Nah, no warrant need to read them -- done all the time. Warrant only needed to convict you for something in them.
But -- no need for a warrant then either. Just use the email to figure out who to watch, and then they bust you for whatever they see you do.
Just like the way you are entitled to confront your accuser. Some guy calls the cops on you, they show up, and they see, you name it, and bust you for it. The cop is now "the accuser" and you never find out who called them. Just ask the cops sometime if they know, or are allowed to tell (yes, and no).
And I now drive a 2010 Camaro SS that has upwards of 430 hp and gets 26 mpg on the highway, and about 22 climbing the mountain roads around here...nice -- and plenty of torque to do burnouts at 60+ mph if you turn the nanny computer off. Ahh, progress.
And thanks UAW for lending me the GM shares to short that paid for the car -- Ahh, stupidity.
I'm standing in front of it in my avatar on my forums....
Me too, without RTFA -- a claim of 3x improvement, when a good ICE already gets over 30% under ideal conditions violates a few laws of physics and thermodynamics. How do I know this? I run on PV solar, and need a backup generator, and have been working on those for quite a few years, some decades. I got to about 33% efficiency with a high compression, highly modified honda single cylinder engine -- fuel injected, MSD ignition, computer control, a damn fancy lawnmower, direct driving a very efficient generator from an old fighter plane, the generator so slick it would spin freely from a hand spin, and run at well under 1/4 of it's rated output -- very low I^R losses.
It still produced waste heat -- about 2/3 of the btu's in the gasoline by calculations and measurement..
So, I did about as good as a major coal power plant in chemical BTU to electricity, even at a tiny scale (roughly 5 hp).
That's pretty good, but then I had a better fuel to work with.
Someone needs to read Carnot and so forth. 100% efficiency is implied by the number they claim. Sorry, you can't fool mother nature like that.
Bacteria can consume things with radioactive isotopes in them, and do. They can even be used in leach mining of such things. So can yeasts and other organisms. So can you for that matter. Nothing can "metabolize" radiation. Metabolism is chemistry. Chemistry cannot change one element or isotope to another.
Sorry, but the question isn't even wrong. Nuclei don't take part in chemistry directly, nor does chemistry affect them -- chemistry, and life, is all about exchanging electrons in bonds. Wrong level of detail here.
You can burn up radioactive isotopes and even get net energy doing so, and one of the famous accelerator scientists, Carlo Rubbia (and others), has been pushing for this for quite some time. The concept is called the energy amplifier and requires a large accelerator (which is kind of a natural idea considering the source).
The wiki article is OK but I have his actual papers. Interesting enough so someone should look into it further -- you may not need to do it the expensive way he proposes, but even that is borderline economically feasible.
Or truly ignorant gamers. See the comments on this article at the Inquirer.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2041179/anonymous-takes-playstation-website-playstation-network
Either there are a lot of very stupid gamers who forget the sony rootkit incident, and who also need to get a life, or this is Sony's class of counterattack.
Sadly, Sony will be able to use this against GeoHot, as in "all those hackers are alike, see?"
Gheesh.
One -- you can't breed thorium into a fissionable isotope with alpha rays from smoke detectors. It takes neutrons. Slow ones give the best results. It is pretty hard to make a "beam" of neutrons, but easy to make an isotropic source. If you're going to do that, natural uranium is cheaper anyway, and not impossible to get ore (legally) from rock hounds. But refining it is illegal in most cases. And oh yes, fairly dangerous, and since you didn't know the above point, way past your speed. Getting this stuff inside you is the death penalty, and not a very pleasant one at that -- there's no more effective way to irradiate yourself than consuming a heavy metal radioactive, and they tend to collect in "all the best places". Micrograms matter here.
Two -- I already live off the grid on solar PV (and backups). There has never been a power company wire on my land, ever. That's a heck of a lot more realistic. I've been doing it since 1982, it works.
Three -- it's not terribly legal to have a hot radiation source of any kind without a lot of paperwork with the government (to say the least). Check that out first, before you hurt yourself with either radiation or legal troubles. Even an X ray machine is verboten without a license.
But if this isn't an April Fools goof, you're an idiot. For one thing, if you have an interesting enough neutron beam, why bother with mere fission. I make mine fusing hydrogen isotopes.
I don't know if I'm "that guy on slashdot last week" that built a fusor last week, but I am a guy on slashdot who does build fusors and other fusion devices for the last few years, and I even run a discussion board about it to help and encourage others to do so. It's not a hobby for idiots (various parts are dangerous) or the impatient, or people with no funds, but it's a lot of fun for those who do it.
FWIW, my best output (continuous) is on the order of 5 microwatts fusion energy, quite a lot of which goes into energetic neutrons. If I were to use tritium instead of just deuterium, I'd expect about 100 times that.
