Oh, I agree that doing it makes you feel better, and it's harmless. It's just not a very effective riposte.
On most tech related issues the large mass of people are not only going to do nothing but aren't even going to be cynical about it.
Unless it can be made to connect to them in a way they feel, why should they? Example: I can get all worked up over funding for some esoteric physics research that will have a good effect, but most people will have no idea about it. To expect them to pick up that torch is unrealistic. So too is this.
"That's why we can't have nice things."
Y'know, the religious right said the same thing about not boycotting Disney because they have a day for gays, or not supporting Prop 8. They felt just as strongly about it as you do about this.
I thought they were being silly.
At least your pet cause is a more less objectionable one than that one. But saying that because Joe Random doesn't pick up your cause they're part of the problem is an old and very tired saw that's been used for causes both good and bad.
Now, donating to EFF or other online rights organizations, or helping mirror the data, that's something that actually might have an effect.
I recently went to a talk on travelling to Mars by Dr. Alexander Martynov, the former director of ballistics for the Russian mission control. He said there was a proposal floating around in the late 60s in the Russian space community for a one way mission to Mars, and there were actually quite a number of cosmonauts who said they'd volunteer for it.
Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin wasn't so hot on the idea for political reasons.
"They've paid 100 Billion. Think how much more they would have gotten if they'd granted that to my field."
I'm sure it is everywhere, but I've seen this personally in biochemistry, solid state physics, and particle physics.
My original advisor in grad school was literally jumping for joy when the SSC was cancelled. He didn't like it when I pointed out that none of that money would be going to grants he was involved in and would in large part go back to the general US budget.
Indeed. Hexane can be used quite safely. It's effective and not nearly as bad as some things used previously.
I use it regularly as a cleaning solvent, but it's in a fume hood. I have gloves. And I don't use it all day long.
One of the big problems with it is high flammability. You're basicly working with a component of gasoline and it's just as flammable. So, you keep the amounts you're using fairly small.
In a poor production environment, it isn't used with adequate ventilation to keep the exposure down. Larger amounts are used in open pans (fire hazard). Gloves aren't used, etc, etc, lather, rinse your hands in it as it's great for getting the grime off, repeat.
And, they are exposed to it continously during their work day. This results in a higher dose and chronic effects. All of these add up to it being a problem.
But, most of us deal with chemicals that are just as dangerous or worse. Gasoline is a prime example.
The problem isn't the hexane, it's the way it's being used. (It's not just China. I've sure seen problems with solvent exposure in plants here in the US.)
As-Received-By: OOB shipboard ad hoc Language-Path: Arbwyth->Trade 24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK units From: Twirlip of the Mists Subject: Blighter Video thread Keywords: Hexapodia as the key insight Distribution: Threat of the Copyright Blight Approved: yes Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay
I haven't had a chance to get the famous video from the Pirate Bay of the intercept, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that RIAA employees have six legs? I wasn't sure from the evocation. If these humanoids have three pairs of legs, then I think there is an easy explanation for them shooting down the Pirate Party relay satellite... (more)
I'd like to point out that there are large numbers of untrained people engaging in largely unsupervised DIY Bio that is FAR more advanced than anything done in any professional laboratory, let alone a home one.
Further, this activity has already resulted in the release of extremelydangerousorganisms being released into the wild.
The current DIYBIO is mostly about as dangerous as raising and breeding animals as far as the bio part.
The chemicals involved might be some hazard. But, we already deal with pretty bad hazmat in our daily life. Look at gasoline. Toxic as a vapor in common concentrations, volatile, highly flammable, even explosive, likely carcinogenic. You'd never get it onto the market nowadays.
I'd worry more about picking up already known zoonosis (anthrax, brucellosis, tularemia, glanders, and a whole host of parasites already extant and well adapted just to name a very few) from animals than making something either accidentally or intentionally.
In fact, if you raise pigs and ducks on the same farm, you're probably more a source of danger since flu virii can go back and forth between the pigs, the ducks, and you/you're family and develop the mutations to cross species.
