I can think of no cloud-based solution of any size that qualifies as a critical resources during emergency situations including war.
At least none that is not well served by a server resource in a shipping container. i.e. generator, storage, display, mother boards. Such a shipping container (20"box) could be transported by air or truck and pre-positioned near and directly connected to an ISP central network location.
One key problem is the network bandwidth and connectivity. In the vast majority of situations connectivity would be lost so cloud solutions make little or no sense. We saw this after 9/11 where a number of folk assembled "Pringle can" links that moved data for weeks after the buildings collapsed, severing services in the area.
Someone needs to clearly understand the modes of failure and the needs. Critical resources should not be contracted to a cloud because it is both hardware and people that are being contracted. This legislation is in effect conscription of those people and it is not clear that they are citizens subject to conscription. It is also a tax on cloud providers that is uncounted and not acknowledged.
I saw problems like this in the media after Katrina. Any senior officer and most junior officers would note that the path of the storm was going to cause a logistical nightmare as communications and transportation into and out of New Orleans was washed away. The news failed in their understanding of the damage over time aspects. They were there with their portable satellite links broadcasting intermittent images of the clear sky and intact levies. The mayor and the governor acted on this and released national guard resources that once released could not be recalled because the storm swept away roads and communication resources needed to recall them. A military logistical expert would map the damage of the storm much the same as the damage from sappers and airborne troops dropped behind the FEBA to disrupt resupply and communications. FEBA == forward edge of the battle area, not FEMA.
Today it is not the time spent in an aircraft it is the time spent in a cramped ill served aircraft.
A high speed system would suffer the same fate as airlines and optimize the return on investment by mushing folk in tight as dead fish in a tin after herding and corralling them like cattle off to the arbitour.
Regional rail has to find ways to deliver service without abusing the commuters. This includes local transportation for the last mile of the commute.
There is a reason folk take big boats yet big boats also suffer from the pack em in like dead fish problem.
A generator suitable for real emergency use for vulnerable people is not that inexpensive. For that situation you'd really need one powered by natural gas with automatic start if the main electricity supply failed. It would have to be powerful enough, in most areas, to be able to drive air conditioning, and perhaps other energy demanding systems.
Folly.....
There is a short list of things....
* Insulation.... Folks in AC country need MORE insulation than folk in the northern regions.
* Ventilation.... Homes, apartments, offices are not designed for secure ventilation.
* Water.... A cool water tank about the size of a hot water tank belongs in most homes
flash heaters + a cool water tank would be about the same physical size.
Apart from and after the above, electric vehicles have the generation and storage capacity to cool a room and maintain a refrigerator freezer for a couple days on a 1/4 tank of gas if and only if insulation, ventilation and water was available. They do need a converter to tap into them.
Points to anchor on, we all know that a car left in the sun will get so hot it will kill. Insulation and ventilation would temper that and while uncomfortable the worst midday heat in the shade is tolerable for most if an adult is well hydrated.
Ventilation... we hear it over and over summer after summer folks sealed up in their home die from heat because they are afraid to leave a window or door open at night. From Wikipedia: "Transom windows which could be opened to provide cross-ventilation while maintaining security and privacy (due to their small size and height above floor level) were a common feature of office buildings and apartments before air conditioning became common." Retrofitting and installing these or the equivalent should be a priority in all housing especially low income housing. Without modest ventilation a home becomes a sweat lodge on common days and a sauna on hot summer days.
It is possible to put on blankets and "bundle" in the winter but body temp +5 at 99% humidity is near lethal.
Aha but who owners the copyright. The text and story transcribed may be a Violation of the copyright . The owner of the screen play could and should balk.
Except that the employee had no idea she was going to give it to anyone in Iran:"Sabet told WSBTV that the iPad was intended as a gift to her cousin in Iran, but said she didn't mention that to the clerk."
Except you are wrong and the whole point was the clerk who was Iranian as well heard her say in Iranian while in the store she intended to send it to Iran, not to mention she admitted on the news she intended to break US law.
Bingo.... now that she has admitted to the news she could be in the slammer before night fall. Both her and her Uncle have colluded in a conspiracy to break the law.
