The premise is sound enough. Using the communications infrastructure (phones, data communications) to connect distant experts to remote people in need is a great idea.
In many situations, it can actually alleviate a sort of utilization issue, where those with the need are too far from those with "the know" for the necessary information to flow between them.
I think a lot of people want to find a way to bring US or European-standard care to others in the backwoods of Africa, but do so instantly. That won't happen due to multiple reasons. Still, any improvement to the current situation is to be encouraged.
Hopefully, we won't shoot down something that could be helpful in pursuit of "perfection".
No, the IT guys who lose their jobs will most likely be those supporting commodity solutions that the average secretary is too lazy to figure out for herself. There is still going to be a huge need for local support and IT staff no matter what happens, because some things are just too damn important to trust outside of the organization, or too expensive to not do yourself.
Few, if any, companies are going to use an outside provider to hold their critical and/or proprietary data. There is no way in Hell, for example, that my Subversion repository will be stored anywhere but on a machine in my company, under my direct control, physically and logically - regardless of SLAs, encryption, or whatever else.
And I am most certainly not putting our accounting database anywhere that could possibly require a "rent payment" or external connection - if I lost access for 1 minute, we're out of business entirely. Or, what if it leaked out and competitors had access?
There is no possible way to make a cloud of untrusted machines substitute for locally owned, managed, and controlled systems.
For the love of God, managers don't even trust the geek in the cubes, what makes anyone think that they will trust a "cloud" with anything important?
Some managers have proprietary information that gives them an edge over the competition. Toss that out there? Some may even be Bernie Madoff, and those fucks aren't giving up any information.
A whole lot of IT will stay local just for security and paranoia reasons alone.
In short, clouds may expand what we do nowadays but they won't supplant anything.
Oh, and who is going to troubleshoot the loss of the Internet connection?
One thing that is great about science is that it does have a way of eventually finding errors and correcting them in the face of new evidence.
As far as galactic collisions are concerned, we are in no immediate danger. 2-3 Gy vs 5 is an academic exercise, as the Sun will most likely increase its output sufficiently by then to boil off the Earth's oceans anyway,
Besides, the density of a galaxy (outside of the core) is so low that the chance of a stellar or planetary collision is negligable anyway.
Or, by then, we would have the technology to detect it and either deflect it or GTFO of the way anyhow.
Still, it is nice to know we're not in the pipsqueak galaxy. Hoorah!?!?
This particular design is quite interesting, for it seems that they have taken advantage of the physical properties of certain oxides of the fuel isotopes such that it can't go "supercritical" nor "subcritical" under any circumstances.
The key is using the normal thermal reaction of all materials to heat. In physics class, I'm sure all of us were taught, materials expand when heated and contract when cooled.
Nuclear reactions depend on the density of the fissile material, not the density of the overall material in which they may be compounded. It's a matter of N nuclei in V volume.
A material whose thermal expansion/contraction characteristics very closely match an inverse of the fissile material's will always seek an equilibrium temperature. If it gets too hot, it expands and reduces the density (and thus inter-nuclear distance, which increases neutron loss), and if it cools due to less reactivity it contracts and does the opposite.
In short, the fuel becomes self-regulating. It will basically output exactly as much heat energy via fission as is extracted or lost from the system.
At the point that the fissile material is sufficiently exhausted, the compound iteself will not be able to contract sufficiently to permit the nuclear reaction to remain critical, at which point it simply cools down.
Both Chernyobyl and TMI were possible because a supercritical mass of metallic fuel was assembled with neutron-absorbing materials that could be added and removed at will. Remove the control rods, and the mass becomes very supercritical. Put them all the way in, and it is sub-critical. It works fine until the rods can't be moved or there is a catestrophic cooling failure that melts the fuel, which allows it to move past the rods and we have a major disaster.
Solar panels could also potentially create a big explosion. Okay, not the panels themselves, but any time enough megawatts of electrical energy is concentrated, the results can be more powerful than a TNT explosion if it arcs.
It sure looks like the market has gotten incredibly removed from reality. Huge sums of money are invested in side-bets such as options and dervitives, with less actually invested in owning shares of actual companies.
