After seeing all these strange articles, I have come to the conclusion that these are not April Fools jokes. A real slashdot april fools joke would have been witty and subtle.
You are to be commended for the only constructive criticism I've seen so far among a flurry of comments best translated as, "I dinna like it, can't tell you what I like but I'll know when I see it. Next!". Like a game of darts where you score by hitting the other players.
'42:MOL' has achieved cultural Trope status for many of us. If I am ever on an elevator with a 42nd floor button, I for one will never be able to resist tapping it and as the door opens, announce "Behold... the meaning of life!" in the company of complete strangers --- or even if alone --- for my own amusement. The power of tropes is such that one's invocation of them becomes a talisman to ward off boredom and introverted desperation. In the lonely desperate emotional wilderness of our time. To ward off the abyss, as its howling winds tear at the edges of our souls.
Presenting a trope with fanfare and flourish to a wide audience, as was done here, that is risky business. Part of the problem is that it was presented flat-out as-is without a twist. Among those in the know, the presence of a twist begs forgiveness for the heinous (gosh gee Wally) act of dishing up something that we already know. We shouldn't forget though that to those who have only recently read Douglas Adams' books for the first time, this Slashdot story would be perceived as a welcome (and hilarious!) allusion and affirmation. I envy those people, maybe I will order a lobotomy from Amazon so I can rediscover Hitchhiker's Guide again for the first time.
So let me raise a glass and propose a toast to whatever the fuck I just said. Or we could just all shut up and drink.
It's [solar energy] going to be enough for those who will remain after the Generational Purge. The One Percenters will find those figures quite satisfactory, since the plans for California is to turn it into a state-size vacation area anyway.
Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
Sorry Bob, the devil is looking elsewhere to fill quota, and even good drink will be scarce during the Generational Purge due to a loss of the 'Just In Time' food supply chain. Modern cannibals will find scarcely a week's worth of cans on the grocery shelf and perhaps another few weeks in distribution centers, but this will serve only to swell the ranks of the migrant Cannibal Armies that will actually conduct the Purge.
The Cannibal Army is the ultimate (and last) achievement of any failed modern civilization. The only reason the history books are not chock full of 'em is that historians are delicious, and there has never been enough population to achieve the necessary critical mass, collapsed societies to this point have always left numbers few enough to live off the land, and retained enough know-how to do so. That is not true today.
Ask anyone on the street if they know how to solder a joint, sow seed, plant a cow or where delivery pizza comes from and they haven't a clue. But ask them if they could figure out how to eat someone and they will quickly nod assent. It is not only instinctive it is infused into the culture. The recurring theme of pursuit and car chases in popular movies expresses the primal knowledge necessary for cannibalism.
The cannibals will be ruthless, they will employ cleverness and the use of technology to scour the land. Your stationary survival enclaves will be the favorite feast of the first wave, where all the cherished ideals of small sustainable energy, and those who practice it, go into the cooking pot. Domestic cattle and other animals will be mere appetizers in this Moveable Feast, because cannibal armies have no patience to raise them. Disease from improper preparation will claim some, but the critical mass will persist until there is only one Cannibal Army left in California.
That last cannibal army, great in number, will then march on the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant to absorb and consume the small group of engineers and scientists who have gathered there to preserve the remaining fruits of civilization, and for hot showers. Cannibals are easily swayed by reason, you might say they are even attracted to it, because wherever reason exists there are yummy people to consume. And consume they will until the last corn-fed game is exhausted. And then they will turn on each other and feast until human population levels out and reaches a sustainable level of -1.
The fate of California's energy policy is foretold in Lucifer's Hammer. Devour this book.
[...] some people started GOOgling it, not knowing what it was, and they'll continue GOOging it forever just because This is the trend that never ends, only the name does change my friend, [...]
It means eLearning or iBrainPodPeople or LearningMOO/MUD. It also means Learn-A-TRON or Learn-O-Matic. As you see on the oldest revisions of the Wiki, it was "founded on the theory of connectivism and an open pedagogy based on networked learning." From these huble 2011 origins it has gone on to have been founded on other things too. TIL In MOOC "every letter is negotiable," which means the shortest possible variant of it is "" the null set...
No biting satire intended, as one who never attended High School I welcome the advent of the online courses that can be realized for less than $100,000, whatever the cost. Along with Benny Hill I am learning all the time.
I offer Sendmail in its mid-1990s form as an example. We had several dialup customers with Microsoft Exchange servers. They'd connect and Exchange would issue an ETRN to dequeue waiting messages. The problem was that Sendmail by default, would send a "Warning: could not deliver mail for 4 hours" reply back to sender after the email had languished in the queue that long, and they dialed in sporadically and not at all on weekends so folks who emailed them would get these messages. It was bad. I wanted to disable this warning specifically for ETRN domains but not for everyone.
Does this feature exist? Sendmail documentation defined 'queuewarn' as a global setting but did not address this "deferred delivery by design" problem. Could there be a presently-undocumented or undiscovered workaround? Delving into the source it was visually apparent the answer was no, the warning was unconditional. The only workaround would have been to run a completely separate SMTP server on another IP address with the queuewarn off, and MX 'em to that. What a bother. Are domain-specific attributes available? Yes, these had a mailer flag of HOLD. Can it be addressed with a one-liner? Yes. So the _FFR_NODELAYDSN_ON_HOLD compile/config flag was born, off by default because we don't want to break things.
Sendmail had the right balance of code-to-comment. What comments were there would not make sense until you understood the underlying process, and tag names were explicit enough that comments were seldom necessary.
Cell phone use causes the brain to disconnect from the whole body. When you spend your whole day staring at that tiny screen ignoring everything around you many things go wrong.
[Cue music] It would not have been possible otherwise, to sufficiently emphasize the frightful toll of the new menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers. Cell phones are that distraction -- and the Internet is the enabler -- an unspeakable scourge -- The Real Public Enemy Number One !
Its first effect is sudden violent, uncontrollable laughter, then come dangerous hallucinations -- space expands -- time slows down, almost stands still.... fixed ideas come next, conjuring up monstrous extravagances --- followed by emotional disturbances, the total inability to direct thoughts, the loss of all power to resist physical emotions leading finally to acts of shocking violence... ending often in incurable insanity.
In picturing its soul-destroying effects no attempt was made to equivocate. The scenes and incidents, while fictionized for the purposes of this story, are based upon actual research into the results of cellphone and Internet addiction. If their stark reality will make you think, will make you aware that something must be done to wipe out this ghastly menace, then the picture will not have failed in its purpose.
Because the dread technology may be reaching forth next for your son or daughter...or yours... or YOURS!
Amen. Surely more of a 'State of Emergency' than some sorry-ass hurricane. Oh yeah, and see about finding a President who'd veto this kind of shit, maybe roll back some of those perpetual declared emergencies too. Oops, that was Ron Paul. Better luck next time.
Also don't shoot video from upper balconies, GoPro headbands while skateboarding 'Ollies' in the air, while hanging from chandeliers, cliffs, standing on the transparent tourist platform atop the Eiffel Tower, from tethered balloons, while being shot from a cannon, while head-butting a ram, riding glass elevators, or suspended from suspenderences such as but not limited to rope or chain, or if you are tall, or if the subject is short.
These distinct camera angles strongly suggest drone use to busy compliance officers, who have been judicially empowered to employ the same 'presumption of use', 'intent to distribute' arguments that have made the War On Drugs the successful endeavor it is today. If your content is flagged, you will be pressed to supply proof that a drone was not present, and unmarked drones may appear next to your your house and photographs taken. Drawing on the 'admissibility loophole' that has made the partnership between Intelligence agencies and Law Enforcement the successful endeavor it is today, where the fact of warrantless, illegal surveillance need not be disclosed, these photos may be presented to Judge and Jury without comment or disclosure of origin.
To avoid unnecessary legal hassle, do not even post footage of model environments such as Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Even obvious depth-of-field artifacts may be targeted by zealous prosecutors if they allege the use of drones in pan-tilt photography. Due to the perceived nature of building giant models and the fact that bugs were in it, the movie "Bugs' Life" is exempt. There is also a blanket exemption for drone footage of cats, or drones that ARE cats.
Fortunately for us... Google has announced they have developed an AI program that detects the use of drone footage with 99% accuracy.
yeah lets combine 2 technologies that are each too expensive on their own. that will solve all our problems. you forgot to shave your neckbeard, doorstop.
