[excerpts from Secretary of State testimony before the UN]
"... Numerous sources tell us that they are moving, not just documents and hard drives, but Protoplanet fragments to keep them from being found by inspectors. [...] In this next example, you will see the type of concealment activity [...] We must ask ourselves: Why would the Moon suddenly move equipment of this nature before inspections if they were anxious to demonstrate what [evidence of Protoplanet impact] they had or did not have? [...] While this -- less than a teaspoon of Protoplanet dust, [shows small glass vial] a little bit about this amount -- provides evidential clues of a Protoplanet impact, UNSCOM estimates that the Moon could be harbor TONS of Protoplanet material, enough to wipe out every competing Lunar formation theory on Earth [...] The Moon has now placed itself in danger of the serious consequences called for in U.N. Resolution 1441. And this body places itself in danger of irrelevance if it allows the Moon to continue to defy its will without responding effectively and immediately. [...] There can be no doubt that the Moon has in its possession evidence of planetary impact and the capability to rapidly produce more, much more. [...] My colleagues, we have an obligation to our citizens, we have an obligation to this body to see that our resolutions are complied with. We wrote 1441 not in order to go to war, we wrote 1441 to try to preserve the peace. We wrote 1441 to give the Moon one last chance. The Moon is not so far taking that one last chance. We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us. We must not fail in our duty and our responsibility to the citizens of the countries that are represented by this body..."
THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW. We must move on the Moon, in waves of human exploration and occupation to establish the Protoplanet theory, secure all available Protoplanet evidence, and ensure the evolution of our species' manifest destiny to expand into space. Also.
And then, ON TO MARS to further secure the region. We must gather an invasion force, resolve to stay the course until 'mission accomplished', and declare war on Martian aggression (which has been implicated in the sudden disappearance of Pluto).
As an alternative to conquering the rest of our world so as to destroy the currency of others to protect the value of our own... as an alternative to easing into authoritarian government to enable the building of gulags that could encircle those unrepentant, those dissenting... as an alternative to this sewer of cultured dependencies and endless terrestrial wars...
We choose to broaden our horizons. This means space war.
We choose to meet this Lunar threat head-on and go to the Moon. And We Choose Mars also.
If it is war they want, such a war we shall give them.
TWENTY YEARS ago when a 1 megabit T1 cost $10,000 a month installed to the Caribbean -- with an equal measure of determination, deft grantsmanship and elbow grease we managed to bring Internet to the US Virgin Islands with the Virgin Islands Freenet. One day in September 1994 connectivity was available for ~40 cents a minute if you dialed long distance to the states, a couple thou a month for 56kbit or 10k for T1. The day after you could get an email address, access Usenet groups and browse the web with Lynx on 4 (and later as many as 12) local dialup lines.
There does seem to be a general lack of civility and willingness to participate in process these days.
Now I do hold some measure of contempt for the Federal Government as a whole in its hubris over control of the Internet. The NSA is pushing net neutrality in its charter-be-damned initiative to listen to everyone, the president-du-jour tolerates 'Internet kill switch' dialogue throughout the Executive Branch as if martial law security checkpoints should be written into law, and let's not forget the peoples' hero Al Gore who lobbied for the government to hold our encryption keys in escrow. There is a large bullshit factor.
But attacking the FCC is sort of like going after park rangers. For better or worse (mostly better) it presided over the breakup of the Bells. It helped to ensure that even rural USA modernized its telecom to bring about modern access choices, the ones we take for granted today, to as much of the country as possible. And now they are charged with accepting comments on 'net neutrality' -- which will be as hard to adequately define in the modern context as it would be to discuss.
Now more than ever we need the real voices of people who aren't afraid to write their thoughts into multi-paragraph letters and opinions, no matter the medium, so say something about it. Just like my Freenet folks twenty years ago were eager to do. These folks are not wanting to know how to control, they are asking in what ways it may be best to regulate.
Control is what we generally try to avoid. Regulation that occurs with a majority of support that accomplishes useful goals -- such as the rural electrification and building of telecom in America -- is a necessary part of due process.
Time to try to recapture just a bit of the cultural restraint and intelligent determination of yesteryear, methinks.
powerdns can connect to a database backend, which can then permanently store a huge collection of dns records.
thanks kindly, this route looks the most promising.
All; the other relevant details of my response including a sketch of how I could implement this idea are OMITTED because I am being harassed by Slashdot's 'Lameness filter' and rather than engage in some investigatory process (hint: it had nothing to do with CAPS) I said Fuck It. Time to move to Pipedot?.
Being a prepper of sorts, and seeing the Gub'mint positioning itself to hijack DNS in order to exert control (or potentially just shut everything down by attacking this low hanging fruit) I've been looking around for a very specific type of resolver, which can be placed manually into one of several modes:
NORMAL: all lookups are resolved with network queries (as a standalone resolver OR as a 'thin' resolver which just forwards to some upstream DNS server). The results are returned as a real-time resolver does, but are also cached permanently to disk in a database that will inevitably grow over time.
FALLBACK 1, fill in the blanks: when a real result is received yet it is a fail (NOERROR,SRVFAIL,NXDOMAIN), as might be the case in a hypothetical shutdown attack, a stored query that had a positive result is returned.
FALLBACK 2, DNS network down/disabled: all queries are returned from the database and network lookups are not attempted.
So while we are resolving normally a database is being created for emergency use, yet if some disruption to DNS occurs it would be possible to switch to one of the fallback modes to surf -- if not completely, at least with some reasonable level of success...
A desirable feature would be to store a maintainable list of 'poison' ip/net masks of known DHS/ICE webservers, so any A records matching this list are NOT treated as real results, and trigger fallback action. Another desirable feature would be explicit (and implicit via matching of results) recognition of wildcard DNS schemes such as gobblegook.realdomain.com so repeated resolves of these do not overwhelm the database. But there might be some gruesome heuristics behind this.
I realize OpenDNS is in itself a step in this direction, but the local fallback resolver would also give you options for cases when OpenDNS itself is not reachable, such as a hostile/draconian ISP that rewrites DNS packets to point to its own servers.
Perl Festivity Level 1: Developers and users have gathered to nibble hors d'oeuvres and chat amiably with each other about the Modern Perl Renaissance. With every sip of their drinks Perl seems ever more striking. Some are gathered around the upright piano improvising songs that proclaim how it is faster, neater, and sharper than ever before with its asynchronous APIs.
Perl Festivity Level 2: Everyone is talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all. Perl seems even better. Perl Monks are patiently explaining syntax and style to potted plants and other nearby objects. Around the piano people are feeling fun and flexible, just as programming in scripting languages used to be. Someone is crooning a bawdy ballad where a couple of inexperienced DOM and CSS selectors encounter a very supportive bundled development server.
Perl Festivity Level 3: Monks are arguing violently and defrocking one another over nested do...until loops that bail on exceptions. People are gulping down other peoples' drinks, placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike as everyone bawls "Got my Mojolicious workin'... but it don't work on Python!" They have lost count of their drinks, and the world is harmonious with blissful adherence to modern interfaces and standards.
Perl Festivity Level 4: All the guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around a burning heap of tables and chairs in celebration of postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations. The piano is missing.
Your driver liability insurance policy has come up for review. We have been recently been acquired by AAAA, the quadruple-A company -- the "Autonomous AAA of the future" and what that means for you as a member is -- it has never been easier to upgrade to an a-car! Financing is available! [link] Due to increasing pressure in the political, legal and underwriters' arenas, we regret to inform you that the cost of your driver policy will be rising this quarter in order to begin collection of fees for the Federal National Driver Insurance Pool, and rising at a steady rate thereafter. It will continue to rise over time despite your [good to excellent] driving record. Now that the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Act is law, and blanket liability accident investigation procedures have been approved by Congress, the legal liability of autonomous vehicles is capped nationwide. While this grants the manufactures freedom from risk of direct criminal penalty and potentially unlimited civil liability, it places human drivers in a difficult position. Most a-car accidents will, of historical necessity rather than actual circumstances, be "no-fault". Since human drivers and any victims claiming injury from them are still obliged to use traditional law enforcement and legal means of redress -- and the cost of these continues to rise -- underwriters are pressuring insurance companies to drop human drivers altogether. We do not intend to do this, but we can no longer provide policies for extended periods. Your new maximum policy period is now [one month]. Thank you for insuring with AAAA.
