"Since when was non-ionizing EM radiation dangerous?"
It isn't.
There are three parts to assessing something like this.
First, is there some physical method consistent with known science by which injury could occur? In this case, no.
Second, do controlled experiments on human or lab animals show an effect? In this case, no.
Third, do statistical studies show a correlation? In this case, not when they are done competently. The problem is that a lot of studies have been done by people who don't understand statistics. They think that everything should be exactly average. They look at a bunch of populations, find 20% are more than one standard deviation above average, and try to find some explanation for this.
Sort of like Dilbert's PHB getting angry when he finds out that 40% of employee sick days are taken either on a Monday or a Friday.
"I've heard this before, but I haven't heard a terribly good explanation for why."
Easy.
First, DC actually is better for transmitting power over long distances. AC current tends to concentrate in the surface of the conductor, leading to higher current densities and larger ohmic losses.
So, why do we use AC almost everywhere? Transformers. It is relatively easy and efficient to use a transformer to change voltages of AC power. For large electrical lines, the voltage is cranked way up, which means the current is reduced. The less current, the smaller the losses due to resistance in the wires. So power is transmitted at high voltages, so the current and hence losses are low. Then, near the place where power is needed, transformers change the power to lower voltage, higher current. (This is because you can't have house wiring and appliances that won't arc or explode when hit with 13,800 V.)
Converting between high and low voltages with DC power is much more difficult, and requires more complex equipment. (An AC transformer is two pieces of wire wrapped around a chunk of iron.)
"a tokamak is still seen as the best candidate for a earthly fusion reactor."
Yes. It is important to understand the meaning of the maturity level of a field of research.
One the one hand, there are projects that seem like good ideas based on theoretical analysis. They appear to hold promise, but all the steps in the theory are not rigorously supported.
Then there are mature projects, where most aspects of the science have been studied and verified. All sorts of problems that were not evident initially have been found and overcome. Predictions of future performance are based on justifiable extrapolation of experiments, not back-of-the-envelope estimates.
What is the point of this distinction? You cannot meaningfully compare a new idea to an established, mature idea. This is not to say that new ideas should be ignored, just that these are different categories that should not be confused.
To be specific, the magnetic fusion community supports spending money on "alternative concepts". A significant amount of the research magnetic fusion budget is spent on non-tokamak experiments. However, no one is going to consider tossing out tokamak research until some other idea continues to look enticing after significant experimental verification.
To be a little more concrete, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen will take a couple eV more or less per molecule. Fusion reactions release many MeV per fusion reaction. The energy involved in nuclear reactions really dwarfs anything else.
Thank you for your very interesting reply. The fact that the understory is dense in these planted forests makes it sound like they are doing something to enhance the habitat, and not just growing as many trees as possible. That is great to hear.
The newspaper has been dying for a long, long time.
When I was a kid, the nearest city (about a million people) had at least two real newspapers, one of which had a morning edition and an evening edition. It was down to one paper, one edition long before the web existed.
How many of your local papers have names that show that they are the result of a merger of two older papers? Like the Union Tribune or the Times-Picayune?
"the replanting of the trees is about as dense as can be sustained and is GREAT for wildlife"
I am going to have to be skeptical of this statement.
In general, large tracts of land densely planted with a single species of tree with all trees of a similar age do not provide good habitat for wildlife. The crowded trees block out the light that would allow understory plants to grow, the plants that provide most of the food and cover for animals. Almost all animals require many different kinds of plants. Usually, the boundary between forest and fields provides the best habitat for animals.
The fact that a lot of deer are shot there does not prove that it is good habitat. Most of the east coast is overcrowded with deer, so they are pushed into marginal habitats. An open forest with no understory plants is also an easy place to see animals from a large distance, making them particularly vulnerable there.
I cannot say that any of this applies specifically to paper mill lands in TE, because I have never been there. But my general knowledge makes me skeptical of your claims.
Rob Pike describes in the article how some uses of symlinks can result in confusion for the user.
Another one he does not mention is a directory containing a symlink back to the directory. cd linkname leaves you where you started. Or worse, a link back to a parent directory.
Does the fact that symlinks can be made to do horrible things mean that they should be thrown out despite all their extremely valuable uses?
