Who cares who is spawned from where... the Lawyers of MIT, engineers of Harvard, oil barons from Berkeley, nuclear physicists from Julliard or shoe-makers from Oxford... oh futz, all this bickering is just a proxy war between the Four Horsemen of the Economicalypse. Their cycles reflect the luminance and lunacy of the Moon.
1. The Anarchist/Free Trade Absolutist (new moon) 2. The Keynesian (waxing) 3. The Oligarchy/Thin Veneer of Government, no link offered for my own protection (full moon) 4. The Austrian (waning)
We are now in a latter phase of waxing gibbous that has gone on for quite awhile. Our politicians are spineless and scripted, vetted faux-choices are the only ones presented, economies have merged and inflated to the degree that a world war is the most likely 'correction' with any historical precedent. The only choice available to us may be Hobson's, because the 'Status Quo' is unraveling in countless tiny (almost holographic) ways.
2011-07-10: Startalk: NASA and Nichelle Nichols Through her ground-breaking role as Star Trek's Chief Communications Officer Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols became a passionate advocate to get women and minorities involved in real-world space exploration. Many were inspired to become astronauts thanks to her efforts, including NASA's current administrator, General Charles Bolden. While she continues working through various endeavors to get young people excited about space, she hopes that the power of Star Trek will inspire us to keep pushing the boundaries of the final frontier.
2011-07-11: StarTalk: A Conversation with Nichelle Nichols Some might know Nichelle Nichols best from Star Trek, but this actress, singer, dancer and space advocate has much to say beyond her role in TV's exploration of the final frontier. In this exclusive interview, she talks about how science fiction and Star Trek --- and specifically her ground-breaking role as Chief Communications Officer Lt. Uhura --- not only impacted her life, but also had an influence on society over space and time.
I wonder if the "greenies" will latch onto this. Given the unrealistic claims of energy sources and power distribution systems from these people I expect someone will read this report and expect to see all the power lines in the world disappear and be replaced with antennas.
General ignorance of inverse-square law and the order of magnitude between a fun experiment and practical applications.
Let's build central humidifiers in the home and sell wireless water systems to bring up the humidity to the point where little condensers installed in each faucet can deliver a steady stream of life-giving water from a series of packets called 'drips' --- enough to sustain an adult grasshopper. Since our wireless plumbing will be a tough sell, there is no escape from the scaling problem, we'll go on the offensive. We'll launch an ad campaign with a cute cartoon grasshopper that portrays him as the one true environmentalist living among a teeming mass of wasteful cartoon humans always drawn with their gaping gullets demanding a raging torrent of precious water, even as they're pissing it out the other end. To personify the grasshopper and dehumanize the people we'll give the little fellow expressive eyes, a top hat and cane, and the humans' eyes will be expressionless and button-like. The first market goal is to get folks to install at least one 'water base station' and wireless faucet in the home to prove their commitment to the environment.
Tesla was a bloomin' genius but his tech was noisier than hell and the global power concept unscalable and even IF we had a Krell technology generator at the top of the world, irresponsibly dangerous chemically and inductively. Tesla lived in a radio-quiet world that is not our world. We made this choice, to deliver energy in pipes, wires and tanks, leaving the ether quiet enough for true distance communication. It was a good choice.
This WiFi/Radio free-power-all-around-you idea is a parasitic vulture-culture where someone wants to get rich on a little idea whose unintended consequences exceed the benefits. Never mind the unworkable engineering, even the concept is creepy, sociopathic. If Walmarts were built with Faraday Shields that block communications from the outside people would consider it inconvenient to shop there. But the folks who want to fill the world with tiny parasitic power systems want them to become so ubiquitous that they are woven into the clothing and all, is an actual direct affront to that decision we have made to preserve the airwaves for communication.
A woman trapped in her vehicle, fatally injured and bloody after an automobile crash is attempting to dial 911. She is down in a ditch and at the extreme end of cell range, but she cannot manage to get a reliable connection. Finally she gives up and writes in her own blood on the dashboard her last message to the world. The headlights and shorted wires quickly drain the car's battery and all goes dark, except for a dim mesmerizing pattern of tiny LEDs dancing across her shirt. The shirt's designers needed to incorporate several band resonators into it to make it practical, and even bragged in their advertising that it became brighter every time you were on your cell phone, speaking to the one you love.
I mean a recirculating water run, a slightly inclined track of water in glass channel running along the walls... that begins at the highest elevation of the house and leads through every room of the house as it descends, passing through small openings next to doorways or the corners where walls meet. The channel should be wide enough to accommodate the passage of a small rubber duck.
In the middle of wall spaces you might have a small channel or hole to allow a bit of water to divert into various wall-mounted contrivances such as tiny waterwheels, various resonant metallic or glass surfaces that resonate when dripped upon, where it's overflow passes via tube to a lower elevation of the main channel in another room, or a drain channel, if you can spare the loss of water volume. The water movement may itself contribute a comfortable background noise, but you may be able to amplify it by placing shapes along the bottom of the main channel that introduce turbulence.
At the terminus directly below the origin, a vertical bucket lift would ensure that the rubber duck and other floating items are always headed somewhere. Due to the large surface area of this concept and difficulty to clean you might have to keep the water mostly sterile with a bit of disinfectant to discourage algal growth in the water. keeping it slightly acidic to elevate surface tension for best drip sounds.
Thus if you're wiring your house for water, you might also commit to a separate plant system that delivers wholesome plant-water to each room, with a touch of hydroponic nutrients and a overflow drain ffor recirculation. Then pots or vine anchors or window trellis can be served by a watering system run for a couple minutes a day, each plant container tapped to receive a sufficient amount of watering.
I'd really like to know on what principles this 'security driver' is based on
TFS I'm going for homeopathy.
If the marketing technobabble is correct the code is 100k but naught is said about data store, memory and persistent. Or whether the system satisfies these claims 'out of the box' or there is some training/learning period. Of course the pitch also does not indicate how often the Key Operator is called to investigate and override false alarms, and what the investigate/resolution process takes. Some ACs with experience might be useful...
You could have a 'train/run' switch that you flip to 'train' on first install during a period in which you do not reasonably expect intrusions, putting it through paces and trigger your software to check for updates, things like that, where it passively builds a profile of normal activity. Then flip it to 'run'. Then if it is a machine that does just a few things all day, the software has a pretty good idea of what to expect.
The payoff would come from how well you could parametrize the basic inputs --- stack state, communications endpoints and addresses, using directory hierarchy on disk --- and introduce a clever degree of fuzziness that also implements a sense of 'near' and 'far' on both class of operation and value.
Then maintain a pointer in some so-called 'phase space' and burn data into a sparse array to create a virtual landscape with erosion. In 'run' mode it is almost always hitting (or near) areas that have been populated. If the pointer strays from from the populated region we have an alarm.
For example, a process that has never accessed data outside its installed folders suddenly does so. Network addresses compared by closeness in the neighborhood.
All of this is moot....unless you actually believe that we haven't invented quantum computing already. This is moot unless you believe quantum computing isn't already here.
You are in a little twisty maze of quantum computing, spooky at a distance.. You are in a twisty little maze of quantum computing, all entangled. You are in a little twisty computing of quanta, all moot. You are in a moot of quantum twisters, all charmed. There are some keys on the ground here.
This is literally the dumbest fucking question I've ever seen in a slashdot article header. Fuck you slashdot, you're getting stupid to the point of being insulting.
Potty mouth zero-content sniping comments and Dice troll crap. Do they come in spray cans these days? So a science article has stunning visuals and not a single damned equation, like some of the boring games discussed around here. Back inside your Schwarzschildlike radius!
Of course it is relevant and interesting to speculate what black holes look like. It's primal because they're the most perilous things yet conceived and yet no one has actually 'seen' one. Even more disturbing, the physics claims we never could actually see them, only their effects. So we become curious about those effects. Not just from idle fancy, we instinctively feel the need to know how they may appear to us, no matter how unlikely that they would, because they are dangerous.
Imagine the night illuminated by a house being completely consumed by fire, explosions, steam rising as jets from fire hoses sweep across its blackened face and through windows. Children splash in the puddles, step over hoses. People stand transfixed... why? And almost no one is clustered around the physicist who has set up a portable chalkboard on the corner and is trying to describe the exothermic process of combustion in real-time. They are interested, sure, but there will be time for that later. As the terrifying monster rages they must look, see it through to the end, because we are curious, intelligent resourceful beings and must look directly into the eyes of the Enemy.
Does anyone really think they, the NSA, is not going to spy, with or without approval? We have no way to control them, they hold all the cards!
