks needed to travel at speed, and during that time they are also learning how to anticipate unsafe conditions and how to get along with other cyclists, skateboarders, scooters, and pedestrians. But with the e-bikes, these persons are speeding along much faster than is safe for them or anyone around them, since they don't know what they are doing. And they are often oblivious to the fact that they are crash waiting to happen.
So e-bikes are not without problems. There is a place for them in the grand scheme of things, but their introduction is going to be disruptive and a lot of persons are going to get hurt.
Twenty percent of PP's users are still with MSIEv6. Looking at this in the context of the 80/20 rule of business brings these questions to mind:
In general, 80% of customer-related costs are generated by 20% of the customers. How many of the these MSIEv6 users fall within this 20% group?
In general, 20% of customers account for 80% of sales revenue. How many of this top quintile of customers are using MSIEv6?
As a rule, it is worthwhile to identify the much smaller number of customers who are in the intersection of these two groups and treat them as special cases, red carpet treatment, whether they use MSIEv6 or not. Could this be done in PP's situation?
For many businesses this analysis is going to show that the bottom line could be improved by dropping support for MSIEv6. Pruning customers whose support costs more than the revenues they provide is good business sense (selling at a net loss never makes good sense). There are of course niche markets where this isn't true, such as direct sales of adult incontinence supplies. But even those niches are shrinking.
One thing that is nice about Firefox is that the processes are open to public inspection so it is easy to know how many flaws are outstanding and assess the risks in any specific context.
But probably more germane to this thread is that Firefox has a history of fairly rapid fixes for security flaws. It is clear that it is easier for persons using Mozilla/FOSS development model to get the fixes done.
Nobody in their right mind expects perfection in software (or in anything else for that matter). But Firefox and several other browsers are demonstrating that getting security right in a reasonably fast fashion is not an impossibly hard problem. It can be done, and it does not take the resources of a multi billion dollar company to do it.
Isn't it time to use another language? it even makes economic sense to CREATE an new language
That's been done. It's called Ada. Nobody uses it by choice because its basically worthless. It's been compared to a car that is so heavily crash proofed and armor coated that it can't get out of the driveway before it runs out of gas.
Don't confuse the lack of an efficient and effective workflow with bad componentry. There are plenty of good packages to be had that can handle the various issues described in PP. If the developer doesn't know how to glue them together... well, it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.
Of course if for some reason the freely available packages cannot be used then you are stuck trying to reinvent the wheel. Which I suppose is the case for Microsoft since it cannot use FOSS, and is also committed to supporting its legacy of strategically bad design decisions. Like folding the browser into the operating system.
Good browsers are not that difficult to work with. Firefox, Konqueror, Opera, and so on keep churning out steadily improving products in short order and have had very little trouble with security flaws. One of the reasons for this is that the black hats are well aware that any vulnerability they might exploit is likely to be short-lived, while if they just focus on MSIE, they are likely to get a much longer window of opportunity before the holes are patched.
It seems to me that in light of MS's inability to provide an adequate fix, the appropriate solution would be, in those situations where IE has to be used, to run Windows in a virtual machine that was well isolated from the real OS. This could be done under Linux or Mac.
Uh, no, not really. It is not that difficult to manage the standard Internet protocols, nor is that hard to construct a DOM and render from it. Add a plugin interface for all the other stuff and you've still got a basically simple browser, that you can make as complex as you need or want.
I think you might be looking at IE as a sample of one, and extrapolating incorrectly from there. IE was designed intentionally to be a core part of the OS, in order to get around a court decision that MS didn't like. By folding it into the OS rather than running it as an application on top of the OS, MS introduced a lot of complexity... and a lot of potential security flaws. It also did not help that until IEv7, MS had deliberately built incompatibilities into IE (the broken box model for one). Although MS may be on the right course since IEv7, it still has to support all the legacy crap, including the non-browser functions that were put on IE (such as help system support, and IIRC some interprocess communications).
Perhaps the basic problem with Microsoft is that Marketing has always told Engineering what to do. That is the short route to crapware, but it is also the inside track to the fat markets.
And if you learn next year that you have some liver damage consistent with the Monsanto Syndrome, will you still feel the same way?
