Scientology has its personal crusade against Psychology and Psychiatry, like because they are the branches of Science most likely to out their bogus claims.
Perhaps the final irony of Scientology is that L. Ron Hubbard died while taking psych drugs. Virtually all of their membership doesn't know this, and would consider it a vicious lie if they heard it, despite the fact that it's a matter of public record as reported by the local police.
Goggles are too intrusive. However, the 'beam images into your retina' article earlier today is about the right shade for me. Lightweight, fit like normal glasses that I wear anyway. Inobtrusive 10 cm 'display 3 feet 'away'.
I'd kill to have something like that for pilots to provide terrain awareness in Instrument Meterological Conditions! Just being able to 'see' terrain in a small box, where red is above you, yellow is less than 1k feet below, and green more than 1k feet below, fading to show distance would the BOMB!
Maybe even allow overlay of google maps so you could 'deadstick' to a road at night or in fog if you have a power failure...
Would be awesome... Today's aviation GPS is a far cry from just a few years ago, but still just hint at what a beamed retina HUD could do... I'd drop a grand or two for one in a hearteat!
I have a Compaq low-profile Presario P3. It's tiny (about 3 inches tall and about 12 inches on a side) and consumes very little power - about 20-25 watts.
1 Ghz CPU, 512 RAM, 100 Mb Ethernet, 250 GB HDD, worth about 20 dollars w/o the HD, been my "mini" server for years now running CentOS 4.
The BBC's charter has various requirements to show balance in political reporting and the government is denied direct mechanisms to interfere in editorial decisions. This generally works pretty well and the BBC is widely considered a fairly accurate, relatively unbiased news source.
unless you are an American Republican. I mentioned the Beeb as a fairly unbiased "outside" news source to a Republican friend of mine and the venom was immediate. Yes, I think they do a pretty good job. But it does seem that the Republican party today is somewhere to the right of the Nazi party.
Ext2/Ext3 aren't supported by Macs. MSDOS doesn't support the extended attributes. HFS support on Linux sucks. The only one I've been able to find was UFS. It's not terrible, but it does seem to corrupt more often than I'd like.
If true, I think that is completely OK. A mix of free ad-supported content with premium high-quality content people are willing to pay for. Not sure how that would work currently, but HBO has proven people are happy to pay for *quality* programming.
Remember when buying cable meant you didn't have to watch ads? When that was one of the big selling points of buying cable in the first place? I do.
And somehow, 20 years later, cable TV comes with oodles and oodles of ads. Literally, ads on top of ads. (you know, when they take 2 inches off the bottom of the screen to put an ad, and it happens while other ads are playing?)
Now Hulu comes along. it's got decent shows, a decent experience, and doesn't crush your consciousness with ads on top of ads, and it's FREE. Any surprise it's popular?
Give it a few years. Then you'll be PAYING for access to shows riddled with ads on top of ads, if history is any lesson.
No PROCESS based on closed-source software can ever be trusted for elections.
Having a free, open-source voting system at lesat opens the door to a possibility. I'm not saying software-based voting systems are the best. But having more options is generally a good thing...
Carbon nanotubes in the "armchair configuration" AKA 5,5 configuration, are excellent conductors of electricity along with having fantastic tensile strength properties.
To see this at work:
1) Get a metal, NON-magnetic tube (eg aluminum)
2) Get a magnet.
3) drop the magnet down the tube. The magnet will go VERY SLOWLY down the tube because of the magnetic field it generates. It never touches the tube. That's because of the electricty inducted by the magnet creates its own magnetic field. Since there's nowhere for the electricity to go, the magnet drops very slowly.
If we make the space elevator a loop, where there are two points touching the earth (perhaps a few hundred miles apart) then we could use the flow of electricity and a magnetic field to provide both power and propulsion, and "get it back" when an elevator goes back down to Earth, without ever touching the nano cable. And we can control the rate of ascent/descent just by adjusting how much resistance we put on the loop circuit.
If you have gone 460 days without a reboot, it's because you haven't been applying security updates. Your system is highly vulnerable, and you are a joke as a system administrator.
Almost all security is security theater. It's there to make fearful people feel better, prevent good people from doing normal things, and does nothing to stop a sufficiently driven enemy from doing anything.
It's all a theater, and it works because people operate on perception, not reality. In truth, there is no security that can't be breached by somebody with enough determination. The idea of absolute security would be laughable if so many people didn't buy into it.
Most real security breaches are basically just retardedly stupid. Somebody left the backup tapes IN PLAIN SIGHT in the back seat of their UNLOCKED Ford Pinto when they went to the movies after work, and somebody else came along and swiped them. A simple factor such as throwing a jacket over the security tapes in the back seat would stop the vast majority of security breaches at this scale.
