I used to wind line sets for sport kites at a kite factory (Shanti, if anyone cares). We used Spectra and Kevlar (and Dacron, but it's really only suitable for single line kites). Anyway, Spectra does have a fair amount of creep, IIRC something like 8-12%. We would stretch it out with 3 or 4 strong pulls and then it had the same stretch as Kevlar, something like 3-5%. Once the creep was out the main difference between Spectra and Kevlar was flamability. The Kevlar wouldn't burn. We did have to put sleeves on both, because when you tied them in knots they'd cut through themselves.
Oh, and Kevlar really thrashes scissors.
Never heard of Vectran, though. Has it been around long?
The asked question is; where do we STOP limiting Aunt Tillie?
If we decide she shouldn't be allowed to compile her own kernel, how much more of a stretch is it to say she shouldn't be allowed to install her own OS? And from there, how big a step is it to say she shouldn't be allowed to install her own apps, and so on down the line until you've got poor Aunt Tillie wearing a straight jacket and drugged to unconsciousness in a padded room.
The point is that Open Source is about choice, and Aunt Tillie should have the choice to compile her kernel if she wants to, and she shouldn't have to become a "silly immature 'hardcore' computer user" to do it. If we say, for any reason that she can't compile her kernel, where do we stop telling her what she can't do?
It has nothing to do with how intelligent she is, it has everything to do with competency to do the task at hand, namely compiling a kernel, and how we as a community respond to that competency level. Did it ever occur to you that one of your scientific geniuses may be no more competent a kernel configuror than ESR's Aunt Tillie?
What about putting the Autoconfigurator and compile in the install script so that the "default" kernel is optimized for your hardware? I think that has some very interesting possibilities.
SuSE has said that since at least 6.3, and I suspect most distros that offer any kind of support at all already have such a clause.
Ditto with the "this software supported under Red Hat 7.2" or whatever mentioned in another reply. Many packages already do this, especially if they can be bought off the shelf.
much like how people don't pay much for assembly language programmers from the 1950's, or COBOL programmers from the 1960's and 70's.
Maybe, but if for some reason you NEED a programmer who knows 1950's assembly there is no substitute for the real thing, and I imagine the few surviving could command top dollar for their return from retirement.
Think about all those COBOL systems that nobody ever dreamed would still be running today, and yet they are. Who would you rather have maintaining that code; somebody that's been hacking COBOL since 1970, or some kid who took a COBOL class at the local JC? I don't know about you, but the Ancient COBOL Master would be worth at least twice as much to me if I were in that situation.
The same thing goes for old hardware. Some folks will pay incredible amounts of money for obsolete parts because they need to be able to replace the part in an existing machine that's been doing a mission critical job for 5 or sometimes even 10 years. There's a company around the corner from me that does very well refurbishing obsolete hardware.
Certainly people wouldn't be paid much money for creating 1996 applications in 2015
But they guys who created those 1996 apps will be doing just fine maintaining them.
An exoskeleton is basically a vehicle optimized to mimic human mobility ranges. Which is silly - optimize a vehicle to work as a vehicle, and it'll be simpler and more efficient.I totally agree. My company designs and builds custom industrial automation systems (simple robotics for manufacturing is the closest explanation the most people understand).
Anyway, this reminds me of a project I worked on a few months ago. Basically, the customer wanted a machine that would take something very much like a wound guitar string and cut both ends simultaneously. Not difficult at all. Unfortunately, the customer had an additional requirement: the cutting had to be done using the existing tool; a pair of diagonal cutters made of a particular stainless steel alloy and with handle curved so as to be comfortable for the human hand. An excellent tool if the job is being done by a human, but a really piss-poor one if the job is being done by a machine. Getting the tool securly held and properly positioned is a huge pain in the ass, and took our machinist nearly a week of guess-and-check work to get right, costing us about 5 times what it would have to build the machine if we didn't have to design it around a hand tool. And as an added bonus, every time the cutters are replaced the customer will have to send it to their callibration lab for at least a day, losing all that production time, when it could have been 10 minutes total for replacement and calibration.
The big lesson: the human body is a really incredible general purpose machine, but you should never try to model a machine after it. For any specific task there is an optimal design, and it is extremely unlikely to resemble the human form in any way.
That said, though, gant robot power armor is damned sexy!
First, especially in low level classes like intro to programming, the prof often outlines examples which are related to the assignment problem, and which diligent students like myself copy down and modify to fit the assignment. Thus, it would be quite simple for multiple students to have solutions with identical lines since those would likely be lines the instructor wrote which didn't need to be altered to fit the assignment.
This amounts to cutting and pasting from the instructor, rather than another student, but these are intro classes. How do you teach a language without providing example code that illustrates the concepts you're trying to teach? How can the students (who don't already know the language) complete their assignments without anything to work from? Can you imagine an instructor asking a bunch of newbies to format a printf() without an example to work from?
I think a lot of people who are going to get "caught" by a system like this won't be cheaters at all. There are going to be a lot of students getting slammed for using the resources that SHOULD be available to them; textbooks, lecture notes, tutors, etc.
What it WON'T catch are the real cheaters who get their solutions off the internet. A solution to that problem would be a lot more interesting.
One thing about MS' track record is that they do have a history of having their own products compete with themselves and letting the market decide which one survives. Argueably, DirectX has already beaten OpenGL, so maybe that's a moot point.
As a patent, though, this could be very bad if MS decides it wants OpenGL to die, since patents cover ALL implementations of the concept covered in the patent. As such, MS essentially owns mesa, and that makes me very uncomfortable.