Since I have a mild intolerance to high fructose corn syrup (it, or something closely associated with it, contributes to my exercise induced asthma attacks which in turn make my bicycling much less fun), for several years I have been scanning ingredients labels for the word "corn". Some kind of processed corn is used in a surprisingly wide variety of foods, and is often near the top of the ingredients list. In the USA, much of this comes from the huge acreages of Monsanto owned agribusiness farms that would be growing one of Monsanto's GM corns, which would then be processed through one of Monsanto's operations before being sold in railroad tanker lots to Kraft, General Foods, Coca Cola, Kellog, Pepsi, Tyson, Little Debby, Hostess, etc. Fortunately the problem that I know about is limited to just HFCS so I don't avoid all corn products and can still eat a lot of stuff from the shelves of Safeway. I'm just pickier about which brands of hamburger relish, salsa, and crackers I buy.
But if there is anything unhealthy about Monsanto's corn operations, it could potentially affect all USA citizens who were not zealous in avoiding corn (because of severe allergies). That would probably be more than 90% of the USA population. Considering the size of the potential public health problem, I don't think there is sufficient oversight of Monsanto's operations, including its GM corn.
BTW, Monsanto gets a nice chunk of cash from the Federal Guvmint as a subsidy for growing corn. Although to be fair it should be noted that through their lobbying and campaign contributions they do return a lot of that to the political process....
It is good to know that some physicists are challenging this, and are looking for ways to see behind the curtain. I also hope that there are some mathematicians who are seeking an answer to the annoying question of why Pi is 3.14159etc, and not precisely 3.1416 or some other rational number.
Actually I knew where VY is located, but I used a little artistic license to show the general risk in a short form.
In VY's specific case, the persons at risk are the large number of people in the cities and towns of Mass and Conn who get their drinking water out of the Connecticut River. And of course those who eat produce grown on the farms who use the river for irrigation, or the sea food from the Long Island Sound fisheries.
Parent post is the real quibble here. It seeks to distract the reader from rational risk assessment by raising a stylistic objection to the presentation of the data.
Yes, there are far more dangerous ways of doing fission power plants than doing them with profit as the primary motivation. It is also far more dangerous to drive at the speed limit with no working brakes than it is to drive too fast for conditions. So what was your point again?
Basically it is as absurd to consider fission power safe when done within a profit oriented framework as it is to consider a Formula One race car safe when driven in town, by a teenager who needs to show off, on a Saturday night. The US Navy has demonstrated that fission power can be done safely. BUT... the USN power plants are designed and operated by persons who have had intensive training in handling lethal situations and who are not trying to make a buck.
Your beer is probably safe. Your kids' milk and Mac'n'cheese are at risk. Rising tritium levels could be an early indicator of other contaminates having gotten loose: tritium can migrate faster than cesium, strontium, etc. Strontium is particularly problematic in Vermont, since grazing animals concentrate it in their milk, and Vermont is still a major dairy state.
As other posters and TFA point out, if conditions at the VY were really the way that Entergy has said they are, then there could be no tritium leaking into the ground water because there would be no buried pipes or tanks that could leak. The presence of tritium suggests that the plant was not built according to plan: someone routed a pipe underground, or decided that a settling tank that was supposed to be on the surface would be better if it was installed below the frost line...
In theory, light water fission plants could be built and operated safely. But in a cost-cutting, capitalist economy the actual practice is not going to be that way. The problem with nuclear power is not a materials engineering problem. It is mostly a social engineering problem: we don't have a clue how to manage anything as complex as building and running these things in a way that would ensure that not one of the thousands of persons involved would never fuck it up.
Before we can do fission power safely, we need to make a higher quality human.
First, as you point out, it is a postulate. Not an assumption. And therefore not subject to evidentiary proof. Although it is certainly falsifiable.
Second, I lack the time to do the training (estimate about ten years culminating in PhD in physics level mentation) to understand the kind of evidence involved. Further, I probably lack the intellect to handle that evidence properly: I did not do well in calculus. Additionally, I also lack the skills that would be needed to communicate such evidence to persons such as the AC I'm responding to: I'm not particularly good at dummying things down. So even if this was an assumption that could be supported by evidence, and I was capable of personally assessing the evidence, I could not provide that evidence in a form that the AC would understand.
