What could possibly go wrong? Ask my friend Sue, Sue Nami. What else would happen when you create a "void" under the ocean floor? I know it's not really a void, but I'm equally sure that the freshwater in that porous stone is part of the strength of the stone, just like the aquifers under Florida.
(Putting "tsunami" here in case anyone else searches for the word and doesn't see it. Credit to Larry Norman's "So Long Ago, the Garden" for Sue Nami.)
I've often heard the "methane is 17 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gase", and that's repeated (without the specific number) in the referenced Wikipedia article. It's equally "well known" that CH4 has a much shorter lifetime than CO2 as a greenouse gas.
That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime? The carbon is still there, as is the hydrogen, so it must be either precipitated out of the atmosphere or chemically recombined. My bets would be on the latter, and that the methane ends up turming into CO2 and either water or plain old H2, with the reaction influenced by ultraviolet light. So it turns from a very potent greenhouse gas into a merely potent one?
I realize I'm asking a serious question on a funny thread, but this seems to be the most appropriate point.
Not with Richard Feynman, but instead with William Hurt and Blair Brown, I rather enjoyed "Altered States", even though it was filled with William Hurt pretentiousness - it fit because he played a pompous academic.
As for related, the movie involved sensory deprivation chambers, with and without chemical assistance.
Not really... Musk recently came out with a rebuttal to the "rampant FIRE! threat of his cars." So far nobody has been hurt, and in every case I've heard of the car warned the owner that it was in distress, and allowed/assisted time to evacuate. Plus the battery pack design itself does a good job of comparmentalizing the problem.
No doubt someday someone will take a Tesla at high speed right over the vertical support for a guard rail, and rip the battery pack the length of the vehicle. But you also have to ask how survivable that kind of accident would be in a conventional vehicle.
Don't forget, lithium batteries have almost the energy density of gasoline - but not quite. Plus gasoline is a liquid, once the tank is ruptured, you don't have a lot of control over where the gas flows. I saw one mention that statistically the Tesla, even with 3 fires on its low production quantity, is ahead of gasoline fires on conventional vehicles.
"The Assassination Bureau", starring Diana Rigg (Mrs. Peel) amoung others. The IMDB summary has the spoiler, but it's basically about the parent post, set right before WWI.
An interesting aside, if one for a moment suspends disbelief and takes the plot as something real, and isn't that what we're supposed to do in fiction books and movies???
The Asgardians had technology... Jane Foster and her cohorts had science. When she was on the medical table in Asgard, those working on her explained what they were doing, but it was more of a "work-the-machine" level explanation. Jane understood what was happening.
Ultimately the Asgard machines weren't able to do the trick, because they didn't really understand them or know what any underlying capabilities might have been. The duck-taped-together things did the trick, because there was knowledge there, if not craftsmanship.
Also, Thor did what Jane needed him to do at the end. Without question he accepted her competence. My wife liked that.
GP was talking about the generic issue of promoting invasive species as tasty and fun to eat. Jellyfish and Lionfish both fit.
StoneyMahoney mentioned that Japan has been promoting jellyfish sushi for some time, and having problems overcoming texture revulsion. I guess carp have a bad enough name in the US that it's going to be tough trying to save the Great Lakes with the "Yumm, tasty" approach.
I know you're making a joke, but it's actually serious. They're busy trying to promote eating Lionfish, another troublesome invasive species. Perhaps not coincidentally, Lionfish can also be dangerous to handle, so part of the promotion is teaching people how to safely handle and prepare them.
There were several jellyfish recpies, but your sesame jellyfish is the only one with a picture.
Used OS/2 for a while, never knew it put any drivers in ring 2. I know both OS/2 and Windows used ring0 for the kernel, and I seem to remember that one of them initially used ring 1 for userspace, then in a subsequent release moved userspace to ring 3. Aside from that early use of ring 1, I thought pretty much everything since then put the kernel in ring 0 and userspace in ring 3.
The whole license issue wasn't sufficiently covered in any of this discussion, not in TFA, not even in the Wikipedia article. Reading the Wikipedia article, ia64 seems to have been driven by HP and joined by Intel. I had thought it was the other way around.