Doesn't sound like much does it? Well, it's enough to make silver radioactive enough to count about 2000 cpm on a geiger with a five minute exposure. Or enough to kill you if you expose yourself to the radiation output (which also has a lot of gamma rays) for too long.
I think, but am not sure, that I hold the record for non-funded (eg I paid for all this myself) fusion work, and beat out quite a few government and university efforts hands down. I fund the effort via trading stocks, as does my partner in this particular crime.
Be aware, we've been attacked by bots lately, and I only allow new members to join if they use obviously real human first and last names....by the time I make the captcha hard enough for the robots to fail, so do the humans, sigh. The site should otherwise withstand a slashdotting, and has in the past.
Bring it on!
A serious series of failures to be able to actually make magnets and detectors to the specs physicists made -- was what really did it. They promised a lot more than it turned out they could deliver, and proved that by not delivering on the preliminary prototypes, and after spending money ahead of schedule.
For once, the politicians did the right thing, actually. These clowns weren't even in the same class as the guys are CERN. Hate to say it, I'm American and wish it were otherwise, but really, go read the reports. This was a bunch of people who thought conceptually trivial meant actually trivial. Nope, and most people outside ivory towers know that. Even some politicians.
VB's what I use here, and I like it fine myself. Just to be able to use windows on a linux box for certain things like embedded programming IDE's. Works well (after a small amount learning), lets my program PICS via USB, sound works, serial works, it all just works.
Here's hoping Oracle doesn't start charging for it -- just after releasing some updates the mess up the free version. But you know they will, being Oracle and all. I suggest keeping older versions of the packages in case they do that. After all, if all you need is to run XP for some things, or a few spare linux distros -- you don't need to change the VB platform, ever, unless a new one has new features you need.
Yes. Here in the boonies of SW Virginia, we are already subsidizing the road repairs up near DC -- the richest county around, as they have a lot more road-miles per person to maintain and it seems they beat them harder than we do. Gasoline taxes are a net outflow to the north, richer counties, for us.
It's often a campaign issue for our local and state reps.
Where I happen to live, not too many people commute - it's too expensive to get to the nearest large town with jobs. A few do it, but there are more farmers, telecommuters, entrepreneurs, and retired here than most other places.
Interestingly, diesel which gets better mileage (usually) than gasoline costs more due to the higher tax to take into account the extra damage big heavy trucks do. Which in turn hoses anyone with a small, fuel efficient diesel.
As the poster below notes - the poor (in other words, the majority) need better lobbyists, and a better choice of who to vote for in the first place so we actually get representation. GoodLuckWithThat, but it'd be nice.
You want to cut deficit? Means test SS so only those who don't really need it get a hit. Ditto medi-this or that. Make it a safety net (at most). Tax for SS should not have a limit with income either. You still get more money if you make more, so that doesn't disincentivize hard work and success too badly. And yeah, cut back on this military some. Seems every administration falls to the temptation to "make history" - yeah, well, it's bad history in the main, and costs not only money, but lives.
We've already more or less told our young they're not going to get anything like the current entitlement levels, and I've heard just about 100% of them say so to me -- all the smart ones are planning their own retirement fund.
Yeah, I'm one of those who drives 20 miles to do absolutely anything. Or more. Which is why I started my own business that mostly did telecommuting, then retired, but still work from home to an extent. I drive *less* than almost anyone. I live in near-heaven, why go anywhere else? Get groceries is about it, or take my wife out once in awhile.
If you want to live in a city, with all the "advantages" we out here don't have -- crime, pollution, higher rent/mortgage, crowding, idiots, bad roads, more government intrusion in your life -- go for it. Been there, done that, this is better.
Obviously, the bottom line here is the government wants more money to waste, and the concentration of all power into federal and away form local hands (where the people have a voice!). It's the sorry way everything is going.
It's still pretty much the case as far as I can tell. I run linux (duh, of course) and the NVidia stuff rocks, particularly if you want to do "other" things with the card (CUDA). This may not be as true in a windows environment, but I now only run windows in virtual box...and there it only sees a generic vid card anyway (which is still fast enough for what I do in windows, which isn't gaming).
Were I doing this, the first thing I'd do wouldn't be to "seize" the control machines, but watch a little while and find out some information on all the bots themselves. You know, the information needed to really fix the problem for good. Not just shut down a controller. If the machines are really compromised, surely the control machines can in some way shut down the bots by other than just stopping telling them spam to send. Does the malware have the ability to upgrade on command? I'd put that in if I were writing it. Could that ability be used to patch it to neutralize it, or send a real security patch down the wire?
Seems to me like leaving all those infected machines in the wild and most likely unknown to their owners is not really solving the problem except temporarily.
