Do watch the SSD market. I noticed that the local Frys is looking to all but purge their inventory.
Is there a price jump, a price cut or some new stuff hitting the market? I was all set to buy a SSD disk but the prices did not make sense and the display astoundingly bollixed and confused.
My current plan is to move to a SSD and the new AC network links. I can have large storage on my router/ cloud/ drive/ dropbox/ resource and a light quick laptop with modest storage. The speed of SSD devices is getting to be a serous game changer at home and at work.
But these OCZ folks seem to have stepped in it badly.
The best compiler support for numbers will commonly be Fortran.
Python belongs on the list because slow functions can be coded in C or another native language for speed. It is also a rich and portable protyping language.
There is value in asking your advisor.
A linux distro like Centos is well regarded, almost any programming language can be downloaded. Switching to Redhat for product support has a small learning curve.
R is a statistical rich environment that you should be aware of. Python bindings for R exist so again Python.
SUMMARY: Python and R. R may be all you need.... R makes charts and graphs, slices dices.... runs on many platforms even WinsowZ
There was a NPR show poking into the recent chicken contamination related problems. The numbers cited were so extremely different that I found it incredible that they were valid.
One caller asserted that a small european nation had zero salmonella contamination at their chicken processing plants. I can understand a low number but not zero for a bug that is ubiquitous to chickens.
Perhaps this plant permits sanitizing of chicken with intense gamma radiation which has repeatedly been dis-allowed in the US. Perhaps it is a case of strict washing with acetic acid also dis-allowed (last I heard) in the US.
Perhaps is is a simple problem that Google translate got it wrong.
In the US it appears that the energy required to file problem reports is large and demands astounding dedication. Perhaps it is only the largest plants that has the critical mass of inspectors to slog through the system and file reports.
If I recall Kafka noted that unlike the mythical man month for software bureaucracy increases in effectiveness the larger it gets. This may simply be a measure of how effectively the system gets gamed by a largish bureaucratic organization. Sadly Kafka was unavailable to comment on this internet reported fact.
Paper ballots at moderately large polling places are moderately anonymous.
Ink on a finger at exit is sufficient to prevent multiple ballots (one of many types of fraud).
Digitally signed ballots lack the ability to verify the real person test. Another difficult nut to crack is the "entitled to vote test".... Voter entitlement is a tangle.
All the rest depends on an audit trail. At the end of voting the box is closed, sealed, transported, counted, verified, aggregated results signed sealed and delivered.... All under the watchful eyes of proctors... today live camera feeds permit more eyes.
Sort of yes. OpenCL is a way to load code into a special co-processor.
More interesting is an array of processors that are not special. One might ask why the system has 4-6 cores and the display more than one hundred. Eye candy is nice but as I think about it this is unbalanced and perhaps even inverted.
Parallel programming is hard and the closer to "normal" programming it can be the better. One of the issues is that the FPU of GFX hardware is a 32 bit float and the system has a choice of 32 or 64 bit IEEE floats. With 7.1 transistors on a modern nVidia part it is clear that their design has a narrow focus on display problems.
However with billions of transistors more general devices make sense (to me).
And yes I lament the loss of the Alpha and 128 bit floats. But I am happy to roll my own if needed... but that is another rant.
Rumors are that newer designs are more symmetric and while most are to be dedicated to driving displayed content that dedication can be toggled or the balance shifted to give the OS more cores to do work.
I'm not sure what that would mean. The current GPUs are able to give you pretty much all the cores (shader units) to do general purpose work if you want to.
What if the array of processing elements in the GPU were pulled out of the GPU and presented as full class citizens? A 'mode-bit' could give them access to one or more tiles of display memory.
There are days when I would be happy as a clam to have +100 cores and a simple terminal to manage the system. Other days four+ cores would do the job but +100 cores for smooth as silk graphics would be nice. I love it when I win at solitaire and the cards fly in circles too and fro....
The underlying challenge is the internal bus/ interconnect and data paths to and from memory I/O and display. Some of this was only a pipe dream in the past but with modern chips and a billion transistors the impossible is now within reach.
This type of design is difficult.... and risky but hey I am not talking about my money.
Video cards are basically mini computers in themselves, or as I like to jokingly refer to them "NVidia/AMD Consoles".
Not mini... the processing power in modern graphic cards and subsystems is serious stuff.
Rumors are that newer designs are more symmetric and while most are to be dedicated to driving displayed content that dedication can be toggled or the balance shifted to give the OS more cores to do work.
The value of this is a don't care to Microsoft. They seem to be well trained by the GigHz banter of one CPU designer and maker. Power management is another omission in the OS design matrix. Perhaps with better instrumentation on chips & motherboards things will improve.
None of this is the full answer. Decades ago I played with X windows with the server and client separated via a serial line IP link. The slow link made it obvious that the layers and layers of libraries were not well designed. With the most trivial event I would see the screen redraw itself many many times. No wonder perf sucked and the good news is that we were able to sell hardware upgrades as fast as we could design them.