Getting "blown up" happens to the derivitives traders, not those who hold actual stocks. That is what has taken down the firms that spectacularly cratered earlier this year - they were holding options and swaps that they or the other party could not actually cover when the markets shifted.
My approach to a business-critical system is to employ a strategy of defense in depth.
First level: RAID-10 array in NFS/DB boxes.
Second level: DRBD said NFS/DB boxes such that one server failure results in seconds of downtime max.
Third level: Automated dump of DB and make a tarball of website content and code.
Fourth level: RSYNC the tarballs offsite.
Fifth level: Occasionally backup the offsite backups to some form of removable storage.
It's concievable that this strategy could still have a failure whereby the data was all lost, but such disaster would need to be on the scale of a global thermonuclear war, asteroid impact, etc. In such an eventuality, nobody is going to care at all about the backed-up data anyway.
I've used Malwarebytes to fix this nasty little bugger too, several times. It seems to work pretty well.
I've had times where it's been necessary to rename the mbam-setup.exe to something like mbs.exe, and the main.exe to a different name, too. Some of these malwares do block access to known removal tools.
Come on, the FCC is not an evil agency by any stretch. It does have a legitimate role in issues like frequency allocations - there is only so much spectrum to go around.
It also has a great role in the enforcement of technical standards like those that prevent one user from interfering with another's use of the airwaves.
Only if the FCC interferes in the actual content of the communications can it be considered to be entering the category of "evil". Or if they mandate the use of a patented "standard" as a condition of use of the public airwaves, they are certainly at least in bed with "evil".
That said, I actually applaud the dropping of a well-meaning but ill-concieved idea.
It looks like the Chairman haas understood that what he originally wanted was impractical, infeasible, and really a bad idea.
It's okay to propose something stupid, so long as one listens to the reasons for those who object to it and doesn't respond by a "digg in the heels, fight, and whine" attitude when the suggestion and it's rationale is challenged.
One of the nice benefits of having driver source available is that the kernel developers can fix them if they understand the device itself. The original designer of the device is always in the best position to write at least the initial driver code.
One of the big rules in kernel development is that "if you break it, you have to fix it."
Having a good-quality original driver from the manufacturer means that the driver will be ported to new kernel versions, and any incompatibilities introduced are fixed by the person on the kernel team who made them break.
If 4% growth in a mature company isn't good enough, then you need to recalibrate your expectations. The big gains in growth and stock price are just after a start-up and IPO. No business can grow at high rates forever, eventually the market for their product/service is saturated.
Looking at this case, it's almost certain that the same result will occur if this case goes before the Supremes. The issues are almost identical, and they already ruled that only material made with "real" minors can be prohibited. It's settled precident.
The court *explicitly* ruled in regard to "simulated" material:
"In these cases, the defendant can demonstrate no children were harmed in producing the images, yet the affirmative defense would not bar the prosecution. For this reason, the affirmative defense cannot save the statute, for it leaves unprotected a substantial amount of speech not tied to the Government's interest in distinguishing images produced using real children from virtual ones....
"Finally, the Government says that the possibility of producing images by using computer imaging makes it very difficult for it to prosecute those who produce pornography by using real children. Experts, we are told, may have difficulty in saying whether the pictures were made by using real children or by using computer imaging. The necessary solution, the argument runs, is to prohibit both kinds of images. The argument, in essence, is that protected speech may be banned as a means to ban unprotected speech. This analysis turns the First Amendment upside down."
The Supreme Court does not like having its decisions ignored, and the cartoons and writings cover ground that the same justices who wrote the original decision would be re-hearing. Every justice who voted for overturning COPA is still on the bench.
The same arguments that didn't fly in 2002 still won't fly in 2009. I'd expect the jist of the decision to read basically "Hey dumbasses! We already said you can't do this. Knock the shit off!" Naturally, the language will be in legalese, but the theme will be there nonetheless.
It'll also be easy for the court to overturn the convictions for the cartoons and textual messages because the guy was also convicted for possessing "real CP" (and thus, will still be in prison). There's no motivation in this case to uphold the conviction on those counts in the name of "justice" when the other charges are sufficient to keep the creep locked up anyway.