It is a fact that unix-like OS's let you do stupid, destructive things. Do you want the rm executable to be hacked up so that root cannot run rm -Rf/? The philosophy, it seems to me, is to err on the side of providing capabilities, rather than creating a forgiving environment.
Hardly. Being a monopoly is perfectly legal. What a company cannot legally do is use its status as a monopoly to expand its market or otherwise restrict trade in an anticompetitive fashion.
The Baby Bells are still monopolies. How many choices do I have in what company will hook up the land line at my house? But they cannot use their monopolies in local phone service to control the market for long distance service.
"Beyond the obvious downside to this (4 times the CPU time for legitimate matches) the advantage is obviously that the cracker has 4 times the bruteforcing to do."
That is the whole point. The CPU work that needs to be done to check passwords at login is negligible. We can make that take orders of magnitude longer, and no one will even notice. Making the brute forcing take orders of magnitudes longer will gain us a few years before we have to move to using retinal scans or 50 character passphrases.
This is in essence already part of normal Unix passwords. The password encryption scheme was intentionally made slow to thwart brute force attacks. Adding pepper just recalibrates the slowness factor to be appropriate for modern hardware.
"I can carry a USB memory stick with me and keep my $HOME there."
But with this you also have/usr. Carrying around my home directory is only useful if I know I'll have a Linux box on which to read it. Carrying around all my data plus the applications and being able to access it on anyone's Windoze machine is completely different.
Carrying this could replace lugging around a 10 lb laptop.
"I really don't see a big issue with performance that way."
Your message shows that you are assessing the various possibilities only in terms of your specific needs. Every setup has its own requirements and its own performance criteria. There are situtations where having the disk access speed drop by 50% could cost someone from 10's of thousands of dollars to order of a million dollars.
Then there are people who are trying to maximize their value in disk space per dollar, and the difference between N/2 (RAID 1, RAID 10) and N-1 (RAID 5) disk space is significant.
Similarly, what is the risk of two dead drives? Higher than you think, because failures of drives are not uncorrelated, often corresponding with power supply issues or rebooting. Higher also if you have a system with ten drives in it.
How useful and valuable is the backup? How valuable is whatever went on the drives since the last backup? If you have the work of 250 people being stored, losing one day's work for everyone is like wiping out a year's work from one person, so that's $50-100k. The value of redundancy is really going to vary, depending on the purpose of the system.
"With LVM spanning multiple disks, the loss of any single disk means the loss of all data on all disks."
According to the docs, that appears to be true only if you are using striping, in effect making the LVM a RAID-0 system. I think it is true that someone who wants to span multiple drives but doesn't need redundancy and doesn't care about the speed increase from striping would be better off using LVM than RAID, because LVM is a lot more versatile. So change the sentence to, "If I want RAID, it would be for the redundancy."
"Also, another surprise is that a SATA RAID (speed) performs about as well as a SCSI RAID."
That is a surprise. As far as I can tell (not being able to read the article) he is comparing 7200 rpm SATA drives to 10,000 rpm SCSI drives (see page Testoppsett in TFA). Rule of thumb people use is that read/write speeds are proportional to the disk speed, so that is an advantage for the SCSI setups. He could at least compare 10k rpm SATA to 10k rpm SCSI "Harddisker."
"If I want RAID, it would be for the redundancy and spanning multiple drives, not speed."
For spanning multiple drives I think you want LVM.
Almost, but in your analogy he never gave her the piece of paper. He may have read the poem aloud, but he kept the piece of paper.
There is nothing that says he ever gave the site to her in any way; it was registered in his name, and he kept the passwords and did the admin work.
Sure she wants the domain. Most of us want a lot of things that we don't deserve (and are never going to get). If she had asked nicely for it, he would have given it to her. Instead, she tried to push him around, and he pushed back. What a surprise. She apparently has not figured out that it doesn't work as well to try to force guys to do what you want after you have dumped them.
"Lastly, you can spend $100 and get an attorney to simply write a letter (you don't want to retain counsel, since that will be incredibly expensive compared to your potential returns, but a letter can have massive sway)."
Save the $100 and send a letter certified mail.
