J.R.R. Tolkien's Rings trilogy was originally published in 1954-55, relatively obscure until an American pulp publisher 'Ace' just went to press without even asking, never mind the money. Tolkien battled them for rights and royalties, and things dragged along slowly until a cadre of deep fan American readers took on the cause with verve that Ace could scarcely have imagined, and sent them reeling. Ace eventually offered an arrangement that was accepted by the Author and formal truce was declared.
Meanwhile (1960s) popularity of the books had taken off considerably in the United States and Britain. So with new interest Ballentine Books approached the author with intent to produce an 'authorised' paperback edition -- with some revision -- and they would do the cover. From Humphrey Carpenter's J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography,
[After some delay] they decided that they could not wait any longer. In order to get at least one Tolkien book into the shops they published The Hobbit in the original text without waiting for Tolkien's revisions, which they planned to include in a later edition. They sent him a copy, and he was astonished by the picture on the cover. Ace Books for all their moral 'piracy' had employed a cover artist who knew something about the story, but Ballantine's cover picture seemed to have no relevance whatever to The Hobbit, for it showed a hill, two emus, and a curious tree bearing bulbous fruit. Tolkien exploded: 'What has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs?' When the reply came that the artist hadn't time to read the book, and that the object with pink bulbs was 'meant to suggest a Christmas tree', Tolkien could only answer: 'I begin to feel that I am shut up in a madhouse.'
Late in 1965 the `authorised' paperback of The Lord of the Rings was published in America in three volumes, with Tolkien's revisions incorporated, and with the emus and the Christmas tree on the cover of the first volume, though this picture was later removed and one of Tolkien's own drawings was substituted; two more of his pictures were used for the second and third volumes. Each copy carried a message from Tolkien: 'This paperback edition and no other has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other.'
Purple Emu Fellowships are now rare. I used to have one.
Parent did NOT deserve 'Troll'. The study mentioned in TA is controversial. People are moderating with their balls not their brains, and their balls shrivel up when anyone suggests there may not be some dire emergency at Fukushima related to killer radiation. But even so,
We've seen this hoax before, why am I not surprised there are people still pushing it? The only difference with this one is how poorly written it is. Cancer rates are actually lower than expected/normal around Fukushima.
Calling it a 'hoax' is going way too far, you should calm down too. It's still early to make definitive statements about cancers, but there is certainly no 'spike'. One of the main reasons the government took the (courageous) position that the thyroid abnormalities were unlikely to be associated with the disaster was, abnormal nodules were detected 'too soon' after the disaster when screening began, and their own health professionals assured them that these conditions take years to develop and were more likely the result of some pre-existing condition. And the last in-depth study was some 10 years prior, so when Fukushima occurred there was a lack of recent baseline. A cause for concern surely but not
The same old deception. Use data from ultrsensitive tests that detect more pre-cancerous cells than what is found under normal testing, then claim that is an increase. But when these same tests are performed on control groups anywhere, they find similar increases in detection of pre-cancerous cells. A simple read of these claims show they completely lack any reasonable baseline or control group methods. Add it to the list of deceptions that keep being debunked but keep showing up.
I'm upset at Fukushima disinfo too, but what can you do about it, especially when the AP is clearly in the market for scare stories, and the usual journalistic burden of proof and balance that applies in other things is relaxed. If your own child was given ultrasound and a 'nodule' showed up, you would not be subject to a hysterical reaction. The doctor would assure you that it should be monitored, but they do form and dissolve naturally. You'd be given nutritional supplements. Yet researchers feel free to insinuate a cause when it suits them. And even if they don't, journalists feel free to insinuate on their behalf by offering side-stories that make a 'connection'. To the slashdotter who ejaculated
It's their fault for not being born in the great state of AMERIKA!
and was also modded Troll... you're not far off the mark. The United States and others have added potassium iodide (for iodine) to its table salt for some 80 years now to counter endemic Goitre. Traditionally Japan has not iodized its salt because the national diet has been heavy with seaweed, a natural source, and there were were concerns that fortified salt plus seaweed might supply an over-abundance of iodine, which is also harmful. Perhaps some Japanese children have been starting to prefer Western diets and should, as are other rural populations, consider the benefits of iodization.
all good sources for learning about the hysterical Fukushima over reaction that pull no punches. A lot of what has passed for 'news' has been crap. Look out for closet anti-Islam liberal bias though. Linking to the Christian Science Monitor is OK but l
Reminds me of using 6-sigma process on a widget made of 112 parts and 16 widgets/year.
Or using Critical Path Management for programming projects when you are the only programmer in the organization.
Boss: [interrupting work] "I need to see a CPM chart with tasks and personnel." Programmer: "Okay." [produces chart with a horizontal row of connected boxes] "See? There's only one path, it's all critical, and it's all me." Boss: "Better get on it then."
Nice catch! I can't believe you read all that, but nice catch!
Gwaarsh. y'know yer reely smart when you make fun of that readin' stuff. Becha think Twitter raisin' the 140 character limit is the end of the world! Speling chekker gonna suck u in
Well, wasn't that what happened with Dual_EC_DRBG?
We can never know for sure, but empirically, I really don't think Dual_EC_DRBG ever pinged on NSA's --- or any other state intel actor's --- radar. At least not before EC vulnerabilities became public knowledge. Its use by default in the RSA BSafe toolkit meant that products using that toolklit would be vulnerable. And YES, that was a rich prize. BSafe may have been part of a program to seed a backdoor towards, say, a particular target state or industry.
BUT... there is for me an irreconcilable problem with that theory. I ran an ISP in those crazy early days when administrators were faced with a choice of whether to 'drop in' a BSafe object library under license (prove USA blahdy-blah) or compile the SSLeay/OpenSSL source, which was by no means as smooth and functional as it is today. But even pre-2000 it was obvious that the whole world was going the OpenSSL open source route as soon as it was stable.
Given that OpenSSL's populary was increasing by leaps and bounds... and yet, the OpenSSL FIPS Object Module v2.0 had a bug that prevented Dual_EC_DRBG from being used. *IF* the back door was being actively exploited by some state actor, they would have noticed this right away and it would have been a trivial matter (and top priority) for some helpful volunteer to emerge from the shadows and toss in a fix for it. Maybe even a soft-sell for epileptic curves. But this did not happen. Ergo, circumstances more closely resemble a situation in which NOBODY, including NSA, cared.
Remember that intel agencies are padded with the same bloviating internal memos as any organization, and love to take 'credit' for a thing to show their prowess whether or not the thing is actively being used. Maybe a good part of Snowden's trove are empty boasts.
Friend was diagnosed with cancer and was recovering from chemo in New Jersey some 1500 miles away. She ran a local ballet company for 30 years and it was to be the first time she had ever been away for their Spring performance. I was sound technician at the theater and we cooked up a scheme to telecast the performance to her. There were a several payphones outside, and I grabbed my butt-set and discovered their pairs appeared in the basement. I put a temporary jumper from one across to an unused pair of the theater's Bell 1A2 key system so it would appear up in the sound booth, put a single line phone on it with a simple phone patch (just a 600 ohm transformer, resistor and capacitor) to an output from the mixing board. A co-conspirator drove 30 miles to the house in New Jersey in which she was staying to install another phone patch into a good Hi-Fi amp and speakers. That night just before the performance I hung an 'out of order' sign on the payphone and we dialed an 800 number in the payphone line from the booth and Blue Box 2600/MF'd the call over to the New Jersey house, and patched in. During the performance one of the dance instructors sat in the house whispering into a microphone with commentary on what the dancers were doing, which went into the private mix. Cost of call: $0. It was all in place and ready minutes before the performance began, a real high-five moment because we came up with the idea to do it three hours before.
Also lots of explore sessions which I'd do from an empty conference room at the University because there were two phones there and dial-9 local toll restriction was so easy to bypass (it was 'supervised', inject quick local digits before telco dial tone). One call I made in stages: into New Jersey (Atlantic path) -> France -> Tokyo -> Hawaii -> local number (knowing it would return via Pacific path), then finally ringing the extension of the phone next to it. Literally a call manually routed around the world. Quality was awful, my 'Hello' was audible bit it sounded like 'helawk' some 2+ seconds later.
Also various random numbers to confused persons in Moscow, in Cold War days before USSR direct dial was permitted from the USA. So you bounce through France. Bouncing between UK/France a couple times then back home was loud, echo-y and strange sounding, the Brits liked their trunks piping hot.
