To be pedantic, Watt's nationality was British. Scotland wasn't a sovereign state then (and still is not today). There is no such nationality as Scottish or English, only British. A bit like Texan isn't a nationality.
Only terrorists, criminals and spies should fear secret activities of the British and US intelligence agencies.
There have already been stories of non-terrorist, non-criminal people being deported from the US when going there on vacation because of innocent remarks made on their social networking page that were mis-interpreted by the DHS.
Oops 2^64 times larger than the entire IPv4 address space. That'll teach me to preview....
Incidentally, there are enough/48s that you can give every man, woman and child on the planet over 4000/48 allocations each before IANA even has to think about releasing some of the currently undefined address space.
IPv6 space won't run out in 20 years. "Well", you say, "It's inefficiently doled out - each user gets a/64 under how it's supposed to work even if their network has just one device!"
However, the amount of/64 prefixes theoretically available is 2^32 (4 billion) times larger than the address space of the *entire* IPv4 address space. Four billion times larger. Even if only 48 bits of those were usable for whatever reason, that would still be 65536 times larger than the *entire global IPv4 space*. However, there's more than 48 bits usable.
That's tremendously short sighted. Should we wait until IPv4 exhaustion is actually causing us lots of problems, or should we get things ready in advance, and make an orderly transition and avoid the problems (arguably the problems started already with all the issues NAT brings when you want to actually establish end to end connections - especially when you discover the guys at the far end happened to use exactly the same RFC1918 netblocks as you did and now someone has to renumber their internal network. We avoided that one by the skin of our teeth - we have a Very Expensive Piece Of Machinery that gets remote support from Siemens who made it. The netblocks they use for their internal networks are the same as ours - it was just blind luck our network addressing didn't end up overlapping, and their network was an adjacent/24 of RFC1918 space to one of our internal networks!)
Fines DO work. We have a £1000 fine where I live if you're caught using a handheld phone while driving. You just don't see people around here using phones while driving, and the only time you see someone use a phone in a car they've found somewhere to pull over and stop before using it.
You make the phone work only when it's either in the back of the car, or the right half of the car if in the front (or the left in countries that drive on the left). If it passes over the transmission tunnel to the left side front then it shuts down. Short range radio transmissions can be used to accomplish this.
I'm actually a bit puzzled about the hatred of Gnome 3. I only started using it very recently (I use Debian, so I'm not exactly on the bleeding edge for my Linux workstation), and Gnome 3 came with the recent upgrade to Debian 7.
It took me all of 30 minutes to get used to. It's uncluttered and doesn't get in my way, I kind of like the hot corner thing too, and it's become my preferred DE with Mac OSX coming a very close second.
Maybe it's because being a Debian user I missed the early buggy versions or something, or maybe because the only customization I really care about is focus-follows-mouse and Gnome 3 still does this. I do have a multi-monitor setup, and I agree that the default should be that both monitors change workspace when you want a workspace change, but I've not run into any problems after setting it to do that.
I have an electric jet. OK, so it's a model, but what it spews out the back is exactly what the same model would spew out the back if it were fitted with a turbine engine minus a bit of CO2 and unburned hydrocarbons. Normally we call them a "ducted fan" rather than a jet, but what comes out the tailpipe is a jet of fast moving air (reaction mass) which propels the aircraft forwards. Modern airliners also use ducted fans, but they are powered by a turbine engine.
It's not just charging cycles. An unused lithium ion battery stored at full charge loses 20% of capacity a year. So even if you'd hardly used that battery you'd still have ended up replacing it. (You can make a Li-Ion last much longer by storing it at a lower charge state, or keeping it cool. If you have a loose Li-Ion spare battery, putting it in the fridge when you're not going to use it for a long while can reduce this loss of capacity tremendously).
It doesn't matter what the battery is made of - batteries capable of a very high discharge current and water do not usually mix. Dumping a Li-Ion battery in water doesn't make it explode because the lithium reacts. The lithium is already in an ionic compound which on its own does not react with water. It's the very high current that can pass, especially in salty water, that causes the problem. No battery is suitable for aquatic purposes unless they are well waterproofed or are unable to deliver a high current.
