According to http://stupendous.rit.edu/richmond/answers/snrisks.txt, the kill radius for a supernova is around thirty light years. Beyond that, bad stuff happens, but less as the distance increases, and life would survive. Our satellites would probably all get toasted, though.
I don't see any avoidance. It does require a bit of interpretation. Translated: "The only people who care about FW800 are professionals, who don't buy iMacs anyway."
Also, at the current exchange rate, 500CAD is worth about 385USD. Even without drug dealing and tax evasion, 500CAD would be worth much more than 100USD.
It always gives me a chuckle when I see someone call outright stealing "borrowing". Let's look at two key differences between the two:
It always gives me a chuckle when I see someone call copyright infringement "outright stealing". Let's look at two key differences between the two:
1: When one steals something, it usually deprives the original owner of the objects. This is true of stealing a CD from a music store. The store no longer has that CD to sell to its customers.
2: When something is copied against the will of the copyright owner, the copyright owner loses nothing but an abstract potential.
"Stealing" music from a friend in the form of a copied CD or MP3 or downloading music from strangers on the internet does not meet the definitions of stealing.
I believe people SHOULD respect copyright, because it causes people to make valuable contributions to society. But let's not muddy the waters to make a point against those who may disagree; it isn't stealing just because you disagree. It's copyright infringement. Let's at least be honest.
The Chernobyl accident was caused by five factors: the use of a highly-inflammable material as a moderator, a positive void coefficient in the pile design (i.e. the reactor experiences positive feedback during loss-of-coolant events and requires active external control to remain stable), a lack of a containment structure which every single Western reactor has, inadequately trained personnel, and an extremely stupid management decision. Of these factors, the IAEA believes that the reactor design flaws were the main cause.
If any one of those factors had been missing, the accident never could have happened. In Western civilian reactors, at least two of those factors are always missing; they always have containment structures, and they don't use flammable moderators. I believe that they all lack the positive void coefficient as well, but I'm not as sure on that.
All of the design flaws are fairly stupid, but the lack of a containment structure is completely unforgiveable.
I honestly don't know whether what you say is true or not, but I don't think that is anywhere near enough to be able to say that anything about the RBMK reactor design even resembled "safe".
Chernobyl was a terrible disaster but the pile itself was engineered with safety in mind. In many ways, this kind of reactor was considered safer than the kinds of reactors common in the US.
Please explain further. Chernobyl was built without a containment structure and the reactor itself had a positive void coefficient. I can't see how this kind of idiocy can be made up for in any way, no matter how advanced your other safety systems are.
You do realize that the Three Mile Island incident released no radioactivity and resulted in no injuries or deaths, don't you? TMI is not an illustration of a safety failure in nuclear reactors, it is an illustration of the success of the multiple layers of safety systems in a nuclear reactor in the face of adverse situations.
Chernobyl was bad, but the Chernobyl accident could never have happened in a properly designed and managed nuclear reactor.
You don't know what you're talking about and you are wrong. Next time do some research.
I may not have done any research before posting, but at least I can read the post I'm replying to. The topic at hand is manned space flight, so most of your examples are totally irrelevant. Only two things actually address this topic; the safety record, about which you are totally correct, and this:
The USSR's shuttle (Buran) flew only once, unmanned, 7 years after the US' shuttle first flew. Technically it was superior, but the program was canned. The US are the only country to have ever routinely flown a reusable vehicle.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Now, please, tell me how it matters to the question of who is doing better. The Russian combination of expendable manned launchers and expendable cargo boosters has basically the same capabilities as the US shuttle system, at lower cost and lower risk to human life. Expendables work; reusables have never been shown to be anything more than a pipe dream.
The Russians couldn't keep pace? They put a man into orbit first, they had great space stations up, continuously manned for years on end, long before we dreamed up the crappy ISS, they're the only people currently launching people into orbit on a regular basis. Other than going to the Moon, they've been ahead in every area of manned spaceflight; I would say it is the Americans who can't keep up.
There's no simple way to focus the menu from the keyboard like when you hit the "Alt" key in Windows or Linux.
In System Prefs, select Keyboand & Mouse, Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and check "Turn on full keyboard access". Press control-F1 to get into the menu, type the first letter(s) of a menu item to activate it.
SETI is not a search for random alien communications. The telescopes they use don't have enough power by far to pick up that sort of thing, for exactly the kind of reasons you're thinking of. SETI is searching for deliberate "HEY, OVER HERE" signals sent by hypothetical aliens, which would not be using encryption or spread-spectrum schemes.
Because the military is out there fighting for our freedoms, where as the rest of us lousy expats are just living it up away from our homeland instead of contributing to the American economy like we should be.
Pay the bill on time, or don't use the card. You only get interest charges if you haven't paid within 30 days. The bank hasn't made any money from me.