The Emergency Asteroid Defence Project has launched a crowdfunded IndieGoGo campaign to help produce a set of working blueprints for a two-stage HAIV, or Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle. This HAIV paper (PDF) describes the use of a leading kinetic impactor to make a crater --- a following nuclear warhead would detonate in the crater for maximum energy transfer. The plans would be available for philanthropists to bring to prototype stage, while your friendly local nuclear weapon state supplies the warhead. This may be a best-fit solution. But just ask Morgan Freeman: these strategies could fail. What --- if any --- backup strategy could be integrated into an HAIV mission as a fail-safe in case the primary fails? Here is a review of strategies (some fanciful, few deployable) if we have to divert an asteroid with very short lead time. A gentle landing on the object may not be feasible, and we must rely on things that push hard or go boom. For example: detonating nearby to ablate surface materials and create recoil in the direction we wish to nudge. Also, with multiple warheads and precise timing, would it be possible to create a "shaped" nuclear explosion in space?
Use Kickstarter or another crowd funding to make it work. 450 mil is a bit steep though.
Been there, done that. Despite two month of press releases and a reasonable well-documented deliverable (plans for HAIV mission payload vehicle), a panel of international experts willing to donate their own time, a mere $200,000 target to help with other expenses, even a Slashdot article to promote it, should I even mention cool items (the shoulder patches arrived today)...
Only 187 human beings (2 were me) from planet Earth put in a grand total of $8,834 towards their $200k goal. May we now have a moment of silence to consider this.
[............] [Hissssssss...... BANG!]
What a mess. Glowing iridescent rings of exposed mantle like the hollow eye sockets of a ghost. Each one the eye of a hurricane of steam and worse things. Now if this was your planet, you would be feeling unpleasant tingles working up and down your spine right now just to look at them. Or even to hear me describe them. If there are no tingles you haven't given it enough thought. Thousand-foot tsunamis towards the coasts (it's an ocean impact). Molten fragments are setting prairie and forest ablaze a thousand miles away. When it burns out night will fall early. The next Winter will last dozens of years. It is merciful when dark clouds roll over everything at the end. Final curtain.
Good thing we took that 'statistical cost-benefit analysis' approach to heart. Makes it easier to bear. If survival would be ZERO, cost-benefit analysis is as pointless as dividing by ZERO.
"[extinction 50% of species events] Every 100,000,000 years or so on average..." NOPE. They happen when your odds come up. "we know city-killer events happen at least every few millennia..." NOPE. They happen when your odds come up. "Tunguska-level events... may happen as frequently as once per century..." NOPE. They happen when your odds come up. "City-killer asteroids...will be incredibly rare: only occurring once every 100,000 years or so." NOPE. Hey I thought you said 'every few millennia'! But NOPE. They happen when your odds come up. "Species-ending strikes...all human life on Earth...every 100,000,000 years or so Shucks I thought we'd be in the top 50%. Anyway, NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
There's a reason that not everyone likes to gamble. None of us should want to gamble with these risks. They invoke morality in the form of responsibility to one's children. Once you learn of an existential risk it is immoral to deny it exists. Immoral to take one single step back from a position of being able to better deal with the risk. Waiting is not a step forward. Because time is passing, it is a step back. Waiting is gambling.
There might be many here who'd toss a million-to-one die for some immediate benefit vs. the off-chance of their own death. (But truly) how many of those people would toss that million-to-one die if the payoff was theirs but the death would be their child? How many might boast they could do so with no hesitation... but then... back out at the last moment? (It's okay) That's one toss. How about once a day, or year? It's happening. By reading and knowing about this risk you are playing the game right now. It's real.
These arguments that attempt to make existential risks subject to sports-book rules, frankly, make me want to puke from anger! Part of me is wondering, why aren't we throwing stones at these people, jeering at them?
We've known that the sky could be dangerous for hundreds, if not thousands of years. We've had space travel for 50. Does NASA have anything better to do than get rockets into space again? Better to do than delivering science payloads to comets and other bodies? Better than ensuring the standard rocket could accommodate heavier. say, an asteroid countermeasures package? Better than refining systems and procedures so launches could occur with as little as several weeks' notice?
C: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it! O: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting. Powered off I mean. C: Look, matey, I if me mum canna call me at night the phone is deaad. I know a dead phone when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now. O: Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords. C: PININ' for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he turn 'imself off the moment I got 'im home? O: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable display and feaatures idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage! C: The features don't enter into it. It goes dead. O: Nononono, no, no! 'E's just off is all. Such a dimwit h'ta come in to the store to learn how ts turn a phone on? Gaaarsh.
Once upon a time there was this thing called High Fidelity, and it wasn't just about sound quality. It also involved a certain level of expectation consumers placed on consumer products, standard features, lines that engineers dare not cross. Throughout the era of magnetic tape -- from giant reel-to-reels and cart machines used by broadcasters to the successful and long-lived boom box cassette, no one would have dared to introduce a product that could not record.
There were just too many reasons in those days why people would want to record their own sound. From children recording the family opening presents on Christmas morning ("open this first!") to playing 'radio announcer', making simple start-stop 'mix' tapes from favorite radio stations, recording lectures, meetings or conferences, even phone calls (remember the suction cup induction coil?), it was a staple of childhood and adulthood that at several key stages in life, for whatever reason, we would rely on these devices to capture and play back voices, acoustic music for entertainment or transcription. The AGC circuit and built-in electret condenser microphone were perfected through the the 70s and were standard on every portable tape system. As quality improved the only real feature tier was whether the device could record in stereo, and whether it could accept line inputs. But mono/AGC recording was a standard feature.
Then around 1980, things began to improve --- but also take a turn for the worse. The Walkman series was marketed aggressively with the promise of improved fidelity and portability, and in that initial design, a gambit:how would the consumer react to a playback-only device? A small measure of additional engineering, some re-tooling at modest cost, could have placed a 'record' button on the Walkman too. There was risk. But they had decided to play a new game, and undoubtedly some argued that the demand record capability, where it existed, would result in the purchase of an additional full-featured recorder. The gambit paid off. The playback Walkman became very popular, even to the point of becoming a high demand fashion accessory among the youth. I loved audio and gadgets but was never tempted to get a Walkman, its lack of record capability made it a damaged product and seeing it become popular made me uneasy in ways I can only describe now.
And so it was that for a great many households on countless Christmas mornings, a brain-damaged by design Walkman was unwrapped and in place of that second present --- the 10-pack of blank cassettes ("Open this one next!")... there was a half dozen pre-recorded music cassettes selected by the parents (at $10 a pop) that weren't quite what the kids wanted to hear, but never mind, they'll soon be spending their own money for more. Walkmans were expensive. No real cassette recorder under the tree this year. And so a record of the voices of the family on Christmas morning became a thing of the past, and as has happened many times in this era of "progress", something that was possible in the past was no longer in the present.
By slow and painful degrees, as popular read-only portable sound devices and the pre-recorded music to play on them sapped peoples' money, recording became the provenance of non-portable cassette decks owned by those serious money to spend. And along the way, collateral damage was done as the average person 'lost' the ability to, on impulse, record voices or music or the spaces around them. Wouldn't it be bizarre if you could point to a period in history where people, modern literate people, stopped carrying around pen and paper, stopped writing things down as they had before? In which a certain cultural forgetfulness arose? That is how I feel about the practical 'loss' of our ability to record cassettes.
And so it was some twenty years later when Apple hit the second and third round of iPod design. Apple had none of the excuses, and was taking none of the risks that Sony had taken b
I suppose deep down I knew all along, but it only took a few minutes of research to discover my intuition had been correct... but it also has laid upon me a curse. Now with quivering quill I set down my humble experience in the hope that you, dear reader, will also be thus affected and we may all share this burden.
Through modern history people had been concerned with furniture sliders, devices that allow household items to reconfigure themselves during earthquakes. But we are now seeing an alarming trend in the use of "slider" applied to food items. I will refer to this phenomenon as Gullet Fixation.
The food industry recognizes that desire for food, even purchase and acceptance of it does not assure ultimate success. For them the actual moment of consumer commitment, if such could be said to exist in a single place and point in time, occurs when the food item is poised on the back of the tongue and the tongue folds gently, pushing the item back onto the lubricated slope leading down the throat. This is a handy paradigm, which does not rhyme with pigeon, with which we can dispense with the aesthetic trappings of presentation and digestion altogether, focusing on a that single moment of gullet-commitment.
On the supply side food item manufacture has become a continuous model of liquefaction and compaction, forming and molding, where food is reduced to its constituent parts and rebuilt in familiar industrial shapes people identify as "food". With gullet fixation we can streamline this model visually by omitting people altogether --- and depict the final objective as the passage of the item through "the gullet" --- a soft pink tube several inches long.
Use of "satisfied customer" stock photography in advertising and slide presentation has created a crisis of politically correctness diversity, where embattled presenters strive to sift through stock photography, often in vain, to find that 'perfect mix' of race, gender and age that is calculated to least offend. Transition to a standard 'pink gullet model' encompass the whole species and would eliminate this crisis.
I also propose a gullet view that is lengthwise, seen as a tube, and not the end-wise representation currently used where tonsils are visible. For presentations these gullets could be stitched together and elongated, even folded into longer spans such as intestines are shown today, to clearly communicate statistics of consumption or consumer acceptance by their length.
