With a bit of find and replace s/Solar{ PV|}/Natural Gas/g
Now your comment makes sense... even at night!
Natural gas is the new darling of base load generation. The only problem being that IF the present burdens of coal is shifted onto it and present coal infrastructure is decommissioned and abandoned, we'll have nothing to fall back on WHEN natural gas peaks and declines.
When considering the relative costs of things I try to factor in whether they will ultimately 'work' at all. Solar PV for base load energy will not work. Therefore it is too expensive, because extinction is expensive.
Aw C'mon, everybody's whining about the subsidies and 'net metering hardware' that needs to be installed and maintained at each point of presence -- aside from the purchase of the solar and wind units themselves... at the core of it are a few folks discovering that power utilities are not as eager as they like them to be.
For solar It's just a politics-entitlement issue because, frankly, the power these solar installations push back onto the grid is too tiny for the 'trouble' they cause. I am SO GLAD that my small midwest city has none of this DAMNED FOOLISHNESS going on. We can see what our electrical co-ops pay by the kilowatt for reliable grid power and we see the salaries of the fine people who maintain it, and it's pretty much in parity.
Here is someone who has devoted his career to grid stability, understands it completely -- and what is his own take?
A TRILLION DOLLARS to retrofit the grid to accommodate so-called renewables. That's without putting a single additional megawatt on the grid. He even advocates the build out of a parallel grid for variable sources to protect the essential 24/7 machinery of power generation, which can incur physical damage from these effects -- allowing us to concentrate new infrastructure for tuning reactive load to a few buffer points.
Sounds great down the road. We need reliable baseload power cheaper than coal first.
With LFTR you would not need to use an expensive and power hogging Reverse Osmosis plant to desalinate seawater. A thorium reactor is an excellent and efficient way to desalinate seawater by the tons per minute. The gigawatts of free power are also a plus.
In Kirk Sorensen's TEAC 2013 presentation he describes using waste heat for this purpose -- showing a concept drawing of a LFTR electric/water plant next to the ocean. Am I certain that LFTR could be sited safely on the shore and be completely submerged by a tsunami or hurricane with no resulting disaster? Absolutely! Would he be able to convince some forward-thinking country such as Qatar to place these in the desert to ensure a source of fresh water in some post-petroleum future? Yep.
What of the United States? I'm afraid that the prospect of siting a new nuclear project on the coast -- or more generally, any parcel of land that would be contested by locals -- is remote. The regions which surround lakes, rivers and coastline are completely settled (and defended) by people.
My idea is to build out LFTR inland in areas less likely to be contested by humans, such as along existing cross-country transmission line corridors, in compact configurations that might even fit within the cleared right-of-way path directly beneath them; multiple 1GW reactors sharing turbine and active fuel reprocessing infrastructure.
My hope is to place such a surplus of power onto the grid that by the ocean even 'wasteful' reverse osmosis techniques or some scale-up of vacuum desalinization might be practical... and acceptable to the locals.
on 9/11 the terrorists actually flew past indian point nuke plant to get to the trade center
Or... how about the plane that flew right past the Statue of Liberty to attack the second Trade Center tower?
Or... how about the Pentagon plane which executed a complex maneuver to hit the segment of the building that had recently been renovated and reinforced... to better withstand... a plane?
Imagine that -- "They hate our freedom" and yet spared Lady Liberty. This official conspiracy theory is coming apart at the seams. Toto, I get the feeling we are not talking about those terrorists anymore.
When I hear about clever-but low energy processes that have low yield because -- and only because -- the scientists feel the need toss a stock photo of a windmill or solar cell into the paper to trigger that warm fuzzy feeling, I think to myself, "How cute."
Decades of cuteness now. It's not cute any more.
The world needs less cuteness and more large scale thinking. Gigawatts not milliwatts. We also need to get into reverse osmosis in a big way, so we can start to manufacture fresh water from salt and pipe it inland. This requires massive amounts of energy.
Real Humans do not need to wait for rain, real humans need not wait for oil and gas to diminish in order to achieve the next step. Real humans better wake up and resume the industrial revolution. We are smart enough to keep it clean.
For example, most self proclaimed environmentalists I know leave their computers running 24/7 and deliberately disable the standby features. I myself have all of my machines configured to enter S4 after 15 minutes of no activity.
Running a computer 24/7 minimizes the minimum/maximum temperature range to which its components are exposed. I also run hard disks 24/7 with spin-down disabled to maximize their lifespan. Always keep hard disks oriented horizontal, not because of the bearing -- do it to ensure that heat rises uniformly from its surface. For my external hard disks, I ALWAYS take them apart and burn additional holes in the top and bottom with a soldering iron for increased airflow, because the folks that assemble them no longer give a damn about operating temperature.
These are 21st century 'fails'. Some of us remember a time when all electronic components were properly spec'd and given a generous amount of airflow, and plug-in power adapters were not hot to the touch. I call it predatory engineering.
I consider a healthy computer to be an integral part of my environment, and I'm very environmentally conscious.