One can always hope, though, for legal relief. Perhaps this will be the case that kills software patents?
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
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The problem is simply that centralized control is inefficient and subject to corruption.
Benevolent Dictatorship is absolutely the best, most efficient form of government possible, because all decisions are made by a single person who has the common good in mind and there's no beauracracy or red tape. Benevolent Dictatorship is immune to corruption, else it ceases to be benevolent. Benevolent Dictatorship is also totally imaginary and will never exist, but that doesn't make your assesment of the concept any less wrong.
Not that business is immune from corruption
Debatable. Some would argue that business is inherently corrupt, since its focus is on making money rather than promoting the common good. These concepts aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but modern business theory is certainly pushing in that direction.
Others might say that the concept of corruption is totally inapplicable to business. Corruption implies that something is other than it should be. Business is about financial gain, and any step taken in that direction, no matter how deplorable, is not corrupt.
I'm on the fence, myself.
Government, OTOH, should be primarily concerned with the common good of the governed and thus the idea of corruption is much more applicable.
They can be guaranteed customers through regulation (utilities and telecom monopolies are an example)
Telecom and Utilities are not guaranteed customers through regulation, nor have they ever been. Regulation of these industries started in order to force the already existing monopolies to make service available to customers who would otherwise be unprofitable (Universal Access). Ma Bell obtained their telecom monopoly because they invented the telephone! They invented it, patented it, and provided it as a service to the rest of us, which is exactly how Intellectual Property and Capitalism are supposed to work.
Notice I said Capitalism and not Free Market. I'll touch on this again.
Anyway, telecom regulation was expanded because Ma Bell abused her monopoly and was subsequently broken up into a bunch of little monopolies. Again, this is as it should be. Someone has to maintain the phone lines and operate the switches, and I think we can all agree that telecom is better off not being run by the same folks who run the Post Office. So the local telecoms were allowed to retain ownership of and responsibility for all the infrastructure necessary for the phone system to work, and then commanded, through regulation, to allow other companies access to that infrastructure at a reasonable price.
What happened here is equivalent to creating an easement through Imminent Domain. The government coming along and taking your property is wrong, and that's exactly what would have happened if the local telecoms were not allowed to retain ownership. They can force you to let others pass through your property if it is in the interests of the greater good, but they have to compensate you for the value that you've lost, which is exactly what happened here. Despite popular opinion, telecom in the US is not a government sponsored monopoly, it is a government limited monopoly.
Utilities are a slightly different issue, they grew as local monopolies and have continued relatively unchanged. Regulation of utilities is mainly focused on public safety. The fact is, you can hook up a phase matched invertor to some solar panels and become a power company (at least in CA). There may be some requirements for amount of power produced before you can legally be considered a power company, I don't really know, but even if you're just considered a private individual the utility is required to pay you for any power you feed into the grid, though it may not be at the same rate a company would get. So, in CA anyway, the utility company is not a monopoly at all.
The myth that captalism leads to monopoly is utter and complete nonsense, and dangerous indeed.
The goal of the Capitalist is to achieve a monopoly, since that is the most profitable position to be in and Capitalism is about profit above all else. That's why it's called Capitalism. Capitalism must be regulated in order to preserve the Free Market. I think we can agree that competition benefits us much more than monopoly, but you're deluding yourself if you think that the ideals of Capitalism will preserve competition. If you honestly believe that, than you don't know the meaning of the word.
If the myth were true, then why isn't there a single company that runs all the dry-cleaning shops in the country? Why aren't all the convenience stores run by one huge ConvenienceCo? Why are there 20 brands of VCR's on the shelves instead of one?
Because no one company in any of these industries has been able to gain enough competetive edge to overwhelm their competition. It's that simple. That doesn't mean they aren't trying, just that they haven't succeeded.
One final note, I agree that regulation in the US is generally done poorly, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have any. Americans are practical people, and no institution gets created here without a need for it. Check out the history of anti-trust and wellfare if you don't believe me. There are very good reasons why these were created and, despite popular rhetoric, there are very good reasons why they continue to exist. They could certainly benefit from some reform, especially wellfare, but when it comes down to it they do more good than harm.
The General Purpose computer, in all it's current implementations, is buggy and unstable. Does that mean we should get rid of them all?
Given that the Macintosh and is OS have been the most easy to use and reliable system in the PC world
This is directly contrary to my experiences with Macs. The last Mac I used was a G3 running OS 8, so things may have changed since then, but it was REALLY bad. Hard locks all the time, I'm talking 4-5 times a day, and this thing locked up so hard that even the power switch wouldn't work and I had to crawl under the desk and unplug the thing from the wall. A reset switch would have been nice, but I never found one. Not even a switch on the PSU like most of the Current ATX ones have. The only other computer I used at the time was an Acer P-120 running Windows 95A (by all accounts the buggiest OS ever produced). It only crashed on me about once a week (usually Netscape, but that's a whole different gripe), and only hard locked to the point where I had to hit the reset switch twice in 2 years.
On top of that it took us forever to get this G3 to recognize the (external) modem that it came with (direct from Apple). All the admin tools are totally buried, which I've always found extremely irritating. There's no such thing as perfection. Give me access to the tools I need to fix your product when it breaks and I'll be a happy customer. Try and pretend nothing ever goes wrong with your product and I'll never buy it again, which is exactly what Apple did.
Cool PC's and laptop draw additional users. But, it's not all about that at Apple.