The have always spied and that part will never cease. But it's time to shake them up a little.
1. If it can and will be abused, refrain from building it in the first place. 2. If it has been built, see that it is laid bare to the greatest extent possible and dismantled. 3. For egregious offenses, the offending Agency must be completely disbanded, its assets liquidated, and formed anew. 4. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. (only joking!)
The United States is presently under attack, by itself, in a way even Stalin was unable to achieve given the limited technology of his time. Due to a lack of transparency and believability, a technological renaissance with (apparently) no moral compass steered by Charter, the NSA has likely deployed assets and capabilities for domestic surveillance. The following attack vectors cannot be ruled out:
There is an unknown, possibly massive tapping of the backbone network occurring. Utah Data Center's central location is a clue. Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Mark Klein have all come forward alleging domestic surveillance far exceeding 'telephone records'. Klein is of especial note, for it is he who revealed the existence of Room 641A in the lawsuit Heptig vs AT&T that EFF took almost to the Supreme Court, who declined to hear the case on the basis that the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 protected AT&T from liability for involvement with any illegal activities. A law passed after the lawsuit was filed. In response to it, even.
That should make you a bit angry. We're not talking about telephone records here. We're talking about fiber splitting with drop-in access to the whole slurp. To any future despot this means that the United States may be prepared to deliver real-time private communications and databases of activity for its citizens, cradle to grave. Why the fuck would anyone want to build this thing, unless they were insane? James Bamford hinted at the possibility that NSA was 'going domestic' in his 1982 book Puzzle Palace as he suggests its interest in developing technology for bulk microwave gathering. That is to be expected as this technology was deployed worldwide. But the way they wished to go about it was a bit... peculiar:
Another indication of NSA's "broadband sweeping of multi-circuited domestic telecommunications trunk lines," David L. Watters told the Senate Intelligence Committee [in 1978!] lies in the Agency's request for an amendment to the wiretap law that would permit NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping "for the sole purpose of determining the capability of equipment" when such "test period shall be limited... to... ninety days." Continuing, he warned: "Let there be no misunderstanding here. There is only one category of wiretapping equipment or system which requires up to ninety days for test and adjustment, and that system is broadband electronic eavesdropping equipment, the vacuum-cleaner approach to intelligence gathering, the general search of microwave trunk lines. I make this assertion on the strength of actual experience in the electronic intelligence trade and on the strength of over twenty-five years' experience in the telecommunications profession. An ordinary, single-line wire tap requires only five minutes to adjust and test."
Don't be scared my little Yankee "barbarian" friend, let a Greek hug you... everything will be o.k.! BUT: remember that EVIL BARBARIANS (not like those who voted for the Patriot Act) exist... please DON'T FORGET!
Thanks kindly. And hey --- on behalf of my country, I'm truly sorry we unleashed credit default swaps upon the world. That shit must have escaped from a lab somewhere.
I am so jittery... as the clock strikes Midnight I will no longer bask in the protective glow of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. I cannot fall asleep without the reassuring sound of telephone records being gathered. Surely something awful will happen tonight or tomorrow. Maybe I will try to organize the neighborhood for a continuous vigil until the Act is restored. But first, I'll just turn on the radio and catch some news...
The fault of that lies in Congress. Spend Middle East War money on NASA and science and it goes a lot faster.
You cannot successfully argue against war itself as a waste of human resources or a needless monetary expense. Sure you can philosophize and get a show of nodding heads in peacetime, but then something awful happens and someone shouts "Remember the Maine!" or "Hitler will invade the UK, then Mexico!" or "Let's get Bin Laden!" and all is moot. Inquiring line items is useful... such as whether ~$60 billion disappeared while out-sourcing the supply line or whether airlifting $40 billion in 'unmarked bills' into Iraq was a great idea.
Government spending is a mysterious process. When it is time for the Fed to mint virtual money for Quantitative Easing, bail out banks by easing their losses, or the Federales to finance wars by raising the trade deficit ceiling and selling bonds to the Chinese we are awash in Magical Unicorn Money. When it is budget time every cent is haggled or omnibussed. Clearly this beast has two heads.
But you have to get more specific than 'military spending'. Pick something, anything and try to start a grass roots movement to attack it. Or better yet, just spend your time 'selling' space exploration in all of its forms. Neil deGrasse Tyson wasn't completely joking when he suggests that a militarized space race with China (or rumors thereof) would jump-start the process. A new Cold War would certainly unlock that Magical Unicorn Money. It may seem odd but weaponizing space is actually a good idea.
But there is something I call the 'Pizza Delivery Syndrome', where someone desirous of something, say a Space Program, will seize upon a money-factoid such as this
cite"Consumers spend around 33 billion U.S. dollars in quick service pizza restaurants each year in the United States. Takeout pizza constitutes the largest share of spending within this category at nearly 15 billion U.S. dollars annually, followed by pizza delivery at around ten billion. This is perhaps unsurprising considering more than 20 percent of U.S. consumers eat takeout or delivered meals at least once a week. While older generations appear less dependent on such services, around 40 percent of 18 to 54 year olds felt that takeout food was essential to their way of life as of November 2014..."
and create, out of thin air, some hypothetical world where every one who desires a pizza is visited by a Fairy Godmother who smiles and asks, do you really want that pizza or could we all fulfill mankind's most glorious dream? Your wish is my command. In this scenario they always choose the pizza, statistics show. It serves as foundation for acerbic commentary on the wretched excess of modern humans. This is a dead end because (on the whole) people would rather talk about pizza than space.
Ask not what pizza lovers can do for you. Ask what you can do to send pizza into
Wow, the delusion that somehow by clinging to space fantasies you're rescuing the species... Wow. If anyone ever needs evidence how lunatic the space fringe is... Evolution is still happening. There won't be a human species in a million years one way or another. Sending a few test pilots to die on a rusty empty ball won't change anything to that. You self-important schizophrenic lunatic.
How much is that in library of congress? Please, I'm no nerd, I don't know this "technology" stuff.
6 Shakespeares... or 16.5 gzip-Shakespeares... or a whopping 22.6 bzip2-Shakespeares.
The Bard fares well by the Burrows-Wheeler algorithm for his works are so oft-repeated he even runs on and repeats himself. "...So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent" as RLE (run length encoding) and "To smother up the English in our throngs, If any order might be thought upon..." as MTF (Move to Front) Transform. "We render you the tenth; to be ta'en forth! Before the common distribution at your only choice... as encode to Huffmans and selection of the sweetest table, and "Spare your arithmetic; never count the turns. Once, and a million!... symbol usage stored as sparse array.
The total number of nuclear weapons is in decline.
Many of the doomsday horrors that tipped ICBMS for Cold War Game Over scenarios have been rendered into electricity.
cite"The Megatons to Megawatts program was initiated in 1993 and successfully completed in December 2013. A total of 500 tonnes of Russian warhead grade HEU (high enriched uranium, equivalent to 20,008 nuclear warheads) were converted in Russia to nearly 15,000 tonnes tons of LEU (low enriched uranium) and sold to the US for use as fuel in American nuclear power plants. During the 20-year Megatons to Megawatts program, as much as 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States was generated by fuel fabricated using LEU from Russian HEU. During this period, on a comparatively modest basis, the U.S. government has also been converting some of its excess nuclear warhead HEU into power plant fuel. Efforts have also been undertaken to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of converting warhead plutonium into fuel to augment nuclear fuel for U.S. power plants."
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck.... Shoot it!
I find it ironic that an approach with a proven track record, Mutual Assured Destruction, has been lambasted as some sort of cold-war artifact, of intrinsic evil. The threat of Armageddon is the evil, MAD was the preventative. The United States of America was even founded on it. The 'armed militia model' where the empire and an armed populace, each with the power to hold the other in check -- the whole quotable 'We the People' litany -- is just a flowery and (to our ears) archaically quaint way of introducing the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction as a deterrent to tyranny. In a practical and historical sense MAD is the only device capable of holding peoples in restraint, long enough that the meme of self-restraint might creep into the culture.
Decreasing weapons count is just a stage past what Carl Sagan referred to as 'nuclear adolescence', and from the height of tensions to now we're coming along fine. Too many young folk just dismiss the Cold War weapons buildout as some kind of mass psychosis without trying to place themselves there mentally. Sure it was insane, but when you believe your enemy is batty insane what would you do? You have to do something a bit dodgy yourself, in calculated fashion. When revisionist historians try to inject the idea that some hypothetical and magical Kissinger-robot could have descended from the heavens (The Day The Earth Stood Still) and defused the situation, gotten the nuclear powers to sit down and talk like kindergarteners in a circle waiting for a pat on the head, they cheat us all. There was rational thinking, difficult and courageous decisions and some pretty good know-how behind those Cold War excesses. The idea of a hostile invasion may seem quaint and laughable today, but then it was a very real concern. We had just fought a world war to prevent one.