"Hey, you're wearing one of those EEG thingies right?" "Yup." "Remember... when you posted that photo of your lawn the other day?" "Sure do." "Right... golly, it worked! It's coming in now. I see you are... sitting on the toilet? Gross!" "Hey!" "And just THINK... all you had to do was REMEMBER!" "Cut it out!!" "Oh look, another one. You let your dog watch you poop?" [xxxxxx] has left the chatroom
Why use a side channel attack when a direct approach also works.
OOPS... a link to a youtube-censored video. Try this one: NO PRESSURE! Bad taste should never be flagged 'inappropriate' for kids of any age. How else would they learn what it is?
Good step: Offer to eliminate tariffs on solar panels and other things. Good step: Get behind building LOTS of modern nuclear plants. LOTS. Good step: Get behind building LOTS of electric cars, and the technology to increase batteries' energy density.
Three great steps!
As to "and other things..." I have always favored a move in the direction of free trade in all things, as Jefferson (not Hamilton) intended. In modern context this involves rolling back tariffs altogether, including ones for which a reciprocal arrangement exists, with the objective of simplifying things in general, and Federal law in particular. Henry George's 1886 treatise Protection or Free Trade remains as relevant and thought-provoking as ever. I agree with other posters who have said that tariffs are a market distortion -- and would add that selective tariffs by technology category (within the classification of power generation) are an even more awful distortion. You're taking the rudder from market forces -- which reflect a combination of necessity and desire -- and placing it into the hands of those who get to decide what is save-de-planet environmental and what is not.
I consider the present worldwide system of tariffs a form of pollution and wasted energy. I believe the only sustainable form of wealth creation is meaningful innovation, not the borderline kind that results from some tech firm beating another to the patent office. I mean something new that can reduce the cost of living by reducing expenses. My chosen (workable) path is to reduce the cost of grid electricity delivered (and remaining hydrocarbons extracted) in North America by harnessing Thorium.
And it so happens that NOT ONE of those politically correct green solutions generates the base load energy necessary to survive a harsh Winter, let alone grow. It really has been two decades of bad road. "Cheaper" Chinese solar panels or wind turbines will not keep us all alive during a continent-wide hard freeze. Until the "Green" parties of the world agree on a some method of generating an incredible amount of energy 24x7 reliably, something that will work, we're screwed.
Suggest plans for it that everyone can support. Leave the death threats at home. ; )
Because modern technology has made them "civilized" and "comfortable" and soo "enlightened".
It starts when they are children. They are the bullies who would kick or trip others for fun, but do not because they are afraid. The more fortunate among them actually did these things and got an ass whoopin' -- and at least in the context of person-to-person relations, (perhaps) learned the greatest lesson -- that restraint of bully impulses saves you from retaliation, but also even a tiny bit of polite respect gets you further still.
But as emerging adults they learned that the human race as a whole, has no staunch defenders. You can trash the human race as a whole, in as stupid or skillful a manner as you wish, and as long as you are speaking about people in general, your opinions and remarks go unchallenged.
And sadly, they do not. Among others who also get off on this people-hating trend, you are a celebrity in this useless and ultimately dangerous sport. Those who disagree are held back by social conditioning that, in striving for a conflict free world, encourages you to disengage from confrontation.
In order for our species to succeed it is NOT ENOUGH to teach politeness and respect.
You have to teach children to draw a line, their own personal line.
And you MUST teach your children that is their duty to kick ass, LOUDLY, when someone crosses that line.
People all over are teaching their children that when someone crosses a line, it is okay to re-draw the line.
Meanwhile, the most ugly sentiments get the most traction.
Which is why assholes like the one who wrote TA feel free to take something he did not think of himself, something that would ennoble the human species with the simply inspiring, breathtaking act of its construction -- sitting in his electricity powered climate controlled room, he will proceed to take a shit on the idea and try to smear it all over the rest of us.
Okay it is painfully obvious what he is against. Maybe, it all sounds so vaguely political. That 'thing'. What is he FOR?? He does not think it worthwhile to elaborate on what his real 'plan' for those resources are, he'll leave it to you. He can't be bothered. He's done.
What you read in TA is a symptom of a really dangerous problem.
Someone who respects and stands up for the whole human needs to kick his ass. Verbally and en masse, of course.
Get back on your choo choo train and quit yer bitching.
+5 Funny also on the mark.
These affectations of language have their origin in entertainment and activities for young children that include a special 'vocational adult hat' to wear. Latent memories of this technique emerge later on as iconography, such as the cute Sherlock Holmes hat (with Cavendish pipe) or graduation mortarboard cap beside extra credit puzzles.
This Wears A Special Hat trick is used to titillate the news media, which is locked in a state of perpetual childhood.
So Mr. and Ms. Whale, I hope you have fun wearing your Very Special Hats.
Whoa, I am not saying you are right or wrong, but why are you so angry about this?
Thanks kindly for asking.
Because some one needs to stand up for the whole damned human race. I'm no stellar specimen -- but someone needs to do it. Misanthropy is becoming "cool", in the guise of clumsily vague self-effacing applied psychoanalysis, in environmental activism, in trendy herd angst. Now that we have developed this comfortable security blanket of modern technology, some of us feel no need to show respect for our own kind on any scale whatsoever.
