Number of security experts who get the shot and resources for doing a good job of it -- less than zero. Math doesn't have much to do with security in this sense -- theory isn't practice. And as to how good they are at math, I seem to recall "the housing crisis is contained" and a few other laughable statements out of these academic mathematicians who know precisely squat that their corporate masters don't tell them to think.
You think the Fed is well run, predicted and prevented any of this disaster? Or even raised an alarm? Go learn some stuff, then talk.
I watch them every day, as a trader. Puleese, they're not real good at what they try to do -- or deciding what they should do.
In fiscal year 2010, the FBI requested almost $50,000,000 in new resources for internet crimes. Any bets they get more than that in new resources this year?
Whatcha want to be this justifies more resources for them? Which leads direction in a "follow the money" sort of way to....want to bet this is all a ruse -- by them -- to get that money? These are the same set of guys who thought it'd be cool to facilitate guns to mexican cartels after all. And a long list of other stuff they admit to...and plenty they don't but it's obvious.
Sure was cool them wrecking that ferrari though. Some competence.
Title says it all. Promising you'll get something done well after you'll be out of office? Puleese - I know the Germans can't be stupid enough to buy into that! Oh, it's the self-defeating greens, maybe they are that stupid.
Name one case in all history where such a projection came true. In this case, the rising costs of power will turn the popular view around, I suspect, and the next politician will be singing a different tune. Or the one after.
As a poster above said -- Japan paid a price to teach us how not to do it. It'd be ignorant to throw that lesson away.
iTunes only has deals with the 4 majors, not "all music" by a very very long shot. At least 1/3 of my music collection is not in there -- transcription discs from old live radio shows....for one. Indie music -- not gonna be there. And so forth. So you only get insurance on a match, and I'm not sure whether if there's not a match, you can have it in the cloud at all --
Like in electronics, the thing to look for is what's not on the data sheet, but is still important. When a vendor makes, say, an A/D that has wondrous features, but say, is noisy or has a weird drive requirement - that's what's not there, with them hoping you don't notice till you design it in. I'd bet that's the same thing here.
Luckily, the last time the powers that be tried that, we repelled them, with some effort, "but you should have seen the other guy". As far as them reading this far down in an old story on slashdot....it might as well be one of the more private chat rooms at this point. And to the extent it attracts other cool geeks here -- that was the point.
Partly luck, and partly skill. I'm in Floyd County, Virginia. Proud home to all kinds of crazy people, about 20k of us, and one stoplight.
The surrounding counties, like the one VA Tech is in, are much more dense, but they take my checks there too.
I'm from DC -- an ex big city boy. I really prefer this to that by a country mile. The diamond to turd ratio in humans is vastly better here.
Many people are entrepreneurs, as the commute to "anywhere that has jobs" is too long.
The niceness is self-sustaining in a Darwinian way - if you're a jerk, everyone knows it, and no one helps you anymore, you may as well leave town. Because in the boonies, you'll be needing (and giving) help now and then. We do our own snowplowing before the state gets around to it, cut trees that fall in the roads ourselves for the firewood -- and off people's roofs when that happens, as it recently did to a few neighbors.
I do physics research here in this time warp. It's kind of cool, really. As far as I can tell, civilization hasn't been moving forward in the denser regions of the planet, but going backwards, or as Asimov said "the galactic empire is crumbling". I'm sort of doing the First Foundation trip myself.
A business account only takes a couple minutes a the bank to sign a couple papers -- if you also have a personal account, they know what to fill in for you. Mine is very low cost...and very nice for the features. Nothing is wrong with me, it's the easiest way to get things done sometimes.
In case you didn't know, setting up as a "real business" has some very attractive tax benefits if your business and your toy habit have some overlap. The hassle really comes in if you have "employees" -- states really rape you for prepaid benefits. But if all you ever have is "contractors" -- other guys like you -- it's a great deal and most of your life becomes deductible. In fact, you might save more on taxes than the profits you make selling a few odd things on ebay. Once you have income....all costs associated with it become tax losses.
Companies sue Google because of "deep pockets" and jealousy. The game only works on the big (who could pay, like Google) and the small (who can't afford to take you to court, so settle). Look around. The original fight against net neutrality was ISP's who get paid by their subscribers, wanted extra revenue from Google, who already pays at their end for bandwidth -- trying to double dip - for no other reason than they thought Google had the bucks. They might have moved on to NetFlix now, but there's no real difference. And we'll all be watching what Comcast does, won't we.
ISPs all oversold their capability -- and now that people can and are trying to use what they thought they'd paid for (and the ISPs did set the prices) - they don't like it. Tough -- they deserve what they are getting, it's their own fault, and they should have to lie in the bed they made.