Intel does not own IP on ia64, nor does HP. It was done that way on purpose. The ia64 IP is owned by a separate organization spawned by Intel and HP, and that organization licenses the IP back to Intel and HP. The reason... it's cross-license-proof. Intel and HP use other comanies' patents and vice-versa - that's normal practice. Pretty much everyone has to do some measure of cross-licensing, just to be in the business. Had HP or Intel owned the ia64 IP, sooner or later it would have gotten included into some cross-licensing agreement, the cat would have been out of the bag, and competition from clones would have started. The IP holding company is a NPE, so they have no need to cross-license with anyone. (Is this the only non-troll use of a NPE IP holding company?)
It was all done this way to avoid competition with clones. That's why I thought ia64 originated with Intel - it's an anti-clone scheme. It's also Intel solving Intel's problems, rather than their customers' problems, which was what amd64 did. This is why I really hate seeing AMD fade - it removes market pressure from Intel and lets them wander into left field again. Hopefully ARM will keep them decent.
Also, I'd tend to echo ArhcAngel's peer comment, that it's not really competition if you can set the license terms.
RTFA - their intent is to make an Open Source solution. Given that these people shut down their businesses rather than compromise their principles, I'd find it hard to believe they were about to release patent-encumbered source code on the world.
They will have made us all less safe. While villanizing the NSA may be fun, and while they clearly have gone way beyond their mission, and while they are acting like real-life versions of Colonel Sam Flagg from MASH, one little fact remains.
There really are people out there who want to hurt us and cause widespread mayhem and destruction. I get the general impression that those same people want a return to the Caliphate, and would just as soon see technology worldwide return to that of the old Caliphate days. Though not in the US, not even in the Western world, every day someone is dying from this kind of thinking and action.
The threat may never have been as real or frequent as the NSA would like to present, but nevertheless the threat is there. But now they've stepped up, placed themselves as front-and-center villains, and taken our eyes off of people who really want to do harm.
As others have said, even if the NSA's motivations are pure as the driven snow, they're putting in place the machinery of a police state, simply waiting for someone "less pure" to take the helm.
It's your layer of molasses over the whole system, but it's necessary to remember it's optical properties, obscuring everything it covers.
Actually the 1800s aren't a particularly good example. The "Robber Baron" era started somewhere in there, illustrating a key point. Businessmen like the free market when it lets them jump into some marketplace. But once they become incumbents they do pretty much everything they can to close down that free market and turn it into their own private marketplace. Maybe in time the marketplace could correct their behavior, but it would likely be quite a long time and a lot of collateral damage - in the case of the Robber Barons perhaps nearly irreperable damage to the country. Anyway, noted conservative Republicant Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts.
Theoretically every element of government is accountable - that's what the voting booth is for.
Theoretically business is accountable too, that's what the free market is for.
Government gets corrupted, and accountability lost, but that's considered a malfunction.
Business attempts to corner the marketplace, and as a (frequently desired) side-effect eliminates its own accountability. That's actually considered part of its mission. Business is supposed to try, it's just that the free market is supposed to prevent it from succeeding. But there's no safety/backup mechanism, other than trust-busting.
It's kind of like what C. Everett Koop once said, "The only product on the market, that when used according to directions, kills." The goal of pretty much every business is ultimately to destabilize/disable the free market.
Which is easier to correct? I don't know. It gets even uglier when the line between business and government blurs.
Regulation happens because: 1 - It's a response to abuse, and an attempt to prevent it from happening again. 2 - Someone woke up one day and said, "Wouldn't it be really FUN to create some obnoxious regulations to annoy people?"
Regulations become complex because: 1 - The entities being regulated find innovative ways to avoid those regulations, the regulators try to close those loopholes. Lather, rinse, repeat. 2 - The entites being regulated participate in the regulatory process, trying to make it easier for themselves and optionally harder for their competitors. 3 - Someone woke up one day and said, "Those regulations are too simple, today's joyous job will be complicating them so that nobody can understand them or properly comply with them."