Here's another one: At large events, football games and such, the FAA issues a Temporary Flight Restriction around the stadium or whatever. Typical circumference is 5 miles. Sounds good, doesn't it - airplanes are prohibited from flying overhead. Except that a cheap, widely available Cessna 4-seater can cross the 2.5 mile radius in under a minute. Do you think jets are going to scram to stop a Cessna in less than 60 seconds? You've already spent more time than that reading my post, and that's barely enough time for ATC to notice and give a warning, if in fact they do! The net result of breaching such a flight restriction usually amounts to a slap on the back of the hand, and maybe a fine by the FAA.
Yet measures such as these serve not only to make the protected feel safer, but intimidate people who would try to circumvent them. People are social animals, and nearly everybody is, at some level, driven to be a "good boy" and protect society at large. And this protects people against a great many compromises that would otherwise happen, even if only out of convenience.
Methinks your numbers are a bit unrealistic. Yeah, because everybody just sits and hits google all day long...
Me? I probably throw about 10-20 searches per day their way, taking probably less than 1 or 2 seconds of system CPU time total. With numbers like these, handling 679 people per server or even 6,790 people per server would be a piece of cake. At this exact moment, I have about 2,000 active sessions being managed in a *very* database/processor intensive web-based application being smoothly handled by 3 logic and 3 database servers. A single hit typically causes anywhere from 5 to 25 database hits, many of these being very large joins with 10 or more tables at a time with combined inner, outer, and virtual table joins, million of records, and billions of cartesian record combinations.
All servers are white box 1U rack-mount systems with 8 GB of ECC RAM and 8 cores apiece, by no stretch a particularly large amount of hardware.
Parent covers an EXCELLENT point. We've gone to great lengths to replicate data from production to test/dev modes. We have scripts set up so that in just a few commands, we can replicate data from production to test/dev, and that do data checks to make sure that something stupid isn't done. (EG: copying a customer's data from test -> production and wiping out current data with something 2 weeks old, etc)
In our case, each customer has their own database, and their own set of files. A single command sends it all, EG:
production$ senddata.sh customer3 testserver;
And that sends all the data for "customer3" to the test server, to a temp folder where it can be loaded as needed. This last bit is important, because often, when testing data, you screw things up and need to "start fresh" without having to wait another hour for the data to re-replicate over rsync. In order to keep things fast, all customers' data gets sent over to the test server nightly, and to the dev server weekly. (a la cron) By keeping the data off-site fresh, it takes some 8-12 hours to get all of our customers by rsync at night.
testserver$ loaddata customer3;
That loads the data for customer3 from the temp directory into the test server. We have similar interfaces for publishing scripts from our dev server to test and production servers. We do something similar for backups, which are off-site to a separate location, behind a strict firewall, mirrors across multiple drives. (no, not RAID, 3 actual separate copies on separate disks) We back up our entire SVN repo, all scripts, all databases, and all files for all customers offsite nightly.
We have our test environment virtually identical to our production, only with fewer servers in the cluster. In this way, we have a "hot fail" server that has recent data at all times, and enough performance to do a meaningful job if we should somehow lose our primary production cluster.
All 4 environments would have to be compromised before we lose meaningful amounts of data. We have a tested and continuously verified D/R server that doubles as our test environment. We use SVN in our dev environment so that we can all work together smoothly.
All with virtually zero administration overhead after setup. It's amazing what you can do with bash, cron and a few PHP/perl scripts!
I don't buy that shit. If you're a douchebag, you're a douchebag even if you're in a pack of douchebags.
Unless the rules of the game are such that you have to be a douchebag in order to eat. And while that's not exactly the case, it IS a way to eat. Therefore, some people will do it. Take away the incentive, and the behaviour will all but disappear.
... in San Francisco, at least. They have lines of pure electric buses, with two power cables that run up to lines suspended over the road. You can see one here and I don't think this is particularly unique to San Francisco.
Is this to say that electric buses in San Francisco ALSO generate 1/3 the CO2? How are they lighter, since they aren lugging around huge ultracapacitors and regenerative brakes? How efficient are regenerative brakes? Could you put smaller ultracaps on existing buses and just use them to charge up from brakes, feeding the rest from the existing power lines?
Neat idea, but in reality, this doesn't seem like as big a step as it may seem. Might be nice to get rid of unsightly wires, though.
My maths around high-end physics is weak, so perhaps one of the more qualified slashdotters could answer my question?
Yes it is. The efficiency of a rocket is tied to the velocity of the propellant. VASIMR has a much higher velocity(~ speed of light/- 10%) than chemical(liquid propelant ~4,400 m/s) rockets. On the other hand VASIMR has very litte thrust. That means it is only useful in situation where there are no forces working against you i.e. already in orbit and no atmosphere.
