Heh, I love this bit quoted from the above linked website:
In this segment Doug outlines the participation of ARC in the planned ARPA computer network to be established within the next year (1969), in which 20 different computer sites across the country will be connected in a network. Doug muses that with the planned band width of 20KB per second and delay times with less than one-tenth of a second, he might be able to show the present demo again next year from Boston.
So, you're saying that Internet shopping was invented before the Internet?;-) (And love that bandwidth!)
Actually the problem isn't so much the salt as moisture in the soil. Water soaks up radar big time.
Indeed, one of the surprise discoveries from an early Shuttle radar-mapping mission was that, over the Sahara, they were getting back images from several meters under the sand, showing old water courses and in some cases ruins of early settlements quite well.
In general ground penetrating radar works better in less conductive soils. Damp soils with high salt content are more conductive than damp soils without, but bone dry soils aren't conductive at all, whether or not there is salt. The soils on Mars are pretty darn dry. (If not, that'll be a pleasant surprise.)
My big picture uneducated assumption is, for most areas of the US, water not "used" would end up back in the ocean anyway.
The problem is that in large areas of the country, the water doesn't come from the ocean (as rain or snow) in the first place, at least not recently. A lot of western (at least) states get a great deal of their water from wells that tap into aquifers that have been slowly collecting water for thousands (at least) of years, and are draining them much faster than they are replenished. (The Ogallala Aquifer, for example, contains water from the last Ice Age.) Yes, it will end up back in the ocean, but local rainfall doesn't fill it as fast as it is drained.
I don't care much for ATI either, but the fact remains that they used to open the specs on their chips while Nvidia never has. That said, I buy 3rd-party cards that happen to use the ATI 9250 chipset. The 3D performance is more than adequate for the FlightGear flight simulator and the other OpenGL apps I use. (And 9250 cards are relatively cheap, although getting harder to find retail.)
If Intel graphics becomes available on a card I can plug into my AMD-based machine (vs being built into the system board, and no way in hell is an Intel board going to support AMD processors), I might go with that since they seem more supportive of open source and Linux.
Maybe AMD's purchase of ATI will lead to a change in ATI's attitude.
Yep. The open source drivers for ATI have always been better than for NV because at one time, ATI did release specs for their chips. Can't say if the ati would let you program your flat panel for 1600x1200, because I don't have a flat panel to try it on, though.
Nvidia is a closed-source company, but they make good products.
With root-exploitable drivers. Must be some new meaning of the words "good products" with which we were previously unaware.
Personally I don't touch NVidia graphics cards. My ATI-9250 based card (the last chip for which ATI released the specs) works just fine (including OpenGL support) with open source drivers.
We're talking about TWO full scale reactors on a barge.
No, we're talking two relatively small reactors on a barge. Typical nuclear power reactors for feeding the electrical grid are in the 600 to 1000 megawatt range, not 60 MW, and most facilities have more than one (the Pickering and Darlington facilities near Toronto have 8 650 MW and 4 850 MW reactors respectively).
The reactors aboard an aircraft carrier do more than just run the lights, they can push the whole thing at speeds in excess of 40 knots (how much in excess isn't exactly talked about -- but even that is more than fast enough to water ski behind!). Ditto for nuclear subs -- plus they provide air and water for the crew (hydrolysis and reverse osmosis).
Modern nuclear submarines typically use reactors up to 200 MW, the French Rubis-class subs use a 48 MW reactor, Russia's Oskar-II class uses 2 190 MW reactors. Surface ships like aircraft carriers or the Kirov-class battle cruiser use two reactors each up to 300 MW each.
Title pretty much says it all, but with Sony's history of format lock-in and recent DRM root-kit shenanigans, I'm inclined to avoid any Sony electronics, let alone something like an e-book.
They were only missing in the Catholic world. In England and colonies they didn't switch until 1752, skipping from Sept 2 to Sept 14, although the 13th wouldn't have fallen on a Friday in any case. (Note the extra missing day because of another 170 years of calendar slippage.)
