(Here's a clue: The AC was playing along by taking the part of a conspiracy theorist spouting the line that even an obvious joke is just one of the conspirators being a shill.)
Who knows. Maybe this submission is a trial balloon from Dice Holdings to see if they can get away with becoming a posted content/advertising only site.
That's from the view of the users. Having the reserve shut down on the 7th and not even be able to extract the helium owned by others creates a disruption to the end users. This has been developing for a long time as you say.
The part about could have and should have makes little difference to the physics when a magnet quenches.
There's plenty of time for assigning well deserved blame, but it doesn't change the temperature of the magnet "right now".
The problem isn't the amount of helium in the earth. It's the dislocation caused by the government selling it at an artificially low price for some years, thus undercutting building new refining capacity. This current mess that we just mostly avoided would have been from suddenly shutting off the government supply and causing a price/availability problem.
Full Disclosure: This effects me directly. I work with Dean Olson, the guy quoted in the article. Unavailability of helium (the price wasn't so bad, but it just wasn't available. i.e. The supplier says it costs N dollars a liter of liquid helium, but you need X liters, and we have one fourth that amount available.) kept a new NMR system here offline for some months, thus delaying a bunch of research (And of course, that has a knock on effect of increased cost down the line. You have to keep paying the salaries of the researchers while they wait and do something else.)
Hopefully we can get back to our usual form of governmental funding neurosis soon rather than reaching a new and interesting level of insanity.
They can just stay at home and play Kerbal Space Program. It's a lot easier and you can get pizza delivered.;)
(In my pessimistic moments, I wonder if rather than a technological singularity, we won't have a great stagnation with everyone opting for VR rather than the real world.)
Lubos Motl seems to be going over the moon about it. Woit is a good counterpoint for giving a less breathless view.
It sounds quite interesting, but I've seen a lot of interesting things not pan out. Unfortunately, this is advanced enough that those of us who are mere mathematical mortals either have to take someone else's word for it, or face a very long slog along the learning curve to really understand it.
One factor that's often overlooked, is that the jobs themselves were changed so they could be automated.
Human run factory lines were made to have utterly no variation in the parts, products, or in the movements needed. The decisions that needed to be made during manufacture were weeded out. i.e. We'll do it this way as it always works the same rather than this other method that is more efficient but requires a human decision because it works only part of the time.
An example would be the construction industry. Right now, automation would be very difficult. But that's because of all the variation in the buildings the ground under them, and the area where they are built (sewer hookup on the north one place, on the south in another, etc.). You could redesign the buildings and the cities so you could automate building them, but you'd have to change the expectations of the customers to allow it. In that, you've changed the job, not just automated it.
Please tell me how you intend to virtualize a proprietary control card that you know nearly nothing about that plugs into an ISA bus and is driven with software that is often hardware dependent, and the company that made it has a disincentive to tell you about. (The standard answer is: We don't support that system anymore, but I'd be happy to connect you with sales.)
These are usually the embedded systems in the machine and do things like running stepper motors or the like that are not terribly standard. The software talks directly to the hardware and thus timing and such is often hard coded into it. Reverse engineering and updating to modern methods is, as always, possible with massive effort, but generally not practical.
They generally have ways of getting the data out at a high enough speed, but it may be over a serial, parallel, GPIB or any of a whole range of proprietary data links. At worst, you can use an older ISA machine for holding the specialty cards, running the control software and then out the Ethernet card to the rest of the world.
The problem is that the software can't be updated. You don't have access to the source and the company that made it doesn't want to. (Updating it would allow old machines to be used still and cut into selling new ones)
I meant updating the entire x ray diffraction machine to a new one, not just the computer.
That particular machine is old enough that it needs more operator intervention and maintenance than a new one would. The more modern x ray sources and detectors on a newer one would allow the particular tests this does to be done more quickly. A more capable control system would require less operator time for alignment and setup. (For those who do x ray diff work, it's a rotating anode machine that does our small angle x ray scattering and powder diffraction work. We just don't do as much powder diffraction or SAXS as we do other methods, so it's not as high a priority to keep up to date).
The attitude you are showing is that of a toy fan, not a professional.