I wonder if the dot in/. is a reminder to contemplate your navel and look inward at things?
I will believe Google is genuinely against NSA's encryption breaking scheme only when Google moves ALL their servers OUTSIDE of the United States of America.
No point of talking about "upping the stakes" when the same old thing - a secret warrant demanding full disclosure - can happen anytime.
Google has seen so very many attacks on its infrastructure that all links are now or will soon be encrypted.
Rumors are that Google is also large enough to distribute secret keys to the end point devices and can even manage building to building and room to room encrypted data links.
I am of the opinion that Google is under pressure from TLA organizations to protect its resources as a mater of national security. i.e. penetration from China, Iran, Korea, Cuba needs to be stopped. The capability to stop industrial and international agents has the side effect of stopping or slowing down US agencies.
Those agencies are well armed with paper and via legal process can get that which is needed.
There is a lesson here. Do not obstruct US national TLAs but protect fully from international and industrial attacks and you will be in as good a legal situation as possible. Secret orders are a tangle. Validating that a secret order is a valid order risks divulging the secret order to the degree that it pays to not act on or acknowledge the order that cannot be verified as it may well be an elaborate phishing attack by a foreign agency with deep pockets. OK that may not be practical but the point is that becoming the target of international agents unfriendly to the US is very possible and astoundingly possible. Physical, technical and social attacks are very possible...
Since I am not an attorney none of what I said can be construed as advice. Do get advice in advance of the need for advice when adversarial stuff is flying hither and yon and clear thinking and communication is impossible.
The water will be safe LONG before that. The worst of the stuff in the water has a 30 year half life.
However, simple distillation (noting that simple is a relative term when dealing with radiation at that level) would be a better choice since that would greatly reduce the volume of waste to store.
So, now you want to cook water with radioactive materials in it?
....snip....
The real issue is that TEPCO cannot even sit on radioactive material without messing it up, much less run a reactor or cleaning system with moving parts.
Caution this stuff is self heating. You could let it boil water and then vent water vapor but the more you concentrate the waste the more trouble you have with the thermal load which then compromises storage tanks.
It is increasing obvious that the material needs to be sealed tight and a thermal solution put in place.
Each locality in the site needs attention. Storage pools are not thermally stable. Damaged reactor cores need to be unloaded as much as possible. It is impossible to unload melted/ slagged rods. When the cladding began reacting and releasing hydrogen the ability to safely remove rods went in the crapper.
Then there is contamination... anything and everything is likely unsafe for humans. Robot technology can barely survey the damage.... The contamination is so wide spread that you cannot bring a container near material that need to be removed without contaminating the outside of the container.
As the core is dissected, I'd direct the robots to place each piece in a lead-lined storage pod; this needs to be done as each piece is cut off, so as to not create further metldowns;
.....snip.....
Lead lined???
Enough lead to act as a shield would not have the needed thermal profile.
You are working with meltdown temperatures that compromise Zircaloy or steel used in modern construction. So not lead which has a low melting point.
Yes cut off bits of reactor rods (and stuff) could be dropped into stainless tubes, crimped tight, perhaps welded and then slipped into a multi layered shielded transport container to manage the thermal load as well as protect from external damage and internal leakage.
One pending solution for undamaged rods of which there may be many is coffins. Long enough for the full length of the rod. Sealed for 20+years with a thermal management profile that lets them be lined up in parking lot sized areas "high and dry" away from the ocean and with the potential of transport "as is" to secure storage.
There is a global issue with the storage of undamaged rods. Pools permit the removal of heat and make monitoring for leaks easy but once the pool's coolant water is lost all pooh happens. A pool is small and physically easy to secure other thermal dissipation methods not so compact. The number of rods in a reactor is large... There are about 179-264 fuel rods per fuel bundle and about 121 to 193 fuel bundles are loaded into a reactor core -- someone else do the math.
These rods are hot in two ways. Like ordering "hot sauce" in English at a Mexican restaurant can prove ambiguous., hot is ambiguous.
The news media is blundering all over their adjectives here... One the only care to gain eyeballs for their sponsors. They have no incentive to get it right.
RO treatment has the risk of concentrating very radioactive water into astoundingly radioactive filter cartridges. These cartridges could then not be handled.
One remedy I have not seen is transport by diluting the very radioactive water to a point that it is largely self shielding and then transport those tanks to a place where arrays of cartridges have been installed in large banks inside a "solid rock" bunker. Then filter the water, clamp seal and back fill the array of cartridges with sand or another mass shielding for long term storage. At some future date the sand could be hoovered and the carts recollected for longer isotope sequestering.
The problem is this is a one time (hopefully) solution and would be hard as heck to develop and test. The volcanic and seismic activity of Japan make this a more challenging issue than it might be in Nevada, USA or Mongolia high desert in China. i.e no solution in Japan would be as good as Yucca Mtn which is not good enough. Yet Yucca Mtn. is better than many moon pool on site storage solutions.
Clearly the world needs better but too many demand the unobtanium best. We do not need best -- but we do need better. This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor tells me the world will not "end" if the solution is not perfect.