INGREDIENTS two million years of domesticated fire six millennia of scientific curiosity two centuries of significant progress in science and engineering 50 years of space exploration 35 years of awareness of KT impact and necessity of planetary defense one cup irrational fear of radiation and willful disregard for shielding techniques (to taste) one sprinkle fear of death from any cause not typically experienced by modern suburbans lump of plain common sense (if you can not find it, substitute two tbsp blind faith and a pound of dogged determination) tiny dash of optimism
PREPARATION Carefully combine all ingredients in a large bowl of stars, ensuring that you completely blend the essential characteristics that have allowed these naked apes to overcome natural extremes of climate, predators, disease and boredom. Beat until technological excellence rises to the top. Form into several self-sustainable colonies and multinational corporate enterprises. Place in space oven preheated to a degree of caution and optimism. Bake until spinoffs from the enterprise rise to the occasion with the potential to enhance and expand human civilization with its yummy goodness, colonies in space are able to mobilize quickly in Earth's defense, and Galaxia might be achieved.
SERVING Throw out all that shit. Engage the collective human mind in sitcoms and 'reality' shows. Promote artificial issues that represent lack of vision or restraint (terrorism, energy poverty) as if they were natural threats Let the fucking insurance companies guide all innovation and risk taking.
Promote zombies and head-shot horror in mainstream media as a gateway to cannibalism and violent population reduction. Popularize cheeky '1001 ways to Die' angles. Feed the slack. Characterize folks who try to push through these barriers as 'space nutters'.
For cookies, spray flavored coating over a nutritionally inert Styrofoam shapes and market them as "heart healthy".
Adding the keyword BRILLO to your searches effectively locks out 'intelligent design' search results that have been deliberately seeded to rank among science articles. It thrusts you into the bizarre world of people who call themselves brillo-head, folks making fun of popular culture. Also some money saving coupons! Also a great many documents in Spanish. Brillo even makes a shoe shine product, so anyone researching boot problems.
Came to mind because the company who made its fortune bringing relevance to online search results just decided to name their new project in such a way as to aggravate people searching for specific technical topics on it, until the end of time. Instead of choosing a nonsensical name. If you want to name a new project Google, please Google it first. Or connect a USB Ouija Board and ask Lewis Carroll to think one up for you.
#!/bin/perl -pn -0777 use Math::Prime::Util 'next_prime'; # 'pepper' ROT13 backwards from end of message # using distribution of primes so occasional blips # become more concentrated at the end
s/\s+$//; # no whitespace at end s/ \[.*?\]//sg; # eliminate added Slashdot [host] for decode s/ nut //s; # undo a post-correction I made
@a=unpack('C*',$_); $i=0; while (($i=next_prime($i))<1018) { # only last 1018 chars
$p=\$a[-$i];
if (($$p>=97) and ($$p<=122)) {
$$p+=($$p>109? -13 : 13); # ROT13
} } $_=pack('C*',@a)."\n";
[...decode...] Another bizarre theory posed in science fiction that to everyone's dismay became entangled in String Theory is the idea that Multiverses may exist. Since the incomprehensible ones too dissimilar to ours cannot be comprehended, lazy popular speculation centers around parallel Universes populated with people just like us, but slightly different and dumber. If tickling Higgs and twanging strings shifts things ever so slightly, continued accelorater accidents (aka experiments) might even be holographically disturbing the Multiverse in additive fashion effect that subtly shifts regions of them around. Only stable life-forms with highly advenced thought processes would notice this subtle effect, since our mental process also a holographic pattern and has a degree of chemical hysterisis and self-correcting properties. Percieved effects might be 'senses' that things have changed though empirical measurements have changed, or violent extremes of weather as the butterfly-wings of chaotic processes in a parallel Universe match winbgbeats for brief spans. But in the end everything is speculative nonsense except for the prevailing theory that is supported by evidence, and we don't know which one that is until the end of all things. Life may not be all you want, but it's all you've got. So stick a flower in your bellybutton and be happy.
And now I am being told I should embrace some gambler's fallacy of 'non-imminence' (on average! we think!) and ratchet down my whimpering terror and boost complacency until I am a well-adjusted individual.
Statisticians and writers sometimes take inappropriate liberties when presenting probabilities. This is natural because finding joy in figuring things out is one of our finest traits. The reason for choosing any particular angle to present a result can be "because it would be fun to think of it that way". Or as in articles like this, to allay what is perceived as a generally unfounded or disproportionate amount of fear. Addressing these fears directly is invaluable because they can traumatize children, and have even been known to swing adults into voting Republican --- or Democrat!
For preventable global existential threats, is it 'OK' to play the stats game by the same rules as for other non-global or non-existential threats? Is it even ethical? That word bites doesn't it.
Isn't there some kind of 'division by zero' thrown exception thing that applies when we're talking about extinction events? As a species, aren't we clever enough to invent one if it does not exist?
Not all statistics are actionable. And not all science articles are fit for children.
[TA ] Human beings haven't been around on Earth forever. [...] Chances are, we're not going to be around forever, either. It's only a question of how and when we're going to go out.
That's it, kids --- it's nature's way. Go gently into the Good Night when your time is come, as a species. "That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea." If this some sort of foundation argument, then what is being built?
We are the species who invented "forever". We are not bound by it because its definition is not yet complete. By what ever objective scientific time scale that can be derived from any present theory of The End, you must try to factor an important unknown: the effect future human insight and due diligence may bring to bear on the problem of survival. If you have trouble believing this as I do, join the club. I won't.
All in all, a great article, well researched and compellingly written. But the why of it really sucks. How did that happen? Are there hungry insurance salesman lurking nearby worried that the sorry-ass-monkey-fuck $5,898 from 111 people in 11 days will eat into their commissions?
Don't sell out that ultimate future by falling prey to an extinction event that could happen tomorrow. The way things stand it may be at least ten years before a viable mission is ready to go IF we start today. Let us hope it's ten years of good luck.
Now is always an excellent time to warn of the conceivable dangers of high energy particle physics experiments which are already in progress. Stephen Hawking warns that Higgs Boson 'God' particle, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could cause a 'catastrophic vacuum delay' if scientists were to put it under extreme stress. Fortunately this is not a major budget concern for CERN since if this is true, the facility need not be relocated to a safer place because there is no safer place. Another is the formation of so-called 'mini back holes'. The math says they will be very brief and very small and especially very unstable, which is apparently a good thing. Aside from the Universe ending or oops-not-so-unstable black holes falling into a hissy-sucky orbit around the center of Earth's mass, we have the pedestrian possibility that when nature's fur is rubbed the wrong way she might maintain stability by righting things with a highly localized and energetic 'correction'. Which blows things up. Another bizarre theory posed in science fiction that to everyone's dismay became entangled in String Theory is the idea that Multiverses may exist. Since the incomprehensible ones too dissimilar to ours cannot be comprehended, lazy popular speculation centers around parallel Universes populated with people just like us, but slightyy dvfferent and dumbee. If tipkling Higgs and twanging striags shvfts tuingf ever sb slightly, continhed nccelorater accidentf (axa exprriments) mighg evrn be uolographicalll disturbiag the Mhltiverse vn additive fafhion effept that subtly shists regibns bf thez around. Onyy staole lise-forms with highyy advenped thoughg procesfes wohld aotice this fuotle esfect, sinpe our mentay process alfo a hblograchic pntgern aad has a degree bf chezipal hyfterisvs and sels-corrrcting properties. Prrcieved effrcts mvght be 'senfes' that thvngs have chnngeq ghouth empirvcal mrasueementf uave nut changrd, or violeat extrezes bf weathrr as ghe outtersly-wiags of cuaotic propefses in a carallrl Universe magch jiabgbrats for brief spans. Bug vn tue end eierythvng is specuyative nonfease expept fbr tue prevailint theory thag vs shpcorted by rvvdence, and je dbn't kaow whvcu one that if untiy thr end of all tuingf. Lifr zay aot be ayl you wang, but ig's nll yoh'ie got. So sgick a flojer in ybur beylybhtgon nnq be hnpcl.
Windows 3.0 was launched on 22 May 1990 â" I know, 'coz I was there as a SDE on the team. [...] It was a big deal for me, and I still consider Win 3 as *the* most significant Windows' release, and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?