I personally use checks for quite nearly 100% of my purchases, and I suppose I'm "lucky" to live in an area where 100% of retailers take them. Or, if you forget, an IOU, even on a napkin.
The dishonesty issues are better dealt with by mechanisms like, say, jail. All you people who make sure schools can't teach morality -- it's on you @@sholes. Not my fault you've moved society from "don't do wrong" to "don't get caught". Use the wire fraud system when someone writes you a bad one. It would only take a few more doing this to make even the more ignorant criminals wake up.
I like having the records of what I spend -- it's helped me stay rich once I got there by seeing where the money goes. Yeah, you can do that other ways, but the bank is a nice paper pusher and cheaper than one I'd hire.
Ever heard of a business account, you know, like you have to have if you're a legit business, rather than a freeloader avoiding taxes and regulations? They clear checks right now, and I mean right now -- and I get a phone call immediately if a deposited check doesn't fly. Maybe you're just too dumb to bank-shop and get a good one?
And yeah, I'm a luddite -- a weird thing for an ex dev and current physicist. I've had all the other payment options, and 100% of them have been hacked more than once, till I just gave up on them. But at the small town bank, if something goes wrong, I can just offer to take my business across the street. And, so far, 100% of the time -- if I even feel the need to say that -- it's enough and "nothing ever happened, please have a nice day and keep your business with us".
Like paper ballots, it's a lot harder to cheat this system, you're not being very smart to call for ditching it. So you got hosed. Karma -- or sloth. Takes one or the other.
From what I can see it's a case of ineptitude by Tepco employees that made this situation much worse than it should be been.
Yup, as far as I can tell, every single accident like this (and including the really dumb one Tepco had in reprocessing, which should have gotten their license yanked right then) is due to inept employees. All of them.
So, what do we do about that? Seems we might need nuclear power, but the human stupidity we also seem to be stuck with has no obvious solution.
Don't laugh at this one. My computer consulting firm, deep in the boonies, was raided as a drug operation. It wasn't but in talking to them we discovered that having solar panels was part of the profiling done on us, as it indicates "pot growing". Which of course is stupid. We do run on solar, but it's way not enough to grow pot in any amount worth it. That's what they make the rest of the boonies for -- outdoors.
FWIW, the profiling was:
Has domestic disputes (I prevented a suicide and they knew that)
People come and go (employees)
People at all hours (we called it flex time)
Those people look rich and happy (it was a great place to work, and high pay)
Owner rarely leaves (no need, my business is on the same campus as my house)
Owner is rich (see above)
Just because the DEA is stupid, doesn't mean it doesn't cost a lot in court fees to make them go away, and the damage they do they never pay for. And due to all those rarely enforced laws on the books, they'll by golly find SOMETHING to bust you for once they've done their "dynamic entry" - count on it.
When most of your customers on a platform are only 13 yr olds who have only been dimly aware of the world for less than half that -- you can get away with more. Daddy just buys what the kids demand.
Yes, it's light indeed. They don't (and honestly/legally can't) record what we all know will be losses in the future due to this -- we'll see that later on when they make "any" money and need tax losses against it.
You learn these things as a stock trader -- some things get recorded later as a matter of course, usually to "paint the tape", but sometimes just as good business practice as the future isn't as predictable as most seem to think, and loss of reputation sometimes miraculously doesn't matter to companies with short-memory customers -- of which young gamers would be the epitome.
And before the Walkman, there was the trinitron TV -- which really was a bigger deal in the consumer electronics business - I worked for a retailer at the time.
No, it was just a bean counter that figured out if they could sell it as also a computer, rather than a gaming device, that they'd be excluded from many sorts of taxes in the EU. That is all. They never had customer interest at heart, other than to help them evade some predatory taxes. Once that was settled, no need for other OS.
As a trader - when things line up this nicely, I go short on things like SNE....and while you probably shouldn't have to do anything or pay attention to not get screwed -- shouldn't isn't a synonym for or descriptive of the reality here.
The phrase "a sucker never gets an even break" wasn't even coined in the current century, after all.
It's only getting worse as the sheeple seem to think they can't have an effect on things, and/or are too lazy and careless to even try. In that atmosphere, it's quite profitable to be a con artist -- like SNE.
I do nuclear research for a living in a lab I own, check my site for some info. Potassium isn't so hot, it's barely out of a low background in my lab on a very nice 6" NaI:Tl gamma spectrometer, and since you eat it daily, that's a good thing indeed. Our geiger counters can usually not see a jar of KNO3 out of the cosmic background -- partly because the sensing mechanism in a geiger tube doesn't see gammas all that well -- you want a scintillator based detector for that.