Couldn't we just say 500gb up front and be done with it, instead of having a bogus multiplier on a meaningless size? What's next, "this hard drive holds 30 Library of Congresses, which are each 6x the capacity of a regular library?"
Too close to reality to need meaningless facts...
What is the image size in that newfangled 40MP phone that Microsoft and Nokia are shilling for? Link a tablet to the auto-down load of the phone and in no time the 500GB is filled up. Compound that with HD video and this is nothing.
The resolution of a quality image on an iPad retina display makes a decent screen to crop images for but no one tosses the master file so 40MPx24bitcolordepth is a lot even when JPEG encoded.
Clearly the 100,000 photos could fill up the device to the point that the "and 125000 songs" compressed by some lousy lossy compression trick statement is misleading.
If I recall this has been addressed. There may be some case law but a real legal beagle should cite it. Not a bystander like me.
Whistle blowers and reporters have had tenuous exceptions as has legal counsel.
Apparently, You can invoke the 5th and then be compelled to answer the question in some cases. Any fall out from this testimony is fruit of a poisoned tree or some such. The reality is that any testimony that demonstrated you had been involved in a crime makes you an investigative target for other crimes. As anyone sitting in a criminal proceedings might note the long list of charges presented can prove astounding and can fence witnesses in as well as the defendant.
News media has an interesting shield but in these cases of national security things get tangled. The confidentiality of legal counsel is also under attack. Sure you may be protected from prosecution for crime "A" but protection from persecution for "B", "C", "D"..... for all time past and future seems to be under attack.
The massive data collections are virtual time machines. Thus your history well beyond any statute of limitations is opened up and those childhood connections make you one degree away from a criminal. All that is needed is to have a k-12 classmate be convicted of a felony to connect you to a criminal element.
For many on/. Hans Thomas Reiser may be the necessary direct or one removed criminal connection to permit digging into your stuff to any degree some zealot wishes (kernel.org mailing list for example). In too many cases it is the connection not the nature of the connection that opens the gate.
Some might doubt the legal umbrella -- http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175 but if any or all communication in and out is monitored it gets tangled as heck to be a legal firm. Umbrellas are near worthless in a high wind -- and here we go hang on to your hat Mary.
Write? vs. Speak?/. does not support audio to the best of my knowledge./. is available to a global audience many places English is a second language. Worse English is the perl of languages. It has cruft and junk in it from almost all languages, a scosche of this and a bit of that.
....snip.... I get the funny feeling that maybe Albini doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. There are an awful lot of people in music who really don’t understand digital audio and seem to be too afraid of embarassment to ask.
This is likely true but irrelevant to someone busy getting work done.
In the years he has been at it the entire game has changed often. Yet he has been able to be productive despite the tempest in a teapot swirling around him.
I happen to know a quality old guy programmer that still used "ed" the last time I watched him work. You can look at the code text he writes and it looks no different than text generated by vi, vim, emacs, xemacs, jove, joe,...... The point is the result not the tool. In retrospect I have almost abandoned emacs because it turns my hands into claws suffering from RSI. I have abandoned editors that demand mice because reaching for the mouse takes longer than a couple short reach touch typing strokes. I have a ten year old laptop that still has the best laptop keyboard. I have a cautiously preserved collection of SUN and SGI keyboards from a time when the keys were set on a curved correctly spaced base.
A modern band might be well advised to run the analogue tapes through a high quality A-D process because, well just because.
Yes, predicting the future is not an option. It is known to be hard.
Note, some of us are open source minded and drag digital copies of this that and almost anything with us. I suspect he is a product consumer. and has found a media he can work with. He will have seen a lot of digital solution come and go none of which were as good as his analogue tool kit. Modern audio digital recording is a long way from where he has been but is still compared to his gold-standard analog tape to validate its quality.
The issue of "gold-standard" is interesting and tells any listener what is needed in the studio. When a new gold standard arrives the solution will change.
He can still mix and publish in a digital domain but the master tracks are something he has faith in as a primary recording media.
In 20-30 years there will be another SteveA that has his own opinion and it will be different (most likely). But I know better than to predict the future so forget what I said....;)
PH of a very acidic soda = 2.522, PH of stomach acid = 1.35
Don't blame the soda for having an acidic stomach.
The stomach is not the interesting local of pH.
Further down the gut is where pH becomes an issue for sustaining the bacteria mix in the gut. Poo does not exit at a pH of 3 or lower. It is clear to me that the pH profile through the gut is important. Small intestine bacteria is likely different from large bowel bugs.
As these bugs live and die they release "stuff" to be taken up by the body and other bacteria. In addition the nutritional profile is modified. Consider Vegemite and Marmite and note the folic acid in Marmite as well as useful quantities of several other vitamins, even in small servings.
The starvation of the body for many nutrients can cause extreme caloric intake to satisfy some trivial nutrient content. Niacin in corn is one critical and common food need that is solved by nixtamalization and mitigates pellagra. Scurvy and pellagra. are the most well known nutritional deficiency related problems... many more exist and more remain to be understood.