She is cute but I know from numerous James Bond movies that not all cute girls are good girls. Some are downright bad ass spies and assassins. Thank you Ian for the education.
> if you know, or have reason to know, that the item is being purchased for export. And he knew it for sure. She was speaking Farsi! And
And still we do not know what was said!
There is a current commercial running here where an Asian couple buying a car was speaking Chinese thinking it was a secure sufficiently encrypted channel. She disclosed that she wanted the car and for him to get it. He said....
Then the very large nosed WASP looking salesman said in apparently fluent Chinese then English "... will that be cash or charge!..." or something to that effect.
I know that I cannot say things like "bomb" or "hijack" on a aircraft, but how many different languages does the crew understand. In my heart of heart the dangerous uses of "bomb or hijack" will not be in English or even a romance language that sounds close... Yet I would get tossed in the clink lickety split if I used the English words and might just get away with it in Chinese (any of many), Russian, Basque, Bodo, Dogri, etc.
And yes I worked with a man named Jack.... I learned to say "Hello Jay" instead.
And yes the law is clear -- you cannot knowingly sell to or support a long list of products to Iran... If you suspect a violation of the law you must not play.....
Until the advent of drones you would be the only target of legal actions so just say not if you think this is an issue.
Sorry for not rhyming this... that would be true Poetic Justice.
Hate to bust your bubble buddy but American police as far a New Zealand or any other countries laws are concerned are nothing but bloody tourists. It is illegal to hand over evidence to visting tourists and let them take it out of the country.......t tourists stole a copy infringing other peoples copyrights doesn't mean that work now permanently loses copyright protection.
This could be interesting..... Further if "tourists" made copies of copyrighted material and then transported the same across international borders these tourists are in trouble. News at eleven....
If I had mod points today, I would have modded you up. How does this relate to tech or IT?
Well I have moderator points.. What this has to do with/. is in a word "education".
The foundations of tech is education and open knowledge. Those that wage war on education wage war on us all.
In this micro slice of the world that is/. we tolerate a lot. We enjoy rants and debate. This article shies a light on a part of the world where intolerance is the norm and expected.
I'm a resident of Utah. The DEA has been talking about stuff like this literally since the technology came about. I'm not surprised they are trying to get the Legislature to authorize it, they just had to get a county to buy in on it. But I am surprised it took them this long to find a county willing. Frankly the counties do a LOT of seizures and probably make a tidy profit on it but these cameras are going to make the DEA more interested in letting people pass so they can track them later so that's probably why it took this long to get........ There just aren't that many roads across the Sierra's and as a result I-15 before it reaches I-70 becomes an ideal candidate for scanning and data collection. All you'd need is another camera in Arizona before it reaches Phoenix and you could cover almost 100% of the drug traffic out of southern California.
As I said, there's been articles every few months in the local papers talking about it for the last couple decades with a big focus on tracking repeat users of the highway the last few years. As soon as I saw the report it wasn't hard to put it together.
But, but, but...how does this really work.
If you have a list of tag numbers you scan only them and discard all the other vehicle tag data at the get go.
If you do not have a list of suspect tag ID's then it involves massive survelience of the population that is likely 99.99% not involved in drug trafficking. Especially so if the issue is interstate commerce involving drugs.
I do suspect that there is some data mining scheme [il]logic here where someone believes this data could be mined for suspects. However the logic may be very wrong... Cats are furry mammals thus all fury mammals are cats. The same analysis that puts all the drug traffic on this highway also puts all vehicular commerce to and from So. Cal on the same road.
So like a wiretap a "target" needs to be identified and a warrant processed for this to be other than a fishing machine.
Much the same problem exists with real fishing. Whales, turtles, proposes are caught and killed in great numbers by commercial fishing methods. If I believe the Greenpeace kid 40% of the animals caught and killed are tossed back. The number of false accusations and the legal fall out from them could bankrupt the state and countiy legal system.
Storage for two years is idiotic because a single court case would cause the data to be retained for the court case and any appeal involved. This could stretch out to twenty or more years. This is just the drug cases. The data would be of interest for civil cases, divorce. It may also be forced to be retained in any challenge to the existence of the data itself (catch 22ish).
It is the power consumption silly... and asymmetric is OK.