Government serves its constituents. When the whole thing isn't working, two prime possibilities come to mind: 1 - Only a small subset of the population is the "real constituents". Think of the Communist Party in the old USSR or China. 2 - Different portions of the constituents have different needs/wishes, and they are not being well or effectively balanced.
I almost see your "safe, legal, and rare." but because human nature these days just isn't that hot, I'll substitute, "enough, but not more" for that last one.
Having some background in semiconductor testing, there are 2 philosophies to it: 1 - Quality design and quality production, so test is needed to get rid of the fliers and exceptions. 2 - Test the quality in.
#1 would be nice, I suspect it's what you're advocating, and to be honest, it's the world I'd rather live in. #2 is the world we actually do live in.
Proof: Look at all of those successful nations run on Libertarian principles.
No, I would say that in China the corporate/government line is even more blurred than in the US, except that in China the power flow is in the other direction. The net result is the same.
There are starry-eyed types on both sides, the side that says government can solve problems, and the side that says government is the problem. You obviously appear to be in the latter camp.
Given the government that you describe, I'll ask my 3 questions again: 1 - What keeps our air cleaner than China's? 2 - What keeps the Cuyahoga river from burning? 3 - What keeps Triangle Shirtwaist factories from burning?
Actually, I fear the real problem is this: "Homo Sapiens is an oxymoron." Both corporations and government are composed of people, and all-too-often people embrace and extend their flaws, rather than trying to be better people.
As for option 1, you're right. As for option 2, you're nuts. Corporations would do away with regulations, our air would be like China's, The Cuyahoga River would still be burning, and things like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire would be regular occurrances, except "tort reform" would be used to make sure corrective action couldn't be taken.
IMHO the power hierarchy should be: 1 - The voters 2 - The government, but that government should be wise enough to know that that power should be used sparingly. 3 - The rest.
Nifty experiment... Imagine that we could all designate how our tax dollars were to be spent. You can't change the amount, just the distribution. I have this ugly feeling that by the time everyone had stated their wishes, with perhaps a few rounds of iteration on the process, the budget would wind up pretty close to where it is now.
> but did not travel when they were infected with the bubonic plague.
Or at least not far. Any idea what the incubation time of the plagues were, or how that time compared to how long a trader would spend in one market before moving to the next? In other words, were they in one spot long enough to get infected and start showing symptoms before they would have been scheduled to move on.
Another thought... Someone once wrote about mapping plague outbreaks to elevation in London - really to river and sewer rats carrying the fleas that carried the plague. There is a preference to make roads follow higher ground, to avoid getting mired. Traders might have generally accidentally avoided the plague because of this.
As for shipping, you probably couldn't go far before falling sick with the plagues, so this might be one more cause for shipping loss back then.
For all of the comparisons happening, comparing Musk to Blofeld (here) and other people in other places, this topic brings up another much older one...
> this game called Life always ends in Sudden Death
No, it doesn't, and that's part of what this topic is all about. Sometimes life ends slowly - tragically slowly, slipping away little at a time, day by day. Sometimes that slipping away is purely mental, leaving a perfectly serviceable body behind, with barely any of You in it.
Maybe if you're single, "Carpe Diem" works just fine, but if you have wife, kids, etc, do you really want to "play yourself penniless" and then saddle them with the cost of caring for your worthless husk, let alone have them watch you go through the process?
My guess is that most of the politicians that preach against doctor-assisted-suicide don't have much experience with this type of ending. I have no close experience myself, but close enough to tell me that it's bad.
I have 2 qualms. First, without proper controls it may be used prematurely or unnecessarily for greed. Second, has the person's mind been destroyed, or simply suppressed? Is there the possibility of a medical breakthrough that could bring a person back, or are they already gone?
Slashdot Mirror
What could possibly go wrong? Ask my friend Sue, Sue Nami. What else would happen when you create a "void" under the ocean floor? I know it's not really a void, but I'm equally sure that the freshwater in that porous stone is part of the strength of the stone, just like the aquifers under Florida.
(Putting "tsunami" here in case anyone else searches for the word and doesn't see it. Credit to Larry Norman's "So Long Ago, the Garden" for Sue Nami.)