In the case of the study, this simple 'respect' might have taken the form of following up on the men and women who administered themselves shocks to determine their real motivation for doing so. Could be mere curiosity, or a desire to endure/accomplish something one had dismissed as scary/unthinkable. For all we know, some of the subjects could have believed they were expected to use the button at least once. Why was it there at all if it had no other effect (such as releasing them from remaining contemplation time)?
I find it perfectly healthy that half of the people admitted they "hated" the experience of enforced idleness on some one else's terms. Asking people their feelings towards contemplation, especially in cases the subject could choose their own place, that's real research. The part with the shock-button was badly done and butt-ugly.
These psychologist boffins who put their heads together only to discern only one possible motive for pushing the button -- being "tormented" by boredom or idleness, my response is what the fuck. Why am I angry? Without passionate opinion life itself is a dull study in uselessness that none would care to read.
___ The press has already seized on this pop-psych tabloid lollipop and is slurping on it nosily:
"When asked to sit alone in a room, with nothing but a button that administers an electric shock, men will choose to take that shock more often than not. Yes, a series of 11 experiments has confirmed that men would rather experience a mild electric current course through their body, than think." ~Wired UK "People, and especially men, hate being alone with their thoughts so much that they'd rather be in pain." ~Washington Post "In a new study, people who were asked to spend a few minutes alone with their thoughts disliked it so much that they would zap themselves with electricity during their alone time." ~LA Times "The results are a testament to our discomfort with our own thoughts, say psychologists, and to the challenge we face when we try to rein them in." [...] " In the next experiment, participants were given a small electric shock that was so unpleasant that three-quarters of them said they would be willing to pay not to experience the shock again. Yet when they were placed in the room to sit alone with their thoughts, 67 percent of male participants and 25 percent of female subjects were so eager to find something to do that they shocked themselves voluntarily." ~Business Standard [India]
We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We slew the great warrior. We took the prisoners. We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand that gives us man's-flesh to eat. We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we choose. I am Uglúk. I have spoken.
*IF AND ONLY IF* they had agreed to sit for 15 minutes but were permitted to leave right away after shocking themselves -- and some did so, could the researchers claim that some people would rather endure a shock than be alone with their thoughts.
As the experiment was conducted (correct me if I'm wrong!) they agreed to sit out the period alone and all of them did so. They were not asked to refrain from pressing the button..
So the only difference from the basic experiment was the presence of the button which offered entertainment and also enlightenment -- in the form of providing the subject an opportunity to test and prove they could endure the shock, a new and unfamiliar experience.
In this version the experimenters FAILED to provide an environment with NO stimulation. They merely reduced available entertainment options to one, the button.
What the experiment did prove is that given time alone to think and reflect -- people will reevaluate their own aversion to an "unpleasant" sensation and decide to take advantage of an opportunity to better themselves by proving (to themselves) they can endure it.
This is SO DIFFERENT from the conclusion that people are little scardie-rabbits who cannot endure being alone with themselves, these researchers should be ashamed of themselves for irresponsibly portraying this, or permitting this to be portrayed in the news without rebuttal. They should apologize and re-do the experiment.
Hrrrmph. These subjects were cheated. These times are full of shoddy research and tabloid sound-bite conclusions like this.
Nothing ever happens the way I expect it to. The bartender says "Why the long face?" A tachyon flies into a bar . ..
Horse flies like a banana.
How best to study the Big Bang? Make a Little Bang in the laboratory! Perhaps we will discover that the optimal conditions for the Big Bang arose when someone began to devise practical laboratory experiments to study and understand the previous one. Ad infinitum.
When Anonymous Cowards bicker, it makes God laugh. When real people do it, it makes Him cry.
Assuming that Emperors return to the same nest areas throughout their history because we have visited the Antarctic a few times and followed them to the same spot more than once, that's a good one.
Posing that any deviation in their behavior is due to so-called climate change, that's a better one.
Listen to an ananamatroiniclly correct president! Listen as the president is hacked! Listen as the president is placed in diagnostic mode! Listen as the artificial intelligence is crashed! Listen as the president is broken! Listen!
This was done in 1971 Either these folks were waay ahead of their time,or things haven't changed much. Rewind and listen to the whole thing. It's a life changing experience. As my parents would attest.
I would say that you are clueless idiot who likes the smell of his own verbal excrement on the internet.
*** Relevance fight! ***
Rosin yer bows fiddlers, hike yer skirts ladies and sweep out the pit, smoke dem crawdads while you got 'em... we're gonna have open source pit 'relevance wraslin' tonite!
Over in the corner Papa Snuff Daddy is totin' his signed binary drivers, he's a real tootin' feller. He installs clean and you can see he's runnin' but yo better watch out for his kernel panic hold, it'll get ya good. And when he gets ya, whatch gonna do, patch him? He's been patched so many times but the scars don't show 'cuz he wore out his version number years ago.