We as a group are quite pleases with "COMPUTERS" where graphics and raw horsepower is needed. Further we are interested in what happens when the bug is pegged at 100%.
However like automobiles where a hybrid car can sit at a stop light and sip power to keep the radio active and then respond when the light changes.
HOWEVER the OS folk are well stuck on SMP system design and all that flows from there.
The OS should run on a very low power device perhaps a bit more than a simple state machine. I/O should be tied to quick responsive engines with no FPU....
Computation intensive work can run on what runs it best....
The point is that there are a lot of transistors today but the easy solution involves cut and paste + glue. Building a power friendly system requires much more design and is harder to program at first. Then there is the problem where the differences get in the way and we begin to see N! different design spaces.
INMOS had it close back in the '80s with the Transputer but that is a distraction.
In the litigation happy world we live in the caution applies more to the legal liability than the risk from radiation. I.E. the risk of litigation is so very high there is often more attention given it then the patient.
Strange as it may seem to people outside the profession, most physicians are more concerned about health than litigation. Remember, these are guys who swear to a Hippocratic-style oath based on the tenet, "First, do no harm." And physicians are likely to recognize and respect that their patients may not wish not to place others--and particularly their own children or grandchildren--at any kind of risk.
In practice, the risk from legal liability from consequences of this kind of exposure is pretty small. Consequences are not certain, and if they occur it would likely be years after exposure, and the type of harm most likely to result could arise from other causes. It would be very difficult to make a strong legal case that the exposure was at fault.
I don't understand what point you are trying to make about alpha emitters. These are unlikely to be detected in this manner anyway, so they are irrelevant to the topic at hand. The isotopes most associated with thyroid damage are I-125 and I-131 (the latter of which is used medically), which concentrate in the thyroid and emit gamma and fairly high energy beta, which would be potentially detectable. And I don't think that anybody is suggesting that X-ray analysis of pipelines should not be done, so I don't understand what this has to do with anything.
Two things are involved here: advice and care. My comment was focused on advice not care. In a litigious world it is good advice to stay clear of children, pregnant women..... etc.
Imaging of welds requires a strong as heck source of X-rays and the electric powered X-ray tube technology used for bones and tissue imaging does not match the needs. So there are two common sources of dense radioactive material that could be diverted. Medical and Industrial.
Aha, there is the rub. As lethal as it was these detectors would not detect the isotope used to kill Alexander. Revisit your link with the question: "Why was it so difficult to diagnose and verify. The hospital had and has a full nuclear medicine facility. I.e. it was fully equipped, far better than the mobile detector system involved in this traffic stop. And did they call in hazmat equipped assistance? If no hazmat then no probable cause. I.e they did not perceive a hazzard.
?...... It is not uncommon for patients to be cautioned to keep their distance from kids and women who might be pregnant. Isotopes used for medical purposes mostly decay rapidly, but particularly early on, they can emit well above background......
While true it is necessary to explore the level of caution being exercised in such cases.
In the litigation happy world we live in the caution applies more to the legal liability than the risk from radiation. I.E. the risk of litigation is so very high there is often more attention given it then the patient.
Worse this may be justified because by and large too many M.D.s fall in the set of social behaviors that would send you home under risk conditions that some would call unacceptable.
The doses for thyroid and prostrate distruction are high. They involve alpha emitters that are difficult to detect if not impossible by these detection techniques. X-ray bombs for weld quality verifications are very dangerous (powerful) and do get lost from time to time. We could an these bombs -at the risk of many more San Bruno style gas line ruptures.
"evidence of a crime having been committed". In the case the evidence was of a crime....... Given how rare it is for people's cars to give off radiation, and the potential for such radiation to indicate that a catastrophic crime is about to be committed, a police officer would be highly negligent if he didn't stop and investigate such a car.
I wanted to let this pass.....but.
The levels and isotopes involved while easy to detect are clearly not a safety hazzard to the public.
Building sensors to detect a truck full of banannas or even lamp mantles is the easy bit. What is hard is detecting a cobalt 60 X-ray source transported in an approved transport pig. The stuff that scares me and should scare us all is insanely difficult to handle, easy to shield, and orders of magnitude more intense than any medical treatment would present.