It is also true that gut pH is an issue for cattle fed corn. The side effect has been countered by antibiotic abuse....
Well the conclusion for non scientists is obvious. There's going to be a market to extract Julia Roberts' gut bacteria and reinject them into a bunch of fat one percenters for millions of dollars a pop.
You don't win wars by levelling the playing field, you win by using advantage. When it comes to cyber-terrorism and the like, the US has no advantage, if anything, it's potentially disadvantaged over less developed nations.
Too true. One of the most gifted ASIC engineers grew up where he and others in his mountain town had to walk miles to get to a bus that could get to "civilization".
One smart and clever man is all that might be needed to crack the cyber lock on a nation or more.
Note well that war is not civilized yet may prove necessary when a bad guy or rogue nation go sideways. There is nothing civilized in a developed nation waging war on an ill developed nation.
The troubling red line to not cross is when a developed nation also becomes a bad guy, rogue nation.
Now to go and compost all the horse stuff I have accumulated.
Thousands more exoplanets coming your way! Good news indeed.
I don't want even one exoplanet coming my way! I want them to stay in their own solar systems where they belong!
Bonus point for reading with precision...;-)
Tools like this combined with GPS time synchronized continent wide synthetic aperture images could open new astronomy doors and windows of discovery.
As it is today exoplanets tell us little just as the discovery of the Higs tells us commoners little.
Way back when science was the purview of the idle and the rich. With the modern views of global economy many will be idle and many will be able to contribute to science (seismic, weather, climate, astronomy, pollution, radiation monitoring, health, genetics).
Some tasks will be routine while some more interesting... but the data will be available for those with the skill to reduce it.
Consider the Raspberry-Pi, many forks of the linux kernel might shed light on improvements where Linus would never gate them because they pose risks the larger user pool cannot assume. OK I am a fan of low power low budget "sufficiently interesting" computers. RMS has set the stage with sufficient tools... the future is ours fly free, fly free.
Some of the leakers have posted large files of clearly random data. By using that data in interesting ways key exchange or data exchange could move forward for many destinations.
It is interesting that private communications once were safe inside a common gummed envelope and protected by a few penny seal in the upper right corner.
The thoughts and prayers of many are now laid open to the whims of unknown agencies, companies and bureaucrats. The issue to me is that they are unknown... The journal or diary of anyone is no longer as safe as it once was under a mattress. Once exposed, once disclosed it cannot be undone without astounding expense and perverse effort. The commerce in "stolen words" by media boggles the mind. Should a friend of yours be implicated in a crime the media seems happy to steal you images and words without compensation and without liable for truth regarding you or your acquaintances.
Samsung is the only manufacturer that doesn't have their head up their
Well they are not keeping up. I have wonderful phone from Samsung and the base OS is locked at old and musty. Worse the graphics code does not take advantage of the graphics hardware as it should.
One of the critical buggers in phone land is the big system lump upgrade. The Android team apparently elected to structure things to exclude modest updates and fail to establish a path for trusted updates.
But this stuff is all new. A couple turns of the crank and good things are possible.
Prototypes of a modern calculator could be coded in Java-Script or Dart and presented on a browser.
I seriously question whether JavaScript's internal number representation would be accurate enough to implement a calculator for use in education. All numbers in JavaScript are represented as double-precision floats, which IMHO are not going to be accurate enough......
Nothing prevents a string oriented math lib! This is a calculator not a machine for HPC. So yes your point is valid with the point that precision is a topic to discuss and teach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dc_(computer_program) $ bc bc 1.06.95 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. scale=100 1/3.3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333\ 333333333333333333333333333333333
So for each N 3 4 6 7 9 20 50 100 500 1000 whatever do scale=N "run function" done
IMO 64bit IEEE floating point is marginal. With modern transistor counts we should be looking at Alpha's 128 and even 256 bit native floating point hardware support.
Oh and stupid user tricks that "PI=3.14" in the front of a dusty FORTRAN deck used for Gulf of Mexico circulation dynamic modeling that was also used to support some global warming stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Do watch the SSD market. I noticed that the local Frys is looking to all but purge their
inventory.
Is there a price jump, a price cut or some new stuff hitting the market?
I was all set to buy a SSD disk but the prices did not make sense and
the display astoundingly bollixed and confused.
My current plan is to move to a SSD and the new AC network links.
I can have large storage on my router/ cloud/ drive/ dropbox/ resource
and a light quick laptop with modest storage. The speed of SSD devices
is getting to be a serous game changer at home and at work.
But these OCZ folks seem to have stepped in it badly.
The best compiler support for numbers will commonly be Fortran.
Python belongs on the list because slow functions can be coded in C
or another native language for speed. It is also a rich and portable protyping
language.
There is value in asking your advisor.
A linux distro like Centos is well regarded, almost any programming language
can be downloaded. Switching to Redhat for product support has a small learning curve.
R is a statistical rich environment that you should be aware of. Python bindings for R exist so
again Python.
