These are disparate expenditures. They are not related in any way. The implications were that 1) MSL was "cheap", so we should be doing more of this at the expense of the war effort. 2) War is expensive (Have you ever heard of a cheap war?)
These expenditures come from a politically negotiated budget. The implication was that somehow we should conflate expenditures on one thing with expenditures of the other. In other words, the OP was off topic and foolishly so besides.
And since this discussion is off topic, my contribution to it will end here. Babble amongst yourselves if you like.
How is it trolling when Scentcone responds to a highly rated moronic comment regarding the Budget of the US?
You rated it trolling because you disagree with it? You moderated a moronic comment up because you agree with it? What do you think that does to the Slashdot readership?
I used to frequent this forum because it was funny, incisive, informative, interesting, and all of those good things. Now it's just an amalgamation of links I have already seen elsewhere with moderators who can't seem to understand what their role is for this forum. I find myself watching this web site less and less.
This is no longer news for nerds. This is news for politically perverted idiots who can not tolerate honest dissent.
When acting as a timing judge for swim team events, we have always been told to watch for the strobe flash from the start signal. It is supposed to be much more consistent.
The Baltimore Sun is known to be a left leaning newspaper even in the significantly left-leaning state of Maryland.
The case was later dropped after the plaintiffs failed to meet a 120 day deadline for filing. And by the way AC, all you had to plug in to Google was O'keefe acorn maryland and you'd have seen results.
This varies state by state in the US. Some states are one party consent states, others are two party consent states. For example, Maryland is a Two Party consent state. Often this law is used against those who film others who break the law. Recent examples include James O'Keefe when he did some undercover video of some very unflattering behavior by ACORN. The state of Maryland went after O'Keefe for obtaining video without permission, while they left ACORN alone.
In general, one party recording consent works better.
As for the instructions from Chief Lanier, it's a good start. She is one of the more level headed police chiefs in this country. I hope others follow her example.
People often walk around with some very bad assumptions about how resilient the Internet or a Cloud must be.
You may have a very good internet presence with lots of bandwidth, but it may be all housed in the same building where the same sprinkler system can bring it all down. You may think that ISPs can reroute lots of traffic to other places because it is possible. Yet, there are common failure modes there too.
Cloud computing is often hailed as a very resilient method for infrastructure. Yet, there is a disturbing tendency to focus all the servers in one big glass room of everything. You may get the dynamic pay per clock-cycle performance, but it may all come back to one substation. A single fire in that substation could bring everything down.
This is the problem with SLA deals: You don't know what kind of planning they may use for such infrastructure. Remember, the Internet itself may be resilient, but your cloud and your ISP may not be.
First, Low Earth Orbit speeds are about 17000 MPH. Launching a sub-orbital spacecraft toward a destination is actually just as fat and also orders of magnitude less expensive to build. The technology to do that is much more within reach than a vacuum tube train and it requires far less infrastructure.
Second, who says the tube that has the train car has to be a vacuum? If the train car were shaped like a dart, one could accelerate it with a rocket motor to get it to speed, and then as it breaks through a membrane to get in to the tunnel, it would compress a mixture of natural gas and air where the tunnel meets the edge of the dart. The burn of this fuel would then accelerate the car/dart further in to the tunnel. This is roughly the method that the SHARP gun used to accelerate projectiles to 3 km/sec. I'm not exactly sure how one could keep the acceleration to something that wouldn't turn everyone in to goo, but I am certain that a bit of propellant selection might make this practical.
It does. There is precedent for this memo, as much as I detest it. That precedent goes all the way back to WW II at least. Back then, ham radio operator ceased operations, and often surrendered their equipment for use in the war effort. Aircraft were grounded, some by cutting propellers. Commerce was on a war footing. The president had vast powers to direct the war effort and few questioned his authority.
This is not a new concept. It has been there for generations.
Note: I am not a fan of this president. I am right of center conservative. As much as this stuff turns my stomach, there appears to be a strong precedent for it, though I wonder why he would stir this hornet's nest of an issue...