I have used this several times. Receiving certified mail scares the pants off some people. Maybe it suggests that you are ready to escalate the matter to a legal dispute. If this is indeed a 2-bit operation, such a letter could make them jump. (I guess it is because a threat of legal action can be blown off as a bluff, but acting as if you are creating a legal paper trail is ominous.)
This is more like writing a poem for someone. You can write a poem in someone's honor as a gift, but you don't transfer the copyrights to them. Sounds like the site was a fansite, not a site for her to use (as in, "Here, I created an e-commerce site for your business").
"Redhat announced a while back that they'd support a given version of RHEL for, what, 3 years after its release? That's what enterprise/server users need."
That is why RHEL costs money. That is one of the Open Source/Free Software business models, that users who need the level of support that commercial software has (or should have) will pay for it.
It doesn't sound fair to expect Debian volunteers to support as many releases as Redhat's employees do. (And if Redhat's maintenance support of RHEL is no better than the support it used to give to RHL, it is not worth that much.)
Mitchell talks about going to Firefox to get rid of bloat. Could someone explain what she is talking about?
Downloading the installer.tar.gz files, moz is 13M and firefox is 8M. Not a huge difference. In either case, if you are on a slow connection you go out for coffee while it downloads and if you are on a fast connection it loads almost instantly. When running, ff uses a little less RAM, but again not enough to matter much. So what's the big deal?
If you want an unbloated browser, the dillo rpm is 280k. Loading this article nested, threshold 2, in ff uses 32M, in dillo 5M. That is a difference worth talking about.
The point is not to rag on firefox. The question is why people who know better advance empty technical arguments to support the change. The developers who started phoenix were quite up-front that politics and bureaucracy were a major motivation. They said that working inside the vast mozilla structure was stifling and not any fun. Now somehow the project that started as a way to work outside the main browser development process has become the main browser development process. ("Everybody's trying to be so alternative, but alternative is so main stream" - JBE)
"I know people at MIT who are currently working on cold fusion research"
Oh, please tell us who this is. A department head? A janitor?
Sorry, but anonymous "people at MIT" lost any possible value after Darl McBride's claim about his stable of MIT mathematicians finding UNIX SVRX code in Linux (which he made up, it seems).
If you tell me that the work is secret and you can't say who it is, then you make it hard for anyone to take the CF community seriously.
I think there is something there to take seriously. There are some smart people working hard getting results that can't be explained, but they are drowned out by outrageous claims and bogus science. But "I know people at MIT" doesn't help.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't.
There are three parts to assessing something like this.
First, is there some physical method consistent with known science by which injury could occur? In this case, no.
Second, do controlled experiments on human or lab animals show an effect? In this case, no.
Third, do statistical studies show a correlation? In this case, not when they are done competently. The problem is that a lot of studies have been done by people who don't understand statistics. They think that everything should be exactly average. They look at a bunch of populations, find 20% are more than one standard deviation above average, and try to find some explanation for this.
Sort of like Dilbert's PHB getting angry when he finds out that 40% of employee sick days are taken either on a Monday or a Friday.
Easy.
First, DC actually is better for transmitting power over long distances. AC current tends to concentrate in the surface of the conductor, leading to higher current densities and larger ohmic losses.
So, why do we use AC almost everywhere? Transformers. It is relatively easy and efficient to use a transformer to change voltages of AC power. For large electrical lines, the voltage is cranked way up, which means the current is reduced. The less current, the smaller the losses due to resistance in the wires. So power is transmitted at high voltages, so the current and hence losses are low. Then, near the place where power is needed, transformers change the power to lower voltage, higher current. (This is because you can't have house wiring and appliances that won't arc or explode when hit with 13,800 V.)
Converting between high and low voltages with DC power is much more difficult, and requires more complex equipment. (An AC transformer is two pieces of wire wrapped around a chunk of iron.)
Yes. It is important to understand the meaning of the maturity level of a field of research.
One the one hand, there are projects that seem like good ideas based on theoretical analysis. They appear to hold promise, but all the steps in the theory are not rigorously supported.