I really don't like the idea of remote bricking of someone's machine. But I could get interested in the idea of having it put up a big flashing red window that wouldn't go away until some (free) patch from MS was applied.
It'd also be great research to know/identify the stupids, though less valuable than the far shorter list of good users.
His privacy ain't all -- how about everyone he's ever done business with (paypal) or communicated with, or who even commented on the same blog as he did?
Way, way, far, out of control. Should be, and probably is, completely illegal for them to do that. Where's the constitution when you need it? Oh....forgot, last few administrations have been using it for toilet paper.
Mod parent up! That's exactly why sony is working so hard to keep it with this particular media-friendly judge, who is giving them one heck of a lot more lattitude in discovery than is normal, or even really legal.
But what you gonna do, take her out back and shoot here (in joke from Groklaw).
Haven't been a sony customer for either hardware or media in some decades. See no reason to change that now.
When the fuel is fresh -- uranium and perhaps plutonium for the MOX type, yeah, it doesn't self heat much unless you are chain reacting with neutrons. That has been stopped all the way in all the reactors.
However fission -- look it up -- means splitting atoms. In other words, the fuel becomes full of the results of that, some of which are extremely short half life, and make plenty of heat with no chain reaction at all going on, just normal (for the resulting isotopes) radioactive decay, as the fission products are mostly unstable.
This is because things like uranium and plutonium have a lot more neutrons per proton than any stable ligher element, and the extra neutrons cause the reaction products to be unstable, usually decaying via beta (a neutron becomes a proton and emits an electron) or alpha (emission of a helium nucleus) and gamma (photons) due to the excitation of the recently busted up nucleus.
At end of life, a fuel rod makes about 7% of the heat just sitting there as it would at full chain-reacting output.
(why they let it go that far I don't know, but I'd guess economics). This might not seem like a lot, but remember if you were producing say 1 gigawatt thermal normally, that would still be 70 million watts of heat for the whole core, even after all the chain reactions have stopped. Hence the need to continue active cooling long after the reactor has been "scrammed". It's not that it's hot (it is) but that it's still making more heat.
That's a lot of heat being produced -- it's not just how hot (thermally) they started out, they are still making new heat. Most of it is from very unstable (and thus short lived) isotopes decaying, and after a fairly short time that 7% becomes a far smaller number. But until then, a spent fuel element is sitting there making quite a lot of heat.
Clear that up for you?
The fuel itself can't burn -- it's already an oxide. The danger is the rods, which are made of a zirconium alloy, can burn, and release the fuel and byproducts, most of which are quite nasty for awhile. Further, at high temperatures, zirconium (or for that matter a lot of things) can split water in to hydrogen and oxygen, giving you a chemical explosion risk that can spread bad things around.
Zirconium is used as it doesn't itself absorb neutrons very well, and the other choices are all worse -- Beryllium is for example poisonous all by itself. Carbon catches fire...we only have the periodic table to choose from.
A good while back, while we were still on dialup, actually. Being a small software shop who delivered results and of course our bills over the 'net, we did a ton of email traffic. At the time it was a windows shop as well (by customer demand). We "captured" many viruses in emails, didn't catch them -- we were all pros and knew better. Since we had all the best tools money could buy, we looked pretty closely at these "captured" (eg, not caught) viruses. At first, they were obviously not the work of very skilled or well financed people. Many still had debug symbols in the code, and things like Devstudio and reverse compilation showed they were usually done with a "free" C compiler, not GCC, but Borland.
Most were pretty crummy code, at least by our standards, though there were a few interesting tricks, like pushing data on the stack and then doing a return to get a goto to happen, often into a system function.
All of a sudden, things got better or worse, depending on your POV. The stuff we were capturing suddenly changed, a lot - it was well written, well obfuscated, and tricky stuff -- we even got a cool idea or two from it, and the new stuff was much smaller and made better use of the system API to do nearly all the work -- none of the obviously malicious code was in the virus itself, just system calls with destructive parameters. This would have been around the 2006 timeframe.
It was obvious that someone had started putting money into the game, or for whatever reason the quality of the crackers had suddenly gotten a heck of a lot better, which usually implies the former. Real talent.
To the fanboi who said "it's not windows", sorry pal. Might have been true once, for bot farms and so on, that need volume. Today's cracking is financially based, and much more targeted. And most machines that deal with tons of money aren't running windows -- after being burned a few times, you think the financial business has any loyalty to the guys in redmond? Or anyone at all, for that matter? Linux is just plain more difficult to crack, and more proactive about patching when possible vuln's are discovered. Anyone who looks at the flow of updates to Ubuntu and how many of them "fix a possible security bug" knows this. Many bugs that would have been zero-day exploits are fixed before anyone has put an exploit out for them at all, just by doing some fairly obvious code analysis, looking for ways to overflow allocations and such.
