If they ever get a commercial fusion reactor, the "waste" heat would be more than sufficient for you to recycle garbage into ultra-pure reservoirs of the elements within it. The radiation might alter a few of them in the process (you can turn platinum into gold even in fission reactors, it's just kinda pointless).
It's an interesting idea and there should be a way to make it work, but previous attempts at injecting water into geothermally active areas have tended to cause mini earthquakes. It would take some doing to get it right and I'm not sure I'm inclined to trust the companies capable of the drilling necessary.
I'd have thought using the LLVM as a baseline and writing a new language to work on top of it would be easier than writing a new VM. It's a decent framework.
However, writing a new VM wouldn't be such a bad idea - Java's VM has evolved over a very long time (Sun had originally developed it for controlling appliances) and it carries a lot of cruft as a result. This is why it has only recently started to improve on threading, garbage collection is difficult to configure well, Swing is based on AWT and why Java applets have largely been abandoned in favour of Javascript + XML despite being theoretically more powerful (if signed) and theoretically faster (it's compiled into bytecode rather than interpreted). Java also isn't pure OO - it's faster, yes, but it's much harder to debug mixed-style languages because you lose clarity.
Oracle have threatened to sue anyone and their aunt Mildred if they step out of line on the Java standard or violate any Java-related patent. Apache needs a JVM-type system to run Tomcat and Debian will supply patentware over their collective dead bodies (once an open-source license for dead bodies is agreed upon). Red Hat knows this. Red Hat also knows that commercial vendors like Adobe (Cold Fusion runs on JRun, a servlet engine) like Java because nothing makes for bigger profits than free. Patent-based lock-ins don't usually mean free. Sun killed JScript, sure, but we're talking proprietary extensions and a platform-specific compiler designed by Microsoft for the sole purpose of killing Java. It was a digital gunfight and it's not surprising Sun used the guns it had.
Oracle, on the other hand, already uses proprietary extensions (they bought JRockit and it has all kinds of weird stuff), platform-specific compilers (you'll notice real-time Java isn't available for that many OS') and proprietary implementations (JDK7 doesn't include some of Oracle's accelerations to JDK6). Language dilution - and the inevitable long-term death of Java as a result - isn't an issue for them. They're not using patents to protect Java, but to protect a virtual monopoly.
We're lucky to have those in museums. The only "complete" Saturn V was left out in the rain with zero protection and zero maintenance. It is getting a major overhaul now, but we nearly lost irreplaceable history there. (Next time someone in the US says that it has less history than other countries, stop and consider how close we came to losing one of the most significant pieces in the 20th century. Then consider how much has indeed been lost through negligence or lack of resources. Then consider slapping the person because it's in believing there's nothing historically important that there's so very little historically important left.)
I'd suggest something akin to the Charter system that the BBC in the UK operates under: freedom to do what the hell they like with such-and-such as the objective of the charter, no Governmental interference (other than charter renewal), none of the restrictions Government departments would normally operate under (such as copyright and patent restrictions, civil service rules, etc etc) and the right to hire the top brass without imposition of a selected appointee.
This system of a para-public organization (a hybrid of public and private) actually works quite impressively - you've the resources only a Government can amass combined with much of the efficiency you get in the private sector, with enough influence from both camps to limit the corruption either would bring on its own.
Yes, it does also have quite a few drawbacks (the BBC is effectively answerable only for charter violatations - it is otherwise a State in miniature unto itself - with the upshot that it's incredibly hard to beat the stupids out of it).
There's also the political consequences. In the US, I cannot imagine the military being thrilled with the idea of NASA becoming a virtual State with all the power and authority (and autonomy) that implies. I can't imagine the political parties being too happy either. Besides, if NASA were to become independent in such a manner and do so successfully, other Federally-funded activities might be inclined to join suit. You could end up with half of any given budget being contractually obligated with no room for political posturing.
That depended. If you were in a college that taught according to the market (ie: Java and web applications) rather than according to the discipline, you were ruined.
If you were in a college that gave you a flexible background, skills that were transferrable across the industry, and exposure to a range of languages, you could find work that paid damn well after the crash.
Colleges should NEVER focus on what the marker wants this week. Even without the crash, what's wanted today will NOT be what's wanted 4 years down the road and won't even begin to resemble what's wanted when you're 20-30 years in. If you want to survive in an industry that evolves faster than you can learn a new skill, you have to have learned all the skills you will ever need in the business by the time you step out into the world. Everything beyond that point HAS to be pure reference work for the latest syntax. Do that and the market is irrelevant. You will always be employable.
Hmmm. If the US bombs the UN for saying the US isn't all about freedom, and the UN is on US soil, will the US have to retaliate against the US for bombing the US?
Yes in that if the US can't (and won't) live up to the standards it claims to set, then other governments are entitled to ask if those standards are achievable or even desirable.
No in that if the front-runner drops out of the race, you still won't win by joining them.
It is the publicists and the control freaks who can't. Building a nuclear reactor that is extremely safe is trivial. Building one that is fundamentally incapable of a meltdown is harder but doable. Building fail-safe technology isn't hard. Designing for catastrophe (which, in the UK and US, means assuming all of the worst-case scenarios happen simultaneously) already happens. Fault-tolerant designs (ie: ones that are intended to function even when things go wrong) have existed for decades. The technology isn't the problem. The technology is a cinch.
The problems are:
People want cheap solutions, not good ones, which is why Americans prefer Black Lung and an undersea New York to replacing coal.
People want quick solutions, not good ones, and quick is always the enemy of quality.
Businesses want big profits. See "cheap" and "quick", then double the severity.
Shareholders want big profits too, and dividends depend on what's left after the big bonus checks and luxury cruises.
Lobbyists get paid by said businesses and shareholders, not by sane, rational people.
Every time someone complains about taxes being used for environmental protection, scientific research or education (ie: 99.5% of all Tea Party statements) they are saying that the insignificant amount they save is more important than the consequences of a failure. I disagree. If it took doubling taxes to make existing power stations environmentally safe and capable of handling catastrophic situations, I'd say go for it. To hell with the complaints, the whiners will complain if there's any tax at all and very few people are interested in dying on the whiners' behalf.
To be fair, TEPCO was saying almost nothing, the IAEA was scolding them and usually when that combination happens it's Big And Scary Stuff for real. The media had absolutely no meaningful facts to give and they had no scientists to ask because they were complaining about a lack of information too,
This is as much a PR disaster as a nuclear one, probably more so. TEPCO should have given clear, honest, concise data at all times, damn any theories about panic (people panic when they're ignorant). They should have said clearly what was known, what wasn't known and what they intended to do about the unknowns. They failed in all regards.
Deuterium is stable and tritium decays rapidly. Insofar as radioactive hydrogen was concerned, there was zero to worry about. Other gasses - well, those might have been a problem, depends on what isotopes were expected. That is plant-specific. My guess is that there would have been no high-level radioactive material and no more low-level material than was being spilled into the oceans.
The difference, of course, is that air contamination gets big scary media reports and ocean contamination can be downplayed.
The sensible thing would have been to vent directly to the atmosphere. If they couldn't do that, then having the hydrogen chemically react with something - anything - as it was being vented would have been a good alternative. There wasn't the slightest possibility of anything catastrophic even if they burned the hydrogen off.
Their tactics were solely and purely a media play and had nothing to do with the crisis itself.
Novell's sale to Microsoft of various technologies has come under investigation I believe. Nonetheless, we need something/someone to monitor events. However, I'd suggest that groklaw would be the wrong forum - for now. We need to know intentions, motives, attitudes, not whether it's actually legal or not. This needs more of a private investigator or investigative journalist. Sadly, those aren't the people who tend to be interested in open and honest. Unless you can find a way of bringing Jeremy Brett back from the dead and turn him into a real consulting detective.
Slashdot Mirror
They say they won't create any fake accounts. So presumably they've already created them. In which case, you can skip step 2.
Don't see ab excercises on the list.