Must have made life interesting in the world between 1582 and 1752. Talk about time zone changes. Travel from Paris to London and arrive a week before you left...
The unix/linux 'cal' program recognizes this, at least for 1752. Might be different for other countries (or different versions of cal).
Ah yes, that's right. I'd forgotten about that one. Thanks.
Mind, I was thinking about deliberately simulating a nuclear explosion. I turned up some more details: there were two, Operation Snowball and Operation Sailorhat (who comes up with these names?), in 1965 and 1966 respectively, somewhere in northern Alberta. 500 ton hemispheres of TNT at ground level, detonated at the center, to simulate nuke blast effects.
They stopped such tests partly because of the rising cost of TNT: WW-II surplus was running out, and the Vietnam War was putting a big demand on new production.
We had a departmental meeting about this the other day where a bunch of nuclear engineering professors got together and discussed what they thought had happened.
You should have called in some mining engineers. Your analysis is a bit off.
The speeds involved were close enough -- although the detonation of 500 tons of TNT takes about half a millisecond and given your energy for the neutrons that takes closer to a microsecond -- but either kind of explosion has to couple the energy to the rocks surrounding and propagate out from there as seismic waves for the seismic people to detect it. That coupling is going to be affected by the precise nature of the surrounding rock -- density, water content, etc. Without knowing that, it will be hard to tell the difference even with good seismic signals (or a much more powerful blast).
There were only (as I recall) a few stations that even detected the blast, enough to triangulate it but not enough for really good signal data. Good enough to tell that it was an explosion rather than an earthquake, but not to determine the kind of explosion.
it's pretty hard to pile up ten thousand tons of conventional explosive in a remote area
Nobody is talking about 10,000 tons. The estimate is 500 tons. At a density of about 1.65, 500 tons of TNT is about a 21 foot cube. About two or three moving van loads, although you'd need to spread it a bit thinner than that for the weight. If you're digging a hole and setting up instrumentation for a test, a few extra trucks spread over several weeks or months is no big deal.
In 1965/66, Canada (in cooperation the US and possibly Britain) detonated two 0.5 kT explosions -- specifically, two 500 ton hemispheres of TNT -- in Alberta, as Projects Snowball and Sailorhat. The specific intent of these was to simulate and study nuclear blast effects.
I'm not going to argue about his access to plutonium, but what he does NOT have is direct access to P-239. You need several kilos of P-239 to make a nice big boom.
Phosphorus-239?! That must be incredibly unstable, no wonder he doesn't have access to any and no wonder it makes a nice big boom.
Canada deliberately conducted a non-nuclear nuclear test (in cooperation with the US) in, IIRC, the 1960s. 500 tons of TNT -- a hemisphere about the size of a small house or large garage -- was detonated in one of the prairie provinces. (Sorry about the fuzzy details, this is from memory). The crater (ground level detonation) was as large as one from a multi-kiloton nuclear detonation in the Nevada Test Site, because the higher moisture content in and nature of the underlying rock conducted the shock better (and probably added to it from vaporization). This was hypothesized beforehand and one of the reasons they did the test in first place.
Now, that 500 tons of (real) TNT was a 0.5 kt blast, about what the North Korea blast is estimated at from the shockwave. Could easily have been a few container loads of TNT. It's a pretty damp squib as far as even first-attempt nukes go.
Certainly, there are inventions, works of art, and so on. These aren't "intellectual" property, these are tangible goods. The "intellectual" property is the temporary government-granted monopoly on making copies (possibly modified or as part of something larger) of those tangible goods.
Now, while people can exchange money for temporary government-granted monopolies, those temporary monopolies themselves aren't particularly economically useful. From the point of view of increasing the available volume of these tangible goods, they are in fact economically counter-productive. (If you want to talk about the economic utility of increasing the variety of inventions, art works, etc, then we can discuss incentives for inventors, authors and artists. Most of whom do not benefit significantly from the current government-granted monopoly system.