Could be windows guys do that some too, but since they long-delay even well known holes, and you can't see what is in those closed source, uncommented updates, (sometimes there's a KB entry, but not always and always little detail) how could you prove that? I don't think you can.
Actually, dos mode stopped working about win2k sp2 (sp2 broke it, sp1 was still fine).
No, it's not that they stopped supporting it -- they broke it and took away all hardware access from it.
Just like Sony --
I know, as I use an old freeware version of Protel PCB layout tools here, still. Dumb, very fast, very stable, and did I say fast? It was written in the 286 era, so imagine how it runs on a modern machine.
For me, that was the beginning of the end for windows -- I was a windows developer, but couldn't afford the shiny new version of the Protel tools for my prototypes (tens of thousands bucks) and didn't like the new ones anyway.
(.NET and Vista crap were THE end. Devstudio was ok before it became VB again)
Linux to the rescue. Dosemu, freedos, whatever -- dos works in linux better than it did as itself.
For some programs, you have to tweak a setup file so the bottom 64k memory is available to dos programs, the default blocks it due to some security issue. Which is probably imaginary, haven't heard of dos exploits a lot lately myself.
For example:
#!/bin/bash
sudo sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=0/usr/bin/xdosemu
You get:
C:
To which you type "Traxedit"
and there you are, with a program that looks like windows but was written before windows existed.
I'm an ex audiophool, and yeah, I can hear the difference fine -- but only on recordings that were well made in the first place.
For YEARS we whined to the recording studios to quit using so much limiting, compression, and putting too much level on the vinyl so no cartridge on earth could track it (and mistracking makes vinyl wear faster).
No go, "louder is better" and "wall of sound" and all that, with very few exceptions -- some producers or bands that had good taste and such.
Now, having gotten everyone used to second rate sound quality, they find that people are happy with the easy to "share" mp3 class formats that no old audiophile would have poked with a stick. And on nearly all current popular music, there really isn't much difference -- just substituting one kind of crap for another when you digitally compress it further.
Remember, in information theory, the ability to compress means there was redundant content...heh.
Why does putting p in brackets to separate my paragraphs make every single line double spaced on top of that? Does no one at slasdot know how to code? That's stupid.
And even you forgot loose and lose, and affect and effect, which are classics around here.
I'm a sort of precisionist when it comes to language -- human or computer. While you can never make, say, English as specific and definite as say, C++, if you can't communicate the problem, you're never going to get a correct solution except by luck. And of course, it can be kinda tough to express some things in a computer language. For that matter, somethings resist expression in any known language.
And some languages lose meanings. The Romans had three words for love -- eros, filial, agape. Once you know what those mean, there's a lot less misunderstanding. We didn't pick up on that.....and look at the effects on society from using just one word to mean 3 different things!
Say what you mean, and if you have to stop and think how to do that with few words, fine.
Mean what you say -- again, if that takes extra thought, take the time, don't waste mine.
And what exactly changed for the better? Or for that matter, at all? Now the new clowns, in their vanity, claim a "mandate" when in truth all we were doing it picking the only other unacceptable choice off a very short multiple choice list. How many times (and years we can't get back) do we have to repeat the performance before the next batch of clowns "gets it". And how many times should it take, by rights?
One? did that. Two? Did that too. In fact we've been doing it in most elections for my entire lifetime, and it's almost over for me, I ain't getting any younger -- are you?
So get real about the ballot box helping anything at all. That's the bullshit cool-ade they got you drinking. I fell for it too, for about 40 years.
I'm telling you from the other side, it's bullshit cool-ade and a flat out lie -- whether by design or accident doesn't matter.
The fundamental imbalance is that we give them many of the rights of personhood without the responsibilities, as Heinlein pointed out eloquently. We don't put them in jail when they do crimes as we do people, nor do we fine them enough to make the crime not worth it, like we do people. That's really the main thing that has to be fixed.
As Heinlein also pointed out in the series about the Howards -- long lives give inherent advantages, especially financially. People have to die at some point, but we don't now force corps to die (we did used to). That's the other major imbalance.
Third, and some tiny progress is being made here, is the corporate veil is all too difficult to penetrate. For example, the people who signed off on Sony's rootkit should face the same penalties I would if I did the same thing. SCO's executives should face jail for fraud. Things that get us regular humans into jail should also apply to corporate employees, period. At least we now make the CEO personally responsible for the financial reports he signs -- a tiny start, but a start.