Making a microbe that can survive and outcompete the wild types isn't easy. Making one that subverts the immune system better than the wild types isn't easy. It's been done, but generally by nongenetic engineering methods (passing it through multiple hosts of the target type and selecting for the worst cases, etc. See the biowar programs of the US, WW-2 Japan, and the USSR for examples).
Every foreigner who's in China is a loser who's there for Chinese women? Uh huh. Suuuure...
Might it be that you're pissed that one or more Chinese gals paid you no mind? Or, are you one of those who derides any Chinese female who goes out with a non-Chinese as a "yellow cab"?
Or is it that there's a shortage of them?
China's made its own problem of being 2 million female children short because of "one child" and the cultural emphasis on sons. Better start working on opening your own minds before trying to change minds here.
Oh, wait. You're here in the West according to your comments. Then how is it that you aren't just the same sort of loser leaving your own failures in the country you left behind? Oh. I got it. Different standard for you and others. You're inherently superior somehow. I've heard that philosophy somewhere before.
Or, maybe you were born here, and became embittered all on your own. Good to know to know that bullshit xeno attitude of yours can spring up anywhere.
Here in America (and across the world) we know your kind. We despise you.
Almost as much as we despise a totalitarian government censoring.
(Hopefully, you just wrote something silly because you were ticked off at the previous poster. Very few here sympathize with the Chinese government, but your comment came across just as alienating and biased as how I tried to wrote the above.)
Obvious question: Are you hitting Baidu from inside China, or from outside? An awful lot of sites give different results based on where they determine you are coming from.
It could also depend on what part of the path from the computer to the server the filtering and monitoring was being done on. If it was at a few choke points en route rather than at boatloads of individual sites(likely) then a non Chinese located computer might not hit the filters.
Mostly good. Why do it a more expensive or less effective way?
One downside is that it makes it hard to do repairs on some items. Example: I fix lab equipment. An incubator I was working on uses an RTD temperature probe. It has settings in the software of the microcontroller running the machine to match it to the particulars of the probe. I have no access to those, so I'm limited in what sort of repairs I can do.
Repair and support contracts are very lucrative for some industries, and that leads to companies being unwilling to tell you enough information to fix the item. You're restricted to buying their expensive support contracts or trying to reverse engineer anytime you do a repair.
Congress limited how much car companies could do that, but there is little reason to think they'd do that for more technically oriented items.
Nowadays, they use the electronics to compensate for less robust mechanical design. A lot of work and expense used to be put into making mechanical control systems linear and well behaved.
Now, instead you use position sensors and servo motors or other actuators with a microcontroller doing the translation in between. Who cares how bouncy, slippy, or hysteresis laden the system is? You just compensate for it in the software that calculates the control outputs to the actuator.
Belts are simple, cheap and provide some useful slip and stretch in a power transmission system. For short range power transmission (a few inches, or so), they're great. They use a lot less material and can tolerate more misalignment than a gear set or chain and sprockets that span the same distance.
When you have to use lots of them, and transmit the power greater distances (more than a few feet), they become unwieldy.
Oh, there are lots of possibilities for who might do it. The list of groups and nations who would quietly or not so quietly be very happy to see a deniable dagger stuck in the back of the Iranian nuclear program is quite long.
I'll just toss up some involving Russia, the US and Saudi Arabia. (disclaimer: I have no particular reason to think they would do this, but as long as conspiracy theories are running rampant here on Slashdot, I'll add fuel to the fire.:)
If you are a Russian company that is doing engineering on the Bushehr plant, it could be an interesting way to make extra money. Plant a worm to damage the plant and then not only make the original contract money, but charge them a large extra fee for fixing the plant after the sabotage. Make it look like the Israelis did it, and you're home free. (There is speculation that the worm was funneled through Russian contractors doing work on Bushehr.)
