I blame it all on Marvel comics. Poor dude was trying to come up with some radiation-induced superpower, like Spiderman, the Fantastic Four or the Hulk.
Back on the old Burroughs mainframes, the unexpected termination of a child process could terminate the parent process. The error message was "Program abort: death of a child".
I remember some gal totally freaking out over that. It may have hit a nerve.
Never had the joy(?) of doing a hardware design spec, but I once spent about a year of my life on the software design and spec for a major contract.
Even (especially!) standards as complex as the definitions of programming languages come with dates or version numbers. Fortran 66 is not Fortran 77 is not Fortran90 is not Fortran 95 is not Fortran2003 is not Fortran2008. Close, and there's probably a common subset in there somewhere, but they aren't the same.
Ditto for any other programming language with an ISO standard -- the year is part of the standard number. (Although curiously, C89 and C90 are the same language, because the 1989 ANSI C standard (X3.159-1989) was adopted as the ISO standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1990) in 1990.)
So yeah, if you're spec'ing something as part of a billion-dollar project, hardware or software, get the details nailed down. At the very least, stick in verbiage to the effect that "all standards named here-in, unless otherwise specified, shall refer to those current as of the date of this specification."
It is when you consider the amount of mining, separation, transportation and disposal of the energy-equivalent amount of coal and ash -- 1 cubic centimetre of uranium is about the equivalent of a mile-long train load of coal.
(Or the amount of mining, refining, etc, etc, to manufacture and install the equivalent in solar panels or wind turbines.)
Most people have no comprehension of the energy density of nuclear vs chemical fuels. This might help.
(Fun fact -- the trace thorium in coal has more potential nuclear energy than the chemical energy of burning the coal.)
The next thing you know, civilization has collapsed and there are triffids prowling the countryside looking for walking nitrogen/nutrient bundles (aka humans).
You can't have a country whose economic foundation was slavery not have a cultural problem.
You might want to review history. At the time the US was founded, slavery was legal and practised in nearly every other country in the world. (And historically, slavery was almost never about race per se, just different social/cultural/economic groups. Islamic holders of Christian slaves, for example.)
That doesn't make it right, but it does mean you're full of shit. (Or perhaps you have a point: the west African nations whose economic foundation was selling those slaves also have cultural problems. Or perhaps the cultural problems came first.)
But slavery was everywhere, since the dawn of agriculture (those fields aren't going to work themselves). It was the Industrial Revolution which made it economically unviable -- which is why it died out in the northern, industrial states sooner than in the southern largely agricultural ones, and in Europe before it did in the New World.
Of course it depends where you are on the ground. I used to work in a data center in Colorado Springs, at about 6000 feet altitude. We saw quite a few correctable memory errors in the logs (and a few random crashes).
Might have been cosmic rays, might have been radiation from the mountain of granite (Pikes Peak) we were in the shadow of.
Either way, if the errors occurred several times in the same DIMM, it was probably bad memory and we replaced it. The odds of cosmic rays hitting the same DIMM every few days or so are pretty remote.
Even if you're going to restrict yourself to movies, SPECTRE was the villain in most of the Sean Connery Bond flics. And that was in no small part because they took liberally from Ian Fleming's books.
At least you got the acronym right.
Now, for bonus points, what did THRUSH (the Man from UNCLE bad guys) stand for? (And, trivia note, Ian Fleming contributed concepts for that TV series, including the name of the main character, Napoleon Solo.)
It's also light bulbs (Philips stupid mood thingie), thermostats (Nest, etc), nannycams (every manufacturer and his brother), (in)security systems, even fricking doorbells, et bloody cetera.
Heh. Back in my college (mainframe!) days, one of the systems guys had a blackboard in his office, and up in one corner were a few innocuous characters (something like "&:*").
Now, I was just a student, but spent enough time hanging around the computer center to know most of these guys. I noticed this one day and said "Jay, is it really a good idea to have the system privcode [essentially, the root password on that OS] in plain sight like that?", and grinned as his face turned white, then red. At least it wasn't "1234".
I'd learned it from a 2-inch thick stack of printout of the OS source code I'd found in the dumpster, it had been hardcoded into a function call. (I couldn't believe it was that simple when I first found it, but checking the Espol manual -- which I'd been given by a guy in a Burroughs sales office; when I went in and just asked what manuals they had on the B6700 system, he was happy to help out a student with some old stuff from a back room -- and sure enough, that's what it was.)
(I'm not even sure the terms "social engineering" and "dumpster diving" had even been coined back then, it was in the mid-1970s. And I never did anything malicious with the knowledge.)