We know standard model is broken much more fundamentally anyway -- gravity, singularity, math all blows up and can't be renormalized. One of the better kept secrets of physics over the years, sort of -- that there are two theories (SM and relativity) that prove out to the nth decimal in their own domains, but can't be used together at all. Most laymen don't know how truly embarrassing that really is. And as a cosmologist, how again was it that all that matter/energy of the big bang escaped the black hole it would have to have been? Or is the standard answer "it didn't, we live inside still"?
Me, I hope it does find something that gets rid of dark matter, dark energy (which are pretty awful bandaids to say the least), Mond (which is just too obviously a fit of a model to certain data) and gives us a way to make a model where we don't have to put in particle masses, speed of light and a bunch of other constants ad hoc.
But hey, that's just me. I never liked how Schrödinger's equations only take the magnitude of a complex number, toss out the phase, and then complain about indeterminacy. Duh, if you do that with even a Laplace transform, or FFT, you can't inverse transform without the data you threw away -- same result, indeterminacy. Dumb^2. Maybe god really doesn't play dice!
All those gross me out. I'd rather see a string or M theory that actually works and has all that fall out of it naturally.
Extra dimensions have some interesting possible ramifications no one is mentioning, even if compact. From galaxy seeding from leak-through gravity, to teleportation -- if you're already everywhere in 7 of the 11 dimensions, for example, then it would seem "hetrodyning" might be how you project onto the familiar four. Heh.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, no warrant need to read them -- done all the time. Warrant only needed to convict you for something in them. But -- no need for a warrant then either. Just use the email to figure out who to watch, and then they bust you for whatever they see you do. Just like the way you are entitled to confront your accuser. Some guy calls the cops on you, they show up, and they see, you name it, and bust you for it. The cop is now "the accuser" and you never find out who called them. Just ask the cops sometime if they know, or are allowed to tell (yes, and no).
I'm standing in front of it in my avatar on my forums....
Me too, without RTFA -- a claim of 3x improvement, when a good ICE already gets over 30% under ideal conditions violates a few laws of physics and thermodynamics. How do I know this? I run on PV solar, and need a backup generator, and have been working on those for quite a few years, some decades. I got to about 33% efficiency with a high compression, highly modified honda single cylinder engine -- fuel injected, MSD ignition, computer control, a damn fancy lawnmower, direct driving a very efficient generator from an old fighter plane, the generator so slick it would spin freely from a hand spin, and run at well under 1/4 of it's rated output -- very low I^R losses. It still produced waste heat -- about 2/3 of the btu's in the gasoline by calculations and measurement.. So, I did about as good as a major coal power plant in chemical BTU to electricity, even at a tiny scale (roughly 5 hp). That's pretty good, but then I had a better fuel to work with. Someone needs to read Carnot and so forth. 100% efficiency is implied by the number they claim. Sorry, you can't fool mother nature like that.
Sorry, but the question isn't even wrong. Nuclei don't take part in chemistry directly, nor does chemistry affect them -- chemistry, and life, is all about exchanging electrons in bonds. Wrong level of detail here.
You can burn up radioactive isotopes and even get net energy doing so, and one of the famous accelerator scientists, Carlo Rubbia (and others), has been pushing for this for quite some time. The concept is called the energy amplifier and requires a large accelerator (which is kind of a natural idea considering the source).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier
The wiki article is OK but I have his actual papers. Interesting enough so someone should look into it further -- you may not need to do it the expensive way he proposes, but even that is borderline economically feasible.
And yes, I AM a nuclear physicist.
Or truly ignorant gamers. See the comments on this article at the Inquirer. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2041179/anonymous-takes-playstation-website-playstation-network Either there are a lot of very stupid gamers who forget the sony rootkit incident, and who also need to get a life, or this is Sony's class of counterattack. Sadly, Sony will be able to use this against GeoHot, as in "all those hackers are alike, see?" Gheesh.
One -- you can't breed thorium into a fissionable isotope with alpha rays from smoke detectors. It takes neutrons. Slow ones give the best results. It is pretty hard to make a "beam" of neutrons, but easy to make an isotropic source. If you're going to do that, natural uranium is cheaper anyway, and not impossible to get ore (legally) from rock hounds. But refining it is illegal in most cases. And oh yes, fairly dangerous, and since you didn't know the above point, way past your speed. Getting this stuff inside you is the death penalty, and not a very pleasant one at that -- there's no more effective way to irradiate yourself than consuming a heavy metal radioactive, and they tend to collect in "all the best places". Micrograms matter here.
Two -- I already live off the grid on solar PV (and backups). There has never been a power company wire on my land, ever. That's a heck of a lot more realistic. I've been doing it since 1982, it works.
Three -- it's not terribly legal to have a hot radiation source of any kind without a lot of paperwork with the government (to say the least). Check that out first, before you hurt yourself with either radiation or legal troubles. Even an X ray machine is verboten without a license.