Did I hear a-scuffle? Whose humor is so obtuse? Well sure... it's No-Plan Stan, Knight of the Status Quo! Good to see you in these parts. Kinda reminds me of a wild teenage party in progress with parents out of town, loud music, unidentified liquids and guests sliding down the bannisters, toilet paper rolled down the stairs. Owners' kids gathering the crystal and the nicknacks to hide in the basement, pets being fed hors d'oeuvres (Hot Wings) and throwing up on the carpet. People throwing up on the carpet. Bedroom, bathroom doors locked from inside. The piano is missing. Some kids are wearing funny hats in the hallway, giggling. One of them mentions Thorium Energy.
There is a loud banging on the door. In bursts No-Plan Stan, Knight of the Status Quo. The music stops. With hands on hips he bellows, "You should all be ashamed of yourselves!" Everyone is silent for a moment, each thinking of something truly shameful. "This is all too damned fucking expensive! And Thorium Energy will never happen!" He slams the door in retreat.
Yes, it was expensive for me. Was it expensive for you too? Did you feel the economy move?
It really is time to reexamine the reasons why things are expensive. I mean get down and dirty, research directly to the ultimate source of the resource, and chart its costs along the way. When it comes to the price of lollygagging while we have some idea of a new and exciting source of energy, but lack the guuumph to take the next step tomorrow, what a price that is.
After No-Plan Stan left, everyone streamed into the front room. Lipstick-smudged faces peered out from doors in the hallway, then couples emerged. The piano was found, and put back into place. Fires were put out. "What a bitch! You mean, it all comes down to money?" "That's what he said." "What could we possibly do to change the world then? Go to Wall Street?" "My Dad works on Wall Street. He says it's fucked just like everything else, and he's too low on the pyramid." "Your Dad is building a pyramid?" "No, he's low on the pyramid. He's building a Bubble. It's hard to explain." "Okay. What was that bit about Thor Eeum?" "Um... maybe... my hat?" The hat is passed around. It is a Burger King paper hat with a silver DVD in front. The DVD is labelled 'Thorium Energy'. "So what's 'Thorium Energy'? It's weird how that guy just popped in and left." "I dunno, it was in a pile of mail someone sent Dad because he works on Wall Street." "So what's on it?" "Hell if I know. I just picked it out because it would look cool on my hat." "So let's see it then." Everyone gathered around the screen. Snacks emerged. Some put arms around shoulders.
CONTENT: [00:00] LFTR in 5 minutes; [06:05] dialogue on Energy sources & conservation; [08:29] Elizabeth May (Green Party of Canada) on why nuclear 'fails', response; [13:40] Kirk Sorensen's time at NASA, discovering molten salt research; [17:30] on Glenn Seaborg's discovery of Thorium's fissile properties in 1942; [20:05] What nuclear fission is, decay chains, half life; [26:45] neutron absorption, cross section, Xenon poisoning at Hanford; [30:06] isotopic enrichment, Thorium/u233 rejected for weapons; [32:45] Atoms for Peace, absorption propensity and performance of nuclear fuels, thermal & fast spectrum, Thorium/Plutonium debate; [36:28] Alvin Weinberg focuses on Thorium and liquid fuels, Oak Ridge Labs, Aircraft Reactor Experiment, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, Fluoride Salts; [44:40] two-fluid molten salt reactor; [48:18] light water reactors, Watts Bar, reactor safety and containment systems, issues with wat
The Hydraulic Empire was touched upon by James Burke in Connections S01E01: The Trigger Effect. The water stuff begins about ~28 minutes in, but don't cheat yourself out of what comes before. I consider this single program to be the finest hour ever filmed for television. It inspired in my me as a boy a lifelong love of infrastructure and concern for our continued species-survival as modern humans.
Energy is the thread that runs through everything now. With an ocean and technology and applied energy... fresh water is possible, on any scale. It just depends how determined we are to extract it. Every major source of fresh water in North America is presently guarded by peoples who will fight to the death to preserve their own land and way of life. Even the tapping of 'unlimited' deep geological reservoirs of water is fraught with unintended consequences. The only way to really solve the problem is to bring into existence something completely new that changes the game. Whether we be enslaved by access to water, to energy or the parasitic economy and the tax man, the breaking of these bonds are turning points of history.
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a carbon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common." ~Kirk Sorensen, Thorium Remix 2011
ENRON. The latest wonder-tool of the late 90s, a bold new approach to the distribution and settlement policies of grid energy [or water!] suppliers. You have all been losing money trying to buy and sell your product among yourselves. Now it is time to buy and sell your product through US. We'll take a percent and you will have MORE.
ENRON. Let us make everything into a stock market, a futures market. Let us negotiate on your behalf (said to both halves at once). Let us woo you with impressive corporate speak and wooly acronyms to describe what is essentially a transparent middleman-insertion tactic.
ENRON. Tired of trying to sell your customer base on some desired tactic by disclosing said tactic to the PSC and the public? Tired of those public hearings? Let ENRON come to the rescue. Tell us what you need to happen and we'll see that back-room conspiratorial tactics can ease your pain, by making all other options seem more expensive.
ENRON. Ask us how triggered brownouts [or droughts!] and planned resource shortages can improve your bottom line [and ours]!
ENRON. Because no one needs to innovate or improve infrastructure. We just need to make life suck a little more, cost more, and people will demand less. More complicated is BETTER.
OH --- AND BEFORE YOU GO --- do please look over these necklaces of fine silicon jewels and take one as your own, or for your sweetie. You see they are actually little computers, or 'chips', as ran the great society of old. I have filed off the covering so you can see the tiny chip, which shines in the light. See here! Only a copper or two for each, and if you look me in the eye and promise you will strive to better your mind and help re-build this world, I'll part with it for a shake of the hand.
Did you know that the little chips in these fine adornments were called IBM Power8 Chips, and they were powered by... coal? Absolutely true! But that is another story...
The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future --- and Gained the Past.
WE CAN ONLY BLAME OURSELVES for the Time Rift. From discrete logic to main boards to chipsets to picoboards to nanite molecular clusters, we had machines re-drawing the same machines on smaller scale until they were like dust and pebbles, and yet, everything worked pretty well most of the time.
THE DISTINCTION between software and hardware had merged, workable modules open sourced and refined with a really clever interconnection scheme. Somewhere along the line we left hardware design from 'scratch' --- and software design to the 'code' level --- behind. Things were no longer constructed for purpose. Software was no longer compiled. We began to plug and play and clone and shim.
IT WAS HUMANS, amateur enthusiasts even, that first cloned and shimmed small machines into other machines of similar more refined purpose, and they did it with the same techniques we had used to construct analog circuits: locking together this way, and securing with that, test and done. There was an art to it. Where one had once meshed APIs together in the synchronous communications realm, now it was a matter of finding the proper angle and orientation of these smart pebbles, based on their markings and unique shapes. There was a flair to it, and some of this art was as much judged by its appearance as by function.
BUT SOON WE GREW WEARY of that, and trained our machines to clone, shim and assemble these smaller machines. It was like some cyborg Tetris game where your challenge was to fit the pieces together as they fell from the sky. And the sky was full of pieces. Anything was possible if your reach was long and you gazed far enough, to grasp the perfect puzzle-piece.
A FEW RESPONSIBLE ENGINEERS of the era took the time to publish diagnostic procedures with which one could fix these amalgamations, should one have the patience to pull them apart to do so, like the SAMS Photofacts of old. Every piece had its own direct interface for configuration and in theory at least, one could fix problems or reconfigure the pieces by simply talking to them directly. They documented these diagnostic and configuration interfaces, often cribbed from the documents of other engineers, which were scarcely ever used now, probing them to discover the more primal pieces within to gather documentation on those too.
BUT IT WAS THANKLESS to do so, and these engineers found themselves out of work or forcefully retired. Their productivity paled besides younger geniuses who were simple hunter-gatherers, whose cleverness in assembling working prototypes was deft and swift. From concept to bubble-wrap technology companies had little interest in deep documentation. It was seen as a fetish. The thing works! Clone it and done. These hastily made things flooded the market and soon replaced other well-documented things. At times something failed and its inventors could not say why, they just assembled a new one or went bankrupt.