From WP: "Eidetic memory (/adtk/), commonly referred to as photographic memory, is a medical term, popularly defined as the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects in memory with extreme precision and in abundant volume."
I would assert(tm) that the class of programmers a company like Google hires would have Eidetic memory to one degree or another. Fundamental patterns would stick and be used little different that humming a tune in the shower.
"Double double toil and trouble fire burn and cauldron bubble... " I would further assert(R) that despite the geekish bent of this community a very large number could continue for nine line and perhaps a lot more.
If nine lines is worth billions then programming is in trouble as a profession except for those that live like mushrooms.
AND most importantly these qualities could hold an individual hostage to the point that an employer that wishes to enforce copyright must continue to pay these employees full and fair for the reasonable legal length of such copyrights if they wish to enforce such limitations to this degree.
There is a corner in bankruptcy where a vendor that fails to deliver product in a way that hobbles a company from making money to repay that vendor can find themselves liable for more than they bargained for.
While most US student loans are guaranteed by the federal gvmt the school could find that the guarantee is void because they blocked the student from working.
Student loans like home loans were granted with no consideration of the true ability to pay the loan back. The honest wages that some degrees might qualify a graduate for might fall under the poverty level after a couple kids yet the loan is in keeping with a high paying executive level dotcom/startup lottery ticket winner.
There are dead beats out there and they need to pay back a little or a lot. Sadly the terms of many loans are so good that paying the loan back does not make financial sense to someone with a sharp pencil .
University finances are out of control.... it is not a light dance shoe that will drop.
No the judge has reserved this for himself. My memory is that the Judge charged the jury to rule on the assumption that APSs can be. The good news for most of the tech community is that European courts have ruled that they cannot.
If the judge rules that APIs can be then an entire industry moves away from the US and all the US programmers will need to renounce their citizenship and emigrate to other nations. I have a short list of places I would love to live in. Some nations have good health care laws and......
This can be resolved by congress! One would note that congress has the power to pass laws that sort this out -- and they should. They also need to kill the Mouse tangle.
Actually, I was pretty sure because we had computer images that showed the hole, showed it was growing over time, and most importantly we could reproduce the effects of CFCs on ozone in a lab instead of just in a computer simulation. It also helps that we didn't have to dismantle civilization to get rid of CFCs.
Computer images???????? Perhaps sensor data displayed on a computer I/O device.
Let us not confuse the display technology with the data. Plots made with pen and ink or plots made quicker with a machine all depend on data points.
And we do not understand the natural swing of global climate. We can quibble all we want but we do not know if a natural change will feed or starve millions in the next ten years let alone the next five generations. Muddy that with the masses of human excrement we are producing and stink who knows.
Speaking of poo, I once had cause to look at a climate model code. In the code was "PI=3.14". The reason I had it was a parallel run mis compare in the 19th decimal digit when doubling the CPU count.
NC is trying to protect their licensing revenue, and just for laughs, their policies are based on a combination of hokum and paid-for "advice" from big agro. Check for yourself. You know enough now to do that. Google scholar and medline are two good places to start.
I looked fo but did not find qualification for licensing criteria. Without training and criteria the state is on fragile footing.
One phrase caught my eye where medical practices are equated with dietician services. I wonder what medical privileges are confirmed by the license.
Given the range of fools out there I think the only hope is universal Obamacare.
I think it is the legal and moral responsibility for mothers and fathers to practice nutrition. This action makes no sense and MUST be balanced by banning all books and school health clases that present health information. History bookers must be purged of all references to Limies and why British seamen were called "Limies". Further dictionaries must be purged of references to rickets, palegra, scurvy, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of no cloud-based solution of any size
that qualifies as a critical resources during emergency
situations including war.
At least none that is not well served by a server resource in
a shipping container. i.e. generator, storage, display, mother boards.
Such a shipping container (20"box) could be transported
by air or truck and pre-positioned near and directly connected
to an ISP central network location.
One key problem is the network bandwidth and connectivity. In the
vast majority of situations connectivity would be lost so cloud solutions
make little or no sense. We saw this after 9/11 where a number of
folk assembled "Pringle can" links that moved data for weeks after
the buildings collapsed, severing services in the area.