Most nuclear waste products and fuel produce either beta (electrons) or alpha (He nuclei) which geiger counters see quite well, especially the thin window types. That's what you want, and many are available or the parts for them, on places like ebay. The tiny ones based on Russian tubes the size of a pencil aren't that great, lousy quantum efficiency, but that's not hardly a blanket condemnation of them, since even a relatively numb sensor will still tell you "you're going to die" a long time before you're in trouble. The ones to really avoid are the ion chamber based old CDV models for civil defense -- they won't read jack on a box of rocks (U ore) so hot they'll burn you.
It's not hard for any EE type hacker to make a counter if you can find the tubes surplus, which is how we do it. Plenty of good Russian new-old-stock out there cheap, and all it needs is an appropriate power supply in the few hundred volt range, a series resistor in the 1 meg region, and a coupling cap in the hundred pf region to be able to drive cmos logic directly -- the rest is left to the student.
We use inexpensive CCFL inverters and fast diodes and caps to do the HV supply -- the older ones are quite good for this, the new ones with dimming aren't what's wanted. You can control the HV output by regulating the LV input to the CCFL with a simple 3 terminal regulator - they run all the way down to about 1 volt - even the 12 volt input types, and the output scales with the input.
It's true that a decent geiger counter or the better "gamma scout" are hard to find right now, the demand way outstripped the supply on the event in Japan. There are other issues with the TSA and others buying up all the good detectors for neutrons (rare He isotope based) and so forth - but there's a lot of used stuff around that's still quite good if you look. Just avoid the old civil defense stuff and dosimeter pens -- they really stink. I've had one of those pens in a box of U ore for months and it's barely started to read at all.
A typical 2" diameter window pancake geiger tube will read about 100 cpm here on cosmic background for reference. A smoke detector source right on it will be in the 10k cpm range, as will a little bit of yellowcake in a test sample. A CS-137 cal sample will read quite high 14k cpm (it is rated at.25 microcurie)-- and those are considered "safe" to have in the lab, outside of a lead pig.
Yes, there is plenty of controversy about what constitutes "safe" and there are even people who believe in hormesis -- that a little is good for you. Whatever your personal religion -- don't get alpha or beta sources inside you (eat them) because then you are going to absorb 100% of the radiation they produce, and most often they sequester in some bad place for that. I would point out that moderate amounts of radiation mainly increase risk of cancer in the out years -- so if you're already old, maybe not such a worry as if you're pretty young. I might get cancer from the radiation I've been exposed to - but it will have to reach down into my grave to get me 30 years out.
I still use PIC's all the time myself, even for some relatively fancy/fast stuff. They make great front ends for data aq in a pc, where they can buffer a little and cope with the PC's random pauses well, for example. Or do a control feedback loop with the PC just providing the tuning parameters and maybe logging the data after reduction by the PIC.
With a well written (by me of course) tiny opsys, and a decent C compiler (I use CCS these days) it's so quick to get a simple project going there's not much excuse anymore not to.
The days we dreamed about when uP's hit the markets are finally here -- it's actually worth designing around one as the basis of a project, rather than the project being all about getting one working at all.
I like writing efficient code right on the metal, especially when the metal is simple and "wanting to work".
had a solution to "insurgent tax collectors and parasites".
Check "The Ultimate Sniper".
Soap and ballot boxes didn't avail. The slimebags will never stop till there is a penalty. Either suck it up or do something, all the whining hasn't accomplished anything.
Yeah about the lawyers get rich -- you're just figured out a way to change one possibly un-bringable suit into 3 that have to be tried.
Either you're a lawyer, or someone who has never had to defend themselves. Even if you win, you lose -- time, probably a goodly amount of money or at least the time-value of that (unless we add more suits for that too).
You can get money back, but you can't get time back on your life just because someone wasted it. And by your best example, most of the people so afflicted are innocent and you know that up front.
We could hope this judge caught that clue by watching SCO antics, maybe even reading Groklaw. Hope, anyway. PJ sure did a job of work to raise awareness to the point where that's a possibility.
There is copious helium available on earth (the regular He4 that is). We used to pay to have it recovered from nat gas and oil wells, where it's abundant (presumably from the above mentioned radioactive decay). Now we just flare off that stuff, and the He escapes earth's gravity. A cost cutting measure by our wise government who is ditching the reserves to avoid paying the rent on the storage.
Kudos to the parents here for mostly getting it right. Fusion is what I work on every day myself. I particularly appreciate the running of the numbers above -- that's something I have to do all the time to get the starry-eyed a little perspective on things.