Pleasedtomeet'cha. Some fine work you did on 3.x! Windows 2.11 was the first version I encountered, but we never really considered it more than a wrapper in which one could run Aldus PageMaker (the Adobe InDesign of today) to output to a LasterMaster 1000 typesetter, which was 'the' first dry toner laser that could lay down small serif type that would reproduce on camera.
Windows 3.0 was the first environment one could consider booting into and staying there... we sold a number of them for personal use and its stability for publishing began to rival the Mac (I'm a PC person but pull no punches). Wide adoption for business use in our area did not really start until 3.11 and even 95, but that was mainly because we had done our job 'really well' and had a large installed base of IBMPC/clones networked with Novell and LanTastic running DOS applications. Our customers were comfortable in the DOS environment and we didn't hurry them. Memory and CPU were precious and all graphical environments had plenty of 'hourglass' in those days.
It's worth noting that graphical environments, even multi-tasking is pervasive today but it is still a learned skill and there were many people from the DOS era who had optimized their work techniques well into the Windows era. One fellow who dealt with real estate contracts tried Windows said "It can hardly keep up with my typing speed! This is an improvement?" Even the task switching latency of DesqView (which did lag because hard disk was really slow by today's standard) was a source of frustration to him. Most days he'd stay out of it. He'd seen examples of multitasking workflow and was not convinced. "My DOS programs import and export just fine. Exporting useful bits and naming them properly is an essential part of working efficiently. If you haven't done that you haven't finished the job. So... I'm supposed to bring up some old thing and cut and paste paragraphs or sentences of it into a new thing, one at a time, while switching between them? Look here." He shows me a folder with hundreds of small files. "That's my clipboard. I have all the names in my head. Some of the pieces have several variations, but I can import the whole thing and delete the unused parts faster than the graphic environment can scroll a document from top to bottom." He really could too, in the days of green phosphor displays he was able to read while scrolling quickly, while half the characters had fading ghosts of the previous line. He did not fully commit to a graphical environment until it was running on a 486.
For all the early issues, Windows 3 was still a technician's dream. In order to fully appreciate its beauty, you would have had to experience the nefarious and wacky world of TSRs, IPX and 'packet driver' network stacks and DOS 386 memory extenders. When they finally did work they were really stable but it took a wizard's touch. Windows' driver architecture was well designed from the start.
What crazy thing those "Space Nutters" been up to today?
How 'bout dem Space Nutters, ain't they kooks? Heads in the stars, readin' space booooooks! Plannin' dem missions to launch men 'n probes or spinny-dizzy colonies in LaGrangian lobes wearin' them space suits on Halloween on Earth chewin' the Space fat on for all that it's worth! Dem nugger-mugger Space Huggers way down South stuffin' Space Nutter Central for all that funds allow'th How to be a Space Nutter, only one way to hack it Get yerself a nuke, find an asteroid and smack it!
"Blah blah PR whore not a hero who cares about independent candidates blah straw polls straw men blah Obama good Obama bad yay Rand yay Ron guns terrorists NSA python script Hosts file WTF all crooks no change schedule all for nought TV says 'filibuster is happening' blah no transcript blah Brietbart posts transcript Yah! Pauls site no transcript posted WTF blah kook like Alex Jones blah USA Freedom Act must be good cuz it has Freedom in the name blah yeah right? good PR bad PR hate dem Repubs hate dem libs blah Rand just a flip flop flip flop dookey drones liquor store tach story FAIL bleedin' heart whatever blah blah look moron blah screw that like dislike fake filibuster real filibuster blah blah"
Y'all go on without me. I'm busy reading the first couple hours of transcript because I like to read, then maybe pick up some of the rest at CSPAN because it does represent exhaustive research to gather talking points, and it also might yield insight on whether Rand and the staff he hires are presidential material.
This is a phenomenon where music is produced from the very sounds IT professionals most dreaded to hear. A symphony of aggravation The clattering brings to mind drives in which customers had somehow inserted two or floppies at once and managed to latch them down, bending all the retaining mechanisms. The shrill higher timbres reminiscent of a faulty drive controller or driver software run amok. Louder notes mean resonance in the enclosure which does not mean "wow what a cool sound", it means "oh shit something's loose and I'll have to disassemble the drive to discover what it is. And get it back together without creating a new one".
Anyone who can pick up these items for $10+ used but functional or $30+ may find it difficult to grasp the level of dedication that went into avoiding these sounds and the dread we experienced to hear them. From the late 70s floppy drives were in constant use, and replacement drives cost hundreds of dollars. You are a tech making $20/hour (the $80/hour of today) and you are given a drive to fix. Can you fix it? You clean the heads (thin epoxy resin over tiny coil) and put in a calibration disk, hook an oscilloscope to the analog circuit to see the Lissajous pattern, look at the patterns. Adjust the optical track-zero stop and re-index until signal is at maximum. Then go for track 79 and check the pattern. Does it get there? If not you could have stepper failure (missing pulses? grit in the slide mechanism? Graphite and tiny needlenose pliers are your only friends. Does the pattern waver on each rotation? weak spring or bent spring retainer. And so on.
Then you have fixed the drive and send it out, only to discover that all the customer's data (and backup) disks were written to with the misaligned drive and no longer read properly. You get the drive back with the discs, and must intentionally mis-align it again until they read well enough to copy to a properly aligned drive. And then explain how your time doing all this was well spent.
Not so nice music to my ears.
"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances." ~Francis Bacon, from New Atlantis, written in 1626. This dude nailed modern electronics and digital sampling some 350 years before its time.
When my father died, it was as if a whole library had burned down. ~Laurie Anderson
Until we learn to mourn for all the music that might soon be lost or the movies that never made it to DVD, or even VHS, because it was never transferred from vinyl, or film because people do not cherish vinyl when they see it at Goodwill or more tragically, someone dies --- and the collection of a lifetime goes into the landfill because the dozen people who stopped by at the garage sale had no interest when everything you 'own' is inside your phone, a single toilet can swallow Western Civilization remember that direct-to-digital CD? Now all you have is a badly encoded mp3 all those books that were fascinating but went right over your head as a kid, wouldn't it be great to know which ones they were? every day there are fewer people out there who have read things that never made it to 'digital' another one died this morning. so-called 'magnetic master tapes' cannot master time, they fade into Gaussian noise a decently kept mass-produced vinyl phonograph record is the BEST way to recover the music how many of your family's most precious photographs are on paper, anywhere? have you spilled water on one lately? most families these days have NOT A SINGLE MEMBER who considers themself a LIBRARIAN a (tragically thankless) job of gathering, organizing, copying, re-distributing the copies and ensuring that at least some of them are stored safely. Writings, photos. Even who is related to whom! YOU may be the only likely candidate. Unless you begin tomorrowit will never be done by anyone. on the Internet it's even worse. How many entities can you think of that store Internet pages long term with a real commitment? The Wayback machine and who else? newer tech better? Not necessarily so, IF it breeds such a mass complacency about simple preservation of knowledge that the day arrives when EVERYONE thinks making backups and saving previous generations of knowledge and artistic works is SOMEONE ELSE'S JOB. In such a situation we could 'lose' more than half of everything that was worth saving in a single human lifetime. Are we living in that time span now? Think about it (please!).
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares who is spawned from where... the Lawyers of MIT, engineers of Harvard, oil barons from Berkeley, nuclear physicists from Julliard or shoe-makers from Oxford... oh futz, all this bickering is just a proxy war between the Four Horsemen of the Economicalypse. Their cycles reflect the luminance and lunacy of the Moon.
1. The Anarchist/ Free Trade Absolutist (new moon)
2. The Keynesian (waxing)
3. The Oligarchy/Thin Veneer of Government, no link offered for my own protection (full moon)
4. The Austrian (waning)
We are now in a latter phase of waxing gibbous that has gone on for quite awhile. Our politicians are spineless and scripted, vetted faux-choices are the only ones presented, economies have merged and inflated to the degree that a world war is the most likely 'correction' with any historical precedent. The only choice available to us may be Hobson's, because the 'Status Quo' is unraveling in countless tiny (almost holographic) ways.
I see trees of green, red roses, too, I see them bloom, for me and you, And I think to myself, What a wonderful world. I see skies of blue, and clouds of white, The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night, And I think to myself, What a wonderful world. The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, Are also on the faces of people going by. I see friends shaking hands, saying "How do you do?" They're really saying, "I love you." I hear babies cryin'. I watch them grow. They'll learn much more than I'll ever know, And I think to myself, What a wonderful world. Yes, I think to myself, What a wonderful world
Pure gold.