For that matter, it's arguable as to whether or not art (including movies, fiction and music) is economically useful at all. It's as subject to popular whim as, say, tulip bulbs.
IP or "intellectual property" is an oxymoron. If you mean "copyrights, trademarks and/or patents", say what you mean.
Everybody is a producer of copyright material -- everything you write, everything you draw or build, everything you say is subject to copyright -- and hence a producer of "IP". It's just that most folks don't bother to try to sell any of it.
" As long as I don't do anything wrong why should I worry? "
Read "Atlas Shrugged", and memorize the speech (is it Dagny Taggart's?) about how the government has no hold over law-abiding citizens, which is why the government passes so many laws covering so many different aspects of everyday life -- and often laws that conflict with each other -- that it's virtually impossible to "not do anything wrong". It's just that most of those laws are only enforced when it is convenient (for the government) to do so.
One may well go through life not doing anything morally wrong -- but that's not the same as never doing anything against the law.
Trivial examples: speeding, jaywalking, parking violations, code violations from minor house repairs, copyright violations -- and singing "Happy Birthday" except perhaps in the shower could be a public performance in violation of the owner's copyrights. (Which is why restaurant staff sing something else at birthday celebrations.)
The other answer to that question comes from the opening to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil": what if they get her confused with somebody else? (Or consider the case of Richard Jewell:
"Though he was never officially charged, the FBI aggressively investigated him in spite of a continuing lack of evidence. They publicly searched his home, questioned his associates, investigated his background, and maintained twenty-four hour surveillance of Jewell. The pressure only began to ease after Jewell's attorneys hired an ex-FBI agent to administer a polygraph, which Jewell reportedly passed. Despite this, in the searches of Jewell's residence, which he shared with his mother, the FBI confiscated his mother's tupperware collection and family photographs, and when returned the tupperware had many broken pieces, and the photographs were ripped apart."
Slashdot Mirror
"It's not a toomah."
So, you're saying that Internet shopping was invented before the Internet?
Actually the problem isn't so much the salt as moisture in the soil. Water soaks up radar big time.
Indeed, one of the surprise discoveries from an early Shuttle radar-mapping mission was that, over the Sahara, they were getting back images from several meters under the sand, showing old water courses and in some cases ruins of early settlements quite well.
In general ground penetrating radar works better in less conductive soils. Damp soils with high salt content are more conductive than damp soils without, but bone dry soils aren't conductive at all, whether or not there is salt. The soils on Mars are pretty darn dry. (If not, that'll be a pleasant surprise.)
My big picture uneducated assumption is, for most areas of the US, water not "used" would end up back in the ocean anyway.
The problem is that in large areas of the country, the water doesn't come from the ocean (as rain or snow) in the first place, at least not recently. A lot of western (at least) states get a great deal of their water from wells that tap into aquifers that have been slowly collecting water for thousands (at least) of years, and are draining them much faster than they are replenished. (The Ogallala Aquifer, for example, contains water from the last Ice Age.) Yes, it will end up back in the ocean, but local rainfall doesn't fill it as fast as it is drained.
And nowhere near as easy/safe to work with. Bison are still very much a wild beast and as such don't take to a human presence very well.
That's nothing that a dozen generations of selective breeding can't fix.
Or even fewer generations of crossbreeding.
Mmm, beefalo.
You're probably right about the admitted-to 30 knots. Subs can go faster, so maybe I saw the 40-kt figure in reference to them.
In any case, over the long haul a carrier isn't going to go any faster than its support group can keep up with.
I don't care much for ATI either, but the fact remains that they used to open the specs on their chips while Nvidia never has. That said, I buy 3rd-party cards that happen to use the ATI 9250 chipset. The 3D performance is more than adequate for the FlightGear flight simulator and the other OpenGL apps I use. (And 9250 cards are relatively cheap, although getting harder to find retail.)
If Intel graphics becomes available on a card I can plug into my AMD-based machine (vs being built into the system board, and no way in hell is an Intel board going to support AMD processors), I might go with that since they seem more supportive of open source and Linux.