If this case is heard, I'd expect the oral arguments to be very entertaining as the justices mercilessly grill the government attorneys on exactly how their arguments are different from what they already rejected a few years previously.
I would expect that if this case hits the SCOTUS, we will see exactly the same result. From the Opinion:
"Kennedy, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. O'Connor, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, in which Rehnquist, C. J., and Scalia, J., joined as to Part II. Rehnquist, C. J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Scalia, J., joined except for the paragraph discussing legislative history."
I notice the names of the justices who overturned the original statute, and note further that all of them are still on the Court. Two of the three dissenting justices have subsequently been replaced due to death or retirement.
Actually, since it would be just a rehash of the previous case, it is quite possible that Chief Justice Roberts would join in with the "overturn it" bloc. He is a huge fan of Stare Decisis and doesn't like overturning previous decisions.
It's actually possible that the decision would be unanimous, though that may be a stretch. I'd doubt Antonin Scalia would change his position from the previous case.
In the book "It" there is a passage where the young Beverly character has sex with all of the young boys in her circle of friends. The scene is graphically described in detail.
I actually learned more algebra in my 10th grade Physics class than I did in the actual algebra class. The difference was that in "physics" we were actually learning about something much more "real" than in the "math" classes. In physics, it "clicked" as to "why" it was an important thing to understand.
Let's face it - without some link to solving a real problem, mathematics is just plain drudgery that is boring to 99% of students, who will proceed to flush the information as soon as they leave the class. Link it to the real world in some way, and they will learn it quickly, even as just a tool to understand what you are really teaching.
That's not to say that there is no need to teach mathematics - there is. But link the entire curriculum such that there is a utility to learning it.
Sometimes the trade-off between "crude and mostly works", "works every time perfectly" and "don't have the damn thing at all" has to be made.
Where resources are scant, you do the best effort to get something, even if it's somewhat sub-optimal. At least then there's a chance of helping someone who is almost certain to die.
If the choice is no care and death, or crappy care and a chance, most people will take crappy care.
If we really want to split hairs, we should note that "explode" and "detonate" are two different concepts. Some explosions are detonations, and others are simple deflagration where the fuel burns rapidly but evenly over some period of time.
The physics of the two is vastly different. A detonation denotes an event where the material burns at a rate that is supersonic, and a deflagration is subsonic.
In a detonation, an instantaneous pressure jump moves through the material faster than the material's normal speed of sound. This produces instantaneous pressures that can go into the millions of PSI. A strong enough shock will shatter any material.
Occasionally, the fuel/air mixture in an automobile cylinder will partially detonate. These cause weak shocks that we notice as "knocks" and "pings" - and which over time will destroy the pistons in the engine. High compression, low octane fuel, and local hotspots in the cylinders are the usual reason for this.
As a side note, even smokeless gunpowder doesn't detonate, it just deflagrates on a time scale of 0.5 - 3 milliseconds. If it did detonate, the gun would quite spectacularly imitate a fragmentation grenade.
From the perspective of an observer outside the combustion both can produce similar effects, though detonations are much more spectacular.
My guess is that they want a test case to push to the SCOTUS if necessary.
There may be a razor-thin chance of overturning anti-discrimination law under certain "narrow" circumstances.
The argument would be a first amendment violation for freedom of religion and additionally freedom of association.
If they are a privately-held company there is actually a snowball's chance in Hell that it could actually fly. Publicly traded corporations can be argued to be "different" in some way from those that aren't.
Never underestimate what some slimeball posing as a lawyer can sell - especially to the 5 conservatives on the SCOTUS.
Slashdot Mirror
Bring in Cartman to fix the situation.
Most states now do the entire process online or by phone only. There is no office to go to any more.
The premise is sound enough. Using the communications infrastructure (phones, data communications) to connect distant experts to remote people in need is a great idea.
In many situations, it can actually alleviate a sort of utilization issue, where those with the need are too far from those with "the know" for the necessary information to flow between them.
