I'd think anytime that you have an unscheduled explosion would be the most inopportune time.
Well, some times are more inopportune than others.
Having the battery explode while the computer is sitting on a desk and you're having a beer watching the game is inopportune. Having the battery explode while you're working on the computer and it's in your lap, that's most inopportune.
Divide the hundreds of square kilometers that is CFB Petawawa by 15000 people and you get "mostly empty".
I went through GMT (general military training, aka "basic") at Pet. That was a few years (okay, decades) back, I'll grant you, but "mostly empty" fits. You don't play war games somewhere that isn't.
(I remember seeing the Chalk River facility from the river as we were paddling the 10 or 20-man inflatables (I don't remember exactly -- big suckers, and we'd inflated them by hand) across and what seemed like five miles upriver to where we'd hike around, rappel down some cliffs, and then paddle back. What fun.)
This is a small reactor (ie, not a power reactor), way the hell in the middle of nowhere north of Ottawa. It's upstream from Camp Petawawa (large and mostly empty Cdn Forces base), which itself is way out in the boonies.
And no, this isn't capable of "spectacular" failure for most values of spectacular.
Time doesn't (of course) slow down in such situations. Your perception speeds up, which is to say, you start processing more information, probably much of it in parallel.
They should repeat the experiment, this time with the chronometers calibrated to legible speed, but give the subject a half-dozen or more of them to read the numbers off of at once.
Although I rather suspect that this phenomenon may be more geared toward processing and reacting to data relevant to the situation (ie, that which will help you survive) than to some arbitrary task like reading numbers off a dial (unless those numbers are relevant - airspeed, for example).
Actually there are plenty of places in the US where you might encounter a trolley or a streetcar. It's just that most places these days call them "light rail".
Around here (south Denver suburbs), some traffic lights switch from the usual red-green-yellow cycle to flashing yellow (or red for cross traffic) in the late hours when traffic volume is low. This lets cross traffic treat the light as a stop sign instead of having to wait several minutes for it to cycle to green for them.
I don't recall seeing it in the US, but in Canada it's not uncommon to have a flashing green either before or after the regular solid green, as an indication that "it's only green in your direction" and go ahead and make turns without worrying about oncoming traffic. Here they just add a green arrow light for controlling turns.
Well, the additional lanes added to I-25 by the T-REX project helped that too. That and redesigning the underpasses that used to flood during heavy rains. But yeah, the volume is much higher.
They've recently (well, within the last few years) added the on-ramp lights to some of the ramps on C-470, and they also help.
Now, if they could only do something about the sun glare on March mornings and September afternoons. (Westbound 470 in the evening rush hour you can see the standing waves in various places as the road curves point the cars at the sun and everyone slows down)
Re:OB In Soviet Russia
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Flying Humans
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· Score: 2, Funny
Which reminds me of the story of a group of draftees (this goes back a ways) who were selected to begin jump training. They were told how they'd begin jumping the next day. There was some muttering and in response to "Any questions?", one soldier asks "how high will we be jumping from, sir?"
"About 2,500 feet."
More muttering, and the guy hesitantly raises his hand to ask another question: "Uh, couldn't we start a little lower, maybe 200 feet?"
"200 feet!? Good god, man, the parachutes won't have time to open!"
"Oh, parachutes. You didn't tell us we'd be using parachutes."
(I've got a couple of static-line jumps under my belt, but decided it'd be more useful to learn to pilot the plane than to jump out of it.)
Yeah, you could almost single-step a computer faster than single digit Hz. That's in the days when there was actually a switch on the the computer front panel (along with all the blinkenlights) that took a processor in the halted state and actually stepped the circuitry through one cycle. (And when "halted" just meant the clock had been temporarilty dropped to 0 Hz, not shutdown or crashed.)
Well no, the Constitution itself specifically allows for amendment, so proposals to amend the constitution (even repealing one of its earlier amendments) would not fall under my suggested prohibition.
Proposals of laws that violate the Constitution without amending it appropriately first, however, would.
And yes, there are subtleties involved, that's why I said "prima facie violates the constitution", ie, blatantly obvious. For more subtle issues perhaps the Supreme Court would have to be the final arbiter for that, too.
I've no problem whatsoever with someone who crafts a bogus law just to garner votes - election grandstanding - being summarily banned from ever holding office again. It's disgusting behaviour, and we shouldn't tolerate it.