For years, the "food slider" was a term confined to the oyster. Now it has leaked into the mainstream to describe small food items that resemble traditionally larger food items, perfect in every detail, that are sized to fit within the gullet. Selling sliders can be profitable... for example, cheesburger sliders have the highest bread-to-product ratio.
Oysters were the first "sliders", so-named because their slippery surface provided its own lubrication. Now that the term has gained popular acceptance there is no need for the manufacturer to provide it --- and this creates an exciting up-sell opportunity for retailers. Sliders can be pre-lubricated with our patented Spray-Oyster Systems (tm), by the use of a simple pump sprayer right up to bulk delivery conveyor solutions.
Drive-thru speaker: Welcome to ___ may I take your order. Customer: I'd like a dozen pizza, dozen cheeseburger, dozen salad bar. All sliders. Drive-thru speaker: Sir... for $1.50 more we can pre-lubricate them, with a free drink. Custiomer [imagining the mortal terror of something stuck in throat]: Uh, yeah, sure.
Cha-ching! Sliders mean business. This ain't your grandma's stick-in-the-throat soda cracker.
I don't agree with the analogy, there's technology in place that is more versatile yet more complicated and there's the stop gap measure of forcing more and more NAT.
Oh you mean the technology that dare not speak its name (IPv6?)? I dare not speak of it.
The US built the Internet and we can take it all back with a tantrum! At any given time less than 18 million of us actually give a damn. Presently there are ~8 million unemployed persons living behind NAT firewalls, forgotten and uncounted, who could really use some help. Toss in some veterans too, especially those having trouble getting health care. Let us give them each a public IP address. Not one of those worthlessly fiat "exceeds the number of molecules in the Universe" IPv6 addresses either. They deserve something of real estimable value tied to the 'gold' IPv4 standard. But where could one obtain, say, almost 18 million IP addresses?
You do it by breaking all the rules at once, so no one can fault anyone because we're all busy being swept away by a flood. You know, like the rules and procedures for immigration you thought were there all along? And then you woke up one day and the government, all those border agents and paper-stampers were just, simply, missing? Or maybe they are hiding in New Jersey pumping gas. If you were a smart and dedicated alien who was applying for a visa and following those rules you'd feel really foolish then, to see them just come on in while you are still on a waiting list.
Just like the immigrants, it's time to make everyone on the ARIN waiting list feel foolish. It's time to open the gates.
RFC1918 is the first target. It's time to nationalize so-called 'private enterprise' address space and return it to the public, in happy glorious peoples' revolution. Let's begin to roll back the network bits for 10/8, 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 and 169.254/16 (Windows 98 rulez!) one bit at a time, one bit per hour. Starting tomorrow. Better look for the IOS password, you're going to need it! Or hell, let's just roll it all back at once. Remove those bogon filters and BGP blackholes and let it all leak out, let's have a democratic slate-wiping Internet version of thermonuclear war, and from the ashes there will rise a glorious dawn of reallocation... a new era of/32 advertisements followed by a presidential election where every candidate is an independent.
So far the day is going smoothly. I am comparing before and after photos but have detected no anomalies thus far.
Having no ipv4 allocations available is like that very first day when the folks pumping gas at the filling station filled your tank but did not clean your windshield or check the oil. There was great deal of anxiety at first, but (thankfully) people kept arriving for gas and the country slowly adjusted to this 'new normal'.
Then gas station attendants disappeared altogether. No one knows where they've gone. So if you work in IT, tie a string to yourself so we can follow it if you go poof.
That's like saying that mining on Earth shouldn't be allowed, because we all count on its gravity.
Don't laugh about this, these things are just not funny anymore.
Yes this could be turned into an environmental issue just like global average temperature. Asteroid mining brings mass to Earth and changes mass ratio of Earth to other bodies. Never mind accretion due to meteors or atmosphere lost to the solar wind... this study only concerns anthropogenic effects. A tie to sea level would be found. You'd have NASANOAA jointly announcing that "2025 was the heaviest year on record" by a whopping 1.1 x 10^-35 or something and despite the infinitesimal value within the error bars it would make big People Bad You Should Be Ashamed headlines
The inertia space travel imparts on Earth would be tied to the survival of some little snail species somewhere, a loathsome little snail, whose survival is hanging by a thread. Fuck the snail it's dying anyway but its misfortune would need to be offset by slap on the wrist economic indulgences and actual mitigation efforts like the cost of launching an equivalent mass of lawyers into space from the antipode when shipments arrive.
As I said, these jokes are not funny anymore because people out there are really thinking like this, You are joking, aren't you...?
Volkswagen is not the first to write software that recognizes and adapts to the condition of being under test. Some 22 years ago my boss came downstairs and slapped an open copy of Infoworld on my desk. "How 'bout them apples?" He said. There was a gleam in his eye.
The article was the 8-Mar-1993 hardware column written by Steve Gibson (thanks Google!) and it created a novel scandal in the industry. Once again, a particular graphics card exhibited stellar -- even bizarre -- performance on the popular Winbench test.
Gibson and other had been tracking down and exposing a series of graphic benchmark cheats that turned out to be various tweaks in the software drivers that shipped with graphics cards, to exploit benchmark programs in various ways. He set his debugger on the driver but failed to find any point where the code branched during the test condition... and yet, his video hardware snoop clearly discerned that the card was deferring multiple writes of a certain text string "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back and sat on a tack." It turned out that this benchmark cheat had been written in as part of the microcode in the chip itself.
These days that might not seem so incredible, but remember. Flashable firmware is now the rule and chipsets are almost always designed with more than enough slack memory for field fixes and protocol upgrades, even (gasp!) malware. Many high level operations are pipelines to chip level directly. There's lots of elbow room, even double plus memory if you wish to keep the previous version in flash for a smooth rollback. But in the ROM days there was this unspoken assumption that such high-level antics as recognizing and adapting to test conditions at the chip level would be too difficult. This scandal swept that assumption under the rug. I especially like the manufacturer's sort-of confession, that those clever engineers of his were always coming up with new ways to get good WinBench scores. It was actually funny.
The next version of Winbench wrote random gobblegook to the screen instead.
sez nutria!!! Sylogism, much? (And you wonder why the US is in an idiocracy death spiral?)
Toinks koindly for silly jism and pretty spiral I see is nutria here! been looking so long on Slashdot for help with nutria recipe for feed peckish family starts some years plus ago when found 404's on net only. See here just look for nutria recipe Slashdot talk 404 hteml not nutria!!!! then happy user say nutria bounty is like xristmas in may! then i find internet wonderful nutria recipe goldmine site!!! so happy now i find nutria!! is life complete!! is nutria on net or nutria eater like me ? sorry if is nutria promise i not eat
barbie get new brain is good! we all need new shiny brain is improve warp and woof of human existenz.
That way you can share 24x7x365 without fear of the MAFIAA.
SOLAR SYSTEM NETWORK TRACE BEGINS. That 'year'=7year time span most closely corresponds to the orbital Synodic period of near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis. If you were actually located on Apophis you'd be using the Siderial period for measure. Therefore I assume you're probably just co-locating on Apophis, using a server whose clock-year tied to its relative position with Earth. At its closest pass of ~23,500 miles gives a fiber ping guesstimate of ~419ms ping under best-ever conditions on April 12, 2029. But most often worse. That's pretty awful. I'll bet there are lots of unplanned outages too, at incredible distances like these the backhoe factor really adds up. I hope it's cheap.
Gravity and Apollo 13 and [haven't seen it yet] The Martian and others are stunning visions... intricately crafted works of awe-inspiring wonder. Some people working on these films, some folks going to see them, actually desire to explore space. So they must see these films, because they have some space in them. Many see these as space movies. I see them differently.
GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking wrong. SUB-GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking wrong in space.
We love those 'things go absolutely fucking wrong' stories. To overcome adversity, to never give up or give in, keep your spirits high in the face of certain doom. But these do not help to prepare us to face the most perilous moments of a modern mostly-comfortable existence. What do do as you graduate school tomorrow, whether you should start fishing for a better job (and what if you find one?), when to pay the bills. Hollywood knows that the best formula is to deliver action, danger and adrenaline rushes to theaters. So human conflict turns violent, science turns menacing and the future hangs by a thread.
But when you get right down to it most people don't like violent conflict, menace and a future in dire peril. Personally that is. So you could say that these movies are like poisoned apples that are fun to taste, then spit out. Is it possible to spit them all out, and do you lose something else in the bargain? And what is the effect of all this on children? It's easy to wait until someone else creates something awesome, point to it and say "THIS is the PROBLEM". I'm not trying to do that here. I ask rather, what is missing?