2011-07-10: Startalk: NASA and Nichelle Nichols
Through her ground-breaking role as Star Trek's Chief Communications Officer Lt. Uhura, Nichelle Nichols became a passionate advocate to get women and minorities involved in real-world space exploration. Many were inspired to become astronauts thanks to her efforts, including NASA's current administrator, General Charles Bolden. While she continues working through various endeavors to get young people excited about space, she hopes that the power of Star Trek will inspire us to keep pushing the boundaries of the final frontier.
2011-07-11: StarTalk: A Conversation with Nichelle Nichols
Some might know Nichelle Nichols best from Star Trek, but this actress, singer, dancer and space advocate has much to say beyond her role in TV's exploration of the final frontier. In this exclusive interview, she talks about how science fiction and Star Trek --- and specifically her ground-breaking role as Chief Communications Officer Lt. Uhura --- not only impacted her life, but also had an influence on society over space and time.
I wonder if the "greenies" will latch onto this. Given the unrealistic claims of energy sources and power distribution systems from these people I expect someone will read this report and expect to see all the power lines in the world disappear and be replaced with antennas.
General ignorance of inverse-square law and the order of magnitude between a fun experiment and practical applications.
Let's build central humidifiers in the home and sell wireless water systems to bring up the humidity to the point where little condensers installed in each faucet can deliver a steady stream of life-giving water from a series of packets called 'drips' --- enough to sustain an adult grasshopper. Since our wireless plumbing will be a tough sell, there is no escape from the scaling problem, we'll go on the offensive. We'll launch an ad campaign with a cute cartoon grasshopper that portrays him as the one true environmentalist living among a teeming mass of wasteful cartoon humans always drawn with their gaping gullets demanding a raging torrent of precious water, even as they're pissing it out the other end. To personify the grasshopper and dehumanize the people we'll give the little fellow expressive eyes, a top hat and cane, and the humans' eyes will be expressionless and button-like. The first market goal is to get folks to install at least one 'water base station' and wireless faucet in the home to prove their commitment to the environment.
Tesla was a bloomin' genius but his tech was noisier than hell and the global power concept unscalable and even IF we had a Krell technology generator at the top of the world , irresponsibly dangerous chemically and inductively. Tesla lived in a radio-quiet world that is not our world. We made this choice, to deliver energy in pipes, wires and tanks, leaving the ether quiet enough for true distance communication. It was a good choice.
This WiFi/Radio free-power-all-around-you idea is a parasitic vulture-culture where someone wants to get rich on a little idea whose unintended consequences exceed the benefits. Never mind the unworkable engineering, even the concept is creepy, sociopathic. If Walmarts were built with Faraday Shields that block communications from the outside people would consider it inconvenient to shop there. But the folks who want to fill the world with tiny parasitic power systems want them to become so ubiquitous that they are woven into the clothing and all, is an actual direct affront to that decision we have made to preserve the airwaves for communication.
A woman trapped in her vehicle, fatally injured and bloody after an automobile crash is attempting to dial 911. She is down in a ditch and at the extreme end of cell range, but she cannot manage to get a reliable connection. Finally she gives up and writes in her own blood on the dashboard her last message to the world. The headlights and shorted wires quickly drain the car's battery and all goes dark, except for a dim mesmerizing pattern of tiny LEDs dancing across her shirt. The shirt's designers needed to incorporate several band resonators into it to make it practical, and even bragged in their advertising that it became brighter every time you were on your cell phone, speaking to the one you love.
I mean a recirculating water run, a slightly inclined track of water in glass channel running along the walls... that begins at the highest elevation of the house and leads through every room of the house as it descends, passing through small openings next to doorways or the corners where walls meet. The channel should be wide enough to accommodate the passage of a small rubber duck.
In the middle of wall spaces you might have a small channel or hole to allow a bit of water to divert into various wall-mounted contrivances such as tiny waterwheels, various resonant metallic or glass surfaces that resonate when dripped upon, where it's overflow passes via tube to a lower elevation of the main channel in another room, or a drain channel, if you can spare the loss of water volume. The water movement may itself contribute a comfortable background noise, but you may be able to amplify it by placing shapes along the bottom of the main channel that introduce turbulence.
At the terminus directly below the origin, a vertical bucket lift would ensure that the rubber duck and other floating items are always headed somewhere. Due to the large surface area of this concept and difficulty to clean you might have to keep the water mostly sterile with a bit of disinfectant to discourage algal growth in the water. keeping it slightly acidic to elevate surface tension for best drip sounds.
Thus if you're wiring your house for water, you might also commit to a separate plant system that delivers wholesome plant-water to each room, with a touch of hydroponic nutrients and a overflow drain ffor recirculation. Then pots or vine anchors or window trellis can be served by a watering system run for a couple minutes a day, each plant container tapped to receive a sufficient amount of watering.
Or if you like cats, just substitute cats for the water. WARNING: Your heart may explode.
I'd really like to know on what principles this 'security driver' is based on
TFS I'm going for homeopathy.
If the marketing technobabble is correct the code is 100k but naught is said about data store, memory and persistent. Or whether the system satisfies these claims 'out of the box' or there is some training/learning period. Of course the pitch also does not indicate how often the Key Operator is called to investigate and override false alarms, and what the investigate/resolution process takes. Some ACs with experience might be useful...
You could have a 'train/run' switch that you flip to 'train' on first install during a period in which you do not reasonably expect intrusions, putting it through paces and trigger your software to check for updates, things like that, where it passively builds a profile of normal activity. Then flip it to 'run'. Then if it is a machine that does just a few things all day, the software has a pretty good idea of what to expect.
The payoff would come from how well you could parametrize the basic inputs --- stack state, communications endpoints and addresses, using directory hierarchy on disk --- and introduce a clever degree of fuzziness that also implements a sense of 'near' and 'far' on both class of operation and value.
Then maintain a pointer in some so-called 'phase space' and burn data into a sparse array to create a virtual landscape with erosion. In 'run' mode it is almost always hitting (or near) areas that have been populated. If the pointer strays from from the populated region we have an alarm.
For example, a process that has never accessed data outside its installed folders suddenly does so. Network addresses compared by closeness in the neighborhood.
All of this is moot. ...unless you actually believe that we haven't invented quantum computing already.
This is moot unless you believe quantum computing isn't already here.
You are in a little twisty maze of quantum computing, spooky at a distance..
You are in a twisty little maze of quantum computing, all entangled.
You are in a little twisty computing of quanta, all moot.
You are in a moot of quantum twisters, all charmed.
There are some keys on the ground here.
This is literally the dumbest fucking question I've ever seen in a slashdot article header. Fuck you slashdot, you're getting stupid to the point of being insulting.
Potty mouth zero-content sniping comments and Dice troll crap. Do they come in spray cans these days? So a science article has stunning visuals and not a single damned equation, like some of the boring games discussed around here. Back inside your Schwarzschildlike radius!
Of course it is relevant and interesting to speculate what black holes look like. It's primal because they're the most perilous things yet conceived and yet no one has actually 'seen' one. Even more disturbing, the physics claims we never could actually see them, only their effects. So we become curious about those effects. Not just from idle fancy, we instinctively feel the need to know how they may appear to us, no matter how unlikely that they would, because they are dangerous.
Imagine the night illuminated by a house being completely consumed by fire, explosions, steam rising as jets from fire hoses sweep across its blackened face and through windows. Children splash in the puddles, step over hoses. People stand transfixed... why? And almost no one is clustered around the physicist who has set up a portable chalkboard on the corner and is trying to describe the exothermic process of combustion in real-time. They are interested, sure, but there will be time for that later. As the terrifying monster rages they must look, see it through to the end, because we are curious, intelligent resourceful beings and must look directly into the eyes of the Enemy.
Does anyone really think they, the NSA, is not going to spy, with or without approval? We have no way to control them, they hold all the cards!
The have always spied and that part will never cease. But it's time to shake them up a little.
1. If it can and will be abused, refrain from building it in the first place.
2. If it has been built, see that it is laid bare to the greatest extent possible and dismantled.
3. For egregious offenses, the offending Agency must be completely disbanded, its assets liquidated, and formed anew.
4. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. (only joking!)
The United States is presently under attack, by itself, in a way even Stalin was unable to achieve given the limited technology of his time. Due to a lack of transparency and believability, a technological renaissance with (apparently) no moral compass steered by Charter, the NSA has likely deployed assets and capabilities for domestic surveillance. The following attack vectors cannot be ruled out:
There is an unknown, possibly massive tapping of the backbone network occurring. Utah Data Center's central location is a clue. Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Mark Klein have all come forward alleging domestic surveillance far exceeding 'telephone records'. Klein is of especial note, for it is he who revealed the existence of Room 641A in the lawsuit Heptig vs AT&T that EFF took almost to the Supreme Court, who declined to hear the case on the basis that the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 protected AT&T from liability for involvement with any illegal activities. A law passed after the lawsuit was filed. In response to it, even.