..that the BusyBox developers could have Verizon's servers seized for the GPL violations?
I can't wait.
(Not that I really expect that would ever happen even if this became law. We all know there's one law for the people and another for the corporations (and yet another for the politicians).)
What I'd really like to see is a constitutional amendment (that's what it would take) that automatically bars an official from re-election if he or she proposes, sponsors, or votes for legislation like this which is prima facie unconstitutional (they've violated their oath of office to uphold the constitution).
Automatic openers were pretty rare in sport parachuting back when I was doing it (but that was a long time ago) and non-existent in other kinds of parachuting.
Static lines (your "bit of string" contraptions) have been around forever and are pretty standard for cargo drops, initial training, and mass paratroop deployment. (Special forces insertions etc don't use them because they need to free-fall from higher altitude before opening.)
When dealing with huge amounts of data and computationally intensive tasks, it's going to take a long time, period.
That said, though, there are frequently optimizations that would occur to someone skilled in computer programming that wouldn't to someone whose training and experience lies elsewhere.
Case in point, I once made a simple change to some code (specifically, the disk location of certain working files) that reduced the run time from about 40 days (extrapolated from a sample data set) to about 30 hours. (The change was to put the input, workfile and output on different disk drives, eliminating seek time and disk head thrashing. This was long ago, hardware constraints were severe.)
The difference lies in knowing what the underlying systems (libraries, OS, memory and I/O systems, hardware) are actually doing when you code your high level analysis routines. Can't make the floating point calculations any faster (although perhaps there are some you can cache for later reuse) but there are a lot of things that can be tweaked and are worth tweaking for high volume calculations.
If your definition of using high level language requires writing a sonnet, then most humans don't qualify either.
(Hell, some of them don't even come up to the "rolling over to get a doggy treat" standard either, but that's less so from inability to use language as apparent inability to relate actions to consequences.)
Applications are already able to customize menu picks and available buttons based on context.
That's an example of artificial stupidity. The whole point of having a menu instead of a command line is to remind you of the commands you only need infrequently. I hate having to go through expanding "helpfully shortened" menu lists looking for a freaking command I know is there somewhere, I just don't remember exactly where, just because I haven't used it lately.
Even ignoring the ad breaks in TV shows, there's still product placement within the shows
It's not working. There's no way I'm ever flying Oceanic, and I haven't been able to find any Dharma Initiative brand products in any of my local grocery stores.
Most of that "managing the waste stream" cost is, in fact, regulatory (bureaucracy) cost, which could be reduced.
The waste is in "temporary storage" because of various groups protesting anything remotely related to radwaste, including transporting it to safer storage locations ("not on my highway!") or setting up said safer storage locations ("not in my backyard!"). See above re. studies, permits, permits for studies, protests, counter protest, etc, ad nauseum.
Spent fuel is a tiny part of it -- although the most radioactive part (and yes, we should recycle it).
There are plenty of technologically simple solutions to radwaste. (Dead easy: vitrify the stuff into glass blocks and store it in the uranium mines the original ore came from in the first place.) The expensive problem is politics, as usual.
The simple proof is the other countries in the world where nuclear power generation is popular and increasingly deployed. This wouldn't be the case if the problems were technical rather than political.
(I see several trainloads of coal a day travelling the route south from Wyoming. Each one of those nearly mile-long trainloads of coal will, when burned, produce about the same amount of energy you could get from a slug of reactor fuel about the size of the last joint of my little finger. Consider the relative waste issues (coal ash is nasty, nasty stuff and stays toxic forever, unlike something with a half-life). Consider that the thorium in the coal ash from that trainload of coal could yield more energy, if fissioned in a reactor, than burning the coal did.)
Most of that cost is government imposed -- studies, permits, permits for studies, impact statments, reviews, more reviews, more permits, protests, counterprotests, hearings, more studies, etc.
Not saying that none of that is necessary, but it could certainly be streamlined. Cost of money being what it is, that process is too lengthy and too risky (financial risk of not knowing just when it will all get approved, and whether it will stay approved.)
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I'd think anytime that you have an unscheduled explosion would be the most inopportune time.
Well, some times are more inopportune than others.
Having the battery explode while the computer is sitting on a desk and you're having a beer watching the game is inopportune. Having the battery explode while you're working on the computer and it's in your lap, that's most inopportune.
Divide the hundreds of square kilometers that is CFB Petawawa by 15000 people and you get "mostly empty".