I live in central Maryland. There is more to this than just a Derecho. We get every two to three years. They're not unheard of.
We had a mild winter and a cool spring. The winter did not have any significant snow or ice. So weak tree limbs didn't come down. There weren't many significant thunderstorms in the spring either, so no significant dead wood fell because of that. Here we are in early summer, and we get the first major storm of the season and all that weak and dying wood that hasn't been cleared out of the trees comes down at once. In many cases it takes the whole damned tree down. This wouldn't have been a big deal if it had been spread over a few storms here and there, but instead it happened all at once.
So this guy was writing, what, approximately nine or ten papers a year on average? Was anyone paying attention? Didn't anyone notice something strange about his "discoveries?"
What does that say about the field of academic medical research?
Anyone in sales learns early on that they should dress well. They need to look attractive. The concept of a Booth Babe is to look attractive and successful. But the question we should all ask is "To Whom?"
A typical Slashdot nerd wants answers, not pretty looks. Most are indifferent to Booth Babes. In other words, when selling to a technical crowd, Booth Babes don't help much. If anything, they can intimidate an asexual nerd from visiting (I have worked with people like this). Most nerds would be more impressed with large kinetic displays.
I disagree with the notion that Engineers and IT have a culture that encourages Booth Babes. The Booth Babes are selling to Managers, not Engineers. The question we all should ask is why Management of technical fields like this are falling for this kind of stuff.
In fairness to those who practice the law: I've seen first hand what happens to those who stop practicing the technical arts. Those skills atrophy pretty quickly. My own brother has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering and really was a true "Rocket Scientist" in the 1980s and early 1990s. He's now a patent attorney. Much of what he knew as an engineer is long forgotten.
Likewise, I have little doubt that those who stop practicing the law quickly lose track of all the handy exceptions, loopholes, and interpretive subtleties of the law.
There is no shame in admitting that one does not understand the subtleties of surveying, and determining flood plains. What is shameful is when someone with only a meager background goes off and tries to write legislation with little input from those who would be bound by such legislation.
Let the Engineers explain the proposal, and let the lawyers enshrine it in to law. We all have to read and understand this stuff, or the law will be of no use to society. Without comprehensible and reasonable legislation, we would then have a very jaundiced view of the very fabric that is supposed to keep our society fair and productive.
An Engineer is obligated to build a reliable, workable design. If the state tells the profession that the Earth is flat, they'll still design around a spherical Earth. They'll find some other sophistry to justify it.
At the end of the day, who is going to sue an engineer for suggesting a slightly more resilient design? I see estimates of 100 year floodplains that I know from visiting the site are utter nonsense. Careful review of flood-plane location is always a good idea during the initial site survey. It is almost never a good idea to simply take someone's word for it.
This bill seeks to do for the state what should be done through Engineering guidelines.
A sea-level rise estimate would have to take in to consideration all sorts of issues, not the least of which is potential for Tsunamis, Storm surges, and the like.
This is what happens when lawyers write technical documents...
Sadly the FCC has not been doing much oversight or even decent regulation for a good many decades. I've been following it off and on since the late 1970s. They were a mess back then, and they're still a mess. This is what happens when technical people leave judges, lawyers, and politicians to fend for themselves.
I don't think we're disagreeing much, but I am going to point out that even in a very practical sense, bandwidth costs money. You focused upon the physical fiber infrastructure, whereas I focused on the concept.
In a practical sense it costs money to get the hardware to support that connection to the home. It costs money to modulate it on a cable to the end user. It costs money to trunk and coordinate the flow so that we do not need to overbuild infrastructure. The Terrabit link you cited may be very low in power, but the gear to process that link at each end is not.
After all, you don't have a pair of wires that go all the way back to the generation plant. You have wires that go to a pole transformer that goes to a substation on a transmission ring through very large transformers, breakers, relays, and so forth. THEN you get to one of several generation plants.
Data networks are no different.