Or, if you're the Russian government, Bushehr has been a sticking point with the Western powers. If it's be taken down by an ostensibly Israeli worm just as it's completed, you've fulfilled your commitment to the Iranians, and removed a point of contention. You could even have negotiated a valuable quid pro quo of some kind in return for that. (So sorry, Iran. We tried to finish the plant we've been delaying on for so long, but the Israelis broke it. Shucky dern... Of course, if we get ticked off at the US again, we could help fix it for a substantial fee.;)
(As to possible paybacks: There has been a question of whether there was some quid pro quo for the US, seemingly unilaterally deciding to not put interceptor missiles in Poland. Russia helping scuttle Iranian nuclear ambitions would be a very valuable payback for that. For another tack, the Saudis are very worried about Iran's nuclear ambitions and their influence in OPEC could be very valuable for an oil exporter like Russia.)
May 9th 1979. This is the anniversary of the US & USSR signing the Salt 2 treaty, limiting nuclear weapons.
Thus, the worm is OBVIOUSLY the cooperative work of disaffected former nuclear weapons designers in the US and Russia. They're angry that Iran is trying to build a bomb, and the sanctions on Iran won't let them make lots of money helping them like Abdul Qadeer Khan did.
And Myrtus is a religious reference to the practice of women wearing myrtle garlands in their hair during the Roman Veneralia festival celebrating the Goddess Venus Verticordia (Venus, the changer of hearts).
How can this be anything but a clear plea for those placing the sanctions to have a change of heart and allow these worthy weapons designers to support themselves in a thoroughly capitalist manner.
The book Optical Refrigeration by Mansoor Sheik-Bahai and R.I. Epstein is an overview of this field that cools semiconductors and other macroscopic objects with lasers.
(disclaimer: I used to work as a grad student for Sheik-Bahai long ago. Very cool guy.)
Absolutely. Several years ago, I heard him talk on the prospects for finding more exoplanets in the future. He's a serious and highly competent scientist.
He also is a Jesuit monk. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
(And, he seemed like a heck of a nice Guy. Forgive the pun.:)
My own preferences are for a return to the moon. But, an asteroid mission will be fine. A Mars mission would be fine. Any of them would be fine, provided one thing.
We actually bloody well do it!
A lot of good ideas have been started and then gone down in flames do to half hearted support, underfunding, and the politics of not being built in the right constituencies, etc, etc, Republican spacecraft, Democrat spacecraft, etc whatnot, cost overrun, technical challenge not risen to, lather rinse, oh crap our engineers all retired.
It doesn't have to be the "best possible" mission. It just has to be done to be a sucess especially when compared to sitting on this rock.
Depends on where you live. There are lots of young Republicans in areas where the party is the leading one. Example, the small midwest town I'm in. The Democrats tend to be older here as they're often university workers (or university retirees) who commute in about 20 miles to the nearby University of Illinois. They tend to come from a different demographic than the rest of the town.
There's an awful lot of sample bias going on in these replies. It's the old "How can that guy have won the election? None of the people I know voted for him." The answer: There are far more voters you don't know than those you do.
"and old people and tech tend not to go hand-in-hand."
Rotten kid. Come closer so I can whack your Droid phone with my cane!
I'd rephrase that to "Old people and NEW tech tend not to go hand-in-hand". There are lots of old techies, but the tech they were so hot for isn't the current fashion. This is why ham radio, for example, tends now to be a hobby for the older set. I'd say that the hams were in general more clued in to how their tech toys worked than the average iPhone user is today.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you read too much into my initial post. I'm hardly pissed off. Or even annoyed by it. You'd have to work much harder for that. ;)
So, you can not patronize Amazon, and I can donate to the EFF, and I'll buy you a beer (or soda, or your preference) if we ever meet up.
Fair enough?
Oh, I agree that doing it makes you feel better, and it's harmless. It's just not a very effective riposte.
On most tech related issues the large mass of people are not only going to do nothing but aren't even going to be cynical about it.
Unless it can be made to connect to them in a way they feel, why should they? Example: I can get all worked up over funding for some esoteric physics research that will have a good effect, but most people will have no idea about it. To expect them to pick up that torch is unrealistic. So too is this.