I went through GMT (general military training, aka "basic") at Pet. That was a few years (okay, decades) back, I'll grant you, but "mostly empty" fits. You don't play war games somewhere that isn't.
(I remember seeing the Chalk River facility from the river as we were paddling the 10 or 20-man inflatables (I don't remember exactly -- big suckers, and we'd inflated them by hand) across and what seemed like five miles upriver to where we'd hike around, rappel down some cliffs, and then paddle back. What fun.)
This is a small reactor (ie, not a power reactor), way the hell in the middle of nowhere north of Ottawa. It's upstream from Camp Petawawa (large and mostly empty Cdn Forces base), which itself is way out in the boonies.
And no, this isn't capable of "spectacular" failure for most values of spectacular.
Time doesn't (of course) slow down in such situations. Your perception speeds up, which is to say, you start processing more information, probably much of it in parallel.
They should repeat the experiment, this time with the chronometers calibrated to legible speed, but give the subject a half-dozen or more of them to read the numbers off of at once.
Although I rather suspect that this phenomenon may be more geared toward processing and reacting to data relevant to the situation (ie, that which will help you survive) than to some arbitrary task like reading numbers off a dial (unless those numbers are relevant - airspeed, for example).
Actually there are plenty of places in the US where you might encounter a trolley or a streetcar. It's just that most places these days call them "light rail".
Around here (south Denver suburbs), some traffic lights switch from the usual red-green-yellow cycle to flashing yellow (or red for cross traffic) in the late hours when traffic volume is low. This lets cross traffic treat the light as a stop sign instead of having to wait several minutes for it to cycle to green for them.
I don't recall seeing it in the US, but in Canada it's not uncommon to have a flashing green either before or after the regular solid green, as an indication that "it's only green in your direction" and go ahead and make turns without worrying about oncoming traffic. Here they just add a green arrow light for controlling turns.
Well, the additional lanes added to I-25 by the T-REX project helped that too. That and redesigning the underpasses that used to flood during heavy rains. But yeah, the volume is much higher.
They've recently (well, within the last few years) added the on-ramp lights to some of the ramps on C-470, and they also help.
Now, if they could only do something about the sun glare on March mornings and September afternoons. (Westbound 470 in the evening rush hour you can see the standing waves in various places as the road curves point the cars at the sun and everyone slows down)
Which reminds me of the story of a group of draftees (this goes back a ways) who were selected to begin jump training. They were told how they'd begin jumping the next day. There was some muttering and in response to "Any questions?", one soldier asks "how high will we be jumping from, sir?"
"About 2,500 feet."
More muttering, and the guy hesitantly raises his hand to ask another question: "Uh, couldn't we start a little lower, maybe 200 feet?"
"200 feet!? Good god, man, the parachutes won't have time to open!"
"Oh, parachutes. You didn't tell us we'd be using parachutes."
(I've got a couple of static-line jumps under my belt, but decided it'd be more useful to learn to pilot the plane than to jump out of it.)
Yeah, you could almost single-step a computer faster than single digit Hz. That's in the days when there was actually a switch on the the computer front panel (along with all the blinkenlights) that took a processor in the halted state and actually stepped the circuitry through one cycle. (And when "halted" just meant the clock had been temporarilty dropped to 0 Hz, not shutdown or crashed.)
You lost me at "anterograde". The opposite of "retrograde" is "prograde".
The bafflegab up to that point was amusing.
(And the less said about whoever moderated that "insightful" rather than "funny", the better.)
Well no, the Constitution itself specifically allows for amendment, so proposals to amend the constitution (even repealing one of its earlier amendments) would not fall under my suggested prohibition.
Proposals of laws that violate the Constitution without amending it appropriately first, however, would.
And yes, there are subtleties involved, that's why I said "prima facie violates the constitution", ie, blatantly obvious. For more subtle issues perhaps the Supreme Court would have to be the final arbiter for that, too.
I've no problem whatsoever with someone who crafts a bogus law just to garner votes - election grandstanding - being summarily banned from ever holding office again. It's disgusting behaviour, and we shouldn't tolerate it.
"You can't run the IE 7 on it, so you're stuck with Firefox."
"but XP comes included in the price when you buy a new PC"
There, made a few fixes for you.
..that the BusyBox developers could have Verizon's servers seized for the GPL violations?
I can't wait.