Do we need to regulate these monopolies? Of course! Do we need to set minimum performance standards? Of course! Do we need to set privacy laws? Yes, of course!
This all costs money. My question to you: The infrastructure is expensive. Who pays for it?
I work for a large industrial user of electricity. We have medium voltage substations and we buy our electricity by bidding for blocks of energy in advance and by buying it off of the spot market from the PJM grid. We do get good prices. Why? because we own some of the infrastructure and we attach at the inner tiers of the grid. If you could afford to put a large substation in your back-yard and to run feeders to the transmission grid at a million dollars per mile, you too could get these rates.
Likewise, if you build a data center in your basement, and you manage your bandwidth, you will be paying a lower rate than someone with a home firewall/switch who just wants an ISP to handle his e-mail, DNS, and web site for him.
But you will still be paying for the bandwidth. Someone needs to make the connection in to the rest of the Internet. Someone eventually has to attach to the inner Tiers of Internet routing. That infrastructure isn't free either. The hardware and the trunks and the energy that hardware uses isn't free.
So there will be graduated pricing and volume pricing for how you use bandwidth. Eventually, I predict time-of-day pricing for bandwidth use.
It's not that outrageous. Look at bandwidth use on the Internet. It is not constant. It has a rhythm and flow just like most energy firms have diurnal curves of consumption.
What the FCC seeks to do is to set up a framework that acknowledges this reality. I don't like it, but I also realize that it is very necessary.
It happens all the time with utilities. People fail to notice that their toilet flapper valve is leaking until they get their next quarterly bill. And it will be a very large bill.
The same happens when someone fails to realize that the compressor for their heat pump is running nearly all the time and isn't keeping up with demand.
Most utilities have forgiveness policies for people who simply can not know any better. An example would be a deaf person who has a toilet flapper valve problem. He or she would never hear the water running.
Likewise, a busy single parent with kids and several computers could also have this happen. Computer hygiene is not always easy.
The cost of GENERATING electricity is actually pretty small. The cost of getting it to your home is significant. Furthermore, fundamental laws of physics would tell you that the cost of higher data rates is more power. Literally. So at some fundamental level, this is not a bad idea.
However we need to recognize some facts: the delivery company of this content is a monopoly. The infrastructure to deliver FiOS was paid for and is maintained exclusively by Verizon. So, as a monopoly, they should not be allowed to "shape" traffic, they should not be allowed to block traffic, or even to inspect it without a court order. But it is not unrealistic for them to meter how much traffic is headed to your home and to bill you accordingly.
This will cause two things to happen: First, people will become somewhat aware of how much bandwidth they're using and what they're getting for that bandwidth. You want to play games at high bandwidth? Have at it. But expect to pay for it at the end of the month, just as someone who keeps their thermostat real cool in the summer and very warm in the winter will pay for it.
Why 12 volts? Telephone companies figured out decades ago that 48 volt positive ground systems were more desirable. They reduced the need for heavier copper wire, and they are not likely to be lethal shock hazards (though burns are certainly possible).
Furthermore, every motherboard has multiple switching supplies built in. We have 12 volts, 5 volts, 3.3 volts, 1.8 volts, and probably some adjustable voltages too. Some even have separate regulators for individual parts of the board. We will never be rid of the power supplies. We have simply moved them closer to the processors, memory, I/O, and GPU. Why not design the boards to use -48 volt battery systems as primary inputs so that we can reduce corrosion, use existing infrastructure designs, and keep I^2R losses down?
Slashdot Mirror
My name is Jake Brodsky. I worked with Bob Radvanovsky and others to create this experiment.
The formal announcement of this project is here.
Have you never read an implied argument?
These are disparate expenditures. They are not related in any way. The implications were that
1) MSL was "cheap", so we should be doing more of this at the expense of the war effort.
2) War is expensive (Have you ever heard of a cheap war?)
These expenditures come from a politically negotiated budget. The implication was that somehow we should conflate expenditures on one thing with expenditures of the other. In other words, the OP was off topic and foolishly so besides.