Well, no, they tell us in TFA that it's four times the energy density than a Li-Ion battery. We don't use the Li-Ion's native voltage (about 3.8v nominal for most of them) to power electric cars, either. The battery is made up of multiple cells connected in series (or series parallel for a big pack) such that the resulting battery voltage is what you need for your application.
What the article doesn't mention is what the 'C' rating for these batteries would be. Current lithium-ion technologies these days had very good C ratings, but early ones did not. The early batteries couldn't discharge at more than about 1C (so a 1 amp hour battery could only deliver a current of 1 amp without damage) but current lithium-polymer batteries often have C ratings >30. I have a Li-Poly battery for my RC gear that's about the size of two cigarette packs that can output enough current to easily start a car. Can Li-S batteries be built to have high C ratings for both charge and discharge? If not then they are only really useful in portable devices.
Imagine we had this: an accused, who has a safe made from unobtanium (which needless to say, is as hard as Minecraft bedrock) with an unpickable lock. Can the accused be ordered to turn over the key if a search warrant to search the safe is properly executed? If this is the case, then why can't someone be ordered to turn over encryption keys in the case of encrypted data where there is a properly issued search warrant?
But mathematics is also about abstract analysis and logic (and it can be argued linguistics -- you don't get far without knowing the language of mathematics). It has all those same qualities.
Hold on - isn't that solvable with linear algebra? I've never done calculus myself (I intend to do it later this year) but it's the sort of thing that comes up in linear algebra word problems all the time. (It's of course possible that the question was a lot more detailed than that and so needed a different approach to solve, but I'm curious as to what it was that meant plain old linear algebra wasn't usable)
No nuclear tests don't count, because none of those tests were exploded over cities. None of those tests were injecting tens of millions of tonnes of soot into the stratosphere, where it could linger for years. It's the byproduct of the stuff the nukes set on fire that's the problem in terms of climate, not the actual bombs themselves. Densely populated cities (which are often in places where they would be ignited even with attacks against purely military targets) full of hydrocarbons and other flammable material all set alight is what causes the climate disruption, not the mushroom clouds of bombs let off in the desert where there is nothing to burn. This is nothing to do with fall-out or the other commonly though of effects of a nuclear weapon, as you may see if you explode one in a desert with nothing to burn but the effects of dozens of firestorms as highly flammable cities are burned to the ground, the IR-absorbing soot reaching the stratosphere and lingering there for years.
The TLDR version of the 2006 study about the climate effects of a regional nuclear war is:
A study presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2006 found that even a small-scale, regional nuclear war could disrupt the global climate for a decade or more. In a regional nuclear conflict scenario where two opposing nations in the subtropics would each use 50 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons (about 15 kiloton each) on major populated centres, the researchers estimated as much as five million tons of soot would be released, which would produce a cooling of several degrees over large areas of North America and Eurasia, including most of the grain-growing regions.
Basically, even a regional conflict would be very bad for all of us, even if you're on the other side of the planet and don't even see a speck of radioactive dust. Those living in places where food supplies are already marginal could end up facing famine in this scenario, and there's a billion people in that situation.
I guess my experience over the last couple of years differs from you then. The Windows GUI tools aren't perfect for that matter, either. I've had to tinker with registry settings often enough which is morally equivalent to editing a config file due to various bugs. No it doesn't happen often - but it happens with Windows nonetheless, quite often with XP, quite rarely with Windows 7 (but I've still had to do it once or twice).
The amount of config file tweaking I do with my desktop Linux systems is no more than with Windows 7. The level of config file tinkering is pretty much at an all time low. My work workstation is currently running Debian 7 with Gnome 3 and before that it ran Debian 6. I've not touched a single configuration file by hand, and I've had the machine a year - it just works (including the proprietary ATi graphics driver, which has a GUI installer and also just works). Perhaps it's because I'm running Debian rather than the bleeding edge. I also have Debian 7 on a virtual machine on my Macbook so that I can run the Xilinx ISE software, again, I've not touched a single config file on that either, it also just works. Not only that, the Debian desktop auto resizes when I change the VM's window size or full screen it or plug into a monitor, all without having to even click an icon let alone a config file! And when I get a software update, all software gets updated, not just the OS but all the applications I've installed from the Debian repositories, so office tools, compilers, the lot.