"That's why we can't have nice things."
Y'know, the religious right said the same thing about not boycotting Disney because they have a day for gays, or not supporting Prop 8. They felt just as strongly about it as you do about this.
I thought they were being silly.
At least your pet cause is a more less objectionable one than that one. But saying that because Joe Random doesn't pick up your cause they're part of the problem is an old and very tired saw that's been used for causes both good and bad.
Now, donating to EFF or other online rights organizations, or helping mirror the data, that's something that actually might have an effect.
Comcast needs to be all over something. Last night was just one of a series of troubles with dns they've had.
Well, it probly was better than Comcast last night in the MidWest.
They promoted equality by failing to return ALL dns queries for several hours.
Uh... I'm sure Bezos is just terrified of losing your and a few other accounts.
And you're just twigging to the nature of large businesses? Ah. Before this you believed them when they said things like "Don't be evil."?
I recently went to a talk on travelling to Mars by Dr. Alexander Martynov, the former director of ballistics for the Russian mission control. He said there was a proposal floating around in the late 60s in the Russian space community for a one way mission to Mars, and there were actually quite a number of cosmonauts who said they'd volunteer for it.
Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin wasn't so hot on the idea for political reasons.
Here. Let me translate:
"They've paid 100 Billion. Think how much more they would have gotten if they'd granted that to my field."
I'm sure it is everywhere, but I've seen this personally in biochemistry, solid state physics, and particle physics.
My original advisor in grad school was literally jumping for joy when the SSC was cancelled. He didn't like it when I pointed out that none of that money would be going to grants he was involved in and would in large part go back to the general US budget.
Indeed. Hexane can be used quite safely. It's effective and not nearly as bad as some things used previously.
I use it regularly as a cleaning solvent, but it's in a fume hood. I have gloves. And I don't use it all day long.
One of the big problems with it is high flammability. You're basicly working with a component of gasoline and it's just as flammable. So, you keep the amounts you're using fairly small.
In a poor production environment, it isn't used with adequate ventilation to keep the exposure down. Larger amounts are used in open pans (fire hazard). Gloves aren't used, etc, etc, lather, rinse your hands in it as it's great for getting the grime off, repeat.
And, they are exposed to it continously during their work day. This results in a higher dose and chronic effects. All of these add up to it being a problem.
But, most of us deal with chemicals that are just as dangerous or worse. Gasoline is a prime example.
The problem isn't the hexane, it's the way it's being used. (It's not just China. I've sure seen problems with solvent exposure in plants here in the US.)
I must be really really old...
Yeah, you are. And me too. I bet a lot of the young'uns here have never heard of the protocol in your username.
As-Received-By: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language-Path: Arbwyth->Trade 24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Twirlip of the Mists
Subject: Blighter Video thread
Keywords: Hexapodia as the key insight
Distribution: Threat of the Copyright Blight
Approved: yes
Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay
I haven't had a chance to get the famous video from
the Pirate Bay of the intercept, except as an evocation.
(My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true
that RIAA employees have six legs? I wasn't sure from the
evocation. If these humanoids have three pairs of legs,
then I think there is an easy explanation for them shooting
down the Pirate Party relay satellite... (more)
(With apologies to Vernor Vinge.)
She won't cause a sex scandal
You're joking, right?
Methinks you underestimate the Otakus. Just do a search on "Miku porn".
Another example of Rule 34. If it exists, there is porn of it.
Not only animated, but apparently live action cosplay as well.
I'd like to point out that there are large numbers of untrained people engaging in largely unsupervised DIY Bio that is FAR more advanced than anything done in any professional laboratory, let alone a home one.
Further, this activity has already resulted in the release of extremely dangerous organisms being released into the wild.
The current DIYBIO is mostly about as dangerous as raising and breeding animals as far as the bio part.
The chemicals involved might be some hazard. But, we already deal with pretty bad hazmat in our daily life. Look at gasoline. Toxic as a vapor in common concentrations, volatile, highly flammable, even explosive, likely carcinogenic. You'd never get it onto the market nowadays.