Is there a limit to specific impulse? Do you "run out" of improvement as you pack ever more energy into each specific atom of propellant? Based on my "gut feeling", I'd say that there isn't any such limit, because as you approach the speed of light, the mass of the propellant rises with unlimited potential. (if a particle with mass were travelling at the speed of light, its mass would be infinite) Thus you can continue bundling ever-more energy into your propellant, and specific impulse would continue to increase, for as far as you have the ability to add more energy....
Remember Carnivore? The FBI email filter that sniffed network traffic and kept copies of emails sent to a directed user? It fell afoul of privacy groups and was eventually withdrawn as it was effectively a form of warrantless wiretapping.
I wish I could find the source - but I remember it as C/Net or something like that. Anyway, the problem behind it's withdrawal wasn't that it was ineffective, (it was) nor was it that it picked up emails to people other than the intended recipient. (It didn't) The problem was that the carnivore system itself was insecure.
So the FBI would deploy this thing, essentially packet-sniffing an ISP's network, and then would be hacked by the Chinese or the Ruskies and all the information gathered by the FBI intelligence was then disclosed to the foreign powers. It was (apparently) an open Joke within the spy community.
Why does this somehow come to mind when I think of "Cloud computing" for the gubbmint? Because as bad as it is for the gubbmint getting a system to be secured, doing so with an outside 3rd party takes the problem to a whole new magnitude.
Get your facts straight and it will strengthen our campaign for social justice in the world.
One of the logical fallacies is to find fault with ANY point in an argument, and then use that to spread fault "by association" to the rest of the argument. Yes, I did make a mistake dividing 1 Trillion into 1 Billion instead of 10. And I won't discount the money that we already donate. Let's take YOUR numbers:
Iraq war cost ~ 2 Trillion dollars (and counting)
Total, Annual foreign aid - 22 Billion dollars.
It's a drop in the bucket. We're spending anywhere from 20 to 100 times as much to bomb shit as to build anything.
And you still have done nothing to justify
A) Bombing the shit out of a country that bankrupted "the other" superpower by occupation.
B) Giving Billions to Trillions of dollars to companies that became broke by doing stupid, idiotic things.
C) Cutting Education (which is well proven to improve a college graduate's earning power many many times the cost of the education)
D) Cutting Infrastructure development.
Have I made my point yet? Because you've certainly failed to make any point of your own, that I can see...
Ever think about what effect free food has on the target country's local agriculture economy? I'll give you a hint: Local farmers have to start competing with free. The answer isn't dumping free food onto people--it's investing in infrastructure so that functional and stable markets can develop.
... Which is accomplished by bombing the shit out of them how, exactly?
Me, I'm PISSED at the bail-outs. We've done stupid idiotic things in order to financially support companies that have done stupid idiotic things, essentially giving them license to do more stupid, idiotic things. And we, lowly, powerless tax-payers are going to foot the bill.
"Stimulous money" should go to things that create wealth: Science exploration, improving education, infrastructure (roads, powerlines, maybe the "smart grid") pure research, space exploration. These are things that create wealth and set us up (as a country) for the next big wave of wealth. But instead, we prop up companies that are "too big to fail" who do stupid things like borrow money to buy derivatives that were created from borrowed money. A multi-trillion dollar industry created out of thin air and lots of pencil-pushing.
Meanwhile, our roads are clogged and crowded, our power grid is ancient and increasingly taxed/unstable by the more volatile alternative fuels being used to power it, and our schools lag so far behind that some are even considering teaching creation as "science".
Meanwhile, we squander our wealth with wild abandon, killing Iraqis and Afghans, spending a TRILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR just to send in planes and bombs.
Hey, I have a better idea. Let's take just 1% of that trillion dollars per year, and use it to feed EVERY SINGLE !@## STARVING KID THE WORLD OVER. Yes, that's all it would take. A Billion dollars per year could by a handful of rice, corn, or wheat to put into the hands of every single starving kid in the world. Can you imagine just how much goodwill this would cause? We'd be hailed the world over as harbingers of peace.
But, instead, we send the bombs and drone planes and guns, we violate international treaties by torturing people who haven't been accused of any crime, and do our damnedest to repeat the mistakes the Russians made when they invaded Afghanistan and spent their status as a world power trying to bring order to the same country we have so far failed completely to do.
Just !@#@ing stupid, and it's me, the smart, hardworking, disappearing upper middle class that gets to pay the !@#$ing bill.
This would be true only in certain property associations. It's not a California thing, it's a neighborhood thing.