Incidentally, I don't get all the hate over Gnome 3.x. Admittedly I never used the earliest versions of Gnome 3 (after all, I'm on the trailing edge with Debian) but I got used to it within a half hour and rather like it. Perhaps I'm strange.
The only place I edit configuration files on Linux is on servers. And on Windows servers, I also have to do the same (there's an awful lot you can't do with the GUI on a Windows server, or is just 100 times more efficient to do with a script).
The hardware I'm running for Debian desktops has been mostly HP (formerly Compaq) business systems, but my current work workstation is a custom machine kitted out to be able to run lots of VMs for testing and on none of this stuff have I had to tweak configs by hand. I ran CentOS before that which wasn't as good in that respect, but that was back in the CentOS 5 days, perhaps 6 is better.
It's irrelevant who they have the nuclear war is, my point is we *all* will suffer the consequences due to the abrupt disruption of the climate. The developing world especially which will likely be pushed into famine.
We need to stop this madness. Even if we assume that fall-out outside of India/Pakistan's borders is not severe if they were to ever have a war that turned nuclear, the entire world will suffer the climatological consequences. See the following link (warning, PDF)
Most people just don't drive that far, though. Even when I lived in the US (for 7 years or so), the number of times I drove more than 200 miles can be counted on one hand. Most of the people I knew were the same. 99.9999857% of their journeys were 15 miles or less.
If electric cars had been around then (and I had been rich and able to afford one), for the very few times I went on a road trip I could have rented a gasoline powered car. America is just too damned big to drive most of the time, even with the TSA shennanigans, it's easier to get on SouthWest.
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To be pedantic, Watt's nationality was British. Scotland wasn't a sovereign state then (and still is not today). There is no such nationality as Scottish or English, only British. A bit like Texan isn't a nationality.
There have already been stories of non-terrorist, non-criminal people being deported from the US when going there on vacation because of innocent remarks made on their social networking page that were mis-interpreted by the DHS.
The stuff at the ISP end (routers and the like) have supported IPv6 for years.
Oops 2^64 times larger than the entire IPv4 address space. That'll teach me to preview....
Incidentally, there are enough /48s that you can give every man, woman and child on the planet over 4000 /48 allocations each before IANA even has to think about releasing some of the currently undefined address space.
IPv6 space won't run out in 20 years. "Well", you say, "It's inefficiently doled out - each user gets a /64 under how it's supposed to work even if their network has just one device!"
However, the amount of /64 prefixes theoretically available is 2^32 (4 billion) times larger than the address space of the *entire* IPv4 address space. Four billion times larger. Even if only 48 bits of those were usable for whatever reason, that would still be 65536 times larger than the *entire global IPv4 space*. However, there's more than 48 bits usable.
That's tremendously short sighted. Should we wait until IPv4 exhaustion is actually causing us lots of problems, or should we get things ready in advance, and make an orderly transition and avoid the problems (arguably the problems started already with all the issues NAT brings when you want to actually establish end to end connections - especially when you discover the guys at the far end happened to use exactly the same RFC1918 netblocks as you did and now someone has to renumber their internal network. We avoided that one by the skin of our teeth - we have a Very Expensive Piece Of Machinery that gets remote support from Siemens who made it. The netblocks they use for their internal networks are the same as ours - it was just blind luck our network addressing didn't end up overlapping, and their network was an adjacent /24 of RFC1918 space to one of our internal networks!)
Fines DO work. We have a £1000 fine where I live if you're caught using a handheld phone while driving. You just don't see people around here using phones while driving, and the only time you see someone use a phone in a car they've found somewhere to pull over and stop before using it.
All patrol cars around here have two cops in them. Even while on foot, they tend to go around in pairs.