Who knows, it could even happen, "The Day After Tomorrow". I wonder how busy Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal are.
Slightly more seriously, on the recent risk report, fresh water stopping the Gulf Stream was rated quite low-risk. (I forget the adjective.)
I've often heard the "methane is 17 times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gase", and that's repeated (without the specific number) in the referenced Wikipedia article. It's equally "well known" that CH4 has a much shorter lifetime than CO2 as a greenouse gas.
That begs the question, what happens to methane to limit its greenhouse lifetime? The carbon is still there, as is the hydrogen, so it must be either precipitated out of the atmosphere or chemically recombined. My bets would be on the latter, and that the methane ends up turming into CO2 and either water or plain old H2, with the reaction influenced by ultraviolet light. So it turns from a very potent greenhouse gas into a merely potent one?
I realize I'm asking a serious question on a funny thread, but this seems to be the most appropriate point.
Not with Richard Feynman, but instead with William Hurt and Blair Brown, I rather enjoyed "Altered States", even though it was filled with William Hurt pretentiousness - it fit because he played a pompous academic.
As for related, the movie involved sensory deprivation chambers, with and without chemical assistance.
Not really... Musk recently came out with a rebuttal to the "rampant FIRE! threat of his cars." So far nobody has been hurt, and in every case I've heard of the car warned the owner that it was in distress, and allowed/assisted time to evacuate. Plus the battery pack design itself does a good job of comparmentalizing the problem.
No doubt someday someone will take a Tesla at high speed right over the vertical support for a guard rail, and rip the battery pack the length of the vehicle. But you also have to ask how survivable that kind of accident would be in a conventional vehicle.
Don't forget, lithium batteries have almost the energy density of gasoline - but not quite. Plus gasoline is a liquid, once the tank is ruptured, you don't have a lot of control over where the gas flows. I saw one mention that statistically the Tesla, even with 3 fires on its low production quantity, is ahead of gasoline fires on conventional vehicles.
"The Assassination Bureau", starring Diana Rigg (Mrs. Peel) amoung others. The IMDB summary has the spoiler, but it's basically about the parent post, set right before WWI.
A few years back my /. .sig was something like, "Technology without science is magic." (Really pretty much a rephrasing of Clarke's Third Law)
I don't know how well the Dark Elves understood their technology either. Makes you wonder who the contractors were for both groups.
An interesting aside, if one for a moment suspends disbelief and takes the plot as something real, and isn't that what we're supposed to do in fiction books and movies???
The Asgardians had technology... Jane Foster and her cohorts had science. When she was on the medical table in Asgard, those working on her explained what they were doing, but it was more of a "work-the-machine" level explanation. Jane understood what was happening.
Ultimately the Asgard machines weren't able to do the trick, because they didn't really understand them or know what any underlying capabilities might have been. The duck-taped-together things did the trick, because there was knowledge there, if not craftsmanship.
Also, Thor did what Jane needed him to do at the end. Without question he accepted her competence. My wife liked that.
Or how about a vanadium redox battery instead, a bit tough to handle right now, but with some engineering...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery
GP was talking about the generic issue of promoting invasive species as tasty and fun to eat. Jellyfish and Lionfish both fit.
StoneyMahoney mentioned that Japan has been promoting jellyfish sushi for some time, and having problems overcoming texture revulsion. I guess carp have a bad enough name in the US that it's going to be tough trying to save the Great Lakes with the "Yumm, tasty" approach.
I know you're making a joke, but it's actually serious. They're busy trying to promote eating Lionfish, another troublesome invasive species. Perhaps not coincidentally, Lionfish can also be dangerous to handle, so part of the promotion is teaching people how to safely handle and prepare them.
There were several jellyfish recpies, but your sesame jellyfish is the only one with a picture.
Used OS/2 for a while, never knew it put any drivers in ring 2. I know both OS/2 and Windows used ring0 for the kernel, and I seem to remember that one of them initially used ring 1 for userspace, then in a subsequent release moved userspace to ring 3. Aside from that early use of ring 1, I thought pretty much everything since then put the kernel in ring 0 and userspace in ring 3.
