We should now be able to compute the asymptotic limit of web-server bandwidth for slashdot-proofness per year for 600 years. I bet it's a constant price in street dollars.
I moved to Canada from the United Kingdom in 1969. My father was really surprised that a Canadian hardware store sold crowbars. According to him, at that time in the UK, they were considered primarily burglar tools and thus were not available to the general public. I believe that he knew what he was talking about, since he had actually had had a UK firearms permit, also pretty difficult to acquire in those years.
YMMV. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there--Oscar Wilde
I first suspected conductive particles - which could be part of volcanic output. Conductive dust and electricity and methane could account for all this. Where's the hard data?
At home I have a nifty aircleaner called a Sanuvox. It uses short UV to split O2 into O- free radicals, which promptly make OH radicals, which eat just about anything. And have a free path in air about 2 inches so they don't get loose.
I borrowed the big version from a local dealer. This box had been doing duty in a smoky bar, and I had to clean it first. At the intake end, the goop was just what you'd expect. After the UV element, it was just black odorless carbon dust.
Ozone is a bit iffy-it eats plastics. We got into all this through a moldy basement. We did ozone, and all kinds of things suffered early failures because of it. Rubber bans are particularly vulnerable.
Of course, ozone eats people too, which is why it can only be used after hours.
Now, this is for cleaning the cirulating air, not surfaces.
A very useful point - if it's the right 1000 yards, it's a useful tool.
Warfare is inherently wasteful - consider the Doolittle raid on Tokyo that used B-25 bombers as expendable munitions. (Short summary - load 16 bombers on an aircraft carrier, steam across Pacific, bomb Tokyo April 18, 1942, crash bombers in China and attempt to evade/escape. Precipitate the key naval battle of Midway. Establish aircraft carriers as pre-eminent.)
The easiest way to do this is to code a standards-compliant page. IE will run in what is alleged to be standards-compliant mode, if it finds a valid DOCTYPE as the first line.
It then leaks memory, formats badly, and crashes a lot.
For another example, consider the American Taliban, John Walker. He's a pretty fat target for abuse; but is it so surprising to the nerds of slashdot that someone might do the things that Walker did? And then when someone like Steve Earle writes a sympathetic song about Walker, the derision is turned up to 11. (try this google; most of the entries are either parodies or negative criticism, poisonous "patriotism" or other nonsense.)
The original googles for "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o e=UTF8&q=ballad+of+john+walker&btnG=Google+Search"
But the title is actually John Walker's Blues and google on that finds more serious discussion and respect for genuine dissent.
There's a Dilbert where the PHB outsources a bunch of jobs, then uses the freed-up people to take on an outsourced contract... which turns out to be the same jobs he outsourced in the first place, through two intermediaries.
Or, the old joke about the three arbitrageurs stranded on a desert island - when they were rescued, they were all immensely wealthy from trading coconuts with each other.
I invite people to do a Google search on William Safire and assess for themselves his credbility and impartiality. I'm dubious about the first, but certain that he's not impartial.
Probably at least a billion are AOL give-aways, too.
Ballparking the figures, assume that every one of those is in a "thick" jewel-case, 1/4 x 5 x 6 inches. 7.5 cubic inches or 112.5 cubic centimeters (12.5 x 15 x.6). One hundred billion is 10**11, so this is roughly 10**13 cubic centimeters of CDs, or 10**7 cubic metres of CDs!
Which sounds huge, but is a 215 meter cube.
The City of Ottawa, Canada has a 56 hectare (5.6 x 10**5 square metre) landfill. All the CDs ever made would make an 18 meter or 37 foot layer in this one city's small landfill. That's noticable, about ten years garbage for a population around a million.
(I'm interpolating from the numbers in the proposal to extend the life of the landfill.)
But is it an important waste disposal problem? If it's ten million people years of garbage, then a CD is roughly one ten-thousandth (10**-4) of a years average garbage. If I ditch a hundred this year, that's likely one percent of my garbage output.