I'd worry more about picking up already known zoonosis (anthrax, brucellosis, tularemia, glanders, and a whole host of parasites already extant and well adapted just to name a very few) from animals than making something either accidentally or intentionally.
In fact, if you raise pigs and ducks on the same farm, you're probably more a source of danger since flu virii can go back and forth between the pigs, the ducks, and you/you're family and develop the mutations to cross species.
Making a microbe that can survive and outcompete the wild types isn't easy. Making one that subverts the immune system better than the wild types isn't easy. It's been done, but generally by nongenetic engineering methods (passing it through multiple hosts of the target type and selecting for the worst cases, etc. See the biowar programs of the US, WW-2 Japan, and the USSR for examples).
Every foreigner who's in China is a loser who's there for Chinese women? Uh huh. Suuuure...
Might it be that you're pissed that one or more Chinese gals paid you no mind? Or, are you one of those who derides any Chinese female who goes out with a non-Chinese as a "yellow cab"?
Or is it that there's a shortage of them?
China's made its own problem of being 2 million female children short because of "one child" and the cultural emphasis on sons. Better start working on opening your own minds before trying to change minds here.
Oh, wait. You're here in the West according to your comments. Then how is it that you aren't just the same sort of loser leaving your own failures in the country you left behind? Oh. I got it. Different standard for you and others. You're inherently superior somehow. I've heard that philosophy somewhere before.
Or, maybe you were born here, and became embittered all on your own. Good to know to know that bullshit xeno attitude of yours can spring up anywhere.
Here in America (and across the world) we know your kind. We despise you.
Almost as much as we despise a totalitarian government censoring.
(Hopefully, you just wrote something silly because you were ticked off at the previous poster. Very few here sympathize with the Chinese government, but your comment came across just as alienating and biased as how I tried to wrote the above.)
Obvious question: Are you hitting Baidu from inside China, or from outside? An awful lot of sites give different results based on where they determine you are coming from.
It could also depend on what part of the path from the computer to the server the filtering and monitoring was being done on. If it was at a few choke points en route rather than at boatloads of individual sites(likely) then a non Chinese located computer might not hit the filters.
I've been following that for some months. Some quite good content on it.
Mostly good. Why do it a more expensive or less effective way?
One downside is that it makes it hard to do repairs on some items. Example: I fix lab equipment. An incubator I was working on uses an RTD temperature probe. It has settings in the software of the microcontroller running the machine to match it to the particulars of the probe. I have no access to those, so I'm limited in what sort of repairs I can do.
Repair and support contracts are very lucrative for some industries, and that leads to companies being unwilling to tell you enough information to fix the item. You're restricted to buying their expensive support contracts or trying to reverse engineer anytime you do a repair.
Congress limited how much car companies could do that, but there is little reason to think they'd do that for more technically oriented items.
Nowadays, they use the electronics to compensate for less robust mechanical design. A lot of work and expense used to be put into making mechanical control systems linear and well behaved.
Now, instead you use position sensors and servo motors or other actuators with a microcontroller doing the translation in between. Who cares how bouncy, slippy, or hysteresis laden the system is? You just compensate for it in the software that calculates the control outputs to the actuator.
Belts are simple, cheap and provide some useful slip and stretch in a power transmission system. For short range power transmission (a few inches, or so), they're great. They use a lot less material and can tolerate more misalignment than a gear set or chain and sprockets that span the same distance.
When you have to use lots of them, and transmit the power greater distances (more than a few feet), they become unwieldy.
That can have downsides.
Go read up on the late Jerry Bull
Oh, there are lots of possibilities for who might do it. The list of groups and nations who would quietly or not so quietly be very happy to see a deniable dagger stuck in the back of the Iranian nuclear program is quite long.