DD fusion splits between two main reaction pathways that give He3 for one and tritium for the other, about half and half when the fusion is done thermally (without polarizing the input nuclei). DT fusion makes much more energetic neutrons (very roughly 13 MeV vs about 2.5 MeV) that do more materials damage than straight DD does, but is being considered as it's got about 100 times the reaction cross section -- easier to do -- except for that little materials problem. Any (hydrogen isotope based) fusion reactor is thus to some extent already a breeder from the DD reactions in it.
It's not so much that you make the materials radioactive in a reactor as it is hydrogen embrittlement from all those neutrons (the ones not captured in a nucleus decay into hydrogen) -- things get too weak as a result.
We have high hopes of course, but the two fusion reactors we've built here on an "amateur" basis are mainly good for a loud neutron source that can be turned on and off with a switch. Much smaller than a fission reactor for making isotopes of things. And safer.
Much of the energy in fission comes from later decay of the fission products in the form of beta, alpha, gamma radiation, and slashdot readers who followed the cooling issues at Fukishima should know that - a big problem with fission is that you can turn the fission off easily, but not this secondary decay and heat, you just have to wait -- and cool while waiting. Fusion reactors aren't a problem in that regard, and some types can even be fast-pulsed to get short bursts of neutrons used in time of flight experiments.
Heck, I think we should be going to the moon at any rate myself -- this may not be the best reason, but whatever gets us there to a real presence off earth suits me fine. I'd be quite surprised if we didn't find a way to make it worth the effort, He3 or not.
BTW, there is a worldwide shortage of He3 used for neutron detectors and some cryogenic dilution refrigerators, largely due to an excessive demand by DHS to make detectors for everywhere they can think of. It's got real scientists in somewhat of a tizzy as good sensitive neutron detectors are priced out of sight and backordered at that. There is also somewhat of a tritium shortage, with the reduction of its production for nukes (a good thing I suppose).
What you're pointing out here is the need for context. I have people "wanting to help me" do this or that, but from previous experience, I know they are so unsuited for whatever that might be, that at best someone will get hurt if I "let them" help me, and it's going to be less hassle to just do it myself.
In cases where I've been the boss of people like that -- they know they are in trouble, as this wouldn't be the first time they were left with nothing to do while everyone else was busy getting something done, and were trying to fix the situation -- laudable, but when really fixing it means learning how to make more than you break -- you were supposed to know that already, and I can't afford a lifetime of teaching you.
By the time it gets to "you're toast" you've wasted a lot of my time and money...I've never been hair trigger on that at all, but there's a point...
Wrote the TV typewriter book in 1976 or so, and I bet he didn't pay any patent royalty. At the time, as Wiki says, it was a medium challenging thing to make for a hobbyist, took a fair chunk of TTL logic and some space on a WW board. I know, I made one, and at the time the other stuff you could get were ASR-33 teletypes or a very expensive terminal that used special fast logic to get more than 40 chars on a screen. Mine got hooked to my PDP-8 (there weren't uP's like now)....
At the time, rom and pixel rates made this actually fairly hard to do well and keep up with TV refresh rates with any resolution.
Hopefully this will be sorted out by the next LTS release. I found awhile back that I'm much better off with those than being a guinea pig for whatever comes out twice a year.
After all, at least so far, if a nice new app comes along, I can still find a backport of it.
I'm not a computer newb at all -- I started way back before there were portable ones. I do some software development still as well as content management for a site I run. I'm always doing something a little closer to the metal than most users. I like the UI model as is -- since I know whats going on underneath, and I don't need any magic between me and the machine. Other people may feel differently, and may want a new look and feel -- the same way people might sell a perfectly good car that now bores them. For me, that boredom is glorious! I just want a stable platform to do my own thing with -- those are exciting enough, and I don't like the idea of having to learn a bunch of new habits to do the same old things (or worse, not being able to do them any more).
Could be the whole desktop thing needs a new way of going about it all for ever dumber users, or some sort of "look, shiny" for those of short attention span who thrive on anything that lets them be a little ahead of us old fogies who aren't into constantly changing things that worked fine already. If that's what it takes to get market share.....but in the case of ubuntu -- I don't really understand a need for that anyway.
At any rate, due to the short attention span driving this, again, I hope/predict it will be sorted out in some decent way by the time I care to go to a newer LTS version (of whatever distro I like then, for now, it's still Ubuntu).
Or really, even on earth. Ever hear about special (or general) relativity and the fact that matter-energy warps spacetime?
Pi is only correct in flat space -- devoid of matter or energy, which the galaxy isn't, nor is earth - some folks heads might qualify....
There is no flat space anywhere we know of, and if you put the gear into it to measure pi there, it wouldn't be flat anymore.