There are still large numbers of XP boxes out there doing tasks every day.
They might not be what you'd want for your own workstation, but for running the mass spectrometer or x ray diffraction machines that would take 200K+ each to replace with the modern ones, they work just fine.
I'll guarantee that a lot of the workhorse computers in the laboratories at your university run XP (or maybe even Win 2K, or NT 4).
I maintain those systems for the chemistry department at a major university. Most researchers aren't flush with so much cash they can replace machines that are only a few years old. And, the manufacturers tend not to update their systems without good reason (if it ain't broke, don't break it by trying to fix it).
Just yesterday, I was working on a system with a VESA local bus 486 DX2 running it. Yeah, it's old, but it does certain specialized x-ray diffraction work just fine. We'll be happy to update it as soon as our broke state (or the NSF that's under sequester) coughs up a quarter to a half a million for something that can replace it. i.e. no time soon.
There are many things that I suspect, but don't have enough evidence of to directly say.
The speed of Lavrov picking up on what Kerry said was very convenient. I suspect this was a proposal that the Russians had mentioned before (and was rejected) that was put back in play. If the Russians pursue it, it gets Obama out of a position where either attacking or backing down in the face of a failed vote in congress were unpalatable. If not, no one notices.
Securing chemical weapons sites in a civil war zone where people shoot at UN inspectors.
Now, there's some interesting logistics.
Add to that the possibility that some has already been stolen and at least one of the sites is under regular rebel attack.
So, we have a "red line" comment that had unintended consequences. That's now followed by an offhand comment by the Secretary of State that had unintended consequences, and the two just might cancel the worst of each other's damage out.
Ike Eisenhower once said: "I'll take a lucky general over a smart general."
I think it goes double for national leaders and diplomats.
Someone just remind Gov. Jerry Brown that lots of conservative politicos from the central valley will be trying to remotely hack the plate on the gubernatorial limo to say "MOONBEAM".
That'll get a veto so fast it'll outpace the refresh rate.
Take an existing societal problem. Add technology to it. Write an article about it as if totally new. . Profit?
As if this hasn't been happening forever and a day. Roman citizens were telling each other "That one area downstream from where the Cloaca Maxima empties into the Tiber is really bad.". When a diplomat came to Rome, I'm sure they'd ask the locals where a good place to put a house was.
The "technology": Word of mouth. And if you really wanted to be fancy, writing.
I thought about something similar a good bit in the 1980s when the Army was fielding Mobile Subscriber Equipment (MSE, cell phone for the field). It seemed a bit too centralized and fragile for my liking. Take out a few antenna sites and lose much of the comm for a whole division.
The idea was to make traffic analysis useless by drowning any listener in phony communications between nodes in a mesh network. You'd just scatter little relay nodes all over the battlefield.
The encrypted messages would look the same whether they were real or phoney. This was before GPS was online and you could also use signal timing to locate your troops the same way PLRS was proposed to. You'd have units trade the radios/nodes around so you couldn't identify them by key up signatures.
Figured that robots were a bit much at that time (and frankly, we didn't have the small enough compute power for a mesh system like this), but considered putting some of them on either wild or trained animals so they'd move and you couldn't easily see which were phoney because they were stationary for too long. Now robots would be do-able.
I tend to agree this may be the way things will proceed. Now the doors are open to armed autonomous robots to do a lot of jobs.
Drones can be pretty sophisticated in behavior now and you don't have to write letters to their mom telling them why they won't be coming home.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoosh! "Hook, line, sinker"
(Here's a clue: The AC was playing along by taking the part of a conspiracy theorist spouting the line that even an obvious joke is just one of the conspirators being a shill.)
"it takes a lot of ignorance - or vested interests - to keep touting that line."
*tip-of-the hat*
I wish I could give you mod points for that one. Kudos.
Two great sources of them. Now in one easy package!
"Monsanto must be buying Climate Corp. to help the global warming denialists to let them keep destroying the earth!"
Who knows. Maybe this submission is a trial balloon from Dice Holdings to see if they can get away with becoming a posted content/advertising only site.