Indirectly, they have. The prices you pay are several percent higher than they otherwise would be, because the merchant you buy from is paying several percent of the purchase price to the credit card company every time you use your card.
You do realize that to do business on line, you would still have to give them your pin, right?
It would be up to them if they wanted to store that info or not, but at some point, you will have to enter your pin into a web page.
No, I do not realize this. You are not using your imagination.
During the checkout phase, you get a code. You log on to your bank/credit card/whatever account, paste that code into a field to authorize the funds, and get an order confirmation from the place where you bought your stuff.
There are probably a ton of other ways to make this work, too. It is not a requirement that you feed an online business enough information to make purchases using your credit card, that's just how it happens to be set up now.
It would be nice if we could switch away from totally unverified financial transactions like the current credit card systems, and start using something that at least requires a PIN. That way, instead of having to trust every single company with which I do business, I only have to trust my bank.
There is already an existing protocol for this; if your hotspot has no password, no access controls, and "just works" for anybody who's in range, it's public.
If you want a private network, make it private. You don't have to do a good job, but put up a crappy WEP password or add some kind of access controls to it.
I know this message is late, but I've been without a connection, and I still want to follow up.:-)
I write Mac programs for a living, and I'm very aware of the issues.
Same here.
Cool.
I know that you need to load Classic, but Classic is part of the OS.
That kind of depends on what you consider "part" of the OS. Apple no longer ships a OS 9 install as part of the default installation of OS X, so for a fraction of users (usually switchers) they can't run the original "Missile" app.
You're technically correct, but that fraction is going to be vanishingly small. Every new Mac still ships with OS 9, even if it can't boot it. The only people who run OS X and can't run Classic are people with Macs old enough to have shipped with OS 8 but new enough to still be able to run OS X, and who never upgraded to OS 9 in the meantime. (Or people who lost their discs, I guess.)
My point is that Apple is taking the right approach; they sandbox old backwards-compatibility junk in a virtual machine and don't let it impact the rest of the system.
That's true, but my understanding was that Microsoft bought out Virtual PC for that very reason. Just before the buyout, Connectix released a Windows hosted version of VPC that does the very sandboxing that Classic is supposed to do. Microsoft is expected to include part of the code base in a future server product to allow Win95/98 emulation, but not as a full-fledged UI participant.
Yes, that sounds reasonable. However, Microsoft still seems committed to providing the utmost possible backwards compatibility without the VM approach. The VPC solution seems to be to allow whatever they miss to continue working, not as a change in their overall strategy, although it certainly could be, and probably should be.
IMHO, while technically impressive, the sandboxing that Apple did for Classic isn't really long term viable. To try to co-exist with the OS X native environment, the OS 9 environment sacrificed 100% compatibility with old software. The VPC style of sandboxing can get closer to 100% by better isolating the virtual machine from the real one.
Yes, this is true. I already can't play some favorite old games in Classic. However, the VM approach allows the OS vendor to choose how compatible they want to be, and without sacrificing the rest of the OS. Classic's problems aren't part of the idea, as I'm sure you know, but "merely" part of the implementation.
I fully expect Apple to "finish" the sandboxing in a future version of the OS, so as to reduce the UI confusions between Aqua and Platinum. Already, there are some freeware emulation packages on the 'Net (like Basilisk and vMac) that can do a more accurate job with 68k era apps than Classic. (Sadly, they usually require Apple copyrighted ROMs, which limit their real world deployment potential.)
Classic doesn't seem to have changed much in years, so I'm not sure if much effort will be put into it in the future. Apple certainly seems to be more forward-looking than backwards-looking in this respect, to the detriment of compatibility. For myself, I don't care, because other than games I have no old software that I care to continue using, but I'm sure this impacts people.
I write Mac programs for a living, and I'm very aware of the issues. I know that you need to load Classic, but Classic is part of the OS. My point is that Apple is taking the right approach; they sandbox old backwards-compatibility junk in a virtual machine and don't let it impact the rest of the system. Microsoft is always intent on making everything work in the same box, and it makes their OS horrible. Everybody cries that any other approach would make their old software break, but that is obviously not true. The VM approach works well, but it demotes old software to a second-class citizen. I prefer to have some software be second-class citizens and have the rest run in a modern, non-broken OS to the Microsoft alternative.
If Apple can make a Missile Command clone from 1984 run perfectly on their modern OS X which shares absolutely zilch with the original Mac system, then I'm sure Microsoft can figure out some way to fix Windows without breaking all of the old programs out there.
I dunno about mid-80s, but in the late 80s I had about 512k of RAM and 40MB of hard drive space. Now I have 1.25GB of RAM and 80GB of hard drive space, almost exactly the same ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
Some scientists think that the sun will gradually increase in luminosity and that earth will be unhabitable in a billion years.
Uninhabitable!? Oh my god, oh my god! What will we do?!