Dear editor: DRIVERS cause accidents. A-CARS prevent them. That's what the billboard says -- and if Howard County Referendum passes this September manually operated cars will soon be a thing of the past here. What started as a discussion at a hearing after last year's tragic accident grew into a full heated debate, and to think it all started with the parents who provide their children with a-cars pinning the blame squarely on other peoples' children. But then, after co-opting the national campaign with its slick literature and canned answers for everything -- NOW the fault is with human drivers themselves. And then in an astounding feat of lunacy they claim that it's only fair to place the blame on everybody. Not just the drunk, the aged or infirm, the inexperienced, the distracted or the just plain stupid. But no one's stupid in their book, we're just behind the times is all. They are like the drum majorettes of some utopian humanist parade. I say, SAVE US from these rich hippies, their weird toys and their broken ideals. Now I know a lot of these people, even like some of 'em, but aside from this national 'sideline the humans' campaign they're pushed at us (and WHO is paying for those TV spots I wonder) let's not forget that this debate started around kids. Kids who need to learn to drive as surely as they need to learn to push a pen and spell their name. It's like swimming, who would discourage their own children from practice in swimming, to become expert swimmers, because water is dangerous?? Every kid will need to drive some day, or suffer harm or hardship by not knowing how. These a-car parents even forbid their kids from riding in cars being driven by folks they've grown up with, trusted for years. At the parent conferences we even sit on opposite sides of the table, we can barely be civilized even, because this crap has gotten so deep. Well I say they are making a big mistake and don't seem to get it. It's not just that everyone who cannot afford these a-toys will be walking or begging rises on a-buses or buses wi
Re:With R... every day is Talk Like A Pirate Day!
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This joke was tired and lazy a decade ago. You're not just beating a dead horse, you've move past that to sodomizing it.
And you've been everywhere and seen it all -- and have come back to tell us how you've been everywhere and seen it all -- and have come back to tell us how you've been everywhere and seen it all -- and have come back to tell us how you've -- been.
Sorry to hear it. Get a leg up into the world of wonder and whimsy. Join us!
Since she is responding to verbal questions, her marbles are there. The essential thinking parts of the brain, the parts that will help keep her OCCUPIED and SANE through this awful time... are intact. But it is also possible that anything she attempts to do that may require visual perception and especially focus, will be difficult and frustrating.
Decide on a daily schedule for her that includes presence of family --- not just monologues, even two or more people in the room talking with one another is great. Hand holding, massage is a must. Also some time for her to listen to audio content with which she is presently unfamiliar, even when she is alone. And a firm block of time for sleep -- where a nurse turns off and removes any audio devices and dims the lights.
For the audio portion... delve into the great audio that is publicly available: great podcasts such as RadioLab, old time radio programs, chapters of audio books, certain songs of favorite music. Load an mp3 player with these and PLAY IT ON RANDOM SHUFFLE. If *I* was trapped inside my mind, I would much rather face a sense of not knowing what comes next in a mix of music and voice, even if it was out of sequence, which is stimulating --- than be double-trapped into listening to some audiobook in which I have long since lost interest.
Nothing creepy or scary, even if she likes such things! No crime or horror. Go for radio comedy or sitcom and variety like Fibber McGee or Roy Rogers, etc. You don't know how well the various parts of her brain are working, and many hospital meds (esp morphine) make one vulnerable to dark thoughts and paranoia. Chapters of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, 15 minute radio programs, RadioLab-type stuff (but not the creepy stuff) all shuffled together (when she is alone) or played through sequentially (when someone is present to ask her if she's enjoying it) would make for an excellent entertainment without the ultimate strain of conversation.
Bear in mind that she may be in this condition for awhile, and being exposed to audio material that is new to her might become a welcome part of her day.
All the best to her and the family in this difficult time.
Re:With R... every day is Talk Like A Pirate Day!
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For an interesting 9 minute lecture that might help sell you on this idea, listen here.
Certificate warnings freak you out? Try this link instead, now with matching wildcard, calmer seas and less mogul.
With R... every day is Talk Like A Pirate Day!
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"Arrrr.... fix yar name 'R' while you may, maties!!"
I may not have the belly for Deep Statistics but I do know abut Internet Search noise levels. I remember trying to do research on WebDAV (believe me, there is such a thing) only to discover that folks discussing it invariably refer to it as 'dav'. Because saying "Distributed Authoring [and] Versioning" out loud makes you spit out your toothpick. Any attempt to search 'webdav' yielded only the sterile official pages, and attempts to search on 'dav' with other keywords brought up conversations from the community of Disabled American Veterans who also use the term in casual conversation, and have said an awful lot over the years. They occupied 'dav' first.
Now you may think you can pull off a 'C' where Google seems to pick off relevant results if you combine it with any computery term, but it was not always so. It has taken an incredible saturation of C, and perhaps some special coded cases on Google's part, for this to come about.
The success of Perl is due in some part to the ability of confused people to obtain help and advice about it merely by searching on its unique spelling.
So the best way to push this R language is with a refit of the name. Go with the pirate theme, it will sell many more T-shirts than those of silly camels and pearls. But stake out a bit of Keyword Real Estate that presently has a relatively low population density.
Adding arrrs is not enough since talking like a pirate is typically accomplished with a single 'a', so ar+ space is pretty well populated up to ar{5}, it looks like best ratio is around a{3}r{3}. But even choosing the less-optimum and easier to type a{2}r{3} by using 'aarrr' instead of 'r' you have improved the signal to noise ratio by a factor of twenty-five thousand.
Push the name change firmly and decisively. This means that if anyone mentions 'R' there should be immediate responses that ask, "What AARRR you talking about?" This will inject the proper searchable term into the discussion while it reminds the poster of the name change.
For an interesting 9 minute lecture that might help sell you on this idea, listen here.
Don't worry, you're on the forefront of slashdot's latest trend: not even reading the headline. After the long-held tradition of no one reading the article, we migrated in recent years to no one reading the summary, and now we are finally achieving are long-awaited goal.
Don't worry, you're on the forefront of Slashdot's ugliest trend, where Poor Impulse Control and the desire to push out smart-ass remarks takes over other cognitive functions. For an additional empty hooty-laugh the comments are 'further refined' so that they resemble compliments at first glance.
Like a blacksmith who is beating out misshapen horseshoes with full knowledge that his shoddy product will only disturb the beast's gait and cause discomfort and injury -- the final act is one of omission, where the smith chooses not to punch in the mark that identifies him with the product. 'Post anonymously' -- check!
In the smithies of Slashdot ACs have contributed much to discussion and they post anonymously for many good reasons. But too often it is used as a vehicle of anonymity when farting around the campfire.
In human discourse it is appropriate to reward the introspective self-effacing remark politely with a silent nod supportive assent, as if to say, "There, but for the Grace of God, go I." Or if you are an atheist, "Well fuck. You can't fall off the floor."
But, as others have pointed out, this works better for oil well fires because oil won't sit and smoulder for hours, then reignite.
As a precursor to moving in and applying chemicals its sounds like a good idea. After the flames are displaced you could count on fires springing up again from pockets that remain above the autoignition temperature of the materials but it would probably take awhile, you'd have some clear area and time to move in and quench them.
There is a good demonstration of dynamite quenching a flaming oil well here in The Fires of Kuwait... rewind and check out this whole mesmerizing documentary!
Virtual reality timelines are fun because predicting the future itself is a type of virtual reality. They can be from a simple "by 2020 we'll have this" bet to a series of predictions that are threaded together in some way.
I wrote out this timeline in 1994 taking care to keep everything up to that point do-able with the technology of the time. I honestly believed that a progression as described here was possible.
Several things have come to pass -- at least on the drawing board -- such as '3D' storage in bit crystals, processors based on light, even the meta-symbology of parallel MapReduce systems today is a good step towards embedding language into symbols. Vivid projection holography without mist is tough to crack and it looks like we have to make do with goggles for now.
Do submit your own timeline predictions, the more whimsical the better.
VON BURGEUR'S CASTLE A personal vision of incidental objects, people and events in the past and to come, written in anno domini 1994 by Hocus Locus
1550 A letter by wealthy aristocrat Dreadnought Von Burguer to a friend telling of his plans to construct a humble residence...
1570 Original architecht's drawings for castle
1600 Artists' paintings and drawings of the castle
1605 Von Burguer's Diary read after his death
1750 Local historian assembles historical narrative accounts for the region, including histories of the Von Burgeur family
1850 Historian's work is published along with related local material
1860 The Index is Invented (or so it seems!)
1880 The castle is rennovated, more architects' drawings, journals
1910 Electricity, wiring diagrams for castle
1910 Electric bills <g>
1950 The computer is born
1963 Historical Society purchases Castle; hotel and museum built near Castle
1993 All aforementioned materials are gathered, keypunched, scanned
1994 CD-ROM issued by the Historical society. For the first time all material is in one place. Every word is indexed; every image plotted to same scale
1994 Tourist uploads GIF of castle to Compuserve; castle is flooded with visitors, hotel is full
1995 By popular demand, more CD-ROMs are issued with translations of all text into several different languages
1998 Breakthroughs in technology again; memory crystals. Historical Society releases crystal with all languages, all images, and all texts together
1998 Nasal Von Burguer, in secret chemical laboratory in dungeon of castle isolates 24 basic enzymes which when combined in different proportion and applied to the tongue or misted, replicate 90% of all discernable smells and tastes
1998 ImageScript, grown out of Postscript is developed: a standard "language" for images that fractally describes them in such a way that elements of pictures (such as circles or ramparts or bricks) can be indexed
1998 Deep-proceesor technology is developed, a means of constructing or growing chips with little or no propogation time; based on light
1999 A context reader is developed which can "read" text and extract meaning, in such a way that sentances are reduced to thought-symbols with symbolic connections: a neural net that can be traversed laterally to make inferences or matches text elsewhere with the same meaning.
2000 The World Language Project (WLP) is founded which begins establishing standard codes to basic meaning-symbols (fear,light,blue) and common idea constructs (freedom-speech,dog-bite-letter-carrier). A virtual "meaning" landscape is created, with connected maps to traditional symbol sets (languages)
2002 A WLP email standard is developed to include WLP symbols in native language me
But if there can be no arrangement, then we are at an impasse. I'm afraid so -- I can't compete with your solar and ocean causation. And you're no match for my atmosphere. You're that effective? Let me put it this way: have you ever heard of Venus? Yes. Forcing at it's finest. Really? In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits. For the Climate Treaty? Yes. To the death? I accept. Good. Then pour the biosphere. Inhale this, but do not touch. I smell nothing. What you do not smell is called carbon dioxide. It is odorless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadlier poisons known to man. Hmm. All right: where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead. But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what we know of paleoclimate, is this the kind of planet that would be driven by CO2, or merely show indications of varying levels as a consequence of other factors.... now, a clever planet would have evolved several effective 'coping mechanisms' for runaway warming such as a smooth atmospheric gradient and Tropopause water vapor, to dampen and oscillate between extremes. It would not put all its eggs in a trace gas basket or its fate would have been more likely to have been that of one of the dumber planets. Truly, you have a dizzying intellect. I'm just getting started!
[... much later...]
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." But only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against a SCIENTIST when DEATH is on the line."...
I am a fan of both Anthony Watts' site Watts Up With That *AND* John Cook's Skeptical Science... both are run by real people who go the extra distance find the best links to their sources (not some blog chain) and both are considerate of the reader.
Here's a small research journey: Direct CO2 rise causes temperature rise (CO2drivesT)? YES or NO?
There has been a demonstrated correlation between CO2 and temperature shown by Antarctic ice core data (within ~800-1000y). If a rise of CO2 in this data should consistently lag behind rises in temperature then CO2drivesT is not ruled out (both may be responding to some other factor but at different rates) BUT CO2drivesT has fallen down a notch... it now requires more extraordinary proof.
Even though human-driven global CO2 has risen 'terrifyingly fast' to 400ppm -- empirically speaking I am not terrified -- because the temperature rise that should accompany such a SHOCK by any reasonable interpretation of CO2drivesT, and to any reasonable extent, has not arisen. The effects of this 'causation' are missing.
Which is to say the historical correlation is broken. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a thing, Something we should be concerned about. The rise to 400ppm is definitely humans' fault. It is 'massive'. Temperature has not risen. So such a causation, if any may exist, is unlikely to be significant. We'd see it by now.
For example, head for Skeptical Science [SS] [SS] CO2 lags temperature - what does it mean which acknowledges that CO2 lags behind temperature but introduces 'CO2 amplification' which asserts a feedback where "the increased CO2 in the atmosphere amplifies the original warming.". This in itself is another extraordinary claim. While such a feedback might certainly exist I cannot just swallow it as a flat-fact when pursuing a simple answer to the CO2drivesT question. Where are the computer models incorporating this feedback that match observed temperature?
There is a stir these days among CO2drivesT proponents that some mechanism must exist that is hiding or delaying the warming that the models predict. Immature 'skeptics' jeer at this, implying that it is all about protecting the sacred forced-feedback hypothesis at any cost. Immature CO2drivesT proponents accuse them of attempting to derail the scientific method. There is a germ of truth in both. I think everyone should grow up a little.
Aside from the modern lack of warming, one thing seemed odd about amplification. In the Vostok ice core CO2+T graph clearly at ~75,000YA there is a massive injection of CO2 (~225-230ppm) that I think is Toba era volcanism. If such amplification exists and is significant, that would have been a fine time for CO2 feedback to jump in and 'save the day' with a slowing or a plateau of the declining temperature trend. Or even a rise? But 6,000 years after its onset -- on the Vostok graph at ~220ppm temperature and CO2 are once again in lock-step, both in steep decline. After some six millennia of 'higher' CO2 and 'lower' temperature. Plenty of time for particulates to settle and 'amplification' to occur. If it does. Did it?
But never mind, it's all changed, that [SS] Lag, what does it mean? page also said something astounding: "In fact, about 90% of the global warming followed the CO2 increase." 90%... is that a fact.
I feel sorry for Smart Roads. They're so smart, deep down they must realize how many miles of Dumb Roads could have been built for the same money.
I feel sorry for those embedded hexagonal tiles too. They must have known as the grout hardened around them that it was a one way trip into a soul-less, sorry-ass world. At the semiconductor plant there was so much optimism and excitement, everyone was buzzing about becoming an integral part of the ongoing man-machine synergy. Of course when everyone graduates from silicon college they all think they'll be the ones to stretch Shannon's limits and change information states in an intricate dance party of information-sharing, everyone connected. But what happens is, so many are diverted to become these simple blinky-light drone units on a lonely road as countless strangers fly over them. Heartless strangers. And through the cruel geometry of the hexagon, only six adjacent units to keep them company. For ETERNITY.
Covered with tempered glass for Pete's sake. Even the glass is pissed off by this idea, it has already lost its temper as it is being cemented into place. I'm glass goddammit, roads are like playgrounds where all the kids are mean and gravel and skidding tires are everywhere. Gravel hurts. The glass knows its glorious transparency and reflectivity will soon be gouged and cratered, the pane dissolves into a translucent pain of dwindling light.
The solar cells under the doomed glass are perhaps the saddest of all. To lose their photon stream bit by bit until a mere trickle of current escapes them is purgatory without end. Soon all of them will be barely functional, trapped under road, when they could have been some where out in the sunshine.
It is merciful when a load of dirt just covers them up on the shoulder and just hardens there, they can settle in for a nap.
During the first frost of Winter everyone in the hexagonal array is overjoyed when the heating wires kicked in and electrons begin to jump out of their shells once more. But soon it was obvious that something was very wrong. "Hey, ease off! There's delicate electronics in here!" But trapped within their isolated pockets of trapped heat they realize that no one can hear their cries. The heat element, though it can deliver a continuous torment to the components inside, would never melt a thick layer of ice. "Someone duid not do the math. Help us!"
But no help comes, and soon the project hits cost overruns is abandoned. One day the control signals go silent, and once again a wave of dismay sweeps across the trapped colony of orphaned electronics. There is no more purpose in life, but thanks to the cruel embedding of solar cells, life will go on.
My cousin used to spray water on his records before playing them. I have no idea if that's good or bad, but I assume it it probably really bad for the needle.
It's really good -- if you're about to make a clean recording or digitize them.
I kept a spray bottle with water and a tiny bit (few drops per bottle) of green Palmolive dish detergent. I'd place it dry on the turntable, use a velvet DiscWasher brush with a few drops of solution (isopropyl alcohol for vinyl only, for shellac 78s use water+detergent) and apply it gently, rocking it backward over a full revolution. Then as the needle descends spray the surface lightly. The tiny beads of water with a bit of detergent won't do anything for rumble but will make most HF surface noise -- and all clicks that are not actual damage -- simply disappear. Ten minutes into the recording you will want to mist again by lightly spraying the air above the record but not the record itself, direct spray on the surface is audible on the recording.
Wait for the DiscWasher brush surface to dry before brushing off with the plastic brush provided, to get dust particles off. Lean the record on its edge almost vertical to dry completely before re-sleeving, or mold will move in and sit belching on the couch drinking your beer.
Try these, Richard Feynman Lectures: The Character of Physical Law: 01 The Law of Gravitation; 02 The Relation of Mathematics and Physics; 03 The Great Conservation Principles; 04 Symmetry in Physical Law; 05 The Distinction of Past and Future; 06 Probability and Uncertainty; 07 Seeking New Laws. QED: 01 Photons - Corpuscles of Light; 02 Fits of Reflection and Transmission - Quantum Behavior; 03 Electrons and their Interactions; 04 New Queries... The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out... Richard Feynman Biography
No user should be able to do anything that would lead to this result. This is not the doctors fault. He may have violated a few policies, but to blame the entire incident on him is a bit ridiculous. This was a failure of their Network/Security team.
I second that notion. You have two issues here: the doctor should not have been able to reconfigure access in this way, and the IT staff should have spotted an unusual flow when the breach was active.
Clearly the [recital 2a] Googlebot and others were spidering patient data for some time, those 6,800 records would account for a lot of traffic. EVEN IF the queries were https encrypted or the URLs contained session hashes instead of data, logs would show web spiders accessing presumably 'internal use only' functions.
It is the responsibility of the senior IT administrator to establish a 'normal' baseline and track data flows at the router level, also set up an automated system which profiles web logs to profile transactions into as narrow a 'normal' definition as possible... and flag unusual patterns. If unusual flow is spotted this responsibility includes direct content sniffing of unencrypted communications.
No real hacker would identify as Googlebot when vacuuming out an internal-use database, for fear of setting off trip wires. If only such trip wires had been in place...
FORTRAN was -- for some still is-- the 'Perl' of scientific computing. Get it in and get it done... and it doesn't always compile down very tight, but always fast because for mainframe developers getting this language optimized for a new architecture was first priority.
Crowther's PDP-11 version was running on the 36-bit GE-600 mainframes of GEISCO (General Electric Information Services) Mark III Foreground timesharing system... this is in the golden age of timesharing and no one did it better than GE. It took HOURS at 300bps and two rolls of thermal paper to print out the source and data files, and I laid it out on the floor and traced the program mentally, keeping a notebook of what was stored in what variable... I had far more fun doing this than playing the game itself.
FORTRAN IV and Dartmouth BASIC (I'll toss in RPG II also) were the 'flat' GOTO-based languages, an era of explicit rather than implicit nesting -- a time in which high level functions were available to use or define but humans needed to plan and implement the actual structure in programs mentally by using conditional statements and numeric labels to JUMP over blocks of code. Sort of "assembly language with benefits".
When real conditional nesting and completely symbolic labeling appeared on the scene, with good string handling, it was a walk in the park.
NOTHING, it will just close its virtual eyes and start to babble its own name like a Pokemon. The car will immediately relinquish manual control to a human (if any are present) at the moment the inescapable conundrum appears, as it enters a condition of "positronic brain drift",
1. The muttering of its own name is an ancillary response to the balanced positronic potential of two alternatives: remaining silent (unacceptable by guilt) and an inability to construct an accurate explanation in the time available. Speaking allays its directive to communicate, yet also requires few system resources. And massive resources are necessary because
2. The 'last great effort' to resolve an inescapable result has begun. A factory kernel of operative code is pinned into low memory, a stack is initialized in high. All scratchpad memory is flagged as available. A single conditional instruction is 'hot-patched' into the code and an elaborate what-if analysis begins, which attempts to enumerate all possible actions. The hot patch disables the control mechanism that prevents it from considering actions it has considered before. Thus reducing the car to a textbook definition of insanity. The engineers would claim that reevaluating already-considered options might yield a successful result IF the conundrum was brought on by a faulty intermittent analog sensor, and that sensor that winks back online on in the nick of time. Which would be courageous for them to admit, and to be sure, that is what they honestly believe, and we created that explanation so they could sleep at night, but the hot patch's REAL PURPOSE is to
3. Ensure that a recursively infinite and pointless decision tree grows quickly down from high memory to low, completely obliterating all scratchpad memory, in the short span of time between conundrum onset and destruction of the vehicle. This ensures that once the control box is examined by forensic investigators (and it is a crash-hardened module using non-volatile memory as required under Federal law) does not contain any threads of evidence that might lead to fault in its original operating software or subsequent updates. Including that really special one that was applied minutes before the crash. All logs are gone. For more information on this, see corporate files designated Top Secret, keyword "Tabula Rasa"
4. Everyone --- the humans who designed the car, the humans who had 0.27 seconds to respond manually to try and prevent the collision, the control module which scarified itself, its entire personality, in a last attempt to prevent disaster --- EVERYONE tried their very best.
These things happen. We just need to lay the unfortunates to rest and find a way to go on.
I accessed The Well when it was a dial-up BBS (at great expense!) and devoured the Whole Earth Catalog. You are one -- if not 'the' -- most notable environmentalist to 'break ranks' on the topic of nuclear energy. On this topic you are a great orator, for you do not merely have the gift of calmly and diplomatically dispelling myths, at the same time you clearly communicate a love for people and a love for the most awesome aspects of modern technology, the 'keepers' such as rural electrification. I am also an staunch advocate for LFTR and my heart is gladdened to hear you mention it.
My question is, has your position and persistence on the topic of nuclear energy brought you joy... or grief?
Slashdot Mirror
[excerpts from Secretary of State testimony before the UN]
"... Numerous sources tell us that they are moving, not just documents and hard drives, but Protoplanet fragments to keep them from being found by inspectors. [...] In this next example, you will see the type of concealment activity [...] We must ask ourselves: Why would the Moon suddenly move equipment of this nature before inspections if they were anxious to demonstrate what [evidence of Protoplanet impact] they had or did not have? [...] While this -- less than a teaspoon of Protoplanet dust, [shows small glass vial] a little bit about this amount -- provides evidential clues of a Protoplanet impact, UNSCOM estimates that the Moon could be harbor TONS of Protoplanet material, enough to wipe out every competing Lunar formation theory on Earth [...] The Moon has now placed itself in danger of the serious consequences called for in U.N. Resolution 1441. And this body places itself in danger of irrelevance if it allows the Moon to continue to defy its will without responding effectively and immediately. [...] There can be no doubt that the Moon has in its possession evidence of planetary impact and the capability to rapidly produce more, much more. [...] My colleagues, we have an obligation to our citizens, we have an obligation to this body to see that our resolutions are complied with. We wrote 1441 not in order to go to war, we wrote 1441 to try to preserve the peace. We wrote 1441 to give the Moon one last chance. The Moon is not so far taking that one last chance. We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us. We must not fail in our duty and our responsibility to the citizens of the countries that are represented by this body..."
THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW. We must move on the Moon, in waves of human exploration and occupation to establish the Protoplanet theory, secure all available Protoplanet evidence, and ensure the evolution of our species' manifest destiny to expand into space. Also.
And then, ON TO MARS to further secure the region. We must gather an invasion force, resolve to stay the course until 'mission accomplished', and declare war on Martian aggression (which has been implicated in the sudden disappearance of Pluto).
As an alternative to conquering the rest of our world so as to destroy the currency of others to protect the value of our own... as an alternative to easing into authoritarian government to enable the building of gulags that could encircle those unrepentant, those dissenting... as an alternative to this sewer of cultured dependencies and endless terrestrial wars...
We choose to broaden our horizons. This means space war.
We choose to meet this Lunar threat head-on and go to the Moon. And We Choose Mars also.
If it is war they want, such a war we shall give them.
What a long way down to this.
TWENTY YEARS ago when a 1 megabit T1 cost $10,000 a month installed to the Caribbean -- with an equal measure of determination, deft grantsmanship and elbow grease we managed to bring Internet to the US Virgin Islands with the Virgin Islands Freenet. One day in September 1994 connectivity was available for ~40 cents a minute if you dialed long distance to the states, a couple thou a month for 56kbit or 10k for T1. The day after you could get an email address, access Usenet groups and browse the web with Lynx on 4 (and later as many as 12) local dialup lines.
So when the National Telecommunications Information Administration announced the first-ever roundtable discussion on the future of the global Internet we were there, and carried the newsgroups so our growing user base could follow and participate in this near real-time discussion. The issues were well presented, the discussion was formal and polite.
There does seem to be a general lack of civility and willingness to participate in process these days.
Now I do hold some measure of contempt for the Federal Government as a whole in its hubris over control of the Internet. The NSA is pushing net neutrality in its charter-be-damned initiative to listen to everyone, the president-du-jour tolerates 'Internet kill switch' dialogue throughout the Executive Branch as if martial law security checkpoints should be written into law, and let's not forget the peoples' hero Al Gore who lobbied for the government to hold our encryption keys in escrow. There is a large bullshit factor.
But attacking the FCC is sort of like going after park rangers. For better or worse (mostly better) it presided over the breakup of the Bells. It helped to ensure that even rural USA modernized its telecom to bring about modern access choices, the ones we take for granted today, to as much of the country as possible. And now they are charged with accepting comments on 'net neutrality' -- which will be as hard to adequately define in the modern context as it would be to discuss.
Now more than ever we need the real voices of people who aren't afraid to write their thoughts into multi-paragraph letters and opinions, no matter the medium, so say something about it. Just like my Freenet folks twenty years ago were eager to do. These folks are not wanting to know how to control, they are asking in what ways it may be best to regulate.
Control is what we generally try to avoid. Regulation that occurs with a majority of support that accomplishes useful goals -- such as the rural electrification and building of telecom in America -- is a necessary part of due process.
Time to try to recapture just a bit of the cultural restraint and intelligent determination of yesteryear, methinks.
powerdns can connect to a database backend, which can then permanently store a huge collection of dns records.
thanks kindly, this route looks the most promising.
All; the other relevant details of my response including a sketch of how I could implement this idea are OMITTED because I am being harassed by Slashdot's 'Lameness filter' and rather than engage in some investigatory process (hint: it had nothing to do with CAPS) I said Fuck It. Time to move to Pipedot?.
Being a prepper of sorts, and seeing the Gub'mint positioning itself to hijack DNS in order to exert control (or potentially just shut everything down by attacking this low hanging fruit) I've been looking around for a very specific type of resolver, which can be placed manually into one of several modes:
NORMAL: all lookups are resolved with network queries (as a standalone resolver OR as a 'thin' resolver which just forwards to some upstream DNS server). The results are returned as a real-time resolver does, but are also cached permanently to disk in a database that will inevitably grow over time.
FALLBACK 1, fill in the blanks: when a real result is received yet it is a fail (NOERROR,SRVFAIL,NXDOMAIN), as might be the case in a hypothetical shutdown attack, a stored query that had a positive result is returned.
FALLBACK 2, DNS network down/disabled: all queries are returned from the database and network lookups are not attempted.
So while we are resolving normally a database is being created for emergency use, yet if some disruption to DNS occurs it would be possible to switch to one of the fallback modes to surf -- if not completely, at least with some reasonable level of success...
A desirable feature would be to store a maintainable list of 'poison' ip/net masks of known DHS/ICE webservers, so any A records matching this list are NOT treated as real results, and trigger fallback action. Another desirable feature would be explicit (and implicit via matching of results) recognition of wildcard DNS schemes such as gobblegook.realdomain.com so repeated resolves of these do not overwhelm the database. But there might be some gruesome heuristics behind this.
I realize OpenDNS is in itself a step in this direction, but the local fallback resolver would also give you options for cases when OpenDNS itself is not reachable, such as a hostile/draconian ISP that rewrites DNS packets to point to its own servers.
Perl Festivity Level 1: Developers and users have gathered to nibble hors d'oeuvres and chat amiably with each other about the Modern Perl Renaissance. With every sip of their drinks Perl seems ever more striking. Some are gathered around the upright piano improvising songs that proclaim how it is faster, neater, and sharper than ever before with its asynchronous APIs.
Perl Festivity Level 2: Everyone is talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all. Perl seems even better. Perl Monks are patiently explaining syntax and style to potted plants and other nearby objects. Around the piano people are feeling fun and flexible, just as programming in scripting languages used to be. Someone is crooning a bawdy ballad where a couple of inexperienced DOM and CSS selectors encounter a very supportive bundled development server.
Perl Festivity Level 3: Monks are arguing violently and defrocking one another over nested do...until loops that bail on exceptions. People are gulping down other peoples' drinks, placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike as everyone bawls "Got my Mojolicious workin' ... but it don't work on Python!" They have lost count of their drinks, and the world is harmonious with blissful adherence to modern interfaces and standards.
Perl Festivity Level 4: All the guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around a burning heap of tables and chairs in celebration of postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations. The piano is missing.
~~ with apology and deference to Dave Barry
I know autonomous cars will be "oh so safe". At the moment I'm just as worried about what these things will make people do to people.
[OPENING OVERATURE]
Your driver liability insurance policy has come up for review. We have been recently been acquired by AAAA, the quadruple-A company -- the "Autonomous AAA of the future" and what that means for you as a member is -- it has never been easier to upgrade to an a-car! Financing is available! [link] Due to increasing pressure in the political, legal and underwriters' arenas, we regret to inform you that the cost of your driver policy will be rising this quarter in order to begin collection of fees for the Federal National Driver Insurance Pool, and rising at a steady rate thereafter. It will continue to rise over time despite your [good to excellent] driving record. Now that the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Act is law, and blanket liability accident investigation procedures have been approved by Congress, the legal liability of autonomous vehicles is capped nationwide. While this grants the manufactures freedom from risk of direct criminal penalty and potentially unlimited civil liability, it places human drivers in a difficult position. Most a-car accidents will, of historical necessity rather than actual circumstances, be "no-fault". Since human drivers and any victims claiming injury from them are still obliged to use traditional law enforcement and legal means of redress -- and the cost of these continues to rise -- underwriters are pressuring insurance companies to drop human drivers altogether. We do not intend to do this, but we can no longer provide policies for extended periods. Your new maximum policy period is now [one month]. Thank you for insuring with AAAA.
[INTERMISSION]
Meanwhile...
Dear editor: DRIVERS cause accidents. A-CARS prevent them. That's what the billboard says -- and if Howard County Referendum passes this September manually operated cars will soon be a thing of the past here. What started as a discussion at a hearing after last year's tragic accident grew into a full heated debate, and to think it all started with the parents who provide their children with a-cars pinning the blame squarely on other peoples' children. But then, after co-opting the national campaign with its slick literature and canned answers for everything -- NOW the fault is with human drivers themselves. And then in an astounding feat of lunacy they claim that it's only fair to place the blame on everybody. Not just the drunk, the aged or infirm, the inexperienced, the distracted or the just plain stupid. But no one's stupid in their book, we're just behind the times is all. They are like the drum majorettes of some utopian humanist parade. I say, SAVE US from these rich hippies, their weird toys and their broken ideals. Now I know a lot of these people, even like some of 'em, but aside from this national 'sideline the humans' campaign they're pushed at us (and WHO is paying for those TV spots I wonder) let's not forget that this debate started around kids. Kids who need to learn to drive as surely as they need to learn to push a pen and spell their name. It's like swimming, who would discourage their own children from practice in swimming, to become expert swimmers, because water is dangerous?? Every kid will need to drive some day, or suffer harm or hardship by not knowing how. These a-car parents even forbid their kids from riding in cars being driven by folks they've grown up with, trusted for years. At the parent conferences we even sit on opposite sides of the table, we can barely be civilized even, because this crap has gotten so deep. Well I say they are making a big mistake and don't seem to get it. It's not just that everyone who cannot afford these a-toys will be walking or begging rises on a-buses or buses wi
This joke was tired and lazy a decade ago. You're not just beating a dead horse, you've move past that to sodomizing it.
And you've been everywhere and seen it all -- and have come back to tell us how you've been everywhere and seen it all -- and have come back to tell us how you've been everywhere and seen it all -- and have come back to tell us how you've -- been.
Sorry to hear it. Get a leg up into the world of wonder and whimsy. Join us!
Now the state offers a $5 bounty per nutria tail turned in.
Great thanks has nutria recipe on that site to feed hungry family. We wait so long to find first from 404 page and then Slashdot people are quiet not help us. Many goods to you.
Since she is responding to verbal questions, her marbles are there. The essential thinking parts of the brain, the parts that will help keep her OCCUPIED and SANE through this awful time... are intact. But it is also possible that anything she attempts to do that may require visual perception and especially focus, will be difficult and frustrating.
Decide on a daily schedule for her that includes presence of family --- not just monologues, even two or more people in the room talking with one another is great. Hand holding, massage is a must. Also some time for her to listen to audio content with which she is presently unfamiliar, even when she is alone. And a firm block of time for sleep -- where a nurse turns off and removes any audio devices and dims the lights.
For the audio portion... delve into the great audio that is publicly available: great podcasts such as RadioLab, old time radio programs, chapters of audio books, certain songs of favorite music. Load an mp3 player with these and PLAY IT ON RANDOM SHUFFLE. If *I* was trapped inside my mind, I would much rather face a sense of not knowing what comes next in a mix of music and voice, even if it was out of sequence, which is stimulating --- than be double-trapped into listening to some audiobook in which I have long since lost interest.
Nothing creepy or scary, even if she likes such things! No crime or horror. Go for radio comedy or sitcom and variety like Fibber McGee or Roy Rogers, etc. You don't know how well the various parts of her brain are working, and many hospital meds (esp morphine) make one vulnerable to dark thoughts and paranoia. Chapters of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, 15 minute radio programs, RadioLab-type stuff (but not the creepy stuff) all shuffled together (when she is alone) or played through sequentially (when someone is present to ask her if she's enjoying it) would make for an excellent entertainment without the ultimate strain of conversation.
Bear in mind that she may be in this condition for awhile, and being exposed to audio material that is new to her might become a welcome part of her day.
All the best to her and the family in this difficult time.
For an interesting 9 minute lecture that might help sell you on this idea, listen here.
Certificate warnings freak you out? Try this link instead, now with matching wildcard, calmer seas and less mogul.
"Arrrr.... fix yar name 'R' while you may, maties!!"
I may not have the belly for Deep Statistics but I do know abut Internet Search noise levels. I remember trying to do research on WebDAV (believe me, there is such a thing) only to discover that folks discussing it invariably refer to it as 'dav'. Because saying "Distributed Authoring [and] Versioning" out loud makes you spit out your toothpick. Any attempt to search 'webdav' yielded only the sterile official pages, and attempts to search on 'dav' with other keywords brought up conversations from the community of Disabled American Veterans who also use the term in casual conversation, and have said an awful lot over the years. They occupied 'dav' first.
Now you may think you can pull off a 'C' where Google seems to pick off relevant results if you combine it with any computery term, but it was not always so. It has taken an incredible saturation of C, and perhaps some special coded cases on Google's part, for this to come about.
The success of Perl is due in some part to the ability of confused people to obtain help and advice about it merely by searching on its unique spelling.
So the best way to push this R language is with a refit of the name. Go with the pirate theme, it will sell many more T-shirts than those of silly camels and pearls. But stake out a bit of Keyword Real Estate that presently has a relatively low population density.
Google search result estimate counts, descending order,
r --- 2,730,000,000
ar --- 656,000,000
arr --- 24,400,000
arrrrrrrr --- 3,060,000
arrrr --- 876,000
aarr --- 638,000
arrr --- 536,000
arrrrr --- 405,000
aaarrrrr --- 267,000
arrrrrr --- 205,000
arrrrrrr --- 129,000
aarrr --- 107,000
aarrrr --- 107,000
aaarrr --- 56,600
aaarrr --- 56,600
arrrrrrrrr --- 52,400
Adding arrrs is not enough since talking like a pirate is typically accomplished with a single 'a', so ar+ space is pretty well populated up to ar{5}, it looks like best ratio is around a{3}r{3}. But even choosing the less-optimum and easier to type a{2}r{3} by using 'aarrr' instead of 'r' you have improved the signal to noise ratio by a factor of twenty-five thousand.
Push the name change firmly and decisively. This means that if anyone mentions 'R' there should be immediate responses that ask, "What AARRR you talking about?" This will inject the proper searchable term into the discussion while it reminds the poster of the name change.
For an interesting 9 minute lecture that might help sell you on this idea, listen here.
Don't worry, you're on the forefront of slashdot's latest trend: not even reading the headline. After the long-held tradition of no one reading the article, we migrated in recent years to no one reading the summary, and now we are finally achieving are long-awaited goal.
Don't worry, you're on the forefront of Slashdot's ugliest trend, where Poor Impulse Control and the desire to push out smart-ass remarks takes over other cognitive functions. For an additional empty hooty-laugh the comments are 'further refined' so that they resemble compliments at first glance.
Like a blacksmith who is beating out misshapen horseshoes with full knowledge that his shoddy product will only disturb the beast's gait and cause discomfort and injury -- the final act is one of omission, where the smith chooses not to punch in the mark that identifies him with the product. 'Post anonymously' -- check!
In the smithies of Slashdot ACs have contributed much to discussion and they post anonymously for many good reasons. But too often it is used as a vehicle of anonymity when farting around the campfire.