I think a lot of people want to find a way to bring US or European-standard care to others in the backwoods of Africa, but do so instantly. That won't happen due to multiple reasons. Still, any improvement to the current situation is to be encouraged.
Hopefully, we won't shoot down something that could be helpful in pursuit of "perfection".
...will be eating the LOL cats...
No, the IT guys who lose their jobs will most likely be those supporting commodity solutions that the average secretary is too lazy to figure out for herself. There is still going to be a huge need for local support and IT staff no matter what happens, because some things are just too damn important to trust outside of the organization, or too expensive to not do yourself.
Few, if any, companies are going to use an outside provider to hold their critical and/or proprietary data. There is no way in Hell, for example, that my Subversion repository will be stored anywhere but on a machine in my company, under my direct control, physically and logically - regardless of SLAs, encryption, or whatever else.
And I am most certainly not putting our accounting database anywhere that could possibly require a "rent payment" or external connection - if I lost access for 1 minute, we're out of business entirely. Or, what if it leaked out and competitors had access?
There is no possible way to make a cloud of untrusted machines substitute for locally owned, managed, and controlled systems.
For the love of God, managers don't even trust the geek in the cubes, what makes anyone think that they will trust a "cloud" with anything important?
Some managers have proprietary information that gives them an edge over the competition. Toss that out there? Some may even be Bernie Madoff, and those fucks aren't giving up any information.
A whole lot of IT will stay local just for security and paranoia reasons alone.
In short, clouds may expand what we do nowadays but they won't supplant anything.
Oh, and who is going to troubleshoot the loss of the Internet connection?
One thing that is great about science is that it does have a way of eventually finding errors and correcting them in the face of new evidence.
As far as galactic collisions are concerned, we are in no immediate danger. 2-3 Gy vs 5 is an academic exercise, as the Sun will most likely increase its output sufficiently by then to boil off the Earth's oceans anyway,
Besides, the density of a galaxy (outside of the core) is so low that the chance of a stellar or planetary collision is negligable anyway.
Or, by then, we would have the technology to detect it and either deflect it or GTFO of the way anyhow.
Still, it is nice to know we're not in the pipsqueak galaxy. Hoorah!?!?
This particular design is quite interesting, for it seems that they have taken advantage of the physical properties of certain oxides of the fuel isotopes such that it can't go "supercritical" nor "subcritical" under any circumstances.
The key is using the normal thermal reaction of all materials to heat. In physics class, I'm sure all of us were taught, materials expand when heated and contract when cooled.
Nuclear reactions depend on the density of the fissile material, not the density of the overall material in which they may be compounded. It's a matter of N nuclei in V volume.
A material whose thermal expansion/contraction characteristics very closely match an inverse of the fissile material's will always seek an equilibrium temperature. If it gets too hot, it expands and reduces the density (and thus inter-nuclear distance, which increases neutron loss), and if it cools due to less reactivity it contracts and does the opposite.
In short, the fuel becomes self-regulating. It will basically output exactly as much heat energy via fission as is extracted or lost from the system.
At the point that the fissile material is sufficiently exhausted, the compound iteself will not be able to contract sufficiently to permit the nuclear reaction to remain critical, at which point it simply cools down.
Both Chernyobyl and TMI were possible because a supercritical mass of metallic fuel was assembled with neutron-absorbing materials that could be added and removed at will. Remove the control rods, and the mass becomes very supercritical. Put them all the way in, and it is sub-critical. It works fine until the rods can't be moved or there is a catestrophic cooling failure that melts the fuel, which allows it to move past the rods and we have a major disaster.
Solar panels could also potentially create a big explosion. Okay, not the panels themselves, but any time enough megawatts of electrical energy is concentrated, the results can be more powerful than a TNT explosion if it arcs.
No really high-density power is truly safe.
It sure looks like the market has gotten incredibly removed from reality. Huge sums of money are invested in side-bets such as options and dervitives, with less actually invested in owning shares of actual companies.
Getting "blown up" happens to the derivitives traders, not those who hold actual stocks. That is what has taken down the firms that spectacularly cratered earlier this year - they were holding options and swaps that they or the other party could not actually cover when the markets shifted.