Doh! The stuff copy-writers come up with to spice it up for 'tards shows what retards they are themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Number of security experts who get the shot and resources for doing a good job of it -- less than zero. Math doesn't have much to do with security in this sense -- theory isn't practice. And as to how good they are at math, I seem to recall "the housing crisis is contained" and a few other laughable statements out of these academic mathematicians who know precisely squat that their corporate masters don't tell them to think.
You think the Fed is well run, predicted and prevented any of this disaster? Or even raised an alarm? Go learn some stuff, then talk. I watch them every day, as a trader. Puleese, they're not real good at what they try to do -- or deciding what they should do.
In fiscal year 2010, the FBI requested almost $50,000,000 in new resources for internet crimes. Any bets they get more than that in new resources this year?
Whatcha want to be this justifies more resources for them? Which leads direction in a "follow the money" sort of way to....want to bet this is all a ruse -- by them -- to get that money? These are the same set of guys who thought it'd be cool to facilitate guns to mexican cartels after all. And a long list of other stuff they admit to...and plenty they don't but it's obvious.
Sure was cool them wrecking that ferrari though. Some competence.
Title says it all. Promising you'll get something done well after you'll be out of office? Puleese - I know the Germans can't be stupid enough to buy into that! Oh, it's the self-defeating greens, maybe they are that stupid.
Name one case in all history where such a projection came true. In this case, the rising costs of power will turn the popular view around, I suspect, and the next politician will be singing a different tune. Or the one after.
As a poster above said -- Japan paid a price to teach us how not to do it. It'd be ignorant to throw that lesson away.
iTunes only has deals with the 4 majors, not "all music" by a very very long shot. At least 1/3 of my music collection is not in there -- transcription discs from old live radio shows....for one. Indie music -- not gonna be there. And so forth. So you only get insurance on a match, and I'm not sure whether if there's not a match, you can have it in the cloud at all --
Like in electronics, the thing to look for is what's not on the data sheet, but is still important. When a vendor makes, say, an A/D that has wondrous features, but say, is noisy or has a weird drive requirement - that's what's not there, with them hoping you don't notice till you design it in. I'd bet that's the same thing here.
Luckily, the last time the powers that be tried that, we repelled them, with some effort, "but you should have seen the other guy". As far as them reading this far down in an old story on slashdot....it might as well be one of the more private chat rooms at this point. And to the extent it attracts other cool geeks here -- that was the point.
Partly luck, and partly skill. I'm in Floyd County, Virginia. Proud home to all kinds of crazy people, about 20k of us, and one stoplight. The surrounding counties, like the one VA Tech is in, are much more dense, but they take my checks there too. I'm from DC -- an ex big city boy. I really prefer this to that by a country mile. The diamond to turd ratio in humans is vastly better here. Many people are entrepreneurs, as the commute to "anywhere that has jobs" is too long. The niceness is self-sustaining in a Darwinian way - if you're a jerk, everyone knows it, and no one helps you anymore, you may as well leave town. Because in the boonies, you'll be needing (and giving) help now and then. We do our own snowplowing before the state gets around to it, cut trees that fall in the roads ourselves for the firewood -- and off people's roofs when that happens, as it recently did to a few neighbors. I do physics research here in this time warp. It's kind of cool, really. As far as I can tell, civilization hasn't been moving forward in the denser regions of the planet, but going backwards, or as Asimov said "the galactic empire is crumbling". I'm sort of doing the First Foundation trip myself.
A business account only takes a couple minutes a the bank to sign a couple papers -- if you also have a personal account, they know what to fill in for you. Mine is very low cost...and very nice for the features. Nothing is wrong with me, it's the easiest way to get things done sometimes. In case you didn't know, setting up as a "real business" has some very attractive tax benefits if your business and your toy habit have some overlap. The hassle really comes in if you have "employees" -- states really rape you for prepaid benefits. But if all you ever have is "contractors" -- other guys like you -- it's a great deal and most of your life becomes deductible. In fact, you might save more on taxes than the profits you make selling a few odd things on ebay. Once you have income....all costs associated with it become tax losses.
Companies sue Google because of "deep pockets" and jealousy. The game only works on the big (who could pay, like Google) and the small (who can't afford to take you to court, so settle). Look around. The original fight against net neutrality was ISP's who get paid by their subscribers, wanted extra revenue from Google, who already pays at their end for bandwidth -- trying to double dip - for no other reason than they thought Google had the bucks. They might have moved on to NetFlix now, but there's no real difference. And we'll all be watching what Comcast does, won't we.
ISPs all oversold their capability -- and now that people can and are trying to use what they thought they'd paid for (and the ISPs did set the prices) - they don't like it. Tough -- they deserve what they are getting, it's their own fault, and they should have to lie in the bed they made.