And since this discussion is off topic, my contribution to it will end here. Babble amongst yourselves if you like.
Slashdot moderators Pay attention:
How is it trolling when Scentcone responds to a highly rated moronic comment regarding the Budget of the US?
You rated it trolling because you disagree with it? You moderated a moronic comment up because you agree with it? What do you think that does to the Slashdot readership?
I used to frequent this forum because it was funny, incisive, informative, interesting, and all of those good things. Now it's just an amalgamation of links I have already seen elsewhere with moderators who can't seem to understand what their role is for this forum. I find myself watching this web site less and less.
This is no longer news for nerds. This is news for politically perverted idiots who can not tolerate honest dissent.
When acting as a timing judge for swim team events, we have always been told to watch for the strobe flash from the start signal. It is supposed to be much more consistent.
So what are they supposed to do, make a law against using this technology? Yeah, that will work --NOT!
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2009-09-24/news/0909230103_1_acorn-bertha-lewis-maryland-court-records
The Baltimore Sun is known to be a left leaning newspaper even in the significantly left-leaning state of Maryland.
The case was later dropped after the plaintiffs failed to meet a 120 day deadline for filing. And by the way AC, all you had to plug in to Google was O'keefe acorn maryland and you'd have seen results.
This varies state by state in the US. Some states are one party consent states, others are two party consent states. For example, Maryland is a Two Party consent state. Often this law is used against those who film others who break the law. Recent examples include James O'Keefe when he did some undercover video of some very unflattering behavior by ACORN. The state of Maryland went after O'Keefe for obtaining video without permission, while they left ACORN alone.
In general, one party recording consent works better.
As for the instructions from Chief Lanier, it's a good start. She is one of the more level headed police chiefs in this country. I hope others follow her example.
People often walk around with some very bad assumptions about how resilient the Internet or a Cloud must be.
You may have a very good internet presence with lots of bandwidth, but it may be all housed in the same building where the same sprinkler system can bring it all down. You may think that ISPs can reroute lots of traffic to other places because it is possible. Yet, there are common failure modes there too.
Cloud computing is often hailed as a very resilient method for infrastructure. Yet, there is a disturbing tendency to focus all the servers in one big glass room of everything. You may get the dynamic pay per clock-cycle performance, but it may all come back to one substation. A single fire in that substation could bring everything down.
This is the problem with SLA deals: You don't know what kind of planning they may use for such infrastructure. Remember, the Internet itself may be resilient, but your cloud and your ISP may not be.
First, Low Earth Orbit speeds are about 17000 MPH. Launching a sub-orbital spacecraft toward a destination is actually just as fat and also orders of magnitude less expensive to build. The technology to do that is much more within reach than a vacuum tube train and it requires far less infrastructure.
Second, who says the tube that has the train car has to be a vacuum? If the train car were shaped like a dart, one could accelerate it with a rocket motor to get it to speed, and then as it breaks through a membrane to get in to the tunnel, it would compress a mixture of natural gas and air where the tunnel meets the edge of the dart. The burn of this fuel would then accelerate the car/dart further in to the tunnel. This is roughly the method that the SHARP gun used to accelerate projectiles to 3 km/sec. I'm not exactly sure how one could keep the acceleration to something that wouldn't turn everyone in to goo, but I am certain that a bit of propellant selection might make this practical.
It does. There is precedent for this memo, as much as I detest it. That precedent goes all the way back to WW II at least. Back then, ham radio operator ceased operations, and often surrendered their equipment for use in the war effort. Aircraft were grounded, some by cutting propellers. Commerce was on a war footing. The president had vast powers to direct the war effort and few questioned his authority.
This is not a new concept. It has been there for generations.
Note: I am not a fan of this president. I am right of center conservative. As much as this stuff turns my stomach, there appears to be a strong precedent for it, though I wonder why he would stir this hornet's nest of an issue...
http://blog.aopa.org/blog/?p=3729
Effectively this is a storm with nearly hurricane force winds but no rotation. I'm a weather Nerd too.