What I can do, and have done, is refer to a recognized authority in these matters. Actually several of them: Heisenberg, Bohr, and a bunch of others all put their heads together and collectively came up with the Copenhagen convention. It remains a valid and useful frame for considering certain physics problems. It is not the only frame and sometimes other frames make more sense. Like centrifugal force when detailing an automotive accident.
Google "Copenhagen convention". A few years ago there were a large number of articles on it, some more accessible than others. I doubt that they have gone away.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but it was a Good Kind Of Troll. An attempt to briefly hijack the conversation in order to trick some people into questioning some unconscious assumptions that have been having a profound effect on the common good. As opposed to the usual troll of just trying to score points in some weird Bernesian ego game.
I'll look for you on my freaks list and if you show up, I'll probably do the tit for tat thing. That seems to improve the slashdot experience. I also befriend most of those who befriend me.
They sequenced the genes of the tumours themselves.
Good point. I was making an assumption that knowing the sequence of the tumor genes would lead to easy identification of the at risk populations. Technically I should not have done that; while it seems likely that this will be shown, it is not yet proven.
But if I had not done that stretch of logic, we would not have been entertained by the kneejerk reaction to any criticism of the USA insurance dominated Health Care Profit Machine*. Which while tangential to the science being reported, is more central to the livelihood of all USA slashdot readers.
Despite their entertainment value, the apologists for the current way of funding everything having to do with health care through privatized third party payment schemes need to be taken seriously. There is way too much concern about protecting dividends, extending return on investments, and earning the individual bonuses used as carrots in such schemes. These motivations should have very little if any influence on health care research or health care delivery, but in the USA these are motivations are the dominant factors in determining what research is done and how care delivery is shaped.
[HCPM: this millenium's replacement for the now outmoded Military Industrial Complex. This is where all the MIC moneys have gone since the ways of the Cold War are no longer so profitable.]
</rant>
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in America this will certainly be a boon to the health care industry. While it would have been better for the industry before the recent legislation that prevents denial of insurance for pre-existing conditions, it can still be used to set up tiered insurance charges so that people who don't have the genes will only pay a little more for insurance than they do now (doing business as it has always been done), while people who have the genes will be in a different risk group and will be required by law to pay much higher premiums than anyone has ever had to pay before. It will all be honest and above board and based on industry standard actuarial statistics....
While I am pleased to see this scientific progress, I have serious concerns about how it will play out in the politics of the American health care industry. I'm thinking that capitalism has no place at the sick bed; the profit motive has to be removed from American health care before we can begin to see the true benefits of technology.
I've read through about half the posts on this lengthy thread, and I'm disappointed with the caliber of slashdot thinking.
(Okay, no surprise there! But still...)
People here are not recognizing that if there is any kind of afterlife state, the transition from the universe of everyday physics into that state is going to be similar to the experience of an observer accelerating toward the speed of light, or another observer dropping into a black hole. Among other things, time dilation is a reasonable expectation. So what we might observe from the outside of the experience may be entirely different from the experience of the person going through the "moment of death".
Connie Willis does a good job of exploring this in her novel Passage. Anyone interested in the changes of point of view that occur at those places where one is about to exit the known universe (approaching black holes, approaching the speed of light, approaching death) should check out this book. (The book is strongly based on the research into NDEs that are the subject of this slashdot story).
Willis needs almost 600 pages to talk about this. I won't pretend to be able to summarize her work. Her book can help a person shed preconceptions they did not even know they had, and become open to new points of view, and that is not easy stuff to handle (for either the author or the reader).
All I can say is that programmers who use the word "kibibytes" should be forced to eat their own puppy chow.
Is this the same logic that says the problem of Mexican drugs being imported into the US is the US's fault?
Maybe it is.
Whether or not it is, the logic concerning the effect of USA drug laws on criminal activities is sound. If USA drug laws were revised in a rational fashion, then the cost of feeding a drug habit would plummet, and the tremendous profits in illegal drugs would disappear. Yes, there would be problems with addicts becoming more visible and perhaps even their numbers increasing somewhat, but those problems can be managed at much lower cost to society than what we have now.
To put this argument another way, ask this question: who currently benefits the most from the current USA drug laws? The answer is completely obvious: the drug cartels are the primary beneficiary. Without the USA drug laws, that whole industry could not survive.
Yeah, we'd face other societal problems. But those problems could be handled much more easily than what we now have.