I don't know if I'm "that guy on slashdot last week" that built a fusor last week, but I am a guy on slashdot who does build fusors and other fusion devices for the last few years, and I even run a discussion board about it to help and encourage others to do so. It's not a hobby for idiots (various parts are dangerous) or the impatient, or people with no funds, but it's a lot of fun for those who do it.
FWIW, my best output (continuous) is on the order of 5 microwatts fusion energy, quite a lot of which goes into energetic neutrons. If I were to use tritium instead of just deuterium, I'd expect about 100 times that. Doesn't sound like much does it? Well, it's enough to make silver radioactive enough to count about 2000 cpm on a geiger with a five minute exposure. Or enough to kill you if you expose yourself to the radiation output (which also has a lot of gamma rays) for too long.
I think, but am not sure, that I hold the record for non-funded (eg I paid for all this myself) fusion work, and beat out quite a few government and university efforts hands down. I fund the effort via trading stocks, as does my partner in this particular crime.
My forum is in my sig. Here's a thread on a recent run I did: http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40&p=1836#p1836
This one has a picture of the side I don't sit on while it's running. It's where most of the radiation comes out. http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=309
And of course, everyone wants to see the eye candy, so here it is: http://www.coultersmithing.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=246
Be aware, we've been attacked by bots lately, and I only allow new members to join if they use obviously real human first and last names....by the time I make the captcha hard enough for the robots to fail, so do the humans, sigh. The site should otherwise withstand a slashdotting, and has in the past.
Bring it on!
For once, the politicians did the right thing, actually. These clowns weren't even in the same class as the guys are CERN. Hate to say it, I'm American and wish it were otherwise, but really, go read the reports. This was a bunch of people who thought conceptually trivial meant actually trivial. Nope, and most people outside ivory towers know that. Even some politicians.
I know another guy who used to say that. I showed him VB (free) and he was amazed by it. Maybe you should check it out.
Here's hoping Oracle doesn't start charging for it -- just after releasing some updates the mess up the free version. But you know they will, being Oracle and all. I suggest keeping older versions of the packages in case they do that. After all, if all you need is to run XP for some things, or a few spare linux distros -- you don't need to change the VB platform, ever, unless a new one has new features you need.
Yes. Here in the boonies of SW Virginia, we are already subsidizing the road repairs up near DC -- the richest county around, as they have a lot more road-miles per person to maintain and it seems they beat them harder than we do. Gasoline taxes are a net outflow to the north, richer counties, for us. It's often a campaign issue for our local and state reps. Where I happen to live, not too many people commute - it's too expensive to get to the nearest large town with jobs. A few do it, but there are more farmers, telecommuters, entrepreneurs, and retired here than most other places. Interestingly, diesel which gets better mileage (usually) than gasoline costs more due to the higher tax to take into account the extra damage big heavy trucks do. Which in turn hoses anyone with a small, fuel efficient diesel. As the poster below notes - the poor (in other words, the majority) need better lobbyists, and a better choice of who to vote for in the first place so we actually get representation. GoodLuckWithThat, but it'd be nice. You want to cut deficit? Means test SS so only those who don't really need it get a hit. Ditto medi-this or that. Make it a safety net (at most). Tax for SS should not have a limit with income either. You still get more money if you make more, so that doesn't disincentivize hard work and success too badly. And yeah, cut back on this military some. Seems every administration falls to the temptation to "make history" - yeah, well, it's bad history in the main, and costs not only money, but lives. We've already more or less told our young they're not going to get anything like the current entitlement levels, and I've heard just about 100% of them say so to me -- all the smart ones are planning their own retirement fund. Yeah, I'm one of those who drives 20 miles to do absolutely anything. Or more. Which is why I started my own business that mostly did telecommuting, then retired, but still work from home to an extent. I drive *less* than almost anyone. I live in near-heaven, why go anywhere else? Get groceries is about it, or take my wife out once in awhile. If you want to live in a city, with all the "advantages" we out here don't have -- crime, pollution, higher rent/mortgage, crowding, idiots, bad roads, more government intrusion in your life -- go for it. Been there, done that, this is better. Obviously, the bottom line here is the government wants more money to waste, and the concentration of all power into federal and away form local hands (where the people have a voice!). It's the sorry way everything is going.
It's still pretty much the case as far as I can tell. I run linux (duh, of course) and the NVidia stuff rocks, particularly if you want to do "other" things with the card (CUDA). This may not be as true in a windows environment, but I now only run windows in virtual box...and there it only sees a generic vid card anyway (which is still fast enough for what I do in windows, which isn't gaming).