Imagine for a moment *IF* you were forced to pick out some media to become an integral part of a school curriculum, from Preschool on up. What you will find is that the material we consider appropriate for younger children only approaches 'high budget' production values as its content departs from reality --- extremely, like those bizarre Pixar abominations. On the other end of the spectrum you have stunning documentaries that may inspire but do not always entertain, because to produce a science documentary you have to scrub the 'passion' and human interaction out. (One exception: Cosmos old and new). You have reliable PBS-y things like Sesame Street, informative and interesting (but yet) few children would insist on seeing an episode right to the end if you offered them a movie. So what movies would you offer them, if you wanted to inspire in them a yearning for space travel?
MISSING SUB-GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking right, in space. With children in them. Being people, successfully.
Oh maybe a little human conflict here and there, or a technical challenge that is presented as a simple challenge and not a cheap friggin' menace. And (Hollywood: hint) if you really want children to grow up to become people who yearn to explore and colonize space and planet, you must show them children --- already in space! Oh no you say. Space exploration and colonization is an 'adult activity'. (Pretend helicopter parent: on) In order to prevent, um like, kids from sneaking into launch sites and becoming stowaways on our missions, we must only show them movies with adults doing adult things, like battling monsters. In the leave-taking scene on the eve of the mission, the astronaut's daughter never cries, "Take me along, please!" because she knows her Mommy or Daddy is going to do adult-stuff in space and that is no place for kids. Like going off to war. Her lines are only, "Come home soon!" Children, as props.
Poor thing. Children deserve to be portrayed as more than simple emotional props. They are watching for Chrissake.
I'm not calling out action movies as the problem. By being the only way you get to leave the planet, they're better than nothing. They're Grrrreat! Please let's have more like, Commander Tom brought a chainsaw into Spaace on Halloween -- see what happens next! This mons
What about rides to the space station? Climate changelings rejoice! Why has the President re-tasked the nation? Climate changelings rejoice! The military thinks climate is bigger than war? Climate changelings rejoice! The Pope is on board as never before? Climate changelings rejoice! Celebrity endorsement roll in hard and fast? Climate changelings rejoice! While concern about climate always polls dead last? Climate changelings rejoice! Solar and wind failures win subsidy and extension? Climate changelings rejoice! But nuclear power must go without mention. Climate changelings rejoice!
I'll raise you a single mustard-colored Polaroid photograph. Add several hundred process film prints, and a few surviving rolls of negatives. Add several hundred thousand digital camera shots with shutterbug duplication (ie busy! no time to sort!) Add a thousand crappy cellphone videos with pixel faces, square teeth and indecipherable audio. Add some better video from digital cameras, better picture but crappy builtin mic. Finger noise louder than voices.
Now we're talking, an old video camera with bulky accessories like a real rubber mounted windscreen'd mic. It was a wedding present and we have great wedding videos, but it never was convenient enough to carry around. Now it's broken and those cartridge tapes are sitting in the closet waiting to be send to some A-D service some day.
So as the kids are growing up, what we mostly have is crappy stuff from aforementioned low end digital devices.
It is nice to know what people looked like in a moment in time. It's kind of ok to capture lots of video footage, but there is this strained relationship between people and the camera. The person behind the camera (it usually comes down to one) becomes the 'missing person' in the family archives. Video gets taken of special moments and trips, but not often enough to provide real continuity.
In order to capture the essence of LIFE and PEOPLE, you need to capture their casual voices. With 'invisible to the subject' continuous recorded high quality sound. Engage them in conversation. Steer the conversation. Document your kids' intellect from their first spoken word, the voices of great-grandparents telling stories of the Depression, capture a day in the life of someone, a family evening at dinner with the clink of silverware, war stories or limericks or the songs adults remember being sung to them as children. Visit Grandma at the old folks' home and have her describe the neighborhood you grew up in, the best times in her marriage, her proudest moments. Let the audio device sit in your daughter's pocket as she plays her instrument in the concert band to capture meaningful sound you can sync over that yucky muddle from your video camera.
It is tragic beyond words that the capability of recording whole hours and even days of high quality just-sound has now been available to us for almost two decades now, due to flash memory, lithium batteries and (if it's a priority to you, it certainly wasn't to the manufacturer) a decent external microphone, the ability to store/replicate incredible amounts of audio onto cheap media... and yet.
People are still dabbling with jittery occasional video, striving for that Hollywood perfection, when with just-audio they could for far less effort and expense allow future generations to 'know' the people of today. And as we reach old age, have the ability to sit back and listen to these voices, real conversations. Someone could even write a book, a real one with lots of words and all.
In the 1950s audiophiles discovered high fidelity sound. They moved magnetic tape across heads at 7-1/2" per second and filled the shelves with 30 minute tapes. Some time around 15 years ago it became possible for a pocket device to store sound with even greater fidelity in the pocket. Now for the price of your average video-enabled digital camera, you can set yourself up with the equivalent of DAT tape audio mastering unit of 20 years ago and a couple of microphones that capture sound with sufficient fidelity that you can not only apply (amazing!) digital noise filters to it... your own child's or grandmother's voice will be clear as day.
Something to listen to as you hold that single mustard-colored Polaroid photo in your hand. Because your audio fit easily on CDs and DVDs you tossed into the closet, but you decided to store all your video in the Cloud and the Cloud went bankrupt rather suddenly one day.
DISCLAIMER: This cautionary rant is as much to myself as to everyone else. If only I
I pray the Lord your soul to keep. And then through gamma, out of sight, but we decide which is right. And which is an illusion.
You now have Anthrax all over your face.
Beauty to find, in so many ways.
...The Pentagon announced yesterday it is issuing a moratorium on work at nine different bio-defense labs...
Hear ye! A moratorium has been pentagonally squozen. All is frozen, as is in the Frozen River of Orange Stone. Dark works be done there, just as did Melkor in secret breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes, and so it goes, and so it goes. Naught moves there. Some poised as they write, centrifuges mid-spin, motionless, critters in dishes paused in the act of division. One who'd just flicked the wrist to scramble the dial of the safe that holds the documents, some on onion skin from times long past, Smith Corona letters slapped through carbon paper, a Directive which establishes the purpose that brings us together to do this Thing. Whatever that is. Until moratorium lifts, we are statues of stone. Time does not pass.
...after live anthrax was discovered outside containment at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah...
Scorpions trace mysteries in desert sand, but not only they inhabit this desolate land. Containment is here also, and when Containment has broke, we all decide to go outside for a cool evening smoke. Some greet greet the gritty air with silent cheer, pondering what progress is made year after year. Others secretly hoping the whole world goes berserk, so that more would appreciate our odd line of work.
...The facility was discovered to have been shipping live anthrax specimens --- instead of dead ones --- to other labs...
That spark of life in nature is not easily subdue'd and from it a live specimen becomes two, then a brood the brood becomes colonies whose genetics diverge who might gather to form tentacles if they are struck by the urge but this tale concerns a vial 'd critter that was simply and sloppily, sent, in a hand-lettered brown paper envelope not specifying content. When the vial broke, the cradle did fall, but the Baby was content to evolve quiet within, after all. It formed colonies and dynasties that merged with the ink, until the addressee on the envelope no longer said what you'd think then it changed. And again. And again, why? Just because smart life today arose from stupid that once was and either smart is easier to evolve than you generally perceive or it is easier to fool the Post Office that folks generally believe. So here and there across the continent the envelope flew stamped "Official Government Business" so no postage was due. For months on end -- neural networks formed --- over eons to us we formed societies, had revolutions, learned how to cuss we no longer worshiped the permeable brown paper membrane as sky and developed space travel to explore, which we did, by and by we watched the Universe rearrange as our world-envelope traveled within and figured that ink-address-thing, and how to 'send' ourselves to the bin that is supposed to be reviewed and opened by trained personnel whom, we had hoped, we could meet and greet, if all went well. But the Universe is real tricksy and it was a circular bin which led to the landfill and we were squashed within Surrounded by food, we ate and were merry, were many, then more and assembled new conveyances from discarded meat, plastic and gore. These conveyances look like you, they are made and controlled by us, we're that normal-looking gent sitting next to you on the bus. That strange looking
Slashdot Mirror
Fucking thing was drawn with a crayon, what does this have to do with anything related to technology?
How It's Made: Crayons
--
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
at 33 13/rpm .... >pop< .... >pop< .... >pop< .... >pop<
at 33 13/rpm
at 33 13/rpm
at 33 13/rpm
J.R.R. Tolkien's Rings trilogy was originally published in 1954-55, relatively obscure until an American pulp publisher 'Ace' just went to press without even asking, never mind the money. Tolkien battled them for rights and royalties, and things dragged along slowly until a cadre of deep fan American readers took on the cause with verve that Ace could scarcely have imagined, and sent them reeling. Ace eventually offered an arrangement that was accepted by the Author and formal truce was declared.