SUMMARY: Python and R. R may be all you need.... R makes charts and graphs, slices dices....
runs on many platforms even WinsowZ
Not just power plants.
There was a NPR show poking into the recent chicken contamination related
problems. The numbers cited were so extremely different that I found it incredible
that they were valid.
One caller asserted that a small european nation had zero salmonella contamination
at their chicken processing plants. I can understand a low number but not zero
for a bug that is ubiquitous to chickens.
Perhaps this plant permits sanitizing of chicken with intense gamma radiation
which has repeatedly been dis-allowed in the US. Perhaps it is a case of strict
washing with acetic acid also dis-allowed (last I heard) in the US.
Perhaps is is a simple problem that Google translate got it wrong.
In the US it appears that the energy required to file problem reports is large
and demands astounding dedication. Perhaps it is only the largest plants
that has the critical mass of inspectors to slog through the system and
file reports.
If I recall Kafka noted that unlike the mythical man month for software
bureaucracy increases in effectiveness the larger it gets. This may
simply be a measure of how effectively the system gets gamed by
a largish bureaucratic organization. Sadly Kafka was unavailable
to comment on this internet reported fact.
All nations and all companies need to think hard about their communication
strategies.
Back in the old dot dash days companies had thick code books and
code protocols.
Nations like Japan in WWII had serious codes for their navy (Purple)
and the Germans had Enigma.
Cracking them was key to the outcome of the war and almost
exposed the attack on Perl in time to act.
Any nation needs some control over their communications.
The troubling bit to many might be the man in the middle attacks
where web content is rewritten or simply exposed via a wide open
leak.
Companies with old school processes still on file should take
note.
Tis not an anonymity issue it is fraud.
Paper ballots at moderately large polling places are moderately anonymous.
Ink on a finger at exit is sufficient to prevent multiple ballots (one of many types of fraud).
Digitally signed ballots lack the ability to verify the real person test.
Another difficult nut to crack is the "entitled to vote test".... Voter
entitlement is a tangle.
All the rest depends on an audit trail. At the end of voting the box is closed,
sealed, transported, counted, verified, aggregated results signed sealed and delivered....
All under the watchful eyes of proctors... today live camera feeds permit more eyes.
Sort of yes. OpenCL is a way to load code into a special co-processor.
More interesting is an array of processors that are not special.
One might ask why the system has 4-6 cores and the display
more than one hundred. Eye candy is nice but as I think about
it this is unbalanced and perhaps even inverted.
Parallel programming is hard and the closer to "normal" programming
it can be the better. One of the issues is that the FPU of GFX hardware
is a 32 bit float and the system has a choice of 32 or 64 bit IEEE floats.
With 7.1 transistors on a modern nVidia part it is clear that their
design has a narrow focus on display problems.
However with billions of transistors more general devices make sense (to me).
And yes I lament the loss of the Alpha and 128 bit floats. But I am happy
to roll my own if needed... but that is another rant.
Rumors are that newer designs are more symmetric and while most are to be dedicated to
driving displayed content that dedication can be toggled or the balance shifted
to give the OS more cores to do work.
I'm not sure what that would mean. The current GPUs are able to give you pretty much all the cores (shader units) to do general purpose work if you want to.
What if the array of processing elements in the GPU were pulled out of the GPU and presented as full class
citizens? A 'mode-bit' could give them access to one or more tiles of display memory.
There are days when I would be happy as a clam to have +100 cores and a simple terminal to manage the
system. Other days four+ cores would do the job but +100 cores for smooth as silk graphics would be nice.
I love it when I win at solitaire and the cards fly in circles too and fro....
The underlying challenge is the internal bus/ interconnect and data paths to and from memory I/O and
display. Some of this was only a pipe dream in the past but with modern chips and a billion transistors
the impossible is now within reach.
This type of design is difficult.... and risky but hey I am not talking about my money.
Video cards are basically mini computers in themselves, or as I like to jokingly refer to them "NVidia/AMD Consoles".
Not mini... the processing power in modern graphic cards and subsystems is serious stuff.
Rumors are that newer designs are more symmetric and while most are to be dedicated to
driving displayed content that dedication can be toggled or the balance shifted
to give the OS more cores to do work.
The value of this is a don't care to Microsoft. They seem to be well
trained by the GigHz banter of one CPU designer and maker. Power
management is another omission in the OS design matrix. Perhaps
with better instrumentation on chips & motherboards things will improve.
None of this is the full answer. Decades ago I played with X windows
with the server and client separated via a serial line IP link. The slow
link made it obvious that the layers and layers of libraries were not well
designed. With the most trivial event I would see the screen redraw itself
many many times. No wonder perf sucked and the good news is that
we were able to sell hardware upgrades as fast as we could design them.
I wonder if the dot in /. is a reminder to contemplate your navel
and look inward at things?
I will believe Google is genuinely against NSA's encryption breaking scheme only when Google moves ALL their servers OUTSIDE of the United States of America.