The whole license issue wasn't sufficiently covered in any of this discussion, not in TFA, not even in the Wikipedia article. Reading the Wikipedia article, ia64 seems to have been driven by HP and joined by Intel. I had thought it was the other way around.
Intel does not own IP on ia64, nor does HP. It was done that way on purpose. The ia64 IP is owned by a separate organization spawned by Intel and HP, and that organization licenses the IP back to Intel and HP. The reason... it's cross-license-proof. Intel and HP use other comanies' patents and vice-versa - that's normal practice. Pretty much everyone has to do some measure of cross-licensing, just to be in the business. Had HP or Intel owned the ia64 IP, sooner or later it would have gotten included into some cross-licensing agreement, the cat would have been out of the bag, and competition from clones would have started. The IP holding company is a NPE, so they have no need to cross-license with anyone. (Is this the only non-troll use of a NPE IP holding company?)
It was all done this way to avoid competition with clones. That's why I thought ia64 originated with Intel - it's an anti-clone scheme. It's also Intel solving Intel's problems, rather than their customers' problems, which was what amd64 did. This is why I really hate seeing AMD fade - it removes market pressure from Intel and lets them wander into left field again. Hopefully ARM will keep them decent.
Also, I'd tend to echo ArhcAngel's peer comment, that it's not really competition if you can set the license terms.
And have you ever seen any x86 software use more than 2 rings, even though it has 4?
RTFA - their intent is to make an Open Source solution. Given that these people shut down their businesses rather than compromise their principles, I'd find it hard to believe they were about to release patent-encumbered source code on the world.
Wrong.
They will have made us all less safe. While villanizing the NSA may be fun, and while they clearly have gone way beyond their mission, and while they are acting like real-life versions of Colonel Sam Flagg from MASH, one little fact remains.
There really are people out there who want to hurt us and cause widespread mayhem and destruction. I get the general impression that those same people want a return to the Caliphate, and would just as soon see technology worldwide return to that of the old Caliphate days. Though not in the US, not even in the Western world, every day someone is dying from this kind of thinking and action.
The threat may never have been as real or frequent as the NSA would like to present, but nevertheless the threat is there. But now they've stepped up, placed themselves as front-and-center villains, and taken our eyes off of people who really want to do harm.
As others have said, even if the NSA's motivations are pure as the driven snow, they're putting in place the machinery of a police state, simply waiting for someone "less pure" to take the helm.
It's your layer of molasses over the whole system, but it's necessary to remember it's optical properties, obscuring everything it covers.
Actually the 1800s aren't a particularly good example. The "Robber Baron" era started somewhere in there, illustrating a key point. Businessmen like the free market when it lets them jump into some marketplace. But once they become incumbents they do pretty much everything they can to close down that free market and turn it into their own private marketplace. Maybe in time the marketplace could correct their behavior, but it would likely be quite a long time and a lot of collateral damage - in the case of the Robber Barons perhaps nearly irreperable damage to the country. Anyway, noted conservative Republicant Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts.
Theoretically every element of government is accountable - that's what the voting booth is for.
Theoretically business is accountable too, that's what the free market is for.
Government gets corrupted, and accountability lost, but that's considered a malfunction.
Business attempts to corner the marketplace, and as a (frequently desired) side-effect eliminates its own accountability. That's actually considered part of its mission. Business is supposed to try, it's just that the free market is supposed to prevent it from succeeding. But there's no safety/backup mechanism, other than trust-busting.
It's kind of like what C. Everett Koop once said, "The only product on the market, that when used according to directions, kills." The goal of pretty much every business is ultimately to destabilize/disable the free market.
Which is easier to correct? I don't know. It gets even uglier when the line between business and government blurs.
So do you call them "pillbugs" or "rolly polies"?
Regulation happens because:
1 - It's a response to abuse, and an attempt to prevent it from happening again.
2 - Someone woke up one day and said, "Wouldn't it be really FUN to create some obnoxious regulations to annoy people?"
Regulations become complex because:
1 - The entities being regulated find innovative ways to avoid those regulations, the regulators try to close those loopholes. Lather, rinse, repeat.