Someone needs to clearly understand the modes of failure
and the needs. Critical resources should not be contracted
to a cloud because it is both hardware and people that are
being contracted. This legislation is in effect conscription
of those people and it is not clear that they are citizens subject
to conscription. It is also a tax on cloud providers that is
uncounted and not acknowledged.
I saw problems like this in the media after Katrina. Any senior officer and
most junior officers would note that the path of the storm was going
to cause a logistical nightmare as communications and transportation
into and out of New Orleans was washed away. The news failed
in their understanding of the damage over time aspects. They
were there with their portable satellite links broadcasting intermittent
images of the clear sky and intact levies. The mayor and the governor
acted on this and released national guard resources that once released
could not be recalled because the storm swept away roads and communication
resources needed to recall them. A military logistical expert would map
the damage of the storm much the same as the damage from sappers
and airborne troops dropped behind the FEBA to disrupt resupply and
communications. FEBA == forward edge of the battle area, not FEMA.
Today it is not the time spent in an aircraft it is the time spent in a cramped ill served aircraft.
A high speed system would suffer the same fate as airlines and
optimize the return on investment by mushing folk in tight as
dead fish in a tin after herding and corralling them like cattle
off to the arbitour.
Regional rail has to find ways to deliver service without
abusing the commuters. This includes local transportation
for the last mile of the commute.
There is a reason folk take big boats yet big boats also suffer
from the pack em in like dead fish problem.
A generator suitable for real emergency use for vulnerable people is not that inexpensive. For that situation you'd really need one powered by natural gas with automatic start if the main electricity supply failed. It would have to be powerful enough, in most areas, to be able to drive air conditioning, and perhaps other energy demanding systems.
Folly.....
There is a short list of things ....
* Insulation.... Folks in AC country need MORE insulation than folk in the northern regions.
* Ventilation.... Homes, apartments, offices are not designed for secure ventilation.
* Water.... A cool water tank about the size of a hot water tank belongs in most homes
flash heaters + a cool water tank would be about the same physical size.
Apart from and after the above, electric vehicles have the generation and storage capacity
to cool a room and maintain a refrigerator freezer for a couple days on a 1/4 tank of
gas if and only if insulation, ventilation and water was available. They do need a converter
to tap into them.
Points to anchor on, we all know that a car left in the sun will get so hot it will kill. Insulation
and ventilation would temper that and while uncomfortable the worst midday heat in the shade
is tolerable for most if an adult is well hydrated.
Ventilation... we hear it over and over summer after summer folks sealed up
in their home die from heat because they are afraid to leave a window or
door open at night. From Wikipedia: "Transom windows which could be opened to
provide cross-ventilation while maintaining security and privacy (due to their small size
and height above floor level) were a common feature of office buildings and apartments
before air conditioning became common." Retrofitting and installing these or the equivalent
should be a priority in all housing especially low income housing. Without modest
ventilation a home becomes a sweat lodge on common days and a sauna on hot
summer days.
It is possible to put on blankets and "bundle" in the winter but body temp +5 at 99%
humidity is near lethal.
Aha but who owners the copyright. The text and story transcribed may be a
Violation of the copyright . The owner of the screen play could and should balk.
Except that the employee had no idea she was going to give it to anyone in Iran:"Sabet told WSBTV that the iPad was intended as a gift to her cousin in Iran, but said she didn't mention that to the clerk."
Except you are wrong and the whole point was the clerk who was Iranian as well heard her say in Iranian while in the store she intended to send it to Iran, not to mention she admitted on the news she intended to break US law.
Bingo.... now that she has admitted to the news she could be in the slammer before night fall.
Both her and her Uncle have colluded in a conspiracy to break the law.
She is cute but I know from numerous James Bond movies that not all cute girls
are good girls. Some are downright bad ass spies and assassins. Thank you
Ian for the education.
> if you know, or have reason to know, that the item is being purchased for export.
And he knew it for sure. She was speaking Farsi! And
And still we do not know what was said!
There is a current commercial running here where an Asian couple buying a car was speaking ....
Chinese thinking it was a secure sufficiently encrypted channel. She disclosed that she
wanted the car and for him to get it. He said
Then the very large nosed WASP looking salesman said in apparently fluent Chinese
then English "... will that be cash or charge!..." or something to that effect.