I live in central Maryland. There is more to this than just a Derecho. We get every two to three years. They're not unheard of.
We had a mild winter and a cool spring. The winter did not have any significant snow or ice. So weak tree limbs didn't come down. There weren't many significant thunderstorms in the spring either, so no significant dead wood fell because of that. Here we are in early summer, and we get the first major storm of the season and all that weak and dying wood that hasn't been cleared out of the trees comes down at once. In many cases it takes the whole damned tree down. This wouldn't have been a big deal if it had been spread over a few storms here and there, but instead it happened all at once.
In so many ways, this was a perfect storm...
So this guy was writing, what, approximately nine or ten papers a year on average? Was anyone paying attention? Didn't anyone notice something strange about his "discoveries?"
What does that say about the field of academic medical research?
Why should they fear for their jobs? Who ever heard of good British Cafeteria food?
Anyone in sales learns early on that they should dress well. They need to look attractive. The concept of a Booth Babe is to look attractive and successful. But the question we should all ask is "To Whom?"
A typical Slashdot nerd wants answers, not pretty looks. Most are indifferent to Booth Babes. In other words, when selling to a technical crowd, Booth Babes don't help much. If anything, they can intimidate an asexual nerd from visiting (I have worked with people like this). Most nerds would be more impressed with large kinetic displays.
I disagree with the notion that Engineers and IT have a culture that encourages Booth Babes. The Booth Babes are selling to Managers, not Engineers. The question we all should ask is why Management of technical fields like this are falling for this kind of stuff.
In fairness to those who practice the law: I've seen first hand what happens to those who stop practicing the technical arts. Those skills atrophy pretty quickly. My own brother has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering and really was a true "Rocket Scientist" in the 1980s and early 1990s. He's now a patent attorney. Much of what he knew as an engineer is long forgotten.
Likewise, I have little doubt that those who stop practicing the law quickly lose track of all the handy exceptions, loopholes, and interpretive subtleties of the law.
There is no shame in admitting that one does not understand the subtleties of surveying, and determining flood plains. What is shameful is when someone with only a meager background goes off and tries to write legislation with little input from those who would be bound by such legislation.
Let the Engineers explain the proposal, and let the lawyers enshrine it in to law. We all have to read and understand this stuff, or the law will be of no use to society. Without comprehensible and reasonable legislation, we would then have a very jaundiced view of the very fabric that is supposed to keep our society fair and productive.
An Engineer is obligated to build a reliable, workable design. If the state tells the profession that the Earth is flat, they'll still design around a spherical Earth. They'll find some other sophistry to justify it.
At the end of the day, who is going to sue an engineer for suggesting a slightly more resilient design? I see estimates of 100 year floodplains that I know from visiting the site are utter nonsense. Careful review of flood-plane location is always a good idea during the initial site survey. It is almost never a good idea to simply take someone's word for it.
This bill seeks to do for the state what should be done through Engineering guidelines.
A sea-level rise estimate would have to take in to consideration all sorts of issues, not the least of which is potential for Tsunamis, Storm surges, and the like.
This is what happens when lawyers write technical documents...
Sadly the FCC has not been doing much oversight or even decent regulation for a good many decades. I've been following it off and on since the late 1970s. They were a mess back then, and they're still a mess. This is what happens when technical people leave judges, lawyers, and politicians to fend for themselves.
I don't think we're disagreeing much, but I am going to point out that even in a very practical sense, bandwidth costs money. You focused upon the physical fiber infrastructure, whereas I focused on the concept.
In a practical sense it costs money to get the hardware to support that connection to the home. It costs money to modulate it on a cable to the end user. It costs money to trunk and coordinate the flow so that we do not need to overbuild infrastructure. The Terrabit link you cited may be very low in power, but the gear to process that link at each end is not.