If they ever get a commercial fusion reactor, the "waste" heat would be more than sufficient for you to recycle garbage into ultra-pure reservoirs of the elements within it. The radiation might alter a few of them in the process (you can turn platinum into gold even in fission reactors, it's just kinda pointless).
It's an interesting idea and there should be a way to make it work, but previous attempts at injecting water into geothermally active areas have tended to cause mini earthquakes. It would take some doing to get it right and I'm not sure I'm inclined to trust the companies capable of the drilling necessary.
I'd have thought using the LLVM as a baseline and writing a new language to work on top of it would be easier than writing a new VM. It's a decent framework.
However, writing a new VM wouldn't be such a bad idea - Java's VM has evolved over a very long time (Sun had originally developed it for controlling appliances) and it carries a lot of cruft as a result. This is why it has only recently started to improve on threading, garbage collection is difficult to configure well, Swing is based on AWT and why Java applets have largely been abandoned in favour of Javascript + XML despite being theoretically more powerful (if signed) and theoretically faster (it's compiled into bytecode rather than interpreted). Java also isn't pure OO - it's faster, yes, but it's much harder to debug mixed-style languages because you lose clarity.
Oracle have threatened to sue anyone and their aunt Mildred if they step out of line on the Java standard or violate any Java-related patent. Apache needs a JVM-type system to run Tomcat and Debian will supply patentware over their collective dead bodies (once an open-source license for dead bodies is agreed upon). Red Hat knows this. Red Hat also knows that commercial vendors like Adobe (Cold Fusion runs on JRun, a servlet engine) like Java because nothing makes for bigger profits than free. Patent-based lock-ins don't usually mean free. Sun killed JScript, sure, but we're talking proprietary extensions and a platform-specific compiler designed by Microsoft for the sole purpose of killing Java. It was a digital gunfight and it's not surprising Sun used the guns it had.
Oracle, on the other hand, already uses proprietary extensions (they bought JRockit and it has all kinds of weird stuff), platform-specific compilers (you'll notice real-time Java isn't available for that many OS') and proprietary implementations (JDK7 doesn't include some of Oracle's accelerations to JDK6). Language dilution - and the inevitable long-term death of Java as a result - isn't an issue for them. They're not using patents to protect Java, but to protect a virtual monopoly.
2. Invade the 12 colonies during peace talks
Was that really running Windows or just WINE?
So very true and so very problematical.
Considering the teacher has been trying this for 5 years, the school principal is probably on the board of directors of one of the manufacturers.
Medical News Update: Computer geeks are subject to brain scrambling via the Hall Effect.
You could give it an MRI.
We're lucky to have those in museums. The only "complete" Saturn V was left out in the rain with zero protection and zero maintenance. It is getting a major overhaul now, but we nearly lost irreplaceable history there. (Next time someone in the US says that it has less history than other countries, stop and consider how close we came to losing one of the most significant pieces in the 20th century. Then consider how much has indeed been lost through negligence or lack of resources. Then consider slapping the person because it's in believing there's nothing historically important that there's so very little historically important left.)
I'd suggest something akin to the Charter system that the BBC in the UK operates under: freedom to do what the hell they like with such-and-such as the objective of the charter, no Governmental interference (other than charter renewal), none of the restrictions Government departments would normally operate under (such as copyright and patent restrictions, civil service rules, etc etc) and the right to hire the top brass without imposition of a selected appointee.
This system of a para-public organization (a hybrid of public and private) actually works quite impressively - you've the resources only a Government can amass combined with much of the efficiency you get in the private sector, with enough influence from both camps to limit the corruption either would bring on its own.
Yes, it does also have quite a few drawbacks (the BBC is effectively answerable only for charter violatations - it is otherwise a State in miniature unto itself - with the upshot that it's incredibly hard to beat the stupids out of it).
There's also the political consequences. In the US, I cannot imagine the military being thrilled with the idea of NASA becoming a virtual State with all the power and authority (and autonomy) that implies. I can't imagine the political parties being too happy either. Besides, if NASA were to become independent in such a manner and do so successfully, other Federally-funded activities might be inclined to join suit. You could end up with half of any given budget being contractually obligated with no room for political posturing.
5/10 for half of the joke from Regular Show.
That depends on how high the floor was and whether the CFO had the skills to wipe camera footage.
That depended. If you were in a college that taught according to the market (ie: Java and web applications) rather than according to the discipline, you were ruined.
If you were in a college that gave you a flexible background, skills that were transferrable across the industry, and exposure to a range of languages, you could find work that paid damn well after the crash.
Colleges should NEVER focus on what the marker wants this week. Even without the crash, what's wanted today will NOT be what's wanted 4 years down the road and won't even begin to resemble what's wanted when you're 20-30 years in. If you want to survive in an industry that evolves faster than you can learn a new skill, you have to have learned all the skills you will ever need in the business by the time you step out into the world. Everything beyond that point HAS to be pure reference work for the latest syntax. Do that and the market is irrelevant. You will always be employable.
Hmmm. If the US bombs the UN for saying the US isn't all about freedom, and the UN is on US soil, will the US have to retaliate against the US for bombing the US?
Yes in that if the US can't (and won't) live up to the standards it claims to set, then other governments are entitled to ask if those standards are achievable or even desirable.
No in that if the front-runner drops out of the race, you still won't win by joining them.
They were experimenting to see if it causes mutations.
Assuming the Library of Congress to be at STP, how many LoCs is this new chilli?
It is the publicists and the control freaks who can't. Building a nuclear reactor that is extremely safe is trivial. Building one that is fundamentally incapable of a meltdown is harder but doable. Building fail-safe technology isn't hard. Designing for catastrophe (which, in the UK and US, means assuming all of the worst-case scenarios happen simultaneously) already happens. Fault-tolerant designs (ie: ones that are intended to function even when things go wrong) have existed for decades. The technology isn't the problem. The technology is a cinch.
The problems are:
Every time someone complains about taxes being used for environmental protection, scientific research or education (ie: 99.5% of all Tea Party statements) they are saying that the insignificant amount they save is more important than the consequences of a failure. I disagree. If it took doubling taxes to make existing power stations environmentally safe and capable of handling catastrophic situations, I'd say go for it. To hell with the complaints, the whiners will complain if there's any tax at all and very few people are interested in dying on the whiners' behalf.
To be fair, TEPCO was saying almost nothing, the IAEA was scolding them and usually when that combination happens it's Big And Scary Stuff for real. The media had absolutely no meaningful facts to give and they had no scientists to ask because they were complaining about a lack of information too,
This is as much a PR disaster as a nuclear one, probably more so. TEPCO should have given clear, honest, concise data at all times, damn any theories about panic (people panic when they're ignorant). They should have said clearly what was known, what wasn't known and what they intended to do about the unknowns. They failed in all regards.
Deuterium is stable and tritium decays rapidly. Insofar as radioactive hydrogen was concerned, there was zero to worry about. Other gasses - well, those might have been a problem, depends on what isotopes were expected. That is plant-specific. My guess is that there would have been no high-level radioactive material and no more low-level material than was being spilled into the oceans.
The difference, of course, is that air contamination gets big scary media reports and ocean contamination can be downplayed.
The sensible thing would have been to vent directly to the atmosphere. If they couldn't do that, then having the hydrogen chemically react with something - anything - as it was being vented would have been a good alternative. There wasn't the slightest possibility of anything catastrophic even if they burned the hydrogen off.
Their tactics were solely and purely a media play and had nothing to do with the crisis itself.
Novell's sale to Microsoft of various technologies has come under investigation I believe. Nonetheless, we need something/someone to monitor events. However, I'd suggest that groklaw would be the wrong forum - for now. We need to know intentions, motives, attitudes, not whether it's actually legal or not. This needs more of a private investigator or investigative journalist. Sadly, those aren't the people who tend to be interested in open and honest. Unless you can find a way of bringing Jeremy Brett back from the dead and turn him into a real consulting detective.