I know that I cannot say things like "bomb" or "hijack" on a aircraft, but
how many different languages does the crew understand. In my heart
of heart the dangerous uses of "bomb or hijack" will not be in English
or even a romance language that sounds close... Yet I would get tossed in
the clink lickety split if I used the English words and might just get away
with it in Chinese (any of many), Russian, Basque, Bodo, Dogri, etc.
And yes I worked with a man named Jack.... I learned to say "Hello Jay"
instead.
And yes the law is clear -- you cannot knowingly sell to or support a long list of
products to Iran... If you suspect a violation of the law you must not play.....
Until the advent of drones you would be the only target of legal actions so
just say not if you think this is an issue.
Sorry for not rhyming this... that would be true Poetic Justice.
Hate to bust your bubble buddy but American police as far a New Zealand or any other countries laws are concerned are nothing but bloody tourists. It is illegal to hand over evidence to visting tourists and let them take it out of the country.......t tourists stole a copy infringing other peoples copyrights doesn't mean that work now permanently loses copyright protection.
This could be interesting.....
Further if "tourists" made copies of copyrighted material and then transported the same across international borders these tourists are in trouble. News at eleven....
They give you an unrealistic dead line.
bugs are to be expected.
But what is unreasonable?
One metric for a largish task is documented in TeX.
D. Knuth commented that the test code took ten times as much work as the code itself. Even so bugs were found.
This tells me that most bids are 1/10 the cost of bug free code.
I bet Siri could solve it.
All the voice tools out there could be harnessed to this sad end.
If I had mod points today, I would have modded you up. How does this relate to tech or IT?
Well I have moderator points.. /. is in a word "education".
What this has to do with
The foundations of tech is education and open knowledge.
Those that wage war on education wage war on us all.
In this micro slice of the world that is /. we tolerate a lot. We enjoy rants and debate.
This article shies a light on a part of the world where intolerance is the norm and expected.
Pay attention.... This is important.
I'm a resident of Utah. The DEA has been talking about stuff like this literally since the technology came about. I'm not surprised they are trying to get the Legislature to authorize it, they just had to get a county to buy in on it. But I am surprised it took them this long to find a county willing. Frankly the counties do a LOT of seizures and probably make a tidy profit on it but these cameras are going to make the DEA more interested in letting people pass so they can track them later so that's probably why it took this long to get ........
There just aren't that many roads across the Sierra's and as a result I-15 before it reaches I-70 becomes an ideal candidate for scanning and data collection. All you'd need is another camera in Arizona before it reaches Phoenix and you could cover almost 100% of the drug traffic out of southern California.
As I said, there's been articles every few months in the local papers talking about it for the last couple decades with a big focus on tracking repeat users of the highway the last few years. As soon as I saw the report it wasn't hard to put it together.
But, but, but...how does this really work.
If you have a list of tag numbers you scan only them and discard all the other vehicle tag data at the get go.
If you do not have a list of suspect tag ID's then it involves massive survelience of the population that is likely 99.99% not involved in drug trafficking. Especially so if the issue is interstate commerce involving drugs.
I do suspect that there is some data mining scheme [il]logic here where someone believes this data could be mined for suspects. However the logic may be very wrong... Cats are furry mammals thus all fury mammals are cats. The same analysis that puts all the drug traffic on this highway also puts all vehicular commerce to and from So. Cal on the same road.
So like a wiretap a "target" needs to be identified and a warrant processed for this to be other than a fishing machine.
Much the same problem exists with real fishing. Whales, turtles, proposes are caught and killed in great numbers by commercial fishing methods. If I believe the Greenpeace kid 40% of the animals caught and killed are tossed back.
The number of false accusations and the legal fall out from them could bankrupt the state and countiy legal system.
Storage for two years is idiotic because a single court case would cause the data to be retained for the court case and any appeal involved. This could stretch out to twenty or more years. This is just the drug cases. The data would be of interest for civil cases, divorce. It may also be forced to be retained in any challenge to the existence of the data itself (catch 22ish).
It is the power consumption silly... and asymmetric is OK.