You make the phone work only when it's either in the back of the car, or the right half of the car if in the front (or the left in countries that drive on the left). If it passes over the transmission tunnel to the left side front then it shuts down. Short range radio transmissions can be used to accomplish this.
I'm actually a bit puzzled about the hatred of Gnome 3. I only started using it very recently (I use Debian, so I'm not exactly on the bleeding edge for my Linux workstation), and Gnome 3 came with the recent upgrade to Debian 7.
It took me all of 30 minutes to get used to. It's uncluttered and doesn't get in my way, I kind of like the hot corner thing too, and it's become my preferred DE with Mac OSX coming a very close second.
Maybe it's because being a Debian user I missed the early buggy versions or something, or maybe because the only customization I really care about is focus-follows-mouse and Gnome 3 still does this. I do have a multi-monitor setup, and I agree that the default should be that both monitors change workspace when you want a workspace change, but I've not run into any problems after setting it to do that.
I have an electric jet. OK, so it's a model, but what it spews out the back is exactly what the same model would spew out the back if it were fitted with a turbine engine minus a bit of CO2 and unburned hydrocarbons. Normally we call them a "ducted fan" rather than a jet, but what comes out the tailpipe is a jet of fast moving air (reaction mass) which propels the aircraft forwards. Modern airliners also use ducted fans, but they are powered by a turbine engine.
It's not just charging cycles. An unused lithium ion battery stored at full charge loses 20% of capacity a year. So even if you'd hardly used that battery you'd still have ended up replacing it. (You can make a Li-Ion last much longer by storing it at a lower charge state, or keeping it cool. If you have a loose Li-Ion spare battery, putting it in the fridge when you're not going to use it for a long while can reduce this loss of capacity tremendously).
It doesn't matter what the battery is made of - batteries capable of a very high discharge current and water do not usually mix. Dumping a Li-Ion battery in water doesn't make it explode because the lithium reacts. The lithium is already in an ionic compound which on its own does not react with water. It's the very high current that can pass, especially in salty water, that causes the problem. No battery is suitable for aquatic purposes unless they are well waterproofed or are unable to deliver a high current.
Well, no, they tell us in TFA that it's four times the energy density than a Li-Ion battery. We don't use the Li-Ion's native voltage (about 3.8v nominal for most of them) to power electric cars, either. The battery is made up of multiple cells connected in series (or series parallel for a big pack) such that the resulting battery voltage is what you need for your application.
What the article doesn't mention is what the 'C' rating for these batteries would be. Current lithium-ion technologies these days had very good C ratings, but early ones did not. The early batteries couldn't discharge at more than about 1C (so a 1 amp hour battery could only deliver a current of 1 amp without damage) but current lithium-polymer batteries often have C ratings >30. I have a Li-Poly battery for my RC gear that's about the size of two cigarette packs that can output enough current to easily start a car. Can Li-S batteries be built to have high C ratings for both charge and discharge? If not then they are only really useful in portable devices.
Imagine we had this: an accused, who has a safe made from unobtanium (which needless to say, is as hard as Minecraft bedrock) with an unpickable lock. Can the accused be ordered to turn over the key if a search warrant to search the safe is properly executed? If this is the case, then why can't someone be ordered to turn over encryption keys in the case of encrypted data where there is a properly issued search warrant?
But mathematics is also about abstract analysis and logic (and it can be argued linguistics -- you don't get far without knowing the language of mathematics). It has all those same qualities.
Hold on - isn't that solvable with linear algebra? I've never done calculus myself (I intend to do it later this year) but it's the sort of thing that comes up in linear algebra word problems all the time. (It's of course possible that the question was a lot more detailed than that and so needed a different approach to solve, but I'm curious as to what it was that meant plain old linear algebra wasn't usable)
But is vector and matrix maths "advanced"? I'd argue not - here, we do that for our GCSEs (exams taken at 16 years old).
That's if anyone's left afterwards.
http://www.dorringtoninstruments.com/columbia/Robock_nuclear_winter.pdf
Perhaps I didn't explain my point clearly enough.