In the other corner we have the astounding Patefacio Radix Maximus Mesa! He is 'open', he is 'sourced', 'committed' to victory! You can clearly see he has the biggest package, but does he know how to use it? This feller is so smug he wants you to patch him! An when the proverbial shit hits the coolin' appatarus, who would you rather have out in the woods with ya, far away from dem vendor websites? Lets just say if Maximus panics you could fix him yerself in time. Or if you can't chop off the part of him that don't work. Ha, he heard me say that, only jokin' fella, now he's ready to fight!
The musicians were poised with their instruments. They were ready to go. It would only be a few seconds now, I wrote.
Monday: red watermelons. Tuesday: golden watermelons. Wednesday: gray watermelons. Thursday: black, soundless watermelons. Friday: white watermelons. Saturday: blue watermelons. Sunday: brown watermelons.
A so sad, too bad story of genius... it reminds me of some of the tales told in the Cosmos and Connections series (Sagan, Tyson and Burke) of astronomical and physics visionaries, folks glimpsed truths that became essential building blocks of our modern understanding of the world, and yet in their own time this information was of little or no practical use.
I've been down some of the rabbit holes of Xanadu in my own algorithmic doodles which centered around 'compressing' information by changing tokens into references to tokens down to the rudiments of language, which is going too far because you lose useful context, and have witnessed some of the grandest experiments in whole encapsulation -- such as the replication versioning disaster that was Microsoft OLE (object linking and embedding), where burned-in OS paths to data (on my computer, not necessarily yours) create a fragile web of things on disk and things inside other things that is easily broken, leaving us with data cobwebs flapping in the wind.
Sadly, and with utmost sympathy -- it's a beautiful dream-- but I believe that many of these concepts are dangerous and should be abandoned.
These are extremes. Make lots of copies, knowing some will evolve and diverge... and try to smarten the analysis so after the fact you can reconcile diffs, but it's a separate process and you're screwed if non-trivial transformations occur. Or centralize and impose a System (as Xanadu attempts) with a battery of willing monkeys feeding knowledge into the system, correctly applying transclusion down to some atomic level, and on the seventh day He looked down upon it and saw that it was Good...
But you're screwed with Xanadu. You're screwed as a species because you have distilled a knowledge base into a few high-tech points of failure. Where knowledge survives over history through massive and often wasteful replication, oops there goes the Library of Alexandria, oops there goes another rubber tree, you're putting all your intellectual eggs a few baskets. Baskets held in Xanadu servers that are so pointer and reference rich that a raw dump of the damned thing wouldn't make any sense at all.
Xanadu screws you as a person because we assimilate knowledge via a narrative process. Books render completely and we read. We need lectures to learn, great lectures that illuminate and inspire. Good lecturers are those whose minds unroll knowledge into talking-streams. They cannot and will not (instead) engage in some process of hashing out every sentence they utter, completely researching and correctly embedding the underlying link to the utterance of the person who said it last to first, and did not necessarily say it better. When faced with the task of applying tranny-links to their work they would likely just fall silent.
Because (since we are each alone in the mind) there is no one way to say anything, and no distilled 'true' method of thinking. Not even in German. It's treatises, sermons and pulpits all the way down.
If you are excited by the Xanadu concept and think fewer points of failure are better, please take a moment to view this exquisite and amazing visit with Computer Zero. It is from the 1975 movie Rollerball, and what the hell is it doing there, it is true genius and is creepy as hell.
Zero was a 'memory pool', an actual Xanadu Server! It had all the books, all the knowledge, all the connections, and yet -- it was absent-minded and going insane, losing things, mumbling. If there had been a sequel to Rollerball world 100 years hence, it would surely have been a medieval society.
Make a zillion copies of everything. Re-tell in your own words. There's no time for linking or data trans-substantiation, just replicate data like rabbits and we'll fix it in the mix. Or let the kids sort it out.
Some type of triggered fission in the heavy elements of the meteorite? And gamma emitter with a short half life of minutes is being created and left in the trail, such as Barium-137?
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Thanks for your inquiry. Don't bother to give your name or address, simply head down to the nearest book store and purchase a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. You will be hearing from us soon.
Slashdot Mirror
With a bit of find and replace
s/Solar{ PV|}/Natural Gas/g
Now your comment makes sense... even at night!
Natural gas is the new darling of base load generation. The only problem being that IF the present burdens of coal is shifted onto it and present coal infrastructure is decommissioned and abandoned, we'll have nothing to fall back on WHEN natural gas peaks and declines.
When considering the relative costs of things I try to factor in whether they will ultimately 'work' at all. Solar PV for base load energy will not work. Therefore it is too expensive, because extinction is expensive.
Aw C'mon, everybody's whining about the subsidies and 'net metering hardware' that needs to be installed and maintained at each point of presence -- aside from the purchase of the solar and wind units themselves... at the core of it are a few folks discovering that power utilities are not as eager as they like them to be.