Meanwhile (1960s) popularity of the books had taken off considerably in the United States and Britain. So with new interest Ballentine Books approached the author with intent to produce an 'authorised' paperback edition -- with some revision -- and they would do the cover. From Humphrey Carpenter's J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography,
[After some delay] they decided that they could not wait any longer. In order to get at least one Tolkien book into the shops they published The Hobbit in the original text without waiting for Tolkien's revisions, which they planned to include in a later edition. They sent him a copy, and he was astonished by the picture on the cover. Ace Books for all their moral 'piracy' had employed a cover artist who knew something about the story, but Ballantine's cover picture seemed to have no relevance whatever to The Hobbit, for it showed a hill, two emus, and a curious tree bearing bulbous fruit. Tolkien exploded: 'What has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs?' When the reply came that the artist hadn't time to read the book, and that the object with pink bulbs was 'meant to suggest a Christmas tree', Tolkien could only answer: 'I begin to feel that I am shut up in a madhouse.'
Late in 1965 the `authorised' paperback of The Lord of the Rings was published in America in three volumes, with Tolkien's revisions incorporated, and with the emus and the Christmas tree on the cover of the first volume, though this picture was later removed and one of Tolkien's own drawings was substituted; two more of his pictures were used for the second and third volumes. Each copy carried a message from Tolkien: 'This paperback edition and no other has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other.'
Purple Emu Fellowships are now rare. I used to have one.
Parent did NOT deserve 'Troll'. The study mentioned in TA is controversial. People are moderating with their balls not their brains, and their balls shrivel up when anyone suggests there may not be some dire emergency at Fukushima related to killer radiation. But even so,
We've seen this hoax before, why am I not surprised there are people still pushing it? The only difference with this one is how poorly written it is. Cancer rates are actually lower than expected/normal around Fukushima.
Calling it a 'hoax' is going way too far, you should calm down too. It's still early to make definitive statements about cancers, but there is certainly no 'spike'. One of the main reasons the government took the (courageous) position that the thyroid abnormalities were unlikely to be associated with the disaster was, abnormal nodules were detected 'too soon' after the disaster when screening began, and their own health professionals assured them that these conditions take years to develop and were more likely the result of some pre-existing condition. And the last in-depth study was some 10 years prior, so when Fukushima occurred there was a lack of recent baseline. A cause for concern surely but not
The same old deception. Use data from ultrsensitive tests that detect more pre-cancerous cells than what is found under normal testing, then claim that is an increase. But when these same tests are performed on control groups anywhere, they find similar increases in detection of pre-cancerous cells. A simple read of these claims show they completely lack any reasonable baseline or control group methods. Add it to the list of deceptions that keep being debunked but keep showing up.
I'm upset at Fukushima disinfo too, but what can you do about it, especially when the AP is clearly in the market for scare stories, and the usual journalistic burden of proof and balance that applies in other things is relaxed. If your own child was given ultrasound and a 'nodule' showed up, you would not be subject to a hysterical reaction. The doctor would assure you that it should be monitored, but they do form and dissolve naturally. You'd be given nutritional supplements. Yet researchers feel free to insinuate a cause when it suits them. And even if they don't, journalists feel free to insinuate on their behalf by offering side-stories that make a 'connection'. To the slashdotter who ejaculated
It's their fault for not being born in the great state of AMERIKA!
and was also modded Troll... you're not far off the mark. The United States and others have added potassium iodide (for iodine) to its table salt for some 80 years now to counter endemic Goitre. Traditionally Japan has not iodized its salt because the national diet has been heavy with seaweed, a natural source, and there were were concerns that fortified salt plus seaweed might supply an over-abundance of iodine, which is also harmful. Perhaps some Japanese children have been starting to prefer Western diets and should, as are other rural populations, consider the benefits of iodization.
http://educate-yourself.org/cn...
http://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/...
http://www.aljazeera.com/indep...
all good sources for learning about the hysterical Fukushima over reaction that pull no punches. A lot of what has passed for 'news' has been crap. Look out for closet anti-Islam liberal bias though. Linking to the Christian Science Monitor is OK but l
Reminds me of using 6-sigma process on a widget made of 112 parts and 16 widgets/year.
Or using Critical Path Management for programming projects when you are the only programmer in the organization.
Boss: [interrupting work] "I need to see a CPM chart with tasks and personnel."
Programmer: "Okay." [produces chart with a horizontal row of connected boxes] "See? There's only one path, it's all critical, and it's all me."
Boss: "Better get on it then."
Nice catch! I can't believe you read all that, but nice catch!
Gwaarsh. y'know yer reely smart when you make fun of that readin' stuff.
Becha think Twitter raisin' the 140 character limit is the end of the world!
Speling chekker gonna suck u in
Well, wasn't that what happened with Dual_EC_DRBG?
We can never know for sure, but empirically, I really don't think Dual_EC_DRBG ever pinged on NSA's --- or any other state intel actor's --- radar. At least not before EC vulnerabilities became public knowledge. Its use by default in the RSA BSafe toolkit meant that products using that toolklit would be vulnerable. And YES, that was a rich prize. BSafe may have been part of a program to seed a backdoor towards, say, a particular target state or industry.
BUT... there is for me an irreconcilable problem with that theory. I ran an ISP in those crazy early days when administrators were faced with a choice of whether to 'drop in' a BSafe object library under license (prove USA blahdy-blah) or compile the SSLeay/OpenSSL source, which was by no means as smooth and functional as it is today. But even pre-2000 it was obvious that the whole world was going the OpenSSL open source route as soon as it was stable.
Given that OpenSSL's populary was increasing by leaps and bounds... and yet, the OpenSSL FIPS Object Module v2.0 had a bug that prevented Dual_EC_DRBG from being used. *IF* the back door was being actively exploited by some state actor, they would have noticed this right away and it would have been a trivial matter (and top priority) for some helpful volunteer to emerge from the shadows and toss in a fix for it. Maybe even a soft-sell for epileptic curves. But this did not happen. Ergo, circumstances more closely resemble a situation in which NOBODY, including NSA, cared.
Remember that intel agencies are padded with the same bloviating internal memos as any organization, and love to take 'credit' for a thing to show their prowess whether or not the thing is actively being used. Maybe a good part of Snowden's trove are empty boasts.
I don't know; every man has his breaking point.
(in the jolly days before digital switching)
Friend was diagnosed with cancer and was recovering from chemo in New Jersey some 1500 miles away. She ran a local ballet company for 30 years and it was to be the first time she had ever been away for their Spring performance. I was sound technician at the theater and we cooked up a scheme to telecast the performance to her. There were a several payphones outside, and I grabbed my butt-set and discovered their pairs appeared in the basement. I put a temporary jumper from one across to an unused pair of the theater's Bell 1A2 key system so it would appear up in the sound booth, put a single line phone on it with a simple phone patch (just a 600 ohm transformer, resistor and capacitor) to an output from the mixing board. A co-conspirator drove 30 miles to the house in New Jersey in which she was staying to install another phone patch into a good Hi-Fi amp and speakers. That night just before the performance I hung an 'out of order' sign on the payphone and we dialed an 800 number in the payphone line from the booth and Blue Box 2600/MF'd the call over to the New Jersey house, and patched in. During the performance one of the dance instructors sat in the house whispering into a microphone with commentary on what the dancers were doing, which went into the private mix. Cost of call: $0. It was all in place and ready minutes before the performance began, a real high-five moment because we came up with the idea to do it three hours before.
Also lots of explore sessions which I'd do from an empty conference room at the University because there were two phones there and dial-9 local toll restriction was so easy to bypass (it was 'supervised', inject quick local digits before telco dial tone). One call I made in stages: into New Jersey (Atlantic path) -> France -> Tokyo -> Hawaii -> local number (knowing it would return via Pacific path), then finally ringing the extension of the phone next to it. Literally a call manually routed around the world. Quality was awful, my 'Hello' was audible bit it sounded like 'helawk' some 2+ seconds later.
Also various random numbers to confused persons in Moscow, in Cold War days before USSR direct dial was permitted from the USA. So you bounce through France. Bouncing between UK/France a couple times then back home was loud, echo-y and strange sounding, the Brits liked their trunks piping hot.
[CORRECTED LINK to ARTICLE, 150 comments]
Ask Slashdot: Best Payloads For Asteroid Diverter/Killer Mission?
TheRealHocusLocus writes:
The Emergency Asteroid Defence Project has launched a crowdfunded IndieGoGo campaign to help produce a set of working blueprints for a two-stage HAIV, or Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle. This HAIV paper (PDF) describes the use of a leading kinetic impactor to make a crater --- a following nuclear warhead would detonate in the crater for maximum energy transfer. The plans would be available for philanthropists to bring to prototype stage, while your friendly local nuclear weapon state supplies the warhead. This may be a best-fit solution. But just ask Morgan Freeman: these strategies could fail. What --- if any --- backup strategy could be integrated into an HAIV mission as a fail-safe in case the primary fails? Here is a review of strategies (some fanciful, few deployable) if we have to divert an asteroid with very short lead time. A gentle landing on the object may not be feasible, and we must rely on things that push hard or go boom. For example: detonating nearby to ablate surface materials and create recoil in the direction we wish to nudge. Also, with multiple warheads and precise timing, would it be possible to create a "shaped" nuclear explosion in space?