I don't think that justifies worrying about CDs separately from any number of other categories of garbage.
It seems to me that there's a market for X-prize level suborbital flights, other than tourism. What if FedEx or a competitor offered an on-demand 90 minutes to anywhere flight for $250,000 or so? And a scheduled New York to Tokyo documents flight at 5:45 pm New York time at $25,000 a package? There are enough high-priority shipments to keep the Flight Courier business going rather well.
There'd be significant capital investment in space travel required. But if one courier bites, then there'd be competitive pressure to build better capabilities - higher payload, faster turnaround!
(Why does the preview say Sunday August 03, @08:00PM when it's Monday, August 4, 8:11 AM EDT here?)
As a long-time reader of comp.risks (archive here) I remember a lot of problems caused by "redundant" connections that were all routed over the same fiber. I believe that this showed up in the 1999 Hinsdale fire amoungst others.
Gorman's work and the access he used is vital - if I'm paying for two links that should be separate, I need to know that I can really check that we have separated physical facilities.
There are a lot more backhoe operators than terrorists - and historically, the chances of a backhoe impact on infrastructure are pretty high.
That was a BNR/Nortel tradition. Every serious project wrote its own compiler for a custom language. Generally, these were unnecessary, but really useful for creating organizational silos.
I recall the shock, horror, and derision heaped on someone we discovered had written a program to do something the system file copy command could do simply, correctly, and faster. This was on VM/CMS in the 1980's and the poor sucker had written in COBOL.
The various dating techniques can be tied together (and are). The geologists talk of the "Geologic Column". Try this link (although it's primarily a debunking of the young earth, rather than a good basic article in geology.) Or this talk.origins FAQ.
Similarly, recent history is well mapped by the intersection of dendrochronology and carbon-14 dating. C-14 techniques are good enough to get C-14 levels from a single tree ring. So, you go to an old but living tree and take a core. Counting tree rings directly gives you years in the past. The oldest trees are around 5000 years old. But! the tree ring patterns in a locality are consistent. So you find the same patterns in the dead trees in the area. With brutal amounts of work (it's called the scientific method - 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration), you can map C14 levels for a lot of time in a number of areas.
Then you can take your dendrochronologically corrected C-14 clock and date, for example, a number of landslides and other disasters from the trees and wooden artifacts in them, under them, and above them.
Young-earth creationists, such as the site you reference, attempt to break down the strong network of interrelated geologic theory with point arguments, mostly spurious. Answers in Genesis has pages like this one which claim that under some conditions, trees have more than one growth ring per year, and various other niggles. They are niggles, because they throw a lot of weight on small details, distracting you from the bigger picture. The trick is, learning enough about things like how chronology is really done is grad school stuff, while making plausible objections is grade school stuff.
I really want to link to the hoax "debunking" of the atom bomb, but I can't find a link.
Way too many Star Trek episodes not withstanding, messing with an adult's genes is not going to restructure existing tissues. For example, a gene for longer bones won't make you grow taller, because your bones have already stopped growing. A gene for more body hair won't make you hairier, because what the gene really does is controls the development of follicles in the fetus.
Some gene therapies for diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, work (or will work) because the tissues involved - lung tissue - have substantial continuous growth. Others work at the single protein level, sometimes creating a de facto extra organ in the form of altered cells or symbiotic bacteria. Some can be reapplied to active or inactivate existing structures. (Some male pattern baldness could be treated.)
Recently, we've seen that the brain retains stem cells, but to upgrade your brain (or mine), we'd need to:
rework the genes in the brain stem cells
remove some brain tissue (to make room)
get the stem cells to regenerate upgraded brain
provide therapy to train the new brain tissue to work
There's a couple of good SF novels in that... of course, Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire has already covered a good deal of this territory.
Ah, but the social purpose of the overtime law is to create more jobs. Mandatory overtime pay is means to encourage the employer to hire more people rather than squeeze the ones they have harder. So if there are people feeling unlucky in not having a job, they should be pushing for enforcement of the overtime laws.