That should make you a bit angry. We're not talking about telephone records here. We're talking about fiber splitting with drop-in access to the whole slurp. To any future despot this means that the United States may be prepared to deliver real-time private communications and databases of activity for its citizens, cradle to grave. Why the fuck would anyone want to build this thing, unless they were insane? James Bamford hinted at the possibility that NSA was 'going domestic' in his 1982 book Puzzle Palace as he suggests its interest in developing technology for bulk microwave gathering. That is to be expected as this technology was deployed worldwide. But the way they wished to go about it was a bit... peculiar:
Another indication of NSA's "broadband sweeping of multi-circuited domestic telecommunications trunk lines," David L. Watters told the Senate Intelligence Committee [in 1978!] lies in the Agency's request for an amendment to the wiretap law that would permit NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping "for the sole purpose of determining the capability of equipment" when such "test period shall be limited... to... ninety days." Continuing, he warned: "Let there be no misunderstanding here. There is only one category of wiretapping equipment or system which requires up to ninety days for test and adjustment, and that system is broadband electronic eavesdropping equipment, the vacuum-cleaner approach to intelligence gathering, the general search of microwave trunk lines. I make this assertion on the strength of actual experience in the electronic intelligence trade and on the strength of over twenty-five years' experience in the telecommunications profession. An ordinary, single-line wire tap requires only five minutes to adjust and test."
NSA should not have wanted th
Don't be scared my little Yankee "barbarian" friend, let a Greek hug you... everything will be o.k.! BUT: remember that EVIL BARBARIANS (not like those who voted for the Patriot Act) exist... please DON'T FORGET!
Thanks kindly. And hey --- on behalf of my country, I'm truly sorry we unleashed credit default swaps upon the world. That shit must have escaped from a lab somewhere.
1. reassuring sound of telephone records being gathered
2. turn on the radio and catch some news...
Run these concurrently in separate tabs. You might also enjoy this 1971 re-creation. Also the chicken heart that terrified Bill Cosby as a young child. Even Mr. Roger's Neighborhood combines well with dark ambient industrial.
I am so jittery... as the clock strikes Midnight I will no longer bask in the protective glow of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. I cannot fall asleep without the reassuring sound of telephone records being gathered. Surely something awful will happen tonight or tomorrow. Maybe I will try to organize the neighborhood for a continuous vigil until the Act is restored. But first, I'll just turn on the radio and catch some news...
The fault of that lies in Congress.
Spend Middle East War money on NASA and science and it goes a lot faster.
You cannot successfully argue against war itself as a waste of human resources or a needless monetary expense. Sure you can philosophize and get a show of nodding heads in peacetime, but then something awful happens and someone shouts "Remember the Maine!" or "Hitler will invade the UK, then Mexico!" or "Let's get Bin Laden!" and all is moot. Inquiring line items is useful... such as whether ~$60 billion disappeared while out-sourcing the supply line or whether airlifting $40 billion in 'unmarked bills' into Iraq was a great idea.
Be sure to tune in C-SPAN today [Sunday] at 4:00pm ET to see how many senators believe the Patriot Act is a good thing. But I'd bet my bottom dollar that all the NSA rhetoric will center on so-called 'call metadata sharing agreements' with nary a word about full content backbone taps which are the greatest threat.
Government spending is a mysterious process. When it is time for the Fed to mint virtual money for Quantitative Easing, bail out banks by easing their losses, or the Federales to finance wars by raising the trade deficit ceiling and selling bonds to the Chinese we are awash in Magical Unicorn Money. When it is budget time every cent is haggled or omnibussed. Clearly this beast has two heads.
But you have to get more specific than 'military spending'. Pick something, anything and try to start a grass roots movement to attack it. Or better yet, just spend your time 'selling' space exploration in all of its forms. Neil deGrasse Tyson wasn't completely joking when he suggests that a militarized space race with China (or rumors thereof) would jump-start the process. A new Cold War would certainly unlock that Magical Unicorn Money. It may seem odd but weaponizing space is actually a good idea.
But there is something I call the 'Pizza Delivery Syndrome', where someone desirous of something, say a Space Program, will seize upon a money-factoid such as this
cite "Consumers spend around 33 billion U.S. dollars in quick service pizza restaurants each year in the United States. Takeout pizza constitutes the largest share of spending within this category at nearly 15 billion U.S. dollars annually, followed by pizza delivery at around ten billion. This is perhaps unsurprising considering more than 20 percent of U.S. consumers eat takeout or delivered meals at least once a week. While older generations appear less dependent on such services, around 40 percent of 18 to 54 year olds felt that takeout food was essential to their way of life as of November 2014..."
and create, out of thin air, some hypothetical world where every one who desires a pizza is visited by a Fairy Godmother who smiles and asks, do you really want that pizza or could we all fulfill mankind's most glorious dream? Your wish is my command. In this scenario they always choose the pizza, statistics show. It serves as foundation for acerbic commentary on the wretched excess of modern humans. This is a dead end because (on the whole) people would rather talk about pizza than space.
Ask not what pizza lovers can do for you.
Ask what you can do to send pizza into
Wow, the delusion that somehow by clinging to space fantasies you're rescuing the species... Wow. If anyone ever needs evidence how lunatic the space fringe is...
Evolution is still happening. There won't be a human species in a million years one way or another.
Sending a few test pilots to die on a rusty empty ball won't change anything to that.
You self-important schizophrenic lunatic.
Let's take this outside.
Meet me at the YouTube comments section of 'Bright Giant Love Ball' where I'll kick your ass.
How much is that in library of congress?
Please, I'm no nerd, I don't know this "technology" stuff.
6 Shakespeares... or
16.5 gzip-Shakespeares... or a whopping
22.6 bzip2-Shakespeares.
The Bard fares well by the Burrows-Wheeler algorithm for his works are so oft-repeated he even runs on and repeats himself. "...So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent" as RLE (run length encoding) and "To smother up the English in our throngs, If any order might be thought upon..." as MTF (Move to Front) Transform. "We render you the tenth; to be ta'en forth! Before the common distribution at your only choice... as encode to Huffmans and selection of the sweetest table, and "Spare your arithmetic; never count the turns. Once, and a million!... symbol usage stored as sparse array.
Here is a brief video clip showing the moment the LightSail team browsed the log file to discover the error.
The total number of nuclear weapons is in decline.
Many of the doomsday horrors that tipped ICBMS for Cold War Game Over scenarios have been rendered into electricity.
cite "The Megatons to Megawatts program was initiated in 1993 and successfully completed in December 2013. A total of 500 tonnes of Russian warhead grade HEU (high enriched uranium, equivalent to 20,008 nuclear warheads) were converted in Russia to nearly 15,000 tonnes tons of LEU (low enriched uranium) and sold to the US for use as fuel in American nuclear power plants. During the 20-year Megatons to Megawatts program, as much as 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States was generated by fuel fabricated using LEU from Russian HEU. During this period, on a comparatively modest basis, the U.S. government has also been converting some of its excess nuclear warhead HEU into power plant fuel. Efforts have also been undertaken to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of converting warhead plutonium into fuel to augment nuclear fuel for U.S. power plants."
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck.... Shoot it!
From 1950-present the effective yield of nuclear weapons in general has also increased by ~35% as people-targets voluntarily clump together.
I find it ironic that an approach with a proven track record, Mutual Assured Destruction, has been lambasted as some sort of cold-war artifact, of intrinsic evil. The threat of Armageddon is the evil, MAD was the preventative. The United States of America was even founded on it. The 'armed militia model' where the empire and an armed populace, each with the power to hold the other in check -- the whole quotable 'We the People' litany -- is just a flowery and (to our ears) archaically quaint way of introducing the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction as a deterrent to tyranny. In a practical and historical sense MAD is the only device capable of holding peoples in restraint, long enough that the meme of self-restraint might creep into the culture.
Decreasing weapons count is just a stage past what Carl Sagan referred to as 'nuclear adolescence', and from the height of tensions to now we're coming along fine. Too many young folk just dismiss the Cold War weapons buildout as some kind of mass psychosis without trying to place themselves there mentally. Sure it was insane, but when you believe your enemy is batty insane what would you do? You have to do something a bit dodgy yourself, in calculated fashion. When revisionist historians try to inject the idea that some hypothetical and magical Kissinger-robot could have descended from the heavens (The Day The Earth Stood Still) and defused the situation, gotten the nuclear powers to sit down and talk like kindergarteners in a circle waiting for a pat on the head, they cheat us all. There was rational thinking, difficult and courageous decisions and some pretty good know-how behind those Cold War excesses. The idea of a hostile invasion may seem quaint and laughable today, but then it was a very real concern. We had just fought a world war to prevent one.