IN A SAD IRONY as to the supposed superiority of digital over analog --- that this whole professionon of digitally-stored 'source' documentation began to fade and was finally lost. It had became dusty, and the unlooked-for documents of previous eras were first flagged and moved to lukewarm storage. It was a circular process, where the world's centralized search indices would be culled to remove pointers to things that were seldom accessed. Then a separate clean-up where the fact that something was not in the index alone determined that it was purgeable. The process was completely automated of course, so no human was on hand to mourn the passing of material that had been the proud product of entire careers. It simply faded.
THEN SOMETHING TOOK THE INTERNET BY STORM, it was some silly but popular Game with a perversely intricate (and ultimately useless) information store. Within the space of six months index culling and auto-purge had assigned more than a third of all storage to the Game. Only as the Game itself faded
Main difference being that it never actually burns through to Uruguay, because it stops when it hits the last letter of syndrome.
Who knew that the Silent E had such awesome power??A perusal of available scientific literature does not even hint at this ability. Even graphene has a silent E, which could be the true source of its unique properties. Silent E should be incorporated into the design of all Gen V reactors.
Silent E decommissioning may also help with radiological cleanup. It can turn a plume into a plum.
The title "No Fuel In the Fukushima Reactor #1" is WRONG. The fuel is still inside the reactor. It is just melted down at the bottom.
That is correct. The title is misleading, but summary link text "not in its place" is on the mark. Muon scanning is still in progress. The paper Cosmic Ray Radiography of the Damaged Cores of the Fukushima Reactors [2012] describes the approach in more detail. Most thought the fuel would melt under these conditions but the real question is, has the there been a 'melt-through', where melted fuel escaped the reactor containment vessel, as Chernobyl's did? To make an so-called Elephant's Foot of solidified corium?
Leslie Corrice speculates (section 'c') that the fuel is still in the reactor and has not escaped containment. He uses a line of empirical reasoning based on radiation measurements with a few assumptions about water flow inside the building. We will see if his analysis is correct.
If the melted fuel remains in the Reactor Pressure Vessel and it has not been breached, then this safety measure worked, even if nothing else did.
Over the years I have experienced many major spills on electronics, various liquids. The most success I had was with Carbon Tet (toxic! use outside with gloves!) with an almost-100% recovery rate (unless of course components were damaged before power was removed), but a flush with 90% Isopropyl Alcohol can work given enough drying time.
None of my keyboards have ever lasted long enough to wear out, and in the last decade the recovery rate has gone down. I don't know whether it's pin spacing, decreased circuit margins or stuff trapped in tiny spaces, but many a 'pristine' cleaned keyboard was a goner with several keys inoperable or 'latched'.
The Logitech 310 ends all that. It is certainly not the best key action I've had (Cherry!)... but the tradeoff is all the spills (coffee, soda, water) thus far have been easy to clean, it remains operational, no disassembly required. With a spare in the closet, I know I have a keyboard that will keep going indefinitely, or until it wears out.
Yea, you can purchase waterproof keyboards for a pretty penny. Fact is, most keyboards are engineered to suck in liquids like a wick and stop working. This one is reasonably priced. Weather or not you 'like' this keyboard, I encourage everyone to purchase a K310 to at least keep in the closet to use as an emergency spare, and thus reward Logitech for this simple design innovation that battles 'willful' planned obsolescence.
Wyden's on-record questioning of James Clapper â" wherein Clapper answered "No sir... not wittingly" to Wyden's "Do you collect any information on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" question â" is cited by Snowden as the event that pushed him over the edge, and caused him to disclose the US domestic spying programs. Wyden's patriotism set the whole thing in motion.
I wonder if Wyden really knows this... and realizes where it may lead. If political ambition is his goal he could take it to the top some day. In 2015 Americans view 'the government' as the No. 1 Problem to solve. Unfortunately the issues they are most upset with -- such as healthcare -- are extremely partisan.
"Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everythingâ"telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.
"If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
As Snowden has revealed, we are at the edge of the abyss. As I have repeatedly warned in these forums, this furor over so-called phone call metadata is a limited hang-out, a diversion from the clear and present danger of full content backbone taps at interconnects. And here in Wyden's remarks we get a glimpse that there is more to the story. A 21st Century Church Committee is needed.
Here's what Wyden needs to do:
1. Call a press conference to announce that there is enough cause in the publicly available Snowden leaks, as well as certain other details he is privy to and cannot disclose, to form a 21st century bi-partisan 'Church Committee'. He would need to give a quick recap of those 1975 proceedings for those who are historically challenged... but it would make for a very interesting and well televised event.
2. Call another press conference the very next day. This one to publicly announce and air out any personal dirty laundry he may have. Extra-marital affairs, investments with conflicts of interest. Unless there is murder in there not only will he get a free pass, but people would take notice if he states that he is 'clearing the field' and proactively mitigating any attempt to leak this information as a distraction. He can also point out that whether or not they would take such action, they may be in possession of this information, and that is what the Committee hopes to address.
3. Get the ball rolling.
It's time to pull the chain and flush the NSA. I call for the death penalty -- that is complete defunding (including black budget), complete dism
Stop dreaming about Space Elevators and proselytizing about the end of the world, and start building a backyard garden and build long-term green communities right here.
Spoken like a dinosaur perched directly on the KT Boundary some 66 million years ago. They had a really thriving green community going. CO2 ~ten times what it is now but creatures of the Mesozoic were chilll about it. Those creatures are now part of that curious layer of ash. It's good stuff, plants love it!
Will someone some day be fertilizing the garden with us?
Space travel and habitation is really our only hope for long term survival. I realize that NASA is re-tooling to weather an era of robotic exploration and many think we can just sling a bunch of missiles anywhere, but sit down and watch Deep Impact again. Pay attention to Morgan Freeman as he says, "Our missiles have failed." Read his lips. Yes, it is possible that missiles could fail, or some Earthly shot-wad interception effort would miss the target or run short on megatons or time.
Therefore, the greatest assurance of continuance for Earth would be the presence of many humans, ships and capability already out there in space, who could quickly launch a coordinated effort to divert an asteroid's course, with enough time to keep trying.
Parent modded Troll, flamebait? Once again childish moderators are gainsaying one another, as if moderation is some way to one-click express your own opinion. Amazon patent pending. Parent post is deftly written and is a valid point of view, though bitter. Read it again, this time asking yourself --- if even some of this is true, wouldn't its author have the right to express bitterness?
If you simply disagree with it, ignore it or at least use your words. Don't try to make it disappear. Of course, once you speak up you will undo the mods. What a better world this would be if that happened.
I finished them. But they did kinda feel longer than they needed to be.
How does that feel?
The Mars Trilogy does not dwell and it does not ramble. There is a larger portion of casual dialogue and thought than most other authors use, save Niven perhaps. The books span some 200 years' events, and some one or something is always on the move. There is very little useless dialogue, though the topic does wander at times. In sheer density of material covered these books are formidable. The ratio of human drama to hard science is pretty much equal to actual life, even among scientists. (Side read: Madam Curie tarnishes the reputation of her deceased husband!)
The weight and page-span of books being what it is from the moment you first pick them up... there seems to be the sentiment that there's some tipping point at which a criticism of total word-count becomes valid, even to where it is the only criticism offered.
I just do not understand this.
It seems to be borrowed from movies, where an arduous and perilous series of edits achieves the hour-and-a-half movie formula with maybe 5-15 minutes of throwaway cuts, so TV can stuff in more commercials. A three hour movie without intermission can be an arduous ordeal, as the aisles filled with people taking unsynchronized bathroom breaks and the expense of pop€orn and $oda approaches the down payment on a car. But these are social outings within time-slots. Books live in the personal elastic moment. The time we give them is the time it takes.
Perhaps there is a certain sense that at its ending, a book has 'wasted' [a tangible percentage of] your time. Its central theme undoubtedly kept your interest, but at a price. Perhaps it ends badly or dangly, the author's style changes abruptly (seen in works where the writer had set it aside and the publisher gives them a time ultimatum). Perhaps there are things or persons in it you just don't give a hoot about. This is natural.