That's exactly what Macs are about, because that's what the Mac market wants. Macs are most popular with gaphics people. How do you sell to graphics people? Make something that looks cool. I'll admit that ease and power were once the domain of Apple, but they lost the usability crown years ago to an OS that could display multiple toolbars at the same time (Windows), and they gave up their last hold on the power crown when they switched from SCSI to IDE (sorry, but the G4 just doesn't keep up for anything other than Photoshop). The caveat here is that I'm only considering systems that have survived, and thus ignoring the Amiga, which IMHO topped Apple on both fronts.
The growth of Mac seems inevitable as it becomes as BSD box with the coolest hardware and the most capabilities.
Right... because BSD is such a popular OS...
Sorry, I don't mean that as flamebait, but you have to admit it's a pretty head-in-the-clouds statement. I think it'll take another year for Apple to get all their ducks lined up behind OS X. They're building on a solid foundation this time, but I'll have to see where they're able to take it before I'll buy into the hype. OS X has recieved high marks from my personal *nix guru, though, which is the only reason I'm even paying it any attention.
It is not understanding PC users that brings Gates to the top. It is the fact that he uses monopolistic powers and bully tactics to force people and competitors to use his sytems.
You have this exactly backwards. One has to have a monopoly before one can abuse it, and Microsoft didn't spring forth whole from the computer industry like Athena from Zeus' head. Jobs and Gates both knew what they had to do, people buy what they're familiar with. Jobs went for the schools and Gates went for the business world. Those were both places where people were going to be familiarized with computers. Gates won because the people with jobs are the ones who have the money to buy stuff, and very few adults are ready to throw down a couple thousand dollars on the word of a 12 year old. The ones with money are the ones who the make decisions, and they were more familiar with MS/IBM than Apple.
Gates understood PC users and what would get them to buy his product, and that's what put him the position where he could use "monopolistic powers and bully tactics".
What kind of asshole builds their site entirely in Flash? Have they never heard of usability? My hand has painfully cramped up from clicking on their stupid down arrow 100 times. And what's with the new-age meditation soundtrack coupled with the jarring beep everytime you hover over a link? This is the most annoying, unusable site I've seen since the Cyborg Manifesto. At least they had the decency to give you a scrollbar, even if they had no concept contrast between text and background.
A quick google search on "San Onofre" turns up a lot of info on safety at nuclear plants. This article from the Orange County Register, amusing references to the pressure in a car radiator and winter in San Diego aside, does a pretty good job of outlining the reasons why I inherently distrust any info that comes from the nuclear power industry or the NRC. They're always saying everything is perfectly safe, and they're regularly found to be lying and/or not performing the proper tests. Political and economic factors tend to dominate the decisions of these groups more than best practices.
This is really the heart of my disagreement with Yucca Mtn. That the siesmic properties of the site can be engineered around is largely irrelevant, I don't trust those responsible to do what they should. The responsible agencies have proven time and again that the economic viabilty and public image of nuclear power are much higher priorities than public safety.
Moving on, though, this page has a lot of information about the Northridge quake, and the cover photo shows exactly the type of damage I'm talking about. The pillar hasn't sustained much (if any) damage, basically serving as a spliting wedge driven through the roadway that formerly rested upon it. Compare that to the photos of pillar damage from the 1971 quake on the transportation page. In all fairness, none of the overpasses that failed had been retrofitted yet.
I agree that what I laid out is an oversimplification of the design criteria, but I also think you seriously overestimate our ability to predict geologic activity. Going back to the Yucca Mtn site, there have been over 600 earthquakes within 50 miles, ranging from 2.5 to 5.6, over the last 25 years. How confidently can you say that there won't be an 8.0 in that area next week? How safe do you feel this site is for storage of nuclear waste?
The 5.6 (1992) did a million dollars in damage to the DOE field office which was studying the site. In 1999 an earthquake derailed a train on one of the tracks that could be used to transport nuclear waste to the site. How safe do you feel now?
Is a single large point of failure safer than 70 smaller ones? I'm not convinced that it is. My understanding is that the security at the current storage locations is poor, and I see that as an arguement that those installations need better security, rather than combining them all into one location that may or may not be more secure. The sad truth is security at many "secured" government sites isn't very good.
I'm not entirely opposed to storage as a temporary solution, but I am certainly opposed to storage at Yucca Mtn. The site itself is simply not stable enough to be suitable, and I think it's extremely irresponsible of the DOE to have not even considered, let alone study, other sites.
The standards listed impress me about as much as the 5mph bumper.
40 inch drop puncture test -- That's the MINIMUM distance a container would drop if it fell off a STATIONARY train. Most tracks are placed on top of embankments which at least double that. Considering that within 20 miles of my home there are 3 (that I know of) railroad bridges where the drop to the SHARP rocks below is at least 50 feet, plus the fact that the train would likely be traveling in excess of 50mph, a 40 inch drop is equivalent to kicking the tires of your car. Unless there is a serious defect, this proves nothing relevant to real world performance.
That pretty much covers the 30 foot drop to a flat surface standard as well
1475F for 30 minutes -- sounds impressive, until you consider that estimated temperatures inside the world trade center exceded 1600F (which, btw, is what caused them to actually come down. With less heat the upper stories would merely have been gutted by fire, with little or no actual structural damage.) What if it's subjected to heat before it's dropped?
50 foot immersion for 8 hours -- how exactly does one recover one of these 25-120 ton casks from under 50 feet of water? How long would it take to get the necessary equipment and trained crews to a remote location, for the divers to prepare their dive plans, etc?
