Bingo. Just used a newer laptop. Backed it all up over the network to my thumb drive. (and made a second copy onto the laptop too, just for kicks). Thats also what I used to do testing to be sure that if it all bit the dust I could get their accounting software to run on a peer to peer (or a laptop). A couple simple subst mappings and it was running on the laptop.
I recently got called in by a client to "help out a relative with their server". A smallish family business at least three generations deep (selling and maintaining farm equipment). When I arrived I was greeted with a lot of questions - about if I could possibly help them move their office to a smaller space down the road. They were very concerned about their server, because a bigger local consulting company had told them it would cost $4000 to move it to a new office.
I took a look, and found a pristine (c) 1992 DEC server (x86) running Netware 3.1 with two software mirrored SCSI drives. 10-base-T, and an old "concentrator". Heheh...
Workstations were IBM PCs (the old style) with Novell ethernet network cards.
I backed up their entire server (SYS vol and DATA vol) to my FLASH DRIVE. Did some testing offline to be sure their (c)1994 accounting software could be made to run independently of the server if needed, and moved their stuff the next weekend. The server had been up for 2664 days. Uneventful move. Server is still up. We plan to replace it with a small SAN sometime this summer. That thing had been running 24/7 with only a few reboots due to power loss since 1992. This just happened a month or two ago. (And no, no one had ever applied the Y2K fixes to it...)
Same thing... Advanced enough aliens would, in fact, be Gods... "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Aurthur C. Clarke
OK, so let me get this straight. They want to create a GIANT system with many layers of government, to take more money based on actual miles driven. But we already have that - called a gasoline tax. At least with the gas tax I have an incentive to buy a more fuel-efficient car if I must commute (I must, far too). With this I would have much less. I think this is just to avoid being the "bad guys" that raise the gas tax. I thought one of the points of the gas taxes was to encourage efficiency.
I assume (Without RFA) that this interface could be used in some way to pass simple commands. Oh, like opcodes say. Something the user could be trained to do.
If so, they why couldnt this interface be used to control a robot-arm RIGHT NOW. Or any number of other, more special purpose robotics/devices? I.e. Television, radio, tilt bed, ring nurse for drink, "Im Wet" etc. etc.
I think you are shortsighted at the possibilities here. Just having a successful interface that doesn't burn out the neurons after THREE YEARS is an amazing achievement. This is clearly an alpha-implementation. Think of the possibilities. Heck, look at what Stephen Hawking can do with one finger.
Hell yeah to everything you said. Back when "smartphones" were new, we had some crappy Samsung windows mobile phone shoved on our group. Were were to rotate it as on-call rotated. We could 'work' from it, but it was horrible, slow, tiny, and useless. We got rid of that idea and never looked back, even with the newer better phones. Why would you want to be that available?
Oh, and there IS a category of "decent" dumb phones. On VZ we have had the Env2, new LG Octane, and several others that have good screen, keyboard, good call quality and up to two week battery life. Heck you can even do real email on the Octane... if you pay for data. (NOT).
Good SMS, a decent screen, reasonably rugged, at least 7 day standby, and good call quality. Thats ALL I need or want. I have a laptop if I need more...
I was in 11th grade. It was cold as hell in NY, it was my birthday (as is today coincidentally)... It was mid-terms week, and I was going into my "Math Course III" midterm. The kid behind me (Chris Wheeler) said "hey, did you hear the space shuttle blew up?". I thought he was kidding, until a few minutes later a few other kids came in and said the same thing. I was flattened. I remember finding it a bit hard to concentrate, but I finished my midterm, went home after school, and remember watching the replays on the tv for HOURS.. That's literally ALL that was on (we only got like 13 channels on cable then). At about 7 PM my Dad finally said "Enough. Turn it off. There's nothing else to say or that anyone can do." So we did, and I still recall almost every minute of that day as one of the most surreal birthdays I ever had. It seemed quite strange to be "celebrating" and eating cake later that evening. In my bedroom was still a poster of the space shuttle that I got when in Florida for the 2nd launch of Columbia, and I STILL have a Challenger baseball cap that I bought a few years later in FL when Challenger first flew. (Its real ratty, cause I wore it all the time as a kid before it blew up).
I too thought it was a shame how the media only focused on the school teacher dying. And also all the crude jokes that came out not even days later.
I agree completely. When walmart came to our town, pop about 20,000, it put many other retailers out of business within 5 years: Kmart, Ames (both before their parent companies dried up), two local hardware stores, a 50+ year old (good) local sporting goods store, etc. A few years later when they went "supercenter" and added the groceries it looked dismal for the local grocers too. However, interestingly, after shopping at walmart for groceries and thinking I was getting the best deal/prices, I found that not to always be true. Enough that I found that I can actually shop at Wegmans (a GREAT grocery store that I actually enjoy shopping at) and not really spend any more (with shoppers club card, free). The quality and selection at Wegmans also is infinitely better - especially meat and produce. I now shop at wallyworld as little as possible, which is still too often since there are simply no other nearby options for many goods.
Here in NY too, in fact I think we were the first state with a "bottle bill" back in the mid 80's. All the nonprofit groups in NY collect bottles and cans as a fundraiser, and people are often willing to donate a big old bag of cans more than they would shell out $10. Homeless people and others collect them willingly from anywhere. There used to be lots of trash, cans, bottles, etc on the sides of roads and in ditches. Not so much anymore, in fact after the bottle law passed there were virtually none (bottles and cans). They just added a deposit on water bottles (GOOD idea, IMHO) and I have seen most of these also disappear from roadsides and parking lots, etc.
Really, the deposit idea is a great system. Now, actually DOING something useful (like this plastic to fuel project, or a plastic to plastic, or etc) with the recycled goods is another story, but here in NY I think the majority do get recycled into a variety of things. There was in fact a show on TV about bottle plastic and all the goods that are made from it.
I wish I had mod points. You make some good points, and ones I have made myself in these sorts of philosophical arguments before. However, this is just a thought experiment. What if, when the copied brain is "lit up" it DOES have YOUR consciousness? What if you just "forked" yourself? It really IS you, but a 100% point-in-time clone... Makes for an interesting thought... You ARE you, but so is it. When you die, do YOU still die? YES, because you are the original. Perhaps, if you die as part of the copying process, you can be said to live on. But is it you?
What if you "stop" your brain, by putting it in some sort of halt state. Say, a deep coma. Then copy it. Do you "wake up" on the other side? If not, WHY NOT?
These are all interesting thought experiments. At any rate, this story ends with the usual "extraordinary new technology ready... in 5 years" as usual, so don't bet on any brain cloning in the next 50.
Except that the bacteria mentioned are genetically closely related to "known hydrocarbon degraders" and "... results suggest that the gabbroic layer hosts a microbial community that can degrade hydrocarbons and fix carbon and nitrogen." Not exactly producing hydrocarbons, more like living off them.
Although, I do wonder what "It has been hypothesized that these hydrocarbons might originate abiotically from serpentinization reactions that are occurring deep in the Earth's crust" is all about...
serpentinization: a hydration and metamorphic transformation of ultramafic rock from the Earth's mantle
Hmm... So sounds like they are saying the hydrocarbons are likely produced by some hot water/pressure/mineral interaction. That's even more interesting than the bacterial production that I've heard bounced around (and generally dismissed).
They were working on this from the start, as well as the "top hat" that will probably not be needed now. They had at least 3 different methods working in parallel. This one took this long because it was unbelievably complicated and had never been tried at anything even close to this depth. This (the actual stoppage) is an amazing success for the many 100's of skilled engineers that have been working around the clock on it for weeks. (Mostly not BP people BTW)
They had to fabricate all kinds of gear that had never been made before. This was a herculean effort by 100's of the most skilled deepwater engineers in the world, and they actually did it in record time. This was not a small task, it would normally take months to pull something like this off.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually - that's almost exactly it. Right there. If it is shown that this resulted from systemic faults or negligence on the part of BP management, and is something that results from decisions of the "Very High Up" - i.e. safety shortcuts, speed at the expense of safe(er) procedures, known faults with safety equipment and/or a culture of "get it done fast".
Things that management knew about, condoned, encouraged or "looked the other way", then I believe we should hold the CEO and entire personally responsible. That is (one of the many things) that is wrong with corporate culture in the world now. All the profits and percs of a "human" and none of the responsibility. I think if the CEO and board of corporations were held personally responsible then we'd see a lot less screwing of the public. I'm all for that and the "corporate death penalty".
If you were the CEO of said trucking company, and encouraged or looked the other way when your drivers were falsifying log books, driving extra hours, and ignoring the safety concerns of your maintenance contractor, and your tired driver plowed into a shopping mall with a tanker truck of propane because he was tired, then yes I DO hold you responsible. If that's not the case, and the guy was just an idiot or had too many tacos at lunch and got distracted, then no.