My business partner lives up in the pines, and her house is in a property association that bans fences, because the area has wildlife (deer, mostly) and they want to encourage them to come around. My business partner HATES the deer, because they eat any kind of decorative flowers and plants she might want to grow.
In case you aren't familiar, a property association is a contractual obligation that comes with owning a piece of property. It can be done after the houses are built, but are usually put into place when a developer builds a group of houses. They typically raise the value of property by providing assurances to the prospective buyers that the neighborhood will be quiet and pretty.
I concur. Lawyers care only tangentially about the code itself. What they are looking for is case law - not what did the law say, but what does the law mean? And what the law means isn't determined by what the law says, but what a judge says it means - how the judge interprets it.
And that interpretation is pretty static - when a judge gives a ruling on a code, other judges are reticent to overturn that ruling. Instead, they'll try to clarify or eliminate ambiguity in the earlier ruling.
In the '90s, I tried to do a 'net startup by making it easy to search through state codes. I built elaborate pattern matching algorithms to break up state statutes by article, section, and number, and build a huge, hyper-relational database (think wiki on steroids) back when a Pentium 90 was cutting edge. It took me some 4-6 months of long, hard work to get my prototype together for a few large states. (California and Texas)
I succeeded, the product worked fine, but no lawyers were interested - even for free. That was a very short-lived enterprise.
Why don't they just get it over with, and just take your money?
It's not like making a game, with rules and all, really makes that much difference if they just decide that because you are playing the game by the rules, that you are somehow bad because you succeed? So, you can play the game by their rules, so long as you lose?!?!?
This is retarded. I've given the casinos less than $10 of my money for gambling. I'll never give them more than $20. Fuck them and their stupid "you can play by our rules so long as you lose!" mentality. Nevermind their billion dollar profit margins...
Anything the government does is evil, restricts freedoms and is inefficient by definition.
So please, stop this evil FCC man in his tracks.
Moderated funny, I don't think that was your intent.
And it's bullsh-7. Take your bullsh17 anti-gubbmint sentiment and cram it up your backside. Spreading this kind of toxic poison can only serve to get people hurt, and it's clearly starting to undermine the United State's ability to maintain it's position of power.
If "da gubbmint" sucked at everything, why is it important to have one? If "da gubbmint" wasn't necessary, then Rwanda (which effectively has no government) would be a fscking paradise. Yet, despite having no evil gubbmint holding down the people, there's hardly a better example of hell on Earth. Rapes and crime are so rampant, basic infrastructure like roads, water, and power are almost nonexistent. Starvation is the order of the day for those who haven't already been killed by the nearest tyrant.
Contrast that with YOUR privileged life: The glorious cell phone at your hip that work so well do so because of gubbmint regulations that standardize their broadcast signals, and make those frequencies available. FCC police keep it that way, too. Aircraft don't typically fall out of the sky because of stiff gubbmint regulations that require frequent mechanic reviews so well that an otherwise very dangerous activity has become one of the safest means of transportation... period.
And I can go on and on.
1) Roads that cost $1,000,000 per mile that are so extensive that you generally expect to go anywhere you like, anytime you want.
2) Public education available for nearly your entire childhood that made it possible for you to read this post,
3) Military that protects your interests very effectively.
4) Police that keep "bad guys" from robbing you, raping you, or killing you.
5) Fresh, pure, clean water so cheap that it's often not even measured. You walk to the sink. You jigger a handle and voila! A virtually endless supply of clean, cheap water so pure that you can pour it straight into your car.
6) Cars that are safe to drive! You'd think it was in the interests of the car companies to make safe cars, but paradoxically, they've bitterly opposed every single measure introduced by the "gubbmint" to improve either safety or fuel economy. You can get into a car crash at highway speeds and total the car, and even in these circumstances it's most likely that you'll live and suffer only minor to moderate injuries. You get 250 or more miles on a tank and it doesn't break the bank.
7) Food that's safe to eat. Go to China and you don't really quite know what's in your baby food. It might be good, protein-rich baby food, or it might be Melamine. How do you know? Well, it's the US "gubbmint" that identified the problem and stopped the flow of melamine-infested food before too many people got hurt. I buy my chicken at the local grocery store without having to worry about much more than the price because of strict "gubbmint" regulations on food handling. And China is a pretty good country - it's far worse elsewhere.
How much longer should I go on? Talking like gubbmint is somehow universally bad is just idiot talk. Sure, it's got it's problems, but the idea that it's somehow the definition of evil is... wrong!
Get lost, and come back when you have something intelligent to say!
Slashdot Mirror
Scientology has its personal crusade against Psychology and Psychiatry, like because they are the branches of Science most likely to out their bogus claims.