No point of talking about "upping the stakes" when the same old thing - a secret warrant demanding full disclosure - can happen anytime.
Google has seen so very many attacks on its infrastructure that all links are now or will soon be encrypted.
Rumors are that Google is also large enough to distribute secret keys to the end point devices and can even
manage building to building and room to room encrypted data links.
I am of the opinion that Google is under pressure from TLA organizations to protect its resources as a mater of national
security. i.e. penetration from China, Iran, Korea, Cuba needs to be stopped. The capability to stop industrial
and international agents has the side effect of stopping or slowing down US agencies.
Those agencies are well armed with paper and via legal process can get that which is needed.
There is a lesson here. Do not obstruct US national TLAs but protect fully from international and industrial
attacks and you will be in as good a legal situation as possible. Secret orders are a tangle. Validating
that a secret order is a valid order risks divulging the secret order to the degree that it pays to not act on
or acknowledge the order that cannot be verified as it may well be an elaborate phishing attack by a foreign
agency with deep pockets. OK that may not be practical but the point is that becoming the target of
international agents unfriendly to the US is very possible and astoundingly possible. Physical, technical
and social attacks are very possible...
Since I am not an attorney none of what I said can be construed as advice. Do get advice in
advance of the need for advice when adversarial stuff is flying hither and yon and clear thinking
and communication is impossible.
The water will be safe LONG before that. The worst of the stuff in the water has a 30 year half life.
However, simple distillation (noting that simple is a relative term when dealing with radiation at that level) would be a better choice since that would greatly reduce the volume of waste to store.
So, now you want to cook water with radioactive materials in it?
The real issue is that TEPCO cannot even sit on radioactive material without messing it up, much less run a reactor or cleaning system with moving parts.
Caution this stuff is self heating. You could let
it boil water and then vent water vapor but the more you
concentrate the waste the more trouble you have
with the thermal load which then compromises storage
tanks.
It is increasing obvious that the material needs to be sealed tight
and a thermal solution put in place.
Each locality in the site needs attention. Storage pools
are not thermally stable. Damaged reactor cores need
to be unloaded as much as possible. It is impossible to
unload melted/ slagged rods. When the cladding began
reacting and releasing hydrogen the ability to safely remove rods
went in the crapper.
Then there is contamination... anything and everything is
likely unsafe for humans. Robot technology can barely
survey the damage.... The contamination is so wide spread
that you cannot bring a container near material that need to
be removed without contaminating the outside of the container.
Bring in the Russian dolls.
One big stinking pile of trouble...
...snip....
As the core is dissected, I'd direct the robots to place each piece in a lead-lined storage pod; this needs to be done as each piece is cut off, so as to not create further metldowns;
.....snip.....
Lead lined???
Enough lead to act as a shield would not have the needed thermal profile.
You are working with meltdown temperatures that compromise
Zircaloy or steel used in modern construction. So not lead which
has a low melting point.
Yes cut off bits of reactor rods (and stuff) could be dropped into stainless
tubes, crimped tight, perhaps welded and then slipped
into a multi layered shielded transport container to manage the
thermal load as well as protect from external damage and internal
leakage.
One pending solution for undamaged rods of which there may be
many is coffins. Long enough for the full length of the rod. Sealed
for 20+years with a thermal management profile that lets them be
lined up in parking lot sized areas "high and dry" away from the
ocean and with the potential of transport "as is" to secure storage.
There is a global issue with the storage of undamaged rods.
Pools permit the removal of heat and make monitoring for leaks
easy but once the pool's coolant water is lost all pooh happens.
A pool is small and physically easy to secure other thermal dissipation
methods not so compact. The number of rods in a reactor is large...
There are about 179-264 fuel rods per fuel bundle and about 121 to 193 fuel
bundles are loaded into a reactor core -- someone else do the math.
These rods are hot in two ways. Like ordering "hot sauce" in
English at a Mexican restaurant can prove ambiguous., hot
is ambiguous.
The news media is blundering all over their adjectives here...
One the only care to gain eyeballs for their sponsors. They
have no incentive to get it right.
RO treatment has the risk of concentrating very radioactive water
into astoundingly radioactive filter cartridges. These cartridges
could then not be handled.
One remedy I have not seen is transport by diluting the
very radioactive water to a point that it is largely self shielding
and then transport those tanks to a place where arrays of
cartridges have been installed in large banks inside a "solid
rock" bunker. Then filter the water, clamp seal and back fill the array
of cartridges with sand or another mass shielding for long term
storage. At some future date the sand could be hoovered
and the carts recollected for longer isotope sequestering.
The problem is this is a one time (hopefully) solution and
would be hard as heck to develop and test. The volcanic
and seismic activity of Japan make this a more challenging
issue than it might be in Nevada, USA or Mongolia high desert
in China. i.e no solution in Japan would be as good as Yucca
Mtn which is not good enough. Yet Yucca Mtn. is better than many moon
pool on site storage solutions.
Clearly the world needs better but too many demand the unobtanium
best. We do not need best -- but we do need better. This:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
tells me the world will not "end" if the solution is not perfect.