The Mexicans who do enter illegally aren't exactly "stealing" great jobs from American citizens.
From personal knowledge, I can say that the situation is much worse than illegals simply filling the lower rungs of burger flipping, etc.
In Portland OR, illegals are doing self-destructive jobs like scraping lead paint from Victorian houses, removing asbestos, and so on. Without knowledge about the risks they are taking, or training or equipment that are required by law to do the job right. I do not have direct knowledge of what is going on elsewhere in the country, but I think the pattern is clear: whenever there is high risk work that could be done by untrained labor but where there are health and safety laws requiring an expensive approach, there will be scumbags who contract to do the work under the table with untrained illegals without proper gear who are unknowingly poisoning themselves. Whether this be asbestos removal before renovation of older houses, or harvesting crops too soon after pesticide applications, or otherwise working in toxic environments.
We need to see the existing laws revised. But we also need to consider new laws, that will target those who exploit illegals and put them in the same despicable category as slave traders.
From what I've seen and heard this 'hidden' information is hidden on a purpose - most such sites I've ever encountered are trafficking (child) porn, software, audio and video
My first reaction was to respond "bullshit!", but on further reflection I realized that parent post is legitimate within the context of an extremely narrow point of view. It isn't so much an example of bullshit as an example of limited thinking of someone who knows very little about a subject, but thinks he knows it all.
As a writer of fiction, I use the darknet extensively: I've got hidden wikis and websites where I collect information I don't yet want to share publicly, and where I compose rough drafts that I want to share with only a selected few. I am sure that I am not alone in this approach. I can't imagine any new authors of the 21st century who are not doing the same kind of thing.
Most of the darknet is benign. Most of it is the aggregate of the huge number of private conversations that go on within the global crowd. There is nothing sinsiter about this, nor does it contradict the "information wants to be free" imperative. Since for the most part these conversations have to do with things that might eventually become information, but are in their nascent period, where they are confused, incomplete pieces that a private group is trying to make sense of.
AFAIK, high speed flywheel storage is the best general purpose means of storing power.
That said, if there are geologic formations that could be exploited for compressed air storage, or topographic features that could be exploited for hydro storage, then in those situations it would make sense to do so.
Here's an interesting exercise: coal is currently mined in the North American Rocky Mountains and shipped down to nearly sea level by train to its point of use. If these trains used regenerative braking to charge flywheel batteries mounted on gimbals in special cars, how much electricity could be captured as each tonne of coal is dropped several thousand feet?
Crappy code is all around.
Crappy code exists because it works. It matters not how elegant a solution is; it matters that such is, in fact, a solution.
Code is like government: it doesn't have to be good; it only has to be good enough.
Good enough to appear to be usable. Good enough that the benefits of its use look like they will outweigh the costs of dealing with its bugs. For way too many people involved in marketing software, it only has to be good enough to look better than any competitor products, and even then only that good for long enough for the customer to begin to rely on it.
So, no, I disagree with the second quote: crappy code doesn't even have to work. It only has to look like it is working for long enough that the customer cannot afford to replace it.
Coding and software development in general needs a level of professionalism at least as great as civil engineering, medicine and surgery, and architecture. The current model is much too academic to instill the kind of internalised professional behavior that society needs. It is only through that kind of individual professional standards, with support of a fully developed professional community, that marketing and other external forces that work to degrade coding quality can be held at bay. </rant>
Gee, can't we just send Chuck Norris? Wouldn't that be the definitive solution?
Fully agree: Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon.
Suggest starting with Jupiter, with focus on its moons and (if you are lucky with your choice of nights) changes in their positions relative to Jupiter. Tie this in with Galileo as the prototypical scientific mind questioning the authorities of his day. (Remember that Galileo came to recognize the Sun's central position in the Solar System after watching the dance of Jupiter's moons).
Also Saturn. With luck the rings will be evident.
Save the Moon for last. Nights that best for Jupiter and Saturn are going to be moon-less nights, but OTOH you can do more with the Moon with 10x binoculars than with a 4 inch telescope: you need the wider field of view to figure out what you are looking at.
You can probably find an amateur astronomer in your town who would be interested in helping with a project like this. In fact this kind of thing could easily become the focus for a series of star parties.