We as a group are quite pleases with "COMPUTERS"
where graphics and raw horsepower is needed. Further we
are interested in what happens when the bug is pegged at
100%.
However like automobiles where a hybrid car can sit at
a stop light and sip power to keep the radio active and
then respond when the light changes.
HOWEVER the OS folk are well stuck on SMP system
design and all that flows from there.
The OS should run on a very low power device perhaps
a bit more than a simple state machine. I/O should be
tied to quick responsive engines with no FPU....
Computation intensive work can run on what runs it
best....
The point is that there are a lot of transistors today but
the easy solution involves cut and paste + glue. Building
a power friendly system requires much more design and
is harder to program at first. Then there is the problem where
the differences get in the way and we begin to see N! different
design spaces.
INMOS had it close back in the '80s with the Transputer
but that is a distraction.
Strange as it may seem to people outside the profession, most physicians are more concerned about health than litigation. Remember, these are guys who swear to a Hippocratic-style oath based on the tenet, "First, do no harm." And physicians are likely to recognize and respect that their patients may not wish not to place others--and particularly their own children or grandchildren--at any kind of risk.
In practice, the risk from legal liability from consequences of this kind of exposure is pretty small. Consequences are not certain, and if they occur it would likely be years after exposure, and the type of harm most likely to result could arise from other causes. It would be very difficult to make a strong legal case that the exposure was at fault.
I don't understand what point you are trying to make about alpha emitters. These are unlikely to be detected in this manner anyway, so they are irrelevant to the topic at hand. The isotopes most associated with thyroid damage are I-125 and I-131 (the latter of which is used medically), which concentrate in the thyroid and emit gamma and fairly high energy beta, which would be potentially detectable. And I don't think that anybody is suggesting that X-ray analysis of pipelines should not be done, so I don't understand what this has to do with anything.
Two things are involved here: advice and care. ..... etc.
My comment was focused on advice not care. In a litigious world
it is good advice to stay clear of children, pregnant women
Imaging of welds requires a strong as heck source of X-rays
and the electric powered X-ray tube technology used for bones and tissue
imaging does not match the needs. So there are two common
sources of dense radioactive material that could be diverted. Medical and Industrial.
try a .22 rimfire, more reliable.
A nail gun is less of a threat and has uses around the home.
Number of medical tests every year using enough radioactive tracers to trigger a radiation detector: ~10 million.
Number of terrorist attacks in the world involving radioactive material: ~1*
You think 1/10 million is a reasonable suspicion?
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko
Aha, there is the rub. As lethal as it was these detectors would not detect the isotope used to kill Alexander. Revisit your link with the question: "Why was it so difficult to diagnose and verify. The hospital had and has a full nuclear medicine facility. I.e. it was fully equipped, far better than the mobile detector system involved in this traffic stop. And did they call in hazmat equipped assistance? If no hazmat then no probable cause. I.e they did not perceive a hazzard.
?...... It is not uncommon for patients to be cautioned to keep their distance from kids and women who might be pregnant. Isotopes used for medical purposes mostly decay rapidly, but particularly early on, they can emit well above background. .....
While true it is necessary to explore the level of caution being exercised in such cases.
In the litigation happy world we live in the caution applies more to the legal liability than the risk from radiation. I.E. the risk of litigation is so very high there is often more attention given it then the patient.
Worse this may be justified because by and large too many M.D.s fall in the set of social behaviors that would send you home under risk conditions that some would call unacceptable.
The doses for thyroid and prostrate distruction are high. They involve alpha emitters that are difficult to detect if not impossible by these detection techniques. X-ray bombs for weld quality verifications are very dangerous (powerful) and do get lost from time to time. We could an these bombs -at the risk of many more San Bruno style gas line ruptures.
"evidence of a crime having been committed". In the case the evidence was of a crime .......
Given how rare it is for people's cars to give off radiation, and the potential for such radiation to indicate that a catastrophic crime is about to be committed, a police officer would be highly negligent if he didn't stop and investigate such a car.
I wanted to let this pass.....but.
The levels and isotopes involved while easy to detect are clearly not a safety hazzard to the public.
Building sensors to detect a truck full of banannas or even lamp mantles is the easy bit.