For solar It's just a politics-entitlement issue because, frankly, the power these solar installations push back onto the grid is too tiny for the 'trouble' they cause. I am SO GLAD that my small midwest city has none of this DAMNED FOOLISHNESS going on. We can see what our electrical co-ops pay by the kilowatt for reliable grid power and we see the salaries of the fine people who maintain it, and it's pretty much in parity.
The power grid is a massive tuned circuit which uses frequency to regulate power flow. Several regions such as Oklahoma, Florida and the Northeast already contain enough intermittent energy sources to create real problems with distribution, today. Electrical Engineer Andrew Dodson lays out a few of these problems at this fascinating presentation at the recent Thorium Energy Conference in Chicago, showing plots of dissonant waves hundreds of miles across caused by the onset and outset of wind surges. He describes the "single machine infinite bus" model that grid engineers design for and how it is being compromised in this followup interview.
Here is someone who has devoted his career to grid stability, understands it completely -- and what is his own take?
A TRILLION DOLLARS to retrofit the grid to accommodate so-called renewables. That's without putting a single additional megawatt on the grid. He even advocates the build out of a parallel grid for variable sources to protect the essential 24/7 machinery of power generation, which can incur physical damage from these effects -- allowing us to concentrate new infrastructure for tuning reactive load to a few buffer points.
Sounds great down the road. We need reliable baseload power cheaper than coal first.
___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security
With LFTR you would not need to use an expensive and power hogging Reverse Osmosis plant to desalinate seawater. A thorium reactor is an excellent and efficient way to desalinate seawater by the tons per minute. The gigawatts of free power are also a plus.
In Kirk Sorensen's TEAC 2013 presentation he describes using waste heat for this purpose -- showing a concept drawing of a LFTR electric/water plant next to the ocean. Am I certain that LFTR could be sited safely on the shore and be completely submerged by a tsunami or hurricane with no resulting disaster? Absolutely! Would he be able to convince some forward-thinking country such as Qatar to place these in the desert to ensure a source of fresh water in some post-petroleum future? Yep.
What of the United States? I'm afraid that the prospect of siting a new nuclear project on the coast -- or more generally, any parcel of land that would be contested by locals -- is remote. The regions which surround lakes, rivers and coastline are completely settled (and defended) by people.
My idea is to build out LFTR inland in areas less likely to be contested by humans, such as along existing cross-country transmission line corridors, in compact configurations that might even fit within the cleared right-of-way path directly beneath them; multiple 1GW reactors sharing turbine and active fuel reprocessing infrastructure.
My hope is to place such a surplus of power onto the grid that by the ocean even 'wasteful' reverse osmosis techniques or some scale-up of vacuum desalinization might be practical... and acceptable to the locals.
___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security
on 9/11 the terrorists actually flew past indian point nuke plant to get to the trade center
Or... how about the plane that flew right past the Statue of Liberty to attack the second Trade Center tower?
Or... how about the Pentagon plane which executed a complex maneuver to hit the segment of the building that had recently been renovated and reinforced... to better withstand... a plane?
Imagine that -- "They hate our freedom" and yet spared Lady Liberty. This official conspiracy theory is coming apart at the seams. Toto, I get the feeling we are not talking about those terrorists anymore.
A Think Tank chock full O' Think.
I like it.
When I hear about clever-but low energy processes that have low yield because -- and only because -- the scientists feel the need toss a stock photo of a windmill or solar cell into the paper to trigger that warm fuzzy feeling, I think to myself, "How cute."
Decades of cuteness now. It's not cute any more.
The world needs less cuteness and more large scale thinking. Gigawatts not milliwatts. We also need to get into reverse osmosis in a big way, so we can start to manufacture fresh water from salt and pipe it inland. This requires massive amounts of energy.
Real Humans do not need to wait for rain, real humans need not wait for oil and gas to diminish in order to achieve the next step. Real humans better wake up and resume the industrial revolution. We are smart enough to keep it clean.
Follow us down the rabbit hole...
For example, most self proclaimed environmentalists I know leave their computers running 24/7 and deliberately disable the standby features. I myself have all of my machines configured to enter S4 after 15 minutes of no activity.
Running a computer 24/7 minimizes the minimum/maximum temperature range to which its components are exposed. I also run hard disks 24/7 with spin-down disabled to maximize their lifespan. Always keep hard disks oriented horizontal, not because of the bearing -- do it to ensure that heat rises uniformly from its surface. For my external hard disks, I ALWAYS take them apart and burn additional holes in the top and bottom with a soldering iron for increased airflow, because the folks that assemble them no longer give a damn about operating temperature.
These are 21st century 'fails'. Some of us remember a time when all electronic components were properly spec'd and given a generous amount of airflow, and plug-in power adapters were not hot to the touch. I call it predatory engineering.
I consider a healthy computer to be an integral part of my environment, and I'm very environmentally conscious.
Reading your thoughts is not the scary bit.
"Hey, you're wearing one of those EEG thingies right?"
"Yup."
"Remember... when you posted that photo of your lawn the other day?"
"Sure do."
"Right... golly, it worked! It's coming in now. I see you are... sitting on the toilet? Gross!"
"Hey!"
"And just THINK... all you had to do was REMEMBER!"