Seems to me like leaving all those infected machines in the wild and most likely unknown to their owners is not really solving the problem except temporarily.
I really don't like the idea of remote bricking of someone's machine. But I could get interested in the idea of having it put up a big flashing red window that wouldn't go away until some (free) patch from MS was applied.
It'd also be great research to know/identify the stupids, though less valuable than the far shorter list of good users.
Way, way, far, out of control. Should be, and probably is, completely illegal for them to do that. Where's the constitution when you need it? Oh....forgot, last few administrations have been using it for toilet paper.
But what you gonna do, take her out back and shoot here (in joke from Groklaw).
Haven't been a sony customer for either hardware or media in some decades. See no reason to change that now.
However fission -- look it up -- means splitting atoms. In other words, the fuel becomes full of the results of that, some of which are extremely short half life, and make plenty of heat with no chain reaction at all going on, just normal (for the resulting isotopes) radioactive decay, as the fission products are mostly unstable. This is because things like uranium and plutonium have a lot more neutrons per proton than any stable ligher element, and the extra neutrons cause the reaction products to be unstable, usually decaying via beta (a neutron becomes a proton and emits an electron) or alpha (emission of a helium nucleus) and gamma (photons) due to the excitation of the recently busted up nucleus.
At end of life, a fuel rod makes about 7% of the heat just sitting there as it would at full chain-reacting output. (why they let it go that far I don't know, but I'd guess economics). This might not seem like a lot, but remember if you were producing say 1 gigawatt thermal normally, that would still be 70 million watts of heat for the whole core, even after all the chain reactions have stopped. Hence the need to continue active cooling long after the reactor has been "scrammed". It's not that it's hot (it is) but that it's still making more heat.
That's a lot of heat being produced -- it's not just how hot (thermally) they started out, they are still making new heat. Most of it is from very unstable (and thus short lived) isotopes decaying, and after a fairly short time that 7% becomes a far smaller number. But until then, a spent fuel element is sitting there making quite a lot of heat.
Clear that up for you?
The fuel itself can't burn -- it's already an oxide. The danger is the rods, which are made of a zirconium alloy, can burn, and release the fuel and byproducts, most of which are quite nasty for awhile. Further, at high temperatures, zirconium (or for that matter a lot of things) can split water in to hydrogen and oxygen, giving you a chemical explosion risk that can spread bad things around.
Zirconium is used as it doesn't itself absorb neutrons very well, and the other choices are all worse -- Beryllium is for example poisonous all by itself. Carbon catches fire...we only have the periodic table to choose from.
A good while back, while we were still on dialup, actually. Being a small software shop who delivered results and of course our bills over the 'net, we did a ton of email traffic. At the time it was a windows shop as well (by customer demand). We "captured" many viruses in emails, didn't catch them -- we were all pros and knew better. Since we had all the best tools money could buy, we looked pretty closely at these "captured" (eg, not caught) viruses. At first, they were obviously not the work of very skilled or well financed people. Many still had debug symbols in the code, and things like Devstudio and reverse compilation showed they were usually done with a "free" C compiler, not GCC, but Borland.
Most were pretty crummy code, at least by our standards, though there were a few interesting tricks, like pushing data on the stack and then doing a return to get a goto to happen, often into a system function.
All of a sudden, things got better or worse, depending on your POV. The stuff we were capturing suddenly changed, a lot - it was well written, well obfuscated, and tricky stuff -- we even got a cool idea or two from it, and the new stuff was much smaller and made better use of the system API to do nearly all the work -- none of the obviously malicious code was in the virus itself, just system calls with destructive parameters. This would have been around the 2006 timeframe.
It was obvious that someone had started putting money into the game, or for whatever reason the quality of the crackers had suddenly gotten a heck of a lot better, which usually implies the former. Real talent.
To the fanboi who said "it's not windows", sorry pal. Might have been true once, for bot farms and so on, that need volume. Today's cracking is financially based, and much more targeted. And most machines that deal with tons of money aren't running windows -- after being burned a few times, you think the financial business has any loyalty to the guys in redmond? Or anyone at all, for that matter? Linux is just plain more difficult to crack, and more proactive about patching when possible vuln's are discovered. Anyone who looks at the flow of updates to Ubuntu and how many of them "fix a possible security bug" knows this. Many bugs that would have been zero-day exploits are fixed before anyone has put an exploit out for them at all, just by doing some fairly obvious code analysis, looking for ways to overflow allocations and such.
Could be windows guys do that some too, but since they long-delay even well known holes, and you can't see what is in those closed source, uncommented updates, (sometimes there's a KB entry, but not always and always little detail) how could you prove that? I don't think you can.
I know, as I use an old freeware version of Protel PCB layout tools here, still. Dumb, very fast, very stable, and did I say fast? It was written in the 286 era, so imagine how it runs on a modern machine.