Perhaps the final irony of Scientology is that L. Ron Hubbard died while taking psych drugs. Virtually all of their membership doesn't know this, and would consider it a vicious lie if they heard it, despite the fact that it's a matter of public record as reported by the local police.
Goggles are too intrusive. However, the 'beam images into your retina' article earlier today is about the right shade for me. Lightweight, fit like normal glasses that I wear anyway. Inobtrusive 10 cm 'display 3 feet 'away'.
I'd kill to have something like that for pilots to provide terrain awareness in Instrument Meterological Conditions! Just being able to 'see' terrain in a small box, where red is above you, yellow is less than 1k feet below, and green more than 1k feet below, fading to show distance would the BOMB!
Maybe even allow overlay of google maps so you could 'deadstick' to a road at night or in fog if you have a power failure...
Would be awesome... Today's aviation GPS is a far cry from just a few years ago, but still just hint at what a beamed retina HUD could do... I'd drop a grand or two for one in a hearteat!
I have a Compaq low-profile Presario P3. It's tiny (about 3 inches tall and about 12 inches on a side) and consumes very little power - about 20-25 watts.
1 Ghz CPU, 512 RAM, 100 Mb Ethernet, 250 GB HDD, worth about 20 dollars w/o the HD, been my "mini" server for years now running CentOS 4.
Tough combo to beat....
The BBC's charter has various requirements to show balance in political reporting and the government is denied direct mechanisms to interfere in editorial decisions. This generally works pretty well and the BBC is widely considered a fairly accurate, relatively unbiased news source.
unless you are an American Republican. I mentioned the Beeb as a fairly unbiased "outside" news source to a Republican friend of mine and the venom was immediate. Yes, I think they do a pretty good job. But it does seem that the Republican party today is somewhere to the right of the Nazi party.
PS: Godwin's law, blah blah...
Ext2/Ext3 aren't supported by Macs. MSDOS doesn't support the extended attributes. HFS support on Linux sucks. The only one I've been able to find was UFS. It's not terrible, but it does seem to corrupt more often than I'd like.
Anybody know of any better options?
If true, I think that is completely OK. A mix of free ad-supported content with premium high-quality content people are willing to pay for. Not sure how that would work currently, but HBO has proven people are happy to pay for *quality* programming.
Remember when buying cable meant you didn't have to watch ads? When that was one of the big selling points of buying cable in the first place? I do.
And somehow, 20 years later, cable TV comes with oodles and oodles of ads. Literally, ads on top of ads. (you know, when they take 2 inches off the bottom of the screen to put an ad, and it happens while other ads are playing?)
Now Hulu comes along. it's got decent shows, a decent experience, and doesn't crush your consciousness with ads on top of ads, and it's FREE. Any surprise it's popular?
Give it a few years. Then you'll be PAYING for access to shows riddled with ads on top of ads, if history is any lesson.
Patching doesn't inherently make a OS secure, there are plenty of other methods to keep it secure.
True that. But Not patching a system does make it inherently INsecure.
No PROCESS based on closed-source software can ever be trusted for elections.
Having a free, open-source voting system at lesat opens the door to a possibility. I'm not saying software-based voting systems are the best. But having more options is generally a good thing...
Carbon nanotubes in the "armchair configuration" AKA 5,5 configuration, are excellent conductors of electricity along with having fantastic tensile strength properties.
To see this at work:
1) Get a metal, NON-magnetic tube (eg aluminum)
2) Get a magnet.
3) drop the magnet down the tube. The magnet will go VERY SLOWLY down the tube because of the magnetic field it generates. It never touches the tube. That's because of the electricty inducted by the magnet creates its own magnetic field. Since there's nowhere for the electricity to go, the magnet drops very slowly.
If we make the space elevator a loop, where there are two points touching the earth (perhaps a few hundred miles apart) then we could use the flow of electricity and a magnetic field to provide both power and propulsion, and "get it back" when an elevator goes back down to Earth, without ever touching the nano cable. And we can control the rate of ascent/descent just by adjusting how much resistance we put on the loop circuit.
If you have gone 460 days without a reboot, it's because you haven't been applying security updates. Your system is highly vulnerable, and you are a joke as a system administrator.
Turn in your geek card NOW.
Almost all security is security theater. It's there to make fearful people feel better, prevent good people from doing normal things, and does nothing to stop a sufficiently driven enemy from doing anything.
It's all a theater, and it works because people operate on perception, not reality. In truth, there is no security that can't be breached by somebody with enough determination. The idea of absolute security would be laughable if so many people didn't buy into it.
Most real security breaches are basically just retardedly stupid. Somebody left the backup tapes IN PLAIN SIGHT in the back seat of their UNLOCKED Ford Pinto when they went to the movies after work, and somebody else came along and swiped them. A simple factor such as throwing a jacket over the security tapes in the back seat would stop the vast majority of security breaches at this scale.