The actual tests listed are much more impressive (and realistic), but no statistics about repeatability are listed. So what if a container can withstand one of these tests, can 30 containers in a row survive? (Note that 30 tests is the minimum number for true statistical significance.)
Another issue is terrorism. This is briefly touched upon in the article you linked, but important details are missing, such as the size of the explosive used. Regarding hijack, 25-40 tons is not unmanagable. A licensed heavy equipment operator can easily rent (or steal) the necessary equipment. In my area heavy equipment yards tend to be located near railroad tracks, probably to facilitate shipping/recieving of equipment, but price/sq.ft is likely also a factor. Security tends to be pretty lax at these yards, generally consisting of a padlocked chainlink fence.
It may come as a surprise to you to find that the people who designed our nuclear infrastructure are neither stupid nor suicidal.
It may come as a surprise to you to find out how hampered these designers are by politics, beaurocratic red-tape, and "financial concerns". That's true of any design project, and quite visible in the design standards listed here.
It may also come as a surprise to you that the NRC is almost completely controlled by companies it's supposed to be regulating.
I know that there are some distributions of Linux out there that are pretty easy to use and set up, but they still don't compare to Windows or MacOS in overall ease.
Not true. Try SuSE 7.3. With YaST2 install and admin are a breeze, and hardware autodetection is excellent. The default install is extremely usable, and the only reason you'd ever need to see a command line is if your hardware won't run X.
There is a HUGE difference between being poor in North America and being poor anywhere else in the world. It's the poor in the rest of the world who are truely suffering from the Digital Divide. Anyone in the US can get access to the internet if they want it, even if it means using a terminal at the local library. The same is not true in, say, Nigeria.
You make an interesting point about piracy, though. I read somewhere recently that in a lot of countries that are currently bootstrapping themselves into into the digital age Windows is fairly popular, mostly because it's all pirated. Linux is often a popular choice as well, but has no economic advantage since Windows is free-as-in-beer also.
People who don't even have a computer would find Linux a lot harder to use than either of those two commercial operatings systems.
I think this is a common misconception about Linux. It's probably based on the fact that most people who have used Linux had a hard time learning it because they had to learn something different from what they already knew. Everyone I've ever met who has used Linux used a different OS first. They were already experienced computer users. When they started learning it they discovered that most of the things they took for granted before no longer applied, little things like hotkeys and how to cut and paste are different, so they get frustrated and it seems harder than when they were first learning how to use a computer. It isn't. As you say:
A lot of people don't even have much comprehension of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS, that runs of the computer they have.
They have so little comprehension of their OS because it doesn't matter that much. People will learn what they have, whether it's Windows, MacOS, or Linux, and any of them are equally bewildering to the beginner. Once learned it's just as easy to use, too.
Linux is not hard. It certainly was at one point, but we've been past that point for at least a year now. With a modern distro one no longer needs to ever see a command line, even during installation and configuration.
No one is proposing that we hand people a pile of old hardware and a slackware CD and send them on their way. That would be an equally rediculous proposition if we were to hand them a Windows or MacOS CD. We're talking about prebuilt systems with Linux preinstalled and configured to work out of the box, just like the one they'd get from Gateway or Dell except it costs them $100 less for the same hardware, or even much cheaper for lesser hardware which would be unbearably slow under Windows. I don't know of anyone offering such a thing, all the preinstalled Linux boxes I know of are meant to be servers or high-end workstations, and seem to start at about $1500. There's no reason it couldn't be done, though.
As long as we're on the topic of installation, though, having recently upgraded several Windows and Linux machines (Windows 98 to Windows 2000 and SuSE various to SuSE 7.3) Linux was by far easier. Much of that has to do with the fact that with Linux everything is there on the install disk(s); driver, utilities, applications, etc. Not so with Windows 2000. All that stuff had to be hunted down and installed seperately. Never mind the fact that having to reinstall all your drivers when you're upgrading a working machine is completely asinine. Installing SuSE 7.3 from scratch is incredibly simple as well, again because everything is right there. All my hardware was autodetected without a hitch. The only thing that might complicate it is if you have a windows install you'd like to preserve. Much easier than installing Windows.
That was "magnitude 2.5 or greater". Certainly one can engineer for earthquakes, but no amount of engineering is 100%. Take the earthquake in LA a few years ago. Everything in LA (indeed, all of California) is engineered to be earthquake safe (up to 6.something minimum as I recall, it's been a few years since I worked in construction). However, they were engineered to withstand earthquakes with horizontal movement, which is by far the most common type in CA. That particular one was mostly verticle which is why it caused so much damage. Bridges were literally speared through by their own supports when they were lifted up and then slammed back down on top of them. If you drive through SoCal now, you'll notice that all the overpasses now have more of an arch shape, when they used to have a flat bottom supported by straight pillars.
I wandered a little bit there, but my point is that we don't know enough about geology to relyably engineer for seismic events. They are still incredibly unpredictable. Why not store the stuff somewhere stable like the salt caves in Texas (which have the added bonus of being naturally radiation absorbant)? My arguement is that we shouldn't store this stuff at Yucca Mtn, not that we shouldn't do anything with it at all. Ther are much better alternatives, even if all we're going to do is store the stuff.
Personally, I'd rather see reprocessing, but there's a lot of political opposition to building more nuclear plants and I can't say I disagree with that ideologically. But at the same time, if we can reduce the half-life of our waste by orders of magnitude it needs to be persued. The fact is that storage is not a solution, it's merely procrastination. It's like fixing dry rot with a new coat of paint.