I personally use checks for quite nearly 100% of my purchases, and I suppose I'm "lucky" to live in an area where 100% of retailers take them. Or, if you forget, an IOU, even on a napkin.
The dishonesty issues are better dealt with by mechanisms like, say, jail. All you people who make sure schools can't teach morality -- it's on you @@sholes. Not my fault you've moved society from "don't do wrong" to "don't get caught". Use the wire fraud system when someone writes you a bad one. It would only take a few more doing this to make even the more ignorant criminals wake up.
I like having the records of what I spend -- it's helped me stay rich once I got there by seeing where the money goes. Yeah, you can do that other ways, but the bank is a nice paper pusher and cheaper than one I'd hire.
Ever heard of a business account, you know, like you have to have if you're a legit business, rather than a freeloader avoiding taxes and regulations? They clear checks right now, and I mean right now -- and I get a phone call immediately if a deposited check doesn't fly. Maybe you're just too dumb to bank-shop and get a good one?
And yeah, I'm a luddite -- a weird thing for an ex dev and current physicist. I've had all the other payment options, and 100% of them have been hacked more than once, till I just gave up on them. But at the small town bank, if something goes wrong, I can just offer to take my business across the street. And, so far, 100% of the time -- if I even feel the need to say that -- it's enough and "nothing ever happened, please have a nice day and keep your business with us".
Like paper ballots, it's a lot harder to cheat this system, you're not being very smart to call for ditching it. So you got hosed. Karma -- or sloth. Takes one or the other.
From what I can see it's a case of ineptitude by Tepco employees that made this situation much worse than it should be been.
Yup, as far as I can tell, every single accident like this (and including the really dumb one Tepco had in reprocessing, which should have gotten their license yanked right then) is due to inept employees. All of them.
So, what do we do about that? Seems we might need nuclear power, but the human stupidity we also seem to be stuck with has no obvious solution.
Don't laugh at this one. My computer consulting firm, deep in the boonies, was raided as a drug operation. It wasn't but in talking to them we discovered that having solar panels was part of the profiling done on us, as it indicates "pot growing". Which of course is stupid. We do run on solar, but it's way not enough to grow pot in any amount worth it. That's what they make the rest of the boonies for -- outdoors. FWIW, the profiling was: Has domestic disputes (I prevented a suicide and they knew that) People come and go (employees) People at all hours (we called it flex time) Those people look rich and happy (it was a great place to work, and high pay) Owner rarely leaves (no need, my business is on the same campus as my house) Owner is rich (see above) Just because the DEA is stupid, doesn't mean it doesn't cost a lot in court fees to make them go away, and the damage they do they never pay for. And due to all those rarely enforced laws on the books, they'll by golly find SOMETHING to bust you for once they've done their "dynamic entry" - count on it.
When most of your customers on a platform are only 13 yr olds who have only been dimly aware of the world for less than half that -- you can get away with more. Daddy just buys what the kids demand.
Yes, it's light indeed. They don't (and honestly/legally can't) record what we all know will be losses in the future due to this -- we'll see that later on when they make "any" money and need tax losses against it.
You learn these things as a stock trader -- some things get recorded later as a matter of course, usually to "paint the tape", but sometimes just as good business practice as the future isn't as predictable as most seem to think, and loss of reputation sometimes miraculously doesn't matter to companies with short-memory customers -- of which young gamers would be the epitome. And before the Walkman, there was the trinitron TV -- which really was a bigger deal in the consumer electronics business - I worked for a retailer at the time.
No, it was just a bean counter that figured out if they could sell it as also a computer, rather than a gaming device, that they'd be excluded from many sorts of taxes in the EU. That is all. They never had customer interest at heart, other than to help them evade some predatory taxes. Once that was settled, no need for other OS.
As a trader - when things line up this nicely, I go short on things like SNE....and while you probably shouldn't have to do anything or pay attention to not get screwed -- shouldn't isn't a synonym for or descriptive of the reality here.
The phrase "a sucker never gets an even break" wasn't even coined in the current century, after all. It's only getting worse as the sheeple seem to think they can't have an effect on things, and/or are too lazy and careless to even try. In that atmosphere, it's quite profitable to be a con artist -- like SNE.
I do nuclear research for a living in a lab I own, check my site for some info. Potassium isn't so hot, it's barely out of a low background in my lab on a very nice 6" NaI:Tl gamma spectrometer, and since you eat it daily, that's a good thing indeed. Our geiger counters can usually not see a jar of KNO3 out of the cosmic background -- partly because the sensing mechanism in a geiger tube doesn't see gammas all that well -- you want a scintillator based detector for that.
.25 microcurie)-- and those are considered "safe" to have in the lab, outside of a lead pig.