"Cut it out!!"
"Oh look, another one. You let your dog watch you poop?"
[xxxxxx] has left the chatroom
Why use a side channel attack when a direct approach also works.
To atone... and hide our shame.
And yet they don't seem to have any problem violating the fundamental rights of nearly everyone in and outside the US.
That is because blah blah blah NO blah blah NATIONAL SECURITY blah blah SHUT THE HELL UP.
Thar be dragins.
Okay. Remember in all of this... NO PRESSURE!
OOPS... a link to a youtube-censored video. Try this one: NO PRESSURE!
Bad taste should never be flagged 'inappropriate' for kids of any age.
How else would they learn what it is?
Good step: Offer to eliminate tariffs on solar panels and other things.
Good step: Get behind building LOTS of modern nuclear plants. LOTS.
Good step: Get behind building LOTS of electric cars, and the technology to increase batteries' energy density.
Three great steps!
As to "and other things..." I have always favored a move in the direction of free trade in all things, as Jefferson (not Hamilton) intended. In modern context this involves rolling back tariffs altogether, including ones for which a reciprocal arrangement exists, with the objective of simplifying things in general, and Federal law in particular. Henry George's 1886 treatise Protection or Free Trade remains as relevant and thought-provoking as ever. I agree with other posters who have said that tariffs are a market distortion -- and would add that selective tariffs by technology category (within the classification of power generation) are an even more awful distortion. You're taking the rudder from market forces -- which reflect a combination of necessity and desire -- and placing it into the hands of those who get to decide what is save-de-planet environmental and what is not.
I consider the present worldwide system of tariffs a form of pollution and wasted energy. I believe the only sustainable form of wealth creation is meaningful innovation, not the borderline kind that results from some tech firm beating another to the patent office. I mean something new that can reduce the cost of living by reducing expenses. My chosen (workable) path is to reduce the cost of grid electricity delivered (and remaining hydrocarbons extracted) in North America by harnessing Thorium.
And it so happens that NOT ONE of those politically correct green solutions generates the base load energy necessary to survive a harsh Winter, let alone grow. It really has been two decades of bad road. "Cheaper" Chinese solar panels or wind turbines will not keep us all alive during a continent-wide hard freeze. Until the "Green" parties of the world agree on a some method of generating an incredible amount of energy 24x7 reliably, something that will work, we're screwed.
Suggest plans for it that everyone can support. Leave the death threats at home. ; )
Okay. Remember in all of this... NO PRESSURE!
It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot ... sometimes you just have to point things out point by point ... some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs ... or using solid fuel Thorium, which is pointless so long as uranium is available ... yes it's full of dangerous glop, but it is useful and happy glop ... yes, I think a LFTR could be developed and built within $4B ... every path to biofuels leads to scorched-earth disaster, Thorium energy gives us the surplus to generate synfuels ... a move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum) ...
Faux-socialist misanthropes are WINNING.
Time to beat them down.
Because modern technology has made them "civilized" and "comfortable" and soo "enlightened".
It starts when they are children. They are the bullies who would kick or trip others for fun, but do not because they are afraid. The more fortunate among them actually did these things and got an ass whoopin' -- and at least in the context of person-to-person relations, (perhaps) learned the greatest lesson -- that restraint of bully impulses saves you from retaliation, but also even a tiny bit of polite respect gets you further still.
But as emerging adults they learned that the human race as a whole, has no staunch defenders. You can trash the human race as a whole, in as stupid or skillful a manner as you wish, and as long as you are speaking about people in general, your opinions and remarks go unchallenged.
And sadly, they do not. Among others who also get off on this people-hating trend, you are a celebrity in this useless and ultimately dangerous sport. Those who disagree are held back by social conditioning that, in striving for a conflict free world, encourages you to disengage from confrontation.
In order for our species to succeed it is NOT ENOUGH to teach politeness and respect.
You have to teach children to draw a line, their own personal line.
And you MUST teach your children that is their duty to kick ass, LOUDLY, when someone crosses that line.
People all over are teaching their children that when someone crosses a line, it is okay to re-draw the line.
Meanwhile, the most ugly sentiments get the most traction.
Which is why assholes like the one who wrote TA feel free to take something he did not think of himself, something that would ennoble the human species with the simply inspiring, breathtaking act of its construction -- sitting in his electricity powered climate controlled room, he will proceed to take a shit on the idea and try to smear it all over the rest of us.
Okay it is painfully obvious what he is against. Maybe, it all sounds so vaguely political. That 'thing'. What is he FOR?? He does not think it worthwhile to elaborate on what his real 'plan' for those resources are, he'll leave it to you. He can't be bothered. He's done.
What you read in TA is a symptom of a really dangerous problem.
Someone who respects and stands up for the whole human needs to kick his ass. Verbally and en masse, of course.
Get back on your choo choo train and quit yer bitching.
+5 Funny also on the mark.
These affectations of language have their origin in entertainment and activities for young children that include a special 'vocational adult hat' to wear. Latent memories of this technique emerge later on as iconography, such as the cute Sherlock Holmes hat (with Cavendish pipe) or graduation mortarboard cap beside extra credit puzzles.