No nuclear tests don't count, because none of those tests were exploded over cities. None of those tests were injecting tens of millions of tonnes of soot into the stratosphere, where it could linger for years. It's the byproduct of the stuff the nukes set on fire that's the problem in terms of climate, not the actual bombs themselves. Densely populated cities (which are often in places where they would be ignited even with attacks against purely military targets) full of hydrocarbons and other flammable material all set alight is what causes the climate disruption, not the mushroom clouds of bombs let off in the desert where there is nothing to burn. This is nothing to do with fall-out or the other commonly though of effects of a nuclear weapon, as you may see if you explode one in a desert with nothing to burn but the effects of dozens of firestorms as highly flammable cities are burned to the ground, the IR-absorbing soot reaching the stratosphere and lingering there for years.
The TLDR version of the 2006 study about the climate effects of a regional nuclear war is:
Basically, even a regional conflict would be very bad for all of us, even if you're on the other side of the planet and don't even see a speck of radioactive dust. Those living in places where food supplies are already marginal could end up facing famine in this scenario, and there's a billion people in that situation.
Here's a rather longer paper on climate changes that may be caused by using nuclear weapons on "live" targets.
http://www.dorringtoninstruments.com/columbia/Robock_nuclear_winter.pdf
I guess my experience over the last couple of years differs from you then. The Windows GUI tools aren't perfect for that matter, either. I've had to tinker with registry settings often enough which is morally equivalent to editing a config file due to various bugs. No it doesn't happen often - but it happens with Windows nonetheless, quite often with XP, quite rarely with Windows 7 (but I've still had to do it once or twice).
The amount of config file tweaking I do with my desktop Linux systems is no more than with Windows 7. The level of config file tinkering is pretty much at an all time low. My work workstation is currently running Debian 7 with Gnome 3 and before that it ran Debian 6. I've not touched a single configuration file by hand, and I've had the machine a year - it just works (including the proprietary ATi graphics driver, which has a GUI installer and also just works). Perhaps it's because I'm running Debian rather than the bleeding edge. I also have Debian 7 on a virtual machine on my Macbook so that I can run the Xilinx ISE software, again, I've not touched a single config file on that either, it also just works. Not only that, the Debian desktop auto resizes when I change the VM's window size or full screen it or plug into a monitor, all without having to even click an icon let alone a config file! And when I get a software update, all software gets updated, not just the OS but all the applications I've installed from the Debian repositories, so office tools, compilers, the lot.
Incidentally, I don't get all the hate over Gnome 3.x. Admittedly I never used the earliest versions of Gnome 3 (after all, I'm on the trailing edge with Debian) but I got used to it within a half hour and rather like it. Perhaps I'm strange.
The only place I edit configuration files on Linux is on servers. And on Windows servers, I also have to do the same (there's an awful lot you can't do with the GUI on a Windows server, or is just 100 times more efficient to do with a script).
The hardware I'm running for Debian desktops has been mostly HP (formerly Compaq) business systems, but my current work workstation is a custom machine kitted out to be able to run lots of VMs for testing and on none of this stuff have I had to tweak configs by hand. I ran CentOS before that which wasn't as good in that respect, but that was back in the CentOS 5 days, perhaps 6 is better.
It's irrelevant who they have the nuclear war is, my point is we *all* will suffer the consequences due to the abrupt disruption of the climate. The developing world especially which will likely be pushed into famine.
We need to stop this madness. Even if we assume that fall-out outside of India/Pakistan's borders is not severe if they were to ever have a war that turned nuclear, the entire world will suffer the climatological consequences. See the following link (warning, PDF)
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/RobockToonSAD.pdf
Most people just don't drive that far, though. Even when I lived in the US (for 7 years or so), the number of times I drove more than 200 miles can be counted on one hand. Most of the people I knew were the same. 99.9999857% of their journeys were 15 miles or less.
If electric cars had been around then (and I had been rich and able to afford one), for the very few times I went on a road trip I could have rented a gasoline powered car. America is just too damned big to drive most of the time, even with the TSA shennanigans, it's easier to get on SouthWest.
> solipsistic
You keep using that word. It does not mean what you think it means.