And yes, I'm aware that very little electricity is produced by burning oil, but apparently our president isn't, and since the statement was specifically a dig on his energy plan I thought it best to use his own wording.
I guess I won't be trying out Kylix then. It's too bad, really. I learned to program on Builder and I liked the IDE much better than MSVC++. No big loss for me, though. vi/gcc/gdb serves my purposes just fine.
It is a shame, though, when an otherwise great company does something stupid like this.
I've heard of this and I think it's a cool idea; certainly a better idea than Yucca Mtn. But I think there's plenty we could be doing to reduce the amount of waste we need to store, such as using breeder reactors to burn our current "waste" to something with less mass and a much shorter half-life. This is already being done in France.
Saying have the producers pay for it (again) is unrealistic.
The producers (nuclear power industry) haven't paid for it (disposal) at all. They have raked in the profits and relied on the government to take care of the disposal problem using taxpayer money. Why do you think nuclear energy has such a reputation for being cheap? It's because all the overhead of disposal/storage comes out of your tax dollars rather than showing up on your electric bill. I don't think it's unrealistic to ask a private corporation to cover their own costs. Plenty of corporations manage to do that, and the nuclear power industry should be no exception.
And this solves that 40,000 tons of spent fuel problem how?
By reducing the future need to produce more of this stuff, and hopefully giving us some breathing room to deal with what we already have. Additionally, oil, coal and nuclear energy are all non-renewable sources, and the sooner we ween ourselves from them the better off we will be in the long run.
Disagree on the seismic FUD.
Well over 600 earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or greater within 50 miles of Yucca Mtn in the last 25 years is FUD? How exactly do you define "geologically stable", then?
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As long as you restrict their diet. A goat that's been alowed to eat whatever it wants can have some pretty gnarly-tasting milk.
Oh, and Kevlar really thrashes scissors.
Never heard of Vectran, though. Has it been around long?
It's nice to know that it's possible, though.
The asked question is; where do we STOP limiting Aunt Tillie?
If we decide she shouldn't be allowed to compile her own kernel, how much more of a stretch is it to say she shouldn't be allowed to install her own OS? And from there, how big a step is it to say she shouldn't be allowed to install her own apps, and so on down the line until you've got poor Aunt Tillie wearing a straight jacket and drugged to unconsciousness in a padded room.
The point is that Open Source is about choice, and Aunt Tillie should have the choice to compile her kernel if she wants to, and she shouldn't have to become a "silly immature 'hardcore' computer user" to do it. If we say, for any reason that she can't compile her kernel, where do we stop telling her what she can't do?
It has nothing to do with how intelligent she is, it has everything to do with competency to do the task at hand, namely compiling a kernel, and how we as a community respond to that competency level. Did it ever occur to you that one of your scientific geniuses may be no more competent a kernel configuror than ESR's Aunt Tillie?
Ditto with the "this software supported under Red Hat 7.2" or whatever mentioned in another reply. Many packages already do this, especially if they can be bought off the shelf.
Maybe, but if for some reason you NEED a programmer who knows 1950's assembly there is no substitute for the real thing, and I imagine the few surviving could command top dollar for their return from retirement.
Think about all those COBOL systems that nobody ever dreamed would still be running today, and yet they are. Who would you rather have maintaining that code; somebody that's been hacking COBOL since 1970, or some kid who took a COBOL class at the local JC? I don't know about you, but the Ancient COBOL Master would be worth at least twice as much to me if I were in that situation.
The same thing goes for old hardware. Some folks will pay incredible amounts of money for obsolete parts because they need to be able to replace the part in an existing machine that's been doing a mission critical job for 5 or sometimes even 10 years. There's a company around the corner from me that does very well refurbishing obsolete hardware.
Certainly people wouldn't be paid much money for creating 1996 applications in 2015
But they guys who created those 1996 apps will be doing just fine maintaining them.
Why don't they just use -ac? Didn't he keep van Riel's VM?
Anyway, this reminds me of a project I worked on a few months ago. Basically, the customer wanted a machine that would take something very much like a wound guitar string and cut both ends simultaneously. Not difficult at all. Unfortunately, the customer had an additional requirement: the cutting had to be done using the existing tool; a pair of diagonal cutters made of a particular stainless steel alloy and with handle curved so as to be comfortable for the human hand. An excellent tool if the job is being done by a human, but a really piss-poor one if the job is being done by a machine. Getting the tool securly held and properly positioned is a huge pain in the ass, and took our machinist nearly a week of guess-and-check work to get right, costing us about 5 times what it would have to build the machine if we didn't have to design it around a hand tool. And as an added bonus, every time the cutters are replaced the customer will have to send it to their callibration lab for at least a day, losing all that production time, when it could have been 10 minutes total for replacement and calibration.
The big lesson: the human body is a really incredible general purpose machine, but you should never try to model a machine after it. For any specific task there is an optimal design, and it is extremely unlikely to resemble the human form in any way.
That said, though, gant robot power armor is damned sexy!
<Homer Simpson>Mmmmm... Mecha...</Homer Simpson>
This amounts to cutting and pasting from the instructor, rather than another student, but these are intro classes. How do you teach a language without providing example code that illustrates the concepts you're trying to teach? How can the students (who don't already know the language) complete their assignments without anything to work from? Can you imagine an instructor asking a bunch of newbies to format a printf() without an example to work from?
I think a lot of people who are going to get "caught" by a system like this won't be cheaters at all. There are going to be a lot of students getting slammed for using the resources that SHOULD be available to them; textbooks, lecture notes, tutors, etc.