E-bikes are bringing a couple of new problems to bicycling.
I live in Portland Oregon, and I put about 3,000 miles on my bike last year. I'll probably double that this year, since I'm riding through the winter for the first time since I was a kid.
We've started to see e-bikes last summer, and two problems are emerging:
So e-bikes are not without problems. There is a place for them in the grand scheme of things, but their introduction is going to be disruptive and a lot of persons are going to get hurt.
Twenty percent of PP's users are still with MSIEv6. Looking at this in the context of the 80/20 rule of business brings these questions to mind:
For many businesses this analysis is going to show that the bottom line could be improved by dropping support for MSIEv6. Pruning customers whose support costs more than the revenues they provide is good business sense (selling at a net loss never makes good sense). There are of course niche markets where this isn't true, such as direct sales of adult incontinence supplies. But even those niches are shrinking.
One thing that is nice about Firefox is that the processes are open to public inspection so it is easy to know how many flaws are outstanding and assess the risks in any specific context.
But probably more germane to this thread is that Firefox has a history of fairly rapid fixes for security flaws. It is clear that it is easier for persons using Mozilla/FOSS development model to get the fixes done.
Nobody in their right mind expects perfection in software (or in anything else for that matter). But Firefox and several other browsers are demonstrating that getting security right in a reasonably fast fashion is not an impossibly hard problem. It can be done, and it does not take the resources of a multi billion dollar company to do it.
Isn't it time to use another language? it even makes economic sense to CREATE an new language
That's been done. It's called Ada. Nobody uses it by choice because its basically worthless. It's been compared to a car that is so heavily crash proofed and armor coated that it can't get out of the driveway before it runs out of gas.
Don't confuse the lack of an efficient and effective workflow with bad componentry. There are plenty of good packages to be had that can handle the various issues described in PP. If the developer doesn't know how to glue them together... well, it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.
Of course if for some reason the freely available packages cannot be used then you are stuck trying to reinvent the wheel. Which I suppose is the case for Microsoft since it cannot use FOSS, and is also committed to supporting its legacy of strategically bad design decisions. Like folding the browser into the operating system.
Good browsers are not that difficult to work with. Firefox, Konqueror, Opera, and so on keep churning out steadily improving products in short order and have had very little trouble with security flaws. One of the reasons for this is that the black hats are well aware that any vulnerability they might exploit is likely to be short-lived, while if they just focus on MSIE, they are likely to get a much longer window of opportunity before the holes are patched.
It seems to me that in light of MS's inability to provide an adequate fix, the appropriate solution would be, in those situations where IE has to be used, to run Windows in a virtual machine that was well isolated from the real OS. This could be done under Linux or Mac.
browsers... are really complicated software
Uh, no, not really. It is not that difficult to manage the standard Internet protocols, nor is that hard to construct a DOM and render from it. Add a plugin interface for all the other stuff and you've still got a basically simple browser, that you can make as complex as you need or want.
I think you might be looking at IE as a sample of one, and extrapolating incorrectly from there. IE was designed intentionally to be a core part of the OS, in order to get around a court decision that MS didn't like. By folding it into the OS rather than running it as an application on top of the OS, MS introduced a lot of complexity... and a lot of potential security flaws. It also did not help that until IEv7, MS had deliberately built incompatibilities into IE (the broken box model for one). Although MS may be on the right course since IEv7, it still has to support all the legacy crap, including the non-browser functions that were put on IE (such as help system support, and IIRC some interprocess communications).
Perhaps the basic problem with Microsoft is that Marketing has always told Engineering what to do. That is the short route to crapware, but it is also the inside track to the fat markets.
Actually, it sounds like the system worked to me.
And if you learn next year that you have some liver damage consistent with the Monsanto Syndrome, will you still feel the same way?
Since I have a mild intolerance to high fructose corn syrup (it, or something closely associated with it, contributes to my exercise induced asthma attacks which in turn make my bicycling much less fun), for several years I have been scanning ingredients labels for the word "corn". Some kind of processed corn is used in a surprisingly wide variety of foods, and is often near the top of the ingredients list. In the USA, much of this comes from the huge acreages of Monsanto owned agribusiness farms that would be growing one of Monsanto's GM corns, which would then be processed through one of Monsanto's operations before being sold in railroad tanker lots to Kraft, General Foods, Coca Cola, Kellog, Pepsi, Tyson, Little Debby, Hostess, etc. Fortunately the problem that I know about is limited to just HFCS so I don't avoid all corn products and can still eat a lot of stuff from the shelves of Safeway. I'm just pickier about which brands of hamburger relish, salsa, and crackers I buy.