As a young child I devoured the Hobbit and started into the Ring Trilogy and found myself enthralled with Frodo's quest, but started skimming it to sprint past the minutiae of politics and war. I felt a measure of guilt to do this, but I just wanted to wander in this new land, take in the sights and vistas, and be chased across Middle Earth. Then in my teens I spotted Tolkien on the shelf and experienced a dismissive sense of, "been there done read that". And another voice, the one that had supplied that wordless guilt years before, whispered, "actually... you haven't really" Upon which I dove into the four books again, this time the entire thing, and was left with a sense of wonder and discovery.
This been there done that seen that too long too boring too talky too thinky too rambly thing so often reflects the level of personal distraction, phase of life or judgmental sentiment of the moment. We change, and by re-reading familiar works over time, especially those we felt lukewarm about, we can gain a sense of how much we have changed. The stories set into books are like sundials of the mind --- as fixed and unvarying as stone. As our shadow drifts with the season, so do we glimpse our evolutions of thought and the added insight (and hopefully concentration and patience) that years may bring.
So books we have finished that were 'too long'...? Maybe we're just not mature or attentive enough to grasp them wholly. They deserve a second reading, some day. But not if they suck. Some books do suck.
Mars Trilogy does not suck.
Just what goes through my mind whenever I hear some one say, "that book went on too long". It takes awhile to go through all this, it's why people think I spend half my life just staring at the wall.
Do. An aversion to the death penalty is a twisted concept because it leads to so-called 'life' sentences.
A 'life without parole' sentence is the most horrible torture ever devised. A 'comfortable' life in prison (without institutionalized slavery, malnourishment or brutality) is a modern invention of energy-wealthy society in which a moment's mortal agony is stretched out over many pointless years. Confinement, a dreary existence far from one's desired path, a great and ultimately worthless expense to society. Any sane person placed in this condition will harbor a degree of growing resentment that cannot be channeled away. You would think the only hope they could muster is that society may change its mind someday. And for some, this needs to happen.
Abandoning execution for the worst crimes also leads us inexorably in the direction of a 'revolutionary' new medical procedure that will render a bad person into brand new good person. They can return home to their families in varying states of sentience and independence, they know their name, they are as cuddly as ever, no vulgar scars on the forehead. There is a warranty. The procedure is so successful (and financially lucrative!) that it is naturally 'improved' and 'refined' so it can be applied to smaller gentler degree and under various brand names, to many judicial and civil markets. As told in our latest prospectus, a particularly fertile R&D effort may make 'problem teens' and 'repeat offenders' a thing of the past. To ease barriers of parental consent, a multi-faceted campaign has been launched in news and social media. Our secured trademark has been injected as a clever and cute internet meme, so even Grumpy Cat is promoting our product though he does not know it yet. Contacts in the AMA and DOJ have assured us that there is even a useable legal framework in which judges may order the procedure done, in the same way that a vaccine may be involuntarily given. We have a saying, the customer *is* the cure.
If you are curious about this medical procedure and wish to research it further, see this essay I wrote in 2006 in which you will learn its medical name. I will not disclose the trademark-meme at this time, you will have to wait for product launch. If you think this is a good idea then get the fuck away from me and my family.
But back to the prisons. For those guilty of heinous crimes and disposed to violence, what they're actually hoping is that the society around them collapses, the grid goes down, or some violent insurrection or hostile invasion occurs in which prisons are opened as a war tactic. Some would seek only escape and obscurity, some directed revenge at any cost. Who is to say what most would do? We cannot know. To us, a lifer prison is an undiscovered country. What would the guards do if some apocalyptic disaster ensues, that no help or food will arrive? They begin to leave, one by one to be with their families. Will the last one open the gates?
Few would consider storing gasoline-soaked rags near an open flame in the boiler room a good idea. But when you oppose the death penalty for the most horrid monsters of our age... you bring into existence the possibility you or someone you know might meet them in person some day under conditions in which you'd rather not. This may be more likely than being hit by a tornado. I see you have a storm shelter.
Some may see life imprisonment as a sort of societal insurance policy against injustice. File 'em all away for good, and if some new miracle of technology proves their innocence we can get 'em back and fix it, make it right. The most celebrated cases
"I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job." ~~Samuel Goldwyn
Check out Negative Results are Disappearing from Most Disciplines and Countries [2011] from master lexicographer Daniele Fanelli, whose other 2009 work on scientific misconduct was covered on Slashdot. He finds "the proportion of papers that, having declared to have tested a hypothesis, reported a full or partial support has grown by more than 20% between 1990 and 2007." One thing that jumped at me in Fanelli's paper [Fig 3, p7] was the smoothness of this progression for the US authors, as compared with other countries.
Richard Feynman noted "The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's most interesting." Are we seeking those things? Newton was almost right. Bereft of rigorous testing to invalidate popular hypotheses, would we be likely to notice "negative results" such as the disparities that revolutionized quantum mechanics? Or would they be swept under the rug of selective funding and implied consensus? "Of the hypothesized problems, perhaps the most worrying is a worsening of positive-outcome bias. A system that disfavours negative results not only distorts the scientific literature directly, but might also discourage high-risk projects and pressure scientists to fabricate and falsify their data." Say it isn't so!
What is being claimed here is a progressive shortage of applied effort to discredit popular hypotheses. We may be great guessers, but it is not always a waste of time and effort to back-check, to reproduce. Does it come down to money?
Or are people letting themselves become a teeny bit religious about science? Isn't this what Carl Sagan warned us about?
Inspired by this cry wolfy article by Illuminati seer Dave Hodges, I devised a simple psychological test for paranoid perception of current events, and it was so popular in my own mind I decided to share it.
________
1. Major area of Northern Arizona recently experienced a complete outage of Internet, land-line phone and some cell phones. The fault was traced to a field where someone had dug up a cable and cut partway through it. Why?
A: An idiot with a hacksaw intending to steal copper B: Covert beta test for implementation of Martial Law
________
2. A call is received by the Fire Department for a cat in tree. They arrive at the correct address and there is a tree but no cat. What has happened?
A: The cat has gathered its courage and climbed down the tree B: Covert beta test for implementation of Martial Law
________
3. On an evening of gentle breezes, dogs in the neighborhood have begun howling, but there is no moon, siren or train. What is the most likely cause?
A: Female dog in heat B: Covert beta test for implementation of Martial Law
________
Note on answers and scoring: Congratulations, you did really well!
One would think the company who runs the most popular Internet search engine would understand the hard-ass difficulty of finding relevant search results on specific topics about redundantly named things, especially deep results in discussion forums. Freon is discussed in automotive, ecological and chemistry contexts, there are tons of government and UN docuiments. Graphic software projects should be uniquely named. This is because in every written discipline people say, "Graphics 2 and 3 show sales for......" so for example, "freon graphics" still would yield irrelevant results.
And then it gets worse, as if software suites are some kind of goofy themed Senior Prom. You will see plugins and offshoots of Freon software called Condenser, Compressor, Ozone and Fanbelt, Squeaking, Vent Solenoid and Thermostat, Sunburn, Cancer and Death.
Google has come to praise knowledge, not to bury it.
Slashdot Mirror
After seeing all these strange articles, I have come to the conclusion that these are not April Fools jokes. A real slashdot april fools joke would have been witty and subtle.
You are to be commended for the only constructive criticism I've seen so far among a flurry of comments best translated as, "I dinna like it, can't tell you what I like but I'll know when I see it. Next!". Like a game of darts where you score by hitting the other players.
My submission Evidence Suggests LHC Test Already Begun did not make the front page lineup, maybe it was too subtle.
'42:MOL' has achieved cultural Trope status for many of us. If I am ever on an elevator with a 42nd floor button, I for one will never be able to resist tapping it and as the door opens, announce "Behold... the meaning of life!" in the company of complete strangers --- or even if alone --- for my own amusement. The power of tropes is such that one's invocation of them becomes a talisman to ward off boredom and introverted desperation. In the lonely desperate emotional wilderness of our time. To ward off the abyss, as its howling winds tear at the edges of our souls.
Presenting a trope with fanfare and flourish to a wide audience, as was done here, that is risky business. Part of the problem is that it was presented flat-out as-is without a twist. Among those in the know, the presence of a twist begs forgiveness for the heinous (gosh gee Wally) act of dishing up something that we already know. We shouldn't forget though that to those who have only recently read Douglas Adams' books for the first time, this Slashdot story would be perceived as a welcome (and hilarious!) allusion and affirmation. I envy those people, maybe I will order a lobotomy from Amazon so I can rediscover Hitchhiker's Guide again for the first time.