Wait, wait... whew, a billion years. I thought you said a million years.
According to http://stupendous.rit.edu/richmond/answers/snrisks .txt, the kill radius for a supernova is around thirty light years. Beyond that, bad stuff happens, but less as the distance increases, and life would survive. Our satellites would probably all get toasted, though.
I don't see any avoidance. It does require a bit of interpretation. Translated: "The only people who care about FW800 are professionals, who don't buy iMacs anyway."
Buy your RAM third-party. It avoids this trouble, and is usually half the price too.
Most likely it was not parallelizable enough for a distributed-computing solution to help.
Also, at the current exchange rate, 500CAD is worth about 385USD. Even without drug dealing and tax evasion, 500CAD would be worth much more than 100USD.
Brilliant. Life would be so much better if your only choices were to be a slave to The State or a slave to a business that is a slave to The State.
It always gives me a chuckle when I see someone call outright stealing "borrowing". Let's look at two key differences between the two:
It always gives me a chuckle when I see someone call copyright infringement "outright stealing". Let's look at two key differences between the two:
1: When one steals something, it usually deprives the original owner of the objects. This is true of stealing a CD from a music store. The store no longer has that CD to sell to its customers.
2: When something is copied against the will of the copyright owner, the copyright owner loses nothing but an abstract potential.
"Stealing" music from a friend in the form of a copied CD or MP3 or downloading music from strangers on the internet does not meet the definitions of stealing.
I believe people SHOULD respect copyright, because it causes people to make valuable contributions to society. But let's not muddy the waters to make a point against those who may disagree; it isn't stealing just because you disagree. It's copyright infringement. Let's at least be honest.
The Chernobyl accident was caused by five factors: the use of a highly-inflammable material as a moderator, a positive void coefficient in the pile design (i.e. the reactor experiences positive feedback during loss-of-coolant events and requires active external control to remain stable), a lack of a containment structure which every single Western reactor has, inadequately trained personnel, and an extremely stupid management decision. Of these factors, the IAEA believes that the reactor design flaws were the main cause.
If any one of those factors had been missing, the accident never could have happened. In Western civilian reactors, at least two of those factors are always missing; they always have containment structures, and they don't use flammable moderators. I believe that they all lack the positive void coefficient as well, but I'm not as sure on that.
All of the design flaws are fairly stupid, but the lack of a containment structure is completely unforgiveable.
I honestly don't know whether what you say is true or not, but I don't think that is anywhere near enough to be able to say that anything about the RBMK reactor design even resembled "safe".
Chernobyl was a terrible disaster but the pile itself was engineered with safety in mind. In many ways, this kind of reactor was considered safer than the kinds of reactors common in the US.
Please explain further. Chernobyl was built without a containment structure and the reactor itself had a positive void coefficient. I can't see how this kind of idiocy can be made up for in any way, no matter how advanced your other safety systems are.
You do realize that the Three Mile Island incident released no radioactivity and resulted in no injuries or deaths, don't you? TMI is not an illustration of a safety failure in nuclear reactors, it is an illustration of the success of the multiple layers of safety systems in a nuclear reactor in the face of adverse situations.
Chernobyl was bad, but the Chernobyl accident could never have happened in a properly designed and managed nuclear reactor.
I meant to say F2, but had a brain fart. Thanks for the correction.
You don't know what you're talking about and you are wrong. Next time do some research.
I may not have done any research before posting, but at least I can read the post I'm replying to. The topic at hand is manned space flight, so most of your examples are totally irrelevant. Only two things actually address this topic; the safety record, about which you are totally correct, and this:
The USSR's shuttle (Buran) flew only once, unmanned, 7 years after the US' shuttle first flew. Technically it was superior, but the program was canned. The US are the only country to have ever routinely flown a reusable vehicle.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Now, please, tell me how it matters to the question of who is doing better. The Russian combination of expendable manned launchers and expendable cargo boosters has basically the same capabilities as the US shuttle system, at lower cost and lower risk to human life. Expendables work; reusables have never been shown to be anything more than a pipe dream.
The Russians couldn't keep pace? They put a man into orbit first, they had great space stations up, continuously manned for years on end, long before we dreamed up the crappy ISS, they're the only people currently launching people into orbit on a regular basis. Other than going to the Moon, they've been ahead in every area of manned spaceflight; I would say it is the Americans who can't keep up.
There's no simple way to focus the menu from the keyboard like when you hit the "Alt" key in Windows or Linux.
In System Prefs, select Keyboand & Mouse, Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and check "Turn on full keyboard access". Press control-F1 to get into the menu, type the first letter(s) of a menu item to activate it.
SETI is not a search for random alien communications. The telescopes they use don't have enough power by far to pick up that sort of thing, for exactly the kind of reasons you're thinking of. SETI is searching for deliberate "HEY, OVER HERE" signals sent by hypothetical aliens, which would not be using encryption or spread-spectrum schemes.