After all, you don't have a pair of wires that go all the way back to the generation plant. You have wires that go to a pole transformer that goes to a substation on a transmission ring through very large transformers, breakers, relays, and so forth. THEN you get to one of several generation plants.
Data networks are no different.
Do we need to regulate these monopolies? Of course! Do we need to set minimum performance standards? Of course! Do we need to set privacy laws? Yes, of course!
This all costs money. My question to you: The infrastructure is expensive. Who pays for it?
I work for a large industrial user of electricity. We have medium voltage substations and we buy our electricity by bidding for blocks of energy in advance and by buying it off of the spot market from the PJM grid. We do get good prices. Why? because we own some of the infrastructure and we attach at the inner tiers of the grid. If you could afford to put a large substation in your back-yard and to run feeders to the transmission grid at a million dollars per mile, you too could get these rates.
Likewise, if you build a data center in your basement, and you manage your bandwidth, you will be paying a lower rate than someone with a home firewall/switch who just wants an ISP to handle his e-mail, DNS, and web site for him.
But you will still be paying for the bandwidth. Someone needs to make the connection in to the rest of the Internet. Someone eventually has to attach to the inner Tiers of Internet routing. That infrastructure isn't free either. The hardware and the trunks and the energy that hardware uses isn't free.
So there will be graduated pricing and volume pricing for how you use bandwidth. Eventually, I predict time-of-day pricing for bandwidth use.
It's not that outrageous. Look at bandwidth use on the Internet. It is not constant. It has a rhythm and flow just like most energy firms have diurnal curves of consumption.
What the FCC seeks to do is to set up a framework that acknowledges this reality. I don't like it, but I also realize that it is very necessary.
It happens all the time with utilities. People fail to notice that their toilet flapper valve is leaking until they get their next quarterly bill. And it will be a very large bill.
The same happens when someone fails to realize that the compressor for their heat pump is running nearly all the time and isn't keeping up with demand.
Most utilities have forgiveness policies for people who simply can not know any better. An example would be a deaf person who has a toilet flapper valve problem. He or she would never hear the water running.
Likewise, a busy single parent with kids and several computers could also have this happen. Computer hygiene is not always easy.
Uh, no. The differences aren't so huge after all.
The cost of GENERATING electricity is actually pretty small. The cost of getting it to your home is significant. Furthermore, fundamental laws of physics would tell you that the cost of higher data rates is more power. Literally. So at some fundamental level, this is not a bad idea.
However we need to recognize some facts: the delivery company of this content is a monopoly. The infrastructure to deliver FiOS was paid for and is maintained exclusively by Verizon. So, as a monopoly, they should not be allowed to "shape" traffic, they should not be allowed to block traffic, or even to inspect it without a court order. But it is not unrealistic for them to meter how much traffic is headed to your home and to bill you accordingly.
This will cause two things to happen: First, people will become somewhat aware of how much bandwidth they're using and what they're getting for that bandwidth. You want to play games at high bandwidth? Have at it. But expect to pay for it at the end of the month, just as someone who keeps their thermostat real cool in the summer and very warm in the winter will pay for it.
Surely the name and brand are worth SOMETHING. Hasn't anyone purchased the rights to the name or logo?
Why 12 volts? Telephone companies figured out decades ago that 48 volt positive ground systems were more desirable. They reduced the need for heavier copper wire, and they are not likely to be lethal shock hazards (though burns are certainly possible).
Furthermore, every motherboard has multiple switching supplies built in. We have 12 volts, 5 volts, 3.3 volts, 1.8 volts, and probably some adjustable voltages too. Some even have separate regulators for individual parts of the board. We will never be rid of the power supplies. We have simply moved them closer to the processors, memory, I/O, and GPU. Why not design the boards to use -48 volt battery systems as primary inputs so that we can reduce corrosion, use existing infrastructure designs, and keep I^2R losses down?
Quiet? Hardly. Yes, the engine does make some noise, but it's actually the slap of air from each pass of a propeller blade that makes the most noise.