Then there are mature projects, where most aspects of the science have been studied and verified. All sorts of problems that were not evident initially have been found and overcome. Predictions of future performance are based on justifiable extrapolation of experiments, not back-of-the-envelope estimates.
What is the point of this distinction? You cannot meaningfully compare a new idea to an established, mature idea. This is not to say that new ideas should be ignored, just that these are different categories that should not be confused.
To be specific, the magnetic fusion community supports spending money on "alternative concepts". A significant amount of the research magnetic fusion budget is spent on non-tokamak experiments. However, no one is going to consider tossing out tokamak research until some other idea continues to look enticing after significant experimental verification.
To be a little more concrete, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen will take a couple eV more or less per molecule. Fusion reactions release many MeV per fusion reaction. The energy involved in nuclear reactions really dwarfs anything else.
You should be worrying about neutrons and gammas.
Thank you for your very interesting reply. The fact that the understory is dense in these planted forests makes it sound like they are doing something to enhance the habitat, and not just growing as many trees as possible. That is great to hear.
The newspaper has been dying for a long, long time.
When I was a kid, the nearest city (about a million people) had at least two real newspapers, one of which had a morning edition and an evening edition. It was down to one paper, one edition long before the web existed.
How many of your local papers have names that show that they are the result of a merger of two older papers? Like the Union Tribune or the Times-Picayune?
I am going to have to be skeptical of this statement.
In general, large tracts of land densely planted with a single species of tree with all trees of a similar age do not provide good habitat for wildlife. The crowded trees block out the light that would allow understory plants to grow, the plants that provide most of the food and cover for animals. Almost all animals require many different kinds of plants. Usually, the boundary between forest and fields provides the best habitat for animals.
The fact that a lot of deer are shot there does not prove that it is good habitat. Most of the east coast is overcrowded with deer, so they are pushed into marginal habitats. An open forest with no understory plants is also an easy place to see animals from a large distance, making them particularly vulnerable there.
I cannot say that any of this applies specifically to paper mill lands in TE, because I have never been there. But my general knowledge makes me skeptical of your claims.
Rob Pike describes in the article how some uses of symlinks can result in confusion for the user.
Another one he does not mention is a directory containing a symlink back to the directory. cd linkname leaves you where you started. Or worse, a link back to a parent directory.
Does the fact that symlinks can be made to do horrible things mean that they should be thrown out despite all their extremely valuable uses?
It is a fact that unix-like OS's let you do stupid, destructive things. Do you want the rm executable to be hacked up so that root cannot run rm -Rf /? The philosophy, it seems to me, is to err on the side of providing capabilities, rather than creating a forgiving environment.
Hardly. Being a monopoly is perfectly legal. What a company cannot legally do is use its status as a monopoly to expand its market or otherwise restrict trade in an anticompetitive fashion.
The Baby Bells are still monopolies. How many choices do I have in what company will hook up the land line at my house? But they cannot use their monopolies in local phone service to control the market for long distance service.
I am putting AAA on notice that I will cancel my membership immediately if they try to pull a stunt like that.
104: touch ./-foo ./-foo
105: rm -- -foo
106: ls
Yup.
That is the whole point. The CPU work that needs to be done to check passwords at login is negligible. We can make that take orders of magnitude longer, and no one will even notice. Making the brute forcing take orders of magnitudes longer will gain us a few years before we have to move to using retinal scans or 50 character passphrases.
This is in essence already part of normal Unix passwords. The password encryption scheme was intentionally made slow to thwart brute force attacks. Adding pepper just recalibrates the slowness factor to be appropriate for modern hardware.
But with this you also have /usr. Carrying around my home directory is only useful if I know I'll have a Linux box on which to read it. Carrying around all my data plus the applications and being able to access it on anyone's Windoze machine is completely different.
Carrying this could replace lugging around a 10 lb laptop.
The part that is visible is http://goat.
Your message shows that you are assessing the various possibilities only in terms of your specific needs. Every setup has its own requirements and its own performance criteria. There are situtations where having the disk access speed drop by 50% could cost someone from 10's of thousands of dollars to order of a million dollars.
Then there are people who are trying to maximize their value in disk space per dollar, and the difference between N/2 (RAID 1, RAID 10) and N-1 (RAID 5) disk space is significant.