So let me raise a glass and propose a toast to whatever the fuck I just said. Or we could just all shut up and drink.
It's [solar energy] going to be enough for those who will remain after the Generational Purge. The One Percenters will find those figures quite satisfactory, since the plans for California is to turn it into a state-size vacation area anyway.
Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
Sorry Bob, the devil is looking elsewhere to fill quota, and even good drink will be scarce during the Generational Purge due to a loss of the 'Just In Time' food supply chain. Modern cannibals will find scarcely a week's worth of cans on the grocery shelf and perhaps another few weeks in distribution centers, but this will serve only to swell the ranks of the migrant Cannibal Armies that will actually conduct the Purge.
The Cannibal Army is the ultimate (and last) achievement of any failed modern civilization. The only reason the history books are not chock full of 'em is that historians are delicious, and there has never been enough population to achieve the necessary critical mass, collapsed societies to this point have always left numbers few enough to live off the land, and retained enough know-how to do so. That is not true today.
Ask anyone on the street if they know how to solder a joint, sow seed, plant a cow or where delivery pizza comes from and they haven't a clue. But ask them if they could figure out how to eat someone and they will quickly nod assent. It is not only instinctive it is infused into the culture. The recurring theme of pursuit and car chases in popular movies expresses the primal knowledge necessary for cannibalism.
The cannibals will be ruthless, they will employ cleverness and the use of technology to scour the land. Your stationary survival enclaves will be the favorite feast of the first wave, where all the cherished ideals of small sustainable energy, and those who practice it, go into the cooking pot. Domestic cattle and other animals will be mere appetizers in this Moveable Feast, because cannibal armies have no patience to raise them. Disease from improper preparation will claim some, but the critical mass will persist until there is only one Cannibal Army left in California.
That last cannibal army, great in number, will then march on the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant to absorb and consume the small group of engineers and scientists who have gathered there to preserve the remaining fruits of civilization, and for hot showers. Cannibals are easily swayed by reason, you might say they are even attracted to it, because wherever reason exists there are yummy people to consume. And consume they will until the last corn-fed game is exhausted. And then they will turn on each other and feast until human population levels out and reaches a sustainable level of -1.
The fate of California's energy policy is foretold in Lucifer's Hammer. Devour this book.
Frankly, I had to look up MOOC online too because it wasn't in my 1938 Webster or Corey Ford's Guide To Thimking [1961, Doubleday] , the computer reference I most often consult.
[...] some people started GOOgling it,
not knowing what it was,
and they'll continue GOOging it forever
just because This is the trend that never ends,
only the name does change my friend, [...]
It means eLearning or iBrainPodPeople or LearningMOO/MUD. It also means Learn-A-TRON or Learn-O-Matic. As you see on the oldest revisions of the Wiki, it was "founded on the theory of connectivism and an open pedagogy based on networked learning." From these huble 2011 origins it has gone on to have been founded on other things too. TIL In MOOC "every letter is negotiable," which means the shortest possible variant of it is "" the null set...
No biting satire intended, as one who never attended High School I welcome the advent of the online courses that can be realized for less than $100,000, whatever the cost. Along with Benny Hill I am learning all the time.
I offer Sendmail in its mid-1990s form as an example. We had several dialup customers with Microsoft Exchange servers. They'd connect and Exchange would issue an ETRN to dequeue waiting messages. The problem was that Sendmail by default, would send a "Warning: could not deliver mail for 4 hours" reply back to sender after the email had languished in the queue that long, and they dialed in sporadically and not at all on weekends so folks who emailed them would get these messages. It was bad. I wanted to disable this warning specifically for ETRN domains but not for everyone.
Does this feature exist? Sendmail documentation defined 'queuewarn' as a global setting but did not address this "deferred delivery by design" problem. Could there be a presently-undocumented or undiscovered workaround? Delving into the source it was visually apparent the answer was no, the warning was unconditional. The only workaround would have been to run a completely separate SMTP server on another IP address with the queuewarn off, and MX 'em to that. What a bother. Are domain-specific attributes available? Yes, these had a mailer flag of HOLD. Can it be addressed with a one-liner? Yes. So the _FFR_NODELAYDSN_ON_HOLD compile/config flag was born, off by default because we don't want to break things.
Just a couple of hours to discover, patch and test. another hour to render it into a contrib patch where it made its way into Sendmail. Open source is cool and when you see your own contribution being proposed as a solution to solve someone else's problem years later... that is quite satisfying.
Sendmail had the right balance of code-to-comment. What comments were there would not make sense until you understood the underlying process, and tag names were explicit enough that comments were seldom necessary.
Cell phone use causes the brain to disconnect from the whole body. When you spend your whole day staring at that tiny screen ignoring everything around you many things go wrong.
[Cue music] It would not have been possible otherwise, to sufficiently emphasize the frightful toll of the new menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers. Cell phones are that distraction -- and the Internet is the enabler -- an unspeakable scourge -- The Real Public Enemy Number One !
Its first effect is sudden violent, uncontrollable laughter, then come dangerous hallucinations -- space expands -- time slows down, almost stands still.... fixed ideas come next, conjuring up monstrous extravagances --- followed by emotional disturbances, the total inability to direct thoughts, the loss of all power to resist physical emotions leading finally to acts of shocking violence ... ending often in incurable insanity.
In picturing its soul-destroying effects no attempt was made to equivocate. The scenes and incidents, while fictionized for the purposes of this story, are based upon actual research into the results of cellphone and Internet addiction. If their stark reality will make you think, will make you aware that something must be done to wipe out this ghastly menace, then the picture will not have failed in its purpose.
Because the dread technology may be reaching forth next for your son or daughter ...or yours ... or YOURS!
~~Cellphone Madness
Amen. Surely more of a 'State of Emergency' than some sorry-ass hurricane. Oh yeah, and see about finding a President who'd veto this kind of shit, maybe roll back some of those perpetual declared emergencies too. Oops, that was Ron Paul. Better luck next time.
We should also give thought to those presently employed in these industries to ensure there is a safety net of retraining and placement. With a basic course in Constitutional Law and Civics. Those who do not score well might take advantage of the porous national borders, seek their fortunes in El Salvador or Mexico.
___
Things have got to change, But first, you gotta get mad!
NSA and the Desolation of Smaug
I am Sam. Uncle Sam I am.
I really hated Men In Black
Am I the first to suggest... BLACKMAIL??
Sherlock Holmes: training wheels for NSA surveillance
Stick a fork in the Republic, it's done. HR4681/309 [failed submission]
The backbone, then [1980s] and now
Whatever happened to the 'old' NSA? Directive 18?
Last Wish (aka The Pact)
The pedant in me must know: you're referring to false-negatives, right?
The pendant in me says, just leave it dangling.
And especially fuck AT&T. Never forget Room 641A and their "retroactive immunity"
Yeah. Never forget. Remind others. Explain to the young.
Things have got to change, But first, you gotta get mad!
NSA and the Desolation of Smaug
I am Sam. Uncle Sam I am.
I really hated Men In Black
Am I the first to suggest... BLACKMAIL??
Sherlock Holmes: training wheels for NSA surveillance
Stick a fork in the Republic, it's done. HR4681/309 [failed submission]
The backbone, then [1980s] and now
Whatever happened to the 'old' NSA? Directive 18?
The Day Israel Attacked the NSA [failed submission]
Last Wish (aka The Pact)
Yes, the FAA: Don't post drone videos on Youtube Any more questions?
Also don't shoot video from upper balconies, GoPro headbands while skateboarding 'Ollies' in the air, while hanging from chandeliers, cliffs, standing on the transparent tourist platform atop the Eiffel Tower, from tethered balloons, while being shot from a cannon, while head-butting a ram, riding glass elevators, or suspended from suspenderences such as but not limited to rope or chain, or if you are tall, or if the subject is short.
These distinct camera angles strongly suggest drone use to busy compliance officers, who have been judicially empowered to employ the same 'presumption of use', 'intent to distribute' arguments that have made the War On Drugs the successful endeavor it is today. If your content is flagged, you will be pressed to supply proof that a drone was not present, and unmarked drones may appear next to your your house and photographs taken. Drawing on the 'admissibility loophole' that has made the partnership between Intelligence agencies and Law Enforcement the successful endeavor it is today, where the fact of warrantless, illegal surveillance need not be disclosed, these photos may be presented to Judge and Jury without comment or disclosure of origin.