Here's some threads on detectors: http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=11
Most nuclear waste products and fuel produce either beta (electrons) or alpha (He nuclei) which geiger counters see quite well, especially the thin window types. That's what you want, and many are available or the parts for them, on places like ebay. The tiny ones based on Russian tubes the size of a pencil aren't that great, lousy quantum efficiency, but that's not hardly a blanket condemnation of them, since even a relatively numb sensor will still tell you "you're going to die" a long time before you're in trouble. The ones to really avoid are the ion chamber based old CDV models for civil defense -- they won't read jack on a box of rocks (U ore) so hot they'll burn you.
It's not hard for any EE type hacker to make a counter if you can find the tubes surplus, which is how we do it. Plenty of good Russian new-old-stock out there cheap, and all it needs is an appropriate power supply in the few hundred volt range, a series resistor in the 1 meg region, and a coupling cap in the hundred pf region to be able to drive cmos logic directly -- the rest is left to the student. We use inexpensive CCFL inverters and fast diodes and caps to do the HV supply -- the older ones are quite good for this, the new ones with dimming aren't what's wanted. You can control the HV output by regulating the LV input to the CCFL with a simple 3 terminal regulator - they run all the way down to about 1 volt - even the 12 volt input types, and the output scales with the input.
It's true that a decent geiger counter or the better "gamma scout" are hard to find right now, the demand way outstripped the supply on the event in Japan. There are other issues with the TSA and others buying up all the good detectors for neutrons (rare He isotope based) and so forth - but there's a lot of used stuff around that's still quite good if you look. Just avoid the old civil defense stuff and dosimeter pens -- they really stink. I've had one of those pens in a box of U ore for months and it's barely started to read at all.
A typical 2" diameter window pancake geiger tube will read about 100 cpm here on cosmic background for reference. A smoke detector source right on it will be in the 10k cpm range, as will a little bit of yellowcake in a test sample. A CS-137 cal sample will read quite high 14k cpm (it is rated at
Yes, there is plenty of controversy about what constitutes "safe" and there are even people who believe in hormesis -- that a little is good for you. Whatever your personal religion -- don't get alpha or beta sources inside you (eat them) because then you are going to absorb 100% of the radiation they produce, and most often they sequester in some bad place for that. I would point out that moderate amounts of radiation mainly increase risk of cancer in the out years -- so if you're already old, maybe not such a worry as if you're pretty young. I might get cancer from the radiation I've been exposed to - but it will have to reach down into my grave to get me 30 years out.
I still use PIC's all the time myself, even for some relatively fancy/fast stuff. They make great front ends for data aq in a pc, where they can buffer a little and cope with the PC's random pauses well, for example. Or do a control feedback loop with the PC just providing the tuning parameters and maybe logging the data after reduction by the PIC.
With a well written (by me of course) tiny opsys, and a decent C compiler (I use CCS these days) it's so quick to get a simple project going there's not much excuse anymore not to.
The days we dreamed about when uP's hit the markets are finally here -- it's actually worth designing around one as the basis of a project, rather than the project being all about getting one working at all. I like writing efficient code right on the metal, especially when the metal is simple and "wanting to work".
had a solution to "insurgent tax collectors and parasites".
Check "The Ultimate Sniper".
Soap and ballot boxes didn't avail. The slimebags will never stop till there is a penalty. Either suck it up or do something, all the whining hasn't accomplished anything.
Yeah about the lawyers get rich -- you're just figured out a way to change one possibly un-bringable suit into 3 that have to be tried. Either you're a lawyer, or someone who has never had to defend themselves. Even if you win, you lose -- time, probably a goodly amount of money or at least the time-value of that (unless we add more suits for that too).
You can get money back, but you can't get time back on your life just because someone wasted it. And by your best example, most of the people so afflicted are innocent and you know that up front.
We could hope this judge caught that clue by watching SCO antics, maybe even reading Groklaw. Hope, anyway. PJ sure did a job of work to raise awareness to the point where that's a possibility.
There is copious helium available on earth (the regular He4 that is). We used to pay to have it recovered from nat gas and oil wells, where it's abundant (presumably from the above mentioned radioactive decay). Now we just flare off that stuff, and the He escapes earth's gravity. A cost cutting measure by our wise government who is ditching the reserves to avoid paying the rent on the storage.
Kudos to the parents here for mostly getting it right. Fusion is what I work on every day myself. I particularly appreciate the running of the numbers above -- that's something I have to do all the time to get the starry-eyed a little perspective on things.
DD fusion splits between two main reaction pathways that give He3 for one and tritium for the other, about half and half when the fusion is done thermally (without polarizing the input nuclei). DT fusion makes much more energetic neutrons (very roughly 13 MeV vs about 2.5 MeV) that do more materials damage than straight DD does, but is being considered as it's got about 100 times the reaction cross section -- easier to do -- except for that little materials problem. Any (hydrogen isotope based) fusion reactor is thus to some extent already a breeder from the DD reactions in it.