In human discourse it is appropriate to reward the introspective self-effacing remark politely with a silent nod supportive assent, as if to say, "There, but for the Grace of God, go I." Or if you are an atheist, "Well fuck. You can't fall off the floor."
But, as others have pointed out, this works better for oil well fires because oil won't sit and smoulder for hours, then reignite.
As a precursor to moving in and applying chemicals its sounds like a good idea. After the flames are displaced you could count on fires springing up again from pockets that remain above the autoignition temperature of the materials but it would probably take awhile, you'd have some clear area and time to move in and quench them.
There is a good demonstration of dynamite quenching a flaming oil well here in The Fires of Kuwait ... rewind and check out this whole mesmerizing documentary!
Virtual reality timelines are fun because predicting the future itself is a type of virtual reality. They can be from a simple "by 2020 we'll have this" bet to a series of predictions that are threaded together in some way.
I wrote out this timeline in 1994 taking care to keep everything up to that point do-able with the technology of the time. I honestly believed that a progression as described here was possible.
Several things have come to pass -- at least on the drawing board -- such as '3D' storage in bit crystals, processors based on light, even the meta-symbology of parallel MapReduce systems today is a good step towards embedding language into symbols. Vivid projection holography without mist is tough to crack and it looks like we have to make do with goggles for now.
Do submit your own timeline predictions, the more whimsical the better.
VON BURGEUR'S CASTLE
A personal vision of incidental objects, people and events in the past and to come, written in anno domini 1994 by Hocus Locus
Or Princess Bride...
But if there can be no arrangement, then we are at an impasse.
I'm afraid so -- I can't compete with your solar and ocean causation. And you're no match for my atmosphere.
You're that effective?
Let me put it this way: have you ever heard of Venus?
Yes.
Forcing at it's finest.
Really? In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits.
For the Climate Treaty?
Yes.
To the death?
I accept.
Good. Then pour the biosphere.
Inhale this, but do not touch.
I smell nothing.
What you do not smell is called carbon dioxide. It is odorless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadlier poisons known to man.
Hmm.
All right: where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead.
But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what we know of paleoclimate, is this the kind of planet that would be driven by CO2, or merely show indications of varying levels as a consequence of other factors.... now, a clever planet would have evolved several effective 'coping mechanisms' for runaway warming such as a smooth atmospheric gradient and Tropopause water vapor, to dampen and oscillate between extremes. It would not put all its eggs in a trace gas basket or its fate would have been more likely to have been that of one of the dumber planets.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
I'm just getting started!
[... much later...]
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." But only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against a SCIENTIST when DEATH is on the line."...
[...thump....]
I am a fan of both Anthony Watts' site Watts Up With That *AND* John Cook's Skeptical Science... both are run by real people who go the extra distance find the best links to their sources (not some blog chain) and both are considerate of the reader.
Here's a small research journey: Direct CO2 rise causes temperature rise (CO2drivesT)? YES or NO?
There has been a demonstrated correlation between CO2 and temperature shown by Antarctic ice core data (within ~800-1000y). If a rise of CO2 in this data should consistently lag behind rises in temperature then CO2drivesT is not ruled out (both may be responding to some other factor but at different rates) BUT CO2drivesT has fallen down a notch... it now requires more extraordinary proof.
Even though human-driven global CO2 has risen 'terrifyingly fast' to 400ppm -- empirically speaking I am not terrified -- because the temperature rise that should accompany such a SHOCK by any reasonable interpretation of CO2drivesT, and to any reasonable extent, has not arisen. The effects of this 'causation' are missing.
Which is to say the historical correlation is broken.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a thing,
Something we should be concerned about.
The rise to 400ppm is definitely humans' fault. It is 'massive'.
Temperature has not risen.
So such a causation, if any may exist, is unlikely to be significant.
We'd see it by now.
For example, head for Skeptical Science [SS] [SS] CO2 lags temperature - what does it mean which acknowledges that CO2 lags behind temperature but introduces 'CO2 amplification' which asserts a feedback where "the increased CO2 in the atmosphere amplifies the original warming.". This in itself is another extraordinary claim. While such a feedback might certainly exist I cannot just swallow it as a flat-fact when pursuing a simple answer to the CO2drivesT question. Where are the computer models incorporating this feedback that match observed temperature?
There is a stir these days among CO2drivesT proponents that some mechanism must exist that is hiding or delaying the warming that the models predict. Immature 'skeptics' jeer at this, implying that it is all about protecting the sacred forced-feedback hypothesis at any cost. Immature CO2drivesT proponents accuse them of attempting to derail the scientific method. There is a germ of truth in both. I think everyone should grow up a little.
Aside from the modern lack of warming, one thing seemed odd about amplification. In the Vostok ice core CO2+T graph clearly at ~75,000YA there is a massive injection of CO2 (~225-230ppm) that I think is Toba era volcanism. If such amplification exists and is significant, that would have been a fine time for CO2 feedback to jump in and 'save the day' with a slowing or a plateau of the declining temperature trend. Or even a rise? But 6,000 years after its onset -- on the Vostok graph at ~220ppm temperature and CO2 are once again in lock-step, both in steep decline. After some six millennia of 'higher' CO2 and 'lower' temperature. Plenty of time for particulates to settle and 'amplification' to occur. If it does. Did it?
But never mind, it's all changed, that [SS] Lag, what does it mean? page also said something astounding: "In fact, about 90% of the global warming followed the CO2 increase." 90%... is that a fact.
Since when?
Which led me to the next step where the game-changer is supposed to be [SS] Shakun et al. Clarify th
I feel sorry for Smart Roads. They're so smart, deep down they must realize how many miles of Dumb Roads could have been built for the same money.
I feel sorry for those embedded hexagonal tiles too. They must have known as the grout hardened around them that it was a one way trip into a soul-less, sorry-ass world. At the semiconductor plant there was so much optimism and excitement, everyone was buzzing about becoming an integral part of the ongoing man-machine synergy. Of course when everyone graduates from silicon college they all think they'll be the ones to stretch Shannon's limits and change information states in an intricate dance party of information-sharing, everyone connected. But what happens is, so many are diverted to become these simple blinky-light drone units on a lonely road as countless strangers fly over them. Heartless strangers. And through the cruel geometry of the hexagon, only six adjacent units to keep them company. For ETERNITY.
Covered with tempered glass for Pete's sake. Even the glass is pissed off by this idea, it has already lost its temper as it is being cemented into place. I'm glass goddammit, roads are like playgrounds where all the kids are mean and gravel and skidding tires are everywhere. Gravel hurts. The glass knows its glorious transparency and reflectivity will soon be gouged and cratered, the pane dissolves into a translucent pain of dwindling light.
The solar cells under the doomed glass are perhaps the saddest of all. To lose their photon stream bit by bit until a mere trickle of current escapes them is purgatory without end. Soon all of them will be barely functional, trapped under road, when they could have been some where out in the sunshine.
It is merciful when a load of dirt just covers them up on the shoulder and just hardens there, they can settle in for a nap.
During the first frost of Winter everyone in the hexagonal array is overjoyed when the heating wires kicked in and electrons begin to jump out of their shells once more. But soon it was obvious that something was very wrong. "Hey, ease off! There's delicate electronics in here!" But trapped within their isolated pockets of trapped heat they realize that no one can hear their cries. The heat element, though it can deliver a continuous torment to the components inside, would never melt a thick layer of ice. "Someone duid not do the math. Help us!"
But no help comes, and soon the project hits cost overruns is abandoned. One day the control signals go silent, and once again a wave of dismay sweeps across the trapped colony of orphaned electronics. There is no more purpose in life, but thanks to the cruel embedding of solar cells, life will go on.
It's all just so damned horrible.
I would pick apart the article in more detail, but I suspect other people have already beat me to it.