Because the military is out there fighting for our freedoms, where as the rest of us lousy expats are just living it up away from our homeland instead of contributing to the American economy like we should be.
Pay the bill on time, or don't use the card. You only get interest charges if you haven't paid within 30 days. The bank hasn't made any money from me.
Indirectly, they have. The prices you pay are several percent higher than they otherwise would be, because the merchant you buy from is paying several percent of the purchase price to the credit card company every time you use your card.
Credit cards are still great things, though.
You do realize that to do business on line, you would still have to give them your pin, right?
It would be up to them if they wanted to store that info or not, but at some point, you will have to enter your pin into a web page.
No, I do not realize this. You are not using your imagination.
During the checkout phase, you get a code. You log on to your bank/credit card/whatever account, paste that code into a field to authorize the funds, and get an order confirmation from the place where you bought your stuff.
There are probably a ton of other ways to make this work, too. It is not a requirement that you feed an online business enough information to make purchases using your credit card, that's just how it happens to be set up now.
It would be nice if we could switch away from totally unverified financial transactions like the current credit card systems, and start using something that at least requires a PIN. That way, instead of having to trust every single company with which I do business, I only have to trust my bank.
There is already an existing protocol for this; if your hotspot has no password, no access controls, and "just works" for anybody who's in range, it's public.
If you want a private network, make it private. You don't have to do a good job, but put up a crappy WEP password or add some kind of access controls to it.
Same here.
Cool.
That kind of depends on what you consider "part" of the OS. Apple no longer ships a OS 9 install as part of the default installation of OS X, so for a fraction of users (usually switchers) they can't run the original "Missile" app.
You're technically correct, but that fraction is going to be vanishingly small. Every new Mac still ships with OS 9, even if it can't boot it. The only people who run OS X and can't run Classic are people with Macs old enough to have shipped with OS 8 but new enough to still be able to run OS X, and who never upgraded to OS 9 in the meantime. (Or people who lost their discs, I guess.)
That's true, but my understanding was that Microsoft bought out Virtual PC for that very reason. Just before the buyout, Connectix released a Windows hosted version of VPC that does the very sandboxing that Classic is supposed to do. Microsoft is expected to include part of the code base in a future server product to allow Win95/98 emulation, but not as a full-fledged UI participant.
Yes, that sounds reasonable. However, Microsoft still seems committed to providing the utmost possible backwards compatibility without the VM approach. The VPC solution seems to be to allow whatever they miss to continue working, not as a change in their overall strategy, although it certainly could be, and probably should be.
IMHO, while technically impressive, the sandboxing that Apple did for Classic isn't really long term viable. To try to co-exist with the OS X native environment, the OS 9 environment sacrificed 100% compatibility with old software. The VPC style of sandboxing can get closer to 100% by better isolating the virtual machine from the real one.
Yes, this is true. I already can't play some favorite old games in Classic. However, the VM approach allows the OS vendor to choose how compatible they want to be, and without sacrificing the rest of the OS. Classic's problems aren't part of the idea, as I'm sure you know, but "merely" part of the implementation.
I fully expect Apple to "finish" the sandboxing in a future version of the OS, so as to reduce the UI confusions between Aqua and Platinum. Already, there are some freeware emulation packages on the 'Net (like Basilisk and vMac) that can do a more accurate job with 68k era apps than Classic. (Sadly, they usually require Apple copyrighted ROMs, which limit their real world deployment potential.)
Classic doesn't seem to have changed much in years, so I'm not sure if much effort will be put into it in the future. Apple certainly seems to be more forward-looking than backwards-looking in this respect, to the detriment of compatibility. For myself, I don't care, because other than games I have no old software that I care to continue using, but I'm sure this impacts people.
I write Mac programs for a living, and I'm very aware of the issues. I know that you need to load Classic, but Classic is part of the OS. My point is that Apple is taking the right approach; they sandbox old backwards-compatibility junk in a virtual machine and don't let it impact the rest of the system. Microsoft is always intent on making everything work in the same box, and it makes their OS horrible. Everybody cries that any other approach would make their old software break, but that is obviously not true. The VM approach works well, but it demotes old software to a second-class citizen. I prefer to have some software be second-class citizens and have the rest run in a modern, non-broken OS to the Microsoft alternative.
If Apple can make a Missile Command clone from 1984 run perfectly on their modern OS X which shares absolutely zilch with the original Mac system, then I'm sure Microsoft can figure out some way to fix Windows without breaking all of the old programs out there.
I dunno about mid-80s, but in the late 80s I had about 512k of RAM and 40MB of hard drive space. Now I have 1.25GB of RAM and 80GB of hard drive space, almost exactly the same ratio.
;-)
If your ratio is too big, buy more memory!