Everybody talks about a new world in the morning.
New world in the morning, that's today!
It's time to weaponize space for quick response in defense of the Earth,
or we're ALL sitting ducks.
EVOLUTIONARY DEAD END COOKIES
(serves 7 billion)
INGREDIENTS
two million years of domesticated fire
six millennia of scientific curiosity
two centuries of significant progress in science and engineering
50 years of space exploration
35 years of awareness of KT impact and necessity of planetary defense
one cup irrational fear of radiation and willful disregard for shielding techniques (to taste)
one sprinkle fear of death from any cause not typically experienced by modern suburbans
lump of plain common sense (if you can not find it, substitute two tbsp blind faith and a pound of dogged determination)
tiny dash of optimism
PREPARATION
Carefully combine all ingredients in a large bowl of stars, ensuring that you completely blend the essential characteristics that have allowed these naked apes to overcome natural extremes of climate, predators, disease and boredom. Beat until technological excellence rises to the top. Form into several self-sustainable colonies and multinational corporate enterprises. Place in space oven preheated to a degree of caution and optimism. Bake until spinoffs from the enterprise rise to the occasion with the potential to enhance and expand human civilization with its yummy goodness, colonies in space are able to mobilize quickly in Earth's defense, and Galaxia might be achieved.
SERVING
Throw out all that shit. Engage the collective human mind in sitcoms and 'reality' shows.
Promote artificial issues that represent lack of vision or restraint (terrorism, energy poverty) as if they were natural threats
Let the fucking insurance companies guide all innovation and risk taking.
Promote zombies and head-shot horror in mainstream media as a gateway to cannibalism and violent population reduction.
Popularize cheeky '1001 ways to Die' angles.
Feed the slack.
Characterize folks who try to push through these barriers as 'space nutters'.
For cookies, spray flavored coating over a nutritionally inert Styrofoam shapes and market them as "heart healthy".
Adding the keyword BRILLO to your searches effectively locks out 'intelligent design' search results that have been deliberately seeded to rank among science articles. It thrusts you into the bizarre world of people who call themselves brillo-head, folks making fun of popular culture. Also some money saving coupons! Also a great many documents in Spanish. Brillo even makes a shoe shine product, so anyone researching boot problems.
Came to mind because the company who made its fortune bringing relevance to online search results just decided to name their new project in such a way as to aggravate people searching for specific technical topics on it, until the end of time. Instead of choosing a nonsensical name. If you want to name a new project Google, please Google it first. Or connect a USB Ouija Board and ask Lewis Carroll to think one up for you.
#!/bin/perl -pn -0777
use Math::Prime::Util 'next_prime';
# 'pepper' ROT13 backwards from end of message
# using distribution of primes so occasional blips
# become more concentrated at the end
s/\s+$//; # no whitespace at end /s; # undo a post-correction I made
s/ \[.*?\]//sg; # eliminate added Slashdot [host] for decode
s/ nut /
@a=unpack('C*',$_);
$i=0;
while (($i=next_prime($i))<1018) { # only last 1018 chars
$p=\$a[-$i];
if (($$p>=97) and ($$p<=122)) {
$$p+=($$p>109? -13 : 13); # ROT13
}
}
$_=pack('C*',@a)."\n";
[...decode...] Another bizarre theory posed in science fiction that to everyone's dismay became entangled in String Theory is the idea that Multiverses may exist. Since the incomprehensible ones too dissimilar to ours cannot be comprehended, lazy popular speculation centers around parallel Universes populated with people just like us, but slightly different and dumber. If tickling Higgs and twanging strings shifts things ever so slightly, continued accelorater accidents (aka experiments) might even be holographically disturbing the Multiverse in additive fashion effect that subtly shifts regions of them around. Only stable life-forms with highly advenced thought processes would notice this subtle effect, since our mental process also a holographic pattern and has a degree of chemical hysterisis and self-correcting properties. Percieved effects might be 'senses' that things have changed though empirical measurements have changed, or violent extremes of weather as the butterfly-wings of chaotic processes in a parallel Universe match winbgbeats for brief spans. But in the end everything is speculative nonsense except for the prevailing theory that is supported by evidence, and we don't know which one that is until the end of all things. Life may not be all you want, but it's all you've got. So stick a flower in your bellybutton and be happy.
Every time a statistician uses 'average' or 'chances are' in a sentence, God kills a kitten.
Think of the kittens!
I am at a complete loss to understand why taking an important step in Earth's defense that could only be accomplished by its most intelligent species is only able to raise a sorry-ass-monkey-fuck $5,898 from 111 people in 11 days.
And now I am being told I should embrace some gambler's fallacy of 'non-imminence' (on average! we think!) and ratchet down my whimpering terror and boost complacency until I am a well-adjusted individual.
Statisticians and writers sometimes take inappropriate liberties when presenting probabilities. This is natural because finding joy in figuring things out is one of our finest traits. The reason for choosing any particular angle to present a result can be "because it would be fun to think of it that way". Or as in articles like this, to allay what is perceived as a generally unfounded or disproportionate amount of fear. Addressing these fears directly is invaluable because they can traumatize children, and have even been known to swing adults into voting Republican --- or Democrat!
For preventable global existential threats, is it 'OK' to play the stats game by the same rules as for other non-global or non-existential threats? Is it even ethical? That word bites doesn't it.
Isn't there some kind of 'division by zero' thrown exception thing that applies when we're talking about extinction events? As a species, aren't we clever enough to invent one if it does not exist?
Not all statistics are actionable.
And not all science articles are fit for children.
[TA ] Human beings haven't been around on Earth forever. [...] Chances are, we're not going to be around forever, either. It's only a question of how and when we're going to go out.
That's it, kids --- it's nature's way. Go gently into the Good Night when your time is come, as a species. "That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea." If this some sort of foundation argument, then what is being built?
We are the species who invented "forever". We are not bound by it because its definition is not yet complete. By what ever objective scientific time scale that can be derived from any present theory of The End, you must try to factor an important unknown: the effect future human insight and due diligence may bring to bear on the problem of survival. If you have trouble believing this as I do, join the club. I won't.
I've already said my piece about those poor 100 people who died from asteroids last year (on average! we think!).
All in all, a great article, well researched and compellingly written. But the why of it really sucks. How did that happen? Are there hungry insurance salesman lurking nearby worried that the sorry-ass-monkey-fuck $5,898 from 111 people in 11 days will eat into their commissions?
Don't sell out that ultimate future by falling prey to an extinction event that could happen tomorrow. The way things stand it may be at least ten years before a viable mission is ready to go IF we start today. Let us hope it's ten years of good luck.
Has LHC destroyed the Earth yet?
For best results, keep reloading the page.
Now is always an excellent time to warn of the conceivable dangers of high energy particle physics experiments which are already in progress. Stephen Hawking warns that Higgs Boson 'God' particle, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could cause a 'catastrophic vacuum delay' if scientists were to put it under extreme stress. Fortunately this is not a major budget concern for CERN since if this is true, the facility need not be relocated to a safer place because there is no safer place. Another is the formation of so-called 'mini back holes'. The math says they will be very brief and very small and especially very unstable, which is apparently a good thing. Aside from the Universe ending or oops-not-so-unstable black holes falling into a hissy-sucky orbit around the center of Earth's mass, we have the pedestrian possibility that when nature's fur is rubbed the wrong way she might maintain stability by righting things with a highly localized and energetic 'correction'. Which blows things up. Another bizarre theory posed in science fiction that to everyone's dismay became entangled in String Theory is the idea that Multiverses may exist. Since the incomprehensible ones too dissimilar to ours cannot be comprehended, lazy popular speculation centers around parallel Universes populated with people just like us, but slightyy dvfferent and dumbee. If tipkling Higgs and twanging striags shvfts tuingf ever sb slightly, continhed nccelorater accidentf (axa exprriments) mighg evrn be uolographicalll disturbiag the Mhltiverse vn additive fafhion effept that subtly shists regibns bf thez around. Onyy staole lise-forms with highyy advenped thoughg procesfes wohld aotice this fuotle esfect, sinpe our mentay process alfo a hblograchic pntgern aad has a degree bf chezipal hyfterisvs and sels-corrrcting properties. Prrcieved effrcts mvght be 'senfes' that thvngs have chnngeq ghouth empirvcal mrasueementf uave nut changrd, or violeat extrezes bf weathrr as ghe outtersly-wiags of cuaotic propefses in a carallrl Universe magch jiabgbrats for brief spans. Bug vn tue end eierythvng is specuyative nonfease expept fbr tue prevailint theory thag vs shpcorted by rvvdence, and je dbn't kaow whvcu one that if untiy thr end of all tuingf. Lifr zay aot be ayl you wang, but ig's nll yoh'ie got. So sgick a flojer in ybur beylybhtgon nnq be hnpcl.