....snip...And 3oz is, what, just shy of a quarter pound?....snip....
Since when is missing by 25% "just shy".
N.B. You must ante up 33.333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333%+ a bit to break even.
Couldn't we just say 500gb up front and be done with it, instead of having a bogus multiplier on a meaningless size? What's next, "this hard drive holds 30 Library of Congresses, which are each 6x the capacity of a regular library?"
Too close to reality to need meaningless facts...
What is the image size in that newfangled 40MP phone that Microsoft
and Nokia are shilling for? Link a tablet to the auto-down load of
the phone and in no time the 500GB is filled up. Compound that
with HD video and this is nothing.
The resolution of a quality image on an iPad retina display makes a
decent screen to crop images for but no one tosses the master file
so 40MPx24bitcolordepth is a lot even when JPEG encoded.
Clearly the 100,000 photos could fill up the device to the point that
the "and 125000 songs" compressed by some lousy lossy compression
trick statement is misleading.
And while I am at it, there was a 13" drive by IBM and others way back when.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Kittyhawk_microdrive so aside from capacity
this is OLD NEWS.
If I recall this has been addressed.
There may be some case law but a real legal beagle
should cite it. Not a bystander like me.
Whistle blowers and reporters have had tenuous exceptions
as has legal counsel.
Apparently, You can invoke the 5th and then be compelled to answer the
question in some cases. Any fall out from this testimony is fruit of a poisoned tree
or some such. The reality is that any testimony that demonstrated you had been involved in
a crime makes you an investigative target for other crimes. As anyone sitting
in a criminal proceedings might note the long list of charges presented
can prove astounding and can fence witnesses in as well as the defendant.
News media has an interesting shield but in these cases of national security
things get tangled. The confidentiality of legal counsel is also under attack.
Sure you may be protected from prosecution for crime "A" but protection
from persecution for "B", "C", "D"..... for all time past and future seems to be
under attack.
The massive data collections are virtual time machines. Thus your history
well beyond any statute of limitations is opened up and those childhood
connections make you one degree away from a criminal. All that is needed
is to have a k-12 classmate be convicted of a felony to connect you to a
criminal element.
For many on /. Hans Thomas Reiser may be the necessary direct or one
removed criminal connection to permit digging into your stuff to any degree
some zealot wishes (kernel.org mailing list for example). In too many cases
it is the connection not the nature of the connection that opens the gate.
Some might doubt the legal umbrella -- http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
but if any or all communication in and out is monitored it gets tangled as heck to
be a legal firm. Umbrellas are near worthless in a high wind -- and here we go
hang on to your hat Mary.
Write? vs. Speak? /. does not support audio to the best of my knowledge. /. is available to a global audience many places English
is a second language. Worse English is the perl of languages.
It has cruft and junk in it from almost all languages, a scosche of
this and a bit of that.
....snip.... I get the funny feeling that maybe Albini doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. There are an awful lot of people in music who really don’t understand digital audio and seem to be too afraid of embarassment to ask.
This is likely true but irrelevant to someone busy getting work done.
In the years he has been at it the entire game has changed often.
Yet he has been able to be productive despite the tempest in a teapot
swirling around him.
I happen to know a quality old guy programmer that still used "ed" the ...... The point is the result not the tool. In retrospect I have
last time I watched him work. You can look at the code text he writes
and it looks no different than text generated by vi, vim, emacs, xemacs,
jove, joe,
almost abandoned emacs because it turns my hands into claws suffering from
RSI. I have abandoned editors that demand mice because reaching for
the mouse takes longer than a couple short reach touch typing strokes.
I have a ten year old laptop that still has the best laptop keyboard. I have
a cautiously preserved collection of SUN and SGI keyboards from a time
when the keys were set on a curved correctly spaced base.
A modern band might be well advised to run the analogue tapes through
a high quality A-D process because, well just because.
Again... The point is the result not the tool.
Yes, predicting the future is not an option. It is known to be hard.
Note, some of us are open source minded and drag digital copies of this
that and almost anything with us. I suspect he is a product consumer.
and has found a media he can work with. He will have seen a lot of
digital solution come and go none of which were as good as his analogue
tool kit. Modern audio digital recording is a long way from where he
has been but is still compared to his gold-standard analog tape to validate
its quality.
The issue of "gold-standard" is interesting and tells any listener what
is needed in the studio. When a new gold standard arrives the
solution will change.
He can still mix and publish in a digital domain but the master tracks are something
he has faith in as a primary recording media.
In 20-30 years there will be another SteveA that has his own opinion and it ;)
will be different (most likely). But I know better than to predict the future so
forget what I said....
PH of a very acidic soda = 2.522, PH of stomach acid = 1.35
Don't blame the soda for having an acidic stomach.
The stomach is not the interesting local of pH.
Further down the gut is where pH becomes an issue for sustaining
the bacteria mix in the gut. Poo does not exit at a pH of 3 or lower.