More Military SF
Tanya Huff - Valor's Choice and The Better Part of Valor
Her non-military urban fantasy in the Blood series: Blood Price, Blood Trail, Blood Pact, Blood Debt concern Henry Fitzroy, vampire and bastard son of Henry VII, and Vickie Nelson, a private investigator, and the stranger goings on of a big city (Toronto, in fact.) Great entertainment. Ghosts, mummies, zombies, werewolves, all with a sense of humour, and not horror. She has that indefinable "Yes, there are consistent rules here" Unknown Worlds kind of fantasy writing.
Slashdot Mirror
We should now be able to compute the asymptotic limit of web-server bandwidth for slashdot-proofness per year for 600 years. I bet it's a constant price in street dollars.
YMMV. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there--Oscar Wilde
I first suspected conductive particles - which could be part of volcanic output. Conductive dust and electricity and methane could account for all this. Where's the hard data?
HP-67/97 calculator in 1970's. Nice computer.
I borrowed the big version from a local dealer. This box had been doing duty in a smoky bar, and I had to clean it first. At the intake end, the goop was just what you'd expect. After the UV element, it was just black odorless carbon dust.
Ozone is a bit iffy-it eats plastics. We got into all this through a moldy basement. We did ozone, and all kinds of things suffered early failures because of it. Rubber bans are particularly vulnerable.
Of course, ozone eats people too, which is why it can only be used after hours.
Now, this is for cleaning the cirulating air, not surfaces.
Warfare is inherently wasteful - consider the Doolittle raid on Tokyo that used B-25 bombers as expendable munitions. (Short summary - load 16 bombers on an aircraft carrier, steam across Pacific, bomb Tokyo April 18, 1942, crash bombers in China and attempt to evade/escape. Precipitate the key naval battle of Midway. Establish aircraft carriers as pre-eminent.)
Doing the job is what it's about.
The easiest way to do this is to code a standards-compliant page. IE will run in what is alleged to be standards-compliant mode, if it finds a valid DOCTYPE as the first line. It then leaks memory, formats badly, and crashes a lot.
I know he didn't. Really. I promise not to do it again.
Yeah, without Microsoft products, Al Gore couldn't have invented the internet.
There's a Dilbert where the PHB outsources a bunch of jobs, then uses the freed-up people to take on an outsourced contract ... which turns out to be the same jobs he outsourced in the first place, through two intermediaries.
Or, the old joke about the three arbitrageurs stranded on a desert island - when they were rescued, they were all immensely wealthy from trading coconuts with each other.
I invite people to do a Google search on William Safire and assess for themselves his credbility and impartiality. I'm dubious about the first, but certain that he's not impartial.
Ballparking the figures, assume that every one of those is in a "thick" jewel-case, 1/4 x 5 x 6 inches. 7.5 cubic inches or 112.5 cubic centimeters (12.5 x 15 x .6). One hundred billion is 10**11, so this is roughly 10**13 cubic centimeters of CDs, or 10**7 cubic metres of CDs!
Which sounds huge, but is a 215 meter cube.
The City of Ottawa, Canada has a 56 hectare (5.6 x 10**5 square metre) landfill. All the CDs ever made would make an 18 meter or 37 foot layer in this one city's small landfill. That's noticable, about ten years garbage for a population around a million. (I'm interpolating from the numbers in the proposal to extend the life of the landfill.)
But is it an important waste disposal problem? If it's ten million people years of garbage, then a CD is roughly one ten-thousandth (10**-4) of a years average garbage. If I ditch a hundred this year, that's likely one percent of my garbage output.
I don't think that justifies worrying about CDs separately from any number of other categories of garbage.
For a while I've been hosting some of James Oberg's Space History items. One is titled Dead Cosmonauts -- he documents five definite deaths:
The last two were publicly (if not fully) acknowledged at the time.