But if there is anything unhealthy about Monsanto's corn operations, it could potentially affect all USA citizens who were not zealous in avoiding corn (because of severe allergies). That would probably be more than 90% of the USA population. Considering the size of the potential public health problem, I don't think there is sufficient oversight of Monsanto's operations, including its GM corn.
BTW, Monsanto gets a nice chunk of cash from the Federal Guvmint as a subsidy for growing corn. Although to be fair it should be noted that through their lobbying and campaign contributions they do return a lot of that to the political process....
...Copenhagen Interpretation....
Thanks for the clarification.
It is good to know that some physicists are challenging this, and are looking for ways to see behind the curtain. I also hope that there are some mathematicians who are seeking an answer to the annoying question of why Pi is 3.14159etc, and not precisely 3.1416 or some other rational number.
Actually I knew where VY is located, but I used a little artistic license to show the general risk in a short form.
In VY's specific case, the persons at risk are the large number of people in the cities and towns of Mass and Conn who get their drinking water out of the Connecticut River. And of course those who eat produce grown on the farms who use the river for irrigation, or the sea food from the Long Island Sound fisheries.
Parent post is the real quibble here. It seeks to distract the reader from rational risk assessment by raising a stylistic objection to the presentation of the data.
Yes, there are far more dangerous ways of doing fission power plants than doing them with profit as the primary motivation. It is also far more dangerous to drive at the speed limit with no working brakes than it is to drive too fast for conditions. So what was your point again?
Basically it is as absurd to consider fission power safe when done within a profit oriented framework as it is to consider a Formula One race car safe when driven in town, by a teenager who needs to show off, on a Saturday night. The US Navy has demonstrated that fission power can be done safely. BUT... the USN power plants are designed and operated by persons who have had intensive training in handling lethal situations and who are not trying to make a buck.
Your beer is probably safe. Your kids' milk and Mac'n'cheese are at risk. Rising tritium levels could be an early indicator of other contaminates having gotten loose: tritium can migrate faster than cesium, strontium, etc. Strontium is particularly problematic in Vermont, since grazing animals concentrate it in their milk, and Vermont is still a major dairy state.
As other posters and TFA point out, if conditions at the VY were really the way that Entergy has said they are, then there could be no tritium leaking into the ground water because there would be no buried pipes or tanks that could leak. The presence of tritium suggests that the plant was not built according to plan: someone routed a pipe underground, or decided that a settling tank that was supposed to be on the surface would be better if it was installed below the frost line...
In theory, light water fission plants could be built and operated safely. But in a cost-cutting, capitalist economy the actual practice is not going to be that way. The problem with nuclear power is not a materials engineering problem. It is mostly a social engineering problem: we don't have a clue how to manage anything as complex as building and running these things in a way that would ensure that not one of the thousands of persons involved would never fuck it up.
Before we can do fission power safely, we need to make a higher quality human.
First, as you point out, it is a postulate. Not an assumption. And therefore not subject to evidentiary proof. Although it is certainly falsifiable.
Second, I lack the time to do the training (estimate about ten years culminating in PhD in physics level mentation) to understand the kind of evidence involved. Further, I probably lack the intellect to handle that evidence properly: I did not do well in calculus. Additionally, I also lack the skills that would be needed to communicate such evidence to persons such as the AC I'm responding to: I'm not particularly good at dummying things down. So even if this was an assumption that could be supported by evidence, and I was capable of personally assessing the evidence, I could not provide that evidence in a form that the AC would understand.
What I can do, and have done, is refer to a recognized authority in these matters. Actually several of them: Heisenberg, Bohr, and a bunch of others all put their heads together and collectively came up with the Copenhagen convention. It remains a valid and useful frame for considering certain physics problems. It is not the only frame and sometimes other frames make more sense. Like centrifugal force when detailing an automotive accident.
Google "Copenhagen convention". A few years ago there were a large number of articles on it, some more accessible than others. I doubt that they have gone away.