Here's another one: At large events, football games and such, the FAA issues a Temporary Flight Restriction around the stadium or whatever. Typical circumference is 5 miles. Sounds good, doesn't it - airplanes are prohibited from flying overhead. Except that a cheap, widely available Cessna 4-seater can cross the 2.5 mile radius in under a minute. Do you think jets are going to scram to stop a Cessna in less than 60 seconds? You've already spent more time than that reading my post, and that's barely enough time for ATC to notice and give a warning, if in fact they do! The net result of breaching such a flight restriction usually amounts to a slap on the back of the hand, and maybe a fine by the FAA.
Yet measures such as these serve not only to make the protected feel safer, but intimidate people who would try to circumvent them. People are social animals, and nearly everybody is, at some level, driven to be a "good boy" and protect society at large. And this protects people against a great many compromises that would otherwise happen, even if only out of convenience.
Methinks your numbers are a bit unrealistic. Yeah, because everybody just sits and hits google all day long...
Me? I probably throw about 10-20 searches per day their way, taking probably less than 1 or 2 seconds of system CPU time total. With numbers like these, handling 679 people per server or even 6,790 people per server would be a piece of cake. At this exact moment, I have about 2,000 active sessions being managed in a *very* database/processor intensive web-based application being smoothly handled by 3 logic and 3 database servers. A single hit typically causes anywhere from 5 to 25 database hits, many of these being very large joins with 10 or more tables at a time with combined inner, outer, and virtual table joins, million of records, and billions of cartesian record combinations.
All servers are white box 1U rack-mount systems with 8 GB of ECC RAM and 8 cores apiece, by no stretch a particularly large amount of hardware.
Dang. Out of mod points, so I'll reply.
Parent covers an EXCELLENT point. We've gone to great lengths to replicate data from production to test/dev modes. We have scripts set up so that in just a few commands, we can replicate data from production to test/dev, and that do data checks to make sure that something stupid isn't done. (EG: copying a customer's data from test -> production and wiping out current data with something 2 weeks old, etc)
In our case, each customer has their own database, and their own set of files. A single command sends it all, EG:
production$ senddata.sh customer3 testserver;
And that sends all the data for "customer3" to the test server, to a temp folder where it can be loaded as needed. This last bit is important, because often, when testing data, you screw things up and need to "start fresh" without having to wait another hour for the data to re-replicate over rsync. In order to keep things fast, all customers' data gets sent over to the test server nightly, and to the dev server weekly. (a la cron) By keeping the data off-site fresh, it takes some 8-12 hours to get all of our customers by rsync at night.
testserver$ loaddata customer3;
That loads the data for customer3 from the temp directory into the test server. We have similar interfaces for publishing scripts from our dev server to test and production servers. We do something similar for backups, which are off-site to a separate location, behind a strict firewall, mirrors across multiple drives. (no, not RAID, 3 actual separate copies on separate disks) We back up our entire SVN repo, all scripts, all databases, and all files for all customers offsite nightly.
We have our test environment virtually identical to our production, only with fewer servers in the cluster. In this way, we have a "hot fail" server that has recent data at all times, and enough performance to do a meaningful job if we should somehow lose our primary production cluster.
All 4 environments would have to be compromised before we lose meaningful amounts of data. We have a tested and continuously verified D/R server that doubles as our test environment. We use SVN in our dev environment so that we can all work together smoothly.
All with virtually zero administration overhead after setup. It's amazing what you can do with bash, cron and a few PHP/perl scripts!
I don't buy that shit. If you're a douchebag, you're a douchebag even if you're in a pack of douchebags.
Unless the rules of the game are such that you have to be a douchebag in order to eat. And while that's not exactly the case, it IS a way to eat. Therefore, some people will do it. Take away the incentive, and the behaviour will all but disappear.
... in San Francisco, at least. They have lines of pure electric buses, with two power cables that run up to lines suspended over the road. You can see one here and I don't think this is particularly unique to San Francisco.
Is this to say that electric buses in San Francisco ALSO generate 1/3 the CO2? How are they lighter, since they aren lugging around huge ultracapacitors and regenerative brakes? How efficient are regenerative brakes? Could you put smaller ultracaps on existing buses and just use them to charge up from brakes, feeding the rest from the existing power lines?
Neat idea, but in reality, this doesn't seem like as big a step as it may seem. Might be nice to get rid of unsightly wires, though.
My maths around high-end physics is weak, so perhaps one of the more qualified slashdotters could answer my question?