2 - The entites being regulated participate in the regulatory process, trying to make it easier for themselves and optionally harder for their competitors.
3 - Someone woke up one day and said, "Those regulations are too simple, today's joyous job will be complicating them so that nobody can understand them or properly comply with them."
Government serves its constituents. When the whole thing isn't working, two prime possibilities come to mind:
1 - Only a small subset of the population is the "real constituents". Think of the Communist Party in the old USSR or China.
2 - Different portions of the constituents have different needs/wishes, and they are not being well or effectively balanced.
I almost see your "safe, legal, and rare." but because human nature these days just isn't that hot, I'll substitute, "enough, but not more" for that last one.
Having some background in semiconductor testing, there are 2 philosophies to it:
1 - Quality design and quality production, so test is needed to get rid of the fliers and exceptions.
2 - Test the quality in.
#1 would be nice, I suspect it's what you're advocating, and to be honest, it's the world I'd rather live in. #2 is the world we actually do live in.
Proof: Look at all of those successful nations run on Libertarian principles.
No, I would say that in China the corporate/government line is even more blurred than in the US, except that in China the power flow is in the other direction. The net result is the same.
There are starry-eyed types on both sides, the side that says government can solve problems, and the side that says government is the problem. You obviously appear to be in the latter camp.
Given the government that you describe, I'll ask my 3 questions again:
1 - What keeps our air cleaner than China's?
2 - What keeps the Cuyahoga river from burning?
3 - What keeps Triangle Shirtwaist factories from burning?
Actually, I fear the real problem is this: "Homo Sapiens is an oxymoron." Both corporations and government are composed of people, and all-too-often people embrace and extend their flaws, rather than trying to be better people.
As for option 1, you're right. As for option 2, you're nuts. Corporations would do away with regulations, our air would be like China's, The Cuyahoga River would still be burning, and things like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire would be regular occurrances, except "tort reform" would be used to make sure corrective action couldn't be taken.
IMHO the power hierarchy should be:
1 - The voters
2 - The government, but that government should be wise enough to know that that power should be used sparingly.
3 - The rest.
Nifty experiment... Imagine that we could all designate how our tax dollars were to be spent. You can't change the amount, just the distribution. I have this ugly feeling that by the time everyone had stated their wishes, with perhaps a few rounds of iteration on the process, the budget would wind up pretty close to where it is now.
> but did not travel when they were infected with the bubonic plague.
Or at least not far. Any idea what the incubation time of the plagues were, or how that time compared to how long a trader would spend in one market before moving to the next? In other words, were they in one spot long enough to get infected and start showing symptoms before they would have been scheduled to move on.
Another thought... Someone once wrote about mapping plague outbreaks to elevation in London - really to river and sewer rats carrying the fleas that carried the plague. There is a preference to make roads follow higher ground, to avoid getting mired. Traders might have generally accidentally avoided the plague because of this.
As for shipping, you probably couldn't go far before falling sick with the plagues, so this might be one more cause for shipping loss back then.
For all of the comparisons happening, comparing Musk to Blofeld (here) and other people in other places, this topic brings up another much older one...
Robur the Conqueror
> this game called Life always ends in Sudden Death
No, it doesn't, and that's part of what this topic is all about. Sometimes life ends slowly - tragically slowly, slipping away little at a time, day by day. Sometimes that slipping away is purely mental, leaving a perfectly serviceable body behind, with barely any of You in it.
Maybe if you're single, "Carpe Diem" works just fine, but if you have wife, kids, etc, do you really want to "play yourself penniless" and then saddle them with the cost of caring for your worthless husk, let alone have them watch you go through the process?
My guess is that most of the politicians that preach against doctor-assisted-suicide don't have much experience with this type of ending. I have no close experience myself, but close enough to tell me that it's bad.
I have 2 qualms. First, without proper controls it may be used prematurely or unnecessarily for greed. Second, has the person's mind been destroyed, or simply suppressed? Is there the possibility of a medical breakthrough that could bring a person back, or are they already gone?
Which story? I'm a little bit of an A.E. Van Vogt collector. (not dedicated, just as I see them in the used book stores)