Similarly, what is the risk of two dead drives? Higher than you think, because failures of drives are not uncorrelated, often corresponding with power supply issues or rebooting. Higher also if you have a system with ten drives in it.
How useful and valuable is the backup? How valuable is whatever went on the drives since the last backup? If you have the work of 250 people being stored, losing one day's work for everyone is like wiping out a year's work from one person, so that's $50-100k. The value of redundancy is really going to vary, depending on the purpose of the system.
According to the docs, that appears to be true only if you are using striping, in effect making the LVM a RAID-0 system. I think it is true that someone who wants to span multiple drives but doesn't need redundancy and doesn't care about the speed increase from striping would be better off using LVM than RAID, because LVM is a lot more versatile. So change the sentence to, "If I want RAID, it would be for the redundancy."
That is a surprise. As far as I can tell (not being able to read the article) he is comparing 7200 rpm SATA drives to 10,000 rpm SCSI drives (see page Testoppsett in TFA). Rule of thumb people use is that read/write speeds are proportional to the disk speed, so that is an advantage for the SCSI setups. He could at least compare 10k rpm SATA to 10k rpm SCSI "Harddisker."
"If I want RAID, it would be for the redundancy and spanning multiple drives, not speed."
For spanning multiple drives I think you want LVM.There is nothing that says he ever gave the site to her in any way; it was registered in his name, and he kept the passwords and did the admin work.
Sure she wants the domain. Most of us want a lot of things that we don't deserve (and are never going to get). If she had asked nicely for it, he would have given it to her. Instead, she tried to push him around, and he pushed back. What a surprise. She apparently has not figured out that it doesn't work as well to try to force guys to do what you want after you have dumped them.
Save the $100 and send a letter certified mail.
I have used this several times. Receiving certified mail scares the pants off some people. Maybe it suggests that you are ready to escalate the matter to a legal dispute. If this is indeed a 2-bit operation, such a letter could make them jump. (I guess it is because a threat of legal action can be blown off as a bluff, but acting as if you are creating a legal paper trail is ominous.)
No matter what your legal rights may be...
There is one simple guiding principle that applies here: The woman is always right.
Accept that, and the resolution is clear: You can't win. Give her whatever she wants.
This is more like writing a poem for someone. You can write a poem in someone's honor as a gift, but you don't transfer the copyrights to them. Sounds like the site was a fansite, not a site for her to use (as in, "Here, I created an e-commerce site for your business").
That is why RHEL costs money. That is one of the Open Source/Free Software business models, that users who need the level of support that commercial software has (or should have) will pay for it.
It doesn't sound fair to expect Debian volunteers to support as many releases as Redhat's employees do. (And if Redhat's maintenance support of RHEL is no better than the support it used to give to RHL, it is not worth that much.)
Downloading the installer.tar.gz files, moz is 13M and firefox is 8M. Not a huge difference. In either case, if you are on a slow connection you go out for coffee while it downloads and if you are on a fast connection it loads almost instantly. When running, ff uses a little less RAM, but again not enough to matter much. So what's the big deal?
If you want an unbloated browser, the dillo rpm is 280k. Loading this article nested, threshold 2, in ff uses 32M, in dillo 5M. That is a difference worth talking about.
The point is not to rag on firefox. The question is why people who know better advance empty technical arguments to support the change. The developers who started phoenix were quite up-front that politics and bureaucracy were a major motivation. They said that working inside the vast mozilla structure was stifling and not any fun. Now somehow the project that started as a way to work outside the main browser development process has become the main browser development process. ("Everybody's trying to be so alternative, but alternative is so main stream" - JBE)
Can anyone explain what is really going on?
Oh, please tell us who this is. A department head? A janitor?
Sorry, but anonymous "people at MIT" lost any possible value after Darl McBride's claim about his stable of MIT mathematicians finding UNIX SVRX code in Linux (which he made up, it seems).
If you tell me that the work is secret and you can't say who it is, then you make it hard for anyone to take the CF community seriously.
I think there is something there to take seriously. There are some smart people working hard getting results that can't be explained, but they are drowned out by outrageous claims and bogus science. But "I know people at MIT" doesn't help.