I'll just toss up some involving Russia, the US and Saudi Arabia. (disclaimer: I have no particular reason to think they would do this, but as long as conspiracy theories are running rampant here on Slashdot, I'll add fuel to the fire. :)
If you are a Russian company that is doing engineering on the Bushehr plant, it could be an interesting way to make extra money. Plant a worm to damage the plant and then not only make the original contract money, but charge them a large extra fee for fixing the plant after the sabotage. Make it look like the Israelis did it, and you're home free. (There is speculation that the worm was funneled through Russian contractors doing work on Bushehr.)
Or, if you're the Russian government, Bushehr has been a sticking point with the Western powers. If it's be taken down by an ostensibly Israeli worm just as it's completed, you've fulfilled your commitment to the Iranians, and removed a point of contention. You could even have negotiated a valuable quid pro quo of some kind in return for that. (So sorry, Iran. We tried to finish the plant we've been delaying on for so long, but the Israelis broke it. Shucky dern... Of course, if we get ticked off at the US again, we could help fix it for a substantial fee. ;)
(As to possible paybacks: There has been a question of whether there was some quid pro quo for the US, seemingly unilaterally deciding to not put interceptor missiles in Poland. Russia helping scuttle Iranian nuclear ambitions would be a very valuable payback for that. For another tack, the Saudis are very worried about Iran's nuclear ambitions and their influence in OPEC could be very valuable for an oil exporter like Russia.)
May 9th 1979. This is the anniversary of the US & USSR signing the Salt 2 treaty, limiting nuclear weapons.
Thus, the worm is OBVIOUSLY the cooperative work of disaffected former nuclear weapons designers in the US and Russia. They're angry that Iran is trying to build a bomb, and the sanctions on Iran won't let them make lots of money helping them like Abdul Qadeer Khan did.
And Myrtus is a religious reference to the practice of women wearing myrtle garlands in their hair during the Roman Veneralia festival celebrating the Goddess Venus Verticordia (Venus, the changer of hearts).
How can this be anything but a clear plea for those placing the sanctions to have a change of heart and allow these worthy weapons designers to support themselves in a thoroughly capitalist manner.
(If you take this seriously, I truly pity you. ;)
http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/science21/LaserCooling.html
For just one example.
The book Optical Refrigeration by Mansoor Sheik-Bahai and R.I. Epstein is an overview of this field that cools semiconductors and other macroscopic objects with lasers.
(disclaimer: I used to work as a grad student for Sheik-Bahai long ago. Very cool guy.)
Absolutely. Several years ago, I heard him talk on the prospects for finding more exoplanets in the future. He's a serious and highly competent scientist.
He also is a Jesuit monk. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
(And, he seemed like a heck of a nice Guy. Forgive the pun. :)
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno
My own preferences are for a return to the moon. But, an asteroid mission will be fine. A Mars mission would be fine. Any of them would be fine, provided one thing.
We actually bloody well do it!
A lot of good ideas have been started and then gone down in flames do to half hearted support, underfunding, and the politics of not being built in the right constituencies, etc, etc, Republican spacecraft, Democrat spacecraft, etc whatnot, cost overrun, technical challenge not risen to, lather rinse, oh crap our engineers all retired.
It doesn't have to be the "best possible" mission. It just has to be done to be a sucess especially when compared to sitting on this rock.
"Republicans are old... (Where's my dead horse?)"
Depends on where you live. There are lots of young Republicans in areas where the party is the leading one. Example, the small midwest town I'm in. The Democrats tend to be older here as they're often university workers (or university retirees) who commute in about 20 miles to the nearby University of Illinois. They tend to come from a different demographic than the rest of the town.
There's an awful lot of sample bias going on in these replies. It's the old "How can that guy have won the election? None of the people I know voted for him." The answer: There are far more voters you don't know than those you do.
"and old people and tech tend not to go hand-in-hand."
Rotten kid. Come closer so I can whack your Droid phone with my cane!
I'd rephrase that to "Old people and NEW tech tend not to go hand-in-hand". There are lots of old techies, but the tech they were so hot for isn't the current fashion. This is why ham radio, for example, tends now to be a hobby for the older set. I'd say that the hams were in general more clued in to how their tech toys worked than the average iPhone user is today.