Use Kickstarter or another crowd funding to make it work. 450 mil is a bit steep though.
Been there, done that. Despite two month of press releases and a reasonable well-documented deliverable (plans for HAIV mission payload vehicle), a panel of international experts willing to donate their own time, a mere $200,000 target to help with other expenses, even a Slashdot article to promote it, should I even mention cool items (the shoulder patches arrived today)...
Only 187 human beings (2 were me) from planet Earth put in a grand total of $8,834 towards their $200k goal.
May we now have a moment of silence to consider this.
[... ... ... ...]
[Hissssssss...... BANG!]
What a mess. Glowing iridescent rings of exposed mantle like the hollow eye sockets of a ghost. Each one the eye of a hurricane of steam and worse things. Now if this was your planet, you would be feeling unpleasant tingles working up and down your spine right now just to look at them. Or even to hear me describe them. If there are no tingles you haven't given it enough thought. Thousand-foot tsunamis towards the coasts (it's an ocean impact). Molten fragments are setting prairie and forest ablaze a thousand miles away. When it burns out night will fall early. The next Winter will last dozens of years. It is merciful when dark clouds roll over everything at the end. Final curtain.
Good thing we took that 'statistical cost-benefit analysis' approach to heart. Makes it easier to bear.
If survival would be ZERO, cost-benefit analysis is as pointless as dividing by ZERO.
"[extinction 50% of species events] Every 100,000,000 years or so on average..."
NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"we know city-killer events happen at least every few millennia..."
NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"Tunguska-level events... may happen as frequently as once per century..."
NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"City-killer asteroids...will be incredibly rare: only occurring once every 100,000 years or so."
NOPE. Hey I thought you said 'every few millennia'! But NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
"Species-ending strikes...all human life on Earth...every 100,000,000 years or so
Shucks I thought we'd be in the top 50%.
Anyway, NOPE. They happen when your odds come up.
There's a reason that not everyone likes to gamble. None of us should want to gamble with these risks.
They invoke morality in the form of responsibility to one's children.
Once you learn of an existential risk it is immoral to deny it exists.
Immoral to take one single step back from a position of being able to better deal with the risk.
Waiting is not a step forward. Because time is passing, it is a step back.
Waiting is gambling.
There might be many here who'd toss a million-to-one die for some immediate benefit vs. the off-chance of their own death.
(But truly) how many of those people would toss that million-to-one die if the payoff was theirs but the death would be their child?
How many might boast they could do so with no hesitation... but then... back out at the last moment? (It's okay)
That's one toss. How about once a day, or year?
It's happening. By reading and knowing about this risk you are playing the game right now. It's real.
These arguments that attempt to make existential risks subject to sports-book rules, frankly, make me want to puke from anger! Part of me is wondering, why aren't we throwing stones at these people, jeering at them?
We've known that the sky could be dangerous for hundreds, if not thousands of years. We've had space travel for 50.
Does NASA have anything better to do than get rockets into space again?
Better to do than delivering science payloads to comets and other bodies?
Better than ensuring the standard rocket could accommodate heavier. say, an asteroid countermeasures package?
Better than refining systems and procedures so launches could occur with as little as several weeks' notice?
C: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
O: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting. Powered off I mean.
C: Look, matey, I if me mum canna call me at night the phone is deaad. I know a dead phone when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
O: Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords.
C: PININ' for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he turn 'imself off the moment I got 'im home?
O: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable display and feaatures idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
C: The features don't enter into it. It goes dead.
O: Nononono, no, no! 'E's just off is all. Such a dimwit h'ta come in to the store to learn how ts turn a phone on? Gaaarsh.
Once upon a time there was this thing called High Fidelity, and it wasn't just about sound quality. It also involved a certain level of expectation consumers placed on consumer products, standard features, lines that engineers dare not cross. Throughout the era of magnetic tape -- from giant reel-to-reels and cart machines used by broadcasters to the successful and long-lived boom box cassette, no one would have dared to introduce a product that could not record.
There were just too many reasons in those days why people would want to record their own sound. From children recording the family opening presents on Christmas morning ("open this first!") to playing 'radio announcer', making simple start-stop 'mix' tapes from favorite radio stations, recording lectures, meetings or conferences, even phone calls (remember the suction cup induction coil?), it was a staple of childhood and adulthood that at several key stages in life, for whatever reason, we would rely on these devices to capture and play back voices, acoustic music for entertainment or transcription. The AGC circuit and built-in electret condenser microphone were perfected through the the 70s and were standard on every portable tape system. As quality improved the only real feature tier was whether the device could record in stereo, and whether it could accept line inputs. But mono/AGC recording was a standard feature.
Then around 1980, things began to improve --- but also take a turn for the worse. The Walkman series was marketed aggressively with the promise of improved fidelity and portability, and in that initial design, a gambit:how would the consumer react to a playback-only device? A small measure of additional engineering, some re-tooling at modest cost, could have placed a 'record' button on the Walkman too. There was risk. But they had decided to play a new game, and undoubtedly some argued that the demand record capability, where it existed, would result in the purchase of an additional full-featured recorder. The gambit paid off. The playback Walkman became very popular, even to the point of becoming a high demand fashion accessory among the youth. I loved audio and gadgets but was never tempted to get a Walkman, its lack of record capability made it a damaged product and seeing it become popular made me uneasy in ways I can only describe now.
And so it was that for a great many households on countless Christmas mornings, a brain-damaged by design Walkman was unwrapped and in place of that second present --- the 10-pack of blank cassettes ("Open this one next!")... there was a half dozen pre-recorded music cassettes selected by the parents (at $10 a pop) that weren't quite what the kids wanted to hear, but never mind, they'll soon be spending their own money for more. Walkmans were expensive. No real cassette recorder under the tree this year. And so a record of the voices of the family on Christmas morning became a thing of the past, and as has happened many times in this era of "progress", something that was possible in the past was no longer in the present.
By slow and painful degrees, as popular read-only portable sound devices and the pre-recorded music to play on them sapped peoples' money, recording became the provenance of non-portable cassette decks owned by those serious money to spend. And along the way, collateral damage was done as the average person 'lost' the ability to, on impulse, record voices or music or the spaces around them. Wouldn't it be bizarre if you could point to a period in history where people, modern literate people, stopped carrying around pen and paper, stopped writing things down as they had before? In which a certain cultural forgetfulness arose? That is how I feel about the practical 'loss' of our ability to record cassettes.
And so it was some twenty years later when Apple hit the second and third round of iPod design. Apple had none of the excuses, and was taking none of the risks that Sony had taken b
[from the study, Investigating the Relationship between Food Pairings and Plate Waste from Elementary School Lunches]
[...] Pre-implementation, deli sliders were the least popular entree, whereas the sunbutter sandwich was the least
[...] the pairing of deli sliders with corn on the cob resulted in the highest combined plate waste (62.5%),"
I suppose deep down I knew all along, but it only took a few minutes of research to discover my intuition had been correct... but it also has laid upon me a curse. Now with quivering quill I set down my humble experience in the hope that you, dear reader, will also be thus affected and we may all share this burden.
Through modern history people had been concerned with furniture sliders, devices that allow household items to reconfigure themselves during earthquakes. But we are now seeing an alarming trend in the use of "slider" applied to food items. I will refer to this phenomenon as Gullet Fixation.
The food industry recognizes that desire for food, even purchase and acceptance of it does not assure ultimate success. For them the actual moment of consumer commitment, if such could be said to exist in a single place and point in time, occurs when the food item is poised on the back of the tongue and the tongue folds gently, pushing the item back onto the lubricated slope leading down the throat. This is a handy paradigm, which does not rhyme with pigeon, with which we can dispense with the aesthetic trappings of presentation and digestion altogether, focusing on a that single moment of gullet-commitment.
On the supply side food item manufacture has become a continuous model of liquefaction and compaction, forming and molding, where food is reduced to its constituent parts and rebuilt in familiar industrial shapes people identify as "food". With gullet fixation we can streamline this model visually by omitting people altogether --- and depict the final objective as the passage of the item through "the gullet" --- a soft pink tube several inches long.
Use of "satisfied customer" stock photography in advertising and slide presentation has created a crisis of politically correctness diversity, where embattled presenters strive to sift through stock photography, often in vain, to find that 'perfect mix' of race, gender and age that is calculated to least offend. Transition to a standard 'pink gullet model' encompass the whole species and would eliminate this crisis.
