Surprised nobody here has mentioned Adventure Game Studio yet. It's free, runs on Windows. Ports are available for linux and mac. Some pretty great games have been made with it, including the excellent Sierra classic remakes by AGD Interactive. If you want something more old school, there is also ScummVM. It's mainly used to run old games by enthusiasts, but it can probably be used to develop new games as well.
No user changeable battery. I push my phone quite hard and although battery life is better than what my friend's iPhone seems to get eventually that battery will wear out, and I want to be able to change it.
No SD card, and I need iTunes just to access the damn thing. The amount Apple charges for an extra 16GB is outrageous, more than I can get a 64GB SD card for.
Agreed. This is annoying, and apparently a trend for many products. You can't browse a Canon DSLR with Finder either. However, it appears linux has a solution. Not sure how long it will take for this to make its way to Windows, but it should eventually.
Lack of multitasking. I often want to copy/paste from the browser to Colornote or an email but on iOS you have to close each app before going to the other one. There are no background apps either, for instance I use a GPS logger while I am taking photos on my DSLR so I can geotag them later and it does it quietly while I can look at maps etc. without closing it.
Complete bullshit. I multitask all the time on the iPad. Skype runs in the background, happily draining the crap out the battery, and receives calls/chats while I'm doing something else. So does Vtok, which I use for gmail.
Poor screen. The iPad 2 screen is only 1024x768, too small for web browsing IMHO. I upgraded my old Thinkpad laptop because the screen was only 1024 pixels wide and would never want to go back to anything under 1280 now. My 12.5" Let's Note is 1400 pixels which seems to be about the right DPI.
The screen isn't poor. Far from it, actually, because it is an IPS display. It's better than a typical laptop screen. But yes, the resolution is low. I have mixed feelings about it. It does make things a bit crowded for web browsing and such, but I think a higher resolution would make the text much harder to read on a small screen. Your 12.5" screen comparison is almost 3" larger than the iPad. 1024 pixels is perfectly sufficient for movies and looking at pictures, though.
Expensive accessories and peripherals. Apple charges silly money and seem to be keeping official 3rd party prices high too.
So don't buy them. Seriously, why do you need them? I don't use any peripherals for the iPad. It works fine. The only thing I have considered is a keyboard, but any bluetooth keyboard should suffice. You don't need to buy that from Apple.
Page display in the browser. Android has reformatted pages since day one to make them readable on a phone screen, but iOS doesn't seem to do it.
No idea what you are talking about. Websites need to have a mobile stylesheet. If they do, Safari works just as well whatever Android has (Chrome?). If you mean that Android intentionally reformats pages that don't have a mobile layout, that is indeed a novel feature.
My post was in the context of restoring apps that have been discontinued/broken in newer versions of [desktop environment]. Not to simply upgrade the desktop environment and migrate to new apps.
The point is nobody ever does that. I have never done it. GP has never done it. Nobody here (except you, apparently) has ever needed to do that. This must be some seriously precious software if you need it that badly. For everybody else, if it isn't being actively developed anymore, there is likely a better alternative available.
I find that on Windows, app developers are exceedingly lazy. They originally develop their software for a target, say Win95, and then they never update the app ever. They just rebundle and call it new version X! And because Microsoft maintains backwards-compatibility so well, this actually works the majority of the time (there were issues for some with XP service packs and Vista/7 upgrades). So if new features are introduced, dialogs refactored, library cruft removed, older functions deprecated in favor of newer functions that do the same thing better, all things that can make the app run better and more smoothly (especially with respect to things like hardware utilization), none of that gets used by the app, because they never clean it up and get rid of the crap. If it breaks, they are forced to. But since it doesn't, they don't bother.
1) The mortality rate was not 95%. It was more like 50%. Still high, but not that high.
2) You need more information than the mortality rate for risk assessment. You need number of cases and distribution through the population. For example, if 75% of the cases are in immunocompromised individuals, the mortality rate will be high, but not reflective of what it would do in a healthy population. Similarly, genetic differences in the individuals can affect the outcome of infection.
3) Replicating this research requires specialized equipment and training. It's not something somebody can do in a garage. These findings are the result of 10 yrs. of research spanning multiple labs and many millions of dollars of funding. It would be far easier for a bioterrorist to cultivate some Cryptosporidium and dump it in the water supply, or any number of other well-known virulent pathogens.
4) This research has a number of very useful applications in the public health sector: from screening activities to treatment and vaccine development to understanding some fundamental virology that can aid our ability to combat other unrelated strains. Keeping the research classified would inhibit all of these efforts, just to protect against the very slim possibility that it would aid bioterrorism. I think that is a big mistake.