This may well be overkill for your needs, and it's a bit pricey, but the book Building Scientific Apparatus has been on my wish list for a while. It has chapters on working with glass, vacuum technoloy, charged-particle optics, and electronics, among others.
Sigh, too many projects (including a pair of novels to finish) and not enough time.
If the market was truly free, I could buy that drug for $5 (I don't have cancer), and turn around and sell it somebody with cancer for $50 and a tidy markup for my trouble. And so could anyone else, or they could undercut me and sell it for $25; the company trying to sell it for $100,000 wouldn't get any takers.
I can't, because the government won't let me. That particular market is not free.
At the "University of Waterloo" we like Python and JS...
Maybe they do now, but back in the day they liked Fortran. Anyone remember WATFOR (and WATFIV)?
There was also a Waterloo BASIC, and later (actually done by a company spun off from UW) Watcom C/C++.
(Me, I learned ALGOL and APL more or less in parallel with each other. If you really want to learn programming, vs just doing some bit-bashing, learn at least two very dissimilar languages. It'll stretch your brain.)
But you could get an expansion memory cartridge (fit the same slot as the game cartridge). I got an 8 k one and soldered in 4 more 2k (static) RAM chips to bring it up to 16k. Luxury!
Slashdot Mirror
In related news, a spokesman for Volkswagen was heard to say:
"Kaaaahhhnnnn!!!"
I take back my earlier post about F4 on afterburner. Jetson's car is way cooler.
Screw that, I want one that sounds like an F-4 on afterburners.
I blame it all on Marvel comics. Poor dude was trying to come up with some radiation-induced superpower, like Spiderman, the Fantastic Four or the Hulk.
Back on the old Burroughs mainframes, the unexpected termination of a child process could terminate the parent process. The error message was "Program abort: death of a child".
I remember some gal totally freaking out over that. It may have hit a nerve.
This.
Never had the joy(?) of doing a hardware design spec, but I once spent about a year of my life on the software design and spec for a major contract.
Even (especially!) standards as complex as the definitions of programming languages come with dates or version numbers. Fortran 66 is not Fortran 77 is not Fortran90 is not Fortran 95 is not Fortran2003 is not Fortran2008. Close, and there's probably a common subset in there somewhere, but they aren't the same.
Ditto for any other programming language with an ISO standard -- the year is part of the standard number. (Although curiously, C89 and C90 are the same language, because the 1989 ANSI C standard (X3.159-1989) was adopted as the ISO standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1990) in 1990.)
So yeah, if you're spec'ing something as part of a billion-dollar project, hardware or software, get the details nailed down. At the very least, stick in verbiage to the effect that "all standards named here-in, unless otherwise specified, shall refer to those current as of the date of this specification."
Why mess around with heat at all? Just sandwich some beta-emitting isotope with a semiconductor and use the emitted electrons directly.
Betavoltaics for the win, baby!
Hey, imagine one of those batteries in a Galaxy Note 7! ;)
And "clean" is also relative
It is when you consider the amount of mining, separation, transportation and disposal of the energy-equivalent amount of coal and ash -- 1 cubic centimetre of uranium is about the equivalent of a mile-long train load of coal.
(Or the amount of mining, refining, etc, etc, to manufacture and install the equivalent in solar panels or wind turbines.)
Most people have no comprehension of the energy density of nuclear vs chemical fuels. This might help.
(Fun fact -- the trace thorium in coal has more potential nuclear energy than the chemical energy of burning the coal.)
promised to generate enough power to light up 1.3 million homes.
So how many megawatts is that? (And no, given the name of the plant, searching for "watts" doesn't help.)
And are we talking trailer park homes or mansions? Does "light up" include heating/cooling, running the electronics, etc, etc.
Who comes up with these freaking units, anyway?
(Grouchy because /me hasn't finished first cup of coffee yet.)
But timezones match working hours, ip ranges and easy to discover code litter.
All of which are dead easy to fake if you're doing a false-flag operation, and should be at least obfuscated as a part of normal operational security.
Unless, of course, that's what they want you to think. (So clearly, I cannot choose the cup in front of you.)
This.
You just do it ... and make it look like the attack came from China.
She's worse than Putin, she's Lennart Poettering level of badness.
Oh, come on now. I mean, I don't like her either, but nobody is that bad.
This would be that same FBI that didn't think Hillary Clinton did do anything worth bringing charges over? That FBI?
That's how it starts.
The next thing you know, civilization has collapsed and there are triffids prowling the countryside looking for walking nitrogen/nutrient bundles (aka humans).