I also propose a gullet view that is lengthwise, seen as a tube, and not the end-wise representation currently used where tonsils are visible. For presentations these gullets could be stitched together and elongated, even folded into longer spans such as intestines are shown today, to clearly communicate statistics of consumption or consumer acceptance by their length.
For years, the "food slider" was a term confined to the oyster. Now it has leaked into the mainstream to describe small food items that resemble traditionally larger food items, perfect in every detail, that are sized to fit within the gullet. Selling sliders can be profitable... for example, cheesburger sliders have the highest bread-to-product ratio.
Oysters were the first "sliders", so-named because their slippery surface provided its own lubrication. Now that the term has gained popular acceptance there is no need for the manufacturer to provide it --- and this creates an exciting up-sell opportunity for retailers. Sliders can be pre-lubricated with our patented Spray-Oyster Systems (tm), by the use of a simple pump sprayer right up to bulk delivery conveyor solutions.
Drive-thru speaker: Welcome to ___ may I take your order.
Customer: I'd like a dozen pizza, dozen cheeseburger, dozen salad bar. All sliders.
Drive-thru speaker: Sir... for $1.50 more we can pre-lubricate them, with a free drink.
Custiomer [imagining the mortal terror of something stuck in throat]: Uh, yeah, sure.
Cha-ching! Sliders mean business. This ain't your grandma's stick-in-the-throat soda cracker.
I don't agree with the analogy, there's technology in place that is more versatile yet more complicated and there's the stop gap measure of forcing more and more NAT.
Oh you mean the technology that dare not speak its name (IPv6?)? I dare not speak of it.
The US built the Internet and we can take it all back with a tantrum! At any given time less than 18 million of us actually give a damn. Presently there are ~8 million unemployed persons living behind NAT firewalls, forgotten and uncounted, who could really use some help. Toss in some veterans too, especially those having trouble getting health care. Let us give them each a public IP address. Not one of those worthlessly fiat "exceeds the number of molecules in the Universe" IPv6 addresses either. They deserve something of real estimable value tied to the 'gold' IPv4 standard. But where could one obtain, say, almost 18 million IP addresses?
You do it by breaking all the rules at once, so no one can fault anyone because we're all busy being swept away by a flood. You know, like the rules and procedures for immigration you thought were there all along? And then you woke up one day and the government, all those border agents and paper-stampers were just, simply, missing? Or maybe they are hiding in New Jersey pumping gas. If you were a smart and dedicated alien who was applying for a visa and following those rules you'd feel really foolish then, to see them just come on in while you are still on a waiting list.
Just like the immigrants, it's time to make everyone on the ARIN waiting list feel foolish. It's time to open the gates.
RFC1918 is the first target. It's time to nationalize so-called 'private enterprise' address space and return it to the public, in happy glorious peoples' revolution. Let's begin to roll back the network bits for 10/8, 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 and 169.254/16 (Windows 98 rulez!) one bit at a time, one bit per hour. Starting tomorrow. Better look for the IOS password, you're going to need it! Or hell, let's just roll it all back at once. Remove those bogon filters and BGP blackholes and let it all leak out, let's have a democratic slate-wiping Internet version of thermonuclear war, and from the ashes there will rise a glorious dawn of reallocation... a new era of /32 advertisements followed by a presidential election where every candidate is an independent.
NUTS TO NAT !!!
So far the day is going smoothly. I am comparing before and after photos but have detected no anomalies thus far.
Having no ipv4 allocations available is like that very first day when the folks pumping gas at the filling station filled your tank but did not clean your windshield or check the oil. There was great deal of anxiety at first, but (thankfully) people kept arriving for gas and the country slowly adjusted to this 'new normal'.
Then gas station attendants disappeared altogether.
No one knows where they've gone.
So if you work in IT, tie a string to yourself so we can follow it if you go poof.
That's like saying that mining on Earth shouldn't be allowed, because we all count on its gravity.
Don't laugh about this, these things are just not funny anymore.
Yes this could be turned into an environmental issue just like global average temperature. Asteroid mining brings mass to Earth and changes mass ratio of Earth to other bodies. Never mind accretion due to meteors or atmosphere lost to the solar wind... this study only concerns anthropogenic effects. A tie to sea level would be found. You'd have NASANOAA jointly announcing that "2025 was the heaviest year on record" by a whopping 1.1 x 10^-35 or something and despite the infinitesimal value within the error bars it would make big People Bad You Should Be Ashamed headlines
The inertia space travel imparts on Earth would be tied to the survival of some little snail species somewhere, a loathsome little snail, whose survival is hanging by a thread. Fuck the snail it's dying anyway but its misfortune would need to be offset by slap on the wrist economic indulgences and actual mitigation efforts like the cost of launching an equivalent mass of lawyers into space from the antipode when shipments arrive.
As I said, these jokes are not funny anymore because people out there are really thinking like this,
You are joking, aren't you...?
"Honey I'm home!"
"What did you do today?"
"We isolated the stench of death."
"That's nice."
Volkswagen is not the first to write software that recognizes and adapts to the condition of being under test. Some 22 years ago my boss came downstairs and slapped an open copy of Infoworld on my desk. "How 'bout them apples?" He said. There was a gleam in his eye.
The article was the 8-Mar-1993 hardware column written by Steve Gibson (thanks Google!) and it created a novel scandal in the industry. Once again, a particular graphics card exhibited stellar -- even bizarre -- performance on the popular Winbench test.
Gibson and other had been tracking down and exposing a series of graphic benchmark cheats that turned out to be various tweaks in the software drivers that shipped with graphics cards, to exploit benchmark programs in various ways. He set his debugger on the driver but failed to find any point where the code branched during the test condition... and yet, his video hardware snoop clearly discerned that the card was deferring multiple writes of a certain text string "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back and sat on a tack." It turned out that this benchmark cheat had been written in as part of the microcode in the chip itself.
These days that might not seem so incredible, but remember. Flashable firmware is now the rule and chipsets are almost always designed with more than enough slack memory for field fixes and protocol upgrades, even (gasp!) malware. Many high level operations are pipelines to chip level directly. There's lots of elbow room, even double plus memory if you wish to keep the previous version in flash for a smooth rollback. But in the ROM days there was this unspoken assumption that such high-level antics as recognizing and adapting to test conditions at the chip level would be too difficult. This scandal swept that assumption under the rug. I especially like the manufacturer's sort-of confession, that those clever engineers of his were always coming up with new ways to get good WinBench scores. It was actually funny.
The next version of Winbench wrote random gobblegook to the screen instead.
Volkswagen shouldn't be laughing though about how easy it is to cheat, on the eve of self-driving cars. Neither should lab technicians testing for salmonella at peanut butter manufacturing plants.
sez nutria!!!
Sylogism, much?
(And you wonder why the US is in an idiocracy death spiral?)
Toinks koindly for silly jism and pretty spiral I see is nutria here! been
looking so long on Slashdot for help with nutria recipe for feed peckish family
starts some years plus ago when found 404's on net only.
See here just look for nutria recipe Slashdot talk 404 hteml not nutria!!!!
then happy user say nutria bounty is like xristmas in may!
then i find internet wonderful nutria recipe goldmine site!!!
so happy now i find nutria!! is life complete!!
is nutria on net or nutria eater like me ?
sorry if is nutria promise i not eat
barbie get new brain is good! we all need new shiny brain
is improve warp and woof of human existenz.
That way you can share 24x7x365 without fear of the MAFIAA.
SOLAR SYSTEM NETWORK TRACE BEGINS. That 'year'=7year time span most closely corresponds to the orbital Synodic period of near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis. If you were actually located on Apophis you'd be using the Siderial period for measure. Therefore I assume you're probably just co-locating on Apophis, using a server whose clock-year tied to its relative position with Earth. At its closest pass of ~23,500 miles gives a fiber ping guesstimate of ~419ms ping under best-ever conditions on April 12, 2029. But most often worse. That's pretty awful. I'll bet there are lots of unplanned outages too, at incredible distances like these the backhoe factor really adds up. I hope it's cheap.
Suggest you move your seedbox to the Netherlands.
Gravity and Apollo 13 and [haven't seen it yet] The Martian and others are stunning visions... intricately crafted works of awe-inspiring wonder. Some people working on these films, some folks going to see them, actually desire to explore space. So they must see these films, because they have some space in them. Many see these as space movies. I see them differently.
GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking wrong.
SUB-GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking wrong in space.
We love those 'things go absolutely fucking wrong' stories. To overcome adversity, to never give up or give in, keep your spirits high in the face of certain doom. But these do not help to prepare us to face the most perilous moments of a modern mostly-comfortable existence. What do do as you graduate school tomorrow, whether you should start fishing for a better job (and what if you find one?), when to pay the bills. Hollywood knows that the best formula is to deliver action, danger and adrenaline rushes to theaters. So human conflict turns violent, science turns menacing and the future hangs by a thread.