Yes it is. The efficiency of a rocket is tied to the velocity of the propellant. VASIMR has a much higher velocity(~ speed of light /- 10%) than chemical(liquid propelant ~4,400 m/s) rockets. On the other hand VASIMR has very litte thrust. That means it is only useful in situation where there are no forces working against you i.e. already in orbit and no atmosphere.
Is there a limit to specific impulse? Do you "run out" of improvement as you pack ever more energy into each specific atom of propellant? Based on my "gut feeling", I'd say that there isn't any such limit, because as you approach the speed of light, the mass of the propellant rises with unlimited potential. (if a particle with mass were travelling at the speed of light, its mass would be infinite) Thus you can continue bundling ever-more energy into your propellant, and specific impulse would continue to increase, for as far as you have the ability to add more energy....
It makes sense to me, but is this right?
Remember Carnivore? The FBI email filter that sniffed network traffic and kept copies of emails sent to a directed user? It fell afoul of privacy groups and was eventually withdrawn as it was effectively a form of warrantless wiretapping.
I wish I could find the source - but I remember it as C/Net or something like that. Anyway, the problem behind it's withdrawal wasn't that it was ineffective, (it was) nor was it that it picked up emails to people other than the intended recipient. (It didn't) The problem was that the carnivore system itself was insecure.
So the FBI would deploy this thing, essentially packet-sniffing an ISP's network, and then would be hacked by the Chinese or the Ruskies and all the information gathered by the FBI intelligence was then disclosed to the foreign powers. It was (apparently) an open Joke within the spy community.
Why does this somehow come to mind when I think of "Cloud computing" for the gubbmint? Because as bad as it is for the gubbmint getting a system to be secured, doing so with an outside 3rd party takes the problem to a whole new magnitude.
Get your facts straight and it will strengthen our campaign for social justice in the world.
One of the logical fallacies is to find fault with ANY point in an argument, and then use that to spread fault "by association" to the rest of the argument. Yes, I did make a mistake dividing 1 Trillion into 1 Billion instead of 10. And I won't discount the money that we already donate. Let's take YOUR numbers:
Iraq war cost ~ 2 Trillion dollars (and counting)
Total, Annual foreign aid - 22 Billion dollars.
It's a drop in the bucket. We're spending anywhere from 20 to 100 times as much to bomb shit as to build anything.
And you still have done nothing to justify
A) Bombing the shit out of a country that bankrupted "the other" superpower by occupation.
B) Giving Billions to Trillions of dollars to companies that became broke by doing stupid, idiotic things.
C) Cutting Education (which is well proven to improve a college graduate's earning power many many times the cost of the education)
D) Cutting Infrastructure development.
Have I made my point yet? Because you've certainly failed to make any point of your own, that I can see...
Ever think about what effect free food has on the target country's local agriculture economy? I'll give you a hint: Local farmers have to start competing with free. The answer isn't dumping free food onto people--it's investing in infrastructure so that functional and stable markets can develop.
... Which is accomplished by bombing the shit out of them how, exactly?
Me, I'm PISSED at the bail-outs. We've done stupid idiotic things in order to financially support companies that have done stupid idiotic things, essentially giving them license to do more stupid, idiotic things. And we, lowly, powerless tax-payers are going to foot the bill.
"Stimulous money" should go to things that create wealth: Science exploration, improving education, infrastructure (roads, powerlines, maybe the "smart grid") pure research, space exploration. These are things that create wealth and set us up (as a country) for the next big wave of wealth. But instead, we prop up companies that are "too big to fail" who do stupid things like borrow money to buy derivatives that were created from borrowed money. A multi-trillion dollar industry created out of thin air and lots of pencil-pushing.
Meanwhile, our roads are clogged and crowded, our power grid is ancient and increasingly taxed/unstable by the more volatile alternative fuels being used to power it, and our schools lag so far behind that some are even considering teaching creation as "science".
Meanwhile, we squander our wealth with wild abandon, killing Iraqis and Afghans, spending a TRILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR just to send in planes and bombs.
Hey, I have a better idea. Let's take just 1% of that trillion dollars per year, and use it to feed EVERY SINGLE !@## STARVING KID THE WORLD OVER. Yes, that's all it would take. A Billion dollars per year could by a handful of rice, corn, or wheat to put into the hands of every single starving kid in the world. Can you imagine just how much goodwill this would cause? We'd be hailed the world over as harbingers of peace.
But, instead, we send the bombs and drone planes and guns, we violate international treaties by torturing people who haven't been accused of any crime, and do our damnedest to repeat the mistakes the Russians made when they invaded Afghanistan and spent their status as a world power trying to bring order to the same country we have so far failed completely to do.
Just !@#@ing stupid, and it's me, the smart, hardworking, disappearing upper middle class that gets to pay the !@#$ing bill.
Yes. I'm pissed.