You can't have a country whose economic foundation was slavery not have a cultural problem.
You might want to review history. At the time the US was founded, slavery was legal and practised in nearly every other country in the world. (And historically, slavery was almost never about race per se, just different social/cultural/economic groups. Islamic holders of Christian slaves, for example.)
That doesn't make it right, but it does mean you're full of shit. (Or perhaps you have a point: the west African nations whose economic foundation was selling those slaves also have cultural problems. Or perhaps the cultural problems came first.)
But slavery was everywhere, since the dawn of agriculture (those fields aren't going to work themselves). It was the Industrial Revolution which made it economically unviable -- which is why it died out in the northern, industrial states sooner than in the southern largely agricultural ones, and in Europe before it did in the New World.
Of course it depends where you are on the ground. I used to work in a data center in Colorado Springs, at about 6000 feet altitude. We saw quite a few correctable memory errors in the logs (and a few random crashes).
Might have been cosmic rays, might have been radiation from the mountain of granite (Pikes Peak) we were in the shadow of.
Either way, if the errors occurred several times in the same DIMM, it was probably bad memory and we replaced it. The odds of cosmic rays hitting the same DIMM every few days or so are pretty remote.
And iron, aluminium, silicon, and calcium atoms. Carbon and hydrogen are much less abundant than these.
Really? What planet are you posting from? Or are you a mole person?
And I'm sure I've left out some major categories.
Oh yeah, sex toys.
"From a James Bond movie."
Kids these days.
Even if you're going to restrict yourself to movies, SPECTRE was the villain in most of the Sean Connery Bond flics. And that was in no small part because they took liberally from Ian Fleming's books.
At least you got the acronym right.
Now, for bonus points, what did THRUSH (the Man from UNCLE bad guys) stand for? (And, trivia note, Ian Fleming contributed concepts for that TV series, including the name of the main character, Napoleon Solo.)
Are we sufficiently off-topic yet? ;)
It's not just refrigerators and light switches.
It's also light bulbs (Philips stupid mood thingie), thermostats (Nest, etc), nannycams (every manufacturer and his brother), (in)security systems, even fricking doorbells, et bloody cetera.
And I'm sure I've left out some major categories.
PS: currently a whiteboard in the lab.
Heh. Back in my college (mainframe!) days, one of the systems guys had a blackboard in his office, and up in one corner were a few innocuous characters (something like "&:*").
Now, I was just a student, but spent enough time hanging around the computer center to know most of these guys. I noticed this one day and said "Jay, is it really a good idea to have the system privcode [essentially, the root password on that OS] in plain sight like that?", and grinned as his face turned white, then red. At least it wasn't "1234".
I'd learned it from a 2-inch thick stack of printout of the OS source code I'd found in the dumpster, it had been hardcoded into a function call. (I couldn't believe it was that simple when I first found it, but checking the Espol manual -- which I'd been given by a guy in a Burroughs sales office; when I went in and just asked what manuals they had on the B6700 system, he was happy to help out a student with some old stuff from a back room -- and sure enough, that's what it was.)
(I'm not even sure the terms "social engineering" and "dumpster diving" had even been coined back then, it was in the mid-1970s. And I never did anything malicious with the knowledge.)
This may well be overkill for your needs, and it's a bit pricey, but the book Building Scientific Apparatus has been on my wish list for a while. It has chapters on working with glass, vacuum technoloy, charged-particle optics, and electronics, among others.
Sigh, too many projects (including a pair of novels to finish) and not enough time.
If the market was truly free, I could buy that drug for $5 (I don't have cancer), and turn around and sell it somebody with cancer for $50 and a tidy markup for my trouble. And so could anyone else, or they could undercut me and sell it for $25; the company trying to sell it for $100,000 wouldn't get any takers.
I can't, because the government won't let me. That particular market is not free.
At the "University of Waterloo" we like Python and JS...
Maybe they do now, but back in the day they liked Fortran. Anyone remember WATFOR (and WATFIV)?
There was also a Waterloo BASIC, and later (actually done by a company spun off from UW) Watcom C/C++.
(Me, I learned ALGOL and APL more or less in parallel with each other. If you really want to learn programming, vs just doing some bit-bashing, learn at least two very dissimilar languages. It'll stretch your brain.)
Well, 3.5k if you were using BASIC.
But you could get an expansion memory cartridge (fit the same slot as the game cartridge). I got an 8 k one and soldered in 4 more 2k (static) RAM chips to bring it up to 16k. Luxury!