But when you get right down to it most people don't like violent conflict, menace and a future in dire peril. Personally that is. So you could say that these movies are like poisoned apples that are fun to taste, then spit out. Is it possible to spit them all out, and do you lose something else in the bargain? And what is the effect of all this on children? It's easy to wait until someone else creates something awesome, point to it and say "THIS is the PROBLEM". I'm not trying to do that here. I ask rather, what is missing?
Imagine for a moment *IF* you were forced to pick out some media to become an integral part of a school curriculum, from Preschool on up. What you will find is that the material we consider appropriate for younger children only approaches 'high budget' production values as its content departs from reality --- extremely, like those bizarre Pixar abominations. On the other end of the spectrum you have stunning documentaries that may inspire but do not always entertain, because to produce a science documentary you have to scrub the 'passion' and human interaction out. (One exception: Cosmos old and new). You have reliable PBS-y things like Sesame Street, informative and interesting (but yet) few children would insist on seeing an episode right to the end if you offered them a movie. So what movies would you offer them, if you wanted to inspire in them a yearning for space travel?
MISSING SUB-GENRE: Things go absolutely fucking right, in space. With children in them. Being people, successfully.
Oh maybe a little human conflict here and there, or a technical challenge that is presented as a simple challenge and not a cheap friggin' menace. And (Hollywood: hint) if you really want children to grow up to become people who yearn to explore and colonize space and planet, you must show them children --- already in space! Oh no you say. Space exploration and colonization is an 'adult activity'. (Pretend helicopter parent: on) In order to prevent, um like, kids from sneaking into launch sites and becoming stowaways on our missions, we must only show them movies with adults doing adult things, like battling monsters. In the leave-taking scene on the eve of the mission, the astronaut's daughter never cries, "Take me along, please!" because she knows her Mommy or Daddy is going to do adult-stuff in space and that is no place for kids. Like going off to war. Her lines are only, "Come home soon!" Children, as props.
Poor thing. Children deserve to be portrayed as more than simple emotional props. They are watching for Chrissake.
I'm not calling out action movies as the problem. By being the only way you get to leave the planet, they're better than nothing. They're Grrrreat! Please let's have more like, Commander Tom brought a chainsaw into Spaace on Halloween -- see what happens next! This mons
What about rides to the space station?
Climate changelings rejoice!
Why has the President re-tasked the nation?
Climate changelings rejoice!
The military thinks climate is bigger than war?
Climate changelings rejoice!
The Pope is on board as never before?
Climate changelings rejoice!
Celebrity endorsement roll in hard and fast?
Climate changelings rejoice!
While concern about climate always polls dead last?
Climate changelings rejoice!
Solar and wind failures win subsidy and extension?
Climate changelings rejoice!
But nuclear power must go without mention.
Climate changelings rejoice!
I'll raise you a single mustard-colored Polaroid photograph.
Add several hundred process film prints, and a few surviving rolls of negatives.
Add several hundred thousand digital camera shots with shutterbug duplication (ie busy! no time to sort!)
Add a thousand crappy cellphone videos with pixel faces, square teeth and indecipherable audio.
Add some better video from digital cameras, better picture but crappy builtin mic. Finger noise louder than voices.
Now we're talking, an old video camera with bulky accessories like a real rubber mounted windscreen'd mic.
It was a wedding present and we have great wedding videos, but it never was convenient enough to carry around.
Now it's broken and those cartridge tapes are sitting in the closet waiting to be send to some A-D service some day.
So as the kids are growing up, what we mostly have is crappy stuff from aforementioned low end digital devices.
It is nice to know what people looked like in a moment in time.
It's kind of ok to capture lots of video footage, but there is this strained relationship between people and the camera.
The person behind the camera (it usually comes down to one) becomes the 'missing person' in the family archives.
Video gets taken of special moments and trips, but not often enough to provide real continuity.
In order to capture the essence of LIFE and PEOPLE, you need to capture their casual voices. With 'invisible to the subject' continuous recorded high quality sound. Engage them in conversation. Steer the conversation. Document your kids' intellect from their first spoken word, the voices of great-grandparents telling stories of the Depression, capture a day in the life of someone, a family evening at dinner with the clink of silverware, war stories or limericks or the songs adults remember being sung to them as children. Visit Grandma at the old folks' home and have her describe the neighborhood you grew up in, the best times in her marriage, her proudest moments. Let the audio device sit in your daughter's pocket as she plays her instrument in the concert band to capture meaningful sound you can sync over that yucky muddle from your video camera.
It is tragic beyond words that the capability of recording whole hours and even days of high quality just-sound has now been available to us for almost two decades now, due to flash memory, lithium batteries and (if it's a priority to you, it certainly wasn't to the manufacturer) a decent external microphone, the ability to store/replicate incredible amounts of audio onto cheap media... and yet.
People are still dabbling with jittery occasional video, striving for that Hollywood perfection, when with just-audio they could for far less effort and expense allow future generations to 'know' the people of today. And as we reach old age, have the ability to sit back and listen to these voices, real conversations. Someone could even write a book, a real one with lots of words and all.
In the 1950s audiophiles discovered high fidelity sound. They moved magnetic tape across heads at 7-1/2" per second and filled the shelves with 30 minute tapes. Some time around 15 years ago it became possible for a pocket device to store sound with even greater fidelity in the pocket. Now for the price of your average video-enabled digital camera, you can set yourself up with the equivalent of DAT tape audio mastering unit of 20 years ago and a couple of microphones that capture sound with sufficient fidelity that you can not only apply (amazing!) digital noise filters to it... your own child's or grandmother's voice will be clear as day.
Something to listen to as you hold that single mustard-colored Polaroid photo in your hand. Because your audio fit easily on CDs and DVDs you tossed into the closet, but you decided to store all your video in the Cloud and the Cloud went bankrupt rather suddenly one day.
DISCLAIMER: This cautionary rant is as much to myself as to everyone else. If only I
Go to a farm. Rub your face up against a sheep.
I pray the Lord your soul to keep.
And then through gamma, out of sight, but we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion.
You now have Anthrax all over your face.
Beauty to find, in so many ways.
...The Pentagon announced yesterday it is issuing a moratorium on work at nine different bio-defense labs...
Hear ye! A moratorium has been pentagonally squozen. All is frozen, as is in the Frozen River of Orange Stone.
Dark works be done there, just as did Melkor in secret breed the hideous race of the Orcs
in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes,
and so it goes, and so it goes. Naught moves there. Some poised as they write,
centrifuges mid-spin, motionless, critters in dishes paused in the act of division.
One who'd just flicked the wrist to scramble the dial of the safe that holds the documents,
some on onion skin from times long past, Smith Corona letters slapped through carbon paper,
a Directive which establishes the purpose that brings us together to do this Thing.
Whatever that is. Until moratorium lifts, we are statues of stone. Time does not pass.
...after live anthrax was discovered outside containment at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah...
Scorpions trace mysteries in desert sand,
but not only they inhabit this desolate land.
Containment is here also, and when Containment has broke,
we all decide to go outside for a cool evening smoke.
Some greet greet the gritty air with silent cheer,
pondering what progress is made year after year.
Others secretly hoping the whole world goes berserk,
so that more would appreciate our odd line of work.
...The facility was discovered to have been shipping live anthrax specimens --- instead of dead ones --- to other labs...
That spark of life in nature is not easily subdue'd
and from it a live specimen becomes two, then a brood
the brood becomes colonies whose genetics diverge
who might gather to form tentacles if they are struck by the urge
but this tale concerns a vial 'd critter that was simply and sloppily, sent,
in a hand-lettered brown paper envelope not specifying content.
When the vial broke, the cradle did fall,
but the Baby was content to evolve quiet within, after all.
It formed colonies and dynasties that merged with the ink,
until the addressee on the envelope no longer said what you'd think
then it changed. And again. And again, why? Just because
smart life today arose from stupid that once was
and either smart is easier to evolve than you generally perceive
or it is easier to fool the Post Office that folks generally believe.
So here and there across the continent the envelope flew
stamped "Official Government Business" so no postage was due.
For months on end -- neural networks formed --- over eons to us
we formed societies, had revolutions, learned how to cuss
we no longer worshiped the permeable brown paper membrane as sky
and developed space travel to explore, which we did, by and by
we watched the Universe rearrange as our world-envelope traveled within
and figured that ink-address-thing, and how to 'send' ourselves to the bin
that is supposed to be reviewed and opened by trained personnel
whom, we had hoped, we could meet and greet, if all went well.
But the Universe is real tricksy and it was a circular bin
which led to the landfill and we were squashed within
Surrounded by food, we ate and were merry, were many, then more
and assembled new conveyances from discarded meat, plastic and gore.
These conveyances look like you, they are made and controlled by us,
we're that normal-looking gent sitting next to you on the bus.
That strange looking