This Wears A Special Hat trick is used to titillate the news media, which is locked in a state of perpetual childhood.
So Mr. and Ms. Whale, I hope you have fun wearing your Very Special Hats.
Whoa, I am not saying you are right or wrong, but why are you so angry about this?
Thanks kindly for asking.
Because some one needs to stand up for the whole damned human race. I'm no stellar specimen -- but someone needs to do it. Misanthropy is becoming "cool", in the guise of clumsily vague self-effacing applied psychoanalysis, in environmental activism, in trendy herd angst. Now that we have developed this comfortable security blanket of modern technology, some of us feel no need to show respect for our own kind on any scale whatsoever.
In the case of the study, this simple 'respect' might have taken the form of following up on the men and women who administered themselves shocks to determine their real motivation for doing so. Could be mere curiosity, or a desire to endure/accomplish something one had dismissed as scary/unthinkable. For all we know, some of the subjects could have believed they were expected to use the button at least once. Why was it there at all if it had no other effect (such as releasing them from remaining contemplation time)?
I find it perfectly healthy that half of the people admitted they "hated" the experience of enforced idleness on some one else's terms. Asking people their feelings towards contemplation, especially in cases the subject could choose their own place, that's real research. The part with the shock-button was badly done and butt-ugly.
These psychologist boffins who put their heads together only to discern only one possible motive for pushing the button -- being "tormented" by boredom or idleness, my response is what the fuck. Why am I angry? Without passionate opinion life itself is a dull study in uselessness that none would care to read.
___
The press has already seized on this pop-psych tabloid lollipop and is slurping on it nosily:
"When asked to sit alone in a room, with nothing but a button that administers an electric shock, men will choose to take that shock more often than not. Yes, a series of 11 experiments has confirmed that men would rather experience a mild electric current course through their body, than think."
~Wired UK
"People, and especially men, hate being alone with their thoughts so much that they'd rather be in pain."
~Washington Post
"In a new study, people who were asked to spend a few minutes alone with their thoughts disliked it so much that they would zap themselves with electricity during their alone time."
~LA Times
"The results are a testament to our discomfort with our own thoughts, say psychologists, and to the challenge we face when we try to rein them in." [...] " In the next experiment, participants were given a small electric shock that was so unpleasant that three-quarters of them said they would be willing to pay not to experience the shock again. Yet when they were placed in the room to sit alone with their thoughts, 67 percent of male participants and 25 percent of female subjects were so eager to find something to do that they shocked themselves voluntarily."
~Business Standard [India]
Urks = irks
We are the fighting Uruk-hai!
We slew the great warrior.
We took the prisoners.
We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand:
the Hand that gives us man's-flesh to eat.
We came out of Isengard, and led you here,
and we shall lead you back by the way we choose.
I am Uglúk. I have spoken.
We definitely should use Google' and Photoshop that way in everyday language. If we do it enough Google and Adobe will lose their trademarks.
I xerox that remark!
*IF AND ONLY IF* they had agreed to sit for 15 minutes but were permitted to leave right away after shocking themselves -- and some did so, could the researchers claim that some people would rather endure a shock than be alone with their thoughts.
As the experiment was conducted (correct me if I'm wrong!) they agreed to sit out the period alone and all of them did so. They were not asked to refrain from pressing the button..
So the only difference from the basic experiment was the presence of the button which offered entertainment and also enlightenment -- in the form of providing the subject an opportunity to test and prove they could endure the shock, a new and unfamiliar experience.
In this version the experimenters FAILED to provide an environment with NO stimulation. They merely reduced available entertainment options to one, the button.
What the experiment did prove is that given time alone to think and reflect -- people will reevaluate their own aversion to an "unpleasant" sensation and decide to take advantage of an opportunity to better themselves by proving (to themselves) they can endure it.
This is SO DIFFERENT from the conclusion that people are little scardie-rabbits who cannot endure being alone with themselves, these researchers should be ashamed of themselves for irresponsibly portraying this, or permitting this to be portrayed in the news without rebuttal. They should apologize and re-do the experiment.
Hrrrmph. These subjects were cheated. These times are full of shoddy research and tabloid sound-bite conclusions like this.
Nothing ever happens the way I expect it to. .
The bartender says "Why the long face?"
A tachyon flies into a bar . .
Horse flies like a banana.
How best to study the Big Bang? Make a Little Bang in the laboratory! Perhaps we will discover that the optimal conditions for the Big Bang arose when someone began to devise practical laboratory experiments to study and understand the previous one. Ad infinitum.
When Anonymous Cowards bicker, it makes God laugh.
When real people do it, it makes Him cry.
Assuming that Emperors return to the same nest areas throughout their history because we have visited the Antarctic a few times and followed them to the same spot more than once, that's a good one.
Posing that any deviation in their behavior is due to so-called climate change, that's a better one.
Question.
Evaluate.
Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?
Obligatory Firesign Theater reference.
Listen to an ananamatroiniclly correct president!