I generally consider myself to lean libertarian - but what we have now in the US is too many cases of privatizing profits and socializing losses/screwups - and that to me is the worst of all worlds.
If they are comparing efficiency to a "Standard" fuel injected gas engine, I can buy it. This appears to be a GDI engine, i.e. diesel, with no throttle. This is well known to reduce pumping losses, and could be worth 20% gain right there. Add in the possibility of added efficiency from HCCI and it just might be "plausible".
It does sound an awful lot like the GDI technology already in use by VW and Toyota however, just with the added twist of injecting the fuel as a hot gas.
Wow, how did I not see that Courtney Love letter before. From 2000! I think I just gained a pile of respect for her, that was quite forward looking for 10 years ago.
Someone someplace must have access to get a copy of this DVD and slap it out on BT for all to see. Sounds crazy, but it does make a lot of sense in the context of some of the risks of being fully out.
I am one of the "strange" on here that prefer to NOT be put out, ever. I never have, and hope to never be. I worry about the risks, and honestly just don't want to be "unplugged" for fear that I won't "reboot" properly.
I know, irrational...
However, I have had dental surgery without being out, several minor but large skin operations, and will be having another soon on my eyelid. I don't intend to be put out for that either. Just Novocaine please....
I admit, if having open heart surgery, Id have to consider it. But as long as they looped me up good on some Xanax or similar, and gave me the epidural, I think I could handle it. Look at the picture on the Wired article, that guy is definitely looped...
Although I agree the investment is probably not worth it at most airports, at places like the big 3 in NYC, O'Hare, Boston, etc, it would be fairly easy to put a "peoplemover" at the exit to the concourse. I.e. get on the moving belt, ride out of the exit door. To "accidentally" go the wrong way would be HIGHLY unlikely. They already have these things all over the airports, just install a few (side by side?) at the exits. Let the guards and cameras sit there and watch. Hell, a camera could use motion detection to flag/alarm if it detected a "person" or object going the wrong way any significant distance....
I just read through that entire thing, and seems to me this is a really good and well thought-out coloring book about general disasters and helping young kids cope. The cover is really the only thing that's 9/11 related - and if you look, even that is just ONE part of the disasters represented.
I think this is clearly yet another example of overzealous political correctness - i.e. pussification.
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Bingo. Just used a newer laptop. Backed it all up over the network to my thumb drive. (and made a second copy onto the laptop too, just for kicks). Thats also what I used to do testing to be sure that if it all bit the dust I could get their accounting software to run on a peer to peer (or a laptop). A couple simple subst mappings and it was running on the laptop.
Sometimes older (simpler) stuff is great...
I recently got called in by a client to "help out a relative with their server". A smallish family business at least three generations deep (selling and maintaining farm equipment). When I arrived I was greeted with a lot of questions - about if I could possibly help them move their office to a smaller space down the road. They were very concerned about their server, because a bigger local consulting company had told them it would cost $4000 to move it to a new office.
I took a look, and found a pristine (c) 1992 DEC server (x86) running Netware 3.1 with two software mirrored SCSI drives. 10-base-T, and an old "concentrator". Heheh...
Workstations were IBM PCs (the old style) with Novell ethernet network cards.
I backed up their entire server (SYS vol and DATA vol) to my FLASH DRIVE. Did some testing offline to be sure their (c)1994 accounting software could be made to run independently of the server if needed, and moved their stuff the next weekend. The server had been up for 2664 days. Uneventful move. Server is still up. We plan to replace it with a small SAN sometime this summer. That thing had been running 24/7 with only a few reboots due to power loss since 1992. This just happened a month or two ago. (And no, no one had ever applied the Y2K fixes to it...)
Crazy reliable.
Same thing... Advanced enough aliens would, in fact, be Gods... "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Aurthur C. Clarke
OK, so let me get this straight. They want to create a GIANT system with many layers of government, to take more money based on actual miles driven. But we already have that - called a gasoline tax. At least with the gas tax I have an incentive to buy a more fuel-efficient car if I must commute (I must, far too). With this I would have much less. I think this is just to avoid being the "bad guys" that raise the gas tax. I thought one of the points of the gas taxes was to encourage efficiency.
I assume (Without RFA) that this interface could be used in some way to pass simple commands. Oh, like opcodes say. Something the user could be trained to do.
If so, they why couldnt this interface be used to control a robot-arm RIGHT NOW. Or any number of other, more special purpose robotics/devices? I.e. Television, radio, tilt bed, ring nurse for drink, "Im Wet" etc. etc.