To avoid unnecessary legal hassle, do not even post footage of model environments such as Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Even obvious depth-of-field artifacts may be targeted by zealous prosecutors if they allege the use of drones in pan-tilt photography. Due to the perceived nature of building giant models and the fact that bugs were in it, the movie "Bugs' Life" is exempt. There is also a blanket exemption for drone footage of cats, or drones that ARE cats.
Fortunately for us... Google has announced they have developed an AI program that detects the use of drone footage with 99% accuracy.
yeah lets combine 2 technologies that are each too expensive on their own. that will solve all our problems. you forgot to shave your neckbeard, doorstop.
Did I hear a-scuffle? Whose humor is so obtuse? Well sure... it's No-Plan Stan, Knight of the Status Quo! Good to see you in these parts. Kinda reminds me of a wild teenage party in progress with parents out of town, loud music, unidentified liquids and guests sliding down the bannisters, toilet paper rolled down the stairs. Owners' kids gathering the crystal and the nicknacks to hide in the basement, pets being fed hors d'oeuvres (Hot Wings) and throwing up on the carpet. People throwing up on the carpet. Bedroom, bathroom doors locked from inside. The piano is missing. Some kids are wearing funny hats in the hallway, giggling. One of them mentions Thorium Energy.
There is a loud banging on the door. In bursts No-Plan Stan, Knight of the Status Quo.
The music stops.
With hands on hips he bellows, "You should all be ashamed of yourselves!"
Everyone is silent for a moment, each thinking of something truly shameful.
"This is all too damned fucking expensive! And Thorium Energy will never happen!"
He slams the door in retreat.
Yes, it was expensive for me. Was it expensive for you too? Did you feel the economy move?
It really is time to reexamine the reasons why things are expensive. I mean get down and dirty, research directly to the ultimate source of the resource, and chart its costs along the way. When it comes to the price of lollygagging while we have some idea of a new and exciting source of energy, but lack the guuumph to take the next step tomorrow, what a price that is.
After No-Plan Stan left, everyone streamed into the front room.
Lipstick-smudged faces peered out from doors in the hallway, then couples emerged.
The piano was found, and put back into place. Fires were put out.
"What a bitch! You mean, it all comes down to money?"
"That's what he said."
"What could we possibly do to change the world then? Go to Wall Street?"
"My Dad works on Wall Street. He says it's fucked just like everything else, and he's too low on the pyramid."
"Your Dad is building a pyramid?"
"No, he's low on the pyramid. He's building a Bubble. It's hard to explain."
"Okay. What was that bit about Thor Eeum?"
"Um... maybe... my hat?"
The hat is passed around. It is a Burger King paper hat with a silver DVD in front.
The DVD is labelled 'Thorium Energy'.
"So what's 'Thorium Energy'? It's weird how that guy just popped in and left."
"I dunno, it was in a pile of mail someone sent Dad because he works on Wall Street."
"So what's on it?"
"Hell if I know. I just picked it out because it would look cool on my hat."
"So let's see it then."
Everyone gathered around the screen. Snacks emerged. Some put arms around shoulders.
The world changed.
Thorium Remix 2011 DVD 02:23:49
CONTENT:
[00:00] LFTR in 5 minutes; [06:05] dialogue on Energy sources & conservation; [08:29] Elizabeth May (Green Party of Canada) on why nuclear 'fails', response; [13:40] Kirk Sorensen's time at NASA, discovering molten salt research; [17:30] on Glenn Seaborg's discovery of Thorium's fissile properties in 1942; [20:05] What nuclear fission is, decay chains, half life; [26:45] neutron absorption, cross section, Xenon poisoning at Hanford; [30:06] isotopic enrichment, Thorium/u233 rejected for weapons; [32:45] Atoms for Peace, absorption propensity and performance of nuclear fuels, thermal & fast spectrum, Thorium/Plutonium debate; [36:28] Alvin Weinberg focuses on Thorium and liquid fuels, Oak Ridge Labs, Aircraft Reactor Experiment, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, Fluoride Salts; [44:40] two-fluid molten salt reactor; [48:18] light water reactors, Watts Bar, reactor safety and containment systems, issues with wat
This story, and your comment, made me think of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
The Hydraulic Empire was touched upon by James Burke in Connections S01E01: The Trigger Effect. The water stuff begins about ~28 minutes in, but don't cheat yourself out of what comes before. I consider this single program to be the finest hour ever filmed for television. It inspired in my me as a boy a lifelong love of infrastructure and concern for our continued species-survival as modern humans.
Energy is the thread that runs through everything now. With an ocean and technology and applied energy... fresh water is possible, on any scale. It just depends how determined we are to extract it. Every major source of fresh water in North America is presently guarded by peoples who will fight to the death to preserve their own land and way of life. Even the tapping of 'unlimited' deep geological reservoirs of water is fraught with unintended consequences. The only way to really solve the problem is to bring into existence something completely new that changes the game. Whether we be enslaved by access to water, to energy or the parasitic economy and the tax man, the breaking of these bonds are turning points of history.
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a carbon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common." ~Kirk Sorensen, Thorium Remix 2011
Fee Fie Foe Fum... I Smell ENRON!
ENRON. The latest wonder-tool of the late 90s, a bold new approach to the distribution and settlement policies of grid energy [or water!] suppliers. You have all been losing money trying to buy and sell your product among yourselves. Now it is time to buy and sell your product through US. We'll take a percent and you will have MORE.
ENRON. Let us make everything into a stock market, a futures market. Let us negotiate on your behalf (said to both halves at once). Let us woo you with impressive corporate speak and wooly acronyms to describe what is essentially a transparent middleman-insertion tactic.
ENRON. Tired of trying to sell your customer base on some desired tactic by disclosing said tactic to the PSC and the public? Tired of those public hearings? Let ENRON come to the rescue. Tell us what you need to happen and we'll see that back-room conspiratorial tactics can ease your pain, by making all other options seem more expensive.
ENRON. Ask us how triggered brownouts [or droughts!] and planned resource shortages can improve your bottom line [and ours]!
ENRON. Because if energy [or water!] were priced properly, it is a safe bet that people would waste far less of it. We can help.
ENRON. Because no one needs to innovate or improve infrastructure. We just need to make life suck a little more, cost more, and people will demand less. More complicated is BETTER.
This message brought to you by The Smartest Guys In The Room.
Ask the kids to focus on owning their own home some day.
It'll cure 'em in minutes.
OH --- AND BEFORE YOU GO --- do please look over these necklaces of fine silicon jewels and take one as your own, or for your sweetie. You see they are actually little computers, or 'chips', as ran the great society of old. I have filed off the covering so you can see the tiny chip, which shines in the light. See here! Only a copper or two for each, and if you look me in the eye and promise you will strive to better your mind and help re-build this world, I'll part with it for a shake of the hand.
Did you know that the little chips in these fine adornments were called IBM Power8 Chips, and they were powered by... coal? Absolutely true! But that is another story...
The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future --- and Gained the Past.
WE CAN ONLY BLAME OURSELVES for the Time Rift. From discrete logic to main boards to chipsets to picoboards to nanite molecular clusters, we had machines re-drawing the same machines on smaller scale until they were like dust and pebbles, and yet, everything worked pretty well most of the time.
THE DISTINCTION between software and hardware had merged, workable modules open sourced and refined with a really clever interconnection scheme. Somewhere along the line we left hardware design from 'scratch' --- and software design to the 'code' level --- behind. Things were no longer constructed for purpose. Software was no longer compiled. We began to plug and play and clone and shim.
IT WAS HUMANS, amateur enthusiasts even, that first cloned and shimmed small machines into other machines of similar more refined purpose, and they did it with the same techniques we had used to construct analog circuits: locking together this way, and securing with that, test and done. There was an art to it. Where one had once meshed APIs together in the synchronous communications realm, now it was a matter of finding the proper angle and orientation of these smart pebbles, based on their markings and unique shapes. There was a flair to it, and some of this art was as much judged by its appearance as by function.
BUT SOON WE GREW WEARY of that, and trained our machines to clone, shim and assemble these smaller machines. It was like some cyborg Tetris game where your challenge was to fit the pieces together as they fell from the sky. And the sky was full of pieces. Anything was possible if your reach was long and you gazed far enough, to grasp the perfect puzzle-piece.