It's not so much that you make the materials radioactive in a reactor as it is hydrogen embrittlement from all those neutrons (the ones not captured in a nucleus decay into hydrogen) -- things get too weak as a result.
We have high hopes of course, but the two fusion reactors we've built here on an "amateur" basis are mainly good for a loud neutron source that can be turned on and off with a switch. Much smaller than a fission reactor for making isotopes of things. And safer.
Much of the energy in fission comes from later decay of the fission products in the form of beta, alpha, gamma radiation, and slashdot readers who followed the cooling issues at Fukishima should know that - a big problem with fission is that you can turn the fission off easily, but not this secondary decay and heat, you just have to wait -- and cool while waiting. Fusion reactors aren't a problem in that regard, and some types can even be fast-pulsed to get short bursts of neutrons used in time of flight experiments.
Heck, I think we should be going to the moon at any rate myself -- this may not be the best reason, but whatever gets us there to a real presence off earth suits me fine. I'd be quite surprised if we didn't find a way to make it worth the effort, He3 or not.
BTW, there is a worldwide shortage of He3 used for neutron detectors and some cryogenic dilution refrigerators, largely due to an excessive demand by DHS to make detectors for everywhere they can think of. It's got real scientists in somewhat of a tizzy as good sensitive neutron detectors are priced out of sight and backordered at that. There is also somewhat of a tritium shortage, with the reduction of its production for nukes (a good thing I suppose).
What you're pointing out here is the need for context. I have people "wanting to help me" do this or that, but from previous experience, I know they are so unsuited for whatever that might be, that at best someone will get hurt if I "let them" help me, and it's going to be less hassle to just do it myself.
In cases where I've been the boss of people like that -- they know they are in trouble, as this wouldn't be the first time they were left with nothing to do while everyone else was busy getting something done, and were trying to fix the situation -- laudable, but when really fixing it means learning how to make more than you break -- you were supposed to know that already, and I can't afford a lifetime of teaching you. By the time it gets to "you're toast" you've wasted a lot of my time and money...I've never been hair trigger on that at all, but there's a point...
Wrote the TV typewriter book in 1976 or so, and I bet he didn't pay any patent royalty. At the time, as Wiki says, it was a medium challenging thing to make for a hobbyist, took a fair chunk of TTL logic and some space on a WW board. I know, I made one, and at the time the other stuff you could get were ASR-33 teletypes or a very expensive terminal that used special fast logic to get more than 40 chars on a screen. Mine got hooked to my PDP-8 (there weren't uP's like now)....
At the time, rom and pixel rates made this actually fairly hard to do well and keep up with TV refresh rates with any resolution.
Here's the Wiki page.
Sure, guys were doing it for the military earlier, much -- they had access to logic we normal folks couldn't get or afford. Now, get off my lawn.
Hopefully this will be sorted out by the next LTS release. I found awhile back that I'm much better off with those than being a guinea pig for whatever comes out twice a year.
After all, at least so far, if a nice new app comes along, I can still find a backport of it.
I'm not a computer newb at all -- I started way back before there were portable ones. I do some software development still as well as content management for a site I run. I'm always doing something a little closer to the metal than most users. I like the UI model as is -- since I know whats going on underneath, and I don't need any magic between me and the machine. Other people may feel differently, and may want a new look and feel -- the same way people might sell a perfectly good car that now bores them. For me, that boredom is glorious! I just want a stable platform to do my own thing with -- those are exciting enough, and I don't like the idea of having to learn a bunch of new habits to do the same old things (or worse, not being able to do them any more).
Could be the whole desktop thing needs a new way of going about it all for ever dumber users, or some sort of "look, shiny" for those of short attention span who thrive on anything that lets them be a little ahead of us old fogies who aren't into constantly changing things that worked fine already. If that's what it takes to get market share.....but in the case of ubuntu -- I don't really understand a need for that anyway.
At any rate, due to the short attention span driving this, again, I hope/predict it will be sorted out in some decent way by the time I care to go to a newer LTS version (of whatever distro I like then, for now, it's still Ubuntu).
Or really, even on earth. Ever hear about special (or general) relativity and the fact that matter-energy warps spacetime? Pi is only correct in flat space -- devoid of matter or energy, which the galaxy isn't, nor is earth - some folks heads might qualify.... There is no flat space anywhere we know of, and if you put the gear into it to measure pi there, it wouldn't be flat anymore. Doh! The stuff copy-writers come up with to spice it up for 'tards shows what retards they are themselves.