My approach to a business-critical system is to employ a strategy of defense in depth.
First level: RAID-10 array in NFS/DB boxes.
Second level: DRBD said NFS/DB boxes such that one server failure results in seconds of downtime max.
Third level: Automated dump of DB and make a tarball of website content and code.
Fourth level: RSYNC the tarballs offsite.
Fifth level: Occasionally backup the offsite backups to some form of removable storage.
It's concievable that this strategy could still have a failure whereby the data was all lost, but such disaster would need to be on the scale of a global thermonuclear war, asteroid impact, etc. In such an eventuality, nobody is going to care at all about the backed-up data anyway.
My experience with AirTran was the worst flight I've ever been on. Bastards left us stranded in Atlanta for 8 hours.
I'd never fly on that airline again even if the ticket was free.
I've used Malwarebytes to fix this nasty little bugger too, several times. It seems to work pretty well.
I've had times where it's been necessary to rename the mbam-setup.exe to something like mbs.exe, and the main .exe to a different name, too. Some of these malwares do block access to known removal tools.
Come on, the FCC is not an evil agency by any stretch. It does have a legitimate role in issues like frequency allocations - there is only so much spectrum to go around.
It also has a great role in the enforcement of technical standards like those that prevent one user from interfering with another's use of the airwaves.
Only if the FCC interferes in the actual content of the communications can it be considered to be entering the category of "evil". Or if they mandate the use of a patented "standard" as a condition of use of the public airwaves, they are certainly at least in bed with "evil".
That said, I actually applaud the dropping of a well-meaning but ill-concieved idea.
It looks like the Chairman haas understood that what he originally wanted was impractical, infeasible, and really a bad idea.
It's okay to propose something stupid, so long as one listens to the reasons for those who object to it and doesn't respond by a "digg in the heels, fight, and whine" attitude when the suggestion and it's rationale is challenged.
One of the nice benefits of having driver source available is that the kernel developers can fix them if they understand the device itself. The original designer of the device is always in the best position to write at least the initial driver code.
One of the big rules in kernel development is that "if you break it, you have to fix it."
Having a good-quality original driver from the manufacturer means that the driver will be ported to new kernel versions, and any incompatibilities introduced are fixed by the person on the kernel team who made them break.
If 4% growth in a mature company isn't good enough, then you need to recalibrate your expectations. The big gains in growth and stock price are just after a start-up and IPO. No business can grow at high rates forever, eventually the market for their product/service is saturated.
Looking at this case, it's almost certain that the same result will occur if this case goes before the Supremes. The issues are almost identical, and they already ruled that only material made with "real" minors can be prohibited. It's settled precident.
The court *explicitly* ruled in regard to "simulated" material:
"In these cases, the defendant can demonstrate no children were harmed in producing the images, yet the affirmative defense would not bar the prosecution. For this reason, the affirmative defense cannot save the statute, for it leaves unprotected a substantial amount of speech not tied to the Government's interest in distinguishing images produced using real children from virtual ones....
"Finally, the Government says that the possibility of producing images by using computer imaging makes it very difficult for it to prosecute those who produce pornography by using real children. Experts, we are told, may have difficulty in saying whether the pictures were made by using real children or by using computer imaging. The necessary solution, the argument runs, is to prohibit both kinds of images. The argument, in essence, is that protected speech may be banned as a means to ban unprotected speech. This analysis turns the First Amendment upside down."
The Supreme Court does not like having its decisions ignored, and the cartoons and writings cover ground that the same justices who wrote the original decision would be re-hearing. Every justice who voted for overturning COPA is still on the bench.
The same arguments that didn't fly in 2002 still won't fly in 2009. I'd expect the jist of the decision to read basically "Hey dumbasses! We already said you can't do this. Knock the shit off!" Naturally, the language will be in legalese, but the theme will be there nonetheless.
It'll also be easy for the court to overturn the convictions for the cartoons and textual messages because the guy was also convicted for possessing "real CP" (and thus, will still be in prison). There's no motivation in this case to uphold the conviction on those counts in the name of "justice" when the other charges are sufficient to keep the creep locked up anyway.