A FEW RESPONSIBLE ENGINEERS of the era took the time to publish diagnostic procedures with which one could fix these amalgamations, should one have the patience to pull them apart to do so, like the SAMS Photofacts of old. Every piece had its own direct interface for configuration and in theory at least, one could fix problems or reconfigure the pieces by simply talking to them directly. They documented these diagnostic and configuration interfaces, often cribbed from the documents of other engineers, which were scarcely ever used now, probing them to discover the more primal pieces within to gather documentation on those too.
BUT IT WAS THANKLESS to do so, and these engineers found themselves out of work or forcefully retired. Their productivity paled besides younger geniuses who were simple hunter-gatherers, whose cleverness in assembling working prototypes was deft and swift. From concept to bubble-wrap technology companies had little interest in deep documentation. It was seen as a fetish. The thing works! Clone it and done. These hastily made things flooded the market and soon replaced other well-documented things. At times something failed and its inventors could not say why, they just assembled a new one or went bankrupt.
IN A SAD IRONY as to the supposed superiority of digital over analog --- that this whole professionon of digitally-stored 'source' documentation began to fade and was finally lost. It had became dusty, and the unlooked-for documents of previous eras were first flagged and moved to lukewarm storage. It was a circular process, where the world's centralized search indices would be culled to remove pointers to things that were seldom accessed. Then a separate clean-up where the fact that something was not in the index alone determined that it was purgeable. The process was completely automated of course, so no human was on hand to mourn the passing of material that had been the proud product of entire careers. It simply faded.
THEN SOMETHING TOOK THE INTERNET BY STORM, it was some silly but popular Game with a perversely intricate (and ultimately useless) information store. Within the space of six months index culling and auto-purge had assigned more than a third of all storage to the Game. Only as the Game itself faded
Main difference being that it never actually burns through to Uruguay, because it stops when it hits the last letter of syndrome.
Who knew that the Silent E had such awesome power?? A perusal of available scientific literature does not even hint at this ability. Even graphene has a silent E, which could be the true source of its unique properties. Silent E should be incorporated into the design of all Gen V reactors.
Silent E decommissioning may also help with radiological cleanup.
It can turn a plume into a plum.
The title "No Fuel In the Fukushima Reactor #1" is WRONG.
The fuel is still inside the reactor. It is just melted down at the bottom.
That is correct. The title is misleading, but summary link text "not in its place" is on the mark. Muon scanning is still in progress. The paper Cosmic Ray Radiography of the Damaged Cores of the Fukushima Reactors [2012] describes the approach in more detail. Most thought the fuel would melt under these conditions but the real question is, has the there been a 'melt-through', where melted fuel escaped the reactor containment vessel, as Chernobyl's did? To make an so-called Elephant's Foot of solidified corium?
Leslie Corrice speculates (section 'c') that the fuel is still in the reactor and has not escaped containment. He uses a line of empirical reasoning based on radiation measurements with a few assumptions about water flow inside the building. We will see if his analysis is correct.
If the melted fuel remains in the Reactor Pressure Vessel and it has not been breached, then this safety measure worked, even if nothing else did.
Over the years I have experienced many major spills on electronics, various liquids. The most success I had was with Carbon Tet (toxic! use outside with gloves!) with an almost-100% recovery rate (unless of course components were damaged before power was removed), but a flush with 90% Isopropyl Alcohol can work given enough drying time.
None of my keyboards have ever lasted long enough to wear out, and in the last decade the recovery rate has gone down. I don't know whether it's pin spacing, decreased circuit margins or stuff trapped in tiny spaces, but many a 'pristine' cleaned keyboard was a goner with several keys inoperable or 'latched'.
The Logitech 310 ends all that. It is certainly not the best key action I've had (Cherry!)... but the tradeoff is all the spills (coffee, soda, water) thus far have been easy to clean, it remains operational, no disassembly required. With a spare in the closet, I know I have a keyboard that will keep going indefinitely, or until it wears out.
Yea, you can purchase waterproof keyboards for a pretty penny. Fact is, most keyboards are engineered to suck in liquids like a wick and stop working. This one is reasonably priced. Weather or not you 'like' this keyboard, I encourage everyone to purchase a K310 to at least keep in the closet to use as an emergency spare, and thus reward Logitech for this simple design innovation that battles 'willful' planned obsolescence.
Wyden's on-record questioning of James Clapper â" wherein Clapper answered "No sir... not wittingly" to Wyden's "Do you collect any information on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" question â" is cited by Snowden as the event that pushed him over the edge, and caused him to disclose the US domestic spying programs. Wyden's patriotism set the whole thing in motion.
I wonder if Wyden really knows this... and realizes where it may lead. If political ambition is his goal he could take it to the top some day. In 2015 Americans view 'the government' as the No. 1 Problem to solve. Unfortunately the issues they are most upset with -- such as healthcare -- are extremely partisan.
Domestic NSA surveillance is NOT a partisan issue. Who will chair the first Church Committee of the 21st Century? Senator Frank Church warned us waay back in 1975,
"Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everythingâ"telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.
"If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
As Snowden has revealed, we are at the edge of the abyss. As I have repeatedly warned in these forums, this furor over so-called phone call metadata is a limited hang-out, a diversion from the clear and present danger of full content backbone taps at interconnects. And here in Wyden's remarks we get a glimpse that there is more to the story. A 21st Century Church Committee is needed.
Here's what Wyden needs to do:
1. Call a press conference to announce that there is enough cause in the publicly available Snowden leaks, as well as certain other details he is privy to and cannot disclose, to form a 21st century bi-partisan 'Church Committee'. He would need to give a quick recap of those 1975 proceedings for those who are historically challenged... but it would make for a very interesting and well televised event.
2. Call another press conference the very next day. This one to publicly announce and air out any personal dirty laundry he may have. Extra-marital affairs, investments with conflicts of interest. Unless there is murder in there not only will he get a free pass, but people would take notice if he states that he is 'clearing the field' and proactively mitigating any attempt to leak this information as a distraction. He can also point out that whether or not they would take such action, they may be in possession of this information, and that is what the Committee hopes to address.
3. Get the ball rolling.
It's time to pull the chain and flush the NSA. I call for the death penalty -- that is complete defunding (including black budget), complete dism
Stop dreaming about Space Elevators and proselytizing about the end of the world, and start building a backyard garden and build long-term green communities right here.
Spoken like a dinosaur perched directly on the KT Boundary some 66 million years ago. They had a really thriving green community going. CO2 ~ten times what it is now but creatures of the Mesozoic were chilll about it. Those creatures are now part of that curious layer of ash. It's good stuff, plants love it!
Will someone some day be fertilizing the garden with us?
Space travel and habitation is really our only hope for long term survival. I realize that NASA is re-tooling to weather an era of robotic exploration and many think we can just sling a bunch of missiles anywhere, but sit down and watch Deep Impact again. Pay attention to Morgan Freeman as he says, "Our missiles have failed." Read his lips. Yes, it is possible that missiles could fail, or some Earthly shot-wad interception effort would miss the target or run short on megatons or time.
Therefore, the greatest assurance of continuance for Earth would be the presence of many humans, ships and capability already out there in space, who could quickly launch a coordinated effort to divert an asteroid's course, with enough time to keep trying.
Parent modded Troll, flamebait? Once again childish moderators are gainsaying one another, as if moderation is some way to one-click express your own opinion. Amazon patent pending. Parent post is deftly written and is a valid point of view, though bitter. Read it again, this time asking yourself --- if even some of this is true, wouldn't its author have the right to express bitterness?
If you simply disagree with it, ignore it or at least use your words. Don't try to make it disappear. Of course, once you speak up you will undo the mods. What a better world this would be if that happened.
I finished them. But they did kinda feel longer than they needed to be.
How does that feel?
The Mars Trilogy does not dwell and it does not ramble. There is a larger portion of casual dialogue and thought than most other authors use, save Niven perhaps. The books span some 200 years' events, and some one or something is always on the move. There is very little useless dialogue, though the topic does wander at times. In sheer density of material covered these books are formidable. The ratio of human drama to hard science is pretty much equal to actual life, even among scientists. (Side read: Madam Curie tarnishes the reputation of her deceased husband! )
The weight and page-span of books being what it is from the moment you first pick them up... there seems to be the sentiment that there's some tipping point at which a criticism of total word-count becomes valid, even to where it is the only criticism offered.