Listen as the president is hacked!
Listen as the president is placed in diagnostic mode!
Listen as the artificial intelligence is crashed!
Listen as the president is broken!
Listen!
This was done in 1971 Either these folks were waay ahead of their time,or things haven't changed much. Rewind and listen to the whole thing. It's a life changing experience. As my parents would attest.
opensource (...) relevant
I would say that you are clueless idiot who likes the smell of his own verbal excrement on the internet.
*** Relevance fight! ***
Rosin yer bows fiddlers, hike yer skirts ladies and sweep out the pit, smoke dem crawdads while you got 'em... we're gonna have open source pit 'relevance wraslin' tonite!
Over in the corner Papa Snuff Daddy is totin' his signed binary drivers, he's a real tootin' feller. He installs clean and you can see he's runnin' but yo better watch out for his kernel panic hold, it'll get ya good. And when he gets ya, whatch gonna do, patch him? He's been patched so many times but the scars don't show 'cuz he wore out his version number years ago.
In the other corner we have the astounding Patefacio Radix Maximus Mesa! He is 'open', he is 'sourced', 'committed' to victory! You can clearly see he has the biggest package, but does he know how to use it? This feller is so smug he wants you to patch him! An when the proverbial shit hits the coolin' appatarus, who would you rather have out in the woods with ya, far away from dem vendor websites? Lets just say if Maximus panics you could fix him yerself in time. Or if you can't chop off the part of him that don't work. Ha, he heard me say that, only jokin' fella, now he's ready to fight!
The musicians were poised with their instruments. They were ready to go. It would only be a few seconds now, I wrote.
It is really very simple. The colors of the days and the watermelons go like this --
Monday: red watermelons.
Tuesday: golden watermelons.
Wednesday: gray watermelons.
Thursday: black, soundless watermelons.
Friday: white watermelons.
Saturday: blue watermelons.
Sunday: brown watermelons.
A so sad, too bad story of genius... it reminds me of some of the tales told in the Cosmos and Connections series (Sagan, Tyson and Burke) of astronomical and physics visionaries, folks glimpsed truths that became essential building blocks of our modern understanding of the world, and yet in their own time this information was of little or no practical use.
I've been down some of the rabbit holes of Xanadu in my own algorithmic doodles which centered around 'compressing' information by changing tokens into references to tokens down to the rudiments of language, which is going too far because you lose useful context, and have witnessed some of the grandest experiments in whole encapsulation -- such as the replication versioning disaster that was Microsoft OLE (object linking and embedding), where burned-in OS paths to data (on my computer, not necessarily yours) create a fragile web of things on disk and things inside other things that is easily broken, leaving us with data cobwebs flapping in the wind.
Sadly, and with utmost sympathy -- it's a beautiful dream-- but I believe that many of these concepts are dangerous and should be abandoned.
These are extremes. Make lots of copies, knowing some will evolve and diverge... and try to smarten the analysis so after the fact you can reconcile diffs, but it's a separate process and you're screwed if non-trivial transformations occur. Or centralize and impose a System (as Xanadu attempts) with a battery of willing monkeys feeding knowledge into the system, correctly applying transclusion down to some atomic level, and on the seventh day He looked down upon it and saw that it was Good...
But you're screwed with Xanadu. You're screwed as a species because you have distilled a knowledge base into a few high-tech points of failure. Where knowledge survives over history through massive and often wasteful replication, oops there goes the Library of Alexandria, oops there goes another rubber tree, you're putting all your intellectual eggs a few baskets. Baskets held in Xanadu servers that are so pointer and reference rich that a raw dump of the damned thing wouldn't make any sense at all.
Xanadu screws you as a person because we assimilate knowledge via a narrative process. Books render completely and we read. We need lectures to learn, great lectures that illuminate and inspire. Good lecturers are those whose minds unroll knowledge into talking-streams. They cannot and will not (instead) engage in some process of hashing out every sentence they utter, completely researching and correctly embedding the underlying link to the utterance of the person who said it last to first, and did not necessarily say it better. When faced with the task of applying tranny-links to their work they would likely just fall silent.
Because (since we are each alone in the mind) there is no one way to say anything, and no distilled 'true' method of thinking. Not even in German. It's treatises, sermons and pulpits all the way down.
If you are excited by the Xanadu concept and think fewer points of failure are better, please take a moment to view this exquisite and amazing visit with Computer Zero. It is from the 1975 movie Rollerball, and what the hell is it doing there, it is true genius and is creepy as hell.
Zero was a 'memory pool', an actual Xanadu Server! It had all the books, all the knowledge, all the connections, and yet -- it was absent-minded and going insane, losing things, mumbling. If there had been a sequel to Rollerball world 100 years hence, it would surely have been a medieval society.
Make a zillion copies of everything. Re-tell in your own words. There's no time for linking or data trans-substantiation, just replicate data like rabbits and we'll fix it in the mix. Or let the kids sort it out.
Some type of triggered fission in the heavy elements of the meteorite? And gamma emitter with a short half life of minutes is being created and left in the trail, such as Barium-137?
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