What it WON'T catch are the real cheaters who get their solutions off the internet. A solution to that problem would be a lot more interesting.
As a patent, though, this could be very bad if MS decides it wants OpenGL to die, since patents cover ALL implementations of the concept covered in the patent. As such, MS essentially owns mesa, and that makes me very uncomfortable.
One can always hope, though, for legal relief. Perhaps this will be the case that kills software patents?
Benevolent Dictatorship is absolutely the best, most efficient form of government possible, because all decisions are made by a single person who has the common good in mind and there's no beauracracy or red tape. Benevolent Dictatorship is immune to corruption, else it ceases to be benevolent. Benevolent Dictatorship is also totally imaginary and will never exist, but that doesn't make your assesment of the concept any less wrong.
Not that business is immune from corruption
Debatable. Some would argue that business is inherently corrupt, since its focus is on making money rather than promoting the common good. These concepts aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but modern business theory is certainly pushing in that direction.
Others might say that the concept of corruption is totally inapplicable to business. Corruption implies that something is other than it should be. Business is about financial gain, and any step taken in that direction, no matter how deplorable, is not corrupt.
I'm on the fence, myself.
Government, OTOH, should be primarily concerned with the common good of the governed and thus the idea of corruption is much more applicable.
They can be guaranteed customers through regulation (utilities and telecom monopolies are an example)
Telecom and Utilities are not guaranteed customers through regulation, nor have they ever been. Regulation of these industries started in order to force the already existing monopolies to make service available to customers who would otherwise be unprofitable (Universal Access). Ma Bell obtained their telecom monopoly because they invented the telephone! They invented it, patented it, and provided it as a service to the rest of us, which is exactly how Intellectual Property and Capitalism are supposed to work.
Notice I said Capitalism and not Free Market. I'll touch on this again.
Anyway, telecom regulation was expanded because Ma Bell abused her monopoly and was subsequently broken up into a bunch of little monopolies. Again, this is as it should be. Someone has to maintain the phone lines and operate the switches, and I think we can all agree that telecom is better off not being run by the same folks who run the Post Office. So the local telecoms were allowed to retain ownership of and responsibility for all the infrastructure necessary for the phone system to work, and then commanded, through regulation, to allow other companies access to that infrastructure at a reasonable price.
What happened here is equivalent to creating an easement through Imminent Domain. The government coming along and taking your property is wrong, and that's exactly what would have happened if the local telecoms were not allowed to retain ownership. They can force you to let others pass through your property if it is in the interests of the greater good, but they have to compensate you for the value that you've lost, which is exactly what happened here. Despite popular opinion, telecom in the US is not a government sponsored monopoly, it is a government limited monopoly.
Utilities are a slightly different issue, they grew as local monopolies and have continued relatively unchanged. Regulation of utilities is mainly focused on public safety. The fact is, you can hook up a phase matched invertor to some solar panels and become a power company (at least in CA). There may be some requirements for amount of power produced before you can legally be considered a power company, I don't really know, but even if you're just considered a private individual the utility is required to pay you for any power you feed into the grid, though it may not be at the same rate a company would get. So, in CA anyway, the utility company is not a monopoly at all.
The myth that captalism leads to monopoly is utter and complete nonsense, and dangerous indeed.
The goal of the Capitalist is to achieve a monopoly, since that is the most profitable position to be in and Capitalism is about profit above all else. That's why it's called Capitalism. Capitalism must be regulated in order to preserve the Free Market. I think we can agree that competition benefits us much more than monopoly, but you're deluding yourself if you think that the ideals of Capitalism will preserve competition. If you honestly believe that, than you don't know the meaning of the word.
If the myth were true, then why isn't there a single company that runs all the dry-cleaning shops in the country? Why aren't all the convenience stores run by one huge ConvenienceCo? Why are there 20 brands of VCR's on the shelves instead of one?
Because no one company in any of these industries has been able to gain enough competetive edge to overwhelm their competition. It's that simple. That doesn't mean they aren't trying, just that they haven't succeeded.
One final note, I agree that regulation in the US is generally done poorly, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have any. Americans are practical people, and no institution gets created here without a need for it. Check out the history of anti-trust and wellfare if you don't believe me. There are very good reasons why these were created and, despite popular rhetoric, there are very good reasons why they continue to exist. They could certainly benefit from some reform, especially wellfare, but when it comes down to it they do more good than harm.
The General Purpose computer, in all it's current implementations, is buggy and unstable. Does that mean we should get rid of them all?
This is directly contrary to my experiences with Macs. The last Mac I used was a G3 running OS 8, so things may have changed since then, but it was REALLY bad. Hard locks all the time, I'm talking 4-5 times a day, and this thing locked up so hard that even the power switch wouldn't work and I had to crawl under the desk and unplug the thing from the wall. A reset switch would have been nice, but I never found one. Not even a switch on the PSU like most of the Current ATX ones have. The only other computer I used at the time was an Acer P-120 running Windows 95A (by all accounts the buggiest OS ever produced). It only crashed on me about once a week (usually Netscape, but that's a whole different gripe), and only hard locked to the point where I had to hit the reset switch twice in 2 years.
On top of that it took us forever to get this G3 to recognize the (external) modem that it came with (direct from Apple). All the admin tools are totally buried, which I've always found extremely irritating. There's no such thing as perfection. Give me access to the tools I need to fix your product when it breaks and I'll be a happy customer. Try and pretend nothing ever goes wrong with your product and I'll never buy it again, which is exactly what Apple did.