There were various rumours, but they have not stood up to investigatation, even after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Yup - this page will tell you a lot.
There'd be significant capital investment in space travel required. But if one courier bites, then there'd be competitive pressure to build better capabilities - higher payload, faster turnaround!
(Why does the preview say Sunday August 03, @08:00PM
when it's Monday, August 4, 8:11 AM EDT here?)
Gorman's work and the access he used is vital - if I'm paying for two links that should be separate, I need to know that I can really check that we have separated physical facilities.
There are a lot more backhoe operators than terrorists - and historically, the chances of a backhoe impact on infrastructure are pretty high.
That was a BNR/Nortel tradition. Every serious project wrote its own compiler for a custom language. Generally, these were unnecessary, but really useful for creating organizational silos.
I recall the shock, horror, and derision heaped on someone we discovered had written a program to do something the system file copy command could do simply, correctly, and faster. This was on VM/CMS in the 1980's and the poor sucker had written in COBOL.
The various dating techniques can be tied together (and are). The geologists talk of the "Geologic Column". Try this link (although it's primarily a debunking of the young earth, rather than a good basic article in geology.) Or this talk.origins FAQ.
Similarly, recent history is well mapped by the intersection of dendrochronology and carbon-14 dating. C-14 techniques are good enough to get C-14 levels from a single tree ring. So, you go to an old but living tree and take a core. Counting tree rings directly gives you years in the past. The oldest trees are around 5000 years old. But! the tree ring patterns in a locality are consistent. So you find the same patterns in the dead trees in the area. With brutal amounts of work (it's called the scientific method - 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration), you can map C14 levels for a lot of time in a number of areas.
Then you can take your dendrochronologically corrected C-14 clock and date, for example, a number of landslides and other disasters from the trees and wooden artifacts in them, under them, and above them.
Young-earth creationists, such as the site you reference, attempt to break down the strong network of interrelated geologic theory with point arguments, mostly spurious. Answers in Genesis has pages like this one which claim that under some conditions, trees have more than one growth ring per year, and various other niggles. They are niggles, because they throw a lot of weight on small details, distracting you from the bigger picture. The trick is, learning enough about things like how chronology is really done is grad school stuff, while making plausible objections is grade school stuff.
I really want to link to the hoax "debunking" of the atom bomb, but I can't find a link.
I guess this is close enough to on-topic.
Way too many Star Trek episodes not withstanding, messing with an adult's genes is not going to restructure existing tissues. For example, a gene for longer bones won't make you grow taller, because your bones have already stopped growing. A gene for more body hair won't make you hairier, because what the gene really does is controls the development of follicles in the fetus.
Some gene therapies for diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, work (or will work) because the tissues involved - lung tissue - have substantial continuous growth. Others work at the single protein level, sometimes creating a de facto extra organ in the form of altered cells or symbiotic bacteria. Some can be reapplied to active or inactivate existing structures. (Some male pattern baldness could be treated.)
Recently, we've seen that the brain retains stem cells, but to upgrade your brain (or mine), we'd need to:
There's a couple of good SF novels in that ... of course, Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire has already covered a good deal of this territory.
Ah, but the social purpose of the overtime law is to create more jobs. Mandatory overtime pay is means to encourage the employer to hire more people rather than squeeze the ones they have harder. So if there are people feeling unlucky in not having a job, they should be pushing for enforcement of the overtime laws.
More Military SF
Tanya Huff - Valor's Choice and The Better Part of Valor
Her non-military urban fantasy in the Blood series: Blood Price, Blood Trail, Blood Pact, Blood Debt concern Henry Fitzroy, vampire and bastard son of Henry VII, and Vickie Nelson, a private investigator, and the stranger goings on of a big city (Toronto, in fact.) Great entertainment. Ghosts, mummies, zombies, werewolves, all with a sense of humour, and not horror. She has that indefinable "Yes, there are consistent rules here" Unknown Worlds kind of fantasy writing.