I just do not understand this.
It seems to be borrowed from movies, where an arduous and perilous series of edits achieves the hour-and-a-half movie formula with maybe 5-15 minutes of throwaway cuts, so TV can stuff in more commercials. A three hour movie without intermission can be an arduous ordeal, as the aisles filled with people taking unsynchronized bathroom breaks and the expense of pop€orn and $oda approaches the down payment on a car. But these are social outings within time-slots. Books live in the personal elastic moment. The time we give them is the time it takes.
Perhaps there is a certain sense that at its ending, a book has 'wasted' [a tangible percentage of] your time. Its central theme undoubtedly kept your interest, but at a price. Perhaps it ends badly or dangly, the author's style changes abruptly (seen in works where the writer had set it aside and the publisher gives them a time ultimatum). Perhaps there are things or persons in it you just don't give a hoot about. This is natural.
As a young child I devoured the Hobbit and started into the Ring Trilogy and found myself enthralled with Frodo's quest, but started skimming it to sprint past the minutiae of politics and war. I felt a measure of guilt to do this, but I just wanted to wander in this new land, take in the sights and vistas, and be chased across Middle Earth. Then in my teens I spotted Tolkien on the shelf and experienced a dismissive sense of, "been there done read that". And another voice, the one that had supplied that wordless guilt years before, whispered, "actually... you haven't really" Upon which I dove into the four books again, this time the entire thing, and was left with a sense of wonder and discovery.
This been there done that seen that too long too boring too talky too thinky too rambly thing so often reflects the level of personal distraction, phase of life or judgmental sentiment of the moment. We change, and by re-reading familiar works over time, especially those we felt lukewarm about, we can gain a sense of how much we have changed. The stories set into books are like sundials of the mind --- as fixed and unvarying as stone. As our shadow drifts with the season, so do we glimpse our evolutions of thought and the added insight (and hopefully concentration and patience) that years may bring.
So books we have finished that were 'too long'...? Maybe we're just not mature or attentive enough to grasp them wholly. They deserve a second reading, some day. But not if they suck. Some books do suck.
Mars Trilogy does not suck.
Just what goes through my mind whenever I hear some one say, "that book went on too long". It takes awhile to go through all this, it's why people think I spend half my life just staring at the wall.
Don't.
Do. An aversion to the death penalty is a twisted concept because it leads to so-called 'life' sentences.
A 'life without parole' sentence is the most horrible torture ever devised. A 'comfortable' life in prison (without institutionalized slavery, malnourishment or brutality) is a modern invention of energy-wealthy society in which a moment's mortal agony is stretched out over many pointless years. Confinement, a dreary existence far from one's desired path, a great and ultimately worthless expense to society. Any sane person placed in this condition will harbor a degree of growing resentment that cannot be channeled away. You would think the only hope they could muster is that society may change its mind someday. And for some, this needs to happen .
Abandoning execution for the worst crimes also leads us inexorably in the direction of a 'revolutionary' new medical procedure that will render a bad person into brand new good person. They can return home to their families in varying states of sentience and independence, they know their name, they are as cuddly as ever, no vulgar scars on the forehead. There is a warranty. The procedure is so successful (and financially lucrative!) that it is naturally 'improved' and 'refined' so it can be applied to smaller gentler degree and under various brand names, to many judicial and civil markets. As told in our latest prospectus, a particularly fertile R&D effort may make 'problem teens' and 'repeat offenders' a thing of the past. To ease barriers of parental consent, a multi-faceted campaign has been launched in news and social media. Our secured trademark has been injected as a clever and cute internet meme, so even Grumpy Cat is promoting our product though he does not know it yet. Contacts in the AMA and DOJ have assured us that there is even a useable legal framework in which judges may order the procedure done, in the same way that a vaccine may be involuntarily given. We have a saying, the customer *is* the cure.
If you are curious about this medical procedure and wish to research it further, see this essay I wrote in 2006 in which you will learn its medical name. I will not disclose the trademark-meme at this time, you will have to wait for product launch. If you think this is a good idea then get the fuck away from me and my family.
But back to the prisons. For those guilty of heinous crimes and disposed to violence, what they're actually hoping is that the society around them collapses, the grid goes down, or some violent insurrection or hostile invasion occurs in which prisons are opened as a war tactic. Some would seek only escape and obscurity, some directed revenge at any cost. Who is to say what most would do? We cannot know. To us, a lifer prison is an undiscovered country. What would the guards do if some apocalyptic disaster ensues, that no help or food will arrive? They begin to leave, one by one to be with their families. Will the last one open the gates?
Few would consider storing gasoline-soaked rags near an open flame in the boiler room a good idea. But when you oppose the death penalty for the most horrid monsters of our age... you bring into existence the possibility you or someone you know might meet them in person some day under conditions in which you'd rather not. This may be more likely than being hit by a tornado. I see you have a storm shelter.
Some may see life imprisonment as a sort of societal insurance policy against injustice. File 'em all away for good, and if some new miracle of technology proves their innocence we can get 'em back and fix it, make it right. The most celebrated cases
"I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job."
~~Samuel Goldwyn
Check out Negative Results are Disappearing from Most Disciplines and Countries [2011] from master lexicographer Daniele Fanelli, whose other 2009 work on scientific misconduct was covered on Slashdot. He finds "the proportion of papers that, having declared to have tested a hypothesis, reported a full or partial support has grown by more than 20% between 1990 and 2007." One thing that jumped at me in Fanelli's paper [Fig 3, p7] was the smoothness of this progression for the US authors, as compared with other countries.
Richard Feynman noted "The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's most interesting." Are we seeking those things? Newton was almost right. Bereft of rigorous testing to invalidate popular hypotheses, would we be likely to notice "negative results" such as the disparities that revolutionized quantum mechanics? Or would they be swept under the rug of selective funding and implied consensus? "Of the hypothesized problems, perhaps the most worrying is a worsening of positive-outcome bias. A system that disfavours negative results not only distorts the scientific literature directly, but might also discourage high-risk projects and pressure scientists to fabricate and falsify their data." Say it isn't so!
What is being claimed here is a progressive shortage of applied effort to discredit popular hypotheses. We may be great guessers, but it is not always a waste of time and effort to back-check, to reproduce. Does it come down to money?
Or are people letting themselves become a teeny bit religious about science?
Isn't this what Carl Sagan warned us about?
Inspired by this cry wolfy article by Illuminati seer Dave Hodges, I devised a simple psychological test for paranoid perception of current events, and it was so popular in my own mind I decided to share it.
________
1. Major area of Northern Arizona recently experienced a complete outage of Internet, land-line phone and some cell phones. The fault was traced to a field where someone had dug up a cable and cut partway through it. Why?
A: An idiot with a hacksaw intending to steal copper
B: Covert beta test for implementation of Martial Law
________
2. A call is received by the Fire Department for a cat in tree. They arrive at the correct address and there is a tree but no cat. What has happened?
A: The cat has gathered its courage and climbed down the tree
B: Covert beta test for implementation of Martial Law
________
3. On an evening of gentle breezes, dogs in the neighborhood have begun howling, but there is no moon, siren or train. What is the most likely cause?
A: Female dog in heat
B: Covert beta test for implementation of Martial Law
________
Note on answers and scoring: Congratulations, you did really well!
FREON indeed.
How about X12? It is only an XML exchange standard, an experimental superhuman and adjustable bed.
One would think the company who runs the most popular Internet search engine would understand the hard-ass difficulty of finding relevant search results on specific topics about redundantly named things, especially deep results in discussion forums. Freon is discussed in automotive, ecological and chemistry contexts, there are tons of government and UN docuiments. Graphic software projects should be uniquely named. This is because in every written discipline people say, "Graphics 2 and 3 show sales for......" so for example, "freon graphics" still would yield irrelevant results.
And then it gets worse, as if software suites are some kind of goofy themed Senior Prom. You will see plugins and offshoots of Freon software called Condenser, Compressor, Ozone and Fanbelt, Squeaking, Vent Solenoid and Thermostat, Sunburn, Cancer and Death.
Google has come to praise knowledge, not to bury it.