It is clear to me that the pH profile through the gut is important. Small
intestine bacteria is likely different from large bowel bugs.
As these bugs live and die they release "stuff" to be taken up by the
body and other bacteria. In addition the nutritional profile is modified.
Consider Vegemite and Marmite and note the folic acid in Marmite
as well as useful quantities of several other vitamins, even in small servings.
The starvation of the body for many nutrients can cause extreme caloric ... many more exist and more
intake to satisfy some trivial nutrient content. Niacin in corn is one
critical and common food need that is solved by nixtamalization
and mitigates pellagra. Scurvy and pellagra. are the most well known
nutritional deficiency related problems
remain to be understood.
It is also true that gut pH is an issue for cattle fed corn. The side effect
has been countered by antibiotic abuse....
Well the conclusion for non scientists is obvious. There's going to be a market to extract Julia Roberts' gut bacteria and reinject them into a bunch of fat one percenters for millions of dollars a pop.
Units are incorrect:
millions of dollars a poop.
^ This..
You don't win wars by levelling the playing field, you win by using advantage. When it comes to cyber-terrorism and the like, the US has no advantage, if anything, it's potentially disadvantaged over less developed nations.
Too true. One of the most gifted ASIC engineers grew up where he and others in his mountain town had to walk miles to get to
a bus that could get to "civilization".
One smart and clever man is all that might be needed to crack the cyber lock on
a nation or more.
Note well that war is not civilized yet may prove necessary when a bad guy or rogue nation go sideways.
There is nothing civilized in a developed nation waging war on an ill developed nation.
The troubling red line to not cross is when a developed nation also becomes
a bad guy, rogue nation.
Now to go and compost all the horse stuff I have accumulated.
Thousands more exoplanets coming your way! Good news indeed.
I don't want even one exoplanet coming my way! I want them to stay in their own solar systems where they belong!
Bonus point for reading with precision... ;-)
Tools like this combined with GPS time synchronized continent wide synthetic
aperture images could open new astronomy doors and windows of discovery.
As it is today exoplanets tell us little just as the discovery of the Higs tells us
commoners little.
Way back when science was the purview of the idle and the rich. With the modern
views of global economy many will be idle and many will be able to contribute
to science (seismic, weather, climate, astronomy, pollution, radiation monitoring,
health, genetics).
Some tasks will be routine while some more interesting... but the data will be available
for those with the skill to reduce it.
Consider the Raspberry-Pi, many forks of the linux kernel might shed light on improvements
where Linus would never gate them because they pose risks the larger user pool
cannot assume. OK I am a fan of low power low budget "sufficiently interesting"
computers. RMS has set the stage with sufficient tools... the future is ours fly free,
fly free.
Perhaps one way pads have been exchanged already.
Some of the leakers have posted large files of clearly
random data. By using that data in interesting ways
key exchange or data exchange could move forward for
many destinations.
It is interesting that private communications once were safe
inside a common gummed envelope and protected by
a few penny seal in the upper right corner.
The thoughts and prayers of many are now laid open to the whims
of unknown agencies, companies and bureaucrats. The issue
to me is that they are unknown... The journal or diary of anyone
is no longer as safe as it once was under a mattress. Once exposed,
once disclosed it cannot be undone without astounding expense
and perverse effort. The commerce in "stolen words" by media
boggles the mind. Should a friend of yours be implicated in a crime
the media seems happy to steal you images and words without
compensation and without liable for truth regarding you or your
acquaintances.
Samsung is the only manufacturer that doesn't have their head up their
Well they are not keeping up. I have wonderful phone from Samsung
and the base OS is locked at old and musty. Worse the graphics code
does not take advantage of the graphics hardware as it should.
One of the critical buggers in phone land is the big system lump upgrade.
The Android team apparently elected to structure things to exclude modest updates
and fail to establish a path for trusted updates.
But this stuff is all new. A couple turns of the crank and good things are possible.
Prototypes of a modern calculator could be coded in Java-Script or Dart and presented
on a browser.
I seriously question whether JavaScript's internal number representation would be accurate enough to implement a calculator for use in education. All numbers in JavaScript are represented as double-precision floats, which IMHO are not going to be accurate enough ......
Nothing prevents a string oriented math lib!
This is a calculator not a machine for HPC. So yes your point is valid
with the point that precision is a topic to discuss and teach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dc_(computer_program) .3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333\
$ bc
bc 1.06.95
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
scale=100
1/3
333333333333333333333333333333333
So for each N 3 4 6 7 9 20 50 100 500 1000 whatever
do
scale=N
"run function"
done
IMO 64bit IEEE floating point is marginal. With modern transistor counts
we should be looking at Alpha's 128 and even 256 bit native floating point hardware support.
The most interesting bit is the fragile nature of transcendental functions and friends. ...
see: http://lipforge.ens-lyon.fr/www/crlibm/documentation.html
Oh and stupid user tricks that "PI=3.14" in the front of a dusty FORTRAN deck used for Gulf of Mexico
circulation dynamic modeling that was also used to support some global warming stuff.