Scotty: Captain! We're caught in an interstellar flux transfer event!"
Kirk: Is that worse than the heartbreak of psoriasis?
Oh, it's not getting deferred. Take a look at the other threads and you'll see it's well underway. There's little this thread could add to that.
But, the reality is that Slashdot isn't where the blame assigning is going to make much difference.
Yes, suddenly.
That's from the view of the users. Having the reserve shut down on the 7th and not even be able to extract the helium owned by others creates a disruption to the end users. This has been developing for a long time as you say.
The part about could have and should have makes little difference to the physics when a magnet quenches.
There's plenty of time for assigning well deserved blame, but it doesn't change the temperature of the magnet "right now".
Here's a Chemical and Engineering News article from last month about it.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i37/Helium-Headache.html
The problem isn't the amount of helium in the earth. It's the dislocation caused by the government selling it at an artificially low price for some years, thus undercutting building new refining capacity. This current mess that we just mostly avoided would have been from suddenly shutting off the government supply and causing a price/availability problem.
Full Disclosure: This effects me directly. I work with Dean Olson, the guy quoted in the article. Unavailability of helium (the price wasn't so bad, but it just wasn't available. i.e. The supplier says it costs N dollars a liter of liquid helium, but you need X liters, and we have one fourth that amount available.) kept a new NMR system here offline for some months, thus delaying a bunch of research (And of course, that has a knock on effect of increased cost down the line. You have to keep paying the salaries of the researchers while they wait and do something else.)
Hopefully we can get back to our usual form of governmental funding neurosis soon rather than reaching a new and interesting level of insanity.
I can't be the only one to think that. :)
Why would most slashdotters want a space program?
They can just stay at home and play Kerbal Space Program. It's a lot easier and you can get pizza delivered. ;)
(In my pessimistic moments, I wonder if rather than a technological singularity, we won't have a great stagnation with everyone opting for VR rather than the real world.)
Lubos Motl seems to be going over the moon about it. Woit is a good counterpoint for giving a less breathless view.
It sounds quite interesting, but I've seen a lot of interesting things not pan out. Unfortunately, this is advanced enough that those of us who are mere mathematical mortals either have to take someone else's word for it, or face a very long slog along the learning curve to really understand it.
For the moment it's on my "look into this" list.
Actually, they did pretty well during the Mississippi River flooding in 1993.
Remember when Newt Gingrich was so roundly ridiculed for wanting to buy laptops for schoolkids?
Now school districts worry about the price and fairness of the contract, rather than whether we should or not.
One factor that's often overlooked, is that the jobs themselves were changed so they could be automated.
Human run factory lines were made to have utterly no variation in the parts, products, or in the movements needed. The decisions that needed to be made during manufacture were weeded out. i.e. We'll do it this way as it always works the same rather than this other method that is more efficient but requires a human decision because it works only part of the time.
An example would be the construction industry. Right now, automation would be very difficult. But that's because of all the variation in the buildings the ground under them, and the area where they are built (sewer hookup on the north one place, on the south in another, etc.). You could redesign the buildings and the cities so you could automate building them, but you'd have to change the expectations of the customers to allow it. In that, you've changed the job, not just automated it.
It's head's not pointy enough.
Please tell me how you intend to virtualize a proprietary control card that you know nearly nothing about that plugs into an ISA bus and is driven with software that is often hardware dependent, and the company that made it has a disincentive to tell you about. (The standard answer is: We don't support that system anymore, but I'd be happy to connect you with sales.)
These are usually the embedded systems in the machine and do things like running stepper motors or the like that are not terribly standard. The software talks directly to the hardware and thus timing and such is often hard coded into it. Reverse engineering and updating to modern methods is, as always, possible with massive effort, but generally not practical.
They generally have ways of getting the data out at a high enough speed, but it may be over a serial, parallel, GPIB or any of a whole range of proprietary data links. At worst, you can use an older ISA machine for holding the specialty cards, running the control software and then out the Ethernet card to the rest of the world.
The problem is that the software can't be updated. You don't have access to the source and the company that made it doesn't want to. (Updating it would allow old machines to be used still and cut into selling new ones)
I meant updating the entire x ray diffraction machine to a new one, not just the computer.