Uhhh, why? Are you responsible for the budget? What does it matter to you what software they use? Just because you think your choice is superior, based on your "objective evaluation" doesn't mean it is. I can argue that everybody should use the GIMP, but the graphic artists are going to want Photoshop. It's not my place to tell them they can't use Photoshop if that is what they prefer. Nothing wrong with making your recommendation, but at the end of the day it's just that, a recommendation.
Hmm, well, there's a lot of trolling here for sure, but further down in the article he does make this point:
Here's an easy test: Is the standard proposed by IT higher for what you want than for what IT provisions? Take mobile -- if encryption or app revocation is required on smartphones, it should also be required on laptops that hold much more sensitive information. An honest requirement should be enforced equitably.
I'm not an IT guy, so I have no response to this. But his argument makes sense to me....
You know, it's interesting that you say this because people pop up occasionally on Slashdot wondering about open source licenses and trying to convince their bosses/partners to open source code. GPL is certainly not universally applicable, but I can see situations where companies should actually prefer it over other licenses. I think a lot of scientific software falls into this category. If you are selling an HPLC, for example, the money you are making is on the hardware and support. The software you just charge an arm and a leg for because it is expensive to custom develop for your own instrument, and you have to pay people who really understand how to do the data analysis properly (for GLP, for example). However, a GPL'd application would not only be able to use a lot of already GPL'd code, making development costs cheaper, but competitors would also not be able to use it unless they contributed back the code they added to make it work with their own instruments or to customize the workflow in a particular way. So you have multiple companies competing to offer the best/cheapest instrument, but cooperating on the software because the redundancy is expensive and it makes it hard to move data around, which is being done a lot more these days than it ever used to.
If you are interested in something a little bit different from "the usual," I would have a look at the International diaspora Engagement Alliance. It is an interesting project, with the potential to have real economic impact in developing nations. There are multiple ways to be involved. Philanthropy is only one of them.
In India, for example, there's no bias against women in technology fields, and as a result you see tons of Indian women in those positions or in tech majors in college, both there and here in the USA. Same goes for China.
While true, it is important to note that the women in those cultures are also still responsible for the household. So they can go to school and become a programmer, but they are still expected to cook, clean, and take care of the children. And in many agrarian societies, the women work in the fields with the men as well as taking care of the household.
2) If you can build a reactor that can't melt down (you can), the fear of meltdowns should no longer be an issue when considering the building of new reactors.
Except it is not. There are ways to do it. This thread is an example of one way. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean they are "doing it wrong."
If the changes to the configuration files are limited, it should be relatively easy to keep track of them. A script could do this easily. Chroot, I think, would be much more complicated because you would have to have everything in the jail (jvm, X libraries) and I don't know if there is a way to prevent somebody from exiting at a shell anyway.
My impression from the question, is that the people developing this application don't actually own the computers in question.
My guess is this is a University or department run lab that doesn't want professors coming in and making a bunch of changes to the computers. They could probably get approval for minor changes that are reversed completely when they are done, though. They aren't going to be able to make any change without root access anyway, so they will need approval whatever they do.
Yes, absolutely. The only problem would be if, like the grandparent said, they could crash or kill the X server in a way that would bring them back to the login screen. If the exam gets aborted, though, that is probably easy to detect, so it might not matter.
The term 'renewable' indicates an energy source that either never runs out or can be indefinitely replaced.
No, that is not what a renewable energy source is. You just made up that definition to support your argument. I believe we call this sophistry.
If you really want to get into it, there are different classes of renewable resources. But the general definition amounts to the replenishment of said resource being on the same timescale as its consumption such that it can be managed in a sustainable way. The sun is not a natural resource. It is simply a requirement for our existence on this planet. The sustainability of the sun is not a worthwhile discussion to be having.
It just takes a lot of time, and we use them far faster than they can be replenished.
That is, in fact, the exact definition of a non-renewable resource. We cannot consume fossil fuels at a rate that allows them to be replenished naturally within a reasonable time frame. In other words, they cannot be sustainably managed and at some point they will be depleted and inaccessible to future generations. So they are not renewable.
First of all, there is a difference between the materials needed to build the generator and the materials needed to run the generator. The cost to building is going to exist for every generator. So you are comparing apples and oranges. Solar will never need fuel, hence the term "renewable." Coal (or oil or gas) will always need fuel.
Second, if there is any need for rare earths (does not mean esoteric, btw), that is only due to a limitation in current technology. As it gets researched, deployed, scaled up, improved upon, etc, the need for these materials could very well lessen or disappear entirely. A coal (or oil or gas) plant will never evolve beyond it's need for fuel.
Uh, well, I think the goal was stated rather clearly.
When the testing app is launched, we need to restrict users from exiting the app so they can't do things like search the internet for answers or use other applications.
So what is a good way to do this? Using a password-protected kiosk mode was suggested as an example.