Windows 3.0 was launched on 22 May 1990 â" I know, 'coz I was there as a SDE on the team. [...] It was a big deal for me, and I still consider Win 3 as *the* most significant Windows' release, and I wonder what other Slashdotters think, looking back on Win 3?
Pleasedtomeet'cha. Some fine work you did on 3.x! Windows 2.11 was the first version I encountered, but we never really considered it more than a wrapper in which one could run Aldus PageMaker (the Adobe InDesign of today) to output to a LasterMaster 1000 typesetter, which was 'the' first dry toner laser that could lay down small serif type that would reproduce on camera.
Windows 3.0 was the first environment one could consider booting into and staying there... we sold a number of them for personal use and its stability for publishing began to rival the Mac (I'm a PC person but pull no punches). Wide adoption for business use in our area did not really start until 3.11 and even 95, but that was mainly because we had done our job 'really well' and had a large installed base of IBMPC/clones networked with Novell and LanTastic running DOS applications. Our customers were comfortable in the DOS environment and we didn't hurry them. Memory and CPU were precious and all graphical environments had plenty of 'hourglass' in those days.
It's worth noting that graphical environments, even multi-tasking is pervasive today but it is still a learned skill and there were many people from the DOS era who had optimized their work techniques well into the Windows era. One fellow who dealt with real estate contracts tried Windows said "It can hardly keep up with my typing speed! This is an improvement?" Even the task switching latency of DesqView (which did lag because hard disk was really slow by today's standard) was a source of frustration to him. Most days he'd stay out of it. He'd seen examples of multitasking workflow and was not convinced. "My DOS programs import and export just fine. Exporting useful bits and naming them properly is an essential part of working efficiently. If you haven't done that you haven't finished the job. So... I'm supposed to bring up some old thing and cut and paste paragraphs or sentences of it into a new thing, one at a time, while switching between them? Look here." He shows me a folder with hundreds of small files. "That's my clipboard. I have all the names in my head. Some of the pieces have several variations, but I can import the whole thing and delete the unused parts faster than the graphic environment can scroll a document from top to bottom." He really could too, in the days of green phosphor displays he was able to read while scrolling quickly, while half the characters had fading ghosts of the previous line. He did not fully commit to a graphical environment until it was running on a 486.
For all the early issues, Windows 3 was still a technician's dream. In order to fully appreciate its beauty, you would have had to experience the nefarious and wacky world of TSRs, IPX and 'packet driver' network stacks and DOS 386 memory extenders. When they finally did work they were really stable but it took a wizard's touch. Windows' driver architecture was well designed from the start.
What crazy thing those "Space Nutters" been up to today?
How 'bout dem Space Nutters, ain't they kooks?
Heads in the stars, readin' space booooooks!
Plannin' dem missions to launch men 'n probes
or spinny-dizzy colonies in LaGrangian lobes
wearin' them space suits on Halloween on Earth
chewin' the Space fat on for all that it's worth!
Dem nugger-mugger Space Huggers way down South
stuffin' Space Nutter Central for all that funds allow'th
How to be a Space Nutter, only one way to hack it
Get yerself a nuke, find an asteroid and smack it!
One in a growing series of 'them poem' tributes
First hour
Second Hour
Great reading so far. Hopefully more forthcoming.
C-SPAN of the event:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?3...
Rand Paul Filibuster begins at index 3 hours 49 minutes.
OPTIONAL POST CONTENT:
"Blah blah PR whore not a hero who cares about independent candidates blah straw polls straw men blah Obama good Obama bad yay Rand yay Ron guns terrorists NSA python script Hosts file WTF all crooks no change schedule all for nought TV says 'filibuster is happening' blah no transcript blah Brietbart posts transcript Yah! Pauls site no transcript posted WTF blah kook like Alex Jones blah USA Freedom Act must be good cuz it has Freedom in the name blah yeah right? good PR bad PR hate dem Repubs hate dem libs blah Rand just a flip flop flip flop dookey drones liquor store tach story FAIL bleedin' heart whatever blah blah look moron blah screw that like dislike fake filibuster real filibuster blah blah"
Y'all go on without me. I'm busy reading the first couple hours of transcript because I like to read, then maybe pick up some of the rest at CSPAN because it does represent exhaustive research to gather talking points, and it also might yield insight on whether Rand and the staff he hires are presidential material.
This is a phenomenon where music is produced from the very sounds IT professionals most dreaded to hear. A symphony of aggravation The clattering brings to mind drives in which customers had somehow inserted two or floppies at once and managed to latch them down, bending all the retaining mechanisms. The shrill higher timbres reminiscent of a faulty drive controller or driver software run amok. Louder notes mean resonance in the enclosure which does not mean "wow what a cool sound", it means "oh shit something's loose and I'll have to disassemble the drive to discover what it is. And get it back together without creating a new one".
Anyone who can pick up these items for $10+ used but functional or $30+ may find it difficult to grasp the level of dedication that went into avoiding these sounds and the dread we experienced to hear them. From the late 70s floppy drives were in constant use, and replacement drives cost hundreds of dollars. You are a tech making $20/hour (the $80/hour of today) and you are given a drive to fix. Can you fix it? You clean the heads (thin epoxy resin over tiny coil) and put in a calibration disk, hook an oscilloscope to the analog circuit to see the Lissajous pattern, look at the patterns. Adjust the optical track-zero stop and re-index until signal is at maximum. Then go for track 79 and check the pattern. Does it get there? If not you could have stepper failure (missing pulses? grit in the slide mechanism? Graphite and tiny needlenose pliers are your only friends. Does the pattern waver on each rotation? weak spring or bent spring retainer. And so on.
Then you have fixed the drive and send it out, only to discover that all the customer's data (and backup) disks were written to with the misaligned drive and no longer read properly. You get the drive back with the discs, and must intentionally mis-align it again until they read well enough to copy to a properly aligned drive. And then explain how your time doing all this was well spent.
Not so nice music to my ears.
"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances."
~Francis Bacon, from New Atlantis, written in 1626 .
This dude nailed modern electronics and digital sampling some 350 years before its time.
When my father died, it was as if a whole library had burned down.
~Laurie Anderson
Until we learn to mourn for all the music that might soon be lost
or the movies that never made it to DVD, or even VHS,
because it was never transferred from vinyl, or film
because people do not cherish vinyl when they see it at Goodwill
or more tragically, someone dies --- and the collection of a lifetime goes into the landfill
because the dozen people who stopped by at the garage sale had no interest
when everything you 'own' is inside your phone,
a single toilet can swallow Western Civilization
remember that direct-to-digital CD? Now all you have is a badly encoded mp3
all those books that were fascinating but went right over your head as a kid,
wouldn't it be great to know which ones they were?
every day there are fewer people out there who have read things that never made it to 'digital'
another one died this morning.
so-called 'magnetic master tapes' cannot master time, they fade into Gaussian noise
a decently kept mass-produced vinyl phonograph record is the BEST way to recover the music
how many of your family's most precious photographs are on paper, anywhere?
have you spilled water on one lately?
most families these days have NOT A SINGLE MEMBER who considers themself a LIBRARIAN
a (tragically thankless) job of gathering, organizing, copying, re-distributing the copies
and ensuring that at least some of them are stored safely. Writings, photos. Even who is related to whom!
YOU may be the only likely candidate. Unless you begin tomorrowit will never be done by anyone.
on the Internet it's even worse. How many entities can you think of that store Internet pages
long term with a real commitment? The Wayback machine and who else?
newer tech better? Not necessarily so, IF it breeds such a mass complacency about simple
preservation of knowledge that the day arrives when EVERYONE thinks making backups and
saving previous generations of knowledge and artistic works is SOMEONE ELSE'S JOB.
In such a situation we could 'lose' more than half of everything that was worth saving
in a single human lifetime. Are we living in that time span now?
Think about it (please!).
WE ARE LIVING IN A FUTURE DARK AGE
A too-short history of data retention
The only day we clearly recall some day may be the day we lost all our memories.