Cool PC's and laptop draw additional users. But, it's not all about that at Apple.
That's exactly what Macs are about, because that's what the Mac market wants. Macs are most popular with gaphics people. How do you sell to graphics people? Make something that looks cool. I'll admit that ease and power were once the domain of Apple, but they lost the usability crown years ago to an OS that could display multiple toolbars at the same time (Windows), and they gave up their last hold on the power crown when they switched from SCSI to IDE (sorry, but the G4 just doesn't keep up for anything other than Photoshop). The caveat here is that I'm only considering systems that have survived, and thus ignoring the Amiga, which IMHO topped Apple on both fronts.
The growth of Mac seems inevitable as it becomes as BSD box with the coolest hardware and the most capabilities.
Right... because BSD is such a popular OS...
Sorry, I don't mean that as flamebait, but you have to admit it's a pretty head-in-the-clouds statement. I think it'll take another year for Apple to get all their ducks lined up behind OS X. They're building on a solid foundation this time, but I'll have to see where they're able to take it before I'll buy into the hype. OS X has recieved high marks from my personal *nix guru, though, which is the only reason I'm even paying it any attention.
It is not understanding PC users that brings Gates to the top. It is the fact that he uses monopolistic powers and bully tactics to force people and competitors to use his sytems.
You have this exactly backwards. One has to have a monopoly before one can abuse it, and Microsoft didn't spring forth whole from the computer industry like Athena from Zeus' head. Jobs and Gates both knew what they had to do, people buy what they're familiar with. Jobs went for the schools and Gates went for the business world. Those were both places where people were going to be familiarized with computers. Gates won because the people with jobs are the ones who have the money to buy stuff, and very few adults are ready to throw down a couple thousand dollars on the word of a 12 year old. The ones with money are the ones who the make decisions, and they were more familiar with MS/IBM than Apple.
Gates understood PC users and what would get them to buy his product, and that's what put him the position where he could use "monopolistic powers and bully tactics".
This is really the heart of my disagreement with Yucca Mtn. That the siesmic properties of the site can be engineered around is largely irrelevant, I don't trust those responsible to do what they should. The responsible agencies have proven time and again that the economic viabilty and public image of nuclear power are much higher priorities than public safety.
Moving on, though, this page has a lot of information about the Northridge quake, and the cover photo shows exactly the type of damage I'm talking about. The pillar hasn't sustained much (if any) damage, basically serving as a spliting wedge driven through the roadway that formerly rested upon it. Compare that to the photos of pillar damage from the 1971 quake on the transportation page. In all fairness, none of the overpasses that failed had been retrofitted yet.
I agree that what I laid out is an oversimplification of the design criteria, but I also think you seriously overestimate our ability to predict geologic activity. Going back to the Yucca Mtn site, there have been over 600 earthquakes within 50 miles, ranging from 2.5 to 5.6, over the last 25 years. How confidently can you say that there won't be an 8.0 in that area next week? How safe do you feel this site is for storage of nuclear waste?
The 5.6 (1992) did a million dollars in damage to the DOE field office which was studying the site. In 1999 an earthquake derailed a train on one of the tracks that could be used to transport nuclear waste to the site. How safe do you feel now?
Is a single large point of failure safer than 70 smaller ones? I'm not convinced that it is. My understanding is that the security at the current storage locations is poor, and I see that as an arguement that those installations need better security, rather than combining them all into one location that may or may not be more secure. The sad truth is security at many "secured" government sites isn't very good.
I'm not entirely opposed to storage as a temporary solution, but I am certainly opposed to storage at Yucca Mtn. The site itself is simply not stable enough to be suitable, and I think it's extremely irresponsible of the DOE to have not even considered, let alone study, other sites.
40 inch drop puncture test -- That's the MINIMUM distance a container would drop if it fell off a STATIONARY train. Most tracks are placed on top of embankments which at least double that. Considering that within 20 miles of my home there are 3 (that I know of) railroad bridges where the drop to the SHARP rocks below is at least 50 feet, plus the fact that the train would likely be traveling in excess of 50mph, a 40 inch drop is equivalent to kicking the tires of your car. Unless there is a serious defect, this proves nothing relevant to real world performance.
That pretty much covers the 30 foot drop to a flat surface standard as well
1475F for 30 minutes -- sounds impressive, until you consider that estimated temperatures inside the world trade center exceded 1600F (which, btw, is what caused them to actually come down. With less heat the upper stories would merely have been gutted by fire, with little or no actual structural damage.) What if it's subjected to heat before it's dropped?
50 foot immersion for 8 hours -- how exactly does one recover one of these 25-120 ton casks from under 50 feet of water? How long would it take to get the necessary equipment and trained crews to a remote location, for the divers to prepare their dive plans, etc?
The actual tests listed are much more impressive (and realistic), but no statistics about repeatability are listed. So what if a container can withstand one of these tests, can 30 containers in a row survive? (Note that 30 tests is the minimum number for true statistical significance.)
Another issue is terrorism. This is briefly touched upon in the article you linked, but important details are missing, such as the size of the explosive used. Regarding hijack, 25-40 tons is not unmanagable. A licensed heavy equipment operator can easily rent (or steal) the necessary equipment. In my area heavy equipment yards tend to be located near railroad tracks, probably to facilitate shipping/recieving of equipment, but price/sq.ft is likely also a factor. Security tends to be pretty lax at these yards, generally consisting of a padlocked chainlink fence.
It may come as a surprise to you to find that the people who designed our nuclear infrastructure are neither stupid nor suicidal.
It may come as a surprise to you to find out how hampered these designers are by politics, beaurocratic red-tape, and "financial concerns". That's true of any design project, and quite visible in the design standards listed here.
It may also come as a surprise to you that the NRC is almost completely controlled by companies it's supposed to be regulating.
Not true. Try SuSE 7.3. With YaST2 install and admin are a breeze, and hardware autodetection is excellent. The default install is extremely usable, and the only reason you'd ever need to see a command line is if your hardware won't run X.
You make an interesting point about piracy, though. I read somewhere recently that in a lot of countries that are currently bootstrapping themselves into into the digital age Windows is fairly popular, mostly because it's all pirated. Linux is often a popular choice as well, but has no economic advantage since Windows is free-as-in-beer also.
I think this is a common misconception about Linux. It's probably based on the fact that most people who have used Linux had a hard time learning it because they had to learn something different from what they already knew. Everyone I've ever met who has used Linux used a different OS first. They were already experienced computer users. When they started learning it they discovered that most of the things they took for granted before no longer applied, little things like hotkeys and how to cut and paste are different, so they get frustrated and it seems harder than when they were first learning how to use a computer. It isn't. As you say:
A lot of people don't even have much comprehension of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS, that runs of the computer they have.
They have so little comprehension of their OS because it doesn't matter that much. People will learn what they have, whether it's Windows, MacOS, or Linux, and any of them are equally bewildering to the beginner. Once learned it's just as easy to use, too.
Linux is not hard. It certainly was at one point, but we've been past that point for at least a year now. With a modern distro one no longer needs to ever see a command line, even during installation and configuration.
No one is proposing that we hand people a pile of old hardware and a slackware CD and send them on their way. That would be an equally rediculous proposition if we were to hand them a Windows or MacOS CD. We're talking about prebuilt systems with Linux preinstalled and configured to work out of the box, just like the one they'd get from Gateway or Dell except it costs them $100 less for the same hardware, or even much cheaper for lesser hardware which would be unbearably slow under Windows. I don't know of anyone offering such a thing, all the preinstalled Linux boxes I know of are meant to be servers or high-end workstations, and seem to start at about $1500. There's no reason it couldn't be done, though.
As long as we're on the topic of installation, though, having recently upgraded several Windows and Linux machines (Windows 98 to Windows 2000 and SuSE various to SuSE 7.3) Linux was by far easier. Much of that has to do with the fact that with Linux everything is there on the install disk(s); driver, utilities, applications, etc. Not so with Windows 2000. All that stuff had to be hunted down and installed seperately. Never mind the fact that having to reinstall all your drivers when you're upgrading a working machine is completely asinine. Installing SuSE 7.3 from scratch is incredibly simple as well, again because everything is right there. All my hardware was autodetected without a hitch. The only thing that might complicate it is if you have a windows install you'd like to preserve. Much easier than installing Windows.
That was "magnitude 2.5 or greater". Certainly one can engineer for earthquakes, but no amount of engineering is 100%. Take the earthquake in LA a few years ago. Everything in LA (indeed, all of California) is engineered to be earthquake safe (up to 6.something minimum as I recall, it's been a few years since I worked in construction). However, they were engineered to withstand earthquakes with horizontal movement, which is by far the most common type in CA. That particular one was mostly verticle which is why it caused so much damage. Bridges were literally speared through by their own supports when they were lifted up and then slammed back down on top of them. If you drive through SoCal now, you'll notice that all the overpasses now have more of an arch shape, when they used to have a flat bottom supported by straight pillars.
I wandered a little bit there, but my point is that we don't know enough about geology to relyably engineer for seismic events. They are still incredibly unpredictable. Why not store the stuff somewhere stable like the salt caves in Texas (which have the added bonus of being naturally radiation absorbant)? My arguement is that we shouldn't store this stuff at Yucca Mtn, not that we shouldn't do anything with it at all. Ther are much better alternatives, even if all we're going to do is store the stuff.
Personally, I'd rather see reprocessing, but there's a lot of political opposition to building more nuclear plants and I can't say I disagree with that ideologically. But at the same time, if we can reduce the half-life of our waste by orders of magnitude it needs to be persued. The fact is that storage is not a solution, it's merely procrastination. It's like fixing dry rot with a new coat of paint.
And yes, I'm aware that very little electricity is produced by burning oil, but apparently our president isn't, and since the statement was specifically a dig on his energy plan I thought it best to use his own wording.
It is a shame, though, when an otherwise great company does something stupid like this.
The producers (nuclear power industry) haven't paid for it (disposal) at all. They have raked in the profits and relied on the government to take care of the disposal problem using taxpayer money. Why do you think nuclear energy has such a reputation for being cheap? It's because all the overhead of disposal/storage comes out of your tax dollars rather than showing up on your electric bill. I don't think it's unrealistic to ask a private corporation to cover their own costs. Plenty of corporations manage to do that, and the nuclear power industry should be no exception.
And this solves that 40,000 tons of spent fuel problem how?
By reducing the future need to produce more of this stuff, and hopefully giving us some breathing room to deal with what we already have. Additionally, oil, coal and nuclear energy are all non-renewable sources, and the sooner we ween ourselves from them the better off we will be in the long run.
Disagree on the seismic FUD.
Well over 600 earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or greater within 50 miles of Yucca Mtn in the last 25 years is FUD? How exactly do you define "geologically stable", then?