The goal stated was not: What are a variety of test administration methods we can use to discourage students from cheating and better reflect a real world scenario where they will have reference books handy?
So all of the answers attempting to address the latter goal are completely off-topic.
Well, obviously some change to the OS configuration is going to be necessary. There is no button on any operating system I know of that enables a kiosk mode automagically. The poster wasn't specific about what kind of configuration would be allowed and what wouldn't, though. I assume whole scale changes to the OS are not allowed (ex: installing a different distribution, instituting lockdown policy with gconf, running a vm, configuring a chroot with custom everything, messing with firewall settings, etc), but minor changes to config files (especially ones that don't affect how the machines get used for the most part) should be allowed. Disabling the ttys is something I would consider a minor change, especially since it could be reverted after the exam very easily. For the X server, you don't need to create a special user. Just make a custom.xsession file for them that they can't change. They'll use it to take the exam and delete it when they are done. Simple, nonintrusive, seems like it's exactly what the poster is looking for.
Well, the regulatory burden is immense, but to be fair, the ongoing costs of fuel production, fuel reprocessing (have to build the plants for these too), waste storage (have to build the storage facility), security, inspections, and maintenance does make both the upfront and operating costs of a reactor fairly high relative to other options. The idea, though, is to lessen the upfront cost by building a shared infrastructure, and to offset the operating cost by operating at much higher outputs with more efficient fuel cycles (ex: thorium).
Some of the generation IV reactor designs are still in prototyping stage, so I wouldn't say the engineering is "complete." But it is far enough along to scale up to production. Some work on the engineering side will still need to be done to achieve this. And while the passively safe reactors are less complicated in design than their 1970s counterparts, they still aren't "simple." So I think it is fair to say that nuclear is expensive and complicated compared to, say, coal.
Nuclear, for sure, can work, and it can be safe and it can be clean. It just can't happen tomorrow because it takes a commitment to build the infrastructure and streamline the regulatory requirements, which isn't going to happen with all of the Greenpeace nuts running around pulling crap like this.
Seriously, this is the best answer I have read here so far. It is simple and elegant. No booting custom images, whitelisting sites, or any of that.
Also, gotta love that half of the answers are: just give a different test, who cares about cheating, just install a different operating system, just fail anyone who cheats, yada yada yada. Why do so many Slashdotters always feel like the best answer to a question is "you're doing it wrong"? Sheesh.
The whole point of this action was to show that people can attack nuclear installations,
People can attack chemical plants and military research labs as well. What is your point? Security should not be a problem. If there is a breach, again, it is a regulatory issue, not a technical one (ie: one that is relatively easy to fix). Anyway, a nuclear plant is a horrible terrorist target.
It doesn't matter how old the technology is, if you blow up a reactor, sabotage it to cause a meltdown or just smash something big and heavy into it like an aircraft there is going to be a very big problem.
No, there isn't. That is the whole point of what everybody is trying to tell you. You can't sabotage a modern reactor to cause it to meltdown. It is not possible. That is why it is much safer to use the new designs. Also, the containment buildings of nuclear plants have long been built to anticipate flying a plane into them. They are built to withstand that type of attack.
You also have to consider the potential for accidents and attack on fuel processing sites and transportation. The reactor itself is not the only vulnerability.
A fuel processing facility is basically a reactor. So the security is the same. For transportation, the key is to make sure whatever you are transporting is not a target. The short-lived isotopes (the ones you would want to target for a dirty bomb) can be stored on-site, for example, or they can be encapsulated in a way that makes them useless for terrorists. It's an easy problem to solve if we put the infrastructure in place to do it. The problem is the infrastructure doesn't exist. All attempts to fund/build it have been shutdown by activists.
I think you will find that raping the environment is not Greenpeace's preferred solution.
I think I will find that Greenpeace is ignoring the reality of the situation. If they shutdown all nuclear plants, people aren't suddenly going to switch to solar thermal instead. They are going to switch to coal. I like green energy, by the way. I think it is what we should be moving toward. I just don't think nuclear should be taken off the table. Nuclear is expensive and complicated. When it is economically viable to switch away from it without going to coal, people will. No shenanigans from Greenpeace are necessary.
As Fukushima and Chernobyl have demonstrated the damage can easily run into billions.
I don't think you are paying attention. Fukushima and Chernobyl, both, were using old reactors and old reactor technology. In Chernobyl's case, the reactor safety mechanisms were deliberately disabled. In Fukushima's case, the safety mechanisms operated as expected, but the on-site waste storage (which it was not designed to handle) caused a big problem. In other words, they were operating outside of the safety design of the reactor. Since Fukushima was targeted for decommissioning soon anyway, nobody considered it a priority to move the waste right away. If both Fukushima and Chernobyl had been properly operating within their safety margins (which are big, btw), neither disaster would have happened on such a large scale--Chernobyl's wouldn't have happened at all and Fukushima's would have been very safely contained.