If this case is heard, I'd expect the oral arguments to be very entertaining as the justices mercilessly grill the government attorneys on exactly how their arguments are different from what they already rejected a few years previously.
I would expect that if this case hits the SCOTUS, we will see exactly the same result. From the Opinion:
"Kennedy, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. O'Connor, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part, in which Rehnquist, C. J., and Scalia, J., joined as to Part II. Rehnquist, C. J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Scalia, J., joined except for the paragraph discussing legislative history."
I notice the names of the justices who overturned the original statute, and note further that all of them are still on the Court. Two of the three dissenting justices have subsequently been replaced due to death or retirement.
Actually, since it would be just a rehash of the previous case, it is quite possible that Chief Justice Roberts would join in with the "overturn it" bloc. He is a huge fan of Stare Decisis and doesn't like overturning previous decisions.
It's actually possible that the decision would be unanimous, though that may be a stretch. I'd doubt Antonin Scalia would change his position from the previous case.
In the book "It" there is a passage where the young Beverly character has sex with all of the young boys in her circle of friends. The scene is graphically described in detail.
Actually, there is much merit in the parent post.
I actually learned more algebra in my 10th grade Physics class than I did in the actual algebra class. The difference was that in "physics" we were actually learning about something much more "real" than in the "math" classes. In physics, it "clicked" as to "why" it was an important thing to understand.
Let's face it - without some link to solving a real problem, mathematics is just plain drudgery that is boring to 99% of students, who will proceed to flush the information as soon as they leave the class. Link it to the real world in some way, and they will learn it quickly, even as just a tool to understand what you are really teaching.
That's not to say that there is no need to teach mathematics - there is. But link the entire curriculum such that there is a utility to learning it.
Do not welcome our new computer-generated overlords.
Sometimes the trade-off between "crude and mostly works", "works every time perfectly" and "don't have the damn thing at all" has to be made.
Where resources are scant, you do the best effort to get something, even if it's somewhat sub-optimal. At least then there's a chance of helping someone who is almost certain to die.
If the choice is no care and death, or crappy care and a chance, most people will take crappy care.
I heard he tried to get slash slash backslash dot com....
Just to find the real killer, of course.
If we really want to split hairs, we should note that "explode" and "detonate" are two different concepts. Some explosions are detonations, and others are simple deflagration where the fuel burns rapidly but evenly over some period of time.
The physics of the two is vastly different. A detonation denotes an event where the material burns at a rate that is supersonic, and a deflagration is subsonic.
In a detonation, an instantaneous pressure jump moves through the material faster than the material's normal speed of sound. This produces instantaneous pressures that can go into the millions of PSI. A strong enough shock will shatter any material.
Occasionally, the fuel/air mixture in an automobile cylinder will partially detonate. These cause weak shocks that we notice as "knocks" and "pings" - and which over time will destroy the pistons in the engine. High compression, low octane fuel, and local hotspots in the cylinders are the usual reason for this.
As a side note, even smokeless gunpowder doesn't detonate, it just deflagrates on a time scale of 0.5 - 3 milliseconds. If it did detonate, the gun would quite spectacularly imitate a fragmentation grenade.
From the perspective of an observer outside the combustion both can produce similar effects, though detonations are much more spectacular.
if(politician.speaketh!="truth" {
if(politician.party=="republican") {
attack(politician);
} else if(politician.party=="democrat") {
fellate(politician);
} else {
ignore(politician);
}
} else {
destroy_with_utter_contempt(politician)
}
My guess is that they want a test case to push to the SCOTUS if necessary.
There may be a razor-thin chance of overturning anti-discrimination law under certain "narrow" circumstances.
The argument would be a first amendment violation for freedom of religion and additionally freedom of association.
If they are a privately-held company there is actually a snowball's chance in Hell that it could actually fly. Publicly traded corporations can be argued to be "different" in some way from those that aren't.
Never underestimate what some slimeball posing as a lawyer can sell - especially to the 5 conservatives on the SCOTUS.
I personally don't care if the developer killed his wife or not - if the filesystem works, it works.