Explain to me how that is substantially different than the use of "medical marijuana"?
This would be true only in certain property associations. It's not a California thing, it's a neighborhood thing.
My business partner lives up in the pines, and her house is in a property association that bans fences, because the area has wildlife (deer, mostly) and they want to encourage them to come around. My business partner HATES the deer, because they eat any kind of decorative flowers and plants she might want to grow.
In case you aren't familiar, a property association is a contractual obligation that comes with owning a piece of property. It can be done after the houses are built, but are usually put into place when a developer builds a group of houses. They typically raise the value of property by providing assurances to the prospective buyers that the neighborhood will be quiet and pretty.
I concur. Lawyers care only tangentially about the code itself. What they are looking for is case law - not what did the law say, but what does the law mean? And what the law means isn't determined by what the law says, but what a judge says it means - how the judge interprets it.
And that interpretation is pretty static - when a judge gives a ruling on a code, other judges are reticent to overturn that ruling. Instead, they'll try to clarify or eliminate ambiguity in the earlier ruling.
In the '90s, I tried to do a 'net startup by making it easy to search through state codes. I built elaborate pattern matching algorithms to break up state statutes by article, section, and number, and build a huge, hyper-relational database (think wiki on steroids) back when a Pentium 90 was cutting edge. It took me some 4-6 months of long, hard work to get my prototype together for a few large states. (California and Texas)
I succeeded, the product worked fine, but no lawyers were interested - even for free. That was a very short-lived enterprise.
Why don't they just get it over with, and just take your money?
It's not like making a game, with rules and all, really makes that much difference if they just decide that because you are playing the game by the rules, that you are somehow bad because you succeed? So, you can play the game by their rules, so long as you lose?!?!?
This is retarded. I've given the casinos less than $10 of my money for gambling. I'll never give them more than $20. Fuck them and their stupid "you can play by our rules so long as you lose!" mentality. Nevermind their billion dollar profit margins...
Anything the government does is evil, restricts freedoms and is inefficient by definition.
So please, stop this evil FCC man in his tracks.
Moderated funny, I don't think that was your intent.
And it's bullsh-7. Take your bullsh17 anti-gubbmint sentiment and cram it up your backside. Spreading this kind of toxic poison can only serve to get people hurt, and it's clearly starting to undermine the United State's ability to maintain it's position of power.
If "da gubbmint" sucked at everything, why is it important to have one? If "da gubbmint" wasn't necessary, then Rwanda (which effectively has no government) would be a fscking paradise. Yet, despite having no evil gubbmint holding down the people, there's hardly a better example of hell on Earth. Rapes and crime are so rampant, basic infrastructure like roads, water, and power are almost nonexistent. Starvation is the order of the day for those who haven't already been killed by the nearest tyrant.
Contrast that with YOUR privileged life: The glorious cell phone at your hip that work so well do so because of gubbmint regulations that standardize their broadcast signals, and make those frequencies available. FCC police keep it that way, too. Aircraft don't typically fall out of the sky because of stiff gubbmint regulations that require frequent mechanic reviews so well that an otherwise very dangerous activity has become one of the safest means of transportation... period.
And I can go on and on.
1) Roads that cost $1,000,000 per mile that are so extensive that you generally expect to go anywhere you like, anytime you want.
2) Public education available for nearly your entire childhood that made it possible for you to read this post,
3) Military that protects your interests very effectively.
4) Police that keep "bad guys" from robbing you, raping you, or killing you.
5) Fresh, pure, clean water so cheap that it's often not even measured. You walk to the sink. You jigger a handle and voila! A virtually endless supply of clean, cheap water so pure that you can pour it straight into your car.
6) Cars that are safe to drive! You'd think it was in the interests of the car companies to make safe cars, but paradoxically, they've bitterly opposed every single measure introduced by the "gubbmint" to improve either safety or fuel economy. You can get into a car crash at highway speeds and total the car, and even in these circumstances it's most likely that you'll live and suffer only minor to moderate injuries. You get 250 or more miles on a tank and it doesn't break the bank.
7) Food that's safe to eat. Go to China and you don't really quite know what's in your baby food. It might be good, protein-rich baby food, or it might be Melamine. How do you know? Well, it's the US "gubbmint" that identified the problem and stopped the flow of melamine-infested food before too many people got hurt. I buy my chicken at the local grocery store without having to worry about much more than the price because of strict "gubbmint" regulations on food handling. And China is a pretty good country - it's far worse elsewhere.
How much longer should I go on? Talking like gubbmint is somehow universally bad is just idiot talk. Sure, it's got it's problems, but the idea that it's somehow the definition of evil is... wrong!
Get lost, and come back when you have something intelligent to say!