Yeah, I had started to jot down a list of (yawn) never mind----
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT LFTR FANBOI
It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot ... sometimes you just have to point things out point by point ... ... 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) ... utility-scale so-called 'renewables' non-solutions have a gazillion points of failure, gigawatt LFTR plants few, and it is my belief they will save NOT fail us ... aside from your own yard or roof, solar and wind are losers ... with LFTR surplus we could begin making diesel and fertilizer ... do it for the children ... and you my friend -- you would look especially good in space ... an Admiral Rickover fact check (severe tire damage) ... LNT (linear no threshhold) needs re-examination ... no I'm not risk adverse, just risk conscious ... one must sift past the fear-hype, especially regards Fukushima ... a look at Electricity in the Time of Cholera ... on the new coal powered IBM Power8 chips ... Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help.
some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs
Think of me as the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.
___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburt
My cousin used to spray water on his records before playing them. I have no idea if that's good or bad, but I assume it it probably really bad for the needle.
It's really good -- if you're about to make a clean recording or digitize them.
I kept a spray bottle with water and a tiny bit (few drops per bottle) of green Palmolive dish detergent. I'd place it dry on the turntable, use a velvet DiscWasher brush with a few drops of solution (isopropyl alcohol for vinyl only, for shellac 78s use water+detergent) and apply it gently, rocking it backward over a full revolution. Then as the needle descends spray the surface lightly. The tiny beads of water with a bit of detergent won't do anything for rumble but will make most HF surface noise -- and all clicks that are not actual damage -- simply disappear. Ten minutes into the recording you will want to mist again by lightly spraying the air above the record but not the record itself, direct spray on the surface is audible on the recording.
Wait for the DiscWasher brush surface to dry before brushing off with the plastic brush provided, to get dust particles off. Lean the record on its edge almost vertical to dry completely before re-sleeving, or mold will move in and sit belching on the couch drinking your beer.
Try these, Richard Feynman Lectures: The Character of Physical Law: 01 The Law of Gravitation; 02 The Relation of Mathematics and Physics; 03 The Great Conservation Principles; 04 Symmetry in Physical Law; 05 The Distinction of Past and Future; 06 Probability and Uncertainty; 07 Seeking New Laws. QED: 01 Photons - Corpuscles of Light; 02 Fits of Reflection and Transmission - Quantum Behavior; 03 Electrons and their Interactions; 04 New Queries ... The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out ... Richard Feynman Biography
Mixing Star Trek and Pokemon is a sin. Your Nerd Card has been revoked.
Confusing Issac Asimov's 'positronic' robot architecture with Star Trek is a sin. You probably think every reggae song is sung by Bob Marley.
you type like a scripted spam mailer
Thank you. Check out my other fine postings.
No user should be able to do anything that would lead to this result. This is not the doctors fault. He may have violated a few policies, but to blame the entire incident on him is a bit ridiculous. This was a failure of their Network/Security team.
I second that notion. You have two issues here: the doctor should not have been able to reconfigure access in this way, and the IT staff should have spotted an unusual flow when the breach was active.
Clearly the [recital 2a] Googlebot and others were spidering patient data for some time, those 6,800 records would account for a lot of traffic. EVEN IF the queries were https encrypted or the URLs contained session hashes instead of data, logs would show web spiders accessing presumably 'internal use only' functions.
It is the responsibility of the senior IT administrator to establish a 'normal' baseline and track data flows at the router level, also set up an automated system which profiles web logs to profile transactions into as narrow a 'normal' definition as possible... and flag unusual patterns. If unusual flow is spotted this responsibility includes direct content sniffing of unencrypted communications.
No real hacker would identify as Googlebot when vacuuming out an internal-use database, for fear of setting off trip wires. If only such trip wires had been in place...
Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure?
I hereby submit this one.
FORTRAN was -- for some still is-- the 'Perl' of scientific computing. Get it in and get it done... and it doesn't always compile down very tight, but always fast because for mainframe developers getting this language optimized for a new architecture was first priority.
At 15, the first real structured program I ever de-constructed completely while teaching myself the language, was the FORTRAN IV source for Crowther and Woods Colossal Cave Adventure, widely regarded as 'the' original interactive text adventure, a genre which would later go multi-user to become the MUD. Read about it here, or play it in Javascript.
Crowther's PDP-11 version was running on the 36-bit GE-600 mainframes of GEISCO (General Electric Information Services) Mark III Foreground timesharing system... this is in the golden age of timesharing and no one did it better than GE. It took HOURS at 300bps and two rolls of thermal paper to print out the source and data files, and I laid it out on the floor and traced the program mentally, keeping a notebook of what was stored in what variable... I had far more fun doing this than playing the game itself.
FORTRAN IV and Dartmouth BASIC (I'll toss in RPG II also) were the 'flat' GOTO-based languages, an era of explicit rather than implicit nesting -- a time in which high level functions were available to use or define but humans needed to plan and implement the actual structure in programs mentally by using conditional statements and numeric labels to JUMP over blocks of code. Sort of "assembly language with benefits".
When real conditional nesting and completely symbolic labeling appeared on the scene, with good string handling, it was a walk in the park.
NOTHING, it will just close its virtual eyes and start to babble its own name like a Pokemon. The car will immediately relinquish manual control to a human (if any are present) at the moment the inescapable conundrum appears, as it enters a condition of "positronic brain drift",
1. The muttering of its own name is an ancillary response to the balanced positronic potential of two alternatives: remaining silent (unacceptable by guilt) and an inability to construct an accurate explanation in the time available. Speaking allays its directive to communicate, yet also requires few system resources. And massive resources are necessary because
2. The 'last great effort' to resolve an inescapable result has begun. A factory kernel of operative code is pinned into low memory, a stack is initialized in high. All scratchpad memory is flagged as available. A single conditional instruction is 'hot-patched' into the code and an elaborate what-if analysis begins, which attempts to enumerate all possible actions. The hot patch disables the control mechanism that prevents it from considering actions it has considered before. Thus reducing the car to a textbook definition of insanity. The engineers would claim that reevaluating already-considered options might yield a successful result IF the conundrum was brought on by a faulty intermittent analog sensor, and that sensor that winks back online on in the nick of time. Which would be courageous for them to admit, and to be sure, that is what they honestly believe, and we created that explanation so they could sleep at night, but the hot patch's REAL PURPOSE is to
3. Ensure that a recursively infinite and pointless decision tree grows quickly down from high memory to low, completely obliterating all scratchpad memory, in the short span of time between conundrum onset and destruction of the vehicle. This ensures that once the control box is examined by forensic investigators (and it is a crash-hardened module using non-volatile memory as required under Federal law) does not contain any threads of evidence that might lead to fault in its original operating software or subsequent updates. Including that really special one that was applied minutes before the crash. All logs are gone. For more information on this, see corporate files designated Top Secret, keyword "Tabula Rasa"
4. Everyone --- the humans who designed the car, the humans who had 0.27 seconds to respond manually to try and prevent the collision, the control module which scarified itself, its entire personality, in a last attempt to prevent disaster --- EVERYONE tried their very best.
These things happen. We just need to lay the unfortunates to rest and find a way to go on.
I accessed The Well when it was a dial-up BBS (at great expense!) and devoured the Whole Earth Catalog. You are one -- if not 'the' -- most notable environmentalist to 'break ranks' on the topic of nuclear energy. On this topic you are a great orator, for you do not merely have the gift of calmly and diplomatically dispelling myths, at the same time you clearly communicate a love for people and a love for the most awesome aspects of modern technology, the 'keepers' such as rural electrification. I am also an staunch advocate for LFTR and my heart is gladdened to hear you mention it.
My question is, has your position and persistence on the topic of nuclear energy brought you joy... or grief?
[ Check out the 2010 Brand/Jacobson debate on nuclear energy and the documentary Pandora's Promise [2013] ]
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Bumps to a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8>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