(Not that I really expect that would ever happen even if this became law. We all know there's one law for the people and another for the corporations (and yet another for the politicians).)
What I'd really like to see is a constitutional amendment (that's what it would take) that automatically bars an official from re-election if he or she proposes, sponsors, or votes for legislation like this which is prima facie unconstitutional (they've violated their oath of office to uphold the constitution).
But I don't expect that to happen either.
Automatic openers were pretty rare in sport parachuting back when I was doing it (but that was a long time ago) and non-existent in other kinds of parachuting.
Static lines (your "bit of string" contraptions) have been around forever and are pretty standard for cargo drops, initial training, and mass paratroop deployment. (Special forces insertions etc don't use them because they need to free-fall from higher altitude before opening.)
False dichotomy.
/. stereotypes notwithstanding.
There are plenty of nerds who get their vaccines and do breed,
And there'll be those who don't get their vaccines who don't survive to breed.
..as evolution in action.
(see also "Darwin Awards")
I just use the serial number off a dollar bill in my wallet.
Mind, if I ever have to spend that I'm in trouble.
You both have valid points.
When dealing with huge amounts of data and computationally intensive tasks, it's going to take a long time, period.
That said, though, there are frequently optimizations that would occur to someone skilled in computer programming that wouldn't to someone whose training and experience lies elsewhere.
Case in point, I once made a simple change to some code (specifically, the disk location of certain working files) that reduced the run time from about 40 days (extrapolated from a sample data set) to about 30 hours. (The change was to put the input, workfile and output on different disk drives, eliminating seek time and disk head thrashing. This was long ago, hardware constraints were severe.)
The difference lies in knowing what the underlying systems (libraries, OS, memory and I/O systems, hardware) are actually doing when you code your high level analysis routines. Can't make the floating point calculations any faster (although perhaps there are some you can cache for later reuse) but there are a lot of things that can be tweaked and are worth tweaking for high volume calculations.
If your definition of using high level language requires writing a sonnet, then most humans don't qualify either.
(Hell, some of them don't even come up to the "rolling over to get a doggy treat" standard either, but that's less so from inability to use language as apparent inability to relate actions to consequences.)
Applications are already able to customize menu picks and available buttons based on context.
That's an example of artificial stupidity. The whole point of having a menu instead of a command line is to remind you of the commands you only need infrequently. I hate having to go through expanding "helpfully shortened" menu lists looking for a freaking command I know is there somewhere, I just don't remember exactly where, just because I haven't used it lately.
Even ignoring the ad breaks in TV shows, there's still product placement within the shows
It's not working. There's no way I'm ever flying Oceanic, and I haven't been able to find any Dharma Initiative brand products in any of my local grocery stores.
Which non-rude pronunciation is that, "urine us" or "your anus" ?
Most of that "managing the waste stream" cost is, in fact, regulatory (bureaucracy) cost, which could be reduced.
The waste is in "temporary storage" because of various groups protesting anything remotely related to radwaste, including transporting it to safer storage locations ("not on my highway!") or setting up said safer storage locations ("not in my backyard!"). See above re. studies, permits, permits for studies, protests, counter protest, etc, ad nauseum.
Spent fuel is a tiny part of it -- although the most radioactive part (and yes, we should recycle it).
There are plenty of technologically simple solutions to radwaste. (Dead easy: vitrify the stuff into glass blocks and store it in the uranium mines the original ore came from in the first place.) The expensive problem is politics, as usual.
The simple proof is the other countries in the world where nuclear power generation is popular and increasingly deployed. This wouldn't be the case if the problems were technical rather than political.
(I see several trainloads of coal a day travelling the route south from Wyoming. Each one of those nearly mile-long trainloads of coal will, when burned, produce about the same amount of energy you could get from a slug of reactor fuel about the size of the last joint of my little finger. Consider the relative waste issues (coal ash is nasty, nasty stuff and stays toxic forever, unlike something with a half-life). Consider that the thorium in the coal ash from that trainload of coal could yield more energy, if fissioned in a reactor, than burning the coal did.)
Most of that cost is government imposed -- studies, permits, permits for studies, impact statments, reviews, more reviews, more permits, protests, counterprotests, hearings, more studies, etc.
Not saying that none of that is necessary, but it could certainly be streamlined. Cost of money being what it is, that process is too lengthy and too risky (financial risk of not knowing just when it will all get approved, and whether it will stay approved.)
Precisely. Thank you.