What is hard is detecting a cobalt 60 X-ray source transported in an approved transport pig.
The stuff that scares me and should scare us all is insanely difficult to handle, easy to shield,
and orders of magnitude more intense than any medical treatment would present.
While the phrase is overused this is theater....
From WP: /adtk/), commonly referred to as photographic memory,
"Eidetic memory (
is a medical term, popularly defined as the ability to recall images, sounds, or
objects in memory with extreme precision and in abundant volume."
I would assert(tm) that the class of programmers a company like Google hires
would have Eidetic memory to one degree or another. Fundamental patterns
would stick and be used little different that humming a tune in the shower.
"Double double toil and trouble fire burn and cauldron bubble... " I would further
assert(R) that despite the geekish bent of this community a very large number
could continue for nine line and perhaps a lot more.
If nine lines is worth billions then programming is in trouble as a profession
except for those that live like mushrooms.
AND most importantly these qualities could hold an individual hostage to the
point that an employer that wishes to enforce copyright must continue to
pay these employees full and fair for the reasonable legal length of such copyrights
if they wish to enforce such limitations to this degree.
Scarlett Johansson in her cat suit -full screen.
I rest my case.
......
Yes sir. Needs a BIG screen.
There is a corner in bankruptcy where a vendor that fails
to deliver product in a way that hobbles a company from
making money to repay that vendor can find themselves
liable for more than they bargained for.
While most US student loans are guaranteed by the federal gvmt
the school could find that the guarantee is void because they blocked
the student from working.
Student loans like home loans were granted with no consideration of
the true ability to pay the loan back. The honest wages that
some degrees might qualify a graduate for might fall under the poverty
level after a couple kids yet the loan is in keeping with a high paying
executive level dotcom/startup lottery ticket winner.
There are dead beats out there and they need to pay back
a little or a lot. Sadly the terms of many loans are so good
that paying the loan back does not make financial sense to
someone with a sharp pencil .
University finances are out of control.... it is not a light dance shoe that will drop.
No the judge has reserved this for himself.
My memory is that the Judge charged the jury to rule on the assumption
that APSs can be. The good news for most of the tech community is
that European courts have ruled that they cannot.
If the judge rules that APIs can be then an entire industry moves away ......
from the US and all the US programmers will need to renounce their citizenship
and emigrate to other nations. I have a short list of places I would love
to live in. Some nations have good health care laws and
This can be resolved by congress! One would note that congress has the
power to pass laws that sort this out -- and they should. They also
need to kill the Mouse tangle.
Actually, I was pretty sure because we had computer images that showed the hole, showed it was growing over time, and most importantly we could reproduce the effects of CFCs on ozone in a lab instead of just in a computer simulation. It also helps that we didn't have to dismantle civilization to get rid of CFCs.
Computer images????????
Perhaps sensor data displayed on a computer I/O device.
Let us not confuse the display technology with the data.
Plots made with pen and ink or plots made quicker with a
machine all depend on data points.
Like it or not we are changing the earth.
And we do not understand the natural swing of global climate.
We can quibble all we want but we do not know if a natural change
will feed or starve millions in the next ten years let alone the next five
generations. Muddy that with the masses of human excrement we are
producing and stink who knows.
Speaking of poo, I once had cause to look at a climate model code.
In the code was "PI=3.14". The reason I had it was a parallel run
mis compare in the 19th decimal digit when doubling the CPU count.
Gaia knows, GIGO.
....snip....
NC is trying to protect their licensing revenue, and just for laughs, their policies are based on a combination of hokum and paid-for "advice" from big agro. Check for yourself. You know enough now to do that. Google scholar and medline are two good places to start.
I looked fo but did not find qualification for licensing criteria.
Without training and criteria the state is on fragile footing.
One phrase caught my eye where medical practices are equated with dietician services. I wonder what medical privileges are confirmed by the license.
Given the range of fools out there I think the only hope is universal Obamacare.
I think it is the legal and moral responsibility for mothers and fathers to practice nutrition.
This action makes no sense and MUST be balanced by banning all books and school health
clases that present health information. History bookers must be purged of all references
to Limies and why British seamen were called "Limies". Further dictionaries must be purged
of references to rickets, palegra, scurvy, etc.