That particular machine is old enough that it needs more operator intervention and maintenance than a new one would. The more modern x ray sources and detectors on a newer one would allow the particular tests this does to be done more quickly. A more capable control system would require less operator time for alignment and setup. (For those who do x ray diff work, it's a rotating anode machine that does our small angle x ray scattering and powder diffraction work. We just don't do as much powder diffraction or SAXS as we do other methods, so it's not as high a priority to keep up to date).
And?
The attitude you are showing is that of a toy fan, not a professional.
There are still large numbers of XP boxes out there doing tasks every day.
They might not be what you'd want for your own workstation, but for running the mass spectrometer or x ray diffraction machines that would take 200K+ each to replace with the modern ones, they work just fine.
I'll guarantee that a lot of the workhorse computers in the laboratories at your university run XP (or maybe even Win 2K, or NT 4).
I maintain those systems for the chemistry department at a major university. Most researchers aren't flush with so much cash they can replace machines that are only a few years old. And, the manufacturers tend not to update their systems without good reason (if it ain't broke, don't break it by trying to fix it).
Just yesterday, I was working on a system with a VESA local bus 486 DX2 running it. Yeah, it's old, but it does certain specialized x-ray diffraction work just fine. We'll be happy to update it as soon as our broke state (or the NSF that's under sequester) coughs up a quarter to a half a million for something that can replace it. i.e. no time soon.
The US Postal Service would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone to get your letter bombs in the mail early this year.
Thank You,
There are many things that I suspect, but don't have enough evidence of to directly say.
The speed of Lavrov picking up on what Kerry said was very convenient. I suspect this was a proposal that the Russians had mentioned before (and was rejected) that was put back in play. If the Russians pursue it, it gets Obama out of a position where either attacking or backing down in the face of a failed vote in congress were unpalatable. If not, no one notices.
Securing chemical weapons sites in a civil war zone where people shoot at UN inspectors.
Now, there's some interesting logistics.
Add to that the possibility that some has already been stolen and at least one of the sites is under regular rebel attack.
So, we have a "red line" comment that had unintended consequences. That's now followed by an offhand comment by the Secretary of State that had unintended consequences, and the two just might cancel the worst of each other's damage out.
Ike Eisenhower once said: "I'll take a lucky general over a smart general."
I think it goes double for national leaders and diplomats.
Someone just remind Gov. Jerry Brown that lots of conservative politicos from the central valley will be trying to remotely hack the plate on the gubernatorial limo to say "MOONBEAM".
That'll get a veto so fast it'll outpace the refresh rate.
Take an existing societal problem.
Add technology to it.
Write an article about it as if totally new.
.
Profit?
As if this hasn't been happening forever and a day. Roman citizens were telling each other "That one area downstream from where the Cloaca Maxima empties into the Tiber is really bad.". When a diplomat came to Rome, I'm sure they'd ask the locals where a good place to put a house was.
The "technology": Word of mouth. And if you really wanted to be fancy, writing.
I thought about something similar a good bit in the 1980s when the Army was fielding Mobile Subscriber Equipment (MSE, cell phone for the field). It seemed a bit too centralized and fragile for my liking. Take out a few antenna sites and lose much of the comm for a whole division.
The idea was to make traffic analysis useless by drowning any listener in phony communications between nodes in a mesh network. You'd just scatter little relay nodes all over the battlefield.
The encrypted messages would look the same whether they were real or phoney. This was before GPS was online and you could also use signal timing to locate your troops the same way PLRS was proposed to. You'd have units trade the radios/nodes around so you couldn't identify them by key up signatures.
Figured that robots were a bit much at that time (and frankly, we didn't have the small enough compute power for a mesh system like this), but considered putting some of them on either wild or trained animals so they'd move and you couldn't easily see which were phoney because they were stationary for too long. Now robots would be do-able.
I tend to agree this may be the way things will proceed.
Now the doors are open to armed autonomous robots to do a lot of jobs.
Drones can be pretty sophisticated in behavior now and you don't have to write letters to their mom telling them why they won't be coming home.