With the new reactor designs, neither accident would have been possible (even with deliberate sabotage by workers at the plant). Combine that with proper waste handling and recycling, and you have a very safe very clean source of energy. If you choose to not use new reactor designs, if you choose not to store the waste properly, then yeah, you have problems. The point is, though, that these problems are completely solvable and/or manageable. There is no inherent unsolvable safety issue with nuclear power. All problems are regulatory and/or political in nature.
Economics is another thing, of course. Building a new plant and a waste storage facility is expensive, and making the ends meet might be a problem (which is why new plants haven't been built). That won't change until people decide that raping the environment with oil/gas/coal solutions and that externalizing those costs is unacceptable. As long as energy is dirt cheap with coal (because of the low regulatory burden), it is more politically expedient to convince people that "clean coal" is the solution. When it becomes more expensive, nuclear will be a much more viable alternative.
Yes, you are right about that. That was originally why I liked Ubuntu so much. In the beginning, it was the only distribution you could pick that would pretty much work with no weird issues. But in the later releases (especially the 10.x series), they've been incorporating more and more experimental stuff that is really buggy. So yeah, I understand the frustration. The 11.x series still has bugs, but it is getting better. So I'm hoping they'll have it pretty much sorted out by the 12.x series. And then more breakage when they make the switch to Wayland. Yay!
There were some pretty buggy releases over the past few cycles which were frustrating, to say the least. I stayed with 9.10 for a while to avoid annoying upgrades, but now here I am at 11.10 and everything seems fine. I vaguely remember a problem with the NVidia drivers in one of the drivers, where certain versions didn't work well with certain hardware, so maybe that's where the screen flickering was coming from. As for the kernel issue, do you have an error message for that or is the screen actually locked up? That would be very unusual, and I would suggest using the older kernel if that works. There is no reason to use the newer one if you don't need it. You can use Startup Manager to make the older kernel the default.
For the second hard disk, you need to set it up to automount. Make sure your fstab entry looks something like this,/dev/sdb1/media/harddisk2 ext4 users 0 0
The default is to automount. If you have anything else for the options (fourth column) it might not automount. Make sure the mountpoint (second column) exists, of course. Spaces in the name will be problematic. Unfortunately there does not appear to be a GUI for doing this, which is odd. I haven't used that Simple Backup utility, but from the website it looks like it will mount the volume for you if it isn't already mounted. So if it isn't doing that, make sure it is configured to go to the right mountpoint and that you have the "users" option in your fstab. I suspect your problem is that you initially mounted it through Gnome, which uses gvfs and not fstab. This automatically creates the mountpoint for you and does not pay attention to fstab. Then you configured Simple Backup to use that mountpoint. Normally this would be fine, but when you log out or shut down the computer, gvfs unmounts everything and removes any mountpoints it created. So when you start up again, the mountpoint doesn't exist, and even with an entry in fstab it can't automount, and Simple Backup can't mount it either. So just, sudo mkdir/media/harddisk2 (or whatever) to create a persistent mountpoint that both fstab and Simple Backup can use for mounting.
As for the version of Ubuntu...well, the thing is, the desktop is an evolving and changing target. There are bugs in releases, like the ones you are encountering, that are fixed in future releases. There are also usability enhancements, like handling devices, in future releases. So if you insist on using an older release, you are going to have problems that may have already been fixed. The sound latency is one of the problems with the 10.x series of Ubuntu, due to the new Pulseaudio that was introduced, that does not seem to be a problem in 11.x now that it has had a chance to mature a bit. If you don't like Unity, well, you can try Mint. That seems to be popular; I haven't used it. But I have been using Unity for a while now, and it works fine for me. I can understand how it might disrupt people with specific workflows. But if all you really need to do is web browsing, email, music, and movies, I don't see why Unity should be much of a hindrance.
The key point of your statistic is "per-passenger-mile". It's high for Amtrak because there are fewer passengers for Amtrak. Why? Because Amtrak generally sucks! If rail travel in the US wasn't so utterly miserable to start with, I think more passengers would opt for it and the cost would come down accordingly. To get a sense of how much of an effect that has, look at the difference in number between Commercial Aviation (3.03 in 2001), which is the category for a typical commercial airline, and General Aviation (89.72 in 2001) which is everything else (personal aircraft, charter, skydiving, etc). Also, Amtrak could probably offset it's costs a bit if it carried mail and freight, much like most of the commercial airlines. Passengers are expensive, and it's hard to make money if that is all you are doing.
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Surprised nobody here has mentioned Adventure Game Studio yet. It's free, runs on Windows. Ports are available for linux and mac. Some pretty great games have been made with it, including the excellent Sierra classic remakes by AGD Interactive. If you want something more old school, there is also ScummVM. It's mainly used to run old games by enthusiasts, but it can probably be used to develop new games as well.
No user changeable battery. I push my phone quite hard and although battery life is better than what my friend's iPhone seems to get eventually that battery will wear out, and I want to be able to change it.
Are you talking about phones or tablets? Because the Asus Transformer (your pick) does not have a user replaceable battery. If you have AppleCare, you get free battery replacement for two years from Apple for the iPad, and after that it costs $99.
No SD card, and I need iTunes just to access the damn thing. The amount Apple charges for an extra 16GB is outrageous, more than I can get a 64GB SD card for.
Agreed. This is annoying, and apparently a trend for many products. You can't browse a Canon DSLR with Finder either. However, it appears linux has a solution. Not sure how long it will take for this to make its way to Windows, but it should eventually.
Lack of multitasking. I often want to copy/paste from the browser to Colornote or an email but on iOS you have to close each app before going to the other one. There are no background apps either, for instance I use a GPS logger while I am taking photos on my DSLR so I can geotag them later and it does it quietly while I can look at maps etc. without closing it.
Complete bullshit. I multitask all the time on the iPad. Skype runs in the background, happily draining the crap out the battery, and receives calls/chats while I'm doing something else. So does Vtok, which I use for gmail.
Poor screen. The iPad 2 screen is only 1024x768, too small for web browsing IMHO. I upgraded my old Thinkpad laptop because the screen was only 1024 pixels wide and would never want to go back to anything under 1280 now. My 12.5" Let's Note is 1400 pixels which seems to be about the right DPI.
The screen isn't poor. Far from it, actually, because it is an IPS display. It's better than a typical laptop screen. But yes, the resolution is low. I have mixed feelings about it. It does make things a bit crowded for web browsing and such, but I think a higher resolution would make the text much harder to read on a small screen. Your 12.5" screen comparison is almost 3" larger than the iPad. 1024 pixels is perfectly sufficient for movies and looking at pictures, though.
Expensive accessories and peripherals. Apple charges silly money and seem to be keeping official 3rd party prices high too.
So don't buy them. Seriously, why do you need them? I don't use any peripherals for the iPad. It works fine. The only thing I have considered is a keyboard, but any bluetooth keyboard should suffice. You don't need to buy that from Apple.
Page display in the browser. Android has reformatted pages since day one to make them readable on a phone screen, but iOS doesn't seem to do it.
No idea what you are talking about. Websites need to have a mobile stylesheet. If they do, Safari works just as well whatever Android has (Chrome?). If you mean that Android intentionally reformats pages that don't have a mobile layout, that is indeed a novel feature.
My post was in the context of restoring apps that have been discontinued/broken in newer versions of [desktop environment]. Not to simply upgrade the desktop environment and migrate to new apps.
The point is nobody ever does that. I have never done it. GP has never done it. Nobody here (except you, apparently) has ever needed to do that. This must be some seriously precious software if you need it that badly. For everybody else, if it isn't being actively developed anymore, there is likely a better alternative available.
I find that on Windows, app developers are exceedingly lazy. They originally develop their software for a target, say Win95, and then they never update the app ever. They just rebundle and call it new version X! And because Microsoft maintains backwards-compatibility so well, this actually works the majority of the time (there were issues for some with XP service packs and Vista/7 upgrades). So if new features are introduced, dialogs refactored, library cruft removed, older functions deprecated in favor of newer functions that do the same thing better, all things that can make the app run better and more smoothly (especially with respect to things like hardware utilization), none of that gets used by the app, because they never clean it up and get rid of the crap. If it breaks, they are forced to. But since it doesn't, they don't bother.
1) The mortality rate was not 95%. It was more like 50%. Still high, but not that high.
2) You need more information than the mortality rate for risk assessment. You need number of cases and distribution through the population. For example, if 75% of the cases are in immunocompromised individuals, the mortality rate will be high, but not reflective of what it would do in a healthy population. Similarly, genetic differences in the individuals can affect the outcome of infection.
3) Replicating this research requires specialized equipment and training. It's not something somebody can do in a garage. These findings are the result of 10 yrs. of research spanning multiple labs and many millions of dollars of funding. It would be far easier for a bioterrorist to cultivate some Cryptosporidium and dump it in the water supply, or any number of other well-known virulent pathogens.
4) This research has a number of very useful applications in the public health sector: from screening activities to treatment and vaccine development to understanding some fundamental virology that can aid our ability to combat other unrelated strains. Keeping the research classified would inhibit all of these efforts, just to protect against the very slim possibility that it would aid bioterrorism. I think that is a big mistake.
Uhhh, why? Are you responsible for the budget? What does it matter to you what software they use? Just because you think your choice is superior, based on your "objective evaluation" doesn't mean it is. I can argue that everybody should use the GIMP, but the graphic artists are going to want Photoshop. It's not my place to tell them they can't use Photoshop if that is what they prefer. Nothing wrong with making your recommendation, but at the end of the day it's just that, a recommendation.
Hmm, well, there's a lot of trolling here for sure, but further down in the article he does make this point:
Here's an easy test: Is the standard proposed by IT higher for what you want than for what IT provisions? Take mobile -- if encryption or app revocation is required on smartphones, it should also be required on laptops that hold much more sensitive information. An honest requirement should be enforced equitably.
I'm not an IT guy, so I have no response to this. But his argument makes sense to me....
Excellent comment! I agree 100%
I'm in business to make money.
You know, it's interesting that you say this because people pop up occasionally on Slashdot wondering about open source licenses and trying to convince their bosses/partners to open source code. GPL is certainly not universally applicable, but I can see situations where companies should actually prefer it over other licenses. I think a lot of scientific software falls into this category. If you are selling an HPLC, for example, the money you are making is on the hardware and support. The software you just charge an arm and a leg for because it is expensive to custom develop for your own instrument, and you have to pay people who really understand how to do the data analysis properly (for GLP, for example). However, a GPL'd application would not only be able to use a lot of already GPL'd code, making development costs cheaper, but competitors would also not be able to use it unless they contributed back the code they added to make it work with their own instruments or to customize the workflow in a particular way. So you have multiple companies competing to offer the best/cheapest instrument, but cooperating on the software because the redundancy is expensive and it makes it hard to move data around, which is being done a lot more these days than it ever used to.
If you are interested in something a little bit different from "the usual," I would have a look at the International diaspora Engagement Alliance. It is an interesting project, with the potential to have real economic impact in developing nations. There are multiple ways to be involved. Philanthropy is only one of them.
In India, for example, there's no bias against women in technology fields, and as a result you see tons of Indian women in those positions or in tech majors in college, both there and here in the USA. Same goes for China.
While true, it is important to note that the women in those cultures are also still responsible for the household. So they can go to school and become a programmer, but they are still expected to cook, clean, and take care of the children. And in many agrarian societies, the women work in the fields with the men as well as taking care of the household.
1) Chernobyl didn't melt down
2) If you can build a reactor that can't melt down (you can), the fear of meltdowns should no longer be an issue when considering the building of new reactors.
Except it is not. There are ways to do it. This thread is an example of one way. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean they are "doing it wrong."
If the changes to the configuration files are limited, it should be relatively easy to keep track of them. A script could do this easily. Chroot, I think, would be much more complicated because you would have to have everything in the jail (jvm, X libraries) and I don't know if there is a way to prevent somebody from exiting at a shell anyway.
My impression from the question, is that the people developing this application don't actually own the computers in question.
My guess is this is a University or department run lab that doesn't want professors coming in and making a bunch of changes to the computers. They could probably get approval for minor changes that are reversed completely when they are done, though. They aren't going to be able to make any change without root access anyway, so they will need approval whatever they do.
Yes, absolutely. The only problem would be if, like the grandparent said, they could crash or kill the X server in a way that would bring them back to the login screen. If the exam gets aborted, though, that is probably easy to detect, so it might not matter.
The term 'renewable' indicates an energy source that either never runs out or can be indefinitely replaced.
No, that is not what a renewable energy source is. You just made up that definition to support your argument. I believe we call this sophistry.
If you really want to get into it, there are different classes of renewable resources. But the general definition amounts to the replenishment of said resource being on the same timescale as its consumption such that it can be managed in a sustainable way. The sun is not a natural resource. It is simply a requirement for our existence on this planet. The sustainability of the sun is not a worthwhile discussion to be having.
It just takes a lot of time, and we use them far faster than they can be replenished.
That is, in fact, the exact definition of a non-renewable resource. We cannot consume fossil fuels at a rate that allows them to be replenished naturally within a reasonable time frame. In other words, they cannot be sustainably managed and at some point they will be depleted and inaccessible to future generations. So they are not renewable.
First of all, there is a difference between the materials needed to build the generator and the materials needed to run the generator. The cost to building is going to exist for every generator. So you are comparing apples and oranges. Solar will never need fuel, hence the term "renewable." Coal (or oil or gas) will always need fuel.
Second, if there is any need for rare earths (does not mean esoteric, btw), that is only due to a limitation in current technology. As it gets researched, deployed, scaled up, improved upon, etc, the need for these materials could very well lessen or disappear entirely. A coal (or oil or gas) plant will never evolve beyond it's need for fuel.
Uh, well, I think the goal was stated rather clearly.
When the testing app is launched, we need to restrict users from exiting the app so they can't do things like search the internet for answers or use other applications.
So what is a good way to do this? Using a password-protected kiosk mode was suggested as an example.
The goal stated was not: What are a variety of test administration methods we can use to discourage students from cheating and better reflect a real world scenario where they will have reference books handy?
So all of the answers attempting to address the latter goal are completely off-topic.
Well, obviously some change to the OS configuration is going to be necessary. There is no button on any operating system I know of that enables a kiosk mode automagically. The poster wasn't specific about what kind of configuration would be allowed and what wouldn't, though. I assume whole scale changes to the OS are not allowed (ex: installing a different distribution, instituting lockdown policy with gconf, running a vm, configuring a chroot with custom everything, messing with firewall settings, etc), but minor changes to config files (especially ones that don't affect how the machines get used for the most part) should be allowed. Disabling the ttys is something I would consider a minor change, especially since it could be reverted after the exam very easily. For the X server, you don't need to create a special user. Just make a custom .xsession file for them that they can't change. They'll use it to take the exam and delete it when they are done. Simple, nonintrusive, seems like it's exactly what the poster is looking for.
Well, the regulatory burden is immense, but to be fair, the ongoing costs of fuel production, fuel reprocessing (have to build the plants for these too), waste storage (have to build the storage facility), security, inspections, and maintenance does make both the upfront and operating costs of a reactor fairly high relative to other options. The idea, though, is to lessen the upfront cost by building a shared infrastructure, and to offset the operating cost by operating at much higher outputs with more efficient fuel cycles (ex: thorium).
Some of the generation IV reactor designs are still in prototyping stage, so I wouldn't say the engineering is "complete." But it is far enough along to scale up to production. Some work on the engineering side will still need to be done to achieve this. And while the passively safe reactors are less complicated in design than their 1970s counterparts, they still aren't "simple." So I think it is fair to say that nuclear is expensive and complicated compared to, say, coal.
Nuclear, for sure, can work, and it can be safe and it can be clean. It just can't happen tomorrow because it takes a commitment to build the infrastructure and streamline the regulatory requirements, which isn't going to happen with all of the Greenpeace nuts running around pulling crap like this.
Seriously, this is the best answer I have read here so far. It is simple and elegant. No booting custom images, whitelisting sites, or any of that.
Also, gotta love that half of the answers are: just give a different test, who cares about cheating, just install a different operating system, just fail anyone who cheats, yada yada yada. Why do so many Slashdotters always feel like the best answer to a question is "you're doing it wrong"? Sheesh.
The whole point of this action was to show that people can attack nuclear installations,
People can attack chemical plants and military research labs as well. What is your point? Security should not be a problem. If there is a breach, again, it is a regulatory issue, not a technical one (ie: one that is relatively easy to fix). Anyway, a nuclear plant is a horrible terrorist target.
It doesn't matter how old the technology is, if you blow up a reactor, sabotage it to cause a meltdown or just smash something big and heavy into it like an aircraft there is going to be a very big problem.
No, there isn't. That is the whole point of what everybody is trying to tell you. You can't sabotage a modern reactor to cause it to meltdown. It is not possible. That is why it is much safer to use the new designs. Also, the containment buildings of nuclear plants have long been built to anticipate flying a plane into them. They are built to withstand that type of attack.
You also have to consider the potential for accidents and attack on fuel processing sites and transportation. The reactor itself is not the only vulnerability.
A fuel processing facility is basically a reactor. So the security is the same. For transportation, the key is to make sure whatever you are transporting is not a target. The short-lived isotopes (the ones you would want to target for a dirty bomb) can be stored on-site, for example, or they can be encapsulated in a way that makes them useless for terrorists. It's an easy problem to solve if we put the infrastructure in place to do it. The problem is the infrastructure doesn't exist. All attempts to fund/build it have been shutdown by activists.
I think you will find that raping the environment is not Greenpeace's preferred solution.
I think I will find that Greenpeace is ignoring the reality of the situation. If they shutdown all nuclear plants, people aren't suddenly going to switch to solar thermal instead. They are going to switch to coal. I like green energy, by the way. I think it is what we should be moving toward. I just don't think nuclear should be taken off the table. Nuclear is expensive and complicated. When it is economically viable to switch away from it without going to coal, people will. No shenanigans from Greenpeace are necessary.
As Fukushima and Chernobyl have demonstrated the damage can easily run into billions.
I don't think you are paying attention. Fukushima and Chernobyl, both, were using old reactors and old reactor technology. In Chernobyl's case, the reactor safety mechanisms were deliberately disabled. In Fukushima's case, the safety mechanisms operated as expected, but the on-site waste storage (which it was not designed to handle) caused a big problem. In other words, they were operating outside of the safety design of the reactor. Since Fukushima was targeted for decommissioning soon anyway, nobody considered it a priority to move the waste right away. If both Fukushima and Chernobyl had been properly operating within their safety margins (which are big, btw), neither disaster would have happened on such a large scale--Chernobyl's wouldn't have happened at all and Fukushima's would have been very safely contained.
With the new reactor designs, neither accident would have been possible (even with deliberate sabotage by workers at the plant). Combine that with proper waste handling and recycling, and you have a very safe very clean source of energy. If you choose to not use new reactor designs, if you choose not to store the waste properly, then yeah, you have problems. The point is, though, that these problems are completely solvable and/or manageable. There is no inherent unsolvable safety issue with nuclear power. All problems are regulatory and/or political in nature.
Economics is another thing, of course. Building a new plant and a waste storage facility is expensive, and making the ends meet might be a problem (which is why new plants haven't been built). That won't change until people decide that raping the environment with oil/gas/coal solutions and that externalizing those costs is unacceptable. As long as energy is dirt cheap with coal (because of the low regulatory burden), it is more politically expedient to convince people that "clean coal" is the solution. When it becomes more expensive, nuclear will be a much more viable alternative.
Yes, you are right about that. That was originally why I liked Ubuntu so much. In the beginning, it was the only distribution you could pick that would pretty much work with no weird issues. But in the later releases (especially the 10.x series), they've been incorporating more and more experimental stuff that is really buggy. So yeah, I understand the frustration. The 11.x series still has bugs, but it is getting better. So I'm hoping they'll have it pretty much sorted out by the 12.x series. And then more breakage when they make the switch to Wayland. Yay!
There were some pretty buggy releases over the past few cycles which were frustrating, to say the least. I stayed with 9.10 for a while to avoid annoying upgrades, but now here I am at 11.10 and everything seems fine. I vaguely remember a problem with the NVidia drivers in one of the drivers, where certain versions didn't work well with certain hardware, so maybe that's where the screen flickering was coming from. As for the kernel issue, do you have an error message for that or is the screen actually locked up? That would be very unusual, and I would suggest using the older kernel if that works. There is no reason to use the newer one if you don't need it. You can use Startup Manager to make the older kernel the default.
For the second hard disk, you need to set it up to automount. Make sure your fstab entry looks something like this, /dev/sdb1 /media/harddisk2 ext4 users 0 0
The default is to automount. If you have anything else for the options (fourth column) it might not automount. Make sure the mountpoint (second column) exists, of course. Spaces in the name will be problematic. Unfortunately there does not appear to be a GUI for doing this, which is odd. I haven't used that Simple Backup utility, but from the website it looks like it will mount the volume for you if it isn't already mounted. So if it isn't doing that, make sure it is configured to go to the right mountpoint and that you have the "users" option in your fstab. I suspect your problem is that you initially mounted it through Gnome, which uses gvfs and not fstab. This automatically creates the mountpoint for you and does not pay attention to fstab. Then you configured Simple Backup to use that mountpoint. Normally this would be fine, but when you log out or shut down the computer, gvfs unmounts everything and removes any mountpoints it created. So when you start up again, the mountpoint doesn't exist, and even with an entry in fstab it can't automount, and Simple Backup can't mount it either. So just, sudo mkdir /media/harddisk2 (or whatever) to create a persistent mountpoint that both fstab and Simple Backup can use for mounting.
As for the version of Ubuntu...well, the thing is, the desktop is an evolving and changing target. There are bugs in releases, like the ones you are encountering, that are fixed in future releases. There are also usability enhancements, like handling devices, in future releases. So if you insist on using an older release, you are going to have problems that may have already been fixed. The sound latency is one of the problems with the 10.x series of Ubuntu, due to the new Pulseaudio that was introduced, that does not seem to be a problem in 11.x now that it has had a chance to mature a bit. If you don't like Unity, well, you can try Mint. That seems to be popular; I haven't used it. But I have been using Unity for a while now, and it works fine for me. I can understand how it might disrupt people with specific workflows. But if all you really need to do is web browsing, email, music, and movies, I don't see why Unity should be much of a hindrance.
The key point of your statistic is "per-passenger-mile". It's high for Amtrak because there are fewer passengers for Amtrak. Why? Because Amtrak generally sucks! If rail travel in the US wasn't so utterly miserable to start with, I think more passengers would opt for it and the cost would come down accordingly. To get a sense of how much of an effect that has, look at the difference in number between Commercial Aviation (3.03 in 2001), which is the category for a typical commercial airline, and General Aviation (89.72 in 2001) which is everything else (personal aircraft, charter, skydiving, etc). Also, Amtrak could probably offset it's costs a bit if it carried mail and freight, much like most of the commercial airlines. Passengers are expensive, and it's hard to make money if that is all you are doing.