For me, that was the beginning of the end for windows -- I was a windows developer, but couldn't afford the shiny new version of the Protel tools for my prototypes (tens of thousands bucks) and didn't like the new ones anyway. (.NET and Vista crap were THE end. Devstudio was ok before it became VB again)
Linux to the rescue. Dosemu, freedos, whatever -- dos works in linux better than it did as itself. For some programs, you have to tweak a setup file so the bottom 64k memory is available to dos programs, the default blocks it due to some security issue. Which is probably imaginary, haven't heard of dos exploits a lot lately myself.
For example: #!/bin/bash sudo sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=0 /usr/bin/xdosemu
You get:
C:
To which you type "Traxedit"
and there you are, with a program that looks like windows but was written before windows existed.
For YEARS we whined to the recording studios to quit using so much limiting, compression, and putting too much level on the vinyl so no cartridge on earth could track it (and mistracking makes vinyl wear faster).
No go, "louder is better" and "wall of sound" and all that, with very few exceptions -- some producers or bands that had good taste and such.
Now, having gotten everyone used to second rate sound quality, they find that people are happy with the easy to "share" mp3 class formats that no old audiophile would have poked with a stick. And on nearly all current popular music, there really isn't much difference -- just substituting one kind of crap for another when you digitally compress it further.
Remember, in information theory, the ability to compress means there was redundant content...heh.
Why does putting p in brackets to separate my paragraphs make every single line double spaced on top of that? Does no one at slasdot know how to code? That's stupid.
Yeah, if I had mod points I'd mark parent "insightful".
And even you forgot loose and lose, and affect and effect, which are classics around here. I'm a sort of precisionist when it comes to language -- human or computer. While you can never make, say, English as specific and definite as say, C++, if you can't communicate the problem, you're never going to get a correct solution except by luck. And of course, it can be kinda tough to express some things in a computer language. For that matter, somethings resist expression in any known language. And some languages lose meanings. The Romans had three words for love -- eros, filial, agape. Once you know what those mean, there's a lot less misunderstanding. We didn't pick up on that.....and look at the effects on society from using just one word to mean 3 different things! Say what you mean, and if you have to stop and think how to do that with few words, fine. Mean what you say -- again, if that takes extra thought, take the time, don't waste mine.
And what exactly changed for the better? Or for that matter, at all? Now the new clowns, in their vanity, claim a "mandate" when in truth all we were doing it picking the only other unacceptable choice off a very short multiple choice list. How many times (and years we can't get back) do we have to repeat the performance before the next batch of clowns "gets it". And how many times should it take, by rights? One? did that. Two? Did that too. In fact we've been doing it in most elections for my entire lifetime, and it's almost over for me, I ain't getting any younger -- are you? So get real about the ballot box helping anything at all. That's the bullshit cool-ade they got you drinking. I fell for it too, for about 40 years. I'm telling you from the other side, it's bullshit cool-ade and a flat out lie -- whether by design or accident doesn't matter.
As Heinlein also pointed out in the series about the Howards -- long lives give inherent advantages, especially financially. People have to die at some point, but we don't now force corps to die (we did used to). That's the other major imbalance.
Third, and some tiny progress is being made here, is the corporate veil is all too difficult to penetrate. For example, the people who signed off on Sony's rootkit should face the same penalties I would if I did the same thing. SCO's executives should face jail for fraud. Things that get us regular humans into jail should also apply to corporate employees, period. At least we now make the CEO personally responsible for the financial reports he signs -- a tiny start, but a start.
Thanks for the nice, intelligent reply, Boris. I'll buy ya a beer and pizza sometime and we can go at it and have some fun! (Doug)
Me, I hope it does find something that gets rid of dark matter, dark energy (which are pretty awful bandaids to say the least), Mond (which is just too obviously a fit of a model to certain data) and gives us a way to make a model where we don't have to put in particle masses, speed of light and a bunch of other constants ad hoc.
But hey, that's just me. I never liked how Schrödinger's equations only take the magnitude of a complex number, toss out the phase, and then complain about indeterminacy. Duh, if you do that with even a Laplace transform, or FFT, you can't inverse transform without the data you threw away -- same result, indeterminacy. Dumb^2. Maybe god really doesn't play dice!
All those gross me out. I'd rather see a string or M theory that actually works and has all that fall out of it naturally. Extra dimensions have some interesting possible ramifications no one is mentioning, even if compact. From galaxy seeding from leak-through gravity, to teleportation -- if you're already everywhere in 7 of the 11 dimensions, for example, then it would seem "hetrodyning" might be how you project onto the familiar four. Heh.
Scotty, beam me up!