Maybe AMD's purchase of ATI will lead to a change in ATI's attitude.
Knowing Nvidia they'll have a fix out at least as fast as any OSS project.
Two years? That's how long they've apparently known about the problem.
Apparently you don't know Nvidia.
This just sucks, IMHO.
Yep. The open source drivers for ATI have always been better than for NV because at one time, ATI did release specs for their chips. Can't say if the ati would let you program your flat panel for 1600x1200, because I don't have a flat panel to try it on, though.
Nvidia is a closed-source company, but they make good products.
With root-exploitable drivers. Must be some new meaning of the words "good products" with which we were previously unaware.
Personally I don't touch NVidia graphics cards. My ATI-9250 based card (the last chip for which ATI released the specs) works just fine (including OpenGL support) with open source drivers.
We're talking about TWO full scale reactors on a barge.
No, we're talking two relatively small reactors on a barge. Typical nuclear power reactors for feeding the electrical grid are in the 600 to 1000 megawatt range, not 60 MW, and most facilities have more than one (the Pickering and Darlington facilities near Toronto have 8 650 MW and 4 850 MW reactors respectively).
The reactors aboard an aircraft carrier do more than just run the lights, they can push the whole thing at speeds in excess of 40 knots (how much in excess isn't exactly talked about -- but even that is more than fast enough to water ski behind!). Ditto for nuclear subs -- plus they provide air and water for the crew (hydrolysis and reverse osmosis).
Modern nuclear submarines typically use reactors up to 200 MW, the French Rubis-class subs use a 48 MW reactor, Russia's Oskar-II class uses 2 190 MW reactors. Surface ships like aircraft carriers or the Kirov-class battle cruiser use two reactors each up to 300 MW each.
Title pretty much says it all, but with Sony's history of format lock-in and recent DRM root-kit shenanigans, I'm inclined to avoid any Sony electronics, let alone something like an e-book.
They were only missing in the Catholic world. In England and colonies they didn't switch until 1752, skipping from Sept 2 to Sept 14, although the 13th wouldn't have fallen on a Friday in any case. (Note the extra missing day because of another 170 years of calendar slippage.)
Must have made life interesting in the world between 1582 and 1752. Talk about time zone changes. Travel from Paris to London and arrive a week before you left...
The unix/linux 'cal' program recognizes this, at least for 1752. Might be different for other countries (or different versions of cal).
Ripple Rock
Ah yes, that's right. I'd forgotten about that one. Thanks.
Mind, I was thinking about deliberately simulating a nuclear explosion. I turned up some more details: there were two, Operation Snowball and Operation Sailorhat (who comes up with these names?), in 1965 and 1966 respectively, somewhere in northern Alberta. 500 ton hemispheres of TNT at ground level, detonated at the center, to simulate nuke blast effects.
They stopped such tests partly because of the rising cost of TNT: WW-II surplus was running out, and the Vietnam War was putting a big demand on new production.
We had a departmental meeting about this the other day where a bunch of nuclear engineering professors got together and discussed what they thought had happened.
You should have called in some mining engineers. Your analysis is a bit off.
The speeds involved were close enough -- although the detonation of 500 tons of TNT takes about half a millisecond and given your energy for the neutrons that takes closer to a microsecond -- but either kind of explosion has to couple the energy to the rocks surrounding and propagate out from there as seismic waves for the seismic people to detect it. That coupling is going to be affected by the precise nature of the surrounding rock -- density, water content, etc. Without knowing that, it will be hard to tell the difference even with good seismic signals (or a much more powerful blast).
There were only (as I recall) a few stations that even detected the blast, enough to triangulate it but not enough for really good signal data. Good enough to tell that it was an explosion rather than an earthquake, but not to determine the kind of explosion.
it's pretty hard to pile up ten thousand tons of conventional explosive in a remote area
Nobody is talking about 10,000 tons. The estimate is 500 tons. At a density of about 1.65, 500 tons of TNT is about a 21 foot cube. About two or three moving van loads, although you'd need to spread it a bit thinner than that for the weight. If you're digging a hole and setting up instrumentation for a test, a few extra trucks spread over several weeks or months is no big deal.