I think you are shortsighted at the possibilities here. Just having a successful interface that doesn't burn out the neurons after THREE YEARS is an amazing achievement. This is clearly an alpha-implementation. Think of the possibilities. Heck, look at what Stephen Hawking can do with one finger.
Hell yeah to everything you said. Back when "smartphones" were new, we had some crappy Samsung windows mobile phone shoved on our group. Were were to rotate it as on-call rotated. We could 'work' from it, but it was horrible, slow, tiny, and useless. We got rid of that idea and never looked back, even with the newer better phones. Why would you want to be that available?
Oh, and there IS a category of "decent" dumb phones. On VZ we have had the Env2, new LG Octane, and several others that have good screen, keyboard, good call quality and up to two week battery life. Heck you can even do real email on the Octane ... if you pay for data. (NOT).
Good SMS, a decent screen, reasonably rugged, at least 7 day standby, and good call quality. Thats ALL I need or want. I have a laptop if I need more...
I was in 11th grade. It was cold as hell in NY, it was my birthday (as is today coincidentally)... It was mid-terms week, and I was going into my "Math Course III" midterm. The kid behind me (Chris Wheeler) said "hey, did you hear the space shuttle blew up?". I thought he was kidding, until a few minutes later a few other kids came in and said the same thing. I was flattened. I remember finding it a bit hard to concentrate, but I finished my midterm, went home after school, and remember watching the replays on the tv for HOURS.. That's literally ALL that was on (we only got like 13 channels on cable then). At about 7 PM my Dad finally said "Enough. Turn it off. There's nothing else to say or that anyone can do." So we did, and I still recall almost every minute of that day as one of the most surreal birthdays I ever had. It seemed quite strange to be "celebrating" and eating cake later that evening. In my bedroom was still a poster of the space shuttle that I got when in Florida for the 2nd launch of Columbia, and I STILL have a Challenger baseball cap that I bought a few years later in FL when Challenger first flew. (Its real ratty, cause I wore it all the time as a kid before it blew up).
I too thought it was a shame how the media only focused on the school teacher dying. And also all the crude jokes that came out not even days later.
I agree completely. When walmart came to our town, pop about 20,000, it put many other retailers out of business within 5 years: Kmart, Ames (both before their parent companies dried up), two local hardware stores, a 50+ year old (good) local sporting goods store, etc. A few years later when they went "supercenter" and added the groceries it looked dismal for the local grocers too. However, interestingly, after shopping at walmart for groceries and thinking I was getting the best deal/prices, I found that not to always be true. Enough that I found that I can actually shop at Wegmans (a GREAT grocery store that I actually enjoy shopping at) and not really spend any more (with shoppers club card, free). The quality and selection at Wegmans also is infinitely better - especially meat and produce. I now shop at wallyworld as little as possible, which is still too often since there are simply no other nearby options for many goods.
Here in NY too, in fact I think we were the first state with a "bottle bill" back in the mid 80's. All the nonprofit groups in NY collect bottles and cans as a fundraiser, and people are often willing to donate a big old bag of cans more than they would shell out $10. Homeless people and others collect them willingly from anywhere. There used to be lots of trash, cans, bottles, etc on the sides of roads and in ditches. Not so much anymore, in fact after the bottle law passed there were virtually none (bottles and cans). They just added a deposit on water bottles (GOOD idea, IMHO) and I have seen most of these also disappear from roadsides and parking lots, etc.
Really, the deposit idea is a great system. Now, actually DOING something useful (like this plastic to fuel project, or a plastic to plastic, or etc) with the recycled goods is another story, but here in NY I think the majority do get recycled into a variety of things. There was in fact a show on TV about bottle plastic and all the goods that are made from it.
I wish I had mod points. You make some good points, and ones I have made myself in these sorts of philosophical arguments before. However, this is just a thought experiment. What if, when the copied brain is "lit up" it DOES have YOUR consciousness? What if you just "forked" yourself? It really IS you, but a 100% point-in-time clone... Makes for an interesting thought... You ARE you, but so is it. When you die, do YOU still die? YES, because you are the original. Perhaps, if you die as part of the copying process, you can be said to live on. But is it you?
What if you "stop" your brain, by putting it in some sort of halt state. Say, a deep coma. Then copy it. Do you "wake up" on the other side? If not, WHY NOT?
These are all interesting thought experiments. At any rate, this story ends with the usual "extraordinary new technology ready... in 5 years" as usual, so don't bet on any brain cloning in the next 50.
Except that the bacteria mentioned are genetically closely related to "known hydrocarbon degraders" and "... results suggest that the gabbroic layer hosts a microbial community that can degrade hydrocarbons and fix carbon and nitrogen." Not exactly producing hydrocarbons, more like living off them.
Although, I do wonder what "It has been hypothesized that these hydrocarbons might originate abiotically from serpentinization reactions that are occurring deep in the Earth's crust" is all about...
serpentinization: a hydration and metamorphic transformation of ultramafic rock from the Earth's mantle
Hmm... So sounds like they are saying the hydrocarbons are likely produced by some hot water/pressure/mineral interaction. That's even more interesting than the bacterial production that I've heard bounced around (and generally dismissed).
They were working on this from the start, as well as the "top hat" that will probably not be needed now. They had at least 3 different methods working in parallel. This one took this long because it was unbelievably complicated and had never been tried at anything even close to this depth. This (the actual stoppage) is an amazing success for the many 100's of skilled engineers that have been working around the clock on it for weeks. (Mostly not BP people BTW)
They had to fabricate all kinds of gear that had never been made before. This was a herculean effort by 100's of the most skilled deepwater engineers in the world, and they actually did it in record time. This was not a small task, it would normally take months to pull something like this off.
Actually - that's almost exactly it. Right there. If it is shown that this resulted from systemic faults or negligence on the part of BP management, and is something that results from decisions of the "Very High Up" - i.e. safety shortcuts, speed at the expense of safe(er) procedures, known faults with safety equipment and/or a culture of "get it done fast".
Things that management knew about, condoned, encouraged or "looked the other way", then I believe we should hold the CEO and entire personally responsible. That is (one of the many things) that is wrong with corporate culture in the world now. All the profits and percs of a "human" and none of the responsibility. I think if the CEO and board of corporations were held personally responsible then we'd see a lot less screwing of the public. I'm all for that and the "corporate death penalty".
If you were the CEO of said trucking company, and encouraged or looked the other way when your drivers were falsifying log books, driving extra hours, and ignoring the safety concerns of your maintenance contractor, and your tired driver plowed into a shopping mall with a tanker truck of propane because he was tired, then yes I DO hold you responsible. If that's not the case, and the guy was just an idiot or had too many tacos at lunch and got distracted, then no.
I generally consider myself to lean libertarian - but what we have now in the US is too many cases of privatizing profits and socializing losses/screwups - and that to me is the worst of all worlds.
If they are comparing efficiency to a "Standard" fuel injected gas engine, I can buy it. This appears to be a GDI engine, i.e. diesel, with no throttle. This is well known to reduce pumping losses, and could be worth 20% gain right there. Add in the possibility of added efficiency from HCCI and it just might be "plausible". It does sound an awful lot like the GDI technology already in use by VW and Toyota however, just with the added twist of injecting the fuel as a hot gas.
Wow, how did I not see that Courtney Love letter before. From 2000! I think I just gained a pile of respect for her, that was quite forward looking for 10 years ago.
Someone someplace must have access to get a copy of this DVD and slap it out on BT for all to see. Sounds crazy, but it does make a lot of sense in the context of some of the risks of being fully out. I am one of the "strange" on here that prefer to NOT be put out, ever. I never have, and hope to never be. I worry about the risks, and honestly just don't want to be "unplugged" for fear that I won't "reboot" properly. I know, irrational... However, I have had dental surgery without being out, several minor but large skin operations, and will be having another soon on my eyelid. I don't intend to be put out for that either. Just Novocaine please.... I admit, if having open heart surgery, Id have to consider it. But as long as they looped me up good on some Xanax or similar, and gave me the epidural, I think I could handle it. Look at the picture on the Wired article, that guy is definitely looped...
I just posted the same idea but you beat me to it by 1 second... Seem so simple.
Although I agree the investment is probably not worth it at most airports, at places like the big 3 in NYC, O'Hare, Boston, etc, it would be fairly easy to put a "peoplemover" at the exit to the concourse. I.e. get on the moving belt, ride out of the exit door. To "accidentally" go the wrong way would be HIGHLY unlikely. They already have these things all over the airports, just install a few (side by side?) at the exits. Let the guards and cameras sit there and watch. Hell, a camera could use motion detection to flag/alarm if it detected a "person" or object going the wrong way any significant distance....
I just read through that entire thing, and seems to me this is a really good and well thought-out coloring book about general disasters and helping young kids cope. The cover is really the only thing that's 9/11 related - and if you look, even that is just ONE part of the disasters represented. I think this is clearly yet another example of overzealous political correctness - i.e. pussification.