In 1965/66, Canada (in cooperation the US and possibly Britain) detonated two 0.5 kT explosions -- specifically, two 500 ton hemispheres of TNT -- in Alberta, as Projects Snowball and Sailorhat. The specific intent of these was to simulate and study nuclear blast effects.
I'm not going to argue about his access to plutonium, but what he does NOT have is direct access to P-239. You need several kilos of P-239 to make a nice big boom.
Phosphorus-239?! That must be incredibly unstable, no wonder he doesn't have access to any and no wonder it makes a nice big boom.
I think you mean Pu-239.
Canada deliberately conducted a non-nuclear nuclear test (in cooperation with the US) in, IIRC, the 1960s. 500 tons of TNT -- a hemisphere about the size of a small house or large garage -- was detonated in one of the prairie provinces. (Sorry about the fuzzy details, this is from memory). The crater (ground level detonation) was as large as one from a multi-kiloton nuclear detonation in the Nevada Test Site, because the higher moisture content in and nature of the underlying rock conducted the shock better (and probably added to it from vaporization). This was hypothesized beforehand and one of the reasons they did the test in first place.
Now, that 500 tons of (real) TNT was a 0.5 kt blast, about what the North Korea blast is estimated at from the shockwave. Could easily have been a few container loads of TNT. It's a pretty damp squib as far as even first-attempt nukes go.
Can anything be done to stop Web bugs?"
Um, how about not reading email in HTML? Even LookOut!, er, Outlook you can set to convert mail to plain text.
The term "ice weasel" was invented by Matt Groening for one of his The Far Side cartoons.
Far Side? That's Gary Larson. ITYM "Life Is Hell".
economically useful intellectual property
No such thing.
Certainly, there are inventions, works of art, and so on. These aren't "intellectual" property, these are tangible goods. The "intellectual" property is the temporary government-granted monopoly on making copies (possibly modified or as part of something larger) of those tangible goods.
Now, while people can exchange money for temporary government-granted monopolies, those temporary monopolies themselves aren't particularly economically useful. From the point of view of increasing the available volume of these tangible goods, they are in fact economically counter-productive. (If you want to talk about the economic utility of increasing the variety of inventions, art works, etc, then we can discuss incentives for inventors, authors and artists. Most of whom do not benefit significantly from the current government-granted monopoly system.
For that matter, it's arguable as to whether or not art (including movies, fiction and music) is economically useful at all. It's as subject to popular whim as, say, tulip bulbs.
Yes, that's the one. Didn't think it was Dagny's. Thanks.
IP or "intellectual property" is an oxymoron. If you mean "copyrights, trademarks and/or patents", say what you mean.
Everybody is a producer of copyright material -- everything you write, everything you draw or build, everything you say is subject to copyright -- and hence a producer of "IP". It's just that most folks don't bother to try to sell any of it.
This posting © 2006. Unless your Slashdot ID is s20451 you are hereby granted unlimited distribution rights. Slashdot user s20451 must pay the author $1000 for said rights. All other rights reserved.
Read "Atlas Shrugged", and memorize the speech (is it Dagny Taggart's?) about how the government has no hold over law-abiding citizens, which is why the government passes so many laws covering so many different aspects of everyday life -- and often laws that conflict with each other -- that it's virtually impossible to "not do anything wrong". It's just that most of those laws are only enforced when it is convenient (for the government) to do so.
One may well go through life not doing anything morally wrong -- but that's not the same as never doing anything against the law.
Trivial examples: speeding, jaywalking, parking violations, code violations from minor house repairs, copyright violations -- and singing "Happy Birthday" except perhaps in the shower could be a public performance in violation of the owner's copyrights. (Which is why restaurant staff sing something else at birthday celebrations.)
The other answer to that question comes from the opening to Terry Gilliam's "Brazil": what if they get her confused with somebody else?
(Or consider the case of Richard Jewell: